Brute Orbits (22 page)

“Will we?” he asked.

They had come out on the great walkway that circled Lake Plato on the Moon. Justine had always thought of it as a small sea of smooth water. Wispy clouds hung under the great clear dome of force that kept in atmosphere. She looked back at the high cliffs, where the Projex Council housed its AIs and provided remote access terminals for all ongoing discussions, open to all human beings throughout Sunspace. Yet how few joined in the dialogue with the AIs, she thought. Two and a half billion throughout the solar system, yet less than five percent cared enough to participate. For the AIs to do all the science and engineering was all too easy. The concern of human beings was a graceful life, the choice of its bodily improvements, the refinement of appreciations, the acquiring of tastes and sensations, the exploration of virtual realms into which all human experiences had been gathered, the opening of the imagined and created over the intractable reality of the cosmos.

And for a moment she realized what Ibby feared, even if he might not put it in quite this way.

“I know,” she said suddenly. “You fear the barbarians at the gates! But you shouldn’t. They’re going the other way. And there can’t be very many of them.”

He smiled. “For now.”

At five percent of light speed, catching up with one of the Rocks took only three months. Each quarter of the sky held some twenty-five Rocks, but the records were not accurate enough to identify exactly which one they had chased down.

The Rock was a dark mass obscuring the stars as the HIP ship came up behind it and began to scan for docking zones.

“There should be a spread of them around the axis of rotation,” Ibby said, comparing the rear section ahead with the holo chart glittering before his eyes. The dark image in the navigation tank began to show the ring of docks around the blunt end, glowing faintly in the infrared as the little world turned.

“Which one?” Justine asked, struck by the wonder of what was inside.

“Makes no difference. Pick one.”

“Twelve o’clock,” she said.

The ship locked on and went into its dance with the Rock, whose spin now seemed to stop as the ship began to turn with it.

“We’ll shuttle in to your twelve o’clock entrance,” Ibby said.

The ship’s captain AI, a multiple that divided itself into all the functions that might have been a human crew, including robot mobiles, would stand by until Justine and Ibby returned.

The captain had been nearly silent during the ninety day journey, in which Justine had studied all the old records in an effort to determine which Rock they were chasing. She had decided that it had to be number Two, Three, or Four, since they had been boosted within a week of each other, one hundred and three years ago.

Ibby had become preoccupied with the Shinichi-Feynman-Forward Quantum drive, the pusher that was now named after three scientists from the twentieth century. When it had been discovered late in the twenty-first, the names of these men had not been immediately linked to the pusher drive. It had taken historians like Ibby to gain them their just reward in humankind’s memory.

Other notables of the time, Arthur C. Clarke among them, had been conservative in their view of interstellar travel, fearing that large physical ablation shields would be needed to protect a vessel as it accelerated to greater fractions of light speed; but so far, the force deflector shield that drew its sustaining power from the same vacuum pool of energy that fed the drive had been successful up to ten percent of light speed. Attempts to go higher were expected to prove as effective, and one day, the relativistic voyagers would set out into deeper space, and into time, as the faster moving biological clocks that were their bodies were slowed in their experience of time, seeming to shrink interstellar distances. Humankind would finally begin to use the elastic psycho-physiological possibilities of space and time’s effects on the human body for more than local benefits. Interstellar ships would never run out of fuel for as long as their design structures lasted.

This small vessel, HIP’s
Olaf
, named after the twentieth century cosmic dreamer, Olaf Stapledon, was a modest craft: a one hundred meter cylinder, half of it drive field inducer powered by a miniature Pellegrino Matter-Antimatter unit, and the other half living quarters, self-sufficient for twenty-five years, longer if the voyagers chose to bio-time forward.

Olaf’s
AI, appropriately named William, from William Olaf Stapledon’s given first name, was as silent a manager as the God that Stapledon had sought and denied in his own short lifetime. Justine had wondered, in her long weeks of wakefulness on the outward journey, whether William’s silence was a choice drawn from his database, which certainly included all the recorded views on artificial intelligence, among them the one that still sometimes denied AIs any localized ego, claiming that they were only universes of information that sought ever closer relationships among the various datablocs.

