Hot Sky at Midnight

  “Yes. Yes. Look, when they show up, tell them I’m on board, and—listen, tell them also that Farkas didn’t deliver the message this morning. Do you have that? Farkas didn’t deliver the message.”

  “Yes, sir. ‘Farkas didn’t deliver the message.’ ”

  “Good. Thank you.” Carpenter rummaged in his pocket and came up with one of the local coins. Callaghanos, they called them. Not really coins: currency plaques, actually. He had no idea what this one was worth, but it was a big silvery-looking one with a twenty on it, and it would have to be enough. He handed it to Kluge.

  “Final call for Flight 1133—”

  Where were Enron and Jolanda? Where was Davidov? In custody: Carpenter was sure of that.

  And Olmo had discovered the bombs, yes. But had he discovered all of the bombs? Did he have any idea how many had been planted? Had he thought to ask?

  Carpenter entered the lounge. He half expected to be arrested the moment he showed his identity plaque, but no, they told him that everything was in order, so apparently he was in the clear, not linked in any way to the conspirators, too unimportant even to notice during his short stay on Valparaiso Nuevo.

  Noon.

  He was supposed to create a disturbance if the others hadn’t arrived on time—cause a delay, make them hold the shuttle until the rest showed up. At the check-in counter he said, “Some friends of mine aren’t here yet. You’ll have to wait on the departure until they arrive.”

  “That’s impossible, sir. Orbital schedules—”

  “I saw them last night, and they were definitely intending to be here on time!”

  “Perhaps they are already on board, then.”

  “No. A courier out there who knows them said—”

  “May I have their names, sir?”

  Carpenter rattled off the names. He was still speeding. The desk steward asked him to repeat them more slowly, and he did. A shake of the head, then.

  “Those people are not on this flight, sir.”

  “They aren’t?”

  “Reservations canceled. All three. We have an entry here on the board that they will not be taking the flight.”

  Carpenter stared.

  They’ve been arrested, he thought. No doubt of it now. Olmo has them, and with any luck they’ve been telling him about the plot, unless, of course, they’ve been stashed away for interrogation later on.

  And the bombs—the bombs—had Olmo found them all? Did he know?

  “If you don’t mind, sir—you’ll have to take your place on board, now—”

  “Yes,” Carpenter said mechanically. “Of course.”

  Moving with the leaden tread of a dying robot, he went lurching onto the shuttle. Looked about for Jolanda, Enron, Davidov. Not to be seen. Of course not.

  Let himself be strapped into his gravity cradle. Waited for the shuttle to push off.

  Enron. Davidov. Jolanda.

  A colossal bungle. He could do nothing. Nothing at all. Make them delay the flight? They wouldn’t. They would simply pull him off and stick him in restraint at the shuttle terminal. Suicide, is what that would be.

  “Please sit back, enjoy the flight—”

  Yes. Sure.

  The shuttle was moving outward, now. Quarter past twelve, exactly. Carpenter put his hands over his eyes. He had felt a little while before that he was as tired as he had ever been, but he suspected now that he had gone beyond that, that now he was tired as he could ever possibly get. If you could die of sheer weariness, he thought, he would be dead by now.

  “What time is it?” he asked a man in the opposite seat, a long while later.

  “Valparaiso Nuevo time?”

  “Yes.”

  “One twenty-eight exactly.”

  “Thank you,” Carpenter said. He turned toward his porthole and stared fixedly out, wondering which side of the shuttle was facing toward Valparaiso Nuevo, and, if it was this one, which of the many little points of light out there was the habitat he had left a little while before.

  He didn’t have to wait long to find out.

  The explosion, when it came, was like the sudden distant blossoming of a scarlet flower in the sky. And a second flare of red, and a third.

  28

  rhodes was clearing out his desk when the annunciator light went on and the android outside said, “Mr. Paul Carpenter is here to see you, Dr. Rhodes.”

  It was Rhodes’ final day at Santachiara Technologies, and he had a million and a half things to do. But he could hardly tell Paul Carpenter that he was too busy to see him.

  “Tell him to come in,” Rhodes said.

