Flatlander

by Larry Niven

  “Because if I can get my UN citizenship back, Earth will replace my arm. Free.”

  “Oh. That’s true,” he’d said dubiously.

  The Belt had organ banks, too, but they were always undersupplied. Belters didn’t give things away. Neither did the Belt government. They kept the prices on transplants as high as they would go. Thus they dropped the demand to meet the supply and kept taxes down to boot.

  In the Belt I’d have to buy my own arm. And I didn’t have the money. On Earth there was social security and a vast supply of transplant material.

  What Owen had said couldn’t be done, I’d done. I’d found someone to hand me my arm back.

  Sometimes I’d wondered if Owen held the choice against me. He’d never said anything, but Homer Chandrasekhar had spoken at length. A Belter would have earned his arm or done without. Never would he have accepted charity.

  Was that why Owen hadn’t tried to call me?

  I shook my head. I didn’t believe it.

  The room continued to lurch after my head stopped shaking. I’d had enough for the moment. I finished my third grog and ordered dinner.

  Dinner sobered me for the next lap. It was something of a shock to realize that I’d run through the entire life span of my friendship with Owen Jennison. I’d known him for three years, though it had seemed like half a lifetime. And it was. Half my six-year life span as a Belter.

  I ordered coffee grog and watched the man pour it: hot, milky coffee laced with cinnamon and other spices and high-proof rum poured in a stream of blue fire. This was one of the special drinks served by a human headwaiter, and it was the reason they kept him around. Phase two of the ceremonial drunk: blow half your fortune in the grand manner.

  But I called Ordaz before I touched the drink.

  “Yes, Mr. Hamilton? I was just going home for dinner.”

  “I won’t keep you long. Have you found out anything new?”

  Ordaz took a closer look at my phone image. His disapproval was plain. “I see that you have been drinking. Perhaps you should go home now and call me tomorrow.”

  I was shocked. “Don’t you know anything about Belt customs?”

  “I do not understand.”

  I explained the ceremonial drunk. “Look, Ordaz, if you know that little about the way a Belter thinks, then we’d better have a talk. Soon. Otherwise you’re likely to miss something.”

  “You may be right. I can see you at noon, over lunch.”

  “Good. What have you got?”

  “Considerable, but none of it is very helpful. Your friend landed on Earth two months ago, arriving on the Pillar of Fire, operating out of Outback Field, Australia. He was wearing a haircut in the style of Earth. From there—”

  “That’s funny. He’d have had to wait two months for his hair to grow out.”

  “That occurred even to me. I understand that a Belter commonly shaves his entire scalp except for a strip two inches wide running from the nape of his neck forward.”

  “The strip cut, yah. It probably started when someone decided he’d live longer if his hair couldn’t fall in his eyes during a tricky landing. But Owen could have let his hair grow out during a singleship mining trip. There’d be nobody to see.”

  “Still, it seems odd. Did you know that Mr. Jennison has a cousin on Earth? One Harvey Peele, who manages a chain of supermarkets.”

  “So I wasn’t his next of kin, even on Earth.”

  “Mr. Jennison made no attempt to contact him.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I’ve spoken to the man who sold Mr. Jennison his droud and plug. Kenneth Graham owns an office and operating room on Gayley in Near West Los Angeles. Graham claims that the droud was a standard type, that your friend must have altered it himself.”

  “Do you believe him?”

  “For the present. His permits and his records are all in order. The droud was altered with a soldering iron, an amateur’s tool.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “As far as the police are concerned, the case will probably be closed when we locate the tools Mr. Jennison used.”

  “Tell you what. I’ll wire Homer Chandrasekhar tomorrow. Maybe he can find out things—why Owen landed without a strip haircut, why he came to Earth at all.”

  Ordaz shrugged with his eyebrows. He thanked me for my trouble and hung up.

  The coffee grog was still hot. I gulped at it, savoring the sugary, bitter sting of it, trying to forget Owen dead and remember him in life. He was always slightly chubby, I remembered, but he never gained a pound and never lost a pound. He could move like a whippet when he had to.

