Jane sat, weak-kneed, on one of the cowhide hassocks.
"Leo, what are you doing? What have you gotten into?"
"It wasn't for us. It was never for ourselves. It was for the future."
The woman spoke up again. "The delightful part about the Great Game-I mean, the genuinely clever and innovative part-is that we don't even know what we've done! It all takes place through electronic blinds, and cells, and fail-safes, and need-to-know, and digital anonymity and encryption. One cell, for instance, will think up five potential direct actions. Then another cell will choose just one candidate action from that list of five, and break the action up into independent pieces. And then, yet other cells will distribute that work into small independent actions, so fragmented as to be meaningless. It's just the way engravers used to design money. When money was on engraved paper and money still meant something."
"Right," said the second chess player, nodding. "So that one year, some theorist predicts how useful it would be to have Bengali cholera decimate some overcrowded hellhole of a city. And eight months later, someone watches some little paper sailboats melting in a reservoir."
Jane stared. "Why would anyone do that?"
"The best of reasons," Leo said. "Survival. Survival of humanity, and of millions of endangered species. A chance for humanity to work its way out of heavy weather into real sunlight an& blue skies again. We had a lot of chances to take steps to save our world, and we blew them all, Jane. All of them. We were greedy and stupid and shortsighted, and we threw all our chances away. Not you personally, not me personally, not any of us personally, just our ancestors, of course. No one convenient to blame. But you, and me, and the people here, we are all the children of heavy weather, and we have to live under consequences, we have to deal with them. And the only real way to them is ugly, just unbearably ugly."
"Why you, Leo?"
"Because we know! Because we can! For the sake of the survivors. I suppose." He shrugged. "There's no global... There's no formal, deliberate control over these or events, anywhere. Institutions have given up. vernments have given up. Corporations have given up. 'the people in the room, and the many others who are us and with us, we've never given up. We're the closest this planet has to an actual working government." ane looked around the room. They were agreeing with It wasn't any joke. He was telling a truth that they all and recognized.
"Some of us, most of us, are in the government. But there's not any government in the world that can stand up publicly, and say coldly and openly, that the eight billion people on this collapsing planet are at least four billion people too many. Jane, each year, every year, there are children born on Earth to equal the entire populaot Mexico. That's insanely far too many, and it's been that for eighty years now. The situation is so desperate mat working to solve it is like joining a bomb squad. Every war a bomb explodes, and it's a bomb made of human and every human splinter in that bomb means extincand carbon dioxide and toxins and methane and pestiand clearcutting and garbage and further decline.
There were a lot of ways out once, but there are no more alternatives now. Just people who will probably survive, people who probably won't."
"Leo's being a bit dramatic, as usual, but that's part of bis charm," said the woman, Rosina, with a fond smile at him. Rosina looked like a schoolteacher might look-a teacher with a taste for platinum jewelry and expensive facial surgery. "The Great Game is less romantic than iniaht sound. Basically, it's just another American secret and, and while those are common enough, they iasr long. We're very much like the southern resisace during Reconstruction. Like the Invisible Empire- e Ku Klux Klan. For a decade or so, the Ku Klux Klan was a genuine underground government! Where everybody took turns holding the rope for a minute. So nobody really lynched the darkie. You see, the darky just sort of perished."
She smiled. She said this terrible, heart-freezing thing, and she smiled, because she found it amusing. "And everybody involved went right back to being a county judge and a policeman and a lawyer and the owner of the hardware store. And next week they rode out in their hoods and masks and they killed again. That's exactly what it's like for us, Jane. It can really happen. It has happened. It's happened in the United States. And it's happened here be-fore, long before networks or encryption, or any of the really easy, safe, convenient ways to facilitate large conspiracies. It's not farfetched at all, it's not even hard. It's quite easy if you work at it sincerely, and it's very real, it's real like this table is real." She slapped it.
