In 140 BC a Chinese sage recorded the first known reference to the hexagonal nature of snowflakes, unaware that two thousand years later, snow would be a myth that existed only in the pages of history books and in the memories of very old men.
Johnu Klo was such a man, even though he looked no older than twenty-five. God save the queen and genetic cosmetology.
Johnu stood beneath the crushing sun, his boots crawling with dust, his hand a pitiful shelf to shield his eyes. His lips had been chapped for weeks, like two worms cracked and bloodless from the heat. If he didn’t make a miracle in the next few days, a million more lives would be lost, maybe more. He moved his head slowly, panning the empty horizon, and the desert of south Kansas stared back at him.
Johnu turned toward the dome, his heel stirring up silt from the crust of the earth, wondering how long it took a planet to die.
* * *
The Yoke started talking before he reached the dome.
"Do you think the weather cell has moved northward, Father?"
Johnu didn’t answer. It was only eight in the morning, and he didn’t yet feel compelled to make small talk. Unlike the Yoke, Johnu was still human enough to require modest applications of coffee before conversation could ensue.
Besides, it was his birthday today. He thought he must be seventy-nine.
"And isn’t today your birthday?" asked the Yoke.
Okay. So now the damn thing was reading his mind.
"Yes, I think that it must be your birthday. My chronometer is never wrong. Now tell me, Father, please. Is the high-pressure cell coming this way, do you think? Every afternoon the clouds form overhead. So will the rains come soon? I hope so. Don’t you, Father? What was it called again? That atmosphere-thingy? The belt of . . . conservation?"
"Convergence," Johnu finally sighed. The sound of his voice was like the alkali that blew up when the wind spiraled across the hardpan. "The belt of convergence. And to answer your question, no. I don’t think the tropical cell has any chance in the darkest basement of hell of moving this far north. Even in this day of senseless and sporadic wind shifts, they rarely venture more than thirty degrees either side of the equator. Satisfied?"
"Well, no." There was a slight whine in the Yoke’s voice that wore like sand on Johnu’s bones. "The weather patterns have changed so much in the last decade. Sometimes the tropical cells surprise us, right? I was hoping this drought might soon be over."
"It will never be over," Johnu whispered, and then he stopped to inspect the first of this morning’s balloons.
Lashed down about ten meters from the dome was a giant silver weather balloon, tugging gently in the wind. The balloon was taller than Johnu himself, its fishlike skin reflecting a thousand images of the sun. Narrowing his eyes to protective slits, Johnu knelt before the balloon and examined the machinery he’d designed to be borne by helium into the upper elevations of the atmosphere.
"What do you call this thing, Father?"
"A rawinsonde," Johnu replied, distractedly. Using the palm-sized diagnostic guide he wore on a lanyard around his neck, he double checked the unit’s sensors. "If you really must know, a rawinsonde is a radio-wind-sounding device, which will measure upper-air temperature, pressure and humidity, and then, hopefully, it will survive the heat long enough to transmit its findings."
Satisfied that the instrument was functioning properly, and silently sweating into his clothes, Johnu toggled the radio transmitter, disengaged the tethers, and watched as the sphere lifted into the waterless sky. Quietly he wished he could follow it. He stared upward until the balloon was nothing but a speck against the vast white firmament above him, then swiped the hat from his head and plowed the perspiration from his brow with the back of his arm.
Thirsty again, he realized. He’d learned to hoard bodily fluids like a miser hoards his gold.
Before heading into the dome to track the progress of the weather probe, he slugged over to the well they’d drilled before abandoning him here. The shaft was metal-lined, and a phantasm of cool air drifted up from the darkness, tempting him with the memory of rain. Running his tongue over the rough burlap of his lips, he sent down a bucket, and when he brought it back up, he found himself staring at his reflection in the water.
His cheeks were scarred by the sun, his skin made red by it. But youth lived undeniably in his bones; no wrinkles, no saggy pockets of skin, no liver spots to betray his actual age.
His eyes didn’t linger on his face, however; his gaze kept returning to the Yoke.
Permanently affixed to his neck was a broad collar of a lightweight and apparently indestructible silicon composite, bright beads of light flickering around it to indicate that its innards were still working as they should. There was no on/off switch on the device, no visible wires to short-circuit, only a single loudspeaker and a node of solar collectors. Out here in this ineffable sunlight, the batteries of the Yoke would never fade. . . .
Johnu spent a few minutes in silence, lost in thought.
And then:
"Happy birthday, Father."
Scowling, Johnu quickly turned away from his reflection and loped into the dome.
