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,

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Bruce Sterling - Heavy Weather

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