Heavy Weather

Leo said nothing. Jane heard an odd rumbling, then realized he was rapidly drumming his fingers on the desktop.

"I have to go now, Leo. There's a lot of work."

"Thank you for being so frank with me, Juanita. I appreciate that."

"My friends call me Janey."

"Oh. Of course. Hasta Ia vista, Janey." Leo hung up. Jane shivered, looked around herself once more.

Rick entered the yurt.

"I've got Med-I mean, I've got Alex riding shotgun in the ultralight tonight," he said. "He said he wanted to go."

Jane stared at him blankly.

Rick smiled at her. "I told you that kid really liked all of this."

ALEX WAS NIGHT-FLYING high over Texas with his head in a helmet and his face wrapped in oxygen. A tiny amber light glowed between his knees, lighting the joystick~ and rolierball. More light leaked from the translucent face shield of the virching helmet, the phantom watery glow of the menu bar falling off his own brow onto the pitch-black wings of the aircraft.

The hot spark of a global surveillance satellite showed at the horizon. Overhead were a million stars, a sliver of moon, a galactic river fog of Milky Way, a curl of high feathery cirrus. The fan behind his back pushed almost silently, merely sipping power, as it kept slow pace with the Troupe's land convoy, far below.

If there was anything more pleasant than this, Alex hadn't yet discovered it.

This time they were letting him actually fly the machine by hand. Buzzard had booted Ultralight Beryl with an obligatory big-dummy's control setting. Any ham-handed lurch at the joystick was instantly dumbed down into a gentle, nonlethal veer or dip.

Flying under these conditions strongly reminded Alex of riding a motorized wheelchair. Those same 'dainty fingertip controls, that same almost silent buzz of engine, and that same sense of sitting, wrapped with cloying security, in the care of a smart machine. Alex direly wanted to try something stupid, but he wasn't about to try anything stupid under these circumstances. He'd wait till he'd won their confidence, till they gave him a lot more initiative and leeway. Then he'd try something stupid.

Rick was in Ultralight Amber, casing the landscape be-hind the Troupe. Rick had his rifle. Just before their launches, Rick had given Alex a hair-raising lecture about the cu

Alex found this pretty hard to swallow-at least as hard as the night's rations had been, a gruesome chop suey of jackrabbit, parched corn, and buffalo-gourd root. It had been a hell of a root, though. It took two men to carry it, and it tasted like a cross between celery and pencil shavings. It was the biggest root the Troupe had ever unearthed.

Alex couldn't help but feel rather proud of this. And riding point for the Troupe beat the hell out of riding one of -the crammed, overloaded buses. But Alex couldn't imagine that riding point was really all that dangerous. After all, the Troupe chase teams drove on the backroads all over West Texas, and they'd never been stopped and robbed.

Granted, most bandits, assuming there were any bandits around, wouldn't want to hassle with Juanita and her combat-retrofitted jumping hell spider. Juanita's pursuit car didn't have any guns, but it sure looked as if it ought to, and it moved like a bat out of hell. But the Aerodrome Truck and the Radar Bus were pretty fat and easy targets, chock-full of valuable equipment, yet nobody had bothered them.

Alex reasoned that if bandits were too timid and out of it to bushwhack a lone bus, there was no way they'd tackle the entire Troupe convoy. The convoy was behind him now, slowly winding its way along the pitch-black road. Two pursuit vehicles, two robot buses hauling trailers, the Radar Bus, the Aerodrome Truck, an old dune buggy, two robot supply jeeps with trailers, three robot pedicab bikes with sidecars, and a small tractor.

Not a headlight in the lot. All moving in darkness, supposedly for greater security. The smart pursuit cars were leading the way, sniffing out the road with microwave radar. Every once in a while Alex would catch a faint glimpse of light through a bus or truck window-somebody's flipped-up laptop screen, where some Trouper was catching up on work or killing time grepping a disk.

The convoy looked rather more interesting when Alex clicked the virching helmet into infrared. Then there were vivid putt-putts of grainy pixeled heat out of the alcohol-fueled buses and the ancient dune buggy. The tractor too. Everything else ran on batteries. There was a faint foggy glow of human body heat out the windows of the buses. It was cold at night in a High Plains spring, and the buses were crowded.

Alex had no gun. He was kind of glad the Troupe hadn't handed out a lot of guns. In his experience, unusual minority social groups with lots of guns tended to get mashed rapidly underfoot by nervous, trigger-happy government SWAT teams. So he had no weapon. He had six dusty, dead-looking emergency flares and a big flashlight.

Rick had also surreptitiously passed him some ibogaine chewing gum for maximum combat alertness. Alex hadn't tried chewing the gum yet. He wasn't sleepy yet. And besides, he didn't much like ibogaine.

His earphones crackled. "Rick here. How ya doin'? Over."

"Fine. Comfy. I reset the seat, over."

"How'd you do that?"

"I got out and stood in the stirrups and pulled the pin."

"You're not supposed to do that."

"Rick, listen. It's just you and me up here. Nobody's listening, nobody cares. I'm not go

Rick was silent a moment. "Don't he stupid, okay?" He clicked off.

Alex rode on, most of another long hour. It was all right. An hour with oxygen was never boring. He was trying to make the oxygen last, sipping at the tank bit by bit, but he knew the tank would be empty by the time he landed. After that, he was going to have to buy more oxygen somehow.

He was going to have to start buying stuff for the Troupe.

For all their rhetoric, Alex could see that this was the crux of the deal, as far .as he was concerned. The same unspoken bargain went for Juanita too, mostly. These people weren't hanging out with Juanita just because they really liked big chunky-hipped cyber-art-school grads. They liked Juanita because she bought them stuff, and looked after their numerous assorted needs. She was their patroness. And he, Alex, was on track to be next car in the gravy train.

For all that, though, there was the puzzling matter of Jerry Mulcahey. Troupe life all boiled down to Mulcahey in the end, because any Trouper who didn't fear, love, and worship the guy would obviously get their walking papers in short order. Alex still wasn't too sure about Mulcahey's real motives. Mulcahey was a genuinely twisted individual. Alex had been watching Mulcahey closely, and he was pretty sure of two things: (A) Mukahey was genuinely possessed of some kind of genius, and (B) Mulcahey didn't have much idea what the hell money was. When he and Juanita were face-to-face in public, Mulcahey would treat her with odd archaic courtliness: he let her sit down first at the campfire, he'd help her to her feet after, he wouldn't eat until she'd started eating, that sort of thing. Neither of them ever made a big deal of these silent little courtesies, but Mulcahey rarely missed a chance to do them.

And quite often, if some minor Troupe hassle came up, Mulcahey would let Juanita do all the talking for him. She'd get really animated and deeply into the topic, and he'd get really stone-faced and abstract and reserved. It was just as if he was letting her have his emotions for him. And the two of them clearly thrived on this arrangement. Every once in a while he would suddenly finish one of her sentences, and everyone else would flinch.