Mark de Silva - Square Wave

“You’ve got a lot left to fill in, don’t you. It sounds like nothing.”

“It’s not me, actually. But as far as I know it’s finished. Polished nothing.”

“You’ll do better.”

“Oh, I don’t know. It memorializes 9/11. It’s very deep. I slept to it last night.”

“So when is this concert of yours?” Menar asked. “I told Dad about it. He just stared at me.”

“Saturday.” He unplugged the guitar and strummed the strings he was choking with his other hand.

“After the show, Ravan, can’t you use a break? From all this industriousness. Dad would like to see you. So would this little one.” Menar resettled the boy on his lap. For a moment the baby’s eyes, the bridge of his nose, took up the entire screen. He’d lunged over the keyboard. Menar pulled him back and the giant became a child again.

“The storm is coming in,” Ravan said. “I’m pretty sure the lab will want me here.”

“They will. But I can put in a call to your boss. You owe it to yourself to come back this way. The family hasn’t seen you in a while, not all at once. You can sift data for them so long as you’re on the network. The seeding missiles are what count. They’re all marked. The ones with gold decals should go to the naval platforms, the Coast Guard.”

“I know.”

“The gold ones are calibrated for your storm, the colder air. The other seeders are standard, but can be added if necessary, or used later in trials.”

“Good, good, yes.” Ravan wasn’t looking at the screen anymore but the fingers he was forming chords with now.

“So…”

“So…” Ravan didn’t look up.

“You know,” Menar said, “I was thinking just today how tricky it all is, really.”

“What.”

“Preparing these rockets.”

“Hm.”

“Do you appreciate that? Probably that’s what you don’t quite grasp. You’ve been too busy with this music to notice.”

Ravan let go of the guitar and let it swing from the strap around his neck. “Actually I know quite—”

“You know a lot, yes. But not as much as you should. The hundreds of steps we take each of the seeders through, the treatment of the antimony at the core of the formula. You see, beyond the allotropic phases, the cooling and heating, there are all the isotopes. Some are more useful than others. Most are benign. But if the starting materials are off just a little, or if we overtreat them a fraction, a couple of kinds of radioisotopes appear.”

“Right.”

“One of which, post-treatment, is worryingly radioactive. A very short half-life, but within that window, a big problem.”

Ravan unstrapped the guitar and leaned it against the amp. “I’ve been paying that much attention, yes.”

“The margins are just so fine. That’s why this has been as expensive as it has been, the precision that’s demanded.”

“I know the dangers.”

“In theory, you do. But the thing of it is, it’s actually already happened once in trial. Just last year we launched a few seeders into clouds deep in the Indian Ocean. They failed to make rain. Fine. Nothing so unusual about that. But they succeeded in doing something else. They charged the cloud with the radioisotope, loaded it like a gun. When the storm finally did break — by this point it was an odd pink, or red — it broke in the middle of the ocean. That was our one bit of luck. The waters were sampled and tested, as always. And they were more than a little toxic. We dodged a bullet. Did you know all that too?”

Ravan shook his head slowly and switched off the amplifier.

“Now you’re paying attention. Good. You see, I’m a bit closer to Dad on these matters than you. The music’s taken you away from some of this. Your government has been leaning on us for these rockets for a while now. Bringing the Starstreak missile home, for properly humanitarian purposes this time, they say, by converting them into cloud seeders. But do you suppose they can cleanse these rockets of their former purpose entirely? Or will we find, down the road, that it was merely dormant, and at just the right moment these missiles will come chasing us again, but as weather this time?”

“I don’t know how we can say.” Ravan said this only after a complicated pause, one that consumed all the distance he usually felt toward his brother’s line of work.

“And isn’t that just the problem, Ravan?” Menar said gently. “In any case, you’ll know they’ve asked for this batch last minute, and we’ve obliged and rigged these seeders up quickly — more quickly than they really ought to have been. All just to deal with your storm.

“Now, in fairness, it does look to be a true monster. That’s why clearance was so easy on your end. The storm we had that problem with in India, it was quite small, and it was not a bet to make landfall. But yours, well, if we don’t burst it, it will certainly come ashore, brutally. And all that coastline, the nerve center of the country. I don’t know if there is any surge barrier that can cope with it. It’s more than a category five, really. We just don’t have the right scale for it.

“Given its size, we are sending up a lot of seeding agent. I have complete belief in our chemists, of course. The odds are small, objectively speaking. But these things, well…”

Menar kissed the back of the child’s head and finished the thought in a lower, slower voice. “Nothing is perfect. And no process, none at all, is really, truly stable.”

Ravan needed no convincing.

The child squirmed and cried, stretched out his hands to one edge of the screen. Menar’s wife broke into the frame. Ravan had met her only once, at the wedding. She was a gentle, fine-boned woman with a translucent complexion, the signature of the Muslim clan his brother had married into a few years ago.

The union had driven a slight wedge between the two Menars, Sr. and Jr., though they still worked closely together. After the marriage, work seemed to become the central plank of their closeness, and this was not lost on the son. It changed him, his father’s chilly response to his wife and her family, which included higher-ups in the Pakistani military his father thought needlessly radical, and moreover who seemed to be suspicious of his own research collaborations with the U.S. government — though, infuriatingly, they would always stop short of saying so.

She took the Indo-Aryan boy to a place off-screen without saying anything to Ravan.

“Look, however it is, I’m glad you’ve got everything,” Menar said. “The gold ones, I know I’ve said this, are the ones that will do what’s needed. God willing.”

The smirk made the briefest of appearances. Then a hot stare shot down somewhere near his feet. Finally there was a firm smile back at his brother.

“Got it,” Ravan said.

“You really must come and see this boy,” Menar said, looking off-camera with a softer smile toward his wife and child. “Before he gets any bigger. You’d be a fool not to.”

The nap of the cloth was as dense as jenko’s pool tables, but the green was deeper, carrying thick casino light that broke up the dark between games of cards. Lewis thumbed it in a slow spiral, felt the trapped warmth. He ran his finger over the cold white paint of the stenciled box, and then the card sitting face-up within it, a ten of diamonds. The second card came. He was looking for an ace, a blackjack. A king arrived instead.

Lewis’s hand froze beside the pair. There was no hitting a hard twenty, so he waited for her, this young Vegas dealer with a face like an arrow and a platinum blond ponytail bobbing behind her head. She had a six showing. He nodded to show he would stand. She flipped her hole card. Another ace, giving her a soft seventeen. She pulled another card from the dealing shoe, still four decks thick and resistant to counting, though he wouldn’t have known how to anyway. He wasn’t a real gambler, just passing time till the show. Now a second face appeared, not a king’s but a queen’s. Twenty-seven. Dealer bust. She pushed a small stack of chips toward him.