Heavy Weather

It was very old and very wild country. It had few roads, and those in poor repair. Around local creekbeds and water holes, people sometimes found twelve-thousand-year-old flint spearheads, mixed with the blackened, broken bones of extinct giant bison. Jane always wondered what the reaction of those flint-wielding Folsom Point peopie had been when they realized they had exterminated their giant bison, wiped them into extinction with their dreadful high-tech ati-atls, and their cutting-edge flint industry, and the all-consuming giant wildfires they'd used to chase whole assembly lines of bison pell-mell off the canyon cliffs. Maybe some had condemned the wildfires and atlatls, and tried to destroy the flints. While others had been sick at heart forever, to find themselves p arty to such a dreadful crime. And the vast majority, of course, simply hadn't noticed.

The canyon walls of the Breaks played hell with communications. They cast a major radio shadow, and if you got really close to them they could even block satellite relay. That posed no challenge for Pursuit Vehicle Charlie, though, who put his superconductive to work and scuttled up the slope to the top of the largest mesa in the neighborhood. That mesa was helpfully festooned with big towers and microwave horns.

Jane and Jerry weren't the first to come here for their own purposes. Most of the horns were lavishly stenciled with bullet holes, some old, some new. A structure-hit gang had tagged the tower blockhouses with much-faded graffiti. Old-fashioned psycho-radical slogans like SMASH THE BALLOT MARKET and t.rr m~it EAT DATA and SCREAMING wou SURVIVES, done with that kinky urban folk intensity that urban graffiti had once had, before the spirit had suddenly and inexplicably leached out of it and the whole practice of tagging had dried up and gone away.

There was a fire pit with some ancient burned mesquite stubs, and a mess of scattered beer cans, the old aluminum kind of beer container that didn't melt in the rain. It was easy to imagine the vanished Luddite marauders, up here with their dirt bikes and guns and howling, chanting boom boxes.

Jane found this intensely sad, somehow more lonely than if there had never been anyone here in the first place. She wondered who the gang had been, and what in hell they had thought they were doing way out here, and what had become of them. Maybe they were just plain dead, as dead as the Folsom flint people. The state of Texas had always been remarkably generous with the noose, the chair, and the needle, and in the early days of parole cuffs there'd been little complaint about tamperproofing them with contact nerve poison. And that was just the formal way-the polite and legitimate way of erasing people. If the gang had been jumped by Rangers they'd be unmarked graves by the roadside now, green lumps in some overgrown pasture. Maybe they had blown themselves up, trying to cook demolition bombs out of simple household chemicals. Had they snapped out of the madness and achieved a foothold in what passed for real life? Did they have jobs now?

She'd once asked Carol, tactfully, about the Underground, and Carol had said bluntly: "There is no more alternative society. Just people who will probably survive, and people who probably won't." And Jane could pretty much go with that assessment. Because from her own experience with structure-hit activity, the people who were into that radical bullshit were just like Rangers, only stupider and not as good at it.

The sun was setting. Off in the western distance, beneath the dissolving clouds, Jane could see, with intense and lovely clarity, the skeletal silhouetting of very distant trees. The trees were whole kilometers away and no bigger than a fingernail paring, and yet she could see the shape of their every branch in the clear still air, stenciled against the colors around the sun, great bands of subtle, gradated, desert color, umber to amber to translucent pearly white.

The chase was over now. It was time to call camp.

Jerry got the spider ante

And then the wind stopped. And it grew terribly still.

And then it began to get hot.

Jane looked at the barometer readout. It was soaring- moving visibly even as she looked.

"What's going on?" she said.

"It's a solitary wave," Jerry said. "It must have peeled off the high somehow." Not a wind, not something you could feel as moving air, but a kind of silent compression wave in the atmosphere, a silent rippling bulge of pressure and heat. Jane's ears popped loudly. The hot air felt very dry, and it smelled. It smelled of drought and ozone.

She leaned against the car and the edge of the door stung her hand with a sharp pop of static electricity.

Jerry looked up at the tallest of the microwave horns.

"Jane," he said in a tight voice, "get back in the car, get the cameras ru

"All right." She got in.

It grew darker, and then she began to hear it. A thin, flowing hiss. Not a crackle, but a sound like escaping gas. The tall tower had begun to vent something, to ooze something, something very odd, something like wind, something like fur, something like flame. White, striated, gaseous spikiness, a flickering, rippling presence, at the corners of the old tower's braced galvanized-iron uprights and crossbars. All on one side, vowing up and down one metal corner of the tower, like glowing ball moss. It hissed and it ffickered and it moved a little, fitfully, like the spitting breath of ghosts. She watched it steadily through the binocular cameras, rock steadily, and she called out, very unsteadily, "Jerry! What is it?"

"It's Saint Elmo's fire."

Jane suddenly felt the hair rise all over her head. She didn't stop recording, but the electric fire had fallen on her now, it had seeped down and come inside the car with her. The corona lifted her hair like a pincushion. Deep natural electricity was discharging off the top of her head. Her whole scalp, from nape to forehead, felt like an eyelid felt when an eyelid was gently peeled back.

"I've seen this at Pike's Peak," Jerry said. "I've never seen it at this low an elevation."

"'Will it hurt us?"

"No. It should pass us when this wave passes."

"All tight. I'm not afraid."

"Keep recording."

"Don't worry, I've got it."

And in less than a minute the wave passed. And the fire was gone away from them, the strange deep fire was gone completely. Just as if there had never been anything.

IT WAS VERY hard to sleep together when you weren't allowed to sleep together. Jane had always had trouble sleeping, always ready to prowl around red-eyed and pull an all-nighter. Jerry had no such problems. Jerry was good at catnaps; he could turn off his virching helmet, lie down on the carpet with his head inside the casket of blackness, sleep twenty minutes, and then get right up and resume his calculations.

But tonight, although Jerry was silent and still, Jerry wasn't sleeping. Jane had her head in the hollow of his left shoulder, a place that fit her as if it had been designed for her, the place where she had passed the most sweetly restLtd nights of her life. They would come away from a chase and have a furious encounter, and then she would fling one naked possessive leg over him and put her head on his shoulder, and she'd close her eyes and hear his heart beating, and she would tumble headlong into a dark sated slumber so deep and healing that it would have set Lady Macbeth to rights.

But not tonight. Her nerves felt as tight and high-pitched as a mariachi violin, and she found no comfort in Jerry. Somehow he didn't smell right. And she didn't smell right either: she smelled of topical vaginal ointment, possibly the least erotic scent known to humankind. But unless at least one of them got some real rest, something awful was going to happen.