Hot Sky at Midnight

“Hooks away!” Carpenter called. “Sharp! Sharp!”

Nakata waved an okay and put his hands to the keyboard. An instant later there came the groaning sound of the grapple-hatch opening, and the deep rumbling of the hook gimbals. Somewhere deep in the belly of the ship immense mechanisms were swinging around, moving into position. The great berg sat motionless in the calm sea.

It was a little like deep-sea fishing: the trick didn’t lie in hooking your beast, but in what you did with it afterward, when you had to play it.

The whole ship shivered as the first hook came shooting up into view. It hovered overhead, a tremendous taloned thing filling half the sky, black against the shining brightness of the air. Then Nakata hit the keys again and the hook, having reached the apex of its curve, spun downward with slashing force, heading for the breast of the berg.

It hit and dug and held. The berg recoiled, quivered, rocked. A shower of loose ice came tumbling off the upper ledges. As the impact of the hooking was transmitted to the vast hidden undersea mass of the berg, the whole thing bowed forward a little farther than Carpenter had been expecting, making a nasty sucking noise against the water, and when it pulled back again a geyser came spuming up about twenty meters.

Those poor bastards aboard the Calamari Maru weren’t going to like that. But they had chosen to stay in their anchorage while a hooking was going on, hadn’t they? What the hell did they expect, a teeriy splash or two?

Down by the bow, Nakata was making his I-got-you gesture at the berg, the middle finger rising high.

A cold wind was blowing from the berg now. It was like the exhalation of some huge wounded beast, an aroma of ancient times, a fossil-breath wind.

They moved on a little farther along the berg’s flank.

“Hook two,” Carpenter told him.

The berg was almost stable again now. Plainly there was more undercutting than they had thought, but they would manage. Carpenter, watching from his viewing tower by the aft rail, waited for the rush of pleasure and relief that everybody had said would come from a successful claiming, but it wasn’t there. All he felt was impatience, an eagerness to get all four hooks in and start chugging on back to the Golden Gate.

The second hook flew aloft, hovered, plunged, struck, bit.

A second time the berg slammed the water, and a second time the sea jumped and shook. Carpenter had just a moment to catch a glimpse of the other ship popping around like a floating cork, and wondered if that ice tongue they found so cozy was going to break off and sink them. It would have been a lot smarter of them to drop anchor somewhere else. But to hell with them. They’d been warned.

The third hook was easier.

One more, now.

“Four,” Carpenter called. A four-hook berg was something special. Plenty of opportunity to snag your lines, tangle your cables. But Nakata knew what he was doing. One last time the grappling iron flew through the air, whipping off at a steep angle to catch the far side of the berg over the top, and then they had it, the whole monstrous floating island of ice snaffled and trussed. Now all they had to do was spray it with mirror-dust, wrap a plastic skirt around it at the waterline to slow down wave erosion, and start towing it toward San Francisco.

All right, Carpenter thought.

Now at last he could take a little time to think about the goddamned squid ship and its problems.

13

the annunciator said, “Dr. Van Vliet is calling on Line Three, Dr. Rhodes.”

Quarter to nine in the morning. It was never too early for Van Vliet to start in on the day’s toil and trouble. A lot too soon, though, for Rhodes to start in on the day’s drinking. “Later,” he said. “I don’t want to take any calls just now.”

Rhodes had been in the office since just after eight, early for him. At the end of yesterday’s workday his desk had still been littered with unfinished items, and both virtual extensions had been loaded as well; and, as usual, things had come pouring in all night long for his urgent attention in the morning. The weather had taken a turn for the worse too: sweltering heat, well beyond the norms even of modern times, and scary Diablo winds blasting down out of the east, bringing once again the threat, now practically a weekly event, of stirring up devastating fires along the bone-dry grassy ridges of Oakland and Berkeley. The winds were carrying with them, also, an oppressive shitload of toxic fumes out of the valley stagnation pool, potent enough to cut acne-like pockmarks into the facades of stone buildings.

Aside from that, Rhodes had had a lousy night with Isabella the night before, and maybe three hours of sleep. It was an all-around wonderful morning. He was restless, irritable, swept by bursts of rage and confusion and occasionally something close to panic. For almost an hour now he had been spinning his wheels, accomplishing nothing.

Time to get to work, finally.

“Open, sesame,” Rhodes said stolidly, and Virtual One began to disgorge streaming ribbons of data into the air.

He watched it all come spilling out, aghast. Reports, reports, reports. Quantitative stuff about enzyme absorption from the Portland lab; a long stupid screed from one of the sub-departments dealing with a foredoomed project to provide senior citizens with lung implants instead of genetic retrofits; a formidable batch of abstracts and preprints from Nature and Science that he would never have time in this present life to deal with; a horrendous pile of crap about some employee arbitration hassle involving third-floor janitorial androids overstepping their stipulated spheres of responsibility; the minutes of a meeting at the Sao Paulo office of a Samurai subsidiary he had never heard of, the work of which evidently impinged in some unspecified way on his department’s area of operations. And on and on and on and on.

Rhodes felt like sobbing.

Somehow his job had become all administration, very little actual doing of science any more. The science around here was done by kids like Van Vliet, while Rhodes coped with the inundation of reports, budget requests, strategic analyses, dead-end schemes like the lung-implant business, et cetera, et cetera, all the while attending an infinity of petrifyingly dull meetings and killing the occasional evening trying to fend off the troublesome curiosities of Israeli spies. For after-hours amusement he engaged in bewildering corrosive strife with the woman he supposedly loved. Somehow this was not the life he had intended for himself. Somehow he had veered off course, that was obvious.

And the unthinkable heat today—the hard, malignant, abrasive air—the hot howling wind—

Van Vliet—

Isabelle—

Isabelle—

Isabelle—

Wild unfocused sensations swept him like a sudden fever. Some kind of explosion seemed to be building up within him. He found that frightening. It was days like this, Rhodes thought, that led otherwise peaceable men to jump off bridges or commit random acts of murder. Diablo winds could do that to you. They were famous for that.

My life is in need of fundamental change, he told himself. Fundamental change.

What kind of change was in order, though? The work? The Isabelle relationship? Paul Carpenter had told him to break up with her and to take a job with some other mega-corp. There was a lot of sense in both those suggestions.

But he simply wasn’t capable of the first, he thought, and the other was tempting but terrifying. Change jobs? Where would he go? How would he break free from Santachiara and Samurai? He was immobilized, tied hand and foot—to the Company, to Isabelle, to the adapto project, to the whole bloody mess.

He put his head in his hands. He sat listening to the wind.