And, besides, he was eager to stay close to Jolanda Bermudez. His one assignation with her, in the hotel on Valparaiso Nuevo, had whetted his appetite for more. Farkas was a little abashed to admit even to himself that his decision to come to San Francisco rather than Los Angeles had been based mostly on the fact that Jolanda was going there first. After his long period of abstinence, Farkas found himself wholly captivated by the lavish generosity of her flesh, by the uncomplicated givingness of her temperament, by the easily aroused fevers of her passionate nature.
That was all very foolish, he knew, and very adolescent, and possibly risky, and probably futile as well: Enron seemed intent on keeping her out of his reach. But Farkas was sure that Enron’s possessiveness was nothing more than a power game that Enron was playing out of sheer masculine reflex. He sensed that the Israeli had no real use for Jolanda except as a commodity to be employed in the service of attaining his larger goals.
Jolanda seemed to see that also. Perhaps Farkas could detach her from him while they were here. Farkas suspected, with what he was certain was good reason, that she felt as strong an attraction for him as he did for her. When this unexpected Valparaiso Nuevo adventure was behind him, he thought, it might be pleasant to spend a few weeks’ holiday in and around San Francisco with Jolanda while she finished the sculpture of him that had been the pretext—a pretext, nothing more: he had no illusions about that—for their hotel-room rendezvous.
For the moment, though, he was in a different hotel room and he was alone. For the moment.
He unpacked, showered, drew a little brandy from the room’s minibar. Once again Farkas contemplated calling New Kyoto to let them know what he was up to; once again, he rejected the idea. Sooner or later, he was going to have to let the Company know that he was in the process of entangling it in an international conspiracy. But there was no binding commitment yet. That would come in Los Angeles, after the final meeting with Davidov and the other plotters. Then, then, only then, would he send the details up-level to the Executive Committee. If they didn’t like the scheme, or had some objection to any of its principals, whatever pledges he had seemed to give up to this point were easily enough deniable. If they did, he could probably write his own ticket upward, Level Eight for sure, possibly higher—Victor Farkas, Level Seven, Farkas thought, lovingly savoring the concept— Level Seven pay, Level Seven privileges, the high-rise flat in Monaco, the summer home on the coast at New Kyoto. Until the starship was ready to take off and he could put Earth behind him forever.
The telephone chimed softly.
Farkas was reluctant to let go of his fantasy of Level Seven life. But he answered anyway. There were only two people in the universe who knew where he was, and—
Yes. It was Jolanda. “Everything comfortable?” she asked.
“Very fine, yes.” Then, quickly—too quickly, perhaps: “I wonder, Jolanda, do you have any plans for dinner this evening? There are Kyocera people I could call, but if you would be willing to join me—”
“I’d love to,” she said. “But Marty and I are spending this evening with some people we know over here in Berkeley. Isabelle Martine, Nick Rhodes—she’s a kinetic therapist, my closest friend, a fascinating wonderful woman, and he’s a brilliant geneticist who’s with Samurai—adapto research, I’m sorry to say, really awful stuff, but he’s such a sweet man that I forgive him—”
“Tomorrow, then?” Farkas asked.
“That’s why I’m calling, actually. Tomorrow night—”
He leaned forward tensely. “Perhaps we could have dinner in San Francisco, just you and I—”
“Well, that would be pleasant, wouldn’t it? But what would I do with Marty? And in any case I want you to come over here, to see my sculptures—” A self-conscious giggle. “To experience them, I suppose I should have said. It’ll be a little dinner party. You’ll be able to meet Isabelle and Nick, and a friend of Nick’s named Paul Carpenter, who was an iceberg-ship captain for Samurai, and got into some sort of trouble out at sea and lost his job, and now he’s back in town, and we’re all trying to cheer him up a little while he tries to figure out what he’s going to do next—”
“Yes. Of course. How sad for him. And perhaps during the day, then, Jolanda—would it be possible to have lunch, do you think?”
Farkas felt absurd, pursuing her this way. But there was always the chance that—
No. There wasn’t.
