The unbroken malignant high had been sitting, for six long weeks, over Colorado. It seemed to be anchored there. The high hadn't moved, but it had expanded steadily. A great dome of dry, superheated air had spread from Colorado to northeastern New Mexico and the Panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas. Beneath it was the evil reign of drought.
Jane was rather fond of Oklahoma. The roads were generally in worse condition than Texas, but the state was more thoroughly settled. There was good civil order, and the people were friendly, and even way outside the giant modern megalopolis of Oklahoma City, there were living little rural towns where you could still get real breakfast and a decent cup of coffee. The sky was a subtler blue in Oklahoma, and the wildflowers were of a gentler palette than the harshly vivid flowers of a Texas spring.The soil was richer, and deeper, and iron red, and quite a lot of it was cultivated. The sun never climbed quite as punishingly high in the zenith, and it rained mote often.
But there was no rain now. Not under the slow swell of the continental monster. Rushing storm fronts had scourged Missouri and Iowa and Kansas and Illinois, but the high at the foot of the Rockies had passed from a feature, to a nuisance, to a regional affliction.
SESAME's Climate Analysis Center liked to netcast a standard graphics map, "Departure of Average Temperature from Normal (C)," a meteorological document that SESAME had inherited from some precybernetic federal-government office. The map's format was rather delightfully antiquated, both in its old-fashioned distinction of "Centigrade" (the old Fahrenheit scale had been extinct for years) and in its wistful pretense that there was still such a thing in American weather as "Normal." The map's colored shadings of temperature were crudely vivid, with the crass aesthetic limits of early computer graphics, but for the sake of archival continuity, the maps had never been redesigned. In her Troupe career, Jane had examined dozens of these average-temperature maps. But she'd never before seen so much of that vividly anomalous shade of hot pink.
It was only June, and people were already dying under those pixelated hot-pink pools. Not dying in large numbers; it wasn't yet the kind of heavy weather where the feds would start sending in the iron-barred evacuation trucks. It was still only early June, when heat could be very anomalous without becoming actually lethal. But it was the kind of heat that kicked up the stress several notches. So the old folks' pacemakers failed, and there'd be gunfire in the evening and a riot at the mall.
The temperature map dissolved on Charlie's dashboard readout, then blushed again into a blotchy new depiction: pound-level SESAME Lidar.
"I've never seen it like this before," Jerry commented, from Charlie's passenger seat. "Look at the way it's breaking, way outside the rim of that high. That's not supposed to happen."
"I don't see how anything can happen until that air mass moves," Jane said. "It doesn't make any sense."
"The core's not moving for hell, but it's still ripping loose today, all along that secondary dryline," Jerry said.
"We're gonna see some F-2s, F-3s drop out of this, and they're going to be"-he thought it over-"a minor feature."
Jane looked up at the northern horizon: the storm line that was their destination. Beyond a line of wilting Oklahoma cottonwoods, there were towers rising-sheetlike in parts, half-concave, starved for moisture. They didn't look powerful, but they didn't look minor; they looked convulsive. "Well," she said, "maybe we're finally seeing it, then. Maybe this is what it looks like when it starts."
"The F-6 isn't supposed to shape up like this. The mesosphere's all wrong and the jet stream is hanging north like it was nailed there."
"Well, this is where the F-6 ought to be. And the time is right. So what else could it be?"
Jerry shook his head. "Ask me when it starts moving."
Jane sighed, and munched a handful of government granola from her paper bag, and pulled her booted legs up in the driver's seat. "I can't believe that you gave up now-casting, and came out to hammer some spikes with me, and now you're telling me they're a minor feature."
Jerry laughed. "Spikes. They're like sex. Just 'cause you've nailed 'em once before, doesn't mean you lose all interest the next time."
"It's good to have you out here with me." She paused. "You're being real sweet to me lately, under the circumstances."
"Babe," he said, "you were in camp two months before all willpower shattered, remember? If we can't make love, we won't. Simple." He hesitated. "It's hell, true, but it's simple."
Jane knew better than to take this male bravado at face value. All was not well in camp. Her infection, the drought. Nerves, restlessness. Missed connections.
One of the things Jane loved best about chasing spikes was that liberating way that gigantic storms smashed flat and rendered irrelevant all the kinks in her personal life. You couldn't sweat your own angst in the face of a monster spike; it was stupid and vulgar and deeply beside the point, like trying to make the Grand Canyon your spittoon.
She did love Jerry; she loved him as a person, very dearly, and she often thought she might have loved him almost as much, even if he'd never given her any tornadoes. She could have loved Jerry even if he'd been something everyday and nonexotic and dull, like, say, some kind of economist. Jerry was skillful and accomplished and dedicated and, when you got used to him, rather intensely attractive. Sometimes Jerry was even funny. She often thought that even under other circumstances, she might easily have become his lover, or even his wife.
It would have been much more like her other affairs, though; the ones with the vase throwing and the screaming fits and the shaking sense of absolute black desperation in the back of a limo at three in the morning.
Jerry made her do crazy things. But Jerry's crazy things had always made her better and stronger, and with Jerry around, for the first time in her life she no longer felt miserably troubled about being her own worst enemy. She'd always been wrapped too tight, and wired too high, and with a devil inside; in retrospect, she could see that dearly now. Jerry was the first and only man in her life who had really appreciated her devil, who had accepted her devil and been sweet to it, and had given her devil some proper down-and-dirty devil-things to do. Her devil no longer had idle hands. Her devil was working its ass off, all the time.
So now she and her devil were quite all right, really.
It was as if acting crazy, and taking crazy risks, had completely freed her of any obligation to actually become crazy. It might sound rather sappy, but really and truly, Jerry had made her a free woman. She was dirty and she was broke and she smelled bad most of the time, but she was free and in love. She'd spent most of her life in a fierce, determined, losing battle to make herself behave and make sense and be good and be happy; and then she'd met Jerry Mulcahey and had given up the war. And when all that old barbed wire snapped loose inside of her, she'd discovered surprising reservoirs of simple decency and goodwill in herself. She wasn't even half as bad as she'd thought she was. She wasn't crazy, she wasn't wicked, she wasn't even particularly dangerous. She was a mature adult woman who wasn't afraid of herself, and could even be a source of real strength to other people. She could give and sacrifice for other people, and love and be loved, without any fear or any mean calculation. And she acknowledged all this, and was grateful for it.
It was just that she really, really hated to talk about it.
Jerry wasn't any better at discussing it than she was. Jerry Mulcahey wasn't like other men. Not that that was entirely to Jerry's credit; Jerry wasn't much like any kind of human being. Jane was a bright person, and Jane knew what it was like to be brighter than other people; bright enough to be disliked for it, sometimes. But she knew she wasn't bright like Jerry was. In particular areas of his comprehension, Jerry was so bright as to be quite alien. There were large expanses of his mental activity that were as blank and hot and shiny as someone on drugs.
