April Logan stood up. "Forgive me for interrupting your deliberations, but if it's all right with the group, I'd like to ask all of you something."
April Logan looked at Jerry. Jerry lifted his brows.
"Actually, it's something of a poll query."
"Go ahead, just ask," Jane hissed at her.
"My question is: When do you think the human race conclusively lost control over its own destiny? I'd like everyone here to answer, if you don't mind." April produced a handheld notepad. "Please just start anywhere in the arclc-here at my left, will do."
Martha Madronich stood up, reluctantly. "Well, I hate ao first, but in answer to your question, um, Professor, I figured we lost it for good sometime during the or Emergency." She sat down.
Ed Dunnebecke stood up. "I'd have to say 1968. Maybe 1967. If you look at the CO2 statistics, they had a chance to choke it all back right there, and they knew well they were screwing the environment. There was iitely revolutionary potential in the period, and even ~me political will, but they squandered the opportunity in the drugs and the Marxism and the mystical crap, and they never regained the momentum. Nineteen sixty-eight, defiI've said enough."
Greg Foulks stood up. "I'm with Ed on that one, except was one last chance in 1989 too. Maybe even as late after the First Gulf War. Well, that one was actually econd Gulf War, strictly speaking. But after they blew big chance at genuine New World Order in '89 and they were definitely trashed. I've said enough." He sat down.
Carol Cooper stood up. "Well, you hear this question bit, of course. . . . Call me romantic, but I always thought 1914. The First World War. I mean, you look at peace in Europe before the slaughter, and it looks ation might have had a chance to stick. And if we 't blown most of the twentieth century on fascism and communism and the rest of the ism bullshit, maybe we tiM have built something decent, and besides, no matter at Taney says, Art Nouveau was the last really truly looking graphic-art movement. I've said enough." ~am Moncrieff took his turn. "Late 1980s .. . there re some congressional hearings on global warming that rybody ignored. . . . Also the Montreal Accords on chlorofluorocarboflS; they should have passed those with some serious teeth about CO2 and methane, and things would be a lot better today. Still heavy weather, probably, but not insanely heavy. Late eighties. Definitely. I've said enough."
Rick Sedletter rose. "What Greg said." He sat down.
Peter Vierling stood up. "Maybe it's just me, but I always felt like if personal computers had come along in the 1950s instead of the 1970s, everybody would have saved a lot of time. Well . . . never mind." He sat down.
Buzzard stood up. "I think they blew it with the League of Nations in the twenties. That was a pretty good idea, and it was. strictly pig-stupid isolationism on the part of the USA that scragged that whole thing. Also the early days of aviation should have worked a lot better. Kind of a real wings-over-the-world opportunity. A big shame that Charles Lindbergh liked fascists so much. I've said enough."
Joanne stood up. "Nineteen forty-five. United Nations could have rebuilt everything. They tried too. Some pretty good declarations, but no good follow-through, though. Too bad. I've said enough."
Joe Brasseur stood. "I'm with Joanne on the 1940s thing. I don't think humanity ever really recovered from the death camps. And Hiroshima too. After the camps and the Bomb, any horror was possible, and nothing was certain anymore. . . . People never straightened up again after that, they always walked around bent and shivering and scared. Sometimes I think I'd rather be scared of the sky than that scared about other human beings. Maybe it was even worth heavy weather to miss nuclear Armageddon and genocide. . . . I wouldn't mind discussing this matter with you later, Professor Logan. But for the meantime, I've said enough."
Ellen Mae Lankton spoke. "Me? If I gotta blame somebody, I blame Columbus. Five hundred thirty-nine years of oppression and genocide. I blame Columbus, and that bastard who designed the repeating rifle. You'd never find an F-6 on any plain that was still covered with buffalo.
But I've said this before, and I've said it enough." She sat down.
Ed Dunnebecke stood up. "Funny thing, but I think the French Revolution had a very good chance and blew it. Europe wasted the next two centuries trying to do what the Revolution had right in its grasp in 1789. But once you stumble into that public-execution nonsense . . . Hell, that was when I knew the Regime had lost it during the State of Emergency, when they started cablecasting their goddamn executions. Give 'em to Madame Guillotine, and the Revolution will eat its young, just as sure as hell.
