"Charles L. Harness-Lethary Fair" - читать интересную книгу автора (Harness Charles L)

and that's how I got involved with the Alien.
I knew I was in line for court-appointment. The pay was nominal, the case was a sure loser. I had to
get out of town-- fast. But Judge Martin Cloke was faster. He strode into my office just as I was making
a reservation at the Surf and Sand, a seashore resort in Galveston.
The judge didn't sit down, he didn't even take off his hat. He spoke first, and he was using his mean
grim tone of voice. "He needs somebody like you, William."
"Judge-- "
"Arraignment tomorrow morning, 9 o'clock. Be there."
"Now wait a-- " But I was talking to a closing door.
Now, I don't want to give the impression that Martin Cloke is actually mean. He isn't. He's a very
decent man with a thankless job and a mortgage just like the rest of us. On the bench he's totally fair.
As a youth he had wanted to be a painter, and indeed while he was still in junior high school he had
painted a masterpiece. He had been painting by the numbers, and accidentally moved everything up one
number, so that cobalt blue became saffron yellow, and yellow became red, and so on. The astonishing
result won first prize in the Provincial School Exhibit. His parents were of course delighted. Forthwith
they got him the Van Gogh-Gauguin cerebral implant, plus all the accessories, palette, paints, beautiful
white canvas smock, and so on. But somehow the implant wiring went awry: the chroma networks failed
to connect properly, and there was a loss of color reception in the occipital lobe, with the result that the
young aspirant could see, paint, and think only in black and white. So his parents switched him to law,
which paid better anyway. But the chroma problem never went away. As a lawyer, and later as a judge,
he tended to see things only in black and white, with no intermediate shades of gray.
Not a man to waste a thing as valuable as an artist's smock, the judge had in fact put it to
extraordinary use. He had printed all his favorite Latin phrases on it in indelible black ink. He wore the
over-printed smock only in his most important cases, and in these only on the last day, when he was
about to hand down a portentous decision and was in need of the support of appropriate citations.
For his study of the law, Martin's parents bought for him the prestigious Harvard Lexus Implant, with
Latin Addenda and a lifetime subscription to Connaught's Legal Updates. Equipped with these and a high
native intelligence, he was easily the most erudite jurist in the Province.
I'll get to the Alien and his trial soon, but first some more history, starting with me.
My paternal grandfather, Hondo Whitmore, was a sergeant in the militia during the Border Wars. In
which militia? Hard to say. Sometimes he fought for the baron, sometimes against, depending on where
the money was. When he lay dying in the Old Soldiers' Home, he called me to his deathbed. "Dear boy,
there will be no more money." (He had been drawing pensions and disability from both sides.) "You're on
your own. Go into the law. Become a respected scoundrel." And with a gurgly chuckle, he died.
And so for the next six years I clerked in the law offices of Pillfeder and Wantech, and I learned the
law.
As old Mr. Amos Pillfeder explained when I reported for work. "There is nothing strange, peculiar, or
illogical about the law. You just have to understand that things are rarely what they seem. Generally,
they're something else."
 He was right. At first the law made no sense, but as the months passed it suddenly all came together.
In the sixth year I took and passed the Provincial Bar exam and was duly admitted to the bar. I left
Pillfeder and Wantech, opened my own office, and for the first month I starved.
And now back to the Alien. We had to be in court tomorrow morning, and I had yet to meet him.
Manslaughter-- that accidental killing of the old Buddhist savant Dr. Banchou-- was of course pretty
bad. For this the Alien was looking at a ten-year prison sentence. But destruction of Sara might prove
even worse, because she was owned by the Sixtrees.
Sara was an exquisite creation, and I had secretly admired her for more than thirty years. For me her
demise was a painful personal loss, like watching the Mona Lisa pass through a shredder, or a Gutenberg
Bible go up in flames.
I first saw her when I was ten years old. Word had got around that she worked for the Sixtrees in the