Pallas (19 page)

“I believe...” Emerson drew the giant Grizzly and thumbed the ha
m
mer back as if there were a round in the chamber and seven more in the magazine. He aligned the colorful front sight precisely on the center of Altman’s torso as if he were a seventy-five-yard turkey. The two thugs flanking the Senator tensed, but they were basically powerless to do a
n
ything about it and they knew it. At the same time, Emerson heard the sweet whispery ring of steel on wet-formed leather as the girl standing beside him followed his example. “...I’ll decline your offer.”

“Your call, Emerson,”
came
Gretchen’s voice, gentle but determined. He half expected her to remind him to take a breath, focus on the front sight, and squeeze. Unlike the boy, she hadn’t missed the Chief Admi
n
istrator’s unpleasant insinuations. “I’ve got the others covered—don’t think I can trust myself with Altman.”

The Chief Administrator gave her an odd, evaluating look, as if he knew her already but at the same time was meeting her all over again. Emerson nodded without looking back at her, keeping his gun level, wondering why he didn’t feel afraid.

“In effect,” he told the man, “there isn’t any US government any more, although you manage to keep the fact from most of your slaves. And the UN has nothing to say about what goes on outside the Rimfence. This is Pallas we’re standing on and I’m a free man. I’m not your servant or my parents’ property, and I won’t go back to be beaten up or buggered by your trained animals. Now get out of here or I’ll kill you where you
stand.” He wished he hadn’t cocked the Grizzly quite so soon. Psych
o
logically, this would have been a better time.

The Senator swallowed, but stood his ground. Emerson suddenly understood, in a manner rare even among grown-ups, that the man may have been a lot of evil things, but he wasn’t a coward. “You’d actually shoot another human being, child, and an unarmed one at that, over an abstract philosophical concept so alien to your upbringing that you can’t possibly understand it, let alone believe it?”

“I’d shoot a politician, Senator,” the boy told him, convinced, at least for the moment, that he was speaking the plain truth. “It isn’t the same thing at all.”

“No,” Gretchen agreed cheerfully, “it isn’t.”

Emerson had been glaring at the Senator, all his attention focused on the man while he trusted Gretchen to keep an eye on the pair of thugs he’d brought with him. Now he was distracted for an instant as, out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of a small cloud of dust coming up the road from the nearby town. At the base of that cloud strode Aloysius Brody, cane in one hand, pistol in the other, followed by at least two dozen well-armed, angry-looking men and women.

Beside Emerson, Gretchen smiled, nodded to herself, and released what must have been a very deep breath, although she kept her own weapon ready in her hand.

“Chief...” One of the Senator’s toughs tried to warn him that som
e
thing new was happening. It was a noisy crowd coming up the road and Altman had already turned to see what the racket was about. So did his men, their confrontation with Emerson and Gretchen momentarily fo
r
gotten. As the people from Curringer approached Mrs. Singh’s front gate, another pair of goons alighted from the rollabout, handling their shock batons uneasily and looking to the Senator for some indication of his wishes.

Altman didn’t seem to notice.

“Gretchen!” the innkeeper shouted when he was near enough. “Your mother called t’say you could use some moral support. Stand yer ground, Emerson! Now what’s this all about, Senator
darlin
’?”

Emerson was mildly confused, although he realized it was irrelevant at
the moment. From what Gretchen had said, he’d thought Brody had stayed at the house last night. He had a brief, ridiculous mental flash of the man sneaking out the back door, pants in hand.

Equally taken by surprise, Altman snarled. “Stay out of this! It’s Project business!”

Brody raised a hand, telling his companions to remain in the road. He came through the gate himself, making a ceremony of letting his pistol pivot around his finger by the trigger guard, rolling it backward in his hand until he held it by the slide with its handle reversed, and dropping the weapon into his holster with a twist at the last moment so that it settled with the handle in a normal position. “I can scarcely believe that haulin’ Curringer’s new champion silhouette shooter off t’durance vile is leg
i
timate Project business. Like all Pallatians, this young fellow’s a free man. He’s got rights which must be respected.”

Behind Emerson, the screen door creaked as Mrs. Singh joined him and her daughter on the porch. She’d either decided it was safe to leave the back door unguarded or simply couldn’t resist finding out what was going on here at the front of the house. Uncharacteristically, she remained silent, waiting for others to talk.

