Brute Orbits

by George Zebrowski

  “Why laughter, Ibby?”

  “Oh, it’s not mockery—but a kind of divine understanding that we achieve ourselves. There’s a lot of reason in laughter.”

  She touched his hand and held it. “You’ve tied yourself in a knot, and I did not see it.”

  “A knot which should not be untied. I’ve spent a long time tying it, and the problems it represents cannot simply be dissipated by untying it. This knot has unsolvable character, because it can’t even be cut. There would be nothing left. A man is best known, understood, measured, even valued, not by his settled conclusions, but by the dilemmas he keeps. They are the best markers of fleeting truth on the perverse road of time. My problem, Justine, is that I no longer have any dilemmas. And worse, I don’t want any new ones. I am a finished piece of work.”

  “Oh, Ibby, that can’t be!”

  “But it is. You must let me go.”

  “How can I?”

  “You can,” he said, “and you will—because you cannot bear to give up what is to come.”

  “And you can give it up?” she asked.

  “I can’t give up what was—because it stands within me like some massive foundation stone. Oh, I know it is cracking, but it holds me up, and will until my mind is full, and I will either forget or perish.”

  “Ibby…” she started to say.

  But he said, “If in some far futurity, we meet again, all new with forgetfulness, it will not be me, and it will not be you.”

  28

  A Supplement to the Soul

  The hundred habitats formed an expanding shell around the solar system during the next century—and again they were a reminder: The sky in every direction was now peppered with venturesome, relativistically flung humanity. The expanding shell of skylife became a source of grudging pride, even among those who would never go themselves; but although the old sense of responsibility was gone, new insecurities arose about the nature of the previous, biologically unchanged form of humankind that persisted in the habitats.

  Occasionally, additional habitats joined the shell. Back and forth traffic in fast ships continued for some years; people came and went under the pressure of second thoughts, and this growing familiarity disarmed many suspicions. The young coming to maturity were faced with the choice of a frontier.

  Judge Overton voiced his last suspicions before becoming a new personality. “They’re growing their own AIs out there,” he said, “and not sharing them with us! Some visitors say that they’ve learned something about raising AIs and are deliberately hiding the knowledge, which worries me. We do need a step up from man, no doubt. Not much, just a step or two in the genome, so it will run cleaner—not much more than separates us from the apes. But this AI news is disturbing…”

  Justine Harre deleted the beloved memory of Ibby Khaldun from herself, but placed it in storage—between two lines of verse in her favorite book—where she knew she would come upon it from time to time and puzzle over what it might be. The memory was timed to expire after three warnings, one decade apart, and would then be irretrievable even with her best internal enhancements.

  At first, Ibby had not set his memories of Justine to expire. He lived with what was left of her within himself, however painful it became at times; but there came a day when it ceased to be painful and became disturbing, as he tried to understand the mystery of personal affinities, sympathies, attractions, and especially unconditional love.

  Love was simply there, as easily perceived within one’s self as one perceived a color; one saw it or one didn’t. And love could die, he admitted, without pushing it into the grave, as he began to feel that Justine had done with her affections. Had she told him, by her action, that he should do no less?

  He had come here to the habitat monitoring facility on the Moon for a specific purpose—to see how he would feel about Justine before the memory of her expired, and how he would feel immediately after about the great enterprise to which she had given herself for the indefinite future.

  He had drifted away from the HIP project that had been his life to the pursuit of historical miniatures. He selected particularly attractive periods of history and spent VR time in them. The HIP project’s vast database worked wonders in recreating the romance of past times as they had never been lived. He accepted this antiquarian longing, and resolved that one day he would study its origins in himself; but by then he might well be moving on to another pursuit. The miniatures, he knew, were also a form of love, not essentially different than his love of Justine’s character. He wished to live in them just as he had become part of Justine’s inner landscape in their time together.

  “I want to look outward into the universe as it is,” she had told him after their return to Earth, “and as it will be. You want to make it over out of the accumulation of historical fact that you have gathered, and then live in that.”

  “I do love it so,” he had told her. “The breezes of times that are gone, the skies and landscapes, the people who in their time could hope to know all that could be known. If I could travel into the past in any other way, I would.”

  “Romance,” she had said. “Don’t you find it a bit grotesque to love it?”

