Heavy Weather

CHAPTER 9

By June 15 it was obvious to the veriest wannabe weather tyro that an outbreak from the dimension of hell was about to descend upon Oklahoma. As a direct consequence, the state was having its largest tourist boom in ten years.

Everyone with the least trace of common sense had battened down, packed up, and/or evacuated. But the sensible evacuees did not begin to match the raw demographic numbers of people without any common sense, who had come swarming in an endless procession of trailers, chartered buses, and motorized bicycles. Oklahoma had become an instant mecca for heavy-weather freaks. And there were far more of these people than Jane had ever imagined.

After some hesitation, many of the people with sense had shamefacedly returned to ground zero, to make sure that the freaks were not stealing everything. Which, in fact, the freaks were doing, in their jolly, distracted sort of way. Anadarko, Chickashaw, Weatherford and Elk City, their cheaper hotels packed and their city parks full of squatters' tents, had turned into slobbering, good-natured beer busts, punctuated with occasional nocturnal shootings and smash-and-grab raids. The National Guard had been called out to maintain order, but in Oklahoma the National Guard was pretty much always out. The National Guard was one of the largest employers in the state, right up there with crops, livestock, timber, and Portland cement. The paramilitary Guard sold the marauders souvenir T-shirts and Sno-Kones by day, then put on their uniforms and beat the shit out of them by night.

To judge by the frantically enthusiastic local TV coverage, most everybody involved was perversely and frankly enjoying the hysterical, unbearable edge of weather tension. The sky was canary yellow and full of dust, and great fearsome sheets of dry heat lightning crackled all evening, and everything smelled of filth and sweat and ozone, and the people were actively savoring this situation. The drought had simply gone on too long. The people of Tornado Alley had suffered far too much already. They had gone far past fear. They had even gone past grim resignation. By now, the poor bastards were deep into convulsively ironical black humor.

The people trickling in from all over America-including, of course, Mexico and Canada-were a far different crowd of wannabes than the standard tornado chasers. The standard tornado freak tended to be, at heart, a rather bookish, owlish sort, carefully reading the latest netcasts and polishing his digital binoculars so he could jump out the door and frantically pursue a brief, elusive phenomenon that usually lasted bare minutes.

But the current heavy-weather crowd was a different scene entirely, not the weather people Jane was used to, not the ones she had expected. Even though they were in the heart of the continent and long kilometers from any shore, they were much more like your basic modern hurricane crowd.

Heavy-weather freaks came in a lot of sociological varieties. First, there were a certain number of people who genuinely didn't give a damn about living. People in despair, people actively hunting their own destruction. The overtly suicidal, though a real factor and kind of the heart-and-soul of the phenomenon, were a very small minority. Most of these mournful black-clad Hamlets would suddenly rediscover a strong taste for survival once the wind outside hit a solid, throbbing roar.

Second, and far more numerous, were the rank thrill freaks, the overtanned jocks and precancerous muscular surfer-dude types. It was amazing how few of these reckless idiots would be killed or maimed, by even the worst storms. They usually sported aqualungs and windsurflng smart boards, with which to hunt the Big Wave, the Really Big Wave, the Insanely Big Wave. No surf in Oklahoma, though, so, with the grotesque ingenuity of a leisure industry far gone into deep psychosis, they had brought dozens of mean-ass little diamond-hubbed "wind schooners," sail-powered vehicles so inherently unpredictable that even their onboard computer navigation acted crazy. And yet the sons of bitches who rode the things seemed to bear a charmed life. They were as hard to kill as cockroaches.

Then there were the largest group, the variant people who simply admired and doted on storms. Most of them didn't hack storms. Sometimes they took photos or videos, but they had no intellectual or professional interest. They were simply storm devotees. Some of them were deeply religious. Some wrote really bad net-poetry. Some few of them were very private people, with tattoos and chains and scab art, who would take hallucinogens and/or hold deliberate orgies in bunkers at the height of the troubles. They all tended to have a trademark look of vacant sincerity, and odd fixations in dress and diet.

