Jane said nothing.
Rick adjusted his glasses and spread his hands expansively. He was wearing a pair of deerskin carpal tunnel wraps on his sunburned forearms. "I can understand," he said, "intellectually speaking of course-why a woman would find Jerry attractive. I mean, he's big and strong, and he's a good-looking guy in his way, and he's really smart. And he's not mean, or dishonest. Ruthless, sure, but he's not cruel. And he's got, like, pretty serious outlaw sex appeal, because he's the stud duck of this gang of weirdos who follow him around. Women tend to go for that kind of guy. So I can see why some woman would want to ride on the back of Jerry's motorcycle and share his sleeping bag. But hell! Marry him? Have his kids? Try and put him behind a picket fence? What possible good could that do you? I mean, why even try?"
Jane laughed.
"You can laugh, Janey," Rick said, "but that's what Valerie was up to. I don't think she ever realized it. I mean, consciously. It was pure genetic imperative, that's what. Some kind of female chromosome thing."
Jane sighed. "Rick-you are the prize asshole of all tune.
"Oh," Rick said, shocked. "Okay. Sorry."
"I don't want him to marry me. I don't have a picket fence. I don't want to take him away from the Troupe. I like living with the Troupe. It really suits me. It's my Troupe."
"Sure, okay," Rick said, nodding hastily. "I never meant you, Janey. You should know that by now."
"I want the F-6 for my own reasons. And even if Jerry drops down dead, then I'm gonna find it. And I'm gonna chase it down and document it and blow the data over every network on this planet. Okay?"
"Okay, Janey." Rick grinned. "Have it your way."
"You never talked to this brother of his, right?"
"No. I don't even know where he is. But if I wanted to find out"-he looked at her-"I guess I'd start by asking Jerry's mom."
THEY GOT SPIKES just east of the Foard County line, off State Highway 70. Both sides of the highway were lined with parked spotter vehicles: cops, meandering amateurs with cheap binoculars and hand cams, a monster SESAME lidar bus with tuned lasers and a rack of parabolic arrays.
SESAME and the Troupe's own Radar Bus had both been showing a major circulation hook for almost an hour, and the word was out on the police bands and the public weather alerts. So far, though, there was no visible wall cloud, and the rain-free shelf looked surprisingly cramped and unpromising.
Then, at 17:30, two spikes made a simultaneous appearance; not in the front pocket inside the hook, where they might have been expected, but wriggling off the back of the storm.
Rick picked up the first alert by nicking it off the air traffic of a surprised and excited TV crew. He immediately spread the word to the Troupe and booted the binocular cameras on Charlie's front weapons mount.
Given the chance, Troupers in ground pursuit would anticipate the path of the moving spike, getting ahead of it and to the right, so as to silhouette the approaching spike against brighter air. The ideal was to set up a series of target grids of intense, networked instrumentation and have the spike wander through the grids. This was the standard research strategy for the clearest, full-capacity data collection, and the SESAME people with their computational heavy iron probably had much the same idea.
That wouldn't be possible with these new twin spikes, though. Their position off the back of the storm put them right behind a moving wall of hail.
Jane gleefully showed the amateurs what they were up against by ordering Charlie into unconventional mode and lea'~'ing the highway entirely in a hot, fence-jumping, cross-country pursuit. The car bounded across a drenched pasture full of young sunflowers and knee-high Johnsongrass.
The binocular cameras, mounted on their own reactive pedestal, moved along with a rock-solid technological smoothness originally invented for modern fifty-caliber machine guns. Jane's nerves sang with anticipation. She was going where she loved to be: into the thick of it. Alert, alive, and in danger.
Spikes were very dangerous. They carried extremely high winds and often flung large, lethal chunks of debris. But the funnel wasn't the greatest danger in a pursuit. A modern pursuit vehicle could almost always dodge a visible funnel that was already on the ground. The greatest real dangers to the Troupe were big hail, lightning, and collisions.
Hail swaths were hard to predict, and they covered a lot more ground than the tip of a spike. Most hail was only nuisance hail, sleety or mushy or pebbly, but Jane had personally chased storms that dumped rock-solid hail the size of citrus fruit into heaps that were shin-deep.
