Heavy Weather

CHAPTER 3

Alex climbed out of five levels of complex nightmare to find someone kicking his ribs. He gazed up for a long, deeply dazed moment into the conical funnel of a tepee, then focused on a tall, bony young woman looming at the side of his sleeping bag.

"Hey, Medicine Boy," she said. She was sharp-nosed and bright-eyed and wearing a sleeveless multipocketed jacket and jeans.

"Yeah," Alex croaked. "Hi."

"I'm Martha, remember? You're s'posed to be on our chase team. Get up, dude."

"Right," he muttered. "Where's the sauna?" Martha smiled thinly. She swung out one long arm- her fingertips lacquered black. "The latrines are over that way." Her arm swung again from the shoulder, like the needle of a compass. "The truck's chargin' up by the solar rack. You got ten minutes." She left the tepee, leaving its flap hanging open to a malignant burst of morning glare.

Alex sat up. He'd slept all night, naked inside a padded cloth bag on a big round floor mat of bubblepak. The bag itself was old and dusty and torn, and he was pretty sure that two people in a doubtful state of cleanliness had spent a lot of time having sex in it. As for the bubblepak, it was clearly a stuff of deep unholy fascination for Storm Troupers. To judge by what he'd seen so far, the Troupe spent half their lives sprawling, sitting, and sleeping on carpet-covered bubblepak, big blisterwads of condom-thin but rawhide-tough translucent inflated film. Bubblepak was one of the basic elements of their nomad's cosmos: Bubblepak, Paper & Sticks; Chips, Wire, & Data; Wind, Clouds, & Dirt. He'd just spent the night inside a rolled-up tepee cone of polymerized recycled newsprint, a thing of paper and sticks and string, like something a little kid might make with tape and scissors.

Alex clambered slowly to his feet. His knees shook, and his arms and back were sore; the bones of his spine felt like a stack of wooden napkin rings. He had a minor lump on his head that he didn't remember receiving.

But his lungs felt good. His lungs felt very good, amazingly good. He was breathing. And that was all that mattered. For the first time in at least a year, he'd spent the entire night, deeply asleep, without a coughing fit.

Whatever vile substance he'd received in the lung enema, and whatever misguided quack doctrine had guided the clinica staff, the treatment had nonetheless worked. The street rumors that had guided him were true: the sans of bitches in Nuevo Laredo actually had something workable. He wasn't cured-he knew full well that he wasn't cured, he could sense the sullen reservoirs of baffled sickness lurking deep in his bones-but he was much better. They had hacked him back, they had patched him up, they had propped him on his feet. And just in time to have him stolen away.

Alex laughed aloud. He had rallied; he was on a roll again. It was very welcome; but it was very strange.

Alex had had spells of good health before. The longest had been a solid ten months when he was seventeen, when the whole texture of his life had changed for a while, and he had even considered going to school. But that little dream had broken like a bubble of blood, when the blight set its flshhooks into him again and reeled him back gasping into its own world of checkups, injections, biopsies, and the sickbed.

His latest siege of illness had been the worst by far, the worst since his infancy, really. At age eighteen months, he had almost coughed to death. Alex didn't remember this experience, naturally, but his parents had made twenty-four-hour nursery videotapes during the crisis. Alex had later discovered those tapes and studied them at length.

In the harsh unsparing light of Texas morning, Alex stood naked by his battered sleeping bag and examined himself, with a care and clarity that he'd avoided for a while.

He was past thin: he was emaciated, a stick-puppet creature, all tendon and bone. He was close to gone, way too close. He'd been neglectful, and careless.

Careless-because he hadn't expected to emerge from those shadows again. Not really, not this time. The clinica had been his last hope, and to pursue it, he had cut all ties to his family, and his family's agents. He'd gone underground with all the determination he could manage-so far underground that he didn't need eyes anymore, the kind of deep dark underground that was the functional equivalent of a grave. The hope was just an obligatory long shot. In reality, he'd been quietly killing off the last few weeks of lease on his worn-out carcass, before the arrival of the final wrecking ball.

But now it appeared he was going to live. Somehow, despite all odds, he'd gotten another lease extension. That wasn't very much to rely on, but it was all he'd ever had: and if it lasted awhile, then he could surely use the time.

The Trouper camp might be good for him. The air of the High Plains was thin and dry, cleaner somehow, and less of a burden to breathe.

Alex felt particularly enthusiastic about the Troupe's oxygen tank. Most of the doctors of his experience had been a little doubtful about his habit of sneaking pure oxygen. But these Troupers weren't doctors; they were a pack of fanatical hicks, with a refreshing lack of any kind of propriety, and the oxygen had been lovely.

Alex climbed quickly into his baggy paper suit and zipped it up to the neck. Let the stick puppet disappear into his big paper puppet costume. It wouldn't do for the Troupers to dwell on his medical condition. He couldn't describe them as bloodthirsty or sadistic people; they lacked that criminal, predatory air he'd so often seen in his determined slumming with black marketeers. But the Troupe did have the stony gaze of people overused to death and killing: hunters, ranchers, butchers. Thrill freaks. Euthanasia enthusiasts.

Alex put on his new shoes-the same makeshift plastic soles as yesterday, but trimmed closer to the shape of his foot, with a seamed-paper glued-on top, and a paper shoe tongue, and a series of reinforced paper lace holes. If you didn't look hard, Carol Cooper's constructions were practically actual clothes.

Alex tottered squinting across the camp and into the peaked latrine tent. The Troupe's lavatory features were simplicity itself: postholes augered about two meters down into the rocky subsoil, with a little framework seatless camp stool to squat on. After a prolonged struggle, Alex rose and zipped his drop seat back in place, and looked for the aerodrome truck.

Buzzard and Martha's telepresence chase truck was a long white wide-bodied hardtop, spined all over with various species of antenna. It had a radar unit clamped to the roof, in a snow-white plastic dome. Buzzard was topping off the batteries with a trickle of current from the solar array; Martha Madronich had the back double doors open and was stowing a collapsed ornithopter into an interior wall-mounted rack.

"Got any water?" Alex said.

Martha stepped out of the truck and handed Alex a plastic canteen and a paper cup. Martha limped a bit, and Alex noticed for the first time that she had an artificial foot, a soft flesh-colored prosthetic with dainty little joints at the ankles and toes, in a black ballet slipper.

Alex poured, careful not to touch the paper cup to Martha's possibly infectious canteen rim, and he gulped thirstily at the flat distilled water. "Not too much," she cautioned him.

He gave the canteen back and she handed him a dense wedge of cornmeal-and-venison scrappie. "Breakfast." Alex munched the mincemeat wedge of fried deer he art, deer liver, and dough while he slowly circled the truck. The truck had two bucket seats in front, with dangling earphones and eye goggles Velcroed to the fabric roof, and an impressive arsenal of radio, radar, microwave, and telephone equipment bolted across the dash.

"Where do I ride?" he said.

Martha pointed to a cubbyhole she'd cleared on the floor of the truck, a burrowed nook amid a mass of packed equipment: big drawstring bags, a pair of plastic tool chests, three bundles of strapped-down spars.

"Oh yeah," Alex said, at length. "Luxury."

Martha sniffed and ran both bony hands through her black-dyed hair. "We'll nest you down in some bubblepak, you'll do okay. We don't do any rough cross-country stuff. Us telepresence types always stick close to the highways."

"You'll have to move when we pull that chaff bag," Buzzard warned.

Alex grunted. Buzzard unrolled a flattened sheet of bubblepak, fit it to a palm-sized battery air pump, and inflated it with a quick harsh hiss and crackle.

Martha wadded the bubblepak helpfully into the hole, then climbed back out. Alex's cheap cuff emitted a loud hour chime. Martha glanced at her wrist, then back up at Alex again.

"Aren't you calibrated?" she said.

"Sorry, no." Alex lifted his wrist. "I couldn't figure out how to set the clock on this thing. Anyhow, it's not a real Trouper cuff like yours, it's just my sister's cheap wannabe Trouper cuff."

Martha sighed in exasperation. "Use the clock in the laptop, then. Get in, man, time's a-wastin'." She and Buzzard went to the front of the vehicle and climbed in.

The truck took off downhill, hit the highway, and headed north. It drove itself and was very quiet. Besides the thrum of tires on pavement, the loudest sound in the truck was the crinkling of Alex's bubblepak and paper suit as he elbowed bags aside and settled in place.

"Hey, Medicine Boy!" Buzzard said suddenly. "You like that ultralight?"

"Loved it!" Alex assured him. "My life began when I met you and your machinery, Boswell."

Buzzard snickered. "I knew you liked it, man."

Alex spotted a gray laptop under Boswell's driver seat and snagged it out. He opened it up, and placed the clock readout in the corner: 12 May, 2031, 9:11:46 4.M~ Then he started grepping at the hard disk. "Hey Buzzard, you got the Library of Congress in here," he said. "Nice machine!"

