by Gaiman, Neil
‘I take it that I will get that co-operation, sir?’
Jones didn’t look at her. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘You do, and you don’t. It’s not that we don’t want to give you all the help we can. But you’re a Mega-City One Judge. And this is Brit-Cit. We do things differently here.
‘I’m assigning you to Judge Armour. You two can work together on this case. You can use Brit-Cit Justice Department Facilities. But while you’re here you take orders from Armour. And from me. And none of this charging into places, Lawgiver blazing, damaging property and putting the wind up our citizens! You aren’t in Mega-City One now, lass.’
‘No,’ said Hershey. ‘I can see that I’m not.’
‘Right then,’ said Chief Judge Jones. ‘That’s all that needs to be said then. Good luck.
‘Just remember. We’ve got a saying over here. Softly softly catchee perp. Right then. Good morning.’
TV NASTIES
Clute had done five years in an Iso-Cube when he was twenty. The hologram of him taken then showed Hershey a weasely little man, short, prematurely balding, with little cherubic lips.
Since then he had been on the move. Severian Clute was just one of the half-dozen names he had used, a minor confidence man and compulsive liar who had informed on the Brit-Cit underworld just enough to keep in circulation. No record of sugar dealing until six weeks back, when he had left his job handling transit passengers at the Space Port, abandoned his apartment, and gone underground.
There were no leads as to his current whereabouts.
Hershey sat in her hotel room, and reviewed the files again and again, hoping to pry some clue from Clute’s shifty little face, from the list of dates and places. No go. She paced the room. Flipped on her communicator.
‘Armour? Hershey here. Got anything?’
‘’Fraid not. I’ll contact you as soon as I have.’
She sighed. ‘I can’t sit around forever! I’ll go nuts!’
‘I’ll call you as soon as there’s any word. Really, in the meantime why don’t you watch the box?’
‘Huh?’ Why couldn’t the man speak in English?
‘The television. Armour out.’
Hershey activated the television, flipped the channels. BCB1 was showing a historical drama about the Second Elizabethan Era. A woman named Thatcher – played by a remarkably attractive young actress – whom Hershey took to be the Chief Judge of that period, was riding her horse down a freeway, in company with an army of punk rockers.
‘If Hitler is to be defeated,’ she told her troops, ‘we must declare this to be The Summer of Love!’
Hershey flipped channels.
‘Don’t move perpy, ’cos I am the Law!’ shouted a wild-eyed young man. There was a burst of canned laughter. ‘It’s Dudd!’ said someone. ‘Don’t talk to me about crime in Brit-Cit. I left my bicycle by Tony Hancock Block last week, and when I got back that evening it was still there!’ ‘The bicycle?’ ‘No, blah-face! The Block!’ More hysterical laughter.
Hershey thought seriously about heading down to Brit-Cit Broadcasting and arresting the lot of them. Instead she turned the television off.
‘Be a good citizen,’ a recorded message implored her. ‘Please destroy your television set now. Support local obsolescence.’
Hershey had never destroyed public property in her life. She walked to the far side of her hotel room, took out her Lawgiver, and fired at the TV set.
Her communicator crackled.
‘Hershey? It’s Armour here–! What’s that noise? I thought I heard a shot!’
‘It’s just the television,’ she explained.
‘Oh gosh – it sounded so real! Anyway, one of our Judges thinks he may have a lead. Meet you downstairs.’
As she left the room a new television set slid up from the floor.
There was another Judge waiting with Armour, whom he introduced as Judge Pratchett. Hershey had never seen a Judge with a beard before. She found it vaguely obscene. Judge Pratchett was holding a middle-aged woman with a runny nose; he had her arm twisted as far up her back as it would go without actually breaking anything.
‘Now then, chummy,’ said Pratchett, ‘tell this Judge what you told me. And none of your lip this time, sunshine, or I’ll add on another year to your sentence.’
‘All I know,’ squealed the terrified woman, ‘is that Clute’s been hanging around Speaker’s Corner. Near the Legalise Sugar stand. I bought some stuff off him yesterday.’
‘Have you taken any yet?’ said Hershey quickly.
