by Larry Niven
The wall above that little table had a scorched look. I should have wondered about that earlier.
“No baths,” he was saying. “I was afraid to use up that much water. No exercise, practically. But I had to eat, didn’t I? And all for nothing.”
“Will you tell us how to find the organlegger you dealt with?”
“This is your big day, isn’t it, Hamilton? All right, why not. It won’t do you any good.”
“Why not?”
He looked up at me very strangely.
Then he spun about and ran.
He caught me flat-footed. I jumped after him. I didn’t know what he had in mind; there was only one exit to the apartment, excluding the balcony, and he wasn’t headed there. He seemed to be trying to reach a blank wall with a small table set against it and a camp flashlight on it and a drawer in it. I saw the drawer and thought, Gun! And I surged after him and got him by the wrist just as he reached the wall switch above the table.
I threw my weight backward and yanked him away from there … and then the field came on.
I held a hand and arm up to the elbow. Beyond was a fluttering of violet light: Peterfi was thrashing frantically in a low-inertia field. I hung on while I tried to figure out what was happening.
The second generator was here somewhere. In the wall? The switch seemed to have been recently plastered in, now that I saw it close. Figure a closet on the other side and the generator in it. Peterfi must have drilled through the wall and fixed that switch. Sure, what else did he have to do with six months of spare time?
No point in yelling for help. Peterfi’s soundproofing was too modern. And if I didn’t let go, Peterfi would die of thirst in a few minutes.
Peterfi’s feet came straight at my jaw. I threw myself down, and the edge of a boot sole nearly tore my ear off. I rolled forward in time to grab his ankle. There was more violet fluttering, and his other leg thrashed wildly outside the field. Too many conflicting nerve impulses were pouring into the muscles. The leg flopped about like something dying. If I didn’t let go, he’d break it in a dozen places.
He’d knocked the table over. I didn’t see it fall, but suddenly it was lying on its side. The top, drawer included, must have been well beyond the field. The flashlight lay just beyond the violet fluttering of his hand.
Okay. He couldn’t reach the drawer; his hand wouldn’t get coherent signals if it left the field. I could let go of his ankle. He’d turn off the field when he got thirsty enough.
And if I didn’t let go, he’d die in there.
It was like wrestling a dolphin one-handed. I hung on anyway, looking for a flaw in my reasoning. Peterfi’s free leg seemed broken in at least two places … I was about to let go when something must have jarred together in my head.
Faces of charred bone grinned derisively at me.
Brain to hand: HANG ON! Don’t you understand? He’s trying to reach the flashlight!
I hung on.
Presently Peterfi stopped thrashing. He lay on his side, his face and hands glowing blue. I was trying to decide whether he was playing possum when the blue light behind his face quietly went out.
I let them in. They looked it over. Valpredo went off to search for a pole to reach the light switch. Ordaz asked, “Was it necessary to kill him?”
I pointed to the flashlight. He didn’t get it.
“I was overconfident,” I said. “I shouldn’t have come in alone. He’s already killed two people with that flashlight. The organleggers who gave him his new arm. He didn’t want them talking, so he burned their faces off and then dragged them out onto a slidewalk. He probably tied them to the generator and then used the line to pull it. With the field on, the whole setup wouldn’t weigh more than a couple of pounds.”
“With a flashlight?” Ordaz pondered. “Of course. It would have been putting out five hundred times as much light. A good thing you thought of that in time.”
“Well, I do spend more time dealing with these oddball science fiction devices than you do.”
“And welcome to them,” Ordaz said.
PATCHWORK GIRL
1. CITY OF MIRRORS
We fell east to west, dipping toward the moon in the usual shallow, graceful arc. Our pilot had turned off the cabin lights to give us a view. The sun set as we fell. I peered past Tom Reinecke and let my eyes adjust.
It was black below. There wasn’t even Earthlight; the “new” Earth was a slender sliver in the eastern sky. The black shadows of mountains emerged form the western horizon and came toward us.
Reinecke had fallen silent.
