Smart machines lurked about the suite, their power lights in theshuttered dimness like the small red eyes of bats. The machinescrouched in inches in white walls of Mexican stucco: an ionizer, atelevision, a smoke alarm, a squad of motion sensors. A vaporizerhissed and bubbled gently in the corner, emitting a potent reek ofoil, ginseng, and eucalyptus.Alex lay propped on silk-cased pillows, his feet and knees dentingthe starched cotton sheets. His flesh felt like wet clay, somethinggreased and damp and utterly inert. Since morning he had been huffingat the black neoprene mask of his bedside inhaler, and now hisfingertips, gone pale as wax and lightly trembling, seemed to bemelting into the mask. Alex thought briefly of hanging the mask fromits stainless-steel hook at the bedside medical rack. He rejected theidea. It was too much of a hassle to have the tasty mask out ofreach. The pain in his lungs and throat had not really gone away. Such amiracle was perhaps too much to ask, even of a Mexican black-marketmedical clinic. Nevertheless, aftertwo weeks of treatment in the dinica, his pain had assumed a newsubtlety. The scorched inflammation had dwindled to an interestinglynovel feeling, something thin and rather theoretical.The suite was as chilly as a fishbowl and Alex felt as cozy and astorpid as a carp. He lay collapsed in semidarkness, cyes blinkinggrainily, as a deeper texture of his illness languorously revealeditself. Beneath his starched sheets, Alex began to feel warm. Thenlight-headed. Then slightly nauseous, a customary progression ofsymptoms. He felt the dark rush build within his chest.Then it poured through him. He felt his spine melting. He seemed topercolate into the mattress.These spells had been coming more often lately, and with more powerbehind them. On the other hand, their dark currents were taking Alexinto some interesting places. Alex, not breathing, swam alongpleasantly under the rim of unconsciousness for a long moment.Then, without his will, breath came again. His mind broke delirium'ssurface. When his eyes reopened, the suite around him seemedintensely surreal. Crawling walls of white stucco, swirling whitestucco ceiling, thick wormy carpet of chemical aqua blue. Bulbouspottery lamps squatted unlit on elaborate wicker tables. The chest ofdrawers, and the bureau, the wooden bedframe were all marked with thesame creepy conspiracy of aqua-blue octagons. ... Iron-hinged woodenshutters guarded the putty-sealed windows. A dying tropicalhouseplant, the gaunt rubber-leafed monster that had become his mostfaithful companion here, stood in its terra-cotta pot, gentlypoisoned by the constant darkness, and the medicated vaporousdamp....A sharp buzz sounded alongside his bed. Alex twisted his matted headon the pillow. The machine buzzed again. Then, yet again.Alex realized with vague surprise that the machine was a telephone.He had never received any calls on the telephone in his suite. He didnot even know that he had one. The elderly, humble machine had beensitting there among its fellow machines, much overshadowed.Alex examined the p hone's antique, poorly designed push-buttoninterface or a long groggy moment. The phone buzzed again,insistently. He dropped the inhaler mask and leaned across the bed,with a twist, and a rustle, and a pop, and a groan. He pressed thetiny button denominated ESPKR."Hola," he puffed. His gummy larynx crackled and shrieked, bringingsudden tears to his eyes."~Quien es?" the phone replied."Nobody," Alex rasped in English. "Get lost." He wiped at one eye andglared at the phone. He-had no idea how to hang up. 
"Alex!" the p hone said in English. "Is that you?"
Alex blinked. Blood was rushing through his numbed flesh. Beneath the
sheet, his calves and toes began to tingle resentfully.
"I want to speak to Alex Unger!" the phone insisted sharply. "~Dónde
estd?" 
"Who is this?" Alex said. 
"It's Jane! Juanita Unger, your sister!"
"Janey?" Alex said, stunned. "Gosh, is this Christmas? I'm sorry,
Janey. . .
"What!" the phone shouted. "It's May the ninth! Jesus, you sound
really trashed!"
"Hey•. . ." Alex said weakly. He'd never known his sister to phone
him up, except at Christmas. There was an ominous silence. Alex
blearily studied the cryptic buttons on the speakerphone. RDIAL,
FLAS, PROGMA. No clue how to hang up.The open ph one line sat there
eavesdropping on him, a torment demanding response. "I'm okay,"
heprotested at last. "How're you, Janey?"
"Do you even know what year this is?" the phone demanded. "Or where
you are?"
"Uinm . . . Sure . . ." Vague guilty panic penetrated his medicated
haze. Getting along with his older sister had never been Alex's
strong suit even in the best of times, and now he felt far too weak
and dazed to defend himself. "Janey, I'm not up for this right now. .
. . Lemme call you back.. .
"Don't you dare hang up on me, you little weasel!" the phone
shrieked. "What the hell are they doing to you in there? Do you have
any idea what these bills look like?"
"They're helping me here," Alex said. "I'm in treatment. ... Go
away."
"They're a bunch of con-artist quacks! They'll take you for every
cent you have! And then kill you! And bury you in some goddamned
toxic waste dump on the border!"
Juanita's shrill assaultive words swarmed through his head like
hornets. Alex slumped back into his pillow heap and gazed at the
slowly turning ceiling fan, trying to gather his strength. "How'd you
find me here?" 
"It wasn't easy, that's for sure!"
Alex grunted. "Good . .
"And getting this phone line was no picnic either!"
Alex drew a slow deep breath, relaxed, exhaled. Something viscous
gurgled nastily, deep within him.
"Goddamn it, Alex! You just can't do this! I spent three weeks
tracking you down! Even Dad's people couldn't track you down this
time." 
"Well, yeah," Alex muttered. "That's why I did it that way.~~
When his sister spoke again, her voice was full of grim resolve. "Get
packed, Alejandro. You're getting out of there."
"Don't bother me. Let me be." 
"I'm your sister! Dad's written you off-don't you get that yet?
You're grown up now, and you've hurt him too many times. I'm the only
one left who cares." 
"Don't be so stupid," Alex croaked wearily. "Take it easy.~~
"I know where you are. And I'm coming to get~ou. And anybody who
tries to stop me-you include -is gonna regret it a lot!"
"You can't do anything," Alex told her. "I signed all the clinic
papers . . . they've got lawyers." He cleared his throat, with a long
rasping ache. Returning to full alertness was far from pleasant;
variant parts of his carcass-up per spine, ankles, sinuses,
diaphragm-registered sharp aching protests and a deep reluctance to
function. "I want to sleep," he said. "I came here to rest."

"You can't kid me, Alejandro! If you want to drop dead, then go
ahead! But don't blow family money on that pack of thieves."
"You're always so goddamned stubborn," Alex said. "You've gone and
woke me up now, and I feel like hell!" He sat up straight. "It's my 

money, and it's my life! I'll do whatever I want with it! Go back toart school." He reached across the bed, grabbed the phone lead, andyanked it free, snapping its plastic clip.Alex picked the dead phone up, examined it, then stuffed it securelyunder the pillows. His throat hurt. He reached back to the bedsidetable, dipped his lingers into a tray of hammered Mexican silver, andcame up with a narcotic lozenge. He unwrapped it and crunched itsweetly between his molars.Sleep was far away now. His mind was working again, and requirednumbing. Alex slid out of the bed onto his hands and knees andsearched around on the thick, plush, ugly carpet. His head swam andpounded with the effort. Alex persisted, being used to this.The TV's remote control, with the foxlike cunning of all importantinanimate objects, had gone to earth in a collapsing heap of Mexicantrue-crime fotonovelas. Alex noted that his bed's iron springs, afterthree weeks of constant humidity, were gently but thoroughly going torust. Alex rose to his knees, clutching his prize, and slid with arthriticlanguor beneath the sheets again. He caught his breath, blew hisnose, neatly placed two cold drops of medicated saline against thesurface of each eyeball, then began combing the clinic's cableservice with minimal twitches of his thumb. Weepy Mexican melodramas.A word-game show. Kids chasing robot dinosaurs in some massiveunderground mall. The ever-present Thai pop music.And some English-language happytalk news. Spanish happytalk news.Japanese happytalk news. Alex, born in 20 10, had watched the newsgrow steadily moreand cheerful for all of his twenty-one years. As a m~ he'd witnessedhundreds of hours of raw footage: plagues, mass death, desperate riot, unsanitary wreckage,all against a panicky backdrop of ominous and unrelentingenvironmental decline. All that stuff was still out there, just asevery aspect of modern reality had its mirrored shadow in the Netsomewhere, but nowadays you had to hunt hard to find it, and thepeople discussing it didn't seem to have much in the way of budgets.Somewhere along the line, the entire global village had slipped intoneurotic denial. Today, as an adult, Alex found the glass pipelines of the Netchockablock with jet-set glamour weddings and cute dog stories. Perkyheroines and square-jawed heroes were still, somehow, getting richquick. Starlets won lotteries and lottery winners became starlets.Little children, with their heads sealed in virtuality helmets, mimeddelighted surprise as they waved their tiny gloved hands at enormoushallucinations. Alex had never been that big a fan of current eventsanyway, but he had now come to feel that the world's cheerful shiny-toothed bullshitters were the primal source of all true evil.Alex collided and stuck in a Mexican docudrama about UFOs; they wereknown as los OVNIS in Spanish, and on 9 de mayo, 2031, a largefraction of the Latin American populace seemed afflicted withspectacular attacks of ozmimania. Long minutes of Alex's life seepedidly away as the screen pumped images at him: monster fireballs bynight, puffball-headed dwarfs in jumpsuits of silver lame, and avideo prophecy from some interstellar Virgen de Guadalupe with herowll Internet address and a toll-free phone number.The day nurse tapped at the door and bustled in. The day nurse wasnamed Concepcibn. She was a hefty, nononsense, fortyish individualwith a taste for liposuction, face-lifts, and breast augmentation."~Ya le hicieron Ia prueba de Ia sattgre?" she said.Alex turned off the television. "The blood test? Yeah, I had one thismorning.""~Le duele todcwia el ped.~o como anoche?""Pretty bad last night," Alex admitted. "Lots better, though, since Istarted using the mask."
"Un catarro atroz, complicado con una alergia," Concepción 
sympathized.
"No problem with pain, at least," Alex said. "I'm getting the best of
treatment." 
Concepciôn sighed and gestured him up. "Todavi~ no acabamos,
muchacho, le falta la enema de los pulmones."
"A lung enema?" Alex said, puzzled. 

"Today? Right now? ~Ahora?"
She nodded. 
"Do I have to?" 
Concepciôn looked stern. "jEl doctor Mirabi Ia recetd! Fue muy claro.
'Cuidado con una pulmonia.' El nuevo tipo de pulmonia es peor que eI
SIDA, ban muerto ya centenares de personas.
"Okay, okay," Alex said. "Sure, no problem. I'm doing lots better
lately, though. I don't even need the chair."
Concepción nodded and helped him out of bed, shoving her solid
shoulder under his armpit. The two of them made it out the door of
the suite and a good ten meters down the carpeted hall before Alex's
knees buckled. The wheelchair, a machine of limited but highly
specialized intelligence, was right behind Alex as he stumbled. He
gave up the struggle gracefully and sat within the chrome-and-leather
machine. 
Concepciôn left Alex in the treatment room to wait for Dr. Mirabi.
Alex was quite sure that Dr. Mirabi was doing nothing of consequence.
Having Alex wait alone in a closed room was simply medical etiquette,
a way to establish whose time was more important. Though Dr. Mirabi's
employees were kept on the hustle-especially the hardworking retail
pharmacists-Dr. Mirabi himself hardly seemed oppressed by his duties.
As far as Alex could deduce from the staff schedules, there were only
four long-
patients in the whole clinica. Alex was pretty sure
most of the clinica's income came from yanquis on

• down from Laredo. Before he himself had ~ckecfin last April,he'd seen a line of Americans halfway wn the block, eagerly pickingup Mexican megadosage ~strums for the new ultraresistant strains ofTh. Dr. Mirabi's treatment room was long and rectangular and full of tallcanvas-shrouded machinery. Like every place else in the clinica, itwas air-conditioned to a deathly chill, and smelled of sharp andpotent disinfectant. Alex wished that he had thought to snag afotonovela on the way out of his room. Alex pretended distaste forthe nave-las' clumsy and violence-soaked porn, but their comicallydistorted gutter-level Spanish was of a lot of philological interest.Concepción opened the door and stepped in. Behind her, Dr. Mirabiarrived, his ever-present notepad in hand. Despite his vaguelyIslamic surname, Alex suspected strongly that Dr. Mirabi was, infact, Hungarian.Dr. Mirabi tapped the glass face of his notepad with a neat blackstylus and examined the result. "Well, Alex," he said briskly inaccented English, "we seem to have defeated that dirty streptococcusonce and for all." "That's right," Alex said. "Haven't had a night sweat in ages.""That's quite a good step, quite good," Dr. Mirabi encouraged. "Ofcourse, that infection was only the crisis symptom of your syndrome.The next stage of your cure"-he examined the notepad-"is the chronic mucus congestion! We mustdeal with that chronic mucus, Alex. It might have been protectivemucus at first, but now is your metabolic burden. Once the chronicmucus is gone, and the tubercles are entirely cleansed-cleaned . .." He paused. "Is it 'cleaned,' or 'cleansed'?""Either one works," Alex said."Thank you," the doctor said. "Once the chronic mucu~ is scrubbedaway from the lung surfaces, then we can treat the membranesdirectly. There is membrane damage in your lungs, of course, deep cellular damage, but we cannot get to the damaged surfaces until themucus is removed." He looked at Alex seriously, over his glasses."Your chronic mucus is full of many contaminations, you know' Yearsof bad gases and particles you have inhaled. Environmentalpollutions, allergic pollens, smoke particles, virus, and bacteria.They have all adhered to the chronic mucus. When your lungs arescrubbed clean with the enema, the lungs will be as the lungs of a newborn child!" Hesmiled. Alex nodded silently."It won't be pleasant at first, but afterward you will feel quitelovely.""Do you have to knock me Out again?" Alex said."No, Alex. It's important that you breathe properly during theprocedure. The detergent has to reach the very bottom of the lungs.You understand?" He paused, tapping his notepad. "Are you a goodswimmer, Alex?""No," Alex said."Then you know that sensation when you swallow water down the wrongpipe," said the doctor, nodding triumphantly. "That choking reflex.You see, Alex, the reason Mother Nature makes you choke on water, isbecause there is no proper oxygen in water for your lungs. The enemaliquid, though, which will be filling your lungs, is not water, Alex.It is a dense silicone fluid. It carries much oxygen dissolved insideit, plenty of oxygen." Dr. Mirabi chuckled. "If you lie still withoutbreathing, you can live half an hour on the oxygen in a singlelungful of enema fluid! It has so much oxygen that at first you willfeel hyperventilated.""I have to inhale this stuff somehow, is that it?""Not quite. It's too dense to be inhaled. In any case, we don't wantit to enter your sinuses." He frowned. "We have to decant the fluidinto your lungs, gently.""I see." "We fit a thin tube through your mouth and down past the epiglottis.The end of the tube will have a local anesthetic, so you should notfeel the pain in the epiglottis very long.... You must remain quitestill during the procedure, try to relax fully, and breathe only onmy order."Alex nodded. "The sensations are very unusual, but they are not dangerous. Youmust make up your mind to accept the procedure. If you choke up thefluid, then we have to begin again.""Doctor," Alex said, "you don't have to go on pet.~ suading me. I'mnot afraid. You can trust me. I don't stop.I never stop. If I stopped at things, I wouldn't be here now, wouldI?" "There will be some discomfort." "That's not new. I'm not afraid of that, either.""Very well, Alex." Dr. Mirabi patted Alex's shoulder. "Then we willbegin. Take your place on the manipulation table, please."Concepciôn helped Alex to lie on the jointed leather table. Shetouched her foot to a floor pedal. A worm gear whined beneath thefloor. The table bent at Alex's hips and rose beneath his back, to asharp angle. Alex coughed twice.Dr. Mirabi drew on a pair of translucent gloves, deftly unwrapped oneof his canvas-bound machines, and busied himself at the switches. Heopened a cabinet, retrieved a pair of matched, bright yellow aerosoltanks, and inserted both tanks into sockets at the top of themachine. He attached clear plastic tubing to the taps on the tanksand opened both the taps, with brief pneumatic hisses. The machinehummed and sizzled a bit and gave off a hot waft of electricalresistance. "We will set the liquid to blood heat," Dr. Mirabi explained. "Thatway there is no thermal shock to the tuberdes. Also heat will dissolve the chronic mucus more effectively. Efficiently? Is it'efficiently' or 'effectively'?""They're synonyms," Alex said. "Do you think I might throw up? Theseare my favorite pajamas."Concepción stripped the pajamas off, then wrapped him briskly in apaper medical gown. She strapped him against the table with a pair offabric belts. Dr. Mirabi approached him with the soft plastic nozzleof the insert, smeared with a pink paste. "Open widely, don't tastethe anesthetic," he warned. Alex nevertheless got a generous smear ofthe paste against the root of his tongue, which immediately went asnumb as a severed beef tongue on a butcher's block.The nozzle slid its way down a narrow road of pain along his throat.Alex felt the fleshy valve within his chest leap and flap as the tubetouched and penetrated. Then the numbness struck, and a great core ofmeat behind his heart simply lost sensation, went into nothingness,like a core mechanically punched from an apple.His eyes filled with tears. He heard, more than saw, Dr. Mirabitouching taps. Then the heat came.He'd never known that blood was so hot. The fluid was hotter than blood, and much, much heavier, like fizzing, creamy, molten lead. Hecould see the fluid moving into him through the tube. It waschemical-colored, aqua blue. "Breathe!" Dr. Mirabi shouted.Alex heaved for air. A bizarre reverberating belch tore free from theback of his throat, something like the cry of a monster bullfrog. Foran instant he tried to laugh; his diaphragm heaved futilely at theliquid weight within him, and went still."El nina tiene un bulto en la garganta," said Concepcion,conversationally. She placed her latex-gloved hand against hisforehead. "Muy doloroso.""Poco a poco," Dr. Mirabi said, gesturing. The worm gear rustledbeneath the table and Alex rose in place, liquid shifting within himwith the gut-bulging inertia of a nine-course meal. Air popped inbursts from his clamped lips and a hot gummy froth rose against hisupper palate."Good," said Dr. Mirabi. "Breathe!"Alex tried again, his eyes bulging. His spine popped audibly and hefelt another pair of great loathsome bubbles come up, stinkingancient bubbles like something from the bottom of LaBrea.Then suddenly the oxygen hit his brain. An orgasmic blush ran up hisneck, his cheeks. For a supreme moment he forgot what it was to besick. He felt lovely. He felt free. He felt without constraint. Hefelt pretty sure that he was about to die.He tried to speak, to babble something-gratitude perhaps, or lastwords, or an eager yell for more-but there -was only silence. Hislungs were like two casts of and bonemeal, each filled to brimmingwith hot ber. His muscles heaved against the taut liquid bags twofists clenching two tennis balls, and his ears road and things wentblack. Suddenly he could hear his straining to beat, thud-thud, thud-thud, each coaushock of the ventricles passing through his liquid-filled lungs withbooming subaqueous clarity.And then the beat stopped too. 
ON THE EVENING of May 10, Jane Unger made a reconnaissance of hertarget, on the pretext of buying heroin. She spent half an hour inline outside the clinic with desolate, wheezing Yankees from over theborder. The customers lined outside the clinic were the seediest,creepiest, most desperate people she'd ever seen who were not actualcriminals. Jane was familiar with the look of actual criminals,because the vast network of former Texas prisons had been emptied offelons and retrofitted as medical quarantine centers and emergencyweather shelters. The former inhabitants of the Texan gulag, theactual criminals, were confined by software nowadays. Convicted criminals, in their tamper-proof parole cuffs, couldn't make it downto Nuevo Laredo, because they'd be marooned on the far side of theRio Grande by their 6overnment tracking software. Nobody in theclinic line wore a parole cuff. But they were clearly the kind ofpeople who had many good friends wearing them.All of the American customers, without exception, wore sinisterbreathing masks. Presumably to avoid contracting an infection. Or toavoid spreading an infection that they already had. Or probably justto conceal their identities while they bought drugs.The older customers wore plain ribbed breathing masks in antisepticmedical white. The younger folks were into elaborate knobby strap-onswith vivid designer colors.The line of Americans snaked along steadily, helped by the presenceof a pair of Mexican cops, who kept the local street hustlers off thebacks of the paying clientele. Jane patiently made her way up theclinic steps, through the double doors, and to the barred andbulletproof glass of the pharmacy windows.There Jane discovered that the clinic didn't sell any "brown Mexicanheroin." Apparently they had no "heroin" at all in stock, there beinglittle demand for this legendary substance among people with respiratory illnesses.Jane slid a private-currency card through the slit beneath thewindow. The pharmacist swiped Jane's card through a reader, studiedthe results on the network link, and began to show real interest.Jane was politely abstracted from the line and introduced to thepharmacist's superior, who escorted her up to his office. There heshowed her a vial of a more modern analgesic, a designer endorphin athousand times more potent than morphine. Jane turned down his offerof a free trial injection.When Jane haltingly brought up the subject of bribery, thesupervisor's face clouded. He called a big pnvatesecurity thug, andJane was shown out the clinic's back entrance, and told not toreturn. Keep It Simple, Stupid. The famous KISS acronym had always beenJane's favorite design principle. If you need access, keep it simple.Bribing the staff of the clinic sounded like the simplest solution toher problem. But it wasn't.At least one of the staff seemed happy enough to take her bribemoney. Over a long-distance phone line from Texas, Jane had managedto subvert the clinic's receptionist. The receptionist was delightedto take Jane's electronic funds in exchange for ten minutes' free runon the clinic's internal phone system.And accessing the clinic's floor plans had been pretty simple too;they'd turned out to be Mexican public records. It had been useful,too, to sneak into the building under the simple pretext of a drugbuy. That had con-finned Jane's ideas of the clinic's internallayout.Nothing about Alex was ever simple, though. Having talked to herbrother on the phone, Jane now knew that Alex, who should have beenher ally inside the enemy gates, was, as usual, worse than useless.Carol and Greg-Jane's favorite confidants within theStorm Troupe-had urged her to stay as simple as possible.Forget any romantic ninja break-and-enter muscle stuff.That kind of stunt hardly ever worked, even when the U.S.Army tried it. It was smarter just to show up in NuevoLaredo in person, whip out a nicely untraceabledebit card, and tell the night guard that it was ~iejanaro Unger outthe door, or No bay dinero. Chances were that the guard would springAlex in exchange for, say, three months' salary, local rates.Everybody could pretend later that the kid had escaped the buildingunder his own power. That scheme was nice and straightforward. It waspretty hard to prosecute criminally. And if it ended up in a completecollapse and debacle and embarrassment, then it would look a lotbetter, later. 
By stark contrast, breaking into a Mexican black-market clinic andkidnapping a patient was the sort of overly complex maneuver thatalmost never looked better later. There'd been a time in Jane Unger's life when she'd cared a lot about"later." But that time was gone, and "later" had lost all its charm.She had traveled twelve hundred kilometers in a day, and now she wason foot, alone, in a dark alley at night in a foreign country,preparing to assault a hospital single-handed. And unless they caughther on. the spot, she was pretty sure that she was going to get awaywith it. This was an area of Nuevo Laredo the locals aptly called"Salsipuedes," or "Leave-if-you-can." Besides Alex's slick but modestclinic, it had two other thriving private hospitals stuffed withgullible gnngos, as well as a monster public hospital, a big septickilling zone very poorly managed by the remains of the Mexicangovernment. Jane watched a beat-up robot truck rumble past, markedwith a peeling red cross. Then she watched her hands trembling. Herunpainted fingertips were ivory pale and full of nervous jitter. Justlike the jitter she had before a storm chase. Jane was glad to seethat jitter, the fear and the energy racing along her nerves. Sheknew that the jitter would melt off like dry ice once the actionstarted. She had learned that about herself in the past year. It wasa good thing to know.Jane made a final check of her equipment. Glue gun, jigsaw, penlight,cdlular phone, ceramic crowbar-all hooked and holstered to herwebbing belt, hidden inside baggy paper refugee Suit. Equipment checkwas a calm-ritual. She zipped the paper suit up to the neck, overicr denim shorts and cotton T-shirt. She strapped on a plain whiteantiseptic mask.Then she cut off the clinic's electrical power.Thermite sizzled briefly on the power pole overhead, and half thecity block went dark. Jane swore briefly inside her mask. Clearlythere had been some changes made lately in the Nuevo Laredo municipalpower grid. Jane Unger's first terrorist structure hit had turned Outto be less than surgical."Not my fault," she muttered. Mexican power engineers were alwayshacking around; and people stole city power too, all kinds of illegalnetwork linkups around here. . . . They called the hookups diablitos,"little devils," another pretty apt name, considering that the worldwas well on its way to hell. . . . Anyway, it wouldn't kill them torepair one little outage.Greg's thermite bomb had really worked. Every other week or so, Gregwould drop macho hints about his military background doing structurehits. Jane had never quite believed him, before this.Jane tied a pair of paper decontamination covers over her trailboots. She cinched and knotted the boot covers tightly at the ankles,then ghosted across the blacked-out street, puddles gleaming damplyunderfoot. She stepped up three stone stairs, entered the now pitch-black akove at the clinic's rear exit, and checked the street behindher. No cars, no people, no visible witnesses... . Jane pulled atranslucent rain hood over her head, cinched and knotted it. Then shepeeled open a paper pack and pulled on a pair of tough plasticsurgical gloves.She slapped the steel doorframc with the flat of her hand.The clinic's door opened with a shudder.Jane had structure-hit the door earlier, on her way out of theclinic. She'd distracted her security escort for two vital secondsand craftily jammed the exit's elaborate keypad lock with a quick,secret gush of glue. Jane had palmed the aerosol glue can, a tinything not much bigger than a shotgun cartridge. Glue spray was one ofCarol's favorite tricks, something Carol had taught her. Carol coulddo things with glue spray that were halfway to witchcraft.Despite the power outage, the door's keypad lock was still alive onits battery backup-but the door mistakenly thought it was working. 
Smart machines were smart enough to make some really dumb blunders.Jane closed the door gently behind her. It was chilly inside thebuilding, pitch-black and silent and sepulchral. A good thing,because she'd immediately begun to sweat like crazy in the stiflinggloves, hood, overalls, mask, and boots. Her armpits prickled withterror sweat as if she were being tattooed there. Cops-or worse yet,private-industry investigators-could do plenty with the tiniest bitsof evidence these days. Fingerprints, sboeprints, stray hairs, aspeck of clothing fiber, one lousy wisp ofDNA... Jane reached inside her paper suit through a slit behind its hippocket. She unclipped the penlight from her webbing belt. The littlelight clicked faithfully under her thumb and a reddish glow lit thehail. Jane took a step down the hall, two, three, and then the fearleft her completely, and she began to glide across the ceramictiling, skid-dancing in her damp paper boot covers.She hadn't expected burglary to be such a visceral thrill. She'd beeninside plenty of ruined buildings-just like everyone else from hergeneration-but she'd never broken her way into a live one. A rush ofwicked pleasure touched her like a long cold kiss on the back of theneck. Jane tried the first door to her left. The knob slid beneath her latexed fingers-locked. Jane had a handheld power jigsaw on thewebbing belt that would slice through interior door locks like aknife through a wedding cake, and for a moment her left hand workedinside the paper suit and she touched the jigsaw's lovely checkeredrubber grip. But she stopped. She wisely resisted the urge to breakinto the room just for the thrill of it. Would they be locking Alexinto a room at night? Not likely. Not night-owl Alex.Stubborn, mean-tempered, night-owl Alex. Even at death's. < door,Alex wouldn't put up with that.Next door. Unlocked. Room empty.Next door. It was unlocked too. Some kind of janitor's supply, ragsand jugs and paper. A good place to start a diversionary fire if youneeded to. Next door. Unlocked. The room stank. Like cough medicine cut withabsinthe. Little red-eyed machines on the walls and floor, stillalive on their battery backup. Jane's dim red light played over a bigempty bed, then on a startling knot of hideous shadow-some kind ofhalf-wilted monster houseplant.She hadn't found her brother yet, but she could sense his presence.She slipped through the door, closed it gently, leaned her backagainst it. The reek in the room pried at her sinuses like thebouquet off a shot of cheap whiskey. Jane held her breath, playingthe penlight around. A television. Some kind of huge clothes hangerlike an outsized trouser press. .. a wardrobe. . . scattered tapecassettes and paper magazinesSomething was dripping. Thick oily dripping, down at floor level. Itwas coming from the big trouser-press contraption. Jane steppedtoward the machine and played her light across the floor. Some kindof bedpan there.Jane half knelt. It was a white ceramic pot, half-full of a darknasty liquid, some kind of dense chemical oil. Grainy stuff like finecoffee grounds had sunk to the bottom, with a nasty white organicscum threading the top, just like avile egg-drop soup .. . As Jane watched, a sudden thin -drool of thestuff plummeted into the pot.Her light went up. It discovered two racks of white human teeth. Ahuman mouth there, with tight-drawn white lips and a stiff bluetongue. The head was swaddled in bandages, a thick padded strap atthe forehead. Some kind of soft rubber harness bar was jammed intothe gaping jaws. .They had him strapped to a rack, head down. Both his shouldersstrapped, both his wrists cuffed at his sides, his chest strapped down against the padded surface. His knees were bound, his anklescuffed. The whole rack was tilted skyward on a set of chromed springsand hinges. Up at the very top, his pale bare feet were like twoskinned animals. Down at the bottom, his strap-swaddled head was justabove the floor. They were draining him.Jane took two quick steps back and slapped her plastic-gloved handagainst the mask at her mouth.She fought the fear for a moment and she crushed it. And then shefought the disgust, and she crushed that too.Jane stepped back to the rack, deliberately, and put her gloved handat the side of Alex's neck. It was fever-hot and slick with his sweat. He was alive. Jane examined the rack for a while, her eyes narrowing hotly. Thefear and disgust were gone now, but she couldn't stop her sudden hotsurge of hatred. This was probably a fairly easy machine to manage,for the sons of bitches who were used to using it. Jane didn't havetime to learn. She undid the stop locks on the casters at the bottom, shoved thewhole contraption to the side of the big bed, and toppled it, andAlex, onto the mattress, with one strong angry heave.The straps on his chest were easy. Just Velcro. The padded latches onhis wrists and ankles were harder: elaborate bad-design flip-toplock-down nonsense. Jane yanked her jigsaw and went through all fourof the evil things in ten seconds each. There was bad noise-a whineand a muted chatter-with a sharp stench of chewed and molten plastic.Not too much noise, really, but it sounded pretty damned loud insidea blacked-out building. Someone might come to investigate. Janepatted the glue pistol in its holster at the back of her webbingbelt. When the last strap went, Alex tumbled off the rack into her lap. Sherolled her brother faceup and checked his eyeballs. Cold, cold as amackerel, even while his fevered skin was as hot as the shaved hideof a lab rabbit She'd have to carry him out.Well, Alex had been pretty easy to carry the last time she had triedit. When he'd been five years old, and she'd been ten. Jane knelt onthe bed and methodically clipped her jigsaw back onto her belt,inside her paper Suit. And then she thought somberly about thestrength that it would take to do this thing.Jane rolled off the bed onto her feet, grabbed her brother by bothhis slender wrists, and heaved.He slid across the sheets like an empty husk. Jane jammed her leftshoulder under his midriff and hoisted him in a fireman's carry,flinging her left arm across the backs of his knees. . . . The momentshe had him up, she realized that she was strong enough-more thanstrong enough. There was nothing left of her brother but birdbone andgristle.Fluid gurgled loudly out of him and spattered the backs -of her legs.Jane staggered through the door and into the hail. She heardfootsteps overhead, somewhere up on the second floor, and a distantmutter of puzzled voices. .. . She lurched down the hall toward theexit and pulled the jimmied door open, right-handed. Her brother'slolling head cracked against the jamb as she stumbled through.She pulled the door shut behind her, then sank to her knees on thecool pavement of the alcove. Alex sprawled bonelessly over her in hisbackless medical gown. She slid Alex aside onto the chill stonepaving.Breathing hard, Jane felt at the webbing belt and yanked out hercellular phone. She pushed little glowing yellow numbers with herthumb. "Hello," her car recited cheerfully. "I am Storm Pursuit VehicleCharlie. There's no one aboard me right now, but if you have an ID, 
you can give me verbal orders. Other-. wise, leave a message at the
beep."
Jane pressed the digits 56#033.
"Hello, Juanita," the car replied.
"Come get me," Jane panted. "You know where. Come quick." 

SHE'D FORGO1TEN HOW fast Charlie could move when there were no human 
beings aboard it. Freed from the burden of protecting human flesh
from g-forces. the robot car moved e a demented flea.
Charlie landed on the street in front of her with a sharp hiss of
pneumatics, at the far end of a twenty-meter leap. It then began
noisily walking sideways, up and across the pavement.
"Stop walking sideways," Jane ordered it. "Open your doors." She
braced herself against the wall of the alcove, squat-lifted Alex onto
her unused and un-aching right shoulder, and made it down the stairs.
"Turn around," she puffed.
Charlie spun around with microprocessed precision, its pistoned wheel
spokes wriggling.
Jane heaved and shoved her brother into the passenger seat, closed
the door, and stepped back, panting. Her knees trembled so badlythats
ettootiredtowalk. 
"Turn around again!" she ordered. Charlie spun neatly in place, on
the damp and darkened street. Jane clambered shakily into the
driver's seat. "Go fast!" 
"Not until you're strapped in."
"All right, go at a conventional pace while I am strapping us in,"
Jane grated. "And stop using Jerry's verbal interface at me."
"I have to use Jerry's verbal interface when I'm out of range of the
Troupe's uplink and in conventional mode," the car said, rolling
daintily down the street.
Jane struggled to strap her unresisting brother into the vehide
harness. His blond head lolled like a daisy at the end of a stalk and
his floppy arms were like two bags of wax. It was just too cramped
inside the car, no use.
Jane lurched back into her own seat, frustrated. "Well, can you run
my interface if you segue into unconventional mode?" she said.
"UHMMMMMMMM . . ." the car temporized, for a full fifteen seconds. "I
think I can do that, if we pull over and I reboot."
"No, no!" Jane said. "God, nd Don't reboot! Just get US Out of town
on the route that you have in memory."
"Okay, Juanita, will do."
"Jesus," Jane said. She folded up the steering wheel to make more
room and succeeded in wedging her brother upright against the
passenger door. He coughed then, twice, blue drool appearing at his
lips.
Jane peeled her plastic gloves off, then whipped the rain hood from
her hair. Her hair was sweat-caked to her scalp
-she tugged at it with damp sweaty fingers. She'd been doing okay
until she'd had to manage heavy lifting.
She yanked the paper covers from off her trail boots, then peeled and
shrugged her way out of the paper suit, down to her shirt and shorts,
much to the bemusement of passing night-owl pedestrians on the
Avenida Guerrero. 
Jane methodically stuffed the boot covers, and the gloves, and the
paper suit, all into the rain hood. She drew the hood's drawstring
tight and repeatedly stomped the evidence into a small wad. She
eighty-sixed the saw blade
-incriminating traces of plastic on it now-and, just for luck, the
glue canister too. If they were mad enough about the break-in to hire
a good P1, then they might trace the glue batch. Jane hated to throw
away good hardware, but on mature consideration, it was a lot less
troublesome than getting clamped into a Mexican electronic bail cuff,
down at the juzgado. 

She detached all her tools from the webbing belt, carefully set thetools and the belt into the metal kit box in back. The car crossed before the Mercado Maclovio Herrera, heading towardthe old international bridge. She hoped nobody was in the mood totake any special notice of Charlie. On a dark night, the car couldpass for a standard smuggler's vehicle, a vehicle rather too commonto notice in towns either side of the border. Jane pulled into the darkest corner of a parking lot, beside agigantic, thriving supermarket tobacconist's. Even at midnight, ringsof Yankee addicts were steadily packingir lungs with smoke. Jane yanked another paper refugee jut from the
U.S. government carton, and in a sevenninute determined struggle, shecrammed Alex's arms and into the suit and zipped him up to the neck.She didn't ye any shoes for Alex. She should have thought about ~goddamned shoes.When they crossed the flood-swollen Rio Grande, Jane grabbed thecar's roll bar, stood up in her seat, and flung all the criminalevidence over the railing. Let them arrest her for littering. Ormaybe for illegal discharge into an aquifer.Jane pulled over at a U.S. Customs booth. An elderly customs officeremerged, with long snow-white hair, a walrus mustache, and a hand-carved mahogany cane. He tottered over to her car.When Jane saw how proudly and carefully the old gentleman had darnedand brushed his U.S. Customs jacket, she took an instant liking tohim. "Nice car," he drawled."Thank you, sir."The officer tapped one of Charlie's spring-mounted antennas with hiscane. "Ex-military stuff?""Yeah!" Jane told him brightly. "Actually it's a knock-off of anAmerican Special Forces all-terrain vehicle." Jane paused. "It's beenkind of modified." "Looks that way . . ." He nodded, moving spryly around it. Therewasn't room inside Charlie for any serious amount of contraband.Unlike the usual smuggler's vehicle, Charlie didn't have a trunk. Ithad a short flatbed, now empty, and the car's engine was grafted intothe axles, spokes, and hubs. Charlie basically resembled a doubleglass coffin mounted onto a wheeled spider."You're letting this car drive itself tonight, miss?"The old man had actually called her "miss." Jane couldn't recallanyone calling her "miss" since she'd turned twelve years old. Shewas charmed by the Customs man's stately anachronism. She smiled athim. "It's got a license," Jane said. "Want to see it?""That's okay," he grumbled. "What's with Junior here?""Big party in town," Jane said. "He overdid it tonight, and he'sjassed out. You know how it is with kids these days."The Customs officer looked at her with pity. "You didn't mean to tellme that, did you, miss? You meant to tell me the truth, and say thathe's sick, didn't you?"Jane felt her face go stiff.The old man frowned. "Miss, I can recognize this situation. God knowswe see it often enough, down here. Your friend there is sick, andhe's wasted too, on who-knows-what.... We don't allow that kind ofgoings-on here on American soil. . . . And there's some dang goodreasons why it's not allowed up here. . .Jane said nothing."I'm not telling you this just to hear myself chatter, y'know.""Look, Officer," Jane said. "We're American citizens. We're notcriminals." She held up her bare wrist. "If you want to turn us backfrom here, then we'll go back to Mexico. But if I had anything Ireally wanted to hide from you, then I wouldn't even stop here atall, would I? I wouldn't even take the road. This is an all-terrainvehicle, okay? I can ford the river anywhere I want, and be in San Antonio in two hours." The Customs officer tapped the toe of his polished shoe with hiscane. "If you want to lecture me, Officer, okay, that's fine. I'mlistening. I even agree with you. But get real."He stared briefly into her eyes, then looked aside and rubbed hismustache. "It floats too, huh?""Of course this car floats. It swims! I know it looks like solid steel, but that's all foamed metal there. Without the batteries, thewhole car only weighs ninety kilos. I can deadlift this car all bymyself!"Jane stopped. The old man seemed so crushed that she felt quite sorryfor him. '~Come on, Officer. I can't be telling you anything newhere, right? Haven't you ever caught one of these things before?""To tell you the truth, miss, we don't even bother catching 'emnowadays. Not cost-effective." He peeled off an adhesive sticker andattached it to Charlie's front roll bar. "Y'all take care now." He waved them on: Jane let the car drive. They were through Laredo and onto the highwayin short order. Even with the prospect of a ten-hour drive indarkness, Jane felt far too wired to sleep. She knew from experiencethat she was about to pull another all-nighter. She'd be up andjumping till 8:00 A.M., then grab maybe three hours' doze, and beback up and after it again, with nothing to show for it but asharpened temper. She'd never been much good at sleeping, and lifearound Jerry Mulcahey's people had only wound her up tighter.As the city lights of Laredo faded behind her, stars poured outoverhead. It was a clear spring night, a little mare's-tail cirrus onthe western horizon. She'd once heard Jerry say that it bothered himto ride a car in complete darkness. Jerry was thirty-two, and hecould remember when people did most of their own driving, and eventhe robots always left their headlights on. Jane, by contrast, foundthe darkness soothing. If there was anything really boring about theexperience of driving at night, it was that grim chore of gripping awheel with your own hands and staring stiff-necked for hours into anarrow cone of glare. In darkness you could see the open sky. The bigdark Texas sky, that great abyss.And you could hear. Except for the steady rush of wind, Charlie wasalmost silent; a faint whir of tough plastic tread lightly kissingthe highway, the frictionless skid of diamond axles. Jane had tapedor glued everything on the car that would rattle. Jane did not permither machines to rattle. Jane heard Alex gurgling as he breathed. She turned on a smallinterior light and checked her brother again. In the feeble amberglow he looked very bad. At his best, Alex was not an attractiveyoung man: gaunt, hollow-chested, pop-eyed, with a thin bladelikenose and clever narrow bird-claw hands. But she'd never seen him look this supremely awful. Alex had become a repulsive physical presence,a collapsed little goblin. His matted blond hair stood up in tuftsacross his skull, and he stank. Not just sweat reek-Jane was used topeople who stank of sweat and camp smoke. A light but definitechemical stench emanated from her brother's flesh. They'd beenmarinating him in narcotics.She touched his cheek. His skin was chilly and damp now, like theskin on a tapioca pudding. The paper refugee suit, still fresh fromthe carton but already badly wadded, made him look like a stormvictim in deep shock, someone freshly yanked from wreckage. The kindof person whose demand for your help and attention was utter, total,immediate-and probably more than you could bear.Jane turned on the radio, heard a great deal of en-cry p ted trafficfrom banks, navigation beacons, and hams, and turned it off again.Funny what had happened to the broadcast radio spectrum. She turnedon the car's music l~ox. It held every piece of music that had evermeant anything to her, including stuff from her early childhood that she'd never managed to erase. Even with sixteen-digit digitalprecision, everything she'd ever recorded took up only a few hundredmegabytes, the merest sliver in the cavernous memory of a modernmusic box. Jane played some Thai pop music, cheerful energetic bonging andstrumming. There'd been a time, back in design school, when Thai popmusic had meant a lot to her. When it seemed that a few dozen wild kids in Bangkok were the last people on earth who really knew what itmeant to have some honest fun. She'd never figured out why thislovely burst of creativity had happened in Bangkok. With AIDS stillmethodically eating its way into the vast human carcass of Asia,Bangkok certainly wasn't any happier than most other places.Apparently the late 2020s had just somehow been Bangkok's globalmoment to shine. It was genuinely happy music, bright, clever music,like a gift to the world. It felt so new and fresh, and she'dlistened to it and felt in her bones what it meant to be a woman of the 2020s, alive inside, and aware inside.It was 2031 now. The music was distant now, like a whiff of good ricewine at the bottom of an empty bottle. It still touched somethinginside her, but it didn't touch all of her. It didn't touch all thenew parts. 
ALEX WOKE IN wind and darkness. Rapid warbling music was creeping uphis shins. The music oozed like syrup into his skull and its beatgently pummeled him into full consciousness. With awareness camerecognition: Thai popgibberish. No other noise had quite that kind of high-pitchedparalyzing sweetness.Alex turned his head-with a painless squeaking dee p in the vertebraeof his neck-and he saw, without much real surprise, his sister.Barely lit by the tiny amber glow of a map light, Juanita sat perchedin the driver's seat. Her head was thrown back, her elbows werepropped on her bare, hairy knees, and she was munching government-issue granola from a paper bag.The sky above them was a great black colander of stars.Alex closed his eyes again and took a slow deep breath. His lungsfelt truly marvelous. Normally his lungs were two wadded tissues ofpain, two blood-soaked sponges, his life's two premiere burdens. Butnow they had somehow transmuted into two spotless clean-room bags,two crisp high-tech sacs of oiled wax paper, two glorious life-givingorgans. Alex had a savage cramp in his lower back, and his feet andhands were so chilled by the whipping night wind that they felt likethe feet and hands of a wax dummy, but that didn't matter. That wasbeside the point.He couldn't believe how wonderful it felt just to sit therebreathing.Even his nose was clear. His sinuses. His sinuses felt as if they'dbeen steam-cleaned. He could smell the wind. There was sage in it,the fervent bitter reek of a ten-thousand-year-old Texas desert gonemad with repeated heavy rains. He could even smell the sweet reek offederally subsidized dietary sucrose on Juanita's munching teeth.Everything smelled so lovely.Except for himself.Alex shifted in the seat and stretched. His spine popped in fourplaces, and blood began to tingle back into his numbed bare feet. Hecoughed. Dense liquid shifted tidally, deep within his chest. Hecoughed again, twice. Dregs of goo heaved and fizzed within histubercles. The sensation was truly bizarre, and remarkablyinteresting. The slime they'd pumped into him tasted pretty bad,oiling the back of his tongue with a thick bitter nastiness, but itseffect on his lungs and throat was ambrosial. He wiped happy tearsfrom his eyes with the back of his wrist.He was wearing a paper refugee suit. He'd never actually worn one before, but he'd certainly seen plenty of them. Paper suits were thebasic native garb of the planet's derelict population. A modernAmerican paper refugee suit, though utterly worthless and disposable,was a very high-tech creation. Alex could tell, just by stirringaround inside it, that the suit's design had absorbed the fullcreative intelligence of dozens of federal emergency-managementexperts. Whole man-years, and untold trillions of CAD-CAM cycles, hadvanished into the suit s design, from the microscopic scale of itsvapor-breathing little paper pores, up to the cunning humanergonomics of its accordioned shoulder seams. The paper suit waslight and airy, and though it flapped a little in the night wind, itkept him surprisingly warm. It worked far better than paper clothinghad any natural right to work.But, of course, it was still paper clothing, and it still didn't workall that well. "Nice fashion choice," Alex said. His larynx had gone slick with oil,and his voice was a garbled croon.Juanita leaned forward, turned up the interior lights, and shut offher music. "You're awake now, huh?"Alex nodded. Juanita touched another button at the dash. Fabric burst from a fat slot above the windshield and flung itself above their heads. Thefabric hissed, flopped, sealed itself, and became a roof of bubbledmembrane. A sunburned dome of stiff ribbed fabric that looked as dryand brown and tough as the shell of a desert tortoise.Juanita turned to him in the sudden bright windless silence insidethe car. "How d'you feel?""I've been worse," Alex whispered gluily, and grinned a little."Yeah. I feel pretty good.""I'm glad to hear that, Alex. 'Cause it's no picnic, where we'regoing."Alex tried to clear his throat. Blood-hot oil clung to his vocalcords. "Where are we?" "Highway 83, West Texas. We just passed Junction, headed toward SanAngelo. I'm taking you where I live."Juanita stared at him, as if expecting him to crumble to pieces onthe spot. "Actually I don't live anywhere, anymore. But I'm takingyou to the people I stay with.""Nice of you to ask permission, Janey."She said nothing.This was a different kind of silence from his sister. Not irritated silence. And not barely controlled fury. A deep, steely silence.Alex was nonplussed. He'd never been on good terms with his sister,but in the past he'd always been able to come in under her radar.He'd always been able to get at her. Even when worse came to worst,he could always successfully catch some piece of her in his teeth,and twist. "You shouldn't be doing this, you know," he said. "They were helpingme." Silence. "You can't stop me from going back there if I want to.""I don't think you're gonna want to go back," Juanitatold him. "That clinic won't be happy to see you again. Ihad to break you Out. I structure-hit the building and Iglue-gunned a guard.""You what?" "Ever seen a guy get glue-gunned? It's not pretty. Especially when hetakes it right in the face." Juanita knocked back a palmful ofgranola. "He'd have yelled, though, if I hadn't glued him," she said,munching deliberately. "I had to clear his nose with acetone, once Ihad him pinned. Otherwise he'd have smothered to death right there onthe spot." She swallowed, and laughed. "I'd bet good money he's stillstuck to the wall." 
"You're kidding, right?"She shook her head. "Look, you're sitting here, aren't you? How doyou think you got into this car? Did you think those hustlers werejust gonna let you go? When I broke into your clinic room, you wereupside down, naked, unconscious, and strapped to a metal rack.""Jesus," Alex said. He ran his hand through his hair and shivered.His hair was filthy-he was filthy all over, a mess of fever sweat andhuman grease. "You're telling me you broke me out of the clinic?Personally? Jesus, Janey, couldn't you have sued them or something?""I'm a busy woman now, Alex. I don't have time for lawsuits." Juanitapulled her feet Out of her trail boots, dropping the boots onto thefloorboard and crossing her sock-clad legs in the seat. She looked athim, her hazel eyes narrowing. "I guess there might be some troubleif you went back and informed against me to the local authorities."No way," he said."You wouldn't sue me or anything?""Well, I wouldn't rule out a lawsuit completely," Alex said, "notconsidering Dad's idea of family finances.But there's no way I need Mexican police to deal with my ownsister." He rubbed his greasy, stubbled chin. "At least, I never didbefore. What the hell has gotten into you?""Plenty. A lot." She nodded. "You'll see.""What did you do to your hair?"She laughed."You gave up dyeing it," he concluded. "That's its natural color,right? Brownish. Did you stop paying people to cut it?"He'd struck home. "Oh, that's really good, coming from you,Alejandro. Yeah, I look like a derelict, don't I? I look like adisplaced person! You know what you look like, handsome? You looklike you washed up five days after a hurricane surge. You look like agoddamn Cadaver." Her. voice rnse.i'I just dragged you back from thebrink of the grave! I'm dressed up for committing a felony, youmoron!" "You used to dress for the couture circuit, Janey.""Once," she said. "I did a few designs, one season. Boy, you neverforget.""Your hair's been red ever since I can remember." "Yeah? Well, maybe I needed red hair once. Back when I was intoidentity crisis.Juanita picked at her hair for a bit, then frowned. "Let's getsomething straight right now. I know you can go back over the borderif you want to. I know all about your scene, and I know all I wannaknow about your creep-ass little dope-smuggler friends. I can't stopyou. I don't even much want to stop you." She snorted. "It's justthat before you check back into the hospital-from-hell andelaborately croak yourself, I want to show you something. Okay? Iwant you to see exactly what's happened to me since the last time wemet.~~ Alex considered this proposal at length. Then he spoke up. "Oh yeah?""Yeah! This car is going to take us into camp, and I'm going to showyou the people that I live with. They're probably going to reallyhate your guts. They didn't much like me, either-not at iirst." Janeshrugged. "But they're alive inside, Alex. They have something to dothat's really worth doing. They're good people, they really are.They're the only people I've ever met that I really respect."Alex mulled over this bizarre news. "They're not religious, arethey?"She sighed. "No, they're not religious.""This is some kind of cult thing, though, isn't it? I can tell fromthe way you're talking. You're way too happy about this.""No, I'm not in a goddamned cult! Well, okay then- yes, I am. TheTroupe's a cult. Kind of. But I'm not brainwashed. That's not thestory."Alex parsed this statement and filed it away. "So what's the story, then?" "I'm in love." Juanita dug into her bag of granola. "So there's a bigdifference. Supposedly.""You're in love, Janey? Really?""Yeah. I really am.""You?" "Yes, goddamn it, of course me!""Okay, okay, sorry." Alex spread his hands. "It's coming clear to menow. I'm starting to get it. New boyfriend doesn't like red hair?""I just stopped doing red hair. A year ago. It didn't fit anymore.""So what does boyfriend like? Besides you, presumably.""Boyfriend likes really big tornadoes."Alex sank into his seat. "His people are called the Storm Troupe. We hack h~eavy weather. Andthat's where I'm taking you now."Alex gazed out to his left. Dawn was smearing the horizon. Theeastern stars were bleaching out, and lumps of dark poisonous graygreen-cedar and juniper brush- were emerging from roadside darkness.Alex looked back at his sister. "You're serious about this?" "Yep! Been hacking storms quite some time now." She offered him herpaper bag. "Have some granola."Alex took the bag, dipped into it, and ate. He was hungry, and he hadno prejudice against government-issue chow. It had the completerecommended dietary allowances and the stuff was so bland that it hadnever irritated any of his various allergies. "So that's really whatyou're doing, huh? You chase thunderstorms for a living these days?""Oh, not for a living," she said. She reached down and clicked offthe map light, then stretched, briskly tapping her fingernailsagainst the fabric roof. She wore a short-sleeved shirt of undyedcotton, and Alex noted with vague alarm that her freckled arms werelithe with muscle. "That's for TV crews, or labcoat types. With us,it doesn't pay. That's the cool thing about it. If you're in theTroupe, you just do storms.""Damn, Janey!""I like doing storms. I like it a whole lot. I feel like that's whatI'm for!" Juanita laughed, long and high-pitched and twitchy. Alexhad never heard her laugh like that before. It sounded like the kindof laugh you had to learn from someone else."Does Papa know about this?""Papa knows. Papa can sue me. You can sue me too, little brother. Ifyou boys don't like how I'm living, then you can both kiss my ass!"He grinned. "Damn, Janey.""I took a big risk to do this for you," she told him. "So I just wantyou to know"-she placed her hand against the side of his head andlooked into his eyes-"I'm not doing this for you because I thinkyou're cute. You're not cute,Alex. And if you screw things up between me and my Troupe, then I'mfinished with you, once and for all.""I never asked you to do any of this!""I know you didn't ask me, but nevertheless, if you mess with me andJerry, then I'm gonna break both your legs and leave you at the sideof the road!" Alex found it hard to take this wild threat seriously, though she wasclearly very sincere. It was the old story. As far as Alex figuredit, all the trouble he'd had with his sister in the past was entirelyher own doing. She'd always been the one barging into his room tobend his arms, break his toys, and bark out orders. Sooner or laterall their encounters ended with him prying her fingers from histhroat. He, on the other hand, almost never tried to interfere in the nearhysteria that Juanita called her daily life. Just watching his sistergo at life, repeatedly cracking brick walls with her head, made himfeel tired.. He'd always allowed her to caterwaul her way to hell inany wayshe pleased. 
Now she seemed to think that she was going to run his life, sinceMama was long dead, and Papa on the ropes. She'd soon be disabused ofthat notion. "Take it easy," he advised her. "Your love affair, or whatever it isthat you've got happening now, is strictly your own lookout. I gotnothing against this Jerry character." He chuckled. "Hell, I pityhim.~~ "Thanks a lot. His name's Jerry Mulcahey. Doctor . . . Gerald . . .Mulcahey."He'd never seen a look like the look on Juanita's face as she recited that name. It was like a cross between a schoolgirl's crush and theultravampish look of a bad actress on a Mexican soap opera. Whateverit was that had bitten her, it had bitten her really bad. "That'sfine, Janey," he said cautiously. "I don't have any grudge againsthim, or any of your hick weirdo friends. Just as long as they don'ttry to step on my neck.""Well, they will step on you, Alex, and I'm asking you to put up withit. Not as a brotherly favor to me or anything-I wouldn't ask forthat-but just because it's interesting. Really interesting, okay? Andif you can manage to stay upright for a while, you'll learnsomething."Alex grunted. He gazed out the window again. Dawn was becomingimpressive. The Texas High Plains were bleak country by nature, 'butnature had packed up and left sometime back. The stuff growing by theside of the road looked very happy about this. They were passingkilometer after kilometer of crotch-high, tough-stemmed, olive-drabweeds with nasty little flower clusters of vivid chemical yellow. Notthe kind of hue one wanted in a flower somehow; not inviting otpretty. A color ort might expect from toxic waste or mustard gas.Out beyond the roadside flowers was the collapsed barbed-wire fencingof a dead cattle ranch, the long-deserted pastureland overrun withmesquite. They passed the long dawn shadows of a decapitated oilpump, with a half-dozen rust-streaked storage tanks for West Texascrude, a substance now vanished like the auk. The invisible tonnageof drill pipe was quietly rusting deep in the rocky flesh of theearth, invisible to any human eye, but nonetheless there for thegeological ages, a snapped-off rotting proboscis from a swattedgreenhouse-effect mosquito.Here and there along the highway dead windmills loomed, their taperedtin vanes shot to hell, their concrete cisterns cracked and dustempty above an aquifer leached to bare sandstone. . . . They'd suckedthe landscape dry, and abandoned their mechanical vampire teeth inplace, like the torn-off mandibles of a tick. .They'd mined the place of everything in it that could be sold on themarket; and then they'd given up. But after that, the greenhouserains had come. You could tell that the plant life here wasn't at allused to the kindness of rain. The plants weren't a bit better thanhumanity, really-just another ugly, nasty, acquisitive species, bornto suffer, and expecting little. . . . But the rain had come anyway.Now the Texas High Plains were glutted with rain, and with rich,warm, carbonated air, all under a blazing greenhouse sun. It was Oz,for a cactus. Arcadia for mesquite. Every kind of evil weed thatstank, stabbed, or scratched was strutting its stuff like nouveauriche Texas hicks with an oil strike. Juanita touched her music box. "Can you knock it off with that Thai stuff?""What do you want me to play?""Something a little less incongruous. Some kind of-I dunno-crazedlonesome fiddle music. Cedar flutes and bone whistles. Listening tothat tropical stuff out here in the savage boonies makes me feel likeI'm losing my mmd.""Alex, you don't know anything about surviving out here. You needenough imagination to at least think you're somewhere else, or theplains can really get to you." She laughed. "You'll get the Long Stare, brother. Just ride off into that landscape and kill-and-eatjackrabbits till you die. Hey, you want to really go run?""Huh?" Juanita raised her voice. "Charlie?" "Yes, Juanita?" the car said.Alex was surprised. "Hey Janey, how come this car calls you Juanita?""Never mind. Long story." She gripped his shoulder. "You buckled intight? You feel up to this, right? Not carsick or anything?"Alex patted the smart cushions beneath him. "Not in a reactive seatlike this one. I'd have better luck getting carsick on a living-roomcouch." "Yeah, well, you're about to learn why they installed that kind ofseat in here." Juanita reached over, took the paper bag of granolafrom his lap, saw it was empty, then folded it neatly and stuck it inthe waistband of her denim shorts. "Charlie, do a local map."The car extruded a flexible tongue of white screen from the dash. Ahigh-definition map bloomed across the screen, topography at themeter scale. The map flashed briefly into a comparative series ofultradetailed satellite renditions. Juanita picked up the loose endof the map gently, examined the flickering imagery, then tapped thescreen with her finger. "Charlie, see this little hill?"
"Two thousand three hundred twelve meters north," the car replied,outlining the crest of the hill in orange."Charlie, take us there, fast."The car slowed and pulled over off the road shoulder, its prow towardthe hill. "Hold tight," Juanita said. Then the car leaped into the air.It got up speed in the first dozen meters, bounding, and then beganto clear the tops of mesquite trees. The car moved in a wild seriesof twists and hissing pounces; it was like being blown through theair by jets. Alex felt the seat's support cells repeatedly catchinghim, rippling like the flesh of a running animal."Look at those wheels now!" Juanita shouted gleefully, pointing."See, they're not even rolling. Hell, they're not even wheels. Thespokes are smart pistons. Feels like a hovercraft, right?"Alex nodded dumbly."We're hovering on computation. The big power drain in this car isn'tthe engine. It's the sensors and the circuits that keep us fromhitting stuff while we jump!" Juanita crowed with laughter. "Isn'tthis wild? God bless the military!"They cleared the last of the thick brush, and then the car slidunerringly up the cracked slope of the hill, its pistons barelyraising dust. Alex could tell from the eerie smoothness of the ridethat the car never skipped, and never skidded. The intelligent padsat the base of each spoke contacted the earth with a dainty andtentative touch. Then the pistons set themselves firmly and punchedup against the diamond hub, lifting the car in repeated, near-silent,precise staccato, faster than any human eye or ear could follow. Itwas like riding the back of a liquefied cheetah.At the hill's crest, the car stopped gently, as if settling into tar."Time for a stretch," Juanita announced, her hazel eyes glowing withdelight. She put down the fabric top, and a morning breeze swept thenow silent car. "Let's get out.""I got no shoes," Alex realized.Hell, I forgot. . . . Oh well." She jammed her sock-clad feet intoher unlaced trail boots, opened the door, and stepped out alone. Sheshook herself cheerfully and stretched through some kind ofcalisthenic routine, then gazed across the landscape with one handraised to her eyes, like a minor-league Sacagawea. To Alex, the viewfrom the hilltop was dismally unimpressive; clumps of mesquite andcedar, sparse leathery grasses, and three distant, squalid littlehills. The entire plain was ancient seafloor, flat as the bottom of adrained pond. The hills were tired lumps of limestone that, unlikethe rest of the landscape, had not quite collapsed yet. 
"This car must have cost you plenty," he said."No, it was cheap, considering! Government tries to keep 'em rare,though, because of the security threat." The vivid glare of dawn wasspilling all across the landscape, the orange-yellow sun too brightto look at. "You can order a car like this to follow a map top speed,to any locale. And they're damn hard to spot, when they jump topspeed cross-country, ignoring all the roads. With a big truck bombaboard, you can structure-hit like nobody's business." She smiledcheerfully. "They did that a lot in the Malaysian resettlement wars-this is a Malaysian attack vehicle. War surplus. Of course, they'rereal popular with border smugglers now." Juanita turned to face thewind and ran both hands through her hair. "I think they're stilltechnically illegal for civilians in the U.S. In some states,anyhow.""Texas?" "Heck no, anything's legal in Texas now. . . . Anyway, Texas Rangerslove these cars. Cheap, fast, ignores roads-what's not to like? Theonly real problem is the batteries. They're superconductives.""Superconductives sure aren't cheap.""No, and they wear Out fast too. But they're getting better. . . .They'll be everywhere someday, cars like this. Just for fun. A carjust for fun, isn't that a wild idea?" She strolled around the car,almost on tiptoe in her big but lightweight trail boots. "It's amega-tasty design. Don't you love the look of it?" She patted thejointed rim of the wheel. "It's that truly elegant design that peoplealways use when they make things to kill each other."She flipped open a small metal toolbox in back, behind the passengercompartment, and fished out a pair of sunglasses. The reactive lenseswent dark the moment she slipped them on. "Charlie is my flying hellspider. . . . A real beauty, isn't he . . . ? I love him, really. . .. Except for the goddamned hopeless military interface!" Juanitascowled beneath her shades. "I don't know what morons the Pentagongot to hack interface, but they should have been choked in theirbunkers!" "You own this car, Janey?""Sort of," she said. "No. Not really. I wouldn't want it registeredin my name.~~"Who does own it, then?""It's a Troupe car." She shut and locked the toolbox, then opened thedoor and slid back into the driver's seat. Alex hesitated. "You know, I kind of like this car too. I could gofor one of these." She smirked. "Right, I bet you could. . . . Charlie, let's go."The car picked its way gently down the slope.Alex examined a big tuft of torn-off yellow grass embedded in theright front wheel hub. "You'd think you'd get really airsick,considering the acrobatics, but it has a very smooth ride. Hell, I'vebeen in wheelchairs that were worse than this." "Yeah? Well, they designed it for very smooth. So you can sightautomatic weapons off the bumpers at full throttle. Charlie comesfrom commando stuff, death-by-darkness tiger teams and militarystructure hits and all that weird ugly crap. . . . But he sure hassome killer apps in civilian life." Juanita ducked as the edge of along mesquite branch whipped across the windshield, then she put upthe roof again, with a jab of her thumb. "The Troupe used to chasestorms in old dune buggies. But we were punching the core once on anF-4, and the hail wrapped real hard, and hailstones just beat 'em todeath, dented the hoods and roof all to hell. . . . But Charlie justlaughs at hailstones."
"You must be pretty big on hailstones.""Hailstones have been pretty big on me, Alex. In Oklahoma last springI got caught in the open. They leave welts on you as big as yourfist." "What's that mean, when you say 'punch the core'?" 
Juanita looked surprised. "Well, urn . . . it means you shoot the
vortex when you're running the drones."
"Oh," Alex said.
C H A P T E R 

7I7he vertebrae of tall transmission towers stenciled the horizon. 
Juanita's people had set up their tent complex a kilometer from the
highway, on a low limestone rise where they could keep a wary eye on
any passing traffic. Morning sunlight lit a confusion of round puffy
circus tents and the spiked cones of white tepees.
Juanita had doze doff in the journey's last two hours, mopping up
bits of twitchy, REM-riddled sleep like a starving woman dabbing
gravy from a plate. Now Alex watched with interest as his sister
became a different person. In the last few minutes, as they'd neared
the camp, she'd become alert, tight-mouthed, warriorly, nervous.
Juanita found a security cuff beneath the passenger seat, and she
carefully strapped it on her left wrist. The cuff had a readout watch
and a thick strap of tanned, hand-beaded, hand-stitched leather. Some
of the beads were missing, and the leather was worn and stained, and
from the look on Juanita's face as she strapped it on, Alex could see
that she felt a lot better to have it back on again.
Almost as an afterthought, she gave Alex a flimsy-looking plastic
cuff, with a cheap watch sporting an entirely useless array of
confusing little orange push buttons. "You'll wanna keep that on at
all times so you can pass in and out bf camp," she told him.
"Right. Great."
Juanita's car rolled uphill through a last stretch of sparse grass
and between a pair of electronic perimeter stakes.
"What's the drill?" Alex asked. 
"I have to go talk to Jerry now. About you."
"Oh good! Let's both go have a nice chat with Dr. Jerry.~~
Juanita glanced at him in nettled amazement. "Forget it! I've got to
think this through first, how to present the situation to him. . . .
Look, you see those people over there by the kitchen yurt?"
"By the what?"
"By that big round tent. The people with the tripod and the pulley."
"Yeah?" 
"Go over there and be nice to them. I'll come fetch you later when
I've cleared things." Juanita threw the car door open, jumped out,
and half trotted toward the center of 
camp.
"I got no shoes!" Alex yelped after her, but the wind whipped his
words away, and Juanita didn't look back.
Alex pondered his situation. "Hey car," he said at last. "Charlie."
"Yes, sir?" the car replied.
"Can you drive me over to that group of people?"
"I don't understand what you mean by the term group of people."
"I mean, twenty meters, urn, northwestish of here. Can you roll
across that distance? Slowly?"
"Yes, sir, I could perform that action, but not at your command. I
can't follow the orders of any passenger without a security ID."
"I see," Alex said. "She was right about your interface, Jack. You
are totally fucked."
Alex searched through the car, twisting around in his seat. There was
no sign of any object remotely shoelike. Then his eyes lit on the
cellular phone mounted on the dash. He plucked it up, hesitated over
the numeral "1," then speed-dialed "4" instead.
A woman answered. "Carol here." 
"Hi, Carol. Are you a Storm Trouper?"
"Yeah," the phone replied. "What's it to ya?" 

