03-Flatlander Read online

  The crowds had gone, but in some of the sidewalk cafés a few citizens still watched the world go by. We walked toward the black band of horizon, holding hands, taking our time. There was no way to hurry Taffy when she was passing shop windows. All I could do was stop when she did, wearing or not wearing an indulgent smile. Jewelry, clothing, all glowing behind plate glass—

  She tugged my arm, turning sharply to look into a furniture store. I don’t know what it was she saw. I saw a dazzling pulse of green light on the glass and a puff of green flame spurting from a coffee table.

  Very strange. Surrealistic, I thought. Then the impressions sorted out, and I pushed Taffy hard in the small of the back and flung myself rolling in the opposite direction. Green light flashed briefly, very near. I stopped rolling. There was a weapon in my sporran the size of a double-barreled Derringer, two compressed-air cartridges firing clusters of anesthetic crystal slivers.

  A few puzzled citizens had stopped to watch what I was doing.

  I ripped my sporran apart with both hands. Everything spilled out, rolling coins and credit cards and ARM ident and cigarettes and—I snatched up the ARM weapon. The window reflection had been a break. Usually you can’t tell where the pulse from a hunting laser might have come from.

  Green light flashed near my elbow. The pavement cracked loudly and peppered me with particles. I fought an urge to fling myself backward. The afterimage was on my retina, a green line as thin as a razor’s edge, pointing right at him.

  He was in a cross street, poised kneeling, waiting for his gun to pulse again. I sent a cloud of mercy needles toward him. He slapped at his face, turned to run, and fell skidding.

  I stayed where I was.

  Taffy was curled on the pavement with her head buried in her arms. There was no blood around her. When I saw her legs shift, I knew she wasn’t dead. I still didn’t know if she’d been hit.

  Nobody else tried to shoot at us.

  The man with the gun lay where he was for almost a minute. Then he started twitching.

  He was in convulsions when I got to him. Mercy needles aren’t supposed to do that. I got his tongue out of his throat so he wouldn’t choke, but I wasn’t carrying medicines that could help. When the High Cliffs police arrived, he was dead.

  Inspector Swan was a picture-poster cop, tri-racial and handsome as hell in an orange uniform that seemed tailored to him, so well did he fit it. He had the gun open in front of him and was probing at the electronic guts of it with a pair of tweezers. He said, “You don’t have any idea why he was shooting at you?”

  “That’s right.”

  “You’re an ARM. What do you work on these days?”

  “Organlegging, mostly. Tracking down gangs that have gone into hiding.” I was massaging Taffy’s neck and shoulders, trying to calm her down. She was still shivering. The muscles under my hands were very tight.

  Swan frowned. “Such an easy answer. But he couldn’t be part of an organlegging gang, could he? Not with that gun.”

  “True.” I ran my thumbs around the curve of Taffy’s shoulder blades. She reached around and squeezed my hand.

  The gun. I hadn’t really expected Swan to see the implications. It was an unmodified hunting laser, right off the rack.

  Officially, nobody in the world makes guns to kill people. Under the Conventions, not even armies use them, and the United Nations Police use mercy weapons with the intent that the criminals concerned should be unharmed for trial and, later, for the organ banks. The only killing weapons made are for killing animals. They are supposed to be, well, sportsmanlike.

  A continuous-firing X-ray laser would be easy enough to make. It would chop down anything living, no matter how fast it fled, no matter what it hid behind. The beast wouldn’t even know it was being shot at until you waved the beam through its body: an invisible sword blade a mile long.

  But that’s butchery. The prey should have a chance; it should at least know it’s being shot at. A standard hunting laser fires a pulse of visible light and won’t fire again for about a second. It’s no better than a rifle, except in that you don’t have to allow for windage, the range is close enough to infinite, you can’t run out of bullets, it doesn’t mess up the meat, and there’s no recoil. That’s what makes it sportsmanlike.

  Against me it had been just sportsmanlike enough. He was dead. I wasn’t.

