Brute Orbits (10 page)

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Howes and Dantès became good friends; and after a while more than that. But both were regarded as Tasarov’s property, so no one bothered them. Tasarov wondered whether Eddie was the only one of his kind in the habitat, but he really didn’t want to know. If there were others, they were well hidden and just as well that they were.

Some of the older men were attempting to cultivate small gardens in front of their barracks. Tasarov’s forays through the engineering level with Howes and Dantès, to inventory what was available had turned up flowering plant seed packets in a few of the guards’ locker rooms. They had been meant as a mercy for someone, and now they were received as a miraculous find.

“Who knows,” Howes said, “maybe we’ll find a cat or a dog somewhere. Even a rat would do.”

The engineering level took up some thirty percent of the area under the inner land, Tasarov estimated; and clearly the intent had been to excavate and use all of the available area in time. He had his own suspicions about the engineering level that he wanted to test, but it would take time.

Most of the men, he knew, were sleepwalking through their new life, following the easiest way: sleep and eat, think as little as possible, hang out with comrades, even if the relationships offered no physical intimacy, which was the case for most; still, one could get lucky on a strange day. “Hope makes a man deathless,” Melville had once written. Tasarov accepted the words only if they meant that a man should refuse to think about death in the midst of life, since it was only wise not to poison what time a man had; but there was a point at which denial was an attempt to wear blinders. It just couldn’t be done. Sometimes he felt that prisoners needed their guards, needed a society around them to make sense of their imprisonment.

This Earth, which had thrown them into the darkness, had implemented something new in renunciations…and he considered its evil as he had never regarded the so-called wrongdoing that he had practiced. The fools of history had whispered in their vain hearts that good may come from evil means; and they had ignored that good intentions may produce unwished evils.

Well, perhaps; but both results depend on later understandings, which may not come. “Making it good—later” ignores the evil and suffering of today, which is all that the victims have, while the tormentors console themselves with future benefits. Even the doctor who sends his patient through pain in search of health leaves behind mental damage that will earn unwanted interest. And that account may not be closed out by simple withdrawal…accruing, it grows heavy and immovable, and is passed on. Crimes committed against criminals are no less crimes; they are new crimes, which do not know the old ones for which the criminal is committed…

No—that wasn’t quite right, either. The waves of humankind who can be imprisoned for wrongdoing never stop. One might as well try to stop the human enterprise itself, which seeks every niche to fill. All attempts at law, all religion, all ethical norms, might be nothing more than attempts by the weak to restrain the strong. Then, within the law, arise the new strong, who subvert the law for their own ends of power and family interest, leaving the old strong outside their circle to pursue the waiting possibilities which they call crime. The weak, the cowardly, the decent ones, live between these groups…

He was sure of only one thing: that no official thinking on these matters could be taken at face value. The corruption that lay beneath the settled surface of all societies was based on a self-serving, grasping need to hold power, to project one’s own children into the future ahead of the children of others, to pass wealth forward like a communicable disease, to speak from the grave into futurity, to shackle it. And in this century, as lifespan leapt forward beyond the century mark, the greedy old brain sought to become its own posterity by invading the future…

That was it, he told himself. As more people lived longer, a cleansing and clearing amnesia was necessary, to make the Earth ready for the new ways. Send them out, the violent, the deranged, the politically dangerous—anyone who threatens the power of the richest and their access to their recruiting pool, the clean middle classes. And remember to prune from the bottom, lest the middle recruit from it and grow too powerful. And never think about what you are doing; it comes naturally, with only informal conspiracies at work.

Well, this tack was also not quite right, he told himself. We are all villains by degrees. Our villainies depend on where we start on the social ladder, and on what opportunities come our way. Those who have no opportunities to overdo we call good people. Untempted, they shame the powerful by using their goodness as a weapon; it is all they can do. They live almost no lives at all, risking nothing, secure in the illusion that they would never do ill to anyone. We are all villains, but some welcome the use of muzzles and manacles. These are called saints. Those whom we muzzle and manacle we call criminals.

He remembered an unpopular study of the last century, in which it was shown that nearly everyone, when questioned with a guarantee of anonymity, admitted to some kind of illegal or criminal act, from petty theft to violence and sexual abuse of others.

Humankind, he had come to believe, lived in a collective fantasy about who it was, where it came from, and what it wanted to be. To see or even glimpse what the truth might be was, for most people, to court horror and dismay. Criminals, of course, were always breaking into the fantasy and showing it up for an illusion.

Yet freedom might come only when we have looked truth in the face and realize that we are responsible only to ourselves and each other. There is no other pedigree for moral codes except human needs, which are reality enough…

To reign in hell is our only fate, since there is no heaven…

Thought was tiring. One had to love mazes to think well. The hunter-gatherer ape, so recent from the trees, had inexplicably, as if by the grace of a merciful God, developed a taste for thought; but it was a wonder how good he was at it, and how infrequently he paid attention to its answers, or bothered to remember them. The ancients had guessed nearly all the right questions, and many of the answers, using transcendent speculation and reason alone. The religionists had seen the need for social engineering, but they couldn’t face up to what they were doing and had to insist upon imaginary authorities. The secular state builders did no better with human nature, with their police forces and criminal justice systems run by money and power…

Thinking, one climbed up to a plateau of reason and looked around for heroes, but found none. The creature that thought and acted was one and the same, high and low, stupid and smart, making reform slow, if not impossible, subversion and corruption of ideals inevitable. Why did they bother voicing them?

Something was crying to be free—

—of itself—

—to take wing without wings.