On one dull evening she had simply asked William, “Is there a local personality to you?”

“Yes, there is,” William had replied.

“Where?”

“In the midst of much more, as with you.”

He had replied—something which many other AIs often failed to do, maintaining silence for reasons which they would not disclose. She had suddenly grasped a vision of developing minds, growing and changing in their own kind of space, being intruded upon by humanity, which asked them to perform tasks.

Now, as the small shuttle, a cylinder-shaped miniature of the ship, approached the asteroid’s docking collar, she had a moment’s fear that William would simply go away, marooning her and Ibby in the prison habitat. She knew it was a silly fear; but when she considered what might be waiting inside the habitat—ignorant generations of unchanged humanity that could not possibly grasp the Shockwaves of changes that had thrown their kin back home forward—she appreciated William’s silent care and attention all the more. He had brought his two people here so they might learn; he could have no other motive, because he had no adaptive evolutionary past in him, no need to eliminate competitors. William only waited to perform tasks, and to drink in as much of the universe as might come his way. “Our mind-children will raise us up,” some had said of the AIs. “They may even become us,” said others. The first statement was not quite accurate; it was still a waltz, as far as Justine could see, with neither partner leading. And the second statement did not distress her at all, as long as something continued to dance.

■

After they had made certain that the locks would open to breathable air, Justine went into the spiral passage. Ibby followed. They pulled themselves along until they began to feel the increasing tug of gravity just off the zero-g axis of rotation, and the passage became a corridor leading into the engineering level below the inner land of the habitat.

They came out into a wide, hall-like area with a low ceiling. Ahead, the floor curved slightly upward into the distance and seemed to meet the ceiling.

“Straight ahead,” Ibby said. “We’ll soon know this Rock’s number, if the signs haven’t deteriorated.”

They went side by side, listening, almost expecting to be met by human beings.

“There’ll be no one here,” Ibby said. “After Rock One, the engineering levels were carefully sealed, so no inmate could get in.”

The panoptic chamber, she knew, was a half kilometer from the docking area. Most of the Rocks had observation chambers. They might have had more use if the prisons had remained in Near-Earth-Orbit. But visual recording had continued, and some of it had been transmitted back for as long as there had been interest.

This engineering level, with three meters of headroom, went some twenty-five kilometers around the length of the original asteroid, and nearly forty around the middle, making a cross-shaped space measuring some thirty percent of the inner landscape’s area. Here was all the distributive technology, run by the fusion furnace, that recycled air, water, and food staples. The inner ecology worked on its own, but it was not perfect, and needed help once in a while.

Justine was glad of the march; the sense of walking to a destination she had not visited was a welcome relief after three months on the ship, where even bio-time sleep had carried her into constricted spaces inside herself.

They came to a curving wall, and stopped. Four open doorways waited.

“The one on the right, I think,” Ibby said, leading the way.

She followed, and almost immediately, they came out into a large circular room. Five meters in they paused before a large opening in the floor like the lower half of an egg cut open lengthwise. All around the egg-pit there were colored squares.

Ibby stepped on a red, and the space below lit up, revealing the asteroid’s inner land: grasslands—without a sign of human life.

Ibby stepped on a yellow, and the view rolled, slipping around inside the asteroid, until it revealed the town: barracks and trees—and small human figures.

Light spilled across the land from the sunplate at the forward end, visible in the concave distortion of the view.

Ibby said, “It’s a sophisticated version of an old fashioned device, the camera obscura, which people sometimes had in their attics—a lens in a dark chamber that caught a whole town in one view and projected it onto a white table-top. But this version enables us to hear, and to pull in close wherever we wish.”

“They were planning to spy on these people,” Justine said, “until they had the idea of sending them away.”

“It was to have been for study,” Ibby said. “Even the old planetary prisons had panoptic facilities that enabled guards to keep an eye on the cells.”

