When they'd popped and snapped and wedged the box kite's various spars and crossbars into place, the kite was two meters wide. Martha had to steady it with both her hands-not because of its weight, which was negligible, but because of its eagerness to catch the wind.
Buzzard unreeled its cable then. The kite string looked very much like 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 on the center of one hollow spar.
The kite suddenly leaped into eerie life and shook itself like a panicked pterodactyl. "Yo!" Buzzard cried. "Didn't you check the diagnostics on this sucker?"
"It's a bad boot, man," Martha yelled, her slippers skidding in the dust as she fought the kite. "Power-down!"
Buzzard jumped in the back of the truck and hit keys on the kite's laptop. The kite went dead again.
"Smart cloth," Martha explained, shaking the kite with a mix of fondness and annoyance. "Smart enough to screw up bad sometimes, but it's got lift potential right off the scale."
"She's a good machine," Buzzard hedged, rebooting the kite and patiently watching the start-u p progressing on the screen. "On a good 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 the light prevailing breeze.
Buzzard clamped the kite's spool to the rear bumper of the truck and watched as Martha drew line out a dozen meters. "Go!" he yelled, and Martha threw the big kite with an overhand heave, and it leaped silently into the sky.
The kite paid out line on its spool, with deft little self-calculated reelings and unreelings, until it caught a faster wind. It took on height quickly then, with deliberate speed, arcing and rearcing upward, in a neat set of airborne half parabolas.
"Smart cloth," Alex said, impressed despite himself. "That is very sweet . . . how many megs does she carry?"
"Oh, just a couple hundred," Buzzard said modestly. "It doesn't take much to fly a kite."
Martha then took it upon herself to hack the ceramic blockhouse of the tower. The tower's stolid, windowless blockhouse looked practically indestructible, an operational necessity in an area practically abandoned. Alex had not seen any wasteland structure vandals yet: word was that the major gangs had been ruthlessly tracked and exterminated by hard-riding posses of Texas Rangers. He'd been assured, though, that there were still a few structure vandals around: looters, scavengers, burglars, hobbyist lunatics from out of the cities. They tended to travel in packs.
Martha established that the relay tower belonged to a bank: it was an electronic-funds-transfer cell. The fact that the cell was out in the middle of nowhere suggested that the funds under transference were not entirely of a state-sanctioned variety. She then began the tedious but largely automated process of figuring out how to use it for free. Almost all networks had some diplomatic recognition of other networks, especially the public-service kinds. If you brought up the proper sequence of requests, in the proper shelter of network identity, you could win a smaller or greater degree of free access.
In the meantime, Buzzard took out his ornithopters. These were hollow-boned winged flying drones with clever foamed-metal joints and a hide of individual black plastic "feathers." The three omithopters could easily pass for actual buzzards at a distance. Provided, that is, that one failed to notice their thin extrudable antennas and their naked, stripped-metal heads, which were binocular video-cams spaced at the width of human eyes.
It took a lot of computational power to manage the act of winged flight. Like most buzzards, the omithopters spent much of their time passively soaring, wings spread to glide, the algorithmic chips in their wired bellies half shut down and merely sipping power. Only when they hit real turbulence would the 'thopters begin to outfly actual birds by an order of magnitude. The machines looked frail and dainty, but they were hatchlings of a military technology.
With the ease of long habit, Buzzard hooked the first ornithopter's breastbone to the notched end of a long throwing stick. He preened the machine's feathered wings back, then ran forward across the hilltop with the long hopping steps of a javelineer and flung the machine skyward with a two-handed over-the-shoulder whip of his arms.
The ornithopter caught itself in midair with a distantly audible whuff of its wings, wheeled aside with dainty computational precision, and began to climb.
Buzzard swaggered back to the rear of the truck, his throwing stick balanced 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. He detached the second ornithopter from its plastic wall clips and carried 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 there in actuality."
"It's a manned paraglider?"
"Yeah."
"Well, I want to fly it."
Buzzard tucked the bundled ornithopter in the crook of his arm and pulled off his sunglasses. "Look, kid. You got to know something about flying before you can ride one of those. That thing doesn't even have a motor. It's an actual glider, and we have to tow it off the back of the truck."
"Well, I'm game. Let's go."
"That's cute," Buzzard said, grinning at him with a flash of yellow teeth. "But your sister would get on my case. Because you would fall right 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 work accessing the tower. "Don't let Martha hear you say that. She hates it 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." He helped Martha out of the chair and into his own. Martha began wiping the phones down with a little attached Velcro pack of antisePtic tissues.
Buzzard fetched up his shades and cap. "Let's get well away from the truck, dude. C'mon with me."
Alex followed Buzzard as they picked their way down the western slope of the hill, down the dirt track. Off in the distance, a broken line of squat grayish clouds was lurking on the horizon. The approaching violent storm front, if that was indeed what it was, looked surprisingly unimpressive.
"Still hear the hum?" Buzzard said.
"'SI0."
"Well, listen."
