There was a break in the investigation. Ben had been taken back home by the two elderly people he had been staying with since the incident. These people, who formed a temporary trio with their patient, looked professionally after people who found themselves in grave trouble and were unable to rehabilitate themselves – though murderers were quite rare as patients. Ben was not considered dangerous, not even to himself; all he required was some personal attention to his needs, rather than punishment for an act he was unlikely to repeat. It was obvious that his separation from Nan was punishment enough for him.
After a short break for refreshment, the five persons gathered again around the large table in the High Council conference room, to discuss their findings. Murder, though not unheard of in Gardenland, was unusual enough not to be going over lightly and Lilit, the highest authority among the five as a High Councilor, had been leading the investigation.
Now, she said, "In this discussion, there is no chair person and each member of this committee can talk at anytime, asking any question or expressing any opinion she or he may have. Everything discussed here will be recorded by the Computer and preserved for further study and as a historical record. Bearing all that in mind, don't wait for me to give you permission to talk, and I trust we all know how to keep to a civilized, respectful behavior."
In the silence that fell, she heard a suppressed sound of musical notes. "What's that you're humming, Shin?" she asked.
Shin, a tall, stooping man in his fifties, was a poet and a homosexual who belonged to a fairly stable Trio. He was the person who had emanated calm and sympathy during the questioning – so unlike his poems, Lilit thought; she had read some of his brilliant, gemlike works and found them hard to appreciate. She also thought how, in a similar way of contradiction, Lee's sex-laden poems were expressed by an impotent body...
'It would be a good idea to find from Shin if he had known Lee's works and what he had thought of them,' she thought. "Ha? What?" The man seemed to be aroused from a reverie. "Oh, that... I've an idea it's something written for a poem by Lee..."
"You know his poetry, then?"
"It's quite good to put to music," Shin shrugged; "there's a number of songs made from his poems. They have good rhythm."
"But what'd you think of it as poetry?" the old woman pursued her idea.
"What? Oh, I'm sorry." The poet seemed distracted. "Well, not very deep, is it? Nothing much about the real world, its problems, etc."
"You think poems should deal with the problems of the world, then?" asked the young woman whose smile had been hovering on her lips during the questioning. Her name was Ada and she was a tall, handsome woman in her thirties who, like Ben, was also a technician; she specialized in the making of plastiglass artifacts, both for use and for decoration. Unlike Ben, though, she belonged to a Five Parent family and was at the beginning state of pregnancy. Lilit recalled the faint smile that had hovered continually on the woman's finely curved lips during the questioning; but without using her telepathy to probe her mind, she found it difficult to decide what Ada had made of Ben. Her voice, either with or without intention, was loaded with sexual overtones, which had evidently affected Ben – Lilit thought it might be reminiscent of Nan's voice, though she was not sure, having scarcely met that woman who had been a motivation for murder.
"Why, yes! What else?" Shin queried.
"Something more emotional, perhaps; more personal – don't you think?" The question was asked by the short, dark, heavily built man with the bas profundo. His name was Per and he was a known psychologist; at the age of seventy-two, he was the Gran of a five-parent family. He was the only member of the Committee Lilit had met before, having attended two or three of his lectures and staying behind to discuss some advanced ideas he had formed. During the questioning, Per was silent most of the time, letting his mates do that rough job to allow him drawing his own conclusions. Lilit knew that his rough outer appearance belied an emotional, sympathetic nature, which he took great effort to hide. Lilit thought Per's membership in the Committee could be a great advantage to Ben.
"I've read some of Lee's poems," the motherly-looking woman, whose high, clear voice, the bright, sharp look from her light-colored eyes, and her brisk movements had belied that appearance. An anthropologist by the name of Bruke, she was the kind of scientist who behaved more as a biologist who would unemotionally dissect and examine some interesting life form under a microscope. She was now manipulating the monitor in front of her, Lilit could not tell what her objective attitude would make of the emotional bundle that was Ben. Bruke belonged to a Parent family, seeing it as a duty to Gardenland to have children more than she felt much love for her fellow people.
"I though I should familiarize myself with the subject before venturing on that kind of investigation, you know. They are very personal, but more fantastically aesthetic than deeply emotional. Not much sense in them as I could see. Making sex into something poetical, ethereal... No wonder he had problems – Here, take a look at these words." She turned the screen toward Per, who was sitting next to her. The psychologist considered.
"There seems to be enough in it that could affect certain people, yes... These words express strong self-involvement."
"Actually," Lilit pointed out, "these verses had very little effect on Lee's own peers, as I understood the position. He did not have many friends of his own age."
"Talking about influence," Bruke said, "shouldn't we question Nan as well?"
"In my opinion," Per objected, "her character had very little to do with the clash of personalities between the two men, except the way she had brought them together. Her only crime was a very bad judgment, not a malicious intent."
"From what I had heard about Ben," Ada said, "he was very good at his job; steady going and quite reliable. How could he go and do something like that – push a man off a cliff... I can't get over that thought..."
"It can be explained in one of two ways," Per said, didactically, "either he had been covering his real inclination for violence very well indeed; I myself do not support that idea in this case, because it makes him much more sophisticated than he really was. More likely, it seems, something inside him snapped, the way he himself described it. He was put in a very strange situation, completely alien to his own nature. As a steady man, well set in his ways, the abrupt turn of circumstances in a stressful situation as it was, he could not stand the pressure."
