Robert Sikverberg - Hot Sky at Midnight

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HOT SKY AT MIDNIGHT
Robert Siverberg
Copyright® 1994 by Agberg, Ltd.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 93-29755
ISBN 0-553-56935-X
e-book ver. 1.0
For Alice K.
Who taught an old dog a couple of new tricks
O Western wind, when wilt thou blow,
That the small rain down can rain?
Christ, that my love were in my arms
And I in my bed again!
----ANONYMOUS
1
that's my mark, Juanito told himself. That one, there. That one for sure.
He stared at the new dinkos coming off the midday shuttle from Earth. The one he meant to go for was the tall one with no
eyes at all, blank from brow to bridge of nose, just the merest suggestions of shadowy pits below the smooth skin of the forehead.
Not even any eyebrows, just bare brow-ridges. As if the eyes had been erased, Juanito thought. But in fact they had probably
never been there in the first place. It didn't look like a retrofit gene job, more like a prenatal splice.
He knew he had to move fast. There was plenty of competition. Fifteen, twenty couriers here in the waiting room, gathering
like vultures, and they were some of the best: Ricky, Lola, Kluge. Nattathaniel. Delilah. Everybody looked hungry today. Juanito
couldn't afford to get shut out. He hadn't worked in six weeks, and it was time. His last job had been a fast-talking fancy-dancing
Ukrainian, wanted on Commonplace and maybe two or three other habitat worlds for dealing in plutonium. Juanito had milked
that one for all it was worth, but you can milk only so long. The newcomers learn the system, they melt in and become invisible,
and there's no reason for them to go on paying. So then you have to find a new client.
"Okay," Juanito said, looking around challengingly. "There's mine. The weird guy. The one with half a face. Anybody else want
him?"
Kluge laughed and said, "He's all yours, man."
"Yeah," Delilah said, with a little shudder. "All yours." That saddened him, her chiming in like that. It had always disappointed
Juanito that Delilah didn't have his kind of imagination. "Christ," she said. "I bet he'll be plenty trouble."
"Trouble's what pays best," Juanito said. "You want to go for the easy ones, that's fine with me." He grinned at her and waved
at the others. "If we're all agreed, I think I'll head downstairs now. See you later, people."
He started to move inward and downward along the shuttle-hub wall. Dazzling sunlight glinted off the docking module's silvery
rim, and off the Earth shuttle's thick columnar docking shaft, wedged into the center of the module like a spear through a
doughnut. On the far side of the wall the new dinkos were making their wobbly way past the glowing ten-meter-high portrait of
El Supremo and on into the red fiberglass tent that was the fumigation chamber. As usual, they were having a hard time with the
low gravity. Here at the hub it was one-sixteenth Earth-G, max. Probably the atmosphere bothered them too. It was clean here,
with a lot of oxygen in it and no garbage. They were accustomed to the foul filthy soup that passed for air on Earth, the poison
that they breathed all the time, full of strange stinking gases that rotted your lungs and turned your bones to jelly.
Juanito always wondered about the newcomers, what it was that had made them choose Valparaiso Nuevo in particular, of all
the worlds in space. Everybody wanted to get away from Earth, sure. That was easy to understand. Earth was a mess. But there
were plenty of other satellite worlds to run off to. You could get nice fresh air and a decent climate on any of them. Those who
came to Valparaiso Nuevo had to have special reasons for making that choice. They fell into one of two main classes: those who
wanted to hide, and those who wanted to seek.
The place was nothing but an enormous spacegoing safe house. You had some good reason for wanting to be left alone, you
came to Valparaiso Nuevo and bought yourself a little privacy. But that implied that you had done something that would make
other people not want to let you alone. And a lot of those people came to Valparaiso looking for the ones who didn't want to be
found. There was always some of both going on here, a lot of hide-and-seek, some people hiding, some seeking—with El
Supremo looking down benignly on it all, raking in his cut. And not just El Supremo.
Down below, the new dinkos were trying to walk jaunty, to walk mean. But that was hard to do when you were keeping your
body all clenched up as though you were afraid that you might go drifting off into midair if you put your foot down too hard.
Juanito loved it, the way they were crunching along, that constipated mudcrawler shuffle of theirs.
Gravity stuff didn't ever bother Juanito. He had spent all his life out here in the habitats, the satellite worlds, and he took it for
granted that the pull was going to fluctuate according to your distance from the hub. You automatically made compensating
adjustments, that was all.
Juanito found it hard to understand a place where the gravity would be the same everywhere all the time. He had never set
foot on Earth or any of the other natural planets, didn't care to, didn't expect to. The settlements on Mars and Ganymede were
strictly for scientists only, and Luna was a damn ugly place, and as for Earth, well, you had to be out of your mind to want to go
to Earth, even for a visit. Just thinking about Earth, it could make you sick to your stomach.
The guard on duty at the quarantine gate was an android with a flat plastic-looking face. His name, his label, whatever it was,
was something like Velcro Exxon. Juanito had seen him at this gate before. As he came up close the android glanced at him and
said, "Working again so soon, Juanito?"
"Man has to eat, no?"
The android shrugged. Eating wasn't all that important to him, most likely. "Weren't you working that plutonium peddler out of
Commonplace?"
Juanito said, smiling, "What plutonium peddler?"
"Sure," said the android. "I hear you."
He held out his waxy-skinned hand. Even the machines had to be bribed on Valparaiso Nuevo. Juanito put a fifty-callaghano
currency plaque in it. The usual fee for illicit entry to the customs tank was only thirty-five callies, but Juanito believed in
spreading the wealth, especially where the authorities were concerned. They didn't have to let you in here, after all. Some days
more couriers showed up than there were dinkos, and then the gate guards had to allocate. Overpaying the guards was simply a
smart investment.
