Heavy Weather

CHAPTER 1

Smart machines lurked about the suite, their power lights in the shuttered dimness like the small red eyes of bats. The machines crouched in inches in white walls of Mexican stucco: an ionizer, a television, a smoke alarm, a squad of motion sensors. A vaporizer hissed and bubbled gently in the corner, emitting a potent reek of oil, ginseng, and eucalyptus.

Alex lay propped on silk-cased pillows, his feet and knees denting the starched cotton sheets. His flesh felt like wet clay, something greased and damp and utterly inert. Since morning he had been huffing at the black neoprene mask of his bedside inhaler, and now his fingertips, gone pale as wax and lightly trembling, seemed to be melting into the mask. Alex thought briefly of hanging the mask from its stainless-steel hook at the bedside medical rack. He rejected the idea. It was too much of a hassle to have the tasty mask out of reach.

The pain in his lungs and throat had not really gone away. Such a miracle was perhaps too much to ask, even of a Mexican black-market medical clinic. Nevertheless, after two weeks of treatment in the dinica, his pain had assumed a new subtlety. The scorched inflammation had dwindled to an interestingly novel feeling, something thin and rather theoretical.

The suite was as chilly as a fishbowl and Alex felt as cozy and as torpid as a carp. He lay collapsed in semidarkness, eyes blinking grainily, as a deeper texture of his illness languorously revealed itself. Beneath his starched sheets, Alex began to feel warm. Then light-headed. Then slightly nauseous, a customary progression of symptoms. He felt the dark rush build within his chest.

Then it poured through him. He felt his spine melting. He seemed to percolate into the mattress.

These spells had been coming more often lately, and with more power behind them. On the other hand, their dark currents were taking Alex into some interesting places. Alex, not breathing, swam along pleasantly under the rim of unconsciousness for a long moment.

Then, without his will, breath came again. His mind broke delirium's surface. When his eyes reopened, the suite around him seemed intensely surreal. Crawling walls of white stucco, swirling white stucco ceiling, thick wormy carpet of chemical aqua blue. Bulbous pottery lamps squatted unlit on elaborate wicker tables. The chest of drawers, and the bureau, the wooden bedframe were all marked with the same creepy conspiracy of aqua-blue octagons. ... Iron-hinged wooden shutters guarded the putty-sealed windows. A dying tropical houseplant, the gaunt rubber-leafed monster that had become his most faithful companion here, stood in its terra-cotta pot, gently poisoned by the constant darkness, and the medicated vaporous damp....

A sharp buzz sounded alongside his bed. Alex twisted his matted head on the pillow. The machine buzzed again. Then, yet again.

Alex realized with vague surprise that the machine was a telephone. He had never received any calls on the telephone in his suite. He did not even know that he had one. The elderly, humble machine had been sitting there among its fellow machines, much overshadowed.

Alex examined the p hone's antique, poorly designed push-button interface or a long groggy moment. The phone buzzed again, insistently. He dropped the inhaler mask and leaned across the bed, with a twist, and a rustle, and a pop, and a groan. He pressed the tiny button denominated ESPKR.

"Hola," he puffed. His gummy larynx crackled and shrieked, bringing sudden tears to his eyes.

"~Quien es?" the phone replied.

"Nobody," Alex rasped in English. "Get lost." He wiped at one eye and glared at the phone. He-had no idea how to hang up.

"Alex!" the p hone said in English. "Is that you?"

Alex blinked. Blood was rushing through his numbed flesh. Beneath the sheet, his calves and toes began to tingle resentfully.

"I want to speak to Alex Unger!" the phone insisted sharply. "~Dónde estd?"

"Who is this?" Alex said.

"It's Jane! Juanita Unger, your sister!"

"Janey?" Alex said, stunned. "Gosh, is this Christmas? I'm sorry, Janey...

"What!" the phone shouted. "It's May the ninth! Jesus, you sound really trashed!"

"Hey..." Alex said weakly. He'd never known his sister to phone him up, except at Christmas. There was an ominous silence. Alex blearily studied the cryptic buttons on the speakerphone. RDIAL, FLAS, PROGMA. No clue how to hang up.The open ph one line sat there eavesdropping on him, a torment demanding response. "I'm okay," heprotested at last. "How're you, Janey?"

"Do you even know what year this is?" the phone demanded. "Or where you are?"

"Uinm... Sure..." Vague guilty panic penetrated his medicated haze. Getting along with his older sister had never been Alex's strong suit even in the best of times, and now he felt far too weak and dazed to defend himself. "Janey, I'm not up for this right now... . Lemme call you back.. .

"Don't you dare hang up on me, you little weasel!" the phone shrieked. "What the hell are they doing to you in there? Do you have any idea what these bills look like?"

"They're helping me here," Alex said. "I'm in treatment. ... Go away."

"They're a bunch of con-artist quacks! They'll take you for every cent you have! And then kill you! And bury you in some goddamned toxic waste dump on the border!"

Juanita's shrill assaultive words swarmed through his head like hornets. Alex slumped back into his pillow heap and gazed at the slowly turning ceiling fan, trying to gather his strength. "How'd you find me here?"

"It wasn't easy, that's for sure!"

Alex grunted. "Good . .

"And getting this phone line was no picnic either!"

Alex drew a slow deep breath, relaxed, exhaled. Something viscous gurgled nastily, deep within him.

"Goddamn it, Alex! You just can't do this! I spent three weeks tracking you down! Even Dad's people couldn't track you down this time."

"Well, yeah," Alex muttered. "That's why I did it that way.~~

When his sister spoke again, her voice was full of grim resolve. "Get packed, Alejandro. You're getting out of there."

"Don't bother me. Let me be."

"I'm your sister! Dad's written you off-don't you get that yet? You're grown up now, and you've hurt him too many times. I'm the only one left who cares."

"Don't be so stupid," Alex croaked wearily. "Take it easy.~~

"I know where you are. And I'm coming to get~ou. And anybody who tries to stop me-you include -is gonna regret it a lot!"

"You can't do anything," Alex told her. "I signed all the clinic papers... they've got lawyers." He cleared his throat, with a long rasping ache. Returning to full alertness was far from pleasant; variant parts of his carcass-up per spine, ankles, sinuses, diaphragm-registered sharp aching protests and a deep reluctance to function. "I want to sleep," he said. "I came here to rest."

"You can't kid me, Alejandro! If you want to drop dead, then go ahead! But don't blow family money on that pack of thieves."

"You're always so goddamned stubborn," Alex said. "You've gone and woke me up now, and I feel like hell!" He sat up straight. "It's my money, and it's my life! I'll do whatever I want with it! Go back to art school." He reached across the bed, grabbed the phone lead, and yanked it free, snapping its plastic clip.

Alex picked the dead phone up, examined it, then stuffed it securely under the pillows. His throat hurt. He reached back to the bedside table, dipped his lingers into a tray of hammered Mexican silver, and came up with a narcotic lozenge. He unwrapped it and crunched it sweetly between his molars.

Sleep was far away now. His mind was working again, and required numbing. Alex slid out of the bed onto his hands and knees and searched around on the thick, plush, ugly carpet. His head swam and pounded with the effort. Alex persisted, being used to this.

The TV's remote control, with the foxlike cunning of all important inanimate objects, had gone to earth in a collapsing heap of Mexican true-crime fotonovelas. Alex noted that his bed's iron springs, after three weeks of constant humidity, were gently but thoroughly going to rust.

Alex rose to his knees, clutching his prize, and slid with arthritic languor beneath the sheets again. He caught his breath, blew his nose, neatly placed two cold drops of medicated saline against the surface of each eyeball, then began combing the clinic's cable service with minimal twitches of his thumb. Weepy Mexican melodramas. A word-game show. Kids chasing robot dinosaurs in some massive underground mall. The ever-present Thai pop music.

