Heavy Weather Page 20

  Most people had gotten over that period of history and managed to or et the peculiar way they'd been behaving at the time, but Joe Brasseur, like other Troupers, was pretty clearly not most people.

  Alex knew that it was useless talking to lawyers unless you were willing to tell them a lot of embarrassing things. He felt pretty sure that Brasseur was not a narc or some cop's little finger, so he told Brasseur in detail about his financial arrangements with the clinica in Nuevo Laredo.

  Most people went through life without ever using a private currency. Most~ people were, of course, poor. They didn't have enough wealth to buy into the private-money system, or enough contacts or market smarts to use private currencies effectively. Except, of course, during the State of Emergency, when every American, rich and poor alike, 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 been accomplished, back at the time. He was similarly vague about the Regime's massive "data nationalizations.~~ Joe Brasseur, however, seemed to have an excellent grasp of these principles. Brasseur was in charge of the Troupe's financial books, and they were a rat nest of private currencies.

  Alex was well-to-do, and he had some unlikely friends, so he had the basics down pretty well. It all had to do with unbreakable encryption, digital authentication, anonymous remailing, and network untraceability. These were all computer networking techniques that had once been considered very odd and naughty. They were also so elementary to do, that once they were in place, they couldn't be stopped without tearing the whole Net down.

  Of course, once these techniques were in place, they conclusively destroyed the ability of governments to control the flow of electronic funds, anywhere, anytime, for any purpose. As it happened, this process had pretty much destroyed any human control at all over the modern electronic economy. By the time people figured out that raging nonlinear anarchy was not exactly to the advantage of anyone concerned, the process was simply too far gone to stop. All workable standards of wealth had vaporized, digitized, and vanished into a nonstop hurricane of electronic thin air. Even physically tearing up the fiber optics couldn't stop it; governments that tried to just found that the whole encryption mess oozed swiftly into voice mail and even fax machines.

  One major upshot of the Regime's privatization of the currency was that large amounts of black-market wealth bad suddenly surfaced. This had been part of the plan, apparently-that even though the government was sabotaging its own ability to successfully impose any income tax, the government would catch up on the other end, by imposing punitive taxes on previously hidden black-market transactions.

  They'd swiftly discovered, however, that the scale of black money was titanic. The black-market wealth in tax evasion, kickbacks, official corruption, theft, embezzlement, arms, drugs, prostitution, barter, and off-the-books moonlighting was far huger than any conventional economist had ever imagined. The global ocean of black money was so vast in scope that it was instantly, crushingly obvious that the standard doctrines of conventional finance had no workable contact with reality. Economists who'd thought they understood the basic nature of modern finance had been living in a dogmatic dreamland as irrelevant as Marxism. After that terrible revelation, there'd been savage runs on most national currencies and the stock markets had collapsed.

  As the Emergency had deepened, the panicking Regime had rammed its data nationalizations through Congress, and with that convulsive effort, the very nature of money and information had both mutated beyond any repair.

  The resultant swirling chaos had become the bedrock of Alex's everyday notions of modem normality.

  Alex did not find it surprising that people like the Chinese Triads and the Corsican Black Hand were electronically minting their own cash. 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, such funds didn't boldly say "Sicilian Mafia" right on the transaction screen; they usually had some stuffy official-sounding alias such as "Banco Ambrosiano ATM Euro-DigiLira," but the private currency speculators would usually have a pretty good guess as to the solvency of the issuers.

  Quite often these private currencies would collapse, though sheer greed, mismanagement, or just bad luck in the market. But the usual carnivorous free-enterprise market forces had jolted some kind of rough order into the mess. Nowadays, for a lot of people, private currencies were just the way money was.

  When you used private, digital cash, even the people who sold you their money didn't know who you were. Quite likely you had no real idea who they were, either, other than their rates, their market recognition, and their performance history. You had no identity other than your unbreakably encrypted public key word. You could still use government currencies if you really wanted to, and most people did, for the sake of simplicity or though lack of alternatives. Most people had no choke in the matter, because most people in the world were poor.

  Unfortunately, thanks to their catastrophic loss of control over basic economics, so were most governments. Government-issued currencies were scarcely more stable than the private kind. Governments, even the governments of powerful advanced countries, had already lost control of their currencies to the roiling floodwaters of currency trading as early as the 1990s. That was the main reason why 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 not untypical 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 had left a hefty wad of private currency under a secured lien by a third party. He hadn't gotten the money back, had no real idea how to get his money back, but he thought that maybe Brasseur would be the logical 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 then Brasseur had nodded and set to work, and Alex bad never heard another word about the subject. Except that thin s perked up markedly for the Troupe after a week and a ha ~f.A bunch of former Troupers, Fred and José and Maureen and Palaniappan and Kenny, showed up in a convoy with a lot of canned food and a beer keg. The command yurt got a new carpet. A new improved air condenser arrived that weighed less than the old one, used less energy, and supplied more water. There was a party, and everyone's mood improved for a few days.

  Nobody thanked Alex for this. Just as well, Alex thought, that there was no public fuss made about himself or his role. Those who needed to know were going to know. Alex had already concluded that almost everything that really mattered in Troupe life took place way under the surface. It was a lot like life in a barracks, or a dorm, or a Th ward.

