Alex rarely minded any kind of work that allowed him to sit very still and breathe shallowly. What he minded about kitchen work was the mesquite smoke. Whenever Ellen Mae turned her back to manage the stewpot, Alex would whip his paper mask up quickly and steal a few quiet huffs of properly filtered air.
As Ellen Mae bustled about, doing her endless round of mysterious kitchen rituals, Alex sat nearby, in the yurt's only draft of clear air. As the morning had worn on, several Troupers had wandered in hunting snacks or water, and they'd seen Alex sitting near Ellen Mae's feet in a humble, attentive, apprentice's posture. And they'd given Ellen Mae a kind of surprised, eyebrow-raised, respectful look. After a while Ellen Mae had warmed up to Alex considerably, and now this strange, witchy-looking, middle-aged woman wouldn't shut up to save her life.
"For one thing, she's got a really strange way o talkin'," said Ellen Mae.
"You mean her accent?" Alex said.
"Well, that's part of it...
"That's simple," Alex said. "We Ungers are German Mexicans."
"'What?"
"Yeah, we're descended from this German guy named Heinrich Unger, who emigrated to Mexico in 1914. He was a German spy. He tried to get the Mexicans to invade the U.S. during the First World War."
"Huh," said Ellen Mae, stirring stew.
"He didn't have much luck at it, though."
"I reckon he didn't."
"Another German spy named Hans Ewers wrote a couple of books about their mission. They're supposed to be pretty good books. I wouldn't know, myself. I don't read German."
"German Mexicans," Ellen Mae mused.
"There's lots of German Mexicans. Thousands of 'em, really. It's a pretty big ethnic group." Alex shrugged. "My dad moved over the border and took out U.S. citizenship after he made some money in business."
"When did that happen, exactly?"
"Mound 2010. Just before I was born."
"Must have been one of those free-trade things. When the U.S. sent all the workin' jobs down to Mexico, and the Mexicans sent the USA all their rich people."
Alex shrugged. His family's entanglement with history meant little to him. He was vaguely interested in the distant and romantic 1914 aspect, but his dad's postindustrial business career was the very essence of tedium.
"Janey doesn't sound German, though. Or Mexican either, for that matter. You don't sound German or Mexican either, kid."
"I do sound pretty German when I speak Spanish," Alex offered. "Can I have some more of that tea?"
"Sure, have all you want," said Ellen Mae, surprising him. "We're gonna break camp tomorrow. Can't carry much water on the road." She poured him a generous paper-cup-fit! of some acrid herbal soak she'd made from glossy green bush leaves. It sure as hell wasn't tea, but it wasn't as bad as certain Mexican soft drinks he'd sampled. "So we'll use up the spare water now. Tonight we can all have a bath!"
"Wow!" Alex enthused, sipping the evil brew.
Ellen Mae frowned thoughtfully. "What is it you do, exactly, Alex?"
"Me?" Alex said. He considered. the question. He hadn't often been asked it. "I'm a play-testing consultant."
"What's that?"
"Well, network computer games..." Alex said vaguely, "network dungeons... There's not much money in computer games anymore, because of the copyright property screwups and stuff, but there's still, I dunno, cryptware and shareware and the subscription services, right? Some guys who are really into dungeons can still make good money. Sometimes I help with the work."
Ellen Mae looked doubtful, even though it was almost the truth. Alex had spent most of his teenage years ardently playing dungeons, and since he was generous with his upgrade payments and his shareware registrations, he'd eventually ended up in the fringes of game marketing. Not that he designed games or anything-he didn't have the maniacal attention to detail necessary for that-but he did like to be among the first to play the new games, and he didn't mind being polled for his consumer reactions. On occasion, Alex had even been given a little money for this-all told, maybe five percent of the money that he'd poured into the hobby.
At eighteen, though, Alex had given up dungeon gaming. It had dawned on him that his numerous dungeon identities were stealing what little vitality remained in his own daily life. The dungeons weren't that much of an improvement, really, over the twisted, dungeonlike reality of a series of sickrooms. Since that realization, Alex had given up gaming, and devoted his time and money to exploring the twisted depths of his own medical destiny and the wonders of the pharmaceutical demimonde.
"I also collect comics," he offered.
"Why?" Ellen Mae said.
"Well, I thought it was really interesting that there was this, like, weird pop-culture thing that's still published on paper instead of on networks." This remark cut no apparent ice with Ellen Mae. Alex plowed on. "I own lots of old American paper comics-y'see, nobody does paper comics in the U.S. anymore, but some of the antique ones, the undergrounds and stuff, never got copied and scanned, so they're not on network access anywhere. So if you're a serious collector, quite often you can buy some art that's just not publicly available... . Some art that nobody else can see... A piece of art that nobody's accessed or viewed in years!"
Ellen Mae only looked puzzled; she clearly didn't grasp the basic thrill involved in this hobby. Alex continued: "My real specialty is modern Mexican paper comics. The fotonovelas, and the true-crime manga-rags, and the UFOzines and stuff. They're an antique medium in a modern context, and they're this kind of cool nightmare folk art, really... . I like them, and they're kinda hard to get. I own lots, though." He smiled.
"What do you do with them?" Ellen Mae said.
"I dunno," Alex admitted. "Catalog 'em, put 'em in airproof bags. ....hey're all stored in Houston. I thought maybe that I would pirate-scan them all, and post them on networks, so that a lot more people could see how cool they were. And see how much great stuff I'd collected. But I dunno, that kind of spoils the whole thing, really."
Ellen Mae looked at him so strangely then that Alex realized he was wading in too deep. He gave her his best smile, humbly offered up a couple of well-peeled roots, and asked, "What do you hack, Ellen Mae?"
"I hack Comanche," Ellen Mae said.
"What's that mean?"
"I was born Out here in West Texas," she told him. "I'm a native."
"Really." She didn't look like any Comanche Indian. She looked like a big Anglo woman with middle-aged spread in a bloodstained paper suit.
"I grew up out here on a ranch, back when everything was dying out... . There never were a lot of people in this part of Texas. Most of the people just packed up and left, after the aquifers went. And then during the State of Emergency, when the really big drought hit? Well, everything and everybody out here just blew away, like so much dust."
Alex nodded helpfully and started on another root with his ceramic peeler.
"Everybody who stayed behind-well, they pretty much stopped farming and ranching, and went into scavenging. Wrecking work, in the ghost towns." She shrugged. "They didn't call it structure hitting back then, because we didn't blow up anything that wasn't already abandoned. I mean, we had reasons to blow stuff up. We wanted to make some money. We didn't blow stuff up just because we liked to watch stuff fall down-all that bullshit came later."
"Okay," Alex said, sipping his brew.
"I started to think it through back then, you know. ....ee, Alex, the truth is, nobody should have ever done any farming out here. Ever. This land just wasn't cut Out for farming. And ranching-running cattle on this land just took way too much out of the soil. It wasn't any accident that all this happened. We brought it on ourselves."