Flatlander - Larry Niven [10]
I had reached that stage where time becomes discontinuous, where gaps of seconds or minutes appear between the events you can remember. Somewhere in that period I found myself staring at a cigarette. I must have just lighted it, because it was near its original two-hundred-millimeter length. Maybe a waiter had snuck up behind me. There it was, at any rate, burning between my middle and index fingers.
I stared at the coal as the mood settled on me. I was calm, I was drifting, I was lost in time …
… We’d been two months in the rocks, our first trip out since the accident. Back we came to Ceres with a holdful of gold, fifty percent pure, guaranteed suitable for rustproof wiring and conductor plates. At nightfall we were ready to celebrate.
We walked along the city limits, with neon blinking and beckoning on the right, a melted rock cliff to the left, and stars blazing through the dome overhead. Homer Chandrasekhar was practically snorting. On this night his first trip out culminated in his first homecoming, and homecoming is the best part.
“We’ll want to split up about midnight,” he said. He didn’t need to enlarge on that. Three men in company might conceivably be three singleship pilots, but chances are they’re a ship’s crew. They don’t have their singleship licenses yet; they’re too stupid or too inexperienced. If we wanted companions for the night—
“You haven’t thought this through,” Owen answered. I saw Homer’s double take, then his quick look at where my shoulder ended, and I was ashamed. I didn’t need my crewmates to hold my hand, and in this state I’d only slow them down.
Before I could open my mouth to protest, Owen went on. “We’ve got a draw here that we’d be idiots to throw away. Gil, pick up a cigarette. No, not with your left hand—”
I was drunk, gloriously drunk and feeling immortal. The attenuated Martians seemed to move in the walls, the walls that seemed to be picture windows on a Mars that never was. For the first time that night I raised my glass in a toast.
“To Owen, from Gil the Arm. Thanks.”
I transferred the cigarette to my imaginary hand.
By now you’ve got the idea I was holding it in my imaginary fingers. Most people have the same impression, but it isn’t so. I held it clutched ignominiously in my fist. The coal couldn’t burn me, of course, but it still felt like a lead ingot.
I rested my imaginary elbow on the table, and that seemed to make it easier—which is ridiculous, but it works. Truly, I’d expected my imaginary arm to disappear after I got the transplant. But I’d found I could dissociate from the new arm to hold small objects in my invisible hand, to feel tactile sensations in my invisible fingertips.
I’d earned the title Gil the Arm that night in Ceres. It had started with a floating cigarette. Owen had been right. Everyone in the place eventually wound up staring at the floating cigarette smoked by the one-armed man. All I had to do was find the prettiest girl in the room with my peripheral vision, then catch her eye.
That night we had been the center of the biggest impromptu party ever thrown in Ceres Base. It wasn’t planned that way at all. I’d used the cigarette trick three times so that each of us would have a date. But the third girl already had an escort, and he was celebrating something; he’d sold some kind of patent to an Earth-based industrial firm. He was throwing money around like confetti. So we let him stay. I did tricks, reaching esper fingers into a closed box to tell what was inside, and by the time I finished, all the tables had been pushed together and I was in the center, with Homer and Owen and three girls. Then we got to singing old songs, and the bartenders joined us, and suddenly everything was on the house.
Eventually about twenty of us wound up in the orbiting mansion of the First Speaker for the Belt Government. The goldskin cops had tried to bust us up earlier, and the First Speaker had behaved very rudely indeed, then compensated by inviting them to join us …
And that was why I used TK on so many cigarettes.