Flatlander

by Larry Niven

  His lecturer’s manner made him seem older, somehow. If he went into politics, he’d succeed at it.

  “Might I ask, are these your father’s views, too?”

  “We’ve talked about it, but I’m not just quoting him.” He smiled. “The last conference established the holding tanks. Even if Naomi’s convicted, she still goes into a holding tank for six months. Six months to prove she’s innocent, and I’m very glad of that.”

  “Wups. Alan, does she know that? She may be more scared than she has to be.”

  “Oh, good lord!” He was horrified.

  “So you never told her. So make an opportunity. Can she have visitors?”

  “She’s in her own room with the phone turned off and the door geared to reject her voice. I’m sure a policeman could visit her. I just didn’t think. The trial’s set for day after tomorrow, and she thinks that’s it, the end. I’ll tell her, Gil. Gil, what are you doing?”

  We had reached Hovestraydt City, and I was hard up against Chris Penzler’s window. I said, “Checking the scene of the crime from the other side, kid.”

  I noted with approval that I was in the fields of three cameras. Our clumsy killer might conceivably want to plant a small bomb on the window.

  I peered in. Chris was on his back on the bed, covered with foam plastic from chin to navel and armpit to armpit. The mobile autodoc was standing above him like a polished steel nursemaid.

  “Alan, come here a second. Do you see anything like a miniature hologram in there? On a wall or the table?”

  “No.”

  “Neither do I. Dammit.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe it was moved. I still can’t see our half-competent marksman sticking his face into sunlight, blinding himself, just before he fired. I thought maybe Chris had a holo of his mother or someone on the wall and saw it reflected in the window just before he got shot. But there’s nothing.”

  “No.”

  The door opened and closed behind Harry McCavity. The doctor prodded his unconscious patient for a bit, then moved to the autodoc screen and typed, read the screen for a bit, typed again … ran his hands through his fluffy brown hair in a swift gesture that changed nothing … turned around, and jumped a yard in the air when he saw faces peering in the window.

  I gestured in a curve to the left. We’ll come through the air lock. He glared and gestured back. Up Uranus!

  A few minutes later we knocked at the door, and he let us in. “We were looking around,” Alan said lamely.

  “For what?” McCavity demanded.

  I said, “A hologram portrait. My idea. Have you seen anything that might fit?”

  “No.”

  “It’s important.”

  “No!”

  “Can he answer questions?” I waved at Chris Penzler.

  “No. Let him alone; he’s doing fine. He’ll be mobile tomorrow … not comfortable but mobile. Ask him then. Gil, are you booked for dinner?”

  “No. What time do you like?”

  “Say half an hour. We can check with Ms. Grimes, see if she’s off duty. Perhaps she can join us.”

  5. THE CONFERENCE TABLE

  We’d chosen a table in a far corner of the dining level. Lunie diners tended to cluster around the Garden. We could barely see the Garden, and nobody was in eavesdropping distance.

  “It isn’t just that we aren’t man and wife,” McCavity said, stabbing the air with splay-ended chopsticks. “We can’t even keep the same hours. We enjoy each other … don’t we?”

  Taffy nodded happily.

  “I need constant reassurance, my dear. Gil, we enjoy each other, but when we see each other, it’s generally over an open patient. I’m glad for Taffy that you’re here. Isn’t this kind of thing supposed to be normal on Earth?”

  “Well,” I said, “it’s normal where I’ve lived … California, Kansas, Australia … Over most of the Earth we tend to keep recreational sex separate from having children. There are the Fertility Laws, of course. The government doesn’t tell people how to use their birthrights, but we do check the baby’s tissue rejection spectrum to see which father has used up a birthright. Don’t get the idea that Earth is all one culture. The Arabs are back to harems, for God’s sake, and so were the Mormons, for a while.”

  “Harems? What about the birthrights?”

  “The harems are recreation as far as the sheikh is concerned, and of course he uses up his own birthrights. When they’re gone, the ladies take sperm from some healthy genius with an unlimited birthright and the right skin color, and the sheikh raises the children as the next generation of aristocrats.”