* * *
The problem was that Earth was dying.
Back before the accident and subsequent trial and sentencing, Dr. Johnu Klo had been a meteorologist of certain esteem. His field of expertise was synoptic meteorology, a sage of day-to-day weather variations who also dabbled in electrical and optical atmospheric anomalies. On the afternoon of Johnu’s thirtieth birthday, the World Meteorological Organization declared an impending crisis. That magician called ozone was up to its old tricks again.
Specifically, it was disappearing.
Fifteen years later, when Johnu turned forty-five, people were either staying indoors or lining up under their parasols for cancer treatment. On his sixtieth birthday, he gifted himself with anti-aging chromosome cleansing, all the rage for those who could afford it, and a year later he was so invigorated as to sire his first child, a son, and by then the ice caps were fading fast and flooding was wiping out the coasts. Crops were burned to ash on the stalk.
Folks were starting to assert that The End was imminent.
And on the morning he turned seventy-five, Johnu was given a matching pair of handcuffs and an all-expense-paid vacation in a two-by-three meter room. . . .
He blinked the memories away.
"Electrical resistance is altering," he announced for the benefit of his recorded journal. He was bent over the receiving unit which tracked the balloon and measured its position at successive time intervals as it crossed the heavens. "Humidity is unfortunately consistent with predictions." He looked away long enough to get a glance at the equipment which surrounded him. "Ceilometer gives no reading. Day sixty-four without any visible morning cloud cover, though it should accumulate a bit by this afternoon. I still maintain that a sortie into the mid reaches of the ionosphere with the new Coalescence Catalysts remains the only means possible of cooling the air to a degree sufficient for the formation of cloud droplets." Cloud droplets were formed by condensation. Condensation had become Johnu’s religion.
"What is the best birthday gift you ever received, Father?"
"Hours of uninterrupted silence," Johnu replied automatically. He stared intently at the riddles of data which scrolled across the bank of monitors in front of him.
The lights on the Yoke glimmered.
"Did you ever have a birthday cake?"
"Yes, of course," Johnu said. "Everyone gets cake on their birthday at least once in their lives. It’s some kind of law, I think. And my favorite was vanilla with chocolate frosting, before you ask."
"Sounds delicious."
"Can’t say that I remember."
"And candles?" the Yoke asked, ever eager.
"Always blew them out in one breath. Now, can you leave me in peace for a few moments? I’ve some extended calculations to perform." With abundant effort he was able to focus on the task at hand, assembling a mathematical analog of the immediate weather cycle with data collected from eleven different atmospheric levels. Until he’d designed the prototype software, the world’s most sophisticated weather computers used only nine levels for computation. His vocational genius, he supposed, was the principal reason they’d sent him here to this gulag rather than to a conventional prison. Of course, there were days when the Yoke made even the grimmest dungeon seem a welcome respite.
As soon as he’d worked through the equations and established a model of the local forecast, he transmitted the information to the national collection center in what was left of Maryland, which was looking a lot like Venice these days. Johnu’s dome was connected by a high-speed global trunk circuit to the worldwide meteorological community--his only link to the rest of the human race.
Then he spent an hour trying to formulate an alternative solution. But it was no use.
He was going to have to make it rain.
Grabbing his flight helmet and a thermos of brandy-laced coffee, Johnu ignored the Yoke’s ceaseless dialogue about candles and birthday gifts, and went out to fire up the space plane.
* * *
The fissionjet was hidden beneath a tarp.
You’d think they’d give me a better way to take care of a hundred-million dollar piece of equipment. He removed the covering, and it sloughed off like old skin, disturbing the dust and the dead sand beetles which had become lodged in its plastic wrinkles. Is a hangar too much to ask? Then he stood there for a moment, squinting in the light which banked off the fissionjet’s considerable chrome.
"It’s beautiful," the Yoke observed.
The plane was small and sinister with forward-thrusting wings.
"How can you see it without any goddamn eyes?" Johnu grunted, though he already knew the answer. The bitterness sometimes spilled out before he could bottle it.
"Ultrasonic sensors, of course. And if you’d like to know how they function--"
"I wouldn’t. Thanks anyway." He approached the vehicle and put his hand along its sleek skin, finding it marginally strange that he could still recognize beauty when it was before him. The plane was a Fokker Fissionjet 2S, powered by a single nuclear engine which could be shifted beneath the plane’s belly for vertical takeoff and landing capability. The reactor provided the Fokker with sufficient thrust to achieve escape velocity, making it a true space plane, like the ones NASA employed to rendezvous with the Plymouth Rock Orbital Colony and the experimental domiciles on the moon. Standing there observing the Fokker’s graceful curves and predatory angles, Johnu fancied it an alien bird of prey awaiting orders to scramble upwards and rend the sky in twain.
