Alex clambered slowly to his feet. His knees shook, and his arms and back were sore; the bones of his spine felt like a stack of wooden napkin rings. He had a minor lump on his head that he didn't remember receiving.
But his lungs felt good. His lungs felt very good, amazingly good. He was breathing. And that was all that mattered. For the first time in at least a year, he'd spent the entire night, deeply asleep, without a coughing fit.
Whatever vile substance he'd received in the lung enema, and whatever misguided quack doctrine had guided the clinica staff, the treatment had nonetheless worked. The street rumors that had guided him were true: the sans of bitches in Nuevo Laredo actually had something workable. He wasn't cured-he knew full well that he wasn't cured, he could sense the sullen reservoirs of baffled sickness lurking deep in his bones-but he was much better. They had hacked him back, they had patched him up, they had propped him on his feet. And just in time to have him stolen away.
Alex laughed aloud. He had rallied; he was on a roll again. It was very welcome; but it was very strange.
Alex had had spells of good health before. The longest had been a solid ten months when he was seventeen, when the whole texture of his life had changed for a while, and he had even considered going to school. But that little dream had broken like a bubble of blood, when the blight set its flshhooks into him again and reeled him back gasping into its own world of checkups, injections, biopsies, and the sickbed.
His latest siege of illness had been the worst by far, the worst since his infancy, really. At age eighteen months, he had almost coughed to death. Alex didn't remember this experience, naturally, but his parents had made twenty-four-hour nursery videotapes during the crisis. Alex had later discovered those tapes and studied them at length.
In the harsh unsparing light of Texas morning, Alex stood naked by his battered sleeping bag and examined himself, with a care and clarity that he'd avoided for a while.
He was past thin: he was emaciated, a stick-puppet creature, all tendon and bone. He was close to gone, way too close. He'd been neglectful, and careless.
Careless-because he hadn't expected to emerge from those shadows again. Not really, not this time. The clinica had been his last hope, and to pursue it, he had cut all ties to his family, and his family's agents. He'd gone underground with all the determination he could manage-so far underground that he didn't need eyes anymore, the kind of deep dark underground that was the functional equivalent of a grave. The hope was just an obligatory long shot. In reality, he'd been quietly killing off the last few weeks of lease on his worn-out carcass, before the arrival of the final wrecking ball.
But now it appeared he was going to live. Somehow, despite all odds, he'd gotten another lease extension. That wasn't very much to rely on, but it was all he'd ever had: and if it lasted awhile, then he could surely use the time.
The Trouper camp might be good for him. The air of the High Plains was thin and dry, cleaner somehow, and less of a burden to breathe.
Alex felt particularly enthusiastic about the Troupe's oxygen tank. Most of the doctors of his experience had been a little doubtful about his habit of sneaking pure oxygen. But these Troupers weren't doctors; they were a pack of fanatical hicks, with a refreshing lack of any kind of propriety, and the oxygen had been lovely.
Alex climbed quickly into his baggy paper suit and zipped it up to the neck. Let the stick puppet disappear into his big paper puppet costume. It wouldn't do for the Troupers to dwell on his medical condition. He couldn't describe them as bloodthirsty or sadistic people; they lacked that criminal, predatory air he'd so often seen in his determined slumming with black marketeers. But the Troupe did have the stony gaze of people overused to death and killing: hunters, ranchers, butchers. Thrill freaks. Euthanasia enthusiasts.
Alex put on his new shoes-the same makeshift plastic soles as yesterday, but trimmed closer to the shape of his foot, with a seamed-paper glued-on top, and a paper shoe tongue, and a series of reinforced paper lace holes. If you didn't look hard, Carol Cooper's constructions were practically actual clothes.
Alex tottered squinting across the camp and into the peaked latrine tent. The Troupe's lavatory features were simplicity itself: postholes augered about two meters down into the rocky subsoil, with a little framework seatless camp stool to squat on. After a prolonged struggle, Alex rose and zipped his drop seat back in place, and looked for the aerodrome truck.
Buzzard and Martha's telepresence chase truck was a long white wide-bodied hardtop, spined all over with various species of antenna. It had a radar unit clamped to the roof, in a snow-white plastic dome. Buzzard was topping off the batteries with a trickle of current from the solar array; Martha Madronich had the back double doors open and was stowing a collapsed ornithopter into an interior wall-mounted rack.
"Got any water?" Alex said.
Martha stepped out of the truck and handed Alex a plastic canteen and a paper cup. Martha limped a bit, and Alex noticed for the first time that she had an artificial foot, a soft flesh-colored prosthetic with dainty little joints at the ankles and toes, in a black ballet slipper.
Alex poured, careful not to touch the paper cup to Martha's possibly infectious canteen rim, and he gulped thirstily at the flat distilled water. "Not too much," she cautioned him.
He gave the canteen back and she handed him a dense wedge of cornmeal-and-venison scrappie. "Breakfast." Alex munched the mincemeat wedge of fried deer he art, deer liver, and dough while he slowly circled the truck. The truck had two bucket seats in front, with dangling earphones and eye goggles Velcroed to the fabric roof, and an impressive arsenal of radio, radar, microwave, and telephone equipment bolted across the dash.
"Where do I ride?" he said.
Martha pointed to a cubbyhole she'd cleared on the floor of the truck, a burrowed nook amid a mass of packed equipment: big drawstring bags, a pair of plastic tool chests, three bundles of strapped-down spars.
"Oh yeah," Alex said, at length. "Luxury."
Martha sniffed and ran both bony hands through her black-dyed hair. "We'll nest you down in some bubblepak, you'll do okay. We don't do any rough cross-country stuff. Us telepresence types always stick close to the highways."
"You'll have to move when we pull that chaff bag," Buzzard warned.
Alex grunted. Buzzard unrolled a flattened sheet of bubblepak, fit it to a palm-sized battery air pump, and inflated it with a quick harsh hiss and crackle.
Martha wadded the bubblepak helpfully into the hole, then climbed back out. Alex's cheap cuff emitted a loud hour chime. Martha glanced at her wrist, then back up at Alex again.
"Aren't you calibrated?" she said.
"Sorry, no." Alex lifted his wrist. "I couldn't figure out how to set the clock on this thing. Anyhow, it's not a real Trouper cuff like yours, it's just my sister's cheap wannabe Trouper cuff."
Martha sighed in exasperation. "Use the clock in the laptop, then. Get in, man, time's a-wastin'." She and Buzzard went to the front of the vehicle and climbed in.
The truck took off downhill, hit the highway, and headed north. It drove itself and was very quiet. Besides the thrum of tires on pavement, the loudest sound in the truck was the crinkling of Alex's bubblepak and paper suit as he elbowed bags aside and settled in place.
"Hey, Medicine Boy!" Buzzard said suddenly. "You like that ultralight?"
"Loved it!" Alex assured him. "My life began when I met you and your machinery, Boswell."