Rock Five carried away humankind’s aliens.
These were the sexually damaged beyond repair. Some said that to have killed them all would have been better; only their numbers—six thousand men and women gathered in the Rock from all over the world—made it politically unacceptable to simply gas them in the enclosed space. Most of them were under a sentence of life imprisonment or death; but the delays were endless, as were the discussions about “clearing the Rock” of vermin, so it might be used again, for a better class of criminals. A mass execution inside the rock might even have achieved legality, but then it would have been necessary to subtract the lifers. “Send it into the Sun,” was a common suggestion.
The final decision sent the Rock into another “open” orbit, a persistent misnomer which actually meant that its period was longer than anyone on the Rock could live. Escape velocity from the Sun was not necessary when a period of a century or more would do the job. Sentences of death and life imprisonment were thus again satisfied.
Those who had received life differed only in legal technicalities from those who had been given death; both groups had committed rape and murder, preceded by cruel tortures. Death seemed the most expedient solution, but the understanding of researchers stood against it. Too much was known about what had alienated these human beings from their own kind to permit even the “social self-defense” justification for acceptable killing.
These sexual predators and killers knew that their behavior was fearfully rejected by the society around them; and for periods of time some of them were able to restrain themselves; but sexual release was not possible for them except through violence. After periods of self-restraint that could only weaken, when all other forms of gratification paled before the memory of pleasure, they went out to quiet their bodies by killing. As the normally adjusted man or woman seeks affection and orgasm, these others sought the same through cruelty, rape, and murder.
To find eroticism and adventure at the borders of danger and pain was a tropism closely linked to the main line of human behavior, to be eradicated in the mature adult of this kind only through the dubious purgings of drugs and surgery. Early violence against the child was blamed, in which the initial sexual gratification was released through cruelty and pain, fixing the pleasure response as effectively as the common sexual awakening, but replacing its reproductively purposeful way with an interloper whose only aim was joyous, unspeakable, forbidden domination and bloodletting.
Ordinary violence and rape by otherwise self-directed males was the middle ground between these aliens and the usual run of humanity, except that their avenue to gratification was not occasional but pathological. No other way existed for them. They moved among their kind as secret agents from an alien world, as despised and misunderstood as normal gays and lesbians had once been, driven by their devils to prey that had to struggle and show fear to be desirable.
The richest and most intelligent among them simply understood and filled their needs and were rarely caught; the powerless lived bewildered lives of attempted adaptation, no different than the lives of alcoholics and drug users. As the world grew smaller, the nets of organization pulled them in, preached at them, imprisoned them, drugged them, altered them surgically, locked them up, killed them, ignored them—and yet made new ones. Where were they coming from? From the fatal liberty of human nature, some said.
Humanity cried out in denial, “The Devil does not drive us!” It sought to rip out its evolutionary heart and hurl it into the darkness, denying in the brightly lit realm of its cerebral cortex that predation, sexual domination, the killing of infants and male enemies had all been part of the leverage by which nature had raised humankind out of time’s darkness, caring for individuals only if they lived to the age of reproduction. Nature did not fret over how the male delivered his wetware, caring only that he did so; it knew nothing of social systems, and did not agonize over deluded and damaged individuals; it did not trust the species to decide its own survival—so it gave it the orgasm as reward, and whipped the male who denied it into submission.
Social systems, grown from exhortations backed by physical force, acted in ignorance, recognizing neither humankind’s true origins nor its waiting, open possibilities…
The three women came at him on all fours, like slow moving wolves, eyeing him with fear and suspicion. It had taken some time to beat and frighten them into performing. The first one, a curly-headed brunette, came up into his lap, took his penis in her mouth, and bit him…
He felt the token pain, then shot her through the head and kicked the body back for the others to see. The other two waited, then began to whimper…
As the mercy-VR program ran out, he held on to the three naked figures in his field of vision—one cheesecake white, one silky chocolate, one amber, each with a foresty pubis. They were all probably dead by now, and he could only torment them in the system’s limited variations. This had been one of the last downloaded programs shouted to the Rock by pitying friends and relatives before communications had been cut off. The record was supposedly of a real crime, for which the unseen man had been tried and sentenced. Maybe he was even here…
As he took off the old style VR helmet, Bellamy longed to have VRs of his own adventures. They sang to him from his fading memory, reminding him that their like would never come again in the lifetime left to him out here. Looking back, he knew that he had once lived and was now dead.
