Hot Sky at Midnight

by Robert Silverberg

  His first order of duty was to file the official notice of embarkation with the harbormaster. He went down to his cabin to take care of that, making his way with difficulty through the narrow, cramped, and unfamiliar belowdecks spaces, jammed everywhere as they were with materiel and instruments.

  As he picked up the phone he thought of calling Nick Rhodes back and trying to take some of the sting out of what he had said earlier. Telling a man that the woman he loves is a dangerous nutcase who ought to be jettisoned is a heavy thing to do, even if he is your closest friend. Rhodes might be brooding right now about that, angry, resentful. It might be best to attempt some retroactive softening. No, Carpenter thought. Don’t.

  What he had said was the truth as he saw it. If he was wrong about Isabelle—and he didn’t think he was—Rhodes would forgive him for having spoken out of turn: their friendship had survived worse things than that over the years. They were inextricably bound by time and history and nothing they could say to each other could do permanent damage to that bond.

  But even so—

  The poor unhappy bastard. Such a nice, gentle guy, such a brilliant man. And always drifting into some kind of anguish and grief. Rhodes deserved better of life, Carpenter thought. But instead he kept finding women who were more than he could handle; and even in the one area of his life where he was a true genius, his research, he was managing now to fuck himself over with the tormenting qualms of profound moral uneasiness, gratuitously self-generated. No wonder he drank so much. At least the bottle didn’t engage him in philosophical discussions. It just offered him a little solace, an hour or so at a time. Carpenter wondered what would happen to Rhodes when the drinking too got out of hand, and began to erode the parts of his life that actually worked.

  A rough business, he thought sadly.

  Best not to call him again now, though.

  “Harbormaster’s office,” said an androidal voice out of the visor.

  “This is Captain Carpenter of the Tonopah Maru,” Carpenter said. “Requesting port clearance, 1800 hours—”

  11

  enron said, “It is a beautiful place, where you live. Is it very old?”

  “Mid-twentieth century,” Jolanda Bermudez told him. “Old, but not exactly ancient. Not like the old world, where everything’s five thousand years old. You like it?”

  “So beautiful, yes. A quaint little cottage.”

  So it was, in a way, Enron thought. A small ramshackle building on a narrow winding street high up on the hillside not far north of the university campus. It was definitely charming, with its little decks and odd outcurving windows and its mitre-saw filigree decorations along the roofline. Charming, yes: even though the paint was pocked and peeling from the constant onslaught of the chemical-laden air and the windows were so degraded for the same reason that they were starting to look like stained glass and the decks were swaybacked and lopsided and the shingles were coming loose and the garden in front was a shameless withered tangle of dry knotty weeds.

  This was the third evening Enron had seen Jolanda in the past week, but he hadn’t come to her house before; she had preferred to go with him to his hotel in the city. His little fling with her had greatly enlivened his week in the United States. Of course she would undoubtedly begin to bore him, over any considerable span of time. But he wasn’t expecting to marry her, and he would be going back to Israel very soon now anyway. In the short run she had been just what he needed here, an undemanding companion and a complaisant, eager playmate in bed; and there was always still the possibility that he might actually learn something useful from her, on this otherwise largely wasted trip. A slender possibility, but it was there.

  “Well? Shall we go in? I’m dying to have you experience my work.”

  She was like a big prancing dog, Enron thought. Not very bright, in fact not intelligent at all, but extremely friendly and lively, and good company for a romp. A warmhearted, easy-natured person. Very different from most of the shrewd, hard-edged, keen-eyed Israeli women he knew, who prided themselves on being utterly clear-minded, who always had everything in its absolutely proper perspective, not caring that their souls had turned to ice.

