Heavy Weather

Alex, a consummate urbanite, had always imagined deer as timid, fragile, endangered creatures, quailing somewhere in the darkened depths of their crumbling ecosystems. This sure as hell wasn't the case with these West Texas deer, who were thriving in an ecosystem that was already about as screwed up as mankind could manage. The deer were snorty and flop-eared and skittish, but they were as bold as rats in a junkyard.

By the time Alex and his entourage of goats returned to camp that evening, he was a lot less impressed about the local diet of venison. There wasn't much to obtaining venison-it was about as hard as finding dog meat at a pound. He and Jeff milked the goats, which produced a variety of odd cheesy fluids, some with U.N.-mandated dietary vitamin requirements, and some with commercial potential in drugstore retail. Milking goats was kind of interesting work on a weird level of interspecies intimacy, but it was also hard manual labor, and he was glad to leave most of it to Jeff.

Greg Foulks had pulled Jeff out of the wreckage of an F-S a couple years back, from the jackstraw rubble where Jeff had lost both his parents. Jeff had worked his way into the Troupe by simply ru

Everyone in the Troupe had that Look, really. Except maybe Jerry Mulcahey. Examined closely, Mulcahey looked as if he'd never set foot on Earth in the first place.

Next day they put Alex on kitchen duty-KP.

"YOUR Sister," SAID Ellen Mae Lankton, "is a real hairpin."

"I couldn't agree with you more," said Alex. He was sitting cross-legged on the bubblepak floor of the kitchen yurt, peeling a root. It was the root of some local weed known as a "poppymallow." It looked like a very dirty and distorted carrot, and when peeled, it had some of the less appetizing aspects of a yam.

Ellen Mae had been up at dawn to grub up poppymallows. She was up at every dawn, methodically wandering the fields, snapping miles of old barbed wire with her personal diamond-edged cable cutters and digging up weeds with her sharpshooter shovel. So now Alex had a dozen filthy roots at his elbow, in Ellen Mae's canvas sling bag. Peeling roots, it seemed, was not a popular task among Storm Troupers. Alex, however, didn't mind it much.

Alex rarely minded any kind of work that allowed him to sit very still and breathe shallowly. What he minded about kitchen work was the mesquite smoke. Whenever Ellen Mae turned her back to manage the stewpot, Alex would whip his paper mask up quickly and steal a few quiet huffs of properly filtered air.

As Ellen Mae bustled about, doing her endless round of mysterious kitchen rituals, Alex sat nearby, in the yurt's only draft of clear air. As the morning had worn on, several Troupers had wandered in hunting snacks or water, and they'd seen Alex sitting near Ellen Mae's feet in a humble, attentive, apprentice's posture. And they'd given Ellen Mae a kind of surprised, eyebrow-raised, respectful look. After a while Ellen Mae had warmed up to Alex considerably, and now this strange, witchy-looking, middle-aged woman wouldn't shut up to save her life.

"For one thing, she's got a really strange way o talkin'," said Ellen Mae.

"You mean her accent?" Alex said.

"Well, that's part of it...

"That's simple," Alex said. "We Ungers are German Mexicans."

"'What?"

"Yeah, we're descended from this German guy named Heinrich Unger, who emigrated to Mexico in 1914. He was a German spy. He tried to get the Mexicans to invade the U.S. during the First World War."

"Huh," said Ellen Mae, stirring stew.

"He didn't have much luck at it, though."

"I reckon he didn't."

"Another German spy named Hans Ewers wrote a couple of books about their mission. They're supposed to be pretty good books. I wouldn't know, myself. I don't read German."

"German Mexicans," Ellen Mae mused.

"There's lots of German Mexicans. Thousands of 'em, really. It's a pretty big ethnic group." Alex shrugged. "My dad moved over the border and took out U.S. citizenship after he made some money in business."

"When did that happen, exactly?"

"Mound 2010. Just before I was born."

"Must have been one of those free-trade things. When the U.S. sent all the workin' jobs down to Mexico, and the Mexicans sent the USA all their rich people."

Alex shrugged. His family's entanglement with history meant little to him. He was vaguely interested in the distant and romantic 1914 aspect, but his dad's postindustrial business career was the very essence of tedium.

"Janey doesn't sound German, though. Or Mexican either, for that matter. You don't sound German or Mexican either, kid."

"I do sound pretty German when I speak Spanish," Alex offered. "Can I have some more of that tea?"

"Sure, have all you want," said Ellen Mae, surprising him. "We're go

"Wow!" Alex enthused, sipping the evil brew.

Ellen Mae frowned thoughtfully. "What is it you do, exactly, Alex?"

"Me?" Alex said. He considered. the question. He hadn't often been asked it. "I'm a play-testing consultant."

"What's that?"

"Well, network computer games..." Alex said vaguely, "network dungeons... There's not much money in computer games anymore, because of the copyright property screwups and stuff, but there's still, I du

Ellen Mae looked doubtful, even though it was almost the truth. Alex had spent most of his teenage years ardently playing dungeons, and since he was generous with his upgrade payments and his shareware registrations, he'd eventually ended up in the fringes of game marketing. Not that he designed games or anything-he didn't have the maniacal attention to detail necessary for that-but he did like to be among the first to play the new games, and he didn't mind being polled for his consumer reactions. On occasion, Alex had even been given a little money for this-all told, maybe five percent of the money that he'd poured into the hobby.

At eighteen, though, Alex had given up dungeon gaming. It had dawned on him that his numerous dungeon identities were stealing what little vitality remained in his own daily life. The dungeons weren't that much of an improvement, really, over the twisted, dungeonlike reality of a series of sickrooms. Since that realization, Alex had given up gaming, and devoted his time and money to exploring the twisted depths of his own medical destiny and the wonders of the pharmaceutical demimonde.

"I also collect comics," he offered.

"Why?" Ellen Mae said.

"Well, I thought it was really interesting that there was this, like, weird pop-culture thing that's still published on paper instead of on networks." This remark cut no apparent ice with Ellen Mae. Alex plowed on. "I own lots of old American paper comics-y'see, nobody does paper comics in the U.S. anymore, but some of the antique ones, the undergrounds and stuff, never got copied and sca