  Harry ate while he thought. Then, “It sounds wonderful, by Allah! But for us, having children is a big thing. We tend to stay faithful. I’m the freak. And I know of a lunie who fathered a child for two good friends … but I could maybe get killed for naming them.”

  I said, “Okay, we’re a ménage à at least trois. But you would like it noised abroad that Taffy and I are steady roommates.”

  “It would be convenient.”

  “Would it be convenient for me? Harry, I gather lunies don’t like that sort of thing. There are four lunie delegates in the conference. I can’t alienate them.”

  Taffy was frowning. “Futz! I hadn’t thought of that.”

  Harry said, “I did. Gil, it’ll help you. What the lunie citizen really wants to know is that you aren’t running around compromising the honor of lunie women.”

  I looked at Taffy. She said, “I think he’s right. I can’t swear to it.”

  “Okay.”

  We ate. It was mostly vegetables, fresh, with good variety. I had almost finished a side dish, beef with onions and green pepper over rice, before I wondered. Beef?

  I looked up into Harry’s grin. “Imported,” he said, and laughed as my jaw dropped. “No, not from Earth! Can you imagine the delta-V? Imported from Tycho. They’ve got an underground bubble big enough to graze cattle. It costs like blazes, of course. We’re fairly wealthy here.”

  Dessert was strawberry shortcake with whipped cream from Tycho. The coffee was imported from Earth, but freeze-dried. I wondered if they saved anything that way, given that the water in coffee beans had to be imported anyway … then kicked myself. Lunies don’t import water. They import hydrogen. They run the hydrogen past heated oxygen-bearing rock to get water vapor.

  So I sipped my coffee and asked, “May we talk business?”

  “None of us are squeamish,” McCavity said.

  “The wound, then. Would a layer of bathwater spread the beam that much?”

  “I don’t know. Nobody knows. It’s never happened before.”

  “Your best guess, then.”

  “Gil, it had to be enough, unless you’ve got another explanation.”

  “Mmm … there was a case in Warsaw where a killer put a dot of oil over the aperture of a laser. The beam was supposed to spread a little, just enough that the police couldn’t identify the weapon. It would have worked fine if he hadn’t got drunk and bragged about it.”

  McCavity shrugged. “Not here. Any damn fool would guess it was a message laser.”

  “We know the beam spread. We’re speculating.”

  Harry’s eyes went distant and dreamy. “Would the oil vaporize?”

  “Sure. Instantly.”

  “The beam would constrict in midburn. That would fit. The hole in Penzler’s chest looked like the beam changed width in the middle of the burn.”

  “It constricted?”

  “It constricted, or expanded, or there’s something we haven’t thought of.”

  “Futz. Okay. Do you know Naomi Mitchison?”

  “Vaguely.” Harry seemed to withdraw a little.

  “Not intimately?”

  “No.”

  Taffy was looking at him. We waited.

  “I grew up here,” Harry said abruptly. “I never make proposals to a woman unless I have reason to think they’ll be accepted. Okay, I must have read the signals wrong. She rea
cted like an insulted married lunie woman! So I apologized and went away, and we haven’t spoken since. You’re right; flatlanders aren’t all the same. A week ago I would have said we were friends. Now … no, I don’t know the lady.”

  “Do you hate her?”

  “What? No.”

  Taffy said, “Maybe your killer doesn’t care if Penzler lives or dies. Maybe it’s Naomi he wants to hurt.”

  I mulled that. “I don’t like it. First, how would he know he could make it stick? There might have been someone else out there. Second, it gives us a whole damn city full of suspects.” I noticed, or imagined, Harry’s uneasiness. “Not you, Harry. You sweated blood to save Chris. It would have been trivial to kill him while the ‘doc was cutting him up.”

  Harry grinned. “So what? It was already an organ bank crime for Naomi.”

  “Yes, but he saw something. He might remember more.”

  Taffy asked, “Who else wouldn’t want to frame Naomi?”

  “I’m really not taking the idea too seriously,” I said, “but I guess I’d want to know who she insulted. Who made passes and got slapped down and who took it badly.”