Gently Jolanda said, “I’d love to, Victor. You know I would. But we have to wait until Marty goes back to Israel, don’t we? I mean, he’s here now, he’s staying with me, and it would all be terribly awkward—surely you see that. But later— after the thing with Valparaiso Nuevo is done with—there’ll be plenty of time then, and not just for lunch. I wish it could be some other way right now, but it can’t. It just can’t.”
“Yes,” Farkas said, dry-throated. “I understand.”
“Tomorrow night, then—at my house in Berkeley—”
He made a note of the transit code, blew her a kiss, broke the contact.
He was amazed at how irritated he felt: amazed, too, at his own sudden obsessiveness. It was a long time since he had behaved this way. Never, perhaps. Why did this woman matter so much? Because she was unattainable just now, maybe? There were other breasts in the world, other thighs, other lips. It seemed a little dangerous to him, his fascination with this Jolanda.
Through the hotel’s guest-services menu Farkas arranged a companion for himself for dinner and three hours afterward. He had long ago learned to rely on professional companionship in times of physical needs. A good professional was almost always quick to hide her initial reaction to his appearance; and there were no troublesome involvements afterward. Farkas had never cared for emotional involvements. But the physical side of things—ah, that!—there was no escaping it indefinitely, he thought. A good thing that ways and means were available for dealing with it.
He took another brandy from the minibar, and sat back to wait for his companion to arrive.
25
“I shouldn’t,” carpenter said, as Rhodes picked up his glass and started to refill it. “I don’t handle this stuff as well as you do.”
“Indulge yourself,” said Rhodes. “Why the fuck not?” Amber fluid splashed into the glass. Carpenter had forgotten whether they were drinking rye or bourbon. Bourbon has a sweeter taste, he told himself; but he had lost the capacity to distinguish flavors. It seemed to him that he had been drinking steadily all evening. Certainly Rhodes had, but Rhodes always did.
Have I been matching him one for one? Carpenter wondered.
Yes. Yes, I think I have.
“Indulge yourself,” Rhodes said. He had said that already, hadn’t he? Was he starting to repeat himself, now? Or had Carpenter simply generated a replay of Rhodes’ remark of a moment earlier in his mind? He wasn’t sure.
It didn’t matter. “Don’t mind if I do,’’ Carpenter said. “As you so eloquently put it, Nick: Why the fuck not?”
Carpenter had reached the Bay Area earlier that day, after a wild and indistinctly remembered drive back from Chicago. The car had been on automatic the entire time, programmed to seek the shortest route between Illinois and California, stopping only when it needed to recharge itself and paying minimal attention to speed limits, and Carpenter had slept through most of the trip, curled up on the back seat like a bundle of discarded clothing. He recalled that there had been some trouble when the car bumped up against a newly extended tendril of the virus quarantine zone and had to make a wide detour to the north; he could remember seeing the sun go down over western Nebraska like a plummeting red fireball; he had a vague and untrustworthy memory of traversing a broad black inexplicable plain of heaped ashes and glossy volcanic clinkers the following dawn. That was about it for him, so far as recollections of the journey went.
His recollections of Chicago were sharper ones.
Jeanne gasping in his arms in the surprise of pleasure during a long hungry night of embraci
ng. Jeanne breaking into convulsive sobs just as abruptly later that same night, and refusing to say why. Jeanne telling him that she had become a Catholic, and offering to pray for him. Jeanne pushing him away, finally, toward dawn, saying that she was out of practice at lovemaking and had had about all she could handle of it for now.
The two of them, masked and shot full with Screen, walking hand in hand through the Loop at midday in heat that would make Satan feel homesick, under a splotchy green sky that looked like an inverted bowl of vomit. Sensing the rotten-egg aroma of hydrogen sulfide in the air, even through the mask. Looking up at immense ancient buildings whose soaring stone facades had been carved by the virulent erosive air and acid rains into a phantasmagoria of accidental Gothic parapets and turrets and pinnacles and asymmetrical spires.
Jeanne hiding her body from him in her shapeless robe later that day, telling him she was too ugly to be seen with the lights on, and getting angry when he told her that she was crazy, that she had a truly beautiful body.
