Hot Sky at Midnight

25

“I shouldn’t,” carpenter said, as Rhodes picked up his glass and started to refill it. “I don’t handle this stuff as well as you do.”

“Indulge yourself,” said Rhodes. “Why the fuck not?” Amber fluid splashed into the glass. Carpenter had forgotten whether they were drinking rye or bourbon. Bourbon has a sweeter taste, he told himself; but he had lost the capacity to distinguish flavors. It seemed to him that he had been drinking steadily all evening. Certainly Rhodes had, but Rhodes always did.

Have I been matching him one for one? Carpenter wondered.

Yes. Yes, I think I have.

“Indulge yourself,” Rhodes said. He had said that already, hadn’t he? Was he starting to repeat himself, now? Or had Carpenter simply generated a replay of Rhodes’ remark of a moment earlier in his mind? He wasn’t sure.

It didn’t matter. “Don’t mind if I do,’’ Carpenter said. “As you so eloquently put it, Nick: Why the fuck not?”

Carpenter had reached the Bay Area earlier that day, after a wild and indistinctly remembered drive back from Chicago. The car had been on automatic the entire time, programmed to seek the shortest route between Illinois and California, stopping only when it needed to recharge itself and paying minimal attention to speed limits, and Carpenter had slept through most of the trip, curled up on the back seat like a bundle of discarded clothing. He recalled that there had been some trouble when the car bumped up against a newly extended tendril of the virus quarantine zone and had to make a wide detour to the north; he could remember seeing the sun go down over western Nebraska like a plummeting red fireball; he had a vague and untrustworthy memory of traversing a broad black inexplicable plain of heaped ashes and glossy volcanic clinkers the following dawn. That was about it for him, so far as recollections of the journey went.

His recollections of Chicago were sharper ones.

Jeanne gasping in his arms in the surprise of pleasure during a long hungry night of embracing. Jeanne breaking into convulsive sobs just as abruptly later that same night, and refusing to say why. Jeanne telling him that she had become a Catholic, and offering to pray for him. Jeanne pushing him away, finally, toward dawn, saying that she was out of practice at lovemaking and had had about all she could handle of it for now.

The two of them, masked and shot full with Screen, walking hand in hand through the Loop at midday in heat that would make Satan feel homesick, under a splotchy green sky that looked like an inverted bowl of vomit. Sensing the rotten-egg aroma of hydrogen sulfide in the air, even through the mask. Looking up at immense ancient buildings whose soaring stone facades had been carved by the virulent erosive air and acid rains into a phantasmagoria of accidental Gothic parapets and turrets and pinnacles and asymmetrical spires.

Jeanne hiding her body from him in her shapeless robe later that day, telling him she was too ugly to be seen with the lights on, and getting angry when he told her that she was crazy, that she had a truly beautiful body.

Jeanne saying at last, “It’s been wonderful having you here, Paul. I mean that. To have made it real, when it was only pretend for so long. But now—if you think you can find the strength to move onward, now—”

Finishing off the last of Jeanne’s meager liquor supply, then, putting it away in a steady dedicated manner that was worthy of Nick Rhodes. Trying to call Jolanda in Berkeley, hoping it wouldn’t upset Jeanne too much to see him turning so swiftly to another woman, but getting only a recorded message at Jolanda’s number, not even a seek-forwarding indicator. Calling Nick, then. Inviting himself to stay with him. Telling Jeanne that he was going to leave for California right this minute, and seeing the suddenly bereft look on her face, and wondering if he had really been supposed to take her words at face value when she had asked him to move along. “It’s the middle of the night, Paul,” she had said. And he had said, “Even so. Such a long drive: I’d better get started.” The glistening of her eyes. Tears of sadness? Relief? Jeanne gave eternally mixed signals.

“Stay in touch, Paul. Come back to see me whenever you want.”

“Yes. Yes.”

“It was wonderful to have you here.”

“Yes. Yes. Yes.”

“I love you, Paul.”

“I love you, Jeannie. Really.”

