Heavy Weather

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alex grunted. "Yeah, yeah."

"We're ru

"Huh

"All those big white rods, staked out in a circle around the camp, are our perimeter posts. They're motion detectors, and they've got some security muscle built in; you're go

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

A handy phone menu rolled down with fifteen speed dials.

They were thoughtfully accompanied by

1 Jerry Mulcahey.

2 Greg Foulks.

3 Joe Brasseur.

4 Carol Cooper.

5 Ed Du

6 Mickey Kiehl.

7 Rudy Martinez.

8 Sam Moncrieff.

9 Martha Madronich.

10 Peter Vierling.

11 Rick Sedletter.

12 Ellen Mae Lankton.

13 Boswell Harvey.

14 Joa

15 Jane Unger.

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

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

"Carol here."

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

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

"Carol, am I correct in assuming that this is some kind of hick hazing ritual? And pretty soon they're go

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

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

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

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

"Alex, don't hang up!"

"Yeah?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

dial numbers. names.

Peter's voice buzzed in his ears.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Hit it, man, push the envelope!"

Peter fell silent.

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

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

The plane soared trembling toward the zenith.

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

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

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

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