Heavy Weather

CHAPTER 5

Chasing tornadoes until two in the morning had been pretty bad, but not half so bad as Alex had feared. They'd spent most of those hours humming down darkened roads, with Alex curled in his nest of bubblepak, dozing.

They'd stopped three times to fling machinery into the sky, a fever of virtual activity in the midst of distance and darkness and thunder. They were ardently chasing storms by remote control. And yet there was little sense of real danger.

The storms didn't frighten Alex. He found them impressive and interesting. His only true fear was that the Troupers would discover the real and humiliating extent of his weakness. He could think straight, he could talk, he could eat, and he could breathe beautifully. But he was still bone feeble, with an edge of endurance that was razor thin. He was lucky that Martha and Buzzard hadn't asked him to do anything truly strenuous. It wasn't because they were sparing him, of course. They simply didn't trust him to do anything important.

The day after the chase, Alex was up with the dawn, his lungs still clear, his eyes bright, with no sign of sore throat or fever. He felt better than he'd felt in at least a year. Meanwhile, the road-burned Troupers lay around in their smelly bags and their stick-and-paper cones, in the grip of prolonged siestas. The after-chase day was a busy day for the support crews, but they were busy with information, a fourteeii-hour-day of annotating, editing, collating, cutting, and copying. The Troupe's road pursuers were physically worn-out, and the rest of them were crouching over their keyboards. Nobody paid Alex much mind.

Mound noon, Carol Cooper made Alex a big paper sombrero, gave him a bag of granola and a small canteen, and sent him out to watch the Troupe's goats. The Troupers had this teenage kid, Jeff, who usually did the goat watching and the firewood fetching and other little gopher chores around camp, but with Alex's arrival, Jeff had been bumped up the pecking order.

Alex didn't mind watching the goats. It was clearly the stupidest and lowest-status job in Troupe life, but at least there was very little to it. All the goats had smart collars, and you could set the herd's parameters on a laptop to give them minor shocks and buzzes when they wandered out of range. They were gene-spliced pharmaceutical goats, "pharm animals," and despite their yellow, devillike, reptilian eyeballs, the goats were remarkably docile and stupid. Most of the time the goats seemed to grasp the nature of the collar business, and they stayed where the machine wanted them. They industriously nibbled anything remotely edible and then lay in the shade belching gas from their gene-spliced guts.

Alex spent most of the day up in a mesquite tree at the edge of a brush-filled gully, wearing his paper breathing mask, grepping around with the laptop, and swatting mosquitoes and deer ffies. He wasn't too happy about the mosquitoes, but his bite-proof paper hat, mask, and jumpsuit kept them at bay, except on his bare neck and ankles. The deerflies were big, buzzing, aggressive, head-circling pests, and it wasn't too surprising that there were a lot of them around-the brush was crawling with deer. The damned deer were as common as mice.

Alex, a consummate urbanite, had always imagined deer as timid, fragile, endangered creatures, quailing somewhere in the darkened depths of their crumbling ecosystems. This sure as hell wasn't the case with these West Texas deer, who were thriving in an ecosystem that was already about as screwed up as mankind could manage. The deer were snorty and flop-eared and skittish, but they were as bold as rats in a junkyard.

By the time Alex and his entourage of goats returned to camp that evening, he was a lot less impressed about the local diet of venison. There wasn't much to obtaining venison-it was about as hard as finding dog meat at a pound. He and Jeff milked the goats, which produced a variety of odd cheesy fluids, some with U.N.-mandated dietary vitamin requirements, and some with commercial potential in drugstore retail. Milking goats was kind of interesting work on a weird level of interspecies intimacy, but it was also hard manual labor, and he was glad to leave most of it to Jeff.

Greg Foulks had pulled Jeff out of the wreckage of an F-S a couple years back, from the jackstraw rubble where Jeff had lost both his parents. Jeff had worked his way into the Troupe by simply running away and returning to them whenever the Troupe tried to place him into better care. Jeff was a cheerful, talkative, sunburned Texas Anglo kid, openly worshipful of Jerry and Greg, and full of what he thought was good advice about Troupe life. Jeff was only sixteen, but he had that drawn, tight-around-the-eyelids look that Alex had seen on the faces of displaced people, of the world's heavy-weather refugees. A haunted, wary look, like the solid earth beneath their feet had become thin ice, never to be trusted again.