And some English-language happytalk news. Spanish happytalk news. Japanese happytalk news. Alex, born in 20 10, had watched the news grow steadily more and cheerful for all of his twenty-one years. As a m~ he'd witnessed hundreds of hours of raw footage: plagues, mass death, desperate riot, unsanitary wreckage, all against a panicky backdrop of ominous and unrelenting environmental decline. All that stuff was still out there, just as every aspect of modern reality had its mirrored shadow in the Net somewhere, but nowadays you had to hunt hard to find it, and the people discussing it didn't seem to have much in the way of budgets. Somewhere along the line, the entire global village had slipped into neurotic denial.

Today, as an adult, Alex found the glass pipelines of the Net chockablock with jet-set glamour weddings and cute dog stories. Perky heroines and square-jawed heroes were still, somehow, getting rich quick. Starlets won lotteries and lottery winners became starlets. Little children, with their heads sealed in virtuality helmets, mimed delighted surprise as they waved their tiny gloved hands at enormous hallucinations. Alex had never been that big a fan of current events anyway, but he had now come to feel that the world's cheerful shiny-toothed bullshitters were the primal source of all true evil.

Alex collided and stuck in a Mexican docudrama about UFOs; they were known as los OVNIS in Spanish, and on 9 de mayo, 2031, a large fraction of the Latin American populace seemed afflicted with spectacular attacks of ozmimania. Long minutes of Alex's life seeped idly away as the screen pumped images at him: monster fireballs by night, puffball-headed dwarfs in jumpsuits of silver lame, and a video prophecy from some interstellar Virgen de Guadalupe with her owll Internet address and a toll-free phone number.

The day nurse tapped at the door and bustled in. The day nurse was named Concepcibn. She was a hefty, nononsense, fortyish individual with a taste for liposuction, face-lifts, and breast augmentation.

"~Ya le hicieron Ia prueba de Ia sattgre?" she said.

Alex turned off the television. "The blood test? Yeah, I had one this morning."

"~Le duele todcwia el ped.~o como anoche?"

"Pretty bad last night," Alex admitted. "Lots better, though, since I started using the mask."

"Un catarro atroz, complicado con una alergia," Concepción sympathized.

"No problem with pain, at least," Alex said. "I'm getting the best of treatment."

Concepciôn sighed and gestured him up. "Todavi~ no acabamos, muchacho, le falta la enema de los pulmones."

"A lung enema?" Alex said, puzzled.

"Today? Right now? ~Ahora?"

She nodded.

"Do I have to?"

Concepciôn looked stern. "jEl doctor Mirabi Ia recetd! Fue muy claro. 'Cuidado con una pulmonia.' El nuevo tipo de pulmonia es peor que eI SIDA, ban muerto ya centenares de personas.

"Okay, okay," Alex said. "Sure, no problem. I'm doing lots better lately, though. I don't even need the chair."

Concepción nodded and helped him out of bed, shoving her solid shoulder under his armpit. The two of them made it out the door of the suite and a good ten meters down the carpeted hall before Alex's knees buckled. The wheelchair, a machine of limited but highly specialized intelligence, was right behind Alex as he stumbled. He gave up the struggle gracefully and sat within the chrome-and-leather machine.

Concepciôn left Alex in the treatment room to wait for Dr. Mirabi. Alex was quite sure that Dr. Mirabi was doing nothing of consequence. Having Alex wait alone in a closed room was simply medical etiquette, a way to establish whose time was more important. Though Dr. Mirabi's employees were kept on the hustle-especially the hardworking retail pharmacists-Dr. Mirabi himself hardly seemed oppressed by his duties. As far as Alex could deduce from the staff schedules, there were only four long-term patients in the whole clinica. Alex was pretty sure most of the clinica's income came from yanquis on down from Laredo. Before he himself had ~ckecfin last April, he'd seen a line of Americans halfway down the block, eagerly picking up Mexican megadosage ~strums for the new ultraresistant strains of Th.

Dr. Mirabi's treatment room was long and rectangular and full of tall canvas-shrouded machinery. Like every place else in the clinica, it was air-conditioned to a deathly chill, and smelled of sharp and potent disinfectant. Alex wished that he had thought to snag a fotonovela on the way out of his room. Alex pretended distaste for the nave-las' clumsy and violence-soaked porn, but their comically distorted gutter-level Spanish was of a lot of philological interest.

Concepción opened the door and stepped in. Behind her, Dr. Mirabi arrived, his ever-present notepad in hand. Despite his vaguely Islamic surname, Alex suspected strongly that Dr. Mirabi was, in fact, Hungarian.

Dr. Mirabi tapped the glass face of his notepad with a neat black stylus and examined the result. "Well, Alex," he said briskly in accented English, "we seem to have defeated that dirty streptococcus once and for all."

"That's right," Alex said. "Haven't had a night sweat in ages."

"That's quite a good step, quite good," Dr. Mirabi encouraged. "Of course, that infection was only the crisis symptom of your syndrome. The next stage of your cure" -he examined the notepad-"is the chronic mucus congestion! We must deal with that chronic mucus, Alex. It might have been protective mucus at first, but now is your metabolic burden. Once the chronic mucus is gone, and the tubercles are entirely cleansed-cleaned..." He paused. "Is it 'cleaned,' or 'cleansed'?"

"Either one works," Alex said.

"Thank you," the doctor said. "Once the chronic mucu~ is scrubbed away from the lung surfaces, then we can treat the membranes directly. There is membrane damage in your lungs, of course, deep cellular damage, but we cannot get to the damaged surfaces until the mucus is removed." He looked at Alex seriously, over his glasses. "Your chronic mucus is full of many contaminations, you know' Years of bad gases and particles you have inhaled. Environmental pollutions, allergic pollens, smoke particles, virus, and bacteria. They have all adhered to the chronic mucus. When your lungs are scrubbed clean with the enema, the lungs will be as the lungs of a newborn child!" He smiled.

Alex nodded silently.

"It won't be pleasant at first, but afterward you will feel quite lovely."

"Do you have to knock me Out again?" Alex said.

"No, Alex. It's important that you breathe properly during the procedure. The detergent has to reach the very bottom of the lungs. You understand?" He paused, tapping his notepad. "Are you a good swimmer, Alex?"

"No," Alex said.

"Then you know that sensation when you swallow water down the wrong pipe," said the doctor, nodding triumphantly. "That choking reflex. You see, Alex, the reason Mother Nature makes you choke on water, is because there is no proper oxygen in water for your lungs. The enema liquid, though, which will be filling your lungs, is not water, Alex. It is a dense silicone fluid. It carries much oxygen dissolved inside it, plenty of oxygen." Dr. Mirabi chuckled. "If you lie still without breathing, you can live half an hour on the oxygen in a single lungful of enema fluid! It has so much oxygen that at first you will feel hyperventilated."

"I have to inhale this stuff somehow, is that it?"

"Not quite. It's too dense to be inhaled. In any case, we don't want it to enter your sinuses." He frowned. "We have to decant the fluid into your lungs, gently."

"I see."

"We fit a thin tube through your mouth and down past the epiglottis. The end of the tube will have a local anesthetic, so you should not feel the pain in the epiglottis very long.... You must remain quite still during the procedure, try to relax fully, and breathe only on my order."

Alex nodded.

"The sensations are very unusual, but they are not dangerous. You must make up your mind to accept the procedure. If you choke up the fluid, then we have to begin again."

"Doctor," Alex said, "you don't have to go on pet.~ suading me. I'm not afraid. You can trust me. I don't stop.

I never stop. If I stopped at things, I wouldn't be here now, would I?"

"There will be some discomfort."

"That's not new. I'm not afraid of that, either."

"Very well, Alex." Dr. Mirabi patted Alex's shoulder. "Then we will begin. Take your place on the manipulation table, please."

Concepciôn helped Alex to lie on the jointed leather table. She touched her foot to a floor pedal. A worm gear whined beneath the floor. The table bent at Alex's hips and rose beneath his back, to a sharp angle. Alex coughed twice.

Dr. Mirabi drew on a pair of translucent gloves, deftly unwrapped one of his canvas-bound machines, and busied himself at the switches. He opened a cabinet, retrieved a pair of matched, bright yellow aerosol tanks, and inserted both tanks into sockets at the top of the machine. He attached clear plastic tubing to the taps on the tanks and opened both the taps, with brief pneumatic hisses. The machine hummed and sizzled a bit and gave off a hot waft of electrical resistance.