"Thank you kindly," the android said. "Thank you very much." He hit the scanner override. Juanito stepped through the security
shield into the customs tank and looked around for his mark.
The new dinkos were being herded into the fumigation chamber now. They were annoyed about that—they always were—but
the guards kept them moving right along through the puffy bursts of pink and green and yellow sprays that came from the ceiling
nozzles. Nobody got out of customs quarantine without passing through that chamber. El Supremo was paranoid about the entry
of exotic microorganisms into Valparaiso Nuevo's closed-cycle ecology. El Supremo was paranoid about a lot of things. You
didn't get to be sole and absolute ruler of your own little satellite world, and stay that way for thirty-seven years, without a heavy
component of paranoia in your makeup.
Juanito leaned up against the great curving glass wall of the customs tank and peered through the mists of sterilizer fog. The
rest of the couriers were starting to come in now. Juanito watched them going to work, singling out potential clients, cutting them
out of the herd. Most of the dinkos were signing up as soon as the deal was explained, but as always there were a few who
would shake off all help and insist on setting out by themselves. Cheapskates, Juanito thought. Assholes and wimps, Juanito
thought. But they'd find out. It wasn't possible to get started on Valparaiso Nuevo without a courier, no matter how sharp you
thought you were. Valparaiso was a free enterprise zone, after all. If you knew the rules, you were pretty much safe from all
harm here forever. If not, not.
Time to make the approach, Juanito figured.
It was easy enough finding the blind man. He was very much taller than the other dinkos, practically a giant: a long-limbed
massive man some thirty-odd years old, heavy bones, powerful muscles. In the bright glaring light his blank forehead gleamed like
a reflecting beacon. The low gravity didn't seem to trouble him much, or his blindness. His movements along the customs track
were easy, confident, almost graceful. Like all the rest of the newly arrived passengers, he had the rough, blotchy skin that Earth
people tended to have, flaky and reddened from frying all the time in that murderous torrid sunshine of theirs.
Juanito sauntered over and said, "I'll be your courier, sir. Juanito Holt" He barely came up to the blind man's elbow.
"Courier?"
"New arrival assistance service. Facilitate your entry arrangements. Customs clearance, currency exchange, hotel
accommodations, permanent settlement papers if that's what you intend. Also special sendees by arrangement."
Juanito stared up expectantly at the blank face. The eyeless man looked back at him in a blunt straight-on way, what would
have been strong eye contact if the dinko had had eyes. That was eerie. What was even eerier was the sense Juanito had that
the eyeless man was seeing him clearly. For just a moment Juanito wondered who was going to be controlling whom in this deal.
"What kind of special services?"
"Anything else you need," Juanito said.
"Anything?"
"Anything. This is Valparaiso Nuevo, sir."
"Mmm. What's your fee?"
"Two thousand callaghanos a week for the basic. Specials are extra, according."
"How much is that in Capbloc dollars, your basic?"
Juanito told him.
"That's not so bad," the blind man said.
"Two weeks minimum, payable in advance."
"Mmm," said the blind man again. Again that intense eyeless gaze, seeing right through him. He was silent for a time. Juanito
listened to the sound of his breathing, quick and shallow, the way all Earthsiders breathed. As if they were trying to hold their
nostrils pinched together to keep the poisons that were in the air from getting into their lungs. But it was safe to breathe the air on
Valparaiso Nuevo.
"How old are you?" the blind man asked suddenly.
"Seventeen," Juanito blurted, caught off guard.
"And you're good, are you?"
"I'm the best. I was born here. I know everybody."
"I'm going to be needing the best. You take electronic handshake?"
"Sure," Juanito said. This was too easy. He wondered if he should have asked three kilocallies a week, not two, but it was too
late for that now. He pulled his flex terminal from his tunic pocket and slipped his fingers into it. "Unity Callaghan Bank of
Valparaiso Nuevo. That's access code 22-44-66, and you might as well give it its own default key, because it's the only bank
here. Account 1133, that's mine."
The blind man donned his own terminal and deftly tapped the number pad on his wrist. Then he grasped Juanito's hand firmly in
his until the sensors overlapped, and made the transfer of funds. Juanito touched for confirm and a bright green +cl. 4000 lit up
on the screen in his palm. The payee's name was Victor Farkas, out of an account in the Royal Amalgamated Bank of
Liechtenstein.
"Liechtenstein," Juanito said, frowning. "That's an Earth country?"
"Very small one. Between Austria and Switzerland."
"I've heard of Switzerland. You live on Liechtenstein?"
"No," Farkas said. "I bank there. In Liechtenstein, is what Earth people say. Except for islands. Liechtenstein isn't an island.
Can we get out of this place now, do you think?"
"One more transfer," Juanito said. "Pump your entry software across to me. Baggage claim, passport, visa. Make things much
easier for us both, getting out of here."
"Make it easier for you to disappear with my suitcase, yes. And I'd never find you again, would I?"
"Do you think I'd do that?"
"I'm more profitable to you if you don't."
"You've got to trust your courier, Mr. Farkas. If you can't trust your courier, you can't trust anybody at all on Valparaiso
Nuevo."
"I know that," Farkas said.
Collecting Farkas's baggage and getting him clear of the customs tank took another half an hour and cost about two hundred
callies in miscellaneous bribes, which was about standard. Everyone from the baggage-handling androids to the cute snotty teller
at the currency-exchange booth had to be bought. Juanito understood that things didn't work that way on most habitat worlds; but
Valparaiso Nuevo, Juanito knew, was different from most habitat worlds. In a place where the chief industry was the protection
of fugitives, it made sense that the basis of the economy would be the recycling of bribes.
