"Heavy Weather" - читать интересную книгу автора (Sterling Bruce)

CHAPTER 6

"I'm pulling, I'm pulling," Alex told her. "My people in Matamoros have got that shipment ready, they're just waiting for us to give them the coordinates."

"Standard satellite global-position coordinates?"

"That's what they use, all right," he said. "Just like the Troupe, like the army, just like everybody."

"I can give you those anytime, it's no big secret where we're pitching camp."

"That's good. I'll try and phone 'em in, if I can still get that encrypted line."

'No problema," Carol said, bored. She watched as#8226; Alex hefted the cable, then slid the whole coil of it over his right shoulder. It rested there easily. The cable weighed only a couple of kilos, but it felt bizarrely serpentine and supple, somehow dry and greasy at the same time. It was as thick as his little finger, and maybe twenty meters long. "What is this thing exactly?"

"Smart rope."

"What's smart about it?"

"Well, there's this chip in the battery box that understands knot topology. You know what topology is?"

"It's a kind of math about deforming the geometry of space."

"Great."

"Anyhow, that rope is braided from a lot of different cabling. Got sensor cable, power cable, and this is the tricky part, electric reactive fiber. Okay? It'll stretch, it'll contract-hard and fast-it can bend and wiggle anywhere along the length. The damn thing can tie itself in knots."

"Like the smart cloth in kites," Alex said, "except it's a line, not a sheet."

"That's right."

"Why'd you try to spook me with that topology crap, then? You just use the damned glove, right?"

"Right," she said. "Except technically, you won't understand what you're actually doing."

"So what? Who cares?"

Carol sighed. "Look, just take the damn thing out of here, and try not to hurt yourself. I don't wanna see that rope again, okay? I thought it was really cool hardware when I first heard about it, and I spent a lot of Janey's money to buy it. I was sure there'd be a million uses for smart rope around a camp, and hell, there are a million uses-so many goddamn uses that nobody ever uses it! Nobody ever remembers that it's around! Nobody's ever liked it! It gives everybody the creeps."

"Okay!" said Alex cheerfully. This last little speech had sent his morale soaring. He liked the smart rope already. He was glad to have it. He was kinda sorry he didn't have two of them. "I'll take real good care of it. Don't forget about the phone. Hasta Ia uista."

Alex left the tent and shuffled out of camp again, back to the root from hell. He scraped and chipped and dug at the root for a while, until he was Out of breath again. Then he stretched the rope out to its full twenty-pace length across the weedy earth. He turned the power switch on.

The rope lay there, totally inert. The little readout screen suggested: INPUT PARAMETERS FOR HYPERBOLIC CURVATURE.

He tried on the power glove. It had the usual knuckle sensors along the back and a thousand little beaded pressure cells across the palms and the fingers. It was a right-hand glove, and the fit was pretty good. The fingertips were free, and the glove slid very nicely along the rope, a " mix of grip and slickness.

Alex punched a few numbers at random into the readout box, then flopped the rope around with the glove. Nothing much happened. He put the rope aside and wore the glove to dig with the pick. The glove had a good grip and helped quite a bit with the incipient blisters.

Along about sundown, Peter and Rick showed up. They were wearing paper gear fresh off the roll, and they'd been bathed and their hair was combed.

"You'd better come on in, Medicine Boy," said Peter. "They're wasbin' the clothes, everybody's takin' a bath, we're all gonna eat pretty soon."

"I'm still busy," Alex said.

Rick laughed. "Busy with what?"

"Pretty big job," Alex said. "A buffalo gourd. Ellen Mae said the root weighs thirty kilos."

"You can't have a root that weighs thirty kilos, man," said Rick. "Look, trees don't have roots that weigh thirty kilos."

"Where's the plant?" Peter said.

Alex pointed to the severed gourd vine, which he had cast aside. The vine had shriveled badly in the sunlight.

"Hell," said Rick, contemptuous. "Look, it's a matter of simple physics. It takes a lot of energy to grow a root- starches and cellulose and stuff. Look at the photosynthetic area on those vine leaves. You can't grow something that weighs thirty kilos off a plant with no more solar-collecting area than that!"

Peter stared into the shallow hole and laughed. "Ellen Mae sent you on a snipe hunt, dude. She's had you diggin' all day for nothin'. Man, that's cold."