Into the car. On the road. Eyes swollen with fatigue, tongue thickened by booze, face all stubbly. The quarantine zone. The swollen, plummeting red sun. Ashes and clinkers; and then, a thousand years later, the smoothly rounded tawny hills of the Bay Area, the tunnel into Berkeley, Nick Rhodes’ apartment high up on its hillside with the fantastic view.

“Isabelle will be here soon,” Rhodes said. “We’ll all go out for dinner. Jolanda wants to come along too. Unless you don’t want to see her, of course. She has Enron with her, you know. I told you that when you called, didn’t I?”

“Yes. What the hell. The more the merrier.”

A peculiar evening. Isabelle terrifically sweet, gentle, tender, several times expressing her deep concern for all that Carpenter had been through lately—the therapist Isabelle that Carpenter had not seen before, the softer woman with whom Nick Rhodes was so desperately in love. She and Rhodes were like a loving married couple in the restaurant, not in the least adversarial this time, a real team. Jolanda too told Carpenter how sorry she was for his troubles, and consoled him with a torrid hug, breasts pushing close, tongue flicking through her lips and between his, which from anyone else might have seemed an immediate invitation to bed, but which Carpenter realized was just Jolanda’s standard kind of friendly greeting. Enron didn’t seem to care. He scarcely looked at Jolanda, showed no sign of interest in her whatever. The Israeli was oddly remote, none of the frenetic intensity of that other dinner ages ago in Sausalito, hardly saying anything: he was physically present but his mind appeared to be elsewhere.

Dinner that night—an early one at some restaurant in Oakland unknown to Carpenter—involved a lot of wine, a lot of superficial chitchat, not much else. Jolanda, obviously hyperdexed to the max, bubbled on and on about the wonders of the L-5 habitat that she and Enron had just been visiting. “What was the occasion for the trip?” Carpenter asked her, and Enron answered for her, a little too quickly and forcefully, “A holiday. That was all it was, a holiday.” Odd.

Something was bothering Nick Rhodes, too. He was quiet, moody, drinking heavily even for him. But, then, Carpenter thought, something was always bothering Nick.

“Tomorrow,” Jolanda said, “we all have dinner at my house, you, Nick, Paul, Isabelle, Marty and me. We have to finish off everything I’ve got in the freezer.” She was going away again, she and Enron, off to Los Angeles this time. Strange that they were traveling together so much, when they scarcely seemed to pay attention to each other. Jolanda said to Carpenter, “There’ll be one other guest tomorrow night, a man we met on Valparaiso Nuevo. Victor Farkas is his name. It might be useful for you to talk to him, Paul. He works for Kyocera, pretty high level, and I’ve told him a little about your recent difficulties. Maybe he could turn up something for you with Kyocera. In any case you’ll find him an interesting man. He’s very unusual, very fascinating, really, in an eerie way.”

“No eyes,” Enron said. “A prenatal genetic experiment, one of the atrocities in Central Asia during the Second Breakup. But he’s very sharp. Sees everything, even behind his head, using some kind of almost telepathic ability.”

Carpenter nodded. Let them invite a man with three heads to dinner, or with none, for all he cared. He was floating now, drifting a short way above the ground, indifferent to what might be going on around him. He had never felt so tired in his life.

Jolanda and Enron disappeared right after dinner. Isabelle returned to Rhodes’ house with Rhodes and Carpenter, but didn’t stay. Carpenter was surprised at that, considering the warmth that had passed between the two of them at the restaurant. “She wants to give the two of us a chance to be alone,” Rhodes explained. “Figures we have things to tell each other.”

“Do we?” Carpenter said.

That was when the bourbon came out, or perhaps it was rye.

“Who’s this Chicago woman?” Rhodes asked.

“Just a friend, from the Samurai office in St. Louis, years ago. Very dear kind woman, somewhat fucked up.”

“Here’s to fucked-up women,” Rhodes said. “And fucked-up men, too.” They clinked glasses noisily. “Why didn’t you stay with her longer?”

