Hot Sky at Midnight

by Robert Silverberg

  He shook his head. Poor Nick. He never did have any luck with women.

  “We’re going over to Sausalito,” Rhodes said. “Nice restaurant with a wonderful view. Isabelle and I go there a whole lot.”

  “Our special place,” she said. Her tone was a little grating. She sounded as though she might be being sarcastic, but perhaps not. Carpenter wasn’t at all sure.

  But it turned out to be a fine romantic place indeed, when they finally reached it an hour later, after a harrowing drive all the way across the heart of the city and over the Golden Gate Bridge. Carpenter had forgotten how ghastly a driver Rhodes was; he kept overriding the car brain, imposing his own goofy judgment at every traffic interchange, and left a trail of astounded fellow drivers in his wake, honking madly as he passed. Hard to see how you could get lost between Frisco and Sausalito, Carpenter thought, a straight shot right across the bridge, but Rhodes kept managing to do it. The glowing colored map on his dashboard would say one thing, Rhodes persisted in saying another. The car didn’t like that and the dash lit up with warning lights. Rhodes overrode them. His little expression of power.

  Rhodes was smart, yes, and had lived in Berkeley long enough to believe that he knew his way around in the bigger city across the bay: but the car, old as it was, really was smarter, within its special area of competence, and it had an utterly accurate San Francisco grid in its memory tank. It went on patiently guiding Rhodes out of the western ends of the city into which he constantly seemed to be compulsively drifting, and back toward the bridge. And somehow they all survived the trip, even the overloaded and doubtless exasperated car brain; and the restaurant, nestled cozily away on a hillside above the walled-in Sausalito waterfront, gave them the warm welcome of regular customers.

  Indeed the view was spectacular: the whole northern side of San Francisco, rising out of the bay in a dazzling brilliance of a million lights, and the floodlit splendor of the bridge.

  Drinks arrived almost at once. Rhodes was very good at arranging for that, Carpenter was discovering.

  “I want to make it understood,” said Enron, “that the magazine is paying for this, for everything, tonight. You should not stint yourselves at all.” As the foreign guest, he had a seat facing the picture window. “What a beautiful city, your San Francisco. It reminds me very much of Haifa: the hills, the white buildings, the foliage. But of course it is not so dry and dusty in Haifa. Not nearly. You have ever been in Israel, Dr. Carpenter?”

  “Just Mr. Carpenter, please. And no, no, never.”

  “So beautiful. You would love it. Flowers everywhere, trees, vines. Of course all of Israel is beautiful, one big garden. A paradise. I weep when I must leave it for another place.” Enron gave Carpenter a look of astonishingly intense scrutiny. His eyes were dark and fathomless and glittering with curiosity, his face angular and taut, closely shaven, the earliest black bristles of what was surely a dense Assyrian beard already poking through the carefully and recently scraped skin. “You are with Samurai Industries also, I understand? In what capacity, may I ask?”

  “Salaryman Eleven,” Carpenter said. “Hoping to make Ten, one of these days. I’ve been up north, working as a weatherman, and now I’m about to ship out as captain of a trawler that brings icebergs to shore for the San Francisco Public Utility District. San Francisco doesn’t have all the rainfall that you people in the Middle East do.”

  “Ah,” Enron said. Carpenter saw something click shut behind his eyes. The glitter of curiosity left them. End of Enron’s moment of interest in Mr. Salaryman Eleven Carpenter of Samurai Industries.

  The Israeli turned to Jolanda, who was sitting between him and Carpenter. “And you, Ms. Bermudez? You are an artist, is this correct?”

  Enron was interviewing everybody, it seemed.

  “Mainly a sculptor, yes,” she said, giving Enron another tremendous smile. She must have had fifty teeth just in front. Her face was round, full, pretty, with a wide mouth and those great bulging hyperdexy eyes standing out wondrously. “I work in bioresponsive materials, mainly. The viewer and the work of art are linked in a feedback loop, so that what you see is modified by who you intrinsically are.”

  “How fascinating,” said Enron, all too plainly not meaning it. “I hope to experience your work very closely.”

