Heavy Weather

CHAPTER 2

The vertebrae of tall transmission towers stenciled the horizon.

Juanita's people had set up their tent complex a kilometer from the highway, on a low limestone rise where they could keep a wary eye on any passing traffic. Morning sunlight lit a confusion of round puffy circus tents and the spiked cones of white tepees.

Juanita had doze doff in the journey's last two hours, mopping up bits of twitchy, REM-riddled sleep like a starving woman dabbing gravy from a plate. Now Alex watched with interest as his sister became a different person. In the last few minutes, as they'd neared the camp, she'd become alert, tight-mouthed, warriorly, nervous.

Juanita found a security cuff beneath the passenger seat, and she carefully strapped it on her left wrist. The cuff had a readout watch and a thick strap of tanned, hand-beaded, hand-stitched leather. Some of the beads were missing, and the leather was worn and stained, and from the look on Juanita's face as she strapped it on, Alex could see that she felt a lot better to have it back on again.

Almost as an afterthought, she gave Alex a flimsy-looking plastic cuff, with a cheap watch sporting an entirely useless array of confusing little orange push buttons. "You'll wanna keep that on at all times so you can pass in and out bf camp," she told him.

"Right. Great."

Juanita's car rolled uphill through a last stretch of sparse grass and between a pair of electronic perimeter stakes.

"What's the drill?" Alex asked.

"I have to go talk to Jerry now. About you."

"Oh good! Let's both go have a nice chat with Dr. Jerry.~~

Juanita glanced at him in nettled amazement. "Forget it! I've got to think this through first, how to present the situation to him... . Look, you see those people over there by the kitchen yurt?"

"By the what?"

"By that big round tent. The people with the tripod and the pulley."

"Yeah?"

"Go over there and be nice to them. I'll come fetch you later when I've cleared things." Juanita threw the car door open, jumped out, and half trotted toward the center of camp.

"I got no shoes!" Alex yelped after her, but the wind whipped his words away, and Juanita didn't look back.

Alex pondered his situation. "Hey car," he said at last. "Charlie."

"Yes, sir?" the car replied.

"Can you drive me over to that group of people?"

"I don't understand what you mean by the term group of people."

"I mean, twenty meters, urn, northwestish of here. Can you roll across that distance? Slowly?"

"Yes, sir, I could perform that action, but not at your command. I can't follow the orders of any passenger without a security ID."

"I see," Alex said. "She was right about your interface, Jack. You are totally fucked."

Alex searched through the car, twisting around in his seat. There was no sign of any object remotely shoelike. Then his eyes lit on the cellular phone mounted on the dash. He plucked it up, hesitated over the numeral "1," then speed-dialed "4" instead.

A woman answered. "Carol here."

"Hi, Carol. Are you a Storm Trouper?"

"Yeah," the phone replied. "What's it to ya?"

"Are you presently in a camp on a hillside somewhere off the side of Highway 208 in West Texas?"

"Yeah. That's right." She laughed.

"Are you standing in the middle of a bunch of people who are trying to haul some kind of animal carcass up on a tripod?"

"No, man, I'm in the garage yurt working repair on a fucked-up highway maintenance hulk, but I know the people you're talking about, if that's any help."

"Could you get one of them to bring me a pair of shoes? Size eight?"

"Who the hell are you?"

"My name's Alex Unger, I'm fresh in from Mexico and I need some shoes before I'm gonna leave this car."

Carol paused. "Hold on a sec, Alex." She hung up.

Alex settled back into the seat. After a moment's idle~. ness, he whipped up the phone again and dialed Informaciôn in Matamoros. He asked for the current alias of one of his favorite contacts and had no trouble getting through.

He hung up hastily, though, in the midst of the ensuing.conversation, as a woman approached the car.

The stranger, a black woman, had short black braids cinched with wire, over a broad, windburned, cheerful face. She looked about thirty-five. She wore a paper refugee suit that had been spewed through somebody's fulL color printer, with remarkable results.

The woman handed Alex a pair of sandals through tlK~ open door. The sandals were flat soles of thick dark green vinyl, with broad straps of white elastic cloth freshly glued across the top of the foot.

"What are these?" Alex said. "They look like shower mules."

She laughed. "You need a shower, kid. Put 'em on."

Alex dropped the impromptu sandals on the ground and stuffed his feet into them. They were two sizes too big, but they were more or less the proper shape of his feet and seemed unlikely to fall off. "That's not bad for two minutes' w&rk, Carol."

"Thanks a lot, dude. Since you and your sister are both richer than God, feel free to give me several thousand dollars." Carol looked him over skeptically. "Boy, you're all Jane said you were, and much, much more!"

Alex let that one hang for a moment. "Juanita said I should stay with those people over there until she came back."

"Then that's what you'd better do, man. But do 'em a favor and stay downwind of 'em." Carol stepped back from the car. "And don't mess with our phones anymore, okay? Peter gets real nervous when amateurs mess with our phones."

"Nice to meet you," Alex said. Carol spared him a half wave as she left.

Alex decamped from the car and stepped carefully across the West Texas earth. The narrow-leafed prairie grass looked okay, but the sparse, pebbled ground was scattered about with a scary variety of tiny, wire-stemmed little weeds, all chockablock with burs and hooks and rash-raising venomous bristles.

Alex minced carefully to the group at the tripod. They were busy. They had a velvet-horned buck up by its neck, at a pulley mounted at the junction of three tall tepee poles. There were four of them: two men in long-sleeved hunter's gear, and two hard-bitten women in bloodstained paper and trail boots. One of the men, the one with glasses, had an electric rifle over his back. They were all wearing Trouper cuffs.

"Qué pasa?" Alex said.

"We're butchering Bambi," the second man told him, grunting as he cinched off the end of the pulley rope.

The hunters had already cut the entrails from the animal and dumped them somewhere along the trail. Alex closely examined the animal's lean, swaying, eviscerated carcass.