Everyone in the Troupe had that Look, really. Except maybe Jerry Mulcahey. Examined closely, Mulcahey looked as if he'd never set foot on Earth in the first place.

Next day they put Alex on kitchen duty-KP.

"YOUR Sister," SAID Ellen Mae Lankton, "is a real hairpin."

"I couldn't agree with you more," said Alex. He was sitting cross-legged on the bubblepak floor of the kitchen yurt, peeling a root. It was the root of some local weed known as a "poppymallow." It looked like a very dirty and distorted carrot, and when peeled, it had some of the less appetizing aspects of a yam.

Ellen Mae had been up at dawn to grub up poppymallows. She was up at every dawn, methodically wandering the fields, snapping miles of old barbed wire with her personal diamond-edged cable cutters and digging up weeds with her sharpshooter shovel. So now Alex had a dozen filthy roots at his elbow, in Ellen Mae's canvas sling bag. Peeling roots, it seemed, was not a popular task among Storm Troupers. Alex, however, didn't mind it much.

Alex rarely minded any kind of work that allowed him to sit very still and breathe shallowly. What he minded about kitchen work was the mesquite smoke. Whenever Ellen Mae turned her back to manage the stewpot, Alex would whip his paper mask up quickly and steal a few quiet huffs of properly filtered air.

As Ellen Mae bustled about, doing her endless round of mysterious kitchen rituals, Alex sat nearby, in the yurt's only draft of clear air. As the morning had worn on, several Troupers had wandered in hunting snacks or water, and they'd seen Alex sitting near Ellen Mae's feet in a humble, attentive, apprentice's posture. And they'd given Ellen Mae a kind of surprised, eyebrow-raised, respectful look. After a while Ellen Mae had warmed up to Alex considerably, and now this strange, witchy-looking, middle-aged woman wouldn't shut up to save her life.

"For one thing, she's got a really strange way o talkin'," said Ellen Mae.

"You mean her accent?" Alex said.

"Well, that's part of it...

"That's simple," Alex said. "We Ungers are German Mexicans."

"'What?"

"Yeah, we're descended from this German guy named Heinrich Unger, who emigrated to Mexico in 1914. He was a German spy. He tried to get the Mexicans to invade the U.S. during the First World War."

"Huh," said Ellen Mae, stirring stew.

"He didn't have much luck at it, though."

"I reckon he didn't."

"Another German spy named Hans Ewers wrote a couple of books about their mission. They're supposed to be pretty good books. I wouldn't know, myself. I don't read German."

"German Mexicans," Ellen Mae mused.

"There's lots of German Mexicans. Thousands of 'em, really. It's a pretty big ethnic group." Alex shrugged. "My dad moved over the border and took out U.S. citizenship after he made some money in business."

"When did that happen, exactly?"

"Mound 2010. Just before I was born."

"Must have been one of those free-trade things. When the U.S. sent all the workin' jobs down to Mexico, and the Mexicans sent the USA all their rich people."

Alex shrugged. His family's entanglement with history meant little to him. He was vaguely interested in the distant and romantic 1914 aspect, but his dad's postindustrial business career was the very essence of tedium.

"Janey doesn't sound German, though. Or Mexican either, for that matter. You don't sound German or Mexican either, kid."

"I do sound pretty German when I speak Spanish," Alex offered. "Can I have some more of that tea?"

"Sure, have all you want," said Ellen Mae, surprising him. "We're gonna break camp tomorrow. Can't carry much water on the road." She poured him a generous paper-cup-fit! of some acrid herbal soak she'd made from glossy green bush leaves. It sure as hell wasn't tea, but it wasn't as bad as certain Mexican soft drinks he'd sampled. "So we'll use up the spare water now. Tonight we can all have a bath!"

"Wow!" Alex enthused, sipping the evil brew.

