The bailiffs led me through another exit and down a corridor where Loyoka waited for me, holding the sleeping Reggie. He signaled for the bailiffs to stay as he placed the buffalito in my arms.
“Conroy, before these witnesses, do you acknowledge the return and receipt of your property, a buffalo dog designated Regina Catherine Alyosious Nantucket Bitter Almonds St. Croix?”
I held him to my chest and pressed my face into his, eyes squeezed shut to hold back tears at the memory of the day he’d come into my life and I’d named him before confirming his sex. Reggie whuffled, but otherwise did not acknowledge me. He still hadn’t awakened. “Why is he still comatose? Couldn’t you heal him?”
Loyoka frowned and gestured at the waiting bailiffs.
“Yes, yes, this is my property. I accept delivery or whatever. Now what’s wrong with him?”
The bailiffs left, and Loyoka held up a stoppered glass phial. “You understand that these creatures are nearly indestructible. What you don’t appear to have learned is that they are pack animals and communicate among their kind by scent.”
“I know that. Why are you telling me that?”
“If you knew, then why didn’t you return your creature to its pack?”
“Why didn’t I… most of them gave their lives to protect him inside a volcano. Your people seized all the fertile ones, and the rest were either all over Human Space on job sites or scattered across the Earth to keep them safe from eco-terrorists. He doesn’t have a pack any more, it’s just the two of us now.”
He nodded and I saw my first half smile on an Arconi face. I didn’t like it.
“As I suspected. And along with your other shortcomings, you don’t smell right.” He broke the seal on the phial. “Which is why I acquired this for you. It is a compound of the scent of the descendants of his littermates. Not quite as efficacious as his own pack’s smell, but more than adequate, I believe, to convince him he is safe to return. I thought you would want to be present when I administered it.”
He wafted the open end under Reggie’s nose. My buffalo dog snorted once, and a tremor rippled through his body. He arched his back and stretched his legs while I held onto his torso. His neck shifted first one way then the next as his jaw dropped open in a huge yawn and his blue tongue tasted the air, once, twice. Then his eyes opened with complete wakefulness and he began licking my face with familiar delight.
I pressed him to my chest, buried my face in his fur, and just stood there unable to do anything more for a long moment.
I finally taxed Loyoka’s patience and he tapped my shoulder with the re-sealed phial. “Keep this. You might have need of it again. Now, if you would follow me, I have been instructed to take you to a waiting transport which will conduct you to a courier vessel currently in orbit, which will in turn rendezvous with your previous ship, The Mumby, and allow you to return to your life.”
We walked a while, Loyoka slowing his long-legged stride to accommodate my pace, out into the warm air of an alien world, down streets lined with wispy architecture that housed a people who couldn’t lie, but hadn’t fully realized how complicated truth could be. Reggie wriggled like he wanted me to put him down and let him walk alongside, but I wasn’t ready to let him out of my arms quite yet. Maybe once we were aboard ship. Maybe.
“I have questions I hope you will answer for me,” Loyoka said, eyes fixed on the path in front of us.
“Sure, why not?”
“Veltuma is one of the most well-regarded practitioners of her craft. She had been assigned you as a client as a political stunt to show that though you had been provided the most astute of Advocates, you would nonetheless be found guilty. And yet, despite her many decades of experience, something happened during your interview that broke her.”
We kept walking. I waited for him to say more, but he didn’t. “That’s not a question,” I said. It occurred to me that the other way to avoid an Arcon’s truth sense was not to volunteer information. If Loyoka wasn’t going to ask a direct question, I certainly wasn’t going to provide any answer.
“Yes, well… You have acquainted yourself with Arconi jurisprudence. You knew the charges against you, and you had to have known that our laws would not allow you to defend yourself in court. Why did you give up the right to have an Advocate? How could you have known I would defend you? How could you know I would even be present?”
And there it was, the direct question. Reggie squirmed in my arms, pressing his forehead up against my chin. The familiar gesture nearly brought me to tears, reminding me that I owed Loyoka a real answer. So be it.
“Arconi see everything as black and white. I introduced some gray ideas to your view of justice, and your world view wouldn’t allow that.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Hypnosis isn’t about putting people into trance. That’s part of what I do it on stage, but it’s not a necessity. Hypnosis really comes down to giving people suggestions and finding ways to encourage them to act on them. An induction and trance is one method, but similar effects can be accomplished by what you might call ‘conversational hypnosis’. You and the rest of your people had defined my situation entirely by the limited pieces you’d assembled. You’d reached a conclusion, and you’d stopped looking any further. Back on your ship, while we were talking, I slipped you some indirect suggestions that maybe that wasn’t the whole story.”
“You manipulated me!”
“That’s one interpretation. I prefer to say that I relied on your integrity and character. I knew you wanted justice; I depended on it.”
We continued on in silence until we reached the entrance to the port. A female Arcon came forward to meet us, and presumably escort me the rest of the way to the first in the series of ships that would take me back. I patted the phial in the pocket of my tuxedo coat, hugged Reggie tighter to my chest, and wondered if I’d ever meet Loyoka again.
“One last thing,” he said. “I know you are not a smuggler, Conroy. I saw the truth of this in your own mind years past. And yet, every instinct of my profession tells me you are. Can you explain this to me?”