"You’ll never make it to the ionosphere, you know," the Yoke needled him.
"We’ll see."
"The Turnkey will stop you."
"Probably."
"Then why even make the attempt?"
Johnu popped the cockpit shell and tossed the thermos in. "Because it’s either that, or give the bastards the pleasure of seeing me lay down and die. Which I’m not about to do, at least not today. Tomorrow, maybe, but not today. Now do me a favor."
"Anything."
"Shut the hell up."
The lights of the collar pulsed spasmodically. By the grace of whatever deities still looked down upon this desolate place, the Yoke fell silent.
Swearing behind his teeth, Johnu climbed into the plane. He fixed his helmet over his head, attached the oxygen line, and raised the polarized face shield while he glanced around the cockpit. "Initiate start-up sequence."
The plane responded to his voice command, instantly coming to life, as if it had anticipated his arrival and had already made the various systems ready for his immediate use. He spent five minutes running pre-flight integrity tests and checking the sensors which would measure atmospheric conditions during flight. The digital hygrometer reported dismally low humidity. No surprise there. Out of habit he noted the dry-bulb and wet-bulb temperatures reported by the monitors linked to the dome’s psychrometer, as well as the current wind speed, which was relayed from the electronic cup anemometer attached to the summit of the dome. But he needn’t have bothered, as the wind sock told that story well enough: the bright orange fabric was as lifeless as a man hanging from the gallows.
The base of his helmet rubbed uncomfortably against the Yoke, just like it always did.
Johnu slipped his fingers around the collar, adjusting it, while issuing the last few oral passwords that swept the engine under the plane and readied it for VTOL operation. The entire space plane began to hum, the level of the noise rising steadily as Johnu prepared for takeoff. Dust swirled out from under the machine, rising like half-formed spirits, chased by the heat waves which warbled slowly after them. Johnu felt the vibration shaking his legs and gently massaging his back. He set a program for autopilot, dropped his face shield, and--
"Father?"
Johnu forced his jaw to unclamp. "What now?"
"You shouldn’t get so angry. It can’t be good on your heart."
Fighting back the bile, Johnu slammed his hand against the takeoff switch, and the plane roared savagely into the sky.
* * *
Almost twenty years ago, Johnu had invented the GHOST.
Not invented, perhaps, but at the very least perfected. Before Johnu had come along, weather predictions had been made by the interpretation of satellite photos, in conjunction with observations of temperature and pressure. Johnu had spearheaded the Global Horizontal Sounding Technique, or GHOST, which replaced the old collection methods with a worldwide system of free-floating, semi-sentient probes, connected electronically to the satellites that provided the necessary upper-air reconnaissance. Since then, predictions had become far more precise, and the sharing of intelligence between nations almost instantaneous.
GHOST had been particularly effective when monitoring ozone degradation. Not that there was much left to monitor anymore.
"Faster!" the Yoke encouraged.
"If we go too fast," Johnu said evenly, "then the sensors will give us inaccurate readings."
To this, the normally loquacious Yoke had no reply.
Johnu thought the thing must be pouting.
Though the plane itself did most of the flying, Johnu kept his hand on the stick, his eyes swiveling from the instrument panels to the white nothingness beyond the canopy. Already the Fokker was several kilometers up and only going higher, far beyond the level where low-riding nimbostratus clouds should have been forming, dripping their fat rains. At an altitude of just over eleven kilometers, the plane soared through a thin cirrus veil, an anorexic excuse for cloud cover if ever there was one. Then Johnu found himself entering the stratosphere, and thank God his oxygen was working properly again. Last week he’d complained to his keepers that the O2 unit was on the fritz, and though his message hadn’t received a human reply, at least the dogs had the decency to airdrop the parts needed to make the repair.
The high-g thrust kept him pressed almost painfully against the seat. He knew that if he gave in to the need to puke, he’d more than likely strangle on his own vomit.
A flashing indicator informed him that he was now within the ozonosphere, twenty-six kilometers above Earth. Normally he would have taken over control of the craft at this point, leveling out and going about his routine measurements, groaning in frustration when it became apparent yet again that the molecular chain reaction was beyond the dominion of mankind. Ultraviolet radiation had already split an innumerable number of dreaded CFC molecules, releasing their chlorine atoms, which then went on to attack the atmosphere by stealing oxygen atoms from ozone molecules to form chlorine monoxide, or CIC. And when the CIC encountered a free oxygen atom, it gave up its own oxygen atom to make an O2 molecule, freeing up its chlorine to steal another oxygen atom, and so on and so forth until the process was beyond anyone’s ability to curtail.
