Robert Siverberg: Hot Sky at Midnight

“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.

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—”