Christopher Nuttall - A Learning Experience

“Justice has been served,” Steve said, after a moment’s thought. “The guilty man has been offered a choice between punishment or permanent exile from the moon.”

“Which is likely to be exile from his wife and daughter too,” Dawlish said. “Or will they be exiled too?”

“No,” Steve said. “They are not to blame for Witherspoon’s actions, so they will not be held to account for them. Should they wish to go with him, if he leaves, we will honour their request. If not, they will always have a place here.”

Another blogger stepped forward. “Don’t you feel it was handled a little too fast?”

That , Steve had to admit, was an awkward question. “I think we had all the facts established,” he said. “If there had been a requirement for more investigations, we would have delayed the trial until they were carried out. If necessary, we would have used lie detectors to ensure that everyone involved was telling the truth.”

“But the prosecutor was also the policewoman,” another blogger asked. “Does that not create a conflict of interest?”

“She wasn’t the one who passed sentence,” Steve said, with a shrug. The blogger had a point, but they didn’t have a legal staff yet. One would be needed, sooner rather than later. The next trial might be far less open and shut. “And now, if you will excuse me…”

He followed Rochester back to his office and sighed. “That could have gone better.”

“It went about as well as could be expected,” Rochester said. “Drink?”

Steve let him pour two cups of coffee, then took one gratefully. “Are there any other problems I ought to know about?”

“There’s one that may turn into a problem,” Rochester said, carefully. “You know we have a number of homosexual men on the moon?”

“I know,” Steve said. “So?”

“Two of them want to marry,” Rochester said. “Should we allow it?”

“What we want doesn’t actually matter,” Steve said. “Let them call themselves husband and husband if they want. If they want to register a partnership, let them do that too. It’s not as if we give any incentives to married couples.”

Or disincentives , he thought, in the privacy of his own mind. One of the reasons he had never actually married Mariko was out of fear of what would happen if the marriage failed. Judges granted women all the rights in America these days, while leaving the man permanently tied to her. He’d known two retired Marines who had been unable to remarry or even have more children because their income was being garnished to keep the wife in house and home, while they could only see their children from time to time. He had just never felt like taking the risk.

He shook his head. “It doesn’t cause any harm to the rest of us if they get married, does it?”

“Not really,” Rochester said. “Their teams will have to be resorted — I try to keep brothers apart, just to keep emotion out of the picture. But that isn’t a problem now we have plenty of people on the surface teams.”

“Then let us not stand in their way,” Steve said. He couldn’t understand homosexuality, but he imagined they had the same problem with heterosexuals. Besides, everyone deserved a chance to seek happiness wherever they found it. “Any other problems?”

“The teachers want the kids to have more afterschool activities,” Rochester said. “They think the kids spend too long in VR worlds, so I’m planning to expand the sporting complex for them. But not all of the kids are interested in remaining in school. Some of the teenagers have even been caught roaming the upper levels.”

Steve sighed. “Give them another lecture,” he said.

“I have,” Rochester said. “I’ve even threatened to have the next teenager caught up there publically paddled. It doesn’t seem to have done any good.”

“Of course not,” Steve agreed. “I was an idiot when I was a teenager too.”

He shrugged, expressively. “We’ll just have to keep playing with the problem,” he said. “And as we expand, the problem will solve itself.”

Rochester smiled. “And someone wants to set up a brothel,” he added. “She even has girls lined up and everything.”

“Best not to talk about it,” Steve said. “Mariko would kill me.”

Ying System

It was a curious fact — Cn!lss attributed it to the stubbornness of the average Hordesman — that stunners didn’t have quite the same effect on them as they did on most other races. They were immobilised, sure, but they could still hear and feel what was going on around them, even though they were helpless. He could hear the Hordesmen chattering as they picked up their victims and carried them off, then picked up Cn!lss himself.

An odd sense of fatalism fell over him as he was carried away. Maybe he hadn’t been captured — recaptured — by his own Horde, but he had no reason to expect anything other than an inglorious death. Hordesmen who were captured were expected to kill themselves — and Hordesmen who didn’t kill themselves were generally killed anyway by their captors. No one would seriously believe a Hordesman to know anything worth sparing their lives.

He listened, carefully, as they were carried through the city. He knew better than to expect rescue; part of the reason he’d recommended Ying in the first place was because it was almost completely lawless. No one would object to the humans scanning the libraries for information, but no one would move to protect them too. They were captives now… where were they going? And why had they been targeted?

Cn!lss found it hard to believe, as he heard the sound of a door opening ahead of them, that the Hordesmen had been watching for humans in particular. Had they been watching for the missing starships? But they weren’t a part of Cn!lss’s Horde… he pushed the thought aside and waited, feeling a brief spurt of pain as he was dropped on a stone floor. Moments later, his entire body jerked as someone zapped him with an shocker. His eyes snapped open, revealing five armed Hordesmen and a single small blue alien.

There was a groan from beside him. Cn!lss turned to see the human — Kevin , he reminded himself — sitting upright, clutching his head. The small alien snapped his fingers and another alien appeared from the shadows, carrying a bottle of water. A servitor, Cn!lss realised, someone from yet another race that had no hope of standing on its own two feet. He would be a servant all his life, just as the Horde were nothing more than brutish mercenaries, slaves to the races that could and did build their own technology. Would the humans, too, end up like that?

“I believe we should talk,” the small blue alien said, addressing Kevin. “We may have made something of an error.”

Kevin had been concussed once before, during a mission in Afghanistan that had very nearly been the end of him. It wasn’t an experience he’d enjoyed. Now, he had to fight hard to keep from throwing up as the tall green alien offered him water to drink. The alien was oddly cute, pretty much a green-skinned alien space babe. But the genitals, if they were genitals, were completely different from anything human. Staggering slightly, he managed to pull himself to his feet and stared at the smaller alien confronting him.

He couldn’t help thinking of a mutated Smurf. The alien was short, barely taller than Yoda, with bright blue skin, no hair and eyes that were as dark as the inky blackness of space. He — Kevin assumed it was a he — wore a loincloth and nothing else, revealing a bare and utterly hairless blue chest. He couldn’t help thinking of the alien as a child, yet there was no doubt that he was the one in command. The Hordesmen clearly deferred to his authority.