"Are you presently in a camp on a hillside somewhere off the side ofHighway 208 in West Texas?""Yeah. That's right." She laughed."Are you standing in the middle of a bunch of people who are tryingto haul some kind of animal carcass up on a tripod?""No, man, I'm in the garage yurt working repair on a fucked-uphighway maintenance hulk, but I know the people you're talking about,if that's any help.""Could you get one of them to bring me a pair of shoes? Size eight?""Who the hell are you?""My name's Alex Unger, I'm fresh in from Mexico and I need some shoesbefore I'm gonna leave this car."Carol paused. "Hold on a sec, Alex." She hung up.Alex settled back into the seat. After a moment's idle~. ness, hewhipped up the phone again and dialed Informaciôn in Matamoros. Heasked for the current alias of one of his favorite contacts and had no trouble getting through.He hung up hastily, though, in the midst of the ensuing.conversation,as a woman approached the car.The stranger, a black woman, had short black braids cinched withwire, over a broad, windburned, cheerful face. She looked aboutthirty-five. She wore a paper refugee suit that had been spewedthrough somebody's fulL color printer, with remarkable results.The woman handed Alex a pair of sandals through tlK~ open door. Thesandals were flat soles of thick dark green vinyl, with broad strapsof white elastic cloth freshly glued across the top of the foot."What are these?" Alex said. "They look like shower mules."She laughed. "You need a shower, kid. Put 'em on."Alex dropped the impromptu sandals on the ground and stuffed his feetinto them. They were two sizes too big, but they were more or lessthe proper shape of his feet and seemed unlikely to fall off. "That'snot bad for two minutes' w&rk, Carol.""Thanks a lot, dude. Since you and your sister are both richer thanGod, feel free to give me several thousand dollars." Carol looked himover skeptically. "Boy, you're all Jane said you were, and much, muchmore!" Alex let that one hang for a moment. "Juanita said I should stay withthose people over there until she came back.""Then that's what you'd better do, man. But do 'em a favor and staydownwind of 'em." Carol stepped back from the car. "And don't messwith our phones anymore, okay? Peter gets real nervous when amateursmess with our phones.""Nice to meet you," Alex said. Carol spared him a half wave as sheleft. Alex decamped from the car and stepped carefully across the WestTexas earth. The narrow-leafed prairie grass looked okay, but thesparse, pebbled ground was scattered about with a scary variety oftiny, wire-stemmed little weeds, all chockablock with burs and hooksand rash-raising venomous bristles.Alex minced carefully to the group at the tripod. They were busy.They had a velvet-horned buck up by its neck, at a pulley mounted atthe junction of three tall tepee poles. There were four of them: twomen in long-sleeved hunter's gear, and two hard-bitten women inbloodstained paper and trail boots. One of the men, the one withglasses, had an electric rifle over his back. They were all wearingTrouper cuffs."Qué pasa?" Alex said."We're butchering Bambi," the second man told him, grunting as hecinched off the end of the pulley rope.The hunters had already cut the entrails from the animal and dumpedthem somewhere along the trail. Alexclosely examined the animal's lean, swaying, eviscerated carcass.The taller woman drew a bowie knife of ice-pale ceramic and steppedup to her work. She took each of the buck's dangling rear legs in hand, then slashed out some meaty, ill-smelling gland from within thehocks. She tossed the bloody glands aside, wiped and holstered herbowie knife, and fetched up a smaller knife about the length of herthumb. The man with the rifle gazed at Alex indifferently. "Just get in .tocamp?""Yeah. My name's Alex. Juanita's my sister."Who's Juanita?" the rifleman said. The second man silently jerkedhis thumb toward the camp's central yurt. "Oh," the riflemanrealized. "You mean Janey.""You'll have to forgive Rick here," the taller woman said. "Rickprograms." She circled the deer's neck with a swift shallow cut, thencarved straight down its throat to the chest and out at right anglesto the end of each foreleg. She was very deft about it. With the helpof the second woman, she began methodically shredding the hide downover the sleek naked meat. Alex shook one of the tripod poles. It seemed very sturdy. Thelacquer on the bamboo was one of those modem lacquers. "Are youplanning to eat this thing? I don't think I ever ate a wild animalbefore." "You'll eat the weirdest crap in Texas when Ellen Mae's around," saidthe second man. "Suck it up, Peter," said Ellen Mae spiritedly. "If you don't likereal food, stick to Purina Disaster Chow." She glanced at Alex."These mighty hunters don't appreciate me. Hand me that bone saw."Alex examined Ellen Mae's butcher tools on their bed of rawhide. He recognized the bone saw by its long, glacier-colored, fractal edge.He stooped and picked it up. It had a slight permanent bloodstainingin the ceramic, and a worn checkered grip, but its serrated teethwere every bit as sharp as freshly broken glass. It was a beautifultool, and one of the objects in the world one would least like to bestruck with. Alex made an experimental slash or two atthe air and was a bit surprised to see the others leap mm diately outof his reach. "Sorry," he said. "Mega-tasty item." He gripped the back of the bladecarefully and offered Ellen the handle.Ellen took it impatiently and began to saw the buck's legs oil at theknee joints. It took her about a minute flat to do all four of them.The second woman neatly stacked the severed limbs aside."Y'know, you don't look much like Jane at first, but I'm starting toget the resemblance," Peter told him;"Maybe," Alex told him. "Are you the Peter who does the phones aroundhere?" "Yeah, that's right," Peter said, pleased. "Peter Vierling. I hacktowers. Satellites, cellular coverage, the relays, that's all mylookout." "Good. You and me are gonna have to do some business."Peter looked at him with such open contempt that Alex was takenaback. "After lunch or whatever," Alex amended. "No big hurry, man.""You look like you need lunch, kid," said Rick the programmer. "Youneed some real meat on your bones." He patted his backpack. "Got youa special treat here. You can have Bambi's liver.""Great," Alex said. "Bambi's lats and pecs look pretty chewy. . . .Any of you guys ever try human meat?""What?" Peter said. "I had human meat last time I was in Matamoros," Alex said. "It'skind of fashionable now." "Cannibalism?" Rick said. Alex hesitated. He hadn't expected them to act so alarmed. "It wasn'tmy idea. It just sort of showed up during the meal.""I've heard of that stuff," Ellen Mae said slowly. "It's a Santeriathing.""Well, it's not like they bring you out a big human steak," Alexdemurred. "It comes out in this little pile of cubes. On a silver platter. Like fondue. It's a bad idea to eat the meat raw because ofthe, you know, infection risk. So everybody cooks it on these littleforks." They were silent for a long moment. The two women stopped theirmethodical skinning work. "What's itiste like?" Rick asked. "Well, not much, by the time you get through cooking ," Alex said."Everybody sort of dipped 'em in the fondueand took 'em out to cool on these little fork rests. And en we ate 'em one after another, and everybody looked-really solemn about it.""Did anybody say prayers?" said the second woman."I wouldn't call 'em prayers exactly. . . . It used to be likeSanteria, I guess, but now it's mostly kind of a dope-trade custom. Alot of those dope-trade guys got into organ smuggling and stuff afterthe legalizations, so there's lots of . . . you know . ."Spare parts around?" Peter suggested."This guy's bullshitting us," Rick concluded.Alex said nothing. His hosts in Matamoros had told him it was humanmeat, but they hadn't brought in any fresh bones or anything, so itcould have just as easily been rabbit. He didn't see much realdifference anyway, as long as you thought you were eating human meat. . "It's just a border thing," he said at last. "Una cosa de Iafrontera." "You really hang out with dope dealers?" Rick said."I don't care about dope," Alex said. "I'm into medical supplies."The four of them burst into laughter. For some reason this centralfact of his life seemed to strike them as hilarious. Alex concluded swiftly that he was dealing with mentally damaged hicks and wouldhave to adjust his behavior accordingly."Tell our friend Alex about the special tour of the camp," Rickurged."Oh yeah," Peter said. "Y'see, Alex, we get a lot of visitors.Especially in the peak storm season, during the spring. And we'vediscovered that the easiest way to get a good overview of Troupeoperations is to fly an ultralight over the camp.""An aircraft," Alex said. He glanced at Ellen and the other, shorterwoman, whose name he had still not The two women were deliberatelypaying a lot of attention to severing the animal's left shoulder."Yçah. We have two manned ultralights. Plus three powered parafoilchutes, but those are for experts. You interested?""Never tried that before," Alex said."The ultralight's got its own navigation," Peter said. "Just like acar! Only even safer, 'cause in midair there's no traffic and notricky road conditions. You don't have to lift a finger.""Does it go really fast?" Alex said."No, no, not at all.""How about high, then? Does it go really high?""No, it won't take you very high, either.""Then it doesn't sound very interesting," Alex said. He pointed atthe carcass. "What's with that weird discoloration on the shoulder blade? Are they always like that?""Well," Rick broke in, "it can go pretty damned high, but you'd haveto take oxygen with you.""You people got oxygen?" Alex said.Rick and Peter exchanged glances. "Sure.""Can I skip the tour, and just have some oxygen?""Wait till you see the machine," Peter hedged. "You're gonna wantthis bad, after you see the machine."Alex followed the pair of them across camp, stepping cautiously onthe treacherous earth. His occasional curious glances up from hisendangered feet across camp didn't much impress him. There was amonkish air about the place, a kind of military desiccation. Four skeletal towers dominated the camp, with microwave dishes, racks ofspiny aerials, wrist-thick wiring and cable guides, and whirling cup-shaped wind gauges. Three large, dirty buses were parked side by sideunder a flat paper sunshade, along with three robot bikes. A tractorwith a dozer blade and a spiraled posthole digger had planted a setof tall water-distillation stacks, which were dripping into afauceted plastic reservoir.The three of them stopped by the curtained door of another yurt. Twomonster winches flanked the entrance, with thin woven cable on motor-driven drums. Alex followed the two men inside, past a thick hanging door curtain.The yurts were quilted paper, stretched over crisscrossed expandablelattices of lacquered wood. The diamond-shaped ends of these latticeswere neatly and solidly lashed together, and eight of the lattices,curved into a broad ring, formed the yurt's round wall. Sixteenslender bent poles of lacquered bamboo ran from the tops of thelattices up to a central ring, bracing the white paper top of thedome. The paper walls flapped a bit in the constant wind, but the interiorhad a surprisingly rich and pearly glow, and with its carpetedflooring, the yurt seemed remarkably snug and solid and permanent.Alex realized that the place was a -minor aircraft hangar, all kitesand keels and foamed-metal spars and great bundles of reinforcedsailcloth. A Trouper was at work in the place, sitting cross-leggedon a cushion amid a confusion of specialized hand tools. He bad agaunt weather-beaten face and an almost bald, freckled dome ofskull,with a few lank strands of colorless shoulder-length hair. He woreblack cotton leotards and had a blackened lump of metal on a rawhidethong around his neck."How's it goin', Buzzard?" Peter said.Buzzard looked up from his rapt examination of a flexing cabledjoint. "Who's the geek?""Alex Unger," Alex said. He stepped forward across the blissfullycarpeted yurt flooring and jammed Out his hand."Boswell Harvey," said Buzzard, surprised, dropping his evisceratedbit of machinery as he reached up for Alex's hand. "I hack, uh . . .I hack ornithopters.""Buzz, we need to boot the ultralight," Rick said."Well, Amethyst is down," Buzzard said."Beryl will do," Peter said."Oh," Buzzard said. "Oh, okay." Alex saw dawning comprehension spreadacross Buzzard's hooded eyes. "I can boot her from here, off thestation." He stalked across the yurt and dropped into a crouch over acabled laptop on the floor. He flipped it open, stared at the resulton the flat screen, and pecked at the keyboard.Peter and Riak took Alex outside to a nearby section of anchoredsunshade. The paper shelter, up on bamboo poling, had its back to thewind and was firmly pitoned to the limestone earth. The ultralightsbeneath the shelter, both of them missing their wings, were heavilystaked down with cabling. Just in case of sudden wind bursts,presumably.Rick checked a set of input jacks on the motor housing while Peterindustriously began assembling the left wing."I know this wing doesn't look too great right now," Peter assuredAlex, "but when it inflates it gets very aerodynamic.""No problem," Alex muttered."And check this out for safety-diamond bolts and nuts on every spar!Man, I can remember when we didn't have any construction diamond. Iused to tower-monkey around Oklahoma working towers for TV stations,and we had to worry about, like, mechanical stress." Peter laughed."Sometimes using diamonds to build everyday stuff seems like somekind of cheat! But hell, here it is, man; if you got a resource likethat, you just gotta use it.""Yeah," Rick mused aloud, "a lot of the basic thrill went out of hardware design when diamond got really cheap.""Yeah," Alex offered, "I can remember my mom being pretty upset aboutthat development." He examined the ultralight. The wings seemedabsurdly long and thin, but as Peter tightened their struts with anut driver, they became convincingly tough and rigid. The littleaircraft had a big padded bicycle seat with foamed-metal stirrups.There was a foam-padded skeletal back and neck rest, with a sturdylap belt and shoulder harness. The motor and propeller were rear-mounted in a large plastic housing.A controlling joystick and a rollerball were set into a plastic ridgebetween the pilot's knees. "Where's the instrument panel?" Alex said."It's in the virching helmet," Peter said. "Do you do virtuality?""Sure. Doesn't everybody?""Well, it doesn't matter much, because you're not going to be flyingthis thing anyway. It's all controlled from the ground." With theease of long habit, Peter swabbed the interior band of the helmetwith rubbing alcohol, then scrubbed the faceplate inside and out."But take good care of this virching helmet, because it's worth twiceas much as the aircraft." "Twice, hell, three times," Rick said. "Let me db that, Peter." Hemethodically adjusted the virtuality helmet's interior webbing forAlex's narrow skull, then set and wiggled it onto Alex's head. Itfelt like having one's head firmly~ inserted into a lightweightplastic bowling ball. "Now see, if you want a naked-eyeball look, thefaceplate just hinges up like this. . . . And feel that com antennaback there? Don't snag that antenna on the left-hand spar there,okay?""Right," Alex said. Despite Peter's alcohol scrub, the interior ofthe helmet still smelled strongly of someone else's old excitedsweat. Alex began to settle into the mood. There was a momentum tothis situation that appealed to him. He'd always rather enjoyedhaving his head at the mercy of someone else's media system.With a resourcefulness that surprised himself, he rolled up the pantlegs of his paper suit to the knee and stuffed both his makeshiftsandals securely into the big baggy pa• per cuffs. Then he straddledthe seat, barefoot, and tried it on foi size. With a bit of stirrup-shifting and linchpin work, the seat was not too bad. "Where's myoxygen?"They insisted that he wouldn't really need any oxygen, but Alexcounterinsisted with such leaden, pigheaded emphasis that theyquickly gave in.Rick had to confer with Buzzard by belt phone to find the dust-covered oxygen tank. Then its mask had to be sterilized-purely amatter of routine, Peter assured him, they always sterilized anyequipment that might carry strep, flu, or TB. . . . Finally thechrome-yellow tank was strapped neatly behind the pilot's seat, itsaccordion tube draped over Alex's right shoulder, and the mask'selastic firmly snagged at the nape of his neck.Then they rolled him, snugly socketed within his plane, out of thepaper hangar. The plane bumped along easily on its little pipe-stçmundercarriage. After rolling the plane eighty meters, the twoTroupers faced the ultralight into the west wind.Rick turned the helmet on, and Alex was rewarded with a meaninglesspull-down menu of virtual instrumentation across the upper rim of hisfaceplate. Alex dinked around a bit with the rollerball and clickbutton. The system seemed to be functional.Five new Troupers now made their appearance, attracted by the fuss.They were three men, a woman, and, to Alex's surprise, a teenage boy.The boy hauled a hundred meters of winch cable out to the ultralight,and the towline was snapped to the aircraft's nose. Two new guyswedged a ten-meter bamboo bipod against the nose of the aircraft.Buzzard, lurking distantly at the door of his yurt, drew in the slackon the winches until the launch cable thrummed with tension. "Ready, Alex?" Rick shouted at the side of the helmet. 
"Right." Alex nodded. "Let's do it.""Just relax, it's gonna be fine! You'll enjoy this!"Alex flipped up his faceplate and glared at Rick. "Look, man, stoppersuading me. I'm here already, okay? You got me strapped down, Igot my oxygen. Launch the son of a bitch."Rick's face fell, and he stepped back. He strode out of the way ofthe wings, then pulled his belt phone and barked into it.The cable snapped to, the bipod jammed itself in the limestone earth,and the aircraft was instantly catapulted skyward.The drum reeled up with vicious, singing efficiency, and the aircraftclimbed as steeply as a roller coaster. The cable detached and fellearthward, and the engine kicked in, and Alex was in free flight.The aircraft veered aside to avoid the guy cable on one of the largertowers. It then methodically began vectoring upward, gaining heightin a clockwise spiral."How's it going, Alex?" Peter asked over headphones."Okay, I guess," Alex said. He saw the prairie below, sun-blastedstraw and patches of poi~onous green, the black strap of highway, alot of stunted cedars clustered at a nearby draw. In the tug of windhis white paper sleeves flapped like cheap toy flags. The metalstirrups bit at his bare soles.Deliberately, Alex swayed back and forth in his seat. The distantends of the ultralight's wings dipped in response, like the ends of aseesaw, but they soon righted themselves in a chip-aided loop offeedback. And the ground beneath him dwindled steadily.He was being gently juggled in midair by the hands of an invisiblegiant. He was lounging in a folding chair at the parapet of a twelve-story building. If he wanted to, he could pull the harness straploose, step out on a stirrup, lean out, and drop to earth as sweetand clean as a meteor. Death was near. Death was near. . Alex flipped up his faceplate and felt the dry wind strip the sweatfrom his cheeks. "Go higher, man!""You'll notice that we have six major yurts and four vehiclehangars," Peter told him. "Three of those towers are telecom, and wehave four smaller towers for weather instrumentation. The black gridwork over by the latrine tents is a big patch of solar arrays."Alex grunted. "Yeah, yeah.""We're running on solar now, but the wind generators run around theclock." "Huh "All those big white rods, staked out in a circle around the camp,are our perimeter posts. They're motion detectors, and they've gotsome security muscle built in; you're gonna want to be a littlecareful with those. We have a set of 'em staked out by the highwaytoo. Those big yellow panels are mosquito lures. They smell just likeskin does, but any mosquito that lands on those lures gets instantlyzapped."Alex flipped his faceplate back down. He rollerballed to the menubar, pulled down a section labeled telecom, and switched to cellular.Peter vanished into telephonic limbo in the midst of his tour-guidespiel.A handy phone menu rolled down with fifteen speed-
They were thoughtfully accompanied by11 12 13 14 15 Martha Madronich. Peter Vierling.Rick Sedletter. Ellen Mae Lankton. Boswell Harvey.Joanne Lessard. Jane Unger.This looked very much like the Storm Troupe's idea of a digitalpecking order. Alex was amazed to see that Juanita had somehow meeklysettled for being number fifteen.He clicked fifteen and got Juanita's voice mail, an I'mnot-in-right­now spiel. He hung up and clicked four."Carol here." "It's me again. I'm now flying over your camp."Carol laughed into his helmeted ears. "I know, man, word getsaround." "Carol, am I correct in assuming that this is some kind of hickhazing ritual? And pretty soon they're gonna tell me there's somekind of terrible software malf in this aircraft? And I'm gonna gothrough a whole bunch of, like, crazy barrel rolls and Immelmanns andsuch?" Carol was silent for a moment. "YoU don't miss much, for a guy yourage.""What do you think I should do? Should I act really macho about it?Or should I scream my head off over the radio channel and actcompletely panicked?""Well, personally, I screamed bloody murder and threw up inside thehelmet." "Macho it is, then. Thanks for the advice. Bye.""Alex, don't hang up!""Yeah?" "I think I'd better tell you this. . . . If you don't scream, andscream a whole lot, then they might just push the envelope on thatlittle bird until its wings tear off.""You sure have some interesting friends," Alex said. He hung up andswitched back to radio channel. support the generators. And it's useful for keeping track of goats,"Peter was droning."That's really remarkable," Alex assured him. He switched the catchon the oxygen mask and pressed the mask firmly over his mouth andnose. For a moment he thought he'd been gypped, that he'd get nothingfor his effort but the dry stink of plastic hose, but then the oxygenhit him. It spiked deep into his lungs and blossomed there, like asweet dense mat of cool blue fur. The paper walls of the camp dwindled beneath him as the aircraftcontinued its climb, spiraling up with the mathematical precision ofa bedspring. As pure oxygen flushed through him to the sharp redmarrow of his bones, Alex realized suddenly that he had found theideal method to experience the Texas High Plains. The horizon hadexpanded to fantastic, planetary, soul-stretching dimensions. Nothingcould touch him. At this height, the air at ground level showed its true character.Alex could witness the organic filth in the low-lying atmosphere,banding the horizon all around him. It was a sepia-tinted permanentstain, a natural smog of dirts and grits and pollens, of molds andstinks and throat-clogging organic spew. . . . By contrast, the highsweet air around him now, cool and thin and irresistible, was a bone-washing galactic ether. He felt as if it were blowing straightthrough his flesh. 
1 2 3  Jerry Mulcahey.Greg Foulks.Joe Brasseur.  
4 S  Carol Cooper.Ed Dunnebecke.  
6 7 8  Mickey Kiehl.Rudy Martinez.Sam Moncrieff.  
9  
10  

In the distance, half a dozen buzzards corkscrewed down a thermal in
pursuit of earthly carrion. 

dial numbers. names. 
Peter's voice buzzed in his ears. 
Alex tugged the mask from his face. "What?"
"You okay, man? You're not answering."
"No. I mean, yeah! No problem. It's beautiful up here! Go higher!"
"We seem to be having a little software trouble down here at base,
Alex." 
"Really?" Alex said in delight. "Hold on a sec.
He pressed the mask to his face, huffed hard at it three times. From
some lurking tarry mess deep within his tuberdes, blue goo suddenly
fizzed like a rack of sparklers. "Go!" he screamed. 

"Hit it, man, push the envelope!"
Peter fell silent. 
The wings wobbled, building up to a convulsion. Suddenly the craft
pitched over nose-first and headed straight toward the earth. The
descent lasted five heart-stopping, gut-gripping seconds. Blood left
his heart, sweat jetted instantly from every pore in his body, and he
felt a lethal chill grip his arms and legs.
Then the machine caught itself with a vicious huff of fabric and
swooped through the pit of a parabola. Alex's head snapped back
against the seat hard enough to see stars, and he felt his hands and
feet fill with blood from g-forces. Great gummy bubbles rose in his
chest. 
The plane soared trembling toward the zenith.
Alex jammed his trembling blood-sausage fingers against the mask and
gulped down fresh oxygen.
The plane was now flying upside down, piercing some timeless peak of
weightless nothingness. Alex, his head swimming within his helmet,
examined the enormous platonic sprawl of blue beneath his naked feet,
through eyes that were two watery congested slits. Pulling loose and
flinging himself into that limitless wonder would be worth not one,
but a dozen lives. 

JANE o~~m mi~ door flap of the command yurt. Inside the big tent,
pacing the carpet at the end of his thick fiber-optic leash, was
Jerry Mulcahey. Jerry's head was encased in the Troupe's top-of-the­line virching helmet, and both his hands were in stripe-knuckled data
gloves. Jerry was wearing paper, a refugee suit that had seen some
road wear. His right paper sleeve, and both his paper legs, were
covered in his pencil-scrawled mathematical notation.
As Jerry turned and paced back toward her, Jane glimpsed his bearded
face through the helmet's dark display plate, his abstracted eyes
stenciled with gently writhing white contour lines.
Jerry had ten-kilogram training weights strapped to each ankle, which
gave him a leaden, swinging tread. Jane had often seen him pace with
those weights, in marathon virching sessions, for hours on end. Every
other hour or so, Jerry Would suddenly stop, deliberately pull the
weights from his ankles, and then strap them onto both his hairy
wrists. 
Jane Velcroed~the yurt's doorway shut behind her, against the rising
gusts of dusty west wind. Then she waited, her arms folded, for her
presence to register on him, and for Jerry to surface from whatever
strange sea of cyberspace had tangled his attention.
At length Jerry's pacing slowed, and the karate chops and Balinese
hand gestures with the data gloves became a bit more perfunctory, and
finally he glided to a stop in front of her. He pulled the blank-
screened helmet off and set it on his hip and offered her a big
bearded smile. 

"We need to talk," Jane said.
Jerry nodded once, paused, then raised his shaggy blond brows in
inquiry.
Jane turned her head toward one of the two attached subyurts. "Are
Sam or Mickey in right now?"
"No. You can talk, Jane."
"Well, I went down to Mexico and I got Alex. He's here right now."
"That was quick," Jerry said. He seemed pleasantly surprised.
"Quick and dirty," Jane told him.
Jerry set his tethered helmet down on the carpet, crouched, and sat
heavily beside it. "Okay then, tell me. How dirty was it?"
Jane sat down beside him and lowered her voice. "Well, I structure-
hit the power to the clinic, then I broke into the place when it was
blacked out, and I found him with a flashlight, and I carried him out
on my back."
Jerry whistled. "Damn! You did all that? We've created a monster!"
"I know that was a really stupid thing to do, but at least it was
over in a hurry, and I didn't get caught, Jerry. I didn't get caught,
I got him Out, and I aced it!" She shivered, then looked into his
eyes. "Are you proud of me?"
"I guess," Jerry said. "Sure I am. I can't help it. Were there
witnesses?" 
"No. Nobody knows, besides you and me. And Carol and Greg, they know,
but they'll never tell. And Leo, of course."
Jerry frowned. "You didn't tell Leo about this little escapade, did
you?"
"No, no," Jane assured him. "I haven't been in contact with Leo since
he found Alex for me." She paused, watching his face carefully. "But
Leo's smart. I know Leo must have figured out what I was up to. I
could tell that much, just from the E-mail he wrote me."
"Well, don't figure out Leo anymore," Jerry said. "You don't know
Leo. And I don't want you to know Leo. And if you ever do get to know
Leo, you'll be very sorry that you did."
She knew it would annoy Jerry if she pushed, but she had to push
anyway. "I know you don't trust Leo, and neither do I. But you know,
he's been very helpful to us. It can't have been easy to track Alex.
Leo didn't have to do that for me, just because he's your brother.
But he did it anyway, and he never asked you or me for anything in
return." 
"My brother is a spook, and spooks are professionally affable," Jerry
said. "You've got what you needed now. Let Leo alone from now on.
Your brother's one thing, but my brother's another. It's bad enough
that your no-good brother's shown up in camp, but if my brother ever
arrives here, then all hell will break loose."
Jane smiled. "Y'know, Jerry, it does me a lot of good to hear you say
that. In a very sick, paradoxical way, of course."
Jerry grimaced and ran his hand over his sandy hair. He was losing
some of it in front, and the virching helmet had mashed the sides
down over his ears, like a little boy's hair. ''Family is a
nightmare.~~
"I'm with you," Jane said. She felt very close to him suddenly.
Family troubles were one of their great commonalities. It had been
good of him to agree to let her brother into the Troupe, when she'd
been so frank about Alex's shortcomings. She was sure that Jerry
would never have done such a thing for anyone else. She was being
stupid and reckless and troublesome, and Jerry was letting her do it,
as a kind of gift. Because he loved her.
"We gotta think this through, some," she told him. "The Troupe's not
gonna like this much. Alex is no star recruit, that's for sure. He
has no skills. And not much education. And he's an invalid." 
"How sick is he? Is he badly off?"
"Well, I've always thought Alex was nine tenths malingerer, at heart.
Dad's dropped thousands on him, but never pinned down what's wrong
with him. But I can guarantee he's not contagious." 

"That's something, at least."
"But he does get bored, and touchy, and then he gets these spells.
They're pretty bad, sometimes. But he's always been like that."
"No one stays with the Troupe who can't pull weight," Jerry said.
"I know that, but I don't think he'll stay for long. If he doesn't
run off by himself, then the Troupe'll throw him out after a while.
They're not patient people. And if there's a way to make trouble
here, Alex will probably find it." Jane paused. "He's not stupid."
Jerry silently drummed his fingers on his papered knee.
"I had to do this, because he's my little brother, and he was in
really bad trouble, and I felt sure he was going to die." Jane was
surprised at how much it hurt her to say that, at how much real pain
and sense of failure she felt at the thought of Alex dead. She'd
resented Alex for as long as she could remember, and in rescuing him,
she'd thought she was doing something tiresome and familial and
obligatory. But at the thought of Alex dead, she felt a slow burn of
deep unsuspected emotion, a tidal surge of murky grief and panic. She
wasn't being entirely frank with Jerry. Well, it wasn't exactly the
first time. 
She took a breath and composed herself. "I've just dragged Alex out
of the mess he was in, but I wish I could be responsible for him. But
I can't. I believe in the work here. You know I believe in the work,
and I do what I can to help. But now I've done something that really
doesn't help the Troupe. I just brought you a big load of trouble.
I'm sorry, sweetheart."
Jerry was silent.
"You're not angry with me, Jerry?"
"No, I'm not angry. It is a complication, and it's not helpful. But
it's simple, if you can let it be simple. As far as I'm concerned,
your brother is just like any other wannabe. He pulls his weight
here, or out he goes."
She said nothing.
"We throw people out of the Troupe every season. It's ugly, but it
happens. If it happens to your brother, you'll just have to accept
that. Can you do that for me?"
She nodded slowly. "I think so. .
That earned her one of Jerry's looks. "You'd better tell me that you
can do that, Jane. If you can't, then we'd all be better off if I
threw him out right now."
"All right," she said quickly. "I can do that, Jerry."
"Maybe Alex can measure up. We'll give Alex his chance." Jerry stood
and fetched up his helmet lefthanded, dangling it by one strap.
Jane stood too. "I'm not real hopeful, but maybe he can do it, Jerry.
If you'll back him a little."
Jerry nodded. He swung up his helmet at the end of its strap and
caught it in his other hand. "I'm glad you're back. You picked a good
time for it. We've got a show for your little brother. Tomorrow it's
gonna break loose along the dryline from here to Anadarko."
"Wonderful! At last!" Jane jumped to her feet. "Is it mega-heavy?"
"It's not the F-6, but the midlevel stream has serious potential.
We're gonna chase spikes."
"Oh that's great!" She laughed aloud.
A shadow appeared at the door of the yurt. It was Rudy Martinez, from
the garage. Rudy stood flatfooted, visibly sorry to interrupt. Jane
aimed her brightest smile at him, wanting him to know that life would
go on, the Troupe was moving, she'd aced another one.
Jerry nodded. "What's up, Rudy?"
Rudy cleared his throat. "Just tuning up for the chase . . . What's
with the malf in Charlie's right front hub?"
"Oh hell," Jane said. "Hell hell hell . . . Take me there, Rudy, we
can fix that, let's go see." 

ALEX WAS SrITING in a flaccid plastic bath with a trickling sponge on 

his head. He was in the back of the hangar yurt, where Peter and Rickhad dragged him, after pulling him, unconscious, from the seat of theultralight.Buzzard, severed from all things earthly by his virching helmet,crouched on his cushion in the yurt's center. He was methodicallyputting his remote-control ornithopters through their paces, inpreparation for the chase to come.Carol Cooper sat on the floor near the tub, methodically stitching aset of carpal tunnel wrist supports out of tanned deerskin."You think I could have some more water in here?" Alex said. "Maybelike a couple hundred cc's?"Carol snorted. "Dude, you're damn lucky to draw what you got. Mostdays we wash in, like, four tablespoons. When we wash, that is."A Trouper in bright yellow Disaster Relief paramedical gear enteredthe yurt, circled around the oblivious Buzzard, and handed Carol aplastic squeeze bottle and a paper pack of antiseptic gloves. "Ibrought the sheep dip."
"Thanks, Ed." Carol paused. "This is Alex.""Yo," Alex offered, sketching out a half salute. 
Ed gave Alex a long gaze of silent medical objectivity, then noddedonce and left. Alex plucked the sponge from his head and began to dab at hisarmpits. "I take it you folks aren't real big on bathroom privacy.""Ed's a medic," Carol told him. "He was checking you out hereearlier, when you were flat on your back and covered with barf."Carol compared her leather cutout to a pattern displayed on herlaptop screen, then deftly nicked away another sliver with her pencilknife. "There's never much privacy in camp life. If we Troupe typeswant to have sex or something, then we sneak into one of the tepeesand move some of the storage crap out of the way. Or if you want, youcan drive out way over the horizon and toss a blanket over somecactus." Carol put her leather stitchwork aside and hefted thesqueeze bottle. "You feel okay now, Alex?""Yeah. I guess so.""You're not gonna pass out again, or anything?""I didn't 'pass out,'" Alex said with dignity. "I just was reallygetting deeply into the experience, that's all."Carol let that ride. "This stuff is heavy-duty antiseptic. Kind of adelousing procedure. We have to do this to all the wannabes now, eversince a staph carrier showed up at camp once and gave us a bad set ofboils." "I've had staph boils." Alex nodded."Well, you never had staph like that stuff; it was like one of theplagues of Egypt.""I've had Guatemalan Staph IVa," Alex told her. "Never heard of theEgyptian strains before."Carol pondered him for a long moment, then shrugged and let it go."I've got to wash you down in this stuff. It's gonna sting a little.""Oh good!" Alex said, sitting up straighter. The flaccid camp bathswashed about in its thin metal frame, and the pathetic dribble ofwater in the bottom did its best to slosh. "Y'know, Carol, it'sreally good of you to take so much time for me."That's okay, man. It's not everybody I know who can throw up bluegoo." She paused. "I did mention that you have to clean out thehelmet later, right?""No, you didn't mention that. But I'm not real surprised to hear it."Carol tore the paper pack open and pulled out the thin plasticgloves. She drew them on. "This stuff stings some at first, but don'tpanic. You don't need to panic unless you get it in your eyes. It'spretty tough on mucous membranes.""Look, stop making excuses and just pour it in the goddamnedsponge," Alex said, holding it out.Carol soaked the sponge down with the squeeze bottle and emptied the rest into the tub. Alex began to lather himself up. The slitheringsoapy concoction wasn't bad at all-kind of a pleasantly revoltingmedical peppermint.Then it began to acid-etch its way into his skin.Alex gritted his teeth, his eyes watering, but deliberately made nosound. Carol watched him with an interesting mx of compassion and openpleasure in his suffering. "Blood will tell, huh, Alex? I swear toGod I saw your sister get exactly that same expression on her face. ... Close your eyes tight, and I'll do your back and scalp.The sharp gnawing edge of the antiseptic faded after a moment, inCarol's steady scrubbing and the blood-colored darkness of his ownclosed eyelids, and he began to feel merely as if he were beinglaundered and drastically overbleached. The antiseptic was doingsomething very peculiar to the caked sweat, sebum, and skin flakes atthe roots of his hair. Great metropolitan swarms of his nativebacteria were perishing in microscopic anguish.Carol allowed him another dribble of clean water then, enough torinse his hair and free his eyes. He was more than clean now. He wascleaner than he ever wanted to be again. He was scorched and smokingearth. Juanita chose this moment to storm headlong into the yurt, in boots,shorts, T-shirt, and a pair of big grimy work gloves, her square jawset with fury and her hair knotted in a kerchief. She had to pause inmidrush to skip her way over the fiber-optic trip wires of Buzzard'snetworked laptops. "Alex!" she yelled. "Are you all right?"He looked up mildly. "Did you bring a towel?""I heard those bastards stunted you until you fainted!" She stoppedshort at his tub. She glanced at Carol, then back at him. "Is thattrue?" "I like ultralights," he told her. "They're interesting. Get out ofmy bathroom."Carol burst into laughter. "He's okay, Jane.""Well, they were wrong to do that! If they'd hurt you, I'd have . . .well, you should have told them that you were never supposed to-"Juanita broke off short. "Hell! Never mind. We've got to chasestorms. We've got to calibrate." She threw the back of one work gloveto her sweating forehead. "Never mind . . . Alex, just for me,please, try and stay out of trouble for ten goddamn minutes, okay?""I'm only doing what you wanted me to do," Alex pointed Out,exasperated. "Can't we discuss this while you're having a bath?""Alex, don't drive me crazy!" Juanita stared at him. "I guess you'reokay after all, huh . . . ? Y'know, you don't look half so bad now!You're still kinda pale and airsick looking, but you do look a lotbetter clean." Stung, Alex switched to their childhood household Spanish. "Listen tome, all of the world will be more happy when you get away from me,and stay away from me!'Juanita looked startled. "What? Slow down." She shook her head. "Never mind, I get it. Okay, I'm leaving. Have it your way." Sheturned to Carol, frowning. "Peter and Rick! I'm gonna think upsomething special for Peter and Rick."Carol pursed her lips. "Be nice, Janey.""Yeah, right, sure." Juanita left the yurt.Alex waited until his sister was well out of earshot. "She sure hasn't changed much," he said. "How do you people put up with thatcrap?""Oh, for us, she's an asset," Carol assured him. "I like Jane! Ialways liked her. I liked her even when she first showed up in theflicking limo! I'm one of your sister's big partisans.""Huh," Alex said. "Well, that's your lookout, I guess." He rinsed hisarms, then gazed around the yurt. "How long does it take around herebefore us lowly wannabes are actually given real clothes?""Well, that's your lookout, dude. Maybe I could be persuaded to cut­
and-paste you a paper suit that would fit you a little better." Carol
shrugged. "But you'll have to pull some weight for me, in return.
What are you good at?"
"What do you mean?"
"I mean what do you hack?"
Alex thought it over. "Well, I'm pretty good at ordering weird stuff
with charge cards. If I can get an encrypted phone line, that is."
Carol's eyes narrowed. "Huh." 

THERE WASN'T MUCH wrong with Charlie. He had what was known in the
trade as a vegetable jam. A whip-thin length of West Texas briar had
managed to work its way into the fullerene grease around the right
front axle, and had been liquefied into a burned-caramel goo. Jane
fetched and carried for Greg and Rudy for a while, dismounting and
remounting Charlie, running diagnostics off the older Pursuit Vehicle
Baker, and trying to pamper the dinosaur-like alcohol-burning Dune
Buggy Able. As time ticked on, though, and the two experienced
mechanics worked their way into the finer tolerances, she could sense
their patience with her amateurism beginning to wear.
Jane took some time then to work on the maintenance hulk, one of the
dirt-stupid machines that the state of Texas used to keep up its
county roads. The Troupe sometimes made a little money working repair
on busted state robotry, and it kept them in a better air with
sheriff's deputies and the Texas Rangers. Out in West Texas, official
repair yards were very few and far between, and worse yet, for some
reason, the locals seemed to dote on structure-hitting highway
machinery. The hulk in their shop had
been put out of its misery by a fusillade of twenty-four shots from a
deer rifle. 
Jane followed the repair coaching of a state-government on-line
expert system for about an hour, extending Carol's weld-and-glue
work, till she hit some tangled wiring she didn't feel competent to
hack. 
She left the garage yurt. The wind was picking up, pulling a tangled
pennant of mesquite smoke from the vent hole in the dome of the
kitchen. With the approach of evening, the dry wind off the
continental uplands had ripped the morning's cumulus to desiccated
shreds-the dryline was pushing east.
Jane stepped into the command yurt-no sign of Jerry there-and stepped
into its left annex, the telecom office.
She picked up a spare laptop between the silent helmeted heads of
Mickey Kiehl, the Troupe's network sysadmin, and Sam Moncrieff,
Jerry's meteorological disciple. She logged into the Troupe's own
local net, then onto the federal SESAME Net.
First, a quick scan of the satellite view. It looked very tasty. Half
of Texas was swamped under a classic springtime gush of suffocating
damp stratus from the Gulf of Mexico.
She scrolled north. So far, 2031 did not seem to be shaping up as an
El Niño year, which was something of a rarity, lately. The high
midcontinental jet stream was more or less behaving itself, doing
some mildly odd and tortuous things at the rim of a cold front over
Iowa. 
Jane kicked out of satellite view and into SESAME's complex of
ground-level Doppler Lidars. She saw at once what Jerry had meant
about the midlevel local jet. Along the edge of the torpidly
encroaching damp there was a great flat ribbon of spew; down around
San Antonio it was chopping the advancing stratus into a mass of
roller bars. 
Mickey's voice emerged from the laptop's speaker. "What do you think,
Jane?" 
She glanced over at Mickey. Mickey sat on the carpet, his gloved
hands gently pawing the air, his head and face hidden in his personal
virching helmet. The side of his helmet was logo'd with the peeling 

emblem of a mocking-bird perched on a lightning bolt. It struck Jane
as a little odd that a guy sitting three steps away from her would
network a vocal signal over fiber-optic wiring, when he might have
just lifted his faceplate and started talking. But that was Mickey
all over. 
She clicked patiently through three levels of pull-downs into a
vocal-chat mode and leaned into the laptop's dorky little inset mike.
"Well, Mickey, I think if that midlevel local jet impacts the
dryline, we are gonna have vorticity to burn."
"Me too," Mickey offered tinnily. The miked acoustics inside his
helmet were exactly like the bottom of a barrel. "Are you chasing
tomorrow?" 
"Of course I'm chasing, man, I always do pursuit!"
"Well, SESAME has two dead relays south of Paducah, we're either
gonna have to route around 'em or get our own relay ~
"Hell," Jane said. "Stupid structure-hit vandals, I hate those
people!" She peered into her laptop screen. "Well, it looks to me
like it'll break well south of Paducah, though. What do you think,
Sam?" 
Sam Moncrieff lifted his faceplate and gazed at her in total
distraction. "Huh? Did you just say something?"
She paused. "Yeah, I did. Where's it gonna break?"
Sam circled his gloved hand three times in the air, stabbed out with
his forefinger. "Stonewall County. Boom!"
"Damn near right on top of us," Jane said.
Sam's freckled face was the picture of satisfaction. "Jerry doesn't
often miss." He shut his faceplate again with a snap.
A piece of groupware now took it upon itself to hunt Jane down on the
local Net and make its presence known. Jane was rather proud about
the groupware. It was the only groupware she'd ever installed-ever
seen, even-that actually worked, in the sense that it genuinely
helped a group manage rather than slowly driving its users bughouse.
Unfortunately the code was cryptware-it reencrypted itself every
goddamn month and demanded a payoff before unfreezing-but she kept up
the lease out of 
her own pocket, even though paying actual money for code was an
archaic pain in the ass.
Jane fed the groupware a couple of clicks. It opened up.
-It was Jerry's assignments. 

Calibration Tonight 2100 HQ Yurt 

11 Mar 2031 
ABLE: Greg Foulkes, Carol Cooper.
BAKER: Rudy Martinez, Sam Moncrieff.
cHAIuIE: Rick Sedletter, Jane Unger.
AFRODROME mucic: Bosweli Harvey. Martha
Madromch, Alex Unger.
RADAR Bus: Peter Vierling, Joanne Lessard.
NAVIGATION, SUPPORT JEEPS: Joe Brasseur. 

BACKUP TEAM: Ellen Mae Lankton, Ed Dunnebecke,
Jeff Lowe. 
N~rwomc coo~i~: Mickey Kiehl.
N0WCASrER: Jerry Mukahey. 

ABLE team departs 0630 to plant monitors along storm track and cover
the north flank. RADAR BUS departs 0700 to deploy kite relays and
cover Paducah hole around SESAME Net. BAKER departs 0800 to pursue
midmorning towers on left flank. AERODROME crew departs behind
dryline 0900 for chaff launch and ornithopter virching. CHARLIE
departs approx 1200 to pursue secondary propagation towers. 

So she was riding with Rick. How lovely. It looked as though Alex 

would be crammed into the back of the aerodrome truck. If Alex thought that stunting an ultralight was hairy, he'd learn otherwiseif Buzzard virched him in an ornithopter to punch the core.A tinny ringing came from Jane's laptop. In unison, Sam and Mickeyboth yanked the virching helmets from their heads. "Goddamn it!"Mickey said, massaging his ears. "I wish she'd stop doing that!"Sam looked rueful, climbing to his feet. "When Ellen Mae wants you toeat, you'd better devirch and go eat, and that's all there is to it.""I wish she'd use something else besides a chuckwagontriangle at fifty decibels, man."Jane smiled silently. It was good to be able to pull network weightfor good old Ellen Mae.C H A P T E R 
Alex climbed out of five levels of complex nightmare to find someone kicking his ribs. Hegazed up for a long, deeply dazed moment into the conical funnel of atepee, then focused on a tall, bony young woman looming at the sideof his sleeping bag."Hey, Medicine Boy," she said. She was sharp-nosed and bright-eyedand wearing a sleeveless multipocketed jacket and jeans."Yeah," Alex croaked. "Hi.""I'm Martha, remember? You're s'posed to be on our chase team. Getup, dude.""Right," he muttered. "Where's the sauna?" Martha smiled thinly. Sheswung out one long arm- her fingertips lacquered black. "The latrinesare over that way." Her arm swung again from the shoulder, like theneedle of a compass. "The truck's chargin' up by the solar rack. Yougot ten minutes." She left the tepee, leaving its flap hanging opento a malignant burst of morning glare.Alex sat up. He'd slept all night, naked inside a padded cloth bag ona big round floor mat of bubblepak. The bag itself was old and dustyand torn, and he was pretty sure that two people in a doubtful stateof cleanliness had spent a lot of time having sex in it. As for thebubblepak, it was clearly a stuff of deep unholy fascination forStorm Troupers. To judge by what he'd seen so far, the Troupe spenthalf their lives sprawling, sitting, and sleeping on carpet-coveredbubblepak, big blisterwads of condom-thin but rawhide-toughtranslucent inflated film. Bubblepak was one of the basic elements oftheir nomad's cosmos: Bubblepak, Paper & Sticks; Chips, Wire, & Data;Wind, Clouds, & Dirt. He'd just spent the night inside a rolled-uptepee cone of polymerized recycled newsprint, a thing of paper andsticks and string, like something a little kid might make with tapeand scissors. Alex clambered slowly to his feet. His knees shook, and his arms andback were sore; the bones of his spine felt like a stack of woodennapkin rings. He had a minor lump on his head that he didn't rememberreceiving.But his lungs felt good. His lungs felt very good, amazingly good. Hewas breathing. And that was all that mattered. For the first time inat least a year, he'd spent the entire night, deeply asleep, withouta coughing fit.Whatever vile substance he'd received in the lung enema, and whatevermisguided quack doctrine had guided the clinica staff, the treatmenthad nonetheless worked. The street rumors that had guided him weretrue: the sans of bitches in Nuevo Laredo actually had somethingworkable. He wasn't cured-he knew full well that he wasn't cured, he could sense the sullen reservoirs of baffled sickness lurking deep inhis bones-but he was much better. They had hacked him back, they hadpatched him up, they had propped him on his feet. And just in time tohave him stolen away.Alex laughed aloud. He had rallied; he was on a roll again. It wasvery welcome; but it was very strange.Alex had had spells of good health before. The longest had been asolid ten months when he was seventeen, when the whole texture of hislife had changed for a while, and he had even considered going toschool. But that little dream had broken like a bubble of blood, whenthe blight set its flshhooks into him again and reeled him backgasping into its own world of checkups, injections, biopsies, and thesickbed. His latest siege of illness had been the worst by far, the worstsince his infancy, really. At age eighteen months, he had almostcoughed to death. Alex didn't remember this experience, naturally,but his parents had made twenty-four-hour nursery videotapes duringthe crisis. Alex had later discovered those tapes and studied them atlength.In the harsh unsparing light of Texas morning, Alex stood naked byhis battered sleeping bag and examined himself, with a care andclarity that he'd avoided for a while.He was past thin: he was emaciated, a stick-puppet creature, alltendon and bone. He was close to gone, way too close. He'd beenneglectful, and careless.Careless-because he hadn't expected to emerge from those shadowsagain. Not really, not this time. The clinica had been his last hope,and to pursue it, he had cut all ties to his family, and his family'sagents. He'd gone underground with all the determination he couldmanage-so far underground that he didn't need eyes anymore, the kindof deep dark underground that was the functional equivalent of agrave. The hope was just an obligatory long shot. In reality, he'dbeen quietly killing off the last few weeks of lease on his worn-outcarcass, before the arrival of the final wrecking ball.But now it appeared he was going to live. Somehow, despite all odds,he'd gotten another lease extension. That wasn't very much to relyon, but it was all he'd ever had:and if it lasted awhile, then he could surely use the time.The Trouper camp might be good for him. The air of the High Plainswas thin and dry, cleaner somehow, and less of a burden to breathe.Alex felt particularly enthusiastic about the Troupe's oxygen tank.Most of the doctors of his experience had been a little doubtfulabout his habit of sneaking pure oxygen. But these Troupers weren'tdoctors; they were a pack of fanatical hicks, with a refreshing lackof any kind of propriety, and the oxygen had been lovely.Alex climbed quickly into his baggy paper suit and zipped it up tothe neck. Let the stick puppet disappear into his big paper puppetcostume. It wouldn't do for the Troupers to dwell on his medicalcondition. He couldn't describe them as bloodthirsty or sadisticpeople; they lacked that criminal, predatory air he'd so often seenin his determined slumming with black marketeers. But the Troupe didhave the stony gaze of people overused to death and killing: hunters,ranchers, butchers. Thrill freaks. Euthanasia enthusiasts.Alex put on his new shoes-the same makeshift plastic soles asyesterday, but trimmed closer to the shape of his foot, with aseamed-paper glued-on top, and a paper shoe tongue, and a series ofreinforced paper lace holes. If you didn't look hard, Carol Cooper'sconstructions were practically actual clothes.Alex tottered squinting across the camp and into the peaked latrinetent. The Troupe's lavatory features were simplicity itself:postholes augered about two meters down into the rocky subsoil, witha little framework seatless camp stool to squat on. After a prolongedstruggle, Alex rose and zipped his drop seat back in place, andlooked for the aerodrome truck. 
Buzzard and Martha's telepresence chase truck was a long white wide-bodied hardtop, spined all over with various species of antenna. Ithad a radar unit clamped to the roof, in a snow-white plastic dome.Buzzard was topping off the batteries with a trickle of current fromthe solar array; Martha Madronich had the back double doors open andwas stowing a collapsed ornithopter into an interior wall-mountedrack. "Got any water?" Alex said.Martha stepped out of the truck and handed Alex a plastic canteen anda paper cup. Martha limped a bit, and Alex noticed for the first timethat she had an artificial foot, a soft flesh-colored prosthetic withdainty little joints at the ankles and toes, in a black balletslipper.Alex poured, careful not to touch the paper cup to Martha's possiblyinfectious canteen rim, and he gulpedthirstily at the flat distilled water. "Not too much," she cautionedhim. He gave the canteen back and she handed him a dense wedge ofcornmeal-and-venison scrappie. "Breakfast." Alex munched themincemeat wedge of fried deer he art, deer liver, and dough while heslowly circled the truck. The truck had two bucket seats in front,with dangling earphones and eye goggles Velcroed to the fabric roof,and an impressive arsenal of radio, radar, microwave, and telephoneequipment bolted across the dash."Where do I ride?" he said. Martha pointed to a cubbyhole she'd cleared on the floor of thetruck, a burrowed nook amid a mass of packed equipment: bigdrawstring bags, a pair of plastic tool chests, three bundles ofstrapped-down spars."Oh yeah," Alex said, at length. "Luxury."Martha sniffed and ran both bony hands through her black-dyed hair."We'll nest you down in some bubblepak, you'll do okay. We don't doany rough cross-country stuff. Us telepresence types always stickclose to the highways.""You'll have to move when we pull that chaff bag," Buzzard warned.Alex grunted. Buzzard unrolled a flattened sheet of bubblepak, fit itto a palm-sized battery air pump, and inflated it with a quick harshhiss and crackle. Martha wadded the bubblepak helpfully into the hole, then climbedback out. Alex's cheap cuff emitted a loud hour chime. Martha glancedat her wrist, then back up at Alex again."Aren't you calibrated?" she said."Sorry, no." Alex lifted his wrist. "I couldn't figure out how to setthe clock on this thing. Anyhow, it's not a real Trouper cuff likeyours, it's just my sister's cheap wannabe Trouper cuff."Martha sighed in exasperation. "Use the clock in the laptop, then.Get in, man, time's a-wastin'." She and Buzzard went to the front ofthe vehicle and climbed in. The truck took off downhill, hit the highway, and headed north. Itdrove itself and was very quiet. Besides the thrum of tires onpavement, the loudest sound in the truckwas the crinkling of Alex's bubblepak and paper suit as he elbowedbags aside and settled in place."Hey, Medicine Boy!" Buzzard said suddenly. "You like thatultralight?""Loved it!" Alex assured him. "My life began when I met you and yourmachinery, Boswell."Buzzard snickered. "I knew you liked it, man."Alex spotted a gray laptop under Boswell's driver seat and snagged itout. He opened it up, and placed the clock readout in the corner: 12May, 2031, 9:11:46 4.M~ Then he started grepping at the hard disk."Hey Buzzard, you got the Library of Congress in here," he said."Nice machine!" "That's the 2015 Library of Congress," Buzzard said proudly. 
"Really?""Yeah, the one they released right after the data nationalizations,"Buzzard said. "The whole on-line works! The complete set, noencryptions, no abridgments! They tried to recopyright a lot of thatstuff, after the impeachments, y'know.""Yeah, like the government could get it back after doing that," Alexsniffed. "You'd be surprised how many losers just gave back that data!"Buzzard said darkly. "Sent federal cops out to raid the universitiesand stuff . . . Man, you'll get my Library of Congress when you prymy cold dead fingers off it!""I see you've got the 2029 release of the Library in here too."Yeah, I've got most of that one . . . there's some pretty good newstuff in that '29 release, but it's not like the classic 2015 set. Idunno, you can say what you want about the State of Emergency, butthe Regime had some pretty dang good ideas about public domain."Alex opened the 2015 Library, screened up a visualization of its datastacks, zipped down randomly through its cyberspace architecturethrough three orders of fractal magnitude, and punched at random intoa little cream-yellow cube. The thing unfolded like the usual origamitrick and he found himself gazing at a full-color digital replica ofan illuminated twelfth-century French manuscript.It was almost always like that when you screwed around with theLibrary. He'd hammered away in the Library on occasion, whenabsolutely sick of cable television, but the way he figured it, thebig heap of electric text was way overrated. There were derelictsaround who could fit all their material possessions in a paper bag,but they'd have a cheap laptop and some big chunk of the Library, andthey'd crouch under a culvert with it, and peck around on it and flyaround in it and read stuff and annotate it and hypertext it, andthen they'd come up with some pathetic, shattered, crank, loony,paranoid theory as to what the hell had happened to them and theirplanet. . . . It almost beat drugs for turning smart people intohuman wreckage.Alex looked up from the screen, bored. "What do you hack, Martha?""I hack kites," she told him. "Balloons, chaff, ultralights,parafoils . . . Chutes are my favorite, though. I like to structure-jump.""You do structure hits, Martha?"She whirled in her seat to glare at him. "Not structurehits, you moron! Structure jumps! I don't blow things up! Ijust climb up on top of things when the wind is right, and Ijump off them with a parachute.""Oh. I get it. Sorry." Alex thought about it. "What kinda thingsd'you jump off, Martha?""Bridges are pretty good," she said, relaxing a bit. "Mountains aregreat. Urban skyscrapers are mega-cool, but you have to worry about,like, private security guards and stupid city cops and moron straightcivilians and stuff. . . . The coolest, though, is really bigtransmission towers." "Yeah?" "Yeah, I like the really big antique ones without any constructiondiamond in 'em." She paused. "That's how I lost my foot.""Oh. Right. Okay." Alex nodded repeatedly. "How'd someone like youcome to join the Storm Troupe?"Martha shook her head. "I'll give you some advice, little dude. Don'tever ask people that."Fair enough. Alex retreated back into the laptop screen.They drove on. Every ten minutes Buzzard and Martha would stop totrade laconic updates with the Trouper base camp, or parley with Gregand Carol in the Dune Buggy Able, or send some side-of-the-mouthremark to Peter and Joanne in the Radar Bus. Their traffic was all acronyms and in-jokes and jargon. Every once in a while Martha wouldscrawl a quick note in grease pencil on the inside of the windshield. 
When Alex's cuff chimed again, she took it off his wrist, fixed itbrusquely, and handed it back.After a long hour on the road, Buzzard began methodically gnawing ata long strap of venison jerky. Martha started picking her waydaintily through a little drawstring bag of salted sunflower seeds,tongue-flicking her chewed-up seed hulls through the half-openpassenger window. Alex had a strong stomach-he could read text off alaptop in a moving vehicle without any trace of headache or motionsickness-but at the sight of this, he shut his laptop and his eyes,and tried to sleep a bit.He lounged half-awake for a while, then he sank with unexpected speedand impetus into a deep healing doze. A month's worth of narcotic-suppressed REM sleep suddenly rose from his bloodstream's sedimentsand seized control of his frontal lobes. Vast glittering tinselsheets of dream whipped and rippled past his inner eye, hyperactivevisions of light and air and speed and weightlessness. .Alex came to with a start and realized that the truck had stopped.He sat up slowly in his nest of bubblepak, then climbed out the openback double doors into simmering, eye-hurting, late-morning sunlight.The Troupers had left the highway and worked their way up a scarcelyused dirt track to the top of a low flat hill. The hill was one ofthe limestone rises typical of the region, a bush-spattered bump inthe landscape that had tried and failed to become a mesa.However, the hill had a respectably sized relay tower on it, with itsown concrete-embedded solar array and a small windowless cementblockhouse. Buzzard and Martha had parked, and they'd laced a sectionof blue fabric to the side of the truck's roof. They were stretchingthe fabric out on a pair of sticks to form a sunshade veranda."What's up?" Alex said.Buzzard had slung a long narrow-billed black cap over his baldingnoggin, the base of its bill resting on the outsized nose bridge of apair of insectile mirrorshades. "Well," he allowed, "we'll put up arelay kite on some co-ax, boot the packet relay, try and tap in onthis tower node . . . and then maybe launch a couple ornithopters.""You can go back to sleep if you want," Martha offered."No, that's okay," said Alex, rubbing his eyes. He envied Buzzard thesunglasses. They were a matter of survival out here.Alex shook the stiffness out of his back and gazed over thelandscape, shading his eyes right-handed. This had once been cattlecountry, of a sort; never thriving, but a place you could squeeze aliving from, if you owned enough of it. Alex could trace the still-lingering ligature scars of rusted and collapsed barbed-wire fencing,old scalpel-straight incisions across the greenly flourishing wildexpanses of bunchgrass and grama and needle grass and weed. Since themass evacuations and the livestock die-offs, much of the abandonedpastureland had grown up in mesquite.Here, however, the mesquite was mysteriously dead:brown and leafless and twisted, the narrow limbs peeling leprousrotten gray bark. Stranger yet, there was a broad path broken throughthe dead mesquite forest, a series of curved arcs like the stampingof a gigantic horseshoe. The dead forest was scarred with ragged,overlapping capital Cs, some of them half a kilometer across. Itlooked as if somebody had tried to set a robot bulldozer on thepasture, to knock the dead wood down, but the dozer bad suffered someweird variety of major software malf."How come all those mesquite trees are dead down there?" he said."Looks like herbicide." Martha shook her head. "No, dude. Drought.""What the beck kind of drought can kill a mesquite tree?""Look, dude. If it doesn't rain at all, for more than a year, theneverything dies. Mesquite, cactus, everything. Everything around thisplace died, fifteen years ago.""Heavy weather," Buzzard said somberly.Martha nodded. "It looks pretty good right now, but that's because all this grass and stuff came back from seed, and this county hasbeen getting a lot of rain lately. But man, that's why nobody canlive out here anymore. There's no water left underground, nothingleft in the aquifer, so whenever a drought hits, it hits bad. Youcan't water your stock, so the cattle die of thirst and you go broke,just like that." Martha snapped her fingers. "And you sure can'tfarm, 'cause there's no irrigation. Anyway, those new-style geneticcrops with the chlorophyll hack, they need a lot of steady water tokeep up those super-production rates.""I see," Alex said. He thought it over. "But there's plenty of grassgrowing wild Out there now. You could still make some money if youdrove cattle back and forth all over the rangeland, and didn't keep'em all confined in one ranch." Martha laughed. "Sure, dude. You could cattle-drive 'em up the oldChisolm Trail and slaughter 'em in Topeka, just like the old days, ifthey'd let you. You're not the first to think of that idea. Butthere's no free range anymore. The white man still owns all thisland, okay? The range war is over, and the Comanches lost big time.""But the land's not worth anything to anybody now," Alex said."It's still private property. There's still a little bit of money inthe mineral rights and oil rights. Sometimes biomass companies comeout and reap off the brush, and turn it to gasohol and feedstocks andstuff. It's all in state courts, all absentees and heirs and such,it's a god-awful mess.""We're trespassing right now," Buzzard announced.
"Legally speaking. That's why the Troupe's got its own lawyer.""Joe Brasseur's a pretty good guy, for a lawyer," Martha allowedtolerantly. "He's got friends in Austin.""Okay," Alex said. "I get it with the legal angle. So what happeneddown there with the bulldozer? Somebody trying to clear off thepastureland?"Martha and Buzzard traded glances, then burst into laughter."A bulldozer." Buzzard chuckled. "What a geek. A bulldozer. This kidis the tenderfoot dude wannabe geek of all time!" He clutched hisshaking ribs below his black cotton midriff.Martha pounded Buzzard's back with the flat of her hand. "Sorry," shesaid, controlling her smirk. "Boswell gets like this sometimes. . . .Alex, try and imagine a big wind, okay? A really, really, big wind.""You're not telling me that's a tornado track, are you?""Yeah, it is. About five years old."Alex stared at it. "I thought tornadoes Just flattened everything intheir path.""Yeah, an F-4 or F-5 will do that for sure, but that was a littleone, maybe F-2, tops. Those curves in the damage path, those are realtypical. They're called suction spots. A little vortex that's insidethe big vortex, but those suction spots always pack the most punch."Alex stared downhill at the broken path through the dead mesquite. Hecould understand it now: those overlapping C-shaped marks were thescars of some narrow spike of savage energy, a scythe embedded in therim of a bigger wheel, slashing through the trees again and again asthe funnel cycled forward. The twister had pulled dead trees apartand left their limbs as mangled, dangling debris, but the lethalsuction spot had splintereened everything it touched, snapping trunksoff at ground level, ripping roots up in dense shattered mats, andspewing branches aside as a wooden salad of chunks and matchsticks.He licked dry lips. "I get it. Very tasty . . . did you see thishappen? Did you chase this one, back then?"Martha shook her head. "We can't chase 'em all, dude. We're after thebig ones."Buzzard lifted his shades, wiped tears of laughter, and adjusted thecap on his sweating scalp. "The F-6," he said, sobering. "We want theF-6, Medicine Boy.""Are we gonna find an F-6 today?" Alex said."Not today," Buzzard said. "But if there's ever one around, Jerry can find it for us." He stepped into the back of the truck.Alex stared, meditatively, at the twister's scarred track. Marthaedged closer to him and lowered her voice. "You're not scared now,are you?""No, Martha," he said deliberately. "I'm not afraid."She believed him. "I could tell that about you, when they werestunting you in the ultralight. You're like your sister, only not so. .. I dunno ... not so flicking classy and perfect.""Not the words I'd have chosen," Alex told her."Well, about the F-6," Martha confided quickly, glancing over hershoulder. "The thing is-it's virtual. There's never been any actualF-6 tornado in the real-life atmosphere. The F-6 only lives inJerry's math simulations. But when the F-6 hits, the Troupe will bethere. And we'll document it!" Buzzard emerged from the truck with a long bundle of spars and clothand a thick spool of kite cable. He and Martha set to work. The kitewas made of a very unusual cloth: like watered blue silk with flatplastic laths half-melted into the fabric. The plastic had anembedded grid of hair-thin ribs of wiring.The two Troupers took such loving pride in assembling their box kitethat Alex felt quite touched. He felt a vague urge to photographthem, as if they were ethnic exotics doing some difficult folk dance.When they'd popped and snapped and wedged the box kite's variousspars and crossbars into place, the kite was two meters wide. Marthahad to steady it with both her hands-not because of its weight, whichwas negligible, but because of its eagerness to catch the wind.Buzzard unreeled its cable then. The kite string looked very muchlike old-fashioned cable-television line. Buzzard anchored the kite's double guy wires to a specialized collar on the end of the cable,then carefully screwed the cable's end jack onto a threaded knob onthe center of one hollow spar.The kite suddenly leaped into eerie life and shook itself like apanicked pterodactyl. "Yo!" Buzzard cried. "Didn't you check thediagnostics on this sucker?""It's a bad boot, man," Martha yelled, her slippers skidding in thedust as she fought the kite. "Power-down!"Buzzard jumped in the back of the truck and hit keys on the kite'slaptop. The kite went dead again."Smart cloth," Martha explained, shaking the kite with a mix offondness and annoyance. "Smart enough to screw up bad sometimes, butit's got lift potential right off the scale.""She's a good machine," Buzzard hedged, rebooting the kite andpatiently watching the start-u p progressing on the screen. "On agood day, you can float her off the thermal from a camp stove."The kite came to life again suddenly, thrumming like a drumhead."That's more like it," Martha said. She carried the kite into thelight prevailing breeze.Buzzard clamped the kite's spool to the rear bumper of the truck andwatched as Martha drew line out a dozen meters. "Go!" he yelled, andMartha threw the big kite with an overhand heave, and it leapedsilently into the sky.The kite paid out line on its spool, with deft little self-calculatedreelings and unreelings, until it caught a faster wind. It took onheight quickly then, with deliberate speed, arcing and rearcingupward, in a neat set of airborne half parabolas."Smart cloth," Alex said, impressed despite himself. "That is verysweet . . . how many megs does she carry?""Oh, just a couple hundred," Buzzard said modestly. "It doesn't takemuch to fly a kite."Martha then took it upon herself to hack the ceramic blockhouse ofthe tower. The tower's stolid, windowless blockhouse lookedpractically indestructible, an operational necessity in an areapractically abandoned. Alex had not seen any wasteland structurevandals yet: word was that the major gangs had been ruthlessly tracked and exterminated by hard-riding posses of Texas Rangers. He'dbeen assured, though, that there were still a few structure vandalsaround: looters, scavengers, burglars, hobbyist lunatics from out ofthe cities. They tended to travel in packs.Martha established that the relay tower belonged to a bank: it was anelectronic-funds-transfer cell. The fact that the cell was out in the middle of nowhere suggested that the funds under transference werenot entirely of a state-sanctioned variety. She then began thetedious but largely automated process of figuring out how to use itfor free. Almost all networks had some diplomatic recognition ofother networks, especially the public-service kinds. If you broughtup the proper sequence of requests, in the proper shelter of networkidentity, you could win a smaller or greater degree of free access.In the meantime, Buzzard took out his ornithopters. These werehollow-boned winged flying drones with clever foamed-metal joints anda hide of individual black plastic "feathers." The three omithopterscould easily pass for actual buzzards at a distance. Provided, thatis, that one failed to notice their thin extrudable antennas andtheir naked, stripped-metal heads, which were binocular video-camsspaced at the width of human eyes.It took a lot of computational power to manage the act of wingedflight. Like most buzzards, the omithopters spent much of their timepassively soaring, wings spread to glide, the algorithmic chips intheir wired bellies half shut down and merely sipping power. Onlywhen they hit real turbulence would the 'thopters begin to outflyactual birds by an order of magnitude. The machines looked frail anddainty, but they were hatchlings of a military technology.With the ease of long habit, Buzzard hooked the first ornithopter'sbreastbone to the notched end of a long throwing stick. He preenedthe machine's feathered wings back, then ran forward across thehilltop with the long hopping steps of a javelineer and flung themachine skyward with a two-handed over-the-shoulder whip of his arms.The ornithopter caught itself in midair with a distantly audiblewhuff of its wings, wheeled aside with dainty computationalprecision, and began to climb.Buzzard swaggered back to the rear of the truck, his throwing stickbalanced over his shoulders and his long floppy hands draped over it."Fetch me out another birdie," he told Alex.Alex rose from his seat on the bumper and dimbed into the truck. Hedetached the second ornithopter from its plastic wall clips andcarried it out. "What's that really big bundle next to the wheel well?" Alex said."That's the paraglider," Buzzard said. "We won't be using it today,but we like to carry it. In case we want to, you know, fly up therein actuality.""It's a manned paraglider?""Yeah." "Well, I want to fly it."Buzzard tucked the bundled ornithopter in the crook of his arm andpulled off his sunglasses. "Look, kid. You got to know somethingabout flying before you can ride one of those. That thing doesn'teven have a motor. It's an actual glider, and we have to tow it offthe back of the truck." "Well, I'm game. Let's go.""That's cute," Buzzard said, grinning at him with a flash of yellowteeth. "But your sister would get on my case. Because you would fallright out the sky, and be a bloody heap of roadkill."Alex considered this. "I want you to teach me, then, Boswell."Buzzard shrugged. "That's a big weight for me to pull, Medicine Boy.What's in it for me?" Alex frowned. "Well, what the hell do you want? I've got money.""Shit," Buzzard said, glancing uphill at Martha, still hard at workaccessing the tower. "Don't let Martha hear you say that. She hatesit when people try to pull money stuff inside the Troupe. Nobody ever 
offers us money who's not a geek wannabe or a goddamn tourist."
Buzzard 
stalked away deliberately, hooked his second bird to the throwing
stick, and flung it into the sky.
Alex waited for him to return and handed him the third flier from the 
truck. "Why does Martha have to know?" he persisted. "Can't we work
this out between us? I want to fly."
"'Cause she'd find out, man," Buzzard said, annoyed. "She's not
stupid! Janey used to throw money around, and you shoulda seen what
happened. First month Janey was here, she and Martha had it out in a
major mega-scrap."
Alex's eyes widened. "What?"
"It was a brawl, man! They went at it tooth and nail. Screamin',
punchin', knocking each other in the dirt-2- man, it was beautiful!"
Buzzard grinned, in happy reminiscence. "I never heard Janey scream
like that! Except when she and Jerry are gettin' it on after a chase,
that is." 
"Holy cow," Alex said slowly. He metabolized the information. "Who
won?" 
"Call it a draw," Buzzard judged. "If Martha had two real feet, she'd
have kicked Janey's ass fer sure. .
Martha's skinny but she's strong, man, she can do those climber's
chin-ups forever. But Janey's big and sturdy. And when she gets real
excited, she just goes nonlinear. She's a wild woman.~~
"Jerry let them fight like that?" Alex said.
"Jerry was out-of-camp at the time. Besides, he wasn't actually
fucking Janey back then; she was just hanging around the Troupe,
trying to buy popularity. She was being a pain in the ass. Kind of
like you're being right now." 

