Hot Sky at Midnight

6

carpenter was the first to reach the restaurant. The trip across the bay had been quicker than he expected. He waited out in front for Rhodes, pacing up and down in the white midday glare. The restaurant was a series of small perspex domes nestling along the rim of the seawall that protected lowland Berkeley from further incursions by the bay. They looked like clumps of gleaming fungi.

Half the Berkeley flatlands had been gobbled by the rising water in the first big surges forty or fifty years back, and at low tide, so Carpenter understood, it was possible to glimpse the tops of the old drowned buildings sticking up out of the glistening microorganism-stained surface of the bay. But there hadn’t been any serious new flooding here since the seawall had been put in. The West Coast had come off pretty well, generally speaking, in the great drowning of the shorelines, which had happened in a highly erratic way around the world: catastrophic in China and Japan and Bangladesh, and also the eastern United States, especially Florida, Georgia, the Carolina coast, but only a minor annoyance in Western Europe—except in Holland, Denmark, and the Baltic countries, which were pretty much gone— and no big deal along the Pacific side of the Americas, either. Now they said that the present phase of the melting of the polar ice caps was essentially complete: what remained of them was going to stay frozen, at least for the immediate future, so there was nothing more to fear from the rising of the planetary water levels. That was always nice to hear, Carpenter thought, that there was nothing more to fear. In any context at all. Even if it wasn’t true.

The noon sun was fierce and big and the air was, as usual, like thick soup. Rhodes was late, not unusual for him. Carpenter, fidgeting in the sticky heat, walked up the ramp leading up to the seawall, flapping his shirt to cool himself and tugging at his face-lung where it was clinging, warm and clammy, to his cheek.

He stared out at the fine old bridges and the broad bay, green and blue and violet with its skin of tropical pond scum, and at the glistening elegance of San Francisco across the way, and the dark heavy bulk of Mount Tamalpais off to the north. Then he looked around the other way, at the Berkeley-Oakland hills, heavily built over but still showing big grassy areas.

All the grass was brown and withered and dead looking, but Carpenter knew from childhood experience that it would spring up in fresh green life within a week or two, once the winter rains came. The trouble was that the winter rains didn’t seem to come here very often, any more. It was an endless summer all up and down the coast, year in, year out. Whereas former deserts like those in the Middle East and northern Africa were blessed now with sweet downpourings of precipitation as never before, and the whole southeastern arc of the United States from East Texas to Florida had turned into one enormous rain forest, strangling under a phantasmagorical burden of colossal furry vines and great clumps of orchids and gigantic creeping plants with shiny leaves.

“There you are,” said a deep, husky voice behind him. “I’ve been looking all over the place.”

Nick Rhodes grinned at him from the foot of the seawall ramp. He had risen up out of nowhere, it seemed. Rhodes was maskless, wearing an airy-looking white cotton djellaba imprinted with bold Egyptian motifs. His tight, curling brown hair had begun to turn gray and had receded considerably at his temples since Carpenter had last seen him, and he looked tired and eroded. His round face had become fleshy, almost puffy. There was a feeling of forced exuberance about his grin, Carpenter thought. Something was wrong. Definitely wrong.

“Herr Doktor,” Carpenter said. “Here at last. The soul of punctuality, as ever.” He descended to Rhodes and put out his hand. Rhodes caught it and reeled him in and gave him an effusive bear hug, cheek to cheek. Carpenter was a tall man, but Rhodes was a little taller and very much broader and deeper, and the hug was a crusher.

They stepped back, then, and surveyed each other. They had known each other all their lives, more or less. Rhodes, two years older, had been an early friend of Carpenter’s slightly older brother, originally, in their distant Southern California boyhoods. By the time they had reached adolescence Rhodes had become a little too dreamy, a little too vulnerable, for the older Carpenter, but he had clicked in some mysterious way with Paul.

