Heavy Weather

by Bruce Sterling

  It was very old and very wild country. It had few roads, and those in poor repair. Around local creekbeds and water holes, people sometimes found twelve-thousand-year-old flint spearheads, mixed with the blackened, broken bones of extinct giant bison. Jane always wondered what the reaction of those flint-wielding Folsom Point peopie had been when they realized they had exterminated their giant bison, wiped them into extinction with their dreadful high-tech ati-atls, and their cutting-edge flint industry, and the all-consuming giant wildfires they'd used to chase whole assembly lines of bison pell-mell off the canyon cliffs. Maybe some had condemned the wildfires and atlatls, and tried to destroy the flints. While others had been sick at heart forever, to find themselves p arty to such a dreadful crime. And the vast majority, of course, simply hadn't noticed.

  The canyon walls of the Breaks played hell with communications. They cast a major radio shadow, and if you got really close to them they could even block satellite relay. That posed no challenge for Pursuit Vehicle Charlie, though, who put his superconductive to work and scuttled up the slope to the top of the largest mesa in the neighborhood. That mesa was helpfully festooned with big towers and microwave horns.

  Jane and Jerry weren't the first to come here for their own purposes. Most of the horns were lavishly stenciled with bullet holes, some old, some new. A structure-hit gang had tagged the tower blockhouses with much-faded graffiti. Old-fashioned psycho-radical slogans like SMASH THE BALLOT MARKET and t.rr m~it EAT DATA and SCREAMING wou SURVIVES, done with that kinky urban folk intensity that urban graffiti had once had, before the spirit had suddenly and inexplicably leached out of it and the whole practice of tagging had dried up and gone away.

  There was a fire pit with some ancient burned mesquite stubs, and a mess of scattered beer cans, the old aluminum kind of beer container that didn't melt in the rain. It was easy to imagine the vanished Luddite marauders, up here with their dirt bikes and guns and howling, chanting boom boxes.

  Jane found this intensely sad, somehow more lonely than if there had never been anyone here in the first place. She wondered who the gang had been, and what in hell they had thought they were doing way out here, and what had become of them. Maybe they were just plain dead, as dead as the Folsom flint people. The state of Texas had always been remarkably generous with the noose, the chair, and the needle, and in the early days of parole cuffs there'd been little complaint about tamperproofing them with contact nerve poison. And that was just the formal way-the polite and legitimate way of erasing people. If the gang had been jumped by Rangers they'd be unmarked graves by the roadside now, green lumps in some overgrown pasture. Maybe they had blown themselves up, trying to cook demolition bombs out of simple household chemicals. Had they snapped out of the madness and achieved a foothold in what passed for real life? Did they have jobs now?

  She'd once asked Carol, tactfully, about the Underground, and Carol had said bluntly: "There is no more alternative society. Just people who will probably survive, and people who probably won't." And Jane could pretty much go with that assessment. Because from her own experience with structure-hit activity, the people who were into that radical bullshit were just like Rangers, only stupider and not as good at it.

  The sun was setting. Off in the western distance, beneath the dissolving clouds, Jane could see, with intense and lovely clarity, the skeletal silhouetting of very distant trees. The trees were whole kilometers away and no bigger than a fingernail paring, and yet she could see the shape of their every branch in the clear still air, stenciled against the colors around the sun, great bands of subtle, gradated, desert color, umber to amber to translucent pearly white.

  The chase was over now. It was time to call camp.

  Jerry got the spider antenna out of its bag and kicked its tripod open and started cranking it into full extension.

  And then the wind stopped. And it grew terribly still.

  And then it began to get hot.

  Jane looked at the barometer readout. It was soaring- moving visibly even as she looked.

  "What's going on?" she said.

  "It's a solitary wave," Jerry said. "It must have peeled off the high somehow." Not a wind, not something you could feel as moving air, but a kind of silent compression wave in the atmosphere, a silent rippling bulge of pressure and heat. Jane's ears popped loudly. The hot air felt very dry, and it smelled. It smelled of drought and ozone.

