Flatlander

by Larry Niven

  One thing helped the manpower situation. We had reached another lull. Missing persons complaints had dropped to near zero all over the world.

  “We should have been expecting that,” Bera commented. “For the last year or so most of their customers must have stopped going to organleggers. They’re waiting to see if the second Freezer Bill will go through. Now all the gangs are stuck with full organ banks and no customers. If they learned anything from last time, they’ll pull in their horns and wait it out. Of course I’m only guessing.” But it looked likely enough. At any rate, we had the men we needed.

  We monitored the top dozen corpsicle heirs twenty-four hours a day. The rest we checked at random intervals. The tracers could only tell us where they were, not who they were with or whether they wanted to be there. We had to keep checking to see if anyone had disappeared.

  We sat back to await results.

  * * *

  The Security Council passed the second Freezer Bill on February 3, 2125. Now it would go to the world vote in late March. The voting public numbered ten billion, of whom perhaps sixty percent would bother to phone in their votes.

  I took to watching the boob cube again.

  NBA Broadcasting continued its coverage of the corpsicle heirs and its editorials in favor of the bill. Proponents took every opportunity to point out that many corpsicle heirs still remained to be discovered. (And YOU might be one.) Taffy and I watched a parade in New York in favor of the bill: banners and placards (SAVE THE LIVING, NOT THE DEAD … IT’S YOUR LIFE AT STAKE … CORPSICLES KEEP BEER COLD) and one censored big mob of chanting people. The transportation costs must have been formidable.

  The various committees to oppose the bill were also active. In the Americas they pointed out that although about forty percent of people in frozen sleep were in the Americas, the spare parts derived would go to the world at large. In Africa and Asia it was discovered that the Americas had most of the corpsicle heirs. In Egypt an analogy was made between the pyramids and the freezer vaults: both bids for immortality. It didn’t go over well.

  Polls indicated that the Chinese sectors would vote against the bill. NBA newscasters spoke of ancestor worship and reminded the public that six ex-chairmen resided in Chinese freezer vaults, alongside myriad lesser ex-officials. Immortality was a respected tradition in China.

  The committees to oppose reminded the world’s voting public that some of the wealthiest of the frozen dead had heirs in the Belt. Were Earth’s resources to be spread indiscriminately among the asteroidal rocks? I started to hate both sides. Fortunately, the UN cut that line off fast by threatening an injunction. Earth needed Belt resources too heavily.

  Our own results began to come in.

  Mortimer Lincoln, alias Anthony Tiller, had not been at Midgard the night he had tried to kill me. He’d eaten alone in his apartment, a meal sent from the communal kitchen. Which meant that he himself could not have been watching Chambers.

  We found no sign of anyone lurking behind Holden Chambers or behind any of the other corpsicle heirs, publicized or not, with one general exception. Newsmen. The media were unabashedly and constantly interested in the corpsicle heirs, priority based on the money they stood to inherit. We faced a depressing hypothesis: the potential kidnappers were spending all their time watching the boob cube, letting the media do their tracking for them. But perhaps the connection was closer.

  We started investigating newscast stations.

  In mid-February I pulled Holden Chambers in and had him examined for an outlaw tracer. It was a move of desperation. Organleggers don’t use such tools. They specialize in medicine. Our own tracer was still working, and it was the only tracer in him. Chambers was icily angry. We had interrupted his studying for a midterm exam.

  We managed to search three of the top dozen when they had medical checkups. Nothing.

  Our investigations of the newscast stations turned up very little. Clark and Nash was running a good many onetime spots through NBA. Other advertising firms had similar lines of possible influence over other stations, broadcasting companies, and cassette newszines. But we were looking for newsmen who had popped up from nowhere, with backgrounds forged or nonexistent. Ex-organleggers in new jobs. We didn’t find any.

  I called Menninger’s one empty afternoon. Charlotte Chambers was still catatonic. “I’ve got Lowndes of New York working with me,” Hartman told me. “He has precisely your voice and good qualifications, too. Charlotte hasn’t responded yet. We’ve been wondering: could it have been the way you were talking?”

