Heavy Weather Page 5

  "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 of Highway 208 in West Texas?"

  "Yeah. That's right." She laughed.

  "Are you standing in the middle of a bunch of people who are trying to haul some kind of animal carcass up on a tripod?"

  "No, man, I'm in the garage yurt working repair on a fucked-up highway 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 shoes before 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, he whipped up the phone again and dialed Informaciôn in Matamoros. He asked 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 with wire, over a broad, windburned, cheerful face. She looked about thirty-five. She wore a paper refugee suit that had been spewed through somebody's fulL color printer, with remarkable results.

  The woman handed Alex a pair of sandals through tlK~ open door. The sandals were flat soles of thick dark green vinyl, with broad straps of 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 feet into them. They were two sizes too big, but they were more or less the proper shape of his feet and seemed unlikely to fall off. "That's not bad for two minutes' w&rk, Carol."

  "Thanks a lot, dude. Since you and your sister are both richer than God, feel free to give me several thousand dollars." Carol looked him over skeptically. "Boy, you're all Jane said you were, and much, much more!"

  Alex let that one hang for a moment. "Juanita said I should stay with those people over there until she came back."

  "Then that's what you'd better do, man. But do 'em a favor and stay downwind of 'em." Carol stepped back from the car. "And don't mess with our phones anymore, okay? Peter gets real nervous when amateurs mess with our phones."

  "Nice to meet you," Alex said. Carol spared him a half wave as she left.

  Alex decamped from the car and stepped carefully across the West Texas earth. The narrow-leafed prairie grass looked okay, but the sparse, pebbled ground was scattered about with a scary variety of tiny, wire-stemmed little weeds, all chockablock with burs and hooks and 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 at the junction of three tall tepee poles. There were four of them: two men in long-sleeved hunter's gear, and two hard-bitten women in bloodstained paper and trail boots. One of the men, the one with glasses, had an electric rifle over his back. They were all wearing Trouper cuffs.

  "Qué pasa?" Alex said.

  "We're butchering Bambi," the second man told him, grunting as he cinched off the end of the pulley rope.

  The hunters had already cut the entrails from the animal and dumped them somewhere along the trail. Alex closely examined the animal's lean, swaying, eviscerated carcass.

  The taller woman drew a bowie knife of ice-pale ceramic and stepped up 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 the hocks. She tossed the bloody glands aside, wiped and holstered her bowie knife, and fetched up a smaller knife about the length of her thumb.

  The man with the rifle gazed at Alex indifferently. "Just get in .to camp?"

  "Yeah. My name's Alex. Juanita's my sister.

  "Who's Juanita?" the rifleman said. The second man silently jerked his thumb toward the camp's central yurt. "Oh," the rifleman realized. "You mean Janey."

  "You'll have to forgive Rick here," the taller woman said. "Rick programs." She circled the deer's neck with a swift shallow cut, then carved straight down its throat to the chest and out at right angles to the end of each foreleg. She was very deft about it. With the help of the second woman, she began methodically shredding the hide down over the sleek naked meat.

  Alex shook one of the tripod poles. It seemed very sturdy. The lacquer on the bamboo was one of those modem lacquers. "Are you planning to eat this thing? I don't think I ever ate a wild animal before."

  "You'll eat the weirdest crap in Texas when Ellen Mae's around," said the second man.

  "Suck it up, Peter," said Ellen Mae spiritedly. "If you don't like real 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 bloodstaining in the ceramic, and a worn checkered grip, but its serrated teeth were every bit as sharp as freshly broken glass. It was a beautiful tool, and one of the objects in the world one would least like to be struck with. Alex made an experimental slash or two at the air and was a bit surprised to see the others leap mm diately out of his reach.

  "Sorry," he said. "Mega-tasty item." He gripped the back of the blade carefully and offered Ellen the handle.

  Ellen took it impatiently and began to saw the buck's legs oil at the knee 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 to get the resemblance," Peter told him;

  "Maybe," Alex told him. "Are you the Peter who does the phones around here?"

  "Yeah, that's right," Peter said, pleased. "Peter Vierling. I hack towers. Satellites, cellular coverage, the relays, that's all my lookout."

  "Good. You and me are gonna have to do some business."

  Peter looked at him with such open contempt that Alex was taken aback. "After lunch or wh
atever," Alex amended. "No big hurry, man."

  "You look like you need lunch, kid," said Rick the programmer. "You need some real meat on your bones." He patted his backpack. "Got you a 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's kind of fashionable now."

  "Cannibalism?" Rick said.

  Alex hesitated. He hadn't expected them to act so alarmed. "It wasn't my idea. It just sort of showed up during the meal."

  "I've heard of that stuff," Ellen Mae said slowly. "It's a Santeria thing."

  "Well, it's not like they bring you out a big human steak," Alex demurred. "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 of the, you know, infection risk. So everybody cooks it on these little forks."

  They were silent for a long moment. The two women stopped their methodical skinning work. "What's it like?" Rick asked.

  "Well, not much, by the time you get through cooking ," Alex said. "Everybody sort of dipped 'em in the fondue and 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 like Santeria, I guess, but now it's mostly kind of a dope-trade custom. A lot of those dope-trade guys got into organ smuggling and stuff after the 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 human meat, but they hadn't brought in any fresh bones or anything, so it could have just as easily been rabbit. He didn't see much real difference anyway, as long as you thought you were eating human meat. .

  "It's just a border thing," he said at last. "Una cosa de Ia frontera."

