INFINITY HOLD3

by Longyear, Barry B.

  "Kill him!" shouted one of the popcorns behind me, and soon I could hear the phrase being repeated over and over again through the gathering crowd. "Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!"

  Jesus, it made my skin crawl. I got to my feet and fired my rifle in the air. Bringing down my piece to the ready as the crowd shut up, I poked Booker Dry with my toe.

  "Man, you have got yourself an attitude. Right now Deadeye could drill you right through your knuckle head, and it would be legal. Didn't you read the law?"

  "Fuck the law."

  The sentiment was picked up by the inmates, and soon every one was saying "Fuck the law! Fuck the law! Fuck the law!"

  I raised my weapon again and they quieted down. Looking at Booker, I said "I don't guess it's going to be any big surprise to you that you're fired."

  "Don't fire him, Chief," said Deadeye. "I won't bring any charges. Seeing Booker Dry as a Razai Cop has made the whole trip worthwhile."

  The big haystack pushed away from Booker and sprang to his feet. Spitting sand, Booker pushed himself up and rubbed his left arm as he glared at Jay Ostrow through grit-filled eyes.

  "We want Booker for our RC," said a pleasant voice with what sounded like a very gentile southern accent. I looked and there was a skinny man in his late forties with pale skin and thinning gray hair. He was smiling.

  "Did you say that?" I asked.

  "Yes, I did." He continued to smile.

  "What's your name?"

  "James Britton," he said as he grinned, "friend of the court."

  "Why do you want him for your RC?"

  "Why?" The man rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "I guess it's because he's a crazy son of a bitch. Just like us." A wave of very scary laughter came from the surrounding crowd. When the laughter eased, I stood squarely in front of Booker Dry and looked him in the eyes.

  "Speak to me, asshole."

  "What about, greaseball?"

  With my finger on the trigger, I stuck the muzzle of my rifle in Booker's mouth. "Let me introduce myself. I'm Bando Nicos, Chief of the RCs."

  The garble of words around my rifle's muzzle sounded like "Pleased to meet you."

  "Have you read the law?"

  He nodded vigorously.

  "Then can you tell me what Rule 13 is?"

  His eyes went wide and he shook his head.

  "Rule 13 says that a threat is a crime, and it carries as a penalty the performance of the threat upon the threatener. I could squeeze my trigger right now and put a picture window in the back of your skull for that alone. But, do you know what Rule 33 says?"

  Again he shook his head.

  "Rule 33 says that the penalty for attempted murder is the max. I could blow your head off for that and go home and get a good night's sleep. There's more, though. You want to know what that is?"

  He shrugged as best he could.

  "We don't like crooked RCs. We just smoked an RC out of her sox for taking a pack of nails for a bribe. Just imagine what we'd do to an RC who tried to murder another RC. But then that's all up to Deadeye. He's the one you jumped."

  Deadeye Jay Ostrow stood next to Booker Dry, put his right arm around Booker's shoulders, and removed my gun muzzle from the man's mouth with his left hand. "Hey, Book. You're slobbering all over the man's piece." Deadeye looked at me, still grinning. "Booker was only grabassing around, weren't you, Booker?"

  Booker nodded with considerable enthusiasm. I slung my rifle and looked around at the crowd. Disappointment was on many of the faces. "That's it," I said. Many of them began wandering off, since the fun was over and it was time to tear down the camp and get back on the trail. I instructed Zarika to post the guard, told Bongo to see what he could do about training, and tried to figure out what to do about an RC for the popcorns. There would be an hour or so for chow before we struck out to make contact with the next load from Earth.

  As I was rooting through my sack for something to eat, the skinny Cici with the gray hair walked up and offered me one of his ration bars. I took it and tried it. It was made from dried fruits and was delicious. "Thanks."

  The man was still smiling when he said, "Bando Nicos, you are just like us, too. One crazy son of a bitch."

  The evening air was shattered by a hideous scream followed by laughter and more screaming. I dropped the ration bar, held my rifle at the ready, and ran in the direction of the noise. I ran up and over a dune, and when I reached the top I saw a small crowd down at the bottom. Some of those in the crowd were screaming, some were moaning. Cicis were racing to join the crowd and see what was to be seen.