"That's the 2015 Library of Congress," Buzzard said proudly.

"Really?"

"Yeah, the one they released right after the data nationalizations," Buzzard said. "The whole on-line works! The complete set, no encryptions, no abridgments! They tried to recopyright a lot of that stuff, after the impeachments, y'know."

"Yeah, like the government could get it back after doing that," Alex sniffed.

"You'd be surprised how many losers just gave back that data!" Buzzard said darkly. "Sent federal cops out to raid the universities and stuff... Man, you'll get my Library of Congress when you pry my cold dead fingers off it!"

"I see you've got the 2029 release of the Library in here too.

"Yeah, I've got most of that one... there's some pretty good new stuff in that '29 release, but it's not like the classic 2015 set. I dunno, you can say what you want about the State of Emergency, but the Regime had some pretty dang good ideas about public domain."

Alex opened the 2015 Library, screened up a visualization of its data stacks, zipped down randomly through its cyberspace architecture through three orders of fractal magnitude, and punched at random into a little cream-yellow cube. The thing unfolded like the usual origami trick and he found himself gazing at a full-color digital replica of an illuminated twelfth-century French manuscript.

It was almost always like that when you screwed around with the Library. He'd hammered away in the Library on occasion, when absolutely sick of cable television, but the way he figured it, the big heap of electric text was way overrated. There were derelicts around who could fit all their material possessions in a paper bag, but they'd have a cheap laptop and some big chunk of the Library, and they'd crouch under a culvert with it, and peck around on it and fly around in it and read stuff and annotate it and hypertext it, and then they'd come up with some pathetic, shattered, crank, loony, paranoid theory as to what the hell had happened to them and their planet... . It almost beat drugs for turning smart people into human wreckage.

Alex looked up from the screen, bored. "What do you hack, Martha?"

"I hack kites," she told him. "Balloons, chaff, ultralights, parafoils... Chutes are my favorite, though. I like to structure-jump."

"You do structure hits, Martha?"

She whirled in her seat to glare at him. "Not structure hits, you moron! Structure jumps! I don't blow things up! I just climb up on top of things when the wind is right, and I jump off them with a parachute."

"Oh. I get it. Sorry." Alex thought about it. "What kinda things d'you jump off, Martha?"

"Bridges are pretty good," she said, relaxing a bit. "Mountains are great. Urban skyscrapers are mega-cool, but you have to worry about, like, private security guards and stupid city cops and moron straight civilians and stuff... . The coolest, though, is really big transmission towers."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, I like the really big antique ones without any construction diamond in 'em." She paused. "That's how I lost my foot."

"Oh. Right. Okay." Alex nodded repeatedly. "How'd someone like you come to join the Storm Troupe?"

Martha shook her head. "I'll give you some advice, little dude. Don't ever ask people that."

Fair enough. Alex retreated back into the laptop screen.

They drove on. Every ten minutes Buzzard and Martha would stop to trade laconic updates with the Trouper base camp, or parley with Greg and Carol in the Dune Buggy Able, or send some side-of-the-mouth remark to Peter and Joanne in the Radar Bus. Their traffic was all acronyms and in-jokes and jargon. Every once in a while Martha would scrawl a quick note in grease pencil on the inside of the windshield. When Alex's cuff chimed again, she took it off his wrist, fixed it brusquely, and handed it back.

After a long hour on the road, Buzzard began methodically gnawing at a long strap of venison jerky. Martha started picking her way daintily through a little drawstring bag of salted sunflower seeds, tongue-flicking her chewed-up seed hulls through the half-open passenger window. Alex had a strong stomach-he could read text off a laptop in a moving vehicle without any trace of headache or motion sickness-but at the sight of this, he shut his laptop and his eyes, and tried to sleep a bit.

He lounged half-awake for a while, then he sank with unexpected speed and impetus into a deep healing doze. A month's worth of narcotic-suppressed REM sleep suddenly rose from his bloodstream's sediments and seized control of his frontal lobes. Vast glittering tinsel sheets of dream whipped and rippled past his inner eye, hyperactive visions of light and air and speed and weightlessness. .

Alex came to with a start and realized that the truck had stopped.

He sat up slowly in his nest of bubblepak, then climbed out the open back double doors into simmering, eye-hurting, late-morning sunlight. The Troupers had left the highway and worked their way up a scarcely used dirt track to the top of a low flat hill. The hill was one of the limestone rises typical of the region, a bush-spattered bump in the landscape that had tried and failed to become a mesa.

However, the hill had a respectably sized relay tower on it, with its own concrete-embedded solar array and a small windowless cement blockhouse. Buzzard and Martha had parked, and they'd laced a section of blue fabric to the side of the truck's roof. They were stretching the fabric out on a pair of sticks to form a sunshade veranda.

"What's up?" Alex said.

Buzzard had slung a long narrow-billed black cap over his balding noggin, the base of its bill resting on the outsized nose bridge of a pair of insectile mirrorshades. "Well," he allowed, "we'll put up a relay kite on some co-ax, boot the packet relay, try and tap in on this tower node... and then maybe launch a couple ornithopters."

"You can go back to sleep if you want," Martha offered.

"No, that's okay," said Alex, rubbing his eyes. He envied Buzzard the sunglasses. They were a matter of survival out here.

Alex shook the stiffness out of his back and gazed over the landscape, shading his eyes right-handed. This had once been cattle country, of a sort; never thriving, but a place you could squeeze a living from, if you owned enough of it. Alex could trace the still-lingering ligature scars of rusted and collapsed barbed-wire fencing, old scalpel-straight incisions across the greenly flourishing wild expanses of bunchgrass and grama and needle grass and weed. Since the mass evacuations and the livestock die-offs, much of the abandoned pastureland had grown up in mesquite.

Here, however, the mesquite was mysteriously dead: brown and leafless and twisted, the narrow limbs peeling leprous rotten gray bark. Stranger yet, there was a broad path broken through the dead mesquite forest, a series of curved arcs like the stamping of a gigantic horseshoe. The dead forest was scarred with ragged, overlapping capital Cs, some of them half a kilometer across. It looked as if somebody had tried to set a robot bulldozer on the pasture, to knock the dead wood down, but the dozer bad suffered some weird variety of major software malf.

"How come all those mesquite trees are dead down there?" he said. "Looks like herbicide."

Martha shook her head. "No, dude. Drought."

"What the beck kind of drought can kill a mesquite tree?"

"Look, dude. If it doesn't rain at all, for more than a year, then everything dies. Mesquite, cactus, everything. Everything around this place died, fifteen years ago."

"Heavy weather," Buzzard said somberly.

Martha nodded. "It looks pretty good right now, but that's because all this grass and stuff came back from seed, and this county has been getting a lot of rain lately. But man, that's why nobody can live out here anymore. There's no water left underground, nothing left in the aquifer, so whenever a drought hits, it hits bad. You can't water your stock, so the cattle die of thirst and you go broke, just like that." Martha snapped her fingers. "And you sure can't farm, 'cause there's no irrigation. Anyway, those new-style genetic crops with the chlorophyll hack, they need a lot of steady water to keep up those super-production rates."

"I see," Alex said. He thought it over. "But there's plenty of grass growing wild Out there now. You could still make some money if you drove cattle back and forth all over the rangeland, and didn't keep 'em all confined in one ranch."

Martha laughed. "Sure, dude. You could cattle-drive 'em up the old Chisolm Trail and slaughter 'em in Topeka, just like the old days, if they'd let you. You're not the first to think of that idea. But there's no free range anymore. The white man still owns all this land, okay? The range war is over, and the Comanches lost big time."

"But the land's not worth anything to anybody now," Alex said.

"It's still private property. There's still a little bit of money in the mineral rights and oil rights. Sometimes biomass companies come out and reap off the brush, and turn it to gasohol and feedstocks and stuff. It's all in state courts, all absentees and heirs and such, it's a god-awful mess."

"We're trespassing right now," Buzzard announced.

"Legally speaking. That's why the Troupe's got its own lawyer."

"Joe Brasseur's a pretty good guy, for a lawyer," Martha allowed tolerantly. "He's got friends in Austin."

"Okay," Alex said. "I get it with the legal angle. So what happened down there with the bulldozer? Somebody trying to clear off the pastureland?"

Martha and Buzzard traded glances, then burst into laughter.

"A bulldozer." Buzzard chuckled. "What a geek. A bulldozer. This kid is the tenderfoot dude wannabe geek of all time!" He clutched his shaking ribs below his black cotton midriff.

Martha pounded Buzzard's back with the flat of her hand. "Sorry," she said, controlling her smirk. "Boswell gets like this sometimes... . Alex, try and imagine a big wind, okay? A really, really, big wind."

"You're not telling me that's a tornado track, are you?"

"Yeah, it is. About five years old."

