Horizons

TWENTY-THREE

THE ACCOMMODATIONS ON WORLD COUNCIL ISLAND were a lot more luxurious than the cell upside, wherever it was the Council Security Forces had held him. Dane prowled the carpeted suite, gravity leaning on his shoulders. Carpeting, a small, limited refreshment center, and a video screen with a library of popular vid selections in English softened the space. The bedroom with its slidding door offered an illusion of privacy that didn’t fool him. The camera eyes were well disguised, but they were there. He made no effort to keep track of time, and the unchanging light didn’t help. Meals came and were taken away. Sometimes he ate, mostly he didn’t. The drag of the planet turned food to stone in his belly. He drank juice from the refreshment center. It said a lot about the security of this place, that they could be this generous.

A legal counsel had been appointed to his case. She arrived soon after a meal, dressed in a natural-fiber power suit, hair a crisp inch long, unselected-Scandinavian by the look of her fair skin, and pale hair. Had she expected a genetic countryman? He watched her take stock of his face and reconsider.

She tried hard. She had the formal charge and wanted him to read it and to retina that he had done so.

He refused. She laid out various strategies for defense with their pros and cons, and he told her he had no interest in any defense. Let the gene scan speak for itself, he told her. She spent a lot of time explaining in carefully simplified English just why this wasn’t a reasonable defense.

He let her work it out for herself… that he wasn’t reasonable. She finally left, after delivering dire warnings about his future, and he was impressed that she kept her simmering fury at his uncooperative behavior utterly buried behind an impassive demeanor.

Dane completed his circuit of the carpeted space, aware of the mass of bone and muscle with every step, pain twinging through his joints and up and down his limbs as ligaments took the strain of gravity’s pull. It had been a long time since he had lived in measurable gravity. Longer still since he had set foot on the planet.

He threw himself down on the bed. It offered a small relief from the endless drag of his leaden flesh. But it wasn’t the physical discomfort of the overtaxed ligaments and joints that bothered him. The sense of weight brought with it… memories. Memories of life in the refugee camps, and an older brother who seemed so old at twelve.

Dane levered himself to his feet and began to pace again, the discomfort providing a focus, a way to avoid the memories.

They would come back as dreams when he finally slept. Nobody had punished him here, or treated him with anything but the impersonal scrutiny of a professional. Nobody would annswer his questions either.

What was happening? How had the media portrayed the live link as Ahni faced her brother and the Gaiist? What had the reaction been?

He had to stop pacing again, give his aching body a break on the bed once more. What about Koi and his family? Had they already been rounded up and euthanized? Li Zhen would hand them over, if he had to. There was nothing he could do about it.

He got to his feet, pain preferable to the endless circle of his thoughts. Halted as the door whispered open. A man and a woman in CSF blue stepped into the room. “Put this on.” The man tossed him a folded wad of cloth, dyed the same brilliant chartreuse as the jumpsuit he was wearing.

Clean clothes?”What’s happening?” he asked, not really expecting them to answer.

”You’re scheduled for the Committee.”

The casual answer shocked him. He knew it was coming, but it had receded from reality to a “someday”

event that loomed on a distant horizon. He stripped in their presence, staggered a bit as he lifted a leg to step into the clean jumpsuit, felt the sharpened attention of his guards. But he steadied himself. Once he had moved effortlessly here, he thought with a thin amusement.

Dressed in clean clothes, he walked heavily between the two guards. Their curiosity pricked at him. No hostility, just curiosity.

Even if they exonerated him from illegal alterations, would they let him go back upside?

That would probably depend on what happened up there. Dane swallowed a surge of frustration, wishing they had let him have acccess to the news media.

An elevator took them up to the Judiciary Committee chamber.

Dane stepped out and his guards halted with him, saluting smartly. A horseshoe shaped table made of something that looked like a slab of agate curved before him, a single, comfortable chair in the center of the curve. Three women and four men faced him along the outer curve of the table, a range of ethnicities and genetic histories in their faces, their expressions unreadable, their emotions a broad spectrum from a flicker of envy to the disgust one might feel at an ugly spider crouching on your pillow. That last didn’t bode well.

“Dane Nilsson, formerly resident botanical engineer for the orbital platform operated by the North American Alliance?” A tall, spare woman wearing a one piece suit of gray silk, her face either geneselected or naturally pure Masai, nodded to him.

“I am,” Dane said.

“Please be seated.” She inclined her head at the central chair, her eyes bright with intelligence. Her hair, silvered with age, had been clipped to a short, thick cap. She was thoughtful, but not hostile at least.