  “I also do modern dance,” she said. “And I’ve written a little poetry, though I wouldn’t really call it very good, and of course I’ve acted. I was in Earth Saga in Berkeley last summer, outdoors, along the seawall. It was quite a great event for all of us, as much of an incantation as it was a theatrical performance. An incantation designed to protect the planet, I mean.

  “We were attempting to place the audience in tune with the deeper cosmic forces that hold us in their grasp at every moment but which are so rarely apparent to us. I hope to perform it again in Los Angeles during the winter.” Another wondrous smile, and she leaned toward Enron, giving him the full pheromonic blast.

  “Ah,” Enron said again, and Carpenter saw a second click of disengaged attention. Doubtless the Israeli would be able to find Jolanda Bermudez of interest in one obvious way or another, but he clearly had heard all he needed to about her artistic endeavors. Carpenter’s own heart sank a little too. Jolanda was full of passion and energy, obviously, drug-induced or otherwise, and the notion that she might actually be a talented artist had cast a momentary aura of intense glamour over her; but Carpenter realized now that there was probably no talent here at all, very likely not even any basic ability of any sort, certainly not any common sense, just the old-fashioned nutty artiness that seemed to be a Bay Area tradition going back into the remote past. And the part about the incantation to protect the planet gave him a queasiness in the gut. Here was the future erupting about them at a mile a minute and she was still mumbling mantras out of an earlier century.

  She was, all the same, a handsome woman. But Rhodes had warned him that she was screwed up, and Rhodes was probably in a position to know.

  Isabelle jumped in, while Rhodes was signaling— already—for the second round of drinks, wanting to be told about Enron’s magazine, whether it was published in Israeli or Arabic, or both. Enron explained to her, with what was probably great restraint, for him, that the language spoken in Israel was called Hebrew, not Israeli, and went on to let her know that Cosmos was, of course, published primarily in English, like all important magazines throughout the world. But its readers, he said, always had the option, with a single keystroke, of having Arabic or Hebrew text come up on the visor instead. Unbelievable as it might seem, said Enron, there were still some people in the remote reaches of the vast Judaeo-Islamic world who had not yet achieved full reading comprehension in English.

  “Mostly Arabs, I suppose,” Isabelle said. “There still are a lot of backward Arabs, aren’t there? Like medieval people in a high-tech world?”

  It was too obvious an attempt at flattery. Enron responded with a flash of contempt in his eyes and the quickest, bleakest of smiles. “Actually, no, Ms. Martine. The Arabs proper are all quite sophisticated. You must really learn to distinguish between Arabs and speakers of the Arabic language, you see. I was referring specifically to our readers in the agricultural regions of the northern Sudan and the Sahara, who are Arabic-speaking Islamics, but certainly not Arabs in any true way.”

  Isabelle looked flustered. “We know so little, here, of what things are really like in other parts of the world.”

  “Indeed,” said Enron. “This is true. A great pity, the insularity of this country. I feel sorry for America. Ignorance is dangerous, in such difficult times as these. Especially the kind of ignorance that displays itself in triumphant complacency.”

  “Perhaps we ought to order dinner,” Rhodes put in, sounding strained. “If I might make a few recommendations—”

  He made more than a few. But Carpenter observed that Enron was paying almost no attention to anything Rhodes was saying. His eyes were already on the menu; he had punched choices of his own into the
restaurant’s data system long before Rhodes had finished. There was a certain abrasive charm about the fellow, Carpenter decided: he was gloriously offensive, all the bad things you had heard about Israeli rudeness and arrogance rolled into one—practically a stage Israeli, a ballsy little guy with such totally excessive self-esteem that you began to think it had to be an act. And yet you had to respect the intelligence, the quicksilver Darwinian adaptability, the dry playful Darwinian wit of him. A bastard, sure, but an amusing bastard, if you could be amused by someone like that. Carpenter could.