  She leaned against the car and the edge of the door stung her hand with a sharp pop of static electricity.

  Jerry looked up at the tallest of the microwave horns.

  "Jane," he said in a tight voice, "get back in the car, get the cameras running. Something's happening."

  "All right." She got in.

  It grew darker, and then she began to hear it. A thin, flowing hiss. Not a crackle, but a sound like escaping gas. The tall tower had begun to vent something, to ooze something, something very odd, something like wind, something like fur, something like flame. White, striated, gaseous spikiness, a flickering, rippling presence, at the corners of the old tower's braced galvanized-iron uprights and crossbars. All on one side, vowing up and down one metal corner of the tower, like glowing ball moss. It hissed and it ffickered and it moved a little, fitfully, like the spitting breath of ghosts. She watched it steadily through the binocular cameras, rock steadily, and she called out, very unsteadily, "Jerry! What is it?"

  "It's Saint Elmo's fire."

  Jane suddenly felt the hair rise all over her head. She didn't stop recording, but the electric fire had fallen on her now, it had seeped down and come inside the car with her. The corona lifted her hair like a pincushion. Deep natural electricity was discharging off the top of her head. Her whole scalp, from nape to forehead, felt like an eyelid felt when an eyelid was gently peeled back.

  "I've seen this at Pike's Peak," Jerry said. "I've never seen it at this low an elevation."

  "'Will it hurt us?"

  "No. It should pass us when this wave passes."

  "All tight. I'm not afraid."

  "Keep recording."

  "Don't worry, I've got it."

  And in less than a minute the wave passed. And the fire was gone away from them, the strange deep fire was gone completely. Just as if there had never been anything.

  IT WAS VERY hard to sleep together when you weren't allowed to sleep together. Jane had always had trouble sleeping, always ready to prowl around red-eyed and pull an all-nighter. Jerry had no such problems. Jerry was good at catnaps; he could turn off his virching helmet, lie down on the carpet with his head inside the casket of blackness, sleep twenty minutes, and then get right up and resume his calculations.

  But tonight, although Jerry was silent and still, Jerry wasn't sleeping. Jane had her head in the hollow of his left shoulder, a place that fit her as if it had been designed for her, the place where she had passed the most sweetly restLtd nights of her life. They would come away from a chase and have a furious encounter, and then she would fling one naked possessive leg over him and put her head on his shoulder, and she'd close her eyes and hear his heart beating, and she would tumble headlong into a dark sated slumber so deep and healing that it would have set Lady Macbeth to rights.

  But not tonight. Her nerves felt as tight and high-pitched as a mariachi violin, and she found no comfort in Jerry. Somehow he didn't smell right. And she didn't smell right either: she smelled of topical vaginal ointment, possibly the least erotic scent known to humankind. But unless at least one of them got some real rest, something awful was going to happen.

  "Jerry?" she said. In the still of camp-the ticking of insects, the distant whoosh of the wind generator-even a tender whisper sounded loud as a gunshot.

  "Mmmph."

  "Jerry, I'm getting better now, I really am. Maybe we should try something."

  "I don't think that's a good idea."

  "Okay, maybe you're right, but that's no reason why you should have to lie there stiff as a board. Let me try something, darling, let me see if
I can make you feel better." Before he could say anything, she slipped her hand down and gripped his cock.

  His penis felt so odd and hot in her fingers that for one shocked instant she thought something had gone terribly wrong with him. Then she realized that he didn't have a condom on. She'd touched it before, and even stroked it and kissed it, but never without the condom.

  Well, no harm done. Not just with fingers.

  "All tight?" she said.

  "All right."

  He didn't seem to lack enthusiasm. And if she stopped and got out in the pitch darkness and made him put a condom on, it would be a mega drag. Forget it: so far, so good. She stroked him patiently and persistently, until she got a bad cramp in her forearm. Then she burrowed down into the sleeping bag and tried kissing for a while, and although he didn't come, he at least began to make the right noises.

