Flatlander - Larry Niven [34]
The arguments for the second Freezer Bill were not much different. The corpsicles named in group two had money, but they were insane. Today there were chemical cures for most forms of insanity. But the memory of having been insane, the habitual thought patterns formed by paranoia or schizophrenia, these would remain, these would require psychotherapy. And how to cure them in men and women whose patterns of experience were up to 140 years out of date to start with?
And the organ banks are always empty …. Sure, I could see it. The citizens wanted to live forever. One day they’d work their way down to me, Gil Hamilton.
“You can’t win,” I said.
Taffy said, “How so?”
“If you’re destitute, they won’t revive you because you can’t support yourself. If you’re rich, your heirs want the money. It’s hard to defend yourself when you’re dead.”
“Everyone who loved them is dead, too.” She looked too seriously into her coffee cup. “I didn’t really pay much attention when they passed the Freezer Law. At the hospital we don’t even know where the spare parts come from: criminals, corpsicles, captured organleggers’ stocks, it all looks the same. Lately I find myself wondering.”
Taffy had once finished a lung transplant with hands and sterile steel after the hospital machines had quit at an embarrassing moment. A squeamish woman couldn’t have done that. But the transplants themselves had started to bother her lately. Since she met me. A surgeon and an organlegger-hunting ARM, we made a strange pairing.
When I looked again, Holden Chambers was gone. We split the tab, paid, and left.
The first shopping level had an odd outdoor-indoor feel to it. We came out into a broad walk lined with shops and trees and theaters and sidewalk cafés, under a flat concrete sky forty feet up and glowing with light. Far away, an undulating black horizon showed in a narrow band between concrete sky and firmament.
The crowds had gone, but in some of the sidewalk cafés a few citizens still watched the world go by. We walked toward the black band of horizon, holding hands, taking our time. There was no way to hurry Taffy when she was passing shop windows. All I could do was stop when she did, wearing or not wearing an indulgent smile. Jewelry, clothing, all glowing behind plate glass—
She tugged my arm, turning sharply to look into a furniture store. I don’t know what it was she saw. I saw a dazzling pulse of green light on the glass and a puff of green flame spurting from a coffee table.
Very strange. Surrealistic, I thought. Then the impressions sorted out, and I pushed Taffy hard in the small of the back and flung myself rolling in the opposite direction. Green light flashed briefly, very near. I stopped rolling. There was a weapon in my sporran the size of a double-barreled Derringer, two compressed-air cartridges firing clusters of anesthetic crystal slivers.
A few puzzled citizens had stopped to watch what I was doing.
I ripped my sporran apart with both hands. Everything spilled out, rolling coins and credit cards and ARM ident and cigarettes and—I snatched up the ARM weapon. The window reflection had been a break. Usually you can’t tell where the pulse from a hunting laser might have come from.
Green light flashed near my elbow. The pavement cracked loudly and peppered me with particles. I fought an urge to fling myself backward. The afterimage was on my retina, a green line as thin as a razor’s edge, pointing right at him.
He was in a cross street, poised kneeling, waiting for his gun to pulse again. I sent a cloud of mercy needles toward him. He slapped at his face, turned to run, and fell skidding.
I stayed where I was.
Taffy was curled on the pavement with her head buried in her arms. There was no blood around her. When I saw her legs shift, I knew she wasn’t dead. I still didn’t know if she’d been hit.
Nobody else tried to shoot at us.
The man with the gun lay where he was for almost a minute. Then he started twitching.
He was in convulsions when I got to him. Mercy needles aren’t supposed