by Eugen Bacon
There, she swooped down, straight into the Justice Library. Xhaust was renowned for documentation. Every citizen, every event was carefully charted into the books of history. Myra was determined to find record of Balmoral’s crime. What thing had brought him trial and condemnation, a sentence of life exile in Shiva had the prison shuttle not spiraled from the skies to crash into Middle Creek? What terrible thing had he done to warrant such punishment for him and his family? That was the thing Myra sought.
She was uneasy about what she might uncover but try finding it she would. Perhaps if she unearthed it, Amber might see. As right now, the girl couldn’t hold sense for grief. If her father was better dead than alive, soon Amber would know. Myra would see to it that Amber knew.
• • •
The documentation Myra found of Balmoral’s crime was not that of the guilt she sought. The papers said a man had died. He was thrown from a roof he was repairing, and slowly choked until he died, strangled by a hoisting rope that looped around his neck. The man’s name was Setius Rosellumus. He was Balmoral’s rich uncle. And his sole heir? Balmoral.
Myra flipped the page. Palatio, the first wife of Setius, raised the accusation. By and by, witnesses came forward. They attested to catching glimpse of Balmoral in the vicinity of the crime about the time of the uncle’s death. But it was a time nobody exactly could pinpoint, one only ascertained by the depth of rope-cut in his neck, by the degree of rigor mortis in his fingers . . .
Balmoral was tried. The jury that convicted him did so by a single deciding vote. He escaped execution, a punishment the weight of his crime deserved, and was sentenced to exile with his family in Shiva.
However, oh however!
Five moons later evidence emerged of Palatio’s hand in her husband’s death, having carefully staged it with the help of a lover, a hit man named Spoon—named so for he was dumb as a spoon on all matters except murder. Spoon had made this murder look like an accident. The law caught up with Palatio. Spoon confessed his participation in order to escape execution. He brought to court receipts of transaction between him and Palatio, payment for the hit. Spoon was exiled to Shiva. Palatio was convicted for the murder of Setius Rosellumus and was executed by disintegration.
If so, wondered Myra, why was Balmoral not exonerated? Why was he not allowed return to Xhaust from his temporary refuge in Camp Zero, before all those terrible things happened to his wife Nickel and teenage daughter Jacadi in the hands of Shiva guards?
Balmoral’s framing and subsequent familial persecution encouraged Myra to wonder how many people and their families in Xhaust had suffered wrong persecution. She contemplated how she could drum up interest in the case.
She sought audience with the chief magistrate, dubbed as a prominent personage in Xhaust, the very whisper in the Premier’s ear.
A servant, solemn at the main door, observed the topaz in Myra’s hair, the pulse beating in her neck, and ushered her in. More servants popped in and out of the waiting room before the chief magistrate himself breezed in. He had eyes that not only bulged; they were dichromatic too. They changed hue from tsavolite green to opaque. Despite his nasal voice that was exasperating to listen to, Myra understood he was a temperate man of good listening.
But he would not delve into her serious matter until she was watered and fed. He talked about his country, about many other things, about anything in fact that popped into his head, but steered clear of politics.
“Wife,” he introduced an equally bug-eyed and nasal-voiced creature, but how beautiful! “Is name Astrid.”
Astrid wore a lemon kimono sprigged with olive and gold petals. Her robe swept the floor, and Myra could not catch glimpse of her feet. She glided, not walked. Her hands were laden with gilded trays. Her first serve was finely garnished in little tents. Myra lifted a tent and found what looked like a stalk of fried asparagus that turned out to be a roasted worm. The snail caviar, sickly sweetened, Myra tried, but her stomach turned at skewers of frog legs.
At last Astrid glided away with the last of food trays, and true conversation was possible.
“This business you bring,” the chief magistrate encouraged, his tsavolite green eyes going opaque.
Myra cleared her throat. “I’ve had many years as President of the Arbitration Council of Refugees.”
He nodded.
