Castor stopped feeling grateful to the jolly young Han.
When he got to the Criminal Courts Building they told him that he had been given peremptory orders to check in with Inspector Tsoong Delilah; when he had finished hoofing the extra kilometer to the police headquarters, she wasn't there; when at last her secretary reached her for instructions the word was for Castor to report to a transient hotel and show up in court in the morning—a kilometer and a half, that time, and the sun already down. The desk clerk told him the good news and the bad news when he checked in. The bad news was that the hour for serving dinner was over. The good news was that that didn't matter, because there were plenty of fast-food restaurants within a block's walk...
But, of course, only if you had the money.
Pettyman Castor's testimony amounted only to answering three questions, with none of the answers above one word, but it took some time to do it in spite of the fact that he was the first witness called. First there was a lot of whispered wrangling among the five judges and various functionaries, while Castor and everyone else sat restless (and, in Castor's case, gnawed by hunger) and waited for the show to get on the road.
Hunger was less important, though, than excitement. Castor used the time profitably to rubberneck. The courtroom was divided into three concentric quarter-circle shells like the floor plan of a concert hall. At the front, which was the "stage," were the benches for the judges, the people's law advisors, and the clerks. One remove away, the seats for the witnesses and specialists, where Castor sat—and where, ahead of him in the front row, he spotted the black-bobbed hair of Renmin Police Inspector Tsoong Delilah. Behind Castor was a transparent screen, to cut off the spectators' gallery and their noise from the court itself. There were seats for several hundred gawkers, but only sparsely occupied—mostly by the idle and the curious, he supposed. There did seem to be a number of Yankees watching the proceedings, and one or two of them looked vaguely familiar to Castor. Were they members of the cattle collective? That made sense, for certainly that village had an interest in the matter—but so did Castor's own, and none of his people had come to watch his performance. Some of the other spectators were more interesting, though. There was a busload of the omnipresent tourists from the Mainland and even a smaller party of Indians, saris and turbans and cameras. Some of the spectators seemed quite queer. There was a man with a very large head—or a very large hat, almost like a football helmet five sizes too big for his skull; Castor could not decide which. He was Han Chinese, but his face seemed to change at every look, and his behavior was odder than his face. He could not seem to make up his mind what he wanted to do. Stand up, start to leave— then clamber back along the seats to his place; stand up again for an instant; sit down with a crash of folding seat.
Castor was surprised the attendants didn't throw him out, but evidently the attendants considered him privileged.
Then, when the judges finally came out of their huddle and the proceedings began, there was a second delay.
The stern-faced clerk who approached Castor, squirming before all those eyes on the witness stand, addressed him in the high tongue: "Do you understand the penalties for perjury, and will you undertake to speak only truth and all truth here?" And when he started to answer, she looked shocked, made him wait while another clerk translated the question into English before she would let him reply. Castor resentfully understood that he was not considered capable of comprehending the high tongue. He allowed the charade to proceed, but it rankled. He glared back at the staring eyes, not least the queer old big-headed man in the visitors' gallery and most of all Inspector Tsoong herself. The sardonic half smile played about her lips as she studied him. At last came the three questions:
"Are you Pettyman Castor, citizen of the Bama Autonomous Republic, member of Production Team Three of the Heavenly Grain Village Collective?"
Pause for translation, then Castor was allowed to answer: "Yes."
"Hsieh-hsieh," reported the translator, and the attorney asked the next question.
"Did you one week ago, while engaged in your duties in the transplanting of rice seedlings, discover a human head?"
"Yes."
"Hsieh-hsieh."
And then the final question:
"Is this the head?"
And that question would have needed no translation for even the most exclusively Anglophone witness, because the woman thrust before him a picframe, life-size, of the head itself in all its ruin. The tilapia had eaten the soft parts out. The face was awful. Worse than the sight was the knowledge that he had touched that terrible thing. "Y—yes," he croaked, trying not to retch, and was dismissed.
The image of that once-human horror followed him back to his seat, and it was some minutes before he was able to take interest in the proceedings again.
But, really, it was interesting. It was almost like a detective opera. Methodically the state paraded its evidence, and how this piece fit in with that was an absorbing puzzle to work at. The second witness was a young boy from the River of Pearl Cattle Collective, where the corpse's bones had been ground to powder. The youth was frightened but enjoying his prominence as he said that yes, he and some other boys had sneaked away from tai chi to play baseball and yes, they had found part of a human arm. As the cattle-herding dogs had found it before they did, it was well chewed. Castor was glad he didn't have to look at that pic close up, but it didn't seem to bother the boy.
Then there was an elderly man, also from the cattle collective. He was obviously even more scared than the boy. He took it out in belligerence, delivering his answers as though spitting them in the face of the translator. Yes, he was in charge of the packinghouse. Yes, he was responsible for the use of it. Yes, he always kept it locked when not in use—children might hurt themselves there. No, he had no idea how anyone could have gained admittance to it to debone the parts of the corpse and grind its skeleton for spreading on the fields. When he was excused he tottered off to the end of the back row and sat with his head down, paying no attention to the next witness. That was a forensic surgeon, reporting that the fragments found in the bonemeal were human. Then it was Tsoong Delilah, who came back to sit down next to Castor when she had finished testifying how she had supervised the team that had interrogated the witnesses from the B.A.R. and located the various fragments of the deceased. "Scholar," she whispered in his ear, "you spoke very well." But as Castor could not tell how much of what she said was mockery he didn't reply.
To his surprise, there was only one more witness that morning—another police official, to add a few details to Tsoong's evidence—and then the judges conferred and announced that there would be a two-hour recess for lunch. After only an hour and a half or less! Oh, yes, these Han Chinese did themselves well. Fat Rhoda would have allowed no such slackness on her production team. As Tsoong Delilah started to get up she saw Castor still rooted to his seat and paused, "What's the matter, Scholar? Aren't you hungry?" she asked.
"I am nearly starved," Castor said bitterly, explaining how his pocket had been picked and how he had been wakened too late for breakfast in the transient hotel.
"What a fool you are!" the policewoman scolded. "Don't you know that witnesses are entitled to payment and reimbursement for expenses? Go downstairs to the accounts room. Simply identify yourself and draw your pay—or, no, better, come with me. We'll eat across the street, where the food is good, and I will find out just how naive you are, Scholar!"