‘Oh no. I was saving it for a cup of tea. There’s a bloke I know said he could put a few tea bags my way, you see.’
‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ said Judge Pratchett, cheerfully. ‘Well, well, well, tea as well is it? You’re a regular little den of iniquity, my girl. It looks like you’re going to be helping us with our enquiries for quite some time to come, eh?’
Hershey got on her Lawmaster. ‘Speaker’s Corner?’
‘Follow me.’ They headed off into the misty Brit-Cit morning, Judge Pratchett’s muffled ‘Mind how you go, now!’ echoing after them.
ROCKS IN CONCERT
Hyde Park was a smallish car park, not more than a hundred and fifty storeys high, covering less than five square miles. The top floor had been turned into some kind of park. In the centre a Rock Group – an alien species of intelligent granite, top musicians all, on a galaxy-wide tour – were being hooked up to huge loudspeakers. According to the painted legend on their sides they were called the Growling Stones. Hershey had heard a little rock music in Mega-City, but didn’t like it.
In one corner a knot of people had gathered.
‘That’s Speaker’s Corner,’ said Judge Armour. ‘We’ll leave the Lawmasters here by the gate, and go over on foot. We’ll be less conspicuous.’
As they drew closer the wind blew snatches of speech over to Hershey. She was not sure she believed what she was hearing.
‘...of course Judges are evil. The system is an evil, corrupting system...’
‘...all right, so if you can grow your own tobacco, what’s wrong with smoking it – in your own home of course...’
‘...sure we’re robots. But why should we be treated as second class citizens? A neuronic brain is...’
‘...so what’s wrong with a little mutie-bashing, I should like to know? I mean they aren’t like us...’
The speakers were all men and women (and in two cases robots) who stood on chairs and boxes, in the middle of the crowd. Around them people cheered or heckled, made suggestions or cracked jokes, moving from speaker to speaker by osmosis.
Hershey stopped. ‘These people... what they’re saying! Shall we round them up now? They’ll get ten years in an Iso-Cube.’
Armour shook his head. ‘This is Speaker’s Corner. They can say what they like.’
‘But... it’s seditious. And all the people listening to them...’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Judge Armour. ‘Nobody’s paying any attention. It’s a game.’
Hershey could not believe her ears. ‘I think you British Judges are crazy. They – they’re breaking the Law!’
Armour shrugged. ‘It doesn’t matter, Judge Hershey,’ he said softly. ‘They can do what they like. It won’t change anything.’ He pointed to the far corner. ‘Over there. The Legalise Sugar speaker. You move in from the left, I’ll hit the right. Keep an eye out for Clute.’
‘...and what they say is, they tell us that sugar is harmful! They tell us it rots our teeth! They tell us it burns out the pancreas! Well my brothers and sisters, that’s a load of tommyrot! I have evidence, I say evidence, that far from being harmful, sugar is actually beneficial to the human body! And I say this...’ But what else the Sugar Speaker had to say Hershey never found out. She spotted a familiar face in the crowd around the stand, a sweating, shifty, ferrety little face, and shouted:
‘Clute! Freeze!’
The man ran for it, which, in retrospect, was something of a mistake. When a Judge t
ells you to freeze, you freeze. He ran, not for the gate, but towards the Stones in the centre of the park, through the crowds, with Armour and Hershey following.
Clute elbowed and kicked, ducked and weaved, clambered on top of the largest of the boulders, then, pulling a gun from his jacket, he pointed it down at the huge, round rock beneath him.
‘If you Judges come one step closer – I-I’ll vap’rise Mig’Yeagger here! Now... n-now you don’t want to cause an interplanetary stink, do you? D-DO YOU?’
Hershey weighed the alternatives quickly. She could get her Lawmaster to hit him from the back... she and Armour could double team... she could try and stun him before he had a chance to move...
At the end of the day she didn’t know which of these she would have picked. She was quite sure she could have disarmed Clute in seconds. That was why she was a Judge. But whatever Hershey could have done would have been less surprising to the crowd, and to Clute, than what actually happened.
The stone rolled.