The taller woman drew a bowie knife of ice-pale ceramic and stepped up to her work. She took each of the buck's dangling rear legs in hand, then slashed out some meaty, ill-smelling gland from within the hocks. She tossed the bloody glands aside, wiped and holstered her bowie knife, and fetched up a smaller knife about the length of her thumb.

The man with the rifle gazed at Alex indifferently. "Just get in .to camp?"

"Yeah. My name's Alex. Juanita's my sister.

"Who's Juanita?" the rifleman said. The second man silently jerked his thumb toward the camp's central yurt. "Oh," the rifleman realized. "You mean Janey."

"You'll have to forgive Rick here," the taller woman said. "Rick programs." She circled the deer's neck with a swift shallow cut, then carved straight down its throat to the chest and out at right angles to the end of each foreleg. She was very deft about it. With the help of the second woman, she began methodically shredding the hide down over the sleek naked meat.

Alex shook one of the tripod poles. It seemed very sturdy. The lacquer on the bamboo was one of those modem lacquers. "Are you planning to eat this thing? I don't think I ever ate a wild animal before."

"You'll eat the weirdest crap in Texas when Ellen Mae's around," said the second man.

"Suck it up, Peter," said Ellen Mae spiritedly. "If you don't like real food, stick to Purina Disaster Chow." She glanced at Alex. "These mighty hunters don't appreciate me. Hand me that bone saw."

Alex examined Ellen Mae's butcher tools on their bed of rawhide. He recognized the bone saw by its long, glacier-colored, fractal edge. He stooped and picked it up. It had a slight permanent bloodstaining in the ceramic, and a worn checkered grip, but its serrated teeth were every bit as sharp as freshly broken glass. It was a beautiful tool, and one of the objects in the world one would least like to be struck with. Alex made an experimental slash or two at the air and was a bit surprised to see the others leap mm diately out of his reach.

"Sorry," he said. "Mega-tasty item." He gripped the back of the blade carefully and offered Ellen the handle.

Ellen took it impatiently and began to saw the buck's legs oil at the knee joints. It took her about a minute flat to do all four of them. The second woman neatly stacked the severed limbs aside.

"Y'know, you don't look much like Jane at first, but I'm starting to get the resemblance," Peter told him;

"Maybe," Alex told him. "Are you the Peter who does the phones around here?"

"Yeah, that's right," Peter said, pleased. "Peter Vierling. I hack towers. Satellites, cellular coverage, the relays, that's all my lookout."

"Good. You and me are gonna have to do some business."

Peter looked at him with such open contempt that Alex was taken aback. "After lunch or whatever," Alex amended. "No big hurry, man."

"You look like you need lunch, kid," said Rick the programmer. "You need some real meat on your bones." He patted his backpack. "Got you a special treat here. You can have Bambi's liver."

"Great," Alex said. "Bambi's lats and pecs look pretty chewy... . Any of you guys ever try human meat?"

"What?" Peter said.

"I had human meat last time I was in Matamoros," Alex said. "It's kind of fashionable now."

"Cannibalism?" Rick said.

Alex hesitated. He hadn't expected them to act so alarmed. "It wasn't my idea. It just sort of showed up during the meal."

"I've heard of that stuff," Ellen Mae said slowly. "It's a Santeria thing."

"Well, it's not like they bring you out a big human steak," Alex demurred. "It comes out in this little pile of cubes. On a silver platter. Like fondue. It's a bad idea to eat the meat raw because of the, you know, infection risk. So everybody cooks it on these little forks."

They were silent for a long moment. The two women stopped their methodical skinning work. "What's it like?" Rick asked.

"Well, not much, by the time you get through cooking ," Alex said. "Everybody sort of dipped 'em in the fondue and took 'em out to cool on these little fork rests. And en we ate 'em one after another, and everybody looked -really solemn about it."

"Did anybody say prayers?" said the second woman.

"I wouldn't call 'em prayers exactly... . It used to be like Santeria, I guess, but now it's mostly kind of a dope-trade custom. A lot of those dope-trade guys got into organ smuggling and stuff after the legalizations, so there's lots of... you know . .

"Spare parts around?" Peter suggested.

"This guy's bullshitting us," Rick concluded.

Alex said nothing. His hosts in Matamoros had told him it was human meat, but they hadn't brought in any fresh bones or anything, so it could have just as easily been rabbit. He didn't see much real difference anyway, as long as you thought you were eating human meat. .

"It's just a border thing," he said at last. "Una cosa de Ia frontera."

"You really hang out with dope dealers?" Rick said.

"I don't care about dope," Alex said. "I'm into medical supplies."

The four of them burst into laughter. For some reason this central fact of his life seemed to strike them as hilarious. Alex concluded swiftly that he was dealing with mentally damaged hicks and would have to adjust his behavior accordingly.

"Tell our friend Alex about the special tour of the camp," Rick urged.

"Oh yeah," Peter said. "Y'see, Alex, we get a lot of visitors. Especially in the peak storm season, during the spring. And we've discovered that the easiest way to get a good overview of Troupe operations is to fly an ultralight over the camp."

"An aircraft," Alex said. He glanced at Ellen and the other, shorter woman, whose name he had still not The two women were deliberately paying a lot of attention to severing the animal's left shoulder.

"Yçah. We have two manned ultralights. Plus three powered parafoil chutes, but those are for experts. You interested?"

"Never tried that before," Alex said.

"The ultralight's got its own navigation," Peter said. "Just like a car! Only even safer, 'cause in midair there's no traffic and no tricky road conditions. You don't have to lift a finger."

"Does it go really fast?" Alex said.

"No, no, not at all."

"How about high, then? Does it go really high?"

"No, it won't take you very high, either."

"Then it doesn't sound very interesting," Alex said. He pointed at the carcass. "What's with that weird discoloration on the shoulder blade? Are they always like that?"

"Well," Rick broke in, "it can go pretty damned high, but you'd have to take oxygen with you."

"You people got oxygen?" Alex said.

Rick and Peter exchanged glances. "Sure."

