Square Wave (28 page)

“The team around my father thought much of this was just absurd. But then, my father himself knew it was absurd. Still, an American government précis reports this same experiment, conducted by Dyrenforth, as intermittently successful. Many of the early experiments, actually, were carried out under government auspices. The likelihood of out and out charlatanry, then, was not very large. There must have been
something
in them, even if the original experimenters never succeeded in isolating that something. They might have tripped atmospheric conditions by accident, simply through enough blind groping.

“The cannonading of the skies, though, I don’t believe my father did any better on that one. I must have been ten at the time. But I think he thought, down the line, he might extract something from it, fuse it with other techniques, and see if the composite yielded a result. So he filed all the barometric data away.

“A couple of years later he tried an incendiary tack, lofting these flares, dozens of them, with high-velocity ground launchers. It was a sight. They phosphoresced, turning day brighter than day, beading the sky with mercury. I have tried, and it’s just not possible to imagine anything brighter, Carl. It stung our eyes. For days I was plagued by afterimages. But it was difficult to look away.

“The point, of course, wasn’t this visual revelation, a quicksilver sky. It was about shooting searing heat into pockets of cold, moist air, again with the hope of forcing condensation and precipitating them. But nothing. One more stage in the history of weather mod we could tick off.

“So, we moved on to cloud building. We’d send up columns of smoke, either from charcoal or trees or simply ignited oil. This smoke with a greasy sheen would go up, glossy black, through the cold fronts. I can’t say these definitively failed, like the cannonading and flaring—these fires that raged by design, though resembling in every way some primordial annihilation.

“There were several cases where rain followed our burns. Dark brown clouds that kept their shape—proper clouds, not just collocated smoke—ones that stoked condensation and carried water. But sometimes no precipitation would follow. Replication was the problem. There must have been atmospheric differences we didn’t, or couldn’t, measure for.

“Again, my father was greedy for the data. How had they changed the constitution of the air? Had the burns encouraged the coalescence of microdroplets? Or had they only managed to shunt more carbon into the atmosphere—”

“And destabilize things further.”

“Exactly, yes. Had we only done more damage to the climate was the question. So he would sift the data for tiny changes, rebalancings, and compare them with the changes induced by other experiments. Menar and I helped with this, once we had the training to.”

Stagg thought Ravan might be done at this point, but no, the torrent kept coming as the science (and his past) came surging back to him.

“Then came the dispersal techniques,” he said. “How to kill a cloud. That was just as important. Everywhere in India, either you got too much or too little water. That’s still true.

“We turned to various compounds: calcium chloride, silica gel, quicklime, a range of alkalis. We tried overseeding. The idea was to make microdroplets of water coalesce around so many condensation nuclei that any further condensation, into the bigger droplets that fall as rain, became impossible. It would all just hang as a mist.

“We tried electrical fields, using a network of magnets, either attached to planes flying in formation through cloudbanks or set up along the ground, looking like a field of telecom towers or a power grid. There were also the brute force techniques, World War II stuff. Applying continuous heat to clouds, vaporizing them, like the Brits did with FIDO. During the war, they’d run open burners the length of the runways so they could land in the thick, grounded stratus common to England. It kept their fleet airborne against the Germans. But the approach isn’t practical with aerosols higher up in the atmosphere. And anyway, the amount of fuel you’d need to burn out a storm is preposterously large.

“That was simple dispersal. But we also wanted to precipitate these same clouds. Again we started with the cannonading, sending warheads on rockets basically. There’s this idea that’s been around a long time, of a trigger event, that in unstable conditions the eyes of monsoons, for instance, might set off an ‘atmospheric collapse.’ But if there are such triggers, we never found them. The storms were indifferent to our strikes.

“So it came down to nucleation: seeding flares shot from the ground or released from planes, around which, we hoped, droplets, the stuff of clouds, would coalesce and fall as rain. Again there were all sorts of agents to consider. Salt, charcoal, sulfuric acid, graphite, volcanic dust even—torrential rains often follow eruptions—and the simplest of all, water itself. A few droplets, properly placed, could precipitate whole cloudbanks. There were the more exotic nucleators too. Things like lead iodide, zinc oxide, even dry ice. Silver iodide, though, has a structure that can fool microdroplets into crystallizing into ice. It’s shaped like a hexagon. So it was the most promising.”

