"Make the prisoner stand straight before this court, Trooper!"
The flesh splitting lash of pain wrenched him into a sort of pseudo-consciousness. He struggled to rise from the rough wooden floor on which he'd been thrown, and brought sound back to his ears, fuzzy sight to his eyes. The sound was of the crowd. A muffled crowd sound; they would still be outside, still struggling for a look at his broken down track despite the heavy trooper cordons that were around it, awaiting a qharaak team of sufficient size to haul it away.
And the sight was of a windowless, thin-walled cubicle, sole court of this narrow, desert fringe Department, and of the Prokyman judge, and the Troopers standing idly with their stinging quirts at either side and just behind him.
But he had been before Prokyman judges before. Once, even, there had been a jury of the local peasantry, and he had won an easy acquittal then because of his youth—it had been a full five Terrayears ago, when he had been barely 12 years old.
He struggled unaided to his feet, faced the wooden throne like structure upon which the magistrate, girdled in coarse ruuk hide, sat toying with his polished mace of office. Beside him stood his Stenosmith. The Stenosmith held a slender scroll in one hand, but for the moment his legal superior let it go unnoticed, and fixed the Court's prisoner with a gaze as hard as Terrestrial diamonds.
"Jon Kane, aged 17 Sol III years, second generation Sol III descendant, renegade colonial resident of the Sol III agricultural Department of J'iira-IX: do you understand the charges against you?"
He struggled to make his tongue move to form the clipped syllables of the Interplanetary. It was an old language, but he had never spoken it as easily as the one which his father had taught him, the one which he said had come from Terra. But he must learn the Interplanetary, his father had said for some day, he might venture beyond the blue fields of the Department where he lived; someday, perhaps, even use it to speak with the starmen of the great ITA, who landed on Procyon V every seven cycles. Some day, perhaps, and the work of the language tutors would not have gone in vain.
"Charges? These men have uttered no charges, Senior. They have pursued and threatened—"
"Silence! Civil use of your tongue, or no tongue at all! The law prescribes trial even for heretics under the age of eleven cycles, or you would not be so fortunate as to be standing where you are! Stenosmith, your scroll!"
In a quick motion the slender scroll was in the magistrate's hands, and in another it was spread before him.