  Harry said, “You won’t find many lunie suspects.”

  “The men are too careful?”

  “That, and— No offense, my dear, but Naomi isn’t beautiful by lunie standards. She’s stocky.”

  “What,” Taffy wondered, “does that make me?”

  Harry grinned at her. “Stocky. I told you I was a freak.”

  She grinned back at that tall, narrow offshoot of human stock … and I found myself grinning, too. They did get along. It was a pleasure to watch them.

  We broke it up soon afterward. Taffy was on duty, and I needed my sleep.

  The city hall complex was four stories deep, with the mayor’s office on the ground level. A room on the second level was reserved for the conference.

  I got there at 0800. Eight-foot-tall Bertha Carmody was in animated discussion with a small, birdlike Belt woman in late middle age. They broke off long enough to introduce the stranger: Hildegarde Quitting, Fourth Speaker for the Belt Government.

  Chris Penzler was in a bulky armchair equipped with safety straps and a ground-effect skirt. Soft foam covered his chest. He seemed to be brooding on his wrongs.

  I said hello anyway. He looked up. “You’ll find coffee and rolls on the side table,” he said, and tried to wave in the right direction. “Ow!”

  “Hurts?”

  “Yah.”

  I got coffee in a small-mouthed bottle with a foam plastic sleeve. Other delegates trickled in until we were all present.

  A lunie I hadn’t met, Charles Ward of Copernicus, moved to elect a chairman, then nominated Bertha Carmody of Tycho Dome. With four lunies out of ten delegates, the chairman was bound to be a lunie, so I voted for Bertha. So did everybody else. The lunies seemed surprised at their easy victory. But Bertha was a good choice; she had the loudest voice among us.

  We spent the morning covering old ground.

  Belt and moon and United Nations each had its own ax to grind. Officially the moon was a satellite of Earth and was subject to United Nations law, in which even minor crimes carried the death penalty: laws designed not only to punish the guilty but also to supply transplant organs to the innocent voting public.

  The ethical gap between Earth and Belt was as vast as the physical gap. On Earth the hospitals had been supplied by criminals for well over a hundred years. When Luke Garner was young the death penalty had been revived for murder, kidnapping, treason, and the like. As medical techniques had improved and spread to the have-not nations, demands on the public organ banks had grown. The death penalty was imposed for armed robbery, rape, burglary. A plea of insanity became worthless. Eventually felons died for income tax evasion or driving while high on funny chemicals.

  Belt hospitals kept organ banks, but there were major differences. The Belt used fewer transplants. Belters tend to let evolution take care of the careless ones; they are not egalitarians. Space accidents don’t tend to leave medical cases, anyway. The Belt didn’t perform its own executions. Up to twenty years ago their practice had been to ship convicts to Earth and buy the organs back. In theory, their law would not be affected by the flatlanders’ greed for life.

  The moon’s shallower gravity well made it a far better choice as the Belt’s place of execution.

  So the first conference was called, and strange were the results.

  There had been major compromises at the conference of 2105. The biggest was the holding tanks. They were unique. The Belt had insisted that they be built, and the UN had capitulated. The holding tanks would hold a convict inactivated, but alive and healthy, for six months. If new evidence was found, the convict could be revived.

  Twenty years later that solution was under fire.

  Hildegarde Quitting wanted a rundown on the past twenty years of lunar jurisprudence. In particular, had the holding tanks ever been forced to disgorge a living felon?

  Charles Ward obliged. He was six-eleven or so, in his late thirties, a frail dark man with a receding hairline. In a colorless voice he told us that over the past twenty years some six thousand felons had passed through the lunar courts and hospitals. Just under a thousand were lunies. The Belt felons had been convicted by Belt courts; lunar hospitals served only as execution grounds. No conviction had yet been reversed.

