Heavy Weather Read online

  HEAVY WEATHER

  Bruce Sterling

  Smart machines lurked about the suite, their power lights in the shuttered dimness like the small red eyes of bats. The machines crouched in inches in white walls of Mexican stucco: an ionizer, a television, a smoke alarm, a squad of motion sensors. A vaporizer hissed and bubbled gently in the corner, emitting a potent reek of oil, ginseng, and eucalyptus.

  Alex lay propped on silk-cased pillows, his feet and knees denting the starched cotton sheets. His flesh felt like wet clay, something greased and damp and utterly inert. Since morning he had been huffing at the black neoprene mask of his bedside inhaler, and now his fingertips, gone pale as wax and lightly trembling, seemed to be melting into the mask. Alex thought briefly of hanging the mask from its stainless-steel hook at the bedside medical rack. He rejected the idea. It was too much of a hassle to have the tasty mask out of reach.

  The pain in his lungs and throat had not really gone away. Such a miracle was perhaps too much to ask, even of a Mexican black-market medical clinic. Nevertheless, after two weeks of treatment in the dinica, his pain had assumed a new subtlety. The scorched inflammation had dwindled to an interestingly novel feeling, something thin and rather theoretical.

  The suite was as chilly as a fishbowl and Alex felt as cozy and as torpid as a carp. He lay collapsed in semidarkness, eyes blinking grainily, as a deeper texture of his illness languorously revealed itself. Beneath his starched sheets, Alex began to feel warm. Then light-headed. Then slightly nauseous, a customary progression of symptoms. He felt the dark rush build within his chest.

  Then it poured through him. He felt his spine melting. He seemed to percolate into the mattress.

  These spells had been coming more often lately, and with more power behind them. On the other hand, their dark currents were taking Alex into some interesting places. Alex, not breathing, swam along pleasantly under the rim of unconsciousness for a long moment.

  Then, without his will, breath came again. His mind broke delirium's surface. When his eyes reopened, the suite around him seemed intensely surreal. Crawling walls of white stucco, swirling white stucco ceiling, thick wormy carpet of chemical aqua blue. Bulbous pottery lamps squatted unlit on elaborate wicker tables. The chest of drawers, and the bureau, the wooden bedframe were all marked with the same creepy conspiracy of aqua-blue octagons. ... Iron-hinged wooden shutters guarded the putty-sealed windows. A dying tropical houseplant, the gaunt rubber-leafed monster that had become his most faithful companion here, stood in its terra-cotta pot, gently poisoned by the constant darkness, and the medicated vaporous damp....

  A sharp buzz sounded alongside his bed. Alex twisted his matted head on 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 did not even know that he had one. The elderly, humble machine had been sitting there among its fellow machines, much overshadowed.

  Alex examined the p hone's antique, poorly designed push-button interface 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 the tiny button denominated ESPKR.

  "Hola," he puffed. His gummy larynx crackled and shrieked, bringing sudden tears to his eyes.

  "~Quien es?" the phone replied.

  "Nobody," Alex rasped in English. "Get lost." He wiped at one eye and glared 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 to art school." He reached across the bed, grabbed the phone lead, and yanked it free, snapping its plastic clip.

  Alex picked the dead phone up, examined it, then stuffed it securely under the pillows. His throat hurt. He reached back to the bedside table, dipped his lingers into a tray of hammered Mexican silver, and came up with a narcotic lozenge. He unwrapped it and crunched it sweetly between his molars.

  Sleep was far away now. His mind was working again, and required numbing. Alex slid out of the bed onto his hands and knees and searched around on the thick, plush, ugly carpet. His head swam and pounded with the effort. Alex persisted, being used to this.

  The TV's remote control, with the foxlike cun
ning of all important inanimate objects, had gone to earth in a collapsing heap of Mexican true-crime fotonovelas. Alex noted that his bed's iron springs, after three weeks of constant humidity, were gently but thoroughly going to rust.

  Alex rose to his knees, clutching his prize, and slid with arthritic languor beneath the sheets again. He caught his breath, blew his nose, neatly placed two cold drops of medicated saline against the surface of each eyeball, then began combing the clinic's cable service with minimal twitches of his thumb. Weepy Mexican melodramas. A word-game show. Kids chasing robot dinosaurs in some massive underground 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 news grow steadily more and cheerful for all of his twenty-one years. As a m~ he'd witnessed hundreds of hours of raw footage: plagues, mass death, desperate riot, unsanitary wreckage, all against a panicky backdrop of ominous and unrelenting environmental decline. All that stuff was still out there, just as every aspect of modern reality had its mirrored shadow in the Net somewhere, but nowadays you had to hunt hard to find it, and the people discussing it didn't seem to have much in the way of budgets. Somewhere along the line, the entire global village had slipped into neurotic denial.