Fourth, thieves. People on the lookout for the main chance. Looters, black marketeers, rip-off people. Structure-hit people too. Not tremendous numbers, not whole marauding armies of them, but plenty to worry about. They tended to leave mysterious chalk-mark symbols wherever they went, and to share mulligatawny stew in vacant buildings.

And last-the group rising up the charts, and the group that Jane found, basically, by far the least explicable, the creepiest, and the most portentous-evacuation freaks.

People who flourished just after storms. People who liked to dwell in evacuation camps. Perhaps they'd grown up in such a camp during the State of Emergency, and always perversely missed the experience afterward. Or maybe they just enjoyed that feeling of intense, slightly hallucinatory human community that always sprang up in the aftermath of a major natural disaster. Or maybe they just needed disaster to really live, because having grown up under the crushing weight of heavy weather, they had never possessed any real life.

If you had no strong identity of your own, then you could become anyone and everyone, inside an evacuation camp. The annihilation of a town or suburb broke down all barriers of class, status, and experience, and put everyone into the same paper suit. Some people-and growing numbers of them, apparently-actively fed on that situation. They were a new class of human being, something past charlatan, something past fraudster or hustler, something without real precedent, something past history, something past identity. Sometimes-a lot of times-the evacuation freak would be the heart and soul of the local recovery effort, a manic, pink-checked person always cheerful, with a smile for everybody, always ready to console the bereaved, bathe the wounded, play endless games of cot-side charades with the grateful crippled child. Often they passed themselves off as pastors or medical workers or social counselors or minor-league feds of some kind, and they would get away with it too, because no one was checking papers in the horror and pain and confusion.

They would stay as long as they dared, and eat the government chow and wear the paper suits and claim vaguely to be from "somewhere around." Oddly, evacuation freaks were almost always harmless, at least in a physical sense. They didn't steal, they didn't rob, they didn't kill or structure-hit. Some of them were too dazed and confused to do much of anything but sit and eat and smile, but quite often they would work with literally selfless dedication, and inspire the people around them, and the people would look up to them, and admire them, and trust them implicitly, and depend on these hollow people as a community pillar of strength. Evacuation freaks were both men and women. What they were doing was not exactly criminal, and even when caught and scolded or punished for it, they never seemed able to stop. They would just drift to some fresh hell in another state, and rend their garments and cover themselves with mud, and then stagger into camp, faking distress.

But the very weirdest part was that evacuation freaks always seemed to travel entirely alone.

"Juanita," said April Logan, "I always sensed you might p rove to be one of my star students."

"Thank you, April."

"How do you count yourself, in this little social analysis of yours?"

"Me?" Jane said. "Scientist."

"Oh yes"-April nodded slowly-"that's very good."

Jane laughed. "Well, you're here too, you know."

"Of course," April Logan said. Her styled hair lifted a little in the dry, sour breeze, and she gave a long, meditative stare around the Troupe camp, sucking in everything with her flat, yellowish, all-comprehending gaze.

If not for the drought, it would have been a very pretty area. The Troupe was cam~ west of El Reno on Interstate 40, an area of red cliifs of crumbling sandstone, red soil, creek bottoms full of pecans and as p ens and festooned with honeysuckle, a place of goldenrod and winecup and coneflowers and trailing purple legume. Spring hadn't given up yet. It was parched and covered with dust, but spring hadn't given up.

April Logan was wearing a tailored paper jumpsuit printed in gold leaf: a perfectly body-morphed adaptation of one of the more lysergic ornaments from the Book of Kells. It was just like April to wear something like that: costume as oxymoron. Gilded paper. Preindustrial handicraft warped by postindustrial machine, a consumer conundrum from the warring no-man's-land of Cost versus Value versus Worth. And it was, coincidentally, quite beautiful. "I'm still riding the back of the Project," April Logan said. "The Project wanted me to come here, you know."

"You're kidding."

"Oh no," said April. "The Project is sometimes crazy, but it never kids."

