Alex poured, careful not to touch the paper cup to Martha's possibly infectious canteen rim, and he gulped thirstily at the flat distilled water. "Not too much," she cautioned him.
He gave the canteen back and she handed him a dense wedge of cornmeal-and-venison scrappie. "Breakfast." Alex munched the mincemeat wedge of fried deer he art, deer liver, and dough while he slowly circled the truck. The truck had two bucket seats in front, with dangling earphones and eye goggles Velcroed to the fabric roof, and an impressive arsenal of radio, radar, microwave, and telephone equipment bolted across the dash.
"Where do I ride?" he said.
Martha pointed to a cubbyhole she'd cleared on the floor of the truck, a burrowed nook amid a mass of packed equipment: big drawstring bags, a pair of plastic tool chests, three bundles of strapped-down spars.
"Oh yeah," Alex said, at length. "Luxury."
Martha sniffed and ran both bony hands through her black-dyed hair. "We'll nest you down in some bubblepak, you'll do okay. We don't do any rough cross-country stuff. Us telepresence types always stick close to the highways."
"You'll have to move when we pull that chaff bag," Buzzard warned.
Alex grunted. Buzzard unrolled a flattened sheet of bubblepak, fit it to a palm-sized battery air pump, and inflated it with a quick harsh hiss and crackle.
Martha wadded the bubblepak helpfully into the hole, then climbed back out. Alex's cheap cuff emitted a loud hour chime. Martha glanced at her wrist, then back up at Alex again.
"Aren't you calibrated?" she said.
"Sorry, no." Alex lifted his wrist. "I couldn't figure out how to set the clock on this thing. Anyhow, it's not a real Trouper cuff like yours, it's just my sister's cheap wannabe Trouper cuff."
Martha sighed in exasperation. "Use the clock in the laptop, then. Get in, man, time's a-wastin'." She and Buzzard went to the front of the vehicle and climbed in.
The truck took off downhill, hit the highway, and headed north. It drove itself and was very quiet. Besides the thrum of tires on pavement, the loudest sound in the truck was the crinkling of Alex's bubblepak and paper suit as he elbowed bags aside and settled in place.
"Hey, Medicine Boy!" Buzzard said suddenly. "You like that ultralight?"
"Loved it!" Alex assured him. "My life began when I met you and your machinery, Boswell."
Buzzard snickered. "I knew you liked it, man."
Alex spotted a gray laptop under Boswell's driver seat and snagged it out. He opened it up, and placed the clock readout in the corner: 12 May, 2031, 9:11:46 4.M~ Then he started grepping at the hard disk. "Hey Buzzard, you got the Library of Congress in here," he said. "Nice machine!"
"That's the 2015 Library of Congress," Buzzard said proudly.
"Really?"
"Yeah, the one they released right after the data nationalizations," Buzzard said. "The whole on-line works! The complete set, no encryptions, no abridgments! They tried to recopyright a lot of that stuff, after the impeachments, y'know."
"Yeah, like the government could get it back after doing that," Alex sniffed.
"You'd be surprised how many losers just gave back that data!" Buzzard said darkly. "Sent federal cops out to raid the universities and stuff... Man, you'll get my Library of Congress when you pry my cold dead fingers off it!"
"I see you've got the 2029 release of the Library in here too.
"Yeah, I've got most of that one... there's some pretty good new stuff in that '29 release, but it's not like the classic 2015 set. I dunno, you can say what you want about the State of Emergency, but the Regime had some pretty dang good ideas about public domain."
Alex opened the 2015 Library, screened up a visualization of its data stacks, zipped down randomly through its cyberspace architecture through three orders of fractal magnitude, and punched at random into a little cream-yellow cube. The thing unfolded like the usual origami trick and he found himself gazing at a full-color digital replica of an illuminated twelfth-century French manuscript.
It was almost always like that when you screwed around with the Library. He'd hammered away in the Library on occasion, when absolutely sick of cable television, but the way he figured it, the big heap of electric text was way overrated. There were derelicts around who could fit all their material possessions in a paper bag, but they'd have a cheap laptop and some big chunk of the Library, and they'd crouch under a culvert with it, and peck around on it and fly around in it and read stuff and annotate it and hypertext it, and then they'd come up with some pathetic, shattered, crank, loony, paranoid theory as to what the hell had happened to them and their planet... . It almost beat drugs for turning smart people into human wreckage.
Alex looked up from the screen, bored. "What do you hack, Martha?"
"I hack kites," she told him. "Balloons, chaff, ultralights, parafoils... Chutes are my favorite, though. I like to structure-jump."
"You do structure hits, Martha?"
She whirled in her seat to glare at him. "Not structure hits, you moron! Structure jumps! I don't blow things up! I just climb up on top of things when the wind is right, and I jump off them with a parachute."
"Oh. I get it. Sorry." Alex thought about it. "What kinda things d'you jump off, Martha?"
"Bridges are pretty good," she said, relaxing a bit. "Mountains are great. Urban skyscrapers are mega-cool, but you have to worry about, like, private security guards and stupid city cops and moron straight civilians and stuff... . The coolest, though, is really big transmission towers."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah, I like the really big antique ones without any construction diamond in 'em." She paused. "That's how I lost my foot."
"Oh. Right. Okay." Alex nodded repeatedly. "How'd someone like you come to join the Storm Troupe?"
Martha shook her head. "I'll give you some advice, little dude. Don't ever ask people that."
Fair enough. Alex retreated back into the laptop screen.
They drove on. Every ten minutes Buzzard and Martha would stop to trade laconic updates with the Trouper base camp, or parley with Greg and Carol in the Dune Buggy Able, or send some side-of-the-mouth remark to Peter and Joanne in the Radar Bus. Their traffic was all acronyms and in-jokes and jargon. Every once in a while Martha would scrawl a quick note in grease pencil on the inside of the windshield. When Alex's cuff chimed again, she took it off his wrist, fixed it brusquely, and handed it back.
After a long hour on the road, Buzzard began methodically gnawing at a long strap of venison jerky. Martha started picking her way daintily through a little drawstring bag of salted sunflower seeds, tongue-flicking her chewed-up seed hulls through the half-open passenger window. Alex had a strong stomach-he could read text off a laptop in a moving vehicle without any trace of headache or motion sickness-but at the sight of this, he shut his laptop and his eyes, and tried to sleep a bit.
He lounged half-awake for a while, then he sank with unexpected speed and impetus into a deep healing doze. A month's worth of narcotic-suppressed REM sleep suddenly rose from his bloodstream's sediments and seized control of his frontal lobes. Vast glittering tinsel sheets of dream whipped and rippled past his inner eye, hyperactive visions of light and air and speed and weightlessness. .
Alex came to with a start and realized that the truck had stopped.
He sat up slowly in his nest of bubblepak, then climbed out the open back double doors into simmering, eye-hurting, late-morning sunlight. The Troupers had left the highway and worked their way up a scarcely used dirt track to the top of a low flat hill. The hill was one of the limestone rises typical of the region, a bush-spattered bump in the landscape that had tried and failed to become a mesa.