“As you can plainly see, there are many, many major holes in the prosecution’s theory, but these are not why you should find my friend not guilty. You should find him not guilty for the simple reason that he did not murder Clinton Manchester.
“There has not been a murder on my planet for over a thousand years. We are not a violent people.
We are, as a people, committed to the relentless pursuit of the truth.” She looked at Waterstone. “There have been times when truth seemed to be the last thing this court was interested in, when the prosecution has gone out of their way to prevent anything that did not square with their version of events.”
Waterstone could not object. He wanted to. Anyone could see it in the throbbing vein of his neck and forehead. “But the final, inescapable truth is, TyroCommander Redfire did not kill Manchester. He did not somehow get into a sealed room, deliver a violent beating, and slip out again, leaving the room sealed, without a spot of blood on his body, without so much as a hair left in the room, and then hand over to the police the bloody murder weapon while protesting his innocence.
“TyroCommander Redfire did not kill Manchester, because he is not a killer. A defender, za, he defends the lives of his family and shipmates, but Manchester was not a deadly threat. Manchester sexually propositioned a boy Redfire loved, and Redfire gave him the beating he deserved, but no more than that. No more than that.
“TyroCommander Redfire is a brave officer, who has many times risked his life to protect strangers.
He would have done the same for anyone on this planet, including Clinton Manchester. He would do the same for any one of you, He is not a killer. He is innocent of this crime.” She sat down, feeling like it had all been too weak and unconvincing. A negative can not be proven, she reminded herself, once again. She had a bad feeling this was not going to turn out well.
Winter – The Alcazar of General Ziang
Keeler tapped the top of the casket. “Okay, time to raise the Dead.” For a few seconds, just enough time to give doubt and make the Commander start to sweat, nothing happened. Then, the silver crest of the planet Sapphire on the cover began to glow with a faint white light.
Suddenly, a beam of light shot upward from the side, followed by another and then another until the effect was almost blinding. Amid the light, a figure appeared.
It was quite an entrance. Usually Dead Keeler just appeared. This time, the apparition continued to grow and swell until it was twice human size. Its eyes sparkled with ancient and forbidden wisdom. Its face was a mask of grim rectitude. When it stopped growing, it unfolded a ghostly arm and pointed at the General. With a rasping, ghostly intonation it spoke, “That jerk owes me forty bucks.”
“Is this a hologram?” Ziang asked.
The apparition laughed. “Nargh, I’m the real deal. The essence of Lexington Keeler’s intellect and spirit, maintained in a matrix of pure energy, and you still owe me forty bucks.” Ziang squinted at the specter examining it. “How do I know that this is no trick?”
“Because I hit that bank shot and sent the entire planet of Boer IV into a black hole. Now, pay up!”
“How does it know about that?” Ziang asked.
“It’s not an it, it’s a he,” Keeler answered. “My ancestor was a founding father of the planet where I live, and when his body died, they preserved his essence in a cybernetic matrix.”
“This is most curious,” said General Ziang. “Is this really you? Is it your spirit, or just your intellect?”
“Is laughter the music of the soul?” Dead Keeler asked. “’Cos I get a great laugh whenever I watch this boob of a descendant try to command a starship.”
“Do not let this dog insult you,” Ziang turned to Keeler. “He was never anything more than a pirate.”
“Aaarrrrgh! Aaarrrrgh!” Dead Keeler growled. “I be not a pirate.”
“Before the Christian fleet captured his privateer and pressed him into service, he and his crew were the scourge of the Capricorn sector.”
“Arrrgh! Now that’s a blasted lie. My crew was the scurviest lot of space-dogs ever to send the minions of a Dark Lord to Davey Jordan’s Locker. Arrgh! They’ll not have their good names spat upon by the likes of ye! Arrgh! Arrgh!”
“To think I mourned for you when I learned you had given your life driving the Dark Lord Enoch from the galaxy. How did you …?”
