The profession of design," sniffed April Logan, "having once lost its aspiration to construct a better world, must by necessity decay into a work-for-hire varnish for barbarism." April Logan's noble, aquiline head, with its single careful forelock of white hair, began, subtly at first and then with greater insistence, to stretch. Rather like taffy. "The density of information embodied in the modern technological object creates deep conceptual stress that implodes the human-object interface... . Small wonder that a violent reactive Luddism has become the definitive vogue of the period, as primates, outsmarted by their own environment, lash out in frenzy at a postnatural world."
The critic's head was morphing like a barber pole on the slender pillar of her tanned and elegant neck. "The same technology that makes our design tools more complex, vastly increases the number of options in determining how any designed object may appear and function. If there are no working parts visible to the naked eye, then techne itself becomes liquid and amorphous. It required the near collapse of the American republic to finally end the long, poisonous vogue for channel switching and ironic juxtaposition... ." April Logan's head was gently turning inside out, in full fine-grain pixelated color. Even her voice was changing, some kind of acoustic sampling that mimicked a female larynx evolving into a helix, or a Klein bottle.
Jane's belt phone buzzed. At the same instant a classic twentieth-century telephone appeared in midair, to Jane's right. A phone designed by one Henry Dreyfuss, Jane recalled. Professor Logan often spoke of Henry Dreyfuss.
Jane paused the critic's lecture with a twitch of her glove, then pulled off her virching helmet. She plucked the flimsy little phone from her belt and answered it. "Jane here."
"Janey, it's Alex. I'm out with the goats."
"Yes?"
"Can you tell me something? I- got a laptop here and I'm trying to pull up a fine-grain of the local landscape, and I got some great satellite shots, but I can't find any global-positioning grids."
"Oh," Jane said. Alex sounded so earnest and interested that she felt quite pleased with him. She couldn't remember the last time Alex had openly asked a favor of her, that he'd simply asked her for her help. "What longitude and latitude are you looking for, exactly?"
"Longitude 100' 22' 39ff, latitude 34' 07' 25"."
"That's real close to camp."
"Yeah, I thought so."
"Should be about three hundred meters due east of the command yurt." Jerry always set the yurt right on a grid-line if he could manage it. It helped a little with radiolocation and Doppler triangulation and such.
"Yeah, that's pretty much where me and the goats are now, but I was just checking. Thanks. Bye." He hung up.
Jane thought this over for a moment, sighed, and put her helmet away.
She passed Rick and Mickey, beavering away on the system, and the helmeted Jerry, back at his usual weighted pacing. Jerry was starting to seriously wear the carpet. Jane put on her sunglasses and left camp.
Lovely spring sky. Sweet fluffy altocumulus. You'd think a sky like that could never do a moment's harm.
She found Alex sitting cross-legged under the shade of a mesquite tree. Getting shade from the tiny pinnate leaves of a mesquite was like trying to fetch water in a sieve, but Alex wore his much-glued sombrero as well. And he was wearing his breathing mask.
He was messing languidly with the flaccid black smart rope. Jane was surprised, and not at all happy, to see the smart rope again. The thing's primitive user-hostile interface was a total joke. The first time she'd used it, the vicious rope had whipped back like a snapping strand of barbed wire and left a big welt on her shin.
She walked up closer, boots crunching the spiky grass. Alex suddenly turned.
"Hi," she said.
"Hola, hermana."
"Y'know, if I'd been a coyote, I coulda just walked off with one of these goats."
"Be my guest." Alex took off the mask and yawned. "Walk off with one of these tracking collars, and Rick will come out with his rifle and exterminate you."
"What's going on Out here?"
"Just basking in my glory as hero of the day," Alex drawled. "See my throng of enthusiastic admirers?" The smart rope twitched uneasily as he tried, without success, to fling it at the goats. "I wish you hadn't called the Texas Rangers. I really don't wanna talk to those guys."
"The Rangers never stay for long. What are you up to?"
Alex said nothing. He opened his laptop, checked the clock on the screen, then stood up theatrically and looked to the south.
She turned to match his gaze. An endless vista of odd hump-shaped caprocks dotted with juniper and mesquite, here and there the blobby green lobes of distant prickly pear, a yellow sparkling of tall waving coneflowers. Far to the south a passenger jet kft a ragged contrail.
"Whoa," he said. "There it is. Here it comes. I'll be damned." He laughed. "Right on time too! Man, it's amazing what a kind word and a credit card can do."
Jane's heart sank. She didn't know what was about to happen, but already she didn't like it. Alex was watching the horizon with his worst and most evil grin.
She stepped behind his shoulder and looked across the landscape.
Then she saw it too. A bouncing machine. Something very much like a camouflage-painted kangaroo.
It was crossing the hills with vast, unerring, twenty-meter leaps. A squat metal sphere, painted in ragged patches of dun and olive drab. It had a single thick, pistoning, metal leg.
The bounding robot whipped that single metal leg around with dreadful unerring precision, like some nightmare one-legged pirate. It whacked its complex metal foot against the earth like a hustler's cue whacking a pooi ball, and it bounded off instantly, hard. The thing spent most of its time airborne, a splotchy cannonball spinning on its axis and kicking like a flea against the Texan earth. It was doing a good eighty klicks an hour. As it got closer she saw that its underside was studded with grilled sensors.
It gave a final leap and, God help her, a deft little somersault, and it landed on the earth with a brief hiss of sucked-up impact. Instantly, a skinny little gunmetal tripod flicked Out from beneath it, like a triple set of hinged switchblades.
And there it sat, instantly gone as quiet as a coffee table, not ten meters away from them.
"All right," she said. "What is that thing?"
"It's a dope mule. From my friends in Matamoros."
"Oh, Jesus."
"Look," he said, "relax. It's just a cheaper street version of Charlie, your car! Charlie's a smuggler's vehicle, and this is a smuggler's vehicle. It's just that instead of having two hundred smart spokes and driver's seats and roll bars like that big kick-ass car does, it's only got one spoke. One spoke, and a gyroscope inside, and a global positioning system." He shrugged. "And some mega chip inside so it never runs into anything and no cop ever sees it."
"Oh," she groaned. "Yeah, this is great, Alex."
"It'll carry, I dunno, maybe forty kilos merchandise. No big deal. Dope people have hundreds of these things now. They don't cost much to make, so it's like a toy for 'em.