  “Not that it’s so censored easy to modify a hunting laser,” Swan said. “It takes some basic electronics. I could do it myself—”

  “So could I. Why not? We’ve both had police training.”

  “The point is, I don’t know anyone who couldn’t find someone to modify a hunting laser, give it a faster pulse or even a continuous beam. Your friend must have been afraid to bring anyone else into it. He must have had a very personal grudge against you. You’re sure you don’t recognize him?”

  “I never saw him before. Not with that face.”

  “And he’s dead,” Swan said.

  “That doesn’t really prove anything. Some people have allergic reactions to police anesthetics.”

  “You used a standard ARM weapon?”

  “Yah. I didn’t even fire both barrels. I couldn’t have put a lot of needles in him. But there are allergic reactions.”

  “Especially if you take something to bring them on.” Swan put the gun down and stood up. “Now, I’m just a city cop, and I don’t know that much about ARM business. But I’ve heard that organleggers sometimes take something so they won’t just go to sleep when an ARM anesthetic hits them.”

  “Yah. Organleggers don’t like becoming spare parts themselves. I do have a theory, Inspector.”

  “Try me.”

  “He’s a retired organlegger. A lot of them retired when the Freezer Bill passed. Their markets were gone, and they’d made their pile, some of them. They split up and became honest citizens. A respected citizen may keep a hunting laser on his wall, but it isn’t modified. He could modify it if he had to with a day’s notice.”

  “Then said respected citizen spotted an old enemy.”

  “Going into a restaurant, maybe. And he just had time to go home for his gun while we ate dinner.”

  “Sounds reasonable. How do we check it?”

  “If you’ll do a rejection spectrum on his brain tissue and send everything you’ve got to ARM Headquarters, we’ll do the rest. An organlegger can change his face and fingerprints as he censored pleases, but he can’t change his tolerance to transplants. Chances are he’s on record.”

  “And you’ll let me know.”

  “Right.”

  Swan was checking it with the radio on his scooter while I beeped my clicker for a taxi. The taxi settled at the edge of the walkway. I helped Taffy into it. Her movements were slow and jerky. She wasn’t in shock, just depression.

  Swan called from his scooter. “Hamilton!”

  I stopped halfway into the taxi. “Yah?”

  “He’s a local,” Swan boomed. His voice carried like an orator’s. “Mortimer Lincoln, ninety-fourth floor. Been living here since—” He checked again with his radio. “April 2123. I’d guess that’s about six months after they passed the Freezer Law.”

  “Thanks.” I typed an address on the cab’s destination board. The cab hummed and rose.

  I watched High Cliffs recede, a pyramid as big as a mountain, glowing with light. The city guarded by Inspector Swan was all in one building. It would make his job easier, I thought. Society would be a bit more organized.

  Taffy spoke for the first time in a good while. “Nobody’s ever shot at me before.”

  “It’s all over now. I think he was shooting at me, anyway.”

  “I suppose.” Suddenly she was shaking. I took her in my arms and held her. She talked into my shirt collar. “I didn’t know what was happening. That green light; I thought it was pretty. I didn’t know what happened until you knocked me down, and then that green line flashed at you and I heard the sidewalk go ping, and I didn’t know what to do! I—�
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  “You did fine.”

  “I wanted to help! I didn’t know; maybe you were dead, and there wasn’t anything I could do. If you hadn’t had a gun— Do you always carry a gun?”

  “Always.”

  “I never knew.” Without moving, she seemed to pull away from me a little.

  At one time the Amalgamation of Regional Militia had been a federation of civil defense bodies in a number of nations. Later it had become the police force of the United Nations itself. They had kept the name. Probably they liked the acronym.

  When I got to the office the next morning, Jackson Bera had already run the dead man to Earth. “No question about it,” he told me. “His rejection spectrum checks perfectly. Anthony Tiller, known organlegger, suspected member of the Anubis gang. First came on the scene around 2120; he probably had another name and face before that. Disappeared April or May 2123.”

