NOVELLA

The Trial Of Summary James — Chapter Seventeen

A great African nation has risen in North America. But something is… wrong: Chapter 17 of 20 in the novella.

Check out the links at the end of this story under “Notes” for additional chapters.

Chapter Seventeen

We all stayed at the guesthouse the next day and night, mostly waiting for Trace to finish his work. He was able to deliver earpieces to everyone the next day. He brought them personally, not trusting the sufficiency of a courier service’s security.

This gave him an opportunity to meet Hiawatha, who of course he hassled for being a Comanche with an Iroquois given name. Hiawatha returned the sentiment with a couple of slurs about the mad ambition of Nor’easters. In other words, they got along swimmingly.

Hiawatha left the next morning for Seminole City. Sonata and I took a ride share to Campeche Island for an appointment she had made with Baldestero Tanning, Keeper of the Campeche Internment Housing Program.

Surprisingly, the new Tribune for the Congregation of the Texas Light, Artfield Long, would also be there. It surprised me that the new tribune for Texas Light would travel from Houston to Campeche to meet us, and I was somewhat hoping it was a coincidence that he was there. Previous Texas Light tribunes had maintained a hands-off attitude towards the internment program, probably because they didn’t want to know what was going on there.

Hiawatha insisted on sending two of his team with us. Eight others would follow closely behind. “I don’t know what to expect here, Longman,” said Sonata as we emerged from the rideshare and started walking towards the internment with Hiawatha’s men flanking us on each side.

“Either do I. I kind of feel like we’re pushing our luck a little.”

“I think that’s the idea.” She looked behind us, but Hiawatha’s people were stealthy. The other eight men were nowhere to be seen.

“Remember,” she said, “We’re here just for routine observation of the premises. We suspect nothing.”

“They know better.”

“I know. That’s a problem. I don’t know what we can do about that.”

“Part of what we need to decide is how hard to push this. If our earpieces signal a problem to Hiawatha’s team, they’ll blow the doors down and come in shooting. If our earpieces are compromised in some way, same thing. How are your nerves?”

She smiled at that. “I’m nervous, but I’ve got a supply of adrenaline fueled by a whole lot of determination and not a small amount of anger at what they’ve tried on both of us. How about you?”

I nodded. “That about sums it up.”

We reached the entrance, which was nothing like I had ever seen. Most convict housing was like any other housing. Convicts could come and go as they pleased, provided they maintained their therapy, work, and church schedules.

This place was fronted by a barrier with a tall, thick steel door. In front of that was a small set of thick concrete walls surrounding a lone guard sitting on a chair reading a book. When he saw us through some protective glass covered by a metal mesh, he stood up as we approached.

We identified ourselves and told him who we were here to see. He asked for identification, then opened the barrier doors to reveal yet another imposing wall with a similar door. He signaled to us that the two men with us would not be allowed to proceed.

Ever the warriors, Hiawatha’s men made a move as if they were going to blast the guards to kingdom come with something, but Sonata nodded to them and they relaxed as she said to them, “Wait here. We won’t be long.”

The guard spoke into his com bracelet, then the first door slammed shut with a heavy clang before the next opened. I couldn’t imagine how Hiawatha thought his team could get through all this, no matter how well they were trained.

I knew the place was locked down. But not like this. In my view, this changed things. There was no way for Hiawatha to have a full understanding of this place’s security level. It was unique to the Union. The Union simply didn’t do, for lack of a better word, prisons. Sonata and I were on our own. I looked at her, she looked at me. I didn’t need to tell her this, even if I could have.

The guard let us through the second door. This led to yet another secure sanctuary manned by a few guards hiding behind a steel lattice window with a slot at its bottom that served as a receptacle.

A woman in uniform walked in front of us, throwing a set of heavy keys into the slot. The man who let us in said a few words quietly to the guards before yet another loud door clamored open with a loud buzz.

He motioned us through the door to an X-ray machine of some kind, but he didn’t ask us to remove any metal we may have had in our pockets, or put anything into a tray. Instead, he just sent us through the device. Something flickered as we walked through the machine into an enormous expanse.

Drones were buzzing quickly across the floor as if the place was an online delivery warehouse. Large teams of men were working at tables far away, towards the middle of the floor, presumably doing the kind of work we had seen on Trace’s video.

