Brute Orbits (21 page)

“Look here,” she said with a sudden deep breath. “There’s more on the other side.”

She turned it over and read: “To anyone who may see this, please note that I found the surveillance equipment after some years of searching, and have wiped the memory databases in the best way possible—by physical destruction. It gave me great pleasure to do this in my last years, when I thought there was nothing left for me to do. I told as many of us as were still alive, to give them some satisfaction in their last years, and they helped as much as they were physically able. Nothing is retrievable, except my notebooks. You will not study us, except through my heart and mind.”

Harre looked at Ibby with disappointment. “How cruel to leave us such a message,” she said,…handing him the page. “There’s a bit more.”

“I cannot take it as true,” he said, “until we have made our own search. He may have missed some of the backups.”

Malthus said, “Even physical destruction of a recording medium may not be final, unless it is ground into fine powder. Today we can reconstruct from even the smallest fragments.”

Ibby looked at the page and saw that it ended with the question: “Do you hear us laughing?”

JUDGE OVERTON’S PRIVATE CHAMBER

“Judge Overton, what are your thoughts and feelings about your retirement as Chief Justice of the Orbits?”

“Did you think it wouldn’t happen, young man? That sooner or later we would not start to get at the root causes of violent crime?”

“So the Orbits will come to an end?”

“Of course! Or so they tell me. As long as we had economies of scarcity and human nature combining to create the political struggles of the last two centuries, we had a system for creating the criminals for the Orbits. There are fewer of them now—except for the perverse ones, who commit crimes when they don’t really have to.”

“But they do.”

“Yes, but it’s nothing to ship them away for. And there’s so few of them! With the AIs helping us so much, even power has lost its attractions, since you can’t influence the running of economies without risking disaster. We’ve learned that much—that no individual can control an economy. Oh, we can override AI decisions, but why should we risk it? The only power that individuals can now have is the power of dialogue and persuasion with the AIs and their specialist human collaborators. When the inputs from human brains are good, and they sometimes are, then all disagreement ceases. No one wants to go back to the intuitive, predatory economies of the twentieth century, which cost more than they made in ruined human beings.”

“You mean the criminals?”

“And the underclasses, the seemingly necessary poor. All who failed to make their contribution for lack of properly raised character and mind. I’ve learned a lot in my time. I’m glad to be done with the past.”

“What do you mean?”

“We had to do what we did, until we could change the fundamentals of human life. Economics and the restraints of given human nature had to be opened up, loosened. Now, no one wants to go back to short-timer, scarcity blighted living. I know I don’t want to. It cost us too much to get here. The old economics of value through scarcity, together with short lifespan, poor health and education, made what we called politics for most of human history, and that kind of politics of self-interest for classes and nation states was contemptible. It was this way: economics and human nature make politics; but increase human lifespan, give us better technologies, and we produce better politics. But what else could we have had? We sought efficiency and profit, because that was what could be had. We had to work through it. But after we could generate all the power we needed, achieved health and longlife, and partnered with our AIs, the old game was over.”

“So no more Orbits?”

“No more.”

“Were there abuses?”

“Yes, of course. The law, like our past technologies, was a social prosthetic. Like a wooden leg. It doesn’t work like a real one. We have better now, and a chance at real law, the kind that rules from inside each of us.”

“Do you really think so?”

“Yeah. Maybe.”

Astonished and horrified by the return of the tomb that was Rock One, it was a better, wiser world that now looked out into the dark and wondered what had become of the other exiles; a smaller world that sought to reach out along these brute orbits to any kin that might still be living.

The world was better because so many had died, and it was this uneasiness about how many dead stood behind each healthy, educated human being of the twenty-second century that brought concern for these survivors of a shameful past.

Something could still be done.

But what was to be done with them?

Were they even human beings?

What could be done for them?

Nothing was even attempted until the 2150s.

Of the one hundred or more cometary prisons sent out in the twenty-first century, none exceeded an initial boost velocity of 150,000 kilometers per hour, with no additional acceleration.

“They’re not that far away,” Ibby said to the HIP Projex Council. “Nothing is more distant than 150,000 kilometers per hour times 24 hours times 365 days times 100 years, expressed in kilometers away. Any of our relativistic ships, doing five percent or more of light speed, can reach them in three to four months, and in less than a year at even twice that distance. Nothing is more than one hundred thirty-two billion kilometers away. That’s less than two percent of a light year. Not very far in astronomical numbers, but far enough when you have no way to get back. Pluto’s only about six billion kilometers out.”

“Refresh us as to your views for why this should be done,” said the council chairman. “Why not leave them alone? They are not like us, but from another time. It would make them unhappy, or even do them harm, to be contacted by us.”

Ibby glanced at Justine Harre, then back at the chairman, and said, “Quite simply, HIP is incomplete without their histories. AI-17 backs up this judgment.”

“Yes, yes,” said Chairman More, “but that’s a technicality, isn’t it? What is the real use to us?”

“I have the right to complete my project,” Ibby said. “Permit me to point out that HIP is part of the Universal Knowledge Project, which is attempting to assemble every last scrap of human knowledge from still untapped physical records. Together with HIP, this will form a vast database and permit the uncovering of previously unexamined relationships within that database, yielding new insights in our kind’s existence.”

“In other words,” More said, “you are a trivial completist…”

“It is part of our mandate,” Ibby said sharply, “and far from trivial. And we should not deny our AIs their continuing familiarity with the history of their biological partners.”

“There is the ethical issue,” Dr. Harre said. “What do we owe these habitats?”