"We will set the liquid to blood heat," Dr. Mirabi explained. "That way there is no thermal shock to the tuberdes. Also heat will dissolve the chronic mucus more effectively. Efficiently? Is it 'efficiently' or 'effectively'?"

"They're synonyms," Alex said. "Do you think I might throw up? These are my favorite pajamas."

Concepción stripped the pajamas off, then wrapped him briskly in a paper medical gown. She strapped him against the table with a pair of fabric belts. Dr. Mirabi approached him with the soft plastic nozzle of the insert, smeared with a pink paste. "Open widely, don't taste the anesthetic," he warned. Alex nevertheless got a generous smear of the paste against the root of his tongue, which immediately went as numb as a severed beef tongue on a butcher's block.

The nozzle slid its way down a narrow road of pain along his throat. Alex felt the fleshy valve within his chest leap and flap as the tube touched and penetrated. Then the numbness struck, and a great core of meat behind his heart simply lost sensation, went into nothingness, like a core mechanically punched from an apple.

His eyes filled with tears. He heard, more than saw, Dr. Mirabi touching taps. Then the heat came.

He'd never known that blood was so hot. The fluid was hotter than blood, and much, much heavier, like fizzing, creamy, molten lead. He could see the fluid moving into him through the tube. It was chemical-colored, aqua blue. "Breathe!" Dr. Mirabi shouted.

Alex heaved for air. A bizarre reverberating belch tore free from the back of his throat, something like the cry of a monster bullfrog. For an instant he tried to laugh; his diaphragm heaved futilely at the liquid weight within him, and went still.

"El nina tiene un bulto en la garganta," said Concepcion, conversationally. She placed her latex-gloved hand against his forehead. "Muy doloroso."

"Poco a poco," Dr. Mirabi said, gesturing. The worm gear rustled beneath the table and Alex rose in place, liquid shifting within him with the gut-bulging inertia of a nine-course meal. Air popped in bursts from his clamped lips and a hot gummy froth rose against his upper palate.

"Good," said Dr. Mirabi. "Breathe!"

Alex tried again, his eyes bulging. His spine popped audibly and he felt another pair of great loathsome bubbles come up, stinking ancient bubbles like something from the bottom of LaBrea.

Then suddenly the oxygen hit his brain. An orgasmic blush ran up his neck, his cheeks. For a supreme moment he forgot what it was to be sick. He felt lovely. He felt free. He felt without constraint. He felt pretty sure that he was about to die.

He tried to speak, to babble something-gratitude perhaps, or last words, or an eager yell for more-but there -was only silence. His lungs were like two casts of and bonemeal, each filled to brimming with hot ber. His muscles heaved against the taut liquid bags two fists clenching two tennis balls, and his ears road and things went black. Suddenly he could hear his straining to beat, thud-thud, thud-thud, each coau shock of the ventricles passing through his liquid-filled lungs with booming subaqueous clarity.

And then the beat stopped too.

ON THE EVENING of May 10, Jane Unger made a reconnaissance of her target, on the pretext of buying heroin. She spent half an hour in line outside the clinic with desolate, wheezing Yankees from over the border. The customers lined outside the clinic were the seediest, creepiest, most desperate people she'd ever seen who were not actual criminals. Jane was familiar with the look of actual criminals, because the vast network of former Texas prisons had been emptied of felons and retrofitted as medical quarantine centers and emergency weather shelters. The former inhabitants of the Texan gulag, the actual criminals, were confined by software nowadays. Convicted criminals, in their tamper-proof parole cuffs, couldn't make it down to Nuevo Laredo, because they'd be marooned on the far side of the Rio Grande by their 6overnment tracking software. Nobody in the clinic line wore a parole cuff. But they were clearly the kind of people who had many good friends wearing them.

All of the American customers, without exception, wore sinister breathing masks. Presumably to avoid contracting an infection. Or to avoid spreading an infection that they already had. Or probably just to conceal their identities while they bought drugs.

The older customers wore plain ribbed breathing masks in antiseptic medical white. The younger folks were into elaborate knobby strap-ons with vivid designer colors.

The line of Americans snaked along steadily, helped by the presence of a pair of Mexican cops, who kept the local street hustlers off the backs of the paying clientele. Jane patiently made her way up the clinic steps, through the double doors, and to the barred and bulletproof glass of the pharmacy windows.

There Jane discovered that the clinic didn't sell any "brown Mexican heroin." Apparently they had no "heroin" at all in stock, there being little demand for this legendary substance among people with respiratory illnesses.

Jane slid a private-currency card through the slit beneath the window. The pharmacist swiped Jane's card through a reader, studied the results on the network link, and began to show real interest. Jane was politely abstracted from the line and introduced to the pharmacist's superior, who escorted her up to his office. There he showed her a vial of a more modern analgesic, a designer endorphin a thousand times more potent than morphine. Jane turned down his offer of a free trial injection.

When Jane haltingly brought up the subject of bribery, the supervisor's face clouded. He called a big pnvatesecurity thug, and Jane was shown out the clinic's back entrance, and told not to return.

Keep It Simple, Stupid. The famous KISS acronym had always been Jane's favorite design principle. If you need access, keep it simple. Bribing the staff of the clinic sounded like the simplest solution to her problem. But it wasn't.

At least one of the staff seemed happy enough to take her bribe money. Over a long-distance phone line from Texas, Jane had managed to subvert the clinic's receptionist. The receptionist was delighted to take Jane's electronic funds in exchange for ten minutes' free run on the clinic's internal phone system.

And accessing the clinic's floor plans had been pretty simple too; they'd turned out to be Mexican public records. It had been useful, too, to sneak into the building under the simple pretext of a drug buy. That had con-finned Jane's ideas of the clinic's internal layout.

Nothing about Alex was ever simple, though. Having talked to her brother on the phone, Jane now knew that Alex, who should have been her ally inside the enemy gates, was, as usual, worse than useless.

Carol and Greg-Jane's favorite confidants within the Storm Troupe-had urged her to stay as simple as possible.

Forget any romantic ninja break-and-enter muscle stuff.

That kind of stunt hardly ever worked, even when the U.S.

Army tried it. It was smarter just to show up in Nuevo Laredo in person, whip out a nicely untraceable debit card, and tell the night guard that it was ~iejanaro Unger out the door, or No bay dinero. Chances were that the guard would spring Alex in exchange for, say, three months' salary, local rates. Everybody could pretend later that the kid had escaped the building under his own power. That scheme was nice and straightforward. It was pretty hard to prosecute criminally. And if it ended up in a complete collapse and debacle and embarrassment, then it would look a lot better, later.

By stark contrast, breaking into a Mexican black-market clinic and kidnapping a patient was the sort of overly complex maneuver that almost never looked better later.

There'd been a time in Jane Unger's life when she'd cared a lot about "later." But that time was gone, and "later" had lost all its charm. She had traveled twelve hundred kilometers in a day, and now she was on foot, alone, in a dark alley at night in a foreign country, preparing to assault a hospital single-handed. And unless they caught her on. the spot, she was pretty sure that she was going to get away with it.

This was an area of Nuevo Laredo the locals aptly called "Salsipuedes," or "Leave-if-you-can." Besides Alex's slick but modest clinic, it had two other thriving private hospitals stuffed with gullible gnngos, as well as a monster public hospital, a big septic killing zone very poorly managed by the remains of the Mexican government. Jane watched a beat-up robot truck rumble past, marked with a peeling red cross. Then she watched her hands trembling. Her unpainted fingertips were ivory pale and full of nervous jitter. Just like the jitter she had before a storm chase. Jane was glad to see that jitter, the fear and the energy racing along her nerves. She knew that the jitter would melt off like dry ice once the action started. She had learned that about herself in the past year. It was a good thing to know.

