Terry Pratchett - The Long War

Beside Maggie, Joe Mackenzie grunted in grudging appreciation. “Cowley may be a slimeball, but he is still the President.”

“And he’s supple, Doc,” Maggie murmured. “Here he is pleasing one constituency by appearing to take on the colonists, while appeasing the colonists by presenting our mission as a kind of embrace.”

Mac glanced up at the heavily armed twains. “Some embrace. That isn’t Santa’s sleigh up there. We’ll be lucky if we don’t provoke some kind of shooting war.”

“It won’t come to that.”

“Well, however it turns out you can’t beat being given a mission to fulfil.”

“Ain’t that the truth,” said Maggie.

Of course, once they were actually out in the Long Earth, they had encountered much wariness about their mission.

Many Long Earth pioneers, at least the first generation, had left the Datum precisely because they had been intensely suspicious of central government, deriving from a country in which from its founding that sentiment had always run deep. What could the Datum government offer a far-stepwise colony now? It could threaten to tax, but provided damn few services—and over the years had withdrawn what little it had once offered. Protection? The major problem with that argument was that there was no detectable adversary, no bad guys to spy on or shadow, no bogeymen to point to as hostiles. China was still reeling from its own post-Step Day revolution. The parallel Europes were filling up with peaceful farmers. A new generation of Africans were reclaiming their ravaged continent, or stepwise copies of it. And so on. There was no threat to counter.

However weak the case, Maggie Kauffman knew she was expected to diplomatically remind these estranged colonial sheep that they were part of a bigger flock, because back in DC there was a profound sense that, under the American Aegis, this newly extended country was fragmenting—and that , it was instinctively felt, couldn’t be allowed. That had been true even before the provocative “Declaration of Independence” that had come out of Valhalla.

All that was for the future. Right now Maggie found the present hard enough to manage: a horrible ethical and legal knot for her raw crew to untangle, in a ship still being shaken down, that they’d encountered just weeks after Cowley’s send-off.

The office of the mayor of Four Waters City was predictable pioneering architecture, though a veritable mansion compared with anything that Daniel Boone would have known, Maggie thought. However, he would have recognized and approved of the drying pelts, the jars of pickles in the corner, the miscellaneous shovels and other gardening implements—all the detritus of a pioneering life busily being lived. And there was a basement, which suggested that the mayor and her family were thoughtful people, and perhaps mildly paranoid (or sensibly cautious): it was impossible for an intruder to step into an underground room—

“The child,” Robinson blurted. “Let’s get to it, Captain.”

“Fine.” Maggie sat down.

“Her name is Angela Hartmann. It happened a week ago. She was found by her family, stoned out of her mind… Sorry. She wouldn’t wake up, she was in a kind of coma, took days to come out of it. We know who did it, who gave her the drugs and got high with her. And we know who committed the murder.”

What murder? “Where are these people now?”

The mayor shrugged. “It never dawned on us before to build a jail. We were building a stone ice house for the winter. We used that. It’s pretty well made. I don’t think anyone could possibly get out of it, it’s real big and heavy.”

“And this is where you put the guy who gave the kid the drugs?”

Robinson glanced at her. “I’m sorry. You’ve misunderstood, I’ve not been clear, I kind of gabble stuff out when I’m nervous. That bastard isn’t in the ice house. That bastard’s in the mortuary. Such as it is. The guy we’re keeping in the ice house—he was the father of the little girl.”

“Ah. So the father found the pusher—”

“And killed him.”

“OK.” Maggie began to see it. “Two crimes: the drugs, the murder.”

“Nobody’s denying any of this. But as a result of all this, we are—riven. About how to handle this. What to do with the father.”

Why me? Maggie thought to herself. She was supposed to be cheerfully showing the flag, and maintaining goodwill. Right now Nathan Boss, her XO, was out bartering for fresh vegetables. And now this. Well, why not me? This is what I came out here for . “I take it you haven’t tried to contact the Datum authorities.”

Robinson flushed. “To tell you the truth, we were scared. We never even told the Datum that we were here. We thought it wasn’t their business, after all.”

“And there’s no local justice system, in the stepwise neighbourhood?”

She shook her head.

Maggie sat in silence, letting the moment extend. “Very well. Here’s what you’re going to do. First of all, you are going to get your act together and make it clear to the Datum government that you are here. We’ll help you with that, and such details as ratifying property claims. Then you have a man in custody without trial, or any due process, and we need to sort that out. Look, to repeat: I’m not here with any mandate to police you. But we can help. And before all that, you’re going to let my ship’s doctor have a good look at the girl.”

A few hours later Joe Mackenzie came out of the Hartmann house. Mac was in his fifties, grizzled, beaten up by a long career in emergency and battlefield medicine. He was old for a field posting, in fact; Maggie had helped him bend the regulations to have him at her side on this mission. This bright afternoon, the doctor’s expression was as dark as twilight.

“You know, Maggie, sometimes there are no words… If I were to say that it could have been worse, you need to understand that even so I would like to spend some time alone in a room with the gentleman concerned and a baseball bat, knowing with surgical precision the right spots to hit—”

It was at times like this that Maggie was glad she’d stuck to her career, never married, never had kids of her own, left the glorious burden of caring for children to her siblings, cousins, friends; she was happy to be an aunt, honorary or otherwise. “It’s OK, Mac.”

“Well, no, it isn’t OK, not for that little girl, and may never be again. I’d prefer her to be sent to a Datum hospital for a full examination. At the least I want to take her up on to the ship for observation for a while.”

Maggie nodded. “Let’s go meet the leaders of this joint.”

They met in the mayor’s office. At Maggie’s side were Mac and Nathan Boss. Maggie had invited Robinson herself, and a few chosen citizens from the town meeting whom the mayor reckoned to be well-balanced and sensible, at least by the standards of this community, to consider the verdict.

As they sat down, everybody looked to the Captain—looked to her as a saviour, she realized. Maggie cleared her throat. Time to step up to the plate, she thought.

“For the record—and we are being recorded—this session is nothing more than a panel of inquiry. Judicial processes can follow as necessary. I have no policing role here. But I have taken it upon myself, at the request of the mayor of the town, to ascertain fairly all the facts of the matter.

“I’ll summarize what I’ve been told; the facts are apparently not being denied. A week ago Roderick Bacon plied with drugs Angela Hartmann, a girl of nine years old, the daughter of Raymond Hartmann and Daphne Hartmann. Hearing the girl cry out, her father, Ray Hartmann, rushed to her room and saw Bacon with her. The girl was vomiting, fitting. Hartmann pulled the man away, handed the girl to her mother, and then beat Bacon, dragged him out of the house, and set about him again, causing, after a minute or two, his death. The neighbours, alerted by the screams, told us that Bacon was pleading for his life, saying that ‘a lurid angel’ made him do it, made him want to give this ‘pure child’ the gift of his own ‘inner light’… You get the picture.