The unbroken malignant high had been sitting, for six long weeks, over Colorado. It seemed to be anchored there. The high hadn't moved, but it had expanded steadily. A great dome of dry, superheated air had spread from Colorado to northeastern New Mexico and the Panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas. Beneath it was the evil reign of drought.
Jane was rather fond of Oklahoma. The roads were generally in worse condition than Texas, but the state was more thoroughly settled. There was good civil order, and the people were friendly, and even way outside the giant modern megalopolis of Oklahoma City, there were living little rural towns where you could still get real breakfast and a decent cup of coffee. The sky was a subtler blue in Oklahoma, and the wildflowers were of a gentler palette than the harshly vivid flowers of a Texas spring.The soil was richer, and deeper, and iron red, and quite a lot of it was cultivated. The sun never climbed quite as punishingly high in the zenith, and it rained mote often.
But there was no rain now. Not under the slow swell of the continental monster. Rushing storm fronts had scourged Missouri and Iowa and Kansas and Illinois, but the high at the foot of the Rockies had passed from a feature, to a nuisance, to a regional affliction.
SESAME's Climate Analysis Center liked to netcast a standard graphics map, "Departure of Average Temperature from Normal (C)," a meteorological document that SESAME had inherited from some precybernetic federal-government office. The map's format was rather delightfully antiquated, both in its old-fashioned distinction of "Centigrade" (the old Fahrenheit scale had been extinct for years) and in its wistful pretense that there was still such a thing in American weather as "Normal." The map's colored shadings of temperature were crudely vivid, with the crass aesthetic limits of early computer graphics, but for the sake of archival continuity, the maps had never been redesigned. In her Troupe career, Jane had examined dozens of these average-temperature maps. But she'd never before seen so much of that vividly anomalous shade of hot pink.
It was only June, and people were already dying under those pixelated hot-pink pools. Not dying in large numbers; it wasn't yet the kind of heavy weather where the feds would start sending in the iron-barred evacuation trucks. It was still only early June, when heat could be very anomalous without becoming actually lethal. But it was the kind of heat that kicked up the stress several notches. So the old folks' pacemakers failed, and there'd be gunfire in the evening and a riot at the mall.
The temperature map dissolved on Charlie's dashboard readout, then blushed again into a blotchy new depiction: pound-level SESAME Lidar.
"I've never seen it like this before," Jerry commented, from Charlie's passenger seat. "Look at the way it's breaking, way outside the rim of that high. That's not supposed to happen."
"I don't see how anything can happen until that air mass moves," Jane said. "It doesn't make any sense."
"The core's not moving for hell, but it's still ripping loose today, all along that secondary dryline," Jerry said.
"We're gonna see some F-2s, F-3s drop out of this, and they're going to be"-he thought it over-"a minor feature."
Jane looked up at the northern horizon: the storm line that was their destination. Beyond a line of wilting Oklahoma cottonwoods, there were towers rising-sheetlike in parts, half-concave, starved for moisture. They didn't look powerful, but they didn't look minor; they looked convulsive. "Well," she said, "maybe we're finally seeing it, then. Maybe this is what it looks like when it starts."
"The F-6 isn't supposed to shape up like this. The mesosphere's all wrong and the jet stream is hanging north like it was nailed there."
"Well, this is where the F-6 ought to be. And the time is right. So what else could it be?"
Jerry shook his head. "Ask me when it starts moving."
Jane sighed, and munched a handful of government granola from her paper bag, and pulled her booted legs up in the driver's seat. "I can't believe that you gave up now-casting, and came out to hammer some spikes with me, and now you're telling me they're a minor feature."
Jerry laughed. "Spikes. They're like sex. Just 'cause you've nailed 'em once before, doesn't mean you lose all interest the next time."
"It's good to have you out here with me." She paused. "You're being real sweet to me lately, under the circumstances."
"Babe," he said, "you were in camp two months before all willpower shattered, remember? If we can't make love, we won't. Simple." He hesitated. "It's hell, true, but it's simple."
Jane knew better than to take this male bravado at face value. All was not well in camp. Her infection, the drought. Nerves, restlessness. Missed connections.
One of the things Jane loved best about chasing spikes was that liberating way that gigantic storms smashed flat and rendered irrelevant all the kinks in her personal life. You couldn't sweat your own angst in the face of a monster spike; it was stupid and vulgar and deeply beside the point, like trying to make the Grand Canyon your spittoon.
She did love Jerry; she loved him as a person, very dearly, and she often thought she might have loved him almost as much, even if he'd never given her any tornadoes. She could have loved Jerry even if he'd been something everyday and nonexotic and dull, like, say, some kind of economist. Jerry was skillful and accomplished and dedicated and, when you got used to him, rather intensely attractive. Sometimes Jerry was even funny. She often thought that even under other circumstances, she might easily have become his lover, or even his wife.
It would have been much more like her other affairs, though; the ones with the vase throwing and the screaming fits and the shaking sense of absolute black desperation in the back of a limo at three in the morning.
Jerry made her do crazy things. But Jerry's crazy things had always made her better and stronger, and with Jerry around, for the first time in her life she no longer felt miserably troubled about being her own worst enemy. She'd always been wrapped too tight, and wired too high, and with a devil inside; in retrospect, she could see that dearly now. Jerry was the first and only man in her life who had really appreciated her devil, who had accepted her devil and been sweet to it, and had given her devil some proper down-and-dirty devil-things to do. Her devil no longer had idle hands. Her devil was working its ass off, all the time.
So now she and her devil were quite all right, really.
It was as if acting crazy, and taking crazy risks, had completely freed her of any obligation to actually become crazy. It might sound rather sappy, but really and truly, Jerry had made her a free woman. She was dirty and she was broke and she smelled bad most of the time, but she was free and in love. She'd spent most of her life in a fierce, determined, losing battle to make herself behave and make sense and be good and be happy; and then she'd met Jerry Mulcahey and had given up the war. And when all that old barbed wire snapped loose inside of her, she'd discovered surprising reservoirs of simple decency and goodwill in herself. She wasn't even half as bad as she'd thought she was. She wasn't crazy, she wasn't wicked, she wasn't even particularly dangerous. She was a mature adult woman who wasn't afraid of herself, and could even be a source of real strength to other people. She could give and sacrifice for other people, and love and be loved, without any fear or any mean calculation. And she acknowledged all this, and was grateful for it.
It was just that she really, really hated to talk about it.
Jerry wasn't any better at discussing it than she was. Jerry Mulcahey wasn't like other men. Not that that was entirely to Jerry's credit; Jerry wasn't much like any kind of human being. Jane was a bright person, and Jane knew what it was like to be brighter than other people; bright enough to be disliked for it, sometimes. But she knew she wasn't bright like Jerry was. In particular areas of his comprehension, Jerry was so bright as to be quite alien. There were large expanses of his mental activity that were as blank and hot and shiny as someone on drugs.