Brute Orbits (17 page)

Wang looked down at the knife.

“I can’t…now.”

“You can’t?” Tasarov asked coldly. “Then we’ll have to do it for you.”

Wang looked up. “What? You can’t! You have no right.”

“We can and we will. That’s all that matters. Here, give me back the knife.”

Wang looked down at the instrument again, then backed away until he bumped into the first row of seated inmates. One of them raised his leg and pushed him forward. Wang staggered and fell on his face. The knife lay in front of his nose.

“Come on, give it here,” Tasarov said. “I’ll cut your throat for you.”

Wang sat up, pulled his knees close and wrapped his arms around them.

Tasarov said, “We have to take you out before you kill more of us.”

“You really gonna kill me?” Wang asked with unbelief.

“Then do it yourself, if that bothers you,” Tasarov said, getting off the table and sitting down.

Wang put his head between his knees, and Tasarov could almost see the twists inside him. Wang looked up suddenly and said, “I won’t do it again. Please.”

“I don’t think it’s up to you whether you kill again. We have to protect ourselves.”

Tasarov knew himself well, and therefore, he told himself, he also knew something of Wang’s innards. Murders of his kind were not the rule. They were occasional evils, when one’s fixation on another reached out to relieve itself in violence. He had known it often, but practiced it sparingly.

Wang looked up at him, still hugging his knees. “What did I ever do to you?” His eyes were reproachful, unbelieving. He made a pitiable figure bunched up on the ground. He might never kill again—or he might—there was no way to make sure. But there was also the fact the Wang seemed to enjoy the act. That need made him unpredictable. Tasarov wondered how many others like him were present in the four thousand, hiding their needs. Killing Wang would be a warning to them.

“Who are you?” Wang asked. “You have no right.”

But his eyes said the opposite: If you enforce your will, you have the right. It was the rule of history’s power gangs, from top to bottom. The best of them tried to appear as unganglike as possible, seeking legitimacy from a divine being, human reason, or mutual sympathy. But it had always been a gang—the tribe, the old school tie, the profession, the business. You had to join one, or be a gang of one—the most troublesome kind. The other gangs occasionally looked to the one to see what he might have, thinking that maybe they could get in on it; where the pathfinders went, the rest could follow with less fear. Sometimes they made a hero of the one, so they could park their lost ideals somewhere, so the gang of one, if he was distinguished enough to make them doubt, would not shame them when he came into his kingdom.

As a prison, this place was no worse than landside prisons. Maybe better in several ways, worth keeping as peaceful as it had been these last years. Worthy enough to get rid of unstables like Wang.

There was no struggle here for anything except flesh, and that was pretty nearly divvied up, with few changes or trades. Those who chose no one had faithful Madame Palm, or nothing. Most everyone wanted peace after five years. It was an attainable prize, after all the others had turned illusory or too costly to seek. Power couldn’t have much here, because raising soldiers to enforce it was difficult. What could you pay them if you didn’t have them already to get what you needed to pay them? No enterprise was worthwhile, since food and shelter were givens before any game could begin. Those who had tried to control food and shelter had failed with the same problem of soldiers.

Wang was news and excitement. He brought a sense of life and danger. To kill him might not do. The suspense of watching out for him might even be useful.

“Wang—you will have your life,” Tasarov said, and saw a questioning look spread through the crowd. “But—every day you will thank ten of us for your life, such as it is, until all have been thanked. Do you agree?”

Wang looked up with surprise. Then, very slowly, he nodded, and Tasarov knew that there was more, that something had finally broken him inside.

Suddenly Wang threw himself on his face and cried out, “I will never see my beloved again! What have I done?”

