But the very weirdest part was that evacuation freaks always seemed to travel entirely alone.
"Juanita," said April Logan, "I always sensed you might p rove to be one of my star students."
"Thank you, April."
"How do you count yourself, in this little social analysis of yours?"
"Me?" Jane said. "Scientist."
"Oh yes"-April nodded slowly-"that's very good."
Jane laughed. "Well, you're here too, you know."
"Of course," April Logan said. Her styled hair lifted a little in the dry, sour breeze, and she gave a long, meditative stare around the Troupe camp, sucking in everything with her flat, yellowish, all-comprehending gaze.
If not for the drought, it would have been a very pretty area. The Troupe was cam~ west of El Reno on Interstate 40, an area of red cliifs of crumbling sandstone, red soil, creek bottoms full of pecans and as p ens and festooned with honeysuckle, a place of goldenrod and winecup and coneflowers and trailing purple legume. Spring hadn't given up yet. It was parched and covered with dust, but spring hadn't given up.
April Logan was wearing a tailored paper jumpsuit printed in gold leaf: a perfectly body-morphed adaptation of one of the more lysergic ornaments from the Book of Kells. It was just like April to wear something like that: costume as oxymoron. Gilded paper. Preindustrial handicraft warped by postindustrial machine, a consumer conundrum from the warring no-man's-land of Cost versus Value versus Worth. And it was, coincidentally, quite beautiful. "I'm still riding the back of the Project," April Logan said. "The Project wanted me to come here, you know."
"You're kidding."
"Oh no," said April. "The Project is sometimes crazy, but it never kids."
Jane had helped to build the Project, as an undergraduate. It was something Professor Logan had been patiently assembling and refining for years-an eldritch chimera of monster clipping service, genetic algorithm, and neural net. A postliterate, neoacademic Correlation Machine, a megachipped Synchronicity Generator. There were a lot of lumps in April's vast analytical stew: demographics, employment records, consumption trends. Geographical distribution of network data trafficking. Mortality rates, flows of private currency. And various arcane indices of graphic design-like April herself, the Project was very big on graphic-design trends.
When discussing her Project, April liked to dwell on the eldritch twentieth-century correlation between women's hemlines and the stock market. The market would go up, hemlines would go up. The market would drop, hemlines would drop. Nobody knew why, or ever learned why, but the correlation held quite steady for decades. Eventually, of course, the stock market lost all contact with reality, and women no longer gave a damn about their hemlines even if they bothered to wear skirts, but, as April said, the crux of her Project was to discover and seize similar modern correlations while they were still fresh, and before the endless chaos of society necessarily rendered them extinct. Given that chaos, the "why" of the correlation was indeterminate. And given those genetic algorithms, causation wasn't even logically traceable within the circuits of the machine. In any case, reason and causation were not the point of April's effort. The crux of the matter was whether April's massive simulation could parallel reality closely enough to be a useful design tool.
The Project wasn't that much different, in its basic digital operation, from Jerry's weather modeling-except that Jerry's simulations were firmly based on openly testable, fully established laws of physics, while April Logan was not a scientist but an artist and design critic. As far as Jane could figure, April's analytical armature wasn't much of a genuine intellectual advance over a tarot deck. And yet, like a tarot deck, no matter what nonsense the damn thing threw out, it always seemed to work somehow, to make a certain deep and tantalizing sense.
It wasn't science, and didn't pretend to be, but it had made April Logan into a very wealthy and influential woman. She had left academia-where she had been doing quite well-and now commanded enormous fees as a private consultant. People-sensible, practical people-paid April Logan huge sums to predict things like "the color of the season." And whether there might be a mass market for disposable fast-food plasticware that you could chew up and eat. And why hotels were suffering a plague of teen suicides inside glass elevators, and why installing bright pink carpeting might help. April had become a genuine Design Guru.
The years hadn't been kind to April. Seeing her teacher in person again, outside the hard controlled gleam of April's precisely calculated public image, Jane noticed tremor and flakiness there, a touch of madness, even. April ~an was not a happy woman. But success hadn't changed her much. April had always had that innate jitter and tang, and it was slowly and visibly eating her heart out but April Logan had a lot of heart. She had her muse in a hammerlock, and she was possessed by the Work. Just to be around April was to feel a radioactive glow from a capable, perceptive, brilliant woman, someone paying a focused and terrible attention to things most human beings couldn't even see. April was a real artist, the truest artist Jane had ever met. The genuine article. Even the worst and most dismal commercial bullshit in a hell-bound planet couldn't kill them all off.
"True innovation tends to afflict the eccentric April mused. "A minority of the eccentric, one in a hundred, maybe." She paused. "Of course, that leaves society with the burden of ninety-nine pretentious, ill-behaved basket cases."
"Same old Professor Logan."
"I might have known I'd see you end up in the heart of an event like this, Juanita. There's no question that it's an event of some pivotal importance. I've watched it work its way from speculation, to fad, to near mania... . If it's a natural disaster that matches its advance billings, this could become a long-term societal landmark."
"And we're documenting it."
"It's very dangerous, isn't it? Not only physically, but it is clearly attracting a large nexus of unstable social elements."
"Fortune rewards the brave," Jane said cheerfully. "We'll be fine. We know what we're doing. And so will everyone else, if you will help us."
"Interesting," April said. From her, that was high praise. "I did a comprehensive category search through the Project for neural weightings for your friend, Dr. Mulcahey. It's rare for the Project to single out any individual, especially one as publicly little known as he is, and yet Dr. Mulcahey registers in no less than fourteen different categories.
"Really."
"That's quite extraordinary. And yet he has an even lesser-known brother who showed up in no less than seventeen!"
"Do you ever look yourself up in the Project?"
"Every day. I've gotten as high as five, sometimes. Six once, briefly." She frowned. "Of course, you could argue that a lower number of categories deepens the basic societal influence."
"Right. Have you looked me up, lately?"
April gazed tactfully across the camp. "What is that device they're launching?"
"Weather balloon," Jane said, standing up. No use taking offense. It was just a big damn fortune-telling machine. 'Would you like to watch?"
JERRY STOOD BEFORE the firelight, his head bare, his hands behind his back. "Tomorrow we are going to track the most violent storm in recorded history," he said. "It will break tomorrow, probably by noon, and it will kill thousands, probably tens of thousands of people. If it's stable and it persists beyond a few hours, it may kill millions. If we had time, and energy, and opportunity, I would try to save lives. But we don't, and we can't. We don't have time, and we don't have authority, so we can't save anyone. We can't even save ourselves. Our own lives are not our top priority tomorrow."