head in the clouds

Agent Ascher looked at me from the other side of the table.

"Your name is really, truly Claude Raines?" he said finally, a skeptical look on his face.

I shrugged. "My mom was a big fan. Cloud."

He leaned forward. "Pardon?"

"It's pronounced like 'cloud,'" I said, pointing upwards, "not like 'clawed.'" I raked the air.

He grunted doubtfully. "Sounds appropriate, given the nature of..." he sighed deeply. "...whatever the hell this is." Then the light went on. "Hey," he said, smiling crookedly, "Cloud rains?"

I nodded.

He chuckled, then groaned. "Great," he muttered, settling back in his chair. "A nut."

"Look, I'm serious," I said. "Do you mind if I smoke?"

He shrugged and nudged the small glass ashtray toward me.

I hesitated, my pack of Marlboro Lights halfway out of my shirt pocket. "Really? I thought smoking wasn't allowed indoors."

"We're the government," Ascher said. "Nobody's going to cite us."

I chuckled, uncertain as to the right response, and pulled a cigarette out. Lighting up and taking in that first wonderful lungful of nicotine, I settled back in my chair. "Listen, I know it sounds all fucked up, okay?"

"I know what it sounds like," he said abruptly. "I have your file here. Let's take a look at it, shall we?" He flipped the front cover open with a quick, sarcastic gesture, and looked at the single sheet. "Raines, Claude--oops, pardon me, 'Cloud.' Claims to be a mass-murderer in a spree covering six states. Murder weapon of choice: tornadoes." He looked up at me again. "I'm summarizing quite a bit, but does that about cover it?"

I cleared my throat. "More or less. Or it might be more like accidental homicide. Or criminal negligence."

He nodded. "Sure. Why not? It's such a clear-cut case, I can't imagine why the local badges didn't pick you up already."

I took a deep, nervous drag. "Look, sarcasm isn't gonna help. I'm simply thrilled to find a government agent that has a sense of humor, but all that aside, please trust me when I say that I'm telling the truth!"

He sighed. "I assume you're referring to all the storms over the last few weeks?" I nodded, and he shook his head. "Listen, I'm sure you feel bad about all the people who died, but why in the world would you think you're responsible for it?"

"I can control the weather," I said.

He rolled his eyes and stood up. "This is a waste of my time, Raines," he said. "You're a little too suggestible, I think. I think your mother just had a lousy sense of humor and terrible taste in movies. Get over it. Go home. This interview is over."

"No, wait," I said. "Just listen, okay? You don't have to believe me, but at least I'll feel better knowing that I told you and tried to take responsibility for what I've done. Please."

He looked at me doubtfully. "You really do feel responsible, don't you?" I nodded, and he sighed and settled back into his chair again, waving his hand. "Shoot."

I took another drag on the cigarette and flicked a spot of ash off my arm. "It started a few years ago, I guess. I was living in Florida at the time. I remember hearing about the hurricanes that year--I think Katrina was one of them."

He nodded. "2005."

"Right. And I was sitting in the break room at work, watching the news. I remember thinking about how badly I wanted to make sure none of those storms ever hit the part of Florida where I lived, and about ways to prevent that from happening. I had read somewhere that hurricanes needed warm water--they'd lose their strength otherwise. And I got to thinking about the Gulf of Mexico and how the red tide had somehow indicated that the water was pretty warm."

I paused and took another drag, blowing out a cloud of smoke that partially obscured the agent across from me. "And then something strange happened. I felt like I was part of the wind in this really weird, disembodied way. Like I was flying over the water as a piece of cold air and I began to sink down and, sort of, infect the water with my coldness." I sighed. "It felt so real, so serious. I'd never felt anything like that before. Anyway, it seemed to work--Florida didn't sustain any real damage that year."

Ascher scoffed. "Coincidence."

I nodded. "I thought so too. Until the year after that. I did it every time I heard a hurricane was coming, and they always missed, going off in strange directions. And the year after that..." I trailed off. Ascher looked bored. "In a nutshell, I decided to try something else, something that didn't involve cooling the water. That year, a high-pressure warm front parked itself over the state for months. There were loads of other fronts coming in, but they kept being pushed around, and we had huge storms that year. But no hurricanes. They kept heading for Mexico instead.

