Brute Orbits Read Free

them.
    Looking at the humanity around him, watching it haul itself through the vast changes of the last century and a half, Tasarov had concluded early in life that it was doing only what it could do, not what it should. That way was mostly beyond the capacities of concerted action; whenever humankind sought to agree and act in a large group, a curve of differing opinions appeared, as if someone had pressed a display button. The curve was always the same, with all the expected views present as if they were built-in. They probably were built-in.
    Besides, it was hard to know what should be done with humanity; most were still content to live with no hindsight, less foresight, and little self-awareness. The whole species was still on automatic. Maybe it would never be a breakout species. So he had decided to do what he could do with the tools of thought and learned craft. He was the one-eyed man in the country of the blind, but he worried about having only one eye; two would have been better. Lawful or unlawful mattered little, as long as a project was practical and profitable, and not overly repellent. The craft made him happy; thought was hard work, but the reality of waiting pitfalls sharpened his alertness, as he brought the pleasure of craft to bear against failure.
    In the fall of 2051, when he was twenty-five, he looked up at the overcast sky of upstate New York and knew what was possible, and that he would do it. It would require equipment and leadership. He already had the small inner group to persuade, but that would be the quickest part of it, indoctrinating them with the truth of the plan, to the point where it would work on their imaginations and dispel all doubt.
    Was there any doubt in him? Of course there was, because the plan needed weaker links to make it work. Key moments might crumble before the fallible nature of men and lurking circumstance. One could not plan for the unexpected, except through redundancy, and hope there would be enough redundancy to swamp any sudden obstacles or reversals.
    The way he had been caught was an example: with an old fashioned thumbprint from the money terminal he had emptied in Binghamton, New York, out of his own account! True, it was some money he had collected from the fading russmob in Philadelphia, for saving them millions in bank transfers, and legal, except for the intentionally wrong tax code he had entered; but some local cop had decided to do some old fashioned print dusting. In one hour they had his alias and ticket number on the bullet train to Manhattan, and the arrest had come at the Westchester stop.
    He had felt humiliated by their easy luck, by the smallness of the offense, and by the doubts that had been sown in his mathematician’s brain about his own failing abilities. He should not have discounted some old cop’s eyesight. The one consolation was that they had arrested one of his aliases, not his core identity, which was still unknown to them and vastly more guilty. This would make it easier for him to execute his plan; they would not know who had planned it. He smiled to himself, admiring the beauty of the risk, knowing that up to a point they did not have to know his true self to stop him.
    He told himself that a man losing his mind would be oblivious to it; he would not work to improve his long-chain reasoning; he would be blindly unquestioning of himself. His capture had been a freak event, and now his choice was to sit out five years or do something about it while his skills were still intact.
    He knew what he wanted to try: to do whatever it would take to free him from a system that had learned too much about him, and which had to be coaxed back into forgetfulness. Once his plan had begun there would be no turning back; he would succeed or earn life without parole, or worse; death would come to him as a decision not to be taken alive.
    Now, as he looked at the overcast sky from Dannemora prison, he saw what was to come and how it would be made to