Brute Orbits (12 page)

Osokin tossed his handful of grass into the air, and the wind whipped the loose blades toward the rocks. Osokin noted their direction and started climbing. He scrambled past the oblivious Ashe, and stopped in horror when he saw the crack swallow the grass.

Ashe opened his eyes, turned and called after him, “Brother, be patient, be still, and hear the words of the Great Ones.”

“I hear well enough,” Osokin answered through a tight throat, his heart racing. After a few moments, he turned and stumbled back to stand at Ashe’s right hand.

Osokin raised his arms. “Friends! Behind me there’s a narrow crack. Our atmosphere is going out that way…”

There was a silence, as if the seconds before an execution were running out.

A woman screamed, “My child, my child!”

Osokin saw she was pregnant as she clutched at her belly, which was clearly filling out her loose fitting prison coveralls.

“Listen!” he shouted. “This may not be serious. It may only be rushing away into the engineering level—but we can’t take a chance. We’ll have to seal it up.”

Ashe was looking at him with an open mouth. He seemed to understand; but then something else deep within him reasserted itself and said, “Blasphemer! The voice of the Great Ones is not to be mocked.”

Osokin ignored him. “We have to get dirt, wet it, and pack it in until the wind stops.”

“You dare, you dare?” Ashe cried out. “You dare to silence the voice of the Great Ones?”

Osokin wanted dearly to say that he dared, but restrained himself as he saw that a group was already breaking away to go back and get spades.

Ashe said the only thing left for him to say. “Have you no ears? Do you not hear? The voice of saving armies speaks!”

Everyone was turning away from him. He dropped to his knees and cried, “I hear, I hear!” Then he lowered his head and wept.

Osokin stepped up to him and put a hand on his shoulder.

Ashe looked up at him and said, “But I do hear,” over the whipping wind, “I do hear it.”

Osokin nodded, trying to dredge up some show of pity from himself; but he knew that he was only contorting his face into a feeble mask of compassion; so he kept his hand on the man’s shoulder and said, “Of course you hear…it happens that way…sometimes,” knowing that it was a necessary display of human feeling, to disarm anyone who would later repeat the tale.

Rock Five carried away humankind’s aliens.

These were the sexually damaged beyond repair. Some said that to have killed them all would have been better; only their numbers—six thousand men and women gathered in the Rock from all over the world—made it politically unacceptable to simply gas them in the enclosed space. Most of them were under a sentence of life imprisonment or death; but the delays were endless, as were the discussions about “clearing the Rock” of vermin, so it might be used again, for a better class of criminals. A mass execution inside the rock might even have achieved legality, but then it would have been necessary to subtract the lifers. “Send it into the Sun,” was a common suggestion.

The final decision sent the Rock into another “open” orbit, a persistent misnomer which actually meant that its period was longer than anyone on the Rock could live. Escape velocity from the Sun was not necessary when a period of a century or more would do the job. Sentences of death and life imprisonment were thus again satisfied.

Those who had received life differed only in legal technicalities from those who had been given death; both groups had committed rape and murder, preceded by cruel tortures. Death seemed the most expedient solution, but the understanding of researchers stood against it. Too much was known about what had alienated these human beings from their own kind to permit even the “social self-defense” justification for acceptable killing.

These sexual predators and killers knew that their behavior was fearfully rejected by the society around them; and for periods of time some of them were able to restrain themselves; but sexual release was not possible for them except through violence. After periods of self-restraint that could only weaken, when all other forms of gratification paled before the memory of pleasure, they went out to quiet their bodies by killing. As the normally adjusted man or woman seeks affection and orgasm, these others sought the same through cruelty, rape, and murder.

To find eroticism and adventure at the borders of danger and pain was a tropism closely linked to the main line of human behavior, to be eradicated in the mature adult of this kind only through the dubious purgings of drugs and surgery. Early violence against the child was blamed, in which the initial sexual gratification was released through cruelty and pain, fixing the pleasure response as effectively as the common sexual awakening, but replacing its reproductively purposeful way with an interloper whose only aim was joyous, unspeakable, forbidden domination and bloodletting.

