Hot Sky at Midnight Page 13

  Don’t say anything to anybody, he was told. Just drift around the place and listen to things, and let us know what’s going on, if in fact anything is.

  The message didn’t name any source for the rumor. The most probable one was Colonel Olmo, who after all was K-M’s main man on Valparaiso Nuevo, but why, then, hadn’t the Company instructed Farkas to check in with Olmo first thing? Did the Company no longer trust Olmo, or had the coup rumor reached them from some other direction, or was it just a case of the right hand not giving a damn about the left? In any event, there didn’t seem to be much substance to Olmo’s notion that the Company was somehow involved in the plot itself. The Company seemed to be as much in the dark about it as Olmo was himself.

  Hi-ho. The most likely possibility, Farkas thought, was that there was no coup conspiracy at all, just some vaporous cloud of disinformation floating around the system. Or else that it really was being put together by a bunch of free-lancers from Southern California with no corporate affiliation of any kind, as Olmo had been told. Well, maybe so. A crazy scheme, all right. But there would be billions in it if it worked.

  Farkas caught the morning shuttle back to Valparaiso Nuevo. A horde of eager couriers came swarming around him when he arrived, but Farkas amiably shook them all off and made his own way back to the San Bernardito Hotel in Cajamarca, where he was able to check back into the room he had vacated the day before. He liked the view there, that rimside room, facing out toward the stars. And the Earth-one gravity pull that the town of Cajamarca enjoyed was very pleasing to his Earth-one-type musculature.

  He took a long shower and went out for a stroll.

  What a nice place this is, Farkas thought. He was getting used to the atmosphere of it, now. All that bright, clean air, giving you that terrific oxygen zap with every inhalation. You could get drunk on air like this. He pulled it deep into his lungs, playing with it, trying to analyze it with his alveoli, separating out the individual molecules of CO2 and nitrogen and oxygen.

  This stuff could spoil you fast, he knew. It wasn’t going to be easy, going back to Earth and Earth’s poisonous, corrupting air. To return to life as a dinko, a mudcrawler, a shitbreather, whatever the L-5 people called those who were condemned to live out their lives on the unfortunate mother world. But no one seemed to be in any hurry for him to head back to Earth just yet.

  That was good. Good. Take your time, enjoy yourself, have a little holiday in outer space. Carry out an extremely thorough investigation of the supposed conspiracy against the government of Generalissimo Callaghan.

  There was a cheerful cafe at the upside end of Cajamarca not far from the hotel. It was right under one of the shield windows, with a fantastic view of Earth and moon that afternoon. Farkas took a seat out front and ordered a brandy, and sat back, drinking slowly. Maybe one of the conspirators would come up to him while he sat here and offer to sell him some useful information.

  Sure. Sure.

  He sipped his brandy. He sat and waited. Nobody offered to sell him anything. After a while he went back to his room. Put some soft music on. Made the subtle mental adjustments that were his private equivalent of closing his eyes. It had been a pretty full few days, and he was tired. A little downtime was in order, Farkas told himself. Yes. Yes, definitely, a little downtime.

  10

  the port of Oakland was a crazy maze of gray steel structures on about fourteen different levels. Carpenter, with his identification plaque strapped to the palm of his open upraised hand for easy display to every laser scanner he met along the way, went from level to level, up one and down the next, following the portentous instructions of invisible metallic voices, until at last he came to the waterfront itself, ashimmer in a bright green haze of midday heat. He saw dozens of vessels sitting placidly atop the tranquil slime-covered estuary like sleeping ducks drifting in the shallows. His own ship, the Tonopah Maru, had reached San Francisco this very morning after its journey up the coast from the San Pedro shipyard in Los Angeles. It was in port over here on the Oakland side of the bay—San Francisco’s own piers had been purely tourist arcades for a century or more—and on this hot grimy afternoon of near-lethal atmospheric inversions, greenish-brown air pressing down like a fist out of a concrete sky and breathing-masks mandatory even in wonderful San Francisco, Carpenter had taxied over there to meet his crew and take formal command.

  On the waterfront level he found not merely the expectable array of blinking laser scanners, but an immense square-headed robot guarding the approach to the piers like Cerberus before the gates of hell. It turned slowly to face him.