I looked up, confirming what I knew about the design of the structure. The walls were pure concrete until probably the 250-foot mark, as expected, where there was a long, fenced gangway along the length of all six interior walls.

“Wait here, please,” said the guard.

We waited silently, but Sonata grabbed my hand and squeezed it for a moment before letting go. I figured they were recording every movement of ours, but I didn’t care. I ate that up.

Four men approached, two of them fit for battle, which was not leaving us in a good situation. One of the men in the middle wore a long black robe with a colorful pattern in its middle, and the other wore a stark blue shirt and pants combination and a long gun strapped on a shoulder harness behind his back. Two other armed men walked just behind them, one on each side.

The man in the fancy robe extended his hand. “May I be pleased to welcome you to our grand experiment,” he said. I thought that was weird since the place was about twenty years old, so it was no longer an experiment. “Artfield Long. I have been given the honor of becoming the new Tribune of the Congregation of the Texas Light.” I gave him the traditional bow as Sonata curtsied.

We introduced ourselves, and Baldestero Tanning, the man with the gun on his back, joined in the introductions. Of the four men we met, the Tribune was by far the smallest, and he wasn’t small. Tanning, the largest, could have filled a small arena by himself.

“Artfield,” said Sonata. “That is a very lovely name.”

“It was extended to me because I had such an affinity for drawing and painting that sometimes I would have as many as five to ten paintings and drawings on easels in my home at one time.”

Sonata laughed. “That’s cute,” she said.

“I’m afraid my artistic practice has waned a bit. Especially now, as I inherit this project, which is a handful, I find.”

“It’s, umm, quite the bustling place,” said Sonata.

He didn’t acknowledge the comment. “We have endured two tragedies at our congregation, as you know, Honoress Holmes. Our most esteemed tribune, Tomas Kibende, died a tragic death of natural causes. He was a spiritual mountain, irreplaceable, truly. But we must move on, and we did, with the quite gifted Sonoma Williams. Who suffered at the hands of the murderer Summary James. A most wicked act, don’t you think Honoress?” He was looking at me when he said that, in a way that made me feel like he knew about every convicted murderer I had helped escape the bonds of this facility.

“Of course, the federal government was very interested in this attack, as you can imagine, it having happened on congregational property.” He was still looking directly at me. “An attack on one congregation, after all, is an attack on all. But I have let the federal authorities know that we at Texas Light are satisfied that this was the act of one individual, and we are pleased that our facility here in Campeche is given the responsibility of rehabilitating him.”

Of course you are, I thought.

“Come,” he said. “You were promised a tour of our fine facility.”

It had not occurred to me before now how seriously wrong this situation was. Not the inmates working on drug vials shaped like cones to be possibly inserted into baseball bats. But the fact that the federal government was taking such a hands-off approach.

The murder of a tribune, on or off congregation property, was essentially an act of war. It didn’t matter if everything pointed to an internal domestic matter. I kicked myself mentally for not having asked Sonata about this earlier. Surely, she had been aware of the implications of this since we first met. Why had she never mentioned it? The new Tribune’s explanations were not at all satisfactory.

“I’d like to ask you, Ms. Holmes, where you think a government inquiry would take us,” Long said as we approached a group of men at tables doing piecework. Sonata and I both assumed the congregation would hide their drug work. We were wrong. The men were openly filling the same cones we had seen on video.

“Probably right to this,” Sonata answered bravely.

“Precisely. Which of course we cannot have. Now,” he said waving a hand across his small empire, “you are right to wonder why I’m showing you this. Truth be told, it would be quite an effort to hide in the short time we had before your arrival. But, too, I was aware of your knowledge of our work here. Nothing leaves this facility without our knowledge, including video feeds extracted from a convict’s eyewear.”

Neither of us knew what to say. Especially me.

“Next question. Why would we be doing this? We are, at the end of the day, after all, a church, are we not? Well, this facility doesn’t pay for itself. Other congregations don’t provide anywhere near sufficient funding for the layers of security we need.”

“Wait a minute,” said Sonata. “You people signed up for this.”

“In truth, we people, that is, my administration, inherited this problem. It is only mine in that I have to help maintain the solution. Nobody is hurt by this.”

“Except the people using vanti,” I said.

