Sterling, Bruce - Heavy Weather
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2024-11-30
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141 页
5.9玖币
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file:///G|/rah/Bruce%20Sterling%20-%20Heavy%20Weather.txt
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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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