Prisoner of the Rings
by David Barber
Somebody must have been telling lies about Joseph Kay, because one fine morning they doubled his quota.
Another day in the rings, watching Saturn turn, the joys of air and food, of warmth and light, all that we have and all that we need. But this morning, out of the speaker came a hubbub of angry voices. The quota had been raised again, and to survive, it must be met.
Joseph listened open-mouthed, while the bowl he held beneath the food tap brimmed and overflowed. Shouting questions into the uproar would not help. He clicked to other, less frequented channels.
Twelve was speaking. This was what she called herself, after the number painted large on the hull of her craft. Alone with his thoughts, as all prisoners must find themselves, Joseph had tried to picture the owner of that voice.
“They cleverly sow disunity,” she was insisting to Manfred. “Equal penalties would risk uniting us in our punishment. Now we resent other prisoners instead of our gaolers.”
He knew better than to question Twelve’s pronouncements. Even her silences seemed scornful. But it was true that his own quota had doubled, while others had hardly changed. Later he discussed this with Manfred.
“It is not a zero-sum game, Joseph Kay. Our craft are spread across the rings. Your success is not hindered by mine, nor is your failure mitigated by the failure of others.”
Joseph was doubtful. Perhaps the quota was set in response to their collective efforts.
Manfred had no answer to this. For Joseph Kay it would mean twice as long in the pilot’s seat — a punishing fourteen hour day — and failing to meet the quota meant a prisoner’s food ration was cut; sometimes the chill of space was allowed to creep in.
“To encourage us,” Twelve said.
Joseph did not feel encouraged. Like all her utterances, Twelve’s words hinted at further meanings and ulterior knowledge. He itched to talk to Manfred about Twelve, but could not risk her overhearing.
Over the years, a few prisoners, braver than the rest, had ventured out in emergency suits. This is how it became known that the pilot’s station, living quarters and storage rooms — the narrow limit of their lives — were only an afterthought, a barnacle upon a much larger craft.
As this behemoth nosed endlessly through the rings, its robot maw harvested the icy rubble, processing it into cubes of ice and pellets of organics, which were then flung away by mass drivers.
Left to their own devices — and this had been tried — craft on automatic rarely achieved the quota. Flesh proved better than silicon at the ancient skills of hunter-gathering.
Sometimes Twelve mentioned venturing outside, though Joseph Kay always faltered at the open airlock, daunted by the vast darkness, by Saturn looming, and the endless tumbling debris of the rings. His failure of nerve was something he was shamed to admit.
To an approximation, Saturn’s rings were just water-ice, so for most prisoners this was the key to survival, and long experience had established the best ways of working. Some ice-boulders, for instance, were so large it was common sense to avoid them. Yet others proved to be just loose aggregates, easy to fragment. One sort could be profitably consumed by their craft, the other not.
In judging such differences lay the slender advantage of human over machine.
In the first days of his imprisonment, Joseph Kay had set about harvesting ice like the rest. It was from Twelve and Manfred that he learned otherwise. The rings were also contaminated with dust and organics that coloured them umber and ochre at certain sun angles.
Attempting to fill the quota with these was a riskier strategy, but meant spending fewer hours in the pilot’s seat. Eventually, Joseph Kay came to think himself superior to those satisfied with pursuing frozen water.
Tidal forces between Saturn and its moons caused the rings to clump in some parts and thin in others. The new quota had coincided with Joseph Kay entering one of these sparser regions and no matter how many hours he worked, his food ration dwindled.
Manfred was unmoved. “One can eat less and still survive. But the loss of heat is far worse.” His mood grew sombre. “The cold of space chills to the bone.”
Joseph had always known his craft skirted a void between rings, perhaps the Huygens or Cassini Gap, and Twelve claimed to be harvesting a ring rich in organics on the far side of the same gap, farther out from Saturn.
“All you have to do is to cross the void between them,” she insisted.
According to Manfred, the gaps were hundreds of kilometres wide, and since it was hard to alter the speed and direction of their ponderous craft, a crossing would take days. Manfred was interested in the plan but offered no encouragement.
Twelve was brusque. “While you navigate the emptiness, your food ration would cease, but this merely means you should put food aside while you can.”
“Wait,” said Joseph.
“And when the heating is reduced,” Manfred warned, “there is your emergency suit, which would insulate against the cold of space. For a time.”
“Wait,” repeated Joseph anxiously.
“You have no choice,” said Twelve. “Even you must see that.”
