by D. Tolmach
“Trial? What trial? Is who guilty of what? Get that out of my face.”
The aliens burst out in laughter. “Car-lot Silvos, of course. Did she kill and eat Tombstone Wolfram?”
“Car-lot? Who? You mean Karlatte . . . Silvos?”
As everyone in the Galactic Union of Autonomous Planets knew, Osco Silvos’s wife and fifteen-year-old daughter died tragically in a freak avalanche while snowboarding Olympus Mons. Devastated by sadness, Osco had Mars completely demolished and declared every thirty-fourth of April a Galactic Day of Mourning.
She has risen from the dead! It was a miracle!
“Where is she?”
“In jail, of course. Court is in recess. It starts . . .”—the journalist looked at her watch—“. . . fuck, it’s starting now. We have to go!”
“Take me to her!”
* * *
Outside the courtroom, dozens of camera crews, journalists, and legal assistants buzzed around this way and that, a seemingly chaotic organism with its own internal logic. Two large bailiffs were blocking anyone else from entering.
“You have to let me in! I’m . . . I’m Ms. Silvos’s spiritual council. According to Article 14.44486 of the Galactic Convention of Sapient Rights, all prisoners are allowed access to religious counseling during their trial and incarceration.”
The guards looked at one another. Neither of them had read the Galactic Convention of Sapient Rights, but it sounded legit.
As Gerrard entered, a wave of commotion grew as the observers noticed him and whispered to one another. The judge banged his gavel. “Order, order. Bailiff, what is the meaning of this disruption?”
“Um, he says he’s Ms. Silvos’s priest.”
“By Article 14.444—”
“Ms. Silvos, is this your priest?”
At the witness stand, Karlatte looked at the unfamiliar Truther and shrugged. “Sure, why not.”
“Fine. Sit down and shut up. Defense, commence please.”
“What exactly was it you and Mr. Wolfram were discussing during your . . . liaison in his suite?”
“I was interviewing him for a feature in a magazine and gathering information for a biography I’m working on.”
“Can you tell the court about this biography?”
“Objection, your Honor, on the grounds that it is irrelevant and boring.”
“Sustained. A murder trial is not the place to push your upcoming tell-all book, Ms. Silvos.”
“When you left Mr. Wolfram’s room, did you lock the door?”
Karlatte’s heart sank. Maybe she had been somewhat responsible for what happened to Tombstone. “No, I must have forgotten. I was in such a rush to get back to my room and start writing that I didn’t think to lock the door.”
* * *
During the cross examination, the prosecutor openly relished the seedy nature of the case.
“Ms. Silvos, do you always use such, shall we say, unorthodox methods when interviewing your subjects?”
“Objection!”
“Overruled.”
“It was the only way he would open the door. He was sad because he had just gotten dumped. I had to talk to him that night because he was leaving in the morning.”
“So you prostituted yourself to him for your scoop?”
“Objection! You can’t call the daughter of President of the Galactic Union of Autonomous Planets St. Osco Silvos a prostitute!”
Again the judge slammed his gavel. “Father . . . whatever your name is, spiritual council is not granted the right of protest. Now sit silently and pray, or whatever it is you do, or I will have you jailed for contempt.”
* * *
After the court adjourned for the evening, Gerrard was allowed to follow Karlatte to her cell and sit with her just outside the bars.
“You’re alive! Goldath the Merciful has brought you back to us.”
“Father, I’m sorry, but I didn’t die.”
“Of course you did. It was all over the news. The Galactic Assembly named an entire sector of the Milky Way after you. There’s a Karlatte Silvos Street in every city and starstation in the Union.”
“Whoa.”
“Yes. We have to let your father know as soon as possible.”
“No, um, really . . . I don’t want him to see me like this, in jail for murder.”
“Don’t be silly. As soon as he finds out, he’ll send the entire Galactic Navy. You’ll be free by morning.” Gerrard wrote a message to the Patriarch, but when he pressed Send, he got an error message. “Damn, these Muggers can’t do anything right. I’m going to go file a formal complaint. You keep praying, Karlatte Silvos. We will get you out in no time!”
* * *
“Where’s Liona?”
“We didn’t invite her.” The rest of the sextet silently—and sometimes not so silently—blamed Liona for Tombstone’s death. If she’d been with him, if she hadn’t upset him so much, this never would have happened. They were getting blasted on Mugger’s moonshine in a hotel suite and reminiscing about their dead comrade. The drummer took another swig and gave the bottle to Chirp, who had come mainly because he wanted to patch things up with Liona and maybe get her to peg him with her tail. Then someone picked up Tombstone’s button accordion and started playing one of his ballads, and everyone chimed in except for Chirp, who didn’t know the words. He had liked Tombstone—he seemed like a really swell guy—but this scene was getting really depressing, so he passed the shine on to the next person and stood up. Caught up in their grief and song, none of them noticed when he left.
* * *
Not wanting to be alone that evening, Chirp knocked on Kanard’s door, which opened. The old man was sitting at his desk, reading one of those strange bricks with pages.
“What are you up to?”
“I’m trying to come up with a plan to save Karlatte.”
