Hot Sky at Midnight

by Robert Silverberg

  Her smile vanished. “I’ll try to control myself, Nick. I can be very good. But wouldn’t it help give his article a broader perspective if it were to reflect American diversity of opinion on the whole subject of human adapto work?”

  “Please.”

  “All right,” she said. Her tone was cool. Rhodes wondered whether she really would keep quiet this evening. Isabelle meant well, but she was a very volatile woman. Probably it had been a mistake to ask her along. But, then, probably the whole relationship with Isabelle was a mistake, and he had never let that interfere with anything up till now.

  “I’ll pick you up at seven,” he said. “He’s staying in the city, and we didn’t discuss where we would eat. Maybe we’ll go over to Sausalito after all.” He blew her a kiss, through the visor. The thought came to him suddenly of the other end of the evening, when all the babble was done with and over and Meshoram Enron was out of his hair, and he and Isabelle were alone together at midnight in his flat high up above the bay—the lights low, soft music tinkling, maybe a little brandy, then on the couch with Isabelle in his arms, her sweet fragrance rising to dizzy him, his head swooping down to nestle between her breasts—

  Yes. Yes. To hell with Alex Van Vliet and his red-and-purple snakes, to hell with Meshoram Enron, to hell with the whole doomed withering pollution-choked world. What mattered was to carve out an island of safety for yourself in the night.

  Christ, that my love were in my arms, and I in my bed again!

  There was the annunciator light again.

  Jesus. Rhodes glared at the machine. “If it’s Van Vliet, you can tell him—”

  “Mr. Paul Carpenter is calling on Line One,” said the android blandly.

  “Paul Carpenter?” Rhodes was astounded. He jabbed at the button and there was old Paul, all right, square in the middle of the visor, the unmistakable Paul, looking a little older, maybe more than a little, and with a dark shaggy beard covering the whole lower half of his face instead of the trim little Vandyke that he once had affected. His coarse blond hair was very much longer than Rhodes remembered it and he was tanned and weather-beaten and crows’-footed, as though he might have been outdoors a little too much for his own good, lately. It was five years since Rhodes last had any contact with him.

  “Well,” Rhodes said. “The prodigal returns. Where the hell are you calling from, man?”

  “Right over here next door to you in San Francisco. How are you, Nick? Splicing a lot of interesting genes these days?”

  Rhodes stared. “San Francisco? You’re in town? Why? What for? Why didn’t you give me a little notice that you were coming in?”

  “I didn’t think I needed to. I’ll be here for a few weeks, and then the Company’s shipping me out to the fucking South Pacific. Skipper of an iceberg trawler, I am. Call me Ahab. Do you think you could manage lunch with an old friend sometime next week?”

  “Next week?” Rhodes said. “What about today?”

  Carpenter looked surprised. “Can you do it on such short notice? Important man like you?”

  “I’d love to. A chance to get out of this goddamned bughouse for a couple of hours.”

  “I could catch a pod across the bay and be over there in thirty minutes. Go straight up to your lab, get the grand tour before we eat—how’s that?”

  “Not good,” Rhodes said. “All the interesting work areas are under security seal and the rest is just offices. Anyway, there’s someone here I’m trying to duck this morning and I don’t dare come out into view before lunchtime.” He looked at his watch. “Meet me at noon at a place called Antonio’s, along the Berkeley waterfront, right on the seawall. Any cabbie will know where that is. Jesus, it’ll be good to see you, Paul! Jesus! What a goddamned surprise!”

  5

  farkas said, “I think we’ve located our merchandise.”

  He was in his hotel room, alone, talking by scrambled telephone to Colonel Emilio Olmo, the number-three man in Valparaiso Nuevo’s Guardia Civil. Colonel Olmo was very high up in the confidence of Don Eduardo Callaghan, the Generalissimo, El Supremo, the Valparaiso Nuevo habitat’s Defender and Maximum Leader. More significantly for Farkas’s purposes, though, Olmo was Kyocera-Merck’s chief point man on Valparaiso Nuevo. It was Kyocera-Merck’s long-range plan, so Farkas understood, to bring Olmo forward as the successor to El Supremo whenever it seemed appropriate for Don Eduardo’s long reign to come to an end. Drawing pay from both sides, Olmo was in a nice position and it might be considered unwise to trust him in any major way, but his long-term interests plainly lay with K-M and therefore Farkas deemed it safe to deal with him.

