Heavy Weather

by Bruce Sterling

  The F-4 walked into the midst of the greenhouse bubbles and methodically wreaked utter havoc. It simply stomped the big pockets of bubbtepak and catastrophically ruptured them, with sharp balloon-pop bangs that you could feel in your bones from a mile away. The acres of damp air inside the ruptured bubbles geysered instantly upward in fat twisting rushes of condensation fog, and before Jane's amazed, observant eyes, the F-4 literally drank up those big sweet pockets of hot wet air, just like a thug at a bar doing tequila stammers.

  It ripped every greenhouse in its path into flat deflated tatters, and it entirely destroyed alt the crops inside them.

  The citizens of Quanah were not just farmers. They were modern bioagriculturists. They had set up a silage refinery: stacks, towers, fermentation chambers. They were taking the worst harvest in the world: raw weed, brush, mesquite, cactus, anything-and cracking it into useful products: sugars, starches, fuel, cellulose. Silage refining was such an elaborate, laborious process that it was barely profitable. But it made a lot of honest work for people.

  And it made some honest use out of the vast expanse of West Texas's abandoned wasteland. Silage refining came very close to making something useful and workable out of nothing at all.

  The F-4 waded into the silage refinery and tore it apart.

  It picked up the pipelines, snapped them off clean at the joints, and wielded them like supersonic bludgeons. It twisted the refinery towers until they cracked off and tumbled and fell, and it threw a hot spew of gene-twisted yeast and fungi into a contaminating acres-wide stop. It blew out windows, and ripped off roofs, and cracked cement foundations, and shorted out generators. It swiftly killed three refinery workers who had been too stubborn and dedicated to leave. After the twister had shattered half the refinery and broken the rest open, its ally the rain arrived, and thoroughly drenched everything that had been exposed.

  The twister then chewed its way through Quanah's flat checkerboard of streets, smashing homes and shops, destroying the ancient trees around the courthouse, and annihilating a dance hall.

  When it had finished with the town of Quanah, Texas, the twister headed, undiminished, toward the Red River, and the people of the great state of Oklahoma.

  WHEN JANE GOT back to the camp, it was five in the morning. She'd managed to sleep a little in the driver's seat during the long haul back, but she was far too full of adrenaline for anything like real rest.

  She drove the car under one of the camp's garage tents and prodded Rick awake. Rick got up groggily without a word and staggered off for his tepee.

  Jane walked stiff-legged and trembling into the command yurt. There was no sign of Jerry, and all his machines were shut down.

  She went to their favorite tepee, the one they usually used for assignations.

  Jerry was on the bubblepak floor in a bag, asleep.

  Jane threw her sweaty clothes off and fought her way into the bag next to him.

  "You've got the shakes," he told her.

  "Yeah," Jane said, trembling harder to hear him say it. "I always get the shakes whenever they kill people."

  "Nothing we can do about that," he said gently. "We just bear witness.

  Jane stared up at the tepee's dark conical recess. She could see stars through the smoke flap. She was stiff all over and trembling with stress and she smelled really bad.

  "My life sure has changed since I met you . . ." she said, "you crazy son of a bitch."

  Jerry laughed and put his hand on her right breast. "Yeah?"

  "That's right. I've seen people get killed. . . . I've raced down highways at two hundred klicks an hour. I've jumped out of airplanes. I climbed up a radio tower and I jumped off it, and I beat up the woman who taught me how to do it."

  "You didn't beat her up very hard," Jerry said. He slid his bearded face into the hollow of her neck.

  Jane started trembling much harder. "Just once," she told him, "I'd like to fuck you in a bed. With a mattress, and clean sheets. When we've both showered. And me wearing something slinky and maybe some perfume. Don't you like that, Jerry? Perfume?"

  "What I like is remembering where the condoms are. Where are they?"

  "They ought to be tucked over there under that ditty bag, unless somebody used 'em all."

  Jerry climbed out of the bag, naked, found a condom after prolonged search, and crawled back into the bag again. His skin had gone cold in the night air. Jane shivered violently.

  Jerry turned her onto her stomach and set his solid hands to work on her shoulders. "You've got it bad tonight," he said.