"Just because we few are dropping out of the game doesn't mean that the Great Game will end," said another poker player. He looked vaguely Asian, with a West Coast accent. There weren't any black people among these people. No Hispanics, either. Jane got the strong impression that ethnic balance hadn't been high on the agenda when they did their recruiting, however people like this did their recruiting. Floating Nietzschean Ubermensch IQ tests in obscure corners of networks, maybe. Intriguing intellectual puzzles that only those of a certain cast of mind could win. Little suction spots in the Net where people could slip into the Underground and never, ever come out . . . "Like AIDS for instance. That bug is a godsend, we might have cured it by now, but there are brave, determined, clever people who will guard every last AIDS variant like a Holy Grail. . . . A virus that kills sexually careless people! While at the same time lowering nnmunity, so that afflicted people become a giant natural reservoir for epidemics. It's thanks mainly to AIDS that new tuberculosis treatments become so useless so quickly. . . . If AIDS didn't exist, we'd have been forced to invent it. If it weren't for AIDS, we'd have ten billion people now, not eight."
"My dear friend Rosina has misled you somewhat with that ancient KKK analogy," said Leo, gently. "We're certainly not racists, we're very multicultural; we never aim to exterminate any ethnic group, we simply work consistently to lower global birthrates and raise global death rates. Really, our activity is no more a lynching than this F-6 is like a lynching. Like the F-6, it's a death remotely traceable to human action, but taking steps to increase the global death rate doesn't make death into murder. An epidemic isn't genocide, it's just another epidemic. Anyway, the vast majority of all our actions are perfectly legal and aboveboard, things that would never raise a second glance! Things such as . . . offering a scholarship to a medical student."
He poured himself some coffee and added steamed milk. "Instead of saving thousands of harmful human lives through public-health measures like clean water and sewers, why not train that doctor to do elaborate, costly measures, like neural brain scans? Usually, the heart and soul of a nation's public-health work are a few very lonely, very dedicated people. They are easy to find, and their organization can be structure-hit in a very subtle way. These selfless neurotics don't have to be shot out of hand or lynched by racists, for heaven's sake. Generally, all they need is a few kind words and a little gentle distraction."
"Yeah, a fad here, a twist there," said the Asian guy, "a brief delay in shipping to some hard-hit famine site, or a celebrity scandal to chase off news coverage of some lethal outbreak . . . The current muddled semilegal situation with drugs, for instance, that was a work of genius. .
A great source of finance for anybody's underground, and the people who shoot up heroin are extremely reckless and credulous. Street drugs will almost never be tested for additives, as long as they supply the thrill. There are narcocontraceptives-one shot makes a woman permanently allergic to the lining of her own uterus, something the woman would never notice, except that a fertilized egg will never adhere to her womb." He nodded sagely. "That works very well with mass inoculations too, if you can manage to contaminate the vaccines. . . . I suppose you could argue the technique's rather sexist, but we've tried covert sterilization with men, and statistics prove that the cohort of fertile women is the real crux of population expansion; it's all in the womb, that's just the way human reproduction works... . People willing to take intravenous drugs are already flirting with suicide; there's no real harm in assis
ting them."
"Not to mention legalizing euthanasia on demand," said the second woman, testily. "And at least that form of suicide tends to be far more male-based."
"The whole military policy of structure hits was based on destroying enemy infrastructure-avoiding the political embarrassment of battlefield deaths so that the enemy populace died of apparently natural causes." It was the radio guy again, sitting ramrod straight in his chair before the scanner. "It was Luddism writ large-the first deliberate policy of national Luddism. That the practice of structure hitting quickly leaked into the American civilian populace only indicates the broad base of support for the practice. . . . Very much like the CIA and lysergic acid, if you don't mind a favorite analogy of mine."
Leo sipped his coffee. "I'm going to miss all of you very much," he confessed.
"I told you he was sentimental," said Rosina.
"It seems such a terrible shame that the talents of a group like this should be wasted on entirely clandestine endeavors. That you'll never have your real due. You all deserve so much better."
