"But you've got the gun, man."
"I'm not gonna shoot anybody, are you kidding? If these are real bandidos, we're gonna pull the hell back and call the Texas Rangers!"
"Right," Alex said. "'Death from above.' I kinda figured." He laughed.
"Look, Medicine Boy, I'll shoot if I have to. But if we just start blowing people away, out in the middle of nowhere without askin' any questions, then we're the ones who are gonna get stomped by the Rangers."
"Cut your motor and buzz 'em, get a good quiet look."
"Right," Alex said. "I get it."
He took several deep huffs of oxygen. It felt lovely. Then he discovered that the motor would not shut down. He couldn't override the controls. Oh well. It wasn't a loud motor, anyway.
He dropped down a dozen meters over the treetops and crossed the road at an angle, right to left. The goats didn't seem to notice, or care. He did, however, spot the intense infrared glow of some kind of smokeless electric heater at the edge of the mesquite trees. There were people there too-at least half a dozen. Standing up.
He opened the channel. "Alex here. I count about eighty goats and at least six guys standing by the brush. They're awake. I think they're cooking something, over."
"I don't like this, over."
"Me either. Man, you gotta be some kind of hard-ass to steal goats from people who'd raise goats in an awful goddamn place like this." Alex felt surprised at the sudden depth of his own anger. But hell-he himself herded goats. He'd developed a genuine class feeling for goat ranchers.
"Okay." Rick sighed. "Lemme see who's awake in the convoy.~~
Alex circled the herd, slowly. More glowing bipedal figures appeared, this time at the other side of the road.
"Greg says drop a flare and check it out," Rick reported.
"Right," Alex said.
He plucked one of the flares from its plastic clip-on mount on the right-hand strut. The flares were old and dusty and covered with military-issue stenciling in Cyrillic. He hadn't imagined them working too well, but at least they were simplicity itself to use.
He yanked the top off. The flare popped and smoldered and then burst into welding-torch brilliance. Surprised despite himself, Alex dropped it.
The flare tumbled in a neat parabola and landed bouncing on the highway, at the edge of the goat herd, which immediately panicked. The goats didn't get far, though; they were all hobbled.
Sharp bangs came from the edge of the road. Alex blinked, saw several men in big hats and shaggy, fringed clothing.
"Rick," he said, "they're shooting at me."
"What?"
"They've got rifles, man, they're trying to shoot me.
"Get out of there!"
"Right," Alex muttered. He put some effort into gaining height. The ultralight responded with the grace and speed of a sofa lugged up a ffight of stairs. Blinded by the flare down on ground level, they couldn't seem to see him very well. Their shooting was ragged and they were using old-fashioned, loud, banging, chemically propelled bullets. That wouldn't matter, though, if they kept shooting.
Alex had a sudden deep conviction that he was about to be shot. Death was near. He had a rush of terror so intense that he actually felt the bullet strike him. It was going to hit him just above the hipbone and pass through his guts like a red-hot burning catheter and leave him dying in his harness dripping blood and spew. He would bleed to death in midair in the grip of a smart machine. The Troupe would call the machine in to land, and they would find him still strapped in his, seat, cold and gray and bloody and dead.
Knowing with irrational conviction that his life was over, Alex felt a dizzy spasm of terrible satisfaction. Shot dead by men with rifles. It was so much better than the way he'd always known he would die. He was gonna die like a normal person, as if his life had meant something and there had been some real alternative to dying. He was going to die like a Trouper, and anybody who learned about his death would surely think he'd died that way on purpose. Like he'd died for their Work.
For an insane moment Alex actually did believe in the Work, with his whole heart. Everything in his life had led up to this moment. Now he was going to be killed, and it was all fated, and had all been meant this way from the beginning.
But the men with guns kept missing him. And after a while the firing stopped. And then a crouching man in the shaggy clothes ran out rapidly to the burning flare in the road, and he stomped it into embers.
Alex realized that Rick had been shouting scratchily in his ears for some time.
"I'm okay!" Alex said. "Sorry."
"Where are you?"
"Ummm... between them and the convoy. Up pretty high. I think they're herding the goats off the road now. Hard to tell . .
"You're not hurt? How about the aircraft?"
Alex looked around himself. The ultralight was entirely invisible. He pulled the flashlight from its holster and waved it over the wings, the bow, the propeller housing.
"Nothing," he said, putting the light away. "No damage, they missed me by ten kilometers, they never even knew where I was." Alex laughed shrilly, coughed, cleared his throat. "Goddamn, that was great!"
"We're gonna pull back now, man. There's another route... come back to the convoy now."
"You don't want me to throw another flare at 'em?"
"Fuck no, man! Just stay away from the bastards."
Alex felt a sudden burst of fury. "There's nothing to these people, man! They're crazy, they're nothing! We should go kick their asses!"
"Alex, calm down, man. That's the Rangers' job. We chase storms, we don't chase crooks."
"We could wipe 'em all out right now!"
"Alex, talk sense. I'm tellin' you there are other routes. We just back up a few klicks and we take a different road. It'll take us half an hour. What do you wanna do-lose half an hour, or walk into a firefight and lose some of your friends?"
Alex grunted.
"That's why we put people flying point in the first place, man," Rick said, smacking his gum. "You did a fine job there. Now just relax."
"Okay," Alex said. "Sure, I get it. If that's the way you want it, sure. Have it your way." He was still alive. Alive and breathing. Alive, alive, alive . .
CHAPTER 7
The profession of design," sniffed April Logan, "having once lost its aspiration to construct a better world, must by necessity decay into a work-for-hire varnish for barbarism." April Logan's noble, aquiline head, with its single careful forelock of white hair, began, subtly at first and then with greater insistence, to stretch. Rather like taffy. "The density of information embodied in the modern technological object creates deep conceptual stress that implodes the human-object interface... . Small wonder that a violent reactive Luddism has become the definitive vogue of the period, as primates, outsmarted by their own environment, lash out in frenzy at a postnatural world."
The critic's head was morphing like a barber pole on the slender pillar of her tanned and elegant neck. "The same technology that makes our design tools more complex, vastly increases the number of options in determining how any designed object may appear and function. If there are no working parts visible to the naked eye, then techne itself becomes liquid and amorphous. It required the near collapse of the American republic to finally end the long, poisonous vogue for channel switching and ironic juxtaposition... ." April Logan's head was gently turning inside out, in full fine-grain pixelated color. Even her voice was changing, some kind of acoustic sampling that mimicked a female larynx evolving into a helix, or a Klein bottle.
Jane's belt phone buzzed. At the same instant a classic twentieth-century telephone appeared in midair, to Jane's right. A phone designed by one Henry Dreyfuss, Jane recalled. Professor Logan often spoke of Henry Dreyfuss.