“Well…” The Chief Justice looked around, then shrugged. “So ordered,” he said, opening the mikes. “Get on with the other prunt then, gang. Tim? You want to say anything for your criminal?”
Tim Kapetzki stood up slowly. He glanced at his client, sighed and, as he approached the bench, took out a joint and lighted it. “Let’s all mellow out a little,” he proposed, passing it around. And for a wonder, the C.J., who always disliked smoking in his court because it made him sneeze, only smiled, directly into the camera. “Okay,” said the defense lawyer, “let’s get to it. E did what e said you did, sure.”
“You mean e wants to plead guilty? So we can get right to the sentencing?”
“Well, now, C.J.,” Kapetzki sighed, “that word ‘guilty’ covers a whole lot of shit. There’s ‘guilty’ like somebody takes a gun and kills somebody, and there’s ‘guilty’ like e got a little mixed up and did something, like, almost by accident. I admit e clings to what you’d call an outmoded life style, and of course that messes things up for other people—”
“That’s the Thirty-first Amendment, right?” said the Chief Justice. He fiddled with his controls, and in a moment the circling letters spelled out:
“Nobody has any right to dump on anybody else. This takes precedence over everything else.”—The Thirty-first Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
Kapetzki didn’t even look at it. “But e didn’t realize e was dumping,” he said, without very much conviction. “Tell you what. How about if you let the old girl talk for umself?”
“Well, sure,” said the C.J. hospitably, grinning into the cameras again; but Gwenanda flared:
“Girl? What’s this girl shit?”
“Excuse me, Gwenanda, you’re right, but e calls umself a ‘girl.’ Like, ‘we girls used to do this’ and ‘when we girls get together’ and so on. You ought to talk to um sometime, Gwennie. E’s really interesting—only I don’t see why I always get all the yoyos.”
“Now, now,” said the Chief Justice indulgently. “We said we’d let the, uh, girl talk for umself, so let’s do it. Come on, Feigerman. This is your chance, so don’t blow it.”
So Jocelyn Balmer Tisdale Feigerman composedly stood up and identified herself. She did not show her wickedness to Gwenanda’s eyes—damn, would the rest of the Court see what a prunt she really was? She was no taller than a twelve-year-old and plump as a baby, and her eyes were a sad, pale brown. “I do not know,” she said, “why I am here, for I certainly committed no crime. What I did may have been against some minor ordinance, but it was done only to uphold God’s law.”
“Old Thirty-one’s no damn minor ordinance,” snapped Gwenanda, but subsided when she felt the C.J.’s eyes on her.
“It is possible,” said Jocelyn bravely, “that unfamiliarity with your present customs may have caused me to offend in some worse way than I realized. I can only apologize, like Judge Margov, and ask that you give me, as you did him, the opportunity to tell you about myself, so you will understand my motives and take into consideration my past record.
“I was brought up as a God-fearing Presbyterian,” she went on, settling into an oration. “I married young, to a man who died in the service of his country. Some years later I married again, to a distinguished engineer and philanthropist, and remained his wife for nearly thirty-five years. I was his wife at the time I was admitted to cryonic suspension. In all that time I was active in community affairs, and particularly in attempting to prevent the sin of murder of unborn children. Although I was only able to have one child myself, I raised him with a mother’s full devotion and—”
“Hold on a damn minute,” Gwenanda cut in. “Let me get this straight. You were shacked with two different marries, altogether maybe thirty, forty years, and you didn’t flush or anything and still only had one kid?”
The C.J. turned up the amplification on his mike. “Now, stop it right there, Gwenanda,” he said sternly. “It’s the, uh, girl’s turn now, you can kick the shit out of her later.” And over the private line came the whispering voice of one of the Tin Twins in Gwenanda’s ear—she could not tell which:
“Gwenanda? I wonder if you want to disqualify yourself—after all, you were the arresting officer.”
“Aw, damn,” said Gwenanda, and was moodily silent while Jocelyn Feigerman went on.
“I was a good wife,” she said strongly, “but I was also mindful of God’s law. Reverend Arbneth used to say that the best birth-control device was a silver dollar. Hold it between your knees and never drop it, and you’ll never have a problem. He was right. Girls today—I mean, girls then, before I was suspended, they should have taken that advice, and then there wouldn’t be any need for legalized murder, and I’m sure that’s still true now, whatever else has changed. Murder is a sin, and it’s also a crime. You should prevent it! Put them in jail if they can’t live decently! What kind of a world would it be if you let people do whatever they wanted?”
And she stood silent, with her eyes downcast.
