Hot Sky at Midnight

8

at quarter to eight sharp, Carpenter walked out in front of the hotel to wait for Rhodes to arrive. The night was mild, humid, a soft moist breeze blowing in off the ocean. You could almost believe that rain was on the way, unless you knew something about recent West Coast weather patterns, in which case you realized that the Second Coming of Christ would be a more probable event in San Francisco this evening. But Rhodes was, of course, late, and there was a nasty, sour, nostril-stinging chemical tang in the damp air that made Carpenter feel uncomfortable about standing outside maskless very long, despite all Rhodes had told him that afternoon about the relative benevolence of the Bay Area atmosphere. He went back inside and stood there peering out through the lobby portholes. Rhodes finally showed up around ten after eight.

He was driving a big, broad-nosed car, an antiquated-looking job extremely full of people. Carpenter got in back, next to a hefty Latin-looking woman with an immense mass of dark, tumbling hair, who flashed him a huge, beacon-bright, improbably glossy smile. Her eyes had a sheen and protrusiveness that said immediately to Carpenter that she was a heavy hyperdex user. She seemed about to introduce herself, but before she could say a thing a stocky, swarthy-faced man on the other side of her reached his hand across her, seizing Carpenter’s with a startlingly aggressive grip, and said loudly, in a deep, robust voice, faintly tinged with a European accent of some unspecifiable sort, “I am Meshoram Enron. I am from Israel.”

As if I couldn’t guess, Carpenter thought.

“Paul Carpenter,” he said. “Friend of Dr. Rhodes. Childhood friend, in fact.”

“Very good. I am extremely pleased to make your acquaintance, Dr. Carpenter. I write for Cosmos, on scientific and technological matters. You know this magazine? It is one of the biggest. I am with the Tel Aviv office. I have arrived from Israel only the day before yesterday, especially to talk with your friend.”

Carpenter nodded, wondering how often Enron began a sentence with anything except the first-person-singular pronoun. One out of three? One out of five?

“And I’m Jolanda,” said the big woman with the hair and the smile and the hyperdex eyes, now that Enron had subsided for the moment.

Her voice was a trained theatrical one, rich and husky, straight from the diaphragm. A cloud of pheromonal fragrance seemed to burst from her as she spoke, and Carpenter felt an immediate response in his groin. But he was too experienced to build any happy assumptions on that. Most likely she greeted everyone that way, plenty of voltage up front, nothing in particular behind it.

Rhodes said without looking back, “Paul, this is Isabelle.”

The woman sitting next to Rhodes up front swiveled and flashed the swiftest of how-d’ye-do grins, a mere chilly flicker. Carpenter found himself taking an immediate irrational dislike to her. She was very attractive, he saw, in the moment before she turned away from him again; but attractive in an oddly discordant way, too much force in the eyes and too little in the rest of the face, and her great corona of wild, frizzy scarlet hair was like a shriek of disdain for the conventions of ordinary beauty. She was probably a handful and a half, Carpenter thought, on scarcely any evidence at all: an unpredictable mix of tenderness and ferocity.

He shook his head. Poor Nick. He never did have any luck with women.

“We’re going over to Sausalito,” Rhodes said. “Nice restaurant with a wonderful view. Isabelle and I go there a whole lot.”

“Our special place,” she said. Her tone was a little grating. She sounded as though she might be being sarcastic, but perhaps not. Carpenter wasn’t at all sure.

But it turned out to be a fine romantic place indeed, when they finally reached it an hour later, after a harrowing drive all the way across the heart of the city and over the Golden Gate Bridge. Carpenter had forgotten how ghastly a driver Rhodes was; he kept overriding the car brain, imposing his own goofy judgment at every traffic interchange, and left a trail of astounded fellow drivers in his wake, honking madly as he passed. Hard to see how you could get lost between Frisco and Sausalito, Carpenter thought, a straight shot right across the bridge, but Rhodes kept managing to do it. The glowing colored map on his dashboard would say one thing, Rhodes persisted in saying another. The car didn’t like that and the dash lit up with warning lights. Rhodes overrode them. His little expression of power.

Rhodes was smart, yes, and had lived in Berkeley long enough to believe that he knew his way around in the bigger city across the bay: but the car, old as it was, really was smarter, within its special area of competence, and it had an utterly accurate San Francisco grid in its memory tank. It went on patiently guiding Rhodes out of the western ends of the city into which he constantly seemed to be compulsively drifting, and back toward the bridge. And somehow they all survived the trip, even the overloaded and doubtless exasperated car brain; and the restaurant, nestled cozily away on a hillside above the walled-in Sausalito waterfront, gave them the warm welcome of regular customers.