The Senator shook his head, obviously relieved that they were all still talking. He visibly began to relax. Emerson knew that this sort of thing was what he was best at. “Judge Brody, the boy is a minor, a legal ward of the Greeley Utopian Memorial Project, of which I happen to be Chief Administrator. I have a duty which I cannot neglect, to his parents and the community as a whole—”

“I’m glad to see we share the same opinion of your
community!
” Mrs. Singh put in. For the first time, Emerson noticed that she’d acquired another gun from somewhere in the house. She held both of them at her waist now, leveled on Altman.

Brody’s expression was pained. “Now, let’s try not to complicate things more than they hafta be.” He eyed the muzzles of Mrs. Singh’s pistols,
then
turned to Altman. “Senator,
y’must know
I’ve a duty of me own t’discharge, one I take no less seriously than you do yours, for all that it’s a bit on the informal side.” He turned to the porch again. “Emerson,
me boy, would y’be objectin’ to a hearin’ t’settle this matter once an’ for all, over to the Nimrod?”

Brody’s proposition caught Emerson by surprise. He supposed he’d been expecting his new friends simply to run Altman and company off, back to where they’d come from. In his life at the Project, he’d never had any reason to trust adults before, and he was suddenly filled now with an odd foreboding, a premonition of betrayal. “I don’t know, Mr. Brody. I don’t see why I should have to—”

Brody shook his head. “Y’don’t hafta do anything, son, but this’d settle it publicly an’ permanently, to everybody’s satisfaction.
Or at least their mutual an’ equal dissatisfaction.
Y’know these lawyer types, me boy, sneaky an’ persistent bastards that they be. Y’don’t wanna go through this malarkey every few months, do ye?”

The boy shook his head. “No, sir, I don’t.”

“Best t’get it done, then. An’ don’t ‘sir’ me, Emerson.”

“Yes, s—I mean, Mr. Brody.”

The older man looked him over carefully, tossed the briefest possible glance at Gretchen,
then
scrutinized Emerson again.
“Time y’started callin’ me Aloysius, me boy.”

“Yes, Mr.—Aloysius.”

“An’ how about yerself, Senator
darlin
’?” Brody had turned to Al
t
man. “If ye’re dead set on the due process of law, let’s see where that leads us. Y’may
be
the HMFWIC where ye’re from, but, as y’know, it’s me that’s the magistrate here.”

Emerson wondered what an HMFWIC was. For some reason Altman seemed even more dubious about the idea than the boy himself. Neve
r
theless, after some thought, he nodded.
“Very well, Judge Brody.
I’ll go along with you—provisionally.”

“Done.”
Brody clapped his hands together once,
then
looked at his watch. “We’ll all meet at the Nimrod in two hours. That’ll just give me an’ mine a chance to tidy up a bit.”

He winked at Emerson.

Emerson suddenly felt very cold.

For any twentieth-century American who’d been paying attention at all, the phrase “criminal justice system” should have been warning enough.

—William Wilde Curringer,
Unfinished Memoirs

T
hey took his gun at the door.

The Senator and his enforcers had climbed back aboard their rollabout after reaching an agreement with Brody and returned to Curringer. When the time arrived, two hours later, Emerson and Gretchen, along with her mother and the other boarders, had walked into town, fully armed and in their best clothes. Emerson wore a stiff woolen suit of Horatio Singh’s which the widow had been threatening to cut down for him.

It was clear that news of Emerson’s plight and the Chief Administr
a
tor’s mission had spread by word of mouth; there had been nothing said about it on the radio Emerson had listened to while he’d waited. Altman and his party weren’t popular. People had gathered in knots along both sides of the street, muttering to each other and watching the rollabout. For his part, the Senator, perhaps wisely considering how well armed these hostile observers happened to be, had kept himself and his own people securely buttoned up inside the vehicle.

Emerson wasn’t certain how fair and impartial this hearing would be, but decided, pragmatically, that since Pallas in general and its magistrate in particular appeared to be siding with him, he didn’t care. Fair and impartial were one thing, admirable in
themselves
as far as that went. What was
right
was something altogether different. As he and his co
m
panions passed through the middle of Curringer—gathering well-wishers and spectators along the way—Brody, who’d apparently been off somewhere on an errand of his own, met them on his way back to the Nimrod, escorted them inside, and helped them dispose of their guns.