Yeah, put me down for 1789. I've said enough."
Jeff Lowe rose to his feet. "'I don't know very much aboui history. Sorry."
Mickey Kiehl stood up. "I think we lost it when we go for nuclear power. They coulda designed much better plants than they did, and a hell of a lot better dissystem, but they didn't because of that moral taint the Bomb. People were scared to death of any kind of iatation' even when a few extra curies aren't really danrous. I'd say 1950s. When the atomic-energy people hid the military-security bullshit instead of really trying make fission work safely for real people in real life. So got all-natural CO2 instead. And the CO2 ruined everying. rye said enough."
Jerry stood up. "I think it's fruitless to look for first sea or to try to assign blame. The atmosphere is a chasystem; humanity might have avoided all those mis~s and still found itself in this conjunction. That begs question of when we lost control of our destiny. We have none now; I doubt we ever had any." with Jerry on this one," Jane said cheerfully. more so. I mean, if you look back at the glacial for the Eemian Period, the one before the last set of ages, there were no people around to speak of, and yet weather was completely crazy. Global temps used to and dip eight, nine, ten degrees within a single cenThe climate was highly unstable, but that was a corntezy natural state. And then right after that, most of rope, Asia, and America were covered with giant cliffs of ice that smashed and froze everything in their path. Even worse than agriculture and urbanization! And a lot worse than heavy weather is now. Pm real sorry that we did this to ourselves and that we're in the fix we are in now, but so-called Mother Earth herself has done worse things to the planet. And believe it or not, the human race has actually had things worse.
"Very good," said April Logan. "Thanks very much for that spectrum of opinion by people who ought to know. Since I have no intention of being here when Dr. Mulcahey's forecast is tested, I'll be taking his advice and leaving Oklahoma immediately. I wish you all the very best of luck." She turned to Jane. "If I can do anything for you, leave E-mail."
"Thanks, April."
"Wait a moment," Carol said aloud. "You don't want to miss the night's entertainment."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Alex is doing something for us, right after the powwow."
Alex. Where was Alex? Jane realized with a guilt-stricken start that she hadn't even missed him.
"Yeah," Rick blurted. "Where is ol' Alex?"
Carol smiled. "Ladies and gentlemen, Alex Unger and his Magic Lariat!"
Alex wandered into the circle of firelight. He was wearing leather chaps and pearl-buttoned shirt and a ten-gallon hat. He'd polished his Mexican boots and put clown white and lipstick on his face.
"Yippee-ti-yi-yo," Peter suggested warily.
Alex whipped the smart rope off his shoulder. He had done something to it, greased it or oiled it somehow; it looked very shiny tonight.
He whipped a little energy into it with a pop of his skinny arm, then sent a big loop of it rotating over his head. His face was stony, perfectly solemn.
The loop hung over him like a halo for a moment, humming with speed. Then he somehow bent the loop sideways and began to jump through it. Not much of a jump really; a feeble hop, so that his bootheels barely cleared the earth; but the loop of smart rope went whizzing past him with impressive buzzing speed, kicking up brief gouts of dirt.
Alex threw the thing a full twenty meters into the air, then sent the loop at its end
ricocheting back and forth, over the heads of the crowd. It went hissing through every point of the circle, darting among them like the head of a snake. People whooped and flinched, some of them whacking out at it with their hands.
The lariat loop at the end of the rope suddenly went square: a raggedly revolving square of spinning rope. Then it turned triangular. Then, amazingly, a five-pointed Texas star. It was more than a little odd to see a cowboy's rope behaving in that fashion; it was, Jane thought dizzily, downright outré.
Alex tugged the star inward, toward himself, then bounced it around the circle, stenciling the star across the earth, bouncing it on its points. Alex turned slowly on his heels. The rope passed unharmed through the flames of the campfire.
People began laughing.
Alex waved with his free hand, in acknowledgment, and then began catching and tossing pieces of flaming wood. He lassoed a burning length of cedar from the fire, tossed it high in the air, and caught it with the end of the loop. He flipped the flaming branch end over end, lassoing it repeatedly with unerring, supernatural accuracy. After a moment Jane realized that the trick wasn't that hard; he wasn't actually casting the rope, he was holding the loop up in waiting, then snapping it shut as the stick fell through it. But the effect was so unnaturally fluid and swift that it actually did look magical. It was just as if her little brother had hog-tied the laws of physics. Jane broke into a gale of laughter. It was the funniest thing she had seen in ages, and by far the funniest thing she had ever seen Alex do.