Jane had no gift for mathematics; math was something that she had to crawl through on her belly, like mud. It had taken her quite some time to fully comprehend that this strange man in the wastelands of West Texas with his cobbled-up crew of eccentrics was, really and truly, one of the brightest mathematicians in the world.
Jerry's parents had both been computer-science researchers in Los Alamos. They'd both been good at their work too; but their son Jerry had been doing cutting-edge magnetohydrodynamics when he was twelve. Jerry had pioneered in fields like multidimensional minimal-surface manifolds and higher-order invariant polynomials, things that made your brain explode just to look at them. Jerry was good enough at math to frighten people. His colleagues couldn't make up their minds whether to envy him for his gifts, or resent him for not publishing more often. Every once in a while Jane would have some net-idiot give her a hard time about Jerry's "professional qualifications," and she would E-mail the skeptic the paper that Jerry'd done back in 2023 that established the Mulcahey Conjecture, and the skeptic would try to read it and his brain would explode, and he would quietly slink away and never be heard from again.
Unless he turned out to be one of the math wannabes. The Troupe attracted all kinds of wannabes, most of them rather nutty, but every once in a while some anxious weedy-looking guy would show up at camp who didn't give a shit about tornadoes and really, really wanted Jerry to forget all about it and get back to proving how many soap bubbles could fit inside a collapsing torus in hyperspace. Jerry was always terribly kind to these people.
The weight lifting was another prominent aspect of Jerry's oddity. He hadn't always been that way. She'd seen pictures of Jerry as a teenager-his mother had sent them-and Jerry had been lithe and slender, with a tall kid's wary stoop. Lots of Troupers were into weights; Jane lifted weights herself, enough to get strong, enough to get the point of doing it. But Jerry was doing weights just because a saved him time. It saved him time and effort to be as big as a house so he could briefly surface out of his abyss of distraction, and snap out something, and have people just jump up and run do it for him. Because he radiated raw physical authority, Jerry didn't have to slow down to explain very much. Plus, the weights gave Jerry something to do while he was thinking seriously, and Jerry liked to think seriously for about five hours straight, every day. The fact that he was lugging thirty kilos of steel on his legs at the time never seemed to register on him much.
There was no question that the great trial of Jerry's life was relating to other human beings. Jerry had really worked terribly hard at this problem, with such painstaking patience and suffering and dedication, that her heart truly melted for him.
Jerry didn't readily empathize with people, because Jerry just wasn't a very peoplelike being. But he could model people. He could dryly comprehend the whole Structure of their personalities, and re-create them as a kind of dry run in his own head. He had built his relationships with the other Troupers like a one-armed man buildlug model cathedrals out of toothpicks.
And when he had it all figured, then he would sit you down. And start telling you exactly what you were really thinking, and what it was that really motivated you, and how you could get what you wanted and how that would, by the way, help him and the others too. It would be laid out with such amazing clarity and detail that your own self-image would crumble by comparison. Jerry would have invented this thing, just by watching you closely and speculating, but it was so much more like you than you were that it felt more real than your own identity. It was like confronting your ideal self, your better nature: smoother, more sensible, wiser, a lot better managed. All you had to do was let the scales fall from your eyes and reach out for it.
Jane had gone through this process exactly once. Well, half of once, actually. It was hard to seduce someone while in a paper jumpsuit. You could zip it down to the waist and coyly peel it open, and it felt like you were offering a guy a couple of bran muffins out of a bakery bag. But once he'd started in on her with the toothpick analysis, she'd known that the only way to break him out of it was to knock him down and straddle him.
It had worked brilliantly too. It had shut Jerry up to the great satisfaction of all concerned. Now she and Jerry could freely and openly discuss all kinds of things: spikes, interfaces, tools, camp, feds, Rangers, other Troupers, even money. But they didn't discuss The Relationship. The Relationship didn't even have a name. The Relationship had its own shape and its own life and it was not made of toothpicks.
But Jerry had assigned himself to her car. He never did this without reason. Sooner or later the shoe would drop. The big hot core was gone from The Relationship, and both of them were hurting, and some rational analysis was going to come out of Jerry. She was hoping for the best.
"For the first time I'm really getting afraid of this," he said.
Jane set her granola bag on the floorboard. "What is it you're afraid of, darling?"
"I think we may be shaping up toward the bad scenario.
"What's bad about it?"
"I've never told you fully what I thought this would be like if it became a permanent fixture."
"All right," she said, bracing herself. "If that's on your mind, tell me, then."
"The winds are not the half of it. It could strip the earth's surface right down to bedrock. It could vent more dust into the troposphere than a major volcanic eruption."
"Oh," she said. "You mean the F-6."
He gave her the oddest look he'd ever given her. "Are you okay, Janey?"
"Yeah, sure, I'm as okay as anybody with a yeast infection ever is. Sorry, I thought you were discussing something else. What about the F-6, sweetheart?"
"Oh, nothing really," Jerry said, staring straight ahead. "Just that it might kill everyone within hundreds of kilometers. Including us, of course. All in the first few hours. And after that-a giant, permanent vortex on the planet's surface. That could happen! It could actually take place in the real world."
"I know that," Jane said. "But for some reason, I just don't worry about it much."
"Maybe you should worry a lot more, Jane. It could mean the end of civilization."
"I just can't believe in it enough to worry," she told him. "I mean, I do believe something really awesome is going to break loose this season, but I can't believe it means the end of anything. It's like-somehow-I just can't believe that civilization is going to get off the hook that easy. 'The end of civilization'-what end? What civilization, for that matter? There isn't any end. We're in way too deep to have any end. The kind of troubles we got, they aren't allowed to have any end."
"The troposphere could saturate with dust. There could be a nuclear winter." He paused. "Of course, a majot drop in temperature would starve out the vortex."
"That's just it! It's always something like that! Things can get totally awful, but then something else comes up that's so amazingly screwy that it makes it all irrelevant. There never was any nuclear war or nuclear winter.
There's never gonna be one. That was all just stupid hype, so they could go on ruining the environment, so we'd end up living just like we're living now, living with the consequences.
She sighed. "Look, I saw the sky turn black when I was a kid-I saw it turn black as the ace of spades! It didn't last, though. It was just a big dust bowl. Even if the F-6 is really awful, somebody somewhere would survive. Millions of people, billions maybe. They'd just march into some fucking salt mine, with the chlorophyll hack and some gene-splicing and some superconductives, and as long as theyhadtheir virching and cable TV, most of 'em would never even notice!"
"People talked like that before heavy weather," Jerry said. "It wasn't the end of the world, but they noticed, all right. If they lived long enough."
"Okay," Jane said. "Have it your way. Let's assume for the sake of argument that the F-6 is the end of the world. What do you wanna do about it?"
He said nothing.
