there were Zabarans present, who have particular concerns regarding privacy, he switched off his recording device before entering the room.”
“If we can prove that they were all working for Amara Guur,” I said, hopefully, “that would surely be evidence of a conspiracy.”
“Can we prove that, Mr. Rousseau?” asked 238-Zenatta, skeptically. I couldn’t blame him. Whether he believed me or not—and I was pretty certain that he didn’t—his chances of finding any evidence of a formal contract of employment between any of the five fatal witnesses and our unfriendly neighborhood crime-lord were a bit slim.
“Can we prove that they dosed me with the alcohol after I was unconscious?” I asked.
“Perhaps, if a sufficiently thorough medical examination were carried out,” he said, even more skeptically. “But it would be severely detrimental to our best defense if we did.”
“I’m not going to admit to killing the Sleath,” I told him, flatly. “Diminished responsibility is not an option. I’m not guilty, and that’s the way I’m going to plead. Whether anyone believes me or not, I’m going to tell the court the truth.”
“I fear, Mr. Rousseau, that the court might not approve of that strategy,” the lawyer said. “It might well seem to the court that you are adding a manifest slander to the burden of your culpability. You would be asking the court to believe that someone would go to extraordinary lengths to obtain your participation in a perfectly ordinary expedition. There are hundreds of people in Skychain City who have skills similar to yours, Mr. Rousseau, many of whom are desperate for employment. Why would Amara Guur, or Heleb, or anyone else, commit murder in order to obtain your services, when they could hire a person of almost equal capability for little more than half the wage that Heleb offered you in your apartment?”
Put like that, it did seem impossibly weird. Obviously, I considered myself the best of the best when it came to pioneering the trackless wilderness, but I could see how other people might find it difficult to agree with me. After all, I’d never actually made the big strike for which I felt myself destined. I was so poor, in fact, that if I really had thought that I could finance my next expedition by running a crooked card-school, I might very well have tried it.
I looked at 238-Zenatta and he looked back. There wasn’t the slightest hint of challenge in his stare; none was necessary.
“I didn’t do it,” I said. “I don’t have any real evidence that Heleb did, or that anyone was working for Amara Guur, so we’ll leave that out of the story—but I’m sticking to the truth. I wasn’t cheating, and I didn’t kill the Sleath. He went for me with a knife, and I defended myself with entirely reasonable force. He was still alive when Heleb attacked me and knocked me out. That’s it.”
238-Zenatta shook his head sadly, but he knew his duty. “Very well,” he said. “That is the case I shall argue.”
CHAPTER SIX
I watched my trial on television, giving evidence from my cell. 238-Zenatta put in what seemed to me to be a rather lackluster performance, but I couldn’t blame him for that. My performance lacked luster too. We both knew the score.
The Tetron magistrate, a supersmart AI, found me guilty in thirty-seven seconds. My appeal took a little longer, but it was dismissed within two minutes.
I was given three days to find a way of paying off my debt that was acceptable to all interested parties. The Sleath had had no traceable relatives, so the parties in question were myself and the Tetron administration. The administration would be reasonable—but they would insist on my finding a way to pay back the necessary ransom as quickly as humanly possible. I might be able to persuade them that twenty-five years of servitude was reasonable, but they wouldn’t let me work it off at a rate that would take fifty or a hundred if anyone made a formal offer that looked better.
I called Aleksandr Sovorov immediately and told him that I’d take the job at the C.R.E.—but he informed me, rather coldly, that the offer had been withdrawn. The Coordinated Research Establishment had an image to maintain; they didn’t hire convicted murderers.
Naturally enough, nobody came forward immediately to offer me a way out. I knew that I’d have at least two days to contemplate the possibility that I’d be spending the next forty years in a coma while my metabolism devoted itself to the manufacture of exotic proteins and my brain processed data for anyone whose calculative problems required a ready-made neural network rather than something custom-built from silicon and high-temperature superconductors. Neither process would leave any manifest scars, but rumor has it that the only kind of mid-life crisis worse than discovering that you’re fifty years out of sync with history and living in a second-hand body is finding that you’re also living in a second-hand brain whose habitual pathways have been re-geared to processes of thought that are, to say the least, unhuman.
While I waited, I played cards with my jailer, 69-Aquila. He seemed quite pleased to have me around; it was obviously a slow week, and he was winning the game. Fortunately, he wasn’t allowed to play for money.
“Slavery is an abomination,” I informed him, by way of making conversation. “On my homeworld, we gave it up centuries ago, on the grounds that it’s an intolerable affront to civilized values.”
“How do you deal with criminals in your home system?” he asked, politely.
I told him.
He laughed.
“I realize, of course, that everything we lesser species do seems to the Tetrax to be comical as well as barbaric,” I said, “but in this particular instance I really don’t think your way is any better. At least we call a punishment a punishment. We don’t try to pretend that it’s anything else. Your way is hypocritical.”
“You simply don’t realize how backward your culture is,” 69-Aquila assured me. “It is perfectly understandable, even though you have been given the opportunity to observe the folkways of hundreds of other cultures here in Skychain City. You are imprisoned by primitive habits of thought, blinded by parochial prejudices. It is not sufficient merely to live alongside other species; you must learn to make comparisons, to understand the reasons for the differences between them. We Tetrax have had the opportunity to study thousands of humanoid cultures, and to grasp the fundamental principles of their historical development. We understand the inevitability of what you call slavery as well as its practical necessity. There are a great may things your species might have given up whose abandonment would do you credit, but slavery is not one of them. War, for instance. I understand that your species has actually been engaged inn a war for almost as long as you have possessed starships.”
“So it’s rumored,” I conceded. “It’s over now, according to Alex Sovorov, but I’m in no position to defend the fact that it took place at all, given that I left the system before it started. Obviously, I’d rather it hadn’t happened, and I expect that the poor bastards who had to fight it felt the same way.”
Mercifully, there was no word in parole for “bastard”, so I had to use the English one—which saved me from having to explain that I didn’t really mean that Earth’s warships were staffed by people whose parents hadn’t been legally married.
I hurried on. “Anyway, you shouldn’t try to worm out of it by changing the subject. It’s your system that’s in question, not ours. I’m sitting here waiting for someone to buy me, or at least to hire me for a very substantial slice of my future life. The only person who’s likely to offer is the gangster who fitted me up, whose offer will probably look a great deal more attractive on paper than
