Cronix

by James Hider

  And with that, she marched off across the manicured lawns, leaving the waiter to offer the hotel’s sole guest an extensive list of exotic cocktails.

  ***

  The courtroom was a small, ornate chamber decorated in Louis XVI style, its gilt chairs catching the light that streamed through the bay windows. Peering nervously through the glass, Oriente saw a view over the shimmering lake dotted with sailboats and wooded islands. He wished he could be out there, alone in a yacht with the wind in his sails and the sun on his face.

  Loretta Joyce caught his eye from the public benches and gave what was supposed to be a reassuring smile. She had picked him up, as promised, at precisely ten and driven him the short distance through hedgerowed country lanes to the manor house where the court was to convene. A clerk greeted them in the driveway and showed them to a room where two inspectors from the DPP took a brief statement. Oriente told them everything that had transpired since he had been abducted by Wexler and his fake cop squad in London. The men nodded, recorded his statement and disappeared. The usher returned half an hour later, and led him into the chamber where the president of the court and his two fellow judges waited.

  Two of the judges were kindly looking older people, a white-haired gent with sunken cheeks and a stout woman in her fifties with a double chin. Oriente wondered if these were the looks they had been born with back on Earth, reverted to out of a sense of nostalgia or comfort, like wearing an old pair of jogging pants at home. The third, rather disconcertingly, was a teenage girl with her hair in bunches who could have passed for their granddaughter.

  The court secretary rose from his desk and handed the elderly judge a paper. The president of the court smacked his dry lips, squinted at the sheet and started reading in a rather hoarse voice.

  “Case 7325G, Department of Personalities and Profiles versus Luis Oriente,” he intoned. “On the seventh of March, this year the accused, Luis Oriente, was found wounded from an animal attack on the southern fringes of the London Urban Reserve and taken to the Whistler Hospital. There the DPP carried out a series of scans that showed the accused had been residing on Earth without due permission…” the judge winced, stopped reading and put the paper down.

  “Distinguished members of this court, I think we all know the charges. We've all seen the news. Mr Oriente was in DPP custody in London and cooperating with their investigations, when he suddenly took off. Literally,” the judge smiled. “Charges are: unauthorized residence on Earth, evading DPP custody, illegal use of human-to-animal downloads and entering the Forbidden Zone without a permit. In his defense, it has to be said that since coming airside, he has cooperated with the DPP inquiry in full, and had turned himself in at the Great Wall three weeks after fleeing. Also, it seems his abrupt departure from London may well have been under duress.”

  The two other judges nodded. The middle-aged woman spoke up.

  “Mr Oriente, you have informed the DPP since your second detention that you had gone into the Zone in the belief that Douglas Fitch was still alive and had tried to contact you. Instead, you were met by a certain Laura McClure, whom I understand from your lengthy deposition to the Delpy Institute, you claim was one Professor Fitch’s erstwhile collaborators and who was deported, much later, to the Zone. Is that correct?”

  “That is correct, ma’am.” He nodded politely.

  “What did she want?”

  “Well, it wasn’t exactly her, your honor. It was a group of self-replicating clones who believed themselves to be her. They told me something was amiss here, in the Orbiters. They seemed to think there was some kind of malfunction, something that you folk had failed to notice.”

  There was a silence from the panel, broken ultimately by the third judge, the girl who looked barely fifteen but who must have been much older. Or at least Oriente hoped she was. “The only malfunction is in this Laura McLure’s brain,” she laughed. “An insane obsessive who tried to create an illegal simulacrum of Douglas Fitch, who was a hero to all of us here. From what you say it sounds as if she is still in the grip of that madness down in the Zone, if indeed she is alive.”

  “Obviously there may be some need, in light of your testimony at the Delpy, to re-examine her case,” said the elderly judge. “But I’m sure if there was anything wrong with the Orbiters we would have known about it. True, there were some problems reported with the downloads in London, but maintenance teams are fixing those even as we speak.”

