"Well, I wouldn't say that," Alex said. "After all, there's government records. The government's real goad about that. Databases and statistics. Stuff on platinum disks that they keep in salt mines."
"Sure, and in Anadarko there's American Indian museums where everything has got a nice tag on it, but it's gone, kid! The Comanches got smashed and blown away! We got smashed and blown away! First we did it to them.. And then we did it to the land. And then we did it to ourselves. And after we're gone for good, I don't know why the hell anybody is gonna want to know about us."
Alex was impressed. He'd seen old people talking openly about the declining state-of-the-world on old people's television talk shows, the crustier, more old-fashioned talk shows, without many video effects, where people never did very much. But old people usually seemed pretty embarrassed to bring up such matters right in front of young people. Probably because of the inherent implication that the world's old people were ecological criminals. Who probably ought to be hauled into court by a transgenerational tribunal and tried for atrocities against the biosphere.
Not that old people would ever allow this to happen, though. There were shitloads of old people still running everything all over the world, and they were in no hurry to give up their power, despite the grotesquely stupid things they'd done with it. Sometimes they would allude to all the awful consequences of heavy weather, but always in very mealymouthed, very abstract ways, as if the disasters surrounding them had nothing to do with anything they'd ever done themselves.
Alex kinda figured that there might be some kind of reckoning someday. When everybody who might be tound guilty was safely dead and buried. It would probably be like it had been, back when the communist government finally fell in China. Lots of tribunals of guys in suits issuing severe public reprimands to lots of elderly dead people.
"Well, I can tell that you learned something useful," Alex said. "'Cause I never saw anybody eat like this Troupe eats."
"Off the land," Ellen Mae said, nodding. "It ain't easy, that's for sure. The old species balance, the original ecology, is completely shot out here. Believe me, it's nothing like the High Plains used to be, and it never will be again. There's all these foreign weeds, invader species, depleted soils, and the climate's crazy. But the West Texas flora was always pretty well adapted to severe weather. So there's still Comanche food around. Stuff like pigweed. Hell, pig-weed's an amaranth, it's a really nutritious grain, but it'll grow in a crack in a sidewalk. Of course, you'd never think to eat pigweed if you didn't already know what it was."
"Right," Alex said. He'd never seen pigweed-or, at least, he'd never recognized it. He felt a dreadful certainty that he was going to have to eat some of it pretty soon.
"It's been a long time since anybody was out here, gathering the wild forage. But now the grazing pressure is off the native plants. And there's no more plowing, or crops, or herbicides, or fertilizers. So even though the weather's bad, some of those native plants are coming back pretty strongly. Stuff like poppymallow, and devil's claw, and prairie turnip. There's nowhere near enough for a cityful of civilized people. But for a little tribe of lering nomads, who can cover a lot of ground, well, there's quite a lot of food out here, especially in spring and summer."
"I guess the Troupe was pretty lucky that you ended up g them," Alex said.
"No," said Ellen Mae, "there wasn't anything like luck to that."
AFTER JERRY AND Sam had pored over the forecast, and Joe Brasseur had run through a legal database of likely areas to squat, they picked a destination and announced a route.
The Troupe broke camp.
Joe Brasseur, the oldest member of the Troupe, had once referred to breaking camp as "labor-intensive." Jane found that a hilariously old-fashioned term, but she understood what it meant, all right-there was no way to shrug the work off onto machines, so everybody involved just plain had to sweat.
The Troupe pulled up all the carpets, beat a hundred kilos of dust out of them, and rolled them up neatly. They deflated the bubblepak, and rolled that up too. Peter, Martha, and Rick deftly unstacked the towers-a nerve-racking business to watch-while Greg and Carol and Mickey went after the instrumentation and the wind generator.
Then there were the tepees and the yurts to strip, collapse, and pack, and the systems to shut down and uncable and stow away. And then there would be the bonfire, and the last big meal in camp, and the ritual bath... . Jane pitched in headlong. She felt good after a day off, she felt alert and strong. There was a lot to do, but she knew how to do it. She was ready to work, and she would do it in one daylong blur of harnessed nervous energy, and when it was over, she would sleep in the Troupe bus in the moving dark, and she would feel very satisfied.
She was hauling a bundled stack of tepee poles to one of the trucks when she saw Alex slouching past her.
She scarcely recognized her brother at first: a strange, hunched, gnomelike figure, less like a Troupe wannabe than some kind of prisoner of war. He was wearing a dirty paper jumpsuit, a big cardboard-and-paper sombrero, with a big white mask elastic-strapped over his nose and mouth.
He was carrying a large double-headed digging pick.
She'd never seen anyone carry a pick with less enthusiasm- Alex was lugging it clumsily, thigh-high, at the end of his outstretched arms, as if it were some kind of barbell.
He trudged slowly out of the camp. Jane called out to him, waved, then jogged over and caught up to him just past one of the camp's perimeter posts.
"What's on your mind?" he muttered.
"Just wanted to see how you're doing," she sai4. She looked into his pale, squinting eyes. "You mind taking off that mask for a second?"
Alex pulled his mask down, with bad grace. The mask's thin elastic straps had left four little stripes of pale skin across his sunburned cheeks. "Ellen Mae wants me to dig up a root."
"Oh." Jane thought that Alex looked shaky, and she was pretty sure he'd never touched a pickax in his life. "Are you up to that kind of labor? You just got out of a hospital.
"I'm not gonna work very hard," he told her patiently. "It's just makework bullshit. Ellen Mae's just getting me out of the way so one of those big radio towers won't fall on my head."
"You got along all right with Ellen Mae?"
"I can get along.' Alex sighed. "These people of yours are really something. They remind me of some Santeria people I used to know, in a rancho outside Matamoros. Kind of survivalist compound thing? They had the bunkers, y'know, and the security systems and stuff... . Of course, those dope vaqueros were a much heavier outfit than these jokers." Alex thumped the broadside of the pick against the base of one of the perimeter posts. "This thing can't listen to us talking, can it?"
"Well, yeah, it can," Jane admitted, "but we never record any speech with it. It's just an intruder alarm, with some tasers and pellets and stuff. We can talk."
"No problem," Alex muttered, watching- a pack of Troupers strip the paper walls from the hangar yurt. "Well, you don't have to worry about me. Run along and go do something useful."
"Is anybody bugging you, Alex? Rick or Peter or anybody?"
Alex shrugged. "You're bugging me."
"Don't be that way. I just want to help you fit in."
Alex laughed. "Look! You kidnapped me here, I didn't ask to come. I'm sunburned and covered with mosquito bites, and I'm really dirty. The food stinks here. There's not enough water. There's no privacy. It's dangerous! I'm wearing clothes made of paper. Your friends are a pack of hicks and loans, except for your boyfriend, who's a big cigar-store Indian. Under the circumstances, I'm being a really good sport about this."