The Ophiuchi Hotline (3 page)

“I’ll take the job,” Lilo said, as loudly as she could. Tweed looked at her.

“Are you sure?”

The clone was looking dully from one to the other.

“Yes.” She swallowed, hard. “Yes. Kill her. Let me live.”

I felt as though I had suddenly disappeared.

Tweed and the other woman were talking right through me, right over my head as I knelt there on the floor. I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t follow what they were saying; there was a roaring in my ears and I was dizzy again. I think I hit my head when I fell.

I had to make them notice me. My life depended on it. I got up, shakily, and stood between them, but still they took no notice. It was a nightmare. I screamed at them, but it was no use. They were getting up and leaving the room, the female guard imposing herself between me and the door. Her face was hard.

I lunged, struggled with the woman, but she held me tightly. They were gone.

I went in and out of consciousness, sitting in my chair, alone. Hygeia, the guard, had given me a double-dose of painkiller a few hours ago and I had been sitting there, waiting for it to take effect. My dreams were black and formless, except for the familiar forest I had always run through in my dreams: a forest beneath a blue sun.

When I could no longer feel much in my hands and feet I got up. Everything went black, and I found myself in the bathroom without remembering how I got there. I turned on the shower.

I stared down at my wrist for a moment. There was a deep cut, the blood was pumping sluggishly through my
fingers and splattering on my bare legs and feet. How had that happened? My head was thick as soup, but I thought I remembered…I had put the knife down…hadn’t I? That woman—what was her name?—had been in my room. Had she tried to kill me, and make it look like suicide?

Warm water was flowing over me. Pink rivers wound between my toes. I staggered, and hit my head on the wall. I knew it was too late. I was dying. It was so cold. I would be dead soon.

The spray was in my face. My feet were freezing. I looked at my wrist again and saw that the blood had stopped flowing. I got up, slipped and fell on my face in a puddle of red.

In the main room again. Unable to stand up. I was looking for something. What? There was another blank in my mind. The knife. I was going to finish the job the woman had started. Or was it me? I left the knife…where? In my hand. Hacking, my fingers losing their grip. The knife was gone again. I crawled.

I saw booted feet in front of me, tried to stand up.

“You passed out again.” It was Hygeia.

“There’s no pain,” I told her. “Don’t be afraid.”

Circum-Luna 6 was a metal shell, five hundred meters in radius. The gravity on the outer surface was five meters per second squared, but a visitor descending through one of the three entrances would experience a perceptible rise in weight for each step downward. CL-6 had few visitors.

All orbital power stations were “holes,” but only CL-6 was known as The Hole. Five or six times a year it was shut down for a few hours so people could descend into what had recently been a hell of radioactivity.

It was shut down now. At the one-gee level a terrace hung beneath the gargantuan field generators which held the black hole suspended in the center of the station. Arcing away from the terrace was a span of unsupported metal with rails on each side and low steps built into it. The thirteen steps were traditional, just a few
centimeters high. The stretcher rolled over them easily, the body strapped to it bouncing as the black-clad man and woman pushed it out to the end of the arc.

One of the executioners removed the drape from Lilo’s body while the other attached the stretcher to an ejection mechanism. Finished, they stood for a moment under the eye of the camera, then walked down the span and climbed to the surface.

The stretcher tilted, hung suspended for an instant, and then fell. It picked up speed asymptotically, and the interior of CL-6 blazed in hard light. Far down the slope of the hole, halfway to infinity, a tiny mass of neutronium that had been Lilo was orbiting at almost the speed of light, releasing energy as it was stressed to the limits of matter before it finally decayed into oblivion.

Vaffa took me from my cell. He hustled me through deserted corridors and into an elevator. I had been curious to see how they were going to get me out of there; thinking about doing it on my own had occupied a great deal of my time over the last year. I had made a study of escapes. Most of them involved bribery, help from the outside, or perseverance, in that order. I had nothing to bribe with, and no one on the outside I could appeal to. As for perseverance, the Count of Monte Cristo would have been stymied by the Terminal Institute. It was three kilometers below the surface. Worse, it was fifty kilometers from the nearest tube station. The only way to get out of it was to walk, or ride the unpressurized induction-rail. For that, a suit was helpful. Naturally, keeping track of suits was the major security precaution.

On the way up, I suddenly remembered what Tweed had been doing in the years since his last term of office. He had been appointed Commissioner of Corrections.

The elevator stopped and Vaffa motioned for Lilo to get out. She had gone about ten steps when he grabbed her arm and directed her through a door. The corridor on the other side was dim and narrow. Vaffa didn’t
seem worried. Obviously Tweed had many people he trusted at the institute. It looked as though it was going to be easy.

She stopped thinking that when Vaffa directed her to a door marked
EMERGENCY
AIRLOCK
. She stepped inside, and noted with more than casual interest that there was no suit in the small chamber. She stared at the red light on the second door. Beyond it was vacuum.

“Wait a minute,” she said, abruptly. “What are you doing?”

“There was no way we could get an unauthorized suit into the institute,” he said. “Suits are monitored by a section we don’t control.”

“Yeah, but—”

“The sensor on this airlock has been disconnected. The computer won’t know it’s in use. Take these, and put them on.” He handed her a pair of thick, flexible boots.

“Wait a minute. I can’t.”

“You must.”