Ellen Mae frowned thoughtfully. "What is it you do, exactly, Alex?"

"Me?" Alex said. He considered. the question. He hadn't often been asked it. "I'm a play-testing consultant."

"What's that?"

"Well, network computer games..." Alex said vaguely, "network dungeons... There's not much money in computer games anymore, because of the copyright property screwups and stuff, but there's still, I dunno, cryptware and shareware and the subscription services, right? Some guys who are really into dungeons can still make good money. Sometimes I help with the work."

Ellen Mae looked doubtful, even though it was almost the truth. Alex had spent most of his teenage years ardently playing dungeons, and since he was generous with his upgrade payments and his shareware registrations, he'd eventually ended up in the fringes of game marketing. Not that he designed games or anything-he didn't have the maniacal attention to detail necessary for that-but he did like to be among the first to play the new games, and he didn't mind being polled for his consumer reactions. On occasion, Alex had even been given a little money for this-all told, maybe five percent of the money that he'd poured into the hobby.

At eighteen, though, Alex had given up dungeon gaming. It had dawned on him that his numerous dungeon identities were stealing what little vitality remained in his own daily life. The dungeons weren't that much of an improvement, really, over the twisted, dungeonlike reality of a series of sickrooms. Since that realization, Alex had given up gaming, and devoted his time and money to exploring the twisted depths of his own medical destiny and the wonders of the pharmaceutical demimonde.

"I also collect comics," he offered.

"Why?" Ellen Mae said.

"Well, I thought it was really interesting that there was this, like, weird pop-culture thing that's still published on paper instead of on networks." This remark cut no apparent ice with Ellen Mae. Alex plowed on. "I own lots of old American paper comics-y'see, nobody does paper comics in the U.S. anymore, but some of the antique ones, the undergrounds and stuff, never got copied and scanned, so they're not on network access anywhere. So if you're a serious collector, quite often you can buy some art that's just not publicly available... . Some art that nobody else can see... A piece of art that nobody's accessed or viewed in years!"

Ellen Mae only looked puzzled; she clearly didn't grasp the basic thrill involved in this hobby. Alex continued: "My real specialty is modern Mexican paper comics. The fotonovelas, and the true-crime manga-rags, and the UFOzines and stuff. They're an antique medium in a modern context, and they're this kind of cool nightmare folk art, really... . I like them, and they're kinda hard to get. I own lots, though." He smiled.

"What do you do with them?" Ellen Mae said.

"I dunno," Alex admitted. "Catalog 'em, put 'em in airproof bags. ....hey're all stored in Houston. I thought maybe that I would pirate-scan them all, and post them on networks, so that a lot more people could see how cool they were. And see how much great stuff I'd collected. But I dunno, that kind of spoils the whole thing, really."

Ellen Mae looked at him so strangely then that Alex realized he was wading in too deep. He gave her his best smile, humbly offered up a couple of well-peeled roots, and asked, "What do you hack, Ellen Mae?"

"I hack Comanche," Ellen Mae said.

"What's that mean?"

"I was born Out here in West Texas," she told him. "I'm a native."

"Really." She didn't look like any Comanche Indian. She looked like a big Anglo woman with middle-aged spread in a bloodstained paper suit.

"I grew up out here on a ranch, back when everything was dying out... . There never were a lot of people in this part of Texas. Most of the people just packed up and left, after the aquifers went. And then during the State of Emergency, when the really big drought hit? Well, everything and everybody out here just blew away, like so much dust."

Alex nodded helpfully and started on another root with his ceramic peeler.

"Everybody who stayed behind-well, they pretty much stopped farming and ranching, and went into scavenging. Wrecking work, in the ghost towns." She shrugged. "They didn't call it structure hitting back then, because we didn't blow up anything that wasn't already abandoned. I mean, we had reasons to blow stuff up. We wanted to make some money. We didn't blow stuff up just because we liked to watch stuff fall down-all that bullshit came later."

"Okay," Alex said, sipping his brew.

