She nods, waiting.
“In your professional judgement, and strictly in your professional judgement, were these injuries sufficient to cause death?”
Shutting out the sight of the dead before her, shutting out the memory of her friend struggling in the trap, she nods. “When I found him, he was shocking from blood loss and exposure. Infection and frostbite had destroyed muscle and organ tissue. The left tibia and fibula, as you can see, were both shattered past the point where they could have been pinned.”
“Had you found him earlier, could surgery have saved his life?”
She answers, not quite able to keep the anger from her voice. ” If I had found him much earlier, before he was attacked by whatever tore him open—yes. His life, yes. But not his life, Fenton. Even if the other wounds could be repaired or had never happened, even if the infection could be fought down, the leg was unsalvageable. Only a sadist would have condemned him to that.”
The judge raises one hand, palm outward. “Bear with me a moment longer, please. Quality of life aside, why did you not bring him back and attempt the operation?”
“Because his respiration was depressed and his blood loss so heavy that, in my professional judgement,” she bites the words off, “he would not have survived transportation, much less anaesthesia.”
‘Thank you. Now allow me to help.”
Together they fold the plastic back into place, taping it firmly. Gently they lay Wa Uspewicakiyapi back into his chill resting place. Her hand lingers for a moment on the bundle. Only for a while, old friend, she promises silently. Only until justice has been done.
We will not fail you again.
In the silence of her mind, a wolf howl rises to the floating moon.
*
The witness room, four generically off-white walls topped by a yellowing acoustic–tile ceiling, fits only a bit less snugly than a coffin. Three paces long, three paces wide, its furnishings consist of one small table, one spine-cracking folding chair of undetermined but ancient vintage and one 60-watt light bulb further dimmed by a frosted glass globe. It bears a decided resemblance to the classic police interrogation room. According to her watch, Koda has been here for almost an hour, apparently going on all morning.
Good thing I’m not claustrophobic. Yet.
A jury for the trial of the Rapid City jail rapists was seated yesterday, with final selection in the morning and opening statements after lunch. The prosecution has begun its case this morning with accounts of the raid from the participants, to be followed by testimony from the victims in the afternoon. She has reviewed her testimony twice with Alderson, the last time before the opening gavel more than two hours ago. Larke and Martinez have already given their accounts; Andrews is up now, with Koda held back for last. The strategy may be transparent, but its effectiveness is undisputed. As the hero of the Cheyenne, she is the pièce de resistance. She is also mortally bored with the tedium of waiting.
Checking her watch one last time—Damn, he said we’d be out of here by eleven.—Koda sinks crosslegged to the relative comfort of the floor, opens Spengler at her bookmark, and begins to read.
She had snatched this particular book up on her way out her house all those months ago, not sure why then, not really sure why now. Then it had seemed a token of the past, a link to connect her to the spacious library that occupies a third of her home, something to remind her of—and call her back to—the comfortable life she and Tali had built between them. An incomplete farewell.
But now—she lets the book fall open on her knees, propping her chin on her fists. Spengler had been the great heretic of early twentieth century history, a prophet of doom floating loose on the riptide of social and industrial progressivism. History, he had said, moved not in ever-ascending lines but in cycles: birth, rise, maturity, decline and fall. He had fallen in and out of academic fashion, spiking in the late thirties when he had predicted that the Thousand Year Reich would last less than ten and thereafter relegated to the “crank science” midden along with von Daniken and other psuedoscholarly nutjobs.
Come the early 2000’s, Spengler had been rescued from the refuse heap and dusted off by Stan Uribe, then of Baylor. Uribe had argued that the United States at that time was in a phase corresponding to Europe’s Reformation, complete with religious wars—mostly fought in the political arena rather than on the battlefield—and imploding corporate feudalism. His theories had cost him his job, but he had moved on to U Penn’s infinitely more prestigious department. There he had gone on to extrapolate the theory to encompass the rise of American Empire, built like others before it on the three G’s of colonialism and conversion: God, Gold and Glory. He had nearly gotten fired again in 2003, when he published the capstone of his theory, the inevitable fall of the Empire to those it, like Rome two millennia before, had labeled barbarians: women, Muslims, pagans, African Americans, gays and lesbians, Hispanics, the Indigenous Nations.
While battle raged in the boardroom, Koda and Tali had sat in his lectures spellbound. They had spent hours in his office, talking, questioning, then gone on to use their scarce elective hours for his seminars, sitting up until four in the morning with friends arguing the consequences if Uribe were right.
If he were right. . . And it seems he is, though not in the way he expected.
What now? How do we rebuild, but on a different model that can break the cycle? Can we break the cycle? For the first time in nearly four hundred years, the Nations have the opportunity to develop something different from the European pattern. We need to begin to make contact with other communities that have survived, like the commune Kirsten stayed at in Minnesota. Assuming that we survive, we need—not an exit strategy, a way in to a different world. How will a technological people, most of whom will be former white, middle-class Americans, fit into the Time of the White Buffalo?
And gods, how am I going to bring a white girl home to Mother?
A sharp rap brings her suddenly to her feet. The Bailiff’s face, florid under its blond buzz cut, appears in the door. “Doctor Rivers, you’ve been called to the stand.”
Setting her book down, she follows the uniformed Sergeant out of the witness room and through the double doors of the court. Spectators fill two-thirds of the seats on the public’s side of the rail, a respectable crowd for all but the most notorious cases even in the time before the uprising. Some she recognizes as women liberated from the prison; one is Millie Buxton, her thin face drawn and pale with sleeplessness. Her fingers, clasped in her lap, writhe incessantly. She sits somewhat apart from the rest, toward the back. Also toward the back, Koda notes a large man wearing dark glasses, one foot on the floor and a fold of his jeans over the stump above his knee. His crutches lean against the back of the bench. She casts him a sharp glance, trying to place him, though she is certain she does not recognize him.
The second bailiff swings the gate open for her, and she approaches the dais with the judge’s bench and the witness stand. Harcourt fills his high seat as though he has grown there, inseparable from the black robe of his office or the gavel laid ready to his hand. He gives no sign of recognition—no fear, no favor from this one, ever—and says simply, “Madam Clerk, swear the witness.”
The Clerk steps from behind her desk, raising the Bible there slightly with an inquiring look. Koda shakes her head and lays her hand on the medicine bundle around her neck instead. In a low but clear voice, she swears to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, “so help me, Ina Maka.”