Hot Sky at Midnight

5

farkas said, “I think we’ve located our merchandise.”

He was in his hotel room, alone, talking by scrambled telephone to Colonel Emilio Olmo, the number-three man in Valparaiso Nuevo’s Guardia Civil. Colonel Olmo was very high up in the confidence of Don Eduardo Callaghan, the Generalissimo, El Supremo, the Valparaiso Nuevo habitat’s Defender and Maximum Leader. More significantly for Farkas’s purposes, though, Olmo was Kyocera-Merck’s chief point man on Valparaiso Nuevo. It was Kyocera-Merck’s long-range plan, so Farkas understood, to bring Olmo forward as the successor to El Supremo whenever it seemed appropriate for Don Eduardo’s long reign to come to an end. Drawing pay from both sides, Olmo was in a nice position and it might be considered unwise to trust him in any major way, but his long-term interests plainly lay with K-M and therefore Farkas deemed it safe to deal with him.

“Who’s your courier?” Olmo asked.

“Juanito Holt.”

“Nasty little spic. I know him. Very clever kid, I have to say. How’d you find him?”

“He found me, actually. Five minutes off the shuttle, and there he was. He’s very quick.”

“Very. Too quick, sometimes. Father was mixed up in the Central American Empire thing—you remember it? The three-cornered revolution?—working both sides against the middle. Very tricky hombre. He was either a socialist or a fascist, nobody could ever be quite sure, and in the end when things fell apart he skipped out and continued his plotting from up here. He made himself troublesome and after a time the right and the left found it best to team up and send a delegation here to get rid of him. The kid is tricky too. Watch him, Victor.”

“I watch everything,” Farkas said. “You know that.”

“Yes. Yes, you certainly do watch.”

Farkas was watching the telephone visor, now. It was mounted flush against the wall, and to Farkas it looked like an iridescent yellow isosceles triangle whose long, tapering upper point bent backward into the wall as though it were trying to glide into some adjacent dimension. Olmo’s head-and-shoulders image, centered near the base of the triangle, impinged on Farkas’s sensorium in the form of a pair of beveled cubes in cobalt blue, linked by a casual zigzag of diamond-bright white light.

The air in the room was unnervingly cool and sweet. Breathing it was like breathing perfume. It was just as artificial as the air you breathed indoors anywhere on Earth, in fact even more so: but somehow it was artificial in a different way. The difference, Farkas suspected, was that on Earth they had to filter all sorts of gunk out of the air before they could let it come into a building, the methane, the extra CO₂, all the rest of the greenhouse stuff, so that it always had a sterile, empty quality about it once they were done filtering. You knew it was air that had needed to be fixed so you could breathe it, and you mistrusted it. You wondered what they had taken out of it besides the gunk. Whereas on an L-5 satellite they manufactured the atmosphere from scratch, putting together a fine holy mix of oxygen and nitrogen and carbon dioxide and such in the proportions God had originally intended, in fact better than God had designed things, since there was less of the relatively useless nitrogen in the air than there was on Earth and a greater proportion of oxygen; and there was no need to filter anything out of it, since it contained nothing in the first place that wasn’t supposed to be there.

So the completely synthetic air of the habitats was richer and fuller in flavor than the denatured real air of Earth’s sealed buildings. Headier. Too heady for him. Farkas knew that it was better air than the indoor air on Earth, but he had never been able quite to get used to it. He expected air to taste dead, except when you were outdoors without a mask, filling your lungs with all those lovely hydrocarbons. This bouncy, springy stuff was holier than he needed his air to be.

But give me a little more time, Farkas thought. I’ll get to like it.

He said to Olmo, “The merchandise is said to be stored in a place called El Mirador. My courier will be taking me there later in the day to inspect the warehouse.”

“Bueno. And you are confident you will find everything in order?”

“Very.”

“Do you have any reason to think so?” Olmo asked.

“Just intuition,” said Farkas. “But it feels right.”

“I understand. You have senses that are different from our senses. You are a very unusual man, Victor.”

Farkas made no reply.

Olmo said, “If the merchandise is to your satisfaction, when will you want to make shipment?”

“Very soon, I think.”

“To the home office?”

“No,” said Farkas. “That plan has been changed. The home office has requested that the merchandise be sent directly to the factory.”

“Ah. I see.”

“If you would make certain that the cargo manifests are in proper order,” Farkas said, “I’ll let you know as soon as we’re ready to transfer the goods.”

“And the customs fees—”

“Will be taken care of in the usual manner. I don’t think Don Eduardo will have reason to complain.”

“It would be very embarrassing if he did.”

“There won’t be any problem.”

“Bueno,” Olmo said. “Don Eduardo is always unhappy when valuable merchandise is removed from Valparaiso Nuevo. His unhappiness must always be taken into account.”

“I said there’d be compensation, didn’t I?”

There was sudden new force in Farkas’s tone, and Olmo’s image responded by changing color ever so slightly, deepening from cobalt blue almost to black, as though he wanted Farkas to understand that the possibility that the necessary bribes might somehow fall through was disturbing to him and that the eyeless man’s implied rebuke was offensive. But Farkas saw Olmo’s color return to its normal shade after a moment, and realized that the little crisis had passed.

“Bueno,” Olmo said once more. And this time he seemed to mean it.

El Mirador was midway between hub and rim on its spoke. There were great glass windows punched in its shield that provided a colossal view of all the rest of Valparaiso Nuevo and the stars and the sun and the moon and the Earth and everything. A solar eclipse was going on when Juanito and Farkas arrived, not a great rarity in the satellite worlds but not all that common, either: the Earth was plastered right over the sun with nothing but one bright squidge of hot light showing down below like a diamond blazing on a golden ring. Purple shadows engulfed the town, deep and thick, a heavy velvet curtain falling over everything.

Juanito tried to describe what he saw. Farkas made an impatient brushing gesture.

“I know, I know. I feel it in my teeth.” They stood on a big peoplemover escalator leading down into the town plaza. “The sun is long and thin right now, like the blade of an ax. The Earth has six sides, each one glowing a different color.”

Juanito gaped at the eyeless man in amazement.

“Wu is here,” Farkas said. “Down there, in the plaza. I feel his presence.”

“From five hundred meters away?”

“Come with me.”

“What do we do if he really is there?”

“Are you armed?” Farkas asked.

“I have a spike, yes.” Juanito patted his thigh.

“Good. Tune it to shock intensity, and don’t use it at all if you can help it. I don’t want you to hurt him in any way.”

“I understand. You want to kill him yourself, in your own sweet time. Very slowly and in the fullest enjoyment of the pleasure.”

“Just be careful not to hurt him, that’s all,” Farkas said. “Come on.”

It was an old-fashioned-looking town, a classic Latin American design, low pastel buildings with plenty of ironwork scrolling along their facades, cobblestone plaza with quaint little cafes around its perimeter and an elaborate fountain in the middle. About ten thousand people lived there and it seemed as if they were all out in the plaza right this minute sipping drinks and watching the eclipse. Juanito was grateful for the eclipse. It was the entertainment of the day. No one paid any attention to them as they came floating down the peoplemover and strode into the plaza. Hell of a thing, Juanito thought. You walk into town with a man with no eyes walking right behind you and nobody even notices. But when the sunshine comes back on it may be different.

“There he is,” Farkas whispered. “To the left, maybe fifty meters, sixty.”

He indicated the direction with a subtle movement of his head. Juanito peered through the purple gloom down the way, focusing on the plazafront cafe that lay just beyond the one in front of them. A dozen or so people were sitting in small groups at curbside tables under iridescent fiberglass awnings, drinking, chatting, taking it easy. Just another casual afternoon in good old cozy El Mirador on sleepy old Valparaiso Nuevo.

Farkas stood sideways, no doubt to keep his strange face partly concealed. Out of the corner of his mouth he said, “Wu is the one sitting by himself at the front table.”

Juanito shook his head. “The only one sitting alone is a woman, maybe fifty, fifty-five years old, long reddish hair, big nose, dowdy clothes ten years out of fashion.”

“That’s Wu.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“It’s possible to retrofit your body to make it look entirely different on the outside. You can’t change the nonvisual information, the data I pick up by blindsight. What Dr. Wu looked like to me, the last time I saw him, was a cubical block of black metal polished bright as a mirror, sitting on top of a pyramid-shaped copper-colored pedestal. I was nine years old then, but I promised myself I wouldn’t ever forget what he looked like, and I haven’t. That’s exactly what the person sitting over there by herself looks like.”

Juanito stared. He still saw a plain-looking woman in a rumpled old-fashioned suit. They did wonders with retrofitting these days, he knew: they could make almost any sort of body grow on you, like clothing on a clothes rack, by fiddling with your DNA. But still Juanito had trouble thinking of that woman over there as a sinister Chinese gene-splicer in disguise, and he had even more trouble seeing her as a polished cube sitting on top of a coppery pyramid.

He could practically feel the force of the hatred that was radiating from Farkas, though. So he knew that this must really be the one. The eyeless man was going to exact a terrible vengeance for the thing that had been done to him at birth, the thing that had set him apart from all the rest of the human race.

“What do you want to do now?” Juanito asked.

“Let’s go over and sit down alongside her. Keep that spike of yours ready. But I hope you don’t need to use it.”

“If we put the arm on her and she’s not Wu,” Juanito said uneasily, “it’s going to get me in a hell of a lot of trouble, particularly if she’s paying El Supremo for sanctuary. Sanctuary people get very stuffy when their privacy is violated. She could raise a stink and before she’s finished with us you’ll be expelled and I’ll be fined a fortune and a half and I might wind up getting expelled too, and then what? Where would I live, if I had to leave here? Have you thought about that?”

“Don’t worry so much,” Farkas said. “That’s Dr. Wu, all right. Watch him react when he sees me, and then you’ll believe it.”

“We’ll still be violating sanctuary. All he has to do is yell for the Guardia Civil.”

“We would need to make it clear to him right away,” said Farkas, “that that would be a foolish move. You follow?”

“But I’m not supposed to hurt him,” Juanito said.

“No. Not in any fashion do you hurt him. All you do is demonstrate a willingness to hurt him if that should become necessary.” Farkas nodded almost imperceptibly toward the woman at the front table of the cafe. “Let’s go, now. You sit down first, ask politely if it’s okay for you to share the table, make some little comment about the eclipse. I’ll come over maybe thirty seconds after you. All clear? Good boy. Go ahead, now.”

“You have to be insane,” the red-haired woman said, sounding really testy. But she was sweating in an astonishing way and her fingers were knotting together like anguished snakes. “I’m not any kind of doctor and my name isn’t Wu or Fu or whatever it was that you said, and you have exactly two seconds to get yourself away from me.” She seemed unable to take her eyes from Farkas’s smooth blank forehead. Juanito realized that he had grown used to the strangeness of that face by this time, but to other people Farkas must seem like a monstrosity.

Farkas didn’t move. After a moment the woman said in a different tone of voice, sounding more calm, merely curious now, “What sort of thing are you, anyway?”

She isn’t Wu, Juanito decided.

The real Wu wouldn’t have asked a question like that. The real Wu would have known. And fled. Besides, this was definitely a woman. She was absolutely convincing around the jaws, along the hairline, the soft flesh behind her chin. Women were different from men in all those places. Something about her wrists, too. The way she sat. A lot of other things. There weren’t any genetic surgeons good enough to do a retrofit this convincing. Juanito peered at her eyes, trying to see the place where the Chinese fold had been, but there wasn’t a trace of it. Her eyes were blue gray. All Chinese had brown eyes, didn’t they? Not that that would have been hard to fix, Juanito thought.

Farkas said in a low, taut voice, leaning in close and hard, “You know exactly what sort of thing I am, doctor. My name is Victor Farkas. I was born in Tashkent during the Second Breakup. My mother was the wife of the Hungarian consul, and you did a gene-splice job on the fetus she was carrying. That was your specialty back then, tectogenetic reconstruction. You don’t remember that? You deleted my eyes and gave me blindsight in place of them, doctor.”

The woman looked down and away. Color came to her cheeks. Something heavy seemed to be stirring within her. Juanito began to change his mind again. Maybe there really were some gene surgeons who could do a retrofit this good, he thought.

“None of this is true,” the woman said. “I’ve never heard of you and I was never in whatever place it was you mentioned. You’re nothing but a lunatic. I can show you who I am. I have papers. You have no right to harass me like this.”

“I don’t want to hurt you in any way, doctor.”

“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.”