"Why didn't you tell me about this?"
"Are you kidding? Since when do I ask your permission to do anything?" He walked up to the mule.
She hurried after him. "You'd better not."
"Get away from there!" he yelped. "They're hot-wired." Jane jumped back warily, flinching, and Alex chuckled with pleasure. "Tamperproof! Put in the wrong password, and the sucker explodes on the spot and destroys all the evidence! And what's more-if you're not, like, their friend? Or they're tired of dealing with you? Then sometimes they just booby-trap it, and blow you away the second you touch the keypad."
He laughed. "Don't look so glum. That's all just legend, really. Doper brag talk. The dope vaqueros hardly ever blow anyone up. You and me both know the border doesn't mean anything anymore. There are no more borders. Just free and open markets!" He chuckled merrily. "They can send me whatever the hell they want. Dope, explosives, frozen human hearts, who cares? They're just another delivery service."
Alex punched a long string of numbers, with exaggerated care, into a telephone keypad welded into the top of the mule. The robot mulled the matter over, then hissed open on a stainless-steel hinge, showing a big rubber 0-ring around its midsection.
Alex started pulling out the goods. Lots of plastic-wrapped cloth. A pair of cowboy boots. A yellow cylinder tank. A plastic jug. Designer sunglasses in a shockproof case. A handgun.
Alex tried the sunglasses on immediately, clearly delighted with them. "Here, you can have this," he said, tossing her the handgun. "I'm not interested."
Jane caught it with a gasp. The handgun was all injection-molded ceramic and plastic, a short-barreled six-shot revolver. It felt hard as a rock and utterly lethal. It weighed about as much as a teacup. It would pass any metal detector in the world and had probably cost all of two dollars to make.
"You're full of shit!" she said. "If the Rangers found out about this, they'd go ape."
"Yeah, and the Houston cops wouldn't like it either, if the vaqueros were dumb enough to send a mule bouncin' right down the streets of Houston, but they're not gonna do that, are they? Nobody's that stupid. Nobody knows about this but you and me. And Carol, that is." Alex pulled out a gleaming metal bracelet. "I got Carol this barometer watch! She doesn't know that I bought it for her, but I think she'll like it, don't you? It'll match her Trouper cuff." He tipped his floppy paper sombrero back on his head. "Carol's the only one around here who's been really decent to me."
"Carol isn't going to approve of this-"
"Oh, get off it!" Alex snapped. "Carol is bent! Carol loves this!" He grinned beneath his new gold-framed shades. "Carol is old-time structure-hit people, for Christ's sake! And she's flicking Greg, and Greg is some kinda cx- Special Forces demolition spook, a scary, heavy guy. I'm real glad they chase storms now instead of knocking bridges down, but Carol and Greg are very bent people. They're not from milk-and-cookie land."
"I've never seen Carol or Greg commit any act of vandalism," Jane said with dignity.
"Yeah," he scoffed. "Besides helping you break into Mexican hospitals." He shook his head. "You're just pissed off because I didn't get you anything, aren't you? Well, there's a nice handgun for ya! If boyfriend gets wandering eyes, blow him away!" He laughed.
Jane stared at him. "You think this is funny, don't you?"
"Janey, it is funny." He pulled the plasticwrap from a hand-stitched denim shirt. Then he peeled off his paper suit. He stood there naked in his big paper hat and shades, the paper suit pooled around his ankles, tugging the fine blue shirt onto his skinny arms. "You can get all hot and bothered about the implications and the morality and all that shit, if you really want to. Or else, you can just try and live in the modem world! It doesn't make a damn bit of difference either way!"
He kicked the paper suit off his feet, then stood on top of the paper and pulled off his right shoe. "The border is lucked, and the government is flicked!" He pulled off the left shoe and flung it aside. "And society is flicked, and the climate is really fucked. And the media are lucked, and the economy is lucked, and the smartest people in the world live like refugees and criminals!" He ripped the plasticwrap off a pair of patterned silk boxer shorts and stepped into them. "And nobody has any idea how to make things any better, and there isn't any way to make things better, and there isn't gonna be any way, and we don't control anything important about our lives! And that's just how it is today, and yes, it's funny!" He laughed shrilly. "It's hilarious! And if you don't get the joke, you don't deserve to be alive in the 2030s."
Alex climbed into a satiny pair of brown jeans, carefully tucking in the denim shirttails. "And what's more, right now I've got myself a really nice shirt. And real nice pants too. And boots too, look, these boots are hand-tooled Mexican leather, they're really beautiful." He unrolled a pair of thick cotton boot socks.
"The Troupe aren't gonna appreciate this. They're not really into, y'know, play-cowboy gear."
"Janey, I don't give a rat's ass what your friends think about my goddamn clothes." He stepped into the socks, jammed his feet in the boots, then walked over to the robot mule, looked into its empty cavity one last time, and slammed its top.
After a three-second pause, the mule suddenly whipped its tripod shut and fired itself into the air. "If it were up to you and your friends," Alex said, watching it bounce madly away, "I'd be wearing plastic toilet paper the rest of my life. I'm not a weather refugee, and I'm not gonna pretend to be one. And if they don't like what I'm wearing, they can make me ride point again, if they're too goddamned timid to do it themselves." He watched the machine bounding off southward, as he carefully buttoned his shirt cuffs. "I am what I am. If you want to stop me, then shoot me."
THE RANGER POSSE showed up at three that afternoon. Jane was unhappy to see them. She was never happy to see Rangers, and worse yet, she had a yeast infection and was running a low-grade fever.
It wasn't the first time she'd had yeast. Yeast was common. The pollution from overuse of broad-scale antibiotics had made candida fiercer and scarier, the same way it had supercharged staph and flu and TB and all the rest. Candida hadn't bootstrapped its way up to the utter lethality of, say, Bengali cholera, but it had gotten a lot more contagious, and nowadays it actually was a genital infection that you could catch off a toilet seat.
A few discreet inquiries around camp established that none of the other Troupe women had yeast, so it had to be a repeated flare-up of her old curse, the yeast she'd caught back in 2027. That one had flared up in sullen little bouts of nastiness for almost six months, until her immune system had finally gotten on top of it. She'd hoped she had the yeast knocked down for good, but yeast was a lot like staph or herpes, it was always there lurking low-level, and it went crazy when it got a good excuse.
