Bruce Sterling - Heavy Weather

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Smart machines lurked about the suite, their power lights in the shuttered

dimness like the small red eyes of bats. The machines crouched in inches in

white walls of Mexican stucco: an ionizer, a television, a smoke alarm, a

squad of motion sensors. A vaporizer hissed and bubbled gently in the corner,

emitting a potent reek of oil, ginseng, and eucalyptus.

Alex lay propped on silk-cased pillows, his feet and knees denting the

starched cotton sheets. His flesh felt like wet clay, something greased and

damp and utterly inert. Since morning he had been huffing at the black

neoprene mask of his bedside inhaler, and now his fingertips, gone pale as wax

and lightly trembling, seemed to be melting into the mask. Alex thought

briefly of hanging the mask from its stainless-steel hook at the bedside

medical rack. He rejected the idea. It was too much of a hassle to have the

tasty mask out of reach.

The pain in his lungs and throat had not really gone away. Such a miracle was

perhaps too much to ask, even of a Mexican black-market medical clinic.

Nevertheless, after

two weeks of treatment in the dinica, his pain had assumed a new subtlety. The

scorched inflammation had dwindled to an interestingly novel feeling,

something thin and rather theoretical.

The suite was as chilly as a fishbowl and Alex felt as cozy and as torpid as a

carp. He lay collapsed in semidarkness, cyes blinking grainily, as a deeper

texture of his illness languorously revealed itself. Beneath his starched

sheets, Alex began to feel warm. Then light-headed. Then slightly nauseous, a

customary progression of symptoms. He felt the dark rush build within his

chest.

Then it poured through him. He felt his spine melting. He seemed to percolate

into the mattress.

These spells had been coming more often lately, and with more power behind

them. On the other hand, their dark currents were taking Alex into some

interesting places. Alex, not breathing, swam along pleasantly under the rim

of unconsciousness for a long moment.

Then, without his will, breath came again. His mind broke delirium's surface.

When his eyes reopened, the suite around him seemed intensely surreal.

Crawling walls of white stucco, swirling white stucco ceiling, thick wormy

carpet of chemical aqua blue. Bulbous pottery lamps squatted unlit on

elaborate wicker tables. The chest of drawers, and the bureau, the wooden

bedframe were all marked with the same creepy conspiracy of aqua-blue

octagons. ... Iron-hinged wooden shutters guarded the putty-sealed windows. A

dying tropical houseplant, the gaunt rubber-leafed monster that had become his

most faithful companion here, stood in its terra-cotta pot, gently poisoned by

the constant darkness, and the medicated vaporous damp....

A sharp buzz sounded alongside his bed. Alex twisted his matted head on the

pillow. The machine buzzed again. Then, yet again.

Alex realized with vague surprise that the machine was a telephone. He had

never received any calls on the telephone in his suite. He did not even know

that he had one. The elderly, humble machine had been sitting there among its

fellow machines, much overshadowed.

Alex examined the p hone's antique, poorly designed push-button interface or a

long groggy moment. The phone buzzed again, insistently. He dropped the

inhaler mask and leaned across the bed, with a twist, and a rustle, and a pop,

and a groan. He pressed the tiny button denominated ESPKR.

"Hola," he puffed. His gummy larynx crackled and shrieked, bringing sudden

tears to his eyes.

"~Quien es?" the phone replied.

"Nobody," Alex rasped in English. "Get lost." He wiped at one eye and glared

at the phone. He-had no idea how to hang up.

"Alex!" the p hone said in English. "Is that you?"

Alex blinked. Blood was rushing through his numbed flesh. Beneath the sheet,

his calves and toes began to tingle resentfully.

"I want to speak to Alex Unger!" the phone insisted sharply. "~Dónde estd?"

"Who is this?" Alex said.

"It's Jane! Juanita Unger, your sister!"

"Janey?" Alex said, stunned. "Gosh, is this Christmas? I'm sorry, Janey. . .

"What!" the phone shouted. "It's May the ninth! Jesus, you sound really

trashed!"

"Hey•. . ." Alex said weakly. He'd never known his sister to phone him up,

except at Christmas. There was an ominous silence. Alex blearily studied the

cryptic buttons on the speakerphone. RDIAL, FLAS, PROGMA. No clue how to hang

up.The open ph one line sat there eavesdropping on him, a torment demanding

response. "I'm okay," heprotested at last. "How're you, Janey?"

"Do you even know what year this is?" the phone demanded. "Or where you are?"