  She nodded. "That's good. Keep doing that. Maybe I'll live."

  Silently, deftly, Jerry worked his way off her shoulders, down her spine and rib cage, going after knotted nerves that were like snarled fishline. It felt so good to have the strong human touch of someone she trusted. Someone who wouldn't stop or hesitate, who knew what he was doing and who had never hurt her. He was pulling the jitters out of her, and it was like he was chasing little devils Out of her skin. Jane stretched out on her stomach and went languorous and heavy-lidded.

  She turned over and stretched her arms out in welcome. He kissed her briefly, put the condom on, climbed over her, braced himself on his elbows. He slid into her all at once on an oiled film of latex.

  She put her feet in the backs of his knees. "Short and sweet, okay," she whispered. "I'm really tired, baby. I'm going right to sleep after this, I promise.

  "Good," he said, hitting his favorite rhythm.

  "Do me, but don't do the daylights out of me.

  He said nothing.

  He wasn't violent, and he wasn't ever careless, but he was a big man, a head and a half taller than she was, and he was really strong. He had ropes of muscle in his back where people shouldn't even have muscle. He wasn't acrobatic or elaborately erotic, but he never got winded easily. And when he got up to speed, he tended to hit the groove and to stay there.

  She gritted her teeth, rolled her head back in the soft darkness, and had an orgasm. She came out of the far side of it gasping and limp all over, with all the tension gone from her jaw and temples and her arms hanging slack.

  He stopped, and hung there over her, and let her breathe awhile. There was a big lumpy rock under her neck, beneath the bag and the bubblepak, and she squirmed on her back to miss it. She'd been very tired before, but now she was fully wrapped in the hot life-giving power of her own libido, and all the weariness and horror of the day was like something that had happened to another woman somewhere far away. When she spoke again it was rough and low.

  "I changed my mind about that daylights business."

  He laughed. "You always say that."

  "Unless you let me get on top, I'm gonna have to scream a little bit."

  "Go ahead and scream," he told her, moving hard. "You never scream all that much."

  CHAPTER 5

  Chasing tornadoes until two in the morning had been pretty bad, but not half so bad as Alex had feared. They'd spent most of those hours humming down darkened roads, with Alex curled in his nest of bubblepak, dozing.

  They'd stopped three times to fling machinery into the sky, a fever of virtual activity in the midst of distance and darkness and thunder. They were ardently chasing storms by remote control. And yet there was little sense of real danger.

  The storms didn't frighten Alex. He found them impressive and interesting. His only true fear was that the Troupers would discover the real and humiliating extent of his weakness. He could think straight, he could talk, he could eat, and he could breathe beautifully. But he was still bone feeble, with an edge of endurance that was razor thin. He was lucky that Martha and Buzzard hadn't asked him to do anything truly strenuous. It wasn't because they were sparing him, of course. They simply didn't trust him to do anything important.

  The day after the chase, Alex was up with the dawn, his lungs still clear, his eyes bright, with no sign of sore throat or fever. He felt better than he'd felt in at least a year. Meanwhile, the road-burned Troupers lay
around in their smelly bags and their stick-and-paper cones, in the grip of prolonged siestas. The after-chase day was a busy day for the support crews, but they were busy with information, a fourteeii-hour-day of annotating, editing, collating, cutting, and copying. The Troupe's road pursuers were physically worn-out, and the rest of them were crouching over their keyboards. Nobody paid Alex much mind.

  Mound noon, Carol Cooper made Alex a big paper sombrero, gave him a bag of granola and a small canteen, and sent him out to watch the Troupe's goats. The Troupers had this teenage kid, Jeff, who usually did the goat watching and the firewood fetching and other little gopher chores around camp, but with Alex's arrival, Jeff had been bumped up the pecking order.

  Alex didn't mind watching the goats. It was clearly the stupidest and lowest-status job in Troupe life, but at least there was very little to it. All the goats had smart collars, and you could set the herd's parameters on a laptop to give them minor shocks and buzzes when they wandered out of range. They were gene-spliced pharmaceutical goats, "pharm animals," and despite their yellow, devillike, reptilian eyeballs, the goats were remarkably docile and stupid. Most of the time the goats seemed to grasp the nature of the collar business, and they stayed where the machine wanted them. They industriously nibbled anything remotely edible and then lay in the shade belching gas from their gene-spliced guts.

