The Last Days of Krypton - Kevin J. Anderson [22]
When old Jul-Us stood up in his white robes, he no longer looked grandfatherly or kind. He spoke in a booming voice. “Gur-Va, you have committed a heinous crime. You were caught in the Kandor zoo soaked with the blood of your victims, their torn bodies at your feet.”
Gur-Va lifted his blond head, pulled back his lips to expose long teeth. “I am a predator. They were prey. What I did was only natural.”
“What you did was an abomination!” said Kor-Te, a Council member who had thick silver hair that hung to his shoulders in waves, intentionally emulating the style of Krypton’s classic leaders. “All details of this incident should be struck from the record so that future generations need not be sickened by it!”
Jor-El was astonished by the statement. Kor-Te practically worshipped past decisions and mandates; he read and quoted from the Council annals and documents as if they were holy scripture. In Council business Kor-Te believed that all important discoveries had already been made and that all matters had already been decided. To him, any question could be answered by digging through the annals and finding the appropriate quotation. It was inconceivable that such a man would propose striking an event from the historical record.
Jor-El leaned forward, fascinated. He turned to an intent gray-haired woman next to him. “What exactly has this man done? Whom did he kill?”
The old woman’s expression overflowed with disgust and disbelief. “He’s the Butcher of Kandor—broke into the zoo and went from cage to cage with his long knives, slaughtering rare animals. He chopped apart the last living flamebird. He decapitated the drang. He slit the throats of both rondors on display. It was senseless and appalling.”
Above the arena floor, Council member Pol-Ev called for a series of evidence images to be projected. Pol-Ev, the dandy on the Council, had so many clothes and robes with trendy folds and ruffles it was hard to tell whether he followed fashion or set it. His hair was swirled and primped and pomaded, and he always wore a distinctive cologne that added a lingering background aroma to the entire chamber. Now, though, he looked ready to faint.
Crisp holograms showed mangled carcasses in merciless detail. Amid gasps and outcries from the spectators’ gallery, several people became audibly ill; others, greenish and pale, stumbled out of the Council temple. The orange-haired teacher nearly fell over himself as he hurried his group of young students out of the tiers of seats.
Jor-El could hardly believe the sheer violence of what he saw in the display. The drang, a purple flying snake, had been hacked to pieces. The snagriff, a winged dinosaur, had been hamstrung in its cage and, once it had dropped to the ground, Gur-Va had gutted it while it was still alive. The heavy rondors, nearly hunted to extinction because their curved horns supposedly cured many illnesses, lay in a pool of their own blood; one had managed to crawl to its watering pond and slumped over the rim, near its mutilated mate.
Standing in the arena, Gur-Va seemed maliciously delighted to see the images. Why would anyone commit such a senseless act? What purpose did it serve? What could this man possibly have meant to accomplish? The utter irrationality of it made Jor-El reel.
Trying to steady himself, he viewed this as a problem, a puzzle. Something had corrupted Gur-Va’s personality, broken him from sanity. The bloodthirsty temperament of this twisted man was a throwback to violent and primitive times. Where did such destructive impulses come from?
Such ferocious criminals were true anomalies on modern, peaceful Krypton. Inspired in part by his father’s psychological deterioration from the Forgetting Disease, Jor-El’s mother had spent a great deal of time trying to understand the mysteries of the Kryptonian mind. But psychology was not a mathematical, precise science.
All eleven Council members were so appalled