"You wanna go down to Costa Rica? I know this cute little hotel there, they've got frozen margaritas and hot showers."
"You're gonna go and hack the F-6 no matter what, aren't you? Of course you are. And good ol' Janey's gonna go with you to do it. Of course I am. End of story."
"It bothers me when you talk like this, Jane. You're not that cynical."
Jane stopped. It was rare of Jerry to confess so openly that he was upset. She lowered her voice. "Darling, listen to me. Don't be so anxious about us. Everybody in the Troupe knows that this is very dangerous. You haven't been hiding that from us, that's not any surprise to us. You can't protect us, we know that. We're all adults-well, almost all adults-and we know what we're doing." She shrugged. "Pretty much, anyhow. A lot more than those dumb feds at SESAME. And a hell of a lot more than the poor damned civilians."
"I think we'd better have a Troupe powwow after this chase, and make ~ll of this very clear and straightforward to everyone."
"Good. Fine. If that'll make you feel better. But I can already tell you what's gonna happen. Nobody's gonna jump up and say, 'Oh wait, Jerry! A really big tornado? Nope, no, sorry, I'm too scared to go watch.' That'll never happen in eight million years!" She laughed. "You couldn't keep 'em away with a cattle prod."
"The F-6 is not just a spike. I'm thinking more and more... along the lines of a different order of storm, something unprecedented. We'll be going up against some-thing I don't understand. The Troupe are good people. They trust my judgment, and they might be killed because of that. It wouldn't be right."
"Jerry, we Troupers are like soldiers, we don't need any rights. Anyway, we'd all be chasing spikes even if you weren't around. If you think I'm doing all this just to please you, you can think otherwise. The F-6 is the big one, it's the payoff. It's what I want." She fetched up her granola bag. "I can get April Logan to come down here."
"Your design professor? Why?"
"April's way out of academia now, she's mega-big in netcritique! She has real influence! She's the heaviest net-friend I have. If April Logan puts the word Out that we have a hot presentation coming up, we can pull some mega postproduction people. People who can take our data, and do it up really right for once. We'll pull a major audience."
"Money, you mean."
"That's right, Jerry. Money. Pots of it." She shrugged. "Well, the net-equivalent. Attention, access. Fame. I can turn that into money. It ain't easy, but there are ways."
"I see."
"Good. So you can forget all that gallant stuff about protecting little me from the big bad storm."
"All right," he said. "That's good, Jane. You've done well and I've come to expect that from you. But what about after the storm?"
"What do. you mean?"
"That's the other eventuality, the one that really stuns 'me. Suppose that we survive the F-6. That we ace this.
That we nail it and make pots of money and fame, and we put it all behind us. What'll we do then? What will become of us? You and me?"
She was surprised, and more than a little alarmed, to hear Jerry bring this up. "Well, nothing has to change, darling! It's not like I never had money before! I can deal with money, you know I can! That's not a problem for us! We'll kick back on the off-season, like the Troupe always does. And we'll upgrade our hardware, really decently this time. You can write a paper, and I'll have plenty of network on my hands... . Then we'll wait for next season."
"There's not gonna be an F-6 next season. And with the global CO2 finally dropping, there may not ever be another F-6."
"So what? There will always be other spikes. Even if the CO2 drops, that doesn't mean the weather's gonna get any calmer. There was less CO2 in the air during the State of Emergency! Besides, CO2's just one part of the climatic disruption. There's still tropical deforestation and delayed ocean warming."
Jerry said nothing.
"There's thermal pollution from cities. And changes in the North Atlantic currents. Glacier retreats in Antarctica, and higher albedos in Africa, and CFCs in the ozone, and that permanent hitch in the ENSO cycle, and the solar variation... Christ, I can't even count them all. Jerry, the weather's never gonna calm down and be normal. Not in our lifetime. Probably not in three hundred years. We'll have all the spikes we ever want! You and me, we're disaster experts with an endless supply of disaster! And if you nail the F-6 while the feds are sitting on their hands saying an F-6 isn't even possible, then you'll be famous forever."
"Jane, I've been forecasting the F-6 for ten years. I don't just chase spikes, anyone can chase spikes. Spikes aren't enough. There are thousands of spikes, and thousands of weather people, but I'm different, and the F-6 is why. I've been so obsessed by it, so consumed and fascinated and intent on this terrible thing, that I have no real idea how I'll live when it's gone. Everything has been honed for this crisis, and we're in top condition to do it. we're all united to do this, to go through hell to nail this thing. But after that, what's to become of us?"
"Jerry..." She bit her lip. "Jerry, I promise you, as long as I'm m your life, you're never gonna lack things to do, and a reason to live. All right?"
"That's sweet of you, but it's just not like that," he said, sadly. "It's hard to explain, but... I have to have the Work. And it has to be big, bigger than myself, because the way I do my Work is with something that's too big. It's me all right, it's very much part of me, but it's not something I'm in command of, and I don't control it. It's like a force, a compulsion, that tears at things, and sheds them, and chops them up, and comprehends them, and I don't control it, and I never have. I can't. You understand?"
"Yes. I do understand. It's like a spike, inside."
"Yes." -"I have one of those too, you know. It's just very different from yours. And being with you, Jerry, it's helped me with it, and I'm better! What we have together, what we give to each other, it's not hurtful or doomed or destructive, it's really good and strong! We do see a lot of hurt. And I don't know, the world around us might be doomed. And we study destruction all the time, every day. But what you and I have, together, in the middle of all of that, it's really good and strong! There's nothing weak or frail about it. I'll never love anyone else, the way I've learned to love you."
"But when this monster has smashed everything, what if we're part of the wreckage?"
"I'll still want you and love you.
"I might become something very different, after the F-6. I know I won't be able to stand still. I'll have to change, there's no avoiding that. Who knows? I might be-come something like Leo."
She sat up very straight. "What do you mean by that? Tell me."
"I mean that I just bear witness, Jane. The Troupe, we all just bear witness. Half of Oklahoma could be smashed into rubble, and we'll just bear witness. But there are those who talk about the weather-as I do and you do-and those who do something about it. Leo, and his friends, his people, they all do things. He's a man of the world, my older brother, he's a man of competence, a man of influence. And it's a dreadful world, and my brother does some very dreadful things. I watch destruction, but Leo abets it. I'm nothing but eyes, but Leo has hands."
Jerry shook his head. "I don't know exactly what Leo's done, or how he's done it or who helped him-he doesn't tell me, for good and ample operational reasons, and I don't want to learn. But I know why. I know why Leo does what he does, and I know why the prospect of action fascinates him. You see, it's not just one spasmodic passing horror in a small locality, like a spike is. The modem world of global strategic politics and economics, that's Leo's world, and it's eight billion people who've lost all control over their destiny, and are gnawing the planet down to the bone. It's our civilization, turned -into an endless world-eating horror, just like the F-6 itself may well turn out to be. And Leo, he lives inside that, and feeds it energy, and tries to bend it to his will. He'd very much like me to join him in there, you know. To help him maneuver the chaos, by whatever means necessary. And I can understand my brother. I can sympathize. My brother and I, we have a similar affliction. We understand one another, as few people ever do."
