Hot Sky at Midnight

him tremendously for what he’s accomplished. But I just don’t want to see the whole world turned into a zoo full of weird adaptos. There’s been enough genetic fooling around already, all the retrofitting and baby-splicing and everything. The sex-changing stuff, the cosmetic body-modeling. And now to have every fetus automatically altered into some grotesque kind of creature with gills and three hearts and I don’t know what—”

Isabelle shook her head. “For one thing, we can’t afford to do it. There are too many other problems that we need to solve for us to have the luxury to go into any project as far out as that. For another, I think it’s horrible. It would mean the end of humanity as we know it. You change the body, you change the mind. That’s a law of nature. It’ll be a new species coming forth, God only knows what. Not human any more. Some kind of hideous, evil, bizarre thing. We can’t do that to ourselves. We just can’t. I love Nick, sure, but I hate what he and his people want to do to the human race.”

“But if the human race is no longer able to survive on Earth as we are presently designed—?” Enron asked.

“Fix the world, then. Not the species.”

“I wonder, Isabelle,” said Jolanda Bermudez in the same dreamy lady-from-space voice as before. “It just may be too late for that, I sometimes think. You know, sweet, I don’t really care for Nick’s research any more than you do, and I agree with you that it ought to be stopped. But not because it’s evil, only because it’s a waste of time and money. There’s no reason for us to turn ourselves into things with gills, or whatever. Our real hope, I do believe, is in the habitat worlds.”

“Ms. Bermudez—” Enron said.

But she rolled right on. “Personally I’ve done everything I can think of to protect the Earth, through my work, my art, and I don’t intend to give up the effort now. But I’ve started to realize that possibly it’s no use, that we may have damaged it beyond repair. So we may have to leave, and that’s the honest truth. Like the expulsion from Eden, you know? I think I mentioned that I know people who are very deeply involved in the whole habitat culture that has evolved up there in orbit. L-5 is the coming place. I hope to emigrate there myself, before long.”

Isabelle said, “You never told me—”

“Oh, yes. Yes.”

“Ladies, please,” Enron said.

But it was all beyond the Israeli’s control. Jolanda, who seemed to be able to hold three or four contradictory beliefs at the same time without the least difficulty, had tossed a new ball into play. They went on and on, arguing with Enron, with each other, with the environment, with destiny. Carpenter, watching as though from a great height, had to fight back laughter. The women were beating their various political tom-toms and Rhodes, drinking steadily, had passed into a kind of impassive stupor, not actually drunk—did he ever really get drunk⁷ Carpenter wondered—but simply glazed, detached, absent; and Enron was looking on in horror, undoubtedly having come to realize by now that he was going to get nothing useful out of this evening.

Carpenter felt sorry for Rhodes, mixed up with this ferocious and badly confused Isabelle: poor sad Nick, pussy-whipped yet again. He almost felt sorry for Enron, too. Whatever he had hoped to learn from Rhodes tonight was shrouded now in a haze of fuzzy polemic. It was nearly midnight. The Israeli made one last attempt to pin Rhodes down on the kind of genetic modifications his lab was working on; but Rhodes, vanishing fast into alcoholic nebulosity, offered him nothing but vague talk about restructuring the respiratory and circulatory systems.

“Yes, but how? How?” Enron kept asking. And got no coherent answers. The whole thing was hopeless.

Angrily the Israeli called up the check and clicked it with his flex terminal, and they all went out into the sticky night, wobbling a little from all the wine.

Even at this late hour, tangible bands of blast-furnace heat seemed to be pulsing out of the sky. A kind of chemical fog had settled over Sausalito, a dense pungent glop. It smelled like vinegar with an undertone of mildew and disinfectant. Carpenter lamented not having taken his face-lung with him tonight.

