Heavy Weather

EPILOGUE

Austin, Texas, had once been called the "City of the Violet Crown," back when the city had been small enough to fit within its bowl of hills. That bowl of hills was alleged to serve as protection from local tornadoes. Of course the Violet Crown no longer did that, if in fact it ever had, and even the oldest central section of Austin had been ravaged by an F-2 within the past five years.

The spike had tracked right through the city's oldest northern suburb, an ancient residential district just north of The University of Texas. The area was now part of The University's privately managed, and privately policed, urban demesne. There was not much overt sign left of the spike damage, except for some ancient and now spectacularly crippled trees. Big old pecans mostly; some dead and replaced by saplings, but many of them maimed and left upright.

To Alex's eye, the damage track was easy to spot. You'd be driving under an even canopy of flourishing, pampered, C02-glutted streetside giants, and then there would be this tortured Goyaesque mutant breaking out all up and down with scrawny little green sapling limbs, maybe one original crooked branch left as a kind of beckoning finger. He pointed this out to his companion.

"We never have tornadoes in Boston," she said.

His sister was living in a little crackerbox place. A little brown-and-white shack that looked a hundred years old, if it was a day. Back in the early 2020s, when the practice had been in vogue, somebody had sprayed the outside of the entire building with a weatherproof lacquer. The white housepaint beneath the lacquer looked unnaturally clean and sprightly.

When Alex stepped up to the concrete porch, he could see that the housepaint trapped beneath the lacquer had given up the ghost and shattered into tens of millions of tiny paint flakes no bigger than fine dust. It didn't matter. The dust wasn't going anywhere. That lacquer was there for the ages.

JANE LOOKED THROUGH the security glass at her door and saw a short, plump young blond man in a suit and tie. And a very odd-looking woman. A tiny, witchy-looking boho student type, in a slashed silk dress and striped stockings and red ankle-tied sandals. Half her face-ear, cheeks, temple-was disfigured by a huge purple tattoo.

They didn't look armed, though. And not very dangerous. Anyway, there was rarely much civil trouble around The University. Because The University had massive heaps of data and attention, and even some money, and more importantly, it had a large paramilitary phalanx of armed, disciplined, and enthusiastically violent students.

Jane opened the door. "Hello?"

"Janey?"

"Yeah?"

"It's me."

Jane stared at him. "Christ! Alex."

"This is Sylvia," Alex said. "Sylvia Muybridge. She's traveling with me. Sylvia, this is my sister, Jane Unger."

"How do you do," Jane said. "Actually, I go by Jane Mulcahey these days. It's simpler, and besides, it's legal." She held up her hand with the gold ring.

"Yes," Alex said, pained, "I knew you had a married name, but I thought you still networked professionally as Jane Unger."

"Yeah, well, I'm probably gonna change that too."

Alex paused. "Can we come in?"

"Oh hell, yes!" Jane laughed. "Come on in."

She knew that the place looked disastrous. It was astrew with printouts, textbooks, and heaps of disks. There was a giant framed multicolored chart on the wall reading UNITED STATES FREQUENCY ALLOCATIONS: THE RADIO SPECTRUM.

Jane threw a cat off the couch-a paper-covered futon and cleared a small space for them to sit. "Are you still allergic to cats?"

"No. Not anymore," Alex said.

"How long has it been, Alex?"

"Eleven months," he said, sitting. "Almost a year."

"Damn," Jane said. "What can I get y'all?"

Sylvia spoke up for the first time. "You got any ibogame?"

"What's that?"

"Never mind, then."

Jane touched her brother's shoulder. "They must have been pretty good to you in Cyprus, because you look pretty fine, Alex."

"Yeah," Alex said, "they tore out all my seams and rewove me, in Nicosia. They tell me I'm supposed to be this fat. Metabolically, I mean. Genetically, I'm supposed to be a big fat blond guy, Janey. Of course, I'll never get over being stunted in my youth." He laughed.

"I'm sorry I didn't recognize you at first. Mostly it was that suit."

"No," he said. "No, I'm completely different now, I know that. Genetics, it's the core of everything, Janey, it's mega witchcraft. Just look at my hands! It was supposed to change my lungs, and it did that, my lungs are like rock now. But look at my hands! They never looked like this."

Jane held her own hand out and placed it gently against his. "You're right. They look just like my hands now. They're not all... well, they're not all thin."

