Flatlander - Larry Niven [51]
Taffy watched me watching a blank phone screen. “What’s wrong?”
“The Chambers kid. Remember Holden Chambers, the corpsicle heir? He lied to me. He refused permission for the hospitals to revive Leviticus Hale. A year ago.”
“Oh.” She thought it over, then reacted with a charity typical of her. “It’s a lot of money just for not signing a paper.”
The cube was showing an old flick, a remake of a Shakespeare play. We turned it to landscape and went to sleep.
I back away, back away. The composite ghost comes near, using somebody’s arm and somebody’s eye and Loren’s pleural cavity containing somebody’s heart and somebody’s lung and somebody’s other lung, and I can feel it all inside him. Horrible. I reach deeper. Somebody’s heart leaps like a fish in my hand.
Taffy found me in the kitchen making hot chocolate. For two. I know damn well she can’t sleep when I’m restless. She said, “Why don’t you tell me about it?”
“Because it’s ugly.”
“I think you’d better tell me.” She came into my arms, rubbed her cheek against mine.
I said to her ear, “Get the poison out of my system. Sure, and into yours.”
“All right.” I could take it either way.
The chocolate was ready. I disengaged myself and poured it, added meager splashes of bourbon. She sipped reflectively. She said, “Is it always Loren?”
“Yah. Damn him.”
“Never this one you’re after now?”
“Anubis? I never dealt with him. He was Bera’s assignment. Anyway, he retired before I was properly trained. Gave his territory to Loren. The market in stiffs was so bad that Loren had to double his territory just to keep going.” I was talking too much. I was desperate to talk to someone, to get back my grip on reality.
“What did they do, flip a coin?”
“For what? Oh. No, there was never a question about who was going to retire. Loren was a sick man. It must have been why he went into the business. He needed the supply of transplants. And he couldn’t get out because he needed constant shots. His rejection spectrum must have been a bad joke. Anubis was different.”
She sipped at her chocolate. She shouldn’t have to know this, but I couldn’t stop talking. “Anubis changed body parts at whim. We’ll never get him. He probably made himself over completely when he … retired.”
Taffy touched my shoulder. “Let’s go back to bed.”
“All right” But my own voice ran on in my head. His only problem was the money. How could he hide a fortune that size? And the new identity. A new personality with lots of conspicuous money … and, if he tried to live somewhere else, a foreign accent, too. But there’s less privacy here, and he’s known … I sipped the chocolate, watching the landscape in the boob cube. What could he do to make a new identity convincing? The landscape scene was night on some mountaintop, bare tumbled rock backed by churning clouds. Restful.
I thought of something he could do.
I got out of bed and called Bera.
Taffy watched me in amazement. “It’s three in the morning,” she pointed out.
“I know.”
Lila Bera was sleepy and naked and ready to kill someone. Me. She said, “Gil, it better be good.”
“It’s good. Tell Jackson I can locate Anubis.”
Bera popped up beside her, demanded, “Where?” His hair was miraculously intact, a puffy black dandelion ready to blow. He was squint-eyed and grimacing with sleep and as naked as … as I was, come to that. This thing superseded good manners.
I told him where Anubis was.
I had his attention then. I talked fast, sketching in the intermediate steps. “Does it sound reasonable? I can’t tell. It’s three in the morning. I may not be thinking straight.”
Bera ran both hands through his hair, a swift, violent gesture that left his natural in shreds. “Why didn’t I think of that? Why didn’t anyone think of that?”
“The waste. When the stuff from one condemned ax murderer can save a dozen lives, it just doesn’t occur to you—”
“Right right right. Skip that What do we do?”
“Alert headquarters. Then call Holden Chambers. I may be able to tell just by talking to him. Otherwise we’ll have to go over.”
“Yah.” Bera grinned through the pain of