Flatlander

by Larry Niven

  Bera ran both hands through his hair, a swift, violent gesture that left his natural in shreds. “Why didn’t I think of that? Why didn’t anyone think of that?”

  “The waste. When the stuff from one condemned ax murderer can save a dozen lives, it just doesn’t occur to you—”

  “Right right right. Skip that What do we do?”

  “Alert headquarters. Then call Holden Chambers. I may be able to tell just by talking to him. Otherwise we’ll have to go over.”

  “Yah.” Bera grinned through the pain of interrupted sleep. “He’s not going to like being called at three in the morning.”

  The white-haired man informed me that Holden Chambers was not to be disturbed. He was reaching for a (mythical) cutoff switch when I said, “ARM business, life and death,” and displayed my ARM ident. He nodded and put me on hold.

  Very convincing. But he’d gone through some of the same motions every time I’d called.

  Chambers appeared, wearing a badly wrinkled cloth sleeping jacket. He backed up a few feet (wary of ghostly intrusions?) and sat down on the uneasy edge of a water bed. He rubbed his eyes and said, “Censor it, I was up past midnight studying. What now?”

  “You’re in danger. Immediate danger. Don’t panic, but don’t go back to bed, either. We’re coming over.”

  “You’re kidding.” He studied my face in the phone screen. “You’re not, are you? A-a-all right, I’ll put some clothes on. What kind of danger?”

  “I can’t tell you that. Don’t go anywhere.”

  I called Bera back.

  He met me in the lobby. We used his taxi. An ARM ident in the credit slot turns any cab into a police car. Bera said, “Couldn’t you tell?”

  “No, he was too far back. I had to say something, so I warned him not to go anywhere.”

  “I wonder if that was a good idea.”

  “It doesn’t matter. Anubis only has about fifteen minutes to act, and even then we could follow him.”

  There was no immediate answer to our ring. Maybe he was surprised to see us outside his door. Ordinarily you can’t get into the parking roof elevator unless a tenant lets you in, but an ARM ident unlocks most locks.

  Bera’s patience snapped. “I think he’s gone. We’d better call—”

  Chambers opened the door. “All right, what’s it all about? Come—” He saw our guns.

  Bera hit the door hard and branched right; I branched left. Those tiny apartments don’t have many places to hide. The water bed was gone, replaced by an L-shaped couch and coffee table. There was nothing behind the couch. I covered the bathroom while Bera kicked the door open.

  Nobody here but us. Chambers lost his astonished look, smiled, and clapped for us. I bowed.

  “You must have been serious,” he said. “What kind of danger? Couldn’t it have waited for morning?”

  “Yah, but I couldn’t have slept,” I said, coming toward him. “I’m going to owe you a big fat apology if this doesn’t work out.”

  He backed away.

  “Hold still. This will only take a second.” I advanced on him. Bera was behind him now. He hadn’t hurried. His long legs give him deceptive speed.

  Chambers backed away, backed away, backed into Bera, and squeaked in surprise. He dithered, then made a break for the bathroom.

  Bera reached out, wrapped one arm around Chambers’s waist, and pinned his arms with the other. Chambers struggled like a madman. I stepped wide around them, moved in sideways to avoid Chambers’s thrashing legs, reached out to touch his face with my imaginary hand.

  He froze. Then he screamed.

  “That’s what you were afraid of,” I told him. “You never dreamed I could reach through a phone screen to do this.” I reached into his head, felt smooth muscle and grainy bone and sinus cavities like bubbles. He tossed his head, but my hand went with it. I ran imaginary fingertips along the smooth inner surface of his skull. It was there. A ridge of scar, barely raised above the rest of the bone, too fine for X rays. It ran in a closed curve from the base of his skull up through the temples to intersect his eye sockets.

  “It’s him,” I said.

  Bera screamed in his ear. “You pig!”

  Anubis went limp.

  “I can’t find a joining at the brain stem. They must have transplanted the spinal cord, too; the whole central nervous system.” I found scars along the vertebrae. “That’s what they did, all right.”

