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.
A heartbeat that would allow her to go back to being a scientist, not a political figure.
Or, more aptly, a figurehead. A figurehead with life and death in her hand, and no way to open her fingers and cast herself free of them.
Finally Harcourt sits, and the rest of the room follows suit. The crowd remains silent as he opens the folder in front of him and studies it briefly. Then he closes it and folds his hands on its cover. Pitching his voice so that it carries to every corner of the high-ceilinged room, he says, “Ladies and gentlemen, I want to thank you for coming here today despite what must be considerable hardship for some of you. I commend you on your sense of duty even in the present crisis and for your willingness to undertake perhaps the most solemn responsibility of a citizen of this state and this nation. You are here to administer justice. Justice under the law.”
He glances around the room. “The circumstances are extraordinary. For one, this court is of necessity a hybrid of military and civilian practice, even though the defendants are civilians and no state of war has been formally declared by the Congress of the United States. So, even though you will see both the defense counsel and the prosecutor in the uniform of their service, the charges laid against these defendants are those allowable in the criminal law of the State of South Dakota. They are not federal charges. They are not war crimes, even though it seems, in logic, that they should be.