Hot Sky at Midnight

by Robert Silverberg

  “It’s too late, Paul. I already am.”

  “Right. She’s cast a spell over you with her magic vagina, which is of utterly fantastic pleasure-giving ability and unique and irreplaceable, so that you could never find its equal if you were to search the whole length and breadth of the female sex, and therefore you’re incapable of—”

  “Please, Paul.”

  “Sorry,” Carpenter said.

  Rhodes smiled sheepishly. “I admit that I’m hung up on her in a stupid way. I am, and that’s the shape of things, and so be it. I also understand very clearly that her political ideas are simplistic know-nothing nonsense. The trouble is, Paul, that in a certain sense I agree with her.”

  “What? You really have fucked yourself up, haven’t you? You agree with her?”

  “Not that it’s wrong to be using genetic engineering to help us cope with all the bad stuff that’s heading our way, no. Isabelle’s completely full of crap if she thinks that we can go on living on Earth without modifying the human race. It has to be done. We don’t have any option.”

  “So where are you in agreement with her, then?”

  Rhodes said, “Here’s the thing. The gene work that’s going on at Santachiara Labs is already far ahead of any research that’s being done elsewhere. Samurai has its corporate espionage division just like anybody else and the reports that I’m getting have me altogether convinced that we’re way out front. And the new work that I told you about last week that this kid Alex Van Vliet wants to do would be the clincher. I hate to say this, but Van Vliet’s notion, wild as it is, seems to hold better promise of helping the race cope with the environmental problems of the upcoming century than any scheme I’ve ever seen.”

  “The hemoglobin idea.”

  “That’s the one. It’s still missing a couple of critically important breakthroughs, but who’s to say that the problems can’t be overcome? As you know, I’d simply like to deep-six his whole project, because it scares me, but I can’t. I simply can’t. Not without running decent simulations and some actual lab work. It sounds corny, but my conscience won’t let me kill it a priori, without testing.”

  “That’s all right. It’s okay to have a conscience, Nick.”

  “I have some reservations about his concept, not just the moral ones I was telling you about, but technical ones too. I’m not at all sure it’s really doable, or, even if it is, whether it ought to be done. But I’m very conservative in these things. I’m getting a little elderly for making big speculative jumps. It’s possible that I’m a hopeless stick-in-the-mud and Van Vliet is a true genius. The only way to find out whether he is or not is to give his proposal a proper checking out. Okay, so that’s what we’re going to do. I dithered around for a couple of days and then this morning I called Van Vliet in to see me and I told him that I was going to requisition an expansion of his research funds.”

  “The only honorable course,” Carpenter said.

  “But if it turns out that he’s actually got something workable, and Santachiara successfully develops it, it’ll give Samurai Industries essential control over all human survival on Earth. A monopoly on staying alive, Paul, do you see that?”

  “Jesus.”

  “You want to go on breathing, you get yourself retrofitted by Samurai. You want to bring kids into the world that are capable of surviving outside of a sealed room, you get your genes remodeled by Samurai. It’ll be a world empire, Paul. Absolute control. And here I am taking the first steps toward wrapping the package up and delivering it to New Tokyo. How do you think I feel about that, with or without Isabelle’s rhetoric ringing in my ears?”

  “And if you quit the Company now?” Carpenter asked. “Wouldn’t it turn out just the same? Someone else would deliver the package instead of you.”

  “It would be someone else. That’s the whole point.”

  “And what would you do?”

  “I could get a job anywhere. With Kyocera, with IBM/Toshiba, with one of the Swiss megacorps.”

  “And four generations from now Samurai Industries will own the world.”

  “I won’t be here in four generations. And at least nobody will curse my name for having helped hand the world over to them.”

  “You sound like one of those twentieth-century physicists who refused to work on developing the atomic bomb, because it was a weapon too deadly to use. But it got developed anyway, without their help. There were other people willing enough to work on it. In the long run, what difference did it make whether Scientist A had moral qualms or not, if the thing was needed and Scientist B and C were available to do the work?”

