Heavy Weather

by Bruce Sterling

  The U.S. government had gone nuts over climate regulators during the State of Emergency, pouring money into the global climate modeling at a frantic rate that im;ed even the Pentagon. Boxes like Jerry's were Brob -Jerry's lone system had more raw computational power than the entire planet had possessed in 1995.

  Officially, Jerry's system was "on loan" from the SESCollaboratory, a research net in which Jerry had fairly good standing, but nobody was going to come and repossess it. No~y but the Troupe gave a damn about Jerry's box, really. It was stone obvious now that the problems of climate modeling simply weren't going to yield to raw computational power. Power wasn't the bottleneck at all; the real bottleneck was in the approaches, the approximations, the concepts, and the code.

  Jane opened her favorite laptop, dragged the system monitor onto it off Mickey's sysadmin machine, and checked to see that all the instrumentation was safely down. Peter, Greg, and Martha had been on the job: all the towers were off-line and down now, except for the telecom tower. They always left the telecom for last. It made more sense, really, to take down the security system last, but the perimeter posts were pig stupid and paranoid little entities that reacted to any sudden loss of packets as prima facie evidence of enemy sabotage. Unless they were petted to sleep first, the posts would whoop like crazy.

  An icon appeared on Jane's screen. An incoming phone call-to her own number. Surprised, she took the call.

  A postcard-sized video inclusion appeared in the upper right-hand corner of her laptop. It was a stranger: clean shaven, sandy-haired, distinguished looking, close to forty maybe. Ruggedly handsome, in a funny, well-groomed sort of way. Oddly familiar looking. He wore a shirt, jacket, and tie.

  "Hello?" the stranger said. "Is this Juanita?"

  "Yes?"

  "Good," the stranger said, smiling and glancing down at his desk. "I didn't think this would quite work." lie seemed to be in a hotel lobby somewhere, or maybe a very nicely furnished office. Jane could see a lithograph behind his head and a spray of leaves from an exotic potted plant.

  The stranger looked up from his console. "I'm not getting any video off my side, should I shut down my video feed?"

  "Sorry," Jane said, leaning forward to speak into the laptop's little inset mike. "I'm getting this off a laptop, I've got no camera here."

  "Sorry to hear that," the stranger said, adjusting his tie.

  "Y'know, Juanita, I've never actually seen you. I was quite looking forward to it."

  The stranger had Jerry's ears on the sides of his head. Jane could scarcely have been more surprised if he'd had Jerry's ears on a string around his neck. But then the bump of shock passed, and Jane felt a little cold thrill of recognition. She smiled shyly at the laptop, even though he couldn't see her. "This is Leo, isn't it?"

  "Right," Leo Mulcahey said, with a gentle smile and a wink. "Can we talk?"

  Jane glanced around the command yurt. Mickey and Rick were both in the bath line. They usually gave her a while to work alone before they'd show up to run diagnostics and start lugging machines to the trucks.

  "Yeah," she said. "I guess so. For a little while." It was the first time she had seen Jerry's brother. Leo looked older than Jerry, his cheeks thinner and a little lined, and she was shocked at how good-looking he was. His head had just the shape of Jerry's head, but his haircut was lovely. Jane had been cutting Jerry's hair herself, but she could see now that as a hair designer, she was dog meat.

  "I understand you've been talking with Mom," Leo said.

  Jane nodded silently, but Leo of course couldn't see her. "Yes I have," she blurted.

  "I happen to be in the States again, at the moment. Mom's been filling me in on Jerry's activities."

  "I didn't mean any harm by it," Jane said. "Jerry hardly ever calls your mother, but he doesn't mind if I do it. . . . Sorry if that seemed intrusive on my part."

  "Oh, Mom thinks the world of you, Juanita," said Leo, smiling. "Y'know, Mom and I have never seen Jerry carry on in quite this way before. I'm convinced you must be someone very special."

  "Well . . ." Jane said. "Leo, I just thought of something-I have some photos on disk here, let me see if I can pull them up and feed them to you."

  "That would be good." Leo nodded. "Always feels a little odd to speak to a blank screen."

  Jane punched up the digital scrapbook. "I wanted to thank you for helping me find my brother . . . Alejandro."