  “That fits. No, dammit, it doesn’t. He must have been out of his mind. There he was, home free, rich and safe. Why would he blow it all to kill a man who never harmed a hair of his head?”

  “You don’t really expect an organlegger to behave like a well-adjusted member of society.”

  I answered Bera’s grin. “I guess not … Hey. You said Anubis, didn’t you? The Anubis gang, not the Loren gang.”

  “That’s what it says on the hard copy. Shall I query for probability?”

  “Please.” Bera programs a computer better than I do. I talked while he tapped at the keyboard in my desk. “Whoever the bleep he was, Anubis controlled the illicit medical facilities over a big section of the Midwest. Loren had a part of Eurasia, bigger area, bigger population. The difference is that I killed Loren myself by squeezing the life out of his heart with my imaginary hand, which is a very personal thing, as you will realize, Jackson. Whereas I never touched Anubis or any of his gang, or even interfered with his profits, to the best of my knowledge.”

  “I did,” Bera said. “Maybe he thought I was you.” Which is hilarious, because Bera is dark brown and a foot taller than me if you include the hair that puffs out around his head like a black powder explosion. “You missed something. Anubis was an intriguing character. He changed faces and ears and fingerprints whenever he got the urge. We’re pretty sure he was male, but even that isn’t worth a big bet. He’s changed his height at least once. Full leg transplant.”

  “Loren couldn’t do that. Loren was a pretty sick boy. He probably went into organlegging because he needed the transplant supply.”

  “Not Anubis. Anubis must have a sky-high rejection threshold.”

  “Jackson, you’re proud of Anubis.”

  Bera was shocked to his core. “The hell! He’s a dirty murdering organlegger! If I’d caught him I’d be proud of Anubis—” He stopped because my desk screen was getting information.

  The computer in the basement of the ARM Building gave Anthony Tiller no chance at all of being part of the Loren gang and a probability in the nineties that he had run with the Jackal God. One point was that Anubis and the rest had all dropped out of sight around the end of April 2123, when Anthony Tiller/Mortimer Lincoln changed his face and moved into High Cliffs.

  “It could still have been revenge,” Bera suggested. “Loren and Anubis knew each other. We know that much. They set up the boundary between their territories at least twelve years ago, by negotiation. Loren took over Anubis’s territory when Anubis retired. And you killed Loren.”

  I scoffed. “And Tiller the Killer gave up his cover to get me two years after the gang broke up?”

  “Maybe it wasn’t revenge. Maybe Anubis wants to make a comeback.”

  “Or maybe this Tiller just flipped. Withdrawal symptoms. He hadn’t killed anyone for almost two years, poor baby. I wish he’d picked a better time.”

  “Why?”

  “Taffy was with me. She’s still twitching.”

  “You didn’t tell me that! She wasn’t hit, was she?”

  “No, just scared.”

  Bera relaxed. His hand caressed the interface where his hair faded into air, feather-lightly, in the nervous way another man might scratch his head. “I’d hate to see you two split up.”

  “Oh, it’s not …” Anything like that serious, I’d have told him, but he knew better. “Yah. We didn’t get much sleep last night. It isn’t just being shot at, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Taffy’s a surgeon. She thinks of transplant stocks as raw material. Tools. She’d be crippled without an organ bank. She doesn’t think of the stuff as human … or she never used to, till she met me.”

  “I’ve never heard either of you talk about it.”

  “We don’t, even to each other, but it’s there. Most transplants are condemned criminals, captured by heroes such as you and me. Some of the stuff is respectable citizens captured by organleggers, broken up into illicit organ banks, and eventually recaptured by said heroes. They don’t tell Taffy which is which. She works with pieces of people. I don’t think she can live with me and not live with that.”

  “Getting shot at by an ex-organlegger couldn’t have helped much. We’d better see to it that it doesn’t happen again.”

  “Jackson, he was just a nut.”

  “He used to be with Anubis.”

  “I never had anything to do with Anubis.” Which reminded me. “You did, though, didn’t you? Do you remember anything about the Holden Chambers kidnapping?”