Big hail didn't fall the way rain or snow or little graupel hail would fall. Big hail fell like jagged-edged lumps of solid ice dropped from the height of a three-thousand-story building. In the Oklahoma Panhandle, in the spring of 2030, Jane had been hit in the ribs by a hailstone that had put her in unguent and elastic wrap for a solid week. That same storm had caught two of the Troupe's early dune buggies and left them measled with hundreds of fist-sized dents.
Hail could be dodged, though, if you stayed out from under the mass of the storm and kept a wary eye on the radar. Lightning was different. There was no dodging lightning; lightning was roll-of-the-dice. In her pre-Troupe days, Jane had heard the usual pious civil-defense nonsense about staying away from exposed heights and throwing yourself flat if you felt your hair start to crackle, but she had seen plenty of no-kidding lightning since, and she had a firm grasp of its essential nature. Lightning was a highly nonlinear phenomenon. Most lightning sizzled along pretending to obey the standard laws of physics, but Jane had often seen even quite minor storms suddenly whip out a great crackling lick of eccentric fury that blasted the hell out of some little remote patch of ground that had absolutely nothing to do with anything. Lightning was crazy stuff, basically, and if it happened to hit you, there was damn-all you could do about it.
As for collisions, well, Charlie was a mega-sweet machine, but he ran on eight hundred and seventy-five million lines of code. Good code, solid, well-tested code, spewed through distributed parallel processors far swifter and more accurate than the nervous system of any human driver. But code was still code, and code could crash. If the code crashed when Charlie was number-crunching high-speed all-terrain pursuit, then crashing Charlie would be the same as crashing any precybernetic car: fast hard stupid metal versus soft wet human flesh.
They rounded a heavily knuckled wall of back shear and saw two spikes curling out of the back of the nimbus shelf like a gigantic pair of curved antelope horns. The twin spikes were fantastically beautiful, and they filled Jane with a deep sweet sense of gratitude and awe, but they looked like F-2s, tops. It was rare to get a really heavy spike off an unorthodox part of the storm.
With the target in sight, Charlie put his code to serious work and got a lot closer in a very short time. Suddenly the chill damp air around them was full of the Train. Only a tornado could do the Train. Once you'd heard the Train you would never forget or mistake it.
Jane loved the Train. That elemental torrent of noise hit something inside her that was as deep and primal and tender as the pulp of her teeth. It did something to her that was richer than sex. A rush of pure aesthetic battle joy rocketed up her spine and she felt as if she could jump out of her skin and spread wings of fire.
"Which one do you want?" she shouted at Rick.
Rick pulled up the rubber-rimmed lenses of the binocular videocam's goggle link. Without his glasses, his eyes looked crazed and dilated and shiny. "Go for the first to touch down!"
The horn on the right looked like the dominant one of the pair. To judge by the complex curdling of the shelf behind them, the two spikes were trying hard to go into slow orbit around one another. Rick's advice was sound: the first spike to touch down would likely get a better supply of updraft. Over the next few minutes the twin with more juice would probably starve out and eat up the other one.
But you could never tell. Spikes lived on the far side of turbulent instability and sometimes the least little extra puff of e
nergy would push them off trajectory into a monster phase space. . . . Jane was coming hard to the point of decision. She slowed the car and stared upward.
"Damn!" she yelled. "That left one's backward!"
"What?"
"It's anticyclonic! Look at that damn thing spin!"
Rick swung his head, moving the slaved cameras out on the bumper. "Good Christ!" he said. The spikes were rotating in opposite directions.
It was hard to judge the vortex rotation against the curdled black background of shelf, but once she'd recognized the movement, there was no mistaking it. Jane was flabbergasted. There hadn't been an anticyclonic spike documented since the late nineties. Finding a storm spinning clockwise in the northern hemisphere was freakish, like seeing a guy running down the Street who happened to have two left feet.
"We're following that crazy one!" Jane announced. She reached beneath the seat and yanked up a pair of cordless headphones and mike.
"Good choice!" Rick said, his voice high with disbelief.