“She didn’t seem up for it. We never were lovers before, you know. Just good friends. I think sex is a very charged thing for her. She was sweet to take me in the way she did, hardly any notice at all, just told me to come right to her. A port in a storm is a welcome thing.”

“Ports. Storms.” Rhodes raised his glass in a toast again. Downed its contents, poured more for them both.

“Go easy,” Carpenter said. “I’m not the bottomless pit that you are.”

“Sure you are. You just haven’t fully tested your capacity.” Rhodes refilled his glass and topped off Carpenter’s. Brooded for a moment, studying his shoes. Said finally, “I think I’m going to take the Kyocera job.”

“Oh?”

“I’m not sure, but it’s sixty-forty I will. Seventy-thirty, maybe. I’ll be giving them my final decision the day after tomorrow.”

“You’ll take it. I know you will.”

“It scares me. Working with Wu Fang-shui: we’ll be achieving wonders, I know it. That’s the problem. The good old fear of success.”

“You may fear success, but you love it, too. Take the job, Nick. Go ahead, turn us all into sci-fi monsters. It’s what the fucking world deserves.”

“Right. Cheers.”

“Cheers. Down the hatch.”

They laughed.

Rhodes said, “If I go to Kyocera, maybe I can find a slot for you there. What do you say?”

“You’ve got to be kidding. You and Jolanda both. She was talking before about getting her friend Farkas to find me a job with them. Don’t any of you have any common sense? I’m the guy who left a bunch of Kyocera people in the sea to die, remember?”

“They won’t give a shit about that, not after a little time has gone by. I can probably get them to hire you as a favor, or else this Farkas probably could, even easier. You change your name so it doesn’t look too weird, and they’ll find a slot for you. Most likely some level lower than what you had, but you can work your way back up. Excellence will always out.”

“Don’t be crazy. Kyocera wouldn’t touch me.”

“I know a Level Three man there. Honestly. If I tell him he can’t hire me unless he hires my friend too, who has had a little bad publicity in an unfortunate recent event, but is eager to redeem himself under another name, a fresh start—”

“Don’t.”

“Why not?”

“It’s dumb,” Carpenter said. “Dumb and impossible. Don’t even try, Nick. Please.”

“What will you do, then?”

“People keep asking me that question, for some reason. I don’t know, is what I say. But I don’t think I have a future with Kyocera, that’s all.”

“Well, maybe not. Here. Have another drink.”

“I shouldn’t,” Carpenter said. “I don’t handle this stuff as well as you do.”

“Indulge yourself,” said Rhodes. “Why the fuck not?”

Somewhere in the middle of the night Carpenter realized without any sort of anxiety about it that he was slipping into delirium. He and Rhodes were still sitting at Rhodes’ living-room table, with two empty bottles in front of them, or maybe three—it was hard now to distinguish fine details— and Rhodes was still pumping the liquor into their glasses like a demented android bartender. Conversation had sputtered out long ago. The lights of San Francisco across the way were beginning to go off. It was probably two, three, four in the morning.

There were vines creeping across the windows, now. Big, snaky vines, thick as his arm, with little octopoid sucker pads on them, and heavy clusters of leaves. Everything was turning green. A green mist filled the air outside. A light, steady rain, green rain. The West Coast drought had magically ended and the San Francisco Bay Area was part of the global greenhouse now, rich and rank with tropical growth.

Carpenter looked out the window, peering between the greenery. The overnight transformation was astonishing. A green light was playing on the hillside. He saw vines everywhere, creepers, gigantic ferns, enormous unfamiliar shrubs with colossal gleaming leaves and great swollen gaudy flowers. It was a berserk garden, magical, yes, but the magic that had been at work here was a dark and evil one. Unending rain was falling, and the plants stirred and murmured beneath it, expanding moment by moment, rising and stiffening, spreading their wings.

“Let’s go for a walk,” he said to Rhodes, and they stepped through the sealed windows and floated easily downward into the moist green world beyond.