Indeed the view was spectacular: the whole northern side of San Francisco, rising out of the bay in a dazzling brilliance of a million lights, and the floodlit splendor of the bridge.

Drinks arrived almost at once. Rhodes was very good at arranging for that, Carpenter was discovering.

“I want to make it understood,” said Enron, “that the magazine is paying for this, for everything, tonight. You should not stint yourselves at all.” As the foreign guest, he had a seat facing the picture window. “What a beautiful city, your San Francisco. It reminds me very much of Haifa: the hills, the white buildings, the foliage. But of course it is not so dry and dusty in Haifa. Not nearly. You have ever been in Israel, Dr. Carpenter?”

“Just Mr. Carpenter, please. And no, no, never.”

“So beautiful. You would love it. Flowers everywhere, trees, vines. Of course all of Israel is beautiful, one big garden. A paradise. I weep when I must leave it for another place.” Enron gave Carpenter a look of astonishingly intense scrutiny. His eyes were dark and fathomless and glittering with curiosity, his face angular and taut, closely shaven, the earliest black bristles of what was surely a dense Assyrian beard already poking through the carefully and recently scraped skin. “You are with Samurai Industries also, I understand? In what capacity, may I ask?”

“Salaryman Eleven,” Carpenter said. “Hoping to make Ten, one of these days. I’ve been up north, working as a weatherman, and now I’m about to ship out as captain of a trawler that brings icebergs to shore for the San Francisco Public Utility District. San Francisco doesn’t have all the rainfall that you people in the Middle East do.”

“Ah,” Enron said. Carpenter saw something click shut behind his eyes. The glitter of curiosity left them. End of Enron’s moment of interest in Mr. Salaryman Eleven Carpenter of Samurai Industries.

The Israeli turned to Jolanda, who was sitting between him and Carpenter. “And you, Ms. Bermudez? You are an artist, is this correct?”

Enron was interviewing everybody, it seemed.

“Mainly a sculptor, yes,” she said, giving Enron another tremendous smile. She must have had fifty teeth just in front. Her face was round, full, pretty, with a wide mouth and those great bulging hyperdexy eyes standing out wondrously. “I work in bioresponsive materials, mainly. The viewer and the work of art are linked in a feedback loop, so that what you see is modified by who you intrinsically are.”

“How fascinating,” said Enron, all too plainly not meaning it. “I hope to experience your work very closely.”

“I also do modern dance,” she said. “And I’ve written a little poetry, though I wouldn’t really call it very good, and of course I’ve acted. I was in Earth Saga in Berkeley last summer, outdoors, along the seawall. It was quite a great event for all of us, as much of an incantation as it was a theatrical performance. An incantation designed to protect the planet, I mean.

“We were attempting to place the audience in tune with the deeper cosmic forces that hold us in their grasp at every moment but which are so rarely apparent to us. I hope to perform it again in Los Angeles during the winter.” Another wondrous smile, and she leaned toward Enron, giving him the full pheromonic blast.

“Ah,” Enron said again, and Carpenter saw a second click of disengaged attention. Doubtless the Israeli would be able to find Jolanda Bermudez of interest in one obvious way or another, but he clearly had heard all he needed to about her artistic endeavors. Carpenter’s own heart sank a little too. Jolanda was full of passion and energy, obviously, drug-induced or otherwise, and the notion that she might actually be a talented artist had cast a momentary aura of intense glamour over her; but Carpenter realized now that there was probably no talent here at all, very likely not even any basic ability of any sort, certainly not any common sense, just the old-fashioned nutty artiness that seemed to be a Bay Area tradition going back into the remote past. And the part about the incantation to protect the planet gave him a queasiness in the gut. Here was the future erupting about them at a mile a minute and she was still mumbling mantras out of an earlier century.

She was, all the same, a handsome woman. But Rhodes had warned him that she was screwed up, and Rhodes was probably in a position to know.

Isabelle jumped in, while Rhodes was signaling— already—for the second round of drinks, wanting to be told about Enron’s magazine, whether it was published in Israeli or Arabic, or both. Enron explained to her, with what was probably great restraint, for him, that the language spoken in Israel was called Hebrew, not Israeli, and went on to let her know that Cosmos was, of course, published primarily in English, like all important magazines throughout the world. But its readers, he said, always had the option, with a single keystroke, of having Arabic or Hebrew text come up on the visor instead. Unbelievable as it might seem, said Enron, there were still some people in the remote reaches of the vast Judaeo-Islamic world who had not yet achieved full reading comprehension in English.

