"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... . Run '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.
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