The drone fought for more height for a while, then veered in a long panorama across the growing squall line. "See how ripped up it looks, way up here?"
"Yeah."
"That cap is working hard. It'll push all that wet air back today, west to east. But to work like that is costing it energy, and it's cooling it off some. When it cools, it gets patchy and breaks up. See that downdraft there? That big clear hole?"
"I see the hole, man."
"You learn to stay away from big clear holes. You can lose a lot of height in a hurry that way... ." The drone skirted the cavernous blue downdraft, at a respectful distance. "When these towers underneath us build up enough to erode through the cap and soar up right past us, then it's gonna get loud around here."
The drone scudded suddenly into a cloud bank. The goggles swathing Alex's eyes went as white and blank as a hospital bandage. "Gotta do some hygrometer readings inside this tower," Buzzard said. "We'll put Kelly on automatic and switch over to Lena... whoops!"
"The flying I like," Alex told him. "It's that switching that bugs me."
"Get used to it." Buzzard chuckled. "We're not really up there anyhow, dude."
The machine called Lena had already worked its way past the line of cloud, into the hotter, drier air behind the advancing squalls. Seen from the rear, the cloud front seemed much darker, more tormented, sullen. Alex suddenly saw a darting needle of aerial lighting pierce through four great mounds of vapor, dying instantly with the muffled glow of a distant bomb burst.
Thunder hammered at his right ear, under the earphone.
Martha's voice suddenly sounded, out of the same ear. "Are you on Lena?"
"Yeah!" Alex and Buzzard answered simultaneously.
"Your packets are getting patchy, man, I'm gonna have to step you down a level."
"Okay," Buzzard said. The screens clamped to Alex's face suddenly went perceptibly grainier, the cascading pixels slowing and congealing into little blocks of jagginess. "Ugh," Alex said.
"Laws of physics, man," Buzzard told him. "The bandwidth can only handle so much."
Now, belatedly, Alex's clear left ear-the one outside the headphones-heard a sudden muffled rumble of faraway thunder. He was hearing in stereo. His ears were ten kilometers apart. At the thought of this, Alex felt the first rippling, existential spasm of virch-sickness.
"We're running instruments off these 'thopters too, so we gotta cut back on screen clarity sometimes," said Buzzard. "Anyway, most of the best cloud data is the stuff a human eye can't see."
"Can you see us from up here?" Alex asked. "Can you see where our bodies are, can you see where we're parked?"
"We're way ahead of the squall line," Buzzard told him, bored. "Now, over there south, lost in the heat haze -that's where the base camp is. I could see the camp right now, if I had good telescopics on Lena. I did, too, once- but that 'thopter caught a stroke of lightning, and fried every chip it had... a goddamn shame."
"Where do you get that kind of equipment?" Alex said.
"Military surplus, mostly... depends on who you know."
Alex suddenly felt his brain becoming radically overstuffed. He tore his goggles off. Exposed to the world's sudden air and glare, his pupils and retinas shrank in pain, as if ice-picked.
Alex sat up on his bubblepak and wiped tears and puddled sweat from the hollows of his eyes. He looked at the two Troupers, a-sprawl on their lounge chairs and indescribably busy. Buzzard was gently flapping his fingertips. Martha was groping at empty air like a demented conjurer.
They were completely helpless. With a rock or a stick, he could have easily beaten them both to death. A sudden surge of deep unease touched Alex: not fear, not nausea either, but a queer, primitive, transgressive feeling, like a superstition.
"I'm... I'm gonna stay out for a while," Alex said. "Good, make us some lunch," said Buzzard.
ALEX MANAGED THE lunch and ate his share of the rations too, but then he discovered that Buzzard and Martha wouldn't give him enough water. There simply wasn't watèr to spare. It took a while for this to fully register on Alex -that there just wasn't water, that water was a basic constraint for the Troupe, something not subject to negotiation.
The Troupe had an electric condenser back in camp that would pull water vapor from the air onto a set of chilled coils. And they had plastic distillery tarps too; you could chop up vegetation and strew it in a pit under the tarp, and the transparent tarp would get hot in the sun and bake the sap out of the chopped-up grass and cactus, and the tarp's underside would drip distilled water into a pot. But the tarps were clumsy and slow. And the condenser required a lot of electrical energy. And there just wasn't much energy to spare.
The Troupe carried all the solar racks that they could manage, but even the finest solar power was weak and feeble stuff. Even at high noon, their modest patches of captured sunshine didn't generate much electricity. And sometimes the sun simply didn't shine.
The Troupe also had wind generators-but sometimes the wind simply didn't blow. The Troupe was starving for energy, thirsty for it, and watchful of it. They were burdened by their arsenal of batteries. Cars. Trucks. Buses. Ornithopters. Computers. Radios. Instrumentation. Everything guzzling energy with the implacable greed of machines. The Troupe was always running in the red on energy. They were always creeping humbly back to civilization to recharge a truckload of their batteries off some municipal grid.
Energy you could beg or buy. But you couldn't hack your way around the absolute need for water. You couldn't replace or compress water, or live on virtual water or simulated water. Water was very real and very heavy, and a lot of trouble to make. Sometimes the Troupe captured free rainwater, but even a rainy year in West Texas never brought very much rain. And even when they did catch rainwater, they couldn't ship much water with them when they moved the camp, and the Troupe was always moving the camp, chasing the fronts.
It was simple: the more you wanted to accomplish, the less you had to drink.
Now Alex understood why Buzzard and Martha lay half-collapsed in their sling chairs beneath their sunshade, the two of them torpid as lizards while their eyes and ears flew for them. Sweat was water too. Civilization had been killed in West Texas, killed as dead as Arizona's Anasazi cliff-dweller Indians, because there just wasn't enough water here, and no easy way to get water anymore.
Alex stopped arguing and followed the lead of Buzzard and Martha by steadily tucking scraps of venison jerky into his mouth. It kept his saliva flowing. Sometimes he could forget the thirst for as long as ten minutes. They'd promised him a few refreshing mouthfuls every half hour or so.
The wind from the east had died. The smart kite's wiring, once taut and angular, now hung in the sky in a listless swaying curve. The wind had been smothered in a tense, gelatinous stillness, a deadly calm that was baking greased sweat from his flesh. The rumbles of distant western thunder were louder and more insistent, as if something just over the horizon were being clumsily demolished, but the unnatural calm around the aerodrome truck seemed as still and solid as the smothering air in a bank vault.
Alex squatted cross-legged on his bubblepak, mechanically chewing the cud of his venison jerky and wiping sweat back through his hair. As the heat and thirst and tension mounted, his paper suit was becoming unbearable.
The suit's white, plasticized, bakery-bag sheen did help with the heat some. It was a clever suit, and it worked. But in the final analysis, it didn't really work very well. His spine was puddled with sweat, and his bare buttocks were adhering nastily to the drop seat. His shoulder blades were caught up short whenever he leaned forward. And the suit was by far the loudest garment he had ever worn. In the tense stillness, his every movement rustled, as if he were digging elbow-deep through a paper-recycling bin.