Out beyond the roadside flowers was the collapsed barbed-wire fencing of a dead cattle ranch, the long-deserted pastureland overrun with mesquite. They passed the long dawn shadows of a decapitated oil pump, with a half-dozen rust-streaked storage tanks for West Texas crude, a substance now vanished like the auk. The invisible tonnage of drill pipe was quietly rusting deep in the rocky flesh of the earth, invisible to any human eye, but nonetheless there for the geological ages, a snapped-off rotting proboscis from a swatted greenhouse-effect mosquito.
Here and there along the highway dead windmills loomed, their tapered tin vanes shot to hell, their concrete cisterns cracked and dust empty above an aquifer leached to bare sandstone... . They'd sucked the landscape dry, and abandoned their mechanical vampire teeth in place, like the torn-off mandibles of a tick.
They'd mined the place of everything in it that could be sold on the market; and then they'd given up. But after that, the greenhouse rains had come. You could tell that the plant life here wasn't at all used to the kindness of rain. The plants weren't a bit better than humanity, really-just another ugly, nasty, acquisitive species, born to suffer, and expecting little... . But the rain had come anyway. Now the Texas High Plains were glutted with rain, and with rich, warm, carbonated air, all under a blazing greenhouse sun. It was Oz, for a cactus. Arcadia for mesquite. Every kind of evil weed that stank, stabbed, or scratched was strutting its stuff like nouveau riche Texas hicks with an oil strike.
Juanita touched her music box.
"Can you knock it off with that Thai stuff?"
"What do you want me to play?"
"Something a little less incongruous. Some kind of-I dunno-crazed lonesome fiddle music. Cedar flutes and bone whistles. Listening to that tropical stuff out here in the savage boonies makes me feel like I'm losing my mmd."
"Alex, you don't know anything about surviving out here. You need enough imagination to at least think you're somewhere else, or the plains can really get to you." She laughed. "You'll get the Long Stare, brother. Just ride off into that landscape and kill-and-eat jackrabbits till you die. Hey, you want to really go run?"
"Huh?"
Juanita raised her voice. "Charlie?"
"Yes, Juanita?" the car said.
Alex was surprised. "Hey Janey, how come this car calls you Juanita?"
"Never mind. Long story." She gripped his shoulder. "You buckled in tight? You feel up to this, right? Not carsick or anything?"
Alex patted the smart cushions beneath him. "Not in a reactive seat like this one. I'd have better luck getting carsick on a living-room couch."
"Yeah, well, you're about to learn why they installed that kind of seat in here." Juanita reached over, took the paper bag of granola from his lap, saw it was empty, then folded it neatly and stuck it in the waistband of her denim shorts. "Charlie, do a local map."
The car extruded a flexible tongue of white screen from the dash. A high-definition map bloomed across the screen, topography at the meter scale. The map flashed briefly into a comparative series of ultradetailed satellite renditions. Juanita picked up the loose end of the map gently, examined the flickering imagery, then tapped the screen with her finger. "Charlie, see this little hill?"
"Two thousand three hundred twelve meters north," the car replied, outlining the crest of the hill in orange.
"Charlie, take us there, fast."
The car slowed and pulled over off the road shoulder, its prow toward the hill.
"Hold tight," Juanita said. Then the car leaped into the air.
It got up speed in the first dozen meters, bounding, and then began to clear the tops of mesquite trees. The car moved in a wild series of twists and hissing pounces; it was like being blown through the air by jets. Alex felt the seat's support cells repeatedly catching him, rippling like the flesh of a running animal.
"Look at those wheels now!" Juanita shouted gleefully, pointing. "See, they're not even rolling. Hell, they're not even wheels. The spokes are smart pistons. Feels like a hovercraft, right?"
Alex nodded dumbly.
"We're hovering on computation. The big power drain in this car isn't the engine. It's the sensors and the circuits that keep us from hitting stuff while we jump!" Juanita crowed with laughter. "Isn't this wild? God bless the military!"
They cleared the last of the thick brush, and then the car slid unerringly up the cracked slope of the hill, its pistons barely raising dust. Alex could tell from the eerie smoothness of the ride that the car never skipped, and never skidded. The intelligent pads at the base of each spoke contacted the earth with a dainty and tentative touch. Then the pistons set themselves firmly and punched up against the diamond hub, lifting the car in repeated, near-silent, precise staccato, faster than any human eye or ear could follow. It was like riding the back of a liquefied cheetah.
At the hill's crest, the car stopped gently, as if settling into tar. "Time for a stretch," Juanita announced, her hazel eyes glowing with delight. She put down the fabric top, and a morning breeze swept the now silent car. "Let's get out."
"I got no shoes," Alex realized.
Hell, I forgot... . Oh well." She jammed her sock-clad feet into her unlaced trail boots, opened the door, and stepped out alone. She shook herself cheerfully and stretched through some kind of calisthenic routine, then gazed across the landscape with one hand raised to her eyes, like a minor-league Sacagawea. To Alex, the view from the hilltop was dismally unimpressive; clumps of mesquite and cedar, sparse leathery grasses, and three distant, squalid little hills. The entire plain was ancient seafloor, flat as the bottom of a drained pond. The hills were tired lumps of limestone that, unlike the rest of the landscape, had not quite collapsed yet.
"This car must have cost you plenty," he said.
"No, it was cheap, considering! Government tries to keep 'em rare, though, because of the security threat." The vivid glare of dawn was spilling all across the landscape, the orange-yellow sun too bright to look at. "You can order a car like this to follow a map top speed, to any locale. And they're damn hard to spot, when they jump top speed cross-country, ignoring all the roads. With a big truck bomb aboard, you can structure-hit like nobody's business." She smiled cheerfully. "They did that a lot in the Malaysian resettlement wars-this is a Malaysian attack vehicle. War surplus. Of course, they're real popular with border smugglers now." Juanita turned to face the wind and ran both hands through her hair. "I think they're still technically illegal for civilians in the U.S. In some states, anyhow."
"Texas?"
"Heck no, anything's legal in Texas now... . Anyway, Texas Rangers love these cars. Cheap, fast, ignores roads-what's not to like? The only real problem is the batteries. They're superconductives."
"Superconductives sure aren't cheap."
"No, and they wear Out fast too. But they're getting better... . They'll be everywhere someday, cars like this. Just for fun. A car just for fun, isn't that a wild idea?" She strolled around the car, almost on tiptoe in her big but lightweight trail boots. "It's a mega-tasty design. Don't you love the look of it?" She patted the jointed rim of the wheel. "It's that truly elegant design that people always use when they make things to kill each other."
She flipped open a small metal toolbox in back, behind the passenger compartment, and fished out a pair of sunglasses. The reactive lenses went dark the moment she slipped them on. "Charlie is my flying hell spider... . A real beauty, isn't he... ? I love him, really... . Except for the goddamned hopeless military interface!" Juanita scowled beneath her shades. "I don't know what morons the Pentagon got to hack interface, but they should have been choked in their bunkers!"