Flatlander - Larry Niven [43]
Whatever she was looking for, she didn’t find it in my face. What looked like hope gradually died out of her eyes, and she sank back in her chair, looking straight ahead of her without interest. Doctor Hartman gestured, and I took the hint and left.
Twenty minutes later he joined me in the visitors’ waiting room. “Hamilton, that’s the first time she’s ever shown that much awareness. What could possibly have sparked it?”
I shook my head. “I wanted to ask, Just how good is your security?”
“I’ll warn the aides. We can refuse to permit her visitors unless accompanied by an ARM agent. Is that good enough?”
“It may be, but I want to plant a tracer in her. Just in case.”
“All right.”
“Doctor, what was that in her expression?”
“I thought it was hope. Hamilton, I will just bet it was your voice that did it. You may sound like someone she knows. Let me take a recording of your voice, and we’ll see if we can find a psychiatrist who sounds like you.”
When I put the tracer in her, she never so much as twitched.
All the way home her face haunted me. As if she’d waited two years in that chair, not bothering to move or think, until I came. Until finally I came.
* * *
My right side seems weightless. It throws me off stride as I back away, back away. My right arm ends at the shoulder. Where my left eye was is an empty socket. Something vague shuffles out of the dark, looks at me with its one left eye, reaches for me with its one right arm. I back away, back away, fending it off with my imaginary arm. It comes closer, I touch it, I reach into it. Horrible! The scars! Loren’s pleural cavity is a patchwork of transplants. I want to snatch my hand away. Instead I reach deeper and find his borrowed heart and squeeze. And squeeze.
How can I sleep nights, knowing what I know? Well, Doctor, some nights I dream.
Taffy opened her eyes to find me sitting up in bed, staring at a dark wall. She said, “What?”
“Bad dream.”
“Oh.” She scratched me under the ear for reassurance.
“How awake are you?”
She sighed. “Wide awake.”
“Corpsicle. Where did you hear the word corpsicle? In the boob cube? From a friend?”
“I don’t remember. Why?”
“Just a thought. Never mind. I’ll ask Luke Gamer.”
I got up and made us some hot chocolate with bourbon flavoring. It knocked us out like a cluster of mercy needles.
Lucas Garner was a man who had won a gamble with fate. Medical technology had progressed as he grew older, so that his expected life span kept moving ahead of him. He was not yet the oldest living member of the Struldbrugs’ Club, but he was getting on, getting on.
His spinal nerves had worn out long since, marooning him in a ground-effect travel chair. His face hung loose from his skull, in folds. But his arms were apishly strong, and his brain still worked. He was my boss.
“Corpsicle,” he said. “Corpsicle. Right. They’ve been saying it on tridee. I didn’t notice, but you’re right. It’s funny they should start using that word again.”
“How did it get started?”
“Popsicle. A Popsicle was frozen sherbet on a stick. You licked it off.”
I winced at the mental picture that evoked. Leviticus Hale, covered with frost, a stake up his anus, a gigantic tongue—
“A wooden stick.” Garner had a grin to scare babies. Grinning, he was almost a work of art: an antique, a hundred eighty-odd years old, like a Hannes Bok illustration of Lovecraft. “That’s how long ago it was. They didn’t start freezing people until the nineteen sixties or seventies, but we were still putting wooden sticks in Popsicles. Why would anyone use it now?”
“Who uses it? Newscasters? I don’t watch the boob cube much.”
“Newscasters, yah, and lawyers … How are you making out on the Committees to Oppose the Second Freezer Bill?”
It took me a moment to make the switch. “No positive results. The program’s still running, and results are slow in some parts of the world, Africa, the Middle East … They all