"Are we there yet?" the Yoke asked.
"Funny," Johnu growled.
The digital gauge informed him that the Fokker had penetrated the D layer of the ionosphere, and was now twenty kilometers from the target E layer--
The watchdog appeared on an intercept course above him.
"Dammit!" Johnu nudged the stick and killed upward thrust, pulling away a few seconds before the drone sizzled past.
"Told you so."
"Up yours!" Still sweating in spite of the frigid altitude, Johnu settled the Fokker into a steady eastward curve, his stomach lurching from the sudden motion, his eyes instinctively going for the radar, and there it was, a blue blip on his screen, and--
He turned his head in time to see it screaming toward him.
Again he jerked the stick, careful to keep the plane from pitching into a spiral, biting down painfully on his lower lip. Every whistle and warning light in the plane was going berserk. The drone was an unmanned, sentinel-grade seeker and destroyer, programmed to execute a single mission: keep its lone inmate from passing beyond sixty kilometers of his cage.
Years ago, Johnu had dubbed it the Turnkey.
He didn’t know how the Turnkey was powered--solar engine, most likely--or the exact capabilities of its munitions. He’d been fired at only once. A warning shot, taken from about three kilometers up. Johnu had dug the slug out of the sand the next morning; it was a .50 caliber incendiary. So the thing was an ace marksman, William Tell with wings and a pissy disposition.
"It’s advising us to decrease elevation," the Yoke observed.
"Yes, I can read the monitor, thank you very much." Though he couldn’t see much at such speeds, he was aware of the drone’s proximity because of the radar’s incessant beeping.
"These myopic, paranoid idiots." He dropped a few meters, just to let the thing know he wasn’t taunting it. "They put me here to get some precipitation falling, and then they shackled this thing to my ass to keep me from doing it!"
"They probably don’t see any need for such an altitude," the Yoke opined.
"Last time I looked, God hadn’t lowered the ionosphere."
"Well, you should tell them this."
"Has that ever done any goddamn good?" The Turnkey was sending another demand, and Johnu was too frazzled to do anything but comply. He guided the plane lower, into an easy, downward curve. "I’m a pariah, do you know what that means?"
"Actually, no . . ."
"It means I don’t exist, okay? I’m persona non grata. Got it? I’ve been excommunicated from the human race. End of story."
"Excommunicated? I’m still not sure I understand . . ."
Johnu started to shout a scathing reply, but the wind rushed out of him. He felt exhausted, as if his very essence had been sucked through the seat behind him and shot out with the engine exhaust. He slumped forward. Almost blindly he coaxed the space plane to lower altitudes and engaged the auto-nav. He drew a tattered breath. "I’m not sure I believe that," he whispered. "If there’s anyone in the world who understands my situation, Benji, it’s you."
The Yoke didn’t make a sound. It might have been thinking.
"In fact," Johnu said, his throat constricting, "if it hadn’t been for you asking about the thunder, none of this would have ever come to be . . ."
* * *
Dr. Johnu Klo strode through the glistening halls of the Severe Forecast Center in Kansas City, talking to three people at once.
Gravis from Washington was on the phone; Johnu wore a hands-free unit, and assured Gravis that the latest projected migration of anticyclones in the middle latitudes was as accurate as current science allowed. After all, meteorologists weren’t fortune-tellers.
Gravis said the President was starting to get concerned.
On Johnu’s left, trying to keep up with his determined strides, was the reporter from a science journal whose name Johnu had already forgotten. He was saying something about a possible story, and would Dr. Klo be open for a photo session on Thursday?
Johnu referred the man to a secretary more suited to such matters.
And finally, little legs pumping gamely, baseball clutched in one hand, was wee Benjamin, who wanted to know now, Father, just how long they had to stay here tonight, when there was so much good stuff on TV.
"I don’t know, Benji," Johnu said, more incisively than he’d intended. Benjamin’s face darkened almost immediately. Oh, well. That was a kid for you. Like ancient Ptolemy, children thought the universe revolved around them.
". . . perhaps if you could come to Washington . . ."
". . . secretary told me I should talk to you instead . . .
". . . but it’s so boring here . . ."
