“Hmm. That’s interesting.”
“Why?” F’tim asked. “In what way?”
Rabinowitz hesitated. “I’m not sure, really,” she replied. “It just sounds like it should be.”
“I plan to devote an entire chapter to it,” Dinh told her. “It’s highly symbolic of the entire culture.”
“Perhaps,” Rabinowitz said absently. She filed the information away in the back of her mind. There were too many other things to concentrate on at the moment.
The crowd continued to file into the room. Rabinowitz noticed several dozen people wearing the aqua-colored sashes of K’anal’orb’s aides. She didn’t have enough experience to recognize individuals of this race, yet, but she was sure K’anal’orb himself was somewhere within the audience, waiting for the right dramatic moment to come forward and take the stage.
The doors were closed when the room was filled to capacity, leaving the rest of the bystanders reduced to viewing the trial broadcast. F’tim assured her this was the largest courthouse in the area, but some trials were so notorious that not everyone who wanted to affect the outcome could fit inside.
“That’s OK,” Rabinowitz said. “I’m sure K’anal’orb has packed enough of his supporters in here to guarantee a guilty verdict.”
A clerk with a green ribbon around his shoulders stepped forward and read the charges aloud: that the alien known as Bian Dinh conspired with the deceased, P’tar’houn-Hoc, to subvert the public morality and then, for reasons unknown, murdered him in his private dining chamber.
A policeman next explained that P’tar’houn-Hoc’s body was found lying on the floor of his dining chamber with a knife in his chest, and that the alien body Bian Dinh had rented was standing over the corpse. Rental agency and cab records proved that Bian Dinh had indeed rented the body and traveled to P’tar’houn-Hoc’s house at about the time the killing occurred.
The policeman withdrew, and a strange silence fell over the courtroom. “Well,” Dinh said, prodding her friend over their private phone link. “Aren’t you going to say anything?”
“I want to let them take the first shot,” Rabinowitz replied.
It wasn’t long in coming. Rabinowitz had half expected K’anal’orb to let his lieutenants take the first few easy jabs, have her rebut them, and then come out personally to deliver the big blows. But apparently K’anal’orb wanted all the glory for himself, because he strode arrogantly onto the stage amid the worshipful sighs and mutterings of his followers. He made an expansive gesture to acknowledge the crowd, and received a hissing/humming sound that served as applause on K’tolu’tan. Patently ignoring the rented alien bodies, he spoke directly to the audience.
“Too long have we allowed our world to be corrupted by the evil, perverse teachings of disgusting outsiders, who mock our honored customs and lead us into the ways of degradation. They flaunt their perversions in our faces and demand we join them in their decadence. It is the ultimate irony, then, that P’tar’houn-Hoc, a blaspheming convert to their warped and twisted values, became a victim to their sickness and died at the hand of that murdering alien garbage.”
“Feel free to defend me any time,” Dinh said over their private connection.
“Just a little bit longer,” Rabinowitz said. “K’anal’orb works to a specific rhythm in his speech. If I wait till he gets nearly to the peak of an emotional cycle and then interrupt, it’ll come crashing down and it’ll take him that much more work to build it up again.”
She kept her ears carefully tuned, only half-listening to the actual words, until she felt he was nearly ready to smash his point home. Then she stepped awkwardly forward, waved her claw about feebly and shouted, “No, this is wrong!”
K’anal’orb stopped in mid-sentence and seemed lost for a moment. He was obviously unused to interruptions. He turned to glare at Rabi-nowitz’s ungainly rented body. “See how one of these loathsome creatures comes to mock our very system of justice,” he sneered.
“I’ve come here because I respect your system of justice,” Rabinowitz replied. “My name is Deborah Rabinowitz, and I am a friend of Bian Dinh who has been accused of this terrible crime. Like yourselves, I seek to unmask falsehood and bring the truth to light.”
“And yet you rudely interrupt the speech of an honored man,” said someone from the crowd—someone wearing the aqua sash of K’anal’orb’s disciples.
“If my action caused offense, it was merely through ignorance and not disrespect. I spoke as I did because I believe K’anal’orb is a man who also seeks the truth and who would like to be corrected when he himself delivers offense out of what I’m sure is ignorance rather than disrespect.”
K’anal’orb had probably expected some kind of rejoinder, but not one with this slant. He hesitated, and Rabinowitz pressed her point.
“It’s true, Bian and I are aliens. We were born on another world, our natural bodies take other forms, and we were raised to think in other ways. But that just makes us different, not evil. Don’t condemn an alien just for being alien. Has not an alien eyes? Has not an alien hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed—” She paused abruptly, realizing that line might get her in trouble in a society that considered eating a taboo subject, but recovered quickly.
“Are we not hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by summer and winter as any K’tolu’tano? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?
“We may be different, but we share many values with you—two of them being a reverence for life and a passion for the truth. We are as shocked as you are by this killing, and we come here, as you do, to search for the truth.”
The crowd moved resdessly, not accustomed to having their prejudices upset this way. Rabinowitz wished she was a more dynamic actor, but trusted to the strength of the Bard’s material to make its own point.
K’anal’orb, too, could see that some in the audience were starting to think, and that was not part of his plan. “A pretty speech,” he said sarcastically, “but it cannot cover the feet that a life was taken. It cannot replace their loving husband and father.”
He gestured across the room, and a group of his followers parted to reveal three small bodies standing apart from the crowd. Beside her, Rabinowitz could see F’tim react with surprise. “Who are they?” she asked him.
“P’tar’houn-Hoc’s family,” he told her. “I thought they were safely at my house. K’anal’orb’s followers must have brought them here after I left.”
“I thought P’tar’houn-Hoc only had two children.”
“He did. The one in the middle is his wife.”
Rabinowitz looked at the central figure, who was no larger than the ones flanking her. “He married a midget?”
F’tim sounded confused. “Et’fhan is a full-grown woman.”
“But everyone else in the room is—” And then she stopped as the realization hit her. Women on K’tolu’tan could not inherit property; they were themselves property to be inherited. Physically, they were barely half the size of full-grown males. She was dealing with an all-male culture, an allmale audience. Did they know she was a female? If so, would they listen to her? Did they know Bian was a female? If so, did that somehow make her alleged crime even worse?
And as this revelation came to her, she knew there was something else, but she couldn’t put her finger on it. It was fluttering around the back of her mind like the little Tinkerbell light fluttering around the Darlings’ bedroom. The more she tried to catch it, the more it danced merrily out of reach—and she couldn’t concentrate on it, because too many other things were going on at once.