"I started to think it through back then, you know. ....ee, Alex, the truth is, nobody should have ever done any farming out here. Ever. This land just wasn't cut Out for farming. And ranching-running cattle on this land just took way too much out of the soil. It wasn't any accident that all this happened. We brought it on ourselves."

Alex nodded.

"This was nomad land. The High Plains-they were black with buffalo from here straight to Canada! The biggest migrating herds of animals ever seen in history. They killed the buffalo off with repeating rifles, in twenty years. It took another hundred fifty years to drain off all the water underground, and of course by then the atmosphere was wrecked too... . But see, it was all a really bad mistake. The people who settled out here-we destroyed this place. And we were destroyed for doing it."

Alex said nothing.

"At the time, you know-people just couldn't believe it. They couldn't believe that this huge area of the good old USA would just end up abandoned by everybody, that the people who settled the land and tamed it-they used to say that a lot, 'taming the land'-that those people would just be driven right out of existence. I mean, at the time it was unprecedented. Seemed really unlikely and abnormal. Of course, it's a pretty damn common business now.

But at the time there was a lot of government talk about how it was all just temporary, that they were gonna resettle West Texas as soon as they learned how to pipe water down from Minnesota, or melt icebergs, or some other such damn nonsense... . Hell, Alex, they're never gonna move the water. It's a hundred times cheaper just to move the people. They were all living in a dreamland."

"Dreamlands, yeah," Alex said, "I've been in a few of those."

"And the strangest thing was, that it had all happened before, but nobody learned the lesson. Because it happened to the Comanches. The Comanches lived out here two hundred years-off the land, off the buffalo. But when those buffalo went, well, they were just wiped out. Starved right out of existence. Had to move up to Oklahoma, and live in reservation camps eating food that the government. gave 'em, just like us low-down modern weather tramps. No fight left in 'em." She sighed. "See, Alex, if you got the basics of life, then you can fight for your place in the world. But if you got no food and water, then you got no place at all. You just leave. Go away, or die."

"Right," Alex said. "I get it." It was clearly doing Ellen Mae some good to get this matter off her chest. It was obvious that she'd discussed all this before. Probably this was a standard lecture she gave all the Troupe wannabes.

Normally, in a discussion of this sort, Alex would have pitched right in with a few devil's-advocate arguments, just to mess everything up and kinda make it more interesting. Under the circumstances, though, he thought it was wisest to let Ellen Mae talk it out. A good idea, for instance, not to mention the many other places in the world where relocations had been a hundred times worse than in West Texas. After all, the people in West Texas had had the giant, well-developed United States to help them. So that they didn't starve on the spot. They didn't break out in eye-gouging, street-to-street, structure-hitting, down-and-dirty little ethnic wars. And they weren't wiped out by massive septic plagues, all the little predatory bugs that jumped out of the woodwork whenever people got seriously disorganized: dysentery, cholera, typhus, malaria, hantavirus.

It had been pretty damned stupid to dry up the aquifers in West Texas, but it didn't really compare in scale with the planet's truly monumental ecoblunders. Slowly poisoning the finest cropland in China, Egypt, and India with too much salt from irrigation, for instance. Clear-cutting the jungles in Indonesia and Brazil. The spread of the Sahara.

But why bring all that up? It wouldn't make Ellen Mae feel any better. If you lost everything, it didn't really ease your pain much to know that other people, somewhere else, might be hurting even worse. People who wanted to judge your pain by your privileges were mean-spirited people-the kind of people who thought it must be big fun to be an invalid, as long as you were rich. Alex knew better. Sure, if he'd been poor, he'd have been dead long ago-he knew that. He wasn't poor. He was a rich kid, and if he had any say about it, he was going to stay that way. But that didn't make his life a picnic. Let her talk.

"When I figured that much out," Ellen Mae said, "I decided I was gonna learn all about Comanches."

"How come?"

She paused. "Alex, there are twokin~ of people in this world. The people who don't wanna know, even if they oughta know. And the people who just have to know, even if it's not gonna help 'em." She smiled at him. "Troupe people-we're all that second kind. People who just have to know, even though we can't do a damn thing about any of it."

