Heavy Weather

She hadn't found her brother yet, but she could sense his presence. She slipped through the door, closed it gently, leaned her back against it. The reek in the room pried at her sinuses like the bouquet off a shot of cheap whiskey. Jane held her breath, playing the penlight around. A television. Some kind of huge clothes hanger like an outsized trouser press. .. a wardrobe... scattered tape cassettes and paper magazines

Something was dripping. Thick oily dripping, down at floor level. It was coming from the big trouser-press contraption. Jane stepped toward the machine and played her light across the floor. Some kind of bedpan there.

Jane half knelt. It was a white ceramic pot, half-full of a dark nasty liquid, some kind of dense chemical oil. Grainy stuff like fine coffee grounds had sunk to the bottom, with a nasty white organic scum threading the top, just like a vile egg-drop soup. As Jane watched, a sudden thin -drool of the stuff plummeted into the pot.

Her light went up. It discovered two racks of white human teeth. A human mouth there, with tight-drawn white lips and a stiff blue tongue. The head was swaddled in bandages, a thick padded strap at the forehead. Some kind of soft rubber harness bar was jammed into the gaping jaws. .

They had him strapped to a rack, head down. Both his shoulders strapped, both his wrists cuffed at his sides, his chest strapped down against the padded surface. His knees were bound, his ankles cuffed. The whole rack was tilted skyward on a set of chromed springs and hinges. Up at the very top, his pale bare feet were like two ski

They were draining him.

Jane took two quick steps back and slapped her plastic-gloved hand against the mask at her mouth.

She fought the fear for a moment and she crushed it. And then she fought the disgust, and she crushed that too.

Jane stepped back to the rack, deliberately, and put her gloved hand at the side of Alex's neck. It was fever-hot and slick with his sweat.

He was alive.

Jane examined the rack for a while, her eyes narrowing hotly. The fear and disgust were gone now, but she couldn't stop her sudden hot surge of hatred. This was probably a fairly easy machine to manage, for the sons of bitches who were used to using it. Jane didn't have time to learn.

She undid the stop locks on the casters at the bottom, shoved the whole contraption to the side of the big bed, and toppled it, and Alex, onto the mattress, with one strong angry heave.

The straps on his chest were easy. Just Velcro. The padded latches on his wrists and ankles were harder: elaborate bad-design flip-top lock-down nonsense. Jane yanked her jigsaw and went through all four of the evil things in ten seconds each. There was bad noise-a whine and a muted chatter-with a sharp stench of chewed and molten plastic. Not too much noise, really, but it sounded pretty damned loud inside a blacked-out building. Someone might come to investigate. Jane patted the glue pistol in its holster at the back of her webbing belt.

When the last strap went, Alex tumbled off the rack into her lap. She rolled her brother faceup and checked his eyeballs. Cold, cold as a mackerel, even while his fevered skin was as hot as the shaved hide of a lab rabbit.

She'd have to carry him out.

Well, Alex had been pretty easy to carry the last time she had tried it. When he'd been five years old, and she'd been ten. Jane knelt on the bed and methodically clipped her jigsaw back onto her belt, inside her paper Suit. And then she thought somberly about the strength that it would take to do this thing.

Jane rolled off the bed onto her feet, grabbed her brother by both his slender wrists, and heaved.

He slid across the sheets like an empty husk. Jane jammed her left shoulder under his midriff and hoisted him in a fireman's carry, flinging her left arm across the backs of his knees... . The moment she had him up, she realized that she was strong enough-more than strong enough. There was nothing left of her brother but birdbone and gristle.

Fluid gurgled loudly out of him and spattered the backs -of her legs.

Jane staggered through the door and into the hail. She heard footsteps overhead, somewhere up on the second floor, and a distant mutter of puzzled voices. ....he lurched down the hall toward the exit and pulled the jimmied door open, right-handed. Her brother's lolling head cracked against the jamb as she stumbled through.

She pulled the door shut behind her, then sank to her knees on the cool pavement of the alcove. Alex sprawled bonelessly over her in his backless medical gown. She slid Alex aside onto the chill stone paving.

Breathing hard, Jane felt at the webbing belt and yanked out her cellular phone. She pushed little glowing yellow numbers with her thumb.

"Hello," her car recited cheerfully. "I am Storm Pursuit Vehicle Charlie. There's no one aboard me right now, but if you have an ID, you can give me verbal orders. Other-. wise, leave a message at the beep."

Jane pressed the digits 56#033.

"Hello, Juanita," the car replied.

"Come get me," Jane panted. "You know where. Come quick."

SHE'D FORGOTTEN HOW fast Charlie could move when there were no human beings aboard it. Freed from the burden of protecting human flesh from g-forces. the robot car moved like a demented flea.

Charlie landed on the street in front of her with a sharp hiss of pneumatics, at the far end of a twenty-meter leap. It then began noisily walking sideways, up and across the pavement.

"Stop walking sideways," Jane ordered it. "Open your doors." She braced herself against the wall of the alcove, squat-lifted Alex onto her unused and un-aching right shoulder, and made it down the stairs. "Turn around," she puffed.

Charlie spun around with microprocessed precision, its pistoned wheel spokes wriggling.

Jane heaved and shoved her brother into the passenger seat, closed the door, and stepped back, panting. Her knees trembled so badlythats ettootiredtowalk.

"Turn around again!" she ordered. Charlie spun neatly in place, on the damp and darkened street. Jane clambered shakily into the driver's seat. "Go fast!"

"Not until you're strapped in."

"All right, go at a conventional pace while I am strapping us in," Jane grated. "And stop using Jerry's verbal interface at me."

"I have to use Jerry's verbal interface when I'm out of range of the Troupe's uplink and in conventional mode," the car said, rolling daintily down the street.

Jane struggled to strap her unresisting brother into the vehide harness. His blond head lolled like a daisy at the end of a stalk and his floppy arms were like two bags of wax. It was just too cramped inside the car, no use.

Jane lurched back into her own seat, frustrated. "Well, can you run my interface if you segue into unconventional mode?" she said.

"UHMMMMMMMM..." the car temporized, for a full fifteen seconds. "I think I can do that, if we pull over and I reboot."

"No, no!" Jane said. "God, nd Don't reboot! Just get US Out of town on the route that you have in memory."

"Okay, Juanita, will do."

"Jesus," Jane said. She folded up the steering wheel to make more room and succeeded in wedging her brother upright against the passenger door. He coughed then, twice, blue drool appearing at his lips.

Jane peeled her plastic gloves off, then whipped the rain hood from her hair. Her hair was sweat-caked to her scalp -she tugged at it with damp sweaty fingers. She'd been doing okay until she'd had to manage heavy lifting.

She yanked the paper covers from off her trail boots, then peeled and shrugged her way out of the paper suit, down to her shirt and shorts, much to the bemusement of passing night-owl pedestrians on the Avenida Guerrero.