Hot Sky at Midnight Read online

  “No!” Isabelle Martine cried. “What a cowardly solution that would be! The thing we need to do is to stay here and regain control of our own environment!”

  “But there are those,” said Enron with merciless restraint, “who are convinced that evacuation is our only recourse. And so—secondly, if I may continue, Ms. Martine—we have filled the nearby zones of outer space with dozens, hundreds, of artificial satellite worlds with agreeable artificial climates, and built a few domed encampments on Mars and the moons of Jupiter.”

  “I do sometimes think the habitats are really the only answer,” Jolanda Bermudez said, dreamily cutting in once again. “I’ve often considered moving up there myself, if all else fails. Some friends of mine in Los Angeles are very interested in L-5 resettlement.” She seemed to be speaking entirely to herself.

  Enron, caught up in the momentum of his own monologue, ignored her. “The orbital settlements are a notable achievement; but each one has extremely limited capacity, and they are very costly to construct. Obviously we could never afford to transport the entire population of Earth to those small refuges in space. There is still another evacuation option, however, one which at the moment seems even less feasible: the proposal to discover and colonize a New Earth of planetary size in some other solar system, where human life can get a second chance.”

  Isabella snorted. “That’s just foolishness. A dumb crazy fantasy.”

  “Indeed, so it appears,” said Enron reasonably. “As I understand it, we have no workable stardrive, nor have we yet been able to discover any extrasolar planets, let alone one that would be suitable for human life.”

  “I’m not so sure of that,” Rhodes said, just barely at the threshold of audibility.

  Everyone turned to look at him. Rhodes, obviously disconcerted by the attention he had drawn to himself, hastily gulped the dregs of his most recent drink and signaled for yet another.

  “We have found a planet, you say?” Enron asked.

  “We have a stardrive,” Rhodes said. “May have, that is. I understand some considerable breakthroughs have been achieved lately, and that important tests are coming up.”

  “This stardrive—you say ‘we.’ It is a project of Samurai Industries, then?” Enron asked. He was perspiring, suddenly. His eyes revealed a greater degree of interest, perhaps, than he might have wanted to display.

  Rhodes said, “No, actually, I was using ‘we’ collectively, to mean the human race in general. In fact the rumor going around is that it’s Kyocera-Merck that is well along on some sort of a starship project. Not us.”

  “But surely Samurai would want to be involved in a similar project too,” said Enron, “if only to remain competitive.”

  “As a matter of fact, you’re probably right,” Rhodes said. And winced, as though someone had kicked him under the table. Carpenter saw him glower briefly at Isabelle. “I mean, there’s a rumor to that effect going around as well,” he said, after a moment, sounding newly evasive. “I wouldn’t really know whether there’s any substance to it. We hear things like that all the time. —Of course you understand that any kind of Samurai stardrive research would involve a completely different division of the company from mine.”

  “Yes. Yes, of course,” said Enron. He was silent for a while, poking purposelessly at the food on his plate, obviously considering the thing that Rhodes had allowed to slip out.

  Carpenter wondered whether there could be any truth to it. A stardrive? An expedition to some other solar system, a New Earth to be founded fifty light-years away? A fresh start, a second Eden. The notion momentarily dazzled him with its vastness.

  But Isabelle was right, for once: there was no solution in that for Earth’s problems. The idea was too wild. It would take centuries to get to any of the other stars, even if another Earth-like planet could be found somewhere; and even if one were to be found, no significant fraction of Earth’s billions could be transported there. Forget about it, Carpenter told himself. It made no real sense.

  Enron, recovering his poise, said, “That is very interesting, the hope of an effective stardrive. I must look into it at another time, Dr. Rhodes. But for now let us turn our attention to the final option that humanity has—the one that I have come here tonight to discuss with you. I mean, doctor, the use of gene-splicing techniques to adapt newborn children to the ever-more-poisonous atmosphere that the people of Earth will be facing.”

  “Not only newborns,” said Rhodes. He appeared animated for the first time since they had reached the restaurant. “We’re looking also into ways of retrofitting adult humans to cope with the conditions that will lie ahead.”