They had followed parallel tracks all through life, both entering the giant Samurai Industries combine soon after college, the one difference being that Rhodes had real scientific ability and Carpenter’s main areas of intellectual interest lay in soft fields like history and anthropology, where there were no real career possibilities at all. So Rhodes had gone in for genetic bioengineering, a potent fast-slope path for which the Company would underwrite his graduate work and subsequent research, and Carpenter had signed on as an unspecialized executive trainee, which he knew would carry him to an unpredictable, constantly shifting series of enterprises, completely at the whim of his employer. Through all the twists and turns of their lives ever since they had managed to maintain a tenuous but nevertheless tenacious sort of friendship.

“Well,” Carpenter said. “It’s been quite a while.”

“So it has, Paul. What a treat this is. I have to tell you, you look great.”

“Do I? Life in fabulous Spokane. The wine, the women, the fragrance of the flowers. And you? Everything going well? The life, the work?”

“Wonderful.”

Carpenter couldn’t tell if there was irony in that. He suspected there was.

“Let’s go inside,” he said. “You must be crazy, coming out without a breathing-mask. Or else you’ve had your lungs retrofitted with vanadium steel.”

“This isn’t your Inland Empire, Paul. We have actual sea breezes here. It’s safe to let unfiltered air into your lungs.”

“Is it, now?” Carpenter undipped his face-lung and pocketed it, with some relief. The whole mask thing, he suspected, was a paranoid overreaction, anyway. Places like Memphis, yes, Cleveland, St. Louis, you wanted to hide behind as much filtering as you could, if you had to be outdoors. The ruinous air there hit you like a knife, scalpeling right down through your lungs into your gut. But the Bay Area? Rhodes was right. The whole world hadn’t quite become unlivable yet. Not quite.

Rhodes seemed well known in the restaurant. The place was busy, but the maitre d’, a silky-voiced android of vaguely Oriental appearance, greeted him with a stagy overabundance of warmth and led them at once to what must have been a choice table, high up in the middle dome with a terrific view of the water. “What will you drink?” Rhodes asked, the moment they were seated.

Carpenter, caught by surprise, asked for a beer. Rhodes ordered a whiskey on the rocks. Both drinks came almost at once and Carpenter noticed with interest how quickly Rhodes went to work on it, and how rapidly he proceeded to put it away.

“An iceberg skipper,” Rhodes said, bringing up menus for them both on the table visor. “Whatever gave you the idea of doing that?”

“It was handed to me. Woman I know in Personnel, working out of Paris. She said there was slope in it. Hell, even if there wasn’t, Nick. I hated Spokane. So I move along. I do this, I do that, whatever the Company says. Your basic uncomplaining salaryman. Jack of all trades, master of each, sooner or later.”

“Weather forecaster, weren’t you, this last time?”

Carpenter nodded. Somehow a second round of drinks had arrived. He hadn’t seen Rhodes order them. He still hadn’t finished his first beer.

“What about you, Nick? Continuing to steam away on Project Frankenstein, are you?”

“Easy,” Rhodes said. He looked hurt. “Cuts a little close.”

“Sorry.”

“I hear enough crap from my humanist friends here about the diabolical implications of my research. It gets a little tiresome, being a villain to your friends.”

“I don’t understand,” said Carpenter. “Why a villain?”

Rhodes made quotation marks in the air with his fingers. “’Changing the human race into something grotesque and hideous, something that can scarcely be deemed human at all. Creating a new species of sci-fi monsters.’”

Carpenter took a long, reflective pull of the first beer, finishing it, and contemplated the second one. He began to think it would be a good idea to shift to something stronger for the next round.

Carefully he said, “You aren’t doing any such thing, though. You’re simply trying to develop some useful anatomical modifications to meet the really heavy conditions that are waiting for us somewhere down the road. Right?”

“Right.”

“Then why—”

“Do we have to talk about this?” Rhodes said, a little snappishly. “I just want to relax, to get the fuck away from—” He looked up. “I’m sorry. You were just asking questions. And the answer is, no, I’m not actually setting out to create monsters in human form. Or even inhuman form. I’m just trying to use my knowledge for the good of humanity, pretentious as that may sound. The monsters are already here, anyway. Out there.”

He pointed through the curving perspex, toward the bay.

“I don’t get you,” Carpenter said.