"I noticed Jerry took Jane a lot more seriously after that fight,
though," Buzzard mused. "Got her started on the weight training and
stuff . . . Kinda shaped Janey up, I guess. She acts better now. I
don't think Martha would want to tangle with her nowadays. But
Martha's sure not one of Janey's big fans."
Alex grunted.
Buzzard pointed into the back of the truck. "See those deck chairs?
Set 'em up under the sunshade."
Alex dragged the two collapsible deck chairs out of the truck. After
prolonged study of their slack fabric supports and swinging wooden
hinges, he managed to assemble them properly.
Buzzard launched his third ornithopter, then retreated into the cab
of the truck. He emerged with a tangle of goggles, headphones, his
laptop, and a pair of ribbed data gloves.
Buzzard then collapsed into his reclining chair, slipped on the
gloves, the goggles, and the phones. He propped his elbows on the
edge of the chair, extended his gloved fingers, wiggled the ends of
them, and vanished from human ken into hidden mysteries of aerial
telepresence.
Martha returned and collapsed sweating into the second deck chair.
"What a mega-hassle, man, banks are the most paranoid goddamn
networks in the universe. I hate banks, man." She shot Alex a narrow
glare of squinting anger. "I even hate outlaw banks."
"Did you get through?" Alex said, standing at her elbow.
"Yeah, I got through-I wouldn't be sitting here if I didn't get
through! But I didn't pull much real use out of that tower, so we're
gonna have to depend on that relay kite or we'll be droppin' packets
all over West Texas." She frowned. "Jerry's gonna give us shit when
he sees how we ran down the batteries." 
"You'd think they'd at least give you some of their solar power,"
Alex said. "It just goes to waste otherwise."
"Only a fuckin' bank would want to sell you sunshine," Martha said
bitterly.
Alex nodded, trying to please. "I can hear those racks humming from 

here." 
Martha sat up in her chair. "You hear humming?"
"Sure," Alex said.
"Real low? Electrical? Kind of a throbbing sound?"
"Well, yeah."
Martha reached out and poked the virch-blind Buzzard between the
ribs. Buzzard jumped as if gun-shot and angrily tore off his goggles
and phones.
"Hey, Buzz!" Martha said. "Medicine Boy hears The Hum!"

"Wow," Buzzard said. He got up from his chair. "Here, take over." Hehelped Martha out of the chair and into his own. Martha began wipingthe phones down with a little attached Velcro pack of antisePtictissues. Buzzard fetched up his shades and cap. "Let's get well away from thetruck, dude. C'mon with me."Alex followed Buzzard as they picked their way down the western slopeof the hill, down the dirt track. Off in the distance, a broken lineof squat grayish clouds was lurking on the horizon. The approachingviolent storm front, if that was indeed what it was, lookedsurprisingly unimpressive."Still hear the hum?" Buzzard said. "'SI0." "Well, listen."Alex strained his ears for half a silent minute. Insect chirps, afeeble rustle of wind, a few distant bird cries. "Maybe. A little.""Well, I hear it," Buzzard said, with satisfaction. "Most peoplecan't. Martha can't. But that's the Taos Hum." "What's that?" "Real low, kind of a wobbling sound . . . about thirty to eightyhertz. Twenty hertz is about as low as human hearing can go." Hespread his arms. "Sourceless, like it's all around you, all aroundthe horizon. Like an old-fashioned motor, or a fuel-burninggenerator. You can only hear it when it's really quiet.""I thought it was the solar rack.""Solar racks don't hum," Buzzard told him. "They hiss a little,sometimes. . . "Well, what is it?""They call it the Taos Hum, 'cause the first reports came out of NewMexico about fifty years ago," Buzzard said. "That was when the firstreal greenhouse effects starting kicking in. . . . Taos, Santa Fe,Albuquerque . .then parts of Florida. Y'know, Jerry was born in Los Alamos. That'swhere Jerry grew up. He can hear The Hum.""I still don't understand what it is, Boswell."
"Nobody knows," Buzzard said simply. "Jerry's got some theories. ButThe Hum doesn't show up on instruments. You can't pick up The Humwith any microphone."Alex scratched his stubbled chin. "How d'you know it's really real,then?" Buzzard shrugged. "What do you mean, 'real'? The Hum drives peoplenuts, sometimes. Is that real enough for ya? Maybe it's not a realsound. Maybe it's some disturbance inside the ear, some kind ofresonant power harmonic off the bottom of the ionosphere, orsomething.Some people can hear the northern lights, they say; they hear 'emsort of hiss and sparkle when the curtains move. There's noexplanation for that, either. There's a lot we don't understand aboutweather." Buzzard clutched the lump of blackened metal on the leatherthong around his neck. "A lot, man."They stared silently at the western horizon for a lQng moment. "I'msending the 'thopters out to scan those towers," Buzzard said."They're gonna break the cap by noontime.""You don't happen to have a spare pair of those shades, do you?" Alexsaid. "This glare is killing me." 
"Naw," Buzzard said, turning back toward the truck. "But I got somespare virching goggles. I can put you under 'em and patch you in tothe 'thopters. Let's go."They returned to the truck, where Martha was remotely wrapped inflight. Buzzard rummaged in a tool kit, then produced a pair ofcalipers. He measured the distance between the pupils of Alex'seyeballs, then loaded the parameters into a laptop. He pulled sparegoggles and phones from their dustproof plastic wrap and sterilizedthem with a swab. "Can't be too careful with virching equipment," heremarked. "People get pinkeye, swimmer~s ear . . . in the cityarcades, you can get head lice!""I got no chair," Alex pointed Out."Sit on some bubblepak."Alex fetched his bubblepak mat and sat on it, sweating. There was afaint hot wind from the southeast, and he couldn't call it damp,exactly, but something about it was suffocating him.A lanky mosquito had landed unnoticed on Martha's virch-blinded armand was filling its belly with blood. Alex thought of reaching overto swat it, then changed his mind. Martha probably wouldn't take aswat on the arm all that well. "Here ya go," Buzzard said, handing him the goggles. "Telepresence iskind of special, okay? You can get some real somatic disturbance,'cause there's no body sensation to go with the movement. Especiallysince you won't be controlling the flight. You'll just be ridingshotgun with me and Martha, kinda looking over our wings, right?""Right, I get it.""If you start getting virch-sick, just close your eyes tight till youfeel better. And for Christ's sake, don't puke on the equipment.""Right, I get it, no problem!" Alex said. He hadn't actually thrownup during his ultralight experience. On the contrary: he'd coughed upabout a pint of blue goo from the pit of his lungs, then passed outfrom oxygen hyperventilation. He thought it was wiser not to mentionthis. If they thought it was merely vomit, so much the better.Alex slipped the goggles on and stared at two tiny televisionscreens, a thumb's width from the surface of his eyes. They wereinput-free and cybernetic blue, and the display had seen some harduse; the left one had a light pepper sprinkling of dead black pixels.He felt sweat beading on his goggle-smothered eyelids."Ready?" came Buzzard's voice from the distant limbo of the realworld. "I'm gonna leave the earphones off awhile so we can talkeasier. "Yeah, okay.""Remember, this is going to be a little disorienting.""Would you just shut up and do it, man? You people kill me!"White light snapped onto his face. He was halfway up the sky, andflying.Alex immediately lost his balance, pitched over backward, and thunkedthe back of his head onto the hard plastic of the truck's rear tire.Eyes wide, he squirmed on his back with his shoulders and heels andflung out both his arms to embrace the drifting sky. He felt both hisarms fall to the bubblepak with distant thuds, like severed butcher'smeat. He was now soaring gut-first through space. The ground feltbeautifully solid beneath his back, as if the whole weight of theplanet was behind him and shoving. The outline of distant cloudsshimmered slightly, a hallucinatory perceptual crawl. Computationaleffects; when he looked very closely, he could see tiny dandruffflakes of pixel sweeping in swift little avalanches over the variantsin color and light intensity."Wow," he muttered. "This is it. Mega, mega heavy . .Instinctively, he tried to move his head and gaze around himself.There was no tracking inside the goggles. The scene before him stayedrock steady, welded to his face. He was nothing but eyeball, a numbedcarcass of amputated everything. He was body-free. 
He heard the squeak of the lawn chair as Buzzard settled into his ownrig. "You're on Jesse now," Buzzard said. "I'll switch you ontoKelly."The scene blinked off and on again, flinging him electronically frommachine to machine, like a soundless hammer blow between the eyes."We're gonna climb now," Buzzard announced. The machine beganflapping soundlessly, with slow wrenching dips in the imagery."We want to get up to the cap," Buzzard said. "That's where theaction is right now.""Gimme those headphones," Alex demanded, stretching out one arm."I'll put 'em over just one ear."Buzzard handed him the headphone rig and Alex adjusted it by feel.The earphones had a little attached mouth mike, a foam blob on a bentplastic stick. Under his fumbling blind fingers, Alex's head feltunexpectedly huge and ungainly. His head felt like somebody else'shead, like a big throw pillow upholstered in scalp.With his ears secured beneath the pads of the earphones, Alexsuddenly felt The Hum again, buzzing and tickling at the edge of hisperception. The Hum was flowing right through him, some creepyrumbling transaction between the rim of outer space and planetarymagma currents deep below. He strained his ears-but the harder hetried to hear The Hum, the less there was to perceive. Alex decidedthat it was safer not to believe in The Hum. He pulled the pad offhis left ear. No more Hum. Good. Then he began to hear the keening wind of the heights. "We gotourselves a storm situation," Buzzard announced, with satisfaction."What we got, is two air masses m a scrap. You listening, Alex?""Yeah." "That line of cloud dead ahead, that's the cutting edge of some damphot air off the Gulf. It's wedging up a front of hot dry air comingoff New Mexico. That dry air aloft- we're coming into that right now-that's the cap. Right now it's suckin' steam off the tops of thosecumulus towers and strippin' 'em off flat."Alex understood this. He was gazing down across the tops of clouds,approaching them unsteadily on flapping digital wings. The climbing,bubbling sides of the heap were the normal cauliflower lumps, but theflattened tops of the towers looked truly extraordinary: greatrippling plazas of turbulent vapor that were being simultaneouslyboiled and beaten. The drone fought for more height for a while, then veered in a longpanorama across the growing squall line. "See how ripped up it looks,way up here?""Yeah." "That cap is working hard. It'll push all that wet air back today,west to east. But to work like that is costing it energy, and it'scooling it off some. When it cools, it gets patchy and breaks up. Seethat downdraft there? That big clear hole?""I see the hole, man.""You learn to stay away from big clear holes. You can lose a lot ofheight in a hurry that way. . . ." The drone skirted the cavernousblue downdraft, at a respectful distance. "When these towersunderneath us build up enough to erode through the cap and soar upright past us, then it's gonna get loud around here."The drone scudded suddenly into a cloud bank. The goggles swathingAlex's eyes went as white and blank as a hospital bandage. "Gotta dosome hygrometer readings inside this tower," Buzzard said. "We'll putKelly on automatic and switch over to Lena . . . whoops!""The flying I like," Alex told him. "It's that switching that bugsme." "Get used to it." Buzzard chuckled. "We're not really up thereanyhow, dude."The machine called Lena had already worked its way past the line ofcloud, into the hotter, drier air behind the advancing squalls. Seenfrom the rear, the cloud front seemed much darker, more tormented, sullen. Alex suddenly saw a darting needle of aerial lighting piercethrough four great mounds of vapor, dying instantly with the muffledglow of a distant bomb burst.Thunder hammered at his right ear, under the earphone.Martha's voice suddenly sounded, out of the same ear. "Are you onLena?" "Yeah!" Alex and Buzzard answered simultaneously."Your packets are getting patchy, man, I'm gonna have to step youdown a level." "Okay," Buzzard said. The screens clamped to Alex's face suddenlywent perceptibly grainier, the cascading pixels slowing andcongealing into little blocks of jagginess. "Ugh," Alex said."Laws of physics, man," Buzzard told him. "The bandwidth can onlyhandle so much." Now, belatedly, Alex's clear left ear-the one outside the headphones-heard a sudden muffled rumble of faraway thunder. He was hearing instereo. His ears were ten kilometers apart. At the thought of this,Alex felt the first rippling, existential spasm of virch-sickness."We're running instruments off these 'thopters too, so we gotta cutback on screen clarity sometimes," said Buzzard. "Anyway, most of thebest cloud data is the stuff a human eye can't see.""Can you see us from up here?" Alex asked. "Can you see where ourbodies are, can you see where we're parked?""We're way ahead of the squall line," Buzzard told him, bored. "Now,over there south, lost in the heat haze-that's where the base camp is. I could see the camp right now, if Ihad good telescopics on Lena. I did, too, once- but that 'thoptercaught a stroke of lightning, and fried every chip it had . . . agoddamn shame.""Where do you get that kind of equipment?" Alex said."Military surplus, mostly . . . depends on who you know."Alex suddenly felt his brain becoming radically overstuffed. He torehis goggles off. Exposed to the world's sudden air and glare, hispupils and retinas shrank in pain, as if ice-picked.Alcx sat up on his bubblepak and wiped tears and puddled sweat fromthe hollows of his eyes. He looked at the two Troupers, a-sprawl ontheir lounge chairs and indescribably busy. Buzzard was gentlyflapping his fingertips. Martha was groping at empty air like ademented conjurer.They were completely helpless. With a rock or a stick, he could haveeasily beaten them both to death. A sudden surge of deep uneasetouched Alex: not fear, not nausea either, but a queer, primitive,transgressive feeling, like a superstition."I'm . . . I'm gonna stay out for a while," Alex said. "Good, make ussome lunch," said Buzzard. 
ALEX MANAGED THE lunch and ate his share of the rations too, but thenhe discovered that Buzzard and Martha wouldn't give him enough water.There simply wasn't watèr to spare. It took a while for this to fullyregister on Alex-that there just wasn't water, that water was a basic constraint forthe Troupe, something not subject to negotiation.The Troupe had an electric condenser back in camp that would pullwater vapor from the air onto a set of chilled coils. And they hadplastic distillery tarps too; you could chop up vegetation and strewit in a pit under the tarp, and the transparent tarp would get hot inthe sun and bake the sap out of the chopped-up grass and cactus, andthe tarp's underside would drip distilled water into a pot. But thetarps were clumsy and slow. And the condenser required a lot ofelectrical energy. And there just wasn't much energy to spare.The Troupe carried all the solar racks that they could manage, buteven the finest solar power was weak and feeble stuff. Even at highnoon, their modest patches of captured sunshine didn't generate much electricity. And sometimes the sun simply didn't shine.The Troupe also had wind generators-but sometimes the wind simplydidn't blow. The Troupe was starving for energy, thirsty for it, andwatchful of it. They were burdened by their arsenal of batteries.Cars. Trucks. Buses. Ornithopters. Computers. Radios.Instrumentation. Everything guzzling energy with the implacable greedof machines. The Troupe was always running in the red on energy. Theywere always creeping humbly back to civilization to recharge atruckload of their batteries off some municipal grid.Energy you could beg or buy. But you couldn't hack your way aroundthe absolute need for water. You couldn't replace or compress water,or live on virtual water or simulated water. Water was very real andvery heavy, and a lot of trouble to make. Sometimes the Troupecaptured free rainwater, but even a rainy year in West Texas neverbrought very much rain. And even when they did catch rainwater, theycouldn't ship much water with them when they moved the camp, and theTroupe was always moving the camp, chasing the fronts.It was simple: the more you wanted to accomplish, the less you had todrink. Now Alex understood why Buzzard and Martha lay half-collapsed intheir sling chairs beneath their sunshade, the two of them torpid aslizards while their eyes and ears flew for them. Sweat was water too.Civilization had been killed in West Texas, killed as dead asArizona's Anasazi cliff-dweller Indians, because there just wasn'tenough water here, and no easy way to get water anymore.Alex stopped arguing and followed the lead of Buzzard and Martha bysteadily tucking scraps of venison jerky into his mouth. It kept hissaliva flowing. Sometimes he could forget the thirst for as long asten minutes. They'd promised him a few refreshing mouthfuls everyhalf hour or so. The wind from the east had died. The smart kite's wiring, once tautand angular, now hung in the sky in a listless swaying curve. Thewind had been smothered in a tense, gelatinous stillness, a deadlycalm that was baking greased sweat from his flesh. The rumbles ofdistant western thunder were louder and more insistent, as ifsomething just over the horizon were being clumsily demolished, butthe unnatural calm around the aerodrome truck seemed as still and solid as the smothering air in a bank vault.Alex squatted cross-legged on his bubblepak, mechanically chewing thecud of his venison jerky and wiping sweat back through his hair. Asthe heat and thirst and tension mounted, his paper suit was becomingunbearable. The suit's white, plasticized, bakery-bag sheen did help with theheat some. It was a clever suit, and it worked. But in the finalanalysis, it didn't really work very well. His spine was puddled withsweat, and his bare buttocks were adhering nastily to the drop seat.His shoulder blades were caught up short whenever he leaned forward.And the suit was by far the loudest garment he had ever worn. In thetense stillness, his every movement rustled, as if he were diggingelbow-deep through a paper-recycling bin.Alex stood up, peeled the suit's front zip down, pulled it down tohis waist, and crudely belted it around his midriff with its danglingwhite paper arms. He looked truly awful now, pallid, skeletal, heat-prickled, and sweaty, but the others wouldn't notice; they werevirch-blind and muttering steadily into their mikes.Alex left the sunshade and walked around the truck, sweat running inlittle rills down the backs of his knees. He found himself confronting an amazing western sky.Alex had seen violent weather before. He'd grown up in the soupy Gulfweather of Houston and had seen dozens of thunderstorms and Texas blue northers. At twelve, he'd weathered the fringes of a fairlysevere hurricane, from the family's Houston penthouse.But the monster he was witnessing now was a weather event of anotherorder. It was a thunderhead like a mountain range. It was piercing white, and dusky blue, and streaked here and there with half-hiddenmasses of evil greenish curds. It was endless and rambling andcolumnar and tall and growing explosively and visibly.And it was rolling toward him.A tower had broken the cap. It had broken it suddenly and totally,the way a firecracker might rupture a cheap tin can. Great roundedtorrents of vengeful superheated steam were thrusting themselves intothe upper air, like vast slow-motion fists. The dozens of risingcauliflower bubbles looked as hard and dense as white lumps ofmarble. And up at the top of their ascent-Alex had to crane his neckto see it-vapor was splashing at the bottom of the stratosphere.Alex stood flat-footed in his plastic-and-paper shoes, watching thethunderstorm swell before his eyes. The uprushing tower had a roundeddome at its very top, a swelling blister of vapor as big as a town,and it was visibly trying to break its way through that secondbarrier, into the high upper atmosphere. It was heaving hard at thebarrier, and amazingly, it was being hammered back. The tower wasbeing crushed flat and smashed aside, squashed into long flattenedfeathers of ice. As the storm's top thickened and spread to block thesunlight, the great curdled uprushing walls of the tower, far beneathit, fell into a dreadful gloom.It was a thunderstorm anvil. An anvil was floating in the middle ofthe blue Texas sky, black and top-heavy and terrible. Mere air had nobusiness trying to support such a behemoth.Lightning raced up the nimbus, bottom to top. First a thin, nervoussizzle of crazy brightness, and then, in the space of a heartbeat,one, two, three rapid massive channeled strokes of electrical hell,throwing fiery light into the greenish depths of the storm.Alex ducked back around the truck. The thunder came very hard.Buzzard tugged his goggles and earphones down, into an elastic messaround his neck. "Gettin' loud!" he said cheerfully."It's getting big," Alex said.Buzzard stood up, grinning. "There's a gust front comin' our way.Gonna kick up some bad dust around here. Gotta get the masks."Buzzard fetched three quilted mouth-and-nose masks from a stack ofthem in a carton in the truck. The paper masks were ribbed and poredand had plastic nose guards and elastic bands. Martha put her mask onand methodically wrapped her hair in a knotted kerchief. Buzzard shutthe doors and windows of the truck securely, checked the supports ofthe sunshade, and tightened the strap of his billed cap. Then he putall his gear on again, and lay in the chair, and twitched hisfingers.All around the hill, little birds began fluttering westward, poppingup and down out of the brush in a search for cover.The searing light of early afternoon suddenly lost its strength. Thespreading edge of the anvil had touched the sun. All the hotbrilliance leached out of the sky, and the world faded into eerieamber. Alex felt the cramp of a long squint easing from his eyelids. He puthis mask on, tightly. It was cheap paper, but it was a good mask-themalleable plastic brace shaped itself nicely to the bridge of hisnose. Breathing felt cleaner and easier already. If he'd knownbreathing masks were so easy to get, Alex would have demanded one along time ago. He would keep the mask handy from now on.Alex put his masked face around the corner of the truck. The stormwas transmuting itself into a squall line, tower after towerspringing up on the mountainous flanks of the first thunderhead.Worse yet, this whole vast curdled mass of storms was lurching intomotion, the mountainous prow of some unthinkably vast and powerfulbody of hot transparent wind. There was nothing on earth that couldstop it, nothing to interfere in the slightest. It would steam acrossthe grassy plains of Tornado Alley like a planetary juggernaut.But it would miss them. The aerodrome truck was parked out of rangeof the squall line, just past the southern rim of it. The Troupers had chosen their stand with skill. Alex walked into the open, for a better look. Off to the northwest, apatch of the squall's base had ruptured open. A dark skein ofrainfall was slowly drifting out of it. Distant shattered strokes oflightning pierced the sloping clouds.Alex watched the lightning display for a while, timing thethunderclaps and pausing periodically to swat mosquitoes. He'd neverhad such a fine naked-eye view of lightning before. Lightning wasreally interesting stuff:flickering, multibranched, very supple, and elaborately curved. Reallightning had almost nothing to do with the standard two-dimensionalcartoon image of a jagged lightning bolt. Real lightning looked a lotmore like some kind of nicely sophisticated video effect.Out on the western horizon, the grass and brush suddenly went crazy.It bent flat in a big spreading wave. Then, it whipped and wriggledfrantically in place. The grass seemed to be crushed and trampledunder some huge invisible stampede.A flying wall of dirt leaped up from the beaten earth, like the spewfrom a beaten carpet.Alex had never seen the like. He gaped in astonishment as the wall ofdirty wind rushed forward. It was moving across the landscape withunbelievable speed, the speed of a highway truck.It rocketed up the slope of the hill and slammed into him.It blew him right off his feet. Alex landed hard on his ass andtumbled through the spiky grass, in a freezing, flying torrent ofairborne trash and filth. A shotgun blast of grit spattered into bothhis eyes, and he was blinded. The wind roared.The gust front did its level best to strip his clothes off. It hadhis paper suit around his knees in an instant and was tearing hard athis shoes, all the while scourging him with little broken whips ofairborne pebble and weed. Alex yelled in pain and scrambled on handsand knees for the shelter of the truck. The truck was heaving back and forth on its axles. The fabric verandaflapped crazily, its vicious popping barely audible in the gustinghowl. Alex fought his way back inside the writhing, flapping paper suit,and he tunneled his grimy arms into its empty sleeves. His eyesgushed painful tears, and his bare ankles stung in the gust of dirtbeneath the truck. The wind was very cold, thin, and keening andalpine. Alex's fingers were white and trembling, and his teethchattered behind the mask. More filth was gusting steadily beneath the truck. The dirty windskirled harmlessly under the bottoms of the Troupers' sling chairs.Though Alex couldn't hear what they were saying, he could see theirjaws moving steadily below their paper masks. They were stilltalking, into the little bent sticks of their microphones.Alex trawled up his windswept virching gear as it danced and dangledviolently at the end of its wiring. He jammed his back against thelurching truck and clamped the earphones on."Feels nice and cool now, doesn't it?" Buzzard commented, into Alex'ssheltered ears. Buzzard's was voice mask-muffled and cut with microphone wind shrieks."Are you crazy?" Alex shouted. "That coulda killed us!""Only if it caught us in the open," Buzzard told him. "Hey, now we'recool." "Carol's got circulation!" Martha said."Already?" Buzzard said, alarmed. "It's gonna be a long day. . . .Bring Jesse in for a chaff run, then."The violence of the gust front faded quickly, in a series of windyspasms. It was followed by a slow chill breeze, with a heavy reek ofrain and ozone. Alex shivered, bunching his numbed fists into hispaper armpits.The insides of his virching goggles were full of wind blown grit.Alex took his mask off, spat onto the screens, and tried to wash them clean with his thumbs. Buzzard pulled his own goggles off and stood up. Something landedheavily on the stretched fabric of the veranda. Buzzard hopped to theedge of the veranda, jumped up, and snagged it: a landed ornithopter.Buzzard brushed dust from his leotards and looked at Alex with ungoggled eyes. "What the hell! Did you get caught in that gustfront?" "How do I clean these?" Alex said evasively, holding up the goggles.Buzzard handed him an antiseptic wipe. Then he opened the back of thetruck and ducked in. He reemerged with a duffel bag and slammed the doors. The bag wasfull of reels of iridescent tape. Buzzard picked a patch of yellowstickum from the end of one reel and pulled at the tape. A section ofshining ribbon tore loose in his fingers and fluttered in the breeze.He handed it to Alex. "Smart chaff." The chaff looked like old-fashioned videotape. Both ends of the tapewere neatly perforated. The strip of chaff was as wide as two fingersand as long as Alex's forearm. It was almost weightless, but itsedges were stiff enough to deal a nasty paper cut, if you weren'tcareful. It had a lump embossed in one end: a chip and a tiny flat battery.Buzzard screwed the axle of the chaff reel snug against theornithopter's breastbone. Then he fetched his throwing stick again,walked out into the wind, and launched the machine. It rocketedupward in the stiff breeze, wings spread. "We got a hundred stripsper reel," Buzzard said, returning. "We deploy 'em through thespike.""What good are they?" Alex said."Whaddya mean?" Buzzard said, wounded. "They measure temperature,humidity . . . and wind speed, 'cause you can track that chaff onradar in real time." 
"Any little updraft can carry chaff." Buzzard fetched up his virchingrig. "So chaff will stay with a spike till it ropes out. C'mon, virchup, dude, Greg 'n Carol have got circulation!"Alex sat on his bubblepak. He pulled the back of the mat up and overhis shoulders, like a blanket. The plastic bubbles of trapped air cutthe chill wind nicely. He might have been almost comfortable, if notfor the windblown filth clinging greasily to his sweat-stained face,neck, and chest. He put on his goggles.In an instant Alex was miles away, on the wings of Lena, confrontinga long white plateau of roiling cloud. Above the plateau, the greatcurling mountain of the thunderhead was shot through with aeriallightning.Martha's ornithopter dived below the base of the cloud. The bottom ofthe thunderhead was steadily venting great ragged patches of rain.But the southern edge of the cloud base was a long, trailing darkshelf, slightly curved, and free of any rain. Seen from below, thestorm was charcoal black veined with evil murky green, leaden, andpalpably ominous."How'd you get in place so fast?" Buzzard asked Martha.Martha's voice dropped crackling into the channel. "I caught themidlevel jet, man! It's like a goddamn escalator! Did you see thatIenticular slit up there? The jet's peeling the front of that towerlike a fuckin' onion!" Martha paused. "It's weird.""There aren't any normal ones anymore, Martha," Buzzard saidpatiently. "I keep tryin' to tell you that.""Well, we might get an F-3 out of it, tops," Martha diagnosed."That's no supercell. But man, it's plenty strange."Buzzard suddenly yelped in surprise. "Hell! I see what you mean aboutthat midlevel jet. . . . Damn, I just lost two strips of chaff.""Get your 'thopter's ass up here, man, that wall cloud is movin'."Martha's Okie drawl thickened as her excitement grew."What exactly are we looking at?" Alex asked her. 
"See that big drawdown at the base?" Martha toldhim. "Between the flankin' line and all that rain? Look close and youcan see it just now startin' to turn."Alex stared Into his goggles. As far as he could tell, the entirecloud was a mass of indistinguishable lumps. Then he realized that awhole area of the base-a couple dozen lumps, a cloudy sprawl the sizeof four, maybe five football fields-was beginning a slow waltz. Thelumps were being tugged down-powerfully wrenched and heaved down-into a broad bulging round ridge, well below the natural level of thecloud base. The lumps were black and ugly and sullen and looked veryunhappy about being forced to move. They kept struggling hard to riseinto the parent cloud again, and to maintain their shape, but theywere failing, and falling apart. Some pitiless unseen force wasstretching them into long circular striations, like gaseous taffy.Suddenly a new voice broke in, acid-etched with a distant cracklingof lightning static. "Carol in Alpha here! We got dust whirl, over!""Nowcaster here," came Jerry Mulcahey's calm voice. "Give me locationfix, over." Good old Dr. Jerry, Alex realized, had the advantage ofthe Storm Troupe's best antennas. He seemed to be hovering over thebattlefield like God's recording angel."Greg in Alpha here," came Greg Foulks. "How's the data channelholdin' up, Jerry, over?""Clear enough for now, over."Here's your coords, then." Greg sent them, in a digital screech. "Wegotta move, Jerry. That wall cloud's gonna wrap hard, and the truck'sgetting radar off a sheet of big-ass hail to northwest, over.""Then move behind the hook and get the array booted," Jerrycommanded. "Report in, Aerodrome. Where's the chaff, over?""Boswell in Aerodrome," Buzzard said, and though he was speaking froman arm's length away, his rerouted voice signal was unexpectedly thinand crispy. "I got Jesse loaded and moving in hard on the jet stream,and Kelly coming out to Aerodrome to load a second reel, over."
"Lena is right in position now, Jerry, should I strafe that dustwhirl for you, over?" said Martha."Beautiful, Martha," Jerry told her, his deep voice rich with praiseand satisfaction. "Let me bring you up on monitor. . . . Okay,Martha, go! Nowcaster out."Martha's voice, lost its static and settled again at the very edge ofAlex's t. "You with me, little dude?"
"Yeah." ­
"This is where it gets IIThe ornithopter fell out The wall cloud above them was mucn tmcKer:it didn't seem to be moving any faster. The 'thopter and Alexsuddenly noticed a messy puff of filth, way dowii at ground level.The cloud of dust didn't seem to be spin-fling much. Instead, thedust cloud was spewing. It was clumsily yanking up thin dry gouts ofocher-tinted soil and trying to fling them aside.Martha scanned the dust cloud, circling. Alex had never seen dirtbehave in such an odd and frantic fashion. The dirt kept trying hardto fall, or spin loose, or escape just any old way back to thenatural inertness of dirt, but it just couldn't manage the trick.Instead, whole smoky masses of the stuff would suddenly buckle andvanish utterly, as if they were being inhaled.Then water vapor began to condense, in the very midst of the drychurning filth, and for the first time Alex fully realized the realshape, and the terrible speed, of the whirlwind. The air was beingthrashed into visibility through sheer shock.The infant tornado had a strange ocher-amber tint, like a gush ofmagician's stage smoke running backward in an antique movie reel.Some weird phase change, somber and slow and deeply redolent ofmystery, was moving up the structure. Translucent bands of amberdamp, and ocher filth, reeled slowly up the spike, silhouetting itagainst the sky and earth. It was very narrow at the bottom, growingbroader and thicker with height. . . 
Martha swooped in hard beside the tornado, in a complex bankingfigure eight, and she gained a lot of very sudden altitude. Alexwinced with disorientation. Then he saw the top of the twister, deadahead-the spinning wall cloud, shoving thick vaporous roots slowlydownward toward the earth. The 'thopter dodged and leveled out, circling back. The twister'smiddle looked treacherously empty: a core of utter nothingness with agreat black wall melting down from above, and a bottleneck oftortured dirt rising up. But then the wall's funnel moved down verysuddenly, in four thick, churning, separate runnels of octopus ink,and it seized the little dust whirl and ate it, and the world wasfilled with a terrible sound. The twister's howling had crept up on Alex almost without his notice.But now, as the twister reached its full dark fury, it began to emita grotesque earthshaking drone. Even over the ornithopter's limitedmicrophones, it seemed a very rich and complex noise, grinding andrattling and keening, over a dreadful organ-pipe bass note, a noisethat crammed the ears, mechanical and organic and orchestral.The fmmel began to migrate. It grew steadily fatter, and it spunsteadily faster, and it rolled forward fitfully, across the earth.There was nothing much for it to hurt here, nothing but grass andbushes. Every bush it touched either disappeared or was knocked intotattered knots, but the tornado didn't seem to be damaging the grassmuch. It was casually tearing at the grass a bit, and leaving itflour-blanched with filth, but it wasn't drilling its way downthrough topsoil into the bedrock. It was just bellowing andscreeching and humming to itself, in a meditative, utterly demonicway, deliberately rubbing the narrow tip of itself through the grass,like a migrating mastodon hunting for stray peanuts.Martha was wheeling around the structure counterclockwise, keeping arespectful distance. On one pass, Alex caught a sudden glimpse ofPursuit Vehicle Alpha, sitting still behind the twister, shockinglyclose, shockingly tiny. It was only in glimpsing the Trou 's littlepursuit machine that Alex realized the scale of wl~t he waswitnessing: the bottom of the twister had grown as wide as a parkinglot. As it reached full speed and size the twister grew livelier. Itmarched confidently up the gentle slope of a hill, in a brisk, alertfashion, with its posture straight and its shoulders squared. As itmarched down the slore it put its whirling foot through the rustingwreckage o a barbed-wire fence. A dozen rotten cedar posts wereinstantly snapped off clean at the surface of the earth, tumblingthirty meters into the air in a final exultation of tangled rustywiring.The fence fell to earth again in a mangled yarn ball. The twistercrossed a road in a frantic blast of dust. Everything around Alex went silent and black. He thought thatMartha's drone had been smashed, that he'd lost contact; but then heremembered that the natural color of a dead virching screen was blue,not black. He was seeing blackness: black air. And he could hearBuzzard breathing hard over audio."You're gonna want to see this, dude," Buzzard told him. "I don't dothis every day. I'm gonna punch the core.""Where are we?" "We're on Jesse, and we're right above the spike. We're up in thewall cloud." "We can't fly around in here," Alex said. "It's pitch-dark!""Sure, man. But Greg and Carol have their array up, and the Radar Busis on-line. I just put ninety-seven chips of straff-hell! I meanstrips of chaff-down this spike! Jerry's running the camp monitorsflat out! We're gonna punch the core, dude! We're gonna go right downthis funnel, live, real time, flyin' on instruments! Ready?"Alex's heartbeat changed gears. "Yeah! Do it!""There's no light inside the core, either. It's almost always pitch­black inside a twister. But Jesse has a little night-light-red andinfrared. I dunno what we'll see, dude, but we'll see something.""Shut up and go!" Alex pressed the goggles against both eyes with theflats of his hands. His head flooded with maxed-out roaring. Eerie red light bloomedagainst his eyeballs. He was shearing down the monster's tightened,spinning throat. The 'thopter trembled violently, a dozen times asecond. Inside the twister's core, the wind was moving so fast thatits terrible speed was oddly unfelt and unseen, like the spin of theearth. Hell had a structure. It had a texture. The spinning inner walls werea blurry streaky gas, and a liquid rippling sheen, and a hard blackwobbling solid, all at once. Great bulging rhythmical waves andhollows of peristalsis were creeping up the funnel core, slow anddignified, like great black smoke rings in the throat of a deepthinker. The 'thopter jerked hard once, harder again, then lost all controland punched the wall. All sound ceased at once.The image froze, then disintegrated before Alex's eyes into a coloredtangle of blocky video trails.Then the image reintegrated and slammed back into real-time motion.They were outside the twister, flung free of it, tumbling through airwith all the grace of a flung brick.The 'thopter spread its wings and banked. Buzzard crowed aloud in thesudden silence. "We just blew both mikes," he said. "Pressure drop!"Alex stared into the screens pasted to his face. There was somethingvery wrong with what he was seeing. He felt his eyes beginning tocross, with a complex headachy pang behind the bridge of his nose."What's wrong?" he croaked."A little alignment problem," Buzzard admitted grudgingly. "Not half-bad for a core punch, though.""I can't look at this," Alex realized. "I'm seeing double, it hurts.""Shut one eye."No, I can't stand this!" Alex tore off the goggles.The veranda was sitting in full sunlight again. The thunderstormanvil had moved on to the northwest, leaving a trail of thin highcirrus clouds behind it, like a snail's slime track.Alex stood up, walked past Buzzard and Martha's inert legs, andlooked to the north. The entire squall line was receding rapidly,speeding off toward Oklahoma. Alex couldn't even see the tornadowhose guts he'd just witnessed. It was either blocked from line ofsight by nearer towers, or it was already over the horizon.Behind the storm line, the air was cool and blue and sweet. The skylooked balmy and clear and full of gentle naïveté, as if tornadoeswere all someone else's fault. Alex walked back under the veranda, plucked up an antiseptic tissue,and started smearing filthy grease from his face and neck. His chestand neck and arms were reddened with little clotted nicks and wind whips, as if he'd tried to stuff a house cat inside his paper suit.His eyes ached with dust and trapped sweat from the goggles. He wastired and dizzy and very thirsty, and his mouth tasted like gunmetal.But nothing was bleeding. The scratches weren't serious. He wasbreathing beautifully. And he was having a really good time.He sat down again and put on his virching rig.Martha was circling the twister, with difficulty. The twister's spinehad bent way off the vertical; its top was firmly embedded in themoving cloud base, but its tip was stubbornly dragging the earth, farto the rear. The forced stretching was visibly distressing it. Thetip was badly kinked inside its corona of flying filth, and thewobbling midsection was flinging off long petulant tatters of dirt."You had to punch the goddamn core, didn't you," Martha said."Yeah!" said Buzzard. "I taped almost four seconds right down thethroat!" "You blew both mikes and you screwed the optics on Jesse, man." 
Buzzard was pained. "Yeah, but there's no debris in that spike. Alittle dust, a little grass, it was real clean!""You pulled that dumb macho stunt just because you were late with thechaff!" "Don't fuckin' start with me, Madronich," Buzzard warned. "I punchedthe core and the 'thopter still flies, okay? I'm not asking you tofly Jesse now. You can start flappin' your lips when you punch a coreand come out in one piece.""Jerk," Martha muttered.Something very odd had happened to the earth in front of the twister.A huge patch of the ground was snow-white and visibly steaming. Itlooked volcanic. "What the hell is that?" Alex said. "That's hail," Martha said."Cold hail with ground fog off it," Buzzard said. "Watch this babysuck it up!"As the twister approached, streamers of icy fog buckled and writhed,caught up in torrents of suddenly visible ground flow. The tornadolurched headlong through the swath, sucking up torrents of chilly airfrom all directions, in a giant ragged overhead rosette of tormentedfog.The swatch of fallen hail was only a few dozen meters across. Afterhalf a minute the twister had cleared it. But wading knee-deepthrough the chilly air had visibly upset it. Its violent spew offilth at ground level dropped off drastically. Then it shivered topto bottom. The dry bands of filth around its midsection thinned anddimmed out. As the air grew clearer a pair of dense dirty runnelssuddenly appeared within the spike, for all the world like a pair ofstumbling, whirling legs."See that, dude?" Martha said triumphantly. "Suction' spots!"The 'thopter nose-dived suddenly and was almost swept into thevortex. Martha careened free, yelping."Careful," Buzzard said calmly. "It's wrapped that downdraft realhard." The twister slowed, hesitated. Down at ground level, itsoverstretched tip elongated, kinked hard, and reluctantly broke off.The abandoned tip of the whirl vanished in a collapsing puff ofliberated dust. The amputated twister, stranded in midair, took a great pogo hopforward, centering itself under the cloud again. Then it tried totouch down again, to stretch out and rip the earth, but it wasvisibly losing steam.The two suction spots, rotating about one another, stumbled andcollided. The bigger leg messily devoured the smaller leg. There wasa fresh burst of vitality then, and the twister stretched out andtouched down, and a torrent of dirt rocketed up the shaft. But nowthe funnel was much narrower, thin and quick and kinky."It's ropin' out," Martha said. "I like this part. This is when theystart actin' really insane."The twister had changed its character. It had once been a wedge, avast blunt-nosed drill. Now it looked like a sloppy corkscrew made ofsmoke and string.Big oblate whirling lumps were traveling up and down the corkscrew,great dirty onions of trapped vorticity that almost choked the lifeout of it. Every few seconds one of the trapped lumps would blow out inspectacular fashion, spewing great ribbons of filth that tried tocrawl up the cloud base. Sometimes they made it. More often theywriggled and spasmed and swam out into midair and vaporized.The roped twister grew narrower still, so pinched at points along itslength that it looked like a collapsing hose. The clear air around itwas still in very violent motion, but no longer violent enough to beseen. The currents of air seemed to be losing cohesion.The roping twister finally snaked its way into a sloppy, wrigglinghelix-it seemed to be trying to blend into some larger invisible 
vortex, to wrap itself around a bigger core and give up its fierce
little life in exchange for large-scale wrath again.
But it failed. After that, it lost heart. It surrendered all its
strength, in a ripple of disintegration up and down the shaft, a
literal last gasp.
Martha methodically scanned the cloud base. The rotating wall cloud
had broken. A great clear notch had appeared just behind it, a
downdraft channeling cold air from somewhere near the stratosphere,
chewing through the source of the vortex and breaking its rotation.
The twister was dead and gone.
A light, filthy curtain of rain appeared, conjured up and sucked down
by the twister's death spasm.
Martha headed out from under the cloud base into clear sunlit air. 
"Seventeen minutes," she said. "Pretty good for an
"That was an F-3 at maturity," Buzzard objected.
"You wanna bet? Let Jerry check the numbers on that chaff."
"Okay, F-2," Buzzard backed down. "It's still a little early in the
day for a big one. How's Lena's battery?"
"Not good. Let's pull out, charge up the 'thopters, pull up stakes
here, and head the hell after the dryline."
"Good move," Buzzard said. "Okay, you and Medicine Boy break camp,
and I'll fly the 'thopters in.
"Have it your way," Martha said.
Alex pulled off his gear. He watched Martha carefully divest herself
of her equipment. She got up off the sling chair, stretched, grinned,
shook herself, and looked at him. Her eyes widened.
"What the hell! Did you get caught in that gust front?"
"A little." 
Martha laughed. "You're a real prize. Well, get up! We gotta pursue."
"Wait a minute," Alex said. "You don't mean to tell me there's gonna
be another one of those?" 
"Maybe," Martha said, deftly wrapping her gear. "You've been lucky,
for a first chase. Jerry's a good now-caster, the best around, but he
only hits a spike one chase out of two. Okay, maybe three out of
five, lately
But"-Martha stood up straight, waving her black-nailed hand overhead
with a lasso-tossing gesture-"with this kind of midlevel vorticity?
Man, we could log half a dozen spikes out of a front like this one."
"Oh, man," Alex said.
"Gotta get movin'. These spring squalls always move like a bat out of
hell, they're doing fifty klicks an hour.. . . We'll be lucky if we
don't end up in Anadarko, by midnight." She gazed down at Buzzard's
inert carcass, seeming to resist a sudden urge to kick him out of his
chair. 
"Midnight?" Alex said.
"Hell yeah! 'Bout two hours after sundown, that's when nocturnal
convection gives everything a fresh dose of the juice." Martha
grinned. "Dude, you haven't really chased spikes till you've chased
'em in the dark." 
"Don't you people ever relax?" Alex said.
"Kid, we got all goddamn winter to relax. This is storm season."
Alex thought it over. "You got any salt tablets?"
C H A P T E R 

Normally, Jane didn't really
mind Rick Sedletter. Normally, she got along with Rick Sedletter as 

well as any interface designer ever got along with any creep-asstechie code grinder. But this was not a normal day. The two of themhad been on the road for hours, and she had Rick writhing on the hookof the patented Jane Unger Silent Treatment.Both of them knew what the struggle was about: Alex. Jane was surethat Rick was already regretting his rashness in harassing herbrother. But as the hours and kilometers wore on, Jane had plenty oftime to dwell on her own recklessness in bringing Alex to the Troupein the first place. He was already causing trouble, and that wasnothing compared with what he might do. She had dire, recurrentvisions of Alex hemorrhaging a spew of Mexican lung narcotics overthe unsuspecting Martha and Buzzard.She'd taken a big, stupid risk to rescue Alex, and his chances ofsuccess were so small. Suppose that Alex did make it through hisfirst long hard day of road pursuit. Suppose that Alex got along inthe Troupe, and somehow learned how to pull weight for the first timein his life without folding up and falling into little pieces. Itwould still do her very little good. She might very well have savedhis life, but Alex would never be grateful about it, not in a hundndyears.Jane wondered if Alex had spared her even one thought all day-if ithad even occurred to Alex to wonder how his sister was getting along.She very much doubted it.Charlie emitted a not-entirely-necessary bell-and-whistle alert andextruded a ma p screen from the dash. It held Jerry's latest nowcast.Rick stopped pecking at his laptop and pretended a lot of deepprofessional interest in the map's colored contours of upper-airvelocity fields.Rick was doing this just to get back at her. Both of them could seeat a glance that nothing was tearing loose at the moment.Outside, up to the north, lurked the trailing tower of the squallline, rippling in hot midafternoon sunlight and sucking hard for theadiabatic juice. Jerry had been sending them the full spectrum ofregular updates: satellite overviews, the progress of the squall'spseudo-cold front, SESAME's wind-shear estimates, big bulgingdownpours of rain off the Dopplers. The front was gushing precip,dropping hail in big lemon-sized chunks, and blowing some impressivegust fronts. But there were no spikes.The Troupe had scared up an F-2 early in the day. The spike had comevery suddenly, and rather unexpectedly, and Out in the middle ofnowhere. And that was all to the good, because the Troupe had had thespike all to themselves. Greg and Carol had taped the entiredevelopment sequence, from wall cloud to rope-out, at close rangefrom the ground. Buzzard and Martha had nailed it with chaff, soPeter and Joanne in the Radar Bus had gotten some very good internaldata. That one had to be counted a success. Now the afternoon's solar heat loading was reaching its peak, and thechances had improved for a major F-4 or F-S. The squall line washeaded for the Texas-Oklahoma border, moving fast and dragging themidlevel jet with it. The chase situation would be a lot differentnow. As the Troupe pursued they'd be leaving the abandoned lands,reaching places where the aquifers were still patchily existent, andwhere a lot of people still actually lived.Once they had come off the arid plains of King and Stonewall countiesand into the great flat floodplain of the Red River, any spikes wouldbe swarming with storm-chase spotters. There would be environmentalfeds from the national storm centers, and heavy network brass fromSESAME. Local cops and firemen, maybe Rangers or Oklahoma NationalGuard. Television news crews. And amateur chaser wannabes, out ontheir own, with Christ only knew what kind of homemade equipment.Plus the usual ugly scattering of lurking creeps: wreck freaks,structure hitters, and professional looters.Plus, of course, the people who were there because they couldn't helpit: the everyday, poor damned civilians, trying to mind their own business until a spike tore their town apart.The help would be the last to show up: choppers food-bombing thedisaster area, ground convoys of federal rescue paramedics,bureaucrat refugee managers with their hard-ass official charity ofsoup-kitchen tents and paper clothes. Eventually, help would arrive,all right. You couldn't keep the government help away. After so manyyears of heavy weather, the help didn't have a lot of genuinecompassion left, but they sure as hell had had a lot of practice."For Christ's sake, Janey, lighten up," Rick blurted suddenly. "It'snot like we killed the kid." Jane said nothing."He took that a lot better than you think!"Before joining Jerry and the Troupe, Jane had never been much good atsaying nothing. But Jane was plenty good at saying nothing now.She'd had a lot of practice. She'd learned how to say nothing in hersecond month of Troupe life, after her ugly scream fest and punch-outwith Martha Madronich. Jerry hadn't scolded her about the fight. Hehadn't taken sides, or made judgments, or criticized. But he hadasked Jane to take a formal vow of silence for a week. Jerry's style as a leader never ran to the standard sicko cultpractices of public chew-outs and group humiliations. Jerry rarelyraised his voice to anyone, and even in the Troupe's formal powwows,he rarely said anything beyond short summaries and a few measuredwords of praise. However, Jerry truly excelled at mysterious privateconferences. Before the fight, he'd never called Jane in for one ofhis heavy private head-to-head sessions. But she had seen him quietlytake people aside-even the Troupe's hard-bitten core people, likeCarol or Greg or Ellen Mae-and she'd seen them emerge an hour or solater, looking shaken and serious and kind of square-shouldered andglowing-eyed.A vow of silence was a very weird request. But she had never seenJerry more serious. It was crystal clear that he was giving her adeliberate challenge, setting her an act of ritual discipline. Worstof all, she could tell that Jerry really doubted that she had thenecessary strength of character to go through with it.So Jane had quickly made the promise to him, without any complaintsor debate. She'd left the tent without a word, and for seven endlessdays she had said nothing to anybody. No talking, and no phone calls,and no radio links. She hadn't even typed commentary onto a network.It had been unbelievably hard, far harder than she'd ever imagined.After several reflexive near blunders, she'd secretly kept her upperand lower teeth locked together with a little piece of bent metalpin. The bent pin was a stupid thing, and kind of a cheat, but itsure helped a lot whenever Martha limped by, grinning at her andtrying to strike up conversations.Silence had been truly painful and difficult for Jane. It had beenlike sweating off a drug addiction. Like fasting. Like running amarathon. It had changed her a lot, inside.It was no secret to anyone in the Troupe that she deeply fanciedJerry, and she could tell that he knew, and that he was tempted. He'dlet her join the Troupe. He'd trusted her with assignments. He'dalways politely listened to her advice and opinions. But he'd beenpainfully scrupulous about keeping his hands to himself.Jerry was tempted, but he wasn't quite tempted enough. That was thereal reason he had set her the challenge. Like everything that reallyinterested Jerry Mulcahey, the challenge was subtle and difficult andfor big stakes. The rest of the Troupe might construe it as apunishment, but Jane knew better: it was a very personal trial, makeor break. Jerry wanted her to make himasolemn promise and break it.So that he'd have the excuse he needed to politely usher her out ofhis life. And so she'd have no excuse not to go.But Jane hadn't broken her promise. She'd kept it. Naturally, she hadsaid nothing at all to anyone in the Troupe about her promise toJerry. She'd simply walked out of the tent with her mouth shut. In the too close atmosphere of Troupe life, though, they had all veryquickly caught on. Her vow had been a painful burden to her, but itseffect on the other Troupers was profound and startling. She'd hadtheir grudging respect before, but she'd never had their opensympathy. They knew she was going through hell, and they were pullingfor her. By the end of her week of silence, all the Troupers weretreating her, for the first time, as if she really belonged.And after that happened, things between her and Jerry had quicklyturned very mega-different."Okay, so he passed out," Rick whined. "So he's not exactly thebrawny outdoor type. Did you know he's a cannibal?""What?" Jane blurted. "Yeah, he was bragging to us about eating human meat! No.t that Imyself got anything against cannibalism personally. . . ." Rickpaused, hunting words. "Y'know, there's something to that kid. He'skind of an ugly, weedy, crazy little guy, but I think he's gotsomething going there. Actually, I kinda like him!""Look, he can't possibly be eating human meat," Jane said. "He's onlytwenty. Well, twenty-one.""Hell, we all knew he was bullshitting us! But that's why me andPeter had to stunt him. We're not gonna put up with that! Are we? Sowhat if he's your brother? Come on, Janey!""Well, he is my brother, Rick, damn it."Rick slapped his laptop shut. "Well, hell, you can't protect him fromanything! The Troupe's not your day-care center! We're chasingtornadoes out here! Why'd you even bring your brother out here?""Well," Jane said slowly, "can you keep a secret?"Rick's face fell. He looked at her guardedly. "What is it?""I'm broke, Rick. And Alex isn't."Rick grimaced. She'd brought up the subject of money; the Troupe'sultimate taboo. From the look on Rick's round, stubbled face, heseemed to be in genuine spiritual pain. She knew he'd be tooembarrassed to complain anymore.Jane gazed thoughtfully at the twenty-thousand-meter thunderheadrising on the horizon ahead of her and wondered if there'd ever beena time when it was a whole lot of good clean fun to have money. Maybeback before heavy weather hit, back when the world was quiet andorderly. Back before the "information economy" blew up and fell downin the faces of its eager zealot creators, just like communism. Backwhen there were stable and workable national currencies. And stock markets that didn't fluctuate insanely. And banks that belonged tocountries and obeyed laws, instead of global pirate banks thatexisted nowhere in particular and made up their own laws Out ofchickenwire dishes, encryption, and spit.Juanita Unger happened to be an heiress. If she'd been born a hundredyears earlier, Jane thought, she might have been some very nice old-fashioned twentieth-century heiress. With family money from somethingquaint and old-fashioned and industrial and ladylike, like laundrysoap or chewing gum. And if she'd happened to get a raging case ofthe hots for some scientist, then she could have set him up, like, adiscreet foundation grant. And she could have driven out to hisresearch site three times a week in her goddamned three-ton internal-combustion fossil-fueled car and fucked his brains out on a backseat the size of a living-room couch.Maybe somewhere, somehow, sometime, some twentieth-century woman hadactually done all that. If so, Jane bore her no real grudge. In fact,Jane kind of hoped that the twentieth-century heiress had reallyenjoyed herself as she thoughtlessly squandered the planet'sresources and lived like a fattened barnyard animal. Jane hoped thatit had all turned out okay for the woman in the end, and that she'dbeen nice and dead and buried before she realized what her way oflife had done to her planet. It might have been a really sweet andtasty life, under the circumstances. But it sure as hell didn't bearany resemblance to life as Jane Unger had ever experienced it. 
Jane was a Storm Trouper. A Trouper who happened to have money, andshe'd never met anyone as resolutely antimoney as the Storm Troupe.They genuinely thought that they could survive on wreckage, scrap,grunge computers, fellow feeling, free software, cheap thrills, andJerry's charisma. And given that their ideas of self-sufficiency werehopelessly impractical, they'd actually done surprisingly well.Therewas their repair work, and the occasional bit of salvage. Most ofthem held city day jobs during the winter, and some of them, herselfincluded, even had the wreckage of once-promising careers. Theyscraped up some cash that way. And given that they were almost allcity-bred urbanites, the Troupe did pretty well at eating things thatthey killed and/or pulled out of the ground.But they weren't doing genuine, first-class research, because therewasn't enough capital around for real science, until Jane Unger hadshown up.Jane had first found Dr. Gerald Mulcahey's work tucked in an obscureniche of a Santa Fe science network, very strange, very arcane, andelaborately smothered under nonlinear atmospheric mathematics thatmaybe five guys on the planet could understand. Jane wasn't quite thefirst designer to discover Mulcahey's work. The word was just gettingout about it in her network circles. The word was still very streetlevel-but Jane had a good ear for the word.The raw power of those graphics had amazed her. It was virtuosospectacle, and the guy wasn't even trying. He'd created a hypnoticvirtuality of writhing and twisting hallucinatory fluids whileseriously attempting to describe scientifically the behavior of thereal world. With the proper interface and editing, and a much betterchoice of color, angle, and detail, the work had definite commercialpotential.So Jane, with a bit of deft network voodoo, had successfully trackeddown Dr. Gerald Mulcahey. She'd gone to his research camp out in thedesolate ass end of nowhere, met him, talked to him, and cut a dealwith him. She'd redesigned the graphics herself and released themwith a new front end over an arts distribution network. And althoughthe whole modern structure of copyright and intellectual property wasa complete joke-it had been shattered utterly during the State ofEmergency and never successfully reassembled or stabilized, byanybody, anywhere, ever-Jane had actually made some money from doingthis. And she'd given Mulcahey royalties.Of course Mulcahey had immediately spent all his royalties on newhardware. And then he'd spent her share of the money too. And thenthe two of them had gone on, in sweet, collegial fashion, to spend alot more of her money.And now all of her money was pretty much gone. Though they sure had ahell of a chase team assembled. She might even get all her moneyback, someday.If they found the F-6.Jane wasn't foolish enough to think that the Troupe would have the F­6 all to themselves. She'd seen Jerry's simulations, and if Jerry waseven half-right about the nature of that beast, then the F-6 would bevery damned obvious, a spectacular calamity impossible to miss. Butif the Troupe found the F-6, they would have a major advantage overany other media competition. Because the Troupe would be the onlypeople in the world who actually understood the full power and horrorof what they were witnessing. Because nobody else in the worldunderstood or believed that an F-6 was even possible."Rick," she said."What?" "I've decided to forgive you, man." 
"On the condition you don't harass Alex ever again."
"Okay, okay," Rick said sourly. "He can stay for all of me. Younever see me throw anybody out of the Troupe! Jerry throws peopleout, Greg throws people out, Carol throws people out. Me, I'm just a lowly code geek, I can put up with anybody. I don't even care if hegives me money-hell, I'm not proud. Go ahead, give me money, you andyour brother! I don't care.""Did you know Jerry has a brother?""Yeah, I knew that," Rick said. Rick didn't seem much surprised bythe change of subject. "I never met his brother or anything. . . Ithink he's in government, state department, military, something likethat. He and Jerry don't get along.""Did Jerry ever talk about his brother, before I showed up?""Well, you know Jerry," Rick said. "He doesn't exactly broadcast thatkind of stuff. . . . I did hear the subject come up, though, backwhen he was breaking up with Valerie. That was Valerie theseismographer, y'know.""I know about Valerie," Jane said tightly."Yeah," Rick said, with an oblivious nod, "Val was into, like,aquifer collapses and subsidence and stuff, she used to hang with theTroupe and do echo blasts. .Not much to look at, but a really bright girl, really sharp. It gotpretty ugly toward the end before Jerry threw her out. She keptcarryin' on about his family.""Oh really," said Jane, with her best pretense of tepid disinterest."Yeah!" The long hours of silence had bottled Rick up. "It's funnywhat men and women argue about. . . . I mean, I've never beenmarried, but from what I see it's like three basic things-sex, money,and commitment. Right?"Jane said nothing."So with Valerie it was commitment. Like, what do you care aboutmore-me or your work, me or your friends, me or your family, me oryour brain? I can't figure out why a woman would ever want to askJerry that. The guy's obviously a fanatic! He's never gonna rest tillhe finds what he's looking for! A guy like that, either you pitch inand help him, or you get the hell out of his way! Otherwise, you're justgonna get stepped on. It's like a law of nature."Jane said nothing.Rick adjusted his glasses and spread his hands expansively. He waswearing a pair of deerskin carpal tunnel wraps on his sunburnedforearms. "I can understand," he said, "intellectually speaking ofcourse-why a woman would find Jerry attractive. I mean, he's big andstrong, and he's a good-looking guy in his way, and he's reallysmart. And he's not mean, or dishonest. Ruthless, sure, but he's notcruel. And he's got, like, pretty serious outlaw sex appeal, becausehe's the stud duck of this gang of weirdos who follow him around.Women tend to go for that kind of guy. So I can see why some womanwould want to ride on the back of Jerry's motorcycle and share hissleeping bag. But hell! Marry him? Have his kids? Try and put himbehind a picket fence? What possible good could that do you? I mean,why even try?"Jane laughed."You can laugh, Janey," Rick said, "but that's what Valerie was upto. I don't think she ever realized it. I mean, consciously. It waspure genetic imperative, that's what. Some kind of female chromosomething."Jane sighed. "Rick-you are the prize asshole of all tune."Oh," Rick said, shocked. "Okay. Sorry.""I don't want him to marry me. I don't have a picket fence. I don'twant to take him away from the Troupe. I like living with the Troupe.It really suits me. It's my Troupe.""Sure, okay," Rick said, nodding hastily. "I never meant you, Janey.You should know that by now.""I want the F-6 for my own reasons. And even if Jerry drops downdead, then I'm gonna find it. And I'm gonna chase it down anddocument it and blow the data over every network on this planet.Okay?" 
"Okay, Janey." Rick grinned. "Have it your way."
"You never talked to this brother of his, right?"
"No. I don't even know where he is. But if I wanted to find out"-he 
looked at her-"I guess I'd start by asking Jerry's mom." 