“Survive?” The Apparition put in. “Damb near didn’t. Went into stasis when my ship was shot up and drifted back into Commonwealth space three hundred years later. Real science fiction-y. Eventually, though, I had the good sense to die properly, unlike some people I can think of. Good God, what happened to you, Zhanzhou? Every day on the line you prayed to die fighting, and now I find you here? In this planetary-scale retirement home for the undead?” The Old Man’s eyes were ablaze.
“Bank your reactor, Deathwish,” came a low voice from the fire. Queequeg looked up from his fish.
“The man is a righteous host.”
“No, his criticism is just,” said Ziang. “I have rebuked myself a million times for my cowardice, my fear of …” He broke off, then addressed the ghost. “What is it like being alive without a body?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?” Dead Keeler growled. He cast an eye toward the Lady Goldenrod.
“Who’s the babe?”
Goldenrod lit up like a thousand candles on a Solstice Tree. “Whatever he is, I like him.” Dead Keeler made a kind of purring/growling noise that would have come from the deepest parts if his throat if he still had one.
“Oh, stop it,” said Live Keeler.
“I’m dead, but I am not that dead.”
Ziang turned away in anger. “Same old obstinate fool he was 3,000 years ago.”
“I don’t get older, I just get better.”
Ziang maintained a calm aspect and turned to Keeler. “You wish to know of the Crusades. Where shall we begin?”
Suddenly, Keeler felt rather foolish. He had been so preoccupied with the demands of his journey, he had not thought really of any questions to ask. “Uh, well, let’s start at the beginning. The origins of the Crusades are shrouded in mists and legend…”
“Which is where it should stay…” Dead Keeler interrupted.
Ziang turned on the ghost. “You have never told them.”
“They don’t need to know, besides, I’m dead.”
“That’s his excuse for everything,” Live Keeler confided.
“I have something to show you, that will illustrate much about the Crusades.” Ziang shuffled over the a large, ornate cabinet that stood upright in an alcove of the main hall. The cover was black lacquer trimmed with gold hinges and levers. He opened it and revealed the figure of an alien. The creature had pink skin and a kind of teal cap of flesh in place of hair. Its narrow skull crested in a high protuberance. It had a snout, rather than a nose, long sharp teeth and rounded ears that gave it an overall shaved-rat-with-an-old-cheese-hat-like appearance.
“What is it?” Live Keeler asked.
“You don’t recognize the creature who supplied your weapon? This is a Thean.”
“Oh, is it?” Keeler said, failing to sound nonchalant. Not many drawings of the enemy had survived since the aliens had laid siege to his world, and those that had survived had apparently not been very accurate. It was remarkably well-preserved, no sign of decay at all. Its beady black eyes stared straight ahead. “Where did you get this trophy? Did you do battle with the Theans?”
“No one did battle with the Theans,” Ziang answered. “They were badly misunderstood. They laid siege to your world, as I remember. They called it ‘Sas,’ and thought it was a lost colony of their empire, but they never attacked, did they?”
“Neg, they did not.”
“This specimen was part of the collection of the Commonwealth Knowledgeum on the Inner Colony New Dawn. Before New Dawn fell to the dark forces in the Eighth Crusade, much of its treasure was shipped off-planet for safekeeping in the Perseus Quadrant. This p
articular piece never made it. However, somewhere in the Equuleus Sector, as I understand it, is an artificial, terra-formed planet with treasures from the Twelve Inner Colonies hidden somewhere on its surface.” Keeler licked his dry lips. “You wouldn’t happen to know the … uh, name of that artificial, terra-formed planet would you?”
“That’s not important right now,” Ziang hissed. “ Let me show you why the Theans do not fight.” With a quick flip of his hand, ripped the face from the Thean. It came off smoothly, revealing a patchwork of circuitry and intricate gearworks.
“A Thean and/oroid?” Live Keeler asked.
“The Theans were all and/oroids,” Ziang told him. “They had once been an organic species, but they fell to extinction millions of years before humans went into space. They never left their homeworld, only sent mechanicals to explore the galaxy, but their sun died, and they died with it. Their and/oroids wandered around the galaxy, until they too expired. They did not fight, and they did not survive, because they were without purpose.”
