“Nobody would volunteer to have his eyes replaced with blindsight.”
“How would I know? People do all sorts of crazy things. But if he wanted to kill you I think he’d have operated differently when we tracked you down.”
“He’ll get me off Valparaiso and kill me somewhere else.”
“I don’t know,” Juanito said. “He keeps his plans to himself. I’m just doing a job.”
“How much did he pay you to do the trace?” Savagely. “How much?” A quick darting glance downward. “I know you’ve got a spike in your pocket. Just leave it there and answer me. How much?”
“Three thousand callies a week,” Juanito muttered, padding things a little.
“I’ll give you five to help me get rid of him.”
Well, that was a switch. But Juanito hesitated. Sell Farkas out? He didn’t know if he could turn himself around that fast. Was it the professional thing to do, to take a higher bid?
“Eight,” he said, after a moment.
Why the hell not? He didn’t owe Farkas any loyalty. This was a sanctuary world; the compassion of El Supremo entitled Wu to protection here. It was every citizen’s duty to shield his fellow citizens from harm. And eight thousand callies was a big bundle of money.
“Six five,” Wu said.
“Eight, or no deal. Handshake right now. You have your glove?”
The woman who had been Dr. Wu Fang-shui made a sour muttering sound and pulled out her flex terminal. “Account 1133,” Juanito said, and they made the transfer of funds. “How do you want to do this?” Juanito asked.
“There is a passageway into the outer shell just behind this cafe. You will catch sight of me slipping in there and the two of you will follow me. When we are all inside and he is coming toward me, you get behind him and take him down with your spike. And we leave him buried in there.” There was a frightening gleam in Wu’s eyes. It was almost as if the cunning retrofit body was melting away and the real Wu beneath was emerging, moment by moment. “You understand?” Wu said. A fierce, blazing look. The face of a dithering old woman, but the eyes of a devil. “I have bought you, boy. I expect you to stay bought when we are in the shell. Do you understand me? Do you? Good.”
6
carpenter was the first to reach the restaurant. The trip across the bay had been quicker than he expected. He waited out in front for Rhodes, pacing up and down in the white midday glare. The restaurant was a series of small perspex domes nestling along the rim of the seawall that protected lowland Berkeley from further incursions by the bay. They looked like clumps of gleaming fungi.
Half the Berkeley flatlands had been gobbled by the rising water in the first big surges forty or fifty years back, and at low tide, so Carpenter understood, it was possible to glimpse the tops of the old drowned buildings sticking up out of the glistening microorganism-stained surface of the bay. But there hadn’t been any serious new flooding here since the seawall had been put in. The West Coast had come off pretty well, generally speaking, in the great drowning of the shorelines, which had happened in a highly erratic way around the world: catastrophic in China and Japan and Bangladesh, and also the eastern United States, especially Florida, Georgia, the Carolina coast, but only a minor annoyance in Western Europe—except in Holland, Denmark, and the Baltic countries, which were pretty much gone— and no big deal along the Pacific side of the Americas, either. Now they said that the present phase of the melting of the polar ice caps was essentially complete: what remained of them was going to stay frozen, at least for the immediate future, so there was nothing more to fear from the rising of the planetary water levels. That was always nice to hear, Carpenter thought, that there was nothing more to fear. In any context at all. Even if it wasn’t true.
The noon sun was fierce and big and the air was, as usual, like thick soup. Rhodes was late, not unusual for him. Carpenter, fidgeting in the sticky heat, walked up the ramp leading up to the seawall, flapping his shirt to cool himself and tugging at his face-lung where it was clinging, warm and clammy, to his cheek.
He stared out at the fine old bridges and the broad bay, green and blue and violet with its skin of tropical pond scum, and at the glistening elegance of San Francisco across the way, and the dark heavy bulk of Mount Tamalpais off to the north. Then he looked around the other way, at the Berkeley-Oakland hills, heavily built over but still showing big grassy areas.
All the grass was brown and withered and dead looking, but Carpenter knew from childhood experience that it would spring up in fresh green life within a week or two, once the winter rains came. The trouble was that the winter rains didn’t seem to come here very often, any more. It was an endless summer all up and down the coast, year in, year out. Whereas former deserts like those in the Middle East and northern Africa were blessed now with sweet downpourings of precipitation as never before, and the whole southeastern arc of the United States from East Texas to Florida had turned into one enormous rain forest, strangling under a phantasmagorical burden of colossal furry vines and great clumps of orchids and gigantic creeping plants with shiny leaves.
“There you are,” said a deep, husky voice behind him. “I’ve been looking all over the place.”
Nick Rhodes grinned at him from the foot of the seawall ramp. He had risen up out of nowhere, it seemed. Rhodes was maskless, wearing an airy-looking white cotton djellaba imprinted with bold Egyptian motifs. His tight, curling brown hair had begun to turn gray and had receded considerably at his temples since Carpenter had last seen him, and he looked tired and eroded. His round face had become fleshy, almost puffy. There was a feeling of forced exuberance about his grin, Carpenter thought. Something was wrong. Definitely wrong.
“Herr Doktor,” Carpenter said. “Here at last. The soul of punctuality, as ever.” He descended to Rhodes and put out his hand. Rhodes caught it and reeled him in and gave him an effusive bear hug, cheek to cheek. Carpenter was a tall man, but Rhodes was a little taller and very much broader and deeper, and the hug was a crusher.
They stepped back, then, and surveyed each other. They had known each other all their lives, more or less. Rhodes, two years older, had been an early friend of Carpenter’s slightly older brother, originally, in their distant Southern California boyhoods. By the time they had reached adolescence Rhodes had become a little too dreamy, a little too vulnerable, for the older Carpenter, but he had clicked in some mysterious way with Paul.
They had followed parallel tracks all through life, both entering the giant Samurai Industries combine soon after college, the one difference being that Rhodes had real scientific ability and Carpenter’s main areas of intellectual interest lay in soft fields like history and anthropology, where there were no real career possibilities at all. So Rhodes had gone in for genetic bioengineering, a potent fast-slope path for which the Company would underwrite his graduate work and subsequent research, and Carpenter had signed on as an unspecialized executive trainee, which he knew would carry him to an unpredictable, constantly shifting series of enterprises, completely at the whim of his employer. Through all the twists and turns of their lives ever since they had managed to maintain a tenuous but nevertheless tenacious sort of friendship.
“Well,” Carpenter said. “It’s been quite a while.”
“So it has, Paul. What a treat this is. I have to tell you, you look great.”
“Do I? Life in fabulous Spokane. The wine, the women, the fragrance of the flowers. And you? Everything going well? The life, the work?”
“Wonderful.”
Carpenter couldn’t tell if there was irony in that. He suspected there was.
“Let’s go inside,” he said. “You must be crazy, coming out without a breathing-mask. Or else you’ve had your lungs retrofitted with vanadium steel.”
“This isn’t your Inland Empire, Paul. We have actual sea breezes here. It’s safe to let unfiltered air into your lungs.”
“Is it, now?” Carpenter undipped his face-lung and pocketed it, with some relief. The whole mask thing, he suspected, was a paranoid overreaction, anyway. Places like Memphis, yes, Cleveland, St. Louis, you wanted to hide behind as much filtering as you could, if you had to be outdoors. The ruinous air there hit you like a knife, scalpeling right down through your lungs into your gut. But the Bay Area? Rhodes was right. The whole world hadn’t quite become unlivable yet. Not quite.