And she had to admit that it had a pretty good excuse now. She'd been having sex until it hurt. It wasn't very sçnsible to do that, but sex wasn't very much use to her when it was sensible. Jane hadn't truly appreciated sex, really, until she'd gotten into headlong sex at full tilt. Hard, clawing, yelling sex that didn't stop until you were sweaty and chafed and sore. Sex on a nice comfy bed of rock-hard Texas dirt, with a guy in top physical condition who was a lot taller than you were and outweighed you by twenty kilos. It was like discovering a taste for really hot food. Like a taste for whiskey. Except that whiskey was a poison, and you regretted whiskey in the morning, but a really passionately physical affair had been a tonic for her, and she'd never regretted it for a moment.
It had changed her. In a surprising number of ways. Physically, even. It was kind of weird and didn't sound real plausible, but she could swear that her pelvis had actually changed shape in the past year. That her hipbones fit at a different angle and she actually walked differently now. Differently and better, with her back straight and her head up. But she was only flesh and blood. The spirit was willing and the flesh was more than willing, but the body could only take so much. She'd asked too much of the body. And now she had the crud.
And then there was that even more harassing annoyance, the cops. The Rangers. There were six of them, and they rode boldly into camp in three hand-me-down U.S. Army pursuit vehicles. They rolled in a cloud of yellow dust right through the camp's perimeter posts, which immediately went into panic mode, whooping and flashing lights and arcing electricity in big harmless crackling gouts. One of them fired a taser dart on a leash, which missed.
Greg rushed into the command yurt and quickly shut off the alarms while the Rangers slowly climbed Out of their slab-sided carbon-armored prowl cars and stood there in the settling dust, in their hats and sunglasses and guns.
Once upon a time the Texas Rangers had basically been packs of frontier vigilantes violently enforcing the peace on pretty much anything that moved. A hundred years later Texas was settled and civilized, and the Texas Rangers were paragons of professional law enforcement. And then a century later yet, everything had pretty much gone to hell. So now the Texas Rangers were pretty much what they'd been two hundred years ago.
One Ranger tradition always rang true, though. Texas Rangers always carried an absolute shitload of weaponry. If a bad guy had a six-gun, then a Ranger had two six-guns, plus a rifle and a bowie knife. If bad guys had rifles, then Rangers had tommy guns, shotguns, and gas grenades. Now bad guys had crazy stuff like plastic explosive and smart land mines and electric rifles, so Rangers had toxic fléchette pistols and truck-mounted machine guns and rocket-slug sniper rifles and heat-seeking aerial drones. Plus satellite backup and their own cellular bands.
The leader of the Rangers was a Captain Gault, down from what was left of Amarillo. Captain Gault had a white cowboy hat, a neat gray-streaked ponytail in a silver band, smart sunglasses, and a drooping black mustache. Captain Gault was in creased khaki trousers and a bellows-pocketed, long-sleeved khaki shirt with a silver-star badge at the breast. He wore a neatly knotted black tie and two broad, silver-buckled, black-leather belts, one belt for the khaki trousers, the other for his twin, pearl-handled pistols. They were beautifully polished fléchette pistols in elaborate black leather holsters. The captain's shining guns were so radiant of somber police authority that there was something almost papal about them.
The four Ranger privates were in chocolate-chip U.S. desert camou fatigues. They had brown cowboy hats with the Lone Star on the crown, and brown leather holsters with the Lone Star inset in the leather, and trail boots with the Lone Star on the uppers, and one of them even had a little silver Lone Star inset in his front tooth. They were bearded and hairy and slit-mouthed and dusty, and they bristled with guns and cell phones, and they looked extremely tough.
And then there was the last guy. He was wearing a khaki T-shirt and cutoff fatigue pants and running shoes, and he had a beat-up cloth fatigue cap and a nasty-looking, well-worn rifle across his back.
This last guy was black. He had a mess of kinky buffalo-soldier locks. Jane never put much emphasis on skin color. ~-People who made fine ethnic distinctions always smacked of weird ethnic race-war craziness to her, and considering her own ethnic background, Jane figured she had a right to be a little nervous about that kind of hairsplitting attitude. Carol was black, and nobody much noticed or cared. Rudy Martinez looked kinda like some grandparent of his might have been black. But this Ranger guy was really black, like inhumanly satin black. Sometimes people did odd chemical things to their skin nowadays. Especially if they spent a lot of time out in the open sun, and thought a lot about ozone damage.
Jerry came out of the command yurt to greet the Rangers, flanked by Greg and Joe Brasseur, trailed by a reluctant, shuffling Alex. Jerry had thrown off his usual ratty paper suit and was wearing clean slacks and a decent buttoned shirt and a white coat. Joe Brasseur had a shirt and a tie and glasses, and was carrying a clipboard and looking very lawyerly. Greg looked pretty much like Greg always did: jeans, army shirt, shades, muscle. Alex was in his new shirt and brown jeans and looked like he wished he was on some other continent.
The men gathered around the Ranger prowl cars and started muttering deep in their chests. This was another thing Jane didn't like about Rangers. They were unbelievably chauvinist. Jane knew that a few Texan policewomen had joined the Rangers decades back, but when the Rangers had started routinely shooting people in large numbers again, the whole sex-integration thin a suddenly evaporated. It was as dead as drug-law enforcement and racial integration and universal health care and other perished niceties of the period. There were no women in combat positions in the Texas Rangers, or the state National Guard units, or the U.S. Army for that matter. And the men in these little all-male enclaves of violence were more than a little obnoxious about it.
Alex submitted to Captain Gault's brief interrogation and then left in a hurry, with relief all over his face.
The extremely black guy noticed Jane watching from the sidelines. He dogtrotted over to her, grinning. "Got any water? Got any salt?"
"Sure, Officer." Jane called Ellen Mae on the phone.
The black Ranger nodded peaceably, dipped into the baggy pockets of his cutoffs, and began to hand-roll a marijuana cigarette. The guy's shins and forearms were chicken-scratched with fine scars. He had a big scarred crater in the side of his neck that Jane could have put the end of her thumb into.
"I'm not sure a law enforcement officer on duty ought to be smoking marijuana," Jane said.
The Ranger flicked a wooden match with his callused thumbnail, lit the joint, and inhaled sharply. "Get a life," he suggested.