  His speech appeared to be an attempt to calm the nerves of the other judges and few court officials. Oriente wondered what had been going down in London since his abrupt departure. “You people didn’t hear about what happened there? A whole unit of Rangers being sliced up and that giant thing appearing out of nowhere?”

  The woman judge shook his head. “Nothing to get excited about. The DPP says the situation is quite under control now.”

  “Now, to return to the case at hand,” the old judge went on. “It seems to me, Mr Oriente, that you were duped into participating in what I might call, in the circumstances, a wild goose chase” – he paused to allow his witticism to register, which it did to an indulgent smile from his fellow judges – “and that the minor infraction of your prolonged and unauthorized stay on Earth might be overlooked in consideration of the considerable debt that it appears we all owe to you.

  “Therefore, my fellow judges and I have decided to impose the very minimum sentence set out by the law in the circumstances.”

  Oriente started to smile and looked around at Loretta Joyce, who was beaming. He snapped back around as the judge finished his speech, though.

  “Luis Oriente, I hereby sentence you to twenty years in a minimum security correctional facility. You will be taken from this place and escorted directly to the Fern Bay Detention Centre to start serving your sentence.”

  “What?” Oriente was in shock. “Twenty years for being abducted? Your honor, you must be kidding me. With all due respect…”

  “We never joke about the law, Mr Oriente, I assure you. This is an extremely lenient sentence, compared to what the prosecution had demanded. After all, we only have your word that you were abducted.”

  “But twenty years, your honor? I have friends down on Earth who could be dead by the time I get back.”

  “If you get back to Earth, Mr Oriente. That is not a given,” the teenager chipped in. “And nobody dies who doesn't want to, I would remind you.”

  Oriente was spluttering in rage when the middle-aged woman interrupted. “There is, as you may know, Mr Oriente, an alternative to a custodial sentence. You have the right to opt for a CB transfer into a historical re-enactment scenario.”

  “A what?” Oriente sensed that whatever it was, it must be better than kicking his heels in a prison yard for the next two decades.

  “The historical re-enactment society has for many years been recreating human history, using consciousness-blocking to allow volunteers and other actors to fully assume the role of the people whose lives they are living. We offer it as an option for people convicted of minor crimes and misdemeanors, though in fact most people do it for fun. I personally have done it a number of times and have some of my best memories from the experience. I must warn you though, since it is human history, it can get rather bloody at times.”

  “What was it Boden said?” mused the elderly judge. “’War is the rich, dark river through the past on whose banks all human history is built.’” He chuckled and turned to Oriente. “He was the first director of the historical society. Wonderful chap, used to do those battlefield re-enactments back on Earth. Had lunch with him just the other week, he was telling me how he used to like dressing up as a Nazi German, smashing uniforms...”

  “But…” Oriente’s mind was spinning. “Wouldn’t that last longer than my actual sentence?”

  “Possibly,” the woman said. “But the society has been doing this for so long, with so many participants, that they have gone back to the dawn of history. I believe they are now just past the a
gricultural revolution, doing the very first towns and settlements. Life expectancy was extremely short then. You could very well die in childbirth and be out next week.”

  Oriente didn’t hesitate. “I’ll take it, your honor.”

  She squinted at him. “It’s my duty to warn you, it can be a very disconcerting experience, especially for a first-timer, and going so far back in human history. You will not know that you are you. You’ll live exactly as they did back then, with all the fears and diseases and gruesome deaths that were part and parcel of daily life then.”

  “I died a horrible death in the plague of Athens,” piped up the old judge, with a wistful sigh that could easily have passed for nostalgia.

  Oriente scanned their faces. “Doesn’t matter. I’ll take it.”

  “Very well then,” said the court president, evidently pleased that Oriente had shown such vim. “It may be tough, but believe me, you won’t regret it. Mr Waziel, let’s see what the society can offer our friend in the coming days.” The clerk walked over and handed the old judge another sheet of paper. He pored over a list, chuckling. His fellow judges leaned in to get a peek.

  “Oh, that one sounds very good,” muttered the old man with glee.