"Well, he hasn't been digging very hard," Rick judged, kicking the small heap of calichelike soil with the toe of his boot. "I've seen a prairie dog turn more earth than this."

"What's with the rope?" Peter said.

"I thought it might help me haul the root out," Alex lied glibly. "I can't even lift thirty kilos."

Peter laughed again. "This is pathetic! Look, we're outta here, right after sundown. You better get back to camp and figure out how you're gonna hitch a ride."

"How are you riding?" Alex asked.

"Me?" Peter said. "I'm riding the ultralight! I'm ridin' escort duty."

"Me too," Rick said. "With a rifle. There are bandits out on these highways, sometimes. Structure-hit people, bushwhackers. Most folks in a convoy like ours, with all this fine equipment, they might run a pretty big risk. But not the Troupe. The Troupe's got air support!"

"You're not gonna find any structure-hit creeps with any air support," Peter said.

"Exactly," Rick said. "You're flying up there in the dark, no lights, silent, with the infrared helmet and a laser-sighted silent rifle-if it should ever come to that, you are death from above."

"One shot, one kill, no exceptions," said Peter. "Panoptic battlefield surveillance," said Rick.

"Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee."

"Aerial counterinsurgency-the only way to travel."

Alex blinked. "I wanna do that."

"Sure," said Peter.

"Trade you my root for it, Peter." Peter laughed. "There's no such thing, man." "Wanna bet? C'mon, bet me."

Peter glanced into the hole. "Bet what? There's nothing in there, man. Nothing but that big shelf of rock."

"That shelf of rock is the root," Alex said. "Not thirty kilos, either. I figure it's gotta weigh at least eighty. That sorry little vine has gotta be two hundred years old."

Rick stared into the hole, then spat on his hands and hefted the pick. "He's gotcha there, Pete. He's right, you're wrong, he's flyin' escort, and you're dog meat audi yoti~t'e ~ riding the bus with Janey." He barked with iaugh~ asd~ swung the pick down with a crunch.

JANE's EYES STILL stung from the antiseptic. The baths always hurt. She had refused to take antiseptic baths at first, until she'd glimpsed the cratered scars on Joanne Lessard's shoulders. Joanne was fair-skinned and dainty, and the staph boils that had hit the Troupe had come close to killing her. Bombay Staph flb was wicked as hell; it just laughed aloud at broad-spectrum antibiotics. Modern strains of staphylococcus were splendidly adapted for survival on the earth's broadest, widest, richest modern environment. The world's vast acreage of living human skin.

Jane's eyes stung, and her crotch itched, but at least her was clean, and she smelled good. She'd even come to enjoy the sensation of fresh clean paper over damp naked the closest one came in Troupe life to padding around terry cloth with your hair in a towel. Outside the cornland yurt, the camp rang with bestial howls as Ed Dunneecke poured another big kettleful of scalding water into fabric tub. Hot water felt so lovely-at least till the opened and Ed's sheep dip started to bite.

Shutting down the Troupe's systems was delicate work. Even the minor systems, for instance, the little telephone switches, had a million or more lines of antique corporate freeware. The software had been created by vast teams of twentieth-century software engineers, hired labor for extinct telephone empires like ATamp;T and SPRINT. It was freeware because it was old, and because everybody who'd ever made it was either dead now or in other work. Those armies of telephone engineers were now as scattered and extinct as the Soviet Red Army.

Those armies of engineers had basically been automated out of existence, replaced by higher-and-higher-level expert systems, that did error checks, bug hunts, resets, fault recoveries. Now a single individual could use the technology-any individual with a power plug and a desk. The sweat and talent of tens of thousands of clever people had vanished into a box you could hold in your hand and buy in a flea market.

The Troupe's switching stations were cheap-ass little Malaysian-made boxes of recycled barf-colored plastic. They cost about as much as a pair of good shoes.

There wasn't a single human being left in the world who fully understood what was going on inside those little boxes. Actually, no single human being in the world had ever understood an intellectual structure of that complexity. Any box running a million lines of code was far beyond the direct comprehension of any human brain. And it was simply impossible to watch those modern screamer-chips grind that old code, on any intimate line-by-line basis. It was like trying to listen in on every conversation in a cocktail party bigger than Manhattan.