He did not blame anyone for his confinement; they were simply protecting themselves, as they said. On Earth, he would have been selecting and stalking new victims, satisfying new needs.
He did not think of himself as abnormal, because he had never known any other way. As he saw it, those unlike him had a right to protect themselves, and he had a right to use those who failed to escape him as his needs demanded. He had tried repeatedly to live as they did, as a practical matter, to avoid their getting after him; but it was life in an emotional desert of denial. He could not understand how they managed to live in such a way. The only way he could understand it was to tell himself that they had different needs, smaller needs. They were welcome to their ways.
But his body knew what he was and what had been done to deny it: Everyone here was like him, in one way or another, and could not be easily stalked and used as he had done back home. Here there was no prey.
So another kind of order had emerged, and could not be avoided. Bellamy had grown familiar with the ritual, and he lived in the hope of getting something out of it.
The ritual, which was sometimes enacted in the mess halls and sometimes outside in the fields, was a way of deciding who would be the abused and who would abuse. One by one, each inmate of the Rock was tested by tormentors, who used implements, food, and their own bodies to bring the victim to the breaking point, but without killing. Those who resisted best went over to the pool of tormentors; but this also needed a vote of the mass, based on whether they were especially entertained or not. One worked hard to become a tormentor by resisting fear, panic, and pain; one could also fall from tormentor status back into the mass of victims.
But the greatest missing pleasure, one that had disappeared in the first year of exile, was death. Too many were dying at the outset, and it became clear that the Rock could not afford many more deaths. So while the new order guaranteed a chance for everyone to fulfill their needs, it frustrated their most intense realization.
Most everyone lived with the feeling, especially those who had known the ecstasy of sexual slaughter but were now denied it, of a vast emptiness at the center of their lives; and many of them suspected that this had also been the intended punishment of exile in the spinning, fleeing Rock: The rise of necessary order, alien to individuals of this other humanity, would trivialize and domesticate their predator’s needs, giving with one hand a chance for community survival beyond the present population, while taking away with the other the right to sexual release through killing.
There arose an order, alien by Earth’s standards, that saw quickly that it did not wish to abolish itself through anarchy, even if that meant building a wall between two parts of its own nature.
A far-seer sitting on that wall would have said that there was nothing new or alien about the arrangement. The contortions of the soul-body that lived on Earth were not different. The cruelties and humiliations of economics and business conduct; the accepted inhumanities that called upon a hidden and necessary hand in human history; the silent cruelty of the powerful to the lesser and powerless; the personal vendettas of commission and omission; the hatreds of race, class, and personal antipathies—all sang the song of the predators who dreamed of slaughtering their neighbor’s children, enslaving their women, and swarming the future with only their own whelpings. If they had been souls in stone, they would have roughed and polished each other until only the largest were left, and these would have crushed each other into dust.
Humankind had only hurled its most denied self out into the dark, but the angels still battled with devils back home. Bellamy was sure of that.
Would it have helped Bellamy to understand what he was, to step back into endless perspectives on what he took for granted? Would it have helped him to stare reality in the face? He lacked this insight of step-back that had led some individuals into discontented greatness, whose endless method of examination tortured all givens, and yet whose beatific light had somehow sprung from the same cauldron as the unthinking predator.
When Bellamy wore out the mercy-VRs, he had no choice but to work with the details of his own memory. Miraculously, they returned to him, as if the VR had retrained his memory, and he treasured each rescued moment. It was his way of avoiding the rituals—by going out into the tall grass at duskdown and lying there invisible to everyone.