Jane made a final check of her equipment. Glue gun, jigsaw, penlight, cdlular phone, ceramic crowbar-all hooked and holstered to her webbing belt, hidden inside baggy paper refugee Suit. Equipment check was a calm-ritual. She zipped the paper suit up to the neck, over icr denim shorts and cotton T-shirt. She strapped on a plain white antiseptic mask.

Then she cut off the clinic's electrical power.

Thermite sizzled briefly on the power pole overhead, and half the city block went dark. Jane swore briefly inside her mask. Clearly there had been some changes made lately in the Nuevo Laredo municipal power grid. Jane Unger's first terrorist structure hit had turned Out to be less than surgical.

"Not my fault," she muttered. Mexican power engineers were always hacking around; and people stole city power too, all kinds of illegal network linkups around here... . They called the hookups diablitos, "little devils," another pretty apt name, considering that the world was well on its way to hell... . Anyway, it wouldn't kill them to repair one little outage.

Greg's thermite bomb had really worked. Every other week or so, Greg would drop macho hints about his military background doing structure hits. Jane had never quite believed him, before this.

Jane tied a pair of paper decontamination covers over her trail boots. She cinched and knotted the boot covers tightly at the ankles, then ghosted across the blacked-out street, puddles gleaming damply underfoot. She stepped up three stone stairs, entered the now pitch-black akove at the clinic's rear exit, and checked the street behind her. No cars, no people, no visible witnesses.....ane pulled a translucent rain hood over her head, cinched and knotted it. Then she peeled open a paper pack and pulled on a pair of tough plastic surgical gloves.

She slapped the steel doorframc with the flat of her hand.

The clinic's door opened with a shudder.

Jane had structure-hit the door earlier, on her way out of the clinic. She'd distracted her security escort for two vital seconds and craftily jammed the exit's elaborate keypad lock with a quick, secret gush of glue. Jane had palmed the aerosol glue can, a tiny thing not much bigger than a shotgun cartridge. Glue spray was one of Carol's favorite tricks, something Carol had taught her. Carol could do things with glue spray that were halfway to witchcraft.

Despite the power outage, the door's keypad lock was still alive on its battery backup-but the door mistakenly thought it was working. Smart machines were smart enough to make some really dumb blunders.

Jane closed the door gently behind her. It was chilly inside the building, pitch-black and silent and sepulchral. A good thing, because she'd immediately begun to sweat like crazy in the stifling gloves, hood, overalls, mask, and boots. Her armpits prickled with terror sweat as if she were being tattooed there. Cops-or worse yet, private-industry investigators-could do plenty with the tiniest bits of evidence these days. Fingerprints, shoeprints, stray hairs, a speck of clothing fiber, one lousy wisp of DNA...

Jane reached inside her paper suit through a slit behind its hip pocket. She unclipped the penlight from her webbing belt. The little light clicked faithfully under her thumb and a reddish glow lit the hail. Jane took a step down the hall, two, three, and then the fear left her completely, and she began to glide across the ceramic tiling, skid-dancing in her damp paper boot covers.

She hadn't expected burglary to be such a visceral thrill. She'd been inside plenty of ruined buildings-just like everyone else from her generation-but she'd never broken her way into a live one. A rush of wicked pleasure touched her like a long cold kiss on the back of the neck.

Jane tried the first door to her left. The knob slid beneath her latexed fingers-locked. Jane had a handheld power jigsaw on the webbing belt that would slice through interior door locks like a knife through a wedding cake, and for a moment her left hand worked inside the paper suit and she touched the jigsaw's lovely checkered rubber grip. But she stopped. She wisely resisted the urge to break into the room just for the thrill of it. Would they be locking Alex into a room at night? Not likely. Not night-owl Alex.

Stubborn, mean-tempered, night-owl Alex. Even at death's door, Alex wouldn't put up with that.

Next door. Unlocked. Room empty.

Next door. It was unlocked too. Some kind of janitor's supply, rags and jugs and paper. A good place to start a diversionary fire if you needed to.

Next door. Unlocked. The room stank. Like cough medicine cut with absinthe. Little red-eyed machines on the walls and floor, still alive on their battery backup. Jane's dim red light played over a big empty bed, then on a startling knot of hideous shadow-some kind of half-wilted monster houseplant.

She hadn't found her brother yet, but she could sense his presence. She slipped through the door, closed it gently, leaned her back against it. The reek in the room pried at her sinuses like the bouquet off a shot of cheap whiskey. Jane held her breath, playing the penlight around. A television. Some kind of huge clothes hanger like an outsized trouser press. .. a wardrobe... scattered tape cassettes and paper magazines

Something was dripping. Thick oily dripping, down at floor level. It was coming from the big trouser-press contraption. Jane stepped toward the machine and played her light across the floor. Some kind of bedpan there.

Jane half knelt. It was a white ceramic pot, half-full of a dark nasty liquid, some kind of dense chemical oil. Grainy stuff like fine coffee grounds had sunk to the bottom, with a nasty white organic scum threading the top, just like a vile egg-drop soup. As Jane watched, a sudden thin -drool of the stuff plummeted into the pot.

Her light went up. It discovered two racks of white human teeth. A human mouth there, with tight-drawn white lips and a stiff blue tongue. The head was swaddled in bandages, a thick padded strap at the forehead. Some kind of soft rubber harness bar was jammed into the gaping jaws. .

They had him strapped to a rack, head down. Both his shoulders strapped, both his wrists cuffed at his sides, his chest strapped down against the padded surface. His knees were bound, his ankles cuffed. The whole rack was tilted skyward on a set of chromed springs and hinges. Up at the very top, his pale bare feet were like two skinned animals. Down at the bottom, his strap-swaddled head was just above the floor.

They were draining him.

Jane took two quick steps back and slapped her plastic-gloved hand against the mask at her mouth.

She fought the fear for a moment and she crushed it. And then she fought the disgust, and she crushed that too.

Jane stepped back to the rack, deliberately, and put her gloved hand at the side of Alex's neck. It was fever-hot and slick with his sweat.

He was alive.

Jane examined the rack for a while, her eyes narrowing hotly. The fear and disgust were gone now, but she couldn't stop her sudden hot surge of hatred. This was probably a fairly easy machine to manage, for the sons of bitches who were used to using it. Jane didn't have time to learn.

She undid the stop locks on the casters at the bottom, shoved the whole contraption to the side of the big bed, and toppled it, and Alex, onto the mattress, with one strong angry heave.

The straps on his chest were easy. Just Velcro. The padded latches on his wrists and ankles were harder: elaborate bad-design flip-top lock-down nonsense. Jane yanked her jigsaw and went through all four of the evil things in ten seconds each. There was bad noise-a whine and a muted chatter-with a sharp stench of chewed and molten plastic. Not too much noise, really, but it sounded pretty damned loud inside a blacked-out building. Someone might come to investigate. Jane patted the glue pistol in its holster at the back of her webbing belt.

When the last strap went, Alex tumbled off the rack into her lap. She rolled her brother faceup and checked his eyeballs. Cold, cold as a mackerel, even while his fevered skin was as hot as the shaved hide of a lab rabbit.

She'd have to carry him out.

Well, Alex had been pretty easy to carry the last time she had tried it. When he'd been five years old, and she'd been ten. Jane knelt on the bed and methodically clipped her jigsaw back onto her belt, inside her paper Suit. And then she thought somberly about the strength that it would take to do this thing.

Jane rolled off the bed onto her feet, grabbed her brother by both his slender wrists, and heaved.

He slid across the sheets like an empty husk. Jane jammed her left shoulder under his midriff and hoisted him in a fireman's carry, flinging her left arm across the backs of his knees... . The moment she had him up, she realized that she was strong enough-more than strong enough. There was nothing left of her brother but birdbone and gristle.

Fluid gurgled loudly out of him and spattered the backs -of her legs.

Jane staggered through the door and into the hail. She heard footsteps overhead, somewhere up on the second floor, and a distant mutter of puzzled voices. ....he lurched down the hall toward the exit and pulled the jimmied door open, right-handed. Her brother's lolling head cracked against the jamb as she stumbled through.

She pulled the door shut behind her, then sank to her knees on the cool pavement of the alcove. Alex sprawled bonelessly over her in his backless medical gown. She slid Alex aside onto the chill stone paving.