“Save Karlatte? But she killed Tombstone.”
“I remain unconvinced. It just doesn’t make any sense. Why did she leave and then come back in a bathrobe?”
Chirp stood uneasily in silence.
“What is it, my son?”
“I saw her that night. She came to my room in a bathrobe.”
“She did? What did she say?”
“She said she wanted to find out if I was as good in bed as I was onstage.”
Kanard took a thoughtful pause. “I see. And then?”
“We fucked. When I woke up in the morning, she was gone.”
“Well. That is a turn of events.”
“The weird thing is, when I saw her at breakfast, she pretended she didn’t know who I was.”
* * *
“I guess my moves in the sack weren’t crazy enough for you?”
“What are you going on about?”
Chirp was sitting in a jail cell across from Karlatte. He had been arrested that morning for the murder of the remaining male members of the Tombstone Wolfram Sextet.
“After you killed Tombstone, you came to my room and seduced me.”
“I did no such thing! Did you kill those men?”
“No.”
“Well, I didn’t kill Tombstone, either. And I sure as shit didn’t sleep with you.”
Chirp sat on his bench, offended.
“Look, I’m sorry. Maybe it was someone else. It seems like all the Human girls here look like me. All I know is, after I talked to Tombstone, I went straight back to my room and started writing.”
He folded his arms, unsatisfied. There was a clanging down the hall as the main door opened. Gerrard and Kanard, together with a Mugger guard, walked quickly to the jailbirds.
“It was you all along!” Gerrard pointed frantically at Chirp. “You dressed up like Karlatte and killed that musician, and then you killed the rest of them.”
“Now, Gerrard, calm yourself. Chirp was with me last night.”
“With you? What was he doing with you?”
“I was showing him the literature of ancient Earth, the writings of his ancestors.
The Muggers have been studying anthropology for a very long time. They’ve collected and translated practically all our books, honoring Human history even as we Humans have all but forgotten it.”
“Books? The only book of any importance is the Big Holy Book of Absolute Truth. Anything written before that is pagan rubbish.”
Kanard politely ignored this, as one does when an ignorant person makes a particularly ignorant statement. He was reminded of why he left everyone he knew in the Ministry of Dogma to come here and live among the Muggers. “I’m afraid it doesn’t look good, Chirp. Shakespeare informed me that they have video of you slaughtering and eating four people last night. I’ve informed him of your alibi, but we’ll need something more concrete.” Then something occurred to him and he turned to Karlatte. “Did you happen to have intercourse before you went through the Interdimensional Point?”
“Father Kanard, I object!” Gerrard was aghast at the implication and found that he enjoyed talking like they do in court.
Karlatte, though, had gotten used to being asked publicly about her sexual habits. “Yeah.”
“With whom?”
“Um, this guy in the hotel . . . Perry?”
“I see. Come, Father Gerrard, we have much work to do!”
* * *
When his boredom finally outweighed his anger, Chirp resumed talking to Karlatte.
“How is it you came back to life, anyway? Maybe you are an alien monster that eats people.”
Sigh. “I never died. When I was a child, my father grew madder and madder every day. My mother decided it was no longer safe to be around him. Either he would go completely off the rails and kill us or someone would finally assassinate him and we’d be caught in the cross fire. Somehow she learned about the Muggers and their Interdimensional Point, and we applied for visas to the Gamma Dimension, staged our death, and fled.”
“You know, he destroyed Mars after your . . . death.”
“Yeah? Well, a lot has changed since I left.”
* * *
“Well, Sally, it’s the last day of trial and pre-verdict polling favors the prosecution eighty-seven percent to five percent.”
“That’s right, Jim. I guess the remaining eight percent are too stupid to make up their minds.”
Both commentators laughed heartily.
“Do you think the fact that Karlatte’s father is the dreaded Osco Silvos is prejudicing the results?”
“Perhaps, Jim, but not nearly as much as the video of her actually committing the crime.”
The Mugger’s Court was the most popular TV show on the planetoid, and the trial of Karlatte Silvos had driven its ratings through the roof.
“Unless her attorney can pull a miracle out of his ass, things are looking grim for the defendant.”
* * *
“Your Honor, the defense would like to call a surprise witness.”
The court went abuzz with ooohs and ahhhs.
“I object!”
“Overruled on the grounds that it will be a very dramatic plot twist and ratings gold.”
The door opened and the bailiffs escorted in a strikingly handsome man dressed in leather and with a five-o’clock shadow.
“Percy?” Karlatte gasped from her cage.
Sitting at the witness stand, the man peered out confidently over the courtroom, smiling brilliantly and basking in the attention.
“Please state your name and occupation.”
“Pritchard P. Parsons, Interdimensional Man of Mystery.” He winked and the audience gasped, completely enthralled.
“Can you tell the court where you were the night of March fifty-third of this year?”
“I was being wrongly imprisoned for the murder—and consumption—of the nice old lady that lived next door. And a few other people.”
“So you have never met the defendant, Ms. Karlatte Silvos?”
“Can’t say I’ve had the pleasure.”
