Hot Sky at Midnight Read online

  “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 Juanito had stayed away from that side of the profession. He earned his money by helping dinkos go underground on Valparaiso, not by selling people out. One reason for that was that nobody yet had happened to offer him a really profitable trace deal; but another was that he was the son of a former fugitive himself. Someone had been hired to do a trace on his own father seven years back, which was how his father had come to be assassinated. Juanito preferred to work the sanctuary side of things.

  He was also a professional, though. He was in the business of providing service, period. If he didn’t find the runaway gene surgeon for this weird eyeless dinko who had hired him, this Farkas, somebody else would. And Farkas was his client. Juanito felt it was important to do things in a professional way.

  “If I run into problems,” he said, “I might subcontract. In the meanwhile I just thought I’d let you know, in case you happened to stumble on a lead. I’ll pay finders’ fees. And you know it’ll be good money.”

  “Wu Fang-shui,” Kluge said. “Chinese. Old. I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Me too,” said Delilah.

  “Hell,” Juanito said. “How many people are there on Valparaiso Nuevo altogether? Maybe nine hundred thousand? I can think of fifty right away who can’t possibly be the guy I’m looking for. That narrows the odds some. What I have to do is just go on narrowing, right? Right?”

  In fact Juanito didn’t feel very optimistic. He was going to do his best, sure; but the whole system on Valparaiso Nuevo was heavily weighted in favor of helping those who wanted to hide stay hidden.

  Even Farkas realized that. “The privacy laws here are very strict, aren’t they?”

  With a smile Juanito said, “They’re just about the only laws we have, you know? The sacredness of sanctuary. It is the compassion of El Supremo that has turned Valparaiso Nuevo into a place of refuge for fugitives of all sorts from every world, other artificial planets as well as Earth itself, and we are not supposed to interfere with the compassion of El Supremo.”

  “Which is very expensive compassion, I understand.”

  “Very. Sanctuary fees are renewable annually. Anyone who harms a permanent resident who is living here under the compassion of El Supremo is bringing about a reduction in El Supremo’s annual income, you see? Which doesn’t sit very well with the Generalissimo.”

  They were in the Villanueva Cafe in the town of San Martin de Porres, E Spoke. They had been touring Valparaiso Nuevo all day long, back and forth from rim to hub, going up one spoke and down the other. Farkas said he wanted to experience as much of Valparaiso Nuevo as he could. Not to see; to experience. That was the word he used. And his hunger for experience was immense. He was insatiable, prowling around everywhere, gobbling it all up, soaking it in. He never slowed down. The man’s energy was fantastic, Juanito thought. Considering that he had to be at least twice Juanito’s age, maybe more. And confident, too. The way he strutted around, you’d think he was the new Generalissimo and not just some strange deformed long-legged dinko who in fact was owned, body and soul, by the unscrupulous Kyocera-Merck combine down there on filthy Earth.

  Farkas had never been to one of the satellite worlds before, he told Juanito. It amazed him, he said, that there were forests and lakes here, broad fields of wheat and rice, fruit orchards, herds of goats and cattle. Apparently he had expected the place to be nothing more than a bunch of aluminum struts and grim concrete boxes with everybody living on food pills, or something. People from Earth couldn’t quite manage to comprehend that the larger habitat worlds were comfortable places with blue skies, fleecy clouds, lovely gardens, handsome buildings of steel and brick and glass. The way Earth used to be, before they ruined it.

  Farkas said, “If fugitives are protected by the government, how do you go about tracing one, then?”

  “There are always ways. Everybody knows somebody who knows something about someone. Information is bought here the same way compassion is.”

  “From the Generalissimo?” Farkas said, looking startled.

  “From his officials, sometimes. If done with great care. Care is important, because lives are at risk. There are also couriers who have information to sell. All of us know a great deal that we are not supposed to know.”

  “I suppose you know a great many fugitives by sight, yourself?”

  “Some,” Juanito said. “You see that man, sitting by the window?” He frowned. “I don’t know, can you see him? To me he looks around sixty, bald head, thick lips, no chin?”

  “I see him, yes. He looks a little different to me.”

  “I bet he does. Well, that man, he ran a swindle at one of the Luna domes, sold a lot of phony stock in an offshore monopoly fund that didn’t exist, fifty million Capbloc dollars. He pays plenty to live here. And this one here—you see? With the blond woman?—an embezzler, that one, very good with computers, reamed a big bank in Singapore for almost its entire capital. Him over there, with the mustache—you see?—he pretended to be pope. Can you believe that? Everybody in Rio de Janeiro did.”

  “Wait a minute,” Farkas said. “How do I know you’re not making all this up?”

  “You don’t,” Juanito said amiably. “But I’m not.”

