Rye had thought she'd pity the poor soul who had to defend Lark, but Caesar Romita blew it out of the water. Deliberately tossing aside the issue of personal loathsomeness, he turned it all into a free-speech case. A very smart move, with how touchy everyone was about the issue now, though it irritated her that Lark got rights she had never had until last year.
As Romita came as close to convincing Rye as possible, given how loudly 'the lark' had sung from the rooftops about why the Districts were inferior (most of her family had dismissed it as pandering towards the lowest common denominator in the Capitol and then believed everything he said about 'terrorists', 'wreckers', and 'the glory of the Hunger Games'), Lark himself sat in the front back corner with a completely inscrutable expression on his face. Without his makeup and artfully styled hair and beard, he looked absolutely ordinary. Dark round eyes, light-brown skin, buzz-cut black hair more than tinged with grey - he could have been any middle-aged man Rye saw on the tram back home.
"I hope the judges don't fall for it," Rye whispered to Carver. Rakesh was at the assistant Gamemakers' trial, where he was currently making a presentation. "Incitement isn't covered by free speech."
Carver chuckled. "A case on the limits of free speech? What is this, the twentieth century?"
"Something along those lines." The willingness of the new government to resurrect principles nobody had cared about since before the Cataclysm seemed completely crazy to Rye, but things were already so crazy, she supposed there was no better time for it than now.
Romita said something about free press, ignoring the fact that Lark had literally encouraged murders. The media, and even some of her colleagues, were sincerely outraged by some of the defenses the defense counsel used. Rye wasn't. She wasn't sure if she was just callous - though had someone tried to argue that the restrictions on movement had been a good thing, she'd certainly have exploded - or if they were too emotional.
Fifteen minutes later, lunch break was announced. Gratefully, Rye and Carver linked up with the prosecutors from Two and headed to their cafeteria. "What do you think so far?" Rye asked Laur Mason, the deputy chief prosecutor from Two who was twenty-five years older than her. Jinwe was off politicking, so Mason was replacing her like Rye was replacing Rakesh and Anna Goldfield.
"Honestly, don't ask me - I know as much about free-speech cases as you or anyone else."
"Let's hope the judges aren't included in that category," Carver said, looking at something on her phone. "I'd rather they not make a stupid decision that'll stand as precedent. Ooh, nice, they repaired that curb."
"Curb?" Yekutiel Aharoni asked. "Where?"
"The one by our house I always complain about when we go to the black market."
"That's good," Rye said. "I think poor Lope is tired of hauling you up and down it."
Carver chuckled. "I'm still holding out hope for someone to shrink hovercraft engines so I can fly."
"If it hasn't happened so far," Nora Pillar said sadly, "I doubt it ever will."
"Oh, great, buckwheat again," Mason said as they entered the cafeteria and looked at the board.
"It's the second week in a row," Rye joined in. She was sick and tired of buckwheat at this point. "How long are we going to eat the same thing for lunch for?"
"Ah, so that's where your daughter gets it from," Carver said with a chuckle.
Rye could only cringe - she had complained the other day about how Flora was refusing to eat semolina for breakfast. She said nothing, grabbing a tray and joining the queue. Buckwheat with bits of something, a smaller portion of succotash, a round piece of flat bread, and an apple.
"This trial is getting to me," Mason said as he dug into his buckwheat. Despite his complaints, he ate eagerly enough, which could not be said for Flora, if Barrow was to be believed. "Had a nightmare the other night."
"About the trial?" Aharoni asked.
Mason chuckled. "What, a nightmare about sitting in that courtroom forever? Brr. No, it was about - before."
Rye nodded sympathetically. Her own nightmares about her children being Reaped had stopped completely, so at least she had that. "You want to talk about it?" she asked, trying to wrap the succotash in the bread. She gave up and ate it with the fork.
"Why not?" Mason tore his bread to pieces. "I dreamt I got arrested for something, and I was being led somewhere. We had to run down a hill too steep to stay standing on, so we were all falling, and somebody was shouting at us that if we fell down, we'd be shot."
"I remember I got arrested once," Aharoni said with a sigh. "They just told me to stop saying certain things or I'd never get into university. I stopped saying these things."
That was typical. Rye had always known to not complain about the government outside the apartment. It had taken years before she and Barrow had trusted each other enough to complain about anyone more important than a municipal official.
"I saw an interesting allegory on the Web," Carver said. "Somewhere abroad, a bear was freed from a small cage in which it had lived for years. It continued to behave as if it was in a cage, walking around in a small radius and not stepping beyond that invisible line."
"And we lived in that cage for generations," Rye said. "Actual organized rebels aside, it's shocking how many people are showing themselves to be dedicated to democracy. All those politicians - where did they come from?"