As a single human individual, you could only interface with that code on a very remote and abstract level-you had to negotiate with the code, gently, politely, and patiently, the way you might have dealt with a twentieth-century phone company. You owned a twentieth-century phone company-it was all inside the box now.

As you climbed higher and higher up the stacks of in~ terface, away from the slippery bedrock of the hardware grinding the ones and zeros, it was like walking on stilts.

And then, stilts for your stilts, and stilts for your stilts for your stilts. You could plug a jack in the back of the box and run like the wind of the wind. Until something crashed somewhere, that the system's system's system couldn't diagnose and figure out and override. Then you threw the little box away and plugged in another one.

The Troupe's system was temperamental. To say the least. For instance, the order in which you detached the subsystems mattered a lot. There was no easy or direct explanation as to why that should matter, but it mattered plenty.

Jane kept careful professional track of the system's in-congruities, its wealth of senseless high-level knots and kinks and cramps. She kept her notes with pencil and paper, in a little looseleaf leather notebook she'd had since college. Mickey the sysadmin and Rick the code grinder had given Jane wary, weary looks when she'd first started working seriously on the Troupe's system, but she'd more proved her worth since then. -She'd resolved screwups, seizures, and blockages that had had Mickey cursing wildly and Rick so mired in code that he staggered around camp like a blacked-out drunk.

The difference between hacking code and hacking in-was like the difference between a soldier and a diplomat. Certain crises would only yield to a political solution.

Jane kept her notebook inside a plastic case, glued to underside of Jerry's connectionist simulator. This was safest storage place in camp, because Jerry's simulator ,s the Troupe's most valued machine. The simulator was only box in the crowd of them that actually impressed.

The U.S. government had gone nuts over climate regulators during the State of Emergency, pouring money into the global climate modeling at a frantic rate that im;ed even the Pentagon. Boxes like Jerry's were Brob -Jerry's lone system had more raw computational power than the entire planet had possessed in 1995.

Officially, Jerry's system was "on loan" from the SESCollaboratory, a research net in which Jerry had fairly good standing, but nobody was going to come and repossess it. No~y but the Troupe gave a damn about Jerry's box, really. It was stone obvious now that the problems of climate modeling simply weren't going to yield to raw computational power. Power wasn't the bottleneck at all; the real bottleneck was in the approaches, the approximations, the concepts, and the code.

Jane opened her favorite laptop, dragged the system monitor onto it off Mickey's sysadmin machine, and checked to see that all the instrumentation was safely down. Peter, Greg, and Martha had been on the job: all the towers were off-line and down now, except for the telecom tower. They always left the telecom for last. It made more sense, really, to take down the security system last, but the perimeter posts were pig stupid and paranoid little entities that reacted to any sudden loss of packets as prima facie evidence of enemy sabotage. Unless they were petted to sleep first, the posts would whoop like crazy.

An icon appeared on Jane's screen. An incoming phone call-to her own number. Surprised, she took the call.

A postcard-sized video inclusion appeared in the upper right-hand corner of her laptop. It was a stranger: clean shaven, sandy-haired, distinguished looking, close to forty maybe. Ruggedly handsome, in a funny, well-groomed sort of way. Oddly familiar looking. He wore a shirt, jacket, and tie.

"Hello?" the stranger said. "Is this Juanita?"

"Yes?"

"Good," the stranger said, smiling and glancing down at his desk. "I didn't think this would quite work." lie seemed to be in a hotel lobby somewhere, or maybe a very nicely furnished office. Jane could see a lithograph behind his head and a spray of leaves from an exotic potted plant.

The stranger looked up from his console. "I'm not getting any video off my side, should I shut down my video feed?"

"Sorry," Jane said, leaning forward to speak into the laptop's little inset mike. "I'm getting this off a laptop, I've got no camera here."

"Sorry to hear that," the stranger said, adjusting his tie.

"Y'know, Juanita, I've never actually seen you. I was quite looking forward to it."

The stranger had Jerry's ears on the sides of his head. Jane could scarcely have been more surprised if he'd had Jerry's ears on a string around his neck. But then the bump of shock passed, and Jane felt a little cold thrill of recognition. She smiled shyly at the laptop, even though he couldn't see her. "This is Leo, isn't it?"

"Right," Leo Mulcahey said, with a gentle smile and a wink. "Can we talk?"