It was a luminous world, too. Eerie foxfire burned in it, a universal pallid flickering glow. The air was thick, wet, sickly-sweet. Everything seemed to be coated with fur. No, not fur, fungus of some kind, a dense damp growth of mold. From swollen organs burst periodic clouds of dark spores that sought and quickly found tiny crevices where they might take hold and sprout. There were no sharp edges visible anywhere, no bare surfaces: everything was overgrown. The trees, enormous and overbearing, had a lumpy, bearded look. They bulged with bewildering knobs and knurled excrescences.

The moon glimmered faintly through the mists. Lashings of wild mutant bamboo crisscrossed its pockmarked face. Green blood dripped from it across the sky.

Figures moved in the mist—trolls, strange boneless shapeless tentacular beings, alien and monstrous, that might have been natives of some other star; but as Carpenter came closer to them, he saw their faces, their eyes, and he could read the humanity that was in them. The staring stricken eyes, the gaping horrified mouths. And the scaly skins, the slithery limbs, the sagging pudding bodies, the alien forms surrounding the embedded nucleus of humanity still visible within. They too had undergone a magical transformation in the night.

Nick Rhodes seemed to know them all. He greeted them the way one would greet neighbors, friends. Introduced Carpenter to them with a cheerful wave of a tentacle.

“My friend Paul,” he said. “My oldest and dearest friend.”

“Pleased to meet you,” they said, and passed onward through the mist, the green rain, the forest of shaggy trees, the clouds of furry spores that filled the humid air.

Dangling festoons of ropy vines covered every building. Lunatic vegetable life ran riot under a cinnamon sky. Carpenter could make out, under the whips and cords and ropes of the sprawling vines, the indistinct shapes of the ruins of the former world, lichen-stained pyramids, shattered cathedrals, marble stelae inscribed with unreadable hieroglyphs, the fallen statues of gods and emperors. At an altar drenched in green blood a sacrifice was taking place, a crowd of tentacled beings clustered solemnly about one of their own kind who was bound to a stone slab by furry ropes. A furry green knife rose and fell. Carpenter heard distant singing—it was chanting, really—all on a single note, “Oh oh oh oh,” like a gentle, blurry far-off cry of inexpressible pain.

“How long has it been this way?” he asked Rhodes. But Rhodes merely shrugged, as though his question had no meaning.

Carpenter stared. The world he had known, he realized, was lost forever. The Earth of mankind was dying, or already dead, its long history over: now it was the turn of the funguses and the slime molds, the vines and the bamboos. The jungle would cover all of the works of man. And mankind itself would fade away into that jungle, a tribe of haunted, hunted creatures, hiding from the groping tendrils, seeking out pitiful niches of safety for themselves in the midst of this wild efflorescence of the new creation. But there would be no safety. Eventually the last humans would transform themselves into a vegetable species also, filling their mouths with the new spores and giving forth a generation of unimaginable new creatures.

What of us? he wondered. Those of us who have not yet changed, who still walk about in our animal forms, our rigid bones and our old human skins? Is there no place for us? Must we be swallowed up in the general disaster?

He looked past the bamboo-bound moon, toward the unreadable sparkle of the stars.

There, Carpenter thought. There: a new rebirth in the stars, that’s our only hope. There. There. We shall walk up off the Earth into the sky, and we shall all be saved. Yes. While the mutilated Earth regenerates itself without us.

“Look,” Rhodes said, pointing toward the bay.

Something immense was rising from it, a solid massive column of green topped with eyes, an unthinkable unknowable being. Water streamed from its shoulders and fell in sizzling clouds back into the bay. Its eyes were huge, irascible, overwhelming. Rhodes was down on his knees, and he was gesturing to Carpenter to do the same.

“What is it?” Carpenter asked. “That thing—what is it?”

“Get down and acknowledge,” Rhodes whispered fiercely. “Down and acknowledge!”

“No,” said Carpenter. “I don’t understand.”

But all the world was bowing to the thing from the waters. A great music was swelling upward and filling the heavens. A new god had come, the overlord of this altered world. Carpenter, despite himself, felt moved by the grandeur and the strangeness of the scene. His knees weakened. He began to lower himself to the moist spongy ground.

