03-Flatlander

by Larry Niven

  Taffy said, “The linear accelerator?”

  “Yes. She’s on her way. When Luke Garner was a boy, that flicker would have been the electric chair.”

  “The what?”

  “Skip it.”

  “Lie down.” She went to work on my abdomen. “I don’t see why you’re quite this shook up. I had the idea she never even slept with you.”

  “No. Well, once.”

  “When?”

  “About two this morning.”

  I’d been a little startled when Naomi had raised the subject. “I’d have thought sex would be the last thing on your mind.”

  “But it’s our last chance. Unless you wait six months and then buy the appropriate—” She stopped, horrified.

  “Not funny,” I said.

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  “Maybe you’d rather just be held? Cuddled?”

  “No.” She was out of her dress in an instant. I plucked it out of the wind on its way to the air circulation unit. Then I turned to look at her. I had never seen her naked before. It took my breath away. I caught myself thinking, Where were you ten years ago, when I needed you? and was ashamed.

  She opened a drawer in the bed table and took out a tube of jell. She was frigid; she was expecting to be frigid; she kept that tube very handy. This was normal for Naomi.

  I couldn’t bring her to climax. She faked it very nicely … and didn’t I owe something to the Gil Hamilton of ten years ago? Wouldn’t he have given up a testicle for this night? I made myself enjoy it.

  I moved from love into massage. Taffy had taught me massage, both sensual and therapeutic. I managed to relax her a little. Naomi was on her back, staring at the ceiling while I worked on her hands, when she said, “I’d love to have another baby.”

  “But you said—”

  “Never mind what I said!” Suddenly she was enraged. I turned her over and went back to work till I had her relaxed again.

  We made love, or I did. She couldn’t concentrate. I didn’t try again. I told her stories from my time in the Belt. She talked about her days in college. She asked about my life as an ARM and cut me off when I spoke the word organlegger. And she kept glancing at the clock.

  “What time is it?”

  “Oh-eight-ten,” Taffy said.

  “Time to go to the conference.”

  “You’re a basket case. I’ll call them and tell them you’ll make the afternoon session.”

  “Oh, no. Let me make that call. My reputation.” I got up. “Chir—”

  “Then put some clothes on, too,” she said sharply.

  I got Bertha Carmody, worse luck, and told her the situation. I sat down on the bed, and flopped back, and found my head in Taffy’s lap.

  I half woke when a pillow was substituted for the lap.

  Then Taffy’s phone was saying, “Time to wake up, Ms. Grimes. It’s twelve hundred. Time to wake up.”

  I called it off, but it wouldn’t obey my voice. I swore and rolled off the bed. I should have smashed the phone instead. Or else I should have made the morning session …

  8. THE OTHER CRIME

  The morning session that fourth day of the conference was when they started getting specific about lunar laws. Naomi or no Naomi, I should have been there. By the time Carmody called the afternoon session to order, all I could do was listen and learn what the fighting was about.

  Item: Death penalties on the moon included murder, attempted murder, manslaughter, rape, armed theft, theft involving betrayal of trust, and assault. A similar ARM list would have included far more minor crimes, but—

  What constituted assault? We ran that around for a good hour. Armed theft and rape were covered by other laws. What about a simple brawl? To Belters, a barroom brawl classed as recreation. Corey Metchikov from Mare Moscoviense explained that lunies were more fragile than Belters or flatlanders, and their longer reach gave a fighter extra leverage. A brawl among lunies was likely to be lethal, he claimed.

  Marion Shaeffer expressed doubt that a lunie had the muscle to hurt even a lunie. Bertha Carmody offered to Indian wrestle. Marion accepted. We moved some chairs. They looked ridiculous: Marion wasn’t even shoulder high to Bertha. Bertha turned Marion in a complete cartwheel, and it was done purely by leverage.

  Stone repeated an earlier demand for a legal definition of rape. That started an uproar. There were statutory penalties to protect minors and the marriage bond, and four outnumbered lunies looked ready for murder or war to preserve them. To Budrys and Shaeffer and Quifting, such laws added up to murder plus invasion of privacy.