“Nothing, perhaps,” More said with a shrug. “We did not place them where they are. The Orbits, as I understand them, were the last gasp of outmoded penal systems, built on theories of separation from society and a token nod toward rehabilitation, which no one believed was possible. With biological praxis of newborn and proper early education, imprisonment is now almost unknown…”

Dr. Harre raised her hand. “Please, that is true but not relevant. Also not relevant is our innocence—relative innocence, I must emphasize, with regard to what was done. But we will not be innocent of the decisions we now make. If we do not take an inventory of the habitats, we will not know whether we should leave them alone or not. And the harm we may do by omission will be our responsibility.”

“Can we observe without actual contact?” More asked with a show of interest obviously designed to prepare the way for later dismissal of proposals.

“I think it possible, given the construction schematics we have researched.”

“Dr. Harre,” More said, “it occurs to me that even undetected observation will carry ethical implications. And it also seems to me that this inventory, as you call it, may go unexpectedly wrong, and then we will be responsible directly for whatever accidents or unforeseen effects that may come about.”

“Then what do you advise?” she asked.

“And it will be only advice,” Ibby added. “We have the power of decision about this.”

“That remains to be seen,” More said. “This may require a referendum. My advice? Leave them alone—at least for now, while we live with it for a while. They may all be dead, you know.”

“Or in great need of our help,” Harre replied. “The potted ecosystems in which these people went out were nothing like what we have today.”

“Therefore, I repeat,” More said, “they may all be dead. You admit the possibility?”

“Yes,” Harre said, “but it’s not a certainty. The people who made these prisons planned for indefinite periods of operation and self-maintenance. There is certainly enough energy, in the form of fusion reactors, to run recycling of air, food, and water.”

“Wasn’t there surveillance transmitted automatically back to us?” More asked.

Harre nodded. “Some was. Some were cut off. From what I have been able to learn, the archives were not kept after a time, because of the sheer amount of recorded time for both audio and visual. A lot was lost during our decades of disorder.”

More smiled at her. “So there is nothing to do but go out and take a look—and you want it that way, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she replied.

More nodded patronizingly. “Projex will probably agree with you. I suppose some of us are curious about these…earlier human transitionals.”

“Scarcely more than a century ago,” she said.

“Yes, of course. But we’ve come so far…”

So few of us, he did not say, and Harre wondered who were the transitional types—those who might still be alive in the Orbits, or the descendants of those who had sent them. And transitional to what? What will we find out there? It might well he more merciful to leave them alone, to let them come hack in the normal course of the orbit, if that was possible. But then she reminded herself that no one knew how long some of the orbits would be. Some habitats might never come back.

As she and Ibby left the chairman’s chamber, she suddenly knew what was about to happen, and what might have to be done, if her hopes about what was possible proved to be practical and justifiable. More’s long-term advice would be to leave the Rocks alone, to treat them as if they had never existed.

“They might all be dead out there,” Ibby said.

“We have to know that, too,” she said, stopping to face him. “But there is more. You realize that this is the only reservoir of unchanged humankind. If you examined any of them, you’d find almost no changes much beyond twentieth century expectations.”

“We do have some here on Earth,” Ibby said.

“Not really,” she replied. “Don’t count Nostalgists. You have to take their word for it that they have few or no changes. The people in these habitats are not like you and me, Ibby. There’s a lot of biology we might learn from, and every bit of diversity we can preserve counts!”

“It may be dangerous to go out there,” Ibby said. “What can we really expect to find?”

“If most have perished, we will find empty shells.”

“So you don’t expect any surprises,” he said.

“No, but I would like to be proven wrong. These prisons were sent out just as we were learning more about ourselves, and our social systems, which manufactured criminals in ways that they did not fully understand. And this was the most effective way to separate criminals from their victims. For thousands of years we lacked the tools and knowledge to deal with social evils, so in place of tools and knowledge we applied religiously derived exhortations and enforced them as best we could with police forces. But we were experimenting. And those prisons out there are what’s left of our experimental ignorance.”

“I would prefer to find no one alive,” Ibby said. “I feel uneasy enough about our current stability to worry about facing it with past failures.”

“What do you mean?” Justine asked, looking puzzled.

“History,” he said, “may force us to look into an ugly mirror again. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries made it respectable to decry pity and compassion with the rationalization that the rich and powerful should be left to be rich and powerful and all would benefit. Practice revealed that market economies simply did not need as many people as we had, and that we could discard them without mercy. The boat was full. There had to be losers, even though they contributed to the game. Everything will right itself, cried the winners as they discarded lives. Then, the twenty-first century saw a loss of population, and today we all live in the guilt-haunted palaces of the rich.”

“Palaces?” she asked.

“By comparison with mid-twentieth century, yes. And our bodies are new, cared for and adjusted in ways once thought blasphemous, our lives longer, our social problems fewer…”

“So what is it that you fear—exactly?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Our history makes me uneasy, and history has been my life.”

“Maybe too much so. There are virtues to forgetfulness—and to looking ahead.”

He said, “The history of the last two hundred years, I sometimes think, has frightened us into prudence. But I wonder what it would take to unbalance us again.”

“And you think that this…” she started to say.

“This, or contact with an alien culture. Something is on the way, and gaining on us…and we are not fleeing forward fast enough.”

“When you speak,” Justine said, “you say ‘we’ whether you talk of today or the past. We are not the past, Ibby.”

“I’m not so sure of that. We have hidden certain…tendencies and habits of mind from ourselves, because they no longer pay. There is no gain in them. But if there were…if there are people alive in the prisons, what shall we do with them? Bring them home? Give them a choice? Can they even make such a choice and know what they’re choosing?”

“You’re trying to decide too much in advance, Ibby. When we go out and see, we’ll know what to do.”