Trial of the Century Page 2

  The scum in question ignored me, squirmed in place, and stared down at her feet. Despite being twice the size of her opponent she trembled like a child at her first piano recital who has just discovered she’s forgotten the sheet music. “I don’t see how I can. Your forms were not properly executed at the time of incorporation. Clearly someone slipped up.”

  “At last something we agree upon.” The prince lowered the blaster and brought a hand to his face, twirling the ends of a nonexistent moustache.

  “You misunderstand me,” whined the adjuster. “Our agency only takes on clients who either will never actually file a claim or who have improper paper work. It’s all in your file. We knew the day you signed that the paperwork was flawed. That’s the advantage of time travel, after all. The error was they didn’t include mention of your, um, weapon in the file.”

  “So, what, you wouldn’t have shown up if they had?”

  “Exactly. Now, if you’ll just give me a moment to make a notation in the file, a quick temporal correction will ensure that, uh, no one gets hurt. I’ll never have been here—”

  The blaster came up before she finished speaking. Flecks of pepper sprayed across the stage.

  “Sleep!”

  Both of my participants slumped in place, heads lolling, chins resting against chests. I stepped between them, whispering phrases for their ears only. They opened their eyes, blinking lazily and stared at the audience in confusion.

  “Gentlebeings, can I have a round of applause for our excellent volunteers? Please show your appreciation for the former prince of invertebrates from a very well known cloud of ionized gases and interstellar dust, and his companion the junior adjustment agent from Temporal Insurance of the Arequipa Constellation.”

  The audience went wild, clapping their hands, stomping their feet, slapping their tendrils, and otherwise banging their tabletops. The two beings on stage with me—a Flen and a Colian—had no recollection of the characters they’d just portrayed. They returned to their seats awash in the praise of their companions and buoyed up by the suggestions of well-being I’d left in their unconscious minds.

  As the applause began to die down, I quieted the crowd with a conspiratorial wink and a wave. “Thank you, you’ve been a wonderful audience. That’s my show for tonight. It’s been my pleasure entertaining you. Please enjoy the rest of your cruise. I’m the Amazing Conroy, and I look forward to seeing you again.” I took a final bow and cued the stage lights to cut off, leaving me in darkness. The audience cheered again. I loved my profession; a good show always left me with that heady blend of invigoration and exhaustion with a bit of smug self-satisfaction on the side.

  I retrieved my carpet bag from the backstage wing where I’d left it with Reggie still fast asleep within. I loosened my bowtie as I headed for my dressing room, pausing only long enough to reach into the bag and give him a good scritch behind his left ear.

  He whuffled softly but didn’t awaken. The good humor instilled by my show vanished like vapor as reality took hold again and I contemplated my remaining option: the Arconi. Maybe they could heal Reggie, but the fact that they were sending Loyoka shouted not only did they know who I was but that they still held a grudge. Years before I had stood in front of Loyoka with a stolen buffalito under my arm. He’d asked if I was a smuggler, and I’d answered I wasn’t. His telepathic truth sense assured him I believed every word of it. And I did too, courtesy of a trick of self-hypnosis. The empire I’d built and lost had begun with that moment, and I had no doubt that when the Arcon questioned me again I wouldn’t slip away with trickery. For Reggie’s sake I had to come up with something better, and maybe Malsh’s acquaintance had just the thing.

  I’d earned a private dressing room when my status on The Mumby had improved. Originally, I’d had to share one with a Bwiller who, like most of his kind, had a profound aversion to bathing and the associated personal hygiene. Never had a new contract brought me more happiness than the upgrade to my own space. It wasn’t particularly large — that whole dues-paying thing again — but I didn’t care. The Bwiller and his stench were fast becoming a memory.

  Malsh had promised I’d meet the mysterious pilot after my show, but I’d expected to find him outside my door, not waiting for me in the dressing room. I closed the door behind me, making a show of locking it.

  “It was open when I got here,” he said.

