Brute Orbits (20 page)

Long life rewarded the shrinking of populations, even as diseases had their last go at the human body, which could now be adapted to meet every new illness with immediately engineered responses that could be infinitely adjusted to any resistant organisms that arose, in a perpetual embrace of responses.

Later historians commented that “Death had no chance against an ambitious middle class.” For this growing body of aging-healthy who later became longlifers, the young no longer served the needs of personal survival; this bond was broken as decisively as had been the link between sexual pleasure and reproduction in the previous century. In the transition years, the face of violent youth became especially fearful. “You will not invade our world!” cried the coming longlifers.

As the AIs increasingly made prescriptions in both politics and economics, humankind initially opposed them; but as the disinterested prescriptions proved productive, no one dared or wanted to oppose them. Business flocked to the education of better AIs, which outran humanity in speed and threatened to achieve a much expected but ambivalently judged critical mass of consciousness. Here also humankind knew that embrace would be necessary to avoid leaving the human mind behind: as AIs evolved, they would also help humankind change itself, as often as was necessary to keep up.

But Great Clarke’s hope—that “politics and economics will cease to be as important in the future as they have been in the past,” and that the time would come when “these matters will seem as trivial, or as meaningless, as the theological debates in which the keenest minds of the Middle Ages dissipated their energies”—was not to be fulfilled very easily. Competition for power and the distinction of credit for work done continued among human beings; but already those who kept power through profit and investment were in the hands of experts into whose skills they had given their lives. And these experts sought satisfying lives in their work, and not in the accumulation of wealth and power which had nowhere to go and nothing to do.

Later AI management of economies confirmed Clarke’s hope that since “politics and economics are concerned with power and wealth,” they should not be the “primary, still less the exclusive, concern of full-grown men.” Alter human lifespans, bring mature technologies online, and we will have a better polity.

Nevertheless, even as humankind’s right hand worked for betterment, its juvenile left hand carried on with its criminal empires; but these became strangely muted, by the standards of past ages, and were based more on personal antipathies and humiliations than on simple greed. There were still too many ways to gain distinction outside the law for mindful, willful individuals to ignore. A twentieth century judgment on the ineradicability of crime in free societies, a conclusion that had counted crime as the cost of certain levels of freedom, would have seen the societies of the twenty-first and early twenty-second century as being nearly without crime. Crimes of passion still existed: assault and murder. Theft of large amounts of wealth existed—but more as a game of information-siege than mugging at gunpoint. Odd crimes still existed in remote places on the Earth and in various settlements throughout the solar system; but in the great urban centers of offworld habitats and surface communities, a better grade of human being was being born and raised. Some said it was a wolf in sheep’s clothing, with wool so thick that even the wolf rarely guessed his own true nature.

It was this changing humanity that looked out into the dark, and wondered what had happened to its million exiles. Awareness of them swept Earth’s Sunspace when the first timed habitat came back in 2105—twenty-five years later than scheduled.

“The first one is back!” shouted the news.

“So late!”

“What happened?”

No one had an answer; the records lay buried in electronic archives that could only be viewed with great difficulty on outmoded machines. But there were only two possible answers: There had either been a mistake in the initial boost velocity, or it had been done deliberately. That some chance encounter had altered the prison habitat’s long orbit was discounted as unlikely.

Rock One was met as it crossed the orbit of Neptune by two torchships from the Martian colony, under the cultural command of Anthony Ibn Khaldun, whose massive historical project was suddenly somewhat incomplete from the early quarter of the twenty-first century. His ambition, ever since he had become head of the Historical Information Project, was to record every fact of human history available, in straight outline form, leaving out all interpretive materials. These would be available as unabridged footnotes, to be accessed separately.

HIP’s goal was simply to find and set down every straightforward fact of human existence since the beginning of record-keeping. With the help of fast AIs, the organization of facts was routine, but tracking down elusive physical records had become a problem. All over the Earth and throughout occupied Sunspace, records hid from him. They were buried in old books and papers, in defunct data storage and retrieval systems; they were personal and public. He wanted them all.

His ships met Rock One on January 18, 2105. Only one vessel was able to dock at the rear axis entrance. Ibby, as he was known to his colleagues, went in with a team of twenty men and women, emerging through an ancient hatch just off the axis at the rear rocky parts of the interior.

The sunplate at the front end was shining brightly as he stood with his team and gazed out over the grasslands that seemed wrapped around the light. Surveying through multi-spectrum binoculars, he saw the barracks complex, the dining domes, and several well-worn footpaths; but there were no visible signs of humanity.

The team came down from the rocks, and gradually moved from the narrower section into higher gravity. An hour later they were marching down a dirt road toward the barracks town. The air smelled a bit sweet, but it was difficult to guess what had made the odors.

“Why does this road lead back to the rocks?” asked Justine Harre, one of the doctors.

Ibby stopped and said, “I’ve been thinking the same thing. There’s nothing there except the old hatch, and that only leads outside. But the road seems to have been well traveled, more than can be explained by its first uses.”

“A gathering place?” said Ferret the anthropologist.

As they entered the barracks complex, no one came out to greet them. The team paused and looked around, struck by the stillness.

“Doctor Harre,” Ibby said, “come with me. The rest of you stay here.”

He led the way to the small stairs that led up the back of one barrack. He came up, opened the door, and stepped inside. Doctor Harre came in and stood next to him.

As their eyes adjusted to the light, they saw shapes lying in the bunks. She came up to the first one, and pulled back the blanket. A skeleton lay there, as if he had just gone to sleep and lost his flesh.

“Male?” asked Ibby.

“Yes. They were all males here.” She looked around at the other dark bunks. “They’re all dead. Too much time gone, not enough lifespan.”