  And now he was terribly thin, and his death grin was ripe with obscene joy.

  I ordered another coffee grog. The waiter, a showman, made sure he had my attention before he lit the heated rum, then poured it from a foot above the glass. You can’t drink that drink slowly. It slides down too easily, and there’s the added spur that if you wait too long, it might get cold. Rum and strong coffee. Two of these and I’d be drunkenly alert for hours.

  Midnight found me in the Mars Bar, running on scotch and soda. In between I’d been barhopping. Irish coffee at Bergin’s, cold and smoking concoctions at the Moon Pool, scotch and wild music at Beyond. I couldn’t get drunk, and I couldn’t find the right mood. There was a barrier to the picture I was trying to rebuild.

  It was the memory of the last Owen, grinning in an armchair with a wire leading down into his brain.

  I didn’t know that Owen. I had never met the man and never would have wanted to. From bar to nightclub to restaurant I had run from the image, waiting for the alcohol to break the barrier between present and past.

  So I sat at a corner table, surrounded by 3D panoramic views of an impossible Mars. Crystal towers and long, straight blue canali, six-legged beasts and beautiful, impossibly slender men and women looked out at me across never-never land. Would Owen have found it sad or funny? He’d seen the real Mars and had not been impressed.

  I had reached that stage where time becomes discontinuous, where gaps of seconds or minutes appear between the events you can remember. Somewhere in that period I found myself staring at a cigarette. I must have just lighted it, because it was near its original two-hundred-millimeter length. Maybe a waiter had snuck up behind me. There it was, at any rate, burning between my middle and index fingers.

  I stared at the coal as the mood settled on me. I was calm, I was drifting, I was lost in time …

  … We’d been two months in the rocks, our first trip out since the accident. Back we came to Ceres with a holdful of gold, fifty percent pure, guaranteed suitable for rustproof wiring and conductor plates. At nightfall we were ready to celebrate.

  We walked along the city limits, with neon blinking and beckoning on the right, a melted rock cliff to the left, and stars blazing through the dome overhead. Homer Chandrasekhar was practically snorting. On this night his first trip out culminated in his first homecoming, and homecoming is the best part.

  “We’ll want to split up about midnight,” he said. He didn’t need to enlarge on that. Three men in company might conceivably be three singleship pilots, but chances are they’re a ship’s crew. They don’t have their singleship licenses yet; they’re too stupid or too inexperienced. If we wanted companions for the night—

  “You haven’t thought this through,” Owen answered. I saw Homer’s double take, then his quick look at where my shoulder ended, and I was ashamed. I didn’t need my crewmates to hold my hand, and in this state I’d only slow them down.

  Before I could open my mouth to protest, Owen went on. “We’ve got a draw here that we’d be idiots to throw away. Gil, pick up a cigarette. No, not with your left hand—”

  I was drunk, gloriously drunk and feeling immortal. The attenuated Martians seemed to move in the walls, the walls that seemed to be picture windows on a Mars that never was. For the first time that night I raised my glass in a toast.

  “To Owen, from Gil the Arm. Thanks.”r />
  I transferred the cigarette to my imaginary hand.

  By now you’ve got the idea I was holding it in my imaginary fingers. Most people have the same impression, but it isn’t so. I held it clutched ignominiously in my fist. The coal couldn’t burn me, of course, but it still felt like a lead ingot.

  I rested my imaginary elbow on the table, and that seemed to make it easier—which is ridiculous, but it works. Truly, I’d expected my imaginary arm to disappear after I got the transplant. But I’d found I could dissociate from the new arm to hold small objects in my invisible hand, to feel tactile sensations in my invisible fingertips.

  I’d earned the title Gil the Arm that night in Ceres. It had started with a floating cigarette. Owen had been right. Everyone in the place eventually wound up staring at the floating cigarette smoked by the one-armed man. All I had to do was find the prettiest girl in the room with my peripheral vision, then catch her eye.

