24: Cobalt, 2

la·i·ty
1. the body of religious worshipers, as distinguished from the clergy.
2. the people outside of a particular profession, as distinguished from those belonging to it: "the medical ignorance of the laity."

It wasn't a prison cell. But the cushions were too plush, the drapes too livid, the dark wood of the alien oak too real. They were assuring him.

"Tell us what happened," the Heirophant had asked, in delicate, practiced English.

Outside the window, the once satellite Geleira - now deserving of its Portugese name - was slipping into a coma from which it would not return. Cleft from its mother planet, it was following a new course toward the outer reaches of the Florescente System. The forests had frozen, in ice and in time, and would be left as statues testifying to a paradise whose warmth of life had fled. The moon faced the necessarily opposite fate of its parent.

Strange how life can only survive in such a narrow space, he thought. Pushed outside that slim belt of habitable conditions - one burns, the other freezes.

"Tell us what happened," he heard again, remotely.

They had given him traditional pen and paper to write, synthesized specially for his use. He had realized it later - when he saw them carrying their digital pads, their styluses, using their voice activated commands. Ritual, perhaps? To make him more comfortable? It had only seemed natural that his story must come from his hand onto parchment, as blood stains linen. Anything less would be neither fitting nor appropriate. Perhaps they had anticipated that feeling. Perhaps his was not the first confession they had taken.

There was no jury to try him, no court that would take him; not one of this world, at any rate. No judge looked down upon him other than what remained of his Earth-born morality, that last vestige of his childhood there. Earth itself had forgotten his plight before they'd even known of it. The secession had made certain of that. The Clergy, meanwhile, were after something of practical value. When this was over, they would leave him free to go wherever his one-man ship could take him.

Yet the words would not come. The paper remained clean as an infant's conscience. He stared out through the diamond windowpane at one of the worlds he had killed, and wondered: from whom am I hiding?