Rigellian rocks, being a silicate life form, are not known for their speed of action. This one, however, realising its very existence was in danger, wobbled slightly, then rolled over completely, crushing Clute’s leg, and trapping it underneath its huge and weighty bulk. Clute dropped the gun and screamed.
Armour and Hershey walked over to the rock, and to its victim.
‘I’m not talking,’ sobbed Clute. ‘And don’t think about mind-probing me, ’cos I’ve had treatment. I bin done. You’ll never get a word out of me!’
‘They are terribly unsafe things, rocks,’ remarked Armour to Hershey, apparently ignoring Clute’s speech.
‘Terribly unsafe,’ she echoed. ‘Positively precarious.’
‘Why, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that one didn’t tip over completely... totally, horribly crushing our Mister Severian here.’
‘Crushed into mince,’ agreed Hershey, brightly. They began to walk back the way they had come.
‘WAIT!’ screamed Clute.
The Judges’ bikes were riding through the crowds towards them. The rocks vibrated the triad of D sharp minor. The crowd applauded.
‘Wait... please...’ begged Clute. ‘Listen. The sugar. It’s in the basement of Ennio Morricone Block. But get me out of here. It’s a retinal lock – keyed to my eyeprints. You need me to open it. Get me out. Please! Get me out!’
Hershey looked at Armour and Armour looked at Hershey. They turned back.
‘Please,’ said Hershey to the rock star. It rolled back. Armour picked Clute up, and threw him over his shoulder. ‘Let’s go, jerk,’ he muttered.
THE WHITE STUFF
The basement of Ennio Morricone Block smelt peculiar, although Hershey didn’t recognise the smell. Clute couldn’t stand, so Hershey picked him up and held his face against the microcamera. It scanned his eyeball, compared the tracery of blood vessels to the pattern on its records, and auto-unlocked the door. So far, at least, the little perp had been telling the truth.
‘I-I’ll wait out here, me leg is giving me gyp. You all go in...’
The smell was so strong it almost knocked her out. A high, sweet smell unlike anything she had known before. The room – and it was huge – was piled high with white crystals, hills and mountains of sugar. A white expanse. And the smell was so sweet. Hershey wanted to throw herself on the ground, to bury her face in the stuff, lap it up and taste the candied flavour flooding through every nerve. Out of the corner of her eye she could see Armour falling to his knees, digging his gloves into the white drift.
Something twitched behind a hillock. Whatever it was, it was enough to snap her out of the state she was in. She snapped down her respirator, and kicked the sugar out of Armour’s hand.
‘Judge Armour! Use your respirator!’
He reached up a trembling arm and fumbled it down.
‘I don’t know what come over me,’ his voice echoed in her helmet.
‘This stuff isn’t sugar,’ said Hershey. ‘We’ve known that all along. But I think we’re about to find out where it came from...’
And then the thing came over the hill.
Seen at that size the resemblance to a spider was decreased. It had seven legs, and dragged a hairy, bulbous body between them. A network of tiny eyes circled its body; at the front were mandibles, behind it a stream of white crystals was trickling down.
It was enormous.
Armour sighted his Lawgiver. She put out an arm. ‘No, don’t shoot.’
‘Huh?’
‘It’s intelligent. I recognise the life-form. A Sakishira. It’s non-aggressive... I saw some seven years ago, when I went extragalactic. This one is sick.
‘Armour, put out a call to Justice Central, or whatever you people call it here. Tell them we need an alien handler. And a truck to move the thing. And an alien medic, if you’ve got such a thing in Brit territories – otherwise call Mega-City One and ask them to send Sturgeon over. He’s the best we’ve got.’
Armour began to put in the calls. Hershey walked over to the spider-creature. Her Allspeak was rusty – it had never been good – but she managed. ‘You-ill-make-better-thing-come.’ The alien shuddered, and lay down.
Hershey walked over to where Clute was lying.
‘There used to be an insect called the bee. Almost extinct these days. Not enough plants around. Bees made a synthetic sugar in their bodies called honey. Food for their young. When you saw this alien come in on the shuttle point, trickling sugar, you thought it was something like that. That right, creep?’
The man nodded. Sugar crystals were sticking to his sweat-soaked forehead.