  “You mean the accent? It’s Kansas with an overlay of west coast and Belter.”

  “No, Lowndes has that, too. I mean organlegger slang.”

  “I use it. Bad habit.”

  “That could be it.” He made a face. “But we can’t act on it. It might just scare her completely into herself.”

  “That’s where she is now. I’d risk it.”

  “You’re not a psychiatrist,” he said.

  I hung up and brooded. Negatives, all negatives.

  I didn’t hear the hissing sound until it was almost on me. I looked up then, and it was Luke Garner’s ground-effect travel chair sliding accurately through the door. He watched me a moment, then said, “What are you looking so grim about?”

  “Nothing. All the nothing we’ve been getting instead of results.”

  “Uh huh.” He let the chair settle. “It’s beginning to look like Tiller the Killer wasn’t on assignment.”

  “That would blow the whole thing, wouldn’t it? I did a lot of extrapolating from two beams of green light. One ex-organlegger tries to make holes in one ARM agent, and now we’ve committed tens of thousands of man-hours and seventy or eighty computer-hours on the strength of it. If they’d been planning to tie us up, they couldn’t have done it better.”

  “You know, I think you’d take it as a personal insult if Tiller shot at you just because he didn’t like you.”

  I had to laugh. “How personal can you get?”

  “That’s better. Now, will you stop sweating this? It’s just another long shot. You know what legwork is like. We bet a lot of man-effort on this one because the odds looked good. Look how many organleggers would have to be in on it if it were true! We’d have a chance to snaffle them all. But if it doesn’t work out, why sweat it?”

  “The second Freezer Bill,” I said, as if he didn’t know.

  “The will of the people be done.”

  “Censor the people! They’re murdering those dead men!”

  Garner’s face twitched oddly. I said, “What’s funny?”

  He let the laugh out. It sounded like a chicken screaming for help. “Censor. Bleep. They didn’t used to be swear words. They were euphemisms. You’d put them in a book or on TV when you wanted a word they wouldn’t let you use.”

  I shrugged. “Words are funny. Damn used to be a technical term in theology, if you want to look at it that way.”

  “I know, but they sound funny. When you start saying bleep and censored, it ruins your masculine image.”

  “Censor my masculine image. What do we do about the corpsicle heirs? Call off the surveillance?”

  “No. There’s too much in the pot already.” Garner looked broodingly into one bare wall of my office. “Wouldn’t it be nice if we could persuade ten billion people to use prosthetics instead of transplants?”

  Guilt glowed in my right arm, my left eye. I said, “Prosthetics don’t feel. I might have settled for a prosthetic arm—” Dammit, I’d had the choice! “—but an eye? Luke, suppose it was possible to graft new legs on you. Would you take them?”

  “Oh, dear, I do wish you hadn’t asked me that,” he said venomously.

  “Sorry. I withdraw the question.”

  He brooded. It was a lousy thing to ask a man. He was still stuck with it; he couldn’t spit it out.

  I asked, “Did you have any special reason for dropping in?”

  Luke shook himself. “Yah. I got the impression you we
re taking all this as a personal defeat. I stopped down to cheer you up.”

  We laughed at each other. “Listen,” he said, “there are worse things than the organ bank problem. When I was young—your age, my child—it was almost impossible to get anyone convicted of a capital crime. Life sentences weren’t for life. Psychology and psychiatry, such as they were, were concerned with curing criminals, returning them to society. The United States Supreme Court almost voted the death penalty unconstitutional.”

  “Sounds wonderful. How did it work out?”

  “We had an impressive reign of terror. A lot of people got killed. Meanwhile, transplant techniques were getting better and better. Eventually Vermont made the organ banks the official means of execution. That idea spread very damn fast.”

  “Yah.” I remembered history courses.

  “Now we don’t even have prisons. The organ banks are always short. As soon as the UN votes the death penalty for a crime, most people stop committing it. Naturally.”

