Brute Orbits (15 page)

She had asked him why he did it, and all he could remember was that his two friends were going to do something and wanted him along. When the time came, it seemed right to kill the people in the car, or get killed. They had killed Mario right off, so at least one of them had to die. He had killed one, and Angela had killed the other. That made three. What had the judge expected? That he and Angela should have stood there and got shot? It seemed like a dream to think about it, and have it come out the same way every time.

“Ricardo,” his lawyer had continued, “there’s not much more I can do for you except say a few things that might stick in your head. It’s my last shot. Do you understand?”

“Yeah, sure,” he had said to make her feel better. What could it matter. She had great tits and good legs. Her butt was getting bigger, but still pretty good for over thirty. He could enjoy her if he had the chance.

“Ricardo, the Rock you’re going to will be nearly all orphans, or so close it’s the same thing. It’s going to be overcrowded, because they’re packing in as many as they can get in before the boost.”

“So?”

She had smiled, trying to look friendly. He had thought of killing her right there, because there wasn’t much more they could do to him except kill him, but they weren’t killing lately.

“Do you have any feelings about why you are here, and why you are as you are?” she had asked. “You might have been very different. Look—think this way, for just a few moments. You didn’t make yourself the way you think and feel right now, because you weren’t around to decide back before you were born. A lot of other things decided it for you.”

He knew what she meant, but it didn’t matter.

“A great judge said that if a child isn’t fixed between the age of three and seven, it’ll never be fixed. Do you feel you’ll never get better?”

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” he had said, just to say something she obviously wanted to hear.

“You know only what your way of growing up has taught you—look out for yourself and get what you can of what you need.”

“Don’t you do that?” he had asked. “What else is there?”

She had sighed. “Other people. You don’t need to step on them when they get in your way.”

“You do if they try to step on you,” he had said.

“It’s the way you look out for yourself and get what you need,” she had said. “And you will get it.”

She had given him a long look of
how sorry I am
, then touched his cheek gently with her hand as she stood up. “You are a handsome boy, you know.” And she had left, thinking it was too bad.

He was the youngest of the boys in the Rock, except for the hundred or so eleven-year olds. The oldest males and females here were well over twenty. The oldest had the largest number of screamers, the drug addicted, and the crazies. A few were recovering, but many were dying, unable to eat. He had seen a few of them sitting in the tall grass, where they had to sleep. They had been brought here at the last minute, a few thousand of them, just before the boost. There was no room for them in the barracks. They didn’t come to the mess halls to eat, and were getting sicker each day. A few were already dead.

The rest of the girls, even those his age, were competing for the oldest non-addicted guys, the eighteen to twenty-fives. There were maybe ten thousand people in the Rock, counting the screamers.

There wasn’t much to do except eat, sleep, and spy on the older guys making it with the girls you couldn’t get, and avoid getting beaten up by the gays and perverts. Many of the frooties would just ask, even beg, but the pervs went around in twos and threes, and they could get you. Unwilling girls were stalked, but he had not yet gotten up the courage to try it until today.

He was following a tall, willowy girl with short blond hair who liked to go up to the grove behind the mess halls. A footpath was being worn through the grass to the place. As he came to the grove of maple trees, he noticed a flurry of movement on the ground. He crept closer and peered out from the side of a tree. The girl was on the ground, her arms pinned by a tall, dark-haired boy. She struggled, then lay back, cursing at him as he reached down and started to pull up her denim skirt. She threw her long legs into the air, trying to get him into a headlock, but missed every time.

Ricardo stepped into view and shouted, “Hey, let her go!” He didn’t know why he did it.

The boy looked at him and grinned. “Wanna watch? I don’t mind.”

The girl broke loose as he spoke and scrambled to her feet. The boy reached out for her crotch. She turned and fled through the trees. The tall boy came up to him and knocked him down. Then he started after the girl.

Ricardo got up with blood in his mouth, and followed at a run.