Now, amazingly, Alex somehow hog-tied his own waist and lifted himself up, hanging in midair. He seemed to lift himself by his own bootstraps. He hung there in space, magically hoisted by his own Hindu rope trick, while the wide loops of smart rope spun around on the earth beneath him, like the rim of a wobbling corkscrew.
First he rolled awhile, slowly spinning himself around, like some lost fancy sock in a laundry. Then he began, clumsily, to hop. He'd mutated the smart rope into a spiraled, wiry pogo stick. The Troupers were falling all over themselves with hilarity. Carol was clinging onto Greg's shoulder, so convulsed with laughter that she was hardly able to look. Even Jerry was laughing aloud.
"My word," April Logan commented. "Why, he's rather good!"
"That's Alex!" Jane told her. "He's my-" She stopped. "He's one of our Troupe."
Jane felt a hand on her shoulder. It was Ed Dunnebecke. Ed bent low, beside her right ear. "I didn't know he was this funny, did you?"
"No, I didn't."
"I gotta leave, Jane, I got business tonight, but your little brother can really hack that thing."
"Yeah, Ed, he can, can't he?"
"It's not a real useful hack, I guess, but hell, this is real entertainment! He's got imagination!"
"Thanks, Ed."
"I'm glad you brought him here. Bye, Janey." He patted her shoulder and left.
Alex was holding on to the rope with both hands, with extra loops snaked around his ankles, and he was rolling around the edge of the circle of Troupers, doing a giant cartwheel. Alex went head over heels, head over heels, head over heels, his clown-white face scything along, while the night rang out with whoops and applause.
Then he lost it suddenly, and wobbled, and fell. He fell headlong, and he fell pretty hard. Dust whumped the earth where his booted legs flopped down.
Everyone was silent. Jane heard the fire crackle.
Alex got up again, quickly but shakily. He slapped dust from his fancy shirt, trying gamely to smile. He'd been to town, somehow, into some neowestern clothing store. Probably sneaked off on a bike to Oklahoma City while nobody was paying attention to him.
He said his first words of the evening. "Spinnin' a rope is fun," he shouted raggedly, "if yore neck ain't in it!"
The Troupe broke into howls of laughter.
"Now for my goldurn pièce de résistance," Alex shouted. He began whipping energy into the rope, his dust-smeared pale face set grimly. The rope rose, began to spin, then to spiral inward. Narrow at the bottom. Broader at the top. It spun so fast that the lines of rope became a glimmering blur.
And faster yet. The fire billowed in the wind of its passage. It was sucking up dust from the ground.
A little toy spike.
The whipping rope was blowing hard enough to feel. As the vortex wandered past her at the end of the rope, Jane felt the rush of wind tugging her hair. Then, up at the very top, the end of the smart rope whipped loose, lashing out above their heads with a nasty whip crack of toy thunder. It cracked again, then a third time. The spike spun faster, with a mean dynamo hum. Alex was putting everything into it that the battery could hold. Jane saw him crouching there, flinching away below, wary, at the edge of control, frightened of his own creation.
Then he turned it off. It sagged in midair, and fell over in a heap of loops. A dead thing, dead rope.
The Troupe applauded wildly.
Alex stooped and gathered the dead rope up in both his arms.
"That's all I've got for y'all," he said, bowing. "Thanks a lot for your kindly attention."
CHAPTER 10
The day dawned bilious yellow and veined with blue, like a bad cheese. The jet stream had shifted, and at last, the high was on the move.
Jane and Alex took Charlie west down Highway 40 in pursuit of ground zero. Jane didn't know why Jerry had assigned her Alex as a chase companion, on this critical day of all days. Maybe to teach her some subtle lesson about the inevitable repercussions from an arrogant good deed.
She had anticipated a mean-spirited battle of wills between herself and her brother, but Alex was unusually subdued. He looked genuinely ill-or more likely, doped. It. would have been only too much like Alex, to sneak into Oklahoma City and score some hellish concoction.
