Hot Sky at Midnight Read online

  “Nothing,” she said. “God’s honest truth, Marty.” He had told her to call him “Marty,” because “Meshoram” sounded too alien for her. She giggled. Maybe the idea of being an espionage source had some appeal for her. “I’d tell you what I knew, if I knew anything, but I don’t. You should have made a pass at Isabella instead, if that’s what you were after. Nick tells her things, sometimes, about his work. But she doesn’t pass them along to me, not so they would be of any use to you. I just hear bits and patches.”

  “Such as?” He ran his hand lightly along the curve of her breast. She shivered and wriggled a little. “Come on,” he said. “Such as?”

  She closed her eyes for a moment and seemed to be thinking.

  “Well, that they have some young guy there who’s working on a big breakthrough, something to do with changing our blood so that it’ll be green instead of red. And other changes beyond that. I don’t know what they are. I really don’t. —Here, have some more wine. It’s nice, isn’t it? Green blood! Better than having to drink green wine, I guess.”

  Enron pretended to sip the wine. Green blood, he thought. Some sort of hemoglobin adjustment? But he realized that she was telling the truth: she knew nothing. Probably it was useless to pursue the details.

  Nevertheless he said, “Do you know this other scientist’s name, the younger one?”

  “No. Isabelle might. You ought to talk to her.”

  “She is a very difficult woman. I think she might not want to cooperate with me.”

  “Yes,” Jolanda said, peering into her wine. “Most likely you’re right. After all, if Israel wants to develop its own adapto technology, and you’ve come here to find out what Samurai has actually achieved along those lines, then by helping you, she’d be helping the cause of adapto technology. And you know how she feels about that.”

  “Yes.”

  “Me too, for that matter. I think it’s tremendously scary. Frankly, it gives me the creeps.”

  They had been through all this before. Enron forced himself to be patient with her. “But if it is necessary, the adapto, the only step left to us for the preservation of human life on Earth—”

  “Is it so important that the human race remain on Earth, if Earth is so terribly fucked up? We could all emigrate to the space habitats, after all.”

  He gave her some more wine. The sun had set now; the sky was swiftly turning black. Across the bay the lights of San Francisco were coming on, twinkling in the dense haze. Casually Enron’s hand roamed Jolanda’s generous body: breasts, belly, now her knee, now sliding up along her thigh. Such foreplay seemed to loosen her tongue, he thought. Or maybe it was loose all the time. He went on touching her regardless. She sat with her head thrown back, her eyes closed. One of the cats jumped up beside him and began to rub its head against his elbow. He knocked it away with a quick sidewise nudge.

  Quietly he said, “We love our land. We fought for centuries to possess it. We would not want to leave it now, not even for some New Israel in the sky.”

  “The Japanese left their land. The rich ones did, anyway. They’re scattered all around the world, now. They loved their country as much as you love yours. But they’re gone. If they could go, why can’t you?”

  “They left, yes, because their islands were flooded by the rising seas. They lost all their fertile land and most of their cities, and nothing but barren mountaintops remained. They would never have gone otherwise. They would still be clinging to every rock. But they had no choice but to go. Just as we once left Israel to go into exile, long ago, two or three thousand years ago, because we were forced to by our enemies. And then one day we returned. We struggled, we suffered, we built, we fought. And now we live in the Garden of Eden. The sweet rains fall, the desert plains have turned green. We will not leave again.”

  “What good is staying, though, if everything is going to change so much?” Her voice had grown eerie and thin, as though it came from far away. “If we all turn ourselves into weird mutant adapto creatures, will any of us still be human? Can you still be a Jew if you have green blood and gills?”

  Enron smiled. “There is nothing in the Bible, I think, about what color our blood must be. Only that we must obey the law and live honorable lives.”

  She considered that for a time.

  Then she said, “And is it honorable to be a spy?”