“Acknowledge,” Rhodes said again. And Carpenter closed his eyes, he bowed his head, he moistened the damp earth with his tears. In wonder and incomprehension he acknowledged the world’s new master; and the vision passed, and he awoke, sober and aghast, with the first gray light of morning creeping into the room. His head was pounding. There were empty bottles everywhere. Nick Rhodes lay sprawled on the floor near the couch. Carpenter pressed his hands to his throbbing temples, and rubbed and rubbed in the vain hope of pressing the pain out of them, and listened to the dull tolling sound of his own mind telling himself in bleak and utter conviction that there was no hope for the poor weary damaged old world, none, no hope whatever. All was lost. All, all, all. Lost, lost, lost. All. Lost.

All. Lost. Lost.

Lost.

An enzyme bath, a leisurely day of lounging about the apartment, an hour or two spent in Rhodes’ spindizzy chamber getting all the kinks steamed out of his nervous system for the time being, and Carpenter felt almost functional again. Rhodes seemed to show no ill effects at all from his night of bingeing. About five in the evening Isabella Martine appeared, once again very amiable and solicitous and nonirritating, and after some sherry and a little light conversation the three of them went over to Jolanda Bermudez’s place north of the campus.

Carpenter was amused and pleased by the overwrought splendor of the little house—its baroque, antiquated external appearance, the multitude of small rooms within, all jammed with myriad preposterous artifacts, the drifts of incense in the air, the horde of cats, every one of them of some strange and elegant breed. It was just the sort of house, faintly ridiculous but full of eccentric vitality, that he would have expected Jolanda to have, only more so.

And Farkas, the eyeless Kyocera man that Jolanda had somehow collected along the way, up there in the L-5s—he seemed to fit right in with the rest of her things. A curio, an artifact, a one-of-a-kind.

You could not fail to be impressed by him, Carpenter thought. Enormously tall: a powerful, commanding figure, radiating self-assurance and strength, practically filling the little room where Jolanda was serving them canapes. Fine clothes, pearl-gray suit and orange foulard, boots polished to a mirror finish: high-level dandyism. Massive cheekbones, jutting chin. And above all that high smooth arching forehead, that mesmerizing expanse of blank skin where everybody else had eyebrows and eyes: a freakish monstrous thing, something out of a dream, something you never expected to see in real life. Not simply blind, but completely eyeless; and yet nothing in Farkas’s movements gave any indication that his vision was at all impaired.

Carpenter cautiously sipped a drink, nibbled a canape. Watched the changing scene.

Curious social patterns formed, held a moment or two, broke. People shifted, floated about the room.

Farkas and Enron—a huge lordly man and a small, tense, tightly coiled one—conferring in low voices in a far corner like a couple of ill-matched business partners discussing a contract that they expected soon to receive. Perhaps that was what they were.

Then Farkas went to Jolanda. They stood close to each other with Enron looking on sourly from a distance, Farkas plainly fascinated by Jolanda, every aspect of his stance telegraphing his intense interest in her. His shoulders were tipped forward and his great strange domed head was inclined toward her; he seemed to be using some extrasensory X-ray vision to see right through Jolanda’s flamboyant scarlet gown to the fleshy nakedness beneath.

And she was enjoying it, flushing like a schoolgirl, wriggling about, brimming with pleasure, practically thrusting herself at him. It definitely looked as if they were setting up some kind of encounter right under Enron’s nose. Certainly Enron seemed to think so. His scowl was extremely expressive. There was Isabelle intervening, now, drawing Enron off, distracting him. Loyalty to her friend, Carpenter figured. Getting the Israeli out of the way so Jolanda could cast her net, not that Farkas appeared to require a lot of catching.

And now Enron was talking to Nick Rhodes: interviewing him again, maybe? Jolanda going over to them. An interchange of grins between Jolanda and Rhodes, oddly intimate, though only for an instant. Carpenter was reminded of things that Rhodes had said about Jolanda to him on the night of the Sausalito dinner, and realized now that Jolanda must have slept with every man in this room, and was proud of it, too.