  He wasn’t prepared for the change in Carpenter’s appearance. His old friend looked as though he had lost twenty pounds in just a matter of weeks, and aged ten years. His face was haggard, his eyes were vacant-looking and rimmed with red, his long yellow hair had lost most of its luster. Carpenter had shaved off his beard for the first time in Rhodes’ recent memory, and the look of the lower half of his face, gaunt and hard and outjutting, was altogether unfamiliar.

  “Paul,” Rhodes said, going to him, wrapping his arms around him. “Hey, fellow. Hey, there!”

  It was like embracing a sack of bones.

  Carpenter smiled grimly, a ghostly burned-out smile. “A crazy time,” he said softly.

  “I’ll bet it was. You want a drink?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither,” said Rhodes.

  Carpenter flashed him that dead, practically expressionless little spectral smile again. “You didn’t give it up, did you?”

  “Me? Not a chance. I’ve got a serious habit, fellow. But I can do without it right now. Sit down, will you? Relax.”

  “Relax, he says.” Carpenter chuckled hollowly. He gestured at the packing crates, the stacks of cubes and virtuals. “You going somewhere?”

  “This is the last day. I start at Kyocera on Monday.”

  “Good for you.”

  “I’ll be taking most of my people over with me. Hubbard, Van Vliet, Richter, Schiaparelli, Cohen—all the key personnel. Samurai is appalled, of course. They’re talking big lawsuit. Not my problem.”

  “No?”

  “Kyocera will indemnify.”

  “Nice,” Carpenter said. “I’m very glad for you, Nick. Go over there and genetify the hell out of things. Fix everything the way it needs to be fixed. A new human race that can breathe methane and drink hydrochloric acid. Do it, Nick. You and Dr. Wu.”

  “I haven’t talked with Wu yet. He’s still up there on Cornucopia, retrofitting the crew for the interstellar trip.”

  “Cornucopia?”

  “The Kyocera research satellite. Practically next door to the place that—”

  “Ah,” Carpenter said. “Yes.”

  Neither of them spoke for a time.

  “What a shitty thing. Valparaiso Nuevo.”

  “Yes.”

  “Isabelle still hasn’t even begun to cope with it. Jolanda was her best friend.”

  “I know,” said Carpenter. “What vitality that woman had! I can’t believe she’s—”

  “No. Neither can I.”

  “I saw it blow up. Sat there on the shuttle, watching it, thinking, Jolanda, Enron, Davidov. And all those thousands of other people. But mainly Jolanda. Jolanda. Jolanda.”

  “Don’t talk about it, Paul. Don’t even think about it.”

  “Sure.”

  “You certain you don’t want a drink?” Rhodes asked.

  “Listen, if you’d like to have one—”

  “Not me. You.”

  “I don’t dare touch it. I had a hyperdex overdose while I was up there. Only thing that saved my life, but it ruined my nervous system for a long time to come.”

  “Hyperdex? Saved your life?”

  “A long story,” Carpenter said. “Farkas decided he needed to kill me, and Jolanda tipped me off and gave me some of her pills, and—oh, shit. Shit, Nick I don’t feel like talking about it at all”

  “You shouldn’t,” Rhod
es said.

  It was unbearable, he thought, to see Carpenter this way, this dazed, woozy shell of a man, this wreck. But Carpenter had been through so much, the iceberg thing, the firing, the trip across the country, the L-5 explosion—

  They sat in silence again for a while.

  The thing about a friendship that goes back this many years, Rhodes told himself, is that when a moment comes when it’s more appropriate not to say something than to say something, you can just keep your mouth shut. And the other one will understand.

  But after a time it was impossible for him to sustain the silence. Quietly Rhodes said, “Well, Paul? What now? Do you know?”

  “Yes. I do.”

  Rhodes waited.

  “Back to space,” Carpenter said. “I’ve got to get out of here. Earth is fucked, Nick. At least it is for me. I have nobody here but you. And Jeanne, I guess, but I don’t really have her. And I don’t want to mess her up any more than she already is, so the best thing I can do is to leave her alone, I don’t want to stick around and watch things continue to fall apart here.”

  “They won’t,” Rhodes said. “We’re going to fix them. Or rather, we’re going to fix ourselves so that we can handle what’s about to come down.”