  “We have the past in our hands now,” he had replied, “as much of it as we will ever have short of direct retrieval of information from the past. Why should we not do something with this vast mass of information for our delight? It’s nothing new to do so—historical dramas began the process, and later novels of all kinds. Paintings, sculptures, movies, and VRs. I may be able to shape new experiences that will give great pleasure.”

  “And be unreal.”

  “Reality is overrated,” he had said.

  She had nodded and said, “A very old phrase.”

  “Reality is given to us against our will,” he added. “Imposed. A game not of our choosing, even though we remake ourselves.”

  Now as he stood in the great display chamber which showed the shimmering galaxy, he tried to tell himself that she had never cared enough for him even with full memory. He gazed up at the shell of green points set in the starry ways, and wondered which habitat was hers. Not one of them had made much of an inroad into stellar distance, not even much of a light-year, despite twenty-five years of acceleration; but each worldlet had been making vast progress within itself, bringing all of humankind’s gains with it, standing on the shoulders of countless dreaming dead and preparing…for what? To become unrecognizable to the past?

  The moment when her life within him would expire was fast approaching—a matter of minutes now…

  He looked around the vast chamber, where his stay-at-home humanity had sought to display and memorialize the dispersal of its kind. There was a young man sitting at a nearby station drinking a cup of tea. He seemed to be contemplating the vision. Was he regretting that he had not gone? There was still time, as the last of the Rocks were renovated and filled with malcontents and amnesiacs…

  His historian’s sense of humor blossomed within him, and he saw the continuing dispersal as the greatest prison break in all history—planned by Justine and the other joiners who had come out to help bring down the walls…

  I’m not that different, he told himself, as Justine’s memory expired within him, and he found himself staring up at the scattering of emeralds among the diamonds…as if waking from one dream into another.

  And suddenly, one by one, the green points began to wink out…

  The young man stood up, knocking over his cup of tea.

  A half dozen figures came into the chamber, and as they gazed up at the display, the green markers continued to wink off until they were all gone…

  “All of them?” asked a voice.

  “Yes, as if…”

  Ibby saw from the monitors that it had taken some weeks for the beacon transmitters to affect the display. Had the beacons been turned off to further delay the news? It was all past now.

  “As if…” the voice continued, “they had simply jumped off into the dark.” />
  “They wouldn’t have turned their beacons off,” said the young man.

  “It’s as if they’d got hold of newer stuff…and used it,” said a third voice.

  Ibby felt a quickening of meaning in himself, and a sudden sense of freedom, as if a great weight had been lifted from his mind.

  The young man stepped forward and said, “I’ve heard things recently, about the experimental drive technologies that were going out there.” He looked around as if he had lost something, then said, “They’re gone, and I was too late deciding to go with them!”

  He seemed very angry at himself.

  “There’s nothing to show here any more,” one of the others said.

  “We can keep watch,” said another. “Some may return.”

  “Do you think so?” asked the young man.

  Ibby felt a well-being that had not been his for a long time, and wondered what price he had paid for it. A gift of sky waited, he thought as he looked into the black-bright heaven, wondering how the habitats would use it. Would they settle distant solar systems? Some probably would, while others would remain mobile and reproduce, seeking the secrets of the deep as they moved outward into the Galaxy, becoming many humanities, even different species. And some might even return with gifts for the homelife.

  He wondered, then asked how it would be, even as his intellect doubted and his heart quickened to the words of an answer that he had once heard somewhere, from someone…from Justine, perhaps, and mercifully had somehow not quite forgotten.

  The rough crucible of Earth

  Is not a loving cradle.

  Freedom waits beyond

  The way of blood that whelped us,

  Whispering into the past,

  Stand aside, stand aside,

  And seize posterity.

  Ride outward you dying devils,

  For homeward is the way to hells

  Of faith and hopeless yearning

  With those who settle to believe,

  Fearing to voyage the swifts of thought.

  Stride across the eons,

  Spy the horizon of nature,

  And birth new ways.

  “Here There Be Tygers”

  Or “If You Think It Couldn’t Happen… Read on and Learn More about It”

  In doing the research for the novel you have just read, I started with an outline of penal history and was startled by an interesting account. In the early post-colonial period of the United States, the least affordable, most expensive structure to be built was a prison in Philadelphia. Here the prisoners were provided central heating, an indoor toilet, and an enclosed stone courtyard for each cell. Each inmate—man, woman, or child—was given a Bible and consigned to utter silence and isolation in which to reflect on their transgressions. No one was permitted to speak to them during the entire period of incarceration. The idea put forward by Quakers was rehabilitation, a new idea opposed to the older model of prisons where it was acceptable to do just about anything to prisoners as punishment for their crimes, unless they could bribe their way into better treatment.