Alex stared at it. "I thought tornadoes Just flattened everything in their path."

"Yeah, an F-4 or F-5 will do that for sure, but that was a little one, maybe F-2, tops. Those curves in the damage path, those are real typical. They're called suction spots. A little vortex that's inside the big vortex, but those suction spots always pack the most punch."

Alex stared downhill at the broken path through the dead mesquite. He could understand it now: those overlapping C-shaped marks were the scars of some narrow spike of savage energy, a scythe embedded in the rim of a bigger wheel, slashing through the trees again and again as the funnel cycled forward. The twister had pulled dead trees apart and left their limbs as mangled, dangling debris, but the lethal suction spot had splintereened everything it touched, snapping trunks off at ground level, ripping roots up in dense shattered mats, and spewing branches aside as a wooden salad of chunks and matchsticks.

He licked dry lips. "I get it. Very tasty... did you see this happen? Did you chase this one, back then?"

Martha shook her head. "We can't chase 'em all, dude. We're after the big ones."

Buzzard lifted his shades, wiped tears of laughter, and adjusted the cap on his sweating scalp. "The F-6," he said, sobering. "We want the F-6, Medicine Boy."

"Are we gonna find an F-6 today?" Alex said.

"Not today," Buzzard said. "But if there's ever one around, Jerry can find it for us." He stepped into the back of the truck.

Alex stared, meditatively, at the twister's scarred track. Martha edged closer to him and lowered her voice. "You're not scared now, are you?"

"No, Martha," he said deliberately. "I'm not afraid."

She believed him. "I could tell that about you, when they were stunting you in the ultralight. You're like your sister, only not so . .. I dunno ... not so flicking classy and perfect."

"Not the words I'd have chosen," Alex told her.

"Well, about the F-6," Martha confided quickly, glancing over her shoulder. "The thing is-it's virtual. There's never been any actual F-6 tornado in the real-life atmosphere. The F-6 only lives in Jerry's math simulations. But when the F-6 hits, the Troupe will be there. And we'll document it!"

Buzzard emerged from the truck with a long bundle of spars and cloth and a thick spool of kite cable. He and Martha set to work. The kite was made of a very unusual cloth: like watered blue silk with flat plastic laths half-melted into the fabric. The plastic had an embedded grid of hair-thin ribs of wiring.

The two Troupers took such loving pride in assembling their box kite that Alex felt quite touched. He felt a vague urge to photograph them, as if they were ethnic exotics doing some difficult folk dance.

When they'd popped and snapped and wedged the box kite's various spars and crossbars into place, the kite was two meters wide. Martha had to steady it with both her hands-not because of its weight, which was negligible, but because of its eagerness to catch the wind.

Buzzard unreeled its cable then. The kite string looked very much like old-fashioned cable-television line. Buzzard anchored the kite's double guy wires to a specialized collar on the end of the cable, then carefully screwed the cable's end jack onto a threaded knob on the center of one hollow spar.

The kite suddenly leaped into eerie life and shook itself like a panicked pterodactyl. "Yo!" Buzzard cried. "Didn't you check the diagnostics on this sucker?"

"It's a bad boot, man," Martha yelled, her slippers skidding in the dust as she fought the kite. "Power-down!"

Buzzard jumped in the back of the truck and hit keys on the kite's laptop. The kite went dead again.

"Smart cloth," Martha explained, shaking the kite with a mix of fondness and annoyance. "Smart enough to screw up bad sometimes, but it's got lift potential right off the scale."

"She's a good machine," Buzzard hedged, rebooting the kite and patiently watching the start-u p progressing on the screen. "On a good day, you can float her off the thermal from a camp stove."

The kite came to life again suddenly, thrumming like a drumhead. "That's more like it," Martha said. She carried the kite into the light prevailing breeze.

Buzzard clamped the kite's spool to the rear bumper of the truck and watched as Martha drew line out a dozen meters. "Go!" he yelled, and Martha threw the big kite with an overhand heave, and it leaped silently into the sky.

The kite paid out line on its spool, with deft little self-calculated reelings and unreelings, until it caught a faster wind. It took on height quickly then, with deliberate speed, arcing and rearcing upward, in a neat set of airborne half parabolas.

"Smart cloth," Alex said, impressed despite himself. "That is very sweet... how many megs does she carry?"

"Oh, just a couple hundred," Buzzard said modestly. "It doesn't take much to fly a kite."

Martha then took it upon herself to hack the ceramic blockhouse of the tower. The tower's stolid, windowless blockhouse looked practically indestructible, an operational necessity in an area practically abandoned. Alex had not seen any wasteland structure vandals yet: word was that the major gangs had been ruthlessly tracked and exterminated by hard-riding posses of Texas Rangers. He'd been assured, though, that there were still a few structure vandals around: looters, scavengers, burglars, hobbyist lunatics from out of the cities. They tended to travel in packs.

Martha established that the relay tower belonged to a bank: it was an electronic-funds-transfer cell. The fact that the cell was out in the middle of nowhere suggested that the funds under transference were not entirely of a state-sanctioned variety. She then began the tedious but largely automated process of figuring out how to use it for free. Almost all networks had some diplomatic recognition of other networks, especially the public-service kinds. If you brought up the proper sequence of requests, in the proper shelter of network identity, you could win a smaller or greater degree of free access.

In the meantime, Buzzard took out his ornithopters. These were hollow-boned winged flying drones with clever foamed-metal joints and a hide of individual black plastic "feathers." The three omithopters could easily pass for actual buzzards at a distance. Provided, that is, that one failed to notice their thin extrudable antennas and their naked, stripped-metal heads, which were binocular video-cams spaced at the width of human eyes.

It took a lot of computational power to manage the act of winged flight. Like most buzzards, the omithopters spent much of their time passively soaring, wings spread to glide, the algorithmic chips in their wired bellies half shut down and merely sipping power. Only when they hit real turbulence would the 'thopters begin to outfly actual birds by an order of magnitude. The machines looked frail and dainty, but they were hatchlings of a military technology.

With the ease of long habit, Buzzard hooked the first ornithopter's breastbone to the notched end of a long throwing stick. He preened the machine's feathered wings back, then ran forward across the hilltop with the long hopping steps of a javelineer and flung the machine skyward with a two-handed over-the-shoulder whip of his arms.

The ornithopter caught itself in midair with a distantly audible whuff of its wings, wheeled aside with dainty computational precision, and began to climb.

Buzzard swaggered back to the rear of the truck, his throwing stick balanced over his shoulders and his long floppy hands draped over it. "Fetch me out another birdie," he told Alex.

Alex rose from his seat on the bumper and dimbed into the truck. He detached the second ornithopter from its plastic wall clips and carried it out.

"What's that really big bundle next to the wheel well?" Alex said.

"That's the paraglider," Buzzard said. "We won't be using it today, but we like to carry it. In case we want to, you know, fly up there in actuality."

"It's a manned paraglider?"

"Yeah."

"Well, I want to fly it."

Buzzard tucked the bundled ornithopter in the crook of his arm and pulled off his sunglasses. "Look, kid. You got to know something about flying before you can ride one of those. That thing doesn't even have a motor. It's an actual glider, and we have to tow it off the back of the truck."

"Well, I'm game. Let's go."

"That's cute," Buzzard said, grinning at him with a flash of yellow teeth. "But your sister would get on my case. Because you would fall right out the sky, and be a bloody heap of roadkill."

Alex considered this. "I want you to teach me, then, Boswell."

Buzzard shrugged. "That's a big weight for me to pull, Medicine Boy. What's in it for me?"

Alex frowned. "Well, what the hell do you want? I've got money."

"Shit," Buzzard said, glancing uphill at Martha, still hard at work accessing the tower. "Don't let Martha hear you say that. She hates it when people try to pull money stuff inside the Troupe. Nobody ever offers us money who's not a geek wannabe or a goddamn tourist." Buzzard stalked away deliberately, hooked his second bird to the throwing stick, and flung it into the sky.

Alex waited for him to return and handed him the third flier from the truck. "Why does Martha have to know?" he persisted. "Can't we work this out between us? I want to fly."

"'Cause she'd find out, man," Buzzard said, annoyed. "She's not stupid! Janey used to throw money around, and you shoulda seen what happened. First month Janey was here, she and Martha had it out in a major mega-scrap."

Alex's eyes widened. "What?"

"It was a brawl, man! They went at it tooth and nail. Screamin', punchin', knocking each other in the dirt-2- man, it was beautiful!" Buzzard grinned, in happy reminiscence. "I never heard Janey scream like that! Except when she and Jerry are gettin' it on after a chase, that is."

"Holy cow," Alex said slowly. He metabolized the information. "Who won?"

"Call it a draw," Buzzard judged. "If Martha had two real feet, she'd have kicked Janey's ass fer sure. .