  “Not due to give birth for another two weeks though,” the woman judge replied. “No, the soonest we can get you…” she looked up at the defendant, then back to the list “… is the day after tomorrow. Standard peasant, due to give birth within 48 hours. Probably in a field, by the sounds of it. Should be a fairly brief tenure for the child. The mother is only thirteen herself.”

  “Uh,” Oriente was totally nonplussed by this strange turn of events. “Where is this birth to take place? I mean, where would I be?”

  “Hmm.” The old man peered closer at the list, his bushy white eyebrows bunching together. “City of Naram-Sin, near the shrine of Girsu. Never heard of it.”

  He handed the paper to the middle-aged woman and looked around, as though someone else might offer an explanation.

  “Somewhere in Mesopotamia,” the female judge said. “Fertile Crescent, circa 3200 BC. I do hope you like hoeing dirt, Mr Oriente,” she added with a prim smile.

  ***

  The life of Sulili the Mesopotamian farm boy was, as predicted, mercifully short. The squalling baby was delivered in a mud hut in the city-state Naram-Sin, near the river of Tira-am, named for the goddess who waters the plains and brings harvests to the city of almost three thousand people. The boy grew up fast. By age three he was tending to the family’s chickens, by five, he helped thresh the wheat that yielded a crop just big enough to keep the Naram-Sin from slipping back into the wilderness from which it had emerged just a century or two before. Everyone knew the story of the lost city of Shuruppak, which the gods punished for its sins with three failed harvests in a row, and whose inhabitants were banished to the plains where barbaric nomads dwelled. Occasionally, Naram-Sin was raided by those same hunters from the grasslands that rolled out beyond the irrigated fields. The nomad attacks were desultory, fought with sticks and rocks, the village dogs joining in to fight the attackers’ own starving hounds. The nomads were more adept fighters but fewer in number, and few died in their brief but vicious encounters. Those that did often succumbed in the days afterwards to fevers from dog bites or cracked skulls.

  In times of peace, Sulili grew to his full height of four feet three by the age of thirteen. He would rise with the sun, work the fields till dusk, and once a month visit the temple of Girsu, a large, flat-topped blockhouse of mud bricks and painted wooden beams. It was dark inside, and the shrine itself was a raised circle of stones topped by a wooden post bearing the clay figurine of a buxom woman. Sulili would leave a small offering of barley bread and some oil in a bowl, then join a procession to the squat ziggurat that dominated the low skyline of Naram-Sin. There, the priestess slowly climbed to the little room atop the pyramid to recite her prayers for hours, until the sun went down. Then she would return to her quarters and have sex with one of the farmers as a token of fertility. When it was Sulili’s turn, the woman, who was old enough to be his grandmother, tugged off his rough leather kilt and crouched on all fours as he mounted her. As his thighs slapped against her withered shanks, she uttered prayers and occasional gasps until he fulfilled his duty, with a grunt of relief. He pulled his clothes on and backed out of the sacred room, hurrying back to his family and dinner of barley porridge.

  The gods had seen fit to take both his parents: his father died in agony on his bed, his body livid with fever. His mother had simply seeped away shortly after her twelfth childbirth, of whom only four made it past infancy. Both parents were buried under the brick platform that supported the communal bed where the family slept. Sulili, being the eldest, slept closest to the door, in case wild beasts or other interlopers strayed in. The family’s goats and sheep were stabled on the other side of a low wall bisecting the hovel, keeping the house warm in winter but stinking it up in the hot summers. In any case, the vague scent of his parents decaying in their clay tomb underneath the communal bed lent the house a permanent odor of death, a reminder that man’s tenure on Earth was brief and only the gods lived forever.

  In the summer of Sulili’s thirteenth year, the king ordered all men over the age of twelve to assemble in the square before the ziggurat. The king always wore a bronze ceremonial mask on public occasions, and this time he was dressed in a leather breastplate and helmet. He stood on the dais before the temple, telling his people that they were in dire peril and only their king and the god Aminu could save them. Lugalbanda, the king of the much larger town of Iahdun-Lim, had ordered him to submit to his power and pledge taxes and sacrifices to the god Erishum. But the proud city of Naram-Sin would not submit to blasphemy and extortion, the king said, they would fight and kill the men of Iahdun-Lim if they tried to invade this sacred land.