"The state had been in a pretty severe drought for a few years at that time. There were wildfires at the beginning of that summer. Those storms broke the drought and kept the state cool enough that power demand hit an all-time low." I shrugged. "Then I found out the southwest was drying up and hitting record temperatures, while the Midwest was drowning under some major floods."

Ascher cocked his head. "So?"

"So I decided to start fooling around a little bit. Direct some of that Midwestern weather further over, and weaken the high-pressure front over Florida. That was the year Johann hit. Massive property damage, but no lives lost--which made me feel a little bit better, although it fucked up our insurance rates. So the following year, I tried to arrange things so that there was no hurricane risk to the United States, while ensuring that every region got its water and more moderate weather. Unfortunately, that set up a little..." I sighed. "I'm not sure what to call it. A crinkle? Yeah. A crinkle in the system right over the eastern seaboard, and boom--tornadoes. Six hundred lives lost, billions in property damage, and all of it my fault."

Ascher sighed. "Well, I'm sorry to hear that. Call it a learning experience, okay?" I opened my mouth and he cut me off. "All better now? Good. Go home."

"Jesus," I said. "Fine. What the fuck ever," and I stood up, rubbing my eyes. I took a last drag on my cigarette and stubbed it out. Then an idea came.

"Okay. How about this?" I held my hands up in a propitiating gesture. "If it snows in the next two weeks, you'll know I'm telling the truth and that you should arrest me."

Ascher looked shocked, then laughed. "In the middle of August? Sure, why not?" He stuck out his hand. "It's a deal."

---

The phone rang. I picked it up and answered before the first ring had faded away.

"Hello, Agent Ascher."

There was a long pause. Then: "Come in this afternoon, please. Two o'clock."

Click.

---

"Can you turn this off?" he asked, looking miserable in his parka.

I smiled. "Give me a week."

"You can't just...make the clouds clear away right now?"

I sighed. "Just because it happens in X-Men doesn't make it true."

Ascher looked at me, his eyes needle-sharp. "Says the man who claims to manipulate the weather."

I shrugged. "What I actually meant was that these things take time. We're talking about enormous masses of air, you know. Loads of energy, huge amounts of water. I can't just make a cloudy sky turn blue without putting all that moisture somewhere."

He sighed. "But was it necessary to bring on a power outage?"

I shrugged. "Let's call it collateral damage, a sort of unintended, unforeseen consequence of all the meddling."

"Droll," he said. Then his face took on a much more serious aspect. "Like those tornadoes."

"I wouldn't call those twisters droll," I said. "They were pretty mean." I sighed and settled back in my chair. "What happens now?"

He looked out the window for a long time. "You know," he said finally, "I can't arrest you." He looked back at me and went on, "There's no proof, you see." When I jabbed my finger at the window, at the blizzard coming down outside, he shook his head and said, "I'm sorry, but there's no case here. Nobody would convict you of committing murder by means of an act of God."

"I'm not God," I insisted.

Ascher scoffed. "That much is apparent." He leaned back in his chair. "My suggestion? Go home and figure out how you can make some money off of this."

"Money?"

"Hell yeah," he said. "Remember the 2008 Olympics? The Chinese would have paid you billions for a few clear days." Then he looked outside again and drew his parka tighter around himself. "I'd suggest you practice a little bit, though."

---

I chuckled to myself and shook my head. The helicopter's rotor blades were too loud to talk and plan, so I was spending the two-hour flight out of Nairobi wandering through my memories. Ascher had become a different kind of agent, one who didn't work with the governmental acronym, but rather with the broadcast television type. I had made him truckloads of money those few years we had worked together, doing TV appearances and book signings and professional weather manipulation.

My list of accomplishments was now quite long. Modified hurricane activity in the Atlantic, ensuring minimal property damage and loss of life, while maintaining the convective effect that cooled the ocean and negated the impact of global warming and ensuring that natural wetlands and silt barriers were built up again. A continuous contract with several multinational shipping concerns to ensure clear weather for their ships. Same with quite a few cruise lines. The few heads of state who got married while in office these days brought in some extra money on the side, while the Fourth of July brought in a huge amount of extra cash.