Martha's skinny but she's strong, man, she can do those climber's chin-ups forever. But Janey's big and sturdy. And when she gets real excited, she just goes nonlinear. She's a wild woman.~~

"Jerry let them fight like that?" Alex said.

"Jerry was out-of-camp at the time. Besides, he wasn't actually fucking Janey back then; she was just hanging around the Troupe, trying to buy popularity. She was being a pain in the ass. Kind of like you're being right now."

"I noticed Jerry took Jane a lot more seriously after that fight, though," Buzzard mused. "Got her started on the weight training and stuff... Kinda shaped Janey up, I guess. She acts better now. I don't think Martha would want to tangle with her nowadays. But Martha's sure not one of Janey's big fans."

Alex grunted.

Buzzard pointed into the back of the truck. "See those deck chairs? Set 'em up under the sunshade."

Alex dragged the two collapsible deck chairs out of the truck. After prolonged study of their slack fabric supports and swinging wooden hinges, he managed to assemble them properly.

Buzzard launched his third ornithopter, then retreated into the cab of the truck. He emerged with a tangle of goggles, headphones, his laptop, and a pair of ribbed data gloves.

Buzzard then collapsed into his reclining chair, slipped on the gloves, the goggles, and the phones. He propped his elbows on the edge of the chair, extended his gloved fingers, wiggled the ends of them, and vanished from human ken into hidden mysteries of aerial telepresence.

Martha returned and collapsed sweating into the second deck chair. "What a mega-hassle, man, banks are the most paranoid goddamn networks in the universe. I hate banks, man." She shot Alex a narrow glare of squinting anger. "I even hate outlaw banks."

"Did you get through?" Alex said, standing at her elbow.

"Yeah, I got through-I wouldn't be sitting here if I didn't get through! But I didn't pull much real use out of that tower, so we're gonna have to depend on that relay kite or we'll be droppin' packets all over West Texas." She frowned. "Jerry's gonna give us shit when he sees how we ran down the batteries."

"You'd think they'd at least give you some of their solar power," Alex said. "It just goes to waste otherwise."

"Only a fuckin' bank would want to sell you sunshine," Martha said bitterly.

Alex nodded, trying to please. "I can hear those racks humming from here."

Martha sat up in her chair. "You hear humming?"

"Sure," Alex said.

"Real low? Electrical? Kind of a throbbing sound?"

"Well, yeah."

Martha reached out and poked the virch-blind Buzzard between the ribs. Buzzard jumped as if gun-shot and angrily tore off his goggles and phones.

"Hey, Buzz!" Martha said. "Medicine Boy hears The Hum!"

"Wow," Buzzard said. He got up from his chair. "Here, take over." He helped Martha out of the chair and into his own. Martha began wiping the phones down with a little attached Velcro pack of antisePtic tissues.

Buzzard fetched up his shades and cap. "Let's get well away from the truck, dude. C'mon with me."

Alex followed Buzzard as they picked their way down the western slope of the hill, down the dirt track. Off in the distance, a broken line of squat grayish clouds was lurking on the horizon. The approaching violent storm front, if that was indeed what it was, looked surprisingly unimpressive.

"Still hear the hum?" Buzzard said.

"'SI0."

"Well, listen."

Alex strained his ears for half a silent minute. Insect chirps, a feeble rustle of wind, a few distant bird cries. "Maybe. A little."

"Well, I hear it," Buzzard said, with satisfaction. "Most people can't. Martha can't. But that's the Taos Hum."

"What's that?"

"Real low, kind of a wobbling sound... about thirty to eighty hertz. Twenty hertz is about as low as human hearing can go." He spread his arms. "Sourceless, like it's all around you, all around the horizon. Like an old-fashioned motor, or a fuel-burning generator. You can only hear it when it's really quiet."

"I thought it was the solar rack."

"Solar racks don't hum," Buzzard told him. "They hiss a little, sometimes...

"Well, what is it?"

"They call it the Taos Hum, 'cause the first reports came out of New Mexico about fifty years ago," Buzzard said. "That was when the first real greenhouse effects starting kicking in... . Taos, Santa Fe, Albuquerque...hen parts of Florida. Y'know, Jerry was born in Los Alamos. That's where Jerry grew up. He can hear The Hum."

"I still don't understand what it is, Boswell."

"Nobody knows," Buzzard said simply. "Jerry's got some theories. But The Hum doesn't show up on instruments. You can't pick up The Hum with any microphone."

Alex scratched his stubbled chin. "How d'you know it's really real, then?"

Buzzard shrugged. "What do you mean, 'real'? The Hum drives people nuts, sometimes. Is that real enough for ya? Maybe it's not a real sound. Maybe it's some disturbance inside the ear, some kind of resonant power harmonic off the bottom of the ionosphere, or something.

Some people can hear the northern lights, they say; they hear 'em sort of hiss and sparkle when the curtains move. There's no explanation for that, either. There's a lot we don't understand about weather." Buzzard clutched the lump of blackened metal on the leather thong around his neck. "A lot, man."

They stared silently at the western horizon for a lQng moment. "I'm sending the 'thopters out to scan those towers," Buzzard said. "They're gonna break the cap by noontime."

"You don't happen to have a spare pair of those shades, do you?" Alex said. "This glare is killing me."

"Naw," Buzzard said, turning back toward the truck. "But I got some spare virching goggles. I can put you under 'em and patch you in to the 'thopters. Let's go."

They returned to the truck, where Martha was remotely wrapped in flight. Buzzard rummaged in a tool kit, then produced a pair of calipers. He measured the distance between the pupils of Alex's eyeballs, then loaded the parameters into a laptop. He pulled spare goggles and phones from their dustproof plastic wrap and sterilized them with a swab. "Can't be too careful with virching equipment," he remarked. "People get pinkeye, swimmer~s ear... in the city arcades, you can get head lice!"

"I got no chair," Alex pointed Out.

"Sit on some bubblepak."

Alex fetched his bubblepak mat and sat on it, sweating. There was a faint hot wind from the southeast, and he couldn't call it damp, exactly, but something about it was suffocating him.

A lanky mosquito had landed unnoticed on Martha's virch-blinded arm and was filling its belly with blood. Alex thought of reaching over to swat it, then changed his mind. Martha probably wouldn't take a swat on the arm all that well.

"Here ya go," Buzzard said, handing him the goggles. "Telepresence is kind of special, okay? You can get some real somatic disturbance, 'cause there's no body sensation to go with the movement. Especially since you won't be controlling the flight. You'll just be riding shotgun with me and Martha, kinda looking over our wings, right?"

"Right, I get it."

"If you start getting virch-sick, just close your eyes tight till you feel better. And for Christ's sake, don't puke on the equipment."

"Right, I get it, no problem!" Alex said. He hadn't actually thrown up during his ultralight experience. On the contrary: he'd coughed up about a pint of blue goo from the pit of his lungs, then passed out from oxygen hyperventilation. He thought it was wiser not to mention this. If they thought it was merely vomit, so much the better.

Alex slipped the goggles on and stared at two tiny television screens, a thumb's width from the surface of his eyes. They were input-free and cybernetic blue, and the display had seen some hard use; the left one had a light pepper sprinkling of dead black pixels. He felt sweat beading on his goggle-smothered eyelids.

"Ready?" came Buzzard's voice from the distant limbo of the real world. "I'm gonna leave the earphones off awhile so we can talk easier.

"Yeah, okay."

"Remember, this is going to be a little disorienting."

"Would you just shut up and do it, man? You people kill me!"

White light snapped onto his face. He was halfway up the sky, and flying.

Alex immediately lost his balance, pitched over backward, and thunked the back of his head onto the hard plastic of the truck's rear tire.

Eyes wide, he squirmed on his back with his shoulders and heels and flung out both his arms to embrace the drifting sky. He felt both his arms fall to the bubblepak with distant thuds, like severed butcher's meat.

He was now soaring gut-first through space. The ground felt beautifully solid beneath his back, as if the whole weight of the planet was behind him and shoving. The outline of distant clouds shimmered slightly, a hallucinatory perceptual crawl. Computational effects; when he looked very closely, he could see tiny dandruff flakes of pixel sweeping in swift little avalanches over the variants in color and light intensity.

"Wow," he muttered. "This is it. Mega, mega heavy . .

Instinctively, he tried to move his head and gaze around himself. There was no tracking inside the goggles. The scene before him stayed rock steady, welded to his face. He was nothing but eyeball, a numbed carcass of amputated everything. He was body-free.

He heard the squeak of the lawn chair as Buzzard settled into his own rig. "You're on Jesse now," Buzzard said. "I'll switch you onto Kelly."

The scene blinked off and on again, flinging him electronically from machine to machine, like a soundless hammer blow between the eyes.

"We're gonna climb now," Buzzard announced. The machine began flapping soundlessly, with slow wrenching dips in the imagery.

"We want to get up to the cap," Buzzard said. "That's where the action is right now."

