"I see," Alex said. He thought it over. "But there's plenty of grass growing wild Out there now. You could still make some money if you drove cattle back and forth all over the rangeland, and didn't keep 'em all confined in one ranch."
Martha laughed. "Sure, dude. You could cattle-drive 'em up the old Chisolm Trail and slaughter 'em in Topeka, just like the old days, if they'd let you. You're not the first to think of that idea. But there's no free range anymore. The white man still owns all this land, okay? The range war is over, and the Comanches lost big time."
"But the land's not worth anything to anybody now," Alex said.
"It's still private property. There's still a little bit of money in the mineral rights and oil rights. Sometimes biomass companies come out and reap off the brush, and turn it to gasohol and feedstocks and stuff. It's all in state courts, all absentees and heirs and such, it's a god-awful mess."
"We're trespassing right now," Buzzard announced.
"Legally speaking. That's why the Troupe's got its own lawyer."
"Joe Brasseur's a pretty good guy, for a lawyer," Martha allowed tolerantly. "He's got friends in Austin."
"Okay," Alex said. "I get it with the legal angle. So what happened down there with the bulldozer? Somebody trying to clear off the pastureland?"
Martha and Buzzard traded glances, then burst into laughter.
"A bulldozer." Buzzard chuckled. "What a geek. A bulldozer. This kid is the tenderfoot dude wannabe geek of all time!" He clutched his shaking ribs below his black cotton midriff.
Martha pounded Buzzard's back with the flat of her hand. "Sorry," she said, controlling her smirk. "Boswell gets like this sometimes... . Alex, try and imagine a big wind, okay? A really, really, big wind."
"You're not telling me that's a tornado track, are you?"
"Yeah, it is. About five years old."
Alex stared at it. "I thought tornadoes Just flattened everything in their path."
"Yeah, an F-4 or F-5 will do that for sure, but that was a little one, maybe F-2, tops. Those curves in the damage path, those are real typical. They're called suction spots. A little vortex that's inside the big vortex, but those suction spots always pack the most punch."
Alex stared downhill at the broken path through the dead mesquite. He could understand it now: those overlapping C-shaped marks were the scars of some narrow spike of savage energy, a scythe embedded in the rim of a bigger wheel, slashing through the trees again and again as the funnel cycled forward. The twister had pulled dead trees apart and left their limbs as mangled, dangling debris, but the lethal suction spot had splintereened everything it touched, snapping trunks off at ground level, ripping roots up in dense shattered mats, and spewing branches aside as a wooden salad of chunks and matchsticks.
He licked dry lips. "I get it. Very tasty... did you see this happen? Did you chase this one, back then?"
Martha shook her head. "We can't chase 'em all, dude. We're after the big ones."
Buzzard lifted his shades, wiped tears of laughter, and adjusted the cap on his sweating scalp. "The F-6," he said, sobering. "We want the F-6, Medicine Boy."
"Are we gonna find an F-6 today?" Alex said.
"Not today," Buzzard said. "But if there's ever one around, Jerry can find it for us." He stepped into the back of the truck.
Alex stared, meditatively, at the twister's scarred track. Martha edged closer to him and lowered her voice. "You're not scared now, are you?"
"No, Martha," he said deliberately. "I'm not afraid."
She believed him. "I could tell that about you, when they were stunting you in the ultralight. You're like your sister, only not so . .. I dunno ... not so flicking classy and perfect."
"Not the words I'd have chosen," Alex told her.
"Well, about the F-6," Martha confided quickly, glancing over her shoulder. "The thing is-it's virtual. There's never been any actual F-6 tornado in the real-life atmosphere. The F-6 only lives in Jerry's math simulations. But when the F-6 hits, the Troupe will be there. And we'll document it!"
Buzzard emerged from the truck with a long bundle of spars and cloth and a thick spool of kite cable. He and Martha set to work. The kite was made of a very unusual cloth: like watered blue silk with flat plastic laths half-melted into the fabric. The plastic had an embedded grid of hair-thin ribs of wiring.
The two Troupers took such loving pride in assembling their box kite that Alex felt quite touched. He felt a vague urge to photograph them, as if they were ethnic exotics doing some difficult folk dance.
When they'd popped and snapped and wedged the box kite's various spars and crossbars into place, the kite was two meters wide. Martha had to steady it with both her hands-not because of its weight, which was negligible, but because of its eagerness to catch the wind.
Buzzard unreeled its cable then. The kite string looked very much like old-fashioned cable-television line. Buzzard anchored the kite's double guy wires to a specialized collar on the end of the cable, then carefully screwed the cable's end jack onto a threaded knob on the center of one hollow spar.
The kite suddenly leaped into eerie life and shook itself like a panicked pterodactyl. "Yo!" Buzzard cried. "Didn't you check the diagnostics on this sucker?"
"It's a bad boot, man," Martha yelled, her slippers skidding in the dust as she fought the kite. "Power-down!"
Buzzard jumped in the back of the truck and hit keys on the kite's laptop. The kite went dead again.
"Smart cloth," Martha explained, shaking the kite with a mix of fondness and annoyance. "Smart enough to screw up bad sometimes, but it's got lift potential right off the scale."
"She's a good machine," Buzzard hedged, rebooting the kite and patiently watching the start-u p progressing on the screen. "On a good day, you can float her off the thermal from a camp stove."
The kite came to life again suddenly, thrumming like a drumhead. "That's more like it," Martha said. She carried the kite into the light prevailing breeze.
Buzzard clamped the kite's spool to the rear bumper of the truck and watched as Martha drew line out a dozen meters. "Go!" he yelled, and Martha threw the big kite with an overhand heave, and it leaped silently into the sky.
The kite paid out line on its spool, with deft little self-calculated reelings and unreelings, until it caught a faster wind. It took on height quickly then, with deliberate speed, arcing and rearcing upward, in a neat set of airborne half parabolas.
"Smart cloth," Alex said, impressed despite himself. "That is very sweet... how many megs does she carry?"
"Oh, just a couple hundred," Buzzard said modestly. "It doesn't take much to fly a kite."
Martha then took it upon herself to hack the ceramic blockhouse of the tower. The tower's stolid, windowless blockhouse looked practically indestructible, an operational necessity in an area practically abandoned. Alex had not seen any wasteland structure vandals yet: word was that the major gangs had been ruthlessly tracked and exterminated by hard-riding posses of Texas Rangers. He'd been assured, though, that there were still a few structure vandals around: looters, scavengers, burglars, hobbyist lunatics from out of the cities. They tended to travel in packs.
Martha established that the relay tower belonged to a bank: it was an electronic-funds-transfer cell. The fact that the cell was out in the middle of nowhere suggested that the funds under transference were not entirely of a state-sanctioned variety. She then began the tedious but largely automated process of figuring out how to use it for free. Almost all networks had some diplomatic recognition of other networks, especially the public-service kinds. If you brought up the proper sequence of requests, in the proper shelter of network identity, you could win a smaller or greater degree of free access.