Hot Sky at Midnight Page 7

  “I am not a doctor.”

  “Could you be a doctor again? For a price?”

  Juanito swung around, astounded, to look at Farkas. This was a twist he hadn’t expected.

  The tall man was smiling pleasantly. Leaning forward, waiting for an answer.

  “I will not listen to this,” the woman said. “You will go away from me this instant or I summon the patrol.”

  Farkas said, “Listen to me very carefully, Dr. Wu. We have a project that could be of great interest to you. I represent an engineering group that is a division of a corporation whose name I’m sure you know. Its work involves an experimental spacedrive, the first interstellar voyage, faster-than-light travel. The estimate is that the program is three years away from a launch. Perhaps four.”

  The woman rose. “This madness is of no importance to me.”

  “The faster-than-light field distorts vision,” Farkas went on. He didn’t appear to notice that she was standing and looked about ready to bolt. “It disrupts vision entirely, in fact. Perception becomes totally abnormal. A crew with normal vision wouldn’t be able to function in any way. But it turns out that someone with blindsight can adapt fairly easily to the peculiar changes that the field induces. As you see, I would be ideally fitted for a voyage aboard such a vessel, and indeed I have been asked to take part in the first experimental trip.”

  “I have no interest in hearing about—”

  “The spacedrive has been tested, actually. Ground tests, strictly preliminary, no distance covered, but the theoretical results are extremely encouraging. With me as the subject. So we are quite confident that the project is going to work out. But I can’t make the voyage alone. We have a crew of five and they’ve volunteered for tectogenetic retrofits to give them what I have. We don’t know anyone else who has your experience in that area. We’d like you to come out of retirement, Dr. Wu.”

  This was not at all the way Juanito had expected the meeting to go. He was altogether off balance.

  Farkas was saying, “We’ve set up a complete lab for you on a nearby habitat, already containing whatever equipment you’re likely to need, though anything else you want, you just have to ask. We’ll pay you very well, of course. And ensure your personal safety all the time you’re gone from Valparaiso Nuevo. What do you say? Do we have a deal?”

  The red-haired woman was trembling and slowly backing away. Farkas didn’t seem to notice her movements.

  “No,” she said. “It was such a long time ago. Whatever skills I once had, I have forgotten, I have buried.”

  So Farkas had been right all along, Juanito thought. No question about it. This was his Dr. Wu.

  “You can give yourself a refresher course,” Farkas said. “I don’t think it’s possible really for a person to forget a great gift like yours, do you?”

  “No. Please. Let me be.”

  Juanito was amazed at how cockeyed his whole handle on the situation had been from the start. He had had it all wrong, that entire scenario of revenge. He had rarely been so wrong in his life. Farkas hadn’t come here with the idea of evening the score with Wu, Juanito saw now. Just to cut a deal, apparently. On behalf of Kyocera-Merck. Farkas didn’t give a shit about revenge. He wasn’t at all angry about what the gene surgeon had done to him long ago, no.

  He was even more alien than Juanito had thought.

  “What do you say?” Farkas asked again.

  Instead of replying, the woman—Wu—took a further couple of steps backward. She—he—whatever—seemed to be poised, getting ready to bolt in another second or two.

  “Where’s he going?” Farkas said suddenly. “Don’t let him get away, Juanito.”

  Wu was still retreating, moving faster now, not quite running but sidling away at a steady pace, back into the enclosed part of the cafe. Farkas gestured sharply and Juanito began to follow. The spike he was carrying could deliver a stun-level jolt at fifteen paces. But he couldn’t just spike Wu down in this crowd, not if she had sanctuary protection, not in El Mirador of all places. There’d be fifty sanctuaries on top of him in a minute. They’d grab him and club him and sell his foreskin to the Generalissimo’s men for two and a half callies.

  The cafe was crowded and dark. Juanito caught sight of the woman somewhere near the back, near the rest rooms. Go on, he thought. Go into the ladies’ room. I’ll follow you right in there if you do. I don’t give a damn about that.

