by Roger Elwood
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 tugging 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 vast 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 realised how rudely I was staring. I looked away, embarrassed. “Bera thought an organlegging gang might be involved. Some of the gang 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, world wide. 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 voting for the Second Freezer Bill. The first Freezer Law had applied only to the destitute, the Freeze-out 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 that much different. The corpsicles named in Group II 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 a hundred and forty 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 organlegging stock, 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 were bothering her lately. Since she met me. A surgeon and an organlegger-hunting ARM, we made a strange pairing.
When I looked again, a quartet of nudists had taken over Chambers’ table. Healthy, athletic, smooth-shaven, they jarred oddly with the World-Ash beyond the windows. Olympus would have fit them better.
We split the tab, paid, and left.
The first shopping level of High Cliffs had an odd indoor-outdoor feel to it. We came out into a broad walk lined with shops and trees and theaters and sidewalk cafes, under a flat concrete sky forty feet up and glowing with light. Far away, a mountainous black horizon showed in a narrow band between concrete sky and firmament.
The crowds had gone, but in some of the sidewalk cafes, a few citizens still watched the world go by. We walked toward the black band of horizon, holding hands, taking our time. There was no way to hurry Taffy when she was passing shop windows. All I could do was stop when she did, wearing or not wearing an indulgent smile. My sporan swung at my waist, heavy with a weight I had ceased to notice long ago.
Taffy tugged my arm, turning sharply to look into a furniture store. Maybe it was the Womb Room arrangement she wanted me to see: a desk and easy chair and boob cube and videotape and hi-fi setup, all combined in flowing curves of artificial woods. But what I noticed was a dazzling pulse of green light on the glass and a puff of green flame spurting from the back of the chair.
Very strange. Surrealistic, I thought. Then the impressions sorted out, and I pushed Taffy hard in the small of her back and flung myself rolling in the other direction. Green light flashed briefly, very near.
Some puzzled citizens stopped to watch what I was doing.
I ripped my sporan apart with both hands. The seam gave and everything spilled out, rolling coins and credit cards and ARM ident and cigarettes and the regulation off-duty weapon that I had only used twice in my life, though I had to fumble past it every time I paid a dinner check. It was Derringer-sized: a butt and trigger and two compressed air cartridges firing clusters of anaesthetic crystal slivers.
The window reflection had been a break. Usually yo
u can’t tell where the pulse from a hunting laser might have come from.
Green light flashed near my elbow. The pavement cracked loudly and peppered me with particles. I fought an urge to fling myself backward. The afterimage was on my retina, a green line thin as a razor’s edge, pointing him out.
There in a narrow cross street: a shadow man, posed kneeling, waiting for his gun to pulse again. I sent a cloud of mercy-needles toward him. He slapped at his face, turned to run, and fell skidding.
I stayed where I was. There might be more.
Taffy was curled on the pavement with her head buried in her arms. There was no blood around her. When I saw her legs shift, I knew she wasn’t dead. I still didn’t know if she’d been hit.
Nobody else tried to shoot at us.
The man with the gun lay where he was for almost a minute. Then he started twitching.
He was in convulsions when I got to him. Mercy-needles aren’t supposed to do that. I got his tongue out of his throat so he couldn’t choke, but I wasn’t carrying medicines that could help. When the High Cliffs police arrived, he was dead.
Inspector Swan was a picture-poster cop, tri-racial and handsome as hell in an orange uniform that seemed tailored to him, so well did he fit it. He had the gun open in front of him and was probing at the electronic guts of it with a pair of tweezers. He said, “You don’t have any idea why he was shooting at you?”
“That’s right.”
“You’re an ARM. What do you work on these days?”
“Organlegging, mostly. Tracking down gangs that have gone into hiding.” I was massaging Taffy’s neck and shoulders, trying to calm her down. She was still shivering. The muscles under my hands were very tight.
Swan frowned. “Such an easy answer. But he couldn’t be part of an organlegging gang, could he? Not with that gun.”
“True.” I ran my thumbs around the curve of Taffy’s shoulder blades. She reached around and squeezed my hand.
The gun. I hadn’t really expected Swan to see the implications. It was an unmodified hunting laser, right off the rack.
Officially, nobody in the world makes guns to kill people. Under the conventions, not even armies use them; and the United Nations police use mercy-weapons, with the intent that the criminals concerned should be unharmed for trial—and, later, for the organ banks. The only killing weapons made are for killing animals. They are supposed to be, well, sportsmanlike.
A continuous-firing X-ray laser would be easy enough to make. It would chop down anything living, no matter how fast it fled, no matter what it hid behind. The beast wouldn’t even know it was being shot at until you waved the beam through its body: an invisible sword blade a mile long.
But that’s butchery. The prey should have a chance; it should at least know it’s being shot at. A standard hunting laser fires a pulse of visible light and won’t fire again for about a second. It’s no better than a rifle, except that you don’t have to allow for windage, the range is close enough to infinite, you can’t run out of bullets, it doesn’t mess up the meat, and there’s no recoil. That’s what makes it sportsmanlike.
Against me it had been just sportsmanlike enough. He was dead. I wasn’t.
“Not that it’s so censored easy to modify a hunting laser,” said Swan. “It takes some basic electronics. I could do it myself—”
“So could I. Why not? We’ve both had police training.”
“The point is, I don’t know anyone who couldn’t find someone to modify a hunting laser, give it a faster pulse or even a continuous beam. Your friend must have been afraid to bring anyone else into it. He must have had a very personal grudge against you. You’re sure you don’t recognise him?”
“I never saw him before. Not with that face.”
“And he’s dead,” said Swan.