Alex grunted. He was of a different kind, personally. He was the kind who didn't mind knowing, but didn't feel up to devoting much energy to finding out.

"So I read a lot about Comanches. I mean, with the towns empty and the cattle gone, it was a lot easier to understand that kind of nomad life... . That's one good thing about living nowadays. You can read about anything, for nothing, anywhere where there's a laptop screen. So, I read all these on-line books about Comanches, and how they lived, while I was living off the backs of trucks, hunting, and gathering scrap metal.

"And that's when I started to really understand this land. For instance, why us wreckers got so much heat from the Texas Rangers. Why the Rangers used to just show up out here, and chase down our convoys, and shoot us. They had databases and cell phones and all, but there wasn't anything cute and modern about the goddamned Texas Rangers-the Rangers in the 2020s were exactly the same as the goddamned Texas Rangers in the 1 880s! And if you were some nomad, living out of a tent in West Texas, then the Rangers just weren't gonna be able to stand havin' you around! Simple as that!" She was shaking her soup ladle.

"They just couldn't stand it, that we were out here wreckin' stuff, and that we hadn't cleared out for good and gone exactly where the government said we should, when we should. That we didn't pay taxes, or get vaccinations, or have any rule books." She stirred her stew, and tasted it, and started crumbling a dried ancho pepper.

"Sure, every once in a while a few wrecker boys would get all liquored up and smash up some stuff in towns where there were still people livin'. That happened, and I'm not denyin' it. We weren't all perfect. But the Rangers used that as their excuse for everything. They came right after the wreckiñ' gangs, the Rangers did. They just wouldn't let us live. They broke us up, and they shot us and arrested us, and they put us away in camps."

"What did you do then?"

"Well, I didn't get arrested myself, so I went up to Oklahoma to meet some real Comanches."~

"Really?"

"Hell yes! There's more Comanches up in Oklahoma right now, after everything, than there were when the tribe was out riding the free range. That's the weirdest part of it. The Comanches didn't die out or anything. They just got changed and moved. They been up there multiplying, just like every other human being in the world. There's thousands of Comanches. They're farmers, and they got little stores and stuff... they're big on churches, y'know, big churchgoing people. None of that weirdo cult stuff, but good old-fashioned Christians. I wouldn't call 'em prosperous, they're pretty damned poor people for Americans, but you see a lot worse on TV."

"I see. So what did you learn from that?"

Ellen Mae laughed. "Well, I married one... . But they know about as much about living off the buffalo as you know about being a German spy, kid. I dunno ... the oldest folks still use the language a little, the smell of the old life is still around, just a little bit. I wanted to learn about herbal lore, about living off the land. I ended up learning a lot about botany. But mostly I learned it off text files and databases. Hell, Alex, it's been a hundred and fifty years."

She sighed. "That's a long time. I mean, I grew up m West Texas. I was a nice girl from a decent ranchin' family, went to high school, went to church, watched TV, bought dresses and shoes and went to dances.... We thought we owned this land. How much of that life do you think is gonna be left in a hundred and fifty years? Fuck-all, Alex. Nothin'."

"Well, I wouldn't say that," Alex said. "After all, there's government records. The government's real goad about that. Databases and statistics. Stuff on platinum disks that they keep in salt mines."

"Sure, and in Anadarko there's American Indian museums where everything has got a nice tag on it, but it's gone, kid! The Comanches got smashed and blown away! We got smashed and blown away! First we did it to them.. And then we did it to the land. And then we did it to ourselves. And after we're gone for good, I don't know why the hell anybody is gonna want to know about us."

Alex was impressed. He'd seen old people talking openly about the declining state-of-the-world on old people's television talk shows, the crustier, more old-fashioned talk shows, without many video effects, where people never did very much. But old people usually seemed pretty embarrassed to bring up such matters right in front of young people. Probably because of the inherent implication that the world's old people were ecological criminals. Who probably ought to be hauled into court by a transgenerational tribunal and tried for atrocities against the biosphere.