“You see those low green humps just offshore? Monster algae, is what they are. Something new, some kind of mutant species, a foot wide and God knows how many yards long. They arrived a couple of years ago, from Monterey. The bay is choked with them. They grow a yard a month. The Bay Environmental Commission has brought in dugongs to feed on them in the hope of clearing the waterway a little.”

“Dugongs?”

“Herbivorous aquatic mammals, from the Indian Ocean. Ugly as shit, but harmless. They’re stupid looking and practically blind. They eat seaweed as if it was candy. You can see them lying around in the algae beds gobbling like pigs in clover. The trouble is that the crocodiles like to eat them a whole lot.”

“Crocodiles,” said Carpenter dully.

“In San Francisco Bay, yes. They finally made it up here from Los Angeles, and they love it.”

“I can’t believe it. Crocodiles up here!”

“You better believe it. They’ll be in Puget Sound next.”

Carpenter stared. He knew that crocodiles had been making a comeback as the global climate warmed. Even when he was a boy they had started crawling up out of Mexico toward San Diego. In a world where most wildlife was on the skids, practically everything desperately sliding toward extinction, there was a sudden bizarre boom in obsolete Mesozoic reptiles.

They were all over sweltering super-tropical Florida, of course—what little had survived of it after the sinking of the shoreline. You couldn’t pee in Florida without seeing a crocodile grinning up at you out of the bowl. But California? Crocs in San Francisco Bay? It had never been that way. It was an abomination.

“And then we get tyrannosaurs?” Carpenter asked.

“I doubt that very much. But what we do have is nutty enough as it is. The bay is full of giant seaweed and giant seaweed-eating dugongs and giant dugong-eating crocodiles, and here they have the gall to tell me that I’m making monsters. With monsters all around us and more arriving every day. Jesus Christ, Paul, it drives me crazy!” Rhodes smiled almost sheepishly, as though to take the impetus out of his outburst. He had always been a very self-effacing man, Carpenter thought. Something must really be eating at him to make him complain like this.

Neither of them had glanced at their menus, yet. “It’s been a shitty day,” Rhodes said, after a moment, in a quieter tone. “A little problem in my department. One of those steely little completely amoral kids who happens to be a genius, got his doctorate at nineteen, that sort of kid, and he’s come up with something how, or says he has, a substitute for hemoglobin that’ll thrive on lethal metallic salts. His scheme as currently set forth is full of huge assumptions and speculative leaps. But if it works, it’ll lead the way to a total redesign of the body that’ll enable us to cope with almost any sort of environmental crap that’s heading our way.”

“And what’s the problem? Isn’t it going to work?”

“The problem is that it just might. I figure the odds against it are ninety-nine to one. But long shots sometimes do come through, don’t they?”

“And if this one does—?”

“If it does,” Rhodes said, “we really will wind up with a world full of sci-fi monsters instead of human beings. You change the hemoglobin, that means changing the basic chemical makeup of the blood, and then the heart-lungs interface has to be modified, and the lungs need to go some other route anyway because of the atmospheric changes, maybe turn them into book-lungs like spiders have, and then too the kidneys will need rearrangement, and that leads to modification of the skeletal structure because of calcium differentials, and then—” Rhodes caught his breath. “Oh, shit, Paul, when it’s all done we have a creature that may be very nicely adapted to the new conditions, but what kind of thing is it, really? Can you still call it human? I’m scared. I’m tempted to have this kid transferred to Siberia to raise cucumbers, before he can fill in the missing pieces in his puzzle and bring his goddamn idea off.”

Carpenter felt confused. But the confusion, he sensed, was really in Nick Rhodes.

“I don’t want to bug you about any of this,” he said. “But you told me five minutes ago that your goal is to work for humanity as the planet changes around us.”

“Yes. But I want us to stay human.”

“Even if the world becomes unfit for human life?”

Rhodes looked away. “I see the contradiction. I can’t help it All this is making me very uneasy. On the one hand I believe that what I’m doing is fundamentally necessary for human survival, and on the other hand I’m frightened of the deeper implications of my own work. So I’m really marching in two directions at once. But I go along like a good soldier, doing my research, winning little victories and trying not to ask the big questions. And then a kid like this Alex Van Vliet breaks through to the next plateau, or seems to, or at any rate claims that he has, and forces me to contemplate the ultimate issues. Shit. Let’s order lunch, Paul.”