“That doesn’t really prove anything. Some people have allergic reactions to police anaesthetics.”
“You used a standard ARM weapon?”
“Yah. I didn’t even fire both barrels. I couldn’t have put a lot of needles in him. But there are allergic reactions.”
“Especially if you take something to bring them on.” Swan put the gun down and stood up. “Now, I’m just a city cop, and I don’t know that much about ARM business. But I’ve heard that organleggers sometimes take something so they won’t just go to sleep when an ARM anaesthetic hits them.”
“Yah. Organleggers don’t like becoming spare parts themselves. I do have a theory, Inspector.”
“Try me.”
“He’s a retired organlegger. A lot of them retired when the Freezer Bill passed. Their markets were gone, and they’d made their pile, some of them. They split up and became honest citizens. A respected citizen may keep a hunting laser on his wall, but it isn’t modified. He could modify it if he had to, with a day’s notice.”
“Then said respected citizen spotted an old enemy.”
“Going into a restaurant, maybe. And he just had time to go home for his gun, while we ate dinner.”
“Sounds reasonable. How do we check it?”
“If you’ll do a rejection spectrum on his brain tissue and send everything you get to ARM Headquarters, we’ll do the rest. An organlegger can change his face and fingerprints as he censored pleases, but he can’t change his tolerance to transplants. Chances are he’s on record.”
“And you’ll let me know.”
“Right.”
Swan checked in via the radio on his scooter. I beeped my clicker at a cruising taxi, waited for it to settle, then helped Taffy into it. Her movements were slow and jerky. Her hands were cold, her face still pale with shock.
Swan called from his scooter. “Hamilton!”
I stopped halfway into the taxi. “Yah?”
“He’s a local,” Swam boomed. His voice carried like an actor’s. “Mortimer Lincoln, ninety-fourth floor. Been living here since—” He checked again with his radio. “April, 2123 I’d guess that’s about six months after they passed the Freezer Law.”
“Thanks.” I typed an address on the cab’s destination board. The cab hummed and rose.
I watched High Cliffs recede, a pyramid as big as a mountain, glowing with light. The city guarded by inspector Swan was all in one building. It would make his job easier, I thought. Society would be a bit more organized.
Taffy spoke for the first time in a good while. “Nobody’s ever shot at me before.”
“It’s all over now. I think he was shooting at me anyway.”
“I suppose.” Suddenly she was shaking. I took her in my arms and held her. She talked into my shirt collar. “I didn’t know what was happening. That green light, I thought it was pretty. I didn’t know what happened until you knocked me down, and then that green line flashed at you and I heard the sidewalk go ping, and I didn’t know what to do! I—”
“You did fine.”
“I wanted to help! I didn’t know, maybe you were dead, and there wasn’t anything I could do. If you hadn’t had a gun—Do you always carry a gun?”
“Always.”
“I never knew.” Without moving, she seemed to pull away from me a little.
At one time the Amalgamated Regional Militia had been a federation of Civil Defense bodies in a number of nations. Later it had become the police force of the United Nations itself. They had kept the name. Probably they liked the acronym.
ARM Headquarters in Los Angeles was a relatively new building. By early morning light, it looked almost like a flowering plant: all balconies and open bridges around a central stalk. It did not look institutional, at least from outside. Inside? Well, mine was an inside office, comfortable enough, but not very big, and with no windows.
Jackson Bera had already run the dead man to earth. “No question about it,” he told me. “His rejection spectrum checks perfectly. Anthony Tiller, known organlegger, suspected member of the Anubis gang. First came on the scene around 2120; he probably had another name and face before that. Disappeared April or May 2123.”
“That fits.” I thought about it. “No, dammit, it doesn’t. He must have been out of his mind. He was home free. Safe and comfortable. Why would he blow it all to kill a man who never harmed a hair of his head?”
“You don’t really expect an organlegger to behave like a well-adjusted member of society.”
I answered Bera’s grin. “I guess not. . . . Hey. You said Anubis, didn’t you? The Anubis gang, not the Loren gang.”
“That’s what it says on the hard copy. Shall I query for probability?”
“Please.” Bera programs a computer better than I do. I talked while he tapped at the keyboard in my desk. “Whoever the bleep he was, Anubis controlled the illicit medical facilities over a big section of the Midwest. Loren had a piece of the North American west coast, smaller area, bigger population. The difference is that I killed Loren myself, by squeezing the life out of his heart with my imaginary hand, which is a very personal thing, as you will realize, Jackson. Whereas I never touched Anubis or any of his gang, nor even interfered with his profits, to the best of my knowledge.”
“I did,” said Bera. “Maybe he thought I was you.” Which is hilarious, because Bera is dark brown and a foot taller than me if you include the hair that puffs out around his head like a black powder explosion. “You missed something. Anubis was an intriguing character. He changed faces and ears and fingerprints whenever he got the urge. We’re pretty sure he was male, but even that isn’t worth a big bet. He’s changed his height at least once. Full leg transplant.”
“Loren couldn’t do that. Loren was a pretty sick boy. He probably went into organlegging because he needed the transplant supply.”
“Not Anubis. Anubis must have had a sky-high rejection threshold.”
“Jackson, you’re proud of Anubis.”
Bera was shocked to his core. “The hell! He’s a dirty murdering organlegger! If I’d caught him, I’d be proud of Anubis—” He stopped, because my desk screen was getting information.
The computer in the basement of the ARM building gave Anthony Tiller no chance at all of being part of the Loren gang, and a probability in the nineties that he had run with the Jackal God. One point was that Anubis and the rest had all dropped out of sight around the end of April, 2123, when Anthony Tiller-Mortimer Lincoln changed his face and moved into High Cliffs.