Larry Niven - The Barsoom Project

Max was thunderstruck. Bowles projected more power, more sheer emotional force than the screen had ever conveyed. To be this close to a master actor at the height of his craft was awe-inspiring.

“Murder,” the white/Europe judge suggested.

“I think not,” Bowles replied. “We punish our murderers. They often repent. The Gods have always granted the right of repentance, and loved a people who police their own. The Gods made man, flaws and all. They have also made it possible for men to repent.”

“Abortion.”

Bowles thought. “Your concept of abortion-”

“-includes yours,” the Eskimo finished.

Trianna Stith-Wood was on her feet. Bowles noticed and deferred to her in body language. She didn’t notice at all; she was already talking.

“In times of hardship, Eskimo babies were sometimes left in the snow, given back to the elements. There are places where a baby doesn’t even get a name until it can name itself! I don’t say that’s a good idea. We don’t like it-we never have. The fact that some people have abortions just because they’re”-she paused for a moment, and her voice went a little tight-”too lazy to get implants is, is bad. We don’t like it any better than you do. But you can’t make abortions illegal-you’d just drive poor women to back-alley clinics, while their rich cousins go to nice clean family doctors. That’s murder too. At least the children who are born are really wanted. Don’t condemn us because the Gods gave us love, and reproduction, but limited the available food and space.”

When she finished her outburst and sat down, she was crying. Hippogryph seemed embarrassed, but Charlene reached forward and held her shoulder.

Welles paused. What had brought that on?

A few taps of the finger, and Trianna Stith-Wood’s personal file was on the screen. He could only devote a tiny fraction of his attention to it. His quick scan found no reference to abortion, or trauma, or specific incidents which might have triggered it. Not surprising-the dossiers were voluntary, and easy enough to leave discreetly incomplete.

Ah, well, he thought. Not his concern. He might mention it to Vail.

The judges began to confer. They were yards apart, but they buzzed at each other in a torrent of tiny incomprehensible voices. It was all buzzing now, rising in vehemence and falling back, while the judges blurred with internal motion.

The water seemed a little thicker. A few more fish wafted by.

The judged turned back. “We have come to a decision. We believe that it is possible to select a single sin, one unrepented in your culture. We are willing to condenm you for this one sin.”

The Eskimo leaned forward, and gave a conspiratorial wink, a thin translucent eyelid covering a tiny screaming head. “I believe that this is called ‘plea bargaining’ among your people.”

Robin Bowles nodded.

“We choose your meat-packing industry.”

Orson blinked in confusion. “Excuse me?”

“Every year, billions of animals are raised in captivity in disgraceful, barbaric circumstances, and then shunted down assembly lines-”

The air above the sins wavered, and they were in a meat-packing plant, and the smell of blood and animal fear was in the air. An endless line of steers streamed toward an iron-walled factory building.

A fluid camera movement took them into the slaughterhouse itself.

A castrated bull waited, its head in the killing-slot, a milky foam bubbling from its mouth. A robot arm pivoted, braced an automatic gun against the head of the hapless bovine. There came a brief, explosive hiss, and the cracking sound of a shot. The steer collapsed.

“This is the way that your people slaughter cows-and chickens-”

There was an immediate, accompanying image of an endless conveyer belt of chickens, each hapless fowl in its own metal collar, heading toward the decapitation machine. A nauseating, blood-spurting close-up. The chicken’s legs twitched spastically as the conveyer belt rolled on and another bird took its place.

It was a Treblinka, an Auschwitz, an infinite chorus line locked in a mechanized dance of death.

There were images of seafaring boats catching countless millions of tuna, and then those fish dumped through automatic sizing and gutting machines. The sequence culminated in a mountain of fishy refuse, guts and heads stinking in the sun. They could see it, and smell it. To Max’s right, Trianna Stith-Wood was turning green.

“To us, this is the ultimate sin. To us and to Sedna, this is abortion, and on a scale almost beyond imagination. Compare this practice with the old ways, the traditional ways,” the judges said. Suddenly there was a crisp, calm Alaskan vista. Men tracked caribou across the tundra; furred hunters crouched beside ice holes for the momentary appearance of a walrus, and then the sudden thrust of a spear-

Max could feel the howl of the wind, the adrenaline burn as the Inuit hunted in the manner of his ancestors. Something told him that yes, this was the way that these things were supposed to be, the way it should have been done, should always have been done…

They were pitching on a high sea, seized in the black grip of an angry ocean. A boat rode the water, a whalebone framework with a sealskin envelope, carrying four men. They were tough men, hardened to the elements, inured to suffering. They were staking their lives against an unpitying wasteland in hope of bringing home precious food.

They pitched and yawed, and then a flash! Just a momentary flash, and a seal broke the surface. The lead hunter made his cast, and A modern supermarket. Bovine, doughy shoppers pushed baskets down gleaming, Muzak-gentled aisles, choosing between packages of prewrapped, precleaned, prekilled meat.

The buzz was almost gone from the voice of their Eskimo judge. “Where is the threat here? Where is the life? You have lost all sense of the unity of man with his world, and of the price which is paid in blood and suffering by one creature to give life to another. And your sin is greater than this,” the Eskimo said, his voice rising.

He’s really getting into this, Max thought. Good! A demi-god should enjoy his work. Otherwise, what’s the point of demideity?

The supermarket fogged… and cleared to show a cartoon image. It was Ferdinand the Bull.

Oh yes, Max knew Ferdinand. Everyone in America and sixteen other countries knew Ferdinand, spokesbull for the Lazy Taco string of Mexican restaurants. Famous, infamous, having gone from mouthpiece for a fast-food emporium to a series of B-movie misadventures to an eventual holovision series. Ferdinand, the Lazy Bull who slyly coaxed cows into the clover and other bulls into the bullring or onto the dinner table, was instantly recognizable.

Ferdinand looked out at them and said: “Come on down to Lazy Taco. We serve the best Beeefs in the wooorld.” Suddenly he grinned stupidly and his eyes grew huge with mock surprise. “Oh! Beeef! Thass me, I theenk!”

Max was humiliated to remember the many times his sides had ached from Ferdinand’s routine.

It didn’t stop there. The parade of animals, real and cartoon, who had encouraged or begged customers to eat them over the years was long and disturbing. Foghorn Leghorn (“Ah say! This here is some mighty tasty chicken!”). Charlie the Tuna (“Sorry, Charlie”).

The parade was endless. Daffy Duck, Clarabelle Cow, Porky Pig, Chiquita Banana-Orson put his head down into his hands. “Oh, no. Even the plants. We’re screwwwwed.”

All were dancing and prancing, shaking their collective rear ends, happy happy happy to make that consummate sacrifice. Distracting consumers from the bloody reality of death.

Max felt shamed.

The four Judges of the Apocalypse looked out at them. The Eskimo figure said, “There can be no defense. You have dishonored the Inua of the creatures which give you life. Sin!”