"Uinm . . . Sure . . ." Vague guilty panic penetrated his medicated haze.

Getting along with his older sister had never been Alex's strong suit even in

the best of times, and now he felt far too weak and dazed to defend himself.

"Janey, I'm not up for this right now. . . . Lemme call you back.. .

"Don't you dare hang up on me, you little weasel!" the phone shrieked. "What

the hell are they doing to you in there? Do you have any idea what these bills

look like?"

"They're helping me here," Alex said. "I'm in treatment. ... Go away."

"They're a bunch of con-artist quacks! They'll take you for every cent you

have! And then kill you! And bury you in some goddamned toxic waste dump on

the border!"

Juanita's shrill assaultive words swarmed through his head like hornets. Alex

slumped back into his pillow heap and gazed at the slowly turning ceiling fan,

trying to gather his strength. "How'd you find me here?"

"It wasn't easy, that's for sure!"

Alex grunted. "Good . .

"And getting this phone line was no picnic either!"

Alex drew a slow deep breath, relaxed, exhaled. Something viscous gurgled

nastily, deep within him.

"Goddamn it, Alex! You just can't do this! I spent three weeks tracking you

down! Even Dad's people couldn't track you down this time."

"Well, yeah," Alex muttered. "That's why I did it that way.~~

When his sister spoke again, her voice was full of grim resolve. "Get packed,

Alejandro. You're getting out of there."

"Don't bother me. Let me be."

"I'm your sister! Dad's written you off-don't you get that yet? You're grown

up now, and you've hurt him too many times. I'm the only one left who cares."

"Don't be so stupid," Alex croaked wearily. "Take it easy.~~

"I know where you are. And I'm coming to get~ou. And anybody who tries to stop

me-you include -is gonna regret it a lot!"

"You can't do anything," Alex told her. "I signed all the clinic papers . . .

they've got lawyers." He cleared his throat, with a long rasping ache.

Returning to full alertness was far from pleasant; variant parts of his

carcass-up per spine, ankles, sinuses, diaphragm-registered sharp aching

protests and a deep reluctance to function. "I want to sleep," he said. "I

came here to rest."

"You can't kid me, Alejandro! If you want to drop dead, then go ahead! But

don't blow family money on that pack of thieves."

"You're always so goddamned stubborn," Alex said. "You've gone and woke me up

now, and I feel like hell!" He sat up straight. "It's my money, and it's my

life! I'll do whatever I want with it! Go back to art school." He reached

across the bed, grabbed the phone lead, and yanked it free, snapping its

plastic clip.

Alex picked the dead phone up, examined it, then stuffed it securely under the

pillows. His throat hurt. He reached back to the bedside table, dipped his

lingers into a tray of hammered Mexican silver, and came up with a narcotic

lozenge. He unwrapped it and crunched it sweetly between his molars.

Sleep was far away now. His mind was working again, and required numbing. Alex

slid out of the bed onto his hands and knees and searched around on the thick,

plush, ugly carpet. His head swam and pounded with the effort. Alex persisted,

being used to this.

The TV's remote control, with the foxlike cunning of all important inanimate

objects, had gone to earth in a collapsing heap of Mexican true-crime

fotonovelas. Alex noted that his bed's iron springs, after three weeks of

constant humidity, were gently but thoroughly going to rust.

Alex rose to his knees, clutching his prize, and slid with arthritic languor

beneath the sheets again. He caught his breath, blew his nose, neatly placed

two cold drops of medicated saline against the surface of each eyeball, then

began combing the clinic's cable service with minimal twitches of his thumb.

Weepy Mexican melodramas. A word-game show. Kids chasing robot dinosaurs in

some massive underground mall. The ever-present Thai pop music.

And some English-language happytalk news. Spanish happytalk news. Japanese

happytalk news. Alex, born in 20 10, had watched the news grow steadily more

and cheerful for all of his twenty-one years. As a m~ he'd witnessed hundreds

of hours of raw

footage: plagues, mass death, desperate riot, unsanitary wreckage, all against

a panicky backdrop of ominous and unrelenting environmental decline. All that

stuff was still out there, just as every aspect of modern reality had its

mirrored shadow in the Net somewhere, but nowadays you had to hunt hard to

find it, and the people discussing it didn't seem to have much in the way of

budgets. Somewhere along the line, the entire global village had slipped into

neurotic denial.