"Oh, none of us are any worse off than Alan Turing was," objected the second chess player. "Just more deep, dark, digital spooks."
"Someone will track it down someday," Rosina told Leo, comfortingly. "We ourselves don't know the full extent of Game activities, but there must be tens of thousands of buried traces. . . . Someone in the future, the next century maybe, with time on their hands and real resources for once and some proper database investigation, they'd be able to dig us all up and piece the story together." She smiled. "And utterly condemn us!"
"That's their privilege. A privilege we're giving to the future. Two great privileges-survival and innocence."
"That's why we're dead people now," Rosina said. "You know what we are, Jane? We are lifeboat cannibals. We did something terrible that had to be done, and now we're sitting here, sitting here on these couches right now in front of you, still smacking our lips on the shreds of meat from a dead baby's thighbones. We've done things that are way past sin and become necessity. We are vile little pale creepy creatures that live deep under the rocks, and we belong by rights with the anonymous dead." She turned to the man at the scanner. "How does it look, Red?"
"It looks pretty good," Red said. "Real quiet."
"Then I want to go first. Get this damned thing off me, somebody." She lifted her left arm. No one moved. Rosina raised her voice. "I said I want to go first! I'm volunteering! So who's gonna cut it for me?"
The very young man in the suit stood up. "You know what the hell of this is?" he said to Jane, his dark eyes like two oysters from a can. "The hell is that you bust your ass for five years finding some network doods that are truly elect, and then they turn out to be this crowd of middle-aged rich pols and lawyers! People who post way too much about academic political philosophy shit that doesn't mean anything, and then when it finally comes to taking some real action, it's always somebody else's fault, and they end up hiring some bent Mexican cop to do it for them. Jesus Christ!" He sighed. "Gimme that pneumatic. dood."
The second chess player reached under the leather couch and handed the young man a pair of pneumatic diamond-edged bolt cutters. "You want the safety goggles?"
"Do I look like I want fuckin' safety goggles? Wimp!" He hefted the bolt cutters and turned to Rosina. "Out. Out on the stairs."
The two of them left.
No one said anything for thirty seconds. They dealt cards, they studied the chessboard, Leo pretended huge interest in the broadband scanner. They were in anguish.
Rosina came back in, her wrist bare. A big bright smile. Like a woman on cocaine.
"It works!" gasped the second chess player. "Me next!"
The young man came in with the bolt cutters. The armpits of his suit were soaked with sweat.
"Do me next!" said the second chess player.
"Are you kidding?" said the very young man. "I know statistics. Let somebody else do it this time."
"I'll do it," Leo told the chess player. "If you'll do me afterward."
"Deal, Leo." The chess player blinked gratefully. "You're a straight shooter, Leo. I'm gonna miss you too, man."
They went out of the room. A minute passed. They came back in.
"We're real lucky," said the second chess player. He wiped sweat from his forehead with a canary-yellow washcloth he'd snagged from the bathroom.
"Either that," the very young man scoffed, "or they're not designed as well as we thought. What'd you do with the dead bracelets?"
"Left 'em in the hall."
"We'd better detonate 'em later. Wouldn't want anybody reverse-engineering that circuitry."
"Right," said Leo, with a glance at Jane. "You can see now why the Crimson Avenger became so integral to our group! Only nineteen years old-but there's one of those young rascals in every network; it happens to even the best of company."
"Why did you come here?" Jane asked the Crimson Avenger.
"I been in the Game five years now," the Crimson Avenger muttered. "It gets real old." His face clouded. "And besides, if I don't clear town but good, I'm gonna have to kill both my lame bitchfucker parents! With a fuckin' shotgun!"
Two of the poker players rose-the Asian guy and the second woman. They exchanged a silent glance heavy with deep personal meaning and the man took the bolt cutters and they left together.
Fifteen seconds later there was a loud explosion. Then, screams.
Everyone went white as paper. The screams dwindled to agonized breathy sobs.