“I have bustled in and out of worlds in nanoseconds to mediate for refugees.”
He nodded.
“My husband encrypts and decodes intergalactic signals and has a professorship in cosmic sciences. Often he has helped me in search of homes for the displaced in strange worlds. Often we have succeeded.”
He nodded.
“The one time I failed and my refugees landed in a harem, I flew right back to save them. All this and more I have done for no gain to myself or to my family.”
He nodded. “I am clear in my mind this thing you are speaking,” he said.
“By coming to you today,” said Myra, “I am staking my career because I have signed an oath of neutrality. But I cannot stay neutral on this matter. In fact, I am very biased. You see, I come to speak of one Balmoral Rosellumus, an exile whose child I have raised in my house as my daughter. For her, mostly, I seek justice.” She leaned forward and handed him documentation from the Justice Library.
“Now, Your Honor,” she continued when he lifted his eyes from the evidence, “despite my lack of neutrality, I have no real gain now in the righting of an injustice. It would be much easier for the child to think of her father as a murderer, as a lunatic, and not as a saint. That way, she might forget him and his passing.”
“I am clear in my mind,” the chief magistrate said.
“Now,” said Myra. “Did you know there are many kinds of madness? To simply say that one is mad is like saying today is winter. What kind of winter? Gray fog winter? High wind winter? Rain bucketing winter? Is it slush snow winter? Hailstorm winter? Ice pellets like big golf balls falling from the sky winter? It is like saying I like food. What kind of food? Sweet? Savory? Boiled? Fried? Is it plant food or meat food? Is it chewable or drunk?”
“I am clear why you is Arbitrate President of Refugee Council,” the chief magistrate said.
“Now, your Honor, so it is that there are many kinds of madness. There is madness that brings something wild and evil to the eye of an individual. This type of madness makes one carry out things of such atrocity that people shake their heads and refuse to remember. There is a type of madness that makes one mistake his fingers for someone else’s and cut them off. This type of madness makes people shudder about it for generations to come. There is a type of madness that reduces a full grown man to a baby, enough for him to say, “Are you my mummy?” to men, mice and marigolds. This type of madness walks like feet and makes someone strap tins to their ankles and they roam the world.
“The atrocity against Balmoral and his family brought a different kind of madness. This one made a husk of a man whose memories returned to surrender to a river in his head, a river that drowned those same memories. That water one day brought along laughter, tear-drawing, shoulder-clapping laughter, that finally killed Balmoral.”
The chief magistrate spat on the ground. “This Balmoral,” he said, “may the gods of rapture walk by his rib.”
“Why was he not exonerated when Spoon and Palatio were convicted?”
The chief magistrate’s bulging eyes changed hue. “I hear tell of Shiva corruption, buy slave labor in Xhaust but I no take serious. Me take serious now that innocent Balmoral still sentence to Shiva when Palatio is true crime. Palatio she executed, why Balmoral not exonerate? I investigate who responsible for take money.”
“And, your Honor, I would like you to remember that his entire family was also punished . . .”
“I investigate. Premier take action! This corrupt of worst kind!” When he had calmed, he said, “I deal with important matte
r first.”
Turned out that not only was he the chief magistrate, he was also chairman of Xhaust’s treasury. Together with a certificate of posthumous pardon, he handed Myra a bag of gold. “For Balmoral child,” he said.
The recompense, he said, was nothing compared to the ill done.
“One last I ask question,” he said. Myra paused at the door. “Now dead one child: maybe she grow, she marry well?”
“Yes,” said Myra. “Yes,” with conviction. “I will see to her future.”
• • •
Le Piste Funerals coordinated the service. There were pies, cupcakes and sandwiches that were too pretty to eat, lemonade and cider too sweet for the somberness of the event, an evening reception where a local band played jazzed up numbers to the congregation until Tempest changed the beat.
