Brute Orbits (11 page)

“Who knows? He doesn’t talk much to anyone.”

“Look at that!” Dantès cried. “He’s lying down.”

“Come on!” shouted Tasarov.

The men behind Tasarov swelled to over a thousand. They spread out into the grassland, encircling the flames, and began to pull out the grass with their hands to make a firebreak. Others were chopping and digging with the few gardening tools that had been found in the guards’ quarters.

A terrible scream reached their ears over the crackle and roar of the flames, as if the fire itself had cried out.

The men redoubled their efforts. Slowly, the break was made. The fire reached the bare ground, stopped, and began to die for lack of fuel.

The men stood around their unexpected enemy, perspiring, roused to a new understanding of their vulnerability. Finally, they started across the burnt stubble, searching.

They found the blackened body of Crazy Bachelard on the smoking ground. Eddie Dantès identified him by the skull ring on his right forefinger.

By the time they finished burying him, a great cloud of smoke hung high overhead in the great hollow space. Tasarov held back from telling the men what an uncontrolled fire might have done inside the habitat, but some of the men certainly suspected that a great danger had been averted.

Later, back in his warden’s quarters, Tasarov thought of the abyss that waits to swallow every society. More so ours, he thought, which exists on little better than a thin sheet of glass above the void. But seeing the comradeship that had followed the extinguishing of the fire, he concluded that Crazy Bachelard had done them all a favor, by drawing them all together into a single act. Unknowingly, he had made the glass underfoot a little stronger. Tasarov had seen it in the eyes of the men. At whomever he looked, he saw resolve tinged with pride, because something necessary had been accomplished, in a place that had taken away all useful work.

The void outside and the moral law within, he said to himself, paraphrasing old Kant. Tasarov had never met a criminal who did not have some kind of code; even among themselves they knew the wild animals from the crooks out for profit. Was there hope in that? But hope for what? To become sheep? Lawfulness might succeed too well, and that was also to be feared. To live was to twist in the antinomies, to subvert old victories and seek new strife, hoping never to find boredom.

Tasarov had learned too much and thought too long not to smile at his own relentless wrestling with both angels and devils. Human minds were prone to it when left too much alone; but he welcomed it, because it gave him a seat on a high court in which he was also being tried.

■

Few Earthly eyes watched to see how the inmates of the Rocks fared. It was not the kind of display routinely available in planet-based prisons, where the resistance of inmates’ wills was plain to guards and authorities. There prisoners were still at times held in respect; there prisoners might still shame authorities as they lived in the prison of their jailers’ eyes. Here only recording eyes scanned the condemned, creating a record that few human eyes cared to study. Some of it was transmitted home; the rest was stored in engineering databases.

Unable to look out from the Rock, Tasarov had looked back to the Earth inside himself—once; a while later he had looked again—and not since; it was not his world out there. And he knew that many of the other inmates had also turned away from the memory within themselves.

Early on he had suspected that there might be some kind of continuing surveillance being sent back to Earth; but he had not found any evidence of it so far and was reluctant to make a better search. It troubled him that he should hope for a secret, panoptic gaze that saw and judged the rejects in the pit. It was too much of a hope, and he crushed it within himself, ashamed of feeling such a need.

He sometimes missed the look of inevitability that seemed to mask a woman’s face during copulation. What was it for a man—resignation…conquest? He had never looked into a man’s face in such a state, only felt his own expressions from within. A woman’s face in ecstasy was a glorious fantasy, lending romance to what was, after all, the central action, the great forward pass of genetic data in evolution’s relay race.

He smiled at the sporting analogy, because it didn’t quite fit; it was more like the struggle in a football game, in which you fought first for the right to make the forward pass, to set it up and hope that it would connect and score, presuming that the little bitch or bastard born would grow up and earn the same right to make forward passes. Or maybe the bitch was the catcher in a baseball game? Perhaps there had been some progress—away from invading armies that scored by raping and pillaging for their share of the future…

■

Tasarov got to know his prison.

