"Carol isn't going to approve of this-"
"Oh, get off it!" Alex snapped. "Carol is bent! Carol loves this!" He grinned beneath his new gold-framed shades. "Carol is old-time structure-hit people, for Christ's sake! And she's flicking Greg, and Greg is some kinda cx- Special Forces demolition spook, a scary, heavy guy. I'm real glad they chase storms now instead of knocking bridges down, but Carol and Greg are very bent people. They're not from milk-and-cookie land."
"I've never seen Carol or Greg commit any act of vandalism," Jane said with dignity.
"Yeah," he scoffed. "Besides helping you break into Mexican hospitals." He shook his head. "You're just pissed off because I didn't get you anything, aren't you? Well, there's a nice handgun for ya! If boyfriend gets wandering eyes, blow him away!" He laughed.
Jane stared at him. "You think this is funny, don't you?"
"Janey, it is funny." He pulled the plasticwrap from a hand-stitched denim shirt. Then he peeled off his paper suit. He stood there naked in his big paper hat and shades, the paper suit pooled around his ankles, tugging the fine blue shirt onto his skinny arms. "You can get all hot and bothered about the implications and the morality and all that shit, if you really want to. Or else, you can just try and live in the modem world! It doesn't make a damn bit of difference either way!"
He kicked the paper suit off his feet, then stood on top of the paper and pulled off his right shoe. "The border is lucked, and the government is flicked!" He pulled off the left shoe and flung it aside. "And society is flicked, and the climate is really fucked. And the media are lucked, and the economy is lucked, and the smartest people in the world live like refugees and criminals!" He ripped the plasticwrap off a pair of patterned silk boxer shorts and stepped into them. "And nobody has any idea how to make things any better, and there isn't any way to make things better, and there isn't gonna be any way, and we don't control anything important about our lives! And that's just how it is today, and yes, it's funny!" He laughed shrilly. "It's hilarious! And if you don't get the joke, you don't deserve to be alive in the 2030s."
Alex climbed into a satiny pair of brown jeans, carefully tucking in the denim shirttails. "And what's more, right now I've got myself a really nice shirt. And real nice pants too. And boots too, look, these boots are hand-tooled Mexican leather, they're really beautiful." He unrolled a pair of thick cotton boot socks.
"The Troupe aren't gonna appreciate this. They're not really into, y'know, play-cowboy gear."
"Janey, I don't give a rat's ass what your friends think about my goddamn clothes." He stepped into the socks, jammed his feet in the boots, then walked over to the robot mule, looked into its empty cavity one last time, and slammed its top.
After a three-second pause, the mule suddenly whipped its tripod shut and fired itself into the air. "If it were up to you and your friends," Alex said, watching it bounce madly away, "I'd be wearing plastic toilet paper the rest of my life. I'm not a weather refugee, and I'm not gonna pretend to be one. And if they don't like what I'm wearing, they can make me ride point again, if they're too goddamned timid to do it themselves." He watched the machine bounding off southward, as he carefully buttoned his shirt cuffs. "I am what I am. If you want to stop me, then shoot me."
THE RANGER POSSE showed up at three that afternoon. Jane was unhappy to see them. She was never happy to see Rangers, and worse yet, she had a yeast infection and was running a low-grade fever.
It wasn't the first time she'd had yeast. Yeast was common. The pollution from overuse of broad-scale antibiotics had made candida fiercer and scarier, the same way it had supercharged staph and flu and TB and all the rest. Candida hadn't bootstrapped its way up to the utter lethality of, say, Bengali cholera, but it had gotten a lot more contagious, and nowadays it actually was a genital infection that you could catch off a toilet seat.
A few discreet inquiries around camp established that none of the other Troupe women had yeast, so it had to be a repeated flare-up of her old curse, the yeast she'd caught back in 2027. That one had flared up in sullen little bouts of nastiness for almost six months, until her immune system had finally gotten on top of it. She'd hoped she had the yeast knocked down for good, but yeast was a lot like staph or herpes, it was always there lurking low-level, and it went crazy when it got a good excuse.
And she had to admit that it had a pretty good excuse now. She'd been having sex until it hurt. It wasn't very sçnsible to do that, but sex wasn't very much use to her when it was sensible. Jane hadn't truly appreciated sex, really, until she'd gotten into headlong sex at full tilt. Hard, clawing, yelling sex that didn't stop until you were sweaty and chafed and sore. Sex on a nice comfy bed of rock-hard Texas dirt, with a guy in top physical condition who was a lot taller than you were and outweighed you by twenty kilos. It was like discovering a taste for really hot food. Like a taste for whiskey. Except that whiskey was a poison, and you regretted whiskey in the morning, but a really passionately physical affair had been a tonic for her, and she'd never regretted it for a moment.
It had changed her. In a surprising number of ways. Physically, even. It was kind of weird and didn't sound real plausible, but she could swear that her pelvis had actually changed shape in the past year. That her hipbones fit at a different angle and she actually walked differently now. Differently and better, with her back straight and her head up. But she was only flesh and blood. The spirit was willing and the flesh was more than willing, but the body could only take so much. She'd asked too much of the body. And now she had the crud.
And then there was that even more harassing annoyance, the cops. The Rangers. There were six of them, and they rode boldly into camp in three hand-me-down U.S. Army pursuit vehicles. They rolled in a cloud of yellow dust right through the camp's perimeter posts, which immediately went into panic mode, whooping and flashing lights and arcing electricity in big harmless crackling gouts. One of them fired a taser dart on a leash, which missed.
Greg rushed into the command yurt and quickly shut off the alarms while the Rangers slowly climbed Out of their slab-sided carbon-armored prowl cars and stood there in the settling dust, in their hats and sunglasses and guns.
Once upon a time the Texas Rangers had basically been packs of frontier vigilantes violently enforcing the peace on pretty much anything that moved. A hundred years later Texas was settled and civilized, and the Texas Rangers were paragons of professional law enforcement. And then a century later yet, everything had pretty much gone to hell. So now the Texas Rangers were pretty much what they'd been two hundred years ago.
One Ranger tradition always rang true, though. Texas Rangers always carried an absolute shitload of weaponry. If a bad guy had a six-gun, then a Ranger had two six-guns, plus a rifle and a bowie knife. If bad guys had rifles, then Rangers had tommy guns, shotguns, and gas grenades. Now bad guys had crazy stuff like plastic explosive and smart land mines and electric rifles, so Rangers had toxic fléchette pistols and truck-mounted machine guns and rocket-slug sniper rifles and heat-seeking aerial drones. Plus satellite backup and their own cellular bands.
The leader of the Rangers was a Captain Gault, down from what was left of Amarillo. Captain Gault had a white cowboy hat, a neat gray-streaked ponytail in a silver band, smart sunglasses, and a drooping black mustache. Captain Gault was in creased khaki trousers and a bellows-pocketed, long-sleeved khaki shirt with a silver-star badge at the breast. He wore a neatly knotted black tie and two broad, silver-buckled, black-leather belts, one belt for the khaki trousers, the other for his twin, pearl-handled pistols. They were beautifully polished fléchette pistols in elaborate black leather holsters. The captain's shining guns were so radiant of somber police authority that there was something almost papal about them.