Bruce Sterling - Heavy Weather

Jane, against her own will, looked up. The-dust had thinned, and the sun was higher, and the cirrus looked utterly bizarre. There were hundreds of little growing patches of it now. Shapes just like frost on a windowpane, like patchy mutant snowflakes. The clouds looked like a down feather might look if you shot ten thousand volts through it.

But that wasn't the half of it. The crazy thing was that all the little feather clouds were all exactly the same shape. They weren't the same size. Some were huge, some were tiny. They were pointed in different directions. Not all different directions, mind you-exactly six different directions. And yet hellishly, creepily, the clouds were all identical. A little comma drip on one end, a curved spine with a hook at the other, and hundreds of fine little electrified streamers branching off from both sides.

It looked like a tiling pattern. Like ceramic tiling. The Oklahoma sky was tiled like a bathroom floor.

"Bénard convection does that sometimes," Jane babbled. "The cells have six different axes of rotation and that self-similarity has gotta mean that the cell updraft vectors are all, well..." Words failed her. Words failed her quite suddenly, and really badly. A kind of software crash for language. Words-yeah, even scientific words-there were times and contingencies when reality ripped loose from verbal symbolism and just went its own goddamned way. And this was one of those times.

"What's that big seam growing up the middle?" Alex said.

"I dunno. Get the cameras on it."

"Good idea." Alex put his face into the camera goggles and tilted them upward on the weapons mounts. "Wow."

"That's gotta be the jet stream," Jane said. "The major, polar jet stream that's been hanging north all this time. It's finally moved."

"Janey, I don't know much about the jet stream, but I know the jet stream doesn't bend at that kind of angle."

"Well, it's probably not really bending; it just looks that way from this angle of observation."

"The hell it is. The hell it does. Janey, I can see it through these cameras a hell of a lot better than you can, and whatever that thing is, it's coming down. It's coming down right at us, it's gonna hit the earth."

"Great! Keep recording!"

His voice cracked. "I think we'd better leave this place."

"Hell no! That's it! Of course! Of course, that's what Jerry's been looking for-a permanent source of power for the F-6, and the jet stream is permanent power! It wraps the whole planet, and it's seven kilometers thick and it's fifty degrees below zero and it does two hundred klicks an hour. God, the jet stream, if the jet stream spikes down out of the stratosphere, then it's all gonna add up!" She grabbed for her headset.

"Janey, that thing's going to kill us. We're gonna die here."

"Shut up and keep recording." A remarkably stupid robot truck raced suddenly past them, mangling and crippling dozens of bloodied flopping jackrabbits. The rest of the rabbits exploded off in all directions, like fleas on a hot plate.

"Jane in Charlie here!" she shouted. "We got a massive outbreak! These are the coords . .

She began reading them off, her voice rising.

An avalanche of freezing air fell out of the sky. The stratosphere was ten kilometers up. Even at two hundred klicks an hour, it took the jet stream a good four minutes to fall to earth.

First, the sky cracked open, on a long, furred, spiky seam. Then, maybe ninety seconds down, the vast, thick surge of air hit a warm layer in the upper atmosphere. There was a massive, soundless explosion. Freezing gouts of ice-white cloud blew out in all directions. The clouds touched the sun, and in instants, everything began to darken.

The stream plowed through the spewing clouds like a bullet through an apple, and hit a second thermopause. There was another fantastically powerful explosion. There was still no trace of wind at ground level, but the sound from that first overhead explosion reached the earth then, a cataclysmic roll of thunder that did not vary and did not stop. A cottonwood tree at the side of the road trembled violently, for no visible reason, so violently that it shed all its leaves.

From the second explosion, actual vortices blasted out in every corner of the compass, literal swirls of splitting, freezing, curling air, whirlpool swirls of air as big as towns.

She had one last glimpse up the central core of the falling jet stream. It was clear and cold and vast and lethal. She could see stars through it.

Then the jet stream hit the living earth, maybe three kilometers away. The earth erupted in torment and dozens of vast clotted cobras of filth leaped skyward instantly. Jane jammed her sound-cahcellation earphones over her head then so she did not go deaf, but the sound of the F-6 was something far beyond the Train. It was a sonic weapon pressing through her body and crushing her inside. It was more than sound, it was raw shock, terrible, unendurable, deadly.

She fought with the car then, trying to get Charlie to turn and run. Nothing happened; the machine sat as if stunned. Lightning like no lightning she had ever seen caine out of the erupting columns of dirt. It was dirt lightning, rock lightning. It was thick and crooked and horizontal, and it looked like flying, spinning swastikas. A great flying complex of crooked lightning flew right over their heads, and it broke apart in front of her eyes into gigantic, glowing, sparking chunks.

The car moved. She turned and ran. The day was gone. They were in black hell, instant Gehenna. A hurricane of dirt had spread all over the sky. They were buried alive under a giant spreading plateau of screaming, crackling filth. The air was half-dirt. The maddened earth had forgotten the difference between air and dirt. Dirt and air were going to be the same thing from now on. The black slurry of wind was hanging over them, it was all around them.

And out at the far edge of it-at the very far, spreading edge, where there was still a little squashed and sickly light at the horizon: there were spikes dropping. Spikes, all around them. Dozens of spikes. A corona of spikes, a halo of spikes. F-is, F-2s, F-3s. Kinky spikes. Fat spikes. Spikes as squat as footballs. Spikes that whipped like venom-spitting mambas. Spikes that the F-6 had flung out all around itself in a single gesture, spikes it had conjured up and flung to earth in a moment, a chorus line of devils at the skirts of its Dance of Destruction.

Charlie flew as it had never flown before. They ran east over a darkened road, and the pursuit vehicle's complex wheels scarcely touched the ground. Jane glanced at Alex. He was still looking through the cameras. He was still recording-everything that he could. He had the cameras turned backward and he was looking behind the car.

Then suddenly Alex flung the cameras off his face and he doubled over hard, and he wrapped both arms around his head. Jane wondered for a passing instant what he had seen, and then in the next instant, the car simply became airborne. Charlie was actually flying. No illusion. No simulation. No hallucination. A very simple matter.

They were flying through the air. Maybe ten meters off the road. They were up in the air in an arctic, polar, stratospheric gust of wind that had simply caught the car and plucked it from the earth like a paper cup, and it was bearing them along inside it, like a supersonic torrent of black ice.

Jane felt a chill existential horror as they remained airborne, remained flying, and things began to drift gently and visibly past them. Things? Yes, all kinds of things. Road signs. Bushes. Big crooked pieces of tree. Half-naked chickens. A cow. The cow was alive, that was the strangest thing. The cow was alive and unharmed, and it was a flying cow. She was watching a flying cow. A Holstein. A big, plump, well-looked-after barnyard Holstein, with a smart collar around its neck. The cow looked like it was trying to swim. The cow would thrash its great clumsy legs in the chilly air, and then it would stop for a second, and look puzzled.