The U.S. government had gone nuts over climate regulators during the State of Emergency, pouring money into the global climate modeling at a frantic rate that im;ed even the Pentagon. Boxes like Jerry's were Brob -Jerry's lone system had more raw computational power than the entire planet had possessed in 1995.
Officially, Jerry's system was "on loan" from the SESCollaboratory, a research net in which Jerry had fairly good standing, but nobody was going to come and repossess it. No~y but the Troupe gave a damn about Jerry's box, really. It was stone obvious now that the problems of climate modeling simply weren't going to yield to raw computational power. Power wasn't the bottleneck at all; the real bottleneck was in the approaches, the approximations, the concepts, and the code.
Jane opened her favorite laptop, dragged the system monitor onto it off Mickey's sysadmin machine, and checked to see that all the instrumentation was safely down. Peter, Greg, and Martha had been on the job: all the towers were off-line and down now, except for the telecom tower. They always left the telecom for last. It made more sense, really, to take down the security system last, but the perimeter posts were pig stupid and paranoid little entities that reacted to any sudden loss of packets as prima facie evidence of enemy sabotage. Unless they were petted to sleep first, the posts would whoop like crazy.
An icon appeared on Jane's screen. An incoming phone call-to her own number. Surprised, she took the call.
A postcard-sized video inclusion appeared in the upper right-hand corner of her laptop. It was a stranger: clean shaven, sandy-haired, distinguished looking, close to forty maybe. Ruggedly handsome, in a funny, well-groomed sort of way. Oddly familiar looking. He wore a shirt, jacket, and tie.
"Hello?" the stranger said. "Is this Juanita?"
"Yes?"
"Good," the stranger said, smiling and glancing down at his desk. "I didn't think this would quite work." lie seemed to be in a hotel lobby somewhere, or maybe a very nicely furnished office. Jane could see a lithograph behind his head and a spray of leaves from an exotic potted plant.
The stranger looked up from his console. "I'm not getting any video off my side, should I shut down my video feed?"
"Sorry," Jane said, leaning forward to speak into the laptop's little inset mike. "I'm getting this off a laptop, I've got no camera here."
"Sorry to hear that," the stranger said, adjusting his tie.
"Y'know, Juanita, I've never actually seen you. I was quite looking forward to it."
The stranger had Jerry's ears on the sides of his head. Jane could scarcely have been more surprised if he'd had Jerry's ears on a string around his neck. But then the bump of shock passed, and Jane felt a little cold thrill of recognition. She smiled shyly at the laptop, even though he couldn't see her. "This is Leo, isn't it?"
"Right," Leo Mulcahey said, with a gentle smile and a wink. "Can we talk?"
Jane glanced around the command yurt. Mickey and Rick were both in the bath line. They usually gave her a while to work alone before they'd show up to run diagnostics and start lugging machines to the trucks.
"Yeah," she said. "I guess so. For a little while." It was the first time she had seen Jerry's brother. Leo looked older than Jerry, his cheeks thinner and a little lined, and she was shocked at how good-looking he was. His head had just the shape of Jerry's head, but his haircut was lovely. Jane had been cutting Jerry's hair herself, but she could see now that as a hair designer, she was dog meat.
"I understand you've been talking with Mom," Leo said.
Jane nodded silently, but Leo of course couldn't see her. "Yes I have," she blurted.
"I happen to be in the States again, at the moment. Mom's been filling me in on Jerry's activities."
"I didn't mean any harm by it," Jane said. "Jerry hardly ever calls your mother, but he doesn't mind if I do it... . Sorry if that seemed intrusive on my part."
"Oh, Mom thinks the world of you, Juanita," said Leo, smiling. "Y'know, Mom and I have never seen Jerry carry on in quite this way before. I'm convinced you must be someone very special."
"Well..." Jane said. "Leo, I just thought of something-I have some photos on disk here, let me see if I can pull them up and feed them to you."
"That would be good." Leo nodded. "Always feels a little odd to speak to a blank screen."
Jane punched up the digital scrapbook. "I wanted to thank you for helping me find my brother... Alejandro."
Leo shrugged. "De nada. I pulled a string for you. Okay, two strings. That's Mexico for you... walls within walls, wheels within wheels... . An interesting place, a fine culture." He looked down again. "Oh yes. That's coming across very well. Nice photo."
"I'm the one in the hat," Jane said. "The other woman's our camp cook."
"I could have guessed that," Leo said, sitting up intently. He seemed genuinely intrigued. "Oh, this one of you and Jerry is very good. I didn't know about the beard. The beard looks good, though."
"He's had the beard ever since I met him," Jane said. "I'm sorry that, um... well, that it's been so long. And that you and he don't get along better."
"A misunderstanding," Leo offered, weighing his words. "You know how Jerry can be... very singleminded, am I right? If you're addressing some issue, and it doesn't quite chime with Jerry's current train of thought.
He's a very bright man of course, but he's a mathematician, not very tolerant of ambiguity." Leo smiled sadly. He has his dignity, Jane thought. That magnetism Jerry has, and that ruthlessness too.
She found him extremely attractive. Alarmingly so. She could easily imagine fucking him. She could hotly imagine flicking both of them. At once.
And when they went for each other's throats she'd be smashed between them like a mouse between two bricks.
She cleared her throat. "Well... is there something I can do for you in particular, Leo?"
"Actually, yes," Leo said. "By the way, you don't mind if I hard-copy these photos, do you?"
"Oh, go ahead."
"It's about this strange business with the F-6," said Leo as his printer emitted a well-bred hum. "I wonder if you could explain that to me a little more thoroughly."
"Well," Jane said, "the F-6 is a theory Jerry has."
"It sounds a bit alarming, doesn't it? A tornado an order of magnitude larger than any seen before?"
"Well, strictly speaking it wouldn't be a tornado per se -more of a large-scale vortex. Something smaller than a hurricane, but with a different origin and different structure. Different behavior."
"Was I right in hearing that this thing is supposed to be a permanent feature of the atmosphere?"
"No," Jane said. "No. I mean, yes, there is some indication in the models-if you set the parameters just right, there are some, urn, indicators that an F-6 might become a stable configuration under certain circumstances. Look, Leo, we don't emphasize that aspect, okay? The woods are full of nutty amateurs running homemade climate models and declaring all kinds of crazy doomsday crap. It would look really bad if the press started telling everybody that Jerry's forecasting some kind of giant permanent storm over Oklahoma. That's just not responsible behavior from a scientist. Jerry's got problems enough already with the labcoat crowd, without that kind of damage to his credibility.''
"Jerry does think, seriously, that an F-6 will actually occur, though."