Carver used her long spoon to eat buckwheat. Half still got everywhere except her mouth. "I really should have asked Lope to help out," she said. "Ah well. In any case, I'm also shocked. I don't know the first thing about democracy."
"I heard a foreign correspondent wax poetic about it," Aharoni said. "As the phoenix is born out of flame and ashes, so is the Panem eagle arisen out of the ruins."
"Though not without taking some damage," Mason remarked ruefully. "Did you see that abomination they hung up in Congress? If an eagle can look derpy, that one's it. It's like they went to an artist and said, give us an eagle nobody will ever be afraid of."
"Maybe that was the plan all along," Rye said - in her opinion, the eagle was quite cute. She ate the buckwheat, feeling it stick in her throat. Perhaps she shouldn't have been so harsh on poor Flora.
They ate in silence for a few seconds, listening to snatches of conversation at nearby tables. Opinions on Romita's defense, political arguments, gossip.
"I got a job offer," Carver said, tilting her head and just barely getting the bread into her mouth. She bit off a piece, chewed, and swallowed. "Well, more like a volunteer position offer, all they'll pay me is a few snacks. The children's hospital wants me to come in and talk to kids who just became paralyzed."
"Makes sense," Mason said, trying to pick up the last bits of buckwheat. "I'm sure everyone interested in those sorts of things knows there's a quadriplegic prosecutor at Lodgepole."
Carver laughed. "That'd be an important lesson - see, kids? Just because you can barely use your limbs or not at all won't stop you from doing a job that'll make half the country hate you. They actually found out about me from boccia. My club leader informed the entire quadriplegic world, which apparently exists, that they've got a lawyer with cerebral palsy."
"Maybe they could come to Thread's cross-examination," Mason said seriously. "That might encourage them. Being a lawyer - really, you just need to be able to read and think critically, there's technology here in the Capitol that helps with writing and speaking."
"That's a great idea," Carver said. "I'll pass it on. They can sit next to the VIPs in the front row - seating's an accessibility nightmare."
"Aren't you worried they'll refuse to come to the trial?" Rye asked.
Carver shook her head. "The younger ones probably don't grasp what is going on and the older ones will hopefully be willing to attend just for the sake of watching me try to stop Thread from actually exploding."
"I wonder if Lark will explode," Mason said.
"Probably," Rye predicted. "They've got a District prosecutor cross-examining him."
"We should wager on whether he'll use slurs," Aharoni joked.
The day had been a difficult one for Stephen. One guard drove drunk into a pole and was in hospital, another had been arrested for selling meth, and now, the lesser criminals and witnesses thought that the yard was for their personal amusements. The scheduling of everyone's time outside was a major headache. Despite all of his attempts, he had been unable to separate the two categories.
Not too far from him, two adolescent witnesses were passionately making out. They were too young to be held legally accountable for crimes against humanity, but they were also flight risks, and so they had to live in the jail and interact with the likes of the Death Squad. "You two - up!"
The two sprung apart and leapt to attention, the boy awkwardly fixing his clothes.
"What is the meaning of this?"
No answer.
"Is this what you believe to be an appropriate use of your time?"
"No, warden!" two voices chorused. Someone behind Stephen began to giggle and then reconsidered.
"If I catch you one more time, I will give you both tracking anklets and kick you out to the streets, and then you can do whatever you want."
Silence. That was a bluff, as Stephen had been waiting for a shipment of tracking anklets for months now, but living in jail was better than being fifteen and homeless, at least to the underage dwellers of the witness wing.
"Will you continue to engage in this impropriety again?" Stephen asked.
"No, warden!" the adolescents lied.
"Very well. Dismissed!" In the distance, two Death Squad members had gotten into their heads that this was an appropriate place for gymnastics, so he had to go deal with that. Rosebashvili, a young defendant from the Peacekeepers' trial, tried to show off for Li and Allen of the Death Squad his ability to do a backflip. As Stephen marched up, Li performed a double backflip from a standing position - a highly impressive feat.
"Can you do triple?"
Not noticing Stephen, Li went backspringing down the yard, eventually leaping into the air and just barely completing three somersaults. Quite a few people, including guards, applauded, and Li bowed, smiling widely. Laughing, Allen picked him up and placed him first on her shoulders, and then on her hands. Li squatted down and went into a handstand. Stephen stopped and considered the fact that Allen was holding up the tall and broad man with just her palms pressing up against his, and Li was balancing on his hands on such an unstable support. Had they been in a gymnastic association back home, they'd have won every competition.
