Flatlander - Larry Niven [29]
Magic. Anyone who’s not psychic himself feels the same way, just a little. A touch of dread, a touch of envy. Loren thought he could handle ARMs; he’d killed at least one of us. But to send warlocks against him was grossly unfair.
That was why he’d let me wake up. Loren wanted to gloat. How many men have captured a warlock?
“Don’t be an idiot,” I said. “I didn’t volunteer to play your silly game or Haine’s, either. My rules make you a wholesale murderer.”
Loren got to his feet (what time was it?), and I suddenly realized my time was up. He was in a white rage. His silky blond hair seemed to stand on end.
I looked into the tiny needle hole in the hypo gun. There was nothing I could do. The reach of my TK was the reach of my fingers. I felt all the things I would never feel: the quart of Trastine in my blood to keep the water from freezing in my cells, the cold bath of half-frozen alcohol, the scalpels and the tiny, accurate surgical lasers. Most of all, the scalpels.
And my knowledge would die when they threw away my brain. I knew what Loren looked like. I knew about Monica Apartments and who knew how many others of the same kind? I knew where to go to find all the loveliness in Death Valley, and someday I was going to go. What time was it? What time?
Loren had raised the hypo gun and was sighting down the stiff length of his arm. Obviously he thought he was at target practice. “It really is a pity,” he said, and there was only the slightest tremor in his voice. “You should have stayed a spaceman.”
What was he waiting for? “I can’t cringe unless you loosen these bandages,” I snapped, and I jabbed what was left of my cigarette at him for emphasis. It jerked out of my grip, and I reached and caught it and—
And stuck it in my left eye.
At another time I’d have examined the idea a little more closely. But I’d still have done it. Loren already thought of me as his property. As live skin and healthy kidneys and lengths of artery, as parts in Loren’s organ banks, I was property worth a million UN marks. And I was destroying my eye! Organleggers are always hurting for eyes; anyone who wears glasses could use a new pair, and the organleggers themselves are constantly wanting to change retina prints.
What I hadn’t anticipated was the pain. I’d read somewhere that there are no sensory nerves in the eyeball. Then it was my lids that hurt. Terribly!
But I had to hold on only for a moment.
Loren swore and came for me at a dead run. He knew how terribly weak my imaginary arm was. What could I do with it? He didn’t know; he’d never known, though it stared him in the face. He ran at me and slapped at the cigarette, a full swing that half knocked my head off my neck and sent the now-dead butt ricocheting off a wall. Panting, snarling, speechless with rage, he stood—within reach.
My eye closed like a small tormented fist.
I reached past Loren’s gun, through his chest wall, and found his heart. And squeezed.
His eyes became very round, his mouth gaped wide, his larynx bobbed convulsively. There was time to fire the gun. Instead he clawed at his chest with a half-paralyzed arm. Twice he raked his fingernails across his chest, gaping upward for air that wouldn’t come. He thought he was having a heart attack. Then his rolling eyes found my face.
My face. I was a one-eyed carnivore, snarling with the will to murder. I would have his life if I had to tear the heart out of his chest! How could he help but know?
He knew!
He fired at the floor and fell.
I was sweating and shaking with reaction and disgust. The scars! He was all scars; I’d felt them going in. His heart was a transplant. And the rest of him—he’d looked about thirty from a distance, but this close it was impossible to tell. Parts were younger, parts older. How much of Loren was Loren? What parts had he taken from others? And none of the parts quite matched.
He must have been chronically ill, I thought And the Board wouldn’t give him the transplants he needed. And one day he’d seen the answer to all his problems …
Loren wasn’t moving. He wasn