Ziang carefully replaced the faceplate. “The reason humanity survived, and other races did not, is because we found our purpose. The reason we have survived is because the side that believed in the purpose of humanity won the Great Crusades.”
Ziang led them down a long hallway, and continued talking as he spoke. “You see, in the centuries before interstellar travel became possible, human artists and writers speculated that our galaxy would contain hundreds and thousands of alien species. Hundreds of hours of what the ancients called ‘movies’
and ‘television’ depicted these aliens, most either taking the form of humans with strange-colored skin or odd bumps on their foreheads, or, at the other extreme, aliens whose physiology was biologically improbable.
“The reality was greatly different. We encountered the Garr, a gray-skinned species with tiny bodies and enormous heads, who had once attempted to jumpstart their dying species with infusions of human DNA. In our pre-spacefaring era, they kidnapped human women and implanted them with hybrid embryos. They also tried to do something similar to men.”
“Something similar?”
“They had a terrible misunderstanding about human reproductive and digestive anatomy. Much, much later, we encountered the Theans, but other than that, the galaxy was ours. Thousands of inhabitable worlds, worlds without end, for us to colonize.
“You can not possibly imagine the impact this had on humanity. A great, empty galaxy, filled with stars and worlds, ready for us to claim, to colonize, to build on. A generation earlier, humanity had been dying. Miraculously… miraculously! … we discovered Starflight technology, and soon after we realized, we would not be fighting among aliens for a piece of galactic territory, nor, in our more egomaniacal fantasies, that we would become leaders of some Benevolent Pan-Galactic Federation, leading other alien species and spreading our enlightened values across thousands of intelligent worlds.
“Instead, we found ourselves alone. And even though only one star in several hundred thousand contained inhabitable planets, this still meant the galaxy contained hundreds of thousands of such worlds, ripe for inhabitation… by us!”
“To the dominant, agnostic culture, it was a matter of scientific probability, but to the religious minority, many took this as fulfillment of prophecy, a manifest destiny. For Islam, for Christianity, for Iest, the open galaxy was the opportunity to found worlds in line with our creeds. All of a sudden, the universe was like a yawning chasm begging for us to fill with our voices, a banquet laid out before us by a benevolent, providential Jehovah.”
“So, the Crusades really were Holy Wars?” Keeler asked.
“Not really… not, entirely, and not at first, anyway. The Crusades began as a simple rebellion. It was the beginning of the fifth century of the human experiment settling space. There were already hundreds of colonies, but almost 9 out of 10 humans lived on one of the thirteen Old-Line Inner Colonies, or Earth. The other colonies were small, trivial and unregarded. It was the conflict as to whether the new colonials would remain independent, or remain under the law of the Commonwealth, that launched the Holy Wars.”
“So, what you are saying is, the Crusades did not begin as Holy Wars, they were begun as a result of demographics and politics?” He was appalled at the mediocrity.
“Initially, but evil seized its opportunity. You are familiar with the Prophet Crow?” Keeler had, as did all Sapphireans. “He demonstrated conclusively that human were spiritual entities, that the soul existed. Naturally, they killed him for that.”
Ziang nodded. “Crow also said that the primary conflict of humanity was between purpose, and purposelessness, between the enlightened whose being was animated by the guiding light of the universe, and the willfully adrift, who denied that life was in any way meaningful. As we moved into space, Crow was more and more proven right.”
Live Keeler was holding a small cup of coffee that had gone cold as he had listened to the General talk.
He now asked, “So, I still can’t get my head around how these Crusades became the Battle of Good versus Evil.”