Ordinary violence and rape by otherwise self-directed males was the middle ground between these aliens and the usual run of humanity, except that their avenue to gratification was not occasional but pathological. No other way existed for them. They moved among their kind as secret agents from an alien world, as despised and misunderstood as normal gays and lesbians had once been, driven by their devils to prey that had to struggle and show fear to be desirable.

The richest and most intelligent among them simply understood and filled their needs and were rarely caught; the powerless lived bewildered lives of attempted adaptation, no different than the lives of alcoholics and drug users. As the world grew smaller, the nets of organization pulled them in, preached at them, imprisoned them, drugged them, altered them surgically, locked them up, killed them, ignored them—and yet made new ones. Where were they coming from? From the fatal liberty of human nature, some said.

Humanity cried out in denial, “The Devil does not drive us!” It sought to rip out its evolutionary heart and hurl it into the darkness, denying in the brightly lit realm of its cerebral cortex that predation, sexual domination, the killing of infants and male enemies had all been part of the leverage by which nature had raised humankind out of time’s darkness, caring for individuals only if they lived to the age of reproduction. Nature did not fret over how the male delivered his wetware, caring only that he did so; it knew nothing of social systems, and did not agonize over deluded and damaged individuals; it did not trust the species to decide its own survival—so it gave it the orgasm as reward, and whipped the male who denied it into submission.

Social systems, grown from exhortations backed by physical force, acted in ignorance, recognizing neither humankind’s true origins nor its waiting, open possibilities…

■

The three women came at him on all fours, like slow moving wolves, eyeing him with fear and suspicion. It had taken some time to beat and frighten them into performing. The first one, a curly-headed brunette, came up into his lap, took his penis in her mouth, and bit him…

He felt the token pain, then shot her through the head and kicked the body back for the others to see. The other two waited, then began to whimper…

As the mercy-VR program ran out, he held on to the three naked figures in his field of vision—one cheesecake white, one silky chocolate, one amber, each with a foresty pubis. They were all probably dead by now, and he could only torment them in the system’s limited variations. This had been one of the last downloaded programs shouted to the Rock by pitying friends and relatives before communications had been cut off. The record was supposedly of a real crime, for which the unseen man had been tried and sentenced. Maybe he was even here…

As he took off the old style VR helmet, Bellamy longed to have VRs of his own adventures. They sang to him from his fading memory, reminding him that their like would never come again in the lifetime left to him out here. Looking back, he knew that he had once lived and was now dead.

He did not blame anyone for his confinement; they were simply protecting themselves, as they said. On Earth, he would have been selecting and stalking new victims, satisfying new needs.

He did not think of himself as abnormal, because he had never known any other way. As he saw it, those unlike him had a right to protect themselves, and he had a right to use those who failed to escape him as his needs demanded. He had tried repeatedly to live as they did, as a practical matter, to avoid their getting after him; but it was life in an emotional desert of denial. He could not understand how they managed to live in such a way. The only way he could understand it was to tell himself that they had different needs, smaller needs. They were welcome to their ways.

But his body knew what he was and what had been done to deny it: Everyone here was like him, in one way or another, and could not be easily stalked and used as he had done back home. Here there was no prey.

So another kind of order had emerged, and could not be avoided. Bellamy had grown familiar with the ritual, and he lived in the hope of getting something out of it.

The ritual, which was sometimes enacted in the mess halls and sometimes outside in the fields, was a way of deciding who would be the abused and who would abuse. One by one, each inmate of the Rock was tested by tormentors, who used implements, food, and their own bodies to bring the victim to the breaking point, but without killing. Those who resisted best went over to the pool of tormentors; but this also needed a vote of the mass, based on whether they were especially entertained or not. One worked hard to become a tormentor by resisting fear, panic, and pain; one could also fall from tormentor status back into the mass of victims.

