Passion Play

  So you feel that moral and ethical questions are complex, many-valued and ambiguous. Sometimes it seems like there are no simple answers, doesn’t it?

  > There’s you…

  Thank you for your vote of confidence. (I was never sure if FRIEND was incapable of recognizing sarcasm, or simply chose to ignore it. Programmers are clever bastards.) However, for moral and ethical guidance, I suggest you contemplate your relationship with Jesus Christ. Perhaps it would be helpful if you talked to your minister about these questions.

  > Couldn’t you just put me through to God directly? You know, GO TO —> HEAVENLY FATHER.

  It really bothers me when you take His name in vain, Diane.

  > Is there any other way to do it?…There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as in religion, my FRIEND.

  sig. DF/522334597/08:14:24

  By the time I got off the computer, I had only minutes to grab a snack and feed the cat. I made White’s hearing, but the lack of sleep was beginning to tell on me.

  Zeno Serenson, the prosecutor, cracked a grin from underneath his vast, thick-lensed glasses as I slumped into my seat. “God bless. You look like a juvenile offender picked up after an all-night party. Trying to maintain the hunter image, Fletcher? I didn’t think that was your style.”

  “We’re all killers, Zeno, and don’t you forget it.” I scowled up at him. “Remember, I know where your optician lives. Don’t give me a hard time.”

  He snapped open his lap-top with a set of professional clicks. “Hey—we got the Red Prez in to take care of punks like you.”

  “I have a special dispensation—a Papal Bullshit.” I closed my eyes again, too tired to stop smiling. The grin crinkled up my cheeks.

  “Shades of idolatrous Catholicism! I thought we abolished you guys.” Zeno popped a microdisk into his portable and called White’s display onto the small screen. “Seriously Fletcher, you look beat.”

  “It’s just a rhythm. In half an hour I’ll be good as new.” I would be out of here and able to follow up some leads, for one thing. Before I could really start investigating I needed information that had seemed trivial yesterday. My mind was ready to work, but I didn’t have any solid food for thought. It was like trying to run a marathon on Tamex chips.

  “What’s this guy like?” said Zeno as he read down the file. “Looks like a pillar of the community. Salt of the earth.” He nudged me with a flabby elbow. “Pillar, salt—get it?” I winced and he wheezed happily before going back to the file. “It’s been a weird day already. Hear about the ban on voice-synth?” I nodded. “Well it wasn’t just because it offended the President’s morals. They got some hot connectionist software out that interfaces with the Smithson synthesizer. Record fifteen or twenty minutes of someone on digital tape and run it, and hey presto, instant sim. Trouble is, it’s good enough to get through voice-operated security checks.” He clucked, impressed. “Clever bastards. I was arraigning one just before I came here…So, what is this guy, a psycho?”

  “I don’t know. Thinks he’s God’s instrument. He found out that the wife of a friend of his was fooling around. He whipped up a few local Reds and they beat her to death with bricks. Crazy? Sure he’s crazy. And we’re going to snap his spinal cord for it. Does that make moral sense?” I slumped further into my seat, ignoring Zeno’s unhappy expression. “Delete that: you’re a lawyer. You aren’t paid to think about morality.”

  His careful lawyer’s eyes grew more careful behind their wall of glass. “Fletcher, the Law is a long sight closer to morality than it used to be. Sure, there are some discrepancies, but not serious ones. That’s what the Red Bench has been working on for twenty years. Look—the guy is a definite threat to society.”

  How would White behave when they brought him in? Ranting? Or calm with the certainty of justice? I hoped he would be ranting; calmness would make his lunacy seem more reasonable. I nodded tiredly. “Yeah, I know. I wouldn’t have scored the make otherwise. You know me.”

  Zeno smiled again. He was forty-four and smiling was his only form of exercise, so he did it often. “Yeah. I know. Straight-arrow Fletcher.” He sniggered, not unpleasantly.

  “That was funnier the first three hundred times, I think.”

  “But what delivery!” He chortled and dug out the necessary documents while the bailiff led White into the room.

