Free Brute Orbits by George Zebrowski

that they had to put us out here, Yevgeny?”
    Tasarov sat back and said, “This has nothing to do with evil, son. This place is not bad, as prisons go. We don’t have the screws to deal with, for one thing. That’s actually an advance, a way of avoiding day-to-day abuse and cruelties. Takes the temptation away from guards. Better than a rock in the middle of San Francisco Bay, where you could see the city you were missing.”
    “Were you there?” Howes asked.
    “No—that was in the last century. They closed it as soon as inmates began to show they were brave enough to take it. They didn’t like setting them a challenge they could meet. Complete lockdown high tech prisons came in, and they were nearly escape proof and unbearable, but too costly to operate. They couldn’t put everyone in them, even though they were supposed to be for a very small group—but that group kept getting larger. This place is probably more frightening to people back home than it is to us. Who knows, we’ll swing out and come back in, and maybe we’ll be heroes, maybe. At least to some people.”
    Howes sat up and looked at him. “It’s…do you feel empty and abandoned? I don’t think it would feel the same on Earth or on the Moon.”
    “We all feel the difference, in one way or another. Something like this has never been done.”
    “I feel,” Howes said, “that they think they’re all better than us. Maybe they are.”
    Tasarov felt a surge of feeling, a concern for another human being as never before in his life; and yet it seemed to him that Howes was no one special. He didn’t seem to have any distinctive abilities or high intelligence. It was this place, heading out away from everything, that was throwing him into a compassionate state of mind which he could not trust, he told himself.
    “They’re not better than us,” Tasarov said, “or we better than them.”
    “They’ve taken everything from us,” Howes replied, avoiding his gaze.
    “Look, son—any of us here, if we’d come up in their world, or gotten in with the rich and powerful gang families at the top, we would have done the same thing, and sent us out, or people like us. They don’t know what else to do.”
    “I don’t get it.”
    “We’re all the same. The problem is human beings. Always has been. Top, bottom, or middle, we all behave alike. We’ve pretty much always done so.”
    “There are better people, somewhere,” Howes said.
    “A few saints here and there, and even they have to work too hard at it. It’s too difficult to sustain. Those who achieve power usually mess it up. Seems there’s no point in raising up the powerless, because you get the same thing.”
    “So you don’t blame them for sending us out?”
    “I feel as much as you do,” Tasarov said, “but more may come of this than anyone knows.”
    “I don’t deserve what’s happened to me,” Howes said.
    There was a long silence between them. Then Tasarov asked, “Are they leaving you alone? I mean the others.”
    “Funny,” Howes said. “They think I…belong to you.”
    “We’re friends,” Tasarov answered quickly. “That much is true. It’s what they’re picking up.”
    Howes looked at him. “You don’t feel more?”
    Tasarov smiled. “I really do like women—and I’d like one right now. Stand-ins just don’t make it for me, even though I see how the illusion might be had.”
    “The illusion?”
    Tasarov nodded. “Soft skin, hairlessness, a vulnerable look in the eyes, and in the darkness friction is pretty much the same. It’s also about power—exerting your will on another human being. The genuine homosexuals can have what a man and woman can. The others are getting off on power and illusion. What it means is they’re going to trade people like animals.”
    “You won’t tell them, will you?” Howes asked. “I mean, that we’re not…”
    “I don’t care what they imagine—and you shouldn’t care either,” Tasarov said. “I don’t care if