  But she went on past the rest rooms and ducked into an alcove near the kitchen instead. Two waiters laden with trays came by, scowling vehemently at Juanito, telling him to get out of the way. It took him a moment to pass around them, and by then he could no longer see the red-haired woman. He knew he was going to have big trouble with Farkas if he lost her in here. Farkas was going to have a fit. Farkas would try to stiff him on this week’s pay, most likely. Two thousand callies down the drain, not even counting the extra charges.

  Then a hand reached out of the shadows and seized his wrist with surprising ferocity. Juanito was dragged a little way into a claustrophobic games room dense with crackling green haze coming from some bizarre machine on the far wall. The red-haired woman glared at him, wild-eyed.

  “He wants to kill me, doesn’t he? That’s all a bunch of shit about having me do retrofit operations, right?”

  “I think he means it,” Juanito said.

  “Nobody would volunteer to have his eyes replaced with blindsight.”

  “How would I know? People do all sorts of crazy things. But if he wanted to kill you I think he’d have operated differently when we tracked you down.”

  “He’ll get me off Valparaiso and kill me somewhere else.”

  “I don’t know,” Juanito said. “He keeps his plans to himself. I’m just doing a job.”

  “How much did he pay you to do the trace?” Savagely. “How much?” A quick darting glance downward. “I know you’ve got a spike in your pocket. Just leave it there and answer me. How much?”

  “Three thousand callies a week,” Juanito muttered, padding things a little.

  “I’ll give you five to help me get rid of him.”

  Well, that was a switch. But Juanito hesitated. Sell Farkas out? He didn’t know if he could turn himself around that fast. Was it the professional thing to do, to take a higher bid?

  “Eight,” he said, after a moment.

  Why the hell not? He didn’t owe Farkas any loyalty. This was a sanctuary world; the compassion of El Supremo entitled Wu to protection here. It was every citizen’s duty to shield his fellow citizens from harm. And eight thousand callies was a big bundle of money.

  “Six five,” Wu said.

  “Eight, or no deal. Handshake right now. You have your glove?”

  The woman who had been Dr. Wu Fang-shui made a sour muttering sound and pulled out her flex terminal. “Account 1133,” Juanito said, and they made the transfer of funds. “How do you want to do this?” Juanito asked.

  “There is a passageway into the outer shell just behind this cafe. You will catch sight of me slipping in there and the two of you will follow me. When we are all inside and he is coming toward me, you get behind him and take him down with your spike. And we leave him buried in there.” There was a frightening gleam in Wu’s eyes. It was almost as if the cunning retrofit body was melting away and the real Wu beneath was emerging, moment by moment. “You understand?” Wu said. A fierce, blazing look. The face of a dithering old woman, but the eyes of a devil. “I have bought you, boy. I expect you to stay bought when we are in the shell. Do you understand me? Do you? Good.”

  6

  carpenter was the first to reach the restaurant. The trip across the bay had been quicker than he expected. He waited out in front for Rhodes, pacing up and down in the white midday glare. The restaurant was a series of small perspex domes nestling along the rim of the seawall that protected lowland Berkeley from further incursions by the bay. They looked like clumps of gleaming fungi.

  Half the Berkeley flatlands had been gobbled
by the rising water in the first big surges forty or fifty years back, and at low tide, so Carpenter understood, it was possible to glimpse the tops of the old drowned buildings sticking up out of the glistening microorganism-stained surface of the bay. But there hadn’t been any serious new flooding here since the seawall had been put in. The West Coast had come off pretty well, generally speaking, in the great drowning of the shorelines, which had happened in a highly erratic way around the world: catastrophic in China and Japan and Bangladesh, and also the eastern United States, especially Florida, Georgia, the Carolina coast, but only a minor annoyance in Western Europe—except in Holland, Denmark, and the Baltic countries, which were pretty much gone— and no big deal along the Pacific side of the Americas, either. Now they said that the present phase of the melting of the polar ice caps was essentially complete: what remained of them was going to stay frozen, at least for the immediate future, so there was nothing more to fear from the rising of the planetary water levels. That was always nice to hear, Carpenter thought, that there was nothing more to fear. In any context at all. Even if it wasn’t true.