  He followed her through a dimly lit vestibule. The interior of the place was dark and cluttered and confusing, a murky maze of little rooms filled with wall hangings, sculptures, statuettes, weavings, brassbound chests, intricate veils dangling from pegs, tribal masks, posters, books, African spears, pieces from a suit of medieval Japanese armor, coiled loops of fiber-optic cable, stacks of data-cubes, carved screens, bells, old wine bottles festooned with colored wax, iridescent strips of hologram tape that stretched from wall to wall, odd ceramic things of uncertain function, items of antique clothing giddily scattered all about, bird cages with actual birds in them, visors flashing abstract patterns: a stupefying, overwhelming plenitude of bric-a-brac. All of it, so far as Enron could see, tasteless and absurd. He could smell the stale odor of burned incense in the air. Cats were meandering around everywhere, five, six, a dozen cats, a couple of Siamese and a couple of Persian and some that were of kinds he could not identify at all. Like their owner, they seemed afraid of nothing: they pushed up against him, sniffed him, nuzzled him, sharpened their claws on his leg.

  “Well? What do you think?” Jolanda asked.

  What could he say? He beamed at her.

  “Fascinating. Delightful. Such a wonderful collection of unusual things.”

  “I knew you’d love it. I don’t bring everybody here, you know. A lot of men, they simply don’t understand. They’d be turned off. But you—a man who’s traveled so widely, a cultured man, who appreciates the arts—” She flung her arms wide in her joy. Enron was afraid she would knock one of her artifacts flying across the room. She was a big woman: he might almost say intimidatingly big, if he were capable of being intimidated by anything, especially a woman. Ten centimeters taller than he was, at least, and probably twenty kilos heavier. Enron suspected that she was a hyperdex user: she had that overwrought look about the eyes. Drug use of any kind disgusted Enron. But what this woman did was no business of his, he told himself. He wasn’t her father.

  “Come,” Jolanda said, taking him by the wrist and pulling him along. “My studio is next.”

  It was a long low-ceilinged room in back, windowless, jutting into the hillside, no doubt something that had been added to the original structure. The clutter of her living area was not replicated here. The studio was empty except for three mysterious objects, large and of indeterminate shape, standing in a triangular array in the middle of the floor.

  “My latest sculptures,” she said. “This one on the left is Agamemnon. On this side, The Tower of the Heart. And the one in back I call Ad Astra PerAspera.”

  “I have never seen such work as this,” said Enron truthfully.

  “No. I don’t think anything like it is being done anywhere else yet. It’s a new art form, strictly American so far.”

  “And it is called—what did you say?—bioresponsive art? How does it work?”

  “I’ll show you,” she said. “Here. You have to put the receptors on, first.” From a cupboard he had not noticed she produced an ominous handful of electrodes and bioamplifiers. “Let me do it,” she said, quickly taping things to him, putting some small device on his left temple, another right on the top of his head, reaching down into his shirt to stick one on his breastbone.

  Go on, Enron thought. Put one between my balls, now.

  But she didn’t. She affixed the fourth and last one at the midpoint of his shoulder blades. Then she was busy for a tune with some sort of electronic rig in the cupboard. He studied her thoughtfully, watching the movements of her unfettered breasts and meaty buttocks within the thin wrap that was all she was wearing, and wondered how long this demonstration of her art was likely to take. There were other things to do tonight and he was ready to get on to them. He could be patient indeed in the pursuit of a goal, but he didn’t want to consume the whole evening in these absur
dities.

  In a very minor way, too, Enron was uneasy about the electrodes and bioamplifiers. Unless he had completely lost his capacity for judging human beings, this woman was harmless, a mere silly innocent with ridiculous taste and a slipshod mind and the morals of a she-camel But what if he was wrong? If she was in fact a functionary of Samurai counterintelligence, and had cunningly set him up with the uninhibited use of her lusty energetic hips and dark musky loins for the sake of administering a brainburning here this evening?

  Paranoia, he told himself. Idiocy.

  “All right, now. We’re ready to go. Which one first?”

  “Which what?” Enron asked.

  “Sculpture.”

  “The one in back,” he said at random. “Ad Astra Per Aspera.”

