Heavy Weather Page 8

  Careless-because he hadn't expected to emerge from those shadows again. 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's agents. He'd gone underground with all the determination he could manage-so far underground that he didn't need eyes anymore, the kind of deep dark underground that was the functional equivalent of a grave. The hope was just an obligatory long shot. In reality, he'd been quietly killing off the last few weeks of lease on his worn-out carcass, 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 rely on, 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 Plains was 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 doubtful about his habit of sneaking pure oxygen. But these Troupers weren't doctors; they were a pack of fanatical hicks, with a refreshing lack of any kind of propriety, and the oxygen had been lovely.

  Alex climbed quickly into his baggy paper suit and zipped it up to the neck. Let the stick puppet disappear into his big paper puppet costume. It wouldn't do for the Troupers to dwell on his medical condition. He couldn't describe them as bloodthirsty or sadistic people; they lacked that criminal, predatory air he'd so often seen in his determined slumming with black marketeers. But the Troupe did have 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 as yesterday, but trimmed closer to the shape of his foot, with a seamed-paper glued-on top, and a paper shoe tongue, and a series of reinforced paper lace holes. If you didn't look hard, Carol Cooper's constructions were practically actual clothes.

  Alex tottered squinting across the camp and into the peaked latrine tent. The Troupe's lavatory features were simplicity itself: postholes augered about two meters down into the rocky subsoil, with a little framework seatless camp stool to squat on. After a prolonged struggle, Alex rose and zipped his drop seat back in place, and looked 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. It had a radar unit clamped to the roof, in a snow-white plastic dome. Buzzard was topping off the batteries with a trickle of current from the solar array; Martha Madronich had the back double doors open and was stowing a collapsed ornithopter into an interior wall-mounted rack.

  "Got any water?" Alex said.

  Martha stepped out of the truck and handed Alex a plastic canteen and a paper cup. Martha limped a bit, and Alex noticed for the first time that she had an artificial foot, a soft flesh-colored prosthetic with dainty little joints at the ankles and toes, in a black ballet slipper.

  Alex poured, careful not to touch the paper cup to Martha's possibly infectious canteen rim, and he gulped thirstily at the flat distilled water. "Not too much," she cautioned him.

  He gave the canteen back and she handed him a dense wedge of cornmeal-and-venison scrappie. "Breakfast." Alex munched the mincemeat wedge of fried deer he art, deer liver, and dough while he slowly 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 telephone equipment bolted across the dash.

  "Where do I ride?" he said.

  Martha pointed to a cubbyhole she'd cleared on the floor of the truck, a burrowed nook amid a mass of packed equipment: big drawstring bags, a pair of plastic tool chests, three bundles of strapped-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 do any rough cross-country stuff. Us telepresence types always stick close 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 it to a palm-sized battery air pump, and inflated it with a quick harsh hiss and crackle.

  Martha wadded the bubblepak helpfully into the hole, then climbed back out. Alex's cheap cuff emitted a loud hour chime. Martha glanced at 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 set the clock on this thing. Anyhow, it's not a real Trouper cuff like yours, 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 of the vehicle and climbed in.

  The truck took off downhill, hit the highway, and headed north. It drove itself and was very quiet. Besides the thrum of tires on pavement, the loudest sound in the truck was the crinkling of Alex's bubblepak and paper suit as he elbowed bags aside and settled in place.

  "Hey, Medicine Boy!" Buzzard said suddenly. "You like that ultralight?"

  "Loved it!" Alex assured him. "My life began when I met you and your machinery, Boswell."

  Buzzard snickered. "I knew you liked it, man."

  Alex spotted a gray laptop under Boswell's driver seat and snagged it out. He opened it up, and placed the clock readout in the corner: 12 May, 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, no encryptions, no abridgments! They tried to recopyright a lot of that stuff, after the impeachments, y'know."

  "Yeah, like the government could get it back after doing that," Alex sniffed.