"Sorry, Grav, I’m booked. The President will have to trust me. Have I ever lied to him in the past?" He shot his eyes at the journalist. "Any evening next week after seven will be fine. Make the arrangements with Margaret. We’re talking a cover story here, aren’t we?" Even as the reporter was nodding, Johnu was turning toward his son. "And I don’t think it happens to be boring at all, young man. And we’ll be here at least another hour. Now go run and find something to do."
"But I want to go now."
At the sound of that single, grating word, Johnu’s hand almost moved. Almost leaped of its own accord and belted the kid across the teeth. The reflex actually caused the muscles in Johnu’s arm to quiver. Gravis kept rattling in his ear and the reporter was thanking him profusely, and when he looked down at Benjamin, he expected to see an apology in the boy’s eyes. Instead, Benjamin only twisted his face into a mask of anguish and lamented, "There’s nothing to do here that’s any fun . . ."
When the two of them were alone in the office, Johnu hit him four times in the face.
One night a few months later, when the environment was going down the crapper and the winds were all wrong and the heat was killing off the cattle, the stress bore down upon him like the wrath of a god he’d offended. And Benjamin kept pestering him about the thunder.
"Please go now, Benji," Johnu begged. His voice was thin and raw.
"But why, Father? You’re a weatherman. Tell me about the thunder--"
"Benji, please."
"The sky always thunders during a rainstorm," the boy continued, his feet shuffling restlessly beneath him. "Everybody knows that. It happens all the time. Right? Why isn’t there ever any thunder when it snows?"
"Benjamin . . ."
"I said, why isn’t there thunder when it snows?"
When Johnu finally came to his senses, he was on his knees beside the body, wearing his son’s blood from his fingers to his neck.
* * *
He climbed out of the Fokker cursing.
"Let me do my job, damn you!" he yelled at the sky. The drone was still visible, a black mote against the whiteness. "Quit making it so bloody difficult, for the love of--"
He cut off his own words by tipping back the thermos. The coffee was cold, but what the hell. The brandy managed to quell his anger while simultaneously scorching his throat. They rationed the alcohol, just like the rest of his provisions, and he could never make his allowance last until the next shipment arrived at the drop zone. He let his flight helmet fall to the ground. It rolled unevenly across the packed dirt.
"May I say something, Father?"
Johnu wiped the wetness from his mouth, tasting the dust which clung to his skin. "As if I could ever stop you."
The Yoke was silent. Perturbed, perhaps.
"What do you want, goddammit?"
"I was just going to ask what you planned to do next?"
Johnu bent over and snatched up his helmet, then plodded toward the dome. "Thought I’d go inside and finish my coffee. Is that okay with you?"
The Yoke pulsed a few of its lights. "You seem to drink a lot of that stuff."
"Not near enough, I assure you." He pushed through the round steel door and activated the lights with a word. He traversed the maze of food crates and electronic gadgetry, kicking a path through the soiled clothes and clearing the books and skin magazines from his cot. After another long pull on the thermos, he stretched out, automatically adjusting the pillow to accommodate the collar, and stared up at the dirty fluorescent bulbs. Over the next hour he worked his way to the bottom of the thermos, trying to think about nothing at all, muttering inane answers to the Yoke’s incessant questions when it refused to shut up. God, the thing was a talker. But such was its nature, and by now Johnu had learned to respond to its queries with only minimal consideration. The device functioned precisely as it had been designed. Even still, you’d think an advanced AI brain could make more mature conversation.
But then again, it was only supposed to be a child, right?
Eventually, Johnu began to drift off. Outside the walls of the dome, the winds started to gather, just as they always did in the early afternoon, producing the upward flow of cool air necessary to the formation of clouds. Over the past six weeks, the strong vertical currents had produced a nice tower of potential rain clouds, but condensation hadn’t occurred to the extent where droplets were formed.
Johnu dreamed, and yet he didn’t. As usual, he slept in a kind of brandy-induced non-slumber, where dream stuff mingled with the Yoke’s unending babble. The Yoke never slept. Johnu muttered half-cogent responses to the Yoke’s questions, and did the same for the Benjamin of his dreams, until the two realities merged into one, plumbing the shaft of his sorrow just as he’d sent the bucket into the well this morning. Both buckets came up full, and in the waters of each he saw his own reflection.
". . . if you won’t tell me about the thunder, Father, then what about lightning?"
Johnu’s eyelids flicked open. He lay utterly still on the cot. "What did you say?"
"I said," the Yoke repeated, "I’d like to know about lightning."
Instantly and fully awake, Johnu didn’t move. He waited, one hand on his chest, the other touching the thermos which sat empty on the floor.
"Father? I’m curious. Please tell me about the--"
"Lightning," Johnu exclaimed, sitting up so fast that his bleary vision swam out of focus.
