“You came here, instead.”
“I came here, instead,” he agreed. “To stop it. And to go out on the Ice.”
They stared at each other. Finally she whispered, “The migration starts in two days.”
“I know,” Lukas said.
“Can we—”
“I don’t know.”
*
There was a group of them, small and not rich, utterly dedicated to saving the pupcats. Did that crusade, Lukas wondered, take the place of the larger one that Eva had once envisioned, using genetics to free society from cruelty to and exploitation of humans? He didn’t ask. The group, led by a middle-aged man named Paul with eyes like lasers and an incongruous paunch, was well organized. Within a few hours they gathered in Eva’s apartment, and a few hours after that everything began.
They targeted the tourists first. Marianne walked through a roverbus terminal filled with tourists about to set out to the pupcats’ feeding grounds. She projected as hard as she could, and in their startled minds unwound the terrible images of pupcats dying as they tried to migrate home. Some people screamed. Marianne was one of them, pretending to be as shocked as the others, collapsing to the ground to cover her eyes and sob.
She walked along Freedom’s hotel strip at dinner time. People leaned into the wind, hurrying into restaurants and shops and bars. Into their minds came the same terrible images of instinct-driven migration ending in death for creatures helpless and appealing and loved.
She sent to a different batch of tourists, this time in a hotel dining room. Then one at the feeding grounds, with the adorable pupcats right in front of the minds into which she sent her terrible images.
“Is it true? Does this happen?”
“That’s not the point, John! There’s a sender here somewhere—ugh!”
“I’m leaving!”
“It shouldn’t be allowed!”
“This is Freedom, remember? Everything is allowed.”
“Well, I’m going to do something about it!”
“About the sender or the pupcats?”
“The pupcats, you idiot! Oh my God, those poor creatures . . .”
“Eleanor just bought one back home.”
Silence.
Lukas, too, was silent. He couldn’t help. The Export Company would have traced the holo projectors to Theobald Garner, and both Garner and the delivery driver could identify Lukas. He stayed in Eva’s apartment with the windows opaqued and watched Marianne grow weaker after each sending. Eventually she would either give out or would be identified as the only person at each scene of telepathy. She stayed anonymous longer than he expected, disguised by the group’s masterly efforts with clothes, make-up, prosthetics, wigs, and fortified after each sending by stimulants. But she was growing weaker.
The protests were growing stronger.
A small rally, held at the spaceport, was easily dispersed by The Export Company’s crowd-control weapons. But the group had recordings—not, Lukas suspected, all of them true—of Company enforcers manhandling protestors. These found their way to the Link, before the Company techs could suppress them, as did the suppression attempts. All at once—and only then—did public opinion move violently in favor of the protestors. This was Freedom! How dare a corporation control any part of the Link that they did not own!
How dare they try to control rallies!
It wasn’t such a large step from there to: How dare they try to exploit the pupcats that bring tourism to Freedom!
Eva said, “Economics trumps liberty. As always.”
Paul, eyes glued to his handheld, said, “Well, not yet. There’ll be more skirmishes. People unconvinced by the recordings, people more outraged by the telepathy than the animal cruelty, people who’ll say that freedom to live however you want is more important than a bunch of dumb animals. The skeptics, the callous, and the fanatics. They are with you always, yea and verily.”
Lukas said, “Marianne can’t go out there anymore.”
Eva said, “She won’t have to. Look out the window.”
A huge crowd surged along the river toward the spaceport. Paul sent out a robocam and Lukas, holding Marianne’s hand, saw it all: the young people smashing the bars of pupcat cages, the older people talking to the press, Export Company security standing back, not interfering, under orders from managers who, true capitalists, could recognize a loss.
Eva, on the computer, said, “Company stock is plummeting. I think you’re wrong, Paul—it is over. The exporters will fold in a week.”
Marianne whispered, “The trappers . . .”
“Will hang on longer,” Paul said. “They’ll get furious, they’ll bluster, and then their numbers will thin down to just a few who will bring back pupcats for locals who will let them migrate each year. Or—oh, I’ll bet this is what happens!—the trappers who are left will organize tourist trips right out onto the Ice.”
Marianne raised her eyes to Lukas’s face. Too exhausted to speak again, she mouthed the single word, “When?”
He said, “Tomorrow.”
*
They had outfitted him. Lukas knew that the group had all contributed more than they could afford to buy him first the necessary gear, and second, a trapper willing to take Lukas with him. Lukas tried to feel grateful, but there was no real room for emotion left in him. He had become a single tsunami-like urge: Go. Go. Go now. The sensation was familiar; he’d felt it every year of his life, and every year, it had sickened him as he kept desperate eyes fastened on a part of the sky not even strewn with many stars.
“Happen you don’t keep up,” the trapper growled at him, “I leave you behind. That’s the deal I signed.”
“I understand.”
“You don’t understand nothing, boy. These damn protestors . . .” He was off on a rant, full of obscenities and anatomical impossibilities, which Lukas ignored.
The migration had begun.
