Hot Sky at Midnight

blood. Carpenter saw that he was bleeding too, at the knuckle, where he’d hit a tooth. Hitchcock continued to stare at him, the way you might stare at a tyrannosaurus that had just stepped out of the forest. Then his look of astonishment softened into something else, sadness, maybe. Or was it pity? Pity would be even worse, Carpenter thought. A whole lot worse.

“Cap’n—” Hitchcock began, his voice hoarse and thick.

“Don’t say it. Just go and get the engines started.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, man.”

He went slouching off, rubbing at his lip.

“Caskie’s picking up an autobuoy SOS,” Rennett called from somewhere updeck.

“Nix,” Carpenter yelled back angrily. “We can’t do it.”

“What?”

“There’s no fucking room for them,” Carpenter said. His voice was as sharp as an icicle. “No way. Nix.”

He lifted his spyglass again and took another look toward the oncoming dinghies. Chugging along hard, they were, but having heavy weather of it in the turbulent water. He looked quickly away, before he could make out faces. The berg, shining like fire, was still oscillating. Carpenter thought of the hot winds sweeping across the continent over there to the east of them, sweeping all around the belly of the world, the dry, rainless winds that forever sucked up what little moisture could still be found. It was almost a shame to have to go back there. Like returning to hell after a little holiday at sea, is how it felt. But that was where they were going. And, like it or not, he was going to leave these people behind in the sea.

Sometimes you had to make lousy choices, just to cope with the circumstances. That was all there was to it, Carpenter thought. Life was tough, sometimes downright rotten. And sometimes you had to make lousy choices.

He turned. They were staring at him, Nakata, Rennett, Caskie, everybody but Hitchcock, who was on the bridge setting up the engine combinations.

“This never happened,” Carpenter told them. He felt numb. He tried to push what had occurred out of his mind. “None of this did. We never saw anybody else out here. Not anybody. You got that? This never happened.”

They nodded, one by one.

There was a quick shiver down below as the tiny sun in the engine room, the little fusion sphere, came to full power. With a groan the engine kicked in at high. The ship started to move away, out of the zone of dark water, toward the bluer sea just ahead. Off they went, pulling eastward as fast as they could, trying to make time ahead of the melt rate. It was afternoon, now. Behind them the other sun, the real one, lit up the sky with screaming fury as it headed off past them into the west. That was good, to have the sun going one way as you were going the other.

Carpenter didn’t look back. What for? So you can beat yourself up about something you couldn’t help?

Home, now.

Back to the wonderful world of North America in the greenhouse age.

This fucking lousy world, Hitchcock had said. Yeah. This berg here, this oversized ice cube, how many days’ water supply would that be for San Francisco? Ten? Fifteen? And then what? Go and get another one? And every berg you took was water that somebody else wasn’t going to be able to have.

His knuckle was stinging where he had split it punching Hitchcock. He rubbed it in a distant detached way, as if it were someone else’s hand. Think east, he told himself. You’re towing two thousand kilotons of million-year-old frozen water to thirsty San Francisco. Think good thoughts. Think about your bonus. Think about your next promotion. No sense looking back. You look back, all you do is hurt your eyes.

19

by the time Enron returned to the hotel, late in Valparaiso Nuevo afternoon, everything was tidy, the bed tightly made, not the slightest hint in the air of the smell of lust or sweat. You would think that no one other than Jolanda had been in the room since morning. Enron had met with Kluge, who had had no luck so far finding Davidov or any of the other Los Angeles people, and then had gone off rambling restlessly around the habitat world for hours, killing time, sitting in cafes, randomly poking his nose in here and there, waiting until it was safe for him to go back.

“Well?” he asked Jolanda. She had changed her clothing since lunchtime: she was wearing a brightly colored kaftan now, bedecked with iridescent lateral sworls of green and pink and yellow that defiantly accentuated the amplitude of her body. Fatigue was evident in her face: coming down off her most recent hyperdex high, Enron figured. “What was it like, fucking a man who has no eyes?”

“Marty—”

“Please. We are not children, you and I. You brought him here; the room has a bed and a door that locks; I understand what must have taken place. That was the idea, was it not? For you to bring him here under the pretense of measuring him for a sculpture, and to go to bed with him?”

“It wasn’t a pretense,” Jolanda said, with some heat in her tone. She was sitting by the window with her back to the awesome view, the black backdrop and the blazing panoply of stars and planets and swiftly moving L-5 worlds. “I actually did measure him. I quite legitimately intend to do a portrait of him. Look—look here—” Jolanda indicated a little stack of data-cubes. “All the measurements are here.”

“Did he tell you what you look like to him? You know, everything is just geometry to him. A very strange geometry.”

“He said I was beautiful.”

“Yes. So you are. He told me, once, how a certain woman looked to him, and I have never forgotten it. This was the other time when we met, when we were at that conference in Caracas, the one about taking molybdenum and beryllium out of seawater. The woman was from Peru, Chile, one of those countries, and she looked something like you, as a matter of fact, big like a cow up here, a very big woman all over, not fat, exactly, but well furnished and extremely—”

“Marty, I don’t care.”

“We were sitting by the pool, Farkas and I, and she came up out of the water like Aphrodite, do you know? A very generous Aphrodite, done by Rubens. With the breasts out to here, and the arms that were as thick as thighs, and the thighs even bigger, but everything very finely shaped and in perfect proportion, just big. Rather like you. And I said something to Farkas, a comment about her body, forgetting for the moment that he has no eyes, and he just laughed, and he said, ‘For me she is somewhat different.’ I think he said that the way she looked to him was like three barrels set on their sides and tied with a flaming cord. Or maybe five barrels. But that was very beautiful to him, he said. Each person looks entirely different to him, you know, an altogether individual shape. The information he gets with his senses, it is not like the information we take in.” Enron smiled. “I’m glad he thought you were beautiful. You are, you know. Much like that woman in Caracas. And you are wonderful in bed. As I am sure he discovered.”

“Do you know what you look like to me right now?” Jolanda asked. “A wolf. A little lean wolf with green eyes and dripping fangs.”

“Would you like to make a sculpture of me? Here: take my measurements too. Right now!” He began to undo his belt.

“This is lousy, Marty. I can’t stand a jealous man. If you didn’t want me to go to bed with him, why did you throw me at him like that?”

“Because I wanted to get certain information. And that seemed like the most efficient way of getting it. Surely you understood that?”

“I suppose I did, yes,” she said. “Now that I think about it a little.” She shot him a fiery look. “But do you understand that I never would have considered doing it except that I found him attractive? I’m not a toy to be passed around, Marty. Or a piece of bait. I wanted to sleep with him. And I did. And I’m glad that I did! I enjoyed it tremendously.”

“Of course you did,” Enron said, changing his tone from one of harsh banter to a softer, more placating one.