Young Jeff Lowe appeared on the trot from the kitchen yurt, with a canteen and an antiseptic paper cup, two salt tablets, and a couple strips of jerky. He handed them shyly to the Ranger.
"Are you smoking dope?" Jeff said, wide-eyed.
"I got glaucoma," the Ranger offered. He bolted the salt pills, knocked back three cups of water, took a last long huff off his joint, then stomped it out and began hungrily gnawing the jerky.
"Good jerky," he said, mouth full. "You don't meet many folks these days who can really cure a deer." He began sidling back toward his vehicle.
"Wait a sec," Jane said. "Please."
The Ranger raised his brows.
"What's it all about?"
"Livestock smugglers," the Ranger told her. "They got those pharm goats hot-wired to do all kinds of weird shit nowadays.....un 'em up backroads by night, mix ~em up with meat goats, and you can't tell no difference without a DNA scan.... That was a pretty tough outfit you met, we been watchin' out for 'em awhile, y'all was lucky."
"What kind of 'weird shit' do you get from illegal goats?" Jeff asked.
"Plastic explosive, for one thing. Strain it out of the milk, make cheese out of it, put a fuse in it, and structure-hit the hell right out of anything."
"Explosive goat's milk," Jane said slowly.
"You're kidding, right?" Jeff said.
The Ranger smiled broadly. "Yeah, folks, I'm kidding, sorry.
Jane stared at him. The Ranger stared back. There was no expression in his reflective shades. "What are you gonna do now?" Jane said.
"Find the contact point, I'll track 'em through the brush.... We'll catch 'em by morning. Maybe noon. Cap'n Gault likes to go by the book, he'll give 'em a chance to throw down their guns and come quiet. Thanks for the water, ma'am. Y'all take care now." The Ranger trotted off.
Jeff waited until the Ranger was out of earshot. Then he spoke with hushed amazement and respect. "Janey, they're gonna kill them all."
"Yeah," Jane said. "I know."
VIOLENT, DEADLY STORMS broke Out in profusion in the last two weeks of May 2031. Unfortunately they were in Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, and Arkansas. A minor front swept Tornado Alley on May 27, ardently pursued by the Troupe, but it yielded no spikes.
Statistically, this was not unusual. However, the statistics themselves had become pretty damned unusual as the century had progressed. Before heavy weather, there had been about nine hundred tornadoes every year in the United States. Nowadays, there were about four thousand. Before heavy weather, a year's worth of tornadoes killed about a hundred people and caused about $200 million (constant 1975 dollars) in damage. Now, despite vastly better warning systems, tornadoes killed about a thousand people a year, and the damage was impossible to estimate accurately because the basic economic nature of both "value" and "currency" had gone nonlinear.
Tornadoes were, for obvious reasons, easier to find nowadays. But most storms, even violent storms with good indicators, never spawned tornadoes. Many hunts were simply bound to turn up dry, even with excellent weather monitoring and rapid all-terrain deployment. And even the much-ravaged Texas-Oklahoma Tornado Alley, the planet's premier spawning ground for twisters, had to get some peace and quiet sometimes.
The dry spell visibly affected the Troupe's morale. Alex saw that they were still on their best behavior around Mulcahey, but Mulcahey himself became withdrawn, wrapping himself in marathon simulation sessions. The Troupe got bored, then petulant. Carol and Greg, whose relationship seemed unstable at the best of times, started openly sniping at one another. Peter and Rick took a motorcycle and sidecar into Amarillo "to get laid," and came back hung over and beaten up. Rudy Martinez went to San Antonio for a week to visit his ex-wife and his kids. Martha and Buzzard, who found one another physically repulsive but couldn't seem to let one another alone, got into a mean, extensive quarrel over minor damage to one of the ultralights. And Juanita spent a lot of her time tearing around uselessly in the dune buggy, ostensibly to give its new, improved interface a shakedown, but more, Alex suspected, for the sake of her own nerves than anything to do with the car.
The High Plains down around Big Spring and Odessa had gotten generous rains this year, but the Troupe had since moved far north, near Palo Duro Canyon. Up here, the grasslands had gotten a good start for spring and then stalled. The unnatural lushness of greenhouse rain had faded to the windy dryness once more natural to the Texas Panhandle, and the supercharged vegetation started to hesitate and shut down. It didn't wither exactly-stuff like hairy grama, elbowbush, and buffalo grass was way too tough and mean-spirited to do anything as sissy as "withering"-but it got yellow and tight and sere and spiky. And up in the Oklahoma Panhandle, it hadn't rained since late March.
Alex had a high tolerance for boredom. True restlessness required a level of animal energy that he simply didn't possess. Unlike the Troupers, he didn't fidget or complain. Given working lungs, a screen to look at, and a place to sleep, Alex felt basically content. He hadn't asked to join a group of touchy thrill freaks as their unpaid amateur goat-herd, and he recognized the true absurdity of his situation, but he didn't actually mind it much. The weather was lovely, the air was clear, his health was good, and he was being left alone all day with some goats and the Library of Congress and a smart rope.
This suited him. The goats were an appreciative audience for his growing repertoire of rope tricks, and they made excellent targets for the new, wicked noose he had installed at the rope's end. As a bonus, now that he had his big leather boots from Matamoros, Alex no longer fretted much about thorns, spines, stinging nettles, and big slithering venomous rattlesnakes. The main inconvenience of his existence was the three meals a day, when he had to deal face-to-face with the Troupers. Besides, the food was awful.
Being shot at for the cause had very much helped Alex's social position in camp. Not many of the Troupers had actually been shot at under any circumstances. Except for Ellen Mae several times, and Peter once, and Rudy on a couple of occasions in civilian life, and Greg "lots of times." Surviving gunfire was an experience the Troupers valued highly, and being shot at in the actual service of the Troupe itself brought Alex a certain cachet. He'd gotten a few grudging, snotty remarks about his new clothes, but the clothes didn't stay new for long. Alex never changed them, rarely washed, and had stopped shaving. His jeans and embroidered shirt were soon filthy, and the paper sombrero, which never left his head, grew steadily more wadded and hideous. Plus, he grew a patchy blond beard. After that, nobody paid him much attention. He'd gotten his wish, and become a cipher.
As tension mounted in the camp, though, Alex decided that his situation had become solid enough for him to take a few useful steps. He quietly approached Joe Brasseur about his legal and financial situation.
