JUDGE OVERTON’S PRIVATE CHAMBER
* * *
“What do you say about hopelessness being the root cause of all crime?”
“Well, yes—but, you see, they get professionally organized, the best of them. They get good at it with practice. Most hopeless people don’t commit crimes. Of course, most of them are just too afraid and don’t have the courage or skill. It’s the bright and canny ones who become the most violent, to maintain their hold on things. They see what it takes.”
“So you say it’s too late for them?”
“Yes.”
“But what if we removed the hopelessness at the very beginning of life, give them something to lose. Then we wouldn’t raise the ambitious ones, much less their soldiers.”
“Yes. But my job is to restrain them until then. It’s the best we can do now.”
* * *
Ivan Osokin now faced a new challenge to the order that he had established by killing John “Jimmy” Barr. The men needed him—to reassure them about their health much of the time; with any luck, the worst cases would come up a long time from now. For them, he might not be able to do much more than the automated diagnostic scanner could do—tell them what they had and order a drug. Still, their knowing that he was, or had been, a doctor of medicine calmed them and kept him safe.
Killing Barr had been a necessary weeding; it had saved lives.
Osokin looked around the mess hall as he ate, and spotted a familiar figure.
“You can be saved!” cried the preacher as he walked among the men and women in the mess hall. “But you must go down on your knees each day of your life!”
“Yeah, tell me about it,” a woman’s voice called out.
Osokin looked up too late to see who had answered the self-professed holy man.
Osokin knew that it was his own success against Barr that had encouraged the preacher to come forth. If you had something to sell, then sell it, was the lesson of Osokin’s victory. There would be other sellers, Osokin knew, as soon as it dawned on them what specific they had to push. An inmate claiming to be a defrocked priest had been going around hearing confessions far out in the grass. The man had told him that his being defrocked didn’t matter, since he was hearing confessions in hell. Osokin had asked him about the hopelessness of it, since no one ever got out of hell. “A true priest ministers to human failings,” the man had replied, “and these are the most failed of failures. What greater accomplishment than to hear the repentance of those in hell? Yes, yes, they do repent, Doctor, and I give them the absolution of the damned—forgiveness without salvation. And hope.” What kind of hope, Osokin had asked, and the man had smiled at him as if he’d walked into a trap. “Doctor, in the infinity of time that waits before us, God may have mercy on us. He may reach down and pull us free.” He had smiled very broadly before adding, “In an infinite time, anything may happen. We may yet dwell in his company and see his face.”
Osokin had given some thought to what there was to trade for power: men and women’s bodies—that would settle itself—medical help, entertainment, and hope. He had not expected to see the selling of hope so soon. The defrocked priest was harmless, but he had his occasional takers, and that seemed to be enough for him. Osokin had expected to see the selling of cruelty as entertainment first.
The preacher was the second seller of hope, and much more ambitious than the priest. He called himself Dr. Jeremy Ashe. He was a long-haired man, as tall as Osokin, an Anglo-Italian with a mother from Bombay. He claimed that she had taught him about the Great Ones who lived in the central region of the galaxy and were “direct intermediaries to God,” whose black holes waited to retrieve the created universe into His bowels. There the damned would be crushed into an infinitely dense state of perpetual pain, but the saved would emerge into light and happiness without end.
Osokin didn’t know whether Ashe believed any of it, but that didn’t matter; the man might be a force for either stability or disorder, and that was not to be dismissed.
“I bring you hope!” shouted Ashe, bringing to market a very saleable good. “And I bring you knowledge, the father of hope—so that your hope will have eyes and not be blind! We are on our way toward the Great Ones of the galaxy, as planned by the compassionates who built this habitat and sent us on our way!”
“Say who?” a male voice asked.
That was pretty clever, Osokin thought, to suggest that the officers of the criminal justice system had been mere tools in the service of a higher power. He spooned up the last of his stew, then looked around at the faces of the others. Most seemed unconvinced; but it took only a few to build a circle of followers that might grow. When do we get there?—he wanted to shout back, but restrained himself; too early an opposition would only gain Ashe the sympathy that sometimes went to an underdog.
“I thought the cop lovers built this place!” shouted a male voice.
“Ah, yes!” Ashe replied. “But its true purpose was hidden even from them!”
“Who told you!” another man’s voice demanded.
Ashe stopped and held his arms over his head. “One of the Great Ones spoke to me from the rocks!”
Osokin smiled to himself. So there was to be the usual pedigree to the Word: handed down by an unimpeachable authority at an unfindable location, requiring faith to seal the bargain. Standard operating unverifiability—according to which even the bringer of the truth was unaware that he was hiding the source from himself, if necessary; the fountain-head of needful order had to be unquestioned. The actual source was of course the purely human impulse toward order. Too bad it had to co-exist in a partly rational brain with so many other evolutionarily embedded commands.
“At the far end rocks!” Ashe cried. “A voice spoke to me!”
Surprised, Osokin looked up, wondering how Ashe could have made such a mistake. It was a bad move to be specific. Ashe must believe he had heard something there. And Osokin saw that his chance had come sooner than he had expected, even if it meant losing any of the stability that Ashe might have brought to the community. One must not overlook a chance to destroy the competition early; a later chance might be too late.
