Heavy Weather

EPILOGUE

Austin, Texas, had once been called the "City of the Violet Crown," back when the city had been small enough to fit within its bowl of hills. That bowl of hills was alleged to serve as protection from local tornadoes. Of course the Violet Crown no longer did that, if in fact it ever had, and even the oldest central section of Austin had been ravaged by an F-2 within the past five years.

The spike had tracked right through the city's oldest northern suburb, an ancient residential district just north of The University of Texas. The area was now part of The University's privately managed, and privately policed, urban demesne. There was not much overt sign left of the spike damage, except for some ancient and now spectacularly crippled trees. Big old pecans mostly; some dead and replaced by saplings, but many of them maimed and left upright.

To Alex's eye, the damage track was easy to spot. You'd be driving under an even canopy of flourishing, pampered, C02-glutted streetside giants, and then there would be this tortured Goyaesque mutant breaking out all up and down with scrawny little green sapling limbs, maybe one original crooked branch left as a kind of beckoning finger. He pointed this out to his companion.

"We never have tornadoes in Boston," she said.

His sister was living in a little crackerbox place. A little brown-and-white shack that looked a hundred years old, if it was a day. Back in the early 2020s, when the practice had been in vogue, somebody had sprayed the outside of the entire building with a weatherproof lacquer. The white housepaint beneath the lacquer looked u

When Alex stepped up to the concrete porch, he could see that the housepaint trapped beneath the lacquer had given up the ghost and shattered into tens of millions of tiny paint flakes no bigger than fine dust. It didn't matter. The dust wasn't going anywhere. That lacquer was there for the ages.

JANE LOOKED THROUGH the security glass at her door and saw a short, plump young blond man in a suit and tie. And a very odd-looking woman. A tiny, witchy-looking boho student type, in a slashed silk dress and striped stockings and red ankle-tied sandals. Half her face-ear, cheeks, temple-was disfigured by a huge purple tattoo.

They didn't look armed, though. And not very dangerous. Anyway, there was rarely much civil trouble around The University. Because The University had massive heaps of data and attention, and even some money, and more importantly, it had a large paramilitary phalanx of armed, disciplined, and enthusiastically violent students.

Jane opened the door. "Hello?"

"Janey?"

"Yeah?"

"It's me."

Jane stared at him. "Christ! Alex."

"This is Sylvia," Alex said. "Sylvia Muybridge. She's traveling with me. Sylvia, this is my sister, Jane Unger."

"How do you do," Jane said. "Actually, I go by Jane Mulcahey these days. It's simpler, and besides, it's legal." She held up her hand with the gold ring.

"Yes," Alex said, pained, "I knew you had a married name, but I thought you still networked professionally as Jane Unger."

"Yeah, well, I'm probably go

Alex paused. "Can we come in?"

"Oh hell, yes!" Jane laughed. "Come on in."

She knew that the place looked disastrous. It was astrew with printouts, textbooks, and heaps of disks. There was a giant framed multicolored chart on the wall reading UNITED STATES FREQUENCY ALLOCATIONS: THE RADIO SPECTRUM.

Jane threw a cat off the couch-a paper-covered futon and cleared a small space for them to sit. "Are you still allergic to cats?"

"No. Not anymore," Alex said.

"How long has it been, Alex?"

"Eleven months," he said, sitting. "Almost a year."

"Damn," Jane said. "What can I get y'all?"

Sylvia spoke up for the first time. "You got any ibogame?"

"What's that?"

"Never mind, then."

Jane touched her brother's shoulder. "They must have been pretty good to you in Cyprus, because you look pretty fine, Alex."

"Yeah," Alex said, "they tore out all my seams and rewove me, in Nicosia. They tell me I'm supposed to be this fat. Metabolically, I mean. Genetically, I'm supposed to be a big fat blond guy, Janey. Of course, I'll never get over being stunted in my youth." He laughed.

"I'm sorry I didn't recognize you at first. Mostly it was that suit."

"No," he said. "No, I'm completely different now, I know that. Genetics, it's the core of everything, Janey, it's mega witchcraft. Just look at my hands! It was supposed to change my lungs, and it did that, my lungs are like rock now. But look at my hands! They never looked like this."

Jane held her own hand out and placed it gently against his. "You're right. They look just like my hands now. They're not all... well, they're not all thin."

"It's simple, really," Alex said. "I didn't have a life before they rewove me, and now, after this, after everything I went through, I actually have a life! I'm just like anyone else, now. The curse is lifted. It's been erased, wiped out. I'm probably go

Jane glanced at Alex's girlfriend. She~assumed this was a girlfriend. Normally a woman wouldn't dress so provocatively and travel alone with a guy unless there was something happening. Her being here could only mean that Alex was deliberately showing her off.

But then there was that face. That huge blotch on her face. It was really hard to look at. And she'd done something to it too; it wasn't just a giant port-wine-stain birthmark, she'd messed with it too; she'd outlined the edges of it in some kind of very fine and very elaborate stippling. Like dots of rainbow ink, that shimmered. Jane had never seen anything like it. She found it frightening.

"How are the Troupe people doing?"

"Oh, we hear from them sometimes," Jane said. "Buzzard, quite a bit. Rudy and Sam and Peter and Rick have their own team up in Kansas now, they're still chasing. Martha never calls much, but I never got along much with Martha. We see Joe Brasseur socially sometimes, he's got some cushy job in town with the State Water Comnusslon.

"I never got a chance to tell you how sorry I was about Greg and Carol. And Mickey too." -

"Well," she said simply, "Mickey was a good man, and Greg and Carol were my closest friends."

"How is Ed?"

"Well, Ed's got the use of both his arms again. Not like before, but pretty much. Ellen Mae is a lot better too. She's up in Anadarko now...

"How is Jerry doing? Is Jerry here?"

"No. He's at The University. I'm expecting him." She glanced at her watch. "You want some lunch? I'm making tacos, it's easy."

"I'll help," Alex said.

THEY DRIFTED INTO Juanita's cramped and ancient kitchen. Sylvia stayed on the couch. Alex winced as he heard her deftly fire up the TV with a remote. She began methodically combing through Austin's eight hundred available cha

He moved beside the electric range and watched the taco mix bubbling in a pan. The top of Juanita's stove was liberally spattered with orange grease. Jane shook some garlic salt at the taco mix, as if trying to choke it into submission. His sister had to be the worst cook in the world.

"You gotta make allowances for Sylvia," he said quietly. "She's not real good with other people, just kind of shy."

"I'm just touched that you would bring your girlfriend along to meet me, Alex."

"I'd kind of like it, if you and she could get along. She's kind of important to me. The most important woman in my life, really."

"That serious, huh?" -

"I don't have a lot of room to judge there," he said. "I met her on the nets, in a genetic-disorder support group. Sylvia's good on nets. People like Sylvia and me, people who've been through a lot of sickness when young, it tends to narrow our social skills. She had kind of an autism thing, she's had a hard time of life. But she's all rewoven now, and she's okay underneath."