Hot Sky at Midnight

This was such a beautiful world, Carpenter thought, before we messed it up.

He prayed again, vaguely, incoherently. Ave Maria, gratia plena. Ora pro nobis. Now and at the hour of our death. On us poor sinners.

Farther to the east there were mountains of an unfamiliar kind, long chains of narrow-ridged fangs, bright red in color as if they were glowing with some interior fire. They seemed incredibly ancient. Carpenter half expected to see prehistoric animals grazing in the flatlands below them. Brontosauruses, mastodons.

No dinosaurs, though. No mastodons. Not much of anything. Pebbles, a little weedy-looking grass, some skittering lizards, that was about it. He found what looked like an old reservoir that still held some water, and stopped and stripped for a bath, which he was coming to need very badly. The water looked safe to enter. And this early in the day he could risk letting his skin have a little extra solar exposure.

The pond was dark and deep and Carpenter thought the water might be too cold to enter, but it wasn’t, not especially. Tepid, in fact. But reasonably pure. There weren’t any chemical stains turning the surface iridescent, hardly any pond scum here, no alligators grinning up at him out of the depths, not even a frog in sight. A real novelty for him, actual outdoor bathing in genuine unpolluted water. It felt good to be clean again. A baptism, of sorts.

A few hours’ drive on the other side of those flaming gorges the countryside began to be populated again. Some pitiful scruffy farms, some miserable ramshackle houses, a few falling-down barns that looked five hundred years old. The inhabitants probably not very friendly. Carpenter went on through without stopping. Beyond the farms was a dusty town, and beyond that a city, which he bypassed. A dull gray haze lay over everything here. Even inside the sealed car, he felt a taste of interior-America heat, interior-America smog, outlying tentacles of the heavy oppressive mass of murk that pressed down everywhere on the midsection of the nation with brutal indifferent force. The air was like a fist, clamping close. He knew that if he stopped the car and stepped outside he would be struck by a blast of scorching Saharan torridity.

During the course of the morning he called Nick Rhodes, simply to tell him what had happened to him, where he was now, where he was heading. Carpenter hadn’t wanted to talk to Rhodes the day before, but now it seemed wrong simply to vanish like this, without a word to him. Otherwise, when Rhodes found out that Carpenter had been terminated by Samurai he might think that he had killed himself. Carpenter didn’t want that.

Rhodes’ office android informed him that Dr. Rhodes was in conference. A little relieved, Carpenter said, “Tell him that Paul Carpenter called, that I’ve left the Company as a result of certain recent events and I’m going to Chicago for a few days to visit a friend, and that I’ll be in touch with him again when I know what my plans beyond that are.” He sidestepped the android’s request for a number where he might be reached. For the moment this was about as far as he could go toward making contact with the life he had left behind him.

Carpenter was hoping now to reach Chicago late that night, or at the worst by dawn. The car didn’t ever get tired. All he had to do was sit still and let the miles float by in their merry hundreds. He didn’t have much in the way of food left now, but he didn’t have much in the way of appetite, either. Sit still, yes, let the miles float by.

He passed through long stretches of terrible wasteland: slagheaps, ashes, blasted heaths. Smoke was coming from the ground in places: the remains of ancient fires burning down there, the subterranean world mysteriously consuming itself. An entire dark forest of dead trees covering a long brown strip of sharp-spined hills, with a rusting ski-lift descending out of them like a bad joke. A dry lake. A zone of dead gray earth, a tangle of blackened and twisted wires, mounds of junked cars—in the background, the skeletal traces of some abandoned city, structural girders showing, window-frames like empty eye-sockets.

Things began to flatten out. The air was brownish gray. He was getting into dust-bowl territory now, the sad dry heart of the continent, where the vast farms once had been, before the summers became furnaces and the air went bad and the rain moved elsewhere. The spacious skies and purple mountain majesties were still there, yes, right there behind him in Utah and Wyoming, but now he was east of there, Nebraska, maybe even Iowa, and the fruited plain had gone to hell and he could find no sign of the amber waves of grain.