Not that old people would ever allow this to happen, though. There were shitloads of old people still running everything all over the world, and they were in no hurry to give up their power, despite the grotesquely stupid things they'd done with it. Sometimes they would allude to all the awful consequences of heavy weather, but always in very mealymouthed, very abstract ways, as if the disasters surrounding them had nothing to do with anything they'd ever done themselves.

Alex kinda figured that there might be some kind of reckoning someday. When everybody who might be tound guilty was safely dead and buried. It would probably be like it had been, back when the communist government finally fell in China. Lots of tribunals of guys in suits issuing severe public reprimands to lots of elderly dead people.

"Well, I can tell that you learned something useful," Alex said. "'Cause I never saw anybody eat like this Troupe eats."

"Off the land," Ellen Mae said, nodding. "It ain't easy, that's for sure. The old species balance, the original ecology, is completely shot out here. Believe me, it's nothing like the High Plains used to be, and it never will be again. There's all these foreign weeds, invader species, depleted soils, and the climate's crazy. But the West Texas flora was always pretty well adapted to severe weather. So there's still Comanche food around. Stuff like pigweed. Hell, pig-weed's an amaranth, it's a really nutritious grain, but it'll grow in a crack in a sidewalk. Of course, you'd never think to eat pigweed if you didn't already know what it was."

"Right," Alex said. He'd never seen pigweed-or, at least, he'd never recognized it. He felt a dreadful certainty that he was going to have to eat some of it pretty soon.

"It's been a long time since anybody was out here, gathering the wild forage. But now the grazing pressure is off the native plants. And there's no more plowing, or crops, or herbicides, or fertilizers. So even though the weather's bad, some of those native plants are coming back pretty strongly. Stuff like poppymallow, and devil's claw, and prairie turnip. There's nowhere near enough for a cityful of civilized people. But for a little tribe of lering nomads, who can cover a lot of ground, well, there's quite a lot of food out here, especially in spring and summer."

"I guess the Troupe was pretty lucky that you ended up g them," Alex said.

"No," said Ellen Mae, "there wasn't anything like luck to that."

AFTER JERRY AND Sam had pored over the forecast, and Joe Brasseur had run through a legal database of likely areas to squat, they picked a destination and announced a route.

The Troupe broke camp.

Joe Brasseur, the oldest member of the Troupe, had once referred to breaking camp as "labor-intensive." Jane found that a hilariously old-fashioned term, but she understood what it meant, all right-there was no way to shrug the work off onto machines, so everybody involved just plain had to sweat.

The Troupe pulled up all the carpets, beat a hundred kilos of dust out of them, and rolled them up neatly. They deflated the bubblepak, and rolled that up too. Peter, Martha, and Rick deftly unstacked the towers-a nerve-racking business to watch-while Greg and Carol and Mickey went after the instrumentation and the wind generator.

Then there were the tepees and the yurts to strip, collapse, and pack, and the systems to shut down and uncable and stow away. And then there would be the bonfire, and the last big meal in camp, and the ritual bath... . Jane pitched in headlong. She felt good after a day off, she felt alert and strong. There was a lot to do, but she knew how to do it. She was ready to work, and she would do it in one daylong blur of harnessed nervous energy, and when it was over, she would sleep in the Troupe bus in the moving dark, and she would feel very satisfied.

She was hauling a bundled stack of tepee poles to one of the trucks when she saw Alex slouching past her.

She scarcely recognized her brother at first: a strange, hunched, gnomelike figure, less like a Troupe wannabe than some kind of prisoner of war. He was wearing a dirty paper jumpsuit, a big cardboard-and-paper sombrero, with a big white mask elastic-strapped over his nose and mouth.

He was carrying a large double-headed digging pick.

She'd never seen anyone carry a pick with less enthusiasm- Alex was lugging it clumsily, thigh-high, at the end of his outstretched arms, as if it were some kind of barbell.

He trudged slowly out of the camp. Jane called out to him, waved, then jogged over and caught up to him just past one of the camp's perimeter posts.

"What's on your mind?" he muttered.

"Just wanted to see how you're doing," she sai4. She looked into his pale, squinting eyes. "You mind taking off that mask for a second?"