  "You'd be surprised how many losers just gave back that data!" Buzzard said darkly. "Sent federal cops out to raid the universities and stuff . . . Man, you'll get my Library of Congress when you pry my 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 new stuff in that '29 release, but it's not like the classic 2015 set. I dunno, you can say what you want about the State of Emergency, but the Regime had some pretty dang good ideas about public domain."

  Alex opened the 2015 Library, screened up a visualization of its data stacks, zipped down randomly through its cyberspace architecture through three orders of fractal magnitude, and punched at random into a little cream-yellow cube. The thing unfolded like the usual origami trick and he found himself gazing at a full-color digital replica of an illuminated twelfth-century French manuscript.

  It was almost always like that when you screwed around with the Library. He'd hammered away in the Library on occasion, when absolutely sick of cable television, but the way he figured it, the big heap of electric text was way overrated. There were derelicts around 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, and they'd crouch under a culvert with it, and peck around on it and fly around in it and read stuff and annotate it and hypertext it, and then they'd come up with some pathetic, shattered, crank, loony, paranoid theory as to what the hell had happened to them and their planet. . . . It almost beat drugs for turning smart people into human 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 he
r seat to glare at him. "Not structure hits, you moron! Structure jumps! I don't blow things up! I just climb up on top of things when the wind is right, and I jump off them with a parachute."

  "Oh. I get it. Sorry." Alex thought about it. "What kinda things d'you jump off, Martha?"

  "Bridges are pretty good," she said, relaxing a bit. "Mountains are great. Urban skyscrapers are mega-cool, but you have to worry about, like, private security guards and stupid city cops and moron straight civilians and stuff. . . . The coolest, though, is really big transmission towers."

  "Yeah?"

  "Yeah, I like the really big antique ones without any construction diamond in 'em." She paused. "That's how I lost my foot."

  "Oh. Right. Okay." Alex nodded repeatedly. "How'd someone like you come to join the Storm Troupe?"

  Martha shook her head. "I'll give you some advice, little dude. Don't ever ask people that."

  Fair enough. Alex retreated back into the laptop screen.

  They drove on. Every ten minutes Buzzard and Martha would stop to trade laconic updates with the Trouper base camp, or parley with Greg and Carol in the Dune Buggy Able, or send some side-of-the-mouth remark to Peter and Joanne in the Radar Bus. Their traffic was all acronyms and in-jokes and jargon. Every once in a while Martha would scrawl 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 it brusquely, and handed it back.

  After a long hour on the road, Buzzard began methodically gnawing at a long strap of venison jerky. Martha started picking her way daintily through a little drawstring bag of salted sunflower seeds, tongue-flicking her chewed-up seed hulls through the half-open passenger window. Alex had a strong stomach-he could read text off a laptop in a moving vehicle without any trace of headache or motion sickness-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 speed and impetus into a deep healing doze. A month's worth of narcotic-suppressed REM sleep suddenly rose from his bloodstream's sediments and seized control of his frontal lobes. Vast glittering tinsel sheets of dream whipped and rippled past his inner eye, hyperactive visions 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 open back double doors into simmering, eye-hurting, late-morning sunlight. The Troupers had left the highway and worked their way up a scarcely used dirt track to the top of a low flat hill. The hill was one of the limestone rises typical of the region, a bush-spattered bump in the landscape that had tried and failed to become a mesa.

  However, the hill had a respectably sized relay tower on it, with its own concrete-embedded solar array and a small windowless cement blockhouse. Buzzard and Martha had parked, and they'd laced a section of blue fabric to the side of the truck's roof. They were stretching the 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 balding noggin, the base of its bill resting on the outsized nose bridge of a pair of insectile mirrorshades. "Well," he allowed, "we'll put up a relay kite on some co-ax, boot the packet relay, try and tap in on this 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 the sunglasses. They were a matter of survival out here.