TI-IEY GOT SPIKES just east of the Foard County line, off State
Highway 70. Both sides of the highway were lined with parked spotter
vehicles: cops, meandering amateurs with cheap binoculars and hand
cams, a monster SESAME lidar bus with tuned lasers and a rack of
parabolic arrays.
SESAME and the Troupe's own Radar Bus had both been showing a major
circulation hook for almost an hour, and the word was out on the
police bands and the public weather alerts. So far, though, there was
no visible wall cloud, and the rain-free shelf looked surprisingly
cramped and unpromising.
Then, at 17:30, two spikes made a simultaneous appearance; not in the
front pocket inside the hook, where they might have been expected,
but wriggling off the back of the storm.
Rick picked up the first alert by nicking it off the air traffic of a
surprised and excited TV crew. He immediately spread the word to the
Troupe and booted the binocular cameras on Charlie's front weapons
mount. 
Given the chance, Troupers in ground pursuit would anticipate the
path of the moving spike, getting ahead of it and to the right, so as
to silhouette the approaching spike against brighter air. The ideal
was to set up a series of target grids of intense, networked
instrumentation and have the spike wander through the grids. This was
the standard research strategy for the clearest, full-capacity data
collection, and the SESAME people with their computational heavy iron
probably had much the same idea.
That wouldn't be possible with these new twin spikes, though. Their
position off the back of the storm put them right behind a moving
wall of hail. 
Jane gleefully showed the amateurs what they were up against by
ordering Charlie into unconventional mode and lea'~'ing the highway
entirely in a hot, fence-jumping, cross-country pursuit. The car
bounded across a drenched pasture full of young sunflowers and knee-
high Johnsongrass.
The binocular cameras, mounted on their own reactive pedestal, moved
along with a rock-solid technological smoothness originally invented
for modern fifty-caliber machine guns. Jane's nerves sang with
anticipation. She was going where she loved to be: into the thick of
it. Alert, alive, and in danger.
Spikes were very dangerous. They carried extremely high winds and
often flung large, lethal chunks of debris. But the funnel wasn't the
greatest danger in a pursuit. A modern pursuit vehicle could almost
always dodge a visible funnel that was already on the ground. The
greatest real dangers to the Troupe were big hail, lightning, and
collisions. 
Hail swaths were hard to predict, and they covered a lot more ground
than the tip of a spike. Most hail was only nuisance hail, sleety or
mushy or pebbly, but Jane had personally chased storms that dumped
rock-solid hail the size of citrus fruit into heaps that were shin-
deep.
Big hail didn't fall the way rain or snow or little graupel hail
would fall. Big hail fell like jagged-edged lumps of solid ice
dropped from the height of a three-thousand-story building. In the
Oklahoma Panhandle, in the spring of 2030, Jane had been hit in the
ribs by a hailstone that had put her in unguent and elastic wrap for
a solid week. That same storm had caught two of the Troupe's early
dune buggies and left them measled with hundreds of fist-sized dents.
Hail could be dodged, though, if you stayed out from under the mass
of the storm and kept a wary eye on the radar. Lightning was
different. There was no dodging lightning; lightning was roll-of-the­
dice. In her pre-Troupe days, Jane had heard the usual pious civil-defense nonsense about staying away from exposed heights and throwingyourself flat if you felt your hair start to crackle, but she hadseen plenty of no-kidding lightning since, and she had a firm graspof its essential nature. Lightning was a highly nonlinear phenomenon.Most lightning sizzled along pretending to obey the standard laws ofphysics, but Jane had often seen even quite minor storms suddenlywhip out a great crackling lick of eccentric fury that blasted thehell out of some little remote patch of ground that had absolutelynothing to do with anything. Lightning was crazy stuff, basically,and if it happened to hit you, there was damn-all you could do aboutit. As for collisions, well, Charlie was a mega-sweet machine, but he ranon eight hundred and seventy-five million lines of code. Good code,solid, well-tested code, spewed through distributed parallelprocessors far swifter and more accurate than the nervous system ofany human driver. But code was still code, and code could crash. Ifthe code crashed when Charlie was number-crunching high-speed all-terrain pursuit, then crashing Charlie would be the same as crashingany precybernetic car: fast hard stupid metal versus soft wet humanflesh. They rounded a heavily knuckled wall of back shear and saw two spikescurling out of the back of the nimbus shelf like a gigantic pair ofcurved antelope horns. The twin spikes were fantastically beautiful,and they filled Jane with a deep sweet sense of gratitude and awe,but they looked like F-2s, tops. It was rare to get a really heavyspike off an unorthodox part of the storm.With the target in sight, Charlie put his code to serious work andgot a lot closer in a very short time. Suddenly the chill damp airaround them was full of the Train. Only a tornado could do the Train.Once you'd heard the Train you would never forget or mistake it.Jane loved the Train. That elemental torrent of noise hit somethinginside her that was as deep and primal and tender as the pulp of herteeth. It did something to her that was richer than sex. A rush ofpure aesthetic battle joy rocketed up her spine and she felt as ifshe could jump out of her skin and spread wings of fire."Which one do you want?" she shouted at Rick.Rick pulled up the rubber-rimmed lenses of the binocular videocam'sgoggle link. Without his glasses, his eyes looked crazed and dilatedand shiny. "Go for the first to touch down!"The horn on the right looked like the dominant one of the pair. Tojudge by the complex curdling of the shelf behind them, the twospikes were trying hard to go into slow orbit around one another.Rick's advice was sound: the first spike to touch down would likely get a better supply ofupdraft. Over the next few minutes the twin with more juice wouldprobably starve out and eat up the other one.But you could never tell. Spikes lived on the far side of turbulentinstability and sometimes the least little extra puff of energy wouldpush them off trajectory into a monster phase space. . . . Jane wascoming hard to the point of decision. She slowed the car and staredupward."Damn!" she yelled. "That left one's backward!""What?" "It's anticyclonic! Look at that damn thing spin!"Rick swung his head, moving the slaved cameras out on the bumper."Good Christ!" he said. The spikes were rotating in oppositedirections. It was hard to judge the vortex rotation against the curdled blackbackground of shelf, but once she'd recognized the movement, therewas no mistaking it. Jane was flabbergasted. There hadn't been ananticyclonic spike documented since the late nineties. Finding astorm spinning clockwise in the northern hemisphere was freakish,like seeing a guy running down the Street who happened to have two left feet. "We're following that crazy one!" Jane announced. She reached beneaththe seat and yanked up a pair of cordless headphones and mike."Good choice!" Rick said, his voice high with disbelief.Jane yelled orders ~to Charlie, got tired of the verbal interface,and pulled down the steering wheel. She got into a manual-assistmode, where a tug on Charlie's steering wheel was the softwareequivalent of a tug on a horse's reins. This was an excellent way topursue a storm, if your horse was a smart machine a thousand timesstronger and faster than you were. Excellent, that is, if your horsedidn't get its code hung between mode changes. And if you didn'tforget that you weren't really driving a car at all, but instead,vaguely chairing a committee on the direction, speed, and tactics ofthe vehicle. It was certainly vastlysafer than driving manually in the wake of a pair of tornadoes. Butit was still a really good way to get killed.Rick yelled a site report at the Troupe while bracketing theanticyclone with the camera's binocular photogrammetry. Jane thoughtanxiously about the chaff bazooka in the back. The bazooka's chaffrounds cost so damned much that she had never had enough practice toget good withit. Rick, unfortunately, considered himself an excellent marksman,as if it were a real feat to kill deer with a silent, high-velocity,laser-sighted electric rifle. Rick was lousy with the bazooka andoverconfident, while she was lousy with the bazooka but at leastproperly cautious about it.She punched Rick's shoulder. "Where're the 'thopters?""They're coming. It'll take a while.""I gotta chaff-shoot that anticydonic from the ground then," shesaid. "No use, Janey! Radar Bus just pulled up stakes, nobody'll get thedata but SESAME!" "Let SESAME get it then, we gotta nail it now, the goddamned thing isleft-handed! It's for Science!" She stopped Charlie in the middle ofthe field, opened the door, and leaped out into wet knee-high grass.Out from under the shelter of Charlie's roof, the sound of the Trainwas enormous, ground-shaking, cosmic. Jane ran around the car,burrowed into the back, and unstrapped the bazooka from its Velcromounting. No use looking up at the spikes just yet. No use gettingrattled. She found the chaff rocket, unstrapped it. Removed its yellow safetytape. Twisted the rocket to arm it. Put up the bazooka's flip-upsight. Powered up the bazooka. Booted the bazooka's trajectory calc.Charlie was vibrating in place with the sheer noise of the Tram, andviolent gusts of entrained updraft were ripping at the grass allaround her. Loading the chaff bazooka was a very complex business. There was avery sweet and twisted intellectual thrill about doing it exactlyright in conditions of intense emotional excitement. It was likepaying a lot of slow, deliberate, very focused attention to givingsomebody else an orgasm.Jane stepped out into the open, carefully braced her legs, raised themuzzle, and squinted into the bazooka's readout. She pressed thefirst trigger. A red light came on. She bracketed the twister in thetarget screen. The red light went out and a green light flicked on.Jane pulled the second trigger.The rocket took off with a calf-scorching backwash of heat and soareddirectly toward the spike. It made a couple of wasplike dips as itfought turbulence and it disappeared right into the spinning murk,not quite dead on, but good. Jane stared ha p pity into the readout,waiting for the detonation signal from the chaff's explosivecanister. Nothing. She waited.Nothing. Another goddamned dud. 
Jane lowered the smoking bazooka with a grinding disappointment andsuddenly noticed movement and color over to her tight. A spindle-wheeled TV camera truck had pulled ;ust to the right of them, maybeten meters away. A woman correspondent with a head mike and a darlinglittle brass-toggled yellow raincoat had jumped out. She was doing astand-up.Not in front of the tornadoes, though. In front of Jane. Jane was onlive television. The realization gave Jane asudden rush of deep irrational fury. It was all she could do to avoidswinging the muzzle around and threatening to blow the journos away,just to watch the sons of bitches run. The bazooka was empty, though,and she had no more chaff rounds, which was just as well, becauseotherwise they and their human-interest spot would have beenstructure-hit to blazing hell-and-gone. Jane flinched away from theircameras and gritted her teeth, and set the bazooka back in place withmeticulous professionalism, and ran around the car and got back inand slammed the door. "That was great!" Rick shouted. "Damn, Janey, you're good with thatthing!""It was a dud round," Jane shouted back."Oh! Shit." Jane turned on the noise cancellation in her headphones. The Trainvanished suddenly, its every sonic wavelength neatly canceled by asound chip inside the earphones. The echoing roar was replaced by aneerie, artificial, oddly wet-sounding silence, as if she'd thrust herhead into a big hollowed-out pumpkin.When Rick shouted at her once again, his voice was a flat filtereddrone. "We just got dust whirl on that right one! We're gonna losethe anticyclonic.""I figured," Jane murmured, her voice loud in her own ears. Ricklifted his goggles, realized she had her noise-cancellationheadphones on, nodded in appreciation, fetched up his own headphonesfrom beneath the passenger seat, and clamped them over his ears."Can't tag 'em all," Rick uttered wetly through the phones. "I'mgettin' some real good photogrammetry, though. Move up closer on thatleft one." The right-hand spike was on the ground now, trying to stabilize. Itwas tearing through a patch of high grass a kilometer away, stewing ablur of dirt and straw. No major debris yet, but that straw was nojoke; tornado straws were flying high-speed needles that could pierceboards and tree trunks. She urged Charlie into pursuit again, avoiding the right-hand spikeand drawing nearer to the anticyclonic twister. It had not toucheddown yet, and didn't seem likely to. The backward twister was beingdragged off behind the front, in the shadow of its bigger brother,kicking and wriggling in distress.Twisters were not living things. Twisters had no will or volition,they felt no joy or pain. Truly, realty, genuinely, tornadoes werejust big storms. Just atmospheric vortices, natural organizations ofrapidly moving air that blindly obeyed the laws of physics. Some ofthose laws were odd and complex and nonlinear, so their behavior wassometimes volatile, but twisters were not magic or mystical, theyobeyed laws of nature, and Jerry understood those laws. He hadpatiently demonstrated their workings to her, in hours and hours ofcomputer simulation. Jane knew all that with complete intellectualcertainty.And yet Jane still couldn't help feeling sorry for the a.nticyclonic.That mutant left-handed runt of the litter . . . the poor damnedgiant evil beautiful thing . .The right-hand twister left the ground, bunched itself, and suddenlymade a major and definite maneuver. It ripped loose from its originalmoorings at the back of the storm and surged forward, root andbranch. The whole structure of the cloud base collapsed before itlike a shattered ceiling and was torn into foggy chaos. The trailing bent tail that was the anticyclonic buckled, and dwindled, and wassucked away.A blinding torrent of almost horizontal rain blasted across thelandscape. The spike vanished behind it.Jane immediately wheeled and started to skirt the right-hand edge ofthe storm. Working her way around it took her twelve long minutes ofhigh-speed pursuit and a painful drain of battery power. On the waythey passed a charging land rush of three TV camera crews, fivegroups of amateur spotters in their rusty ham-hacker trucks, and twosheriff's deputies.The sky was low and overcast ahead of the twister, an endless prairieof damp unstable Gulf air, tinder before a brushfire. When Janecaught sight of the spike again, it was a squat, massive, roaringwedge, lodged right in the pocket of the circulation hook andsmashing northeast like a juggernaut. She turned off her monitor tothe ongoing SESAME traffic and opened her mike and headphones to thegeneral Troupe channel. "Jane in Charlie here. We have the spike insight again! It's a mega F-4 on the ground and in the hook! This onecould go all the way, over!""This is Joe Brasseur at Navigation. Copy, Jane. Your spike hashabitation ahead-Quanah, Texas. Chasers, watch for fleeing vehicles!Watch for civilians! Watch for debris in the air or on the ground!Remember, people, a spike is a passing thing, but a lawsuit youalways have with you. Over."It was really nice, what the people of Quanah had done. You met allkinds out on the edge of the wasteland, most of them pretty unsavorykinds, but the citizens of Quanah were a special breed. There werejust over three thousand of them. Most of them had settled here sincethe aftermath of heavy weather. They were hard and clever andenduring people, and they had a kind of rough-hewn
civic virtue that, in all sincerity, you could only callpioneerspirit.
They didn't irrigate open fields anymore, because withtheir aquifer declining that was illegal as well as useless,But they had genetic crops with the chlorophyll hack, andthey'd done a great deal with greenhouses. Enormousgreenhouses, beautiful ones, huge curved foam-metal sparsand vast ribbed expanses of dew-beaded transparent mem­
• 	brane, greenhouses as big as cornfields, greenhouses thatwere their cornfields, basically. Vast expanses of well-designed, modern, moisture-tight greenhouses, peggeddown tight and neat across the landscape just like a bigsheet of giant bubblepak.
The F-4 walked into the midst of the greenhouse bub­bles and methodically wreaked utter havoc. It simplystomped the big pockets of bubbtepak and catastrophicallyruptured them, with sharp balloon-pop bangs that youcould feel in your bones from a mile away. The acres ofdamp air inside the ruptured bubbles geysered instantlyupward in fat twisting rushes of condensation fog, andbefore Jane's amazed, observant eyes, the F-4 literallydrank up those big sweet pockets of hot wet air, just like athug at a bar doing tequila stammers.
It ripped every greenhouse in its path into flat deflatedtatters, and it entirely destroyed alt the crops inside them.
The citizens of Quanah were not just farmers. Theywere modern bioagriculturists. They had set up a silagerefinery: stacks, towers, fermentation chambers. They weretaking the worst harvest in the world: raw weed, brush,mesquite, cactus, anything-and cracking it into usefulproducts: sugars, starches, fuel, cellulose. Silage refiningwas such an elaborate, laborious process that it was barelyprofitable. But it made a lot of honest work for people. 
And it made some honest use out of the vast expanse ofWest Texas's abandoned wasteland. Silage refining came- -. very close to making something useful and workable out ofnothing at all.
The F-4 waded into the silage refinery and tore it apart.It picked up the pipelines, snapped them off clean at thejoints, and wielded them like supersonic bludgeons. It
I 28 
Bruce Sterling
twisted the refinery towers until they cracked off and tumbled and
fell, and it threw a hot spew of gene-twisted yeast and fungi into a
contaminating acres-wide stop. It blew out windows, and ripped off
roofs, and cracked cement foundations, and shorted out generators. It
swiftly killed three refinery workers who had been too stubborn and
dedicated to leave. After the twister had shattered half the refinery
and broken the rest open, its ally the rain arrived, and thoroughly
drenched everything that had been exposed.
The twister then chewed its way through Quanah's flat checkerboard of
streets, smashing homes and shops, destroying the ancient trees
around the courthouse, and annihilating a dance hall.
When it had finished with the town of Quanah, Texas, the twister
headed, undiminished, toward the Red River, and the people of the
great state of Oklahoma. 

WHEN JANE GOT back to the camp, it was five in the morning. She'd
managed to sleep a little in the driver's seat during the long haul
back, but she was far too full of adrenaline for anything like real
rest. 
She drove the car under one of the camp's garage tents and prodded
Rick awake. Rick got up groggily without a word and staggered off for
his tepee.
Jane walked stiff-legged and trembling into the command yurt. There
was no sign of Jerry, and all his machines were shut down.
She went to their favorite tepee, the one they usually used for
assignations.
Jerry was on the bubblepak floor in a bag, asleep.
Jane threw her sweaty clothes off and fought her way into the bag
next to him. 
"You've got the shakes," he told her.
"Yeah," Jane said, trembling harder to hear him say it. "I always get
the shakes whenever they kill people."
"Nothing we can do about that," he said gently. "We just bear
witness. 
Jane stared up at the tepee's dark conical recess. She
HEAVY WEATHER 129 

could see stars through the smoke flap. She was stiff all over and
trembling with stress and she smelled really bad.
"My life sure has changed since I met you . . ." she said, "you crazy
son of a bitch." 
Jerry laughed and put his hand on her right breast. "Yeah?"
"That's right. I've seen people get killed. . . . I've raced down
highways at two hundred klicks an hour. I've jumped out of airplanes.
I climbed up a radio tower and I jumped off it, and I beat up the
woman who taught me how to do it."
"You didn't beat her up very hard," Jerry said. He slid his bearded
face into the hollow of her neck. 
Jane started trembling much harder. "Just once," she told him, "I'd
like to fuck you in a bed. With a mattress, and clean sheets. When
we've both showered. And me wearing something slinky and maybe some
perfume. Don't you like that, Jerry? Perfume?"
"What I like is remembering where the condoms are. Where are they?" 

"They ought to be tucked over there under that ditty bag, unlesssomebody used 'em all."Jerry climbed out of the bag, naked, found a condom after prolongedsearch, and crawled back into the bag again. His skin had gone coldin the night air. Jane shivered violently.Jerry turned her onto her stomach and set his solid hands to work onher shoulders. "You've got it bad tonight," he said.She nodded. "That's good. Keep doing that. Maybe I'll live."Silently, deftly, Jerry worked his way off her shoulders, down herspine and rib cage, going after knotted nerves that were like snarledfishline. It felt so good to have the strong human touch of someoneshe trusted. Someone who wouldn't stop or hesitate, who knew what hewas doing and who had never hurt her. He was pulling the jitters outof her, and it was like he was chasing little devils Out of her skin.Jane stretched out on her stomach and went languorous and heavy-lidded. I3~ Bruce Sterling 
She turned over and stretched her arms out in welcome. He kissed her briefly, put the condom on, climbed over her, braced himself on hiselbows. He slid into her all at once on an oiled film of latex. She put her feet in the backs of his knees. "Short and sweet, okay,"she whispered. "I'm really tired, baby. I'm going right to sleepafter this, I promise."Good," he said, hitting his favorite rhythm."Do me, but don't do the daylights out of me.He said nothing.He wasn't violent, and he wasn't ever careless, but he was a big man,a head and a half taller than she was, and he was really strong. Hehad ropes of muscle in his back where people shouldn't even havemuscle. He wasn't acrobatic or elaborately erotic, but he never gotwinded easily. And when he got up to speed, he tended to hit thegroove and to stay there.She gritted her teeth, rolled her head back in the soft darkness, andhad an orgasm. She came out of the far side of it gasping and limpall over, with all the tension gone from her jaw and temples and herarms hanging slack.He stopped, and hung there over her, and let her breathe awhile.There was a big lumpy rock under her neck, beneath the bag and thebubblepak, and she squirmed on her back to miss it. She'd been verytired before, but now she was fully wrapped in the hot life-givingpower of her own libido, and all the weariness and horror of the daywas like something that had happened to another woman somewhere faraway. When she spoke again it was rough and low."I changed my mind about that daylights business."He laughed. "You always say that.""Unless you let me get on top, I'm gonna have to scream a littlebit." "Go ahead and scream," he told her, moving hard. "You never screamall that much." C H A P T E R hasing tornadoes until twoin the morning had been pretty bad, but not half so bad as Alex hadfeared. They'd spent most of those hours humming down darkened roads,with Alex curled in his nest of bubblepak, dozing.They'd stopped three times to fling machinery into the sky, a feverof virtual activity in the midst of distance and darkness andthunder. They were ardently chasing storms by remote control. And yetthere was little sense of real danger.The storms didn't frighten Alex. He found them impressive andinteresting. His only true fear was that the Troupers would discoverthe real and humiliating extent of his weakness. He could thinkstraight, he could talk, he could eat, and he could breathebeautifully. But he was still bone feeble, with an edge of endurancethat was razor thin. He was lucky that Martha and Buzzard hadn'tasked him to do anything truly strenuous. It wasn't because they weresparing him, of course. They simply didn't trust him to do anythingimportant.132 Bruce SterlingThe day after the chase, Alex was up with the dawn, his lungs stillclear, his eyes bright, with no sign of sore throat or fever. He feltbetter than he'd felt in at least a year. Meanwhile, the road-burnedTroupers lay around in their smelly bags and their stick-and-papercones, in the grip of prolonged siestas. The after-chase day was abusy day for the support crews, but they were busy with information,a fourteeii-hour-day of annotating, editing, collating, cutting, andcopying. The Troupe's road pursuers were physically worn-out, and therest of them were crouching over their keyboards. Nobody paid Alexmuch mind. Mound noon, Carol Cooper made Alex a big paper sombrero, gave him abag of granola and a small canteen, and sent him out to watch theTroupe's goats. The Troupers had this teenage kid, Jeff, who usuallydid the goat watching and the firewood fetching and other littlegopher chores around camp, but with Alex's arrival, Jeff had beenbumped up the pecking order.Alex didn't mind watching the goats. It was clearly the stupidest andlowest-status job in Troupe life, but at least there was very littleto it. All the goats had smart collars, and you could set the herd'sparameters on a laptop to give them minor shocks and buzzes when theywandered out of range. They were gene-spliced pharmaceutical goats,"pharm animals," and despite their yellow, devillike, reptilianeyeballs, the goats were remarkably docile and stupid. Most of thetime the goats seemed to grasp the nature of the collar business, andthey stayed where the machine wanted them. They industriously nibbledanything remotely edible and then lay in the shade belching gas fromtheir gene-spliced guts.Alex spent most of the day up in a mesquite tree at the edge of abrush-filled gully, wearing his paper breathing mask, grepping aroundwith the laptop, and swatting mosquitoes and deer ffies. He wasn'ttoo happy about the mosquitoes, but his bite-proof paper hat, mask,and jumpsuit kept them at bay, except on his bare neck and ankles.The deerflies were big, buzzing, aggressive, head-circling pests, andit wasn't too surprising that there were a lot of themHEAVY WEATHER 133 
around-the brush was crawling with deer. The damned deer were as common as mice. Alex, a consummate urbanite, had always imagined deer as timid,fragile, endangered creatures, quailing somewhere in the darkeneddepths of their crumbling ecosystems. This sure as hell wasn't thecase with these West Texas deer, who were thriving in an ecosystemthat was already about as screwed up as mankind could manage. Thedeer were snorty and flop-eared and skittish, but they were as boldas rats in a junkyard.By the time Alex and his entourage of goats returned to camp thatevening, he was a lot less impressed about the local diet of venison.There wasn't much to obtaining venison-it was about as hard asfinding dog meat at a pound. He and Jeff milked the goats, whichproduced a variety of odd cheesy fluids, some with U.N.-mandateddietary vitamin requirements, and some with commercial potential indrugstore retail. Milking goats was kind of interesting work on aweird level of interspecies intimacy, but it was also hard manuallabor, and he was glad to leave most of it to Jeff.Greg Foulks had pulled Jeff out of the wreckage of an F-S a coupleyears back, from the jackstraw rubble where Jeff had lost both hisparents. Jeff had worked his way into the Troupe by simply runningaway and returning to them whenever the Troupe tried to place himinto better care. Jeff was a cheerful, talkative, sunburned TexasAnglo kid, openly worshipful of Jerry and Greg, and full of what hethought was good advice about Troupe life. Jeff was only sixteen, buthe had that drawn, tight-around-the-eyelids look that Alex had seenon the faces of displaced people, of the world's heavy-weatherrefugees. A haunted, wary look, like the solid earth beneath theirfeet had become thin ice, never to be trusted again.Everyone in the Troupe had that Look, really. Except maybe JerryMulcahey. Examined closely, Mulcahey looked as if he'd never set footon Earth in the first place.Next day they put Alex on kitchen duty-KP.134 Bruce Sterltflg"YOUR SISThR," SAID Ellen Mae Lankton, "is a real hairpin.""I couldn't agree with you more," said Alex. He was sitting cross-legged on the bubblepak floor of the kitchen yurt, peeling a root. Itwas the root of some local weed known as a "poppymallow." It lookedlike a very dirty and distorted carrot, and when peeled, it had someof the less appetizing aspects of a yam.Ellen Mae had been up at dawn to grub up poppymallows. She was up atevery dawn, methodically wandering the fields, snapping miles of oldbarbed wire with her personal diamond-edged cable cutters and diggingup weeds with her sharpshooter shovel. So now Alex had a dozen filthyroots at his elbow, in Ellen Mae's canvas sling bag. Peeling roots,it seemed, was not a popular task among Storm Troupers. Alex,however, didn't mind it much.Alex rarely minded any kind of work that allowed him to sit verystill and breathe shallowly. What he minded about kitchen work wasthe mesquite smoke. Whenever Ellen Mae turned her back to manage thestewpot, Alex would whip his paper mask up quickly and steal a fewquiet huffs of properly filtered air.As Ellen Mae bustled about, doing her endless round of mysteriouskitchen rituals, Alex sat nearby, in the yurt's only draft of clearair. As the morning had worn on, several Troupers had wandered inhunting snacks or water, and they'd seen Alex sitting near EllenMae's feet in a humble, attentive, apprentice's posture. And they'dgiven Ellen Mae a kind of surprised, eyebrow-raised, respectful look.After a while Ellen Mae had warmed up to Alex considerably, and nowthis strange, witchy-looking, middle-aged woman wouldn't shut up tosave her life. "For one thing, she's got a really strange way o talkin'," said EllenMae. "You mean her accent?" Alex said. 
"Well, that's part of it. . .
"That's simple," Alex said. "We Ungers are German Mexicans."
"'What?" 
"Yeah, we're descended from this German guy named
HEAVY WEATHER 135 

Heinrich Unger, who emigrated to Mexico in 1914. He was a German spy.
He tried to get the Mexicans to invade the U.S. during the First
World War." 
"Huh," said Ellen Mae, stirring stew.
"He didn't have much luck at it, though."
"I reckon he didn't." 
"Another German spy named Hans Ewers wrote a couple of books about
their mission. They're supposed to be pretty good books. I wouldn't
know, myself. I don't read German."
"German Mexicans," Ellen Mae mused.
"There's lots of German Mexicans. Thousands of 'em, really. It's a
pretty big ethnic group." Alex shrugged. "My dad moved over the
border and took out U.S. citizenship after he made some money in
business." 
"When did that happen, exactly?"
"Mound 2010. Just before I was born." 
"Must have been one of those free-trade things. When the U.S. sent
all the workin' jobs down to Mexico, and the Mexicans sent the USA
all their rich people."
Alex shrugged. His family's entanglement with history meant little to
him. He was vaguely interested in the distant and romantic 1914
aspect, but his dad's postindustrial business career was the very
essence of tedium. 
"Janey doesn't sound German, though. Or Mexican either, for that
matter. You don't sound German or Mexican either, kid."
"I do sound pretty German when I speak Spanish," Alex offered. "Can I
have some more of that tea?" 
"Sure, have all you want," said Ellen Mae, surprising him. "We're
gonna break camp tomorrow. Can't carry much water on the road." She
poured him a generous paper-cup-fit! of some acrid herbal soak she'd
made from glossy green bush leaves. It sure as hell wasn't tea, but
it wasn't as bad as certain Mexican soft drinks he'd sampled. "So
we'll use up the spare water now. Tonight we can all have a bath!"
"Wow!" Alex enthused, sipping the evil brew.
Ellen Mae frowned thoughtfully. "What is it you do, exactly, Alex?"
136 
Bruce ~teriirig
"Me?" Alex said. He considered. the question. He hadn't often been
asked it. "I'm a play-testing consultant."
"What's that?" 
"Well, network computer games . . ." Alex said vaguely, "network
dungeons . . . There's not much money in computer games anymore,
because of the copyright property screwups and stuff, but there's
still, I dunno, cryptware and shareware and the subscription
services, right? Some guys who are really into dungeons can still
make good money. Sometimes I help with the work."
Ellen Mae looked doubtful, even though it was almost the truth. Alex
had spent most of his teenage years ardently playing dungeons, and
since he was generous with his upgrade payments and his shareware
registrations, he'd eventually ended up in the fringes of game
marketing. Not that he designed games or anything-he didn't have the
maniacal attention to detail necessary for that-but he did like to be
among the first to play the new games, and he didn't mind being
polled for his consumer reactions. On occasion, Alex had even been
given a little money for this-all told, maybe five percent of the
money that he'd poured into the hobby.
At eighteen, though, Alex had given up dungeon gaming. It had dawned 

on him that his numerous dungeon identities were stealing what littlevitality remained in his own daily life. The dungeons weren't thatmuch of an improvement, really, over the twisted, dungeonlike realityof a series of sickrooms. Since that realization, Alex had given upgaming, and devoted his time and money to exploring the twisteddepths of his own medical destiny and the wonders of thepharmaceutical demimonde."I also collect comics," he offered."Why?" Ellen Mae said."Well, I thought it was really interesting that there was this, like,weird pop-culture thing that's still published on paper instead of onnetworks." This remark cut no apparent ice with Ellen Mae. Alexplowed on. "I own lots of old American paper comics-y'see, nobodydoes paper comics in the U.S. anymore, but some of the antique ones,the undergrounds and stuff, never got copied and scanned, soHEAVY WEATHER 137 
they're not on network access anywhere. So if you're a seriouscollector, quite often you can buy some art that's just not publiclyavailable. . . . Some art that nobody else can see . . . A piece ofart that nobody's accessed or viewed in years!"Ellen Mae only looked puzzled; she clearly didn't grasp the basicthrill involved in this hobby. Alex continued:"My real specialty is modern Mexican paper comics. The fotonovelas,and the true-crime manga-rags, and the UFOzines and stuff. They're anantique medium in a modern context, and they're this kind of coolnightmare folk art, really. . . . I like them, and they're kinda hardto get. I own lots, though." He smiled."What do you do with them?" Ellen Mae said."I dunno," Alex admitted. "Catalog 'em, put 'em in airproof bags. ... They're all stored in Houston. I thought maybe that I would pirate-scan them all, and post them on networks, so that a lot more peoplecould see how cool they were. And see how much great stuff I'dcollected. But I dunno, that kind of spoils the whole thing, really."Ellen Mae looked at him so strangely then that Alex realized he waswading in too deep. He gave her his best smile, humbly offered up acouple of well-peeled roots, and asked, "What do you hack, EllenMae?" "I hack Comanche," Ellen Mae said."What's that mean?" "I was born Out here in West Texas," she told him. "I'm a native.""Really." She didn't look like any Comanche Indian. She looked like abig Anglo woman with middle-aged spread in a bloodstained paper suit."I grew up out here on a ranch, back when everything was dying out. .. . There never were a lot of people in this part of Texas. Most ofthe people just packed up and left, after the aquifers went. And thenduring the State of Emergency, when the really big drought hit? Well,everything and everybody out here just blew away, like so much dust."Alex nodded helpfully and started on another root with his ceramicpeeler.138 Bruce SterIIflS "Everybody who stayed behind-well, they pretty much stopped farmingand ranching, and went into scavenging. Wrecking work, in the ghosttowns." She shrugged. "They didn't call it structure hitting backthen, because we didn't blow up anything that wasn't alreadyabandoned. I mean, we had reasons to blow stuff up. We wanted to makesome money. We didn't blow stuff up just because we liked to watchstuff fall down-all that bullshit came later." "Okay," Alex said, sipping his brew."I started to think it through back then, you know. .. . See, Alex,the truth is, nobody should have ever done any farming out here.Ever. This land just wasn't cut Out for farming. And ranching-running cattle on this land just took way too much out of the soil. It wasn'tany accident that all this happened. We brought it on ourselves."Alex nodded. "This was nomad land. The High Plains-they were black with buffalofrom here straight to Canada! The big­-gest migrating herds of animals ever seen in history. Theykilled the buffalo off with repeating rifles, in twenty years. Ittook another hundred fifty years to drain off all the waterunderground, and of course by then the atmosphere was wrecked too. .. . But see, it was all a really bad mistake. The people who settledout here-we destroyed this place. And we were destroyed for doingit." Alex said nothing."At the time, you know-people just couldn't believeit. They couldn't believe that this huge area of the good old USAwould just end up abandoned by everybody, that the people who settledthe land and tamed it-they used to say that a lot, 'taming the land'­that those people would just be driven right out of existence. Imean, at the time it was unprecedented. Seemed really unlikely andabnormal. Of course, it's a pretty damn common business now.But at the time there was a lot of government talk about how it wasall just temporary, that they were gonna resettle West Texas as soonas they learned how to pipe water down from Minnesota, or melticebergs, or some other139 HEAVY WEATHER 
such damn nonsense. . . . Hell, Alex, they're never gonna move thewater. It's a hundred times cheaper just to move the people. Theywere all living in a dreamland.""Dreamlands, yeah," Alex said, "I've been in a few of those.""And the strangest thing was, that it had all happened before, butnobody learned the lesson. Because it happened to the Comanches. TheComanches lived out here two hundred years-off the land, off thebuffalo. But when those buffalo went, well, they were just wiped out.Starved right out of existence. Had to move up to Oklahoma, and livein reservation camps eating food that the government. gave 'em, justlike us low-down modern weather tramps. No fight left in 'em." Shesighed. "See, Alex, if you got the basics of life, then you can fightfor your place in the world. But if you got no food and water, thenyou got no place at all. You just leave. Go away, or die.""Right," Alex said. "I get it." It was clearly doing Ellen Mae somegood to get this matter off her chest. It was obvious that she'ddiscussed all this before. Probably this was a standard lecture shegave all the Troupe wannabes.Normally, in a discussion of this sort, Alex would have pitched rightin with a few devil's-advocate arguments, just to mess everything upand kinda make it more interesting. Under the circumstances, though,he thought it was wisest to let Ellen Mae talk it out. A good idea,for instance, not to mention the many other places in the world whererelocations had been a hundred times worse than in West Texas. After all, the people in West Texas had had the giant, well-developedUnited States to help them. So that they didn't starve on the spot.They didn't break out in eye-gouging, street-to-street, structure-hitting, down-and-dirty little ethnic wars. And they weren't wipedout by massive septic plagues, all the little predatory bugs thatjumped out of the woodwork whenever people got seriouslydisorganized: dysentery, cholera, typhus, malaria, hantavirus.It had been pretty damned stupid to dry up the aquifers in WestTexas, but it didn't really compare in scale with the planet's trulymonumental ecoblunders. Slowly poisoning the finest cropland inChina, Egypt, and India with too1 4 C) Bruce Ster1ir~gmuch salt from irrigation, for instance. Clear-cutting the jungles inIndonesia and Brazil. The spread of the Sahara.But why bring all that up? It wouldn't make Ellen Mae feel anybetter. If you lost everything, it didn't really ease your pain muchto know that other people, somewhere else, might be hurting evenworse. People who wanted to judge your pain by your privileges weremean-spirited people-the kind of people who thought it must be bigfun to be an invalid, as long as you were rich. Alex knew better.Sure, if he'd been poor, he'd have been dead long ago-he knew that.He wasn't poor. He was a rich kid, and if he had any say about it, hewas going to stay that way. But that didn't make his life a picnic.Let her talk. "When I figured that much out," Ellen Mae said, "I decided I wasgonna learn all about Comanches.""How come?" She paused. "Alex, there are twokin~ of people in this world. Thepeople who don't wanna know, even if they oughta know. And the peoplewho just have to know, even if it's not gonna help 'em." She smiledat him. "Troupe people-we're all that second kind. People who justhave to know, even though we can't do a damn thing about any of it."Alex grunted. He was of a different kind, personally. He was the kindwho didn't mind knowing, but didn't feel up to devoting much energyto finding out."So I read a lot about Comanches. I mean, with the towns empty andthe cattle gone, it was a lot easier to understand that kind of nomadlife. . . . That's one good thing about living nowadays. You can readabout anything, for nothing, anywhere where there's a laptop screen.So, I read all these on-line books about Comanches, and how theylived, while I was living off the backs of trucks, hunting, andgathering scrap metal."And that's when I started to really understand this land. Forinstance, why us wreckers got so much heat from the Texas Rangers.Why the Rangers used to just show up out here, and chase down ourconvoys, and shoot us. They had databases and cell phones and all,but there wasn't anything cute and modern about the goddamned TexasHEAVY WEATHER 141 
Rangers-the Rangers in the 2020s were exactly the same as thegoddamned Texas Rangers in the 1 880s! And if youwere some nomad, living out of a tent in West Texas, then the Rangersjust weren't gonna be able to stand havin' you
around! Simple as that!" She was shaking her soup ladle.
• 
"They just couldn't stand it, that we were out here

wreckin' stuff, and that we hadn't cleared out for good andgone exactly where the government said we should, when we should.That we didn't pay taxes, or get vaccinations, or have any rulebooks." She stirred her stew, and tasted it, and started crumbling adried ancho pepper."Sure, every once in a while a few wrecker boys would get allliquored up and smash up some stuff in towns where there were stillpeople livin'. That happened, and I'm not denyin' it. We weren't allperfect. But the Rangers usedthat as their excuse for everything. They came right after-the wreckiñ' gangs, the Rangers did. They just wouldn't let

• 
us live. They broke us up, and they shot us and arrested us,
and they put us away in camps."
"What did you do then?"
"Well, I didn't get arrested myself, so I went up to Oklahoma to meet
some real Comanches."~ 
"Really?"
"Hell yes! There's more Comanches up in Oklahoma right now, after
everything, than there were when the tribe was out riding the free 



range. That's the weirdest part of it. The Comanches didn't die outor anything. They just got changed and moved. They been up theremultiplying, just like every other human being in the world. There'sthousands of Comanches. They're farmers, and they got little storesand stuff . . . they're big on churches, y'know, big churchgoingpeople. None of that weirdo cult stuff, but good old-fashionedChristians. I wouldn't call 'em prosperous, they're pretty damnedpoor people for Americans, but you see a lot worse on TV.""I see. So what did you learn from that?"Ellen Mae laughed. "Well, I married one. . . . But they know about asmuch about living off the buffalo as you know about being a Germanspy, kid. I dunno ... the oldest folks still use the language alittle, the smell of142 
the old life is still around, just a little bit. I wanted to learnabout herbal lore, about living off the land. I ended up learning alot about botany. But mostly I learned it off text files anddatabases. Hell, Alex, it's been a hundred and fifty years."She sighed. "That's a long time. I mean, I grew up m West Texas. Iwas a nice girl from a decent ranchin' family, went to high school,went to church, watched TV, bought dresses and shoes and went todances.. . . We thought we owned this land. How much of that life doyou think is gonna be left in a hundred and fifty years? Fuck-all,Alex. Nothin'." "Well, I wouldn't say that," Alex said. "After all, there'sgovernment records. The government's real goad about that. Databasesand statistics. Stuff on platinum disks that they keep in saltmines." "Sure, and in Anadarko there's American Indian museums whereeverything has got a nice tag on it, but it's gone, kid! TheComanches got smashed and blown away! We got smashed and blown away!First we did it to them.. And then we did it to the land. And then we did it to ourselves. And after we're gone for good, I don't know whythe hell anybody is gonna want to know about us."Alex was impressed. He'd seen old people talking openly about thedeclining state-of-the-world on old people's television talk shows,the crustier, more old-fashioned talk shows, without many videoeffects, where people never did very much. But old people usuallyseemed pretty embarrassed to bring up such matters right in front ofyoung people. Probably because of the inherent implication that theworld's old people were ecological criminals. Who probably ought tobe hauled into court by a transgenerational tribunal and tried foratrocities against the biosphere.Not that old people would ever allow this to happen, though. Therewere shitloads of old people still running everything all over theworld, and they were in no hurry to give up their power, despite thegrotesquely stupid things they'd done with it. Sometimes they wouldallude to all the awful consequences of heavy weather, but always inveryp.­143 mealymouthed, very abstract ways, as if the disasters surroundingthem had nothing to do with anything they'd ever done themselves.Alex kinda figured that there might be some kind of reckoningsomeday. When everybody who mightbe tound guilty was safely dead and buried. It would probably be likeit had been, back when the communist government finally fell inChina. Lots of tribunals of guys in suits issuing severe publicreprimands to lots of elderly dead people."Well, I can tell that you learned something useful," Alex said."'Cause I never saw anybody eat like this Troupe eats.""Off the land," Ellen Mae said, nodding. "It ain't easy, that's for sure. The old species balance, the original ecology, is completelyshot out here. Believe mc,, it's nothing like the High Plains used tobe, and it never will be again. There's all these foreign weeds,invader species, depleted soils, and the climate's crazy. But theWest Texas flora was always pretty well adapted to severe weather. Sothere's still Comanche food around. Stuff like pigweed. Hell, pig­weed's an amaranth, it's a really nutritious grain, but it'll grow ina crack in a sidewalk. Of course, you'd never think to eat pigweed ifyou didn't already know what it was.""Right," Alex said. He'd never seen pigweed-or, at least, he'd neverrecognized it. He felt a dreadful certainty that he was going to haveto eat some of it pretty soon."It's been a long time since anybody was out here, gathering the wildforage. But now the grazing pressure is off the native plants. Andthere's no more plowing, or crops, or herbicides, or fertilizers. Soeven though the weather's bad, some of those native plants are comingback pretty strongly. Stuff like poppymallow, and devil's claw, andprairie turnip. There's nowhere near enough
• for a cityful of civilized people. But for a little tribe oflering nomads, who can cover a lot of ground, well, there's quite alot of food out here, especially inspring and summer.""I guess the Troupe was pretty lucky that you ended up g them,"Alex said. Bruce SteFIIflK EAVY WEATHER '44 Bruce SterIiflg"No," said Ellen Mae, "there wasn't anything like luck to that." 
AFTER JERRY AND Sam had pored over the forecast, and JoeBrasseur had run through a legal database of likely areas tosquat, they picked a destination and announced a route.The Troupe broke camp.Joe Brasseur, the oldest member of the Troupe, had once referred tobreaking camp as "labor-intensive." Jane found that a hilariouslyold-fashioned term, but she understood what it meant, all right-therewas no way to shrug the work off onto machines, so everybody involvedjust plain had to sweat.The Troupe pulled up all the carpets, beat a hundred kilos of dustout of them, and rolled them up neatly. They deflated the bubblepak,and rolled that up too. Peter, Martha, and Rick deftly unstacked thetowers-a nerve-racking business to watch-while Greg and Carol andMickey went after the instrumentation and the wind generator.Then there were the tepees and the yurts to strip, collapse, andpack, and the systems to shut down and uncable and stow away. Andthen there would be the bonfire, and the last big meal in camp, andthe ritual bath. . . . Jane pitched in headlong. She felt good aftera day off, she felt alert and strong. There was a lot to do, but sheknew how to do it. She was ready to work, and she would do it in onedaylong blur of harnessed nervous energy, and when it was over, shewould sleep in the Troupe bus in the moving dark, and she would feelvery satisfied.She was hauling a bundled stack of tepee poles to one of the truckswhen she saw Alex slouching past her.She scarcely recognized her brother at first: a strange, hunched,gnomelike figure, less like a Troupe wannabe than some kind ofprisoner of war. He was wearing a dirty paper jumpsuit, a bigcardboard-and-paper sombrero, with a big white mask elastic-strappedover his nose and mouth. He was carrying a large double-headed digging pick.'45 HEAVY WEATHER She'd never seen anyone carry a pick with less enthusiasm- Alex waslugging it clumsily, thigh-high, at the end of his outstretched arms,as if it were some kind of barbell. He trudged slowly out of the camp. Jane called out to him, waved,then jogged over and caught up to him just past one of the camp'sperimeter posts."What's on your mind?" he muttered."Just wanted to see how you're doing," she sai4. She looked into hispale, squinting eyes. "You mind taking off that mask for a second?"Alex pulled his mask down, with bad grace. The mask's thin elasticstraps had left four little stripes of pale skin across his sunburnedcheeks. "Ellen Mae wants me to dig up a root.""Oh." Jane thought that Alex looked shaky, and she was pretty surehe'd never touched a pickax in his life. "Are you up to that kind oflabor? You just got out of a hospital."I'm not gonna work very hard," he told her patiently. "It's justmakework bullshit. Ellen Mae's just getting me out of the way so oneof those big radio towers won't fall on my head.""You got along all right with Ellen Mae?""I can get along.' Alex sighed. "These people of yours are reallysomething. They remind me of some Santeria people I used to know, ina rancho outside Matamoros. Kind of survivalist compound thing? Theyhad the bunkers, y'know, and the security systems and stuff. . . . Ofcourse, those dope vaqueros were a much heavier outfit than thesejokers." Alex thumped the broadside of the pick against the base ofone of the perimeter posts. "This thing can't listen to us talking,can it?" "Well, yeah, it can," Jane admitted, "but we never record any speechwith it. It's just an intruder alarm, with some tasers and pelletsand stuff. We can talk." "No problem," Alex muttered, watching- a pack of Troupers strip thepaper walls from the hangar yurt. "Well, you don't have to worryabout me. Run along and go do something useful."146 Bruce SterIt rig"Is anybody bugging you, Alex? Rick or Peter or anybody?"Alex shrugged. "You're bugging me.""Don't be that way. I just want to help you fit in."Alex laughed. "Look! You kidnapped me here, I didn't ask to come. I'msunburned and covered with mosquito bites, and I'm really dirty. Thefood stinks here. There's not enough water. There's no privacy. It'sdangerous! I'm wearing clothes made of paper. Your friends are a packof hicks and loans, except for your boyfriend, who's a big cigar-store Indian. Under the circumstances, I'm being a really good sportabout this." Jane said nothing.He looked her in the eye. "Stop worrying so much. I'm not gonna doanything stupid. If I were a bigger guy, and a stronger guy, and anicer guy, I'd go have it out with your boyfriend about that wayyou've been groaning at night." He shook his head, under the bigpaper hat. "I won't, though. I think I know what kind of guy Mulcaheyis, and I think you're crazy to hook up with a guy like that. Buthey, I'm not one to judge. That's your life, that's all yourdecision." "Thanks a lot," she grated.He smiled at her. "You're really happy here, aren't you?"She was surprised."I've seen you act really crazy sometimes, Janey. And I still thinkyou're acting pretty strange. But I've never seen you act so happybefore." He smiled again. "You're chasing tornadoes in a wasteland!But you're waltzin' around here with a smile on your lips, and a songin your heart, and your little bouquet of fresh wildflowers. - . . 
It's kind of sweet, actually."
Jane straightened to her full height and looked down at him. "Yes,
Alex, I'm happy here. About everything but you, basically."
"You really belong with these people. You really like them."
"That's right. They're my people."
Alex narrowed his eyes. "And this guy you're with. He
HEAVY WEATHER 147 

treats you all right? He wasn't beating you or anything really sick
and twisted, was he?"
Jane looked around for eavesdroppers, smoldering with rage, then
centered her eyes on him. "No. He doesn't beat me. I was fucking him.
I like to flick him. Hard! Loud! A lot! I'm not ashamed about it, and
you can't make me ashamed!" There was a hot flush in her cheeks and
ears. 
"Get this through your head! That is the man in my life!

• 
He is my grand passion." She stared hard at Alex, until he
dropped his gaze.
"I never thought I was gonna have a grand passion," she told him. "I
didn't ever believe in that. I thought it was Hollywood fantasy, or
something from a hundred years ago. But I have a grand passion now,
and he's the one. There'll never be another man like him for me~ 
Ever!" 
Alex took a step back. "Okay, okay."
"It's him and me till theaky falls in!"
Alex nodded quickly, his eyes wide. "Okay, I get it, Janey. Calm
down." 
"I am calm, you little creep. And it's no joke. You can't ever make
it a joke, because you don't know one thing
about it. I love him, and I'm happy with him, and we do


• 
what we do, and we are what we are, and you just better live
with that! And you bettet never forget what I just told
you.
Alex nodded. She could tell from the way he bit his lip that her
words had sunk in-for better or worse, she'd connected. "It's okay,
Janey. I'm not complaining. I'm glad I had a chance to see you acting
like this, I really am. It's real weird, but it's refreshing." He
shrugged, uneasily. I "The only thing is-you shouldn't have brought
me out here. That just wasn't a good idea. I don't belong in any
place like this. I'm not like these people. You should have
left me alone." He lifted the pick carefully and placed on his narrow
shoulder. 
"You're gonna stay with the Troupe awhile, Alex?"
"I oughta make you take me home right away." He balanced the pick
handle on his collarbone, clumsy and restless. "But I got no home to
go to at the moment. Mexico is out, for obvious reasons. I'm sure not
going back
148 
B r u c e S t e r I I n g
home to Papa in Houston. Pa p a acts even stranger than you do, and
those clinic people might be lookin' for me there.. . . And anyway,
there are possibilities in a setup like this. It's stupid for me to
stay here, but I think I might do okay for awhile, if I can get
everybody to mostly ignore me. Especially you." He turned away.
"Alex," she said.
He looked over his shoulder. "What?" 
"Learn to hack something. Like everybody else does. Just so you can
get along better."
He nodded. "Okay, Juanita. Have it your way." 



ALEX FOLLOWED ELLEN Mae's precise but extremely confusing directions,got turned around several times, and finally found the paper-tagged stick she had driven into the earth to mark the spot. The flutteringpaper tag marked a low trailing vine on the ground. The vine wasabout two meters long, with hairy, pointed, conical leaves, and itsmelled rank and fetid. It harbored a large population of smallblack-and-orange beetles. It was called a buffalo gourd.Alex scraped the vine aside with the flat blade of the pick, got atwo-handed choke-up grip on the shaft, and started to chop at theyellow earth. He was impressed with the pick. The tool was well-balanced, sharp, and in good condition. Unfortunately he was nowherenear strong enough to use it properly.Alex chipped, gnawed, and scraped his way several centimeters downinto the miserable, unforgiving soil, until the sweat stood out allover his ribs and his pipe-stem arms trembled.When he spotted the buried root of a buffalo gourd, he stared at itin amazement for some time, then left the pick beside the hole andwalked slowly back to camp.Carol Cooper had pulled a pair of lattices from the wall of thegarage yurt. The highway maintenance hulk rolled out through the bignew gap.Carol watched the machine lumber downhill while she folded and tied the wooden lattices. Alex joined her, tugging down his mask.'49 HEAVY WEATHER 
The machine hit the highway, hesitated, and began creeping alongsouth at ten klicks an hour. "Well, let's hope the poor damn thing gets to paint a few roadstripes before they shoot it to hell and gone again," Carol said,stacking the lattices in the back of a truck. "What's the deal, dude?I'm busy.""Carol, what's the weirdest thing you've got around here?""What in hell are you talking about?""What have you got, that's really strange, only nobody else everhacks with it?" "Oh," Carol said. "I get your drift." She grinned. "There's a touchof that in every Trouper. Old-fashioned hacker gadget jones. Toyhunger, right?" Carol looked around the garage, at the scatteredtools, the bench mounts, the table vise, an industrial glue sprayer."You wanna help me pack all this crap? Rudy and Greg are cominglater." "I'd like to," Alex lied, "but I got another assignment.""Well, I'm gonna be glad to have this thing off my hands, anyhow. Youwant to play with something, you can play with this bastard." Carolwalked to the welding bench and pulled off a long, dusty coil ofblack cable. It looked like a pneumatic feedline for the weldingtorch, a big coil of thin black plastic gas pipe. As she caught it upand brought it to him, though, Alex saw that the apparent pipe wasactually sleek black braided cord.One end of the cord ended in a flat battery unit, with a beltattachment, a small readout screen, and a control glove."Ever seen one of these before?" "Well, I've certainly seen a battery and a control glove," Alex said.She handed him the works. "Yeah, that's a damn good battery!Superconductive. You could drive a motorbike with that battery. Andhere I am, keeping that sucker charged up to no good end-nobody everuses this damn thing!" She frowned. "Of course, if you work thatbattery down, kid, you're gonna have to pull some weight to make upfor that." 
Brtace St~rIIr'~ HEAVY WEATHER '5' 
"I'm pulling, I'm pulling," Alex told her. "My people in Matamoros
have got that shipment ready, they're just waiting for us to give
them the coordinates." 
"Standard satellite global-position coordinates?"
"That's what they use, all right," he said. "Just like the Troupe,
like the army, just like everybody."
"I can give you those anytime, it's no big secret where we're
pitching camp."
"That's good. I'll try and phone 'em in, if I can still get that
encrypted line."
'No problema," Carol said, bored. She watched as• Alex hefted the
cable, then slid the whole coil of it over his right shoulder. It
rested there easily. The cable weighed only a couple of kilos, but it
felt bizarrely serpentine and supple, somehow dry and greasy at the
same time. It was as thick as his little finger, and maybe twenty
meters long. "What is this thing exactly?"
"Smart rope."
"What's smart about it?" 
"Well, there's this chip in the battery box that understands knot
topology. You know what topology is?" 

"It's a kind of math about deforming the geometry of space."
"Great." 
"Anyhow, that rope is braided from a lot of different cabling. Got
sensor cable, power cable, and this is the tricky part, electric
reactive fiber. Okay? It'll stretch, it'll contract-hard and fast-it
can bend and wiggle anywhere along the length. The damn thing can tie
itself in knots." 
"Like the smart cloth in kites," Alex said, "except it's a line, not
a sheet." 
"That's right."
"Why'd you try to spook me with that topology crap, then? You just
use the damned glove, right?"
"Right," she said. "Except technically, you won't understand what
you're actually doing."
"So what? Who cares?" 
Carol sighed. "Look, just take the damn thing out of here, and try
not to hurt yourself. I don't wanna see that
rope again, okay? I thought it was really cool hardware when I first
heard about it, and I spent a lot of Janey's money to buy it. I was
sure there'd be a million uses for smart rope around a camp, and
hell, there are a million uses-so many goddamn uses that nobody ever
uses it! Nobody ever remembers that it's around! Nobody's ever liked
it! It gives everybody the creeps."
"Okay!" said Alex cheerfully. This last little speech had sent his
morale soaring. He liked the smart rope already. He was glad to have
it. He was kinda sorry he didn't have two of them. "I'll take real
good care of it. Don't forget about the phone. Hasta Ia uista."
Alex left the tent and shuffled out of camp again, back to the root
from hell. He scraped and chipped and dug at the root for a while,
until he was Out of breath again. Then he stretched the rope out to
its full twenty-pace length across the weedy earth. He turned the
power switch on.
The rope lay there, totally inert. The little readout screen
suggested: INPtT~ PARAMETERS FOR HYPERBOLIC C1*VA­TURE. 
He tried on the power glove. It had the usual knuckle sensors along
the back and a thousand little beaded pressure cells across the palms
and the fingers. It was a right-hand glove, and the fit was pretty
good. The fingertips were free, and the glove slid very nicely along
the rope, a " mix of grip and slickness.
Alex punched a few numbers at random into the readout box, then
flopped the rope around with the glove. Nothing much happened. He put
the rope aside and wore the glove to dig with the pick. The glove had 

a good grip and helped quite a bit with the incipient blisters.
Along about sundown, Peter and Rick showed up. They were wearing
paper gear fresh off the roll, and they'd been bathed and their hair
was combed. 
"You'd better come on in, Medicine Boy," said Peter. "They're
wasbin' the clothes, everybody's takin' a bath, we're all gonna eat
pretty soon."
"I'm still busy," Alex said.
Rick laughed. "Busy with what?"

Bruzce St~rIIflS 
"Pretty big job," Alex said. "A buffalo gourd. Ellen Mae said the
root weighs thirty kilos."
"You can't have a root that weighs thirty kilos, man," said Rick.
"Look, trees don't have roots that weigh thirty kilos."
"Where's the plant?" Peter said.
Alex pointed to the severed gourd vine, which he had cast aside. The
vine had shriveled badly in the sunlight.
"Hell," said Rick, contemptuous. "Look, it's a matter of simple
physics. It takes a lot of energy to grow a root- starches and
cellulose and stuff. Look at the photosynthetic area on those vine
leaves. You can't grow something that weighs thirty kilos off a plant
with no more solar-collecting area than that!"
Peter stared into the shallow hole and laughed. "Ellen Mae sent you
on a snipe hunt, dude. She's had you diggin' all day for nothin'.
Man, that's cold."
"Well, he hasn't been digging very hard," Rick judged, kicking the
small heap of calichelike soil with the toe of his boot. "I've seen a
prairie dog turn more earth than this."
"What's with the rope?" Peter said.
"I thought it might help me haul the root out," Alex lied glibly. "I
can't even lift thirty kilos."
Peter laughed again. "This is pathetic! Look, we're outta here, right
after sundown. You better get back to camp and figure out how you're
gonna hitch a ride."
"How are you riding?" Alex asked.
"Me?" Peter said. "I'm riding the ultralight! I'm ridin' escort
duty."
"Me too," Rick said. "With a rifle. There are bandits out on these
highways, sometimes. Structure-hit people, bushwhackers. Most folks
in a convoy like ours, with all this fine equipment, they might run a
pretty big risk. But not the Troupe. The Troupe's got air support!"
"You're not gonna find any structure-hit creeps with any air
support," Peter said.
"Exactly," Rick said. "You're flying up there in the dark, no lights,
silent, with the infrared helmet and a laser-sighted silent rifle-if
it should ever come to that, you are death from above."

HEAVY VVEATH ER 153 
"One shot, one kill, no exceptions," said Peter. "Panopticbattlefield surveillance," said Rick.
• 	
"Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.""Aerial counterinsurgency-the only way to travel."