  In the center of the crowd was a woman with a knife. She was kneeling over the bloodied remains of what appeared to be another woman. The woman with the knife was cutting off pieces of the dead woman's thigh and was eating them as quickly as she could. Her chin and the front of her desert sheet glistened with blood. Show Biz was off to the side getting everything down in livid color. I closed my eyes and thought as I worked to hold down my chow, here we go again. This time, however, the insanity defense looked pretty solid.

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  The Dead Lady v. Yvonne

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  The lady with the human blood all over her chin was named Yvonne. There were plenty of witnesses, and they all said the same thing. Yvonne had walked up to the woman, lifted the knife, and stuck the blade through her throat, then again through her heart and a few other places. She then knelt down next to her and began snacking. No one knew the victim's name, and the only thing the other patients had ever heard the perp called was Yvonne.

  As the sun went below the horizon and the desert air turned to ice, Booker referred to the victim once as "the lunch." I smacked him upside his head with the stock of my rifle. Later I apologized to him. After all, I had just broken the law and didn't want Booker Dry doing payback on my head bone. It was important to my own sanity not to let my rages get the better of me. The whole thing was getting just too damned tense.

  We couldn't hold prisoners, so we weren't able to pull Yvonne from the dead lady. She simply knelt there and kept slicing and eating. I instructed two of Zarika's soldiers to remove the body and bury it. Once it had been removed, Yvonne's eyes glazed over, the knife in her hand dropped to the sand, and she became absolutely motionless. I couldn't even tell if she was breathing.

  I squatted in front of her, picked up the knife, and looked into her eyes. It was like looking at the eyes of dead fish in the market.

  "Yvonne?" I said.

  The Cicis surrounding us took up the call with repeated whispers of "Yvonne? Yvonne? Yvonne?" It made every filthy square centimeter of my skin ripple with loathing. Popcorns, I thought. What am I supposed to do with the goddamned shadow talkers?

  I shook her shoulders, and again repeated, "Yvonne?"

  Again the popcorns took up the call. "Yvonne? Yvonne? Yvonne?" There was an unsettling screech of laughter, but the scariest whacks just stood there and stared at my eyes. I couldn't even imagine what their eyes were seeing. I looked around at the faces and asked, "Who knows her?"

  "No one. No one knows her," answered a voice.

  "No one," whispered a few voices. "No one. No one knows."

  The original speaker was a frail old woman who was just about lost inside her parka. There was that chalky smell in the air, which meant that it was getting bitter cold. I unbundled my own shirt and parka and began putting them on beneath my desert sheet. As I did so, I asked the old woman, "What's your name?"

  "Marie. Marie Vonat." The old woman looked down at Yvonne. "For as long as any of us were there, Yvonne was there. She was always there. She never moved or talked or even fed herself." Marie nodded and said with real pride in her voice, "I can feed myself."

  I looked up at Marie as an incredible weariness came over me. "From what I saw, so can Yvonne." More shrill cackles from the popcorn gallery. Here was Bando Nicos doing standup in Gibber City.

  I stood up and lo
oked down at Yvonne. I couldn't even figure out how old she was. Her hair was long, stringy and gray, but her skin was baby smooth. She was incredibly thin making her look like a skeleton. And there was that blood all over her chin and hands.

  You didn't need to be coking up with Siggy Freud to see that Yvonne's head was in another dimension. She was a big time whack, and that would have given her a ticket out of the gas can back on Earth. It let her off the hook for murder almost anywhere that I had ever heard about. But if insanity is your defense, and you get off, they're supposed to stick you somewhere so you can't hurt anybody else. And the Razai couldn't hold prisoners. And what about the dead lady's payback?

  I walked to the edge of the circle and squatted on the sand, my forearms resting on my knees. The Razai couldn't hold prisoners, so there was no place we could stick her. What to do about the killer popcorns? What do you do in the Razai about a genuine not guilty by reason of insanity plea?