"Gimme those headphones," Alex demanded, stretching out one arm. "I'll put 'em over just one ear."

Buzzard handed him the headphone rig and Alex adjusted it by feel. The earphones had a little attached mouth mike, a foam blob on a bent plastic stick. Under his fumbling blind fingers, Alex's head felt unexpectedly huge and ungainly. His head felt like somebody else's head, like a big throw pillow upholstered in scalp.

With his ears secured beneath the pads of the earphones, Alex suddenly felt The Hum again, buzzing and tickling at the edge of his perception. The Hum was flowing right through him, some creepy rumbling transaction between the rim of outer space and planetary magma currents deep below. He strained his ears-but the harder he tried to hear The Hum, the less there was to perceive. Alex decided that it was safer not to believe in The Hum. He pulled the pad off his left ear. No more Hum. Good.

Then he began to hear the keening wind of the heights. "We got ourselves a storm situation," Buzzard announced, with satisfaction. "What we got, is two air masses m a scrap. You listening, Alex?"

"Yeah."

"That line of cloud dead ahead, that's the cutting edge of some damp hot air off the Gulf. It's wedging up a front of hot dry air coming off New Mexico. That dry air aloft- we're coming into that right now-that's the cap. Right now it's suckin' steam off the tops of those cumulus towers and strippin' 'em off flat."

Alex understood this. He was gazing down across the tops of clouds, approaching them unsteadily on flapping digital wings. The climbing, bubbling sides of the heap were the normal cauliflower lumps, but the flattened tops of the towers looked truly extraordinary: great rippling plazas of turbulent vapor that were being simultaneously boiled and beaten.

The drone fought for more height for a while, then veered in a long panorama across the growing squall line. "See how ripped up it looks, way up here?"

"Yeah."

"That cap is working hard. It'll push all that wet air back today, west to east. But to work like that is costing it energy, and it's cooling it off some. When it cools, it gets patchy and breaks up. See that downdraft there? That big clear hole?"

"I see the hole, man."

"You learn to stay away from big clear holes. You can lose a lot of height in a hurry that way... ." The drone skirted the cavernous blue downdraft, at a respectful distance. "When these towers underneath us build up enough to erode through the cap and soar up right past us, then it's gonna get loud around here."

The drone scudded suddenly into a cloud bank. The goggles swathing Alex's eyes went as white and blank as a hospital bandage. "Gotta do some hygrometer readings inside this tower," Buzzard said. "We'll put Kelly on automatic and switch over to Lena... whoops!"

"The flying I like," Alex told him. "It's that switching that bugs me."

"Get used to it." Buzzard chuckled. "We're not really up there anyhow, dude."

The machine called Lena had already worked its way past the line of cloud, into the hotter, drier air behind the advancing squalls. Seen from the rear, the cloud front seemed much darker, more tormented, sullen. Alex suddenly saw a darting needle of aerial lighting pierce through four great mounds of vapor, dying instantly with the muffled glow of a distant bomb burst.

Thunder hammered at his right ear, under the earphone.

Martha's voice suddenly sounded, out of the same ear. "Are you on Lena?"

"Yeah!" Alex and Buzzard answered simultaneously.

"Your packets are getting patchy, man, I'm gonna have to step you down a level."

"Okay," Buzzard said. The screens clamped to Alex's face suddenly went perceptibly grainier, the cascading pixels slowing and congealing into little blocks of jagginess. "Ugh," Alex said.

"Laws of physics, man," Buzzard told him. "The bandwidth can only handle so much."

Now, belatedly, Alex's clear left ear-the one outside the headphones-heard a sudden muffled rumble of faraway thunder. He was hearing in stereo. His ears were ten kilometers apart. At the thought of this, Alex felt the first rippling, existential spasm of virch-sickness.

"We're running instruments off these 'thopters too, so we gotta cut back on screen clarity sometimes," said Buzzard. "Anyway, most of the best cloud data is the stuff a human eye can't see."

"Can you see us from up here?" Alex asked. "Can you see where our bodies are, can you see where we're parked?"

"We're way ahead of the squall line," Buzzard told him, bored. "Now, over there south, lost in the heat haze -that's where the base camp is. I could see the camp right now, if I had good telescopics on Lena. I did, too, once- but that 'thopter caught a stroke of lightning, and fried every chip it had... a goddamn shame."

"Where do you get that kind of equipment?" Alex said.

"Military surplus, mostly... depends on who you know."

Alex suddenly felt his brain becoming radically overstuffed. He tore his goggles off. Exposed to the world's sudden air and glare, his pupils and retinas shrank in pain, as if ice-picked.

Alex sat up on his bubblepak and wiped tears and puddled sweat from the hollows of his eyes. He looked at the two Troupers, a-sprawl on their lounge chairs and indescribably busy. Buzzard was gently flapping his fingertips. Martha was groping at empty air like a demented conjurer.

They were completely helpless. With a rock or a stick, he could have easily beaten them both to death. A sudden surge of deep unease touched Alex: not fear, not nausea either, but a queer, primitive, transgressive feeling, like a superstition.

"I'm... I'm gonna stay out for a while," Alex said. "Good, make us some lunch," said Buzzard.

ALEX MANAGED THE lunch and ate his share of the rations too, but then he discovered that Buzzard and Martha wouldn't give him enough water. There simply wasn't watèr to spare. It took a while for this to fully register on Alex -that there just wasn't water, that water was a basic constraint for the Troupe, something not subject to negotiation.

The Troupe had an electric condenser back in camp that would pull water vapor from the air onto a set of chilled coils. And they had plastic distillery tarps too; you could chop up vegetation and strew it in a pit under the tarp, and the transparent tarp would get hot in the sun and bake the sap out of the chopped-up grass and cactus, and the tarp's underside would drip distilled water into a pot. But the tarps were clumsy and slow. And the condenser required a lot of electrical energy. And there just wasn't much energy to spare.

The Troupe carried all the solar racks that they could manage, but even the finest solar power was weak and feeble stuff. Even at high noon, their modest patches of captured sunshine didn't generate much electricity. And sometimes the sun simply didn't shine.

The Troupe also had wind generators-but sometimes the wind simply didn't blow. The Troupe was starving for energy, thirsty for it, and watchful of it. They were burdened by their arsenal of batteries. Cars. Trucks. Buses. Ornithopters. Computers. Radios. Instrumentation. Everything guzzling energy with the implacable greed of machines. The Troupe was always running in the red on energy. They were always creeping humbly back to civilization to recharge a truckload of their batteries off some municipal grid.

Energy you could beg or buy. But you couldn't hack your way around the absolute need for water. You couldn't replace or compress water, or live on virtual water or simulated water. Water was very real and very heavy, and a lot of trouble to make. Sometimes the Troupe captured free rainwater, but even a rainy year in West Texas never brought very much rain. And even when they did catch rainwater, they couldn't ship much water with them when they moved the camp, and the Troupe was always moving the camp, chasing the fronts.

It was simple: the more you wanted to accomplish, the less you had to drink.

Now Alex understood why Buzzard and Martha lay half-collapsed in their sling chairs beneath their sunshade, the two of them torpid as lizards while their eyes and ears flew for them. Sweat was water too. Civilization had been killed in West Texas, killed as dead as Arizona's Anasazi cliff-dweller Indians, because there just wasn't enough water here, and no easy way to get water anymore.

Alex stopped arguing and followed the lead of Buzzard and Martha by steadily tucking scraps of venison jerky into his mouth. It kept his saliva flowing. Sometimes he could forget the thirst for as long as ten minutes. They'd promised him a few refreshing mouthfuls every half hour or so.

The wind from the east had died. The smart kite's wiring, once taut and angular, now hung in the sky in a listless swaying curve. The wind had been smothered in a tense, gelatinous stillness, a deadly calm that was baking greased sweat from his flesh. The rumbles of distant western thunder were louder and more insistent, as if something just over the horizon were being clumsily demolished, but the unnatural calm around the aerodrome truck seemed as still and solid as the smothering air in a bank vault.

Alex squatted cross-legged on his bubblepak, mechanically chewing the cud of his venison jerky and wiping sweat back through his hair. As the heat and thirst and tension mounted, his paper suit was becoming unbearable.

The suit's white, plasticized, bakery-bag sheen did help with the heat some. It was a clever suit, and it worked. But in the final analysis, it didn't really work very well. His spine was puddled with sweat, and his bare buttocks were adhering nastily to the drop seat. His shoulder blades were caught up short whenever he leaned forward. And the suit was by far the loudest garment he had ever worn. In the tense stillness, his every movement rustled, as if he were digging elbow-deep through a paper-recycling bin.

Alex stood up, peeled the suit's front zip down, pulled it down to his waist, and crudely belted it around his midriff with its dangling white paper arms. He looked truly awful now, pallid, skeletal, heat-prickled, and sweaty, but the others wouldn't notice; they were virch-blind and muttering steadily into their mikes.

