The completed inventory revealed that only fifteen Rocks held living communities. Justine and Ibby went before the Projex Council and pleaded for an end to the exiles’ plight.
“But what can we do for them?” asked Chairman More.
“Granted, we ripped them from ourselves,” said another member, “but we cannot take them back now.”
“Why not?” Ibby asked.
“They are too far along another road,” More said.
Justine said, “We do not have to take them back now, and perhaps never. But we can free them.”
“Free them?”
“Gradually, of course,” Justine said, “with contact at a minimum, so these people can raise themselves from the ignorance into which they were thrown by our predecessors.”
“How will this be done?” asked More.
Ibby said, “First, we will open the engineering levels in each of the inhabited Rocks, and draw younger individuals in to use self-educational programs. This may require that some of us go among them, to start the process. Later it may be required that we take individuals away, educate and restore them to our norms of physical health and longlife, and return them to their people.”
The head of the council nodded. “Yes, but you’ll be setting in motion powerful conflicts in these…small towns, which is what they are.”
“Shall we leave them as they are?” she asked.
“It’s one way to be considered, still, is it not?”
“They’ll die away, given the backwardness and lack of means with which they were thrown away. Most have died already.”
“And what will it all come to?” the council head demanded. “When they are improved, won’t they all wish to come home to Earthspace?”
“We don’t know,” Justine said. “Some time must pass—fifty years or more, before we begin to see what is possible.” She did not wish to propose her longer term goal just now. “It may require, after some time, say twenty-five years, that we send out orientation teams to live in each habitat.”
“And if that is all successful, then what?” More demanded. “What will we have then? When will it all end?”
Ibby said, “We will have discharged some of our responsibility, which we inherit from our past, whether we accept it or not.”
More almost smiled. “That is a very doubtful statement.”
“As I’ve said here before,” Justine cut in, “what was done before our times may or may not be our responsibility, but what we do or fail to do now and in the future is our responsibility. And the harm that our inaction may bring will make us all complicit with past wrongs. What shall we not do? What shall we do? We are responsible either way.”
“Very clever,” said More, “but can we be compelled to act?”
“Yes. AI dialogues since our return support the actions we propose, and we can compel a referendum of all the citizenry in Earthspace, if necessary.”
“How do the AI dialogues support your proposals?”
“The full document is some thousands of pages. But the main arguments of the AI high number participants remind us that we cannot afford to lose any part of the human genetic library—and that useful developments beckon in these habitats…”
“Ah, now we get to it,” said the Projex head. “There are other aims…”
She said, “There is caution in our proposal, which I now urge you to study.”
More raised a hand. “Before we call upon more AI advice, let me point out that they are still regarded by many of us as no more than brilliant pets. They have no interest in our welfare or progress. They have no sympathy…”
“But they do know increase and progress,” she said, “and what will contribute to further elaboration and what will not, taking into account a myriad factors that no unenhanced human can grasp in one vision.”
“Yes, yes,” More said impatiently. “What you are telling me is that my comprehension will forever be inadequate and that I am not a fit judge.”
“Not at all,” Justine continued patiently. “We have values and sympathies to implement. We can guess in transcendental fashion, and bring self-fulfilling prophecies to fruition.”
“You’re only telling us that we don’t know where all this will lead,” More said with even more irritation.
“But do we have the right to intrude?” asked a previously silent member.
“Who will stop us?” More asked as if answering Justine and not his colleague.
“But should we intrude?” asked the same member.
Justine said, “I repeat, that by not intruding, we are still responsible for perpetuating their disadvantages.”
“Are these sovereign communities?” asked More. “By our laws? The criminal justice agencies that created the Orbits no longer exist, and their responsible successors were never clearly defined—in fact, they were never named, as far as our records show. So are the Rocks sovereign?”
“No,” Ibby said, “—in our legal sense. Practically, we can pretty much do what we please with them. They do not have the means to resist us. But I say again that to do nothing also brings responsibility for what may happen.”
“But what is likely to happen?” More asked.
“We’ve already said it. They may all die out.” “But is that not what our predecessors intended?” “Yes, unfortunately,” Ibby said. “And the convicts have died out, for the most part. Those who still live in exile are not the same people.”
Fifteen vessels went out in the first year. They opened the engineering levels. Teams came out to orient the populations. Justine and Ibby visited every worldlet, and in each they found an eagerness to learn, to reach out. The stars were shown to the people of each Rock, and its place in history explained, along with hopes for the future. People were given the choice to stay on their worldlets or to return, after sufficient preparation, to Earthspace. A few entered their names for the return; but when the time came to go, few went.
“They’ve seen what they are,” Ibby said, “and that will change them forever.”
“I think they glimpse new possibilities,” Justine said, “but they also have some feeling for their worlds.”
They sat in the lounge of what would have been the warden’s apartment in Rock Four. This was their third visit here in ten years, in which time large numbers of volunteers had come out to the Rocks to help in yearly shifts. Some were helpful, others troublesome; still others were looking for relatives, real or imagined. And various groups were also going out to the now uninhabited Rocks. Most came back, but a few remained, retrofitting the old systems for their use, putting the dead in order, and organizing what records survived.
The fifteen inhabited Rocks all became aware of each other, and their common history drew them together. Representatives from each had gathered in Rock Four to compare notes and assess what lay ahead. Justine and Ibby attended as observers.
“It’s clear,” Ibby said, “that what we saw was a nearly universal acceptance of the habitats as home—their homes. We can help, but no more, they told us.”
