"Smart rope."
"What's smart about it?"
"Well, there's this chip in the battery box that understands knot topology. You know what topology is?"
"It's a kind of math about deforming the geometry of space."
"Great."
"Anyhow, that rope is braided from a lot of different cabling. Got sensor cable, power cable, and this is the tricky part, electric reactive fiber. Okay? It'll stretch, it'll contract-hard and fast-it can bend and wiggle anywhere along the length. The damn thing can tie itself in knots."
"Like the smart cloth in kites," Alex said, "except it's a line, not a sheet."
"That's right."
"Why'd you try to spook me with that topology crap, then? You just use the damned glove, right?"
"Right," she said. "Except technically, you won't understand what you're actually doing."
"So what? Who cares?"
Carol sighed. "Look, just take the damn thing out of here, and try not to hurt yourself. I don't wanna see that rope again, okay? I thought it was really cool hardware when I first heard about it, and I spent a lot of Janey's money to buy it. I was sure there'd be a million uses for smart rope around a camp, and hell, there are a million uses-so many goddamn uses that nobody ever uses it! Nobody ever remembers that it's around! Nobody's ever liked it! It gives everybody the creeps."
"Okay!" said Alex cheerfully. This last little speech had sent his morale soaring. He liked the smart rope already. He was glad to have it. He was kinda sorry he didn't have two of them. "I'll take real good care of it. Don't forget about the phone. Hasta Ia uista."
Alex left the tent and shuffled out of camp again, back to the root from hell. He scraped and chipped and dug at the root for a while, until he was Out of breath again. Then he stretched the rope out to its full twenty-pace length across the weedy earth. He turned the power switch on.
The rope lay there, totally inert. The little readout screen suggested: INPUT PARAMETERS FOR HYPERBOLIC CURVATURE.
He tried on the power glove. It had the usual knuckle sensors along the back and a thousand little beaded pressure cells across the palms and the fingers. It was a right-hand glove, and the fit was pretty good. The fingertips were free, and the glove slid very nicely along the rope, a " mix of grip and slickness.
Alex punched a few numbers at random into the readout box, then flopped the rope around with the glove. Nothing much happened. He put the rope aside and wore the glove to dig with the pick. The glove had a good grip and helped quite a bit with the incipient blisters.
Along about sundown, Peter and Rick showed up. They were wearing paper gear fresh off the roll, and they'd been bathed and their hair was combed.
"You'd better come on in, Medicine Boy," said Peter. "They're wasbin' the clothes, everybody's takin' a bath, we're all gonna eat pretty soon."
"I'm still busy," Alex said.
Rick laughed. "Busy with what?"
"Pretty big job," Alex said. "A buffalo gourd. Ellen Mae said the root weighs thirty kilos."
"You can't have a root that weighs thirty kilos, man," said Rick. "Look, trees don't have roots that weigh thirty kilos."
"Where's the plant?" Peter said.
Alex pointed to the severed gourd vine, which he had cast aside. The vine had shriveled badly in the sunlight.
"Hell," said Rick, contemptuous. "Look, it's a matter of simple physics. It takes a lot of energy to grow a root- starches and cellulose and stuff. Look at the photosynthetic area on those vine leaves. You can't grow something that weighs thirty kilos off a plant with no more solar-collecting area than that!"
Peter stared into the shallow hole and laughed. "Ellen Mae sent you on a snipe hunt, dude. She's had you diggin' all day for nothin'. Man, that's cold."
"Well, he hasn't been digging very hard," Rick judged, kicking the small heap of calichelike soil with the toe of his boot. "I've seen a prairie dog turn more earth than this."
"What's with the rope?" Peter said.
"I thought it might help me haul the root out," Alex lied glibly. "I can't even lift thirty kilos."
Peter laughed again. "This is pathetic! Look, we're outta here, right after sundown. You better get back to camp and figure out how you're gonna hitch a ride."
"How are you riding?" Alex asked.
"Me?" Peter said. "I'm riding the ultralight! I'm ridin' escort duty."
"Me too," Rick said. "With a rifle. There are bandits out on these highways, sometimes. Structure-hit people, bushwhackers. Most folks in a convoy like ours, with all this fine equipment, they might run a pretty big risk. But not the Troupe. The Troupe's got air support!"
"You're not gonna find any structure-hit creeps with any air support," Peter said.
"Exactly," Rick said. "You're flying up there in the dark, no lights, silent, with the infrared helmet and a laser-sighted silent rifle-if it should ever come to that, you are death from above."
"One shot, one kill, no exceptions," said Peter. "Panoptic battlefield surveillance," said Rick.
"Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee."
"Aerial counterinsurgency-the only way to travel."
Alex blinked. "I wanna do that."
"Sure," said Peter.
"Trade you my root for it, Peter." Peter laughed. "There's no such thing, man." "Wanna bet? C'mon, bet me."
Peter glanced into the hole. "Bet what? There's nothing in there, man. Nothing but that big shelf of rock."
"That shelf of rock is the root," Alex said. "Not thirty kilos, either. I figure it's gotta weigh at least eighty. That sorry little vine has gotta be two hundred years old."
Rick stared into the hole, then spat on his hands and hefted the pick. "He's gotcha there, Pete. He's right, you're wrong, he's flyin' escort, and you're dog meat audi yoti~t'e ~ riding the bus with Janey." He barked with iaugh~ asd~ swung the pick down with a crunch.
JANE's EYES STILL stung from the antiseptic. The baths always hurt. She had refused to take antiseptic baths at first, until she'd glimpsed the cratered scars on Joanne Lessard's shoulders. Joanne was fair-skinned and dainty, and the staph boils that had hit the Troupe had come close to killing her. Bombay Staph flb was wicked as hell; it just laughed aloud at broad-spectrum antibiotics. Modern strains of staphylococcus were splendidly adapted for survival on the earth's broadest, widest, richest modern environment. The world's vast acreage of living human skin.
Jane's eyes stung, and her crotch itched, but at least her was clean, and she smelled good. She'd even come to enjoy the sensation of fresh clean paper over damp naked the closest one came in Troupe life to padding around terry cloth with your hair in a towel. Outside the cornland yurt, the camp rang with bestial howls as Ed Dunneecke poured another big kettleful of scalding water into fabric tub. Hot water felt so lovely-at least till the opened and Ed's sheep dip started to bite.
Shutting down the Troupe's systems was delicate work. Even the minor systems, for instance, the little telephone switches, had a million or more lines of antique corporate freeware. The software had been created by vast teams of twentieth-century software engineers, hired labor for extinct telephone empires like AT&T and SPRINT. It was freeware because it was old, and because everybody who'd ever made it was either dead now or in other work. Those armies of telephone engineers were now as scattered and extinct as the Soviet Red Army.
Those armies of engineers had basically been automated out of existence, replaced by higher-and-higher-level expert systems, that did error checks, bug hunts, resets, fault recoveries. Now a single individual could use the technology-any individual with a power plug and a desk. The sweat and talent of tens of thousands of clever people had vanished into a box you could hold in your hand and buy in a flea market.