Jane glanced around the command yurt. Mickey and Rick were both in the bath line. They usually gave her a while to work alone before they'd show up to run diagnostics and start lugging machines to the trucks.

"Yeah," she said. "I guess so. For a little while." It was the first time she had seen Jerry's brother. Leo looked older than Jerry, his cheeks thinner and a little lined, and she was shocked at how good-looking he was. His head had just the shape of Jerry's head, but his haircut was lovely. Jane had been cutting Jerry's hair herself, but she could see now that as a hair designer, she was dog meat.

"I understand you've been talking with Mom," Leo said.

Jane nodded silently, but Leo of course couldn't see her. "Yes I have," she blurted.

"I happen to be in the States again, at the moment. Mom's been filling me in on Jerry's activities."

"I didn't mean any harm by it," Jane said. "Jerry hardly ever calls your mother, but he doesn't mind if I do it... . Sorry if that seemed intrusive on my part."

"Oh, Mom thinks the world of you, Juanita," said Leo, smiling. "Y'know, Mom and I have never seen Jerry carry on in quite this way before. I'm convinced you must be someone very special."

"Well..." Jane said. "Leo, I just thought of something-I have some photos on disk here, let me see if I can pull them up and feed them to you."

"That would be good." Leo nodded. "Always feels a little odd to speak to a blank screen."

Jane punched up the digital scrapbook. "I wanted to thank you for helping me find my brother... Alejandro."

Leo shrugged. "De nada. I pulled a string for you. Okay, two strings. That's Mexico for you... walls within walls, wheels within wheels... . An interesting place, a fine culture." He looked down again. "Oh yes. That's coming across very well. Nice photo."

"I'm the one in the hat," Jane said. "The other woman's our camp cook."

"I could have guessed that," Leo said, sitting up intently. He seemed genuinely intrigued. "Oh, this one of you and Jerry is very good. I didn't know about the beard. The beard looks good, though."

"He's had the beard ever since I met him," Jane said. "I'm sorry that, um... well, that it's been so long. And that you and he don't get along better."

"A misunderstanding," Leo offered, weighing his words. "You know how Jerry can be... very singleminded, am I right? If you're addressing some issue, and it doesn't quite chime with Jerry's current train of thought.

He's a very bright man of course, but he's a mathematician, not very tolerant of ambiguity." Leo smiled sadly. He has his dignity, Jane thought. That magnetism Jerry has, and that ruthlessness too.

She found him extremely attractive. Alarmingly so. She could easily imagine fucking him. She could hotly imagine flicking both of them. At once.

And when they went for each other's throats she'd be smashed between them like a mouse between two bricks.

She cleared her throat. "Well... is there something I can do for you in particular, Leo?"

"Actually, yes," Leo said. "By the way, you don't mind if I hard-copy these photos, do you?"

"Oh, go ahead."

"It's about this strange business with the F-6," said Leo as his printer emitted a well-bred hum. "I wonder if you could explain that to me a little more thoroughly."

"Well," Jane said, "the F-6 is a theory Jerry has."

"It sounds a bit alarming, doesn't it? A tornado an order of magnitude larger than any seen before?"

"Well, strictly speaking it wouldn't be a tornado per se -more of a large-scale vortex. Something smaller than a hurricane, but with a different origin and different structure. Different behavior."

"Was I right in hearing that this thing is supposed to be a permanent feature of the atmosphere?"

"No," Jane said. "No. I mean, yes, there is some indication in the models-if you set the parameters just right, there are some, urn, indicators that an F-6 might become a stable configuration under certain circumstances. Look, Leo, we don't emphasize that aspect, okay? The woods are full of nutty amateurs running homemade climate models and declaring all kinds of crazy doomsday crap. It would look really bad if the press started telling everybody that Jerry's forecasting some kind of giant permanent storm over Oklahoma. That's just not responsible behavior from a scientist. Jerry's got problems enough already with the labcoat crowd, without that kind of damage to his credibility.''

"Jerry does think, seriously, that an F-6 will actually occur, though."

"Well, yes. We do think that. The mesoscale convection is shaping up, the Bermuda High, the jet stream... Yeah, we think that if it's gonna happen at all, then this is the season. Probably within the next six weeks."

"A giant, unprecedently large, and violent atmospheric storm. Over the heartland of the United States."

"Yes, that's right. That's it exactly."

Leo was silent, and looked grave and thoughtful.