Yet people lived here. Through the deepening afternoon he saw the lights of towns and cities on both sides of the freeway. Why anyone would want to make his home in this place was more than Carpenter could understand, but he realized that they had probably had no choice about it, they had been born here and saw no hope of going anywhere better, or else they had been cast up by the waves of bad fortune on this beach without a sea, and here they were. Here they would stay. R.I.P.

But at least they had homes, he thought.

Carpenter wondered what he was going to do when this long grim odyssey from nowhere to nowhere and back again was finished, and he was ready to begin the next stage of his life. What next stage? Go where, do what? There was no place he could call his home. Los Angeles? He scarcely knew the place any more. San Francisco? Spokane? The Company had been his home, moving him around from Boston to St. Louis to Winnipeg to Spokane as it pleased. Wherever he might be, still he had always been in the Company.

And now he wasn’t. Carpenter could hardly begin to comprehend that. No slope at all. Off the curve entirely. Level Zero.

Imagine that, he thought. What an accomplishment. The first kid in your class to attain Level Zero.

Somewhere in the middle of Illinois, an hour or two west of Chicago, traffic began to back up on the freeway and the car told him there was a roadblock ahead. No vehicular traffic was being admitted to Chicago from the west or the south except through approved quarantine stations.

“What’s going on?” Carpenter asked.

But the car was only a cheap rental job, not programmed to provide anything more than basic information. The best it could do was flash him a map that showed a red cordon zone covering a vast swatch of the region from Missouri and western Illinois south all the way to New Orleans, and up the far side of the Mississippi from Louisiana to Kentucky and parts of Ohio. According to the car, the closest point of entry to the protected zone for travelers intending to reach Chicago was Indianapolis, and the vehicle proposed a detour accordingly.

“Whatever you say,” Carpenter told it.

He turned on the radio and got part of the answer. They were talking about an outbreak of something called Chikungunya in New Orleans and the fear that Guanarito or Oropouche might be spreading there too. Secondary occurrences were reported in the St. Louis area, they said. Carpenter had never heard of Chikungunya or Guanarito or Oropouche, but plainly those were the names of diseases: there must be an epidemic of some sort raging down south and the health authorities were trying to keep it from reaching Chicago.

When he reached Indianapolis, around mid-morning, he was able to learn the rest of the story at the quarantine station while he was waiting to be interviewed. The diseases with the long names were tropical viruses, he was told. They were emigrants from Africa and South America and had become rampant in the new rain forests of Louisiana and Florida and Georgia—carried in nonhuman hosts, spread by ticks and other disagreeable bugs, moved along by them into the bloodstreams of the myriad gibbering monkeys and innumerable giant rodents, themselves refugees from the rain forests that once had existed in the valleys of the Amazon and the Congo, that now infested the wet, steaming jungles of the South.

Everyone who lived in the new jungled regions had to be vaccinated constantly, Carpenter knew, as one virus or another went jumping from some animal that carried it into some hapless member of the human population, setting off yet another epidemic. But this was no rain forest, up here. Why were they worrying about jungle diseases like Oropouche and Chikungunya in the drier, cooler environs of Chicago?

“Bunch of infected monkeys got on a barge full of fruit coming up the Mississippi from New Orleans,” Carpenter was told at the quarantine station. “Some of them got off at Memphis and started biting people. The rest stayed aboard until Cairo. Memphis and Cairo are sealed off, now. We don’t know exactly which bug it is, yet, but they’re all bad. You get bitten, you puff up and turn into a bag of black blood, and then the bag breaks and what was in it runs along the floor like slime until it’s empty.”

“Jesus,” Carpenter said.

“We think we stopped the virus before St. Louis. If this stuff ever got to Chicago, the place would go up like a bonfire. Four million people all packed together like this? Disease that you can spread just by looking at someone the wrong way? Forget it! —Let’s see your route plaque, please.”

Carpenter turned the record of his journey over for inspection.

“No side trips to any part of eastern Missouri that don’t show up on the plaque? Any deviation into