Hot Sky at Midnight

by Robert Silverberg

  Davidov was immense, a great mountain of a man who seemed as broad as he was tall. His eyes were cold and fierce but his manner, as Jolanda had indicated, was gentle, at least superficially. Enron understood, though, that with Davidov the gentleness had to be all on the surface.

  He embraced Jolanda first, swallowing her impressive body into an encompassing bear hug, crushing her against him and even lifting her a little way from the ground.

  Then his vast hand enfolded Enron’s. His grip seemed to be a test of virility. Enron knew how to cope with that sort of thing: he let his fingers go limp while Davidov mangled his bones, then returned the squeeze with equal ferocity. It wasn’t necessary to be a giant to manage a significant handshake.

  Davidov introduced the bespectacled man: Avery Jones, he said. The manager of the farm. With an expansive gesture Davidov indicated the extent of the rabbit farm, swinging his beefy arm from horizon to horizon. Of course, on Valparaiso Nuevo that was no great distance. “Isn’t this a fabulous place! Up to your ass in rabbits, here. A thousand ways to cook the little buggers, they have.” The unyielding Bolshevik eyes focused sharply on Enron. They were as cold and hard as stone. “Come on inside and let’s talk. Israeli, are you? I knew an Israeli woman, once, from Beersheba. Aviva, her name was. A real ball-buster, but smart as hell. Aviva from Beersheba. Where are you from in Israel, Marty?”

  “Haifa,” Enron said.

  “Work for a magazine, do you?”

  “Let us go inside,” Enron said.

  The bespectacled rabbit farmer tactfully disappeared. When they were inside the farmhouse Enron waved aside the offer of a beer and said quickly, “May we dispense with the social preliminaries? I am an official representative of the state of Israel, at quite a high level. I am aware of the plan which you propose to put into effect.”

  “So I gather.”

  “It is a plan that my country finds of great interest.”

  Davidov waited.

  Enron said, “We are, in fact, prepared to make a financial investment in your activities. A considerable financial investment, I should add. Shall I continue, or is taking on another outside investor not of any importance to you?”

  “Another outside investor?” Davidov said. “Who’s the first one?”

  Enron glanced troubledly toward Jolanda. She seemed to be smiling.

  “I am aware,” he said, speaking very slowly and clearly, “that the Kyocera-Merck corporation already has made a substantial contribution to your operation.”

  “You are? I’m not.”

  A little nonplussed, Enron said, “I have discussed the matter with a highly placed Kyocera representative, who assured me—”

  “Yes. I saw you with him. If he assured you of anything involving his company and us, he’s lying.”

  “Ah,” Enron said. “Indeed.” This was very confusing. Breathing deeply, he rocked lightly back and forth on the balls of his feet, trying to recover his poise. “So there is no Kyocera-Merck connection with—”

  “None. Zero. Zilch. Kyocera isn’t in it. Never has been.”

  “Ah,” Enron said again. Jolanda’s smile was unmistakable now, ear to ear.

  But he was equal to the situation. In that first moment of bewilderment, recollected fragments of his conversation with Farkas earlier this morning went rushing through his mind, and though for an instant Enron felt as though he was being carried along on them like a swimmer being borne to a cataract, he very quickly succeeded in snatching order from chaos.

  He saw now that he had jumped to the wrong conclusion. But so had Farkas.

  They had been talking at cross purposes earlier, Enron realized. The Hungarian hadn’t been offering Israel a slice of the deal at all. Obviously Farkas believed for some reason that Israel already controlled the deal, and had been trying this morning to cut Kyocera-Merck in for a piece. Suddenly everything was standing on its head. There were opportunities to be seized in that, Enron thought.

  Calmly he said, “Tell me this, then: Are you interested in outside financial backing for your plan at all?”

  “Very much so.”

  “Good. I am in the position of being able to provide it for you.”

  “Israeli money?”

  “Half from Israel, half from Kyocera-Merck.”

  “You can bring Kyocera in?” Davidov asked.

  It was like standing before a great abyss. Enron leaped blithely across it.

  “Absolutely,” he said.

  “Sit down,” said Davidov. “Let’s have a beer and talk about this a little more. And then maybe we all need to go back down to Earth and do some more talking there.”