  A small cloud moved in the night sky suddenly revealing the tiny satellite we called Blue Moon. I'll be damned if one of those whacks didn't begin howling and growling like a werewolf in full frenzy. Then the nutball laughed and said he was only kidding.

  Popcorn humor.

  I pulled out my copy of the law and leafed through the few pages. They were getting pretty ratty. It was too dark to read, so I pulled a fire cube and struck it off the barrel of my piece. I touched my greenstick to it, picked up the cube, and used the light from it to read. I began reading the entire law from What's Mine Is Mine to the Law of Silence.

  Justice is everybody getting exactly what they deserve as fast as possible. But what did the dead lady deserve? What did Yvonne deserve? Who knew what hell had hammered Yvonne's head into this strange dimension she inhabited?

  We did have one provision that covered old hells. Rule 11. Any crimes or issues that originated before the landing are done past. Any kind of retribution based on such crimes is a new crime.

  And Rule 15. The penalty for all crimes is payback, and payback for taking a life is everything plus a little. Rule 19 held that, in a trial, not entering a plea is a plea of guilty, and Yvonne wasn't going to be entering any plea. It wasn't even possible to get her to understand the charges. If she had that much brain power left, she probably wouldn't have been locked up in the first place. She didn't understand anything like guilty or not guilty. If she understood anything at all it was kill, eat, and drop into neutral.

  I looked up from my copy and saw that the crowd was silently squatting or sitting on the cold sand, Yvonne still motionless in the center. Deadeye was seated cross legged on the sand next to Booker Dry. Both of them were staring at me. Show Biz was getting pictures, and Zarika was keeping an eye on the guards she'd posted to cover the whacks.

  A man came from the far side of the circle, unbundled Yvonne's parka, and put it over her shoulders. It seemed to make no difference to Yvonne. Hot and cold appeared to be too complicated to figure out. But, hell, even a vegetable tries to live. On the vids I'd seen the experiments on the nature shows. Plants have feelings. But you could've fed Yvonne feet first through a meat grinder and she wouldn't have noticed.

  The Eyes of the Spider were in the sky, and I wondered if Alna was watching them. I knew Alna had feelings. Whatever she felt was advertised on her face twenty-seven hours a day. But it'd been pointed out to me several times before that I don't let my emotions show. The therapist at Lancaster juve used to beg me, "Show your feelings, Bando. Show your feelings."

  I liked the guy, so I'd tried, but to show a feeling you have to feel it first, and I had been way beyond feeling anything besides rage and depression for years. Maybe Yvonne wasn't so crazy; maybe I was.

  I looked back at the law. Rule 41 made the investigator responsible for doing payback for dead victims. Rule 42 made it so that when Rule 41 applied, the investigator would always choose the max.

  I leaned forward and moistened my lips as I read Rule 51. ... suffering the symptoms of a compulsive disease (is) no defense if the perp could have sought help prior to the commission of the crime.

  So for addicts, that meant that addiction, being thumped on a chemical, was no defense. But could Yvonne have asked for help before she cut up the dead lady? Maybe she did ask and no one remembered. Maybe she did ask and no one could hear her. Maybe she just couldn't ask anybody for anything. Maybe her mind was on such a level that she had more in common with a great white shark than with a dune shark. Real sharks never ask for help.

  In which case, I asked myself, what in the hell was she doing with a knife? I lifted up the knife and held it in the light of the fire cube. It was no homemade cutter with a taped handle and an edge sharpened on the concrete of a cell floor. In between the sticky gobs of drying blood, the handle glittered with real silver. It was a folding knife with a five-inch single edged blade. I rubbed blood off the handle. Engraved on one side of the handle were the words "Chapel Hill." A sour taste flooded my mouth as I looked at the other side. On the opposite handle was engraved a little shield in the center of which was a tiny set of scales. The mark of the cockroach.

  I pushed myself to my feet and walked until I stood next to Yvonne. I held the knife out in front of her face, and instantly her hands made a grab for it. I yanked it out of her reach just in time. As soon as the knife was out of sight, she went back to looking like a statue. She wasn't a woman; she was an automation; a killing machine.