"All right," Jane said. She put her hand on his. "Jerry, when this is over, then that's what we're going to do. When the F-6 is over, and it's all behind us, and we've shown the whole world what we know and what we witnessed, then we're going to go after your brother. You and me, together, and we're going to rescue him from whatever trouble he's in, and we'll set him all straight."
"That's a major challenge, darling."
"Jerry, you said you wanted a big problem. Well, you've got a big problem, I see that now. I don't care how many political friends your brother has, he's a big problem but he's just a human being, and he's not as big as a storm that can smash Oklahoma. I'm not afraid of your storm, and I'm not afraid of you, and I'm not afraid of your brother. You can't scare me away from you with any of this talk, I love you and I'm staying with you, and nothing will take you from me, nothing but death. We can do this thing. We're not just helpless watchers, we are doers too, in our own way. In our own way, you and I, we are both very practical people."
"Darling," he said, and meant it, "you are very good to me."
The speaker erupted. "This is Rick in Baker! We got circulation!"
ENDLESS RAIN COULD depress you, and there was no disaster like a flood, but there was something uniquely mean and pinched and harsh about a drought. Drought was a trial to the soul.
They'd followed the spike along the rim of the great high. It was a long, ropy, eccentric F-2, and it had moved, with particular oddity, from the north toward the southwest, a very unusual storm track for Tornado Alley. The F-2 had been exceptionally long-lived, never achieving true earthshaking power, but sipping some thread of persistent energy from the edge of the high. And there had been hail with it, nasty, black, dust-choked hail; but scarcely a drop of rain.
Now the F-2 had roped out and Jane and Jerry were in the canyonlands west of Amarillo, the part of the Texas Panhandle people called the Breaks. They'd been running cross-country in a flat plain, and then the earth opened up in front of them. The Canadian River of the Panhandle was not a major river now, but it had been a very major river during the last ice age, and it had done some dreadful things to the landscape here. Real mesas, not the slumped hills of the south High Plains. Mesas weren't mountains. They were not vigorous upthrustings in the landscape. Mesas were remnants, mesas were all that was left, after ages of stubborn resistance to rainsplash and sheetwash and channel cutting. The mesas had a layer of hard sandstone, t caprock, up on top, but below that caprock layer was a soft, reddish, weak, and treacherous rock that was scarcely petrified mud. That rock wa~ so weak you could tear off clods of it and crumble it to dust with your fingers. The mesas were toothless and terribly patient and all wrinkled down the sides, eaten away with vertical gullies, their slopes scattered with the cracked remains of undereaten sandstone slabs.
It was very old and very wild country. It had few roads, and those in poor repair. Around local creekbeds and water holes, people sometimes found twelve-thousand-year-old flint spearheads, mixed with the blackened, broken bones of extinct giant bison. Jane always wondered what the reaction of those flint-wielding Folsom Point peopie had been when they realized they had exterminated their giant bison, wiped them into extinction with their dreadful high-tech ati-atls, and their cutting-edge flint industry, and the all-consuming giant wildfires they'd used to chase whole assembly lines of bison pell-mell off the canyon cliffs. Maybe some had condemned the wildfires and atlatls, and tried to destroy the flints. While others had been sick at heart forever, to find themselves p arty to such a dreadful crime. And the vast majority, of course, simply hadn't noticed.
The canyon walls of the Breaks played hell with communications. They cast a major radio shadow, and if you got really close to them they could even block satellite relay. That posed no challenge for Pursuit Vehicle Charlie, though, who put his superconductive to work and scuttled up the slope to the top of the largest mesa in the neighborhood. That mesa was helpfully festooned with big towers and microwave horns.
Jane and Jerry weren't the first to come here for their own purposes. Most of the horns were lavishly stenciled with bullet holes, some old, some new. A structure-hit gang had tagged the tower blockhouses with much-faded graffiti. Old-fashioned psycho-radical slogans like SMASH THE BALLOT MARKET and t.rr m~it EAT DATA and SCREAMING wou SURVIVES, done with that kinky urban folk intensity that urban graffiti had once had, before the spirit had suddenly and inexplicably leached out of it and the whole practice of tagging had dried up and gone away.
There was a fire pit with some ancient burned mesquite stubs, and a mess of scattered beer cans, the old aluminum kind of beer container that didn't melt in the rain. It was easy to imagine the vanished Luddite marauders, up here with their dirt bikes and guns and howling, chanting boom boxes.
Jane found this intensely sad, somehow more lonely than if there had never been anyone here in the first place. She wondered who the gang had been, and what in hell they had thought they were doing way out here, and what had become of them. Maybe they were just plain dead, as dead as the Folsom flint people. The state of Texas had always been remarkably generous with the noose, the chair, and the needle, and in the early days of parole cuffs there'd been little complaint about tamperproofing them with contact nerve poison. And that was just the formal way-the polite and legitimate way of erasing people. If the gang had been jumped by Rangers they'd be unmarked graves by the roadside now, green lumps in some overgrown pasture. Maybe they had blown themselves up, trying to cook demolition bombs out of simple household chemicals. Had they snapped out of the madness and achieved a foothold in what passed for real life? Did they have jobs now?
She'd once asked Carol, tactfully, about the Underground, and Carol had said bluntly: "There is no more alternative society. Just people who will probably survive, and people who probably won't." And Jane could pretty much go with that assessment. Because from her own experience with structure-hit activity, the people who were into that radical bullshit were just like Rangers, only stupider and not as good at it.
The sun was setting. Off in the western distance, beneath the dissolving clouds, Jane could see, with intense and lovely clarity, the skeletal silhouetting of very distant trees. The trees were whole kilometers away and no bigger than a fingernail paring, and yet she could see the shape of their every branch in the clear still air, stenciled against the colors around the sun, great bands of subtle, gradated, desert color, umber to amber to translucent pearly white.
The chase was over now. It was time to call camp.
Jerry got the spider antenna out of its bag and kicked its tripod open and started cranking it into full extension.
And then the wind stopped. And it grew terribly still.
And then it began to get hot.
Jane looked at the barometer readout. It was soaring- moving visibly even as she looked.
"What's going on?" she said.
"It's a solitary wave," Jerry said. "It must have peeled off the high somehow." Not a wind, not something you could feel as moving air, but a kind of silent compression wave in the atmosphere, a silent rippling bulge of pressure and heat. Jane's ears popped loudly. The hot air felt very dry, and it smelled. It smelled of drought and ozone.
She leaned against the car and the edge of the door stung her hand with a sharp pop of static electricity.
Jerry looked up at the tallest of the microwave horns.