  “So we get the death penalty for having children without a license, or cheating on income tax, or running too many red traffic lights. Luke, I’ve seen what it does to people to keep voting more and more death penalties. They lose their respect for life.”

  “But the other situation was just as bad, Gil. Don’t forget it.”

  “So now we’ve got the death penalty for being poor.”

  “The Freezer Law? I won’t defend it. Except that that’s the penalty for being poor and dead.”

  “Should it be a capital crime?”

  “No, but it’s not too bright, either. If a man expects to be brought back to life, he should be prepared to pay the medical fees. Now, hold it. I know a lot of the pauper group had trust funds set up. They were wiped out by depressions, bad investments. Why the hell do you think banks take interest for a loan? They’re being paid for the risk. The risk that the loan won’t be paid back.”

  “Did you vote for the Freezer Law?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “I must be spoiling for a fight. I’m glad you dropped by, Luke.”

  “Don’t mention it.”

  “I keep thinking the ten billion voters will eventually work their way down to me. Go ahead, grin. Who’d want your liver?”

  Garner cackled. “Somebody could murder me for my skeleton. Not to put inside him. For a museum.”

  We left it at that.

  * * *

  The news broke a couple of days later. Several North American hospitals had been reviving corpsicles.

  How they kept the secret was a mystery. Those corpsicles who survived the treatment—twenty-two of them out of thirty-five attempts—had been clinically alive for some ten months, conscious for shorter periods.

  For the next week it was all the news there was. Taffy and I watched interviews with the dead men, with the doctors, with members of the Security Council. The move was not illegal. As publicity against the second Freezer Bill, it may have been a mistake.

  All the revived corpsicles had been insane. Else why risk it?

  Some of the casualties had died because their insanity was caused by brain damage. The rest were cured, but only in a biochemical sense. All had been insane long enough for their doctors to decide that there was no hope. Now they were stranded in a foreign land, their homes forever lost in the mists of time. Revivification had saved them from an ugly, humiliating death at the hands of most of the human race, a fate that smacked of cannibalism and ghouls. The paranoids were hardly surprised. The rest reacted like paranoids.

  In the boob cube they came across as a bunch of frightened mental patients.

  One night we watched a string of interviews on the big screen in Taffy’s bedroom wall. They weren’t well handled. Too much “How do you feel about the wonders of the present?” when the poor boobs hadn’t come out of their shells long enough to know or care. Many wouldn’t believe anything they were told or shown. Others didn’t care about anything but space exploration—a largely Belter activity which Earth’s voting public tended to ignore. Too much of it was at the level of this last one: an interviewer explaining to a woman that a boob cube was not a cube, that the word referred only to the three-dimensional effect. The poor woman was badly rattled and not too bright in the first place.

  Taffy was sitting cross-legged on the bed, combing out her long, dark hair so that it flowed over her shoulders in shining curves. “She’s an early one,” she said critically. “There may have been oxygen starvation of the brain during freezing.”

  “That’s what you see. All the average citizen sees is the way she acts. She’s obviously not ready to join society.”

  “Dammit, Gil, she’s alive. Shouldn’t that be miracle enough for anyone?”

  “Maybe. Maybe the average voter liked her better the other way.”

  Taffy brushed at her hair with angry vigor. “They’re alive.”

  “I wonder if they revived Leviticus Hale.”

  “Leviti—? Oh. Not at Saint John’s.” Taffy worked there. She’d know.

  “I haven’t seen him in the cube. They should have revived him,” I said. “With that patriarchal visage he’d make a great impression. He might even try the Messiah bit. ‘Yea, brethren, I have returned from the dead to lead you—’ None of the others have tried that yet.”

  “Good thing, too.” Her strokes slowed. “A lot of them died in the thawing process and afterward. From cell wall ruptures.”

  Ten minutes later I got up and used the phone. Taffy showed her amusement. “Is it that important?”

