When you used private, digital cash, even the people who sold you their money didn't know who you were. Quite likely you had no real idea who they were, either, other than their rates, their market recognition, and their performance history. You had no identity other than your unbreakably encrypted public key word. You could still use government currencies if you really wanted to, and most people did, for the sake of simplicity or though lack of alternatives. Most people had no choke in the matter, because most people in the world were poor.
Unfortunately, thanks to their catastrophic loss of control over basic economics, so were most governments. Government-issued currencies were scarcely more stable than the private kind. Governments, even the governments of powerful advanced countries, had already lost control of their currencies to the roiling floodwaters of currency trading as early as the 1990s. That was the main reason why the Regime had given up backing U.S. dollars in the first place.
Joe Brasseur's private-currency node in the Troupe's system was not untypical in the trade: it was the digital equivalent of an entire twentieth-century banking conglomerate, boiled down to a few sectors on a hard disk.
In order to gain admittance to the dinica in Nuevo Laredo, Alex had left a hefty wad of private currency under a secured lien by a third party. He hadn't gotten the money back, had no real idea how to get his money back, but he thought that maybe Brasseur would be the logical choice to find that money and fetch it out somehow. If so, then the Troupe was welcome to use it.
Brasseur took in Alex's confession with a calm, priest-like air, gazing solemnly at him over the rims of his glasses, and then Brasseur had nodded and set to work, and Alex bad never heard another word about the subject. Except that thin s perked up markedly for the Troupe after a week and a ha ~f.A bunch of former Troupers, Fred and José and Maureen and Palaniappan and Kenny, showed up in a convoy with a lot of canned food and a beer keg. The command yurt got a new carpet. A new improved air condenser arrived that weighed less than the old one, used less energy, and supplied more water. There was a party, and everyone's mood improved for a few days.
Nobody thanked Alex for this. Just as well, Alex thought, that there was no public fuss made about himself or his role. Those who needed to know were going to know. Alex had already concluded that almost everything that really mattered in Troupe life took place way under the surface. It was a lot like life in a barracks, or a dorm, or a Th ward.
Some Troupers, such as Mukahey, Brasseur, and Carol and Greg, knew pretty much everything, pretty much immediately. The second rank were those who were gonna catch on pretty fast on their own, like Ellen Mae and Rudy Martinez and Mickey Kiehl. Then there were those who were gonna get told the official version by somebody else, like Peter and Rick and Martha and Sam. And certain beloved characters were gonna be gently protected from the full awful truth for their own good, like Buzzard and Joanne and Jeff and, in her own unique way, Juanita.
The very last and lowest rank were the passing wannabes, and city boy/girlfriends, and ex-husbands/ex-wives, and hangers-on and netfriends and himself, Alex Unger, and the various other non-Troupe subhumans. And that was the way it was always gonna be with the Storm Troupe, until they all turned on each other, or they were all shot by bandits or hit by lightning, or until they found the F-6.
Alex didn't know if he believed in the F-6. But he believed that the Troupe believed. With every day that passed, they were getting more keyed up to plunge headlong into something truly dreadful. And the bottom line was that he didn't want to leave-not until he knew what they would find and what it would do to them.
On May 31, as if to change their luck, Mukahey deliberately moved camp twenty kilometers northwest, into Hall County. The burst of action seemed to help morale some.
On June 2, heavy weather hit again. The luck of the assignment-as if there were any "luck" involved where Mukahey's orders were concerned-had Alex confined to the camp as "support crew." Alex figured this was just as well. Let the others have a chance to blow off steam.
And then there was another, and far more serious, matter: his cough was back. It had started really small at first, just a little throat-clearing rasp, but Alex had known for some time that the dosage of blue goo was losing its charm. His lungs no longer felt like sweet slick paper dipped in oil. Slowly but with terrible sureness, they were starting to feel a hell of a lot more like his own lungs. He'd worn the breathing mask faithfully, until his tanned face had a white triangular muzzle of untanned skin just like a raccoon's, but that wasn't enough. He was going to have to take steps.
The June 2 pursuit was all-out. They were up before dawn, and Mulcahey himself went into the field. The only people left in camp were Joe Brasseur doing navigation, Buzzard as network coord, and Sam Moncrieff as nowcaster. And, of course, Alex, nominally in charge of the support jeeps.
This was not a very taxing job. The support jeeps were unmanned, and were supposed to carry supplies into the field through global positioning. If called upon, Alex was supposed to instantly load the jeeps with spare whatchamacallits and then route them long-distance to a rendezvous.
Alex assumed that this assignment was a subtle reference on Mulcahey's part to Alex's covert use of a dope mule. Kind of a deliberate shoulder tap there on the part of the Troupe jefe. To Alex's deep relief, Mulcahey almost never took any notice of Alex, favorable or unfavorable. He'd never called Alex in for one of those head-to-head encounter sessions that seemed to leave the other Troupers so bent out of shape. But every once in a while there would be these ambiguous little jabs. Intended, Alex figured, to intimidate him, to assure him that Mulcahey did have an eye on him, so he wouldn't try anything really stupid.
When you came right down to it, this tactic worked pretty well.
In reality, Alex's support job consisted mostly of fetching venison chili for Sam, Joe, and Buzzard, since the men were leashed to their machinery. The goats were taken care of: the Troupe had stretched a line of wire around the perimeter posts and had corralled the goats inside the camp. The goats were cropping all the grass in camp, and crapping all over the ground as well, but they'd be breaking camp tomorrow and leaving, so it didn't matter much.
Sam Moncrieff was thrilled with his nowcaster status. He'd been Mulcahey's star grad student before Mukahey had left academia (in a shambles), and Sam took the exalted central role of Troupe nowcaster with complete and utter seriousness. He was stomping around blindly in the command yurt with his head in a virching helmet, burrowing through scientific visualizations like some kind of data-gloved gopher.
Joe Brasseur had his own navigation setup in the command yurt's left-hand annex.
So Alex found himself alone in the right-hand annex, the sysadmin station, with Buzzard.
Buzzard was in a peculiar mood.
"I hate what Janey has done to this system, dude," Buzzard opined, clumsily rolling a marijuana cigarette. "It don't crash as much now, and Christ knows it looks a lot prettier, but it's a real mud bath to run."
Alex examined the gndwork of the display for his support jeeps. It always amazed him how many forgotten little ghost towns there were, out in West Texas. "I guess you'd rather be out virching your 'thopters."
"Aw, you can't chase 'em all," Buzzard said tolerantly. "Let Kiehl get his chance out in the field, this candy-ass sysadmin desk work would drive anybody nuts." He lit his joint with a Mexican cigarette lighter and inhaled. "Want some?" he squeaked.
"No thanks."
"When the cat's away, dude." Buzzard shrugged. "Jerry would get on my case about this, but I tell ya, you spend fourteen straight hours shuffling icons, and it downright helps to be ripped to the tits."