“Mostly Arabs, I suppose,” Isabelle said. “There still are a lot of backward Arabs, aren’t there? Like medieval people in a high-tech world?”

It was too obvious an attempt at flattery. Enron responded with a flash of contempt in his eyes and the quickest, bleakest of smiles. “Actually, no, Ms. Martine. The Arabs proper are all quite sophisticated. You must really learn to distinguish between Arabs and speakers of the Arabic language, you see. I was referring specifically to our readers in the agricultural regions of the northern Sudan and the Sahara, who are Arabic-speaking Islamics, but certainly not Arabs in any true way.”

Isabelle looked flustered. “We know so little, here, of what things are really like in other parts of the world.”

“Indeed,” said Enron. “This is true. A great pity, the insularity of this country. I feel sorry for America. Ignorance is dangerous, in such difficult times as these. Especially the kind of ignorance that displays itself in triumphant complacency.”

“Perhaps we ought to order dinner,” Rhodes put in, sounding strained. “If I might make a few recommendations—”

He made more than a few. But Carpenter observed that Enron was paying almost no attention to anything Rhodes was saying. His eyes were already on the menu; he had punched choices of his own into the restaurant’s data system long before Rhodes had finished. There was a certain abrasive charm about the fellow, Carpenter decided: he was gloriously offensive, all the bad things you had heard about Israeli rudeness and arrogance rolled into one—practically a stage Israeli, a ballsy little guy with such totally excessive self-esteem that you began to think it had to be an act. And yet you had to respect the intelligence, the quicksilver Darwinian adaptability, the dry playful Darwinian wit of him. A bastard, sure, but an amusing bastard, if you could be amused by someone like that. Carpenter could.

A bastard all the same, though. Playing like a cat among mice with poor beleaguered Nick and poor edgy Isabelle and poor silly Jolanda. Enjoying his domination of them a little too much. Perhaps back in Tel Aviv, among his own people, Enron might be considered a tactful and courteous guy, easygoing, even; but here, among the goyim, the barbarian Americans, he felt it was necessary to score points with every word he uttered. You would think that Israelis, a people who had turned up one of the few winning hands in this era of the intensifying uninhabitability of the Earth, would be able to relax and enjoy their position of dominance, without rubbing your face in it. Not this one, apparently.

“But we should get down now to the topic of our chief concern, the great issue that has brought me here tonight,” Enron said, while the others were still tapping out their dinner orders. He placed a tiny crystalline recording cube beside his plate, and activated it with a quick touch of his thumb. Then he looked slowly around the table, letting his eyes linger contemplatively on each one in turn for a long disturbing moment before they came to rest on Nick Rhodes. “My magazine,” he began in a new and more formal tone, “wishes to address itself early next year to the tremendous problem that the world faces: that is, of course, the problem of the continued deterioration of our environment that is occurring despite all the palliatory measures that have been taken. A problem that is more intense in some regions than in others, but will ultimately involve us all. For there is really no hiding place, is there, anywhere on Earth? It is one small planet, is it not? And we have made it very difficult and uncomfortable for ourselves.”

“More difficult for some than for others,” Carpenter said.

“At present, Mr. Carpenter. At present. I agree, the shift of global rainfall patterns in my part of the world has delivered great and unexpected economic advantages to my country.”

That and the general ban on fossil fuels, Carpenter thought, which had wiped out such wealth as the Arab world had been able to accumulate during the years of the world’s dependence on oil and forced them to turn in desperation to their old enemies the Israelis for technological guidance.

“But it is a short-run advantage,” Enron continued. “For us to say that we of the Middle East have not been harmed by the environmental challenges that are presently afflicting other areas—-in fact, have greatly benefited from them—is like the passengers on the top deck of a sinking ocean liner telling each other that they have nothing to worry about, because it’s only the other end of the ship that’s going down, and when the people down there have drowned there’ll be that much more caviar on board for us to eat.” Enron, obviously pleased with his own well-worn simile, laughed enthusiastically. “Only the other end sinking! Do you see, do you see? We all breathe the same air, is that not so? Solutions must be found or we will all sink together. And so my magazine will devote an entire issue to the situation, and to the possible solutions. And you, Dr. Rhodes—your work, the extraordinary potential of your work—” Enron’s eyes were glittering again. His narrow, strong-featured face was alive with predatory intelligence. Clearly he was zeroing in on his real prey, now. “We believe that your work, if we understand its purposes correctly, may hold the only answer to the salvation of the human race on Earth.”

