Good weather is scheduled for the duration of the trial. The Valar put the truth effect in place and invite anyone who'd like to come and test it. Timothy paces and totally fails to appreciate the beauty of Valimar.  The guests from Revelation arrive.

Cam... waits.

Excerpts from the trial of Campbell Mark Swan on two counts of genocide, one count of war crimes, one count of conspiracy to commit the former, seven counts of kidnapping, and fifty-five million, three hundred thousand, one hundred and twenty one counts of premeditated murder:

****

"The deliberate destruction of a purely civilian target in order to advance military objectives has always been held to be a war crime. You cannot raze the enemy’s cities to dispirit them, even if they are doing the same or worse to your own; you cannot do that even should you be highly confident that the blow to the enemy’s spirits will be crushing, and the war won. Every person in Valinor was a civilian; Valinor was known to the defendant to be an exclusively civilian target. I urge this court to consider the implications of declaring the mass targeting of civilian population centers an acceptable tactic under sufficiently extreme circumstances."

****

"When he destroyed Valinor, the defendant was acting on your authorization?"

"Authorization implies that he was in our chain of command, he wasn't. We certainly did help him do it."

"What did that look like."

"The oath. Went over it, again and again. Trying to make sure we hadn't missed anything. And we showed him how to use the Silmarils to access peoples' backups, obviously. My father was the only person who knew how to do that."

"You didn't worry about the defendant misusing that ability?"

"I'd had months to observe him at that point. There are hundreds of billions of people in the known multiverse and there are none I wish had been summoned in Cam's place."

****

"This court has held that an operation against a military target to achieve military objectives, with civilian casualties, is not a war crime and not murder. The court has held that there is an exception to that principle if the objectives could have been achieved with substantially fewer civilian casualties. I invite the court therefore to consider those decisions precedent for the following: if destroying Endorë would have been permissible under the laws of war, then a different action to achieve the same military objectives with fewer civilian casualties must necessarily be permissible also. So let's examine the case that destroying Endorë would have been permissible under the laws of war, a case so transparent that if that is in fact what had occurred we would not even be here. Angband was a legitimate target. The servers on which the Enemy was torturing two point three billion copies of one hundred eighty million people were a legitimate target. The Enemy was a legitimate target. The action taken neutralized all of them; that it did so indirectly does not matter. The law need not ignore causal mechanisms more complicated than explosions."

****

“Your name?”

“Erdellë Larya.”

“When did you meet the defendant?”

“Prince Nelyafinwë assigned me to help with resurrections. We travelled with Cam in a lightleaper to the reassembled Valinor. We – explained to them what was going on, helped move the crowds, helped people arrange transport back home, answered questions…”

“Can you describe the disposition of the defendant on the lightleaper trip there –“

“I don’t think he said a word. He made us food, regularly, and anything else, whenever anyone asked. Kept conjuring for the news.”

“What was on the news?”

“The war was over. There was a treaty with Erdegar, there was a treaty with Daleia, there was a ceasefire in South Anterres –“

“Why did Prince Nelyafinwë select you for the assignment, do you know?”

“Thought I’d be good at it, presumably.”

“Did you support the decision to destroy Valinor?”

“I didn’t have all the relevant strategic information. I trusted the people who did."

“Can you describe the disposition of the defendant once you reached Valinor.”

“Well, he resurrected people. He didn’t stop, he didn’t sleep, he didn’t eat, he barely blinked. Months and months and months, he’d download the chips off the backups and bring out a few hundred at a time and resurrect them in waves and go back in."

“Can you describe his disposition, please.”

“Like it was – intolerable that they were dead, he was an instrument to change that as quickly as possible – I suppose he was in a lot of pain. We debated whether to encourage him to pace himself but – it didn’t really seem like he’d be able to breathe until they were all alive again –“

“He was in a lot of pain?”

“Well, of course.”

“Did he express regret?”

“We really weren’t having conversations. I’m not even entirely sure he’d recognize me. He wanted them to be alive again. He wanted it very badly.”

****

"This court calls the defendant to testify."

(He would too recognize Larya, he recognized an alternate version of her. And he did too blink, not-blinking would have been a distracting effort.)

He goes up.

"Can you describe for this court everything that happened from the moment you took the summons to Valinor?"

Yeah, he can do that, he has his notes all prepped complete with the bits he's supposed to redact for security reasons.

"Do you think that the decision to destroy Valinor was motivated in part by animosity towards the Valar?"

"No. I didn't like them very much but I did not want them dead, definitely not enough to go through millions of other people to get at them."

"What were your plans for after you'd finished resurrecting everyone?"

"Once I'd finished putting everyone I could on Valinor back I was going to go bring back casualties on Endorë and then teach summoning especially to the humans and Dwarves."

"And then?"

"Then I was going to get back the people I'd left on Atriama because it wouldn't matter as much if my summoner dismissed me at that point."

"Is there anything you did during your time in Arda that you regret, or think you could have done better even given only the information you had at the time -"

"It should have occurred to me that people could've been taken in their sleep without a chance to activate their suicide triggers. I wish I'd put a camera on the road from which I took the orc family so I could have noticed that it was actually a family with small children but I'm not sure any nonfamilies would have come by... It probably would have been responsible to start designing a best-case oath during otherwise unoccupied time as soon as I knew I could verify them to shorten negotiation duration even when I didn't know to expect it to come up."

"Can you foresee circumstances under which you would hole a planet again?"

"In an alternate Arda with the help of some Valar to contain the gravitational effect, and a fairy to remove nonresurrectable prisoners and the black hole itself, I have since holed an Angband on an inhabited planet but there were no irretrievable casualties. If there were similar overwhelming concerns as during the war and I was cut off indefinitely from the ability to seek multiversal help that might do it."

"Do you think people will be able to feel safe if they see you walking down the street?"

"I don't think I'm dangerous to passers-by but their feeling of safety seems likely to have as much to do with their opinions about demons and the spin in the media as my actual predilections."

There are three days of questions. Then they deliberate. During this part Timothy is allowed to wrap himself around his boyfriend like a scarf. 

Best scarf.

"You okay?"

"It's a little rough but I'll be fine."

The crowd assembled for the verdict is even larger than the one assembled for the trial; several billion people watch the live stream.

The court finds Cam not guilty of war crimes, murder, genocide, and conspiracy to commit war crimes; they find him guilty of conspiracy to commit genocide and of kidnapping. They recommend a sentence of restitution, already completed for the genocide part, and forty Years' supervised probation. 

"Which means what, exactly," Timothy demands of Cam's lawyers.

            "They'd like his summoner to be from here and they'd like him to check in every Year or send a note explaining why he can't, if something comes up. There are often also terms about use of intoxicants - relax, it doesn't involve a binding, it doesn't oblige him to stay here, he can go right back to doing what he's doing -"

"They should give him a medal."

           "I don't disagree."

The orcs are consulted on appropriate penalties and would be delighted if Cam were to bring them cookies, or dinner or something what with the new baby.

"Oh no. How will I live without my intoxicants. - Unless it includes caffeine and then, seriously, how will I live."

"I have never heard of probation terms forbidding caffeine."