Variable Star (22 page)

I turned back to Jules. “Why don’t you tell me which flower you mean?”

He looked me in the eye. “Poppy flower, okay?”

I took in a deep breath, and then when I was done, I found more room in my chest somewhere and took in a lot more breath. “Get the hell out of my room before I call a proctor,” I said, loudly enough to use up a lot of it, and began exhaling the rest.

Jules didn’t move, or even wince. But Richie came up out of Bal’s chair like a boxer out of his corner, yelling something of his own—

—and then a whole lot of things happened too fast to grasp—

—and then a proctor with somebody’s blood on his tunic blouse was holding me gently but firmly by the upper arm, a really nice guy from the smile on him, and offering me a mood elevator. That sounded like a great idea; it was only after I let him put it under my tongue that I realized the elevator’s cables had been cut, by my anemones. It got exciting then for a few years, but fortunately the basement, when we reached it, turned out to be made out of marshmallow, and I decided it was safe to take a nap after all.

Not really.

I
walked
corridors for a million years. The same ones, for all I know. I didn’t mind. I wasn’t tired. I wasn’t even bored. Funny things kept happening as I walked. Silly-funny. A cat danced with a fire extinguisher. Doors grew phallic knobs, then dilated and swallowed them. The floor was furry beneath my bare feet, then grassy, then hard and cold as ice. A section of pale yellow wall started to melt like frozen urine from the heat of my passage—nothing odd there, but it ran
up
instead of down.
Less
than zero gee whiz. It started to collect overhead, but I ignored it and walked on. Goats sang harmony—in Rabbit rather than Goat, a ludicrous choice. A bubble began to keep station on me, ahead and to my left, and inside it grew a hobo, a lifesize headshot. It was Jinny—hundreds of years older. She smelled like fields of barley, light as flax. Her face was in ruins, beyond the power of even power to save. Her hair was still widely red, but often misunderstood. Her eyes were hazel, stoned, rolling. Then Ganymede devalued the debit, the economy went bad, and her bubble burst. Well, at least the goats finally got their butts out of their heads and started singing in Goat. I began to encounter members of a race of Easter Island statues, huge mouths gaping like Art Deco urinals, making fluttery sounds like pigeons as I went by.

Then one short one blocked my path, and turned into my roommate Pat. “Joel?” he asked me. I waited with interest to hear the answer, but it didn’t come. He asked if I could hear him, and after considering it, I said, “Sometimes.” A pigeon fluttered, and Pat said loudly, “Just a moment, please, Proctor,” and then softly, “Take this.” A piece of notepad paper, folded three times. He folded my fingers around it, used them to tuck it into my breast pocket. “A time will come for you to speak,” he said, very quietly, but with an unmistakable urgency that reached me in my fog. “When that time comes, say exactly what is on that piece of paper, and nothing else. You hear me, Joel? Say it back to me.”

I nodded. “When it’s time to talk, say what’s on the paper, just that.”

He nodded back. “Okay,” he said loudly, and was dissolved by the sudden strong tide that swept me forward. I remembered that I should have told him about his bunk being destroyed. Instead I tried to interest the goats in a strained pun about a farmer who cared for seven or eight goats, even though he never cared for chevon or ate goats. It shut them up, at least. I trudged on in comfortable silence until I came upon my mother. I knew her at once, and was delighted to learn what she looked like, how she moved, how she smelled. It was only when I saw the concern in her troubled eyes that I began to realize how much trouble I must be in. That made me dizzy, and I told her so. She said I could sit down, so I did, and by the time I realized she’d meant I should sit in some chair somewhere nearby it was way too late. My tailbone hit the floor with a crash, angering the floor so much it reared up and smacked me on the back of the head. It burst, like Jinny’s bubble had earlier, disintegrating me just as effectively.

I
was wide awake and clearheaded. I was in an absolutely anonymous cubic, a generic plasteel box of air, about the size of a small studio. Its only features were doors at opposite ends, generic chairs, and a monitor. I was seated on one of the chairs, facing one of the doors, the monitor on the wall to my right. Seated facing me was Solomon Short. Behind him was another man I did not know, who sat facing the monitor and seemed absorbed in it. My tailbone hurt, quite a bit, and so did the back of my head, but I did not mind much.

