Grazing The Long Acre

by Gwyneth Jones

  They heard limping steps behind them, and L’Hibou joined them at the guard rail. ‘Not in entire nakedness,’ he said. ‘But trailing clouds of glory do we come...If stars are born, my young friends, do they have a life before birth, and after death?’

  ‘I’m sorry it didn’t work out,’ said Orlando. ‘I suppose you won’t get your light ships…But I didn’t know he would do that.’

  Grace shook her head. ‘I can’t figure it,’ she said. ‘Light years; gravity equations, time and probability, non-location science…I can’t think on that scale. I just turn it into fantasies, the moment I start.’

  ‘All of science can do no more. And here in deep space, we just live out the same soap-operas as you in the world below.’

  ‘Maybe,’ suggested Orlando, ‘It’s for the best. Maybe it’s better if the gate stays closed, and the empires are contained on separate planets, in the old style.’

  ‘Tuh. It won’t last. The lightships will come…Hm.’ The visor that hid L’Hibou’s ruined eyes was fixed on the view; but they knew he was working up to one of those confessions that can only be made on the brink of a departure.

  ‘When your partner gets killed,’ he remarked at last, ‘You’re supposed to do something. Lana and I were together for a long time. In ways I didn’t like her much, but she was still my partner. Solo wasn’t the murderer, not in my opinion. It was Draco who told Jack you were meeting Lana in the maintenance bay that night, and that she was going to get you your bikes back. Drac knew that would make poor Jack crazy: Jack hated those damned bikes. And I knew Draco would try to go through the gate, if he got the chance…I wanted the murderer to suffer. Well, that’s all.’

  The Deep Spacer turned, and limped back into the drab corridors.

  Orlando and Grace spared a shudder for the fate of Draco Fujima. But if the rule is that there are no rules, then Drac had nothing to complain about.

  ‘One day,’ said Orlando, ‘We’ll make the transition nobody can avoid.’

  ‘Yeah. And then maybe we’ll walk where the stars are born.’

  And who can tell?

  THE VOYAGE OUT

  I

  “Do you want to dream?”

  “No.”

  The woman in uniform behind the desk looked at her screen and then looked at me, expressionless. I didn’t know if she was real and far away; or fake and here.

  “Straight to orientation then.”

  II

  I walked. The Kuiper Belt Station—commonly known as the Panhandle—could afford the energy fake gravity requires. It wasn’t going anywhere; it was spinning on the moving spot of a minimum-collision orbit, close to six billion kilometres from the sun: a prison isle without a native population. From here I would be transported to my final exile from the United States of Earth, as an algorithm, a string of 0s and 1s. It’s illegal to create a code-version of a human being anywhere in the USE, including near-space habitats and planetary colonies. Protected against identity theft, the whole shipload of us, more than a hundred condemned criminals, had been brought to the edge: where we must now be coded individually before we could leave. The number-crunching would take a while, even with the most staggering computation power.

  A reprieve, then. A stay of execution.

  In my narrow cabin, or cell, I lay down on the bunk. Walls, floor, fittings: everything was made of the same, grey-green, dingy ceramic fibre. The ‘mattress’ felt like metal to the touch, but it yielded to the shape and weight of my body. The raised rim made me think of autopsies, crushed viscera. A panel by my head held the room controls: just like a hotel. I could check the status of my vacuum toilet, my dry shower, my air, my pressure, my own emissions, detailed in bright white.

  Questions bubbled behind my lips, never to be answered. I was disoriented by weeks of being handled only by automation (sometimes with a human face); never allowed any contact with my fellow prisoners. When did I last speak to a human being? That must have been the orientation on earth, my baggage allowance session. You’re given a ‘weight limit’—actually a code limit—and advised when you’ve ‘duplicated’. Gray’s Anatomy, for old sake’s sake. A really good set of knives, a really good pair of boots, a field first aid kit, vegetable and flower seeds. The Beethoven piano sonatas, played by Alfred Brendel; Mozart piano sonatas, likewise. The prison officer told me I couldn’t have the first aid. He advised me I must choose the data storage device for my minimalist choice of entertainments, and specify the lifetime power source. He made me handle the knives, the boots, the miniaturised hardware, even the seeds. What a palaver.