  22

  the rain gave out before Carpenter was much more than fifty miles east of San Francisco. There was a sharp line of demarcation between the coastal deluge and the dry interior. Behind him lay a realm of black downpour and overflowing gutters; but when he looked ahead, facing into the swollen and bloodshot eye of the sun rising above the Sierra foothills, he could see that everything still remained in the grip of the endless drought.

  He was driving into a terrain of arid slopes, rounded and tawny, with the isolated green domes of huge old oak trees standing on them like sentinels, and blue valleys shrouded by shimmering dust shadows. Above the entire scene was a vast and uncompromising sky marked only intermittently by fleecy patches of clouds. The bizarre deluge that had been pelting the Bay Area and the rest of the coastal strip for the last few days would bring no gain to San Francisco’s water supply. The main reservoirs were inland, here in the mountains and foothills; and none of the rain was falling on them, no stores of snow would be locked up in the high country for use later on.

  Everything was very quiet out here. Industrial pollution had strangled most of the suburban towns in this part of the Sacramento River Valley, and the depletion of the water table during the years of drought had finished off the agricultural communities beyond them. Still farther east, Carpenter knew, lay the ghost towns of the Mother Lode, and then the awesome, gigantic mountain wall of the Sierra; and on the far side of that was the grim wasteland that was Nevada. Once he crossed the mountains he would be driving through utter desert for a day and a half.

  And yet—and yet—

  It was beautiful here, if you could find beauty in solitude and aridity. With the death of the suburbs and the farms had come a reversion to an almost prehistoric tranquillity in the Sacramento Valley. This was how it might have looked a thousand years ago, Carpenter thought—except for the Pompeii effect of nineteenth- and twentieth-century building foundations and dry-wall boundary markers scattered all about, a multitude of intersecting shin-high grayish-white lines cutting across the dry grassy fields and hillocks like faint stains on the land, the almost imperceptible traces of the buildings that once had been there. But even those had a certain peaceful antique charm. Footprints of antiquity, clues to a vanished world. And the air out here, still and clear, seemed almost to be the air of some earlier century.

  Carpenter wasn’t deceived. This quiet air was as deadly as the air anywhere else. Deadlier, even, because the toxics never got blown away, here in this zone of unvarying atmospheric stagnation, they simply piled up and remained, and if you stayed around here long enough they would rot your lungs right out of your chest for you. You could see it in the trees of this pastoral region, if you took the trouble to look closely. The weird angles of the boughs, the spikiness of the twigs, the sparse and twisted leaves, all manner of genetic deformities induced by hundreds of years of ozone deficits, the buildup of aluminum and selenium traces in the soil, and other exciting forms of environmental bombardment.

  The air and soil and water of our world, Carpenter thought, have become a culture medium for antilife: a zone of negative fertility, blighting whatever it touches. Perhaps some new mutant form of un-life would eventually evolve and thrive in the new medium, some fundamentally dead kind of being that would be capable of carrying on its metabolic activities on the far side of existence, reproduc
ing beyond the grave at birth, a creature that breathed corrosive poisons and pumped hyped-up hydrocarbons through its invulnerable veins.

  He sat quietly behind the wheel, letting the car do all the work, taking him up and up onto the steadily rising spine of California.

  As the hours passed, even the few last traces of civilization began to drop away. He was in the foothill country, now, where people had generally built their houses from wood, and there were hardly any ruins left to see. Fire had taken care of that: the natural succession of forest blazes, sweeping across the uninhabited towns in the dry season year after year, had scoured the land of man’s presence.

  Peaceful. An empty world lay before him.

