Flatlander Read online

  “Why not?”

  “You see, Mr., uh …”

  “Hamilton.”

  “We have a holo camera on every floor, Mr. Hamilton. It takes a picture of each tenant the first time he goes to his room and then never again. Privacy is one of the services a tenant buys with his room.” The manager drew himself up a little as he said this. “For the same reason, the holo camera takes a picture of anyone who is not a tenant. The tenants are thus protected from unwarranted intrusions.”

  “And there were no visitors to any of the rooms on Owen’s floor?”

  “No, sir, there were not.”

  “Your tenants are a solitary bunch.”

  “Perhaps they are.”

  “I suppose a computer in the basement decides who is and is not a tenant.”

  “Of course.”

  “So for six weeks Owen Jennison sat alone in his room. In all that time he was totally ignored.”

  Miller tried to turn his voice cold, but he was too nervous. “We try to give our guests privacy. If Mr. Jennison had wanted help of any kind, he had only to pick up the house phone. He could have called me, or the pharmacy, or the supermarket downstairs.”

  “Well, thank you, Mr. Miller. That’s all I wanted to know. I wanted to know how Owen Jennison could wait six weeks to die while nobody noticed.”

  Miller swallowed. “He was dying all that time?”

  “Yah.”

  “We had no way of knowing. How could we? I don’t see how you can blame us.”

  “I don’t, either,” I said, and brushed by. Miller had been close enough, so I had lashed out at him. Now I was ashamed. The man was perfectly right. Owen could have had help if he’d wanted it.

  I stood outside, looking up at the jagged blue line of sky that showed between the tops of the buildings. A taxi floated into view, and I beeped my clicker at it, and it dropped.

  * * *

  I went back to ARM Headquarters. Not to work—I couldn’t have done any work, not under the circumstances—but to talk to Julie.

  Julie. A tall girl, pushing thirty, with green eyes and long hair streaked red and gold. And two wide brown forceps marks above her right knee, but they weren’t showing now. I looked into her office through the one-way glass and watched her at work.

  She sat in a contour couch, smoking. Her eyes were closed. Sometimes her brow would furrow as she concentrated. Sometimes she would snatch a glance at the clock, then close her eyes again.

  I didn’t interrupt her. I knew the importance of what she was doing.

  Julie. She wasn’t beautiful. Her eyes were a little too far apart, her chin too square, her mouth too wide. It didn’t matter. Because Julie could read minds.

  She was the ideal date. She was everything a man needed. A year ago, the day after the night I killed my first man, I had been in a terribly destructive mood. Somehow Julie had turned it into a mood of manic exhilaration. We’d run wild through a supervised anarchy park, running up an enormous bill. We’d hiked five miles without going anywhere, facing backward on a downtown slidewalk. At the end we’d been utterly fatigued, too tired to think … But two weeks ago it had been a warm, cuddly, comfortable night. Two people happy with each other, no more than that. Julie was what you needed, anytime, anywhere.

  Her male harem must have been the largest in history. To pick up on the thoughts of a male ARM, Julie had to be in love with him. Luckily there was room in her for a lot of love. She didn’t demand that we be faithful. A good half of us were married. But there had to be love for each of Julie’s men, or Julie couldn’t protect him.

  She was protecting us now. Each fifteen minutes Julie was making contact with a specific ARM agent. Psi powers are notoriously undependable, but Julie was an exception. If we got in a hole, Julie was always there to get us out … provided that some idiot didn’t interrupt her at work.

  So I stood outside, waiting, with a cigarette in my imaginary hand.

  The cigarette was for practice, to stretch the mental muscles. In its way my “hand” was as dependable as Julie’s mind-touch, possibly because of its very limitations. Doubt your psi powers and they’re gone. A rigidly defined third arm was more reasonable than some warlock ability to make objects move by wishing at them. I knew how an arm felt and what it would do.

  Why do I spend so much time lifting cigarettes? Well, it’s the biggest weight I can lift without strain. And there’s another reason … something taught me by Owen.

  At ten minutes to fifteen Julie opened her eyes, rolled out of the contour couch, and came to the door. “Hi, Gil,” she said sleepily. “Trouble?”