“Do you accept me as your Advocate, Joel?” Sol asked me.

I blinked. “Sure.”

“I understand Pat has given you your lines.”

I remembered what he must mean, and patted my pocket; the folded note was still there. “Yes.”

He nodded, and gestured to the monitor. “Stick to the script. Now pay attention to that.”

The screen showed a room larger than this one. At its far left, three people sat behind a long table on a short shallow stage. On the right three mailer tables faced the stage, with people seated at them, one at either end and two at the center table. They were the only ones I recognized: Richie and Jules. “Is this real-time?”

“Yes.”

Oh, fine: they got to tell their side first.

“Closest to us on the left,” Sol said, “is Coordinator Merril Grossman, representing the colony. Beyond her is Magistrate Eleanor Will, and after her is Lieutenant Frank Bruce, Third Officer, representing the crew. With me?”

“So far.”

“Good man. Nearest to us on the right of the screen is Prosecutor Arthur Dooley, representing the Covenant. Look him over carefully. I believe you’ve met the next two, transportees Butch and Sundance. Beyond them is their own Advocate, Counselor Randy Lahey.” He spoke over his shoulder. “Sound please, Tiger?”

The man addressed, a Japanese of great grace and dignity, lifted a remote control he hadn’t been holding a second ago, and turned up the volume on the scene we were watching.

Coordinator Grossman was speaking. “…chance to rebut or amend afterward before this recording is formally entered into evidence. Do you both understand?”

“Sure,” Richie said sullenly “If it’s bullshit, we can tell you after, I got it. Only I’ll tell you right now, it’s bullshit.”

His partner Jules threw him a glare. “We understand, Your Honor.” I noticed that his right hand, under the table, visible to the camera but not to the panel onstage, held a half-full drink.

Dr. Will, a striking slender brunette with skeptical eyes, spoke up in the formal tones of one reciting ritual for the record. “The
Sheffield
’s AI began this recording when one of you spoke one of its trigger phrases, ‘gray market.’ Under the terms of the Covenant, the recording was brought to official human attention only upon the observed commission of a breach of peace which occurs several seconds in. It is that breach with which I am primarily concerned today.”

I was delighted. If there was an audiovisual record of what had occurred, I had nothing to worry about—and Jules was going to need whatever he had in that glass he was always holding. I could remember everything that had happened, very clearly. Well, clearly. Clearly enough. The broad outlines at least.

Let’s see now. Richie and Jules had confessed that they were trying to recruit me into a conspiracy to traffic in heroin, or morphine, or possibly opium. Any of the three was an offense not merely detainable but serious enough to get one sent to Coventry…in jurisdictions where one existed. On a starship, for all I knew it was a spacing offense. Naturally I had been angry and afraid. I had asked them to leave my cubic, and had been ignored. When I tried to urge Jules toward the door with a hand on his shoulder, Richie had abruptly attacked me. Releasing a lot of my own pent-up frustration, I had admittedly overresponded a bit, knocked him all the way across the room—back onto my own bed, destroying it. Then Jules had sucker-punched me from behind, and we’d all ended up entangled on the deck, where I’d managed to keep them both restrained until the proctors arrived.

Yep—that was everything. I realized it was a bit unusual for someone of my size, mass, and background to make such easy work of huge bruisers like those two, so I was glad to know a visual record existed to back up my account.

“
Sheffield
, please begin playback.”

“Yes, Magistrate,” the ship said.

I settled back to watch myself in action.

…“
gray-market
,” Jules’s recorded voice said.

“
How gray
?” I heard myself ask after a pause that now seemed to me incriminatingly long.

“Just
barely beige
,” Richie answered. “
It only gets black for a day or so right at the end. Up until then it’s mostly gray, and some green. Tell him, Jules—
”

That’s odd, I thought. Poppies aren’t black at any part of their life cycle. Or gray, or beige. I’d grown them for the Lermer City Hospital, back on Ganymede. They’re extremely colorful flowers, which ultimately yield a white or pale yellow seed pod that oozes a white sap. How could a drug dealer know less about his product than I did? Or was Richie simply talking through his ass?

I glanced at Sol when Richie’s “High Japonics” line came, expecting to share at least a grin if not a chuckle. I was sure it would delight him. He didn’t crack a smile.

