by Dave Stone
The clients treated him like dirt - at best like the high-priced equivalent of a sewerage maintenance technician, a mere functionary doing a necessary but repugnant job.
Still, at least the money meant that he could afford to live here in Shangri La Towers, the most expensive hab-blocks in the city. Glorified servant quarters the homes on this particular level of Shangri La might be, but they were big and luxurious, and he had them to himself. That put him above 99.999 per cent of a city-state population forced to scrape a living in any bolt-hole it could find.
He'd made them nice, filling them with such genuine antiques as had survived the Rad Wars and which he could afford. Waking up safe here in his home made up for almost anything.
Having put himself together to the point where we could face getting out of bed in the morning, Wheems stretched and, for the first time, actually opened his eyes.
When the world falls down around your ears, there are a few moments when the mind simply and flatly fails to register the fact.
The blood was everywhere. The room seemed drenched in it.
That was actually an exaggeration, which some cool and oddly dispassionate part of his mind told him. The human mind is just wired-up, on the fundamental level, to throw up all kinds of panic-flags at the sight of loose blood.
It isn't as bad as it seems, calm thread of consciousness told him. Just the standard spray-and-spatter of a single living creature stabbed brutally to death, no more than that.
Every other part of Barnstable's mind seemed to have shorted itself out, as though an iron spike had been driven through it. So when the personal comms-unit by the bed began to peal, he reached out and activated it automatically.
The virtual screen flashed the message: "NO INCOMING VISUAL SIGNAL", and went back into standby mode. The receiver-bead floated from its port and positioned itself by Barnstable's ear, where it would remain, wherever he moved, until the connection was cut.
"Hey, listen up," said a voice from the receiver-bead. Male, casual and friendly. The sort of voice, attached by the usual means, to a sympathetic ear you could tell your troubles to. "You've just this second realised that under normal circumstances you like people to see this really fine and tasteful place where you live, so you set your receiver to send visuals by default. That means I can see everything you can, even if you can't see me. All that blood.
"Now, I'm telling you not to worry about that, for the moment at least. I'm not going to be calling the Justice Department, and for a number of technical reasons I'm not going to bother going into, there is absolutely no way the Judges can be monitoring this call. Do you understand me?"
There was an edge to the voice, however. Not so much an edge of authority or command; more that it was simply, casually and sympathetically telling you how the world was going to be.
Barnstable tried to reply, but the voice overrode him:
"Aside from that," the voice said, "you're in a minor form of post-traumatic shock, what with waking up to see all that blood and all. Your mental switchboard's jammed with questions and possible scenarios. Just breathe easy and we'll clear things up a little, yes?
"First things first. You're wondering if you've been wounded in the night - maybe in a home invasion or the like - and you're still, somehow, at the point of not feeling it. You're wondering if you're in hysterical denial or some such, that when you can finally bring yourself to look down you'll see the ruin of your chest with a knife still sticking in it.
"You don't have to worry about that, either. The blood isn't yours. Except for trace-contamination, which we'll get along to in a minute, never fear.
"For the moment, look at the trail it makes, through all that wreckage that suggests a violent struggle. Through the door and into the bathroom...
"I'd go in there and have a look, if I were you. Watch your bare feet on the broken glass from that overturned antique jukebox full of classic static-blips from the Two Thousand and Tens - we wouldn't want to add any more direct contamination to the scene, now would we?
"And here we are at, well, let's be honest, what we might as well call the meat of the matter.
"It's quite amazing, really, what you can do with sufficient time and effort. You'll notice that, in certain respects, certain details have been left eminently identifiable.
"This is not some random individual who will not be missed. This is a personage who was quite well-known, in life, and who is known to be in personal contact with yourself. The disappearance will be noticed, make no mistake about that..."
Barnstable Wheems stared at the mess in his bathroom.
"How could you...?" he managed at last. "How were you able to...?"
"In case you're wondering," said the voice from the receiver-bead, "these are not the remains of a clone. A clone does not have all the cumulative imperfections and adaptations that are acquired by the phenotypical act of living. "This is the genuine and definitive article. And the physical evidence linking you to the death is incontrovertible. Look at your hands, please."
Wheems looked down at the barely healing scratches on his hands. He simply hadn't noticed them before, his mind being on other things.
"Acquired during the struggle," said the voice, "to all intents and purposes, and one of the more salutary sources for your contamination of the scene. Justice Department Forensics Division is quite capable of distinguishing between that and the contamination caused simply by living there, in the home where you happen to live. As I said, all the evidence matches."
Barnstable's experience as a lawyer came, somewhat belatedly, into play.
"Yes, okay," he said desperately, "that might be true, but the Judges have other ways of getting to the truth. Security-scans and psych-profiles, Birdie lie-detectors... Something out there, something along the line, will show I didn't do this.
"You have witnesses - I don't know - who say they saw me running into her in a synthi-milk bar and the two of us leaving together. I can prove they're lying. If holo-surveillance shows it, I can prove it's been doctored. Something, somewhere in the world will prove I didn't do this for the simple fact that I didn't, and whoever you are, you can't control the entire world."