When the Chief Justice realized she was through, he cleared his throat and looked around the Court. “Any questions, gang?” he asked. There were no questions. Samelweiss began to smile. “Well, I’ll tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to retire to our chambers for a while, and maybe pass around a joint and mellow out while we figure out what to do with these two, uh, unusual cases.” And led the way out, smiling, because if there was one thing Samelweiss knew, especially when the media people were right there watching, it was how to build a dramatic climax to an interesting case. And, no doubt at Samelweiss’s contrivance, as the robed justices marched or lumbered out, over their heads the circling glow-lights spelled out:
“Nobody can rule guiltlessly.”—Louis de Saint-Just.
So there was time, there was plenty of time, for furious whispering between the defendants and their attorneys in the front bench, so that Jocelyn and the Hanging Judge began to appreciate what deep shit they were in, and for Kriss and Maris, hugging each other in the back, to let each other know how proud they were of Gwenanda, and for the media people to get all the reaction shots from the audience they needed; and then the justices filed back in.
They were grinning.
When he was quite sure the cameras were on him, Samelweiss said, “Myra, the Court is ready.”
Myra Haik put her two forefingers to her lips in thought for a moment. If you looked quick at Myra Haik she seemed like everybody’s mother, but inside that motherly forty-six-year-old head was a dangerous lady. Both defendants discovered that as they met her gaze, and then she said: “Jocelyn, we do you first. By rights it ought to be Gwennie doing this sentence, but e took umself out because e tagged you in the first place, so I asked to do it. Tell you why. I got to thinking that if I’d been born a little earlier my life might’ve been quite a lot like yours, and I sure thank God every morning of my life that it isn’t. Well. Anyway. Here’s what we have for you. We’re going to give you a marry. And you’re going to be uz, what you call, uz ‘wife.’ If e’s in a bad mood, you’re going to live through it. If e snores, you’ll go short on sleep. If e drinks too much at a party, you’ll stay sober enough to get um home, and if e wants to make love then and can’t because e’s too blind smashed to make it, you’ll hang in there. You probably won’t have to worry about your damn silver dollar,” she said charitably, “because while they fixed you up so most of you functions fine at the freezatorium, they probably didn’t think you needed to ovulate any more. Of course, you can go back and get that done if you want it. Anyway. E won’t be handsome. E won’t be smart. E won’t be any kid, either, and as e’s going to be getting along in years you’re going to hear a lot about uz prostate and uz hemorrhoids and a lot of other stuff that’s really kind of tacky. Well, shit, Jocelyn, you get the idea. And that’s the easy part.
“The hard part is this: You’ll keep um in line. You’ll give um sex when you think e deserves it. You’ll clam up and keep um guessing what you’re mad about whe
n e does something to make you mad, like not picking up uz clothes or talking too much to some other shemale an at a party. You’ll tell um how all the other marries in the world take better care of their bodies and get farther in their business, and if e ever thinks e’s done anything special you’ll be sure to explain to um why it isn’t, after all, much. And you’ll do that every day you live and e lives and we won’t give you any divorce, and that is the order of this Court.”
Bang of the gavel. “So ordered,” cried the C.J. happily. “Now you do the other one, Gwenanda.”
Gwenanda winked proudly at Kriss and Maris before returning her gaze to the defendants. They were a lot less cocky now. Jocelyn looked both smiley and faint, as though she thought she was getting off easy and, at the same time, didn’t know if she could live through it; the Hanging Judge looked merely scared. “Horatio,” said Gwenanda, “the easy thing to do with you, with both of you, would be just to pop you back in the freezer and let tomorrow worry about straightening you out. But, shit, you’d probably be just as bad when they thawed you again. So we’ve got something special for you.
“You’re going to be the hemale marry e’s married to.”
And she grinned meltingly into the cameras; and, with a twitch of the dreadlocks, tore the robe off and marched down through the crowded courtroom, the red and black dashiki glowing and smoldering, to where Maris and Kriss were waiting. They kissed. They led the way to the public elevators, arm in arm. And they kept their arms around each other all the way up the long ride, up out of the layers of abiotic rock, past the first prokaryotes and eukaryotes, past the crawling things that lived only to eat each other and spawn and die, past the rocks where the bellowing reptiles were entombed, past the beginning of mammals, past savagery, past history, all the way up, and out, into the clean, kind, civilized air.
About
the
Author
FREDERIK POHL, one of science fiction’s greatest authors, has several times won the Hugo and Nebula awards, the field’s highest honors, for his novels, which include Gateway, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon, Man Plus, and Jem. In addition, he has been honored for the genre classic, The Space Merchants, written in collaboration with C. M. Kornbluth, has won the Hugo for Best Editor three times, is an American Book Award winner, and has been awarded the Prix Apollo in France. In 1982, he was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Mr. Pohl resides in New York City.
Frederik Pohl, The Years of the City
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