  “Of course. It is a very old tradition. When Joshua made ready to lead us across the Jordan, he sent two spies into the land on the other side, and they returned to tell Joshua that it was safe to go across, that the people on the other side were petrified with terror because they understood that the Lord had given their land to the Jews. The names of those two spies are not mentioned in the Bible. They were the first secret agents.”

  “I see.”

  “And even to this day we send our people forth to search out dangers,” Enron said. “There is nothing dishonorable about that.”

  “You people see enemies everywhere, don’t you?”

  “We see dangers.”

  “If there are dangers, there have to be enemies. But the age of war between nations is in the past. There are no enemies any more. We’re all allies now in the struggle to save the planet. Can it be that the enemies you people are worrying about are all in your imaginations?”

  “Our history teaches us to be cautious,” he said. “Three thousand years of being driven from place to place by people who disliked us or envied us or merely wanted to turn us into scapegoats. Why should it be any different today? It would be foolish of us to assume that the millennium has arrived.” Enron felt himself on the defensive, suddenly. It was an unfamiliar sensation for him. He was here tonight to ask questions, not to answer them. She was very persistent, though. He took a deep gulp of the dreadful wine. “The Assyrians massacred us. The Romans burned our temple. The Crusaders blamed us for the death of Christ” The wine was going down more easily, now. “Do you know of the death camps that the Germans built for us in the middle of the twentieth century?” he asked. “Six million of us died for nothing more than being Jews. The survivors went to Israel, then. All around us were Muslims who hated us. They swore to finish the job that the Germans had begun, and several times they attempted to do it It is not easy to live a quiet and productive life, when just on the other side of the river is an enemy who has decreed a holy war against you.”

  “But that was a long time ago. The Arabs are your friends now.”

  “It is nice to think so, isn’t it? Well, their oil wealth is gone, and although our region is more fertile now than it was before the climate changed, their lands are greatly overpopulated, and so they can no longer afford the luxury of the holy war that they would probably still like to wage. So they have turned to their suddenly acceptable Israeli neighbors for technological and industrial assistance. We are all friends now, yes. We are partners. But that can always change. As things get worse and worse on Earth, those who lack our advantages may decide to turn on us. It has happened before.”

  “How terribly suspicious you people are!”

  “Suspicious? But there is everything to suspect! And so we remain ever alert. We send our agents everywhere, sniffing out trouble. We worry about the Japanese, for example.”

  “The Japanese? Why?”

  Enron realized that he was getting a little drunk. Which was also something that was very unusual, for him.

  He said, “They are a hateful people. I mean, full of hatred. They have such great wealth and yet they are miserable exiles. Living their isolated, paranoid lives in their little super-protected enclaves here and there around the world, sealed away behind their walls, bitter about having been driven from their homes, hated by everybody else for their money and their power but hating back even harder, because their hatred is fueled by such enormous resentment and envy. And the ones they hate more than anyone are us Israelis, because we too were exiles once but we were able to go home, and it is a beautiful home, and because we are strong and enterprising and we
are challenging them now for positions of power all over the world.”

  His hand had still been exploring the region between her thighs. Now she clamped her legs closed on his wrist, not so much to prevent him from going further as just to hold him pleasantly in place. Did she want to talk or to make love? Perhaps both at once, he thought. The two things seemed to be related, for her. She was a manic talker—the drug she uses causes that, he thought, the hyperdex—and a sexual maniac as well. I should stop all this chatter, Enron told himself, and simply pull her down with me onto that carpet. And then out to dinner. He felt as if he hadn’t eaten in three days.

  But he too was somehow unable to stop talking.

  “The accidents of life in the greenhouse world brought Israel into world economic prominence even as they drove the Japanese from their home islands,” he heard himself say. “We are moving on many fronts at once. The Israeli government has invested heavily in most of the great megacorps, do you know that? We hold significant minority interests in Samurai and Kyocera both. But the megacorps are still basically Japanese-dominated, and they are fighting to keep us out. They are eager to see us cast down from our high place. They will do anything. Anything. So we watch them, Jolanda. We watch everyone.”