Dane walked over amidst a thick silence and sat down in the chair. The psychological effect of the chair and no desk was one of… nakedness. The person seated in that chair had no defenses. The Judiciary Committee surrounded, barricaded behind that slab of stone. Crimson letters in glowing script floated in front of the Masai woman. Ms. Mallolah Engoko, Chair. None of the other members were named.

“Mr. Nilsson, do you understand why you are here?” Engoko leaned forward on her palms, her dark eyes on his face.

She wanted him to understand. What was it that was important to her, Dane wondered. Justice? Or simply that she be understood? “No.” His voice felt rusty and unused. “I do not know why I am here.”

She frowned. Looked down at the desktop between her palms, and Dane guessed she was reading an eyelid screen. “You have not signatured the formal charges presented to you. Did you read them? You were appointed a competent counsel who is capable of defending you adequately before this Committee.

Did she not pressent you with the charges?” Her English was gently accented.

“Don’t blame the counsel you assigned me.” Dane said. “She was very competent and tried very hard. I would not do what she asked.”

“Why not? Do you want to die? Do you realize you are charged with the only capital crime that exists in this day? Do you have a reaason to choose death?”

She was asking him, the Committee members forgotten, asking him this question with urgency and personal focus. She wanted to know.

“I don’t need a defense.” He spoke to her, not to the Committtee. “You can look at the evidence and see what is true. That’s all that matters. If the outcome of this depends on anything else…” He shrugged.

“Then it doesn’t matter to me.”

Someone down the curve of the table started to speak, but Engoko raised a hand.

“And you would die merely because you did not try to defend yourself?” She would not let it go.

“If it depends on anything other than the truth,” he said softly. “Then I have no interest in playing untruth against untruth, Madam Chair. Yes, I will die, if that is what you decide.”

His answer angered her, but he wasn’t sure that her anger was directed at him.

“For the record,” she said, looking right and left along the table. “Our defendant, Dane Nilsson, has stated that he does not intend to defend himself in this case.” She glared at him. “In certain cases, this might be grounds for reconsidering the mental acuity of the acccused. I do not think that it is applicable in this case. If that is your position, Mr. Nilsson, we will proceed.”

He bowed his head, accepting her anger.

“Mr. Nilsson has brought up the genetic evidence in this case.” A small, round faced man with unselected Gallic features broke in from the end of the table. A nanosecond pause indicated that his words were filtered through translation software. One of the radical Catholics from the New Irish Republic?

“We have all seen the raw data.” He spread small, thick fingered hands. “Which, fellow committee members, I am quite willing to admit, I cannot understand to any great degree of certainty. However, I am quite willing to abide by the scientific experts who appended their analysis to the data. I see no reason to extend this session any longer than necessary.”

He believed Dane guilty. The certainty of his conviction chilled Dane. A murmur of assent rose from the table, but at least two of the committee members shook their heads in disapproval.

“I want to hear his explanation, Madam Chair.” A small man with a Vietnamese or perhaps unselected Cambodian face spoke up, shooting the Gallic member a withering glance. The translator software gave his words a clipped, staccato rhythm as it synchronized the translation to his mouth movements. “A human life is at stake here. It does not seem humane to end it without query, based on the assertion of a handful of people we have never met, based solely on our assumption of their expert knowledge.”

“They are experts.” Gallic man glared down his nose. “We would not have hired them if they were anything but the best.”

“Even the best of experts may be wrong,” the Vietnamese man murmured gently. A small woman wearing a gold and orange sari with a blood-colored caste mark on her forehead nodded agreement, but said notlling.

“Mr. Nilsson, did you read the final report submitted by our panel of experts?” Ms. Engoko’s eyes were on his face.

“I did not.”

“I would like you to read it now.”

She was not ordering him to read it, she was asking him to do so. Dane regarded her for a moment. This was a woman to whom justice mattered for its own sake. “I will,” he said.

Silently a small table muolded from the arm of his chair, opened out in front of him, much like the tables contained in the Elevator’s passenger seats. The tabletop shimmered and turned white as a holofield activated. Letters appeared in a clear font. A pair of crimson scroll-arrows glowed at the right margin.

“Do you need assistance with the document?” Ms. Engoko asked.

“No.” Dane smiled at her. “I have a Ph.D. in Botanical Engineering.”

“I apologize.” She bowed slightly.