Stephen switched to walking in that way that made everyone take notice of him. Instantly, the mood soured. Guards pretended to be attentive and prisoners wandered off. Li let go of one of Allen's hands. Now, his entire weight was balanced on Allen's right palm. How was her arm capable of such loads?
"Cease this circus at once," Stephen ordered. Good thing he had a date with Angelo tonight - he needed a break.
Li delicately slipped down, moving like a slime seeping down a wall. "Yes, warden," he said - he did not know how to respond to authority any other way.
"Warden, we were just trying to entertain the others," Allen said more forcefully.
And they definitely needed some of that - anyone would go crazy sitting in a cell and contemplating their role in mass murders. "Be as that may, this is neither the time nor place."
"Yes, warden," they said, automaton-like.
Once this batch of prisoners went back to their cells, Stephen went to the witness wing to monitor the situation. The adolescent witnesses weren't the only ones interested in those sorts of things. So far, the adults had been too shocked to do more than hold hands, but they were acclimatizing now. Stephen looked into one of the group cells, where he had accidentally placed two spouses into the same cell. It was obvious which two of the women were together - one had her head on the other's shoulder as they played cards.
If only those tracking anklets would finally arrive! The jail was horribly overcrowded, and none of the child soldiers should have been here at all. The children didn't complain, because they didn't know how, but the adults did, and loudly. Stephen knew that many other wardens brushed aside complaints of the sort with a curt 'be grateful you aren't being beaten', but in Stephen's opinion, that was the lowest bar that could be cleared. They were the victors. They had the moral high ground, and needed to act like it.
Unfortunately, not being beaten was one of the few things the dwellers of the group cells had going for them. Strictly speaking, there wasn't enough air for so many people in the cell, which meant they were forced to constantly keep the window open, even with temperatures dropping. And in such cramped conditions, differences in personality could rapidly turn toxic and absolutely ruin the mental health of everyone in the cell. Unlike before, however, everyone received the medications they needed and got enough to eat. Now if only they could stop incarcerating the children!
Once Stephen's shift ended, he tried to put the jail's problems out of his head. He put on his off-duty uniform in his office and looked critically in the mirror.
"Anything special today?" Tiller asked, not looking up from her paperwork.
Stephen chuckled. "He promised a romantic date. I told him that if we were seen entering a hotel room together, that would really get everyone talking."
"Romantic date?" Tiller sounded skeptical. "You mean sitting around and petting that fat cat?"
"Just because I do not make a habit of frequenting the sort of places where our soldiers get arrested-"
"Fine, fine!" Tiller held up her hands. "I'm sure you can have fun as well as anyone else."
Stephen smiled to himself and adjusted his cap.
When Leon walked into the apartment, he was immediately confronted with a furious Marcellus - whose face and neck was bright-green. Only small rectangles around his eyes, where his glasses had saved him, were clean, making this the first time ever the unbearably expensive lenses on a wire frame had made Marcellus's life easier.
"What happened?" Leon asked.
"What does it look like?" Marcellus raged as Mom scrubbed his neck with some cloth dampened with alcohol, going by the smell. "Give it to me, I can do it myself." He tried to remove the brilliant-green from his neck, with limited success. Leon recalled being six and having chickenpox. Mom and Dad had covered the pustules with brilliant-green, making him dotted green all over, and the colour had stained the bed sheets permanently.
"Who threw it at you?" And right in the face, too - that was uncommonly brazen.
"Who do you think? Some kid. I knew those DPs were trouble."
Oh no. "Do you know who exactly it is?" It was odd that Leon was hoping for a Capitol-born kid to have been the culprit, but Marcellus didn't need any more reasons to hate everything District.
"I asked them individually. Something like five or six all blamed the same person, but I know it can't be her. She's just a bit wild. She'd never do something like this." He looked at the cloth, cursed, and poured some more alcohol on it. "They're blaming her because they don't like her. I know it. It had to be one of those DPs. They're the only ones with the gall to do such a thing."
He had recently been complaining about a bizarre new trend where kids threw things at the board while the teacher was writing, sometimes hitting the teacher. And since the teacher didn't see the culprit, the most they could do was whack a random child or single out the usual troublemaker, both of which did not sound like good approaches to Leon. "But how did they get you in the face?"
"Turned around at just the wrong moment. It was in a paper bag."
Leon was no detective, but he knew what brilliant-green was like. "And it didn't leak anywhere? No stains on someone's hands or desk?"
"No. Whoever it was, they're a real hooligan. Tomorrow, I'm going to go in, line up all the DPs, and say I'll punish all of them if the culprit doesn't step forward."
Leon felt like his throat had closed up, but Mom spoke up for him. "You can't do that!" she said. "Now the Capitol-born kids are going to think they'll get away with anything!"