Jeanne saying at last, “It’s been wonderful having you here, Paul. I mean that. To have made it real, when it was only pretend for so long. But now—if you think you can find the strength to move onward, now—”
Finishing off the last of Jeanne’s meager liquor supply, then, putting it away in a steady dedicated manner that was worthy of Nick Rhodes. Trying to call Jolanda in Berkeley, hoping it wouldn’t upset Jeanne too much to see him turning so swiftly to another woman, but getting only a recorded message at Jolanda’s number, not even a seek-forwarding indicator. Calling Nick, then. Inviting himself to stay with him. Telling Jeanne that he was going to leave for California right this minute, and seeing the suddenly bereft look on her face, and wondering if he had really been supposed to take her words at face value when she had asked him to move along. “It’s the middle of the night, Paul,” she had said. And he had said, “Even so. Such a long drive: I’d better get started.” The glistening of her eyes. Tears of sadness? Relief? Jeanne gave eternally mixed signals.
“Stay in touch, Paul. Come back to see me whenever you want.”
“Yes. Yes.”
“It was wonderful to have you here.”
“Yes. Yes. Yes.”
“I love you, Paul.”
“I love you, Jeannie. Really.”
Into the car. On the road. Eyes swollen with fatigue, tongue thickened by booze, face all stubbly. The quarantine zone. The swollen, plummeting red sun. Ashes and clinkers; and then, a thousand years later, the smoothly rounded tawny hills of the Bay Area, the tunnel into Berkeley, Nick Rhodes’ apartment high up on its hillside with the fantastic view.
“Isabelle will be here soon,” Rhodes said. “We’ll all go out for dinner. Jolanda wants to come along too. Unless you don’t want to see her, of course. She has Enron with her, you know. I told you that when you called, didn’t I?”
“Yes. What the hell. The more the merrier.”
A peculiar evening. Isabelle terrifically sweet, gentle, tender, several times expressing her deep concern for all that Carpenter had been through lately—the therapist Isabelle that Carpenter had not seen before, the softer woman with whom Nick Rhodes was so desperately in love. She and Rhodes were like a loving married couple in the restaurant, not in the least adversarial this time, a real team. Jolanda too told Carpenter how sorry she was for his troubles, and consoled him with a torrid hug, breasts pushing close, tongue flicking through her lips and between his, which from anyone else might have seemed an immediate invitation to bed, but which Carpenter realized was just Jolanda’s standard kind of friendly greeting. Enron didn’t seem to care. He scarcely looked at Jolanda, showed no sign of interest in her whatever. The Israeli was oddly remote, none of the frenetic intensity of that other dinner ages ago in Sausalito, hardly saying anything: he was physically present but his mind appeared to be elsewhere.
Dinner that night—an early one at some restaurant in Oakland unknown to Carpenter—involved a lot of wine, a lot of superficial chitchat, not much else. Jolanda, obviously hyperdexed to the max, bubbled on and on about the wonders of the L-5 habitat that she and Enron had just been visiting. “What was the occasion for the trip?” Carpenter asked her, and Enron answered for her, a little too quickly and forcefully, “A holiday. That was all it was, a holiday.” Odd.
Something was bothering Nick Rhodes, too. He was quiet, moody, drinking heavily even for him. But, then, Carpenter thought, something was always bothering Nick.
“Tomorrow,” Jolanda said, “we all have dinner at my house, you, Nick, Paul, Isabelle, Marty and me. We have to finish off everything I’ve got in the freezer.” She was going away again, she and Enron, off to Los Angeles this time. Strange that they were traveling together so much, when they scarcely seemed to pay attention to each other. Jolanda said to Carpenter, “There’ll be one other guest tomorrow night, a man we met on Valparaiso Nuevo. Victor Farkas is his name. It might be useful for you to talk to him, Paul. He works for Kyocera, pretty high level, and I’ve told him a little about your recent difficulties. Maybe he could turn up something for you with Kyocera. In any case you’ll find him an interesting man. He’s very unusual, very fascinating, really, in an eerie way.”
“No eyes,” Enron said. “A prenatal genetic experiment, one of the atrocities in Central Asia during the Second Breakup. But he’s very sharp. Sees everything, even behind his head, using some kind of almost telepathic ability.”
Carpenter nodded. Let them invite a man with three heads to dinner, or with none, for all he cared. He was floating now, drifting a short way above the ground, indifferent to what might be going on around him. He had never felt so tired in his life.
