Brute Orbits (23 page)

“But I don’t accept that they were alien. There were enough examples in mating rituals, marriage practices, warfare, religious torture, and political revolutionary behavior, not to mention economic conflict, to prove our nasty continuity with them. We have only to compare the behavior of nation-states or the wolf-pack mentalities of marketeers to see how few they were, how small when seen against the organized cruelties of the social systems that produced these cruel individuals, yet never received as much public discussion. They did not wake up one fine morning and decide to be as they were.”

“I’m reminded,” Ibby said, “of the wish attributed to Thomas Jefferson—that he would have liked to see the last king strangled with the entrails of the last priest, for all the harm they did through all the wars they started.”

“Both priestliness and kingship,” she said, “were brazen efforts at social engineering, with the priest claiming a pedigree from God for morals, lest the people run amok, and the king claiming the same derived legitimacy for political power. Both warred with human nature, of which we were mostly ignorant—and human nature won, subverting priestliness, kingship, democracy, and legal restraints, with help from a little record-keeping system known as money, which was easily modified so that those who did most of the work got paid the least. The record-keeping system was also manipulated to make more money without the manipulator producing anything of intrinsic value.”

“And all driven by the desire for power,” he said, “through which your progeny, and not your neighbors’, inherits the future, by which one gets to say who’s who and what’s what, and what will be. The desire to be somebody is the great appetite of human history. I often wonder how this kind of human nature has changed itself at all in practice, or how it can ever become something better.”

“It has changed some,” she said.

“Who judges?” he asked. “This same human nature? And can it enforce changes? Whenever I hear a human being talking about progress, I say look who’s talking.”

“Gradually,” she said, “we have progressed.”

“How can we see? From where can we get a good look at ourselves?”

“We can and we do, Ibby. We flip back and forth, in and out of our humanity, as if we can be something else for a moment, and then not, and then a little better next time. This self-conscious step-back is humankind’s greatest innovation.”

“Do you really think so?”

“We do it. We are doing it as we speak.”

“And there’s hope in that?”

“Hope is a healthy body and a clear mind,” she said, “and as Carl Sagan said a long time ago, hope is a database that exceeds the information in the human genetic code, when our knowledge exceeds, overwhelms, and directs our genetic inheritance. We’ve only done this recently.”

Ibby nodded. “I’m well aware of that. But I also see how often humankind has congratulated itself. Look who’s talking. Maybe we need something else to talk about us.”

“The AIs do—and they let us listen! We have our self-correcting view through their feedback, where once we only had it in the ideals of science, which always had to fight the society around them. Both human and AI, as we converge, continue to share critical intellect’s legacy. Err and correct was also the method of ethical religions, but outside of extraordinary individuals the religions only built bureaucracies of salvation, while science applied the method of err and correct systematically to build a body of knowledge.”

“I know all this,” Ibby replied, gazing into the navigational tank where the beacon of Rock Five burned in the night like a threat. “But what will we do with all these—these leftovers—this damaged humanity? What fountain of unreason are we about to open.”

“First we’ll complete our survey,” she said, “then decide on whether it would be productive to make contact—and then we’ll know what to do—and then we’ll do it.”

He looked over at her and asked, “Do you really think it will be that straightforward, with no complications?”

She nodded to him. “Yes—and I have some ideas about what will have to be done.”

“‘What will have to be done’?” he asked. “You sound as if it’s already been decided.”

“If you think about it, you’ll see what the choices are. There’s only two or three.”

■

They watched in the panoptic chamber as the view rolled around the standard countryside of grassland and stopped on one of the barracks villages. A half dozen figures moved around the long structures, tending what seemed to be gardens. A close-in view showed the figures to be young men and women in long shirts down to their knees.

“What do you think?” Ibby asked.

“This doesn’t tell us anything,” Justine said. “Can we see inside any of their buildings?”

“I’m checking, but I doubt it.”

“What can we expect here?” she asked. “The Australian model doesn’t really apply, since most of those people were guilty mostly of being poor, and the country’s development belied its so-called criminal origins. The Lunar penal colony doesn’t help either, because it was closed after a while, with no long-term lessons to teach.”

“Look over there!” Ibby shouted, his voice echoing in the chamber.

The view expanded to show a large group of smiling boys and girls in clean denims walking through the tall grass from one of the mess halls. A middle-aged man was leading them.

The audio came on to reveal that the group was singing “Old MacDonald Had a Farm.”

“They don’t look like they’re going to kill or torment anyone,” Ibby said.

■

As they went on to the next Rock, Justine was beginning to think that they would find only two kinds of outcomes: Either everyone would be dead, or some kind of order would have emerged from the initial conditions.

“I can’t imagine,” she said to Ibby, “that even the worst murderer wouldn’t behave better to his son or daughter.”

Ibby said, “If they’re relatively sane, yes, but the deranged and violent will abuse their children, and who will have protected them?”

“There will be some, I would think,” she said, “who would have stood up for the children, even kill their violent and abusive parents to prevent further outrages. And gradually, a better order would emerge.”

“Or interminable civil wars. And the children might grow up to kill the aging adults, and then start in on each other.”

Justine said, “But there would be fewer killers among these, and even fewer in the next generation, because most of the violence would have the character of rebellion, not pathology. The pathological are unstable, and often die first. Political struggles continue, but what would they struggle for here?”

“One would hope that the number of killers would decline and the violence lose its pathology,” Ibby said. “It’s happened every way in human history. Sometimes the pathology becomes the social institution.”

“But it’s weeded out,” Justine insisted.

“There’s no precedent for these prisons. We’ll have to see many more to have a better idea of what actually happens.”

■

At Rock Two, Justine and Ibby also found an unexpected degree of order. Three generations came and went from the barracks and mess halls in what seemed to be civilized strolls in the park.