That was a new development. Tom Reinecke had been trying to interview me even before we left Outback Field, Australia. Thus:
What was it like out there among the flying mountains? Had I really killed an organlegger by using psychic powers? As a man of many cultures—Kansas farm boy, seven years mining the asteroids, five years in the United Nations Police—didn’t I consider myself the ideal delegate to a Conference to Review Lunar Law? How did I feel about what liberals called “the organ bank problem”? Would I demonstrate my imaginary arm, please? Et cetera.
I’d admitted to being a liberal and denied being the solar system’s foremost expert on lunar law, inasmuch as I’d never been on the moon. Beyond that, I’d managed to get him talking about himself. He’d never stopped.
The flatlander reporter was a small, rounded man in his early twenties, brown-haired and smooth-shaven. Born in Australia, schooled in England, he’d never been in space. He’d gone from journalism school straight into a job with the BBC. He’d told me about himself at length. This young and he was on his way to the moon! To witness deliberations that could affect all of future history! He seemed eager and innocent. I wondered how many older, more experienced newstapers had turned down his assignment.
Now, suddenly, he was quiet. More: he was leaving fingerprints in the hard plastic chair arms.
The black shadows of the D’Alembert Mountains were coming right at us: broken teeth in a godling’s jaw, ready to chew us up.
We passed low over the mountains, almost between the peaks, and continued to fall. Now the land was chewed by new and old meteorite craters. Light ahead of us became a long line of lighted windows, the west face of Hovestraydt City. Slowing, we passed north of the city and curved around. The city was a square border of light, and peculiar reflections flashed from within the border: mostly greens, some reds, yellows, browns.
The ship hovered and settled east of the city, at the edge of Grimalde’s rim wall. No dust sprayed around us as we touched down. Too many ships had landed here over the last century. The dust was all gone.
Tom Reinecke let go of his chair arms and resumed breathing. He forced a smile. “Thrill a minute.”
“Hey, you weren’t worried, were you? You can’t even imagine the real problems with making this kind of landing.”
“What? What do you mean? I—”
I laughed. “Relax, I was kidding. People have been landing on the moon for a hundred and fifty years, and they’ve only had two accidents.”
We fought politely for room to struggle into our pressure suits.
With a little more warning I would have had a skintight pressure suit made at the taxpayers’ expense. But skintight suits have to be carefully fitted, and that takes time. Luke Garner had given me just ten days to get ready. I’d spent the time on research. I was half-certain that Garner had picked someone else for the job and that he or she had died or gotten sick or pregnant.
Be that as it may: I had bought an inflated suit on the expense account. The other passengers—reporters and conference delegates—were also getting into inflated suits.
Half a dozen lunies and Belters waited to greet us when we climbed down from the air lock. I could see fairly well into the bubble helmets. Taffy wasn’t among them. I recognized people I’d seen only on phone screens. And a familiar voice: cheerful, cordial, mildly accented.
“Welcome to Hovestraydt City,” said the voice
of Mayor Hove Watson. “You’ve arrived near dinnertime by the city clocks. I hope to show you around a bit before you begin your work tomorrow.” I had no trouble picking him out of the crowd: a lunie over eight feet tall with thinning blond hair and a cordial smile showing through his helmet and a flowering ash tree on his chest. “You’ve already been assigned rooms, and—before I forget—the city computer’s command name is Chiron. It will be keyed to your voice. Shall we postpone introductions until we can get into shirtsleeves?” He turned to lead the way.
So Taffy hadn’t made it. I wondered if she’d left a message and how long it would be before I reached a phone.
We trooped toward the lights a few hundred yards away. No moondust softened our footfalls. My first look at the moon, and I wasn’t seeing much. Black night around us and a glare of light from the city. But the sky was the sky I remembered, the Belter’s sky, stars by the hundred thousand, so hard and bright, you could reach up and feel their heat. I lagged behind to get the full effect. It was like homecoming.
We were Belters and flatlanders and lunies, and there was no problem telling us apart.
All the flatlanders were wearing inflated suits in bright primary colors. They hampered movement, made us clumsy. Even I was having trouble.