"Can I skip the tour, and just have some oxygen?"

"Wait till you see the machine," Peter hedged. "You're gonna want this bad, after you see the machine."

Alex followed the pair of them across camp, stepping cautiously on the treacherous earth. His occasional curious glances up from his endangered feet across camp didn't much impress him. There was a monkish air about the place, a kind of military desiccation. Four skeletal towers dominated the camp, with microwave dishes, racks of spiny aerials, wrist-thick wiring and cable guides, and whirling cup-shaped wind gauges. Three large, dirty buses were parked side by side under a flat paper sunshade, along with three robot bikes. A tractor with a dozer blade and a spiraled posthole digger had planted a set of tall water-distillation stacks, which were dripping into a fauceted plastic reservoir.

The three of them stopped by the curtained door of another yurt. Two monster winches flanked the entrance, with thin woven cable on motor-driven drums.

Alex followed the two men inside, past a thick hanging door curtain. The yurts were quilted paper, stretched over crisscrossed expandable lattices of lacquered wood. The diamond-shaped ends of these lattices were neatly and solidly lashed together, and eight of the lattices, curved into a broad ring, formed the yurt's round wall. Sixteen slender bent poles of lacquered bamboo ran from the tops of the lattices up to a central ring, bracing the white paper top of the dome.

The paper walls flapped a bit in the constant wind, but the interior had a surprisingly rich and pearly glow, and with its carpeted flooring, the yurt seemed remarkably snug and solid and permanent. Alex realized that the place was a -minor aircraft hangar, all kites and keels and foamed-metal spars and great bundles of reinforced sailcloth. A Trouper was at work in the place, sitting cross-legged on a cushion amid a confusion of specialized hand tools. He bad a gaunt weather-beaten face and an almost bald, freckled dome ofskull, with a few lank strands of colorless shoulder-length hair. He wore black cotton leotards and had a blackened lump of metal on a rawhide thong around his neck.

"How's it goin', Buzzard?" Peter said.

Buzzard looked up from his rapt examination of a flexing cabled joint. "Who's the geek?"

"Alex Unger," Alex said. He stepped forward across the blissfully carpeted yurt flooring and jammed Out his hand.

"Boswell Harvey," said Buzzard, surprised, dropping his eviscerated bit of machinery as he reached up for Alex's hand. "I hack, uh... I hack ornithopters."

"Buzz, we need to boot the ultralight," Rick said.

"Well, Amethyst is down," Buzzard said.

"Beryl will do," Peter said.

"Oh," Buzzard said. "Oh, okay." Alex saw dawning comprehension spread across Buzzard's hooded eyes. "I can boot her from here, off the station." He stalked across the yurt and dropped into a crouch over a cabled laptop on the floor. He flipped it open, stared at the result on the flat screen, and pecked at the keyboard.

Peter and Riak took Alex outside to a nearby section of anchored sunshade. The paper shelter, up on bamboo poling, had its back to the wind and was firmly pitoned to the limestone earth. The ultralights beneath the shelter, both of them missing their wings, were heavily staked down with cabling. Just in case of sudden wind bursts, presumably.

Rick checked a set of input jacks on the motor housing while Peter industriously began assembling the left wing.

"I know this wing doesn't look too great right now," Peter assured Alex, "but when it inflates it gets very aerodynamic."

"No problem," Alex muttered.

"And check this out for safety-diamond bolts and nuts on every spar! Man, I can remember when we didn't have any construction diamond. I used to tower-monkey around Oklahoma working towers for TV stations, and we had to worry about, like, mechanical stress." Peter laughed. "Sometimes using diamonds to build everyday stuff seems like some kind of cheat! But hell, here it is, man; if you got a resource like that, you just gotta use it."

"Yeah," Rick mused aloud, "a lot of the basic thrill went out of hardware design when diamond got really cheap."

"Yeah," Alex offered, "I can remember my mom being pretty upset about that development." He examined the ultralight. The wings seemed absurdly long and thin, but as Peter tightened their struts with a nut driver, they became convincingly tough and rigid. The little aircraft had a big padded bicycle seat with foamed-metal stirrups. There was a foam-padded skeletal back and neck rest, with a sturdy lap belt and shoulder harness. The motor and propeller were rear-mounted in a large plastic housing.

A controlling joystick and a rollerball were set into a plastic ridge between the pilot's knees. "Where's the instrument panel?" Alex said.

"It's in the virching helmet," Peter said. "Do you do virtuality?"

"Sure. Doesn't everybody?"

"Well, it doesn't matter much, because you're not going to be flying this thing anyway. It's all controlled from the ground." With the ease of long habit, Peter swabbed the interior band of the helmet with rubbing alcohol, then scrubbed the faceplate inside and out. "But take good care of this virching helmet, because it's worth twice as much as the aircraft."

"Twice, hell, three times," Rick said. "Let me db that, Peter." He methodically adjusted the virtuality helmet's interior webbing for Alex's narrow skull, then set and wiggled it onto Alex's head. It felt like having one's head firmly~ inserted into a lightweight plastic bowling ball. "Now see, if you want a naked-eyeball look, the faceplate just hinges up like this... . And feel that com antenna back there? Don't snag that antenna on the left-hand spar there, okay?"

"Right," Alex said. Despite Peter's alcohol scrub, the interior of the helmet still smelled strongly of someone else's old excited sweat. Alex began to settle into the mood. There was a momentum to this situation that appealed to him. He'd always rather enjoyed having his head at the mercy of someone else's media system.

With a resourcefulness that surprised himself, he rolled up the pant legs of his paper suit to the knee and stuffed both his makeshift sandals securely into the big baggy pa• per cuffs. Then he straddled the seat, barefoot, and tried it on foi size. With a bit of stirrup-shifting and linchpin work, the seat was not too bad. "Where's my oxygen?"

They insisted that he wouldn't really need any oxygen, but Alex counterinsisted with such leaden, pigheaded emphasis that they quickly gave in.

