by Larry Niven
We rested. Then I made love to her standing up, with Taffy’s strong legs wrapped around my hips, one arm out to clutch the edge of the tub. In lunar gravity that position is almost restful. And I studied her face, joyful, glowing, familiar.
We rested again. Sweat stayed where it was; it wouldn’t drip. Taffy stirred in my arms and asked, “Hungry?”
“Yes!”
There was a tray on the table. Scrambled eggs, chicken wings, toast, coffee. “It may have cooled off,” she said. “It had to get here before you did. Otherwise we’d have to be dressed.”
We ate. I asked, “What is it with lunies? I keep hearing remarks. It’s the kind of thing you’d expect in the eighteenth century, with social diseases and no contraceptives.”
She nodded and swallowed and said, “Harry tried to explain it to me. People have been living on the moon for a hundred twenty years or so, but even eighty years ago there were only a few hundred. Human beings haven’t really adapted biologically to having children in low gravity. Maybe someday, but for now … they marry early and have two or three children and never use a contraceptive at all. Two or three children and a dozen or two dozen pregnancies that don’t come to term. The children are precious. It’s very important who the father is.”
“Uh huh.”
“That’s the official position. But there are contraceptives, and somebody’s buying them. And long engagements are normal, and children born seven or eight months after the ceremony are also normal. I’d guess they try each other out, just like we do, but one at a time, and what they’re looking for is fertility, not compatibility. And they don’t talk about even that.”
“Except Harry.”
She nodded. “Harry likes flatlander women. Society kind of frowns on that, but Harry’s too good a doctor to be fired.” She grinned at me. “That’s his story. He’s actually damned good. And he’s sterile, guaranteed. There are a fair number of men like that, and women, too. They’re in a special position. Not really considered a threat, if you follow.”
I wanted to know more about that relationship. I tried an oblique approach. “Would you recommend that I take a lunie lover?”
She didn’t smile. “Don’t fail to seduce a lunie, Gil. What I mean is, don’t fail. Don’t ask unless the answer is yes. In fact—” Now she smiled. “Don’t ask. You can let yourself be seduced. Everyone knows flatlanders are easy.”
“Are we?”
“Sure. Now, would you like to meet Harry McCavity? Is that what you were getting at? You’d like him, and he doesn’t consider you a threat. Quite the reverse.”
“What?”
“You’re a good cover. You and I are roommates of long standing. Hove City society would really prefer that Harry keep his relationships purely social.”
“Oh. Okay, I’d like to meet him socially. I met him officially last night. He was repairing a hole in a Belt delegate.” I told her about Penzler.
She didn’t like it. “Gil, if someone’s shooting at offworld conference delegates, shouldn’t you start wearing a mirror vest? And me, too?”
“Not to worry. They’ve got a suspect.”
“That’s a relief. The right suspect?”
“She was the only one out there.” I discovered that I didn’t want to talk to Taffy about Naomi. “They’ll be expecting to call me in my room. And I need some sleep. When shall we twain meet again?”
“It looks like Thursday, same time, unless someone changes my schedule again.”
“Same time. Lord.”
“I thought you were used to my funny hours. Look, I’ll leave you a message if it looks like we can get together with Harry. Lunch or dinner, okay?”
“Okay.”
It was nine when I reached my room. I called the mayor’s office, got his secretary, and was told me conference had been postponed for that day but that the conference room would be open for informal discussions.
Interesting. Chris was that important? But two other delegates had been up late into the night, and others could be suffering from time lag. I was just as glad they’d called it off.
I slept till noon. Then Laura Drury called. She was just going off duty, and a team of lunie police were leaving with Naomi in ten minutes.
4. THE CRATERED LANDS
I got into my suit in a hell of a hurry, then stopped and made myself go through the checkout routine. I was long out of practice. I reached the south face air lock and found the rest of the party still in sight on the road. I bounced after them.
