Heavy Weather

by Bruce Sterling

  Ellen Mae only looked puzzled; she clearly didn't grasp the basic thrill involved in this hobby. Alex continued: "My real specialty is modern Mexican paper comics. The fotonovelas, and the true-crime manga-rags, and the UFOzines and stuff. They're an antique medium in a modern context, and they're this kind of cool nightmare folk art, really. . . . I like them, and they're kinda hard to get. I own lots, though." He smiled.

  "What do you do with them?" Ellen Mae said.

  "I dunno," Alex admitted. "Catalog 'em, put 'em in airproof bags. .. . They're all stored in Houston. I thought maybe that I would pirate-scan them all, and post them on networks, so that a lot more people could see how cool they were. And see how much great stuff I'd collected. But I dunno, that kind of spoils the whole thing, really."

  Ellen Mae looked at him so strangely then that Alex realized he was wading in too deep. He gave her his best smile, humbly offered up a couple of well-peeled roots, and asked, "What do you hack, Ellen Mae?"

  "I hack Comanche," Ellen Mae said.

  "What's that mean?"

  "I was born Out here in West Texas," she told him. "I'm a native."

  "Really." She didn't look like any Comanche Indian. She looked like a big Anglo woman with middle-aged spread in a bloodstained paper suit.

  "I grew up out here on a ranch, back when everything was dying out. . . . There never were a lot of people in this part of Texas. Most of the people just packed up and left, after the aquifers went. And then during the State of Emergency, when the really big drought hit? Well, everything and everybody out here just blew away, like so much dust."

  Alex nodded helpfully and started on another root with his ceramic peeler.

  "Everybody who stayed behind-well, they pretty much stopped farming and ranching, and went into scavenging. Wrecking work, in the ghost towns." She shrugged. "They didn't call it structure hitting back then, because we didn't blow up anything that wasn't already abandoned. I mean, we had reasons to blow stuff up. We wanted to make some money. We didn't blow stuff up just because we liked to watch stuff fall down-all that bullshit came later."

  "Okay," Alex said, sipping his brew.

  "I started to think it through back then, you know. .. . See, Alex, the truth is, nobody should have ever done any farming out here. Ever. This land just wasn't cut Out for farming. And ranching-running cattle on this land just took way too much out of the soil. It wasn't any accident that all this happened. We brought it on ourselves."

  Alex nodded.

  "This was nomad land. The High Plains-they were black with buffalo from here straight to Canada! The biggest migrating herds of animals ever seen in history. They killed the buffalo off with repeating rifles, in twenty years. It took another hundred fifty years to drain off all the water underground, and of course by then the atmosphere was wrecked too. . . . But see, it was all a really bad mistake. The people who settled out here-we destroyed this place. And we were destroyed for doing it."

  Alex said nothing.

  "At the time, you know-people just couldn't believe it. They couldn't believe that this huge area of the good old USA would just end up abandoned by everybody, that the people who settled the land and tamed it-they used to say that a lot, 'taming the land'-that those people would just be driven right out of existence. I mean, at the time it was unprecedented. Seemed really unlikely and abnormal. Of course, it's a pretty damn common business now.

  But at the time there was a lot of government talk about how it was all just temporary, that they were gonna resettle West Texas as soon as they learned how to pipe water down from Minnesota, or melt icebergs, or some other such damn nonsense. . . . Hell, Alex, they're never gonna move the water. It's a hundred times cheaper just to move the people. They were all living in a dreamland."

  "Dreamlands, yeah," Alex said, "I've been in a few of those."

  "And the strangest thing was, that it had all happened before, but nobody learned the lesson. Because it happened to the Comanches. The Comanches lived out here two hundred years-off the land, off the buffalo. But when those buffalo went, well, they were just wiped out. Starved right out of existence. Had to move up to Oklahoma, and live in reservation camps eating food that the government. gave 'em, just like us low-down modern weather tramps. No fight left in 'em." She sighed. "See, Alex, if you got the basics of life, then you can fight for your place in the world. But if you got no food and water, then you got no place at all. You just leave. Go away, or die."

  "Right," Alex said. "I get it." It was clearly doing Ellen Mae some good to get this matter off her chest. It was obvious that she'd discussed all this before. Probably this was a standard lecture she gave all the Troupe wannabes.

