Final Reckoning: The Fate of Bester (29 page)

Bester managed a weak laugh.

“Nice speech. You are a coward.”

“Maybe. Maybe I am. But I’d rather be that than what you are. What I would be if I pulled the trigger.”

With relief, Girard sagged against the wall and lowered his gun, still not sure what he would have done if Garibaldi had gone through with it.

No, he knew. He wouldn’t have stopped Garibaldi, but he would have arrested him, and then turned in his own badge. He was flexible on certain points-cynical, some might say - but down deep, he believed. Believed in the law, believed in right.

What he had done to Paulette-yes, Paulette, he could think of her by a name other than “my wife” - hadn’t been right. That was the crux of the problem, the thing he had been dancing around. He could pretend that her reaction was extreme, that he was only upset because he’d been caught, that Marie was being a nuisance, that it was the inconvenience of the whole thing that bothered him. But those were lies. He was upset because he was wrong, and he had to look it full in the face.

But first things first. He took out his cuffs and went to help Garibaldi.

Chapter 15

The War Crimes tribunal facilitation committee met today, to discuss the feasibility of acceding to the demand of the French government that the trial of Alfred Bester be conducted in Paris and not in Geneva.

Speaking before the committee, French President Michel Chambert reiterated his claim that since Bester was arrested on French soil he should be tried there. Senator Charles Sheffer of the United States vehemently opposed this position, calling it a “cynical ploy on the part of the French government to exploit what will surely be the trial of the century.

“Bester stands accused, not by France, but by the Human race,” Sheffer went on, “and should be tried in EarthDome.”

A number of other Earth senators protested as well, but by the end of the dav. it was clear that the committee would likely agree to French demands. Dr. Eugenia Mansfield, a professor of law at Harvard, pointed out in testimony to the rules committee that, ifdenied the larger venue, France could press for trial on local charges, which process might take months-after which every otherjurisdiction with some grievance against the infamous telepath could well press to do the same. This could delay the EA War Crimes trial indefinitely, something EarthGov is not likely to permit.

Senator Nakamura seemed to sum up the majority opinion when he said,

“After waiting for so long for a final resolution to the telepath crisis, the world is hungry for justice. We should not deny the people that justice simply because France chooses an inappropriate time to assert its sovereignty.”

Garibaldi watched the video images come and go, fiddling with the controls from his hospital bed. He was thankful that, for the most part, the hospital had managed to keep the reporters at bay. Oh, one would appear outside of his window now and then, pleading soundlessly for an interview, but only two had managed to actually get in disguised as doctors. That had been a bit disturbing, since Girard had a couple of uniforms outside, just in case Bester had any vengeful allies left. On the other hand, letting them through might have suited the Frenchman’s idea of a prank.

The result was that there were exactly five shots of him that repeated endlessly on the videos: his attack of the Bester look-alike and subsequent dismissal of the reporter, a brief shot of him being loaded into the ambulance after he collapsed at Girard ‘s feet, and two views of him in the hospital bed, puffy-faced and looking incredibly old. In one he simply scowled and pushed the call button. In the other he made a six-word statement summing up his feelings. They were unfortunate words to become famous for.

He wasn’t exactly Churchill or Sheridan, he thought wryly. He had hoped to hear from Sheridan, but the president of the Interstellar Alliance seemed to have dropped out of known space again. He had a way of doing that.

“Well. I’m glad I found you here, and not in the morgue, at least.”

Lise stood in the doorway, more beautiful than ever.

“Hi, honey.”

He tried to look calm. Her lips compressed, and he prepared for the worst, but after a moment or two, she walked over to his bed and took his hand.

“Are you okay?”

“Broken ribs, shattered scapula, ruptured spleen. Bester in custody. Never felt better.”

“You left without telling me where you were going. You won’t do that again.”

She didn’t qualify it. She didn’t even say “or else,” but he was left without any doubts.

“I won’t do that again,” he said, and meant it.

She nodded, then smiled, briefly.

“You didn’t kill him.”

