All right, Carpenter thought.
Now at last he could take a little time to think about the goddamned squid ship and its problems.
13
the annunciator said, “Dr. Van Vliet is calling on Line Three, Dr. Rhodes.”
Quarter to nine in the morning. It was never too early for Van Vliet to start in on the day’s toil and trouble. A lot too soon, though, for Rhodes to start in on the day’s drinking. “Later,” he said. “I don’t want to take any calls just now.”
Rhodes had been in the office since just after eight, early for him. At the end of yesterday’s workday his desk had still been littered with unfinished items, and both virtual extensions had been loaded as well; and, as usual, things had come pouring in all night long for his urgent attention in the morning. The weather had taken a turn for the worse too: sweltering heat, well beyond the norms even of modern times, and scary Diablo winds blasting down out of the east, bringing once again the threat, now practically a weekly event, of stirring up devastating fires along the bone-dry grassy ridges of Oakland and Berkeley. The winds were carrying with them, also, an oppressive shitload of toxic fumes out of the valley stagnation pool, potent enough to cut acne-like pockmarks into the facades of stone buildings.
Aside from that, Rhodes had had a lousy night with Isabella the night before, and maybe three hours of sleep. It was an all-around wonderful morning. He was restless, irritable, swept by bursts of rage and confusion and occasionally something close to panic. For almost an hour now he had been spinning his wheels, accomplishing nothing.
Time to get to work, finally.
“Open, sesame,” Rhodes said stolidly, and Virtual One began to disgorge streaming ribbons of data into the air.
He watched it all come spilling out, aghast. Reports, reports, reports. Quantitative stuff about enzyme absorption from the Portland lab; a long stupid screed from one of the sub-departments dealing with a foredoomed project to provide senior citizens with lung implants instead of genetic retrofits; a formidable batch of abstracts and preprints from Nature and Science that he would never have time in this present life to deal with; a horrendous pile of crap about some employee arbitration hassle involving third-floor janitorial androids overstepping their stipulated spheres of responsibility; the minutes of a meeting at the Sao Paulo office of a Samurai subsidiary he had never heard of, the work of which evidently impinged in some unspecified way on his department’s area of operations. And on and on and on and on.
Rhodes felt like sobbing.
Somehow his job had become all administration, very little actual doing of science any more. The science around here was done by kids like Van Vliet, while Rhodes coped with the inundation of reports, budget requests, strategic analyses, dead-end schemes like the lung-implant business, et cetera, et cetera, all the while attending an infinity of petrifyingly dull meetings and killing the occasional evening trying to fend off the troublesome curiosities of Israeli spies. For after-hours amusement he engaged in bewildering corrosive strife with the woman he supposedly loved. Somehow this was not the life he had intended for himself. Somehow he had veered off course, that was obvious.
And the unthinkable heat today—the hard, malignant, abrasive air—the hot howling wind—
Van Vliet—
Isabelle—
Isabelle—
Isabelle—
Wild unfocused sensations swept him like a sudden fever. Some kind of explosion seemed to be building up within him. He found that frightening. It was days like this, Rhodes thought, that led otherwise peaceable men to jump off bridges or commit random acts of murder. Diablo winds could do that to you. They were famous for that.
My life is in need of fundamental change, he told himself. Fundamental change.
What kind of change was in order, though? The work? The Isabelle relationship? Paul Carpenter had told him to break up with her and to take a job with some other mega-corp. There was a lot of sense in both those suggestions.
But he simply wasn’t capable of the first, he thought, and the other was tempting but terrifying. Change jobs? Where would he go? How would he break free from Santachiara and Samurai? He was immobilized, tied hand and foot—to the Company, to Isabelle, to the adapto project, to the whole bloody mess.
He put his head in his hands. He sat listening to the wind.
Isabelle—
Oh, Jesus. Isabelle.
Last night, after dinner, at Isabelle’s place. Always trouble, when he stays there. He is sitting in the kitchen, by himself, sipping a Scotch. Isabelle has been very distant, cool, all evening, mysteriously so. Rhodes has never been able to understand what sends her into these periods of withdrawal, nor does she give him much help in figuring things out. Now she is busy in her little office off the living room with a memorandum she is dictating to herself about a consultation that day, one of her patients who is in deep shit.
He makes a critical mistake when she comes back in for a glass of water: trying to break through her reserve, Rhodes asks her a question about the particular problem she’s dealing with, wants to know if there’s some kind of special complication.
“Please, Nick.” Shoots him a basilisk glance. “Can’t you see I’m trying to concentrate?”
“Sorry. I thought you were taking a break.”
“I am. My mind isn’t.”
“Sorry,” he says again. “I didn’t know.” Smiles. Shrugs goodheartedly. Tries to make it all nice again. It seems to him that he spends at least half his time with Isabelle just trying to make it all nice again, patching things up after some misunderstanding that is mostly beyond his comprehension.
Instead of returning to the other room, she stands stiffly by the sink, hefting her water glass without drinking from it, as though measuring the specific gravity of its contents.
Says, after a bit, doom-and-gloom voice, “Yes, there is a complication. I’m starting to think that the girl is genuinely suicidal.”
So she wants to talk about it after all. Or else is just talking to herself out loud.
“Who is?” Rhodes asks, gingerly.
“Angela! Angela! Don’t you ever pay any attention?”
“Oh,” he says. “Right. Angela.” He had thought the patient in question was a certain Emma Louise. Isabelle can be extremely nonlinear sometimes.
He summons up what little he knows about Angela. Sixteen, seventeen years old, lives somewhere at the northern end of Berkeley, father a professor of history, or something, at the university. Under treatment by Isabelle for—what? Depression? Anxiety? No, Rhodes thinks: the girl has Greenhouse Syndrome. The new trendy thing. Total environmental paranoia. God knows why it should be setting in only now: it sounds very late-twentieth-century to him. But all the kids are getting it, it seems. A sense not just that the sky is an iron band around the planet, but that the actual walls are closing in, that the ceiling is descending, that asphyxiation is not very far away.
“Suicidal? Really?” Rhodes says.
“I’m afraid that she may be. She was wearing two face-lungs today, when she showed up for her session.”
“Two?”
“Convinced that one’s not enough. That the air is absolute poison, that if she takes a deep breath it’ll turn her lungs to mush. She wanted me to write a prescription for Screen for her, double the usual dose. I told her I’m not allowed to write any sort of prescriptions and she went into hysterics.”