Heavy Weather

by Bruce Sterling

  Alex understood this. He was gazing down across the tops of clouds, approaching them unsteadily on flapping digital wings. The climbing, bubbling sides of the heap were the normal cauliflower lumps, but the flattened tops of the towers looked truly extraordinary: great rippling plazas of turbulent vapor that were being simultaneously boiled and beaten.

  The drone fought for more height for a while, then veered in a long panorama across the growing squall line. "See how ripped up it looks, way up here?"

  "Yeah."

  "That cap is working hard. It'll push all that wet air back today, west to east. But to work like that is costing it energy, and it's cooling it off some. When it cools, it gets patchy and breaks up. See that downdraft there? That big clear hole?"

  "I see the hole, man."

  "You learn to stay away from big clear holes. You can lose a lot of height in a hurry that way. . . ." The drone skirted the cavernous blue downdraft, at a respectful distance. "When these towers underneath us build up enough to erode through the cap and soar up right past us, then it's gonna get loud around here."

  The drone scudded suddenly into a cloud bank. The goggles swathing Alex's eyes went as white and blank as a hospital bandage. "Gotta do some hygrometer readings inside this tower," Buzzard said. "We'll put Kelly on automatic and switch over to Lena . . . whoops!"

  "The flying I like," Alex told him. "It's that switching that bugs me."

  "Get used to it." Buzzard chuckled. "We're not really up there anyhow, dude."

  The machine called Lena had already worked its way past the line of cloud, into the hotter, drier air behind the advancing squalls. Seen from the rear, the cloud front seemed much darker, more tormented, sullen. Alex suddenly saw a darting needle of aerial lighting pierce through four great mounds of vapor, dying instantly with the muffled glow of a distant bomb burst.

  Thunder hammered at his right ear, under the earphone.

  Martha's voice suddenly sounded, out of the same ear. "Are you on Lena?"

  "Yeah!" Alex and Buzzard answered simultaneously.

  "Your packets are getting patchy, man, I'm gonna have to step you down a level."

  "Okay," Buzzard said. The screens clamped to Alex's face suddenly went perceptibly grainier, the cascading pixels slowing and congealing into little blocks of jagginess. "Ugh," Alex said.

  "Laws of physics, man," Buzzard told him. "The bandwidth can only handle so much."

  Now, belatedly, Alex's clear left ear-the one outside the headphones-heard a sudden muffled rumble of faraway thunder. He was hearing in stereo. His ears were ten kilometers apart. At the thought of this, Alex felt the first rippling, existential spasm of virch-sickness.

  "We're running instruments off these 'thopters too, so we gotta cut back on screen clarity sometimes," said Buzzard. "Anyway, most of the best cloud data is the stuff a human eye can't see."

  "Can you see us from up here?" Alex asked. "Can you see where our bodies are, can you see where we're parked?"

  "We're way ahead of the squall line," Buzzard told him, bored. "Now, over there south, lost in the heat haze -that's where the base camp is. I could see the camp right now, if I had good telescopics on Lena. I did, too, once- but that 'thopter caught a stroke of lightning, and fried every chip it had . . . a goddamn shame."

  "Where do you get that kind of equipment?" Alex said.

  "Military surplus, mostly . . . depends on who you know."

  Alex suddenly felt his brain becoming radically overstuffed. He tore his goggles off. Exposed to the world's sudden air and glare, his pupils and retinas shrank in pain, as if ice-picked.

  Alex sat up on his bubblepak and wiped tears and puddled sweat from the hollows of his eyes. He looked at the two Troupers, a-sprawl on their lounge chairs and indescribably busy. Buzzard was gently flapping his fingertips. Martha was groping at empty air like a demented conjurer.

  They were completely helpless. With a rock or a stick, he could have easily beaten them both to death. A sudden surge of deep unease touched Alex: not fear, not nausea either, but a queer, primitive, transgressive feeling, like a superstition.

  "I'm . . . I'm gonna stay out for a while," Alex said. "Good, make us some lunch," said Buzzard.

  ALEX MANAGED THE lunch and ate his share of the rations too, but then he discovered that Buzzard and Martha wouldn't give him enough water. There simply wasn't watèr to spare. It took a while for this to fully register on Alex -that there just wasn't water, that water was a basic constraint for the Troupe, something not subject to negotiation.

