Flatlander

by Larry Niven

  My eyes followed the kid back to his table. A table for two, across the width of the Garden. His companion was an extraordinarily beautiful woman … a flatlander. As he sat down, the woman darted a look of pure poison in our direction.

  For an instant our eyes locked.

  It was Naomi Horne!

  She knew me. Our eyes held … and we broke the lock and went back to eating. It had been fourteen years since I last felt the urge to talk to Naomi Horne, and I didn’t have it now.

  We ended with melon and coffee. Most of us were heading for the elevator when Chris Penzler took my arm. “Look down into the Garden,” he said.

  I did. It was another nine stories to the bottom; I counted. A tree was growing down there. Its top was only two levels below us. The ramp spiraled down around the trunk.

  “That redwood,” Chris said, “was planted when Hovestraydt City was first occupied. It’s much taller now than it was when I first came. They transplant it whenever they dig the Garden deeper.”

  We turned away. I asked, “What’s it going to be like, this conference?”

  “Less hectic than the last one, I hope. Twenty years ago we carved out the general body of law that now rules the moon.” He frowned. “I have my doubts. Some of the lunar citizenry think we are meddling in their internal affairs.”

  “They’ve got a point”

  “Of course they do. We face other opportunities for embarrassment, too. The holding tanks were expensive. Worse, the lunar delegates are in a position to claim that they serve no useful purpose.”

  “Chris, I’m a last-minute replacement. I only had ten days to bone up.”

  “Ah. Well, the first conference was twenty years ago. It wasn’t easy finding compromises between three ways of life. You flatlanders saw no reason why lunar law shouldn’t send all felons to the organ banks. Belt law is considerably more lenient. The death penalty is so damned permanent. Suppose it turns out that you broke up the wrong person?”

  “I know about the holding tanks,” I said.

  “They were our most important point of compromise.”

  “Six months, isn’t it? The convict stays in suspended animation for six months before they break him up. If the conviction is reversed, he’s revived.”

  “That’s right. What you may not know,” Chris said, “is that no convict has been revived in the past twenty years. The moon had to pay half the cost of the holding tanks … well, we could have made them pay the whole bill. And there were some bugs in the prototypes. We know four convicts died and had to be broken up at once, and half the organs were lost.”

  We crowded into the elevator with the rest. We lowered our voices. “And all for nothing?”

  “By lunie standards, yes. But how diligently were the rights of the convicts guarded? Well. As I say, the conference may be more hectic than one would hope.”

  We all got off on zero level. I gathered that few lunies wanted to live on the surface. These rooms were mostly for transients. I left Penzler at his door and walked two down to my own.

  2. VIEW THROUGH A WINDOW

  Wherever you go in space, shirtsleeve environments tend to be cramped. My room was bigger than I expected. There was a bed, narrow but long, and a table with four collapsed chairs, and a tub. There was a phone screen, and I made for that.

  Taffy wasn’t in, but she’d left a message. She wore a paper surgical coverall and sounded a bit breathless. “Gil, I can’t meet you. You’ll get in about ten minutes after I go on duty. I get off at the usual ungodly hour, in this case 0600, city time. Can you meet me for breakfast? Ten past six, in oh-fifty-three, in the north face on zero level. There’s room service. Isn’t Garner lovely?”

  The picture smiled enchantingly and froze. Chiron asked, “Will there be an answer, sir?” and beeped.

  I was still feeling ruffled and mean. I had to force the eager smile. “Chiron, message. Ten past six, your room. I’ll come to you by Earthlight, though hell should bar the way.” Called off the phone and lost the smile.

  For getting me this chance to see Taffy again after two and a half months of separation … yeah, Garner was lovely.

  Taffy and I had been roommates for three years when she got this chance to practice surgery on the moon. Exchange program. It wasn’t something she could turn down: too useful to her career and too much fun. They’d been rotating her among the lunar cities. She’d been in Hovestraydt City almost two weeks now.

