Heavy Weather

"One shot, one kill, no exceptions," said Peter. "Panoptic battlefield surveillance," said Rick.

"Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee."

"Aerial counterinsurgency-the only way to travel."

Alex blinked. "I wa

"Sure," said Peter.

"Trade you my root for it, Peter." Peter laughed. "There's no such thing, man." "Wa

Peter glanced into the hole. "Bet what? There's nothing in there, man. Nothing but that big shelf of rock."

"That shelf of rock is the root," Alex said. "Not thirty kilos, either. I figure it's gotta weigh at least eighty. That sorry little vine has gotta be two hundred years old."

Rick stared into the hole, then spat on his hands and hefted the pick. "He's gotcha there, Pete. He's right, you're wrong, he's flyin' escort, and you're dog meat audi yoti~t'e ~ riding the bus with Janey." He barked with iaugh~ asd~ swung the pick down with a crunch.

JANE's EYES STILL stung from the antiseptic. The baths always hurt. She had refused to take antiseptic baths at first, until she'd glimpsed the cratered scars on Joa

Jane's eyes stung, and her crotch itched, but at least her was clean, and she smelled good. She'd even come to enjoy the sensation of fresh clean paper over damp naked the closest one came in Troupe life to padding around terry cloth with your hair in a towel. Outside the cornland yurt, the camp rang with bestial howls as Ed Du

Shutting down the Troupe's systems was delicate work. Even the minor systems, for instance, the little telephone switches, had a million or more lines of antique corporate freeware. The software had been created by vast teams of twentieth-century software engineers, hired labor for extinct telephone empires like AT&T and SPRINT. It was freeware because it was old, and because everybody who'd ever made it was either dead now or in other work. Those armies of telephone engineers were now as scattered and extinct as the Soviet Red Army.

Those armies of engineers had basically been automated out of existence, replaced by higher-and-higher-level expert systems, that did error checks, bug hunts, resets, fault recoveries. Now a single individual could use the technology-any individual with a power plug and a desk. The sweat and talent of tens of thousands of clever people had vanished into a box you could hold in your hand and buy in a flea market.

The Troupe's switching stations were cheap-ass little Malaysian-made boxes of recycled barf-colored plastic. They cost about as much as a pair of good shoes.

There wasn't a single human being left in the world who fully understood what was going on inside those little boxes. Actually, no single human being in the world had ever understood an intellectual structure of that complexity. Any box ru

As a single human individual, you could only interface with that code on a very remote and abstract level-you had to negotiate with the code, gently, politely, and patiently, the way you might have dealt with a twentieth-century phone company. You owned a twentieth-century phone company-it was all inside the box now.

As you climbed higher and higher up the stacks of in~ terface, away from the slippery bedrock of the hardware grinding the ones and zeros, it was like walking on stilts.

And then, stilts for your stilts, and stilts for your stilts for your stilts. You could plug a jack in the back of the box and run like the wind of the wind. Until something crashed somewhere, that the system's system's system couldn't diagnose and figure out and override. Then you threw the little box away and plugged in another one.

The Troupe's system was temperamental. To say the least. For instance, the order in which you detached the subsystems mattered a lot. There was no easy or direct explanation as to why that should matter, but it mattered plenty.

Jane kept careful professional track of the system's in-congruities, its wealth of senseless high-level knots and kinks and cramps. She kept her notes with pencil and paper, in a little looseleaf leather notebook she'd had since college. Mickey the sysadmin and Rick the code grinder had given Jane wary, weary looks when she'd first started working seriously on the Troupe's system, but she'd more proved her worth since then. -She'd resolved screwups, seizures, and blockages that had had Mickey cursing wildly and Rick so mired in code that he staggered around camp like a blacked-out drunk.

The difference between hacking code and hacking in-was like the difference between a soldier and a diplomat. Certain crises would only yield to a political solution.

Jane kept her notebook inside a plastic case, glued to underside of Jerry's co

The U.S. government had gone nuts over climate regulators during the State of Emergency, pouring money into the global climate modeling at a frantic rate that im;ed even the Pentagon. Boxes like Jerry's were Brob -Jerry's lone system had more raw computational power than the entire planet had possessed in 1995.

Officially, Jerry's system was "on loan" from the SESCollaboratory, a research net in which Jerry had fairly good standing, but nobody was going to come and repossess it. No~y but the Troupe gave a damn about Jerry's box, really. It was stone obvious now that the problems of climate modeling simply weren't going to yield to raw computational power. Power wasn't the bottleneck at all; the real bottleneck was in the approaches, the approximations, the concepts, and the code.

Jane opened her favorite laptop, dragged the system monitor onto it off Mickey's sysadmin machine, and checked to see that all the instrumentation was safely down. Peter, Greg, and Martha had been on the job: all the towers were off-line and down now, except for the telecom tower. They always left the telecom for last. It made more sense, really, to take down the security system last, but the perimeter posts were pig stupid and paranoid little entities that reacted to any sudden loss of packets as prima facie evidence of enemy sabotage. Unless they were petted to sleep first, the posts would whoop like crazy.

An icon appeared on Jane's screen. An incoming phone call-to her own number. Surprised, she took the call.

A postcard-sized video inclusion appeared in the upper right-hand corner of her laptop. It was a stranger: clean shaven, sandy-haired, distinguished looking, close to forty maybe. Ruggedly handsome, in a fu

"Hello?" the stranger said. "Is this Juanita?"

"Yes?"

"Good," the stranger said, smiling and glancing down at his desk. "I didn't think this would quite work." lie seemed to be in a hotel lobby somewhere, or maybe a very nicely furnished office. Jane could see a lithograph behind his head and a spray of leaves from an exotic potted plant.