Hot Sky at Midnight

9

the kyocera-merck research satellite Cornucopia was just a short hop away from Valparaiso Nuevo, a matter of a couple of hundred kilometers. One of the innumerable bright dots that danced through the nearby reaches of L-5 space, one of the myriad twinkling jellyfish in the ocean of night.

Farkas was supposed to go over to Cornucopia to pick up the details of his next assignment, and in any case he wanted a chance to talk with Dr. Wu a little before he left the satellite zone. Surely they would let him have a little chat with Dr. Wu, he thought. He figured they owed him that much; but just to be safe Farkas put it on a need-to-know basis, as though what he wanted to learn from Wu was something that another division of K-M had asked him to find out. That was more likely to produce results than a simple request for a personal favor.

He waited on Valparaiso Nuevo a couple of days, to give them a chance to get their new acquisition properly settled in over there. Then he booked a flight across to Cornucopia for himself, taking the midday shuttle that made a regular daily daisy-chain circuit through the neighboring group of habitat worlds.

No nonsense about visas here. Authorized personnel only: you couldn’t get a ticket to Cornucopia in the first place unless you were going there on legitimate Company business and they were expecting you. Even then, you weren’t allowed off the shuttle until the passenger manifest had been checked at the Cornucopia end and they had formally agreed to receive you.

A reception committee was waiting for Farkas in the docking bay: a short man and a tall woman. The man looked, to Farkas, like a series of yellow spirals arranged around an inverted green cone; the woman was a single vertical flow of soft-textured blue fabric. Farkas didn’t quite catch their names, but decided it didn’t matter. The man was something on the technical side, but obviously nothing very important, and the woman introduced herself as a Level Twenty administrative executive. You didn’t need to bother learning the names of Level Twenties, Farkas had discovered long ago.

“There’s an assignment document waiting for you, Mr. Farkas,” the Twenty said right away. “It’s in your logistics box. You can access it from your accommodation chamber.” She seemed to be fighting to keep from flinching at his strangeness.

“Thank you,” Farkas said. “I also requested an interview with Dr. Wu. Do you have any information about that?”

The Twenty looked uncertainly at the technical-side guy. “Paolo?”

“Affirmative. Subject Wu is to be made available for a meeting with Expediter Farkas upon his demand.”

“Good,” Farkas said. “I so demand. Now.”

The Twenty seemed troubled by the swiftness of his response. “You want to see Dr. Wu now? Before we even take you to your accommodation chamber?”

“Yes,” he said. “If you don’t mind.”

“Well,” the Twenty said. “Of course. No problem, Mr. Farkas. She’s in a security dorm, you understand. I’ll need to do an access notification. It’ll take just a minute, though.”

She, Farkas thought. Well, yes. To these people, Wu was a she. He would have to reprogram his own way of thinking about him, he saw, or there would be confusion.

The Twenty had walked a little distance off and was busy with a terminal, tapping in codes. Obtaining immediate access to Wu for him took a little longer than she had promised. There were complications, evidently. But eventually she got it.

“If you’ll come this way, Mr. Farkas—”

Cornucopia was very different from Valparaiso Nuevo: stark, functional, a place of pure industrial texture, a lot of bare girders and struts and other such structural things showing everywhere. Even by way of blindsight, Farkas could see and feel the difference at once. No fountains here, no waterfalls, no lush vines and banana trees, just lots of austere Company hardware at work. All sorts of research went on up here. It was cheaper to build an entire space satellite from scratch than to try to provide a properly clean laboratory on Earth. Scientific research required pure air and water. And of course there was the advantage of variable gravity aboard a satellite world, very useful, so Farkas had heard, in certain areas of scientific work.

Paolo and the Level Twenty led Farkas through a series of security locks and barrel-shaped vaulted corridors and finally to a sort of vestibule where an android guard asked Farkas for a drop of blood in order to check his serum print against the Company archive, apparently to make sure that he was really who he claimed to be, and not some impostor who had had his eyes removed in order to get in where he didn’t belong. The android didn’t give a damn how unlikely that might be, or that Farkas was a Nine, with all the prestige that that carried. He had his orders. Your finger, please, sir.

Well, so be it, Farkas thought, obligingly offering his finger. He was used to surrendering drops of blood for identification purposes. The usual Company mode of identification check was by way of retinal-print scanning. But they couldn’t very well do that with him.

The android drew Farkas’s blood in a brusque and businesslike way and put it under a scanner.

“Identification confirmed,” the android reported, in a moment. “You may go inside, Expediter Farkas.”

Wu was being kept in a containment area that seemed to be something more lavish than a prison cell, something less comfortable than a hotel room. When Farkas entered the room she remained where she was, seated at a desk along the far wall.

Farkas glanced at the Twenty, who was standing right behind him, with Paolo the technician next to her.

