“If you did not want me to see her as a female, why did you have her bared before me?” he asked.
The judge regarded him, with fury.
“And put a necklace on her, first?” he asked.
“Be silent,” said the judge.
“Was she not a person?” he asked, not quite sure what that word meant. It did not seem to mean anything, or, perhaps it meant “nothing,” intentionally. He did not know. The guards had lifted their stun sticks.
“She is a prisoner, a low woman,” said the judge.
“Not a person?”
“No,” said the judge. “It is all right for such as she to be looked upon with dilated pupils.”
“Then what is wrong with my having done so?” he asked. The judge reddened, angrily. She replaced the papers on the desk.
He had then looked across the court to the officer of the court, in her dark blue robe. She was young, and quite attractive. He wondered what she might look like, if she had been put in a necklace and bared before him, as had been the low woman. Probably not much different, he thought. But then he supposed that such thoughts were improper. She was of the honestore class, perhaps even a minor patrician, surely no more on this provincial world. But she was a woman, surely. So what difference would it make? She, looking at him at this time, gasped, and then stiffened. Then, in fury, blushing hotly, she had looked away. The judge had not noticed this exchange. It may have been one reason, of course, why the officer of the court, on the day of the games, had worn the clingabout, and come even across the sand, to appear before him, and have him bound. Perhaps she had wanted, thusly, to taunt him, and then to show him her power, that men would obey her.
“The court,” had said the judge, which, under the circumstances, was herself, “is prepared to be merciful.”
He had been offered the choice between life, or life of a sort, and death. Certainly his crime had been heinous, theft of a darin and a silver bracelet, and, in the course of its commission, the coldblooded, unprovoked murder of two upright citizens, one a respectable local businessman. There had been nine witnesses for the prosecution, five close associates of the businessman, who had witnessed the murders, and four policemen, who had apprehended the thief with the bracelet and darin in his possession. The defendant had not deigned to respond to the charges. Similarly, he had not chosen to explain how the darin and bracelet had come into his possession. It had been established, from the records of the customs search, that he had not had them with him at the time of his disembarkation.
“You have been found guilty,” announced the judge. “Do you wish to beg the court for mercy?”
“No,” he had said.
That response had not pleased the judge.
But then the field quotas were to be filled.
“The court, nonetheless,” had then said the judge, not pleasantly, “in her generosity, and mercy, despite the gravity of these crimes, and the seemingly unregenerate resoluteness of their perpetrator, is inclined to be lenient. After all, the moral welfare, the reformation, of a culprit, even one so undeserving of consideration, is a gratuitous but legitimate object of a justice with vision. Though a lifetime of penitence and labor is surely no sufficient compensation for the wrongs heretofore wrought, that some repayment to society is better than naught is a consideration which need not be neglected.”
The peasant understood very little of this.
“There is a way,” she said, “to reduce the energy, the power, the unacceptable aggressiveness, of your nature.”
He did not understand.
“Too, you understand, of course, that genes such as yours, so antisocial, so dangerous, are not to be propagated,” she continued.
He did not know what genes were.
It was soon made clear to him however that he had two choices, one was to be smoothed, and then remanded for an indefinite time to the public fields, and the other was to be remanded to the arena. The judge, who hated and feared men such as he, in her pettiness and vanity, had thought it amusing to give him this choice, in order that it might be he, himself, who would choose his own unmanning. He would thus do her will, humiliating and demeaning himself, by his own will.
But he had said, “No.”
There had been gasps, whispers, consternation in the small court.
The judge herself had been for the moment struck speechless.
“You leave me no choice,” she had then said, in inexplicable fury. He was remanded to the arena, into the keeping of its master.
“Take him away,” she had said.
Then the officer of the court, her daughter, in her dark blue robe, had stepped forth, with the guards, and he had been conducted from the courtroom.
There was a cry from the crowd as the barang, gripped in both hands by one of the large, soft men, after some vicious, tentative feints, held back at the last moment, at last struck loose the first head, it flying from the body. One of the waddling dwarfs, comically exaggerating his gait, to the amusement of the crowd, rushed after it, having apparently missed catching it in his basket. He seemed much chagrined. He leaped up and down, as though in frustration. He hurried to the head, putting his basket down beside it. He picked up the head by the hair and wagged his finger at it, as though scolding it. He pointed to the basket. Then he put it in his basket. The body had remained kneeling, as they will, for a time, if the blow is swift enough, and clean enough. The arterial blood, stimulated by the terror of the victim, a terror artificially increased by the feints, spurts to an unusual height. If you have seen this, you will understand what I mean, what it is like. It is ugly to watch. It is a little like a fountain. It spatters about. If one is near, it is easy to be soiled. Dwarfs, with their measuring boards, marked heights on the boards. Other dwarfs, with their hooks, the body then fallen heavily into the sand, rushed forward, striking into the body with the hooks, then drawing it across the sand, in a bloody furrow, toward the dead gate.
Another head then flew away, even farther than the first.
A cheer rang out.
There was betting here and there in the stands, on the height the blood would reach on the boards, on the distance to which the heads might fly, on whether or nor a head would be caught. To be sure, the large, soft men, it was rumored, could control such things, at least the distance and direction of the projectile, by varying the angle of the blow, by turning the blade a little, just at the last instant. It was rumored there was collusion sometimes, between them and gamblers, in the stands.
The hymn to Floon, as thin, as frail, as pathetic as it might seem, was audible in the arena.
There were, of course, far worse ways to die, at least with respect to torture, to pain, and such. There was the rack and, the pincers, the tongs, the knives, the pegs, the skewers, the knotted cords, the stake, the burning irons, such things, such devices, and many others, which would only later, much later, be brought to scrupulous perfection by the adherents of Floon himself, usually for application to other adherents of Floon, heretics, schizmatics and such. Indeed, such devices, on the whole, were seldom employed by the empire, which commonly tended to exercise a certain restraint, or taste, in such matters, given pause, seemingly, by scruples which would seldom deter the later adherents of Floon, but then the adherents of Floon would always possess, it would seem to the peasant, a certain petty, low-class vindictiveness, that of the little person into whose hands suddenly comes power. The most common device of the empire was the rack. It might even appear in courtrooms, where it was commonly employed in the extraction of testimony from slaves. Indeed, a slave was normally fastened on the rack before his testimony was taken, it being assumed that the veridicality of his testimony might be best assured by such a device. But there were the beasts, however. The empire was fond of them. Doubtless because of the spectacle they could provide. These beasts, ravenous, tortured by hunger, released into the arena, driven wild by the scent of blood and flesh, would lose little time in attacking, and feeding.