"Leo, you don't double the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere without some odd things happening."

"I'm used to odd things," Leo said. "I don't believe I'm quite used to this, however."

"Jerry's not alone in this line of thought, you know. He's out on a limb, but he's not way out. There are pale oclimatologists in Europe who think that giant storms were real common during the Eemian Interglacial. There's physical evidence in the fossil record."

"Really."

"There was also a paper out this year saying that the so-called Akkadian volcanism wasn't volcanic at all, that the dust layers, and their three-hundred-year drought, were entirely atmospheric. That was the Akkadian culture in the Tigris and Euphrates."

"I beg your pardon?"

"The Akkadians were the first civilization-2200 B.C., in Mesopotamia? They were the first culture ever, and also the first culture ever destroyed by a sudden climate change."

"Right," Leo said, "I'm certain these matters have been cover our ~fted and crusading popular press. Exhaustively. And to the full satisfaction of the scientific community." He shrugged, elegantly. "I understand that the weather is crazy now, and the weather will be crazy the rest of our lives. What I don't understand is why Jerry is taking you into this."

"Me?" Jane said. "Oh! Well, I hack interface. For the Troupe. And I kinds have to get back to work right now, actually."

"Juanita, you're not taking my point. Suppose this is a really big storm. Suppose that it is a permanent vortex in the atmosphere-as Jerry has said, something like Earth's own version of the Great Red Spot of Jupiter. A permanent planetary sinkhole for excess greenhouse heat, centered somewhere near North Texas. I know that seems like a bizarre supposition, but suppose it's really the truth."

"Yeah? Well, then I'll be there watching it."

"You'll be killed."

"Maybe. Probably. But I'll be there anyway. We'll document it.

"Why?"

"Why? Because we can! Because we know! It's what we do! We'll do it for the sake of the survivors, I suppose." Jane ran her hands through her hair, her face stiff. "Anyway, if the P.6 is really a worst-case F-6, then the survivors are gonna be the unlucky ones."

Leo said nothing. Jane heard an odd rumbling, then realized he was rapidly drumming his fingers on the desktop.

"I have to go now, Leo. There's a lot of work."

"Thank you for being so frank with me, Juanita. I appreciate that."

"My friends call me Janey."

"Oh. Of course. Hasta Ia vista, Janey." Leo hung up. Jane shivered, looked around herself once more.

Rick entered the yurt.

"I've got Med-I mean, I've got Alex riding shotgun in the ultralight tonight," he said. "He said he wanted to go."

Jane stared at him blankly.

Rick smiled at her. "I told you that kid really liked all of this."

ALEX WAS NIGHT-FLYING high over Texas with his head in a helmet and his face wrapped in oxygen. A tiny amber light glowed between his knees, lighting the joystick~ and rolierball. More light leaked from the translucent face shield of the virching helmet, the phantom watery glow of the menu bar falling off his own brow onto the pitch-black wings of the aircraft.

The hot spark of a global surveillance satellite showed at the horizon. Overhead were a million stars, a sliver of moon, a galactic river fog of Milky Way, a curl of high feathery cirrus. The fan behind his back pushed almost silently, merely sipping power, as it kept slow pace with the Troupe's land convoy, far below.

If there was anything more pleasant than this, Alex hadn't yet discovered it.

This time they were letting him actually fly the machine by hand. Buzzard had booted Ultralight Beryl with an obligatory big-dummy's control setting. Any ham-handed lurch at the joystick was instantly dumbed down into a gentle, nonlethal veer or dip.

Flying under these conditions strongly reminded Alex of riding a motorized wheelchair. Those same 'dainty fingertip controls, that same almost silent buzz of engine, and that same sense of sitting, wrapped with cloying security, in the care of a smart machine. Alex direly wanted to try something stupid, but he wasn't about to try anything stupid under these circumstances. He'd wait till he'd won their confidence, till they gave him a lot more initiative and leeway. Then he'd try something stupid.

Rick was in Ultralight Amber, casing the landscape be-hind the Troupe. Rick had his rifle. Just before their launches, Rick had given Alex a hair-raising lecture about the cunning and cruelty of backwoods bandits and the dire necessity for constant alertness while "riding point."

