The Tuareg handed her a cup, gently, courteously, as if it were something precious. The hot tea was dark brown and frothy and sweet, with a sharp minty reek. Laura sipped it. It had been boiled, not brewed, and it hit her like a hard narcotic, astringent and strong. It was foul, but she could feel it toughening her throat like tanned leather, bracing her for another day's survival.
The Tuareg half turned away, shyly, and discreetly lifted his veil. He slurped noisily, appreciatively. Then he opened a drawstring bag and offered it to her. Little brown pellets of something-like peanuts. Some kind of dried scop. It tasted like sugared sawdust. Breakfast. She ate two handfuls.
Gresham emerged from the lightening gloom, an enormous figure wrapped to the eyes, yet another bag slung over his shoulder. He was tossing handfuls of something over the dirt, with swift, ritual gestures. Tracer dust, maybe? She had no idea.
"She made it through the night," Gresham told her, dust- ing his hands. "Even spoke a little this morning. Stubborn, those Boers."
Laura stood up, painfully. She felt ashamed, "I'm not much use, am I?"
"It's not your world, is it." Gresham helped the Tuareg unpeg and fold the tent. "Not much pursuit, this time.... We planted some heat flares, maybe that sidetracked the planes.
Or they may think we were Azanian commandos.... I hope so. We might provoke something interesting."
His relish terrified her. "But if FACT has the Bomb.... You can't provoke people who can destroy whole cities!"
He was unimpressed. "The world's full of cities. " Gresham glanced at a wristwatch on a braided leather bracelet. "Got a long day ahead, let's move."
He'd repacked the buggy-shifted some of his cargo to another truck. Katje lay in a nest of carpet, shaded by the tarp, her eyes open.
"Good morning," she whispered.
Laura sat beside her, bracing her back and legs. Gresham kicked the buggy into motion. It whined reluctantly as it picked up speed-battery draining, she thought.
She took Katje's wrist. Light, fluttery pulse. "We're gonna get you back to your own people, Katje."
Katje blinked, her lids veiny and pale. She forced the words. "He is a savage, an anarchist...."
"Try to rest. You and I, we're gonna live through this.
Live to tell about it." The sun peered over the horizon, a vivid yellow blister of heat.
Time passed, and the heat mounted sullenly as the miles passed. They were leaving the deep Sahara and crossing country with something more akin to soil. This had been grazing land once-they passed the mummies of dead cattle, ancient bone stick-puppets in cracked rags of leather.
She had never realized the scale of the African disaster. It was continental, planetary. They had traveled hundreds of miles without glimpsing another human being, without seeing anything but a few wheeling birds and the tracks of lizards.
She'd thought Gresham was being cavalier, deliberately bru- tal, but she understood now how truly little he must care for
FACT and its weaponry. They lived here, it was their home.
Atomic bombardment could scarcely have made it worse. It would only make more of it.
At midafternoon a FACT pursuit plane found one of the
Tuareg buggies and torched it. Laura never even saw the plane, no sign of the deadly encounter except a distant column of smoke. They stopped and sought cover for half an hour, until the drone had exhausted its fuel or ammo.
Flies found them immediately as they waited. Huge, bold
Saharan flies that settled on Katje's blood-stained clothes like magnets. They had to be knocked loose, slapped away, be- fore they would leave. Even then they moved only in short buzzing arcs and lit again. Laura fought them grimly, wincing as they landed on her goggles, tried to sip moisture from her nose and lips.
At last the scattered caravan passed signals by their semaphore.
The driver had survived unwounded; a companion had picked him up and packed out the usable wreckage.
"Well, that's torn it," Gresham told her as they drove on.
From somewhere he had dug up a battered pair of mirrored sunglasses. "They know where we're heading now, if they didn't before. If we had any sense we'd lie low, rest up, work on the vehicles. "
"But she'll die."
"The odds say she won't even make it through the night."
"If she can make it, then we can, too."
"Not a bad bet," he said.
They stopped after dusk in a dead farming village of roof- less, wind-carved adobe walls. There were thornbushes in the ruins of a corral and a long, creeping gully had split the village threshing ground. The soil in the rudimentary irrigation ditches was so heavily salinized that it gleamed with a salted crust. The deep stone well was dry. People had lived here once-generation after generation, a thousand tribal years.
They left the buggy hidden in one of the ruined houses and set up camp in the depths of a gully, under the stars. Laura had more strength this time-she was no longer giddy and beaten. The desert had sand-blasted her down to some reflexive layer of vitality. She had given up worrying. It was an animal's asceticism.
Gresham set up the tent and heated a bowl of soup with an electric coil. Then he vanished, off on foot to check on some outflung post of his caravan. Laura sipped the oily protein broth gratefully. The smell of it woke Katje where she lay.
"Hungry," she whispered.
"No, you shouldn't eat."
"Please, I must. I must, just a little. I don't want to die hungry. "
Laura thought it over. Soup. It wasn't much worse than water, surely.
"You've been eating," Katje accused her, her eyes glazed and ghostly. "You had so much. And I had nothing."
"All right,- but not too much."
"You can spare it."
"I'm trying to think of what's best for you. No answer, just pain-brimming eyes full of suspicion and fever- ish hope. Laura tilted the bowl and Katje gulped desperately.
"God, that's so much better." She smiled, an act of heart- breaking courage. "I feel better.... Thank you so much."
She curled away, breathing harshly.
Laura leaned back in her sweat-stiff djellaba and dozed off.
She woke when she sensed Gresham climbing into the lean-to.
It was bitterly cold again, that lunar Saharan cold, and she could feet heat radiating off the bulk of him, large and male and carnivorous. She sat up and helped him kick his way under the carpet.
"We made good time today," he murmured. The soft voice of the desert, a bare disturbance of the silence. "If she lives, we can make it to her camp by midmorning. I hope the place isn't full of Azanian commandos. The long arm of imperialist law and order."
" `Imperialist.' That word doesn't mean anything to me."
"You gotta hand it to 'em," Gresham said. He was-looking down at Katje, who lay heavily, unconscious. "Once it looked like their little anthill was sure to go, but they pulled through somehow.... The rest of Africa has fallen apart, and every year they move a little farther north, them and their fucking cops and rule books."
"They're better than FACT! At least they help."
"Hell, Laura, half of FACT are white fascists who split when South Africa went one-man, one-vote. There's not a dime's worth of difference.... Your doctor friend may have a carrot instead of a stick, but the carrot's just the stick by other means. "
"I don't understand." It seemed so unfair. "What do you want?"
"I want freedom." He fumbled in his duffel bag. "There's more to us than you'd think, Laura, seeing us on the run like this. The Inadin Cultural Revolution-it's not just another bullshit cover name, they are cultural, they're fighting for it, dying for it.... Not that what we have is pure and noble, but the lines crossed here. The line of population and the line of resources. They crossed in Africa at a place called disaster.