Brenda Cooper: The Single Larry Ti, or Fear of Black Holes and Ken

Salt-sweat dotted my forehead by the time I neared the last demonstrator in line, an old Asian woman with a hand-painted sign that looked too heavy for her. Indeed, her arms shook. The sign said NO SINGLE LARRY TI.

The benefits of globalization: bastardized spelling. I pictured a single white guy named Larry in a ragged t-shirt. I wanted to laugh—needed to laugh—but the look on her face stopped me. Fear was fear, and her thin pale lips and wide dark eyes with fist-sized circles under them screamed quietly. She even smelled like fear: adrenaline-sour sweat mixed with something antiseptic. I smiled at her, my hand brushing her shoulder as I whispered, “It will be all right. We won’t eat the Moon.”

Her spittle on my hand was warm, and I wiped it quickly on the back of her dirty gray blouse, a reflex. Cameras snapped, catching the back of my hand sliding against her rough shirt. A deep breath enabled me to quell the urge to run from the reporters. I fixed my eyes on the courthouse in front of me, a rounded faux-brick building with open windows that spiraled up its smooth outer surface.

If I looked up at the building I didn’t have to meet any reporter’s eyes. Ten steps.

I ignored the reporter’s buzzing lips, their questions nonsense garbled on nonsense. A deep male voice screamed above the crowd. “Save us, Mary! Recant!”

Twenty steps and then five more. I passed through the line of rainbow-clad UN policemen into near silence. No voices, just the buzz of swarm cams for a few more steps before they, too, gave up.

Inside, I stopped in the women’s room and slathered disinfectant crystal on my hands, rubbing the grit into my palms over a low metal sink. Hopefully the spit didn’t have any nasty bugs. I splashed tepid water on my face, over and over, sputtering, and then blotted my face with a terry towel.

For the last hour, I’d been worried about getting in at all, but now I was here, and there was no way left to avoid the media circus courtroom. Or to avoid Ken. Or to avoid the death of my professional life. The world was on a deep bender of craziness.

I needed to make the case for science. The already lost case. Me, fifty-something and looking it. Even dressed up in my best gray synth suit, I felt invisible next to the lawyers I’d be dealing with soon. Yes, our side had a lawyer or two or three of our own. Volunteers. The career public defenders of science spitting into the legal wind against a world court where four out of seven members didn’t believe in evolution.

I snorted, wondering how they would spell singularity, or even black hole. Not that they needed to. The trial was over already: the media had hung us up on everything from technical details in the original procurement to papers that had come out in Nature in the 2050s.

Dammit. It was doing myself in again. I whispered to the white tile walls. “Don’t underestimate yourself.” On that cheerful thought, I liberated myself from the bathroom and headed down the hall.

The round courtroom (routing evil from all corners) smelled like plastic and money. There were more press and cameras than real people. The prosecution side of the aisle was a blur of suits and ties and high heels, all the best fabrics, shiny in the fluorescent lighting. Our side… well, my best suit looked all right, but not brand new. Same for our lawyers and the presidents of Stanford and MIT. The scientists on our side looked poor and scruffy. The contrast pissed me off. Not the people, the idea that physics had no money in it, no glory. The days when Brian Greene or Stephen Hawking could fill a major auditorium at a hundred dollars a seat were long behind us. Unlike pharma and genetics and the other sexy sciences, physicists begged for money and dreams.

And now one of their dreams was about to go away, making the last five years of my life a great big zero. Scientists get zero a lot, mind you. But this was just flat-out stupid. I walked down white marble steps, my heels clacking in the near silence. Swarm cams hovered the requisite three feet away from me, humming like summer mosquitoes. Why did they care how I walked down the steps?

Probably hoping I’d hook a heel and fall.

I wanted to be back on the Moon. Now that was a round I believed in.

Jeff Rice from Harvard gave me a thumbs up, looking sheepish and hopeful all at once. He’d had his turn yesterday. Even though I’d heard excellent virtual lectures from him, in this setting, standing in front of people who could kill his career, he’d stuttered. Farther down, Salli Indi bit her lip and watched me silently. She hadn’t helped either; the prosecution had used her three marriages against her in a court of science law.

Maybe if I made myself mad enough I’d talk with enough force to be heard.

On the other side of the aisle, standing with the afraid, my ex-husband, Ken. His cowlick was acting up again this morning, the only imperfect thing framing his perfect face. He kept his face turned toward the bench, but I knew he knew I was looking at him. I made myself turn away from his stiff profile.

I snuck into my place beside our best lawyer, an older man named Jerry King. He leaned over close to me, his breath smelling like stale coffee. “Glad you made it.”

I stepped a little away from him, needing air. “Me too. It’s a gauntlet out there.”

He nodded his head sagely. “Most of them are getting paid, you know. By the Preservers.”

Maybe. But not the woman who’d spit on me. “I think they’ve been scared enough to demonstrate without money. The politics of fear and all that.”

Before Jerry could answer me, the bailiff called out. “All rise.”

We rose.

Seven judges filed in. Three men and four women. The women were two Americans and an Italian; the men were a Russian, a Venezuelan, an Aussie, and a Moonite. They wore rainbow robes. One of the Americans, Julie Ray, was chief justice this year. It wasn’t earned, it just passed from justice to justice, and Justice Ray’s experience was marketing. Marketing law.

The justices sat, folding their hands in their lap, looking important.

Screens around the room sprang to life. Behind the judges, looking right at us, smiling as soon as they saw they were live, the assembled UN support team. Africans, East Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese, and two monks from restored Tibet. People who shouldn’t hate science. Behind me, even though I didn’t—wouldn’t—turn to look, the pay-per-view cams from all the major networks stared down at the back of my neck, and behind the cameras, the eyes of many thousands of scared people.

The bailiff called out, “Please be seated. The Court of All the Worlds is now in session.”

Justice Ray turned to Jerry. “You have one more witness to call.”

Jerry stood. “The defense calls Dr. Mary Johnson.”

The windy breath of tiny cameras followed me as close to the witness box as the law allowed, then hovered ten feet from me. I looked at the black hooded eyes of big cameras and wondered if getting sick to my stomach was an option. After the bailiff swore me in, Jerry came up and stood on the far side of me, so the judges would all have a clear view of my face.

No jury of my peers at this level. Just the damned media.

I looked above my head at the multicolored flags of nations hanging from the ceiling, and looked back at the UN support team. The flags should be a promise to promote diversity; they seemed to beg for unity.

We started out with my credentials (undergrad at Stanford, Masters and PhD from MIT), my experience with the project (doctorate based on Large Hadron Collider experiments, managing scientist for the Moon Ring for the last five years, associated with the project from the first grant in ’52), and my reputation (stellar—except for one failed marriage). I didn’t look at Ken when Jerry brought that out. Surely he knew we’d have to bring it up after what his side had done to poor Salli.