Heavy Weather

Alex was well-to-do, and he had some unlikely friends, so he had the basics down pretty well. It all had to do with unbreakable encryption, digital authentication, anonymous remailing, and network untraceability. These were all computer networking techniques that had once been considered very odd and naughty. They were also so elementary to do, that once they were in place, they couldn't be stopped without tearing the whole Net down.

Of course, once these techniques were in place, they conclusively destroyed the ability of governments to control the flow of electronic funds, anywhere, anytime, for any purpose. As it happened, this process had pretty much destroyed any human control at all over the modern electronic economy. By the time people figured out that raging nonlinear anarchy was not exactly to the advantage of anyone concerned, the process was simply too far gone to stop. All workable standards of wealth had vaporized, digitized, and vanished into a nonstop hurricane of electronic thin air. Even physically tearing up the fiber optics couldn't stop it; governments that tried to just found that the whole encryption mess oozed swiftly into voice mail and even fax machines.

One major upshot of the Regime's privatization of the currency was that large amounts of black-market wealth bad suddenly surfaced. This had been part of the plan, apparently-that even though the government was sabotaging its own ability to successfully impose any income tax, the government would catch up on the other end, by imposing punitive taxes on previously hidden black-market transactions.

They'd swiftly discovered, however, that the scale of black money was titanic. The black-market wealth in tax evasion, kickbacks, official corruption, theft, embezzlement, arms, drugs, prostitution, barter, and off-the-books moonlighting was far huger than any conventional economist had ever imagined. The global ocean of black money was so vast in scope that it was instantly, crushingly obvious that the standard doctrines of conventional finance had no workable contact with reality. Economists who'd thought they understood the basic nature of modern finance had been living in a dogmatic dreamland as irrelevant as Marxism. After that terrible revelation, there'd been savage runs on most national currencies and the stock markets had collapsed.

As the Emergency had deepened, the panicking Regime had rammed its data nationalizations through Congress, and with that convulsive effort, the very nature of money and information had both mutated beyond any repair.

The resultant swirling chaos had become the bedrock of Alex's everyday notions of modem normality.

Alex did not find it surprising that people like the Chinese Triads and the Corsican Black Hand were electronically minting their own cash. He simply accepted it: electronic, private cash, unbacked by any government, untraceable, completely anonymous, global in reach, lightninglike in speed, ubiquitous, fungible, and usually highly volatile. Of course, such funds didn't boldly say "Sicilian Mafia" right on the transaction screen; they usually had some stuffy official-sounding alias such as "Banco Ambrosiano ATM Euro-DigiLira," but the private currency speculators would usually have a pretty good guess as to the solvency of the issuers.

Quite often these private currencies would collapse, though sheer greed, mismanagement, or just bad luck in the market. But the usual carnivorous free-enterprise market forces had jolted some kind of rough order into the mess. Nowadays, for a lot of people, private currencies were just the way money was.

When you used private, digital cash, even the people who sold you their money didn't know who you were. Quite likely you had no real idea who they were, either, other than their rates, their market recognition, and their performance history. You had no identity other than your unbreakably encrypted public key word. You could still use government currencies if you really wanted to, and most people did, for the sake of simplicity or though lack of alternatives. Most people had no choke in the matter, because most people in the world were poor.

Unfortunately, thanks to their catastrophic loss of control over basic economics, so were most governments. Government-issued currencies were scarcely more stable than the private kind. Governments, even the governments of powerful advanced countries, had already lost control of their currencies to the roiling floodwaters of currency trading as early as the 1990s. That was the main reason why the Regime had given up backing U.S. dollars in the first place.

Joe Brasseur's private-currency node in the Troupe's system was not untypical in the trade: it was the digital equivalent of an entire twentieth-century banking conglomerate, boiled down to a few sectors on a hard disk.

In order to gain admittance to the dinica in Nuevo Laredo, Alex had left a hefty wad of private currency under a secured lien by a third party. He hadn't gotten the money back, had no real idea how to get his money back, but he thought that maybe Brasseur would be the logical choice to find that money and fetch it out somehow. If so, then the Troupe was welcome to use it.

Brasseur took in Alex's confession with a calm, priest-like air, gazing solemnly at him over the rims of his glasses, and then Brasseur had nodded and set to work, and Alex bad never heard another word about the subject. Except that thin s perked up markedly for the Troupe after a week and a ha ~f.A bunch of former Troupers, Fred and José and Maureen and Palaniappan and Ke

Nobody thanked Alex for this. Just as well, Alex thought, that there was no public fuss made about himself or his role. Those who needed to know were going to know. Alex had already concluded that almost everything that really mattered in Troupe life took place way under the surface. It was a lot like life in a barracks, or a dorm, or a Th ward.

Some Troupers, such as Mukahey, Brasseur, and Carol and Greg, knew pretty much everything, pretty much immediately. The second rank were those who were go

The very last and lowest rank were the passing wa

Alex didn't know if he believed in the F-6. But he believed that the Troupe believed. With every day that passed, they were getting more keyed up to plunge headlong into something truly dreadful. And the bottom line was that he didn't want to leave-not until he knew what they would find and what it would do to them.

On May 31, as if to change their luck, Mukahey deliberately moved camp twenty kilometers northwest, into Hall County. The burst of action seemed to help morale some.

On June 2, heavy weather hit again. The luck of the assignment-as if there were any "luck" involved where Mukahey's orders were concerned-had Alex confined to the camp as "support crew." Alex figured this was just as well. Let the others have a chance to blow off steam.