“We must look everywhere,” Ibby said. “Just in case someone may have exceeded the expected lifespan.”

“Unlikely,” she said.

“We’ll see what’s on the engineering level,” he said.

■

They went in a large half moon of figures, making their way across the landscape toward the engineering entrance beyond the mess halls. There were skeletons all over, lying in the grass with no sign of violence as the cause of death, as if they had lain down for an afternoon nap.

“It wasn’t supposed to happen this way,” said Doctor Harre.

“Something went wrong with the timing of the orbit,” Ibby replied. “Too wide a cometary.”

“Or it was meant this way,” said Clive Malthus, one of the graduate students.

“Later, yes,” Ibby said as the young man, barely forty, caught up and marched between him and Dr. Harre. “Life sentences came much later. What evidence do you have?”

“I heard things,” Malthus said. “I heard things…from some very old people last year. Prisons that were supposed to come back just didn’t show up, earlier on than we know.”

They came to the open ramp that led into the engineering level.

“It’s open?” asked Dr. Harre. “I thought convicts did not have access to these areas.”

Malthus said, “Records are bad this far back—nearly a century. The inmates might have broken in.”

“It didn’t do them much good,” Ibby said. “How could it? There aren’t any controls here, no engines to turn around and go home.”

“And with all men,” said Dr. Harre, “no new generation to raise that might have gone home. I wonder what they did to deserve this?”

“No one deserved this,” Malthus said as they stood before the ramp, waiting for the others to catch up. “It was just something the criminal justice system of the times did, like putting people in stocks. Many worse people stayed home.”

“But this one was a life sentence,” Dr. Harre said, “except that no one told these inmates they weren’t coming back. They lived expecting to return.”

“We should count the dead,” Ibby said, “then bag them all. Someone back home might want to know.”

“Not likely,” said Malthus.

■

They found a skeleton sitting at the desk in the warden’s office. The dead man had written something on a piece of paper, and finished it, because the pen seemed to have been put down with care. Long flowing white hair covered the shoulders and back of his bones.

Young Malthus stood still and stared, shaken by the sight.

Ibby picked up the page and read: “The appointed time is long past, as I, Yevgeny Tasarov, write this. There is no sign of our having returned. Many of us hope that we have simply been left in closer Sun orbit upon our return, and as soon as they decide what to do with us, they will come and open us up. I don’t believe this, or that we have returned to the inner solar system, since there was no sign of deceleration. A few of us believe that a long orbit was intended, as a way to be rid of us. If and when this writing is ever found, please note that if our longer orbit was intentional, then it was a crime committed against us, and should be publicly recognized as such.

“I have thought long and hard about these matters; I had the time. The criminal justice system that sent us away professed justice but committed new crimes of its own. Perhaps it should not have pretended to anything except practical action on behalf of its employers…

“And yet…when crimes are committed against prisoners, these are in fact new crimes, separate from the crimes of the imprisoned. Everyone is forced to be responsible for these new crimes, since the society supports the prisons in which they occur, even though only specific officials may carry them out. Our prison escaped abuse by guards, and it avoided the dilemmas of capital punishment; but the failure of our return is a crime in place of which we might even have accepted the old abuses. Who will ever be punished for this crime?

“The best possible criminal justice system would try the criminal, assess the price he must pay, short of death, and strive to commit no crimes of its own against the criminal. But there is no criminal justice system that can stand outside its society, or outside human failure. Grief and anger fueling cruel vengeance do not die easily.

“As my life runs out, I carry away from it a virulent hatred of the humanity that threw me away—and I know that such a hatred implies a hatred of myself also, of what I was given to he as a human being. I cannot escape this judgment…

“I say carry away as if I meant that I am taking something with me into the grave—except that there is no one left to bury me. Of course, I’m not taking anything anywhere except into the dark that I will not know. One cannot know death while alive, only the long slow steps leading to it…

“Is that unknowing a mercy? One would have to live through dying to know…”

Ibby put down the page.

“It’s from another age,” Justine Harre said. We’re better than that today, she might have said, but the pride of denial in her thought seemed inappropriate to voice with the dead man’s page before them on the desk, into which had spilled a lifetime’s bitterness that by its own argument could not have been avoided.

But finally she had to speak. “Our predecessors did this,” she said, “as a kind of firebreak to criminal violence.” Suddenly her swift thoughts, processing parallel databases, arguments, and the conclusions from decades of debate, outran her ability to speak…
why have we done this…reaching into our breasts we pulled out our evil…but we cannot abolish the freedom to transgress…cannot tear liberty from our heart and hurl it starward…maybe we have hurled our best away…these swine? Without them we were able to try again…without them? They never left us, despite a hundred Rocks…yet we have learned to restrain ourselves. Crime for us is a subtle thing, so hard to notice that these people would not have thought of it as crime at all…money trains carry away wealth, but the street is no longer with us…people are killed, and we delete the memory of the crime from the killer and the victim’s immediate friends and relatives, by request…

“This kind of prison,” she said out loud, “like the ones before it, tried to do too much. Even without rules and guards, this one did too much…too much.”

Ibby looked at her, and saw that she was struggling with herself, in a way he had never seen in a colleague. Her restraint held back a wave. He searched his own feelings about this dead place, and found them orderly.

His curiosity waited to be satisfied by the records that were certain to be here: long-timed visual and audio records of prisoners’ behavior, even in their most private moments, stored in deeply compressed form. They had to be here, and would help him complete HIP’s own record of human life; but if they were not here, he would have to place great blank spaces in HIP’s massed data, to exist along with the many others of prehistory and early human history. They reminded him of the old maps which proclaimed at their edges the legend, “Here there be dragons!”

Harre was looking at the page on the table. She leaned closer and picked it up.