Farkas didn't appear to be any sort of fugitive, though. While he was waiting for the baggage Juanito pulled a readout on the
software that the blind man had pumped over to him and saw that Farkas was here on a visitor's visa, six-week limit. He listed
his employer as Kyocera-Merck, Ltd. So he was a seeker, not a hider, here to track somebody down who was wanted by one of
the biggest of the Earth megacorporations. Well, that was okay. Hider, seeker: it was possible for a courier to turn a profit
working either side of the deal. Running traces wasn't Juanito's usual number, but he figured he could adapt.
The other thing that Farkas didn't appear to be was blind. Maybe he had no eyes, but that didn't seem to interfere with his
perceptions of his surroundings. As they emerged from the customs tank he turned and pointed back at the huge portrait of El
Supremo and said, "Who's that? Your president?"
"The Defender, that's his title. The Generalissimo. El Supremo, Don Eduardo Callaghan." Then it sank in and Juanito said,
blinking, "Pardon me. You can see that picture, Mr. Farkas?"
"In a manner of speaking."
"I don't follow. Can you see or can't you?"
"Yes and no."
"Thanks a lot, Mr. Farkas."
"We can talk more about it later," Farkas said.
Juanito always put new dinkos in the same hotel, the San Bernardito, four kilometers out from the hub in the rim community of
Cajamarca. "This way," he told Farkas. "We have to take the elevator at C Spoke."
Farkas didn't seem to have any trouble following him. Every now and then Juanito glanced back, and there was the big man
three or four paces behind him, marching along steadily down the corridor. No eyes, Juanito thought, but somehow he can see.
He definitely can see.
The four-kilometer elevator ride down C Spoke to the rim was spectacular all the way. The elevator was a glass-walled
chamber inside a glass-walled tube that ran along the outside of the spoke, and it gave you the full dazzling vista: the whole great
complex of wheels within wheels that was the Earth-orbit artificial world of Valparaiso Nuevo, the seven great structural spokes
radiating from the hub to the distant wheel of the rim, each spoke bearing its seven glass-and-aluminum globes that contained the
residential zones and business sectors and farmlands and recreational zones and forest reserves. As the elevator descended—the
gravity rising as you went down, climbing toward an Earth-one pull in the rim towns—you had a view of the sun's brilliant glint on
the adjacent spokes, and an occasional glimpse of the great blue belly of Earth filling up the sky a hundred fifty thousand
kilometers away, and the twinkling hordes of other habitat worlds in their nearby orbits, like a swarm of jellyfish dancing in a vast
black ocean. That was what everybody who came up from Earth said, "Like jellyfish in the ocean." Juanito didn't understand how
a fish could be made out of jelly, or how a habitat with seven spokes looked anything like a fish of any kind, but that was what
they all said.
Farkas didn't say a word about jellyfish. But in some fashion or other he did indeed seem to be taking in the view. He stood
close to the elevator's glass wall in deep concentration, gripping the rail, not saying a thing. Now and then he made a little hissing
sound as something particularly awesome went by outside. Juanito studied him with sidelong glances. What could he possibly
see? Nothing seemed to be moving beneath those shadowy places where his eyes should have been. Yet somehow he was
seeing out of that broad blank stretch of gleaming skin above his nose.
It was damned disconcerting. It was downright weird.
The San Bernardito gave Farkas a rim-side room, facing the stars. Juanito paid the hotel clerks to treat his clients right. That
was something his father had taught him when he was just a kid who wasn't old enough to know a Schwarzchild singularity from
an ace in the hole. "Pay for what you're going to need," his father kept saying. "Buy it and at least there's a chance it'll be there
when you have to have it." His father had been a revolutionary in Central America during the time of the Empire. He would have
been prime minister if the revolution had come out the right way. But it hadn't.
"You want me to help you unpack?" Juanito said.
"I can manage."
"Sure," Juanito said.
He stood by the window, looking at the sky. Like all the other satellite worlds, Valparaiso Nuevo was shielded from cosmic-ray
damage and stray meteoroids by a double shell filled with a three-meter-thick layer of lunar slag. Rows of V-shaped apertures
ran down the outer skin of the shield, mirror-faced to admit sunlight but not hard radiation; and the hotel had lined its rooms up so
each one on this side had a view of space through the Vs. The whole town of Cajamarca was facing darkwise now, and the
stars were glittering fiercely.
When Juanito turned from the window he saw that Farkas had hung his clothes neatly in the closet and was
shaving—methodically, precisely—with a little hand-held laser.
"Can I ask you something personal?" Juanito said.
"You want to know how I see."
"It's pretty amazing, I have to say."
"I don't see. Not really. I'm just as blind as you think I am."
"Then how—"
"It's called Blindsight," Farkas said. "Proprioceptive vision."
"What?"
Farkas chuckled. "There's all sorts of data bouncing around that doesn't have the form of reflected light, which is what your
eyes see. A million vibrations besides those that happen to be in the visual part of the electromagnetic spectrum are shimmering
in this room. Air currents pass around things and are deformed by what they encounter. And it isn't only the air currents. Objects
have mass, they have heat, they have—the term won't make any sense to you—shapeweight. A quality having to do with the
interaction of mass and form. Does that mean anything to you? No, I guess not. But it does to me. And for two-dimensional
images: I have a different technique for detecting those. Look, there's a lot of information available beyond what you can see
with eyes, if you want it. I want it."
"You use some kind of machine to pick it up?" Juanito asked.
Farkas tapped his forehead. "It's in here. I was born with it."
"Some kind of sensing organ instead of eyes?"
"That's pretty close."