“At the time they started, no one else did either,” said Dead Keeler, not exactly warming to his topic, but needing to get his licks in. “Evil took the form evil always does, the desire to possess, control, and micromanage human lives and deny human freedom. The desire to take that which one had not built, to steal what one had not earned. The fervid, fetid desire of people to dictate the destiny of others. The Inner Colonies sought to expand their control over the Outer Colonies.” Ziang picked it up from there. “They were dying, you know, the Inner Colonies. Stagnating. Their populations were old, uninspired. The people with vitality, with spirit, they were all migrating to the frontier. The populations of the outer colonies grew more vital, and creative. The populations of the Inner Colonies became ever more mediocre. A new doctrine was enacted. It stated that all Colonial authority rested with the Commonwealth Central Government on New Europa. Each of the Outer Colonies would be assigned a Governor-Administrator, would be required to observe all Commonwealth laws. Some of the Outer Colonies accepted the new doctrine, but most of them didn’t. Governor-Administrators were sent to these worlds, and were sent back to New Europa in boxes… very small boxes.”
“You make it sound as though the Commonwealth was the enemy.” Keeler asked.
“Initially, they were, the Inner Commonwealth anyway, except for Atlas, which had far too many trade ties to risk by offending the Outer Colonies. Proxima and Corona also remained neutral.”
“Whoa!” said Keeler. “By Clovis’ Lobotomy Scar! This is completely different from the history I’ve been teaching. All along we thought the Commonwealth fought against the Enemy in the Crusades.
Professor PlaneChanger was right that the Crusades began as a civil war.”
“You owe him forty bucks and an ale,” said the cat.
“Za, fat chance he’ll collect on it,” Live Keeler turned to the spirit of his ancestor. “You never told me any of this.”
“And you shouldn’t be listening to it now,” the Dead Guy snapped. “It’s dangerous propaganda, that’s what it is.”
“Is it true?”
“Yes! That’s the most dangerous propaganda of all.”
Ziang hit his fist on the coffee table. “Do you want to hear the story or not?” The ghostly old man turned his back on them, which was a very visually impressive effect since his face remained staring at them, his eyes squinting angrily and glowing with yellow fire. “You ought not be listening to any of this… the senile rantings of this anti-social kook. The only anti-social kook rantings you should be listening to are mine!”
Keeler put his cup down and turned to Ziang. “So, what happened?” Ziang settled into a couch, prepared to begin a long story. “The First Crusade, which was then called the Battle of Orion, began when eleven of the Outer Colonies banded together to build a fleet of starships, a first step toward declaring Independence from the Commonwealth…” Keeler’s heart w
armed, and he settled in for a long night of war stories. In the corner, his dead ancestor brooded.
Winter – Ultima Thule
“Only an hour to decide. Is that good or bad?” Gotobed asked Brigand, as they hurried toward the courtroom, having been recalled barely and hour after the jury had been released.
“Most likely… bad,” Brigand answered.
“What happens if we lose?”
“You will have to call for the Supreme Court to be brought together to hear an appeal on Mr. Redfire’s behalf.”
“How long will that take?”
Brigand shrugged, once again producing the familiar crunch of leather. “To bring together the designated Lords and Ladies, a month at minimum.”
“What happens to Commander Redfire in the meantime?”
“He would be taken to The Pit.” The Pit, Brigand had previously informed her, was a deep, deep cave in which prison cells had been hewn from the living rocks. It smelled unceasingly of rust and sulfur and was never reached by natural light. Redfire would be confined there for several thousand years. The only other denizen was a certain Lord Corvis, who ate people.
The door at the rear of the chamber swung open heavily about then, and allowed in Lord Waterstone and Harmony. Waterstone was almost swaggering, his chest puffed out as though to pop the buttons from his coat.
“Here goes everything,” said Gotobed, as more villagers shuffled in. After they had been seated, the jury was led in by the clerk of the court. Gotobed noted that they avoided looking her way, and thought she saw one woman juror flash a quick smile toward Lord Waterstone. Her heart sank.
“All rise,” called the Clerk of the Court. “The Criminal Court of the Village of Ultima Thule is now in session, the Honorable Judge Ponce de Leon Marquis Le Bon François de Carabas Phillippi Rafael Book of Deuteronomy Braithewaite presiding.”
The judge veered unsteadily toward his bench. His eyes were red, and he carried what seemed to be a small packet of roasted ground corn snacks. He pounded his gavel languorously and called the court to order. “Who is the jury fore-humanoid?” he asked.
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