Nimbus
by Peter Watts
She’s been out there for hours now, listening to the clouds. I can see the Radio Shack receiver balanced on her knees, I can see the headphone wires snaking up and cutting her off from the world.
Or connecting her, I suppose. Jess is hooked into the sky now, in a way I’ll never be. She can hear it talking. The clouds advance, threatening grey anvils and mountains boiling in ominous slow motion, and the ’phones fill her head with alien grumbles and moans.
God she looks like her mother. I catch her profile and for a moment it is Anne there, gently chiding, of course not, Jess, there aren’t any spirits. They’re just clouds. But now I see her face and eight years have passed in a flash, and I know this can’t be Anne.
Anne knew how to smile.
I should go out and join her. It’s still safe enough, we’ve got a good half hour before the storm hits. Not that it’s really going to hit us; it’s just passing through, they say, on its way to some other target. Still, I wonder if it knows we’re in the way. I wonder if it cares.
I will join her. For once, I will not be a coward. My daughter sits five meters away in our own back yard, and I am damn well going to be there for her. It’s the least I can do before I go.
I wonder if that will mean anything to her.
An aftermath, before the enlightenment.
It was as though somebody had turned the city upside down and shaken it. We waded through a shallow sea of detritus; broken walls, slabs of torn roofing, toilets and sofas and shattered glass. I walked behind Anne, Jess bouncing on my shoulders making happy gurgling noises; just over a year old, not quite talking yet but plenty old enough for continual astonishment. You could see it in her eyes. Every blown newspaper, every bird, every step was a new experience in wonder.
Also every loaded shotgun. Every trigger-happy national guardsman. This was a time when people still thought they owned things. They saw their homes strewn across two city blocks and the enemy they feared was not the weather, but each other.
Hurricanes were accidents, freaks of nature. The experts were still blaming volcanoes and the greenhouse effect for everything.
Looters, on the other hand, were real. They were tangible. They were a problem with an obvious solution.
The volunteers’ shelter squatted in the distance like a circus tent at Armageddon. A tired-looking woman inside had given us shovels and pitchforks, and directed us to the nearest pile of unmanned debris. We began to pitch pieces of someone’s life into an enormous blue dumpster. Anne and I worked side by side, stopping occasionally to pass Jessica back and forth.
I wondered what new treasures I was about to unearth. Some priceless family heirloom, miraculously spared? A complete collection of Jethro Tull CDs? Just a game, of course; the whole area had been combed, the owners had come and despaired of salvage, there was only wreckage beneath the wreckage. Still, every now and then I thought I saw something shining in the dirt, a bottle cap or a gum wrapper or a Rolex—
My pitchfork punched through a chunk of plaster and slid into something soft. It dropped suddenly under my weight, as if lubricated. It stopped.
I heard the muted hiss of escaping gas. Something smelled, very faintly, of rotten meat.
This isn’t what I think it is. The crews have already been here. They used trained dogs and infrared scopes and they’ve already found all the bodies, they couldn’t have missed anything there’s nothing here but wood and plaster and cement—
I tightened my grip on the pitchfork, pulled up on the shaft. The tines rose up from the plaster, slick, dark, wet.
Anne was laughing. I couldn’t believe it. I looked up, but she wasn’t looking at me or the pitchfork or the coagulating stain. She was looking across the wreckage to a Ford pickup, loaded with locals and their rifles, inching its way down a pathway cleared in the road.
“Get a load of the bumper,” she said, oblivious to my discovery.
There was a bumper sticker on the driver’s side. I saw the caricature of a storm cloud, inside the classic red circle with diagonal slash. And a slogan.
A warning, to whom it may concern: Clouds, we’re gonna kick your ass.
Jess takes off the headphones as I join her. She touches a button on the receiver. Cryptic wails, oddly familiar, rise from a speaker on the front of the device. We sit for a moment without speaking, letting the sounds wash over us.
Everything about her is so pale. I can barely see her eyebrows.
“Do they know where it’s headed?” Jess asks at last.
I shake my head. “There’s Hanford, but they’ve never gone after a reactor before. They say it might be trying to get up enough steam to go over the mountains. Maybe it’s going after Vancouver or Sea-Tac again.” I tap the box on her knees. “Hey, it might be laying plans even as we speak. You’ve been listening to that thing long enough, you should know what it’s saying by now.”
A distant flicker of sheet lightning strobes on the horizon. From Jessica’s receiver, a dozen voices wail a discordant crescendo.
“Or you could even talk to it,” I continue. “I saw the other day, they’ve got two-ways now. Like yours, only you can send as well as receive.”
Jess fingers the volume control. “It’s just a gimmick, Dad.
These things couldn’t put out enough power to get heard over all the other stuff in the air. TV, and radio, and...” She cocks her head at the sounds coming from the speaker. “Besides, nobody understands what they’re saying anyway.”
“Ah, but they could understand us,” I say, trying for a touch of mock drama.
“Think so?” Her voice is expressionless, indifferent.
I push on anyway. Talking at least helps paper over my fear a bit. “Sure. The big ones could understand, anyway. A storm this size must have an IQ in the six digits, easy.”
“I suppose,” Jess says.
Inside, something tears a little. “Doesn’t it matter to you?”
She just looks at me.
“Don’t you want to know?” I say. “We’re sitting here underneath this huge thing that nobody understands, we don’t know what it’s doing or why, and you sit there listening while it shouts at itself and you don’t seem to care that it changed everything overnight—”
But of course, she doesn’t remember that. Her memory doesn’t go back to when we thought that clouds were just...clouds. She never knew what it was like to rule the world, and she never expects to.
My daughter is indifferent to defeat.
Suddenly, unbearably, I just want to hold her. God Jess, I’m sorry we messed up so badly. With effort, I control myself. “I just wish you could remember the way it was.”
“Why?” she asks. “What was so different?”
I look at her, astonished. “Everything!”
“It doesn’t sound like it. They say we never understood the weather. There were hurricanes and tornadoes even before, and sometimes they’d smash whole cities, and nobody could stop them then either. So what if it happens because the sky’s alive, or just because it’s, you know, random?”
Because your mother is dead, Jess, and after all these years I still don’t know what killed her. Was it just blind chance? Was it the reflex of some slow, stupid animal that was only scratching an itch?
Can the sky commit murder?
“It matters,” is all I tell her. Even if it doesn’t make a difference.
The front is almost directly overhead now, like the mouth of a great black cave crawling across the heavens. West, all is clear.