Today, as an adult, Alex found the glass pipelines of the Net chockablock with

jet-set glamour weddings and cute dog stories. Perky heroines and square-jawed

heroes were still, somehow, getting rich quick. Starlets won lotteries and

lottery winners became starlets. Little children, with their heads sealed in

virtuality helmets, mimed delighted surprise as they waved their tiny gloved

hands at enormous hallucinations. Alex had never been that big a fan of

current events anyway, but he had now come to feel that the world's cheerful

shiny-toothed bullshitters were the primal source of all true evil.

Alex collided and stuck in a Mexican docudrama about UFOs; they were known as

los OVNIS in Spanish, and on 9 de mayo, 2031, a large fraction of the Latin

American populace seemed afflicted with spectacular attacks of ozmimania. Long

minutes of Alex's life seeped idly away as the screen pumped images at him:

monster fireballs by night, puffball-headed dwarfs in jumpsuits of silver

lame, and a video prophecy from some interstellar Virgen de Guadalupe with her

owll Internet address and a toll-free phone number.

The day nurse tapped at the door and bustled in. The day nurse was named

Concepcibn. She was a hefty, nononsense, fortyish individual with a taste for

liposuction, face-lifts, and breast augmentation.

"~Ya le hicieron Ia prueba de Ia sattgre?" she said.

Alex turned off the television. "The blood test? Yeah, I had one this

morning."

"~Le duele todcwia el ped.~o como anoche?"

"Pretty bad last night," Alex admitted. "Lots better, though, since I started

using the mask."

"Un catarro atroz, complicado con una alergia," Concepción sympathized.

"No problem with pain, at least," Alex said. "I'm getting the best of

treatment."

Concepciôn sighed and gestured him up. "Todavi~ no acabamos, muchacho, le

falta la enema de los pulmones."

"A lung enema?" Alex said, puzzled.

"Today? Right now? ~Ahora?"

She nodded.

"Do I have to?"

Concepciôn looked stern. "jEl doctor Mirabi Ia recetd! Fue muy claro. 'Cuidado

con una pulmonia.' El nuevo tipo de pulmonia es peor que eI SIDA, ban muerto

ya centenares de personas.

"Okay, okay," Alex said. "Sure, no problem. I'm doing lots better lately,

though. I don't even need the chair."

Concepción nodded and helped him out of bed, shoving her solid shoulder under

his armpit. The two of them made it out the door of the suite and a good ten

meters down the carpeted hall before Alex's knees buckled. The wheelchair, a

machine of limited but highly specialized intelligence, was right behind Alex

as he stumbled. He gave up the struggle gracefully and sat within the

chrome-and-leather machine.

Concepciôn left Alex in the treatment room to wait for Dr. Mirabi. Alex was

quite sure that Dr. Mirabi was doing nothing of consequence. Having Alex wait

alone in a closed room was simply medical etiquette, a way to establish whose

time was more important. Though Dr. Mirabi's employees were kept on the

hustle-especially the hardworking retail pharmacists-Dr. Mirabi himself hardly

seemed oppressed by his duties. As far as Alex could deduce from the staff

schedules, there were only four long-

patients in the whole clinica. Alex was pretty sure

most of the clinica's income came from yanquis on

•down from Laredo. Before he himself had ~ckecfin last April, he'd seen a

line of Americans halfway wn the block, eagerly picking up Mexican megadosage

~strums for the new ultraresistant strains of Th.

Dr. Mirabi's treatment room was long and rectangular and full of tall

canvas-shrouded machinery. Like every place else in the clinica, it was

air-conditioned to a deathly chill, and smelled of sharp and potent

disinfectant. Alex wished that he had thought to snag a fotonovela on the way

out of his room. Alex pretended distaste for the nave-las' clumsy and

violence-soaked porn, but their comically distorted gutter-level Spanish was

of a lot of philological interest.

Concepción opened the door and stepped in. Behind her, Dr. Mirabi arrived, his

ever-present notepad in hand. Despite his vaguely Islamic surname, Alex

suspected strongly that Dr. Mirabi was, in fact, Hungarian.

Dr. Mirabi tapped the glass face of his notepad with a neat black stylus and

examined the result. "Well, Alex," he said briskly in accented English, "we

seem to have defeated that dirty streptococcus once and for all."

"That's right," Alex said. "Haven't had a night sweat in ages."

"That's quite a good step, quite good," Dr. Mirabi encouraged. "Of course,

that infection was only the crisis symptom of your syndrome. The next stage of

your cure"

-he examined the notepad-"is the chronic mucus congestion! We must deal with

that chronic mucus, Alex. It might have been protective mucus at first, but

now is your metabolic burden. Once the chronic mucus is gone, and the

tubercles are entirely cleansed-cleaned . . ." He paused. "Is it 'cleaned,' or

'cleansed'?"

