Assassination Day

by David J. Wighton

  With no wagon to lean against, the gang members were all sitting on their hands with their legs outstretched in front of them. Getting up would be a difficult process. If they did try, Wolf and Will had their weapons ready, albeit in invisible mode. Hank joined Will and motioned Wolf over to listen in as soon as the firewood wagon had disappeared from view.

  "Will, I am authorized to carry out the sentence of the court. However, I am also authorized to deputize someone else to administer the court's sentence. You saw the results of what these men did. Do you want to be the one to bring them to justice?"

  Out of the corner of his eye, Hank saw the gang starting to whisper. Before Hank could say anything, Wolf slammed them with his ring's gravity beam. All seven found themselves compressed helplessly to the ground, able to breath, but unable to move otherwise.

  Will looked over at the gang, all prone on their back, and then at their guns lying in a pile. Without a word, he selected two guns, took a position standing over the gang, and administered justice in a way that the murdered pacifists would have appreciated. "I can't leave Winnie alone too long,” Will said to Hank, handed him the gun, and started jogging down the rutted trail out of town.

  "Guess that means that we get to take care of the bodies?" Wolf asked.

  "Burial is part of the justice duty," Hank replied. "We can't use the slings in the open like this. A wagon would come in handy."

  "Like the one coming out of town?" Wolf asked.

  # # # # # # # #

  For many years, this incident on the outskirts of Oliver was unknown outside of the community. Within the community, it was recognized as an important part of Oliver's history and remained so well into the 2100s.

  The gunslingers had arrived at the worst possible time for the town of Oliver. All but one of their armed citizens were on a town hunting trip. The only weapon they had left in the village was an antique rifle holding only four bullets and wielded by an old man with uncontrollable tremors. But together he and his neighbours sabotaged the gunslingers' putt-putts that had been left unattended outside the tavern. They freed the women and children while the gunslingers were busy with the firewood traders. The whole town, with its four bullets, was ready to be part of an ambush at the church when the young child keeping watch on the gang reported that they had been captured. Soon afterwards, the old man heard the steady beat of the execution and he was the one who brought out the wagon and took the bodies to the town's cemetery.

  From the words on the wooden marker over the gang's grave, we know that the old man and Hank had talked. How else could that marker have reported that a member of the RCMP had brought a gang of murderers to justice? Although the grave marker is now long gone, a picture of it can still be found in the Oliver Museum along with some personal accounts of what happened. All accounts agree that a member of the RCMP had captured a gang threatening the lives of Oliver's citizens on July 31, 2082.

  Word gradually spread of the incident, and it created a bit of a stir because the RCMP in B.C. had ceased to exist as a police force during the Biker War in 2062/63. It was during that war that bikers were hunting and assassinating the province's police officers one by one. My readers will be well aware of the events of those years, so I won't elaborate. But although history doesn't state this categorically, the last police officer in B.C. was thought to have been killed in June, 2063. Now, here were the Oliver citizens claiming that an RCMP officer was still alive, and active, 19 years later.

  The link connecting the Oliver shootings to the Wilizy legend wasn't made until Justice Wilizy's autobiography was published in this century. In it, he described the whole confrontation in Oliver quite clearly, including the events around the coonskin cap's tail, which had always been considered far-fetched being based as they were on the words of a young villager watching the events from quite a distance. Justice Wilizy was also able to reproduce what his father had said to him and his brothers before he sent them back to their cache of firewood wagons. Hank's speech had made a big impression on Justice at the time and was the prime reason why he gave himself that name and entered his chosen occupation. As to the executions themselves, neither Justice nor his brothers gave them a second thought. They heard the seven gunshots, knew what they signified, and forgot all about the gang. It was only after Justice's autobiography revealed the connection to the Wilizy that Daniel Boone and the Putt-Putt Gang, as Hank must have referred to them, became an historical footnote.