  “Captain Carpenter checking in,” he told it. “Commander of the Tonopah Maru.” It all sounded so terribly self-important that he had to fight to keep from laughing at his own pomposity. He felt like a character out of Joseph Conrad: the earnest young skipper, taking command for the first time, confronting the bored old salt who had seen it all a thousand times and didn’t give the slightest fraction of a damn.

  And indeed the robot, who probably knew nothing about Conrad, was neither amused nor awed by Carpenter’s announcement of his new status. In somber silence it ran one more laser check on Carpenter’s credentials, found them in order, scanned his eyeballs for absolute certainty, and sent him out into the sizzling sunshine beyond the security shed to look for his ship.

  His indoctrination course had taken about a week. It was straight subliminal, an hour a day jacked into the data flow, and now Carpenter knew, or hoped he did, about as much as was necessary for him to know about being the captain of an iceberg trawler that would sail the South Pacific. Any aspects of the job that were missing from his shoreside education would have to be picked up at sea, but that didn’t trouble him. He would manage. Somehow he always did.

  He spotted the Tonopah Maru right away, by the bulge of the giant rack-and-pinion gear that powered its grappling hooks, and by the great spigots that occupied most of the deck space. Those, as he had learned only the day before, were used to spray the captured icebergs with a sintering of melt-retardant mirror-dust. The ship was a long, slim, cigar-shaped vessel, elegant and almost disturbingly narrow in outline. It was sitting oddly high up out of the water amidst a cluster of other specialized ships that bore Samurai Industries’ familiar sun-and-lightning-bolt monogram. Carpenter had no idea what the other ships might be: seaweed collectors, shrimpers, squid-hunters, whatever. There were a million kinds of ships at work in the sea these days, desperately harvesting the ocean’s remaining bounty. Each type was good for only one thing and one thing only, but very good at that one thing.

  A big flat-nosed grizzled-looking man whose Screen-induced body-armor coloring gave his skin a remarkable midnight look was standing on deck, squinting through the eyepiece of some sort of navigational device that he seemed to be trying to calibrate. The gadget afforded Carpenter some notion of who the man might be—his oceanographer/navigator, his number two, essentially—and he called down to him:

  “Are you Hitchcock?”

  “Yeah?” Wary, a little hostile.

  “I’m Paul Carpenter. The new captain.”

  Hitchcock gave him a look of appraisal, a long steady stare. His eyes had a considerable bulge to them and they were rimmed with ribbons of red.

  “Well. Yeah. Come on aboard, Cap’n.”

  No real warmth in the invitation, but Carpenter hadn’t expected any. He understood that he was the enemy, the representative of the managerial class, placed in a position of temporary superiority over the crew of the Tonopah Maru purely by grace of some random twitch of the vast corporate bureaucracy far away. They had to take his orders but that didn’t mean they had to like him, or respect him, or be in any way impressed with him.

  Still, there were appearances that had to be honored. Carpenter came down the catwalk, dropped his bag on the deck, and waited calmly for Hitchcock to approach him and offer him his hand.

  But the handshake seemed ungrudging enough. Hitchcock moved slowly but his grip was powerful and stra
ightforward. Carpenter even got a smile out of him.

  “Good to know you, Cap’n.”

  “The same. Where are you from, Hitchcock?”

  “Maui.”

  That accounted for the color, then, and the face, and the grizzled hair. An Afro-Hawaiian mix, and plenty of Screen to deepen the hue. He was bigger than he had looked from above, and older, too, easily into his fifties.

  “Beautiful place,” Carpenter said. “I was there a few years back. Place called Wailuku.”

  “Yeah,” Hitchcock said. He didn’t seem very interested. “We sail tomorrow morning, right, Cap’n?”

  “Right.”

  “You ever been on board one of these before?”

  “Actually, no, I haven’t,” said Carpenter levelly. “This is my first time out. You want to give me a tour? And I’d like to meet the rest of the crew.”

  “Sure. Sure. There’s one now. Nakata! Hey, Nakata! Come say hello to the new cap’n!”