Rick had to confer with Buzzard by belt phone to find the dust-covered oxygen tank. Then its mask had to be sterilized-purely a matter of routine, Peter assured him, they always sterilized any equipment that might carry strep, flu, or TB... . Finally the chrome-yellow tank was strapped neatly behind the pilot's seat, its accordion tube draped over Alex's right shoulder, and the mask's elastic firmly snagged at the nape of his neck.

Then they rolled him, snugly socketed within his plane, out of the paper hangar. The plane bumped along easily on its little pipe-stçm undercarriage. After rolling the plane eighty meters, the two Troupers faced the ultralight into the west wind.

Rick turned the helmet on, and Alex was rewarded with a meaningless pull-down menu of virtual instrumentation across the upper rim of his faceplate. Alex dinked around a bit with the rollerball and click button. The system seemed to be functional.

Five new Troupers now made their appearance, attracted by the fuss. They were three men, a woman, and, to Alex's surprise, a teenage boy. The boy hauled a hundred meters of winch cable out to the ultralight, and the towline was snapped to the aircraft's nose. Two new guys wedged a ten-meter bamboo bipod against the nose of the aircraft.

Buzzard, lurking distantly at the door of his yurt, drew in the slack on the winches until the launch cable thrummed with tension.

"Ready, Alex?" Rick shouted at the side of the helmet.

"Right." Alex nodded. "Let's do it."

"Just relax, it's gonna be fine! You'll enjoy this!"

Alex flipped up his faceplate and glared at Rick. "Look, man, stop persuading me. I'm here already, okay? You got me strapped down, I got my oxygen. Launch the son of a bitch."

Rick's face fell, and he stepped back. He strode out of the way of the wings, then pulled his belt phone and barked into it.

The cable snapped to, the bipod jammed itself in the limestone earth, and the aircraft was instantly catapulted skyward.

The drum reeled up with vicious, singing efficiency, and the aircraft climbed as steeply as a roller coaster. The cable detached and fell earthward, and the engine kicked in, and Alex was in free flight.

The aircraft veered aside to avoid the guy cable on one of the larger towers. It then methodically began vectoring upward, gaining height in a clockwise spiral.

"How's it going, Alex?" Peter asked over headphones.

"Okay, I guess," Alex said. He saw the prairie below, sun-blasted straw and patches of poi~onous green, the black strap of highway, a lot of stunted cedars clustered at a nearby draw. In the tug of wind his white paper sleeves flapped like cheap toy flags. The metal stirrups bit at his bare soles.

Deliberately, Alex swayed back and forth in his seat. The distant ends of the ultralight's wings dipped in response, like the ends of a seesaw, but they soon righted themselves in a chip-aided loop of feedback. And the ground beneath him dwindled steadily.

He was being gently juggled in midair by the hands of an invisible giant. He was lounging in a folding chair at the parapet of a twelve-story building. If he wanted to, he could pull the harness strap loose, step out on a stirrup, lean out, and drop to earth as sweet and clean as a meteor. Death was near. Death was near. .

Alex flipped up his faceplate and felt the dry wind strip the sweat from his cheeks. "Go higher, man!"

"You'll notice that we have six major yurts and four vehicle hangars," Peter told him. "Three of those towers are telecom, and we have four smaller towers for weather instrumentation. The black gridwork over by the latrine tents is a big patch of solar arrays."

Alex grunted. "Yeah, yeah."

"We're running on solar now, but the wind generators run around the clock."

"Huh

"All those big white rods, staked out in a circle around the camp, are our perimeter posts. They're motion detectors, and they've got some security muscle built in; you're gonna want to be a little careful with those. We have a set of 'em staked out by the highway too. Those big yellow panels are mosquito lures. They smell just like skin does, but any mosquito that lands on those lures gets instantly zapped."

Alex flipped his faceplate back down. He rollerballed to the menu bar, pulled down a section labeled telecom, and switched to cellular. Peter vanished into telephonic limbo in the midst of his tour-guide spiel.

A handy phone menu rolled down with fifteen speed dials.

They were thoughtfully accompanied by

1 Jerry Mulcahey.

2 Greg Foulks.

3 Joe Brasseur.

4 Carol Cooper.

5 Ed Dunnebecke.

6 Mickey Kiehl.

7 Rudy Martinez.

8 Sam Moncrieff.

9 Martha Madronich.

10 Peter Vierling.

11 Rick Sedletter.

12 Ellen Mae Lankton.

13 Boswell Harvey.

14 Joanne Lessard.

15 Jane Unger.

This looked very much like the Storm Troupe's idea of a digital pecking order. Alex was amazed to see that Juanita had somehow meekly settled for being number fifteen.

He clicked fifteen and got Juanita's voice mail, an I'm not-in-right-now spiel. He hung up and clicked four.

"Carol here."

"It's me again. I'm now flying over your camp."

Carol laughed into his helmeted ears. "I know, man, word gets around."

"Carol, am I correct in assuming that this is some kind of hick hazing ritual? And pretty soon they're gonna tell me there's some kind of terrible software malf in this aircraft? And I'm gonna go through a whole bunch of, like, crazy barrel rolls and Immelmanns and such?"

Carol was silent for a moment. "YoU don't miss much, for a guy your age."

"What do you think I should do? Should I act really macho about it? Or should I scream my head off over the radio channel and act completely panicked?"

"Well, personally, I screamed bloody murder and threw up inside the helmet."

"Macho it is, then. Thanks for the advice. Bye."

"Alex, don't hang up!"

"Yeah?"

"I think I'd better tell you this... . If you don't scream, and scream a whole lot, then they might just push the envelope on that little bird until its wings tear off."

"You sure have some interesting friends," Alex said. He hung up and switched back to radio channel.

"...support the generators. And it's useful for keeping track of goats," Peter was droning.

"That's really remarkable," Alex assured him. He switched the catch on the oxygen mask and pressed the mask firmly over his mouth and nose. For a moment he thought he'd been gypped, that he'd get nothing for his effort but the dry stink of plastic hose, but then the oxygen hit him. It spiked deep into his lungs and blossomed there, like a sweet dense mat of cool blue fur.