“Their plan to expand into all the empties,” Justine said, “was quite a surprise.”
“You’re for it, then?” he asked.
“Is it up to us? They’ll go out and make them their own without us.”
“If we continue to educate and provide the technology.”
“That too will come to an end,” she said, “as they become self-sufficient and begin to generate their own research and development. Do you realize what has happened? Humanity now has a real toehold on the stars! We can spread through this whole galactic arm.”
Ibby said, “I don’t think More and the others will think of it as we.”
“I know,” Justine said. “That’s why we have to encourage traffic between Earthspace and the Rocks, help reclaim the empties, and therefore make it we.”
“If we can. I felt a great sense of independence in the leaders of the fifteen. It came out of them like a storm front.”
“And they insisted on a face to face gathering with each other,” she said.
He looked at her and said, “I think we both know what you want for them.”
She nodded. “I hope so much for them. Is that strange?”
“No,” he said. “We’ve worked together for a long time, so I know.”
“Have you ever wondered,” she said, “about the motives of those who planned the Orbits?”
“The motives were obvious.”
“I get the feeling sometimes that the old planners, or maybe some far-seeing individual among them, imagined that this would be a good way to get humankind out of Sunspace.”
“You may be giving them too much credit.”
“But it may turn out that way.”
“Someone might have thought it,” Ibby said. “But look how many died out here—all but fifteen. It might have been all of them.”
“Those who live today,” she said, “must feel like the snail in the story, who was picked up at the front door and hurled away, then came back four months later and asked, ‘what was that all about?’”
“So what happened?” Ibby asked. “I want to hear how you put it all together.” He looked at her carefully, seeking a more personal communication through her gaze, but she was oblivious, completely in the grip of history.
She said, “A century ago, many of the world’s prisons had become small communities, where two and three generations of children were being born to the inmates. Even Riker’s Island in New York City in the late 1990s had people who had never known any other home, children born to lifers who had no place to go, so they stayed with their parents. Then, as a better world beckoned, those who had everything to gain from longer lives and better conditions concluded that they had to clean out these prisons. ‘We’ll still have criminals,’ they announced, ‘but they will be a better class of criminals.’ It was the end of the street as a place of criminal enterprise, the end of the prison as the school to which aspiring criminals would be sent to learn and graduate.
“The high tech prisons of the late 1990s and early 2000s,” she continued, “were the last attempt, before the opportunity presented by asteroid capture and mining, to deal with the most violent criminals. But these systems soon also filled up, as had every prison system of the past. Drug addicts, the mentally ill, the insane, should not have been treated in this way. And the supermaxes became a public shame, as had previous schemes, but they continued to be used long after being discredited, rife with abuse and mismanagement and lawbreaking that no one cared about, until the Rocks beckoned, offering what seemed to be simple incarceration without abuse and public recrimination.
“Then, just as progress seemed about to be proved, the destruction in Lawrence, Kansas, by the hijacked shuttle crash led to the timed orbit solution. A better degree of separation was needed between honest citizens and criminals.”
She paused, then said, “Remember Rock Eight? It was originally made up of people who should not have been in prison at all, but in rehab centers, recovery therapies, or with friends and relatives. But the space was available in the Rocks—and it was believed that if they were released back into the society they might develop into worse cases. So it was easier to give up on helping them and send them away, into the Rocks, where they might help themselves. That’s why their descendants in Rock Eight seemed so normal. They came from people who weren’t criminals at all.
“Use the space for self-rehab. It became an attractive theory, worth trying. Difficult-to-treat non-criminals, not to mention people who should not have been imprisoned for anything, were cleared out simply because it could be done, just as every new prison on Earth had been filled up with a mix of criminals and non-criminals just because the space was available. As with all bureaucracies, work expands to fill up the time—so these prisons filled up as soon as they were ready to go.”
He nodded and said, “It was much harder for specialized, practical minds to understand criminal violence as a continuation of evolutionary behavior built up in past environments and biology—and even more difficult to accept human ingenuity as a capacity that is free to do whatever it can, however mistaken. We still have the career criminals, but they’re less violent, and still nothing can compete with the rewards they set for themselves to seek. We could not give them enough to not do what they find to do. It’s showing off, display of skill and intelligence, public humor.”
“And the old fears, hatreds, and impulses,” she said. “I’m not surprised by the historical hatred for the theory of evolution among our ancestors. Natural selection was a horror, a needed evil…unless you were willing to replace it. They didn’t know how to do it, and feared it when the possibility came up. We came from that violence, and feared the thing in us that would be taking over the old nature. We still have the vitality of that violence with us, and the need to practice it.”
She paused, then said, “I could sometimes strangle More.”
“Let’s agree not to,” he said. “More has his pride in being useful.”
“Which he forgets as soon as he leaves the chamber for his personal life.”
“What does he do?” Ibby asked, touching Justines’s hand gently. “Do you know?”
She smiled. “I think he goes VR fishing—for sharks—but sets the level of difficulty too low, or so I’ve heard.”
“He sets it himself?” Ibby asked.
She nodded and laughed. “And then he wipes the memory of doing it.”
“But…he does this repeatedly? Some kind of general memory of his procedure must remain with him.”
“No,” she said. “I’m told he discovers his enjoyment afresh each time.”
“Still,” Ibby said, “it seems that he may forget the particular act but knows the general approach.”
“Who knows, who cares?” she said, looking at Ibby’s hand as it covered her own.