He walked it from one end to the other—from sunplate to the rocky far end in a straight line; in a spiral, and saw the barracks huddled overhead, men moving around, held down on their feet by the habitat’s centrifugal spin, heads pointed to the invisible axis of zero-g down the center.

It was all grass again, growing back as the dry blades died. He longed for a tree, or a row of bushes. There was a pond, about three inches deep. The gods of punishment had not seen fit to make more.

Men walked with him, behind, at his sides, keeping company and privacy. Some he recognized; others he did not.

No one ever walked ahead of him.

He recalled a line of poetry—about the awful rowing toward God. But he had no oars of belief to propel him. There were no such oars to be had.

He covered distance within himself.

JUDGE OVERTON’S PRIVATE CHAMBER

“What do you say about hopelessness being the root cause of all crime?”

“Well, yes—but, you see, they get professionally organized, the best of them. They get good at it with practice. Most hopeless people don’t commit crimes. Of course, most of them are just too afraid and don’t have the courage or skill. It’s the bright and canny ones who become the most violent, to maintain their hold on things. They see what it takes.”

“So you say it’s too late for them?”

“Yes.”

“But what if we removed the hopelessness at the very beginning of life, give them something to lose. Then we wouldn’t raise the ambitious ones, much less their soldiers.”

“Yes. But my job is to restrain them until then. It’s the best we can do now.”

Ivan Osokin now faced a new challenge to the order that he had established by killing John “Jimmy” Barr. The men needed him—to reassure them about their health much of the time; with any luck, the worst cases would come up a long time from now. For them, he might not be able to do much more than the automated diagnostic scanner could do—tell them what they had and order a drug. Still, their knowing that he was, or had been, a doctor of medicine calmed them and kept him safe.

Killing Barr had been a necessary weeding; it had saved lives.

Osokin looked around the mess hall as he ate, and spotted a familiar figure.

“You can be saved!” cried the preacher as he walked among the men and women in the mess hall. “But you must go down on your knees each day of your life!”

“Yeah, tell me about it,” a woman’s voice called out.

Osokin looked up too late to see who had answered the self-professed holy man.

Osokin knew that it was his own success against Barr that had encouraged the preacher to come forth. If you had something to sell, then sell it, was the lesson of Osokin’s victory. There would be other sellers, Osokin knew, as soon as it dawned on them what specific they had to push. An inmate claiming to be a defrocked priest had been going around hearing confessions far out in the grass. The man had told him that his being defrocked didn’t matter, since he was hearing confessions in hell. Osokin had asked him about the hopelessness of it, since no one ever got out of hell. “A true priest ministers to human failings,” the man had replied, “and these are the most failed of failures. What greater accomplishment than to hear the repentance of those in hell? Yes, yes, they do repent, Doctor, and I give them the absolution of the damned—forgiveness without salvation. And hope.” What kind of hope, Osokin had asked, and the man had smiled at him as if he’d walked into a trap. “Doctor, in the infinity of time that waits before us, God may have mercy on us. He may reach down and pull us free.” He had smiled very broadly before adding, “In an infinite time, anything may happen. We may yet dwell in his company and see his face.”

Osokin had given some thought to what there was to trade for power: men and women’s bodies—that would settle itself—medical help, entertainment, and hope. He had not expected to see the selling of hope so soon. The defrocked priest was harmless, but he had his occasional takers, and that seemed to be enough for him. Osokin had expected to see the selling of cruelty as entertainment first.

The preacher was the second seller of hope, and much more ambitious than the priest. He called himself Dr. Jeremy Ashe. He was a long-haired man, as tall as Osokin, an Anglo-Italian with a mother from Bombay. He claimed that she had taught him about the Great Ones who lived in the central region of the galaxy and were “direct intermediaries to God,” whose black holes waited to retrieve the created universe into His bowels. There the damned would be crushed into an infinitely dense state of perpetual pain, but the saved would emerge into light and happiness without end.

Osokin didn’t know whether Ashe believed any of it, but that didn’t matter; the man might be a force for either stability or disorder, and that was not to be dismissed.