  The Troupe had an electric condenser back in camp that would pull water vapor from the air onto a set of chilled coils. And they had plastic distillery tarps too; you could chop up vegetation and strew it in a pit under the tarp, and the transparent tarp would get hot in the sun and bake the sap out of the chopped-up grass and cactus, and the tarp's underside would drip distilled water into a pot. But the tarps were clumsy and slow. And the condenser required a lot of electrical energy. And there just wasn't much energy to spare.

  The Troupe carried all the solar racks that they could manage, but even the finest solar power was weak and feeble stuff. Even at high noon, their modest patches of captured sunshine didn't generate much electricity. And sometimes the sun simply didn't shine.

  The Troupe also had wind generators-but sometimes the wind simply didn't blow. The Troupe was starving for energy, thirsty for it, and watchful of it. They were burdened by their arsenal of batteries. Cars. Trucks. Buses. Ornithopters. Computers. Radios. Instrumentation. Everything guzzling energy with the implacable greed of machines. The Troupe was always running in the red on energy. They were always creeping humbly back to civilization to recharge a truckload of their batteries off some municipal grid.

  Energy you could beg or buy. But you couldn't hack your way around the absolute need for water. You couldn't replace or compress water, or live on virtual water or simulated water. Water was very real and very heavy, and a lot of trouble to make. Sometimes the Troupe captured free rainwater, but even a rainy year in West Texas never brought very much rain. And even when they did catch rainwater, they couldn't ship much water with them when they moved the camp, and the Troupe was always moving the camp, chasing the fronts.

  It was simple: the more you wanted to accomplish, the less you had to drink.

  Now Alex understood why Buzzard and Martha lay half-collapsed in their sling chairs beneath their sunshade, the two of them torpid as lizards while their eyes and ears flew for them. Sweat was water too. Civilization had been killed in West Texas, killed as dead as Arizona's Anasazi cliff-dweller Indians, because there just wasn't enough water here, and no easy way to get water anymore.

  Alex stopped arguing and followed the lead of Buzzard and Martha by steadily tucking scraps of venison jerky into his mouth. It kept his saliva flowing. Sometimes he could forget the thirst for as long as ten minutes. They'd promised him a few refreshing mouthfuls every half hour or so.

  The wind from the east had died. The smart kite's wiring, once taut and angular, now hung in the sky in a listless swaying curve. The wind had been smothered in a tense, gelatinous stillness, a deadly calm that was baking greased sweat from his flesh. The rumbles of distant western thunder were louder and more insistent, as if something just over the horizon were being clumsily demolished, but the unnatural calm around the aerodrome truck seemed as still and solid as the smothering air in a bank vault.

  Alex squatted cross-legged on his bubblepak, mechanically chewing the cud of his venison jerky and wiping sweat back through his hair. As the heat and thirst and tension mounted, his paper suit was becoming unbearable.

  The suit's white, plasticized, bakery-bag sheen did help with the heat some. It was a clever suit, and it worked. But in the final analysis, it didn't really work very well. His spine was puddled with sweat, and his bare buttocks were adhering nastily to the drop seat. His shoulder blades were caught up short whenever he leaned forward. And the suit was by far the loudest garment he had
ever worn. In the tense stillness, his every movement rustled, as if he were digging elbow-deep through a paper-recycling bin.

  Alex stood up, peeled the suit's front zip down, pulled it down to his waist, and crudely belted it around his midriff with its dangling white paper arms. He looked truly awful now, pallid, skeletal, heat-prickled, and sweaty, but the others wouldn't notice; they were virch-blind and muttering steadily into their mikes.

  Alex left the sunshade and walked around the truck, sweat running in little rills down the backs of his knees.

  He found himself confronting an amazing western sky.

  Alex had seen violent weather before. He'd grown up in the soupy Gulf weather of Houston and had seen dozens of thunderstorms and Texas blue northers. At twelve, he'd weathered the fringes of a fairly severe hurricane, from the family's Houston penthouse.