  The noon sun was fierce and big and the air was, as usual, like thick soup. Rhodes was late, not unusual for him. Carpenter, fidgeting in the sticky heat, walked up the ramp leading up to the seawall, flapping his shirt to cool himself and tugging at his face-lung where it was clinging, warm and clammy, to his cheek.

  He stared out at the fine old bridges and the broad bay, green and blue and violet with its skin of tropical pond scum, and at the glistening elegance of San Francisco across the way, and the dark heavy bulk of Mount Tamalpais off to the north. Then he looked around the other way, at the Berkeley-Oakland hills, heavily built over but still showing big grassy areas.

  All the grass was brown and withered and dead looking, but Carpenter knew from childhood experience that it would spring up in fresh green life within a week or two, once the winter rains came. The trouble was that the winter rains didn’t seem to come here very often, any more. It was an endless summer all up and down the coast, year in, year out. Whereas former deserts like those in the Middle East and northern Africa were blessed now with sweet downpourings of precipitation as never before, and the whole southeastern arc of the United States from East Texas to Florida had turned into one enormous rain forest, strangling under a phantasmagorical burden of colossal furry vines and great clumps of orchids and gigantic creeping plants with shiny leaves.

  “There you are,” said a deep, husky voice behind him. “I’ve been looking all over the place.”

  Nick Rhodes grinned at him from the foot of the seawall ramp. He had risen up out of nowhere, it seemed. Rhodes was maskless, wearing an airy-looking white cotton djellaba imprinted with bold Egyptian motifs. His tight, curling brown hair had begun to turn gray and had receded considerably at his temples since Carpenter had last seen him, and he looked tired and eroded. His round face had become fleshy, almost puffy. There was a feeling of forced exuberance about his grin, Carpenter thought. Something was wrong. Definitely wrong.

  “Herr Doktor,” Carpenter said. “Here at last. The soul of punctuality, as ever.” He descended to Rhodes and put out his hand. Rhodes caught it and reeled him in and gave him an effusive bear hug, cheek to cheek. Carpenter was a tall man, but Rhodes was a little taller and very much broader and deeper, and the hug was a crusher.

  They stepped back, then, and surveyed each other. They had known each other all their lives, more or less. Rhodes, two years older, had been an early friend of Carpenter’s slightly older brother, originally, in their distant Southern California boyhoods. By the time they had reached adolescence Rhodes had become a little too dreamy, a little too vulnerable, for the older Carpenter, but he had clicked in some mysterious way with Paul.

  They had followed parallel tracks all through life, both entering the giant Samurai Industries combine soon after college, the one difference being that Rhodes had real scientific ability and Carpenter’s main areas of intellectual interest lay in soft fields like history and anthropology, where there were no real career possibilities at all. So Rhodes had gone in for genetic bioengineering, a potent fast-slope path for which the Company would underwrite his graduate work and subsequent research, and Carpenter had signed on as an unspecialized executive trainee, which he knew would carry him to an unpredictable, constantly shifting series of enterprises, completely at the whim of his employer. Through all the twists and turns of their lives ever since they had managed to maintain a tenuous but nevertheless tenacious sort of friendship.

  “Well,” Carpenter said. “It’s been quite a while.”

  “So it has, Paul. What a treat this is. I have to tell you, you look great.”

  “Do I? Life in fabulous Spokane. The wine, the women, the fragrance of the flowers. And you? Everything going well? The life, the work?”

  “Wonderful.”

  Carpenter couldn’t tell if there was irony in that. He suspected there was.

  “Let’s go inside,” he said. “You must be crazy, coming out without a breathing-mask. Or else you’ve had your lungs retrofitted with vanadium steel.”

  “This isn’t your Inland Empire, Paul. We have actual sea breezes here. It’s safe to let unfiltered air into your lungs.”

  “Is it, now?” Carpenter undipped his face-lung and pocketed it, with some relief. The whole mask thing, he suspected, was a paranoid overreaction, anyway. Places like Memphis, yes, Cleveland, St. Louis, you wanted to hide behind as much filtering as you could, if you had to be outdoors. The ruinous air there hit you like a knife, scalpeling right down through your lungs into your gut. But the Bay Area? Rhodes was right. The whole world hadn’t quite become unlivable yet. Not quite.