Thank God for Mom and her pragmatic thinking. Moral arguments wouldn't have worked.
"They never do anything of the sort," Marcellus said dismissively.
"Now they might!"
"Look, who spends all day with them - me or you?" Marcellus said harshly. "I know they won't."
Mom wrung her hands. "You'll alienate the DPs. If you punish them just because of where they're from, they'll stop trying to impress you and be good students."
"You think I care? I want them out of my classroom. That trash should stay in the Districts where it belongs."
"Marcellus, you need to see a psychologist."
"Why?"
"You were never like this before," Mom said in a pleading voice.
"Like what?" Marcellus asked, crossing his arms. "I need to enforce discipline if I don't want chaos in my classroom."
"Now that's rich, coming from you," Leon said.
Marcellus drew back, hissing - he knew what Leon referred to. When Marcellus had been in grade three, his teacher had been a tyrant with a penchant for loudly blowing a whistle right in the faces of perceived troublemakers. One day, Marcellus' patience had snapped, and he had leapt onto his desk and shouted 'Why don't you go ahead and blow that whistle louder - I'm not entirely deaf yet!'
Now that Leon thought about it, that incident may have been what led to Marcellus' budding disapproval of the regime. Ms. Renner had dragged him down by the ear, beat him with her cane until it snapped, and then kept going. When Leon saw Marcellus later that day, his brother's face had been covered in blood. It wasn't too hard to imagine him realizing on some subconscious level that a regime that allowed someone to do this to anyone had no right to exist, even if he had lacked the words to express it at that point.
"How dare you!" Marcellus shouted. "Have I ever as much as threatened to hit a child? How can you compare the two?"
Leon saw his chance to take the argument back to the logical plane. "They'll think you're threatening to hit them."
"No they won't, they know me."
"But Marcellus, this is still completely absurd." Good thing Mom wasn't taking his side like usual. "Threatening to punish the innocent to draw out the guilty - it's like a hostage-taking operation."
At that, Marcellus became even more offended, and Leon went to his room, trying to ignore the argument. Sebastian had suggested that maybe Marcellus was upset that things weren't as good as he had dreamed before and was lashing out, and the bits of propaganda he had internalized were making him choose DPs as the target. Maybe she was right, but that didn't make Leon feel any better. He flopped down on his bed and took out his phone. Since there weren't any new texts, he decided to play the snake game instead. The weather outside was terrible, overcast and threatening to rain. There was no getting out of this apartment until he moved out, which would be in about a week.
Stephen knocked on Angelo's door, heart beating fast with anticipation. As always, a part of him was terrified that the door would open to reveal Angelo's grandmother about to hit him with a slipper, but there was only his boyfriend on the other side of the door. "Hey," Stephen said, stepping inside the apartment.
"Hey." They kissed briefly. "Guess what I got?"
"I don't know - what?"
Angelo smiled. "Check this out." He picked up something wrapped in paper from the table. Stephen instantly realized what it was.
"A fish?" he asked, feeling his good mood evaporate. "Angelo, you know there's people in government institutions who aren't getting what they need." Stephen took off his shoes and walked towards Angelo. "You need to hand it over."
"It's just a fish," Angelo said, putting the newsprint-wrapped package on the table. "You don't have to panic over every scrap of food."
"You already have enough to eat, others don't. The calculation seems simple to me."
Angelo crossed his arms. "We're not in Thirteen."
"And? We're still on strict rationing. The entire point of rationing is that there isn't enough for everyone to take as much as they want."
"We're going to fight over a fish?" Angelo asked, leaning on the table.
Stephen wanted to tear his hair out. "You're the one who's breaking the law and also taking away food from the most vulnerable."
"Oh, so now you're going to drag those orphans into this?"
"Yes," Stephen said plainly. "Do you know how many orphans could be fed with this fish?"
"No." Angelo raised his chin. "Please enlighten me."
"Cooked salmon has about two hundred calories per one hundred grams-" Stephen began but was cut off by Angelo flapping his hand.
"I should have known arguing with you about food is pointless," he said with a sigh. He took the fish into the kitchen and put it in the fridge.
Strangely, Stephen felt terrible about winning the argument. Angelo must have spent hours pounding the pavement, looking for something nice to give him, and here he was ruining the entire thing. "I'm sorry for ruining your plans. That fish must have cost a lot."
"I can afford it."
"Still."
They stood there in silence until Feather meowed loudly and wobbled into the room. He had become more mobile recently, able to walk across the room without needing a break.
"There's my aspic!" Angelo said, getting to one knee and rubbing his fingers together. "How's that paw of yours? Feeling better?" The poor cat was so fat, his legs couldn't carry him, resulting in a sprained paw which was currently wrapped up.