  She’d taken to dating a lunie GP, McCavity by name. I refuse to admit that that irritated me, but the way her schedule had messed up our first meeting did. So did the thought of the conference meeting tomorrow at nine-thirty. I’d heard angry voices at dinner. Clay and Budrys hadn’t mastered the art of walking yet, and it would affect their tempers.

  And my own feet kept getting tangled.

  What I needed was a soak in a hot bath.

  The bathtub was strange. It was right out in the open, next to the bed, with a view of the phone screen and the picture window. It wasn’t long, but it stood four feet high, with a rim that curved inward, and the back rose six feet before curving over. The overflow drain was only halfway up. I started water running, then watched, fascinated. The water looked like it was actively trying to escape.

  I tried some commands. The door lock, the closet lock, the lights all responded to my voice and the Chiron command. The water closet lock was manual.

  Presently the bath was full to the overflow line. I got in carefully and stretched out. The water dipped in a meniscus around me, reluctant to wet me, until I added soap.

  I played with the water, jetting it up between my hands, watching it slowly rise and slowly fall back. I stopped when I’d gotten too much on the ceiling and it was dripping back in fat globules. I was feeling a lot better. I found tiny holes under me and tried calling, “Chiron, activate spa.” Water and air bubbles churned around me, battering muscles strained by low-gravity walking.

  The phone rang.

  Taffy? I called, “Chiron, spa off. Answer phone.” The screen rotated to face me. It was Naomi.

  In low gravity her long, soft golden hair floated around her with every motion. Her cheekbones were high in an oval face. She was made up in recent flatlander style, so that her blue eyes were patterns on the wings of a great gaudy butterfly. Her mouth was small, her face just a touch fuller than I remembered.

  Her body was still athletic, tall and slender by flatlander standards. Her dress was soft blue, and it clung to her as if by static electricity. She’d changed in fourteen years, but not much … not enough.

  It was unrequited love, and it had lasted half of a spring and all of summer, until the day I invested my scanty fortune to loft myself from Earth and outfit myself as an asteroid miner. The scar on my heart had healed over. Of course it had. But I’d known her across a crowded restaurant. At that distance a stranger would barely have known her for a flatlander.

  She smiled a bit nervously. “Gil. I saw you at dinner. Do you remember me?”

  “Naomi Horne. Hi.”

  “Hi. Naomi Mitchison now. What are you doing on the moon, Gil?” She sounded a bit breathless. She’d always talked like that, eager to get the words out, as if someone might interrupt.

  “Conference to Review Lunar Law. I represent the ARM. How about you?”

  “I’m sightseeing. My life kind of came apart a while back … I remember now, you were on the news. You’d caught some kind of organlegging kingpin—”

  “Anubis.”

  “Right.” Pause. “Can we meet for a drink?”

  I’d already made that decision. “Sure, we’ll squeeze it in somewhere. I don’t know just how busy I’ll be. See, I actually came here following my ex-roommate. She’s a surgeon on loan to the hospital here. Between Taffy’s weird hours and the conference itself—”

  “You’re likely to meet yourself in the halls. Yes, I see.”

  “But I’ll call you. Hey, who was your date?”

  She laughed. “Alan Watson. He’s Ma
yor Hove’s son. I don’t think the mayor approves of his dating a flatlander. Lunies are a bit prudish, don’t you think?”

  “I haven’t had a chance to find out. I can’t seem to guess a lunie’s age.”

  “He’s nineteen.” She was teasing me a little. “They can’t tell our ages, either. He’s nice, Gil, but he’s very serious. Like you were.”

  “Uh huh. Okay, I’ll leave a message if I get loose. Would you object to a foursome? For dinner?”

  “Sounds good. Chiron, phone off.”

  I scowled at the blank screen. I had an erection under the water. She still affected me that way. She couldn’t have seen it; the camera angle was wrong. “Chiron, spa,” I said, and the evidence disappeared in bubbles.

  Strange. She thought it was funny that a man would want to take her to bed. I’d told myself that fourteen years ago, but I don’t think I believed it. I’d thought it was me.

  And strange: Naomi was clearly relieved when I told her about Taffy. So why had she called? Not because she wanted a date!