  The pilot was a young man in his mid-twenties, deeply tanned, fit but with the beginning of a gut that would likely only get larger as he got older. I’d never seen a pilot with such a bland face, uncreased by either worry or laughter, the kind of face you’d look at one moment and forget in the next. He stood alongside the loveseat that other than my makeup table and chair was the dressing room’s only furniture. He wore the simple uniform of a vacationing Human, a garish shirt with a print of tropical flowers, pico-fiber denim slacks, and white socks and sneakers. A mop of brown hair showed the beginnings of a bald spot that in time would turn itself into a monk’s tonsure but for now could be disguised with a bit of judicious combing, which he hadn’t bothered to employ. Seated on top of the makeup table itself was a meter-tall doll that looked like a miniature version of him.

  The doll jumped to the floor as I entered and made its way to me. So, not a doll. Something else then.

  “You must be Conroy,” said the something else. “Welcome. Come, have a seat and join us. Excellent timing; we only just arrived ourselves. I hope you don’t mind that we’ve made ourselves at home. Fantastic show, by the way. Really fun stuff.”

  I’m comfortable with aliens of all kinds and perfectly at ease with any flavor of humanity, but I’ve never been good talking to mechanisms. I followed it the short distance to my chair and settled in, then began the task of removing my stage makeup. I nodded to the man who’d just dropped onto the loveseat. “So, I take it you’re the pilot?”

  He smiled at that, his face coming alive for an instant before falling back into blandness as he said, “Yes, that’s exactly who I am.” He gestured to the miniature version of him that had clambered onto the arm of the loveseat closest to me.

  “This conversation will go a lot more smoothly if you speak to me instead of him. I’m his A.Y., or rather, I was before he underwent treatment.”

  “A.Y.? Treatment?”

  “Like an A.I.,” it said, “but customized. The Clarkesons invented us. An ‘artificial you,’ or in this case, an artificial him. Kind of like a homunculus, in a way. It seemed like a good idea at the time, to imprint his personality and memories onto me before his treatment. He’s a member of the Prevarication League now, and everything he says is a lie.”

  None of this was making any sense. “I thought you said he was a pilot.”

  “I am a pilot,” said the Pilot.

  “He’s nothing of the kind,” said the A.Y. “And I never said he was. It’s a joke, or I thought it was once upon a time. Not ‘Pilot” but ‘Pilate’, you know? From the Bible? John 18:38?”

  I’d grown up in the Bible Belt back on Earth, but my days of quoting chapter and verse were well behind me and it must have shown on my face because the homunculus provided it for me. “When Jesus tells the Roman governor that everyone on the side of truth listens to him, Pilate replies, ‘What is truth?’ Not much of a joke, is it? But only Humans tend to get it, and it helps them to remember his situation.”

  I glanced back and forth between them before finally looking at the A.Y. “So I should call you both ‘Pilate’ then?”

  “Oh hell no! My name’s Oetting. His was too, back before the treatment. Names don’t have a lot of utility among Prevaricators though, so calling him Pilate is as good as anything else. Make sense?”

  “Not really, no. I don’t understand why Malsh thought it would be helpful for me to meet with you.”

  “Because despite being an alien, Malsh is a good egg, and it understands the inherent unfairness any time one party has a telepathic head start over another. You’re going to meet with an Arcon,
and he’ll have the advantage on you every step of the way because he’ll know the moment you deviate from the truth. The Prevarication League was created to thwart telepathic aliens. Pilate and I are here to help level the playing field for you, and maybe even give you an edge.”

  I looked back at Pilate. “You’re saying you can’t tell the truth? At all? Ever?”

  “Are you asking me or are you telling me?”

  Oetting slapped the back of the loveseat, drawing my attention back to him. “See that? Right there? Lesson one: answer questions with questions.” The homunculus sat back, folding its arms with mechanical satisfaction. “Unless they start getting all meta on you, questions don’t have truth value. And as a response to a direct question they’re a great way to divert to another topic.”

  “How am I supposed to have a conversation with Loyoka if all we do is talk in questions?”