• 
Alex blinked. "I wanna do that." 
"Sure," said Peter.
"Trade you my root for it, Peter." Peter laughed. "There's no such
thing, man." "Wanna bet? C'mon, bet me."
Peter glanced into the hole. "Bet what? There's nothing in there,
man. Nothing but that big shelf of rock."
"That shelf of rock is the root," Alex said. "Not thirty kilos,
either. I figure it's gotta weigh at least eighty. That sorry little
vine has gotta be two hundred years old."
Rick stared into the hole, then spat on his hands and hefted the 



pick. "He's gotcha there, Pete. He's right, you're wrong, he'sflyin' escort, and you're dog meat audi yoti~t'e ~ riding the buswith Janey." He barked with iaugh~ asd~ swung the pick down with acrunch. 
JANE's EYES STILL stung from the antiseptic. The baths always hurt.She had refused to take antiseptic baths at first, until she'dglimpsed the cratered scars on Joanne Lessard's shoulders. Joanne wasfair-skinned and dainty, and the staph boils that had hit the Troupehad come close to killing her. Bombay Staph flb was wicked as hell;it just laughed aloud at broad-spectrum antibiotics. Modern strainsof staphylococcus were splendidly adapted for survival on the earth'sbroadest, widest, richest modern environment. The world's vastacreage of living human skin.Jane's eyes stung, and her crotch itched, but at least her was clean,and she smelled good. She'd even come tomjoy the sensation of fresh clean paper over damp nakedthe closestone came in Troupe life to padding around terry cloth with your hairin a towel. Outside the cornland yurt, the camp rang with bestialhowls as Ed Dunneecke poured another big kettleful of scalding waterinto fabric tub. Hot water felt so lovely-at least till the openedand Ed's sheep dip started to bite. 
Brtzc~ St~rIing'54 
Shutting down the Troupe's systems was delicate work. Even the minorsystems, for instance, the little telephone switches, had a millionor more lines of antique corporate freeware. The software had beencreated by vast teams of twentieth-century software engineers, hiredlabor for extinct telephone empires like AT&T and SPRINT. It wasfreeware because it was old, and because everybody who'd ever made itwas either dead now or in other work. Those armies of telephoneengineers were now as scattered and extinct as the Soviet Red Army.Those armies of engineers had basically been automated out ofexistence, replaced by higher-and-higher-level expert systems, thatdid error checks, bug hunts, resets, fault recoveries. Now a singleindividual could use the technology-any individual with a power plugand a desk. The sweat and talent of tens of thousands of clever people had vanished into a box you could hold in your hand and buy ina flea market. The Troupe's switching stations were cheap-ass little Malaysian-madeboxes of recycled barf-colored plastic. They cost about as much as apair of good shoes.There wasn't a single human being left in the world who fullyunderstood what was going on inside those little boxes. Actually, nosingle human being in the world had ever understood an intellectualstructure of that complexity. Any box running a million lines of codewas far beyond the direct comprehension of any human brain. And itwas simply impossible to watch those modern screamer-chips grind thatold code, on any intimate line-by-line basis. It was like trying tolisten in on every conversation in a cocktail party bigger thanManhattan. As a single human individual, you could only interface with that codeon a very remote and abstract level-you had to negotiate with thecode, gently, politely, and patiently, the way you might have dealtwith a twentieth-century phone company. You owned a twentieth-centuryphone company-it was all inside the box now.As you climbed higher and higher up the stacks of in~ terface, awayfrom the slippery bedrock of the hardware grinding the ones andzeros, it was like walking on stilts.'55 
And then, stilts for your stilts, and stilts for your stilts for yourstilts. You could plug a jack in the back of the box and run like thewind of the wind. Until something crashed somewhere, that thesystem's system's system couldn't diagnose and figure out andoverride. Then you threw the little box away and plugged in anotherone. The Troupe's system was temperamental. To say the least. Forinstance, the order in which you detached the subsystems mattered alot. There was no easy or direct explanation as to why that shouldmatter, but it mattered plenty.Jane kept careful professional track of the system's in-congruities,its wealth of senseless high-level knots and kinks and cramps. Shekept her notes with pencil and paper, in a little looseleaf leathernotebook she'd had since college. Mickey the sysadmin and Rick thecode grinder had given Jane wary, weary looks when she'd firststarted working seriously on the Troupe's system, but she'd moreproved her worth since then. -She'd resolved screwups, seizures, andblockages that had had Mickey cursing wildly and Rick so mired incode that he staggered around camp like a blacked-out drunk.The difference between hacking code and hacking in-was like thedifference between a soldier and a omat. Certain crises would only yield to a political oiution.Jane kept her notebook inside a plastic case, glued to underside ofJerry's connectionist simulator. This was safest storage place incamp, because Jerry's simulator ,s the Troupe's most valued machine.The simulator was only box in the crowd of them that actuallyimpressedThe U.S. government had gone nuts over climate rnulators during theState of Emergency, pouring money ti~ global climate modeling at afrantic rate that im;ed even the Pentagon. Boxes like Jerry's wereBrob -Jerry's lone system had more raw nputational power than the entireplanet had possessed1995. Officially, Jerry's system was "on loan" from the SESCollaboratory, aresearch net in which Jerry hadHEAVY WEATHER i~6 Br,zce SterIIr~g 
fairly good standing, but nobody was going to come and repossess it.No~y but the Troupe gave a damn about Jerry's box, really. It wasstone obvious now that the problems of climate modeling simplyweren't going to yield to raw computational power. Power wasn't thebottleneck at all; the real bottleneck was in the approaches, theapproximations, the concepts, and the code.Jane opened her favorite laptop, dragged the system monitor onto itoff Mickey's sysadmin machine, and checked to see that all theinstrumentation was safely down. Peter, Greg, and Martha had been onthe job: all the towers were off-line and down now, except for thetelecom tower. They always left the telecom for last. It made moresense, really, to take down the security system last, but theperimeter posts were pig stupid and paranoid little entities thatreacted to any sudden loss of packets as prima facie evidence ofenemy sabotage. Unless they were petted to sleep first, the postswould whoop like crazy.An icon appeared on Jane's screen. An incoming phone call-to her ownnumber. Surprised, she took the call.A postcard-sized video inclusion appeared in the upper right-handcorner of her laptop. It was a stranger: clean shaven, sandy-haired,distinguished looking, close to forty maybe. Ruggedly handsome, in afunny, well-groomed sort of way. Oddly familiar looking. He wore a 
shirt, jacket, and tie.
"Hello?" the stranger said. "Is this Juanita?"
"Yes?" 
"Good," the stranger said, smiling and glancing down at his desk. "I
didn't think this would quite work." lie seemed to be in a hotel
lobby somewhere, or maybe a very nicely furnished office. Jane could
see a lithograph behind his head and a spray of leaves from an exotic
potted plant.
The stranger looked up from his console. "I'm not getting any video
off my side, should I shut down my video feed?"
"Sorry," Jane said, leaning forward to speak into the laptop's little
inset mike. "I'm getting this off a laptop, I've got no camera here."
"Sorry to hear that," the stranger said, adjusting his tie.
'57 
HEAVY WEATHER 

"Y'know, Juanita, I've never actually seen you. I was quite looking
forward to it." 
The stranger had Jerry's ears on the sides of his head. Jane could
scarcely have been more surprised if he'd had Jerry's ears on a
string around his neck. But then the bump of shock passed, and Jane
felt a little cold thrill of recognition. She smiled shyly at the
laptop, even though he couldn't see her. "This is Leo, isn't it?"
"Right," Leo Mulcahey said, with a gentle smile and a wink. "Can we
talk?" 
Jane glanced around the command yurt. Mickey and Rick were both in
the bath line. They usually gave her a while to work alone before
they'd show up to run diagnostics and start lugging machines to the
trucks. 
"Yeah," she said. "I guess so. For a little while." It was the first
time she had seen Jerry's brother. Leo looked older than Jerry, his
cheeks thinner and a little lined, and she was shocked at how good-
looking he was. His head had just the shape of Jerry's head, but his
haircut was lovely. Jane had been cutting Jerry's hair herself, but
she could see now that as a hair designer, she was dog meat.
"I understand you've been talking with Mom," Leo said.
Jane nodded silently, but Leo of course couldn't see her. "Yes I
have," she blurted.
"I happen to be in the States again, at the moment. Mom's been
filling me in on Jerry's activities."
"I didn't mean any harm by it," Jane said. "Jerry hardly ever calls
your mother, but he doesn't mind if I do it. . . . Sorry if that
seemed intrusive on my part."
"Oh, Mom thinks the world of you, Juanita," said Leo, smiling.
"Y'know, Mom and I have never seen Jerry carry on in quite this way
before. I'm convinced you must be someone very special."
"Well . . ." Jane said. "Leo, I just thought of something-I have some
photos on disk here, let me see if I can pull them up and feed them
to you."
"That would be good." Leo nodded. "Always feels a little odd to speak
to a blank screen." 
Jane punched up the digital scrapbook. "I wanted to

Brt.ac~ Sterllrug
thank you for helping me find my brother . . . Alejandro."
Leo shrugged. "De nada. I pulled a string for you. Okay, two strings.
That's Mexico for you . . . walls within walls, wheels within wheels.
. . . An interesting place, a fine culture." He looked down again.
"Oh yes. That's coming across very well. Nice photo."
"I'm the one in the hat," Jane said. "The other woman's our camp
cook." 
"I could have guessed that," Leo said, sitting up intently. He seemed
genuinely intrigued. "Oh, this one of you and Jerry is very good. I 

didn't know about the beard. The beard looks good, though.""He's had the beard ever since I met him," Jane said. "I'm sorrythat, um . . . well, that it's been so long. And that you and hedon't get along better.""A misunderstanding," Leo offered, weighing his words. "You know howJerry can be . . . very singleminded, am I right? If you'readdressing some issue, and it doesn't quite chime with Jerry'scurrent train of thoughtHe's a very bright man of course, but he's a mathematician, not verytolerant of ambiguity." Leo smiled sadly. He has his dignity, Janethought. That magnetism Jerry has, and that ruthlessness too.She found him extremely attractive. Alarmingly so. She could easilyimagine fucking him. She could hotly imagine flicking both of them.At once. And when they went for each other's throats she'd be smashed betweenthem like a mouse between two bricks. She cleared her throat. "Well . . . is there something I can do foryou in particular, Leo?""Actually, yes," Leo said. "By the way, you don't mind if I hard-copythese photos, do you?""Oh, go ahead.""It's about this strange business with the F-6," said Leo as hisprinter emitted a well-bred hum. "I wonder if you could explain thatto me a little more thoroughly.""Well," Jane said, "the F-6 is a theory Jerry has.""It sounds a bit alarming, doesn't it? A tornado an order ofmagnitude larger than any seen before?"
HEAVY WEATHER 159 
"Well, strictly speaking it wouldn't be a tornado per se-more of a large-scale vortex. Something smaller than a hurricane,but with a different origin and different structure. Differentbehavior." "Was I right in hearing that this thing is supposed to be a permanentfeature of the atmosphere?""No," Jane said. "No. I mean, yes, there is some indication in themodels-if you set the parameters just right, there are some, urn,indicators that an F-6 might become a stable configuration undercertain circumstances. Look, Leo, we don't emphasize that aspect,okay? The woods are full of nutty amateurs running homemade climatemodels and declaring all kinds of crazy doomsday crap. It would lookreally bad if the press started telling
•
 everybody that Jerry's forecasting some kind of giant permanent
storm over Oklahoma. That's just not responsible behavior from a
scientist. Jerry's got problems enough al- )


•
 ready with the labcoat crowd, without that kind of damage to his
credibility.''
"Jerry does think, seriously, that an F-6 will actually occur,
though."
"Well, yes. We do think that. The mesoscale convection
-is shaping up, the Bermuda High, the jet stream... Yeah, we
think that if it's gonna happen at all, then this is the season.
Probably within the next six weeks."
"A giant, unprecedently large, and violent atmospheric storm. Over
the heartland of the United States." 
"Yes, that's right. That's it exactly."
Leo was silent, and looked grave and thoughtful.
"Leo, you don't double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere
without some odd things happening."
"I'm used to odd things," Leo said. "I don't believe I'm quite used
to this, however."


• 
"Jerry's not alone in this line of thought, you know. He's out
on a limb, but he's not way out. There are pale 



-oclimatologists in Europe who think that giant storms were real
common during the Eemian Interglacial. There's physical evidence in
the fossil record." 
"Really."
"There was also a paper out this year saying that the
N 6~ 
Bruice St~rItrI3 

so-called Akkadian volcanism wasn't volcanic at all, that the dust
layers, and their three-hundred-year drought, were entirely
atmospheric. That was the Akkadian culture in the Tigris and
Euphrates."
"I beg your pardon?"
"The Akkadians were the first civilization-2200 B.C., in Mesopotamia?
They were the first culture ever, and also the first culture ever
destroyed by a sudden climate change."
"Right," Leo said, "I'm certain these matters have been cover our
~fted and crusading popular press. Exhaustively. And to the full
satisfaction of the scientific community." He shrugged, elegantly. "I
understand that the weather is crazy now, and the weather will be
crazy the rest of our lives. What I don't understand is why Jerry is
taking you into this."
"Me?" Jane said. "Oh! Well, I hack interface. For the 

Troupe. And I kinds have to get back to work right now, k
actually."
"Juanita, you're not taking my point. Suppose this is a really big
storm. Suppose that it is a permanent vortex in the atmosphere-as
Jerry has said, something like Earth's own version of the Great Red
Spot of Jupiter. A permanent planetary sinkhole for excess greenhouse
heat, centered somewhere near North Texas. I know that seems like a
bizarre supposition, but suppose it's really the truth."
"Yeah? Well, then I'll be there watching it."
"You'll be killed." 
"Maybe. Probably. But I'll be there anyway. We'll document it.
"Why?"
"Why? Because we can! Because we know! It's what we do! We'll do it
for the sake of the survivors, I suppose." Jane ran her hands through
her hair, her face stiff. "Anyway, if the P.6 is really a worst-case
F-6, then the survivors are gonna be the unlucky ones."
Leo said nothing. Jane heard an odd rumbling, then realized he was
rapidly drumming his fingers on the desktop.
"I have to go now, Leo. There's a lot of work."
T'7EAVY WEATHER 161 

"Thank you for being so frank with me, Juanita. I appreciate that."
"My friends call me Janey."
"Oh. Of course. Hasta Ia vista, Janey." Leo hung up. Jane shivered,
looked around herself once more. 
Rick entered the yurt.
"I've got Med-I mean, I've got Alex riding shotgun in the ultralight
tonight," he said. "He said he wanted to go."
Jane stared at him blankly.
Rick smiled at her. "I told you that kid really liked all of this." 

ALEX WAS NIGHT-FLYING high over Texas with his head in a helmet and
his face wrapped in oxygen. A tiny amber light glowed between his
knees, lighting the joystick~ and rolierball. More light leaked from
the translucent face shield of the virching helmet, the phantom
watery glow of the menu bar falling off his own brow onto the pitch-
black wings of the aircraft.
The hot spark of a global surveillance satellite showed at the 

horizon. Overhead were a million stars, a sliver of moon, a galacticriver fog of Milky Way, a curl of high feathery cirrus. The fanbehind his back pushed almost silently, merely sipping power, as itkept slow pace with the Troupe's land convoy, far below.If there was anything more pleasant than this, Alex hadn't yetdiscovered it. This time they were letting him actually fly the machine by hand.Buzzard had booted Ultralight Beryl with an obligatory big-dummy'scontrol setting. Any ham-handed lurch at the joystick was instantlydumbed down into a gentle, nonlethal veer or dip.Flying under these conditions strongly reminded Alex of riding amotorized wheelchair. Those same 'dainty fingertip controls, thatsame almost silent buzz of engine, and that same sense of sitting,wrapped with cloying security, in the care of a smart machine. Alexdirely wanted to try something stupid, but he wasn't about to tryanything stupid under these circumstances. He'd wait till he'd woni 6z Bru.ac~ St~rItng 
their confidence, till they gave him a lot more initiative andleeway. Then he'd try something stupid.Rick was in Ultralight Amber, casing the landscape be-hind theTroupe. Rick had his rifle. Just before their launches, Rick hadgiven Alex a hair-raising lecture about the cunning and cruelty ofbackwoods bandits and the dire necessity for constant alertness while"riding point."Alex found this pretty hard to swallow-at least as hard as thenight's rations had been, a gruesome chop suey of jackrabbit, parchedcorn, and buffalo-gourd root. It had been a hell of a root, though.It took two men to carry it, and it tasted like a cross betweencelery and pencil shavings. It was the biggest root the Troupe hadever unearthed. Alex couldn't help but feel rather proud of this. And riding pointfor the Troupe beat the hell out of riding one of -the crammed,overloaded buses. But Alex couldn't imagine that riding point wasreally all that dangerous. After all, the Troupe chase teams drove onthe backroads all over West Texas, and they'd never been stopped androbbed. Granted, most bandits, assuming there were any bandits around,wouldn't want to hassle with Juanita and her combat-retrofitted jumping hell spider. Juanita's pursuit car didn't have any guns, butit sure looked as if it ought to, and it moved like a bat out ofhell. But the Aerodrome Truck and the Radar Bus were pretty fat andeasy targets, chock-full of valuable equipment, yet nobody hadbothered them. Alex reasoned that if bandits were too timid and out of it to bushwhack a lone bus, there was no way they'd tackle the entireTroupe convoy. The convoy was behind him now, slowly winding its wayalong the pitch-black road. Two pursuit vehicles, two robot buseshauling trailers, the Radar Bus, the Aerodrome Truck, an old dunebuggy, two robot supply jeeps with trailers, three robot pedicabbikes with sidecars, and a small tractor.Not a headlight in the lot. All moving in darkness, supposedly forgreater security. The smart pursuit cars were leading the way,sniffing out the road with micro-HEAVY WEATHER 163 
wave radar. Every once in a while Alex would catch a faint glimpse oflight through a bus or truck window-somebody's flipped-up laptopscreen, where some Trouper was catching up on work or killing timegrepping a disk.The convoy looked rather more interesting when Alex clicked thevirching helmet into infrared. Then there were vivid putt-putts of 
grainy pixeled heat out of the alcohol-fueled buses and the ancient
dune buggy. The tractor too. Everything else ran on batteries. There
was a faint foggy glow of human body heat out the windows of the
buses. It was cold at night in a High Plains spring, and the buses
were crowded. 
Alex had no gun. He was kind of glad the Troupe hadn't handed out a
lot of guns. In his experience, unusual minority social groups with
lots of guns tended to get mashed rapidly underfoot by nervous,
trigger-happy government SWAT teams. So he had no weapon. He had six
dusty, dead-looking emergency flares and a big flashlight.
Rick had also surreptitiously passed him some ibogaine chewing gum
for maximum combat alertness. Alex hadn't tried chewing the gum yet.
He wasn't sleepy yet. And besides, he didn't much like ibogaine.
His earphones crackled. "Rick here. How ya doin'? Over."
"Fine. Comfy. I reset the seat, over."
"How'd you do that?"
"I got out and stood in the stirrups and pulled the pin."
"You're not supposed to do that."
"Rick, listen. It's just you and me up here. Nobody's listening,
nobody cares. I'm not gonna fall out of this thing. I'd have better
luck falling out of a grocery cart."
Rick was silent a moment. "Don't he stupid, okay?" He clicked off.
Alex rode on, most of another long hour. It was all right. An hour
with oxygen was never boring. He was trying to make the oxygen last,
sipping at the tank bit by bit, but he knew the tank would be empty
by the time he landed. After that, he was going to have to buy more
oxy gen somehow.
164 Bruc~ SterIIri~ 

He was going to have to start buying stuff for the Troupe.
For all their rhetoric, Alex could see that this was the crux of the
deal, as far .as he was concerned. The same unspoken bargain went for
Juanita too, mostly. These people weren't hanging out with Juanita
just because they really liked big chunky-hipped cyber-art-school
grads. They liked Juanita because she bought them stuff, and looked
after their numerous assorted needs. She was their patroness. And he,
Alex, was on track to be next car in the gravy train.
For all that, though, there was the puzzling matter of Jerry
Mulcahey. Troupe life all boiled down to Mulcahey in the end, because
any Trouper who didn't fear, love, and worship the guy would
obviously get their walking papers in short order. Alex still wasn't
too sure about Mulcahey's real motives. Mulcahey was a genuinely
twisted individual. Alex had been watching Mulcahey closely, and he
was pretty sure of two things: (A) Mukahey was genuinely possessed of
some kind of genius, and (B) Mulcahey didn't have much idea what the
hell money was. When he and Juanita were face-to-face in public,
Mulcahey would treat her with odd archaic courtliness: he let her sit
down first at the campfire, he'd help her to her feet after, he
wouldn't eat until she'd started eating, that sort of thing. Neither
of them ever made a big deal of these silent little courtesies, but
Mulcahey rarely missed a chance to do them.
And quite often, if some minor Troupe hassle came up, Mulcahey would
let Juanita do all the talking for him. She'd get really animated and
deeply into the topic, and he'd get really stone-faced and abstract
and reserved. It was just as if he was letting her have his emotions
for him. And the two of them clearly thrived on this arrangement.
Every once in a while he would suddenly finish one of her sentences,
and everyone else would flinch.
Mulcahey's weirdest symptoms happened when Juanita wasn't watching
him at all. She'd be doing her version of some comely girl-thing,
like maybe a big stretch-and-bend-over in her thin paper jumpsuit,
Mulcahey would all of a sudden get this very highly flammable ex
HEAVY WEATHER 

165 ­
pression. Like he was a starving man and she was an expensive cordonbleu dinner and he was really trying to be careful, but it was ali hecould do not to rip the tablecloth right off her and eat from thebroken china on his hands and knees. The look would pass in a hurry,and Mulcahey would get his usual overcontrolled cigar-store-Indianface, but the look was definitely there all right, and it was not thekind of look that a man could fake. Alex wasn't sure how all this was going to turn out for Juanita.She'd known this guy for at least a year now, and it was prettydamned odd for a man and woman who'd been lovers that long not tocalm down some. Maybe they were calm now. In which case, thebeginning must have been something pretty seriously strange.Alex looked down across the landscape. No sign of the convoy. He'dleft the convoy far hehind as he mulled things over. Time to turnaround ~nd head back a bit. As he wheeled the ultralight around, with sluggish machine-assistedcaution, he passed the shoulder of ahiil. In the infrared, thehighway-it happened to be a paved one-smoldered a bit with trappedday heat, but there was a lot of vivid heat on the far slope of thathill. Alex stopped his maneuver and decided to check it out.At first, be thought there was an entire army standing there in theroad. At least a hundred people. Then he realized that most of theglowing patches of heat were standing on all fours. They were deer.No, goats.Somebody had a herd of goats out on the highway.Alex clicked open the radio channel. "Alex here," he said. "Rick, theroad is full of goats, man, over.""Copy, Alex. You see anybody?""Yeah-I think so. Kinda hard to tell from this heights Rick, whywould anybody have a herd of goats out on the road in the middle ofthe night, over?""You got me beat, dude.""Maybe they travel at night for better security, like we do.""Are they moving?""No, man. Just sitting there.""Those could be pharm goats, and they could be goat
166 Brtjce Sterling 167 rustlers, just about to rendezvous with one of those meat-packingtrucks out of the city.""People do that? Rustle goats?""Some people do anything for money, dude." Alex heard Rick loudlysmacking his wide-awake gum into the microphone. "Or maybe they'reblockin' the road with goats on purpose, and they got an ambush setup in the brush, over."Alex lifted his faceplate and looked out bare-eyed. Pretty hard totell in the dark, but it looked like there was some pretty thickmesquite on both sides of the road. Good-sized mesquite, too, acouple of stories tall. You could have hidden a big tribe ofComanches in it. "Maybe you better come up here, Rick.""No way, man, you don't want to desert the rear of the convoy in apossible ambush situation.""But you've got the gun, man.""I'm not gonna shoot anybody, are you kidding? If these are realbandidos, we're gonna pull the hell back and call the Texas Rangers!""Right," Alex said. "'Death from above.' I kinda figured." Helaughed."Look, Medicine Boy, I'll shoot if I have to. But if we just startblowing people away, out in the middle of nowhere without askin' anyquestions, then we're the ones who are gonna get stomped by the 
Rangers." 

"Cut your motor and buzz 'em, get a good quiet look."
"Right," Alex said. "I get it."
He took several deep huffs of oxygen. It felt lovely. Then he
discovered that the motor would not shut down. He couldn't override 
the controls. Oh well. It wasn't a loud motor, anyway.
He dropped down a dozen meters over the treetops and crossed the road
at an angle, right to left. The goats didn't seem to notice, or care.
He did, however, spot the intense infrared glow of some kind of
smokeless electric heater at the edge of the mesquite trees. There
were people there too
-at least half a dozen. Standing up.
He opened the channel. "Alex here. I count about
HEAVY WEATHER 

eighty goats and at least six guys standing by the brush. They're
awake. I think they're cooking something, over."
"I don't like this, over."
"Me either. Man, you gotta be some kind of hard-ass to steal goats
from people who'd raise goats in an awful goddamn place like this."
Alex felt surprised at the sudden depth of his own anger. But hell-he
himself herded goats. He'd developed a genuine class feeling for goat
ranchers. 
"Okay." Rick sighed. "Lemme see who's awake in the convoy.~~
Alex circled the herd, slowly. More glowing bipedal figures appeared,
this time at the other side of the road. 
"Greg says drop a flare and check it out," Rick reported.
"Right," Alex said.
He plucked one of the flares from its plastic clip-on mount on the
right-hand strut. The flares were old and dusty and covered with
military-issue stenciling in Cyrillic. He hadn't imagined them
working too well, but at least they were simplicity itself to use.
He yanked the top off. The flare popped and smoldered and then burst
into welding-torch brilliance. Surprised despite himself, Alex
dropped it.
The flare tumbled in a neat parabola and landed bouncing on the
highway, at the edge of the goat herd, which immediately panicked.
The goats didn't get far, though; they were all hobbled.
Sharp bangs came from the edge of the road. Alex blinked, saw several
men in big hats and shaggy, fringed clothing.
"Rick," he said, "they're shooting at me."
"What?" 
"They've got rifles, man, they're trying to shoot me.
"Get out of there!" 
"Right," Alex muttered. He put some effort into gaining height. The
ultralight responded with the grace and speed of a sofa lugged up a
ffight of stairs. Blinded by the flare down on ground level, they
couldn't seem to see him very well. Their shooting was ragged and
they were using
t68 Bruce Sterling 

old-fashioned, loud, banging, chemically propelled bullets. That
wouldn't matter, though, if they kept shooting.
Alex had a sudden deep conviction that he was about to be shot. Death
was near. He had a rush of terror so intense that he actually felt
the bullet strike him. It was going to hit him just above the hipbone
and pass through his guts like a red-hot burning catheter and leave
him dying in his harness dripping blood and spew. He would bleed to
death in midair in the grip of a smart machine. The Troupe would call
the machine in to land, and they would find him still strapped in
his, seat, cold and gray and bloody and dead. 

Knowing with irrational conviction that his life was over, Alex felt
a dizzy spasm of terrible satisfaction. Shot dead by men with rifles.
It was so much better than the way he'd always known he would die. He
was gonna die like a normal person, as if his life had meant
something and there had been some real alternative to dying. He was
going to die like a Trouper, and anybody who learned about his death
would surely think he'd died that way on purpose. Like he'd died for
their Work. 
For an insane moment Alex actually did believe in the Work, with his
whole heart. Everything in his life had led up to this moment. Now he
was going to be killed, and it was all fated, and had all been meant
this way from the beginning.
But the men with guns kept missing him. And after a while the firing
stopped. And then a crouching man in the shaggy clothes ran out
rapidly to the burning flare in the road, and he stomped it into
embers. 
Alex realized that Rick had been shouting scratchily in his ears for
some time. 
"I'm okay!" Alex said. "Sorry."
"Where are you?"
"Ummm . . . between them and the convoy. Up pretty high. I think
they're herding the goats off the road now. Hard to tell . .
"You're not hurt? How about the aircraft?" 
Alex looked around himself. The ultralight was entirely
169 
HEAVY WEATHER 

invisible. He pulled the flashlight from its holster and waved it
over the wings, the bow, the propeller housing.
"Nothing," he said, putting the light away. "No damage, they missed
me by ten kilometers, they never even knew where I was." Alex laughed
shrilly, coughed, cleared his throat. "Goddamn, that was great!"
"We're gonna pull back now, man. There's another route . . . come
back to the convoy now."
"You don't want me to throw another flare at 'em?" 
"Fuck no, man! Just stay away from the bastards."
Alex felt a sudden burst of fury. "There's nothing to these people,
man! They're crazy, they're nothing! We should go kick their asses!"
"Alex, calm down, man. That's the Rangers' job. We chase storms, we
don't chase crooks." 
"We could wipe 'em all out right now!"
"Alex, talk sense. I'm tellin' you there are other routes. We just
back up a few klicks and we take a different road. It'll take us half
an hour. What do you wanna do-lose half an hour, or walk into a
firefight and lose some of your friends?"
Alex grunted.
"That's why we put people flying point in the first place, man," Rick
said, smacking his gum. "You did a fine job there. Now just relax."
"Okay," Alex said. "Sure, I get it. If that's the way you want it,
sure. Have it your way." He was still alive. Alive and breathing.
Alive, alive, alive . .
C H A P T E R 

6 

Ihe profession of design,"
sniffed April Logan, "having once lost its aspiration to construct a
better world, must by necessity decay into a work-for-hire varnish
for barbarism." April Logan's noble, aquiline head, with its single
careful forelock of white hair, began, subtly at first and then with 

greater insistence, to stretch. Rather like taffy. "The density ofinformation embodied in the modern technological object creates deepconceptual stress that implodes the human-object interface. . . .Small wonder that a violent reactive Luddism has become the definitive vogue of the period, as primates, outsmarted by their ownenvironment, lash out in frenzy at a postnatural world."The critic's head was morphing like a barber pole on the slenderpillar of her tanned and elegant neck. "The same technology thatmakes our design tools more complex, vastly increases the number ofoptions in determining how any designed object may appear andfunction. If there are no working parts visible to the naked eye,then techne itself becomes liquid and amorphous. It required the near
HEAVY WEATHER 
collapse of the American republic to finally end the long, poisonousvogue for channel switching and ironic juxtaposition. . . ." AprilLogan's head was gently turning inside out, in full fine-grainpixelated color. Even her voice was changing, some kind of acousticsampling that mimicked a female larynx evolving into a helix, or aKlein bottle. Jane's belt phone buzzed. At the same instant a classic twentieth-century telephone appeared in midair, to Jane's right. A phonedesigned by one Henry Dreyfuss, Jane recalled. Professor Logan oftenspoke of Henry Dreyfuss.Jane paused the critic's lecture with a twitch of her glove, thenpulled off her virching helmet. She plucked the flimsy little phonefrom her belt and answered it. "Jane here." "Janey, it's Alex. I'm out with the goats.""Yes?" "Can you tell me something? I- got a laptop here and I'm trying topull up a fine-grain of the local landscape, and I got some greatsatellite shots, but I can't find any global-positioning grids.""Oh," Jane said. Alex sounded so earnest and interested that she feltquite pleased with him. She couldn't remember the last time Alex hadopenly asked a favor of her, that he'd simply asked her for her help."What longitude and latitude are you looking for, exactly?""Longitude 100' 22' 39ff, latitude 34' 07' 25".""That's real close to camp.""Yeah, I thought so.""Should be about three hundred meters due east of the command yurt."Jerry always set the yurt right on a grid-line if he could manage it.It helped a little with radiolocation and Doppler triangulation andsuch. "Yeah, that's pretty much where me and the goats are now, but I wasjust checking. Thanks. Bye." He hung up.Jane thought this over for a moment, sighed, and put her helmet away.She passed Rick and Mickey, beavering away on the system, and thehelmeted Jerry, back at his usual weighted pacing. Jerry was startingto seriously wear the carpet. Jane put on her sunglasses and leftcamp.17Z Brtac~ St~rIt flU Lovely spring sky. Sweet fluffy altocumulus. You'd think a sky likethat could never do a moment's harm. She found Alex sitting cross-legged under the shade of a mesquitetree. Getting shade from the tiny pinnate leaves of a mesquite waslike trying to fetch water in a sieve, but Alex wore his much-gluedsombrero as well. And he was wearing his breathing mask.He was messing languidly with the flaccid black smart rope. Jane wassurprised, and not at all happy, to see the smart rope again. Thething's primitive user-hostile interface was a total joke. The firsttime she'd used it, the vicious rope had whipped back like a snapping strand of barbed wire and left a big welt on her shin.She walked up closer, boots crunching the spiky grass. Alex suddenlyturned. "Hi," she said."Hola, hermana.""Y'know, if I'd been a coyote, I coulda just walked off with one ofthese goats.""Be my guest." Alex took off the mask and yawned. "Walk off with oneof these tracking collars, and Rick will come out with his rifle andexterminate you.""What's going on Out here?""Just basking in my glory as hero of the day," Alex drawled. "See mythrong of enthusiastic admirers?" The smart rope twitched uneasily ashe tried, without success, to fling it at the goats. "I wish youhadn't called the Texas Rangers. I really don't wanna talk to thoseguys.""The Rangers never stay for long. What are you up to?"Alex said nothing. He opened his laptop, checked the clock on thescreen, then stood up theatrically and looked to the south.She turned to match his gaze. An endless vista of odd hump-shapedcaprocks dotted with juniper and mesquite, here and there the blobbygreen lobes of distant prickly pear, a yellow sparkling of tallwaving coneflowers. Far to the south a passenger jet kft a raggedcontrail. "Whoa," he said. "There it is. Here it comes. I'll beHEAVY WEATHER 173 
damned." He laughed. "Right on time too! Man, it's amazing what akind word and a credit card can do." Jane's heart sank. She didn't know what was about to happen, butalready she didn't like it. Alex was watching the horizon with hisworst and most evil grin.She stepped behind his shoulder and looked across the landscape.Then she saw it too. A bouncing machine. Something very much like acamouflage-painted kangaroo.It was crossing the hills with vast, unerring, twenty-meter leaps. Asquat metal sphere, painted in ragged patches of dun and olive drab.It had a single thick, pistoning, metal leg.The bounding robot whipped that single metal leg around with dreadfulunerring precision, like some nightmare one-legged pirate. It whackedits complex metal foot against the earth like a hustler's cuewhacking a pooi ball, and it bounded off instantly, hard. The thingspent most of its time airborne, a splotchy cannonball spinning onits axis and kicking like a flea against the Texan earth. It wasdoing a good eighty klicks an hour. As it got closer she saw that itsunderside was studded with grilled sensors.It gave a final leap and, God help her, a deft little somersault, andit landed on the earth with a brief hiss of sucked-up impact.Instantly, a skinny little gunmetal tripod flicked Out from beneathit, like a triple set of hinged switchblades.And there it sat, instantly gone as quiet as a coffee table, not tenmeters away from them."All right," she said. "What is that thing?""It's a dope mule. From my friends in Matamoros.""Oh, Jesus.""Look," he said, "relax. It's just a cheaper street version ofCharlie, your car! Charlie's a smuggler's vehicle, and this is asmuggler's vehicle. It's just that instead of having two hundredsmart spokes and driver's seats and roll bars like that big kick-asscar does, it's only got one spoke. One spoke, and a gyroscope inside,and a global positioning system." He shrugged. "And some mega chip
Bruce Sterling inside so it never runs into anything and no cop ever sees it.""Oh," she groaned. "Yeah, this is great, Alex.""It'll carry, I dunno, maybe forty kilos merchandise. No big deal.Dope people have hundreds of these things now. They don't cost muchto make, so it's like a toy for 'em."Why didn't you tell me about this?""Are you kidding? Since when do I ask your permission to doanything?" He walked up to the mule.She hurried after him. "You'd better not." "Get away from there!" he yelped. "They're hot-wired." Jane jumpedback warily, flinching, and Alex chuckled with pleasure."Tamperproof! Put in the wrong password, and the sucker explodes onthe spot and destroys all the evidence! And what's more-if you'renot, like, their friend? Or they're tired of dealing with you? Thensometimes they just booby-trap it, and blow you away the second youtouch the keypad."He laughed. "Don't look so glum. That's all just legend, really.Doper brag talk. The dope vaqueros hardly ever blow anyone up. Youand me both know the border doesn't mean anything anymore. There areno more borders. Just free and open markets!" He chuckled merrily."They can send me whatever the hell they want. Dope, explosives,frozen human hearts, who cares? They're just another deliveryservice." Alex punched a long string of numbers, with exaggerated care, into atelephone keypad welded into the top of the mule. The robot mulledthe matter over, then hissed open on a stainless-steel hinge, showinga big rubber 0-ring around its midsection.Alex started pulling out the goods. Lots of plastic-wrapped cloth. Apair of cowboy boots. A yellow cylinder tank. A plastic jug. Designersunglasses in a shockproof case. A handgun.Alex tried the sunglasses on immediately, clearly delighted withthem. "Here, you can have this," he said, tossing her the handgun."I'm not interested." Jane caught it with a gasp. The handgun was allHEAVY WEATHER 175 
injection-molded ceramic and plastic, a short-barreled six-shotrevolver. It felt hard as a rock and utterly lethal. It weighed aboutas much as a teacup. It would pass any metal detector in the worldand had probably cost all of two dollars to make."You're full of shit!" she said. "If the Rangers found out aboutthis, they'd go ape.""Yeah, and the Houston cops wouldn't like it either, if the vaqueroswere dumb enough to send a mule bouncin' right down the streets ofHouston, but they're not gonna do that, are they? Nobody's thatstupid. Nobody knows about this but you and me. And Carol, that is."Alex pulled out a gleaming metal bracelet. "I got Carol thisbarometer watch! She doesn't know that I bought it for her, but Ithink she'll like it, don't you? It'll match her Trouper cuff." Hetipped his floppy paper sombrero back on his head. "Carol's the onlyone around here who's been really decent to me.""Carol isn't going to approve of this-""Oh, get off it!" Alex snapped. "Carol is bent! Carol loves this!" Hegrinned beneath his new gold-framed shades. "Carol is old-timestructure-hit people, for Christ's sake! And she's flicking Greg, andGreg is some kinda cx- Special Forces demolition spook, a scary,heavy guy. I'm real glad they chase storms now instead of knockingbridges down, but Carol and Greg are very bent people. They're notfrom milk-and-cookie land." "I've never seen Carol or Greg commit any act of vandalism," Janesaid with dignity."Yeah," he scoffed. "Besides helping you break into Mexicanhospitals." He shook his head. "You're just pissed off because I didn't get you anything, aren't you? Well, there's a nice handgun forya! If boyfriend gets wandering eyes, blow him away!" He laughed.Jane stared at him. "You think this is funny, don't you?""Janey, it is funny." He pulled the plasticwrap from a hand-stitcheddenim shirt. Then he peeled off his paper suit. He stood there nakedin his big paper hat and shades, the paper suit pooled around hisankles, tugging the fine
176 Bruce Sterling HEAVY WEATHER 177 
blue shirt onto his skinny arms. "You can get all hot and botheredabout the implications and the morality and all that shit, if youreally want to. Or else, you can just try and live in the modemworld! It doesn't make a damn bit of difference either way!"He kicked the paper suit off his feet, then stood on top of the paperand pulled off his right shoe. "The border is lucked, and thegovernment is flicked!" He pulled off the left shoe and flung itaside. "And society is flicked, and the climate is really fucked. Andthe media are lucked, and the economy is lucked, and the smartestpeople in the world live like refugees and criminals!" He ripped theplasticwrap off a pair of patterned silk boxer shorts and steppedinto them. "And nobody has any idea how to make things any better,and there isn't any way to make things better, and there isn't gonnabe any way, and we don't control anything important about our lives!And that's just how it is today, and yes, it's funny!" He laughedshrilly. "It's hilarious! And if you don't get the joke, you don'tdeserve to be alive in the 2030s." Alex climbed into a satiny pair of brown jeans, carefully tucking inthe denim shirttails. "And what's more, right now I've got myself areally nice shirt. And real nice pants too. And boots too, look,these boots are hand-tooled Mexican leather, they're reallybeautiful." He unrolled a pair of thick cotton boot socks."The Troupe aren't gonna appreciate this. They're not really into,y'know, play-cowboy gear.""Janey, I don't give a rat's ass what your friends think about mygoddamn clothes." He stepped into the socks, jammed his feet in theboots, then walked over to the robot mule, looked into its emptycavity one last time, and slammed its top.After a three-second pause, the mule suddenly whipped its tripod shutand fired itself into the air. "If it were up to you and yourfriends," Alex said, watching it bounce madly away, "I'd be wearingplastic toilet paper the rest of my life. I'm not a weather refugee,and I'm not gonna pretend to be one. And if they don't like what I'mwearing, they can make me ride point again, if they're too god-damned timid to do it themselves." He watched the machine boundingoff southward, as he carefully buttoned his shirt cuffs. "I am what Iam. If you want to stop me, then shoot me." 
THE RANGER POSSE showed up at three that afternoon. Jane
-was unhappy to see them. She was never happy to see Rangers, andworse yet, she had a yeast infection and was running a low-gradefever. It wasn't the first time she'd had yeast. Yeast was common. Thepollution from overuse of broad-scale antibiotics had made candidafiercer and scarier, the same way it had supercharged staph and fluand TB and all the rest. Candida hadn't bootstrapped its way up tothe utter lethality of, say, Bengali cholera, but it had gotten a lotmore contagious, and nowadays it actually was a genital infectionthat you could catch off a toilet seat.A few discreet inquiries around camp established that none of theother Troupe women had yeast, so it had to be a repeated flare-up ofher old curse, the yeast she'd caught back in 2027. That one hadflared up in sullen little bouts of nastiness for almost six months,until her immune system had finally gotten on top of it. She'd hoped she had the yeast knocked down for good, but yeast was a lot likestaph or herpes, it was always there lurking low-level, and it wentcrazy when it got a good excuse.And she had to admit that it had a pretty good excuse now. She'd beenhaving sex until it hurt. It wasn't very sçnsible to do that, but sexwasn't very much use to her when it was sensible. Jane hadn't trulyappreciated sex, really, until she'd gotten into headlong sex at fulltilt. Hard, clawing, yelling sex that didn't stop until you weresweaty and chafed and sore. Sex on a nice comfy bed of rock-hardTexas dirt, with a guy in top physical condition who was a lot tallerthan you were and outweighed you by twenty kilos. It was likediscovering a taste for really hot food. Like a taste for whiskey.Except that whiskey was a poison, and you regretted whiskey in themorning, but a178 Bruce Sterlingreally passionately physical affair had been a tonic for her, andshe'd never regretted it for a moment.It had changed her. In a surprising number of ways. Physically, even.It was kind of weird and didn't sound real plausible, but she couldswear that her pelvis had actually changed shape in the past year.That her hipbones fit at a different angle and she actually walkeddifferently now. Differently and better, with her back straight andher head up. But she was only flesh and blood. The spirit was willingand the flesh was more than willing, but the body could only take somuch. She'd asked too much of the body. And now she had the crud.And then there was that even more harassing annoyance, the cops. TheRangers. There were six of them, and they rode boldly into camp inthree hand-me-down U.S. Army pursuit vehicles. They rolled in a cloudof yellow dust right through the camp's perimeter posts, whichimmediately went into panic mode, whooping and flashing lights andarcing electricity in big harmless crackling gouts. One of them fireda taser dart on a leash, which missed.Greg rushed into the command yurt and quickly shut off the alarmswhile the Rangers slowly climbed Out of their slab-sided carbon-armored prowl cars and stood there in the settling dust, in theirhats and sunglasses and guns.Once upon a time the Texas Rangers had basically been packs offrontier vigilantes violently enforcing the peace on pretty muchanything that moved. A hundred years later Texas was settled andcivilized, and the Texas Rangers were paragons of professional lawenforcement. And then a century later yet, everything had pretty muchgone to hell. So now the Texas Rangers were pretty much what they'dbeen two hundred years ago.One Ranger tradition always rang true, though. Texas Rangers alwayscarried an absolute shitload of weaponry. If a bad guy had a six-gun,then a Ranger had two six-guns, plus a rifle and a bowie knife. Ifbad guys had rifles, then Rangers had tommy guns, shotguns, and gasgrenades. Now bad guys had crazy stuff like plastic explosive andsmart land mines and electric rifles, so Rangers hadHEAVY WEATHER 179 
toxic fléchette pistols and truck-mounted machine guns and rocket-slug sniper rifles and heat-seeking aerial drones. Plus satellitebackup and their own cellular bands.-The leader of the Rangers was a Captain Gault, down from whatwas left of Amarillo. Captain Gault had a white cowboy hat, a neatgray-streaked ponytail in a silver band, smart sunglasses, and adrooping black mustache. Captain Gault was in creased khaki trousersand a bellows-pocketed, long-sleeved khaki shirt with a silver-starbadge at the breast. He wore a neatly knotted black tie and twobroad, silver-buckled, black-leather belts, one belt for the khakitrousers, the other for his twin, pearl-handled pistols. They were beautifully polished fléchette pistols in elaborate black leatherholsters. The captain's shining guns were so radiant of somber policeauthority that there was something almost papal about them.The four Ranger privates were in chocolate-chip U.S. desert camoufatigues. They had brown cowboy hats with the Lone Star on the crown,and brown leather holsters with the Lone Star inset in the leather,and trail boots with the Lone Star on the uppers, and one of themeven had a little silver Lone Star inset in his front tooth. Theywere bearded and hairy and slit-mouthed and dusty, and they bristledwith guns and cell phones, and they looked extremely tough.And then there was the last guy. He was wearing a khaki T-shirt andcutoff fatigue pants and running shoes, and he had a beat-up clothfatigue cap and a nasty-looking, well-worn rifle across his back.This last guy was black. He had a mess of kinky buffalo-soldierlocks. Jane never put much emphasis on skin color. ~-People who madefine ethnic distinctions always smacked of weird ethnic race-warcraziness to her, and considering her own ethnic background, Janefigured she had a right to be a little nervous about that kind ofhairsplitting attitude. Carol was black, and nobody much noticed orcared. Rudy Martinez looked kinda like some grandparent of his mighthave been black. But this Ranger guy was really black, like inhumanlysatin black. Sometimes people did odd chemical things to their skinnowa K 8~ Bruce Sterling i8x days. Especially if they spent a lot of time out in the open sun, andthought a lot about ozone damage.Jerry came out of the command yurt to greet the Rangers, flanked byGreg and Joe Brasseur, trailed by a reluctant, shuffling Alex. Jerryhad thrown off his usual ratty paper suit and was wearing cleanslacks and a decent buttoned shirt and a white coat. Joe Brasseur had a shirt and a tie and glasses, and was carrying a clipboard andlooking very lawyerly. Greg looked pretty much like Greg always did:jeans, army shirt, shades, muscle. Alex was in his new shirt andbrown jeans and looked like he wished he was on some other continent.The men gathered around the Ranger prowl cars and started mutteringdeep in their chests. This was another thing Jane didn't like aboutRangers. They were unbelievably chauvinist. Jane knew that a fewTexan policewomen had joined the Rangers decades back, but when theRangers had started routinely shooting people in large numbers again,the whole sex-integration thin a suddenly evaporated. It was as deadas drug-law enforcement and racial integration and universal healthcare and other perished niceties of the period. There were no womenin combat positions in the Texas Rangers, or the state National Guardunits, or the U.S. Army for that matter. And the men in these littleall-male enclaves of violence were more than a little obnoxious about it. Alex submitted to Captain Gault's brief interrogation and then leftin a hurry, with relief all over his face.The extremely black guy noticed Jane watching from the sidelines. Hedogtrotted over to her, grinning. "Got any water? Got any salt?""Sure, Officer." Jane called Ellen Mae on the phone.The black Ranger nodded peaceably, dipped into the baggy pockets ofhis cutoffs, and began to hand-roll a marijuana cigarette. The guy'sshins and forearms were chicken-scratched with fine scars. He had a big scarred crater in the side of his neck that Jane could have putthe end of her thumb into. "I'm not sure a law enforcement officer on duty ought to be smokingmarijuana," Jane said.HEAVY WEATHER 
The Ranger flicked a wooden match with his callused thumbnail, litthe joint, and inhaled sharply. "Get a life," he suggested.Young Jeff Lowe appeared on the trot from the kitchen yurt, with a 
canteen and an antiseptic paper cup, two salt tablets, and a couple
strips of jerky. He handed them shyly to the Ranger.
"Are you smoking dope?" Jeff said, wide-eyed.
"I got glaucoma," the Ranger offered. He bolted the salt pills,
knocked back three cups of water, took a last long huff off his
joint, then stomped it out and began hungrily gnawing the jerky.
"Good jerky," he said, mouth full. "You don't meet many folks these
days who can really cure a deer." He began sidling back toward his
vehicle. 
"Wait a sec," Jane said. "Please."
The Ranger raised his brows.
"What's it all about?" 
"Livestock smugglers," the Ranger told her. "They got those pharm
goats hot-wired to do all kinds of weird shit nowadays... . Run 'em
up backroads by night, mix ~em up with meat goats, and you can't tell
no difference without a DNA scan.... That was a pretty tough outfit
you met, we been watchin' out for 'em awhile, y'all was lucky."
"What kind of 'weird shit' do you get from illegal goats?" Jeff
asked. 
"Plastic explosive, for one thing. Strain it out of the milk, make
cheese out of it, put a fuse in it, and structure-hit the hell right
out of anything."
"Explosive goat's milk," Jane said slowly.
"You're kidding, right?" Jeff said.
The Ranger smiled broadly. "Yeah, folks, I'm kidding, sorry.~~
Jane stared at him. The Ranger stared back. There was no expression
in his reflective shades. "What are you gonna do now?" Jane said.
"Find the contact point, I'll track 'em through the brush.... We'll
catch 'em by morning. Maybe noon. Cap'n Gault likes to go by the
book, he'll give 'em a chance to throw down their guns and come
quiet. Thanks for the
x8z Bruce Sterling 183 
water, ma'am. Y'all take care now." The Ranger trotted off.
Jeff waited until the Ranger was out of earshot. Then he spoke with
hushed amazement and respect. "Janey, they're gonna kill them all."
"Yeah," Jane said. "I know." 

VIOLENT, DEADLY STORMS broke Out in profusion in the last two weeks
of May 2031. Unfortunately they were in Kansas, Iowa, Missouri,
Nebraska, and Arkansas. A minor front swept Tornado Alley on May 27,
ardently pursued by the Troupe, but it yielded no spikes.
Statistically, this was not unusual. However, the statistics
themselves had become pretty damned unusual as the century had
progressed. Before heavy weather, there had been about nine hundred
tornadoes every year in the United States. Nowadays, there were about
four thousand. Before heavy weather, a year's worth of tornadoes
killed about a hundred people and caused about $200 million (constant
1975 dollars) in damage. Now, despite vastly better warning systems,
tornadoes killed about a thousand people a year, and the damage was
impossible to estimate accurately because the basic economic nature
of both "value" and "currency" had gone nonlinear.
Tornadoes were, for obvious reasons, easier to find nowadays. But
most storms, even violent storms with good indicators, never spawned
tornadoes. Many hunts were simply bound to turn up dry, even with
excellent weather monitoring and rapid all-terrain deployment. And
even the much-ravaged Texas-Oklahoma Tornado Alley, the planet's
premier spawning ground for twisters, had to get some peace and quiet
sometimes. 
The dry spell visibly affected the Troupe's morale. Alex saw that
they were still on their best behavior around Mulcahey, but Mulcahey
himself became withdrawn, wrapping himself in marathon simulation
sessions. The Troupe got bored, then petulant. Carol and Greg, whose
relationship seemed unstable at the best of times, started openly 

sniping at one another. Peter and Rick took a motorcycleHEAVY WEATHER 
and sidecar into Amarillo "to get laid," and came back hung over andbeaten up. Rudy Martinez went to San Antonio for a week to visit hisex-wife and his kids. Martha and Buzzard, who found one anotherphysically repulsive but couldn't seem to let one another alone, gotinto a mean, extensive quarrel over minor damage to one of theultralights. And Juanita spent a lot of her time tearing arounduselessly in the dune buggy, ostensibly to give its new, improvedinterface a shakedown, but more, Alex suspected, for the sake of herown nerves than anything to do with the car.The High Plains down around Big Spring and Odessa had gotten generousrains this year, but the Troupe had since moved far north, near PaloDuro Canyon. Up here, the grasslands had gotten a good start forspring and then stalled. The unnatural lushness of greenhouse rainhad faded to the windy dryness once more natural to the TexasPanhandle, and the supercharged vegetation started to hesitate andshut down. It didn't wither exactly-stuff like hairy grama,elbowbush, and buffalo grass was way too tough and mean-spirited todo anything as sissy as "withering"-but it got yellow and tight andsere and spiky. And up in the Oklahoma Panhandle, it hadn't rainedsince late March. Alex had a high tolerance for boredom. True restlessness required alevel of animal energy that he simply didn't possess. Unlike theTroupers, he didn't fidget or complain. Given working lungs, a screento look at, and a place to sleep, Alex felt basically content. Hehadn't asked to join a group of touchy thrill freaks as their unpaidamateur goat-herd, and he recognized the true absurdity of hissituation, but he didn't actually mind it much. The weather waslovely, the air was clear, his health was good, and he was being leftalone all day with some goats and the Library of Congress and a smartrope.This suited him. The goats were an appreciative audience for hisgrowing repertoire of rope tricks, and they made excellent targetsfor the new, wicked noose he had installed at the rope's end. As abonus, now that he had his big leather boots from Matamoros, Alex nolonger fretted184 Bruce Sterlingmuch about thorns, spines, stinging nettles, and big slitheringvenomous rattlesnakes. The main inconvenience of his existence was the three meals a day, when he had to deal face-to-face with theTroupers. Besides, the food was awful.Being shot at for the cause had very much helped Alex's socialposition in camp. Not many of the Troupers had actually been shot atunder any circumstances. Except for Ellen Mae several times, andPeter once, and Rudy on a couple of occasions in civilian life, andGreg "lots of times." Surviving gunfire was an experience theTroupers valued highly, and being shot at in the actual service ofthe Troupe itself brought Alex a certain cachet. He'd gotten a fewgrudging, snotty remarks about his new clothes, but the clothesdidn't stay new for long. Alex never changed them, rarely washed, andhad stopped shaving. His jeans and embroidered shirt were soonfilthy, and the paper sombrero, which never left his head, grewsteadily more wadded and hideous. Plus, he grew a patchy blond beard.After that, nobody paid him much attention. He'd gotten his wish, andbecome a cipher.As tension mounted in the camp, though, Alex decided that hissituation had become solid enough for him to take a few useful steps.He quietly approached Joe Brasseur about his legal and financialsituation. Alex was used to lawyers. He'd grown up in the company of his father's numerous hired attorneys. Brasseur was a bent attorney-thatodd and highly exceptional kind of lawyer who wasn't personally well-to-do. Alex strongly suspected that Brasseur had been on the wrongside of politics during the State of Emergency.Most people had gotten over that period of history and managed to oret the peculiar way they'd been behaving at the time, but JoeBrasseur, like other Troupers, was pretty clearly not most people.Alex knew that it was useless talking to lawyers unless you werewilling to tell them a lot of embarrassing things. He felt prettysure that Brasseur was not a narc or some cop's little finger, so hetold Brasseur in detail about his financial arrangements with theclinica in Nuevo Laredo. HEAVY WEATHER 
Most people went through life without ever using a private currency.Most~ people were, of course, poor. They didn't have enough wealth tobuy into the private-money system, or enough contacts or marketsmarts to use private currencies effectively. Except, of course,during the State of Emergency, when every American, rich and pooralike, had been forced to use a private currency because the Regime
• had privatized the U.S. dollar.Alex wasn't exactly sure how "currency privatization" had beenaccomplished, back at the time. He was similarly vague about theRegime's massive "data nationalizations.~~ Joe Brasseur, however,seemed to have an excellent grasp of these principles. Brasseur wasin charge of the Troupe's financial books, and they were a rat nestof private currencies.Alex was well-to-do, and he had some unlikely friends, so he had thebasics down pretty well. It all had to do with unbreakableencryption, digital authentication, anonymous remailing, and networkuntraceability. These were all computer networking techniques thathad once been considered very odd and naughty. They were also soelementary to do, that once they were in place, they couldn't bestopped without tearing the whole Net down.Of course, once these techniques were in place, they conclusivelydestroyed the ability of governments to control the flow ofelectronic funds, anywhere, anytime, for any purpose. As it happened,this process had pretty much destroyed any human control at all overthe modern electronic economy. By the time people figured out thatraging nonlinear anarchy was not exactly to the advantage of anyoneconcerned, the process was simply too far gone to stop. All workablestandards of wealth had vaporized, digitized, and vanished into anonstop hurricane of electronic thin air. Even physically tearing upthe fiber optics couldn't stop it; governments that tried to justfound that the whole encryption mess oozed swiftly into voice mailand even fax machines. One major upshot of the Regime's privatization of the currency wasthat large amounts of black-market wealth bad suddenly surfaced. Thishad been part of the plan, 
Bruce Sterlingi86 
apparently-that even though the government was sabotaging its ownability to successfully impose any income tax, the government wouldcatch up on the other end, by imposing punitive taxes on previouslyhidden black-market transactions. They'd swiftly discovered, however, that the scale of black money wastitanic. The black-market wealth in tax evasion, kickbacks, officialcorruption, theft, embezzlement, arms, drugs, prostitution, barter,and off-the-books moonlighting was far huger than any conventionaleconomist had ever imagined. The global ocean of black money was so vast in scope that it was instantly, crushingly obvious that thestandard doctrines of conventional finance had no workable contact with reality. Economists who'd thought they understood the basicnature of modern finance had been living in a dogmatic dreamland asirrelevant as Marxism. After that terrible revelation, there'd beensavage runs on most national currencies and the stock markets hadcollapsed.As the Emergency had deepened, the panicking Regime had rammed itsdata nationalizations through Congress, and with that convulsiveeffort, the very nature of money and information had both mutatedbeyond any repair.The resultant swirling chaos had become the bedrock of Alex'severyday notions of modem normality.Alex did not find it surprising that people like the Chinese Triadsand the Corsican Black Hand were electronically minting their owncash. He simply accepted it:electronic, private cash, unbacked by any government, untraceable,completely anonymous, global in reach, lightninglike in speed,ubiquitous, fungible, and usually highly volatile. Of course, suchfunds didn't boldly say "Sicilian Mafia" right on the transactionscreen; they usually had some stuffy official-sounding alias such as"Banco Ambrosiano ATM Euro-DigiLira," but the private currencyspeculators would usually have a pretty good guess as to the solvencyof the issuers. Quite often these private currencies would collapse, though sheergreed, mismanagement, or just bad luck in the market. But the usualcarnivorous free-enterprise mar­187 
ket forces had jolted some kind of rough order into the mess.Nowadays, for a lot of people, private currencies were just the waymoney was.When you used private, digital cash, even the people who sold youtheir money didn't know who you were. Quite likely you had no realidea who they were, either,•other than their rates, their market recognition, and theirperformance history. You had no identity other than your unbreakablyencrypted public key word. You could still use government currenciesif you really wanted to, and most people did, for the sake ofsimplicity or though lack of alternatives. Most people had no chokein the matter, because most people in the world were poor.Unfortunately, thanks to their catastrophic loss of control overbasic economics, so were most governments. Government-issuedcurrencies were scarcely more stable than the private kind.Governments, even the governments of powerful advanced countries, hadalready lost control of their currencies to the roiling floodwatersof currency trading as early as the 1990s. That was the main reasonwhy the Regime had given up backing U.S. dollars in the first place.Joe Brasseur's private-currency node in the Troupe's system was notuntypical in the trade: it was the digital
• equivalent of an entire twentieth-century banking conglomerate,boiled down to a few sectors on a hard disk. In order to gain admittance to the dinica in Nuevo Laredo, Alex hadleft a hefty wad of private currency under a secured lien by a thirdparty. He hadn't gotten the money back, had no real idea how to gethis money back, but he thought that maybe Brasseur would be thelogical choice to find that money and fetch it out somehow. If so,then the Troupe was welcome to use it.Brasseur took in Alex's confession with a calm, priest-like air,gazing solemnly at him over the rims of his glasses, and thenBrasseur had nodded and set to work, and Alex bad never heard anotherword about the subject. Except that thin s perked up markedly for theTroupe after a week and a ha ~f.A bunch of former Troupers, Fred and José and Maureen and Palaniappan and Kenny, showed up in aHEAVY WEATHER x88 Bruce Sterlingconvoy with a lot of canned food and a beer keg. The command yurt gota new carpet. A new improved air condenser arrived that weighed lessthan the old one, used less energy, and supplied more water. Therewas a party, and everyone's mood improved for a few days.Nobody thanked Alex for this. Just as well, Alex thought, that therewas no public fuss made about himself or his role. Those who neededto know were going to know. Alex had already concluded that almosteverything that really mattered in Troupe life took place way underthe surface. It was a lot like life in a barracks, or a dorm, or a Thward. Some Troupers, such as Mukahey, Brasseur, and Carol and Greg, knewpretty much everything, pretty much immediately. The second rank werethose who were gonna catch on pretty fast on their own, like EllenMae and Rudy Martinez and Mickey Kiehl. Then there were those whowere gonna get told the official version by somebody else, like Peterand Rick and Martha and Sam. And certain beloved characters were gonna be gently protected from the full awful truth for their owngood, like Buzzard and Joanne and Jeff and, in her own unique way,Juanita. The very last and lowest rank were the passing wannabes, and cityboy/girlfriends, and ex-husbands/ex-wives, and hangers-on andnetfriends and himself, Alex Unger, and the various other non-Troupesubhumans. And that was the way it was always gonna be with the StormTroupe, until they all turned on each other, or they were all shot bybandits or hit by lightning, or until they found theF-6. Alex didn't know if he believed in the F-6. But he believed that the Troupe believed. With every day that passed, they were getting morekeyed up to plunge headlong into something truly dreadful. And thebottom line was that he didn't want to leave-not until he knew what they would find and what it would do to them.On May 31, as if to change their luck, Mukahey deliberately movedcamp twenty kilometers northwest, into Hall County. The burst ofaction seemed to help morale some.189 HEAVY WEATHER 
On June 2, heavy weather hit again. The luck of the assignment-as ifthere were any "luck" involved where Mukahey's orders were concerned-had Alex confined to the camp as "support crew." Alex figured thiswas just as well. Let the others have a chance to blow off steam.And then there was another, and far more serious, matter: his coughwas back. It had started really small at first, just a little throat-clearing rasp, but Alex had known for some time that the dosage ofblue goo was losing its charm. His lungs no longer felt like sweetslick paper dipped in oil. Slowly but with terrible sureness, theywere starting to feel a hell of a lot more like his own lungs. He'dworn the breathing mask faithfully, until his tanned face had a whitetriangular muzzle of untanned skin just like a raccoon's, but thatwasn't enough. He was going to have to take steps.The June 2 pursuit was all-out. They were up before dawn, andMulcahey himself went into the field. The only people left in campwere Joe Brasseur doing navigation, Buzzard as network coord, and SamMoncrieff as nowcaster. And, of course, Alex, nominally in charge ofthe support jeeps.This was not a very taxing job. The support jeeps were unmanned, andwere supposed to carry supplies into the field through globalpositioning. If called upon, Alex was supposed to instantly load thejeeps with spare whatchamacallits and then route them long-distance to a rendezvous. Alex assumed that this assignment was a subtle reference onMulcahey's part to Alex's covert use of a dope mule. Kind of adeliberate shoulder tap there on the part of the Troupe jefe. ToAlex's deep relief, Mulcahey almost never took any notice of Alex,favorable or unfavorable. He'd never called Alex in for one of those head-to-head encounter sessions that seemed to leave the other Troupers so bent out of shape. But every once in a while there wouldbe these ambiguous little jabs. Intended, Alex figured, to intimidatehim, to assure him that Mulcahey did have an eye on him, so hewouldn't try anything really stupid.K9~ Bruce SterlingWhen you came right down to it, this tactic worked pretty well.In reality, Alex's support job consisted mostly of fetching venisonchili for Sam, Joe, and Buzzard, since the men were leashed to theirmachinery. The goats were taken care of: the Troupe had stretched aline of wire around the perimeter posts and had corralled the goatsinside the camp. The goats were cropping all the grass in camp, andcrapping all over the ground as well, but they'd be breaking camptomorrow and leaving, so it didn't matter much.Sam Moncrieff was thrilled with his nowcaster status. He'd been Mulcahey's star grad student before Mukahey had left academia (in ashambles), and Sam took the exalted central role of Troupe nowcasterwith complete and utter seriousness. He was stomping around blindlyin the command yurt with his head in a virching helmet, burrowingthrough scientific visualizations like some kind of data-glovedgopher.Joe Brasseur had his own navigation setup in the command yurt's left-hand annex. So Alex found himself alone in the right-hand annex, the sysadminstation, with Buzzard.Buzzard was in a peculiar mood."I hate what Janey has done to this system, dude," Buzzard opined,clumsily rolling a marijuana cigarette. "It don't crash as much now,and Christ knows it looks a lot prettier, but it's a real mud bath torun." Alex examined the gndwork of the display for his support jeeps. Italways amazed him how many forgotten little ghost towns there were,out in West Texas. "I guess you'd rather be out virching your'thopters.""Aw, you can't chase 'em all," Buzzard said tolerantly. "Let Kiehlget his chance out in the field, this candy-ass sysadmin desk workwould drive anybody nuts." He lit his joint with a Mexican cigarettelighter and inhaled. "Want some?" he squeaked."No thanks." "When the cat's away, dude." Buzzard shrugged. "Jerry would get on mycase about this, but I tell ya, youF 191 HEAVY WEATHER 
spend fourteen straight hours shuffling icons, and it downright helpsto be ripped to the tits."Alex watched as Buzzard plunged into his thicket of screens andmenus. Alex guessed that he was tweaking the flow of data fromdistant Troupe weather instruments, but as far as Alex knew, Buzzardmight as well have been bobbing for digital apples.Buzzard worked a long time, in a glassy-eyed trance of efficiency,stopping twice to decant some dire herbal concoction into a papercup.Alex, testing his ingenuity toits limits, managed to pry open one ofthe Troupe's communication channels on a spare laptop. Rudy and Rick, 
in the Baker pursuit vehicle somewhere in Cimarron County, Oklahoma,
were getting very excited about hail. Not so much the size of it, as
the color. The hail was black. 
"Black hail," Alex remarked.
"That's nothing," Buzzard said, tugging on the metal lump he wore on
a thong around his neck. "Just means there's a little dust in it.
It's gettin' real dry up in Colorado. Lotta dust, lotta haze up top .
. . black hail. It can happen."
"Well, I've never seen black hail before," Alex said. "And it sounds
like they haven't either."
"I saw a stone fall out of the sky once," Buzzard said. "It hit my
fuckin' house." 
"Really?"
"Yeah. And this is the one." Buzzard tugged the metal lump, sharply.
"The biggest piece of it, anyhow. Came right through the roof of my
bedroom. I was ten." 
"Your house was hit by a meteor?"
"Cotta happen to somebody," Buzzard said. "Statistics prove that." He
paused, stared into the screen in deep abstraction, then looked up.
"That's nothin' either. Once I sawa ram of meat." 