"Jane," he said in a tight voice, "get back in the car, get the cameras running. Something's happening."
"All right." She got in.
It grew darker, and then she began to hear it. A thin, flowing hiss. Not a crackle, but a sound like escaping gas. The tall tower had begun to vent something, to ooze something, something very odd, something like wind, something like fur, something like flame. White, striated, gaseous spikiness, a flickering, rippling presence, at the corners of the old tower's braced galvanized-iron uprights and crossbars. All on one side, vowing up and down one metal corner of the tower, like glowing ball moss. It hissed and it ffickered and it moved a little, fitfully, like the spitting breath of ghosts. She watched it steadily through the binocular cameras, rock steadily, and she called out, very unsteadily, "Jerry! What is it?"
"It's Saint Elmo's fire."
Jane suddenly felt the hair rise all over her head. She didn't stop recording, but the electric fire had fallen on her now, it had seeped down and come inside the car with her. The corona lifted her hair like a pincushion. Deep natural electricity was discharging off the top of her head. Her whole scalp, from nape to forehead, felt like an eyelid felt when an eyelid was gently peeled back.
"I've seen this at Pike's Peak," Jerry said. "I've never seen it at this low an elevation."
"'Will it hurt us?"
"No. It should pass us when this wave passes."
"All tight. I'm not afraid."
"Keep recording."
"Don't worry, I've got it."
And in less than a minute the wave passed. And the fire was gone away from them, the strange deep fire was gone completely. Just as if there had never been anything.
IT WAS VERY hard to sleep together when you weren't allowed to sleep together. Jane had always had trouble sleeping, always ready to prowl around red-eyed and pull an all-nighter. Jerry had no such problems. Jerry was good at catnaps; he could turn off his virching helmet, lie down on the carpet with his head inside the casket of blackness, sleep twenty minutes, and then get right up and resume his calculations.
But tonight, although Jerry was silent and still, Jerry wasn't sleeping. Jane had her head in the hollow of his left shoulder, a place that fit her as if it had been designed for her, the place where she had passed the most sweetly restLtd nights of her life. They would come away from a chase and have a furious encounter, and then she would fling one naked possessive leg over him and put her head on his shoulder, and she'd close her eyes and hear his heart beating, and she would tumble headlong into a dark sated slumber so deep and healing that it would have set Lady Macbeth to rights.
But not tonight. Her nerves felt as tight and high-pitched as a mariachi violin, and she found no comfort in Jerry. Somehow he didn't smell right. And she didn't smell right either: she smelled of topical vaginal ointment, possibly the least erotic scent known to humankind. But unless at least one of them got some real rest, something awful was going to happen.
"Jerry?" she said. In the still of camp-the ticking of insects, the distant whoosh of the wind generator-even a tender whisper sounded loud as a gunshot.
"Mmmph."
"Jerry, I'm getting better now, I really am. Maybe we should try something."
"I don't think that's a good idea."
"Okay, maybe you're right, but that's no reason why you should have to lie there stiff as a board. Let me try something, darling, let me see if I can make you feel better." Before he could say anything, she slipped her hand down and gripped his cock.
His penis felt so odd and hot in her fingers that for one shocked instant she thought something had gone terribly wrong with him. Then she realized that he didn't have a condom on. She'd touched it before, and even stroked it and kissed it, but never without the condom.
Well, no harm done. Not just with fingers.
"All tight?" she said.
"All right."
He didn't seem to lack enthusiasm. And if she stopped and got out in the pitch darkness and made him put a condom on, it would be a mega drag. Forget it: so far, so good. She stroked him patiently and persistently, until she got a bad cramp in her forearm. Then she burrowed down into the sleeping bag and tried kissing for a while, and although he didn't come, he at least began to make the right noises.
Then she came out of the bag for some much-needed air and tried rubbing some more.
It was taking a very long time. At first she felt intensely embarrassed; and then she got used to it, and began to feel better, thinking that even if this was a very ungainly and unsatisfactory substitute for sex, at least she was doing something practical. At least she was taking charge of their troubles. Then she thought that he was never going to come, that she wasn't skilled or sweet enough to make him do it, and that brought the threat of a cavernous sense of failure.
But he was stroking her neck and shoulder in an encouraging way, and finally he started breathing seriously hard. Then he groaned in the dark, and she held it carefully, and she felt it pulsing.
The wetness on her fingers felt viscous and drippy. It felt rather like motor oil. She had seen semen before, and she even knew that odd and particular smell that it had, but never in her life had it actually touched her skin. It was an intimate bodily fluid. Intimate bodily fluids were very dangerous.
"I'm twenty-six years old," she said, "and this is the first time I've ever touched this stuff."
He put his arm around her shoulders and hugged her to him. "My sweet darling," he said quietly, "it wont hurt you.
"I know that. You don't have any viruses. You're not sick! You're the healthiest person I how!"
"You have no way to really know that, though."
"Have you ever had sex with anybody, without using a condom?"
"No, never, of course not."
"Me either. So then how could you possibly have any STh?"
"Blood transfusion, maybe? IV drugs? Anyway, I might be lying about the condom use."
"Oh, for heaven's sake! You're not a liar, I've never known you to lie. You never lie to me!" Her voice trembled. "I can't believe that I've known you all this time, that you're the man I love more than anyone else in the world, and yet I never really knew about this simple thing that you do, this simple thing that comes out of your body." She burst into tears.
"Don't cry, sweetheart."
"Jerry, why is our life this way?" she said. "What did we ever do to deserve this? We don't hurt each other! We love each other! Why can't we be like men and women used to be? Why is everything always so difficult for us?"
"It's for protection.
"I don't need any protection from you! I don't want any protection from you! I'm not afraid about this! Christ. Jerry, this is the part of being with you that I'm never afraid about! This is the part that's really wonderful with us, it's the part that we're really good at." She held on to him and sobbed.
He held her close and tight for a long time as she shook and wept. Finally he began to deliberately kiss the tears away from her inflamed and aching face. When their mouths met, she felt a rush of passion so intcnse that her soul seemed to flow from her lips. She slid on top of him in a patch of cooling stickiness and jammed his cock into her aching, needful body.
And it really hurt. She wasn't at all well, she was sick, she had yeast. It stung and burned, but nowhere near enough to make her want to stop. She put her arms out straight to support herself and started rocking on him in the darkness.
"Juanita, yo te quiero."
It was such a perfect, intoxicating thing for him to say at that moment that she lost all sense of herself. She went way past the hurt and into frenzy. Maybe forty seconds of it, something like forty aeons in the hottest Tantric circle of Nirvana. Her yell of exultation was still ringing in her ears when he grabbed her hips hard enough to bruise and rammed into her from underneath and he came, he pulsed, deep inside of her.
She slid off him, exhausted and drenched with sweat. "My God."
"I didn't know it was going to feel like that." He seemed stunned.