  Anubis spoke almost casually, as if he’d lost a chess game. “All right, that’s a gotcha. I concede. Let’s sit down.”

  “Sure.” Bera threw him at the couch. He hit it, more or less. He adjusted himself, looking astonished at Bera’s bad behavior. What was the man so excited about?

  Bera told him. “You pig. Coring him like that, making a vehicle out of the poor bastard. We never thought of a brain transplant.”

  “It’s a wonder I thought of it myself. The stuff from one donor is worth over a million marks in surgery charges. Why should anyone use a whole donor for one transplant? But once I thought of it, it made all kinds of sense. The stuff wasn’t selling, anyway.”

  Funny: they both talked as if they’d known each other a long time. There aren’t many people an organlegger will regard as people, but an ARM is one of them. We’re organleggers, too, in a sense.

  Bera was holding a sonic on him. Anubis ignored it. He said, “The only problem was the money.”

  “Then you thought of the corpsicle heirs,” I said.

  “Yah. I went looking for a rich corpsicle with a young, healthy direct-line heir. Leviticus Hale seemed made for the part. He was the first one I noticed.”

  “He’s pretty noticeable, isn’t he? A healthy middle-aged man sleeping there among all those battered accident cases. Only two heirs, both orphans, one kind of introverted, the other … What did you do to Charlotte?”

  “Charlotte Chambers? We drove her mad. We had to. She was the only one who’d notice if Holden Chambers suddenly got too different.”

  “What did you do to her?”

  “We made a wirehead out of her.”

  “The hell. Someone would have noticed the contact in her scalp.”

  “No, no, no. We used one of those induction helmets you find in the ecstasy shops. We kept her in the helmet for nine days, on full. When we stopped the current, she just wasn’t interested in anything anymore.”

  “How did you know it would work?”

  “Oh, we tried it out on a few prospects. It worked fine. It didn’t hurt them after they were broken up.”

  “Okay.” I went to the phone and dialed ARM Headquarters.

  “It solved the money problem beautifully,” he ran on. “I plowed most of it into advertising charges. And there’s nothing suspicious about Leviticus Hale’s money. When the second Freezer Bill goes through—well, I guess not. Not now. Unless—”

  “No,” Bera said for both of us.

  I told the man on duty where we were, and to stop monitoring the tracers, and to call in the operatives watching corpsicle heirs. Then I hung up.

  “I spent six months studying Chambers’s college courses. I didn’t want to blow his career. Six months! Answer me one,” Anubis said, curiously anxious. “Where did I go wrong? What gave me away?”

  “You were beautiful,” I told him wearily. “You never went out of character. You should have been an actor. Would have been safer, too. We didn’t suspect anything until—” I looked at my watch. “Forty-five minutes ago.”

  “Censored dammit! You would say that. When I saw you looking at me in Midgard, I thought that was it. That floating cigarette. You’d got Loren, now you were after me.”

  I couldn’t help it. I roared. Anubis sat there, taking it. He was beginning to blush.

  They were shouting something, something I couldn’t make out Something with a beat. DAdadadaDAdadada …

  There was just room for me and Jackson Bera and Luke Garner’s travel chair on the tiny balcony outside Garner’s office. Far below, the marchers f
lowed past the ARM building in half-orderly procession. Teams of them carried huge banners. LET THEM STAY DEAD, one suggested, and another in small print: Why not revive them a bit at a time? FOR YOUR FATHER’S SAKE, a third said with deadly logic.

  They were roped off from the spectators, roped off into a column down the middle of Wilshire. The spectators were even thicker. It looked like all of Los Angeles had turned out to watch. Some of them carried placards, too. THEY WANT TO LIVE TOO, and ARE YOU A FREEZER VAULT HEIR?

  “What is it they’re shouting?” Bera wondered. “It’s not the marchers; it’s the spectators. They’re drowning out the marchers.”

  DAdadadaDAdadadaDAdadada. It rippled up to us on stray wind currents.

