If they only knew, Keel thought. A higher Committee on Vital Forms has today passed judgment on me … as it will pass judgment on them, eventually. He felt a deep compassion for the petitioners in front of him but there was no denying the judgment.
“The Committee has determined that the subject”—not “the child,” he thought—“is merely a modified gastrula …”
“We want this child!” The man fisted the rail that separated him from the Committee’s high bench. The security guardians at the rear of the chambers came to attention. The woman continued to hum and sway, not in time with the music that came from her lips.
Keel leafed through a stack of plaz records and pulled out a sheet thick with figures and graphs.
“The subject has been found to have a nuclear construction that harbors a reagent gene,” he reported. “This construction insures that the cellular material will turn on itself, destroying its own cell walls …”
“Then let us have our child until that death,” the man blurted. He swiped at his face with the damp cloth. “For the love of humanity, give us that much.”
“Sir,” Keel said, “for the love of humanity I cannot. We have determined that this construction is communicable should there be any major viral invasion of the subject …”
“Our child! Not a subject! Our child!”
“Enough!” Keel snapped. Security moved silently into the aisle behind the Merman. Keel tapped the bell beside him and all stirring in the chamber ceased. “We are sworn to protect human life, to perpetuate life forms that are not lethal deviants.”
The Merman father stared upward, awed at the invocation of these terrible powers. Even his mate stopped her gentle swaying, but a faint hum still issued from her mouth.
Keel wanted to shout down at them, “I am dying, right here in front of you. I am dying.” But he bit back the impulse and decided that if he were going to give in to hysteria he’d do it in his own quarters.
Instead, he said, “We are empowered to carry out measures in the extreme to see that humankind survives this genetic mess we inherited from Jesus Lewis.” He leaned back and steadied the shaking in his hands and voice. “We are in no way refreshed by a negative decision. Take your woman home. Care for her …”
“I want one …”
The bell rang again, cutting the man short.
Keel raised his voice: “Usher! See these people out. They will be given the usual priorities. Terminate the subject, retaining all materials as stated in Vital Form Orders, subparagraph B. Recess.”
Keel arose and swept past the other Committee members without a glance at the rest of the chambers. The grunts and struggles of the heartsick Merman echoed and re-echoed down the corridors of Keel’s anguished mind.
As soon as he was alone in his office, Keel unstoppered a small flask of boo and poured himself a stiff shot. He tossed it back, shuddered and caught his breath as the warm clear liquid eased into his bloodstream. He sat in the special chair at his desk then, eyes closed, and rested his long, thin neck against the molded supports that took the weight of his massive head.
He could not make a lethal decision as he had done this morning without recalling the moment when he, as an infant, had come before the Committee on Vital Forms. People said it was not possible for him to remember that scene, but he did remember it—not in bits and sketches, but in its entirety. His memory went back into the womb, through a calm birth into a gloomy delivery room and the glad awakening at his mother’s breast. And he remembered the judgment of the Committee. They had been worried about the size of his head and the length of his thin neck. Would prosthetics compensate? He had understood the words, too. There was language in him from some genetic well and although he could not speak until growth caught up with what had been born in him, he knew those words.
“This infant is unique,” that old Chief Justice had said, reading from the medical report. “His intestines must have periodic implantation of a remora to supply missing bile and enzyme factors.”
The Chief Justice had looked down then, a giant behind that enormous and remote bench, and his gaze had fixed on the naked infant in its mother’s arms.
“Legs, thick and stubby. Feet deformed—one-joint toes, six toes, six fingers. Torso overlong, waist pinched in. Face rather small in that …” the Justice cleared his throat, “enormous head.” The Justice had looked at Keel’s mother then, noting the extremely wide pelvis. Obvious anatomical questions had lain unspoken in the man’s mind.
“In spite of these difficulties, this subject is not a lethal deviant.” The words issuing from the Justice’s mouth had all been in the medical report. Keel, when he came to the Committee as a member, fished out his own report, reading it with a detached curiosity.
