Heritage of Flight (41 page)

"Will you sit
down
, man?” demanded Neave, his patience fraying. “I dislike being towered over. Now, sit down and explain to me this passion everyone on this benighted world seems to have for self-incrimination."

Ben Yehuda seated himself on the edge of the nearest chair. “I told you, I'm from Ararat. One generation removed from Earth. Does the commissioner know anything about Ararat?"

"The commissioner—dammit, man, you're not on trial yet, so speak like a normal person!—assumes that Ararat is a planet settled by members of one minority group. Since Mount Ararat was where, allegedly, the Ark touched down after the Flood—"

"That's right, sir. I'm Jewish. Not observant: never was. And when the courts on Ararat denied my wife and kids full citizenship, I left. I won't deny I was angry. But that's not an excuse. The thing is, as a citizen of Ararat, I should have died rather than conspire at ... at what I did. As I saw it, I had a choice to make: my kids’ lives as opposed to the lives of the Cynthians.

"So"—he held out his hands—"I made my decision and knew I'd pay for it all the rest of my life. But the others, Commissioner. There were plenty of people here who opposed the decision to poison the Cynthians. They shouldn't suf—"

The annunciator rang again, and both men jumped.

"Were you expecting anyone?” Neave asked ben Yehuda, more to see his face than anything else.

"My watchdog is outside. I wish you'd remove him. I'm not going to kill myself."

"Your son thinks otherwise..."

"My son's a protective idiot. Takes after his father."

Again the annunciator rang, louder this time, and repeated, a strident, insistent pattern of notes.

"Come in,” Neave said, on a sigh.

The woman who entered was thin, her black skin taut and unwrinkled about dark eyes that flashed with indignation. Her hair was silvered, and seemed to wreathe her face as much from the angry electricity that informed each of her movements as from natural curl.

"I thought you'd be here doing something stupid, Dave,” she greeted the engineer. “Beneatha Angelou, Life Sciences,” she introduced herself curtly to Neave, who had risen and begun a courteous speech about remembering her. Indeed, he wasn't likely to forget her last outbreak.

"What are you here to do?” ben Yehuda asked. They were old enemies, those two, Neave observed; good enemies, a relationship rich and mature with many years and conflicts.

Despite herself, Beneatha grinned. “Certainly not to turn myself in. You know I opposed a military government on Cynthia from the start, and I certainly opposed the annihilation of the Cynthians—"

"I remember, Beneatha. You asked me how
I
could personally consent to such a decision. It was a good question."

She nodded and made a “humph” of dissatisfaction. Then she looked for a chair, waved Neave off as he offered to place it for her, and turned it, to rest her arms and chin across its headrest.

"I need to tell you something,” she informed Neave.

Politely he steepled his fingers.

"Aside from the fact that I think that Dave here is being inflammatory, I want to state for the record that I'm damned if I'm going to turn myself in. Maybe I did wrong in not stopping these people; God knows, I argued myself blue in the face trying. But, Commissioner, what you've got to know is how hard they tried to keep the colony going. During the epidemic of ergot, I think we all would have died without them. Is there some way I can have that put into the record?"

Neave smiled at her. “I'll have one of my officers take your deposition,” he said. Suddenly he liked the caustic woman enormously. “Is that all you came to say?"

"Not quite all. Thorn wasn't at fault. And please,” her eyes suddenly filled with tears, “don't blame the kids, though some of them are blaming themselves right now. They were too young. We tried to protect them, give them some semblance of the normal life they never had. And we did just fine! Commissioner, you just look at our kids. We brought them up
clean!
It doesn't explain anything, or excuse anything, but if we were set down here as seedcorn, I think we did a pretty good job."

She rose as quickly as she had seated herself, and was halfway out the door before she turned.

"Thanks,” she said. “You've been handed a lousy situation. I think you'll do your best too."

The door slid closed behind her. Neave sank back into his chair and saw that ben Yehuda had steepled his fingers against his lips to hide a smile.

"Usually she's even more emphatic,” ben Yehuda said. He rose to leave too. “If you try me as a civilian, you'll have to extradite me, won't you?"

Neave lowered his eyes. “Not to Ararat, I promise you."

"That's all I ask. Thanks."

The door whispered open, then closed.

Damn. I
like
these people. How am I going to try them?

He flipped back to the manual on courts-martial. Subsection: general court-martial. Direct examination. Cross-examination. Redirect. Recross ... the labyrinth of precedent, tradition, and—he had to believe it—justice. The trial counsel had been making heavy weather of Captain Borodin's log, Yeager's continuations, the colony's records, and the “investigation” Yeager had prepared.

Heavy weather. How
had
Halgerd's ultralights withstood the ocean storms? Looking guiltily at the vacant walls in case they showed signs of reproaching him, Neave fed in the exploration team's report and scrolled rapidly to the end, his eyes flicking with the phenomenal speed of an experienced skim reader. He hissed under his breath. “Await subsequent reports” indeed! So much for distraction.

He could find no way around it. He would try the Cynthian leaders; and after he tried them, and convicted them—for so the evidence led—he would have to order them executed.

24

Painstakingly groomed in their ancient uniforms, uneasy in the wardroom set aside for the court-martial, Pauli Yeager and Rafe Adams sat on the very edge of their chairs. After so many years away from starships, being aboard one again was a matter for wonder and discomfort. After one incredulous look about that room with its bright enamels and unscratched surfaces, they had sat quietly, their eyes turned toward Neave. Flanking them were their defense counsel and his assistant. Two spruce young men for whom Cynthia was their first planetfall outside Earth's system, they were the articulate, flexible best that Neave could find.

