Hot Sky at Midnight

“Mind if I get to work on them, then?”

He handed over to Hitchcock the little blue data-cube that they had given him at the briefing center that morning. It was, Carpenter knew, a kind of formal ceremony of taking charge: officially giving his navigator the route software, the defining program for their voyage. Of course Hitchcock must already know approximately where they were supposed to go, and was probably capable of getting them there the way mariners had been getting around in the Pacific since the time of Sir Francis Drake and Captain Cook. They hadn’t needed computers, and most likely neither did Hitchcock. But turning over the data-cube to the navigator was the modern-day equivalent of the conference before the mast on the eve of sailing, and that was okay with Carpenter: he took some mild pleasure out of being the inheritor of ancient tradition.

A sea captain. Odysseus, Vasco da Gama, Columbus, Magellan. Captain Kidd. Captain Hook. Captain Ahab.

Hitchcock went away and left him alone in his tiny cramped cabin. Carpenter stowed his gear, jamming things into the storage holds as efficiently as he could. When he was done with that he put through a ship-to-shore call to Nick Rhodes at the offices of Santachiara Labs.

“You can’t imagine the luxury of my quarters,” he told Rhodes. “I feel like J. P. Morgan aboard his yacht”

“I’m very happy for you,” Rhodes said bleakly.

The visor screen on Carpenter’s cabin communicator wasn’t much bigger than a postage stamp, and the resolution was low-grade black-and-white, like something out of electronic antiquity. Even so, Carpenter could see that Rhodes’ face looked dour and disheartened.

“Actually, I’m lying absolutely and totally,” said Carpenter. “The place is claustrophobia city. If I had a hard- on I wouldn’t be able to turn around in here. —What’s wrong, Nick?”

“Wrong?”

“Plain as the nose on your face on my visor. Come on, you can be straight with me.”

Rhodes hesitated.

“I’ve just been talking to Isabelle.”

“And?”

Another little pause. “What do you think of her, Paul? Really.”

Carpenter wondered how far he wanted to get into this. Carefully he said, “A very interesting woman.” Rhodes seemed to want more. “Probably extremely passionate,” Carpenter added, after a bit.

“What you really think, I said.”

“And deeply dedicated to her beliefs.”

“Yes,” said Rhodes. “She certainly is that.”

Carpenter paused one moment more, then decided to drive on forward. You owe your friends the truth. “Her beliefs are all fucked up, though. Her mind is full of dumb messy ideas and she’s spilling them out all over you. Isn’t that the problem, Nick?”

“That’s it exactly. —She’s driving me crazy, Paul.”

“Tell me.”

“Last night, we get in bed, I reach for her—I always reach for her, it’s as natural as breathing for me when I’m with her—but no, no, she wants to talk about The Relationship. Not about me, not about her, but The Relationship. Right at that very moment, no other time will do. Says that my work is endangering The Relationship.”

“I’d say that that might be true. Which is more important to you?”

“That’s the whole thing, Paul. They’re equally important. I love my work, I love Isabelle. But she wants me to leave Santachiara. Doesn’t quite put it on a basis of either-you-quit-or-we-break-up, but the subtext is there.”

Carpenter tapped the front edge of his teeth with his fingernails.

“Do you want to marry her?” he asked, after a little while.

“I’m not sure. I don’t think much in terms of marrying again, yet. But I want to stay with her, that’s for absolutely sure. If she insisted on my marrying her, I probably would. I’ve got to tell you, Paul, the physical side of this thing is like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. I start to tingle all over as soon as I come into the room where she is. My crotch, my fingertips, my ankles. I can feel something like a kind of radiation coming from her, and it sends me right into heat. And when I touch her—when we start to make love—”

Carpenter studied the visor gloomily. Rhodes sounded like a lovesick college kid. Or, worse, like a screwed- up obsessive erotomaniac adult.

“I tell you, when we make love—you can’t imagine— you simply can’t imagine—”

Sure. He listened to Rhodes going on and on about Isabelle Marline’s fantastic sexual appeal, and all he could think of was that huge frizz of uncouth red steel-wool hair and those hard, implacable, neurotically fierce eyes.

“All right,” Carpenter said finally. “So you have the serious hots for her. I can understand that, I guess. But if she wants you to give up your work—” Carpenter frowned. “Because it’s evil, I suppose? All that bilge about turning the human race into nasty, spooky Frankenstein monsters?”

“Yes.”

Carpenter felt anger beginning to rise in him. “You know as well as I do that that’s just standard antiscientific bullshit of the kind that people of her nitwit mind-set have been handing out since the beginning of the industrial revolution. You told me yourself that she admits she doesn’t see any alternatives to adapting. And yet she continues to lambaste you for working for Santachiara. Jesus, Nick. Brilliant scientists like you ought to have more sense than to get emotionally involved with people like that.”

“It’s too late, Paul. I already am.”

“Right. She’s cast a spell over you with her magic vagina, which is of utterly fantastic pleasure-giving ability and unique and irreplaceable, so that you could never find its equal if you were to search the whole length and breadth of the female sex, and therefore you’re incapable of—”

“Please, Paul.”

“Sorry,” Carpenter said.

Rhodes smiled sheepishly. “I admit that I’m hung up on her in a stupid way. I am, and that’s the shape of things, and so be it. I also understand very clearly that her political ideas are simplistic know-nothing nonsense. The trouble is, Paul, that in a certain sense I agree with her.”

“What? You really have fucked yourself up, haven’t you? You agree with her?”

“Not that it’s wrong to be using genetic engineering to help us cope with all the bad stuff that’s heading our way, no. Isabelle’s completely full of crap if she thinks that we can go on living on Earth without modifying the human race. It has to be done. We don’t have any option.”

“So where are you in agreement with her, then?”

Rhodes said, “Here’s the thing. The gene work that’s going on at Santachiara Labs is already far ahead of any research that’s being done elsewhere. Samurai has its corporate espionage division just like anybody else and the reports that I’m getting have me altogether convinced that we’re way out front. And the new work that I told you about last week that this kid Alex Van Vliet wants to do would be the clincher. I hate to say this, but Van Vliet’s notion, wild as it is, seems to hold better promise of helping the race cope with the environmental problems of the upcoming century than any scheme I’ve ever seen.”

“The hemoglobin idea.”

“That’s the one. It’s still missing a couple of critically important breakthroughs, but who’s to say that the problems can’t be overcome? As you know, I’d simply like to deep-six his whole project, because it scares me, but I can’t. I simply can’t. Not without running decent simulations and some actual lab work. It sounds corny, but my conscience won’t let me kill it a priori, without testing.”

“That’s all right. It’s okay to have a conscience, Nick.”

“I have some reservations about his concept, not just the moral ones I was telling you about, but technical ones too. I’m not at all sure it’s really doable, or, even if it is, whether it ought to be done. But I’m very conservative in these things. I’m getting a little elderly for making big speculative jumps. It’s possible that I’m a hopeless stick-in-the-mud and Van Vliet is a true genius. The only way to find out whether he is