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 helclass="underline" 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—”