  “Yah. A friend of mine just died. I thought you’d better know.” I handed her a cup of coffee.

  She nodded. We had a date tonight, and this would change its character. Knowing that, she probed lightly.

  “Jesus!” she said, recoiling. “How … how horrible. I’m terribly sorry, Gil. Date’s off, right?”

  “Unless you want to join the ceremonial drunk.”

  She shook her head vigorously. “I didn’t know him. It wouldn’t be proper. Besides, you’ll be wallowing in your own memories, Gil. A lot of them will be private. I’d cramp your style if you knew I was there to probe. Now, if Homer Chandrasekhar were here, it’d be different.”

  “I wish he were. He’ll have to throw his own drunk. Maybe with some of Owen’s girls, if they’re around.”

  “You know what I feel,” she said.

  “Just what I do.”

  “I wish I could help.”

  “You always help.” I glanced at the clock. “Your coffee break’s about over.”

  “Slave driver.” Julie took my earlobe between thumb and forefinger. “Do him proud,” she said, and went back to her soundproof room.

  She always helps. She doesn’t even have to speak. Just knowing that Julie has read my thoughts, that someone understands … that’s enough.

  All alone at three in the afternoon, I started my ceremonial drunk.

  The ceremonial drunk is a young custom, not yet tied down by formality. There is no set duration. No specific toasts must be given. Those who participate must be close friends of the deceased, but there is no set number of participants.

  I started at the Luau, a place of cool blue light and running water. Outside it was fifteen-thirty in the afternoon, but inside it was evening in the Hawaiian Islands of centuries ago. Already the place was half-full. I picked a corner table with considerable elbow room and dialed for Luau grog. It came, cold, brown, and alcoholic, its straw tucked into a cone of ice.

  There had been three of us at Cubes Forsythe’s ceremonial drunk one black Ceres night four years ago. A jolly group we were, too, Owen and me and the widow of our third crewman. Gwen Forsythe blamed us for her husband’s death. I was just out of the hospital with a right arm that ended at the shoulder, and I blamed Cubes and Owen and myself all at once. Even Owen had turned dour and introspective. We couldn’t have picked a worse trio or a worse night for it.

  But custom called, and we were there. Then as now, I found myself probing my own personality for the wound that was a missing crewman, a missing friend. Introspecting.

  Gilbert Hamilton. Born of flatlander parents in April 2093 in Topeka, Kansas. Born with two arms and no sign of wild talents.

  Flatlander: a Belter term referring to Earthmen, particularly to Earthmen who had never seen space. I’m not sure my parents ever looked at the stars. They managed the third largest farm in Kansas, ten square miles of arable land between two wide strips of city paralleling two strips of turnpike. We were city people, like all flatlanders, but when the crowds got to be too much for my brothers and me, we had vast stretches of land to be alone in. Ten square miles of playground, with nothing to hamper us but the crops and automachinery.

  We looked at the stars, my brothers and I. You can’t see stars from the city; the lights hide them. Even in the fields you couldn’t see them around the lighted horizon. But straight overhead, they were there: black sky scat
tered with bright dots and sometimes a flat white moon.

  At twenty I gave up my UN citizenship to become a Belter. I wanted stars, and the Belt government holds title to most of the solar system. There are fabulous riches in the rocks, riches belonging to a scattered civilization of a few hundred thousand Belters, and I wanted my share of that, too.

  It wasn’t easy. I wouldn’t be eligible for a singleship license for ten years. Meanwhile I would be working for others and learning to avoid mistakes before they killed me. Half the flatlanders who join the Belt die in space before they can earn their licenses.

  I mined tin on Mercury and exotic chemicals from Jupiter’s atmosphere. I hauled ice from Saturn’s rings and quicksilver from Europa. One year our pilot made a mistake pulling up to a new rock, and we damn near had to walk home. Cubes Forsythe was with us then. He managed to fix the com laser and aim it at Icarus to bring us help. Another time the mechanic who did the maintenance job on our ship forgot to replace an absorber, and we all got roaring drunk on the alcohol that built up in our breathing air. The three of us caught the mechanic six months later. I hear he lived.