Almost at random, Carpenter punched out things on the table computer. A hamburger, some fries, coleslaw, nice antique food, probably all of it synthetic or recycled out of squid and algae, but that didn’t matter to him just now. He wasn’t very hungry.

Rhodes, he observed, had conjured up yet another set of drinks. He seemed to take in alcohol at a steady-state clip, inhaling it like air, without ever showing much effect.

So he was a drinker now. Too bad. Basically, though, nothing had changed for Rhodes, Carpenter saw, in all the time that had gone on since their school days. Back then, Rhodes had often come to Carpenter for advice and a sort of protection from his tendency to fuck up his own head. Though Carpenter was younger than Rhodes, he had always felt like the older of the two, the more capable at meeting the problems of daily living. Rhodes had a way of entangling himself in intricate moral complexities of his own making— involving girls, his developing political consciousness, his teachers, his hopes and plans for the future, a million and one things—and Carpenter, pragmatic and direct, had known how to lead the older boy through the mazes he could not stop weaving about himself. Now Rhodes was a famous scientist, high in the esteem of the Company bigwigs, rising in grade on the steepest of slopes, probably earning ten times what Carpenter made; but Carpenter sensed that inwardly everything was pretty much the same for Rhodes as it had been when they were in their teens. Just a big helpless kid blundering through a world that was always a little too complicated for him to handle.

It seemed like a good idea to change the subject to something lighter. Carpenter said, “How’s your social life? You haven’t gotten married again, have you?”

Mistake, he realized instantly. Dumb.

“No,” Rhodes said, and it was obvious how much the question troubled him. Carpenter saw too late that the collapse of Rhodes’ marriage, which had injured him so deeply eight years back, still must be a bleeding wound for him. Rhodes had been terribly in love with his wife, and he had taken a terrible beating when she left him. “I’m in a relationship. A somewhat difficult one. Beautiful, intelligent, sexy woman, very articulate. We don’t agree on everything.”

“Does anyone?”

“She’s a radical humanist. Old San Francisco tradition, you know. Hates my work, fears its potential, would like to see the laboratory shut down, etc., etc. Not that she sees any alternative, mind you, but she’s against it all the same. The pure reactionary trip, the complete know-nothing antiscientism, absolutely medieval. And yet we managed to fall in love. Aside from the politics, we do just fine. I wish you could get a chance to meet her while you’re in town.”

“I’m sure we could work that out,” Carpenter said. “I’d like that very much.”

“I would too.” Rhodes thought for a moment. “Hey, how about tonight? Isabelle and I are having dinner with some pest of an Israeli newsman who wants to ask me nosy things about my work. I could pick you up over in the city somewhere around quarter to eight, at your hotel. Or wherever. How does your schedule look?”

“I’ve got to get back across to Frisco and over to the Samurai office at half past three to receive some of my indoctrination material,” Carpenter said. “That should take me until around five. After that, nothing.”

“You want to join us, then?”

“Why not? I’m at the Marriott Hilton in China Basin: you know where that is?”

“Sure.”

“One thing, though. If this is an interview, are you certain that I won’t be in the way?”

“It might be helpful if you were, actually. The truth is, I’m scared stiff of telling the Israeli things I shouldn’t say. He’s probably damn good at worming them out. Having friends around will dilute the conversation. The more the merrier, I figure, to keep things from getting down to real stuff. That’s why I’m bringing Isabelle along. And now you.” Rhodes put his glass down and shot Carpenter a curious look. “For that matter I could get you a date, if you like. Friend of Isabelle’s, very attractive, somewhat screwed-up woman named Jolanda Bermudez. A dancer, I think, or a sculptor, or both.”

Carpenter chuckled. “Last time I had a blind date was when I was thirteen.”

“I remember. What was her name? With the freckles?”

“I don’t recall.”

“Shall I see if Jolanda wants to come along also?” Rhodes asked.

“Sure,” said Carpenter. “Why not? The more the merrier, as you say.”