Bruce Sterling - Heavy Weather

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, eyes 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.