Tasarov saw the feelings that washed through the tormented soul. The man had lusted after Howes a long time, hoping for a happier intimacy. When Howes rejected him, loss, humiliation, and terror had assaulted him as one. Rage uncoiled from where it had been waiting, followed by visions of revenge upon Howes. Wang’s act of revenge through the attempted sexual conversion of the object to his need had brought the death of his beloved who refused to be turned to his need. Loss of love, companionship, sexual completion, hope, and the irrevocable loss of the object itself, now warred with pride, which rode above the internal battlefield intent on killing even the wounded.

Wang took the knife, rolled over onto his back, and slowly pushed the point into his heart.

No one cheered as the blood flowed out; too many saw the innards of a kindred organism strewn across their own private landscapes.

■

Tasarov was asked to sit in judgment at least once a month, sometimes two or three times. But he wondered whether he was a plausible authority or simply better than none. He was happy to settle simple disputes, because these usually followed a gamelike strategy, in which it was straightforward to expose the goal of each participant and then give each of them something for their trouble; but when he felt intimations of violence involving inconsolable passions, whose causes wound backward in time through abused and tormented personalities, he sought to separate the participants as best he could, and hoped to be proven wrong about their future acts of violence.

It rarely happened. They beat, raped, tormented, and murdered each other as if following a schedule, following the statistical regularity of the twenty-one card trick, in which the eleventh card never failed to appear. He could imagine much worse. What startled him was the amount of orderly behavior that endured.

He sometimes woke up in the middle of his night, and saw humanity as a single vast creature with billions of heads, its arms and legs struggling with itself. A piece of that creature had been amputated, placed inside this Rock, and sent out to strangle itself in the darkness.

JUDGE OVERTON’S PRIVATE CHAMBER

“Males are strong, and natural selection has made them champion impregnators of women. The weaker males just weren’t as successful. Yet civilization tells the strong to restrain themselves—raise one family at a time, hold back from all other possible females. But nature says get as many as you can, veiling its program with promises of pleasurable domination. What can you ever expect from this, except rape at every opportunity—for the strong, I mean, and mental illness for the weak? We might as well select out the strong and ruthless ones and ship them out, however we can. Will this solve the problem of rape? Not really; as long as there are weaker and stronger, it will go wrong between men and women, women and women, and men and men. Not always. Sometimes.”

“Abebe!” Leibniz’s voice called from the dark.

She sat shivering, with her shirt pulled down to cover her as much as possible.

“It’s getting colder!” he shouted.

She wanted her clothing, but if he got close enough, she would be helpless again. This had been coming for some time, she knew, as she had flirted with their repressed violence and lust for her; something in her had let them stalk her in their secret selves, disbelieving that it could ever happen, but curious about which one would be first to break his reserve.

Now they had done so in cowardly darkness, to stifle their fears, like chimps who masturbated when afraid. What had she expected? That one of them would so impress her with his genuine ardor and that she would welcome him into her citadel?

“Abebe! You must have your clothes.”

She wondered which one she had kicked so well. Not the one who now wanted to bring her the clothes. Well, she would sit here, at odds with herself, “until the day break, and the shadows flee away,” as the poet said, even though there was no Sun to rise and she might never see her shadow again.

And something in her wept at this brutal courting she had found instead of a romantic fantasy. No other might ever find her again, as John Sakaro had found her, with his wealthy storybook ways, tall with a soft voice and deep brown eyes. She had never questioned her professed love for him; she had no right but to insist that she loved him, even though she knew the lie within herself, and that it waited to poison her soul after everything else had been taken away from her.

That time was now, all around her.

“Abebe!” cried the night.

And then it flickered, coloring the landscape between black moments, creating and destroying from moment to moment. Somewhere, she realized, repair systems were at work, striving to light her eyes and warm her body; but they would not be able to banish the deeper chill that oppressed her.

As the flickering continued, she wondered how she could live among these people again. The sewing circle was suddenly an odd domesticity that had given her more than she had valued, despite her mockery of its participants.

In the runaway flickering, she saw Leibniz coming down the path toward her. He was carrying her shorts and underpants. She wanted to get up and run, but froze as if before an approaching train.

He stopped and looked down at her.