There, slowly, he discovered that he could have what he wanted from his past, drifting in a sea-silence until the blessed moments came to him again out of the black grave of fragmented memories—
They were like little chocolates in their supra-suburban villages, far from the paid-poverty of the suburbs into which he had been born, each female body yielding up a different inner core of delight. He watched and logged their comings and goings as if they were butterflies, and bought their house-entry codes from the sellers who knew their captive market well. For him it was always a simple matter to steal enough to pay for the magic keys…
It was always the same with the women. Some were cruel to their males; a few didn’t need males at all; and others were natural victims: their innermost doors were always open, waiting for him to find them…
He entered her bedroom and put the mini-dart gun to her temple.
She opened her eyes.
“You have decisions to make,” he said, dropping his small equipment bag. “Understand?”
Slowly, she nodded, unable to speak. After a moment he saw that she was not breathing. Then her mouth opened and she gasped, staring at him wide-eyed, just the way he liked it.
“Make you a deal,” he said. “Let me watch you…and I won’t touch you at all.”
She took a deep breath, as if surprised at her good fortune, then nodded, and he knew that he had hooked her.
She slipped her arms under the covers and closed her eyes. He watched her play with herself for a minute, then reached down and whipped back the covers.
“Don’t stop,” he said, backing away.
As she closed her eyes and continued, he got down on his knees and took out the four metal eyelets that he had brought. Taking his dart gun, he placed the eyelets, one by one into the business end, then drove them into the hardwood floor. Finally, he took out four sets of cuffs and attached one to each eyelet.
“What…are you doing?” she asked, opening her eyes.
He got up, dragged her from the bed onto the floor, and secured her hands in front of her, one to each cuff so that her palms were flat on the hardwood. Then he spread her from behind, attached each ankle to a cuff, then ripped off her top and panties.
He sat down in a nearby chair and watched her. She turned her head to look back at him, but this position was difficult. He waited a moment longer, then lay down on the floor and reached under her from behind. She twisted as he touched her, opening her gently.
“Don’t,” she whispered perfectly, then began to twist her hands in the manacles.
“You’ll only bloody your wrists,” he said, standing up.
He came around in front of her and unzipped his pants.
“Fellate me,” he said, “and I won’t do anything else.”
“What?” she asked, but understood as he presented himself.
She took him into her mouth, and made a feeble effort, glancing up at him with a mixture of fear and revulsion.
After a while, he withdrew, went around behind her, knelt and pushed her slightly forward.
“But you said…” She whimpered as he prepared to enter her from behind.
She twisted her head back to look at him, and he noticed her blue eyes and short blond hair. “If you don’t move with me, I’ll go up your ass.”
“No, no,” she said at once, facing forward.
He pushed in, bringing himself forward until he could whisper in her ear. “Make another deal. Bring yourself off and I won’t let loose inside you. Good deal. Best you can get right now.”
“Yes,” she said with resignation, and made a show of gyrating against him.
“I’m coming,” he whispered in her ear after a minute.
“What!” she shouted.
“You were faking,” he said, grabbing her short hair and fixing her with his eyes as he forced her to look back at him.
He let go and she turned her head forward once more.
“Try again?” he asked.
She nodded.
“The real thing now,” he said. “I’ll know.”
“Yes,” she said.
As she moved against him, he leaned across her back again and said with his cheek against hers, “When I know it’s real, I’ll pull out and leave nothing in you.”
“I’ll live to kill you,” she said suddenly.
He laughed. “What makes you think you’ll live?”
She clenched, then gasped with pleasure, betraying the perversity of the human orgasm, which belonged to both predator and prey.
“Yes!” she rasped in his ear, and he knew it was real.
He pulled out and lay at her side. She was breathing hard, but watching him carefully. He brought the small gun up in his right hand so she could see it.
He stood up in front of her. “Here, maybe you can get back at me a little,” he said, offering his limp organ.
She hesitated, then received him, and bit slowly, carefully, knowing the power of death that waited in his right hand. He felt a vague sense of the mystery that exists between men and women, in the million-year old dance that bestows pleasure to the individual while securing the survival of the species, driving the individual forward to do what he might otherwise fail to do. Yeah, he’d heard about that, but he cared nothing for children. He might have made some without knowing it, but it didn’t matter.
