“No?”
“Kyocera will indemnify.”
“Nice,” Carpenter said. “I’m very glad for you, Nick. Go over there and genetify the hell out of things. Fix everything the way it needs to be fixed. A new human race that can breathe methane and drink hydrochloric acid. Do it, Nick. You and Dr. Wu.”
“I haven’t talked with Wu yet. He’s still up there on Cornucopia, retrofitting the crew for the interstellar trip.”
“Cornucopia?”
“The Kyocera research satellite. Practically next door to the place that—”
“Ah,” Carpenter said. “Yes.”
Neither of them spoke for a time.
“What a shitty thing. Valparaiso Nuevo.”
“Yes.”
“Isabelle still hasn’t even begun to cope with it. Jolanda was her best friend.”
“I know,” said Carpenter. “What vitality that woman had! I can’t believe she’s—”
“No. Neither can I.”
“I saw it blow up. Sat there on the shuttle, watching it, thinking, Jolanda, Enron, Davidov. And all those thousands of other people. But mainly Jolanda. Jolanda. Jolanda.”
“Don’t talk about it, Paul. Don’t even think about it.”
“Sure.”
“You certain you don’t want a drink?” Rhodes asked.
“Listen, if you’d like to have one—”
“Not me. You.”
“I don’t dare touch it. I had a hyperdex overdose while I was up there. Only thing that saved my life, but it ruined my nervous system for a long time to come.”
“Hyperdex? Saved your life?”
“A long story,” Carpenter said. “Farkas decided he needed to kill me, and Jolanda tipped me off and gave me some of her pills, and—oh, shit. Shit, Nick I don’t feel like talking about it at all”
“You shouldn’t,” Rhodes said.
It was unbearable, he thought, to see Carpenter this way, this dazed, woozy shell of a man, this wreck. But Carpenter had been through so much, the iceberg thing, the firing, the trip across the country, the L-5 explosion —
They sat in silence again for a while.
The thing about a friendship that goes back this many years, Rhodes told himself, is that when a moment comes when it’s more appropriate not to say something than to say something, you can just keep your mouth shut. And the other one will understand.
But after a time it was impossible for him to sustain the silence. Quietly Rhodes said, “Well, Paul? What now? Do you know?”
“Yes. I do.”
Rhodes waited.
“Back to space,” Carpenter said. “I’ve got to get out of here. Earth is fucked, Nick. At least it is for me. I have nobody here but you. And Jeanne, I guess, but I don’t really have her. And I don’t want to mess her up any more than she already is, so the best thing I can do is to leave her alone, I don’t want to stick around and watch things continue to fall apart here.”
“They won’t,” Rhodes said. “We’re going to fix them. Or rather, we’re going to fix ourselves so that we can handle what’s about to come down.”
“Fine. You do the best fix you can, Nick, and more power to you. But I’ve got to get out of here.”
“Which habitat will you go to?”
“Not a habitat. Farther.”
“I don’t understand,” Rhodes said. “Mars? Ganymede?”
“Farther, Nick.”
Rhodes was baffled, at first. Then, gradually, he moved Carpenter’s words around in his mind and began to extract some sense from them.
“The starship project?” Rhodes asked, incredulously.
Carpenter nodded.
“For God’s sake, why? Aren’t the L-5s far enough away?”
“Not nearly. I want to go as far as it’s possible to go, and then go even farther than that. I want to get the hell away. Purge myself of all that’s happened. Start over.”
“But how can you? The starship project—”
“You can do it for me. You can get me in there. It’s a Kyocera thing, Nick. And as of Monday you’re a very high-level Kyocera scientist.”
“Well, yes,” Rhodes said, though he was taken aback by the idea. “I suppose—I will have some influence there, yes. But that’s not what I mean.”
“What do you mean, Nick?”
Rhodes hesitated.
“You really want to be part of the crew?”
“Yes. Isn’t it clear that that’s what I’m saying?”
“Well, then,” Rhodes said. “Consider, Paul. The eyes—”
“Yes. The eyes.”
“You want to be turned into a thing like Farkas?” Rhodes asked.
“I want to get away from here,” Carpenter replied. “That’s the essential thing. All the rest is peripheral. Okay, Nick? You’ve got it now? Good. Good. I want you to help me. Pull strings for me, Nick Pull strings like you’ve never pulled before.”
There was passion in the content of what he was saying, Rhodes thought, but none in his tone. Carpenter seemed like a man talking in his sleep: his voice was flat, affectless, eerie in its tranquillity. Rhodes was frightened by it.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he heard himself saying.
“Yes. Do.” The ghost smile again. “It’s for the best, Nick.”
“If you think it is.”
“It is. I know so. Everything always works out for the best, Nick. Always.”
29
carpenter sat back in his gravity cradle, watching the satellite world of Cornucopia come spinning up into view just ahead. He felt wondrously calm. He felt like a sailor who has passed through the grandfather of all storms and now is moving across a placid sea as still as glass.
It was all arranged. Nick Rhodes had done it all: notifying the powers that be at Kyocera that he had a nominee to fill the vacancy in the starship crew now that Farkas was dead, and making it be known that he expected his new company to take the nomination seriously. Then miraculously maneuvering the cashiered Samurai man Paul Carpenter into position for the opening despite all the difficulties that that involved, guiding him through the entry interview and everything that had followed. And now, sending him up to Cornucopia, where the members of the crew were being prepared for their strange voyage.
“Look,” someone said across the aisle. “There’s the habitat that blew up. The wreckage of it.”
Carpenter didn’t look. He knew that there was a gigantic mess scattered all over the L-5 zone, that pieces of Valparaiso Nuevo were orbiting every which way and that mop-up crews would be collecting bodies for months to come, as well as trying to get the biggest chunks of debris turned around and shoved into trajectories that would take them toward the sun before their orbits decayed and dumped them down on Earth. But he didn’t want to see