Alex was used to lawyers. He'd grown up in the company of his father's numerous hired attorneys. Brasseur was a bent attorney-that odd and highly exceptional kind of lawyer who wasn't personally well-to-do. Alex strongly suspected that Brasseur had been on the wrong side of politics during the State of Emergency.
Most people had gotten over that period of history and managed to or et the peculiar way they'd been behaving at the time, but Joe Brasseur, like other Troupers, was pretty clearly not most people.
Alex knew that it was useless talking to lawyers unless you were willing to tell them a lot of embarrassing things. He felt pretty sure that Brasseur was not a narc or some cop's little finger, so he told Brasseur in detail about his financial arrangements with the clinica in Nuevo Laredo.
Most people went through life without ever using a private currency. Most~ people were, of course, poor. They didn't have enough wealth to buy into the private-money system, or enough contacts or market smarts to use private currencies effectively. Except, of course, during the State of Emergency, when every American, rich and poor alike, had been forced to use a private currency because the Regime had privatized the U.S. dollar.
Alex wasn't exactly sure how "currency privatization" had been accomplished, back at the time. He was similarly vague about the Regime's massive "data nationalizations.~~ Joe Brasseur, however, seemed to have an excellent grasp of these principles. Brasseur was in charge of the Troupe's financial books, and they were a rat nest of private currencies.
Alex was well-to-do, and he had some unlikely friends, so he had the basics down pretty well. It all had to do with unbreakable encryption, digital authentication, anonymous remailing, and network untraceability. These were all computer networking techniques that had once been considered very odd and naughty. They were also so elementary to do, that once they were in place, they couldn't be stopped without tearing the whole Net down.
Of course, once these techniques were in place, they conclusively destroyed the ability of governments to control the flow of electronic funds, anywhere, anytime, for any purpose. As it happened, this process had pretty much destroyed any human control at all over the modern electronic economy. By the time people figured out that raging nonlinear anarchy was not exactly to the advantage of anyone concerned, the process was simply too far gone to stop. All workable standards of wealth had vaporized, digitized, and vanished into a nonstop hurricane of electronic thin air. Even physically tearing up the fiber optics couldn't stop it; governments that tried to just found that the whole encryption mess oozed swiftly into voice mail and even fax machines.
One major upshot of the Regime's privatization of the currency was that large amounts of black-market wealth bad suddenly surfaced. This had been part of the plan, apparently-that even though the government was sabotaging its own ability to successfully impose any income tax, the government would catch up on the other end, by imposing punitive taxes on previously hidden black-market transactions.
They'd swiftly discovered, however, that the scale of black money was titanic. The black-market wealth in tax evasion, kickbacks, official corruption, theft, embezzlement, arms, drugs, prostitution, barter, and off-the-books moonlighting was far huger than any conventional economist had ever imagined. The global ocean of black money was so vast in scope that it was instantly, crushingly obvious that the standard doctrines of conventional finance had no workable contact with reality. Economists who'd thought they understood the basic nature of modern finance had been living in a dogmatic dreamland as irrelevant as Marxism. After that terrible revelation, there'd been savage runs on most national currencies and the stock markets had collapsed.
As the Emergency had deepened, the panicking Regime had rammed its data nationalizations through Congress, and with that convulsive effort, the very nature of money and information had both mutated beyond any repair.
The resultant swirling chaos had become the bedrock of Alex's everyday notions of modem normality.
Alex did not find it surprising that people like the Chinese Triads and the Corsican Black Hand were electronically minting their own cash. He simply accepted it: electronic, private cash, unbacked by any government, untraceable, completely anonymous, global in reach, lightninglike in speed, ubiquitous, fungible, and usually highly volatile. Of course, such funds didn't boldly say "Sicilian Mafia" right on the transaction screen; they usually had some stuffy official-sounding alias such as "Banco Ambrosiano ATM Euro-DigiLira," but the private currency speculators would usually have a pretty good guess as to the solvency of the issuers.
Quite often these private currencies would collapse, though sheer greed, mismanagement, or just bad luck in the market. But the usual carnivorous free-enterprise market forces had jolted some kind of rough order into the mess. Nowadays, for a lot of people, private currencies were just the way money was.
When you used private, digital cash, even the people who sold you their money didn't know who you were. Quite likely you had no real idea who they were, either, other than their rates, their market recognition, and their performance history. You had no identity other than your unbreakably encrypted public key word. You could still use government currencies if you really wanted to, and most people did, for the sake of simplicity or though lack of alternatives. Most people had no choke in the matter, because most people in the world were poor.
Unfortunately, thanks to their catastrophic loss of control over basic economics, so were most governments. Government-issued currencies were scarcely more stable than the private kind. Governments, even the governments of powerful advanced countries, had already lost control of their currencies to the roiling floodwaters of currency trading as early as the 1990s. That was the main reason why the Regime had given up backing U.S. dollars in the first place.
Joe Brasseur's private-currency node in the Troupe's system was not untypical in the trade: it was the digital equivalent of an entire twentieth-century banking conglomerate, boiled down to a few sectors on a hard disk.
In order to gain admittance to the dinica in Nuevo Laredo, Alex had left a hefty wad of private currency under a secured lien by a third party. He hadn't gotten the money back, had no real idea how to get his money back, but he thought that maybe Brasseur would be the logical choice to find that money and fetch it out somehow. If so, then the Troupe was welcome to use it.
Brasseur took in Alex's confession with a calm, priest-like air, gazing solemnly at him over the rims of his glasses, and then Brasseur had nodded and set to work, and Alex bad never heard another word about the subject. Except that thin s perked up markedly for the Troupe after a week and a ha ~f.A bunch of former Troupers, Fred and José and Maureen and Palaniappan and Kenny, showed up in a convoy with a lot of canned food and a beer keg. The command yurt got a new carpet. A new improved air condenser arrived that weighed less than the old one, used less energy, and supplied more water. There was a party, and everyone's mood improved for a few days.
Nobody thanked Alex for this. Just as well, Alex thought, that there was no public fuss made about himself or his role. Those who needed to know were going to know. Alex had already concluded that almost everything that really mattered in Troupe life took place way under the surface. It was a lot like life in a barracks, or a dorm, or a Th ward.