When Myra returned with Balmoral’s pardon, Amber’s face found something softer, something that sometimes permitted a hug. As for Tempest . . . Protecting Amber became a vocation. Her agitation was instant when anyone pointed out Amber with a chin or a nod or a finger.
The night of the vigil, Myra headed out the door to the balcony where Amber stood alone but Vida’s mother, Margo, beat her to it. So Myra joined Margo’s husband, Ken, who stood by a bookshelf rubbing his chin. Together they observed Middle Creek townsfolk. Salem carried around trays stacked tall with biscuits, sandwiches and champagne.
In remembrance of Balmoral’s life and his unassuming spirit, Tempest changed the music’s tempo and the band played When You Were Young. To everyone’s wonderment, Amber sought and found Myra, took her hand and together they danced.
• 44 •
The keeper at the gate in the land of Shiva was a man named G2 from the tag on his breast. Another guard, 0141, refused to meet Myra’s gaze.
G2 was hairless. His eyes were close-knit and his skin wore a coating of lime. Myra scrawled her details into the visitor’s book and took from G2 the chained pass embossed with her name.
Shiva was expecting her.
“I am take you to Commander Deimos,” G2 said. He stepped out of the glassed hut. “Follow,” he said, and took her bag. Myra cast one more look inside the hut. 0141 paused scribbling, crisply nodded. She felt his eyes on her back as G2 guided her into the steel fortress whose walls were spiked with a battalion of more metal.
Along the way she encountered, to her shock, not another guard but a scruff-faced tot, naked, who peered from a white-lit alley between two steel blocks. G2 turned his head and the child retreated.
“Malinger no good. Be already late,” G2 said. “Is good hurry or Deimos be angry.”
“This Deimos . . .” began Myra, but G2 widened his stride.
They approached another hut. This one stood small on the hyperarid ground, triangular shaped like the glassed one at the gate, except it was all metal and no window. A guard with a laser gun stood sentry against its door and from inside its walls came a burst of screaming that ended in sobbing. G2 did not break the pattern of his stride. “Follow,” he said when Myra’s curiosity lingered.
They came to another gate where, it seemed, a new batch of prisoners had just arrived and was being processed. Rows and rows of males and females stood at attention in a chain gang. A hover hangar with more guards, more weapons, monitored the ground from the sky. Beams from a tower blinked on the prisoners at intervals.
Myra noticed the prisoners’ leanness, their muscle tone and prominent cheekbones, their thick-set brows that sent a spasm to her heart because they all reminded her of Amber. Guard D1394 doodled over paperwork at the head of the parade, verifying aloud people’s names and their crimes and places of origin, and then assigning them a number: “Lani Surrimon, robber, Xhaust, prisoner number X6531. Tallefiele Velano, tax evader, Xhaust, prisoner number X10105.”
G2 led Myra from the parade and down a set of thin steps and inside a building whose maze of corridors, overhead monitors and locked doors overwhelmed.
Her mind returned to Balmoral’s framing and how Amber and the rest of her family dearly paid. Shiva had been their fate but what they had endured was worse.
The chief magistrate of Xhaust, long after Myra had sought his audience for Balmoral’s posthumous pardon, had come back with figures: 129 families wrongly persecuted in the year of Balmoral’s tragic fate alone. While the Premier of Xhaust exonerated every single one of them, a reprieve that secured the families’ rightful place back to Xhaust from the barbed fencing of Shiva slave camps, Myra could not help but wonder. If history had proven that Xhaust might succumb to shoddy procedures like failing to exonerate innocent people, how many more innocents still languished in these camps?
Her mission to Shiva in the pretext of officiating the opening of new housing for exiles was ostensibly to undertake a secret audit of the settlement.
“I not clear in my mind,” Chief Magistrate had said, “the fair hand of Commander Deimos on Shiva prisoners. Be my eye, report mission.”
Commander Deimos, when at last Myra met him, was an ageless man with scorched almond eyes, cold. Busy eyebrows part silver. Body straight from Apollo, the god. He looked like someone she should know. “Be here at last,” he said.