Jane had helped to build the Project, as an undergraduate. It was something Professor Logan had been patiently assembling and refining for years-an eldritch chimera of monster clipping service, genetic algorithm, and neural net. A postliterate, neoacademic Correlation Machine, a megachipped Synchronicity Generator. There were a lot of lumps in April's vast analytical stew: demographics, employment records, consumption trends. Geographical distribution of network data trafficking. Mortality rates, flows of private currency. And various arcane indices of graphic design-like April herself, the Project was very big on graphic-design trends.

When discussing her Project, April liked to dwell on the eldritch twentieth-century correlation between women's hemlines and the stock market. The market would go up, hemlines would go up. The market would drop, hemlines would drop. Nobody knew why, or ever learned why, but the correlation held quite steady for decades. Eventually, of course, the stock market lost all contact with reality, and women no longer gave a damn about their hemlines even if they bothered to wear skirts, but, as April said, the crux of her Project was to discover and seize similar modern correlations while they were still fresh, and before the endless chaos of society necessarily rendered them extinct. Given that chaos, the "why" of the correlation was indeterminate. And given those genetic algorithms, causation wasn't even logically traceable within the circuits of the machine. In any case, reason and causation were not the point of April's effort. The crux of the matter was whether April's massive simulation could parallel reality closely enough to be a useful design tool.

The Project wasn't that much different, in its basic digital operation, from Jerry's weather modeling-except that Jerry's simulations were firmly based on openly testable, fully established laws of physics, while April Logan was not a scientist but an artist and design critic. As far as Jane could figure, April's analytical armature wasn't much of a genuine intellectual advance over a tarot deck. And yet, like a tarot deck, no matter what nonsense the damn thing threw out, it always seemed to work somehow, to make a certain deep and tantalizing sense.

It wasn't science, and didn't pretend to be, but it had made April Logan into a very wealthy and influential woman. She had left academia-where she had been doing quite well-and now commanded enormous fees as a private consultant. People-sensible, practical people-paid April Logan huge sums to predict things like "the color of the season." And whether there might be a mass market for disposable fast-food plasticware that you could chew up and eat. And why hotels were suffering a plague of teen suicides inside glass elevators, and why installing bright pink carpeting might help. April had become a genuine Design Guru.

The years hadn't been kind to April. Seeing her teacher in person again, outside the hard controlled gleam of April's precisely calculated public image, Jane noticed tremor and flakiness there, a touch of madness, even. April ~an was not a happy woman. But success hadn't changed her much. April had always had that innate jitter and tang, and it was slowly and visibly eating her heart out but April Logan had a lot of heart. She had her muse in a hammerlock, and she was possessed by the Work. Just to be around April was to feel a radioactive glow from a capable, perceptive, brilliant woman, someone paying a focused and terrible attention to things most human beings couldn't even see. April was a real artist, the truest artist Jane had ever met. The genuine article. Even the worst and most dismal commercial bullshit in a hell-bound planet couldn't kill them all off.

"True innovation tends to afflict the eccentric April mused. "A minority of the eccentric, one in a hundred, maybe." She paused. "Of course, that leaves society with the burden of ninety-nine pretentious, ill-behaved basket cases."

"Same old Professor Logan."

"I might have known I'd see you end up in the heart of an event like this, Juanita. There's no question that it's an event of some pivotal importance. I've watched it work its way from speculation, to fad, to near mania... . If it's a natural disaster that matches its advance billings, this could become a long-term societal landmark."

"And we're documenting it."

"It's very dangerous, isn't it? Not only physically, but it is clearly attracting a large nexus of unstable social elements."

"Fortune rewards the brave," Jane said cheerfully. "We'll be fine. We know what we're doing. And so will everyone else, if you will help us."

"Interesting," April said. From her, that was high praise. "I did a comprehensive category search through the Project for neural weightings for your friend, Dr. Mulcahey. It's rare for the Project to single out any individual, especially one as publicly little known as he is, and yet Dr. Mulcahey registers in no less than fourteen different categories.

"Really."

"That's quite extraordinary. And yet he has an even lesser-known brother who showed up in no less than seventeen!"