The paper walls of the camp dwindled beneath him as the aircraft continued its climb, spiraling up with the mathematical precision of a bedspring. As pure oxygen flushed through him to the sharp red marrow of his bones, Alex realized suddenly that he had found the ideal method to experience the Texas High Plains. The horizon had expanded to fantastic, planetary, soul-stretching dimensions. Nothing could touch him.

At this height, the air at ground level showed its true character. Alex could witness the organic filth in the low-lying atmosphere, banding the horizon all around him. It was a sepia-tinted permanent stain, a natural smog of dirts and grits and pollens, of molds and stinks and throat-clogging organic spew... . By contrast, the high sweet air around him now, cool and thin and irresistible, was a bone-washing galactic ether. He felt as if it were blowing straight through his flesh.

In the distance, half a dozen buzzards corkscrewed down a thermal in pursuit of earthly carrion.

dial numbers. names.

Peter's voice buzzed in his ears.

Alex tugged the mask from his face. "What?"

"You okay, man? You're not answering."

"No. I mean, yeah! No problem. It's beautiful up here! Go higher!"

"We seem to be having a little software trouble down here at base, Alex."

"Really?" Alex said in delight. "Hold on a sec.

He pressed the mask to his face, huffed hard at it three times. From some lurking tarry mess deep within his tuberdes, blue goo suddenly fizzed like a rack of sparklers. "Go!" he screamed.

"Hit it, man, push the envelope!"

Peter fell silent.

The wings wobbled, building up to a convulsion. Suddenly the craft pitched over nose-first and headed straight toward the earth. The descent lasted five heart-stopping, gut-gripping seconds. Blood left his heart, sweat jetted instantly from every pore in his body, and he felt a lethal chill grip his arms and legs.

Then the machine caught itself with a vicious huff of fabric and swooped through the pit of a parabola. Alex's head snapped back against the seat hard enough to see stars, and he felt his hands and feet fill with blood from g-forces. Great gummy bubbles rose in his chest.

The plane soared trembling toward the zenith.

Alex jammed his trembling blood-sausage fingers against the mask and gulped down fresh oxygen.

The plane was now flying upside down, piercing some timeless peak of weightless nothingness. Alex, his head swimming within his helmet, examined the enormous platonic sprawl of blue beneath his naked feet, through eyes that were two watery congested slits. Pulling loose and flinging himself into that limitless wonder would be worth not one, but a dozen lives.

JANE opened the door flap of the command yurt. Inside the big tent, pacing the carpet at the end of his thick fiber-optic leash, was Jerry Mulcahey. Jerry's head was encased in the Troupe's top-of-the-line virching helmet, and both his hands were in stripe-knuckled data gloves. Jerry was wearing paper, a refugee suit that had seen some road wear. His right paper sleeve, and both his paper legs, were covered in his pencil-scrawled mathematical notation.

As Jerry turned and paced back toward her, Jane glimpsed his bearded face through the helmet's dark display plate, his abstracted eyes stenciled with gently writhing white contour lines.

Jerry had ten-kilogram training weights strapped to each ankle, which gave him a leaden, swinging tread. Jane had often seen him pace with those weights, in marathon virching sessions, for hours on end. Every other hour or so, Jerry Would suddenly stop, deliberately pull the weights from his ankles, and then strap them onto both his hairy wrists.

Jane Velcroed~the yurt's doorway shut behind her, against the rising gusts of dusty west wind. Then she waited, her arms folded, for her presence to register on him, and for Jerry to surface from whatever strange sea of cyberspace had tangled his attention.

At length Jerry's pacing slowed, and the karate chops and Balinese hand gestures with the data gloves became a bit more perfunctory, and finally he glided to a stop in front of her. He pulled the blank-screened helmet off and set it on his hip and offered her a big bearded smile.

"We need to talk," Jane said.

Jerry nodded once, paused, then raised his shaggy blond brows in inquiry.

Jane turned her head toward one of the two attached subyurts. "Are Sam or Mickey in right now?"

"No. You can talk, Jane."

"Well, I went down to Mexico and I got Alex. He's here right now."

"That was quick," Jerry said. He seemed pleasantly surprised.

"Quick and dirty," Jane told him.

Jerry set his tethered helmet down on the carpet, crouched, and sat heavily beside it. "Okay then, tell me. How dirty was it?"

Jane sat down beside him and lowered her voice. "Well, I structure-hit the power to the clinic, then I broke into the place when it was blacked out, and I found him with a flashlight, and I carried him out on my back."

Jerry whistled. "Damn! You did all that? We've created a monster!"

"I know that was a really stupid thing to do, but at least it was over in a hurry, and I didn't get caught, Jerry. I didn't get caught, I got him Out, and I aced it!" She shivered, then looked into his eyes. "Are you proud of me?"

"I guess," Jerry said. "Sure I am. I can't help it. Were there witnesses?"

"No. Nobody knows, besides you and me. And Carol and Greg, they know, but they'll never tell. And Leo, of course."

Jerry frowned. "You didn't tell Leo about this little escapade, did you?"

"No, no," Jane assured him. "I haven't been in contact with Leo since he found Alex for me." She paused, watching his face carefully. "But Leo's smart. I know Leo must have figured out what I was up to. I could tell that much, just from the E-mail he wrote me."

"Well, don't figure out Leo anymore," Jerry said. "You don't know Leo. And I don't want you to know Leo. And if you ever do get to know Leo, you'll be very sorry that you did."

She knew it would annoy Jerry if she pushed, but she had to push anyway. "I know you don't trust Leo, and neither do I. But you know, he's been very helpful to us. It can't have been easy to track Alex. Leo didn't have to do that for me, just because he's your brother. But he did it anyway, and he never asked you or me for anything in return."

"My brother is a spook, and spooks are professionally affable," Jerry said. "You've got what you needed now. Let Leo alone from now on. Your brother's one thing, but my brother's another. It's bad enough that your no-good brother's shown up in camp, but if my brother ever arrives here, then all hell will break loose."

