Flatlander - Larry Niven [135]
We were wrapping up the conference the day Alan Watson left for Ceres. I’d have preferred to see him go, but it didn’t matter. Given who he was, he got a police escort. He was definitely gone.
Laura told me about it that evening. “Naomi Mitchison went with him,” she said.
“Good.”
“Do you mean that?”
“Sure. I like to keep things tidy.”
Naomi had asked for her Belt citizenship a few days ago, and Hildegarde Quifting was glad to ram it through for her. Naomi would be an embarrassment on Earth or on the moon. Moving her to the Belt let everyone breathe easier.
Including Naomi. Old friends on Earth could remember her as she used to be. She needn’t stand trial for illegal cloning. Her little girl would be waiting for her.
She might even be in love with Alan Watson. Futz, I even like the idea. Let it stand.
THE WOMAN IN
DEL REY CRATER
We were falling back toward the moon. It’s always an uneasy sensation, and in a lemmy I felt frail. A lemmy is a spacecraft but a very small one; it won’t even reach lunar orbit.
Lawman Bauer-Stanson set the attitude jets popping. The lemmy rolled belly up to give us a view. “There, Hamilton,” she said, waving at the bone-white land above our heads. “With the old VERBOTEN sign across it.”
It was four T-days past sunrise, and the shadows were long. Del Rey was well off to the side, six kilometers across, almost edge-on and flattening as we fell. There were dots of dulled silver everywhere inside the crater, clustering near the center. A crudely drawn gouge ran straight across the crater’s center, deep and blackly shadowed. That line and the circle of rim formed the VERBOTEN sign.
I asked, “Aren’t you going to take us across?”
“No.” Lawman Bauer-Stanson floated at her ease while choppy moonscape drifted nearer. “I don’t like radiation.”
“We’re shielded.”
“Suuure.”
The computer rolled us over and started the main motor. The lunie lawman tapped in a few instructions. The computer was doing all the work, but I let her land us before I spoke. She’d put us a good kilometer south of the crater rim.
I said, “Being cautious, are we?”
Bauer-Stanson looked at me over her shoulder. Narrow shoulders, long neck, pointed chin: she had the lunies’ look of a Tolkien elf matriarch. Her bubble helmet cramped her long hair. It was black going white, and she wore it in a feathery crest, modified Belt style.
She said, “This is a scary place, Ubersleuth Hamilton. Damn few people come here on purpose.”
“I was invited.”
“We’re lucky you were available. Ubersleuth Hamilton, the shield on a lemmy will stop a solar storm, the wildest solar storm. Thank God for the Shreveshield.” The radiation signal pulled at Bauer-Stanson’s eyes and mine. No rads were getting through at all. “But Del Rey Crater is way different.”
The Earth was a blue-white sickle ten degrees above the horizon. Through either window I could see classic moonscape, craters big and little, and the long rim of Del Rey. Wilderness.
“I’m just asking, but couldn’t you have set us down closer to Del Rey? Or else near the processing plant?”
She leaned across me, our helmets brushing. “Look that way, the right edge of the crater. Now lots closer and a bit right. Look for wheel treads and a mound—”
“Ah.” A kilometer out from the rim wall: a long low hill of lunar dust and coarser debris with a gaping hole in one end.
“You should know by now, Hamilton. We bury everything. The sky is the enemy here. There’s meteors, radiation … spacecraft, for that matter.”
I was watching the mound, expecting some kind of minitractor to pop out.
She caught me looking. “We turned off the waldo tugs when we found the body. They’ve been off for twenty hours or so. You get to tell us when we can turn them on again. Shall we get to it?” Bauer-Stanson’s fingers danced over pressure points on the panel. A whine wound down to profound silence as air was sucked