Hot Sky at Midnight

“No, Marty. It’s too dangerous. You’ll just take advantage of whatever I tell you. I want you to take advantage of me in a different way.”

“Take advantage?”

“You ought to know what I mean. But here. I’ll give you a hint.”

She took him by the shoulders and pulled him down to the floor with her. They landed in a tangle of arms and legs, laughing, and he buried himself quickly in the billowing abundance of her. A hot mingling of aromas came upward from her, wine and desire and sweat and even, he thought, the smell of the Screen with which she protected her fantastic satiny skin. Good. Good. He lost himself in her. There had been enough talk for now, he thought. He had been holding himself back for hours, patiently playing the games of espionage with her, and now he allowed himself to put his profession aside for a little while.

“Oh, Marty,” she murmured, over and over again. He gobbled the heavy globes of her breasts as though they were melons and thrust with the zeal of a prophet wielding his lance into the mysterious and apparently infinite depths of her quivering cunt. “Marty Marty Marty.” She held her body tilted high, her legs far apart with her feet waving somewhere in the air behind him, and slammed her thighs steadily against the sides of his body with each of his jolting thrusts. Fucking this Jolanda was like exploring some unknown continent, Enron thought. So big, so moist, so strange, so full of wonders and novelties. It was always like that, for him, with a new woman. The Jewish Balboa, the Jewish Mungo Park, Orellana, Pizarro, plowing unceasingly onward through one uncharted hairy jungle after another in the eternal quest for the unknowable prizes at the core of their hot, throbbing hearts. But this one was a greater enigma than most. She was the mysterious kingdom of Prester John, the lost realm of El Dorado.

They lay side by side afterward, naked, sweat-shiny in the heat of the night, laughing softly.

“It’s too late to go anywhere for dinner,” she said. “I’ll make something here. Would that be all right?”

“Whatever you prefer,” said Enron.

“And then maybe you can take a look at the third sculpture, the Agamemnon. Would you like that?”

“Perhaps after a time,” he said vaguely. “Yes. Yes, perhaps so.”

She was very amusing, Enron decided. And more useful than he had suspected. This would not be their last night together after all, not if he could help it.

When they were washed and dressed and she was clanking around in the kitchen he called in to her, “What you told me, about the leaders of this plot having already gone to Valparaiso Nuevo: was it true?”

“Marty, please. I thought we weren’t going to talk about—”

“Was it?”

“Marty.”

“Was it, Jolanda? I have to know.”

Clattering sounds, pots and pans. Then:

“Yes. They’re up there already, some of them. As I said.”

Enron nodded slowly. “So, then. I have a proposition. Please treat it with great seriousness. How would you like to take a little trip to Valparaiso Nuevo with me, Jolanda?”

12

out here in the chilly zone of the southern Pacific, somewhere between San Francisco and Hawaii, the sea was a weird goulash of currents, streams of cold stuff coming up from the Antarctic and coolish upwelling spirals out of the ocean floor and little hot rivers rolling off the sun-blasted continental shelf far to the east. Sometimes you could see steam rising in places where cold water met warm. It was a cockeyed place to be trawling for icebergs, Carpenter thought. But the albedo readings said there was a big berg somewhere around there, and so the Tonopah Maru was there too.

He sat in front of the scanner, massaging the numbers in the cramped, claustrophobic cell that was the ship’s command center. It was midmorning. The shot of Screen he had taken at dawn still simmered like liquid gold in his arteries. He could almost feel it as it made its slow journey outward to his capillaries and went trickling cozily into his skin, where it would carry out the daily refurbishing of the body armor that shielded him against ozone crackle and the demon eye of the sun. You really had to load up on the infra/ultra drugs out here at sea, where the surface of the water reflected the light like a mirror and hurled it up into your face. Since leaving San Francisco, Carpenter had nearly doubled his regular dose of Screen, building up his armoring, and by now his skin had turned a shimmering iridescent greenish-purple. The effect was strange, but he liked it.

The voyage had gone well enough, so far, aside from the one little problem that they hadn’t yet been able to find any bergs. But it looked like that was solved, now.

“We got maybe a two-thousand-kiloton mass there,” Carpenter said, looking into the readout wand’s ceramic-fiber cone. “Not bad, eh?”

“Not for these goddamn days, no,” Hitchcock said. The oceanographer/navigator was old enough to remember when icebergs were never seen farther north than the latitude of southern Chile, and was always glad to let you know about it. “Man, these days a berg that’s still that big all the way up here must have been three counties long when it broke off the fucking polar shelf. But you sure you got your numbers right, man?”

The implied challenge brought a glare to Carpenter’s eyes, and something went curling angrily through his interior, leaving a hot little trail. Hitchcock never thought Carpenter had done anything right the first time. The tensions had been building up, day after day, since the day they had set out from San Francisco Bay. Though he often denied it—too loudly—it was pretty clear Hitchcock felt no small degree of resentment at having been bypassed for captain in favor of an outsider, a mere salaryman from the land-based sector of the Company. Probably he thought it was racism. But he was wrong. Carpenter was managerial track; Hitchcock wasn’t. That was all there was to it.

Sourly Carpenter said, “You want to check the visor yourself? Here. Here, take a look.”

He offered Hitchcock the wand. But Hitchcock shook his head.

“Easy, man. Whatever the screen says, that’s okay for me.” Hitchcock grinned disarmingly, showing mahogany snags.

On the visor impenetrable whorls and jiggles were dancing, black on green, green on black, the occasional dazzling bloom of bright yellow. The Tonopah Maru’s interrogatory beam was traveling 22,500 miles straight up to Nippon Telecom’s big marine scansat, which had its glassy unblinking gaze trained on the whole eastern Pacific, looking for albedo differentials. The reflectivity of an iceberg was different from the reflectivity of the ocean surface. You picked up the differential, you confirmed it with temperature readout, you scanned for mass to see if the trip was worth making. If it seemed to be, you brought your trawler in fast and made the grab before someone else did.

Back in Frisco, Carpenter knew, they were probably kneeling in the streets, praying for him to have some luck, finally. The lovely city by the bay, dusty now, sitting there under that hot soupy remorseless sky full of interesting-colored greenhouse gases, waiting for the rain that almost never came any more. There hadn’t been any rain along the Pacific seaboard in something like ten, eleven months. Most likely the sea around here was full of trawlers—Seattle, San Diego, L.A. According to Nakata the Angelenos kept more ships out than anybody.

Carpenter said, “Start getting the word around. That berg’s down here, SSW. We get it in the grapple tomorrow, we can be in San Francisco with it by a week from Tuesday.”

“If it don’t melt first. This fucking heat.”

“It didn’t melt between Antarctica and here, it’s not gonna melt between here and Frisco. Get a move on, man. We don’t want L.A. coming in and hitting it first.”

By midafternoon they had it on optical detect, first an overhead view via the Samurai Weather Service spysat, then a sea-level image bounced to them by a navy relay buoy. The berg was a thing like a castle afloat, stately and serene, all pink turrets and indigo battlements and blue-white pinnacles. The drydock kind of berg, it was, two high sides with a valley between, and it was maybe two hundred meters long, sitting far up above the water. Steaming curtains of fog shrouded its edges and the ship’s ear was able to pick up the sizzling sound of the melt effervescence that was generated as small chunks of ice went slipping off its sides into the sea. The whole