Jane smiled. "Y'know, Jerry, it does me a lot of good to hear you say that. In a very sick, paradoxical way, of course."

Jerry grimaced and ran his hand over his sandy hair. He was losing some of it in front, and the virching helmet had mashed the sides down over his ears, like a little boy's hair. ''Family is a nightmare.~~

"I'm with you," Jane said. She felt very close to him suddenly. Family troubles were one of their great commonalities. It had been good of him to agree to let her brother into the Troupe, when she'd been so frank about Alex's shortcomings. She was sure that Jerry would never have done such a thing for anyone else. She was being stupid and reckless and troublesome, and Jerry was letting her do it, as a kind of gift. Because he loved her.

"We gotta think this through, some," she told him. "The Troupe's not gonna like this much. Alex is no star recruit, that's for sure. He has no skills. And not much education. And he's an invalid."

"How sick is he? Is he badly off?"

"Well, I've always thought Alex was nine tenths malingerer, at heart. Dad's dropped thousands on him, but never pinned down what's wrong with him. But I can guarantee he's not contagious."

"That's something, at least."

"But he does get bored, and touchy, and then he gets these spells. They're pretty bad, sometimes. But he's always been like that."

"No one stays with the Troupe who can't pull weight," Jerry said.

"I know that, but I don't think he'll stay for long. If he doesn't run off by himself, then the Troupe'll throw him out after a while. They're not patient people. And if there's a way to make trouble here, Alex will probably find it." Jane paused. "He's not stupid."

Jerry silently drummed his fingers on his papered knee.

"I had to do this, because he's my little brother, and he was in really bad trouble, and I felt sure he was going to die." Jane was surprised at how much it hurt her to say that, at how much real pain and sense of failure she felt at the thought of Alex dead. She'd resented Alex for as long as she could remember, and in rescuing him, she'd thought she was doing something tiresome and familial and obligatory. But at the thought of Alex dead, she felt a slow burn of deep unsuspected emotion, a tidal surge of murky grief and panic. She wasn't being entirely frank with Jerry. Well, it wasn't exactly the first time.

She took a breath and composed herself. "I've just dragged Alex out of the mess he was in, but I wish I could be responsible for him. But I can't. I believe in the work here. You know I believe in the work, and I do what I can to help. But now I've done something that really doesn't help the Troupe. I just brought you a big load of trouble. I'm sorry, sweetheart."

Jerry was silent.

"You're not angry with me, Jerry?"

"No, I'm not angry. It is a complication, and it's not helpful. But it's simple, if you can let it be simple. As far as I'm concerned, your brother is just like any other wannabe. He pulls his weight here, or out he goes."

She said nothing.

"We throw people out of the Troupe every season. It's ugly, but it happens. If it happens to your brother, you'll just have to accept that. Can you do that for me?"

She nodded slowly. "I think so. .

That earned her one of Jerry's looks. "You'd better tell me that you can do that, Jane. If you can't, then we'd all be better off if I threw him out right now."

"All right," she said quickly. "I can do that, Jerry."

"Maybe Alex can measure up. We'll give Alex his chance." Jerry stood and fetched up his helmet lefthanded, dangling it by one strap.

Jane stood too. "I'm not real hopeful, but maybe he can do it, Jerry. If you'll back him a little."

Jerry nodded. He swung up his helmet at the end of its strap and caught it in his other hand. "I'm glad you're back. You picked a good time for it. We've got a show for your little brother. Tomorrow it's gonna break loose along the dryline from here to Anadarko."

"Wonderful! At last!" Jane jumped to her feet. "Is it mega-heavy?"

"It's not the F-6, but the midlevel stream has serious potential. We're gonna chase spikes."

"Oh that's great!" She laughed aloud.

A shadow appeared at the door of the yurt. It was Rudy Martinez, from the garage. Rudy stood flatfooted, visibly sorry to interrupt. Jane aimed her brightest smile at him, wanting him to know that life would go on, the Troupe was moving, she'd aced another one.

Jerry nodded. "What's up, Rudy?"

Rudy cleared his throat. "Just tuning up for the chase... What's with the malf in Charlie's right front hub?"

"Oh hell," Jane said. "Hell hell hell... Take me there, Rudy, we can fix that, let's go see."

ALEX WAS SITTING in a flaccid plastic bath with a trickling sponge on his head. He was in the back of the hangar yurt, where Peter and Rick had dragged him, after pulling him, unconscious, from the seat of the ultralight.

Buzzard, severed from all things earthly by his virching helmet, crouched on his cushion in the yurt's center. He was methodically putting his remote-control ornithopters through their paces, in preparation for the chase to come.

Carol Cooper sat on the floor near the tub, methodically stitching a set of carpal tunnel wrist supports out of tanned deerskin.

"You think I could have some more water in here?" Alex said. "Maybe like a couple hundred cc's?"

Carol snorted. "Dude, you're damn lucky to draw what you got. Most days we wash in, like, four tablespoons. When we wash, that is."

A Trouper in bright yellow Disaster Relief paramedical gear entered the yurt, circled around the oblivious Buzzard, and handed Carol a plastic squeeze bottle and a paper pack of antiseptic gloves. "I brought the sheep dip."

"Thanks, Ed." Carol paused. "This is Alex."

"Yo," Alex offered, sketching out a half salute.

Ed gave Alex a long gaze of silent medical objectivity, then nodded once and left.

Alex plucked the sponge from his head and began to dab at his armpits. "I take it you folks aren't real big on bathroom privacy."

"Ed's a medic," Carol told him. "He was checking you out here earlier, when you were flat on your back and covered with barf." Carol compared her leather cutout to a pattern displayed on her laptop screen, then deftly nicked away another sliver with her pencil knife. "There's never much privacy in camp life. If we Troupe types want to have sex or something, then we sneak into one of the tepees and move some of the storage crap out of the way. Or if you want, you can drive out way over the horizon and toss a blanket over some cactus." Carol put her leather stitchwork aside and hefted the squeeze bottle. "You feel okay now, Alex?"