  I could see their point, but we were not here to start a war. I was glad when we got off that subject.

  Manslaughter. On the moon that covered a variety of sins: sabotage, criminal carelessness, arson. “Any act which, by damaging a local life support system,” said Marion Shaeffer, “could have caused deaths or injuries. Is that right?”

  “Essentially correct,” Ward said.

  “That goes a little far,” Marion said. “We’d execute someone who botched repairs on an air recycler if someone died from it. But if nobody actually gets hurt, why not just assess him for damages?”

  Ward was on his feet by now, towering over the seated goldskin. “You go a little far yourself,” he told her. “Twenty years ago the moon became the execution grounds for every planet, moon, and rock in the solar system, barring Earth itself. We allowed that. It was a needed source of income. But we will tolerate only limited meddling in our affairs. Beyond that, you may kill your own or ship them to Earth.”

  Bertha Carmody broke the angry silence. “We’re all here to make that step unnecessary. The last conference left us with a considerable expense in research and construction and maintenance. The holding tanks have cost us well over three billion UN marks to date. We don’t want to eat the cost. Agreed?”

  We looked at each other. At least nobody disagreed.

  “Your suggestions, Ms. Shaeffer?”

  Marion looked uncomfortable. “I’ll make it a motion. Alter the law. Fines for accidental damage to equipment unless the damage causes death or injury. Anyone who ruins something vital when he can’t pay the damage gets broken up. We can live with that. And I’ll move to table the motion till we work up a proposed program of changes.”

  That passed.

  Jabez Stone had some details on the holding tanks and wanted them read into the record. In particular, there had been a power failure at Copernicus in 2111. Four Belt criminals had had to be broken up at once, and almost half the organs had been lost.

  “There are safeguards now,” Ward told us. “It couldn’t happen again. Remember, holding tank technology was somewhat primitive twenty years ago. We were made responsible for developing it.”

  “That’s reassuring, but it wasn’t what I was getting at. Shouldn’t those felons have been revived?”

  “They were too badly damaged. Only organs could be saved,” Ward told him.

  “It bothers me,” Stone said. “Never a reversal of sentence. Either this is an admirable record—”

  “Stone, for God’s sake! Should we have convicted some innocent just to satisfy you by reviving him? Can you name one single sentence which should have been reversed?”

  Stone said, “Case of Hovestraydt City versus Matheson & Co. It’s in the city computer memory.”

  And everybody groaned.

  If what I needed was something to take my mind off Naomi, then for four days I got my wish.

  Days we spent arguing. We spent a full day on Hovestraydt City versus Matheson & Co., not to mention the night I spent reviewing the case. Allegedly the company’s carelessness had contributed to the Blowout of 2107. Two Matheson & Co. employees had gone to the organ banks. Penzler and I got Metchikov to admit in private that they might have been scapegoats, that the case should have been reviewed after the hysteria died down. Publicly, forget it.

  Late afternoons I watched the news. Steeping myself in lunar culture was worth a try, but the lunie
commentators didn’t make it easy. They used unfamiliar slang. They gave excessive detail. They droned.

  Evenings I met with Stone and Budrys to discuss policy.

  The Belters clearly saw their right, nay, their duty to make the lunar law more humanitarian. The moon didn’t see it that way. I made a long phone call to Luke Garner for instructions. All I could get out of him was that the ARM would support any decision I made.

  So I backed Budrys and Stone. To us the lunar law had its peculiarities, but it wasn’t unduly harsh. Cultures are entitled to their variety, an attitude you’d expect from a club whose members have been battling with words and weapons and economic pressures for close to two hundred years. The drive that spread mankind through the solar system should have given Belters the same attitude, and I said so during a morning session. It fell flat.

