The two Troupers took such loving pride in assembling their box kite that Alex felt quite touched. He felt a vague urge to photograph them, as if they were ethnic exotics doing some difficult folk dance.
When they'd popped and snapped and wedged the box kite's various spars and crossbars into place, the kite was two meters wide. Martha had to steady it with both her hands-not because of its weight, which was negligible, but because of its eagerness to catch the wind.
Buzzard unreeled its cable then. The kite string looked very much like old-fashioned cable-television line. Buzzard anchored the kite's double guy wires to a specialized collar on the end of the cable, then carefully screwed the cable's end jack onto a threaded knob on the center of one hollow spar.
The kite suddenly leaped into eerie life and shook itself like a panicked pterodactyl. "Yo!" Buzzard cried. "Didn't you check the diagnostics on this sucker?"
"It's a bad boot, man," Martha yelled, her slippers skidding in the dust as she fought the kite. "Power-down!"
Buzzard jumped in the back of the truck and hit keys on the kite's laptop. The kite went dead again.
"Smart cloth," Martha explained, shaking the kite with a mix of fondness and annoyance. "Smart enough to screw up bad sometimes, but it's got lift potential right off the scale."
"She's a good machine," Buzzard hedged, rebooting the kite and patiently watching the start-u p progressing on the screen. "On a good day, you can float her off the thermal from a camp stove."
The kite came to life again suddenly, thrumming like a drumhead. "That's more like it," Martha said. She carried the kite into the light prevailing breeze.
Buzzard clamped the kite's spool to the rear bumper of the truck and watched as Martha drew line out a dozen meters. "Go!" he yelled, and Martha threw the big kite with an overhand heave, and it leaped silently into the sky.
The kite paid out line on its spool, with deft little self-calculated reelings and unreelings, until it caught a faster wind. It took on height quickly then, with deliberate speed, arcing and rearcing upward, in a neat set of airborne half parabolas.
"Smart cloth," Alex said, impressed despite himself. "That is very sweet... how many megs does she carry?"
"Oh, just a couple hundred," Buzzard said modestly. "It doesn't take much to fly a kite."
Martha then took it upon herself to hack the ceramic blockhouse of the tower. The tower's stolid, windowless blockhouse looked practically indestructible, an operational necessity in an area practically abandoned. Alex had not seen any wasteland structure vandals yet: word was that the major gangs had been ruthlessly tracked and exterminated by hard-riding posses of Texas Rangers. He'd been assured, though, that there were still a few structure vandals around: looters, scavengers, burglars, hobbyist lunatics from out of the cities. They tended to travel in packs.
Martha established that the relay tower belonged to a bank: it was an electronic-funds-transfer cell. The fact that the cell was out in the middle of nowhere suggested that the funds under transference were not entirely of a state-sanctioned variety. She then began the tedious but largely automated process of figuring out how to use it for free. Almost all networks had some diplomatic recognition of other networks, especially the public-service kinds. If you brought up the proper sequence of requests, in the proper shelter of network identity, you could win a smaller or greater degree of free access.
In the meantime, Buzzard took out his ornithopters. These were hollow-boned winged flying drones with clever foamed-metal joints and a hide of individual black plastic "feathers." The three omithopters could easily pass for actual buzzards at a distance. Provided, that is, that one failed to notice their thin extrudable antennas and their naked, stripped-metal heads, which were binocular video-cams spaced at the width of human eyes.
It took a lot of computational power to manage the act of winged flight. Like most buzzards, the omithopters spent much of their time passively soaring, wings spread to glide, the algorithmic chips in their wired bellies half shut down and merely sipping power. Only when they hit real turbulence would the 'thopters begin to outfly actual birds by an order of magnitude. The machines looked frail and dainty, but they were hatchlings of a military technology.
With the ease of long habit, Buzzard hooked the first ornithopter's breastbone to the notched end of a long throwing stick. He preened the machine's feathered wings back, then ran forward across the hilltop with the long hopping steps of a javelineer and flung the machine skyward with a two-handed over-the-shoulder whip of his arms.
The ornithopter caught itself in midair with a distantly audible whuff of its wings, wheeled aside with dainty computational precision, and began to climb.
Buzzard swaggered back to the rear of the truck, his throwing stick balanced over his shoulders and his long floppy hands draped over it. "Fetch me out another birdie," he told Alex.
Alex rose from his seat on the bumper and dimbed into the truck. He detached the second ornithopter from its plastic wall clips and carried it out.
"What's that really big bundle next to the wheel well?" Alex said.
"That's the paraglider," Buzzard said. "We won't be using it today, but we like to carry it. In case we want to, you know, fly up there in actuality."
"It's a manned paraglider?"
"Yeah."
"Well, I want to fly it."
Buzzard tucked the bundled ornithopter in the crook of his arm and pulled off his sunglasses. "Look, kid. You got to know something about flying before you can ride one of those. That thing doesn't even have a motor. It's an actual glider, and we have to tow it off the back of the truck."
"Well, I'm game. Let's go."
"That's cute," Buzzard said, grinning at him with a flash of yellow teeth. "But your sister would get on my case. Because you would fall right out the sky, and be a bloody heap of roadkill."
Alex considered this. "I want you to teach me, then, Boswell."
Buzzard shrugged. "That's a big weight for me to pull, Medicine Boy. What's in it for me?"
Alex frowned. "Well, what the hell do you want? I've got money."
"Shit," Buzzard said, glancing uphill at Martha, still hard at work accessing the tower. "Don't let Martha hear you say that. She hates it when people try to pull money stuff inside the Troupe. Nobody ever offers us money who's not a geek wannabe or a goddamn tourist." Buzzard stalked away deliberately, hooked his second bird to the throwing stick, and flung it into the sky.
Alex waited for him to return and handed him the third flier from the truck. "Why does Martha have to know?" he persisted. "Can't we work this out between us? I want to fly."
"'Cause she'd find out, man," Buzzard said, annoyed. "She's not stupid! Janey used to throw money around, and you shoulda seen what happened. First month Janey was here, she and Martha had it out in a major mega-scrap."
Alex's eyes widened. "What?"
"It was a brawl, man! They went at it tooth and nail. Screamin', punchin', knocking each other in the dirt-2- man, it was beautiful!" Buzzard grinned, in happy reminiscence. "I never heard Janey scream like that! Except when she and Jerry are gettin' it on after a chase, that is."
"Holy cow," Alex said slowly. He metabolized the information. "Who won?"
"Call it a draw," Buzzard judged. "If Martha had two real feet, she'd have kicked Janey's ass fer sure. .
Martha's skinny but she's strong, man, she can do those climber's chin-ups forever. But Janey's big and sturdy. And when she gets real excited, she just goes nonlinear. She's a wild woman.~~