Earthquake Weather Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF TIM POWERS

  “Philip K. Dick felt that one day Tim Powers would be one of our greatest fantasy writers. Phil was right.”—Roger Zelazny

  “Powers is a fine writer with an elegant and imaginative style, and the things that happen in his story are just weird enough to make us wonder if everyday life might not be as normal as it seems.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “A Tim Powers science fiction novel never fails to titillate and elucidate with the dark and the bizarre, and all with such original, eccentric color and style.”—Los Angeles Times

  Earthquake Weather

  “Influenced by SF master Philip K. Dick, Powers taps into Dick’s surrealistic style to great success.”—Library Journal

  Expiration Date

  “Expiration Date is fascinating. . . . It’ll have you turning pages as much for his sheer inventiveness as for the plot . . . for the remarkable frisson that sparks from the page, the playfulness of the language.”—The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

  “Only a writer of Powers’ skill and imagination could make this goulash of outlandish material work. He blends every outré ingredient into a satisfying and cohesive whole, so that the reader has no choice at the end but to think: ‘Of course. Everything fits. I can see that now.’ Expiration Date ranks with his best work.”—San Francisco Chronicle

  Earthquake Weather

  Tim Powers

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen.

  No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1997 by Tim Powers

  Cover design by Jason Gabbert

  978-1-4804-3399-1

  This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

  345 Hudson Street

  New York, NY 10014

  www.openroadmedia.com

  For Serena again, and still, and always

  AND WITH THANKS TO Chris Arena, Bonnie Badenoch, John Bierer, Jim Blaylock, Russ Galen, Tom Gilchrist, Doug Goulet, Ann James, Delphine Josephe, Dorothea Kenny, Jim Crooks, Phil Mays, David Masesan, Kitty Myshkin, David Perry, Celene Pierce, Brendan and Regina Powers, Richard Powers, Serena Powers, Fred Ramer, Randal Robb, Jacques Sadoul, Marv Torrez, Rex Torrez, and Greg Wade.

  Contents

  Prologue

  The Dolorous Stroke

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Book One

  To the Boats

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Book Two

  Diverse Liquors

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Book Three

  Gout de Terroir

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Epilogue

  “In the Midsummer of This Year …”

  About the Author

  Her wanton spirits look out

  At every joint and motive of her body.

  O, these encounterers, so glib of tongue,

  That give a coasting welcome ere it comes,

  And wide unclasp the table of their thoughts

  To every ticklish reader, set them down

  For sluttish spoils of opportunity

  And daughters of the game.

  —William Shakespeare,

  Troilus and Cressida

  My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul,

  My soul the father, and these two beget

  A generation of still-breeding thoughts;

  And these same thoughts people this little world,

  In humors like the people of this world …

  Thus play I in one person many people,

  And none contented …

  —William Shakespeare,

  Richard II

  So long as you do not die and rise again,

  You are a stranger to the dark earth.

  —Goethe

  PROLOGUE

  THE DOLOROUS STROKE

  LAS VEGAS—A small earthquake rattled Boulder City on New Year’s morning, and workers at the nearby Hoover Dam reported feeling the shock.

  —Associated Press,

  January 2, 1995

  CHAPTER 1

  PANDARUS: … she came and puts me her white hand to his cloven chin—

  CRESSIDA: Juno have mercy; how came it cloven?

  —William Shakespeare,

  Troilus and Cressida

  A PAY TELEPHONE WAS ringing in the corridor by the restrooms, but the young woman who had started to get up out of the padded orange-vinyl booth just blinked around in evident puzzlement and sat down again, tugging her denim jacket more tightly around her narrow shoulders.

  From over by the pickup counter her waiter glanced at her curiously. She was sitting against the eastern windows, but though the sky was already a chilly deep blue outside, the yellow glow of the interior overhead lighting was still relatively bright enough to highlight the planes of her face under the disordered straw-blond hair. The waiter thought she looked nervous, and he wondered why she had reflexively assumed that a pay-phone call might be for her.

  The counter seats were empty where the half-dozen customers who lived in town usually sat chugging coffee at this hour—but the locals could sleep in on this New Year’s Day, and they’d be right back here tomorrow at dawn. This morning the customers were mostly grumpy families who wanted to sit in the booths—holiday-season vacationers, drawn in off of the San Diego Freeway lanes by the spotlit billboards beyond the Batiquitos Lagoon to the north or the San Elijo Lagoon to the south.

  The woman sitting in the dawn-side booth was almost certainly a waitress somewhere—when he had taken her order she had spoken quickly, specified all the side-order options without being asked, and she had sat where she wouldn’t be able to see into the kitchen. And she was hungry, too—she had ordered scrambled eggs and poached eggs, along with bacon and cottage fries, and coffee and orange juice and V-8.