And, he thought as he called the court to order with a faintly apologetic cough, they were a damned sight more comfortable seatmates than the three officers who sat to either side of him, each wearing the official face that masked distrust of Neave (whose direct commission made him ranking officer) with self-conscious professionalism. He had seen more animation in museum exhibits.

His subordinates were correct on one issue: any one of them had more practice conducting courts-martial than Neave. And were welcome to every bit of practice that they had: he wished he could have turned this one over to them, too. He sat back as the trial counsel seized his moment to take over. Neave heard himself mentioned in the appointing orders, and blanked out briefly. Then, the TC's announcement, “The prosecution is ready to proceed with the trial in the case of the Government of Earth against,” slapped him back to awareness.

I am twenty years, too old
, he thought,
to want to set a moral precedent. Id rather go home and leave these people to build their own homes in peace.

"The tribunal,” his ancestor had written so many centuries ago, “would be the voice of the civilized world.” Or worlds. It hardly seemed fair to array all that power against the shabby, painfully earnest pair sitting opposite him, who would willingly have waived the whole ponderous fanfare.

The TC reverted to the drone of ritual, swearing in the court reporter, announcing his own qualifications, then those of the defense counsel. Neave grimaced, as he had each time he thought of that. In all the preparations for this mission, no one had thought to provide enough lawyers for a general court-martial. The spruce young men who served as defense counsel had nowhere near the experience of the TC, who promptly announced that for the record, while the youngsters flushed pink to their ears and wanted to thrust the TC out an airlock, if Neave was any judge. Unlike him, they were young enough, ambitious enough, to want in on this trial. They still had theories of justice, blind-eyed, absolute, and removed from humanity. Better say “intelligent life” instead of “humanity,” Neave cautioned himself.

"No member of the defense present has equivalent legal qualifications. You have the right to be represented by counsel who has such qualifications,” he informed Yeager and Adams, who listened attentively. “Unless you expressly request that you be represented by the defense counsel who is now present, the court will adjourn pending procurement of defense counsel who is so qualified. Do you expressly request that you be represented by the defense counsel who is now present?"

"I do not,” said Pauli Yeager, even as Rafe laid a hand on the assistant counsel's shoulder. Neave would have sworn that Adams’ gesture was fatherly, comforting him despite his wife's rejection of his professional services.

Neave sat upright. If Yeager wished, she could use the lack of qualified defense counsel as a way to force the court to adjourn. The young man at her side had his mouth open to suggest that, but the TC ground on inexorably.

"Do you also wish the services of counsel who has legal qualifications equivalent to those of the member of the prosecution mentioned?"

"I do not,” Yeager said, then held up one hand to forestall the next questions. “I do not desire the regularly appointed defense counsel and assistant defense counsel to act in this case. In fact, we"—her hand went out to touch her husband in a gesture of which, Neave thought, she was completely unaware, though her voice betrayed her at the last with a faint quaver—"we waive counsel."

She tilted her head slightly, wryly at Neave.
Play out your charade, Commissioner. I will not stop you.

He sighed and excused both young men, who saluted and left the room as slowly as military protocol might allow. The monitor before Neave on the desk flashed, green against the gray of the plastic into which it was set, courtesy of the military to the civilian in their midst. That was his cue to speak.

"Proceed to convene the court,” he ordered. Seeing no way around it, he asked Yeager and Adams to rise. “You, Captain Yeager, and you—"

"Lieutenant will do just fine,” Adams supplied. “Sir."

"Lieutenant Adams, do swear that you will faithfully perform the duties of trial counsel and will not divulge the findings or sentence of the court to any but the proper authority till they shall be duly disclosed. So help you God."

"I do.” After their oath, they looked at one another, and Pauli even smiled faintly.

The spruce young defense counsels they had refused would have tried—as Neave knew perfectly well—all manner of challenges, conniving at a postponement or adjournment that would thrust judgment offworld where it might be safely forgotten. Meanwhile, the TC droned toward the arraignment.

The accused, he informed them, had the right to waive the actual reading of the charges and specifications against them. Yeager looked up at her husband, who shook his head.

Carefully as the judges themselves, they listened while the charges were read out in the TC's most impressive voice. Genocide. Intent to commit genocide. Conspiracy to commit genocide. Stares by the other members of the board must have seared like lasers, but the pair sat imperturbably, until Pauli nodded, as if to confirm that the TC had listed all the charges correctly.

For God's sake
, Neave wanted to shout at them,
how can you stand hearing what you're being accused of?

We did it
, he knew they would answer. Involuntarily he shook his head. Why would they put themselves through this? You had only to speak to them to know how passionate their remorse was. They had spent every day for the past fifteen years atoning. Wasn't that enough?

That was what the court had been assembled to judge.

Then Neave remembered. Operation Seedcorn. The settlers had been left on Cynthia as part of an attempt to hide human survivors from what many feared would be the devastation of all known worlds. Yeager still took those orders seriously. To be human. To preserve human lives and human values—among which was this formality of a trial. “I want to be human again,” Captain Yeager had told him, over and over again. “I want to be clean."

Not just for herself, but for the colony she had condemned herself to protect. Even more than Neave himself, these people were Franklins in the old sense of the word. Farmers. Plain husbandmen and -women who had raised their crops despite tremendous odds and now sought to lay down their burden. Even if their actions cost them their lives.

Do you want to hang together?
Neave thought at them.
Would you rather hang together than live separately?
Throughout the hours and hours of interrogation and deposition, he had been unable to shake any of them in the slightest from their pleas of guilty.

I wish I did not respect these people. I wish I did not like them.