  But the locker underneath the bunk was empty.

  Do you want to dream?

  The transit would happen, effectively, in no time at all. I had no idea how long the coding would take. An hour, a week, a month? I thought of the others, dreaming in fantasy boltholes. Some gorging their appetites, delicate or gross. Some exacting hideous revenge on the forces that brought them here: fathers, mothers, lovers; authority figures, SOCIETY. Some even trying to expiate their crimes in virtual torment; you get all sorts in the prison population. None of that for me. If you want to die have the courage to kill yourself, before you reach a finale like this one. If you don’t, then live to the last breath. Face the firing squad without a blindfold.

  Scenes from my last trial went through my head. Me, bloody but unbowed of course, still trying to make speeches, thoroughly alienating the courtroom witnesses. My ex-husband making unconscious gestures in a small blank room, as he finally abandoned this faulty domestic appliance to her fate. He was horrified by that Death Row interview: I was not. I had given up on Dirk long ago. Did he ever believe in me? Or was he just humouring my unbalanced despair, as he says now—in the years when we were lovers and best friends? Did he really twist his hands around like that, and raise them high, palm outwards, as if he faced a terrorist with a gun?

  I thought of the girl who had caught my eye, glimpsed as we sometimes glimpsed each other; waiting to be processed into the Panhandle system. Springy cinnamon braids, sticking out on either side of her head, that made her look like a little girl. Her eyes lobotomised. Who had brushed her hair for her? Why would they waste money sending a lobotomy subject out here? Because it’s a numbers game they’re playing. The weaklings, casualties of the transit, may ensure in some occult way, the survival of a few, who may live long enough to form the foundation stones of a colony, on an earth-like planet of a distant star. Our fate: to be pole-axed and buried in the mud where the bridge of dreams will be built.

  I wondered when ‘orientation’ would begin. The cold of deep space penetrated my thin quilt. The steady shift of the clock numerals was oddly comforting, like a heartbeat. I watched them until at some point I fell asleep.

  III

  The Kuiper Belt station had been planned as the hub of an international deep space city. Later, after that project had been abandoned and before the Buonarotti Device became practicable for mass exits like this one, it’d been an R&R resort for asteroid miners. They’d dock their little rocket ships and party, escaping from utter solitude to get crazy drunk and murder each other, according to the legends. I thought of those old no-hopers as I followed the guidance lights to my first orientation session; but there was no sign of them, no scars, no graffiti on the drab walls of endless curving corridors. There was only the pervasive hum of the Buonarotti torus, like the engines of a vast majestic passenger liner forging through the abyss. The sound—gentle on the edge of hearing—made me shudder. It was warming up, of course.

  In a large bare saloon, prisoners in tan overalls were shuffling past a booth where a figure in medical-looking uniform questioned them and let them by. A circle of chairs, smoothly fixed to the floor or maybe extruded from it, completed the impression of a dayroom in a mental hospital. I joined the line. I didn’t speak to anyone and nobody spoke to me, but the girl with the cinnamon braids was there. I noticed her. My turn came. The woman behind the desk, whom I immediately christened Big Nurse, checked o
ff my name and asked me to take the armband that lay on the counter. “It’s good to know we have a doctor on the team,” she said.

  I had qualified as a surgeon but it was years since I’d practiced, other than as a volunteer ‘barefoot’ GP in Community Clinics for the underclass. I looked at the armband that said ‘captain’ and wondered how it had got there, untouched by human hand. Waldos, robot servitors…It was disorienting to be reminded of the clunky, mechanical devices around here; the ones I was not allowed to see.

  “Where are you in the real world?” I asked, trying to reclaim my dignity. I knew they had ways of dealing with the time-lapse, they could fake almost natural dialogue. “Where is the Panhandle run from these days? Xichang? Or Houston? I’d just like to know what kind of treatment to expect, bad or worse.”

