Free Brute Orbits by George Zebrowski Page A

it helps you.”
    “Thanks.”
    Tasarov smiled. “As long as you don’t one day expect me to take it seriously.”
    Howes looked embarrassed. “Of course not. I just can’t see it.”
    The young man was still shaken up about Polau, Tasarov realized. It would have been more humiliating back home, the way Polau had picked and used him.
    Tasarov didn’t mind queers, as such; human affections were versatile, and existed on a long spectrum; but the long history of social rejection had deformed this creative human exploration into something furtive and desperately predatory, especially in prisons, where it had become linked to tolerated rape, part of the punishment.
    The ancient Greek and Roman acceptance had existed without labels, leaving individuals to find their tendencies. It had always seemed to him that there was for every gay or straight a possible individual somewhere who might arouse and lead them gladly against their grain; and the “next best thing to a woman” philosophy of prison populations certainly made hash of there being any one true path, without exceptions. No one knew what human freedom would find without early training taboos; but it was this very freedom that was feared.
    He often felt a romantic fool for thinking it, but he believed with conviction that love beyond mere physicality was possible between any two living creatures in Darwin’s universe, given the right conditions of knowledge and communication. Possible, even if it rarely happened. How much denial and loneliness was necessary before any human being turned to the only available means of expressing love and physical affection? Might not great friends console each other, or even one console the other as with a ministering angel’s mercy, and would the means that might otherwise be repugnant become unimportant?
    The answer was yes—sometimes.
    Howes stood up and seemed about to speak, then simply nodded and left.
    Tasarov smiled to himself, then wrote: “My kind has always sought to rip the devil from its heart and hurl him away. But he stays, no matter how often they cast him out.” It was a consoling thought, and a difficult one, since it involved a knot that first had to be tied correctly—or the problem would not be stated coherently—and then recognized as a knot that should not be untied—and that to cut it might be disastrous.
    “We’re not machines or angels,” he wrote. “Worse, we need to be devils, to at least be able to choose wrongly, even if it be evil. Every effort to solve the problem of our capacity to choose evil freely breaks down to some degree, because what is to be solved, human freedom, is not all problem, it is only part of the problem. Freedom to succeed or fail is what should be!”
    A series of chance failures had imprisoned him inside this rock.
    Think, he told himself, and write it down. It was all that was left to him. And he knew his thinking happiness as he had never known it before—that it was everything.
     
8
Rough Justice
    Boosted into a twenty-five year loop, the second Rock went out a year after the first. Six months later, warfare broke out among the men over the female prisoners, of whom there were an equal number, but not all of equal desirability. The strongest men and women quickly devised weapons, knives and spears, and seized the prime specimens for themselves and as rewards for their followers. A quarter of the males organized to oppose the slavers and liberate the women, and the struggle began. The rest of the population simply tried to keep out of their way.
    It had been thought that a male/female prison would be more just, more humane than the all male first Rock; and this might have been the case, except for the effect of John “Jimmy” Barr, a database criminal, who collected and memorized the means needed to steal data and sold that knowledge, priding himself on never having to do any job himself. He had killed two policemen when they came to arrest him. His defense had