  “Maybe not.” I dialed the Vault of Eternity in New Jersey. I knew I’d be wondering until I did.

  Mr. Restarick was on night watch. He seemed glad to see me. He’d have been glad to see anyone who would talk back. His clothes were the same mismatch of ancient styles, but they didn’t look as anachronistic now. The boob cube had been infested with corpsicles wearing approximations of their own styles.

  Yes, he remembered me. Yes, Leviticus Hale was still in place. The hospitals had taken two of his wards, and both had survived, he told me proudly. The administrators had wanted Hale, too; they’d liked his looks and his publicity value, dating as he did from the last century but one. But they hadn’t been able to get permission from the next of kin.

  Taffy watched me watching a blank phone screen. “What’s wrong?”

  “The Chambers kid. Remember Holden Chambers, the corpsicle heir? He lied to me. He refused permission for the hospitals to revive Leviticus Hale. A year ago.”

  “Oh.” She thought it over, then reacted with a charity typical of her. “It’s a lot of money just for not signing a paper.”

  The cube was showing an old flick, a remake of a Shakespeare play. We turned it to landscape and went to sleep.

  I back away, back away. The composite ghost comes near, using somebody’s arm and somebody’s eye and Loren’s pleural cavity containing somebody’s heart and somebody’s lung and somebody’s other lung, and I can feel it all inside him. Horrible. I reach deeper. Somebody’s heart leaps like a fish in my hand.

  Taffy found me in the kitchen making hot chocolate. For two. I know damn well she can’t sleep when I’m restless. She said, “Why don’t you tell me about it?”

  “Because it’s ugly.”

  “I think you’d better tell me.” She came into my arms, rubbed her cheek against mine.

  I said to her ear, “Get the poison out of my system. Sure, and into yours.”

  “All right.” I could take it either way.

  The chocolate was ready. I disengaged myself and poured it, added meager splashes of bourbon. She sipped reflectively. She said, “Is it always Loren?”

  “Yah. Damn him.”

  “Never this one you’re after now?”

  “Anubis? I never dealt with him. He was Bera’s assignment. Anyway, he retired before I was properly trained. Gave his territory to Loren. The market in stiffs was so bad that Loren had to double his territory just to keep going.” I was talking
too much. I was desperate to talk to someone, to get back my grip on reality.

  “What did they do, flip a coin?”

  “For what? Oh. No, there was never a question about who was going to retire. Loren was a sick man. It must have been why he went into the business. He needed the supply of transplants. And he couldn’t get out because he needed constant shots. His rejection spectrum must have been a bad joke. Anubis was different.”

  She sipped at her chocolate. She shouldn’t have to know this, but I couldn’t stop talking. “Anubis changed body parts at whim. We’ll never get him. He probably made himself over completely when he … retired.”

  Taffy touched my shoulder. “Let’s go back to bed.”

  “All right” But my own voice ran on in my head. His only problem was the money. How could he hide a fortune that size? And the new identity. A new personality with lots of conspicuous money … and, if he tried to live somewhere else, a foreign accent, too. But there’s less privacy here, and he’s known … I sipped the chocolate, watching the landscape in the boob cube. What could he do to make a new identity convincing? The landscape scene was night on some mountaintop, bare tumbled rock backed by churning clouds. Restful.

  I thought of something he could do.

  I got out of bed and called Bera.

  Taffy watched me in amazement. “It’s three in the morning,” she pointed out.

  “I know.”

  Lila Bera was sleepy and naked and ready to kill someone. Me. She said, “Gil, it better be good.”

  “It’s good. Tell Jackson I can locate Anubis.”

  Bera popped up beside her, demanded, “Where?” His hair was miraculously intact, a puffy black dandelion ready to blow. He was squint-eyed and grimacing with sleep and as naked as … as I was, come to that. This thing superseded good manners.

  I told him where Anubis was.

  I had his attention then. I talked fast, sketching in the intermediate steps. “Does it sound reasonable? I can’t tell. It’s three in the morning. I may not be thinking straight.”