“What?” I cried. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“They weren’t going to start until the bread was done. Besides, it was time for your lesson.”
“But they would have finished baking midafternoon!” I said.
“Isn’t that what time it is?” he asked, looking at the sky briefly.
“I’m gone,” I said, snatching a dripping honeycomb from the flat behind him.
“Hey!”
“See you later.” Off I ran, down the ridge trail, through the woods on a shortcut of my own, and through the potato patches to the Mariani herb garden. They were all out on the grass between the ovens and the river: Steve, Kathryn, Kristen, Mrs. Mariani, Rebel, Mando, Rafael, and Carmen. Steve was reading, and the others barely glanced at me as I sat down, huffing like a dog. “He’s in Russia,” Mando whispered. “Well shit!” I said. “How’d he get there?” Steve never looked up from the page, but kept on reading, from about here as I recalclass="underline"
“In the first year after the war they were very open with the U.N., to show they had nothing to do with the attack. They gave the U.N. a list of all the Americans in Russia, and after that the U.N. was adamant about knowing where we were and what was happening to us. If it weren’t for that I wouldn’t be speaking English. They would have assimilated us. Or killed us.”
Johnson’s tone made me look more closely at the heavily clad, harmless-looking Russians who were crowded in with us. Some of them glanced at us furtively when they heard our foreign speech; most slumped in their seats and slept, or stared dully out the compartment window. The smell of tobacco smoke was powerful, masking to a certain extent other smells: sweat, cheese, the raw alcohol odor of the drink vodka. Outside the huge gray city of Vladivostok was replaced by rolling forest, mile after hilly mile of it. The train rolled along the tracks at a tremendous clip, and we crossed scores of miles every hour; still, Johnson assured me that our journey would take many days.
We had done little more than shake hands before walking under the eyes of the train guards, and playing our parts. Now I asked him about himself; where he lived, what his history had been, what his occupation was.
“I’m a meteorologist,” he said. Seeing my look, he explained, “I study the weather. Or rather, I did study it. Now I watch a Doppler screen used to predict weather and give severe storm warnings. One of the last fruits of American science, the Doppler systems, as a matter of fact. But they’re old now, and it’s a minor position really.”
Naturally I was interested in this. I asked him if he could tell me why the weather had become so much colder on the California coast since the war. This was several hours into our trip, and the Russians around us filled the compartment with an air of utter boredom; at the prospect of talking about his specialty, Johnson’s face brightened somewhat.
“It’s a complicated question. It’s generally agreed that the war did alter the world’s weather, but how it effected the change is still debated. It’s estimated that three thousand neutron bombs exploded on the continental United States that day in 1984. Not too much long term radiation was released, luckily for you, but a lot of turbulence was generated in the stratosphere—the highest levels of air—and apparently the jet stream altered its course for good. You know about the jet stream?”
I indicated that I did not. “I have flown on a jet, however.”
He shook his head. “At the upper levels of the air the wind is constant, and strong. Big rivers of wind. In the northern hemisphere the jet stream circles around west to east, and zigzags up and down as it goes around the world, about four or five zigs and zags for every trip around.” He made a ball of his fist and traced the course of the jet stream with a finger of his other hand. “It varies a little every time, of course, but before the war there was one anchor point, which was your Rocky Mountains. The jet stream invariably curved north around the Rockies, and then back south across the United States, like this.” He pointed out the knuckle that had become the Rockies. “Since the war, that anchoring point has been gone. The jet stream has cut loose, and now it wanders—sometimes it’s sweeping straight down from Alaska to Mexico, which is why you in California get Arctic weather occasionally.”
“So that’s it,” I said.
“That’s part of it,” he corrected me. “Weather is such a complex organism, you can never point to any single thing and say, that’s it. The jet stream is on the loose, but tropical storm systems are changed as well—and which caused which? Or are they causally related? No one can say. The Pacific high, for instance—this would affect you in southern California—there was a high pressure system, very stable, that sat off the west coast of North America. In the summer it would shift north and sit off California, keeping the jet stream pushed north; in the winter it would descend to an area below Baja California. Now it doesn’t move north in the summer anymore, and so you aren’t protected by it. That’s another big factor: but again, cause or effect? And then there’s the dust thrown into the stratosphere by the bombs and the fires, dropping world temperatures by a couple of degrees—and the permanent snowpack that resulted in the Sierra Nevada and the Rockies, generating glaciers that reflect the sunlight and cool things even more… and the shifting of Pacific currents… lots of changes.” Johnson’s expression was a curious mixture of gloom and fascination.
“It sounds as if California’s weather has changed most of all,” I said.
“Oh, no,” Johnson said. “Not at all. California has been strongly affected, no doubt about it—like moving fifteen degrees of latitude north—but a few other parts of the world have been just as strongly affected, or even more so. Lots of rain in northern Chile!—and my, is that washing all that sand off the Andes into the sea. Tropical heat in Europe during the summer, drought during the monsoon—oh, I could go on and on. It has caused more human misery than you can imagine.”
“Don’t be so sure.”
“Ah. Yes. Well, it isn’t only the Russians’ gray empire that has made the world such a sad place since the war; the weather has had a large part in it. Happily Russia itself has not gone unaffected.”
“How so?”
He shook his head, and wouldn’t elaborate.
Two days later—still in Siberia, despite our speed—I saw what he meant.
We spent the morning out in the corridor of our car, exhibiting our travelling papers to a trio of suspicious conductors. The fact that I spoke not a word of Russian was a real stumbling block to their acceptance of us, and I chattered at them in Japanese and fake Japanese in a nervous attempt to assure them I was from Tokyo as my papers declared me to be, hoping they would not know how unlikely that was. Luckily our papers were authentic, and they left satisfied.
When they were gone Johnson was too upset to return to our compartment. “It’s those stupid busybodies in there who got the conductors on us. They heard us speaking a foreign language and that was enough. That’s the Russians for you all over. Let’s stay out here for a while. I can’t stand the stink in there anymore anyway.”
We were still out in the corridor, leaning against the windows, when the train came to a halt, out in the middle of the endless Siberian forest, with not a sign of civilization in sight. Tree-covered hills extended away in every direction for as far as the eye could see; we crossed a rolling green plane, under a low blue hemisphere filled with even lower clouds. I stopped my description of California, which Johnson could not get enough of, and we leaned out the window looking toward the front of the train. To the west the clouds, which had been low and dark, were now a solid black line. When Johnson saw this he leaned far out of the window, saying, “Hold my legs. Hold me in by the legs.” When he slid back in there was a fierce grin on his usually dour face. Leaning close to me he whispered, “Tornado.”