  Then she came out of the bag for some much-needed air and tried rubbing some more.

  It was taking a very long time. At first she felt intensely embarrassed; and then she got used to it, and began to feel better, thinking that even if this was a very ungainly and unsatisfactory substitute for sex, at least she was doing something practical. At least she was taking charge of their troubles. Then she thought that he was never going to come, that she wasn't skilled or sweet enough to make him do it, and that brought the threat of a cavernous sense of failure.

  But he was stroking her neck and shoulder in an encouraging way, and finally he started breathing seriously hard. Then he groaned in the dark, and she held it carefully, and she felt it pulsing.

  The wetness on her fingers felt viscous and drippy. It felt rather like motor oil. She had seen semen before, and she even knew that odd and particular smell that it had, but never in her life had it actually touched her skin. It was an intimate bodily fluid. Intimate bodily fluids were very dangerous.

  "I'm twenty-six years old," she said, "and this is the first time I've ever touched this stuff."

  He put his arm around her shoulders and hugged her to him. "My sweet darling," he said quietly, "it wont hurt you.

  "I know that. You don't have any viruses. You're not sick! You're the healthiest person I how!"

  "You have no way to really know that, though."

  "Have you ever had sex with anybody, without using a condom?"

  "No, never, of course not."

  "Me either. So then how could you possibly have any STh?"

  "Blood transfusion, maybe? IV drugs? Anyway, I might be lying about the condom use."

  "Oh, for heaven's sake! You're not a liar, I've never known you to lie. You never lie to me!" Her voice trembled. "I can't believe that I've known you all this time, that you're the man I love more than anyone else in the world, and yet I never really knew about this simple thing that you do, this simple thing that comes out of your body." She burst into tears.

  "Don't cry, sweetheart."

  "Jerry, why is our life this way?" she said. "What did we ever do to deserve this? We don't hurt each other! We love each other! Why can't we be like men and women used to be? Why is everything always so difficult for us?"

  "It's for protection.

  "I don't need any protection from you! I don't want any protection from you! I'm not afraid about this! Christ. Jerry, this is the part of being with you that I'm never afraid about! This is the part that's really wonderful with us, it's the part that we're really good at." She held on to him and sobbed.

  He held her close and tight for a long time as she shook and wept. Finally he began to deliberately kiss the tears away from her inflamed and aching face. When their mouths met, she felt a rush of passion so intcnse that her soul seemed to flow from her lips. She slid on top of him in a patch of cooling stickiness and jammed his cock into her aching, needful body.

  And it really hurt. She wasn't at all well, she was sick, she had yeast. It stung and burned, but nowhere near enough to make her want to stop. She put her arms out straight to support herself and started rocking on him in the darkness.

  "Juanita, yo te quiero."

  It was such a perfect, intoxicating thing for him to say at that moment that she lost all sense of herself. She went way past the hurt and into frenzy. Maybe forty seconds of it, something like forty aeons in the hottest Tantric circle of Nirvana. Her yell of exultation was still ringing in her ears when he grabbed her hips hard enough to bruise and rammed into her from underneath and he came, he pulsed, deep inside of her.

  She slid off him, exhausted and drenched with sweat. "My God."

  "I didn't know it was going to feel like that." He seemed stunned.

  "Yes," she said thoughtfully, "it was sort of quick."

  "I couldn't help it," he said. "I didn't know it was going to feel so intense. It's like a completely different experience."

  "Is it really, sweetheart? It's nice for you that way.

  "Yes. Very." He kissed her.

  She felt perfectly calm now. Everything was becoming very clear. That mean-tempered tight-stretched whine in her nerves was completely gone, turned to something like the mellow vibratory afterglow of gently plucked angelic harp strings, and everything was suddenly making a lot of solid good sense.

  "Y'know, Jerry, I think maybe it's the latex that's at fault."

  "What?"

  "I think the condom is my health problem. That I'm allergic to the latex, or whatever they make condoms out of these days, and that's why I got all messed up in the first place."

