Pearseus: Schism

Lucas

The small assembly read like a regular who’s who of their community, with Joe, Richard and Barrett sitting around a small table. Katie sat down next to Lucas. She had discovered her cooking talents on the planet, acquiring quite a reputation among their friends. They had gotten married five years after that first fateful meeting at the crash site. She touched his hand, making a forced smile appear on his face.

The dinner on their plates would have been wolfed down any other day, but now everyone seemed to have lost their appetite, playing with their food. Everyone but Joe; having spent much of his life as a poor farmer, he never let a good meal go to waste. Only the crackle of a small fire in the corner and the sound of Joe’s wooden spoon attacking his clay plate interrupted the quiet of the small, dark room. Lucas was the first to break the silence.

“Thank you all for joining us tonight. I thought it’d give us an opportunity to discuss last week’s riot.”

The riot. That is what Croix called it afterwards, minimising his and the Armbands’ role in it. Mercifully, no-one had died, although a great number of people had been injured. Still, the physical damage was nothing compared to the wedge it had driven among the survivors. Croix had presented it as an affront to both Lucas and the memory of Captain Kibwe, and as an unfortunate proof of the validity of his arguments. Lucas had been surprised at how many supported Croix. Most had been frightened enough by his words to trust him and his new army with the city’s safety. They called themselves Loyalists to display their loyalty for their late captain and, by extension, his erstwhile first mate. Lucas felt pretty sure Kibwe would have resented that, but the man’s statue was unable to protest.

“What can we do? The man will surely come to his senses.” Joe shrugged, then let out a content sigh as he put into his mouth the last spoonful of pumpkin soup with honey and the tangy yoghurt they were experimenting with.

Barrett twitched on her chair to pull out of her pocket an e-lib. “Will he? How many e-libs are left now?”

“I assume all of them,” Richard said in a soft voice. “Unless you mean how many are left out of Croix’s hands, in which case the answer is I don’t know. Maybe a handful?”

“Am I the only one who refused to give it?” Barrett asked, placing the thin glass frame on the table. “My e-lib contains all the legislation from Earth. Without it, there can be no justice,” said Barrett.

“Sure, but what about his Armbands?” Richard asked. “What will you do when they come to your house? You all know what happened to Fred.”

The old man had tried to stop the boys from entering his house. In the scuffle he had hit his head. He was now in the hospital, and Croix had used the incident to declare unlawful any attempt to interfere with the Armbands.

Lucas drummed his fingers on the table, holding his forgotten spoon in mid-air with the other hand. “Do they even have the right to enter your home like that? What does the law say about this?”

Barrett leaned forward to pick up her e-lib. She tapped on it with nimble fingers, a bemused look on her face. “Whose law? With his amendments voted in, Croix dubbed this a crisis and dissolved the City Council. His word’s now law. So, does that make his actions legal? I have an e-lib filled to the brim with legislation. Any law passed by man, from Hammurabi’s code to twenty-first century common intellectual property rights is in here. Thousands of pages dealing with mergers and acquisitions alone. What good does that do us here?”

Shaking her head, she plonked the e-lib back on the table. “On a ship, the captain’s word is law, yet the law’s nothing more than people’s beliefs in what’s right and wrong. As these change, so does legislation. So, what is law? Law’s just people’s preconceptions and common sense put into rules. The law’s what we make of it. Tyrants use it to rule and citizens as protection against them. The worst atrocities have been committed by men believing they were doing what the law, religious or otherwise, required of them.”