If the corpsicles had continued to pile up, of course, the situation might have become absurd, and eventually intolerable, but they hadnt. Unlike all previous penal systems, SusAn incarceration had appeared to be effective, in the crude statistical sense that crime rates began to drop quite sharply as the twenty-third century progressed. The drop had been represented by enthusiasts as proof that this deterrent actually worked. It was, of course, no such thing. The real reasons for the steady fall in crime rates, my sources assured me, were the gradual but inexorable removal of incentives to commit crime and the gradual but inexorable increase in the certainty of detection.
I had lived in an era where many people were routinely subject to the vagaries of rage and intoxication, and in which the electronic stores where credit was held were still vulnerable to clever tampering. It was also an era in which a great many people especially the young took a perverse delight in cheating the surveillance systems that had been set up to make crime difficult, regarding all such measures as a challenge to their ingenuity. In my day, hobbyist criminals were everywhere. Although everyone affected to deplore and despise those whose hobbyism extended to raw violence, especially when it involved murder, there was a widespread fascination with violence. That fascination supported a rich and varied pornography as well as a highly developed risk culture. People newly gifted with IT especially when the effectiveness of a persons IT was the most effective badge of wealth and status were inevitably tempted to test its limitations in all kinds of extreme sports, many of them illegal. According to Excelsiors data banks, however, all that stuff had faded away as the novelty wore off.
As the cost of IT had come down, attitudes had shifted dramatically; the fascination of violence, pain,
and death had never disappeared, but it had become the prerogative of exotic cults whose breakthroughs to the cultural mainstream became increasingly rare. As polite exercise of the self-control that better IT permitted became routine, rage and intoxication dwindled toward extinction. As credit-tracking systems were further refined, successful thefts and frauds became so rare that no rational risk calculation could support them. Even the young ceased to see the erosion of privacy and secrecy as a challenge, and adapted themselves to living in a world where no sin was likely to remain long undetected or, for that matter, long unforgiven.
By 2300, the use of SusAn as a mode of incarceration had come to seem unnecessary and ridiculously old-fashioned. By 2400, the spectrum of social misdemeanours had altered dramatically throughout the world, and those which persisted were more commonly addressed by mediated reparation and house arrest. By that time, SusAn incarceration was only used outside the Earth and even there, its use declined in spite of the dramatic increase in the extraterrestrial population. The once-rich flow of individuals committed to SusAn because their neighbors wanted them out of the way had fallen to a mere trickle by the time of the Coral Sea Disaster of 2542, and the vast majority of those were rejects from the burgeoning societies of the moon and the microworlds.
But no one had ever taken up arms on behalf of the existing population of sleepers.
The conveniently forgotten corpsicles had never found a champion willing to campaign for their release or even for the careful discrimination of those who had never done anything to deserve indefinite sentences in the first place. Without such a champion, it had been easy enough to leave the problem to be sorted out by someone who actually cared.
Even now, when a couple of specimen releases had finally been arranged, it was not obvious that anyone really cared. Was it incumbent on me, I wondered, to become the champion that the sleepers had never had?
I tucked the thought away for possible future reference; for the time being, I still had to work out exactly what kind of nest of vipers I had been delivered into, and why.
Thirteen
Emortality for All
Ilooked up Emily Marchant before looking up Mortimer Gray, and was suitably impressed.
There were, allegedly, no Hardinists in or behind the Outer System Confederation but that didnt mean that questions of ownership and stewardship were irrelevant in the outer system. Nor did it mean that the implications of the Tragedy of the Commons hadnt yet raised their ugly head. Quite the reverse, in fact. Questions of who might be entitled to do what with exactly which lumps of mass lumps ranging in size from asteroids no bigger than an average hometree to Jupiter itself seemed to have become measurably more acute during the last few centuries, and the increase had accelerated during the last few decades.
In the Outer System, every rock was precious, and every block of ice even more so. That, apparently, was one of the reasons why the ship carrying Michael Lowenthal and Mortimer Gray from Earth had been exposed to the risk of close encounters with snowballs. The settlers of the Oort Halo had been deflecting new comets sunwards for centuries; although the bigger lumps were greedily intercepted, the residual small debris was pouring into the inner system like an everlasting blizzard. That was, apparently, another cause of tension and disputation between the Confederation and the Earthbound.