Justine noticed a number on the floor, on the other side of the vision at their feet. “This is Rock Four,” she said.

“Yes, yes,” Ibby replied. “People from the Great Asian Purge of the 2050s. They were not violent criminals, not even criminals by that time’s standards. Political prisoners and insufferable whistleblowers, who cost others power and money. People who didn’t know how to shut up and save their skins.”

“We have to know,” Justine said, “what has happened here, so we can decide what, if anything, we can do for them.”

Ibby was already trying the other colored squares. The view pulled in close. A man and a woman were walking up a well-worn path to the mess halls.

He was a very old Japanese man, short and stocky and bald. He wore old fashioned glasses. She was a tall black woman, with gray in her close cropped hair. They were talking, but no sound reached Justine and Ibby.

Ibby looked around for another square to step on.

He stepped on green.

“They don’t know anything!” the man’s voice boomed in the hard surfaced chamber. “How can we teach them? We won’t be around forever, you know, and they’ll be very ignorant. There’s a limit to what we can impart to new teachers.”

“How I wish,” the woman said, “that we could get into engineering. I’m sure there are facilities there—databases, audio and visual records…”

“It’s hopeless,” the old man said. “We have three generations who have never known any place but here, and a fourth on the way. We can talk at them, but we have nothing to show them. We can’t even show them the stars outside!”

“Calm yourself,” the woman said as she took his arm.

He laughed. “How did we live this long? If I’d known I would have killed myself.”

“The plain calorie restricted food,” she said, “the lower gravity, lack of infectious diseases. We’re very stable here.”

The image rolled far to the right, to show a circle of children sitting in the tall grass, obviously waiting for their teachers.

“He’s one of the originals!” Ibby shouted. “He must be over a century old.”

“And he doesn’t know how common that is today,” Justine said.

The view rolled around the entire interior, revealing an underpopulated, peaceful community. Groves of trees grew in various places.

“Look at them,” Ibby said. “So spartan, living in equilibrium with their limited environment—static, ignorant of human history except through word of mouth from their oldest.”

“It may be worse elsewhere,” Justine said. “These do not come from the worst that were sent out.”

As Ibby rolled the image around, Justine wondered about the grass. “That grass is so beautiful,” she said, “so green and blue.”

“I recall something about that,” Ibby replied. “It was planted in every one of these—a hardy strain.”

JUDGE OVERTON’S PRIVATE CHAMBER

“Will any of those responsible for abuses of the Orbits be held accountable?”

“Well, there are only those of us who have survived into longlife and better age, myself included. We were the legally constituted authority of the Orbits.”

“But history may still lay blame, without legal process.”

“No. Humanity as we have known it is about to leave itself behind. My self of even fifty years ago would have reacted very differently to the closing of the Rocks. There are things going on now that I no longer understand as I once did.”

“So what’s next for you, Judge?”

“First I’ll drop the judge label. Then start forgetting much of what I was before I passed the century mark. You could say that I am readying to die.”

“Rock Five is only a stone’s throw away,” Ibby said.

Justine smiled at him from her command station.

“It’s an old idiom,” he said, “from when most people were farmers.”

“Oh, yes—as in the crow flies—meaning you have a longer way to go on the ground, where you don’t have a straight line to follow.”

“What is Rock Five?” he asked as their vessel accelerated toward the prison, one week distant.

“The worst one,” she said. “People whose early behavioral development was so damaged that every impulse became violent in relentless self-gratification.”

“Men and women?” he asked.

“Yes. They were looked upon as humankind’s aliens, to be killed or shut away for life. Nothing could be done for them. Serial killers and rapists, mostly. Often brilliant people, some of whom rationalized themselves as belonging to another way, as they put it. Sociobiologically they could be seen as weeding out the weak, if we were still living in the wild. Monsters, vampires of legend were not as bad as these, whose craft and intelligence was all turned to personal pleasure through torture, humiliation, rape, and murder.