  Chris Penzler spoke to me afterward. He wasn’t moving like a cripple anymore, and some of the foam had sloughed off his chest, leaving bare pink skin bordered by thick black hair. He was a lot more cheerful now. “Kansas boy, you didn’t see variety in the Belt. You saw customs different from Kansas customs. What would happen to a Belt woman who wanted to raise her children in free fall? How do Belters treat a miner who neglects his equipment? Or a Naderite?” He patted the crown of his head, where what remained of his Belter crest started. “We all cut our hair the same way. Doesn’t that tell you something?”

  “It should,” I admitted. “We committee members, we’re all politicians of a sort, aren’t we? Natural meddlers. But what if the UN was meddling with Belt law?”

  He laughed. “I don’t have to wonder about that.”

  “Too right you don’t It happened, and you seceded from Earth! How do you feel about ARM law?”

  He told me what I already knew: the laws of Earth made us not much better than organleggers. I said, “Why don’t you do something about it?”

  “How?”

  “Yeah. You don’t have the power to pressure Earth. But you think you’ve got the lunar economy by the throat.”

  “Gil, I push where I think something will give.”

  “The moon might be stronger than you think, or more determined. You could win a war if it comes to that, but will you like yourselves afterward? And can you keep the UN neutral? Belt ships using asteroids as missiles; we wouldn’t like that this close to Earth.”

  These casual conversations were getting to be more important than the sessions. We took to adjourning in midafternoon. We formed dinner triads: a lunie, a Belter, and a flatlander meeting to seek compromise while full bellies made us mellow. For some of us it worked. Some got indigestion.

  A nightmare started me off again.

  That fourth day, with three hours to go before dinner with Charles Ward and Hildegarde Quifting, I had gone to my room and flopped on the bed to watch the news.

  I remember this item: Mary de Santa Rita Lisboa, the Brazilian planetologist, was doing some excavating south of Tycho. Early that morning she had waded into a dust pool to place some equipment. Her feet grew cold, then numb. She grew frightened almost too late. By the time she reached the edge, her legs were frozen to the knees. Before help reached her, she had fallen hard enough to break ribs and rip a pinhole leak in her suit. Ten minutes passed before she recognized the pain in her ears for what it was. She had slapped a patch on the gash and kept going, on frozen legs, with both ears and one lung ruined by decompression.

  A basically interesting tale, yes? But what I remember is the patronizing tone, as if nothing above the level of a plains ape would have done such a damn-fool thing. The rest of the news was local and dull. Presently it put me to sleep.

  I shouldn’t sleep in the afternoon.

  Wandering through a dark, blurred forest, I found Naomi asleep in an ornate twentieth-century coffin, the kind with a mattress. I knew just how to wake her. I approached her coffin/bed, bent, and kissed her. She fell apart. I tried to put her together with my hands …

  And woke with questions chasing each other through my head.

  … Why would anyone lie herself into the organ banks? It was her own business, I told myself; she’d made that clear. But what could she be hiding that would be worth that?

  Another crime?

  … She had phoned me my first night on the moon. Why? Not because she was eager to see me again. She knew I was an ARM. Was she checking up on me to see what I suspected?

  … She had claimed to be exploring the badlands west of the city. Call that her alibi. Alibi for what? Where could she have gone in four hours on foot?

  I was hooked.

  In my copious free time, with ten minutes to go before a dinner session with Charles Ward and Hildegarde Quifting, I tried to call Laura Drury. Her phone told me that she was asleep; please call back after 1230 tomorrow. My answer wasn’t recorded, I hope.

  Late that night I summoned up a map of the city environs and spent some time studying it.

  I called Laura again after the next day’s morning session. Laura was in uniform, but she hadn’t left her room. I said, “I can’t stand the suspense anymore. Did Naomi in fact reach a holding tank?”

  She blinked. “Of course.”

  “Is this of your own knowledge?”

  “I haven’t seen her lying in the tank, no. I’d have heard if there was an escape.” She studied my image. “It wasn’t just casual sex, was it?”

  “I left Earth to mine the asteroids because Naomi married someone else.”

  “I’m sorry. We tend to think … I mean …”

  “I know; flatlanders are easy. Have you got a minute to talk?”