  I’ve been in these little trial rooms so often I don’t think about them any more, but it was obvious that this was the deacon’s first time. He was apprehensive, but you wouldn’t say scared; his eyes were curious as he scanned the little cubicle. Just room enough to fit the defendant, the judge, the bailiff, counsel, and fifteen or twenty well-wishers. None of those last had come today. A couple of bored staffers from American Investigations and a camera from NBC waited to see if White would go crazy and start foaming at the mouth.

  They were wasting their time. He sat stiff-backed in his little booth, looking at me. I tried to duck his eye, but he took my gaze and held it. I had a tired impulse to cry.

  Rutger White was forgiving me. Maybe he was even feeling sorry for me. For all of us, joined by our best intentions in the demolition of a good man. I reminded myself of the snap of his switchblade spring, and grew calmer. I had enough delusions of my own; I didn’t need to borrow from a vigilante. I took the sheets Zeno passed to me and began filling in the blank lines.

  The side door opened and the last actor in our little play entered, swathed in his black robes. Judge Walters had a much higher opinion of lady hunters than Rolly had; he was old enough that his mind had been well-formed in the Bad Old Days before the first Red Presidency. I liked him, and his eyes seemed to light with a geriatric gleam when he saw me. “Hello hello! Like the pony tail, Diane. Very fetching.” Judge Walters got away with saying this sort of thing because he was old, so he told me. “Signed all the papers?”

  “Yes your honour.”

  Walters was thin and elderly. Like Sherlock’s nemesis Moriarty he had a habit of weaving his narrow head in a curiously reptilian fashion; it gave him the look of an ancient tortoise scouting for his next piece of lettuce. He made his way up to the podium with a slowness that substituted for grandeur, and then turned to address us. “So?”

  “State versus Rutger White, your honour,” the bailiff droned.

  “Fine, fine. Mr. Prosecutor, what is the charge?”

  Zeno popped up. “One count incitement to violence, one count premeditated murder, and one count attempted murder.”

  “Defence counsel pleads?”

  “Innocent in the eyes of God,” White declared.

  The judge stared at him with annoyance. The bailiff readied himself to be threatening, pulling his shoulders back and scowling into the box. Rutger White, however, had no intention of causing a scene. He had one point to make, and having made it, he remained politely silent.

  His counsel, a perplexed looking young man wearing an immaculate suit of HomeSpun Superior, coughed hesitantly. “Ehm, we plead guilty, your honour.”

  The defence lawyer shrugged and glanced over at White as Judge Walters blinked. “Is the defendant aware that a confession and an uncontested plea will leave the bench with no alternative but the death penalty, counsel?”

  “I understand,” White said. Hard and smooth as a white wax candle, sending off thin prayers like smoke drifting up to God.

  Slowly Judge Walters nodded. “Very well. It is not the business of this court to delay the process of justice.” Or to spend tax-payers’ money housing condemned men. “I suggest, Mr. White, that you commend your soul to God; before the week is out, you will hang.”

  Patience Hardy, Tommy Scott, Red Wilson, Rutger White.

  Thou shalt not kill.

  Angela Johnson had only lived to be twenty-three. She had been married a third part of her life. I watched White leave the room, and I felt little for him but pity. And maybe disgust. And finally anger.

  Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.

  With his
Moriarty mannerisms, Judge Walters had put me in mind of Sherlock Holmes. As I stood waiting for Rolly to answer his phone I found myself thinking once again how misleading Holmes was on the science of deduction. He made his chains of inference from one link to the next, in swift, sure lines.

  But life doesn’t have any lines; lines are ideas, pure things, single actions. Life is composed of endless interactions. Life is shapes. To know that Watson had chosen not to invest in South African gold mines you didn’t have to know just that he had mud on his boots and chalk on his fingers. Sherlock had to know Watson, in his totality, and understand a myriad of things about him and his world, in order to make the famous inference. In this Mask case I had the chalk and the mud, but not the person behind the traces. A chalk outline around the body.

