Heavy Weather

by Bruce Sterling

  Alex wasn't sure how all this was going to turn out for Juanita. She'd known this guy for at least a year now, and it was pretty damned odd for a man and woman who'd been lovers that long not to calm down some. Maybe they were calm now. In which case, the beginning must have been something pretty seriously strange.

  Alex looked down across the landscape. No sign of the convoy. He'd left the convoy far hehind as he mulled things over. Time to turn around ~nd head back a bit.

  As he wheeled the ultralight around, with sluggish machine-assisted caution, he passed the shoulder of ahiil. In the infrared, the highway-it happened to be a paved one-smoldered a bit with trapped day heat, but there was a lot of vivid heat on the far slope of that hill.

  Alex stopped his maneuver and decided to check it out.

  At first, be thought there was an entire army standing there in the road. At least a hundred people. Then he realized that most of the glowing patches of heat were standing on all fours. They were deer. No, goats.

  Somebody had a herd of goats out on the highway.

  Alex clicked open the radio channel. "Alex here," he said. "Rick, the road is full of goats, man, over."

  "Copy, Alex. You see anybody?"

  "Yeah-I think so. Kinda hard to tell from this heights Rick, why would anybody have a herd of goats out on the road in the middle of the night, over?"

  "You got me beat, dude."

  "Maybe they travel at night for better security, like we do."

  "Are they moving?"

  "No, man. Just sitting there."

  "Those could be pharm goats, and they could be goat rustlers, just about to rendezvous with one of those meat-packing trucks out of the city."

  "People do that? Rustle goats?"

  "Some people do anything for money, dude." Alex heard Rick loudly smacking his wide-awake gum into the microphone. "Or maybe they're blockin' the road with goats on purpose, and they got an ambush set up in the brush, over."

  Alex lifted his faceplate and looked out bare-eyed. Pretty hard to tell in the dark, but it looked like there was some pretty thick mesquite on both sides of the road. Good-sized mesquite, too, a couple of stories tall. You could have hidden a big tribe of Comanches in it.

  "Maybe you better come up here, Rick."

  "No way, man, you don't want to desert the rear of the convoy in a possible ambush situation."

  "But you've got the gun, man."

  "I'm not gonna shoot anybody, are you kidding? If these are real bandidos, we're gonna pull the hell back and call the Texas Rangers!"

  "Right," Alex said. "'Death from above.' I kinda figured." He laughed.

  "Look, Medicine Boy, I'll shoot if I have to. But if we just start blowing people away, out in the middle of nowhere without askin' any questions, then we're the ones who are gonna get stomped by the Rangers."

  "Cut your motor and buzz 'em, get a good quiet look."

  "Right," Alex said. "I get it."

  He took several deep huffs of oxygen. It felt lovely. Then he discovered that the motor would not shut down. He couldn't override the controls. Oh well. It wasn't a loud motor, anyway.

  He dropped down a dozen meters over the treetops and crossed the road at an angle, right to left. The goats didn't seem to notice, or care. He did, however, spot the intense infrared glow of some kind of smokeless electric heater at the edge of the mesquite trees. There were people there too-at least half a dozen. Standing up.

  He opened the channel. "Alex here. I count about eighty goats and at least six guys standing by the brush. They're awake. I think they're cooking something, over."

  "I don't like this, over."

  "Me either. Man, you gotta be some kind of hard-ass to steal goats from people who'd raise goats in an awful goddamn place like this." Alex felt surprised at the sudden depth of his own anger. But hell-he himself herded goats. He'd developed a genuine class feeling for goat ranchers.

  "Okay." Rick sighed. "Lemme see who's awake in the convoy.~~

  Alex circled the herd, slowly. More glowing bipedal figures appeared, this time at the other side of the road.

  "Greg says drop a flare and check it out," Rick reported.

  "Right," Alex said.

  He plucked one of the flares from its plastic clip-on mount on the right-hand strut. The flares were old and dusty and covered with military-issue stenciling in Cyrillic. He hadn't imagined them working too well, but at least they were simplicity itself to use.

  He yanked the top off. The flare popped and smoldered and then burst into welding-torch brilliance. Surprised despite himself, Alex dropped it.

