Hot Sky at Midnight

“You grew up together?”

“In Los Angeles, yes.”

“He envies you tremendously, you know.” She tossed her underwrap aside, stretched, inhaled, enjoying her nakedness. Heavy breasts, heavy thighs, dimples everywhere, a torrent of dark fragrant curling hair: the torrid Latin look, Carpenter thought. Voluptuous. Nice.

“Envies me?”

“Totally. He told me all about you. How much he admires your freewheeling intellectual outlook, the way you aren’t tied down by all sorts of moral qualms.”

“You’re telling me that he thinks I’m amoral?” Carpenter asked.

“He thinks you’re flexible. That isn’t the same. He admires your willingness to adapt quickly to difficult situations, to moral complexities. He wishes he could do that as easily as you do. He ties himself up in knots all the time. You seem to cut right through them.”

“I hadn’t thought of myself as such a free spirit,” said Carpenter. He came up alongside her and ran his hand lightly down her spine. Her skin was amazingly smooth. He found that pleasing. Many people, lately, had had their skins retrofitted to help them cope with the killer crackle of the ozone-deficient air. It usually didn’t help them much; and they came out of it looking and feeling like lizard-hide luggage. But Jolanda Bermudez had skin that felt like the skin of a genuine female human. Carpenter liked it very much. And the soft resilient flesh beneath it, too.

She said, “What a great man Nick is, isn’t he? So brilliant, so serious-minded. How devoted he is to the task of finding a solution to the terrible problems the world faces! Isabelle gives him an awfully hard time.”

“I think he may prefer women who give him a hard time.”

She didn’t take any notice of that. “And I try not to let her see it, but there are times when I disagree with Isabelle’s condemnation of Nick’s research program. It may just be our only way out, much as I hate to admit it. Even though I do think that emigrating to L-5 is probably our best bet, I privately hope and pray that it’ll be possible for the human race to stay here on Earth, don’t you? And Nick’s answer may be the only one. That is, if we can’t find some way of reversing the terrible damage that we’ve done to the ecology. The work that Nick is doing —”

She was wide-awake, full of verbal energy. Carpenter was afraid that she was going to start in on the need to protect the planet all over again. The hyperdex, he thought. It must keep her jazzed up all the time. He saw that he would have to fuck her in self-defense, before she became too oratorical. With gentle insistence he drew her down on the bed, and eased himself up against the cradle of her soft and creamy body, running his hands up her sides and over her breasts, and covered her mouth with his. It proved to be an effective way of changing the subject.

9

the kyocera-merck research satellite Cornucopia was just a short hop away from Valparaiso Nuevo, a matter of a couple of hundred kilometers. One of the innumerable bright dots that danced through the nearby reaches of L-5 space, one of the myriad twinkling jellyfish in the ocean of night.

Farkas was supposed to go over to Cornucopia to pick up the details of his next assignment, and in any case he wanted a chance to talk with Dr. Wu a little before he left the satellite zone. Surely they would let him have a little chat with Dr. Wu, he thought. He figured they owed him that much; but just to be safe Farkas put it on a need-to-know basis, as though what he wanted to learn from Wu was something that another division of K-M had asked him to find out. That was more likely to produce results than a simple request for a personal favor.

He waited on Valparaiso Nuevo a couple of days, to give them a chance to get their new acquisition properly settled in over there. Then he booked a flight across to Cornucopia for himself, taking the midday shuttle that made a regular daily daisy-chain circuit through the neighboring group of habitat worlds.

No nonsense about visas here. Authorized personnel only: you couldn’t get a ticket to Cornucopia in the first place unless you were going there on legitimate Company business and they were expecting you. Even then, you weren’t allowed off the shuttle until the passenger manifest had been checked at the Cornucopia end and they had formally agreed to receive you.

A reception committee was waiting for Farkas in the docking bay: a short man and a tall woman. The man looked, to Farkas, like a series of yellow spirals arranged around an inverted green cone; the woman was a single vertical flow of soft-textured blue fabric. Farkas didn’t quite catch their names, but decided it didn’t matter. The man was something on the technical side, but obviously nothing very important, and the woman introduced herself as a Level Twenty administrative executive. You didn’t need to bother learning the names of Level Twenties, Farkas had discovered long ago.

“There’s an assignment document waiting for you, Mr. Farkas,” the Twenty said right away. “It’s in your logistics box. You can access it from your accommodation chamber.” She seemed to be fighting to keep from flinching at his strangeness.

“Thank you,” Farkas said. “I also requested an interview with Dr. Wu. Do you have any information about that?”

The Twenty looked uncertainly at the technical-side guy. “Paolo?”

“Affirmative. Subject Wu is to be made available for a meeting with Expediter Farkas upon his demand.”

“Good,” Farkas said. “I so demand. Now.”

The Twenty seemed troubled by the swiftness of his response. “You want to see Dr. Wu now? Before we even take you to your accommodation chamber?”

“Yes,” he said. “If you don’t mind.”

“Well,” the Twenty said. “Of course. No problem, Mr. Farkas. She’s in a security dorm, you understand. I’ll need to do an access notification. It’ll take just a minute, though.”

She, Farkas thought. Well, yes. To these people, Wu was a she. He would have to reprogram his own way of thinking about him, he saw, or there would be confusion.

The Twenty had walked a little distance off and was busy with a terminal, tapping in codes. Obtaining immediate access to Wu for him took a little longer than she had promised. There were complications, evidently. But eventually she got it.

“If you’ll come this way, Mr. Farkas—”

Cornucopia was very different from Valparaiso Nuevo: stark, functional, a place of pure industrial texture, a lot of bare girders and struts and other such structural things showing everywhere. Even by way of blindsight, Farkas could see and feel the difference at once. No fountains here, no waterfalls, no lush vines and banana trees, just lots of austere Company hardware at work. All sorts of research went on up here. It was cheaper to build an entire space satellite from scratch than to try to provide a properly clean laboratory on Earth. Scientific research required pure air and water. And of course there was the advantage of variable gravity aboard a satellite world, very useful, so Farkas had heard, in certain areas of scientific work.

Paolo and the Level Twenty led Farkas through a series of security locks and barrel-shaped vaulted corridors and finally to a sort of vestibule where an android guard asked Farkas for a drop of blood in order to check his serum print against the Company archive, apparently to make sure that he was really who he claimed to be, and not some impostor who had had his eyes removed in order to get in where he didn’t belong. The android didn’t give a damn how unlikely that might be, or that Farkas was a Nine, with all the prestige that that carried. He had his orders. Your finger, please, sir.

Well, so be it, Farkas thought, obligingly offering his finger. He was used to surrendering drops of blood for identification purposes. The usual Company mode of identification check was by way of retinal-print scanning. But they couldn’t very well do that with him.

The android drew Farkas’s blood in a brusque and businesslike way and put it under a scanner.

“Identification confirmed,” the android reported, in a moment. “You may go inside, Expediter Farkas.”

Wu was being kept in a containment area that seemed to be something more lavish than a prison cell,