“Hand ’em over t’young Tyr,” he grinned. “They’ll be taken care of.”

There was something much like sawdust on the floor. The building’s construction of long, narrow, folded strips of plastic-coated sheet steel gave an impression of wooden planks. Mrs. Singh mumbled under her
breath but complied, glaring at Brody’s assistant as he hung her gunbelt on the tines of a set of elk antlers which had frightened and disgusted Emerson the first time he’d set foot in the Nimrod. Now they merely seemed a part of the wall, along with a boar’s head, a stuffed trout, a jackelope—the product of some whimsical Wyoming taxidermist, he’d been told—and other trophies of the hunt.

Only then did he and Gretchen follow her example, and in no better humor—which was expected and allowed for. Outside the Project, Pa
l
latians would tolerate a demand that they disarm themselves only in s
a
loons and courtrooms, which, in Curringer, happened to be the same. Many maintained that even this was too much restraint on the rights of the individual and therefore set a dangerous precedent.

Although the bar itself was closed in anticipation of the hearing, the room was half full of customers, as it always seemed to be whether liquor was being served or not. Several of the girls from Galena’s had taken a table toward the back of the room and sat around it in their working clothes—consisting mostly of brief swatches of bright colors and satiny finishes—laughing, giggling, and commenting in loud whispers on the scene about them. As he squeezed past their table, one of them, a little blond hardly older than himself, eyed him speculatively. Her golden hair was frothy, he thought, rather than curly, and hovered about her head like a pale cloud. She winked at him.

He averted his eyes and blushed.

The Nimrod happened to be the principal social gathering-spot in Curringer only indirectly because it was a bar. Many theories had been offered over the years to explain it, but no one knew why the personal use of alcohol—another of agriculture’s dubious gifts—had been diminishing on the asteroid almost since terraformation. Possibly the requirement that they do their drinking in a state most regarded as nakedness had som
e
thing to do with it, although that failed to account for those seated here with softdrinks before them, their guns hanging on the wall with Eme
r
son’s and Gretchen’s and Mrs. Singh’s.

The widow maintained that there was no mystery to it at all. Before the fall of the Soviet Empire, she pointed out, the alcoholism rate in Moscow
had been estimated at sixty percent, and liver disease had been a principal cause of death in European welfare states from Sweden to France. D
e
prive a people of what they worked so hard to earn and you deprive them of hope. Deprive them of hope and almost automatically they look to the bottle. In the old United States, where the IRS Code had supplanted the Bill of Rights to become the highest law of the land and Americans were intimidated into forking over half of what they earned, drunk drivers killed the population equivalent of a medium-sized town every year.

In the absence of any more acceptable explanation, the proprietors of establishments like the Nimrod had been compelled to diversify the number and variety of services they offered the public. One saloon, the Surly Snail, served as the town’s post office. Another, His Master’s Voice, centered on the radio station Emerson had listened to clandestinely in his cavelet at the Project. And the Nimrod, of course, was the bailiwick of His Honor, Aloysius Brody.

Just because Emerson’s weapon was no longer on his hip didn’t ne
c
essarily mean it had to be out of sight; in fact, some special measures had been taken to assure it wasn’t. As he’d entered the Nimrod and surre
n
dered his belt, he watched it being hung on a back wall behind a waist-high rail along with those handed over by all who had preceded and followed him in. With Mrs. Singh and her daughter, he took a table in the center of the room where he could keep an eye on his gun. New as he was to the Outside, he was suddenly aware that he agreed with the cranky, rugged individualists, most of them being among the oldest, earliest a
r
rivals on the asteroid, who complained about this custom. Whatever he did, calm or angry, drunk or sober (in fact he had never had an alcoholic drink, in this place or any other), was his own responsibility, and that—his responsibility—was what he suddenly felt deprived of.

He didn’t like it.

The Altman party, including the Senator’s hostile-faced, evil-eyed son and Emerson’s mother and father—both looking very subdued (whether it was Altman’s presence, the current circumstances, or they’d always been that way and he’d never noticed it before, he couldn’t guess and didn’t want to—entered the room and sat down well toward the back,
where he had to look past them as well as the little blond from Galena’s, to check on his weapon.

He liked that even less.