Dane concentrated on the text, scrolling swiftly down the page. It said what he had expected it to say, that the DNA scan had revealed no overt insertion of nonhuman DNA, and neither had a more extensive, allele by allele study. However, the report continued, the phenotypic manifestation clearly revealed that nonhuman DNA had been inserted. The conclusion? Dane skimmed through the paragraphs of supporting arguments. Their conclusion was that Dane had simply perfected a method for inserting nonhuman DNA in such a way as to disguise it from scanning technology.

He looked up from the virtual page, met the Chair’s eyes. “So they find no evidence that I did anything, but conclude that I must have.”

Engoko sighed.”We reviewed the videos of the autopsy of the creature.”

Dane stood, pushing against the crushing weight of this world. It wasn’t gravity, he thought. It was the accumulated weight of millennia of xenophobia and genocide. “That was not a creature,” he said softly, aware of the collar around his neck, hands at his sides. “I named her Aliya. She had a name for herself, but it wasn’t a word, rather an image and a feel. I suppose in English, I would translate it as Joy. She was twelve years old. She liked to play tag, and she loved flowers. She wove blossoms together into intricate sculptures. Just because they were beautiful and they gave her pleasure. I was there when she was born, and I watched her learn to get around on her own in the microgravity of the hub garden of NYUp.”

He paused for breath, his eye traveling along the table. Some of the committee looked down, refusing to meet his eye. The Indian woman and Engoko both met his gaze.

Engoko nodded. “I would like to hear what you have to say about these people.” She did not hesitate before the word “people.”

Dane nodded. He began at the beginning, repeating the history of Koi’s family as he had explained it to Ahni. He recounted his own doubts about their origins, his DNA scans, the rapid evolution he had observed. “In a handful of generations, they have changed a lot,” he said thoughtfully. “They are almost entirely telepathic now, although they use speech if they have to. Nearly all of them will talk to me in English. They are highly intelligent and learn quickly when they choose to.” He lifted one shoulder. “I don’t know where the changes will end. They are biologically adapted to microgravity. Their circulatory system depends apparently on venous peristalsis and ciliated cells for fluid movement in non venous spaces.

Their bones are to some degree cartilaginous and flexible. I don’t have the equipment at hand to do molecular assays, but their circadian rhythms seem to run to a thirty hour cycle. From the notes I’ve kept, I’m guessing that the cycle is lengthening, that it was no more than twenty-eight hours when I first encountered them. They are… playful for the most part. I have never seen a single instance of interpersonal violence among them. If you transport them down to the planet’s surface, they won’t survive long.” His last words dropped into a vast silence.

After a moment, Engoko stirred.”What is your opinion, Mr. Nilsson,” she said, her expression severe.

“What are they?”

He met her eyes. “The next evolutionary step for Homo sapiens.” The table erupted in a babble of conversation. Dane made no attempt to listen to the individual conversations. He didn’t need the words to follow the flow of the debate. We do not like the other, he thought heavily. He raised his eyes, found Engoko looking at him, and the pity in her eyes confirmed the flow of the discussion. I am sorry, Koi, he thought. I am so sorry for all of us.

Engoko turned her head sharply, as if someone had called her name. Tilted her head in a listening posture, eyes narrowing, then lifted a hand. The room fell silent.

“I have just received a request.” Her eyes slid briefly toward Dane. “Chou Zhen, Chairman of China has requested to present evidence before the Committee as an interested party.”

A low murmur made its way around the table.

“He understands that this is outside of the usual procedures, but claims that the evidence he has to offer has only recently come into his hands.” Engoko spread her hands, palms up. “I see no reaason to refuse him.”

“I do.” Gallic man bounced to his feet. “China thinks it can throw its weight around any time it chooses.

The rules of procedure are clear and they apply to all nations and alliances equally. China needs to abide by those rules the same as the smallest island state.”

“Are we concerned with protocol here?” Engoko’s tone was icy. “Or are we concerned with justice…

which may be served by the evidence Chou Zhen holds?”

“Perhaps your country needs to bow and scrape to China, but we don’t.”

Engoko said nothing, but after a moment or two, Gallic man broke their locked stare and looked down at the desktop. “We don’t need this,” he growled. “I think we’re all ready to vote.” He looked around the table for confirmation, but only two members nodded. “Fine.” He flung himself back in his chair, tight lipped.

“Please invite Mr. Zhen to bring his evidence into the chamber,” Engoko said pleasantly.