  Leo shrugged. "De nada. I pulled a string for you. Okay, two strings. That's Mexico for you . . . walls within walls, wheels within wheels. . . . An interesting place, a fine culture." He looked down again. "Oh yes. That's coming across very well. Nice photo."

  "I'm the one in the hat," Jane said. "The other woman's our camp cook."

  "I could have guessed that," Leo said, sitting up intently. He seemed genuinely intrigued. "Oh, this one of you and Jerry is very good. I didn't know about the beard. The beard looks good, though."

  "He's had the beard ever since I met him," Jane said. "I'm sorry that, um . . . well, that it's been so long. And that you and he don't get along better."

  "A misunderstanding," Leo offered, weighing his words. "You know how Jerry can be . . . very singleminded, am I right? If you're addressing some issue, and it doesn't quite chime with Jerry's current train of thought.

  He's a very bright man of course, but he's a mathematician, not very tolerant of ambiguity." Leo smiled sadly. He has his dignity, Jane thought. That magnetism Jerry has, and that ruthlessness too.

  She found him extremely attractive. Alarmingly so. She could easily imagine fucking him. She could hotly imagine flicking both of them. At once.

  And when they went for each other's throats she'd be smashed between them like a mouse between two bricks.

  She cleared her throat. "Well . . . is there something I can do for you in particular, Leo?"

  "Actually, yes," Leo said. "By the way, you don't mind if I hard-copy these photos, do you?"

  "Oh, go ahead."

  "It's about this strange business with the F-6," said Leo as his printer emitted a well-bred hum. "I wonder if you could explain that to me a little more thoroughly."

  "Well," Jane said, "the F-6 is a theory Jerry has."

  "It sounds a bit alarming, doesn't it? A tornado an order of magnitude larger than any seen before?"

  "Well, strictly speaking it wouldn't be a tornado per se -more of a large-scale vortex. Something smaller than a hurricane, but with a different origin and different structure. Different behavior."

  "Was I right in hearing that this thing is supposed to be a permanent feature of the atmosphere?"

  "No," Jane said. "No. I mean, yes, there is some indication in the models-if you set the parameters just right, there are some, urn, indicators that an F-6 might become a stable configuration under certain circumstances. Look, Leo, we don't emphasize that aspect, okay? The woods are full of nutty amateurs running homemade climate models and declaring all kinds of crazy doomsday crap. It would look really bad if the press started telling everybody that Jerry's forecasting some kind of giant permanent storm over Oklahoma. That's just not responsible behavior from a scientist. Jerry's got problems enough already with the labcoat crowd, without that kind of damage to his credibility.''

  "Jerry does think, seriously, that an F-6 will actually occur, though."

  "Well, yes. We do think that. The mesoscale convection is shaping up, the Bermuda High, the jet stream... Yeah, we think that if it's gonna happen at all, then this is the season. Probably within the next six weeks."

  "A giant, unprecedently large, and violent atmospheric storm. Over the heartland of the United States."

  "Yes, that's right. That's it exactly."

  Leo was silent, and looked grave and thoughtful.

  "Leo, you don't double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere without some odd things happening."

  "I'm used to odd things," Leo said. "I don't believe I'm quite used to this, however."

  "Jerry's not alone in
this line of thought, you know. He's out on a limb, but he's not way out. There are pale oclimatologists in Europe who think that giant storms were real common during the Eemian Interglacial. There's physical evidence in the fossil record."

  "Really."

  "There was also a paper out this year saying that the so-called Akkadian volcanism wasn't volcanic at all, that the dust layers, and their three-hundred-year drought, were entirely atmospheric. That was the Akkadian culture in the Tigris and Euphrates."

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "The Akkadians were the first civilization-2200 B.C., in Mesopotamia? They were the first culture ever, and also the first culture ever destroyed by a sudden climate change."

  "Right," Leo said, "I'm certain these matters have been cover our ~fted and crusading popular press. Exhaustively. And to the full satisfaction of the scientific community." He shrugged, elegantly. "I understand that the weather is crazy now, and the weather will be crazy the rest of our lives. What I don't understand is why Jerry is taking you into this."

  "Me?" Jane said. "Oh! Well, I hack interface. For the Troupe. And I kinds have to get back to work right now, actually."