"Yes," she said thoughtfully, "it was sort of quick."
"I couldn't help it," he said. "I didn't know it was going to feel so intense. It's like a completely different experience."
"Is it really, sweetheart? It's nice for you that way.
"Yes. Very." He kissed her.
She felt perfectly calm now. Everything was becoming very clear. That mean-tempered tight-stretched whine in her nerves was completely gone, turned to something like the mellow vibratory afterglow of gently plucked angelic harp strings, and everything was suddenly making a lot of solid good sense.
"Y'know, Jerry, I think maybe it's the latex that's at fault."
"What?"
"I think the condom is my health problem. That I'm allergic to the latex, or whatever they make condoms out of these days, and that's why I got all messed up in the first place."
"How could you suddenly develop an allergy like that, after a whole year?"
"Well," she said, "from repeated exposure."
He laughed.
"I do have allergies, you know. I mean, not like Alex does, but I have a couple of them. I think we should always have sex this way, from now on. It's sweet, it's good, it's perfect. Except that ... well, everything's all wet. But that's okay."
"Jane, if we always have sex like this, you're going to get pregnant."
"Holy mackerel! I never thought of that." The concept amazed her. She might get pregnant. She could conceive a child. Yes, that astounding event could actually take place; there was nothing left to stop it from happening. She felt like a fool for not considering pregnancy, but she simply hadn't; the long shadows of disease and disaster had over-whelmed that whole idea.
"Just like men and women used to be. Before birth control." Jerry laughed. "Maybe we should count our blessings. If these were the 1930s instead of the 2030s, you'd be a downtrodden faculty wife with five kids."
"Five kids in less than a year, Professor? You're some kinda guy." Jane yawned, sweetly and uncontrollably.
Sleep was near, and sleep was going to be so good.
"They've got those pills for taking care of that, though. Those month-after pills."
"Contragestives."
"Yeah, you just eat one pill and your period comes right back. No problem! Government-subsidized and everything." She hugged him. "I think we've got this beat, darling. We're going to be all right now. Everything will be all right. I feel so happy."
MOST OF THE Troupers were hard at work shuffling data. They were assembling some fairly major net-presentation, to impress some bigwig netfriend of Juanita's, who was due for a visit to camp.
None of the Troupers struck Alex as showing a particular dramatic flair for net-presentation work, with the possible exception of Juanita herself. But net-presentation was the kind of labor that could be distributed to a million little cut-rate mouse-potato desktoppers all over the planet, and knowing Juanita, it probably would be.
Carol Cooper, however, wasn't having any of that. Carol Cooper was doing some welding in the garage. "I don't like systems," she told Alex. "I'm very analog."
"Yes," said Alex, clearing his throat, "I recognized that about you the moment we met."
"So what's in that big plastic jug there?"
"You're very direct, I noticed that also."
Carol put a final searing touch to a length of bent chromed pipe and set it aside to cool. "You sure are a sneaky little flicker, for a guy your age. Not everybody would have thought to spot-weld a noose on the end of that smart rope." She took off her welding goggles and put on safety glasses.
"It's a smart lariat now. Lariats are useful. Comanches used to catch coyotes with lariats. From horseback, of course."
"Of course," Carol scoffed. "Did you know that Janey threw that gun you bought her right down the latrine?"
"Just as well, it was probably pretty dumb to trust her with a firearm in the first place."
"You oughta go more easy on Janey," Carol chided. She picked up a dented length of bumper from the dune buggy, and fit it methodically into a big bench vise. She was wearing her barometer watch, under her slashed-paper sleeve. On her right wrist, the opposite wrist from the Troupe cuff.
"She sure was noisy last night," Carol remarked, meditatively, as she tightened the vise. "Y'know, the first time I ever heard Janey cut loose like that, I thought we were under attack. And then I thought, Christ, she's doing some kind of sick-and-twisted status thing, like she wants everybody to know that Jerry's finally dam' her. But then after a couple weeks, I figured out, that's just the way Janey is. Janey just plain needs to yell. She's not okay unless she yells."
Carol picked up a big lead-headed mallet and gave the bumper a pair of hard corrective wallops. "But the weirdest p art is that we all got so used to it. For months we all thought it was mega-hilarious, but now we don't even make jokes about Janey's yelling. And then when she stopped yelling for a couple weeks there, we all started to get really worried. But last night, y'know, off she goes. And today, I feel okay again. I feel like maybe we're gonna ace this thing after all."
"People can get used to anything," Alex said.
"No, they don't, dude," Carol said sharply. "You only think that 'cause you're young." She shook her head. "How old do you think I am?"
"Thirty-five?" Alex said. He knew she was forty-two.
"No way, I'm almost forty. I had a kid once who could almost be your age now. Kid died, though."
"I'm sorry to hear that."
She swung the hammer. Bang. Wham. Clank clank dank. "Yeah, they say having a kid can keep your marriage alive, and it's really kinda true, because a kid gives you something to pay attention to, besides each other. But they never tell you that losing your kid can kill your marriage." Whack. Crunch. "Y'know, I was young and kind of stupid back then, and I used tofight with that guy a lot, but hell, I married him on purpose. We got along. And then our kid died. And we never got used to that. Not ever. It just murdered us. We couldn't stand the sight of each other, after that."
"What did your child die of?"
"Encephalitis."
"Really? My mom died of encephalitis."
"You're kidding. Which wave?"
"The epidemic of '25 was pretty bad in Houston."
"Oh, that was a late one, my little boy died in 2014. It was a State of Emergency thing."
Alex said nothing.
"Can you fetch me that big-ass vise grip over there?"
Alex pulled the coil of smart rope from his shoulder, put his gloved hand on it. The thin black rope slid out instantly across the bubblepak flooring, reared like a cobra, seized the end of the vise grip in its metal-collared noose, and lifted the tool into the air. It then swayed across the floor, the vise grip dangling gently from the noose, and hung the tool in midair, within her easy reach.
"Christ, you're getting good with that thing." Carol took the vise grip, with gingerly care. The rope whipped back to coil around Alex's shoulder.
"I've got something I need to tell you," Alex said.
She clamped the vise grip onto the bumper and put her back into twisting it. "I know that," she grunted. "And I'm waiting."
"Do you know Leo Mulcahey?"
Her hands froze on the vise grip and she looked up with eyes like a deer in headlights. "Oh hell."
"You do know him."
"Yeah. What about Leo?"
"Leo was here at camp yesterday. He came in a truck. He wanted to see Jerry, he said."
She stared at him. "What happened?"
"I sent him off with a flea in his ear; I wouldn't let him come in the camp. I said I would punch him out, and that there was a Trouper in the tents who would shoot him. He had a Ranger with him, that tracker guy who was here earlier. But I wouldn't let him in camp, either."
"Christ! Why?"
"Because Leo is evil. Leo's a spook, that's why."