He felt useless as he stopped outside the trees.

The girl was running swiftly across the grass, but the tall boy was pushing hard and gaining. He caught up with her, and the two figures fell silently out of sight into the tall grass.

Ricardo sat down, unable to sort out his feelings.

After a while, he saw the tall boy get up and march away.

A minute later the girl got up and looked around. She saw him. He waved to her. She seemed to be looking toward him. He started to walk toward her. She turned away and marched toward the barracks.

He watched as she neared one of the buildings. Two boys came out to meet her; then the boy who had left her in the grass came up from her left. The three seemed to be talking. She pointed toward Ricardo. The three boys started up toward him.

As he neared the three boys, Ricardo saw that they were grinning at him.

“Get him!” shouted one.

Ricardo halted and stood his ground.

They reached him, and the one who had left the girl in the grass grabbed him by his denim coverall.

“What you doin’ out here, boy?” he demanded. “Spying?”

“I was out walking,” Ricardo said defiantly. “You said I could watch,” he added.

“Who sent you?” asked a short redheaded boy.

“No one.”

“She belongs to us, you know,” said a third boy. “She complained about you.”

“I thought…” Ricardo started to say.

“Yeah?” said the tall boy.

“…you were hurting her,” he finished.

“She likes it that way,” the tall boy said. “She likes to be hunted and chased. Get it?”

Ricardo didn’t but nodded.

The piggish boy sneered. “You can see he’s never been laid,” he said—and punched Ricardo in the mouth.

The blow knocked him on his back.

He lay still, as if he were someone else.

“Ah, he’s no fun,” said the redhead.

The three looked down at him with contempt.

“Leave him,” the tall boy said. “He’ll be taking it up the ass in no time.”

They turned and walked off, laughing…

■

Ten years later, the screamers were all dead and buried or down the disposal chutes. Only a handful had kicked their habits and lived. It had been bad, with rotting bodies in the grass, until he had organized the dump squads.

Ricardo sometimes remembered the laughter of the older boys who had tormented him. They were now old men in their thirties, the ones he had not killed. He and those younger than him now had all the best girls and the better women, including the leggy girl he had tried to help in the grass. His lawyer had given him a good idea when she had told him how handsome he was. He still looked very young, lied about his age, and counted himself a success.

And the three old bullies went in fear of him.

JUDGE OVERTON’S PRIVATE CHAMBER

“There are those who say we should pay up front, or pay at the other end of a life, by building higher walls. They say that education and health must deal with human lives, whose value is beyond price. As an investment, lives should not be subject to the marketplace. The original investment in education and health, in the quality control of bringing new human beings on line, should not be counted or begrudged in any way, since the benefits of prevention will prove to be incalculable.

“To all this I say well and good—but what do we do with the ones who are past any rehabilitation, immune to deterrence, and likely to train more like them? Every generation of humanity to date has been damaged in some way by the previous generation; but until we learn how to make a better generation, we have to protect ourselves. Now we’ve mined all these rocks, and we’re filling them up. They’re available, ready and waiting for that twenty percent who will never be able to return successfully to normal life.”

In the second year of her imprisonment Abebe Chou learned to take a perverse pleasure in the sewing circle. She liked especially to frame chaotic difficulties which set the five men to untangling subtle errors in reasoning or use of fact, forcing them to return to square one of the discussion; at that point she would present another complex misconception with a straight face.

It was pathetic how they vied to instruct her, with the unspoken hope that she would come to prefer one of them over the others. Sadder still were their contortionist efforts to deny the reality of their competition with each other. It was obvious, and yet they continued in their hypocritical good manners. The beast trying to rise above its ancient ways.

On a Saturday morning, by the accepted calendar, as she made her way across the field to the usual meeting place, she noticed that the color was bleeding out of the world. Greens, blues, and distant browns were darkening, as if the sunplate was fading much too quickly toward its usual nightly moonlight.