  “It might have made a difference to Scientist A,” Rhodes said. “How he slept at night. How he saw himself in the mirror. But it’s a false analogy, Paul. There was a war going on then, wasn’t there? You had to be loyal to your country.”

  “There’s a war going on now,” Carpenter said. “A different kind of war, but a war nonetheless. And we’re likely to lose it if we don’t do something drastic. You said so yourself.”

  Rhodes stared at him sadly. Interference waves somewhere high above the Earth carved blurry gray streaks across his face.

  “I’m not very tough, Paul. You know that. Maybe I just can’t face the moral responsibility of being the man who gives Samurai Industries that much power over the world. If we have to transform the whole human race, it shouldn’t be done for the profit of a single megacorp.”

  “So you’re really going to quit, then, Nick?”

  “I don’t know. This whole too-much-power-for-Samurai angle is tremendously confusing. I’ve never had to deal with stuff like this before. And I love my work I love being at Santachiara. Most of the time I think what we’re doing is important and necessary. But of course Isabelle’s turning terrible pressure on me, and it’s messing up my head. And if she understood what I’m really worried about here, she’d never let up on me for a minute. She already thinks the megacorps are menaces. Especially Samurai.”

  “She’s a disturbed woman, Nick.”

  “No, she’s simply deeply committed to—”

  “Listen to me. She’s emotionally disturbed. So is her friend Jolanda, who you were kind enough to toss into my bed the other night. These are very sexually gifted women, and we who wander around looking for the solace of a little nookie are highly vulnerable to the mysterious mojo that throbs out at us from between their legs, but their heads are all full of stupid shit. They have no educations and no real knowledge of anything and they aren’t able to think straight: they just buy into whatever hysterical the-sky-is-falling garbage happens to be making the rounds, and they go around screaming and demonstrating and trying to change the world in five different internally inconsistent ways at once.”

  “I’m unable to see how that justifies your calling her emotionally disturbed,” Rhodes said stiffly.

  “Of course you’re unable to see it. You’re in love with her and she can do no wrong. Well, if Isabelle loved you she’d be capable of meeting the implications of your work halfway instead of handing you all this paranoid jealousy of it, this hatred of your devotion to the cause of saving the human race. Instead she loves the power she holds over you and hopes to enjoy the sublime thrill of rescuing you from grave error. She’s incapable of grasping the inherent contradictions in her loathing of adapto research, and she’s succeeding now in exporting those contradictions into your own head. You’ve entangled yourself with an extremely inappropriate person, Nick. If I were you I’d walk away from her in two seconds flat.”

  “I keep hoping she’ll come around to my viewpoint.”

  “Right. Reason will triumph, as it always does. Except in my experience reason hardly ever triumphs, really. And what is your viewpoint, anyway? You want to succeed in your work but you’re uneasy about Van Vliet and you’re terrified that you’ll ultimately hand Samurai the key to world dominion.” Carpenter took a deep breath. He wondered if he was bearing down too hard on Rhodes. “You want some quick and cheap advice? D
on’t leave genetic engineering. You fundamentally believe in the importance and necessity of what you do. Don’t you?”

  “Well—”

  “Of course you do. You may have some doubts about handing all this power to Samurai Industries, and I can certainly understand where you’re coming from there; but you basically believe that adapting the human race to the coming changes in the atmosphere is the only way to keep civilization alive on Earth.”

  “Yes. I do believe that.”

  “Damned right you do. Your work is the one thing that keeps you sane in this crazy miserable greenhouse of a world. Don’t even think of abandoning it. Immerse yourself in it as deeply as you can, and if Isabelle won’t put up with it, get yourself a different girlfriend. I mean it. You’ll feel like you’ve been through an amputation for a little while, and then you’ll meet someone else—people always do—and maybe it won’t be quite as magical as it was with Isabelle, but it’ll be okay, and after a time you’ll wonder what the magic was all about anyway.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think I—”

  “Don’t think. Do. And as for your worrying about giving the world to Samurai on a silver platter, that’s easy too. Quit Santachiara and go over to somebody like Kyocera-Merck. Take your whole department with you. Turn your gene technology over to the competition. Let Samurai and K-M fight it out for world domination. But at least the technology will be in place when the race needs it.”