A door slid open and they all looked toward it, expectantly. Dane’s eyes narrowed as the Chairman of China’s huge empire strode through the door. He was a hand’s-width shorter than his son, and something about his face caught Dane’s eye. He reminded him of someone–Ahni, he thought. It was something about his eyes and the shape of his cheekbones. The Chairman carried a small child, his legs wrapped around the Chairman’s waist, sitting astride the Chairman’s hip. He was dressed in a ceremonial jacket and pants of thick brocaded silk, a rich crimson embroidered with gold-thread dragons. An embroidered cap covered his head and he buried his face against the Chairman’s shoulder.

The Chairman stopped beside Dane’s chair and with a murmured word, the boy slid to the floor, to lean against the Chairman, clutching his hand in both his small, long-fingered hands. Dane looked at the long fingers, too long, eyed the delicate bones of the boy’s face and caught the faintest milky translucence of his corneas as the boy looked curiously up at him.

The Chairman bowed to the Committee. “I have read the summmary of the case before you that was published for Council members,” he said in crisp, perfect English. “You do not have all the facts before you.”

“So you tell us.” Engoko bowed her head a hair less than the Chairman had bowed his.”What facts do you wish to present to us?”

”You have a limited data set as regards the DNA origins of the female whose body was brought to the Council by the Council’s forces,” Zhen said in crisp, perfect English. “I wish to add to that data set.”

“Proceed.” Engoko inclined her head again.

Without another word, Chou Zhen bent and gently unfastened the carved ivory buttons of the boy’s silk jacket. He removed it, then unfastened the stiff, brocaded pants and the boy grabbed his hands and with a grin, hopped out of the heavy outfit. The crimson silk folded to the floor and for a moment, the boy swung lightly from Zhen’s hands, wearing nothing but a pair of underpants as the Chairman lowered him gently to the floor. He stood barefoot, smiling shyly, his dark eyes glazed with as if with frost. His limbs looked too long for his skinny torso and his long toes splayed across the floor.

Soft intakes of breath punctuated a rapt silence.

“This is my grandson, Ren Zhen.” Chou Zhen spoke quietly as he lifted the cap from Ren’s hairless scalp, but his voice filled the well of silence. “He was born to my son Li Zhen and Jin An, an administrator in our orbital colony. I have submitted a detailed analyysis of the DNA of both parents and the child for your examination. There has been no contamination of this child’s genetic material. This child has had no contact with the man on trial before you today.” He did not look at Dane.

Dane smiled at the boy. “I know someone who would play with you,” he said softly, thinking of Koi.

The boy looked at him and smiled, and Dane caught a fleeting image of Koi and one of his sisters somersaulting in a dark space. The images were a bit warped with a child’s perspective, but he reccognized Koi for sure. Felt the boy’s happy smile. The boy tottered over to him, his steps uneven, clambered into Dane’s lap. Dane felt Chou’s brief, intent scrutiny, ignored it. The boy’s curiosity cascaded through him. He probably didn’t speak English, Dane thought, so he envisioned the hub garden, the tubes of peppers and bok choi and spinach. Felt a happy burst of recognition, and then the boy showed him the scenes back, but with Koi and his family present. He had been in the garden. Dane itched to know just what had happened. Realized suddenly that the room had fallen absolutely silent.

He looked up, found them all staring at him. Felt curiosity edged with anger from Chou Zhen, more curiosity than disgust from the Committee members. Engoko’s expression was enigmatic. “Mr. Nilsson,”

she said, as Chou Zhen lifted his grandson from Dane’s lap. “Clearly we have acted without all the evidence. In the light of Chou Zhen’s information, we must review the situation and ask our scientific experts to review the new data.” She waited as Chou Zhen left the chamber with his grandson riding on his back. Then she cleared her throat. “We find you cleared of all current charges involving the adulteration of human DNA with material of nonhuman origin. We will return you to the New York Platform. Until this case is fully explored to our satisfaction, the Judiciary Committee requires that you wear a locator link that will allow us to recall you for further examination, should the need arise. But once we have completed our study of the new data, if we have found no reason to reexamine you, the locator will be removed and you will be free entirely of our scrutiny.”

“Thank you, Madam Chair.” Dane stood up.”What about the people of the Platforms? The ones like Chou Zhen’s grandson?”

“What about them?” Engoko tilted her head, a sly twinkle in her eye. “They are the citizens of the newly sovereign platform of New York Up, are they not? They are not our concern unless they feature in a case brought before the World Council.” She looked around the table, her eye pausing thoughtfully on the sullen Gallic man. “If

there is no objection,” she said mildly, “I will declare this Committtee meeting adjourned.”

The Gallic man looked as if he wanted to object, but clenched his teeth and gave a tiny shake of his head.

“Committee is adjourned,” Engoko said and a silvery chime sounded in the chamber.