THE TERMINAL COURT

An extreme possibility. If birth control doesn't wor, then death control might.

“Age brings wisdom,” muttered Caleb. “And without wisdom we have nothing.”

He looked at the Jury. The judge, wearing a giant wig, sneered at him. “You mean that I have nothing?” he asked, his voice just breaking as childhood started giving way to adolescence and a few sparse whiskers struggled to be seen on his spotty chin.

“You have life,” murmured Caleb, and he struggled to remain upright.

Recently his legs had become unbelievably feeble and a constant reminder that he wasn't anywhere near as young as he used to be. Tomorrow, after all, would be his fortieth birthday if he ever lived to enjoy it. Few did - very, very few. Now he was facing the Terminating Court and had to prove that he was invaluable to a society that rejected the old, or be terminated.

He didn't want to be terminated. After all, who does? But it's not easy being old in a society that is driven by hunger and vanishing resources to reduce the population to a point of sustainability. Family planning and restrictions on family size hadn't worked, so the Terminal Courts with their breaking-voice judges had been instituted a century or so earlier. The population had fallen drastically, but nothing had got better.

Anyone reaching the grand old age of forty had to be tried at the terminal Court and most were executed soon after the guilty verdict was read out. Execution was fun, a great game, so most were declared “guilty”. It was almost a crime for them not to be. The toddlers in their crèches needed entertainment or they may well rebel. The judges knew that, with their white tightly curled wigs and their gowns and their lollipop

“Yes, I have life,” crowed the Judge triumphantly, “which is more than you'll have tomorrow at dawn, you old fart!”

It was fun taunting the old. They had no rights, no way of redressing the imbalance, though some, as they dangled from the bloody noose cursed until their last cries were cut off by the tautened rope. Their strangled cursing was fun and a reminder that senility was a bad thing and really ought to be eliminated before it claimed its prizes. They thought they understood this, but somewhere in their minds there were doubts. There had to be, for the theory was inadequate.

“You have yourself,” pointed Caleb wearily. “You are, I guess, fourteen and it won't seem so long before you're knocking on the door of forty.”

“I'm thirteen, so it will be longer,” quipped the Judge, but Caleb could see from the glint in his young eyes that something had hit home. Time is a cruel master. Even the young get to realise that. They see death on a daily basis and already, in their teens, it starts moving closer, remorselessly, like life-expectancy of a fixed length must.

“The young are strong and brave and filled with hope and dreams, and want a world fit to live in with green vales and blue skies,” acknowledged Caleb. “They want the fluffy little birds, the leaping lambs, the valiant deer and everything else they see in the archives. Of course they do. Shame they won't get them.”

“Drive the population down and all will return!” crowed the judge, sucking hard on his bright orange lollipop. “Make the world sust ”¦ sust ”¦ sust-something-able!”

“What is the colour of dreams?” asked Caleb, wearily. “Where are the living natural shades coming from? Will you paint the desert and make trees grow tall like in the archives? Will you suck the smoke from he skies until the blue shines though? Or will you light more fires, burn more celebratory bonfires in order to consume those you execute on every dawn?”

“They need to be burnt!” snapped the Judge. “Mummy said so, before we burned her! Else the poison of the dead will fill the air with disease!”

“When you burn me,” hissed Caleb, “my tissues will turn to acrid smoke and I will fill the lungs of the new-born, and they will choke to vomiting death on them! That is the reality! That is the true stupid reality of your final solution! And there's nobody left with the wisdom to see it! All are dead! Our society destroys wisdom, and with it destroys the future! You will take me tomorrow and hang me, then you will cut down one of the last forests on Earth for my pyre, and then you will all die.”

“You're right, old fool!” rasped the Judge, and he pulled his worn out black cap over his white wig. “You are found to be guilty of age,” he hissed, malevolently, “and you will be taken from this place and hanged at dawn, and your flesh will be eaten on fires, and you will become one with the Universe!”

“You're the fool,” murmured Caleb. “Too blinded by youth to see. I wish you well, young fool, and your blasted dying planet. Go on, take me, kill me, I have no more use for life, not any more, not in this cess pit of things.”

The Judge grinned, and sucked his lollipop with a satisfying slopping sound, and called for his mummy, then remembered she was dead and sauntered off to his playpen

Next morning, at a misty, murky dawn, Caleb was dangled from the hanging tree whilst the babies looked on, gurgling with delight, and then he was thrown, rather too unceremoniously for there to be any respect in the matter, onto a raging fire, and his smoke like fingers curled into the air while a beam of sunlight tried to find a way through his atoms, and failed.