Brute Orbits (16 page)

She waited for the dim glow of the sunplate to appear in her field of vision. She opened her eyes wide, as if somehow there was some light that her open pupils might drink in; but the darkness remained complete. It seemed to threaten to become coal-solid.

She shivered in the increasing chill.

■

After what seemed like more than an hour, Abebe got up and made her way up the path toward the voices. The speakers heard her approach and fell silent.

“We’re so glad you could join us,” Stalin said as she knelt down in the darkness and found a spot.

Again there was an awkward silence.

“Shall we simply sit here and wait?” she asked. “Is it reasonable to suppose that somehow the sunplate will come back on?”

“We’re not engineers,” Lenin said with a hint of fear and resentment in his voice. “What do you suggest we do?”

They were always falling into old male patterns: a woman complains and a man feels he’s being blamed; but if he doesn’t know what to do, he reacts resentfully or aggressively.

“Malik?” she asked.

“Well, I hope it’s not the fusion source itself.”

“How could it go wrong?” Trotsky asked him, happy to shift the responsibility to another source of possible wisdom.

“Well, I certainly hope it has not been struck from outside by a meteor.”

“Would we have felt the shock?” asked Leibniz.

“Not if it was small, but it could still do significant damage,” answered Newton. “I don’t know the design, but the habitat must have some kind of buffer or debris deflector.”

Abebe said, “Or they didn’t care enough to give us one.”

“Well, the odds of being struck are small,” Newton said in his usual prissy way, as if he were out taking the air. He had once chided her for bringing up the idea that molecules might somehow be alive, and she had imagined that he might have wanted to address them.

They were all silent again, and Abebe began to think of what they would have to do if the darkness continued indefinitely. Would they stumble and crawl toward the mess halls to eat?

It was definitely getting colder.

“If there’s no power,” Newton said in a sing-song, “then even the mess dispensers won’t work.”

“Oh, shut up, Malik,” Lenin said to the physicist. “You don’t have to try to cheer us up.”

Again there was a long silence.

“Which way are the barracks?” Stalin asked. “And which way the mess?”

“Straight down the path, as I sit,” Abebe said. “Then left and right.”

“But the path ends,” Trotsky said.

“We keep straight on,” Leibniz said. “The way is clear in my mind’s eye.”

“Is that possible in this utter darkness?” Lenin asked.

“We can only try,” Stalin said. “A bank was never robbed by mere talk.” He mentioned banks quite often, which was why Abebe had named him Stalin. The old Bolshevik had routinely robbed czarist banks to fill the party’s coffers.

“Are we safer here or there?” Abebe asked. “Perhaps we should wait a bit longer.”

It was strange, she thought through another long silence, how expectation of light’s return persisted, even as her intellect whispered that it was possible she might never see again.

■

“It’s been a while,” Lenin said. “Perhaps we should consider doing something. Maybe we should get back to our quarters.”

Abebe had never seen such darkness. Not a patch of light anywhere, however she turned her head. The only stimulus to her retinas was from the transient effect of rubbing her eyes.

“We should go,” Trotsky said, “while we still have our strength, before we weaken from hunger. Not much can happen to us. We might trip in the grass, but no more. We can’t really get lost.”

Leibniz said, “We know where we are, and at worst we’ll find our quarters by luck. After all, how many directions can we try?”

Fool, Abebe thought.

“Maybe we should try for the mess halls?” Stalin said.

“But if nothing works,” Newton replied, “then we won’t even be able to eat.”

“So we stay put,” Lenin concluded.

It grew even colder.

Something was seriously wrong, Abebe thought, and there was no way to fix it. Getting into the engineering level would require some dangerous digging, with no guarantee that the right place would be found, or that anyone could fix it.

She took a deep breath of the chilling air, then heard something moving in the grass near her. A hand touched her thigh.

“Are you very upset?” asked Trotsky’s voice.

The hand touched her more insistently, exploring inward. She was about to curse, but restrained herself, waiting to see how far the hand would go. It reached her stomach and began to finger her waistband.

