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 job 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.
Carpenter looked out the window, peering between the greenery. The overnight transformation was astonishing. A green light was playing on the hillside. He saw vines everywhere, creepers, gigantic ferns, enormous unfamiliar shrubs with colossal gleaming leaves and great swollen gaudy flowers. It was a berserk garden, magical, yes, but the magic that had been at work here was a dark and evil one. Unending rain was falling, and the plants stirred and murmured beneath it, expanding moment by moment, rising and stiffening, spreading their wings.
“Let’s go for a walk,” he said to Rhodes, and they stepped through the sealed windows and floated easily downward into the moist green world beyond.
It was a luminous world, too. Eerie foxfire burned in it, a universal pallid flickering glow. The air was thick, wet, sickly-sweet. Everything seemed to be coated with fur. No, not fur, fungus of some kind, a dense damp growth of mold. From swollen organs burst periodic clouds of dark spores that sought and quickly found tiny crevices where they might take hold and sprout. There were no sharp edges visible anywhere, no bare surfaces: everything was overgrown. The trees, enormous and overbearing, had a lumpy, bearded look. They bulged with bewildering knobs and knurled excrescences.
The moon glimmered faintly through the mists. Lashings of wild mutant bamboo crisscrossed its pockmarked face. Green blood dripped from it across the sky.