  Rhodes seemed well known in the restaurant. The place was busy, but the maitre d’, a silky-voiced android of vaguely Oriental appearance, greeted him with a stagy overabundance of warmth and led them at once to what must have been a choice table, high up in the middle dome with a terrific view of the water. “What will you drink?” Rhodes asked, the moment they were seated.

  Carpenter, caught by surprise, asked for a beer. Rhodes ordered a whiskey on the rocks. Both drinks came almost at once and Carpenter noticed with interest how quickly Rhodes went to work on it, and how rapidly he proceeded to put it away.

  “An iceberg skipper,” Rhodes said, bringing up menus for them both on the table visor. “Whatever gave you the idea of doing that?”

  “It was handed to me. Woman I know in Personnel, working out of Paris. She said there was slope in it. Hell, even if there wasn’t, Nick. I hated Spokane. So I move along. I do this, I do that, whatever the Company says. Your basic uncomplaining salaryman. Jack of all trades, master of each, sooner or later.”

  “Weather forecaster, weren’t you, this last time?”

  Carpenter nodded. Somehow a second round of drinks had arrived. He hadn’t seen Rhodes order them. He still hadn’t finished his first beer.

  “What about you, Nick? Continuing to steam away on Project Frankenstein, are you?”

  “Easy,” Rhodes said. He looked hurt. “Cuts a little close.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I hear enough crap from my humanist friends here about the diabolical implications of my research. It gets a little tiresome, being a villain to your friends.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Carpenter. “Why a villain?”

  Rhodes made quotation marks in the air with his fingers. “’Changing the human race into something grotesque and hideous, something that can scarcely be deemed human at all. Creating a new species of sci-fi monsters.’”

  Carpenter took a long, reflective pull of the first beer, finishing it, and contemplated the second one. He began to think it would be a good idea to shift to something stronger for the next round.

  Carefully he said, “You aren’t doing any such thing, though. You’re simply trying to develop some useful anatomical modifications to meet the really heavy conditions that are waiting for us somewhere down the road.
Right?”

  “Right.”

  “Then why—”

  “Do we have to talk about this?” Rhodes said, a little snappishly. “I just want to relax, to get the fuck away from—” He looked up. “I’m sorry. You were just asking questions. And the answer is, no, I’m not actually setting out to create monsters in human form. Or even inhuman form. I’m just trying to use my knowledge for the good of humanity, pretentious as that may sound. The monsters are already here, anyway. Out there.”

  He pointed through the curving perspex, toward the bay.

  “I don’t get you,” Carpenter said.

  “You see those low green humps just offshore? Monster algae, is what they are. Something new, some kind of mutant species, a foot wide and God knows how many yards long. They arrived a couple of years ago, from Monterey. The bay is choked with them. They grow a yard a month. The Bay Environmental Commission has brought in dugongs to feed on them in the hope of clearing the waterway a little.”

  “Dugongs?”

  “Herbivorous aquatic mammals, from the Indian Ocean. Ugly as shit, but harmless. They’re stupid looking and practically blind. They eat seaweed as if it was candy. You can see them lying around in the algae beds gobbling like pigs in clover. The trouble is that the crocodiles like to eat them a whole lot.”

  “Crocodiles,” said Carpenter dully.

  “In San Francisco Bay, yes. They finally made it up here from Los Angeles, and they love it.”

  “I can’t believe it. Crocodiles up here!”

  “You better believe it. They’ll be in Puget Sound next.”

  Carpenter stared. He knew that crocodiles had been making a comeback as the global climate warmed. Even when he was a boy they had started crawling up out of Mexico toward San Diego. In a world where most wildlife was on the skids, practically everything desperately sliding toward extinction, there was a sudden bizarre boom in obsolete Mesozoic reptiles.

  They were all over sweltering super-tropical Florida, of course—what little had survived of it after the sinking of the shoreline. You couldn’t pee in Florida without seeing a crocodile grinning up at you out of the bowl. But California? Crocs in San Francisco Bay? It had never been that way. It was an abomination.