“Remember what I said before about you seeing everything as black or white? You also see everything as static. But it’s not. People are in flux.”
Loyoka stared down at me from his greater height and blinked. “I don’t understand.”
I sighed. “Back on Gibrahl, you didn’t ask if I had ever been a smuggler, or if I would be a smuggler. You asked me, at that moment, if I was one. And, I wasn’t. The act had come and gone and been removed from my awareness through some self-hypnosis. I had changed, and changed again. From hypnotist to courier to smuggler, back to courier, on my way to being corporate CEO. Now I’m just a hypnotist again.”
“Then, was it change? If you are back to who you were in the beginning?”
I shrugged. “Ask yourself that question. Are you the officer of the law you were when we met? Is he the same man you were all the years you pursued me? And is that person the same as the Arcon who came to my defense in court?”
Loyoka looked like he’d been struck in the back of the head by something large, metallic, and shovel-shaped. I could almost hear the gears turning. I wasn’t big on goodbyes anyway so I nodded to my new escort and she opened a gate and gestured me through. Reggie barked, as joyous a sound as I’d ever heard, and we walked away without looking back. I had to wonder, among Loyoka’s growing awareness of the changes he’d undergone, if he’d get around to realizing he’d passed from nemesis to friend.
A few hours later, Reggie and I were comfortably ensconced aboard the VIP cabin of a courier vessel en route to The Mumby, where Captain Undra would grudgingly put me back to work, probably. In a matter of days I’d be sitting in my dressing room and telling the tale of how I’d broken an Arconi lawyer to a professional liar and his robotic alter ego. Sometime later still, I’d share a magnificent meal with a medical haystack. Meanwhile, the Arconi were no longer after me for smuggling and breaking their monopoly,
and while they hadn’t seen fit to repay me for the buffalitos they’d stolen, they’d healed Reggie and I knew I had the better end of the deal. What more did I need? I had my livelihood, the clothes on my back, and my faithful animal companion. As for the Arconi Mark of Aspiration, I fed it to Reggie first thing. I figured he’d earned it.
END
About the Author
Lawrence M. Schoen holds a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology, with a focus in psycholinguistics. He spent ten years as a college professor, and has done extensive research in the areas of human memory and language. His background in the study of human behavior and cognitive processes provide a principal metaphor for his fiction. He currently works as the director of research and analytics for a series of mental health and addiction treatment facilities in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
He's also one of the world's foremost authorities on the Klingon language, having championed the exploration of this constructed tongue and lectured on this unique topic throughout the world since 1992. In addition, he's the publisher behind a speculative fiction small press, Paper Golem, aimed at serving the niche of up-and-coming new writers as well as providing a market for novellas. And finally, inspired by his fictional creation, in 2013 he became certified as a hypnotherapist.
In 2007, Lawrence was nominated for the John W.Campbell Award for best new writer and in 2010 received a Hugo nomination for best short story. His first book, Buffalito Destiny was published in 2009, bringing the characters of the Amazing Conroy and Reggie from short stories to novel-length adventures. The sequel, Buffalito Contingency, came out in 2011.
In 2013, Lawrence received a Nebula Award nomination for his novella, “Barry’s Tale,” which was the cover story for his collection, Buffalito Buffet. The following year, the novella you've just read, “Trial of the Century,” earned him a second Nebula Award nomination for another Amazing Conroy novella. And again, in 2015, his third novella in this series brought him his third Nebula Award nomination in a row for Best Novella.
The next year Lawrence took a break from writing novellas. Instead, he published his anthropomorphic SF novel Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard, which went on to bring hims a fourth Nebula award nomination, this time for Best Novel. The book also won the Cóyotl Award for Best Novel of 2015.
Lawrence lives near Philadelphia with his wife, Valerie, who is neither a psychologist nor a Klingon speaker.
Author photo by Nathan Lilly.
Cover Art for both Buffalito Destiny, Buffalito Contingency and Buffalito Buffet by Rachael Mayo.
Cover Art for Barsk: The Elephants' Graveyard by Victo Ngai.
Acknowledgments
“Trial of the Century”was a finalist for the Nebula Award for Best Novella. Prior to that it enjoyed limited release as an ebook and appeared as part of the anthology World Jumping, edited by Eric T. Reynolds.
Prior to that limited release, versions of this story were read by the members of the eastern court of NobleFusion, and their insight and feedback resulted in my letting it sit a while longer, resulting in a greatly improved tale.
Next, I put out a call for proofreading, and the ebook you know hold was made much more consistent and readable by the proofing efforts of Adrienne Carey, Stephanie Clarkson, Diane Osborne, Kathryn Sullivan, James Van Lydegraf, and Aino Welch. Thank you all for making me look good.
Thank you also to my cover artist, Rachael Mayo, whose colored pencils perfectly capture my words.
Finally, no acknowledgment section is complete without mentioning my wife, Valerie. She put her stamp of approval on this novella or it would never have gone out the door. More than that, she is a constant reminder of how blessed my life is.
And finally, to those readers who, after reading the first two novels in the ongoing saga of the Amazing Conroy contacted me to ask, “hey, how come Reggie is in a coma at the end of book one but happy and healthy at the start of book two. What happened?” This novella is the answer. Thanks for keeping me honest.
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