“I bring you hope!” shouted Ashe, bringing to market a very saleable good. “And I bring you knowledge, the father of hope—so that your hope will have eyes and not be blind! We are on our way toward the Great Ones of the galaxy, as planned by the compassionates who built this habitat and sent us on our way!”

“Say who?” a male voice asked.

That was pretty clever, Osokin thought, to suggest that the officers of the criminal justice system had been mere tools in the service of a higher power. He spooned up the last of his stew, then looked around at the faces of the others. Most seemed unconvinced; but it took only a few to build a circle of followers that might grow.
When do we get there?
—he wanted to shout back, but restrained himself; too early an opposition would only gain Ashe the sympathy that sometimes went to an underdog.

“I thought the cop lovers built this place!” shouted a male voice.

“Ah, yes!” Ashe replied. “But its true purpose was hidden even from them!”

“Who told you!” another man’s voice demanded.

Ashe stopped and held his arms over his head. “One of the Great Ones spoke to me from the rocks!”

Osokin smiled to himself. So there was to be the usual pedigree to the Word: handed down by an unimpeachable authority at an unfindable location, requiring faith to seal the bargain. Standard operating unverifiability—according to which even the bringer of the truth was unaware that he was hiding the source from himself, if necessary; the fountain-head of needful order had to be unquestioned. The actual source was of course the purely human impulse toward order. Too bad it had to co-exist in a partly rational brain with so many other evolutionarily embedded commands.

“At the far end rocks!” Ashe cried. “A voice spoke to me!”

Surprised, Osokin looked up, wondering how Ashe could have made such a mistake. It was a bad move to be specific. Ashe must believe he had heard something there. And Osokin saw that his chance had come sooner than he had expected, even if it meant losing any of the stability that Ashe might have brought to the community. One must not overlook a chance to destroy the competition early; a later chance might be too late.

Osokin stood up. “Where did you hear this voice?” he asked politely.

Ashe looked at him without fear or suspicion and said again, “At the far end rocks.”

There was a sudden quiet.

“Will you take us there?” Osokin asked softly.

Ashe gazed at him as if he were his lover, then shouted, “Ye have asked, and ye shall hear!” Then he looked around the mess. “All shall hear who follow me! Repeat my words in all the halls, and follow me.”

Men and women were looking at him with wonder.

“Yes,” Osokin said, “we shall go hear your voice.”

“Do you doubt, brother?” Ashe asked, looking at him with a puzzled, guileless face.

“I need to hear,” Osokin said in a neutral tone, and for a moment played with the thought that a subtle God was testing him.

“All need to hear!” Ashe replied. “And all shall hear!”

Osokin sat down, wondering how the man could have put himself into such a vulnerable position. A true believer would be too naive to play games. Would they reach the rocks and be told that they were deaf, and that only he could hear the voice?

“Eat and be strong,” Ashe said, “and then follow me.”

■

The turnout was smaller than Osokin had expected. Fewer than three hundred men and women followed Ashe down the length of the habitat. It was not a short walk—some four kilometers. Ashe led the way, never once looking back. There was conviction in his stride.

Gravity decreased slightly as they neared the rocks of far-end, where the inner surface narrowed toward the axis of rotation. Osokin felt a breeze blowing toward the rocks, and a distant high-pitched howl, but thought nothing of it at first; as they drew nearer to the narrows, and both wind and howl increased, he began to worry.

Ashe reached the rocks, turned around, and shouted, “Hear the song, hear the Word!” He raised his arms. “How beautiful, with words!”

It was a brisk wind now. Osokin looked to the rocks beyond Ashe. His long hair was blowing back toward the rocks. Osokin looked around for a patch of grass or shrubbery, found some, and pulled up a handful.

Ashe stood in the wind, eyes closed.

“Hear the song, hear the Word!” he shouted again, closed up within himself, hearing what he prayed to hear, what he needed to hear. He was more dangerous than Osokin had supposed, because he heard the voices and believed what he heard—what some far part of himself was telling him.