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ACTIVITIES
Romance of the Century
A GORP Visionary Adventure by Lucius Shepard
You slip into the transition zone and ride the 250-mph wind
© Jay Kinney & Paul Mavrides |
Let's say you're born in the year 2000, one of the first children of the new millennium. You spend a great deal of your childhood reading about the legendary adventurers-the Marco Polos and the Richard Burtons and the like-and this breeds a desire for adventure in your heart. But you're living in an age in which the possibilities for this sort of trailblazing experience have been severely delimited. The attraction of adventure- travel has always been funded partly by the notion of testing oneself, partly by the allure of mystery, the unknown, and there seems little mystery left in the world. The managed nature areas of the twenty-first century provide a thin illusion of the original wild; the risk factor in such areas is almost nonexistent, though an element of danger is injected when one of the first models of robotic caretakers mistakes a sleeping camper for debris and renders him recyclable. The space program offers new frontiers, but your chances of becoming an astronaut are miniscule. Eventually you gravitate toward journalism, a profession that will allow you to indulge your passion for travel, if not for real exploration, and this leads you, in the autumn of 2026, to a place 560 miles off the coast of South Florida . . .
Mitchell is the biggest tropical storm of the season, a Force 5 hurricane, 700 miles wide and more than 30,000 feet high.
The storm is lit from within by blooms of lightning.
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The radar image they showed you in Miami resembled an enormous throwing star with a hole at its center, spinning across the Caribbean. Up close, it's considerably more daunting, especially to someone cruising toward it in a twelve foot microjet, a tapered cylinder of spun glass composites so narrow, you're less flying the aircraft than wearing it. The outer wall of the storm, a patchwork of roiling gray and black cloud, looks as solid as a tidal wave and is lit from within by blooms of lightning. Bolts of red plasma rip from the cloud tops, fanning outward as they sheet toward the troposphere, leaving afterimages that hang for a second or two against the night sky like immense plumes of dark blood.
The computers have taken control of the microjet. You couldn't possibly manage the split-second maneuvers necessary to survive the windshifts inside Mitchell, but the sense of helplessness that comes with being a passenger and not a pilot amplifies your anxiety.
A bolt shears through the hull inches from your face.
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Your mouth is cottony, your heart is doing a speed-metal riff. But then the nose of the aircraft drops, arrowing downward, and as you penetrate the outer wall, adrenaline flushes away the chemicals of fear, and a shout is torn from your throat, merging with the whine of the jets and the roaring wind. Diving toward the eye is like being trapped inside a splinter of ice in a blender set on high and filled with whirling gray stuff-vibration is bone rattling. Detonations of lightning burn through the clouds on every side, and once a bolt shears through the hull inches from your face. If you were grounded, you'd be charcoal. For half a second the microjet appears encased in liquid light; the hull darkens automatically, preserving your eyesight.
Nearly a minute later, a period of time that seems much longer, you're spat forth into the eye and go sailing off into calm air 5,000 feet above the choppy, slateblue waters of the Caribbean.
The transparent planes look fragile against the storm wall.
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The small jet engines beneath your wings, capable of providing upward and downward-as well as forward-thrust, cut back to minimum. Several dozen aircraft similar to yours are soaring about within the eye: transparent cylinders with swept-forward wings, their visibility enhanced by colored designs on the tail sections that identify the individual pilots. They look incredibly fragile against the massif of the storm wall. One by one they begin diving back toward the wall, or more precisely, toward the transition zone formed by turbulent wind and cloud grinding against the bubble of high pressure that forms the eye. The idea is to slip into the zone, much as a bodysurfer would propell himself into a cresting wave, and ride the nearly 250-mph wind that circulates within it.
Mitchell's transition zone is about 400 meters wide, a murky area filled with clouds that resemble gray floss, and slipping into it is roughly analogous to standing by a railroad track and grabbing onto a speeding train.
You know she buzzed you on purpose.
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The instant you enter the zone, the cross-shear knocks you a thousand feet downward, and you come within a hair of going into a spin. The computers stabilize the craft at 3,800 feet. After thirty seconds of relatively uneventful flight, you guide the craft into the edge of the storm wall, a maneuver similar to that of a surfer shooting the curl. You ride the inner wall long enough to gain momentum, then slip back into the zone at 225 mph. Seconds later, another microjet breaks from the wall directly ahead of you, causing your craft to veer sharply away in order to avoid a collision. A green slash on the tail section identifies the pilot as Maiko Tachibana, the beautiful Japanese girl with whom you've been involved for the past six months. The computerized programs would not permit such a close call, thus you know she must have switched off her computers and buzzed you on purpose.
Furious, you disengage your own computers and follow her downward. You're thoroughly committed to paying her back in kind, and you ignore the warning light on the altimeter signifying that you've breached the 1500-foot mark.
You're thoroughly committed to paying her back in kind.
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You finally come to your senses when you see her dip below the three-hundred-foot mark, a height at which even the slightest cross-shear can send you into the waves below. You relinquish control to the computers, let them take the aircraft up to 2,000, and spend the rest of the flight taping your experience of the storm.
That night you're sitting at a corner table in the Last Supper Club, a storm surfer hangout in South Beach-its decor lent a morbid touch by the recordings of pilot fatalities that play over the walls-Maiko drops into the chair opposite. You've been dictating a voiceover to add to the tape you made inside Mitchell. Maiko hits the playback button and listens as you hold forth on your conviction that the concept of adventure has been pared down to risk-taking and many of those who call themselves adventurers are on a death trip. A smile touches the corners of her mouth. At length she turns off the recorder and says,"It must be tiresome . . . having all that perspective."
You disregard the comment. "What the hell were you trying to do out there?"
"Playing," she says. "I thought you wanted to play. Sorry."
You tell her that your notion of play doesn't include tempting fate unnecessarily. That while death is a potential consequence of the things you've chosen to do, you don't have a need to constantly flirt with dying.
The argument that ensues is vicious, vituperative, and ends with her storming off into the night. Even though you're still angry, you figure you'll work things out back at the hotel; but when you enter the room you've been sharing with her, you find a note.
There's something in her that yearns toward death....
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It's quite a lengthy note, and it states that a relationship with you will prohibit her from exploring her limits, from experiencing things she needs to understand. She loves you, she says, but that's just not enough. She says you were right about her attitude toward death-there's something in her that yearns toward death, that makes her want to brush against it. But it's not, she claims, the morbid preoccupation you might suspect. It's something that nourishes her, something she requires in order to live. She's sorry, and she'll miss you.
You think that her position is thoroughly unreasonable, possibly psychotic, but as you sit there, feeling the dark particularity of her absence and the beginnings of a depression far more severe than you might have expected, you wish you were a bit more unreasonable yourself.
Move on to  Part II
Go to Visionary Adventures Introduction
Article copyright © 2000 by Lucius Shepard.
Illustrations copyright © 2000 by Jay Kinney and Paul Mavrides.
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