  Some Troupers, such as Mukahey, Brasseur, and Carol and Greg, knew pretty much everything, pretty much immediately. The second rank were those who were gonna catch on pretty fast on their own, like Ellen Mae and Rudy Martinez and Mickey Kiehl. Then there were those who were gonna get told the official version by somebody else, like Peter and Rick and Martha and Sam. And certain beloved characters were gonna be gently protected from the full awful truth for their own good, like Buzzard and Joanne and Jeff and, in her own unique way, Juanita.

  The very last and lowest rank were the passing wannabes, and city boy/girlfriends, and ex-husbands/ex-wives, and hangers-on and netfriends and himself, Alex Unger, and the various other non-Troupe subhumans. And that was the way it was always gonna be with the Storm Troupe, until they all turned on each other, or they were all shot by bandits or hit by lightning, or until they found the F-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 more keyed up to plung
e headlong into something truly dreadful. And the bottom 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 moved camp twenty kilometers northwest, into Hall County. The burst of action seemed to help morale some.

  On June 2, heavy weather hit again. The luck of the assignment-as if there were any "luck" involved where Mukahey's orders were concerned-had Alex confined to the camp as "support crew." Alex figured this was just as well. Let the others have a chance to blow off steam.

  And then there was another, and far more serious, matter: his cough was back. It had started really small at first, just a little throat-clearing rasp, but Alex had known for some time that the dosage of blue goo was losing its charm. His lungs no longer felt like sweet slick paper dipped in oil. Slowly but with terrible sureness, they were starting to feel a hell of a lot more like his own lungs. He'd worn the breathing mask faithfully, until his tanned face had a white triangular muzzle of untanned skin just like a raccoon's, but that wasn't enough. He was going to have to take steps.

  The June 2 pursuit was all-out. They were up before dawn, and Mulcahey himself went into the field. The only people left in camp were Joe Brasseur doing navigation, Buzzard as network coord, and Sam Moncrieff as nowcaster. And, of course, Alex, nominally in charge of the support jeeps.

  This was not a very taxing job. The support jeeps were unmanned, and were supposed to carry supplies into the field through global positioning. If called upon, Alex was supposed to instantly load the jeeps with spare whatchamacallits and then route them long-distance to a rendezvous.

  Alex assumed that this assignment was a subtle reference on Mulcahey's part to Alex's covert use of a dope mule. Kind of a deliberate shoulder tap there on the part of the Troupe jefe. To Alex'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 would be these ambiguous little jabs. Intended, Alex figured, to intimidate him, to assure him that Mulcahey did have an eye on him, so he wouldn't try anything really stupid.

  When you came right down to it, this tactic worked pretty well.

  In reality, Alex's support job consisted mostly of fetching venison chili for Sam, Joe, and Buzzard, since the men were leashed to their machinery. The goats were taken care of: the Troupe had stretched a line of wire around the perimeter posts and had corralled the goats inside the camp. The goats were cropping all the grass in camp, and crapping all over the ground as well, but they'd be breaking camp tomorrow 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 a shambles), and Sam took the exalted central role of Troupe nowcaster with complete and utter seriousness. He was stomping around blindly in the command yurt with his head in a virching helmet, burrowing through scientific visualizations like some kind of data-gloved gopher.

  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 sysadmin station, 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 to run."

  Alex examined the gndwork of the display for his support jeeps. It always 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 Kiehl get his chance out in the field, this candy-ass sysadmin desk work would drive anybody nuts." He lit his joint with a Mexican cigarette lighter and inhaled. "Want some?" he squeaked.

  "No thanks."

  "When the cat's away, dude." Buzzard shrugged. "Jerry would get on my case about this, but I tell ya, you spend fourteen straight hours shuffling icons, and it downright helps to be ripped to the tits."

  Alex watched as Buzzard plunged into his thicket of screens and menus. Alex guessed that he was tweaking the flow of data from distant Troupe weather instruments, but as far as Alex knew, Buzzard might 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 paper cup.

  Alex, testing his ingenuity toits limits, managed to pry open one of the 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, 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."

  "Did you 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 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 dug down in the maze of screens and came up with a flashing security alert. "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 the camp, a big cream-colored four-wheeler with tinted windows and an air-conditioned camper. The truck stopped well outside the perimeter in a spew of dust, exciting the goats, who bounded off timidly among the tepees.

  Alex ducked back inside the command yurt. "Somebody's here, man! Some kind of fancy truck with a big aerial."

  "Hell!" Buzzard looked annoyed. "Storm spotters, wannabes. You go tell 'em to get lost, man, tell 'em there's nothing going on here. If you 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 his paper hat at the truck, and waited for them to open fire on him.

  The strangers didn't shoot. Two men clñnbed peaceably out of their nice 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 decent of them to be so obligingly normal, to just be a couple of guys in a truck, instead of nightmarish maniac structure-hit bandits randomly shooting up the camp while everyone else was in Oklahoma. Alex put his hat back on and strolled toward the strangers, slowly and with his hands in plain sight. He deliberately hopped the wire around the perimeter posts.

  As he walked slowly closer he recognized one of the men. It was the black Ranger bush tracker, one member of the Ranger posse who'd visited camp a couple weeks earlier. The Ranger was in civilian gear, ragged jean cutoffs and a beat-to-shit yellow T-shirt with the legend NAVAJO NA11ON RODEO on it. No rifle this time, apparently.