Heavy Weather

"Palmitic acid," she read aloud, slowly. "Anionic lipids. Silicone surfactant. Phosphatidylglycerol

Jesus Christ, this is a witches' brew! And what's all this other shit down here, all this stuff in Spanish?"

"Isotherm of a PA/SP-B1-25m on a NAHCO3-buffered saline subphase," Alex translated swiftly. "It's just a Spanish-language repetition of the basic ingredients."

"And I'm supposed to put a tube down your throat and decant this stuff into you? And then hang you upside down?"

"That's pretty much the story, yeah."

"Sorry, no way.

"Carol, listen. I'm sick. I'm a lot sicker than anyone here realizes. I've got a major syndrome, and it's coming down on me hard right now. And unless you help me, or somebody helps me, I could die here, in real short order."

"Why don't you go back home?"

"They can't help me at home," Alex said simply. "All their money can't help me, nobody can fix what's wrong with me. Not that they didn't try. But it's not just encephalitis, or cholera, or one of those things that kill you quickly. I'm not that lucky. What I've got, it's one of those complicated things. Environmental. Genetic. Whatever. They've been patching me up since I was six days old. If I'd been born in any other time but now, I'd have died in my crib."

"Can't you get somebody else to do this fucking thing for you? Janey? Ed? Ellen Mae?"

"Yeah. Maybe. And I'll ask 'em, if I have to. But I don't want anybody else to know."

"Oh," Carol said. "Yeah, and I can see why not.. Y'know, Alex, I've been wondering why you've been hangin' out here with us. Anyone can tell that you and Janey don't get along for hell. And it ain'j because you like to play games with rope. It's because you're hiding. You're hiding something."

"Yeah, that's right," Alex told her. "I was hiding. I mean, not so much from those contrabandista medicos that I burned down in Nuevo Laredo-they're a tough outfit in their way, but hell, they don't really give a shit about me, they've got a line of no-hope suckers outside that clinica that's longer than the Rio Grande. I was hiding here from my own goddamn life. Not my life, but that thing that I do, that other people call living. I am real close to dead, Carol. It's not all in my head, I'm not making this up. I can't prove toyou what's wrong with me, but I know it's the truth, because I've lived in this body all my life, and I can feel it. There's not much left of me. No matter what anybody does, no matter how much money anybody spends, or how many drugs they pump into me, I don't think I'm go

"Christ, Alex."

"I'm just hiding up here because it's like-a different life. A realer life. I never do very much for the Troupe, because I just can't do much, I'm just too sick and too weak. But when I'm here with you people, I'm just some kid, I'm not just some dying kid." He stopped a moment, thinking hard. "But Carol, that's not all of it, either. I mean, that's what it was like at first, and it's all still true, but it's not the way I really feel anymore. You know what? I'm interested."

"Interested?"

"Yeah. Interested in the F-6. This big thing that's been hanging over us. I really believe in it now. I really know it's there! I know it's go

Carol sat down, heavily, on a folding camp stool. She put her head in her hands. Strong, wrinkled hands. When she looked up again, her face was wet with tears.

"You had to come pick on me, didn't you? You had to come tell me that you're dying."

"I'm sorry, Carol, but you're the only one here that I really trust."

"Because I've got a big soft heart, you little flicker. Because you know you can pick on me! Christ, this is just what I went through with Leo. No wonder you scoped him out so fast. Because there's not a dime's worth of difference between you and him."

"Yeah, except that he kills people, and I'm fucking dying! C'mon, Carol."

"We didn't kill anybody," Carol said bitterly. "All that structure-hit stuff-it's just killing things, is what it is. Leo knew. Hell, Leo was the best we ever had. You never saw us just mow people down, even though we could have done that real easily. We were just trying to kill the machineiy. 'Get rid of it. All that junk that had killed our world, y'know, the bulldozers and the coal plants and the logging machines and the smokestacks, the Goliath, the Monster, Behemoth, the Beast. It!" She shook herself, and wiped at her cheeks with the backs of her hands. "'Cause it was too late to stop it any other way, and we all knew damn well what was a ning to the world... . And if you think the Underground is all gone now, well, you got it wrong! They're not gone at all. Hell no, they're just real different now. They've got power now, a lot of 'em. They're actually in the government, what passes for the govermnent these days. Now they've got real power, not that hopeless pissant rebel shit with the Molotovs and the monkey wrenches and the builshit manifestos, I mean real power, real plans, terrible power, terrible plans. They're all people like him."

"Sorry.

"Guys like you, though ... you new kids, you hopeless little chickenshits... People will get used to anything, yeah, if they're young enough! People used to scream their heads off at the thought of dying of stupid slit like Th or cholera, now you don't even raise your voice, you just make it your own little secret, and you keep watching TV until you drop dead discreetly on the couch. People just put up with living in hell! They just ignore it all, and they're sure the world is always, always go

"I'm not giving up, Carol. I'm asking you to help me. Please help me."

"Look, I'm not a medic. I can't do anything like that. It's too awful, it's too much like it was in the camps."

"Carol," he grated, "I don't care about the weather camps. I don't care about your crazy Luddite friends. I know it was heavy then, and I know it was horrible then, hut I was only five years old then, and it's all history to me, it's dead history. I'm living in a cam p right now', this camp right now, and if I die in a camp I'll think that Cm lucky! I'm not go

"All right. Stop crying."

"You started it."

"Yeah, I'm stupid." She stood up. "I cry. I have a big mouth, I have no operational discretion at all, and that's why I hang out here in the ass end of nowhere, instead of with a real life in some real city, where some good-looking male cop can wheedle it all out of me, and yank a bunch of former friends out of their condos and bust them all on a terror-and-sabotage rap. I'm a born sucker, I'm a real moron." She sighed. "Look, if we're go

"Okay. Right. I get it. Thanks a lot." Alex wiped his eyes on his sleeve.

"And I want you to promise me something, Medicine Boy. I want you to promise to stop picking on your sister. She doesn't need any trouble out of a damned fool like you, she's a good person, she's an i

"Maybe," Alex said. "But she used to beat the shit out of me when we were kids. I have tapes of her trying to smother me to death with a pillow."