  “A good choice to begin with,” she said. “I’ll count to three. Then you start walking toward it One—two—”

  At first he saw nothing except the sculpture itself, an ungainly, unappealing-looking assemblage of wooden struts arranged at awkward angles with some sort of metallic armature visible within. But then something began to glow in the sculpture’s depths, and in another moment he became aware of a distinct psychogenic field beginning to kindle within him: a pulsation at the back of his neck, another in his belly, a sensation of odd disorientation everywhere. As though his feet were beginning to leave the ground, almost as if he was starting to float upward and outward, through the doorway that led to the main part of the house, up through the ceiling, into the hot muggy night—

  Well, it was Ad Astra PerAspera, wasn’t it? So probably he was supposed to be experiencing a simulated star voyage, then. Upward and outward to the for galaxies.

  But all Enron felt was the initial sense of rising. He went nowhere, he experienced nothing beyond a certain queasy strangeness in his nervous system. It was as if his starward impetus was limited, that he could journey only so far and no farther before he hit some kind of psychic wall.

  “There,” Jolanda said. The sensations went away. “What did you think?”

  He was ready, as always. “Magnificent, wholly magnificent. I was scarcely prepared fully enough for the intensity of it. What I felt was—”

  “No! Don’t tell me! It has to stay private—it’s your personal experience of the work. No two are alike. And I wouldn’t presume to ask you to put the essentially nonverbal into words. It would spoil it for you, don’t you think?”

  “Indeed.”

  “Shall we do Tower of the Heart next?”

  “Please.”

  She touched each electrode, as if adjusting the receptors in some minor way, and went to the cupboard again.

  Tower of the Heart was wide, squat, not in any way towerlike that Enron could see. The glow of its internal workings was of a deeper hue than the other’s, violet blue rather than golden pink. Approaching it, he felt very little at first, and then came some of the queasiness he had felt with the first sculpture, indeed pretty much the same sensation. So it is all foolishness, he thought, a mild electric current that gives you the twitches and some gentle discomfort, and then you pretend that you have had a deeply moving aesthetic experience which—

  Suddenly, without warning, he found himself on the verge of an orgasm.

  It was immensely embarrassing. Not only was it his intention to save that orgasm for better use a little later in the evening, but the whole idea of losing control this way, of staining his clothes like a schoolboy, was infuriating to him. He fought it. The emanations coming from the second sculpture were far stronger than those of the first, and it was a struggle for him. His face, he knew, must be ablaze with shame and rage, and his erection was so powerful that it made him ache. He didn’t dare look down to see if it showed. But he fought. It had probably been thirty years since he had had to fight so desperately against the release of pleasure: not since the hairtrigger days of his hot adolescence. His mind was filled with thoughts of Jolanda Bermudez’s overflowing body, her immense swaying breasts, her hot slippery throbbing hole. She was devouring him, she was engulfing him, carrying him away on a tide of ecstasy. Think of anything, he ordered himself sternly. Think of the Dead Sea, the harsh metallic taste of its water, the thick slimy coating on your skin after you emerge from it. Think of the Mosque of Omar’s golden dome shining in the noon sun. Think of the nauseating ball of greenhouse gases that surrounds the spinning globe of Earth. Think of yesterday’s stock-market quotations—of toothpaste—of oranges—of the Sistine Chapel—

  —of camels in the marketplace at Beersheba—

  —of lamb kebabs sizzling over a grill—

  —of the coral reefs at Eilat—

  —of—of the—the—

  But the pressure lifted, just then. The surging tide of his blood receded; his erection subsided. Enron caught his breath and forced himself back toward calmness.

  The room was very quiet. He had to make himself look toward her. When he did, he saw that she was smiling—slyly, knowingly, perhaps? Was she aware of what had happened? Impossible to tell. She must know what effect the work had had on him. On the other hand, everyone was supposed to respond to these things differently. A purely subjective art form.

  He would reveal nothing. As she said, a person’s experience of her art was his own private business. “Extraordinary,” he told her. “Unforgettable.” His voice, hoarse and breathy, sounded almost unrecognizable in his own ears.

  “I’m so glad you liked it. And shall we do the Agamemnon now?” she asked cheerily.

  “In a little while, maybe. I would like to—savor what I have already been shown. To think about it, if I may.” Enron was sweating as though he had just done a ten-kilometer race. “Is that all right? That we wait until later for the third one?”