There were seven of us: Naomi, Marion Shaeffer, me, and four tall lunie cops. The freckled redhead was Jefferson. The face above the tallest of the orange suits was also familiar. I’d seen him talking to the mayor last night at dinner.
“Alan Watson?”
“Yes, that’s right. You’re one of the conference delegates.”
“Gil Hamilton. ARM.” We shook gloves. He was a thin young man with straight black hair, a narrow nose, thick shaggy eyebrows, blunt-fingered hands as strong as mine. He couldn’t make himself smile. Frightened for Naomi? The smallish painting on his chest showed an esoteric spacecraft nearing the North America nebula, all in reds and blacks.
We set off, Naomi leading. The road west was a trade road; it sometimes carried heavy equipment, up to the size of a damaged spacecraft. It was broad and smooth but not straight. Follow it far enough and you would reach the Belt Trading Post.
We had come four or five hundred yards without much conversation when Naomi said, “I turned off here. I wanted to climb that rock.”
She was pointing at a faceted lump a considerable distance away. It was the tallest point around. I had first seen it glowing in darkness, lit by imminent dawn, when I had looked out my window last night.
We followed Naomi toward it. Marion asked, “Did you climb it?”
“Yes.”
The sun was only six degrees up in the sky. We walked in shadow most of the time. It would have been like wading through ink but for our headlamps. The footing was chancy. Naomi stumbled as often as I did, more often than the lunies. Marion had trouble, too.
She stopped Naomi at one point where our only route of approach would round a spur of black volcanic glass. “Okay, what’s around this turn?”
“I don’t know,” Naomi said. “It was dark; it was all different. I’m not even sure this is the way I came.”
The peak was a thousand feet high and not particularly steep. It would give a good view of Hove City, I thought, but we were north of where Chris Penzler had spotted his assassin. A cop directed Naomi to climb it.
She wasn’t exactly agile in unfamiliar gravity, with the inflated suit restricting her movements. But she didn’t have any trouble till she was three hundred feet up. Then she started yelping. She came down dangerously fast.
“It’s hot!” she complained. “It burned me right through the suit!”
“Where?” Alan Watson demanded.
“My chest and arms. It’s okay now, I think, but I can’t climb it in daylight. Shall I try the other side?”
Marion said, “No, skip it. Where next?”
Naomi led us south. I wondered if we would learn anything this way. Whether or not she was lying, her answer would be the same: it was dark, I don’t know the moon, this probably isn’t the way I came. Tentatively, she had lied already. When I’d climbed out of my tub, the peak had been sunlit for the upper hundred feet. Why had she tried to climb the sunlit side today if she’d had the chance to learn better last night?”
Of course she could have started earlier yesterday … and climbed in total darkness. I didn’t like that, either.
And I hated where she was leading us.
This was familiar territory. I had sifted it in miniature, felt its contours with my imaginary hand. I half remembered landmarks large or strange, and so, it seemed, did Naomi.
Like a hill-sized boulder that had split nicely down the middle, leaving flat planes uppermost, Naomi described it before we reached it. She pointed out one hal
f of the split monolith and said, “I climbed up on that one. I lay on my back and looked at the stars and sometimes at Hove City. More than half the windows were dark by then. There was nice backlighting from behind, from the spaceport and the mirror works.”
She moved to climb up on it, but Marion yanked her back. The orange-clad cops searched with headlamps and powerful flashlights for boot scrapes, footprints, anything Naomi might have dropped. When they gave up on the sides, Watson and Jefferson reached the top in one leap and searched that. Slanted sunlight made the lamps unnecessary.
Marion jumped up and joined them. She balanced on boot toes and fingertips and searched with her face two inches from the rock.
“Nothing,” she said. “Are you sure you were in this territory?”
“I was right up there on that rock!”
Marion looked satisfied; Jefferson looked grim; Alan Watson had a haunted look. I climbed up after them, knowing.