  “We could see it better inside, in the boob cube,” Garner said without moving. What held us was a metaphysical force, the knowledge that one is there, a witness.

  Abruptly, Garner asked, “How’s Charlotte Chambers?”

  “I don’t know.” I didn’t want to talk about it.

  “Didn’t you call Menninger Institute this morning?”

  “I mean I don’t know how to take it They’ve done a wirehead operation on her. They’re giving her just enough current to keep her interested. It’s working, I mean she’s talking to people, but …”

  “It’s got to be better than being catatonic,” Bera said.

  “Does it? There’s no way to turn off a wirehead. She’ll have to go through life with a battery under her hat. When she comes back far enough into the real world, she’ll find a way to boost the current and bug right out again.”

  “Think of her as walking wounded.” Bera shrugged, shifting an invisible weight on his shoulders. “There isn’t any good answer. She’s been hurt, man!”

  “There’s more to it than that,” Luke Garner said. “We need to know if she can be cured. There are more wireheads every day. It’s a new vice. We need to learn how to control it What the bleep is happening down there?”

  The bystanders were surging against the ropes. Suddenly they were through in a dozen places, converging on the marchers. It was a swirling mob scene. They were still chanting, and suddenly I caught it.

  ORganleggersORganleggersORganleggers …

  “That’s it!” Bera shouted in pleased surprise. “Anubis is getting too much publicity. It’s good versus evil!”

  The rioters started to collapse in curved ribbon patterns. Copters overhead were spraying them with sonic stun cannon.

  Bera said, “They’ll never pass the second Freezer Bill now.”

  Never is a long time to Luke Garner. He said, “Not this time, anyway. We ought to start thinking about that. A lot of people have been applying for operations. There’s quite a waiting list. When the second Freezer Bill fails—”

  I saw it. “They’ll start going to organleggers. We can keep track of them. Tracers.”

  “That’s what I had in mind.”

  ARM

  The ARM Building had been abnormally quiet for some months now.

  We’d needed the rest—at first. But these last few mornings the silence had had an edgy quality. We waved at each other on our paths to our respective desks, but our heads were elsewhere. Some of us had a restless look. Others were visibly, determinedly busy.

  Nobody wanted to join a mother hunt.

  This past year we’d managed to cut deep into the organlegging activities in the West Coast area. Pats on the back all around, but the results were predictable: other activities were going to increase. Sooner or later the newspapers would start screaming about stricter enforcement of the Fertility Laws, and then we’d all be out hunting down illegitimate parents … all of us who were not involved in something else.

  It was high time I got involved in something else.

  This morning I walked to my office through the usual edgy silence. I ran coffee, carried it to my desk, punched for messages at the computer terminal. A slender file slid from the slot. A hopeful sign. I picked it up one-handed so that I could sip coffee as I went through it and let it fall open in the middle.

  Color holographs jumped out at me. I was looking down through a pair of windows over two morgue tables.

  Stomach to brain: LURCH! What a hell of an hour to be looking at people with their faces burned off! Get eyes to look somewhere else and don’t try to swallow that coffee. Why don’t you change jobs?

  They were hideous. Two of them, a man and a woman. Something had burned their faces away down to the skulls and beyond: bones and teeth charred, brain tissue cooked.

  I swallowed and kept looking. I’d seen the dead before. These had just hit me at the wrong time.

  Not a laser weapon, I thought … though that was chancy. There are thousands of jobs for lasers and thousands of varieties to do the jobs. Not a hand laser, anyway. The pencil-thin beam of a hand laser would have chewed channels in the flesh. This had been a wide, steady beam of some kind.

  I flipped back to the beginning and skimmed.

  Details: They’d been found on the Wilshire slidewalk in West Los Angeles around 4:30 A.M. People don’t use the slidewalks that late. They’re afraid of organleggers. The bodies could have traveled up to a couple of miles before anyone saw them.

  Preliminary autopsy: They’d been dead three or four days. No signs of drugs or poisons or puncture marks. Apparently the burns had been the only cause of death.

