Besides, he had no room for them. Where the fuck were these men going to sleep? On deck between the spigots? Should he pitch a tent on the iceberg, maybe? What about feeding them, for Christ’s sake? What about Screen? Everything was calibrated down to the last molecule.
“I don’t think you understand our situation,” Carpenter said carefully. “Aside from the legalities of the thing, we’ve got no space for extra personnel. We barely have enough room for ourselves.”
“It would be just for a short while, no? A week or two?”
“I tell you we’ve got every millimeter allotted. If God Himself wanted to come on board as a passenger, we’d have a tough time figuring out where to put Him. You want technical help patching your ship back together, we can try to provide that. We can even let you have some supplies. But taking five men aboard—”
Kovalcik’s eyes began to look a little wild. She was breathing very hard now. “You must do this for us! You must! Otherwise—”
She didn’t go on.
“Otherwise?” Carpenter prompted.
All he got from her was a bleak stare, no friendlier than the green-streaked ozone-crisp sky.
“Hilfe,” Kohlberg muttered just then, stirring unexpectedly in his bunk.
“What was that?”
“It is delirium,” said Kovalcik.
“Hilfe. Hilfe. In Gottes Namen, hilfe!” And then, in slow, thickly accented English, the words painfully framed: “Help. She will kill us all.”
“Delirium?” Carpenter said.
Kovalcik’s eyes grew even chillier. Drawing an ultrasonic syringe from a cabinet in the wall, she slapped it against Kohlberg’s arm and pressed. There was a small buzzing sound. Kohlberg subsided into sleep. Snuffling snores rose from his bunk.
Kovalcik smiled. Now that the captain was unconscious again she seemed to be recovering her self-control. “He is a madman. You see what my skin is like. What his madness has done to me, has done to every one of us. If he got loose, if he put the voyage in jeopardy—yes, yes, we would kill him. We would kill them all. It would be only self-defense, you understand me? But it must not come to that.” Her voice was icy. You could air-condition an entire city with that voice. “You were not here during the trouble. You do not know what we went through. We will not go through it again. Take these men from us, Captain.”
She stepped back, folding her arms across her chest. The room was very quiet, suddenly, except for the pingings and thumpings from the ship’s interior, and an occasional snore out of Kohlberg. Kovalcik was completely calm again, the ferocity and iciness no longer visible. As though she were merely telling him: This is the situation, you have heard the story, the ball is now in your court, Captain Carpenter.
What a stinking squalid mess, Carpenter thought.
But he was greatly surprised to find, when he looked behind the irritation he felt at having been dragged into this, a curious sadness where he would have expected anger to be.
Despite everything he found himself flooded with surprising compassion for Kovalcik, for Kohlberg, for every one of them, for the whole damned fucking poisoned heat-blighted world they had all been born into. Who had asked for any of this—the heavy green sky, the fiery air, the daily need for Screen, the million frantic improvisations that made continued life on Earth possible? Not us. Our great-great-grandparents had, maybe, but not us. Only they’re not here to know what it’s like, and we are. They had rucked the world in one long merry carnival of rape, and then had tossed us the battered remains. And never even had known what they were doing. And wouldn’t have given a shit about it if they had.
Then the moment passed. What the hell could he do? Did Kovalcik think he was Jesus Christ? He had no room for these people. He had no extra Screen or food. And the basic thing was that this was none of his business. San Francisco was waiting for its iceberg. The berg was melting even as they dithered here. It was time to move along. Tell her anything, just get out of here.
“All right,” Carpenter said. “I see your problem. I’m not entirely sure I can help out, but I’ll do what I can. I’ll check our supplies and let you know what we’re able to do. Okay?” He looked at Rennett, who for a time seemed to have disappeared into some alternate dimension. Rennett had returned, now. She was staring at Carpenter in a coldly curious way, as though trying to see into his skull and read his mind. Her expression was challenging, truculent. She wanted to know how he was going to cope with this.
So did he, as a matter of fact.
Kovalcik said, “You will give me your answer this evening?”
“First thing in the morning,” said Carpenter. “Best I can do. Too late tonight for working it all out.”
“You will call me, then.”
“Yes. I’ll call you.”
To Rennett he said, “Come on. Let’s get back to the ship.”
16
for farkas, the hotel that the unfortunate Juanito had found for him proved to be a satisfactory home base for him during the period of slow, idle days that he allowed himself after his return to Valparaiso Nuevo. The town of Cajamarca, nicely situated out along the rim on C Spoke, was quiet and attractive and agreeably distant from the hectic commercial activity of the hub communities. Farkas went out early every day, strolling the same path, stopping at the same cafe at the upside end of the town for breakfast, and at a different cafe down the other way for lunch. For dinner he would go to one of the towns on some other spoke of the satellite, never the same one twice.
Everyone in the immediate neighborhood of the hotel quickly got used to the way he looked. The cafe owners, even the android waiters. His strangeness didn’t bother them any more. It took only a couple of days. After that he was one of the regulars, just didn’t happen to have any eyes, smooth blank space above his nose right up to the top of his forehead. Leaves good tips. Place like this, you get to see all kinds. Everyone very tolerant, very cognizant of everybody’s privacy. That was the most important commodity for sale here, privacy. Privacy and courtesy. The social contract, Valparaiso Nuevo style. “Good morning, Mr. Farkas. Nice to see you again, Mr. Farkas. I hope you slept well, Mr. Farkas. A cup of coffee, Mr. Farkas?”
He enjoyed the scenery, the big sky, the dazzling stellar display, the spectacular views of the Earth and the moon. To Farkas, the Earth was a massive involuted purple box with heavy dangling green tassels, and the moon was a dainty, airy hollow ball filled with jagged orange coils, packed tight within it like little springs. Sometimes the sun would strike a neighboring L-5 world in just the right way and set off a brilliant shower of light, both reflected and refracted, spilling across the darkness like a cascade of million-faceted diamonds, a waterfall of glittering jewels. That was very pleasant to watch. This was the most enjoyable holiday Farkas had had in a long time.
Of course, he was supposed to be working as well as resting, here. But he could hardly post a sign on the town bulletin board requesting information concerning plans for coups d’etat. All he could do was tiptoe around, listen, watch, try to pick things out of the air. Gradually he would make connections and find out what the Company had asked him to learn. Or, on the other hand, perhaps he wouldn’t. It wasn’t something that could be forced.
On the fourth day, as he was having lunch at the usual place—a garden restaurant dominated by no less than three portrait busts of El Supremo looming down out of vine-covered walls—Farkas became aware that he was the object of a conversation off at the periphery of the place. Someone who looked like an arrangement of scarlet zigzags and spirals with a big shining oval patch right in the middle—bright blue and very glossy, the way Farkas imagined an eye might look—was discussing him with the headwaiter.