"Either one works," Alex said.

"Thank you," the doctor said. "Once the chronic mucu~ is scrubbed away from

the lung surfaces, then we can treat the membranes directly. There is membrane

damage in your lungs, of course, deep cellular damage, but we cannot get to

the damaged surfaces until the mucus is removed." He looked at Alex seriously,

over his glasses. "Your chronic mucus is full of many contaminations, you

know' Years of bad gases and particles you have inhaled. Environmental

pollutions, allergic pollens, smoke particles, virus, and bacteria. They have

all adhered to the chronic mucus. When your lungs are scrubbed clean with

the enema, the lungs will be as the lungs of a newborn child!" He smiled.

Alex nodded silently.

"It won't be pleasant at first, but afterward you will feel quite lovely."

"Do you have to knock me Out again?" Alex said.

"No, Alex. It's important that you breathe properly during the procedure. The

detergent has to reach the very bottom of the lungs. You understand?" He

paused, tapping his notepad. "Are you a good swimmer, Alex?"

"No," Alex said.

"Then you know that sensation when you swallow water down the wrong pipe,"

said the doctor, nodding triumphantly. "That choking reflex. You see, Alex,

the reason Mother Nature makes you choke on water, is because there is no

proper oxygen in water for your lungs. The enema liquid, though, which will be

filling your lungs, is not water, Alex. It is a dense silicone fluid. It

carries much oxygen dissolved inside it, plenty of oxygen." Dr. Mirabi

chuckled. "If you lie still without breathing, you can live half an hour on

the oxygen in a single lungful of enema fluid! It has so much oxygen that at

first you will feel hyperventilated."

"I have to inhale this stuff somehow, is that it?"

"Not quite. It's too dense to be inhaled. In any case, we don't want it to

enter your sinuses." He frowned. "We have to decant the fluid into your lungs,

gently."

"I see."

"We fit a thin tube through your mouth and down past the epiglottis. The end

of the tube will have a local anesthetic, so you should not feel the pain in

the epiglottis very long.... You must remain quite still during the procedure,

try to relax fully, and breathe only on my order."

Alex nodded.

"The sensations are very unusual, but they are not dangerous. You must make up

your mind to accept the procedure. If you choke up the fluid, then we have to

begin again."

"Doctor," Alex said, "you don't have to go on pet.~ suading me. I'm not

afraid. You can trust me. I don't stop.

I never stop. If I stopped at things, I wouldn't be here now, would I?"

"There will be some discomfort."

"That's not new. I'm not afraid of that, either."

"Very well, Alex." Dr. Mirabi patted Alex's shoulder. "Then we will begin.

Take your place on the manipulation table, please."

Concepciôn helped Alex to lie on the jointed leather table. She touched her

foot to a floor pedal. A worm gear whined beneath the floor. The table bent at

Alex's hips and rose beneath his back, to a sharp angle. Alex coughed twice.

Dr. Mirabi drew on a pair of translucent gloves, deftly unwrapped one of his

canvas-bound machines, and busied himself at the switches. He opened a

cabinet, retrieved a pair of matched, bright yellow aerosol tanks, and

inserted both tanks into sockets at the top of the machine. He attached clear

plastic tubing to the taps on the tanks and opened both the taps, with brief

pneumatic hisses. The machine hummed and sizzled a bit and gave off a hot waft

of electrical resistance.

"We will set the liquid to blood heat," Dr. Mirabi explained. "That way there

is no thermal shock to the tuberdes. Also heat will dissolve the chronic mucus

more effectively. Efficiently? Is it 'efficiently' or 'effectively'?"

"They're synonyms," Alex said. "Do you think I might throw up? These are my

favorite pajamas."

Concepción stripped the pajamas off, then wrapped him briskly in a paper

medical gown. She strapped him against the table with a pair of fabric belts.

Dr. Mirabi approached him with the soft plastic nozzle of the insert, smeared

with a pink paste. "Open widely, don't taste the anesthetic," he warned. Alex

nevertheless got a generous smear of the paste against the root of his tongue,

which immediately went as numb as a severed beef tongue on a butcher's block.

The nozzle slid its way down a narrow road of pain along his throat. Alex felt

the fleshy valve within his chest leap and flap as the tube touched and

penetrated. Then the numbness struck, and a great core of meat behind his

heart simply lost sensation, went into nothingness, like a core mechanically

punched from an apple.

