Hot Sky at Midnight

in your body. Isn’t that so?”

“That is so. I would do it all over again, if I had the chance,” Wu said.

“Ah. Yes, that’s what I thought.”

“So now you know what you already knew. Will you kill me now? I think your Kyocera-Merck will be displeased if you do.”

“No,” Farkas said. “I’m not going to kill you now, or later either, for that matter. I just needed to hear you say what you just said. Now I want to hear one thing more. Did you get any pleasure out of what you were doing?”

“Pleasure?” Wu sounded utterly baffled. “It was not something I was doing for pleasure. The concept of pleasure never entered into it at all. It was research, do you understand? It was a thing that I did because I needed to know if it could be done. But pleasure? The word has no application.”

“A pure technician. A dispassionate seeker after truth.”

“I am not required to listen to your mockery. I will ask them to take you out of here.”

“But I’m not mocking you,” Farkas said. “You really have integrity, don’t you, doctor? Defining ‘integrity’ as the quality of being of a single consistency, of being of an undiluted substance, a oneness. You are completely and totally what you are. That’s good. I understand you a lot better, now.”

Wu was utterly motionless, scarcely seeming even to be breathing. Shining cubical block of black metal, rising out of pyramidal copper-colored pedestal.

Farkas said, “You had no emotional involvement at all in what you did to me. You got no kind of sadistic joy out of it. As you said: there was a thing you needed to find out, so you simply did what you had to do to get your answers. And so there’s no reason why I should take it personally. Right? Right? I never existed as a person in your eyes at all. I was only a hypothesis. I was a problem in biological algebra to you, something that had to be solved, an abstract intellectual challenge. For me to want to get revenge against something like you would be like wanting to get revenge against a hurricane or an earthquake or a landslide or any other impersonal force of nature. They just come along and do to you what they do, but there’s nothing personal in it, and no reason why you should get angry at them for wiping you out. You can’t forgive a hurricane either, though, can you? The memory of what happened sticks with you. But you have to just pick yourself up and dust yourself off and tell yourself that you had the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and then you go on with your life.”

It was perhaps the longest speech Farkas had ever made. His voice was in ragged shreds by the time he was finished; and he wanted nothing more than to go somewhere and lie down.

Wu was still staring at him in that frozen way. Farkas wondered if Wu understood. If Wu cared.

He said to the Level Twenty, “All right, I’m done here now. You can take me to my chamber.”

A chamber was what it was, too, a palatial cubicle about three meters long and a meter and a half high, suitable only for lying down and stretching out. But that was all he wanted to do now anyway.

An icon was flashing, telling him that there was a coded message waiting for him in the message niche. He accessed it and discovered that he was being assigned right back to Valparaiso Nuevo. To investigate, it said, the rumors of a coup d’etat, a plot to overthrow Generalissimo Callaghan.

Don’t say anything to anybody, he was told. Just drift around the place and listen to things, and let us know what’s going on, if in fact anything is.

The message didn’t name any source for the rumor. The most probable one was Colonel Olmo, who after all was K-M’s main man on Valparaiso Nuevo, but why, then, hadn’t the Company instructed Farkas to check in with Olmo first thing? Did the Company no longer trust Olmo, or had the coup rumor reached them from some other direction, or was it just a case of the right hand not giving a damn about the left? In any event, there didn’t seem to be much substance to Olmo’s notion that the Company was somehow involved in the plot itself. The Company seemed to be as much in the dark about it as Olmo was himself.

Hi-ho. The most likely possibility, Farkas thought, was that there was no coup conspiracy at all, just some vaporous cloud of disinformation floating around the system. Or else that it really was being put together by a bunch of free-lancers from Southern California with no corporate affiliation of any kind, as Olmo had been told. Well, maybe so. A crazy scheme, all right. But there would be billions in it if it worked.

Farkas caught the morning shuttle back to Valparaiso Nuevo. A horde of eager couriers came swarming around him when he arrived, but Farkas amiably shook them all off and made his own way back to the San Bernardito Hotel in Cajamarca, where he was able to check back into the room he had vacated the day before. He liked the view there, that rimside room, facing out toward the stars. And the Earth-one gravity pull that the town of Cajamarca enjoyed was very pleasing to his Earth-one-type musculature.

He took a long shower and went out for a stroll.

What a nice place this is, Farkas thought. He was getting used to the atmosphere of it, now. All that bright, clean air, giving you that terrific oxygen zap with every inhalation. You could get drunk on air like this. He pulled it deep into his lungs, playing with it, trying to analyze it with his alveoli, separating out the individual molecules of CO₂ and nitrogen and oxygen.

This stuff could spoil you fast, he knew. It wasn’t going to be easy, going back to Earth and Earth’s poisonous, corrupting air. To return to life as a dinko, a mudcrawler, a shitbreather, whatever the L-5 people called those who were condemned to live out their lives on the unfortunate mother world. But no one seemed to be in any hurry for him to head back to Earth just yet.

That was good. Good. Take your time, enjoy yourself, have a little holiday in outer space. Carry out an extremely thorough investigation of the supposed conspiracy against the government of Generalissimo Callaghan.

There was a cheerful cafe at the upside end of Cajamarca not far from the hotel. It was right under one of the shield windows, with a fantastic view of Earth and moon that afternoon. Farkas took a seat out front and ordered a brandy, and sat back, drinking slowly. Maybe one of the conspirators would come up to him while he sat here and offer to sell him some useful information.

Sure. Sure.

He sipped his brandy. He sat and waited. Nobody offered to sell him anything. After a while he went back to his room. Put some soft music on. Made the subtle mental adjustments that were his private equivalent of closing his eyes. It had been a pretty full few days, and he was tired. A little downtime was in order, Farkas told himself. Yes. Yes, definitely, a little downtime.

10

the port of Oakland was a crazy maze of gray steel structures on about fourteen different levels. Carpenter, with his identification plaque strapped to the palm of his open upraised hand for easy display to every laser scanner he met along the way, went from level to level, up one and down the next, following the portentous instructions of invisible metallic voices, until at last he came to the waterfront itself, ashimmer in a bright green haze of midday heat. He saw dozens of vessels sitting placidly atop the tranquil slime-covered estuary like sleeping ducks drifting in the shallows. His own ship, the Tonopah Maru, had reached San Francisco this very morning after its journey up the coast from the San Pedro shipyard in Los Angeles. It was in port over here on the Oakland side of the bay—San Francisco’s own piers had been purely tourist arcades for a century or more—and on this hot grimy afternoon of near-lethal atmospheric inversions, greenish-brown air pressing down like a fist out of a concrete sky and breathing-masks mandatory even in wonderful San Francisco, Carpenter had taxied over there to meet his crew and take formal command.

On the waterfront level he found not merely the expectable array of blinking laser scanners, but an immense square-headed robot guarding the approach to the piers like Cerberus before the gates of hell. It turned slowly to face him.

“Captain Carpenter checking in,” he told it. “Commander of the Tonopah Maru.” It all sounded so terribly self-important that he had to fight to keep from laughing at his own pomposity. He felt like a character out of Joseph Conrad: the earnest young skipper, taking command for the first time, confronting the bored old salt who had seen it all a thousand times and didn’t give the slightest fraction of a damn.