"What do you see, then? What do things look like to you?"
"What do they look like to you?" Farkas said. "What does a chair look like to you?"
"Well, it's got four legs, and a back—"
"What does a leg look like?"
"It's longer than it is wide."
"Right." Farkas knelt and ran his hands along the black tubular legs of the ugly little chair beside the bed. "I touch the chair, I
feel the shape of the legs. But I don't see leg-shaped shapes."
"What then?"
"Silver globes that roll away into fat curves. The back part of the chair bends double and folds into itself. The bed's a bright
pool of mercury with long green spikes coming up. You're six blue spheres stacked one on top of another, with a thick orange
cable running through them. And so on."
"Blue?" Juanito said. "Orange? How do you know anything about colors?"
"The same way you do. I call one color blue, another one orange. I don't know if they're remotely like your blue or orange, but
so what? My blue is always blue for me. It's different from the color I see as red and the one I see as green. Orange is always
orange. It's a matter of relationships. You Mow?"
"No," Juanito said, "How can you possibly make sense out of anything? What you see doesn't have a thing to do with the real
color or shape or position of anything."
Farkas shook his head. "Wrong, Juanito. For me, what I see is the real shape and color position. It's all I've ever known. If they
were able to retrofit me with normal eyes now, which I'm told would be less than fifty-fifty likely to succeed and tremendously
risky besides, I'd be lost trying to find my way around in your world. It would take me years to learn how. Or maybe forever. But
I do all right, in mine. I understand, by touching things, that what I see by blindsight isn't the 'actual' shape. But I see in consistent
equivalents. Do you follow? A chair always looks like what I think of as a chair, even though I know that chairs aren't really
shaped at all like that. If you could see things the way I do it would all look like something out of another dimension. It is
something out of another dimension, really. The information I operate by is different from what you use, that's all. But I do see, in
my own way. I perceive objects and establish relationships between them, I make spatial perceptions, just as you do. Do you
follow, Juanito?"
Juanito considered that. How very weird it sounded. To see the world in funhouse distortions, blobs and spheres and orange
cables and glimmering pools of mercury. Weird, yes, extremely weird. After a moment he said, "And you were born like this?"
"That's right."
"Some kind of genetic accident?"
"Not an accident," Farkas said quietly. "I was an experiment. A master gene-splicer worked me over in my mother's womb."
"Right," Juanito said. "You know, that's actually the first thing I guessed when I saw you come off the shuttle. This has to be
some kind of splice effect, I said. But why—why—" He faltered. "Does it bother you to talk about these things?"
"Not really."
"Why would your parents have allowed—"
"They didn't have any choice, Juanito."
"Isn't that illegal? Involuntary splicing?"
"Of course," Farkas said. "So what?"
"But who would do that to—"
"This was in the Free State of Kazakhstan, which you've never heard of. It was one of the countries formed out of the Soviet
Union, which you've also probably never heard of, after the First Breakup, a hundred, hundred fifty years ago. My father was
Hungarian consul at Tashkent. He was killed in the Second Breakup, what they called the War of Restoration, and my mother,
who was pregnant, was volunteered for the experiments in prenatal genetic surgery then being carried out in that city under
Chinese auspices. A lot of remarkable work was done there in those years. They were trying to breed new and useful kinds of
human beings to serve the republic. I was one of the experiments in extending the human perceptual range. I was supposed to
have normal sight plus blindsight, but it didn't quite work out that way."
"You sound very calm about it," Juanito said.
"What good is getting angry?"
"My father used to say that too," Juanito said. "Don't get angry, get even. He was in politics, the Central American Empire.
When the revolution failed he took sanctuary here."
"So did the surgeon who did my prenatal splice," Farkas said. "Around fifteen years ago. He's still living here. I'd like to find
him."
"I bet you would," Juanito said, as everything fell into place.
2
carpenter's window, on the thirtieth floor of the grimy old Manito Hotel in downtown Spokane, faced due east. In the year and
a half he had lived there he had never opaqued it. The full blast of the rising sun through the clear pane, as it came rolling
westward in all its terrible grandeur across the weary abraded surface of the North American continent, was his wake-up call
every morning.
These days Carpenter earned his living as a desert jockey, a weather forecaster out here in this forlorn drought-stricken
agricultural belt. His job involved calculating the odds for the farmers who were betting their livelihoods on trying to guess when
the next rainstorm would turn up in eastern Washington—next month, next year, whenever. Inland Washington State was right
on the cusp, situated as it was between the moist, fertile agricultural zone of southern Canada and the miserable, perpetually
parched wasteland that was the upper west-central United States, and the precipitation was a very chancy thing. Sometimes
there was rain and the farmers got fat, and sometimes the rain belt swung far away to the north and east and they all got killed.
They depended on Carpenter to tell them weeks or even months in advance how things were going to go for them each season.
Their soothsayer, their reader of the entrails.
He had been a lot of other things, too. Before being given the weather gig he had been a cargo dispatcher for one of Samurai
Industries' L-5 shuttles, and a chip-runner before that, and before that—well, he was starting to forget. Like a good salaryman
Carpenter took whatever assignment was handed him, and made sure to master the skills that were required.
And one of these days, if he kept his nose clean, he'd be sitting in a corner office atop the Samurai pyramid in New Tokyo in
Manitoba. That was the Samurai head office, just as New Kyoto down in Chile was the Level One zone of Samurai's
arch-competitor, the immense Kyocera-Merck combine. New Tokyo, New Kyoto, it made no difference. One name was simply
the other one turned inside out. But you wanted to get yourself into Headquarters. That was the essential thing, to be taken into
the Japs' embrace, to become a Headquarters guy, an executiveman, one of their specially favored roundeyes. Once you were in
there, you were there for life. It wasn't much of a goal, as ideal visions went, but it was the only one available to him. You played
the Company game, Carpenter knew, or else you didn't play at all.