  "Juanita, you're not taking my point. Suppose this is a really big storm. Suppose that it is a permanent vortex in the atmosphere-as Jerry has said, something like Earth's own version of the Great Red Spot of Jupiter. A permanent planetary sinkhole for excess greenhouse heat, centered somewhere near North Texas. I know that seems like a bizarre supposition, but suppose it's really the truth."

  "Yeah? Well, then I'll be there watching it."

  "You'll be killed."

  "Maybe. Probably. But I'll be there anyway. We'll document it.

  "Why?"

  "Why? Because we can! Because we know! It's what we do! We'll do it for the sake of the survivors, I suppose." Jane ran her hands through her hair, her face stiff. "Anyway, if the P.6 is really a worst-case F-6, then the survivors are gonna be the unlucky ones."

  Leo said nothing. Jane heard an odd rumbling, then realized he was rapidly drumming his fingers on the desktop.

  "I have to go now, Leo. There's a lot of work."

  "Thank you for being so frank with me, Juanita. I appreciate that."

  "My friends call me Janey."

  "Oh. Of course. Hasta Ia vista, Janey." Leo hung up. Jane shivered, looked around herself once more.

  Rick entered the yurt.

  "I've got Med-I mean, I've got Alex riding shotgun in the ultralight tonight," he said. "He said he wanted to go."

  Jane stared at him blankly.

  Rick smiled at her. "I told you that kid really liked all of this."

  ALEX WAS NIGHT-FLYING high over Texas with his head in a helmet and his face wrapped in oxygen. A tiny amber light glowed between his knees, lighting the joystick~ and rolierball. More light leaked from the translucent face shield of the virching helmet, the phantom watery glow of the menu bar falling off his own brow onto the pitch-black wings of the aircraft.

  The hot spark of a global surveillance satellite showed at the horizon. Overhead were a million stars, a sliver of moon, a galactic river fog of Milky Way, a curl of high feathery cirrus. The fan behind his back pushed almost silently, merely sipping power, as it kept slow pace with the Troupe's land convoy, far below.

  If there was anything more pleasant than this, Alex hadn't yet discovered it.

  This time they were letting him actually fly the machine by hand. Buzzard had booted Ultralight Beryl with an obligatory big-dummy's control setting. Any ham-handed lurch at the joystick was instantly dumbed down into a gentle, nonlethal veer or dip.

  Flying under these conditions strongly reminded Alex of riding a motorized wheelchair. Those same 'dainty fingertip controls, that same almost silent buzz of engine, and that same sense of sitting, wrapped with cloying security, in the care of a smart machine. Alex direly wanted to try something stupid, but he wasn't about to try anything stupid under these circumstances. He'd wait till he'd won their confidence, till they gave him a lot more initiative and leeway. Then he'd try something stupid.

  Rick was in Ultralight Amber, casing the landscape be-hind the Troupe. Rick had his rifle. Just before their launches, Rick had given Alex a hair-raising lecture about the cunning and cruelty of backwoods bandits and the dire necessity for constant alertness while "riding point."

  Alex found this pretty hard to swallow-at least as hard as the night's rations had been, a gruesome chop suey of jackrabbit, parched corn, and buffalo-gourd root. It had been a hell of a root, though. It took two men to carry it, and it tasted like a cross between celery and pencil shavings. It was the biggest root the Troupe had ever unearthed.

  Alex couldn't help but feel rather proud of this. And riding point for the Troupe beat the hell out of riding one of -the crammed, overloaded buses. But Alex couldn't imagine that riding point was really all that dangerous. After all, the Troupe chase teams drove on the backroads all over West Texas, and they'd never been stopped and robbed.

  Granted, most bandits, assuming there were any bandits around, wouldn't want to hassle with Juanita and her combat-retrofitted jumping hell spider. Juanita's pursuit car didn't have any guns, but it sure looked as if it ought to, and it moved like a bat out of hell. But the Aerodrome Truck and the Radar Bus were pretty fat and easy targets, chock-full of valuable equipment, yet nobody had bothered them.

  Alex reasoned that if bandits were too timid and out of it to bushwhack a lone bus, there was no way they'd tackle the entire Troupe convoy. The convoy was behind him now, slowly winding its way along the pitch-black road. Two pursuit vehicles, two robot buses hauling trailers, the Radar Bus, the Aerodrome Truck, an old dune buggy, two robot supply jeeps with trailers, three robot pedicab bikes with sidecars, and a small tractor.