  The flare tumbled in a neat parabola and landed bouncing on the highway, at the edge of the goat herd, which immediately panicked. The goats didn't get far, though; they were all hobbled.

  Sharp bangs came from the edge of the road. Alex blinked, saw several men in big hats and shaggy, fringed clothing.

  "Rick," he said, "they're shooting at me."

  "What?"

  "They've got rifles, man, they're trying to shoot me.

  "Get out of there!"

  "Right," Alex muttered. He put some effort into gaining height. The ultralight responded with the grace and speed of a sofa lugged up a ffight of stairs. Blinded by the flare down on ground level, they couldn't seem to see him very well. Their shooting was ragged and they were using old-fashioned, loud, banging, chemically propelled bullets. That wouldn't matter, though, if they kept shooting.

  Alex had a sudden deep conviction that he was about to be shot. Death was near. He had a rush of terror so intense that he actually felt the bullet strike him. It was going to hit him just above the hipbone and pass through his guts like a red-hot burning catheter and leave him dying in his harness dripping blood and spew. He would bleed to death in midair in the grip of a smart machine. The Troupe would call the machine in to land, and they would find him still strapped in his, seat, cold and gray and bloody and dead.

  Knowing with irrational conviction that his life was over, Alex felt a dizzy spasm of terrible satisfaction. Shot dead by men with rifles. It was so much better than the way he'd always known he would die. He was gonna die like a normal person, as if his life had meant something and there had been some real alternative to dying. He was going to die like a Trouper, and anybody who learned about his death would surely think he'd died that way on purpose. Like he'd died for their Work.

  For an insane moment Alex actually did believe in the Work, with his whole heart. Everything in his life had led up to this moment. Now he was going to be killed, and it was all fated, and had all been meant this way from the beginning.

  But the men with guns kept missing him. And after a while the firing stopped. And then a crouching man in the shaggy clothes ran out rapidly to the burning flare in the road, and he stomped it into embers.

  Alex realized that Rick had been shouting scratchily in his ears for some time.

  "I'm okay!" Alex said. "Sorry."

  "Where are you?"

  "Ummm . . . between them and the convoy. Up pretty high. I think they're herding the goats off the road now. Hard to tell . .

  "You're not hurt? How about the aircraft?"

  Alex looked around himself. The ultralight was entirely invisible. He pulled the flashlight from its holster and waved it over the wings, the bow, the propeller housing.

  "Nothing," he said, putting the light away. "No damage, they missed me by ten kilometers, they never even knew where I was." Alex laughed shrilly, coughed, cleared his throat. "Goddamn, that was great!"

  "We're gonna pull back now, man. There's another route . . . come back to the convoy now."

  "You don't want me to throw another flare at 'em?"

  "Fuck no, man! Just stay away from the bastards."

  Alex felt a sudden burst of fury. "There's nothing to these people, man! They're crazy, they're nothing! We should go kick their asses!"

  "Alex, calm down, man. That's the Rangers' job. We chase storms, we don't chase crooks."

  "We coul
d wipe 'em all out right now!"

  "Alex, talk sense. I'm tellin' you there are other routes. We just back up a few klicks and we take a different road. It'll take us half an hour. What do you wanna do-lose half an hour, or walk into a firefight and lose some of your friends?"

  Alex grunted.

  "That's why we put people flying point in the first place, man," Rick said, smacking his gum. "You did a fine job there. Now just relax."

  "Okay," Alex said. "Sure, I get it. If that's the way you want it, sure. Have it your way." He was still alive. Alive and breathing. Alive, alive, alive . .

  CHAPTER 7

  The profession of design," sniffed April Logan, "having once lost its aspiration to construct a better world, must by necessity decay into a work-for-hire varnish for barbarism." April Logan's noble, aquiline head, with its single careful forelock of white hair, began, subtly at first and then with greater insistence, to stretch. Rather like taffy. "The density of information embodied in the modern technological object creates deep conceptual stress that implodes the human-object interface. . . . Small wonder that a violent reactive Luddism has become the definitive vogue of the period, as primates, outsmarted by their own environment, lash out in frenzy at a postnatural world."