  “Gil, why don’t you stop tormenting yourself?”

  “I got to wondering. Naomi was a computer programmer. It was one point against her. The jury assumed she could have got to the message lasers without leaving a record in the computer. Do you believe that?”

  “I don’t know how good she was. Do you?”

  “No. I got to wondering if a computer programmer that good could steal a puffer, again with no records.”

  She sat down to think. Presently she nodded. “Anyone that good could have stolen a puffer, too. No wonder you didn’t find the weapon.”

  “Okay.” Though that wasn’t exactly what I was after.

  “Hold it. With a puffer she could have reached the Belt Trading Post. She could have taken a ship out. Gil, we’d have found her anyway, but at least she would have had a chance! Why would she come back?”

  “Yeah, you’re right. It was just a thought. Thanks,” I called the phone off, and her puzzled frown vanished. Then I started laughing.

  Some alibi! And perfectly genuine, too. Naomi could have been committing an entirely different crime at the Belt Trading Post!

  I was going to have to walk softly. I would have to find Chris’s failed killer without showing the lunie police where Naomi had been.

  I was stripping for a bath when Laura called me back that evening. I said, “Chiron, voice only. Hi, Laura. I’m glad you called. Has anything unusual happened lately at the Belt Trading Post?”

  “Nothing I’ve heard about. And there weren’t any puffers missing that night.”

  “What? How sure are you?”

  “Mesenchev was on duty. He says there were no puffers checked out and no slots. No computer program could keep him from noticing one empty slot. And is that finally the end of the Naomi Mitchison case?”

  “Yes. And if it isn’t, I’ll at least quit bugging you. I’ve done too much of that.”

  She studied me thoughtfully … no, she must have been studying a blank screen. She’d better, because I was just climbing into the tub. She said, “Did I louse up a voice-only command a few days ago?”

  “Eee-yess. I wasn’t about to be the one to tell you.”

  “Well, you’re a gentleman,” she said, and called off, leaving me bemused. What did lunies consider a gentle-man?

  No puffers missing. Futz. While water and air bubbles churned around me, I called up the map again and traced th
e trade road west. Roads branched off to the water and oxygen works, to the abandoned metal mines, to a linear accelerator project that had gone bankrupt.

  I was back to assuming that Naomi had been on foot. Could she have met someone somewhere within reach? The air works required sunlight. At night they might be deserted. Or what about the old strip mine?

  The screen blinked, and Laura Drury glared out of it. “Now, what are you doing with that map again?”

  Watery amoebas left the tub with the force of my flinch. “Hey, are you sure that’s your business? And how do you break into a computer display without permission, anyway?”

  “I knew how to do that when I was ten. Gil, will you give up on her? Maybe she wasn’t out there when Penzler got shot. Maybe she researched it somehow. Gil, if she wasn’t shooting at Penzler, she must have been committing an organ bank crime somewhere else!”

  “You saw that, huh? I went to the wrong person. Well, if you must know, I can’t leave puzzles alone.”

  Long silence. Then, “Want help?”

  “Not from a cop. If you found a crime, you’d have to report it.”

  She nodded reluctantly.

  “Hey, why did you call me a gentleman?”

  “Well, you didn’t… if a lunie saw a, a person naked on his phone screen—” She stopped.

  “He’d crawl out of the screen at you, drooling and leering?”

  “He’d think it was an invitation.” She was blushing darkly.

  “Oh. Hahaha! No. If a lady wants to give me an invitation, I expect her to say so. Flatlanders don’t hint.” I stood up. “Especially on the moon. I was told never to make advances to a lunie.” I started scraping the half inch of water off me with the edges of my hands. Then I saw her eyes bugging. “Have you got vision?”

  She was stricken. Caught!

  “Serves you right.” I reached for a towel. I used it on my hair, concealing my grin, concealing nothing else. Why shouldn’t a lunie be curious? And she’d given me the same privilege inadvertently.

  “Gil?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It was an invitation.”