The Ophiuchi Hotline

2

Living Together: A Child's Introduction to the Law, by Ariadna-Clel-Joule. Tycho-Under Educational, 552. Read-rating I.

There are three kinds of lawbreakers. From bad to worst, they are violators, misdemeanants, and felons.

Violations are crimes like jostling, creating a nuisance, verbal abuse, and body odor: crimes of bad behavior. If you are accused of a violation, you may defend yourself in court. You may demand a human jury. If you are found guilty, violations are punished by fine, either to the offended party or the State.

Misdemeanors are crimes like robbery, burglary, assault, rape, and murder: crimes of property. The more serious misdemeanors are those where the property involved is a citizen's body. All misdemeanors are punished by fines of 90% of the criminal's possessions. In cases of violence to a citizen's body there is a mandatory death penalty with automatic reprieve. The criminal's right to life remains in force, so after execution the criminal is revived at a subjective lifeline point before the first conception of the crime and is required to undergo preventive rehabilitation.

The worst crimes are felonies. These are crimes like arson, sabotage, possession of fissionables, vectoring, blowouting, and tampering with human DNA. Felonies involve a threat to the whole human race, or a large part of it, and are known as Crimes Against Humanity. The punishment for convicted felons is revocation of the right to life. The State will search out and destroy every memory recording and tissue sample of the executed criminal. The criminal's genotype is published and declared outlaw, and if detected again will be put to death, as many times as is necessary.

(Read-rating II, see companion volume: Crime Does Not Pay. Comics and tapes accessible to verbal request.)

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."

Mari scored most of the points. Lilo was too distracted to pay much attention to what her mouth and fingers were doing. She knew she had been a poor partner, but Mari said it was all right, and seemed to mean it. It was a nice gesture, but didn't seem to merit the second upwelling of tears that it caused in Lilo. When it subsided she knew the medico had brought her out of the emotional pit she had occupied for the past year in a way the intellectual knowledge of her reprieve could not have done. She was going to live!

The crawler stopped at Herschel, one of the smaller warrens on the outskirts of the Central Highlands. Mari drove into town to catch the local tube to Panavision. Lilo kept her eyes open for a chance to run, but they were quickly joined by a man and woman. They laughed and joked with Mari, but it was clear they were watchful. The chance would come, she was sure of it. It would be best to wait until she knew a little more of the situation.

She put her hand into the customs machine and felt the sampler scrape along the dry skin of her palm. It clucked to itself, and was satisfied she was someone else. Too bad she wouldn't be able to keep the new hand, she reflected. It would be invaluable. But tissue rejection made that impossible. In less than a week it would die.

Panavision was an artists' town, full of performers and directors. Many of them had been altered into a part; it was an outlandish place. They joined the line for the gravity train to Archimedes. The four of them boarded, the car was sealed, and Lilo's weight dropped away as the car fell down the inclined tunnel for almost four hundred kilometers. Somewhere under the Apennines the tunnel began to slope up again, gradually slowing their speed to a crawl as the car nosed into the elevator which took them back up to inhabited levels. The trip was over by the time Lilo felt settled in her seat.

The Grand Concourse at Archimedes was frightening. She had forgotten there were that many people or that much noise. There was no time to worry about it; she was hustled through the crowds to a private tube station. When she got her wits back, she saw she was alone again with Mari in an eight-seat capsule.

"Where now?"

"I'm not supposed to say," Mari said, with a shrug.

It didn't take Lilo long to figure it out. Most Lunarians know little selenography. They might not get out on the surface more than once or twice in several years, most likely for a trip like that Lilo and Mari were taking: enclosed in a capsule riding an induction rail while landscape whizzed past the windows. But Lilo knew the surface map pretty well. They were going north into the Imbrium flats, and when peaks began to loom up over the horizon she knew it was the Spitzbergen Mountains. So that was where the Boss lived. That kind of information was not exactly a state secret; but it was not advertised, because of the constant danger of assassination.

Tweed's home was on the surface—as it logically would be, Lilo realized, so he could see Earth at all times. Tweed was obsessed by Earth, and by the Invaders. There was one massive geodesic, surrounded by clusters of smaller ones. A spidery telescope with a twenty-meter mirror stood in the shadow of a cupola. It was trained on Earth.

