Robert Siverberg: Hot Sky at Midnight

“They think they have,” said Juanito.

Getting leads was a slow business, and expensive. Juanito left Farkas to roam the spokes of Valparaiso Nuevo on his own, and headed off to the usual sources of information: his father’s friends, other couriers, and even the headquarters of the Unity Party, El Supremo’s grass-roots organization, where it wasn’t hard to find someone who knew something and had a price for it. Juanito was cautious. Middle-aged Chinese gentleman I’m trying to locate, he said. Why do you want to find him? Nobody asked that. Nobody would. Could be any reason, anywhere from wanting to blow him away on contract to handing him a million-Capbloc-dollar lottery prize that he had won last year on New Yucatan. Nobody asked for reasons on Valparaiso. Everybody understood the rules: your business was strictly your business.

There was a man named Federigo who had been with Juanito’s father in the Costa Rica days who knew a woman who knew a man who had a freemartin neuter companion who had formerly belonged to someone high up in the Census Department. There were fees to pay at every step of the way, but it was Farkas’s money, what the hell, or, even better, Kyocera-Merck’s, and by the end of the week Juanito had access to the immigration data stored on golden megachips somewhere in the depths of the hub. The data down there wasn’t going to provide anybody with Wu Fang-shui’s phone number. But what it could tell Juanito, and did, eight hundred callaghanos later, was how many ethnic Chinese were living on Valparaiso Nuevo and how long ago they had arrived.

“There are nineteen of them altogether,” he reported to Farkas. “Eleven of them are women.”

“So? Changing sex is no big deal,” Farkas said.

“Agreed. The women are all under fifty, though. The oldest of the men is sixty-two. The longest that any of them has been on Valparaiso Nuevo is nine years.”

Farkas didn’t seem bothered. “Would you say that rules them out? I wouldn’t. Age can be altered just as easily as sex.”

“But date of arrival can’t be, so far as I know. And you say that your Wu Fang-shui came here fifteen years back. Unless you’re wrong about that, he can’t be any of those Chinese. Your Wu Fang-shui, if he isn’t dead by now, has signed up for some other racial mix, I’d say.”

“He isn’t dead,” Farkas said.

“You sure of that?”

“He was still alive three months ago, and in touch with his family on Earth. He’s got a brother in Tashkent.”

“Shit,” Juanito said. “Ask the brother what name he’s going under up here, then.”

“We did. We couldn’t get it.”

“Ask him harder.”

“We asked him too hard,” said Farkas. “Now the information isn’t available any more. Not from him, anyway.”

Juanito checked out the nineteen Chinese, just to be certain. It didn’t cost much and it didn’t take much time, and there was always the chance that Dr. Wu had cooked his immigration data somehow. But the quest led nowhere.

Juanito found six of them all in one shot, playing some Chinese game in a social club in the town of Havana de Cuba on Spoke B, and they went right on laughing and pushing the little porcelain counters around while he stood there kibitzing. They didn’t act like sanctuaries. There was always an edge of some kind on a sanctuario, a wariness not far below the surface. Not everybody on Valparaiso Nuevo had come here to get away from the law: most, but not all. These just seemed like a bunch of prosperous Chinese merchants sitting around a table having a good time. Juanito hung around long enough to determine that they were all shorter than he was, too, which meant either that they weren’t Dr. Wu, who was tall for a Chinese, or that Dr. Wu had been willing to have his legs chopped down by fifteen centimeters for the sake of a more efficient disguise. That was possible but it wasn’t too likely.

The other thirteen Chinese were all much too young or too convincingly female or too this or too that. Juanito crossed them all off his list. From the outset he hadn’t thought Wu would still be Chinese, anyway.

He kept on looking. One trail went cold, and then another, and then another. By now he was starting to think Dr. Wu must have heard that a man with no eyes was looking for him, and had gone even deeper underground, or off Valparaiso entirely. Juanito paid a friend at the hub spaceport to keep watch on departure manifests for him. Nothing came of that. Then someone reminded him that there was a colony of old-time hard-core sanctuary types living in and around the town of El Mirador on Spoke D, people who had a genuine aversion to being bothered. Juanito went there. Because he was known to be the son of a murdered fugitive himself, nobody hassled him: he of all people wouldn’t be likely to be running a trace, would he?

The visit yielded no directly useful result. Juanito couldn’t risk asking questions and nothing was visible that seemed to lead anywhere. But he came away with the strong feeling that El Mirador was the answer.

“Take me there,” Farkas said.

“I can’t do that. It’s a low-profile town. Strangers aren’t welcome. You’ll stick out like a dinosaur.”

“Take me,” Farkas repeated.

“If Wu’s there and he gets even a glimpse of you, he’ll know right away that there’s a contract out for him and he’ll vanish so fast you won’t believe it.”

“Take me to El Mirador,” said Farkas. “I pay for services and you deliver them, isn’t that the deal?”

“Right,” Juanito said. “Let’s go to El Mirador.”

it was ten in the morning and Nick Rhodes still hadn’t stopped marveling at the weather. Considering the time of year it was and the expectable atmospheric conditions, the day was mysteriously, even miraculously, bright and clear: atmospheric photochemical intensity way down, fog ditto, and patches of blue sky—almost blue, anyway—showing through behind the inescapable striped layerings of vividly colored greenhouse goop and the usual baleful white backdrop.

Rhodes had read about blue skies in storybooks when he was a kid, but he hadn’t had much of an opportunity for seeing them over the past thirty years or so. Today, though, the air was clean, for some reason. Relatively clean, anyway. From his office on the thirteenth floor of the slender, airy Santachiara Technologies tower, up along the highest ridge of the Berkeley hills a couple of miles south of the University campus, he had a 360-degree view of the whole San Francisco Bay Area: the bridges, the shimmering water, the pretty little toy city across the bay, the rounded inland hills behind him with their serene coats of desiccated lion-colored grass. At this distance you weren’t able to see how the surface of practically every structure was spotted and corroded by the unrelenting fumes. And then there was the arching dome of the sky, much of it looking magnificently and improbably blue right now. On a day like this it was impossible to keep your mind on work. Rhodes wandered from window to window, making the full circuit, staring out.

A terrific day, yes. But he knew it couldn’t stay that way for long, and he was right.

The annunciator light went on and the calm impersonal androidal voice said, “Dr. Van Vliet is calling on Line Three, Dr. Rhodes. He wants to know if you have a reaction to his report yet.”

Rhodes felt a falling-away sensation in the floor of his gut. It was a lot too early in the day to have to cope with Van Vliet and the complications that he represented.

“Tell him I’m in conference and I’ll have to get back to him,” Rhodes said automatically.

Nick Rhodes was the associate research director of Santachiara Technologies’ Survival/Modification Program, which is to say that he earned his living trying to find ways to transform human beings into something that would be either more or less than human, Rhodes still wasn’t quite sure which. Santachiara Technologies was a subsidiary of Samurai Industries, the mega-corp that owned pretty near all the segments of the universe that weren’t the property of Kyocera-Merck, Ltd. And Alex Van Vliet was probably the brightest and certainly the most aggressive of Santachiara’s team of hot young genetic engineers. Who supposedly had come up with a hot new adapto plan, a scheme involving hemoglobin replacement, that was said by those who had heard Van Vliet’s lunch-hour explanations to have real breakthrough possibilities. That was a new angle, all right, and one that Rhodes found obscurely threatening, without quite understanding why. Just this moment a conversation with Van Vliet was an event that Rhodes wanted very much to avoid.