"You're gonna stay with the Troupe awhile, Alex?"
"I oughta make you take me home right away." He balanced the pick handle on his collarbone, clumsy and restless. "But I got no home to go to at the moment. Mexico is out, for obvious reasons. I'm sure not going back home to Papa in Houston. Pa p a acts even stranger than you do, and those clinic people might be lookin' for me there.... And anyway, there are possibilities in a setup like this. It's stupid for me to stay here, but I think I might do okay for awhile, if I can get everybody to mostly ignore me. Especially you." He turned away.
"Alex," she said.
He looked over his shoulder. "What?"
"Learn to hack something. Like everybody else does. Just so you can get along better."
He nodded. "Okay, Juanita. Have it your way."
ALEX FOLLOWED ELLEN Mae's precise but extremely confusing directions, got turned around several times, and finally found the paper-tagged stick she had driven into the earth to mark the spot. The fluttering paper tag marked a low trailing vine on the ground. The vine was about two meters long, with hairy, pointed, conical leaves, and it smelled rank and fetid. It harbored a large population of small black-and-orange beetles. It was called a buffalo gourd.
Alex scraped the vine aside with the flat blade of the pick, got a two-handed choke-up grip on the shaft, and started to chop at the yellow earth. He was impressed with the pick. The tool was well-balanced, sharp, and in good condition. Unfortunately he was nowhere near strong enough to use it properly.
Alex chipped, gnawed, and scraped his way several centimeters down into the miserable, unforgiving soil, until the sweat stood out all over his ribs and his pipe-stem arms trembled.
When he spotted the buried root of a buffalo gourd, he stared at it in amazement for some time, then left the pick beside the hole and walked slowly back to camp.
Carol Cooper had pulled a pair of lattices from the wall of the garage yurt. The highway maintenance hulk rolled out through the big new gap.
Carol watched the machine lumber downhill while she folded and tied the wooden lattices. Alex joined her, tugging down his mask.
The machine hit the highway, hesitated, and began creeping along south at ten klicks an hour.
"Well, let's hope the poor damn thing gets to paint a few road stripes before they shoot it to hell and gone again," Carol said, stacking the lattices in the back of a truck. "What's the deal, dude? I'm busy."
"Carol, what's the weirdest thing you've got around here?"
"What in hell are you talking about?"
"What have you got, that's really strange, only nobody else ever hacks with it?"
"Oh," Carol said. "I get your drift." She grinned. "There's a touch of that in every Trouper. Old-fashioned hacker gadget jones. Toy hunger, right?" Carol looked around the garage, at the scattered tools, the bench mounts, the table vise, an industrial glue sprayer. "You wanna help me pack all this crap? Rudy and Greg are coming later."
"I'd like to," Alex lied, "but I got another assignment."
"Well, I'm gonna be glad to have this thing off my hands, anyhow. You want to play with something, you can play with this bastard." Carol walked to the welding bench and pulled off a long, dusty coil of black cable. It looked like a pneumatic feedline for the welding torch, a big coil of thin black plastic gas pipe. As she caught it up and brought it to him, though, Alex saw that the apparent pipe was actually sleek black braided cord.
One end of the cord ended in a flat battery unit, with a belt attachment, a small readout screen, and a control glove.
"Ever seen one of these before?"
"Well, I've certainly seen a battery and a control glove," Alex said.
She handed him the works. "Yeah, that's a damn good battery! Superconductive. You could drive a motorbike with that battery. And here I am, keeping that sucker charged up to no good end-nobody ever uses this damn thing!" She frowned. "Of course, if you work that battery down, kid, you're gonna have to pull some weight to make up for that."
CHAPTER 6
"I'm pulling, I'm pulling," Alex told her. "My people in Matamoros have got that shipment ready, they're just waiting for us to give them the coordinates."
"Standard satellite global-position coordinates?"
"That's what they use, all right," he said. "Just like the Troupe, like the army, just like everybody."
"I can give you those anytime, it's no big secret where we're pitching camp."
"That's good. I'll try and phone 'em in, if I can still get that encrypted line."
'No problema," Carol said, bored. She watched as• Alex hefted the cable, then slid the whole coil of it over his right shoulder. It rested there easily. The cable weighed only a couple of kilos, but it felt bizarrely serpentine and supple, somehow dry and greasy at the same time. It was as thick as his little finger, and maybe twenty meters long. "What is this thing exactly?"
"Smart rope."
"What's smart about it?"
"Well, there's this chip in the battery box that understands knot topology. You know what topology is?"
"It's a kind of math about deforming the geometry of space."
"Great."
"Anyhow, that rope is braided from a lot of different cabling. Got sensor cable, power cable, and this is the tricky part, electric reactive fiber. Okay? It'll stretch, it'll contract-hard and fast-it can bend and wiggle anywhere along the length. The damn thing can tie itself in knots."
"Like the smart cloth in kites," Alex said, "except it's a line, not a sheet."
"That's right."
"Why'd you try to spook me with that topology crap, then? You just use the damned glove, right?"
"Right," she said. "Except technically, you won't understand what you're actually doing."
"So what? Who cares?"
Carol sighed. "Look, just take the damn thing out of here, and try not to hurt yourself. I don't wanna see that rope again, okay? I thought it was really cool hardware when I first heard about it, and I spent a lot of Janey's money to buy it. I was sure there'd be a million uses for smart rope around a camp, and hell, there are a million uses-so many goddamn uses that nobody ever uses it! Nobody ever remembers that it's around! Nobody's ever liked it! It gives everybody the creeps."
"Okay!" said Alex cheerfully. This last little speech had sent his morale soaring. He liked the smart rope already. He was glad to have it. He was kinda sorry he didn't have two of them. "I'll take real good care of it. Don't forget about the phone. Hasta Ia uista."
Alex left the tent and shuffled out of camp again, back to the root from hell. He scraped and chipped and dug at the root for a while, until he was Out of breath again. Then he stretched the rope out to its full twenty-pace length across the weedy earth. He turned the power switch on.
The rope lay there, totally inert. The little readout screen suggested: INPUT PARAMETERS FOR HYPERBOLIC CURVATURE.
He tried on the power glove. It had the usual knuckle sensors along the back and a thousand little beaded pressure cells across the palms and the fingers. It was a right-hand glove, and the fit was pretty good. The fingertips were free, and the glove slid very nicely along the rope, a " mix of grip and slickness.
Alex punched a few numbers at random into the readout box, then flopped the rope around with the glove. Nothing much happened. He put the rope aside and wore the glove to dig with the pick. The glove had a good grip and helped quite a bit with the incipient blisters.
Along about sundown, Peter and Rick showed up. They were wearing paper gear fresh off the roll, and they'd been bathed and their hair was combed.