Hot Sky at Midnight

chilly flicker. Carpenter found himself taking an immediate irrational dislike to her. She was very attractive, he saw, in the moment before she turned away from him again; but attractive in an oddly discordant way, too much force in the eyes and too little in the rest of the face, and her great corona of wild, frizzy scarlet hair was like a shriek of disdain for the conventions of ordinary beauty. She was probably a handful and a half, Carpenter thought, on scarcely any evidence at all: an unpredictable mix of tenderness and ferocity.

He shook his head. Poor Nick. He never did have any luck with women.

“We’re going over to Sausalito,” Rhodes said. “Nice restaurant with a wonderful view. Isabelle and I go there a whole lot.”

“Our special place,” she said. Her tone was a little grating. She sounded as though she might be being sarcastic, but perhaps not. Carpenter wasn’t at all sure.

But it turned out to be a fine romantic place indeed, when they finally reached it an hour later, after a harrowing drive all the way across the heart of the city and over the Golden Gate Bridge. Carpenter had forgotten how ghastly a driver Rhodes was; he kept overriding the car brain, imposing his own goofy judgment at every traffic interchange, and left a trail of astounded fellow drivers in his wake, honking madly as he passed. Hard to see how you could get lost between Frisco and Sausalito, Carpenter thought, a straight shot right across the bridge, but Rhodes kept managing to do it. The glowing colored map on his dashboard would say one thing, Rhodes persisted in saying another. The car didn’t like that and the dash lit up with warning lights. Rhodes overrode them. His little expression of power.

Rhodes was smart, yes, and had lived in Berkeley long enough to believe that he knew his way around in the bigger city across the bay: but the car, old as it was, really was smarter, within its special area of competence, and it had an utterly accurate San Francisco grid in its memory tank. It went on patiently guiding Rhodes out of the western ends of the city into which he constantly seemed to be compulsively drifting, and back toward the bridge. And somehow they all survived the trip, even the overloaded and doubtless exasperated car brain; and the restaurant, nestled cozily away on a hillside above the walled-in Sausalito waterfront, gave them the warm welcome of regular customers.

Indeed the view was spectacular: the whole northern side of San Francisco, rising out of the bay in a dazzling brilliance of a million lights, and the floodlit splendor of the bridge.

Drinks arrived almost at once. Rhodes was very good at arranging for that, Carpenter was discovering.

“I want to make it understood,” said Enron, “that the magazine is paying for this, for everything, tonight. You should not stint yourselves at all.” As the foreign guest, he had a seat facing the picture window. “What a beautiful city, your San Francisco. It reminds me very much of Haifa: the hills, the white buildings, the foliage. But of course it is not so dry and dusty in Haifa. Not nearly. You have ever been in Israel, Dr. Carpenter?”

“Just Mr. Carpenter, please. And no, no, never.”

“So beautiful. You would love it. Flowers everywhere, trees, vines. Of course all of Israel is beautiful, one big garden. A paradise. I weep when I must leave it for another place.” Enron gave Carpenter a look of astonishingly intense scrutiny. His eyes were dark and fathomless and glittering with curiosity, his face angular and taut, closely shaven, the earliest black bristles of what was surely a dense Assyrian beard already poking through the carefully and recently scraped skin. “You are with Samurai Industries also, I understand? In what capacity, may I ask?”

“Salaryman Eleven,” Carpenter said. “Hoping to make Ten, one of these days. I’ve been up north, working as a weatherman, and now I’m about to ship out as captain of a trawler that brings icebergs to shore for the San Francisco Public Utility District. San Francisco doesn’t have all the rainfall that you people in the Middle East do.”

“Ah,” Enron said. Carpenter saw something click shut behind his eyes. The glitter of curiosity left them. End of Enron’s moment of interest in Mr. Salaryman Eleven Carpenter of Samurai Industries.

The Israeli turned to Jolanda, who was sitting between him and Carpenter. “And you, Ms. Bermudez? You are an artist, is this correct?”

Enron was interviewing everybody, it seemed.