Though he kept speaking, at some point a while back now, Ravan had stopped communicating in the strict sense. No one could follow the niceties of what he said anymore, even if he were dead sober. Stagg, of course, wasn’t even trying to.

“I remember our first trials with it,” Ravan continued. “The flare launchers my father commissioned for this work were quite effective, burning the silver iodide, making a smoke of metal. In Palo Alto one winter, we watched a wave of these flares launched into puffy stratocumulus, a brilliant white, with not much vertical extension.

“We watched it go from the purest of whites through a cycle of grays: silver, ash, slate, and finally, gunmetal. With each change of shade the cloud seemed to congeal further, those supercooled droplets crystallizing around the ice-like nuclei. This was coastal California, where snow is basically unheard of. The crystals liquefied on descent. And it drizzled. Then it rained.

“The trick was the presence of the supercooled droplets, enough to get the process started. Lots of clouds have them, even when conditions aren’t generally frigid on the ground. The falling crystals cool the regular microdroplets, reduce them to the freezing point and below, supercooling them, which stokes the process further, and primes them to condense around the silver iodide. That was our understanding, anyway, though again, consistency of results. Could it have all been chance? I don’t think so.” Ravan paused and squinted toward the music. “And now…”

“Where have they taken things?” Stagg encouraged him.

“Well, in the time I’ve been less than dedicated, they’ve moved beyond silver iodide. It’s why their results are more or less provable at this point. It’s still hardly perfect, but my father can get clouds to do what he wants sixty or seventy percent of the time.

“Now the agent of choice is a stable isotope of antimony, but subjected to a series of treatments: alloying, cooling, then returning it to its metallic form. Really it comes down to allotropic variation in the substance…

“In any case, the process is known comprehensively only to him and my brother and a few others in the Indian labs. I’ve kept up a bit, so I know some too. The essential thing is that antimony has a property of water. It expands as it freezes, or it does with the right impurities. And this seems to stimulate further condensation. It also seems to work at even higher temperatures. No need for supercooled droplets. Or perhaps it’s just converting a very small amount of those in a cloud into a large amount, through a chain reaction. A trigger event after all, maybe.

“Whatever it is, warmer stratus and cumulus can be precipitated now, which expands the range of application by miles. And very little of the agent is required, which is good, because it is not so far from arsenic in structure.

“The technology is sought now pretty much everywhere in the developed world. The Indian government has some claim to it, though, since the work was done at the National Institute. But basically, the Americans want it, and the lab in Princeton is comping me a job in the hopes of getting it, I assume. Hoping my father will deliver it through me, or that he will sign on part-time.

“So I think I’ll be doing as I please to some extent. Hurricane dispersal is the focus. There may be more as well. I’ll get to go out to Vegas, where the experimental facilities are. I don’t know exactly what they’re working on over there, in the desert. No hurricanes, obviously. Or in Idaho either, the other facility. But it might be a few months till I stop the watch-work. It
is
interesting in a way, though, isn’t it, Carl? Surveillance. There’s an odd kind of gentility to it, given the history of intelligence. You’ve got a few more months too, it looks like.”

“Maybe more,” Stagg said.

“Well I would love to hear these lectures. Where? Which university? God knows I could stand to know more about India. And the mother country. Britain. They’re open to the public?”

“They are. I’m not sure about the format yet, or the timing. They’re for the Wintry.”

“Ah.” Ravan looked at Renna with red eyes. The rise and fall of her chest was even slower now, her sleep deeper.

Ravan leaned in slightly. “You know the museum, the annex across the bridge, you know how those gargoyles fell, yeah?”

Stagg shook his head and held Renna’s shoulder. “Tell me.” He settled in for the encore.