  Carpenter narrowed his eyes into the sun-blink and saw a tiny figure outlined high up along the superstructure on the far side of the ship, doing something near the housing of the grapple gear. He looked no bigger than a midget against the immensity of the bulging gear, the huge silent mechanism that was capable of hurling the giant grappling hooks far overhead and whipping them down deep into the flanks of even the biggest bergs.

  Hitchcock waved and Nakata came scrambling down. The grapple technician was a sleek beady-eyed catlike little guy with an air of tremendous self-confidence about him. He seemed a little higher up the class ladder than Hitchcock.

  Unhesitatingly he put out his hand, as though equal to equal, for Carpenter. The usual Japanese cockiness, Carpenter figured. Not that being Japanese-American got you anywhere particular in the Samurai hierarchy, any more than being Polish-American or Chinese-American or Turkish-American would. The real Nips awarded no extra points to their cousins of diluted blood. Having a Japanese name didn’t necessarily make you Japanese, in their eyes. A tough bunch.

  Grinning, Nakata said, “We going to go get ourselves some monster bergs, huh, skipper? To keep San Francisco from getting too thirsty.” He giggled.

  “What’s funny about San Francisco?” Carpenter asked.

  “Everything,” Nakata said. “Damn silly place. Always has been. Weirdos and fairies and dataheads and everything. You aren’t from Frisco yourself, are you, skipper?”

  “Los Angeles, in point of fact. West LA.”

  “All right, then. I’m from Santa Monica. Right down the road from you. I never liked it up here for shit. Samurai had this ship chartered to L.A., you know, until Frisco hired it last month.” He gestured vaguely at the bay behind him, the lovely hilly city on the far shore. “I think it’s funny as hell, me working to bring water for Northern California. But you do what they pay you for, right, skipper?”

  Carpenter nodded.

  “Right,” he said. “That’s the system.”

  “Show you around the ship now?” Hitchcock asked.

  “Two more crew still to meet, aren’t there?”

  “Caskie, Rennett, yeah. They went into town. Should be along a little later.”

  Rennett was maintenance/operations, Caskie was the communications operator. Both women. Carpenter was mildly annoyed that they weren’t on hand to give him his official welcome, but he hadn’t sent word ahead that he was coming at this precise time. The official welcome could wait, he figured.

  Hitchcock took him on a tour of the ship. First the deck spigots and the grapple gears, with a view of the stupendous grappling hooks themselves, tucked away in their niche in the ship’s side; and then belowdeck to peer at the powerful fusion-driven engine, strong enough to haul a fair-sized island halfway around the world.

  “And these here are the wonderful cabins,” Hitchcock announced.

  Carpenter had been warned not to expect lavish accommodations, but he hadn’t expected anything quite like this. It was as though the ship’s designers had forgotten that there was going to be an actual crew, and had made a bit of space for them amidst all the machinery purely as an afterthought. The living quarters for Carpenter and the others were jammed into odd little corners here and there. Carpenter’s cabin was a whisker bigger than the other four, but even his wasn’t a whole lot more roomy than the coffin-sized sleeping capsules you got at an airport hotel, and for recreation space they all had to share one little blister dome aft and the pacing area on the foredeck where Carpenter had first spotted Hitchcock checking out his equipment.

  A sardine-can kind of life, Carpenter thought.

  But the pay was decent and there was hope of slope for him. And at least he would be able to breathe fresh air at sea, more or less, instead of the dense gray-brown-green murk that hovered over the habitable parts of the West Coast most of the time.

  “You got the route specs with you, Cap’n?” Hitchcock asked him, when he had seen all that there was to see.

  Carpenter tapped his breast pocket. “Right here.”

  “Mind if I get to work on them, then?”

  He handed over to Hitchcock the little blue data-cube that they had given him at the briefing center that morning. It was, Carpenter knew, a kind of formal ceremony of taking charge: officially giving his navigator the route software, the defining program for their voyage. Of course Hitchcock must already know approximately where they were supposed to go, and was probably capable of getting them there the way mariners had been getting around in the Pacific since the time of Sir Francis Drake and Captain Cook. They hadn’t needed computers, and most likely neither did Hitchcock. But turning over the data-cube to the navigator was the modern-day equivalent of the conference before the mast on the eve of sailing, and that was okay with Carpenter: he took some mild pleasure out of being the inheritor of ancient tradition.