Some Troupers, such as Mukahey, Brasseur, and Carol and Greg, knew pretty much everything, pretty much immediately. The second rank were those who were gonna catch on pretty fast on their own, like Ellen Mae and Rudy Martinez and Mickey Kiehl. Then there were those who were gonna get told the official version by somebody else, like Peter and Rick and Martha and Sam. And certain beloved characters were gonna be gently protected from the full awful truth for their own good, like Buzzard and Joanne and Jeff and, in her own unique way, Juanita.
The very last and lowest rank were the passing wannabes, and city boy/girlfriends, and ex-husbands/ex-wives, and hangers-on and netfriends and himself, Alex Unger, and the various other non-Troupe subhumans. And that was the way it was always gonna be with the Storm Troupe, until they all turned on each other, or they were all shot by bandits or hit by lightning, or until they found the F-6.
Alex didn't know if he believed in the F-6. But he believed that the Troupe believed. With every day that passed, they were getting more keyed up to plunge headlong into something truly dreadful. And the bottom line was that he didn't want to leave-not until he knew what they would find and what it would do to them.
On May 31, as if to change their luck, Mukahey deliberately moved camp twenty kilometers northwest, into Hall County. The burst of action seemed to help morale some.
On June 2, heavy weather hit again. The luck of the assignment-as if there were any "luck" involved where Mukahey's orders were concerned-had Alex confined to the camp as "support crew." Alex figured this was just as well. Let the others have a chance to blow off steam.
And then there was another, and far more serious, matter: his cough was back. It had started really small at first, just a little throat-clearing rasp, but Alex had known for some time that the dosage of blue goo was losing its charm. His lungs no longer felt like sweet slick paper dipped in oil. Slowly but with terrible sureness, they were starting to feel a hell of a lot more like his own lungs. He'd worn the breathing mask faithfully, until his tanned face had a white triangular muzzle of untanned skin just like a raccoon's, but that wasn't enough. He was going to have to take steps.
The June 2 pursuit was all-out. They were up before dawn, and Mulcahey himself went into the field. The only people left in camp were Joe Brasseur doing navigation, Buzzard as network coord, and Sam Moncrieff as nowcaster. And, of course, Alex, nominally in charge of the support jeeps.
This was not a very taxing job. The support jeeps were unmanned, and were supposed to carry supplies into the field through global positioning. If called upon, Alex was supposed to instantly load the jeeps with spare whatchamacallits and then route them long-distance to a rendezvous.
Alex assumed that this assignment was a subtle reference on Mulcahey's part to Alex's covert use of a dope mule. Kind of a deliberate shoulder tap there on the part of the Troupe jefe. To Alex's deep relief, Mulcahey almost never took any notice of Alex, favorable or unfavorable. He'd never called Alex in for one of those head-to-head encounter sessions that seemed to leave the other Troupers so bent out of shape. But every once in a while there would be these ambiguous little jabs. Intended, Alex figured, to intimidate him, to assure him that Mulcahey did have an eye on him, so he wouldn't try anything really stupid.
When you came right down to it, this tactic worked pretty well.
In reality, Alex's support job consisted mostly of fetching venison chili for Sam, Joe, and Buzzard, since the men were leashed to their machinery. The goats were taken care of: the Troupe had stretched a line of wire around the perimeter posts and had corralled the goats inside the camp. The goats were cropping all the grass in camp, and crapping all over the ground as well, but they'd be breaking camp tomorrow and leaving, so it didn't matter much.
Sam Moncrieff was thrilled with his nowcaster status. He'd been Mulcahey's star grad student before Mukahey had left academia (in a shambles), and Sam took the exalted central role of Troupe nowcaster with complete and utter seriousness. He was stomping around blindly in the command yurt with his head in a virching helmet, burrowing through scientific visualizations like some kind of data-gloved gopher.
Joe Brasseur had his own navigation setup in the command yurt's left-hand annex.
So Alex found himself alone in the right-hand annex, the sysadmin station, with Buzzard.
Buzzard was in a peculiar mood.
"I hate what Janey has done to this system, dude," Buzzard opined, clumsily rolling a marijuana cigarette. "It don't crash as much now, and Christ knows it looks a lot prettier, but it's a real mud bath to run."
Alex examined the gndwork of the display for his support jeeps. It always amazed him how many forgotten little ghost towns there were, out in West Texas. "I guess you'd rather be out virching your 'thopters."
"Aw, you can't chase 'em all," Buzzard said tolerantly. "Let Kiehl get his chance out in the field, this candy-ass sysadmin desk work would drive anybody nuts." He lit his joint with a Mexican cigarette lighter and inhaled. "Want some?" he squeaked.
"No thanks."
"When the cat's away, dude." Buzzard shrugged. "Jerry would get on my case about this, but I tell ya, you spend fourteen straight hours shuffling icons, and it downright helps to be ripped to the tits."
Alex watched as Buzzard plunged into his thicket of screens and menus. Alex guessed that he was tweaking the flow of data from distant Troupe weather instruments, but as far as Alex knew, Buzzard might as well have been bobbing for digital apples.
Buzzard worked a long time, in a glassy-eyed trance of efficiency, stopping twice to decant some dire herbal concoction into a paper cup.
Alex, testing his ingenuity toits limits, managed to pry open one of the Troupe's communication channels on a spare laptop. Rudy and Rick, in the Baker pursuit vehicle somewhere in Cimarron County, Oklahoma, were getting very excited about hail. Not so much the size of it, as the color. The hail was black.
"Black hail," Alex remarked.
"That's nothing," Buzzard said, tugging on the metal lump he wore on a thong around his neck. "Just means there's a little dust in it. It's gettin' real dry up in Colorado. Lotta dust, lotta haze up top... black hail. It can happen."
"Well, I've never seen black hail before," Alex said. "And it sounds like they haven't either."
"I saw a stone fall out of the sky once," Buzzard said. "It hit my fuckin' house."
"Really?"
"Yeah. And this is the one." Buzzard tugged the metal lump, sharply. "The biggest piece of it, anyhow. Came right through the roof of my bedroom. I was ten."
"Your house was hit by a meteor?"
"Cotta happen to somebody," Buzzard said. "Statistics prove that." He paused, stared into the screen in deep abstraction, then looked up. "That's nothin' either. Once I sawa ram of meat."
