Hot Sky at Midnight

on lethal and take it up with the Guardia Civil afterward.”

Juanito sullenly spit out a mouthful of slag. He didn’t say anything.

“Dr. Wu? The offer still stands,” Farkas continued. “You come with me, you do the job we need you for. That isn’t so bad a deal, considering what I could do to you for what you did to me. But all I want from you is your skills, and that’s the truth. You are going to need that refresher course, aren’t you, though?”

Wu muttered something indistinct.

Farkas said, “You can practice on this boy, if you like. Try retrofitting him for blindsight first, and if it works, you can do our crew people, all right? He won’t mind. He’s terribly curious about the way I see things, anyway. Aren’t you, Juanito, eh? So we’ll give him a chance to find out firsthand.” Farkas laughed. To Juanito he said, “If everything works out the right way, maybe we’ll let you go along on the voyage with us, boy.” Juanito felt the cold nudge of the spike in his back. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? The first trip to the stars? You’d go down in history. What do you say to that, Juanito? You’d be famous.”

Juanito didn’t answer. His tongue was still rough with slag, and he was so far gone, altogether lost in fear and chagrin, that he did not even attempt to speak. With Farkas prodding him from behind, he shambled slowly along next to Dr. Wu toward the door that Farkas said looked like a starfish. It didn’t look at all like a fish to him, or a star, or like a fish that looked like a star. It looked like a door to him, as far as he could tell by the feeble light of the distant bulbs. That was all it looked like, a door that looked like a door. Not a star. Not a fish. But there was no use thinking about it, or anything else, not now, not with Farkas nudging him between the shoulder blades with his own spike. He let his mind go blank and kept on walking.

Emerging from the habitat’s shell into the plaza of El Mirador again, Farkas very quickly took cognizance of everything around him: the ring of jolly little cafes, the flowing fountain in the middle, the statue of Don Eduardo Callaghan, El Supremo, benignly looming down to the right. Seeing everything in its blindsight equivalent, of course: the cafes as a row of jiggling point-sources of shifting green light, the fountain as a fiery spear, the monument to Don Eduardo as a jutting white triangular wedge that bore the distinctively massive, craggy features of the Generalissimo.

And of course there were his two prisoners, Wu and Juanito, just in front of him. Wu—the shining polished cube atop the copper-hued pyramid—seemed calm. He had come to terms with the event that had just occurred. Juanito—half a dozen blue spheres tied together by an orange cable—was more agitated. Farkas perceived his agitation as an up-spectrum shift in the color of what Farkas called the boundary zone, which marked the Juanito- object off from the surrounding region.

“I have a call to make,” Farkas told them. “Sit here quietly with me at this table. The spike is tuned and ready to use if you force me to do so. Juanito?”

“I didn’t say nothing.”

“I know that. I just wanted you to tell me how cooperative you intend to be. I don’t want to have to kill you. But if you try something funny, I will. I’m way ahead of you on every move. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“So be a good boy and sit right there, and if you see any of your little friends come through the plaza, don’t try to send any sort of signals to them. Because I’ll notice what you’re doing and it’ll be the last thing you ever do. Clear?”

“Look,” Juanito said miserably, “you can just let me get up and walk out of here and we don’t ever need to have anything to do with each other ever again. I got no interest in making any trouble for you.”

“No,” Farkas said. “You tried to fuck me, boy. You were working for me and you sold me out. I make it a rule to punish behavior like that very severely. You aren’t walking away from this in one piece.” He looked toward Wu. “And you, doctor? I’m willing to make an exception for you to my general rule of retribution, for you, if you cooperate. Of course, I’ll leave the choice up to you, but I think I know how you would prefer matters to go. You would rather work for Kyocera-Merck for a short time at a fine salary in a nicely furnished laboratory, wouldn’t you, than have me show you in great detail how displeased I am at what you did to my eyes when I was still a fetus, and how extremely vindictive I’m capable of being. Wouldn’t you, doctor?”

“I told you already,” Wu muttered. “We have a deal.”

“Good. Very good.”

A public communicator wand in a clip was fastened to the side of the table. Without taking his attention off Wu and Juanito, Farkas picked the wand up, using his left hand because his right was holding the spike, and punched in the number of Colonel Emilio Olmo of the Guardia Civil. There was a certain amount of hunt-and-seek action while the central computer tried to find him; and then an androidal voice asked for Farkas’s caller identification code. Farkas gave it, adding, “This is a Channel Seventeen call.” That was a request for a scrambled line. There was another little stretch of silence broken occasionally by screechy bits of electronic noise.

Then:

“Victor?”

“I just want to let you know, Emilio, that I have the merchandise in hand.”

“Where are you calling from?” Olmo asked.

“The plaza in El Mirador.”

“Stay there. I’ll come as soon as possible. I have to talk to you, Victor.”

“You are talking to me,” Farkas said. “All I need is a couple of Guardia men to collect the consignment, right away. I’m sitting here with it right in the plaza, and I don’t like having to be a cargo superintendent out in public.”

“Where are you, exactly? The specific location.”

To Juanito, Farkas said, “What’s the name of this cafe?” Reading signs was often difficult for him: seeing by blindsight was not an exact equivalent of seeing by ordinary vision, a fact of which Farkas was reminded a thousand maddening times a day.

“Cafe La Paloma,” Juanito said.

“La Paloma,” Farkas told Olmo.

“Bueno. I’ll have the plaza patrol make the pickup within two minutes. We’ll collect the shipment and transfer it to the depot as arranged.”

“Something you ought to know. There’s an extra item of merchandise,” said Farkas.

“Oh?”

“I’m sending the courier along to the depot too. Don’t worry. I’ll provide you with the bill of lading in proper order.”

“Whatever you want, my friend,” said Olmo, with a touch of mystification in his voice. “He is yours, whatever you want to do with him, and good riddance. I give him to you freely. But not free, you understand. You are aware that there may be extra shipping charges, yes?”

“That doesn’t worry me.”

“Bueno. The pickup will be made quite swiftly. You stay right there. I will come to you in person in a very little while so that we can speak. A serious matter has developed that must be discussed.”

“Scrambler call isn’t good enough?” Farkas asked, puzzled and a little alarmed.

“Not nearly, Victor. This must be in person. It is very delicate, very. You will stay? Cafe La Paloma?”

“Absolutely,” Farkas said. “You can recognize me by the red carnation in my lapel.”

“What?”

“A joke. Get the goddamned pickup taken care of, Emilio, will you?”

“Immediately.”

“Bueno,” Farkas said.

Olmo rang off. Farkas put the wand back in its slot.

Juanito said, “Was that Colonel Olmo you were talking to?” He sounded awed.

“Why would you think that?”

“You called him ‘Emilio.’ You asked for Guardia men to be sent. Who else could it have been?”

Farkas shrugged. “Colonel Olmo, yes. We occasionally do business with each other. We are friends, in a way.”

“Holy Mary Mother of God,” said Juanito hoarsely, and made the gesture that Farkas recognized as the sign