Alex found this pretty hard to swallow-at least as hard as the night's rations had been, a gruesome chop suey of jackrabbit, parched corn, and buffalo-gourd root. It had been a hell of a root, though. It took two men to carry it, and it tasted like a cross between celery and pencil shavings. It was the biggest root the Troupe had ever unearthed.

Alex couldn't help but feel rather proud of this. And riding point for the Troupe beat the hell out of riding one of -the crammed, overloaded buses. But Alex couldn't imagine that riding point was really all that dangerous. After all, the Troupe chase teams drove on the backroads all over West Texas, and they'd never been stopped and robbed.

Granted, most bandits, assuming there were any bandits around, wouldn't want to hassle with Juanita and her combat-retrofitted jumping hell spider. Juanita's pursuit car didn't have any guns, but it sure looked as if it ought to, and it moved like a bat out of hell. But the Aerodrome Truck and the Radar Bus were pretty fat and easy targets, chock-full of valuable equipment, yet nobody had bothered them.

Alex reasoned that if bandits were too timid and out of it to bushwhack a lone bus, there was no way they'd tackle the entire Troupe convoy. The convoy was behind him now, slowly winding its way along the pitch-black road. Two pursuit vehicles, two robot buses hauling trailers, the Radar Bus, the Aerodrome Truck, an old dune buggy, two robot supply jeeps with trailers, three robot pedicab bikes with sidecars, and a small tractor.

Not a headlight in the lot. All moving in darkness, supposedly for greater security. The smart pursuit cars were leading the way, sniffing out the road with microwave radar. Every once in a while Alex would catch a faint glimpse of light through a bus or truck window-somebody's flipped-up laptop screen, where some Trouper was catching up on work or killing time grepping a disk.

The convoy looked rather more interesting when Alex clicked the virching helmet into infrared. Then there were vivid putt-putts of grainy pixeled heat out of the alcohol-fueled buses and the ancient dune buggy. The tractor too. Everything else ran on batteries. There was a faint foggy glow of human body heat out the windows of the buses. It was cold at night in a High Plains spring, and the buses were crowded.

Alex had no gun. He was kind of glad the Troupe hadn't handed out a lot of guns. In his experience, unusual minority social groups with lots of guns tended to get mashed rapidly underfoot by nervous, trigger-happy government SWAT teams. So he had no weapon. He had six dusty, dead-looking emergency flares and a big flashlight.

Rick had also surreptitiously passed him some ibogaine chewing gum for maximum combat alertness. Alex hadn't tried chewing the gum yet. He wasn't sleepy yet. And besides, he didn't much like ibogaine.

His earphones crackled. "Rick here. How ya doin'? Over."

"Fine. Comfy. I reset the seat, over."

"How'd you do that?"

"I got out and stood in the stirrups and pulled the pin."

"You're not supposed to do that."

"Rick, listen. It's just you and me up here. Nobody's listening, nobody cares. I'm not gonna fall out of this thing. I'd have better luck falling out of a grocery cart."

Rick was silent a moment. "Don't he stupid, okay?" He clicked off.

Alex rode on, most of another long hour. It was all right. An hour with oxygen was never boring. He was trying to make the oxygen last, sipping at the tank bit by bit, but he knew the tank would be empty by the time he landed. After that, he was going to have to buy more oxygen somehow.

He was going to have to start buying stuff for the Troupe.

For all their rhetoric, Alex could see that this was the crux of the deal, as far .as he was concerned. The same unspoken bargain went for Juanita too, mostly. These people weren't hanging out with Juanita just because they really liked big chunky-hipped cyber-art-school grads. They liked Juanita because she bought them stuff, and looked after their numerous assorted needs. She was their patroness. And he, Alex, was on track to be next car in the gravy train.

For all that, though, there was the puzzling matter of Jerry Mulcahey. Troupe life all boiled down to Mulcahey in the end, because any Trouper who didn't fear, love, and worship the guy would obviously get their walking papers in short order. Alex still wasn't too sure about Mulcahey's real motives. Mulcahey was a genuinely twisted individual. Alex had been watching Mulcahey closely, and he was pretty sure of two things: (A) Mukahey was genuinely possessed of some kind of genius, and (B) Mulcahey didn't have much idea what the hell money was. When he and Juanita were face-to-face in public, Mulcahey would treat her with odd archaic courtliness: he let her sit down first at the campfire, he'd help her to her feet after, he wouldn't eat until she'd started eating, that sort of thing. Neither of them ever made a big deal of these silent little courtesies, but Mulcahey rarely missed a chance to do them.