"Meat fell out of the sky," he said simply. "I saw it with my own two eyes." He sighed. "You don't believe me, do ya, kid? Well, go back in the anomaly records sometime and have a look at the stuff people have seen in the past, falling out of the sky. Amazing stuff! Black bail. Black rain. Red rain. Big rocks. Frogs. Rains of fishes. Snails. Jelly. Red snow, black snow. Chunks of ice have fallen out of the sky as big as fuckin' elephants. Dude, I saw meat fall out of the sky."
"What kind of meat?" Alex asked.
"Shaved meat. No hair on it, or anything. Looked kinda like, I dunno, sliced mushrooms or sliced potatoes or something, except it was red and bloody wet and it had little veins in it. It just kinda fell out of a dark cloudy sky one summer, fallin' kinda slow, like somebody throwing potato chips. A little shower of sliced-up meat. About as wide as, I dunno, a good-sized highway, and about eighty meters long. Enough to fill up a couple of big lawn bags, if you raked it up."
"Did you rake it up?"
"Fuck no, man. We were scared to death."
"There were other people seeing this?" Alex said, surprised. "Witnesses?"
"Hell yes! Me, my dad, my cousin Elvin, and my cousin Elvin's probation officer. We were all scared to death." Buzzard's eyes were dilated and shiny. "That was during the State of Emergency.... Most of middle America was one big dust bowl. I was a teenage kid in a suburb in Kentucky, and the sky would get black at noon, and you'd get a layer of airborne Iowa or Nebraska or some shit, onto your doors and windows, dry brown dirt in layers as thick as your fingers. Heavy weather, man. People thought it was the end of the world."
"I've heard of big dust storms. I've never heard of any shaved meat."
"I dunno, man. I saw it happen. I never forgot it, either. I think my Dad and Elvin managed to forget about it after a couple years, kinda block the memory out, but I sure as hell never did. Sometimes I get the feeling that people must see shit happen like that all the time. But they're always too scared to report it to anyone else. People don't like to look like they're .........nd you sure didn't want to do it during the State of Emergency, they were doing that 'demographic relocation' shit at the time, and people were really scared they were gonna end up in weather camps. It was mega-heavy, mega-bad. .
Buzzard glanced down at his screen. What the hell is this?" He dug down in the maze of screens and came up with a flashing security alert. "Hell, we got some kind of ground car outside the camp! Dude, run outside and see!"
Alex didn't run, but he left the yurt at a brisk walk and looked. There was an almost silent, spanking-new civilian truck outside the camp, a big cream-colored four-wheeler with tinted windows and an air-conditioned camper. The truck stopped well outside the perimeter in a spew of dust, exciting the goats, who bounded off timidly among the tepees.
Alex ducked back inside the command yurt. "Somebody's here, man! Some kind of fancy truck with a big aerial."
"Hell!" Buzzard looked annoyed. "Storm spotters, wannabes. You go tell 'em to get lost, man, tell 'em there's nothing going on here. If you need any help, yell, and me and Joe and Sam will back you up."
"Okay," Alex said. "I get it. No problem."
He walked deliberately into the open outside the yurt, waved his paper hat at the truck, and waited for them to open fire on him.
The strangers didn't shoot. Two men clñnbed peaceably out of their nice truck and stood there. His heart rate slowed. Life would go on.
Alex began to feel almost fond of the two men. It seemed very decent of them to be so obligingly normal, to just be a couple of guys in a truck, instead of nightmarish maniac structure-hit bandits randomly shooting up the camp while everyone else was in Oklahoma. Alex put his hat back on and strolled toward the strangers, slowly and with his hands in plain sight. He deliberately hopped the wire around the perimeter posts.
As he walked slowly closer he recognized one of the men. It was the black Ranger bush tracker, one member of the Ranger posse who'd visited camp a couple weeks earlier. The Ranger was in civilian gear, ragged jean cutoffs and a beat-to-shit yellow T-shirt with the legend NAVAJO NA11ON RODEO on it. No rifle this time, apparently.
To Alex's considerable surprise, he recognized the other man as well.
The circumstances came back at him with a sharp chemical rush.
He'd been in a backroom of the Gato Negro in Monterrey, with four of his dope-vaquero acquaintances. They were on a field trip from Matamoros, where Alex had been undergoing treatment at the time. The vaqueros were killing time waiting for their man from Monterrey to show with some of the medically necessary. So they were doing lines of cocaine off the marble café table, cocaine cut with one of Don Aldo's home-brewed memory stimulants, one of those blazingly effective smart-drug concoctions that bad so thoroughly fucked the ability of government and business leaders to function in the longer term.
Being dope vaqueros, their idea of a good time was to get really wired on this shit and then play a big-stakes tournament of the Spanish-language version of Trivial Pursuit. Cocaine gave Alex heart fibrillations, and he didn't drink, either, and thanks to enormous gaps in his education and his general life experience, he was dog meat at any kind of Trivial Pursuit, much less a Mexican version. But Don Aldo had favored him with a thumbnail's worth of the smart drug, and Alex hadn't quite dared to spurn the good Don's hospitality. He snorted it up and began placing little side bets on the progress of the game. Alex was a very good loser. It was the key to his popularity in these circles.
After about twenty minutes, everything in the Gato Negro had started to take on that false but radiant sense of deep meaning that always accompanied chemical memory enhancement, and then these other guys had come in. Three of them, very well dressed. They breezed past the muscle guy at the door, without being patted down for weapons. And this caused Don Aldo, and Juan, and Paco, and Snoopy immediate concern, for Monterrey was not their turf, and their own ceramic Saturday-night specials were in the possession of the house.
The three strangers had regally ignored the vaqueros and had sat down at the room's far corner, and had ordered café con leche and immediately plunged into low, intense conversation.
Don Aldo had beckoned a waiter over with a brisk gesture of somebody else's hot-wired platinum debit card, and had a few words with the waiter, in a border Spanish so twisted with criminal argot that even Alex, something of a connoisseur in these matters, couldn't follow it. And then Don Aldo smiled broadly, and he tipped the waiter. Because one of the three strangers was the police commissioner for the state of Sinaloa. And it was none of their business who El General's two good friends were.
Except that one of El General's friends was the very gentleman who had just stepped out of the helicopter. He'd been of no special relevance to Alex at the time, but thanks to that snort of mnemonics, the guy's face and mannerisms had been irrevocably punch-pressed on the surface of Alex's brain. At the very sight of him, that haircut, the sunglasses, the neatly cut safari jacket, Alex had flasbbacked with such intensity that he could actually taste the memory dust on the back of his throat.