  “It can be overwhelming, sometimes,” she said.

  “And perhaps if there is something to drink—”

  “Yes. Of course. How stupid of me, to haul you right in here so fast, without even offering you a drink!”

  She got the electrodes off him and found a bottle of wine. White wine, warm, sweet. Americans! What did they know of anything that mattered? Gently Enron asked if there might be red, and she found some of that too, even worse, dusty-tasting stuff, full no doubt of baneful pollutants and ghastly insecticide residues. They left the studio and settled on a sort of divan before a long low window in one of her front rooms, and sat looking out at a sunset of stunning photochemical complexity, an astounding apocalyptic Wagnerian thing: enormous bold jagged streaks of scarlet and gold and green and violet and turquoise warring frantically with each other for possession of the sky above San Francisco. Now and then Jolanda sighed heavily and shook her shoulders in a little shiver of aesthetic joy. Ah, yes, such beauty, God’s own heaven dazzlingly illuminated by God’s own industrial contaminants.

  We will go for dinner soon, Enron thought, and there I will ask her the things I must ask her, and then we will return here and I will have her right on the floor of this room, on the thick Persian carpet, and then I will go back to the city and I will never see her again; and in a pig’s eye will I let her put those electrodes back on me, not tonight or any other night.

  The investigation, first, though. How to bring the subject of discourse around to the area of his main interest here? A little maneuvering would be necessary. And with all this romantic business going on in the sky—

  But as it happened he was able to get down to his inquiries much sooner than he had expected. She gave him the opening he needed even as they sat watching the sunset.

  “The night we all had dinner, Marty, Isabelle said you were a spy. Do you remember that?”

  Enron chuckled. “Of course. A spy for Kyocera-Merck, she said.”

  “Are you?”

  “You are so very direct. It is charmingly American of you.”

  “I was just thinking. I’ve never slept with a spy, not that I know of. Unless you are. It would be interesting to know.”

  “Naturally I am,” he said. “All Israelis are spies.
It is a widely known fact.”

  Jolanda laughed and poured more of the abominable wine for them both.

  “No. No, it is true. In our country we lived so long in a condition of dire peril, surrounded by enemies on every side, just a stone’s throw away: how could we not develop ingrained habits of watchfulness? A nation of spies, yes. Wherever we go, we look, we prowl, we lift up coverlets to find out what might be beneath. But a spy for Kyocera-Merck? No. That I am not. I do my spying for my country. It is a matter of patriotism, not of economic greed, do you see?”

  “You really are serious,” she said, in wonder.

  “A journalist, a spy—it is the same thing, is it not?”

  “And you came here to talk to Nick Rhodes because your country wants to steal the adapto technology that he’s working on.”

  She was, Enron realized, getting drunk very quickly. This conversation had veered from the merely playful into something rather different.

  “Steal? I would not do that. We never steal. We license, we copy if necessary, we reinvent. Steal, no. It is forbidden by the laws of Moses. Thou shalt not steal, we are told. Imitate, yes. There is nothing in the commandments about that. And I do confess to you, freely without hesitation, that we wish to learn more about this project of your friend Dr. Rhodes, this scheme for the genetic transformation of mankind.” Enron eyed her closely. She was flushed and at least half-aroused: the heat of the evening, the wine, his no doubt apparent response to Tower of the Heart, all had been working on her. Leaning close, letting his hand rest on hers, he said in an insinuating, confidential way, “Now that I have admitted that I am a spy, you will not mind that I must do some spying now. Yes? Good.” She seemed to think he was playing a game. Very well. He was happy to amuse her. “Answer this for me,” he said. “What do you think about Rhodes, truly? Is he on to something? Are they going to produce some new kind of human being over at that laboratory of his?”

  “Oh, you aren’t joking! You really are a spy!”

  “Did I ever deny it? Come on.” Enron stroked her arm. Her skin was amazingly smooth, the smoothest he had ever touched. He wondered if she had had herself covered in something synthetic. There were women who did that. “What about him? What do you know about his work?”