Robert Heinlein - Variable Star

“Do you accept me as your Advocate, Joel?” Sol asked me.

I blinked. “Sure.”

“I understand Pat has given you your lines.”

I remembered what he must mean, and patted my pocket; the folded note was still there. “Yes.”

He nodded, and gestured to the monitor. “Stick to the script. Now pay attention to that.”

The screen showed a room larger than this one. At its far left, three people sat behind a long table on a short shallow stage. On the right three smaller tables faced the stage, with people seated at them, one at either end and two at the center table. They were the only ones I recognized: Richie and Jules. “Is this real-time?”

“Yes.”

Oh, fine: they got to tell their side first.

“Closest to us on the left,” Sol said, “is Coordinator Merril Grossman, representing the colony. Beyond her is Magistrate Eleanor Will, and after her is Lieutenant Frank Bruce, Third Officer, representing the crew. With me?”

“So far.”

“Good man. Nearest to us on the right of the screen is Prosecutor Arthur Dooley, representing the Covenant. Look him over carefully. I believe you’ve met the next two, transportees Butch and Sundance. Beyond them is their own Advocate, Counselor Randy Lahey.” He spoke over his shoulder. “Sound please, Tiger?”

The man addressed, a Japanese of great grace and dignity, lifted a remote control he hadn’t been holding a second ago, and turned up the volume on the scene we were watching.

Coordinator Grossman was speaking. “…chance to rebut or amend afterward before this recording is formally entered into evidence. Do you both understand?”

“Sure,” Richie said sullenly. “If it’s bullshit, we can tell you after, I got it. Only I’ll tell you right now, it’s bullshit.”

His partner Jules threw him a glare. “We understand, Your Honor.” I noticed that his right hand, under the table, visible to the camera but not to the panel onstage, held a half-full drink.

Dr. Will, a striking slender brunette with skeptical eyes, spoke up in the formal tones of one reciting ritual for the record. “The Sheffield ’s AI began this recording when one of you spoke one of its trigger phrases, ‘gray market.’ Under the terms of the Covenant, the recording was brought to official human attention only upon the observed commission of a breach of peace which occurs several seconds in. It is that breach with which I am primarily concerned today.”

I was delighted. If there was an audiovisual record of what had occurred, I had nothing to worry about—and Jules was going to need whatever he had in that glass he was always holding. I could remember everything that had happened, very clearly. Well, clearly. Clearly enough. The broad outlines at least.

Let’s see now. Richie and Jules had confessed that they were trying to recruit me into a conspiracy to traffic in heroin, or morphine, or possibly opium. Any of the three was an offense not merely detainable but serious enough to get one sent to Coventry… in jurisdictions where one existed. On a starship, for all I knew it was a spacing offense. Naturally I had been angry and afraid. I had asked them to leave my cubic, and had been ignored. When I tried to urge Jules toward the door with a hand on his shoulder, Richie had abruptly attacked me. Releasing a lot of my own pent-up frustration, I had admittedly overresponded a bit, knocked him all the way across the room—back onto my own bed, destroying it. Then Jules had sucker-punched me from behind, and we’d all ended up entangled on the deck, where I’d managed to keep them both restrained until the proctors arrived.

Yep—that was everything. I realized it was a bit unusual for someone of my size, mass, and background to make such easy work of huge bruisers like those two, so I was glad to know a visual record existed to back up my account.

“ Sheffield, please begin playback.”

“Yes, Magistrate,” the ship said.

I settled back to watch myself in action. …“gray-market,” Jules’s recorded voice said.

“How gray?” I heard myself ask after a pause that now seemed to me incriminatingly long.

“Just barely beige,” Richie answered. “It only gets black for a day or so right at the end. Up until then it’s mostly gray, and some green. Tell him, Jules—”

That’s odd, I thought. Poppies aren’t black at any part of their life cycle. Or gray, or beige. I’d grown them for the Lermer City Hospital, back on Ganymede. They’re extremely colorful flowers, which ultimately yield a white or pale yellow seed pod that oozes a white sap. How could a drug dealer know less about his product than I did? Or was Richie simply talking through his ass?

I glanced at Sol when Richie’s “High Japonics” line came, expecting to share at least a grin if not a chuckle. I was sure it would delight him. He didn’t crack a smile.

Solomon Short failing to find humor in a situation was so out of character, I was still puzzling over it when I suddenly realized the crux of the whole matter was approaching, and resumed paying close attention. Here came the sentence that would exculpate me. My heroic battle scene would not be far behind.

Richie’s voice blathered something about his grade ten. My own voice asked Jules, “Why don’t you tell me which flower you mean?”

Here it came—

“Happy hour,” Jules said.

My jaw fell. I was so shocked, I stopped paying attention to the events unfolding onscreen. Someone had to have altered the recording!

“Sol—” I cried.

“Shush,” he said loudly and firmly. “Reserve your questions and observations.”

“But damn it, he said—”

“Pipe down, I said!”

Damn it to hell, he’d said poppy flower , not happy hour .

Developed in one of the L-5s—all of them publicly disavowed blame and all of them privately claimed credit—Happy hour was a flower whose leaves contained a mildly entheogenic alkaloid just slightly stronger than marijuana in effect, and no more habituating. It was about the opposite end of the spectrum from opium poppies. It just barely qualified as a restricted drug on Terra, and there were jurisdictions—among them Ganymede—where its use was legal. I had no idea what the Sheffield ’s policy on it might be. There were shouts and other loud noises from onscreen, but I was oblivious, aghast at this unexpected turn of events, trying to reconcile the impossible. The only rational explanation was that someone, somewhere, somehow, had been able to corrupt the Sheffield ’s AI. If so, I was about as screwed as screwed could be. I began to panic. “Sol, you have to listen to me!”

“I know,” he agreed, eyes on the screen. “Isn’t it terrible?”

“But I—”

“Don’t call me Butt-Eye,” he said, and used the remote to raise the volume enough to drown me out.

It wasn’t easy. The fistfight playback had finished while I was distracted, and the sole audio output now was the soft voice of the magistrate. But Sol mashed down on that volume-up button, and only backed it off when I resumed paying attention to the screen.

And found Dr. Will in mid-lecture, a more-in-sorrow-than-in-contempt tone in her voice. “—even mention your ridiculous attempts to claim your names were actually Corey Trevor and Jay Rock.”

“I told you, it was a fuckin’ reflex—” Richie said off-camera.

“However,” she went on determinedly, “this court does take notice of your special request regarding language, and reluctantly agrees with your argument that for you to defend yourself adequately you must be allowed to use your own natural idiom. To require you to use my vocabulary would be a distraction roughly equivalent to you asking me to speak to you freely and eloquently… without ever using any words that contain the letter ‘t.’ I rule that you— only you—may use profanity in my court.”