“I do not believe I could kill in cold blood. And I did not kill my wife and her lover.”
“Thank you.”
Madoc went through a long series of questions designed to show his client in the best possible light to the jury. How Morton was ambitious but not so ruthless as to use murder to his corporate advantage. How he had shown sympathy and support for his ex-wife after her re-life procedure. How he would have risen to the top no matter what trivial little financial problems beset him forty years ago.
“The prosecution has made much of how cold and ruthless you are,” Madoc finished. “Are you a cold man?”
Morton looked up to the public gallery where Mellanie was sitting, gazing down with a soft devoted smile on her beautiful young face. “You’d have to ask those who know me properly, but I don’t think so.”
Howard Madoc bowed slightly to the judge and sat down.
“Your witness,” Judge Carmichael told the prosecution table.
Everyone in the courtroom fell silent as Paula Myo slowly stood up. Then a round of excited whispering broke out as she bowed to the judge and walked over to the witness stand. If she was having to take charge herself, the prosecution must be desperate.
“Murder ain’t what it used to be,” she said to Morton in a pleasant conversational tone. “It’s no longer death. Not final. Today it’s bodyloss, memory erasure, lots of euphemisms that describe what is essentially a discontinuity in consciousness. Your body can be killed, but the clinics on every Commonwealth planet can bring you back to life with a simple cloning procedure. There’s a blank decade or two, but eventually you’re walking around again as if nothing ever happened. It’s a wonderful psychological crutch to have. A lot of psychiatrists argue that it helps make our society a lot more stable and calm than before. They bandy the word ‘mature’ around quite a lot.
“So you see, murdering somebody is nothing like as serious as it used to be. All you’re actually doing is removing them from the universe for a few years. You’re not really killing them. Especially when you know their insurance will cover a re-life procedure. It would probably be an acceptable risk to remove someone who was going to ruin your plans.”
“No,” Morton said. “It is completely unacceptable. It is not a done thing, something that can be performed for convenience. Murder is barbarism. I wouldn’t do it. Not now, not forty years ago.”
“But we are agreed that your wife and Wyobie Cotal were murdered?”
“Of course.” He frowned, puzzled by the question. “I told you, remember?”
“No, you originally said you were suspicious about her disappearance, especially when it coincided with that of her lover. Feelings of unease aren’t entirely memory-based, they can’t be erased by legal or black-market editing. They are derived from the subconscious. You knew something was wrong about their disappearance.”
Morton sat back and gave her a suspicious stare.
“The Tampico alibi was a good one, wasn’t it?” Paula said.
“Yes.”
“Yes. Assuming you no longer had the memory of murdering her, neither you nor her other friends ever questioned the story that she’d left you to go there.”
“I didn’t kill her. But you’re right, it was a watertight cover-up. I had no reason to question her disappearance, especially after Broher Associates contacted me and said they were acting as intermediaries.”
“Let’s examine this again. You came back from your conference in Talansee, and found your apartment had been stripped of all your wife’s things, her clothes and possessions, and there was a message telling you she had left for good.”
“That’s right.”
“And that was enough to convince you at the time that there was nothing unusual about her leaving.”
“It was unusual, and unexpected, and quite shocking. But it didn’t make me suspicious.”
“So you knew of her affairs?”
“Yes, there had been several by then. Our marriage allowed for them. I’d had a couple myself. I’m only human, not some cold machine.”
“Did you argue the terms of the divorce?”
“No. They were all set out in the marriage contract. I knew what I was getting into.”
“What about the items removed from your apartment, did you ask for any of them to be returned?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
Morton gave Madoc a quick glance. “Tara only took her own stuff.”
“You knew what was hers, did you?”
“Sure.”
“Did anybody else?”
This time the glance Morton shot at his lawyer was a puzzled one. “Excuse me?”
“I read the transcripts of all your calls and messages to Broher Associates,” Paula said. “There was never any dispute over what was removed. So tell me this: In a home where two people have lived together for twelve years, where only those two people could possibly know whose item was whose, how is it that the killer removed only her property?”
Morton’s expression turned to one of stricken incomprehension. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but no words came out.
“No criminal gang would ever know what to take to set up the alibi,” Paula said. “It would take someone intimate with the house and its contents. There were only two of you with the exact knowledge. One of them is your ex-wife, and we know she didn’t do it.”
Morton slowly lowered his head into his hands, covering his grief and confusion. “Oh, holy shit,” he moaned. “I didn’t. Did I?”
“Yes.” Paula regarded him with the kind of sympathy normally extended to the bereaved. “You did.”
