AFRO SYNTHETIC : AFTER THE CLOUDS

After the Clouds

Azibo stood on the glass balcony of the Atmoscraper and looked down at KyaNuru. The wind against his face was warm and dry, and he had programmed it that way, and three weeks into the job he still couldn't feel it without half expecting someone to arrive and tell him there had been a mistake.

Thirty years old. Standing near the top of the tallest building in the capital, deciding what kind of morning several million people would wake up to.

Below him the city ran out to the horizon, parks dividing it into neat districts, artificial rivers holding the last of the light. Beyond the towers were fields that had no business existing here at all. Once this was dry ground at the edge of a region nobody had bothered to name. Now they called it the miracle city.

Miracles don't have control rooms.

Years before he was born, governments across the continent had started spending on weather manipulation at a scale nobody had attempted. The first stations were built to fight drought and nothing else. Then came rainfall management, temperature control, wind systems, cloud formation, until weather stopped being a thing people waited for and became infrastructure, like water pressure or the grid.

The people who ran it became something else.

Weathermen.

Engineers turned into celebrities. Their faces went up on screens and billboards and into school books. Children collected cards with their names and their record harvests on the back. Farmers prayed for them almost as hard as they prayed for rain.

Itoro had been the most famous of all of them, and he was still up there now, floating above a building four districts over.

ITORO KABWE. WEATHER IS PROSPERITY.

The banner cycled. A photograph of smiling children came up beneath a blue sky, and Azibo looked away.

During Itoro's years the harvests had reached numbers the models said were impossible. Rain arrived when it was supposed to. Dry seasons ended almost to the day. Floods became something that happened in archive footage. People called him a genius and meant it.

Then somebody killed him.

The official statement had used the words "tragic circumstances." Nobody in the building used those words. Azibo put both hands on the rail and thought about the Weatherman before Itoro, a woman named Sifa Mbeki, who had died during a robbery according to the file. Nobody believed that either.

A soft chime sounded behind him.

Agent Inandi came down the corridor carrying something in one hand, and it took him a moment to understand what it was. A notebook. Actual paper. Azibo almost smiled, because it was exactly right, because Inandi trusted very little that needed electricity.

She stepped onto the balcony, stopped beside him, and said nothing for long enough that he began to feel it. Then she looked out towards the horizon.

"Less mist today."

"What?"

"The morning mist." She opened the notebook. "Itoro liked it heavier."

"He liked everything heavier."

"I noticed."

"He thought the moisture stayed in the lower soil."

"It does."

Azibo looked at her. "So why does that sound like an accusation?"

"It wasn't." She wrote something down, which made it worse.

Below them the drones moved between the towers in their slow grid, sampling humidity and dust and particulate. One came close to the balcony, hung there a moment, and turned away.

"Itoro was meticulous," Azibo said. "Sometimes irritatingly so."

"You admired him."

"Everyone admired him."

"That isn't what I asked."

He hesitated. "Yes."

Inandi waited. He hated that about her, the way she let silence do her work, and he gave in the way people always gave in.

"I studied his forecasts at university. Some of them were beautiful."

"Beautiful?"

"If you know how to read them."

"I don't."

"Then you'll have to trust me."

"I don't do that either."

That made him laugh, for about a second, until Itoro's face came back around on the banner. "Someone killed him," Azibo said.

Inandi closed the notebook. "Yes."

"You believe that now?"

"I always believed it."

"That's not what you said in your report."

"My reports are read by other people."

He looked at the paper in her hand and understood. She noticed him understanding.

"Paper can't be hacked," she said.

"Paper can be stolen."

"Then at least I know somebody stole it."

He went back inside towards the console and the interface came up around him as he approached, maps unfolding in the air, pressure systems, cloud density, wind paths, a few thousand calculations rearranging themselves every second. His calculations. His weather.

"There are theories," Inandi said behind him.

"Of course there are."

"Some people think the Weathermen became too powerful."

"People say that about anyone they don't understand."

"Others think Itoro found something."

Azibo turned. "What?"

"A flaw. A secret. Something in the system he wasn't supposed to see."

He had heard a version of that as a boy. It was a story children told each other, and his father had called it nonsense in the voice he used for things that were not to be repeated outside the house. The stations don't make rain. They take it. Rain here means drought somewhere else. A green field in KyaNuru means a dead one in a place where nobody important is watching. Azibo had pictured enormous pipes beneath the earth dragging clouds across borders, and then he had grown up and become an engineer and learned how ridiculous that was.

Mostly.

"I've seen things," he said.

"What things?"

"Nothing definite."

"Azibo."

"There are sections of the system we aren't allowed to alter."

"Every system has protected sections."

"Not like these." He reached into the interface and pulled up the continental map. Parts of it glowed. Parts of it stayed dark. "Some patterns are locked. We maintain them because the Council says we maintain them, and the Council doesn't explain."

"And Itoro?"

"He asked."

Inandi came closer. "How do you know?"

"Because I found the requests. Seven of them over two years. He wanted permission to run redistribution models."

"Redistribution of what?"

"Atmospheric moisture."

"And?"

"Denied. All seven. Reason given was national security."

She laughed, a short one with nothing in it. "Useful phrase."

"Very."

Inandi opened the notebook again and turned back several pages. "Sifa Mbeki tried to change a seasonal pattern too. Three days before she died she submitted a reduction in KyaNuru's rainfall allocation. Eleven percent."