  … And now she had set something on fire at her table.

  The waiter clanked her plates back down on the counter and hurried across the carpet toward her booth, but he quickly saw that the smoking paperback book on the table was just smoldering and not actually flaming, and even before he got to the table the woman had flipped open the book and splashed water from her water glass onto the … cigarette butt! … that had ignited the pages.

  The pay telephone was st
ill ringing, but the overhead lights had gone dim for a moment, and a waitress back by the electronic cash register was cussing under her breath and slapping the side of the machine, and nobody else had happened to notice the briefly burning book; and the blond woman, who was now folding the soggy thing closed again, had gone red in the face and was smiling up at him in embarrassed apology—she couldn’t be thirty years old yet—and so he just smiled cautiously back at her.

  “Yesterday you’d have been legal,” he said sympathetically; then, seeing that she was confused, he added, “Seven hours ago there’d have been ashtrays on the table, you wouldn’t have had to hide it.”

  She nodded, pushing the book away across the tabletop and frowning as though she’d never seen the object until it had started smoldering in front of her. “That’s right,” she said to him sternly. “No smoking in restaurants at all in California now, as of midnight last night.” She looked past him now, with a forgiving, we’ll-say-no-more-about-it air. “Where are your public telephones?”

  “Uh …” He waved in the direction of the ringing telephone. “Where you hear. But your breakfast is coming right up, if you want to wait.”

  She was hitching awkwardly forward out of the booth and levering herself up onto her feet. “All I ordered was coffee.” The waiter watched as she walked away toward the telephone. Her left leg swung stiff, not bending, and he was uneasily sure that the dark, wet spot on the thigh of her jeans must be fresh blood.

  She picked up the telephone receiver in mid-ring.

  “Hello?” Again the restaurant’s lights dimmed for a moment, and the woman’s face hardened. In a harsher, flatter voice than she’d used before, she said, “Do I know you, Susan? Sure, I’ll tell him. Now, I don’t mean to be abrupt, but I’ve got a call to make here, don’t I?”

  She hung up and dug a handful of litter out of a jacket pocket and dumped it onto the shelf below the telephone; from among these matchbooks and dry-wall screws and slips of paper and bits of broken green stucco she selected a quarter, thumbed it into the slot, and then punched in a local number.

  After ten seconds of standing with the receiver to her ear, “Hi,” she said, still speaking in her rough new voice. “Is this the Flying Nun?” She laughed. “Gotcha, huh? Listen, Susan says to tell you she still loves you. Oh, and what I called about—I’m going to assume the Flamingo, you know what I mean?” She listened patiently, and with her free hand picked up one of the fragments of green-painted stucco. “Potent pieces of it … persist in percolating in the … what, pasture? Can you spell alliteration? What I’m trying to say, sonny boy, is that even though they did tear it down, I’ve got a chunk of it, and your ass is grass. Don’t waste time chasing the long stories on the front page this morning—skip right to the funny papers.”

  After hanging up, she smacked her lips and frowned as if she’d eaten something rancid, then stepped across to the ladies’ room door and pushed it open.

  She dug a little bottle of Listerine out of another jacket pocket as she crossed the tile floor to the sink, and by the time she was standing in front of the mirror she had opened the bottle and taken a swig; she swished it around in her mouth, looking down at the chrome faucets rather than into the mirror, and she spat out the mouthwash with a grimace.

  She re-capped the bottle and hurried back to her table.

  Already the sky had brightened enough outside the window to cast dim shadows from the steaming plates and glasses that now sat on her table, and as she slid carefully into the booth she frowned at the elaborate breakfast. From her open purse she lifted a waitress’s order pad and another, larger bottle of the mouthwash, and for the next half hour, as she ate, she flipped through the pages of the pad, frowning over the inked notes that filled nearly every leaf, and paused frequently to swallow a mouthful of Listerine. She held her fork in her left hand to eat the scrambled eggs, but switched it to her right to eat the poached eggs. The cash register on the other side of the room kept on spontaneously going into its cash-out cycle, to the frustration of the cashier.

  When the first ray of sunlight from over the distant Vallecito Mountains touched a pastel painting on the far wall of the restaurant, the blond woman lifted her right hand and made a fist in the new daylight; then she packed up her order pad and mouthwash bottle, got up out of the booth, and tossed a twenty-dollar bill onto the table next to the soggy, blackened old paperback copy of Ian Fleming’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

  The waiter was Catholic, so he caught what she was muttering as she hurried past him: “In the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost.” Then she had pushed open the glass front door and stepped out into the chilly morning sunlight.

  Through the glass he watched her hobble out to a little white Toyota in the dawn-streaked parking lot; then he sighed and told a busboy to bring along a towel and a spray bottle of bleach to that booth, because there was probably blood on the seat. “The booth where Miss Chock Full o’ Nuts was sitting,” he told the busboy.