Isabelle Martine said suddenly, very loudly, “Christ, no! No! May God help us all if what you just said is true! Nick’s work the only solution? Christ! Don’t you see, his work is the fucking problem, not any kind of solution!”

Carpenter heard Rhodes gasp. Rhodes turned toward Isabelle in a slow numb way and gave her a sad-eyed look, as though he might be about to break into tears.

No one said anything. Even the Israeli had been startled into speechlessness by her outburst. For the first time all evening his impermeable composure seemed broken. The taut planes of his face seemed to dissolve momentarily in confusion, as though Isabelle’s outburst was entirely beyond his comprehension. He blinked a couple of times and gaped at her as though she had picked up the wine bottle and sent its contents spilling forth across the middle of the table.

Finally Rhodes said, mildly, into the twanging silence of rising tension, “Ms. Martine and I have some political differences, Mr. Enron.”

“Ah. Yes. Yes. So I see.” The Israeli continued to seem mystified. Such a vehement public display of disloyalty to one’s companion must violate even an argumentative Israeli’s sense of the permissible. “But surely it is not a political matter, the saving of the human species,” Enron said. “It is a matter only of doing what must be done.”

“There are ways and then there are ways,” said Isabelle, pointedly ignoring Rhodes’ plaintive stare.

“Yes. Of course.” Enron sounded bored, offended, even, by her contentiousness. He gave her another of his dismissive looks. Carpenter saw the gleam of barely suppressed fury in the Israeli’s eyes. Doubtless Enron was thinking that Isabelle was going to be an obstacle to his gathering the information he needed. A pain in the ass for him, nothing more. Rhodes, who had taken on an unnerved and disconsolate air, was studying the tablecloth and industriously working on his next drink.

Carefully, controlling himself with a visible effort, Enron said to no one in particular, “Let me make the thinking of myself and my editors clear, if you will.” He took a deep breath. A prepared speech was coming up, Carpenter knew. Enron was speaking for the record. “We accept the generally held scientific position that the damage to the world’s environment during the industrial age is irreversible: that the uncontrolled burning of fossil fuels over a period of two or three hundred years created degrees of carbon-dioxide and nitrogen-oxide emission far beyond proper tolerance, that this has caused gradual but eventually significant global warming; that the changes in ocean temperature and pressure which have resulted from that warming have caused release of oceanic methane into the atmosphere, further exacerbating the warming patterns; and that the buildup of the so-called greenhouse gases in the atmosphere plus the locking away of additional quantities of such pollutants in ground storage and in the form of hypertrophied vegetation stimulated by a CO₂ surplus has been such that things are destined to get worse before they get better, because the stored gases that were locked away in the period of environmental abuse are destined to emerge inescapably from storage over the course of time and are in fact being released even now through ground outgassing and the decay of vegetable matter. I think this is a fair statement of the situation.”

“The ozone,” Carpenter said.

“Yes, of course. That, too. I should not have neglected to add that the damage to the ozone layer through the use of chlorofluorocarbons and similar substances in the twentieth century has brought about a serious intensification of incoming solar radiation, adding to the problem of global warming. Et cetera, et cetera. But I think I have sufficiently set the ground for our discussion. I need hardly go further with this summary of our many problems—to list, eh, the many various feedback mechanisms that have operated to make a bad situation worse, for example? All this is old news to you. There is no disagreement that we are entering a time of great peril.”

“Completely true. The planet must be protected,” said Jolanda Bermudez in a spacy voice, as though delivering news bulletins from Venus.

“I agree absolutely with Jolanda,” said Isabelle Martine. “We have to come to our senses. The whole planet is in jeopardy! Something must be done to save it!”