  Normally, in a discussion of this sort, Alex would have pitched right in with a few devil's-advocate arguments, just to mess everything up and kinda make it more interesting. Under the circumstances, though, he thought it was wisest to let Ellen Mae talk it out. A good idea, for instance, not to mention the many other places in the world where relocations had been a hundred times worse than in West Texas. After all, the people in West Texas had had the giant, well-developed United States to help them. So that they didn't starve on the spot. They didn't break out in eye-gouging, street-to-street, structure-hitting, down-and-dirty little ethnic wars. And they weren't wiped out by massive septic plagues, all the little predatory bugs that jumped out of the woodwork whenever people got seriously disorganized: dysentery, cholera, typhus, malaria, hantavirus.

  It had been pretty damned stupid to dry up the aquifers in West Texas, but it didn't really compare in scale with the planet's truly monumental ecoblunders. Slowly poisoning the finest cropland in China, Egypt, and India with too much salt from irrigation, for instance. Clear-cutting the jungles in Indonesia and Brazil. The spread of the Sahara.

  But why bring all that up? It wouldn't make Ellen Mae feel any better. If you lost everything, it didn't really ease your pain much to know that other people, somewhere else, might be hurting even worse. People who wanted to judge your pain by your privileges were mean-spirited people-the kind of people who thought it must be big fun to be an invalid, as long as you were rich. Alex knew better. Sure, if he'd been poor, he'd have been dead long ago-he knew that. He wasn't poor. He was a rich kid, and if he had any say about it, he was going to stay that way. But that didn't make his life a picnic. Let her talk.

  "When I figured that much out," Ellen Mae said, "I decided I was gonna learn all about Comanches."

  "How come?"

  She paused. "Alex, there are twokin~ of people in this world. The people who don't wanna know, even if they oughta know. And the people who just have to know, even if it's not gonna help 'em." She smiled at him. "Troupe people-we're all that second kind. People who just have to know, even though we can't do a damn thing about any of it."

  Alex grunted. He was of a different kind, personally. He was the kind who didn't mind knowing, but didn't feel up to devoting much energy to finding out.

  "So I read a lot about Comanches. I mean, with the towns empty and the cattle gone, it was a lot easier to understand that kind of nomad life. . . . That's one good thing about living nowadays. You can read about anything, for nothing, anywhere where there's a laptop screen. So, I read all these on-line books about Comanches, and how they lived, while I was living off the backs of trucks, hunting, and gathering scrap metal.

  "And that's when I started to really understand this land. For instance, why us wreckers got so much heat from the Texas Rangers. Why the Rangers used to just show up out here, and chase down our convoys, and shoot us. They had databases and cell phones and all, but there wasn't anything cute and modern about the goddamned Texas Rangers-the Rangers in the 2020s were exactly the same as the goddamned Texas Rangers in the 1 880s! And if you were some nomad, living out of a tent in West Texas, then the Rangers just weren't gonna be able to stand havin' you around! Simple as that!" She was shaking her soup ladle.

  "They just couldn't stand it, that we were out here wreckin' stuff,
and that we hadn't cleared out for good and gone exactly where the government said we should, when we should. That we didn't pay taxes, or get vaccinations, or have any rule books." She stirred her stew, and tasted it, and started crumbling a dried ancho pepper.

  "Sure, every once in a while a few wrecker boys would get all liquored up and smash up some stuff in towns where there were still people livin'. That happened, and I'm not denyin' it. We weren't all perfect. But the Rangers used that as their excuse for everything. They came right after the wreckiñ' gangs, the Rangers did. They just wouldn't let us live. They broke us up, and they shot us and arrested us, and they put us away in camps."

  "What did you do then?"

  "Well, I didn't get arrested myself, so I went up to Oklahoma to meet some real Comanches."~

  "Really?"

  "Hell yes! There's more Comanches up in Oklahoma right now, after everything, than there were when the tribe was out riding the free range. That's the weirdest part of it. The Comanches didn't die out or anything. They just got changed and moved. They been up there multiplying, just like every other human being in the world. There's thousands of Comanches. They're farmers, and they got little stores and stuff . . . they're big on churches, y'know, big churchgoing people. None of that weirdo cult stuff, but good old-fashioned Christians. I wouldn't call 'em prosperous, they're pretty damned poor people for Americans, but you see a lot worse on TV."

