03-Flatlander

by Larry Niven

  “I checked you early,” Julie said. She settled herself uncomfortably at the foot of the hospital bed. “Rather, you called me. When I came to work, you weren’t there, and I wondered why, and wham. It was bad, wasn’t it?”

  “Pretty bad,” I said.

  “I’ve never sensed anyone so scared.”

  “Well, don’t tell anyone about it.” I hit the switch to raise the bed to the sitting position. “I’ve got an image to maintain.”

  My eye and the socket around it were bandaged and numb. There was no pain, but the numbness was obtrusive, a reminder of two dead men who had become part of me. One arm, one eye.

  If Julie was feeling that with me, then small wonder if she was nervous. She was. She kept shifting and twisting on the bed.

  “I kept wondering what time it was. What time was it?”

  “About nine-ten.” Julie shivered. “I thought I’d faint when that—that vague little man pointed his hypo gun around the comer. Oh, don’t! Don’t, Gil. It’s over.”

  That close? Was it that close? “Look,” I said, “you go back to work. I appreciate the sick call, but this isn’t doing either of us any good. If we keep it up, we’ll both wind up in a state of permanent terror.”

  She nodded jerkily and got up.

  “Thanks for coming. Thanks for saving my life, too.”

  Julie smiled from the doorway. “Thanks for the orchids.”

  I hadn’t ordered them yet. I flagged down a nurse and got her to tell me that I could leave tonight, after dinner, provided that I went straight home to bed. She brought me a phone, and I used it to order the orchids.

  Afterward I dropped the bed back and lay there awhile. It was nice being alive. I began to remember promises I had made, promises I might never have kept. Perhaps it was time to keep a few.

  I called down to surveillance and got Jackson Bera. After letting him drag from me the story of my heroism, I invited him up to the infirmary for a drink. His bottle, but I’d pay. He didn’t like that part, but I bullied him into it.

  I had dialed half of Taffy’s number before, as I had last night, I changed my mind. My wristphone was on the bedside table. No pictures.

  “‘Lo.”

  “Taffy? This is Gil. Can you get a weekend free?”

  “Sure. Starting Friday?”

  “Good.”

  “Come for me at ten. Did you ever find out about your friend?”

  “Yah. I was right. Organleggers killed him. It’s over now; we got the guy in charge.” I didn’t mention the eye. By Friday the bandages would be off. “About that weekend. How would you like to see Death Valley?”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “I’m kidding, wrong. Listen—”

  “But it’s hot! It’s dry! It’s as dead as the moon! You did say Death Valley, didn’t you?”

  “It’s not hot this month. Listen …” And she did listen. She listened long enough to be convinced.

  “I’ve been thinking,” she said then. “If we’re going to see a lot of each other, we’d better make a—a bargain. No shop talk. All right?”

  “A good idea.”

  “The point is, I work in a hospital,” Taffy said. “Surgery. To me, organic transplant material is just the tools of my trade, tools to use in healing. It took me a long time to get that way. I don’t want to know where the stuff comes from, and I don’t want to know anything about organleggers.”

  “Okay, we’ve got a covenant. See you at ten hundred Friday.”

  A doctor, I thought afterward. Well. The weekend was going to be a good one. Surprising people are always the ones most worth knowing.

  Bera came in with a pint of J&B. “My treat,” he said. “No use arguing, ‘cause you can’t reach your wallet, anyway.” And the fight was on.

  THE DEFENSELESS DEAD

  The dead lay side by side beneath the glass. Long ago, in a roomier world, these older ones had been entombed each in his own double-walled casket. Now they lay shoulder to shoulder, more or less in chronological order, looking up, their features clear through thirty centimeters of liquid nitrogen sandwiched between two thick sheets of glass.

  Elsewhere in the building some sleepers wore clothing, the formal costumery of a dozen periods. In two long tanks on another floor the sleepers had been prettied up with low-temperature cosmetics and sometimes with a kind of flesh-colored putty to fill and cover major wounds. A weird practice. It hadn’t lasted beyond the middle of the last century. After all, these sleepers planned to return to life someday. The damage should show at a glance.