"Who's to say that we can't?" said the voice, somewhat smugly. "All right. Let's just say, for the sake of argument, that we can't. Such things are secondary evidence - the sort of things that you help clients to avoid in your work. That simply doesn't matter in this case.
"People like you are not, to be frank, first on the guest list for the annual Judges' Ball. We're willing to risk that the Justice Department will assume that you've somehow managed to beat the secondary evidence, and go with the open and shut case in front of them. Want to bet on that?"
For all his faults, Barnstable Wheems still held onto a breath of the romantic idealism that had, years ago, spurred him to become a lawyer. In addition, of course, to the potential for acquiring drokkloads of cash for not much actual work.
The fight for justice, as opposed to the Justice of the Department, still held an attraction for him. And whatever else it was, his current situation was a romantic's dream. Hero wakes up with a dead body, accused of a murder he didn't commit, forced to fight and clear his name, armed with only his wits in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds.
And just think of the name he'd make, let alone the compensation, if he could fight such a case and win!
"Of course," said the voice, "if it looks like you're going to get anywhere in proving your innocence, we'll simply kill you stone cold drokking dead. Extremely painfully, for preference."
"Oh," said Barnstable Wheems. There was that.
"All right," he said at last. "What do you want from me?" And because, after all, for all his vestigial romantic idealism, he was still a lawyer: "And what do I get out of it?"
"What you get out of it is that we send a very thorough cleaner to spirit the inconvenient evidence away - just not so far away that we won't be able to lay our hands on it, you understand? I think you'll be pleased w
ith his work. We call him Mister Hand.
"As for what we expect in return, in the next few days, possibly the next few hours, you'll be offered a job of work which, under ordinary circumstances, your first inclinations would be to refuse, for the simple reason, frankly, that nobody in his right mind would accept. There will be no mistaking the job in question. You are expected, simply, to do that job and succeed."
"And, uh, if I were to fail?" asked Barnstable Wheems, even though he knew what the answer would be. It was just the way the script in this situation went.
"Does the phrase 'dead as day-old dog shit' mean anything to you?" asked the voice. "Bit of an anachronism on a number of levels, I'll admit, what with the fact of dogs as such not existing any more... ah yes, I see that it does.
"Good afternoon, Mr Wheems. You'll never know who I am."
Back in the bedroom, the wall-mounted comms unit briefly sparked as an EMP erased any signal-resonance trace of the call.
In the bathroom, the receiver-bead dropped to the floor, where it would subsequently be quite thoroughly whisked away by Mister Hand.
THREE
"We are for our own people. We want to see them happy, healthy and wise, drawing strength from co-operation with the peoples of other lands, but also contributing their full share to the general well-being. Not a broken-down pauper and mendicant, but a strong, living partner in the progressive advancement of civilisation."
- William Gallacher
The Case for Communism
The Chief Judge hated the sleep machine with a passion. To the extent that she allowed herself special privileges of any kind as a result of her position, she had dedicated the time of any number of Tek Division techs to overhaul the unit dedicated to her private use, tweak its processes to match the particular biological processes of her body, but in the end nothing seemed to do much good.
Sleep machines were really intended to be used by those Judges who had started out in life as engineered clones. A number of gene-sequences had been patched in at gestation and switched on in them, allowing them to mesh with the sleep machine processes more or less seamlessly.
The units were not recommended for sustained and regular use by Judges born in the more naturally human manner. The combination of slo-time to effectively compress six hours into as many minutes, the force-ejection of glucotic nutrients and rejuve-compounds to counteract the slo-time and the stutter-slits simulating REM seemed, increasingly, to leave the Chief Judge feeling simultaneously wired, enervated and subtly wrong inside.
Regular physicals still showed her to be in the best of health; it was all quite probably psychosomatic - but that, when you came right down to it, was the problem.
Chief Judges of Mega-City One did not exactly have the best of track records when it came to the subject of mental stability. There was something about the job that seemed to turn what had appeared to be the very best initial choice, comprehensively, and in some cases spectacularly, nuts.
Check out the famous case of Chief Judge Cal, who had promoted a small goldfish to the rank of Senior Judge and installed it as one of his advisors.
The Chief Judge had the uneasy suspicion that half the Justice Department was living in fear of the day she decided to instigate a Mounted Division and started channelling the spirit of Catherine the Great.
She clambered out of the pod and racked it shut behind her. A standby light pulsed balefully on its monitor display.
She rolled her sleeve down over the already-healing welts that the force-injectors had left, pulled on a gauntlet and her private chambers, rubbing absently at her inner arm.
She wished she could make time for a quick shower, but the uniform of a Judge, even the Chief Judge, was not designed to get out of and back into that easily. Fortunately, the uniform was, to a certain extent, self-cleaning.
Judge Dredd was waiting for her in her Audience Chambers, alone. Almost any other Judge, even the head of the SJS - especially the head of the SJS - would have been accompanied by a guard detail, but the Chief Judge had known Dredd for years. She trusted him implicitly.
