She was met with a round of greetings.
She looked down at the sand, then around at the faces. "There have been lots of times when I cursed the lack of justice in the world. Every time I did it, I confirmed for myself that things were just as rotten as I imagined them to be. That gave me a great excuse to go pick up and use. Every time I did that, of course, I'd get into trouble and then complain about the lack of justice in the world. The thing that never got through my thick skull was if there had been any justice in the world, I would have been dead fifteen years ago."
Some of the listeners chuckled, some of them laughed out loud. Ella continued. "I hurt a lot of people chasing my devil. I hurt myself, too. But let me tell you what finally got me honest. It was a cop and a judge. I was caught holding, and I wasn't anything big. If it had been any other cop, I would have been able to cry or buy my way out. I've sold my ass to stay sick lots of times, but this stain wasn't buying. An honest cop, I couldn't believe it. And that ran me into an honest judge. I whined for justice all my life, and then I got it. They took my two little boys from me and dropped me into the crowbars."
She looked at me and smiled. "I called that cop and that judge a million names and damned them to Hell a billion times over. But the truth of the matter is that the first chance I got in the crowbars, I showed up at a CSA meeting because it had finally gotten through to me that I had a problem. That cop and that judge saved my life, and probably the lives of those who I might have killed if I had kept on using."
Ella looked around at the faces. "I've hit every meeting we've had since the landing. There were twenty-four of us at the largest meeting. There were six at the smallest. I haven't counted the house, but it looks like there's getting to be close to two-hundred at this meeting." She looked at me. "I think you and Jim Bennet might have saved a lot of lives this morning."
She sat down. Others got up and talked, but I didn't hear them. The universe can get to be a mighty complicated place at times, and it was very confusing to get patted on the back when you expect to be beaten to a pulp. That is especially true when what you wanted was the beating.
Cap Brady got up at one point and talked about being a rageaholic. He was addicted to rage, and it was while he was in the middle of one of his rages that he had thinned Diaper Lou. I think he made a point that finally got through to me. It wasn't whether or not Diaper Lou should've been snuffed; it was what it had done to Cap.
I nodded. They could give me a medal and show me that I had cured everything from rape to spoiled milk by the death of Vic Myerson and his accomplices, intentional and unintentional. But what was adding their corpses to my collection doing to me? By the time Cap was finished, I knew what I was. I was addicted to rage. That was what had dropped me into the crowbars each time. I didn't get in trouble every time I went off into a tear, but every time I had gotten in trouble, somewhere along the line I had been in a rage. That teacher I had punched out. That wasn't a fight. At the time I had been insane with rage. I could have just as easily killed him.
My sister's powder-puff old man, the bank afterwards, trying to pistol-whip a squad of cops by myself. Rages. I hadn't had one of those rages since the landing. What I heard at the meeting was that, if I kept coming back, I'd never have to do it by myself again.
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▫
Precedent
▫
I didn't think I had the energy to dream. I was wrong. They were all there. Dick Irish was leading a delegation of corpses: Barth Lazar, Huey Garret, Haman Surus, Claudine Lowe, Victor Myerson. They zombied along, their arms stretched out toward me, their faces drawn and pale.
I heard Jimmy cry out.
"You should've helped me! Damn you, you should have helped me!"
His voice shredded my mind.
I heard the shot.
I saw Barth Lazar fall to the sand. I saw him fall again. And again and again and again.
It was like something from a repeating video image. Jimmy would cry out, there would be a shot, Barth would grab his chest and fall to the sand, Jimmy would cry out again, the shot would slam against my ears—
None of the corpses could understand why they were dead. They had grown up with the court game on Earth, the land of pleas, tricks, stalls, appeals, and deals. They would have walked in minutes. If by some fluke they had been held, just the five of them could have tied up the court system for years.