"Yeah. I guess so."

"You're not gonna pass out again, or anything?"

"I didn't 'pass out,'" Alex said with dignity. "I just was really getting deeply into the experience, that's all."

Carol let that ride. "This stuff is heavy-duty antiseptic. Kind of a delousing procedure. We have to do this to all the wannabes now, ever since a staph carrier showed up at camp once and gave us a bad set of boils."

"I've had staph boils." Alex nodded.

"Well, you never had staph like that stuff; it was like one of the plagues of Egypt."

"I've had Guatemalan Staph IVa," Alex told her. "Never heard of the Egyptian strains before."

Carol pondered him for a long moment, then shrugged and let it go. "I've got to wash you down in this stuff. It's gonna sting a little."

"Oh good!" Alex said, sitting up straighter. The flaccid camp bath swashed about in its thin metal frame, and the pathetic dribble of water in the bottom did its best to slosh. "Y'know, Carol, it's really good of you to take so much time for me."

That's okay, man. It's not everybody I know who can throw up blue goo." She paused. "I did mention that you have to clean out the helmet later, right?"

"No, you didn't mention that. But I'm not real surprised to hear it."

Carol tore the paper pack open and pulled out the thin plastic gloves. She drew them on. "This stuff stings some at first, but don't panic. You don't need to panic unless you get it in your eyes. It's pretty tough on mucous membranes."

"Look, stop making excuses and just pour it in the goddamned sponge," Alex said, holding it out.

Carol soaked the sponge down with the squeeze bottle and emptied the rest into the tub. Alex began to lather himself up. The slithering soapy concoction wasn't bad at all-kind of a pleasantly revolting medical peppermint.

Then it began to acid-etch its way into his skin.

Alex gritted his teeth, his eyes watering, but deliberately made no sound.

Carol watched him with an interesting mx of compassion and open pleasure in his suffering. "Blood will tell, huh, Alex? I swear to God I saw your sister get exactly that same expression on her face.... Close your eyes tight, and I'll do your back and scalp.

The sharp gnawing edge of the antiseptic faded after a moment, in Carol's steady scrubbing and the blood-colored darkness of his own closed eyelids, and he began to feel merely as if he were being laundered and drastically overbleached. The antiseptic was doing something very peculiar to the caked sweat, sebum, and skin flakes at the roots of his hair. Great metropolitan swarms of his native bacteria were perishing in microscopic anguish.

Carol allowed him another dribble of clean water then, enough to rinse his hair and free his eyes. He was more than clean now. He was cleaner than he ever wanted to be again. He was scorched and smoking earth.

Juanita chose this moment to storm headlong into the yurt, in boots, shorts, T-shirt, and a pair of big grimy work gloves, her square jaw set with fury and her hair knotted in a kerchief. She had to pause in midrush to skip her way over the fiber-optic trip wires of Buzzard's networked laptops. "Alex!" she yelled. "Are you all right?"

He looked up mildly. "Did you bring a towel?"

"I heard those bastards stunted you until you fainted!" She stopped short at his tub. She glanced at Carol, then back at him. "Is that true?"

"I like ultralights," he told her. "They're interesting. Get out of my bathroom."

Carol burst into laughter. "He's okay, Jane."

"Well, they were wrong to do that! If they'd hurt you, I'd have... well, you should have told them that you were never supposed to-" Juanita broke off short. "Hell! Never mind. We've got to chase storms. We've got to calibrate." She threw the back of one work glove to her sweating forehead. "Never mind... Alex, just for me, please, try and stay out of trouble for ten goddamn minutes, okay?"

"I'm only doing what you wanted me to do," Alex pointed Out, exasperated. "Can't we discuss this while you're having a bath?"

"Alex, don't drive me crazy!" Juanita stared at him. "I guess you're okay after all, huh... ? Y'know, you don't look half so bad now! You're still kinda pale and airsick looking, but you do look a lot better clean."

Stung, Alex switched to their childhood household Spanish. "Listen to me, all of the world will be more happy when you get away from me, and stay away from me!'

Juanita looked startled. "What? Slow down." She shook her head. "Never mind, I get it. Okay, I'm leaving. Have it your way." She turned to Carol, frowning. "Peter and Rick! I'm gonna think up something special for Peter and Rick."

Carol pursed her lips. "Be nice, Janey."

"Yeah, right, sure." Juanita left the yurt.

Alex waited until his sister was well out of earshot. "She sure hasn't changed much," he said. "How do you people put up with that crap?"

"Oh, for us, she's an asset," Carol assured him. "I like Jane! I always liked her. I liked her even when she first showed up in the flicking limo! I'm one of your sister's big partisans."

"Huh," Alex said. "Well, that's your lookout, I guess." He rinsed his arms, then gazed around the yurt. "How long does it take around here before us lowly wannabes are actually given real clothes?"

"Well, that's your lookout, dude. Maybe I could be persuaded to cut-and-paste you a paper suit that would fit you a little better." Carol shrugged. "But you'll have to pull some weight for me, in return. What are you good at?"

"What do you mean?"

"I mean what do you hack?"

Alex thought it over. "Well, I'm pretty good at ordering weird stuff with charge cards. If I can get an encrypted phone line, that is."

Carol's eyes narrowed. "Huh."

THERE WASN'T MUCH wrong with Charlie. He had what was known in the trade as a vegetable jam. A whip-thin length of West Texas briar had managed to work its way into the fullerene grease around the right front axle, and had been liquefied into a burned-caramel goo. Jane fetched and carried for Greg and Rudy for a while, dismounting and remounting Charlie, running diagnostics off the older Pursuit Vehicle Baker, and trying to pamper the dinosaur-like alcohol-burning Dune Buggy Able. As time ticked on, though, and the two experienced mechanics worked their way into the finer tolerances, she could sense their patience with her amateurism beginning to wear.