“No. I couldn’t.”

“The Michael Garibaldi I love wouldn’t kill him. I’m glad to know you’re the man I thought you were.”

“I try to be, Lise. The man you see in me is the best of me. It’s just the rest that’s a mess.”

“Not a mess-just a little untidy.”

“Where’s Mary?”

“Outside. I wanted to see you first. I wasn’t sure how you would be, how I’d react.”

She brushed his cheek.

“Now that this is over…”

“It’s not over yet. There’s still the trial, and the sentencing, all that good stuff. I want to stay for the trial.”

“But for you, it’s over;” she said, firmly.

“And now that it’s over there’s going to be a hole in your life, Michael. You’ll have to be ready to deal with that.”

“No hole. Just a wound, finally closing up. I knew that, when I finally had him.”

He squeezed her hand.

“You think I don’t have enough?”

“You aren’t a quiet man, Michael. You aren’t comfortable just with happiness.”

He laughed. It hurt.

“I bet if I put enough effort into it, I can be,” he said.

“And believe me, I intend to put a lot of effort into it.”

She smiled a little skeptically, then kissed him.

“By the way,” she said, when they came up for air.

“You can explain to our daughter what those words mean. The ones they keep playing on the newscasts.”

Bester felt as if he were looking down on the courtroom from a great height, as if the witness stand were Olympus. For weeks, others had sat here, but they had seemed small to him, lost in the crowd of humanity, in the humming of news-tapers, there in the almost baroque splendor of the French hall of justice.

Small. Even Garibaldi looked small, perched in that place that demanded the truth. Old enemies and old friends came, spoke, and went. A few struggled, unwilling even now to betray him in an entirely unqualified way. Most of these were already in prison.

Others were glad to proclaim him a monster, to paint him as something more removed from humanity than the Drakh or even the Shadows. He listened to them, watched them shrink into history even as he felt himself grow larger, a towering shadow. People would remember Alfred Bester, yes, but these others were mere footnotes.

It might have been different, he mused, if Sheridan had come. Perhaps Sheridan would have even said something good about him. After all, Sheridan understood, as the rest of these insects did not. Understood about the sacrifices one made for the common good, the stains one would accept on one’s own soul when something higher was at stake.

Yes, all of this was inevitable. Oh, his lawyers tried. Hadn’t Bester been an appointed official of an organization created and overseen by the EA Senate? Had he really been doing anything more than implementing the policies of Psi Corps, the president, EarthGov itself?

All of that was just marking time. The prosecution was full of answers. Nothing in the Psi Corps charter allowed for the murder of unarmed civilians, the blackmail of EA senators, unauthorized experiments on detainees, torture, distribution of illegal substances. No, Bester had taken matters into his own hands, creating a government within a government, and had gone to war against not only the law, but everything that was right and decent.

Inevitable.

Now he sat in the chair himself, the place of truth. He wore a black suit. He didn’t wear his telepath’s badge. He smiled when the mouthpiece for the prosecution-a young EA senator named Semparat-stepped onto the floor. Semparat looked… small.

“State your name, please, for the record.”

“My name is Alfred Bester,” he replied.

He paused, cocked his head slightly to the side.

“Or would it make you feel better if I said my name was Hitler, or Stalin, or Satan?”

“Alfred Bester will do,” the senator said, dryly.

“I think by the end of this we will see that it will do quite nicely.”

“Oh, but you knew that coming in, didn’t you?” Bester asked.

“You had no need of a trial, did you?”

Semparat frowned, but ignored that last.

“Mr. Bester,” he continued, “you have heard all the charges against you before, at your hearing. At that time, you maintained that you were innocent. After all of the witnesses that have come before us, do you still so maintain?”

Bester raised his eyebrows.

“Of course I do.”

“Really.”

“I do.”

“You deny, for instance, the murder of forty-three unarmed civilians connected to the telepath Resistance on Mars?”

“I deny their murder, yes.”

“You deny the evidence brought before this court that you ordered their executions and killed three yourself.”