No one goes for the death penalty anymore, because it's too expensive, what with all the appeals, news conferences, candle-carrying sobbers, and other idiots. Only the very poor, the very stupid, and the very repentant get the death penalty. The rich, the clever, and the vicious have the ability to drag it out for too long. That's why the juicer made the death penalty a bargaining chip.
Plea guilty and we'll give you life. This offer not available to the poor, the stupid, or those who really do feel bad about what they did.
So, it didn't make any sense. Why were they dead?
They weren't poor.
They weren't stupid.
They weren't repentant. In fact, as far as they were concerned, they really hadn't done anything wrong.
In a universe of sharks, you minded your own business, did your own thing, and went into frenzy with everyone else. If you want to get along, you go along. That's what they had done, that's what they had always done, so why were they dead?
Vic Myerson was the most confused. Jim Bennet was a faggot, wasn't he? The gay dude is always put down and he always goes down, right? That's the first slogan above the Crowbar Museum of Unnatural History, isn't it?
"Why am I dead, Bando? Why?" Inquiring ghosts want to know.
The frito fagitos; the guards spit on them, the sharks either ignore, fuck, or kill them, and everyone looks the other way. It's not like they were human beings, or anything.
I mean, look at the numbs who write letters, sign petitions, carry signs, and raise hell to keep lab rats from getting cut up in laboratories. Did you ever see them standing up for a crowbar fag's right not to get raped and cut to pieces? Never.
Those were the rules, man, and Vic had lived by those rules for his whole sick life. "Bando," asked his ghost, "why am I dead?"
I tried to defend myself, to defend the RC, to defend Jim Bennet, to explain to Vic—to all of them—the reasons.
—We aren't on Earth.
—We're out of the crowbars.
—The cockroaches and the stains don't operate the justice machine anymore. The juicer is dead.
—We don't rape in the Razai.
—We don't stand by while another is raped; it's not right.
—We are no longer tiny frightened little islands floating in a sea of law-made shit. We are involved with each other.
—If I stand by and let you bung Jimmy Bennet, you have every right to my asshole as well.
—Jim Bennet is a human being.
—One person's freedom is the freedom of us all.
—One person's slavery means we are all enslaved.
The reasons sounded made up and phony. The corpses looked at each other, shook their heads, and held out their hands as they asked, "But why are we dead?"
▫
Two huge crows flew into a cornfield and began tearing at the ears of corn. They pecked, filled their bellies, and pecked some more. They grew bloated and fat, yet the pecking never stopped, and there was never any less corn. In fact, the more they pecked, the more corn there was.
I looked at the crows closely and recognized them. Cockroaches. Money threads. One of them was Pendril and the other was Rossiter. They began speaking.
The two crows filled the air with fine-sounding words like justice, rights, certainty, due process, mercy, motivation, the spirit and the letter of ninety million conflicting laws, all of which said that the dead should be alive and the alive should be dead, but in either case the process should decide these matters with all deliberate speed, which meant v
ery very slowly, the attorneys should be very very well paid, and the cornfield should go on forever.
"What about the scarecrow?" I screamed.
The two crows laughed, flew over to the suit and hat hanging from a pole, and pulled the stuffings out the scarecrow. The pieces of the stuffings fell on the dirt: constitutions, courts, oaths, codes.
While the crows covered the straw man's hat with droppings, I went before the Razai. I had it put to a vote, and the vote was unanimous: the max payback for being a lawyer from now on would be death. Guilty of cockroachery in the first degree.
The two crows, their feathers plucked, were sent walking into a barren, scorching desert.
"There are no cornfields on Tartaros!" I screamed.
▫
I opened my eyes to see that Alsvid was high in the sky and the shadow I had curled up in had disappeared. Alna was not next to me. It was still a long time until the cool of the evening and the exhausting cold of night.
I was on my side. My hood was propped up with a flat green stick making a tiny tent out of my hood and forming a tiny spot of shade for my head. My eyes were filled with grit and I had a two-hundred pound death grip on my rifle.