"Don't call him that," Stephen said, laughing. "Or when you invite me for New Year's, I'll think that you're serving up Feather."
Angelo tried to cuddle Feather, who purred, sounding like a hovercraft taking off. More and more of Feather was clean every time Stephen saw him - as he slimmed down, he was able to reach more and more of his body. Soon enough, he wouldn't require regular baths. "See? Date's not ruined. Feather's here."
Stephen remembered Tiller's joke about his romantic date consisting of petting Feather. Well, if she thought fun dates required doing idiotic things, that was her business. "You know, I really am-"
"No issue. I should have stopped to think. You're not like most people."
Stephen sat on the floor to snuggle with Feather and Angelo, scratching both of them on their necks. Which one was needier was an open question. "Has he lost weight?"
"Two hundred grams since last weighing."
"Good."
Feather meowed something that probably was the cat version of swearing.
"How was work?" Angelo asked eagerly, intensifying the belly rubs.
"Nothing much." Stephen told him how things had been the past few days. "Honestly, Li is bringing me to the breaking point. If not for our date being today, I might have gone past it."
Angelo swore loudly - Feather had stepped on his hand, crushing the delicate bones. "The blob nearly stepped on my balls this morning," he complained. "I just barely rotated my leg in time." Stephen laughed out loud. "It won't be funny when he loses more weight and starts jumping onto things. He'll step on yours, then." Feather lay down on his side with a final wobble. "I'm not surprised the teenagers are trying to hook up."
"Me neither," Stephen said. "I remember how at our outdoor exercises, the instructors took it as a personal offense if someone had the energy to as much as breathe in the evenings - and kids still managed to sneak away."
Angelo chuckled, draping an arm over Stephen's shoulders. "Did you?"
"Oh, yes. I was terribly undisciplined in those days. More interested in cute boys than anything else."
"I can't imagine you doing push-ups with a drill sergeant shouting at you," Angelo said with a shake of his head. He smiled. "Honestly, I can't imagine you breaking the rules at all, with how you explode at the guards."
"They're just kids," Stephen said with a sigh, running his hands over Feather's soft fur. "Kids do stupid things. But these ones are occupation troops with too much time and money on their hands. I remember I was seventeen and I was caught having sex in the barracks. Sergeant made us do drill with heavy packs - but with each other as the packs." Angelo nearly choked. "Yeah, it's the sort of thing you laugh about in hindsight. But these kids? They drive drunk, have unsafe sex, overdose on all sorts of things. Some of these mistakes, they just don't survive. And there's nothing I can do to make them understand that." How many of the occupation troops had already died, become permanently disabled, been arrested? To those kids, it was one big adventure. They didn't understand how peace could be as dangerous as war.
Angelo patted Stephen on the back. "It's terrible."
"It is." Stephen scratched Feather's cheek. The cat's eyes narrowed with pleasure. "I didn't come here to complain to you."
"Who will you complain to, if not me?" Angelo said, kissing Stephen on the cheek.
"Tiller."
"Give the poor second lieutenant a break, she has to do the jail paperwork."
Stephen laughed out loud. "And you have to clean rubble."
"Exactly - I'm so much better off than she is. Besides, I've got a way to unwind from all that."
"And what is that?"
Angelo covered up Feather's ears. "Tying you up and fucking you in the ass, that's what."
"You really think Feather can understand what you're saying?" Stephen scratched him under the chin.
"I don't want to risk it," Angelo said in a mock-serious tone. "I swear my cousin communicates with him telepathically. I keep on worrying he'll report to my grandparents."
"If they're anything like my grandfather, you are right to fear." It was ironic that the same man who had scolded Stephen for dating around as a teenager had later gone on to pester him to find someone and settle down already. "That's an intriguing way to relax you have there, by the way."
Angelo leaned onto Stephen, his hands on Stephen's thighs. "It is, isn't it?" Stephen could feel Angelo's warmth. He leaned into it, acutely aware that Feather was looking at them with a disapproving air. Angelo noticed that, too. "Shut up, you stupid cat. You're sterilized, you know nothing about sex."
"How about we relocate?"
"Yeah."
As they walked into the bedroom, Stephen's gaze fell on the table, and he kicked himself for ruining Angelo's present like that. At least his boyfriend wasn't still angry about that.
"So, what did you say?" Stephen asked playfully as he undid his tie. "Something about tying me up?"
"Until you beg for mercy," Angelo whispered seductively, draping his arms over Stephen's shoulders. "And then I'll keep going, because I know you'll love it."
"We'll need a safeword for that," Stephen realized.