  With these, it did.

  They were all from the tail end of the twentieth century. They looked like hell. Some were clearly beyond saving, accident cases whose wills had consigned them to the freezer banks regardless. Each sleeper was marked by a plaque describing everything that was wrong with his mind and body, in script so fine and so archaic as to be almost unreadable.

  Battered or torn or wasted by disease, they all wore the same look of patient resignation. Their hair was disintegrating very slowly. It had fallen in a thick gray crescent about each head.

  “People used to call them corpsicles, frozen dead. Or Homo snapiens. You can imagine what would happen if you dropped one.” Mr. Restarick did not smile. These people were in his charge, and he took his task seriously. His eyes seemed to look through rather than at me, and his clothes were ten to fifty years out of style. He seemed to be gradually losing himself here in the past, He said, “We’ve over six thousand of them here. Do you think we’ll ever bring them back to life?” I was an ARM; I might know.

  “Do you?”

  “Sometimes I wonder.” He dropped his gaze. “Not Harrison Cohn. Look at him, torn open like that. And her, with half her face shot off; she’d be a vegetable if you brought her back. The later ones don’t look this bad. Up until 1989 the doctors couldn’t freeze anyone who wasn’t clinically dead.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. Why not?”

  “They’d have been up for murder. When what they were doing was saving lives.” He shrugged angrily. “Sometimes they’d stop a patient’s heart and then restart it to satisfy the legalities.”

  Sure, that made a lot of sense. I didn’t dare laugh out loud. I pointed. “How about him?”

  He was a rangy man of about forty-five, healthy-looking, with no visible marks of death, violent or otherwise. The long lean face still wore a look of command, though the deep-set eyes were almost closed. His lips were slightly parted, showing teeth straightened by braces in the ancient fashion.

  Mr. Restarick glanced at the plaque. “Leviticus Hale, 1991. Oh, yes. Hale was a paranoid. He must have been the first they ever froze for that. They guessed right, too. If we brought him back now, we could cure him.”

  “If.”

  “It’s been done.”

  “Sure. We only lose one out of three. He’d probably take the chance himself. But then, he’s crazy.” I looked around at rows of long double-walled liquid nitrogen tanks. The place was huge and full of echoes, and this was only the top floor. The Vault of Eternity was ten stories deep in earthquake-free bedrock. “Six thousand, you said. But the vault was built for ten thousand, wasn’t it?”

  He nodded. “We’re a third empty.”

  “Get many customers these days?”

  He laughed at me. “You’re joking. Nobody has himself frozen these days. He might wake up a piece at a time!”

  “That’s what I wondered.”

  “Ten years ago we were thinking of digging new vaults. All those crazy kids, perfectly healthy, getting themselves frozen so they could wake up in a brave new world. I had to watch while the ambulances came and carted them away for spare parts! We’re a good third empty now since the Freezer Law passed!”

  That business with the kids had been odd, all right. A fad or a religion or a madness, except that it had gone on for much too long.

  The Freezeout Kids. Most of them were textbook cases of anomie, kids in their late teens who felt tr
apped in an imperfect world. History taught them (those who listened) that earlier times had been much worse. Perhaps they thought that the world was moving toward perfection.

  Some had gambled. Not many in any given year, but it had been going on ever since the first experimental freezer vault revivals, a generation before I was born. It was better than suicide. They were young, they were healthy, they stood a better chance of revival than any of the frozen, damaged dead. They were poorly adapted to their society. Why not risk it?

  Two years ago they had been answered. The General Assembly and the world vote had passed the Freezer Bill into law.

  There were those in frozen sleep who had not had the foresight to set up a trust fund or who had selected the wrong trustee or invested in the wrong stocks. If medicine or a miracle had revived them now, they would have been on the dole, with no money and no trace of useful education and, in about half the cases, no evident ability to survive in any society.

  Were they in frozen sleep or frozen death? In law there had always been that point of indecision. The Freezer Law cleared it up to some extent. It declared any person in frozen sleep who could not support himself should society choose to reawaken him to be dead in law.