His eyes filled with tears. He heard, more than saw, Dr. Mirabi touching taps.

Then the heat came.

He'd never known that blood was so hot. The fluid was hotter than blood, and

much, much heavier, like fizzing, creamy, molten lead. He could see the fluid

moving into him through the tube. It was chemical-colored, aqua blue.

"Breathe!" Dr. Mirabi shouted.

Alex heaved for air. A bizarre reverberating belch tore free from the back of

his throat, something like the cry of a monster bullfrog. For an instant he

tried to laugh; his diaphragm heaved futilely at the liquid weight within him,

and went still.

"El nina tiene un bulto en la garganta," said Concepcion, conversationally.

She placed her latex-gloved hand against his forehead. "Muy doloroso."

"Poco a poco," Dr. Mirabi said, gesturing. The worm gear rustled beneath the

table and Alex rose in place, liquid shifting within him with the gut-bulging

inertia of a nine-course meal. Air popped in bursts from his clamped lips and

a hot gummy froth rose against his upper palate.

"Good," said Dr. Mirabi. "Breathe!"

Alex tried again, his eyes bulging. His spine popped audibly and he felt

another pair of great loathsome bubbles come up, stinking ancient bubbles like

something from the bottom of LaBrea.

Then suddenly the oxygen hit his brain. An orgasmic blush ran up his neck, his

cheeks. For a supreme moment he forgot what it was to be sick. He felt lovely.

He felt free. He felt without constraint. He felt pretty sure that he was

about to die.

He tried to speak, to babble something-gratitude perhaps, or last words, or an

eager yell for more-but there -was only silence. His lungs were like two casts

of and bonemeal, each filled to brimming with hot ber. His muscles heaved

against the taut liquid bags two fists clenching two tennis balls, and his

ears road and things went black. Suddenly he could hear his straining to beat,

thud-thud, thud-thud, each coau

shock of the ventricles passing through his liquid-filled lungs with booming

subaqueous clarity.

And then the beat stopped too.

ON THE EVENING of May 10, Jane Unger made a reconnaissance of her target, on

the pretext of buying heroin. She spent half an hour in line outside the

clinic with desolate, wheezing Yankees from over the border. The customers

lined outside the clinic were the seediest, creepiest, most desperate people

she'd ever seen who were not actual criminals. Jane was familiar with the look

of actual criminals, because the vast network of former Texas prisons had been

emptied of felons and retrofitted as medical quarantine centers and emergency

weather shelters. The former inhabitants of the Texan gulag, the actual

criminals, were confined by software nowadays. Convicted criminals, in their

tamper-proof parole cuffs, couldn't make it down to Nuevo Laredo, because

they'd be marooned on the far side of the Rio Grande by their 6overnment

tracking software. Nobody in the clinic line wore a parole cuff. But they were

clearly the kind of people who had many good friends wearing them.

All of the American customers, without exception, wore sinister breathing

masks. Presumably to avoid contracting an infection. Or to avoid spreading an

infection that they already had. Or probably just to conceal their identities

while they bought drugs.

The older customers wore plain ribbed breathing masks in antiseptic medical

white. The younger folks were into elaborate knobby strap-ons with vivid

designer colors.

The line of Americans snaked along steadily, helped by the presence of a pair

of Mexican cops, who kept the local street hustlers off the backs of the

paying clientele. Jane patiently made her way up the clinic steps, through the

double doors, and to the barred and bulletproof glass of the pharmacy windows.

There Jane discovered that the clinic didn't sell any "brown Mexican heroin."

Apparently they had no "heroin" at all in stock, there being little demand for

this

legendary substance among people with respiratory illnesses.

Jane slid a private-currency card through the slit beneath the window. The

pharmacist swiped Jane's card through a reader, studied the results on the

network link, and began to show real interest. Jane was politely abstracted

from the line and introduced to the pharmacist's superior, who escorted her up

to his office. There he showed her a vial of a more modern analgesic, a

designer endorphin a thousand times more potent than morphine. Jane turned

down his offer of a free trial injection.

When Jane haltingly brought up the subject of bribery, the supervisor's face

clouded. He called a big pnvatesecurity thug, and Jane was shown out the

clinic's back entrance, and told not to return.

Keep It Simple, Stupid. The famous KISS acronym had always been Jane's

favorite design principle. If you need access, keep it simple. Bribing the

staff of the clinic sounded like the simplest solution to her problem. But it

wasn't.