Solomon short failing to find humor in a situation was so out of character, I was still puzzling over it when I suddenly realized the crux of the whole matter was approaching, and resumed paying close attention. Here came the sentence that would exculpate me. My heroic battle scene would not be far behind.

Richie’s voice blathered something about his grade ten. My own voice asked Jules, “
Why don’t you tell me which flower you mean
?”

Here it came—

“
Happy Hour
,” Jules said.

My jaw fell. I was so shocked, I stopped paying attention to the events unfolding onscreen. Someone had to have altered the recording!

“Sol—” I cried.

“Shush,” he said loudly and firmly. “Reserve your questions and observations.”

“But damn it, he said—”

“Pipe down, I said!”

Damn it to hell, he’d said
poppy flower
, not
happy hour
.

Developed in one of the L-5s—all of them publicly disavowed blame and all of them privately claimed credit—Happy Hour was a flower whose leaves contained a mildly entheogenic alkaloid just slightly stronger than marijuana in effect, and no more habituating. It was about the opposite end of the spectrum from opium poppies. It just barely qualified as a restricted drug on Terra, and there were jurisdictions—among them Ganymede—where its use was legal. I had no idea what the
Sheffield
’s policy on it might be. There were shouts and other loud noises from onscreen, but I was oblivious, aghast at this unexpected turn of events, trying to reconcile the impossible. The only rational explanation was that someone, somewhere, somehow, had been able to corrupt the
Sheffield
’s AI. If so, I was about as screwed as screwed could be. I began to panic. “Sol, you have to listen to me!”

“I know,” he agreed, eyes on the screen. “Isn’t it terrible?”

“But I—”

“Don’t call
me
Butt-Eye,” he said, and used the remote to raise the volume enough to drown me out.

It wasn’t easy. The fistfight playback had finished while I was distracted, and the sole audio output now was the soft voice of the magistrate. But Sol mashed down on that volume-up button, and only backed it off when I resumed paying attention to the screen.

And found Dr. Will in mid-lecture, a more-in-sorrow-than-in-contempt tone in her voice. “—even mention your ridiculous attempts claim your names were actually Corey Trevor Jay Rock.”

“I told you, it was a fuckin’ reflex—” Richie said off-camera.

“However,” she went on determinedly, “this court does take notice of your special request regarding language, and reluctantly agrees with your argument that for you to defend yourself adequately you must be allowed to use your own natural idiom. To require you to use my vocabulary would be a distraction roughly equivalent to you asking me to speak to you freely and eloquently…without ever using any words that contain the letter ‘t.’ I rule that you—
only
you—may use profanity in my court.”

“Wow. Thanks, Your Magistrate, that’s really fuckin’ awesome.”

“Richie,” Jules began.

“Well, it is,” Richie said. “Okay, so you saw it. That dick got all pissy for no reason, and started talking about proctors and shit. Well, I’m already on probation, like you pointed out before, and who’s a proctor gonna listen to, me or some citizen? So I got mad and told him he was being an asshole, ’cause he was. And what does he do? He punches me in the face!”

No. That wasn’t possible.
Surely
I hadn’t—

Dr. Will said, “At that point, a proctor would have seen your face and his knuckles and believed you. Why didn’t you call one?”

“Well, I would’ve got
around
to it,” he said defensively “I was kind of fuckin’ busy just then.”

“Busy whacking him,” Jules muttered.

“I was trying to, like, knock his punches aside,” Richie insisted. “So I kept missing. Big fuckin’ deal. What am I, a boxer? Anyway Your Wordship, my point is, after that the whole thing kind of got out of hand and nothing that happened was really anybody’s fault, and the stuff that
was
somebody’s fault wasn’t really, so much, because all of us were full of shit, so what I say is, why don’t we let water under the bridge lay where Jesus flang it, and just forget the whole thing? That’s fair.”

Jules said, “I hate to admit it, but he’s right, Your Honor. It’s a wash. No harm, no foul.”

Dr. Will sat breathing through her nose for a while, looking at the pair of them. Finally she said, “Here is my judgment. You will both apologize to Mr. Johnston for invading his privacy, disturbing his harmony, and ruining his furniture. You will repair the damage yourselves. For the next month you will each be confined to your quarters whenever you are not either working or eating.” She closed a folder that lay before her.