"How do you know that bullshit?"
"Look, I just know he's a spook, okay?" Alex coughed, then lowered his voice. "Spook biz has this atmosphere, you get to where you can smell it." It had been a bad mistake to get excited. It felt as if something had peeled loose inside his chest.
"How did he look? Leo?"
"Very smooth. Very spooky."
"That's him all right. Very charming." Carol picked up her mallet, looked at it blankly, set it back down. "Y'know," she said slowly, "I like Greg. I like Greg a lot. But on the off-season, I don't hear word one from that guy. Not a phone call. Not even E-mail. He'll be off mountain climbing or shooting rapids or some fucking thing, and he never calls me, never." She was scowling. "That's why you need to be nicer to Janey. It's not like other Troupe romances; if you can call them romances, whatever the hell they are, when tornado freaks get together. But Jane really loves Jerry. She's loyal to him, she's good to him, she'd go through hell for Jerry. If I had a sister like that, and I was her brother, I'd try to look after my poor sister some, I'd try to help her be all tight."
Alex digested this strange speech, and reached the only possible conclusion. His throat was really starting to hurt.
"Are you telling me you've been fucking Leo?"
Carol stared at him, guilt written all over her face. "I hope I never hit you, Alex. Because you're not the kinda guy that I. could hit just once."
"It's okay," he said hoarsely. "I figured Leo must have some plant inside the camp. That's why I didn't tell anybody yet. I'm still trying to figure how to break the news to His Highness."
"You want me to tell Jerry about it?"
"Yeah. If you want to. That might be good." He drew a breath. "Tell Jerry that I wouldn't let Leo in camp, unless Jerry said it was okay first."
"You know what Leo is?" Carol said, slowly. "Leo is what Jerry would be, if Jerry wanted to hick with people's heads, instead of fucking with the whole universe."
"I don't know what Jerry is," Alex said. "I never saw anything like Jerry before. But Leo-you can ask any dope vaquero in Latin America about a guy like Leo, they all know what he is, and what he's doing. They may not know up here in Estados Unidos, but down in El Salvador they know, in Nicaragua they know, they all fuckin' know, it's not any secret to anybody." He broke into a fit of coughing.
"What the hell is with you, Alex? You look awful."
"That's the other part I have to tell you," Alex said. He began, haltingly, to explain.
By the time he finished, Carol had become quite pale.
"They call it a lung enema?" she said.
"Yeah. But it doesn't matter what they call it. The point is that it works, that it really helps me."
"Lemme see that jug."
With an effort, Alex hefted the plastic medical jug onto the workbench. Carol squinted at the red-on-white adhesive label.
"Palmitic acid," she read aloud, slowly. "Anionic lipids. Silicone surfactant. Phosphatidylglycerol
Jesus Christ, this is a witches' brew! And what's all this other shit down here, all this stuff in Spanish?"
"Isotherm of a PA/SP-B1-25m on a NAHCO3-buffered saline subphase," Alex translated swiftly. "It's just a Spanish-language repetition of the basic ingredients."
"And I'm supposed to put a tube down your throat and decant this stuff into you? And then hang you upside down?"
"That's pretty much the story, yeah."
"Sorry, no way.
"Carol, listen. I'm sick. I'm a lot sicker than anyone here realizes. I've got a major syndrome, and it's coming down on me hard right now. And unless you help me, or somebody helps me, I could die here, in real short order."
"Why don't you go back home?"
"They can't help me at home," Alex said simply. "All their money can't help me, nobody can fix what's wrong with me. Not that they didn't try. But it's not just encephalitis, or cholera, or one of those things that kill you quickly. I'm not that lucky. What I've got, it's one of those complicated things. Environmental. Genetic. Whatever. They've been patching me up since I was six days old. If I'd been born in any other time but now, I'd have died in my crib."
"Can't you get somebody else to do this fucking thing for you? Janey? Ed? Ellen Mae?"
"Yeah. Maybe. And I'll ask 'em, if I have to. But I don't want anybody else to know."
"Oh," Carol said. "Yeah, and I can see why not.. Y'know, Alex, I've been wondering why you've been hangin' out here with us. Anyone can tell that you and Janey don't get along for hell. And it ain'j because you like to play games with rope. It's because you're hiding. You're hiding something."
"Yeah, that's right," Alex told her. "I was hiding. I mean, not so much from those contrabandista medicos that I burned down in Nuevo Laredo-they're a tough outfit in their way, but hell, they don't really give a shit about me, they've got a line of no-hope suckers outside that clinica that's longer than the Rio Grande. I was hiding here from my own goddamn life. Not my life, but that thing that I do, that other people call living. I am real close to dead, Carol. It's not all in my head, I'm not making this up. I can't prove toyou what's wrong with me, but I know it's the truth, because I've lived in this body all my life, and I can feel it. There's not much left of me. No matter what anybody does, no matter how much money anybody spends, or how many drugs they pump into me, I don't think I'm gonna make twenty-two."
"Christ, Alex."
"I'm just hiding up here because it's like-a different life. A realer life. I never do very much for the Troupe, because I just can't do much, I'm just too sick and too weak. But when I'm here with you people, I'm just some kid, I'm not just some dying kid." He stopped a moment, thinking hard. "But Carol, that's not all of it, either. I mean, that's what it was like at first, and it's all still true, but it's not the way I really feel anymore. You know what? I'm interested."
"Interested?"
"Yeah. Interested in the F-6. This big thing that's been hanging over us. I really believe in it now. I really know it's there! I know it's gonna really happen! And I really want to see it."
Carol sat down, heavily, on a folding camp stool. She put her head in her hands. Strong, wrinkled hands. When she looked up again, her face was wet with tears.
"You had to come pick on me, didn't you? You had to come tell me that you're dying."
"I'm sorry, Carol, but you're the only one here that I really trust."
"Because I've got a big soft heart, you little flicker. Because you know you can pick on me! Christ, this is just what I went through with Leo. No wonder you scoped him out so fast. Because there's not a dime's worth of difference between you and him."
"Yeah, except that he kills people, and I'm fucking dying! C'mon, Carol."
"We didn't kill anybody," Carol said bitterly. "All that structure-hit stuff-it's just killing things, is what it is. Leo knew. Hell, Leo was the best we ever had. You never saw us just mow people down, even though we could have done that real easily. We were just trying to kill the machineiy. 'Get rid of it. All that junk that had killed our world, y'know, the bulldozers and the coal plants and the logging machines and the smokestacks, the Goliath, the Monster, Behemoth, the Beast. It!" She shook herself, and wiped at her cheeks with the backs of her hands. "'Cause it was too late to stop it any other way, and we all knew damn well what was a ning to the world... . And if you think the Underground is all gone now, well, you got it wrong! They're not gone at all. Hell no, they're just real different now. They've got power now, a lot of 'em. They're actually in the government, what passes for the govermnent these days. Now they've got real power, not that hopeless pissant rebel shit with the Molotovs and the monkey wrenches and the builshit manifestos, I mean real power, real plans, terrible power, terrible plans. They're all people like him."
