Bruce Sterling - Heavy Weather

"Very good," said April Logan. "Thanks very much for that spectrum of opinion by people who ought to know. Since I have no intention of being here when Dr. Mulcahey's forecast is tested, I'll be taking his advice and leaving Oklahoma immediately. I wish you all the very best of luck." She turned to Jane. "If I can do anything for you, leave E-mail."

"Thanks, April."

"Wait a moment," Carol said aloud. "You don't want to miss the night's entertainment."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Alex is doing something for us, right after the powwow."

Alex. Where was Alex? Jane realized with a guilt-stricken start that she hadn't even missed him.

"Yeah," Rick blurted. "Where is ol' Alex?"

Carol smiled. "Ladies and gentlemen, Alex Unger and his Magic Lariat!"

Alex wandered into the circle of firelight. He was wearing leather chaps and pearl-buttoned shirt and a ten-gallon hat. He'd polished his Mexican boots and put clown white and lipstick on his face.

"Yippee-ti-yi-yo," Peter suggested warily.

Alex whipped the smart rope off his shoulder. He had done something to it, greased it or oiled it somehow; it looked very shiny tonight.

He whipped a little energy into it with a pop of his skinny arm, then sent a big loop of it rotating over his head. His face was stony, perfectly solemn.

The loop hung over him like a halo for a moment, humming with speed. Then he somehow bent the loop sideways and began to jump through it. Not much of a jump really; a feeble hop, so that his bootheels barely cleared the earth; but the loop of smart rope went whizzing past him with impressive buzzing speed, kicking up brief gouts of dirt.

Alex threw the thing a full twenty meters into the air, then sent the loop at its end ricocheting back and forth, over the heads of the crowd. It went hissing through every point of the circle, darting among them like the head of a snake. People whooped and flinched, some of them whacking out at it with their hands.

The lariat loop at the end of the rope suddenly went square: a raggedly revolving square of spinning rope. Then it turned triangular. Then, amazingly, a five-pointed Texas star. It was more than a little odd to see a cowboy's rope behaving in that fashion; it was, Jane thought dizzily, downright outré.

Alex tugged the star inward, toward himself, then bounced it around the circle, stenciling the star across the earth, bouncing it on its points. Alex turned slowly on his heels. The rope passed unharmed through the flames of the campfire.

People began laughing.

Alex waved with his free hand, in acknowledgment, and then began catching and tossing pieces of flaming wood. He lassoed a burning length of cedar from the fire, tossed it high in the air, and caught it with the end of the loop. He flipped the flaming branch end over end, lassoing it repeatedly with unerring, supernatural accuracy. After a moment Jane realized that the trick wasn't that hard; he wasn't actually casting the rope, he was holding the loop up in waiting, then snapping it shut as the stick fell through it. But the effect was so unnaturally fluid and swift that it actually did look magical. It was just as if her little brother had hog-tied the laws of physics. Jane broke into a gale of laughter. It was the funniest thing she had seen in ages, and by far the funniest thing she had ever seen Alex do.

Now, amazingly, Alex somehow hog-tied his own waist and lifted himself up, hanging in midair. He seemed to lift himself by his own bootstraps. He hung there in space, magically hoisted by his own Hindu rope trick, while the wide loops of smart rope spun around on the earth beneath him, like the rim of a wobbling corkscrew.

First he rolled awhile, slowly spinning himself around, like some lost fancy sock in a laundry. Then he began, clumsily, to hop. He'd mutated the smart rope into a spiraled, wiry pogo stick. The Troupers were falling all over themselves with hilarity. Carol was clinging onto Greg's shoulder, so convulsed with laughter that she was hardly able to look. Even Jerry was laughing aloud.

"My word," April Logan commented. "Why, he's rather good!"

"That's Alex!" Jane told her. "He's my-" She stopped. "He's one of our Troupe."

Jane felt a hand on her shoulder. It was Ed Dunnebecke. Ed bent low, beside her right ear. "I didn't know he was this funny, did you?"

"No, I didn't."

"I gotta leave, Jane, I got business tonight, but your little brother can really hack that thing."

"Yeah, Ed, he can, can't he?"

"It's not a real useful hack, I guess, but hell, this is real entertainment! He's got imagination!"

"Thanks, Ed."

"I'm glad you brought him here. Bye, Janey." He patted her shoulder and left.

Alex was holding on to the rope with both hands, with extra loops snaked around his ankles, and he was rolling around the edge of the circle of Troupers, doing a giant cartwheel. Alex went head over heels, head over heels, head over heels, his clown-white face scything along, while the night rang out with whoops and applause.

Then he lost it suddenly, and wobbled, and fell. He fell headlong, and he fell pretty hard. Dust whumped the earth where his booted legs flopped down.

Everyone was silent. Jane heard the fire crackle.

Alex got up again, quickly but shakily. He slapped dust from his fancy shirt, trying gamely to smile. He'd been to town, somehow, into some neowestern clothing store. Probably sneaked off on a bike to Oklahoma City while nobody was paying attention to him.

He said his first words of the evening. "Spinnin' a rope is fun," he shouted raggedly, "if yore neck ain't in it!"

The Troupe broke into howls of laughter.

"Now for my goldurn pièce de résistance," Alex shouted. He began whipping energy into the rope, his dust-smeared pale face set grimly. The rope rose, began to spin, then to spiral inward. Narrow at the bottom. Broader at the top. It spun so fast that the lines of rope became a glimmering blur.

And faster yet. The fire billowed in the wind of its passage. It was sucking up dust from the ground.

A little toy spike.

The whipping rope was blowing hard enough to feel. As the vortex wandered past her at the end of the rope, Jane felt the rush of wind tugging her hair. Then, up at the very top, the end of the smart rope whipped loose, lashing out above their heads with a nasty whip crack of toy thunder. It cracked again, then a third time. The spike spun faster, with a mean dynamo hum. Alex was putting everything into it that the battery could hold. Jane saw him crouching there, flinching away below, wary, at the edge of control, frightened of his own creation.

Then he turned it off. It sagged in midair, and fell over in a heap of loops. A dead thing, dead rope.

The Troupe applauded wildly.

Alex stooped and gathered the dead rope up in both his arms.

"That's all I've got for y'all," he said, bowing. "Thanks a lot for your kindly attention."

The day dawned bilious yellow and veined with blue, like a bad cheese. The jet stream had shifted, and at last, the high was on the move.

Jane and Alex took Charlie west down Highway 40 in pursuit of ground zero. Jane didn't know why Jerry had assigned her Alex as a chase companion, on this critical day of all days. Maybe to teach her some subtle lesson about the inevitable repercussions from an arrogant good deed.

She had anticipated a mean-spirited battle of wills between herself and her brother, but Alex was unusually subdued. He looked genuinely ill-or more likely, doped. It. would have been only too much like Alex, to sneak into Oklahoma City and score some hellish concoction.

But he did as he was told. He took orders, he tried running the cameras, he kept up with the chase reports from camp, he downloaded maps and took notes. She couldn't call him enthusiastic, but he was watchful and careful, and he wasn't making many mistakes. Actually, Alex wasn't any worse as a traveling companion than any other-Trouper. Somehow, despite everything, he'd actually done it. Her brother had become just another Trouper.