The patterns kept shifting. At last Carpenter found himself talking with Farkas. It was Jolanda who brought him over, saying as she did, “This is our friend Paul Carpenter. You remember: I told you about him.” She flashed them both warm smiles and torrid looks and went dancing away toward Enron.

“You are a Samurai man?” the eyeless man asked Carpenter right away. “Captain of an iceberg trawler, I understand.”

“Was,” Carpenter said bluntly, amazed at Farkas’s reckless conversational style. He looked up at Farkas, several inches taller, staring at the smooth, faintly shadowy place where eyes should have been. “There was a little scandal over an incident at sea. I was terminated.”

“Yes. So I was informed. It was my impression that Samurai very rarely terminates its salarymen.”

“Kyocera people were involved, on the short end of things. There was an inquiry. It looked very bad for the Company’s public image. So I was found to be expendable and sincere apologies were made to all concerned.”

“I see,” Farkas said. The phrase sounded very weird, coming from him. “And now? You have plans?”

“I thought I might rob a bank. Or kidnap the daughter of some Level One and hold her for ransom.”

Farkas smiled gravely, as if those might be plausible alternatives.

“What about making a new start for yourself on one of the space habitats?” he asked.

“A definite possibility, yes,” Carpenter said. The idea hadn’t occurred to him. But yes, yes, space was where everybody went who had reached a dead end on Earth. The habitats! Why not? But of course he would have to find some way of getting there. He revolved the new notion dizzily in his mind.

Then he became aware that Farkas was still speaking.

“We have all just come back from Valparaiso Nuevo. The sanctuary world, you know. You might find it of some interest. Are you familiar with it?”

“I’ve heard about it. The last of the glorious banana republics, isn’t it? Some loopy old South American generalissimo runs it as his private empire, and makes a fortune by selling protection to fugitives, from the law.” Carpenter shook his head. “But I’m not a fugitive. I wasn’t found guilty of anything except bad management. I wasn’t sentenced to anything except losing my job. And I’ve got no money anyway for buying my way in with.”

“Oh, no,” Farkas said. “You misunderstand. I don’t mean that you should go there to take sanctuary. I mean you might find opportunity for yourself there.”

“Opportunity? Of what sort?”

“Of many sorts.” Farkas lowered the tone of his voice, making it insinuating, almost seductive. “You see, the Generalissimo Don Eduardo Callaghan is soon to be deposed by an insurrection.”

Carpenter recoiled in surprise.

“He is?” This was starting to sound like lunacy.

“Indeed so,” said Farkas pleasantly. “What I am telling you is all quite true. Some very capable plotters are planning to end his long reign. I am part of the group. Jolanda also, and our friend Mr. Enron. And there are others. You might wish to join us.”

“What are you saying?” Carpenter asked, growing more mystified by the moment.

“It sounds quite straightforward to me. We have a few details to clarify with some people in Los Angeles, and then we will go to Valparaiso Nuevo and take possession of the place. There will be great profit in selling off the fugitives to the agencies that seek their return. You would share in the benefits, which would provide you with the funds to begin a new life for yourself in space. Since obviously there is no future for you now on Earth.”

Lunacy, yes. Or perhaps some sort of sadism. This wasn’t the way real conspirators talked, was it, taking complete strangers into their confidence on the spur of the moment?

No, no, Farkas was spinning out these fantasies for the sake of having a little cruel fun. Or else he was crazy. Carpenter, struggling to make sense of this unexpected stream of seeming madness that was flowing so calmly from the eyeless man, began to feel anger.

“You’re playing with me, aren’t you? This is some sick way you have of amusing yourself.”

“Not at all. I’m being entirely serious. There is a plot. You are invited to join.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why ask me in? Of all people.”

Farkas said calmly, “Call it a gratuitous act. A moment of spontaneous inspiration. Jolanda has told me that you are an intelligent man down on your luck. Desperate, even. Willing to take extreme chances, I would guess. And you have many skills and capabilities. All in all it seems to me as though you could be very useful to us.” His voice had become a sort of a purr. “And it would give me great pleasure to be of assistance to a friend of Jolanda’s.”