“I’d like to talk to Dr. Wu privately.”

“I’m sorry, Expediter Farkas. A private interview hasn’t been authorized.”

“Oh?”

“We have been instructed to be present during the interview. I’m sorry, Expediter Farkas.”

“I don’t intend to murder him, you know. Her, I mean.”

“If you’d like, we could file a formal application for an exception from the instructions, but it would probably take—”

“Never mind,” Farkas said. What the hell. Let them listen. He turned toward Wu. “Hello again, doctor.”

“What do you want with me?” Wu asked, not sounding especially charmed.

“Just a visit. A social visit. I asked permission to have a little talk with you.”

“Please. I am an employee of Kyocera-Merck now. I have the right not to be bothered when I am off duty.”

Farkas took a seat on a kind of low sofa next to the desk. In a quiet voice he said, “I’m afraid you don’t have the option of refusing, Dr. Wu. I’ve requested this meeting and the request has been granted. But I do want it to be a friendly visit.”

“Friendly.”

“Friendly, yes. I mean that sincerely. We aren’t enemies. As you said, we are both employees of Kyocera-Merck.”

“What do you want with me?” Wu said again.

“I’ve told you. A social visit. Bygones are bygones, do you understand what I’m saying?”

Wu did not reply.

Farkas said, “So tell me: how do you like your new accommodations? Everything to your satisfaction? What do you think of the laboratory that’s been fixed up for you?”

“The accommodations are as you see. I have lived in worse places, and also better ones. As for the laboratory, it is a very fine one. Most of the equipment is beyond my understanding.” Wu’s voice was all on the same pitch, flat and dull and dead, as though modulating the tone a little would be too expensive.

“You’ll learn how to use it,” Farkas said.

“Perhaps. Or perhaps not. My knowledge of the field is years out of date. Decades. There’s no assurance that I can do the work you people are expecting from me.”

“Nevertheless,” Farkas said. “Here you are. Here you’ll stay, being comfortably looked after, until you accomplish something worthwhile or the Company decides that you really aren’t going to be of any use. My hunch is that as you familiarize yourself with the equipment in your new lab, you’ll become very excited by the progress that’s been made in your field since you left it, and that you’ll relearn your old skills very fast and pick up all the new ones. After all, there’s no risk for you, is there, doctor? Your work here will be strictly legal.”

“My work was always strictly legal,” Wu said, in the same sullen robotic monotone.

“Ah. Ah, now. That’s what I wanted to talk about.”

Wu was silent.

Farkas said, “Did you ever think, Dr. Wu, that your experimental subjects in the Tashkent laboratory didn’t especially want their genetic material altered?”

“I am not required to discuss this. You indicated that bygones would be bygones.”

“Not required, no. But I’d like you to. I don’t feel any vindictiveness, but I do have some curiosity. Quite a lot of curiosity, in fact, things I really want to learn from you about yourself.”

“Why must I answer you?”

“Because you did a monstrous thing to me,” Farkas said, still keeping his voice quiet but for the first time putting an edge on it, a whiplash crackle. “That gives me the right to get some answers out of you, at the very least. Tell me a few things, out of simple human compassion. You are human, aren’t you, Dr. Wu? You’re not just some kind of soulless thing, some clever sort of android?”

“You will kill me, is that not so, when I am finished with my work in this place.”

“Will I? I don’t know. I don’t see where it would do me any good, and it seems like a petty thing to do. Of course, if you happen to want me to kill you—”

“No. No.”

“Well, then.” Farkas smiled. “If I really wanted to kill you, Dr. Wu, I would have done it on Valparaiso Nuevo. I’m not so completely the creature of Kyocera-Merck that I would put the Company’s interests ahead of my own to that extent. So obviously I saw no point in killing you when I had the chance. I was content instead just to carry out the assignment that I had been sent to Valparaiso Nuevo to do, which was to deliver you to Cornucopia so that you could perform certain research on behalf of the Company, research for which you had unique qualifications.”

“You did your job, yes. It matters a great deal to you, to do your job. And when the Company is through with me, then you will kill me. I know that, Farkas. Why should I talk with you?”

“To give me reasons for not killing you when the Company is finished using you.”

“How could I possibly do that?”

“Well,” said Farkas. “Let’s see, shall we? Perhaps if I could come to understand your side of the event a little better I’d be more inclined toward being merciful. For instance: when you were doing your experiments on fetuses in Tashkent, what exactly did you feel, in here, in your heart, about the nature of your work?”

“It was all such a long time ago.”

“Almost forty years, yes. Some of those fetuses have since turned into large grown men without eyes. But you must remember a little about it. Tell me, doctor: did you experience any hesitation at all, any kind of moral qualms, when you set about working on me in my mother’s womb? Any kind of ethical queasiness? Or pity, say?”

