Heavy Weather

"You're not hurt? How about the aircraft?"

Alex looked around himself. The ultralight was entirely invisible. He pulled the flashlight from its holster and waved it over the wings, the bow, the propeller housing.

"Nothing," he said, putting the light away. "No damage, they missed me by ten kilometers, they never even knew where I was." Alex laughed shrilly, coughed, cleared his throat. "Goddamn, that was great!"

"We're go

"You don't want me to throw another flare at 'em?"

"Fuck no, man! Just stay away from the bastards."

Alex felt a sudden burst of fury. "There's nothing to these people, man! They're crazy, they're nothing! We should go kick their asses!"

"Alex, calm down, man. That's the Rangers' job. We chase storms, we don't chase crooks."

"We could wipe 'em all out right now!"

"Alex, talk sense. I'm tellin' you there are other routes. We just back up a few klicks and we take a different road. It'll take us half an hour. What do you wa

Alex grunted.

"That's why we put people flying point in the first place, man," Rick said, smacking his gum. "You did a fine job there. Now just relax."

"Okay," Alex said. "Sure, I get it. If that's the way you want it, sure. Have it your way." He was still alive. Alive and breathing. Alive, alive, alive . .

CHAPTER 7

The profession of design," sniffed April Logan, "having once lost its aspiration to construct a better world, must by necessity decay into a work-for-hire varnish for barbarism." April Logan's noble, aquiline head, with its single careful forelock of white hair, began, subtly at first and then with greater insistence, to stretch. Rather like taffy. "The density of information embodied in the modern technological object creates deep conceptual stress that implodes the human-object interface... . Small wonder that a violent reactive Luddism has become the definitive vogue of the period, as primates, outsmarted by their own environment, lash out in frenzy at a postnatural world."

The critic's head was morphing like a barber pole on the slender pillar of her ta

Jane's belt phone buzzed. At the same instant a classic twentieth-century telephone appeared in midair, to Jane's right. A phone designed by one Henry Dreyfuss, Jane recalled. Professor Logan often spoke of Henry Dreyfuss.

Jane paused the critic's lecture with a twitch of her glove, then pulled off her virching helmet. She plucked the flimsy little phone from her belt and answered it. "Jane here."

"Janey, it's Alex. I'm out with the goats."

"Yes?"

"Can you tell me something? I- got a laptop here and I'm trying to pull up a fine-grain of the local landscape, and I got some great satellite shots, but I can't find any global-positioning grids."

"Oh," Jane said. Alex sounded so earnest and interested that she felt quite pleased with him. She couldn't remember the last time Alex had openly asked a favor of her, that he'd simply asked her for her help. "What longitude and latitude are you looking for, exactly?"

"Longitude 100' 22' 39ff, latitude 34' 07' 25"."

"That's real close to camp."

"Yeah, I thought so."

"Should be about three hundred meters due east of the command yurt." Jerry always set the yurt right on a grid-line if he could manage it. It helped a little with radiolocation and Doppler triangulation and such.

"Yeah, that's pretty much where me and the goats are now, but I was just checking. Thanks. Bye." He hung up.

Jane thought this over for a moment, sighed, and put her helmet away.

She passed Rick and Mickey, beavering away on the system, and the helmeted Jerry, back at his usual weighted pacing. Jerry was starting to seriously wear the carpet. Jane put on her sunglasses and left camp.

Lovely spring sky. Sweet fluffy altocumulus. You'd think a sky like that could never do a moment's harm.

She found Alex sitting cross-legged under the shade of a mesquite tree. Getting shade from the tiny pi

He was messing languidly with the flaccid black smart rope. Jane was surprised, and not at all happy, to see the smart rope again. The thing's primitive user-hostile interface was a total joke. The first time she'd used it, the vicious rope had whipped back like a snapping strand of barbed wire and left a big welt on her shin.

She walked up closer, boots crunching the spiky grass. Alex suddenly turned.

"Hi," she said.

"Hola, hermana."

"Y'know, if I'd been a coyote, I coulda just walked off with one of these goats."

"Be my guest." Alex took off the mask and yawned. "Walk off with one of these tracking collars, and Rick will come out with his rifle and exterminate you."

"What's going on Out here?"

"Just basking in my glory as hero of the day," Alex drawled. "See my throng of enthusiastic admirers?" The smart rope twitched uneasily as he tried, without success, to fling it at the goats. "I wish you hadn't called the Texas Rangers. I really don't wa

"The Rangers never stay for long. What are you up to?"

Alex said nothing. He opened his laptop, checked the clock on the screen, then stood up theatrically and looked to the south.

She turned to match his gaze. An endless vista of odd hump-shaped caprocks dotted with juniper and mesquite, here and there the blobby green lobes of distant prickly pear, a yellow sparkling of tall waving coneflowers. Far to the south a passenger jet kft a ragged contrail.

"Whoa," he said. "There it is. Here it comes. I'll be damned." He laughed. "Right on time too! Man, it's amazing what a kind word and a credit card can do."

Jane's heart sank. She didn't know what was about to happen, but already she didn't like it. Alex was watching the horizon with his worst and most evil grin.

She stepped behind his shoulder and looked across the landscape.

Then she saw it too. A bouncing machine. Something very much like a camouflage-painted kangaroo.

It was crossing the hills with vast, unerring, twenty-meter leaps. A squat metal sphere, painted in ragged patches of dun and olive drab. It had a single thick, pistoning, metal leg.

The bounding robot whipped that single metal leg around with dreadful unerring precision, like some nightmare one-legged pirate. It whacked its complex metal foot against the earth like a hustler's cue whacking a pooi ball, and it bounded off instantly, hard. The thing spent most of its time airborne, a splotchy ca

It gave a final leap and, God help her, a deft little somersault, and it landed on the earth with a brief hiss of sucked-up impact. Instantly, a ski