Hot Sky at Midnight

“I have to. He cleared it with New Tokyo. I’m not supposed to tell him anything that has any substance, naturally, but Samurai wants the PR exposure. It’s a very big magazine. And the Fertile Crescent is a huge market for Samurai products. We are supposed to position ourselves for their readers as the last best hope for the salvation of humanity. I was supposed to have lunch with him, but I’d rather make it dinner. I want you along to kick me under the table whenever I start veering into classified areas.”

“Sure,” she said, smiling.

“But—please, Isabelle. No political stuff. No diatribes. You and I have our philosophical differences, and so be it, but tonight, in front of this Enron, is not the time to ventilate them.”

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,