Variable Star

10

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 smaller 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 to claim your names were actually Corey Trevor and 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.

Richie couldn’t believe his luck. “That’s it?”

She cleared her throat meaningfully, and his grin vanished. “I would be considerably harsher,” she assured him. “But the Sheffield’s Senior Healer, Dr. Lewis, has advised me that she considers moderate recreational use of happy hour acceptable on this voyage, and the Captain concurs. Neither of you knew that when you approached Mr. Johnston—but it was a fact all the same. You have narrowly escaped serious sanctions. Consider yourselves lucky that camera’s microphone did not malfunction.”

“We do. Thank you, Your Honor,” Jules said at once. “Let’s go, Rich.”

They both got up and left the frame, and a few seconds later, the door I was facing dilated, and they both came out together, accompanied by Lahey, their potbellied Advocate. They were striving hugely, and without much success, to suppress grins big enough to frighten a hired killer or even a real estate agent. When they saw me, their grins did not falter, just became more wolflike somehow. “Hey, Farmer Brown,” Richie called. “Knock knock.”

I was so confused and demoralized I played along. “Who’s there?”

“A fucked-in-the-head dipshit with manure on his shoes who goes around punching people ’cause he doesn’t know his ass from his elmo,” he said triumphantly.

I opened my mouth… but if there is a comeback to that remark, I still don’t know what it is.

“Good luck in there, arsehole,” Jules said, and took a sip of his ever-present drink. “Come on, Rich, let’s go.” They both walked boldly through us, making us step out of their way, and left through the door behind us.

“You have your lines?” Solomon asked again.

I started, and patted my breast pocket. “Damn. I should have studied them—”

“Too late now,” he said. “Let’s go.”

I soon found myself in a surprisingly comfortable chair, facing The Three Bears.

To the left sat Coordinator Grossman. She wasn’t that big, physically. But she was a little bigger than the human average in all dimensions—and more important she was one of those larger-than-life people who can dominate any room she cares to. Right now she was just observing, but she was doing even that with gusto, with appreciation, hoping I would prove entertaining.

Directly ahead of me was Middle Size Bear, Magistrate Will, average height and mass. On the monitor outside her eyes had seemed skeptical. Now they were more… knowing. Mothers always know what you’re thinking, I’ve been told. Until you reach a certain age, anyway. Apparently I hadn’t reached it. I was glad there was a third bear because it gave me a reason to pull my eyes away from hers—

—and then was sorry I had. Littlest Bear, Lieutenant Bruce, was really more of a bantam rooster. Most small men learn to deal with it, but if they get picked on enough, early enough, sometimes they never do get over it. He was permanently pissed off at everyone. And me he was allowed to be pissed at. I tried not to look, and failed, and sure enough, his feet did not quite reach the floor, even with the lifts he was wearing. And he caught me looking.

“Good afternoon, Joel,” Dr. Will said.

I turned back to her and opened my mouth, and only then realized that every molecule of moisture in my oral tract had gone someplace else. I made a faint croaking sound. Solomon said, “Good afternoon, Doctor,” and gestured to someone outside my peripheral vision,

“You speak for Citizen Johnston, Dr. Short?” Lieutenant Bruce asked, surprised.

“Yes, Third Officer.”

A bottle of water was put before me. Once again, I was glad—but only momentarily. The instant the first sip touched my lips, I suddenly knew exactly where all that missing moisture had gone to, where all the moisture in my body had gone to.

Use of his honorific had pleased Lieutenant Bruce. “Do you mind if I ask why, Dr. Short?”

“He plays the saxophone, sir.”

This response clearly baffled Bruce. He wanted to find it contemptible—but even he couldn’t be contemptuous of a Relativist.

Dr. Will cut in, and again it was one of those glad-but-only-for-a-second deals, because with her first words, I realized she was speaking in courtroom tones. “Joel, we’re here to adjudicate the events that occurred in your quarters earlier this afternoon. First we will establish what facts we can. You will have an opportunity to explain, interpret, argue, or rebut, afterward, but please reserve your comments if any until we’ve finished examining the record. The Sheffield’s AI began saving 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 harmony which occurs several seconds in—”

Oh, shit, here we go, I thought. Okay, okay: when it gets to the crucial point in the playback, they’ll all hear how close it sounded like “poppy flower.” They’ll see how it was an honest mistake.