I had since seen the light of altruism, and Ascher abandoned me when I took a comparatively tiny salary with the United Nations to help the poorer folks of the world. Bangladesh no longer flooded and India got the water it needed to grow their crops. In the meantime, polar ice was being steadily replenished, and Australia's droughts were far in the past.

It was a new world. Deserts were blooming, and the tourism market was booming. At my recommendation, coastal areas were abandoned as living space, and were now exclusively either conservation precincts or vacation-only spots. I kept the global climate stable and expended all the energy released into the system by the greenhouse effect through massive hurricanes that never came close to a single human being, while refreshing the oceans of the world in loops that lasted as long as I could sustain them. My current record was 498 days, and not a single life lost or item damaged.

We touched down in a tiny village, houses made of sticks and corrugated tin. Dust blew everywhere. Dust was everywhere, a vast, completely flat pan of orange-tan dust that met the brilliant blue sky, which was completely free of clouds.

I had been asked here by the UN to see what I could do about modifying the local weather. I stepped out of the helicopter and walked for a half-hour. My apprentice, Johann, was used to this and reassured the UN representative and interpreter on that count.

Soon, there was nobody around. Just me and the wind and the sun. I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, smelling the wind, and allowing myself to rise with it. I spent nearly an hour tasting the local air currents and understanding its place in the larger context. I soon saw that this would be a useful place to dump some energy and moisture from the Indian Ocean loop, and began the walk back to the village.

As I approached, the UN representative, Andra Fang, walked up to me.

"Can you do anything about this area?" she asked.

I sighed and nodded. I beckoned Johann over and motioned at his tablet, indicating that he should begin transcribing for the report to the UN Minister for Environmental Concerns. The interpreter wandered over, and introduced me to the village king, Dankwo.

"For starters," I said, squinting against the sunlight, "Frank is scheduled to pass through the Indian Ocean in a week or two. I can spin off a smaller ancillary storm and use the local currents and heat-exchange mechanisms to get it moving up to a self-sustaining loop. And then, in about six months, it might be a good idea to start scheduling some seeding overflights."

"How large an area?" Fang said.

I shrugged and did my best to look modest. "Judging from the currents going on up there, I'd say I can get the system going somewhere between Nairobi and Casablanca. The practical upshot is that the Sahara Desert doesn't really need to be here, you know?"

She needed a moment to catch her breath. "What do you need?"

I sighed. This was the hard part. "Space for several million refugees. I'm going to make it rain hard and long here. It's going to take several months for this place to finish absorbing all the water without flash-flooding, mudsliding, or otherwise causing serious damage. The thing is, Frank's only going to be close enough to be useful for about two days, which will happen, like, ten days from now. So you're going to have to be able to evacuate all these people in that amount of time, or wait another year."

Fang gaped. "Several million people in ten days?"

I shrugged. "Timing sucks, but there you go."

"Can't you just whip up another hurricane?"

Good God. "Sure, I could. As long as California doesn't mind losing their water for the next year. It's the price of a stable climate, Ms. Fang."

She cleared her throat and nodded. "We can do it. What else?"

"After the seeding flights have done their job and the seeds have had time to sprout and anchor the topsoil and I've ensured a stable, consistent local system, we can start bringing people back. You'll need a lot of teachers."

Dankwo interrupted, and the interpreter said, "Teachers? We need no teachers. We have farmed this land for thousands of years."

I cocked an eyebrow at him and said sarcastically, spreading my hands, "And look what a fantastic job you've done."

"Don't translate that!" Fang said sharply. She turned to me. "Watch your mouth, Raines. Listen, teachers for what?"

I sighed. "Sorry. You'll need teachers to show these people how to establish a mubenpos loop with their environment, self-sustaining ecoi that work to preserve the land while getting the most out of it. Otherwise, the same thing will happen in another few hundred years." Fang looked sour, but Johann was used to my verbal shorthand. A mutually-beneficial positive-feedback loop would ensure sustainable living in ecological communities, which were shortened to "ecoi."

I turned to Johann. "Get all that down?" He nodded. "Good. Send it." I turned to Fang. "Any further questions?"

Her mouth gaped open, about to object to, presumably, some piddling nit. Typical bureaucrat. I hated those damn things. I wished a lightning bolt would strike her dead.

It did.