At half past six in the morning on this day in late spring, with the room already flooded with light and Carpenter beginning to
wake up anyway, his Company communicator went beep and the visor opposite his bed lit up and a familiar contralto voice said,
"On your toes, Salaryman Carpenter. Rise and sing the Samurai Industries anthem along with me. 'Our hearts are pure, our
minds are true, Our thoughts, our thoughts, are all for you, dear Companeee'—did I call too early, Salaryman Carpenter?
Morning is well along on the West Coast, isn't it? Are you awake? Are you alone? Turn on the visuals, Salaryman Carpenter!
Let me see your shining smile. Your beloved Jeanne is calling you."
"For Christ's sake, show some mercy," Carpenter murmured. "I don't have my brain in gear yet." He blinked at the visor.
Jeanne Gabel's broad Eurasian face, dark-eyed, strong-featured, looked back at him. A few small alterations around the jaw and
the cheekbones and it could have been a man's face. Carpenter and Jeanne had been good friends, never lovers, when they
worked out of the same Samurai office in St. Louis. That had been four years back. Now she was in Paris and he was in
Spokane: the Company kept you moving around. They talked every once in a while.
He activated the visuals at his end, letting her see the dingy room, the rumpled bed, his bleary eyes. "Is there trouble?" he
asked.
"No more than usual. But there's news."
"Good or bad?"
"Depends on how you want to look at it. I've got a deal for you. But go and wash your face, first. Brush your teeth. Comb your
hair a little. You look like a mess, you know?"
"You're the one who called at the crack of dawn and then told me to turn on the visuals."
"It's the end of the day in Paris. I waited as long as I could to call. Go on, get yourself washed. I'll sit tight."
"Look the other way, then. I'm not decent."
"Right," she said, grinning, and continued to peer out of the visor at him.
Carpenter shrugged and clambered out of bed, naked, leaving the visuals on. Let her have a peek if she wants, he thought. Do
her some good, maybe. He was a lean late-thirtyish man with shoulder-length yellow hair and a brown beard, boyishly proud of
his body: long flat muscles, tight belly, hard butt. He padded across the room to the washzone and stuck his head under the sonic
cleanser. The instrument purred and throbbed.
In a moment he felt clean and almost awake. The Screen injector was sitting on the toilet counter and he picked it up and gave
himself his morning shot, automatically, without even thinking about it. You got out of bed, you washed and peed, and you gave
yourself your shot of Screen: it was how everybody started the day. The sun was waiting for you out there in the killer haze of
the angry white morning sky and you didn't want to face its marvelous ferocity without your skin armor renewed against the daily
onslaught.
Carpenter wrapped a towel around his waist and turned toward the visor. Jeanne was amiably watching him.
"That's better," she told him.
"All right," he said. "You say you have a deal for me?"
"I might. It depends on you. Last time we talked, you said you were going crazy there in Spokane and couldn't wait until you
got moved on to another gig. Well, what about it, Paul? Are you still interested in a transfer out of Spokane?"
"What? Damned straight I am!" His heart rate began to climb. He hated being in Spokane. His weatherman gig in this forlorn
isolated place seemed to him like a giant life detour.
"I can get you out, if you like. How would you like to be a sea captain?"
"A sea captain," Carpenter repeated, with no expression whatever. "A sea captain." But she had startled him. He hadn't
expected something like that. It was as if she had asked him how he would like to be a hippopotamus.
He wondered if Jeanne could just be fucking around with him for the fun of it. It was too early in the day for him to find that
amusing. But it wouldn't be like her, doing that.
"You're serious?" he asked. "For Samurai, you mean?"
"Of course, for Samurai. A change of career track is something I can't manage for you. But I can get you a transfer, if you
want it. Iceberg trawler called the Tonopah Maru, getting ready to sail out of San Francisco, commanding officer needed,
Salaryman Level Eleven. Came across the Personnel node this morning. You're Level Eleven, aren't you, Paul?"
Carpenter didn't want to seem ungrateful. She was a dear woman and had his interests at heart. But he was baffled by all this.
"What the hell do I know about being commanding officer of an iceberg trawler, Jeanne?"
"What the hell did you know about being a weatherman, or a chip-runner, or all the other things you've done, until you did
them? God will provide. God and Samurai Industries. They'll teach you what you need to know. You know that. They give you
the proper indoctrination cube, you jack it in, two hours later you're as good a seaman as Columbus ever was. But if you don't
like the idea of being a sailor—"
"No. No. Tell me more. Is there grade slope to be had out of this?"
"Of course there's slope. You put in eighteen months aboard your cramped little boat hauling icebergs and keeping your nasty
but capable crew in line and you'll make Level Ten for sure. Demonstration of managerial skills under adverse conditions. They'll
move you to Europe and stick you on the administrative track and you'll be sitting pretty from then on, straight up the net to New
Tokyo. I thought of you the moment this came across the node."
"How come there's a vacancy?" Carpenter asked. Usually any job that held the promise of grade improvement, no matter how
disagreeable it might be, was snapped up in-house before it hit any of the general Company nodes. "Why didn't someone in the
trawler division take it right away?"
"Someone did," Jeanne said. "Yesterday. Then his lottery number came up two hours later and he bugged out for one of the
habitats, just like that, caught a shuttle without even stopping to pack. A job on Outback, I think it was, or maybe Commonplace.
The company got caught short and Personnel was asked to fill in with an Eleven, fast. Five names surfaced on the first scoop.