I relaxed my grip on the weapon, flexed my fingers, wiped the sleep from my eyes, and looked again at the stick. I didn't own any stick, so someone must have put it there. Bloody Sarah, Rhome Nazzar, Ondo, Nance, Garoit, Stays, and Minnie McDavies were seated in a circle staring at me.
"What?"
"You yelled something about cornfields," answered Nance. "Are you all right?"
My mouth tasted like I'd slept all night sucking on the warden's jockstrap. I opened my water bottle, and what water I had in my ration bag smelled even worse than my mouth tasted. "Yeah. I'm terrific."
"Bando," said Nance, "about the way those trials finish up—"
"Trials?" I struggled into a sitting position, my legs crossed in front of me. "What about them?"
"There was a lot of shooting."
"That explains all the noise." I shook my head as I rummaged in my bag for something to eat.
Stays scratched the week's growth of hair on his chin. "We've been kicking around the shootings at trials, Bando."
I kept looking in my bag, wishing that they would change the subject. "That's the law for you. When you have to kill a lot of people, there tends to be a lot of shooting, and strangely enough a lot of people wind up shot."
"What if Jimmy hadn't been such a good shot?" asked Sarah. "He might have drilled a few innocent bystanders."
"Then the law would have come down on Jimmy with the max. Another shot, another ventilated head. All accounts paid."
"What about the innocent bystanders?"
"We don't have innocent bystanders. Not on Tartaros." I found a wrapped bar of something grim and took a bite. As I chewed I looked at the horizon and talked. "I suppose we could hang them, except that we don't have any trees and the law says we can't hold any prisoners. Before you can hang 'em, you've got to hold 'em, and we aren't allowed to hold 'em. So, we do it the way we have to do it. We can't take prisoners, which means we can't separate potential targets from the rest of the Razai and hold them. So, it has to be done the way it has to be done."
I looked at Nance. "Ever since the Dick Irish execution, everybody's known how it's done at court, so anyone who wants to watch does so at his or her own risk." I took another bite of the thing-bar.
"Man, Bando," said Nance as she shook her head, "I didn't see the shootings, but I saw the blood splashed on some of the sharks. They were plenty upset."
I gave it a ment, trying to measure my feelings against what seemed to be real. For once they were the same. "When we splash blood for the Law of the Razai, Nance, the more people who are splattered with it, the better. The law, the things it protects, the deaths of those who break it, all belong to us—the Razai. I think they might remember it better if they have to wipe Vic's blood off their boots rather than if they just watch him taken off in the desert out of sight someplace to disappear."
Deeper feelings opened for me, and things I had never known about myself surfaced. "Nance, if it was up to me, I'd rub all their noses in the blood. See, Jimmy didn't kill those people. They killed themselves by what they did and what they didn't do. That's not all of it, either."
I clasped my hands and looked around at the faces. "I wonder how many of us own just a little piece of those executions."
Garoit shook his head. "No, man, I'm not taking on anyone's load of original sin. Sell that one someplace else."
"Pussyface, I can't figure out any way to stick it in the law, but I wonder how many times Vic and his two goons went on a pansy hunt, and everybody looked the other way. How many times've you laughed at one of those, you-mah-little-honey-now, Bubba-bungs-his-cellmate jokes?"
"It's not my job to keep the boybungers off the pansies," said Garoit. "That's why we hire cops."
I nodded. "In other words, it is our job but we hire somebody else to do it. Then we laugh at the rape-a-pansy jokes, keep our mouths shut when Vic or some other boybunger turns a human being into a piece of meat, and otherwise tell the cops we hired to forget about it." I spat on the sand. "Risking a wounded or dead spectator and splashing their sheets with some blood, maybe that brings it home where it belongs." I felt sick to my stomach and tossed the remainder of the bar into my ration bag. "Anyway, that's how I feel about it. You want something different, make another law."
They were all quiet. I noticed the papers Herb had given me and pulled them out of my bag as I looked back at Nance. "Have you seen Alna?"