The dinner conversation resonated in his mind. The poor fucked-up world! All of human history seemed to rise up before him: the Neolithic world, the little farms and settlements, and Babylon and Egypt, Greece and Rome, Byzantium and Elizabethan England and the France of Louis XIV. All that striving, all that arduous movement up from the ape, and where had it ended up? In a civilization so highly advanced, Carpenter thought, that it had been able to make its own environment unlivable. A species so intelligent that it had invented a hundred brilliant ways of fouling its own nest.

And so—the grime, the pollution, the heat, the poisons in the air, the metals in the water, the holes in the ozone layer, the ruined garden that was the world—

Shit! What a marvelous achievement it all was! For a single species of fancy ape to have wrecked an entire planet!

While they waited at the end of the restaurant pier for Rhodes’ car to be brought out, Carpenter went over to him and said quietly, “I can drive, Nick, if you don’t feel up to it.” Rhodes was looking none too steady.

“That’s okay. I’ll just let the car take care of things. It’ll be all right.”

“If you say so. You can drop me off at the Marriott after you take Enron back to his hotel, I guess.”

“And Jolanda?”

“What about her? She lives in the East Bay, doesn’t she?”

“You could let her take the pod home by herself in the morning. That’ll be okay with her.”

“Nick, I haven’t arranged anything at all with her. I’ve hardly said a word to her all evening.”

“You don’t want her? She’s expecting it, you know. She’s your date.”

“Does that automatically mean—”

“With her it does. She’ll be very hurt. Of course, I can always explain that you’ve taken homosex vows since I last saw you, or something, and I can run her back to Berkeley tonight. But you’d be making a mistake. She’s a lot of fun. What’s the matter, Paul? Are you tired?”

“No. Just—ah, to hell with it. Don’t worry, I’ll gallantly play my part. Here’s your car coming up, now.”

Carpenter glanced around for Jolanda. She was standing at the water’s edge with Enron, gazing out at the shining track of light that led across the bay to San Francisco, and from the close way they were standing Carpenter suspected that he might be off the hook. She stood half a head taller than the short, powerfully built Israeli, but he was whispering to her in an urgent, intimate way, and her stance was certainly a responsive one. But then she turned away from him and gave Carpenter an expectant look, and he knew that whatever Enron had been up to just then did not involve this evening.

So he played out the familiar ritual, asking her if she’d like to stop off at his hotel for a late drink, and she fluttered her eyelids at him and gave him a little quiver of acceptance, and that was that. Carpenter felt foolish. And vaguely whorish, too. But what the hell, what the hell: he’d have plenty of time to sleep alone when he was out in the Pacific fishing for icebergs.

Rhodes put the car on autopilot and it got itself across into San Francisco without any problems. Jolanda nestled up comfortably against Carpenter during the drive as though they had spent all evening steadily building up to the consummation that awaited them. Perhaps they had, Carpenter thought, and he had simply failed to notice.

When the car reached Enron’s hotel, a venerable Gothic pile in Union Square, the Israeli took Jolanda’s hand before he got out, held it a long moment, kissed it flamboyantly, and said to her, “It has been a highly pleasant evening. I look forward very much to seeing you again.” He thanked Rhodes and even Isabelle, nodded to Carpenter, and bounded away.

“What a remarkable man,” Jolanda murmured. “Not nice, no, but certainly remarkable. So very dynamic. And such a grasp of world problems. I find Israelis to be fascinating people, don’t you, Paul?”

“Marriott Hilton next,” said the car. Rhodes seemed to have fallen asleep up front, his head on Isabelle’s shoulder. Carpenter wasn’t sleepy at all, but his eyes felt raw and achy, from the air, the tensions of the evening, the lateness of the hour. This was going to be a night of no sleep for him, he suspected. Well, not the first one. Probably not the last.

“Let’s not bother with the drink,” Jolanda said, in the Marriott lobby. “Let’s just go right upstairs.”

In Carpenter’s hotel room, as they were undressing, she said, “Have you known Nick Rhodes a long time?”

“Only about thirty years.”