“He’ll keep you company at your trial,” Gailla said joylessly.
“But you’ll be killing what’s left of your old love!” he cried.
“I’ve been prepared for some time,” she said. “They’ll wipe you clean and start you up as someone else. It’ll be all over for both of us.”
“No!” he cried, turned, and rushed to the other door. She did not fire, and he knew that she couldn’t, and that he would have enough time to do what he now remembered was his last recourse, waiting for him if something went wrong.
He palmed the door, and still she had not fired. As the door slid open, he knew that she was hesitating, unable to kill the last of her lover. And he felt it also, the mountainous regret at having killed him. He could not banish it, or the vast cloud of the man’s mental remains. It refused to fade away, invading his unused regions with new patterns, and he knew that he was too weak to wipe them out. The impulse to love had infected him with weak sentiments, and he knew that she felt it also. The bodily memories of their lovemaking had softened them both. That was why she had not killed him as soon as he had regained himself. Or was she preparing him for when she would rebuild her old lover by amplifying the stubborn echoes that remained until they burgeoned and became again the personality she had known? Maybe she knew how to resurrect him and had planned it all along, and would carry out her plan after sufficient revenge had been visited on him.
Well, he would deny her that. He could still take everything from her, and achieve one last victory over a world that had opposed his every desire from the start, always forcing him to take what he wanted. There was nothing else he could do.
“Wait!” she cried as the door opened into chaos. It would have been a way to somewhere, but he had deliberately left it set to no destination—realizing that he might need its sudden exit one day.
As he tumbled into the black obscenity of existence without form, he saw her in the doorway, her mouth open wide in horror and regret, her arms reaching out to him uselessly. And as he felt himself deforming, changing, losing all sense of time and space, he knew that his death would not be quick, that no supernatural damnation could ever have equaled the slow loss of himself that was just beginning.
Gailla was shooting at him now, and he imagined that it was a gesture of pity, an effort to shorten the suffering of what was left of her lover. The third bullet opened his chest, entering slowly, as if unsure of how to obey the laws of physics in this realm. It explored his pain, telling him that he had made this final fate for himself by building the castle and its doorways, with every fleeting, trivial decision—step by inexorable step to one end, to bring him here, to this death.
“Gailla,” Silverstone whispered through the pain of her bullet’s dancing, failed mercy. “I’m still here.”
Then Robles closed his eyes and heard the soft, terrible music filtering in from behind the show of things. It was an inhuman music, with nothing of song or dance, or memory in it. It was a music of crushed glass, severed nerves, and brute rumblings, preparing the way for a theme of fear.
And as Robles knew himself in his pain, he yearned for death because Silverstone was still with him.
My First World
1
IT WAS THE DAY OF RETURN, BUT THE ROCK DID NOT open and we did not see the stars. Our world was not visited, and release did not begin.
I had heard about it all my life, and looked forward to the evacuation. I also feared it, but that was not an acceptable feeling to show where I grew up, so I kept it to myself.
Agonized, often fierce hopes lived in parents, especially in the mothers and fathers of daughters. Their children’s lives waited to begin on the day of return.
On that same day, so clearly marked by our dining hall clocks and calendars, I walked away from the sunplate to the rocky end of the world, and looked back across its ten-kilometer length of afternoon, at our fifty years of forest and grassland. These lofty pines had never known a real wind, according to my father, but they leaned a bit from our hollow rock’s rotation, he said.
I looked at the light-shot, silver-blue stream, at the central lake’s reflection of the sunplate, at the three small towns around their food dispensary domes, and wondered how all this could end before I fully knew how it had all come about.
Much of the gently hilly interior was tall grass—about a hundred square kilometers of land pasted on the inside of a spinning football. We walked around in centrifugal spin, like gravity, my father said without explaining gravity, but really only acceleration, which pushed us down on the landscape, our feet to the stars we couldn’t see and our heads toward the airy center, sunplate at one end of the long axis and rocky hills at the other.