"Do you ever look yourself up in the Project?"

"Every day. I've gotten as high as five, sometimes. Six once, briefly." She frowned. "Of course, you could argue that a lower number of categories deepens the basic societal influence."

"Right. Have you looked me up, lately?"

April gazed tactfully across the camp. "What is that device they're launching?"

"Weather balloon," Jane said, standing up. No use taking offense. It was just a big damn fortune-telling machine. 'Would you like to watch?"

JERRY STOOD BEFORE the firelight, his head bare, his hands behind his back. "Tomorrow we are going to track the most violent storm in recorded history," he said. "It will break tomorrow, probably by noon, and it will kill thousands, probably tens of thousands of people. If it's stable and it persists beyond a few hours, it may kill millions. If we had time, and energy, and opportunity, I would try to save lives. But we don't, and we can't. We don't have time, and we don't have authority, so we can't save anyone. We can't even save ourselves. Our own lives are not our top priority tomorrow."

The people in the powwow circle were very silent.

"In the terrible scale of tomorrow's event, our lives just don't matter much. Knowledge of the F-6 is more important than any of us. I wish this weren't the case, but it's the truth. I want you to understand that truth and accept it, I want you to take it into your hearts and feel it, and resolve to act on it. People, you've all seen the simulations, you know what I mean when I say F-6. But people, the damned thing is finally upon us. It is here, it's real, no playback this time, no simulacrum. It is with us in stark reality. We have to know all that we can about the real F-6, at all costs. It is a terrible event that must be documented-at all costs. Tomorrow, we must seize as much of the truth as we can possibly steal from this dreadful thing. Even if we all die doing this, but some survivor learns the truth about it because of our efforts, then that will be an excellent price for our lives."

Jerry began to pace back and forth. "I don't want any recklessness tomorrow. I don't want any amateurism, I don't want any nonsense. What I want from you is complete resolve, and complete understanding of the necessity and the consequences. We have only one chance. This is the greatest heavy-weather challenge that our Troupe will ever face, and I hope and believe it will be the single most violent weather event we will see in our natural lifetimes. If you believe that your life is more important than hacking this storm, I can understand that belief. It's wise. Most people would call it sensible. You are all here with me now because you're definitely not most people, but what I'm asking from you now is a terrible thing to ask of anyone. This isn't just another storm pursuit. It's not just another front, and another spike. This thing is Death, people. It's a destroyer of worlds. It's the worst thing human action has brought into this world since Los Alamos. If your life is your first priority, you should leave this camp immediately, now. I am forecasting a weather event that is more swift, more volatile, more massive, and more violent than the strongest F-S maxitornado, by a full order of magnitude. If you want to escape the disaster, you should flee right now, due east, and not stop until you are on the far side of the Mississippi. If you stay, stay in the full knowledge that we are going after this catastrophe head-on."

Nobody moved. Nobody said anything.

Suddenly the air was split with a bloodcurdling bestial yell, a warbling, yodeling, exultant screech like a madwoman gloating over a freshly severed scalp.

It was Joanne Lessard. They all stared at Joanne in complete astonishment. Joanne was sitting cross-legged on a patch of bubblepak near the campfire. She had just washed her thin blond hair and was combing it. She said nothing, but only smiled sunnily in the flickering firelight, and shrugged her shoulders once, and kept combing.

Even Jerry seemed stunned.

"I've said enough," Jerry realized, and deliberately sat down.

Rudy Martinez stood up. "Jerry, are you nowcasting tomorrow?"

"Yeah."

"I'll go anywhere as long as Jerry is nowcasting. I've said enough." Rudy sat down.

Joe Brasseur stood up. "I'm available for consultation by anyone who hasn't made their will. Dying intestate, that's no joke for your heirs. We got enough time tonight to record a will, put on a digital signature, and pipe it to an off-site backup. This means you, Dunnebecke. I've said enough." He sat down.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Finally Jane felt she had to stand up. "I just want to say that I feel really proud of everybody. And I have a good feeling about this. Good hunting tomorrow, people. I've said enough." She sat down.

