Flatlander - Larry Niven [109]
I couldn’t concentrate during the afternoon session. I was trying to outguess a jury several floors away. Talk flowed past me …
“I wonder if you’re not a bit quick to convict,” Octavia Budrys said, “knowing that a conviction can be reversed.”
“You’ve watched a trial,” Bertha Carmody said. “Did you have any quarrel with the proceedings?”
“Only that it was so quick. I’ll admit that the case seems open and shut. What will happen to her now?”
The delegate from Clavius said, “We’ve been through that. She’ll spend six months in the holding tank. It’s the same technology used on the slowboats, the interstellar star-ships, and it’s quite safe. Then, barring a reversal, she’ll be broken up.”
“She won’t be touched until then?”
“Barring an emergency, no.”
“What does the lunar law call an emergency?”
That was the question that snapped me wide awake.
Ward gave us details. There had been emergencies. Six years ago a quake had ripped one of the domes open at Copernicus. The doctors had used everything they could get their hands on, including holding tanks. They’d preserved the felons’ central nervous systems until their grace time was up. They’d done the same after the Blowout of eighteen years ago. Two years ago there was a patient whose odd tissue rejection patterns matched a holding tank felon’s …
Rare and unlikely events. Yeah. Maybe we didn’t really have six months.
There were calls waiting on my phone from Sergeant Laura Drury and Artemus Boone. I took Drury’s call first.
She was sitting cross-legged on a bed, quite naked. I hadn’t thought lunies were that casual. Naked, she was a sheer delight: brown hair three feet long floating in the room’s air currents; a long, slender, graceful body with lines of hard muscle; heavy breasts that floated, too; and legs that went on forever. But her words drove all prurient thoughts out of my mind.
“Gil, forgive the voice-only. I called to tell you the jury’s come back,” she said. “I thought you should hear it from someone you know. It’s a conviction. She’ll be flown to Copernicus tomorrow morning. I’m sorry.”
There was no shock. I’d been expecting it.
The phone asked, “Will there be a reply?”
“Chiron, record reply. Thanks for calling, Laura. I appreciate it. Chiron, phone off.”
I stared out the window for a minute before I remembered the other call.
The black-bearded lawyer was seated behind an ancient computer terminal in an equally ancient windowless office. His message was short. “My client has asked me to ask you to call her. Her number is two-seven-one-one. You may have to get it through the police. I apologize for refusing your calls earlier, but in my judgment it was best.”
Her timing was silly. The trial was over. Oh, well. “Chiron, phone, call two-seven-one-one.”
“Please identify yourself.”
“Gilbert Hamilton.”
I waited while the city computer compared voice prints, while it called Naomi’s room, while Naomi—“Gil! Hello!”
She looked awful. She looked like a once-lovely woman coming out of a year on the wire. Her gaiety was a brittle mask. I said, “Hello. Isn’t your timing a little off? I might have been able to do something.”
She brushed it off. “Gil, will you spend my last night with me? We used to be good friends, and I don’t want to be alone.”
I would have preferred a night on the rack. “There’s Alan Watson. There’s your lawyer.”
“I’ve seen enough of Artemus Boone to last—Gil, he’s all tied up in my mind with the trial. Please?” She hadn’t even mentioned Alan.
“I’ll call you back,” I said.
A last night with Naomi. The thought terrified me.
Taffy wasn’t answering her phone. I tried Harry McCavity’s room and got Harry.
“She’s in a brush-up class on trace element dietary deficiencies,” he said. “I took it last year. Flatlanders don’t need it except in places like Brazil. What’s up?”
“Naomi Mitchison’s been convicted.”
“Is she guilty?”
“For all I know. She’s been lying about something. She wants me to spend her last night with her.”
“Well? You’re old friends, aren’t you?”
“How would Taffy feel about that?”
He looked puzzled.