Hot Sky at Midnight

and fierce but his manner, as Jolanda had indicated, was gentle, at least superficially. Enron understood, though, that with Davidov the gentleness had to be all on the surface.

He embraced Jolanda first, swallowing her impressive body into an encompassing bear hug, crushing her against him and even lifting her a little way from the ground.

Then his vast hand enfolded Enron’s. His grip seemed to be a test of virility. Enron knew how to cope with that sort of thing: he let his fingers go limp while Davidov mangled his bones, then returned the squeeze with equal ferocity. It wasn’t necessary to be a giant to manage a significant handshake.

Davidov introduced the bespectacled man: Avery Jones, he said. The manager of the farm. With an expansive gesture Davidov indicated the extent of the rabbit farm, swinging his beefy arm from horizon to horizon. Of course, on Valparaiso Nuevo that was no great distance. “Isn’t this a fabulous place! Up to your ass in rabbits, here. A thousand ways to cook the little buggers, they have.” The unyielding Bolshevik eyes focused sharply on Enron. They were as cold and hard as stone. “Come on inside and let’s talk. Israeli, are you? I knew an Israeli woman, once, from Beersheba. Aviva, her name was. A real ball-buster, but smart as hell. Aviva from Beersheba. Where are you from in Israel, Marty?”

“Haifa,” Enron said.

“Work for a magazine, do you?”

“Let us go inside,” Enron said.

The bespectacled rabbit farmer tactfully disappeared. When they were inside the farmhouse Enron waved aside the offer of a beer and said quickly, “May we dispense with the social preliminaries? I am an official representative of the state of Israel, at quite a high level. I am aware of the plan which you propose to put into effect.”

“So I gather.”

“It is a plan that my country finds of great interest.”

Davidov waited.

Enron said, “We are, in fact, prepared to make a financial investment in your activities. A considerable financial investment, I should add. Shall I continue, or is taking on another outside investor not of any importance to you?”

“Another outside investor?” Davidov said. “Who’s the first one?”

Enron glanced troubledly toward Jolanda. She seemed to be smiling.

“I am aware,” he said, speaking very slowly and clearly, “that the Kyocera-Merck corporation already has made a substantial contribution to your operation.”

“You are? I’m not.”

A little nonplussed, Enron said, “I have discussed the matter with a highly placed Kyocera representative, who assured me—”

“Yes. I saw you with him. If he assured you of anything involving his company and us, he’s lying.”

“Ah,” Enron said. “Indeed.” This was very confusing. Breathing deeply, he rocked lightly back and forth on the balls of his feet, trying to recover his poise. “So there is no Kyocera-Merck connection with—”

“None. Zero. Zilch. Kyocera isn’t in it. Never has been.”

“Ah,” Enron said again. Jolanda’s smile was unmistakable now, ear to ear.

But he was equal to the situation. In that first moment of bewilderment, recollected fragments of his conversation with Farkas earlier this morning went rushing through his mind, and though for an instant Enron felt as though he was being carried along on them like a swimmer being borne to a cataract, he very quickly succeeded in snatching order from chaos.

He saw now that he had jumped to the wrong conclusion. But so had Farkas.

They had been talking at cross purposes earlier, Enron realized. The Hungarian hadn’t been offering Israel a slice of the deal at all. Obviously Farkas believed for some reason that Israel already controlled the deal, and had been trying this morning to cut Kyocera-Merck in for a piece. Suddenly everything was standing on its head. There were opportunities to be seized in that, Enron thought.

Calmly he said, “Tell me this, then: Are you interested in outside financial backing for your plan at all?”

“Very much so.”

“Good. I am in the position of being able to provide it for you.”

“Israeli money?”

“Half from Israel, half from Kyocera-Merck.”

“You can bring Kyocera in?” Davidov asked.

It was like standing before a great abyss. Enron leaped blithely across it.

“Absolutely,” he said.

“Sit down,” said Davidov. “Let’s have a beer and talk about this a little more. And then maybe we all need to go back down to Earth and do some more talking there.”

22

the rain gave out before Carpenter was much more than fifty miles east of San Francisco. There was a sharp line of demarcation between the coastal deluge and the dry interior. Behind him lay a realm of black downpour and overflowing gutters; but when he looked ahead, facing into the swollen and bloodshot eye of the sun rising above the Sierra foothills, he could see that everything still remained in the grip of the endless drought.

He was driving into a terrain of arid slopes, rounded and tawny, with the isolated green domes of huge old oak trees standing on them like sentinels, and blue valleys shrouded by shimmering dust shadows. Above the entire scene was a vast and uncompromising sky marked only intermittently by fleecy patches of clouds. The bizarre deluge that had been pelting the Bay Area and the rest of the coastal strip for the last few days would bring no gain to San Francisco’s water supply. The main reservoirs were inland, here in the mountains and foothills; and none of the rain was falling on them, no stores of snow would be locked up in the high country for use later on.

Everything was very quiet out here. Industrial pollution had strangled most of the suburban towns in this part of the Sacramento River Valley, and the depletion of the water table during the years of drought had finished off the agricultural communities beyond them. Still farther east, Carpenter knew, lay the ghost towns of the Mother Lode, and then the awesome, gigantic mountain wall of the Sierra; and on the far side of that was the grim wasteland that was Nevada. Once he crossed the mountains he would be driving through utter desert for a day and a half.

And yet—and yet—

It was beautiful here, if you could find beauty in solitude and aridity. With the death of the suburbs and the farms had come a reversion to an almost prehistoric tranquillity in the Sacramento Valley. This was how it might have looked a thousand years ago, Carpenter thought—except for the Pompeii effect of nineteenth- and twentieth-century building foundations and dry-wall boundary markers scattered all about, a multitude of intersecting shin-high grayish-white lines cutting across the dry grassy fields and hillocks like faint stains on the land, the almost imperceptible traces of the buildings that once had been there. But even those had a certain peaceful antique charm. Footprints of antiquity, clues to a vanished world. And the air out here, still and clear, seemed almost to be the air of some earlier century.

Carpenter wasn’t deceived. This quiet air was as deadly as the air anywhere else. Deadlier, even, because the toxics never got blown away, here in this zone of unvarying atmospheric stagnation, they simply piled up and remained, and if you stayed around here long enough they would rot your lungs right out of your chest for you. You could see it in the trees of this pastoral region, if you took the trouble to look closely. The weird angles of the boughs, the spikiness of the twigs, the sparse and twisted leaves, all manner of genetic deformities induced by hundreds of years of ozone deficits, the buildup of aluminum and selenium traces in the soil, and other exciting forms of environmental bombardment.

The air and soil and water of our world, Carpenter thought, have become a culture medium for antilife: a zone of negative fertility, blighting whatever it touches. Perhaps some new mutant form of un-life would eventually