  “Fine. You do the best fix you can, Nick, and more power to you. But I’ve got to get out of here.”

  “Which habitat will you go to?”

  “Not a habitat. Farther.”

  “I don’t understand,” Rhodes said. “Mars? Ganymede?”

  “Farther, Nick.”

  Rhodes was baffled, at first. Then, gradually, he moved Carpenter’s words around in his mind and began to extract some sense from them.

  “The starship project?” Rhodes asked, incredulously.

  Carpenter nodded.

  “For God’s sake, why? Aren’t the L-5s far enough away?”

  “Not nearly. I want to go as far as it’s possible to go, and then go even farther than that. I want to get the hell away. Purge myself of all that’s happened. Start over.”

  “But how can you? The starship project—”

  “You can do it for me. You can get me in there. It’s a Kyocera thing, Nick. And as of Monday you’re a very high-level Kyocera scientist.”

  “Well, yes,” Rhodes said, though he was taken aback by the idea. “I suppose—I will have some influence there, yes. But that’s not what I mean.”

  “What do you mean, Nick?”

  Rhodes hesitated.

  “You really want to be part of the crew?”

  “Yes. Isn’t it clear that that’s what I’m saying?”

  “Well, then,” Rhodes said. “Consider, Paul. The eyes—”

  “Yes. The eyes.”

  “You want to be turned into a thing like Farkas?” Rhodes asked.

  “I want to get away from here,” Carpenter replied. “That’s the essential thing. All the rest is peripheral. Okay, Nick? You’ve got it now? Good. Good. I want you to help me. Pull strings for me, Nick Pull strings like you’ve never pulled before.”

  There was passion in the content of what he was saying, Rhodes thought, but none in his tone. Carpenter seemed like a man talking in his sleep: his voice was flat, affectless, eerie in its tranquillity. Rhodes was frightened by it.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he heard himself saying.

  “Yes. Do.” The ghost smile again. “It’s for the best, Nick.”

  “If you think it is.”

  “It is. I know so. Everything always works out for the best, Nick. Always.”

  29

  carpenter sat back in his gravity cradle, watching the satellite world of Cornucopia come spinning up into view just ahead. He felt wondrously calm. He felt like a sailor who has passed through the grandfather of all storms and now is moving across a placid sea as still as glass.

  It was all arranged. Nick Rhodes had done it all: notifying the powers that be at Kyocera that he had a nominee to fill the vacancy in the starship crew now that Farkas was dead, and making it be known that he expected his new company to take the nomination seriously. Then miraculously maneuvering the cashiered Samurai man Paul Carpenter into position for the opening despite all the difficulties that that involved, guiding him through the entry interview and everything that had followed. And now, sending him up to Cornucopia, where the members of the crew were being prepared for their strange voyage.

  “Look,” someone said across the aisle. “There’s the habitat that blew up. The wreckage of it.”

  Carpenter didn’t look. He knew that there was a gigantic mess scattered all over the L-5 zone, that pieces of Valparaiso Nuevo were orbiting every which way and that mop-up crews would be collecting bodies for months to come, as well as trying to get the biggest chunks of debris turned around and shoved into trajectories that would take them toward the sun before their orbits decayed and dumped them down on Earth. But he didn’t want to see it.

  He looked the other way, instead. Behind him and down, in his landlubber’s way of seeing things: downward to the Earth.

  How beautiful it was!

  A perfect blue ball, gleaming brightly, mottled with bands of white. The wounds mankind had inflicted were invisible. There was no way to see, from this altitude, the squalor, the ruination, the foulness. The bleak new desert zones that had been fertile agricultural areas a few generations back, the steaming fungoid forests covering the sites of abandoned cities, the drowned shorelines, the clotted garbage in the seas, the colorful patches of poisoned air, the long dreary miles of blackened and withered wasteland that he had passed through during his feverish trip to Chicago and back. No, the view from up here beyond the stratosphere was altogether superb.

  A lovely world. A jewel among planets.