  A bastard all the same, though. Playing like a cat among mice with poor beleaguered Nick and poor edgy Isabelle and poor silly Jolanda. Enjoying his domination of them a little too much. Perhaps back in Tel Aviv, among his own people, Enron might be considered a tactful and courteous guy, easygoing, even; but here, among the goyim, the barbarian Americans, he felt it was necessary to score points with every word he uttered. You would think that Israelis, a people who had turned up one of the few winning hands in this era of the intensifying uninhabitability of the Earth, would be able to relax and enjoy their position of dominance, without rubbing your face in it. Not this one, apparently.

  “But we should get down now to the topic of our chief concern, the great issue that has brought me here tonight,” Enron said, while the others were still tapping out their dinner orders. He placed a tiny crystalline recording cube beside his plate, and activated it with a quick touch of his thumb. Then he looked slowly around the table, letting his eyes linger contemplatively on each one in turn for a long disturbing moment before they came to rest on Nick Rhodes. “My magazine,” he began in a new and more formal tone, “wishes to address itself early next year to the tremendous problem that the world faces: that is, of course, the problem of the continued deterioration of our environment that is occurring despite all the palliatory measures that have been taken. A problem that is more intense in some regions than in others, but will ultimately involve us all. For there is really no hiding place, is there, anywhere on Earth? It is one small planet, is it not? And we have made it very difficult and uncomfortable for ourselves.”

  “More difficult for some than for others,” Carpenter said.

  “At present, Mr. Carpenter. At present. I agree, the shift of global rainfall patterns in my part of the world has delivered great and unexpected economic advantages to my country.”

  That and the general ban on fossil fuels, Carpenter thought, which had wiped out such wealth as the Arab world had been able to accumulate during the years of the world’s dependence on oil and forced them to turn in desperation to their old enemies the Israelis for technological guidance.

  “But it is a short-run advantage,” Enron continued. “For us to say that we of the Middle East have not been harmed by the environmental challenges that are presently afflicting other areas—-in fact, have greatly benefited from them—is like the passengers on the top deck of a sinking ocean liner telling each other that they have nothing to worry about, because it’s only the other end of the ship that’s going down, and when the people down there have drowned there’ll be that much more caviar on board for us to eat.” Enron, obviously pleased with his own well-worn simile, laughed enthusiastically. “Only the other end sinking! Do you see, do you see? We all breathe the same air, is that not so? Solutions must be found or we will all sink together. And so my magazine will devote an entire issue to the situation, and to the possible solutions. And you, Dr. Rhodes—your work, the extraordinary potential of your work—” Enron’s eyes were glittering again. His narrow, strong-featured face was alive with predatory intelligence. Clearly he was zeroing in on his real prey, now. “We believe that your work, if we understand its purposes correctly, may hold the only answer to the salvation of the human race on Earth.”

  Isabelle Martine said suddenly, very loudly, “Christ, no! No! May God help us all if what you just said is true! Nick’s work the only solution? Christ! Don’t you see, his work is the fucking problem, not any kind of solution!”

  Carpenter heard Rhodes gasp. Rhodes turned toward Isabelle in a slow numb way and gave her a sad-eyed look, as though he might be about to break into tears.

  No one said anything. Even the Israeli had been startled into speechlessness by her outburst. For the first time all evening his impermeable composure seemed broken. The taut planes of his face seemed to dissolve momentarily in confusion, as though Isabelle’s outburst was entirely beyond his comprehension. He blinked a couple of times and gaped at her as though she had picked up the wine bottle and sent its contents spilling forth across the middle of the table.

  Finally Rhodes said, mildly, into the twanging silence of rising tension, “Ms. Martine and I have some political differences, Mr. Enron.”

  “Ah. Yes. Yes. So I see.” The Israeli continued to seem mystified. Such a vehement public display of disloyalty to one’s companion must violate even an argumentative Israeli’s sense of the permissible. “But surely it is not a political matter, the saving of the human species,” Enron said. “It is a matter only of doing what must be done.”

  “There are ways and then there are ways,” said Isabelle, pointedly ignoring Rhodes’ plaintive stare.