  Ward represented Copernicus Dome, actually a complex of domes plus a metals mine, the site of one of the moon’s three major hospital complexes. Ward had come armed with graphs and maps and statistics. Average of 120 executions a year, mostly Belters shipped in via the Belt Trading Post and the mass driver in Grimalde Crater. The hospital took nearly four hundred patients a year, mostly lunies, the numbers rising over the years as the lunar population increased. I listened carefully. Copernicus was where Naomi would be sent if she was convicted.

  Lunch was delivered around noon. We talked in low voices while we ate, until Carmody called us to order. At once Marion Shaeffer demanded to know whether the lunar hospitals shipped as much transplant material out as came to them through the Belt courts.

  Ward answered, a bit superciliously, that Belt transplants tended to be not quite the right shape, that bones and muscles from Belter arms and legs, for instance, would be drastically too short for a lunie. This seemed obvious enough, but it wasn’t what Marion meant. She wanted to know how much transplant material the moon shipped to Earth.

  Quite a lot.

  The conference was polarizing. Belters and flatlanders were opposite poles, with the lunies in the middle. To frail old Hildegarde Quifting, our approach to the organ bank problem was monstrous: death penalties imposed at every opportunity to keep the voting citizens alive and healthy. To Jabez Stone of the General Assembly, a criminal was lucky to redeem himself in any way, and Belters need not act so damn superior. When a man orders a steak, a steer must be mutilated, then murdered. How many transplants were keeping Quifting alive?

  Carmody ruled that out of order. Quifting insisted on answering it anyway. She had never had a transplant, she said belligerently. I noticed uncomfortable expressions among the delegates. Maybe they noticed mine.

  It was a long session. The break for dinner came none too soon.

  I fell in beside Chris Penzler’s softly whispering air-cushion chair. “You didn’t say much. Are you up to this?”

  “Oh, I’m up to it.” He smiled a passable smile that faded. “I feel mortal,” he said. “Having a hole shot through him can make a man think. I could die. I have one daughter. I never had time for more; I was too busy making money, making a career, and then … there was a solar flare while I was en route to Mercury, and now I’m sterile. When I die, she’ll be all that’s left of me. Almost.”

  I said, “The quality of their lives is as important as their number.”

  Trite, but he nodded thoughtfully. Then, “Somebody hates me enough to kill me.”

  “Does Naomi Mitchison hate you that much
?”

  He scowled. “She has no reason. Oh, she’s strange enough, and she doesn’t like me, but … I wish I knew. I hope to God it’s her.”

  Of course. If it wasn’t Naomi, then the clumsy killer was still loose.

  I asked, “Do you keep holograms in your room? Or statues of any kind?”

  He stared. “No.”

  “Futz. Is your phone working all right?”

  “Yah, it’s working well. Why?”

  “Just a thought. Now, you said you were looking past a big tilted rock when you saw somebody. Which side of the rock?”

  “I don’t remember.” He considered. “That’s very strange. I don’t remember. Mayor Hove?” he bellowed.

  Hove was just coming up a spiral stairwell at the end of the hall. He turned, startled. “Hello, Chris, Gil. How’s the conference going?”

  I said, “There’s a certain amount of friction—”

  Chris interrupted. “Can you let us into your office?”

  “Of course. Why?”

  “I want to look out the window.” He seemed feverishly excited.

  The mayor shrugged. He led the way upstairs.

  His office was big, roomy. The computer terminal built into the desk hooked into the hologram wall and into two more screens. There was a foot and a half of keyboard with a rolltop cover. A hologram wall looked out on Jovian storms, seen from closer than Amalthea, swirling like a million shades of paint poured into a whirlpool. Endless storms big enough to swallow the Earth. Hovestraydt Watson must have a big ego, I thought. How else could he live and work next to that?

  The picture window looked south into a blazing moonscape. Chris edged as close as he could to the window. “I can’t see it. We’ll have to go to my room.”

  “What’s it all about?” the mayor asked.

  “I was looking past a large boulder just before the beam burned me. I must have seen the killer to one side or the other, but I can’t—”

  “Are you sure he wasn’t closer than the rock?”

  Penzler screwed his eyes shut. After a moment he said, “Almost. He’d have to be a midget to show that small, that close. I wish I could be sure.”