  A total contrast to the densely populated turbulence of San Francisco, and all the other nightmare zones of urban life stretching down the coast with hardly a break all the way to the great Belial, the Beast with a Thousand Heads itself, Los Angeles. Even the thought of L.A. made Carpenter wince. That monstrous blemish on the landscape, that pullulating black hole of ineffable ugliness, where uncountable millions of harried souls huddled together in unspeakable heat and air so foul it could be cut and sliced and stacked—

  Los Angeles, the city of his birth—

  Carpenter could remember his grandfather’s tales of growing up in an unfucked world—sentimental memories of the old Los Angeles of long ago—the late twentieth century, maybe? The early twenty-first? A lost paradise, so the old man had said, a place where the wind was fresh and clear off the ocean and days were mild and pleasant. The parks and lush gardens everywhere, the spacious homes, the sparkling sky, the snow on the mountaintops behind Pasadena and San Gabriel in the winter. Sometimes even now Carpenter would visit that vanished Los Angeles in his dreams: the beautiful unspoiled Los Angeles of the distant past, the remote and unattainable 1990s, say, before the iron sky had closed in on everything. He hoped that it hadn’t all been just some senile romantic fantasy of his grandfather’s invention, that it had really been like that back then. He felt sure that it had been. But it was gone now and would never return.

  Onward. Eastward.

  Lightning flashed in the empty sun-blasted vault of the sky, a spear-shaft of white brightness crossing the other brightness. A far-off drumroll of thunder. It meant nothing, Carpenter knew. Merely Zeus clearing his throat. The lightning was generated by heat differentials, and rain almost never came with it All that would come was fire, cutting its scalpel path along the grasslands, then widening, widening.

  The trees were different, now. Instead of oaks, there were soaring pines and slender creamy trees that might be aspens. Low gnarly clumps of chaparral—manzanita and greasewood, mainly—bordered the old highway. He saw no other cars. He was the last man alive in the world. In some places, where fire had lately been, stands of bare and blackened tree trunks stretched away in all directions for miles, rising above the charred earth.

  Fire was pure. Fire was good.

  Let it burn everything everywhere, Carpenter prayed. Let it sear away the sins of the world.

  How strange, he thought, that the human race had survived the worst of its national rivalries and its religious wars, had put so much of the old cockeyed irrational strife behind it, had entered into an era of actual peace and global cooperation, more or less. And then this: rot and ubiquitous tropic heat and atmospheric degradation and doom. Strange, strange, strange. Nick Rhodes in his laboratory, struggling with his conscience as he strived to turn the human race into something with gills and green blood. Kovalcik out in the Pacific under that brute of a sun, filling her ship with sea monsters for the needs of hungry humanity. Poor shitheaded Paul Carpenter, so eager to haul an iceberg back to a foolish ungrateful city that he forgets what little decency had ever been programmed into him, and allows himself to abandon—

  No. Don’t think about that.

  What you are doing right now, he reminded himself, is running away from all of that.

  Fragments of some old barely remembered liturgy came to him. Miserere. Miserere. Qui tollispeccata mundi Agnus dei. Qui tollis. Peccata mundi.

  Dona nobispacem. Pacem. Pacem. Pacem. Pacem.

  Onward. Eastward.

  The highway climbed and climbed and climbed, until it entered a comparatively straight stretch in a pass cloaked by the gathering darkness of the oncoming night. This was the high country here. Thin air, toothpick forests of slender struggling pines reaching toward timberline, above them bare rock faces like immense granite shields. All around him rose the purple-gray bulks of enormous mountains, the loftiest peaks of the Sierra.

  There was actually a tiny fringe of snow on the north faces of some of the tallest ones, trapped in sheltered bowls and cirques, and Carpenter stared at those turreted patches of white as though he had been translated to some other planetary sphere, one of the moons of Jupiter, perhaps. He had seen snow maybe three times in his life before this. You had to go to the high country, two or three miles above sea level, if you wanted to see it, and then only on the north faces, and at certain times of the year.

  Let it snow everywhere, Carpenter thought.

  Let the land be covered from sea to sea by a shining white blanket. And let us emerge from it into a pure new springtime of sweet fresh renewed life.

  Sure. Sure.

  And now he was across the purple-gray mountains, on the far side of the pass, coming down by switchback upon switchback into what he assumed was Nevada. Night was descending quickly. A hard black sky, no moon, plenty of stars, the eerie silent floating lights of space habitats occasionally making their passage among them, visible to the naked eye. Time to settle down for a little while and let the car’s reciprocator get a little ahead of the rate of energy consumption so that it could recharge the batteries for the next leg of the journey.