Somewhere beneath the land, but not as far as the outer protective surface of the original asteroid, was the sealed engineering level, there for the wardens to visit, and to house the machines that ran our eco-systems.
The rock had no propulsion systems of its own. It had been boosted into a timed cometary orbit, and would be maneuvered by large tugs when it returned.
Crowds sat on the hillsides outside the three towns, awaiting arrival, sure of the year-counts, needing to believe in justice from a past that had rejected them.
Only about half the people were still alive from the time when the rock went out. This had left much of the housing of the three towns to be continuously divided more generously among the survivors and their few children. Our town was just beyond the lake, the second was halfway up the curve of the world, and the third was above the lake. My parents and I had one end of a long barracks, which my father had divided into three large rooms, one for himself and my mother, one to sit in, a small corner of which he called his study, and one for me.
Long before we crossed Earth’s orbit, we expected visits by warden vessels. The engineering level would open, and prison officials would emerge to announce the end of the fifty-year sentence meted out to our mothers and fathers.
To me it had not been a prison sentence. It had been only the way we lived. I had never known anything else, and wondered if other ways would be any better. I had only the vaguest ideas of what other ways of life might be like.
Children doubt what parents say about the past; parents are saying it, so it can’t be all that important. It doesn’t seem real, because they say too little about it, and you can’t really understand what their lives were like back on Earth. If it was all that important, they’d tell you more about it.
But I was old enough to begin to know a little better, so I became excited, fearful, and full of wonder, by turns.
Then we got late. Very late. The ground did not open, and we did not see the stars in the great airless. Days went by, but we still waited daily on the hillsides, five thousand of us, including the few sons and daughters, and no one knew what was wrong.
A distant hope spoke within me, unexpectedly reassuring me that my homeland was not going to be taken away from me. A quiet, deep disappointment came over the old people of the rock. I felt strange not feeling as they did.
Our troubles were just beginning.
2
There was a lot of talk at meals about what might have gone wrong, and it all came down to unprovables. I sat with a few of my friends and listened to the chatter, most of it old people’s voices, some strong, others weak or whispering, a few whining.
“We’re just late, that’s all.”
“But why are we late?”
“Something knocked us off course.”
“Maybe we’re not supposed to come back—ever. All they had to do was boost us a little more to make it a long, long orbit. A thousand years.”
“They want us all to die out here!” one old man shouted through his tears.
“No, something went wrong, like what happened ten years ago. Maybe that had something to do with it.”
I remembered that day, even though I had been only ten years old. I felt a pull on my body as I lay in the tall grass. A breeze passed over me. I grabbed some gra
ss and held on, but something was trying to roll me toward the river. I looked toward our town and saw some of the wooden barracks push over and stand crooked.
I didn’t understand then what was happening. Our rock was slowing down, as if it had hit water, or air, except that there couldn’t be air or water outside.
I lay there for over an hour, holding on to the tall grass until my stomach told me that the ground was steady again. I had never felt anything like that before.
“How can we know anything? We can’t look out.”
As I listened to the oldsters in the dining hall, it struck me how I had grown up with the notion of outside. Always there in the back of my mind, but not really important. Outside was where my parents came from, where people lived on the crust of a planet. It was all words.
The look of resignation on my mother’s face disturbed me more than this delay, or whatever it was. Like my father, she didn’t seem to care whether we returned or not. But of course they both cared deeply, and seemed uncaring only because they feared so much.
They feared that the past might still be waiting for them, and for me. They feared broken hopes.
They had never spoken about why they had been sentenced. When I was sixteen they told me that they would explain it all when I was eighteen. Then they told me to wait until I was twenty-one. That time came and I insisted.
“Let’s go for a walk by the lake,” my father said. “Your mother doesn’t want to hear all this again.”
I looked across the room to where she sat in her chair, looking old and defeated, and it seemed to me that her bones were twisted inside her flesh, preventing her from relaxing even when she was sitting.