Enron smiled icily. “I beg to disagree. The planet, Ms. Martine, is not what is in danger. It makes no difference to the planet, does it, whether the rain falls in the Sahara Desert or in the agricultural plains of the middle of North America? So the Sahara ceases to be a desert and your Kansas and Nebraska become one instead. That is very interesting for the farmers of Kansas and Nebraska and for the nomadic herdsmen of the Sahara, yes. But what is it to the planet? The planet has no use for the wheat that used to be produced in Kansas and Nebraska. The atmosphere contains much less oxygen and nitrogen than it did a century ago, and a great deal more carbon dioxide and hydrocarbons. Why should the planet be concerned? There was a time when there was no oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere at all. The planet survived it quite well. The polar ice caps melt and much of the low-lying shoreline of the world is drowned. The planet is indifferent. It is all the same thing to the planet whether the Japanese live along the coast of certain islands at the edge of Asia or are forced to take refuge in other, higher places. The planet does not care about the Japanese. Nor does the planet need saving. People have been parroting this nonsense about saving the planet for I don’t know how long, a hundred, a hundred fifty years. The planet will be okay. We’re in trouble. The issue, Ms. Martine, Ms. Bermudez, is not saving the planet: it is saving ourselves. Earth will go serenely on, with or without oxygen. But we will die.” Enron smiled as though he were speaking of the outcome of some sports event. “We are, of course, taking certain steps to save ourselves.” He held up the fingers of his right hand and ticked items off with the index finger of his left. “Firstly, we have tried to limit our emission of the so-called greenhouse gases. Too late. They continue to emerge from their storage places in the oceans and the land surface, and nothing can hold that process back. Our air grows steadily less breathable. We are faced with the possibility that before very long we will have to evacuate Earth entirely.”

“No!” Isabelle Martine cried. “What a cowardly solution that would be! The thing we need to do is to stay here and regain control of our own environment!”

“But there are those,” said Enron with merciless restraint, “who are convinced that evacuation is our only recourse. And so—secondly, if I may continue, Ms. Martine—we have filled the nearby zones of outer space with dozens, hundreds, of artificial satellite worlds with agreeable artificial climates, and built a few domed encampments on Mars and the moons of Jupiter.”

“I do sometimes think the habitats are really the only answer,” Jolanda Bermudez said, dreamily cutting in once again. “I’ve often considered moving up there myself, if all else fails. Some friends of mine in Los Angeles are very interested in L-5 resettlement.” She seemed to be speaking entirely to herself.

Enron, caught up in the momentum of his own monologue, ignored her. “The orbital settlements are a notable achievement; but each one has extremely limited capacity, and they are very costly to construct. Obviously we could never afford to transport the entire population of Earth to those small refuges in space. There is still another evacuation option, however, one which at the moment seems even less feasible: the proposal to discover and colonize a New Earth of planetary size in some other solar system, where human life can get a second chance.”

Isabella snorted. “That’s just foolishness. A dumb crazy fantasy.”

“Indeed, so it appears,” said Enron reasonably. “As I understand it, we have no workable stardrive, nor have we yet been able to discover any extrasolar planets, let alone one that would be suitable for human life.”

“I’m not so sure of that,” Rhodes said, just barely at the threshold of audibility.

Everyone turned to look at him. Rhodes, obviously disconcerted by the attention he had drawn to himself, hastily gulped the dregs of his most recent drink and signaled for yet another.

“We have found a planet, you say?” Enron asked.

“We have a stardrive,” Rhodes said. “May have, that is. I understand some considerable breakthroughs have been achieved lately, and that important tests are coming up.”

“This stardrive—you say ‘we.’ It is a project of Samurai Industries, then?” Enron asked. He was perspiring, suddenly. His eyes revealed a greater degree of interest, perhaps, than he might have wanted to display.

Rhodes said, “No, actually, I was using ‘we’ collectively, to mean the human race in general. In fact the rumor going around is that it’s Kyocera-Merck that is well along on some sort of a starship project. Not us.”

“But surely Samurai would want to be involved in a similar project too,” said Enron, “if only to remain competitive.”

“As a matter of fact, you’re probably right,” Rhodes said. And winced, as though someone had kicked him under the table. Carpenter saw him glower briefly at Isabelle. “I mean, there’s a rumor to that effect going around as well,” he said, after a moment, sounding newly evasive. “I wouldn’t really know whether there’s any substance to it. We hear things like that all the time. —Of course you understand that any kind of Samurai stardrive research would involve a completely different division of the company from mine.”

“Yes. Yes, of course,” said Enron. He was silent for a while, poking purposelessly at the food on his plate, obviously considering the thing that Rhodes had allowed to slip out.

Carpenter wondered whether there could be any truth to it. A stardrive? An expedition to some other solar system, a New Earth to be founded fifty light-years away? A fresh start, a second Eden. The notion momentarily dazzled him with its vastness.

But Isabelle was right, for once: there was no solution in that for Earth’s problems. The idea was too wild. It would take centuries to get to any of the other stars, even if another Earth-like planet could be found somewhere; and even if one were to be found, no significant fraction of Earth’s billions could be transported there. Forget about it, Carpenter told himself. It made no real sense.

