"Well, he is my brother, Rick, damn it."
Rick slapped his laptop shut. "Well, hell, you can't protect him from anything! The Troupe's not your day-care center! We're chasing tornadoes out here! Why'd you even bring your brother out here?"
"Well," Jane said slowly, "can you keep a secret?"
Rick's face fell. He looked at her guardedly. "What is it?"
"I'm broke, Rick. And Alex isn't."
Rick grimaced. She'd brought up the subject of money; the Troupe's ultimate taboo. From the look on Rick's round, stubbled face, he seemed to be in genuine spiritual pain. She knew he'd be too embarrassed to complain anymore.
Jane gazed thoughtfully at the twenty-thousand-meter thunderhead rising on the horizon ahead of her and wondered if there'd ever been a time when it was a whole lot of good clean fun to have money. Maybe back before heavy weather hit, back when the world was quiet and orderly. Back before the "information economy" blew up and fell down in the faces of its eager zealot creators, just like communism. Back when there were stable and workable national currencies. And stock markets that didn't fluctuate insanely. And banks that belonged to countries and obeyed laws, instead of global pirate banks that existed nowhere in particular and made up their own laws Out of chickenwire dishes, encryption, and spit.
Juanita Unger happened to be an heiress. If she'd been born a hundred years earlier, Jane thought, she might have been some very nice old-fashioned twentieth-century heiress. With family money from something quaint and old-fashioned and industrial and ladylike, like laundry soap or chewing gum. And if she'd happened to get a raging case of the hots for some scientist, then she could have set him up, like, a discreet foundation grant. And she could have driven out to his research site three times a week in her goddamned three-ton internal-combustion fossil-fueled car and fucked his brains out on a backseat the size of a living-room couch.
Maybe somewhere, somehow, sometime, some twentieth-century woman had actually done all that. If so, Jane bore her no real grudge. In fact, Jane kind of hoped that the twentieth-century heiress had really enjoyed herself as she thoughtlessly squandered the planet's resources and lived like a fattened barnyard animal. Jane hoped that it had all turned out okay for the woman in the end, and that she'd been nice and dead and buried before she realized what her way of life had done to her planet. It might have been a really sweet and tasty life, under the circumstances. But it sure as hell didn't bear any resemblance to life as Jane Unger had ever experienced it.
Jane was a Storm Trouper. A Trouper who happened to have money, and she'd never met anyone as resolutely antimoney as the Storm Troupe. They genuinely thought that they could survive on wreckage, scrap, grunge computers, fellow feeling, free software, cheap thrills, and Jerry's charisma. And given that their ideas of self-sufficiency were hopelessly impractical, they'd actually done surprisingly well.There was their repair work, and the occasional bit of salvage. Most of them held city day jobs during the winter, and some of them, herself included, even had the wreckage of once-promising careers. They scraped up some cash that way. And given that they were almost all city-bred urbanites, the Troupe did pretty well at eating things that they killed and/or pulled out of the ground.
But they weren't doing genuine, first-class research, because there wasn't enough capital around for real science, until Jane Unger had shown up.
Jane had first found Dr. Gerald Mulcahey's work tucked in an obscure niche of a Santa Fe science network, very strange, very arcane, and elaborately smothered under nonlinear atmospheric mathematics that maybe five guys on the planet could understand. Jane wasn't quite the first designer to discover Mulcahey's work. The word was just getting out about it in her network circles. The word was still very street level-but Jane had a good ear for the word.
The raw power of those graphics had amazed her. It was virtuoso spectacle, and the guy wasn't even trying. He'd created a hypnotic virtuality of writhing and twisting hallucinatory fluids while seriously attempting to describe scientifically the behavior of the real world. With the proper interface and editing, and a much better choice of color, angle, and detail, the work had definite commercial potential.
So Jane, with a bit of deft network voodoo, had successfully tracked down Dr. Gerald Mulcahey. She'd gone to his research camp out in the desolate ass end of nowhere, met him, talked to him, and cut a deal with him. She'd redesigned the graphics herself and released them with a new front end over an arts distribution network. And although the whole modern structure of copyright and intellectual property was a complete joke-it had been shattered utterly during the State of Emergency and never successfully reassembled or stabilized, by anybody, anywhere, ever-Jane had actually made some money from doing this. And she'd given Mulcahey royalties.
Of course Mulcahey had immediately spent all his royalties on new hardware. And then he'd spent her share of the money too. And then the two of them had gone on, in sweet, collegial fashion, to spend a lot more of her money.
And now all of her money was pretty much gone. Though they sure had a hell of a chase team assembled. She might even get all her money back, someday.
If they found the F-6.
Jane wasn't foolish enough to think that the Troupe would have the F-6 all to themselves. She'd seen Jerry's simulations, and if Jerry was even half-right about the nature of that beast, then the F-6 would be very damned obvious, a spectacular calamity impossible to miss. But if the Troupe found the F-6, they would have a major advantage over any other media competition. Because the Troupe would be the only people in the world who actually understood the full power and horror of what they were witnessing. Because nobody else in the world understood or believed that an F-6 was even possible.
"Rick," she said.
"What?"
"I've decided to forgive you, man."
"On the condition you don't harass Alex ever again."
"Okay, okay," Rick said sourly. "He can stay for all of me. You never see me throw anybody out of the Troupe! Jerry throws people out, Greg throws people out, Carol throws people out. Me, I'm just a lowly code geek, I can put up with anybody. I don't even care if he gives me money-hell, I'm not proud. Go ahead, give me money, you and your brother! I don't care."
"Did you know Jerry has a brother?"
"Yeah, I knew that," Rick said. Rick didn't seem much surprised by the change of subject. "I never met his brother or anything... I think he's in government, state department, military, something like that. He and Jerry don't get along."
"Did Jerry ever talk about his brother, before I showed up?"
"Well, you know Jerry," Rick said. "He doesn't exactly broadcast that kind of stuff... . I did hear the subject come up, though, back when he was breaking up with Valerie. That was Valerie the seismographer, y'know."
"I know about Valerie," Jane said tightly.
"Yeah," Rick said, with an oblivious nod, "Val was into, like, aquifer collapses and subsidence and stuff, she used to hang with the Troupe and do echo blasts. .
Not much to look at, but a really bright girl, really sharp. It got pretty ugly toward the end before Jerry threw her out. She kept carryin' on about his family."
"Oh really," said Jane, with her best pretense of tepid disinterest.
"Yeah!" The long hours of silence had bottled Rick up. "It's funny what men and women argue about... . I mean, I've never been married, but from what I see it's like three basic things-sex, money, and commitment. Right?"
Jane said nothing.
"So with Valerie it was commitment. Like, what do you care about more-me or your work, me or your friends, me or your family, me or your brain? I can't figure out why a woman would ever want to ask Jerry that. The guy's obviously a fanatic! He's never gonna rest till he finds what he's looking for! A guy like that, either you pitch in and help him, or you get the hell out of his way! Otherwise, you're just gonna get stepped on. It's like a law of nature."