  In a spasm of courtesy I opted against the Facesaver when I rang Central, so Rolly and I had the dubious pleasure of gazing at one another early on a harried morning. I wondered nastily what Mrs. French was good for: if Rolly insisted on having a stay-at-home spouse, she could at least see to rectifying his hideous taste in ties. This one was a fat maroon job with appalling lime stripes. “French here. God bless.”

  “Rolly! Look, I need some forensics from the Mask case.” I needed more data. It takes a lot of points to make a good guess about a hidden shape.

  “Oh?” Rolly sounded disappointed. Small wonder; if I was interested in the case on the second day, then there was bound to be something bothering me. “Why?”

  “Trade you. You tell me if the suit was tampered with, and I’ll give you something to think about.”

  “All right,” Rolly said unhappily. “The final word is No. The wiring hadn’t been messed with, by Mask or anybody else. I suppose we had better get some samples from the gang and run the sequencer against that scrape of skin. We’re still looking for the cause of death.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “The cause of death is murder.” Rolly sighed as if this was a headache he didn’t need. I knew the feeling. “Remember the dead man’s face?”

  “Yeah?”

  “That was the look of a man who knew it was coming.”

  “In the Lord’s name, Fletcher, don’t be such a woman. You can’t base an allegation of murder because someone looks scared. The man was electrocuted! Maybe the convulsions gave him that expression.”

  “Maybe, but I don’t think so. Listen, I know the expression is no good as evidence.—Although my woman’s intuition tells me that should be enough,” I added evilly, brushing back my bangs in my most feminine way. “But your convulsion theory is slim. The charge wasn’t going to Mask’s face; he didn’t have the helmet on when he died.”

  “Still weak.”

  “Is it?”

  Standing, Mask faces his assassin. Suddenly fear clutches at his guts and he claws at the snaps, rips back the mocking crimson features of Mephistophilis, revealing the horrified face beneath. “We know that he took fifteen minutes to suit up. And then he took fifteen minutes after that to meditate on his character. Yet the gopher came to give him his call to go onstage only five minutes after the sound of the discharge.”

  Rolly took a minute to work through the implications. “So, what you’re saying is—”

  Ah, the joy of something making sense, the beautiful moment when the first two pieces of the puzzle come together. I nodded at Rolly, suddenly thoughtful at the other end of the line. “Right. Mask knew he was about to die. He wasn’t putting the suit on when he was killed—he was desperately trying to take it off.”

  From Job Talks to the Critics, a communication by Jonathan Mask.

  Othello (John Ransome), leans over the sleeping form of his wife Desdemona (Celia Wu). He kisses her.

  OTHELLO

  Ah, balmy breath, that dost almost persuade

  Justice to break her sword! One more, one more.

  He kisses her again. Both hands gently stroke her cheek, and then come to rest around her throat. His fingers tense.

  Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee,

  And love thee after.

  While the scene goes on, the dialogue fades out, to be replaced by Jonathan Mask, VOICE OVER

  Othello is torn between two passions: the abstract ideal of justice (and hell and sin and heaven and death) and his real and physical love for Desdemona. He seeks revenge, believing that killing Desdemona would be just, and would keep her from harming others. The idealist position wins out, with the tragic consequences with which we are all familiar.

  Othello smothers Desdemona as the cool voice speaks on.

  The argument I have been sketching through these examples is a simple one. The values of comedy are principally social values. Contentment is superior to virtue, and genial amorality is preferable to astringent piety. Comedy is a humanist form—we may laugh at a wronged man who deserves to be cuckolded.

  Tragedy, on the contrary, has principally abstract or ideal values. Tragedies are tragic because the higher principles of Justice or Right cannot allow for human weaknesses. Characters are trapped by the opposition of irreconcilable ideals and implacable situations.

  Occasionally, an attempt is made to escape from tragedy; the best example is King Lear, who adopts humanistic values on the heath (What? Die? Die for adultery? No…What is man but a poor bare forked animal…)—but the events he set in motion within the tragic and absolutist framework of his kingdom have taken over, and he cannot resist them. The tragic pattern overwhelms the man.