  Not a headlight in the lot. All moving in darkness, supposedly for greater security. The smart pursuit cars were leading the way, sniffing out the road with microwave radar. Every once in a while Alex would catch a faint glimpse of light through a bus or truck window-somebody's flipped-up laptop screen, where some Trouper was catching up on work or killing time grepping a disk.

  The convoy looked rather more interesting when Alex clicked the virching helmet into infrared. Then there were vivid putt-putts of grainy pixeled heat out of the alcohol-fueled buses and the ancient dune buggy. The tractor too. Everything else ran on batteries. There was a faint foggy glow of human body heat out the windows of the buses. It was cold at night in a High Plains spring, and the buses were crowded.

  Alex had no gun. He was kind of glad the Troupe hadn't handed out a lot of guns. In his experience, unusual minority social groups with lots of guns tended to get mashed rapidly underfoot by nervous, trigger-happy government SWAT teams. So he had no weapon. He had six dusty, dead-looking emergency flares and a big flashlight.

  Rick had also surreptitiously passed him some ibogaine chewing gum for maximum combat alertness. Alex hadn't tried chewing the gum yet. He wasn't sleepy yet. And besides, he didn't much like ibogaine.

  His earphones crackled. "Rick here. How ya doin'? Over."

  "Fine. Comfy. I reset the seat, over."

  "How'd you do that?"

  "I got out and stood in the stirrups and pulled the pin."

  "You're not supposed to do that."

  "Rick, listen. It's just you and me up here. Nobody's listening, nobody cares. I'm not gonna fall out of this thing. I'd have better luck falling out of a grocery cart."

  Rick was silent a moment. "Don't he stupid, okay?" He clicked off.

  Alex rode on, most of another long hour. It was all right. An hour with oxygen was never boring. He was trying to make the oxygen last, sipping at the tank bit by bit, but he knew the tank would be empty by the time he landed. After that, he was going to have to buy more oxygen somehow.

  He was going to have to start buying stuff for the Troupe.

  For all their rhetoric, Alex could see that this was the crux of the deal, as far .as he was concerned. The same unspoken bargain w
ent for Juanita too, mostly. These people weren't hanging out with Juanita just because they really liked big chunky-hipped cyber-art-school grads. They liked Juanita because she bought them stuff, and looked after their numerous assorted needs. She was their patroness. And he, Alex, was on track to be next car in the gravy train.

  For all that, though, there was the puzzling matter of Jerry Mulcahey. Troupe life all boiled down to Mulcahey in the end, because any Trouper who didn't fear, love, and worship the guy would obviously get their walking papers in short order. Alex still wasn't too sure about Mulcahey's real motives. Mulcahey was a genuinely twisted individual. Alex had been watching Mulcahey closely, and he was pretty sure of two things: (A) Mukahey was genuinely possessed of some kind of genius, and (B) Mulcahey didn't have much idea what the hell money was. When he and Juanita were face-to-face in public, Mulcahey would treat her with odd archaic courtliness: he let her sit down first at the campfire, he'd help her to her feet after, he wouldn't eat until she'd started eating, that sort of thing. Neither of them ever made a big deal of these silent little courtesies, but Mulcahey rarely missed a chance to do them.

  And quite often, if some minor Troupe hassle came up, Mulcahey would let Juanita do all the talking for him. She'd get really animated and deeply into the topic, and he'd get really stone-faced and abstract and reserved. It was just as if he was letting her have his emotions for him. And the two of them clearly thrived on this arrangement. Every once in a while he would suddenly finish one of her sentences, and everyone else would flinch.

  Mulcahey's weirdest symptoms happened when Juanita wasn't watching him at all. She'd be doing her version of some comely girl-thing, like maybe a big stretch-and-bend-over in her thin paper jumpsuit, Mulcahey would all of a sudden get this very highly flammable expression. Like he was a starving man and she was an expensive cordon bleu dinner and he was really trying to be careful, but it was ali he could do not to rip the tablecloth right off her and eat from the broken china on his hands and knees. The look would pass in a hurry, and Mulcahey would get his usual overcontrolled cigar-store-Indian face, but the look was definitely there all right, and it was not the kind of look that a man could fake.