green and black with broad sickening stripes of dismal crud surrounding the great ugly staring eye of the sun, and the air, hot and moist, clung to the streets like a heavy furry blanket. Even through the mask, Carpenter could feel the pungent atmosphere tickling his nostrils like a fine wire probing upward. He was relieved to see a bubble-bus pull up almost immediately. Quickly Carpenter jumped aboard, shouldering in hard among the other masked figures to make a place for himself, and in ten minutes he was back in his hotel room.
He tossed his face-lung aside and threw himself down fully clothed on his bed, too wound up to go to sleep.
Some world out there, he thought. A kitchen sink full of ecological disasters falling on us for a hundred years, falling and falling and falling. Eutrophication. Red tide. Spontaneous diebacks. Outbursts of mutagenesis, just as spontaneous. Drowned coastlines. Mysterious whirlwinds and thermal upheavals. Fermenting acres of dead vegetation, killed by heatstroke and pickling now under the merciless sun. Insect hordes on the march across whole continents, gobbling everything in their way, leaving great scars across the land as the mark of their passage. A host of random environmental effects popping out all over the globe, effects whose causes were not immediately apparent any more, were in fact essentially discontinuities. The underlying damage had been well and thoroughly done a long time ago. The seeds of a continuing and constantly exfoliating disaster had been planted. And now the crop was coming up everywhere.
It was worst in the middle latitudes, the temperate zone, once so fertile. Rain almost never fell at all there now. The dying forests, the new grasslands taking over, deserts where even the grass couldn’t make it, the polar ice packs crumbling, the washed-out bright white hazy sky striped with the gaudy stains of the greenhouse pollutants, the lowlands drowning everywhere, crumbling dead buildings sticking up out of the sea. And of course there were other places where the problem was too much rain instead of not enough. Carpenter thought of that as the revenge of the rain forest: the conquest of places that once had had pleasant warm climates by unending rainfall and stifling wet heat that turned them into humidity-choked jungles, vines sprouting on freeways, monkeys and alligators migrating northward, weird tropical diseases getting loose in the cities.
It occurred to him that if he had been kidding himself about the upcoming movements of the toxic cloud and Seattle and Portland wound up getting trashed next week, McCarthy would have his neck in the noose in two minutes. A scapegoat would be needed and he would be it. And instead of moving up to the iceberg job he’d be sliding downward to some sort of menial crap in a part of the world so dreary it would make Spokane seem like a paradise.
The Company offered you lifetime employment if you toed the line, but any hint of irresponsibility, of nihilistic deviation from proper practice, and you were done for. You didn’t get fired, no: firings were very, very rare. But you lost your upward momentum, and once you did that you almost never regained it. So he had gone out on a limb a little, here. A smart slope-seeker would never have been so definite about proclaiming that a favorable shift in air patterns was in the cards: he had completely neglected to cover his ass, he realized.
But what the hell. He had faith in his prediction. You just had to go with your intuitions, sometimes.
Even so, when Carpenter turned up at the office the next day, after lying atop the bed like an off-duty zombie for twelve hours, it was with a certain apocalyptic feeling that he was going to find everybody gathered grim-faced in the doorway, waiting to truss and bind him for execution the moment he walked in. He was wrong. McCarthy was beaming from ear to ear. His eyes were aglow. He absolutely radiated warmth and pride.
“So?” Carpenter asked.
“All’s well! You were right on the target, Paul. A direct hit. A genius is what you are, man. A fucking genius, you old son of a whore! Christ, we’re going to miss you around here, aren’t we, guys? Aren’t we?”
It seemed that the weather charts had confirmed Carpenter’s intuitive conclusions. Normal cyclonic processes had finally reasserted themselves during the night and all the diabolical Midwestern sky-garbage that had been poisoning the air over the Mountain States was about to be swept back across the Continental Divide to its point of origin. McCarthy couldn’t have been happier. He said so in five or six different ways.
But there was no celebration, no champagne. McCarthy wasn’t capable of a lot of benevolence; and all too obviously he had had to work himself up with significant effort in order to manage this hearty little display of quasi-paternal delight. Almost at once the warmth drained out of him and Carpenter could see the cold anger that lay just behind it. Was it the envious anger of a stalemated and fucked-up failure over the triumphant achievement of a brilliant underling? Or just his annoyance over the defection of a valuable employee? Whatever it was, McCarthy switched modes quickly, turning chilly and brusque, and the party was over before it had begun.
Time to get back to business as usual, now.
A replacement for him, Carpenter was told, was coming in next week from Australia. Carpenter would have to do up a complete outplacement document, fully outlining the parameters of his official responsibilities here, before he would be free to make the changeover to his new job.
Fine. Fine. One outplacement document, coming right up. He set to work.
Later in the day, when McCarthy was on his lunch break, Carpenter made his first contact with the trawler- division people who were taking him on. A woman named Sanborn, Salaryman Nine at the Samurai Headquarters Pyramid in Manitoba. She had the calm, easy voice of a home-office roundeyes who knew that she had it made: quite a contrast to Ross McCarthy’s sour bilious gloom, Carpenter thought.
“You’ll have an outstanding crew,” Sanborn told him. “And the
“I can handle it,” Carpenter said.
A few weeks of paid idleness in San Francisco? Why not? He had grown up in Los Angeles, but he had always been fond of the cooler, smaller northern city. The sea breezes, the fog, the bridges, the lovely little old buildings, the glittering blue bay—sure. Sure. He’d be glad to. Especially after Spokane. There were people he knew in Frisco, old friends, good old friends. It would be great to see them again.
An exhilarating sense of new beginnings swept through Carpenter like a cooling wind. God bless Jeannie Gabel, he thought. I owe her one, for steering me toward this gig. His first shore leave he would head off to Paris and treat her to the best dinner money could buy. Or the best he could afford, anyway.
The surge didn’t last long. Such upbeat feelings rarely did. But Carpenter relished them while they were passing through. You took what joy you could find wherever you found it. It was a tough world and getting tougher all the time.
Getting tougher all the time, yes. Ain’t it the truth.
3
“the man’s name is Wu Fang-shui,” Juanito said. “He’d be about seventy-five years old, Chinese, and that’s pretty much all I know, except there’ll be a lot of money in finding him. There can’t be that many Chinese on Valparaiso Nuevo, right?”
“He won’t still be Chinese,” Kluge said.
Delilah said, “He might not even still be a he.”
“I’ve thought of that,” said Juanito. “Even so, it ought to be possible to trace him.”
“Who you going to use for the trace?” Kluge asked.
Juanito gave him a cool steady stare. Coming from Kluge, who was a consummate pro and constantly wanted to keep everybody else aware of it, the question was virtually a slur on his capabilities as a courier.
“Going to do it myself,” Juanito said.
“You?” A quick flicker of a smile.
“Me, myself. Why the hell not?”
“You never did a trace, did you?”
“There’s always a first,” Juanito said, still staring.
He thought he knew why Kluge was poking at him. A certain quantity of the business done on Valparaiso Nuevo involved finding people who had hidden themselves here and selling them to their pursuers, but up till now