“Face rather small …” These were the very words in the report, just as he remembered them. “Eyes, one brown and one blue.” Keel smiled at the memory. His eyes—”one brown and one blue”—could peek around from the nearly squared edges of his temples, allowing him to look almost straight back without turning his head. His lashes were long and drooping. When he relaxed, they fuzzed his view of the world. Time had put smile wrinkles at the corners of his wide, thick-lipped mouth. And his flat nose, nearly a handsbreadth wide, had grown until it stopped just short of his mouth. The whole face, he knew from comparisons, was oddly pinched together, top to bottom, as though put on his head as an afterthought. But those corner-placed eyes, they were the dominant feature—alert and wise.
They let me live because I looked alert, he thought.
This was a thing he, too, sought in the subjects brought before him. Brains. Intelligence. That was what humankind required to get them out of this mess. Brawn and dexterity, too, but these were useless without the intelligence to guide them.
Keel closed his eyes and sank his neck even deeper into the cushioned supports. The boo was having its desired effect. He never drank the stuff without thinking how strange it was that this should come from the deadly nerve runners that had terrified his ancestors in the pioneer days of Pandora when real land protruded above the sea.
“Worm hordes,” the first observers had called them. The worm hordes attacked warm life and ate out every nerve cell, working their way to the succulent brain where they encysted their clutches of eggs. Even dashers feared them. Came the endless sea, though, and nerve runners retreated to a subsea vector whose fermentation by-product was boo—sedative, narcotic, “happy juice.”
He fondled the small glass and took another sip.
The door behind him opened and a familiar footstep entered—familiar swish of garments, familiar smells. He didn’t open his eyes, thinking what a singular mark of trust that was, even for an Islander.
Or an invitation, he thought.
The beginnings of a wry smile touched the corners of his mouth. He felt the tingling of the boo in his tongue and fingertips. Now in his toes.
Baring my neck for the axe?
There was always guilt after a negative decision. Always at least the unconscious desire for expiation. Well, it was all there in the Committee’s orders, but he was not fool enough to retreat into that hoary old excuse: “I was just obeying orders.”
“May I get you something, Justice?” The voice was that of his aide and sometimes-lover, Joy Marcoe.
“No, thank you,” he murmured.
She touched his shoulder. “The Committee would like to reconvene in quarters at eleven hundred hours. Should I tell them you’re too … ?”
“I’ll be there.” He kept his eyes closed and heard her start to leave. “Joy,” he called, “have you ever thought how ironic it is that you, with your name, work for this Committee?”
She returned to his side and he felt her hand on his left arm. It was a trick of the boo that he felt the hand melt into his senses—more than a touch, she caressed a vital core of his being.
“Today is particularly hard,” she said. “But you know how rare that is, anymore.” She waited, he presumed, for his response
. Then when none came: “I think Joy is a perfect name for this job. It reminds me of how much I want to make you happy.”
He managed a weak smile and adjusted his head in the supports. He couldn’t bring himself to tell her about his own medical reports—the final verdict. “You do bring me joy,” he said. “Wake me at ten-forty-five.”
She dimmed the light when she left.
The mobile device that supported his head began to irritate the base of his neck where it pressed into the chair’s supports. He inserted a finger under the chair’s cushions and adjusted one of the contraption’s fastenings. Relief on his left side was transmitted to irritation on the right. He sighed and poured another short dash of boo.
When he lifted the slender glass, the dimmed overhead light shot blue-gray sparkles through the liquid. It looked cool, as refreshing as a supportive bath on a hot day when the double suns burned through the clouds.
What warmth the tiny glass contained! He marveled at the curve of his thin fingers around the stem. One fingernail peeled back where he had snagged it on his robe. Joy would clip and bind it when she returned, he knew. He did not doubt that she had noted it. This had happened often enough, though, that she knew it did not pain him.