  “Who’s your courier?” Olmo asked.

  “Juanito Holt.”

  “Nasty little spic. I know him. Very clever kid, I have to say. How’d you find him?”

  “He found me, actually. Five minutes off the shuttle, and there he was. He’s very quick.”

  “Very. Too quick, sometimes. Father was mixed up in the Central American Empire thing—you remember it? The three-cornered revolution?—working both sides against the middle. Very tricky hombre. He was either a socialist or a fascist, nobody could ever be quite sure, and in the end when things fell apart he skipped out and continued his plotting from up here. He made himself troublesome and after a time the right and the left found it best to team up and send a delegation here to get rid of him. The kid is tricky too. Watch him, Victor.”

  “I watch everything,” Farkas said. “You know that.”

  “Yes. Yes, you certainly do watch.”

  Farkas was watching the telephone visor, now. It was mounted flush against the wall, and to Farkas it looked like an iridescent yellow isosceles triangle whose long, tapering upper point bent backward into the wall as though it were trying to glide into some adjacent dimension. Olmo’s head-and-shoulders image, centered near the base of the triangle, impinged on Farkas’s sensorium in the form of a pair of beveled cubes in cobalt blue, linked by a casual zigzag of diamond-bright white light.

  The air in the room was unnervingly cool and sweet. Breathing it was like breathing perfume. It was just as artificial as the air you breathed indoors anywhere on Earth, in fact even more so: but somehow it was artificial in a different way. The difference, Farkas suspected, was that on Earth they had to filter all sorts of gunk out of the air before they could let it come into a building, the methane, the extra CO2, all the rest of the greenhouse stuff, so that it always had a sterile, empty quality about it once they were done filtering. You knew it was air that had needed to be fixed so you could breathe it, and you mistrusted it. You wondered what they had taken out of it besides the gunk. Whereas on an L-5 satellite they manufactured the atmosphere from scratch, putting together a fine holy mix of oxygen and nitrogen and carbon dioxide and such in the proportions God had originally intended, in fact better than God had designed things, since there was less of the relatively useless nitrogen in the air than there was on Earth and a greater proportion of oxygen; and there was no need to filter anything out of it, since it contained nothing in the first place that wasn’t supposed to be there.

  So the completely synthetic air of the habitats was richer and fuller in flavor than the denatured real air of Earth’s sealed buildings. Headier. Too heady for him. Farkas knew that it was better air than the indoor air on Earth, but he had never been able quite to get used to it. He expected air to taste dead, except when you were outdoors without a mask, filling your lungs with all those lovely hydrocarbons. This bouncy, springy stuff was holier than he needed his air to be.

  But give me a little more time, Farkas thought. I’ll get to like it.

  He said to Olmo, “The merchandise is said to be stored in a place called El Mirador. My courier will be taking me there later in the day to inspect the warehouse.”

  “Bueno. And you are confident you will find everything in order?”

  “Very.”

  “Do you have any reason to think so?” Olmo asked.

  “Just intuition,” said Far
kas. “But it feels right.”

  “I understand. You have senses that are different from our senses. You are a very unusual man, Victor.”

  Farkas made no reply.

  Olmo said, “If the merchandise is to your satisfaction, when will you want to make shipment?”

  “Very soon, I think.”

  “To the home office?”

  “No,” said Farkas. “That plan has been changed. The home office has requested that the merchandise be sent directly to the factory.”

  “Ah. I see.”

  “If you would make certain that the cargo manifests are in proper order,” Farkas said, “I’ll let you know as soon as we’re ready to transfer the goods.”

  “And the customs fees—”

  “Will be taken care of in the usual manner. I don’t think Don Eduardo will have reason to complain.”

  “It would be very embarrassing if he did.”

  “There won’t be any problem.”