  That night we had been the center of the biggest impromptu party ever thrown in Ceres Base. It wasn’t planned that way at all. I’d used the cigarette trick three times so that each of us would have a date. But the third girl already had an escort, and he was celebrating something; he’d sold some kind of patent to an Earth-based industrial firm. He was throwing money around like confetti. So we let him stay. I did tricks, reaching esper fingers into a closed box to tell what was inside, and by the time I finished, all the tables had been pushed together and I was in the center, with Homer and Owen and three girls. Then we got to singing old songs, and the bartenders joined us, and suddenly everything was on the house.

  Eventually about twenty of us wound up in the orbiting mansion of the First Speaker for the Belt Government. The goldskin cops had tried to bust us up earlier, and the First Speaker had behaved very rudely indeed, then compensated by inviting them to join us …

  And that was why I used TK on so many cigarettes.

  Across the width of the Mars Bar a girl in a peach-colored dress sat studying me with her chin on her fist. I got up and went over.

  My head felt fine. It was the first thing I checked when I woke up. Apparently I’d remembered to take a hangover pill.

  A leg was hooked over my knee. It felt good, though the pressure had put my foot to sleep. Fragrant dark hair spilled beneath my nose. I didn’t move. I didn’t want her to know I was awake.

  It’s damned embarrassing when you wake up with a girl and can’t remember her name.

  Well, let’s see. A peach dress neatly hung from a doorknob … I remembered a whole lot of traveling last night. The girl at the Mars Bar. A puppet show. Music of all kinds. I’d talked about Owen, and she’d steered me away from that because it depressed her. Then—

  Hah! Taffy. Last name forgotten.

  “Morning,” I said.

  “Morning,” she said. “Don’t try to move; we’re hooked together …” In the sober morning light she was lovely. Long black hair, brown eyes, creamy untanned skin. To be lovely this early was a neat trick, and I told her so, and she smiled.

  My lower leg was dead meat until it started to buzz with renewed circulation, and then I made faces until it calmed down. Taffy kept up a running chatter as we dressed. “That third hand is strange. I remember you holding me with two strong arms and stroking the back of my neck with the third. Very nice. It reminded me of a Fritz Leiber story.”

  “‘The Wanderer.’ The panther girl.”

  “Mm hmm. How many girls have you caught with that cigarette trick?”

  “None as pretty as you.”

  “And how many girls have you told that to?”

  “Can’t remember. It always worked before. Maybe this time it’s for real.”

  We exchanged grins.

  A minute later I caught her frowning thoughtfully at the back of my neck. “Something wrong?”

  “I was just thinking. You really crashed and burned last night. I hope you don’t drink that much all the time.”

  “Why? You worried about me?”

  She blushed, then nodded.

  “I should have told you. In fact, I think I did, last night. When a good friend dies, it’s obligatory to get smashed.”

  Taffy looked relieved. “I didn’t mean to get—”

  “Personal? Why not. You’ve the right. Anyway, I like—” maternal types, but I couldn’t say that. “—people who worry about me.”

  Taffy touched her hair with some kind of complex comb. A few strokes snapped her hair instantly into place. Static electricity?

  “It was a good drunk,” I said. “Owen would have been proud. And that’s all the mourning I’ll do. One drunk and—” I spread my hands. “Out.”

  “It’s not a bad way to go,” Taffy mused reflectively. “Current stimulus, I mean. I mean, if you’ve got to bow out—”

  “Now, drop that!” I don’t know how I got so angry so fast. Ghoul-thin and grinning in a reading chair, Owen’s corpse was suddenly vivid before me. I’d fought that image for too many hours. “Walking off a bridge is enough of a cop-out,” I snarled. “Dying for a month while current burns out your brain is nothing less than sickening.”

  Taffy was hurt and bewildered. “But your friend did it, didn’t he? You didn’t make him sound like a weakling.”

  “Nuts,” I heard myself say. “He didn’t do it. He was—”

  Just like that, I was sure. I must have realized it while I was drunk or sleeping. Of course he hadn’t killed himself. That wasn’t Owen. And current addiction wasn’t Owen, either.

  “He was murdered,” I said. “Sure he was. Why didn’t I see it?” And I made a dive for the phone.