  “Yes. Of course.” Enron sounded bored, offended, even, by her contentiousness. He gave her another of his dismissive looks. Carpenter saw the gleam of barely suppressed fury in the Israeli’s eyes. Doubtless Enron was thinking that Isabelle was going to be an obstacle to his gathering the information he needed. A pain in the ass for him, nothing more. Rhodes, who had taken on an unnerved and disconsolate air, was studying the tablecloth and industriously working on his next drink.

  Carefully, controlling himself with a visible effort, Enron said to no one in particular, “Let me make the thinking of myself and my editors clear, if you will.” He took a deep breath. A prepared speech was coming up, Carpenter knew. Enron was speaking for the record. “We accept the generally held scientific position that the damage to the world’s environment during the industrial age is irreversible: that the uncontrolled burning of fossil fuels over a period of two or three hundred years created degrees of carbon-dioxide and nitrogen-oxide emission far beyond proper tolerance, that this has caused gradual but eventually significant global warming; that the changes in ocean temperature and pressure which have resulted from that warming have caused release of oceanic methane into the atmosphere, further exacerbating the warming patterns; and that the buildup of the so-called greenhouse gases in the atmosphere plus the locking away of additional quantities of such pollutants in ground storage and in the form of hypertrophied vegetation stimulated by a CO2 surplus has been such that things are destined to get worse before they get better, because the stored gases that were locked away in the period of environmental abuse are destined to emerge inescapably from storage over the course of time and are in fact being released even now through ground outgassing and the decay of vegetable matter. I think this is a fair statement of the situation.”

  “The ozone,” Carpenter said.

  “Yes, of course. That, too. I should not have neglected to add that the damage to the ozone layer through the use of chlorofluorocarbons and similar substances in the twentieth century has brought about a serious intensification of incoming solar radiation, adding to the problem of global warming. Et cetera, et cetera. But I think I have sufficiently set the ground for our discussion. I need hardly go further with this summary of our many problems—to list, eh, the many various feedback mechanisms that have operated to make a bad situation worse, for example? All this is old news to you. There is no disagreement that we are entering a time of great peril.”

  “Completely true. The planet must be protected,” said Jolanda Bermudez in a spacy voice, as though delivering news bulletins from Venus.

  “I agree absolutely with Jolanda,” said Isabelle Martine. “We have to come to our senses. The whole planet is in jeopardy! Something must be done to save it!”

  Enron smiled icily. “I beg to disagree.
The planet, Ms. Martine, is not what is in danger. It makes no difference to the planet, does it, whether the rain falls in the Sahara Desert or in the agricultural plains of the middle of North America? So the Sahara ceases to be a desert and your Kansas and Nebraska become one instead. That is very interesting for the farmers of Kansas and Nebraska and for the nomadic herdsmen of the Sahara, yes. But what is it to the planet? The planet has no use for the wheat that used to be produced in Kansas and Nebraska. The atmosphere contains much less oxygen and nitrogen than it did a century ago, and a great deal more carbon dioxide and hydrocarbons. Why should the planet be concerned? There was a time when there was no oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere at all. The planet survived it quite well. The polar ice caps melt and much of the low-lying shoreline of the world is drowned. The planet is indifferent. It is all the same thing to the planet whether the Japanese live along the coast of certain islands at the edge of Asia or are forced to take refuge in other, higher places. The planet does not care about the Japanese. Nor does the planet need saving. People have been parroting this nonsense about saving the planet for I don’t know how long, a hundred, a hundred fifty years. The planet will be okay. We’re in trouble. The issue, Ms. Martine, Ms. Bermudez, is not saving the planet: it is saving ourselves. Earth will go serenely on, with or without oxygen. But we will die.” Enron smiled as though he were speaking of the outcome of some sports event. “We are, of course, taking certain steps to save ourselves.” He held up the fingers of his right hand and ticked items off with the index finger of his left. “Firstly, we have tried to limit our emission of the so-called greenhouse gases. Too late. They continue to emerge from their storage places in the oceans and the land surface, and nothing can hold that process back. Our air grows steadily less breathable. We are faced with the possibility that before very long we will have to evacuate Earth entirely.”