Alex left the sunshade and walked around the truck, sweat running in little rills down the backs of his knees.

He found himself confronting an amazing western sky.

Alex had seen violent weather before. He'd grown up in the soupy Gulf weather of Houston and had seen dozens of thunderstorms and Texas blue northers. At twelve, he'd weathered the fringes of a fairly severe hurricane, from the family's Houston penthouse.

But the monster he was witnessing now was a weather event of another order. It was a thunderhead like a mountain range. It was piercing white, and dusky blue, and streaked here and there with half-hidden masses of evil greenish curds. It was endless and rambling and columnar and tall and growing explosively and visibly.

And it was rolling toward him.

A tower had broken the cap. It had broken it suddenly and totally, the way a firecracker might rupture a cheap tin can. Great rounded torrents of vengeful superheated steam were thrusting themselves into the upper air, like vast slow-motion fists. The dozens of rising cauliflower bubbles looked as hard and dense as white lumps of marble. And up at the top of their ascent-Alex had to crane his neck to see it-vapor was splashing at the bottom of the stratosphere.

Alex stood flat-footed in his plastic-and-paper shoes, watching the thunderstorm swell before his eyes. The uprushing tower had a rounded dome at its very top, a swelling blister of vapor as big as a town, and it was visibly trying to break its way through that second barrier, into the high upper atmosphere. It was heaving hard at the barrier, and amazingly, it was being hammered back. The tower was being crushed flat and smashed aside, squashed into long flattened feathers of ice. As the storm's top thickened and spread to block the sunlight, the great curdled uprushing walls of the tower, far beneath it, fell into a dreadful gloom.

It was a thunderstorm anvil. An anvil was floating in the middle of the blue Texas sky, black and top-heavy and terrible. Mere air had no business trying to support such a behemoth.

Lightning raced up the nimbus, bottom to top. First a thin, nervous sizzle of crazy brightness, and then, in the space of a heartbeat, one, two, three rapid massive channeled strokes of electrical hell, throwing fiery light into the greenish depths of the storm.

Alex ducked back around the truck. The thunder came very hard.

Buzzard tugged his goggles and earphones down, into an elastic mess around his neck. "Gettin' loud!" he said cheerfully.

"It's getting big," Alex said.

Buzzard stood up, grinning. "There's a gust front comin' our way. Gonna kick up some bad dust around here. Gotta get the masks."

Buzzard fetched three quilted mouth-and-nose masks from a stack of them in a carton in the truck. The paper masks were ribbed and pored and had plastic nose guards and elastic bands. Martha put her mask on and methodically wrapped her hair in a knotted kerchief. Buzzard shut the doors and windows of the truck securely, checked the supports of the sunshade, and tightened the strap of his billed cap. Then he put all his gear on again, and lay in the chair, and twitched his fingers.

All around the hill, little birds began fluttering westward, popping up and down out of the brush in a search for cover.

The searing light of early afternoon suddenly lost its strength. The spreading edge of the anvil had touched the sun. All the hot brilliance leached out of the sky, and the world faded into eerie amber.

Alex felt the cramp of a long squint easing from his eyelids. He put his mask on, tightly. It was cheap paper, but it was a good mask-the malleable plastic brace shaped itself nicely to the bridge of his nose. Breathing felt cleaner and easier already. If he'd known breathing masks were so easy to get, Alex would have demanded one a long time ago. He would keep the mask handy from now on.

Alex put his masked face around the corner of the truck. The storm was transmuting itself into a squall line, tower after tower springing up on the mountainous flanks of the first thunderhead. Worse yet, this whole vast curdled mass of storms was lurching into motion, the mountainous prow of some unthinkably vast and powerful body of hot transparent wind. There was nothing on earth that could stop it, nothing to interfere in the slightest. It would steam across the grassy plains of Tornado Alley like a planetary juggernaut.

But it would miss them. The aerodrome truck was parked out of range of the squall line, just past the southern rim of it. The Troupers had chosen their stand with skill.

Alex walked into the open, for a better look. Off to the northwest, a patch of the squall's base had ruptured open. A dark skein of rainfall was slowly drifting out of it. Distant shattered strokes of lightning pierced the sloping clouds.

Alex watched the lightning display for a while, timing the thunderclaps and pausing periodically to swat mosquitoes. He'd never had such a fine naked-eye view of lightning before. Lightning was really interesting stuff: flickering, multibranched, very supple, and elaborately curved. Real lightning had almost nothing to do with the standard two-dimensional cartoon image of a jagged lightning bolt. Real lightning looked a lot more like some kind of nicely sophisticated video effect.

Out on the western horizon, the grass and brush suddenly went crazy. It bent flat in a big spreading wave. Then, it whipped and wriggled frantically in place. The grass seemed to be crushed and trampled under some huge invisible stampede.

A flying wall of dirt leaped up from the beaten earth, like the spew from a beaten carpet.

Alex had never seen the like. He gaped in astonishment as the wall of dirty wind rushed forward. It was moving across the landscape with unbelievable speed, the speed of a highway truck.

It rocketed up the slope of the hill and slammed into him.

It blew him right off his feet. Alex landed hard on his ass and tumbled through the spiky grass, in a freezing, flying torrent of airborne trash and filth. A shotgun blast of grit spattered into both his eyes, and he was blinded. The wind roared.

The gust front did its level best to strip his clothes off. It had his paper suit around his knees in an instant and was tearing hard at his shoes, all the while scourging him with little broken whips of airborne pebble and weed. Alex yelled in pain and scrambled on hands and knees for the shelter of the truck.

The truck was heaving back and forth on its axles. The fabric veranda flapped crazily, its vicious popping barely audible in the gusting howl.

Alex fought his way back inside the writhing, flapping paper suit, and he tunneled his grimy arms into its empty sleeves. His eyes gushed painful tears, and his bare ankles stung in the gust of dirt beneath the truck. The wind was very cold, thin, and keening and alpine. Alex's fingers were white and trembling, and his teeth chattered behind the mask.

More filth was gusting steadily beneath the truck. The dirty wind skirled harmlessly under the bottoms of the Troupers' sling chairs. Though Alex couldn't hear what they were saying, he could see their jaws moving steadily below their paper masks. They were still talking, into the little bent sticks of their microphones.

Alex trawled up his windswept virching gear as it danced and dangled violently at the end of its wiring. He jammed his back against the lurching truck and clamped the earphones on.

"Feels nice and cool now, doesn't it?" Buzzard commented, into Alex's sheltered ears. Buzzard's was voice mask-muffled and cut with microphone wind shrieks.

"Are you crazy?" Alex shouted. "That coulda killed us!"

"Only if it caught us in the open," Buzzard told him. "Hey, now we're cool."

"Carol's got circulation!" Martha said.

"Already?" Buzzard said, alarmed. "It's gonna be a long day... . Bring Jesse in for a chaff run, then."

The violence of the gust front faded quickly, in a series of windy spasms. It was followed by a slow chill breeze, with a heavy reek of rain and ozone. Alex shivered, bunching his numbed fists into his paper armpits.

The insides of his virching goggles were full of wind blown grit. Alex took his mask off, spat onto the screens, and tried to wash them clean with his thumbs.

Buzzard pulled his own goggles off and stood up. Something landed heavily on the stretched fabric of the veranda. Buzzard hopped to the edge of the veranda, jumped up, and snagged it: a landed ornithopter.

Buzzard brushed dust from his leotards and looked at Alex with ungoggled eyes. "What the hell! Did you get caught in that gust front?"

"How do I clean these?" Alex said evasively, holding up the goggles.

Buzzard handed him an antiseptic wipe. Then he opened the back of the truck and ducked in.

He reemerged with a duffel bag and slammed the doors. The bag was full of reels of iridescent tape. Buzzard picked a patch of yellow stickum from the end of one reel and pulled at the tape. A section of shining ribbon tore loose in his fingers and fluttered in the breeze.

He handed it to Alex. "Smart chaff."

The chaff looked like old-fashioned videotape. Both ends of the tape were neatly perforated. The strip of chaff was as wide as two fingers and as long as Alex's forearm. It was almost weightless, but its edges were stiff enough to deal a nasty paper cut, if you weren't careful.

It had a lump embossed in one end: a chip and a tiny flat battery.

Buzzard screwed the axle of the chaff reel snug against the ornithopter's breastbone. Then he fetched his throwing stick again, walked out into the wind, and launched the machine. It rocketed upward in the stiff breeze, wings spread. "We got a hundred strips per reel," Buzzard said, returning. "We deploy 'em through the spike."

"What good are they?" Alex said.

"Whaddya mean?" Buzzard said, wounded. "They measure temperature, humidity... and wind speed, 'cause you can track that chaff on radar in real time."