  “Bueno,” Olmo said. “Don Eduardo is always unhappy when valuable merchandise is removed from Valparaiso Nuevo. His unhappiness must always be taken into account.”

  “I said there’d be compensation, didn’t I?”

  There was sudden new force in Farkas’s tone, and Olmo’s image responded by changing color ever so slightly, deepening from cobalt blue almost to black, as though he wanted Farkas to understand that the possibility that the necessary bribes might somehow fall through was disturbing to him and that the eyeless man’s implied rebuke was offensive. But Farkas saw Olmo’s color return to its normal shade after a moment, and realized that the little crisis had passed.

  “Bueno,” Olmo said once more. And this time he seemed to mean it.

  El Mirador was midway between hub and rim on its spoke. There were great glass windows punched in its shield that provided a colossal view of all the rest of Valparaiso Nuevo and the stars and the sun and the moon and the Earth and everything. A solar eclipse was going on when Juanito and Farkas arrived, not a great rarity in the satellite worlds but not all that common, either: the Earth was plastered right over the sun with nothing but one bright squidge of hot light showing down below like a diamond blazing on a golden ring. Purple shadows engulfed the town, deep and thick, a heavy velvet curtain falling over everything.

  Juanito tried to describe what he saw. Farkas made an impatient brushing gesture.

  “I know, I know. I feel it in my teeth.” They stood on a big peoplemover escalator leading down into the town plaza. “The sun is long and thin right now, like the blade of an ax. The Earth has six sides, each one glowing a different color.”

  Juanito gaped at the eyeless man in amazement.

  “Wu is here,” Farkas said. “Down there, in the plaza. I feel his presence.”

  “From five hundred meters away?”

  “Come with me.”

  “What do we do if he really is there?”

  “Are you armed?” Farkas asked.

  “I have a spike, yes.” Juanito patted his thigh.

  “Good. Tune it to shock intensity, and don’t use it at all if you can help it. I don’t want you to hurt him in any way.”

  “I understand. You want to kill him yourself, in your own sweet time. Very slowly and in the fullest enjoyment of the pleasure.”

  “Just be careful not to hurt him, that’s all,” Farkas said. “Come on.”

  It was an old-fashioned-looking town, a classic Latin American design, low pastel buildings with plenty of ironwork scrolling along their facades, cobblestone plaza with quaint little cafes around its perimeter and an elaborate fountain in the middle. About ten thousand people lived there and it seemed as if they were all out in the plaza right this minute sipping drinks and watching the eclipse. Juanito was grateful for the eclipse. It was the entertainment of the day. No one paid any attention to them as they came floating down the peoplemover and strode into the plaza. Hell of a thing, Juanito thought. You walk into town with a man with no eyes walking right behind you and nobody even notices. But when the sunshine comes back on it may be different.

  “There he is,” Farkas whispered. “To the left, maybe fifty meters, sixty.”

  He indicated the direction with a subtle movement of his head. Juanito peered through the purple gloom down the way, focusing on the plazafront cafe that lay just beyond the one in front of them. A dozen or so people were sitting in small groups at curbside tables under iridescent fiberglass awnings, drinking, chatting, taking it easy. Just another casual afternoon in good old cozy El Mirador on sleepy old Valparaiso Nuevo.

  Farkas stood sideways, no doubt to keep his strange face partly concealed. Out of the corner of his mouth he said, “Wu is the one sitting by himself at the front table.”

  Juanito shook his head. “The only one sitting alone is a woman, maybe fifty, fifty-five years old, long reddish hair, big nose, dowdy clothes ten years out of fashion.”

  “That’s Wu.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  “It’s possible to retrofit your body to make it look entirely different on the outside. You can’t change the nonvisual information, the data I pick up by blindsight. What Dr. Wu looked like to me, the last time I saw him, was a cubical block of black metal polished bright as a mirror, sitting on top of a pyramid-shaped copper-colored pedestal. I was nine years old then, but I promised myself I wouldn’t ever forget what he looked like, and I haven’t. That’s exactly what the person sitting over there by herself looks like.”

