Heavy Weather

  "Can I see the baby?"

  "Oh! Sure! Let me turn this down."

  She shut down the stove and led him into the back room. The nursery. The nursery was the first room in the house that actually struck him as a place where Juanita lived. The nursery looked like a room where an intelligent and hyperactive woman with design training had spent a long time thinking hard about exactly how things should look. It was like a big jewel box for a baby, it was like some monster bassinet in shades of fuzzy-cuddly midnight blue. It was the kind of room that created in Alex the instant urge to flee.

  Juanita bent over the antique, hand-stripped, repainted wooden crib and looked in on her child. Alex had never seen quite that expression on her face before, but he recognized it. He recognized it as the place where all Juanita's raw ferocity had gone. All that steamy energy she'd always had, had been sucked into that all-encompassing Madonna look.

  She was actually talking baby talk to the infant. Genuine oogly-googly sounds without enough consonant8 m them. Then she lifted the child up in its little trailing baby dress and handed him over.

  The kid's hairless little noggin was in a little gray skullcap, kind of like a stuffed baked mushroom. Alex was no connoisseur of infants, but even he could tell that his little nephew-Michael Gregory Mulcahey-was not an attractive child. It was hard to tell, with the baby's squashed, cartilaginous little face, but he seemed to have the worst features of both his parents: Juanita's square jaw and Mulcahey's odd, bull-like forehead.

  "Gosh, he's really cute," Alex said. The child reacted with a fitful look and vigorous kicking. There was nothing wrong with the infant's legs. The kid had legs like a centaur.

  "You can't believe it, can you?" Jane said, and smiled.

  "No. Not really. I mean, not until now."

  "Neither could I. I think of all the times I almost took that abortifacient thing, you know. I actually put that pill u~side my mouth once. I was gonna swallow it, and my period was gonna come back, and Jerry and me were gonna be exactly the same, and everything was going to be extremely lifelike. And if I didn't eat that pill, then the consequences were gonna be unimaginable and extremely grave! And I chose consequences, Alex, I did it all on purpose, just like I knew what I was doing. And now I have this little stranger in my life. Only he's not a little stranger at all. He's my baby."

  "I 5CC."

  "I love my baby, Alex. I don't just sort of love him, I really love my baby, I love him desperately, we both do. We dote on him. I want to have another baby."

  "Really."

  "Childbirth's not that bad. It's really interesting. I kind of liked childbirth actually. It felt really intense and important."

  "I guess it would," Alex said. "I want Sylvia to see my nephew."

  JANE FOLLOWED HER brother back to the living room. He carried the child as if Michael Gregory was a wet bag full of live frogs. The strange girl peeled her reptile gaze from the television, and her eyes shot from the baby, to Alex, to Jane, to the baby again, and then to Jane once more, with a look of such dark and curdled envy and hatred that Jane felt stunned.

  "He's really cute," the girl said. "Thanks."

  "That's a nice hat he's got too." "Thank you, Sylvia."

  "That's okay." She started watching TV again.

  Jane carried the baby back to the nursery and put him down. He'd just had his feeding. The baby was good about being handled. He liked to save his most energetic screamings for about 3 A.M.

  "I guess her reaction seemed strange," Alex said. "But babies are kind of a funny topic for women with genetic disorders."

  "She really wanted to see the baby, though. She said she did."

  "It's okay. Sylvia is fine."

  "Did you have the baby scanned for disorders?"

  "Alex . . ." She hesitated. "That's kind of an expensive proposition."

  "Not for me. I know ways, I have contacts. Really, it's no problem; just slip me a little sample, you know, a frozen scraping off the inside of the cheek, we can get a genome rundown started right away, hit the high points, all the major fault centers. Reasonable rates. You really ought to have him scanned, Jane. His uncle has a disorder."

  "We're not very lucky people, are we, Alex?"

  "We're alive. That's lucky."

  "We're not lucky, Alex. This is not a lucky time. We're alive, and I'm glad we're alive, but we're people of disaster. We'll never truly be happy or safe, never. Never, ever."

  "No," he said. He drew a breath. A good, deep breath. "jane. I came here to Austin because I needed to tell you something. I wanted to thank you, Jane. Thank you for saving my life."

  "De nada."

  "No, Jane, it was a hit. You could have let me be, like I was telling you to do, and those quacks would have killed me in that black-market clinica. But you came after me, and you got me, and you even looked after me. And even though we were close to death, and surrounded by death, and we chased deadly things, we both came out alive. We're survivors, and look, there's another one of us now."

  She grabbed his arm. "You want to tell me something, Alejandro? All right. Tell me something that I really want to hear." She tugged him to the side of the baby's crib. "Tell me that's your family, Alex. Tell me you'll help me look after him, like he was family."

  "Sure he's family. He's my nephew. I'm proud of him."