But the greatest missing pleasure, one that had disappeared in the first year of exile, was death. Too many were dying at the outset, and it became clear that the Rock could not afford many more deaths. So while the new order guaranteed a chance for everyone to fulfill their needs, it frustrated their most intense realization.

Most everyone lived with the feeling, especially those who had known the ecstasy of sexual slaughter but were now denied it, of a vast emptiness at the center of their lives; and many of them suspected that this had also been the intended punishment of exile in the spinning, fleeing Rock: The rise of necessary order, alien to individuals of this other humanity, would trivialize and domesticate their predator’s needs, giving with one hand a chance for community survival beyond the present population, while taking away with the other the right to sexual release through killing.

There arose an order, alien by Earth’s standards, that saw quickly that it did not wish to abolish itself through anarchy, even if that meant building a wall between two parts of its own nature.

A far-seer sitting on that wall would have said that there was nothing new or alien about the arrangement. The contortions of the soul-body that lived on Earth were not different. The cruelties and humiliations of economics and business conduct; the accepted inhumanities that called upon a hidden and necessary hand in human history; the silent cruelty of the powerful to the lesser and powerless; the personal vendettas of commission and omission; the hatreds of race, class, and personal antipathies—all sang the song of the predators who dreamed of slaughtering their neighbor’s children, enslaving their women, and swarming the future with only their own whelpings. If they had been souls in stone, they would have roughed and polished each other until only the largest were left, and these would have crushed each other into dust.

Humankind had only hurled its most denied self out into the dark, but the angels still battled with devils back home. Bellamy was sure of that.

Would it have helped Bellamy to understand what he was, to step back into endless perspectives on what he took for granted? Would it have helped him to stare reality in the face? He lacked this insight of step-back that had led some individuals into discontented greatness, whose endless method of examination tortured all givens, and yet whose beatific light had somehow sprung from the same cauldron as the unthinking predator.

■

When Bellamy wore out the mercy-VRs, he had no choice but to work with the details of his own memory. Miraculously, they returned to him, as if the VR had retrained his memory, and he treasured each rescued moment. It was his way of avoiding the rituals—by going out into the tall grass at duskdown and lying there invisible to everyone.

There, slowly, he discovered that he could have what he wanted from his past, drifting in a sea-silence until the blessed moments came to him again out of the black grave of fragmented memories—

They were like little chocolates in their supra-suburban villages, far from the paid-poverty of the suburbs into which he had been born, each female body yielding up a different inner core of delight. He watched and logged their comings and goings as if they were butterflies, and bought their house-entry codes from the sellers who knew their captive market well. For him it was always a simple matter to steal enough to pay for the magic keys…

It was always the same with the women. Some were cruel to their males; a few didn’t need males at all; and others were natural victims: their innermost doors were always open, waiting for him to find them…

He entered her bedroom and put the mini-dart gun to her temple.

She opened her eyes.

“You have decisions to make,” he said, dropping his small equipment bag. “Understand?”

Slowly, she nodded, unable to speak. After a moment he saw that she was not breathing. Then her mouth opened and she gasped, staring at him wide-eyed, just the way he liked it.

“Make you a deal,” he said. “Let me watch you…and I won’t touch you at all.”

She took a deep breath, as if surprised at her good fortune, then nodded, and he knew that he had hooked her.

She slipped her arms under the covers and closed her eyes. He watched her play with herself for a minute, then reached down and whipped back the covers.

“Don’t stop,” he said, backing away.

As she closed her eyes and continued, he got down on his knees and took out the four metal eyelets that he had brought. Taking his dart gun, he placed the eyelets, one by one into the business end, then drove them into the hardwood floor. Finally, he took out four sets of cuffs and attached one to each eyelet.