Heavy Weather

"Maybe you ought to give some thought to the way you treated your good friend the general de polida, back in Sinaloa." It was a shot in the dark, a blindly launched harpoon, but it landed hard. Leo reacted with such a start that even Smithers seemed alarmed.

"Sinaloa," Leo mused, recovering himself. He stared down hard at Alex. He was very tall, and though he didn't have the weightlifter beef of his brother Jerry, he looked, in his own smooth way, like a bad man to cross. "Of course," he concluded suddenly. "You must be Alex. Little Alejandro Unger. My goodness."

"I think you'd better leave," said Alex. "You and your kind aren't wanted here."

"You've been here less than a month, Alejandro! And akeady you're carrying on like Jerry's guard dog! It's amazing the loyalty that man inspires."

"Have it your way, Leo," Alex said. "I'll let you in the camp when Jerry says you can come in, how about that?" He suddenly sensed weakness, and pounced. "How about you wait here while I call Jerry up? I can contact Jerry out in the field, easy enough. Let's see what Jerry says about you.

"I have a counterproposal," Leo said. "Why don't I assume that you have no authority whatever? That you're simply inventing all this on the fly, through some silly grudge all your own. That you're an unbalanced, sick, spoiled little rich-boy punk, who's in way over his head, and that we can simply walk right past you."

"You'll have to knock me down first."

"That doesn't look difficult, Alex. You're still emaciated from that black-market shooting parlor in Nuevo Laredo. You look quite ill."

"You're go

Leo turned slowly to Smithers. "Mr. Smithers. Do tell. Do i in fact have a laser rifle sighted on my person?"

Smithers shook his head. "Not that I can see. Kid, it is really fuckin' stupid to say something like that to a guy like me."

Alex took his sunglasses off, and then his hat. "Look at me," he told Smithers. "Do I look afraid of you? You think I'm impressed ?~" He turned to Leo. "How about you, Leo? Do I look like I care whether we get in a fistfight right now, and you end up shot? You really wa

"No," said Leo, decisively. "There's no need at all for any of this foolishness. We don't want Juanita upset, do we? Janey?"

"You stay the hell away from Jane," Alex said, in throttled fury. "Letting that one slip was a real blunder! Get away from me and my sister, and stay away from us, you spook narc son of a bitch. Get out of here now, before you lose it and try something even stupider than showing up here in the first place."

"This is completely pointless," Leo said. "I don't see what you think you've accomplished with this ridiculous junkie's bravado. We can simply return at some later time, when there are some sane people here."

Alex nodded and crossed his arms. "Okay. Yeah. It's pointless. Come back next Christmas, big brother. In the meantime, go away. Now."

Leo and Smithers exchanged glances. Leo shrugged eloquently, his shoulders rising beneath the padding of his spanking-new safari jacket.

Without haste, the two men climbed into the truck. Smithers started the machine, and it turned and left. As it vanished Alex saw Leo lifting a videocam to his face, methodically sca

Alex walked slowly back to the command yurt. Buzzard was waiting at the door flap. Sam was still in his nowcaster helmet. There was no sign at all of Joe Brasseur.

"Who were those guys?" Buzzard said.

Alex shrugged. "No problem. I took care of 'em. A coupla wa

CHAPTER 8

The unbroken malignant high had been sitting, for six long weeks, over Colorado. It seemed to be anchored there. The high hadn't moved, but it had expanded steadily. A great dome of dry, superheated air had spread from Colorado to northeastern New Mexico and the Panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas. Beneath it was the evil reign of drought.

Jane was rather fond of Oklahoma. The roads were generally in worse condition than Texas, but the state was more thoroughly settled. There was good civil order, and the people were friendly, and even way outside the giant modern megalopolis of Oklahoma City, there were living little rural towns where you could still get real breakfast and a decent cup of coffee. The sky was a subtler blue in Oklahoma, and the wildflowers were of a gentler palette than the harshly vivid flowers of a Texas spring.The soil was richer, and deeper, and iron red, and quite a lot of it was cultivated. The sun never climbed quite as punishingly high in the zenith, and it rained mote often.

But there was no rain now. Not under the slow swell of the continental monster. Rushing storm fronts had scourged Missouri and Iowa and Kansas and Illinois, but the high at the foot of the Rockies had passed from a feature, to a nuisance, to a regional affliction.

SESAME's Climate Analysis Center liked to netcast a standard graphics map, "Departure of Average Temperature from Normal (C)," a meteorological document that SESAME had inherited from some precybernetic federal-government office. The map's format was rather delightfully antiquated, both in its old-fashioned distinction of "Centigrade" (the old Fahrenheit scale had been extinct for years) and in its wistful pretense that there was still such a thing in American weather as "Normal." The map's colored shadings of temperature were crudely vivid, with the crass aesthetic limits of early computer graphics, but for the sake of archival continuity, the maps had never been redesigned. In her Troupe career, Jane had examined dozens of these average-temperature maps. But she'd never before seen so much of that vividly anomalous shade of hot pink.

It was only June, and people were already dying under those pixelated hot-pink pools. Not dying in large numbers; it wasn't yet the kind of heavy weather where the feds would start sending in the iron-barred evacuation trucks. It was still only early June, when heat could be very anomalous without becoming actually lethal. But it was the kind of heat that kicked up the stress several notches. So the old folks' pacemakers failed, and there'd be gunfire in the evening and a riot at the mall.

The temperature map dissolved on Charlie's dashboard readout, then blushed again into a blotchy new depiction: pound-level SESAME Lidar.

"I've never seen it like this before," Jerry commented, from Charlie's passenger seat. "Look at the way it's breaking, way outside the rim of that high. That's not supposed to happen."

"I don't see how anything can happen until that air mass moves," Jane said. "It doesn't make any sense."

"The core's not moving for hell, but it's still ripping loose today, all along that secondary dryline," Jerry said.

"We're go

Jane looked up at the northern horizon: the storm line that was their destination. Beyond a line of wilting Oklahoma cottonwoods, there were towers rising-sheetlike in parts, half-concave, starved for moisture. They didn't look powerful, but they didn't look minor; they looked convulsive. "Well," she said, "maybe we're finally seeing it, then. Maybe this is what it looks like when it starts."

"The F-6 isn't supposed to shape up like this. The mesosphere's all wrong and the jet stream is hanging north like it was nailed there."