Heavy Weather

"Well, this is where the F-6 ought to be. And the time is right. So what else could it be?"

Jerry shook his head. "Ask me when it starts moving."

Jane sighed, and munched a handful of government granola from her paper bag, and pulled her booted legs up in the driver's seat. "I can't believe that you gave up now-casting, and came out to hammer some spikes with me, and now you're telling me they're a minor feature."

Jerry laughed. "Spikes. They're like sex. Just 'cause you've nailed 'em once before, doesn't mean you lose all interest the next time."

"It's good to have you out here with me." She paused. "You're being real sweet to me lately, under the circumstances."

"Babe," he said, "you were in camp two months before all willpower shattered, remember? If we can't make love, we won't. Simple." He hesitated. "It's hell, true, but it's simple."

Jane knew better than to take this male bravado at face value. All was not well in camp. Her infection, the drought. Nerves, restlessness. Missed co

One of the things Jane loved best about chasing spikes was that liberating way that gigantic storms smashed flat and rendered irrelevant all the kinks in her personal life. You couldn't sweat your own angst in the face of a monster spike; it was stupid and vulgar and deeply beside the point, like trying to make the Grand Canyon your spittoon.

She did love Jerry; she loved him as a person, very dearly, and she often thought she might have loved him almost as much, even if he'd never given her any tornadoes. She could have loved Jerry even if he'd been something everyday and nonexotic and dull, like, say, some kind of economist. Jerry was skillful and accomplished and dedicated and, when you got used to him, rather intensely attractive. Sometimes Jerry was even fu

It would have been much more like her other affairs, though; the ones with the vase throwing and the screaming fits and the shaking sense of absolute black desperation in the back of a limo at three in the morning.

Jerry made her do crazy things. But Jerry's crazy things had always made her better and stronger, and with Jerry around, for the first time in her life she no longer felt miserably troubled about being her own worst enemy. She'd always been wrapped too tight, and wired too high, and with a devil inside; in retrospect, she could see that dearly now. Jerry was the first and only man in her life who had really appreciated her devil, who had accepted her devil and been sweet to it, and had given her devil some proper down-and-dirty devil-things to do. Her devil no longer had idle hands. Her devil was working its ass off, all the time.

So now she and her devil were quite all right, really.

It was as if acting crazy, and taking crazy risks, had completely freed her of any obligation to actually become crazy. It might sound rather sappy, but really and truly, Jerry had made her a free woman. She was dirty and she was broke and she smelled bad most of the time, but she was free and in love. She'd spent most of her life in a fierce, determined, losing battle to make herself behave and make sense and be good and be happy; and then she'd met Jerry Mulcahey and had given up the war. And when all that old barbed wire snapped loose inside of her, she'd discovered surprising reservoirs of simple decency and goodwill in herself. She wasn't even half as bad as she'd thought she was. She wasn't crazy, she wasn't wicked, she wasn't even particularly dangerous. She was a mature adult woman who wasn't afraid of herself, and could even be a source of real strength to other people. She could give and sacrifice for other people, and love and be loved, without any fear or any mean calculation. And she acknowledged all this, and was grateful for it.

It was just that she really, really hated to talk about it.

Jerry wasn't any better at discussing it than she was. Jerry Mulcahey wasn't like other men. Not that that was entirely to Jerry's credit; Jerry wasn't much like any kind of human being. Jane was a bright person, and Jane knew what it was like to be brighter than other people; bright enough to be disliked for it, sometimes. But she knew she wasn't bright like Jerry was. In particular areas of his comprehension, Jerry was so bright as to be quite alien. There were large expanses of his mental activity that were as blank and hot and shiny as someone on drugs.

Jane had no gift for mathematics; math was something that she had to crawl through on her belly, like mud. It had taken her quite some time to fully comprehend that this strange man in the wastelands of West Texas with his cobbled-up crew of eccentrics was, really and truly, one of the brightest mathematicians in the world.

Jerry's parents had both been computer-science researchers in Los Alamos. They'd both been good at their work too; but their son Jerry had been doing cutting-edge magnetohydrodynamics when he was twelve. Jerry had pioneered in fields like multidimensional minimal-surface manifolds and higher-order invariant polynomials, things that made your brain explode just to look at them. Jerry was good enough at math to frighten people. His colleagues couldn't make up their minds whether to envy him for his gifts, or resent him for not publishing more often. Every once in a while Jane would have some net-idiot give her a hard time about Jerry's "professional qualifications," and she would E-mail the skeptic the paper that Jerry'd done back in 2023 that established the Mulcahey Conjecture, and the skeptic would try to read it and his brain would explode, and he would quietly slink away and never be heard from again.

Unless he turned out to be one of the math wa

The weight lifting was another prominent aspect of Jerry's oddity. He hadn't always been that way. She'd seen pictures of Jerry as a teenager-his mother had sent them-and Jerry had been lithe and slender, with a tall kid's wary stoop. Lots of Troupers were into weights; Jane lifted weights herself, enough to get strong, enough to get the point of doing it. But Jerry was doing weights just because a saved him time. It saved him time and effort to be as big as a house so he could briefly surface out of his abyss of distraction, and snap out something, and have people just jump up and run do it for him. Because he radiated raw physical authority, Jerry didn't have to slow down to explain very much. Plus, the weights gave Jerry something to do while he was thinking seriously, and Jerry liked to think seriously for about five hours straight, every day. The fact that he was lugging thirty kilos of steel on his legs at the time never seemed to register on him much.

There was no question that the great trial of Jerry's life was relating to other human beings. Jerry had really worked terribly hard at this problem, with such painstaking patience and suffering and dedication, that her heart truly melted for him.

Jerry didn't readily empathize with people, because Jerry just wasn't a very peoplelike being. But he could model people. He could dryly comprehend the whole Structure of their personalities, and re-create them as a kind of dry run in his own head. He had built his relationships with the other Troupers like a one-armed man buildlug model cathedrals out of toothpicks.

And when he had it all figured, then he would sit you down. And start telling you exactly what you were really thinking, and what it was that really motivated you, and how you could get what you wanted and how that would, by the way, help him and the others too. It would be laid out with such amazing clarity and detail that your own self-image would crumble by comparison. Jerry would have invented this thing, just by watching you closely and speculating, but it was so much more like you than you were that it felt more real than your own identity. It was like confronting your ideal self, your better nature: smoother, more sensible, wiser, a lot better managed. All you had to do was let the scales fall from your eyes and reach out for it.