And quite often, if some minor Troupe hassle came up, Mulcahey would let Juanita do all the talking for him. She'd get really animated and deeply into the topic, and he'd get really stone-faced and abstract and reserved. It was just as if he was letting her have his emotions for him. And the two of them clearly thrived on this arrangement. Every once in a while he would suddenly finish one of her sentences, and everyone else would flinch.

Mulcahey's weirdest symptoms happened when Juanita wasn't watching him at all. She'd be doing her version of some comely girl-thing, like maybe a big stretch-and-bend-over in her thin paper jumpsuit, Mulcahey would all of a sudden get this very highly flammable expression. Like he was a starving man and she was an expensive cordon bleu dinner and he was really trying to be careful, but it was ali he could do not to rip the tablecloth right off her and eat from the broken china on his hands and knees. The look would pass in a hurry, and Mulcahey would get his usual overcontrolled cigar-store-Indian face, but the look was definitely there all right, and it was not the kind of look that a man could fake.

Alex wasn't sure how all this was going to turn out for Juanita. She'd known this guy for at least a year now, and it was pretty damned odd for a man and woman who'd been lovers that long not to calm down some. Maybe they were calm now. In which case, the beginning must have been something pretty seriously strange.

Alex looked down across the landscape. No sign of the convoy. He'd left the convoy far hehind as he mulled things over. Time to turn around ~nd head back a bit.

As he wheeled the ultralight around, with sluggish machine-assisted caution, he passed the shoulder of ahiil. In the infrared, the highway-it happened to be a paved one-smoldered a bit with trapped day heat, but there was a lot of vivid heat on the far slope of that hill.

Alex stopped his maneuver and decided to check it out.

At first, be thought there was an entire army standing there in the road. At least a hundred people. Then he realized that most of the glowing patches of heat were standing on all fours. They were deer. No, goats.

Somebody had a herd of goats out on the highway.

Alex clicked open the radio channel. "Alex here," he said. "Rick, the road is full of goats, man, over."

"Copy, Alex. You see anybody?"

"Yeah-I think so. Kinda hard to tell from this heights Rick, why would anybody have a herd of goats out on the road in the middle of the night, over?"

"You got me beat, dude."

"Maybe they travel at night for better security, like we do."

"Are they moving?"

"No, man. Just sitting there."

"Those could be pharm goats, and they could be goat rustlers, just about to rendezvous with one of those meat-packing trucks out of the city."

"People do that? Rustle goats?"

"Some people do anything for money, dude." Alex heard Rick loudly smacking his wide-awake gum into the microphone. "Or maybe they're blockin' the road with goats on purpose, and they got an ambush set up in the brush, over."

Alex lifted his faceplate and looked out bare-eyed. Pretty hard to tell in the dark, but it looked like there was some pretty thick mesquite on both sides of the road. Good-sized mesquite, too, a couple of stories tall. You could have hidden a big tribe of Comanches in it.

"Maybe you better come up here, Rick."

"No way, man, you don't want to desert the rear of the convoy in a possible ambush situation."

"But you've got the gun, man."

"I'm not gonna shoot anybody, are you kidding? If these are real bandidos, we're gonna pull the hell back and call the Texas Rangers!"

"Right," Alex said. "'Death from above.' I kinda figured." He laughed.

"Look, Medicine Boy, I'll shoot if I have to. But if we just start blowing people away, out in the middle of nowhere without askin' any questions, then we're the ones who are gonna get stomped by the Rangers."

"Cut your motor and buzz 'em, get a good quiet look."

"Right," Alex said. "I get it."

He took several deep huffs of oxygen. It felt lovely. Then he discovered that the motor would not shut down. He couldn't override the controls. Oh well. It wasn't a loud motor, anyway.

He dropped down a dozen meters over the treetops and crossed the road at an angle, right to left. The goats didn't seem to notice, or care. He did, however, spot the intense infrared glow of some kind of smokeless electric heater at the edge of the mesquite trees. There were people there too-at least half a dozen. Standing up.

He opened the channel. "Alex here. I count about eighty goats and at least six guys standing by the brush. They're awake. I think they're cooking something, over."

"I don't like this, over."