  The critic's head was morphing like a barber pole on the slender pillar of her tanned and elegant neck. "The same technology that makes our design tools more complex, vastly increases the number of options in determining how any designed object may appear and function. If there are no working parts visible to the naked eye, then techne itself becomes liquid and amorphous. It required the near collapse of the American republic to finally end the long, poisonous vogue for channel switching and ironic juxtaposition. . . ." April Logan's head was gently turning inside out, in full fine-grain pixelated color. Even her voice was changing, some kind of acoustic sampling that mimicked a female larynx evolving into a helix, or a Klein bottle.

  Jane's belt phone buzzed. At the same instant a classic twentieth-century telephone appeared in midair, to Jane's right. A phone designed by one Henry Dreyfuss, Jane recalled. Professor Logan often spoke of Henry Dreyfuss.

  Jane paused the critic's lecture with a twitch of her glove, then pulled off her virching helmet. She plucked the flimsy little phone from her belt and answered it. "Jane here."

  "Janey, it's Alex. I'm out with the goats."

  "Yes?"

  "Can you tell me something? I- got a laptop here and I'm trying to pull up a fine-grain of the local landscape, and I got some great satellite shots, but I can't find any global-positioning grids."

  "Oh," Jane said. Alex sounded so earnest and interested that she felt quite pleased with him. She couldn't remember the last time Alex had openly asked a favor of her, that he'd simply asked her for her help. "What longitude and latitude are you looking for, exactly?"

  "Longitude 100' 22' 39ff, latitude 34' 07' 25"."

  "That's real close to camp."

  "Yeah, I thought so."

  "Should be about three hundred meters due east of the command yurt." Jerry always set the yurt right on a grid-line if he could manage it. It helped a little with radiolocation and Doppler triangulation and such.

  "Yeah, that's pretty much where me and the goats are now, but I was just checking. Thanks. Bye." He hung up.

  Jane thought this over for a moment, sighed, and put her helmet away.

  She passed Rick and Mickey, beavering away on the system, and the helmeted Jerry, back at his usual weighted pacing. Jerry was starting to seriously wear the carpet. Jane put on her sunglasses and left camp.

  Lovely spring sky. Sweet fluffy altocumulus. You'd think a sky like that could never do a moment's harm.

  She found Alex sitting cross-legged under the shade of a mesquite tree. Getting shade from the tiny pinnate leaves of a mesquite was like trying to fetch water in a sieve, but Alex wore his much-glued sombrero as well. And he was wearing his breathing mask.

  He was messing languidly with the flaccid black smart rope. Jane was surprised, and not at all happy, to see the smart rope again. The thing's primitive user-hostile interface was a total joke. The first time she'd used it, the vicious rope had whipped back like a snapping strand of barbed wire and left a big welt on her shin.

  She walked up closer, boots crunching the spiky grass. Alex suddenly turned.

  "Hi," she said.

  "Hola, hermana."

  "Y'know, if I'd been a coyote, I coulda just walked off with one of these goats."

  "Be my guest." Alex took off the mask and yawned. "Walk off with one of these tracking collars, and Rick will come out with his rifle and exterminate you."

  "What's going on Out here?"

  "Just basking in my glory as hero of the day," Alex drawled. "See my throng of enthusiastic admirers?" The smart rope twitched uneasily as he tried, without success, to fling it at the goats. "I wish you hadn't called the Texas Rangers. I really don't wanna talk to those guys."

  "The Rangers never stay for long. What are you up to?"

  Alex said nothing. He opened his laptop, checked the clock on the screen, then stood up theatrically and looked to the south.

  She turned to match his gaze. An endless vista of odd hump-shaped caprocks dotted with juniper and mesquite, here and there the blobby green lobes of distant prickly pear, a yellow sparkling of tall waving coneflowers. Far to the south a passenger jet kft a ragged contrail.

  "Whoa," he said. "There it is. Here it comes. I'll be damned." He laughed. "Right on time too! Man, it's amazing what a kind word and a credit card can do."

  Jane's heart sank. She didn't know what was about to happen, but already she didn't like it. Alex was watching the horizon with his worst and most evil grin.

  She stepped behind his shoulder and looked across the landscape.