  Most of the time I was part of a three-man crew. The members changed constantly. When Owen Jennison joined us, he replaced a man who had finally earned his singleship license and couldn’t wait to start hunting rocks on his own. He was too eager. I learned later that he’d made one round trip and half of another.

  Owen was my age but more experienced, a Belter born and bred. His blue eyes and blond cockatoo’s crest were startling against the dark of his Belter tan, the tan that ended so abruptly where his neck ring cut off the space-intense sunlight his helmet let through. He was permanently chubby, but in free fall it was as if he’d been born with wings. I took to copying his way of moving, much to Cubes’s amusement.

  I didn’t make my own mistake until I was twenty-six.

  We were using bombs to put a rock in a new orbit. A contract job. The technique is older than fusion drives, as old as early Belt colonization, and it’s still cheaper and faster than using a ship’s drive to tow the rock. You use industrial fusion bombs, small and clean, and you set them so that each explosion deepens the crater to channel the force of later blasts.

  We’d set four blasts already, four white fireballs that swelled and faded as they rose. When the fifth blast went off, we were hovering nearby on the other side of the rock.

  The fifth blast shattered the rock.

  Cubes had set the bomb. My own mistake was a shared one, because any of the three of us should have had the sense to take off right then. Instead, we watched, cursing, as valuable oxygen-bearing rock became nearly valueless shards. We watched the shards spread slowly into a cloud … and while we watched, one fast-moving shard reached us. Moving too slowly to vaporize when it hit, it nonetheless sheared through a triple crystal-iron hull, slashed through my upper arm, and pinned Cubes Forsythe to a wall by his heart.

  A couple of nudists came in. They stood blinking among the booths while their eyes adjusted to the blue twilight, then converged with glad cries on the group two tables over. I watched and listened with an eye and an ear, thinking how different flatlander nudists were from Belter nudists. These all looked alike. They all had muscles, they had no interesting scars, they carried their credit cards in identical shoulder pouches, and they all shaved the same areas…. We always went nudist in the big bases. Most people did. It was a natural reaction to the pressure suits we wore day and night while out in the rocks. Get him into a shirtsleeve environment, and your normal Belter sneers at a shirt. But it’s only for comfort. Give him a good reason and your Belter will don shirt and pants as quickly as the next guy.

  But not Owen. After he got that meteor scar, I never saw him wear a shirt. Not just in the Ceres domes but anywhere there was air to breathe. He just had to show that scar.

  A cool blue mood settled on me, and I remembered …

  … Owen Jennison lounging on a corner of my hospital bed, telling me of the trip back. I couldn’t remember anything after that rock had sheared through my arm.

  I should have bled to death in seconds. Owen hadn’t given me the chance. The wound was ragged; Owen had sliced it clean to the shoulder with one swipe of a com laser. Then he’d tied a length of fiberglass curtain over the flat surface and knotted it tight under my remaining armpit. He told me about putting me under two atmospheres of pure oxygen as a substitute for replacing the blood I’d lost. He told me how he’d reset the fusion drive for four gees to get me back in time. By rights we should have gone up in a cloud of starfire and glory.

  “So there goes my reputation. The whole Belt knows how I rewired our drive. A lot of ’em figure if I’m stupid enough to risk my own life like that, I’d risk theirs, too.”

  “So you’re not safe to travel with.”

  “Just so. They’re starting to call me Four Gee Jennison.”

  “You think you’ve got problems? I can just see how it’ll be when I get out of this bed. ‘You do something stupid, Gil?’ The hell of it is, it was stupid.”

  “So lie a little.”

  “Uh huh. Can we sell the ship?”

  “Nope. Gwen inherited a third interest in it from Cubes. She won’t sell.”

  “Then we’re effectively broke.”

  “Except for the ship. We need another crewman.”

  “Correction. You need two crewmen. Unless you want to fly with a one-armed man. I can’t afford a transplant.”

  Owen hadn’t tried to offer me a loan. That would have been insulting even if he’d had the money. “What’s wrong with a prosthetic?”

