had ever touched. He wondered if she had had herself covered in something synthetic. There were women who did that. “What about him? What do you know about his work?”
“Nothing,” she said. “God’s honest truth, Marty.” He had told her to call him “Marty,” because “Meshoram” sounded too alien for her. She giggled. Maybe the idea of being an espionage source had some appeal for her. “I’d tell you what I knew, if I knew anything, but I don’t. You should have made a pass at Isabella instead, if that’s what you were after. Nick tells her things, sometimes, about his work. But she doesn’t pass them along to me, not so they would be of any use to you. I just hear bits and patches.”
“Such as?” He ran his hand lightly along the curve of her breast. She shivered and wriggled a little. “Come on,” he said. “Such as?”
She closed her eyes for a moment and seemed to be thinking.
“Well, that they have some young guy there who’s working on a big breakthrough, something to do with changing our blood so that it’ll be green instead of red. And other changes beyond that. I don’t know what they are. I really don’t. —Here, have some more wine. It’s nice, isn’t it? Green blood! Better than having to drink green wine, I guess.”
Enron pretended to sip the wine. Green blood, he thought. Some sort of hemoglobin adjustment? But he realized that she was telling the truth: she knew nothing. Probably it was useless to pursue the details.
Nevertheless he said, “Do you know this other scientist’s name, the younger one?”
“No. Isabelle might. You ought to talk to her.”
“She is a very difficult woman. I think she might not want to cooperate with me.”
“Yes,” Jolanda said, peering into her wine. “Most likely you’re right. After all, if Israel wants to develop its own adapto technology, and you’ve come here to find out what Samurai has actually achieved along those lines, then by helping you, she’d be helping the cause of adapto technology. And you know how she feels about that.”
“Yes.”
“Me too, for that matter. I think it’s tremendously scary. Frankly, it gives me the creeps.”
They had been through all this before. Enron forced himself to be patient with her. “But if it is necessary, the adapto, the only step left to us for the preservation of human life on Earth—”
“Is it so important that the human race remain on Earth, if Earth is so terribly fucked up? We could all emigrate to the space habitats, after all.”
He gave her some more wine. The sun had set now; the sky was swiftly turning black. Across the bay the lights of San Francisco were coming on, twinkling in the dense haze. Casually Enron’s hand roamed Jolanda’s generous body: breasts, belly, now her knee, now sliding up along her thigh. Such foreplay seemed to loosen her tongue, he thought. Or maybe it was loose all the time. He went on touching her regardless. She sat with her head thrown back, her eyes closed. One of the cats jumped up beside him and began to rub its head against his elbow. He knocked it away with a quick sidewise nudge.
Quietly he said, “We love our land. We fought for centuries to possess it. We would not want to leave it now, not even for some New Israel in the sky.”
“The Japanese left their land. The rich ones did, anyway. They’re scattered all around the world, now. They loved their country as much as you love yours. But they’re gone. If they could go, why can’t you?”
“They left, yes, because their islands were flooded by the rising seas. They lost all their fertile land and most of their cities, and nothing but barren mountaintops remained. They would never have gone otherwise. They would still be clinging to every rock. But they had no choice but to go. Just as we once left Israel to go into exile, long ago, two or three thousand years ago, because we were forced to by our enemies. And then one day we returned. We struggled, we suffered, we built, we fought. And now we live in the Garden of Eden. The sweet rains fall, the desert plains have turned green. We will not leave again.”
“What good is staying, though, if everything is going to change so much?” Her voice had grown eerie and thin, as though it came from far away. “If we all turn ourselves into weird mutant adapto creatures, will any of us still be human? Can you still be a Jew if you have green blood and gills?”
Enron smiled. “There is nothing in the Bible, I think, about what color our blood must be. Only that we must obey the law and live honorable lives.”
She considered that for a time.
Then she said, “And is it honorable to be a spy?”
“Of course. It is a very old tradition. When Joshua made ready to lead us across the Jordan, he sent two spies into the land on the other side, and they returned to tell Joshua that it was safe to go across, that the people on the other side were petrified with terror because they understood that the Lord had given their land to the Jews. The names of those two spies are not mentioned in the Bible. They were the first secret agents.”
“I see.”
“And even to this day we send our people forth to search out dangers,” Enron said. “There is nothing dishonorable about that.”
“You people see enemies everywhere, don’t you?”
“We see dangers.”
“If there are dangers, there have to be enemies. But the age of war between nations is in the past. There are no enemies any more. We’re all allies now in the struggle to save the planet. Can it be that the enemies you people are worrying about are all in your imaginations?”
“Our history teaches us to be cautious,” he said. “Three thousand years of being driven from place to place by people who disliked us or envied us or merely wanted to turn us into scapegoats. Why should it be any different today? It would be foolish of us to assume that the millennium has arrived.” Enron felt himself on the defensive, suddenly. It was an unfamiliar sensation for him. He was here tonight to ask questions, not to answer them. She was very persistent, though. He took a deep gulp of the dreadful wine. “The Assyrians massacred us. The Romans burned our temple. The Crusaders blamed us for the death of Christ” The wine was going down more easily, now. “Do you know of the death camps that the Germans built for us in the middle of the twentieth century?” he asked. “Six million of us died for nothing more than being Jews. The survivors went to Israel, then. All around us were Muslims who hated us. They swore to finish the job that the Germans had begun, and several times they attempted to do it It is not easy to live a quiet and productive life, when just on the other side of the river is an enemy who has decreed a holy war against you.”
“But that was a long time ago. The Arabs are your friends now.”
“It is nice to think so, isn’t it? Well, their oil wealth is gone, and although our region is more fertile now than it was before the climate changed, their lands are greatly overpopulated, and so they can no longer afford the luxury of the holy war that they would probably still like to wage. So they have turned to their suddenly acceptable Israeli neighbors for technological and industrial assistance. We are all friends now, yes. We are partners. But that can always change. As things get worse and worse on Earth, those who lack our advantages may decide to turn on us. It has happened before.”
“How terribly suspicious you people are!”
“Suspicious? But there is everything to suspect! And so we remain ever alert. We send our agents everywhere, sniffing out trouble. We worry about the Japanese, for example.”
“The Japanese? Why?”
Enron realized that he was getting a little drunk. Which was also something that was very unusual, for him.
He said, “They are a hateful people. I mean, full of hatred. They have such great wealth and yet they are miserable exiles. Living their isolated, paranoid lives in their little super-protected enclaves here and there around the world, sealed away behind their walls, bitter about having been driven from their homes, hated by everybody else for their money and their power but hating back even harder, because their hatred is fueled by such enormous resentment and envy. And the ones they hate more than anyone are us Israelis, because we too were exiles once but we were able to go home, and it is a beautiful home, and because we are strong and enterprising and we are challenging them now for positions of power all over the world.”
His hand had still been exploring the region between her thighs. Now she clamped her legs closed on his wrist, not so much to prevent him from going further as just to hold him pleasantly in place. Did she want to talk or to make love? Perhaps both at once, he thought. The two things seemed to be related, for her. She was a manic talker—the drug she uses causes that, he thought, the hyperdex—and a sexual maniac as well. I should stop all