  I walked completely around her, looking at the edge of the crowd as I went, certain that the face I wanted to find would be one of the closest. I spoke to the crowd as I walked. "You've all heard the law," I began. "Every now and then something comes up that the law doesn't cover, and this is one of those times." There were some giggles and a harsh titter. My eyes searched for the titter, and they found the face I was looking for.

  "I'm supposed to begin a trial by asking the perp—the defendant—if he wants a jury or if it's okay that the investigator judges the case. As you can all see, I can't really ask the perp in this case, so we're going to make a new rule. Rule 58. In cases where the investigator can't get a response out of the perp for any reason, a majority vote of the immediate spectators can substitute. So I put it to you: is it okay if I take care of this, or should the perp get a jury?"

  It was almost unanimous that I should take care of it. That covered my ass for what I had to do next, because the last thing I needed right then was trying to put together a couple of juries out of a bucket of popcorns. When the talking quieted down, I walked until I stood face-to-face with James Britton, friend of the court.

  "I've been looking for you," I said.

  "Here I am," he answered. "You're still a crazy son of a bitch," he said as he grinned.

  "James Britton, I'd bet almost anything that at one time you were an attorney."

  Britton's eyebrows went up. "Very astute. I'm astonished at how perceptive you are. I didn't give you near enough credit."

  "Tell me, lawyer, what do you think of The Law of the Razai?"

  His eyebrows went up as his lips locked into terminal smirk. "You want my professional opinion?"

  I stood close enough that I could smell his breath. That meant that he could smell mine, too, and I had been on the sand a week longer than him. I folded my arms. "Sure. You think maybe it needs a little work?"

  He smiled as he practically batted his eyelids and answered with his honeysuckle accent. "Well, there are some amazin' loopholes in it, aren't there?"

  I nodded and asked, "Is that why you did it?"

  "Did it?" His smile slowly evaporated. "Did what?"

  "Is that why you gave her your knife?" I held it up in front of his face.

  "What makes you think that's my knife."

  "You're a cockroach. This knife belongs to a cockroach."

  "That could be anyone's knife." He held up his hands, palms outward. "Look, this is very improper—"

  "A pretty knife like this. Some of your buddies must've seen it on you before." I raised my voice as I held the k
nife above my head. "It's a silver knife with a five inch blade. It's got the name of some mush mouth down south city called Chapel Hill on one side of the handle and a little crest with a set of scales in the middle on the other side." I poked his chest with the handle. "What was it, cockroach, a convention at the local roach motel?"

  He shook his head. "You're wrong. You've got nothin'."

  I held up the knife. "Anybody!" I turned around. "Has anybody seen James Britton with this knife?"

  "I did," called one voice. "He always had it with him even though he wasn't allowed. We weren't allowed any knives."

  "He had his daughter sneak it to him because he was afraid of us," said another. There were giggles and screeches. I could relate; not to the giggles and screeches, but to Jimmy Britton wanting a cutter. I was afraid of them, too.

  "I saw him," said another. "He always had that knife."

  "That's his knife," a third accused.

  I nodded as I stared into those gray eyes. "Just wanted to see what would happen, cockroach? A little test of the system? Just to show how smart you are? Just to show how ignorant we are? Or was it just because we failed to consult your arrogant ass before we put together our pitiful effort?"

  "What are you goin' to do?" asked the whack cockroach. "What ever are you goin' to do? Givin' a knife to someone isn't a crime, even accordin' to the law."

  "It doesn't say," I answered. "But causing someone's death? It has a whole bunch to say about that. If one guy pays the money to blow away Oswald and another one pulls the trigger, who's guilty of killing Oswald? They both are, cockroach."

  That smirk was bolted onto his lips. "I'm going to want a jury, you know."

  His eyes twinkled, and as the corners of his mouth pulled back into a tiny grin, I said, "We already voted that Bando Nicos is settling this hash." I pushed the blade of the knife through his ribs and into his heart with such force I snapped off the blade.

  "The jury's already in on you, cockroach."