  A sea captain. Odysseus, Vasco da Gama, Columbus, Magellan. Captain Kidd. Captain Hook. Captain Ahab.

  Hitchcock went away and left him alone in his tiny cramped cabin. Carpenter stowed his gear, jamming things into the storage holds as efficiently as he could. When he was done with that he put through a ship-to-shore call to Nick Rhodes at the offices of Santachiara Labs.

  “You can’t imagine the luxury of my quarters,” he told Rhodes. “I feel like J. P. Morgan aboard his yacht”

  “I’m very happy for you,” Rhodes said bleakly.

  The visor screen on Carpenter’s cabin communicator wasn’t much bigger than a postage stamp, and the resolution was low-grade black-and-white, like something out of electronic antiquity. Even so, Carpenter could see that Rhodes’ face looked dour and disheartened.

  “Actually, I’m lying absolutely and totally,” said Carpenter. “The place is claustrophobia city. If I had a hard-on I wouldn’t be able to turn around in here. —What’s wrong, Nick?”

  “Wrong?”

  “Plain as the nose on your face on my visor. Come on, you can be straight with me.”

  Rhodes hesitated.

  “I’ve just been talking to Isabelle.”

  “And?”

  Another little pause. “What do you think of her, Paul? Really.”

  Carpenter wondered how far he wanted to get into this. Carefully he said, “A very interesting woman.” Rhodes seemed to want more. “Probably extremely passionate,” Carpenter added, after a bit.

  “What you really think, I said.”

  “And deeply dedicated to her beliefs.”

  “Yes,” said Rhodes. “She certainly is that.”

  Carpenter paused one moment more, then decided to drive on forward. You owe your friends the truth. “Her beliefs are all fucked up, though. Her mind is full of dumb messy ideas and she’s spilling them out all over you. Isn’t that the problem, Nick?”

  “That’s it exactly. —She’s driving me crazy, Paul.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Last night, we get in bed, I reach for her—I always reach for her, it’s as natural as breathing for me when I’m with her—but no, no, she wants to ta
lk about The Relationship. Not about me, not about her, but The Relationship. Right at that very moment, no other time will do. Says that my work is endangering The Relationship.”

  “I’d say that that might be true. Which is more important to you?”

  “That’s the whole thing, Paul. They’re equally important. I love my work, I love Isabelle. But she wants me to leave Santachiara. Doesn’t quite put it on a basis of either-you-quit-or-we-break-up, but the subtext is there.”

  Carpenter tapped the front edge of his teeth with his fingernails.

  “Do you want to marry her?” he asked, after a little while.

  “I’m not sure. I don’t think much in terms of marrying again, yet. But I want to stay with her, that’s for absolutely sure. If she insisted on my marrying her, I probably would. I’ve got to tell you, Paul, the physical side of this thing is like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. I start to tingle all over as soon as I come into the room where she is. My crotch, my fingertips, my ankles. I can feel something like a kind of radiation coming from her, and it sends me right into heat. And when I touch her—when we start to make love—”

  Carpenter studied the visor gloomily. Rhodes sounded like a lovesick college kid. Or, worse, like a screwed-up obsessive erotomaniac adult.

  “I tell you, when we make love—you can’t imagine— you simply can’t imagine—”

  Sure. He listened to Rhodes going on and on about Isabelle Marline’s fantastic sexual appeal, and all he could think of was that huge frizz of uncouth red steel-wool hair and those hard, implacable, neurotically fierce eyes.

  “All right,” Carpenter said finally. “So you have the serious hots for her. I can understand that, I guess. But if she wants you to give up your work—” Carpenter frowned. “Because it’s evil, I suppose? All that bilge about turning the human race into nasty, spooky Frankenstein monsters?”

  “Yes.”

  Carpenter felt anger beginning to rise in him. “You know as well as I do that that’s just standard antiscientific bullshit of the kind that people of her nitwit mind-set have been handing out since the beginning of the industrial revolution. You told me yourself that she admits she doesn’t see any alternatives to adapting. And yet she continues to lambaste you for working for Santachiara. Jesus, Nick. Brilliant scientists like you ought to have more sense than to get emotionally involved with people like that.”