  "No, not that way. I mean the real way. I mean look after him, Alex, really care about him, like when I'm dead, and Jerry's dead, and this city is smashed, and everyone is sick and dying, and you don't even personally like him very much. But you still care anyway, and you still save him."

  "Okay, Janey," Alex said slowly. "That's only fair. It's a bargain."

  "No! Not a bargain, not a money thing, I don't want that from you or from anyone. I want a real promise from you, I want you to swear to me so that I'll never doubt you.

  He looked at her. Her face was tight and her eyes were clouded, and he realized, with a strange little jolt of surprise, that his sister was truly afraid. Juanita had come to know and understand real fear. She was more afraid for this little bundle in the crib than she had ever been for herself. Or for her friends, or for her husband, or for anyone. She had a hostage to fortune now. That baby's sweaty little monkey hands had gripped her soul.

  "All right," he said. He raised his right hand, solemnly. "Juanita Unger Mulcahey, I promise you that I'll look after your son, and all your children. I swear it on our mother's grave. Te lo juro por Ia tumba de nuestra mad re."

  "That's good, Alex." She relaxed, a little. "I really believed you when you said it that way."

  Voices came from the front of the house. Jerry had come home.

  Alex went to meet him in the front room.

  "This is a pleasant surprise," Jerry boomed. He and Alex shook hands.

  Jerry had lost weight. He'd lost the great heaps of muscle on his shoulders, and his arms and legs were of relatively normal dimensions, and his gut looked like the gut of a family man in his thirties. He'd lost more hair, and the sides of the beard were gone now; he had a professorial Vandyke, and a real haircut. He had a shirt, suit jacket and tie, and a leather valise.

  "They must be keeping you busy, Jerry."

  "Oh yes. And you?"

  "I'm getting into genetics."

  "Really. That's interesting, Alex."

  "I felt I had to." He looked hard into Jerry's eyes. Maybe he could, for the first time ever, make some kind of human contact there. "You see, Jerry, genetic treatment changed me so profoundly, I felt I just had to comprehend it. And I mean really understand it, not just get my hands on it and hack at it, but genuinely understand the science. It's a difficult field, but I think I'm up to the challenge. If I work at it hard, I can really learn it." He shrugged. "Of course, ~I still have to go through all that equivalency nonsense first."

  "Right," Jerry said, clear-eyed and nodding sympathetically, "the academic proprieties." Nothing was wrong, and no one was missing, and there were no ghosts at this banquet, and no deep dark secr
ets, and for good old brother-in-law Jerry, life was just life.

  "Done any storm work lately, Jerry?"

  "Of course! The F-6! Extremely well documented. Enough material there for a lifetime."

  Jane spoke up. "Nobody believed it would happen, even though he said it would. And now he's trying to explain to them why it stopped."

  "That's a real problem," Jerry said, savoring it. "A nexus of problems. Nontrivial."

  "The best kind of nexus of problems, I'm sure."

  Jerry laughed. Briefly. "It's good to see you in such good spirits, Alex. You and your friend should stay for lunch."

  "Tacos," Jane said.

  "Good! My favorite." Jerry's eyes glazed. "Just a moment I've got to look after some things first." He vanished into his office.

  Music burst out through Jerry's closed office door, the insistent squeaking and rattling of a Thai pop tune. It was loud.

  "Does he really like that Thai stuff?" Alex asked Juanita.

  Juanita shrugged. "Not really," she said loudly.

  "That's just some of my old college music, but Jerry punches up anything on the box when he works. . . . He plays it to drown out the city noise. To drown out the hum, y'know. So he can think."

  The music segued into an elaborate Asian cha-cha. Sylvia made a face.

  "Let's go in the backyard and I'll show you my garden. The tacos will keep."

  It was quiet in the backyard. It was a lovely spring day. It was sunny and there were honeysuckles and a birdbath.

  "Jerry's always like this when they make him do polynomials," Jane apologized.

  "Always like what? Jerry has always acted just like that."

  "No, not quite like he does now, but . . . well, you don't know him like I do." She sighed. "The labcoat people have really got him where they want him now. The seminars, the lecture tours, the peer review committees . . . If he gets tenure and they offer him the chairmanship, we're gonna have some real problems."

  "What kind of problems?"

  "You don't wanna know. Lemme put it this way- when Mommy gets her claws on some real money again, Mommy's gonna buy Daddy a nice endowed chair where he can sit and think quietly, all by himself." Jane shrugged. "We've been up to Oklahoma City a couple of times to lecture and do media-Jerry's real popular there. . . . It's really weird up there now, that city was just leveled, and they were all completely broke and tragic and desperate, and so they just . . . well, they just threw away all the rule books. And now they're doing the weirdest architecture you can imagine! They're rebuilding everything aboveground, out of dirt-cheap nothing, out of paper and software and foam. The new Oklahoma City is just like a giant, smart, wasp's nest. Have you been up there?"

  "No! But it sounds really worthwhile," Alex said.

