"Thanks a lot," she grated.
He smiled at her. "You're really happy here, aren't you?"
She was surprised.
"I've seen you act really crazy sometimes, Janey. And I still think you're acting pretty strange. But I've never seen you act so happy before." He smiled again. "You're chasing tornadoes in a wasteland! But you're waltzin' around here with a smile on your lips, and a song in your heart, and your little bouquet of fresh wildflowers. - . . It's kind of sweet, actually."
Jane straightened to her full height and looked down at him. "Yes, Alex, I'm happy here. About everything but you, basically."
"You really belong with these people. You really like them."
"That's right. They're my people."
Alex narrowed his eyes. "And this guy you're with. He treats you all right? He wasn't beating you or anything really sick and twisted, was he?"
Jane looked around for eavesdroppers, smoldering with rage, then centered her eyes on him. "No. He doesn't beat me. I was fucking him. I like to flick him. Hard! Loud! A lot! I'm not ashamed about it, and you can't make me ashamed!" There was a hot flush in her cheeks and ears.
"Get this through your head! That is the man in my life!
He is my grand passion." She stared hard at Alex, until he dropped his gaze.
"I never thought I was gonna have a grand passion," she told him. "I didn't ever believe in that. I thought it was Hollywood fantasy, or something from a hundred years ago. But I have a grand passion now, and he's the one. There'll never be another man like him for me~ Ever!"
Alex took a step back. "Okay, okay."
"It's him and me till theaky falls in!"
Alex nodded quickly, his eyes wide. "Okay, I get it, Janey. Calm down."
"I am calm, you little creep. And it's no joke. You can't ever make it a joke, because you don't know one thing about it. I love him, and I'm happy with him, and we do what we do, and we are what we are, and you just better live with that! And you bettet never forget what I just told you.
Alex nodded. She could tell from the way he bit his lip that her words had sunk in-for better or worse, she'd connected. "It's okay, Janey. I'm not complaining. I'm glad I had a chance to see you acting like this, I really am. It's real weird, but it's refreshing." He shrugged, uneasily. I "The only thing is-you shouldn't have brought me out here. That just wasn't a good idea. I don't belong in any place like this. I'm not like these people. You should have left me alone." He lifted the pick carefully and placed on his narrow shoulder.
"You're gonna stay with the Troupe awhile, Alex?"
"I oughta make you take me home right away." He balanced the pick handle on his collarbone, clumsy and restless. "But I got no home to go to at the moment. Mexico is out, for obvious reasons. I'm sure not going back home to Papa in Houston. Pa p a acts even stranger than you do, and those clinic people might be lookin' for me there.. . . And anyway, there are possibilities in a setup like this. It's stupid for me to stay here, but I think I might do okay for awhile, if I can get everybody to mostly ignore me. Especially you." He turned away.
"Alex," she said.
He looked over his shoulder. "What?"
"Learn to hack something. Like everybody else does. Just so you can get along better."
He nodded. "Okay, Juanita. Have it your way."
ALEX FOLLOWED ELLEN Mae's precise but extremely confusing directions, got turned around several times, and finally found the paper-tagged stick she had driven into the earth to mark the spot. The fluttering paper tag marked a low trailing vine on the ground. The vine was about two meters long, with hairy, pointed, conical leaves, and it smelled rank and fetid. It harbored a large population of small black-and-orange beetles. It was called a buffalo gourd.
Alex scraped the vine aside with the flat blade of the pick, got a two-handed choke-up grip on the shaft, and started to chop at the yellow earth. He was impressed with the pick. The tool was well-balanced, sharp, and in good condition. Unfortunately he was nowhere near strong enough to use it properly.
Alex chipped, gnawed, and scraped his way several centimeters down into the miserable, unforgiving soil, until the sweat stood out all over his ribs and his pipe-stem arms trembled.
When he spotted the buried root of a buffalo gourd, he stared at it in amazement for some time, then left the pick beside the hole and walked slowly back to camp.
Carol Cooper had pulled a pair of lattices from the wall of the garage yurt. The highway maintenance hulk rolled out through the big new gap.
Carol watched the machine lumber downhill while she folded and tied the wooden lattices. Alex joined her, tugging down his mask.
The machine hit the highway, hesitated, and began creeping along south at ten klicks an hour.
"Well, let's hope the poor damn thing gets to paint a few road stripes before they shoot it to hell and gone again," Carol said, stacking the lattices in the back of a truck. "What's the deal, dude? I'm busy."
"Carol, what's the weirdest thing you've got around here?"
"What in hell are you talking about?"
"What have you got, that's really strange, only nobody else ever hacks with it?"
"Oh," Carol said. "I get your drift." She grinned. "There's a touch of that in every Trouper. Old-fashioned hacker gadget jones. Toy hunger, right?" Carol looked around the garage, at the scattered tools, the bench mounts, the table vise, an industrial glue sprayer. "You wanna help me pack all this crap? Rudy and Greg are coming later."
"I'd like to," Alex lied, "but I got another assignment."
"Well, I'm gonna be glad to have this thing off my hands, anyhow. You want to play with something, you can play with this bastard." Carol walked to the welding bench and pulled off a long, dusty coil of black cable. It looked like a pneumatic feedline for the welding torch, a big coil of thin black plastic gas pipe. As she caught it up and brought it to him, though, Alex saw that the apparent pipe was actually sleek black braided cord.
One end of the cord ended in a flat battery unit, with a belt attachment, a small readout screen, and a control glove.
"Ever seen one of these before?"
"Well, I've certainly seen a battery and a control glove," Alex said.
She handed him the works. "Yeah, that's a damn good battery! Superconductive. You could drive a motorbike with that battery. And here I am, keeping that sucker charged up to no good end-nobody ever uses this damn thing!" She frowned. "Of course, if you work that battery down, kid, you're gonna have to pull some weight to make up for that."
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• 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 ki
tes," 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 AT&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 deal
t 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.
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