It was roomy and almost flat. It would be a good place to stretch out and watch stars. I looked toward the city, and Chris Penzler’s “tilted rock” was almost in my line of sight, assuming I had the right rock. I could look right into Chris’s window around four hundred yards away. The sun made me squint. But at night that window would make a fine shooting gallery.
I thought it over for a few seconds. Then I said, “Hamilton speaking. I’d like to try a couple of things if nobody has any objection. First, I’d like to test fire a message laser.”
I used Jefferson’s. He showed me how to hook the transceiver cable into my helmet mike and how to aim the thing, first making sure the dimmer switch was at full dim. If you turned it up, the safety gave you five minutes and then turned it down again. Otherwise you could accidentally vaporize whoever you were trying to call. You never used full power, Jefferson explained, for anything closer than an orbiting spacecraft.
He showed me how to find and call the Watchbird One satellite, using the scope. I got a computer. It gave me a news update. Spacecraft Chili Bird had safely departed the Belt Trading Post for Confinement Asteroid. Sunspot activity was on the increase, but no solar flares had yet formed.
I asked Jefferson, “These things do function as weapons, don’t they?”
“In an emergency, yes.”
“How?”
He showed me how to turn the dimmer switch to full bright. I fired at a darkish rock. I got a half-second burst of red flame and a hole three inches deep and a quarter of an inch wide.
“Half a second isn’t much of a message,” I said.
So he showed me how to override the safety. “It burns out the sender, of course, and you get just enough time to yell ‘Help! Blowout!’ That can be enough.”
I handed it back, “Second,” I said, “I’d like to go straight back to Hove City from here, and I’d like to take an escort. Officer Watson, would you care for a stroll?”
He said, “All right. See you later, Naomi, and don’t worry.”
She nodded jerkily, wearing the same stony expression she’d worn all this time.
We hadn’t gone far when Watson said, “Operative Hamilton, we can adjust our helmet mikes so we won’t disturb the others.”
“I know how. Call me Gil.”
“I’m Alan.”
We set our radios for privacy. I said, “It finally hit me that I was missing the point. You and I aren’t looking for the same killer as the rest of them. We think Naomi’s not guilty, right?”
“She’d never kill a man from ambush.”
“So we’re looking for someone else. Sticking to Naomi’s route won’t give him to us. She never saw him.”
He bought it. He relaxed just a little. “She can’t even tell us where he wasn’t. That place where she watched the stars … he could have come after she left. Penzler saw his killer, didn’t he? Jefferson says he did.”
I’d known Naomi ten years ago, but Alan Watson knew her now. He believed her. Could I be wrong?
I filed the question. “Penzler says he saw something, but he can’t even describe the suit. Something human, past the tilted rock. So let’s walk toward the tilted rock, taking our time and looking around.”
We walked through pools of glare and shadow, with almost no in-between. The colors were mostly browns and grays and whites. Alan said, “I wish I knew what to look for. It’s a shame she didn’t lose something.”
I shrugged that off. “We aren’t looking for anything Naomi dropped. This is where the killer had to be. We check the high points because he had to have a view of Chris’s window. We look for tracks of a vehicle or burn marks from a rocket, anything that could get him out of here before the police started looking for him. He had ten minutes or more. And look for pieces of a laser. I would have found a laser, but it could have been broken up.”
“Your imaginary arm?”
Skeptical. He’d have his chance to sneer at my imaginary arm when I testified for the prosecution against Naomi.
The thought of Naomi being broken up for spare parts gave me the creeps. I could never be neutral where Naomi was concerned. But say that love and hate could add to make indifference … say I could feel nothing for Naomi. It would still be like taking scissors to a George Barr painting. Vandalism.
Alan said, “That flat-topped rock where she watched the stars would have been perfect, wouldn’t it?”
“Yeah. A beautiful view of Chris’s window. What I don’t believe is that she’d lead us there. Alan, would a lunie go sightseeing on the moon at night?”
He laughed. “A lunie can always wait two weeks. A tourist has to go home.” The grim look returned. “Most tourists pick daytime. It does look funny. Dammit.”