  “So we just sit here like this and you expose the identities of three fugitives to me free of charge?”

  “It wouldn’t be free,” Juanito said, “if they were people you were looking for.”

  “What if they were? And my claiming to be looking for a Wu Fang-shui just a cover?”

  “But you aren’t looking for any of them,” Juanito said, with scorn in his voice. “Come on. I would know it.”

  “Right,” said Farkas. “I’m not.” He sipped his drink, something green and cloudy and sweet. “How come these men
haven’t done a better job of concealing their identities?” he asked.

  “They think they have,” said Juanito.

  Getting leads was a slow business, and expensive. Juanito left Farkas to roam the spokes of Valparaiso Nuevo on his own, and headed off to the usual sources of information: his father’s friends, other couriers, and even the headquarters of the Unity Party, El Supremo’s grass-roots organization, where it wasn’t hard to find someone who knew something and had a price for it. Juanito was cautious. Middle-aged Chinese gentleman I’m trying to locate, he said. Why do you want to find him? Nobody asked that. Nobody would. Could be any reason, anywhere from wanting to blow him away on contract to handing him a million-Capbloc-dollar lottery prize that he had won last year on New Yucatan. Nobody asked for reasons on Valparaiso. Everybody understood the rules: your business was strictly your business.

  There was a man named Federigo who had been with Juanito’s father in the Costa Rica days who knew a woman who knew a man who had a freemartin neuter companion who had formerly belonged to someone high up in the Census Department. There were fees to pay at every step of the way, but it was Farkas’s money, what the hell, or, even better, Kyocera-Merck’s, and by the end of the week Juanito had access to the immigration data stored on golden megachips somewhere in the depths of the hub. The data down there wasn’t going to provide anybody with Wu Fang-shui’s phone number. But what it could tell Juanito, and did, eight hundred callaghanos later, was how many ethnic Chinese were living on Valparaiso Nuevo and how long ago they had arrived.

  “There are nineteen of them altogether,” he reported to Farkas. “Eleven of them are women.”

  “So? Changing sex is no big deal,” Farkas said.

  “Agreed. The women are all under fifty, though. The oldest of the men is sixty-two. The longest that any of them has been on Valparaiso Nuevo is nine years.”

  Farkas didn’t seem bothered. “Would you say that rules them out? I wouldn’t. Age can be altered just as easily as sex.”

  “But date of arrival can’t be, so far as I know. And you say that your Wu Fang-shui came here fifteen years back. Unless you’re wrong about that, he can’t be any of those Chinese. Your Wu Fang-shui, if he isn’t dead by now, has signed up for some other racial mix, I’d say.”

  “He isn’t dead,” Farkas said.

  “You sure of that?”

  “He was still alive three months ago, and in touch with his family on Earth. He’s got a brother in Tashkent.”

  “Shit,” Juanito said. “Ask the brother what name he’s going under up here, then.”

  “We did. We couldn’t get it.”

  “Ask him harder.”

  “We asked him too hard,” said Farkas. “Now the information isn’t available any more. Not from him, anyway.”

  Juanito checked out the nineteen Chinese, just to be certain. It didn’t cost much and it didn’t take much time, and there was always the chance that Dr. Wu had cooked his immigration data somehow. But the quest led nowhere.

  Juanito found six of them all in one shot, playing some Chinese game in a social club in the town of Havana de Cuba on Spoke B, and they went right on laughing and pushing the little porcelain counters around while he stood there kibitzing. They didn’t act like sanctuaries. There was always an edge of some kind on a sanctuario, a wariness not far below the surface. Not everybody on Valparaiso Nuevo had come here to get away from the law: most, but not all. These just seemed like a bunch of prosperous Chinese merchants sitting around a table having a good time. Juanito hung around long enough to determine that they were all shorter than he was, too, which meant either that they weren’t Dr. Wu, who was tall for a Chinese, or that Dr. Wu had been willing to have his legs chopped down by fifteen centimeters for the sake of a more efficient disguise. That was possible but it wasn’t too likely.

  The other thirteen Chinese were all much too young or too convincingly female or too this or too that. Juanito crossed them all off his list. From the outset he hadn’t thought Wu would still be Chinese, anyway.

  He kept on looking. One trail went cold, and then another, and then another. By now he was starting to think Dr. Wu must have heard that a man with no eyes was looking for him, and had gone even deeper underground, or off Valparaiso entirely. Juanito paid a friend at the hub spaceport to keep watch on departure manifests for him. Nothing came of that. Then someone reminded him that there was a colony of old-time hard-core sanctuary types living in and around the town of El Mirador on Spoke D, people who had a genuine aversion to being bothered. Juanito went there. Because he was known to be the son of a murdered fugitive himself, nobody hassled him: he of all people wouldn’t be likely to be running a trace, would he?

