Oath of Fealty

by Larry Niven

  She smiled up at him across her second iced tea. "Maybe we don't have a lot to hide."

  Touché, dammit. "Well … dating? They tell me the automobile revolutionized dating. It meant that couples could find privacy. Any people, so long as they could get to a car. You've taken a giant step backward, haven't you?"

  "I wouldn't know. I didn't grow up then."

  "But the-" He almost said rent-a-cops. "Security would know every boy you dated. Where you went. I suppose they can even spy on the rooms."

  She thought it through, frowning. Then, "We don't have cars, and we don't have much privacy. We ball, but we tell our parents."

  "You b-b-"

  "After all, they'll find out anyway," she said briskly. "Go ahead and ball, but tell Mom and Dad.' That's what my brother Andy told me when I was growing up. And the schools teach us how not to get pregnant if we don't want to. I wouldn't ball with a boy my parents didn't like, but that still leaves me plenty of leeway. Of course marriage is a lot more serious thing." She noticed his expression, which must have been interesting. "What's wrong? Did I use the wrong word?"

  "No. We use it too." Jackpot. Talk about serendipity-

  The alleyway smelled of urine and stale garbage. It was bounded on one side by a blank wooden wall, on the other by a chain-link fence opaquely overgrown with ivy. The blacktop surface was marked with crystalline smears of dried urine. Homicide Lieutenant Donovan wanted to hold his nose, but he didn't dare. There was a growing crowd of chanting blacks near the alley entrance.

  "PO-LEECE MURDERERS!" The voice was female, but not feminine.

  "Metro squad's coming," Sergeant Ortiz said softly. "The local precinct commander's worried he can't hold them."

  Donovan nodded and went back to the body that lay crumpled behind an overflowing garbage can. It had been a young black man. There wasn't a lot left of the face beneath the thick Afro. There wouldn't be after a charge of number-four buck fired from the twenty-inch barrel of a Remington Model 870 twelve-gauge riot gun had done its work.

  There was also a large hole in the chest.

  A dozen police stood near the body. Two stood just apart from the others, not quite part of the group but not yet separated from it either. Donovan motioned to one of them and led him a few steps farther away from the others. He kept his voice low as he said, "Okay, Patterson, let's go over it once more."

  "Yes, sir. We got a call at oh-nine sixteen this morning. Householder heard noises at the back door. When we arrived at the address of the complainant, we drove to the back of the house. At that moment, without warning, an unidentified black male broke and ran for the alley. I pursued on foot while Officer Farrer took the cruiser to the other end of the alleyway.

  "Before entering the alley I drew my service pistol, and observed Officer Farrer with the riot gun at the other end of the alley. On entering the alley I heard at least two gunshots. The shots came from behind a garbage can. I shouted 'Police,' and heard an additional gunshot. The flash attracted my attention, and I saw an armed suspect crouched behind the garbage can. I aimed for the can at chest height and fired one shot. As I fired I heard my partner's shotgun discharge.

  "The suspect fell from behind the can. When we approached we found a .45-caliber Colt Commander automatic pistol near the suspect. We then reported an officer-involved shooting to the dispatcher."

  And after he's rehearsed that a few more times he'll have it down perfectly, Donovan thought. Now for Farrer- He looked up in annoyance as a black Imperial came into the far end of the alley. The police line holding back the crowd parted briefly to let the car through. Donovan saw batons uplifted and swinging.

  "JUSTICE!" someone shouted.

  "Hope Metro gets here soon," Patterson said. "Can I go now, sir?"

  Donovan nodded, and stood waiting for the Imperial. When it got closer he recognized MacLean Stevens, and felt relieved. The Mayor kept some strange ones on his personal staff, but Stevens was all right.

  The Imperial's window rolled down. Stevens looked at Donovan and raised an eyebrow. Donovan went over. "Looks righteous," he said. "Some crazy kid with a forty-five blazed away at two patrolmen, and they blew him up."

  Stevens scowled distaste. "The crowd thinks differently. Why?"

  "Hell, they always turn out when there's a shooting," Donovan said. "You know that, sir." He frowned. Something was wrong. Stevens wasn't reacting properly. Why? What was going - Holy shit! No wonder Stevens was looking funny. He wasn't alone in the car.

  Donovan recognized the man in the back seat. The Reverend Ebenezer Clay, an old-time civil rights activist and leader. What the hell was he doing here? Frantically Donovan tried to remember what he'd said. Not a lot. No real harm done. He'd said "they," meaning blacks in Watts, but what the hell, it was true. They did turn out whenever there was a shooting.

  "Reverend Clay had an appointment with the Mayor," Stevens said. "Then we heard about the shooting and came down to see."

  "Nothing much to see," Donovan said. "Uh-the body's not very pretty, sir, you wouldn't want to look-"

  "I can stand it," Reverend Clay said. He got out of the car, a tall thin man with skin the color of weak tea. He had cotton-tuft white hair that might have come right out of an old movie. Clay wore a gray suit and clerical collar, but he had put a lavender handkerchief in the breast pocket. He looked around the alley and curled his lip in distaste, then went over to the body.

  "It was a good shooting," Donovan said. "Suspect fired three times at the officers."

  "Witnesses?" Stevens asked.

  Donovan shrugged. "Only the officers-"

  "Only the officers. Nobody heard shots? Nobody saw anything?"

  "Nobody who'll admit it," Donovan said. "And believe me, Mr. Stevens, we're looking. Hell, I know what'll happen. As soon as the officers tell their story for the papers, there'll be a dozen witnesses, all saying it didn't happen that way. Then we'll start running them down. Half of them couldn't possibly have been within miles of here when it happened. Some more will tell stories that don't make sense. But one or two could have been here, and will tell stories that fit the evidence they know about, and then we'll have good cops in trouble."

  Reverend Clay came back to join them. He gestured toward the crowd. "I will talk with them-"

  "To say what?" Stevens asked. "To calm them, or-"

  "Calm? What is calm?" Clay demanded. "A brother lies dead, and you speak of calm! A youth, a mere boy-"

  "That mere boy tried to shoot two police officers," Donovan said quietly. Think of it as evolution in action. Got to be careful about that. Say that here and my ass is grass.

  "So they say," Clay said. "Yet why would he do that? He was guilty of no crime."

  "None we know of," Donovan admitted. At least the officers sent to look at the house where they first saw the kid couldn't find anything. "But he did have a gun we haven't been able to trace. It may have been stolen-"

  "You accuse him, but he cannot defend himself," Clay said.

  "Reverend, you're not making sense," Stevens said quietly. "Neither you nor I know enough to have an opinion. You wanted to see the scene for yourself, and you've done that. I think we should leave."

  "While my people cry for justice," Clay said.

  "Not much we can do to get it for them," Stevens said.

  "There never has been. All right, Mr. Stevens, I'll come with you. I have missed my appointment with the Mayor, but there is a matter of importance we must discuss." He got into the car.

  As they drove away, the first three units of the Metro Squad arrived, and Donovan felt a lot better.

  Eleven years earlier Thomas Lunan had come here with a girl.

  With apartments ready for tenancy in the west wall, the managers had been looking for publicity. There had been refreshments and guides and a hang glider floating around inside the Mall itself. Thomas Lunan had been a fledgling newsman then, but he hadn't come for news. Todos Santos had been publicized to within an inch of its life. The world's television au
diences knew all there was to know about the half-finished city-in-a-building.

  But it was a fine excuse to bring … what was her name? Marion Something. A fine way to get Marion's attention. She'd loved the way the hang glider floated around in all that empty space, diving down to buzz her, then riding the updrafts from the air conditioning fans. ("Making a pass," she'd said, and in fact the pilot had done so, later.) They had sampled the smorgasbord and shopped the Todos Santos Mall, and then Thomas Lunan had used his press card to get them up on the roof.

  The roof of the Mall, that was. The Mall had been finished and two-thirds occupied, with the overhanging balconies partially completed. The city's outer walls had been finished too, and some of the interior. Lunan and Marion had stood on the roof of the Mall and looked up into a tremendous lidless box crisscrossed with girders, girders to shape the inverted pyramids that would be the air light wells. The tips of the inverted pyramids stood on four pillars as big as small apartment buildings.

  Eleven years later. Marion Something was probably fat and married now, and Lunan had never got around to coming back. The great box had been sitting on the skyline for eleven years, while pressures from within the box had reached out into Los Angeles itself. The thing was too big to notice, and Angelinos didn't like to think about it. It was Sunday supplement material, but not news.

  Not until now.

  Thomas Lunan and a different girl looked down on the Mall from a small balcony just under the roof. Cheryl was finishing her dessert. Lunan itched to talk to his microphone, but the girl became restive when he did that. Still, the mike was live, and he had a good memory.

  "Thanks for bringing me," he said.

  Cheryl Drinkwater smiled up at him. There was chocolate syrup at the corner of her mouth. "Has it changed much? It was already finished when we moved in, and I don't remember much anyway."

  "It's changed. I like what they've done with the pillars. Last time I was here they were just-pillars."

  "You really should see the day-care center. I spent a lot of time there."

  They were most of the way up the northwest pillar. Shops wound upward in a spiral, narrowing as they rose, culminating in a series of small balconies with restaurant tables. Cheryl was certainly giving him his lunch money's worth. The whole of Todos Santos was spread below him.

  The view was staggering: the vast expanse of the Mall with its bewildering game board of shops, beltways carrying people, the balconies tiered below them, others across from him glimpsed through a maze of pillars and conveyor tubes. You wouldn't dare try hang gliding in here now. Apartments, shops, restaurants, even factories overlooked the Mall, and Lunan thought it must be wonderful to live with a view like this; so many people to watch. But he was getting more than scenery.

  Again he wished he could dictate. There was a lot to remember.

  The guards. They were not police. They were not obtrusive, unless they were deciding whether to let you in; but they were not invisible. Todos Santos citizens didn't ignore them, any more than Lunan would really ignore a waiter. They were there, and they were convenient.

  Cheryl had stopped at the gate to have a guard locate her father. Drinkwater had been just leaving a dentist's office. He had agreed to meet Lunan for drinks when his tour at the waldo transceiver ended at five. And a boy younger than Cheryl had been asking another guard to track down his missing date, and he knew the guard's name. And the drunk businessman. He'd gotten off the subway looking apprehensive, and weaved his way up to the entryway, and his relief at getting into Todos Santos was so evident that Lunan had spoken to Cheryl about him.

  "Sure he's relieved," Cheryl said. "Angelino police would arrest him, wouldn't they?"

  It hadn't even occurred to her that Todos Santos police might arrest a citizen for being drunk in public, and they hadn't. Instead, one had helped him to an elevator.

  He had to remember it all, because it might be the biggest story he'd ever done. The murders/regrettable incident (choose one) had triggered a renewed interest in Todos Santos, and the city-in-a-box was going to get a lot of headlines and prime time; but that wasn't Lunan's kind of story, not by itself. The new culture that had developed unnoticed here; the impact of Todos Santos on its inhabitants; that could be Pulitzer Prize material.

  A city at peace with its police force. Our guards, our police, holding our civilization together. And it was a civilization. That showed in the very structures. The seeming frailty of shops not built to resist weather … or vandalism.

  It showed in the people, too. The stout lady in her underwear- They had stopped in a clothing shop halfway up the northwest pillar. While Cheryl was buying tennis shoes, a fortyish, matronly woman had realized that the dress she was trying on was too small. She had stepped out to the counter in her bra and support pantyhose to trade the dress for another. Nodded cheerfully to the other customers and went back in. Just before she disappeared, her eye had caught Lunan's.

  Clothes weren't needed for protection here, unless on the roof. A constant awareness of the guards' eyes might make concealment seem futile. If the nudity taboo disappeared in Todos Santos, would it be surprising? But that look. She'd known he was an Angelino; and then she was embarrassed.

  Meanwhile, Cheryl had said-? "Day-care center? Sure, let's go see it. Where is it, on the roof?"

  Cheryl pointed. Lunan didn't .understand, at first. She meant the vast artificial tree enveloping the southwest pillar.

  A fence ran beneath the tips of the lowest branches of that great tree. There were many children and few adults within the fence. When Cheryl and Lunan were close enough, the illusion of a tree broke down; the cone of greenery was hollow. Lunan could look up into what the branches had concealed. Not just schoolrooms, but jungle gyms, seesaws, a merry-go-round; and a vast three-dimensional steel grid for climbing, with netting beneath. A score of children were playing what had to be a team sport within the grid.

  "You liked it," Lunan said. For just that moment he wanted to be a child again. This was wealth.

  Cheryl nodded happily.

  "Do all the Todos Santos kids come here?" Lunan asked.

  "Sure. Well, we have neighborhood parks too," Cheryl said. "But they aren't used much. Some of them are being closed down. Mr. Rand talked about it in class last month. The original idea was to have small neighborhood parks because that's what the people were used to when they lived outside. But when everybody realized that it was safe for the children to go anywhere, the designers decided to build the tree because it could be better than a lot of small places."

  "But you still have small parks?"

  "Sure," Cheryl said. "For adults and babies, mostly, though. And we use them for ball games if it's raining on the roof."

  Another thing to think about. Would Todos Santos be different if the outside weather were worse? Or would they simply put a dome over the roof? "There are four pillars," Lunan said. "The shops, and this tree-what are the others?"

  "Come see."

  She led him to the Mall pedway. They edged inward toward the fast strip, Cheryl always ahead of him, Lunan pushing himself and feeling clumsy. They stood upright, hurtling through the Mall at fifty kilometers an hour, while Cheryl tried to explain the rules of the game she'd played as a girl on that three-dimensional grid in the nursery tree. Everybody around him seemed perfectly at ease.

  Another datum. They must really trust the Todos Santos engineers, Lunan thought. He was filing other impressions in his head:

  Quiet. The machinery was nearly silent, and voices didn't batter the ears. Lunan considered the sound-baffling effect of all those balconies, and the two pillars that had been turned into trees, and the high ceilings. Not enough; there must be soundproofing in the ceilings. Have to ask someone. But that still didn't explain it. Lunan made himself listen ... and knew that the loudest voices he heard were all Angelinos. Even the children. And he could hear the difference.

  Todos Santos children weren't loud, but they were agile. This was their turf (all of it!
No wonder the designers had built that nursery tree. Why would you want to play in your own neighborhood when you could go there? And that promoted loyalty to the city as a whole, not just to your own block!) and they moved through it like streaks, never bumping anyone. Even here, where there were a lot of Angelino visitors, clumsy moving objects to avoid.

  They came to a wide arch spanning the pedway. Above was an arcade with shops, but for a moment they were passing through a tunnel, stationary walks but no shops on either side of the swift moving pedway. There were boys on the walks. One slipped a coil of rope off his shoulder. Lunan watched in horror as he flung it high in the air. It floated down, unrolling, across the fast pedway ahead of Lunan. Boys on the other side caught it. They pulled it taut, leaning back with the effort.