Breathing hard, Jane felt at the webbing belt and yanked out her cellular phone. She pushed little glowing yellow numbers with her thumb.

"Hello," her car recited cheerfully. "I am Storm Pursuit Vehicle Charlie. There's no one aboard me right now, but if you have an ID, you can give me verbal orders. Other-. wise, leave a message at the beep."

Jane pressed the digits 56#033.

"Hello, Juanita," the car replied.

"Come get me," Jane panted. "You know where. Come quick."

SHE'D FORGOTTEN HOW fast Charlie could move when there were no human beings aboard it. Freed from the burden of protecting human flesh from g-forces. the robot car moved like a demented flea.

Charlie landed on the street in front of her with a sharp hiss of pneumatics, at the far end of a twenty-meter leap. It then began noisily walking sideways, up and across the pavement.

"Stop walking sideways," Jane ordered it. "Open your doors." She braced herself against the wall of the alcove, squat-lifted Alex onto her unused and un-aching right shoulder, and made it down the stairs. "Turn around," she puffed.

Charlie spun around with microprocessed precision, its pistoned wheel spokes wriggling.

Jane heaved and shoved her brother into the passenger seat, closed the door, and stepped back, panting. Her knees trembled so badlythats ettootiredtowalk.

"Turn around again!" she ordered. Charlie spun neatly in place, on the damp and darkened street. Jane clambered shakily into the driver's seat. "Go fast!"

"Not until you're strapped in."

"All right, go at a conventional pace while I am strapping us in," Jane grated. "And stop using Jerry's verbal interface at me."

"I have to use Jerry's verbal interface when I'm out of range of the Troupe's uplink and in conventional mode," the car said, rolling daintily down the street.

Jane struggled to strap her unresisting brother into the vehide harness. His blond head lolled like a daisy at the end of a stalk and his floppy arms were like two bags of wax. It was just too cramped inside the car, no use.

Jane lurched back into her own seat, frustrated. "Well, can you run my interface if you segue into unconventional mode?" she said.

"UHMMMMMMMM..." the car temporized, for a full fifteen seconds. "I think I can do that, if we pull over and I reboot."

"No, no!" Jane said. "God, nd Don't reboot! Just get US Out of town on the route that you have in memory."

"Okay, Juanita, will do."

"Jesus," Jane said. She folded up the steering wheel to make more room and succeeded in wedging her brother upright against the passenger door. He coughed then, twice, blue drool appearing at his lips.

Jane peeled her plastic gloves off, then whipped the rain hood from her hair. Her hair was sweat-caked to her scalp -she tugged at it with damp sweaty fingers. She'd been doing okay until she'd had to manage heavy lifting.

She yanked the paper covers from off her trail boots, then peeled and shrugged her way out of the paper suit, down to her shirt and shorts, much to the bemusement of passing night-owl pedestrians on the Avenida Guerrero.

Jane methodically stuffed the boot covers, and the gloves, and the paper suit, all into the rain hood. She drew the hood's drawstring tight and repeatedly stomped the evidence into a small wad. She eighty-sixed the saw blade -incriminating traces of plastic on it now-and, just for luck, the glue canister too. If they were mad enough about the break-in to hire a good P1, then they might trace the glue batch. Jane hated to throw away good hardware, but on mature consideration, it was a lot less troublesome than getting clamped into a Mexican electronic bail cuff, down at the juzgado.

She detached all her tools from the webbing belt, carefully set the tools and the belt into the metal kit box in back.

The car crossed before the Mercado Maclovio Herrera, heading toward the old international bridge. She hoped nobody was in the mood to take any special notice of Charlie. On a dark night, the car could pass for a standard smuggler's vehicle, a vehicle rather too common to notice in towns either side of the border.

Jane pulled into the darkest corner of a parking lot, beside a gigantic, thriving supermarket tobacconist's. Even at midnight, rings of Yankee addicts were steadily packing their lungs with smoke. Jane yanked another paper refugee jut from the U.S. government carton, and in a seven minute determined struggle, she crammed Alex's arms and into the suit and zipped him up to the neck. She didn't ye any shoes for Alex. She should have thought about goddamned shoes.

When they crossed the flood-swollen Rio Grande, Jane grabbed the car's roll bar, stood up in her seat, and flung all the criminal evidence over the railing. Let them arrest her for littering. Or maybe for illegal discharge into an aquifer.

Jane pulled over at a U.S. Customs booth. An elderly customs officer emerged, with long snow-white hair, a walrus mustache, and a hand-carved mahogany cane. He tottered over to her car.

When Jane saw how proudly and carefully the old gentleman had darned and brushed his U.S. Customs jacket, she took an instant liking to him.

"Nice car," he drawled.

"Thank you, sir."

The officer tapped one of Charlie's spring-mounted antennas with his cane. "Ex-military stuff?"

"Yeah!" Jane told him brightly. "Actually it's a knock-off of an American Special Forces all-terrain vehicle." Jane paused. "It's been kind of modified."

"Looks that way..." He nodded, moving spryly around it. There wasn't room inside Charlie for any serious amount of contraband. Unlike the usual smuggler's vehicle, Charlie didn't have a trunk. It had a short flatbed, now empty, and the car's engine was grafted into the axles, spokes, and hubs. Charlie basically resembled a double glass coffin mounted onto a wheeled spider.

"You're letting this car drive itself tonight, miss?"

The old man had actually called her "miss." Jane couldn't recall anyone calling her "miss" since she'd turned twelve years old. She was charmed by the Customs man's stately anachronism. She smiled at him.

"It's got a license," Jane said. "Want to see it?"

"That's okay," he grumbled. "What's with Junior here?"

"Big party in town," Jane said. "He overdid it tonight, and he's passed out. You know how it is with kids these days."

The Customs officer looked at her with pity. "You didn't mean to tell me that, did you, miss? You meant to tell me the truth, and say that he's sick, didn't you?"

Jane felt her face go stiff.

The old man frowned. "Miss, I can recognize this situation. God knows we see it often enough, down here. Your friend there is sick, and he's wasted too, on who-knows-what.... We don't allow that kind of goings-on here on American soil... . And there's some dang good reasons why it's not allowed up here...

Jane said nothing.

"I'm not telling you this just to hear myself chatter, y'know."

"Look, Officer," Jane said. "We're American citizens. We're not criminals." She held up her bare wrist. "If you want to turn us back from here, then we'll go back to Mexico. But if I had anything I really wanted to hide from you, then I wouldn't even stop here at all, would I? I wouldn't even take the road. This is an all-terrain vehicle, okay? I can ford the river anywhere I want, and be in San Antonio in two hours."

The Customs officer tapped the toe of his polished shoe with his cane.

"If you want to lecture me, Officer, okay, that's fine. I'm listening. I even agree with you. But get real."

He stared briefly into her eyes, then looked aside and rubbed his mustache. "It floats too, huh?"

"Of course this car floats. It swims! I know it looks like solid steel, but that's all foamed metal there. Without the batteries, the whole car only weighs ninety kilos. I can deadlift this car all by myself!"

Jane stopped. The old man seemed so crushed that she felt quite sorry for him. "Come on, Officer. I can't be telling you anything new here, right? Haven't you ever caught one of these things before?"

"To tell you the truth, miss, we don't even bother catching 'em nowadays. Not cost-effective." He peeled off an adhesive sticker and attached it to Charlie's front roll bar. "Y'all take care now." He waved them on: Jane let the car drive. They were through Laredo and onto the highway in short order. Even with the prospect of a ten-hour drive in darkness, Jane felt far too wired to sleep. She knew from experience that she was about to pull another all-nighter. She'd be up and jumping till 8:00 A.M., then grab maybe three hours' doze, and be back up and after it again, with nothing to show for it but a sharpened temper. She'd never been much good at sleeping, and life around Jerry Mulcahey's people had only wound her up tighter.

