Brute Orbits Read Free Page A

happen, as clearly as he had ever seen a mathematical proof; but whether the imperfect world would permit the order of events to run remained to be seen.
    How much planning was enough to overcome chance imponderables? Never enough. But it was this very openness in the physical universe that made creative unpredictabilities possible; to ask for guarantees would be to ask for a rigidity that would be intolerable to a free mind. Constraints, yes, but a totalitarian determinism, no. The one honed skills, the other crushed them; the one made happy explorations possible, the other imposed iron mazes. Many a criminologist had reluctantly concluded that a high crime rate was a culture’s price of freedom.
    One by one, his six comrades drifted toward him in the center of the exercise yard of the old prison, until finally they stood in various postures—facing him, facing away, and off to the side, so it would seem they were conversing only casually if they spoke.
    Daylight brightened. He glanced up and saw the Sun rolling like a molten ball of hot iron in the ashes of the overcast sky. Suddenly it sailed out into a break. The still figures around him regained their shadows, which clung like spilled paint to the rough concrete.
    The oldest lifer, Stanley King, whose leathery face had peered out from Coxsackie and here for over thirty years, said, “So, are you ready to tell us?”
    Tasarov did not look at the men. He spoke to the shadows.
    ■
    Philip Emmons didn’t remember killing his boss, a cafeteria manager at the Plato Research Center on the Moon. The court’s doctors had told him about it for three days. Then he had sat before the judge and prosecutor, thinking they could tell him whatever they wanted, show him all the evidence, but he still wouldn’t actually know inside himself that he had done it. They might just as well have been trying someone else. Even if he had been that man for a few moments, he was someone else now. Phil Emmons had never committed a crime in his life, despite the evidence, but they could tell him anything and he wouldn’t know if they had made it up. So to hell with the judge and all the lawyers, his own included; they weren’t interested in him, but in someone else.
    “Whatever triggered you,” the judge said at the sentencing, “might happen again. We can’t let you out. No examination has been able to confirm your amnesia story, and there doesn’t seem to be anything really wrong with you.”
    The judge had looked at him as if expecting him to agree, to say “Yes, I know, you have no choice, it’s all right and I would do the same in your place.” He had looked into the judge’s brown eyes, which were part of a wonderfully composed compassionate gaze that seemed genuine.
    “Have you anything to say before I sentence you?” asked the judge.
    Philip Emmons shook his head. “I have no idea what happened—if it did.”
    The judge nodded. “There may be more to you than the innocent man you seem to believe yourself to be, but you must understand that we can’t let the rest of you roam free—if what you say is true.”
    “What good does it do me to understand?”
    The judge said, “Perhaps it will prevent that other part of you from ever coming out again. I sentence you to thirty years in the Orbits. And for the record, I don’t believe your story for one moment. No one does.” You’ll never be back, his eyes said, whoever you are. “Good-bye, Mr. Emmons.”
     
3
The Thinking Happiness
    JUDGE OVERTON’S PRIVATE CHAMBER
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    “Sooner or later some half-baked historian will write a asinine book about me and call it Overton of the Orbits. He’ll look for motives in what we did, but they’ll be all wrong. No one was looking for rehab, or even humane treatment, as such. We only sought to separate the worst from the best, nothing more. The supermax prisons of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century were simply too costly for the ten to fifteen percent of inmates who