  Alex spent most of the day up in a mesquite tree at the edge of a brush-filled gully, wearing his paper breathing mask, grepping around with the laptop, and swatting mosquitoes and deer ffies. He wasn't too happy about the mosquitoes, but his bite-proof paper hat, mask, and jumpsuit kept them at bay, except on his bare neck and ankles. The deerflies were big, buzzing, aggressive, head-circling pests, and it wasn't too surprising that there were a lot of them around-the brush was crawling with deer. The damned deer were as common as mice.

  Alex, a consummate urbanite, had always imagined deer as timid, fragile, endangered creatures, quailing somewhere in the darkened depths of their crumbling ecosystems. This sure as hell wasn't the case with these West Texas deer, who were thriving in an ecosystem that was already about as screwed up as mankind could manage. The deer were snorty and flop-eared and skittish, but they were as bold as rats in a junkyard.

  By the time Alex and his entourage of goats returned to camp that evening, he was a lot less impressed about the local diet of venison. There wasn't much to obtaining venison-it was about as hard as finding dog meat at a pound. He and Jeff milked the goats, which produced a variety of odd cheesy fluids, some with U.N.-mandated dietary vitamin requirements, and some with commercial potential in drugstore retail. Milking goats was kind of interesting work on a weird level of interspecies intimacy, but it was also hard manual labor, and he was glad to leave most of it to Jeff.

  Greg Foulks had pulled Jeff out of the wreckage of an F-S a couple years back, from the jackstraw rubble where Jeff had lost both his parents. Jeff had worked his way into the Troupe by simply running away and returning to them whenever the Troupe tried to place him into better care. Jeff was a cheerful, talkative, sunburned Texas Anglo kid, openly worshipful of Jerry and Greg, and full of what he thought was good advice about Troupe life. Jeff was only sixteen, but he had that drawn, tight-around-the-eyelids look that Alex had seen on the faces of displaced people, of the world's heavy-weather refugees. A haunted, wary look, like the solid earth beneath their feet had become thin ice, never to be trusted again.

  Everyone in the Troupe had that Look, really. Except maybe Jerry Mulcahey. Examined closely, Mulcahey looked as if he'd never set foot on Earth in the first place.

  Next day they put Alex on kitchen duty-KP.

  "YOUR Sister," SAID Ellen Mae Lankton, "is a real hairpin."

  "I couldn't agree with you more," said Alex. He was sitting cross-legged on the bubblepak floor of the kitchen yurt, peeling a root. It was the root of some local weed known as a "poppymallow." It looked like a very dirty and distorted carrot, and when peeled, it had some of the less appetizing aspects of a yam.

  Ellen Mae had been up at dawn to grub up poppymallows. She was up at every dawn, methodically wandering the fields, snapping miles of old barbed wire with her personal diamond-edged cable cutters and digging up weeds with her sharpshooter shovel. So now Alex had a dozen filthy roots at his elbow, in Ellen Mae's canvas sling bag. Peeling roots, it seemed, was not a popular task among Storm Troupers. Alex, however, didn't mind it much.

  Alex rarely minded any kind of work that allowed him to sit very still and breathe shallowly. What he minded about kitchen work was the mesquite smoke. Whenever Ellen Mae turned her back to manage the stewpot, Alex would whip his paper mask up quickly and steal a few quiet huffs of properly filtered air.

  As Ellen Mae bustled about, doing her endless round of mysterious kitchen rituals, Alex sat nearby, in the yurt's only draft of clear air. As the morning had worn on, several Troupers had wandered in hunting snacks or water, and they'd seen Alex sitting near Ellen Mae's feet in a humble, attentive, apprentice's posture. And they'd given Ellen Mae a kind of surprised, eyebrow-raised, respectful look. After a while Ellen Mae had warmed up to Alex considerably, and now this strange, witchy-looking, middle-aged woman wouldn't shut up to save her life.

