Heavy Weather

He looked at her. Her face was tight and her eyes were clouded, and he realized, with a strange little jolt of surprise, that his sister was truly afraid. Juanita had come to know and understand real fear. She was more afraid for this little bundle in the crib than she had ever been for herself. Or for her friends, or for her husband, or for anyone. She had a hostage to fortune now. That baby's sweaty little monkey hands had gripped her soul.

"All right," he said. He raised his right hand, solemnly. "Juanita Unger Mulcahey, I promise you that I'll look after your son, and all your children. I swear it on our mother's grave. Te lo juro por Ia tumba de nuestra mad re."

"That's good, Alex." She relaxed, a little. "I really believed you when you said it that way."

Voices came from the front of the house. Jerry had come home.

Alex went to meet him in the front room.

"This is a pleasant surprise," Jerry boomed. He and Alex shook hands.

Jerry had lost weight. He'd lost the great heaps of muscle on his shoulders, and his arms and legs were of relatively normal dimensions, and his gut looked like the gut of a family man in his thirties. He'd lost more hair, and the sides of the beard were gone now; he had a professorial Vandyke, and a real haircut. He had a shirt, suit jacket and tie, and a leather valise.

"They must be keeping you busy, Jerry."

"Oh yes. And you?"

"I'm getting into genetics."

"Really. That's interesting, Alex."

"I felt I had to." He looked hard into Jerry's eyes. Maybe he could, for the first time ever, make some kind of human contact there. "You see, Jerry, genetic treatment changed me so profoundly, I felt I just had to comprehend it. And I mean really understand it, not just get my hands on it and hack at it, but genuinely understand the science. It's a difficult field, but I think I'm up to the challenge. If I work at it hard, I can really learn it." He shrugged. "Of course, ~I still have to go through all that equivalency nonsense first."

"Right," Jerry said, clear-eyed and nodding sympathetically, "the academic proprieties." Nothing was wrong, and no one was missing, and there were no ghosts at this banquet, and no deep dark secrets, and for good old brother-in-law Jerry, life was just life.

"Done any storm work lately, Jerry?"

"Of course! The F-6! Extremely well documented. Enough material there for a lifetime."

Jane spoke up. "Nobody believed it would happen, even though he said it would. And now he's trying to explain to them why it stopped."

"That's a real problem," Jerry said, savoring it. "A nexus of problems. Nontrivial."

"The best kind of nexus of problems, I'm sure."

Jerry laughed. Briefly. "It's good to see you in such good spirits, Alex. You and your friend should stay for lunch."

"Tacos," Jane said.

"Good! My favorite." Jerry's eyes glazed. "Just a moment I've got to look after some things first." He vanished into his office.

Music burst out through Jerry's closed office door, the insistent squeaking and rattling of a Thai pop tune. It was loud.

"Does he really like that Thai stuff?" Alex asked Juanita.

Juanita shrugged. "Not really," she said loudly.

"That's just some of my old college music, but Jerry punches up anything on the box when he works... . He plays it to drown out the city noise. To drown out the hum, y'know. So he can think."

The music segued into an elaborate Asian cha-cha. Sylvia made a face.

"Let's go in the backyard and I'll show you my garden. The tacos will keep."

It was quiet in the backyard. It was a lovely spring day. It was su

"Jerry's always like this when they make him do polynomials," Jane apologized.

"Always like what? Jerry has always acted just like that."

"No, not quite like he does now, but... well, you don't know him like I do." She sighed. "The labcoat people have really got him where they want him now. The seminars, the lecture tours, the peer review committees... If he gets tenure and they offer him the chairmanship, we're go

"What kind of problems?"

"You don't wa

"No! But it sounds really worthwhile," Alex said.

"Yeah. I think so. I think it's the future, frankly. You can tell it's the future, too, 'cause the plumbing hardly works, and it's crowded, and it smells bad. They got the storm problem whipped, though. God help them if they get a fire." She looked at her garden: beans, tomatoes. "I got some special stuff from some Oklahoma agro-engineers during Jerry's last speaking tour. It was kind of a celebrity perk."

Jane was growing two rows of corn in her backyard. Corn, Zea mays, but with the chlorophyll hack. It had taken the human race quite some time to understand chlorophyll, the chemical method by which plants turned light into food, and when the ancient secret finally came out, the secret had turned out to be a really dumb botch. Even after two billion years of practice, plants had an utterly lousy notion of how to turn light into food. Plants were damn near as dumb as rocks, basically, and their lame idea of capturing sunlight was the silliest, most harebrained scheme imaginable.

Serious-minded human beings were working on the chlorophyll problem now, and they hadn't done a lot better yet, but they were doing about fifteen percent better, which was not at all bad, considering. And people might do better yet, if they could get living crops to endure the terrible impact of that much-concentrated human ingenuity. And, in tandem, get the ecosystem to survive the terrible consequences should such a technique ever go feral. Alex was really interested in the chlorophyll hack. He'd read a lot about it, and was following the bigger net-discussions. It was just about the neatest hack he'd ever heard of.

Jane's corn plants were squat and fibrous and ugly, and the ears of corn were about the size and shape of bowling pins. They were splotchy and reptilian green.

"Wow, those are really nice," said Sylvia..

"Would you like some for yourself? Just a second." Jane wandered into her backyard garden shed and came out with a drawstring bag. "You can have some spare seeds if you want." She shook half a dozen kernels of corn into Sylvia's outstretched palm. The misshapen kernels were the size of rifle cartridges.

"Thank you, Jane," Sylvia said gratefully. "These are mega-nice, I really like these."

"Help yourself," Jane told her. "Can't copyright a living organism! Ha-ha-ha."

Sylvia wrapped the seeds carefully in her silk kerchief and stuffed them, unselfconsciously, into the thigh-high top of her striped stocking.

"JANE, COME OU~ in the street for a second," Alex said, opening the side gate to the front yard.

She followed him. "What are we doing out here?"

"I want to show you my new car."

"Okay. Great."

"I parked it up the street around the corner because I didn't want it associated with your house."

The car was sitting where he had left it. He'd had to pay a stiff fee to the university police to bring it inside the district.