Abebe Chou’s Rock had been clipped by Rock Seven, sent out with greater boost into a cometary period that no one had been eager to calculate or record. It caught up with the slower prison and brushed forward along its axis for only a moment, then moved ahead. The automatic systems of both prisons slowed spin to zero, adjusted attitude, and ran through a long checklist of sensing information before resuming spin acceleration and control.
Rock Seven housed six thousand women, all murderers of one kind or another, all multiple offenders, all young, reportedly cruel, heartless monsters who deserved to be executed; but a merciful criminal justice system had jumped at the chance to simply sever them from all human society for life.
“We give you your lives,” the judges said, “and a place to spend them not unlike hell, but much more comfortable.”
Judge Overton, Chief World Justice of the Orbits, said those very words to her, Lonnie Beth Hughes recalled as she lounged in her bunk one afternoon, in the second year of her exile. Born in Mexico City in 2002, raped by twelve boys when she was thirteen, she was being paid for sex by fifteen, and running her own whores by eighteen.
When her father had gotten out of prison at forty, he had come to stop her. She had him killed. When her uncle got out at fifty, and came to stop her with a Bible in one hand and a chain in the other, she had him killed.
When she was twenty, her brother got out of prison; he was thirty. He was more understanding, and helped her kill six members of her organization, along with several of the younger girls. They were all getting untrustworthy, and two of them proved it by donating evidence to the police to get rid of her so they could take over. She should have killed the last two sooner, as soon as she’d had their voiceprints certified to prove them liars. The police in her pay had provided the lab service, and also did the killings. Nobody could say she ever killed innocents.
It was only what she had to do to live, nothing more. She’d never sold herself for drugs. Any woman could do that, and the judges always liked that better; it got their sympathy more easily, the few who were honest enough to be suckered. In fact, she had only killed people who were in the business and relatives, never civvies. She had been caught for a murder she had not done, and sentenced by a judge who was in business with her competitors. She had to admire that; it was the way she had always tried to do things.
By the time her case got to Overton, no one knew anything but what was fixed for them to know.
“When I was younger,” he had said to her, “people asked me, how do you know they’ll never get out. Well, nowadays we know. No one ever gets out.”
It was simple. She was out here to die—to die with nothing left over.
It was comfortable, but she didn’t have much of anything to do.
It was boring.
But she was lucky in one way. She didn’t need men. Fantasies of their hairy asses were enough. No smell. Some women liked the hair and the smell. And she didn’t need women, either, especially the stupid killers that got themselves sent here. She hadn’t gotten around to trying hairless Asian or African men, and now she never would.
She had not really been caught at anything, ever. They’d had to make it all up to get her. She had honor and pride in that fact, but she kept it to herself because she knew that there was no one smart enough to believe her. And she wouldn’t have even blamed a smart one for not buying it; the police had been unusually clever in framing her.
Some people claimed to be innocent of everything, and maybe they were. She believed that everyone had their own good reasons for what they had to do to get here, and those reasons were likely enough for that person; no one else needed to hear them. If one had to tell others about it, then something was wrong with the reasons. Real ones kept you going, and no one else.
She was free even though imprisoned; but if she ever thought she was no longer free within herself, she would kill herself.
She had gotten to know more than a dozen of her fellow inmates, and the pictures they painted in her mind were enough to make her shudder. These women made each other afraid. In a ground prison, they had all been in solitary because no one would risk further violence from them. Here they were bemused by how far they could walk in any direction, and how no one would try to stop whatever they did; and no one would protect them. She could see the confusion on their faces, as clear as if they were wearing chains. They didn’t like it. They simmered inside with fear and hatred of others and of themselves, afraid that they might do something to get themselves injured or killed. Lonnie Beth almost laughed when she read their faces, but it shook her to see how much she was in control of herself while the others weren’t.
Three of them she watched very carefully. Carmella Frank, a police officer from Memphis, had shot her partner and three female suspects in the back a dozen times each. She never talked about what she had done, but somehow the word had followed her to Rock Seven. Kelly Rowe Lyone had killed six husbands for their insurance, and collected on all but the last, who lived long enough to call the police and point them to copies of the other policies which she kept under her mattress. Gail Ford, it was said, had orgasms when she killed; whether the victim was a man or woman didn’t matter, but there had to be a robbery motive to sweeten it.
Lonnie Beth was sure she was better than these three, at least, since she had acted in what would have been self-defense if she had waited for them to reach her. The other murders were all business, benefitting more people than they hurt. But these three women here were sickos of one kind or another; they had to kill, it seemed to her, from a deep need, for the sake of killing. They and others like them were dead women waiting, as far as she was concerned, for someone to kill them just to have peace of mind. Life was too long to have to worry about them here.