Jane took some time then to work on the maintenance hulk, one of the dirt-stupid machines that the state of Texas used to keep up its county roads. The Troupe sometimes made a little money working repair on busted state robotry, and it kept them in a better air with sheriff's deputies and the Texas Rangers. Out in West Texas, official repair yards were very few and far between, and worse yet, for some reason, the locals seemed to dote on structure-hitting highway machinery. The hulk in their shop had been put out of its misery by a fusillade of twenty-four shots from a deer rifle.

Jane followed the repair coaching of a state-government on-line expert system for about an hour, extending Carol's weld-and-glue work, till she hit some tangled wiring she didn't feel competent to hack.

She left the garage yurt. The wind was picking up, pulling a tangled pennant of mesquite smoke from the vent hole in the dome of the kitchen. With the approach of evening, the dry wind off the continental uplands had ripped the morning's cumulus to desiccated shreds-the dryline was pushing east.

Jane stepped into the command yurt-no sign of Jerry there-and stepped into its left annex, the telecom office.

She picked up a spare laptop between the silent helmeted heads of Mickey Kiehl, the Troupe's network sysadmin, and Sam Moncrieff, Jerry's meteorological disciple. She logged into the Troupe's own local net, then onto the federal SESAME Net.

First, a quick scan of the satellite view. It looked very tasty. Half of Texas was swamped under a classic springtime gush of suffocating damp stratus from the Gulf of Mexico.

She scrolled north. So far, 2031 did not seem to be shaping up as an El Niño year, which was something of a rarity, lately. The high midcontinental jet stream was more or less behaving itself, doing some mildly odd and tortuous things at the rim of a cold front over Iowa.

Jane kicked out of satellite view and into SESAME's complex of ground-level Doppler Lidars. She saw at once what Jerry had meant about the midlevel local jet. Along the edge of the torpidly encroaching damp there was a great flat ribbon of spew; down around San Antonio it was chopping the advancing stratus into a mass of roller bars.

Mickey's voice emerged from the laptop's speaker. "What do you think, Jane?"

She glanced over at Mickey. Mickey sat on the carpet, his gloved hands gently pawing the air, his head and face hidden in his personal virching helmet. The side of his helmet was logo'd with the peeling emblem of a mocking-bird perched on a lightning bolt. It struck Jane as a little odd that a guy sitting three steps away from her would network a vocal signal over fiber-optic wiring, when he might have just lifted his faceplate and started talking. But that was Mickey all over.

She clicked patiently through three levels of pull-downs into a vocal-chat mode and leaned into the laptop's dorky little inset mike. "Well, Mickey, I think if that midlevel local jet impacts the dryline, we are gonna have vorticity to burn."

"Me too," Mickey offered tinnily. The miked acoustics inside his helmet were exactly like the bottom of a barrel. "Are you chasing tomorrow?"

"Of course I'm chasing, man, I always do pursuit!"

"Well, SESAME has two dead relays south of Paducah, we're either gonna have to route around 'em or get our own relay ~

"Hell," Jane said. "Stupid structure-hit vandals, I hate those people!" She peered into her laptop screen. "Well, it looks to me like it'll break well south of Paducah, though. What do you think, Sam?"

Sam Moncrieff lifted his faceplate and gazed at her in total distraction. "Huh? Did you just say something?"

She paused. "Yeah, I did. Where's it gonna break?"

Sam circled his gloved hand three times in the air, stabbed out with his forefinger. "Stonewall County. Boom!"

"Damn near right on top of us," Jane said.

Sam's freckled face was the picture of satisfaction. "Jerry doesn't often miss." He shut his faceplate again with a snap.

A piece of groupware now took it upon itself to hunt Jane down on the local Net and make its presence known. Jane was rather proud about the groupware. It was the only groupware she'd ever installed-ever seen, even-that actually worked, in the sense that it genuinely helped a group manage rather than slowly driving its users bughouse. Unfortunately the code was cryptware-it reencrypted itself every goddamn month and demanded a payoff before unfreezing-but she kept up the lease out of her own pocket, even though paying actual money for code was an archaic pain in the ass.

Jane fed the groupware a couple of clicks. It opened up.

-It was Jerry's assignments.

Calibration Tonight 2100 HQ Yurt

11 Mar 2031

ABLE: Greg Foulkes, Carol Cooper.

BAKER: Rudy Martinez, Sam Moncrieff.

CHARLIE: Rick Sedletter, Jane Unger.

AFRODROME mucic: Bosweli Harvey. Martha Madromch, Alex Unger.

RADAR Bus: Peter Vierling, Joanne Lessard.

NAVIGATION, SUPPORT JEEPS: Joe Brasseur.

BACKUP TEAM: Ellen Mae Lankton, Ed Dunnebecke, Jeff Lowe.

N~rwomc coo~i~: Mickey Kiehl.

N0WCASrER: Jerry Mukahey.

ABLE team departs 0630 to plant monitors along storm track and cover the north flank. RADAR BUS departs 0700 to deploy kite relays and cover Paducah hole around SESAME Net. BAKER departs 0800 to pursue midmorning towers on left flank. AERODROME crew departs behind dryline 0900 for chaff launch and ornithopter virching. CHARLIE departs approx 1200 to pursue secondary propagation towers.

So she was riding with Rick. How lovely. It looked as though Alex would be crammed into the back of the aerodrome truck. If Alex thought that stunting an ultralight was hairy, he'd learn otherwise if Buzzard virched him in an ornithopter to punch the core.

A tinny ringing came from Jane's laptop. In unison, Sam and Mickey both yanked the virching helmets from their heads. "Goddamn it!" Mickey said, massaging his ears. "I wish she'd stop doing that!"

Sam looked rueful, climbing to his feet. "When Ellen Mae wants you to eat, you'd better devirch and go eat, and that's all there is to it."

"I wish she'd use something else besides a chuckwagon triangle at fifty decibels, man."

Jane smiled silently. It was good to be able to pull network weight for good old Ellen Mae.