Repeatedly in the days that followed, he would become aware of something wrong, and then be reminded by the unnatural silence. As he had edged his craft out into the gap, the ceaseless patter of debris tumbling along the hull had faded away.
Progress was difficult to judge. His destination was visible, but seemed to grow no closer. After the second day, nutrient from the food tap sputtered to nothing and Twelve encouraged him to be strong.
In older days, when the quota was easier to achieve, prisoners would relax by their radio speakers and idly discuss such matters as where the ice was sent. Most believed the frozen blocks were fired back into the rings, their task pointless and unending as befitted the punishment of prisoners. Others, less bleakly, claimed the ice was dropped into Saturn so that one day the gas giant would be stripped of its rings, a far off golden age when prisoners were no longer punished.
Joseph Kay believed the ice had a destination and a purpose, and kept a home-made chart of the rings, an estimate of his craft’s position in them, and the direction ice was slung into the dark. He hoped it would all become clear one day. Manfred was non-committal, citing the human habit of seeing patterns where none existed.
Gradually, news of Joseph’s journey spread, and in the lives of prisoners that were monotonous and dull, became a passing novelty.
On the third day of his crossing, as Joseph suffered the pangs of an empty belly, Manfred distracted him with a question.
“How old are our craft, do you think, Joseph Kay?”
Joseph was intrigued. Manfred often had a different slant on things.
“Ancient,” he decided.
“The walls here,” Manfred continued. “The walls have messages scratched on them.”
Around Joseph gleamed the cold black metal of his own hull. “What do they say?”
“The ravings of someone with no knowledge of history, nor memory of their own name. Someone without hope.”
Joseph digested this. Of course, they had all woken alone aboard a craft with no recollection of their past.
“Why did you choose to call yourself Manfred?” he ventured.
“It is my name. I am sure of it. Almost certain.”
“And what would you write? Your message to another prisoner.”
For a while there was only static, the distant hiss of stars, the soft crackle of electrical storms on Saturn.
“Since we do not remember our crimes,” said Manfred finally. “We cannot know if our punishments are just. Only our gaolers know that.”
Unseen, Joseph shook his head. “And that is what you would write?”
“It is not necessary to accept everything as true; one must accept it only as necessary.”
Whenever the quota was raised, Joseph became enraged with those who claimed the new targets were justified, that we in our ignorance could not understand the bigger picture.
Some questions were impossible to answer, and around these grew speculations that seized the minds of some prisoners. Perhaps they gained comfort from the notion that their labours had meaning. Others seemed satisfied that they suffered for no purpose, since this was the nature of the world.
The speaker crackled back into life. “I would write that our lives appear to be ruled by reason, but the quota belies a greater madness.”
Sometimes Manfred confounded him.
At the end of the fifth day, Joseph Kay sat in the pilot’s seat, shivering despite his emergency suit, his breath visible in the freezing air. By now, the vast ring-arc filled his view. By common consent, a time had been set aside for him to broadcast.
Since the rings were not more than a few hundred metres thick in places, Joseph was explaining it would not take much for any craft to climb out of the drift. He dared them to experience the unnerving quiet of his journey for themselves.
In this way Joseph hoped to distract himself from his ever-present hunger.
Of late, Manfred had become a puzzle. He had never seemed someone who liked to chatter.
“I am minded of a story,” Manfred had begun. “About a prisoner who attempted escape by counterfeiting his own death. Do you know it, Joseph Kay?
“This prisoner had reasoned that on his demise his ship must be recalled so that a fresh prisoner could be put aboard, or perhaps the new prisoner would be brought out to his ship. Either way it was an opportunity. The prisoner had cleverly anticipated his craft shutting down, and had stored food, water and air in a sealed room.”
Joseph stared at the speaker. How could Manfred know all this? Surely the prisoner would not have broadcast his plan to the rings?
“Finally, when another prisoner was delivered, he overpowered the gaolers and escaped in their craft.”
Manfred took Joseph’s silence as scepticism rather than puzzlement.
“Of course you have spotted there was one thing the prisoner could not store in advance,” Manfred admitted.
“He would have grown feeble with the cold of space and suffered the humiliation of being discovered helpless by his gaolers.”
Unseen, Joseph Kay made a face. “What happened afterwards?”
“He woke in his craft, as if from a dream, his punishment to continue as before.”
When Joseph peered ahead, the rings seemed closer, and he spent an impatient hour or two in the pilot’s seat, urging his craft across the last few kilometres.
With his journey almost over, he intended to broadcast some concluding remarks, but was irked to find his channel already crowded with voices.