At least one of the staff seemed happy enough to take her bribe money. Over a

long-distance phone line from Texas, Jane had managed to subvert the clinic's

receptionist. The receptionist was delighted to take Jane's electronic funds

in exchange for ten minutes' free run on the clinic's internal phone system.

And accessing the clinic's floor plans had been pretty simple too; they'd

turned out to be Mexican public records. It had been useful, too, to sneak

into the building under the simple pretext of a drug buy. That had con-finned

Jane's ideas of the clinic's internal layout.

Nothing about Alex was ever simple, though. Having talked to her brother on

the phone, Jane now knew that Alex, who should have been her ally inside the

enemy gates, was, as usual, worse than useless.

Carol and Greg-Jane's favorite confidants within the

Storm Troupe-had urged her to stay as simple as possible.

Forget any romantic ninja break-and-enter muscle stuff.

That kind of stunt hardly ever worked, even when the U.S.

Army tried it. It was smarter just to show up in Nuevo

Laredo in person, whip out a nicely untraceable

debit card, and tell the night guard that it was ~iejanaro Unger out the door,

or No bay dinero. Chances were that the guard would spring Alex in exchange

for, say, three months' salary, local rates. Everybody could pretend later

that the kid had escaped the building under his own power. That scheme was

nice and straightforward. It was pretty hard to prosecute criminally. And if

it ended up in a complete collapse and debacle and embarrassment, then it

would look a lot better, later.

By stark contrast, breaking into a Mexican black-market clinic and kidnapping

a patient was the sort of overly complex maneuver that almost never looked

better later.

There'd been a time in Jane Unger's life when she'd cared a lot about "later."

But that time was gone, and "later" had lost all its charm. She had traveled

twelve hundred kilometers in a day, and now she was on foot, alone, in a dark

alley at night in a foreign country, preparing to assault a hospital

single-handed. And unless they caught her on. the spot, she was pretty sure

that she was going to get away with it.

This was an area of Nuevo Laredo the locals aptly called "Salsipuedes," or

"Leave-if-you-can." Besides Alex's slick but modest clinic, it had two other

thriving private hospitals stuffed with gullible gnngos, as well as a monster

public hospital, a big septic killing zone very poorly managed by the remains

of the Mexican government. Jane watched a beat-up robot truck rumble past,

marked with a peeling red cross. Then she watched her hands trembling. Her

unpainted fingertips were ivory pale and full of nervous jitter. Just like the

jitter she had before a storm chase. Jane was glad to see that jitter, the

fear and the energy racing along her nerves. She knew that the jitter would

melt off like dry ice once the action started. She had learned that about

herself in the past year. It was a good thing to know.

Jane made a final check of her equipment. Glue gun, jigsaw, penlight, cdlular

phone, ceramic crowbar-all hooked and holstered to her webbing belt, hidden

inside baggy paper refugee Suit. Equipment check was a calm-ritual. She zipped

the paper suit up to the neck, over

icr denim shorts and cotton T-shirt. She strapped on a plain white antiseptic

mask.

Then she cut off the clinic's electrical power.

Thermite sizzled briefly on the power pole overhead, and half the city block

went dark. Jane swore briefly inside her mask. Clearly there had been some

changes made lately in the Nuevo Laredo municipal power grid. Jane Unger's

first terrorist structure hit had turned Out to be less than surgical.

"Not my fault," she muttered. Mexican power engineers were always hacking

around; and people stole city power too, all kinds of illegal network linkups

around here. . . . They called the hookups diablitos, "little devils," another

pretty apt name, considering that the world was well on its way to hell. . . .

Anyway, it wouldn't kill them to repair one little outage.

Greg's thermite bomb had really worked. Every other week or so, Greg would

drop macho hints about his military background doing structure hits. Jane had

never quite believed him, before this.

Jane tied a pair of paper decontamination covers over her trail boots. She

cinched and knotted the boot covers tightly at the ankles, then ghosted across

the blacked-out street, puddles gleaming damply underfoot. She stepped up

three stone stairs, entered the now pitch-black akove at the clinic's rear

exit, and checked the street behind her. No cars, no people, no visible

witnesses... . Jane pulled a translucent rain hood over her head, cinched and

knotted it. Then she peeled open a paper pack and pulled on a pair of tough

plastic surgical gloves.

She slapped the steel doorframc with the flat of her hand.

The clinic's door opened with a shudder.