The Crimson Avenger reached inside his jacket and pulled Out a snub-nosed ceramic revolver and walked stiff-legged to the door. He yanked it open, leaving it open behind him. There was a brief gabbling wail of anguished terror, and a shot. Then another shot. And then a long, meditative silence. And then another final shot.
Crimson Avenger came back in, with his suit lightly spattered with blood, flying little droplets of blood on the shins of his charcoal-gray trousers. He had the cutters-the diamond jaws of the device were blackened with impact. "Hers blew," he said. "We don't have to do his now. He's dead too."
"I think I've changed my mind," said the first chess player.
Without changing expression, Crimson Avenger lowered his pistol and pointed it at the bridge of the first chess player's glasses. "Okay, dood."
"Never mind, I'm going." He looked at Red, the radioman. "Let's do it."
"I'm going too," said Crimson Avenger.
"Why?" said the chess player.
"Because I got left over, and you're gonna do me last. And because if you wimp out and try to run off with that bracelet on, you're gonna do it with my bullet in your head." He sniffed, and coughed. "Dood, for a guy with three advanced degrees, man, you are fuckin' slow!"
They left. And they came back alive.
"I think a twenty-five-percent mortality rate is extraordinarily good under the circumstances," said Leo.
"Considering the extreme precautions taken to keep us from accomplishing this . . . yes, quite acceptable," said the second chess player.
The television, which had been showing snow, flickered into life again.
"Look, it's hitting Oklahoma City," said the first chess player. He turned up the sound a bit, and the six surviving Garners settled in on the couch, their faces alight with deep interest.
"Look at the way they've networked those urban securicams to catch that first damage wave coming in," said Red. "Not only that, but they are the very first back on the air! The staff at Channel 005 are really technically adept."
"Leave it on 005," said the second chess player. "They're definitely the best fast-response storm team in the country."
"You got it." Red nodded. "Not that we have any choice. I think everything else is still down." He began channel-switching the second set.
"Whoa," Leo told him. "Look at that SESAME satellite shot. . . . That's very odd, people. Oklahoma City seems to be under siege by a giant doughnut."
Rosina chuckled.
"That's a very odd shape, isn't it, Jane? What does it mean?"
Jane cleared her throat. "It means . . . it means that Jerry is right. Because I've seen that shape before, in his simulations. That's not a spike, it's a . . . well, it's a giant torus vortex down on the ground. I mean, you think of a tornado . .. and you turn it sideways and you put the tip of it into the top of it, like a snake eating its own tail.
And it becomes a giant ring, a tows. And it sucks in updraft from all directions outside the ring, and it spews downdraft out the top and sides, and it's stable. And it just gets bigger until all the heat and moisture are gone."
"What does that imply, exactly?"
Jane felt tears slide thinly down her cheeks. "I think it means that all my friends are dead."
"And that Oklahoma City is definitely dog meat," Rosina added.
"Mega," said Crimson Avenger.
Oklahoma City was methodically recording its own destruction. Jane knew immediately that she was seeing history bubble off the screen, an odd and intense kind of history. Like some decadent Roman poet reciting his autobiography as he opened a vein in the bath.
At the touch of the F-6, now in its full fury, Oklahoma City was exploding on television, block by block. It was being sucked up and peeled apart and smashed. Heavily reinforced high-rises were being pulled up bodily out of the ground, like a farmer pulling up carrots. They were very hard and very strong buildings, and when they fell over and started rolling, all their contents would gush out of their windows, in a fountaining slurry of glass and trash and mist. The falling high-rises would rip up big patches of street with them, and when the wind got under the Street, things would start fountaining up. There was a lot of room under the earth in Oklahoma City, a lot of room with a lot of human beings in it, and when the wind got into those 'long shelters it simply blew them like a flute. Manholes blew off the streets and big whale gushes of vapor came Out of the pavement, and then a whole pod of whales seemed to surface under the street, because another skyscraper was slowly falling over and it was ripping up the street surface with its internet links and its indestructible ceramic water pipes and its concrete pedestrian subway.
Heavy Weather Page 29