His own reflection in the curvature of the glass caught his attention. The curve exaggerated the wide spacing of his eyes. The long lashes drooping almost to the bend of his cheeks receded into tiny points. He strained to focus on the glass so close in front of him. His nose was a giant thing. He brought the glass to his lips and the image fuzzed out, vanished.
Small wonder that Islanders avoid mirrors, he thought.
He had a fascination with his own reflection, though, and often caught himself staring at his features in shiny surfaces.
That such a distorted creature should be allowed to live! The long-ago judgment of that earlier Committee filled him with wonder. Did those Committee members know that he would think and hurt and love? He felt that the often-shapeless blobs that appeared before his Committee bore kinship to all humanity if only they showed evidence of thought, love and the terribly human capacity to be hurt.
From some dim passageway beyond his doors or, perhaps, from somewhere deep in his own mind, the soft tones of a fine set of water-drums nestled him into his cushions and drowsed him away.
Half-dreams flickered in and out of his consciousness, becoming presently a particularly soothing full-dream of Joy Marcoe and himself rolling backward on her bed. Her robe fell open to the smooth softness of aroused flesh and Keel felt the unmistakable stirrings of his body—the body in the chair and the body in the dream. He knew it was a dream of the memory of their first exploratory sharing. His hand slipped beneath her robe and pulled the softness of her against him, stroking her back. That had been the moment when he discovered the secret of Joy’s bulky clothes, the clothes that could not hide an occasional firm trim line of hips or thighs, the small strong arms. Joy cradled a third breast under her left armpit. In the dream of the memory, she giggled nervously as his wandering hand found the tiny nipple hardening between his fingers.
Mr. Justice.
It was Joy’s voice, but it was wrong.
That was not what she said.
“Mr. Justice.”
A hand shook his left arm. He felt the chair and the prosthetics, a pain where his neck joined the massive head.
“Ward, it’s wake-up. The Committee meets in fifteen minutes.” He blinked awake. Joy stood over him, smiling, her hand still on his arm.
“Nodded off,” he said. He yawned behind his hand. “I was dreaming about you.”
A distinctive flush darkened her cheeks. “Something nice, I hope.”
He smiled. “How could a dream with you in it be anything but nice?”
The blush deepened and her gray eyes glittered.
“Flattery will get you anything, Mr. Justice.” She patted his arm. “After Committee, you have a call to Kareen Ale. Her office said she would arrive here at thirteen-thirty. I told them you have a full appointment sheet through …”
“I’ll see her,” he said. He stood and steadied himself on the edge of his desk console. The boo always made him a little groggy at first recovery. Imagine the medics giving him their death sentence and then telling him to knock off the boo! Avoid extremes, avoid anxiety.
“Kareen Ale takes advantage of her position to presume on your good nature and waste your time,” Joy said.
Keel didn’t like the way Joy exaggerated the Merman ambassador’s name: “ah-lay.” True, it was a difficult name to carry through the cocktail parties of the diplomatic corps, but the woman had Keel’s complete respect on the debating floor.
He was suddenly aware that Joy was leaving. “Joy!” he called. “Allow me to cook for you in quarters tonight.”
Her back straightened in the doorway and when she turned to face him she smiled. “I’d like that very much. What time?”
“Nineteen hundred?”
She nodded once, firmly, and left. It was just the economy of movement and grace that endeared her to him. She was less than half his age, but she carried a wisdom about her that age ignored. He tried to remember how long it had been since he’d taken a full-time lover.
Twelve years? No, thirteen.
Joy made the wait that much more right in his mind. Her body was supple and completely hairless—something that excited him in ways he’d thought he’d forgotten.
He sighed, and tried to get his mind set for the coming meeting with the Committee.
Old farts, he thought. One corner of his mouth twisted up in spite of himself. But they’re pretty interesting old farts.