  My readers might wonder how being a party to an execution did not traumatize Hank's young children. You must remember that the 2080s were a time of frontier living, where rough justice was the only justice available. All children in the frontier were used to hunting, killing and dressing their food. Hank's family wore deerskin and they ate venison. Neither blood nor death disturbed them.

  Communities were close-knit for reasons of mutual benefit and protection. People occasionally did behave in ways that could jeopardize an entire community. Being staked out in the hot sun for a day, or being chained to a boulder in the middle of the Fraser River rapids, was a strong message that was rarely ignored. Rough justice was dispensed quickly as a matter of course.

  Contrast that with justice today in the 22rd century. Even with truth serums being applied to all accused and all trial witnesses, there are still huge delays between the laying of the charges and the actual trial because of the sheer number of people awaiting trial. The cause, as we all know, is due to truth serum administrators being in short supply, it being an occupation with a worrisome short life span. A serum administrator either dies young or becomes secretly rich for a short time.

  Even if your truth serum administrator has not been bought, there are now so many rumours of truth serum nullifiers being available for the right price that any reasonable person would admit that they are no longer fiction, but are fact. And even if an accused were found guilty and deported to one of the asteroid penal colonies, do we in fact know that the accused was deported? Nobody actually checks. Instead we take the word of a prison administrator who has every reason to accept generous gifts to pretend that Convict #xx is actually there. And where would that convict be if not in the colonies? We'd never know, would we? With the rich having the resources to slip into whatever un-used body sleeve that they wanted to buy, how would anyone know who he had been in his previous body?

  So for those of you who may have been disturbed by young children being part of a lethal court case, or shocked that a trial might last less than 15 minutes before execution was carried out, is that actually any worse than what we have now?

  Back to the Table of Contents

  Chapter 18

  Will was sitting in a straight-back chair in Yolanda's kitchen, arms folded across his chest, staring off into the distance when Doc and Granny burst into the house. Well, Granny burst in, Doc sauntered in.

  Granny went up to Will, pinched his nostrils together gently until he couldn't breathe, and waited for him to look up at her. When Will was in one of his thinking trances, waving a hand in front of his face wouldn't work. Izzy had shared her method of getting Will's attention in such situations with the family. "How is Winnie?" she asked as soon as Will's eyes focused.

  "Fine," he said.

  "Details, Will. Details."

  "The headaches disappeared the day everyone left. She was happy the whole week. She did her schoolwork and her chores every day without me reminding her. We had games of sling tag in the afternoon and I gave her target practice for her ring. In the evening, I'd hook us up to one of her story-bots and she'd read to me. In the afternoon, I'd study my bot and she'd draw pictures, but I don't know what she drew. She took them to her bedroom. That's where Yolanda is now. Izzy's there too."

  If that sounds verbose for Will, it was. This was the information that Yolanda had painfully extracted from him one question at a time 15-minutes ago. Will just remembered what she had been most interested in and recited that back to Granny who bustled off to Winnie's bedroom. By th
is time, Doc had plopped into an overstuffed chair in the living room and had pulled out his whittling stick and knife.

  Izzy had told Will once that it was rude to continue to study when guests were over for a visit, so Will unplugged his bot and wandered into the living room where Doc was examining his whittling stick.

  "Hand me one of Yolanda's napkins, would you Will?" At home, Doc would whittle whenever and wherever he wanted. Granny didn't care. They'd sweep the floors once a week. At Yolanda's, Doc used a napkin to catch all the little shavings.

  "What's this one going to be?" Will asked as he delivered the napkin.

  "Beats me!" Doc had explained that all sticks have a beautiful carving inside of them. He'd just cut little shavings off them until the stick spoke to him.

  "Are you going to keep this one?" When he had found out that Doc was a prolific whittler, Will had asked if he could see some of his work. Doc explained that he took a stick out of the forest and then he put the stick back into the forest when he was done. Only occasionally did he keep his art. He kept a few special pieces in his and Granny's house, but nobody knew why.

  "Probably not."

  "Stick not talking yet?"