Enron, recovering his poise, said, “That is very interesting, the hope of an effective stardrive. I must look into it at another time, Dr. Rhodes. But for now let us turn our attention to the final option that humanity has—the one that I have come here tonight to discuss with you. I mean, doctor, the use of gene-splicing techniques to adapt newborn children to the ever-more-poisonous atmosphere that the people of Earth will be facing.”

“Not only newborns,” said Rhodes. He appeared animated for the first time since they had reached the restaurant. “We’re looking also into ways of retrofitting adult humans to cope with the conditions that will lie ahead.”

“Ah,” said Enron. “Very interesting indeed.”

“We can all be monsters together,” Isabelle said. “ ‘O brave new world, that has such people in it!’ ”

Carpenter realized that he had been matching Rhodes drink for drink, and was very much less good than Rhodes was at dealing with that quantity of liquor.

“If I may, Ms. Martine,” Enron said smoothly. He turned again toward Rhodes. “What is your timetable, doctor, for Earth’s atmosphere to reach the point where the world becomes uninhabitable for human beings as they are presently constituted?”

Rhodes did not answer right away.

“Four or five generations,” he said, at last. “Six at the outside.”

Enron’s dark eyebrows rose. “You are saying, one hundred fifty years, perhaps two hundred?”

“More or less. I wouldn’t want to try to be too precise. But the figures are there. The encircling layer of greenhouse gases that surrounds us is still letting the ultraviolet come in and preventing the infrared from going out, so we bake and fry as the heat builds up. On top of that we continue to lose our ozone insulation. Strong sunlight is pouring through the hole, cooking the planet like a giant laser, accelerating all of the deleterious processes that have been under way the past couple of centuries. The seas are belching methane like a son of a bitch. The plant biota, which we used to count on to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere through photosynthesis, is now actually providing us with a net annual gain of the stuff, from the rapid decay of dead vegetable matter in the humid new jungles all over the planet. Every year the substance we breathe gets further and further away in its chemical makeup from what we were evolved to deal with.”

“And there is no likelihood that we will continue to evolve to meet these changing conditions?” Enron asked.

Rhodes laughed, a harsh explosive burst of sound. It was the strongest sign of vitality he had shown all evening.

“Evolve? In five generations? Six? Evolution doesn’t work that fast. Not in nature, anyway.”

“But evolution can be artificially brought about,” said the Israeli. “In the laboratory.”

“Exactly.”

“Would you tell us, then, what the specific goals of your research are? Which aspects of the body you are attempting to modify, and what progress you have made thus far?”

“Don’t tell him a fucking thing, Nick,” Isabelle Martine said. “He’s a spy from Kyocera or maybe some company we don’t even know about, some operation working out of Cairo or Damascus, don’t you see?”

Rhodes reddened. “Please, Isabelle.”

“But it’s true!”

Enron, less bothered this time, glanced at her and said, almost jovially, “I have been cleared for this interview by Dr. Rhodes’ employer, Ms. Martine. If they are not afraid of me, is there any reason why you should be?”

“Well—”

Rhodes said, “She didn’t really mean to cast aspersions on your credentials, Mr. Enron. She just doesn’t like to hear me speak of any aspect of my research.”

Enron looked at Isabelle as though she were some strange life-form that had just emerged from the carpet.

“What is it, exactly, about Dr. Rhodes’ work that causes you such distress?” Enron asked her.

She hesitated. She seemed, Carpenter thought, a little abashed now by her own vociferousness.

Softly she said, “I don’t mean to be as critical of Nick as I may have sounded. He’s a genius and I admire him tremendously for what he’s accomplished. But I just don’t want to see the whole world turned into a zoo full of weird adaptos. There’s been enough genetic fooling around already, all the retrofitting and baby-splicing and everything. The sex-changing stuff, the cosmetic body-modeling. And now to have every fetus automatically altered into some grotesque kind of creature with gills and three hearts and I don’t know what—”

Isabelle shook her head. “For one thing, we can’t afford to do it. There are too many other problems that we need to solve for us to have the luxury to go into any project as far out as that. For another, I think it’s horrible. It would mean the end of humanity as we know it. You change the body, you change the mind. That’s a law of nature. It’ll be a new species coming forth, God only knows what. Not human any more. Some kind of hideous, evil, bizarre thing. We can’t do that to ourselves. We just can’t. I love Nick, sure, but I hate what he and his people want to do to the human race.”

“But if the human race is no longer able to survive on Earth as we are presently designed—?” Enron asked.

“Fix the world, then. Not the species.”