He pulled back, saving himself, and went around behind her again. Kneeling, he prepared to penetrate her anally.
“You said you wouldn’t,” she said bitterly.
He was silent as he pushed in and spent himself and sprawled across her back. She was unable to fall on her stomach, so she held him up…
The details! How he treasured the details of the women’s bodies! But more than that he loved their fear of him, their inward resistance, which he crushed repeatedly, until they cried out their acceptance.
How he had wished that their boyfriends or husbands might be manacled and gagged nearby, so he might enjoy the horror in their eyes when he would say, “As soon as I’m done, you will die, and she can watch. Hope I’m slow!” But it had never been his luck to have such a moment.
But wait…yes, there had been one…or had he dreamed it? Yes, it had been…
“Ah!” he cried out with eyes closed and his back pressed to the spinning ground.
“Well, well, what have we here?” a voice said.
He opened his eyes and saw a dozen men standing around him.
“He’s been dreaming,” Rebello said. “I’ve seen him come up here more than once. He knows how to, real well.”
“Maybe he should tell us his dreams,” said a voice behind him.
“Yeah, he should share!” another added.
Rebello leaned down, grinned at him, and asked, “Didn’t yo’ mama teach you to share?”
“You…you want to hear?”
Rebello stood up to his full height and said, “Do we have anything better to do?”
Bellamy heard a fist slap into a palm. “Yeah, let’s kick the shit out of him and make him eat it,” said a voice behind him.
“I’ll tell you everything, fellas!” he shouted. “But leave me alone.”
They sat down in a circle around him. “This better be good,” Rebello said.
Bellamy told them. A few of them masturbated. Two went off together into the grass, just out of sight but within earshot.
“So what did you do to her?” Rebello asked, swallowing hard.
“I cut her throat.”
“Nah, you didn’t,” Rebello said. “Not you!”
“I sure did.”
“Was it good?” Rebello asked, sounding more convinced.
Bellamy shrugged. “She didn’t shake enough before she bled to death. It was too quick. I cut too hard. She had more fierce in her than she gave me.”
“So you had better?”
“Not like her. She never gave in, really. Got her in me still.” So much so, he thought, that he was constantly adding to the scenario, and no longer knew what had happened and what he had made up. Too bad he had no VR of it, or any way to make one.
Rebello stared at him blankly, and Bellamy knew that showing any feelings at all to the likes of Rebello might one day get him killed.
He had been living for some time on the edges of acceptable humanity, but only deep within himself, and went in fear of falling into the abyss of emotion that would rob him of the calm, anxiety-free state that Rebello accepted as normal. There were long minutes when compassion and remorse welled up from him, and he feared that the others would see it in him. He wondered how many suffered and wept in private. Back home, such behavior would have been labeled a ploy to gain release. Here, this fall-back was held in contempt and punished with beatings.
“You’re one of them, aren’t you?” Rebello asked. “You want your fantasies more than the real thing, don’t you!”
Almost.
Bellamy tensed. Sometimes he was glad he no longer had to go out and do anything with anyone, because fantasy was enough. Almost. More didn’t matter. A flood of fear and horror swept into him. He was naked before his enemies, his control gone. They could see right into him.
Rebello stood up and kicked him. “You’re the tenth this week. Some of them are hiding out—but we’ll find them all.”
He moaned and held his side from the pain, and knew that they were about to use him—and he would enjoy some of it and then suffer, suffer and enjoy, and finally suffer completely before he died. He knew that they would lose it and kill him, and he longed for the state of uncaring and self-control that had been his, thinking that if he could regain it, he might be able to stay the hands that would torment him into darkness. If they could see into him, they would know when he was like them again.
But there was no time. There couldn’t be any.
And as Rebello kicked him in the stomach, and the men crowded around him like hyenas, Bellamy cried out the words of a preacher who had once laid hands on him and had been the closest he had ever felt to having a father: “There is time yet to climb the mountain of righteousness, or plunge into the pit of wrong!”
Rebello laughed as if he could hear the words, half grunting and half gurgling, then said, “Hey, he’s gonna be a good one.”
Bellamy closed his eyes and saw the burning red of hell.