“This is incredible,” Carpenter said. “You don’t know me at all. And I don’t understand why you’re trusting me with any of this, if there’s anything to it. I could sell you all out. I could go straight to the police.”

“But why would you do that?”

“For money. Why else?”

“Ah,” Farkas said, “but much greater sums would be involved in the takeover of Valparaiso Nuevo than the police would ever give you. No, no, my friend, the only reason for you to betray us would be out of the abstract love of justice. Perhaps that is an emotion that you actually feel, even now, after your recent experiences. But I am highly skeptical of that. —Tell me: does what I have said interest you in any way?”

“I still think it’s just a bad joke.”

“Ask Mr. Enron, then. Ask Jolanda Bermudez. She says that you and she are friends. Is this not so? Then you trust her, presumably. Ask her whether I am being serious. Go, please, Mr. Carpenter: ask her. Now.”

It was all unreal. A grotesque offer out of the blue, coming from someone who scarcely seemed human. But terribly tempting, if there was anything to it.

Carpenter looked across the room at Jolanda. She had said last night that Farkas might be able to turn up something for him with Kyocera, a suggestion that Carpenter had not placed the least credence in. Was this what she had meant? This?

No, it all had to be some joke, he told himself. A stupid little joke at his expense. Jolanda must be in on it; he would go to her and ask her to confirm what Farkas had just said, and she would, and it would go on and on, new and ever more grandiose nonsense being trotted forth all evening, until suddenly someone could no longer hide a grin, and then the laughter would begin, and—

No.

“Sorry,” Carpenter said. “I’m not in the mood to be made fun of right now.”

“As you wish. Forget the offer, please. I regret making it. Perhaps it was a mistake to have disclosed so much to you.”

There was a sudden note of suppressed menace in Farkas’s voice that Carpenter found disagreeable. But it told him also that this might not be any joke. Carpenter had already started to turn away, but then he paused and looked up into the Kyocera man’s extraordinary face once again.

“You’re really serious about this thing?” he asked.

“Absolutely.”

“Go on, then. Tell me more.”

“Come with us to Los Angeles, if you want to learn more. But there will be no turning back for you, once you do. You will be one of us; and you will not have the option of withdrawing from the group.”

“You are serious.”

“So you believe me, now?”

“If this is any kind of joke, Farkas, I’ll kill you. You better believe me. I mean what I’m saying.” Carpenter wondered if he actually did.

“There is no joke.” Farkas put out his hand. After a moment, Carpenter took it.

“Dinner is served!” Jolanda called, from another room.

“We will talk further, afterward,” Farkas said.

As they were walking toward the dining room, Nick Rhodes came up alongside Carpenter and said, “What was that all about?”

“A strange business. I think he was making me a job offer.”

“With Kyocera?”

“Free-lance work,” Carpenter said. “I’m not sure. It’s all very fucking mysterious.”

“You want to tell me about it?” Rhodes asked.

“Later,” said Carpenter. They went inside.

It was two that morning before Carpenter got his chance to tell Rhodes about the conversation with Victor Farkas, after they had returned to Rhodes’ apartment from the dinner party, and after Isabelle had finally gone home, explaining that she had to be in Sacramento the next day for a professional conference and couldn’t stay over. After seeing her out Rhodes and Carpenter stood for a time in Rhodes’ living room, in the quietness of the warm humid night, looking out at the bay.

Though they had all had plenty to drink at Jolanda’s, Rhodes wanted a nightcap. He brought out a dark, odd-shaped bottle bearing a label that looked at least a hundred years old, antiquated typeface, browning paper. “Actual cognac,” Rhodes said. “From France. Very rare. I feel like celebrating a little. What about you?” He looked inquiringly at Carpenter.

“What the hell. But only one, Nick. I can’t manage another looper like last night.”

