Unknown - The_Growing_589064

Getting the jury pool together has cost a week’s hard work and ingenuity. Maggie is right. Needs must when the devil drives. Hand it to Old Scratch, Kirsten reflects, he’s had his foot flat on the floorboard for the last several months. But the census of Rapid City, taken over two days, has yielded a heartening three thousand plus surviving adult citizens, many of them residents who have only come out of hiding since the defeat of the android force at the Cheyenne. As many more have recently moved into the more populated city, or what is left of it, from outlying ranches and hamlets.

They took the census the old fashioned way, by hand, names and addresses penciled on legal pads and index cards. On Andrews’ inspired notion, a team scoured the city’s churches for bingo machines. The three working models had been pressed into service as randomizing devices, leaving time and computer capacity free for more urgent military applications. Hurriedly repainted with ID numbers, the whirling balls tossed out a selection that is, mirabile dictu, a reasonably accurate microcosm of Rapid City. The citizens slowly jostling their way into their appointed places on the dark oak benches include Anglos in jeans and Stetsons; African Americans in business suits; Lakota and Cheyenne in ribbon shirts; men and women of every color in sweats and Sunday best and everything in between. The only striking difference between this crowd and a pre-uprising gathering is the ratio of women to men. For every man in the courtroom, for every man on the list, three women have survived.

Kirsten closes the door softly and turns back into the room. Unlike the other official spaces she has seen, the Judge Advocate’s chambers have been spared the ubiquitous grey-and-Air-Force-blue décor. The dark wood and forest green walls, the tartan carpet woven in deep reds and greens, give it an air of almost Victorian formality. The lingering smell of pipe tobacco reinforces the impression, as does the well-worn but not yet shabby assortment of leather armchairs and ottomans. The chamber reminds Kirsten of a traditional library, a University reading room. One could curl up in one of those chairs with a book or hand-held and lose oneself for hours.

The few pictures on the walls are idiosyncratic, too, not the official art of fighter planes and bombers. One shows grain fields stretching golden to the horizon, another a forest glade where a stag bends to drink, his antlers struck to gold like a crown by a shaft of sunlight. The third, a photograph, catches a pair of eagles in the midst of their courtship flight, talons locked with talons, wings spread wide against the receding sky. The image is stunning in its clarity, and paradoxically, its untrammeled sense of motion, as if the two birds might come tumbling out of the frame and into the room at the viewer’s feet.

Behind the big desk by window, Fenton Harcourt gives his newly pressed robe a twitch, and its folds fall into perfect place. He seems curiously at home in this room that seems to have slipped out of its proper time and place. As he taps the ash out of his pipe and refills its bowl from a cordovan pouch, his eyes stray again and again to the eagles, a small, secret smile curving his mouth. It suddenly occurs to Kirsten to check the photographer’s signature when she gets a chance. Or she could just ask.

“That’s one of your pictures, isn’t it, Judge? It’s beautiful.”

Harcourt glances sharply up at her over the tops of his old-fashioned half-glasses. For a moment it seems he will not answer her, but he says, “Why, yes. That’s very perceptive of you, Dr. King.”

“Our Judge Advocate was a birdwatcher—I’m sorry, a birder, too,” Maggie says quietly. “We haven’t seen or heard from her since before the uprising.”

“A shame, that. I would have enjoyed telling her about the Cassin’s Sparrow I saw two weeks ago.” Harcourt clamps the stem of the cold pipe between his teeth, picking up the gavel from the desk, together with the bulging portfolio containing the charges against the defendants. “Now,” he says abruptly, “let us see whether we have twelve persons who are at all capable of rendering a disinterested verdict in these appalling cases.”

“Everyone in that room has an interest of some sort in this case, Judge,” Kirsten observes evenly. “Bias and disinterest are not the same thing.”

Kirsten is almost sure she sees a glint of warmth, perhaps even surprise, in the Judge’s eye, but it may as easily be a reflection from the green-shaded banker’s lamp on the desk. “Indeed they are not. But I doubt you will find more than half a dozen folk out there who have not been personally and traumatically injured by the androids. This case has not even begun, but it is already rife with grounds for appeal.”

“Let’s see if we can get these men convicted first, shall we?” Maggie says dryly. “We’ll worry about appeals later, assuming anyone can find the staff to convene and appellate court.”

Kirsten knows what Harcourt will say before he opens his mouth and suppresses urge to kick Maggie’s ankle. “Colonel Allen,” he says mildly, “a court is not needed. You are aware, I am sure, of the prerogative of Presidential pardon?”

With that he steps between them, tucking the unlit pipe back into his pocket, and knocks on the inside of the door. Pausing a moment for the bailiff to shout “All rise!” and for the rustles and thumps that accompany three hundred people getting to their feet, he sweeps behind the witness stand and up the three steps to the bench. Kirsten and Maggie slip out much less dramatically in his wake, to take their places in the observers’ area behind the prosecution table next to the jury box. Again the bailiff gives tongue, rolling out the words one after another on a single pitch: “Oyez! Oyez! The Court of the Fifth Circuit of the State of South Dakota is now in session, the Honorable Fenton Harcourt presiding. God bless the United States and this honorable Court!”

For a long moment, Harcourt stands behind the bench, inspecting the occupants of the courtroom. It is a glance very much like the eagles’ in the photograph, bright and implacable. In a rush for the door that morning, a scrambled egg wrapped in fry bread in her hand, Dakota had referred to the old gentleman as “Hangin’ Harcourt,” a stickler for the law, letter and spirit. It seems to Kirsten that the epithet is not, perhaps, a joking matter. Despite the man’s respect for his fellow bird enthusiasts or his obvious pleasure in a rare sighting, the lean planes of the his face, cut sharply to the bone under his shock of white hair, would not be out of place on an Old Testament prophet—Jeremiah, bewailing the whoredom of the Daughter of Zion, John the Baptizer munching locusts and wild honey—or a Huguenot martyr bearing his Calvinism like a banner to the stake. Kirsten trusts him to be fair. She is not sure there is any mercy in him at all, or whether she thinks there should be.

A chill passes over her as she stands, waiting like the rest for Harcourt to be seated. The Judge will sign a death verdict, if one is rendered, read the sentence, set the date. But she, Kirsten King, must sign the execution warrant when the time comes.

It is a long way home to Twenty-Nine Palms. A long way home and circles upon circles of hell yet to pass through. To Harcourt’s right, the national flag drapes in soft spirals of red and white around its stanchion, and Kirsten wonders how many stars will be left when the insurrection is over. If it is ever over. If anyone survives. To his left, South Dakota’s flag proclaims, “Under God the People Rule.” Kirsten has no interest in presiding over a theocracy, but restoring the government of the people, by the people, is something she would do in a heartbeat if she could.