April Logan stood up. "Forgive me for interrupting your deliberations, but if it's all right with the group, I'd like to ask all of you something."

April Logan looked at Jerry. Jerry lifted his brows.

"Actually, it's something of a poll query."

"Go ahead, just ask," Jane hissed at her.

"My question is: When do you think the human race conclusively lost control over its own destiny? I'd like everyone here to answer, if you don't mind." April produced a handheld notepad. "Please just start anywhere in the arclc-here at my left, will do."

Martha Madronich stood up, reluctantly. "Well, I hate ao first, but in answer to your question, um, Professor, I figured we lost it for good sometime during the or Emergency." She sat down.

Ed Dunnebecke stood up. "I'd have to say 1968. Maybe 1967. If you look at the CO2 statistics, they had a chance to choke it all back right there, and they knew well they were screwing the environment. There was iitely revolutionary potential in the period, and even ~me political will, but they squandered the opportunity in the drugs and the Marxism and the mystical crap, and they never regained the momentum. Nineteen sixty-eight, defiI've said enough."

Greg Foulks stood up. "I'm with Ed on that one, except was one last chance in 1989 too. Maybe even as late after the First Gulf War. Well, that one was actually econd Gulf War, strictly speaking. But after they blew big chance at genuine New World Order in '89 and they were definitely trashed. I've said enough." He sat down.

Carol Cooper stood up. "Well, you hear this question bit, of course... . Call me romantic, but I always thought 1914. The First World War. I mean, you look at peace in Europe before the slaughter, and it looks ation might have had a chance to stick. And if we 't blown most of the twentieth century on fascism and communism and the rest of the ism bullshit, maybe we tiM have built something decent, and besides, no matter at Taney says, Art Nouveau was the last really truly looking graphic-art movement. I've said enough." ~am Moncrieff took his turn. "Late 1980s ....here re some congressional hearings on global warming that rybody ignored... . Also the Montreal Accords on chlorofluorocarboflS; they should have passed those with some serious teeth about CO2 and methane, and things would be a lot better today. Still heavy weather, probably, but not insanely heavy. Late eighties. Definitely. I've said enough."

Rick Sedletter rose. "What Greg said." He sat down.

Peter Vierling stood up. "Maybe it's just me, but I always felt like if personal computers had come along in the 1950s instead of the 1970s, everybody would have saved a lot of time. Well... never mind." He sat down.

Buzzard stood up. "I think they blew it with the League of Nations in the twenties. That was a pretty good idea, and it was. strictly pig-stupid isolationism on the part of the USA that scragged that whole thing. Also the early days of aviation should have worked a lot better. Kind of a real wings-over-the-world opportunity. A big shame that Charles Lindbergh liked fascists so much. I've said enough."

Joanne stood up. "Nineteen forty-five. United Nations could have rebuilt everything. They tried too. Some pretty good declarations, but no good follow-through, though. Too bad. I've said enough."

Joe Brasseur stood. "I'm with Joanne on the 1940s thing. I don't think humanity ever really recovered from the death camps. And Hiroshima too. After the camps and the Bomb, any horror was possible, and nothing was certain anymore... . People never straightened up again after that, they always walked around bent and shivering and scared. Sometimes I think I'd rather be scared of the sky than that scared about other human beings. Maybe it was even worth heavy weather to miss nuclear Armageddon and genocide... . I wouldn't mind discussing this matter with you later, Professor Logan. But for the meantime, I've said enough."

Ellen Mae Lankton spoke. "Me? If I gotta blame somebody, I blame Columbus. Five hundred thirty-nine years of oppression and genocide. I blame Columbus, and that bastard who designed the repeating rifle. You'd never find an F-6 on any plain that was still covered with buffalo.

But I've said this before, and I've said it enough." She sat down.