  “Good morning, Mr. Hamilton.” Detective-Inspector Ordaz looked very fresh and neat this morning. I was suddenly aware that I hadn’t shaved. “I see you remembered to take your hangover pills.”

  “Right Ordaz, has it occurred to you that Owen might have been murdered?”

  “Naturally. But it isn’t possible.”

  “I think it might be. Suppose he—”

  “Mr. Hamilton.”

  “Yah?”

  “We have an appointment for lunch. Shall we discuss it then? Meet me at headquarters at twelve hundred.”

  “Okay. One thing you might take care of this morning. See if Owen registered for a nudist’s license.”

  “Do you think he might have?”

  “Yah. I’ll tell you why at lunch.”

  “Very well.”

  “Don’t hang up. You said you’d found the man who sold Owen his droud and plug. What was his name again?”

  “Kenneth Graham.”

  “That’s what I thought.” I hung up.

  Taffy touched my shoulder. “Do—do you really think he might have been—killed?”

  “Yah. The whole setup depended on him not being able to—”

  “No. Wait. I don’t want to know about it.”

  I turned to look at her. She really didn’t. The very subject of a stranger’s death was making her sick to her stomach.

  “Okay. Look, I’m a jerk not to at least offer you breakfast, but I’ve got to get on this right away. Can I call you a cab?”

  When the cab came, I dropped a ten-mark coin in the slot and helped her in. I got her address before it took off.

  ARM Headquarters hummed with early morning activity. Hellos came my way, and I answered them without stopping to talk. Anything important would filter down to me eventually.

  As I passed Julie’s cubicle, I glanced in. She was hard at work, limply settled in her contour couch, jotting notes with her eyes closed.

  Kenneth Graham.

  A hookup to the basement computer formed the greater part of my desk. Learning how to use it had taken me several months. I typed an order for coffee and doughnuts, then: INFORMATION RETRIEVAL. KENNETH GRAHAM, LIMITED LICENSE: SURGERY. GENERAL LICENSE: DIRECT CURRENT STIMULUS EQUIPMENT SALES. ADDRESS: NEAR WEST LOS ANGELES.

  Tape chattered out of the slot, an instant response, loop after loop of it curling on my desk. I didn�
��t need to read it to know I was right.

  New technologies create new customs, new laws, new ethics, new crimes. About half the activity of the United Nations Police, the ARMs, dealt with control of a crime that hadn’t existed a century ago. The crime of organ-legging was the result of thousands of years of medical progress, of millions of lives selflessly dedicated to the ideal of healing the sick. Progress had brought these ideals to reality and, as usual, had created new problems.

  1900 A.D. was the year Karl Landsteiner classified human blood into four types, giving patients their first real chance to survive a transfusion. The technology of transplants had grown with the growing of the twentieth century. Whole blood, dry bone, skin, live kidneys, live hearts could all be transferred from one body to another. Donors had saved tens of thousands of lives in that hundred years by willing their bodies to medicine.

  But the number of donors was limited, and not many died in such a way that anything of value could be saved.

  The deluge had come something less than a hundred years ago. One healthy donor (but of course there was no such animal) could save a dozen lives. Why, then, should a condemned murderer die for no purpose? First a few states, then most of the nations of the world had passed new laws. Criminals condemned to death must be executed in a hospital, with surgeons to save as much as could be saved for the organ banks.

  The world’s billions wanted to live, and the organ banks were life itself. A man could live forever as long as the doctors could shove spare parts into him faster than his own parts wore out. But they could do that only as long as the world’s organ banks were stocked.

  A hundred scattered movements to abolish the death penalty died silent, unpublicized deaths. Everybody gets sick sometime.

  And still there were shortages in the organ banks. Still patients died for the lack of parts to save them. The world’s legislators had responded to steady pressure from the world’s people. Death penalties were established for first-, second-, and third-degree murder. For assault with a deadly weapon. Then for a multitude of crimes: rape, fraud, embezzlement, having children without a license, four or more counts of false advertising. For nearly a century the trend had been growing as the world’s voting citizens acted to protect their right to live forever.