Flatlander - Larry Niven [86]
I said, “I’d think direct sunlight would kill plants.”
When Penzler started to answer, Bertha Carmody rode him down. “Direct sunlight would. The convex mirrors on the roof thin the sunlight and spread it about. We set more mirrors at the bottom of the pit and the sides to direct the sunlight everywhere. Every city on the moon uses essentially the same system.” She refrained from adding that I should have done my research before I came, but I could almost hear her thinking it.
Lunies were bringing us plates and food. Special service. The other diners were all getting their own from a ledge, buffet style. I plied my chopsticks. They had splayed ends, and they worked better than a spoon and fork in low gravity. Dinner was mostly vegetables, roughly Chinese in approach and quite good. When I found chicken meat, I turned again to the Garden. There were birds flying between the ledges, though most had settled for the night. Pigeons and chickens. Chickens fly very well in low gravity.
A dark-haired young man was talking to the mayor.
I admit to being abnormally curious, but how could I help but stare? The kid was the mayor’s height, a couple of inches over eight feet, and even thinner. Age hard to estimate, say eighteen plus or minus three. They looked like Tolkien elves. Elfish king and elfish prince in well-mannered disagreement. They were not enjoying their inaudible conversation, and they cut it short as quickly as possible.
My eyes followed the kid back to his table. A table for two, across the width of the Garden. His companion was an extraordinarily beautiful woman … a flatlander. As he sat down, the woman darted a look of pure poison in our direction.
For an instant our eyes locked.
It was Naomi Horne!
She knew me. Our eyes held … and we broke the lock and went back to eating. It had been fourteen years since I last felt the urge to talk to Naomi Horne, and I didn’t have it now.
We ended with melon and coffee. Most of us were heading for the elevator when Chris Penzler took my arm. “Look down into the Garden,” he said.
I did. It was another nine stories to the bottom; I counted. A tree was growing down there. Its top was only two levels below us. The ramp spiraled down around the trunk.
“That redwood,” Chris said, “was planted when Hovestraydt City was first occupied. It’s much taller now than it was when I first came. They transplant it whenever they dig the Garden deeper.”
We turned away. I asked, “What’s it going to be like, this conference?”
“Less hectic than the last one, I hope. Twenty years ago we carved out the general body of law that now rules the moon.” He frowned. “I have my doubts. Some of the lunar citizenry think we are meddling in their internal affairs.”
“They’ve got a point”
“Of course they do. We face other opportunities for embarrassment, too. The holding tanks were expensive. Worse, the lunar delegates are in a position to claim that they serve no useful purpose.”
“Chris, I’m a last-minute replacement. I only had ten days to bone up.”
“Ah. Well, the first conference was twenty years ago. It wasn’t easy finding compromises between three ways of life. You flatlanders saw no reason why lunar law shouldn’t send all felons to the organ banks. Belt law is considerably more lenient. The death penalty is so damned permanent. Suppose it turns out that you broke up the wrong person?”
“I know about the holding tanks,” I said.
“They were our most important point of compromise.”
“Six months, isn’t it? The convict stays in suspended animation for six months before they break him up. If the conviction is reversed, he’s revived.”
“That’s right. What you may not know,” Chris said, “is that no convict has been revived in the past twenty years. The moon had to pay half the cost of the holding tanks … well, we could have made them pay the whole bill. And there were some bugs in the prototypes. We know four convicts died and had to be broken up at once, and half the organs were lost.”
We crowded into the elevator with the rest. We lowered our voices. “And all for nothing?”
“By lunie standards,