Ed Dunnebecke stood up. "Funny thing, but I think the French Revolution had a very good chance and blew it. Europe wasted the next two centuries trying to do what the Revolution had right in its grasp in 1789. But once you stumble into that public-execution nonsense... Hell, that was when I knew the Regime had lost it during the State of Emergency, when they started cablecasting their goddamn executions. Give 'em to Madame Guillotine, and the Revolution will eat its young, just as sure as hell.

Yeah, put me down for 1789. I've said enough."

Jeff Lowe rose to his feet. "'I don't know very much aboui history. Sorry."

Mickey Kiehl stood up. "I think we lost it when we go for nuclear power. They coulda designed much better plants than they did, and a hell of a lot better dissystem, but they didn't because of that moral taint the Bomb. People were scared to death of any kind of iatation' even when a few extra curies aren't really danrous. I'd say 1950s. When the atomic-energy people hid the military-security bullshit instead of really trying make fission work safely for real people in real life. So got all-natural CO2 instead. And the CO2 ruined everying. rye said enough."

Jerry stood up. "I think it's fruitless to look for first sea or to try to assign blame. The atmosphere is a chasystem; humanity might have avoided all those mis~s and still found itself in this conjunction. That begs question of when we lost control of our destiny. We have none now; I doubt we ever had any." with Jerry on this one," Jane said cheerfully. more so. I mean, if you look back at the glacial for the Eemian Period, the one before the last set of ages, there were no people around to speak of, and yet weather was completely crazy. Global temps used to and dip eight, nine, ten degrees within a single cenThe climate was highly unstable, but that was a corntezy natural state. And then right after that, most of rope, Asia, and America were covered with giant cliffs of ice that smashed and froze everything in their path. Even worse than agriculture and urbanization! And a lot worse than heavy weather is now. Pm real sorry that we did this to ourselves and that we're in the fix we are in now, but so-called Mother Earth herself has done worse things to the planet. And believe it or not, the human race has actually had things worse.

"Very good," said April Logan. "Thanks very much for that spectrum of opinion by people who ought to know. Since I have no intention of being here when Dr. Mulcahey's forecast is tested, I'll be taking his advice and leaving Oklahoma immediately. I wish you all the very best of luck." She turned to Jane. "If I can do anything for you, leave E-mail."

"Thanks, April."

"Wait a moment," Carol said aloud. "You don't want to miss the night's entertainment."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Alex is doing something for us, right after the powwow."

Alex. Where was Alex? Jane realized with a guilt-stricken start that she hadn't even missed him.

"Yeah," Rick blurted. "Where is ol' Alex?"

Carol smiled. "Ladies and gentlemen, Alex Unger and his Magic Lariat!"

Alex wandered into the circle of firelight. He was wearing leather chaps and pearl-buttoned shirt and a ten-gallon hat. He'd polished his Mexican boots and put clown white and lipstick on his face.

"Yippee-ti-yi-yo," Peter suggested warily.

Alex whipped the smart rope off his shoulder. He had done something to it, greased it or oiled it somehow; it looked very shiny tonight.

He whipped a little energy into it with a pop of his skinny arm, then sent a big loop of it rotating over his head. His face was stony, perfectly solemn.

The loop hung over him like a halo for a moment, humming with speed. Then he somehow bent the loop sideways and began to jump through it. Not much of a jump really; a feeble hop, so that his bootheels barely cleared the earth; but the loop of smart rope went whizzing past him with impressive buzzing speed, kicking up brief gouts of dirt.

Alex threw the thing a full twenty meters into the air, then sent the loop at its end ricocheting back and forth, over the heads of the crowd. It went hissing through every point of the circle, darting among them like the head of a snake. People whooped and flinched, some of them whacking out at it with their hands.

The lariat loop at the end of the rope suddenly went square: a raggedly revolving square of spinning rope. Then it turned triangular. Then, amazingly, a five-pointed Texas star. It was more than a little odd to see a cowboy's rope behaving in that fashion; it was, Jane thought dizzily, downright outré.

Alex tugged the star inward, toward himself, then bounced it around the circle, stenciling the star across the earth, bouncing it on its points. Alex turned slowly on his heels. The rope passed unharmed through the flames of the campfire.

People began laughing.