"Meat fell out of the sky," he said simply. "I saw it with my own two
eyes." He sighed. "You don't believe me, do ya, kid? Well, go back in
the anomaly records sometime and have a look at the stuff people have
seen in the past,
I ~Z 
Bruce Sterling
falling out of the sky. Amazing stuff! Black bail. Black rain. Red
rain. Big rocks. Frogs. Rains of fishes. Snails. Jelly. Red snow,
black snow. Chunks of ice have fallen out of the sky as big as
fuckin' elephants. Dude, I saw meat fall out of the sky."
"What kind of meat?" Alex asked. 
"Shaved meat. No hair on it, or anything. Looked kinda like, I dunno,
sliced mushrooms or sliced potatoes or something, except it was red
and bloody wet and it had little veins in it. It just kinda fell out
of a dark cloudy sky one summer, fallin' kinda slow, like somebody
throwing potato chips. A little shower of sliced-up meat. About as
wide as, I dunno, a good-sized highway, and about eighty meters long.
Enough to fill up a couple of big lawn bags, if you raked it up."
"Didyou rake it up?"
"Fuck no, man. We were scared to death."
"There were other people seeing this?" Alex said, surprised.
"Witnesses?" 
"Hell yes! Me, my dad, my cousin Elvin, and my cousin Elvin's
probation officer. We were all scared to death." Buzzard's eyes were
dilated and shiny. "That was during the State of Emergency.. . . Most
of middle America was one big dust bowl. I was a teenage kid in a
suburb in Kentucky, and the sky would get black at noon, and you'd
get a layer of airborne Iowa or Nebraska or some shit, onto your
doors and windows, dry brown dirt in layers as thick as your fingers.
Heavy weather, man. People thought it was the end of the world."
"I've heard of big dust storms. I've never heard of any shaved meat."
"I dunno, man. I saw it happen. I never forgot it, either. I think my
Dad and Elvin managed to forget about it after a couple years, kinda
block the memory out, but I sure as hell never did. Sometimes I get
the feeling that people must see shit happen like that all the time.
But they're always too scared to report it to anyone else. People
don't like to look like they're ....... . And you sure didn't want to
do it during the State of Emergency, they were doing that
'demographic relocation' shit at the time, and people were
HEAVY WEATHER 193 

really scared they were gonna end up in weather camps. It was mega­
heavy, mega-bad. .Buzzard glanced down at his screen. What the hell is this?" He dugdown in the maze of screens and came up with a flashing securityalert. "Hell, we got some kind of ground car outside the camp! Dude,run outside and see!" Alex didn't run, but he left the yurt at a brisk walk and looked.There was an almost silent, spanking-new civilian truck outside thecamp, a big cream-colored four-wheeler with tinted windows and anair-conditioned camper. The truck stopped well outside the perimeterin a spew of dust, exciting the goats, who bounded off timidly amongthe tepees.Alex ducked back inside the command yurt. "Somebody's here, man! Somekind of fancy truck with a big aerial.""Hell!" Buzzard looked annoyed. "Storm spotters, wannabes. You gotell 'em to get lost, man, tell 'em there's nothing going on here. Ifyou need any help, yell, and me and Joe and Sam will back you up.""Okay," Alex said. "I get it. No problem."He walked deliberately into the open outside the yurt, waved hispaper hat at the truck, and waited for them to open fire on him.The strangers didn't shoot. Two men clñnbed peaceably out of theirnice truck and stood there. His heart rate slowed. Life would go on.Alex began to feel almost fond of the two men. It seemed very decentof them to be so obligingly normal, to just be a couple of guys in atruck, instead of nightmarish maniac structure-hit bandits randomlyshooting up the camp while everyone else was in Oklahoma. Alex puthis hat back on and strolled toward the strangers, slowly and withhis hands in plain sight. He deliberately hopped the wire around theperimeter posts.As he walked slowly closer he recognized one of the men. It was theblack Ranger bush tracker, one member of the Ranger posse who'dvisited camp a couple weeks earlier. The Ranger was in civilian gear,ragged jean cutoffs'94 Bruce Sterlingand a beat-to-shit yellow T-shirt with the legend NAVAJO NA11ON RODEOon it. No rifle this time, apparently.To Alex's considerable surprise, he recognized the other man as well.The circumstances came back at him with a sharp chemical rush.He'd been in a backroom of the Gato Negro in Monterrey, with four ofhis dope-vaquero acquaintances. They were on a field trip fromMatamoros, where Alex had been undergoing treatment at the time. Thevaqueros were killing time waiting for their man from Monterrey toshow with some of the medically necessary. So they were doing linesof cocaine off the marble café table, cocaine cut with one of DonAldo's home-brewed memory stimulants, one of those blazinglyeffective smart-drug concoctions that bad so thoroughly fucked theability of government and business leaders to function in the longerterm. Being dope vaqueros, their idea of a good time was to get reallywired on this shit and then play a big-stakes tournament of theSpanish-language version of Trivial Pursuit. Cocaine gave Alex heartfibrillations, and he didn't drink, either, and thanks to enormousgaps in his education and his general life experience, he was dogmeat at any kind of Trivial Pursuit, much less a Mexican version. ButDon Aldo had favored him with a thumbnail's worth of the smart drug,and Alex hadn't quite dared to spurn the good Don's hospitality. Hesnorted it up and began placing little side bets on the progress ofthe game. Alex was a very good loser. It was the key to hispopularity in these circles.After about twenty minutes, everything in the Gato Negro had startedto take on that false but radiant sense of deep meaning that alwaysaccompanied chemical memory enhancement, and then these other guyshad come in. Three of them, very well dressed. They breezed past themuscle guy at the door, without being patted down for weapons. And this caused Don Aldo, and Juan, and Paco, and Snoopy immediateconcern, for Monterrey was not their turf, and their own ceramicSaturday-night specials were in the possession of the house.The three strangers had regally ignored the vaqueros
IIEAVY WEATHER 
and had sat down at the room's far corner, and had ordered café con
leche and immediately plunged into low, intense conversation.
Don Aldo had beckoned a waiter over with a brisk gesture of somebody
else's hot-wired platinum debit card, and had a few words with the
waiter, in a border Spanish so twisted with criminal argot that even
Alex, something of a connoisseur in these matters, couldn't follow
it. And then Don Aldo smiled broadly, and he tipped the waiter.
Because one of the three strangers was the police commissioner for
the state of Sinaloa. And it was none of their business who El 
General's two good friends were.
Except that one of El General's friends was the very gentleman who
had just stepped out of the helicopter. He'd been of no special
relevance to Alex at the time, but thanks to that snort of mnemonics,
the guy's face and mannerisms had been irrevocably punch-pressed on
the surface of Alex's brain. At the very sight of him, that haircut,
the sunglasses, the neatly cut safari jacket, Alex had flasbbacked
with such intensity that he could actually taste the memory dust on
the back of his throat. 
"~Qué pasa?" he said.
"How do you do?" said the stranger politely. "I'm Leo Mulcahey, and
this is my traveling companion, Mr. Smithers."
"How do you do, Mr. Smithers?" said Alex, sliding instinctively into
parody. "How pleasant to see you again."
"Yo," grunted Smithers.
"And you are?" said Mukahey.
Alex looked up at the thin rose-quartz lenses of Mulcahey's shades,
and felt instantly, with deep and total conviction, that this
encounter was not in the best interests of himself or his friends. 
The tall, charming, and distinguished Leo Mulcahey was exuding a
bone-chilling reek of narc atmosphere. Rangers were bad, bad enough
anyway, but the well-groomed spook friend of El General was not the
sort of person who should ever be in the camp of the Storm Troupe,
for any reason, under any circumstances.
"Mr. Leo Mukahey," Alex said. "Any relation?"
196 Bruce Sterling 

"I'm Jerry's big brother," said Leo Mulcahey, with a gentle smile.
"Must feel pretty special to have a little brother who could break
your back like a twig."
Mulcahey twitched. Not a big reaction, but a definite startled
twitch. "Is Jerry here? May I speak to Jerry?"
"Sorry to tell you that Jerry's out of camp, he's off doing storm
pursuit."
"It was my understanding that Jerry always coordinated the pursuits.
That he stayed in camp as the group's . . . I forget the term."
"Nowcaster. Yeah, that's the usual, all right, but right now Jerry's
off chasing spikes somewhere in Oklahoma, so under the circumstances
I'm afraid I can't allow you into the camp."
"I see," said Leo.
"What the hick you talkin' about?" said Smithers suddenly. "Kid, we
were just in your camp three weeks ago and I been lookin' forward to
more o' that jerky."
"No problema," Alex said. "Give me some positioning coords and I'll
route you all the jerky you want. Today. No charge."
"Is there someone else we can talk to?" Leo said. 

"No," Alex said. Brasseur would temporize. Buzzard would knuckleunder. Sam Moncrieff would do whatever seemed best. "No, thereisn't." "Kid, don't be this way," said Smithers. "I'm the heat!""You're the heat when you're running with Rangers. You're not theheat when you're running with this guy. If you're cops, show me someID and a warrant." "I'm not a police officer, for heaven's sake," Leo said, chidingly."I happen to be a developmental, economist."Smithers, surprised, looked at Leo in frank disbelief, then back atAlex again. "Kid, you got some cojones pullin' that city-boy crap outhere. Where's your goddamnID?" Alex began to sweat. The fear only made him angry. "Look, Smithers,or whatever the hell your real name is, I thought you were a heavierguy than this. How comeHEAVY WEATHER 197 
you're shaking me down for this fucking narc? This guy's not even acop! How much is he paying you?""That's my name!" objected Smithers, wounded. "Nathan R. Smithers.""I don't understand why this has become so unpleasant," said Leo,reasonably."Maybe you ought to give some thought to the way you treated yourgood friend the general de polida, back in Sinaloa." It was a shot inthe dark, a blindly launched harpoon, but it landed hard. Leo reactedwith such a start that even Smithers seemed alarmed. "Sinaloa," Leo mused, recovering himself. He stared down hard atAlex. He was very tall, and though he didn't have the weightlifterbeef of his brother Jerry, he looked, in his own smooth way, like abad man to cross. "Of course," he concluded suddenly. "You must beAlex. Little Alejandro Unger. My goodness.""I think you'd better leave," said Alex. "You and your kind aren'twanted here." "You've been here less than a month, Alejandro! And akeady you'recarrying on like Jerry's guard dog! It's amazing the loyalty that maninspires.""Have it your way, Leo," Alex said. "I'll let you in the camp whenJerry says you can come in, how about that?" He suddenly sensedweakness, and pounced. "How about you wait here while I call Jerryup? I can contact Jerry out in the field, easy enough. Let's see whatJerry says about you."I have a counterproposal," Leo said. "Why don't I assume that youhave no authority whatever? That you're simply inventing all this onthe fly, through some silly grudge all your own. That you're anunbalanced, sick, spoiled little rich-boy punk, who's in way over hishead, and that we can simply walk right past you.""You'll have to knock me down first." "That doesn't look difficult, Alex. You're still emaciated from thatblack-market shooting parlor in Nuevo Laredo. You look quite ill.""You're gonna look quite dead, Leo, when the guy whoxg8 Bruce Sterling HEAVY WEATHER '99 
put that laser dot on your forehead pulls the trigger and your brainsfly Out."Leo turned slowly to Smithers. "Mr. Smithers. Do tell. Do i in facthave a laser rifle sighted on my person?"Smithers shook his head. "Not that I can see. Kid, it is reallyfuckin' stupid to say something like that to a guy like me."Alex took his sunglasses off, and then his hat. "Look at me," he toldSmithers. "Do I look afraid of you? You think I'm impressed ?~" Heturned to Leo. "How about you, Leo? Do I look like I care whether weget in a fistfight right now, and you end up shot? You really wanna hit me, and risk catching a very real bullet, just so you can swanaround in some empty paper tents and pull a fast one on your brotherwhen he comes back-probably with all his friends?""No," said Leo, decisively. "There's no need at all for any of thisfoolishness. We don't want Juanita upset, do we? Janey?""You stay the hell away from Jane," Alex said, in throttled fury."Letting that one slip was a real blunder! Get away from me and mysister, and stay away from us, you spook narc son of a bitch. Get outof here now, before you lose it and try something even stupider thanshowing up here in the first place.""This is completely pointless," Leo said. "I don't see what you thinkyou've accomplished with this ridiculous junkie's bravado. We cansimply return at some later time, when there are some sane peoplehere." Alex nodded and crossed his arms. "Okay. Yeah. It's pointless. Comeback next Christmas, big brother. In the meantime, go away. Now."Leo and Smithers exchanged glances. Leo shrugged eloquently, hisshoulders rising beneath the padding of his spanking-new safarijacket.Without haste, the two men climbed into the truck. Smithers startedthe machine, and it turned and left. As it vanished Alex saw Leolifting a videocam to his face, methodically scanning the camp.Alex walked slowly back to the command yurt. Buzzard was waiting at the door flap. Sam was still in his nowcasterhelmet. There was no sign at all of Joe Brasseur."Who were those guys?" Buzzard said.Alex shrugged. "No problem. I took care of 'em. A coupla wannabes."C H A P T E R 
unbroken malignanthigh had been sitting, for six long weeks, over Colorado. It seemedto be anchored there. The high hadn't moved, but it had expandedsteadily. A great dome of dry, superheated air had spread fromColorado to northeastern New Mexico and the Panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas. Beneath it was the evil reign of drought.Jane was rather fond of Oklahoma. The roads were generally in worsecondition than Texas, but the state was more thoroughly settled.There was good civil order, and the people were friendly, and evenway outside the giant modern megalopolis of Oklahoma City, there wereliving little rural towns where you could still get real breakfastand a decent cup of coffee. The sky was a subtler blue in Oklahoma,and the wildflowers were of a gentler palette than the harshly vividflowers of a Texas spring.The soil was richer, and deeper, and ironred, and quite a lot of it was cultivated. The sun never climbedquite as punishingly high in the zenith, and it rained mote often. 
But there was no rain now. Not under the slow swell of HEAVY WEATHER 2~K 
the continental monster. Rushing storm fronts had scourged Missouriand Iowa and Kansas and Illinois, but the high at the foot of theRockies had passed from a feature, to a nuisance, to a regionalaffliction. -SESAME's Climate Analysis Center liked to netcast a
standard graphics map, "Departure of Average Tempera­ture from Normal (C)," a meteorological document thatSESAME had inherited from some precybernetic federal-government office. The map's format was rather delight­fully antiquated, both in its old-fashioned distinction of"Centigrade" (the old Fahrenheit scale had been extinctfor years) and in its wistful pretense that there was stillsuch a thing in American weather as "Normal." The map'scolored shadings of temperature were crudely vivid, withthe crass aesthetic limits of early computer graphics, butfor the sake of archival continuity, the maps had neverbeen redesigned. In her Troupe career, Jane had examineddozens of these average-temperature maps. But she'd neverbefore seen so much of that vividly anomalous shade of hotpink.
It was only June, and people were already dying underthose pixelated hot-pink pools. Not dying in large num­bers; it wasn't yet the kind of heavy weather where the fedswould start sending in the iron-barred evacuation trucks. Itwas still only early June, when heat could be very anoma­ions without becoming actually lethal. But it was the kind
I -of heat that kicked up the stress several notches. So the oldfolks' pacemakers failed, and there'd be gunfire in the evening and ariot at the mall. The temperature map dissolved on Charlie's dashboard readout, thenblushed again into a blotchy new depiction:pound-level SESAME Lidar."I've never seen it like this before," Jerry commented, fromCharlie's passenger seat. "Look at the way it's breaking, way outsidethe rim of that high. That's not supposed to happen.""I don't see how anything can happen until that air mass moves," Janesaid. "It doesn't make any sense.""The core's not moving for hell, but it's still ripping loose today,all along that secondary dryline," Jerry said.2 ~ 2 Brtice SterItt~g"We're gonna see some F-2s, F-3s drop out of this, and they're goingto be"-he thought it over-"a minor feature."Jane looked up at the northern horizon: the storm line that was theirdestination. Beyond a line of wilting Oklahoma cottonwoods, therewere towers rising-sheetlike in parts, half-concave, starved formoisture. They didn't look powerful, but they didn't look minor; theylooked convulsive. "Well," she said, "maybe we're finally seeing it,then. Maybe this is what it looks like when it starts.""The F-6 isn't supposed to shape up like this. The mesosphere's allwrong and the jet stream is hanging north like it was nailed there.""Well, this is where the F-6 ought to be. And the time is right. Sowhat else could it be?" Jerry shook his head. "Ask me when it starts moving."Jane sighed, and munched a handful of government granola from herpaper bag, and pulled her booted legs up in the driver's seat. "Ican't believe that you gave up now-casting, and came out to hammersome spikes with me, and now you're telling me they're a minorfeature." Jerry laughed. "Spikes. They're like sex. Just 'cause you've nailed 'em once before, doesn't mean you lose all interest the next time.""It's good to have you out here with me." She paused. "You're beingreal sweet to me lately, under the circumstances.""Babe," he said, "you were in camp two months before all willpowershattered, remember? If we can't make love, we won't. Simple." Hehesitated. "It's hell, true, but it's simple."Jane knew better than to take this male bravado at face value. All was not well in camp. Her infection, the drought. Nerves,restlessness. Missed connections. One of the things Jane loved best about chasing spikes was thatliberating way that gigantic storms smashed flat and renderedirrelevant all the kinks in her personal life. You couldn't sweatyour own angst in the face of a monster spike; it was stupid andvulgar and deeply beside the2~~3 HEAVY WEATHER 
point, like trying to make the Grand Canyon your spittoon.She did love Jerry; she loved him as a person, very dearly, and sheoften thought she might have loved him almost as much, even if he'dnever given her any tornadoes. She could have loved Jerry even ifhe'd been something everyday and nonexotic and dull, like, say, somekind of economist. Jerry was skillful and accomplished and dedicatedand, when you got used to him, rather intensely attractive. SometimesJerry was even funny. She often thought that even under othercircumstances, she might easily have become his lover, or even hiswife. It would have been much more like her other affairs, though; the oneswith the vase throwing and the screaming fits and the shaking senseof absolute black desperation in the back of a limo at three in themorning.Jerry made her do crazy things. But Jerry's crazy things had alwaysmade her better and stronger, and with Jerry around, for the firsttime in her life she no longer felt miserably troubled about beingher own worst enemy. She'd always been wrapped too tight, and wiredtoo high, and with a devil inside; in retrospect, she could see thatdearly now. Jerry was the first and only man in her life who hadreally appreciated her devil, who had accepted her devil and beensweet to it, and had given her devil some proper down-and-dirtydevil-things to do. Her devil no longer had idle hands. Her devil wasworking its ass off, all the time.So now she and her devil were quite all right, really.It was as if acting crazy, and taking crazy risks, had completelyfreed her of any obligation to actually become crazy. It might soundrather sappy, but really and truly, Jerry had made her a free woman.She was dirty and she was broke and she smelled bad most of the time,but she was free and in love. She'd spent most of her life in afierce, determined, losing battle to make herself behave and makesense and be good and be happy; and then she'd met Jerry Mulcahey andhad given up the war. And when all that old barbed wire snapped looseinside of her, she'd discovered surprising reservoirs of simpledecency and goodwill in2~4 Bruc~ St~rItngherself. She wasn't even half as bad as she'd thought she was. Shewasn't crazy, she wasn't wicked, she wasn't even particularlydangerous. She was a mature adult woman who wasn't afraid of herself,and could even be a source of real strength to other people. Shecould give and sacrifice for other people, and love and be loved,without any fear or any mean calculation. And she acknowledged allthis, and was grateful for it.It was just that she really, really hated to talk about it.Jerry wasn't any better at discussing it than she was. Jerry Mulcahey wasn't like other men. Not that that was entirely to Jerry's credit;Jerry wasn't much like any kind of human being. Jane was a brightperson, and Jane knew what it was like to be brighter than otherpeople; bright enough to be disliked for it, sometimes. But she knewshe wasn't bright like Jerry was. In particular areas of hiscomprehension, Jerry was so bright as to be quite alien. There werelarge expanses of his mental activity that were as blank and hot andshiny as someone on drugs.Jane had no gift for mathematics; math was something that she had tocrawl through on her belly, like mud. It had taken her quite sometime to fully comprehend that this strange man in the wastelands ofWest Texas with his cobbled-up crew of eccentrics was, really andtruly, one of the brightest mathematicians in the world.Jerry's parents had both been computer-science researchers in LosAlamos. They'd both been good at their work too; but their son Jerryhad been doing cutting-edge magnetohydrodynamics when he was twelve.Jerry had pioneered in fields like multidimensional minimal-surfacemanifolds and higher-order invariant polynomials, things that madeyour brain explode just to look at them. Jerry was good enough atmath to frighten people. His colleagues couldn't make up their mindswhether to envy him for his gifts, or resent him for not publishingmore often. Every once in a while Jane would have some net-idiot giveher a hard time about Jerry's "professional qualifications," and shewould E-mail the skeptic the paper that Jerry'd done back in 2023that established the Mulcahey Conjecture, and the skeptic would tryto read it and his brain V HEAVY WEATHER 2G5 
would explode, and he would quietly slink away and never be heardfrom again.Unless he turned out to be one of the math wannabes. The Troupeattracted all kinds of wannabes, most of them rather nutty, but everyonce in a while some anxious weedy-looking guy would show up at campwho didn't give a shit about tornadoes and really, really wantedJerry to forget all about it and get back to proving how many soapbubbles could fit inside a collapsing torus in hyperspace. Jerry wasalways terribly kind to these people.The weight lifting was another prominent aspect of Jerry's oddity. Hehadn't always been that way. She'd seen pictures of Jerry as ateenager-his mother had sent them-and Jerry had been lithe and slender, with a tall kid's wary stoop.Lots of Troupers were into weights; Jane lifted weights herself,enough to get strong, enough to get the point of doing it. But Jerrywas doing weights just because a saved him time. It saved him timeand effort to be as big as a house so he could briefly surface out ofhis abyss of distraction, and snap out something, and have peoplejust jump up and run do it for him. Because he radiated raw physicalauthority, Jerry didn't have to slow down to explain very much. Plus,the weights gave Jerry something to do while he was thinkingseriously, and Jerry liked to think seriously for about five hoursstraight, every day. The fact that he was lugging thirty kilos ofsteel on his legs at the time never seemed to register on him much.There was no question that the great trial of Jerry's life wasrelating to other human beings. Jerry had really worked terribly hardat this problem, with such painstaking patience and suffering anddedication, that her heart truly melted for him.Jerry didn't readily empathize with people, because Jerry just wasn'ta very peoplelike being. But he could model people. He could drylycomprehend the whole Structure of their personalities, and re-createthem as a kind of dry run in his own head. He had built hisrelationships with the other Troupers like a one-armed man buildlugmodel cathedrals out of toothpicks. 
And when he had it all figured, then he would sit you
2GED 
Brtzc~ St~rIirtg
down. And start telling you exactly what you were really thinking,
and what it was that really motivated you, and how you could get what
you wanted and how that would, by the way, help him and the others
too. It would be laid out with such amazing clarity and detail that
your own self-image would crumble by comparison. Jerry would have
invented this thing, just by watching you closely and speculating,
but it was so much more like you than you were that it felt more real
than your own identity. It was like confronting your ideal self, your
better nature: 
smoother, more sensible, wiser, a lot better managed. All you had to
do was let the scales fall from your eyes and reach out for it.
Jane had gone through this process exactly once. Well, half of once,
actually. It was hard to seduce someone while in a paper jumpsuit.
You could zip it down to the waist and coyly peel it open, and it
felt like you were offering a guy a couple of bran muffins out of a
bakery bag. But once he'd started in on her with the toothpick
analysis, she'd known that the only way to break him out of it was to
knock him down and straddle him. 
It had worked brilliantly too. It had shut Jerry up to the great
satisfaction of all concerned. Now she and Jerry could freely and
openly discuss all kinds of things: spikes, interfaces, tools, camp,
feds, Rangers, other Troupers, even money. But they didn't discuss
The Relationship. The Relationship didn't even have a name. The
Relationship had its own shape and its own life and it was not made
of toothpicks.
But Jerry had assigned himself to her car. He never did this without
reason. Sooner or later the shoe would drop. The big hot core was
gone from The Relationship, and both of them were hurting, and some
rational analysis was going to come out of Jerry. She was hoping for
the best. 
"For the first time I'm really getting afraid of this," he said.
Jane set her granola bag on the floorboard. "What is it you're afraid
of, darling?"
"I think we may be shaping up toward the bad scenario.
V 
t 
2 ~ 7 
HEAVY WEATHER 

"What's bad about it?" 
"I've never told you fully what I thought this would be like if it
became a permanent fixture."
"All right," she said, bracing herself. "If that's on your mind, tell
me, then."
"The winds are not the half of it. It could strip the earth's surface
right down to bedrock. It could vent more dust into the troposphere
than a major volcanic eruption."
"Oh," she said. "You mean the F-6."
He gave her the oddest look he'd ever given her. "Are you okay,
Janey?"
"Yeah, sure, I'm as okay as anybody with a yeast infection ever is.
Sorry, I thought you were discussing something else. What about the
F-6, sweetheart?"
"Oh, nothing really," Jerry said, staring straight ahead. "Just that
it might kill everyone within hundreds of kilometers. Including us,
of course. All in the first few hours. And after that-a giant,
permanent vortex on the planet's surface. That could happen! It could
actually take place in the real world."
"I know that," Jane said. "But for some reason, I just don't worry
about it much." 

"Maybe you should worry a lot more, Jane. It could mean the end of
civilization." 
"I just can't believe in it enough to worry," she told him. "I mean,
I do believe something really awesome is going to break loose this
season, but I can't believe it means the end of anything. It's like­somehow-I just can't believe that civilization is going to get off
the hook that easy. 'The end of civilization'-what end? What
civilization, for that matter? There isn't any end. We're in way too
deep to have any end. The kind of troubles we got, they aren't
allowed to have any end."
"The troposphere could saturate with dust. There could be a nuclear
winter." He paused. "Of course, a majot drop in temperature would
starve out the vortex." 
"That's just it! It's always something like that! Things can get
totally awful, but then something else comes up that's so amazingly
screwy that it makes it all irrelevant. There never was any nuclear
war or nuclear winter. 
z ~ 8 
Bruce Sterling
There's never gonna be one. That was all just stupid hype, so they
could go on ruining the environment, so we'd end up living just like
we're living now, living with the consequences.
She sighed. "Look, I saw the sky turn black when I was a kid-I saw it
turn black as the ace of spades! It didn't last, though. It was just
a big dust bowl. Even if the F-6 is really awful, somebody somewhere
would survive. Millions of people, billions maybe. They'd just march
into some fucking salt mine, with the chlorophyll hack and some gene-
splicing and some superconductives, and as long as theyhadtheir
virching and cable TV, most of 'em would never even notice!"
"People talked like that before heavy weather," Jerry said. "It
wasn't the end of the world, but they noticed, all right. If they
lived long enough."
"Okay," Jane said. "Have it your way. Let's assume for the sake of
argument that the F-6 is the end of the world. What do you wanna do
about it?" 
He said nothing.
"You wanna go down to Costa Rica? I know this cute little hotel
there, they've got frozen margaritas and hot showers." 

"You're gonna go and hack the F-6 no matter what, aren't you? Of
course you are. And good ol' Janey's gonna go with you to do it. Of
course I am. End of story."
"It bothers me when you talk like this, Jane. You're not that
cynical."
Jane stopped. It was rare of Jerry to confess so openly that he was
upset. She lowered her voice. "Darling, listen to me. Don't be so
anxious about us. Everybody in the Troupe knows that this is very
dangerous. You haven't been hiding that from us, that's not any
surprise to us. You can't protect us, we know that. We're all adults-
well, almost all adults-and we know what we're doing." She shrugged.
"Pretty much, anyhow. A lot more than those dumb feds at SESAME. And
a hell of a lot more than the poor damned civilians."
"I think we'd better have a Troupe powwow after this
HEAVY WEATHER 2G9 

chase, and make ~ll of this very clear and straightforward to
everyone."
"Good. Fine. If that'll make you feel better. But I can already tell
you what's gonna happen. Nobody's gonna jump up and say, 'Oh wait,
Jerry! A really big tornado? Nope, no, sorry, I'm too scared to go
watch.' That'll never happen in eight million years!" She laughed.
"You couldn't keep 'em away with a cattle prod."
"The F-6 is not just a spike. I'm thinking more and more . . . along 

the lines of a different order of storm, something unprecedented.We'll be going up against some-thing I don't understand. The Troupeare good people. They trust my judgment, and they might be killedbecause of that. It wouldn't be right.""Jerry, we Troupers are like soldiers, we don't need any rights.Anyway, we'd all be chasing spikes even if you weren't around. If youthink I'm doing all this just to please you, you can think otherwise.The F-6 is the big one, it's the payoff. It's what I want." Shefetched up her granola bag. "I can get April Logan to come downhere." "Your design professor? Why?""April's way out of academia now, she's mega-big in netcritique! Shehas real influence! She's the heaviest net-friend I have. If AprilLogan puts the word Out that we have a hot presentation coming up, wecan pull some mega postproduction people. People who can take ourdata, and do it up really right for once. We'll pull a majoraudience." "Money, you mean.""That's right, Jerry. Money. Pots of it." She shrugged. "Well, thenet-equivalent. Attention, access. Fame. I can turn that into money.It ain't easy, but there are ways.""I see." "Good. So you can forget all that gallant stuff about protectinglittle me from the big bad storm.""All right," he said. "That's good, Jane. You've done well and I'vecome to expect that from you. But what about after the storm?""What do. you mean?""That's the other eventuality, the one that really stuns 'me. Supposethat we survive the F-6. That we ace this. 2 1 -~ Bruce SterlingThat we nail it and make pots of money and fame, and we put it allbehind us. What'll we do then? What will become of us? You and me?" She was surprised, and more than a little alarmed, to hear Jerrybring this up. "Well, nothing has to change, darling! It's not like Inever had money before! I can deal with money, you know I can! That'snot a problem for us! We'll kick back on the off-season, like theTroupe always does. And we'll upgrade our hardware, really decentlythis time. You can write a paper, and I'll have plenty of network onmy hands. . . . Then we'll wait for next season.""There's not gonna be an F-6 next season. And with the global CO2finally dropping, there may not ever be another F-6.""So what? There will always be other spikes. Even if the CO2 drops,that doesn't mean the weather's gonna get any calmer. There was lessCO2 in the air during the State of Emergency! Besides, CO2's just onepart of the climatic disruption. There's still tropical deforestationand delayed ocean warming."Jerry said nothing."There's thermal pollution from cities. And changes in the NorthAtlantic currents. Glacier retreats in Antarctica, -and higher albedos in Africa, and CFCs in the ozone, and thatpermanent hitch in the ENSO cycle, and the solar variation . . .Christ, I can't even count them all. Jerry, the weather's never gonnacalm down and be normal. Not in our lifetime. Probably not in threehundred years. We'll
-have all the spikes we ever want! You and me, we're disasterexperts with an endless supply of disaster! And if you nail the F-6while the feds are sitting on their hands saying an F-6 isn't evenpossible, then you'll be famous forever.""Jane, I've been forecasting the F-6 for ten years. I don't justchase spikes, anyone can chase spikes. Spikes aren't enough. Thereare thousands of spikes, and thousands of weather people, but I'mdifferent, and the F-6 is why. I've been so obsessed by it, soconsumed and fascinated and intent on this terrible thing, that I have no real idea how I'll live when it's gone. Everything has beenHEAVY WEATHER 211 
honed for this crisis, and we're in top condition to do it. we're allunited to do this, to go through hell to nail this thing. But afterthat, what's to become of us?""Jerry . . ." She bit her lip. "Jerry, I promise you, as long as I'mm your life, you're never gonna lack things to do, and a reason tolive. All right?""That's sweet of you, but it's just not like that," he said, sadly."It's hard to explain, but . . . I have to have the Work. And it hasto be big, bigger than myself, because the way I do my Work is withsomething that's too big. It's me all right, it's very much part ofme, but it's not something I'm in command of, and I don't control it.It's like a force, a compulsion, that tears at things, and shedsthem, and chops them up, and comprehends them, and I don't controlit, and I never have. I can't. You understand?""Yes. I do understand. It's like a spike, inside.""Yes." -"I have one of those too, you know. It's just very differentfrom yours. And being with you, Jerry, it's helped me with it, andI'm better! What we have together, what we give to each other, it'snot hurtful or doomed or destructive, it's really good and strong! Wedo see a lot of hurt. And I don't know, the world around us might bedoomed. And we study destruction all the time, every day. But whatyou and I have, together, in the middle of all of that, it's reallygood and strong! There's nothing weak or frail about it. I'll neverlove anyone else, the way I've learned to love you.""But when this monster has smashed everything, what if we're part ofthe wreckage?""I'll still want you and love you."I might become something very different, after the F-6. I know Iwon't be able to stand still. I'll have to change, there's noavoiding that. Who knows? I might be-come something like Leo."She sat up very straight. "What do you mean by that? Tell me.""I mean that I just bear witness, Jane. The Troupe, we all just bearwitness. Half of Oklahoma could be smashed into rubble, and we'lljust bear witness. But there are those
252 Bruce Sterling HEAVY WEATHER who talk about the weather-as I do and you do-and those who dosomething about it. Leo, and his friends, his people, they all dothings. He's a man of the world, my older brother, he's a man ofcompetence, a man of influence. And it's a dreadful world, and mybrother does some very dreadful things. I watch destruction, but Leoabets it. I'm nothing but eyes, but Leo has hands."Jerry shook his head. "I don't know exactly what Leo's done, or howhe's done it or who helped him-he doesn't tell me, for good and ampleoperational reasons, and I don't want to learn. But I know why. Iknow why Leo does what he does, and I know why the prospect of actionfascinates him. You see, it's not just one spasmodic passing horrorin a small locality, like a spike is. The modem world of globalstrategic politics and economics, that's Leo's world, and it's eightbillion people who've lost all control over their destiny, and aregnawing the planet down to the bone. It's our civilization, turned ­into an endless world-eating horror, just like the F-6 itself maywell turn out to be. And Leo, he lives inside that, and feeds itenergy, and tries to bend it to his will. He'd very much like me tojoin him in there, you know. To help him maneuver the chaos, bywhatever means necessary. And I can understand my brother. I cansympathize. My brother and I, we have a similar affliction. Weunderstand one another, as few people ever do.""All right," Jane said. She put her hand on his. "Jerry, when this isover, then that's what we're going to do. When the F-6 is over, andit's all behind us, and we've shown the whole world what we know and 
what we witnessed, then we're going to go after your brother. You and
me, together, and we're going to rescue him from whatever trouble
he's in, and we'll set him all straight."
"That's a major challenge, darling."
"Jerry, you said you wanted a big problem. Well, you've got a big
problem, I see that now. I don't care how many political friends your
brother has, he's a big problem but he's just a human being, and he's
not as big as a storm that can smash Oklahoma. I'm not afraid of your
storm, and I'm not afraid of you, and I'm not afraid of your
213 

brother. You can't scare me away from you with any of this talk, I
love you and I'm staying with you, and nothing will take you from me,
nothing but death. We can do this thing. We're not just helpless
watchers, we are doers too, in our own way. In our own way, you and
I, we are both very practical people."
"Darling," he said, and meant it, "you are very good to me."
The speaker erupted. "This is Rick in Baker! We got circulation!" 

ENDLESS RA.Th~1 COULD depress you, and there was no disaster like a
flood, but there was something uniquely mean and pinched and harsh
about a drought. Drought was a trial to the soul.
They'd followed the spike along the rim of the great high. It was a
long, ropy, eccentric F-2, and it had moved, with particular oddity,
from the north toward the southwest, a very unusual storm track for
Tornado Alley. The F-2 had been exceptionally long-lived, never
achieving true earthshaking power, but sipping some thread of
persistent energy from the edge of the high. And there had been hail
with it, nasty, black, dust-choked hail; but scarcely a drop of rain.
Now the F-2 had roped out and Jane and Jerry were in the canyonlands
west of Amarillo, the part of the Texas Panhandle people called the
Breaks. They'd been running cross-country in a flat plain, and then
the earth opened up in front of them. The Canadian River of the
Panhandle was not a major river now, but it had been a very major
river during the last ice age, and it had done some dreadful things
to the landscape here. Real mesas, not the slumped

-hills of the south High Plains. Mesas weren't mountains. They werenot vigorous upthrustings in the landscape. Mesas were remnants,mesas were all that was left, after ages of stubborn resistance torainsplash and sheetwash and channel cutting. The mesas had a layerof hard sandstone, t caprock, up on top, but below that caprock layerwas a soft, reddish, weak, and treacherous rock that was scarcely214 Bruce Sterling 
petrified mud. That rock wa~ so weak you could tear off clods of itand crumble it to dust with your fingers. The mesas were toothlessand terribly patient and all wrinkled down the sides, eaten away withvertical gullies, their slopes scattered with the cracked remains ofundereaten sandstone slabs. It was very old and very wild country. It had few roads, and those inpoor repair. Around local creekbeds and water holes, people sometimesfound twelve-thousand-year-old flint spearheads, mixed with theblackened, broken bones of extinct giant bison. Jane always wonderedwhat the reaction of those flint-wielding Folsom Point peopie hadbeen when they realized they had exterminated their giant bison,wiped them into extinction with their dreadful high-tech ati-atls,and their cutting-edge flint industry, and the all-consuming giantwildfires they'd used to chase whole assembly lines of bison pell­mell off the canyon cliffs. Maybe some had condemned the wildfiresand atlatls, and tried to destroy the flints. While others had been sick at heart forever, to find themselves p arty to such a dreadfulcrime. And the vast majority, of course, simply hadn't noticed.The canyon walls of the Breaks played hell with communications. Theycast a major radio shadow, and if you got really close to them theycould even block satellite relay. That posed no challenge for PursuitVehicle Charlie, though, who put his superconductive to work andscuttled up the slope to the top of the largest mesa in theneighborhood. That mesa was helpfully festooned with big towers andmicrowave horns. Jane and Jerry weren't the first to come here for their own purposes.Most of the horns were lavishly stenciled with bullet holes, someold, some new. A structure-hit gang had tagged the tower blockhouseswith much-faded graffiti. OId-fashioned psycho-radical slogans likeSMASH THE BALLOT MARKET and t.rr m~it EAT DATA and SCREAMING wou SURVIVES, done with that kinky urban folk intensity that urbangraffiti had once had, before the spirit had suddenly andinexplicably leached out of it and the whole practice of tagging haddried up and gone away.HEAVY WEATHER 21~ 
There was a fire pit with some ancient burned mesquite stubs, and amess of scattered beer cans, the old aluminum kind of beer containerthat didn't melt in the rain. It was easy to imagine the vanishedLuddite marauders, up here with their dirt bikes and guns andhowling, chanting boom boxes.Jane found this intensely sad, somehow more lonely than if there hadnever been anyone here in the first place. She wondered who the ganghad been, and what in hell they had thought they were doing way outhere, and what had become of them. Maybe they were just plain dead,as dead as the Folsom flint people. The state of Texas had
• always been remarkably generous with the noose, the chair, andthe needle, and in the early days of parole cuffsthere'd been little complaint about tamperproofing them with contactnerve poison. And that was just the formal-way-the polite and legitimate way of erasing people. If thegang had been jumped by Rangers they'd be unmarkedgraves by the roadside now, green lumps in some overgrown pasture.Maybe they had blown themselves up, trying to cook demolition bombsout of simple household chemicals. Had they snapped out of themadness and achieved a foothold in what passed for real life? Didthey have jobs now?She'd once asked Carol, tactfully, about the Underground, and Carolhad said bluntly: "There is no more alternative society. Just peoplewho will probably survive, and people who probably won't." And Janecould pretty much go with that assessment. Because from her ownexperience with structure-hit activity, the people who were into thatradical bullshit were just like Rangers, only stupider and not asgood at it.The sun was setting. Off in the western distance, beneath thedissolving clouds, Jane could see, with intense and lovely clarity,the skeletal silhouetting of very distant trees. The trees were wholekilometers away and no bigger than a fingernail paring, and yet shecould see the shape of their every branch in the clear still air,stenciled against the colors around the sun, great bands of subtle,gradated, desert color, umber to amber to translucent pearly white.
The chase was over now. It was time to call camp.
Jerry got the spider antenna out of its bag and kicked
its tripod open and started cranking it into full extension.
And then the wind stopped. And it grew terribly still. 

And then it began to get hot.
Jane looked at the barometer readout. It was soaring- moving visibly
even as she looked. 
"What's going on?" she said.
"It's a solitary wave," Jerry said. "It must have peeled off the high
somehow." Not a wind, not something you could feel as moving air, but
a kind of silent compression wave in the atmosphere, a silent
rippling bulge of pressure and heat. Jane's ears popped loudly. The
hot air felt very dry, and it smelled. It smelled of drought and
ozone. 
She leaned against the car and the edge of the door
stung her hand with a sharp pop of static electricity.
Jerry looked up at the tallest of the microwave horns.
"Jane," he said in a tight voice, "get back in the car, get the
cameras running. Something's happening."
"All right." She got in.
It grew darker, and then she began to hear it. A thin, flowing hiss.
Not a crackle, but a sound like escaping gas. The tall tower had
begun to vent something, to ooze something, something very odd,
something like wind, something like fur, something like flame. White,
striated, gaseous spikiness, a flickering, rippling presence, at the
corners of the old tower's braced galvanized-iron uprights and
crossbars. All on one side, vowing up and down one metal corner of
the tower, like glowing ball moss. It hissed and it ffickered and it
moved a little, fitfully, like the spitting breath of ghosts. She
watched it steadily through the binocular cameras, rock steadily, and
she called out, very unsteadily, "Jerry! What is it?"
"It's Saint Elmo's fire." 
Jane suddenly felt the hair rise all over her head. She didn't stop
recording, but the electric fire had fallen on her now, it had seeped
down and come inside the car with her. The corona lifted her hair 
like a pincushion. Deep natural electricity was discharging off the
top of her head. Her
HEAVY WEATHER 
Bruce Sterling 217 

whole scalp, from nape to forehead, felt like an eyelid felt when an
eyelid was gently peeled back.
"I've seen this at Pike's Peak," Jerry said. "I've never seen it at
this low an elevation." 
"'Will it hurt us?" 
"No. It should pass us when this wave passes."
"All tight. I'm not afraid."
"Keep recording."
"Don't worry, I've got it."
And in less than a minute the wave passed. And the fire

•
 was gone away from them, the strange deep fire was gone completely.Just as if there had never been anything. 

• 
sleeping, always ready to prowl around red-eyed and pull anall-nighter. Jerry had no such problems. Jerry was goodat catnaps; he could turn off his virching helmet, lie down on thecarpet with his head inside the casket of blackness,

• 
sleep twenty minutes, and then get right up and resume hiscalculations. But tonight, although Jerry was silent and still, Jerry

• 
wasn't sleeping. Jane had her head in the hollow of his leftshoulder, a place that fit her as if it had been designed forher, the place where she had passed the most sweetly restLtd nightsof her life. They would come away from a chase and have a furious 


IT WAS VERY hard to sleep together when you weren't allowed to sleeptogether. Jane had always had troubleencounter, and then she would fling one naked possessive leg over himand put her head on his shoulder, and she'd close her eyes and hearhis heart beating, and she would tumble headlong into a dark satedslumber so deep and healing that it would have set Lady Macbeth torights.But not tonight. Her nerves felt as tight and high-pitched as amariachi violin, and she found no comfort in Jerry. Somehow he didn'tsmell right. And she didn't smell right either: she smelled oftopical vaginal ointment, possibly the least erotic scent known tohumankind. But unless at least one of them got some real rest,something awful was going to happen.zi8 Bruce Sterling"Jerry?" she said. In the still of camp-the ticking of insects, thedistant whoosh of the wind generator-even a tender whisper soundedloud as a gunshot."Mmmph.""Jerry, I'm getting better now, I really am. Maybe we should trysomething.""I don't think that's a good idea.""Okay, maybe you're right, but that's no reason why you should haveto lie there stiff as a board. Let me try something, darling, let mesee if I can make you feel better." Before he could say anything, sheslipped her hand down and gripped his cock.His penis felt so odd and hot in her fingers that for one shockedinstant she thought something had gone terribly wrong with him. Thenshe realized that he didn't have a condom on. She'd touched it before, and even stroked it and kissed it, but never without thecondom. Well, no harm done. Not just with fingers."All tight?" she said."All right."He didn't seem to lack enthusiasm. And if she stopped and got out inthe pitch darkness and made him put a condom on, it would be a megadrag. Forget it: so far, so good. She stroked him patiently andpersistently, until she got a bad cramp in her forearm. Then sheburrowed down into the sleeping bag and tried kissing for a while,and although he didn't come, he at least began to make the rightnoises. Then she came out of the bag for some much-needed air and triedrubbing some more.It was taking a very long time. At first she felt intenselyembarrassed; and then she got used to it, and began to feel better,thinking that even if this was a very ungainly and unsatisfactorysubstitute for sex, at least she was doing something practical. Atleast she was taking charge of their troubles. Then she thought thathe was never going to come, that she wasn't skilled or sweet enoughto make him do it, and that brought the threat of a cavernous senseof failure. But he was stroking her neck and shoulder in an en-
HEAVY WEATHER 219 couraging way, and finally he started breathing seriouslyhard. Then he groaned in the dark, and she held it care­fully, and she felt it pulsing.
The wetness on her fingers felt viscous and drippy. Itfelt rather like motor oil. She had seen semen before, andshe even knew that odd and particular smell that it had,but never in her life had it actually touched her skin. It wasan intimate bodily fluid. Intimate bodily fluids were verydangerous.
"I'm twenty-six years old," she said, "and this is the
• first time I've ever touched this stuff."
 He put his arm around her shoulders and hugged her tohim. "My sweet darling," he said quietly, "it won~t hurt 
you.
"I know that. You don't have any viruses. You're notsick! You're the healthiest person I how!"
"You have no way to really know that, though."
•
 "Have you ever had sex with anybody, without using acondom?" 

• 
"No, never, of course not."


"Me either. So then how could you possibly have anySTh?"
 "Blood transfusion, maybe? IV drugs? Anyway, I might
be lying about the condom use."
"Oh, for heaven's sake! You're not a liar, I've never
known you to lie. You never lie to me!" Her voice trem­
• 	
bled. "I can't believe that I've known you all this time, thatyou're the man I love more than anyone else in the world,

• 
and yet I never really knew about this simple thing that youdo, this simple thing that comes out of your body." She burst intotears. "Don't cry, sweetheart.""Jerry, why is our life this way?" she said. "What did we ever do todeserve this? We don't hurt each other! We love each other! Why can'twe be like men and women used to be? Why is everything always sodifficult for us?" "It's for protection."I don't need any protection from you! I don't want any protectionfrom you! I'm not afraid about this! Christ. Jerry, this is the partof being with you that I'm never22 ~ Bruce Sterlingafraid about! This is the part that's really wonderful with us, it'sthe part that we're really good at." She held on to him and sobbed.He held her close and tight for a long time as she shook and wept.Finally he began to deliberately kiss the tears away from herinflamed and aching face. When their mouths met, she felt a rush ofpassion so intcnse that her soul seemed to flow from her lips. Sheslid on top of him in a patch of cooling stickiness and jammed hiscock into her aching, needful body.And it really hurt. She wasn't at all well, she was sick, she hadyeast. It stung and burned, but nowhere near enough to make her wantto stop. She put her arms out straight to support herself and startedrocking on him in the darkness."Juanita, yo te quiero."It was such a perfect, intoxicating thing for him to say at thatmoment that she lost all sense of herself. She went way past the hurtand into frenzy. Maybe forty seconds of it, something like fortyaeons in the hottest Tantric circle of Nirvana. Her yell ofexultation was still ringing in her ears when he grabbed her hipshard enough to bruise and rammed into her from underneath and hecame, he pulsed, deep inside of her.She slid off him, exhausted and drenched with sweat. "My God.""I didn't know it was going to feel like that." He seemed stunned."Yes," she said thoughtfully, "it was sort of quick.""I couldn't help it," he said. "I didn't know it was going to feel sointense. It's like a completely different experience.""Is it really, sweetheart? It's nice for you that way."Yes. Very." He kissed her.She felt perfectly calm now. Everything was becoming very clear. Thatmean-tempered tight-stretched whine in her nerves was completelygone, turned to something like the mellow vibratory afterglow ofgently plucked angelic


HEAVY WEATHER 221 harp strings, and everything was suddenly making a lot ofsolid good sense.
"Y'know, Jerry, I think maybe it's the latex that's at 
fault." "What?" "I think the condom is my health problem. That I'm
• 	allergic to the latex, or whatever they make condoms outof these days, and that's why I got all messed up in the firstplace."
"How could you suddenly develop an allergy like that,
after a whole year?""Well," she said, "from repeated exposure."He laughed."I do have allergies, you know. I mean, not like Alex
does, but I have a couple of them. I think we should alwayshave sex this way, from now on. It's sweet, it's good, it's
• 	
perfect. Except that ... well, everything's all wet. Butthat's okay.""Jane, if we always have sex like this, you're going toget pregnant."

"Holy mackerel! I never thought of that." The conceptamazed her. She might get pregnant. She could conceive achild. Yes, that astounding event could actually take place;there was nothing left to stop it from happening. She feltlike a fool for not considering pregnancy, but she simplyhadn't; the long shadows of disease and disaster had over­whelmed that whole idea. 

•	
 "Just like men and women used to be. Before birth control." Jerry laughed. "Maybe we should count our

• 
blessings. If these were the 1930s instead of the 2030s,


you'd be a downtrodden faculty wife with five kids.""Five kids in less than a year, Professor? You're some
• 	
kinda guy." Jane yawned, sweetly and uncontrollably.Sleep was near, and sleep was going to be so good."They've got those pills for taking care of that, though.Those month-after pills."

"Contragestives."
"Yeah, you just eat one pill and your period comes


• 	
right back. No problem! Government-subsidized and ev­


erything." She hugged him. "I think we've got this beat,222 Bruce Sterling 
darling. We're going to be all right now. Everything will be allright. I feel so happy." 
MOST OF ri* Troupers were hard at work shuffling data. They wereassembling some fairly major net-presentation, to impress some bigwignetfriend of Juanita's, who was due for a visit to camp.None of the Troupers struck Alex as showing a particular dramaticflair for net-presentation work, with the possible exception ofJuanita herself. But net-presentation was the kind of labor thatcould be distributed to a million little cut-rate mouse-potatodesktoppers all over the planet, and knowing Juanita, it probablywould be. Carol Cooper, however, wasn't having any of that. Carol Cooper wasdoing some welding in the garage. "I don't like systems," she toldAlex. "I'm very analog.""Yes," said Alex, clearing his throat, "I recognized that about youthe moment we met." "So what's in that big plastic jug there?""You're very direct, I noticed that also."Carol put a final searing touch to a length of bent chromed pipe andset it aside to cool. "You sure are a sneaky little flicker, for aguy your age. Not everybody would have thought to spot-weld a nooseon the end of that smart rope." She took off her welding goggles and put on safety glasses."It's a smart lariat now. Lariats are useful. Comanches used to catch coyotes with lariats. From horseback, of course.""Of course," Carol scoffed. "Did you know that Janey threw that gunyou bought her right down the latrine?""Just as well, it was probably pretty dumb to trust her with afirearm in the first place.""You oughta go more easy on Janey," Carol chided. She picked up adented length of bumper from the dune buggy, and fit it methodicallyinto a big bench vise. She was wearing her barometer watch, under herslashed-paper sleeve. On her right wrist, the opposite wrist from theTroupe cuff.
HEAVY WEATHER 223
 "She sure was noisy last night," Carol remarked, medi­tatively, as she tightened the vise. "Y'know, the first time Iever heard Janey cut loose like that, I thought we wereunder attack. And then I thought, Christ, she's doing somekind of sick-and-twisted status thing, like she wants every­body to know that Jerry's finally dam' her. But then after acouple weeks, I figured out, that's just the way Janey is.Janey just plain needs to yell. She's not okay unless sheyells."
Carol picked up a big lead-headed mallet and gave thebumper a pair of hard corrective wallops. "But the
• 	
weirdest p art is that we all got so used to it. For months weall thou~t it• was mega-hilarious, but now we don't evenmake jokes about Janey's yelling. And then when shestopped yelling for a couple weeks there, we all started toget really worried. But last night, y'know, off she goes.

• 	
And today, I feel okay again. I feel like maybe we're gonna


ace this thing after all.""People can get used to anything," Alex said."No, they don't, dude," Carol said sharply. "You only
think that 'cause you're young." She shook her head.
"How old do you think I am?""Thirty-five?" Alex said. He knew she was forty-two."No way, I'm almost forty. I had a kid once who could
almost be your age now. Kid died, though."
"I'm sorry to hear that."
She swung the hammer. Bang. Wham. Clank clank

dank. "Yeah, they say having a kid can keep your mar­
• 	
riage alive, and it's really kinda true, because a kid givesyou something to pay attention to, besides each other. Butthey never tell you that losing your kid can kill your mar­riage." Whack. Crunch. "Y'know, I was young and kindof stupid back then, and I used tofight with that guy a lot,but hell, I married him on purpose. We got along. And thenour kid died. And we never got used to that. Not ever. It

• 
just murdered us. We couldn't stand the sight of each
other, after that."
"What did your child die of?"
"Encephalitis."
"Really? My mom died of encephalitis."



B r u c e S t e r I I ii g
"You're kidding. Which wave?"
"The epidemic of '25 was pretty bad in Houston."
"Oh, that was a late one, my little boy died in 2014. It was a State
of Emergency thing."
Alex said nothing.
"Can you fetch me that big-ass vise grip over there?"
Alex pulled the coil of smart rope from his shoulder, put his gloved
hand on it. The thin black rope slid out instantly across the
bubblepak flooring, reared like a cobra, seized the end of the vise 

grip in its metal-collared noose, and lifted the tool into the air.It then swayed across
•
 the floor, the vise grip dangling gently from the noose, and hung
the tool in midair, within her easy reach.


• 
"Christ, you're getting good with that thing." Carol took the
vise grip, with gingerly care. The rope whipped back to coil around
Alex's shoulder. 
"I've got something I need to tell you," Alex said.


• 
She clamped the vise grip onto the bumper and put her back into
twisting it. "I know that," she grunted. "And I'm


•
 waiting."
"Do you know Leo Mulcahey?"
Her hands froze on the vise grip and she looked up with eyes like a
deer in headlights. "Oh hell."
"You do know him." 


• 
"Yeah. What about Leo?" 
"Leo was here at camp yesterday. He came in a truck. He wanted to see
Jerry, he said."
She stared at him. "What happened?"
"I sent him off with a flea in his ear; I wouldn't let him come in
the camp. I said I would punch him out, and that there was a Trouper
in the tents who would shoot him. He had a Ranger with him, that
tracker guy who was here earlier. But I wouldn't let him in camp,
either." 
"Christ! Why?"
"Because Leo is evil. Leo's a spook, that's why."
"How do you know that bullshit?"
"Look, I just know he's a spook, okay?" Alex coughed, then lowered
his voice. "Spook biz has this atmosphere, you get to where you can
smell it." It had been a bad 



HEAVY WEATHER 225 mistake to get excited. It felt as if something had peeledloose inside his chest.
 "How did he look? Leo?"
 "Very smooth. Very spooky."
"That's him all right. Very charming." Carol picked up

her mallet, looked at it blankly, set it back down."Y'know," she said slowly, "I like Greg. I like Greg a lot.But on the off-season, I don't hear word one from that guy.Not a phone call. Not even E-mail. He'll be off mountainclimbing or shooting rapids or some fucking thing, and henever calls me, never." She was scowling. "That's why youneed to be nicer to Janey. It's not like other Troupe ro­mances; if you can call them romances, whatever the hell
• 	
they are, when tornado freaks get together. But Jane reallyloves Jerry. She's loyal to him, she's good to him, she'd gothrough hell for Jerry. If I had a sister like that, and I washer brother, I'd try to look after my poor sister some, I'dtry to help her be all tight."

•
 Alex digested this strange speech, and reached the only

• 	
possible conclusion. His throat was really starting to hurt."Are you telling me you've been fucking Leo?"


Carol stared at him, guilt written all over her face. "Ihope I never hit you, Alex. Because you're not the kindaguy that I. could hit just once."
"It's okay," he said hoarsely. "I figured Leo must havesome plant inside the camp. That's why I didn't tell any­body yet. I'm still trying to figure how to break the news to
• 
His Highness."
"You want me to tell Jerry about it?"
"Yeah. If you want to. That might be good." He drew a breath. "Tell
Jerry that I wouldn't let Leo in camp, unless Jerry said it was okay
first." 
"You know what Leo is?" Carol said, slowly. "Leo is 


•
 what Jerry would be, if Jerry wanted to hick with people's heads,
instead of fucking with the whole universe."
"I don't know what Jerry is," Alex said. "I never saw anything like
Jerry before. But Leo-you can ask any dope vaquero in Latin America
about a guy like Leo, they all know what he is, and what he's doing.
They may not know up here in Estados Unidos, but down in El Salvador
they
22E, 



know, in Nicaragua they know, they all fuckin' know, it's not any
secret to anybody." He broke into a fit of coughing.
"What the hell is with you, Alex? You look awful."
"That's the other part I have to tell you," Alex said. He began,
haltingly, to explain.
By the time he finished, Carol had become quite pale.
"They call it a lung enema?" she said.
"Yeah. But it doesn't matter what they call it. The point is that it
works, that it really helps me."
"Lemme see that jug."
With an effort, Alex hefted the plastic medical jug onto the
workbench. Carol squinted at the red-on-white adhesive label.
"Palmitic acid," she read aloud, slowly. "Anionic lipids. Silicone
surfactant. Phosphatidylglycerol
Jesus Christ, this is a witches' brew! And what's all this other shit
down here, all this stuff in Spanish?"
"Isotherm of a PA/SP-B1-25m on a NAHCO3-buffered saline subphase,"
Alex translated swiftly. "It's just a Spanish-language repetition of
the basic ingredients."
"And I'm supposed to put a tube down your throat and decant this
stuff into you? And then hang you upside down?"
"That's pretty much the story, yeah."
"Sorry, no way.
"Carol, listen. I'm sick. I'm a lot sicker than anyone here realizes.
I've got a major syndrome, and it's coming down on me hard right now.
And unless you help me, or somebody helps me, I could die here, in
real short order." 
"Why don't you go back home?"
"They can't help me at home," Alex said simply. "All their money
can't help me, nobody can fix what's wrong with me. Not that they
didn't try. But it's not just encephalitis, or cholera, or one of
those things that kill you quickly. I'm not that lucky. What I've
got, it's one of those complicated things. Environmental. Genetic.
Whatever. They've been patching me up since I was six days old. If
I'd been born in any other time but now, I'd have died in my crib."

HEAVY WEATHER 227 "Can't you get somebody else to do this fucking thingfor you? Janey? Ed? Ellen Mae?""Yeah. Maybe. And I'll ask 'em, if I have to. But I don'twant anybody else to know."
"Oh," Carol said. "Yeah, and I can see why not..Y'know, Alex, I've been wondering why you've beenhangin' out here with us. Anyone can tell that you andJaney don't get along for hell. And it ain'j because you like
• 	
to p lay games with rope. It's because you're hiding. You'rehiding something."

"Yeah, that's right," Alex told her. "I was hiding. Imean, not so much from those contrabandista medicosthat I burned down in Nuevo Laredo-they're a toughoutfit in their way, but hell, they don't really give a shitabout me, they've got a line of no-hope suckers outsidethat clinica that's longer than the Rio Grande. I was hidinghere from my own goddamn life. Not my life, but that

• 	
thing that I do, that other people call living. I am real close 

• 	
to dead, Carol. It's not all in my head, I'm not making this

• 	
up. I can't prove toyou what's wrong with me, but I knowit's the truth, because I've lived in this body all my life,


and I can feel it. There's not much left of me. No matter what anybody does, no matter how much money anybodyspends, or how many drugs they pump into me, I don'tthink I'm gonna make twenty-two."
"Christ, Alex."
• "I'm just hiding up here because it's like-a differentlife. A realer life. I never do very much for the Troupe,because I just can't do much, I'm just too sick and too
• 	
weak. But when I'm here with you people, I'm just somekid, I'm not just some dying kid." He stopped a moment,

• 	
thinking hard. "But Carol, that's not all of it, either. I

mean, that's what it was like at first, and it's all stilltrue,

• 	
but it's not the way I really feel anymore. You know what?


