Flatlander - Larry Niven [102]
So the first conference was called, and strange were the results.
There had been major compromises at the conference of 2105. The biggest was the holding tanks. They were unique. The Belt had insisted that they be built, and the UN had capitulated. The holding tanks would hold a convict inactivated, but alive and healthy, for six months. If new evidence was found, the convict could be revived.
Twenty years later that solution was under fire.
Hildegarde Quitting wanted a rundown on the past twenty years of lunar jurisprudence. In particular, had the holding tanks ever been forced to disgorge a living felon?
Charles Ward obliged. He was six-eleven or so, in his late thirties, a frail dark man with a receding hairline. In a colorless voice he told us that over the past twenty years some six thousand felons had passed through the lunar courts and hospitals. Just under a thousand were lunies. The Belt felons had been convicted by Belt courts; lunar hospitals served only as execution grounds. No conviction had yet been reversed.
Ward represented Copernicus Dome, actually a complex of domes plus a metals mine, the site of one of the moon’s three major hospital complexes. Ward had come armed with graphs and maps and statistics. Average of 120 executions a year, mostly Belters shipped in via the Belt Trading Post and the mass driver in Grimalde Crater. The hospital took nearly four hundred patients a year, mostly lunies, the numbers rising over the years as the lunar population increased. I listened carefully. Copernicus was where Naomi would be sent if she was convicted.
Lunch was delivered around noon. We talked in low voices while we ate, until Carmody called us to order. At once Marion Shaeffer demanded to know whether the lunar hospitals shipped as much transplant material out as came to them through the Belt courts.
Ward answered, a bit superciliously, that Belt transplants tended to be not quite the right shape, that bones and muscles from Belter arms and legs, for instance, would be drastically too short for a lunie. This seemed obvious enough, but it wasn’t what Marion meant. She wanted to know how much transplant material the moon shipped to Earth.
Quite a lot.
The conference was polarizing. Belters and flatlanders were opposite poles, with the lunies in the middle. To frail old Hildegarde Quifting, our approach to the organ bank problem was monstrous: death penalties imposed at every opportunity to keep the voting citizens alive and healthy. To Jabez Stone of the General Assembly, a criminal was lucky to redeem himself in any way, and Belters need not act so damn superior. When a man orders a steak, a steer must be mutilated, then murdered. How many transplants were keeping Quifting alive?
Carmody ruled that out of order. Quifting insisted on answering it anyway. She had never had a transplant, she said belligerently. I noticed uncomfortable expressions among the delegates. Maybe they noticed mine.
It was a long session. The break for dinner came none too soon.
I fell in beside Chris Penzler’s softly whispering air-cushion chair. “You didn’t say much. Are you up to this?”
“Oh, I’m up to it.” He smiled a passable smile that faded. “I feel mortal,” he said. “Having a hole shot through him can make a man think. I could die. I have one daughter. I never had time for more; I was too busy making money, making a career, and then … there was a solar flare while I was en route to Mercury, and now I’m sterile. When I die, she’ll be all that’s left of me. Almost.”
I said, “The quality of their lives is as important as their number.”
Trite, but he nodded thoughtfully. Then, “Somebody hates me enough to kill me.”
“Does Naomi Mitchison hate you that much?”
He scowled. “She has no reason. Oh, she’s strange enough, and she doesn’t like me, but … I wish I knew. I hope to God it’s her.”
Of course. If it wasn’t Naomi, then the clumsy killer was still loose.
I asked, “Do you keep holograms in your room? Or statues of any kind?”
He stared. “No.