Jane had structure-hit the door earlier, on her way out of the clinic. She'd

distracted her security escort for two vital seconds and craftily jammed the

exit's elaborate keypad lock with a quick, secret gush of glue. Jane had

palmed the aerosol glue can, a tiny thing not much bigger than a shotgun

cartridge. Glue spray was one of Carol's favorite tricks, something Carol had

taught her. Carol could do things with glue spray that were halfway to

witchcraft.

Despite the power outage, the door's keypad lock was still alive on its

battery backup-but the door mistakenly thought it was working. Smart machines

were smart enough to make some really dumb blunders.

Jane closed the door gently behind her. It was chilly inside the building,

pitch-black and silent and sepulchral. A good thing, because she'd immediately

begun to sweat like crazy in the stifling gloves, hood, overalls, mask, and

boots. Her armpits prickled with terror sweat as if she were being tattooed

there. Cops-or worse yet, private-industry investigators-could do plenty with

the tiniest bits of evidence these days. Fingerprints, sboeprints, stray

hairs, a speck of clothing fiber, one lousy wisp of

DNA...

Jane reached inside her paper suit through a slit behind its hip pocket. She

unclipped the penlight from her webbing belt. The little light clicked

faithfully under her thumb and a reddish glow lit the hail. Jane took a step

down the hall, two, three, and then the fear left her completely, and she

began to glide across the ceramic tiling, skid-dancing in her damp paper boot

covers.

She hadn't expected burglary to be such a visceral thrill. She'd been inside

plenty of ruined buildings-just like everyone else from her generation-but

she'd never broken her way into a live one. A rush of wicked pleasure touched

her like a long cold kiss on the back of the neck.

Jane tried the first door to her left. The knob slid beneath her latexed

fingers-locked. Jane had a handheld power jigsaw on the webbing belt that

would slice through interior door locks like a knife through a wedding cake,

and for a moment her left hand worked inside the paper suit and she touched

the jigsaw's lovely checkered rubber grip. But she stopped. She wisely

resisted the urge to break into the room just for the thrill of it. Would they

be locking Alex into a room at night? Not likely. Not night-owl Alex.

Stubborn, mean-tempered, night-owl Alex. Even at death's. < door, Alex

wouldn't put up with that.

Next door. Unlocked. Room empty.

Next door. It was unlocked too. Some kind of janitor's supply, rags and jugs

and paper. A good place to start a diversionary fire if you needed to.

Next door. Unlocked. The room stank. Like cough medicine cut with absinthe.

Little red-eyed machines on the walls and floor, still alive on their battery

backup. Jane's dim red light played over a big empty bed, then on a startling

knot of hideous shadow-some kind of half-wilted monster houseplant.

She hadn't found her brother yet, but she could sense his presence. She

slipped through the door, closed it gently, leaned her back against it. The

reek in the room pried at her sinuses like the bouquet off a shot of cheap

whiskey. Jane held her breath, playing the penlight around. A television. Some

kind of huge clothes hanger like an outsized trouser press. .. a wardrobe. . .

scattered tape cassettes and paper magazines

Something was dripping. Thick oily dripping, down at floor level. It was

coming from the big trouser-press contraption. Jane stepped toward the machine

and played her light across the floor. Some kind of bedpan there.

Jane half knelt. It was a white ceramic pot, half-full of a dark nasty liquid,

some kind of dense chemical oil. Grainy stuff like fine coffee grounds had

sunk to the bottom, with a nasty white organic scum threading the top, just

like a

vile egg-drop soup .. . As Jane watched, a sudden thin -drool of the stuff

plummeted into the pot.

Her light went up. It discovered two racks of white human teeth. A human mouth

there, with tight-drawn white lips and a stiff blue tongue. The head was

swaddled in bandages, a thick padded strap at the forehead. Some kind of soft

rubber harness bar was jammed into the gaping jaws. .

They had him strapped to a rack, head down. Both his shoulders strapped, both

his wrists cuffed at his sides, his chest strapped down against the padded

surface. His knees were bound, his ankles cuffed. The whole rack was tilted

skyward on a set of chromed springs and hinges. Up at the very top, his pale

bare feet were like two skinned animals. Down at the bottom, his

strap-swaddled head was just above the floor.

They were draining him.

Jane took two quick steps back and slapped her plastic-gloved hand against the

mask at her mouth.

She fought the fear for a moment and she crushed it. And then she fought the

disgust, and she crushed that too.