Alex pulled his mask down, with bad grace. The mask's thin elastic straps had left four little stripes of pale skin across his sunburned cheeks. "Ellen Mae wants me to dig up a root."

"Oh." Jane thought that Alex looked shaky, and she was pretty sure he'd never touched a pickax in his life. "Are you up to that kind of labor? You just got out of a hospital.

"I'm not gonna work very hard," he told her patiently. "It's just makework bullshit. Ellen Mae's just getting me out of the way so one of those big radio towers won't fall on my head."

"You got along all right with Ellen Mae?"

"I can get along.' Alex sighed. "These people of yours are really something. They remind me of some Santeria people I used to know, in a rancho outside Matamoros. Kind of survivalist compound thing? They had the bunkers, y'know, and the security systems and stuff... . Of course, those dope vaqueros were a much heavier outfit than these jokers." Alex thumped the broadside of the pick against the base of one of the perimeter posts. "This thing can't listen to us talking, can it?"

"Well, yeah, it can," Jane admitted, "but we never record any speech with it. It's just an intruder alarm, with some tasers and pellets and stuff. We can talk."

"No problem," Alex muttered, watching- a pack of Troupers strip the paper walls from the hangar yurt. "Well, you don't have to worry about me. Run along and go do something useful."

"Is anybody bugging you, Alex? Rick or Peter or anybody?"

Alex shrugged. "You're bugging me."

"Don't be that way. I just want to help you fit in."

Alex laughed. "Look! You kidnapped me here, I didn't ask to come. I'm sunburned and covered with mosquito bites, and I'm really dirty. The food stinks here. There's not enough water. There's no privacy. It's dangerous! I'm wearing clothes made of paper. Your friends are a pack of hicks and loans, except for your boyfriend, who's a big cigar-store Indian. Under the circumstances, I'm being a really good sport about this."

Jane said nothing.

He looked her in the eye. "Stop worrying so much. I'm not gonna do anything stupid. If I were a bigger guy, and a stronger guy, and a nicer guy, I'd go have it out with your boyfriend about that way you've been groaning at night." He shook his head, under the big paper hat. "I won't, though. I think I know what kind of guy Mulcahey is, and I think you're crazy to hook up with a guy like that. But hey, I'm not one to judge. That's your life, that's all your decision."

"Thanks a lot," she grated.

He smiled at her. "You're really happy here, aren't you?"

She was surprised.

"I've seen you act really crazy sometimes, Janey. And I still think you're acting pretty strange. But I've never seen you act so happy before." He smiled again. "You're chasing tornadoes in a wasteland! But you're waltzin' around here with a smile on your lips, and a song in your heart, and your little bouquet of fresh wildflowers. -...t's kind of sweet, actually."

Jane straightened to her full height and looked down at him. "Yes, Alex, I'm happy here. About everything but you, basically."

"You really belong with these people. You really like them."

"That's right. They're my people."

Alex narrowed his eyes. "And this guy you're with. He treats you all right? He wasn't beating you or anything really sick and twisted, was he?"

Jane looked around for eavesdroppers, smoldering with rage, then centered her eyes on him. "No. He doesn't beat me. I was fucking him. I like to flick him. Hard! Loud! A lot! I'm not ashamed about it, and you can't make me ashamed!" There was a hot flush in her cheeks and ears.

"Get this through your head! That is the man in my life!

He is my grand passion." She stared hard at Alex, until he dropped his gaze.

"I never thought I was gonna have a grand passion," she told him. "I didn't ever believe in that. I thought it was Hollywood fantasy, or something from a hundred years ago. But I have a grand passion now, and he's the one. There'll never be another man like him for me~ Ever!"

Alex took a step back. "Okay, okay."

"It's him and me till theaky falls in!"

Alex nodded quickly, his eyes wide. "Okay, I get it, Janey. Calm down."

"I am calm, you little creep. And it's no joke. You can't ever make it a joke, because you don't know one thing about it. I love him, and I'm happy with him, and we do what we do, and we are what we are, and you just better live with that! And you bettet never forget what I just told you.