"No. Not since I left the trial."
I stood up and pulled the stick out of the sand. "Who do I owe for this?"
"I gave it to you, chup," answered Ondo. "You don't owe me nothin' for it. Just figured you'd think better if your brains weren't all baked."
"Thanks." I added the stick to my pack and shaded my head from the angry sun with my hood. I unrolled the papers Herb had given me and read the title: Mob Cinderella by H.O. I was surprised out of my depression. Herb Ollick was the author of Mob Cinderella. My picture of the man kept changing. I stuffed the papers back into my bag and went to join the others.
Once I was comfortably seated in the circle, I took a sip of that grim water, and let the vision of that meal in the Men's Hall pass though my mind as I swallowed.
The circle was silent and I looked around at the faces. "You all look like your pet rat died. What is it? What's going on?"
Nance nodded toward Sarah. "When they went scouting last night, they found something."
"Found what?" I looked at Bloody Sarah.
"When we were at the banquet, I noticed that most of the markings on the sheets were black, green, gold, white, and blue. Only three of the sheets I saw carried the mark of Padra Amitis's Loyal Reds. Thanks to Marantha's lead, we found them. They're about ten kilometers back toward the east. They have about two hundred rifles, and they're guarding something."
I wrapped my arms around my knees. "What are they guarding?"
Sarah looked at Minnie, and Minnie looked at me. "Prisoners," answered Minnie. "They have women prisoners they captured from our ship. They don't look like they're holding any men. They have maybe four hundred women prisoners." Minnie glanced down for a moment. "I never knew there were so many lily-white haystack bits in the crowbars." She looked up at me. "No maus, no chili peppers, no chops, no hows. Angel cakes, all of 'em." I could see her cheek muscles twitch. "Man, they kept what they wanted and killed the rest."
Sarah spoke to Minnie. "Tell Bando how you know."
"I slipped in there and talked with them. They were taken the day after the landing." She waved a tiny hand in a graceful arc. "That's the Hand's pussy supply. When one of those phony goombas wants to rock off, he picks one and just does it. If the bit doesn't go along, the goomba beats her until she does go along. A lot of them don't survive the beating. Some who do survive don't look so good anymore, so they get thinned anyway."
I rubbed my eyes as I tried to ignore the size and nearness of the crime. "So, among other things, we're facing a thousand rifles instead of eight hundred?"
Minnie leaned toward me. "Bando, those women are being raped and murdered."
I could see Bennet v. Myerson hovering above me like a great predatory bird. "And they asked us for help?"
"Yes."
"And we are the Razai. We don't stand by and do nothing when someone is being raped. It's not right." I looked at Nance and the others. "What have you yard eagles been discussing? What to do, or whether or not to do it?"
Garoit spoke. "It's terrible what they're doing, but the Hand has more than double the guns we have. We have to be practical and save ourselves." He held out his hands. "Those prisoners aren't even in the Razai. They had the choice to join up back at the landing, and they chose another group. We don't owe them a thing." He let his hands drop between his knees. "We can't save the whole world."
"Some revolutionary," I snorted and faced Bloody Sarah. "How about it, general? How do we stack up against the Hand?"
"They have us outgunned, but we have them outnumbered. With the two hundred guns they have guarding the women, their forces are split in two. That means we can bring a superior force against the two hundred rifles, equip another two hundred of our people with the captured weapons, and then we would have six hundred rifles against their eight hundred."
My mouth was dry. "What about our chances?"
"Remember to invoke your gods." She smiled and ended by saying, "It's possible that we could win a head-on fight, but I doubt it. The Hand's soldiers aren't like the patrol of Kegel's we surprised. These birds are expecting something."
I looked at Stays. His lips were compressed into a narrow line. He looked down for a moment, then returned my gaze. "You said it first, Chief. We don't stand by and do nothing when someone cries rape. It's not right." He smiled and looked down. "After all, we just made that rule today."
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