  Tragedy is the greater art, because it forces us to acknowledge our failings and struggle to overcome them—not be complacent about them, as comedy counsels.

  This is why tragedy has experienced such a resurgence with the arrival of the Redemption Era. It is an age of hard choices, a time when the leaders of society have pulled us back from the brink of catastrophe. We have been made to see our own failings, and to place our faith in the Absolute.

  The horrified Othello, seeing at last, too late, how Iago’s manipulation has led him to commit the ultimate sin, snatches a dagger from one of his guards and stabs himself through the heart.

  Tragedy is the form of our age because in the stern and ineluctable lineaments of the tragic movement, we can discern, albeit from across a great distance and through a darkened glass, the transcendent majesty that is the face of God.

  And the evening and the morning

  were the third day.

  Five

  “Are you crazy?” Rolly said, glowering at me across a table at the Central cafeteria. “The NT people are trying to keep it quiet, but scheduling these interviews…” He crimped his spoon at right angles, straightened it out in his tea-cup. “We said we’d be out of there for good yesterday, Fletcher.”

  “That was when it was an accident, Rolly. Now it’s a murder.”

  “Yeah.” He looked up at me suspiciously. He owned a dog, a hairy one to judge from the fuzz on his slacks. He was wearing a café au lait suit and matching tie. People with jowls should never wear ties. “Listen, Fletcher. It’s no secret you don’t like the Administration, but you better not be dragging this out just to embarrass the President.”

  “I can’t believe you’re giving me this crap,” I said, surprised.

  “Yeah well it’s fine for you, Fletcher, working on your own, but I have superiors who are coming down on me like the walls of Jericho, credit? They want this over. Now.”

  “It’s a murder, Rolly. I can’t just close it up.”

  “It had better be murder, Fletcher. If you’re just stringing it out hoping something juicy turns up so you can make a car payment or something, Central’s going to throw me out the window and I promise you I’ll land right on your head.”

  “See this?” Rolly flinched as I took the taser out of my pocket and slapped it on the table. “Net weight 23 ounces: 5 more than the Toshiba and 6.5 more than the Brazilian Algo model. Delivers a range of current narrower than either of those, and the charge setting fucks up if you aren’t careful. Total cost wholesale, about
$240—$20 more than the Toshiba even after the Jap Tax, and $55 more than the Algo. But at least it’s Made in America with Pride!” I said bitterly. “If you’re worried about money, fine, that’s your job. But you get paid by the hour, Rolly, I don’t. You know that. If I wanted cash I’d take something I could finish in a day, a bail skip or something.”

  “Yeah,” he sighed. His eyes narrowed. “Of course, with someone like Mask, the media would pay through the nose for any dirt you dug up.”

  “Fuck you, French!”

  French controlled himself, but the thought was on his face like a big ugly tattoo: ‘Be calm and take it. Wish I didn’t have to work with her. Should have gotten some forgiving husband and settled down…’ “Sorry Fletcher. I didn’t mean any offense.”

  “Well then I guess you screwed up.”

  “Drop it, or I drop you!”

  He meant it, and I couldn’t afford not to have police support. The silence that followed was tense. At last I tried a little smile on French. “Rolly, believe me, reporters are your best friends. The longer I’m on the case, the longer I have to deal with those vermin.”

  Rolly sighed. “Which reminds me. I’ve been getting complaints all day that you haven’t been returning messages on the Net. Can’t you be a little civil, at least to the NT guys? Every time you put one of them off, it ends up on my terminal.”

  “Sorry. I just haven’t signed on the last few days,” I lied. Squirming, smiling, trying to make friends again. What gave me the right to bitch at him? I felt embarrassed for yelling at—say it—at a man. God I hate that. I hate that doubt. But the damn Red Father-culture was in me too. In my line of work you have to be hard, but I had never developed all the callouses you need. Never been able to swear a man down without a flicker of doubt. Never able to master what White had, that supreme self-confidence.