As the city lights of Laredo faded behind her, stars poured out overhead. It was a clear spring night, a little mare's-tail cirrus on the western horizon. She'd once heard Jerry say that it bothered him to ride a car in complete darkness. Jerry was thirty-two, and he could remember when people did most of their own driving, and even the robots always left their headlights on. Jane, by contrast, found the darkness soothing. If there was anything really boring about the experience of driving at night, it was that grim chore of gripping a wheel with your own hands and staring stiff-necked for hours into a narrow cone of glare. In darkness you could see the open sky. The big dark Texas sky, that great abyss.

And you could hear. Except for the steady rush of wind, Charlie was almost silent; a faint whir of tough plastic tread lightly kissing the highway, the frictionless skid of diamond axles. Jane had taped or glued everything on the car that would rattle. Jane did not permit her machines to rattle.

Jane heard Alex gurgling as he breathed. She turned on a small interior light and checked her brother again. In the feeble amber glow he looked very bad. At his best, Alex was not an attractive young man: gaunt, hollow-chested, pop-eyed, with a thin bladelike nose and clever narrow bird-claw hands. But she'd never seen him look this supremely awful. Alex had become a repulsive physical presence, a collapsed little goblin. His matted blond hair stood up in tufts across his skull, and he stank. Not just sweat reek-Jane was used to people who stank of sweat and camp smoke. A light but definite chemical stench emanated from her brother's flesh. They'd been marinating him in narcotics.

She touched his cheek. His skin was chilly and damp now, like the skin on a tapioca pudding. The paper refugee suit, still fresh from the carton but already badly wadded, made him look like a storm victim in deep shock, someone freshly yanked from wreckage. The kind of person whose demand for your help and attention was utter, total, immediate-and probably more than you could bear.

Jane turned on the radio, heard a great deal of en-cry p ted traffic from banks, navigation beacons, and hams, and turned it off again. Funny what had happened to the broadcast radio spectrum. She turned on the car's music l~ox. It held every piece of music that had ever meant anything to her, including stuff from her early childhood that she'd never managed to erase. Even with sixteen-digit digital precision, everything she'd ever recorded took up only a few hundred megabytes, the merest sliver in the cavernous memory of a modern music box.

Jane played some Thai pop music, cheerful energetic bonging and strumming. There'd been a time, back in design school, when Thai pop music had meant a lot to her. When it seemed that a few dozen wild kids in Bangkok were the last people on earth who really knew what it meant to have some honest fun. She'd never figured out why this lovely burst of creativity had happened in Bangkok. With AIDS still methodically eating its way into the vast human carcass of Asia, Bangkok certainly wasn't any happier than most other places. Apparently the late 2020s had just somehow been Bangkok's global moment to shine. It was genuinely happy music, bright, clever music, like a gift to the world. It felt so new and fresh, and she'd listened to it and felt in her bones what it meant to be a woman of the 2020s, alive inside, and aware inside.

It was 2031 now. The music was distant now, like a whiff of good rice wine at the bottom of an empty bottle. It still touched something inside her, but it didn't touch all of her. It didn't touch all the new parts.

ALEX WOKE IN wind and darkness. Rapid warbling music was creeping up his shins. The music oozed like syrup into his skull and its beat gently pummeled him into full consciousness. With awareness came recognition: Thai pop gibberish. No other noise had quite that kind of high-pitched paralyzing sweetness.

Alex turned his head-with a painless squeaking dee p in the vertebrae of his neck-and he saw, without much real surprise, his sister. Barely lit by the tiny amber glow of a map light, Juanita sat perched in the driver's seat. Her head was thrown back, her elbows were propped on her bare, hairy knees, and she was munching government-issue granola from a paper bag.

The sky above them was a great black colander of stars.

Alex closed his eyes again and took a slow deep breath. His lungs felt truly marvelous. Normally his lungs were two wadded tissues of pain, two blood-soaked sponges, his life's two premiere burdens. But now they had somehow transmuted into two spotless clean-room bags, two crisp high-tech sacs of oiled wax paper, two glorious life-giving organs. Alex had a savage cramp in his lower back, and his feet and hands were so chilled by the whipping night wind that they felt like the feet and hands of a wax dummy, but that didn't matter. That was beside the point.

He couldn't believe how wonderful it felt just to sit there breathing.

Even his nose was clear. His sinuses. His sinuses felt as if they'd been steam-cleaned. He could smell the wind. There was sage in it, the fervent bitter reek of a ten-thousand-year-old Texas desert gone mad with repeated heavy rains. He could even smell the sweet reek of federally subsidized dietary sucrose on Juanita's munching teeth. Everything smelled so lovely.

Except for himself.

Alex shifted in the seat and stretched. His spine popped in four places, and blood began to tingle back into his numbed bare feet. He coughed. Dense liquid shifted tidally, deep within his chest. He coughed again, twice. Dregs of goo heaved and fizzed within his tubercles. The sensation was truly bizarre, and remarkably interesting. The slime they'd pumped into him tasted pretty bad, oiling the back of his tongue with a thick bitter nastiness, but its effect on his lungs and throat was ambrosial. He wiped happy tears from his eyes with the back of his wrist.

He was wearing a paper refugee suit. He'd never actually worn one before, but he'd certainly seen plenty of them. Paper suits were the basic native garb of the planet's derelict population. A modern American paper refugee suit, though utterly worthless and disposable, was a very high-tech creation. Alex could tell, just by stirring around inside it, that the suit's design had absorbed the full creative intelligence of dozens of federal emergency-management experts. Whole man-years, and untold trillions of CAD-CAM cycles, had vanished into the suit s design, from the microscopic scale of its vapor-breathing little paper pores, up to the cunning human ergonomics of its accordioned shoulder seams. The paper suit was light and airy, and though it flapped a little in the night wind, it kept him surprisingly warm. It worked far better than paper clothing had any natural right to work.

But, of course, it was still paper clothing, and it still didn't work all that well.

"Nice fashion choice," Alex said. His larynx had gone slick with oil, and his voice was a garbled croon.

Juanita leaned forward, turned up the interior lights, and shut off her music.

"You're awake now, huh?"

Alex nodded.

Juanita touched another button at the dash. Fabric burst from a fat slot above the windshield and flung itself above their heads. The fabric hissed, flopped, sealed itself, and became a roof of bubbled membrane. A sunburned dome of stiff ribbed fabric that looked as dry and brown and tough as the shell of a desert tortoise.

Juanita turned to him in the sudden bright windless silence inside the car. "How d'you feel?"

"I've been worse," Alex whispered gluily, and grinned a little. "Yeah. I feel pretty good."

"I'm glad to hear that, Alex. 'Cause it's no picnic, where we're going."

Alex tried to clear his throat. Blood-hot oil clung to his vocal cords. "Where are we?"

"Highway 83, West Texas. We just passed Junction, headed toward San Angelo. I'm taking you where I live."

Juanita stared at him, as if expecting him to crumble to pieces on the spot. "Actually I don't live anywhere, anymore. But I'm taking you to the people I stay with."

"Nice of you to ask permission, Janey."

She said nothing.

This was a different kind of silence from his sister. Not irritated silence. And not barely controlled fury. A deep, steely silence.

Alex was nonplussed. He'd never been on good terms with his sister, but in the past he'd always been able to come in under her radar. He'd always been able to get at her. Even when worse came to worst, he could always successfully catch some piece of her in his teeth, and twist.

"You shouldn't be doing this, you know," he said. "They were helping me."

Silence.

"You can't stop me from going back there if I want to."

"I don't think you're gonna want to go back," Juanita told him. "That clinic won't be happy to see you again. I had to break you Out. I structure-hit the building and I glue-gunned a guard."

"You what?"

"Ever seen a guy get glue-gunned? It's not pretty. Especially when he takes it right in the face." Juanita knocked back a palmful of granola. "He'd have yelled, though, if I hadn't glued him," she said, munching deliberately. "I had to clear his nose with acetone, once I had him pinned. Otherwise he'd have smothered to death right there on the spot." She swallowed, and laughed. "I'd bet good money he's still stuck to the wall."

"You're kidding, right?"