  “And developing the adapto technology before Samurai does—that’s going to put Israel into a stronger position in the world that’s coming?”

  “We believe so.”

  “I think you’re wrong. I think we have to forget about Earth and move to space instead.”

  “To the habitat worlds, yes. Your great obsession.”

  “You think I’m silly, don’t you?”

  “Silly?” he cried. “Oh, no, never!”

  Enron didn’t even bother to try to sound sincere. He was bored and irritated by her, now. To his surprise he found himself even starting to lose sexual interest in her. She is not a she-camel but a cow, he thought, a preposterous cow with delusions of intelligence.

  Even so, he kept his hand where it was.

  Jolanda rocked back and forth on it, squeezing her thighs. Then she turned and opened her eyes and looked at him in an oddly flirtatious, provocative way, smiling dreamily as though she had decided to impart some immensely important secret to him. “I ought to tell you, I may not even wait around down here for the environment to decay any further. I’m seriously thinking of moving to an L-5 world quite soon now.”

  “Are you? And have you chosen any one in particular?”

  “It’s a place called Valparaiso Nuevo,” she said.

  “I don’t know it,” Enron said. They were sitting in near darkness, staring at darkness. A cat that he did not think he had seen before, very long-legged with a thin, angular head, had emerged from somewhere and was nuzzling against his shoe. The wine bottle was empty. “No—wait. I remember. It’s a sanctuary world, isn’t it? Where runaway criminals go to hide?” He was starting to feel light-headed from the heat, the endless talking, the wine, his own mounting hunger, the intensity of Jolanda’s looming physicality, perhaps even the aftereffects of having exposed himself to her bioresponsive sculptures. Desire began to stir in him again, sluggishly at first, then with greater intensity. She was maddeningly annoying but oddly irresistible. The conversation was becoming surreal, now. “Why would you want to go there?” he asked.

  Her eyes flashed at him. A stagily wicked look, a child being wicked.

  “I really shouldn’t be telling you this, I suppose.”

  “Go on. Do.”

  “Will you keep it entirely to yourself?”

  “Keep what?” he asked. “I don’t understand.”

  “Imagine. Swearing a spy to secrecy! But you’ll be gone in a few days anyway and none of it matters to you. It doesn’t concern Israel in the slightest.”

  “You can tell me, then.”

  “Yes. All right. I will.” Another wicked-little-girl flash of the eyes. “But it goes no farther than you. Agreed?” I have a secret, buttwillshare itwithyou, only you, becauseyou are my friend and because I think you’re very cute.

  “I swear it,” he said.

  “You’ve got it right that Valparaiso Nuevo is a sanctuary world, full of criminals of all sorts who pay local government to protect them from law-enforcement agencies that might be looking for them. It’s run by some kind of crazy old Latin American dictator who’s been in charge there since the Year One.”

  “I still don’t follow. What does this have to do with you?”

  “I have a friend in Los Angeles,” Jolanda said. “Who is part of a kind of guerrilla group, in a way—they’re planning to infiltrate this Valparaiso Nuevo and seize control. Take the whole place over, collect all the fugitives and turn them in for rewards. There’ll be a fortune in it, selling them all. And then they’ll live there like kings and queens. Fresh air, fresh water, a brand-new life.” Her gaze was curiously fixed and bright, brighter even than her usual druggy glare. She seemed to be staring past or through him, into some gleaming realm of fulfilled fantasies. “My friend asked me if I wanted to join them. We’d be billionaires. We’d own a whole little planet. It’s supposed to be beautiful up there in the L-5 worlds.”

  Enron was fully sober at once.

  “When is all this supposed to happen?” he asked.

  “Very soon, actually. I think they said they would—” Jolanda put her hand over her mouth. “Good God, look at what I’ve done! I should never have told you any of this!”

  “No, it is very interesting, Jolanda.”