  It must have been quick, then: a single flash of energy. Otherwise they’d have tried to dodge, and there’d be burns elsewhere. There were none. Just the faces and char marks around the collars.

  There was a memo from Bates, the coroner. From the look of them, they might have been killed by some new weapon. So he’d sent the file over to us. Could we find anything in the ARM files that would fire a blast of heat or light a foot across?

  I sat back and stared into the holos and thought about it.

  A light weapon with a beam a foot across? They make lasers in that size, but as war weapons, used from orbit. One of those would have vaporized the heads, not charred them.

  There were other possibilities. Death by torture, with the heads held in clamps in the blast from a commercial attitude jet. Or some kind of weird industrial accident: a flash explosion that had caught them both looking over a desk or something. Or even a laser beam reflected from a convex mirror.

  Forget about its being an accident. The way the bodies were abandoned reeked of guilt, of something to be covered up. Maybe Bates was right. A new illegal weapon.

  And I could be deeply involved in searching for it when the mother hunt started.

  The ARM has three basic functions. We hunt organleggers. We monitor world technology: new developments that might create new weapons or that might affect the world economy or the balance of power among nations. And we enforce the Fertility Laws.

  Come, let us be honest with ourselves. Of the three, protecting the Fertility Laws is probably the most important.

  Organleggers don’t aggravate the population problem.

  Monitoring of technology is necessary enough, but it may have happened too late. There are enough fusion power plants and fusion rocket motors and fusion crematoriums and fusion seawater distilleries around to let any madman or group thereof blow up the Earth or any selected part of it.

  But if a lot of people in one region started having illegal babies, the rest of the world would scream. Some nations might even get mad enough to abandon population control. Then what? We’ve got eighteen billion on Earth now. We couldn’t handle more.

  So the mother hunts are necessary. But I hate them. It’s no fun hunting down some poor sick woman so desperate to have children that she’ll go through hell to avoid her six-month contraceptive shots. I’ll get out of it if I can.

  I did some obvious things. I sent a note to Bates at the coroner’s office. Send all further details on the autopsies and let me know if the corpses are identified. Retinal prints and brain-wave patterns were obviously out, but they might get something on gene patterns and fingerprints.<
br />
  I spent some time wondering where two bodies had been kept for three to four days, and why, before being abandoned in a way that could have been used three days earlier. But that was a problem for the LAPD detectives. Our concern was with the weapon.

  So I started writing a search pattern for the computer: find me a widget that will fire a beam of a given description. From the pattern of penetration into skin and bone and brain tissue, there was probably a way to express the frequency of the light as a function of the duration of the blast, but I didn’t fool with that. I’d pay for my laziness later, when the computer handed me a foot-thick list of light-emitting machinery and I had to wade through it.

  I had punched in the instructions and was relaxing with more coffee and a cigarette when Ordaz called.

  Detective-Inspector Julio Ordaz was a slender, dark-skinned man with straight black hair and soft black eyes. The first time I saw him in a phone screen, he had been telling me of a good friend’s murder. Two years later I still flinched when I saw him.

  “Hello, Julio. Business or pleasure?”

  “Business, Gil. It is to be regretted.”

  “Yours or mine?”

  “Both. There is murder involved, but there is also a machine … Look, can you see it behind me?” Ordaz stepped out of the field of view, then reached invisibly to turn the phone camera.

  I looked into somebody’s living room. There was a wide circle of discoloration in the green indoor grass rug. In the center of the circle, a machine and a man’s body.

  Was Julio putting me on? The body was old, half-mummified. The machine was big and cryptic in shape, and it glowed with a subdued, eerie blue light.

  Ordaz sounded serious enough. “Have you ever seen anything like this?”

  “No. That’s some machine.” Unmistakably an experimental device: no neat plastic case, no compactness, no assembly-line welding. Too complex to examine through a phone camera, I decided. “Yah, that looks like something for us. Can you send it over?”

  Ordaz came back on. He was smiling, barely. “I’m afraid we cannot do that. Perhaps you should send someone here to look at it.”