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Gresham dismounted, shouldering a duffel bag. He pulled his curved machete and began chopping bushes. "The planes are worst after dark," he said. "They use infrareds. If they hit us at all, they'll probably take out the scoot." He began placing bushes over the buggy, camouflaging it. "So we'll sleep away from it. With the baggage."
"All right." Laura crawled from the back of the buggy, battered, filthy, bone-weary. "What can I do to help?"
"You can dress yourself for the desert. Try the knapsack."
She took the knapsack around the far side of the truck and fumbled it open. Shirts. Spare sandals.' A long, coarse tunic of washed-out blue, wrinkled and wadded and stained. She shrugged out of her prison blouse.
God, she was so thin. She could see every rib. Thin and old and exhausted, like something that ought to be killed. She tu
Gresham, as if he had embraced her.
Strange thought, dizzying. She was embarrassed. She was a spectacle, pathetic. Gresham couldn't want a madwoman....
The ground rose up and struck her. She lay in a heap of her own arms and legs, wondering. A muddle of time passed, vague pain and rushing waves of dizziness.
Gresham was gripping her arms.
She looked at him blankly. He gave her water. The water revived her enough to feel her own distress. "You passed out," he said. She nodded, understanding for the first time.
Gresham picked her up. He carried her like a bundle of balloons; she felt light, hollow, bird-boned.
There was a lean-to pegged to the wall of the arroyo.' A
windbreak with a short arching tent roof of desert camo-cloth.
Under the roof a dark figure crouched over the white-striped prison form of Katje-another of the Tuareg raiders, a long sniper's rifle strapped to his back. Gresham set Laura down, exchanged words with the Tuareg, who nodded somberly.
Laura crawled into the tent, felt rough wool beneath her fingers-a carpet.
She curled up on it. The Tuareg was humming tonelessly to himself, under a ramp of blazing stars.
She was woken by the steaming smell of tea. It was barely dawn, a red auroral brightening in the east. Someone had thrown a warm rug over her during the night. She had a pillow too, a burlap bag stenciled in weird angular script. She sat up, aching.
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 ta
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 go
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 go
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.