Hot Sky at Midnight

23

isabelle said, “have you heard from Paul at all, Nick?”

“He called a few days ago,” Rhodes said. “From somewhere in Nevada, I think. Told me that he’d been let go by the Company, and left a message saying he was going to Chicago, but no return number. Nothing since then.”

“Why Chicago?” Isabelle asked. “Of all awful places.”

“He said he had a friend there. I don’t know who he was referring to.”

“A woman, do you think?”

“Very likely,” Rhodes said. “Paul has always tended to turn to women for comfort when he’s under stress.”

Isabelle laughed and rested her hands on his shoulders, digging her fingers firmly but gently into the thick, bunched muscles. “Two peas in a pod, you two are. Things get too hot for you, you want to put your heads on Mommy’s bosom. Well, why not? That’s one of the things it’s there for, I suppose.”

They were in Rhodes’ hilltop flat, close to midnight, after a late dinner in Sausalito. Isabelle was staying the night. Rhodes felt calm and expansive, for a change. Tonight everything was the way he always wanted things to be: soft lights, soft subtle music floating in the air, a glass of his best brandy in his hand. And Isabelle. The relationship had been in one of its up modes for the past few days, Isabelle being relatively benign, accommodating, even tender.

He had just about made up his mind to accept the Kyocera job, despite lingering and troublesome hesitations, bouts of anguished ambivalence. Sixty-forty to take it, he thought. Seventy-thirty, some days. Some days it was seventy-thirty the other way, but those were few. Tonight it was about eighty-twenty in favor of going over to them. Isabelle wasn’t even aware of the offer, yet. She knew that he had been in some sort of inner crisis for a while, but had been too tactful to probe. And with everything tranquil between them for the moment, Rhodes felt no desire to stir her to new wrath, as Kyocera’s offer of greatly expanded technical facilities for adapto research was almost certain to do. Especially with Jolanda coming back from her visit to the L-5s in the morning, as Isabelle had learned earlier today: Jolanda would surely be stirring Isabelle’s political fervor back to its usual degree of intensity after this brief period of quiescence.

Rhodes finished the last of his drink. “How about bed?” he asked.

“Yes,” Isabelle said. But she made no move to leave the living room. Going to the window, she stood staring out at the broad view of the Berkeley hills sloping down to the bay, with San Francisco still gleaming brightly on the far side of the water. The night was clear and dry and hot, the recent heavy rains only an improbable memory now. By the light of a full moon distinct bands of greenhouse gases could be seen cutting across the sky even in the darkness, with patches of stars peeking out between them, shimmering, dancing in the night.

He came up behind her and slipped his hands under her arms, cupping her breasts.

She said, still looking outward, “I feel so sad for him. I hardly know him at all and yet it’s just as though it’s some dear good friend of mine that has run into terrible trouble. His whole life tumbling down in a single moment. Is there anything you could do for him, do you think?”

“Not much, I’m afraid.”

“A job in your department somewhere?”

“He’s been dismissed for cause. No division of Samurai could possibly hire him now.”

“Under some other name?”

“I wish,” Rhodes said. “You can’t just make up an identity for yourself and apply for a job, Isabelle. You need to have a plausible vita to show them. There’s no way he could conceal what happened from any megacorp’s personnel scan.”

“He can’t get any sort of employment, then?”

“Nothing that suits his qualifications, no. A laborer, maybe. I don’t know. For any kind of manual job he’d be competing against all those people from the underclass guilds. They’ve got an inside track on the junk jobs. Somebody falling down from salaryman level is going to have a hard time getting anywhere, when there are so many ahead of him in the underclass who have clean records. A high IQ isn’t exactly the thing that gets you to the front of that line.”

“So he’s completely screwed. He’s entirely out of the system, unemployable. That’s hard to believe.”

“I’ll try to think of something,” Rhodes said.

“Yes. You should.”

But what? What? His soul overflowed with compassion for his old friend; but his mind was empty of solutions for Carpenter’s plight. Dismissals were so rare, in the megacorp society. Recourse was so iffy.

This was very new for him, to be fretting about Paul. All their lives it had been the other way around, Rhodes in trouble or a state of bewilderment, trapped in a mess of some sort, and Carpenter coolly, carefully, explaining how he should deal with it. It was a novelty to think of Carpenter now as vulnerable, damaged, helpless. Of the two of them, Carpenter had always been the more capable one, serenely making his way through life with a sure sense of direction. Not as intelligent as Rhodes, no, not gifted in any particular way, but shrewd, self-directing, moving in an easy confident way from assignment to assignment, from city to city, from woman to woman, always knowing what his next move would be and where it would take him.

And now.

One bad moment, one faulty decision, and here was Carpenter cast loose, washed up, flung by a crazy twitch of fate onto the deadly barren shore of an unforgiving world. Suddenly the whole dynamic of their friendship had been turned upside down, Rhodes saw: Carpenter the puzzled and needy one, and he the finder of solutions for knotty problems. Except that he had no solutions.

He would have to find one, Rhodes told himself. He owed Carpenter that much. And more. Something has to be done for him, he thought. By me. There’s no one else who can help him. But for the moment he was stymied.