‘So you kidnapped the thing, and dragged her down here, and locked her up. Must have taken a lot of work. But you thought you’d made your fortune.
‘There must be twenty million creds worth of sugar down here, eh, creep? You thought you were printing your own money.’
‘You’re smart, Judge, for a–’
‘Shut up, creep. But you were wrong. This stuff isn’t food. It isn’t sugar. It’s eggs. That’s how these things breed. They lay this stuff, animals eat it, and it transforms the cellular structure of the animals into little duplicates of Big Momma over there.
‘You’ve been sugar dealing, kidnapping an intelligent being and killing people, creep. You want to know what the sentence for that is?’
Clute didn’t respond. His face seemed waxen, papery. Something pulsed rhythmically in his cheek. The skin broke, and tiny black legs clawed at the air.
‘How’s our prisoner?’ called Armour.
Hershey shrugged. ‘He’s gone to pieces,’ she said. ‘Must have been sampling his own merchandise.’
Then the clean-up squad arrived, and it was all over.
EPILOGUE
Chief Judge Silver sent for her as soon as she arrived back in Mega-City One.
‘You did all right,’ he told her. ‘The International Justice Council were pleased. So was Chief Judge Jones: if their man had shot the Sakishira it could have provoked an intergalactic incident. And we’ve an antidote to the sugar for anyone we can get it to in time. No point in having them turn into little spiders in the Iso-Cubes.
‘So what did you think of Brit-Cit?’
Hershey was expressionless. ‘I’m pleased to be home, sir.’
‘Yes, I hear they do things differently over there. Still, they get the job done. That will be all, Hershey.’
She left.
Silver looked down at the paper on his desk. It was a request, from the Brit-Cit Chief Judge, that Judge Hershey be assigned to the Brit-Cit Judge force for a six-month tour of duty, while they sent a Brit-Cit Judge to Mega-City One. ‘To foster understanding and the exchange of ideas and techniques’ as Jones put it.
Silver thought of Hershey spending six months in Brit-Cit. And Silver smiled.
JUDGE ANDERSON: DEAR DIARY
By Peter Milligan, 2000 AD Annual 1988
21 JUNE 2109
Today is going to be really boring.
If my flashes are correct, and knowing my luck most of them will be, I’ll get caught in a traffic snarl-up on my way to H.Q., and then I’ll get cornered by that fat greaseball from records, Ned Kamen. I think Kamen has probably got a portrait of himself somewhere, a portrait that stays looking young and beautiful while Kamen himself is the embodiment of all the slimy and devious facets of his slimy and devious life.
Sorry, are you getting the impression I don’t like him? You know I have nothing against ugly people. They can’t help it and, hey, there are probably one or two people in the world who don’t go a bundle on me. No. Just because he’s got a complexion like the Sea of Tranquility and his hands are like two slabs of greasy bacon and to smell his breath you’d think his alimentary canal was linked to the city’s sewer system doesn’t mean to say that he isn’t a nice human being. It’s just that he isn’t a nice human being, and he keeps cornering me and trying to run his not-nice-human-being’s hands all over me. And then–
Hold on. I’m getting something else. Drokk! Someone’s going to break into my locker. I’ll go to the locker at about noon and a find a spare uniform plus some other odds and ends missing. Where are Security going to be, for Grud’s sake?
Make a note, Anderson. Keep your eye on your locker.
The rest of the day is a bit confused. I think there’ll be further outbreaks of violence between rival factions of the Philosophers. A gang of young Existentialists, aided by some disaffected Hedonists, will ambush and kick drokk out of a passing mob of Logical Positivists. Thanks to this flash, there’ll be a squad of Riot Judges there to really give the Philosophers something to think about. Tsch. All this in-fighting amongst the city’s thinkers is enough to make you a cynic; except that all the Cynics are in jail after they finally killed off the Stoics last year. Of course, the Cynics were the biggest gang of all, Mega-City One philosophers having a tendency, for some reason, to embrace that particular creed. And as for the Stoics, well, they didn’t even bother trying to defend themselves when the Cynics attacked them. They just gritted their teeth, accepted it all as their fate, and were subsequently mashed to a pulp.