• 
I'm interested." 
"Interested?" 
"Yeah. Interested in the F-6. This big thing that's been hanging over
us. I really believe in it now. I really know it's there! I know it's
gonna really happen! And I really want to see it."
Brijce Sterling



228 229 Carol sat down, heavily, on a folding camp stool. She put her head inher hands. Strong, wrinkled hands. When she looked up again, her facewas wet with tears. "You had to come pick on me, didn't you? You had to come tell me thatyou're dying.""I'm sorry, Carol, but you're the only one here that I really trust.""Because I've got a big soft heart, you little flicker. Because youknow you can pick on me! Christ, this is just what I went throughwith Leo. No wonder you scoped him out so fast. Because there's not adime's worth of difference between you and him.""Yeah, except that he kills people, and I'm fucking dying! C'mon,Carol." "We didn't kill anybody," Carol said bitterly. "All that structure-hit stuff-it's just killing things, is what it is. Leo knew. Hell,Leo was the best we ever had. You never saw us just mow people down,even though we could have done that real easily. We were just tryingto kill the machineiy. 'Get rid of it. All that junk that had killedour world, y'know, the bulldozers and the coal plants and the loggingmachines and the smokestacks, the Goliath, the Monster, Behemoth, theBeast. It!" She shook herself, and wiped at her cheeks with the backsof her hands. "'Cause it was too late to stop it any other way, andwe all knew damn well what was a ning to the world. . . . And if youthink the Underground is all gone now, well, you got it wrong!They're not gone at all. Hell no, they're just real different now.They've got power now, a lot of 'em. They're actually in thegovernment, what passes for the govermnent these days. Now they'vegot real power, not that hopeless pissant rebel shit with theMolotovs and the monkey wrenches and the builshit manifestos, I meanreal power, real plans, terrible power, terrible plans. They're allpeople like him.""Sorry."Guys like you, though ... you new kids, you hopeless littlechickenshits . . . People will get used to anything, yeah, if they'reyoung enough! People used to scream their heads off at the thought ofdying of stupid slit~tEAVY WEATHER 
like Th or cholera, now you don't even raise your voice, you just make it your own little secret, and you keep watching TV until youdrop dead discreetly on the couch. People just put up with living inhell! They just ignore it all, and they're sure the world is always,always gonna get worse, and they don't ever wanna hear about it, andthey're just grateful they're not in the relocation camp.""I'm not giving up, Carol. I'm asking you to help me. Please helpme." "Look, I'm not a medic. I can't do anything like that. It's tooawful, it's too much like it was in the camps.""Carol," he grated, "I don't care about the weather camps. I don'tcare about your crazy Luddite friends. I know it was heavy then, andI know it was horrible then, hut I was only five years old then, andit's all history to me, it's dead history. I'm living in a cam pright now', this camp right now, and if I die in a camp I'll thinkthat Cm lucky! I'm not gonna have any history. I'm not even gonnamake it through another year! I just want to see this thing that'scoming, that's all that I'm asking of you!" He leaned against thetable, heavily. "Frankly, I kinda hope that the F-6 is gonna kill me.I kinda like that idea, it's worthwhile and it saves a lot of troubleall around. So now, if you'll just help me out here, I think I'mgonna be able to see it while I'm standing up on my own feet, thatmaybe I can pass for a human being while I'm busy getting killed.Will you help me please, Carol? Please!""All right. Stop crying.""You started it." "Yeah, I'm stupid." She stood up. "I cry. I have a big mouth, I haveno operational discretion at all, and that's why I hang out here inthe ass end of nowhere, instead of with a real life in some realcity, where some good-looking male cop can wheedle it all out of me,and yank a bunch offormer friends out of their condos and bust them all on a terror-and­sabotage rap. I'm a born sucker, I'm a real moron." She sighed."Look, if we're gonna do this at all, let's get it over with quickbefore anybody sees us, because it's a really sick and twisted thingfor me to do to you, and Greg has got a big jealous bone."23~ Bruce Sterling 
"Okay. Right. I get it. Thanks a lot." Alex wiped his eyes on hissleeve. "And I want you to promise me something, Medicine Boy. I want you topromise to stop picking on your sister. She doesn't need any troubleout of a damned fool like you, she's a good person, she's an innocentperson, she means well.""Maybe," Alex said. "But she used to beat the shit out of me when wewere kids. I have tapes of her trying to smother me to death with apillow.""What?" "I was three, she was eight. I'd been coughing a lot, at the time. Ithink it got on her nerves."Carol stared at him a long time, then rubbed her reddened eyes withher thumbs. "Well, you're just going to have to forgive her that.""I forgive her, Carol. Sure. For your sake." Alex climbed up onto theworkbench and lay down flat on his back. He pulled a narrowtranslucent hose from his jeans pocket and a flat packet ofanesthetic paste. "Here, take this and screw it on that threading onthe end of the jug.""Wow, this jug is hot.""Yeah, I kept it out in direct sun today, it's pretty damn close toblood heat." "I can't believe we're actually doing this.""My whole life is just like this." Alex tilted his head back andpracticed relaxing his throat. "Do you have any idea how deep Jerryis into her? I mean, financially?" 
"I think he's pretty much wiped her out, Alex. Not that he wants to
do that, but he just doesn't care about anything except hacking
storms." 
"Well, don't tell anybody. But I've made Juanita my sole heir. I
think that'll probably help the Troupe some. A lot, really."
Carol hesitated. "That was a pretty dumb thing to tell me. I'm a
Trouper, too, y'know."
"It's all right. I want you to know."
"You really do trust me, don't you?"
"Carol, I think you're the only actually good person here. One of the
few truly good people I've ever met.
HEAVY WEATHER 23K 

Thank you for helping me. Thank you for looking after me. You deserve
to know what's going on, so I told you, that's all. I'm probably
gonna pass out during this. Try not to worry too much."
He opened the packet of anesthetic paste, smeared it with his smart-
gloved fingers over the nozzle of the tubing, and then, with a single
gesture that took all the courage he had, deliberately shoved it down
his own throat. He successfully avoided the back of his tongue, felt
it fficker down his sore and swollen larynx, down through the beating
center of his chest. He'd nerved himself to do this, maybe even to
talk, but as the anesthetic kicked in. all the strength flew out of
him like an exploding covey of quail, and left him empty and cold and
sick. 
Then the fluid came. Are you a good swimmer, Alex? It was cold. It
was too cold, it was cold as death, cold as the red Laredo clay. A
great rippling belch burst out of his lungs. He heaved for air, eyes
bulging in panic, and felt a great interior tide of the stuff slide
through his tubercles, a deadly, crazy, cold amoeba. His teeth
clamped on the hose, he panicked, he sat upright. Liquid shifted
inside him like a strong kick to a half-empty beer keg, and he began
coughing convulsively.
Carol stood there with the jug still clutched in her arms, the
picture of disgust and terror. Alex pulled the hose, pulled the hose,
pulled the hose, like a hateful battle with some deadly tapeworm, and
finally it came free, in a frothy spew. Carol jumped back as the jug
kept siphoning, the hose trailing and spewing, and Alex kept
coughing. His lungs felt like bloody foam rubber.
He stood up. He was extremely weak. But he was still conscious. He
was half-full of lung-enema fluid, and he was still conscious. He was
carrying the weight of it around inside him like some kind of obscene
gestation.
He tried to talk, then. He faced Carol and moved his mouth and a
sound came out of him like a drowning raccoon and his mouth filled
with great crackling sour bubbles.
Something inside him broke, then, and it really started to hurt. He
fell to his knees, doubled over, and started

232 Bruce Sterling 
venting the stuff across the bubblepak floor. Great deadly vomitousgouts of it, a huge insupportable fizzing bolus. His ears rang. I-Iishands were spattered with it. It was all over his clothes. And hestill wouldn't, couldn't pass out.It was starting to feel good.Carol stared at him in disbelief. All the fluid was draining from thejug, trickling relentlessly from the hose. Shut it off, shut it off,he gestured, making a drowned gobbling noise, and then another fit ofthe coughing seized him, and he made another long, blackening,agonized swoop toward collapse.Some moments later he felt Carol's arms locked around him. She sat him up, propping him against the leg of the table. She looked intohis face, checked his eyelid with her thumb, her broad-cheeked face 
pale and grim. "Alex, can you hear me?"
He nodded. 
"Alex, that's arterial blood. I've seen it before. You're
hemorrhaging."
He shook his head. 
"Alex, listen to me. I'm gonna get Ed Dunnebecke, and we're going to
take you to a hospital somewhere in a city."
Alex swallowed hard. "No," he whispered. "I won't go, you can't make
me. Don't tell. Don't tell. I'm getting better."
C H A P T E R 

8 

By June 15 it was obvious
to the veriest wannabe weather tyro that an outbreak from the
dimension of hell was about to descend upon Oklahoma. As a direct
consequence, the state was having its largest tourist boom in ten
years.
Everyone with the least trace of common sense had battened down,
packed up, and/or evacuated. But the sensible evacuees did not begin
to match the raw demographic numbers of people without any common
sense, who had come swarming in an endless procession of trailers,
chartered buses, and motorized bicycles. Oklahoma had become an
instant mecca for heavy-weather freaks. And there were far more of
these people than Jane had ever imagined.
After some hesitation, many of the people with sense had shamefacedly
returned to ground zero, to make sure that the freaks were not
stealing everything. Which, in fact, the freaks were doing, in their
jolly, distracted sort of way. Anadarko, Chickashaw, Weatherford and
Elk City, their cheaper hotels packed and their city parks full of
squatters'
234 
Bruce Sterling
tents, had turned into slobbering, good-natured beer busts,
punctuated with occasional nocturnal shootings and smash-and-grab
raids. The National Guard had been called out to maintain order, but
in Oklahoma the National Guard was pretty much always out. The
National Guard was one of the largest employers in the state, right
up there with crops, livestock, timber, and Portland cement. The
paramilitary Guard sold the marauders souvenir T-shirts and Sno-Kones
by day, then put on their uniforms and beat the shit out of them by
night.
To judge by the frantically enthusiastic local TV coverage, most
everybody involved was perversely and frankly enjoying the
hysterical, unbearable edge of weather tension. The sky was canary
yellow and full of dust, and great fearsome sheets of dry heat
lightning crackled all evening, and everything smelled of filth and
sweat and ozone, and the people were actively savoring this
situation. The drought had simply gone on too long. The people of
Tornado Alley had suffered far too much already. They had gone far
past fear. They had even gone past grim resignation. By now, the poor
bastards were deep into convulsively ironical black humor.
The people trickling in from all over America-including, of course,
Mexico and Canada-were a far different crowd of wannabes than the 
standard tornado chasers. The standard tornado freak tended to be, at
heart, a rather bookish, owlish sort, carefully reading the latest
netcasts and polishing his digital binoculars so he could jump out
the door and frantically pursue a brief, elusive phenomenon that
usually lasted bare minutes.
But the current heavy-weather crowd was a different scene entirely,
not the weather people Jane was used to, not the ones she had 

expected. Even though they were in the heart of the continent andlong kilometers from any shore, they were much more like your basicmodern hurricane crowd. Heavy-weather freaks came in a lot of sociological varieties. First,there were a certain number of people who genuinely didn't give adamn about living. People in despair, people actively hunting theirown destruction. The 235 I4~AVY WEATHER 
overtly suicidal, though a real factor and kind of the heart-and-soulof the phenomenon, were a very small minority. Most of these mournfulblack-clad Hamlets would suddenly rediscover a strong taste forsurvival once the wind outside hit a solid, throbbing roar.Second, and far more numerous, were the rank thrill freaks, theovertanned jocks and precancerous muscular surfer-dude types. It wasamazing how few of these reckless idiots would be killed or maimed,by even the worst storms. They usually sported aqualungs andwindsurflng smart boards, with which to hunt the Big Wave, the ReallyBig Wave, the Insanely Big Wave. No surf in Oklahoma, though, so,with the grotesque ingenuity of a leisure industry far gone into deeppsychosis, they had brought dozens of mean-ass little diamond-hubbed"wind schooners," sail-powered vehicles so inherently unpredictablethat even their onboard computer navigation acted crazy. And yet thesons of bitches who rode the things seemed to bear a charmed life.They were as hard to kill as cockroaches.Then there were the largest group, the variant people who simplyadmired and doted on storms. Most of them didn't hack storms. Sometimes they took photos or videos, but they had no intellectual orprofessional interest. They were simply storm devotees. Some of themwere deeply religious. Some wrote really bad net-poetry. Some few ofthem were very private people, with tattoos and chains and scab art,who would take hallucinogens and/or hold deliberate orgies in bunkersat the height of the troubles. They all tended to have a trademarklook of vacant sincerity, and odd fixations in dress and diet.Fourth, thieves. People on the lookout for the main chance. Looters,black marketeers, rip-off people. Structure-hit people too. Nottremendous numbers, not whole marauding armies of them, but plenty toworry about. They tended to leave mysterious chalk-mark symbolswherever they went, and to share mulligatawny stew in vacantbuildings.And last-the group rising up the charts, and the group that Janefound, basically, by far the least explicable, the creepiest, and themost portentous-evacuation freaks.236 Bruce SterlingPeople who flourished just after storms. People who liked to dwell inevacuation camps. Perhaps they'd grown up in such a camp during theState of Emergency, and always perversely missed the experienceafterward. Or maybe they just enjoyed that feeling of intense,slightly hallucinatory human community that always sprang up in theaftermath of a major natural disaster. Or maybe they just neededdisaster to really live, because having grown up under the crushingweight of heavy weather, they had never possessed any real life.If you had no strong identity of your own, then you could becomeanyone and everyone, inside an evacuation camp. The annihilation of atown or suburb broke down all barriers of class, status, andexperience, and put everyone into the same paper suit. Some people-and growing numbers of them, apparently-actively fed on thatsituation. They were a new class of human being, something pastcharlatan, something past fraudster or hustler, something withoutreal precedent, something past history, something past identity.Sometimes-a lot of times-the evacuation freak would be the heart and soul of the local recovery effort, a manic, pink-checked personalways cheerful, with a smile for everybody, always ready to consolethe bereaved, bathe the wounded, play endless games of cot-sidecharades with the grateful crippled child. Often they passedthemselves off as pastors or medical workers or social counselors orminor-league feds of some kind, and they would get away with it too,because no one was checking papers in the horror and pain andconfusion. They would stay as long as they dared, and eat the government chowand wear the paper suits and claim vaguely to be from "somewherearound." Oddly, evacuation freaks were almost always harmless, atleast in a physical sense. They didn't steal, they didn't rob, theydidn't kill or structure-hit. Some of them were too dazed and confused to do much of anything but sit and eat and smile, but quiteoften they would work with literally selfless dedication, and inspirethe people around them, and the people would look up to them, andadmire them, and trust them implicitly, and depend on these hollowpeople as a commuHEAVY WEATHER 237 
inty pillar of strength. Evacuation freaks were both men and women.What they were doing was not exactly criminal, and even when caughtand scolded or punished for it, they never seemed able to stop. Theywould just drift to some fresh hell in another state, and rend theirgarments and cover themselves with mud, and then stagger into camp,faking distress.But the very weirdest part was that evacuation freaks always seemedto travel entirely alone."Juanita," said April Logan, "I always sensed you might p rove to beone of my star students.""Thank you, April.""How do you count yourself, in this little social analysis of yours?""Me?" Jane said. "Scientist." "Oh yes"-April nodded slowly-"that's very good."Jane laughed. "Well, you're here too, you know.""Of course," April Logan said. Her styled hair lifted a little in thedry, sour breeze, and she gave a long, meditative stare around theTroupe camp, sucking in everything with her flat, yellowish, all-comprehending gaze.If not for the drought, it would have been a very pretty area. TheTroupe was cam~ west of El Reno on Interstate 40, an area of redcliifs of crumbling sandstone, red soil, creek bottoms full of pecansand as p ens and festooned with honeysuckle, a place of goldenrod andwinecup and coneflowers and trailing purple legume. Spring hadn'tgiven up yet. It was parched and covered with dust, but spring hadn'tgiven up.April Logan was wearing a tailored paper jumpsuit printed in goldleaf: a perfectly body-morphed adaptation of one of the more lysergicornaments from the Book of Kells. It was just like April to wearsomething like that:costume as oxymoron. Gilded paper. Preindustrial handicraft warped bypostindustrial machine, a consumer conundrum from the warring no-man's-land of Cost versus Value versus Worth. And it was,coincidentally, quite beautiful. "I'm still riding the back of theProject," April Logan said. "The Project wanted me to come here, youknow." "You're kidding.~~
Bruce ~terling"Oh no," said April. "The Project is sometimes crazy, but it neverkids." Jane had helped to build the Project, as an undergraduate. It wassomething Professor Logan had been patiently assembling and refining for years-an eldritch chimera of monster clipping service, geneticalgorithm, and neural net. A postliterate, neoacademic CorrelationMachine, a megachipped Synchronicity Generator. There were a lot oflumps in April's vast analytical stew: demographics, employmentrecords, consumption trends. Geographical distribution of networkdata trafficking. Mortality rates, flows of private currency. Andvarious arcane indices of graphic design-like April herself, theProject was very big on graphic-design trends.When discussing her Project, April liked to dwell on the eldritchtwentieth-century correlation between women's hemlines and the stockmarket. The market would go up, hemlines would go up. The marketwould drop, hemlines would drop. Nobody knew why, or ever learnedwhy, but the correlation held quite steady for decades. Eventually,of course, the stock market lost all contact with reality, and womenno longer gave a damn about their hemlines even if they bothered towear skirts, but, as April said, the crux of her Project was todiscover and seize similar modern correlations while they were stillfresh, and before the endless chaos of society necessarily renderedthem extinct. Given that chaos, the "why" of the correlation wasindeterminate. And given those genetic algorithms, causation wasn'teven logically traceable within the circuits of the machine. In anycase, reason and causation were not the point of April's effort. Thecrux of the matter was whether April's massive simulation couldparallel reality closely enough to be a useful design tool.The Project wasn't that much different, in its basic digitaloperation, from Jerry's weather modeling-except that Jerry'ssimulations were firmly based on openly testable, fully establishedlaws of physics, while April Logan was not a scientist but an artistand design critic. As far as Jane could figure, April's analyticalarmature wasn't much of a genuine intellectual advance over a tarotdeck. And yet,HEAVY WEATHER 239 
like a tarot deck, no matter what nonsense the damn thing threw out,it always seemed to work somehow, to make a certain deep andtantalizing sense.It wasn't science, and didn't pretend to be, but it had made AprilLogan into a very wealthy and influential woman. She had leftacademia-where she had been doing quite well-and now commandedenormous fees as a private consultant. People-sensible, practicalpeople-paid April Logan huge sums to predict things like "the colorof the season." And whether there might be a mass market fordisposable fast-food plasticware that you could chew up and eat. Andwhy hotels were suffering a plague of teen suicides inside glasselevators, and why installing bright pink carpeting might help. Aprilhad become a genuine Design Guru.The years hadn't been kind to April. Seeing her teacher in personagain, outside the hard controlled gleam of April's preciselycalculated public image, Jane noticed tremor and flakiness there, atouch of madness, even. April ~an was not a happy woman. But successhadn't changed her much. April had always had that innate jitter andtang, and it was slowly and visibly eating her heart out-but April Logan had a lot of heart. She had her muse in ahammerlock, and she was possessed by the Work. Just to be aroundApril was to feel a radioactive glow from a capable, perceptive,brilliant woman, someone paying a focused and terrible attention tothings most human beings couldn't even see. April was a real artist,the truest artist Jane had ever met. The genuine article. Even theworst and most dismal commercial bullshit in a hell-bound planetcouldn't kill them all off. "True innovation tends to afflict the eccentric April mused. "A minority of the eccentric, one in a hundred, maybe."She paused. "Of course, that leaves society with the burden of ninety-nine pretentious, ill-behaved basket cases.""Same old Professor Logan.""I might have known I'd see you end up in the heart of an event likethis, Juanita. There's no question that it's an event of some pivotalimportance. I've watched it work its24~ Bruce ~terIIr~gway from speculation, to fad, to near mania. . . . If it's a naturaldisaster that matches its advance billings, this could become a long-term societal landmark." "And we're documenting it.""It's very dangerous, isn't it? Not only physically, but it isclearly attracting a large nexus of unstable social elements.""Fortune rewards the brave," Jane said cheerfully. "We'll be fine. Weknow what we're doing. And so will everyone else, if you will helpus." "Interesting," April said. From her, that was high praise. "I did acomprehensive category search through the Project for neuralweightings for your friend, Dr. Mulcahey. It's rare for the Projectto single out any individual, especially one as publicly little knownas he is, and yet Dr. Mulcahey registers in no less than fourteendifferent categories."Really.""That's quite extraordinary. And yet he has an even lesser-knownbrother who showed up in no less than seventeen!""Do you ever look yourself up in the Project?""Every day. I've gotten as high as five, sometimes. Six once,briefly." She frowned. "Of course, you could argue that a lowernumber of categories deepens the basic societal influence.""Right. Have you looked me up, lately?"April gazed tactfully across the camp. "What is that device they'relaunching?""Weather balloon," Jane said, standing up. No use taking offense. Itwas just a big damn fortune-telling machine. 'Would you like towatch?" 
JERRY STOOD BEFORE the firelight, his head bare, his hands behind hisback. "Tomorrow we are going to track the most violent storm inrecorded history," he said. "It will break tomorrow, probably bynoon, and it will kill thousands, probably tens of thousands ofpeople. If it's stable and it persists beyond a few hours, it maykill millions. If F I HEAVY WEATHER 241 
we had time, and energy, and opportunity, I would try to save lives.But we don't, and we can't. We don't have time, and we don't haveauthority, so we can't save anyone. We can't even save ourselves. Ourown lives are not our top priority tomorrow."The people in the powwow circle were very silent."In the terrible scale of tomorrow's event, our lives just don'tmatter much. Knowledge of the F-6 is more important than any of us. Iwish this weren't the case, but it's the truth. I want you tounderstand that truth and accept it, I want you to take it into yourhearts and feel it, and resolve to act on it. People, you've all seenthe simulations, you know what I mean when I say F-6. But people, thedamned thing is finally upon us. It is here, it's real, no playbackthis time, no simulacrum. It is with us in stark reality. We have toknow all that we can about the real F-6, at all costs. It is aterrible event that must be documented-at all costs. Tomorrow, wemust seize as much of the truth as we can possibly steal from this 
dreadful thing. Even if we all die doing this, but some survivor
learns the truth about it because of our efforts, then that will be
an excellent price for our lives."
Jerry began to pace back and forth. "I don't want any recklessness
tomorrow. I don't want any amateurism, I don't want any nonsense.
What I want from you is complete resolve, and complete understanding
of the necessity and the consequences. We have only one chance. This
is the greatest heavy-weather challenge that our Troupe will ever
face, and I hope and believe it will be the single most violent
weather event we will see in our natural lifetimes. If you believe
that your life is more important than hacking this storm, I can
understand that belief. It's wise. Most people would call it
sensible. You are all here with me now because you're definitely not
most people, but what I'm asking from you now is a terrible thing to
ask of anyone. This isn't just another storm pursuit. It's not just
another front, and another spike. This thing is Death, people. It's a
destroyer of worlds. It's the worst thing human action has brought
into this world since Los Alamos. If your life is your first
priority, you should leave this camp immediately,
242 

now. I am forecasting a weather event that is more swift, more
volatile, more massive, and more violent than the strongest F-S
maxitornado, by a full order of magnitude. If you want to escape the
disaster, you should flee right now, due east, and not stop until you
are on the far side of the Mississippi. If you stay, stay in the full
knowledge that we are going after this catastrophe head-on."
Nobody moved. Nobody said anything.
Suddenly the air was split with a bloodcurdling bestial yell, a
warbling, yodeling, exultant screech like a madwoman gloating over a
freshly severed scalp.
It was Joanne Lessard. They all stared at Joanne in complete
astonishment. Joanne was sitting cross-legged on a patch of bubblepak
near the campfire. She had just washed her thin blond hair and was
combing it. She said nothing, but only smiled sunnily in the
flickering firelight, and shrugged her shoulders once, and kept
combing.
Even Jerry seemed stunned.
"I've said enough," Jerry realized, and deliberately sat down.
Rudy Martinez stood up. "Jerry, are you nowcasting tomorrow?"
"Yeah." 
"I'll go anywhere as long as Jerry is nowcasting. I've said enough."
Rudy sat down.
Joe Brasseur stood up. "I'm available for consultation by anyone who
hasn't made their will. Dying intestate, that's no joke for your
heirs. We got enough time tonight to record a will, put on a digital
signature, and pipe it to an off-site backup. This means you,
Dunnebecke. I've said enough." He sat down.
Nobody said anything for a long time.
Finally Jane felt she had to stand up. "I just want to say that I
feel really proud of everybody. And I have a good feeling about this.
Good hunting tomorrow, people. I've said enough." She sat down.
April Logan stood up. "Forgive me for interrupting your
deliberations, but if it's all right with the group, I'd like to ask
all of you something."
April Logan looked at Jerry. Jerry lifted his brows.
WEATHER 

"Actually, it's something of a poll query."
"Go ahead, just ask," Jane hissed at her.
"My question is: When do you think the human race conclusively lost
control over its own destiny? I'd like everyone here to answer, if 

you don't mind." April produced a handheld notepad. "Please juststart anywhere in the arclc-here at my left, will do."Martha Madronich stood up, reluctantly. "Well, I hate ao first, butin answer to your question, um, Professor, Ifigured we lost it for good sometime during theor Emergency." She sat down.Ed Dunnebecke stood up. "I'd have to say 1968. Maybe 1967. If youlook at the CO2 statistics, they had a chance to choke it all backright there, and they knew well they were screwing the environment.There was iitely revolutionary potential in the period, and even ~me pQliticalwill, but they squandered the opportunity in the drugs and theMarxism and the mystical crap, and they
•ver regained the momentum. Nineteen sixty-eight, defiI've saidenough."rreg Foulks stood up. "I'm with Ed on that one, except was one lastchance in 1989 too. Maybe even as late-' after the First Gulf War. Well, that one was actually econd GulfWar, strictly speaking. But after they blew big chance at genuine NewWorld Order in '89 and they were definitely trashed. I've said enough." He sat down.-Carol Cooper stood up. "Well, you hear this question bit, ofcourse. . . . Call me romantic, but I always~d 1914. The First World War. I mean, you look at peace in Europebefore the slaughter, and it looks ation might have had a chance tostick. And if we 't blown most of the twentieth century on fascismand mmunism and the rest of the ism bullshit, maybe we tiM have builtsomething decent, and besides, no matter at Taney says, Art Nouveauwas the last really truly-looking graphic-art movement. I've said enough." ~am Moncrieff tookhis turn. "Late 1980s .. . there re some congressional hearings onglobal warming that rybody ignored. . . . Also the Montreal Accordson 243 Bruce Sterl in~ 
Bruce Sterling HEAVY WEATHER 245 244 
chlorofluorocarboflS; they should have passed those with some seriousteeth about CO2 and methane, and things would be a lot better today.Still heavy weather, probably, but not insanely heavy. Late eighties.Definitely. I've said enough."Rick Sedletter rose. "What Greg said." He sat down.Peter Vierling stood up. "Maybe it's just me, but I always felt likeif personal computers had come along in the 1950s instead of the1970s, everybody would have saved a lot of time. Well . . . nevermind." He sat down. Buzzard stood up. "I think they blew it with the League of Nations inthe twenties. That was a pretty good idea, and it was. strictly pig-stupid isolationism on the part of the USA that scragged that wholething. Also the early days of aviation should have worked a lotbetter. Kind of a real wings-over-the-world opportunity. A big shamethat Charles Lindbergh liked fascists so much. I've said enough."Joanne stood up. "Nineteen forty-five. United Nations could haverebuilt everything. They tried too. Some pretty good declarations,but no good follow-through, though. Too bad. I've said enough."Joe Brasseur stood. "I'm with Joanne on the 1940s thing. I don'tthink humanity ever really recovered from the death camps. AndHiroshima too. After the camps and the Bomb, any horror was possible,and nothing was certain anymore. . . . People never straightened upagain after that, they always walked around bent and shivering and scared. Sometimes I think I'd rather be scared of the sky than thatscared about other human beings. Maybe it was even worth heavyweather to miss nuclear Armageddon and genocide. . . . I wouldn'tmind discussing this matter with you later, Professor Logan. But forthe meantime, I've said enough."Ellen Mae Lankton spoke. "Me? If I gotta blame somebody, I blameColumbus. Five hundred thirty-nine years of oppression and genocide.I blame Columbus, and that bastard who designed the repeating rifle.You'd never find an F-6 on any plain that was still covered withbuffalo. But I've said this before, and I've said it enough." She sat down.Ed Dunnebecke stood up. "Funny thing, but I think the FrenchRevolution had a very good chance and blew it. Europe wasted the nexttwo centuries trying to do what the Revolution had right in its graspin 1789. But once you stumble into that public-execution nonsense . .. Hell, that was when I knew the Regime had lost it during the Stateof Emergency, when they started cablecasting their goddamnexecutions. Give 'em to Madame Guillotine, and the Revolution willeat its young, just as sure as hell.Yeah, put me down for 1789. I've said enough."Jeff Lowe rose to his feet. "'I don't know very much aboui history.Sorry."Mickey Kiehl stood up. "I think we lost it when we go for nuclearpower. They coulda designed muchbetter plants than they did, and a hell of a lot betterdissystem, but they didn't because of that moral taint the Bomb.People were scared to death of any kind ofiatation' even when a few extra curies aren't really danrous. I'd say1950s. When the atomic-energy people hidthe military-security bullshit instead of really trying make fissionwork safely for real people in real life. So got all-natural CO2instead. And the CO2 ruined everying. rye said enough."Jerry stood up. "I think it's fruitless to look for first sea or totry to assign blame. The atmosphere is a chasystem; humanity mighthave avoided all those mis~s and still found itself in this conjunction. That begs question of when we lost control of ourdestiny. We ~ none now; I doubt we ever had any."with Jerry on this one," Jane said cheerfully. more so. I mean, ifyou look back at the glacial for the Eemian Period, the one beforethe last set of ages, there were no people around to speak of, and yet weather wascompletely crazy. Global temps used to-and dip eight, nine, ten degrees within a single cenThe climatewas highly unstable, but that was a corntezy natural state. And thenright after that, most of rope, Asia, and America were covered withgiant cliffs246 Bruce Sterling 
of ice that smashed and froze everything in their path. Even worsethan agriculture and urbanization! And a lot worse than heavy weatheris now. Pm real sorry that we did this to ourselves and that we're inthe fix we are in now, but so-called Mother Earth herself has doneworse things to the planet. And believe it or not, the human race hasactually had things worse."Very good," said April Logan. "Thanks very much for that spectrum ofopinion by people who ought to know. Since I have no intention ofbeing here when Dr. Mulcahey's forecast is tested, I'll be taking hisadvice and leaving Oklahoma immediately. I wish you all the very bestof luck." She turned to Jane. "If I can do anything for you, leave E-mail." "Thanks, April.""Wait a moment," Carol said aloud. "You don't want to miss thenight's entertainment." 
"I beg your pardon?"
"Alex is doing something for us, right after the powwow."
Alex. Where was Alex? Jane realized with a guilt-stricken start that
she hadn't even missed him. 
"Yeah," Rick blurted. "Where is ol' Alex?"
Carol smiled. "Ladies and gentlemen, Alex Unger and his Magic
Lariat!" 
Alex wandered into the circle of firelight. He was wearing leather
chaps and pearl-buttoned shirt and a ten-gallon hat. He'd polished
his Mexican boots and put clown white and lipstick on his face.
"Yippee-ti-yi-yo," Peter suggested warily.
Alex whipped the smart rope off his shoulder. He had done something
to it, greased it or oiled it somehow; it looked very shiny tonight.
He whipped a little energy into it with a pop of his skinny arm, then
sent a big loop of it rotating over his head. His face was stony,
perfectly solemn.
The loop hung over him like a halo for a moment, humming with speed.
Then he somehow bent the loop sideways and began to jump through it.
Not much of a jump really; a feeble hop, so that his bootheels barely
HEAVY WEATHER 247 

cleared the earth; but the loop of smart rope went whizzing past him
with impressive buzzing speed, kicking up brief gouts of dirt.
Alex threw the thing a full twenty meters into the air, then sent the
loop at its end ricocheting back and forth, over the heads of the
crowd. It went hissing through every point of the circle, darting
among them like the head of a snake. People whooped and flinched,
some of them whacking out at it with their hands.
The lariat loop at the end of the rope suddenly went square: a
raggedly revolving square of spinning rope. Then it turned
triangular. Then, amazingly, a five-pointed Texas star. It was more
than a little odd to see a cowboy's rope behaving in that fashion; it
was, Jane thought dizzily, downright outré.
Alex tugged the star inward, toward himself, then bounced it around
the circle, stenciling the star across the earth, bouncing it on its
points. Alex turned slowly on his heels. The rope passed unharmed
through the flames of the campfire.
People began laughing.
Alex waved with his free hand, in acknowledgment, and then began
catching and tossing pieces of flaming wood. He lassoed a burning
length of cedar from the fire, tossed it high in the air, and caught
it with the end of the loop. He flipped the flaming branch end over
end, lassoing it repeatedly with unerring, supernatural accuracy.
After a moment Jane realized that the trick wasn't that hard; he
wasn't actually casting the rope, he was holding the loop up in
waiting, then snapping it shut as the stick fell through it. But the
effect was so unnaturally fluid and swift that it actually did look
magical. It was just as if her little brother had hog-tied the laws
of physics. Jane broke into a gale of laughter. It was the funniest
thing she had seen in ages, and by far the funniest thing she had
ever seen Alex do. 
Now, amazingly, Alex somehow hog-tied his own waist and lifted
himself up, hanging in midair. He seemed to lift himself by his own
bootstraps. He hung there in space, magically hoisted by his own
Hindu rope trick,

Bruce Sterling 

while the wide loops of smart rope spun around on the earth beneath
him, like the rim of a wobbling corkscrew.
First he rolled awhile, slowly spinning himself around, like some
lost fancy sock in a laundry. Then he began, clumsily, to hop. He'd 

mutated the smart rope into a spiraled, wiry pogo stick. The Trouperswere falling all over themselves with hilarity. Carol was clingingonto Greg's shoulder, so convulsed with laughter that she was hardlyable to look. Even Jerry was laughing aloud."My word," April Logan commented. "Why, he's rather good!""That's Alex!" Jane told her. "He's my-" She stopped. "He's one ofour Troupe."Jane felt a hand on her shoulder. It was Ed Dunnebecke. Ed bent low,beside her right ear. "I didn't know he was this funny, did you?""No, I didn't.""I gotta leave, Jane, I got business tonight, but your little brothercan really hack that thing.""Yeah, Ed, he can, can't he?""It's not a real useful hack, I guess, but hell, this is realentertainment! He's got imagination!""Thanks, Ed.""I'm glad you brought him here. Bye, Janey." He patted her shoulderand left. Alex was holding on to the rope with both hands, with extra loopssnaked around his ankles, and he was rolling around the edge of thecircle of Troupers, doing a giant cartwheel. Alex went head overheels, head over heels, head over heels, his clown-white facescything along, while the night rang out with whoops and applause.Then he lost it suddenly, and wobbled, and fell. He fell headlong,and he fell pretty hard. Dust whumped the earth where his booted legsflopped down.Everyone was silent. Jane heard the fire crackle.Alex got up again, quickly but shakily. He slapped dust from hisfancy shirt, trying gamely to smile. He'd been to town, somehow, intosome neowestern clothing store. Probably sneaked off on a bike toOklahoma City while nobody was paying attention to him.HEAVY WEATHER 249 He said his first words of the evening. "Spinnin' a rope is fun," heshouted raggedly, "if yore neck ain't in it!"The Troupe broke into howls of laughter."Now for my goldurn pièce de résistance," Alex shouted. He beganwhipping energy into the rope, his dust-smeared pale face set grimly.The rope rose, began to spin, then to spiral inward. Narrow at thebottom. Broader at the top. It spun so fast that the lines of ropebecame a glimmering blur.And faster yet. The fire billowed in the wind of its passage. It wassucking up dust from the ground.A little toy spike.The whipping rope was blowing hard enough to feel. As the vortexwandered past her at the end of the rope, Jane felt the rush of windtugging her hair. Then, up at the very top, the end of the smart ropewhipped loose, lashing out above their heads with a nasty whip crackof toy thunder. It cracked again, then a third time. The spike spunfaster, with a mean dynamo hum. Alex was putting everything into itthat the battery could hold. Jane saw him crouching there, flinchingaway below, wary, at the edge of control, frightened of his owncreation. Then he turned it off. It sagged in midair, and fell over in a heapof loops. A dead thing, dead rope.The Troupe applauded wildly.Alex stooped and gathered the dead rope up in both his arms."That's all I've got for y'all," he said, bowing. "Thanks a lot foryour kindly attention." 
C H ER APT ZIThe day dawned bilious yellow and veined with blue, like a badcheese. The jet stream had shifted, and at last, the high was on themove. Jane and Alex took Charlie west down Highway 40 in pursuit of groundzero. Jane didn't know why Jerry had assigned her Alex as a chasecompanion, on this critical day of all days. Maybe to teach her somesubtle lesson about the inevitable repercussions from an arrogantgood deed.She had anticipated a mean-spirited battle of wills between herselfand her brother, but Alex was unusually subdued. He looked genuinelyill-or more likely, doped. It. would have been only too much likeAlex, to sneak into Oklahoma City and score some hellish concoction.But he did as he was told. He took orders, he tried running thecameras, he kept up with the chase reports from camp, he downloadedmaps and took notes. She couldn't call him enthusiastic, but he waswatchful and careful, and he wasn't making many mistakes. Actually,Alex wasn't any worse as a traveling companion than anyHEAVY WEATHER 2~I 
other-Trouper. Somehow, despite everything, he'd actually
•done it. Her brother had become just another Trouper.
He had his rope with him. He always carried the rope now, looped
around his bony shoulder like a broken puppet string. But he'd put
away his play-cowboy finery and was wearing a simple paper refugee
suit, fresh off the roll. And he'd sponge-washed, shaved, and he'd
even combed his hair. 
For once, Alex wasn't wearing the breathing mask. She almost wished
that he was. With his pale muzzle and striped cheeks, and the waxy
skin and too neat hair, he looked like some half-finished project off
an undertaker's slab. 
Long kilometers of western Oklahoma went by m silence, broken by
reports from the Aerodrome Truck and the Radar Bus.
"What's with the paper suit, Alex?"
"I dunno. The other clothes just didn't fit anymore."
"I know what you mean.~~ A lot more long silence.
"Put the top back," Alex said.
"It's really dusty out there."
"Put it back anyway."
Jane put it back. The car began to fill with fine whirling vu There
was a nasty hot breeze down at ground level, a breeze from the far
west with a bad smell of ashes and ,minimification.
Alex craned his narrow head back and gazed straight the zenith. "Do
you see that stuff up there, Janey?" 

"It looks like the sky is breaking into pieces." 
There was a low-level yellowish haze everywhere, a 1st haze like thefilm on an animal's teeth, but far upthe dust, it was dry and clearer. Clear enough so that mewhere at thestratosphere, Jane could see a little ciru. More than a littlecirrus, when she got used to looking r it. A very strange.spiderwebby cirrus. Long, thin, filaof feathery cloud that stretchedfar across the sky, in parallel waves either, as might be expectedfrom ~nzs, but crossing at odd angles. A broken grid of high,
razor-thin ice cloud, like a dust-filthy mirror cracking intohexagons."What is that stuff, Janey?""Looks like some kind of Bénard convection," Jane said. It wasamazing how much better heavy weather felt when you had a catchphrasefor it. If you had a catch-phrase, then you could really talksuccessfully about the weather, and it almost felt as if you could dosomething about it. "That's the kind of stratus you get from a veryslow, gentle, general uplift. Probably some thermal action way up offthe top of the high.""Why aren't there towers?""Too low in relative humidity."On 283 North, just east of the Antelope Hills, they encountered arabbit horde. Although she had eaten far more than her share of gamy, rank,jackrabbit tamales over the past year, Jane had never paid muchsustained attention to jackrabbits. Out in West Texas, jackrabbitswere common as dirt. Jack-rabbits could run like the wind and jumpclean over a parked car, but in her own experience, they rarelybothered to do anything so dramatic. There just weren't many naturalpredators around to chase and kill jackrabbits, anymore. So therabbits-they were hares, if you wanted to be exact about it-just ateand reproduced and died in their millions of various nasty parasitesand plagues, just like the other unquestioned masters of the earth.Jackrabbits had gray-brown speckled fur, and absurdly long, veiny,black-tipped ears, and the long, gracile limbs of a desert animal.Glimpsed loping around through the brush, eating most anything-cactus, sagebrush, beer cans, used tires, old barbed wire maybe-jackrabbits were lopsided, picturesque animals, though their bulgingyellow rodent eyes rivaled a lizard's for blank stupidity. Until now,Jane had never seen a jackrabbit that looked really upset.But now, loping across the road like some boiling swarm of gangling,dirt-colored vermin, came dozens of jackrabbits. Then, hundreds. Thenthousands of them, endless swarming ragged loping rat packs of them.Charlie 
HEAVY WEATHER 253 slowed to a crawl, utterly confused by a road transmutedinto a boiling, leaping tide of fur.
The rabbits were anything but picturesque. They werebrown and gaunt with hunger, and trembling and desper­ate, and ragged and nasty, like junked, threadbare stuffedanimals that had been crammed through a knothole. Janewas pretty sure that she could actually smell the jackrab­bits. A hot panicky smell rising off them, like burningmanure.
 The car pulled over and stopped.
"Well, that tears it," said Alex, meditatively. "Eventhese harebrained things have more common sense than wedo. If we had any smarts, we'd turn off the road right nowand head wherever they're heading."
"Oh, for heaven's sake, Alex. It's just a migration. It'sbecause of the drought. The poor things are all starving.""Maybe they are, but that's sure not why they're run­
ning. You seen any birds around here lately? Red-tailed
hawks? Turkey vultures? Scissortails? Me neither.""What are you getting at?""Janey, every wild creature that can get away from this
• 	
place is running as fast as it can run. Get it? That's not anyaccident." He coughed a bit, cleared his throat. "And I'vebeen doing some research," he announced. "There are cer­tain towns in this area that have a lot of available shelter. Really good, solid storm shelter. Like, say, Woodward.That town got wiped flat by an F-4 about ten years ago, sothey got themselves a bunch of diamond drills and theydug out underground in a mega way. Big-city shelters,whole malls down there, lots of private shelters too. And

• 	
it's only twenty minutes from here.""You don't say. It's nice of you to take so much initia­tive." "I want to make you a deal," Alex said. "When this


thing really rips the lid off, I want you to get to a shelter.""Me, Alex? Me, and not you?""Exactly. You won't lose anything by doing that. I can
get you all the data you want. I'll punch the core on thething for you, I swear to God I will. I can do that. But youneed to live through this so you can put it all together later,
254 Bruc~ St~rIIrigand understand it. And sell it too. Right? If I don't make it throughthis experience, it's no big loss to anybody. But Janey, if you don'tsurvive this, it's gonna put a pretty serious long-term crimp in yourcareer." "Alex, this is my career.""You've got nothing, unless you stay alive. That makes good sense, sothink about it." "Do I look afraid to you? You think I want to run for cover? Youthink I like this stupid idea of yours?""I know you're real brave, Janey. That doesn't impress me. i'm notafraid, either. Do I look afraid to you?" He didn't. "Do I look likeI'm kidding about this?" He wasn't. "All I'm telling you is that it'sa bad idea for both of us to get killed today. Both the Unger kidskilled at once? What about our dad?" "What about him?" "Well, he's no prize, our querido papd, but he cares! I mean, hecares some. At least, he wouldn't send his daughter into a deathtrap, just to gratify his own curiosity!" Alex started talking reallyquickly. "I think Mulcahey does care about you some, when he can bebothered to notice you instead of his mathematics, and in fact that'swhy Jerry stuck me in here with you today, so you would slow downsome, and not do anything really crazy. Right? Right! That's him allover!" Jane stared at him, speechless."So maybe Jerry cares about you, I grant you that, but he doesn'tcare about you enough! I don't care what charming bullshit he gaveyou, or how he convinced you to live his life for him, but if heloved you the way somebody ought to love you, he would never havesent you out here, never! This is a suicide mission! You're a youngwoman with a lot going for you, and you shouldn't end up as some kindof broken, stomped, bloody doll out in this goddamned wasteland!" Hebroke into a fit of coughing. "Look at those clouds, Jane!" hecroaked. "Clouds are never supposed to took like that! We're gonnaget ridden down and stomped flat out here, just like two of thoserabbits!" "Take it easy! You're losing it."HEAVY WEATHER 255 "Don't talk down to me, just look up at the sky!"Jane, against her own will, looked up. The-dust had thinned, and thesun was higher, and the cirrus looked utterly bizarre. There werehundreds of little growing patches of it now. Shapes just like froston a windowpane, like patchy mutant snowflakes. The clouds lookedlike a down feather might look if you shot ten thousand volts throughit. But that wasn't the half of it. The crazy thing was that all thelittle feather clouds were all exactly the same shape. They weren'tthe same size. Some were huge, some were tiny. They were pointed indifferent directions. Not all different directions, mind you-exactlysix different directions. And yet hellishly, creepily, the cloudswere all identical. A little comma drip on one end, a curved spinewith a hook at the other, and hundreds of fine little electrifiedstreamers branching off from both sides.It looked like a tiling pattern. Like ceramic tiling. The Oklahomasky was tiled like a bathroom floor."Bénard convection does that sometimes," Jane babbled. "The cellshave six different axes of rotation and that self-similarity hasgotta mean that the cell updraft vectors are all, well . . ." Wordsfailed her. Words failed her quite suddenly, and really badly. A kindof software crash for language. Words-yeah, even scientific words-there were times and contingencies when reality ripped loose fromverbal symbolism and just went its own goddamned way. And this wasone of those times. "What's that big seam growing up the middle?" Alex saa"I dunno. Get the cameras on it." "Good idea." Alex put his face into the camera goggles and tiltedthem upward on the weapons mounts. "Wow.""That's gotta be the jet stream," Jane said. "The major, polar jetstream that's been hanging north all this time. It's finally moved.""Janey, I don't know much about the jet stream, but I know the jetstream doesn't bend at that kind of angle.""Well, it's probably not really bending; it just looks that way fromthis angle of observation."2 ~6 Brt,ce Sterling"The hell it is. The hell it does. Janey, I can see it through thesecameras a hell of a lot better than you can, and whatever that thingis, it's coming down. It's coming down right at us, it's gonna hitthe earth." "Great! Keep recording!"His voice cracked. "I think we'd better leave this place.""Hell no! That's it! Of course! Of course, that's what Jerry's beenlooking for-a permanent source of power for the F-6, and the jetstream is permanent power! It wraps the whole planet, and it's sevenkilometers thick and it's fifty degrees below zero and it does twohundred klicks an hour. God, the jet stream, if the jet stream spikesdown out of the stratosphere, then it's all gonna add up!" Shegrabbed for her headset."Janey, that thing's going to kill us. We're gonna die here.""Shut up and keep recording." A remarkably stupid robot truck racedsuddenly past them, mangling and crippling dozens of bloodiedflopping jackrabbits. The rest of the rabbits exploded off in alldirections, like fleas on a hot plate."Jane in Charlie here!" she shouted. "We got a massive outbreak!These are the coords . . She began reading them off, her voice rising.An avalanche of freezing air fell out of the sky. The stratospherewas ten kilometers up. Even at two hundred klicks an hour, it tookthe jet stream a good four minutes to fall to earth.First, the sky cracked open, on a long, furred, spiky seam. Then,maybe ninety seconds down, the vast, thick surge of air hit a warmlayer in the upper atmosphere. There was a massive, soundless explosion. Freezing gouts of ice-white cloud blew out in alldirections. The clouds touched the sun, and in instants, everythingbegan to darken.The stream plowed through the spewing clouds like a bullet through anapple, and hit a second thermopause. There was another fantasticallypowerful explosion. There was still no trace of wind at ground level,but the sound HEAVY WEATHEfr 257 
from that first overhead explosion reached the earth then, acataclysmic roll of thunder that did not vary and did not stop. Acottonwood tree at the side of the road trembled violently, for novisible reason, so violently that it shed all its leaves.From the second explosion, actual vortices blasted out in everycorner of the compass, literal swirls of splitting, freezing, curlingair, whirlpool swirls of air as big as towns.She had one last glimpse up the central core of the falling jetstream. It was clear and cold and vast and lethal. She could see stars through it.Then the jet stream hit the living earth, maybe three kilometersaway. The earth erupted in torment and dozens of vast clotted cobrasof filth leaped skyward instantly. Jane jammed her sound-cahcellationearphones over her head then so she did not go deaf, but the sound ofthe F-6 was something far beyond the Train. It was a sonic weaponpressing through her body and crushing her inside. It was more thansound, it was raw shock, terrible, unendurable, deadly.She fought with the car then, trying to get Charlie to turn and run.Nothing happened; the machine sat as if stunned. Lightning like nolightning she had ever seen caine out of the erupting columns ofdirt. It was dirt lightning, rock lightning. It was thick and crookedand horizontal, and it looked like flying, spinning swastikas. Agreat flying complex of crooked lightning flew right over theirheads, and it broke apart in front of her eyes into gigantic,glowing, sparking chunks.The car moved. She turned and ran. The day was gone. They were inblack hell, instant Gehenna. A hurricane of dirt had spread all overthe sky. They were buried alive under a giant spreading plateau ofscreaming, crackling filth. The air was half-dirt. The maddened earthhad forgotten the difference between air and dirt. Dirt and air weregoing to be the same thing from now on. The black slurry of wind washanging over them, it was all around them.And out at the far edge of it-at the very far, spreading edge, wherethere was still a little squashed and sickly lightBrt,ce Sterling 
at the horizon: there were spikes dropping. Spikes, all around them.Dozens of spikes. A corona of spikes, a halo of spikes. F-is, F-2s,F-3s. Kinky spikes. Fat spikes. Spikes as squat as footballs. Spikesthat whipped like venom-spitting mambas. Spikes that the F-6 hadflung out all around itself in a single gesture, spikes it hadconjured up and flung to earth in a moment, a chorus line of devilsat the skirts of its Dance of Destruction. Charlie flew as it had never flown before. They ran east over adarkened road, and the pursuit vehicle's complex wheels scarcelytouched the ground. Jane glanced at Alex. He was still lookingthrough the cameras. He was still recording-everything that he could.He had the cameras turned backward and he was looking behind the car.Then suddenly Alex flung the cameras off his face and he doubled overhard, and he wrapped both arms around his head. Jane wondered for apassing instant what he had seen, and then in the next instant, thecar simply became airborne. Charlie was actually flying. No illusion.No simulation. No hallucination. A very simple matter. 
They were flying through the air. Maybe ten meters off the road. Theywere up in the air in an arctic, polar, stratospheric gust of windthat had simply caught the car and plucked it from the earth like apaper cup, and it was bearing them along inside it, like a supersonictorrent of black ice. Jane felt a chill existential horror as they remained airborne,remained flying, and things began to drift gently and visibly pastthem. Things? Yes, all kinds of things. Road signs. Bushes. Bigcrooked pieces of tree. Half-naked chickens. A cow. The cow wasalive, that was the strangest thing. The cow was alive and unharmed,and it was a flying cow. She was watching a flying cow. A Holstein. Abig, plump, well-looked-after barnyard Holstein, with a smart collararound its neck. The cow looked like it was trying to swim. The cowwould thrash its great clumsy legs in the chilly air, and then itwould stop for a second, and look puzzled.And then the cow hit a tree and the cow was smashed and dead, and wasinstantly far behind them.2 5~9 F(EAVY WEATI-IER 
And theft Charlie hit another, different tree. And the air bagdeployed, and it punched her really hard, right in the face.When she came to, Alex was driving, or trying to. Everything waspitch-black. Great sheets of lightning tore across the sky and thenoise-cancellation phones, amazingly, were still on her head. She wasslumped in the passenger seat and drenching wet.They were in some small town. The town strobed, periodically, intovisibility around them, in massive flashes of sky-tearing lightning.Because everything was utterly noisy, everything beneath herheadphones was silent. The town was a silent ghost town, under silentartillery bombardment. The town was simply being blown down, blownapart. Walls were being twisted apart, and roofs methodically cavedin. But the bare wind was not alone in its work. The wind had broughtits -friends. Thinp-projcctiles, shrapnel-were randomly smashing thetown, smashing anything that stood up, smashing anything thatresisted, flying and smashing and crushing and bursting. Flying,wrecking things. Ancient telephone poles from before the wirelessdays-they were being snapped up clean and picked up and thrustthrough the sides of multistory buildings. With a weird kind of ease,like someone piercing big blocks of tofu with a breadstick.Everything was airborne, like a little city churned into a denseaerial mulch. Laundry. Stoplights. Bicycles. Dog-houses. Sheets oftin, bending and tumbling and rippling just like big shining sheetsof paper. Hills of branches, mountains of leaves. Satellite dishes,multibranched hollow radio and telephone aerials. The town's watertower had fallen over and ruptured like a big metal egg. Dirt. Dirteverywhere. Sudden mean gusts of dirt like a sandblast. Dirt thatpierced the skin like ink from a tattoo needle. Dirt and hail, andwater that was full of dirt, and water drops that hit her hard ashail. Alex had twin runnels of blackness streaking down his face and sherealized numbly that his nose was bleeding. Her nose too. Her nosehurt; the wreck had really hurt her nose.. . . Alex was driving downthe main street of Bruce Sterling 
town, rather slowly and clumsily really, and with a lot of painedattention to detail. There were cars turned upside down all over theplace, kicked-over cars like a giant child disturbing a convention ofturtles. A quite large brick building gracefully gave up the ghost as theypassed it, and it cascaded gently into the street like a sackful of dominoes. Inside it, every object on its walls and floors took flightlike liberated pigeons, and its guts spewed great crackling goutsfrom severed power lines.Outside the city, they picked up speed again. Jane's head began tohurt a lot, and suddenly she regained full consciousness, and shecame to herself. She went at once for the comset, pressed the mike toher lips between two closed hands, and began shouting into the mike.Not that she could hear herself. Not that anyone in the Troupe couldhear her, necessarily. But just to bear witness. Just to bear witnessto everything, to bear witness as long as she could.They entered some kind of forest. That seemed like a really bad idea.Charlie-began jumping over downed trees in the road, and she couldtell from the way his wheels scrunched against the tarmac that thiswas not at all good for the car. The car was badly damaged. Howbadly, she couldn't tell.Trees were whipping back and forth at the roadside like damned soulsfrantically flagging down a lift. Another great sheet of cloud-to­cloud lightning arc-lit the zenith, and, incidentally, also lit an F-i that was striding knee-deep through the forest alongside them, notfifty meters away. The spike was just churning along there, spinninglike a black cone of wet rubber and methodically tossing a salad ofsmashed tree. She saw it again, three more times, in three morelightning flashes, until it meandered out of sight.On the far side of the forest an insane wind gust pounced on them andalmost blew them away. Charlie actually leaped into the air like ahooked fish and sort of skipped, leaning and kicking violentlyagainst the wind, an odd maneuver dredged up from some subroutineshe'd 26i HEAVY WEATI-IER 
never seen before. Jane said as much, into the mike, for something tosay, and then she looked at her lit Trouper cuff.It was June i6, at two-thirteen in the afternoon.Then another stronger gust hit them broadside, and Charlie wasknocked completely off its wheels, and roiled right over and jumpedup. And rolled over and jumped up, and roiled and jumped in yet athird somersauIt~ tumbling in the grip of the wind like an aikidomaster. Until Charlie fetched up, very hard, with his undercarriagesmashing into the unyielding trunk of a tree. And then all maneuversstopped.Jane did not pass out. The air bags had deployed again, but withoutthe same slamming gusto they had shown before. She realized from thesharp stink of ozone and the steady buzzing that the superconductivehad cracked. Alex gripped her shoulder-from above, since they were now hangingsideways in-their seats, propped against the tree trunk-and heshouted something at her, which of course she could not hear. Heshook her and shouted again and shook his narrow, rain-drenched head,and then he climbed out of the top of the vehicle and vanished intothe dark. Jane assumed that Alex had at least some vague idea what he wasdoing, but she felt very weak and tired, and she had no urge to leavethe vehicle. Jane had often imagined herself dying in a wreckedpursuit car, and it was a relatively peaceful and natural idea forher. It certainly seemed more comfortable and decent than stumblinginto the woods in a violent rainstorm to hunt for some fresh way tobe killed. She kept on talking. She wiped fresh blood from her upper lip and shekept talking. There were no answers, but she kept talking. Charlie'ssuperconductive blew its last fizzing volt and all the onboardinstrumentation crashed. The radio stayed on, though. It bad its ownbattery. She kept talking. 
After half an hour Alex showed up again. The wind had begun to slackoff in spasms, long glassy moments of weird calm amid the roar. Also,it was not quite so dark.z6z Bruce Sterling 263 There was a rim of drowned greenish light in the west-the F-6 wasmoving east. The F-6 was moving past them.And apparently civilization was not so desperately far away as itseemed from the tilted seat of a smashed car, because Alex,amazingly, was carrying a hooded terry-cloth baby towel, a six-packof beer in biodegradable cans, and half a loaf of bread.She tried talking to Alex then, shouting at him over ~ atches in theconstant rumble of thunder, but he shook is head and patted one ear.He had gone quite deaf. He'd probably been deaf from the very firstinstant the F-6 hit. He might, she thought, be deaf forever now.Worse yet, he looked completely insane. His face was drenched withrain and yet still black with dirt-not just dirt on the skin, butdirt tattooed under his skin, his face stippled with high-speedflying filth.He offered her a beer. She couldn't think of anything she wanted lessat that moment than a beer-especially one from some cheap Oklahomamicrobrewery called "Okie Double-X"-but she was very dry-throatedfrom shock, so she drank some. Then she~wiped her bloodied face withthe towel, which hurt a lot more than she had expected.Alex skulked off again. Hunting something, out in the black pitchingmess of trees. What on earth was he looking for? An umbrella?Galoshes? A credit card, and working fax machine? What?Not two minutes later Leo Mulcahey showed up, and rescued her. 
LEO mivm IN an aging Texas Ranger riot-control vehicle, a big eight-wheeled urban chugger with a peeling Lone Star over black ceramicarmor. What the hell a Texas Ranger vehicle was doing this far out ofTexas jurisdiction was a serious puzzle to Jane, but the thing was abitch to drive and Leo was in a tiny captain's chair looking throughsome virtuality blocks and wearing a headset. Jane sat slumped in theback in a cramped little webbing chair, shaking very hard. Leo wasvery occupied by the challenge of driving.They drove maybe ten kilometers, a lurching, awfulHEAVY WEATHER 
trip, pausing half a dozen times to work around or smash their wayover downed trees. Then Leo drove the vehicle down a wet concrete slope into an underground garage. A steel garage door slid shutbehind them like an airlock, and the torrent of noisy wind ceasedquite suddenly, and fluorescents flicked on.They were in a storm shelter.A privately owned shelter, but it was a big place. They took stairsdown from the garage. A nice place, a regular underground mansion bythe look of it. Thick carpeting underfoot, and oil paintings on thewalls, and designer lighting and a big superconductive someplace tokeep all those lights burning. Outside, hell was raging, but they badjust sealed themselves in a big money-lined Oklahoma bank vault.Leo stepped into a small tiled room with a compost toilet, and openeda pair of overhead cabinet doors, and offered her a thick canary-yellow toweL As if in afterthought, he pulled a pair of foam plugsfrom his ears, then ran one hand through his disordered hair. "Well,Juanita," he told her, smiling at her. "Janey. Well met at last,Jane!" Jane rubbed at her hair and face. Filthy. And her nose was stillbleeding a little. It seemed a real shame to put blood on such a nicethick dry towel. "How'd you find me, out there?""I heard your distress call! I scarcely dared to leave the shelter,but there came a break in the weather, and you were close to the 
shelter, and well"-Leo smiled-"here we are, both safe and sound, so
the risk was well worth it." 
"My brother's still out there."
"Yes"-Leo nodded-"I did overhear that. A shame your brother-Alex,
isn't it?-didn't have the wisdom to stay with the vehicle. When it
dies down, maybe we can make a try to find young Alex. All right?"
"Why not rescue him right now?"
"Jane, I'm no meteorologist, but I can read a SESAME report. All hell
is breaking loose out there. I'm very sorry, but I won't comb a patch
of woods far a missing boy while the landscape swarms with tornadoes.
You and I were lucky to get back here alive." 

Bruce Sterling
264 

"I'll go alone, I can drive that thing."
"Jane, don't be troublesome. I don't own that vehicle."
"Who owns it, then?"
"The group owns it. I'm not here all alone, you know. I have my
friends! Friends who strongly disapproved of my leaving this shelter
in the first place. Would you think this through a bit, please?
Consider this from my perspective."
Jane fell silent. Then she couldn't restrain herself. "My brother's
life is at stake!" 
"So is my brother's," Leo said sternly. "Do you know how many people
have died in this horror already? It's already leveled five towns,
and the F-6 is headed right for Oklahoma City! Tens of thousands of
people are going to die, not just one person that you happen to know!
It's a holocaust out there, and I don't propose to join in it! Get a
grip on yourself!" He opened a tall closet. "Look, here's a bathrobe.
Get out of that wet paper, Jane, and try to compose yourself. You're
in a storm cellar now, and that's where sane people are supposed to
be, during a storm. We're going to~y here now! We won't be leaving
again."
He shut the ck~&r and left her alone in the bathroom. Alone again,
she began shaking violently. She glanced at herself in the mirror.
The sight of her own face sent a chill through her. She looked
terrifying: a madwoman, a bloodied gorgon.
She tried the faucet; a thin trickle of ill-smelling water emerged.
Very chlorinated. If you were rich in Oklahoma, you could drill a big
hole in the ground and put a mansion inside it, but that still
wouldn't get you decent water. She stoppered the sink and rinsed her
face, quickly. Then she put a cupped handful of water through her
hair. Something like a kilo of rust-colored Oklahoma dirt dripped out
of her hair and into the sink. And her paper suit was smeared with
wet dust. 
She stepped out of the paper suit, and put it into the sink and ran a
little water over it, and washed her hands and wrists. Then she
pulled the suit out again and wiped it with the towel, and the paper
suit was pretty darn clean. It dried out in no time. Good old paper.
She stepped back into it and zipped it up.
265 

She -opened the bathroom door again. There were distant voices down a
sloping corridor. Jane tromped down the corridor in her trail boots.
"Leo?" 
"YesP~ He handed her a mug of something hot. Café con leche. It was
very good. And very welcome.
"Leo, what on earth are you doing in this place?"
"Interesting question," Leo admitted. "It's no accident, of course."
"I thought not, somehow."
"Even the blackest cloud has a chrome lining," Leo offered, with a 

tentative smile. He led her into an arched, bombproof den. There wasa sitting area with low, flowing, leather couches in a conversationpit. The walls were stuccoed ceramic and the roof was a thickblastproof stuccoed ceramic dome, like the inside of a roe's egg. Abrass chandelier hung on a chain from the top of the dome. Thechandelier swayed a little, gently.There was a media center with a pair of silent televisions on, and anold rosewood liquor cabinet, and a scattering of brass-and-leatherhassocks of brown-and-white furred brindled cowhide. There were a pair of Remington bronzes of mustached cowpokes on horseback doingunlikely horse-breaker things, and a pair of awesome octagon-barreledfrontier rifles were mounted on the wail. And there were eight strangers in the shelter, counting Leo. Twowomen, six men. Two of the men were playing with an onyx Mexicanchess set, off at the far end of the conversation pit. Another wasgently manipulating a squealing broadband scanner hooked to anantenna feed. The other four were playing some desultory card game ona coffee table, pinochle or poker maybe, and munching from a redlacquered tray of microwaved hors d'oeuvres."Well, here she is," Leo announced. "Everyone, this is Jane Unger."They looked up, mildly curious. No one said much. Jane sipped herwarm coffee, holding the mug with both hands."Forgive me if I don't make introductions," Leo said."You know what would be a really good idea, Leo?" said one of thechess players, mildly, looking over his rim-N-EAVY WEATHER 
z66 
less glasses. "It would be a really good idea if you put Ms. Ungerback outside." "All in good time," Leo said. He turned to the silent televisions."Oh dear, just look at that havoc." He said it in a voice so flat andnumbed that Jane was taken aback. She set her coffee mug down. Leolooked at her. She picked the mug back up."It's pretty much leveled El Reno," remarked the other chess player,cheerfully. "Pretty danm good coverage too.""Have they structure-hit that broadcast tower outside Woodward yet?"Leo said. "Yeah. It came down three minutes ago. A good hit, Leo. Real solidhit. Professional." "That's great," Leo said. "That's splendid. So, Jane. What would youlike? A few spring rolls with hot mustard? You do like Thai food,don't you? I think we have some Thai in the freezer." He took herelbow and led her to the open kitchenette.Jane pulled her arm free. "What the hell are you doing?"Leo smiled. "Short explanatün, or long explanation?""Short. And hurry up.""Well," said Leo, "shortly, my friends and I are very interested indead spots. This is a big dead spot, and that's why we're here. We'veput ourselves here quite deliberately, just like you and your Troupedid. Because we knew that this area would be the epicenter of damagefrom my brother's F-6.""Leo, I gotta hand it to that brother of yours!" called out thesecond chess player, with what sounded like real gratitude."Personally, I had the gravest doubts about any so-called F-6tornado, it seemed like a real reach, a real nutcase long shot, butLeo, I admit it now." The chess player straightened up from hisboard, lifting one finger. "Your brother has really delivered. Imean, just look at that coverage!" He pointed briskly at thetelevision. "This disaster is world-class!" "Thanks," Leo said. "You see, Jane, there are many places in America 
where human beings just can't -live anymore, but that's not true for
our communications technol 

ogles. The machines are literally everywhere. In the U.S.- even
Alaska!-there's not one square meter left that's not in a satellite
footprint, or a radio-navigation triangulation area, or a cellular
link, or in packet range of nemode sites or of wireless cable TV. . .
. 'Wireless cable,' that's a nasty little oxymoron, isn't it?" Leo
shook his head. "It took a truly warped society to invent that
terminology...."
Leo seemed lost for a moment, then recovered himself. "Except, Jane,
not here, and not now! For one shining moment, not here, not around
us! Because we are inside the F-6! The most intense, thorough,
widespread devastation that the national communications
infrastructure has suffered in modern times. Bigger than a hurricane.
Bigger than earthquakes. Far bigger than arson and sabotage, because
arson and sabotage on this huge scale would be far too risky, and far
too much hard work. And yet here we are, you see? In the silence! And
no one can overhear us! No one can monitor us! Not a soul." 
"So that's why you overheard me in my car? My distress call? Because
you're paying so much attention to broadcasts?"
"Yes, that's it exactly. We're listening to everything on the
spectrum. Hoping, aiming, for perfect silence. Luckily, we have the
resources to help the project along a bit-to take out a few crucial
relays and especially solid towers, and such. Because God knows, the
damned repairmen will all be back in force soon enough! With their
cellular emergency phone service, and the emergency radio relays, and
even those idiot ham operators with their damned private services out
of ham shacks and even their bathroom closets, God help us! But for a
little while, a brilliant, perfect silence, and in that moment all
things are possible. Everything is possible! Even freedom."
Someone, lackadaisically, applauded.
Jane swallowed coffee. "Why do you need that much silence?"
"Do you know what 'electronic parole' is?"
"Sure. When they put, like, a government wrist cuff on
Bruce Sterling
EAVY WEATHER 

z68 

prisoners. With a tracker and a relay inside. My Trouper cuff is a
little like that, actually." She held up her wrist.
"Exactly. And all of us here, we all have similar devices."
She was amazed. "You're all out on parole?"
"Not the common kind. A special kind, rather more sophisticated. It's
more accurate to say that my friends and I are all bonded people. We
gave our word of bond. But we're in a Troupe, of a sort. A Troupe of
people in bondage."
"Excuse me," said the man at the broadband scanner. He was a large,
hefty, middle-aged man, with short brush-cut hair. "May I see that
device, please?"
"My Trouper cuff?"
"Yes, ma'am."
Jane unbuckled it and handed it to him. 
"Thanks." The man rose, examining Jane's cuff carefully, then walked
into the kitchen. He placed the cuff carefully beside the sink,
opened a kitchen drawer, swiftly removed a meat-tenderizing hammer,
and smashed Jane's cuff, repeatedly.
"Why are you doing this?" Jane shouted.
"It's a big world," Leo said, between his friend's precisely judged
hammer blows. "It's an old world, it's a sad and wicked world. . . . 