As she sat on the back stairs to her barracks and looked out over the landscape of grass, mud, mess domes, sunplate, and the far rocky end of the hollow, she realized that she would die here. There was no escape, no repeal of sentence possible—unless the authorities of Earth came and turned the Rock around.
She had to admit the finality of it. Inmates could do nothing but complain among themselves about the cruelty of it, as they slowly came apart. And they would, she realized; not the way people came apart in solitary, but in ways no one would ever know about on Earth. Too bad, they’d say, but there’s nothing we can do about it.
She had to admire the practicality of it: find an island in the sky, fill it with the unwanted, then hurl it outward and never think about it again. Some Rocks came back, she knew, or were supposed to come back; but it depended on how much people back home cared about the inmates, whether they had any family or friends who wanted them back.
Carmella Frank came out and sat down next to her. Lonnie Beth tensed as the cop smiled at her with her perfect teeth.
“You know,” Carmella said, “I think there are guards here.”
“What do you mean?” Lonnie Beth asked.
Carmella looked at her and smiled again. “They’re here, but we just don’t know who they are. And you know what that means?”
“What?”
“We can bribe them. Hold them hostage. Find a way to break out.”
“Bribe them with what?” Lonnie Beth asked, trying to sound somewhat interested. There was no point in getting the woman mad at her.
Carmella grinned sheepishly. “Well, maybe we’ll have to hold them hostage. And you know what else?”
“What?” Lonnie Beth answered.
“This place isn’t really moving. It’s just a cavern on the Moon somewhere. They fooled us. You know what that means? We can get out.”
“No. We’re moving.”
“How can you know?”
“This place spins to give us gravity. Don’t you ever notice that you just don’t feel the same way when you walk as back home? Drop something and it doesn’t fall straight.”
“Well…but there’s an engineering level. Wherever we are, maybe there are shuttles we can use to get out.”
“How do we get there?”
“We dig straight down!”
“No shovels.”
“With our hands, if we have to!”
Looking at her, Lonnie Beth knew that the woman was completely gone, and not likely to come back. A drop of perspiration trembled on her upper lip.
“Did you ever dig with your hands?” Lonnie Beth asked her, wondering why she was bothering to try to make sense to her. “It’s not that easy.”
“I can do it,” she said softly, with a grim resolve that came out of her like icy knives. “I can swim through steel if I set my mind to it.”
She was out every day, digging in the grass. Women gathered around to watch, but not Lonnie Beth. She did not wish to see Carmella trying to dig a tunnel out of her life; it was pathetic, not the way to prepare for the life that would have to be lived here.
Lonnie Beth did not yet know what that life would be, but she would find it in the same way she had learned what kind of life was possible for her back on Earth. She had taken for herself what she could not have had in any other way, and for that life and her defense of it she had been imprisoned as a criminal. People with much greater power than she had ever held took much more, including the lives of the lesser, than she had ever done.
But after a week she went out to see what Carmella was doing. Something about the woman’s dedicated imaginings had gotten to Lonnie Beth, and she had to try to understand.
She made her way through the usual gathering of about fifty women, and came to the edge of a hole in the ground.
Carmella sat at the bottom, some five feet down, digging with her hands.
“I’m getting out,” she sang to herself as she tossed handfuls of red dirt up over the edge. Her hands were raw. She had grown thin and pale. Black circles showed under her eyes as she glanced up. “I’m leaving!” she shouted. “Any time now!”
Lonnie Beth felt her chest constrict as she looked at the woman who had been so dangerous and was now so destroyed; and she realized that she preferred the killer’s defiance and pride to the weak human being at the bottom of the hole. Such a humiliation might have meant something only if proud Carmella could have understood it; this creature could no longer be made to suffer in that way.
A handful of bloody dirt landed near Lonnie Beth’s right foot.
“It’ll be different for you!” Carmella shouted, then dug in again with both hands.
What did she mean? That each would go insane in their own way? For the first time in her life Lonnie Beth felt afraid. Not even seeing the Rock from space when the prison shuttle had brought her out from the Moon—hanging in the abyss above some black floor, to which it might fall and shatter—had disturbed her as much as this woman at the bottom of a hole.
Carmella looked up at her and smiled, and the icy knives came out of her eyes again—with triumph. “There!” she shouted. “I’m out of here!”
Then, with hands deep in the dirt in front of her, Carmella stopped moving. A burst of air gurgled in her throat. She sat still like a statue.
The crowd around the hole was very still; then it began to disperse, until only a few were left.
“She’s gone,” Lonnie Beth said, and pushed some dirt forward with her foot until it fell over the edge and down on the motionless figure. There was nothing else to do.
A few of the women stayed and helped her fill in the hole. Lonnie Beth shut down her unwanted feelings as she buried the dead woman in the grave she had dug for herself.
Weeks later, when the tough grass had grown back, Lonnie Beth looked toward the grave and couldn’t tell where it had been.