"Any ideas?" Angelo said quickly, face already just centimetres from Stephen's.
Stephen tried to think fast to not kill the mood. It was hard to think with Angelo pressing up against him. "Er, safeword."
"Good enough." Angelo leaned forward slightly to kiss him on the lips.
Mary had known that Lark's case would be the most difficult. All he had been was a person ranting onscreen, and even if it was an obvious case of incitement, demanding the death penalty for him felt like too much. She had brushed up on the precedents, and there was so little, it could really go either way.
Other countries each had their own laws on what kind of speech was to be tolerated and not tolerated. There were more than a few precedents for executing someone of Lark's calibre by means of lamp-posts or after a show trial, but that was hardly what the IDC was going for. There were also precedents for letting him off the hook, but that had been in situations where only the dictator had been executed. In still other places, Larks had been banned from working as a journalist, participation in politics, or something else of the sort - but it was not this kind of lustration the IDC was going for, either.
In post-Cataclysm North America, there wasn't anything of use, either. Mary had been highly reluctant to go before that, but if they were going to 'bring back the Constitution', as Paylor had it, it made sense to look at a time when the Constitution had been respected. Even without the Constitution there was precedent to execute Lark, but what about domestic law? What sort of example would it set to execute someone for words, even fighting words?
Mary had found an interesting court case - or rather, Dr. Nurbeko (who didn't let being in Tehran for a conference stop them) had sent it to her, because they thought it was funny. Nearly 300 years ago, in 1949, someone had been convicted in a local court for violating a breach-of-peace ordinance that forbade certain types of inflammatory speech. The Supreme Court deemed that the ordinance had been unconstitutional and reversed the conviction, but three of the judges had dissented, and one of them had been Robert Jackson, who must have been very annoyed that the precedent he had worked so hard for just a few years earlier was being thrown out the window.
The Court reverses this conviction by reiterating generalized approbations of freedom of speech with which, in the abstract, no one will disagree. Doubts as to their applicability are lulled by avoidance of more than passing reference to the circumstances of Terminiello's speech and judging it as if he had spoken to persons as dispassionate as empty benches, or like a modern Demosthenes practicing his Philippics on a lonely seashore.
But the local court that tried Terminiello was not indulging in theory. It was dealing with a riot, and with a speech that provoked a hostile mob and incited a friendly one, and threatened violence between the two. When the trial judge instructed the jury that it might find Terminiello guilty of inducing a breach of the peace if his behavior stirred the public to anger, invited dispute, brought about unrest, created a disturbance or molested peace and quiet by arousing alarm, he was not speaking of these as harmless or abstract conditions. He was addressing his words to the concrete behavior and specific consequences disclosed by the evidence. He was saying to the jury, in effect, that, if this particular speech added fuel to the situation already so inflamed as to threaten to get beyond police control, it could be punished as inducing a breach of peace.
But was there a direct line between Lark's broadcasts and the atrocities? Was propaganda the reason why a hundred schoolchildren had been lined up against the wall of their yard and shot? No matter how much Mary argued that the answer was 'yes' and Lark needed to pay with his life for it, the doubts remained. She really wasn't a very good prosecutor.
"Why did he even call this witness?"
Jolted out of her thoughts, Mary looked around, the words of the witness suddenly registering in her brain. This was Lark's assistant, and he was saying that his boss had never been a hateful person. But this was not why Lark was in the dock. Mary remembered the propaganda they had shown the court months ago. He had been the government's loudspeaker, convincing the people to hate each other. Lark and Brack were just two representatives of the propaganda system that had enabled the atrocities.
As Mary watched, the witness floundered under cross-examination and was soon let go, reliability in complete tatters. Lark took the stand next. Mary took careful notes during the direct examination. She had written an outline of that section of her closing arguments, and this was exactly what she had expected. Romita was very, very careful. He stepped around the issue of what the propaganda had contained, getting Lark to say that he had simply been expressing an opinion. Mary noted down that he would most likely concede that Lark's words had not been protected speech, but insist that the death penalty was too much.
The direct examination ended, and Ashford Pulzer stepped up to the lectern. The cross began slowly, as always, Ashford starting out with easy questions Lark could answer.
"You said under direct examination that you simply stated your opinions, correct?" Ashford asked with twenty minutes left in the day.
"Yes."
"Everything you said was simply your opinion?"
"Yes."
"When you said, and I quote Document 0-581 page three paragraph two, 'The Districts are simply inferior to us', was that your opinion?"
"No - I was stating a fact there."
Mary saw Judge Meadowcreek tense as if she had been slapped. The others were used to being insulted in court and did not bat an eye. Romita looked ready to tear out his hair.