She looked at us and took a deep breath as we stood up.
“Go on,” she said. “It’s time he knew it all.”
3
“Stop me,” my father said, “if you find something I say puzzling.”
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry when I recall those words. I might have stopped him every other minute. I was so incredibly ignorant, and he knew only what he could remember. We had few books, no visual records, just the landscape, the barracks, and the dining halls.
The sunplate was dimming toward evening. We walked at the lake’s edge as he spoke, staring into the lake as if he was pulling what he had to say out of the water, but it was sinking away as he got hold of it.
“What I’ll tell you,” he continued slowly, “may explain why we seem not to have returned. We may be back, but they don’t want to let us out.”
He looked at me then, a white haired man who still seemed youthful in his seventies, anxious about what I might say. I had no idea of what he was going to tell me.
“Most of us here,” he said, “were the victims of torture. All of it left us damaged physically for life. We were all guilty of politically motivated acts. We did terrible things to other people to get their attention, believing that political change was possible through violent resistance.” He smiled without looking at me. “I can hear your question—and the answer is that sometimes changes we wanted were possible, sometimes not. You never knew which it was going to be until later. If the change you wished came, they didn’t want you around. Even successful... actions... leave hatreds that will come out later, and die only through long periods of peace, which turn the original conflicts into poetry and literature, into sentimental pageants, even into knick-knacks that stand on shelves. And songs. Many of those who protested violently had to be killed or thrown away, because they probably weren’t good for anything decent after some of the things they had done. That’s what they said to us. Even though we contributed to the change, no one would give us any credit. That would make them have to admit too much, to being accessories to conditions that cried out for change in any way possible.”
He was not looking at me, and it seemed that he was confessing to some hidden listener, maybe to the God he didn’t believe in; but later I knew that he was confessing to me, and that I was expected to judge my parents. At that moment, I felt only a greater curiosity than I had ever known. Suddenly it seemed more important than the curious mystery of our rock’s failure to return. That could wait, yet some part of me felt that we might never find out why, and that was still fine with me.
“We were tortured,” he said with a sudden intake of breath, “your mother and me, for what we knew about our fellow resistors. We were splendidly tormented, by wires and hooks, knives and electrical devices, and with medical procedures. Even after we had told everything we knew, they kept on, because too many of them liked it, had acquired a taste.” He smiled to himself. “I hate to tell you, but our species kept torture chambers in many of the best houses and castles of the rich and powerful. It was considered a normal privilege for centuries. And then governments set them up. I suspect that they’re still there in some form, in out of the way places...”
He stopped to catch his breath.
“But it stopped, and you were released,” I said as his breathing slowed.
“Yes, we were released, but we still posed an embarrassment. We might write memoirs, tell stories. Some doctors concluded that we were too damaged to ever be normal again, that we would abuse our children and the children of others, set bad examples, even write lies about the innocent. In reality we were no different than many other people who had undergone hardships or recovered from physical diseases, not that much different than soldiers back from wars. Returning soldiers were often viewed with suspicion, which only prevented their full recovery. Much of the truth lay in the fact that those who had been responsible for our torments continued in power, and feared exposure more than any lies we might tell. But it was also true that we told lies and destroyed reputations with simple accusations, if we disliked some powerful person. Both guilty and innocent feared us—and there were too many of us in a world whose systems of communication and remembrance were just too good. Besides, there was a lot of money to be made from horror stories. In fact, for simple profit, the very systems we had fought were eager to sell us the ropes with which to hang them in the media.”
“And what happened?” I asked in awe.
“Sometimes it worked, sometimes not. One never knew. Often the truth got buried in a basket of crank, paranoid theories, and no one knew the difference.” He sighed. “Still, there were many of us who were labeled as too damaged to live among normal people. And some of us were too damaged. But many others distinguished themselves in science, literature, and the arts. We got our stories out. But we were always the unwelcome guest at dinner. Too much past was with us, in a world society more and more obsessed with therapy and always fearing that we were plotting revenge. So when the timed asteroid prison system was opened, they found a way to make a place for us. We began to disappear. That took a few years. Then they boosted us away. We weren’t the only ones. Traditional criminals were a much larger number.”
