The Janus Paradox
by Margaret Pearce
Part 1 appears in this issue.
conclusion
George looked with an uncomprehending horror at the young girl sprawled over the bench. The blood was a shocking and garish red against the white of her robes. Her jugular vein had been cut. Her face was remote and peaceful, but the waist-length hair was an unnatural shade of dark red, matted and sticky from the neck down.
He looked at the figure prostrate on the floor, still clutching the long bloodstained sliver of glass. Jarid nodded.
“Why?” George asked.
“Most High Balancer,” came muffled tones from the floor. “I am bent indeed. For two months I had worked on my screen, and Galanea came in and shattered it. In my rage, I picked up a sliver and struck.”
“You killed the girl because you were in a temper over your broken screen?” George’s eyes kept straying back to the pathetic body crumpled over the bench. She looked to have been such a pretty girl.
“I am indeed bent, honoured sir,” was the mournful acknowledgement.
Jarid waited, his dark eyes on George’s face. For an uncomfortable moment George remembered that through his eyes everyone on the entire planet waited for his decision, monitoring his thoughts.
George nodded and turned to leave. Jarid and the others would be aware of his wishes for the girl to be buried. Confinement of the murderer would not be considered necessary. There was nowhere he could go.
“It is the second time he has killed, honoured sir,” Jarid volunteered. “He raised his hand in violence against his brother. He has a temper that rides him.”
George was indecisive. There were no gaols on Janus and no psychologists for rehabilitation, as though a telepath could be rehabilitated and restructured. Yet someone who murdered on impulse was a danger to society, even more than a premeditating murderer whose intentions at least could be forestalled.
Jarid nodded agreement to the inevitable conclusion “He will have to be destroyed. It is the custom. You will have to stay until the papers are prepared for signing.”
George had a place put at his disposal and waited the three days for Jarid to come back with the documents. The Janarians were their usual courteous and kindly selves, but their grief was almost physical.
No one mentioned the murder, or where the murderer was, and George, as he walked around the area, saw the scene over and over in his mind.
The screens the Janarians created for their circuitry were indestructible. At some stage the molecular structure was altered by mind control, and required weeks of patient concentration. Galanea, a girl with the quicksilver mind of a practical joker, had broken his concentration to get him to share some joke.
The screen had shattered, and he had sprung up and flung the sliver. His action and rage were so simultaneous that, by the time the others were aware, it was too late. The girl bled to death in the seconds it took to reach her.
By the third day, the silver flier touched down and Jarid came out with the warrants for the execution, to be signed in triplicate.
“The execution is tomorrow, honoured sir, and you are required to attend.” Jarid forestalled George’s question smoothly.
George shrugged. As a spaceship commander, he was required to attend the occasional court martial and the rare execution. It was all in the line of duty.
The next morning he dressed with his usual care and went with Jarid. For the first time since his arrival, a grave and serious deputation escorted him. Usually the Janarians were a solitary people. It was rare to see more than half a dozen together at the one time.
They paced a slow procession through the purple trees and yellow mushrooms to their destination. It was a circular clearing with what looked like a stone alter in the centre. The Janarians gathered in a circle and waited. Every deep and intense eye fixed on George and Jarid.
Sitting cross-legged on the altar was a young boy. It was the murderer! He looked about eighteen years old by Earth standards, with soft brown hair reflecting the light, and clear olive skin pink-tinted with good health. George was momentarily shocked by his youth, and then shrugged; he had seen offenders just as young in some courts-martial.
“We are waiting, Most High Lord Balancer,” Jarid prompted.
George kept his face blank and nodded. By the side of his eye, he felt a tic jump. It was a barbaric custom, to be expected to witness an execution. No matter how many he witnessed, or how justified they were, it always left him feeling sick.
Jarid went over to the altar. The boy handed him a long knife, bowed his head, then raised it so the column of his neck was exposed. He looked straight at George.
George felt his mouth go dry. The girl had died by having her throat cut, so that would be the method of execution. Jarid walked back and handed George the knife, then stepped back into the surrounding circle.