  “Listen, Marty, it’s not true, none of it, not a word! It’s just a story, a movie idea that they were making up, there’s nothing real about it! You mustn’t take it seriously. It isn’t true!” She was staring at him in horror. In a low somber tone she said, “You shouldn’t have let me have so much wine. Please forget everything I just said about Valparaiso Nuevo. Everything. I could get into enormous trouble if—if—” She began to cry, great lalloping sobs that shook her entire body. His hand was still caught between her legs and he feared that in her convulsive movements she would sprain his wrist.

  “Shh. There’s nothing to worry about, Jolanda. I’m not going to say a word to anyone about this.”

  Hope glistened in her eyes. But she still seemed terrified.

  “You swear it? They would kill me!”

  “The smart spy protects his sources, love. I am a very smart spy.”

  She was still trembling.

  Enron said, “But you must do one thing for me. I want to meet your Los Angeles friend. I want to talk with him, with his group. To work with them.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I am always serious, Jolanda.”

  “But what I just told you about has nothing to do with your—”

  “Ah, but it does. There are people on Valparaiso Nuevo who would be of great interest to the state of Israel, of that I am certain,” Enron said. “If these people are going to be for sale, we would like to contact the sellers very early in the proceedings. For that matter we would probably be willing to provide your friends with support of a very material kind as they undertake their project What is your friend’s name, the one in Los Angeles?”

  Jolanda paused a moment before answering.

  “Davidov. Mike Davidov.”

  Enron felt his pulse rate pick up. “Jewish?”

  “I don’t think so. I think it’s a Russian name. He looks sort of Russian.”

  Enron slipped his hand free of her thighs and began to stroke her breasts again. In his most seductive imploring tone he said to her, “Take me with you to Los Angeles. Introduce me to your friend Mr. Davidov.”

  “I don’t know, Marty—I don’t think I should—”

  “Tomorrow. The nine o’clock shuttle.” No longer seductive. Commanding, now.

  “It’s no use,” she said. “He’s already gone to Valparaiso Nuevo. A lot of the key people are up there already, scoping the place out.”

  “Ah,” Enron said. “I see.”

  He was quiet for a mome
nt, thinking.

  She leaped right into the opening he had provided for her. “Do you know what I want to do now?” she asked. “I want to stop talking about all this, all right? I’m a little bit drunk. More than a little. I’ve talked much too much and I don’t want to talk any more.”

  “But if you would just—”

  “No, Marty. It’s too dangerous. You’ll just take advantage of whatever I tell you. I want you to take advantage of me in a different way.”

  “Take advantage?”

  “You ought to know what I mean. But here. I’ll give you a hint.”

  She took him by the shoulders and pulled him down to the floor with her. They landed in a tangle of arms and legs, laughing, and he buried himself quickly in the billowing abundance of her. A hot mingling of aromas came upward from her, wine and desire and sweat and even, he thought, the smell of the Screen with which she protected her fantastic satiny skin. Good. Good. He lost himself in her. There had been enough talk for now, he thought. He had been holding himself back for hours, patiently playing the games of espionage with her, and now he allowed himself to put his profession aside for a little while.

  “Oh, Marty,” she murmured, over and over again. He gobbled the heavy globes of her breasts as though they were melons and thrust with the zeal of a prophet wielding his lance into the mysterious and apparently infinite depths of her quivering cunt. “Marty Marty Marty.” She held her body tilted high, her legs far apart with her feet waving somewhere in the air behind him, and slammed her thighs steadily against the sides of his body with each of his jolting thrusts. Fucking this Jolanda was like exploring some unknown continent, Enron thought. So big, so moist, so strange, so full of wonders and novelties. It was always like that, for him, with a new woman. The Jewish Balboa, the Jewish Mungo Park, Orellana, Pizarro, plowing unceasingly onward through one uncharted hairy jungle after another in the eternal quest for the unknowable prizes at the core of their hot, throbbing hearts. But this one was a greater enigma than most. She was the mysterious kingdom of Prester John, the lost realm of El Dorado.