  She drove west on Leucadia Boulevard, past old bungalows set back under pines and fig trees away from the new, high pavement, and then crossed a set of railroad tracks; the street descended sharply, and she made a right turn onto a wide street with big old eucalyptus trees separating the north and south bound lanes; after driving past a few blocks of dark surfboard shops and vintage clothing stores she turned left, up into one of the narrow lanes that climbed the bluff beyond which lay the sea. Fences and closed garage doors batted back the rattle of her car’s engine.

  A long fieldstone wall with pepper trees overhanging it hid a property on the seaward side of Neptune Avenue. At the entrance of the private driveway, by a burly pine tree that was strung with flowering orange black-eyed Susans, the woman pulled over onto the gravel shoulder and switched off the engine. The dawn street was empty except for a couple of dew-frosted cars parked tilted alongside the road, and silent—no birds sang, and the surf beyond the bluff was just a slow subsonic pulse.

  Her face was set in a hard grin as she got out of the car, and when she had straightened up on the gravel she began unbuckling the belt on her jeans; and she kept whispering, “Just in the leg, that’s all, settle down, girl! Just in the leg as a warning, and anyway he stabbed himself in the leg already one time, just to have something to talk to some lady about—and he shot himself in the foot before that, with this here very spear. No big deal to him, I swear.” She unzipped her jeans and pulled and tugged them down to her ankles, exposing white panties with SUNDAY embroidered in red on the front, and exposing also a two-foot-long green-painted trident that was duct-taped to her knee and thigh.

  It was a short aluminum speargun spear, with three barbless tips at the trident end and three diagonal grooves notched into the pencil-diameter shaft. The tan skin of her thigh was smeared red around several shallow cuts where the points were pressed against her, and it was with a harsh exhalation of relief that she peeled off the tape and lifted the spear away. Gripping it with her elbow against her ribs, she wrapped one length of the tape back around her thigh, covering the cuts, and then she pulled her pants back up and re-buckled her belt.

  She stuck the spear upright through the gravel into the loam underneath, and then leaned into the car and hoisted out of the back seat a Makita power screwdriver and a yard-square piece of white-painted plywood with black plastic letters glued onto it. She fished two screws out of her pocket and, with an abrupt shrill blasting of the Makita’s motor, screwed the sign to the trunk of the pine tree.

  The sign read:

  REST IN PEACE

  “THE LITTLE LAME MONARCH”

  LATE OF LEUCADIA;

  PREVIOUSLY OF SAN DIEGO, SONOMA, LAS VEGAS

  AND REMOTER PARTS.

  For a moment she just stood there on the dew-damp gravel, with the Makita in her hand still harshly stitching the dawn air with its shrill buzz, and she stared at the sign with a look of blank incomprehension. Then her fingers relaxed and the machine crunched to the gravel, quiet at l
ast.

  She plodded over to the upright spear, plucked it free, and strode around the pine tree and down the unpaved private driveway, away from the street.

  Fifteen minutes later and two hundred and fifty miles to the northeast, an earthquake shook the deep-rooted expanse of Hoover Dam, forty-five million pounds of reinforcing steel and four million cubic yards of concrete that stood braced across Black Canyon against the south end of Lake Mead as it had stood for sixty years; morning-shift engineers in the powerhouse wings below the dam thought that some vast vehicle was traversing the highway at the top, or that one of the gigantic turbines had broken under the weight of water surging down through the penstocks buried inside the Arizona-side mountain. Vacationers aboard houseboats on the lake were shaken awake in their bunks, and in the nearby city of Boulder more than two hundred people called the police in a panic.

  Dawn-patrol prostitutes and crack dealers on Hollywood Boulevard reeled and grabbed for walls or parking meters as the sidewalk pavement, already sagging lower than normal because of shoddy tunneling being done for the Metro Rail line, abruptly dropped another inch and a half.

  Just across the highway from Colma, the gray little cemetery town on the San Mateo Peninsula to which all the evicted burial plots of neighboring San Francisco had been relocated, a pregnant woman wrapped in a bedsheet and screaming nonsense verses in French ran out into the lanes of the 280 Highway.

  Along Ocean Beach on the west coast of San Francisco a sudden offshore gale was chopping up the surf, blowing the swells at chaotic angles and wrecking the long clean lines of the waves. The couple of surfers out past the surf line who had been riding the terrifying winter waves gave up and began struggling to paddle back in to shore, and the ill-at-ease men who had been clustering around the vans and pickup trucks in the Sloat Boulevard parking lot cheered up and assured each other that they had stayed out of the water just because it had been obvious that the weather was going to change this way.

  Similar abrupt gales split and uprooted trees as far north as Eureka and as far south as San Diego, all on that same morning.