“They’re using it anyway, Mr. Jones. But let’s cut to the chase. I’m not here to defend decisions made by others. I don’t know how. But since you are both here, I offer you a fair warning. Halt your prying. Remove your eyes and ears from these proceedings, and I’ll be sure there are no further unannounced sundown dinnertime visits made to anybody’s home. Let me add that your recording devices were disabled by a short microwave pulse when you entered.”

Baldestero Tanning chimed in with a voice that sounded like it came from the bottom of a deep hole. “Friendly advice.” He looked at me. “You’re out of your league, anyway. If you go to the feds, there’s a fifty-fifty chance you’ll be going to the wrong person and you’ll be nobody’s memory.”

“I believe our meeting is over,” said Artfield Long.

I looked around for Summary James, not knowing if this was his shift or not, but not seeing him. “Where is Summary James?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m afraid we were unable to remove his spy lenses without removing his retinas.” Long wore a long, thin, creepy smile that stretched above a thin, dark Mediterranean chin. I noticed for the first time he had an almost impossible-to-detect thin black mustache.

After they finally let us out, I looked at Sonata, who seemed stunned by the events. “Wow,” I said, “Religion has sure gone to hell.”

“He’s lying about Summary James,” Sonata said. “To intimidate us. I had no physical reaction to his claims about what they did to his eyes.”

“So all in all it was a good visit,” I said sarcastically. She leaned slightly into my arm.

Hiawatha’s men had dutifully waited for us. When I told them what happened, they wanted to call in the eight other reinforcements and bust the place up. I shook my head as Sonata and I both rejected the idea. I was sure Tanning was right. Whatever this was, it reached into the federal government.

“It did seem highly unusual at the time,” said Sonata when I asked why she hadn’t raised an alarm about the lack of federal response over the murder. “But the trial was so over so quickly, I guess I thought the feds were satisfied. But you know what, Longman? I wasn’t. Either is my congregation. I don’t care where the tentacles reach from, and neither will the rest of Campeche.”

“There are a lot of congregations that won’t. Once word gets out.”

“Gonna put your newspaper hat back on?”

“If I can keep my friends out of it. I’m not sure how to do this without getting dudes like Trace and Hiawatha in trouble.” I looked at the two guys with us. I wasn’t trying to hide anything from them. They kept a stoic face as we called for our rideshare and headed back to the guesthouses in Campeche.

End of Chapter Seventeen

You can purchase the full novella for 99 cents here:

Table of Contents (links will appear as additional chapters are published daily on Medium):

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12 Chapter 13 Chapter 14 Chapter 15 Chapter 16 Chapter 17 Chapter 18 Chapter 19 Chapter 20

NOTES

This short novella was unplanned. I wrote it under my legal name way back in 2021. Side note: The pen name Charles Bastille originated after the publisher of MagicLand convinced me my name would not be SEO-friendly — I’m no longer convinced that matters and haven’t decided yet if I should publish additional works under the Bastille pen name.

The novella takes place in an alternative North America that celebrates diversity, avoided genocide, and corrected the mistakes of slavery as a side-effect of a failed Revolutionary War. As such, although no human endeavor can avoid tragic error, it takes place on a much less dystopian continent than our current experience.

The world represented here is much larger than can be conveyed in such a short book. This world is more fully represented in a trilogy called Restive Souls, which begins in the late 18th century. It is still in final edits.

But the main character of this novella, Longman Jones, told me he wasn’t willing to wait for me to finish that novel. Maybe that is in part because he makes no appearance at all in the larger work.

But he is a restive soul, and he needed to get out of my head. So I took a couple weeks off from the main novel way back in 2021, and wrote this, in hopes he’d shut up. I never really promoted it, but I’m starting to now a bit.

If you enjoy this novella, please let your friends know that for 99 cents they can spend a couple hours with Longman in a more egalitarian world than what they may be used to. It will make him very happy if you do.

For updates on the Restive Souls series, visit https://medium.com/restive-souls. Or subscribe to my newsletter fiction here (takes you to a site off the Medium platform).

Consider this short novella a teaser for the broader work. And if enough people like it, I suspect Longman Jones will also make another appearance or three.

Thanks for reading!

This story was written by a human, not by AI or Grammarly GO (More Info).

Copyright © 2020–2023 Charles White

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The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

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