Hot Sky at Midnight, Page 2

  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 be
tter. 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. ‘Mon Dieu, monsieur—s’il vous plait, vos vêtements!’ ”

  “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.