Jane stepped back to the rack, deliberately, and put her gloved hand at the

side of Alex's neck. It was fever-hot and slick with his sweat.

He was alive.

Jane examined the rack for a while, her eyes narrowing hotly. The fear and

disgust were gone now, but she couldn't stop her sudden hot surge of hatred.

This was probably a fairly easy machine to manage, for the sons of bitches who

were used to using it. Jane didn't have time to learn.

She undid the stop locks on the casters at the bottom, shoved the whole

contraption to the side of the big bed, and toppled it, and Alex, onto the

mattress, with one strong angry heave.

The straps on his chest were easy. Just Velcro. The padded latches on his

wrists and ankles were harder: elaborate bad-design flip-top lock-down

nonsense. Jane yanked her jigsaw and went through all four of the evil things

in ten seconds each. There was bad noise-a whine and a muted chatter-with a

sharp stench of chewed and molten plastic. Not too much noise, really, but it

sounded pretty damned loud inside a blacked-out building. Someone might come

to investigate. Jane patted the glue pistol in its holster at the back of her

webbing belt.

When the last strap went, Alex tumbled off the rack into her lap. She rolled

her brother faceup and checked his eyeballs. Cold, cold as a mackerel, even

while his fevered skin was as hot as the shaved hide of a lab rabbit

She'd have to carry him out.

Well, Alex had been pretty easy to carry the last time she had tried it. When

he'd been five years old, and she'd been ten. Jane knelt on the bed and

methodically clipped her jigsaw back onto her belt, inside her paper Suit. And

then she thought somberly about the strength that it would take to do this

thing.

Jane rolled off the bed onto her feet, grabbed her brother by both his slender

wrists, and heaved.

He slid across the sheets like an empty husk. Jane jammed her left shoulder

under his midriff and hoisted him in a fireman's carry, flinging her left arm

across the backs of his knees. . . . The moment she had him up, she realized

that she was strong enough-more than strong enough. There was nothing left of

her brother but birdbone and gristle.

Fluid gurgled loudly out of him and spattered the backs -of her legs.

Jane staggered through the door and into the hail. She heard footsteps

overhead, somewhere up on the second floor, and a distant mutter of puzzled

voices. .. . She lurched down the hall toward the exit and pulled the jimmied

door open, right-handed. Her brother's lolling head cracked against the jamb

as she stumbled through.

She pulled the door shut behind her, then sank to her knees on the cool

pavement of the alcove. Alex sprawled bonelessly over her in his backless

medical gown. She slid Alex aside onto the chill stone paving.

Breathing hard, Jane felt at the webbing belt and yanked out her cellular

phone. She pushed little glowing yellow numbers with her thumb.

"Hello," her car recited cheerfully. "I am Storm Pursuit Vehicle Charlie.

There's no one aboard me right now, but if you have an ID, you can give me

verbal orders. Other-. wise, leave a message at the beep."

Jane pressed the digits 56#033.

"Hello, Juanita," the car replied.

"Come get me," Jane panted. "You know where. Come quick."

SHE'D FORGO1TEN HOW fast Charlie could move when there were no human beings

aboard it. Freed from the burden of protecting human flesh from g-forces. the

robot car moved e a demented flea.

Charlie landed on the street in front of her with a sharp hiss of pneumatics,

at the far end of a twenty-meter leap. It then began noisily walking sideways,

up and across the pavement.

"Stop walking sideways," Jane ordered it. "Open your doors." She braced

herself against the wall of the alcove, squat-lifted Alex onto her unused and

un-aching right shoulder, and made it down the stairs. "Turn around," she

puffed.

Charlie spun around with microprocessed precision, its pistoned wheel spokes

wriggling.

Jane heaved and shoved her brother into the passenger seat, closed the door,

and stepped back, panting. Her knees trembled so badlythats ettootiredtowalk.

"Turn around again!" she ordered. Charlie spun neatly in place, on the damp

and darkened street. Jane clambered shakily into the driver's seat. "Go fast!"

"Not until you're strapped in."

"All right, go at a conventional pace while I am strapping us in," Jane

grated. "And stop using Jerry's verbal interface at me."

"I have to use Jerry's verbal interface when I'm out of range of the Troupe's

uplink and in conventional mode," the car said, rolling daintily down the

street.

Jane struggled to strap her unresisting brother into the vehide harness. His

blond head lolled like a daisy at the end of a stalk and his floppy arms were

like two bags of wax. It was just too cramped inside the car, no use.

Jane lurched back into her own seat, frustrated. "Well, can you run my

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