The jury took three hours to deliberate their verdict. Comment on the unisphere was that they took so long in order to enjoy a decent lunch at the taxpayers’ expense. When they filed back into the courtroom and delivered their verdict nobody was surprised that it was unanimous. The electronically disguised voice from behind the curving silver glass announced, “Guilty.”
The outbreak of chatter was swiftly silenced by the judge, who then told Morton to stand. There were, the judge said, very firm guidelines laid down for such appalling crimes: the minimum was usually twice the period of life loss.
“Given that you committed this crime purely for your own advancement, I have to agree with the prosecution’s assessment that you are a cold immoral individual who sees other people’s lives as an inconvenience to your own ambition and has no qualm in eradicating such problems. Due to your evil, Tara Jennifer Shaheef and Wyobie Cotal have suffered the loss of decades without a body, I therefore have no reluctance to imposing a punishment of one hundred and twenty years of life suspension. Sentence to begin immediately.” His gavel banged down loudly.
Tara Jennifer Shaheef leaped to her feet and screeched, “You bastard!” at her ex.
On the other side of the public gallery a hysterical Mellanie screamed incoherently, struggling against the court officials holding her back from jumping the railings to be with her guilty lover. Some members of the public around her were cheering merrily at the commotion. Morton shook his head in bewilderment as he was led out of the dock, a study in tragicomic defeat. The reporters turned en masse to the prosecution table. Hoshe Finn and Ivor Chessel were clearly delighted, smiling wildly as they shook hands. Paula Myo seemed oblivious to the commotion all around her; she was picking up loose sheets of hard copy and slotting them neatly into her briefcase. The table cleared, she walked out of the courtroom without looking around.
FOURTEEN
Wilson was now a hundred twenty-nine days into the mission, and counting. In the same way everyone else on board the Second Chance was counting. Days, hours, minutes: every little unit was being ticked off with a combination of irritation and relief. Their problem, strangely enough, was just how well the starship had worked since they departed Oaktier. He supposed it was inevitable, enough money had been poured into the design, making sure every component had multiple redundancy along with at least a two hundred percent tolerance rating. In his NASA days they’d called it goldplating. Everything on Ulysses had to work, and if some bizarre mishap did knock out a unit then three backup systems jumped up to replace it. And that was when you could still see Earth through the viewing port, while communications with Houston took a few minutes at the most. It provided a tenuous feeling of connection to the rest of the human race that had always given him a degree of security. If something had gone badly wrong, he’d always believed that NASA would ultimately do something to salvage the situation.
Today, though, the sense of isolation was stronger by orders of magnitude. Even he, with his previous experience, found their flight daunting. Should anything go wrong here in hyperspace, nobody was ever going to find them. It made him grateful for the way the starship had been constructed. This mission, he realized, had an altogether more mature feel to it than the Ulysses flight ever had.
It was a civilized voyage. First of all there was the gravity. It might only be an eighth of a gee around the rim of the life-support wheel, but it made sure everything flowed in the right direction. His body was so much more comfortable with that. Then there was the food. Instead of neat, efficient, rehydratable packets of precooked meals, the Second Chance canteen served dishes like pan-fried diver scallops with herb risotto, or loin of lamb with tarte Tatin of vegetables drizzled with a thyme and tomato sauce; and the dessert selection was dangerously broad. For recreation there were a number of gyms, which everyone dutifully attended. But most of the crew spent their spare time accessing TSI dramas. They had a huge library on board, with sexsoaps inevitably the most popular, though first-life first romances were equally fashionable, and there were numerous adaptations of classic fiction and biographies of historical characters. Wilson spent several days immersed in a sumptuous production of Mansfield Park . He’d read the novel in his first life, and was interested in the societal structure of the era that it conjured up (intriguing parallel with present-day Earth, he felt), though he was fairly sure there hadn’t been quite so many lesbian love scenes in the original book.
Between fitness sessions, meals, TSIs, and ship’s duty, he spent most of his hours with Anna. Even after all this time, he still preferred a one-woman-at-a-time lifestyle. The kind of arrangements many of the Commonwealth’s wealthy, and not-so-wealthy, favored had never really appealed to him, not like Nigel Sheldon with his thousand children and dozen-strong harem, or the Kandavu multi-families, or any other of the hundreds of variants on relationships. At heart, he knew he was as old- fashioned as the era he’d come from.
Anna, though, was good company; never demanding, happy to keep things comfortably casual. It was almost the same as before the launch, the difference this time being that everyone onboard knew about them. It didn’t cause any resentment or whispering; they were all grown-ups. Although it had never been a firm policy, one you could find written down or in a program, Wilson had rejected all applications from first-lifers.