Mari cut away the arm and replaced it with the original, then said Tweed was waiting for Lilo in the main dome. She pointed the way. Lilo took her time, looking into open doorways she passed. There would be just the one tube station, and the suits would be carefully watched. She fully realized this was as much a prison as the institute had been, but the time to start planning was right now.

Water was flowing down the hall. She splashed through it until the hall became a brook running through trees, in an artful mix of holos and real plants. She hadn't detected the transition. The creek bed was lined with polished stones of varicolored crystal and the deeper pools were full of fish. A panther studied her from the shore, joined her as she reached dry land, and stropped himself against her after smelling the fur on her calves. She fussed with him for a while, then sent him away with a cuff on the head.

The trail led to a clearing, and in the clearing was Tweed, sitting in a chair with a nude woman standing beside him. She spotted a man, also nude, in the trees at the edge of the clearing.

Lilo had been trying not to be impressed, but it was useless. She had no idea how much money it took to maintain a pocket disneyland like this, but she knew it was a great deal.

"Sit down, Lilo," Tweed said, and a chair unfolded from the high grass. She did, putting one foot up on the seat. She searched the pockets of the robe, found a brush, and began to comb the burrs from the wet hair on her legs.

"You've already met Vaffa," Tweed said, gesturing to the standing woman. Lilo glanced at her, noted the stance and the attitude of the hands. This woman could kill her in a second, and would. She had thought there was something familiar in the eyes.

"How many of them do you keep?" she said. There was a boa constrictor, fully twenty meters long, coiled in the grass at the woman's feet. "That's a hell of a pet."

"You don't like snakes?"

"I wasn't talking about the snake."

Tweed chuckled. "Vaffa is very useful, loyal, smart as can be, and totally ruthless. Aren't you, Vaffa?"

"If you say so, sir." Her eyes never left Lilo.

"In answer to your question, there are many Vaffas. One here, the other who helped you escape a few hours ago. Others in other places." Lilo did not need to ask why Vaffa was so useful. Though the faces and bodies were entirely different in the two she had seen, the feeling was the same. This was a killer. Quite possibly a soldier, though Lilo was not expert in mental diseases.

"Tell me about the Rings," Tweed said, unexpectedly.

"It was brought out at the trial," Lilo stammered. "I thought you knew."

"I knew, but I'm not convinced you were telling the whole truth. Where is the life capsule?"

"I don't know."

"We have ways of making you talk."

"Don't give me that crap." Tweed had a habit of talking that way, like an actor reading his lines in a third-rate thriller. "It's not a question of telling you," she elaborated. "I admitted setting it up. If I knew where it was, it wouldn't be much good to me, would it?"

At that moment, Lilo could see it might do her some harm instead of good. Tweed seemed unhappy, and that was disturbing. Keeping him happy had become very important.

Five years earlier, when her research began taking her into areas where she might expect to have trouble with the law, she had decided to build the capsule. She had contacts among the Ringers, and the money to get the project going. The idea, which had looked good at the time, was that if she got caught and convicted, her work could go on without interruption. Now she was not sure her motives had been that selfless. The urge to live is a strong one, as she had just learned.

"They questioned me with drugs," she said. "I have a friend out there. When I left the capsule, she moved it. I can't lead anyone to it. I don't know where it is."

"This accomplice," he said. "Did you have any way of getting in touch with her?"

"Have you ever been out there?"

"No, there's never time." He shrugged expressively. Lilo had seen it before, on the cube. Tweed was adept at the self-effacement routine, playing the part of one who's always busy with the People's work.

"Well, the Rings are big. If you haven't been there, you can't know just how big. I might get in touch with her by radio, but we couldn't think of a way she could be protected, too. I mean, anything could be drugged out of me, and she'd have no way of knowing if she was being lured into something. It was hard enough to get her involved in this, anyway. Ringers tend to be solitary. They don't worry much about other people's problems."

"But you have a way of getting in touch with her?"

"If you mean finding her, no. I can leave a message at the Janus switchboard. She calls every twenty years, like clockwork."

He spread his hands. "Not very efficient."

"That was sort of the idea. If it was easy for me to stop this project, it would be easy for someone who knew what I knew."

Tweed got up and walked slowly a few paces away, looking at the sky. The snake stirred, and coiled around Vaffa's leg. She bent over to stroke it, never looking away from Lilo.

"What was the name of this accomplice?"

"Parameter. Parameter/Solstice."