Wu said stolidly, “What I felt was intense scientific curiosity. I was trying to learn things that seemed important to discover. We learn by doing.”

“Using human victims.”

“Human subjects, yes. That was necessary. The human genome is different from that of animals.”

“Ah, not true, not true! Not really. You could have experimented with chimpanzee fetuses and had pretty much the same set of genes to work with. You know that, doctor.”

“The chimpanzees would not have been able to report to us verbally on the nature of the extended perceptions they could attain using blindsight.”

“I see. Only humans could do that.”

“Exactly.”

“And a supply of humans was readily available while you were in Tashkent, thanks to the chaos of the Breakup. Unborn humans, highly suitable for genetic experimentation. Your intense scientific curiosity therefore was going to be satisfied, and you were very happy about that. But even so, it would have been more ethical if you had asked the mothers of the unborn humans for permission to operate, wouldn’t it? My mother, for example, not only gave no permission, but was in fact a foreigner, a foreigner with diplomatic immunity. Nevertheless—”

“What do you want me to say?” Wu cried. “That I did a terrible thing to you? Yes. Yes. I admit it. I did a terrible thing. I took advantage of helpless people in a time of war. You want me to say that I’m evil? That I feel remorse for my crimes? That I am willing to have you kill me for the crime I committed against you? Yes. I acknowledge that I am evil. I am racked with remorse. I feel unbearable guilt and I know that I deserve to be punished. What are you waiting for? Kill me right now! Go ahead, Farkas, wring my miserable neck and be done with it!”

The Level Twenty girl said uneasily, from where she stood near the door, “Mr. Farkas, it’s probably not a good idea for this conversation to continue. Perhaps we ought to go now. I can show you to your accommodation chamber, and—”

“Give me another minute,” Farkas said. He turned back to Wu, who had subsided again into sullen stillness. “You didn’t mean a word of that, did you, doctor? You continue to feel to this day that what you did to me and the others like me in Tashkent was perfectly justifiable in the holy name of science, and you don’t have a contrite bone in your body. Isn’t that so?”

“That is so. I would do it all over again, if I had the chance,” Wu said.

“Ah. Yes, that’s what I thought.”

“So now you know what you already knew. Will you kill me now? I think your Kyocera-Merck will be displeased if you do.”

“No,” Farkas said. “I’m not going to kill you now, or later either, for that matter. I just needed to hear you say what you just said. Now I want to hear one thing more. Did you get any pleasure out of what you were doing?”

“Pleasure?” Wu sounded utterly baffled. “It was not something I was doing for pleasure. The concept of pleasure never entered into it at all. It was research, do you understand? It was a thing that I did because I needed to know if it could be done. But pleasure? The word has no application.”

“A pure technician. A dispassionate seeker after truth.”

“I am not required to listen to your mockery. I will ask them to take you out of here.”

“But I’m not mocking you,” Farkas said. “You really have integrity, don’t you, doctor? Defining ‘integrity’ as the quality of being of a single consistency, of being of an undiluted substance, a oneness. You are completely and totally what you are. That’s good. I understand you a lot better, now.”

Wu was utterly motionless, scarcely seeming even to be breathing. Shining cubical block of black metal, rising out of pyramidal copper-colored pedestal.

Farkas said, “You had no emotional involvement at all in what you did to me. You got no kind of sadistic joy out of it. As you said: there was a thing you needed to find out, so you simply did what you had to do to get your answers. And so there’s no reason why I should take it personally. Right? Right? I never existed as a person in your eyes at all. I was only a hypothesis. I was a problem in biological algebra to you, something that had to be solved, an abstract intellectual challenge. For me to want to get revenge against something like you would be like wanting to get revenge against a hurricane or an earthquake or a landslide or any other impersonal force of nature. They just come along and do to you what they do, but there’s nothing personal in it, and no reason why you should get angry at them for wiping you out. You can’t forgive a hurricane either, though, can you? The memory of what happened sticks with you. But you have to just pick yourself up and dust yourself off and tell yourself that you had the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and then you go on with your life.”

It was perhaps the longest speech Farkas had ever made. His voice was in ragged shreds by the time he was finished; and he wanted nothing more than to go somewhere and lie down.

Wu was still staring at him in that frozen way. Farkas wondered if Wu understood. If Wu cared.

He said to the Level Twenty, “All right, I’m done here now. You can take me to my chamber.”

A chamber was what it was, too, a palatial cubicle about three meters long and a meter and a half high, suitable only for lying down and stretching out. But that was all he wanted to do now anyway.

An icon was flashing, telling him that there was a coded message waiting for him in the message niche. He accessed it and discovered that he was being assigned right back to Valparaiso Nuevo. To investigate, it said, the rumors of a coup d’etat, a plot to overthrow Generalissimo Callaghan.

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.