  "How could you suddenly develop an allergy like that, after a whole year?"

  "Well," she said, "from repeated exposure."

  He laughed.

  "I do have allergies, you know. I mean, not like Alex does, but I have a couple of them. I think we should always have sex this way, from now on. It's sweet, it's good, it's perfect. Except that ... well, everything's all wet. But that's okay."

  "Jane, if we always have sex like this, you're going to get pregnant."

  "Holy mackerel! I never thought of that." The concept amazed her. She might get pregnant. She could conceive a child. Yes, that astounding event could actually take place; there was nothing left to stop it from happening. She felt like a fool for not considering pregnancy, but she simply hadn't; the long shadows of disease and disaster had over-whelmed that whole idea.

  "Just like men and women used to be. Before birth control." Jerry laughed. "Maybe we should count our blessings. If these were the 1930s instead of the 2030s, you'd be a downtrodden faculty wife with five kids."

  "Five kids in less than a year, Professor? You're some kinda guy." Jane yawned, sweetly and uncontrollably.

  Sleep was near, and sleep was going to be so good.

  "They've got those pills for taking care of that, though. Those month-after pills."

  "Contragestives."

  "Yeah, you just eat one pill and your period comes right back. No problem! Government-subsidized and everything." She hugged him. "I think we've got this beat, darling. We're going to be all right now. Everything will be all right. I feel so happy."

  MOST OF THE Troupers were hard at work shuffling data. They were assembling some fairly major net-presentation, to impress some bigwig netfriend of Juanita's, who was due for a visit to camp.

  None of the Troupers struck Alex as showing a particular dramatic flair for net-presentation work, with the possible exception of Juanita herself. But net-presentation was the kind of labor that could be distributed to a million little cut-rate mouse-potato desktoppers all over the planet, and knowing Juanita, it probably would be.

  Carol Cooper, however, wasn't having any of that. Carol Cooper was doing some welding in the garage. "I don't like systems," she told Alex. "I'm very analog."

  "Yes," said Alex, clearing his throat, "I recognized that about you the moment we met."

  "So what's in that big plastic jug there?"

  "You're very direct, I noticed that also."

  Carol put a final searing touch to a length of bent chromed pipe and set it aside to cool. "You sure are
a sneaky little flicker, for a guy your age. Not everybody would have thought to spot-weld a noose on the end of that smart rope." She took off her welding goggles and put on safety glasses.

  "It's a smart lariat now. Lariats are useful. Comanches used to catch coyotes with lariats. From horseback, of course."

  "Of course," Carol scoffed. "Did you know that Janey threw that gun you bought her right down the latrine?"

  "Just as well, it was probably pretty dumb to trust her with a firearm in the first place."

  "You oughta go more easy on Janey," Carol chided. She picked up a dented length of bumper from the dune buggy, and fit it methodically into a big bench vise. She was wearing her barometer watch, under her slashed-paper sleeve. On her right wrist, the opposite wrist from the Troupe cuff.

  "She sure was noisy last night," Carol remarked, meditatively, as she tightened the vise. "Y'know, the first time I ever heard Janey cut loose like that, I thought we were under attack. And then I thought, Christ, she's doing some kind of sick-and-twisted status thing, like she wants everybody to know that Jerry's finally dam' her. But then after a couple weeks, I figured out, that's just the way Janey is. Janey just plain needs to yell. She's not okay unless she yells."

  Carol picked up a big lead-headed mallet and gave the bumper a pair of hard corrective wallops. "But the weirdest p art is that we all got so used to it. For months we all thought it was mega-hilarious, but now we don't even make jokes about Janey's yelling. And then when she stopped yelling for a couple weeks there, we all started to get really worried. But last night, y'know, off she goes. And today, I feel okay again. I feel like maybe we're gonna ace this thing after all."

  "People can get used to anything," Alex said.

  "No, they don't, dude," Carol said sharply. "You only think that 'cause you're young." She shook her head. "How old do you think I am?"