Jane yelled orders ~to Charlie, got tired of the verbal interface, and pulled down the steering wheel. She got into a manual-assist mode, where a tug on Charlie's steering wheel was the software equivalent of a tug on a horse's reins. This was an excellent way to pursue a storm, if your horse was a smart machine a thousand times stronger and faster than you were. Excellent, that is, if your horse didn't get its code hung between mode changes. And if you didn't forget that you weren't really driving a car at all, but instead, vaguely chairing a committee on the direction, speed, and tactics of the vehicle. It was certainly vastly safer than driving manually in the wake of a pair of tornadoes. But it was still a really good way to get killed.
Rick yelled a site report at the Troupe while bracketing the anticyclone with the camera's binocular photogrammetry. Jane thought anxiously about the chaff bazooka in the back. The bazooka's chaff rounds cost so damned much that she had never had enough practice to get good with it. Rick, unfortunately, considered himself an excellent marksman, as if it were a real feat to kill deer with a silent, high-velocity, laser-sighted electric rifle. Rick was lousy with the bazooka and overconfident, while she was lousy with the bazooka but at least properly cautious about it.
She punched Rick's shoulder. "Where're the 'thopters?"
"They're coming. It'll take a while."
"I gotta chaff-shoot that anticydonic from the ground then," she said.
"No use, Janey! Radar Bus just pulled up stakes, nobody'll get the data but SESAME!"
"Let SESAME get it then, we gotta nail it now, the goddamned thing is left-handed! It's for Science!" She stopped Charlie in the middle of the field, opened the door, and leaped out into wet knee-high grass.
Out from under the shelter of Charlie's roof, the sound of the Train was enormous, ground-shaking, cosmic. Jane ran around the car, burrowed into the back, and unstrapped the bazooka from its Velcro mounting. No use looking up at the spikes just yet. No use getting rattled.
She found the chaff rocket, unstrapped it. Removed its yellow safety tape. Twisted the rocket to arm it. Put up the bazooka's flip-up sight. Powered up the bazooka. Booted the bazooka's trajectory calc. Charlie was vibrating in place with the sheer noise of the Tram, and violent gusts of entrained updraft were ripping at the grass all around her.
Loading the chaff bazooka was a very complex business. There was a very sweet and twisted intellectual thrill about doing it exactly right in conditions of intense emotional excitement. It was like paying a lot of slow, deliberate, very focused attention to giving somebody else an orgasm.
Jane stepped out into the open, carefully braced her legs, raised the muzzle, and squinted into the bazooka's readout. She pressed the first trigger. A red light came on. She bracketed the twister in the target screen. The red light went out and a green light flicked on. Jane pulled the second trigger.
The rocket took off with a calf-scorching backwash of heat and soared directly toward the spike. It made a couple of wasplike dips as it fought turbulence and it disappeared right into the spinning murk, not quite dead on, but good. Jane stared happily into the readout, waiting for the detonation signal from the chaff's explosive canister.
Nothing. She waited.
Nothing. Another goddamned dud.
Jane lowered the smoking bazooka with a grinding disappointment and suddenly noticed movement and color over to her tight. A spindle-wheeled TV camera truck had pulled ;ust to the right of them, maybe ten meters away. A woman correspondent with a head mike and a darling little brass-toggled yellow raincoat had jumped out. She was doing a stand-up.
Not in front of the tornadoes, though. In front of Jane. Jane was on live television. The realization gave Jane a sudden rush of deep irrational fury. It was all she could do to avoid swinging the muzzle around and threatening to blow the journos away, just to watch the sons of bitches run. The bazooka was empty, though, and she had no more chaff rounds, which was just as well, because otherwise they and their human-interest spot would have been structure-hit to blazing hell-and-gone. Jane flinched away from their cameras and gritted her teeth, and set the bazooka back in place with meticulous professionalism, and ran around the car and got back in and slammed the door.
"That was great!" Rick shouted. "Damn, Janey, you're good with that thing!"
"It was a dud round," Jane shouted back.
"Oh! Shit."
Jane turned on the noise cancellation in her headphones. The Train vanished suddenly, its every sonic wavelength neatly canceled by a sound chip inside the earphones. The echoing roar was replaced by an eerie, artificial, oddly wet-sounding silence, as if she'd thrust her head into a big hollowed-out pumpkin.