I’d talked to the other United Nations delegates just before the flight. Jabez Stone was a cross between tall black Watusi and long-jawed white New Englander. He’d been a prosecution lawyer before going into politics. He represented the General Assembly. Octavia Budrys of the Security Council had very white skin and very black hair. She was overweight but with the muscle tension to carry it well. You sensed their awareness of their own power. On Earth they had walked like rulers. Here—
Their dignity suffered. Budrys bounced like a big rubber ball. Stone fought the lower gravity with a kind of shuffle. They veered from side to side and into each other. I heard their panting in my earphones.
The Belters found their stride easily. Through the bubble helmets you saw Belter crests on both men and women: hair running in a strip from forehead to nape of neck, the scalp shaved on both sides. They wore silvered cloaks against the cold of lunar night. Under the cloaks were skin-tights: membranous elastic cloth that would pass sweat and fitted like a coat of paint.
Paintings glowed across their chests and bellies. A Belter’s pressure suit is his real home, and he will spend a fortune on a good torso painting. The brawny redheaded woman wearing the gold of the Belt Police had to be Marion Shaeffer. Her torso showed an eagle-clawed dragon stooping on a tiger. A broad-shouldered black-haired man, Chris Penzler, wore a copy of a Bonnie Dalzell griffin, the one in the New York Metropolitan: mostly gold and bronze with a cloudy Earth clutched in one claw.
I had abandoned a Belter suit when I returned to Earth. The chest painting showed a great brass-bound door opening on a lush world with two suns. I missed it.
The lunies wore skintights, but they would never be taken for Belters. They stood seven and eight feet tall. Their suits were in bright monochrome colors to stand out against a bright and confusing lunar background. Their chest paintings were smaller and generally not as good and tended to feature one dominant color, as Mayor Watson’s ash tree painting was mostly green. The lunies hardly walked; they flew in shallow arcs, effortlessly, and it was beautiful to watch.
One hundred fifty-seven years after the first landing on the Earth’s moon, you could almost believe that mankind was dividing into different species. We were three branches of humanity, trooping toward the lights.
Most of Hovestraydt City was underground. That square of light was only the top of it Three sides of the square were living quarters; I had seen light spilling through windows. But the whole east face of the city was given over to the mirror works.
We passed telescope mirrors in the polishing stage, with mobile screens to shield them. Silicate ore stood in impressively tall conical heaps. Spindly lunies in skintights and silver cloaks stopped work to watch us pass. They didn’t smile.
Under a roof that had rock and moondust piled high atop it for meteor protection, a wide stretch of the east face was open to vacuum. Here were big, fragile paraboloids and lightweight telescope assemblies for Belter ships; widgetry for polishing and silvering mirrors and more widgetry for measuring their curvature; garage space for wide-wheeled motorcycles, bubble-topped buses, and special trucks to carry lenses and radar reflectors. There were more lunies at work. I’d expected to see amusement at the way we walked, but they weren’t amused. Was that resentment I saw within the bubble helmets?
I could guess what was bothering them. The conference.
Tom Reinecke veered away to peer through a glass wall. I followed him. Lunie workmen were looking this way; I was afraid he’d get in trouble.
He was looking down through thick glass. Beyond and below, an assembly line was birthing acre-sized sheets of silvered fabric, rolling the fabric into tubes with the silvering on the inside, sealing the ends, and folding them into relatively tiny packets.
“City of mirrors,” Tom said reflectively.
“You know it,” said a woman’s voice. Belt accent, specifically Confinement Asteroid. I found her at my shoulder. Within the bubble helmet she was young and pretty and very black: Watusi genes, skin blackened further by the un-filtered sunlight of space. She was almost as tall as a lunie, but the style of her suit made her a Belter. I liked her torso painting. Against the pastel glow of the Veil Nebula, a slender woman’s silhouette showed in uttermost black, save for two glowing greenish-white eyes.