“They were just lying on the steps, whole, patina intact, when the police got there. During a philanthropic event—about urban education, alternative teaching, the need for a cash infusion—hosted by none other than the Wintry, on Friday. It was elaborate, the event. The attack too. Or maybe it wasn’t quite an attack. Not on them in particular.

“A lot of money piled into the lobby that night, maestros of arcane instruments. And their families, beautifully made up. In the first room, just beyond where the drinks were served, there were Clementes everywhere:
Fire, Atlas, Map of What is Effortless
—all looking in on them, these big-faced, color-bleeding men, and the African animals like illustrations. Yes, a painter of ‘ecstatic consciousness.’

“Right. A pop, a cascade of figures—angels with the gargoyles—zipping past the massive windows, top to bottom, knocking on the broad, shallow steps below. Strange to think most of them survived. Then the slow rattle down the steps to the bottom. Not much damage done in the end.

“The windows went next, rattling, then cracking, just the tops. Daggers of glass fell—harmlessly, I should say, as the crowd was tucked away from the entrance by this point. That left behind another set of daggers, stabbing upward, and sideways as well, jags of lead glass still seated comfortably in the frame.

“Inside, the floor is dressed in canapés, bits of Ibérico, overturned sterling trays, bowl-less glass stems twirling on their bases in circles. Good wine’s running, pooling in places. The debutantes, they’re cowering. And rightly so. A third wave of charges releases the chimeras walking the very top of the museum’s frontispiece, its lineaments.

“The explosions were all external. It kept the philanthropists pinned inside the museum, prone or crouched down among the hors d’oeuvres, the wine grabbing at their silks and wools. It seemed like a desecration, more than anything. That’s all we seem to get.”

Ravan bit his lip and frowned. “Talking of wine,” he said. He got up and poured himself some from a bottle Renna had found too readily, Stagg thought, in the shelves beneath the bookcase. Larent must hide his wine there, for whatever reason. “You want some of this plonk, Edward? Yes, yes you do.” He poured more wine into Renna’s glass, still a quarter full, and took it with him to the threshold of Larent’s room, pinching the stem.

Bach’s suite continued without pause. Larent had been playing the entire time, so steadily the music had seemed to disappear. Now they were suddenly aware of it. The gigue had been reached, its articulation smoothed by drink, making the music elastic and droning in a way Bach never was.

Ravan came back to the table shrugging. Stagg waved off the glass in his hand. “Maybe when she wakes,” he said, setting the wine down in front of her on the table.

“You haven’t heard about this, then?”

“Parts of it,” Stagg lied.

“You have.”

“Just what anyone knows. From the Internet.”

“Oh.” Ravan tilted the glass, anchoring it on his lower lip. “And of course the two squares, the fountains, both exploded.”

“And rebuilt.”

“Well, not quite, not fully.” He leaned over again. “You know Celano has resurfaced, but across the water, in Henning.”

“I did know that,” he lied again. “No more girls have turned up.”

“Right.”

“The museum could well be his and Jenko’s work. I’m quite sure the Wintry’s discussions lately—about the resistance to popular orders, about linking voting, political clout, to knowledge or wisdom or whatever you want to call it exactly—this
can’t
suit Jenko’s constituency of workers. More than that, we both saw how expertly their own meeting space, the pool hall, I mean, was destroyed not a week ago. If anyone had both the inclination and the resources to do it, well, you’d have to think about the Wintry. Or the government, of course. But we can’t really be destroying
everything
, can we? And Jenko is certainly no friend of the Wintry, as far as I understand the matter.

“But then maybe I don’t. I was sent in to the museum just to take stock. I suppose we’re not really the brains of this operation, just the registers, the scribes. I’ve filed it with my boss, and yours, Penerin. The main subject I interviewed is someone you must know, probably quite well. That’s why I mention all of this.”

“Oh?”

“Harry.”

“Harry?”

“The director. Harry Kames. You did say your talks are at the Wintry, right?”

“Ah, Harold. Sorry, that’s the way I know him.”

“So you do know him.”

“Of course. It makes perfect sense he was there, though the thought didn’t cross my mind till now. But I don’t know him well.”