  "I see. So what did you learn from that?"

  Ellen Mae laughed. "Well, I married one. . . . But they know about as much about living off the buffalo as you know about being a German spy, kid. I dunno ... the oldest folks still use the language a little, the smell of the old life is still around, just a little bit. I wanted to learn about herbal lore, about living off the land. I ended up learning a lot about botany. But mostly I learned it off text files and databases. Hell, Alex, it's been a hundred and fifty years."

  She sighed. "That's a long time. I mean, I grew up m West Texas. I was a nice girl from a decent ranchin' family, went to high school, went to church, watched TV, bought dresses and shoes and went to dances.. . . We thought we owned this land. How much of that life do you think is gonna be left in a hundred and fifty years? Fuck-all, Alex. Nothin'."

  "Well, I wouldn't say that," Alex said. "After all, there's government records. The government's real goad about that. Databases and statistics. Stuff on platinum disks that they keep in salt mines."

  "Sure, and in Anadarko there's American Indian museums where everything has got a nice tag on it, but it's gone, kid! The Comanches got smashed and blown away! We got smashed and blown away! First we did it to them.. And then we did it to the land. And then we did it to ourselves. And after we're gone for good, I don't know why the hell anybody is gonna want to know about us."

  Alex was impressed. He'd seen old people talking openly about the declining state-of-the-world on old people's television talk shows, the crustier, more old-fashioned talk shows, without many video effects, where people never did very much. But old people usually seemed pretty embarrassed to bring up such matters right in front of young people. Probably because of the inherent implication that the world's old people were ecological criminals. Who probably ought to be hauled into court by a transgenerational tribunal and tried for atrocities against the biosphere.

  Not that old people would ever allow this to happen, though. There were shitloads of old people still running everything all over the world, and they were in no hurry to give up their power, despite the grotesquely stupid things they'd done with it. Sometimes they would allude to all the awful consequences of heavy weather, but always in very mealymouthed, very abstract ways, as if the disasters surrounding them had nothing to do with anything they'd ever done themselves.

  Alex kinda figured that there might be some kind of reckoning someday. When everybody who might be tound guilty was safely dead and buried. It would probably be like it had been, back when the communist government finally fell in China. Lots of tribunals of guys in suits issuing severe public reprimands to lots of elderly dead people.

  "Well, I can tell that you learned something useful," Alex said. "'Cause I never saw anybody eat like this Troupe eats."

  "Off the land," Ellen Mae said, nodding. "It ain't easy, that's for sure. The old species balance, the original ecology, is completely shot out here. Believe me, it's nothing like the High Plains used to be, and it never will be again. There's all these foreign weeds, invader species, depleted soils, and the climate's crazy. But the West Texas flora was always pretty well adapted to severe weather. So there's still Comanche food around. Stuff like pigweed. Hell, pig-weed's an amaranth, it's a really nutritious grain, but it'll grow in a crack in a sidewalk. Of course, you'd never think to eat pigweed if you didn't already know what it was."

  "Right," Alex said. He'd never seen pigweed-or, at least, he'd never recognized it. He felt a dreadful certainty that he was going to have to eat some of it pretty soon.

  "It's been a long time since anybody was out here, gathering the wild forage. But now the grazing pressure is off the native plants. And there's no more plowing, or crops, or herbicides, or fertilizers. So even though the weather's bad, some of those native plants are coming back pretty strongly. Stuff like poppymallow, and devil's claw, and prairie turnip. There's nowhere near enough for a cityful of civilized people. But for a little tribe of lering nomads, who can cover a lot of ground, well, there's quite a lot of food out here, especially in spring and summer."

  "I guess the Troupe was pretty lucky that you ended up g them," Alex said.

  "No," said Ellen Mae, "there wasn't anything like luck to that."

  AFTER JERRY AND Sam had pored over the forecast, and Joe Brasseur had run through a legal database of likely areas to squat, they picked a destination and announced a route.

  The Troupe broke camp.