  “Ah,” said Enron. “Very interesting indeed.”

  “We can all be monsters together,” Isabelle said. “ ‘O brave new world, that has such people in it!’ ”

  Carpenter realized that he had been matching Rhodes drink for drink, and was very much less good than Rhodes was at dealing with that quantity of liquor.

  “If I may, Ms. Martine,” Enron said smoothly. He turned again toward Rhodes. “What is your timetable, doctor, for Earth’s atmosphere to reach the point where the world becomes uninhabitable for human beings as they are presently constituted?”

  Rhodes did not answer right away.

  “Four or five generations,” he said, at last. “Six at the outside.”

  Enron’s dark eyebrows rose. “You are saying, one hundred fifty years, perhaps two hundred?”

  “More or less. I wouldn’t want to try to be too precise. But the figures are there. The encircling layer of greenhouse gases that surrounds us is still letting the ultraviolet come in and preventing the infrared from going out, so we bake and fry as the heat builds up. On top of that we continue to lose our ozone insulation. Strong sunlight is pouring through the hole, cooking the planet like a giant laser, accelerating all of the deleterious processes that have been under way the past couple of centuries. The seas are belching methane like a son of a bitch. The plant biota, which we used to count on to remove CO2 from the atmosphere through photosynthesis, is now actually providing us with a net annual gain of the stuff, from the rapid decay of dead vegetable matter in the humid new jungles all over the planet. Every year the substance we breathe gets further and further away in its chemical makeup from what we were evolved to deal with.”

  “And there is no likelihood that we will continue to evolve to meet these changing conditions?” Enron asked.

  Rhodes laughed, a harsh explosive burst of sound. It was the strongest sign of vitality he had shown all evening.

  “Evolve? In five generations? Six? Evolution doesn’t work that fast. Not in nature, anyway.”

  “But evolution can be artificially brought about,” said the Israeli. “In the laboratory.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Would you tell us, then, what the specific goals of your research are? Which aspects of the body you are attempting to modify, and what progress you have made thus far?”

  “Don’t tell him a fucking thing, Nick,” Isabelle Martine said. “He’s a spy from Kyocera or maybe some company we don’t even know about, some operation working out of Cairo or Damascus, don’t you see?”

  Rhodes reddened. “Please, Isabelle.”

  “But it’s true!”

  Enron, less bothered this time, glanced at her and said, almost jovially, “I have been cleared for this interview by Dr. Rhodes’ employer, Ms. Martine. If they are not afraid of me, is there any reason why you should be?”

  “Well—”

  Rhodes said, “She didn’t really mean to cast aspersions on your credentials, Mr. Enron. She just doesn’t like to hear me speak of any aspect of my research.”

  Enron looked at Isabelle as though she were some strange life-form that had just emerged from the carpet.

  “What is it, exactly, about Dr. Rhodes’ work that causes you such distress?” Enron asked her.

  She hesitated. She seemed, Carpenter thought, a little abashed now by her own vociferousness.
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  Softly she said, “I don’t mean to be as critical of Nick as I may have sounded. He’s a genius and I admire him tremendously for what he’s accomplished. But I just don’t want to see the whole world turned into a zoo full of weird adaptos. There’s been enough genetic fooling around already, all the retrofitting and baby-splicing and everything. The sex-changing stuff, the cosmetic body-modeling. And now to have every fetus automatically altered into some grotesque kind of creature with gills and three hearts and I don’t know what—”

  Isabelle shook her head. “For one thing, we can’t afford to do it. There are too many other problems that we need to solve for us to have the luxury to go into any project as far out as that. For another, I think it’s horrible. It would mean the end of humanity as we know it. You change the body, you change the mind. That’s a law of nature. It’ll be a new species coming forth, God only knows what. Not human any more. Some kind of hideous, evil, bizarre thing. We can’t do that to ourselves. We just can’t. I love Nick, sure, but I hate what he and his people want to do to the human race.”

  “But if the human race is no longer able to survive on Earth as we are presently designed—?” Enron asked.

  “Fix the world, then. Not the species.”

