Flatlander - Larry Niven [152]
“Anyone could see them just by looking over the rim! So I moved the lemmy up onto the crater wall and turned it on its side and used the rocket. I don’t know what Valerie was thinking by then. Did she write some kind of last message?”
Hecate said, “No.”
“Even if she did, who would see it? But I picked up too much radiation. It’s nearly killed me.”
“Well, it kind of did,” I said. “Rad sickness retired you early. It was part of what tipped me off.”
“Hamilton, where are you?”
“Wait, Hecate! Shreve, it wouldn’t be prudent to answer.”
Hecate said edgily, “Gil, he’s accelerating straight up. What was that all about?”
“Last gestures. Right, Shreve?”
“Right,” he said, and turned off his phone.
I told Hecate, “When his Mark Twenty-odd shut down, he had nothing left. He went looking for me. Spray my ship with rocket flame. I lied about being on the rim of Del Rey, but we don’t know what he’s flying, Hecate, and I don’t want him to know where we are. Even a lemmy could do severe damage if you dropped it on Helios Power One at maximum thrust. What’s he doing now?”
“Coasting. I think … I think he’s out of fuel. He burned up a lot, hovering.”
“We should keep watching.”
Two hours later Hecate said, “His travel chair just quit sending.”
“Where did he come down?”
“Del Rey, near the center. I want to look at it before I assume anything.”
“It could have been very messy. He was a hero, after all.” I yawned and stretched. I could be back in Hovestraydt City by tomorrow morning.
AFTERWORD
SCIENCE/MYSTERY FICTION
I have always gotten too involved with my characters.
I certainly did while finishing “Death by Ecstasy.”
Even now, I don’t generally write of purely black-hearted villains. Loren the organlegger was my first. I finished the first draft of that story at six o’clock one morning … went to bed … stared at the ceiling … gave up at about ten and went looking for company.
I finished rewriting that scene a week or two later, at six in the morning. I gave up trying to sleep at around eight. Stopping Loren’s heart with my imaginary hand was a rough experience. It may not shake you, but it shook me.
That was the first of the tales of Gil Hamilton of the Amalgamated Regional Militia, the police force of the United Nations. The second story bubbled in my head for a long time before I wrote down anything but notes.
Bouchercon is a gathering of mystery fans held annually in memory of Anthony Boucher, for many years the editor of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine and of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and the author of the classic “Nine-Finger Jack.” At the first Bouchercon, I already had in mind a most unusual crime with a most unusual motive. I outlined that crime to an audience during a panel discussion. “Death by Ecstasy” just sort of grew, but “The Defenseless Dead” was meticulously plotted in advance, and it didn’t hit me nearly as hard. Maybe it should have. The story and the assumptions behind it are terrifying, and uncomfortably real.
Gil the Arm is one of my favorite characters. Riiight. Thirty years of writing, and still there are only these five stories! If I like him so freezing much, why not write more stories?
Because following two sets of rules is hard work, that’s why.
A detective story is a puzzle. In principle the reader can know what crime was committed, by whom, and how and where and why, before the story hits him in the face with it. He must have enough data to make this obviously true, and there must be only one answer possible.
Science fiction is an exercise in imagination. The more interesting an idea, the less justification it needs. A science-fiction story will be judged on its internal consistency and the reach of the author’s imagination. Strange backgrounds, odd societies following odd laws, and unfamiliar values and ways of thinking are the rule. Alfred Bester overdid it, but see his classic The Demolished Man.
Now, how can the reader anticipate the detective if all the rules are strange?
If science fiction recognizes no