Thousands of pupcats began walking away from the Three Settlements and out toward the Ice. Bellies full from a month at the feeding grounds, some of the females already pregnant, they frisked and barked; the younger ones ran in jubilant circles. Light from Freedom’s dim star played over their silky white coats. In a few more days, they would be deep enough into the farside that the star would have disappeared, and the only glow on the pupcats would be starlight. The pupcats would travel nearly 1,000 miles over the uneven and treacherous Ice, Ice riddled with crevasses and mountains and snow fields, and Lukas would be with them. Migration.
It filled his mind, his muscles, his vision, and would do so until the instinct engineered into him was satisfied. Even last night, saying goodbye to Marianne, it had been difficult to keep his mind off the Ice. But he had tried, pushing away both the exaltation and the deeper resentment that he must feel that exultation, without choice.
“It’s not really Freedom, is it?” Lukas said. “Not here any more than anyplace else. We’re still our biology. All of us, even the so-called human standards.”
“Yes,” Marianne said. She looked very small and weak, lying in her bed. All at once, she smiled and her eyes brightened. “But biology’s not always bad. You know I’ll be here when you get back from the Ice, right?”
“Yes,” he’d said, and brushed his lips across hers, and turned toward the barking outside.
No matter how remote, colonies need law and order like anywhere else. Someone has to hold people accountable and keep the criminals at bay, right? You’d think a judge who travels with an execution chamber and a prison ship would be feared throughout the Colonies, but Judge Morell quickly discovers that’s not true of everyone in this interesting tale by multi-award winner Kristine Kathryn Rusch . . .
THE HANGING JUDGE
KRISTINE KATHRYN RUSCH
They called her a hanging judge, even though no one got ever got hanged. However, Judge Esmé Morell did travel with an execution chamber deep inside the prison wing of her small ship. She used that chamber—and the threat of that chamber—more than all
of the other judges on the circuit.
At conferences, at judicial review, she justified her position this way: The Anzler Colonies were still a group of colonies, loosely tied. None had great prison facilities, most didn’t have the resources to house prisoners. No one seemed to agree with her, but she didn’t care. She didn’t get in trouble, although she occasionally had to justify a decision.
She didn’t worry about it. Instead, she did her job—she went to the outlying colonies, stayed a month or two, listened to cases, passed judgment, then came home for a month or two, got some sleep, and then repeated it all. None of it made for a great personal life, but it did make for a fantastic public one.
And one of the things she liked the very best was that moment at the space port, when she and her four armed guards stepped off the ship. Inside the small port—and outside Latica, they were all small ports—the crowds would often wait for her in the narrow passageway between the docking bay and the interior of the port. Those crowds would always watch her warily. Sometimes, she could actually see the words, “The Hanging Judge,” as she walked past the gossips.
Everyone thought they had something to fear from her, and some days, she liked to believe everyone was right.
*
The hanging judge’s ship was smaller than Jeremiah Keegan expected. The hanging judge herself was smaller, too. He liked that she was small; it made things easier. However, he was concerned about the size of the ship.
He stood in the center of the crowd, gathered, like crowds always did, to see a ship from Latica land. Latica, the first colony, the biggest, the richest, the farthest away, actually had the money—and the resources—to build ships like this.
Shaped like the original ships, but with more up-to-date equipment, these ships had the quality of myth, at least in his mind. He’d expected this one to house half the colony of Pavonne, when in point of fact, maybe one-hundred people could fit inside.
Not that he had a hundred people for today’s action. He barely had twenty, and not all of them were here. Some were in the arrivals wing, others at the far end of the crowd, and two should’ve entered Port Command Central right now. Port Command Central sounded so important, but it was usually one person struggling to fight off sleep. So few ships came to Pavonne that Port Command Central often had someone on call instead of monitoring the equipment.
Keegan’s heart pounded, and his entire body shook. He’d never taken a stand on principle before—at least not one of those stands that could end in someone’s death. He shoved his hands in his pockets, felt the coolness of the ancient laser against his skin, and knew that the moment when he could call everything off was passing.
The hanging judge walked by, flanked by four gigantic bodyguards in full body armor, dark and black and intimidating. Somehow she didn’t get lost in the middle of them, even though she was a foot shorter, a little rounder, and wearing no armor at all.
Was that an intimidation thing? A confidence thing? Or something else? He’d heard that they were finally developing new tech in Latica, stuff that replicated the nanotech their people had left behind two hundred years before. No one had been able to do it until now, not because the tech was lost, but because development was resource- and energy-intensive, and those things were always in short supply.
Maybe the judge wore one of those skinny nanothings under that old-fashioned suit of hers, with its great coat and thin pants. Or maybe she just had the confidence of the virtuous. Maybe she was oblivious to everything but her own opinion.
That’s what he hoped. That’s what he’d heard. But that wasn’t his problem. That was Andrea’s. Andrea got the judge. He got the ship.
They’d do the rest on their own, if they could.
Even if his people all died, as he’d said at the last meeting, at least the Anzler Colonies would understand the importance of the cause.
*
Six months of planning got Andrea Leidinger to the place she was now. Standing front and center in Arrivals, dressed in her new suit actually purchased by the government of Pavonne, three tiny laser pistols—if guns this small could be called pistols—hidden on her person.