  “Don’t worry, you’re not,” assured Oetting. “You’re going to lie your ass off.”

  “There’s only one kind of lie,” said Pilate.

  “I thought you said you couldn’t tell— Oh, wait, so that was a lie?”

  He shook his head, neither smiling nor frowning, and softly added “And your Arcon wouldn’t know.”

  Huh. I felt a headache coming on. “So you’re saying he would know, because saying he wouldn’t is a lie. So you’ve just lied to me twice?”

  “You’re catching on,” said the A.Y. “So the plan is to give you a crash course in some of the many different kinds of lying, but just the blocky stuff. It takes years and some serious mental rewiring to develop the finesse of a Prevaricator, but that’s a one way street anyway and not what you need.”

  “How exactly do you know what I need?”

  “The captain tells me everything,” said Pilate.

  “There’s another example,” explained Oetting. “Obviously the captain doesn’t tell him squat. But we do have some great gear in our stateroom for eavesdropping and unscrambling messages beamed to and from the ship.”

  “Right, I get it, he lied.”

  “It’s not that simple. There are lots of different kinds of lies, and most telepathic aliens can catch the rhythm of them with repeated exposure, which means you think you’re lying but the falsehood gets filtered out. The trick is to mix things up, jump from one type of lie to the next. There are prime lies, white lies, lies that are simple negation, lies of exaggeration, lies of inaccuracy, lies of omission, lies of commission, and many more, but we don’t have time to teach you the finer points of all of those.”

  “I’ve got all the time in the world,” said Pilate, raising a hand as if nonchalantly examining his manicure.

  “Quiet, you. Okay, Conroy, here’s the deal. Your Arcon friend is playing things kinda cagey, and hasn’t supplied a precise time for his rendezvous with The Mumby. We know it’s happening within the next day or so, but we don’t know exactly when, which is kind of strange, actually. In any case the sooner we get some of these ideas loaded into your brain, the better your odds of surviving the kind of conversation he’s going to want to have with you about your past smuggling of a buffalo dog.”

  It was like being slapped. “How do you know about that?”

  “A little bird told me,” said Pilate.

  “That’s as good a segue into the next lesson as any,” said Oetting. “We’re about ninety percent certain that the Arconi ability to discriminate truth from falsity only applies to literal language.”

  I frowned. “You have another kind?”

  “Oh hell yes! Think like a poet, Conroy! If you use figurative language, veracity goes from being a yes/no kind of thing because of its reliance on context to a relative issue at worst and a completely orthogonal concern at best. And since some of that context may be known only to the speaker, an Arcon’s telepathic filter should be stymied.”

  “What, I’m supposed to limit myself to similes and metaphors?”

  “That will work,” said Oetting, “but there are other kinds as well, like idiom, personification, irony, understatement, hyperbole, even puns.”

  I felt a headache coming on, but all of what the A.Y. was saying had begun to make sense to me. Besides, that’s what aspirin were for. “So when Pilate said ‘a little bird’ told him, he wasn’t lying because he was speaking idiomatically, not literally? But how would Loyoka know that?”

  “That’s the beauty of it,” said Pilate. “If he didn’t have that touch of telepathy, he couldn’t know for sure if I’d meant it literally or figuratively, but since he does, he sorts it correctly.”

  “And that,” added Oetting, “is a nice example of irony.”

  “So… the question gets answered, truthfully, but without really giving out any useful information?”

  “That’s it exactly. Now let’s run you through some other examples. For all we know, the Arcon will show up in a couple hours, and the more practiced you are with using both nonliteral language and your own responding questions, the better off you’ll be. Let’s try some personification; giving human characteristics to objects really messes up alien telepathy.”

  “It was just a few hours ago that dinner was calling my name,” said Pilate, giving me a wink.

  “Uh… yeah…” I said.