"Yes? What about it?"
Johnu swung his legs off the cot. His stomach lurched uneasily, but he ignored the nausea and struggled to his feet. Puzzle pieces of baked earth fell from his boots as he hurried across the room. Pellets of sweat clung to his scalp where his hairline met his ears. He threw himself into the swivel chair in front of the bank of computer gear and began the calculations. He threw switches, rattled at the keyboard, worked the mouse, conjured new data to the monitors.
"Father? Father, what are you doing?"
"Loading my gun."
"I don’t understand."
Johnu swiped the paper that tongued from the printer and compared its data to his estimates. "You know that Turnkey up there?"
"Yes, of course."
"Well, I’m goddamn killing it."
"Oh," the Yoke replied, and then said no more for the next hour, perhaps, for once, sensing the wisdom of silence.
* * *
Just before the sun began its final descent and transformed the western horizon into a firestorm, Johnu finished his checks on the fissionjet’s Coalescence Catalyst dispersal unit, and settled himself in the cockpit. The canopy closed over him with the sound of grit grating against steel. Once sealed, the canopy formed a welcome barrier against the sand, which was now razoring across the hardpan in the clutches of the wind. The abrasive sound of debris against the body of the Fokker was drowned out the moment Johnu gave the command to ignite the reactor.
The engine gave a tyrannosaurs scream. A caldera of churning dust engulfed the plane.
Johnu’s helmet adjusted for the sudden noise, dampening all exterior sounds while amplifying the all-important internal system announcements. Like the Yoke, the fissionjet possessed limited sentience, enabling it to perform most routine flight operations, as well as compensate for pilot error during liftoff and rapid aerial maneuvers.
A minute later, the plane commenced a crisp vertical ascension, rising upward in the middle of a tornado of its own creation. Fighting the furious vibrations, Johnu programmed the desired coordinates and elevation, and then concentrated on holding the calcium in his bones while the wicked g threatened to turn him inside out.
"I’m still not sure I understand," the Yoke said.
Do you ever? Johnu wondered. He kept his eyes closed, lest they burst from the pressure.
"Do we have any guns? Missiles? Tell me, Father, does our jet carry missiles?"
Unwilling to fight the plane’s momentum just to appease the Yoke, Johnu kept his mouth clamped shut, but not before a droplet of perspiration sneaked between his lips. As usual, his sweat tasted like sun-screen; for the last three years, everyone had been required by law to wear skin protection whenever they ventured outside. Sun-screen was the only thing Johnu’s keepers didn’t limit to a certain ration, but parachuted the stuff down by the barrel.
The plane soared through the troposphere.
"Father, I think our sensors have spotted it."
Johnu dared to creak open one eye. Sure enough, infrascan was picking up the drone’s heat signature a few dozen kilometers overhead. Unfortunately, the answer to the Yoke’s latest question was no, the Fokker wasn’t equipped with missiles. They’d stripped the plane of everything that Johnu could have been using right now in battle against the Turnkey. At least they could have left him the ECM. But then again, what need did a convict have for electronic countermeasures and state-of-the-art jamming equipment?
The plane continued to climb.
Johnu inched his fingers toward the stick.
He waited . . . waited . . .
Moments later the Fokker speared into the territory currently under dispute: the ionosphere. Johnu had come to consider this particular region of near-space like an old stretch of grazing ground from the nineteenth century, dark with the blood of the ranchers and farmers who killed each other over it. It’s high noon, Sheriff Turnkey, he thought. Where the hell are you? As soon as the plane breached the D layer, Johnu cleared his throat and barked, "Disengage auto-nav!" and then the plane was his, responding to his nervous touch on the stick. He bent the plane into an arc which quickly found it running on a course parallel and several kilometers below the Turnkey.
At least until the Turnkey dove to intercept him.
"I think it’s coming after us, Father."
"Thanks for the deduction, Dr. Holmes. Better buckle up."
"Holmes? I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about, Father."
But Johnu was no longer listening. He guided the Fokker above a growing pack of cirrocumulus clouds--mackerel scales, they called them--and waited until the plane was perfectly positioned. Hold it steady now, he admonished himself, hold it . . . hold it . . .
Now.
He thumbed the trigger that released the Coalescence Catalysts. The Catalysts spewed from the underside of the plane like falling stardust, a hundred million microscopic machines drifting down on the cloudbank below.
Johnu had spent the last eleven months bioengineering the cloud-seeding nanites, each one an independent, self-replicating hybrid of chemistry and computerization. He turned the Fokker in two complete and graceful circuits, sowing his cyberspores on the cloud fields, acutely aware of the drone which zeroed in on his position.