Jolanda and Enron disappeared right after dinner. Isabelle returned to Rhodes’ house with Rhodes and Carpenter, but didn’t stay. Carpenter was surprised at that, considering the warmth that had passed between the two of them at the restaurant. “She wants to give the two of us a chance to be alone,” Rhodes explained. “Figures we have things to tell each other.”
“Do we?” Carpenter said.
That was when the bourbon came out, or perhaps it was rye.
“Who’s this Chicago woman?” Rhodes asked.
“Just a friend, from the Samurai office in St. Louis, years ago. Very dear kind woman, somewhat fucked up.”
“Here’s to fucked-up women,” Rhodes said. “And fucked-up men, too.” They clinked glasses noisily. “Why didn’t you stay with her longer?”
“She didn’t seem up for it. We never were lovers before, you know. Just good friends. I think sex is a very charged thing for her. She was sweet to take me in the way she did, hardly any notice at all, just told me to come right to her. A port in a storm is a welcome thing.”
“Ports. Storms.” Rhodes raised his glass in a toast again. Downed its contents, poured more for them both.
“Go easy,” Carpenter said. “I’m not the bottomless pit that you are.”
“Sure you are. You just haven’t fully tested your capacity.” Rhodes refilled his glass and topped off Carpenter’s. Brooded for a moment, studying his shoes. Said finally, “I think I’m going to take the Kyocera job.”
“Oh?”
“I’m not sure, but it’s sixty-forty I will. Seventy-thirty, maybe. I’ll be giving them my final decision the day after tomorrow.”
“You’ll take it. I know you will.”
“It scares me. Working with Wu Fang-shui: we’ll be achieving wonders, I know it. That’s the problem. The good old fear of success.”
“You may fear success, but you love it, too. Take the job, Nick. Go ahead, turn us all into sci-fi monsters. It’s what the fucking world deserves.”
“Right. Cheers.”
“Cheers. Down the hatch.”
They laughed.
Rhodes said, “If I go to Kyocera, maybe I can find a slot for you there. What do you say?”
“You’ve got to be kidding. You and Jolanda both. She was talking before about getting her friend Farkas to find me a j
ob with them. Don’t any of you have any common sense? I’m the guy who left a bunch of Kyocera people in the sea to die, remember?”
“They won’t give a shit about that, not after a little time has gone by. I can probably get them to hire you as a favor, or else this Farkas probably could, even easier. You change your name so it doesn’t look too weird, and they’ll find a slot for you. Most likely some level lower than what you had, but you can work your way back up. Excellence will always out.”
“Don’t be crazy. Kyocera wouldn’t touch me.”
“I know a Level Three man there. Honestly. If I tell him he can’t hire me unless he hires my friend too, who has had a little bad publicity in an unfortunate recent event, but is eager to redeem himself under another name, a fresh start—”
“Don’t.”
“Why not?”
“It’s dumb,” Carpenter said. “Dumb and impossible. Don’t even try, Nick. Please.”
“What will you do, then?”
“People keep asking me that question, for some reason. I don’t know, is what I say. But I don’t think I have a future with Kyocera, that’s all.”
“Well, maybe not. Here. Have another drink.”
“I shouldn’t,” Carpenter said. “I don’t handle this stuff as well as you do.”
“Indulge yourself,” said Rhodes. “Why the fuck not?”
Somewhere in the middle of the night Carpenter realized without any sort of anxiety about it that he was slipping into delirium. He and Rhodes were still sitting at Rhodes’ living-room table, with two empty bottles in front of them, or maybe three—it was hard now to distinguish fine details— and Rhodes was still pumping the liquor into their glasses like a demented android bartender. Conversation had sputtered out long ago. The lights of San Francisco across the way were beginning to go off. It was probably two, three, four in the morning.
There were vines creeping across the windows, now. Big, snaky vines, thick as his arm, with little octopoid sucker pads on them, and heavy clusters of leaves. Everything was turning green. A green mist filled the air outside. A light, steady rain, green rain. The West Coast drought had magically ended and the San Francisco Bay Area was part of the global greenhouse now, rich and rank with tropical growth.