Yours was one of them. I thought I'd call you before I ran any checks on the other four."
"Nice."
"Am I wasting my breath?"
"I love you, Jeanne."
"I know that. But do you want the gig?"
"Tell me the time frame?"
"You'd have a five-week transition. Enough time to work up the weatherman specs for your successor in Spokane, get down to
Frisco for your indoctrination jacking, and maybe even fit in a few days over here in Paris for fine dining and riotous living, if you
could stand it."
Jeanne's face bore the usual ironic glint but there was, it seemed to Carpenter, some wistfulness in it also. When they worked
together in St. Louis they had always been flirtatious with each other, and whenever they were with other people they had liked
to play at giving the impression that they were sleeping together. But all it was was play. Someone had done some damage to
her, emotional, not physical, long ago— Carpenter had never asked for the details—and so far as he knew she was completely
asexual. A pity, because he wasn't.
He said, "I'd like that. A few days in Paris. The Seine. The Place de la Concorde. The restaurant on the top of the Eiffel
Tower. The Louvre on a rainy day."
"It's always a rainy day here," she said.
"All the better. Water falling from the sky, just dropping right down on your head—it seems like a goddamned miracle to me,
Jeanne. I would take off my clothes and dance naked in it, right down the Champs-Elysees."
"Stop showing off. They'd arrest you in two seconds, anyway. There's a cop on every corner here. Androids, very strict. 'Man
Dieu, monsieur—s'il vous plait, vos vetements!'"
"I'll tell him that I don't speak French. Would you dance with me?"
"No. Not naked down the Champs-Elysees."
"In the grand ballroom of the Georges Cinq, then."
"But of course," she said. "The Georges Cinq."
"I love you, Jeanne." He would never see her in Paris, he was sure of that. By the time he was through with the iceberg
boat they would have reassigned her to Tierra del Fuego or Hong Kong or Kansas City.
"I love you," she told him. "Keep dry, Paul."
"Not a problem, here," Carpenter said.
The morning that his transfer finally came through—it took about ten days; he was just beginning to doubt that Jeanne had been
able to swing it at all—Carpenter had just clocked nineteen straight hours of work at the Samurai Weather Service office in
Spokane. Everybody there was working like that these days. A five-alarm toxic emergency had been declared, the worst one in
three or four years, and the whole meteorological staff had gone on double overtime, tracking the unusual upper-air movements
that might be putting the entire West Coast at risk
What was going on was that there was a big high-pressure zone sitting over Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, and Kansas. That
was not exactly news in itself—there was always a high-pressure zone sitting on those states, which was why it almost never
rained there any more—but this time the entire great mass of heavy dead air had developed a powerful counterclockwise rotation
and was starting to pull streams of greenhouse gases out of the blighted Midwest. All the vile poisonous airborne goo—methane,
nitrous oxides, and other such things— that was normally salted through the atmosphere over Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Louis,
Cincinnati, and Indianapolis was being sucked around the top end of Nebraska and Wyoming and into Idaho.
Ordinarily that would have been no great cause for alarm. It happened once in a while, a river of foul atmospheric bile
streaming into the Mountain States and getting whipped right around through the Southwest and back to where it came from. But
this time the orbital sensors were showing a line of secondary atmospheric eddy currents along the western edge of the
high-pressure zone, currents that had the capacity to peel away the toxic crud as it made its turn southward into Utah and send it
drifting toward the Pacific Northwest. Where it would smother Seattle and Portland for a few eye-stinging days, after which the
normal north-south winds would catch hold of it and shove it down the coast to torment San Francisco and then Los Angeles and
San Diego.
The coast cities had enough toxins of their own to deal with as it was: if a load of extraneous airborne shit got shipped in from
the Midwest it would push things well above the tolerance levels as they were now defined. It would hit like a blast of dragon's
breath. People would be dropping dead in the streets. They would choke on the sulfurous reek The deadly smog would excoriate
their nostrils and claw at their lungs and blacken their blood. Warnings to stay indoors would have to be issued; industrial
production would need to be shut down, maybe for weeks, as would nonessential ground transportation, to avoid aggravating the
situation. The economy of the entire region was bound to suffer a terrific short-run setback, and there would probably be
long-term environmental damage too, increased uptakes of arsenic, cadmium, and mercury in the water supply, continued
infrastructure degradation, severe havoc done to what was left of the West Coast flora and fauna. Redwood trees couldn't go
indoors when a five-alarm toxic cloud came drifting westward.
On the other hand, the toxic cloud could still turn around at any minute and go away without doing any harm. Broadcasting
premature warning of an oncoming peril that wasn't actually coming could lead to needless factory closings and panic among the
civilians: very likely a massive flight of people from the area, which would choke the highways and have environmental
consequences of its own. After which would come a bunch of lawsuits demanding damages because the threatened disaster had
failed to materialize. People would want to be paid for emotional stress, unnecessary expenses incurred, interruption of trade, any
damned thing. Samurai Industries hated being entangled in lawsuits. They had pretty much the deepest pockets around, and
everyone knew it.
So the whole situation needed to be monitored in the finest possible detail, minute by minute, and everybody in the Spokane
Weather Service office had been placed on round-the-clock duty until the emergency was over. Carpenter, who was considered
to have an almost psychic knack for predicting large-scale air movements, was particularly on the spot. He had tanked up on
hyperdex and spent the night in front of the computer in a welter of sweat and drug-induced intensity of perception, staring at
shifting yellow-and-green patterns of bars and dots, internalizing the dancing data as fast as it arrived in the hope that he would
arrive at some mystic sense of the cosmic order of events, some wild gestalt insight that would allow him to see into the future.