It seemed a prisoner had fallen ill, her craft left to trawl the rings on automatic. The speakers offered encouragement and advice, but her replies grew fainter, less coherent and finally ceased altogether. One day that solitary fate would overtake them all.
As Twelve had promised, this new ring was dark with organics, and Joseph busied himself into the business of harvesting. As he began filling his quota, the food tap gurgled back to life.
Now that he had narrowed the distance between their two craft, he felt that Twelve was almost a neighbour, a feeling she must have shared, because she began to confide in him.
“We hear so many different voices from our speaker,” she was saying, “yet there are only three kinds of prisoner. Most are passive, acquiescing in their fate.”
Joseph nodded to himself. Yes, he knew such people.
“The second sort of prisoner refuses to accept their fate. Outsiders. Rebels. For these few, the struggle defines their existence.” She fell silent, and he felt obliged to ask about the third kind.
“Oh, they are just parasites upon the other two.”
Later, Twelve told him to suit up and look out his airlock. Joseph had always resented the way she gave orders, and peevishly occupied his time with trivial tasks. In the end though, curiosity forced him to do as she bid.
Just astern, shouldering through the drift, loomed another craft. On its dark, pitted hull was a vast number Twelve, and a figure in an emergency suit waved from its lock. Joseph’s stomach clenched as Twelve launched herself into the void. She was crossing over to his ship.
“I didn’t picture you with a beard,” she said, unfastening her suit. For some reason she looked disappointed. “And your ship smells funny.”
He trailed along behind her. Already she seemed to have taken charge. “I’d wondered if this craft might be more suitable, but they are the same.”
She began explaining about tools she’d fashioned, about metal plates she’d removed in her own craft to uncover a confusion of pipework, wires and machinery.
Joseph had imagined her younger than this. She was tall and plain. There were even strands of grey in her hair. It was the voice. The voice had deceived him.
“Ask yourself how we are compelled to fill the quota,” she was saying. He hadn’t been paying attention but, as she spoke, her clever eyes shone and his disappointment lessened.
“Because the gaolers control our food,” she said impatiently. “They have their hands round our throats.”
Their craft were factories, harvesting and processing the rings. This was where their food, water and air came from, the surplus fired away into the dark. Their gaolers simply controlled the supply. So in her craft she had taken charge of the food spout mechanism, and similar devices that managed the heat and air.
“The tools I made are like the magic in fairy tales. Just turn the right tap and you are free.”
As the notion sank in, Joseph realised they could escape the tyranny of the quota! They could disappear into the drift, living off the bounty of the rings. He struggled with words to describe this wondrous future.
“It would still be a prison,” interrupted Twelve.
She used that same peremptory tone he’d heard so often. “The ice and organics we slave to collect are sent somewhere. You said so yourself. Somewhere beyond the rings, one of the moons perhaps. And we could follow them.”
“You’re mad,” blurted Joseph Kay.
Twelve’s bleak gaze pierced him. “It’s staying here that’s madness.”
She stood by the lock again, helmet in hand, concerned that her craft might be drifting away, but with one last thing to explain. “Has Manfred told you his escape story?”
Joseph nodded. “I think the prisoner was really him.”
“Be careful what you say over the speaker,” she warned. “Especially to Manfred.”
“Wait,” said Joseph, and came back with his elaborate chart of the rings.
“I think it shows a pattern. Perhaps it would help you.”
They stood in awkward silence, until she realised it was she who would have to speak. What had she expected? She placed her gloved hand upon his arm. He glanced down in surprise then back to her face.
“I want you to come with me,” she said.
Thinking about it afterwards, after that panicked crossing to her craft, abandoning all that he knew, the uncertainty of their future, it seemed to Joseph like being asked to step off a cliff. He had astonished himself, but it was better than being alone.
When voices complained about the quota being raised, Manfred remained silent because his own quota never changed. The gaolers had not punished him for trying to escape, and in return he informed on Twelve and Joseph Kay, as he had betrayed countless others.
It was shameful, but to survive one must do what was necessary, obeying orders, as a dog follows its master.
Manfred was taken aback to hear the voice of Twelve broadcasting all this, warning the prisoners of the rings not to confide their secrets to him. She explained how she had wrenched control from those that imprisoned them, and encouraged other brave souls to do likewise. Privately, Joseph thought brave too strong a word. He still thought himself mad.
Of course, Manfred protested, but the gaolers must have believed the lies told about him because, one fine morning, they doubled his quota.
Copyright © 2021 by David Barber
