A vow of silence was a very weird request. But she had never seen Jerry more serious. It was crystal clear that he was giving her a deliberate challenge, setting her an act of ritual discipline. Worst of all, she could tell that Jerry really doubted that she had the necessary strength of character to go through with it.
So Jane had quickly made the promise to him, without any complaints or debate. She'd left the tent without a word, and for seven endless days she had said nothing to anybody. No talking, and no phone calls, and no radio links. She hadn't even typed commentary onto a network.
It had been unbelievably hard, far harder than she'd ever imagined. After several reflexive near blunders, she'd secretly kept her upper and lower teeth locked together with a little piece of bent metal pin. The bent pin was a stupid thing, and kind of a cheat, but it sure helped a lot whenever Martha limped by, grinning at her and trying to strike up conversations.
Silence had been truly painful and difficult for Jane. It had been like sweating off a drug addiction. Like fasting. Like running a marathon. It had changed her a lot, inside.
It was no secret to anyone in the Troupe that she deeply fancied Jerry, and she could tell that he knew, and that he was tempted. He'd let her join the Troupe. He'd trusted her with assignments. He'd always politely listened to her advice and opinions. But he'd been painfully scrupulous about keeping his hands to himself.
Jerry was tempted, but he wasn't quite tempted enough. That was the real reason he had set her the challenge. Like everything that really interested Jerry Mulcahey, the challenge was subtle and difficult and for big stakes. The rest of the Troupe might construe it as a punishment, but Jane knew better: it was a very personal trial, make or break. Jerry wanted her to make himasolemn promise and break it. So that he'd have the excuse he needed to politely usher her out of his life. And so she'd have no excuse not to go.
But Jane hadn't broken her promise. She'd kept it. Naturally, she had said nothing at all to anyone in the Troupe about her promise to Jerry. She'd simply walked out of the tent with her mouth shut. In the too close atmosphere of Troupe life, though, they had all very quickly caught on. Her vow had been a painful burden to her, but its effect on the other Troupers was profound and startling. She'd had their grudging respect before, but she'd never had their open sympathy. They knew she was going through hell, and they were pulling for her. By the end of her week of silence, all the Troupers were treating her, for the first time, as if she really belonged.
And after that happened, things between her and Jerry had quickly turned very mega-different.
"Okay, so he passed out," Rick whined. "So he's not exactly the brawny outdoor type. Did you know he's a cannibal?"
"What?" Jane blurted.
"Yeah, he was bragging to us about eating human meat! No.t that I myself got anything against cannibalism personally... ." Rick paused, hunting words. "Y'know, there's something to that kid. He's kind of an ugly, weedy, crazy little guy, but I think he's got something going there. Actually, I kinda like him!"
"Look, he can't possibly be eating human meat," Jane said. "He's only twenty. Well, twenty-one."
"Hell, we all knew he was bullshitting us! But that's why me and Peter had to stunt him. We're not gonna put up with that! Are we? So what if he's your brother? Come on, Janey!"
"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.