Jane had no gift for mathematics; math was something that she had to crawl through on her belly, like mud. It had taken her quite some time to fully comprehend that this strange man in the wastelands of West Texas with his cobbled-up crew of eccentrics was, really and truly, one of the brightest mathematicians in the world.
Jerry's parents had both been computer-science researchers in Los Alamos. They'd both been good at their work too; but their son Jerry had been doing cutting-edge magnetohydrodynamics when he was twelve. Jerry had pioneered in fields like multidimensional minimal-surface manifolds and higher-order invariant polynomials, things that made your brain explode just to look at them. Jerry was good enough at math to frighten people. His colleagues couldn't make up their minds whether to envy him for his gifts, or resent him for not publishing more often. Every once in a while Jane would have some net-idiot give her a hard time about Jerry's "professional qualifications," and she would E-mail the skeptic the paper that Jerry'd done back in 2023 that established the Mulcahey Conjecture, and the skeptic would try to read it and his brain would explode, and he would quietly slink away and never be heard from again.
Unless he turned out to be one of the math wannabes. The Troupe attracted all kinds of wannabes, most of them rather nutty, but every once in a while some anxious weedy-looking guy would show up at camp who didn't give a shit about tornadoes and really, really wanted Jerry to forget all about it and get back to proving how many soap bubbles could fit inside a collapsing torus in hyperspace. Jerry was always terribly kind to these people.
The weight lifting was another prominent aspect of Jerry's oddity. He hadn't always been that way. She'd seen pictures of Jerry as a teenager-his mother had sent them-and Jerry had been lithe and slender, with a tall kid's wary stoop. Lots of Troupers were into weights; Jane lifted weights herself, enough to get strong, enough to get the point of doing it. But Jerry was doing weights just because a saved him time. It saved him time and effort to be as big as a house so he could briefly surface out of his abyss of distraction, and snap out something, and have people just jump up and run do it for him. Because he radiated raw physical authority, Jerry didn't have to slow down to explain very much. Plus, the weights gave Jerry something to do while he was thinking seriously, and Jerry liked to think seriously for about five hours straight, every day. The fact that he was lugging thirty kilos of steel on his legs at the time never seemed to register on him much.
There was no question that the great trial of Jerry's life was relating to other human beings. Jerry had really worked terribly hard at this problem, with such painstaking patience and suffering and dedication, that her heart truly melted for him.
Jerry didn't readily empathize with people, because Jerry just wasn't a very peoplelike being. But he could model people. He could dryly comprehend the whole Structure of their personalities, and re-create them as a kind of dry run in his own head. He had built his relationships with the other Troupers like a one-armed man buildlug model cathedrals out of toothpicks.
And when he had it all figured, then he would sit you down. And start telling you exactly what you were really thinking, and what it was that really motivated you, and how you could get what you wanted and how that would, by the way, help him and the others too. It would be laid out with such amazing clarity and detail that your own self-image would crumble by comparison. Jerry would have invented this thing, just by watching you closely and speculating, but it was so much more like you than you were that it felt more real than your own identity. It was like confronting your ideal self, your better nature: smoother, more sensible, wiser, a lot better managed. All you had to do was let the scales fall from your eyes and reach out for it.
Jane had gone through this process exactly once. Well, half of once, actually. It was hard to seduce someone while in a paper jumpsuit. You could zip it down to the waist and coyly peel it open, and it felt like you were offering a guy a couple of bran muffins out of a bakery bag. But once he'd started in on her with the toothpick analysis, she'd known that the only way to break him out of it was to knock him down and straddle him.
It had worked brilliantly too. It had shut Jerry up to the great satisfaction of all concerned. Now she and Jerry could freely and openly discuss all kinds of things: spikes, interfaces, tools, camp, feds, Rangers, other Troupers, even money. But they didn't discuss The Relationship. The Relationship didn't even have a name. The Relationship had its own shape and its own life and it was not made of toothpicks.
But Jerry had assigned himself to her car. He never did this without reason. Sooner or later the shoe would drop. The big hot core was gone from The Relationship, and both of them were hurting, and some rational analysis was going to come out of Jerry. She was hoping for the best.
"For the first time I'm really getting afraid of this," he said.
Jane set her granola bag on the floorboard. "What is it you're afraid of, darling?"
"I think we may be shaping up toward the bad scenario.
"What's bad about it?"
"I've never told you fully what I thought this would be like if it became a permanent fixture."
"All right," she said, bracing herself. "If that's on your mind, tell me, then."
"The winds are not the half of it. It could strip the earth's surface right down to bedrock. It could vent more dust into the troposphere than a major volcanic eruption."
"Oh," she said. "You mean the F-6."
He gave her the oddest look he'd ever given her. "Are you okay, Janey?"
"Yeah, sure, I'm as okay as anybody with a yeast infection ever is. Sorry, I thought you were discussing something else. What about the F-6, sweetheart?"
"Oh, nothing really," Jerry said, staring straight ahead. "Just that it might kill everyone within hundreds of kilometers. Including us, of course. All in the first few hours. And after that-a giant, permanent vortex on the planet's surface. That could happen! It could actually take place in the real world."
"I know that," Jane said. "But for some reason, I just don't worry about it much."
"Maybe you should worry a lot more, Jane. It could mean the end of civilization."
"I just can't believe in it enough to worry," she told him. "I mean, I do believe something really awesome is going to break loose this season, but I can't believe it means the end of anything. It's like-somehow-I just can't believe that civilization is going to get off the hook that easy. 'The end of civilization'-what end? What civilization, for that matter? There isn't any end. We're in way too deep to have any end. The kind of troubles we got, they aren't allowed to have any end."
"The troposphere could saturate with dust. There could be a nuclear winter." He paused. "Of course, a majot drop in temperature would starve out the vortex."
"That's just it! It's always something like that! Things can get totally awful, but then something else comes up that's so amazingly screwy that it makes it all irrelevant. There never was any nuclear war or nuclear winter.
There's never gonna be one. That was all just stupid hype, so they could go on ruining the environment, so we'd end up living just like we're living now, living with the consequences.
She sighed. "Look, I saw the sky turn black when I was a kid-I saw it turn black as the ace of spades! It didn't last, though. It was just a big dust bowl. Even if the F-6 is really awful, somebody somewhere would survive. Millions of people, billions maybe. They'd just march into some fucking salt mine, with the chlorophyll hack and some gene-splicing and some superconductives, and as long as theyhadtheir virching and cable TV, most of 'em would never even notice!"