"Any little updraft can carry chaff." Buzzard fetched up his virching rig. "So chaff will stay with a spike till it ropes out. C'mon, virch up, dude, Greg 'n Carol have got circulation!"

Alex sat on his bubblepak. He pulled the back of the mat up and over his shoulders, like a blanket. The plastic bubbles of trapped air cut the chill wind nicely. He might have been almost comfortable, if not for the windblown filth clinging greasily to his sweat-stained face, neck, and chest. He put on his goggles.

In an instant Alex was miles away, on the wings of Lena, confronting a long white plateau of roiling cloud. Above the plateau, the great curling mountain of the thunderhead was shot through with aerial lightning.

Martha's ornithopter dived below the base of the cloud. The bottom of the thunderhead was steadily venting great ragged patches of rain. But the southern edge of the cloud base was a long, trailing dark shelf, slightly curved, and free of any rain. Seen from below, the storm was charcoal black veined with evil murky green, leaden, and palpably ominous.

"How'd you get in place so fast?" Buzzard asked Martha.

Martha's voice dropped crackling into the channel. "I caught the midlevel jet, man! It's like a goddamn escalator! Did you see that Ienticular slit up there? The jet's peeling the front of that tower like a fuckin' onion!" Martha paused. "It's weird."

"There aren't any normal ones anymore, Martha," Buzzard said patiently. "I keep tryin' to tell you that."

"Well, we might get an F-3 out of it, tops," Martha diagnosed. "That's no supercell. But man, it's plenty strange."

Buzzard suddenly yelped in surprise. "Hell! I see what you mean about that midlevel jet... . Damn, I just lost two strips of chaff."

"Get your 'thopter's ass up here, man, that wall cloud is movin'." Martha's Okie drawl thickened as her excitement grew.

"What exactly are we looking at?" Alex asked her.

"See that big drawdown at the base?" Martha told him. "Between the flankin' line and all that rain? Look close and you can see it just now startin' to turn."

Alex stared Into his goggles. As far as he could tell, the entire cloud was a mass of indistinguishable lumps. Then he realized that a whole area of the base-a couple dozen lumps, a cloudy sprawl the size of four, maybe five football fields-was beginning a slow waltz. The lumps were being tugged down-powerfully wrenched and heaved down- into a broad bulging round ridge, well below the natural level of the cloud base. The lumps were black and ugly and sullen and looked very unhappy about being forced to move. They kept struggling hard to rise into the parent cloud again, and to maintain their shape, but they were failing, and falling apart. Some pitiless unseen force was stretching them into long circular striations, like gaseous taffy.

Suddenly a new voice broke in, acid-etched with a distant crackling of lightning static. "Carol in Alpha here! We got dust whirl, over!"

"Nowcaster here," came Jerry Mulcahey's calm voice. "Give me location fix, over." Good old Dr. Jerry, Alex realized, had the advantage of the Storm Troupe's best antennas. He seemed to be hovering over the battlefield like God's recording angel.

"Greg in Alpha here," came Greg Foulks. "How's the data channel holdin' up, Jerry, over?"

"Clear enough for now, over.

"Here's your coords, then." Greg sent them, in a digital screech. "We gotta move, Jerry. That wall cloud's gonna wrap hard, and the truck's getting radar off a sheet of big-ass hail to northwest, over."

"Then move behind the hook and get the array booted," Jerry commanded. "Report in, Aerodrome. Where's the chaff, over?"

"Boswell in Aerodrome," Buzzard said, and though he was speaking from an arm's length away, his rerouted voice signal was unexpectedly thin and crispy. "I got Jesse loaded and moving in hard on the jet stream, and Kelly coming out to Aerodrome to load a second reel, over."

"Lena is right in position now, Jerry, should I strafe that dust whirl for you, over?" said Martha.

"Beautiful, Martha," Jerry told her, his deep voice rich with praise and satisfaction. "Let me bring you up on monitor... . Okay, Martha, go! Nowcaster out."

Martha's voice, lost its static and settled again at the very edge of Alex's t. "You with me, little dude?"

"Yeah."

"This is where it gets good."

The ornithopter fell out The wall cloud above them was mucn tmcKer: it didn't seem to be moving any faster. The 'thopter and Alex suddenly noticed a messy puff of filth, way dowii at ground level. The cloud of dust didn't seem to be spin-fling much. Instead, the dust cloud was spewing. It was clumsily yanking up thin dry gouts of ocher-tinted soil and trying to fling them aside.

Martha scanned the dust cloud, circling. Alex had never seen dirt behave in such an odd and frantic fashion. The dirt kept trying hard to fall, or spin loose, or escape just any old way back to the natural inertness of dirt, but it just couldn't manage the trick. Instead, whole smoky masses of the stuff would suddenly buckle and vanish utterly, as if they were being inhaled.

Then water vapor began to condense, in the very midst of the dry churning filth, and for the first time Alex fully realized the real shape, and the terrible speed, of the whirlwind. The air was being thrashed into visibility through sheer shock.

The infant tornado had a strange ocher-amber tint, like a gush of magician's stage smoke running backward in an antique movie reel. Some weird phase change, somber and slow and deeply redolent of mystery, was moving up the structure. Translucent bands of amber damp, and ocher filth, reeled slowly up the spike, silhouetting it against the sky and earth. It was very narrow at the bottom, growing broader and thicker with height...

Martha swooped in hard beside the tornado, in a complex banking figure eight, and she gained a lot of very sudden altitude. Alex winced with disorientation. Then he saw the top of the twister, dead ahead-the spinning wall cloud, shoving thick vaporous roots slowly downward toward the earth.

The 'thopter dodged and leveled out, circling back. The twister's middle looked treacherously empty: a core of utter nothingness with a great black wall melting down from above, and a bottleneck of tortured dirt rising up. But then the wall's funnel moved down very suddenly, in four thick, churning, separate runnels of octopus ink, and it seized the little dust whirl and ate it, and the world was filled with a terrible sound.

The twister's howling had crept up on Alex almost without his notice. But now, as the twister reached its full dark fury, it began to emit a grotesque earthshaking drone. Even over the ornithopter's limited microphones, it seemed a very rich and complex noise, grinding and rattling and keening, over a dreadful organ-pipe bass note, a noise that crammed the ears, mechanical and organic and orchestral.

The funnel began to migrate. It grew steadily fatter, and it spun steadily faster, and it rolled forward fitfully, across the earth. There was nothing much for it to hurt here, nothing but grass and bushes. Every bush it touched either disappeared or was knocked into tattered knots, but the tornado didn't seem to be damaging the grass much. It was casually tearing at the grass a bit, and leaving it flour-blanched with filth, but it wasn't drilling its way down through topsoil into the bedrock. It was just bellowing and screeching and humming to itself, in a meditative, utterly demonic way, deliberately rubbing the narrow tip of itself through the grass, like a migrating mastodon hunting for stray peanuts.

Martha was wheeling around the structure counterclockwise, keeping a respectful distance. On one pass, Alex caught a sudden glimpse of Pursuit Vehicle Alpha, sitting still behind the twister, shockingly close, shockingly tiny. It was only in glimpsing the Trou 's little pursuit machine that Alex realized the scale of wl~t he was witnessing: the bottom of the twister had grown as wide as a parking lot.

As it reached full speed and size the twister grew livelier. It marched confidently up the gentle slope of a hill, in a brisk, alert fashion, with its posture straight and its shoulders squared. As it marched down the slore it put its whirling foot through the rusting wreckage o a barbed-wire fence. A dozen rotten cedar posts were instantly snapped off clean at the surface of the earth, tumbling thirty meters into the air in a final exultation of tangled rusty wiring.

The fence fell to earth again in a mangled yarn ball. The twister crossed a road in a frantic blast of dust.

Everything around Alex went silent and black. He thought that Martha's drone had been smashed, that he'd lost contact; but then he remembered that the natural color of a dead virching screen was blue, not black. He was seeing blackness: black air. And he could hear Buzzard breathing hard over audio.

"You're gonna want to see this, dude," Buzzard told him. "I don't do this every day. I'm gonna punch the core."

"Where are we?"

"We're on Jesse, and we're right above the spike. We're up in the wall cloud."

"We can't fly around in here," Alex said. "It's pitch-dark!"

"Sure, man. But Greg and Carol have their array up, and the Radar Bus is on-line. I just put ninety-seven chips of straff-hell! I mean strips of chaff-down this spike! Jerry's running the camp monitors flat out! We're gonna punch the core, dude! We're gonna go right down this funnel, live, real time, flyin' on instruments! Ready?"

Alex's heartbeat changed gears. "Yeah! Do it!"

"There's no light inside the core, either. It's almost always pitch-black inside a twister. But Jesse has a little night-light-red and infrared. I dunno what we'll see, dude, but we'll see something."

"Shut up and go!" Alex pressed the goggles against both eyes with the flats of his hands.

