Rock One was met as it crossed the orbit of Neptune by two torchships from the Martian colony, under the cultural command of Anthony Ibn Khaldun, whose massive historical project was suddenly somewhat incomplete from the early quarter of the twenty-first century. His ambition, ever since he had become head of the Historical Information Project, was to record every fact of human history available, in straight outline form, leaving out all interpretive materials. These would be available as unabridged footnotes, to be accessed separately.
HIP’s goal was simply to find and set down every straightforward fact of human existence since the beginning of record-keeping. With the help of fast AIs, the organization of facts was routine, but tracking down elusive physical records had become a problem. All over the Earth and throughout occupied Sunspace, records hid from him. They were buried in old books and papers, in defunct data storage and retrieval systems; they were personal and public. He wanted them all.
His ships met Rock One on January 18, 2105. Only one vessel was able to dock at the rear axis entrance. Ibby, as he was known to his colleagues, went in with a team of twenty men and women, emerging through an ancient hatch just off the axis at the rear rocky parts of the interior.
The sunplate at the front end was shining brightly as he stood with his team and gazed out over the grasslands that seemed wrapped around the light. Surveying through multi-spectrum binoculars, he saw the barracks complex, the dining domes, and several well-worn footpaths; but there were no visible signs of humanity.
The team came down from the rocks, and gradually moved from the narrower section into higher gravity. An hour later they were marching down a dirt road toward the barracks town. The air smelled a bit sweet, but it was difficult to guess what had made the odors.
“Why does this road lead back to the rocks?” asked Justine Harre, one of the doctors.
Ibby stopped and said, “I’ve been thinking the same thing. There’s nothing there except the old hatch, and that only leads outside. But the road seems to have been well traveled, more than can be explained by its first uses.”
“A gathering place?” said Ferret the anthropologist.
As they entered the barracks complex, no one came out to greet them. The team paused and looked around, struck by the stillness.
“Doctor Harre,” Ibby said, “come with me. The rest of you stay here.”
He led the way to the small stairs that led up the back of one barrack. He came up, opened the door, and stepped inside. Doctor Harre came in and stood next to him.
As their eyes adjusted to the light, they saw shapes lying in the bunks. She came up to the first one, and pulled back the blanket. A skeleton lay there, as if he had just gone to sleep and lost his flesh.
“Male?” asked Ibby.
“Yes. They were all males here.” She looked around at the other dark bunks. “They’re all dead. Too much time gone, not enough lifespan.”
“We must look everywhere,” Ibby said. “Just in case someone may have exceeded the expected lifespan.”
“Unlikely,” she said.
“We’ll see what’s on the engineering level,” he said.
■
They went in a large half moon of figures, making their way across the landscape toward the engineering entrance beyond the mess halls. There were skeletons all over, lying in the grass with no sign of violence as the cause of death, as if they had lain down for an afternoon nap.
“It wasn’t supposed to happen this way,” said Doctor Harre.
“Something went wrong with the timing of the orbit,” Ibby replied. “Too wide a cometary.”
“Or it was meant this way,” said Clive Malthus, one of the graduate students.
“Later, yes,” Ibby said as the young man, barely forty, caught up and marched between him and Dr. Harre. “Life sentences came much later. What evidence do you have?”
“I heard things,” Malthus said. “I heard things…from some very old people last year. Prisons that were supposed to come back just didn’t show up, earlier on than we know.”
They came to the open ramp that led into the engineering level.
“It’s open?” asked Dr. Harre. “I thought convicts did not have access to these areas.”
Malthus said, “Records are bad this far back—nearly a century. The inmates might have broken in.”
“It didn’t do them much good,” Ibby said. “How could it? There aren’t any controls here, no engines to turn around and go home.”
“And with all men,” said Dr. Harre, “no new generation to raise that might have gone home. I wonder what they did to deserve this?”
“No one deserved this,” Malthus said as they stood before the ramp, waiting for the others to catch up. “It was just something the criminal justice system of the times did, like putting people in stocks. Many worse people stayed home.”
“But this one was a life sentence,” Dr. Harre said, “except that no one told these inmates they weren’t coming back. They lived expecting to return.”