  Bera looked at me peculiarly. “Holden and Charlotte Chambers, yah. You’ve got a good memory. There’s a fair chance Anubis was involved.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “There was a rash of kidnappings about that time all over the world. You know how organlegging works. The legitimate hospitals are always short of transplants. Some sick citizens are too much in a hurry to wait their turns. The gangs kidnap a healthy citizen, break him up into spare parts, throw away the brain, use the rest for illegal operations. That’s the way it was until the Freezer Law cut the market out from under them.”

  “I remember.”

  “Some gangs turned to kidnapping for ransom. Why not? It’s just what they were set up for. If the family couldn’t pay off, the victim could always become a donor. It made people much more likely to pay off.

  “The only strange thing about the Chambers kidnap was that Holden and Charlotte Chambers both disappeared about the same time, around six at night.” Bera had been tapping at the computer controls. He looked at the screen and said, “Make that seven. March 21, 2123. But they were miles apart, Charlotte at a restaurant with a date, Holden at Washburn University attending a night class. Now, why would a kidnap gang think they needed them both?”

  “Any ideas?”

  “They might have thought that the Chambers trustees were more likely to pay off on both of them. We’ll never know now. We never got any of the kidnappers. We were lucky to get the kids back.”

  “What made you think it was Anubis?”

  “It was Anubis territory. The Chambers kidnap was only the last of half a dozen in that area. Smooth operations, no excitement, no hitches, victims returned intact after the ransom was paid.” He glared. “No, I’m not proud of Anubis. It’s just that he tended not to make mistakes, and he was used to making people disappear.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “They made themselves disappear, the whole gang, around the time of that last kidnap. We assume they were building up a stake.”

  “How much did they get?”

  “On the Chambers kids? A hundred thousand.”

  “They’d have made ten times that selling them as transplants. They must have been hard up.”

  “You know it. Nobody was buying. What does all this have to do with your being shot at?”

  “A wild idea. Could Anubis be interested in the Chambers kids again?”

  Bera gave me a funny look. “No way. What for? They bled them white the first time. A hundred thousand UN marks isn’t play money.”

  After Bera left, I sat there no
t believing it.

  Anubis had vanished. Loren had acted immediately to take over Anubis’s territory. Where had they gone, Anubis and the others? Into Loren’s organ banks?

  But there was Tiller/Lincoln.

  I didn’t like the idea that any random ex-organlegger might decide to kill me the instant he saw me. Finally I did something about it. I asked the computer for data on the Chambers kidnapping.

  There wasn’t much Bera hadn’t told me. I wondered, though, why he hadn’t mentioned Charlotte’s condition.

  When ARM police had found the Chambers kids drugged on a hotel parking roof, they had both been in good physical condition. Holden had been a little scared, a little relieved, just beginning to get angry. But Charlotte had been in catatonic withdrawal. At last notice she was still in catatonic withdrawal. She had never spoken with coherence about the kidnapping or about anything else.

  Something had been done to her. Something terrible. Maybe Bera had taught himself not to think about it.

  Otherwise the kidnappers had behaved almost with rectitude. The ransom had been paid; the victims had been returned. They had been on that roof, drugged, for less than twenty minutes. They showed no bruises, no signs of maltreatment … another sign that their kidnappers were organleggers. Organleggers aren’t sadists. They don’t have that much respect for the stuff.

  I noted that the ransom had been paid by an attorney. The Chambers kids were orphans. If they’d both been killed, the executor of their estate would have been out of a job. From that viewpoint it made sense to capture them both … but not all that much sense.

  And there couldn’t be a motive for kidnapping them again. They didn’t have the money. Except—

  It hit me joltingly. The second Freezer Bill.

  Holden Chambers’s number was in the basement computer. I was dialing it when second thoughts interrupted. Instead I called downstairs and set a team to locating possible bugs in Chambers’s home or phone. They weren’t to interfere with the bugs or alert possible listeners. Routine stuff.