Osokin stood up. “Where did you hear this voice?” he asked politely.
Ashe looked at him without fear or suspicion and said again, “At the far end rocks.”
There was a sudden quiet.
“Will you take us there?” Osokin asked softly.
Ashe gazed at him as if he were his lover, then shouted, “Ye have asked, and ye shall hear!” Then he looked around the mess. “All shall hear who follow me! Repeat my words in all the halls, and follow me.”
Men and women were looking at him with wonder.
“Yes,” Osokin said, “we shall go hear your voice.”
“Do you doubt, brother?” Ashe asked, looking at him with a puzzled, guileless face.
“I need to hear,” Osokin said in a neutral tone, and for a moment played with the thought that a subtle God was testing him.
“All need to hear!” Ashe replied. “And all shall hear!”
Osokin sat down, wondering how the man could have put himself into such a vulnerable position. A true believer would be too naive to play games. Would they reach the rocks and be told that they were deaf, and that only he could hear the voice?
“Eat and be strong,” Ashe said, “and then follow me.”
■
The turnout was smaller than Osokin had expected. Fewer than three hundred men and women followed Ashe down the length of the habitat. It was not a short walk—some four kilometers. Ashe led the way, never once looking back. There was conviction in his stride.
Gravity decreased slightly as they neared the rocks of far-end, where the inner surface narrowed toward the axis of rotation. Osokin felt a breeze blowing toward the rocks, and a distant high-pitched howl, but thought nothing of it at first; as they drew nearer to the narrows, and both wind and howl increased, he began to worry.
Ashe reached the rocks, tu
rned around, and shouted, “Hear the song, hear the Word!” He raised his arms. “How beautiful, with words!”
It was a brisk wind now. Osokin looked to the rocks beyond Ashe. His long hair was blowing back toward the rocks. Osokin looked around for a patch of grass or shrubbery, found some, and pulled up a handful.
Ashe stood in the wind, eyes closed.
“Hear the song, hear the Word!” he shouted again, closed up within himself, hearing what he prayed to hear, what he needed to hear. He was more dangerous than Osokin had supposed, because he heard the voices and believed what he heard—what some far part of himself was telling him.
Osokin tossed his handful of grass into the air, and the wind whipped the loose blades toward the rocks. Osokin noted their direction and started climbing. He scrambled past the oblivious Ashe, and stopped in horror when he saw the crack swallow the grass.
Ashe opened his eyes, turned and called after him, “Brother, be patient, be still, and hear the words of the Great Ones.”
“I hear well enough,” Osokin answered through a tight throat, his heart racing. After a few moments, he turned and stumbled back to stand at Ashe’s right hand.
Osokin raised his arms. “Friends! Behind me there’s a narrow crack. Our atmosphere is going out that way…”
There was a silence, as if the seconds before an execution were running out.
A woman screamed, “My child, my child!”
Osokin saw she was pregnant as she clutched at her belly, which was clearly filling out her loose fitting prison coveralls.
“Listen!” he shouted. “This may not be serious. It may only be rushing away into the engineering level—but we can’t take a chance. We’ll have to seal it up.”
Ashe was looking at him with an open mouth. He seemed to understand; but then something else deep within him reasserted itself and said, “Blasphemer! The voice of the Great Ones is not to be mocked.”
Osokin ignored him. “We have to get dirt, wet it, and pack it in until the wind stops.”
“You dare, you dare?” Ashe cried out. “You dare to silence the voice of the Great Ones?”
Osokin wanted dearly to say that he dared, but restrained himself as he saw that a group was already breaking away to go back and get spades.
Ashe said the only thing left for him to say. “Have you no ears? Do you not hear? The voice of saving armies speaks!”
Everyone was turning away from him. He dropped to his knees and cried, “I hear, I hear!” Then he lowered his head and wept.
Osokin stepped up to him and put a hand on his shoulder.
Ashe looked up at him and said, “But I do hear,” over the whipping wind, “I do hear it.”
Osokin nodded, trying to dredge up some show of pity from himself; but he knew that he was only contorting his face into a feeble mask of compassion; so he kept his hand on the man’s shoulder and said, “Of course you hear…it happens that way…sometimes,” knowing that it was a necessary display of human feeling, to disarm anyone who would later repeat the tale.
12
Aliens
Rock Five carried away humankind’s aliens.
These were the sexually damaged beyond repair. Some said that to have killed them all would have been better; only their numbers—six thousand men and women gathered in the Rock from all over the world—made it politically unacceptable to simply gas them in the enclosed space. Most of them were under a sentence of life imprisonment or death; but the delays were endless, as were the discussions about “clearing the Rock” of vermin, so it might be used again, for a better class of criminals. A mass execution inside the rock might even have achieved legality, but then it would have been necessary to subtract the lifers. “Send it into the Sun,” was a common suggestion.
