CHAPTER 7
Gilson's contraband had run from Matamoros to Piedras Negras in Mexico, to Junction and Big Spring in Texas, to New Denver. Bits of it tended to flake off en route, like blocks of salt from a camel caravan, tribute to whichever bandits wore the badges during passage. Edwards County, Texas, a weathered piece of South Texas Wild Country, boasted twenty-four hundred people and twice that many limestone caverns honeycombing the heights of Edwards Plateau. Corrugated like Dakota badlands, covered with shrubs, it was an ideal setting for shipment and storage of contraband by the barnload. Gilson never new the debt he accumulated from folks in Edwards County. Anybody with a holo there could afford an unscrambler.
Seventeen-year-old Sandra Grange lived in broken oak-and-cedar land East of Rocksprings, the Edwards County seat, and swapped a three-kilo string of dried peppers for her unscrambler. In the current barter system, two kilos would have been fairer; but barter is more personal than money, and it was understood that Sandy Grange must always pay a bit more. The way that young woman spoiled her mute child, the women whispered, was a crime; and to come down from Sutton County insisting the spindly sprat was her sister! No big sister treated young'uns so well. The comely corn-silk-haired Sandy, they concluded, was simply too proud to tell the truth; claimed she was only seventeen but was probably twenty if she was the mother of silent, big-eyed, five-year-old Childe.
Had there been no Childe, Sandy's age would still have been suspect. She showed great patience but scant interest to the young ranchers around Rocksprings, clearly bored by their efforts to court her. She coveted dictionaries, earned a few twenty-peso pieces and household tools correcting notices and ads for a printer in town, and accepted the town's mild disapproval without complaint. Sandy Grange had known much worse during the war.
On the night of Ralph Gilson's disappearance, Sandy treated herself to an hour of holovision, wheeling her Lectroped into the snug soddy, the kind locals called ‘two rooms and a path'. The two-wheeler's storage batteries yielded steadier power than her creaky fabric-bladed windmill, and furnished a reading lamp too.
The Ciudad Acuna station came in clear. Her voice soft-husky with affection, she called at the door:
"Come on in, Childe, and watch holo with me." Childe, with the most unlikely playmate on Edwards Plateau, had ridden piggyback quite enough for one day.
After a moment the plank door swung open and Childe, slender where Sandy had once been plump, bounded into the half-submerged soddy. Childe was a houseful of kid, a dancing delight radiating affection for those few she trusted. "Want your lap," she piped, and swarmed up to sit on Sandy's legs, sidesaddle. In infancy, Childe had lived the life of an Apache; blistering heat, freezing 'blue northers', malnutrition, and hostile strangers comprising her enemies. She remembered no mother but Sandy, and no other human companion. Childe knew the value of silence in the presence of danger, and by now she was thought mute by all but Sandy and one other. The sisters made a symbiotic pair: Sandy the sturdy thoughtful leader, Childe the spindly little scout who knew the languages of Wild Country better than most adult trappers.
Earlier, Childe had taken Sandy's hand to lead her into dusk-shadowed garden furrows, to show her sister why they must not drive away the coyote that skulked near the garden. Sandy could not afford a fence and placed rabbit snares among the young crops — but there were far more rabbits than snares.
"Coyote's the best trap," Childe had insisted, pronouncing it 'ky-oat' in Sandy's own Wild Country lingo.
She proved her contention with the tracks left by rabbit and coyote.
Now, half-watching the ancient cartoons on Mexico's XEPN holovision, Sandy directed her thoughts from the hapless animated coyote on holo to the shrewd mangy specimen which, she admitted, did patrol her garden. Were the rabbits innocent through their ignorance of guilt? Was ignorance of the law, in fact, the very truest defense? Well, — not when the coyote's justice was like the government's. Sandy had been too young to remember the more liberal prewar form of justice. She knew that she preferred Wild Country and the barter system over the kind of regulation imposed to the North. Any system that would take Childe away to a Mormon orphanage was one Sandy intended to avoid — and so Sandy Grange's personal combat against Streamlined America had begun as flight; South from the few tentacles of officialdom, from her home in Sutton County. Too many acquaintances there would have helped take Childe away
'for her own good', and those Sandy trusted had all been taken by the war. Their father, dead of radiation sickness; their mother, shotgunned by bandits; Sandy's friend, Ted Quantrill, perhaps dead on some Asian battlefield.
On balance, Sandy preferred to live on her land, bought with contraband she had found. Increasingly she lived with books: The Way Things Work; Five Acres and Independence; Baby and Child Care', Twain and Doyle, Traven and Dostoyevsky; and of course the poetry, Benton and Reiss, Neruda, Durrell, and the bits she wrote in her daily journal. Language, she decided, could be a luxury that paid for itself.
Presently, Sandy placed the sleeping Childe on their bed, unplugged the holo, took her journal from the high shelf of valuables and sat cross-legged with the Lectroped's lamp to illumine the pages. Sandy's journal was no longer the product of indifferent grammar multiplied by creative spelling. Her books, her teachers, tutored her daily. Not that isolation and spare time for books could entirely explain Sandy's astonishing grasp of language; it may have been a genetic gift.
Between her twelfth and fourteenth birthdays Sandy knew a verbal blossoming, a becoming, that she could not explain. To call it a sea change would be to ravage a metaphor; for Sandy had never seen a body of salt water larger than a pot of soup. All right, then: demonstrably a South Texas ' land change; a broken prairie change. A Wild Country change.
Sandy's journal, 16 May
Replanted tomatoes from coldframes. Popcorn & peppers flourishing. Childe is wiser than I in ecology, for however sad his harmonies, that coyote is my garden sentry!
Thoughts on holo: it furnishes more lies than laughter. Surely no announcer can love language, the way they all butcher it. I hear so many castoff holo phrases when in town. No wonder I sorrow for the users. It must show in my face, and I cannot afford to be haughty. N.B.: ck. 'haughty' vs. 'haut'. French? Latin?
Childe's expertise in tracking brought me a queasy moment at dusk. Why? I have seen enough violence to harden me— or have I?
Childe reads animal signatures, crossing, doubling back;A fable of flight from cruel attack. Ebony droplets end one track— For, in moonlight, blood is black.
CHAPTER 8
The holo image of Eve Simpson, once a buxom child star and now IEE's director of media research, was familiar to millions; a sultry-voiced pneumatic package and, by remote means, frequent FBN interviewer of important people. Few, including those interviewed, would have recognized the hundred kilos of Eve's real flesh which had swollen with her clout.
The public Eve, interviews and all, was an electronically-managed image. The private Eve was bloated, brilliant, willful, and in some ways unmanageable.
Boren Mills had lusted first for her famous body, enjoyed it less as he wallowed in it more, and had finally turned toward still younger, less pillowy embraces. But by that time Mills knew the inner Eve, her mind incisive as a microtome, as voracious for media techniques as she was for sex. Mills's intellectual arrogance was tempered by the knowledge that Eve Simpson's subtleties rivaled his own. By now each knew the others uses. And abuses.