  He had rarely seen such a backdrop of darkness and such an intensity of brightnesses crossing it. The sky here looked cold, cold as space itself, frigid mountain air, a terrible icy clarity to it quite different from city air, eternally swirling with muck. But Carpenter knew that it wasn’t so. That was a hot sky out there, same as anywhere else. Wherever you went in this sorry world the sky was always hot, even at midnight, even at the edge of this dark and star-flecked mountain kingdom.

  Carpenter pulled off the road into a turnout cut from the side of the hill he was traversing and had a bleak dinner of packaged algae cakes that he had brought with him from Oakland. He washed it down with a little sour wine from a bottle cached below the dashboard. Then he curled up and slept in the car, with the security alarms on, as though he were in the midst of some deadly city. When the sun sprang into the morning sky and came crashing against his windshield he sat up quickly, bewildered, not knowing for a moment where he was or what was happening, thinking blurrily that he might be back in Spokane, in his dismal little room on the thirtieth floor of the Manito Hotel.

  There was actually a town on the valley floor just ahead of him. It even looked inhabited: a couple of dozen houses, some shops, a restaurant or two. Cars moving around, even this early in the morning.

  He pulled up outside the restaurant. DESERT CREEK DINER, it said out front. It looked as if it hadn’t been remodeled since about 1925. Carpenter felt as though he had been traveling in time as well as space.

  Everyone inside was wearing a face-lung. That seemed wrong, wearing face-lungs in this outpost of 1925, but Carpenter put his on and went in.

  A genuine human waitress. No androids, no table visors, no data pads for entering your orders. She smiled at him, eyes twinkling above the breathing-mask.

  “What’ll it be? Scrambled eggs? Coffee?”

  “Fine,” Carpenter said. “That’s what I’ll have.”

  He hadn’t left California yet, he discovered shortly. The Nevada boundary was another couple of miles down the road.

  His Company credit card took care of the meal. He still had that much corporate existence, apparently.

  When he had eaten he set off toward the east again. The mornin
g flowed toward him out of Utah. Everything was sandy and almost colorless here, and the landscape had the look of not having felt rain since at least the thirteenth century. There were jagged mountains here, not anything like the Sierra but big enough, pink in the early light and then golden brown. Fluffy white clouds, deep blue sky with faint yellow striations of greenhouse gases.

  This was such a beautiful world, Carpenter thought, before we messed it up.

  He prayed again, vaguely, incoherently. Ave Maria, gratia plena. Ora pro nobis. Now and at the hour of our death. On us poor sinners.

  Farther to the east there were mountains of an unfamiliar kind, long chains of narrow-ridged fangs, bright red in color as if they were glowing with some interior fire. They seemed incredibly ancient. Carpenter half expected to see prehistoric animals grazing in the flatlands below them. Brontosauruses, mastodons.

  No dinosaurs, though. No mastodons. Not much of anything. Pebbles, a little weedy-looking grass, some skittering lizards, that was about it. He found what looked like an old reservoir that still held some water, and stopped and stripped for a bath, which he was coming to need very badly. The water looked safe to enter. And this early in the day he could risk letting his skin have a little extra solar exposure.

  The pond was dark and deep and Carpenter thought the water might be too cold to enter, but it wasn’t, not especially. Tepid, in fact. But reasonably pure. There weren’t any chemical stains turning the surface iridescent, hardly any pond scum here, no alligators grinning up at him out of the depths, not even a frog in sight. A real novelty for him, actual outdoor bathing in genuine unpolluted water. It felt good to be clean again. A baptism, of sorts.

  A few hours’ drive on the other side of those flaming gorges the countryside began to be populated again. Some pitiful scruffy farms, some miserable ramshackle houses, a few falling-down barns that looked five hundred years old. The inhabitants probably not very friendly. Carpenter went on through without stopping. Beyond the farms was a dusty town, and beyond that a city, which he bypassed. A dull gray haze lay over everything here. Even inside the sealed car, he felt a taste of interior-America heat, interior-America smog, outlying tentacles of the heavy oppressive mass of murk that pressed down everywhere on the midsection of the nation with brutal indifferent force. The air was like a fist, clamping close. He knew that if he stopped the car and stepped outside he would be struck by a blast of scorching Saharan torridity.