“I wonder, Isabelle,” said Jolanda Bermudez in the same dreamy lady-from-space voice as before. “It just may be too late for that, I sometimes think. You know, sweet, I don’t really care for Nick’s research any more than you do, and I agree with you that it ought to be stopped. But not because it’s evil, only because it’s a waste of time and money. There’s no reason for us to turn ourselves into things with gills, or whatever. Our real hope, I do believe, is in the habitat worlds.”

“Ms. Bermudez—” Enron said.

But she rolled right on. “Personally I’ve done everything I can think of to protect the Earth, through my work, my art, and I don’t intend to give up the effort now. But I’ve started to realize that possibly it’s no use, that we may have damaged it beyond repair. So we may have to leave, and that’s the honest truth. Like the expulsion from Eden, you know? I think I mentioned that I know people who are very deeply involved in the whole habitat culture that has evolved up there in orbit. L-5 is the coming place. I hope to emigrate there myself, before long.”

Isabelle said, “You never told me—”

“Oh, yes. Yes.”

“Ladies, please,” Enron said.

But it was all beyond the Israeli’s control. Jolanda, who seemed to be able to hold three or four contradictory beliefs at the same time without the least difficulty, had tossed a new ball into play. They went on and on, arguing with Enron, with each other, with the environment, with destiny. Carpenter, watching as though from a great height, had to fight back laughter. The women were beating their various political tom-toms and Rhodes, drinking steadily, had passed into a kind of impassive stupor, not actually drunk—did he ever really get drunk⁷ Carpenter wondered—but simply glazed, detached, absent; and Enron was looking on in horror, undoubtedly having come to realize by now that he was going to get nothing useful out of this evening.

Carpenter felt sorry for Rhodes, mixed up with this ferocious and badly confused Isabelle: poor sad Nick, pussy-whipped yet again. He almost felt sorry for Enron, too. Whatever he had hoped to learn from Rhodes tonight was shrouded now in a haze of fuzzy polemic. It was nearly midnight. The Israeli made one last attempt to pin Rhodes down on the kind of genetic modifications his lab was working on; but Rhodes, vanishing fast into alcoholic nebulosity, offered him nothing but vague talk about restructuring the respiratory and circulatory systems.

“Yes, but how? How?” Enron kept asking. And got no coherent answers. The whole thing was hopeless.

Angrily the Israeli called up the check and clicked it with his flex terminal, and they all went out into the sticky night, wobbling a little from all the wine.

Even at this late hour, tangible bands of blast-furnace heat seemed to be pulsing out of the sky. A kind of chemical fog had settled over Sausalito, a dense pungent glop. It smelled like vinegar with an undertone of mildew and disinfectant. Carpenter lamented not having taken his face-lung with him tonight.

The dinner conversation resonated in his mind. The poor fucked-up world! All of human history seemed to rise up before him: the Neolithic world, the little farms and settlements, and Babylon and Egypt, Greece and Rome, Byzantium and Elizabethan England and the France of Louis XIV. All that striving, all that arduous movement up from the ape, and where had it ended up? In a civilization so highly advanced, Carpenter thought, that it had been able to make its own environment unlivable. A species so intelligent that it had invented a hundred brilliant ways of fouling its own nest.

And so—the grime, the pollution, the heat, the poisons in the air, the metals in the water, the holes in the ozone layer, the ruined garden that was the world—

Shit! What a marvelous achievement it all was! For a single species of fancy ape to have wrecked an entire planet!

While they waited at the end of the restaurant pier for Rhodes’ car to be brought out, Carpenter went over to him and said quietly, “I can drive, Nick, if you don’t feel up to it.” Rhodes was looking none too steady.

“That’s okay. I’ll just let the car take care of things. It’ll be all right.”

“If you say so. You can drop me off at the Marriott after you take Enron back to his hotel, I guess.”

“And Jolanda?”

“What about her? She lives in the East Bay, doesn’t she?”

“You could let her take the pod home by herself in the morning. That’ll be okay with her.”

“Nick, I haven’t arranged anything at all with her. I’ve hardly said a word to her all evening.”

“You don’t want her? She’s expecting it, you know. She’s your date.”

“Does that automatically mean—”

“With her it does. She’ll be very hurt. Of course, I can always explain that you’ve taken homosex vows since I last saw you, or something, and I can run her back to Berkeley tonight. But you’d be making a mistake. She’s a lot of fun. What’s the matter, Paul? Are you tired?”

“No. Just—ah, to hell with it. Don’t worry, I’ll gallantly play my part. Here’s your car coming up, now.”

