"Anderson, Poul - Fire Time" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anderson Poul)

FIRE TIME
Poul Anderson



FOREWORD

IT is A fearful thing to fall into the hands of a wholly just man.

His image had been chilling enough in court. Now we were summoned to himself. Dusk took us as we stepped from the flyer, blue-gray around, deepening to black where the mountainside toppled into the valley, overhead still a violet touched by the earliest stars. A guardian satellite hastened among them, entered Earth's shadow, and vanished as if the thin cold wind that whittered about us had blown it out. There streamed a smell of glaciers and distances.

The house was built of native stone, enormous, a part of these heights. Few men on man's mother planet can afford solitude. The president of the Tribunal commands it. A light in a bronze frame glowed above an ironbound oaken door. Our pilot gestured us that way. His whole body said we had better not keep Daniel Espina waiting.

Though my heart stammered, we all walked steadily. The door opened to show an attendant, live and nonhuman. "Buenos tardes," the thing said. "Siganme ustedes, por favor." We followed down a hallway darkly wainscoted, to a room perhaps intended for meetings such as this.

It was broad and tall, full of antiquities and silence.

The carpet muffled footfalls. Chairs and a couch stood rigid-framed, leather-covered, with a teak and ivory table. A grandfather clock from centuries agone ticked opposite an owl carved in marble. Shelves lined the walls, carrying books in the hundreds, more codices than reels. A modem desk and console-communications, data retrieval, computation, recording, projection, printout, disposal-somehow likewise belonged.

The far end of the room was a transparency- Beyond it reached the mountain, forest below and valley nighted below that, remote snowpeaks, more stars every minute. Before it, in his mobile chaise longue, sat Espina. As always, he was loosely black-clad; nothing showed except the skeletal head and hands. A look from him halted us.

And yet, "Good evening," he said, tonelessly but quietly, as if we were guests and not criminals whom he would sentence. "Please be seated."

In our separate ways we bowed and lowered ourselves to the edges of chairs facing him.

"I believe English will be the most convenient language?" he inquired.

The question was rhetorical, I thought. How could he not know the answer? To mask the stillness, I replied, "Yes, your honor-sir-You recall... on Ishtar it's been the common human language for a long time. Most permanent residents aren't very good even in Spanish, for lack of practice. It happened the original base personnel was mainly Anglo-pretty isolated since then-"

"Until recently," he cut off my foolish noise.

Dk, went the big clock. Dk. Dk.

After a minute Espina stirred the least bit and said, "Well. Who prefers coffee and who tea?" We mumbled. He beckoned his servant to him and gave the orderWhile the being departed, he took a silver case out of his robe, put a cigarette between yellowed fingers and inhaled it into lighting.

"Smoke if you like," he invited, neither hostile nor cordial, merely informing us that he didn't care. We made no move. His gaze felt like the alpine wind.

"You are wondering why I called you here," he said at last. "Isn't that quite irregular? And if a judge should feel a need to interview prisoners confidentially, why haul their bodies halfway around the globe?"

He drew smoke into lungs and let it out again to veil his Rameses face.

"As for the second point," he proceeded, "hologramy saves me the traveling I no longer wish to do. But it is not the same as the living flesh"-he glanced at his hand-"which you still have so abundantly- For you to be here, in my place and presence, is not the same as us confronting each other's colored shadows. I wish more officials understood the difference."

A cough racked him. I'd seen replays of his historic decisions and speeches. No such attack of mortality marred them. Did he instruct the 3V computers to microdelay and edit their transmissions? That's standard political practice, of course, along with the other glamorizers. But Tribune Espina had always scorned any softening. Hadn't he?

He snapped after air, breathed in fresh poison, and continued:

"As for the first point, in my office there are no regular actions. Every case is a freak.

"Think," he said into our astonishment. "Mine is the final court for matters which fall under no single Jurisdiction. Thus complete precedents never exist. Not only can entire legal systems be at odds; philosophies can." Contempt spoke forth." 'Mankind' is a word about as meaningful as 'phlogiston-' Tell me, if you are able-in this allegedly unified World Federation of ours, just how much in common have a prosperous Japanese engineer, a gang lord in the Welfare district of a North American city, a Russian mystic, and a Dry African peasant? Besides, more and more of our business orginates off Earth altogether"-his voice dropped-"in a damnably peculiar universe."