“Very well,” Brody announced to the room, taking his place at a corner table where he customarily held forth whether court was in session or not. “Let’s be after startin’ this proper. We’ve strangers among us who don’t know how we do things, so if nobody objects, or even if they do, I’ll be takin’ time to explain as we go along.”

He produced a battered gavel from somewhere on his person and rapped on a tabletop much scarred from such abuse. “First off, the Cu
r
ringer Trust, in which all Pallatians are shareholders under provisions of the Hyperdemocratic Covenant, is all the government Pallas has or wants or needs. Its only responsibility is t’maintain the atmospheric envelope over our heads. Every manner of dispute, even those held elsewhere t’be of a criminal nature—providin’, of course, the criminal has survived the initial encounter—are settled by professional intermediaries like meself as civil procedures, where the idea of restitution, rather than punishment or ‘rehabilitation,’ is the accepted custom.”

Brody glanced around the room.

“That understood
,
we’re here today in the matter of Gibson Altman, Chief Administrator of the Greeley Utopian Memorial Project, an inh
a
bitant of the asteroid Pallas within the meanin’ of the Hyperdemocratic Covenant, versus Emerson Ngu, also an inhabitant of Pallas within the meanin’ of the Covenant. It’s me duty to inform y’both that the arbiter, meanin’ meself, may be supplemented, should either party insist, by a jury of individuals fully informed as to their thousand-year-old obligation t’weigh the law itself, as well as the facts of the case.”

He paused, as if formally awaiting an answer from each of them. Emerson didn’t know what was customary or expected of him. He got along with most of the people of Curringer comfortably enough, and they seemed to like him, as well, but he didn’t believe that his fate could be in better hands than it already was.

Before he could compose an answer, the Senator arose and spoke from the back of the room. “Your Honor, I’m somewhat concerned that any
jury we choose—as well as you yourself, Your Honor—will necessarily be personally acquainted with this child, who, in any case, is legally disqualified by his age to be a parry in any proceeding such as this. N
a
turally, I intend no offense.”

Brody smiled. “An’ none taken, considerin’ that there’s no alternative in a town this size.
As t’Mr.
Ngu’s age an’ qualifications, that remains t’be settled.”

Altman nodded amiably. “I’m sure we can rely on you, Your Honor, to do what’s right in this affair. It’s an open and shut matter, really, once you understand that—”

Brody raised both hands to make erasing motions with them as he shook his head. “And we’ll be after makin’ it all clear soon enough, Senator darlin’. In the meantime, I must hear from the other party, as well.” He shifted his gaze to the middle of the room and to Emerson. “How about it, Mr.
Ngu
, d’ye want me t’judge this case, or do ye want a jury of twelve good men an’ women tried an’ true?”

Emerson swallowed and rose. “I’d prefer that you be the judge, Mr. Brody.”

“I thank y’both very kindly for yer confidence in me. Now
y’may state
your case, Senator Altman. I understand that y’want this young fellow handed over t’be returned to the Ant—I mean, the Greeley Utopian Memorial Project, is that correct?”

Like most of the other people in the now-crowded room, Emerson had to strain his neck in order to turn and watch as the Senator, still standing, replied. Aware of the attention and not entirely comfortable with it, Altman cleared his throat.

“Your Honor, the truth is that I’m here primarily to represent this child’s parents, who—”

“Well get to them directly,” Brody interrupted, betraying a trace of irritation. “An’ I suggest fer best results that y’try representin’ yerself, Senator, an’ nobody else, since, one way or another, most of the people on this asteroid came here in the first place to escape a planetful of lawyers an’ their bloody handiwork. In the meantime, have I not stated what y’want correctly?”

The Senator was obviously suppressing annoyance himself. “Esse
n
tially,
Your
Honor.”

Brody nodded. “Now that we understand each other a little better, will y’kindly be after explainin’ why I should allow such a thing when it’s clearly against his will?”

“For two reasons, actually, Your Honor,” replied Altman, “either of which ought to be sufficient in
itself
, since they’re both inarguably true and speak to long and well-established precedents under the law. In the first place, this child is well under the legal age traditionally prescribed for personal autonomy.”

A low, grumbling noise arose among the onlookers. Emerson couldn’t tell whether it represented disapproval of Altman’s claims, and therefore the public support he’d expected, or whether the people around him were now reconsidering their position.