  "For one thing, she's got a really strange way o talkin'," said Ellen Mae.

  "You mean her accent?" Alex said.

  "Well, that's part of it. . .

  "That's simple," Alex said. "We Ungers are German Mexicans."

  "'What?"

  "Yeah, we're descended from this German guy named Heinrich Unger, who emigrated to Mexico in 1914. He was a German spy. He tried to get the Mexicans to invade the U.S. during the First World War."

  "Huh," said Ellen Mae, stirring stew.

  "He didn't have much luck at it, though."

  "I reckon he didn't."

  "Another German spy named Hans Ewers wrote a couple of books about their mission. They're supposed to be pretty good books. I wouldn't know, myself. I don't read German."

  "German Mexicans," Ellen Mae mused.

  "There's lots of German Mexicans. Thousands of 'em, really. It's a pretty big ethnic group." Alex shrugged. "My dad moved over the border and took out U.S. citizenship after he made some money in business."

  "When did that happen, exactly?"

  "Mound 2010. Just before I was born."

  "Must have been one of those free-trade things. When the U.S. sent all the workin' jobs down to Mexico, and the Mexicans sent the USA all their rich people."

  Alex shrugged. His family's entanglement with history meant little to him. He was vaguely interested in the distant and romantic 1914 aspect, but his dad's postindustrial business career was the very essence of tedium.

  "Janey doesn't sound German, though. Or Mexican either, for that matter. You don't sound German or Mexican either, kid."

  "I do sound pretty German when I speak Spanish," Alex offered. "Can I have some more of that tea?"

  "Sure, have all you want," said Ellen Mae, surprising him. "We're gonna break camp tomorrow. Can't carry much water on the road." She poured him a generous paper-cup-fit! of some acrid herbal soak she'd made from glossy green bush leaves. It sure as hell wasn't tea, but it wasn't as bad as certain Mexican soft drinks he'd sampled. "So we'll use up the spare water now. Tonight we can all have a bath!"

  "Wow!" Alex enthused, sipping the evil brew.

  Ellen Mae frowned thoughtfully. "What is it you do, exactly, Alex?"

  "Me?" Alex said. He considered. the question. He hadn't often been asked it. "I'm a play-testing consultant."

  "What's that?"

  "Well, network computer games . . ." Alex said vaguely, "network dungeons . . . There's not much money in computer games anymore, because of the copyright property screwups and stuff, but there's still, I dunno, cryptware and shareware and the subscription services, right? Some guys who are really into dungeons can still make good money. Sometimes I help with the work."

  Ellen Mae looked doubtful, even though it wa
s almost the truth. Alex had spent most of his teenage years ardently playing dungeons, and since he was generous with his upgrade payments and his shareware registrations, he'd eventually ended up in the fringes of game marketing. Not that he designed games or anything-he didn't have the maniacal attention to detail necessary for that-but he did like to be among the first to play the new games, and he didn't mind being polled for his consumer reactions. On occasion, Alex had even been given a little money for this-all told, maybe five percent of the money that he'd poured into the hobby.

  At eighteen, though, Alex had given up dungeon gaming. It had dawned on him that his numerous dungeon identities were stealing what little vitality remained in his own daily life. The dungeons weren't that much of an improvement, really, over the twisted, dungeonlike reality of a series of sickrooms. Since that realization, Alex had given up gaming, and devoted his time and money to exploring the twisted depths of his own medical destiny and the wonders of the pharmaceutical demimonde.

  "I also collect comics," he offered.

  "Why?" Ellen Mae said.

  "Well, I thought it was really interesting that there was this, like, weird pop-culture thing that's still published on paper instead of on networks." This remark cut no apparent ice with Ellen Mae. Alex plowed on. "I own lots of old American paper comics-y'see, nobody does paper comics in the U.S. anymore, but some of the antique ones, the undergrounds and stuff, never got copied and scanned, so they're not on network access anywhere. So if you're a serious collector, quite often you can buy some art that's just not publicly available. . . . Some art that nobody else can see . . . A piece of art that nobody's accessed or viewed in years!"