  Then she saw it too. A bouncing machine. Something very much like a camouflage-painted kangaroo.

  It was crossing the hills with vast, unerring, twenty-meter leaps. A squat metal sphere, painted in ragged patches of dun and olive drab. It had a single thick, pistoning, metal leg.

  The bounding robot whipped that single metal leg around with dreadful unerring precision, like some nightmare one-legged pirate. It whacked its complex metal foot against the earth like a hustler's cue whacking a pooi ball, and it bounded off instantly, hard. The thing spent most of its time airborne, a splotchy cannonball spinning on its axis and kicking like a flea against the Texan earth. It was doing a good eighty klicks an hour. As it got closer she saw that its underside was studded with grilled sensors.

  It gave a final leap and, God help her, a deft little somersault, and it landed on the earth with a brief hiss of sucked-up impact. Instantly, a skinny little gunmetal tripod flicked Out from beneath it, like a triple set of hinged switchblades.

  And there it sat, instantly gone as quiet as a coffee table, not ten meters away from them.

  "All right," she said. "What is that thing?"

  "It's a dope mule. From my friends in Matamoros."

  "Oh, Jesus."

  "Look," he said, "relax. It's just a cheaper street version of Charlie, your car! Charlie's a smuggler's vehicle, and this is a smuggler's vehicle. It's just that instead of having two hundred smart spokes and driver's seats and roll bars like that big kick-ass car does, it's only got one spoke. One spoke, and a gyroscope inside, and a global positioning system." He shrugged. "And some mega chip inside so it never runs into anything and no cop ever sees it."

  "Oh," she groaned. "Yeah, this is great, Alex."

  "It'll carry, I dunno, maybe forty kilos merchandise. No big deal. Dope people have hundreds of these things now. They don't cost much to make, so it's like a toy for 'em.

  "Why didn't you tell me about this?"

  "Are you kidding? Since when do I ask your permission to do anything?" He walked up to the mule.

  She hurried after him. "You'd better not."

  "Get away from there!" he yelped. "They're hot-wired." Jane jumped back warily, flinching, and Alex ch
uckled with pleasure. "Tamperproof! Put in the wrong password, and the sucker explodes on the spot and destroys all the evidence! And what's more-if you're not, like, their friend? Or they're tired of dealing with you? Then sometimes they just booby-trap it, and blow you away the second you touch the keypad."

  He laughed. "Don't look so glum. That's all just legend, really. Doper brag talk. The dope vaqueros hardly ever blow anyone up. You and me both know the border doesn't mean anything anymore. There are no more borders. Just free and open markets!" He chuckled merrily. "They can send me whatever the hell they want. Dope, explosives, frozen human hearts, who cares? They're just another delivery service."

  Alex punched a long string of numbers, with exaggerated care, into a telephone keypad welded into the top of the mule. The robot mulled the matter over, then hissed open on a stainless-steel hinge, showing a big rubber 0-ring around its midsection.

  Alex started pulling out the goods. Lots of plastic-wrapped cloth. A pair of cowboy boots. A yellow cylinder tank. A plastic jug. Designer sunglasses in a shockproof case. A handgun.

  Alex tried the sunglasses on immediately, clearly delighted with them. "Here, you can have this," he said, tossing her the handgun. "I'm not interested."

  Jane caught it with a gasp. The handgun was all injection-molded ceramic and plastic, a short-barreled six-shot revolver. It felt hard as a rock and utterly lethal. It weighed about as much as a teacup. It would pass any metal detector in the world and had probably cost all of two dollars to make.

  "You're full of shit!" she said. "If the Rangers found out about this, they'd go ape."

  "Yeah, and the Houston cops wouldn't like it either, if the vaqueros were dumb enough to send a mule bouncin' right down the streets of Houston, but they're not gonna do that, are they? Nobody's that stupid. Nobody knows about this but you and me. And Carol, that is." Alex pulled out a gleaming metal bracelet. "I got Carol this barometer watch! She doesn't know that I bought it for her, but I think she'll like it, don't you? It'll match her Trouper cuff." He tipped his floppy paper sombrero back on his head. "Carol's the only one around here who's been really decent to me."