  "Yeah. I think so. I think it's the future, frankly. You can tell it's the future, too, 'cause the plumbing hardly works, and it's crowded, and it smells bad. They got the storm problem whipped, though. God help them if they get a fire." She looked at her garden: beans, tomatoes. "I got some special stuff from some Oklahoma agro-engineers during Jerry's last speaking tour. It was kind of a celebrity perk."

  Jane was growing two rows of corn in her backyard. Corn, Zea mays, but with the chlorophyll hack. It had taken the human race quite some time to understand chlorophyll, the chemical method by which plants turned light into food, and when the ancient secret finally came out, the secret had turned out to be a really dumb botch. Even after two billion years of practice, plants had an utterly lousy notion of how to turn light into food. Plants were damn near as dumb as rocks, basically, and their lame idea of capturing sunlight was the silliest, most harebrained scheme imaginable.

  Serious-minded human beings were working on the chlorophyll problem now, and they hadn't done a lot better yet, but they were doing about fifteen percent better, which was not at all bad, considering. And people might do better yet, if they could get living crops to endure the terrible impact of that much-concentrated human ingenuity. And, in tandem, get the ecosystem to survive the terrible consequences should such a technique ever go feral. Alex was really interested in the chlorophyll hack. He'd read a lot about it, and was following the bigger net-discussions. It was just about the neatest hack he'd ever heard of.

  Jane's corn plants were squat and fibrous and ugly, and the ears of corn were about the size and shape of bowling pins. They were splotchy and reptilian green.

  "Wow, those are really nice," said Sylvia..

  "Would you like some for yourself? Just a second." Jane wandered into her backyard garden shed and came out with a drawstring bag. "You can have some spare seeds if you want." She shook half a dozen kernels of corn into Sylvia's outstretched palm. The misshapen kernels were the size of rifle cartridges.

  "Thank you, Jane," Sylvia said gratefully. "These are mega-nice, I really like these."

  "Help yourself," Jane told her. "Can't copyright a living organism! Ha-ha-ha."

  Sylvia wrapped the seeds carefully in her silk kerchief and stuffed them, unselfconsciously, into the thigh-high top of her striped stocking.

  "JANE, COME OU~ in the street for a second," Alex said, opening the side gate to the front yard.

  She followed him. "What are we doing out here?"

  "I want to show you my new car."

  "Okay. Great."

  "I parked it up the street around the corner because I didn't want it associated with your house."

  The car was sitting where he had left it. He'd had to pay a stiff fee to the university police to bring it inside the district.

  "Holy mackerel," Jane said, "looks like they didn't even detach the gun mounts."

  "Those are urban antitheft devices. It's licensed for them too, isn't that great? Technically sublethal."

  Jane's eyes were alight. "You've put it through its paces already, huh?"

  "Yeah. You could say that."

  "What kind of interface is it running?"

  "A mega-dog-meat military interface. That's why I want you to have it for a while."

  "Really?"

  "Yeah, I want you to have this car as long as you like. It's yours, you run it. I'd even sign over the papers, but I don't think that's a really good idea, legally speaking."

  "Oh?"

  "Yeah, and I, uh, wouldn't take it to Hidalgo, Starr, or Zapata counties, or over the border into Reynosa, because it~-inight be slightly hot there."

  Sylvia tugged his sleeve and whispered, "Hey. We need that car! Don't give her the car!"

  "It's all right, trust me," Alex assured her, "Jane's very good with cars, I've never known her to so much as bump a fender." He smiled.

  "You can't just give me a pursuit car, Alex."

  "Sure I can. I just did. Who's gonna stop me? And what's more, I want to see you take it for a spin. Right now. Sylvia and I will do lunch and look after nephew, and I want to see you run this sucker out to Enchanted Rock and tear the hide off of it."

  "I don't think I can do that. Baby needs looking after."

  "Look, Jane, you can't have it both ways. You just made me swear up and down I would guard that child's destiny; you're just gonna have to trust me with him for a couple of hours."

  "Well . . . I'm tempted. I'm really tempted, Alex."

  He leaned toward her, smiling. "Give in."

  "All right!" Suddenly she embraced him.

  It was a solid embrace. It felt surprisingly good to be hugged by one's sister. It was a real gift to have a sister. Not a wife, not a lover, but a woman that you deeply cared about. A friend, a good friend, a powerful ally. An ally against what? Against Nothing, that's what. Against death, against the big empty dark.

  He touched his lips to his sister's ear. "Go and run, sister," he whispered. "Go run!"

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BRUCE STERLING is the author of the nonfiction book The Hacker Crackdown, as well as the novels Involution Ocean, The Artificial Kid, Schismatrix, and Islands in the Net and the short-story collections Crystal Express and Globalhead. He co-a
uthored, with William Gibson, the critically acclaimed novel The Difference Engine. He also edited Mirrors hades, the definitive "cyberpunk" anthology. He lives with his wife and daughter in Austin, Texas.