  The new goal of rehabilitation failed almost from the start, driving the prisoners insane, then collapsing into mere separation and neglect, abuse by guards and wardens, and financial corruption. Yet this system was an advance over previous prisons in Europe, where anything could happen and no one cared. Ironically, this Philadelphia prison looked like a medieval fortress intruding into the Utopian ideals of young America, and it began a quest for the perfect prison that continues to this day with the various high-tech super-maxes, whose success resembles more than anything a desire to wed a perpetual motion machine to a squirrel cage; the impossibility of the one makes its power source absurd.

  So if anything in this novel seems outrageous in regard to penal concepts, I point out that past governments have already tried something like the Orbits, which seem an advance on past abuses even as they create new ones of their own.

  A few of the notable sources I consulted include: Lawrence M. Friedman’s Crime and Punishment in American History (Basic Books, 1993) is a glorious wrestling match with history. George Sylvester Viereck’s Men Into Beasts (Fawcett, 1952) details how a bizarre vendetta application of the Sedition Laws, during World War II and after, was conducted simply to show that the laws were being enforced—even when there was scarcely anyone to use them on—in a manner that became even more vicious on the part of judges as wrongs were exposed, preparing the way for the McCarthy Era witch-hunts of the 1950s. Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Vintage, 1979) profoundly meditates on the nature of crime and punishment. In this and other works, Foucault demonstrates that decades of study will not exhaust the subject. And finally, Melvin Konner’s The Tangled Wing (Holt, 1982) is a compassionate study of humanity’s psychological origins by a biological anthropologist and fellow creature attempting to look out and back through the windows of hopeful freedom that science strives to keep clean.

  I am moved to paraphrase H. G. Wells who once complained that too much reality had taken pages out of his work, determined to supplant him, and so he would write no more fiction. But he complained after the fact. I complain in advance, surprised by how much reality so relentlessly sought to intrude into my novel as I wrote it, and how much reality I left out. Humanity has done much worse than these Brute Orbits, which I fear may also come.

  In my house I have two pieces of artwork by prisoners from Dannemora: tigers on black velvet. Seems right to me as I finished writing my novel.

  We do escape.

  —George Zebrowski

  Spring 1998

  GEORGE ZEBROWSKI’S thirty books include novels, short fiction collections, anthologies, and a book of essays. Science fiction writer Greg Bear calls him “one of those rare speculators who bases his dreams on science as well as inspiration,” and the late Terry Carr, one of the most influential science fiction editors of recent years, described him as “an authority in the SF field.” Zebrowski has published more than sixty works of short fiction and more than a hundred articles and essays, and has written about science for Omni magazine. His short fiction and essays have appeared in every major science fiction magazine, including Omni and Science Fiction Age, and in the Bertrand Russell Society News.

  His best known novel is Macrolife, which Arthur C. Clarke described as “a worthy successor to Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker. It’s been years since I was so impressed. One of the few books I intend to read again.” Library Journal chose Macrolife as one of the one hundred best science fiction novels, and The Easton Press reissued it in its “Masterpieces of Science Fiction” series. Zebrowski’s stories and novels have been translated into a half-dozen languages; his short fiction has been nominated for the Nebula Award and the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. Stranger Suns (1991) was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

  The Killing Star, written with scientist/author Charles Pellegrino and published in the spring of 1995, received unanimous praise in national newspapers and magazines. The New York Times Book Review, which included The Killing Star on its Recommended Summer Reading list, called it “a novel of such conceptual ferocity and scientific plausibility that it amounts to a reinvention of that old Wellsian staple, [alien invasion]…” The Washington Post Book World described the novel as “a classic SF theme pushed logically to its ultimate conclusions.”

  The Borgo Press brought out The Work of George Zebrowski: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide (Third Edition) and Beneath the Red Star, his collection of essays on international SF, in conjunction with his recent appearance as Guest of Honor at the Science Fiction Research Association Conference.

  Forthcoming in 1999 are Skylife: Visions of Our Homes in Space, edited with Gregory Benford (Harcourt Brace), and a novel from HarperPrism, Cave of Stars.

  George Zebrowski’s World Wide Web site is located at:

  http://ebbs.english.vt.edu/alt/projects/zebrowski

  Zebrowski, Brute Orbits