“According to her, the two of you had sex in the Mugger’s Point Hotel in the Gamma Dimension.”
“Sorry, but that babe got doppelbanged.”
“Excuse me?”
“Yeah, it’s a bitch, happened to me too. One minute this smoking-hot piece of ass was all up in my leather pants, and the next thing I know I have an evil twin running around eating people.”
“And these ‘evil twins’ multiply through sexual intercourse with Humans?”
“Oh yeah, Humans, Muggers, whatever. They ain’t picky. I can tell you, that is one STD you do not want to get. Once the DNA of that virus is in you, you go into a deep sleep as every cell in your body in your body is replicated. Gives you freaky-ass dreams and when you wake up, the lady, or guy, you were with is gone, and you end up paying the price for whatever crimes your double commits.”
“Why don’t these imposters just kill their host Human once they are born?”
“They seem to have this, like, psychoquantum connection with you. If you die, they die. They prefer you in prison, alive, but out of their way.”
* * *
“Well, Jim, that was one heck of a miracle the defense pulled out of its ass.”
“It sure was, Sally. Now the closing arguments have been made, and it’s time for you, the jury at home, to decide the fate of Karlatte Silvos. If you think she’s a coldhearted, bloodthirsty cannibal responsible for the death of Tombstone Wolfram, text 0807 for guilty. If you were swayed by the charms of the ruggedly roguish Pritchard P. Parsons, text 0809 for innocent, and remember, depending on your data package, fees and service charges may apply. We’ll be back with the verdict after these words from our sponsors.”
* * *
With a clank, the bailiff opened Karlatte’s cage. She rushed out to hug Pritchard.
“Thank you so much!”
He held her tightly, his hands creeping as close to her ass as possible without making things weird. “Thank you, babe. I’ve been trying to get a visa to this dimension for ages! Really, though, it’s Kanard here you should thank. He’s the one who came all the way to the Gamma Dimension and found me, just as I was getting out of the hooskow. If he had been an hour later, I’d have been long gone.”
She pried herself from Pritchard and turned to Old Beardface, hugging him. “Thanks, you! If there’s any way I can repay you, please let me know.”
In a very foreshadowing manner, Kanard looked at Gerrard, who was awkwardly hoping no one noticed that he had been reaching to hug Karlatte before she had stepped around him to embrace Pritchard. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
“You must be exhausted from the temporal lag. You should get some rest.”
“There’s no time, my dear! The real killers are still on the loose.”
* * *
It must be mentioned that the murder of Orbit Crenshaw was as surprising to Osco Silvos as it was to everyone else. Not that anyone believed that. And that’s not to say that he wasn’t initially ecstatic that the face of the Young Reformers liberal opposition and eternal thorn in his side had finally bitten the dust, but it was a jubilee slightly tainted by the realization that such acts of political violence often have deadly unintended consequences. For now, he would have to feign sadness and promise to catch those responsible. Maybe he could pin it on alien terrorists, or the imperialist Coalition of Free Star Systems trying to start a revolution in the Union, or even younger Young Reformers looking to take Orbit’s place. Most of his citizens would accept whatever conclusions the courts came to, and the rest, Crenshaw’s supporters, would blame Silvos no matter what he said or did. It would intimidate some of them and anger others, perhaps driving them to commit violence of their own.
Whatever message the murder was supposed to send, for Silvos it was confirmation that the people were out for blood.
* * *
The celebration upon Karlatte’s acquittal was cut short when the management of the Mugger’s Point Hotel announced an emergency ban on sex, resulting in a collective “Awwww man” that could be heard from the surface of the planetoid. T
he risk that Chirp’s and Karlatte’s evil twins would infect even more people was too great not to take such drastic measures, especially among the famously promiscuous Muggers. Posters were hung throughout the hotel that read Keep Calm and Spank It.
Chirp was also released from jail, the producers of Mugger’s Court deciding that another trial involving cannibalistic Humans would be “derivative.”
He and Karlatte were given bright orange uniforms to wear at all times so people could tell them apart from their doppelgangers.
* * *
“They could be hiding anywhere. In the ventilation system, the boiler room, anywhere. They feel no pain and can squeeze their bodies into any crevice. But they tend to nest somewhere nearby their hosts so they can keep an eye on them.”
Bartholomew had instructed Shakespeare and Kanard to grill Pritchard for everything he knew about this new threat.
“The key to capturing the imposters is to make Chirp and Karlatte fear for their lives. That’s how they found mine. In prison I was jumped by a biker gang. I was just about to get my dick sliced off with a dull shiv when this dude who looked just like me squeezed through the bars and tore their fucking heads off. That’s when I figured out there was more to my case than just being framed for murder. As soon as the viruses sense that their hosts’ lives are in danger, they come to their defense. But it has to be real fear, so they can’t know about our plan.”
“Is there any way at all to tell the ‘evil twin’ apart from its victim by looking at it?”
“Nope, they’re completely identical.”
“Mr. Shakespeare, I think if at all possible, we should try to catch our uninvited guests alive.”
“Father Kanard, if you’re suggesting what I think you’re suggesting, I’m in full agreement.”
* * *