  "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 central fact of his life seemed to strike them as hilarious. Alex concluded swiftly that he was dealing with mentally damaged hicks and would have to adjust his behavior accordingly.

  "Tell our friend Alex about the special tour of the camp," Rick urged.

  "Oh yeah," Peter said. "Y'see, Alex, we get a lot of visitors. Especially in the peak storm season, during the spring. And we've discovered that the easiest way to get a good overview of Troupe operations is to fly an ultralight over the camp."

  "An aircraft," Alex said. He glanced at Ellen and the other, shorter woman, whose name he had still not The two women were deliberately paying a lot of attention to severing the animal's left shoulder.

  "Yçah. We have two manned ultralights. Plus three powered parafoil chutes, but those are for experts. You interested?"

  "Never tried that before," Alex said.

  "The ultralight's got its own navigation," Peter said. "Just like a car! Only even safer, 'cause in midair there's no traffic and no tricky 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 at the 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 have to 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 want this bad, after you see the machine."

  Alex followed the pair of them across camp, stepping cautiously on the treacherous earth. His occasional curious glances up from his endangered feet across camp didn't much impress him. There was a monkish air about the place, a kind of military desiccation. Four skeletal towers dominated the camp, with microwave dishes, racks of spiny aerials, wrist-thick wiring and cable guides, and whirling cup-shaped wind gauges. Three large, dirty buses were parked side by side under a flat paper sunshade, along with three robot bikes. A tractor with a dozer blade and a spiraled posthole digger had planted a set of tall water-distillation stacks, which were dripping into a fauceted plastic reservoir.

  The three of them stopped by the curtained door of another yurt. Two monster 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 expandable lattices of lacquered wood. The diamond-shaped ends of these lattices were neatly and solidly lashed together, and eight of the lattices, curved into a broad ring, formed the yurt's round wall. Sixteen slender bent poles of lacquered bamboo ran from the tops of the lattices up to a central ring, bracing the white paper top of the dome.

  The paper walls flapped a bit in the constant wind, but the interior had a surprisingly rich and pearly glow, and with its carpeted flooring, the yurt seemed remarkably snug and solid and permanent. Alex realized that the place was a -minor aircraft hangar, all kites and keels and foamed-metal spars and great bundles of reinforced sailcloth. A Trouper was at work in the place, sitting cross-legged on a cushion amid a confusion of specialized hand tools. He bad a gaunt weather-beaten face and an almost bald, freckled dome ofskull, with a few lank strands of colorless shoulder-length hair. He wore black cotton leotards and had a blackened lump of metal on a rawhide thong around his neck.

  "How's it goin', Buzzard?" Peter said.

  Buzzard looked up from his rapt examination of a flexing cabled joint. "Who's the geek?"

  "Alex Unger," Alex said. He stepped forward across the blissfully carpeted yurt flooring and jammed Out his hand.

  "Boswell Harvey," said Buzzard, surprised, dropping his eviscerated bit 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 spread across Buzzard's hooded eyes. "I can boot her from here, off the station." He stalked across the yurt and dropped into a crouch over a cabled laptop on the floor. He flipped it open, stared at the result on the flat screen, and pecked at the keyboard.

  Peter and Riak took Alex outside to a nearby section of anchored sunshade. The paper shelter, up on bamboo poling, had its back to the wind and was firmly pitoned to the limestone earth. The ultralights beneath the shelter, both of them missing their wings, were heavily staked down with cabling. Just in case of sudden wind bursts, presumably.

  Rick checked a set of input jacks on the motor housing while Peter industriously began assembling the left wing.

  "I know this wing doesn't look too great right now," Peter assured Alex, "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. I used 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 some kind of cheat! But hell, here it is, man; if you got a resource like that, 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 offe
red, "I can remember my mom being pretty upset about that development." He examined the ultralight. The wings seemed absurdly long and thin, but as Peter tightened their struts with a nut driver, they became convincingly tough and rigid. The little aircraft had a big padded bicycle seat with foamed-metal stirrups. There was a foam-padded skeletal back and neck rest, with a sturdy lap 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 ridge between 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 flying this thing anyway. It's all controlled from the ground." With the ease of long habit, Peter swabbed the interior band of the helmet with rubbing alcohol, then scrubbed the faceplate inside and out. "But take good care of this virching helmet, because it's worth twice as much as the aircraft."

  "Twice, hell, three times," Rick said. "Let me db that, Peter." He methodically adjusted the virtuality helmet's interior webbing for Alex's narrow skull, then set and wiggled it onto Alex's head. It felt like having one's head firmly~ inserted into a lightweight plastic bowling ball. "Now see, if you want a naked-eyeball look, the faceplate just hinges up like this. . . . And feel that com antenna back there? Don't snag that antenna on the left-hand spar there, okay?"

  "Right," Alex said. Despite Peter's alcohol scrub, the interior of the helmet still smelled strongly of someone else's old excited sweat. Alex began to settle into the mood. There was a momentum to this situation that appealed to him. He'd always rather enjoyed having his head at the mercy of someone else's media system.

  With a resourcefulness that surprised himself, he rolled up the pant legs of his paper suit to the knee and stuffed both his makeshift sandals securely into the big baggy pa• per cuffs. Then he straddled the 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 my oxygen?"

  They insisted that he wouldn't really need any oxygen, but Alex counterinsisted with such leaden, pigheaded emphasis that they quickly gave in.