Of course, she thought, one of the things he could be trusted on was to say and do things that she didn't necessarily agree with.
He was standing there with his hands clasped behind his back, gazing out through the big observation windows at the Mega-City spread below.
The Hall of Justice was the tallest structure in Mega-City One, rising to the centre-point of the ion-plasma dome that, effectively, sealed the city and its inhabitants from an atmosphere contaminated in any number of ways, by any number of wars. Or even wars.
The ionization-dome was in the process of polarising towards its night-time setting, shutting out the light from the Corona Maladictus - the suspended cloud of quasi-biological micro-particles released during the Apocalypse War, the decay of which could at times turn the night sky bright as day.
Corpse-light, basically: the suspended remains of the vaporised dead.
Lights were already coming on in the city below, to stave off the artificially boosted night. The whole arrangement was a colossal waste of resources, in the opinion of some - it was just healthier than spending the night under corpse-light.
"I expected you here later," the Chief Judge said. "There must have been any number of crimes you simply couldn't ignore on the way back."
"I ended up totalling my Lawmaster," said Dredd. "I had to come back directly."
He turned from the windows to face her. Usual procedure was for a Judge to remove his or her helmet when in the presence of the Chief, but Dredd made a point of never showing his face to any living soul. There was even a special dispensation somewhere in the Justice Department records.
Like a lot of clone-based Judges, the Chief Judge knew, Dredd's identity was engaged with the idea of the Law almost to the point of monomania. He was the living and iconic embodiment of it. Showing something so individualistic as his naked face would go against the very core of his being.
Besides, like a lot of clones, Dredd was without a shred of such a basic human weakness as vanity - even to the point of refusing reconstructive surgery for injuries received in the line of duty. There could be anything at all under there. On the whole it was probably best not to think about it.
Then again - and unlike a lot of clones - Dredd could turn around and suddenly display a surprising level of human insight.
"You're looking tired, Hershey," he said. "Just out of the sleep machine?"
"Yeah," said Chief Judge Hershey. "I've stopped complaining about it. Last time I mentioned it, Slithe gave me a week of oh-so-snotty and courteous enquiries about my hormone balance."
Slithe was a Senior Judge in the SJS - the Special Judicial Service - whose job it was, ostensibly, to Judge the Judges, rooting out corruption and abuse of power.
What the SJS seemed to do in actual fact was spend the live-long day hatching plots to stab Chief Judges in the back and overthrow them the moment they brought the faintest breath of humanity or clemency to their job.
Even more worrying, Hershey thought, was the uniform and general ineptitude of these various nefarious plots. It made you wonder how good the SJS drokkers were doing at their proper job of rooting out corruption and abuses and so forth. There could be any number of Judges out there, getting away with totally unnoticed murder.
"There's no reason why you shouldn't get some real sleep, Hershey," Dredd said. "Sure, a Judge has to be better and above human weakness, but there's no sense killing yourself doing the impossible." His lips twitched in the closest he had ever come in his life to a humorous smile. "It'd be like saying it was a sign of weakness to die when you're hit in the head by a hi-ex round."
"Believe me, Dredd," said Hershey, "I'd love to take the time - there just isn't any. Too many problems to deal with."
She gestured to the observation windows and the City beyond. "Out there we have one Judge for every hundred thousand citizens. The job never ends.
"It was different when the blan
ket-tranquilisation programmes were still active, and we could shift the resources to where they did the most good. But now the resources are just spread too thin. We're one big knock away from a mass-riot at the best of times - and it's getting worse."
"What about upping the number of clones on the strength?" Dredd said. "Or increasing the degree of automation?"
"Look what happened the last time," said Hershey. "Both last times. And the times before that."
"Genetics and cybernetics have evolved since then," said Dredd.
"Not to the point where they'll be accepted," Hershey said. "I mean, you, Dredd. You're an individual, as are the other clones on the strength. You were specially produced, as a kind, as a method of preserving the DNA of famous Judges from the past like Fargo and so on. Accent on the special. You know, like Special Edition?"
Dredd simply nodded. In this matter he was almost entirely ego-free, and did not take discussion of his basic clone nature in any pejorative sense.
Hershey sighed. "We start mass-producing faceless drones, DNA or cyber-based, and the city will revolt. No citizen is going to submit to the authority of something he can't think of as human, and at this point, authority is all we have going for us. Without it, we're just another armed gang."
Dredd nodded. It might have seemed odd to those who held that Mega-City One was a totalitarian police state, its jackbooted Judges forever stamping on the faces of the disenfranchised masses, but he truly believed in the democratic principle. Or at least, he found it less thoroughly appalling than any other alternative.
The Justice Department had, after all, come to power by popular acclaim. The fact that the Judges had been the only remaining organised force in the toxic, bloody chaos after the Rad Wars was neither here nor there. It had not been forcibly opposed out of nothing; people had simply recognised that it was the only chance for society to survive in any kind of coherent order.