“Mainly a sculptor, yes,” she said, giving Enron another tremendous smile. She must have had fifty teeth just in front. Her face was round, full, pretty, with a wide mouth and those great bulging hyperdexy eyes standing out wondrously. “I work in bioresponsive materials, mainly. The viewer and the work of art are linked in a feedback loop, so that what you see is modified by who you intrinsically are.”

“How fascinating,” said Enron, all too plainly not meaning it. “I hope to experience your work very closely.”

“I also do modern dance,” she said. “And I’ve written a little poetry, though I wouldn’t really call it very good, and of course I’ve acted. I was in Earth Saga in Berkeley last summer, outdoors, along the seawall. It was quite a great event for all of us, as much of an incantation as it was a theatrical performance. An incantation designed to protect the planet, I mean.

“We were attempting to place the audience in tune with the deeper cosmic forces that hold us in their grasp at every moment but which are so rarely apparent to us. I hope to perform it again in Los Angeles during the winter.” Another wondrous smile, and she leaned toward Enron, giving him the full pheromonic blast.

“Ah,” Enron said again, and Carpenter saw a second click of disengaged attention. Doubtless the Israeli would be able to find Jolanda Bermudez of interest in one obvious way or another, but he clearly had heard all he needed to about her artistic endeavors. Carpenter’s own heart sank a little too. Jolanda was full of passion and energy, obviously, drug-induced or otherwise, and the notion that she might actually be a talented artist had cast a momentary aura of intense glamour over her; but Carpenter realized now that there was probably no talent here at all, very likely not even any basic ability of any sort, certainly not any common sense, just the old-fashioned nutty artiness that seemed to be a Bay Area tradition going back into the remote past. And the part about the incantation to protect the planet gave him a queasiness in the gut. Here was the future erupting about them at a mile a minute and she was still mumbling mantras out of an earlier century.

She was, all the same, a handsome woman. But Rhodes had warned him that she was screwed up, and Rhodes was probably in a position to know.

Isabelle jumped in, while Rhodes was signaling— already—for the second round of drinks, wanting to be told about Enron’s magazine, whether it was published in Israeli or Arabic, or both. Enron explained to her, with what was probably great restraint, for him, that the language spoken in Israel was called Hebrew, not Israeli, and went on to let her know that Cosmos was, of course, published primarily in English, like all important magazines throughout the world. But its readers, he said, always had the option, with a single keystroke, of having Arabic or Hebrew text come up on the visor instead. Unbelievable as it might seem, said Enron, there were still some people in the remote reaches of the vast Judaeo-Islamic world who had not yet achieved full reading comprehension in English.

“Mostly Arabs, I suppose,” Isabelle said. “There still are a lot of backward Arabs, aren’t there? Like medieval people in a high-tech world?”

It was too obvious an attempt at flattery. Enron responded with a flash of contempt in his eyes and the quickest, bleakest of smiles. “Actually, no, Ms. Martine. The Arabs proper are all quite sophisticated. You must really learn to distinguish between Arabs and speakers of the Arabic language, you see. I was referring specifically to our readers in the agricultural regions of the northern Sudan and the Sahara, who are Arabic-speaking Islamics, but certainly not Arabs in any true way.”

Isabelle looked flustered. “We know so little, here, of what things are really like in other parts of the world.”

“Indeed,” said Enron. “This is true. A great pity, the insularity of this country. I feel sorry for America. Ignorance is dangerous, in such difficult times as these. Especially the kind of ignorance that displays itself in triumphant complacency.”

“Perhaps we ought to order dinner,” Rhodes put in, sounding strained. “If I might make a few recommendations—”

He made more than a few. But Carpenter observed that Enron was paying almost no attention to anything Rhodes was saying. His eyes were already on the menu; he had punched choices of his own into the restaurant’s data system long before Rhodes had finished. There was a certain abrasive charm about the fellow, Carpenter decided: he was gloriously offensive, all the bad things you had heard about Israeli rudeness and arrogance rolled into one—practically a stage Israeli, a ballsy little guy with such totally excessive self-esteem that you began to