Rhodes’ mood began to decline precipitously. He found himself imagining Carpenter under Chicago’s sweltering filthy skies, ambling around at loose ends in a strange city, in a toxic environment that made tonight’s bands of sky gases here seem like jolly Christmas decorations.

“Bed,” Rhodes said again. “How about it?”

Isabelle turned. Smiled. Nodded. Her eyes were warm, eager, beckoning. Paul Carpenter and his problems receded from the forefront of Rhodes’ mind. A burst of love for Isabelle suffused his spirit.

I will tell her about the Kyocera job tomorrow, he promised himself. Maybe not the Wu Fang-shui angle, but the rest of it, the bigger laboratory, the greater slope, the increased corporate support. She would understand that it was important for him to persevere and succeed in his work. Important not only for him, but for everybody, the whole world.

He thought of the Christmas present he had had from her last year, the holochip with the six-word mantra that defined the chief zones of his adapto project:

She understood. She ultimately would not let his work come between them, of that he was convinced. For all her love of mouthing trendy antiscientific political slogans, she was aware, on some fundamental level, that it was necessary for human bodily modifications to be made before the atmospheric conditions grew much worse. And they would grow worse, despite all that had been done to halt further damage to the environment and undo what had already been done.

BONES LUNGS SKIN. KIDNEYS HEART MIND. Five of the six would have to be radically changed; the key to the task, Rhodes knew, was seeing to it that the sixth remained more or less the same, that when his work was complete the mind within the bony housing was still recognizably a human mind.

Isabelle crossed the room, leaving a trail of clothing behind her. Rhodes followed her, watching with keen pleasure the play of muscles in her lean tapering back, the delicate knobby line of her backbone clearly visible against her taut skin, the breathtaking inward curve of her narrow waist. Her great wiry nimbus of vermilion hair stood out like a flaming crown above her long slender neck.

Just as she disappeared into the bedroom the telephone rang.

At this hour?

Rhodes flicked it on automatically and Paul Carpenter’s face, red-eyed, drawn, appeared in the visor. Speak of the devil, Rhodes thought.

“I’m sorry to bother you so late, Nick—”

“Late?” Well, yes, it was. But Rhodes tried to shrug the fact away. “It isn’t all that late here. But it must be the middle of the night in Chicago. Are you still in Chicago, Paul?”

“For the time being.” Carpenter’s voice sounded thick and slurred. He was either drunk or very, very tired. “I’m going to leave here tomorrow, I think. Coming back to California.”

“That’s fine, Paul,” Rhodes said cautiously. “I’m glad to hear it.”

There was a little pause. “It’s been a good stay for me, in Chicago. I’ve got my head straightened out a bit, maybe. But the friend I’ve been visiting—well, she’s got her own life, I can’t just dump myself down on her for an indefinite time. And this is an awful place to live, really awful. So I thought— California—a new start—”

“Fine,” Rhodes said again, hating the empty blandness of his tone. “The land of new beginnings.” Rhodes wished he had something specific to offer, and felt hollow and futile because he did not.

He stared at the visor. Blurry weary eyes looked back at him. It seemed to be a struggle for Carpenter to keep them focused. Carpenter was definitely drunk: Rhodes was sure of that, now. He knew the symptoms as well as anyone.

“I called Jolanda just now,” Carpenter was saying. “Thinking maybe she could put me up for a couple of days, until I had my bearings, you know, figured out what next, so on and so forth—”

“She’s still up in L-5,” Rhodes said. “Supposed to be coming home tomorrow.”

“Ah. I thought she might be.”

“She’s still got that Israeli with her. He’ll be coming too. And someone else, someone that they met up there. It sounded like she had a whole goddamned entourage.”

“Ah,” Carpenter said. “I better not figure on staying with her, then.”

“No.”

Another spell of silence, a sticky one.

Carpenter said, “I wonder, then, Nick, if—well, if it would be all right—”

“Yes. Of course it would,” Rhodes said quickly. “With me, here? Of course, Paul. You know you’re always welcome.”

“I won’t be in your way?”

“Don’t be an asshole. Listen, call me when you get on the road, and then call me again when you’re a day or so from the Bay Area. Leave messages, or whatever. Let me know when I can expect you, so I’ll be sure to be here. —Are you all right, Paul?”

“Terrific. Really.”

“Money?”

“I can manage.”

“See you in—what, three days? Four?”

“Less,” Carpenter said. “Looking forward. Say hello to Isabelle for me. You still with Isabelle?”

“Of course,” said Rhodes. “Matter of fact, she’s right here. If you want to talk to her yourself, I’ll—”

But he was peering at a blank visor.

Isabelle, completely naked now, emerged from the bedroom, looking edgy and impatient. More like her old self: annoyed by the intrusion, by Rhodes’ willingness to have allowed it to occur.

“Who was that?”

“Paul,” Rhodes said. “From Chicago. He’s coming back. Wants to stay with me for a little time.”

Her annoyance vanished in an instant. She seemed genuinely concerned.

“How is he?” she asked.

“He looked terrible. He sounded drunk. The poor son of a bitch.” Rhodes snapped off the living-room lights. “Come on,” he told her. “Let’s go to bed. Before the phone rings again.”