  “I wonder, Isabelle,” said Jolanda Bermudez in the same dreamy lady-from-space voice as before. “It just may be too late for that, I sometimes think. You know, sweet, I don’t really care for Nick’s research any more than you do, and I agree with you that it ought to be stopped. But not because it’s evil, only because it’s a waste of time and money. There’s no reason for us to turn ourselves into things with gills, or whatever. Our real hope, I do believe, is in the habitat worlds.”

  “Ms. Bermudez—” Enron said.

  But she rolled right on. “Personally I’ve done everything I can think of to protect the Earth, through my work, my art, and I don’t intend to give up the effort now. But I’ve started to realize that possibly it’s no use, that we may have damaged it beyond repair. So we may have to leave, and that’s the honest truth. Like the expulsion from Eden, you know? I think I mentioned that I know people who are very deeply involved in the whole habitat culture that has evolved up there in orbit. L-5 is the coming place. I hope to emigrate there myself, before long.”

  Isabelle said, “You never told me—”

  “Oh, yes. Yes.”

  “Ladies, please,” Enron said.

  But it was all beyond the Israeli’s control. Jolanda, who seemed to be able to hold three or four contradictory beliefs at the same time without the least difficulty, had tossed a new ball into play. They went on and on, arguing with Enron, with each other, with the environment, with destiny. Carpenter, watching as though from a great height, had to fight back laughter. The women were beating their various political tom-toms and Rhodes, drinking steadily, had passed into a kind of impassive stupor, not actually drunk—did he ever really get drunk7 Carpenter wondered—but simply glazed, detached, absent; and Enron was looking on in horror, undoubtedly having come to realize by now that he was going to get nothing useful out of this evening.

  Carpenter felt sorry for Rhodes, mixed up with this ferocious and badly confused Isabelle: poor sad Nick, pussy-whipped yet again. He almost felt sorry for Enron, too. Whatever he had hoped to learn from Rhodes tonight was shrouded now in a haze of fuzzy polemic. It was nearly midnight. The Israeli made one last attempt to pin Rhodes down on the kind of genetic modifications his lab was working on; but Rhodes, vanishing fast into alcoholic nebulosity, offered him nothing but vague talk about restructuring the respiratory and circulatory systems.

  “Yes, but how? How?” Enron kept asking. And got no coherent answers. The whole thing was hopeless.

  Angrily the Israeli called up the check and clicked it with his flex terminal, and they all went out into the sticky night, wobbling a little from all the wine.

  Even at this late hour, tangible bands of blast-furnace heat seemed to be pulsing out of the sky. A kind of chemical fog had settled over Sausalito, a dense pungent glop. It smelled like vinegar with an undertone of mildew and disinfectant. Carpenter lamented not having taken his face-lung with him tonight.

  The dinner conversation resonated in his mind. The poor fucked-up world! All of human history seemed to rise up before him: the Neolithic world, the little farms and settlements, and Babylon and Egypt, Greece and Rome, Byzantium and Elizabethan England and the France of Louis XIV. All that striving, all that arduous movement up from the ape, and where had it ended up? In a civilization so highly advanced, Carpenter thought, that it had been able to make its own environment unlivable. A species so intelligent that it had invented a hundred brilliant ways of fouling its own nest.

  And so—the grime, the pollution, the heat, the poisons in the air, the metals in the water, the holes in the ozone layer, the ruined garden that was the world—

  Shit! What a marvelous achievement it all was! For a single species of fancy ape to have wrecked an entire planet!

  While they waited at the end of the restaurant pier for Rhodes’ car to be brought out, Carpenter went over to him and said quietly, “I can drive, Nick, if you don’t feel up to it.” Rhodes was looking none too steady.

  “That’s okay. I’ll just let the car take care of things. It’ll be all right.”

  “If you say so. You can drop me off at the Marriott after you take Enron back to his hotel, I guess.”

  “And Jolanda?”

  “What about her? She lives in the East Bay, doesn’t she?”

  “You could let her take the pod home by herself in the morning. That’ll be okay with her.”

  “Nick, I haven’t arranged anything at all with her. I’ve hardly said a word to her all evening.”