Alex nodded. She could tell from the way he bit his lip that her words had sunk in-for better or worse, she'd connected. "It's okay, Janey. I'm not complaining. I'm glad I had a chance to see you acting like this, I really am. It's real weird, but it's refreshing." He shrugged, uneasily. I "The only thing is-you shouldn't have brought me out here. That just wasn't a good idea. I don't belong in any place like this. I'm not like these people. You should have left me alone." He lifted the pick carefully and placed on his narrow shoulder.

"You're gonna stay with the Troupe awhile, Alex?"

"I oughta make you take me home right away." He balanced the pick handle on his collarbone, clumsy and restless. "But I got no home to go to at the moment. Mexico is out, for obvious reasons. I'm sure not going back home to Papa in Houston. Pa p a acts even stranger than you do, and those clinic people might be lookin' for me there.... And anyway, there are possibilities in a setup like this. It's stupid for me to stay here, but I think I might do okay for awhile, if I can get everybody to mostly ignore me. Especially you." He turned away.

"Alex," she said.

He looked over his shoulder. "What?"

"Learn to hack something. Like everybody else does. Just so you can get along better."

He nodded. "Okay, Juanita. Have it your way."

ALEX FOLLOWED ELLEN Mae's precise but extremely confusing directions, got turned around several times, and finally found the paper-tagged stick she had driven into the earth to mark the spot. The fluttering paper tag marked a low trailing vine on the ground. The vine was about two meters long, with hairy, pointed, conical leaves, and it smelled rank and fetid. It harbored a large population of small black-and-orange beetles. It was called a buffalo gourd.

Alex scraped the vine aside with the flat blade of the pick, got a two-handed choke-up grip on the shaft, and started to chop at the yellow earth. He was impressed with the pick. The tool was well-balanced, sharp, and in good condition. Unfortunately he was nowhere near strong enough to use it properly.

Alex chipped, gnawed, and scraped his way several centimeters down into the miserable, unforgiving soil, until the sweat stood out all over his ribs and his pipe-stem arms trembled.

When he spotted the buried root of a buffalo gourd, he stared at it in amazement for some time, then left the pick beside the hole and walked slowly back to camp.

Carol Cooper had pulled a pair of lattices from the wall of the garage yurt. The highway maintenance hulk rolled out through the big new gap.

Carol watched the machine lumber downhill while she folded and tied the wooden lattices. Alex joined her, tugging down his mask.

The machine hit the highway, hesitated, and began creeping along south at ten klicks an hour.

"Well, let's hope the poor damn thing gets to paint a few road stripes before they shoot it to hell and gone again," Carol said, stacking the lattices in the back of a truck. "What's the deal, dude? I'm busy."

"Carol, what's the weirdest thing you've got around here?"

"What in hell are you talking about?"

"What have you got, that's really strange, only nobody else ever hacks with it?"

"Oh," Carol said. "I get your drift." She grinned. "There's a touch of that in every Trouper. Old-fashioned hacker gadget jones. Toy hunger, right?" Carol looked around the garage, at the scattered tools, the bench mounts, the table vise, an industrial glue sprayer. "You wanna help me pack all this crap? Rudy and Greg are coming later."

"I'd like to," Alex lied, "but I got another assignment."

"Well, I'm gonna be glad to have this thing off my hands, anyhow. You want to play with something, you can play with this bastard." Carol walked to the welding bench and pulled off a long, dusty coil of black cable. It looked like a pneumatic feedline for the welding torch, a big coil of thin black plastic gas pipe. As she caught it up and brought it to him, though, Alex saw that the apparent pipe was actually sleek black braided cord.

One end of the cord ended in a flat battery unit, with a belt attachment, a small readout screen, and a control glove.

"Ever seen one of these before?"

"Well, I've certainly seen a battery and a control glove," Alex said.

She handed him the works. "Yeah, that's a damn good battery! Superconductive. You could drive a motorbike with that battery. And here I am, keeping that sucker charged up to no good end-nobody ever uses this damn thing!" She frowned. "Of course, if you work that battery down, kid, you're gonna have to pull some weight to make up for that."