The night went by like the blink of an eye. And he had grasped it: he had. He was peering around the corner of time into the day
after tomorrow, and he saw the deadly stream of toxic atmospherics moving— moving—cutting down past Coeur
d'Alene—turning ever so slightly southward and eastward—eastward, really?—yes— maybe—yes—
"Carpenter."
—yes, a shift, a definite shift in the air movement, coming on Tuesday a little after three in the afternoon—
"Carpenter?"
A voice out of the void: thin, high-pitched, annoying. Carpenter waved his hand angrily without looking around. "Fuck off, will
you?" He struggled to hold his concentration.
"Boss says, Take a break. He wants to talk to you."
"I've almost got it. I can see—fuck. Fuck!" He banged his fist against the edge of the desk. The intrusion had come like a
bucket of icy water hurled in his face. It shattered everything and he was unable to see anything any more. The patterns on the
visor became a meaningless dance of jiggling blotches. Carpenter glanced up, every nerve in his body twanging and humming.
One of the office gofers was standing placidly at his elbow, a pale flimsy girl, Sandra Wong, Sandra Chen, some Chinese name
or other, utterly indifferent to his irritation. "What the hell is it?" he asked her furiously.
"I told you," the kid said. "Boss wants you."
"What for?"
"Do I know? Tell Carpenter, Take a break, come over here, that's all he said."
Carpenter nodded and stood up. All around the room, people speeding as he had been on hyperdex were staring into their
visors with lunatic fixity and babbling back at the computers as torrents of weather data flooded in from space. He wondered
why they were so entranced. Their fanatical dedication to their task seemed alien and repugnant to him now. Two minutes ago
nothing had mattered more in the universe to him than tracking that vicious cloud of atmospheric crud, but now he was
completely out of it, utterly detached, wholly lacking in concern for the fate of Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Los Angeles, San
Diego.
He realized that he had passed into some outer realm of exhaustion without even noticing it. He was no longer speeded up. The
hyperdex must have burned out hours ago and he had continued his vigil on sheer mental momentum, doing who knew what
damage to his nervous system.
He went into the other room, to the big horseshoe-shaped desk of the department administrator.
"You wanted me?" Carpenter asked.
The office was run by a bleak-souled Salaryman Ten named Ross McCarthy, who despite his name had some slight tincture of
Japanese blood in his veins. That had done McCarthy no good whatever in his quest for upward slope, perhaps even had
contributed to his stymieing: he had been stuck at the tenth level for years and plainly was going no higher, and he was bitter
about it. He was a stocky, flat-faced man with faintly greenish skin and straight, glossy black hair that was starting to thin out
across the top.
There was a dispatch printout in his hands. McCarthy fingered it gingerly, as though it were radioactive.
"Carpenter, what the hell is this?" he said.
"How would I know?"
McCarthy made no attempt to let him see it. "I'll tell you what it is. It's the finish of your career that I have right here in my
hands. It's a transfer to some goddamn stupid iceberg ship, that's what it is. Have you taken leave of your senses, Carpenter?"
"I don't think that I have, no." Carpenter reached for the printout. McCarthy held it back from him.
"This ship," McCarthy said, "it's an absolute dead end for you. You'll go out into the middle of the Pacific for a couple of years
and fry your ass doing stupid manual labor and when you come back you'll find that everybody on your grade level has skipped
on past you. Out of sight, off the charts, Carpenter, that's the way things work. Do you follow me? Don't do this to yourself.
Take my advice. What you'll do if you're smart is stay right here. You're needed here."
"Apparently the Company thinks it needs me somewhere else," Carpenter said. He was getting annoyed now.
"You stay here, you're bound to move up slope in no time. I'll be going on to a Nine pretty soon now. The word will come down
from Yoshida-san any day, that's what I hear. And when I do, you'll slide right into my slot. Isn't that better than hauling fucking
icebergs around the ocean?"
McCarthy wasn't going anywhere, Carpenter knew. He had committed some obscure breach of etiquette along the way,
perhaps had tried unwisely to pressure some distant and barely acknowledged Japanese fifth cousin of his for promotion, and he
was going to rot in Level Ten forever and ever. McCarthy knew that too. And wanted to keep everybody who worked for him
trapped here in the same perpetual stasis that enfolded him.
"I think I've achieved as much as I can in weather forecasting," Carpenter told him, controlling himself tautly. "Now I want to
try something else."
"An iceberg trawler. Shit, Carpenter. Shit! Turn it down."
"I don't think I will." He took the transfer order from McCarthy and pocketed it without looking at it. "Oh, and you can start to
call off your five-alarmer, by the way. The poison cloud is about to break up."
McCarthy's black-button eyes took on sudden feverish brightness.
"You sure of that?"
"Absolutely," Carpenter said, amazed at his own audacity. "The entire system will be heading back east by Tuesday afternoon."
If he was wrong, the whole Spokane office would be taken out and shot as soon as the lawsuits began. To hell with them all,
Carpenter thought. He would be a thousand miles from here before any trouble could start.
And in any case his forecast was right. He felt it in his bones.
"Show me on the charts," McCarthy said, beginning to look a little suspicious.
Carpenter led him back to the data room. As never before it looked to him like a gaming center in a lunatic asylum, all the
hyperdex-zonked crazies grinning fixedly into the bright streams of whorls and loops that were dancing across the faces of their
visors. He stood in front of his own computer and pointed to the gaudy yellow-and-green patterns. They made no sense
whatsoever to him now. Chimpanzee finger paintings, nothing more. "Here," he told McCarthy, "these isobars here, they indicate
the changing gradients." He tapped the screen. "You see, here, along the Idaho border? Definite incipient weakening of the toxic
flow. And a clear indication of a retro push coming from Canada, you see, like a giant hand shoving the whole mass the right
way." It was all bullshit, every syllable of it He had unquestionably seen something new taking shapebefore the girl broke in on
him, but whatever it might have been was impossible for him to fathom, now.
