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I nodded at a crane which swung its giraffe-like steel neck ponderously across our line of vision from the window.  "We’ll just swing it over the wall and dump it. They can share it out among themselves."

"Ah, sir." Rajan coughed. "These, um, inmates. They don’t share very well."

"So what do you suggest we do?" I looked at him. "Go in there and hand each one his or her share, individually?"

He didn’t have an answer to that, of course. And so that is what we did.

Most of the time, anyway.

 "I solemnly affirm that I shall tell the truth and nothing but the truth..."

It’s the second day of the trial, and the first prosecution witness is already on the stand. They must be under orders to hurry this along. All I’ve got from Kanarian are strict orders to sit still and stay silent. That I can do.

The first witness is a fat bureaucrat from the government, a middle-level official who’s been, basically, sent to tell us why the government itself isn’t to blame in any way for what happened.

"Could you tell us how the epidemic began," the prosecutor, Sama, asks. I don’t like the looks of the prosecutor. In his black robe and with his long, pallid features he resembles a relative of Dracula. A younger brother, perhaps. "How it began and spread, and how it was contained."

The bureaucrat licks his lips nervously. "The first cases were seen among people in villages along the southern coast," he says. "As you know, there is a, um, considerable amount of illegal immigration from across the straits – or was, before this started." Officially, the government denies this, but everyone knows that it’s true, and I see the judges nodding. "The villagers don’t have anything more to do with the government than they must, because they think..."

"Yes, yes, I think we can take it that the reasons are obvious," Sama says hurriedly. "So the disease began in the villages?"

"Ah, well, perhaps in the villages, or perhaps it came over the sea along with immigrant boats. It’s impossible to tell. But by the time we got to know of it, it was already raging all along the coast. By that time even the villagers couldn’t see any way not to involve us." He goes on to talk of dates and names. None of this is actually new, of course, everyone knows by now where the epidemic first began, but I suppose it has to be stated for the court. "And by that time the, uh, afflicted had already spread out of the villages and were heading north along with refugees, so we couldn’t contain it where it began."

"And the disease began spreading rapidly?"

"Not quite as rapidly as it might have, fortunately." The bureaucrat licks his lips again. "The territory just north of the coast is quite sparsely populated, so it was only when it reached towns that it began spreading quickly."

"And what did you do when the disease began spreading in the towns?"

"We’d already come in contact with some of the afflicted by that time. I believe a police party came upon a few of them, and, thinking them to be drunk, stopped to question them and, um, take them into custody for their own protection if necessary." I repress a snort at that. The cops would’ve recognised them as coastal villagers, known that they were probably without any documents to prove their citizenship, and scented the opportunity for a shakedown. This was one time when they’d have been better advised to pass on by. "Unfortunately, they were attacked at once, and of the five of them, three were killed on the spot. The other two, ah, died in hospital later. By that time they’d infected several more people, but we managed to contain the outbreak by evacuating the hospital and sealing off the area."

"So you knew what to do when the disease reached the towns?"

"We knew that it was extremely dangerous and that we hadn’t any knowledge of how to fight it yet. And of course there were national security implications – "

"Quite so." Again the prosecutor cuts in hurriedly. "So what did you choose to do?"

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