  “An iron arm? Sorry, no. I’m squeamish.”

  Owen had looked at me strangely, but all he’d said was, “Well, we’ll wait a bit. Maybe you’ll change your mind.”

  He hadn’t pressured me. Not then and not later, after I’d left the hospital and taken an apartment while I waited to get used to a missing arm. If he thought I would eventually settle for a prosthetic, he was mistaken.

  Why? It’s not a question I can answer. Others obviously feel differently; there are millions of people walking around with metal and plastic and silicone parts. Part man, part machine, and how do they themselves know which is the real person?

  I’d rather be dead than part metal. Call it a quirk. Call it, even, the same quirk that makes my skin crawl when I find a place like Monica Apartments. A human being should be all human. He should have habits and possessions peculiarly his own, he should not try to look like or behave like anyone but himself, and he should not be half robot.

  So there I was, Gil the Arm, learning to eat with my left hand.

  An amputee never entirely loses what he’s lost. My missing fingers itched. I moved to keep from barking my missing elbow on sharp corners. I reached for things, then swore when they didn’t come.

  Owen had hung around, though his own emergency funds must have been running low. I hadn’t offered to sell my third of the ship, and he hadn’t asked.

  There had been a girl. Now I’d forgotten her name. One night I had been at her place waiting for her to get dressed—a dinner date—and I’d happened to see a nail file she’d left on a table. I’d picked it up. I’d almost tried to file my nails but remembered in time. Irritated, I had tossed the file back on the table—and missed.

  Like an idiot I’d tried to catch it with my right hand.

  And I’d caught it.

  I’d never suspected myself of having psychic powers. You have to be in the right frame of mind to use a psi power. But who had ever had a better opportunity than I did that night, with a whole section of brain tuned to the nerves and muscles of my right arm, and no right arm?

  I’d held the nail file in my imaginary hand. I’d felt it, just as I’d felt my missing fingernails getting too long. I had run my thumb along the rough steel surface; I had turned the file in my fingers. Telekinesis for lift, esper for touch.

  “That’s it,” Owen had said the next day. “That’s all we need. One crewman,
and you with your eldritch powers. You practice, see how strong you can get that lift. I’ll go find a sucker.”

  “He’ll have to settle for a sixth of net. Cubes’s widow will want her share.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll swing it.”

  “Don’t worry!” I’d waved a pencil stub at him. Even in Ceres’s gentle gravity it was as much as I could lift—then. “You don’t think TK and esper can make do for a real arm, do you?”

  “It’s better than a real arm. You’ll see. You’ll be able to reach through your suit with it without losing pressure. What Belter can do that?”

  “Sure.”

  “What the hell do you want, Gil? Someone should give you your arm back? You can’t have that. You lost it fair and square, through stupidity. Now it’s your choice. Do you fly with an imaginary arm, or do you go back to Earth?”

  “I can’t go back. I don’t have the fare.”

  “Well?”

  “Okay, okay. Go find us a crewman. Someone I can impress with my imaginary arm.”

  I sucked meditatively on a second Luau grog. By now all the booths were full, and a second layer was forming around the bar. The voices made a continuous hypnotic roar. Cocktail hour had arrived.

  … He’d swung it, all right. On the strength of my imaginary arm, Owen had talked a kid named Homer Chandrasekhar into joining our crew.

  He’d been right about my arm, too.

  Others with similar senses can reach farther, up to halfway around the world. My unfortunately literal imagination had restricted me to a psychic hand. But my esper fingertips were more sensitive, more dependable. I could lift more weight. Today, in Earth’s gravity, I can lift a full shot glass.

  I found I could reach through a cabin wall to feel for breaks in the circuits behind it. In vacuum I could brush dust from the outside of my faceplate. In port I did magic tricks.

  I’d almost ceased to feel like a cripple. It was all due to Owen. In six months of mining I had paid off my hospital bills and earned my fare back to Earth, with a comfortable stake left over.

  “Finagle’s black humor!” Owen had exploded when I had told him. “Of all places, why Earth?”