Flatlander - Larry Niven [33]
I didn’t try to follow her eyes for fear of blowing her cover. Come, I will conceal nothing from you: I don’t care who’s eating at the next table in a public restaurant. Instead I lit a cigarette, shifted it to my imaginary hand (the weight ragging gently at my mind), and settled back to enjoy my surroundings.
High Cliffs is an enormous pyramidal city in a building in northern California. Midgard is on the first shopping level, way back near the service core. There’s no view, but the restaurant makes up for it with a spectacular set of environment walls.
From inside, Midgard seems to be halfway up the trunk of an enormous tree, big enough to stretch from hell to heaven. Perpetual war is waged in the vasty distances, on various limbs of the tree, between warriors of oddly distorted size and shape. World-sized beasts show occasionally: a wolf attacks the moon, a sleeping serpent coils round the restaurant itself, the eye of a curious brown squirrel suddenly blocks one row of windows …
“Isn’t that Holden Chambers?”
“Who?” The name sounded vaguely familiar.
“Four tables over, sitting alone.”
I looked. He was tall and skinny and much younger than most of Midgard’s clientele. Long blond hair, weak chin—he was really the type who ought to grow a beard. I was sure I’d never seen him before.
Taffy frowned. “I wonder why he’s eating alone. Do you suppose someone broke a date?”
The name clicked. “Holden Chambers. Kidnapping case. Someone kidnapped him and his sister years ago. One of Bera’s cases.”
Taffy put down her dessert spoon and looked at me curiously. “I didn’t know the ARM took kidnapping cases.”
“We don’t. Kidnapping would be a regional problem. Bera thought—” I stopped because Chambers looked around suddenly, right at me. He seemed surprised and annoyed.
I hadn’t realized how rudely I was staring. I looked away, embarrassed. “Bera thought an organlegging gang might be involved. Some of the gangs turned to kidnapping about that time, after the Freezer Law slid their markets out from under them. Is Chambers still looking at me?” I felt his eyes on the back of my neck.
“Yah.”
“I wonder why.”
“Do you indeed?” Taffy knew, the way she was grinning. She gave me another two seconds of suspense, then said, “You’re doing the cigarette trick.”
“Oh. Right.” I transferred the cigarette to a hand of flesh and blood. It’s silly to forget how startling that can be: a cigarette or a pencil or a jigger of bourbon floating in midair. I’ve used it myself for shock effect.
Taffy said, “He’s been in the boob cube a lot lately. He’s the number eight corpsicle heir worldwide. Didn’t you know?”
“Corpsicle heir?”
“You know what corpsicle means? When the freezer vaults first opened—”
“I know. I didn’t know they’d started using the word again.”
“Well, never mind that. The point is that if the second Freezer Bill passes, about three hundred thousand corpsicles will be declared formally dead. Some of those frozen dead men have money. The money will go to their next of kin.”
“Oh. And Chambers has an ancestor in a vault somewhere, does he?”
“Somewhere in Michigan. He’s got an odd biblical name.”
“Not Leviticus Hale?”
She stared. “Now, just how the bleep did you know that?”
“Just a stab in the dark.” I didn’t know what had made me say it. Leviticus Hale, dead, had a memorable face and a memorable name.
Strange, though, that I’d never thought of money as a motive for the second Freezer Bill. The first Freezer Law had applied only to the destitute, the Freezeout Kids.
Here are people who could not possibly adjust to any time in which they might be revived. They couldn’t even adjust to their own times. Most of them weren’t even sick; they didn’t have that much excuse for foisting themselves on a nebulous future. Often they paid each other’s way into the freezer vaults. If revived, they would be paupers, unemployable, uneducated by any possible present or future standards, permanent malcontents.
Young, healthy, useless to themselves