“I
can’t
! You’re trying to kill me, that’s it! I should never have listened to you people. Let me
out
of here!” She was on the edge of panic. Like all Lunarians, Lilo had a powerful fear of vacuum. It was the enemy they fought from the day they were born, as fearful as Hell had been to earlier humans. She felt physically ill.

“Put them on,” Vaffa said, reasonably. “You need them to protect your feet.”

“What’s…what is it I have to do?”

“If you hurry, you’ll be in vacuum for five seconds. A crawler will be near the door, two meters away, at the most.”

“What time of day is it out there?”

“The lock is in shadow.”

She felt the panic rising again. “No. No, it’s impossible.” She was going to say more, but he touched her shoulder and held it tightly for a moment.

“If I have to knock you out and carry you, it will be much slower.”

She saw that he meant it. He smiled slightly as he saw
her realize he was too big for her to fight. So there was only one way out of the lock for her. She put the boots on and faced the door. Vaffa released the latches. The door was still tightly shut, held in place by fourteen thousand kilograms of pressure.

“When?” she asked.

“The crawler must not stop. The guard in the tower must be distracted at the right moment, because we don’t trust him. The car will be in range for ten seconds, and it should arrive in one minute.” He looked up from his watch, and smiled. “If everything is still going according to plan.” For the first time, she thought he had said something he had not been told to say. He stepped out of the lock and closed the inner door.

Suddenly, it was time. She heard a scream that was very familiar, but she had always been in a suit when she heard it before. It was the quick-release valve. Strangely, she didn’t feel anything. She belched continually. The sound died away in a few seconds. She yanked the door open, and was running in silence. There was a dark moving shape, a hand reaching out for her, and she was pulled into the crawler. The door shut, and a shriek took form in the air that rushed in to fill the sealed cabin. Lilo was suddenly shivering.

“I made it,” she cried hoarsely, and passed out.

A woman was leaning over her.

“Don’t move, please.” Lilo’s left arm felt numb. She glanced down. It had been severed at the elbow.

“This will only take a moment,” the woman said. There was a caduceus tattoo between her breasts: a medico. Lilo propped her head up on her other arm and watched.

“What’s this for?” she asked.

“We’ll be leaving the crawler at a station about a hundred kilometers from here. This is to get you through customs.” She took a forearm from a metal lifetank and attached it to her black bag. The white chunk of meat began to color, and the fingers twitched. She
popped Lilo’s own arm into the tank.

“I’m Mari,” she said, with a slight rising inflection on the end. There was the hint of a smile on her face.

“Lilo,” she responded, and they touched palms, Lilo’s right to Mari’s left since Lilo was not equipped at the moment to do it properly.

“That’ll be ready in a minute,” she said, gesturing to the arm. She was reaching into a bag on the shelf behind her. There were two deep purple robes in it. She stood up to pull one over her head. “You can put that on when I’m done with you.”

“Where am I being taken?”

“To see the Boss.” There was a tone in her voice that said Mari respected the Boss a great deal. So she was a Free Earther. Well, it wasn’t exactly a disease. Lilo could tolerate them, except when it came to a fanatic like Tweed who wanted to lead the whole race into oblivion.

Mari got to work again, fitting the elbow joint together, attaching tendons, splicing nerves and vessels. In five minutes the skin sealed up and there was nothing but a faint red line to show where the arm had been grafted. She pulled a plug from the socket at the back of Lilo’s head and the arm became more than dead weight. It was full of pins and needles, and cold.

“Sorry about the job,” Mari said, packing things away. “You’ll only need it for an hour or so, so there’s no sense, is there? You won’t have to use it much.”

“That’s okay. I’m right-handed.” She made a fist. The arm was about five centimeters too short.

“Oh, really? So is my mother.”

“Whose is this?”

“It was grown from somebody who is supposed to be in Luna. We put the genotype through customs every so often so the computer has a record of her…but I don’t think I should be telling you this.”

“Suit yourself.” Lilo had figured it was something like that.

“You don’t look very happy for a woman who’s
just busted out of an escape-proof jail,” Mari said. Her smile had grown by stages; now it was wide and friendly. Lilo felt herself smile back.

“I guess I haven’t had time to react. I’ve lived with a death sentence for so long.”

Mari shifted a little closer. “Would you like to cop?”

“No, thanks. I guess I’d like to start with a man, after such a long time.”

“Sure.” The medico turned her attention to the flat, pitted landscape and angular shadows out the window.

Lilo tried to come to terms with the fact that she now had a chance to survive. It still didn’t mean anything to her. She kept thinking of that other woman, the clone, who would die in her place. She began to cry, surrendering herself to the confused emotions that had to get out. It was not until Mari decided she had gone through enough and touched her on the shoulder that Lilo realized how hungry she had been for a friendly face, for the touch of another human being. She calmed down almost at once. Mari started to withdraw her arm, but Lilo stopped her with a touch.

“How long till we get there?”

Mari glanced at the chronometer on her thumbnail. “About two hours. Would you like to cop now? It might be the best thing for you. I know a little of what you’re going through.”

“Oh, what the hell.” So they did. Mari had been right; it did untie some of the knots in her gut. Mari was skilled and considerate, a good player except for a tendency to talk shop. She would kiss something—nose, navel, knee, labia—and want to know who had done the work. Usually the answer was “it just grew that way.”