However, the hill had a respectably sized relay tower on it, with its own concrete-embedded solar array and a small windowless cement blockhouse. Buzzard and Martha had parked, and they'd laced a section of blue fabric to the side of the truck's roof. They were stretching the fabric out on a pair of sticks to form a sunshade veranda.
"What's up?" Alex said.
Buzzard had slung a long narrow-billed black cap over his balding noggin, the base of its bill resting on the outsized nose bridge of a pair of insectile mirrorshades. "Well," he allowed, "we'll put up a relay kite on some co-ax, boot the packet relay, try and tap in on this tower node... and then maybe launch a couple ornithopters."
"You can go back to sleep if you want," Martha offered.
"No, that's okay," said Alex, rubbing his eyes. He envied Buzzard the sunglasses. They were a matter of survival out here.
Alex shook the stiffness out of his back and gazed over the landscape, shading his eyes right-handed. This had once been cattle country, of a sort; never thriving, but a place you could squeeze a living from, if you owned enough of it. Alex could trace the still-lingering ligature scars of rusted and collapsed barbed-wire fencing, old scalpel-straight incisions across the greenly flourishing wild expanses of bunchgrass and grama and needle grass and weed. Since the mass evacuations and the livestock die-offs, much of the abandoned pastureland had grown up in mesquite.
Here, however, the mesquite was mysteriously dead: brown and leafless and twisted, the narrow limbs peeling leprous rotten gray bark. Stranger yet, there was a broad path broken through the dead mesquite forest, a series of curved arcs like the stamping of a gigantic horseshoe. The dead forest was scarred with ragged, overlapping capital Cs, some of them half a kilometer across. It looked as if somebody had tried to set a robot bulldozer on the pasture, to knock the dead wood down, but the dozer bad suffered some weird variety of major software malf.
"How come all those mesquite trees are dead down there?" he said. "Looks like herbicide."
Martha shook her head. "No, dude. Drought."
"What the beck kind of drought can kill a mesquite tree?"
"Look, dude. If it doesn't rain at all, for more than a year, then everything dies. Mesquite, cactus, everything. Everything around this place died, fifteen years ago."
"Heavy weather," Buzzard said somberly.
Martha nodded. "It looks pretty good right now, but that's because all this grass and stuff came back from seed, and this county has been getting a lot of rain lately. But man, that's why nobody can live out here anymore. There's no water left underground, nothing left in the aquifer, so whenever a drought hits, it hits bad. You can't water your stock, so the cattle die of thirst and you go broke, just like that." Martha snapped her fingers. "And you sure can't farm, 'cause there's no irrigation. Anyway, those new-style genetic crops with the chlorophyll hack, they need a lot of steady water to keep up those super-production rates."
"I see," Alex said. He thought it over. "But there's plenty of grass growing wild Out there now. You could still make some money if you drove cattle back and forth all over the rangeland, and didn't keep 'em all confined in one ranch."
Martha laughed. "Sure, dude. You could cattle-drive 'em up the old Chisolm Trail and slaughter 'em in Topeka, just like the old days, if they'd let you. You're not the first to think of that idea. But there's no free range anymore. The white man still owns all this land, okay? The range war is over, and the Comanches lost big time."
"But the land's not worth anything to anybody now," Alex said.
"It's still private property. There's still a little bit of money in the mineral rights and oil rights. Sometimes biomass companies come out and reap off the brush, and turn it to gasohol and feedstocks and stuff. It's all in state courts, all absentees and heirs and such, it's a god-awful mess."
"We're trespassing right now," Buzzard announced.
"Legally speaking. That's why the Troupe's got its own lawyer."
"Joe Brasseur's a pretty good guy, for a lawyer," Martha allowed tolerantly. "He's got friends in Austin."
"Okay," Alex said. "I get it with the legal angle. So what happened down there with the bulldozer? Somebody trying to clear off the pastureland?"
Martha and Buzzard traded glances, then burst into laughter.
"A bulldozer." Buzzard chuckled. "What a geek. A bulldozer. This kid is the tenderfoot dude wannabe geek of all time!" He clutched his shaking ribs below his black cotton midriff.
Martha pounded Buzzard's back with the flat of her hand. "Sorry," she said, controlling her smirk. "Boswell gets like this sometimes... . Alex, try and imagine a big wind, okay? A really, really, big wind."
"You're not telling me that's a tornado track, are you?"
"Yeah, it is. About five years old."
Alex stared at it. "I thought tornadoes Just flattened everything in their path."
"Yeah, an F-4 or F-5 will do that for sure, but that was a little one, maybe F-2, tops. Those curves in the damage path, those are real typical. They're called suction spots. A little vortex that's inside the big vortex, but those suction spots always pack the most punch."
Alex stared downhill at the broken path through the dead mesquite. He could understand it now: those overlapping C-shaped marks were the scars of some narrow spike of savage energy, a scythe embedded in the rim of a bigger wheel, slashing through the trees again and again as the funnel cycled forward. The twister had pulled dead trees apart and left their limbs as mangled, dangling debris, but the lethal suction spot had splintereened everything it touched, snapping trunks off at ground level, ripping roots up in dense shattered mats, and spewing branches aside as a wooden salad of chunks and matchsticks.
He licked dry lips. "I get it. Very tasty... did you see this happen? Did you chase this one, back then?"
Martha shook her head. "We can't chase 'em all, dude. We're after the big ones."
Buzzard lifted his shades, wiped tears of laughter, and adjusted the cap on his sweating scalp. "The F-6," he said, sobering. "We want the F-6, Medicine Boy."
"Are we gonna find an F-6 today?" Alex said.
"Not today," Buzzard said. "But if there's ever one around, Jerry can find it for us." He stepped into the back of the truck.
Alex stared, meditatively, at the twister's scarred track. Martha edged closer to him and lowered her voice. "You're not scared now, are you?"
"No, Martha," he said deliberately. "I'm not afraid."
She believed him. "I could tell that about you, when they were stunting you in the ultralight. You're like your sister, only not so . .. I dunno ... not so flicking classy and perfect."
"Not the words I'd have chosen," Alex told her.
"Well, about the F-6," Martha confided quickly, glancing over her shoulder. "The thing is-it's virtual. There's never been any actual F-6 tornado in the real-life atmosphere. The F-6 only lives in Jerry's math simulations. But when the F-6 hits, the Troupe will be there. And we'll document it!"
Buzzard emerged from the truck with a long bundle of spars and cloth and a thick spool of kite cable. He and Martha set to work. The kite was made of a very unusual cloth: like watered blue silk with flat plastic laths half-melted into the fabric. The plastic had an embedded grid of hair-thin ribs of wiring.