  And a third of the world’s frozen dead, twelve hundred thousand of them, had gone into the organ banks.

  “You were in charge then?”

  The old man nodded. “I’ve been on the day shift at the vault for almost forty years. I watched the ambulances fly away with three thousand of my people. I think of them as my people,” he said a bit defensively.

  “The law can’t seem to decide if they’re alive or dead. Think of them any way you like.”

  “People who trusted me. What did those Freezeout Kids do that was worth killing them for?”

  I thought: they wanted to sleep it out while others broke their backs turning the world into paradise. But it’s no capital crime.

  “They had nobody to defend them. Nobody but me.” He trailed off. After a bit, and with visible effort, he pulled himself back to the present. “Well, never mind. What can I do for the United Nations Police, Mr. Hamilton?”

  “Oh, I’m not here as an ARM agent. I’m just here to, to—” Hell, I didn’t know myself. It was a news broadcast that had jarred me into coming here. I said, “They’re planning to introduce another Freezer Bill.”

  “What?”

  “A second Freezer Bill. Naming a different group. The communal organ banks must be empty again,” I said bitterly.

  Mr. Restarick started to shake. “Oh, no. No. They can’t do that again. They, they can’t.”

  I gripped his arm to reassure him or to hold him up. He looked about to faint. “Maybe they can’t. The first Freezer Law was supposed to stop organlegging, but it didn’t. Maybe the citizens will vote this one down.”

  I left as soon as I could.

  The second Freezer Bill made slow, steady progress without much opposition. I caught some of it in the boob cube. A perturbingly large number of citizens were petitioning the Security Council for confiscation of what they described as “The frozen corpses of a large number of people who were insane when they died. Parts of those corpses could possibly be recovered for badly needed organ replacements …”

  They never mentioned that said corpses might someday be recovered whole and living. They often mentioned that said corpses could not be safely recovered now, and they could prove it with experts, and they had a thousand experts waiting their turns to testify.

  They never mentioned biochemical cures for insanity. They spoke of the lack of a worldwide need for mental patients and insanity-carrying genes.

  They hammered constantly on the need for organ transplant material.

  I just about gave up watching news broadcasts. I was an ARM, a member of the United Nations police force, and I wasn’t supposed to get involved in politics. It was none of my business.

  It didn’t become my business until I ran across a familiar name eleven months later.

  Taffy was people watching. That demure look didn’t fool me. A secretive glee looked out of her soft brown eyes, and they shifted left every time she raised her dessert spoon.

  I didn’t try to follow her eyes for fear of blowing her cover. Come, I will conceal nothing from you: I don’t care who’s eating at the next table in a public restaurant. Instead I lit a cigarette, shifted it to my imaginary hand (the weight ragging gently at my mind), and settled back to enjoy my surroundings.

  High Cliffs is an enormous pyramidal city in a building in northern California. Midgard is on the first shopping level, way back near the service core. There’s no view, but the restaurant makes up for it with a spectacular set of environment walls.

  From inside, Midgard seems to be halfway up the trunk of an enormous tree, big enough to stretch from hell to heaven. Perpetual war is waged in the vasty distances, on various limbs of the tree, between warriors of oddly distorted size and shape. World-sized beasts show occasionally: a wolf attacks the moon, a sleeping serpent coils round the restaurant itself, the eye of a curious brown squirrel suddenly blocks one row of windows …

  “Isn’t that Holden Chambers?”

  “Who?” The name sounded vaguely familiar.

  “Four tables over, sitting alone.”

  I looked. He was tall and skinny and much younger than most of Midgard’s clientele. Long blond hair, weak chin—he was really the type who ought to grow a beard. I was sure I’d never seen him before.

  Taffy frowned. “I wonder why he’s eating alone. Do you suppose someone broke a date?”

  The name clicked. “Holden Chambers. Kidnapping case. Someone kidnapped him and his sister years ago. One of Bera’s cases.”