He looked at me directly then and said, “Now you want to know what your mother and I did.”
I nodded hesitantly, wondering if I wanted to know or if I had to know.
“Some of us had our revenge,” he said, taking another deep, painful breath. I had never seen him so upset. “Some of it was violent, some of it was simple lies, spread around effectively to ruin people. Well, not simple lies. Whole cases were manufactured against individuals until no one knew lies from truth. Many lives were ruined, especially public ones. Some people were simply killed, and no one cared much, which was disappointing to the naive who tried to help us. These were new crimes that many of us committed, but no greater than the violence that states reserve, illegally even by their laws, often secretly, to themselves.” He smiled at me, but it was a mask. “I was not what you would call a nice person, son, and we were not the best champions to set against the world’s ills. But I refused to live in the middle class zoo.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, feeling my ignorance keenly.
He smiled to himself. “Of course, even the worst people aren’t being their wors
t all the time. Nice, even genuinely good people, aren’t that way all the time, either.”
He had never beaten me, but he would get angry and shake as he restrained himself, and my mother’s breathing would become more labored. Both of them would close their eyes when we heard the cries of the other boys being beaten in the barracks adjacent to ours. Daughters would scream loudly. Fear of their parents was partly why most of the girls avoided the boys; but the girls were also afraid of us, from what their parents told them. They saw the boys at meal times, and nowhere else, and it was mostly long glances, a few smiles.
I knew one face, one name, and a hopeless look.
Their parents had been waiting for the return, and hoping that their girls would have a bigger world to live in and more than the boys of our rock to choose among.
Of the five thousand inhabitants of our world, only two hundred had become parents, with one or two children each. We had been born with great difficulty, and many died. This was because of the physical injuries of the mothers, most of whom believed they might never bear children. They were gripped with both joy and fear when they became pregnant, and both reactions were often justified. Those who had imprisoned my parents did not think it likely that there would be any children, not only because of the high level of infertility due to age and damage, but also because of a lack of will. Those who might have been able had no heart to bring children into our world; but in time they relented and were surprised.
“The middle classes of Earth,” my father said, “were a zoo kept by the rich and powerful to benefit themselves from the working and poor underclasses of the world. The zoo remained even after the great die off in the early twenty-first century, even when it became possible to raise everyone to at least middle-class comfort. But power remained to be hoarded. And yet the top needed talent. They used the zoo to recruit from and to corrupt, to turn into one of their own those who they saw as worthy. Even the underclasses could enter the zoo from below, if they showed enough intelligence and talent, if they were seen as being of possible use. The very wealthy usually just didn’t produce great talent out of their ranks. They hired it.” He laughed. “Not only because they too often couldn’t, but because it would have been dangerous to have too many of their class with critical intelligence and talent. Why nurture class traitors? As it was, they had too many of those with the longing to help the abused, the marginalized, and forgotten. It was a bright and guilty world, son, full of innovation and increasing knowledge—all of it a threat to the powerful growing over from the twentieth century, all of them fearful of losing everything to the mobs.” He smiled at me. “Don’t get me wrong, son, there were good people among the powerful and their recruits. Some of them honestly felt that this was the only way, that where the many would one day go, the few had to go first. They did not see how slow a road that was going to be, how reluctantly power is shared, much less given up. The truth about elites is that they could do everything right, because they have the means, but they don’t do it, or do it only under the kind of pressure that leads them to compromise only when they face losing everything. Then, when things are calmer, they take it all back. The thing to remember is that we’re all like this, capable of rationalizing whatever position of power and influence we attain. It’s human greed.”
Black Pockets Page 14