  But the monster he was witnessing now was a weather event of another order. It was a thunderhead like a mountain range. It was piercing white, and dusky blue, and streaked here and there with half-hidden masses of evil greenish curds. It was endless and rambling and columnar and tall and growing explosively and visibly.

  And it was rolling toward him.

  A tower had broken the cap. It had broken it suddenly and totally, the way a firecracker might rupture a cheap tin can. Great rounded torrents of vengeful superheated steam were thrusting themselves into the upper air, like vast slow-motion fists. The dozens of rising cauliflower bubbles looked as hard and dense as white lumps of marble. And up at the top of their ascent-Alex had to crane his neck to see it-vapor was splashing at the bottom of the stratosphere.

  Alex stood flat-footed in his plastic-and-paper shoes, watching the thunderstorm swell before his eyes. The uprushing tower had a rounded dome at its very top, a swelling blister of vapor as big as a town, and it was visibly trying to break its way through that second barrier, into the high upper atmosphere. It was heaving hard at the barrier, and amazingly, it was being hammered back. The tower was being crushed flat and smashed aside, squashed into long flattened feathers of ice. As the storm's top thickened and spread to block the sunlight, the great curdled uprushing walls of the tower, far beneath it, fell into a dreadful gloom.

  It was a thunderstorm anvil. An anvil was floating in the middle of the blue Texas sky, black and top-heavy and terrible. Mere air had no business trying to support such a behemoth.

  Lightning raced up the nimbus, bottom to top. First a thin, nervous sizzle of crazy brightness, and then, in the space of a heartbeat, one, two, three rapid massive channeled strokes of electrical hell, throwing fiery light into the greenish depths of the storm.

  Alex ducked back around the truck. The thunder came very hard.

  Buzzard tugged his goggles and earphones down, into an elastic mess around his neck. "Gettin' loud!" he said cheerfully.

  "It's getting big," Alex said.

  Buzzard stood up, grinning. "There's a gust front comin' our way. Gonna kick up some bad dust around here. Gotta get the masks."

  Buzzard fetched three quilted mouth-and-nose masks from a stack of them in a carton in the truck. The paper masks were ribbed and pored and had plastic nose guards and elastic bands. Martha put her mask on and methodically wrapped her hair in a knotted kerchief. Buzzard shut the doors and windows of the truck securely, checked the supports of the sunshade, and tightened the strap of his billed cap. Then he put all his gear on again, and lay in the chair, and twitched his fingers.

  All around the hill, little birds began fluttering westward, popping up and down out of the brush in a search for cover.

  The searing light of early afternoon suddenly lost its strength. The spreading edge of the anvil had touched the sun. All the hot brilliance leached out of the sky, and the world faded into eerie amber.

  Alex felt the cramp of a long squint easing from his eyelids. He put his mask on, tightly. It was cheap paper, but it was a good mask-the malleable plastic brace shaped itself nicely to the bridge of his nose. Breathing felt cleaner and easier already. If he'd known breathing masks were so easy to get, Alex would have demanded one a long time ago. He would keep the mask handy from now on.

  Alex put his masked face around the corner of the truck. The storm was transmuting itself into a squall line, tower after tower springing up on the mountainous flanks of the first thunderhead. Worse yet, this whole vast curdled mass of storms was lurching into motion, the mountainous prow of some unthinkably vast and powerful body of hot transparent wind. There was nothing on earth that could stop it, nothing to interfere in the slightest. It would steam across the grassy plains of Tornado Alley like a planetary juggernaut.

  But it would miss them. The aerodrome truck was parked out of range of the squall line, just past the southern rim of it. The Troupers had chosen their stand with skill.

  Alex walked into the open, for a better look. Off to the northwest, a patch of the squall's base had ruptured open. A dark skein of rainfall was slowly drifting out of it. Distant shattered strokes of lightning pierced the sloping clouds.

  Alex watched the lightning display for a while, timing the thunderclaps and pausing periodically to swat mosquitoes. He'd never had such a fine naked-eye view of lightning before. Lightning was really interesting stuff: flickering, multibranched, very supple, and elaborately curved. Real lightning had almost nothing to do with the standard two-dimensional cartoon image of a jagged lightning bolt. Real lightning looked a lot more like some kind of nicely sophisticated video effect.

