Bruce Sterling - Heavy Weather

And then there was the last guy. He was wearing a khaki T-shirt and cutoff fatigue pants and running shoes, and he had a beat-up cloth fatigue cap and a nasty-looking, well-worn rifle across his back.

This last guy was black. He had a mess of kinky buffalo-soldier locks. Jane never put much emphasis on skin color. ~-People who made fine ethnic distinctions always smacked of weird ethnic race-war craziness to her, and considering her own ethnic background, Jane figured she had a right to be a little nervous about that kind of hairsplitting attitude. Carol was black, and nobody much noticed or cared. Rudy Martinez looked kinda like some grandparent of his might have been black. But this Ranger guy was really black, like inhumanly satin black. Sometimes people did odd chemical things to their skin nowadays. Especially if they spent a lot of time out in the open sun, and thought a lot about ozone damage.

Jerry came out of the command yurt to greet the Rangers, flanked by Greg and Joe Brasseur, trailed by a reluctant, shuffling Alex. Jerry had thrown off his usual ratty paper suit and was wearing clean slacks and a decent buttoned shirt and a white coat. Joe Brasseur had a shirt and a tie and glasses, and was carrying a clipboard and looking very lawyerly. Greg looked pretty much like Greg always did: jeans, army shirt, shades, muscle. Alex was in his new shirt and brown jeans and looked like he wished he was on some other continent.

The men gathered around the Ranger prowl cars and started muttering deep in their chests. This was another thing Jane didn't like about Rangers. They were unbelievably chauvinist. Jane knew that a few Texan policewomen had joined the Rangers decades back, but when the Rangers had started routinely shooting people in large numbers again, the whole sex-integration thin a suddenly evaporated. It was as dead as drug-law enforcement and racial integration and universal health care and other perished niceties of the period. There were no women in combat positions in the Texas Rangers, or the state National Guard units, or the U.S. Army for that matter. And the men in these little all-male enclaves of violence were more than a little obnoxious about it.

Alex submitted to Captain Gault's brief interrogation and then left in a hurry, with relief all over his face.

The extremely black guy noticed Jane watching from the sidelines. He dogtrotted over to her, grinning. "Got any water? Got any salt?"

"Sure, Officer." Jane called Ellen Mae on the phone.

The black Ranger nodded peaceably, dipped into the baggy pockets of his cutoffs, and began to hand-roll a marijuana cigarette. The guy's shins and forearms were chicken-scratched with fine scars. He had a big scarred crater in the side of his neck that Jane could have put the end of her thumb into.

"I'm not sure a law enforcement officer on duty ought to be smoking marijuana," Jane said.

The Ranger flicked a wooden match with his callused thumbnail, lit the joint, and inhaled sharply. "Get a life," he suggested.

Young Jeff Lowe appeared on the trot from the kitchen yurt, with a canteen and an antiseptic paper cup, two salt tablets, and a couple strips of jerky. He handed them shyly to the Ranger.

"Are you smoking dope?" Jeff said, wide-eyed.

"I got glaucoma," the Ranger offered. He bolted the salt pills, knocked back three cups of water, took a last long huff off his joint, then stomped it out and began hungrily gnawing the jerky.

"Good jerky," he said, mouth full. "You don't meet many folks these days who can really cure a deer." He began sidling back toward his vehicle.

"Wait a sec," Jane said. "Please."

The Ranger raised his brows.

"What's it all about?"

"Livestock smugglers," the Ranger told her. "They got those pharm goats hot-wired to do all kinds of weird shit nowadays.....un 'em up backroads by night, mix ~em up with meat goats, and you can't tell no difference without a DNA scan.... That was a pretty tough outfit you met, we been watchin' out for 'em awhile, y'all was lucky."

"What kind of 'weird shit' do you get from illegal goats?" Jeff asked.

"Plastic explosive, for one thing. Strain it out of the milk, make cheese out of it, put a fuse in it, and structure-hit the hell right out of anything."

"Explosive goat's milk," Jane said slowly.

"You're kidding, right?" Jeff said.

The Ranger smiled broadly. "Yeah, folks, I'm kidding, sorry.

Jane stared at him. The Ranger stared back. There was no expression in his reflective shades. "What are you gonna do now?" Jane said.

"Find the contact point, I'll track 'em through the brush.... We'll catch 'em by morning. Maybe noon. Cap'n Gault likes to go by the book, he'll give 'em a chance to throw down their guns and come quiet. Thanks for the water, ma'am. Y'all take care now." The Ranger trotted off.

Jeff waited until the Ranger was out of earshot. Then he spoke with hushed amazement and respect. "Janey, they're gonna kill them all."

"Yeah," Jane said. "I know."

VIOLENT, DEADLY STORMS broke Out in profusion in the last two weeks of May 2031. Unfortunately they were in Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, and Arkansas. A minor front swept Tornado Alley on May 27, ardently pursued by the Troupe, but it yielded no spikes.

Statistically, this was not unusual. However, the statistics themselves had become pretty damned unusual as the century had progressed. Before heavy weather, there had been about nine hundred tornadoes every year in the United States. Nowadays, there were about four thousand. Before heavy weather, a year's worth of tornadoes killed about a hundred people and caused about $200 million (constant 1975 dollars) in damage. Now, despite vastly better warning systems, tornadoes killed about a thousand people a year, and the damage was impossible to estimate accurately because the basic economic nature of both "value" and "currency" had gone nonlinear.

Tornadoes were, for obvious reasons, easier to find nowadays. But most storms, even violent storms with good indicators, never spawned tornadoes. Many hunts were simply bound to turn up dry, even with excellent weather monitoring and rapid all-terrain deployment. And even the much-ravaged Texas-Oklahoma Tornado Alley, the planet's premier spawning ground for twisters, had to get some peace and quiet sometimes.

The dry spell visibly affected the Troupe's morale. Alex saw that they were still on their best behavior around Mulcahey, but Mulcahey himself became withdrawn, wrapping himself in marathon simulation sessions. The Troupe got bored, then petulant. Carol and Greg, whose relationship seemed unstable at the best of times, started openly sniping at one another. Peter and Rick took a motorcycle and sidecar into Amarillo "to get laid," and came back hung over and beaten up. Rudy Martinez went to San Antonio for a week to visit his ex-wife and his kids. Martha and Buzzard, who found one another physically repulsive but couldn't seem to let one another alone, got into a mean, extensive quarrel over minor damage to one of the ultralights. And Juanita spent a lot of her time tearing around uselessly in the dune buggy, ostensibly to give its new, improved interface a shakedown, but more, Alex suspected, for the sake of her own nerves than anything to do with the car.

The High Plains down around Big Spring and Odessa had gotten generous rains this year, but the Troupe had since moved far north, near Palo Duro Canyon. Up here, the grasslands had gotten a good start for spring and then stalled. The unnatural lushness of greenhouse rain had faded to the windy dryness once more natural to the Texas Panhandle, and the supercharged vegetation started to hesitate and shut down. It didn't wither exactly-stuff like hairy grama, elbowbush, and buffalo grass was way too tough and mean-spirited to do anything as sissy as "withering"-but it got yellow and tight and sere and spiky. And up in the Oklahoma Panhandle, it hadn't rained since late March.