  "Being stubborn." Doc held his knife up to the stick and made the tinniest possible notch in its center. "How long did it take you to clean the house?"

  "Couple of hours. Winnie helped."

  "Did it pass inspection?"

  "Yah," Will sat down opposite Doc and hunched forward so that he could see the creative process at work. Doc was still eying the notch. "Yolanda seemed disappointed that she couldn't find anything wrong."

  "When Yolanda is bored, she cleans. The Wilizy is now spotless on the inside. We had to persuade her that cleaning the outside of an invisible ship wasn't necessary. I expect that she was hoping that she'd have something to clean back here."

  "What do you do when you're bored, Doc?"

  "Whittle. It's enjoyable when the sticks talk louder than this one." A second notch joined the first but on the other side of the stick. "Granny knits sweaters for the kids for Christmas when she's bored. They'd be great gifts if any of the kids had one arm longer than the other."

  "The sweaters don't fit?"

  "Not even close. As soon as she sees the finished sweater, she tears it apart and starts all over again. The grandkids don't even know that Granny knits. They've never seen a finished sweater."

  "Why does she knit then?"

  "Says that she likes it even if she can't knit worth a darn. What do you do when you're bored, Will?"

  "I'm never bored, Doc."

  "How are you spending your free time then?"

  "Studying a human anatomy bot."

  "Why?"

  "I found out that Izzy can't become pregnant from wireless transmissions from my eyeballs. She seemed to think I was crazy for thinking that."

  "I could see her thinking that."

  "So I thought I should learn more about the human body."

  "Probably a good idea. Are you and Izzy planning on making babies soon?"

  "Nah."

  "An even better idea."

  # # # # # # # #

  They were all settled down in the living room. Winnie was standing in the center of the room, excitedly explaining how she had rearranged her bedroom. Granny was perched on the armrest of Doc's chair, Will and Izzy were each sitting at the distant ends of a love seat that was not living up to its name, and Yolanda was in her rocking chair, leaning back against the back pad and smiling at her daughter.

  "My bed and bureau are now against one wall, and right opposite on the other wall is the bed where my boyfriend will sleep when I find one. I don't have a second bed yet, so I put down a sleeping bag for him for now."

  "And in the middle?" Yolanda prompted.

  "I've hung wires all the way down the middle of the room and that's where I'm attaching all of my pictures. Mom wouldn't want me putting them on the walls because they'd leave a mark."

  "What are you drawing? More pictures of Izzy?" Doc asked.

  "I'll show you." Winnie scampered away.

  "Back to her old self," Doc said softly to Granny.

  "Yolanda is very relieved," Granny whispered back. "The pictures are just multiple tracings of different parts of her hands and feet. They're all the same tracing except for different little lines on them. But she's quite proud of them."

  Winnie burst back into the room waving three pictures and thrust them at Doc, and then slid behind the chair so that she could look at the pictures with him. Doc looked closely at all three pictures one at a time, then put them down on his legs where he could see them side by side.

  "What are these squiggles on this picture, Winnie?"

  "I don't know. They were just there."

  "And the squiggles on this picture?"

  Winnie shrugged.

  "Where did you see them?"

  "In Will's bot. Are they wrong?"

  "No Winnie, in fact they're perfect." Holding up the first and displaying it to the family, he announced, "The circulatory system of the hand. The second is the nervous system of the hand, and the third is the skeletal system of the same hand. Will has been studying human anatomy," he added.

  "Wow," Izzy was the first to react. "That's really good, Winnie. Did you know what those marks were?"

  "No. There were lots of words, but they were too big for me to read. I just traced my hand and put the squiggly lines on where they were supposed to go. It's not drawing like what you do."

  "Still, it's good tracing, Winnie," Yolanda complimented her daughter. "You didn't say that you had hooked Winnie up to your study bot, Will."

  "That's because I hadn't."