"Sorry.
"Guys like you, though ... you new kids, you hopeless little chickenshits... People will get used to anything, yeah, if they're young enough! People used to scream their heads off at the thought of dying of stupid slit like Th or cholera, now you don't even raise your voice, you just make it your own little secret, and you keep watching TV until you drop dead discreetly on the couch. People just put up with living in hell! They just ignore it all, and they're sure the world is always, always gonna get worse, and they don't ever wanna hear about it, and they're just grateful they're not in the relocation camp."
"I'm not giving up, Carol. I'm asking you to help me. Please help me."
"Look, I'm not a medic. I can't do anything like that. It's too awful, it's too much like it was in the camps."
"Carol," he grated, "I don't care about the weather camps. I don't care about your crazy Luddite friends. I know it was heavy then, and I know it was horrible then, hut I was only five years old then, and it's all history to me, it's dead history. I'm living in a cam p right now', this camp right now, and if I die in a camp I'll think that Cm lucky! I'm not gonna have any history. I'm not even gonna make it through another year! I just want to see this thing that's coming, that's all that I'm asking of you!" He leaned against the table, heavily. "Frankly, I kinda hope that the F-6 is gonna kill me. I kinda like that idea, it's worthwhile and it saves a lot of trouble all around. So now, if you'll just help me out here, I think I'm gonna be able to see it while I'm standing up on my own feet, that maybe I can pass for a human being while I'm busy getting killed. Will you help me please, Carol? Please!"
"All right. Stop crying."
"You started it."
"Yeah, I'm stupid." She stood up. "I cry. I have a big mouth, I have no operational discretion at all, and that's why I hang out here in the ass end of nowhere, instead of with a real life in some real city, where some good-looking male cop can wheedle it all out of me, and yank a bunch of former friends out of their condos and bust them all on a terror-and-sabotage rap. I'm a born sucker, I'm a real moron." She sighed. "Look, if we're gonna do this at all, let's get it over with quick before anybody sees us, because it's a really sick and twisted thing for me to do to you, and Greg has got a big jealous bone."
"Okay. Right. I get it. Thanks a lot." Alex wiped his eyes on his sleeve.
"And I want you to promise me something, Medicine Boy. I want you to promise to stop picking on your sister. She doesn't need any trouble out of a damned fool like you, she's a good person, she's an innocent person, she means well."
"Maybe," Alex said. "But she used to beat the shit out of me when we were kids. I have tapes of her trying to smother me to death with a pillow."
"What?"
"I was three, she was eight. I'd been coughing a lot, at the time. I think it got on her nerves."
Carol stared at him a long time, then rubbed her reddened eyes with her thumbs. "Well, you're just going to have to forgive her that."
"I forgive her, Carol. Sure. For your sake." Alex climbed up onto the workbench and lay down flat on his back. He pulled a narrow translucent hose from his jeans pocket and a flat packet of anesthetic paste. "Here, take this and screw it on that threading on the end of the jug."
"Wow, this jug is hot."
"Yeah, I kept it out in direct sun today, it's pretty damn close to blood heat."
"I can't believe we're actually doing this."
"My whole life is just like this." Alex tilted his head back and practiced relaxing his throat. "Do you have any idea how deep Jerry is into her? I mean, financially?"
"I think he's pretty much wiped her out, Alex. Not that he wants to do that, but he just doesn't care about anything except hacking storms."
"Well, don't tell anybody. But I've made Juanita my sole heir. I think that'll probably help the Troupe some. A lot, really."
Carol hesitated. "That was a pretty dumb thing to tell me. I'm a Trouper, too, y'know."
"It's all right. I want you to know."
"You really do trust me, don't you?"
"Carol, I think you're the only actually good person here. One of the few truly good people I've ever met. Thank you for helping me. Thank you for looking after me. You deserve to know what's going on, so I told you, that's all. I'm probably gonna pass out during this. Try not to worry too much."
He opened the packet of anesthetic paste, smeared it with his smart-gloved fingers over the nozzle of the tubing, and then, with a single gesture that took all the courage he had, deliberately shoved it down his own throat. He successfully avoided the back of his tongue, felt it fficker down his sore and swollen larynx, down through the beating center of his chest. He'd nerved himself to do this, maybe even to talk, but as the anesthetic kicked in. all the strength flew out of him like an exploding covey of quail, and left him empty and cold and sick.
Then the fluid came. Are you a good swimmer, Alex? It was cold. It was too cold, it was cold as death, cold as the red Laredo clay. A great rippling belch burst out of his lungs. He heaved for air, eyes bulging in panic, and felt a great interior tide of the stuff slide through his tubercles, a deadly, crazy, cold amoeba. His teeth clamped on the hose, he panicked, he sat upright. Liquid shifted inside him like a strong kick to a half-empty beer keg, and he began coughing convulsively.
Carol stood there with the jug still clutched in her arms, the picture of disgust and terror. Alex pulled the hose, pulled the hose, pulled the hose, like a hateful battle with some deadly tapeworm, and finally it came free, in a frothy spew. Carol jumped back as the jug kept siphoning, the hose trailing and spewing, and Alex kept coughing. His lungs felt like bloody foam rubber.
He stood up. He was extremely weak. But he was still conscious. He was half-full of lung-enema fluid, and he was still conscious. He was carrying the weight of it around inside him like some kind of obscene gestation.
He tried to talk, then. He faced Carol and moved his mouth and a sound came out of him like a drowning raccoon and his mouth filled with great crackling sour bubbles.
Something inside him broke, then, and it really started to hurt. He fell to his knees, doubled over, and started venting the stuff across the bubblepak floor. Great deadly vomitous gouts of it, a huge insupportable fizzing bolus. His ears rang. I-Iis hands were spattered with it. It was all over his clothes. And he still wouldn't, couldn't pass out.
It was starting to feel good.
Carol stared at him in disbelief. All the fluid was draining from the jug, trickling relentlessly from the hose. Shut it off, shut it off, he gestured, making a drowned gobbling noise, and then another fit of the coughing seized him, and he made another long, blackening, agonized swoop toward collapse.
Some moments later he felt Carol's arms locked around him. She sat him up, propping him against the leg of the table. She looked into his face, checked his eyelid with her thumb, her broad-cheeked face pale and grim. "Alex, can you hear me?"
He nodded.
"Alex, that's arterial blood. I've seen it before. You're hemorrhaging."
He shook his head.
"Alex, listen to me. I'm gonna get Ed Dunnebecke, and we're going to take you to a hospital somewhere in a city."
Alex swallowed hard. "No," he whispered. "I won't go, you can't make me. Don't tell. Don't tell. I'm getting better."