She grabbed the wrist and bent it back. Trotsky gave a grunt of pain and pulled his hand away.

“What was that?” Lenin asked.

They were all silent, obviously aware of what was happening. It had to start somewhere.

Then Trotsky was on her, and the others scurried in around her, grabbing at her arms and legs, pushing her down. He tugged at her shorts and underwear, pulling them off together.

She saw the scene in her imagination, fully lighted, as her legs came apart and Trotsky pressed into her and started his pushups. She waited for him to finish, hoping that there would be an instant in which she might break free and be gone into the dark—

Trotsky spent himself like an old bull, breathing hard as he softened. He whispered in her ear, “You’re a goddess,” then pulled back and rolled to one side. “Thank you.”

Her right arm was free, then her left, and then her ankles, and she knew that there would be a few moments of indecision.

She felt a figure trying to crawl into position as Trotsky lay at her side, breathing hard and stroking her belly.

She kicked with her right leg, and heard a snap as she connected. She sat up, threw herself forward, and rolled away into the darkness. She leaped to her feet and ran blindly into the grass.

“Come back!” Lenin shouted with a strange laugh. “We’ll need to keep warm before we die.”

After a few moments, she slowed, realizing that they could not find her. She sat down, bare-assed, with only her shirt for cover. There was nowhere to go. She thought of John Sakaro, and how uncaringly he had thrown her away, into this prison, where the ground itself was a wall. She could not climb it; to dig through to the airless desert outside made as much sense as digging a tunnel out of life.

As her breathing slowed, she shivered on the cold ground. The stars, she thought sadly, were below her—the beautiful bright stars in the black on the other side of the grass.

Tasarov grew apart from the men in the hollow, and sometimes felt that their very existence was an affront to him. He came to the mess halls at the appointed times, but increasingly he kept to himself in the engineering level. The warden’s apartment was comfortable, access to databases easy, and he could even walk long distances, exploring the engineering complex. He had yet to reach its end.

He was hoping to find some sort of astronomical facility, where he might look out from the Rock, but so far he had failed to find it. Seeing the stars again became a minor obsession with him.

He continued to search, building an inner life for himself. Out in the hollow a hundred men died in the first year—from personal violence and illness. A few died for no cause that anyone could see. They simply stopped. Some were buried in marked graves; others went down the garbage chutes to the recycling hellfire.

Murders rarely occurred after the first year; a killer was either beaten or killed, or driven out into the grassy wilderness and not permitted to return. Some of these managed to beg their way back before they starved, if they sounded very convincing. Most offenses were settled between the parties involved. After a while most inmates learned to avoid disputes of any kind.

A kind of peace settled in during the second and third years. It became an unspoken test of character to resist the distant authority of Earth, to live to prove them wrong when the Rock came home. Tasarov had once read that half the prisoners who went to Alcatraz, also known as “the Rock,” came out and lived lawful lives; but he could only believe that the old prison in San Francisco Bay had frightened them into cowardice.

He never forgot that this Rock was a punishment prison, as many had been before it. No rehabilitation, no escape possible, no guards or authorities to blame; yet it seemed that some men were seeing it as rehab, as something better than a vendetta against lawbreakers, better than the vengeance of capital punishment.

But he could not see it that way—not yet anyway. The arrogance of the Earth that had sent them out continued to astonish him. It worked its criminal justice systems with the illusion of clean hands, but they were not even moderately clean hands. The Earth was a mosaic of interlocking corporate societies and extortionist governments, where criminality was in fact the legal way of things. The system in fact created most criminals and then sought to punish them. For most of the human history he knew, social systems were the criminal’s true parents, whelping lawbreakers uncontrollably like the mythical salt mill which could not stop making salt. Certain kinds of criminality could be prevented, and that would eliminate most crime. But he was certain that even a very advanced social system, one that gave its citizens nearly everything they needed, leaving them nothing to covet, might still harbor the creative criminal, one who would undertake special projects simply because they were possible. Could that kind of enterprise be socially engineered out of human beings?