She shook her head. "Look, you're sitting here, aren't you? How do you think you got into this car? Did you think those hustlers were just gonna let you go? When I broke into your clinic room, you were upside down, naked, unconscious, and strapped to a metal rack."

"Jesus," Alex said. He ran his hand through his hair and shivered. His hair was filthy-he was filthy all over, a mess of fever sweat and human grease. "You're telling me you broke me out of the clinic? Personally? Jesus, Janey, couldn't you have sued them or something?"

"I'm a busy woman now, Alex. I don't have time for lawsuits." Juanita pulled her feet Out of her trail boots, dropping the boots onto the floorboard and crossing her sock-clad legs in the seat. She looked at him, her hazel eyes narrowing. "I guess there might be some trouble if you went back and informed against me to the local authorities.

"No way," he said.

"You wouldn't sue me or anything?"

"Well, I wouldn't rule out a lawsuit completely," Alex said, "not considering Dad's idea of family finances.

But there's no way I need Mexican police to deal with my own sister." He rubbed his greasy, stubbled chin. "At least, I never did before. What the hell has gotten into you?"

"Plenty. A lot." She nodded. "You'll see."

"What did you do to your hair?"

She laughed.

"You gave up dyeing it," he concluded. "That's its natural color, right? Brownish. Did you stop paying people to cut it?"

He'd struck home. "Oh, that's really good, coming from you, Alejandro. Yeah, I look like a derelict, don't I? I look like a displaced person! You know what you look like, handsome? You look like you washed up five days after a hurricane surge. You look like a goddamn Cadaver." Her. voice rnse.i'I just dragged you back from the brink of the grave! I'm dressed up for committing a felony, you moron!"

"You used to dress for the couture circuit, Janey."

"Once," she said. "I did a few designs, one season. Boy, you never forget."

"Your hair's been red ever since I can remember."

"Yeah? Well, maybe I needed red hair once. Back when I was into identity crisis.

Juanita picked at her hair for a bit, then frowned. "Let's get something straight right now. I know you can go back over the border if you want to. I know all about your scene, and I know all I wanna know about your creep-ass little dope-smuggler friends. I can't stop you. I don't even much want to stop you." She snorted. "It's just that before you check back into the hospital-from-hell and elaborately croak yourself, I want to show you something. Okay? I want you to see exactly what's happened to me since the last time we met.~~

Alex considered this proposal at length. Then he spoke up. "Oh yeah?"

"Yeah! This car is going to take us into camp, and I'm going to show you the people that I live with. They're probably going to really hate your guts. They didn't much like me, either-not at first." Jane shrugged. "But they're alive inside, Alex. They have something to do that's really worth doing. They're good people, they really are. They're the only people I've ever met that I really respect."

Alex mulled over this bizarre news. "They're not religious, are they?"

She sighed. "No, they're not religious."

"This is some kind of cult thing, though, isn't it? I can tell from the way you're talking. You're way too happy about this."

"No, I'm not in a goddamned cult! Well, okay then- yes, I am. The Troupe's a cult. Kind of. But I'm not brainwashed. That's not the story."

Alex parsed this statement and filed it away. "So what's the story, then?"

"I'm in love." Juanita dug into her bag of granola. "So there's a big difference. Supposedly."

"You're in love, Janey? Really?"

"Yeah. I really am."

"You?"

"Yes, goddamn it, of course me!"

"Okay, okay, sorry." Alex spread his hands. "It's coming clear to me now. I'm starting to get it. New boyfriend doesn't like red hair?"

"I just stopped doing red hair. A year ago. It didn't fit anymore."

"So what does boyfriend like? Besides you, presumably."

"Boyfriend likes really big tornadoes."

Alex sank into his seat.

"His people are called the Storm Troupe. We hack h~eavy weather. And that's where I'm taking you now."

Alex gazed out to his left. Dawn was smearing the horizon. The eastern stars were bleaching out, and lumps of dark poisonous gray green-cedar and juniper brush- were emerging from roadside darkness. Alex looked back at his sister. "You're serious about this?"

"Yep! Been hacking storms quite some time now." She offered him her paper bag. "Have some granola."

Alex took the bag, dipped into it, and ate. He was hungry, and he had no prejudice against government-issue chow. It had the complete recommended dietary allowances and the stuff was so bland that it had never irritated any of his various allergies. "So that's really what you're doing, huh? You chase thunderstorms for a living these days?"

"Oh, not for a living," she said. She reached down and clicked off the map light, then stretched, briskly tapping her fingernails against the fabric roof. She wore a short-sleeved shirt of undyed cotton, and Alex noted with vague alarm that her freckled arms were lithe with muscle. "That's for TV crews, or labcoat types. With us, it doesn't pay. That's the cool thing about it. If you're in the Troupe, you just do storms."

"Damn, Janey!"

"I like doing storms. I like it a whole lot. I feel like that's what I'm for!" Juanita laughed, long and high-pitched and twitchy. Alex had never heard her laugh like that before. It sounded like the kind of laugh you had to learn from someone else.

"Does Papa know about this?"

"Papa knows. Papa can sue me. You can sue me too, little brother. If you boys don't like how I'm living, then you can both kiss my ass!"

He grinned. "Damn, Janey."

"I took a big risk to do this for you," she told him. "So I just want you to know"-she placed her hand against the side of his head and looked into his eyes-"I'm not doing this for you because I think you're cute. You're not cute,

Alex. And if you screw things up between me and my Troupe, then I'm finished with you, once and for all."

"I never asked you to do any of this!"

"I know you didn't ask me, but nevertheless, if you mess with me and Jerry, then I'm gonna break both your legs and leave you at the side of the road!"

Alex found it hard to take this wild threat seriously, though she was clearly very sincere. It was the old story. As far as Alex figured it, all the trouble he'd had with his sister in the past was entirely her own doing. She'd always been the one barging into his room to bend his arms, break his toys, and bark out orders. Sooner or later all their encounters ended with him prying her fingers from his throat.

He, on the other hand, almost never tried to interfere in the near hysteria that Juanita called her daily life. Just watching his sister go at life, repeatedly cracking brick walls with her head, made him feel tired.. He'd always allowed her to caterwaul her way to hell in any wayshe pleased.

Now she seemed to think that she was going to run his life, since Mama was long dead, and Papa on the ropes. She'd soon be disabused of that notion.

"Take it easy," he advised her. "Your love affair, or whatever it is that you've got happening now, is strictly your own lookout. I got nothing against this Jerry character." He chuckled. "Hell, I pity him.~~

"Thanks a lot. His name's Jerry Mulcahey. Doctor... Gerald... Mulcahey."

He'd never seen a look like the look on Juanita's face as she recited that name. It was like a cross between a schoolgirl's crush and the ultravampish look of a bad actress on a Mexican soap opera. Whatever it was that had bitten her, it had bitten her really bad. "That's fine, Janey," he said cautiously. "I don't have any grudge against him, or any of your hick weirdo friends. Just as long as they don't try to step on my neck."

"Well, they will step on you, Alex, and I'm asking you to put up with it. Not as a brotherly favor to me or anything-I wouldn't ask for that-but just because it's interesting. Really interesting, okay? And if you can manage to stay upright for a while, you'll learn something."

Alex grunted. He gazed out the window again. Dawn was becoming impressive. The Texas High Plains were bleak country by nature, 'but nature had packed up and left sometime back. The stuff growing by the side of the road looked very happy about this. They were passing kilometer after kilometer of crotch-high, tough-stemmed, olive-drab weeds with nasty little flower clusters of vivid chemical yellow. Not the kind of hue one wanted in a flower somehow; not inviting ot pretty. A color ort might expect from toxic waste or mustard gas.

Out beyond the roadside flowers was the collapsed barbed-wire fencing of a dead cattle ranch, the long-deserted pastureland overrun with mesquite. They passed the long dawn shadows of a decapitated oil pump, with a half-dozen rust-streaked storage tanks for West Texas crude, a substance now vanished like the auk. The invisible tonnage of drill pipe was quietly rusting deep in the rocky flesh of the earth, invisible to any human eye, but nonetheless there for the geological ages, a snapped-off rotting proboscis from a swatted greenhouse-effect mosquito.

