Hot Sky at Midnight

follow?”

“But I’m not supposed to hurt him,” Juanito said.

“No. Not in any fashion do you hurt him. All you do is demonstrate a willingness to hurt him if that should become necessary.” Farkas nodded almost imperceptibly toward the woman at the front table of the cafe. “Let’s go, now. You sit down first, ask politely if it’s okay for you to share the table, make some little comment about the eclipse. I’ll come over maybe thirty seconds after you. All clear? Good boy. Go ahead, now.”

“You have to be insane,” the red-haired woman said, sounding really testy. But she was sweating in an astonishing way and her fingers were knotting together like anguished snakes. “I’m not any kind of doctor and my name isn’t Wu or Fu or whatever it was that you said, and you have exactly two seconds to get yourself away from me.” She seemed unable to take her eyes from Farkas’s smooth blank forehead. Juanito realized that he had grown used to the strangeness of that face by this time, but to other people Farkas must seem like a monstrosity.

Farkas didn’t move. After a moment the woman said in a different tone of voice, sounding more calm, merely curious now, “What sort of thing are you, anyway?”

She isn’t Wu, Juanito decided.

The real Wu wouldn’t have asked a question like that. The real Wu would have known. And fled. Besides, this was definitely a woman. She was absolutely convincing around the jaws, along the hairline, the soft flesh behind her chin. Women were different from men in all those places. Something about her wrists, too. The way she sat. A lot of other things. There weren’t any genetic surgeons good enough to do a retrofit this convincing. Juanito peered at her eyes, trying to see the place where the Chinese fold had been, but there wasn’t a trace of it. Her eyes were blue gray. All Chinese had brown eyes, didn’t they? Not that that would have been hard to fix, Juanito thought.

Farkas said in a low, taut voice, leaning in close and hard, “You know exactly what sort of thing I am, doctor. My name is Victor Farkas. I was born in Tashkent during the Second Breakup. My mother was the wife of the Hungarian consul, and you did a gene-splice job on the fetus she was carrying. That was your specialty back then, tectogenetic reconstruction. You don’t remember that? You deleted my eyes and gave me blindsight in place of them, doctor.”

The woman looked down and away. Color came to her cheeks. Something heavy seemed to be stirring within her. Juanito began to change his mind again. Maybe there really were some gene surgeons who could do a retrofit this good, he thought.

“None of this is true,” the woman said. “I’ve never heard of you and I was never in whatever place it was you mentioned. You’re nothing but a lunatic. I can show you who I am. I have papers. You have no right to harass me like this.”

“I don’t want to hurt you in any way, doctor.”

“I am not a doctor.”

“Could you be a doctor again? For a price?”

Juanito swung around, astounded, to look at Farkas. This was a twist he hadn’t expected.

The tall man was smiling pleasantly. Leaning forward, waiting for an answer.

“I will not listen to this,” the woman said. “You will go away from me this instant or I summon the patrol.”

Farkas said, “Listen to me very carefully, Dr. Wu. We have a project that could be of great interest to you. I represent an engineering group that is a division of a corporation whose name I’m sure you know. Its work involves an experimental spacedrive, the first interstellar voyage, faster-than-light travel. The estimate is that the program is three years away from a launch. Perhaps four.”

The woman rose. “This madness is of no importance to me.”

“The faster-than-light field distorts vision,” Farkas went on. He didn’t appear to notice that she was standing and looked about ready to bolt. “It disrupts vision entirely, in fact. Perception becomes totally abnormal. A crew with normal vision wouldn’t be able to function in any way. But it turns out that someone with blindsight can adapt fairly easily to the peculiar changes that the field induces. As you see, I would be ideally fitted for a voyage aboard such a vessel, and indeed I have been asked to take part in the first experimental trip.”

“I have no interest in hearing about—”

“The spacedrive has been tested, actually. Ground tests, strictly preliminary, no distance covered, but the theoretical results are extremely encouraging. With me as the subject. So we are quite confident that the project is going to work out. But I can’t make the voyage alone. We have a crew of five and they’ve volunteered for tectogenetic retrofits to give them what I have. We don’t know anyone else who has your experience in that area. We’d like you to come out of retirement, Dr. Wu.”

This was not at all the way Juanito had expected the meeting to go. He was altogether off balance.

Farkas was saying, “We’ve set up a complete lab for you on a nearby habitat, already containing whatever equipment you’re likely to need, though anything else you want, you just have to ask. We’ll pay you very well, of course. And ensure your personal safety all the time you’re gone from Valparaiso Nuevo. What do you say? Do we have a deal?”

The red-haired woman was trembling and slowly backing away. Farkas didn’t seem to notice her movements.

“No,” she said. “It was such a long time ago. Whatever skills I once had, I have forgotten, I have buried.”

So Farkas had been right all along, Juanito thought. No question about it. This was his Dr. Wu.

“You can give yourself a refresher course,” Farkas said. “I don’t think it’s possible really for a person to forget a great gift like yours, do you?”

“No. Please. Let me be.”

Juanito was amazed at how cockeyed his whole handle on the situation had been from the start. He had had it all wrong, that entire scenario of revenge. He had rarely been so wrong in his life. Farkas hadn’t come here with the idea of evening the score with Wu, Juanito saw now. Just to cut a deal, apparently. On behalf of Kyocera- Merck. Farkas didn’t give a shit about revenge. He wasn’t at all angry about what the gene surgeon had done to him long ago, no.

He was even more alien than Juanito had thought.

“What do you say?” Farkas asked again.

Instead of replying, the woman—Wu—took a further couple of steps backward. She—he—whatever— seemed to be poised, getting ready to bolt in another second or two.

“Where’s he going?” Farkas said suddenly. “Don’t let him get away, Juanito.”

Wu was still retreating, moving faster now, not quite running but sidling away at a steady pace, back into the enclosed part of the cafe. Farkas gestured sharply and Juanito began to follow. The spike he was carrying could deliver a stun-level jolt at fifteen paces. But he couldn’t just spike Wu down in this crowd, not if she had sanctuary protection, not in El Mirador of all places. There’d be fifty sanctuaries on top of him in a minute. They’d grab him and club him and sell his foreskin to the Generalissimo’s men for two and a half callies.

The cafe was crowded and dark. Juanito caught sight of the woman somewhere near the back, near the rest rooms. Go on, he thought. Go into the ladies’ room. I’ll follow you right in there if you do. I don’t give a damn about that.

But she went on past the rest rooms and ducked into an alcove near the kitchen instead. Two waiters laden with trays came by, scowling vehemently at Juanito, telling him to get out of the way. It took him a moment to pass around them, and by then he could no longer see the red-haired woman. He knew he was going to have big trouble with Farkas if he lost her in here. Farkas was going to have a fit. Farkas would try to stiff him on this week’s pay, most likely. Two thousand callies down the drain, not even counting the extra charges.

Then a hand reached out of the shadows and seized his wrist with surprising ferocity. Juanito was dragged a little way into a claustrophobic games room dense with crackling green haze coming from some bizarre machine on the far wall. The red-haired woman glared at him, wild-eyed.

“He wants to kill me, doesn’t he? That’s all a bunch of shit about having me do retrofit operations, right?”

“I think he means it,” Juanito said.