His head flooded with maxed-out roaring. Eerie red light bloomed against his eyeballs. He was shearing down the monster's tightened, spinning throat. The 'thopter trembled violently, a dozen times a second. Inside the twister's core, the wind was moving so fast that its terrible speed was oddly unfelt and unseen, like the spin of the earth.

Hell had a structure. It had a texture. The spinning inner walls were a blurry streaky gas, and a liquid rippling sheen, and a hard black wobbling solid, all at once. Great bulging rhythmical waves and hollows of peristalsis were creeping up the funnel core, slow and dignified, like great black smoke rings in the throat of a deep thinker.

The 'thopter jerked hard once, harder again, then lost all control and punched the wall. All sound ceased at once.

The image froze, then disintegrated before Alex's eyes into a colored tangle of blocky video trails.

Then the image reintegrated and slammed back into real-time motion. They were outside the twister, flung free of it, tumbling through air with all the grace of a flung brick.

The 'thopter spread its wings and banked. Buzzard crowed aloud in the sudden silence. "We just blew both mikes," he said. "Pressure drop!"

Alex stared into the screens pasted to his face. There was something very wrong with what he was seeing. He felt his eyes beginning to cross, with a complex headachy pang behind the bridge of his nose. "What's wrong?" he croaked.

"A little alignment problem," Buzzard admitted grudgingly. "Not half-bad for a core punch, though."

"I can't look at this," Alex realized. "I'm seeing double, it hurts."

"Shut one eye.

"No, I can't stand this!" Alex tore off the goggles.

The veranda was sitting in full sunlight again. The thunderstorm anvil had moved on to the northwest, leaving a trail of thin high cirrus clouds behind it, like a snail's slime track.

Alex stood up, walked past Buzzard and Martha's inert legs, and looked to the north. The entire squall line was receding rapidly, speeding off toward Oklahoma. Alex couldn't even see the tornado whose guts he'd just witnessed. It was either blocked from line of sight by nearer towers, or it was already over the horizon.

Behind the storm line, the air was cool and blue and sweet. The sky looked balmy and clear and full of gentle naïveté, as if tornadoes were all someone else's fault.

Alex walked back under the veranda, plucked up an antiseptic tissue, and started smearing filthy grease from his face and neck. His chest and neck and arms were reddened with little clotted nicks and wind whips, as if he'd tried to stuff a house cat inside his paper suit.

His eyes ached with dust and trapped sweat from the goggles. He was tired and dizzy and very thirsty, and his mouth tasted like gunmetal.

But nothing was bleeding. The scratches weren't serious. He was breathing beautifully. And he was having a really good time.

He sat down again and put on his virching rig.

Martha was circling the twister, with difficulty. The twister's spine had bent way off the vertical; its top was firmly embedded in the moving cloud base, but its tip was stubbornly dragging the earth, far to the rear. The forced stretching was visibly distressing it. The tip was badly kinked inside its corona of flying filth, and the wobbling midsection was flinging off long petulant tatters of dirt.

"You had to punch the goddamn core, didn't you," Martha said.

"Yeah!" said Buzzard. "I taped almost four seconds right down the throat!"

"You blew both mikes and you screwed the optics on Jesse, man."

Buzzard was pained. "Yeah, but there's no debris in that spike. A little dust, a little grass, it was real clean!"

"You pulled that dumb macho stunt just because you were late with the chaff!"

"Don't fuckin' start with me, Madronich," Buzzard warned. "I punched the core and the 'thopter still flies, okay? I'm not asking you to fly Jesse now. You can start flappin' your lips when you punch a core and come out in one piece."

"Jerk," Martha muttered.

Something very odd had happened to the earth in front of the twister. A huge patch of the ground was snow-white and visibly steaming. It looked volcanic. "What the hell is that?" Alex said.

"That's hail," Martha said.

"Cold hail with ground fog off it," Buzzard said. "Watch this baby suck it up!"

As the twister approached, streamers of icy fog buckled and writhed, caught up in torrents of suddenly visible ground flow. The tornado lurched headlong through the swath, sucking up torrents of chilly air from all directions, in a giant ragged overhead rosette of tormented fog.

The swatch of fallen hail was only a few dozen meters across. After half a minute the twister had cleared it. But wading knee-deep through the chilly air had visibly upset it. Its violent spew of filth at ground level dropped off drastically. Then it shivered top to bottom. The dry bands of filth around its midsection thinned and dimmed out. As the air grew clearer a pair of dense dirty runnels suddenly appeared within the spike, for all the world like a pair of stumbling, whirling legs.

"See that, dude?" Martha said triumphantly. "Suction' spots!"

The 'thopter nose-dived suddenly and was almost swept into the vortex. Martha careened free, yelping.

"Careful," Buzzard said calmly. "It's wrapped that downdraft real hard."

The twister slowed, hesitated. Down at ground level, its overstretched tip elongated, kinked hard, and reluctantly broke off. The abandoned tip of the whirl vanished in a collapsing puff of liberated dust.

The amputated twister, stranded in midair, took a great pogo hop forward, centering itself under the cloud again. Then it tried to touch down again, to stretch out and rip the earth, but it was visibly losing steam.

The two suction spots, rotating about one another, stumbled and collided. The bigger leg messily devoured the smaller leg. There was a fresh burst of vitality then, and the twister stretched out and touched down, and a torrent of dirt rocketed up the shaft. But now the funnel was much narrower, thin and quick and kinky.

"It's ropin' out," Martha said. "I like this part. This is when they start actin' really insane."

The twister had changed its character. It had once been a wedge, a vast blunt-nosed drill. Now it looked like a sloppy corkscrew made of smoke and string.

Big oblate whirling lumps were traveling up and down the corkscrew, great dirty onions of trapped vorticity that almost choked the life out of it.

Every few seconds one of the trapped lumps would blow out in spectacular fashion, spewing great ribbons of filth that tried to crawl up the cloud base. Sometimes they made it. More often they wriggled and spasmed and swam out into midair and vaporized.

The roped twister grew narrower still, so pinched at points along its length that it looked like a collapsing hose. The clear air around it was still in very violent motion, but no longer violent enough to be seen. The currents of air seemed to be losing cohesion.

The roping twister finally snaked its way into a sloppy, wriggling helix-it seemed to be trying to blend into some larger invisible vortex, to wrap itself around a bigger core and give up its fierce little life in exchange for large-scale wrath again.

But it failed. After that, it lost heart. It surrendered all its strength, in a ripple of disintegration up and down the shaft, a literal last gasp.

Martha methodically scanned the cloud base. The rotating wall cloud had broken. A great clear notch had appeared just behind it, a downdraft channeling cold air from somewhere near the stratosphere, chewing through the source of the vortex and breaking its rotation. The twister was dead and gone.

A light, filthy curtain of rain appeared, conjured up and sucked down by the twister's death spasm.

Martha headed out from under the cloud base into clear sunlit air. "Seventeen minutes," she said. "Pretty good for an

"That was an F-3 at maturity," Buzzard objected.

"You wanna bet? Let Jerry check the numbers on that chaff."

"Okay, F-2," Buzzard backed down. "It's still a little early in the day for a big one. How's Lena's battery?"

"Not good. Let's pull out, charge up the 'thopters, pull up stakes here, and head the hell after the dryline."

"Good move," Buzzard said. "Okay, you and Medicine Boy break camp, and I'll fly the 'thopters in.

"Have it your way," Martha said.

Alex pulled off his gear. He watched Martha carefully divest herself of her equipment. She got up off the sling chair, stretched, grinned, shook herself, and looked at him. Her eyes widened.

"What the hell! Did you get caught in that gust front?"

"A little."

Martha laughed. "You're a real prize. Well, get up! We gotta pursue."

"Wait a minute," Alex said. "You don't mean to tell me there's gonna be another one of those?"

"Maybe," Martha said, deftly wrapping her gear. "You've been lucky, for a first chase. Jerry's a good now-caster, the best around, but he only hits a spike one chase out of two. Okay, maybe three out of five, lately

But"-Martha stood up straight, waving her black-nailed hand overhead with a lasso-tossing gesture-"with this kind of midlevel vorticity? Man, we could log half a dozen spikes out of a front like this one."

"Oh, man," Alex said.

"Gotta get movin'. These spring squalls always move like a bat out of hell, they're doing fifty klicks an hour.... We'll be lucky if we don't end up in Anadarko, by midnight." She gazed down at Buzzard's inert carcass, seeming to resist a sudden urge to kick him out of his chair.

"Midnight?" Alex said.

"Hell yeah! 'Bout two hours after sundown, that's when nocturnal convection gives everything a fresh dose of the juice." Martha grinned. "Dude, you haven't really chased spikes till you've chased 'em in the dark."

"Don't you people ever relax?" Alex said.

"Kid, we got all goddamn winter to relax. This is storm season."

Alex thought it over. "You got any salt tablets?"