Alex strained his ears for half a silent minute. Insect chirps, a feeble rustle of wind, a few distant bird cries. "Maybe. A little."
"Well, I hear it," Buzzard said, with satisfaction. "Most people can't. Martha can't. But that's the Taos Hum."
"What's that?"
"Real low, kind of a wobbling sound . . . about thirty to eighty hertz. Twenty hertz is about as low as human hearing can go." He spread his arms. "Sourceless, like it's all around you, all around the horizon. Like an old-fashioned motor, or a fuel-burning generator. 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 New Mexico about fifty years ago," Buzzard said. "That was when the first real greenhouse effects starting kicking in. . . . Taos, Santa Fe, Albuquerque . . then parts of Florida. Y'know, Jerry was born in Los Alamos. That's where 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. But The Hum doesn't show up on instruments. You can't pick up The Hum with 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 people nuts, sometimes. Is that real enough for ya? Maybe it's not a real sound. Maybe it's some disturbance inside the ear, some kind of resonant power harmonic off the bottom of the ionosphere, or something.
Some people can hear the northern lights, they say; they hear 'em sort of hiss and sparkle when the curtains move. There's no explanation for that, either. There's a lot we don't understand about weather." Buzzard clutched the lump of blackened metal on the leather thong around his neck. "A lot, man."
They stared silently at the western horizon for a lQng moment. "I'm sending 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?" Alex said. "This glare is killing me."
"Naw," Buzzard said, turning back toward the truck. "But I got some spare virching goggles. I can put you under 'em and patch you in to the 'thopters. Let's go."
They returned to the truck, where Martha was remotely wrapped in flight. Buzzard rummaged in a tool kit, then produced a pair of calipers. He measured the distance between the pupils of Alex's eyeballs, then loaded the parameters into a laptop. He pulled spare goggles and phones from their dustproof plastic wrap and sterilized them with a swab. "Can't be too careful with virching equipment," he remarked. "People get pinkeye, swimmer~s ear . . . in the city arcades, 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 a faint 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 arm and was filling its belly with blood. Alex thought of reaching over to swat it, then changed his mind. Martha probably wouldn't take a swat on the arm all that well.
"Here ya go," Buzzard said, handing him the goggles. "Telepresence is kind of special, okay? You can get some real somatic disturbance, 'cause there's no body sensation to go with the movement. Especially since you won't be controlling the flight. You'll just be riding shotgun 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 you feel better. And for Christ's sake, don't puke on the equipment."
"Right, I get it, no problem!" Alex said. He hadn't actually thrown up during his ultralight experience. On the contrary: he'd coughed up about a pint of blue goo from the pit of his lungs, then passed out from oxygen hyperventilation. He thought it was wiser not to mention this. If they thought it was merely vomit, so much the better.
Alex slipped the goggles on and stared at two tiny television screens, a thumb's width from the surface of his eyes. They were input-free and cybernetic blue, and the display had seen some hard use; 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 real world. "I'm gonna leave the earphones off awhile so we can talk easier.
"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, and flying.
Alex immediately lost his balance, pitched over backward, and thunked the 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 and flung out both his arms to embrace the drifting sky. He felt both his arms fall to the bubblepak with distant thuds, like severed butcher's meat.
He was now soaring gut-first through space. The ground felt beautifully solid beneath his back, as if the whole weight of the planet was behind him and shoving. The outline of distant clouds shimmered slightly, a hallucinatory perceptual crawl. Comput
ational effects; when he looked very closely, he could see tiny dandruff flakes of pixel sweeping in swift little avalanches over the variants in 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 stayed rock steady, welded to his face. He was nothing but eyeball, a numbed carcass of amputated everything. He was body-free.
He heard the squeak of the lawn chair as Buzzard settled into his own rig. "You're on Jesse now," Buzzard said. "I'll switch you onto Kelly."
The scene blinked off and on again, flinging him electronically from machine to machine, like a soundless hammer blow between the eyes.
"We're gonna climb now," Buzzard announced. The machine began flapping soundlessly, with slow wrenching dips in the imagery.
"We want to get up to the cap," Buzzard said. "That's where the action 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 bent plastic stick. Under his fumbling blind fingers, Alex's head felt unexpectedly huge and ungainly. His head felt like somebody else's head, like a big throw pillow upholstered in scalp.
With his ears secured beneath the pads of the earphones, Alex suddenly felt The Hum again, buzzing and tickling at the edge of his perception. The Hum was flowing right through him, some creepy rumbling transaction between the rim of outer space and planetary magma currents deep below. He strained his ears-but the harder he tried to hear The Hum, the less there was to perceive. Alex decided that it was safer not to believe in The Hum. He pulled the pad off his left ear. No more Hum. Good.
Then he began to hear the keening wind of the heights. "We got ourselves 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 damp hot air off the Gulf. It's wedging up a front of hot dry air coming off 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 those cumulus towers and strippin' 'em off flat."
Heavy Weather Page 9