The final decision sent the Rock into another “open” orbit, a persistent misnomer which actually meant that its period was longer than anyone on the Rock could live. Escape velocity from the Sun was not necessary when a period of a century or more would do the job. Sentences of death and life imprisonment were thus again satisfied.
Those who had received life differed only in legal technicalities from those who had been given death; both groups had committed rape and murder, preceded by cruel tortures. Death seemed the most expedient solution, but the understanding of researchers stood against it. Too much was known about what had alienated these human beings from their own kind to permit even the “social self-defense” justification for acceptable killing.
These sexual predators and killers knew that their behavior was fearfully rejected by the society around them; and for periods of time some of them were able to restrain themselves; but sexual release was not possible for them except through violence. After periods of self-restraint that could only weaken, when all other forms of gratification paled before the memory of pleasure, they went out to quiet their bodies by killing. As the normally adjusted man or woman seeks affection and orgasm, these others sought the same through cruelty, rape, and murder.
To find eroticism and adventure at the borders of danger and pain was a tropism closely linked to the main line of human behavior, to be eradicated in the mature adult of this kind only through the dubious purgings of drugs and surgery. Early violence against the child was blamed, in which the initial sexual gratification was released through cruelty and pain, fixing the pleasure response as effectively as the common sexual awakening, but replacing its reproductively purposeful way with an interloper whose only aim was joyous, unspeakable, forbidden domination and bloodletting.
Ordinary violence and rape by otherwise self-directed males was the middle ground between these aliens and the usual run of humanity, except that their avenue to gratification was not occasional but pathological. No other way existed for them. They moved among their kind as secret agents from an alien world, as despised and misunderstood as normal gays and lesbians had once been, driven by their devils to prey that had to struggle and show fear to be desirable.
The richest and most intelligent among them simply understood and filled their needs and were rarely caught; the powerless lived bewildered lives of attempted adaptation, no different than the lives of alcoholics and drug users. As the world grew smaller, the nets of organization pulled them in, preached at them, imprisoned them, drugged them, altered them surgically, locked them up, killed them, ignored them—and yet made new ones. Where were they coming from? From the fatal liberty of human nature, some said.
Humanity cried out in denial, “The Devil does not drive us!” It sought to rip out its evolutionary heart and hurl it into the darkness, denying in the brightly lit realm of its cerebral cortex that predation, sexual domination, the killing of infants and male enemies had all been part of the leverage by which nature had raised humankind out of time’s darkness, caring for individuals only if they lived to the age of reproduction. Nature did not fret over how the male delivered his wetware, caring only that he did so; it knew nothing of social systems, and did not agonize over deluded and damaged individuals; it did not trust the species to decide its own survival—so it gave it the orgasm as reward, and whipped the male who denied it into submission.
Social systems, grown from exhortations backed by physical force, acted in ignorance, recognizing neither humankind’s true origins nor its waiting, open possibilities…
■
The three women came at him on all fours, like slow moving wolves, eyeing him with fear and suspicion. It had taken some time to beat and frighten them into performing. The first one, a curly-headed brunette, came up into his lap, took his penis in her mouth, and bit him…
He felt the token pain, then shot her through the head and kicked the body back for the others to see. The other two waited, then began to whimper…
As the mercy-VR program ran out, he held on to the three naked figures in his field of vision—one cheesecake white, one silky chocolate, one amber, each with a foresty pubis. They were all probably dead by now, and he could only torment them in the system’s limi
ted variations. This had been one of the last downloaded programs shouted to the Rock by pitying friends and relatives before communications had been cut off. The record was supposedly of a real crime, for which the unseen man had been tried and sentenced. Maybe he was even here…
As he took off the old style VR helmet, Bellamy longed to have VRs of his own adventures. They sang to him from his fading memory, reminding him that their like would never come again in the lifetime left to him out here. Looking back, he knew that he had once lived and was now dead.
He did not blame anyone for his confinement; they were simply protecting themselves, as they said. On Earth, he would have been selecting and stalking new victims, satisfying new needs.
He did not think of himself as abnormal, because he had never known any other way. As he saw it, those unlike him had a right to protect themselves, and he had a right to use those who failed to escape him as his needs demanded. He had tried repeatedly to live as they did, as a practical matter, to avoid their getting after him; but it was life in an emotional desert of denial. He could not understand how they managed to live in such a way. The only way he could understand it was to tell himself that they had different needs, smaller needs. They were welcome to their ways.
But his body knew what he was and what had been done to deny it: Everyone here was like him, in one way or another, and could not be easily stalked and used as he had done back home. Here there was no prey.
So another kind of order had emerged, and could not be avoided. Bellamy had grown familiar with the ritual, and he lived in the hope of getting something out of it.
The ritual, which was sometimes enacted in the mess halls and sometimes outside in the fields, was a way of deciding who would be the abused and who would abuse. One by one, each inmate of the Rock was tested by tormentors, who used implements, food, and their own bodies to bring the victim to the breaking point, but without killing. Those who resisted best went over to the pool of tormentors; but this also needed a vote of the mass, based on whether they were especially entertained or not. One worked hard to become a tormentor by resisting fear, panic, and pain; one could also fall from tormentor status back into the mass of victims.
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