"Father, it’s getting closer."
"Good. Let it come."
Only three days ago he’d concluded his final test on the Catalysts. At a mere ten micrometers in size, or one millionth of a meter, the individual units were invisible to the unaided eye, a product of nanochemistry and micro-engineering easily borne aloft by the vertical air currents which channeled through the potential rain clouds. In essence, the Catalysts provided the air with water molecules that natural evaporation could not, creating and then dispersing crystal hexagons of ice that melted in the lower cloud layers and then fell, hopefully, as rain.
He held his course until the last of the nanites was clear of the tank, and then banked sharply to his left. He watched the radar as the Turnkey adjusted to keep pace.
The Fokker’s single engine howled. The drone whistled after it. And the Catalysts floated through the insubstantial mackerel scales and entered the heavy nimbostratus giants which dwelled several kilometers underneath.
A message scrolled across the helmet’s visor: BE ADVISED. REDUCE ALTITUDE BELOW 42 KILOMETERS. THIS IS YOUR SECOND WARNING. YOU HAVE 30 SECONDS TO COMPLY.
Johnu’s lips parted in a scimitar smile.
"Father?"
Johnu increased throttle and held his course.
Still the drone was gaining on him.
Johnu began to ease the plane into a broad turn, pointing it back in the direction of the Catalysts and the thunderheads which concealed them. "Only one of us is leaving these clouds today, my friend."
"Are you talking to me, Father?"
Johnu wondered about that. Was he talking to the Yoke, rather than the drone? He shrugged off the thought and concentrated on reaching the cloud wall. Timing was critical. If he could permit the drone to get close enough to establish a targeting lock--say, within two hundred meters or so--he’d have a few fleeting seconds to lead it into a trap. Once the Turnkey made up its mind that a breach of directive had occurred, it would commit to the attack, even if that meant pursuing the Fokker in a suicide plunge. Of course, the drone would unleash its weapons long before the plane could ever get close to the ground, so tricking the thing into smashing itself into the sand wasn’t an option.
Suckling his own sweat, Johnu slammed the throttle forward and hurtled through the clouds.
* * *
The plane pierced the heart of the thunderheads. Darkness descended.
His eyes dazzled with rain.
Rain!
When the canopy struck the water, Johnu blinked, momentarily jolted by the reality of what had previously existed only in his dreams. Holy crow, it’s rain! The cockpit warning lights flashed, the Yoke babbled senselessly about imminent destruction, and the message on Johnu’s face shield changed abruptly.
TARGET ACQUIRED.
"Oh, hell, here we go."
The drone was no more than a thousand meters back and closing fast. Johnu nursed the stick, executing a rapid series of stomach-rending turns, darting through the clouds but always staying well within them. The Fokker was a true acrobat, almost chillingly agile. But the rain was like a sheet of white gauze over the canopy, reducing forward visibility to nil. So relying only on radar, infrascan, and instinct, Johnu angled for position, watching the drone transform a thousand meters into eight hundred, seven hundred . . .
Six.
"What now, Father?"
Almost in response to the question, a twin-tined bolt of lightning serrated the sky.
"Yes!" Johnu trumpeted. "Come and get some juju, you son of an android whore!"
"Lightning?" The Yoke sounded surprised. "I don’t see how that helps anything."
A tangle of harsh laughter escaped Johnu’s teeth. They may have constructed a damn good AI simulation of a dead child, but it was a simulation nonetheless, a mere machine, and its ability to reason was no better than that of a toaster oven.
Five hundred meters.
The Catalysts created ice crystals by the millions. Rain churned.
Four hundred.
Riding the cusp of disaster made Johnu feel abnormally charitable. At least by talking he could shut the Yoke’s unshuttable hole, if only for a while. "Common theory held that the rate at which raindrops fell was instrumental in determining the polarization of thunderclouds, but I’m not buying it. In fact"--he tilted the nose of the Fokker toward the core of the blackest cloud--"just the opposite is true. Polarization causes precipitation, as a result of the electrical potential which exists between the ionosphere and Earth itself."
Three hundred.
"Meaning what, Father?"
"Meaning that the Catalysts are designed in such a way as to stimulate both the negative charge of the ionosphere and the positive charge of the ground by emitting traces of energy--"
Another artery of lightning coursed across the sky, sending tiny blue capillaries of electricity through the body of the clouds.
"Damn, that was close!" Johnu pushed the plane down and to the left, while the drone closed the gap and the warning lights pulsed and--
More lightning, this time from overhead, a green-yellow latticework that seemed to cover half the hemisphere.