  Today, as an adult, Alex found the glass pipelines of the Net chockablock with jet-set glamour weddings and cute dog stories. Perky heroines and square-jawed heroes were still, somehow, getting rich quick. Starlets won lotteries and lottery winners became starlets. Little children, with their heads sealed in virtuality helmets, mimed delighted surprise as they waved their tiny gloved hands at enormous hallucinations. Alex had never been that big a fan of current events anyway, 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 were known as los OVNIS in Spanish, and on 9 de mayo, 2031, a large fraction of the Latin American populace seemed afflicted with spectacular attacks of ozmimania. Long minutes of Alex's life seeped idly away as the screen pumped images at him: monster fireballs by night, puffball-headed dwarfs in jumpsuits of silver lame, and a video prophecy from some interstellar Virgen de Guadalupe with her owll Internet address and a toll-free phone number.

  The day nurse tapped at the door and bustled in. The day nurse was named Concepcibn. She was a hefty, nononsense, fortyish individual with 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 this morning."

  "~Le duele todcwia el ped.~o como anoche?"

  "Pretty bad last night," Alex admitted. "Lots better, though, since I started 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-term 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 down the block, eagerly picking up Mexican megadosage ~strums for the new ultraresistant strains of Th.

  Dr. Mirabi's treatment room was long and rectangular and full of tall canvas-shrouded machinery. Like every place else in the clinica, it was air-conditioned to a deathly chill, and smelled of sharp and potent disinfectant. Alex wished that he had thought to snag a fotonovela on the way out of his room. Alex pretended distaste for the nave-las' clumsy and violence-soaked porn, but their comically distorted gutter-level Spanish was of a lot of philological interest.

  Concepción opened the door and stepped in. Behind her, Dr. Mirabi arrived, his ever-present notepad in hand. Despite his vaguely Islamic surname, Alex suspected strongly that Dr. Mirabi was, in fact, Hungarian.

  Dr. Mirabi tapped the glass face of his notepad with a neat black stylus and examined the result. "Well, Alex," he said briskly in accented English, "we seem to have defeated that dirty streptococcus once 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. "Of course, 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 must deal with that chronic mucus, Alex. It might have been protective mucus at first, but now is your metabolic burden. Once the chronic mucus 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 scrubbed away from the lung surfaces, then we can treat the membranes directly. There is membrane damage in your lungs, of course, deep cellular damage, but we cannot get to the damaged surfaces until the mucus is removed." He looked at Alex seriously, over his glasses. "Your chronic mucus is full of many contaminations, you know' Years of bad gases and particles you have inhaled. Environmental pollutions, allergic pollens, smoke particles, virus, and bacteria. They have all adhered to the chronic mucus. When your lungs are scrubbed clean with the enema, the lungs will be as the lungs of a newborn child!" He smiled.

  Alex nodded silently.

  "It won't be pleasant at first, but afterward you will feel quite lovely."

  "Do you have to knock me Out again?" Alex said.

  "No, Alex. It's important that you breathe properly during the procedure. The detergent has to reach the very bottom of the lungs. You understand?" He paused, tapping his notepad. "Are you a good swimmer, Alex?"

  "No," Alex said.

  "Then you know that sensation when you swallow water down the wrong pipe," said the doctor, nodding triumphantly. "That choking reflex. You see, Alex, the reason Mother Nature makes you choke on water, is because there is no proper oxygen in water for your lungs. The enema liquid, though, which will be filling your lungs, is not water, Alex. It is a dense silicone fluid. It carries much oxygen dissolved inside it, plenty of oxygen." Dr. Mirabi chuckled. "If you lie still without breathing, you can live half an hour on the oxygen in a single lungful of enema fluid! It has so much oxygen that at first you will feel 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 want it to enter your sinuses." He frowned. "We have to decant the fluid into 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 not feel the pain in the epiglottis very long.... You must remain quite still during the procedure, try to relax fully, and breathe only on my order."

  Alex nodded.

  "The sensations are very unusual, but they are not dangerous. You must make up your mind to accept the procedure. If you choke up the fluid, then we have to begin again."

  "Doctor," Alex said, "you don't have to go on pet.~ suading me. I'm not afraid. You can trust me. I don't stop.

  I never stop. If I stopped at things, I wouldn't be here now, would I?"

  "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 will begin. Take your place on the manipulation table, please."

  Concepciôn helped Alex to lie on the jointed leather table. She touched her foot to a floor pedal. A worm gear whined beneath the floor. The table bent at Alex's hips and rose beneath his back, to a sharp angle. Alex coughed twice.

  Dr. Mirabi drew on a pair of translucent gloves, deftly unwrapped one of his canvas-bound machines, and busied himself at the switches. He opened a cabinet, retrieved a pair of matched, bright yellow aerosol tanks, and inserted both tanks into sockets at the top of the machine. He attached clear plastic tubing to the taps on the tanks and opened both the taps, with brief pneumatic hisses. The machine hummed and sizzled a bit and gave off a hot waft of electrical resistance.

  "We will set the liquid to blood heat," Dr. Mirabi explained. "That way 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? These are my favorite pajamas."

  Concepción stripped the pajamas off, then wrapped him briskly in a paper medical gown. She strapped him against the table with a pair of fabric belts. Dr. Mirabi approached him with the soft plastic nozzle of the insert, smeared with a pink paste. "Open widely, don't taste the anesthetic," he warned. Alex nevertheless got a generous smear of the paste against the root of his tongue, which immediately went as numb as a severed beef tongue on a butcher's block.