“We should count the dead,” Ibby said, “then bag them all. Someone back home might want to know.”
“Not likely,” said Malthus.
■
They found a skeleton sitting at the desk in the warden’s office. The dead man had written something on a piece of paper, and finished it, because the pen seemed to have been put down with care. Long flowing white hair covered the shoulders and back of his bones.
Young Malthus stood still and stared, shaken by the sight.
Ibby picked up the page and read: “The appointed time is long past, as I, Yevgeny Tasarov, write this. There is no sign of our having returned. Many of us hope that we have simply been left in closer Sun orbit upon our return, and as soon as they decide what to do with us, they will come and open us up. I don’t believe this, or that we have returned to the inner solar system, since there was no sign of deceleration. A few of us believe that a long orbit was intended, as a way to be rid of us. If and when this writing is ever found, please note that if our longer orbit was intentional, then it was a crime committed against us, and should be publicly recognized as such.
“I have thought long and hard about these matters; I had the time. The criminal justice system that sent us away professed justice but committed new crimes of its own. Perhaps it should not have pretended to anything except practical action on behalf of its employers…
“And yet…when crimes are committed against prisoners, these are in fact new crimes, separate from the crimes of the imprisoned. Everyone is forced to be responsible for these new crimes, since the society supports the prisons in which they occur, even though only specific officials may carry them out. Our prison escaped abuse by guards, and it avoided the dilemmas of capital punishment; but the failure of our return is a crime in place of which we might even have accepted the old abuses. Who will ever be punished for this crime?
“The best possible criminal justice system would try the criminal, assess the price he must pay, short of death, and strive to commit no crimes of its own against the criminal. But there is no criminal justice system that can stand outside its society, or outside human failure. Grief and anger fueling cruel vengeance do not die easily.
“As my life runs out, I carry away from it a virulent hatred of the humanity that threw me away—and I know that such a hatred implies a hatred of myself also, of what I was given to he as a human being. I cannot escape this judgment…
“I say carry away as if I meant that I am taking something with me into the grave—except that there is no one left to bury me. Of course, I’m not taking anything anywhere except into the dark that I will not know. One cannot know death while alive, only the long slow steps leading to it…
“Is that unknowing a mercy? One would have to live through dying to know…”
Ibby put down the page.
“It’s from another age,” Justine Harre said. We’re better than that today, she might have said, but the pride of denial in her thought seemed in
appropriate to voice with the dead man’s page before them on the desk, into which had spilled a lifetime’s bitterness that by its own argument could not have been avoided.
But finally she had to speak. “Our predecessors did this,” she said, “as a kind of firebreak to criminal violence.” Suddenly her swift thoughts, processing parallel databases, arguments, and the conclusions from decades of debate, outran her ability to speak…why have we done this…reaching into our breasts we pulled out our evil…but we cannot abolish the freedom to transgress…cannot tear liberty from our heart and hurl it starward…maybe we have hurled our best away…these swine? Without them we were able to try again…without them? They never left us, despite a hundred Rocks…yet we have learned to restrain ourselves. Crime for us is a subtle thing, so hard to notice that these people would not have thought of it as crime at all…money trains carry away wealth, but the street is no longer with us…people are killed, and we delete the memory of the crime from the killer and the victim’s immediate friends and relatives, by request…
“This kind of prison,” she said out loud, “like the ones before it, tried to do too much. Even without rules and guards, this one did too much…too much.”
Ibby looked at her, and saw that she was struggling with herself, in a way he had never seen in a colleague. Her restraint held back a wave. He searched his own feelings about this dead place, and found them orderly.
His curiosity waited to be satisfied by the records that were certain to be here: long-timed visual and audio records of prisoners’ behavior, even in their most private moments, stored in deeply compressed form. They had to be here, and would help him complete HIP’s own record of human life; but if they were not here, he would have to place great blank spaces in HIP’s massed data, to exist along with the many others of prehistory and early human history. They reminded him of the old maps which proclaimed at their edges the legend, “Here there be dragons!”
Harre was looking at the page on the table. She leaned closer and picked it up.
“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?”
21
Reach Out…
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.”
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