So she was riding with Rick. How lovely. It looked as though Alex would be crammed into the back of the aerodrome truck. If Alex thought that stunting an ultralight was hairy, he'd learn otherwise if Buzzard virched him in an ornithopter to punch the core.
A tinny ringing came from Jane's laptop. In unison, Sam and Mickey both yanked the virching helmets from their heads. "Goddamn it!" Mickey said, massaging his ears. "I wish she'd stop doing that!"
Sam looked rueful, climbing to his feet. "When Ellen Mae wants you to eat, you'd better devirch and go eat, and that's all there is to it."
"I wish she'd use something else besides a chuckwagon triangle at fifty decibels, man."
Jane smiled silently. It was good to be able to pull network weight for good old Ellen Mae.
CHAPTER 3
Alex climbed out of five levels of complex nightmare to find someone kicking his ribs. He gazed up for a long, deeply dazed moment into the conical funnel of a tepee, then focused on a tall, bony young woman looming at the side of his sleeping bag.
"Hey, Medicine Boy," she said. She was sharp-nosed and bright-eyed and wearing a sleeveless multipocketed jacket and jeans.
"Yeah," Alex croaked. "Hi."
"I'm Martha, remember? You're s'posed to be on our chase team. Get up, dude."
"Right," he muttered. "Where's the sauna?" Martha smiled thinly. She swung out one long arm- her fingertips lacquered black. "The latrines are over that way." Her arm swung again from the shoulder, like the needle of a compass. "The truck's chargin' up by the solar rack. You got ten minutes." She left the tepee, leaving its flap hanging open to a malignant burst of morning glare.
Alex sat up. He'd slept all night, naked inside a padded cloth bag on a big round floor mat of bubblepak. The bag itself was old and dusty and torn, and he was pretty sure that two people in a doubtful state of cleanliness had spent a lot of time having sex in it. As for the bubblepak, it was clearly a stuff of deep unholy fascination for Storm Troupers. To judge by what he'd seen so far, the Troupe spent half their lives sprawling, sitting, and sleeping on carpet-covered bubblepak, big blisterwads of condom-thin but rawhide-tough translucent inflated film. Bubblepak was one of the basic elements of their nomad's cosmos: Bubblepak, Paper & Sticks; Chips, Wire, & Data; Wind, Clouds, & Dirt. He'd just spent the night inside a rolled-up tepee cone of polymerized recycled newsprint, a thing of paper and sticks and string, like something a little kid might make with tape and scissors.
Alex clambered slowly to his feet. His knees shook, and his arms and back were sore; the bones of his spine felt like a stack of wooden napkin rings. He had a minor lump on his head that he didn't remember receiving.
But his lungs felt good. His lungs felt very good, amazingly good. He was breathing. And that was all that mattered. For the first time in at least a year, he'd spent the entire night, deeply asleep, without a coughing fit.
Whatever vile substance he'd received in the lung enema, and whatever misguided quack doctrine had guided the clinica staff, the treatment had nonetheless worked. The street rumors that had guided him were true: the sans of bitches in Nuevo Laredo actually had something workable. He wasn't cured-he knew full well that he wasn't cured, he could sense the sullen reservoirs of baffled sickness lurking deep in his bones-but he was much better. They had hacked him back, they had patched him up, they had propped him on his feet. And just in time to have him stolen away.
Alex laughed aloud. He had rallied; he was on a roll again. It was very welcome; but it was very strange.
Alex had had spells of good health before. The longest had been a solid ten months when he was seventeen, when the whole texture of his life had changed for a while, and he had even considered going to school. But that little dream had broken like a bubble of blood, when the blight set its flshhooks into him again and reeled him back gasping into its own world of checkups, injections, biopsies, and the sickbed.
His latest siege of illness had been the worst by far, the worst since his infancy, really. At age eighteen months, he had almost coughed to death. Alex didn't remember this experience, naturally, but his parents had made twenty-four-hour nursery videotapes during the crisis. Alex had later discovered those tapes and studied them at length.
In the harsh unsparing light of Texas morning, Alex stood naked by his battered sleeping bag and examined himself, with a care and clarity that he'd avoided for a while.
He was past thin: he was emaciated, a stick-puppet creature, all tendon and bone. He was close to gone, way too close. He'd been neglectful, and careless.
Careless-because he hadn't expected to emerge from those shadows again. Not really, not this time. The clinica had been his last hope, and to pursue it, he had cut all ties to his family, and his family's agents. He'd gone underground with all the determination he could manage-so far underground that he didn't need eyes anymore, the kind of deep dark underground that was the functional equivalent of a grave. The hope was just an obligatory long shot. In reality, he'd been quietly killing off the last few weeks of lease on his worn-out carcass, before the arrival of the final wrecking ball.
But now it appeared he was going to live. Somehow, despite all odds, he'd gotten another lease extension. That wasn't very much to rely on, but it was all he'd ever had: and if it lasted awhile, then he could surely use the time.
The Trouper camp might be good for him. The air of the High Plains was thin and dry, cleaner somehow, and less of a burden to breathe.
Alex felt particularly enthusiastic about the Troupe's oxygen tank. Most of the doctors of his experience had been a little doubtful about his habit of sneaking pure oxygen. But these Troupers weren't doctors; they were a pack of fanatical hicks, with a refreshing lack of any kind of propriety, and the oxygen had been lovely.
Alex climbed quickly into his baggy paper suit and zipped it up to the neck. Let the stick puppet disappear into his big paper puppet costume. It wouldn't do for the Troupers to dwell on his medical condition. He couldn't describe them as bloodthirsty or sadistic people; they lacked that criminal, predatory air he'd so often seen in his determined slumming with black marketeers. But the Troupe did have the stony gaze of people overused to death and killing: hunters, ranchers, butchers. Thrill freaks. Euthanasia enthusiasts.
Alex put on his new shoes-the same makeshift plastic soles as yesterday, but trimmed closer to the shape of his foot, with a seamed-paper glued-on top, and a paper shoe tongue, and a series of reinforced paper lace holes. If you didn't look hard, Carol Cooper's constructions were practically actual clothes.
Alex tottered squinting across the camp and into the peaked latrine tent. The Troupe's lavatory features were simplicity itself: postholes augered about two meters down into the rocky subsoil, with a little framework seatless camp stool to squat on. After a prolonged struggle, Alex rose and zipped his drop seat back in place, and looked for the aerodrome truck.
Buzzard and Martha's telepresence chase truck was a long white wide-bodied hardtop, spined all over with various species of antenna. It had a radar unit clamped to the roof, in a snow-white plastic dome. Buzzard was topping off the batteries with a trickle of current from the solar array; Martha Madronich had the back double doors open and was stowing a collapsed ornithopter into an interior wall-mounted rack.
"Got any water?" Alex said.
Martha stepped out of the truck and handed Alex a plastic canteen and a paper cup. Martha limped a bit, and Alex noticed for the first time that she had an artificial foot, a soft flesh-colored prosthetic with dainty little joints at the ankles and toes, in a black ballet slipper.