  Out on the western horizon, the grass and brush suddenly went crazy. It bent flat in a big spreading wave. Then, it whipped and wriggled frantically in place. The grass seemed to be crushed and trampled under some huge invisible stampede.

  A flying wall of dirt leaped up from the beaten earth, like the spew from a beaten carpet.

  Alex had never seen the like. He gaped in astonishment as the wall of dirty wind rushed forward. It was moving across the landscape with unbelievable speed, the speed of a highway truck.

  It rocketed up the slope of the hill and slammed into him.

  It blew him right off his feet. Alex landed hard on his ass and tumbled through the spiky grass, in a freezing, flying torrent of airborne trash and filth. A shotgun blast of grit spattered into both his eyes, and he was blinded. The wind roared.

  The gust front did its level best to strip his clothes off. It had his paper suit around his knees in an instant and was tearing hard at his shoes, all the while scourging him with little broken whips of airborne pebble and weed. Alex yelled in pain and scrambled on hands and knees for the shelter of the truck.

  The truck was heaving back and forth on its axles. The fabric veranda flapped crazily, its vicious popping barely audible in the gusting howl.

  Alex fought his way back inside the writhing, flapping paper suit, and he tunneled his grimy arms into its empty sleeves. His eyes gushed painful tears, and his bare ankles stung in the gust of dirt beneath the truck. The wind was very cold, thin, and keening and alpine. Alex's fingers were white and trembling, and his teeth chattered behind the mask.

  More filth was gusting steadily beneath the truck. The dirty wind skirled harmlessly under the bottoms of the Troupers' sling chairs. Though Alex couldn't hear what they were saying, he could see their jaws moving steadily below their paper masks. They were still talking, into the little bent sticks of their microphones.

  Alex trawled up his windswept virching gear as it danced and dangled violently at the end of its wiring. He jammed his back against the lurching truck and clamped the earphones on.

  "Feels nice and cool now, doesn't it?" Buzzard commented, into Alex's sheltered ears. Buzzard's was voice mask-muffled and cut with microphone wind shrieks.

  "Are you crazy?" Alex shouted. "That coulda killed us!"

  "Only if it caught us in the open," Buzzard told him. "Hey, now we're cool."

  "Carol's got circulation!" Martha said.

  "Already?" Buzzard said, alarmed. "It's gonna be a long day. . . . Bring Jesse in fo
r a chaff run, then."

  The violence of the gust front faded quickly, in a series of windy spasms. It was followed by a slow chill breeze, with a heavy reek of rain and ozone. Alex shivered, bunching his numbed fists into his paper armpits.

  The insides of his virching goggles were full of wind blown grit. Alex took his mask off, spat onto the screens, and tried to wash them clean with his thumbs.

  Buzzard pulled his own goggles off and stood up. Something landed heavily on the stretched fabric of the veranda. Buzzard hopped to the edge of the veranda, jumped up, and snagged it: a landed ornithopter.

  Buzzard brushed dust from his leotards and looked at Alex with ungoggled eyes. "What the hell! Did you get caught in that gust front?"

  "How do I clean these?" Alex said evasively, holding up the goggles.

  Buzzard handed him an antiseptic wipe. Then he opened the back of the truck and ducked in.

  He reemerged with a duffel bag and slammed the doors. The bag was full of reels of iridescent tape. Buzzard picked a patch of yellow stickum from the end of one reel and pulled at the tape. A section of shining ribbon tore loose in his fingers and fluttered in the breeze.

  He handed it to Alex. "Smart chaff."

  The chaff looked like old-fashioned videotape. Both ends of the tape were neatly perforated. The strip of chaff was as wide as two fingers and as long as Alex's forearm. It was almost weightless, but its edges were stiff enough to deal a nasty paper cut, if you weren't careful.

  It had a lump embossed in one end: a chip and a tiny flat battery.

  Buzzard screwed the axle of the chaff reel snug against the ornithopter's breastbone. Then he fetched his throwing stick again, walked out into the wind, and launched the machine. It rocketed upward in the stiff breeze, wings spread. "We got a hundred strips per reel," Buzzard said, returning. "We deploy 'em through the spike."