"~Qué pasa?" he said.
"How do you do?" said the stranger politely. "I'm Leo Mulcahey, and this is my traveling companion, Mr. Smithers."
"How do you do, Mr. Smithers?" said Alex, sliding instinctively into parody. "How pleasant to see you again."
"Yo," grunted Smithers.
"And you are?" said Mukahey.
Alex looked up at the thin rose-quartz lenses of Mulcahey's shades, and felt instantly, with deep and total conviction, that this encounter was not in the best interests of himself or his friends. The tall, charming, and distinguished Leo Mulcahey was exuding a bone-chilling reek of narc atmosphere. Rangers were bad, bad enough anyway, but the well-groomed spook friend of El General was not the sort of person who should ever be in the camp of the Storm Troupe, for any reason, under any circumstances.
"Mr. Leo Mukahey," Alex said. "Any relation?"
"I'm Jerry's big brother," said Leo Mulcahey, with a gentle smile.
"Must feel pretty special to have a little brother who could break your back like a twig."
Mulcahey twitched. Not a big reaction, but a definite startled twitch. "Is Jerry here? May I speak to Jerry?"
"Sorry to tell you that Jerry's out of camp, he's off doing storm pursuit."
"It was my understanding that Jerry always coordinated the pursuits. That he stayed in camp as the group's... I forget the term."
"Nowcaster. Yeah, that's the usual, all right, but right now Jerry's off chasing spikes somewhere in Oklahoma, so under the circumstances I'm afraid I can't allow you into the camp."
"I see," said Leo.
"What the hick you talkin' about?" said Smithers suddenly. "Kid, we were just in your camp three weeks ago and I been lookin' forward to more o' that jerky."
"No problema," Alex said. "Give me some positioning coords and I'll route you all the jerky you want. Today. No charge."
"Is there someone else we can talk to?" Leo said.
"No," Alex said. Brasseur would temporize. Buzzard would knuckle under. Sam Moncrieff would do whatever seemed best. "No, there isn't."
"Kid, don't be this way," said Smithers. "I'm the heat!"
"You're the heat when you're running with Rangers. You're not the heat when you're running with this guy. If you're cops, show me some ID and a warrant."
"I'm not a police officer, for heaven's sake," Leo said, chidingly. "I happen to be a developmental, economist."
Smithers, surprised, looked at Leo in frank disbelief, then back at Alex again. "Kid, you got some cojones pullin' that city-boy crap out here. Where's your goddamn ID?"
Alex began to sweat. The fear only made him angry. "Look, Smithers, or whatever the hell your real name is, I thought you were a heavier guy than this. How come you're shaking me down for this fucking narc? This guy's not even a cop! How much is he paying you?"
"That's my name!" objected Smithers, wounded. "Nathan R. Smithers."
"I don't understand why this has become so unpleasant," said Leo, reasonably.
"Maybe you ought to give some thought to the way you treated your good friend the general de polida, back in Sinaloa." It was a shot in the dark, a blindly launched harpoon, but it landed hard. Leo reacted with such a start that even Smithers seemed alarmed.
"Sinaloa," Leo mused, recovering himself. He stared down hard at Alex. He was very tall, and though he didn't have the weightlifter beef of his brother Jerry, he looked, in his own smooth way, like a bad man to cross. "Of course," he concluded suddenly. "You must be Alex. Little Alejandro Unger. My goodness."
"I think you'd better leave," said Alex. "You and your kind aren't wanted here."
"You've been here less than a month, Alejandro! And akeady you're carrying on like Jerry's guard dog! It's amazing the loyalty that man inspires."
"Have it your way, Leo," Alex said. "I'll let you in the camp when Jerry says you can come in, how about that?" He suddenly sensed weakness, and pounced. "How about you wait here while I call Jerry up? I can contact Jerry out in the field, easy enough. Let's see what Jerry says about you.
"I have a counterproposal," Leo said. "Why don't I assume that you have no authority whatever? That you're simply inventing all this on the fly, through some silly grudge all your own. That you're an unbalanced, sick, spoiled little rich-boy punk, who's in way over his head, and that we can simply walk right past you."
"You'll have to knock me down first."
"That doesn't look difficult, Alex. You're still emaciated from that black-market shooting parlor in Nuevo Laredo. You look quite ill."
"You're gonna look quite dead, Leo, when the guy who put that laser dot on your forehead pulls the trigger and your brains fly Out."
Leo turned slowly to Smithers. "Mr. Smithers. Do tell. Do i in fact have a laser rifle sighted on my person?"
Smithers shook his head. "Not that I can see. Kid, it is really fuckin' stupid to say something like that to a guy like me."
Alex took his sunglasses off, and then his hat. "Look at me," he told Smithers. "Do I look afraid of you? You think I'm impressed ?~" He turned to Leo. "How about you, Leo? Do I look like I care whether we get in a fistfight right now, and you end up shot? You really wanna hit me, and risk catching a very real bullet, just so you can swan around in some empty paper tents and pull a fast one on your brother when he comes back-probably with all his friends?"
"No," said Leo, decisively. "There's no need at all for any of this foolishness. We don't want Juanita upset, do we? Janey?"
"You stay the hell away from Jane," Alex said, in throttled fury. "Letting that one slip was a real blunder! Get away from me and my sister, and stay away from us, you spook narc son of a bitch. Get out of here now, before you lose it and try something even stupider than showing up here in the first place."
"This is completely pointless," Leo said. "I don't see what you think you've accomplished with this ridiculous junkie's bravado. We can simply return at some later time, when there are some sane people here."
Alex nodded and crossed his arms. "Okay. Yeah. It's pointless. Come back next Christmas, big brother. In the meantime, go away. Now."
Leo and Smithers exchanged glances. Leo shrugged eloquently, his shoulders rising beneath the padding of his spanking-new safari jacket.
Without haste, the two men climbed into the truck. Smithers started the machine, and it turned and left. As it vanished Alex saw Leo lifting a videocam to his face, methodically scanning the camp.
Alex walked slowly back to the command yurt. Buzzard was waiting at the door flap. Sam was still in his nowcaster helmet. There was no sign at all of Joe Brasseur.
"Who were those guys?" Buzzard said.
Alex shrugged. "No problem. I took care of 'em. A coupla wannabes."