“Here,” he said, dropping her clothes into her lap. “We’re not all animals—but I’ll confess I also wanted you, and still do.”

She looked up at him, but it was impossible in the flickering to glimpse his face. He seemed to be grimacing. The interval slowed. He was staring at her, as if about to tell her something, but after a few moments turned away and went back up the path.

“Lono’s dead,” he shouted back to her. “Your kick snapped his neck.”

Shaken by the revelation, she reached for her clothes. The sunplate stopped flickering suddenly and stayed on at about half strength.

She looked toward the sewing circle, and saw that Lenin, Newton, and Trotsky had met Leibniz on the path. They were whispering among themselves. Behind them, Stalin’s body was just barely visible in the tall grass.

The four men stopped whispering and came toward her. She hurried to put her clothes on.

“Don’t bother!” Lenin shouted.

They surrounded her, looking down at her as if she was prey. She stared up at them brazenly, knowing that they would attempt to speak rationally.

Trotsky seemed the most restrained, but then he had already had his share of her.

“You’ll pay…for killing…our friend,” he said in a halting voice that knew it was rationalizing.

Lenin, Leibniz, and Newton knelt around her and leaned closer.

Leibniz was timid. She saw the resignation in his eyes. There was no telling what was happening to the habitat. If the mess halls shut down, they would all starve—so why not steal a few moments of happiness? He went behind her, as if to avoid her gaze.

Lenin and Newton grabbed her arms. She looked into their eyes and saw their resolve. Trotsky towered over them, watching.

Lenin laughed and reached under her shirt. Newton fondled her naked belly, then took the shorts and underpants from her lap and tossed them aside.

The absurdity of the names she had given them struck her as she began to struggle. Their namesakes would have been outraged. Well, maybe not Lenin or Trotsky, she told herself as if in a dream, recalling when she had played with boys as a child. But Newton had reportedly been a sexual innocent.

Leibniz grabbed her long hair and pulled her head back. Trotsky put his foot on her chest, pressed her to the ground, then leaned over and ripped off her shirt, leaving her completely bare and shivering.

Lenin rolled over on top of her, undid his fly, and pushed into her. Newton sucked at her breasts, while Leibniz worked himself around to her face.

She cried out as Lenin began to move, and struck at him with her suddenly free right arm. Trotsky came around and knelt on it.

Lenin finished and held her for a few pathetic moments, then slid off. Leibniz was still trying to get into position at her head when Newton took his turn.

She took a deep breath, determined to thrust up with her hips and prevent Newton’s entry, when the ground rumbled and shifted beneath her, and she felt as if she were about to fall.

Something was affecting the spin of the habitat, she realized with a cool detachment that escaped her fear of the men. Spin was stopping. The sensation of falling slowly took her and she floated off the ground, with three of the men holding onto her. Centrifugal gravity was gone. Without the acceleration of rotation, nothing would stay on the ground. Unrestrained objects would continue in the direction of spin. The sensation of the ground shifting beneath her also indicated that the asteroid had decelerated slightly—which would send objects toward the sunplate.

As they floated off at a slight upward angle, she imagined that the asteroid had been struck by something. At first this might have affected its power source, which fed the sunplate, and also the attitude and spin maintenance gyro controls, slowing the Rock’s spin until it stopped.

Lenin and Leibniz let go of her and drifted at her side. Newton held on. They heard cries, looked toward the barracks, and saw people floating upward. Without anything to restrain them, they would drift in the direction of spin, unless they had been inside the mess halls or barracks.

Objects would tend to move according to the asteroid’s previous motions: forward and around what had been the central axis of rotation—and now in a drift toward the flickering sunplate. Centrifugal acceleration—and lack of forward acceleration after the initial departure boost had cut off and put the habitat into free fall—had overcome that tendency; but now it would take work to prevent it.

“You fools!” she shouted to the men floating near her. “If you hadn’t been so eager, we might have held onto the grass!”