  “I couldn’t do that. It would violate my contract. They’d hunt me down and kill me.”

  “People have been known to change companies and survive, Nick. You could get protection. Just go public with your desire to see that more than one megacorp has the secret of human adapto work. And then—”

  “Look, this conversation is getting pretty dangerous, Paul.”

  “Yes. I know.”

  “We’d better stop. I need to think about everything you’ve said.”

  “I’m sailing tomorrow. I’ll be out in the Pacific for weeks.”

  “Give me a number where I can reach you aboard the ship.”

  Carpenter thought about that a little. “No. Ungood idea. Samurai ship, Samurai radio channels. We’ll talk when I get back to Frisco.”

  “Okay. Fine.” Rhodes sounded very nervous, as though he had begun to imagine this conversation already being discussed on the highest Company levels. “Hey, Paul, thanks for everything you’ve said. I know that you were telling me things that it was important for me to hear. I just don’t know if I can act on them.”

  “That’s up to you, isn’t it, fellow?”

  “I suppose it is.” A wan smile crossed Rhodes’ face. “Listen, take care of yourself out there on the high seas. Bring back an iceberg for me, will you? A little one.”

  “This big,” Carpenter said. He held up his thumb and forefinger, a couple of inches apart. “Good luck to you, Nick.”

  “Thanks,” said Rhodes. “For everything.”

  The visor went blank. Carpenter shrugged, shook his head. A burst of pity for Nick Rhodes suffused him, and an inexorable sense of the futility of all he had just said. Rhodes was suffering, yes; but he was too weak, really, too muddled, too wounded, to be able to walk away from the things that were hurting him. The breakup of his marriage had damned near killed him; and so on the rebound he had tied himself up with one of your basic airbrained San Francisco radicals, and here he was, hopeless prisoner of Isabelle Marline’s enchanted pussy, coming home from his adapto lab each night to listen to her wild screeds against gene-splicing. Terrific. And in the midst of all that, worrying that the work of his research group might actually be successful, and by its very success give Samurai Industries a deathgrip on the world economy. It all bespoke an element of masochism in Rhodes’ psychic makeup that Carpenter had never consciously noticed before.

  Shit, Carpenter thought Rhodes worries too much, that’s the real truth. He’ll worry himself right into an early grave. But he seems to like to worry. That was a difficult thing for Carpenter to understand.

  He went upstairs to see if the rest of his crew had shown up.

  Apparently they had. As Carpenter came up the ladder he heard voices, Hitchcock’s gruff rasping one and Nakata’s light tenor, but also two female ones. Carpenter paused to listen.

  “We’ll make out all right anyway,” Hitchcock was saying.

  “But if he’s just a dumb Company asshole—” Female voice.

  “Asshole, yes. Probably not dumb.” That was Nakata. “You don’t get to be an Eleven, being dumb.”

  “What I don’t like,” Hitchcock said, “is how they keep sending up these fucking salarymen instead of picking a real sailor to be captain. Just because they’ve sort of learned which buttons to push don’t mean goddamn shit, and they ought to understand that.”

  “Look, as long as he does his job right and lets us be—” Woman’s voice, different one.

  Yeah, Carpenter thought. I’ll push the buttons I’m supposed to push and I’ll let you be so long as you push yours, and we’ll all be happy. Okay? Do we have a deal?