  “No,” said Big Nurse, answering a different question. “I am a bot.” She looked me in the eye, with the distant kindness of a stranger to human concerns. “I am in the information system, nowhere else. There is no treatment, no punishment here, Ruth Norman. That’s over.”

  I glanced covertly at my companions, the ones already hovering around the day-room chairs. I’d been in prison before; I’d been in reform camp before. I knew what could happen to a middle-class woman, in jail for the unimpressive ‘crime’ of protesting the loss of our civil liberties. The animal habit of self-preservation won out. I slipped the band over the sleeve of my overalls. Immediately a tablet appeared, in the same place on the counter. It was solid when I picked it up.

  I quickly discovered that, of the fourteen people in the circle (there were eighteen names listed on my tablet, the missing four never turned up), less than half had opted to stay awake. I tried to convince the dream-deprived that I had not been responsible for the mix-up. I asked them all to answer to their names. They complied, surprisingly willing to accept my authority—for the moment.

  “Hil…de…” said the girl with the cinnamon braids, struggling with a tongue too thick for her mouth: a sigh and a guttural duh, like the voice of a child’s teddy bear, picked up and shaken after long neglect. The braids had not been renewed, fuzzy strands were escaping. Veterans of prison-life glanced at each other uneasily. Nobody commented. There was another woman who didn’t speak at all, so lacking in response you wondered how she’d found her way to the dayroom.

  We were nine women, four men and one female-identifying male transsexual (to give the Sista her prison-system designation). The details on my tablet were meagre: names, ages, ethnic/national grouping, not much else. Mrs Miqal Rohan was Iranian and wore strict hejabi dress, but spoke perfect, icy English. ‘Bimbam’ was European English, rail thin, and haunted by some addiction that made her chew frantically at the inside of her cheek. The other native Englishwoman, a Caribbean ethnic calling herself Servalan (Angela Morrison, forty three), looked as if she’d been institutionalised all her life. I had no information about their crimes. But as I entered nicknames, and read the qualifications or professions, I saw a pattern emerging, and I didn’t like it. Such useful people! How did you all come to this pass? By what strange accidents did you all earn mandatory death sentences or life-without-parole? Will the serial killers, the drug cartel gangsters, and the re-offending child rapists please identify yourselves?

  I kept quiet, and waited to hear what anyone else would say.

  The youngest of the men (Koffi, Nigerian; self-declared ‘business entrepreneur’) asked, diffidently, “Does anyone know how long this lasts?”

  “There’s no way of knowing” said Carpazian, who was apparently Russian, despite the name; a slim and sallow thirty-something, still elegant in the overalls. “The Panhandle is a prison system. It can drug us and deceive us without limit.”

  The man who’d given his handle as Drummer raised heavy eyes and spoke, sonorous as a prophet, from out of a full black beard. “We will be ordered to the transit chamber as we were ordered to this room; or drugged and carried by robots in our sleep. We will lie down in the Buonarotti capsules, and a code-self, the complex pattern of each human body and soul, will be split into two like a cell dividing. The copies will be sent flying around the torus, at half-light speed. You will collide with yourself and cease utterly to exist at these co-ordinates of space-time. The body and soul in the capsule will be annihilated, and know GOD no longer.’

  “But then we wake up on another planet?” pleaded Servalan, unexpectedly shy and sweet from that coarsened mask.

  “Perhaps.”

  The prophet resumed staring at the floor.

  “Isn’t it against your religion to be here, Mr Drummer?”

  He made no answer. The speaker was ‘Gee,’ a high-flier, corporate, who must have got caught up in something very sour. A young and good-looking woman with an impervious air of success, even now. I marked her down as a possible trouble-maker, and tried to start a conversation about survival skills. That quickly raised another itchy topic. Is there really no starship? Not even a lifepod? Are we really, truly meant to pop into existence on the surface of an unknown planet, just as we stand?