But he did as he was told. He took orders, he tried running the cameras, he kept up with the chase reports from camp, he downloaded maps and took notes. She couldn't call him enthusiastic, but he was watchful and careful, and he wasn't making many mistakes. Actually, Alex wasn't any worse as a traveling companion than any other-Trouper. Somehow, despite everything, he'd actually done it. Her brother had become just another Trouper.
He had his rope with him. He always carried the rope now, looped around his bony shoulder like a broken puppet string. But he'd put away his play-cowboy finery and was wearing a simple paper refugee suit, fresh off the roll. And he'd sponge-washed, shaved, and he'd even combed his hair.
For once, Alex wasn't wearing the breathing mask. She almost wished that he was. With his pale muzzle and striped cheeks, and the waxy skin and too neat hair, he looked like some half-finished project off an undertaker's slab.
Long kilometers of western Oklahoma went by m silence, broken by reports from the Aerodrome Truck and the Radar Bus.
"What's with the paper suit, Alex?"
"I dunno. The other clothes just didn't fit anymore."
"I know what you mean.~~ A lot more long silence.
"Put the top back," Alex said.
"It's really dusty out there."
"Put it back anyway."
Jane put it back. The car began to fill with fine whirling vu There was a nasty hot breeze down at ground level, a breeze from the far west with a bad smell of ashes and ,minimification.
Alex craned his narrow head back and gazed straight the zenith. "Do you see that stuff up there, Janey?"
"It looks like the sky is breaking into pieces."
There was a low-level yellowish haze everywhere, a 1st haze like the film on an animal's teeth, but far up the dust, it was dry and clearer. Clear enough so that mewhere at the stratosphere, Jane could see a little ciru. More than a little cirrus, when she got used to looking r it. A very strange. spiderwebby cirrus. Long, thin, filaof feathery cloud that stretched far across the sky, in parallel waves either, as might be expected from ~nzs, but crossing at odd angles. A broken grid of high, razor-thin ice cloud, like a dust-filthy mirror cracking into hexagons.
"What is that stuff, Janey?"
&nb
sp; "Looks like some kind of Bénard convection," Jane said. It was amazing how much better heavy weather felt when you had a catchphrase for it. If you had a catch-phrase, then you could really talk successfully about the weather, and it almost felt as if you could do something about it. "That's the kind of stratus you get from a very slow, gentle, general uplift. Probably some thermal action way up off the top of the high."
"Why aren't there towers?"
"Too low in relative humidity."
On 283 North, just east of the Antelope Hills, they encountered a rabbit horde.
Although she had eaten far more than her share of gamy, rank, jackrabbit tamales over the past year, Jane had never paid much sustained attention to jackrabbits. Out in West Texas, jackrabbits were common as dirt. Jack-rabbits could run like the wind and jump clean over a parked car, but in her own experience, they rarely bothered to do anything so dramatic. There just weren't many natural predators around to chase and kill jackrabbits, anymore. So the rabbits-they were hares, if you wanted to be exact about it-just ate and reproduced and died in their millions of various nasty parasites and plagues, just like the other unquestioned masters of the earth.
Jackrabbits had gray-brown speckled fur, and absurdly long, veiny, black-tipped ears, and the long, gracile limbs of a desert animal. Glimpsed loping around through the brush, eating most anything-cactus, sagebrush, beer cans, used tires, old barbed wire maybe-jackrabbits were lopsided, picturesque animals, though their bulging yellow rodent eyes rivaled a lizard's for blank stupidity. Until now, Jane had never seen a jackrabbit that looked really upset.
But now, loping across the road like some boiling swarm of gangling, dirt-colored vermin, came dozens of jackrabbits. Then, hundreds. Then thousands of them, endless swarming ragged loping rat packs of them. Charlie slowed to a crawl, utterly confused by a road transmuted into a boiling, leaping tide of fur.
The rabbits were anything but picturesque. They were brown and gaunt with hunger, and trembling and desperate, and ragged and nasty, like junked, threadbare stuffed animals that had been crammed through a knothole. Jane was pretty sure that she could actually smell the jackrabbits. A hot panicky smell rising off them, like burning manure.
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