The five Committee members were among the most powerful people on Vashon. Only one person rivaled Keel, with his position as Chief Justice—Simone Rocksack, the Chaplain/Psychiatrist, who commanded great popular support and provided a check on the power of the Committee. Simone could move things by inference and innuendo; Keel could order them done and they were done.
Keel realized, with some curiosity, that as well as he knew the Committee members, he always had trouble remembering their faces. Well … faces were not all that important. It was what lay behind the face that mattered. He touched a finger to his nose, to his distended forehead, and as though it were a magic gesture his hand called up a clear image of those other faces, those four old justices.
There was Alon, the youngest of them at sixty-seven. Alon Matts, Vashon’s leading bioengineer for nearly thirty years.
Theodore Carp was the cynic of the group and, so Keel thought, aptly named. Others referred to Carp as “Fish Man,” a product of both his appearance and his bearing. Carp looked fishlike. A sickly-pale, nearly translucent skin covered the long narrow face and blunt-fingered hands. The cuffs of his robe came nearly to the tips of his fingers and his hands appeared quite finlike at first glance. His lips were full and wide, and they never smiled. He had never been considered seriously for Chief Justice.
Not a political enough animal, Keel thought. No matter how bad things get, you’ve got to smile sometime. He shook his head and chuckled to himself. Maybe that should be one of the Committee’s criteria for passing questionable subjects—the ability to smile, to laugh …
“Ward,” a voice called, “I swear you’ll daydream your life away.”
He turned and saw the other two justices walking the hallway behind him. Had he passed them in the hatchway and not noticed? Possibly.
“Carolyn,” he said, and nodded, “and Gwynn. Yes, with luck I’ll daydream my life away. Are you refreshed after this morning’s session?”
Carolyn Bluelove turned her eyeless face up to his and sighed. “A difficult morning,” she said. “Clear-cut, of course, but difficult …”
“I don’t see why you go through a hearing, Ward,” Gwynn Erdsteppe said. “You just make yourself uncomfortable, it makes us all uncomfortable. We shouldn’t have to whip ourselves over something like that. Can’t we channel the drama outside the chambers?”
“
They have their right to be heard, and the right to hear something as irreversible as our decision from those who make it,” he said. “Otherwise, what might we become? The power over life and death is an awesome one, and it should have all the checks against it that we can muster. That’s one decision that should never be easy.”
“So what are we?” Gwynn persisted.
“Gods,” Carolyn snapped. She put her hand on Keel’s arm and said, “Walk these two dottering old gods to chambers, will you, Mr. Justice?”
“Delighted,” he said. They scuff-scuffed down the hallway, their bare feet hardly more than sighs on the soft deck.
Ahead of them, a team of slurry workers painted nutrient on the walls. This team used broad brushes and laid on vivid strokes of deep blue, yellow and
green. In a week all the color would be absorbed and the walls returned to their hungry, gray-brown hue.
Gwynn positioned herself behind Keel and Carolyn. Her lumbering pace hurried them on. Keel was distracted from Carolyn’s small talk by the constant lurch of Gwynn’s hulk behind them.
“Do either of my fellow justices know why we’re meeting just now?” he asked. “It must be something disturbing because Joy didn’t reveal it when she told me about the appointment.”
“That Merman this morning, he’s appealed to the Chaplain/Psychiatrist,” Gwynn snorted. “Why won’t they leave it be?”
“Curious,” Carolyn said.
It struck Keel as very curious. He had sat the bench for a full five years before a case had been appealed to the Chaplain/Psychiatrist. But this year …
“The C/P’s just a figurehead,” Gwynn said. “Why do they waste their time and ours on—”
“And hers,” Carolyn interrupted. “It’s a lot of work, being the emissary to the gods.”
Keel shuffled quietly between them while they reopened the ages-old debate. He tuned it out, as he’d learned to do years ago. People filled his life too much to leave any time for gods. Especially now—this day when the life burning inside him had become doubly precious.
Eight cases appealed by the C/P in this season alone, he thought. And all eight involved Mermen.