  Juanito stared. He still saw a plain-looking woman in a rumpled old-fashioned suit. They did wonders with retrofitting these days, he knew: they could make almost any sort of body grow on you, like clothing on a clothes rack, by fiddling with your DNA. But still Juanito had trouble thinking of that woman over there as a sinister Chinese gene-splicer in disguise, and he had even more trouble seeing her as a polished cube sitting on top of a coppery pyramid.

  He could practically feel the force of the hatred that was radiating from Farkas, though. So he knew that this must really be the one. The eyeless man was going to exact a terrible vengeance for the thing that had been done to him at birth, the thing that had set him apart from all the rest of the human race.

  “What do you want to do now?” Juanito asked.

  “Let’s go over and sit down alongside her. Keep that spike of yours ready. But I hope you don’t need to use it.”

  “If we put the arm on her and she’s not Wu,” Juanito said uneasily, “it’s going to get me in a hell of a lot of trouble, particularly if she’s paying El Supremo for sanctuary. Sanctuary people get very stuffy when their privacy is violated. She could raise a stink and before she’s finished with us you’ll be expelled and I’ll be fined a fortune and a half and I might wind up getting expelled too, and then what? Where would I live, if I had to leave here? Have you thought about that?”

  “Don’t worry so much,” Farkas said. “That’s Dr. Wu, all right. Watch him react when he sees me, and then you’ll believe it.”

  “We’ll still be violating sanctuary. All he has to do is yell for the Guardia Civil.”

  “We would need to make it clear to him right away,” said Farkas, “that that would be a foolish move. You follow?”

  “But I’m not supposed to hurt him,” Juanito said.

  “No. Not in any fashion do you hurt him. All you do is demonstrate a willingness to hurt him if that should become necessary.” Farkas nodded almost imperceptibly toward the woman at the front table of the cafe. “Let’s go, now. You sit down first, ask politely if it’s okay for you to share the table, make some little comment about the eclipse. I’ll come over maybe thirty seconds after you. All clear? Good boy. Go ahead, now.”

  “You have to be insane,” the red-haired woman said, sounding really testy. But she was sweating in an astonishing way and her fingers were knotting together like anguished snakes. “I’m not any kind of doctor and my name isn’t Wu or Fu or whatever it was that you said, and you have exactly two seconds to get yourself a
way from me.” She seemed unable to take her eyes from Farkas’s smooth blank forehead. Juanito realized that he had grown used to the strangeness of that face by this time, but to other people Farkas must seem like a monstrosity.

  Farkas didn’t move. After a moment the woman said in a different tone of voice, sounding more calm, merely curious now, “What sort of thing are you, anyway?”

  She isn’t Wu, Juanito decided.

  The real Wu wouldn’t have asked a question like that. The real Wu would have known. And fled. Besides, this was definitely a woman. She was absolutely convincing around the jaws, along the hairline, the soft flesh behind her chin. Women were different from men in all those places. Something about her wrists, too. The way she sat. A lot of other things. There weren’t any genetic surgeons good enough to do a retrofit this convincing. Juanito peered at her eyes, trying to see the place where the Chinese fold had been, but there wasn’t a trace of it. Her eyes were blue gray. All Chinese had brown eyes, didn’t they? Not that that would have been hard to fix, Juanito thought.

  Farkas said in a low, taut voice, leaning in close and hard, “You know exactly what sort of thing I am, doctor. My name is Victor Farkas. I was born in Tashkent during the Second Breakup. My mother was the wife of the Hungarian consul, and you did a gene-splice job on the fetus she was carrying. That was your specialty back then, tectogenetic reconstruction. You don’t remember that? You deleted my eyes and gave me blindsight in place of them, doctor.”

  The woman looked down and away. Color came to her cheeks. Something heavy seemed to be stirring within her. Juanito began to change his mind again. Maybe there really were some gene surgeons who could do a retrofit this good, he thought.

  “None of this is true,” the woman said. “I’ve never heard of you and I was never in whatever place it was you mentioned. You’re nothing but a lunatic. I can show you who I am. I have papers. You have no right to harass me like this.”

  “I don’t want to hurt you in any way, doctor.”