  I stood up in the tub. A half-inch sheath of water came up with me. I scraped most of it back into the tub with the edges of my hands, then toweled myself off from the top down.

  The picture window was jet black but for a small glowing triangle.

  “Chiron, lights off,” I said. Blind, I took a chair and waited for my eyes to adjust. Gradually the view took form. Starlight glazed the battered lands to the west. Dawn was creeping down the highest peak. A floating mountain seemed to flame among the stars. I watched until I saw a second peak come alight. Then I set the alarm and went to bed.

  * * *

  “Phone call, Mr. Hamilton,” a neuter voice was saying. “Phone call, Mr. Hamilton. Phone c—”

  “Chiron, answer phone!” I had trouble sitting up. There was a broad strap across my chest; I unfastened it. The phone screen showed Tom Reinecke and Desiree Porter bending low to put her face next to his. “It better be good,” I said.

  “It’s not good, but it’s not dull,” Tom said. “Would an ARM be interested in the attempted murder of a conference delegate?”

  I rubbed my eyes. “He would. Who?”

  “Chris Penzler. Fourth Speaker for the Belt.”

  “Does nudity offend you?”

  Desiree laughed. Tom said, “No. It bothers lunies.”

  “Okay. Tell me about it.” I got up and started putting clothes on while they talked. The screen and camera rotated to follow me.

  “We’re next to Penzler’s room,” Desiree said: “At least Tom is. The walls are thin. We heard a kind of god-awful slosh-thump and sort of a feeble scream. We went and pounded on his door. No answer. I stayed while Tom phoned the lunie cops.”

  “I phoned them, then Marion Shaeffer,” Tom said. “She’s a Belter, too, the goldskin delegate. Okay, she showed up, then the cops, and they talked the door open. Penzler was faceup in his bathtub with a big hole in his chest. He was still alive when they kicked us out.”

  “My fault,” Desiree said. “I took some pictures.”

  I had my clothes on and my hair brushed. “I’ll be there. Chiron, phone off.”

  Penzler’s door was closed. Desiree said, “They’ve got my camera. Can you get it back for me?”

  “I’ll try.” I pushed the bell.

  “And the pictures?”

  “I’ll try.”

  Marion Shaeffer was in uniform. She was my height, muscular, with broad shoulders and heavy breasts. Her ancestors would have been strong farm wives. Her deep tan ended sharply at the throat. “Come in, Hamilton, but stay out of the way. It’s not really your territory.”

  “Nor yours.”

  “He’s one of my people.”

  Chris Penzler’s room was much like mine. It seemed crowded. Three of the six people present were lunies, and that made a difference. I got an impression of too many elbows flashing in my personal space. One was a redheaded, heavily freckled lunie policeman in orange marked with black. He was working the phone. The blond man in informal pajamas was just watching, and he was Mayor Watson himself. The third was a doctor, and he was working on Penzler.

  They’d wheeled up a mobile autodoc, a heavy, dauntingly complex machine armed with scalpels, surgical lasers, clamps, hypos, suction tubes, sensor fingers ending in tiny bristles, all mounted on a huge adjustable stand. That took up room, too. The lunie was hard at work monitoring the keyboard and screen set into the ‘doc, sometimes typing rapid-fire commands with his long, fragile-looking fingers.

  Penzler was on his back on the bed. The bed was wet with water and blood. A pressure bottle was feeding blood into Penzler’s arm; you can’t use gravity feed on the moon. We watched as the autodoc finished spraying foam over Penzler until it covered him from his chin to his navel.

  I swore under my breath, but I couldn’t really claim they should have waited for me.

  “Here.” Marion Shaeffer elbowed me in the ribs and handed me three holograms. “The reporters took pictures. Good thing. Nobody else had a camera.”

  The first picture showed Penzler on the bed. His whole chest was an ugly deep red, beginning to blister around the edges but burned worse than that in the center. White and black showed where a charred hole had been burned deep into the bone of the sternum, an inch wide and an inch deep. The wound must have been sponged out before the picture was taken.

  The second holo showed him faceup in bloody bathwater. The wounds were the same, and he looked dead.

  The third was a shot through the picture window, taken over the rim of the tub.