He looked at his calendar, and saw that it was that day again. Some of the men in the barracks were attempting to celebrate human kinship and mutual concern. He got up and left the warden’s office. As he came up the ramp to the inner land, he heard distant singing that sounded like a love song.

As the hungry Earth ripped out the innards of metal-rich asteroids to enhance the lives of its ever longer living peoples, it quickly filled the empties with its rejects.

These were the last of the lowest criminal class, the freelance soldiers who worked through long chains of command for the better placed lawbreakers who gracefully slipped back and forth through legality’s shifting borders, but who now, increasingly, had less need for the street—for the poorly paid thieves, burglars, fences, specialized prostitutes, and murderers on call.

All were being replaced by ever more sophisticated specialists, who worked only when called from on high, and had the luxury of refusing work. Their great virtue was that they now came from a deep systematic cover of decent, ordinary lives and were willing to do what the powerhoarders were unwilling to do for themselves, as longer life beckoned, and power beyond wealth became the most sought after prize. “We’ll let the world live in comfort, but power must remain with us,” the highest whispered to themselves in their hearts, “because we know what to do with it, because we cannot let it slip from our hands and the hands of our kin.”

But once in a while they also pruned from their own—from the untrustworthy whose sympathies sometimes looked downward to the riching slums, to the talentless towns, to the lazy lands.

Yet the ones of great wealth also feared the sky. Too much profit there, unless controlled by them, would rearrange the interlocks of power on Earth. It had to be done carefully, this outreach and influx, with talent under their control; and hostile talent sent elsewhere.

So the third and fourth Rocks filled with the politically aware and talented who could not be bought, because they sought all for their righteous tribe; and there were a few saints among them, whose persuasion was more dangerous than wealth and power. And the wealthy told themselves in their hearts that these pressures and persuasions of principle and belief were embraced precisely because of the power they might bestow. Nothing more than dangerous insistence, but too influential.

So Rocks Three and Four went out on a loop of centuries, but recorded as much less; and no one recorded exactly how long. An open orbit, one that would never return the Rock, was too costly in energy, since it required achieving escape velocity from the Sun. A century or two would be enough. No one would know until too late; and by then it would not matter to the living of today who might come to worry about mistakes in some far tomorrow.

But it was a never ending charade played by courts that had no ears, seeking to correct educations and economies that were unable to eliminate the enterprises of criminality. Only the crudest forms could be controlled. The rest grew ever various, better concealed and protected human ingenuities whose parents were intelligence and opportunity. Even as crimes of simple greed declined, crimes wedded to the holding of power increased.

Humankind gained greater control over everything except itself, and argued with the saints that it could not be otherwise, with some saying that it should never be otherwise: A weeding process was at work, whose greater good seemed an evil only in short runs, and necessary creativity in longer runs.

Had de Sade been right? Were you free to gain what you lost through abuse by others by abusing for yourself? You must be alert to the nature of the game. Everyone was in reality a wolf, so the raising of sheep should be abolished. It was in fact a great tragedy to raise sheep, to bring low so much vital and daring nobility.

An unadmitted game cannot be changed. It was too well set, beyond tampering, driving all human creativity: bioengineering and even the growth of artificial intelligence. Humanity’s children would indeed be descended from humanity, and no other.

The first longlifers needed the short-timers to do their work, especially their criminal, and military work; but as these short-timers were used up, they were replaced with new athletes who would contribute to the building of wealth and power. Mass killings were not acceptable. A sieve was needed, through which humanity would be poured, to select those who would be saved.

And yet…and yet, the goodwillers cried, something was being misunderstood: Humanity was surely better than this!

No! Social systems grew out of deep biology, not discussion; and whenever discussion alone had given birth to reform, deeper currents quickly drowned the songful whelpings of angelic hope.

Yet saints and great ones had risen above the deep database of the body, and brought some control over the mirror-shy predator within, at least for short times. They had sought to pass on the new commonwealths through culture, but this bravery of good will always ran out of strength; new generations could not be trained and educated fast enough before amnesiacs bought old agendas once again. Something better than the domesticated predator was needed; yet all feared to take away the predator’s strength.

What was needed, cried the aspiring saints, was a generation that would cleanse itself, then become its own posterity. Memory would not slip but grow for such as these, and new additions to their ranks would be slow and sure, conserving memory…

Until then—the cleansing continued.

Rocks Five and Six were hurled, and almost no one knew who was in them.

■

As he walked down toward the barracks town, Tasarov stopped and peered into the grassy distance to his right. A black snake was rising from the dry grass. It took him a moment to guess what he was seeing. In another moment he saw a burst of flame at the base of the smoky snake, which rose and curled in obedience to the Coriolis acceleration of the habitat’s spin. A dark figure moved away from the fire, and Tasarov knew that it had been set with a will.

He started to run toward the barracks, shouting alarm, remembering that he had given the drying grass a passing thought, but had dismissed the danger of fire because there was nothing to start it—except human beings.

“Fire!” he shouted to the men playing ball near the barracks. “Fire!”

As he reached them, they were gaping at the rising smoke. Tasarov wondered how much oxygen loss the habitat’s systems could replace, and what the danger from smoke inhalation might be if all the grass burned.

“Get shovels and gardening tools—we’ve got to make a firebreak around it!”

The ballplayers stared at him in confusion.

“Now!” he shouted, looking to make out the figure who had set the fire. He was still in the grass, moving away from the blaze. Tasarov could not see who it was.

Men were rushing out of the barracks now. Eddie Dantès came up to him. Tasarov pointed and asked, “Do you know who that man out there is?”

Dantès gave a look. “Not at this distance.”

Howes heard the question and said, “I think it’s Crazy Bachelard, by the way he moves.”

“Why did he do it?” Tasarov asked.