  Sulili had heard of Iahdun-Lin, but had never been there, even though it was only four days' walk away. The occasional traveling peddler told of its magnificent stone walls, its huge marketplace and the wealth of goods to be had there. King Lugalbanda even had a war cart pulled by four oxen that he rode to battle in, and which he used to crush those who stood up to his might. The short speech by their king terrified the people of Naram-sin, and they rushed to offer extra bowls of barley mulch to their gods.

  But it didn’t help. Before the next moon had grown full, a frightened farmer came running to the market place screaming that he had seen a dust cloud on the horizon. The host of Iahdun-Lin was on the march.

  The battle was short and bloody. Lugalbanda, in his magnificent chariot of plodding, snorting war oxen, led his horde across the wheat-stubbled fields and into the heart of Naram-Sin, where the men and boys put up brief resistance before fleeing. The men of Iahdun-Lin, armed with flint-tipped staves and bronze axes, cut a rapid swathe through the farmers with their cudgels and slings, beating them to the ground and clubbing them like defenseless whelps. Sulili went out to fight with his wooden staff, but was confronted by a man much older and stronger, adept with his stone-axe. He landed a heavy blow on Sulili’s forearm as he clumsily lashed out with his stick. Sulili could feel the bone break and his arm numb into pain. His foe, a sweating, heavy set man, smiled with both relief and rising blood lust and was upon him, full of the rage and joy of a battle won. He was joined by another, and together they bludgeoned the boy until his teeth shot out of his head on strings of gummy blood and the corpuscles exploded in his eyes. The last thing Sulili could make out through his fading senses was his younger sister being hauled, screaming, into a nearby hut by a group of whooping, sweating men from Iahdun-Lin.

  ***

  Darkness. A cool, refreshing curtain of black after the clamor of battle under the Mesopotamian sun.

  Is this the afterlife?

  Sulili had heard stories of the place, of the dark mudflats between the tides of time, where the souls of the dead washed around like fish stranded on a floodplain. It had always sounded a dour final destination
, which was probably why he never really contemplated it, despite the ubiquity of death all around him.

  The underworld was a murky, unformed place back in those days, yet to be embroidered by the millennia of theology and myth, he reflected.

  An abstract thought. It was as if something clicked deep within him. The first time he had had an abstract thought in…how long was it? Fourteen years. Was this a dream? No, something else. His mind groped for a second, unused to this process, before a huge wave of relief crashed over him and he realized he was not Sulili, dirt farmer turned militiaman and newly minted corpse, servant of Tira-Am, but Luis Oriente, the Missing Link, the Old Man of the Forest. He opened his eyes, instinctively whispering thanks to a god he had never believed in.

  He immediately recognized the luxurious softness of the bed, the stylish décor of the room. The Hotel Revenant’s homey comforts, white sheets of Egyptian cotton, fresh sunflowers smiling in a vase by the windows. The elegant Ottoman that spoke of lazy afternoons of crisp white wine and dozing. He sat up, laughing with joy.

  There was a perfectly tailored Prince of Wales worsted suit hanging in the wardrobe, together with a blue cotton shirt and comfortable brogues. He dressed and looked at himself in the mirror – he was once again recognizably the Luis Oriente who had lived in the woods for centuries -- before adding a stylish cravat to the ensemble. The hotel’s dresser was as impeccable as ever.

  Downstairs, breakfast was being served by Patrick, the hotel’s loyal waiter. He greeted him with a bright ‘welcome back,’ before leading him through the French windows to the hibiscus-draped terrace on the cliff top. Oriente sat down with a fresh pot of coffee and lit a strong Turkish cigarette. He sighed with relief as he looked out over the islands to the distant mountains.

  Alive, and himself again! How he longed suddenly to explore this beautiful land. And why not? Get a touring car – better still, a balloon! -- and off he would go. Literally anything was possible here.