But it was already way past that, and in less than a minute she stood in complete darkness, unable to see the well worn path in front of her. She put her hand before her face and saw nothing. The blackness was complete.

“Abebe!” Leibniz cried out with concern.

“Are we all blind?” she called back.

“No!” Lenin answered. “Something’s gone wrong with the sunplate.”

She moved slowly up the path, knowing that it went straight ahead to the group, with only a minor curve to the left.

“Does anyone have a light?” Stalin called out.

She stopped, realizing that she had never seen a flashlight in the habitat. There had to be matches somewhere, but she did not recall ever having seen them either.

She stopped and turned around in the darkness, straining to see if anyone back at the town had lit a fire; but the blackness around her was still unbroken. Suddenly she did not know which way she had come or which way she had been going.

“This way, Abebe!” Trotsky cried.

She turned toward the voice, then got down on her knees and felt where the path had been worn through the grass.

“Stay where you are!” Newton called out. “Maybe the light will come back shortly.”

She sat down where she knelt and waited.

After a few minutes, cries of anger and dismay drifted up from the town. She turned her head, but still saw no light of any kind. There was nothing to burn, she realized, except perhaps the grass; but it was probably not dry enough.

This was a major failure, she thought, and no one knew the way into the engineering level; but even if a way had been found, there was no certainty that it was a fixable failure.

“Abebe!” Stalin called out. “Are you all right?”

“Yes,” she shouted back. Why wouldn’t I be, she thought, wishing that she still had the watch John Sakari had given her before their separation. He had let her keep it, and she recalled that its face had glowed in the dark.

There was no way to tell how much time had gone by since the blackout, but it seemed long. Time seemed to slow in the absence of light.

Again, she realized that they had nothing to burn, even if a way were available to start a fire. There was simply no need for a flame, not even in the mess halls.

She realized that after a long while there would be no choice but to attempt to reach the mess halls. Maybe there they would find some light, some glow from the equipment.

But as she looked around, she realized that the blackout might mean a more general loss of power. No food would be delivered from the manufacturing plants below the mess halls, where the proteins, carbohydrates, fibers, and nutrients were melded into the uninteresting but necessary edibles and liquids.

Within six hours, she knew that hunger would force her to try for one of the mess halls, if she could remember its direction from the path. She would have to walk very slowly, arms out like a blind person.

“Abebe!” Lenin cried. “Try to get up here to us. No point in sitting there alone. Conversation is better here.”

She smiled, picturing the fools sitting in the dark, continuing their discussion like the inmates of Plato’s cave—except that here there was no fire to cast shadows on the wall to help them develop a theory of knowledge.

“Well, are you coming?” Trotsky called out.

It struck her how irritatingly distinctive their voices and intonations were in the dark. “Lenin” was Goran Tanaka, of New Tokyo, a sociobiologist, and his voice was a plaintive tenor; “Stalin” was Lono Sada, a linguist and low tenor; “Trotsky” was Saburo Nakamura, a security codes expert, a high tenor; “Newton” was Malik Al-Amlak, a physicist with a high tenor voice, whose self-given name meant “king of kings.” “Leibniz” was Salmalin Sander, a Hindustani-Bulgarian economist, whose pleasant baritone was out of place in the sewing circle.

Newton-Malik hated Leibniz-Sander in a seemingly deep-seated way; this animosity was what had prompted her to name them after the historical antagonists. Sir Isaac Newton had vowed “to break Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s heart” for having the effrontery to co-discover the calculus. And he had done so. But she had not been able to discover why Malik so disliked Sander. Their antagonism was obvious when she saw them together. They sat far apart, and gave only token evidence of noticing each other.

“Come along, Abebe!” Stalin cried. “Wait out this inconvenience among friends.”

Abebe felt a chill, as if the temperature in the great hollow had dropped. She had a sudden vision of some great failure in the systems of the worldlet that would not be repaired, and all its inmates would die in cold and darkness.