The one that bothered her the most, attached by a small pocket inside her right sleeve, felt twenty times larger than the others. Twenty times larger, twenty times more conspicuous, twenty times more important.
But no one checked for weapons in Pavonne because everyone had weapons. Even though Pavonne established itself fifty years before, it had done so on the largest island in the Clearwater Sea. So beautiful, so perfect, so threatened by damn near everything on Anzler’s sixth moon.
Other colonies had started on this moon and failed. Pavonne had made it, but with lots of death, and lots of hardship, no thanks to Latica. It wasn’t until the Pavonners—no one dared call them Founders, since the Founders were the Originals, the ones who settled Latica—had figured out how to build the Clearwater barrier that the violence from the native species tamed down.
Not that anyone really believed it. And everyone knew that if they ventured outside that barrier, they could die in less than an instant.
Unless they were prepared.
She waited near the doors. Her job was to be the beautiful face of the welcoming committee. That was if anyone cared to record the arrival for some kind of news feed. If anyone actually thought the arrival was newsworthy, actual reporters would’ve been here.
They had no idea what was planned.
The actual reporters would end up using a feed because the hanging judge’s presence in a colony wasn’t news at all.
It took all of Leidinger’s strength not to look over her shoulder at her accomplices. They had the side and back doors guarded. They also had an escape route in place, one that would startle the local authorities.
No one ever did anything big at this tiny port. Big events didn’t happen in Pavonne, at least not so far. The cases facing Morell on her docket were—at their core—all domestics. Someone killing family, friends, co-workers, usually in a mass, sometimes accidentally.
And the only reason the judge showed up for those instead of doing them via private feed from Latica was simple: somewhere in the past, someone had mandated that no one could be put to death in any of the Anzler Colonies without actual in-person contact. Contact later got defined as a trial of some sort, even though the witnesses, the evidence, the actual case all got presented in absentia.
She watched the judge stride past the crowd without noticing any faces inside it. The judge didn’t leave the protection of her bodyguards for the entire journey, which wasn’t a surprise.
Leidinger had watched dozens of recorded arrivals from this judge, and they all followed a pattern, a pattern the judge herself mandated. She wouldn’t meet or greet local officials inside the port. She would have a formal meeting (with video) hours after her arrival. She did, however, need a local to guide her to the place that would be her home for the next month or two, and she also needed someone she could order about.
Everyone seemed so surprised at how happy Leidinger was to accept that assignment. Apparently, no one wanted the job. Or maybe no one had taken Leidinger as the kind of person who liked taking orders.
Everyone, apparently, saw her more clearly than she realized. So they really wouldn’t be surprised when she violated protocol.
She almost laughed out loud. Violating protocol.
What she was doing was so much more than violating protocol.
But she was going to do it anyway.
*
Once every five years, Judge Morell got Pavonne duty, and once every five years she remembered why she hated it so much. The landing in the tiny port, the long walk of shame (as she privately called it), and afterwards, what awaited her? A mediocre dinner at the “best” restaurant in Pavonne with the current colony governor. Fortunately, this time, it was a rather entertaining fellow named David Chamberlain, whom she’d met in Latica more than once. That at least was something to look forward to.
&nbs
p; This next meet-and-greet was something she didn’t look forward to. She couldn’t quite escape the “hellos,” that each colony wanted to inflict on her, no matter what. So she did them her way: rude and tough.
She glanced at the young earnest woman who had agreed to be her factotum. The poor creature wore a clearly new suit that was at least four years out of date, in Latica styles anyway. She looked uncomfortable as she waited, a fake smile pasted on her reasonably attractive face.
If Morell did her job correctly, that smile would be the last smile on the young woman’s face for at least a month. The Hanging Judge had a reputation to maintain, after all, and it wasn’t the nicest reputation.
Morell nearly smiled herself. Nice. No one used that word for her. To the best of her recollection, no one ever had.
Which was one reason why she was so very, very good at her job.
*
Keagan slipped out of the crowd, and headed to the side door hidden into the wall. He tapped in the code, then held up his left thumb and marveled as the door’s scans registered him as a port employee. He hadn’t been anyone’s employee in more than a decade.
But his people were doing their job. They’d spent six months planning for this.
He stepped inside the door, then held it open just a little. Two other members of his team joined him. They would capture the ship, while the rest of the team would get the judge back on board.
Of course, they’d discussed rushing the ship when it arrived, and he was now glad they’d decided against it. Even as he held that door, he could see the crowd dispersing.
Only a few members of that crowd even cared about the judge. Most of them were hangers-on, folks who took time out of their day to greet any ship that came to Pavonne. Not that they had many opportunities to do so. With the exception of the supply ships that came from Latica twice a year, the circuit judges and the occasional visiting politicians were the only official arrivals. Once in a while, some private ship came in, bearing visitors or extreme hunters or “explorers.” The “explorers” angered him the most. He wanted to ask each and every one of them why they assumed no one in Pavonne was smart enough to explore every solid surface of this moon.
Beyond the Sun Page 3