Heavy Weather

Jane had gone through this process exactly once. Well, half of once, actually. It was hard to seduce someone while in a paper jumpsuit. You could zip it down to the waist and coyly peel it open, and it felt like you were offering a guy a couple of bran muffins out of a bakery bag. But once he'd started in on her with the toothpick analysis, she'd known that the only way to break him out of it was to knock him down and straddle him.

It had worked brilliantly too. It had shut Jerry up to the great satisfaction of all concerned. Now she and Jerry could freely and openly discuss all kinds of things: spikes, interfaces, tools, camp, feds, Rangers, other Troupers, even money. But they didn't discuss The Relationship. The Relationship didn't even have a name. The Relationship had its own shape and its own life and it was not made of toothpicks.

But Jerry had assigned himself to her car. He never did this without reason. Sooner or later the shoe would drop. The big hot core was gone from The Relationship, and both of them were hurting, and some rational analysis was going to come out of Jerry. She was hoping for the best.

"For the first time I'm really getting afraid of this," he said.

Jane set her granola bag on the floorboard. "What is it you're afraid of, darling?"

"I think we may be shaping up toward the bad scenario.

"What's bad about it?"

"I've never told you fully what I thought this would be like if it became a permanent fixture."

"All right," she said, bracing herself. "If that's on your mind, tell me, then."

"The winds are not the half of it. It could strip the earth's surface right down to bedrock. It could vent more dust into the troposphere than a major volcanic eruption."

"Oh," she said. "You mean the F-6."

He gave her the oddest look he'd ever given her. "Are you okay, Janey?"

"Yeah, sure, I'm as okay as anybody with a yeast infection ever is. Sorry, I thought you were discussing something else. What about the F-6, sweetheart?"

"Oh, nothing really," Jerry said, staring straight ahead. "Just that it might kill everyone within hundreds of kilometers. Including us, of course. All in the first few hours. And after that-a giant, permanent vortex on the planet's surface. That could happen! It could actually take place in the real world."

"I know that," Jane said. "But for some reason, I just don't worry about it much."

"Maybe you should worry a lot more, Jane. It could mean the end of civilization."

"I just can't believe in it enough to worry," she told him. "I mean, I do believe something really awesome is going to break loose this season, but I can't believe it means the end of anything. It's like-somehow-I just can't believe that civilization is going to get off the hook that easy. 'The end of civilization'-what end? What civilization, for that matter? There isn't any end. We're in way too deep to have any end. The kind of troubles we got, they aren't allowed to have any end."

"The troposphere could saturate with dust. There could be a nuclear winter." He paused. "Of course, a majot drop in temperature would starve out the vortex."

"That's just it! It's always something like that! Things can get totally awful, but then something else comes up that's so amazingly screwy that it makes it all irrelevant. There never was any nuclear war or nuclear winter.

There's never go

She sighed. "Look, I saw the sky turn black when I was a kid-I saw it turn black as the ace of spades! It didn't last, though. It was just a big dust bowl. Even if the F-6 is really awful, somebody somewhere would survive. Millions of people, billions maybe. They'd just march into some fucking salt mine, with the chlorophyll hack and some gene-splicing and some superconductives, and as long as theyhadtheir virching and cable TV, most of 'em would never even notice!"

"People talked like that before heavy weather," Jerry said. "It wasn't the end of the world, but they noticed, all right. If they lived long enough."

"Okay," Jane said. "Have it your way. Let's assume for the sake of argument that the F-6 is the end of the world. What do you wa

He said nothing.

"You wa

"You're go

"It bothers me when you talk like this, Jane. You're not that cynical."

Jane stopped. It was rare of Jerry to confess so openly that he was upset. She lowered her voice. "Darling, listen to me. Don't be so anxious about us. Everybody in the Troupe knows that this is very dangerous. You haven't been hiding that from us, that's not any surprise to us. You can't protect us, we know that. We're all adults-well, almost all adults-and we know what we're doing." She shrugged. "Pretty much, anyhow. A lot more than those dumb feds at SESAME. And a hell of a lot more than the poor damned civilians."

"I think we'd better have a Troupe powwow after this chase, and make ~ll of this very clear and straightforward to everyone."

"Good. Fine. If that'll make you feel better. But I can already tell you what's go

"The F-6 is not just a spike. I'm thinking more and more... along the lines of a different order of storm, something unprecedented. We'll be going up against some-thing I don't understand. The Troupe are good people. They trust my judgment, and they might be killed because of that. It wouldn't be right."

"Jerry, we Troupers are like soldiers, we don't need any rights. Anyway, we'd all be chasing spikes even if you weren't around. If you think I'm doing all this just to please you, you can think otherwise. The F-6 is the big one, it's the payoff. It's what I want." She fetched up her granola bag. "I can get April Logan to come down here."

"Your design professor? Why?"

"April's way out of academia now, she's mega-big in netcritique! She has real influence! She's the heaviest net-friend I have. If April Logan puts the word Out that we have a hot presentation coming up, we can pull some mega postproduction people. People who can take our data, and do it up really right for once. We'll pull a major audience."

"Money, you mean."

"That's right, Jerry. Money. Pots of it." She shrugged. "Well, the net-equivalent. Attention, access. Fame. I can turn that into money. It ain't easy, but there are ways."

"I see."

"Good. So you can forget all that gallant stuff about protecting little me from the big bad storm."

"All right," he said. "That's good, Jane. You've done well and I've come to expect that from you. But what about after the storm?"

"What do. you mean?"

"That's the other eventuality, the one that really stuns 'me. Suppose that we survive the F-6. That we ace this.

That we nail it and make pots of money and fame, and we put it all behind us. What'll we do then? What will become of us? You and me?"

She was surprised, and more than a little alarmed, to hear Jerry bring this up. "Well, nothing has to change, darling! It's not like I never had money before! I can deal with money, you know I can! That's not a problem for us! We'll kick back on the off-season, like the Troupe always does. And we'll upgrade our hardware, really decently this time. You can write a paper, and I'll have plenty of network on my hands... . Then we'll wait for next season."