Light and shadow. All moonscape and no clues. Every time we walked into full sunlight, I had to blink against the glare. My visor took a fraction of a second to darken, and it was too long. We took the easy paths, but we stopped to climb obvious vantage points.
The silence was getting to me. I asked, “Was your father named after the city itself?”
“Oh … partly. The Jacob Hovestraydt, the man who founded the city, was my great-grandfather. And he had two daughters, and one didn’t have children, and the other had Dad and my three aunts. So we’re the direct genetic line. Dad was practically born mayor. We’ve talked about it, how he grew up … Hey, stay away from there. You don’t know how deep it is.”
I’d been about to wade through a dust pool, scuffing my feet, looking for pieces of a laser. But he was right, of course.
I said, “I’d like another crack at the projection room. Could you get me that?”
“I think so.”
“Did you ever show Naomi the projection room?”
He stopped walking. “How’d you know?”
“I just wondered.”
We marched our crooked path in silence for a time. Then Alan said, “Every time some offworlder bigwig showed up, he had to meet the kid. Me. Once upon a time I told Dad I didn’t like it. He said he went through the same thing when his grandfather was mayor. And his mother picked his school courses for him. Political science, air cycle engineering, ecology, economics. His first job was in the Garden. Then he was in maintenance, tending the air system.”
“And you? Are you being groomed for mayor?”
“Maybe. Dad was in the police, too, for a while. I’m not sure I’ll ever want to run Hovestraydt City … and I’m sure Dad wouldn’t force me, and I’m not sure I could. I don’t want to now. I want to travel. Look, Gil, we’ve almost reached the tilted rock. That’s too close.”
“I wonder. In the first place, I don’t trust a Belter’s sense of distance on the moon.”
“Mmm … yes. In fact … the closer the killer was, the better the chance Penzler would see him. And Naomi wouldn’t have, because she was farther west. He could have been just behind the rock.”
“Yeah, and we’ll look.”
“He’d have had to be in sunlight, wouldn’t he, for Penzler to see him?” Alan squatted, then leapt. Soared. Graceful as all
hell. His parabola peaked at the rock’s rounded tip, and he clutched it with all four limbs, then began his own investigations.
To me it seemed a precarious perch for an aspiring marksman.
From Chris’s window the tilted rock had looked like an elongated egg. But the side in darkness was almost flat. I played my headlamp over it. The surface was rough and white.
I scraped my gloved fingers over it. Crumbly white stuff adhered to my fingers. It disappeared as I watched. What the hell?
“No laser parts, no footprints, no puffer tracks, nothing,” Alan said. “And there’s too much dust around. If he has any brains, the killer wouldn’t have been walking where there’s dust. Gil, we’ll have to backtrack.”
“I don’t think so. I don’t think Chris saw his killer.”
“What?”
“Why would the killer be in sunlight? He’d be half-blind in the glare. It was just dawn, with most of this region in shadow. He’d have had to go looking for sunlight to stand in so Chris could see him. It’s plain silly.”
“Then what did he see?”
“I don’t know yet. I want another look at Chris’s room.”
“Gil, what’s your stake in this?”
“Aesthetic. She’s too beautiful to be broken up.” Too flippant. I tried again. “I loved her once, and I hated her once. Now she’s an old friend in trouble. You?”
“I love her.”
We weren’t looking for clues now. The tilted rock was behind us; Penzler couldn’t have seen anything here. Like the keen-eyed Indian in his forest or the street-wise mugger on his home turf, Alan Watson knew this part of the moon. He’d see anything worth seeing. To me it was all moonscape.
I did get him talking about the conference.
“Six out of ten of you are offworlders,” he said. “We don’t even have a voting majority. I can see why some citizens don’t like that. But they’re wrong. The moon is a kind of halfway house between the mud and the sky … between Earth and the Belt. We gain some advantages from that, but we have to keep you both satisfied, too. The organ bank problem doesn’t make that any easier.”