  *

  The following morning brought a summons from The Mumby’s captain at an hour too early for a late night performer under normal circumstances and unthinkable given the previous evening’s rushed tutorial in telepathy-defeating elocution. On the other hand, when the undisputed authority responsible for your food, shelter, and atmosphere invites you over for coffee, I’ve found the only sensible option involves dunking my head in the sink till I’m alert and showing up with my best helpful/cheerful demeanor turned up to full volume. But it doesn’t always work.

  A Colian ensign, young enough to be of indeterminate gender, ushered me into the Captain’s ready room. I put on my game face and beamed. “Good morning, Captain. How may I be of service to you this fine day?”

  “Shut up and sit down, Mr. Conroy. Moreover, stop looking so chipper! You may be a ‘morning-person’ but I assure you that I am not.”

  My physician friend Malsh not withstanding, most of the aliens I’d encountered in my career were your basic humanoid, which is to say a torso with two arms and two legs, hands and feet where you’d expect to find them, and a head on top with some combination and number of sensory and speech organs like mouths and eyes and ears and noses. Captain Undra didn’t quite fit the pattern. A member of a race who called themselves the Gwirf, she had characteristics that reminded me of some kind of upright cross between an insect and an octopus. A chitinous carapace enveloped her body with gleaming yellow plates from which emerged four pairs of sinuous and suckered tentacles in rows down the length of her torso, the lowest pair dropping straight down like a pair of boneless legs that nonetheless conspired to keep her upright. Her head lay half obscured, sunk back into a cowl-like spiny collar, its ring of compound eyes glaring unblinkingly. But the most striking feature of the Gwirf are the lips, which look no different than what you’d expect to find on any Human. In the Captain’s case they were pink and perfect cupid bows that looked so out of place that no matter how comfortable you were around aliens you’d still have to do a double-take upon seeing them on her face.

  Fortunately for me, I’d had the pleasure of meeting her under more pleasant circumstances when I’d sat at table with her. Instead of gawking, I nodded curtly and dropped into the chair she’d indicated, an uncomfortable bit of furniture that had clearly been crafted to accommodate the needs of Gwirf physiology and no one else. There were a couple other chairs in the room, but they shared the same design. As far as I knew, the only other Gwirf onboard worked in the ship’s laundry. I tried not to read too much into what it said about the captain, but I failed.

  She crossed the room to hover above me, crossing well into the boundaries of acceptable personal space. A matching pair of tentacles latched onto my shoulders and another pair gripp
ed my forearms hard enough to ensure she had my full attention. “You’ve endangered my ship.”

  “Captain?” I hadn’t met very many Gwirf, but I was pretty sure Undra’s actions were meant to intimidate and couldn’t simply be excused as a cultural thing. You don’t last long on stage if you intimidate easily though, and I locked my eyes on hers, staring hard until she turned her head and pulled her arms away, retreating a few steps back across the room.

  “What, do you deny it?”

  Pilate’s lessons were still swimming in my head from the night before. “What exactly do you think I’m denying?”

  “That… creature that came aboard with you. Your pet. My chief medical officer informs me it’s going to explode. The phrase it used was ‘organic fusion.’ I’d call that endangerment, wouldn’t you?”

  Somehow, amidst focusing on ways to baffle a potential Arconi interrogation I’d managed to forget what Malsh had told me. “That’s a recent, um, diagnosis. I didn’t know about it when we arrived.”

  “How convenient for you.”

  “With respect, there’s nothing convenient about having my buffalo dog blow itself up.”

  “Of course you’d say that, but my concern is for the well-being of the entire ship, not just some animal a last-minute entertainer has among his luggage.”

  I stood then, no easy feat given the chair, and only just managed to bite back a series of impolite responses that would have resulted in an immediate and one-way visit to an airlock.

  “I told you to sit down.” Captain Undra glared at me from the recesses of her neck cowl.

  “You did. You’ve also established your priorities and it’s clear that neither I nor my buffalito are in your top ten. We’re not your problem. Right. Message received. So, unless you have something useful to say to me, I’ll see myself out. My contract with you doesn’t include enduring your tirades or your insensitivity.”