"Like a strong, tough material cracking under pressure because it's not flexible enough?" asked Ada.
"Exactly!" Per half-smiled at her, as if in encouragement. Not that she needed it – that young woman seemed both tough and flexible, as the material she worked with, enough to withstand any sort of pressure.
"Would you think," Lilit put in, "that if he had anywhere to get away from that place, from that lonely peak, he could have avoided killing Lee?"
"It's quite possible..." Per replied, reflectively.
"The question is," Bruke intervened, "will he kill again?"
"In my opinion," Per said, "it's unlikely. That action was evidently led to by the circumstances, and these were very special, unique, I would say."
"What would you suggest we do with him?" the anthropologist pursued; "is he fit to belong to ordinary society?"
"He's going through a strong therapeutic course right now, with those people he's staying with," Lilit explained. "We'll just have to wait and see the results."
"Before the questioning," said Per, "I looked up a couple of previous cases of murder – D'you know anything about them, Lilit?"
"I was not involved with any of them personally," she replied, evading a direct answer.
"What were they, then?" asked Shin with interest.
"In one case, there was a young woman – the newest member of a family of five parents – who gave a poisoned drink to the oldest member of the family who was very sick..."
"What happened to her?" asked Ada.
"Nothing," Lilit answered; "she stayed with her family and they looked after her. Everyone knew she had done it out of love for the person she killed, because she was unable to bear the Gran's suffering. What she needed was a better understanding, and a strengthening of character, and that her mates were able to supply together with their love. Anyway, she was so repentant, there was no chance she would ever do anything like that again."
A pondering silence fell over the committee members.
"And what's the other?" asked Shin at last.
"I once heard something – there used to be a rumor at the Youth Hall about a young man..." Ada said, hesitantly.
"That is a classic case, studied in certain branches of psychopathology..." Per completed her sentence.
"Yes," Bruke added, "such savagery..."
"But what happened?" insisted Shin, who seemed to be the only one who had not heard the story. Lilit educated him in short words. It concerned a young man, whose problems had grown with him from childhood and erupted at the Youth Hall. "He was what might be called a charismatic man," Lilit said, her voice lacking any emotions. "He had too much influence over some weak-minded youngsters, and at the Hall he led a small gang, who disrupted the place and pestered the inhabitants. At one occasion they gang-raped a girl just out of school; she was so viciously treated that she died after a few weeks."
"I never heard what happened to these people," said Ada.
"In that case," Per explained, "there was no chance for the instigator to recover normal social relations, and he had to be put down."
"'Put down...' Burke said, reflectively. "That kind of expression was used in reference to sick animals in the old days, before the Catastrophe, although they also did it to some murderers too." Lilit thought she heard a sort of hidden smugness in the woman's harsh voice, and she shuddered.
"And his associates?" asked Shin. He sounded fascinated, and Lilit had an idea he was already in the process of composing a ballad about the subject. It was not very common, and no doubt would capture the ears of his fervent fans.
"They had to undergo a very strict rehabilitation course," Per explained, "but in the end each of them found a place, either in a Parent family or in a Trio; it was concluded that they were unlikely to repeat their violent actions without the leadership of that youth."
"Murder used to be quite common in early Man's existence," Bruke inserted; "some scholars thought it was imbedded in the male character..."
"No female murderers?" Ada asked, curiously.
"Plenty, in certain circumstances," Per asserted; "anyone can kill with enough motivation."
"Luckily, these cases are rare in our present-day society," Lilit said, dryly.
"And more's the pity," Shin stated, the tension in his voice indicating suppressed excitement. "It's a fine subject for poetry, but you can't write about a subject that hardly exists, can you?"
"Are you going to write about this one?" asked Ada.
"I hardly think so..." he answered, pondering. "This case seems so prosaic, so trivial..."
The young technician protested. "Three young people have lost their whole world and to you it looks trivial?"
"You can ask Per about the meaning of the act," Shin replied, dryly; "in my opinion – they all asked for it."
"Asked for it!" Ada's face flushed, and the elderly poet thought she looked very pretty.
"Now, now," and "let it go!" said Per and Lilit together.
"Indeed," pondered Bruke, "Ben seems a useful member of our society; there's no question of elimination here, is there, Lilit?"
"Certainly not!" the old woman replied with emphasis.
"Yes," added Shin with slight sarcasm, "he is much more useful than Lee was..."
"Now, Shin!" Lilit admonished, "That's not the way I see it. There was no objection to Lee's living either, and continuing with his own work... All right, then, I think there's no more to talk about here. Per, you'll arrange for a proper psychological evaluation for Ben, so that we can appreciate his position to the full. Otherwise, your task is finished and I thank you all for your effort."
Tala Bar says, "I grew up in a library, my father was a librarian and my mother a bookbinder. My literary career started by translating into Hebrew a couple of classical books – Jurgen by Cable and The White Goddess by Robert Graves. I translated more than twenty books of English classics.
"Although I live in Israel, I acquired an M.Phil. degree in literature from London University. I have had published three novels, one book of stories and one book of poems – all in Hebrew. I now write literary articles on the Internet in Hebrew, and have my stories published in English."