  Alex shook the stiffness out of his back and gazed over the landscape, shading his eyes right-handed. This had once been cattle country, of a sort; never thriving, but a place you could squeeze a living 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 wild expanses of bunchgrass and grama and needle grass and weed. Since the mass evacuations and the livestock die-offs, much of the abandoned pastureland had grown up in mesquite.

  Here, however, the mesquite was mysteriously dead: brown and leafless and twisted, the narrow limbs peeling leprous rotten gray bark. Stranger yet, there was a broad path broken through the dead mesquite forest, a series of curved arcs like the stamping of a gigantic horseshoe. The dead forest was scarred with ragged, overlapping capital Cs, some of them half a kilometer across. It looked as if somebody had tried to set a robot bulldozer on the pasture, to knock the dead wood down, but the dozer bad suffered some weird 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, then everything dies. Mesquite, cactus, everything. Everything around this place 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 has been getting a lot of rain lately. But man, that's why nobody can live out here anymore. There's no water left underground, nothing left in the aquifer, so whenever a drought hits, it hits bad. You can'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't farm, 'cause there's no irrigation. Anyway, those new-style genetic crops with the chlorophyll hack, they need a lot of steady water to keep up those super-production rates."

  "I see," Alex said. He thought it over. "But there's plenty of grass growing wild Out there now. You could still make some money if you drove 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 old Chisolm Trail and slaughter 'em in Topeka, just like the old days, if they'd let you. You're not the first to think of that idea. But there's no free range anymore. The white man still owns all this land, 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 in the mineral rights and oil rights. Sometimes biomass companies come out and reap off the brush, and turn it to gasohol and feedstocks and stuff. 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 allowed tolerantly. "He's got friends in Austin."

  "Okay," Alex said. "I get it with the legal angle. So what happened down there with the bulldozer? Somebody trying to clear off the pastureland?"

  Martha and Buzzard traded glances, then burst into laughter.

  "A bulldozer." Buzzard chuckled. "What a geek. A bulldozer. This kid is the tenderfoot dude wannabe geek of all time!" He clutched his shaking ribs below his black cotton midriff.

  Martha pounded Buzzard's back with the flat of her hand. "Sorry," she said, 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 in their path."

  "Yeah, an F-4 or F-5 will do that for sure, but that was a little one, maybe F-2, tops. Those curves in the damage path, those are real typical. They're called suction spots. A little vortex that's inside the big vortex, but those suction spots always pack the most punch."

  Alex stared downhill at the broken path through the dead mesquite. He could understand it now: those overlapping C-shaped marks were the scars of some narro
w spike of savage energy, a scythe embedded in the rim of a bigger wheel, slashing through the trees again and again as the funnel cycled forward. The twister had pulled dead trees apart and left their limbs as mangled, dangling debris, but the lethal suction spot had splintereened everything it touched, snapping trunks off at ground level, ripping roots up in dense shattered mats, and spewing branches aside as a wooden salad of chunks and matchsticks.

  He licked dry lips. "I get it. Very tasty . . . did you see this happen? Did you chase this one, back then?"

  Martha shook her head. "We can't chase 'em all, dude. We're after the big ones."

  Buzzard lifted his shades, wiped tears of laughter, and adjusted the cap on his sweating scalp. "The F-6," he said, sobering. "We want the F-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. Martha edged 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 were stunting 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 her shoulder. "The thing is-it's virtual. There's never been any actual F-6 tornado in the real-life atmosphere. The F-6 only lives in Jerry's math simulations. But when the F-6 hits, the Troupe will be there. And we'll document it!"

  Buzzard emerged from the truck with a long bundle of spars and cloth and a thick spool of kite cable. He and Martha set to work. The kite was made of a very unusual cloth: like watered blue silk with flat plastic laths half-melted into the fabric. The plastic had an embedded grid of hair-thin ribs of wiring.

  The two Troupers took such loving pride in assembling their box kite that Alex felt quite touched. He felt a vague urge to photograph them, as if they were ethnic exotics doing some difficult folk dance.