Here and there along the highway dead windmills loomed, their tapered tin vanes shot to hell, their concrete cisterns cracked and dust empty above an aquifer leached to bare sandstone... . They'd sucked the landscape dry, and abandoned their mechanical vampire teeth in place, like the torn-off mandibles of a tick.

They'd mined the place of everything in it that could be sold on the market; and then they'd given up. But after that, the greenhouse rains had come. You could tell that the plant life here wasn't at all used to the kindness of rain. The plants weren't a bit better than humanity, really-just another ugly, nasty, acquisitive species, born to suffer, and expecting little... . But the rain had come anyway. Now the Texas High Plains were glutted with rain, and with rich, warm, carbonated air, all under a blazing greenhouse sun. It was Oz, for a cactus. Arcadia for mesquite. Every kind of evil weed that stank, stabbed, or scratched was strutting its stuff like nouveau riche Texas hicks with an oil strike.

Juanita touched her music box.

"Can you knock it off with that Thai stuff?"

"What do you want me to play?"

"Something a little less incongruous. Some kind of-I dunno-crazed lonesome fiddle music. Cedar flutes and bone whistles. Listening to that tropical stuff out here in the savage boonies makes me feel like I'm losing my mmd."

"Alex, you don't know anything about surviving out here. You need enough imagination to at least think you're somewhere else, or the plains can really get to you." She laughed. "You'll get the Long Stare, brother. Just ride off into that landscape and kill-and-eat jackrabbits till you die. Hey, you want to really go run?"

"Huh?"

Juanita raised her voice. "Charlie?"

"Yes, Juanita?" the car said.

Alex was surprised. "Hey Janey, how come this car calls you Juanita?"

"Never mind. Long story." She gripped his shoulder. "You buckled in tight? You feel up to this, right? Not carsick or anything?"

Alex patted the smart cushions beneath him. "Not in a reactive seat like this one. I'd have better luck getting carsick on a living-room couch."

"Yeah, well, you're about to learn why they installed that kind of seat in here." Juanita reached over, took the paper bag of granola from his lap, saw it was empty, then folded it neatly and stuck it in the waistband of her denim shorts. "Charlie, do a local map."

The car extruded a flexible tongue of white screen from the dash. A high-definition map bloomed across the screen, topography at the meter scale. The map flashed briefly into a comparative series of ultradetailed satellite renditions. Juanita picked up the loose end of the map gently, examined the flickering imagery, then tapped the screen with her finger. "Charlie, see this little hill?"

"Two thousand three hundred twelve meters north," the car replied, outlining the crest of the hill in orange.

"Charlie, take us there, fast."

The car slowed and pulled over off the road shoulder, its prow toward the hill.

"Hold tight," Juanita said. Then the car leaped into the air.

It got up speed in the first dozen meters, bounding, and then began to clear the tops of mesquite trees. The car moved in a wild series of twists and hissing pounces; it was like being blown through the air by jets. Alex felt the seat's support cells repeatedly catching him, rippling like the flesh of a running animal.

"Look at those wheels now!" Juanita shouted gleefully, pointing. "See, they're not even rolling. Hell, they're not even wheels. The spokes are smart pistons. Feels like a hovercraft, right?"

Alex nodded dumbly.

"We're hovering on computation. The big power drain in this car isn't the engine. It's the sensors and the circuits that keep us from hitting stuff while we jump!" Juanita crowed with laughter. "Isn't this wild? God bless the military!"

They cleared the last of the thick brush, and then the car slid unerringly up the cracked slope of the hill, its pistons barely raising dust. Alex could tell from the eerie smoothness of the ride that the car never skipped, and never skidded. The intelligent pads at the base of each spoke contacted the earth with a dainty and tentative touch. Then the pistons set themselves firmly and punched up against the diamond hub, lifting the car in repeated, near-silent, precise staccato, faster than any human eye or ear could follow. It was like riding the back of a liquefied cheetah.

At the hill's crest, the car stopped gently, as if settling into tar. "Time for a stretch," Juanita announced, her hazel eyes glowing with delight. She put down the fabric top, and a morning breeze swept the now silent car. "Let's get out."

"I got no shoes," Alex realized.

Hell, I forgot... . Oh well." She jammed her sock-clad feet into her unlaced trail boots, opened the door, and stepped out alone. She shook herself cheerfully and stretched through some kind of calisthenic routine, then gazed across the landscape with one hand raised to her eyes, like a minor-league Sacagawea. To Alex, the view from the hilltop was dismally unimpressive; clumps of mesquite and cedar, sparse leathery grasses, and three distant, squalid little hills. The entire plain was ancient seafloor, flat as the bottom of a drained pond. The hills were tired lumps of limestone that, unlike the rest of the landscape, had not quite collapsed yet.

"This car must have cost you plenty," he said.

"No, it was cheap, considering! Government tries to keep 'em rare, though, because of the security threat." The vivid glare of dawn was spilling all across the landscape, the orange-yellow sun too bright to look at. "You can order a car like this to follow a map top speed, to any locale. And they're damn hard to spot, when they jump top speed cross-country, ignoring all the roads. With a big truck bomb aboard, you can structure-hit like nobody's business." She smiled cheerfully. "They did that a lot in the Malaysian resettlement wars-this is a Malaysian attack vehicle. War surplus. Of course, they're real popular with border smugglers now." Juanita turned to face the wind and ran both hands through her hair. "I think they're still technically illegal for civilians in the U.S. In some states, anyhow."

"Texas?"

"Heck no, anything's legal in Texas now... . Anyway, Texas Rangers love these cars. Cheap, fast, ignores roads-what's not to like? The only real problem is the batteries. They're superconductives."

"Superconductives sure aren't cheap."

"No, and they wear Out fast too. But they're getting better... . They'll be everywhere someday, cars like this. Just for fun. A car just for fun, isn't that a wild idea?" She strolled around the car, almost on tiptoe in her big but lightweight trail boots. "It's a mega-tasty design. Don't you love the look of it?" She patted the jointed rim of the wheel. "It's that truly elegant design that people always use when they make things to kill each other."

She flipped open a small metal toolbox in back, behind the passenger compartment, and fished out a pair of sunglasses. The reactive lenses went dark the moment she slipped them on. "Charlie is my flying hell spider... . A real beauty, isn't he... ? I love him, really... . Except for the goddamned hopeless military interface!" Juanita scowled beneath her shades. "I don't know what morons the Pentagon got to hack interface, but they should have been choked in their bunkers!"

"You own this car, Janey?"

"Sort of," she said. "No. Not really. I wouldn't want it registered in my name."

"Who does own it, then?"

"It's a Troupe car." She shut and locked the toolbox, then opened the door and slid back into the driver's seat.

Alex hesitated. "You know, I kind of like this car too. I could go for one of these."

She smirked. "Right, I bet you could... . Charlie, let's go."

The car picked its way gently down the slope.

Alex examined a big tuft of torn-off yellow grass embedded in the right front wheel hub. "You'd think you'd get really airsick, considering the acrobatics, but it has a very smooth ride. Hell, I've been in wheelchairs that were worse than this."

"Yeah? Well, they designed it for very smooth. So you can sight automatic weapons off the bumpers at full throttle. Charlie comes from commando stuff, death-by-darkness tiger teams and military structure hits and all that weird ugly crap... . But he sure has some killer apps in civilian life." Juanita ducked as the edge of a long mesquite branch whipped across the windshield, then she put up the roof again, with a jab of her thumb. "The Troupe used to chase storms in old dune buggies. But we were punching the core once on an F-4, and the hail wrapped real hard, and hailstones just beat 'em to death, dented the hoods and roof all to hell... . But Charlie just laughs at hailstones."

"You must be pretty big on hailstones."

"Hailstones have been pretty big on me, Alex. In Oklahoma last spring I got caught in the open. They leave welts on you as big as your fist."

"What's that mean, when you say 'punch the core'?"

Juanita looked surprised. "Well, urn... it means you shoot the vortex when you're running the drones."

"Oh," Alex said.