Rhodes poured carefully. Very rare stuff, yes, no doubt of that. Carpenter drank slowly, thoughtfully. It had been a curious evening. He felt as though he had moved past some strange boundary into the realm of the completely unknown.

But Rhodes had crossed a boundary too that evening, it seemed, and wanted to talk about it.

“It was sixty-forty last night, remember? And then seventy-thirty. But all this evening the numbers kept going up, and when they got to ninety-ten I knew it was clinched.”

Carpenter looked up at him wearily. “What are you talking about, Nick?”

“The Kyocera job. I’m definitely going to take it. I decided around midnight.”

“Ah. Right.”

“Tomorrow, I’m supposed to let Walnut Creek know which way I mean to go. Nakamura, the Level Three who head-hunted me, is waiting for a call. I’m going to tell him that it’s a yes.”

Carpenter lifted his brandy snifter in a formal salute.

“Congratulations. I like a man who can make up his mind.”

“Thank you. Cheers.”

“I’m going to take a new job too,” said Carpenter.

Rhodes, who had his glass to his lips, sputtered and put it down.

“What?” He looked incredulous. “Where?”

“With Farkas. Doing something illegal on a space habitat.”

“Smuggling? Don’t tell me that Kyocera runs drugs on the side!”

“Worse,” Carpenter said. “If I tell you, I’m making you an accomplice before the fact, you know. But I will anyway, and to hell with it. They’re going to knock over Valparaiso Nuevo, Nick. Some kind of joint Israeli-Kyocera venture, carried out by thugs from Los Angeles, Jolanda’s wonderful friends. Seize control of the place, run it for their own private profit. Jolanda and Enron and Farkas seem to have cooked all this up last week, when they were together on Valparaiso. And now Farkas has invited me in. I’m not sure what my exact role is going to be, but I suppose it’ll be something peripheral, like spreading disinformation and general fog and confusion while the coup action is taking place.”

“No,” Rhodes said.

“No what?”

“You aren’t. This is crazy, Paul.”

“Of course it is. But what other choices do I have? I’m not only unemployed but unemployable, on Earth. The place for me to go is space. But I can’t even afford a ticket up.”

“I could buy you a ticket.”

“And if you did, what then? How would I earn a living once I was up there? Crime, I suppose. White-collar crime of some kind. This is simpler and quicker. Anything goes, out in the habitats. You know that. There’s no such thing as interplanetary law, yet. We push over the Generalissimo and the place is ours, and nobody will say a word.”

“I don’t believe I’m hearing this.”

“I don’t believe I’m saying it. But I’m going to do it.”

“Listen to me. I know a little about this man Farkas, Paul. He’s completely cold-blooded, utterly unscrupulous. A monster, literally and figuratively.”

“Fine. Just what’s needed for this kind of thing.”

“No. Listen. You get mixed up with him, you’ll wind up on the scrap heap somewhere at the end of it all. He’s dangerous, amoral, full of hate. He doesn’t give a damn what he does, or who he hurts. Look what the world did to him. He’s spending his whole life paying it back. And what does he need you for, anyway? He’ll take you in for a little while and then when it’s all over he’ll throw you out.”

“Jolanda trusts him,” Carpenter said. “It was Jolanda who talked him into inviting me into this.”

“Jolanda,” Rhodes said, scornfully. “She thinks with her tits, that one.”

“And Enron? Does he think with his tits too? He’s Farkas’s partner. He also appears to trust him.”

“Enron doesn’t trust his own big toe. Besides, even if Enron and Farkas are in bed with each other, what protection does that give you? Don’t go near them, Paul. Don’t do it.”

“May I have a little more of that cognac?” Carpenter asked.

“Sure. Sure. But promise me: stay away from this business.”

“I don’t have any other options, do I?”

“Your fatal flaw,” Rhodes said. “Always to make a bad moral position look like something unavoidable.” He refilled Carpenter’s snifter. “Here. Drink. Enjoy. You cockeyed son of a bitch, are you really going to do it?”

“I really am,” Carpenter said. He raised the snifter. “Here’s to you and me. Our dazzling new career moves. Cheers, Nick.”