The playback began on the monitor before me, with a peripheral echo over on Prosecutor Dooley’s table.

And of course they’ll agree that if somebody had been trying to peddle poppy products in a small society like this one, they should have been spaced. Anybody might take a poke at guys like that, before getting control of their emotions.

Reluctantly I admitted to myself that onscreen, they did not look particularly like villains. They looked like idiots—somehow still optimistic enough to think they might put one over on The Man despite a consistent record of failure. Worse, they were clearly harmless idiots, not nearly as menacing as I remembered them.

Richie said his High Japonics line again, and Sol brayed with laughter, even though he’d heard it already, outside in the anteroom.

Then the recording reached the point at which I’d heard “poppy flower,” and what Jules said onscreen now sounded nothing at all like “poppy flower,” it was clearly and unambiguously “happy hour,” and nothing else.

And then nothing that followed was as I remembered it. I watched in growing dismay at what resembled nothing so much as a performance by an ancient comedy team called The Three Stooges.

I did not land a single punch. Nobody did. I was the only one who even tried very hard.

The me onscreen cussed Richie and Jules out, and told them to get out of his room or he’d call a proctor. Richie jumped up indignantly, shouting, “Hey, fuck that, I’m on probation, okay!” He put a hand on my shoulder—to turn me around to face him, so he could argue more effectively; it was quite clear he wasn’t attempting a sucker punch. And I tried to spin on my heel and punch his face in. And tripped over my own feet and missed by a kilometer and fell heavily into him, staggering him a little. And behind me, Jules tried to step forward and pull me back by the collar, except the place he planned to put his foot turned out to be full of my tangled ankles, so he tripped and fell into me. That tipped Richie the rest of the way over backward, and we all crashed onto Pat’s bunk together, tearing it right out of the wall and dropping us to the deck. Richie and I both got the breath knocked completely out of us, but Jules was able to rise far enough to reach a musclebound arm up and grab hold of my bunk, which promptly also tore out of the wall and whacked him hard enough on the head to knock him cold. It drove his head forward and down, so it slid off the front of his head, and landed edge-on on the middle of Richie’s contorted face, smoothing it out completely, at just about the same instant that Jules’s kneecaps impacted both of my kidneys. Then it fell over onto the back of my head, and Jules’s face landed on it. And then we all were very quiet and still…

“Do you wish to see the recording again, Joel?” Dr. Will asked.

My mouth had once again become dry as a balance sheet. I shook my head no, reached for my water, and allowed myself the tiniest possible sip.

“Is there anything you wish to say on behalf of the colony, Prosecutor Dooley?”

“No, Doctor. I believe what we’ve seen twice now speaks for itself.”

“It certainly does,” Bruce muttered sotto voce.

“Joel, if there is anything you would like to say, now is the time.”

Oh. Oh. I was ready for this one. Thank you, Pat! I fumbled at my pocket, took out my lines, tried to unfold the paper under the table unobtrusively, so it wouldn’t be totally obvious I was using a crib sheet.

And when I had it open, the damned thing was blank.

I looked at Sol. Sol looked back at me. I looked down at that piece of paper. Then I looked back up at the judge and shook my head no.

She merely nodded, but her mouth changed slightly in a way that gave me the impression my response pleased her for some reason. “Anything to add, Advocate Short?”

“Yes, Doctor,” Sol said. He tapped a few keys on the table’s terminal. “You will all find my representation before you. It speaks to certain facts and circumstances which I hope you will agree are mitigational in this matter.”

As all three looked down at their screens and began to read, I looked at ours, but it was blank. I looked at Sol. Sol looked back at me. I faced forward and waited.

“I see,” Magistrate Will said after a few moments. “Thank you, Advocate.”

Coordinator Grossman was next to finish reading; she sat back, turned her head five degrees to the right, and studied me, frowning slightly.