"It's simple, really," Alex said. "I didn't have a life before they rewove me, and now, after this, after everything I went through, I actually have a life! I'm just like anyone else, now. The curse is lifted. It's been erased, wiped out. I'm probably gonna live a really long time."

Jane glanced at Alex's girlfriend. She~assumed this was a girlfriend. Normally a woman wouldn't dress so provocatively and travel alone with a guy unless there was something happening. Her being here could only mean that Alex was deliberately showing her off.

But then there was that face. That huge blotch on her face. It was really hard to look at. And she'd done something to it too; it wasn't just a giant port-wine-stain birthmark, she'd messed with it too; she'd outlined the edges of it in some kind of very fine and very elaborate stippling. Like dots of rainbow ink, that shimmered. Jane had never seen anything like it. She found it frightening.

"How are the Troupe people doing?"

"Oh, we hear from them sometimes," Jane said. "Buzzard, quite a bit. Rudy and Sam and Peter and Rick have their own team up in Kansas now, they're still chasing. Martha never calls much, but I never got along much with Martha. We see Joe Brasseur socially sometimes, he's got some cushy job in town with the State Water Comnusslon.

"I never got a chance to tell you how sorry I was about Greg and Carol. And Mickey too." -

"Well," she said simply, "Mickey was a good man, and Greg and Carol were my closest friends."

"How is Ed?"

"Well, Ed's got the use of both his arms again. Not like before, but pretty much. Ellen Mae is a lot better too. She's up in Anadarko now...

"How is Jerry doing? Is Jerry here?"

"No. He's at The University. I'm expecting him." She glanced at her watch. "You want some lunch? I'm making tacos, it's easy."

"I'll help," Alex said.

THEY DRIFTED INTO Juanita's cramped and ancient kitchen. Sylvia stayed on the couch. Alex winced as he heard her deftly fire up the TV with a remote. She began methodically combing through Austin's eight hundred available channels, with repeated dabs of her thumb.

He moved beside the electric range and watched the taco mix bubbling in a pan. The top of Juanita's stove was liberally spattered with orange grease. Jane shook some garlic salt at the taco mix, as if trying to choke it into submission. His sister had to be the worst cook in the world.

"You gotta make allowances for Sylvia," he said quietly. "She's not real good with other people, just kind of shy."

"I'm just touched that you would bring your girlfriend along to meet me, Alex."

"I'd kind of like it, if you and she could get along. She's kind of important to me. The most important woman in my life, really."

"That serious, huh?" -

"I don't have a lot of room to judge there," he said. "I met her on the nets, in a genetic-disorder support group. Sylvia's good on nets. People like Sylvia and me, people who've been through a lot of sickness when young, it tends to narrow our social skills. She had kind of an autism thing, she's had a hard time of life. But she's all rewoven now, and she's okay underneath."

"Boy, it really is that serious," Jane said.

"How is Jerry? Are you getting along?"

"You really want to know?"

"Yes, really."

"He's different. I'm different. We're a lot different than we were a year ago." She looked at him hard, and he could see it there behind her eyes, waiting to pour out.

"Tell me," he said.

"Well, it's since the baby... . Alex, he's really good with the baby. The baby really got through to him, he's so good with his little son. It's like... he's really good when he has someone he doesn't have to reason with. He's so patient and kind with that little kid, it's really amazing."

"How about you, though?"

"Us? We get along. We don't even have to get along. We're stuck here in this dinky little house, but you wouldn't know it. He's got his little office here with the virching stuff and his university link, and I've got my net-rig in the back in the baby's room, and he does his thing, and I do my thing, and we do our together-thing, and it works out okay, it really does."

"What are you working on these days, exactly?"

"Net-stuff. The usual. Well, not the usual. Mommy net-stuff. The kind of stuff you can do with one hand, while you're wiping warm spit off your forearm." Jane laughed, and poked at her taco mix with a wooden spoon. "Anyway, that data we got-the stuff you recorded when the stream broke down on us? That made itqn three final release disks! We got money for-that. Pretty good money. We bought this house with it."

"Alex, this isn't a big house, I know that, but it's a stand-alone in a really prized area. I've even got a real garden in the backyard, you should see it. And you wouldn't believe the neighborhood politicals here in Austin, they are really fierce. You can walk to campus, and play with your kid right in the parks, anytime day or night, and it's a really pretty area, and it's really safe too. The crime rate is very low here, and you never see a structure hit, never. It's a real enclave here, it's a mega-good place for a little baby to live."

"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 secrets, 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!"