Hot Sky at Midnight

11

enron said, “It is a beautiful place, where you live. Is it very old?”

“Mid-twentieth century,” Jolanda Bermudez told him. “Old, but not exactly ancient. Not like the old world, where everything’s five thousand years old. You like it?”

“So beautiful, yes. A quaint little cottage.”

So it was, in a way, Enron thought. A small ramshackle building on a narrow winding street high up on the hillside not far north of the university campus. It was definitely charming, with its little decks and odd outcurving windows and its mitre-saw filigree decorations along the roofline. Charming, yes: even though the paint was pocked and peeling from the constant onslaught of the chemical-laden air and the windows were so degraded for the same reason that they were starting to look like stained glass and the decks were swaybacked and lopsided and the shingles were coming loose and the garden in front was a shameless withered tangle of dry knotty weeds.

This was the third evening Enron had seen Jolanda in the past week, but he hadn’t come to her house before; she had preferred to go with him to his hotel in the city. His little fling with her had greatly enlivened his week in the United States. Of course she would undoubtedly begin to bore him, over any considerable span of time. But he wasn’t expecting to marry her, and he would be going back to Israel very soon now anyway. In the short run she had been just what he needed here, an undemanding companion and a complaisant, eager playmate in bed; and there was always still the possibility that he might actually learn something useful from her, on this otherwise largely wasted trip. A slender possibility, but it was there.

“Well? Shall we go in? I’m dying to have you experience my work.”

She was like a big prancing dog, Enron thought. Not very bright, in fact not intelligent at all, but extremely friendly and lively, and good company for a romp. A warmhearted, easy-natured person. Very different from most of the shrewd, hard-edged, keen-eyed Israeli women he knew, who prided themselves on being utterly clear- minded, who always had everything in its absolutely proper perspective, not caring that their souls had turned to ice.

He followed her through a dimly lit vestibule. The interior of the place was dark and cluttered and confusing, a murky maze of little rooms filled with wall hangings, sculptures, statuettes, weavings, brassbound chests, intricate veils dangling from pegs, tribal masks, posters, books, African spears, pieces from a suit of medieval Japanese armor, coiled loops of fiber-optic cable, stacks of data-cubes, carved screens, bells, old wine bottles festooned with colored wax, iridescent strips of hologram tape that stretched from wall to wall, odd ceramic things of uncertain function, items of antique clothing giddily scattered all about, bird cages with actual birds in them, visors flashing abstract patterns: a stupefying, overwhelming plenitude of bric-a-brac. All of it, so far as Enron could see, tasteless and absurd. He could smell the stale odor of burned incense in the air. Cats were meandering around everywhere, five, six, a dozen cats, a couple of Siamese and a couple of Persian and some that were of kinds he could not identify at all. Like their owner, they seemed afraid of nothing: they pushed up against him, sniffed him, nuzzled him, sharpened their claws on his leg.

“Well? What do you think?” Jolanda asked.

What could he say? He beamed at her.

“Fascinating. Delightful. Such a wonderful collection of unusual things.”

“I knew you’d love it. I don’t bring everybody here, you know. A lot of men, they simply don’t understand. They’d be turned off. But you—a man who’s traveled so widely, a cultured man, who appreciates the arts—” She flung her arms wide in her joy. Enron was afraid she would knock one of her artifacts flying across the room. She was a big woman: he might almost say intimidatingly big, if he were capable of being intimidated by anything, especially a woman. Ten centimeters taller than he was, at least, and probably twenty kilos heavier. Enron suspected that she was a hyperdex user: she had that overwrought look about the eyes. Drug use of any kind disgusted Enron. But what this woman did was no business of his, he told himself. He wasn’t her father.

“Come,” Jolanda said, taking him by the wrist and pulling him along. “My studio is next.”

It was a long low-ceilinged room in back, windowless, jutting into the hillside, no doubt something that had been added to the original structure. The clutter of her living area was not replicated here. The studio was empty except for three mysterious objects, large and of indeterminate shape, standing in a triangular array in the middle of the floor.

“My latest sculptures,” she said. “This one on the left is Agamemnon. On this side, The Tower of the Heart. And the one in back I call Ad Astra PerAspera.”

“I have never seen such work as this,” said Enron truthfully.

“No. I don’t think anything like it is being done anywhere else yet. It’s a new art form, strictly American so far.”

“And it is called—what did you say?—bioresponsive art? How does it work?”

“I’ll show you,” she said. “Here. You have to put the receptors on, first.” From a cupboard he had not noticed she produced an ominous handful of electrodes and bioamplifiers. “Let me do it,” she said, quickly taping things to him, putting some small device on his left temple, another right on the top of his head, reaching down into his shirt to stick one on his breastbone.

Go on, Enron thought. Put one between my balls, now.

But she didn’t. She affixed the fourth and last one at the midpoint of his shoulder blades. Then she was busy for a tune with some sort of electronic rig in the cupboard. He studied her thoughtfully, watching the movements of her unfettered breasts and meaty buttocks within the thin wrap that was all she was wearing, and wondered how long this demonstration of her art was likely to take. There were other things to do tonight and he was ready to get on to them. He could be patient indeed in the pursuit of a goal, but he didn’t want to consume the whole evening in these absurdities.

In a very minor way, too, Enron was uneasy about the electrodes and bioamplifiers. Unless he had completely lost his capacity for judging human beings, this woman was harmless, a mere silly innocent with ridiculous taste and a slipshod mind and the morals of a she-camel But what if he was wrong? If she was in fact a functionary of Samurai counterintelligence, and had cunningly set him up with the uninhibited use of her lusty energetic hips and dark musky loins for the sake of administering a brainburning here this evening?

Paranoia, he told himself. Idiocy.

“All right, now. We’re ready to go. Which one first?”

“Which what?” Enron asked.

“Sculpture.”

“The one in back,” he said at random. “Ad Astra Per Aspera.”

“A good choice to begin with,” she said. “I’ll count to three. Then you start walking toward it One—two —”

At first he saw nothing except the sculpture itself, an ungainly, unappealing-looking assemblage of wooden struts arranged at awkward angles with some sort of metallic armature visible within. But then something began to glow in the sculpture’s depths, and in another moment he became aware of a distinct psychogenic field beginning to kindle within him: a pulsation at the back of his neck, another in his belly, a sensation of odd disorientation everywhere. As though his feet were beginning to leave the ground, almost as if he was starting to float upward and outward, through the doorway that led to the main part of the house, up through the ceiling, into the hot muggy night—

Well, it was Ad Astra PerAspera, wasn’t it? So probably he was supposed to be experiencing a simulated star voyage, then. Upward and outward to the for galaxies.

But all Enron felt was the initial sense of rising. He went nowhere, he experienced nothing beyond a certain queasy strangeness in his nervous system. It was as if his starward impetus was limited, that he could journey only so far and no farther before he hit some kind of psychic wall.

“There,” Jolanda said. The sensations went away. “What did you think?”