Carpenter glanced around for Jolanda. She was standing at the water’s edge with Enron, gazing out at the shining track of light that led across the bay to San Francisco, and from the close way they were standing Carpenter suspected that he might be off the hook. She stood half a head taller than the short, powerfully built Israeli, but he was whispering to her in an urgent, intimate way, and her stance was certainly a responsive one. But then she turned away from him and gave Carpenter an expectant look, and he knew that whatever Enron had been up to just then did not involve this evening.

So he played out the familiar ritual, asking her if she’d like to stop off at his hotel for a late drink, and she fluttered her eyelids at him and gave him a little quiver of acceptance, and that was that. Carpenter felt foolish. And vaguely whorish, too. But what the hell, what the hell: he’d have plenty of time to sleep alone when he was out in the Pacific fishing for icebergs.

Rhodes put the car on autopilot and it got itself across into San Francisco without any problems. Jolanda nestled up comfortably against Carpenter during the drive as though they had spent all evening steadily building up to the consummation that awaited them. Perhaps they had, Carpenter thought, and he had simply failed to notice.

When the car reached Enron’s hotel, a venerable Gothic pile in Union Square, the Israeli took Jolanda’s hand before he got out, held it a long moment, kissed it flamboyantly, and said to her, “It has been a highly pleasant evening. I look forward very much to seeing you again.” He thanked Rhodes and even Isabelle, nodded to Carpenter, and bounded away.

“What a remarkable man,” Jolanda murmured. “Not nice, no, but certainly remarkable. So very dynamic. And such a grasp of world problems. I find Israelis to be fascinating people, don’t you, Paul?”

“Marriott Hilton next,” said the car. Rhodes seemed to have fallen asleep up front, his head on Isabelle’s shoulder. Carpenter wasn’t sleepy at all, but his eyes felt raw and achy, from the air, the tensions of the evening, the lateness of the hour. This was going to be a night of no sleep for him, he suspected. Well, not the first one. Probably not the last.

“Let’s not bother with the drink,” Jolanda said, in the Marriott lobby. “Let’s just go right upstairs.”

In Carpenter’s hotel room, as they were undressing, she said, “Have you known Nick Rhodes a long time?”

“Only about thirty years.”

“You grew up together?”

“In Los Angeles, yes.”

“He envies you tremendously, you know.” She tossed her underwrap aside, stretched, inhaled, enjoying her nakedness. Heavy breasts, heavy thighs, dimples everywhere, a torrent of dark fragrant curling hair: the torrid Latin look, Carpenter thought. Voluptuous. Nice.

“Envies me?”

“Totally. He told me all about you. How much he admires your freewheeling intellectual outlook, the way you aren’t tied down by all sorts of moral qualms.”

“You’re telling me that he thinks I’m amoral?” Carpenter asked.

“He thinks you’re flexible. That isn’t the same. He admires your willingness to adapt quickly to difficult situations, to moral complexities. He wishes he could do that as easily as you do. He ties himself up in knots all the time. You seem to cut right through them.”

“I hadn’t thought of myself as such a free spirit,” said Carpenter. He came up alongside her and ran his hand lightly down her spine. Her skin was amazingly smooth. He found that pleasing. Many people, lately, had had their skins retrofitted to help them cope with the killer crackle of the ozone-deficient air. It usually didn’t help them much; and they came out of it looking and feeling like lizard-hide luggage. But Jolanda Bermudez had skin that felt like the skin of a genuine female human. Carpenter liked it very much. And the soft resilient flesh beneath it, too.

She said, “What a great man Nick is, isn’t he? So brilliant, so serious-minded. How devoted he is to the task of finding a solution to the terrible problems the world faces! Isabelle gives him an awfully hard time.”

“I think he may prefer women who give him a hard time.”

She didn’t take any notice of that. “And I try not to let her see it, but there are times when I disagree with Isabelle’s condemnation of Nick’s research program. It may just be our only way out, much as I hate to admit it. Even though I do think that emigrating to L-5 is probably our best bet, I privately hope and pray that it’ll be possible for the human race to stay here on Earth, don’t you? And Nick’s answer may be the only one. That is, if we can’t find some way of reversing the terrible damage that we’ve done to the ecology. The work that Nick is doing—”

She was wide-awake, full of verbal energy. Carpenter was afraid that she was going to start in on the need to protect the planet all over again. The hyperdex, he thought. It must keep her jazzed up all the time. He saw that he would have to fuck her in self-defense, before she became too oratorical. With gentle insistence he drew her down on the bed, and eased himself up against the cradle of her soft and creamy body, running his hands up her sides and over her breasts, and covered her mouth with his. It proved to be an effective way of changing the subject.