"Me either. Man, you gotta be some kind of hard-ass to steal goats from people who'd raise goats in an awful goddamn place like this." Alex felt surprised at the sudden depth of his own anger. But hell-he himself herded goats. He'd developed a genuine class feeling for goat ranchers.

"Okay." Rick sighed. "Lemme see who's awake in the convoy.~~

Alex circled the herd, slowly. More glowing bipedal figures appeared, this time at the other side of the road.

"Greg says drop a flare and check it out," Rick reported.

"Right," Alex said.

He plucked one of the flares from its plastic clip-on mount on the right-hand strut. The flares were old and dusty and covered with military-issue stenciling in Cyrillic. He hadn't imagined them working too well, but at least they were simplicity itself to use.

He yanked the top off. The flare popped and smoldered and then burst into welding-torch brilliance. Surprised despite himself, Alex dropped it.

The flare tumbled in a neat parabola and landed bouncing on the highway, at the edge of the goat herd, which immediately panicked. The goats didn't get far, though; they were all hobbled.

Sharp bangs came from the edge of the road. Alex blinked, saw several men in big hats and shaggy, fringed clothing.

"Rick," he said, "they're shooting at me."

"What?"

"They've got rifles, man, they're trying to shoot me.

"Get out of there!"

"Right," Alex muttered. He put some effort into gaining height. The ultralight responded with the grace and speed of a sofa lugged up a ffight of stairs. Blinded by the flare down on ground level, they couldn't seem to see him very well. Their shooting was ragged and they were using old-fashioned, loud, banging, chemically propelled bullets. That wouldn't matter, though, if they kept shooting.

Alex had a sudden deep conviction that he was about to be shot. Death was near. He had a rush of terror so intense that he actually felt the bullet strike him. It was going to hit him just above the hipbone and pass through his guts like a red-hot burning catheter and leave him dying in his harness dripping blood and spew. He would bleed to death in midair in the grip of a smart machine. The Troupe would call the machine in to land, and they would find him still strapped in his, seat, cold and gray and bloody and dead.

Knowing with irrational conviction that his life was over, Alex felt a dizzy spasm of terrible satisfaction. Shot dead by men with rifles. It was so much better than the way he'd always known he would die. He was gonna die like a normal person, as if his life had meant something and there had been some real alternative to dying. He was going to die like a Trouper, and anybody who learned about his death would surely think he'd died that way on purpose. Like he'd died for their Work.

For an insane moment Alex actually did believe in the Work, with his whole heart. Everything in his life had led up to this moment. Now he was going to be killed, and it was all fated, and had all been meant this way from the beginning.

But the men with guns kept missing him. And after a while the firing stopped. And then a crouching man in the shaggy clothes ran out rapidly to the burning flare in the road, and he stomped it into embers.

Alex realized that Rick had been shouting scratchily in his ears for some time.

"I'm okay!" Alex said. "Sorry."

"Where are you?"

"Ummm... between them and the convoy. Up pretty high. I think they're herding the goats off the road now. Hard to tell . .

"You're not hurt? How about the aircraft?"

Alex looked around himself. The ultralight was entirely invisible. He pulled the flashlight from its holster and waved it over the wings, the bow, the propeller housing.

"Nothing," he said, putting the light away. "No damage, they missed me by ten kilometers, they never even knew where I was." Alex laughed shrilly, coughed, cleared his throat. "Goddamn, that was great!"

"We're gonna pull back now, man. There's another route... come back to the convoy now."

"You don't want me to throw another flare at 'em?"

"Fuck no, man! Just stay away from the bastards."

Alex felt a sudden burst of fury. "There's nothing to these people, man! They're crazy, they're nothing! We should go kick their asses!"

"Alex, calm down, man. That's the Rangers' job. We chase storms, we don't chase crooks."

"We could wipe 'em all out right now!"

"Alex, talk sense. I'm tellin' you there are other routes. We just back up a few klicks and we take a different road. It'll take us half an hour. What do you wanna do-lose half an hour, or walk into a firefight and lose some of your friends?"

Alex grunted.

"That's why we put people flying point in the first place, man," Rick said, smacking his gum. "You did a fine job there. Now just relax."

"Okay," Alex said. "Sure, I get it. If that's the way you want it, sure. Have it your way." He was still alive. Alive and breathing. Alive, alive, alive . .