“But look at that!” Ibby said, rolling the image to one side.

“It’s a graveyard,” Justine said.

The view pulled in to show handcrafted markers, more than a hundred of them.

“But why didn’t the bodies go into the recycle chutes?” asked Ibby.

“They needed to have them in view,” Justine said, “maybe to remind them of a hard won peace of the dead. Reminds me of Boot Hill in the old American west.”

“But we’re guessing,” Ibby said, gazing at the neat black markers in the blue-green grass. A few were crosses.

“Of course we’re guessing,” she said, “but I’ll bet it’s what happened. We’d have to go in and ask them, to be sure, of course.”

Ibby was silent for a moment, rolling the picture across the two hundred square kilometers of the habitat. “I’m thinking,” he said finally, “that this system of incarceration in fact gave the inmates a lot. A place to live without guards. Room and board, to use an old phrase. And a place where they might just have the leisure to reflect and think without economic temptations working on their insecurities—a kind of limbo or purgatory in which they might remake themselves.”

“Purgatory?” Justine asked. “The place as bad as hell, but from which you get to leave? These people never got to leave. Imagine how it was when their time ran out and the Rock had not come home. Slowly, they realized that they were never going home, that they would never get out, and that if this was not Purgatory, then they were in Hell itself.”

“Could they have thought that?” he asked.

“Perhaps not—but they must have felt it, even if there was no one to give them the colorful descriptions. Hell has been described as the absence of God, the place where you may even be comfortable, but where to see God’s face is denied to you. These people had to feel something like that when they realized they would never see the Earth again, that their own kind had discarded them. Oh, some maybe hoped it was a mistake, that the orbit was somewhat longer, but that they would return. But as the years passed, they must have known it was not so.”

“But these,” Ibby said, pointing to the people in the hollow, “they look so at home here.”

“Things change,” Justine said. “They sometimes even get better. Remember, the young would not suffer loss and isolation in the same way, since they would never know anything else but here. They might have had great difficulty in understanding what their elders were so upset about. And when the last old one who had known Earth died—well, things might have even gotten better.”

Justine dressed in the observed denim garb of Rock Two, and prepared to go inside. With a fastload of language in her brain and the hope that she wouldn’t be noticed for a while among the thousands of inhabitants, she waited at the ramp opening.

“It might not open,” Ibby’s voice echoed from behind her. “I’ll track you constantly in the chamber, and come out if you need help, but I still don’t see why you want to do this.”

“I want to talk to some of these people face to face.”

“But why? We can observe them for as long as we wish.”

“You pick up more in person,” she insisted once more. “I want to feel for myself what these people are like.”

“What will that tell you?”

“I’ll tell you when I find out.”

“Okay,” Ibby said. “Let’s hope no one notices when we open up. I hope it doesn’t open.”

“Go ahead.”

She heard him breathing nervously, and turned to see him still hesitating.

“Maybe we should both go out,” he said, “—armed.”

“No. If something happens to me, you can help me. Or go home and tell what you’ve seen.”

“I’ll see if I can open the ramp cover only a crack. We don’t know what kind of noise it makes, or who may be nearby.”

“I’m ready,” she said.

She looked straight up the ramp, and heard a low grunting sound. Light came in. She started up toward the opening.

The cover was two meters up when she came to it.

“Is that open enough?” he called.

“Yes, I’m going. Close down in ten seconds.”

She got down on all fours, rolled through sideways, and watched the entrance cover close behind her.

She was alone in a strange afternoon of greens and browns and yellow-orange light. Slowly, she stood up and looked around. The opening to the engineering level was near the rocky farside of the hollow, as far from the sunplate as anyone could go. She was looking some ten kilometers down the full length of the asteroid. Three groupings of barracks surrounded by trees, set well apart, looked like toy villages and clumps of broccoli. There were no settlements in the grasslands overhead.

She scanned the area in which she stood. It was rocky, where the asteroid’s original material showed through the land that had been ground up and mulch-seeded, well over a century ago. There were so many things about a worldlet of this kind, she reminded herself, that one took for granted but which made a great difference to the inhabitants. These people had never seen the stars; the sunplate could be made to function as a screen to show starry space, but that would have required access to the engineering level, and a knowledge of control modules that these people did not have.

Not many provisions had been made for education of the later-born peoples; so the society here had only the oldest members to teach them anything, most of whom were almost certainly gone by now, having imparted all they could, but it would not have been enough. People alive here now were living in profound ignorance. Their mental picture of the past began at their birth, with no history to fill in the preceding depth of time; the future was also a blank, since the habitat was not really going anywhere. It would return to the inner solar system someday.

In her own thinking about the prison Orbits, she had begun to see some positive possibilities; but these conflicted with what she knew about the constraints. She recalled something that had been said by an inmate of an old prison on Earth. “Sometimes I think it’s not so bad,” the man had said. “At other times that it’s worse than I expected. Then I wonder who had thought up this putting of people in boxes and watching them. Who was this person who had thought it up? Where had he been born?”

Well, these little worlds were not quite boxes, and there had been no one watching until now. The Orbits were an advance on the old prisons. A time had come to empty out the world’s prisons, many of which had become small cities, and to begin again to raise a generation that would not need prisons. Escape proof, the Rocks required only an initial investment to rid the rest of humanity of a past that resisted change, and nothing after that.

Nothing. No educational facilities. Limited medical means. Just room and board for life, away from everyone else.

“Whoorayoo?” a youthful voice said from behind her.

She turned around with her hand on the stunner in the belt beneath her shirt, and saw what looked to be a young boy smiling at her from the rocks below. He was about twelve or thirteen, of medium height, with fair skin and long blond hair down to his shoulders. He wore denim coveralls. She wondered for a moment whether he had seen her emerge.