George was surrounded by an unbroken ring of expectant, waiting faces. He looked at the knife he was holding. It was long and narrow, and reflected a steely glitter off its razor-sharp edges. He looked at the young boy, sitting with his head back, waiting, and started to shake.
“You have signed the warrant, honoured sir.’ Jarid answered his unspoken scream. “It is your duty as Most High Balancer to complete the task.”
George, once a daring rocket fighter, had notched up ten kills and survived. He was used to death in battle. You pressed a button, and an alien ship disintegrated under your laser. Disintegration of the control module and ten life forms; plus one life raft with three life forms disintegrated. Death was pressing a button and having your kills tallied on a computer in green and red lights. It wasn’t butchering a defenceless eighteen-year old boy.
He looked around the ring of faces. They were implacable. As the off-world representative, it was his duty to kill. In the back of his mind, he realised dimly the Janarians were incapable of killing a fellow member of their society. Because they were telepathic, it would be like raising a knife to their own throats.
The sweat beaded his face. He felt hot and sick. He licked dried lips and stepped forward. The boy raised his throat to a more convenient angle. A sigh swept around the waiting circle. It was after the two hours that it took them to return to the presidential palace that reaction set in.
“Do you require anything, your Honour?” Jarid asked.
“No,” George answered.
Keeping his head erect was an effort. He went into his large luxurious bathroom that had given him so much innocent pleasure. He tore off his blood-stained uniform. He scrubbed and scrubbed until his hands were a protesting red from the abrasive brush. Every few seconds he trembled uncontrollably, and his teeth chattered. He put on a clean uniform and went into the study.
He poured himself a whisky. It still didn’t stop the shaking or the horror. God! He had butchered the child. Why oh why hadn’t he died as swiftly and painlessly as the girl? He had been shaking so much he had missed the jugular, but under the circle of watching faces, he had to strike and strike again. All the time the boy just lay there, like an animal awaiting his death; just watching with intense dark eyes.
What a trembling, ineffectual executioner he was! Push a button and your computer flickers the figures of a kill. A kill wasn’t butchering a waiting, unarmed boy who flinched but presented his neck after each bungled stroke, a boy who bled and spurted all over you, a boy whose face twitched with an uncontrollable spasm every time you slashed.
At last, the body had mercifully stopped twitching and become a slumped pile of bloody rags. George poured out another whisky. His teeth chattered on to the glass. He was a soldier. He had killed, as duty demanded. Why did he feel this apprehensive shuddering guilt?
What had possessed him to sit in judgement so unthinkingly? The boy had flared up in a fit of temper, something two out of five Earth people do six times a week, and George had ceremoniously butchered him. George had spent six months on a planet that considered losing one’s temper a dangerous crime. His sense of decency and proportion had been warped.
The deep shuddering went through him in waves that disintegrated his innermost being. He was shaking so much that he had to use his two hands to keep the barrel of the old-fashioned revolver square against his forehead before he could risk pulling the trigger.
* * *
Jarid sighed the grief of the planet as he time-froze the mess in the study for the off-world enquiry. It was curious how the off-world occasionally threw up a perfect being from their treacherous morass of bent animals.
Down the centuries, the Janus Paradox kept repeating itself. Only the truly virtuous could live with the telepaths, but it was the virtuous that were unbalanced by executions and ended up destroying themselves.
The tradition of ‘The Balancer’ who maintained the stability of the Janarians by accepting their burden of collective guilt and remorse was lost in antiquity. Jarid wrinkled his brow trying to remember. An answer came through couched in overtones of amused authority from one of the Elders.
“It started on one of the Earth-type worlds. Some ancient shouldered the sins of his world, and they destroyed him. But” — and the voice in Jarid’s mind became smug — “the bent ones were too unintelligent to replace him.”
Jarid nodded agreement. His finger poised over the “call” button for the Federation High Command. The Federation war was providential, he reflected, and the powerful planet of minds agreed with him.
It had been many aeons since they had had such a ready supply of Balancers.
Copyright © 2023 by Margaret Pearce