  “No one knows what happens” said ‘Flick,’ another younger woman with impressive quals, and a blank cv. “The ping signal that registers a successful transit travels very, very fast, but it’s timebound. They’ve only been shipping convicts out of here for five years. It’ll be another twenty before they know for certain if anyone has reached the First Landfall planet, dead or alive—”

  When Big Nurse’s amplified voice told us the session was over, and we must return to our cells, my tablet said that two hours had passed. It felt like a lot longer. I was trembling with fatigue. I went over to the booth while the others were filing out.

  “Take the armband from me,” I muttered.

  Annihilation, okay. Six billion kilometres from home, a charade set up around the lethal injection: whatever turns you on, oh fascist state authority that ate my country, my world and its freedoms…But I refused to accept the role the bastards had dumped on me. I did not stand, I will not serve. I didn’t dare to resign, I knew the rest of them wouldn’t take that well. The system gives, the system better take away.

  “I cannot,” said Big Nurse, reasonably. “I am a bot.”

  “Of course you can. Make this vanish and appoint the next trustee on the list.”

  Software in human form answered the question that I hadn’t asked. “All good government tends towards consensus,” she said. “But consensus operates through forms and structures. Leader is your position in this nexus. The system cannot change your relation to the whole.”

  The girl with the braids was shuffling out, last. She walked as if she was struggling through treacle. Through the veil I saw a young, limber body, full of grace. I could not stop myself imagining the springy crease between her bottom and her thigh, and how it would move. I swallowed hard, and abruptly changed my mind.

  Live to the last breath. Play the game, what does it matter?

  In my cell, the ration tray that had been waiting for me in the ‘morning,’ when I woke, had disappeared. Another prison meal had arrived. I ate it. I had a drinking fountain in a niche in my wall, and the water tasted sweet. My God, what luxuries!

  Aside from the four people who never turned up, everyone attended the dayroom, including Drummer and the unresponsive woman. Most of us were playing the game to ward off madness and the abyss. Some of us genuinely got interested in setting up the ground rules for a new world. I couldn’t tell the difference; not even in myself.

  Carpazian said we would need an established religion.

  “Religion,” he reasoned, “is not all bad. It contains the incomprehensible in human life. People need deities, doorkeepers between the real and unreal. And the Buonarotti device has made the world stranger than people ever knew before.”

  I don’t think he meant to do it, but he started something. Mike, the fourth man, said he’d heard that the Panhandle was haunted by murdered prospectors. Flick said she’d felt someone in her cell with her, invisible, watching
her every move.

  “They say the Buonarotti Transit broke something open,” offered Koffi. “They say it unleashed monsters. And here we are right next to the torus.”

  We shouted him down, we rationalists (including Carpazian). We were all feeling vulnerable. It was hard not to get creeped out, with the ever-present hum of that annihilation wheel, Big Nurse our only company, and the knowledge that we had been utterly abandoned. We were little children, frightened in the dark.

  I decided to go and see Hilde. We were all quartered on the same corridor, and the doors had nameplates. We were free to make visits, other people were doing it. I didn’t know how to make myself known, so I just knocked.

  The door slid open. She stared at me, and began to back away.

  “Do you mind if I come in?”

  She gestured consent, zombie-slow, and embarked on the difficult task of clambering back onto her bunk. There was nowhere else so I sat there too, at the foot of her bed. She fumbled with the room controls, the door closed, we were alone together. It felt perilous, uncertain; but not in a nightmare way.

  “I just wanted to say, the sessions are obviously a strain. Is there anything I can do? Nothing’s compulsory, you know.” Her braids were fuzzed all over, after days without any attention. I wanted to ask if she had a comb.

  “I…am…not like this…willingly…Captain.”

  Beads of sweat stood on her brow, by the end of that momentous effort. Her eyes were dark, her lashes long and curling. Her mouth was very full, almost too much for her narrow face to bear. She would have been pretty, a misfit, awkward prettiness, if there had been any life in her expression.

  “Oh no!” I cried, consternated by her struggle. “I’m not the boss, please. The system did that to me, I’m not checking up on you. I meant—”

  What did I mean? I could not explain myself.

  “Do you have a comb?”