The drone veered slightly off course.
"You see that?" Johnu shouted, teeth bared behind his grin. "Almost fried the little robot bastard. Eh, Benji?"
"Truly, Father."
Two hundred meters.
The rain became a deluge.
WEAPONS ENGAGING.
"Father?"
Johnu whipped the Fokker in a circus act of swoops, rolls, and blood-thinning dives, trying to hold out just long enough for the drone’s prominent electrical signature to turn the damn thing into a flying lightning rod. . . .
One hundred meters.
"I don’t think I like this anymore, Father."
"Too damn bad."
MISSILE LAUNCHED.
The cockpit sirens went crazy. The plane zigzagged through the clouds. Johnu grabbed the stick with both hands and tried not to think of the Yoke, which suddenly felt as if it were carved from granite. If they thought the punishment of wearing the collar was abominable, well, they were right. A more grievous penance no man could ever pay.
"Daddy, please!"
A fresh javelin of lightning appeared. It struck the Turnkey in spectacular fashion, covering it in a cocoon of blue sparks and killing it instantly, and from there it shot horizontally into the speeding missile, causing it to detonate in a sound that Johnu mistook for thunder. And that made him think even harder of Benji and what he wouldn’t have given for a chance to explain to the boy the properties of weather and the scientific reason why there was no thunder when it snowed, and then the lightning jumped from the explosion across the ionized sky to the Fokker, slamming into the base of the nuclear engine.
The plane was electrocuted.
"EJECT!" the Yoke screamed in the voice of a small frightened boy.
As the plane shut down and died, flames leaping from its reactor, the canopy released in response to the voice command, tearing away in the wind. The rain came from every direction, dousing Johnu as his seat catapulted from the cockpit. His stomach seemed to dissolve and his vision began to fail, and then he was falling, tumbling through the darkness, pulling desperately for air and nearly mindless with vertigo. The last thing he saw was the message fading to black on his face shield.
PILOT LIBERATED.
"I certainly hope so," he whispered, and then oblivion claimed him.
* * *
"Father . . ."
It was the half-dream again. The one he could never quite separate. On one side was Benji, vital and alive, tugging his hand and begging the answers to a thousand boyhood mysteries: how birds flew, how fish breathed, why sunsets were orange and why girls threw baseballs in such a funny way. On the other side was dust and wind and unrepentant heat.
"Can you hear me, Father?"
In the depths of himself, Johnu decided the answer to that question was yes.
Yes, son, I hear you, though you’re not really my son. But of course this was a lie.
Timidly: "Dad?"
When Johnu blinked to his senses, his eyelids pasty with sediment and dried tears, he was lying on his back, strapped to a chair in the desert, both hands gripping the Yoke.
And sweet rain falling on his face shield.
He pushed off his helmet and let the rain wash over him.
The water ran in rivulets between his knuckles, cleansing the dirt from the creases in his skin. It moistened his lips, pooled in the dark cups of his ears, and tasted pure when he opened his mouth and swallowed it. His khakis were already soaked.
He lay that way for some time, staring up at the beautiful purple-black sky, the sodden parachute occasionally flapping across the ground in the wind. The deep nimbostratus giants were stitched with a crosshatch of lightning. Occasionally a bolt would escape the turmoil and strike the distant hills, illuminating the horizon in a moment of flash photography but gone long before the thunder arrived.
Dazzled by the display, Johnu didn’t move, except to trace his fingers along the Yoke.
"Benji?" he said after awhile.
"Yes, Father?"
"Have I ever told you how the jet stream affects seasonal temperature shifts in the northern latitudes?"
"No. But I’d love to hear about it."
"I am the son of a poet and a carpenter--one a pacifist, the other a soldier. Perhaps as the result of this contradiction, I consistently find myself writing genre-less fiction. My best stories hover like uncertain hummingbirds between romance and science fiction, or the even rarer air between fantasy and serious literature. I am the misbegotten child of Ray Bradbury, who is in turn the admitted bastard progeny of Jules Verne and Edgar Allan Poe. It is a lineage I embrace, but one that has left me somewhat unpublishable. Nevertheless, my fiction has appeared in Westview, Planet Magazine, and Digital Catapult. I’ve done freelance work for the gaming industry, including about a dozen pieces in Dragon, Polyhedron, Dungeon, and the Living Greyhawk Journal. I have been seen charting the paths of barn swallows and calculating the escape velocity of fictional planets. "
E-mail: Logos@peoplepc.com
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