  “I don’t get this,” I said.

  Penzler turned his head a bare minimum and looked at me with suffering eyes. “Laser. Shot me through the window.”

  “Most laser wounds don’t spread like this. The wound would be narrower and deeper, wouldn’t it, Doctor?”

  The doctor jerked his chin down and up without looking around. But Penzler made a strong effort to face me. The doctor stopped him with a hand on his shoulder.

  “Laser. I saw. Stood up in the tub. Saw someone out there on the moon.” Penzler stopped to pant a bit, then, “Red light. Blast bounced me back in the water. Laser!”

  “Chris, did you see only one person?”

  “Yah,” he grunted.

  Mayor Watson spoke for the first time. “How? It’s night out there. How could you see anything?”

  “I saw him,” Penzler said thickly. “Three hundred, four hundred meters. Past the big tilted rock.”

  I asked, “What was he? Lunie, Belter, flatlander? What was he wearing?”

  “Couldn’t see. It happened too fast. I stood up, I looked out, then flash. I thought … for a second … I couldn’t tell.”

  “Let him rest now,” the doctor said.

  Nuts. Penzler should have seen that much. Not that it would prove anything. A Belter could wear a pressure suit. A flatlander could get a skintight made, though you’d expect to find records. A lunie … well, there exist short lunies, shorter than, for instance, Desiree Porter, who was a Belter.

  I stepped past the tub to reach the window. The tub was still full of pink water. Penzler would have bled to death or drowned if Tom and Desiree hadn’t acted so quickly.

  I looked out on the moon.

  Dawn had crawled down the peaks to touch their bases. Most of the lowlands were still puddles of black, and the shadow of Hovestraydt City seemed to stretch away forever. Out of the city’s shadow, 190 yards away to left of center, was a massive monolith that could be Penzler’s “big tilted rock.” It was the shape of an elongated egg and smooth. Perhaps the surface had been polished by the blast that had made Grimalde Crater.

  “It’s a wonder he saw anything at all,” I said. “Why didn’t the killer just keep to the shadows? The sun wasn’t up yet.”

  Nobody answered. Penzler was unconscious now. The doctor patted his shoulder and said, “Three or four days, the foam will start to peel off. He can come to me then and I’ll remove it. It’ll be longer than that befor
e the bone heals, though.”

  He turned to us. “It was close. A few minutes later and he would have been dead. The beam charred part of the sternum and cooked tissue underneath. I had to replace parts of his esophagus, the superior vena cava, some mesentery … scrape out the charred bone and fill it full of pins … it was a mess. On Earth he wouldn’t move for a week, and then he’d want a wheelchair.”

  I asked, “Suppose the beam had been three inches lower?”

  “Heart cooked, pleural cavity ruptured. Are you Gil Hamilton?” He stuck out a hand. “I believe we have a friend in common. I’m Harry McCavity.”

  I smiled and shook his hand (carefully, fighting temptation; those long fingers did look fragile). My thoughts were only mildly malicious. Doctor McCavity wasn’t with Taffy either tonight.

  McCavity had fluffy brown hair and a nose like an eagle’s beak. He was short for a lunie, but he still looked like he’d grown up on a stretch rack. Only lunies look like that. Belters raise their children in great bubble structures spun up to an Earth gravity, places like Confinement and Farmer’s Asteroid. McCavity was handsome in an elvish, eerie fashion. In no way did he seem freakish.

  “Weird,” he said. “Do you know what saved his life?” He jerked a long thumb at the bathtub. “He stood up, and a lot of water came up with him. The laser beam plowed into the water. Live steam exploded all over his chest, but it saved his life, too. The water spread the beam. It didn’t go deep enough to kill him right away. The steam explosion threw him back in the tub, so the killer didn’t get a second chance.”

  I remembered how the water had sheathed me when I had stood up in the tub. But— “Would it spread that much? Mayor, could the glass in the window cut some of the light?”

  The mayor shook his head. “He said red light. The window wouldn’t stop red light. It filters raw sunlight, but mainly in the blue and ultraviolet and X-ray range.”