Alex waved with his free hand, in acknowledgment, and then began catching and tossing pieces of flaming wood. He lassoed a burning length of cedar from the fire, tossed it high in the air, and caught it with the end of the loop. He flipped the flaming branch end over end, lassoing it repeatedly with unerring, supernatural accuracy. After a moment Jane realized that the trick wasn't that hard; he wasn't actually casting the rope, he was holding the loop up in waiting, then snapping it shut as the stick fell through it. But the effect was so unnaturally fluid and swift that it actually did look magical. It was just as if her little brother had hog-tied the laws of physics. Jane broke into a gale of laughter. It was the funniest thing she had seen in ages, and by far the funniest thing she had ever seen Alex do.

Now, amazingly, Alex somehow hog-tied his own waist and lifted himself up, hanging in midair. He seemed to lift himself by his own bootstraps. He hung there in space, magically hoisted by his own Hindu rope trick, while the wide loops of smart rope spun around on the earth beneath him, like the rim of a wobbling corkscrew.

First he rolled awhile, slowly spinning himself around, like some lost fancy sock in a laundry. Then he began, clumsily, to hop. He'd mutated the smart rope into a spiraled, wiry pogo stick. The Troupers were falling all over themselves with hilarity. Carol was clinging onto Greg's shoulder, so convulsed with laughter that she was hardly able to look. Even Jerry was laughing aloud.

"My word," April Logan commented. "Why, he's rather good!"

"That's Alex!" Jane told her. "He's my-" She stopped. "He's one of our Troupe."

Jane felt a hand on her shoulder. It was Ed Dunnebecke. Ed bent low, beside her right ear. "I didn't know he was this funny, did you?"

"No, I didn't."

"I gotta leave, Jane, I got business tonight, but your little brother can really hack that thing."

"Yeah, Ed, he can, can't he?"

"It's not a real useful hack, I guess, but hell, this is real entertainment! He's got imagination!"

"Thanks, Ed."

"I'm glad you brought him here. Bye, Janey." He patted her shoulder and left.

Alex was holding on to the rope with both hands, with extra loops snaked around his ankles, and he was rolling around the edge of the circle of Troupers, doing a giant cartwheel. Alex went head over heels, head over heels, head over heels, his clown-white face scything along, while the night rang out with whoops and applause.

Then he lost it suddenly, and wobbled, and fell. He fell headlong, and he fell pretty hard. Dust whumped the earth where his booted legs flopped down.

Everyone was silent. Jane heard the fire crackle.

Alex got up again, quickly but shakily. He slapped dust from his fancy shirt, trying gamely to smile. He'd been to town, somehow, into some neowestern clothing store. Probably sneaked off on a bike to Oklahoma City while nobody was paying attention to him.

He said his first words of the evening. "Spinnin' a rope is fun," he shouted raggedly, "if yore neck ain't in it!"

The Troupe broke into howls of laughter.

"Now for my goldurn pièce de résistance," Alex shouted. He began whipping energy into the rope, his dust-smeared pale face set grimly. The rope rose, began to spin, then to spiral inward. Narrow at the bottom. Broader at the top. It spun so fast that the lines of rope became a glimmering blur.

And faster yet. The fire billowed in the wind of its passage. It was sucking up dust from the ground.

A little toy spike.

The whipping rope was blowing hard enough to feel. As the vortex wandered past her at the end of the rope, Jane felt the rush of wind tugging her hair. Then, up at the very top, the end of the smart rope whipped loose, lashing out above their heads with a nasty whip crack of toy thunder. It cracked again, then a third time. The spike spun faster, with a mean dynamo hum. Alex was putting everything into it that the battery could hold. Jane saw him crouching there, flinching away below, wary, at the edge of control, frightened of his own creation.

Then he turned it off. It sagged in midair, and fell over in a heap of loops. A dead thing, dead rope.

The Troupe applauded wildly.

Alex stooped and gathered the dead rope up in both his arms.

"That's all I've got for y'all," he said, bowing. "Thanks a lot for your kindly attention."