  Their grousing didn’t trouble him. It was what they were supposed to do, when a new boss came on board. Any other reaction would have been surprising. They had no reason to love him at first sight. He would simply have to make them see that he was just doing his job, same as them, and that he didn’t want to be here any more than they wanted him to. But he was here. For a while, anyhow. And all the responsibility for running this ship fell to him. He was the one whose feet the Company would put to the fire, if anything went wrong on the voyage.

  But what could go wrong? This was just an iceberg trawler.

  Carpenter clambered the rest of the way to the deck, doing it noisily enough to give them some warning he was coming. The decktop conversation died away as soon as the clattering echoes of his approach could be heard.

  He emerged into the blaze of afternoon. The humid air was thick and gross and a swollen greenish sun stood speared atop one of San Francisco’s pointy high-rises across the bay.

  “Cap’n,” Hitchcock said. “This here’s Caskie, communications. And Rennett, maintenance/ops. Cap’n Carpenter.”

  “At ease,” Carpenter said. It sounded like the right thing to say.

  Caskie and Rennett were both on the small side, but that was where their resemblance ended. Rennett was a husky, broad-shouldered little kid, less than chest-high to him, who looked very belligerent, very tough. Most likely, Carpenter figured, she had come out of one of the dust-bowl areas of the Midwest: they all had that chip-on-the-shoulder look back there. She kept her scalp shaved, the way a lot of them did nowadays, and she was brown as an acorn all over, with the purple glint of Screen shining brilliantly through, making her look almost fluorescent. But for her height you might not have thought she was female at all.

  Brown eyes bright as marbles and twice as hard looked back at him. “Sorry I was late getting back,” she said, not sounding sorry at all.

  Caskie, the communications operator, was slight and almost dainty, with a much softer, distinctly more feminine look about her: glossy black hair and lots of it, no bare scalp for her. Her face was on the plain side, with a wide mouth and an odd little button of a nose, and her skin was spotty and flaked from too much sun, but despite all that there was an agreeable curvy attractiveness to her.

  Carpenter had wondered, upon first hearing that he was getting a crew of two men and two women, how you kept sexual tensions from becoming a problem aboard ship, and now, looking at Caskie, he thought about that once more. But the answer came to him in another moment, and it was so obvious he reproached himself for not having seen it instantly. These two, Caskie and Rennett, were a couple, a closed system. There wouldn’t be any flirtations on the Tonopah Maru, any sort of sexual rivalries, to make life complicated for him.

  He said, “As I think all of you know, this is my first time at sea. That doesn’t mean I’m ignorant of a captain’s duties and responsibilities, though, only that I haven’t e
xercised them before. You’re an experienced crew and you have a record of working well together, and I’m not going to pretend that I know your jobs better than you do. Where I need practical advice and have only theoretical data to fall back on, I won’t be ashamed to ask for your help. I just want you to remember two things: that I’m a fast learner, and that ultimately I’m the one who will have to stand up and account for the voyage before the Company if our performance isn’t up to mode.”

  “Do you think we’d slack off, just because we’ve got a new man in charge?” Rennett asked. Midwest, yes: he could hear it in her voice, the dry flat tone. Raised in dust-bowl poverty, vile dirty air, crumbling shanties, broken windows, the endless uncertainty of the next meal.

  “I didn’t say that you would. But I don’t want you telling yourselves that this is going to be anything less than a profitable voyage because of my supposed inexperience. We’re going to be okay. We’ll do our work properly and well and we’ll get damned fine bonuses when we get back to San Francisco.” Carpenter snapped them a formal smile. “I’m glad to have met you and I’m damned pleased to be shipping out with such a capable crew. That’s all I have to say. We’ll clear port at 1800 hours. Dismissed.”

  He saw them exchange glances with one another before they broke ranks, but he was unable to interpret their expressions. Relief, that the new captain wasn’t an absolute jerk? Confirmation of their suspicion that he was? Formation of an alliance of the true workers against the loathed parasitic eleventh-level salaryman?

  No sense trying to read their minds, Carpenter told himself. Take the voyage day by day, do the work as it comes, stay on top of things, and all will be well.