Nine chairs.
Nine robes.
Nine Prunes, behind a bar that had been built to serve cocktails and now served justice, which in this building was the same thing at a higher markup.
The Commission sat in Luxury Suite 6, on the club level, behind a wall of glass that looked straight down on the ring. Plush carpet. Recessed lights. A mini-fridge humming under the bar with nothing in it but sparkling water and a jar of maraschino cherries nobody would touch. The Promoter rented the suite out on fight nights to people who wanted to watch from somewhere with a carpet, and when nobody had booked it, it became the highest court in the arena. Nobody had booked it in a very long time.
The Prunes had been plums once.
Then they had been appointed, and set out in the sun, and left there for life. Now they were dark and wrinkled and dense with everything that had been concentrated out of them, and they sat in a row in their black robes with their hands folded, nine dried fruit who could not be removed, and very regular in their habits.
All nine of them were men. All nine had been appointed by men. All nine were certain this had nothing to do with anything.
Down through the glass, the round was going on without them. It was the sixth reset. Nobody was counting anymore except an eleven-year-old in Section 312 and the banana, who had started marking them on his desk with the cocktail fork.
In the center chair sat the Chief.
He was the oldest of the Prunes and the most wrinkled, and he had been Chief for so long that the other eight had stopped remembering there had been anyone before him. He had a gavel. He did not use it. He believed a gavel was a confession that a room had stopped listening, and in thirty-four years no room he sat in ever had.
He looked down at the docket.
There were two matters.
“In re Tomato.” The Chief turned the page. “And a brief, submitted by a Pomegranate, on behalf of a Lime, concerning whether this Commission has any purpose whatsoever.”
He looked up.
“Let’s take the vegetable first.”