We in this room, we are definitely people of the world, Jane. We're avery worldly lot!" The radioman carefully ran sink water over Jane'sshattered cuff. "We've done some of the work of the world, in our day," Leo said."But you can't acquire that kind of power without responsibility.Power doesn't come without an obligation, without an account to pay.The people who put these cuffs on us-well, you might say that we allquite voluntarily put them onto one another, really-these braceletsare badges of honor. We thought of them as badges. As fail-safes, asa kind of moral insurance. As talismans of security! But after theyears roll on . . . It doesn't ever stop, Jane, time just keeps goingon, consequences just keep mounting up." He lifted his arm and lookedat his watch. It looked just like any other watch. Nothing tooHEAVY WEATHER 269 
special about Leo's watch. Just another metal-banded businessinan'swatch. Except that the skin beneath the watch was very white."We've come here to stop being what we are," Leo said. "There's noway out of the Game, no way outside the code of silence. Except fordeath, of course; death always works. So we've found a kind ofsilence now that's an electronic, virtual death. We're going to cutour bonds away, and we'll die in the world of the networks, and we'llbecome other people, and we'll leave and vanish for good.""Like evacuation freaks?" One of the poker players burst into laughter. "Hey! That's a goodone! That's dead on. Evacuation freaks. You mean those weird poseurswith no ID who just haunt the camps, right? That's good, that's verygood. That's us right to a T.""Leo, what have you done that's so horrible? Why do you have to doanything this weird and elaborate?" She looked into his eyes. Theywere not cruel eyes. They were like Jerry's eyes. They only lookedvery troubled. "Leo, why don't you just come to the Troupe camp? Wehave our own people there, we have resources and ways to get peopleout of trouble. I can talk to Jerry about it, maybe we can straightenall this out." "That's very sweet of you, Jane. It's very good of you. I'm sorry Inever had a chance to know you better." He lifted his voice to theothers. "Did you hear that? What she just offered? I was right to dowhat I did." He looked into her face. "It doesn't matter. In anycase, after this meeting you'll never see me again.""Why not?"He gestured at the ceiling-at the storm outside their bank vault."Because we are far beneath the disaster now. We're all just emptynames now, in the long roll call of the dead and missing from the F­
6. Everyone you see here-we all died inside the F-6. We vanished, wewere consumed. You'll never see me again; Jerry will never see meagam~ ever. We're cutting all ties, annihilating our identities, andJane, we're the kind of people who know how to do that,Bruce Sterling 
HEAVY WEATHER 271 
Bruce Sterling27~ and are good at doing it. And that's the way it has to be.There's no way out of what I've become, except to stopbeing what I am. Forever."
"What on earth have you done?""It's impossible to say, really," one of the women re­marked. "That's the beauty of the scheme.""Maybe you'll understand it best this way," Leo toldher. "When your friend and colleague April Logan was
• 	asking the Troupers about when the human race lost allpower over its own destiny-" 
 "Leo, how do you know about that? You weren'tthere."
 "Oh," said Leo, surprised. He smiled. "I'm inside thesystem in camp. I've always been inside the Troupe's sys­tem. No one knows, but, well, there I am. Sorry." 
"My brother's an academic, academics never pay anyreal attention to security updates."
• "I'll say," said another of the shelter people, speaking up forthe first time. He was big and dark, and he was wearing a charcoal-gray tailored suit, and Jane noticed for the first time that he wasvery young. Younger than twenty. Maybe no older than seventeen. Howhad this boy . . .And then she looked at him. He was very young, but his eyes were liketwo dead things. He had the skin-creeping look of a professionalpoisoner."You see," said Leo, "the human race still has a great deal ofcontrol over our destiny. Things are by no means so chaoticallyhopeless as people like to pretend. The governments can't doanything, and our lives are very anarchic, but all that means is thatthe work that the governments ought to do is shrugged ontovigilantes. There are certain things, certain activities, thattransparently require doing. What's more, there are people whorecognize the necessity to do them, and who can do them, and are evenwilling to do those things. The only challenge in the situation isthat these necessary things are unbearably horrible and repugnantthings to do.""Leo," said the first chess player, in weary exasperation, "why on earth are you dropping our pants to this woman?"One of the women spoke up. "Oh, go ahead and tellher, Leo. I'm enjoying this. It doesn't matter. We're freenow. We're inside the big silence. We can talk.""That's you all over, Rosina," said the first chess player indisgust. "I hate this bullshit! I hate watching people blow alloperational security, and spew their guts like some teenage burglar,drunk in a bar. We're professionals. for Christ's sake, and she'sjust some prole. Don't you have any pride?""She's not just anyone," Leo protested. "She's family.She's my sister-in-law.""No, I'm not," Jane said. "I didn't marry him, Leo.""Details." Leo shrugged, irritably. "Jerry will marry you. I supposeyou don't realize that yet, but he'll do it, all right. He'll neverlet you go, because he's pulled too much of you inside of him now;and besides, you're too useful to him, and he needs you too much. Butthat's fine, that's fine, I like that idea; you'd never do anythingto hurt Jerry, would you? No, I can see that. Of course not. It's allright it's all just fine.""You are being a complete moral idiot," said the chessplayer."Look," Leo snapped at him, "if I wanted to stay in the Great Game,do you think I'd have gone this far? Do you know anybody else whocould get that danm cuff off you? Then shut up and listen. It's thelast time you'll ever have to hear me out.""Have it your way," the chess player interrupted, with a calm anddeadly look. "Jane Unger, listen to me. I can see that you're a veryobservant person. Stop watching me so very observantly. I don't likeit, and I won't have it. It's boring and clumsy to threaten people,but I'm threatening you, so listen." He pulled his manicured handsfrom the chessboard and steepled his fingertips. "I can commit an actin three seconds that will make you a clinical schizophrenic foreighteen months. You'll hear voices in your head, you'll rave aboutconspiracies and plots and enemies, you'll paint yourself with yourown shit, and that can all 
AVY WEATHER 273 B r ii c e S t e r I I n g
be done in three seconds with less than three hundred micrograms.Dead men actually do tell tales sometimesbut madwomen tell nothing but pathetic lies, and no one believes whatmadwomen say, about anything, ever. Am I clear? Yes? Good." He moveda bishop.Jane sat, weak-kneed, on one of the cowhide hassocks."Leo, what are you doing? What have you gotten into?""It wasn't for us. It was never for ourselves. It was for the future." The woman spoke up again. "The delightful part about the Great Game-Imean, the genuinely clever and innovative part-is that we don't evenknow what we've done! It all takes place through electronic blinds,and cells, and fail-safes, and need-to-know, and digital anonymityand encryption. One cell, for instance, will think up five potentialdirect actions. Then another cell will choose just one candidateaction from that list of five, and break the action up intoindependent pieces. And then, yet other cells will distribute thatwork into small independent actions, so fragmented as to bemeaningless. It's just the way engravers used to design money. Whenmoney was on engraved paper and money still meant something.""Right," said the second chess player, nodding. "So that one year,some theorist predicts how useful it would be to have Bengali choleradecimate some overcrowded hellhole of a city. And eight months later,someone watches some little paper sailboats melting in a reservoir."Jane stared. "Why would anyone do that?""The best of reasons," Leo said. "Survival. Survival of humanity, andof millions of endangered species. A chance for humanity to work itsway out of heavy weather into real sunlight an& blue skies again. Wehad a lot of chances to take steps to save our world, and we blewthem all, Jane. All of them. We were greedy and stupid andshortsighted, and we threw all our chances away. Not you personally,not me personally, not any of us personally, just our ancestors, ofcourse. No one convenient to blame. But you, and me, and the peoplehere, we are all the children of heavy weather, and we have to liveunder consequences,we have to deal with them. And the only real way to them is ugly,just unbearably ugly."why you, Leo?""Because we know! Because we can! For the sake of the rvivors. I suppose." He shrugged. "There's no globalThere's no formal, deliberate control over the ~se or events,anywhere. Institutions have given up. vernments have given up.Corporations have given up. 'the people in the room, and the manyothers who are us and with us, we've never given up. We're theclosest this planet has to an actual working government." ane lookedaround the room. They were agreeing with It wasn't any joke. He wastelling a truth that they all and recognized."Some of us, most of us, are in the government. But there's not anygovernment in the world that can stand up publicly, and say coldlyand openly, that the eight billion people on this collapsing planetare at least four billion people too many. Jane, each year, everyyear, there arechildren born on Earth to equal the entire populaot Mexico. That'sinsanely far too many, and it's beenthat for eighty years now. The situation is so desperatemat working to solve it is like joining a bomb squad. Everywar a bomb explodes, and it's a bomb made of humanand every human splinter in that bomb means extincand carbon dioxideand toxins and methane and pestiand clearcutting and garbage and further decline. were a lot of ways out once, but there are no more rnatives now. Justpeople who will probably survive, people who probably won't.""Leo's being a bit dramatic, as usual, but that's part of bischarm," said the woman, Rosina, with a fond smile athim. Rosina looked like a schoolteacher might look-axñteacher with a taste for platinum jewelry and expen,c facialsurgery. "The Great Game is less romantic thaniniaht sound. Basically, it's just another American secretmt, and while thosç are common enough, theyiasr long. We're very much like the southern resisace duringReconstruction. Like the Invisible Empire- e Ku Klux Klan. For adecade or so, the Ku Klux Klan274 Brttc~ SterIIr~gwas a genuine underground government! Where everybody took turnsholding the rope for a minute. So nobody really lynched the darkie.You see, the darky just sort of perished."She smiled. She said this terrible, heart-freezing thing, and shesmiled, because she found it amusing. "And everybody involved wentright back to being a county judge and a policeman and a lawyer andthe owner of the hardware store. And next week they rode out in theirhoods and masks and they killed again. That's exactly what it's likefor us, Jane. It can really happen. It has happened. It's happened inthe United States. And it's happened here be-fore, long beforenetworks or encryption, or any of the really easy, safe, convenientways to facilitate large conspiracies. It's not farfetched at all,it's not even hard. It's quite easy if you work at it sincerely, andit's very real, it's real like this table is real." She slapped it."Just because we few are dropping out of the game doesn't mean thatthe Great Game will end," said another poker player. He lookedvaguely Asian, with a West Coast accent. There weren't any blackpeople among these people. No Hispanics, either. Jane got the strongimpression that ethnic balance hadn't been high on the agenda whenthey did their recruiting, however people like this did theirrecruiting. Floating Nietzschean Ubermensch IQ tests in obscurecorners of networks, maybe. Intriguing intellectual puzzles that onlythose of a certain cast of mind could win. Little suction spots inthe Net where people could slip into the Underground and never, evercome out . . . "Like AIDS for instance. That bug is a godsend, wemight have cured it by now, but there are brave, determined, cleverpeople who will guard every last AIDS variant like a Holy Grail. . .. A virus that kills sexually careless people! While at the same timelowering nnmunity, so that afflicted people become a giant naturalreservoir for epidemics. It's thanks mainly to AIDS that newtuberculosis treatments become so useless so quickly. . . . If AIDSdidn't exist, we'd have been forced to invent it. If it weren't forAIDS, we'd have ten billion people now, not eight.""My dear friend Rosina has misled you somewhat with275 HEAVY WEATHER 
that ancient KKK analogy," said Leo, gently. "We're certainly notracists, we're very multicultural; we never aim to exterminate anyethnic group, we simply work consistently to lower global birthratesand raise global death rates. Really, our activity is no more alynching than this F-6 is like a lynching. Like the F-6, it's a deathremotely traceable to human action, but taking steps to increase theglobal death rate doesn't make death into murder. An epidemic isn'tgenocide, it's just another epidemic. Anyway, the vast majority ofall our actions are perfectly legal and aboveboard, things that wouldnever raise a second glance! Things such as . . . offering ascholarship to a medical student." 
He poured himself some coffee and added steamed milk. "Instead ofsaving thousands of harmful human lives through public-healthmeasures like clean water and sewers, why not train that doctor to doelaborate, costly measures, like neural brain scans? Usually, theheart and soul of a nation's public-health work are a few verylonely, very dedicated people. They are easy to find, and theirorganization can be structure-hit in a very subtle way. Theseselfless neurotics don't have to be shot out of hand or lynched byracists, for heaven's sake. Generally, all they need is a few kindwords and a little gentle distraction.""Yeah, a fad here, a twist there," said the Asian guy, "a brief delayin shipping to some hard-hit famine site, or a celebrity scandal tochase off news coverage of some lethal outbreak . . . The currentmuddled semilegal situation with drugs, for instance, that was a workof genius. .A great source of finance for anybody's underground, and the peoplewho shoot up heroin are extremely reckless and credulous. Streetdrugs will almost never be tested for additives, as long as theysupply the thrill. There are narcocontraceptives-one shot makes awoman permanently allergic to the lining of her own uterus, somethingthe woman would never notice, except that a fertilized egg will neveradhere to her womb." He nodded sagely. "That works very well withmass inoculations too, if you can manage to contaminate the vaccines.. . . I suppose you could argue the technique's rather sexist, butwe've tried 
276 Brtzce Sterling 277 covert sterilization with men, and statistics prove that the cohortof fertile women is the real crux of population expansion; it's allin the womb, that's just the way human reproduction works... . Peoplewilling to take intravenous drugs are already flirting with suicide;there's no real harm in assisting them.""Not to mention legalizing euthanasia on demand," said the secondwoman, testily. "And at least that form of suicide tends to be farmore male-based." "The whole military policy of structure hits was based on destroyingenemy infrastructure-avoiding the political embarrassment ofbattlefield deaths so that the enemy populace died of apparentlynatural causes." It was the radio guy again, sitting ramrod straightin his chair before the scanner. "It was Luddism writ large-the firstdeliberate policy of national Luddism. That the practice of structurehitting quickly leaked into the American civilian populace onlyindicates the broad base of support for the practice. . . . Very muchlike the CIA and lysergic acid, if you don't mind a favorite analogyof mine." Leo sipped his coffee. "I'm going to miss all of you very much," heconfessed. "I told you he was sentimental," said Rosina."It seems such a terrible shame that the talents of a group like thisshould be wasted on entirely clandestine endeavors. That you'll neverhave your real due. You all deserve so much better.""Oh, none of us are any worse off than Alan Turing was," objected thesecond chess player. "Just more deep, dark, digital spooks.""Someone will track it down someday," Rosina told Leo, comfortingly."We ourselves don't know the full extent of Game activities, butthere must be tens of thousands of buried traces. . . . Someone in the future, the next century maybe, with time on their hands and realresources for once and some proper database investigation, they'd beable to dig us all up and piece the story together." She smiled. "Andutterly condemn us!""That's their privilege. A privilege we're giving to the future. Twogreat privileges-survival and innocence."HEAVY WEATHER 
"That's why we're dead people now," Rosina said. "You know what we
are, Jane? We are lifeboat cannibals. We did something terrible that
had to be done, and now we're sitting here, sitting here on these
couches right now in front of you, still smacking our lips on the
shreds of meat from a dead baby's thighbones. We've done things that
are way past sin and become necessity. We are vile little pale creepy
creatures that live deep under the rocks, and we belong by rights
with the anonymous dead." She turned to the man at the scanner. "How
does it look, Red?"
"It looks pretty good," Red said. "Real quiet."
"Then I want to go first. Get this damned thing off me, somebody."
She lifted her left arm. No one moved. 
Rosina raised her voice. "I said I want to go first! I'm
volunteering! So who's gonna cut it for me?"
The very young man in the suit stood up. "You know what the hell of
this is?" he said to Jane, his dark eyes like two oysters from a can.
"The hell is that you bust your ass for five years finding some
network doods that are truly elect, and then they turn out to be this
crowd of middle-aged rich pols and lawyers! People who post way too
much about academic political philosophy shit that doesn't mean
anything, and then when it finally comes to taking some real action,
it's always somebody else's fault, and they end up hiring some bent
Mexican cop to do it for them. Jesus Christ!" He sighed. "Gimme that
pneumatic. dood."
The second chess player reached under the leather couch and handed
the young man a pair of pneumatic diamond-edged bolt cutters. "You
want the safety goggles?"
"Do I look like I want fuckin' safety goggles? Wimp!" He hefted the
bolt cutters and turned to Rosina. "Out. Out on the stairs." 
The two of them left. 
No one said anything for thirty seconds. They dealt cards, they
studied the chessboard, Leo pretended huge interest in the broadband
scanner. They were in anguish.
Rosina came back in, her wrist bare. A big bright smile. Like a woman
on cocaine. 
278 Bruce Sterling 

"It works!" gasped the second chess player. "Me next!"
The young man came in with the bolt cutters. The armpits of his suit
were soaked with sweat. 
"Do me next!" said the second chess player.
"Are you kidding?" said the very young man. "I know statistics. Let
somebody else do it this time."
"I'll do it," Leo told the chess player. "If you'll do me afterward."
"Deal, Leo." The chess player blinked gratefully. "You're a straight
shooter, Leo. I'm gonna miss you too, man."
They went out of the room. A minute passed. They came back in.
"We're real lucky," said the second chess player. He wiped sweat from
his forehead with a canary-yellow washcloth he'd snagged from the
bathroom. 
"Either that," the very young man scoffed, "or they're not designed
as well as we thought. What'd you do with the dead bracelets?"
"Left 'em in the hall." 
"We'd better detonate 'em later. Wouldn't want anybody reverse-
engineering that circuitry."
"Right," said Leo, with a glance at Jane. "You can see now why the
Crimson Avenger became so integral to our group! Only nineteen years
old-but there's one of those young rascals in every network; it
happens to even the best of company."
"Why did you come here?" Jane asked the Crimson Avenger.
"I been in the Game five years now," the Crimson Avenger muttered.
"It gets real old." His face clouded. "And besides, if I don't clear
town but good, I'm gonna have to kill both my lame bitchfucker 

parents! With a fuckin' shotgun!"
Two of the poker players rose-the Asian guy and the second woman.
They exchanged a silent glance heavy with deep personal meaning and
the man took the bolt cutters and they left together.
HEAVY WEATHER 279 

Fifteen seconds later there was a loud explosion. Then, screams.
Everyone went white as paper. The screams dwindled to agonized
breathy sobs.
The Crimson Avenger reached inside his jacket and pulled Out a snub-
nosed ceramic revolver and walked stiff-legged to the door. He yanked
it open, leaving it open behind him. There was a brief gabbling wail
of anguished terror, and a shot. Then another shot. And then a long,
meditative silence. And then another final shot. 
Crimson Avenger came back in, with his suit lightly spattered with
blood, flying little droplets of blood on the shins of his charcoal-
gray trousers. He had the cutters-the diamond jaws of the device were
blackened with impact. "Hers blew," he said. "We don't have to do his
now. He's dead too." 
"I think I've changed my mind," said the first chess player.
Without changing expression, Crimson Avenger lowered his pistol and
pointed it at the bridge of the first chess player's glasses. "Okay,
dood." 
"Never mind, I'm going." He looked at Red, the radioman. "Let's do
it." 
"I'm going too," said Crimson Avenger.
"Why?" said the chess player.
"Because I got left over, and you're gonna do me last. And because if
you wimp out and try to run off with that bracelet on, you're gonna
do it with my bullet in your head." He sniffed, and coughed. "Dood,
for a guy with three advanced degrees, man, you are fuckin' slow!"
They left. And they came back alive.
"I think a twenty-five-percent mortality rate is extraordinarily good
under the circumstances," said Leo.
"Considering the extreme precautions taken to keep us from
accomplishing this . . . yes, quite acceptable," said the second
chess player.
The television, which had been showing snow, flickered into life
again.
"Look, it's hitting Oklahoma City," said the first chess player. He
turned up the sound a bit, and the six surviving

28G Bruce Sterliuig 281 Garners settled in on the couch, their faces alight with deepinterest. "Look at the way they've networked those urban securicams to catchthat first damage wave coming in," said Red. "Not only that, but theyare the very first back on the air! The staff at Channel 005 arereally technically adept.""Leave it on 005," said the second chess player. "They're definitelythe best fast-response storm team in the country.""You got it." Red nodded. "Not that we have any choice. I thinkeverything else is still down." He began channel-switching the secondset. "Whoa," Leo told him. "Look at that SESAME satellite shot. . . .That's very odd, people. Oklahoma City seems to be under siege by agiant doughnut."Rosina chuckled. "That's a very odd shape, isn't it, Jane? What does it mean?"Jane cleared her throat. "It means . . . it means that Jerry isright. Because I've seen that shape before, in his simulations.That's not a spike, it's a . . . well, it's a giant torus vortex downon the ground. I mean, you think of a tornado . .. and you turn itsideways and you put the tip of it into the top of it, like a snake 
eating its own tail.
And it becomes a giant ring, a tows. And it sucks in updraft from all
directions outside the ring, and it spews downdraft out the top and
sides, and it's stable. And it just gets bigger until all the heat
and moisture are gone."
"What does that imply, exactly?"
Jane felt tears slide thinly down her cheeks. "I think it means that
all my friends are dead."
"And that Oklahoma City is definitely dog meat," Rosina added.
"Mega," said Crimson Avenger.
Oklahoma City was methodically recording its own destruction. Jane
knew immediately that she was seeing history bubble off the screen,
an odd and intense kind of history. Like some decadent Roman poet
reciting his autobiography as he opened a vein in the bath.
HEAVY WEATHER 

At the touch of the F-6, now in its full fury, Oklahoma City was
exploding on television, block by block. It was being sucked up and
peeled apart and smashed. Heavily reinforced high-rises were being
pulled up bodily out of the ground, like a farmer pulling up carrots.
They were very hard and very strong buildings, and when they fell
over and started rolling, all their contents would gush out of their
windows, in a fountaining slurry of glass and trash and mist. The
falling high-rises would rip up big patches of street with them, and
when the wind got under the Street, things would start fountaining
up. There was a lot of room under the earth in Oklahoma City, a lot
of room with a lot of human beings in it, and when the wind got into
those 'long shelters it simply blew them like a flute. Manholes blew
off the streets and big whale gushes of vapor came Out of the
pavement, and then a whole pod of whales seemed to surface under the
street, because another skyscraper was slowly falling over and it was
ripping up the street surface with its internet links and its
indestructible ceramic water pipes and its concrete pedestrian
subway.
And somebody was putting this vision together, deliberately
assembling it. Somebody had broken the screen into compound
miniscreens like a bee's eyes: traffic securicams and building
securicams and minibank securicams and all the other modern urban 
securicams that offered no one even the tiniest trace of security.
And as the cams were blinked out and smashed and ripped apart and
exploded and were blinded and crushed, whoever was at work just kept
adding more viewpoints.
One of them was a sudden glimpse of the Troupe. It was Jerry, he had
his back half-turned to the camera, he was leaning, half-doubled,
into the gusting wind. He was shouting and waving one arm. It was
Troupe camp, and all the paper yurts were smashed and torn and
writhing in the wind. Jerry turned to the camera suddenly and he held
up a broken-winged ornithopter, and his face was alight with
comprehension and terror.
And then he vanished. 
It didn't look like a machine was doing these viewpoints. It was the
sort of montage technique often best left

Bruce Sterling
to machine, but Jane had a very strong intuition that someone was
doing this work by hand. Human auteurs were putting it together, very
deliberately, swiftly, and deftly assembling it with their own busy
human fingertips. Doing it, knowing they were going to die at their
post.
And the sorrow and pity of the great disaster struck her then,
lancing into her right through that busy thicket of interface. And
she felt the hurt explode inside of her. And she thought, with
greater clarity than she had ever thought of anything before, that if 

she ever, somehow, managed to escape from this shelter and from these
People of the Abyss, then she would learn to love something else.
Something new. To learn tu love something that didn't stink at its
spinning core, of disaster and destruction and despair.
Then the broadcast blinked out. 
"Lost transmission again," said Red. "I bet it took down the main
towers out on Britton Road this time-who wants to bet?" 
"That was great," said Rosina, appreciatively. "I can't wait till
they compile all this coverage and do the definitive disk."
Red combed channels. "SESAME's still up."
"Yeah, the feds keep their weather links down in the old missile
silos," said chess player two. "Practically Unnukable."
"Where are we exactly?" asked Crimson Avenger, looking at the SESAME
map. Red pointed. "Well," Avenger said, "I don't see any
precipitation over us. I think we're in the clear!"
Suddenly there was a violent series of explosions just outside the
door-explosions actually inside the shelter. Leo winced, then
suddenly grinned. "Did you hear that, people! Those were our
detonation signals!"
"Close," said chess player one, and plucked at his lower lip. He had
gone quite pale. "Real close."
"How'd they squeeze that signal through?" said the second chess
player.
"I'd bet autonomously launched drone aircraft," Red theorized.
"Probably sweeping the whole locale. Of
283 
HEAVY WEATHER 

course, if a drone can safely fly over us, that ought to mean that we
can leave here safely."
"Fuck the theory, I'm checkin' this out," Crimson Avenger declared.
He left. 
He was back within a minute, his handsome leather shoes leaving faint
smudges of fresh blood on the shelter's thick carpet. "The sun is
out!" 
"You're kidding."
"No way, dood! It's wet, and everything is smashed completely flat,
but the sky is blue and the sun is shining and there's not a cloud in
the sky, and people, I am out of here." He walked into the kitchen
and pulled a shining ceramic valise off the top of the freezer.
"You won't get far on foot," said chess player one.
Crimson Avenger glared at him. "How stupid do you think I am, Gramps?
I don't have to get far. I know exactly where I'm going, and exactly
what I'm doing, and my plans don't include you. Good-bye, doods.
Good-bye forever." He opened the door and stalked away, leaving it
ajar behind him.
"He's got a point," Leo said. "It's a good idea for us to split up as
quickly as possible."
"You want to ferry us out in the personnel carrier?"
"No," Leo said. "It's wiser to stick to Plan A. You leave on foot,
and I'll plastique the works here. The cars, the tank, the bikes, the
shelter, everything."
"The bodies," Rosina pointed out.
"Yeah, okay, I'll put the deceased directly inside the tank before I
detonate it." 
"I'll help you, Leo," the second chess player said. "I owe you that
much, after all this."
"Good. Time's pretty short, people, let's get moving."
Leo and his five remaining friends went into the hall. The woman and
the Asian man were lying very dead on the sloping floor, the carpet
sopping with their blood. The walls were pockmarked with shrapnel
from the eight discarded cuffs that had detonated there. It stank of
plastique. Rosina, and the older chess player, and Red the radioman 

picked their ways daintily past the corpses, with their eyes averted. 

Jane tarried at the back of the hall. She wasn't too upset by the
corpses. She had seen worse corpses. She was far more appalled by the
living.
"Wet work," said the second chess player, sadly.
Leo hesitated. "I think we'd better use latex and medical paper for
this job. That's a lot of body fluid."
"We don't have time for precautions. Leo. Besides, they were two of
us; they're clean!"
"I don't know. I wouldn't put it past Ruby," Leo said, meditatively.
"Ruby was quite the personal devotee of retrovtrus.
Jane began to walk up the hall. She brushed past the two of them. Her
boots squelched moistly on the carpet. She was trembling.
"Jane," Leo called out.
She broke into a run. 
"Jane!" 
She broke out through the garage door. There was no wind. The sun was
shining. The world smelled like fresh-plowed earth. The sky was blue.
She ran for her life. 

ALEX WAS SITtING up in a tree eating a loaf of bread. It wasn't a
fresh loaf, because the smashed home where he'd raided the bread had
been abandoned for at least two days. It had been the home of a man
and his wife and the man's mother and the couple's two bucktoothed
little kids. With a lot of religious stuff inside it; gold-framed
devotional prints and evangelical literature and a thoroughly smashed
farm truck with bumper stickers reading ETERNITY-WHEN?
and AFtER DEATH-WHAT THEN? 
It looked like it had been kind of a nice little farmhouse 
- once; it had its own cistern, anyway, and a chicken coop, but it
was all shattered now, and being Christians, the occupants would
probably act real thankful about it. Alex had been astounded to
discover that the inhabitants had a big stack of paper comic books,
Christian evangelical comics, the real thing, in English no less,
with hand drawings and black ink and real metal staples. A shame they
were all torn up and rain-soaked and uncollectible.
HEAVY WEATHER 285 

Off in the distance, to the north, came an enormous explosion and an
uprushing column of filthy smoke. The wind was so calm now, and the
damp sweet sky so beautifully blue, that the burning column rose
straight up and stood there in the sky and preened itself. It sure
looked and sounded like a massive structure hit, but maybe he was
being uncharitable. Could have been a detonating natural-
tank or maybe a broken propane line. These things did Not every
mishap in the world was somebody's
[aUtL. 

Alex chewed more bread and had some carrot juice. The Christian
family had been very big on organic whole juices. Except for the dad,
presumably, who kept his truly awful Okie Double-X beer hidden under
the sink. 
Alex's tree was a large and fragrant cedar that had been uprooted and
knocked over at an angle. Many of the branches had been twisted off
by a passing F-2, showing red heartwood that smelled lovely. He had
climbed into the downed tree and was lying on the sun-warmed trunk
about four meters up in the air, his back against the underside of
one of the thicker limbs. The gray-barked trunk under his paper-clad 

buttocks was as solid as a bench. His wasn't too far from the site of the crash. He could see dead wreck of Charlie from where he sat. 
Juanita was gone, and to judge by the tracks in the sh mud, she hadleft with a rescuer in civilian shoes who sonic kind of big militarytruck. That was good news Alex, because Juanita's eyes had beencrossed and glassylast hours, and he had her figured for a mild con;ion. He felt surethat Juanita, or at least some helpful uper, would show up again inpretty short order, some~, soon. She'd be coming to find him. Andeven if she 't want to find him in particular, that car had a lot ofiand megabytage in it.Alex felt rather restful and at peace with himself. He partiallydeafened, and his face hurt, and his lungs and his eyes hurt, and hecould taste blood at the of his tongue. Scrambling through theroadside forest -m a mindless panic, basically-had left him striped withBruce Sterling286 Bruce Sterlingmany nasty scratches and a couple of hefty, aching bruises, plus athick coating of cedar gum and dirt.But he had seen the F-6. It had been pretty much what he'd been ledto expect. It was nice not to be disappointed about something inlife. He felt he could put up with dying with a better grace now.He chewed more bread. It wasn't good bread, but it was better thancamp food. There was a gray squirrel running around on the forestfloor. It was drinking out of the rain puddle in the roots of thefallen tree. Didn't seem upset in any way. Just another squirrelgoing about its job.Vaguely, under the persistent whine of aural aftershock, Alex heardsomeone calling out. Calling his name. He sat up, put his foot in thesmart rope, lowered himself down from the trunk to the ground, andswiftly coiled the rope around his shoulder.He worked his way through the labyrinth of fallen trees back to thesite of the wreck. But whea he glJ~~j the rescuer, searching vaguely around thewreckage, Alex fled. He reached the fallen cedar again, cast his ropeback up, and yanked himself quickly back into the tree."Over here," he called, standing on the trunk and waving. He couldn'tcall out too loudly. Shouting really hurt him inside.Leo Mulcahey walked over, methodically working his way through themaze of fallen limbs. He wore a sturdy felt Stetson and a safarijacket.He stopped in a small patch of knee-high undergrowth and looked up atAlex. "Enjoying yourself?" he said.Alex touched his ears. "What's that, Leo? Come closer. I'm kind ofdeaf. Sorry."Leo stepped closer to the leaning tree trunk and looked up again. "Imight have known I'd find you much at your ease!""You don't have to shout now, that's fine. Where's Juanita?""I was going to ask you that, actually. Not that you care."Alex narrowed his eyes. "I know that you took her287 HEAVY WEATHER 
away, so don't bullshit me. You wouldn't be stupid enough to hurther, would you, Leo? Not unless you've really got it in for Jerry, aswell as me." "I have no quarrel with Jerry. Not any longer. That's all in the pastnow. In fact, I'm going to help Jerry. It's the last act I can committhat will really help my brother." He pulled a ceramic pistol out ofhis jacket pocket. 
"Oh, that's really good," Alex scoffed. "You dumb spook bastard! I've
had two tubercular hemorrhages in the past week, and you're coming
out here to shoot me and leave me under this tree? You hopeless
gringo moron, I just lived through the F-6, I don't need some pissant
assassin like you! I can die perfectly well all by myself. Get lost
before I lose my temper."
Leo, astonished, laughed. "That's very funny! Would you like to be
shot up in that tree, where it might be painful, or would you like to
come down here, where I can make it very efficient and quick?"
"Oh," said Alex, daintily, "I prefer being murdered in the most
remote, impersonal, and clinical manner possible, thank you."
"Oh, with you and I, it's personal," Leo assured him. "You kept me
from telling my brother good-bye, face-to-face. I dearly wanted to
see my brother, because I had certain important personal business
with him, and I might well have gotten past his entourage and seen
him privately, but you interfered. And then, in the press of
business, it became too late." Leo's brow darkened. "That's not
sufficient reason to kill you, I suppose; but then, there's the
money. Juanita has no money left; if you're dead, she gets yours, and
Jerry gets hers. So your resources go to environmental science,
instead of being squandered on the drug habits of some decrepit
weakling. Killing you is genuinely helpful. It'll make the world a
better place."
"That's wonderful, Leo," Alex said. "I feel so honored to assuage
your delicate feelings in this way. I can only agree with your
trenchant assessment of my moral and societal worth. May I point one
thing out before you execute me? If the shoe were on the other foot,
and I were 

z88 

about to execute you, I'd do it without the fucking lecture!"
Leo frowned. 
"What's the matter, Leo? An old bulishit artist like you can't bear
to let your condemned man have the last word for once?"
Leo raised the pistol. Behind his head, a thin black noose snaked up
silently from the forest floor.
"Better kill me now, Leo! Shoot quick!"
Leo took careful aim. 
"Too late!" 
The smart rope hissed around his neck and yanked him backward. He
flew off his feet, his neck snapping audibly. Then he leaped up from
the forest floor like a puppet on a string as the serpentine coils of
the smart rope hissed around the butt of a cedar branch. There was a
fragrant stink of burned bark as the body was hauled aloft.
The hanged man swayed there, violently, dangling from the tree. And
at length was still. 

IT TOOK ALEX forty-seven hours to get from a smashed forest in
Oklahoma to his father's penthouse in Houston. There was a lot of
bureaucratic hassle around the federal disaster zone, but the Guard
and the cops couldn't stop him from walking, and his luck changed
when he got his hands on a motor bicycle. He didn't eat much. He
scarcel~ slept. He had a fever. His lungs hurt very badly, and deat
was near, death was very near now, not the romantic death this time,
not the sweet, drug-addled, transcendent death. Just real death, just
death of the cold, old-fashioned variety, death like his mother's
death, an absence and a being still, forever. He didn't love death
anymore. He didn't even like death anymore. Death was something he
was going to have to get over with.
It wasn't easy to get into his father's part of town. The Houston
cops had always been mean, tough cops, the kind of cops that had 

teeth like Dobermans, and heavy weather had not made them kinder. TheHouston cops were kind to people like him, when people-like-himlooked like people-
EAVY WEATHER 289 
e-him; but when people-like-him looked the way that he now, theHouston cops in 2031 were the kind of ho collared diseased vagrantsoff the street and did secret things to them far out in the bayous.But Alex had his ways. He hadn't grown up in Houston r nothing, andhe knew what it meant to have people owe him favors. He got to hisfather's building without so much as a change of clothes.And then he had to work his way past his father's own 
worked his way into the building. He won his own way with the machinein the elevator. The human receptionist at the penthouse floor lethim in; he knew the receptionist. And then he found himself waitingin the usual marble anteroom with the giant Aztec mandalas and theorangutan skulls and the Chinese lamps.He sat there coughing and shivering on a velvet bench, in his filthypaper suit, with his hands on his knees and his head swimming. Hewaited patiently. It was always like this with his Papa. There wereno alternatives, none. If he waited long enough, some gopher wouldshow up and bring him coffee and sweet English biscuits.After maybe ten minutes the bronze double doors opened at the far endof the anteroom, and in came one of the most beautiful women he'dever seen. She was a nineteen-year-old violet-eyed gamine with asweet little cap of black hair and a short skirt and patterned hoseand high heels.She took a few tentative steps across the inlaid marble floor andlooked at him and simpered. "Are you him?" shein Spanish."Sorry," Alex said, "I don't think I am."She switched to English, her eyes widening. "Do you want . . . to goshopping?""Not right now, thank you.""I could take you shopping. I know many nice places inLIStOfl. "Maybe another time," said Alex, and sneezed vioShe looked at himwith deep concern, and turnedBruce Sterling29~~ Bruce Sterlingand left, and the doors closed behind her with a tomblike clunk.Maybe seven minutes later a gopher showed up with the coffee and thebiscuits. It was a new gopher-it was pretty much always a new gopher,gopher being the lowest rung in the Unger organization-but theBritish cookies were really good, and the coffee, as always, wasCosta Rican and fine. He kept the cookies down and had severalcautious sips of the coffee, and he physically recovered to theextent that he really began to hurt. He ordered the gopher off forsome aspirin, or better yet, codeine. The gopher never returned.Then one of the private secretaries arrived. He was oneof the older secretaries, Señor Pabst, a family loyalist, anicely groomed old guy with a Mexican law degree and awell-concealed drinking problem.Pabst looked him over with genuine pity. Pabst was from Matamoros.There were a lot of Unger family connections in Matamoros. Alexcouldn't say that he and Pabst had had~actual dealings, but he andPabst had something akin to an-underst~anding."I think you'd better get right to bed, Alejandro.""I have to see El Viejo.""You're not in any condition to see El Viejo. You're going to dosomething foolish, something you'll regret. See him tomorrow. It's 
better." 
"Look, will he see me, or won't he?"
"He wants to see you," Pabst admitted. "He always wants to see you,
Alejandro. But he won't like to see you like this."
"I think he's past shock by this time, don't you? Let's get this over
with." 
Pabst led Alex to his father. 
Guillermo Unger was a tall, slight man in his late fifties, with
carefully waved artificial blond hair the very color of the finest-
quality creamery butter. He had blue and very watery eyes behind very
thick glasses, the unfortunate legacy of a prolonged experiment with
computer-assisted perception. Beneath his medicated pancake makeup,
the acne from the hormone treatments was flaring up again. He was
291 
HEAVY WEATHER 

wearing a tropical linen suit. His mood seemed-not good, you could
never call it good-but positive.
"So you're back," he said.
"I've been staying with Juanita."
"So I understand." 
"I think she's dead, papa."
"She's not dead," his father said. "Dead women don't read their E-
mail." He sighed. "She's still shacked up with that big dumb bastard
of a mathematician! He's taken her off somewhere in New Mexico now. A 
failed academic, for Christ's sake. A crazy man. She's thrown it all
over, she's let him smash her whole career. God only can help her,
Alejandro. Because God knows I can't."
Alex sat down. He put his hands to his head. His eyes filled with
tears. "I'm really glad she's still alive."
"Alejandro, look at me. Why the paper suit, like a bum off the
street? Why the dirt, Alejandro? Why do you come into my office
looking this way, couldn't you at least get dean? We're not poor
people, we have baths."
"Pa pd, I'm clean as I'm going to get. I've been inside a big
tornado. The dirt lodges deep in your skin. You can't wash it out,
you just have to wait till it grows out. Sorry."
"Were you in Oklahoma City?" his father asked, with real interest.
"No, Dad. We were out where the storm set down at first. We were
tracking it and we saw where it started."
"Oklahoma City was very heavily mediated," his father said,
reflectively. "That was a rather important event."
"We weren't inside Oklahoma City. Anyway, they all died there."
"Not all of them," his father said. "Hardly more than half of them."
"We didn't see that part. We only saw the beginning of the F-6. We-
the Troupe-they wanted to track the storm from the beginning, for
scientific reasons, to understand
it. 
"Understand it, eh? Not very likely! Do they know why the storm
stopped so suddenly, right after Oklahoma City?"
292 Bruce Sterling 

"No. I don't know if they understand that. I doubt they understand
it." Alex stared at his father. This was going nowhere. He didn't
know what to tell the man. He had nothing left to tell him. Except
the ugly news that he was very near death, and someone in the family
had to watch him die now. Just for formal reasons, basically. And he
didn't want Jane to have to do that. And his father was the only one
left. 
"Well," his father said, "I've been wondering when you'd come back
here, back to sense and reason."
"I'm back, papa." 

"I tried to find you. Not much luck there, not with your sister
hiding you from me."
"She, uh . . Well,, I can't defend her, papd. Juanita's very
stubborn. 
"I had good news for you, that's why I wanted to talk to you. Very
good news. Very good medical news, Alex."
Alex grunted. He slumped back in his chair.
"I don't know how to tell you the details myself, but we've had Dr.
Kindscher on retainer for some time, so when I heard you had arrived,
I called him." He gestured above a lens inset in his desk.
Dr. Kindscher arrived in the office. Alex got the strong impression
that Dr. Kindscher had been kept waiting for some time. Just a matter
of medical etiquette, a way to establish whose time was more
important.
"Hello, Alex."
"Hello, Doctor."
"We've had new results from Switzerland on your genetic scan."
"1 thought you'd given up that project years ago."
Dr. Kindscher frowned. "Alex, it's not an easy matter to scan an
entire human genome right down to the last few centimorgans. Doing
that for a single individual is a very complex business."
"We had to subcontract that business," his father said. "Bits and
pieces.
"And we found a new bit, as Mr. Unger has said," Dr. Kindscher said,
radiating satisfaction. "Very unusual. Very!"
HEAVY WEATHER 293 

"What is it?" 
"It's a novel type of mucopolysaccharidosis on chromosome 7-Q-22."
"Could I have that in English?"
"Sorry, Alex, the original lab report is in French."
"I meant give me the upshot, Doctor," Alex croaked. "Give me the
executive report."
"Well, since your birth, this genetic defect that you suffer from has
been periodically blocking proper cellular function in your lungs,
proper expression of fluids. A very rare syndrome. Only four other
known cases in the world. One in Switzerland-we were quite lucky in
that eventuality, I think-and two in California. Yours is the first
known in Texas." 
Alex looked at the doctor. Then at his father. Then at the doctor 
again. It was no joke this time. There wasn't any of the usual
hedging and mumbo jumbo~ and alternate prognoses. They really thought
they had it this time. They did. They had it. This time they actually
had the truth. 
"Why?" he croaked.
"Mutagenic damage to the egg cell," Dr. Kindscher said. "It's a very
rare syndrome, but all five of them diagnosed so far have -involved
maternal exposure to an industrial solvent, a very particular
industrial solvent no longer in use.
"Chip assembly,"-his father said. "Your mother used to do chip
assembly in a border factory, long before you were born."
"What? That's it, that's all there was to it?"
"She was young," his father said sadly. "We lived on the border, and
I had just begun the start-up, and your mother and I, we didn't have
much money."
"So that's it, eh? My mother was exposed to a mutagen in a
maquiladora plant. And all this time I've really been sick."
"Yes, Alex." Dr. Kindscher nodded. He seemed deeply moved.
"I ~ 
"And the best news of all is, there's a treatment."
"I might have known."

294 Bruce Sterling"Illegal in the U.S.," his father said. "And far too advanced for any 
border clinica. But this time it sticks, son. This time they really
have the root of it." 
"We have a clinic contacted already, and they're ready to take you,
Alex. Genetic repair. Legal in Egypt, Lebanon, and Cyprus."
"Oh . . ." Alex groaned. "Not Egypt, I hope."
"No, Cyprus," his father said.
"Good, I heard there's a bad staph strain in Egypt." Alex stood up
and walked, painfully, to the doctor's side. "You're really sure
about it, this time?"
"As sure as I've ever been in my career! Intron scans don't lie,
Alex. You can depend on this one. The flaw is written in your genes,
obvious to any trained technician, and now that we've spotted the
exact position right down to the branch of the chromosome, any lab
can verify that for you. I've already verified it twice!" He beamed.
"We've beaten this thing at last, Alex. We're going to cure you!"
"Thanks a lot," Alex said. "You son of a bitch." He hit Dr. Kindscher
in the face. 
The doctor staggered and fell. He scrambled up, amazed, holding his
cheek, then turned and fled the office.
"That's going to cost me," Alex's f~ther observed.
"Sorry," Alex said. He leaned onto the table, shaking. "Really
sorry."
"It's all right," his father said, "a son of a bitch like that pest,
you can't hit him just once."
Alex began weeping.
"I want to do this for you, Alejandro. Because now I know, it was
never your fault, my boy. You were damaged goods right out of the
box." 
Alex wiped his tears away. "Same old papd," he croaked.
"I don't know if things will change when you are no longer a
mutant," his father declared, nobly, "but maybe you will. Who knows?
I'm your father, my boy, I feel I owe you that chance at life." He
frowned. "But no more foolishness this time! None of these scandals 
like that shameful business in Nuevo Laredo! Alejandro, those people
have lawyers on me! You are going to Cyprus, and you're going

HEAVY WEATHER 295 right away, and you're going to stay there. No talking, nophone calls, no charge cards, and you do just as you'retold! And no more nonsense from you, and especially nonefrom your damn fool of a sister."
"All right," Alex said. He sat in the chair, half collaps­ing. "You win. I give up. Call the ambulance." He began.giggling.
"Don't laugh, Alex. Gene replacement therapy-theytell me it really hurts."
• "It always hurts," Alex said, laughing. "It all hurts.
Everything hurts. For as long as you can still feel it."E P I L 0 ~i U E 
A 
ustin, Texas, had once
been called the "City of the Violet Crown," back when the city had
been small enough to fit within its bowl of hills. That bowl of hills
was alleged to serve as protection from local tornadoes. Of course
the Violet Crown no longer did that, if in fact it ever had, and even
the oldest central section of Austin had been ravaged by an F-2
within the past five years.
The spike had tracked right through the city's oldest northern
suburb, an ancient residential district just north of The University
of Texas. The area was now part of The University's privately
managed, and privately policed, urban demesne. There was not much
overt sign left of the spike damage, except for some ancient and now
spectacularly crippled trees. Big old pecans mostly; some dead and
replaced by saplings, but many of them maimed and left upright.
To Alex's eye, the damage track was easy to spot. You'd be driving
under an even canopy of flourishing, pampered, C02-glutted streetside
giants, and then there
297 
HEAVY WEATHER 

would be this tortured Goyaesque mutant breaking out all up and down
with scrawny little green sapling limbs, maybe one original crooked
branch left as a kind of beckoning finger. He pointed this out to his
companion.
"We never have tornadoes in Boston," she said.
His sister was living in a little crackerbox place. A little brown­and-white shack that looked a hundred years old, if it was a day.
Back in the early 2020s, when the practice had been in vogue,
somebody had sprayed the outside of the entire building with a
weatherproof lacquer. The white housepaint beneath the lacquer looked
unnaturally clean and sprightly.
When Alex stepped up to the concrete porch, he could see that the
housepaint trapped beneath the lacquer had given up the ghost and
shattered into tens of millions of tiny paint flakes no bigger than
fine dust. It didn't matter. The dust wasn't going anywhere. That
lacquer was there for the ages. 

JANE LOOKED THROUGH the security glass at her door and saw a short,
plump young blond man in a suit and tie. And a very odd-looking
woman. A tiny, witchy-looking boho student type, in a slashed silk
dress and striped stockings and red ankle-tied sandals. Half her
face-ear, cheeks, temple-was disfigured by a huge purple tattoo.
They didn't look armed, though. And not very dangerous. Anyway, there
was rarely much civil trouble around The University. Because The
University had massive heaps of data and attention, and even some
money, and more importantly, it had a large paramilitary phalanx of
armed, disciplined, and enthusiastically violent students.
Jane opened the door. "Hello?"
"Janey?"
"Yeah?" 
"It's me." 
Jane stared at him. "Christ! Alex." 
"This is Sylvia," Alex said. "Sylvia Muybridge. She's traveling with
me. Sylvia, this is my sister, Jane Unger."
"How do you do," Jane said. "Actually, I go by Jane

298 H E A V Y W E A T H E R299 
Mulcahey these days. It's simpler, and besides, it's legal." She held
up her hand with the gold ring.
"Yes," Alex said, pained, "I knew you had a married name, but I
thought you still networked professionally as Jane Unger."
"Yeah, well, I'm probably gonna change that too."
Alex paused. "Can we come in?"
"Oh hell, yes!" Jane laughed. "Come on in."
She knew that the place looked disastrous. It was astrew with
printouts, textbooks, and heaps of disks. There was a giant framed
multicolored chart on the wall reading
UNITED STATES FREQUENCY ALLOCATIONS: THE RADIO SPECTRUM.
Jane threw a cat off the couch-a paper-covered futon
-and cleared a small space for them to sit. "Are you still allergic
to cats?" 
"No. Not anymore," Alex said.
"How long has it been, Alex?"
"Eleven months," he said, sitting. "Almost a year."
"Damn," Jane said. "What can I get y'all?"
Sylvia spoke up for the first time. "You got any ibogame?"
"What's that?" 
"Never mind, then."
Jane touched her brother's shoulder. "They must have been pretty good
to you in Cyprus, because you look pretty fine, Alex."
"Yeah," Alex said, "they tore out all my seams and rewove me, in
Nicosia. They tell me I'm supposed to be this fat. Metabolically, I
mean. Genetically, I'm supposed to be a big fat blond guy, Janey. Of
course, I'll never get over being stunted in my youth." He laughed.
"I'm sorry I didn't recognize you at first. Mostly it was that suit."
"No," he said. "No, I'm completely different now, I know that.
Genetics, it's the core of everything, Janey, it's mega witchcraft.
Just look at my hands! It was supposed to change my lungs, and it did
that, my lungs are like rock now. But look at my hands! They never
looked like this." 
Jane held her own hand out and placed it gently against
his. "You're right. They look just like my hands now. They're not all
. . . well, they're not all thin."
"It's simple, really," Alex said. "I didn't have a life before they
rewove me, and now, after this, after everything I went through, I
actually have a life! I'm just like anyone else, now. The curse is
lifted. It's been erased, wiped out. I'm probably gonna live a really
long time."
Jane glanced at Alex's girlfriend. She~assumed this was a girlfriend.
Normally a woman wouldn't dress so provocatively and travel alone
with a guy unless there was something happening. Her being here could
only mean that Alex was deliberately showing her off.
But then there was that face. That huge blotch on her face. It was
really hard to look at. And she'd done something to it too; it wasn't
just a giant port-wine-stain birthmark, she'd messed with it too;
she'd outlined the edges of it in some kind of very fine and very
elaborate stippling. Like dots of rainbow ink, that shimmered. Jane
had never seen anything like it. She found it frightening.
"How are the Troupe people doing?"
"Oh, we hear from them sometimes," Jane said. "Buzzard, quite a bit.
Rudy and Sam and Peter and Rick have their own team up in Kansas now,
they're still chasing. Martha never calls much, but I never got along
much with Martha. We see Joe Brasseur socially sometimes, he's got
some cushy job in town with the State Water Comnusslon.
"I never got a chance to tell you how sorry I was about Greg and
Carol. And Mickey too." ­"Well," she said simply, "Mickey was a good man, and Greg and Carol
were my closest friends."
"How is Ed?" 
"Well, Ed's got the use of both his arms again. Not like before, but
pretty much. Ellen Mae is a lot better too. She's up in Anadarko 

now... 
"How is Jerry doing? Is Jerry here?"
"No. He's at The University. I'm expecting him." She glanced at her
watch. "You want some lunch? I'm making tacos, it's easy."
"I'll help," Alex said.

HEAVY WEATHER 3~I 3~c~ Brt,c~ SterlingTHEY DRIFTED INTO Juanita's cramped and ancient kitchen. Sylviastayed on the couch. Alex winced as he heard her deftly fire up theTV with a remote. She began methodically combing through Austin'seight hundred available channels, with repeated dabs of her thumb.He moved beside the electric range and watched the taco mix bubblingin a pan. The top of Juanita's stove was liberally spattered withorange grease. Jane shook some garlic salt at the taco mix, as iftrying to choke it into submission. His sister had to be the worstcook in the world. "You gotta make allowances for Sylvia," he said quietly. "She's notreal good with other people, just kind of shy.""I'm just touched that you would bring your girlfriend along to meetme, Alex.""I'd kind of like it, if you and she could get along. She's kind ofimportant to me. The most important woman in my life, really.""That serious, huh?" ­"I don't have a lot of room to judge there," he said. "I met her onthe nets, in a genetic-disorder support group. Sylvia's good on nets.People like Sylvia and me, people who've been through a lot ofsickness when young, it tends to narrow our social skills. She hadkind of an autism thing, she's had a hard time of life. But she's allrewoven now, and she's okay underneath.""Boy, it really is that serious," Jane said."How is Jerry? Are you getting along?""You really want to know?""Yes, really.""He's different. I'm different. We're a lot different than we were a year ago." She looked at him hard, and he could see it there behindher eyes, waiting to pour out."Tell me," he said."Well, it's since the baby. . . . Alex, he's really good with thebaby. The baby really got through to him, he's so good with hislittle son. It's like . . . he's really goodwhen he has someone he doesn't have to reason with. He's so patientand kind with that little kid, it's really amazing.""How about you, though?""Us? We get along. We don't even have to get along. We're stuck herein this dinky little house, but you wouldn't know it. He's got hislittle office here with the virching stuff and his university link,and I've got my net-rig in the back in the baby's room, and he doeshis thing, and I do my thing, and we do our together-thing, and itworks out okay, it really does.""What are you working on these days, exactly?""Net-stuff. The usual. Well, not the usual. Mommy net-stuff. The kindof stuff you can do with one hand, while you're wiping warm spit offyour forearm." Jane laughed, and poked at her taco mix with a woodenspoon. "Anyway, that data we got-the stuff you recorded when thestream broke down on us? That made itqn three final release disks! Wegot money for-that. Pretty good money. We bought this house with it." 
"Alex, this isn't a big house, I know that, but it's a stand-alone ina really prized area. I've even got a real garden in the backyard,you should see it. And you wouldn't believe the neighborhoodpoliticals here in Austin, they are really fierce. You can walk tocampus, and play with your kid right in the parks, anytime day ornight, and it's a really pretty area, and it's really safe too. Thecrime rate is very low here, and you never see a structure hit, 
never. It's a real enclave here, it's a mega-good place for a little
baby to live."
"Can I see the baby?"
"Oh! Sure! Let me turn this down." 
She shut down the stove and led him into the back room. The nursery.
The nursery was the first room in the house that actually struck him
as a place where Juanita lived. The nursery looked like a room where
an intelligent and hyperactive woman with design training had spent a
long time thinking hard about exactly how things should look. It was
like a big jewel box for a baby, it was like some monster bassinet in
shades of fuzzy-cuddly midnight
3~2 Brtice Sterling 

blue. It was the kind of room that created in Alex the instant urge
to flee. 
Juanita bent over the antique, hand-stripped, repainted wooden crib
and looked in on her child. Alex had never seen quite that expression
on her face before, but he recognized it. He recognized it as the
place where all Juanita's raw ferocity had gone. All that steamy
energy she'd always had, had been sucked into that all-encompassing
Madonna look. 
She was actually talking baby talk to the infant. Genuine oogly­googly sounds without enough consonant8 m them. Then she lifted the
child up in its little trailing baby dress and handed him over.
The kid's hairless little noggin was in a little gray skullcap, kind
of like a stuffed baked mushroom. Alex was no connoisseur of infants,
but even he could tell that his little nephew-Michael Gregory
Mulcahey-was not an attractive child. It was hard to tell, with the
baby's squashed, cartilaginous little face, but he seemed to have the
worst features of both his parents: Juanita's square jaw and
Mulcahey's odd, bull-like forehead.
"Gosh, he's really cute," Alex said. The child reacted with a fitful
look and vigorous kicking. There was nothing wrong with the infant's
legs. The kid had legs like a centaur.
"You can't believe it, can you?" Jane said, and smiled.
"No. Not really. I mean, not until now."
"Neither could I. I think of all the times I almost took that 
abortifacient thing, you know. I actually put that pill u~side my
mouth once. I was gonna swallow it, and my period was gonna come
back, and Jerry and me were gonna be exactly the same, and everything
was going to be extremely lifelike. And if I didn't eat that pill,
then the consequences were gonna be unimaginable and extremely grave!
And I chose consequences, Alex, I did it all on purpose, just like I
knew what I was doing. And now I have this little stranger in my
life. Only he's not a little stranger at all. He's my baby."
"I 5CC." 

"I love my baby, Alex. I don't just sort of love him, I
3~~3 
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really love my baby, I love him desperately, we both do. We dote on
him. I want to have another baby."
"Really."
"Childbirth's not that bad. It's really interesting. I kind of liked
childbirth actually. It felt really intense and important."
"I guess it would," Alex said. "I want Sylvia to see my nephew." 

JANE FOLLOWED HER brother back to the living room. He carried the
child as if Michael Gregory was a wet bag full of live frogs. The
strange girl peeled her reptile gaze from the television, and her 

eyes shot from the baby, to Alex, to Jane, to the baby again, and
then to Jane once more, with a look of such dark and curdled envy and
hatred that Jane felt stunned. 
"He's really cute," the girl said. "Thanks."
"That's a nice hat he's got too." "Thank you, Sylvia."
"That's okay." She started watching TV again.
Jane carried the baby back to the nursery and put him down. He'd just
had his feeding. The baby was good about being handled. He liked to
save his most energetic screamings for about 3 A.M.
"I guess her reaction seemed strange," Alex said. "But babies are
kind of a funny topic for women with genetic disorders." 

"She really wanted to see the baby, though. She said she did."
"It's okay. Sylvia is fine."
"Did you have the baby scanned for disorders?"
"Alex . . ." She hesitated. "That's kind of an expensive
proposition."
"Not for me. I know ways, I have contacts. Really, it's no problem;
just slip me a little sample, you know, a frozen scraping off the
inside of the cheek, we can get a genome rundown started right away,
hit the high points, all the
.,•, 3~4 Bruc~ Sterling 

major fault centers. Reasonable rates. You really ought to have him
scanned, Jane. His uncle has a disorder."
"We're not very lucky people, are we, Alex?"
"We're alive. That's lucky."
"We're not lucky, Alex. This is not a lucky time. We're alive, and
I'm glad we're alive, but we're people of disaster. We'll never truly
be happy or safe, never. Never, ever."
"No," he said. He drew a breath. A good, deep breath. "jane. I came
here to Austin because I needed to tell you something. I wanted to
thank you, Jane. Thank you for saving my life."
"De nada." 
"No, Jane, it was a hit. You could have let me be, like I was telling
you to do, and those quacks would have killed me in that black-market
clinica. But you came after me, and you got me, and you even looked
after me. And even though we were close to death, and surrounded by
death, and we chased deadly things, we both came out alive. We're
survivors, and look, there's another one of us now."
She grabbed his arm. "You want to tell me something, Alejandro? All
right. Tell me something that I really want to hear." She tugged him
to the side of the baby's crib. "Tell me that's your family, Alex.
Tell me you'll help me look after him, like he was family."
"Sure he's family. He's my nephew. I'm proud of him."
"No, not that way. I mean the real way. I mean look after him, Alex,
really care about him, like when I'm dead, and Jerry's dead, and this
city is smashed, and everyone is sick and dying, and you don't even
personally like him very much. But you still care anyway, and you
still save him." 
"Okay, Janey," Alex said slowly. "That's only fair. It's a bargain."
"No! Not a bargain, not a money thing, I don't want that from you or
from anyone. I want a real promise from you, I want you to swear to
me so that I'll never doubt you.
He looked at her. Her face was tight and her eyes were clouded, and
he realized, with a strange little jolt of surprise, that his sister
was truly afraid. Juanita had come to know and understand real fear.
She was more afraid for 
3c~~ 
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this little bundle in the crib than she had ever been for herself. Or 
for her friends, or for her husband, or for anyone. She had a hostage
to fortune now. That baby's sweaty little monkey hands had gripped
her soul. 
"All right," he said. He raised his right hand, solemnly. "Juanita
Unger Mulcahey, I promise you that I'll look after your son, and all
your children. I swear it on our mother's grave. Te lo juro por Ia
tumba de nuestra mad re." 
"That's good, Alex." She relaxed, a little. "I really believed you
when you said it that way."
Voices came from the front of the house. Jerry had come home.
Alex went to meet him in the front room. 
"This is a pleasant surprise," Jerry boomed. He and Alex shook hands.
Jerry had lost weight. He'd lost the great heaps of muscle on his
shoulders, and his arms and legs were of relatively normal
dimensions, and his gut looked like the gut of a family man in his
thirties. He'd lost more hair, and the sides of the beard were gone
now; he had a professorial Vandyke, and a real haircut. He had a
shirt, suit jacket and tie, and a leather valise.
"They must be keeping you busy, Jerry."
"Oh yes. And you?"
"I'm getting into genetics."
"Really. That's interesting, Alex."
"I felt I had to." He looked hard into Jerry's eyes. Maybe he could,
for the first time ever, make some kind of human contact there. "You
see, Jerry, genetic treatment changed me so profoundly, I felt I just
had to comprehend it. And I mean really understand it, not just get
my hands on it and hack at it, but genuinely understand the science.
It's a difficult field, but I think I'm up to the challenge. If I
work at it hard, I can really learn it." He shrugged. "Of course, ~I
still have to go through all that equivalency nonsense first."
"Right," Jerry said, clear-eyed and nodding sympathetically, "the
academic proprieties." Nothing was wrong, and no one was missing, and
there were no ghosts at this
-~ 3~6 
Bruce Sterling 

banquet, and no deep dark secrets, and for good old brother-in-law
Jerry, life was just life.
"Done any storm work lately, Jerry?"
"Of course! The F-6! Extremely well documented. Enough material there
for a lifetime." 
Jane spoke up. "Nobody believed it would happen, even though he said
it would. And now he's trying to explain to them why it stopped."
"That's a real problem," Jerry said, savoring it. "A nexus of
problems. Nontrivial."
"The best kind of nexus of problems, I'm sure."
Jerry laughed. Briefly. "It's good to see you in such good spirits,
Alex. You and your friend should stay for lunch."
"Tacos," Jane said.
"Good! My favorite." Jerry's eyes glazed. "Just a moment I've got to
look after some things first." He vanished into his office.
Music burst out through Jerry's closed office door, the insistent
squeaking and rattling of a Thai pop tune. It was loud.
"Does he really like that Thai stuff?" Alex asked Juanita.
Juanita shrugged. "Not really," she said loudly.
"That's just some of my old college music, but Jerry punches up
anything on the box when he works. . . . He plays it to drown out the
city noise. To drown out the hum, y'know. So he can think."
The music segued into an elaborate Asian cha-cha. Sylvia made a face.
"Let's go in the backyard and I'll show you my garden. The tacos will
keep."
It was quiet in the backyard. It was a lovely spring day. 

• It was sunny and there were honeysuckles and a birdbath."Jerry's always like this when they make him do polynomials," Janeapologized."Always like what? Jerry has always acted just like that.""No, not quite like he does now, but . . . well, you don't know himlike I do." She sighed. "The labcoat peo3~~7 HEAVY WEATHER 
plc have really got him where they want him now. The seminars, thelecture tours, the peer review committees . . . If he gets tenure andthey offer him the chairmanship, we're gonna have some realproblems.""What kind of problems?""You don't wanna know. Lemme put it this way- when Mommy gets herclaws on some real money again, Mommy's gonna buy Daddy a niceendowed chair where he can sit and think quietly, all by himself."Jane shrugged. "We've been up to Oklahoma City a couple of times tolecture and do media-Jerry's real popular there. . . . It's reallyweird up there now, that city was just leveled, and they were allcompletely broke and tragic and desperate, and so they just . . .well, they just threw away all the rule books. And now they're doingthe weirdest architecture you can imagine! They're rebuildingeverything aboveground, out of dirt-cheap nothing, out of paper andsoftware and foam. The new Oklahoma City is just like a giant, smart,wasp's nest. Have you been up there?""No! But it sounds really worthwhile," Alex said."Yeah. I think so. I think it's the future, frankly. You can tellit's the future, too, 'cause the plumbing hardly works, and it'scrowded, and it smells bad. They got the storm problem whipped,though. God help them if they get a fire." She looked at her garden:beans, tomatoes. "I got some special stuff from some Oklahoma agro­engineers during Jerry's last speaking tour. It was kind of acelebrity perk."Jane was growing two rows of corn in her backyard. Corn, Zea mays,but with the chlorophyll hack. It had taken the human race quite sometime to understand chlorophyll, the chemical method by which plantsturned light into food, and when the ancient secret finally came out,the secret had turned out to be a really dumb botch. Even after twobillion years of practice, plants had an utterly lousy notion of howto turn light into food. Plants were damn near as dumb as rocks,basically, and their lame idea of capturing sunlight was thesilliest, most harebrained scheme imaginable.Serious-minded human beings were working on the3c?8 Bruce Sterling 
chlorophyll problem now, and they hadn't done a lot better yet, butthey were doing about fifteen percent better, which was not at allbad, considering. And people might do better yet, if they could getliving crops to endure the terrible impact of that much-concentratedhuman ingenuity. And, in tandem, get the ecosystem to survive theterrible consequences should such a technique ever go feral. Alex wasreally interested in the chlorophyll hack. He'd read a lot about it,and was following the bigger net-discussions. It was just about theneatest hack he'd ever heard of. Jane's corn plants were squat and fibrous and ugly, and the ears ofcorn were about the size and shape of bowling pins. They weresplotchy and reptilian green."Wow, those are really nice," said Sylvia.."Would you like some for yourself? Just a second." Jane wandered intoher backyard garden shed and came out with a drawstring bag. "You canhave some spare seeds if you want." She shook half a dozen kernels of 
corn into Sylvia's outstretched palm. The misshapen kernels were the
size of rifle cartridges.
"Thank you, Jane," Sylvia said gratefully. "These are mega-nice, I
really like these."
"Help yourself," Jane told her. "Can't copyright a living organism!
Ha-ha-ha." 
Sylvia wrapped the seeds carefully in her silk kerchief and stuffed
them, unselfconsciously, into the thigh-high top of her striped
stocking. 

"JANE, COME OU~ in the street for a second," Alex said, opening the
side gate to the front yard.
Shc followed him. "What are we doing out here?"
"I want to show you my new car."
"Okay. Great."
"I parked it up the street around the corner because I didn't want it
associated with your house." 

The car was sitting where he had left it. He'd had to
3t~9 
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pay a stiff fee to the university police to bring it inside the
district. 
"Holy mackerel," Jane said, "looks like they didn't even detach the
gun mounts."
"Those are urban antitheft devices. It's licensed for them too, isn't
that great? Technically sublethal."
Jane's eyes were alight. "You've put it through its paces already,
huh?" 
"Yeah. You could say that."
"What kind of interface is it running?"
"A mega-dog-meat military interface. That's why I want you to have it
for a while." 
"Really?"
"Yeah, I want you to have this car as long as you like. It's yours,
you run it. I'd even sign over the papers, but I don't think that's a
really good idea, legally speaking."
"Oh?" 
"Yeah, and I, uh, wouldn't take it to Hidalgo, Starr, or Zapata
counties, or over the border into Reynosa, because it~-inight be
slightly hot there."
Sylvia tugged his sleeve and whispered, "Hey. We need that car! Don't
give her the car!"
"It's all right, trust me," Alex assured her, "Jane's very good with
cars, I've never known her to so much as bump a fender." He smiled.
"You can't just give me a pursuit car, Alex."
"Sure I can. I just did. Who's gonna stop me? And what's more, I want
to see you take it for a spin. Right now. Sylvia and I will do lunch
and look after nephew, and I want to see you run this sucker out to
Enchanted Rock and tear the hide off of it." 
"I don't think I can do that. Baby needs looking after."
"Look, Jane, you can't have it both ways. You just made me swear up
and down I would guard that child's destiny; you're just gonna have
to trust me with him for a couple of hours."
"Well . . . I'm tempted. I'm really tempted, Alex."
He leaned toward her, smiling. "Give in."
"All right!" Suddenly she embraced him.
It was a solid embrace. It felt surprisingly good to be
3I~ Bruce Sterling 

hugged by one's sister. It was a real gift to have a sister. Not a
wife, not a lover, but a woman that you deeply cared about. A friend,
a good friend, a powerful ally. An ally against what? Against
Nothing, that's what. Against death, against the big empty dark.
He touched his lips to his sister's ear. "Go and run,
sister," he whispered. "Go run!" 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 
BRUCE STERLING is the author of the nonfiction book The Hacker Crackdown, as well as the novels Involution Ocean, TheArtificial Kid, Schismatrix,
and Islands in the Net and the short-story collec­tions Crystal Express and Globalhead. He co­
• 	authored, with William Gibson, the critically ac­claimed novel The Difference Engine. He also ed­ited Mirrors hades, the definitive "cyberpunk"anthology. He lives with his wife and daughter inAustin, Texas.