  The visit yielded no directly useful result. Juanito couldn’t risk asking questions and nothing was visible that seemed to lead anywhere. But he came away with the strong feeling that El Mirador was the answer.

  “Take me there,” Farkas said.

  “I can’t do that. It’s a low-profile town. Strangers aren’t welcome. You’ll stick out like a dinosaur.”

  “Take me,” Farkas repeated.

  “If Wu’s there and he gets even a glimpse of you, he’ll know right away that there’s a contract out for him and he’ll vanish so fast you won’t believe it.”

  “Take me to El Mirador,” said Farkas. “I pay for services and you deliver them, isn’t that the deal?”

  “Right,” Juanito said. “Let’s go to El Mirador.”

  4

  it was ten in the morning and Nick Rhodes still hadn’t stopped marveling at the weather. Considering the time of year it was and the expectable atmospheric conditions, the day was mysteriously, even miraculously, bright and clear: atmospheric photochemical intensity way down, fog ditto, and patches of blue sky—almost blue, anyway—showing through behind the inescapable striped layerings of vividly colored greenhouse goop and the usual baleful white backdrop.

  Rhodes had read about blue skies in storybooks when he was a kid, but he hadn’t had much of an opportunity for seeing them over the past thirty years or so. Today, though, the air was clean, for some reason. Relatively clean, anyway. From his office on the thirteenth floor of the slender, airy Santachiara Technologies tower, up along the highest ridge of the Berkeley hills a couple of miles south of the University campus, he had a 360-degree view of the whole San Francisco Bay Area: the bridges, the shimmering water, the pretty little toy city across the bay, the rounded inland hills behind him with their serene coats of desiccated lion-colored grass. At this distance you weren’t able to see how the surface of practically every structure was spotted and corroded by the unrelenting fumes. And then there was the arching dome of the sky, much of it looking magnificently and improbably blue right now. On a day like this it was impossible to keep your mind on work. Rhodes wandered from window to window, making the full circuit, staring out.

  A terrific day, yes. But he knew it couldn’t stay that way for long, and he was right.

  The annunciator light went on and the calm impersonal androidal voice said, “Dr. Van Vliet is calling on Line Three, Dr. Rhodes. He wants to know if you have a reaction to his report yet.”

  Rhodes felt a falling-away sensation in the floor of his gut. It was a lot too early in the day to have to cope with Van Vliet and the complications that he represented.

  “Tell him I’m in conference and I’ll have to get back to him,” Rhodes said automatically.

  Nick Rhodes was the associate research director of Santachiara Technologies’ Survival/Modification Program, which is to say that he earned his living trying to find ways to transform human beings into something that would be either more or less than human, Rhodes still wasn’t quite sure which. Santachiara Technologies was a subsidiary of Samurai Industries, the mega-corp that owned pretty near all the segments of the universe that weren’t the property of Kyocera-Merck, Ltd. And Alex Van Vliet was probably the brightest and certainly the most aggressive of Santachiara’s team of hot young genetic
engineers. Who supposedly had come up with a hot new adapto plan, a scheme involving hemoglobin replacement, that was said by those who had heard Van Vliet’s lunch-hour explanations to have real breakthrough possibilities. That was a new angle, all right, and one that Rhodes found obscurely threatening, without quite understanding why. Just this moment a conversation with Van Vliet was an event that Rhodes wanted very much to avoid.

  Not out of cowardice, Rhodes told himself. Merely out of a certain degree of moral confusion. There was a difference, Rhodes liked to think. Sooner or later he would work through the inner contradictions in which he had lately begun to become entangled and then he would deal with Van Vliet. But not just now, please, Rhodes thought. Not just now, okay?

  He returned to his desk.

  The desk had a very important look, a smooth, sweeping boomerang-shaped slab of highly polished wood, mottled red in color, a fabulous million-dollar chunk of rare wood torn from the heart of some South American rain-forest monarch. And it was importantly cluttered, too: data-cubes stacked in this corner, videos over there, a big pile of virtuals that included Van Vliet’s set of simulations and proposals along the far edge. On the left side, below desktop level, was a set of controls for all the room’s electronic gadgets; on the right, in a suspended drawer protected by a crystal-tuned privacy lock, was a small collection of cognacs and whiskeys, private stock of Nicholas Rhodes, Ph.D. And in the middle of everything, next to the grille of the annunciator, was the elegant six-sided holochip that Rhodes’ girlfriend Isabelle Martine had given him at Christmas, the one that proclaimed in letters of fire (if you held it at the right angle) the six-word mantra that Rhodes had formulated to encapsulate the specific tasks of his department, one word per face: