Hot Sky at Midnight

7

the shell of the El Mirador segment of Valparaiso Nuevo was actually a double one, a huge hollow crawl space entirely surrounding the globe that was El Mirador. Around the periphery of the shell’s spaceward face was a deep layer of lunar slag held in place by centrifugal forces, the tailings that had been left over after the extraction of the gases and minerals that had been needed in the construction of the satellite world. On top of that was a low open area for the use of maintenance workers, lit by a trickle of light from a faint line of incandescent bulbs; and overhead was the inner skin of El Mirador itself, shielded by the slagpile from any surprises that might come ricocheting in from the void. Juanito, who was compactly built, was able to move almost upright within the shell, but long-legged Farkas, following along behind, had to bend double, scuttling like a crab.

“Can you see him yet?” Farkas asked.

“Somewhere up ahead, I think. It’s pretty dark in here.”

“Is it?”

Juanito caught a glimpse of Wu off to the right, edging sideways, moving slowly around behind Farkas now. In the dimness the doctor was barely visible, just the shadow of a shadow. Wu had scooped up two handfuls of tailings. Evidently he was going to fling them at Farkas to attract his attention, and then when Farkas turned toward Wu it would be Juanito’s moment to nail him with the spike.

Juanito stepped back to a position near Farkas’s left elbow. He slipped his hand into his pocket and rested his fingertips on the butt of the cool sleek little weapon. The intensity stud was down at the lower end, shock level, and without taking the spike from his pocket he moved the setting up to lethal. Across the way, Wu nodded.

Time to do it.

Juanito began to draw the spike.

At that moment, before Juanito could manage to pull the weapon out, before Wu even could hurl his tailings, Farkas let out a roar like a wild creature going berserk. Juanito grunted in shock, stupefied by that terrible sound. This is all going to go wrong, he realized. In that same instant Farkas whirled and seized him around the waist in a powerful grip, lifting him off his feet with no apparent effort at all. In one smooth and almost casual motion Farkas swung him as if he was a throwing-hammer and released him, sending him hurtling on a rising arc through the air to crash with tremendous impact into Wu’s midsection.

Wu crumpled, gagging and puking, with Juanito sprawled stunned on top of him.

Then the lights went out—Farkas must have reached up and yanked the conduit loose—and then Juanito found himself lying with his cheek jammed into the rough floor of tailings, unable to move. Farkas was holding him face-down with a hand clamped around the back of his neck and a knee pressing hard against his spine. Wu lay alongside him, pinned the same way.

“Did you think I couldn’t see him sneaking up on me?” Farkas asked. “Or you, going for your spike? It’s 360 degrees, the blindsight. Something that Dr. Wu must have forgotten. All these years on the run, I guess you start to forget things.”

Holy Mother of Jesus, Juanito thought.

Couldn’t even get the drop on a blind man from behind him. And now he’s going to kill me. What a goddamned stupid way to die this is.

He imagined what Kluge might say about this, if he knew. Or Delilah. Nattathaniel. Decked by a blind man. Jesus! Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. But he isn’t blind, Juanito thought. Not really. He isn’t blind at all.

Farkas said, in a low harsh voice thick with anger, “How much did you sell me to him for, Juanito?”

The only sound Juanito could make was a muffled moan. His mouth was choked with sharp bits of slag.

Farkas gave him a poke with his knee. “How much? Five thousand? Six?”

“It was eight,” said Wu quietly, from below.

“At least I didn’t go cheaply,” Farkas murmured. He reached into Juanito’s pocket and withdrew the spike. “Get up,” he said. “Both of you. Stay close together. If either of you makes a funny move I’ll kill you both. Remember that I can see you very clearly. I can also see the door through which we entered the shell. That starfish-looking thing over there, with streamers of purple light pulsing from it. We’re going back into El Mirador now, and there won’t be any surprises, will there? Will there? You try to bolt, either one of you, and I’ll spike you on lethal and take it up with the Guardia Civil afterward.”

Juanito sullenly spit out a mouthful of slag. He didn’t say anything.

“Dr. Wu? The offer still stands,” Farkas continued. “You come with me, you do the job we need you for. That isn’t so bad a deal, considering what I could do to you for what you did to me. But all I want from you is your skills, and that’s the truth. You are going to need that refresher course, aren’t you, though?”

Wu muttered something indistinct.

Farkas said, “You can practice on this boy, if you like. Try retrofitting him for blindsight first, and if it works, you can do our crew people, all right? He won’t mind. He’s terribly curious about the way I see things, anyway. Aren’t you, Juanito, eh? So we’ll give him a chance to find out firsthand.” Farkas laughed. To Juanito he said, “If everything works out the right way, maybe we’ll let you go along on the voyage with us, boy.” Juanito felt the cold nudge of the spike in his back. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? The first trip to the stars? You’d go down in history. What do you say to that, Juanito? You’d be famous.”

Juanito didn’t answer. His tongue was still rough with slag, and he was so far gone, altogether lost in fear and chagrin, that he did not even attempt to speak. With Farkas prodding him from behind, he shambled slowly along next to Dr. Wu toward the door that Farkas said looked like a starfish. It didn’t look at all like a fish to him, or a star, or like a fish that looked like a star. It looked like a door to him, as far as he could tell by the feeble light of the distant bulbs. That was all it looked like, a door that looked like a door. Not a star. Not a fish. But there was no use thinking about it, or anything else, not now, not with Farkas nudging him between the shoulder blades with his own spike. He let his mind go blank and kept on walking.

Emerging from the habitat’s shell into the plaza of El Mirador again, Farkas very quickly took cognizance of everything around him: the ring of jolly little cafes, the flowing fountain in the middle, the statue of Don Eduardo Callaghan, El Supremo, benignly looming down to the right. Seeing everything in its blindsight equivalent, of course: the cafes as a row of jiggling point-sources of shifting green light, the fountain as a fiery spear, the monument to Don Eduardo as a jutting white triangular wedge that bore the distinctively massive, craggy features of the Generalissimo.

And of course there were his two prisoners, Wu and Juanito, just in front of him. Wu—the shining polished cube atop the copper-hued pyramid—seemed calm. He had come to terms with the event that had just occurred. Juanito—half a dozen blue spheres tied together by an orange cable—was more agitated. Farkas perceived his agitation as an up-spectrum shift in the color of what Farkas called the boundary zone, which marked the Juanito-object off from the surrounding region.

“I have a call to make,” Farkas told them. “Sit here quietly with me at this table. The spike is tuned and ready to use if you force me to do so. Juanito?”

“I didn’t say nothing.”

“I know that. I just wanted you to tell me how cooperative you intend to be. I don’t want to have to kill you. But if you try something funny, I will. I’m way ahead of you on every move. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes.”

“So be a good boy and sit right there, and if you see any of your little friends come through the plaza, don’t try to send any sort of signals to them. Because I’ll notice what you’re doing and it’ll be the last thing you ever do. Clear?”

“Look,” Juanito said miserably, “you can just let me get up and walk out of here and we don’t ever need to have anything to do with each other ever again. I got no interest in making any trouble for you.”

“No,” Farkas said. “You tried to fuck me, boy. You were working for me and you sold me out. I make it a rule to punish behavior like that very severely. You aren’t walking away from this in one piece.” He looked toward Wu. “And you, doctor? I’m willing to make an exception for you to my general rule of retribution, for you, if you cooperate. Of course, I’ll leave the choice up to you, but I think I know how you would prefer matters to go. You would rather work for Kyocera-Merck for a short time at a fine salary in a nicely furnished laboratory, wouldn’t you, than have me show you in great detail how displeased I am at what you did to my eyes when I was still a fetus, and how extremely vindictive I’m capable of being. Wouldn’t you, doctor?”

“I told you already,” Wu muttered. “We have a deal.”

“Good. Very good.”

A public communicator wand in a clip was fastened to the side of the table. Without taking his attention off Wu and Juanito, Farkas picked the wand up, using his left hand because his right was holding the spike, and punched in the number of Colonel Emilio Olmo of the Guardia Civil. There was a certain amount of hunt-and-seek action while the central computer tried to find him; and then an androidal voice asked for Farkas’s caller identification code. Farkas gave it, adding, “This is a Channel Seventeen call.” That was a request for a scrambled line. There was another little stretch of silence broken occasionally by screechy bits of electronic noise.

Then:

“Victor?”

“I just want to let you know, Emilio, that I have the merchandise in hand.”

“Where are you calling from?” Olmo asked.

“The plaza in El Mirador.”

“Stay there. I’ll come as soon as possible. I have to talk to you, Victor.”

“You are talking to me,” Farkas said. “All I need is a couple of Guardia men to collect the consignment, right away. I’m sitting here with it right in the plaza, and I don’t like having to be a cargo superintendent out in public.”

“Where are you, exactly? The specific location.”

To Juanito, Farkas said, “What’s the name of this cafe?” Reading signs was often difficult for him: seeing by blindsight was not an exact equivalent of seeing by ordinary vision, a fact of which Farkas was reminded a thousand maddening times a day.

“Cafe La Paloma,” Juanito said.

“La Paloma,” Farkas told Olmo.

“Bueno. I’ll have the plaza patrol make the pickup within two minutes. We’ll collect the shipment and transfer it to the depot as arranged.”

“Something you ought to know. There’s an extra item of merchandise,” said Farkas.

“Oh?”

“I’m sending the courier along to the depot too. Don’t worry. I’ll provide you with the bill of lading in proper order.”

“Whatever you want, my friend,” said Olmo, with a touch of mystification in his voice. “He is yours, whatever you want to do with him, and good riddance. I give him to you freely. But not free, you understand. You are aware that there may be extra shipping charges, yes?”

“That doesn’t worry me.”

“Bueno. The pickup will be made quite swiftly. You stay right there. I will come to you in person in a very little while so that we can speak. A serious matter has developed that must be discussed.”

“Scrambler call isn’t good enough?” Farkas asked, puzzled and a little alarmed.

“Not nearly, Victor. This must be in person. It is very delicate, very. You will stay? Cafe La Paloma?”

“Absolutely,” Farkas said. “You can recognize me by the red carnation in my lapel.”

“What?”

“A joke. Get the goddamned pickup taken care of, Emilio, will you?”

“Immediately.”

“Bueno,” Farkas said.

Olmo rang off. Farkas put the wand back in its slot.

Juanito said, “Was that Colonel Olmo you were talking to?” He sounded awed.

“Why would you think that?”

“You called him ‘Emilio.’ You asked for Guardia men to be sent. Who else could it have been?”

Farkas shrugged. “Colonel Olmo, yes. We occasionally do business with each other. We are friends, in a way.”

“Holy Mary Mother of God,” said Juanito hoarsely, and made the gesture that Farkas recognized as the sign of the cross, a lateral trembling and bucking of the middlemost pair of the six blue spheres that made up Juanito’s apparent body. “You and Olmo are friends! You call him up just like that and he talks to you. And so I am really fucked.”

“Yes. You really are,” said Farkas. “Todo jodido, isn’t that the phrase?”

“Si,” Juanito said ruefully. “Estoy jodido, completely. Completely.” He turned away and looked into the distance. A thin chuckle came from Wu. Good for him, Farkas thought. He is capable of being amused by Juanito’s distress. That meant he had stopped caring about his own predicament. Farkas liked the idea that the person who had so casually and gratuitously transformed his life beyond repair, long ago, was fundamentally indifferent to circumstances, an impassive technician, a pure force of nature.

Within moments Farkas saw two shapes moving purposefully toward him from the direction in which Juanito was looking: a red tetrahedron on spiny little legs and a pair of upright emerald columns joined by three parallel golden bars. They had to be the local Guardia Civil patrol, Farkas knew. Olmo was quick. Of course, K-M paid Olmo very well for his cooperation. And Valparaiso Nuevo was a very efficient police state, and the Guardia probably had outstanding communications techniques.

“Mr.—Farkas?” The tetrahedron speaking. A little hitch in the voice, a kind of verbal flinch. Farkas knew what that was: the first sight of the eyelessness, the blank forehead, often did that to people. “Colonel Olmo sent us. Two men, he said, we were supposed to get.” He sounded confused.

“I wasn’t that specific with him. Two people is all that I indicated. A boy and an old woman, as it happens,” said Farkas. “These two.”

“Yes, sir. Glad to be of service, sir.”

“Olmo made it clear to you that you aren’t supposed to hurt them, right? I don’t want you to hurt them. Just put them in storage until the procedures for their deportation are completed. Is that understood?”

“Yes, sir. Of course, sir.”

Farkas watched them lead Juanito and Wu away.

Now that he was no longer obliged to be guarding two prisoners at once, Farkas allowed himself to relax. He sat back, stared around the cobbled plaza.

An odd emptiness came upon him.

His mission had been satisfactorily completed, yes, and with striking ease. But it was strange, having had Wu in his possession after all these years of imagining what he would do to him if he ever caught him, and doing nothing at all.

Disguised as a woman, an old dowdy woman. Well, well, well.

It would have been easy enough, back there in the musty slaggy confines of the habitat shell, to have put his thumbs on Wu’s eyeballs and pushed. But of course Farkas knew that doing that would not thereby give him the normal vision that had been denied him before his birth. He wasn’t even sure that he wanted normal vision, anyway, not any more; but paying Wu back would have brought him a certain degree of pleasure.

But it was also necessary to consider that that one little moment of gory self-indulgence would have destroyed his career, and his career was a very fine one, extremely rewarding in a number of ways. It wouldn’t have been worth it.

And the boy—

Farkas felt no remorse about that. The boy would suffer: good. He was a treacherous little bastard who had behaved exactly as Farkas had expected him to, peddling his loyalties to the highest bidder, just as his father had done before him, apparently; and he needed a lesson. He would get one, a good one. Farkas brushed him from his mind and signaled to the waiter.

He asked for a small carafe of red wine, and sat patiently sipping it, waiting for Olmo.

It wasn’t a long wait.

“Victor?”

Olmo was hovering by his shoulder. By the color he was radiating, he seemed very tense.

“I see you, Emilio. Sit down. You want some wine?”

“I never drink.” Olmo arranged himself ponderously at the table, sitting at a ninety-degree angle from Farkas. It was the first time they had actually met: all their previous dealings had been by scrambled data-link. Olmo was shorter than Farkas expected him to be, but very stocky. The upper cube of the two that made up his body was wider than the lower one in a way that indicated broad shoulders and powerful forearms. When he was sitting down Olmo seemed to be quite tall, a massive presence.

Farkas imagined him at some earlier phase of his career sweatily working over the enemies of the Generalissimo in a basement room with a pliant strip of hemp: rising to his present eminence on this world from the humble ranks of the official torturers. Did El Supremo torture his enemies? Farkas wondered. Of course. All petty tyrants did. He would ask Olmo about it some time or other; but not now.

Farkas took a thoughtful sip of his wine. Local product, he supposed. Not bad at all.

He said, into an awkwardness that he was certain was caused by Olmo’s discomfort over the realities of his physical appearance, “You arouse my curiosity, Emilio. Something so delicate that you won’t even risk telling me about it by scrambler?”

“Indeed. I think I will have some water. It will look more casual to those who are watching us, and I know that they are, if I am drinking something too.”

“Whatever you say.” Farkas beckoned to the waiter.

Olmo hunched forward, cupping his glass in his hand. In a very quiet voice, more than a whisper but less than a normal conversational tone, he said, “This is strictly hearsay. The reliability of the source is questionable and the content of the rumor is so surprising that I am extremely skeptical. But I want to check it with you nonetheless. We did not, of course, have this discussion, if anyone asks.”

“Of course,” said Farkas impatiently.

“Bueno. So, then, this is the news. The possible news. Word has reached me, by, as I say, highly irregular and somewhat untrustworthy sources, that a group of criminals based in South California is getting ready to launch an insurrection against the existing authority here on Valparaiso Nuevo.”

“Southern California,” Farkas said.

“What?”

“Southern California. That’s what they call it. You said South California.”

“Ah.”

“An insurrection.”

“They intend to invade this world and overthrow the Generalissimo by force. Then they intend to establish their own government here, and round up all the fugitives who have taken sanctuary. And then they will sell them, for many billions of Capbloc dollars, to the various agencies and forces on Earth who would like to have them back.”

“Really?” Farkas said. It was a fascinating idea. Crazy, but fascinating. “Someone actually plans to do this?”

“I have no idea. But it is something that perhaps could be done, and it would be very lucrative if it was managed in the right way.”

“Yes. No doubt it would.” Valparaiso Nuevo was an absolute treasure trove, a gold mine of expensively wanted fugitives. But Callaghan had to have it well defended, and himself also. Especially himself. They didn’t call him the Defender for nothing. The only way to overthrow him would be to blow the whole place up. “I see why you called it a delicate matter,” Farkas said. “But why are you telling me this, Emilio?”

“For one thing, if there is a threat against the life of the Generalissimo, it is my responsibility to take preventive action.”

“I understand that. Still, why bring me in? Do you think I can lead you to the conspirators?”

“Perhaps.”

“For God’s sake, Emilio. I thought you were an intelligent man.”

“Intelligent enough, I think.”

“If I were involved with this thing, would I be likely to want to tell you word one about it?”

“That depends,” said Olmo. “Let us look at some other factors. I have not only the Generalissimo’s security to be concerned with, but also my own.”

“Naturally.”

“I am useful to you, or at least to your employer. Your employer is Kyocera-Merck, Victor. You make no secret of that. Why should you? I work for K-M too, of course, although not quite so openly. Indeed, not openly at all.”

“True.”

“The Generalissimo has ruled Valparaiso Nuevo for thirty-seven years, Victor. He was not young when he seized power here and he is quite old now. When he goes, the Company sees it to be in its interest for me to succeed him. You knew this, didn’t you?”

“More or less.” Farkas was getting tired of Olmo’s circuitous manner. The fracas in the outer shell had wearied him and he wanted to go back to his hotel. “Would you mind getting to the point, Emilio?”

“I’ve given you a great deal of help in carrying out the project the Company sent you here to do. Now you help me. It is only reasonable, one K-M man to another. Tell me the truth. Do you know anything whatsoever about this takeover conspiracy?”

Farkas found this hard to believe. He hadn’t imagined Olmo to be so dumb.

“Not a thing,” he said. “This is the first I’ve heard about it.”

“You swear that?”

“Don’t be stupid, Emilio. I could swear to whatever you wanted me to, and what would it matter?”

“I trust you.”

“Do you? Yes, I suppose you do. You shouldn’t trust anybody, but all right. If it’ll make you feel any better, here: the holy truth is that I really don’t know a thing about any of this. God’s sacred truth. By the archangels and apostles, this is absolutely the first that I’ve heard of it. And I suspect that there’s nothing to the rumor at all.”

“No. I believe that you have spoken honestly. But what I am afraid of,” said Olmo, “is that there actually is such a conspiracy, and Kyocera-Merck may be behind it. Perhaps using these California people as proxies. And that when Don Eduardo goes, I will go with him. That I have become irrelevant to the Company; that the Company has decided to discard me.”

“This sounds crazy to me. So far as I know, you’re as important to the Company as you’ve ever been. And your role in facilitating the Wu business will strengthen your position in their eyes even more.”

“And the coup? Let’s say that the stories I have heard have substance behind them, this South California group. Let us assume that such a group exists, and such a plan. It is your belief that they have nothing to do with K-M, then?”

“How would I know? Am I Japanese? Use your brain, Emilio. I’m just a Company expediter, Level Nine. That’s pretty high up the slope but it’s nowhere near policy level. The boys in New Kyoto don’t call me in to share their secret plans with them.”

“You think, then, that the plotters of this coup are merely a gang of free-lance criminals from South California, acting completely on their own. Southern California.”

“God in heaven,” Farkas said, exasperated now close to his limit of tolerance. “Haven’t I made it sufficiently clear that all I know about this idiotic coup is the stuff you’ve just told me? I have no evidence that it exists at all, and apparently you don’t have much yourself. But all right. All right. If it’ll reassure you, Emilio, let me tell you that in my estimation the plotters, if there are any and whoever they may be, are more likely to want to cooperate with you than to put you down, if they have any sense at all, and when and if they get close to making their move on this place, the smartest thing they could possibly do would be to get in touch with you and hire you to help them overthrow the Generalissimo. You will furthermore have the backing of Kyocera-Merck in whatever happens, because K-M is interested, God knows why, in bringing this foul little orbiter into its sphere of influence and has already tapped you to be the next Generalissimo, so they are not likely to sit by idly while a bunch of free-lance gangsters from California push their chosen man out the window. Okay, Emilio? Do you feel better, now?”

Olmo was silent for a time.

Then he said, “Thank you. If you learn anything more about any of this, you will tell me, Victor?”

“Of course.”

“Bueno,” Olmo said, a fraction of a second before Farkas could say it for him. “I do trust you, my friend. As much as I trust anyone.”

“Which is not at all, correct?”

Olmo laughed heartily. He seemed suddenly much more at his ease, after Farkas’s long and irritable outburst “I know you will do nothing to harm me unless you find it absolutely unavoidable, for your own sake, to turn against me.”

“That sounds right enough.”

“Yes. Yes.”

“So you will let me know, if you hear from anyone about this plot?”

“Jesus! I’ve already said I would. Under the terms you’ve just laid out. Does that satisfy you?”

“Yes.”

“Then we can get back to the business at hand, all right? You agree to see to it that Wu and Juanito get shipped off promptly to the K-M lab satellite, as the Company has directed us to arrange. Yes?”

“Absolutely.”

“Bueno,” Farkas said. And they both laughed.