When Bruce spoke, there was something odd about his voice. “You appear to have been under a great deal of stress lately, Colonist.” It took me a moment to identify the subtle change in his tone. He was addressing me with respect. It confused me so much, the interval into which I could have inserted a response passed before I could think of one.

Dr. Will polled her companions by eye. There was some brief silent communication I didn’t get. “Very well,” she said then, and fixed me with an eagle’s remorseless gaze. “Citizen Joel Johnston, physical violence aboard this ship is intolerable. You have damaged fellow citizens and colony property without cause. Examination suggests that you may have done so because of situational emotional imbalance, and possibly perceptual error, rather than from an unhealthy belief that you are entitled to correct the moral lapses of your fellow citizens with assault. Therefore, this matter will be held in abeyance indefinitely. You will not be required to accept remedial neurochemistry at this time. You are released in your own recognizance, on the conditions that, first, you enter treatment immediately, and satisfy all requirements of your chosen Healer to the best of your ability, and second, you either make peace with Transportees Bent and Rafuse, or mutually file a standard hundred-meter restraining order. In addition you are fined their medical expenses, and the cost of materials for repairing the physical damage to your quarters.”

“Do you understand all that, Joel?” Grossman asked. Her voice was deep, raspy, kindly. “Settle the score, bury the hatchet, do as your Healer tells you, this all goes away and you get to keep on being who you are right now. Otherwise your brain chemistry gets readjusted until you’re fit to live with people. It’s our only choice, I’m afraid: we have no Coventry aboard.”

I stood there listening to the blood in my ears until Bruce said, “Is there anything you wish to say for the record, Citizen Johnston?”

I looked at Sol. Sol looked back at me. I looked down at my crib sheet, and it was still blank. I looked up at the panel, and found that there was enough moisture in my mouth to permit speech, and that decided me.

I said, “Thank you,” to Magistrate Will, and “Very much,” to Coordinator Grossman, and “All of you,” to Third Officer Bruce.

All three gave the same inclined nod of polite acknowledgment. All three stood up. So did Sol. So did Prosecutor Dooley. So, finally, did I.

“Hot jets, Citizen,” Dr. Will said formally.

“C-clear skies,” I responded automatically, but she had already spun on her heel and left, followed by her fellow panelists.

I turned to Sol, and found him beaming at me. “Some people are really hard to drag to a shrink,” he said. Then his expression changed slightly. “Whoa, now. Okay. Let’s sit down and have a nice drink of water. That’s better. Now a nice deep breath. Hold it for a moment. That’s it. Let it out. Wait. Deep breath again. Hold. Release. Hold. You’ve got it. A little longer each time.” The breathing thing was very hard to do, but soon it did start to clear my head a little. My heart was pumping a klick a sec. I felt like I was on the Upper Farm Deck: the temperature seemed to have shot up five degrees. I was pouring with fresh sweat from head to toe.

“Idiot,” Sol said, shaking his head. “Before, you sweat.”

“I don’t know why I hadn’t figured it out for myself, but I hadn’t,” I said. “I’m usually much quicker on the uptake, but it never occurred to me I was in danger of being put on neuromeds until she said I wasn’t anymore. It’s kind of a phobia of mine, having my personality altered by someone else. You probably think Ganymedeans are backward primitives in that regard, but—”

“It is precisely because I share your unconventional horror that I chose to act as your Advocate.”

“Sol—”

“Don’t thank me until you hear my fee. I want a new composition. It has to be at least fifteen minutes long. It can have anything you want in it as long as there’s a lot of sax, baritone. Theme, style, tempo, key—all up to you. And it has to have my name in the title. You have until we reach our destination.”

I looked at his goofy kindly smile for a long moment. “Sold,” I said finally. “Thank you, Solomon.”

“Don’t forget to thank Pat for writing your speech. You delivered it eloquently. I might almost say movingly.”

“I won’t. Which one of you put the other up to this?”

He was gone like the Cheshire Cat, leaving behind only a ghost of his dopey grin.