Ashford continued along that line, getting Lark to admit the intensity of his bigotry. Mary doubted that would help, as Lark was not on trial for his loathsomeness, but it would certainly not predispose the judges in his favour.
"I think that's a step too far," Lai said, taking a sip of her tea. Dora and Juan were sitting with their assistants on the living-room couch with tea and cakes freshly baked by the Rolands. "I do think this is incitement of the worst sort, but I would never vote to hang someone for incitement."
"I disagree." Juan cut a slice from a small cylindrical cake with a spiral pattern on the inside. "If a general orders a mass execution, they are on the hook for that. If such an important propagandist calls for mass executions, they cannot evade that responsibility. It is thanks to these Larks that anyone was willing to die for the regime in the first place."
Guzman inspected a small cupcake before eating it in one bite. The judges gave extra money to their housekeepers so that they could buy luxuries like extra sugar and white flour. "I can't decide," she said. "I think he must be punished. His propaganda was not protected speech by any stretch of the imagination. But hanging?"
Dora had dealt with incitement cases before. There had been perhaps one or two cases of incitement to murder someone who was being accused of a crime - usually, the Peacekeepers hadn't bothered with disputes of the sort, forcing people to try to seek their own justice. There had also been quite a few cases of incitement of anti-government action. That had been punished quite severely, with many of the more straightforward cases never making it to trial, the offender being killed extrajudicially or thrown into a secret prison instead.
Before, Dora had thought that objectivity was when she looked at the crime in a vacuum, not taking into account the context. Someone who had gotten a bit carried away when complaining about the price of potatoes was judged the same way as a student who had paid too much attention to their grandparents' stories about the past. But was that really justice, to punish a true believer the same way as someone who had let an incautious word slip when they found out their children would go to bed hungry tonight?
Dora had never executed anyone for words. She had never been asked to do so, whether by a superior's knowing nod at a meeting or with direct instructions, as offenders of that calibre never got even a day in the courtroom. Was it really just to execute someone for incitement to crimes against humanity? The young people in the Capitol who had willingly gone to put down the Rebellion had grown up on Lark and his ilk. He could be blamed for poisoning the minds of two generations.
But he had never given orders or made policy. He had just screamed out of every smoothing-iron about the horrors of the Dark Days and why the Games were necessary. Loathsome as that was, and Dora had to admit she loathed Lark for that, she could not vote to hang him.
Watching Lark's cross-examination, Mary had to amend her previous conclusions. Every word out of Lark's mouth condemned him further. It was as if he was going out of his way to weave the rope that would hang him. He answered a question about the Hunger Games with propagandistic quotes about how it had been an honour for the Districts - Sean Gaudet of Four showed no reaction, but Mary knew he had to be thinking of his sister, who had actually thought it was an honour and run away to train for the Games, and then die in them.
A little icon in the corner of Mary's laptop screen lit up. Mary clicked on it - it was a message from Reed, who was sitting too far away to talk to her directly.
Are you sure reincarnation isn't real and Lark isn't Julius Streicher reborn? :)
Mary smiled inwardly, keeping her face blank. Every dictatorship has its Lark. A person can't be reborn as multiple people, from what I've heard. :)
I pity the world if it is currently inhabited by multiple Larks.
Lark, in the meanwhile, tried to get to safer ground by insisting he had been just a television personality. He was not wrong there, but that was not the issue. Even yesterday's outburst had been enough to irritate the judges, and he was burying himself more and more with every answer. If Mary managed to get a majority of the judges to at least contemplate the possibility of execution, it was in the prosecution's favour that they would be biased, making securing the supreme penalty much more likely.
For his part, Romita sat at the defense counsel table, taking notes. His face showed no emotion as he looked at Ashford, then at Lark, and then back at his notepad. Next to him, his assistant was staring at her computer with an interest that revealed it was not Lark's defense she was looking at.
Mary looked up at the clock. Mid-morning break in half an hour. The audience was dozing; many people had already gotten up and left. The press section, too, was mostly empty. Mary's eye went to the corner closest to the dock, where the three correspondents who seldom missed a day were clustered. As always, they were looking around the courtroom, looking for something they could write down. Today, Mary would be in her office after lunch break. It would be a shame to miss out on the beginning of Thread's case, but she was, as always, buried in a mound of paperwork she needed to do.
Dora was still not used to being the sort of judge who received special treatment. She sat at the table, feeling inwardly smug that here she was at a 'private gathering' and she hadn't even needed to break a single law to do it. Take that, everyone who ever told her to loosen up!
"Our own room at a fine restaurant," Drexel mused, thinking along the same lines as her. "I dreamed of this once. A separate dining room, the most exclusive of entertainment. But it never happened. I wasn't friendly enough, didn't make favourable impressions. So they didn't give me these sorts of cases."