McCarthy was staring thoughtfully at the computer visor.
He said, "It'll be a fucking miracle if the damned thing just goes away, won't it?"
"Won't it be, though. But look, Ross—" Carpenter rarely presumed to use McCarthy's first name. "Look here, here, here. And
especially here. I know it looks locked tight as a constipated whale's gut right this moment, but when I was clicked into the map a
little while ago I could distinctly feel the whole flow shifting, shifting in our favor; definite indications of gradient transform all
along the periphery. Look at this. And this."
"Mmm." McCarthy nodded. "Yes. Mmm." He was faking it, Carpenter knew. On Level Ten you didn't need technical ability
except of the most superficial kind; you needed managerial skill. Which perhaps McCarthy might have had, once.
"You see?" Carpenter said. "I was flying on intuition, sure. But the substantiating data's already beginning to turn up positive.
That toxic mass is as good as out of here. You see that, don't you, Ross?"
McCarthy was still nodding.
"Right. I like it. Right, right, right." And then, abruptly: "Listen, Paul, turn down this transfer, won't you? Stay here with us. We
need your kind of mind."
Carpenter had never heard McCarthy plead before. But the pleasure he drew from it was followed immediately by a desolate
feeling of contempt.
"I can't, Ross. I've got to move along. Surely you understand that."
"But skipper of an iceberg ship—"
"Whatever. I take what I can get." Carpenter felt dizzy, suddenly. His eyeballs were aching. "Hey, Ross, is it okay if I go
home, now? I'm dead on my feet and not worth a damn any more here today. And the crisis is over. I swear to you, it's over. Let
me go, okay?"
"Yeah," McCarthy said, absently. "Go on home, if you need to. But if things turn back the wrong way, we'll have to call you
back in, no matter what."
"They won't turn back, believe me. Believe me."
"And come in tomorrow. We've got to start setting things up for your replacement. Whoever that is."
"Right. Sure."
Carpenter staggered out of the building, masking up in the vestibule, carefully fastening his face-lung in place to shield his throat
and respiratory system from the customary ambient atmospheric garbage. The sky was green and black with broad sickening
stripes of dismal crud surrounding the great ugly staring eye of the sun, and the air, hot and moist, clung to the streets like a heavy
furry blanket. Even through the mask, Carpenter could feel the pungent atmosphere tickling his nostrils like a fine wire probing
upward. He was relieved to see a bubble-bus pull up almost immediately. Quickly Carpenter jumped aboard, shouldering in hard
among the other masked figures to make a place for himself, and in ten minutes he was back in his hotel room.
He tossed his face-lung aside and threw himself down fully clothed on his bed, too wound up to go to sleep.
Some world out there, he thought. A kitchen sink full of ecological disasters falling on us for a hundred years, falling and falling
and falling. Eutrophication. Red tide. Spontaneous diebacks. Outbursts of mutagenesis, just as spontaneous. Drowned coastlines.
Mysterious whirlwinds and thermal upheavals. Fermenting acres of dead vegetation, killed by heatstroke and pickling now under
the merciless sun. Insect hordes on the march across whole continents, gobbling everything in their way, leaving great scars
across the land as the mark of their passage. A host of random environmental effects popping out all over the globe, effects
whose causes were not immediately apparent any more, were in fact essentially discontinuities. The underlying damage had been
well and thoroughly done a long time ago. The seeds of a continuing and constantly exfoliating disaster had been planted. And
now the crop was coming up everywhere.
It was worst in the middle latitudes, the temperate zone, once so fertile. Rain almost never fell at all there now. The dying
forests, the new grasslands taking over, deserts where even the grass couldn't make it, the polar ice packs crumbling, the
washed-out bright white hazy sky striped with the gaudy stains of the greenhouse pollutants, the lowlands drowning everywhere,
crumbling dead buildings sticking up out of the sea. And of course there were other places where the problem was too much rain
instead of not enough. Carpenter thought of that as the revenge of the rain forest: the conquest of places that once had had
pleasant warm climates by unending rainfall and stifling wet heat that turned them into humidity-choked jungles, vines sprouting
on freeways, monkeys and alligators migrating northward, weird tropical diseases getting loose in the cities.
It occurred to him that if he had been kidding himself about the upcoming movements of the toxic cloud and Seattle and
Portland wound up getting trashed next week, McCarthy would have his neck in the noose in two minutes. A scapegoat would be
needed and he would be it. And instead of moving up to the iceberg job he'd be sliding downward to some sort of menial crap in a
part of the world so dreary it would make Spokane seem like a paradise.
The Company offered you lifetime employment if you toed the line, but any hint of irresponsibility, of nihilistic deviation from
proper practice, and you were done for. You didn't get fired, no: firings were very, very rare. But you lost your upward
momentum, and once you did that you almost never regained it. So he had gone out on a limb a little, here. A smart slope-seeker
would never have been so definite about proclaiming that a favorable shift in air patterns was in the cards: he had completely
摘要：

HOTSKYATMIDNIGHTRobertSiverbergCopyright®1994byAgberg,Ltd.LibraryofCongressCatalogCardNumber:93-29755ISBN0-553-56935-Xe-bookver.1.0ForAliceK.WhotaughtanolddogacoupleofnewtricksOWesternwind,whenwiltthoublow,Thatthesmallraindowncanrain?Christ,thatmylovewereinmyarmsAndIinmybedagain!----ANONYMOUS1that's...

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