  # # # # # # # #

  In just a few minutes, the mood in the room had changed drastically. Winnie was standing in front of her mom's rocker, her body posture screaming I'm angry. Yolanda was no longer rocking, but was leaning forward slightly, looking intently at her daughter. Her smile had disappeared.

  "All I'm saying, Winnie, is that it's OK that you copied the drawings from Will's bot, but you should have asked him first if it was alright for you to borrow it."

  "But I didn't borrow it."

  "Sweetie, if you weren't hooked up to Will's brain plug, then there's only one way that you could have seen those images. By putting that bot into your brain plug when Will wasn't using it. It's OK to do that, but ask him first next time. That's just being polite. He'd give you permission."

  "Mom, I know that but I DIDN'T borrow it." Winnie was now hopping up and down.

  Yolanda was trying to keep her voice calm and gentle. "Winnie. You know how we feel about lying . . ."

  "I'M NOT LYING! You're giving me a headache again and I didn't do anything wrong! Mom, why are you always mad at me? I stopped eating the marshmallows but you're still always angry. Now I have a headache and I hate having these headaches."

  Winnie paused in her frustration and turned to look at the others in the room. "Now everyone but Will is angry at me again. I didn't do anything wrong," she wailed as she fled the room.

  Silence. An outburst very unlike Winnie.

  Granny wasn't going to say anything – she knew that her daughter wouldn't appreciate anything she might say, not that she knew what to say anyway. Will was ... well, Will was being Will. Nobody knew what was going on in his mind. Izzy was wondering why Yolanda would be always angry with Winnie – her sentiments were clearly on Winnie's side. It fell to Doc to break the silence.

  "Marshmallows?"

  "Long story." Yolanda unfolded herself out of her rocker and said "Mom can tell you. I don't see any connection whatsoever to the headaches." Then she left the room and disappeared towards Winnie's bedroom.

  About a minute later, Will left the room. He was back soon afterwards. Izzy lifted an eyebrow and he said. "Winnie is wailing and Yolanda is holding her."

  "Why'd you go down?" Izzy asked.

  "I thought I could help."

  "Did you?" Granny, this
time.

  "I don't know. Winnie stopped slapping at Yolanda's hands, at least."

  # # # # # # # #

  Yolanda collected the pieces of paper from Granny, Doc, Will and Izzy. "I don't want to explain. Not yet. Frankly, I don't believe it. I'll bring Winnie up now. When she's here, think about the thoughts or memories that you've written about on the paper. Don't think about anything else. We'll use these papers to prove what you were thinking if we need to. Yolanda scanned the papers quickly. Please close your eyes to concentrate. Don't say anything to Winnie." Then Yolanda left them wondering what was going on.

  Yolanda reappeared about a minute later. Winnie was semi-hiding behind her mom's legs when Yolanda entered the living room again. That was something that would have greatly surprised Granny had she had her eyes open. She hadn't seen that timid behaviour from Winnie for years.

  "It's OK, Sweetie. I've told them to close their eyes so that they can concentrate on something."

  "But I yelled and slapped at you," Winnie murmured from her position behind her mom."

  "They'll understand. Why don't we stand in front of Doc. Take your time. When you're ready, tell us what you see."

  "Doc is carving something with his knife."

  "Is he happy or sad?"

  "He's happy."

  "What is he carving?"

  "It's too small. I can't see it."

  "That's fine. Now let's stand in front of Granny."

  "Wait." Winnie slipped from behind her mom and clambered up into Doc's lap. Finding it too low, she pulled herself up and put her face against Doc's. "It's a loon." Then she scrambled down and went to stand in front of her granny.

  "What do you see?"

  "She's looking at me and smiling."

  "Is that all?"

  "I'm wearing a red and green sweater – it's really thick."

  "Anything else?"

  "Just a minute." Once again face met face and then Winnie slid down. "There are little reindeers on the sweater."

  "And Izzy?"

  Winnie giggled.

  "Well?"

  Winnie giggled again and motioned for her mom to bend over. She whispered something in her ear and then giggled happily again.