Dora's temporary good mood dissipated. So she hadn't been that sort of judge. It had been little consolation for the people in her courtroom. The mere fact that judges had dreamed of dining with government functionaries and businesspeople said a lot. And it felt strange to be sitting here with her fellow judges, dining on bean stew and baked vegetables and fresh fruit (Dora hated her doctors sometimes, but following their dietary recommendations did make her feel much better) while others starved. Before, it had been a matter of course that she ate and others did not, but it felt wrong now. Why was she eating this delicious eggplant with tomato, cheese, and herbs while others queued for soup and bread?
The reason for the gathering - Rosalinda, who turned sixty-five today - asked for the 'exclusive entertainment' to be sent in with a gesture. This was something that Dora had truly dreamed of, once upon a time. To be in the company of a Victor, even as guests at the same party? That was the stuff dreams had been made of. Had someone told Rosalinda just a few years ago that one would appear for her birthday, she would have presumed this heralded a promotion, or the successful marriage of a close relative, or something else of the sort. But now, Rudolf Wang, Nine's Victor of the Forty-Fourth, was a simple singer, even if his status still meant something, and performed at all sorts of gatherings. Dora did the calculation - he was forty-nine years old. An ordinary middle-aged man, not that much older than Rose, his past was not written on his face.
"Good evening, honoured judges," Wang said with a slight bow as the band did final preparations. "Judge Wyatt, I believe you are from our beloved Oh-my-hand, or Centre, as it was officially known?"
Rosalinda laughed. "Rudy, you'll laugh, but I once did try someone accused of killing and dismembering their date."
"Call me Rudolf, please. But how interesting! Now, this is a song for our mutual home. Perhaps not the best time for it, but I'm sure you'll agree that fall is the best time to think of spring."
Before Dora could contemplate the implication of that, Wang launched into song.
Zero degrees, winter plans its retreat
January cuts the skies, and they weep
From the south the wind crawls
Like the beggar, stays low
Devours, the weakling, the dirty old snow!
And behind, like a plague - comes the spring, a-ha!
On McCollum's, the boots still run to and fro
On McCollum's the chaos still queues for its bread
On McCollum's the jail stares out of its window
Consists as it does of lonely young people
Who did not find a reason
For the cost of a fire.
How perplexing you are - oh, spring, a-ha!
In the puddles, the water reflects all it sees
The scraps of the houses and the columns of people
Quarantined blocks of smallpox and flus
And the heaps of the factories, and the coop of a kiosk
With its papers and leaflets
And Miller's Day posters.
The cause of this all - the spring, a-ha!
Ho, Omaha, Centre, Fort Never-wayward
Heroes' Square, that old winter graveyard
Child of a nation, so unlike its parent
Pale and timid but never aberrant
Foundling raised by a dead revolution
Eating the scraps of the old constitution
Marketplace peddlers, their hands and feet swollen
Sell buns steamed and baked, by kids like you stolen
Marked by the centuries, born to the dying
Burned thrice to ashes by those deaf to the crying.
Your greedy devouring of spring's revelations
Sends through my mind unwise contemplations
Omaha, child, how can one not love
Your wide-open terrified eyes?
Fill my plate and my cup, oh spring - a-ha!
Dora clapped out of instinct, trying to not contemplate that one time she had spent the better part of an hour trying to get a five-year-old Jonathan to understand that you couldn't say you can't wait for snow to fall. Jack would have loved this song, which explained why Rosalinda looked so offended. The rest of them also didn't look too happy. For her part, Dora knew nothing about pre-Dark Days history aside from court cases, but she could still guess at the meaning of some of the references to the shattered state era (which, she had not been surprised to discover, was called the Successor States period everywhere else on the continent).
"Well, I hope you enjoyed that." Wang bowed to Rosalinda again. "Now, the next song." It was about icicles and salts, and Dora suspected it was not the stuff spread in the Capitol proper during winter that Wang meant by the latter. Rosalinda didn't seem to like that one, either. Fortunately, the rest of the songs were about friendship, which pleased the judges more.
A/N: The case from 1949 Mary thinks about is Terminiello v. City of Chicago.
The song at the end is loosely inspired by DDT's Весна (Spring) (i.e. I directly translated some lines, altered others, and made up enough to make it its own thing). The song has some romantic elements but I swapped that for familial love.
By 'salts', Wang means 'bath salts'; the icicles are actual icicles that fall on people's heads and kill them because the municipal services had their budget stolen by the mayor so they can't clear snow and ice.
Dismemberment is a running joke in/about St. Petersburg.