“There was a blizzard,” she said.
“Government nosy to bring you,” he said.
“Can’t mind it’s business, can it?”
“No.” He appraised her. “I expect big, tall president of Arbitration Assembly. You small. Beautiful.” He spread his hands. “I am delight to be your host. I entertain.”
“As you will appreciate, Commander, my visit is not for pleasure. If you may, I would like to inspect the new quarters.”
“Beautiful woman, thorn mouth.” He clapped his hands, an action that summoned G2, dutifully stood outside the door. “Take president, she refresh. One hour, bring back. We tour.” He gestured toward the exit. “President, please.”
Myra followed G2 down a corridor. There were so many of them, these corridors. She was annoyed with herself for making plain her dislike. For her ostensible mission to bring success, it was best not to raise suspicion.
Her resting chambers were spartan, as was everything about the settlement. Things sat solid, nothing collapsible except the prisoners.
“A window,” she said in wonderment. G2 turned, perplexed. “And it opens.”
He shrugged, closed the door behind him. The sound of his heels clipped away through the walls, the sound getting small, smaller. Myra threw open the window, leaned her head outside. She surveyed a barren field in the vastness of arid land.
Back in the commander’s office, he was smoking. An overhead fan revolved without pace, spread the white curls until they vanished.
“Cigarette, President?” he loosened one from the pack.
“No thank you, Commander. I don’t smoke.”
“Deimos.” Horns of smoke out of his nostrils. “For you, President, is Deimos.”
“Then I must insist you call me Myra.”
He stamped out the cigarette. “Pretty name, it roll in my mouth. What you suggest is good bargain. Deimos. Myra. We shake on it?”
Myra stretched her hand. “We shake.”
• • •
There were no windows. Everything was butternut gray with no windows.
Myra faced Deimos. “These? The new quarters?”
“Fully furnished. Each unit be family house. We make near to natural habitat.”
“This?” She looked at the iron walls.
His face closed. “You not like?”
“I expected . . .” She bit her lip. “A simple miscalculation of the eye, mine. You are doing the best you can in the circumstances.”
He dropped the cigarette, crushed it with a foot. “Best we can, yes. For integrity of settlement. Xhaust give no funding. Prisoner work in mines: make money. More mine, more money. Who hurt? Prisoner.” His arms folded. “We do
best we can.”
Gate seven led to the sick room, block fifty-three. Here was a place, Myra understood, where inmates no longer useful found their end. Quarantined to die alongside other dying, prisoners were reduced to pus and bones. Eyes on skeletons looked back at her. Some of the inmates muttered, some lay silent, others whimpered.
“Water,” someone begged from a corner.
A guard passed round with a bucket and a ladle, scooped and poured muddied liquid into open mouths. Myra snatched the bucket, hurdled over bodies but by the time she reached the one who had begged, knelt by him, ladle in hand, he was motionless on the cold, gray floor.
• • •
She couldn’t sleep. She stood by the window, gazed outside. A dazzle of lights melted the night. She wondered how anyone could sleep in this miserable world, but eventually she did.
She woke up to a sound of boots, and then distant droning that grew louder. She peered out the window, saw two guards with weapons by the open doors of a chopper. Explosions rattled the compound. Pause, and then she saw a prisoner running. Bursts of fire tore through the blackness. A volley of lasers, then a scream. More lasers, one flash after another. The running man dodged, whirled, the chopper on chase. A second chopper appeared and a fresh volley of fire ended the chase.
Shaken, Myra wondered if this was a bad dream. All was once more silent. But the dream had a real body on the ground below. The slain runner was not moving.
Somewhere out there, someone, perhaps a guard, laughed. The dream was reality. Only a guard would laugh in this forsaken world.
Two prisoners entered the field at a trot, yanked the body out of sight by its feet. An owl whooed! Myra looked out to the cold, starless night and covered her face. She would never again fall asleep in this place, she swore.