It had always been clear to him that a sane criminal justice system was possible: one that would try the criminal, assess the price he had to pay for his crime, short of death, and commit no fresh crimes of its own against the criminal…

“Fresh crimes?” they would ask.

He knew the faces and types that would ask the question with outrage.

“Yes—new crimes.” Not that he really cared for some of the slime that had been executed, but he had always felt that the example of killing a human being was demoralizing for those who did it by law. So brave! It was a cowardly act to tie down any human being and kill him. The criminal justice systems he had known were not perfect and never could be; but the death penalty was perfection itself—it killed you and there was no going back to correct errors, no way to bring back the dead. It would always be an unequal struggle between justice and official killing.

“New crimes? Maybe so, but who cares! Too bad.”

“If killing someone officially for a crime was still a traditional act of vendetta, then so be it,” they would say and shrug. But even they would not want to kill criminals en masse. They would rather fill the sky with prisons, as they overflowed every Earthly lockup. He was sure now that this Rock could not be the only one.

By the fifth year, Tasarov had learned to keep dilemmas, nurture, and feed them, as a wild animal trainer keeps dangerous beasts, and they in turn kept up his skills. He saw them as demons that could not be banished. And their most important feature, he began to believe, was that they were unresolvable dilemmas. A man might be known by the dilemmas he keeps, especially the intractable ones.

As he set down his thoughts, he still sometimes wondered about the Tightness of his mind, and wondered if the bent of his thinking was a bias setting given to him by nature. Being in your right mind was always a fence one could see over, but he still sometimes wondered which side of the fence he was on. Maybe he was sitting on the fence.

■

In the sixth year Tasarov called a meeting, to be held in the open air, so that every inmate who wanted to come could be there.

As he sat down at the table set for the judge, he considered the air of display about the trial that was beginning—as if someone might be listening back home, or some godlike lawgiver was peering into the hollow and waiting to make notes in a book of justice.

An older man had knifed Howes to death out in the tall grass, and everyone had heard his screams.

“We’re here,” Tasarov said as he raised a hand, “to determine why this happened, and what we should do about it.” He glanced at the man sitting on the ground in front of the table.

“What do you care that I did it,” asked Wang Huichin, a burglar from Brooklyn, New York.

There was a murmur of disapproval from the crowd sitting in a massive circle around the table. Everyone was not here, Tasarov noted, but more men were coming in around the edges for a listen.

Tasarov waited for the murmurs to die down, then said loudly, “That’s what we’re here to tell you.”

“Oh yeah?” Wang muttered under his breath.

“Louder,” someone shouted from far back.

Tasarov rose and got up on the table. “Can you hear me now?” he shouted.

“Yes!” five different voices responded.

He looked down at Wang, who seemed unconcerned.

“If you had simply killed your lover,” said Tasarov, “I think many of us would understand. But you have now beaten up and nearly killed a dozen others—and you killed Howes!”

Wang stood up. “You’re no law! What’s it to you?”

Cries of anger rose from the crowd. Tasarov raised his arms for silence. “We’ve got to tell him,” he shouted, “—as much for ourselves as for him.”

“What the fuck are you prattling about?” Wang asked. “Anybody wants to come and kill me can try! I’ll be happy to take him on.”

Tasarov fixed him with his gaze and said, “Just this. Take any six men from this gathering and they’ll tell you we’ve had a somewhat peaceful time here. We eat, we sleep, and we have very little trouble. It could have been worse. You make it worse, Wang. No one feels safe from you. You killed Howes slowly. You wanted to, and it made you happy. Why’d you do it?”

Wang looked at him without fear. “I had to do it. He didn’t want me, and I couldn’t live without him.”

“Then why didn’t you kill yourself?”

“They stopped me,” he said with sudden tears, “before I could.”

Tasarov reached into his pocket, pulled out the murder knife, and threw it in down at Wang’s feet. “Then do it now!”