When Rick shouted at her once again, his voice was a flat filtered drone. "We just got dust whirl on that right one! We're gonna lose the anticyclonic."
"I figured," Jane murmured, her voice loud in her own ears. Rick lifted his goggles, realized she had her noise-cancellation headphones on, nodded in appreciation, fetched up his own headphones from beneath the passenger seat, and clamped them over his ears.
"Can't tag 'em all," Rick uttered wetly through the phones. "I'm gettin' some real good photogrammetry, though. Move up closer on that left one."
The right-hand spike was on the ground now, trying to stabilize. It was tearing through a patch of high grass a kilometer away, stewing a blur of dirt and straw. No major debris yet, but that straw was no joke; tornado straws were flying high-speed needles that could pierce boards and tree trunks.
She urged Charlie into pursuit again, avoiding the right-hand spike and drawing nearer to the anticyclonic twister. It had not touched down yet, and didn't seem likely to. The backward twister was being dragged off behind the front, in the shadow of its bigger brother, kicking and wriggling in distress.
Twisters were not living things. Twisters had no will or volition, they felt no joy or pain. Truly, realty, genuinely, tornadoes were just big storms. Just atmospheric vortices, natural organizations of rapidly moving air that blindly obeyed the laws of physics. Some of those laws were odd and complex and nonlinear, so their behavior was sometimes volatile, but twisters were not magic or mystical, they obeyed laws of nature, and Jerry understood those laws. He had patiently demonstrated their workings to her, in hours and hours of computer simulation. Jane knew all that with complete intellectual certainty.
And yet Jane still couldn't help feeling sorry for the a.nticyclonic. That mutant left-handed runt of the litter . . . the poor damned giant evil beautiful thing . .
The right-hand twister left the ground, bunched itself, and suddenly made a major and definite maneuver. It ripped loose from its original moorings at the back of the storm and surged forward, root and branch. The whole structure of the cloud base collapsed before it like a shattered ceiling and was torn into foggy chaos. The trailing bent tail that was the anticyclonic buckled, and dwindled, and was sucked away.
A blinding torrent of almost horizontal rain blasted across the landscape. The spike vanis
hed behind it.
Jane immediately wheeled and started to skirt the right-hand edge of the storm. Working her way around it took her twelve long minutes of high-speed pursuit and a painful drain of battery power. On the way they passed a charging land rush of three TV camera crews, five groups of amateur spotters in their rusty ham-hacker trucks, and two sheriff's deputies.
The sky was low and overcast ahead of the twister, an endless prairie of damp unstable Gulf air, tinder before a brushfire. When Jane caught sight of the spike again, it was a squat, massive, roaring wedge, lodged right in the pocket of the circulation hook and smashing northeast like a juggernaut. She turned off her monitor to the ongoing SESAME traffic and opened her mike and headphones to the general Troupe channel. "Jane in Charlie here. We have the spike in sight again! It's a mega F-4 on the ground and in the hook! This one could go all the way, over!"
"This is Joe Brasseur at Navigation. Copy, Jane. Your spike has habitation ahead-Quanah, Texas. Chasers, watch for fleeing vehicles! Watch for civilians! Watch for debris in the air or on the ground! Remember, people, a spike is a passing thing, but a lawsuit you always have with you. Over."
It was really nice, what the people of Quanah had done. You met all kinds out on the edge of the wasteland, most of them pretty unsavory kinds, but the citizens of Quanah were a special breed. There were just over three thousand of them. Most of them had settled here since the aftermath of heavy weather. They were hard and clever and enduring people, and they had a kind of rough-hewn civic virtue that, in all sincerity, you could only call pioneer spirit.
They didn't irrigate open fields anymore, because with their aquifer declining that was illegal as well as useless, But they had genetic crops with the chlorophyll hack, and they'd done a great deal with greenhouses. Enormous greenhouses, beautiful ones, huge curved foam-metal spars and vast ribbed expanses of dew-beaded transparent membrane, greenhouses as big as cornfields, greenhouses that were their cornfields, basically. Vast expanses of well-designed, modern, moisture-tight greenhouses, pegged down tight and neat across the landscape just like a big sheet of giant bubblepak.
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