“City of mirrors. There are Hove City mirrors everywhere in space, everywhere you look,” she told us. “Not just telescopes. You know what they’re doing down there? Those are solar reflectors. They’re shipped out flat. We inflate them. Then we spray foam plastic struts on them. They don’t have to be strong. We cut them up and get cylindrical mirrors for solar power.”
“I’ve been a Belt miner,” I said.
She looked at me curiously. “I’m Desiree Porter, newstaper for the Vesta Beam.”
“Tom Reinecke, BBC.”
“Gil Hamilton, ARM delegate, and we’re being abandoned.”
Her teeth flashed like lightning in a black sky. “Gil the Arm! I know about you!” She looked where I was pointing and added, “Yah, we’ll talk later. I want to interview you.”
We jumped to join the last of the line as it cycled through the air lock.
We crowded into different elevators and rejoined on the sixth level, the dining facility. Mayor Watson again took the lead. You couldn’t get lost following Mayor Watson. Eight feet two inches tall, topped with ash blond hair and a nose like the prow of a ship and a smile that showed a good many very white teeth.
By now we were talking away like old friends … some of us, anyway. Clay and Budrys and the other UN delegates still had to keep all their attention on their feet, and they still bounded too high. And I got my first look at the Garden, but I didn’t get a chance to study it till we were seated.
We were three delegates from the United Nations, three from the Belt, and four representing the moon itself, plus Porter and Reinecke, and Mayor Watson as our host.
The dining hall was crowded, and the noise level was high. Mayor Watson was out of earshot at the other end of the table. He’d tried to mix us up a little. The reporters seemed to be interviewing each other and liking what they learned. I found myself between Chris Penzler, Fourth Speaker for the Belt, and a Tycho Dome official named Bertha Carmody. She was intimidating: seven feet three with a spreading crown of tightly curled white hair, a strong jaw, and a penetrating voice.
The Garden ran vertically through Hovestraydt City: a great pit lined with ledges. A bedspring-shaped ramp ran up the center, and narrower ramps fed into it at all levels, including this one. The plants that covered the ledges were crops, but that didn’t keep them from being pretty. Melons hung along one ledge. A ledge of glossy green ground cover turned out to be raspberries and strawberries. There were ledges of ri
pe corn and unripe wheat and tomatoes. The orange and lemon trees lower down were blooming.
Chris Penzler caught me gaping. “Tomorrow,” he said. “You’re seeing it by sunlamps now. By daylight it’s quite beautiful.”
I was surprised. “Didn’t you just get here? Like the rest of us?”
“No, I’ve been here a week. And I was here at the first conference twenty years ago. They’ve dug the city deeper since. The Garden, too.” Penzler was a burly Belter nearing fifty. His immense, sloping shoulders made his otherwise acceptable legs look spindly. He must have spent much of his life in free fall. His Belter crest was still black, but it had thinned on top to leave an isolated tuft on his forehead. His brows formed a single furry black ridge across his eyes.
I said, “I’d think direct sunlight would kill plants.”
When Penzler started to answer, Bertha Carmody rode him down. “Direct sunlight would. The convex mirrors on the roof thin the sunlight and spread it about. We set more mirrors at the bottom of the pit and the sides to direct the sunlight everywhere. Every city on the moon uses essentially the same system.” She refrained from adding that I should have done my research before I came, but I could almost hear her thinking it.
Lunies were bringing us plates and food. Special service. The other diners were all getting their own from a ledge, buffet style. I plied my chopsticks. They had splayed ends, and they worked better than a spoon and fork in low gravity. Dinner was mostly vegetables, roughly Chinese in approach and quite good. When I found chicken meat, I turned again to the Garden. There were birds flying between the ledges, though most had settled for the night. Pigeons and chickens. Chickens fly very well in low gravity.
A dark-haired young man was talking to the mayor.
I admit to being abnormally curious, but how could I help but stare? The kid was the mayor’s height, a couple of inches over eight feet, and even thinner. Age hard to estimate, say eighteen plus or minus three. They looked like Tolkien elves. Elfish king and elfish prince in well-mannered disagreement. They were not enjoying their inaudible conversation, and they cut it short as quickly as possible.