Azibo frowned. "Why would she do that?"

"We don't know."

"What happened?"

"The system rejected it. Then she was robbed."

He looked back at the map, at the dark regions past the edge of the glow, and something turned over in him. They weren't marked low priority. They weren't marked restricted.

Invisible.

"How much water does the network hold?" Inandi said.

"Total charge across all stations?" He gave her the figure without thinking. Every engineer knew it. It was on the wall of the training centre.

"When did it last change?"

He opened his mouth and found nothing in it. The figure was published every quarter, in the same report, in the same font, and it had been the same figure since before he sat his first exam. Twenty three years of it. A closed system holds its total. That is the entire meaning of the word closed. He had recited it in tutorials, he had written it into three separate papers, and he had never once put it next to a map with dark places on it.

"No," he said.

"I didn't say anything."

"You didn't have to."

"No," Inandi agreed. "I suppose I didn't."

He went back out to the balcony because he needed to look at something that wasn't a map. The city was exactly as it had been ten minutes earlier, the same rivers, the same green roofs, the same people walking home through gardens that used to be dust, and that was the problem, that nothing about it had changed. Somewhere past the horizon he put another city, and made the wells empty, and the crops dead, and the people standing in their doorways watching clouds that never opened.

He rubbed his face. "Why tell me?"

Inandi didn't answer.

"Seriously. Why are you here?"

"Because two people had this job before you, and both of them are dead."

"Are you warning me?"

"Maybe."

"Or watching me?"

She said nothing. Azibo laughed without any humour in it at all. "That's comforting."

"I didn't come here to comfort you."

"No. I noticed."

Something in her expression gave way slightly, and he saw for the first time how tired she was. "I want to know what you do next," she said.

"What I do?"

"You can follow the instructions." She nodded back towards the console. "Give KyaNuru its rain. Keep the farms green. Keep the rivers full. Let people go on believing this city solved the climate."

"And if I don't?"

"You know the answer."

Across the skyline the banner cycled again and Itoro reappeared in a wheat field with his sleeves rolled up, smiling next to a farmer. A dead man selling prosperity.

"If the system is doing what you think it's doing," Azibo said, "people deserve to know."

"People always deserve to know."

"That sounded cynical."

"It was."

"You don't think truth matters?"

"I think it matters very much. But deserving the truth and receiving it are two different things."

He had no answer for that. The lights were coming on across the districts, one at a time, and from this height KyaNuru looked impossibly peaceful, which bothered him now.

Inandi started for the corridor.

"That's it?"

She stopped. "You wanted more?"

"You come up here, tell me my predecessors were murdered because this city might be stealing weather from people we've never met, and then you leave."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because what happens next has to be your decision."

"That's convenient."

"It's dangerous."

"For me."

"For both of us."

That shut him up. She held his eyes a moment longer and then she was gone into the corridor, and the chime sounded twice more, further away each time.

The console called him back with a soft tone. Tomorrow was waiting for approval.

LIGHT MORNING RAIN. CLEAR AFTERNOON. EVENING TEMPERATURE 24°C. WIND: EAST.

He had approved a hundred of these. His hand went towards the interface and stopped, because there was a second window sitting under the forecast where it always sat, where it had sat every night for three weeks.

GLOBAL REDISTRIBUTION MODEL. ACCESS RESTRICTED.

Tonight he touched it.

ACCESS DENIED.

He tried again, slowly, the way you do when you think the machine has misunderstood you rather than refused you.

ACCESS DENIED.

Azibo looked over his shoulder at an empty corridor. He could change tomorrow's rain by hand. Reduce it. Move it east. Follow the moisture back up the chain and find out which station it came off and whose sky it had been. He could push something out through the wind network, a message folded into atmospheric data, small enough to survive and strange enough to be noticed by whoever was still reading.

He could also imagine security arriving before he finished, and his own face going up on a banner. AZIBO. THE WEATHERMAN WHO LOVED HIS CITY. People would mourn him properly. Children would carry him on their school bags for a season or two. The Council would appoint the next one from the pool of senior engineers, and the rain would continue exactly as scheduled.

His hand came away from the console.

For the first time in his life he understood Itoro, and that frightened him more than anything Inandi had said.

Out on the balcony the crowds were still moving home through the plaza far below. Someone down there noticed him. A small figure pointed up, and then others looked, and then they were waving. Azibo raised a hand. They cheered. He was too high to hear it and he knew they were cheering anyway. Their Weatherman. The man who brought the rain.

He lowered his hand and pressed his fingers against the glass. No prints. The balcony cleaned itself every few seconds.

Tomorrow the city would wake under a gentle shower. Children would run through it on the way to school, farmers would check their gauges and smile, the reservoirs would take what they needed. And somewhere out past the dark part of the map, perhaps, a person would look up at a sky that stayed closed.

He understood the trap now. Silence made him part of it. Speaking would probably kill him. And being killed would not necessarily change anything, which was the worst of the three.

Above the towers the engineered clouds were already moving into position, spaced and measured and obedient, doing what he had told them to do that afternoon while he was thinking about lunch. For years he had believed control was the great achievement of the Weather Stations. He wondered now whether control had been the point from the beginning.

The forecast was still waiting when he went back inside. Approval closed at midnight. He sat down in front of it and watched the clock in the corner of the display, and there was nothing else in the room, and he had four hours to decide whether to make it rain.