  “You don’t want her? She’s expecting it, you know. She’s your date.”

  “Does that automatically mean—”

  “With her it does. She’ll be very hurt. Of course, I can always explain that you’ve taken homosex vows since I last saw you, or something, and I can run her back to Berkeley tonight. But you’d be making a mistake. She’s a lot of fun. What’s the matter, Paul? Are you tired?”

  “No. Just—ah, to hell with it. Don’t worry, I’ll gallantly play my part. Here’s your car coming up, now.”

  Carpenter glanced around for Jolanda. She was standing at the water’s edge with Enron, gazing out at the shining track of light that led across the bay to San Francisco, and from the close way they were standing Carpenter suspected that he might be off the hook. She stood half a head taller than the short, powerfully built Israeli, but he was whispering to her in an urgent, intimate way, and her stance was certainly a responsive one. But then she turned away from him and gave Carpenter an expectant look, and he knew that whatever Enron had been up to just then did not involve this evening.

  So he played out the familiar ritual, asking her if she’d like to stop off at his hotel for a late drink, and she fluttered her eyelids at him and gave him a little quiver of acceptance, and that was that. Carpenter felt foolish. And vaguely whorish, too. But what the hell, what the hell: he’d have plenty of time to sleep alone when he was out in the Pacific fishing for icebergs.

  Rhodes put the car on autopilot and it got itself across into San Francisco without any problems. Jolanda nestled up comfortably against Carpenter during the drive as though they had spent all evening steadily building up to the consummation that awaited them. Perhaps they had, Carpenter thought, and he had simply failed to notice.

  When the car reached Enron’s hotel, a venerable Gothic pile in Union Square, the Israeli took Jolanda’s hand before he got out, held it a long moment, kissed it flamboyantly, and said to her, “It has been a highly pleasant evening. I look forward very much to seeing you again.” He thanked Rhodes and even Isabelle, nodded to Carpenter, and bounded away.

  “What a remarkable man,” Jolanda murmured. “Not nice, no, but certainly remarkable. So very dynamic. And such a grasp of world problems. I find Israelis to be fascin
ating people, don’t you, Paul?”

  “Marriott Hilton next,” said the car. Rhodes seemed to have fallen asleep up front, his head on Isabelle’s shoulder. Carpenter wasn’t sleepy at all, but his eyes felt raw and achy, from the air, the tensions of the evening, the lateness of the hour. This was going to be a night of no sleep for him, he suspected. Well, not the first one. Probably not the last.

  “Let’s not bother with the drink,” Jolanda said, in the Marriott lobby. “Let’s just go right upstairs.”

  In Carpenter’s hotel room, as they were undressing, she said, “Have you known Nick Rhodes a long time?”

  “Only about thirty years.”

  “You grew up together?”

  “In Los Angeles, yes.”

  “He envies you tremendously, you know.” She tossed her underwrap aside, stretched, inhaled, enjoying her nakedness. Heavy breasts, heavy thighs, dimples everywhere, a torrent of dark fragrant curling hair: the torrid Latin look, Carpenter thought. Voluptuous. Nice.

  “Envies me?”

  “Totally. He told me all about you. How much he admires your freewheeling intellectual outlook, the way you aren’t tied down by all sorts of moral qualms.”

  “You’re telling me that he thinks I’m amoral?” Carpenter asked.

  “He thinks you’re flexible. That isn’t the same. He admires your willingness to adapt quickly to difficult situations, to moral complexities. He wishes he could do that as easily as you do. He ties himself up in knots all the time. You seem to cut right through them.”

  “I hadn’t thought of myself as such a free spirit,” said Carpenter. He came up alongside her and ran his hand lightly down her spine. Her skin was amazingly smooth. He found that pleasing. Many people, lately, had had their skins retrofitted to help them cope with the killer crackle of the ozone-deficient air. It usually didn’t help them much; and they came out of it looking and feeling like lizard-hide luggage. But Jolanda Bermudez had skin that felt like the skin of a genuine female human. Carpenter liked it very much. And the soft resilient flesh beneath it, too.