“I don’t deny killing them. I deny the charge that it was murder. And I applaud your semantic games, Senator. What you now call the telepath Resistance was at the time universally recognized as an illegal, subversive organization of terrorists. The normals involved were also terrorists and subversives.”

“But they weren’t armed, were they? Did they try to resist you?”

“Frankly, I did not care to give them the chance. Their activities had already resulted in the deaths of at least sixty-four of my colleagues. Senator, it was a war. However you look at it, those people fought in that war and they were casualties of it.”

“Who declared this war? You?”

Bester raised an eyebrow mildly.

“The terrorists declared it when they bombed our facilities on Mars. Everything we did after that was response, kind for kind.”

“We’ve heard evidence that you, Alfred Bester, murdered civilians long before the beginning of the telepath conflict. Are you going to claim that that was war, as well?”

“Of course,” Bester said.

“I, for one, am confused by that statement, Mr. Bester, and my guess is that many of this court are equally confused. Would you care to explain?”

“I would be delighted to, Senator,” Bester replied.

“Please do so then.”

Bester took a sip of the water next to him.

“One hundred and fifty-eight years ago, the existence of telepaths was known to almost no one. One hundred and fifty-seven years ago, it became common knowledge thanks to an article in the New England-Journal-of-Medicine.

By the end of that year, eighteen thousand telepaths were dead. No war was declared by any government. They were killed one at a time, they were killed en masse and buried in pits, they were aborted when DNA testing revealed what they were as fetuses.”

“Mr. Bester, I’m sure we all know the history.”

“Really? Funny, I’ve never heard a word about it during this trial. You asked me to speak - I’m speaking. Don’t I have that right?”

“This isn’t a platform for your political views.”

Bester laughed, sharply.

“It seems to be a platform for yours. More than half of the so - called crimes you’re accusing me of were committed with the consent of the legitimate government of the time. You represent the new order, so of course you would like nothing better than to discredit the old one, in order to legitimize yourself.

“This entire trial is nothing more than the final step in rewriting the last century-and-a-half of history to suit those of you who are in charge now. And yet you claim that this trial is not a platform for political views? Senator, your hypocrisy and the hypocrisy of this court sickens me. Either afford me my right to speak without interruption, or send me back to my cell. Frankly, I don’t care which this kangaroo court sees fit to do. But do one or the other.”

That drew a deep murmuring from the audience, and not all of it sounded negative. What he felt was still overwhelmingly hostile, however.

“Very well, Mr. Bester.”

The senator sighed.

“Just get on with it.”

“Thank you. As I said, once telepathy was discovered, the murder of telepaths began. It hasn’t stopped. I could draw your attention to last month’s case in Australia, or the one reported this week in Brazil, but there really is no need for a list of examples, is there? Each of you know it’s true. To grow up telepathic is to grow up with the constant menace of death, the vague but real threat of dying at the hands of someone who doesn’t even know you, only knows what you are, what you represent to them. I grew up with it. The first time I left the academy grounds, to go on a hike with my friends, I was attacked. The first time.”

He paused.

“This undeclared, unrecognized war has been fought for a hundred and fifty-seven years. Its casualties-have always been on my side. And when this killing began, what did EarthGov do about it? They built a telepath ghetto called Teeptown, and they gave us badges to mark us, separate us. They gave any normal who wanted to kill a telepath the means to find us and identify us. Then they used telepaths to control telepaths. Why? The implicit threat was always there-ask any telepath old enough to remember. Either you control yourselves, or we will control you.

That was the choice I grew up with. Hunt down and sometimes kill my own kind, with the blessings of EarthGov and every normal citizen who voted for it, or be subjected to the same uncontrolled genocide that was visited on us in the beginning.

You made that, each and every one of you. Oh, you might try to pawn it off on your ancestors, but you reified it each generation, gave it the nod. I spent the first seventy-two years of my life being told what a good little boy I was, how well I served humanity by hunting down my people. I have the commendations to prove it, an insignia.