  Joe Brasseur, the oldest member of the Troupe, had once referred to breaking camp as "labor-intensive." Jane found that a hilariously old-fashioned term, but she understood what it meant, all right-there was no way to shrug the work off onto machines, so everybody involved just plain had to sweat.

  The Troupe pulled up all the carpets, beat a hundred kilos of dust out of them, and rolled them up neatly. They deflated the bubblepak, and rolled that up too. Peter, Martha, and Rick deftly unstacked the towers-a nerve-racking business to watch-while Greg and Carol and Mickey went after the instrumentation and the wind generator.

  Then there were the tepees and the yurts to strip, collapse, and pack, and the systems to shut down and uncable and stow away. And then there would be the bonfire, and the last big meal in camp, and the ritual bath. . . . Jane pitched in headlong. She felt good after a day off, she felt alert and strong. There was a lot to do, but she knew how to do it. She was ready to work, and she would do it in one daylong blur of harnessed nervous energy, and when it was over, she would sleep in the Troupe bus in the moving dark, and she would feel very satisfied.

  She was hauling a bundled stack of tepee poles to one of the trucks when she saw Alex slouching past her.

  She scarcely recognized her brother at first: a strange, hunched, gnomelike figure, less like a Troupe wannabe than some kind of prisoner of war. He was wearing a dirty paper jumpsuit, a big cardboard-and-paper sombrero, with a big white mask elastic-strapped over his nose and mouth.

  He was carrying a large double-headed digging pick.

  She'd never seen anyone carry a pick with less enthusiasm- Alex was lugging it clumsily, thigh-high, at the end of his outstretched arms, as if it were some kind of barbell.

  He trudged slowly out of the camp. Jane called out to him, waved, then jogged over and caught up to him just past one of the camp's perimeter posts.

  "What's on your mind?" he muttered.

  "Just wanted to see how you're doing," she sai4. She looked into his pale, squinting eyes. "You mind taking off that mask for a second?"

  Alex pulled his mask down, with bad grace. The mask's thin elastic straps had left fou
r little stripes of pale skin across his sunburned cheeks. "Ellen Mae wants me to dig up a root."

  "Oh." Jane thought that Alex looked shaky, and she was pretty sure he'd never touched a pickax in his life. "Are you up to that kind of labor? You just got out of a hospital.

  "I'm not gonna work very hard," he told her patiently. "It's just makework bullshit. Ellen Mae's just getting me out of the way so one of those big radio towers won't fall on my head."

  "You got along all right with Ellen Mae?"

  "I can get along.' Alex sighed. "These people of yours are really something. They remind me of some Santeria people I used to know, in a rancho outside Matamoros. Kind of survivalist compound thing? They had the bunkers, y'know, and the security systems and stuff. . . . Of course, those dope vaqueros were a much heavier outfit than these jokers." Alex thumped the broadside of the pick against the base of one of the perimeter posts. "This thing can't listen to us talking, can it?"

  "Well, yeah, it can," Jane admitted, "but we never record any speech with it. It's just an intruder alarm, with some tasers and pellets and stuff. We can talk."

  "No problem," Alex muttered, watching- a pack of Troupers strip the paper walls from the hangar yurt. "Well, you don't have to worry about me. Run along and go do something useful."

  "Is anybody bugging you, Alex? Rick or Peter or anybody?"

  Alex shrugged. "You're bugging me."

  "Don't be that way. I just want to help you fit in."

  Alex laughed. "Look! You kidnapped me here, I didn't ask to come. I'm sunburned and covered with mosquito bites, and I'm really dirty. The food stinks here. There's not enough water. There's no privacy. It's dangerous! I'm wearing clothes made of paper. Your friends are a pack of hicks and loans, except for your boyfriend, who's a big cigar-store Indian. Under the circumstances, I'm being a really good sport about this."

  Jane said nothing.

  He looked her in the eye. "Stop worrying so much. I'm not gonna do anything stupid. If I were a bigger guy, and a stronger guy, and a nicer guy, I'd go have it out with your boyfriend about that way you've been groaning at night." He shook his head, under the big paper hat. "I won't, though. I think I know what kind of guy Mulcahey is, and I think you're crazy to hook up with a guy like that. But hey, I'm not one to judge. That's your life, that's all your decision."