  Taffy put down her dessert spoon and looked at me curiously. “I didn’t know the ARM took kidnapping cases.”

  “We don’t. Kidnapping would be a regional problem. Bera thought—” I stopped because Chambers looked around suddenly, right at me. He seemed surprised and annoyed.

  I hadn’t realized how rudely I was staring. I looked away, embarrassed. “Bera thought an organlegging gang might be involved. Some of the gangs turned to kidnapping about that time, after the Freezer Law slid their markets out from under them. Is Chambers still looking at me?” I felt his eyes on the back of my neck.

  “Yah.”

  “I wonder why.”

  “Do you indeed?” Taffy knew, the way she was grinning. She gave me another two seconds of suspense, then said, “You’re doing the cigarette trick.”

  “Oh. Right.” I transferred the cigarette to a hand of flesh and blood. It’s silly to forget how startling that can be: a cigarette or a pencil or a jigger of bourbon floating in midair. I’ve used it myself for shock effect.

  Taffy said, “He’s been in the boob cube a lot lately. He’s the number eight corpsicle heir worldwide. Didn’t you know?”

  “Corpsicle heir?”

  “You know what corpsicle means? When the freezer vaults first opened—”

  “I know. I didn’t know they’d started using the word again.”

  “Well, never mind that. The point is that if the second Freezer Bill passes, about three hundred thousand corpsicles will be declared formally dead. Some of those frozen dead men have money. The money will go to their next of kin.”

  “Oh. And Chambers has an ancestor in a vault somewhere, does he?”

  “Somewhere in Michigan. He’s got an odd biblical name.”

  “Not Leviticus Hale?”

  She stared. “Now, just how the bleep did you know that?”

  “Just a stab in the dark.” I didn’t know what had made me say it. Leviticus Hale, dead, had a memorable face and a memorable name.

  Strange, though, that I’d never thought of money as a motive for the second Freezer Bill. The first Freezer Law had applied only to the destitute, the Freezeout Kids.

  Here are people who could not possibly adjust to any time in which they might be revived. They couldn’t even adjust to their own times.
Most of them weren’t even sick; they didn’t have that much excuse for foisting themselves on a nebulous future. Often they paid each other’s way into the freezer vaults. If revived, they would be paupers, unemployable, uneducated by any possible present or future standards, permanent malcontents.

  Young, healthy, useless to themselves and society. And the organ banks are always empty …

  The arguments for the second Freezer Bill were not much different. The corpsicles named in group two had money, but they were insane. Today there were chemical cures for most forms of insanity. But the memory of having been insane, the habitual thought patterns formed by paranoia or schizophrenia, these would remain, these would require psychotherapy. And how to cure them in men and women whose patterns of experience were up to 140 years out of date to start with?

  And the organ banks are always empty …. Sure, I could see it. The citizens wanted to live forever. One day they’d work their way down to me, Gil Hamilton.

  “You can’t win,” I said.

  Taffy said, “How so?”

  “If you’re destitute, they won’t revive you because you can’t support yourself. If you’re rich, your heirs want the money. It’s hard to defend yourself when you’re dead.”

  “Everyone who loved them is dead, too.” She looked too seriously into her coffee cup. “I didn’t really pay much attention when they passed the Freezer Law. At the hospital we don’t even know where the spare parts come from: criminals, corpsicles, captured organleggers’ stocks, it all looks the same. Lately I find myself wondering.”

  Taffy had once finished a lung transplant with hands and sterile steel after the hospital machines had quit at an embarrassing moment. A squeamish woman couldn’t have done that. But the transplants themselves had started to bother her lately. Since she met me. A surgeon and an organlegger-hunting ARM, we made a strange pairing.

  When I looked again, Holden Chambers was gone. We split the tab, paid, and left.

  The first shopping level had an odd outdoor-indoor feel to it. We came out into a broad walk lined with shops and trees and theaters and sidewalk cafés, under a flat concrete sky forty feet up and glowing with light. Far away, an undulating black horizon showed in a narrow band between concrete sky and firmament.