  Too bad we messed it up so badly, Carpenter thought. Fouled our own nest in a glorious centuries-long orgy of stupidity, transformed our wondrous and perhaps unique world into a thing of horror. Which now is continuing the transformation itself, with a power that is beyond our control, so that we have little choice now but to transform ourselves as well if we want to go on living there.

  What else could you feel, looking down at that blue globe of seeming perfection and thinking of the Eden it once had been and what we had made out of it, but rage, pain, fury, anguish, despair? What else could you do but cry and howl and beat your breast?

  And yet—yet—

  Take the long view, Carpenter told himself.

  The damage was only temporary. All would be well. Not soon, of course. There were those who said that the planet had been wounded; well, then, the planet would eventually heal. There were some who felt that it had merely been stained; if that was the case, the planet would need some time to cleanse itself. But it would. It would. Everything would be repaired. A hundred years, a thousand, a million, however long it took: but it would clean itself up. The planet had plenty of time. We don’t, Carpenter thought, but it does. Life would go on. Not necessarily ours, but life of some sort If we must be replaced on Earth by another kind of life, because we were such poor stewards of our domain, so be it. So be it. One kind fails, another kind eventually takes over. Life is persistent. Life is resilient.

  “Passengers bound for Cornucopia, prepare for docking,” a loudspeaker voice said.

  The Kyocera research satellite’s shimmering spokes came looming up. Carpenter glanced at it indifferently. He was still looking back at Earth, lost in what felt to him like some kind of mystic revelation.

  A visionary glimpse came to him now of the new race that Nick Rhodes would create. Monstrous, yes, scales and goggle eyes and webbed feet and green blood. But what of it? To themselves they would look beautiful; and to themselves they would be. In the new and strangely transformed Earth of a hundred years to come they would be perfectly at home, comfortable in the different air, altogether at ease in the furnace heat.

  He could see Rhodes and Isabella down there, at peace with each other at last, a lovely couple man and wife, holding hands, growing old together. Chil
dren, even. Little monsters. A burgeoning tribe. Life goes on.

  The shuttle was docking now. Three or four Cornucopia-bound passengers were getting off. Carpenter went up front when his name was called and passed through the hatch.

  Cornucopia, what he could see of it, looked a lot like the Port of Oakland: no fancy carpeting or wall coverings, no landscape plants, no decoration of any kind, just miles of metal everywhere, a gridwork of bare structural members. Everything strictly functional. Utilitarian. That was all right. He hadn’t come here for a vacation.

  “Mr. Carpenter? This way, please.”

  A couple of Kyocera salarymen waiting for him. Leading him down bleak hallways, through stark corridors.

  A door, finally, labeled in glowing luminous letters:

  PROJECT LONG JUMP

  AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

  This must be the place, Carpenter thought.

  A long jump indeed. All the way to some other star.

  Well, he was ready for it. He felt calm, determined, fully committed: he reached that point beyond all caring, now, and was entering this place the way, in some earlier century, he might have entered a monastery.

  Of his own free choice he was leaving the world behind him, and good riddance to it.

  That world had become an excessively difficult place. Breathing itself was a problem; so was dealing with ordinary sunshine, which was no longer ordinary, and so was the question of doing the right thing, Carpenter thought. He had tried to do the right thing most of his life, and had only fitfully succeeded at it. Not his fault: he had tried. Then he had involved himself in a wrong thing, with catastrophic results. And Enron? Jolanda? They too had tried to do the right thing, according to their own lights. And in the course of doing it they had sought to make their individual accommodations to life in this difficult era, and eventually they had made one accommodation too many, and they had died for it.

  A tough proposition, life in this difficult era. Carpenter wanted a fresh start.

  And he knew he would get it here. They would take him and change him and send him to the far reaches of the universe. Fine. Fine. He, too, could be persistent and resilient. You fail on one world, you pick yourself up and go on to another one. Rebirth, always rebirth: that was the way. As one of the Kyocera men put his hand to the door plate Carpenter allowed himself another vision. This one was brief, redemptive: a golden-green sun, a shimmering lemon sky, a forest of glistening fronds, a lake of pure pearly water. The new Eden, an untarnished paradise, waiting to be found and settled by the chastened, humbled race of man. Of whose vanguard into interstellar space he would be a member.