Heavy Weather

Ellen Mae only looked puzzled; she clearly didn't grasp the basic thrill involved in this hobby. Alex continued: "My real specialty is modern Mexican paper comics. The fotonovelas, and the true-crime manga-rags, and the UFOzines and stuff. They're an antique medium in a modern context, and they're this kind of cool nightmare folk art, really... . I like them, and they're kinda hard to get. I own lots, though." He smiled.

"What do you do with them?" Ellen Mae said.

"I du

Ellen Mae looked at him so strangely then that Alex realized he was wading in too deep. He gave her his best smile, humbly offered up a couple of well-peeled roots, and asked, "What do you hack, Ellen Mae?"

"I hack Comanche," Ellen Mae said.

"What's that mean?"

"I was born Out here in West Texas," she told him. "I'm a native."

"Really." She didn't look like any Comanche Indian. She looked like a big Anglo woman with middle-aged spread in a bloodstained paper suit.

"I grew up out here on a ranch, back when everything was dying out... . There never were a lot of people in this part of Texas. Most of the people just packed up and left, after the aquifers went. And then during the State of Emergency, when the really big drought hit? Well, everything and everybody out here just blew away, like so much dust."

Alex nodded helpfully and started on another root with his ceramic peeler.

"Everybody who stayed behind-well, they pretty much stopped farming and ranching, and went into scavenging. Wrecking work, in the ghost towns." She shrugged. "They didn't call it structure hitting back then, because we didn't blow up anything that wasn't already abandoned. I mean, we had reasons to blow stuff up. We wanted to make some money. We didn't blow stuff up just because we liked to watch stuff fall down-all that bullshit came later."

"Okay," Alex said, sipping his brew.

"I started to think it through back then, you know. ....ee, Alex, the truth is, nobody should have ever done any farming out here. Ever. This land just wasn't cut Out for farming. And ranching-ru

Alex nodded.

"This was nomad land. The High Plains-they were black with buffalo from here straight to Canada! The biggest migrating herds of animals ever seen in history. They killed the buffalo off with repeating rifles, in twenty years. It took another hundred fifty years to drain off all the water underground, and of course by then the atmosphere was wrecked too... . But see, it was all a really bad mistake. The people who settled out here-we destroyed this place. And we were destroyed for doing it."

Alex said nothing.

"At the time, you know-people just couldn't believe it. They couldn't believe that this huge area of the good old USA would just end up abandoned by everybody, that the people who settled the land and tamed it-they used to say that a lot, 'taming the land'-that those people would just be driven right out of existence. I mean, at the time it was unprecedented. Seemed really unlikely and abnormal. Of course, it's a pretty damn common business now.

But at the time there was a lot of government talk about how it was all just temporary, that they were go

"Dreamlands, yeah," Alex said, "I've been in a few of those."

"And the strangest thing was, that it had all happened before, but nobody learned the lesson. Because it happened to the Comanches. The Comanches lived out here two hundred years-off the land, off the buffalo. But when those buffalo went, well, they were just wiped out. Starved right out of existence. Had to move up to Oklahoma, and live in reservation camps eating food that the government. gave 'em, just like us low-down modern weather tramps. No fight left in 'em." She sighed. "See, Alex, if you got the basics of life, then you can fight for your place in the world. But if you got no food and water, then you got no place at all. You just leave. Go away, or die."

"Right," Alex said. "I get it." It was clearly doing Ellen Mae some good to get this matter off her chest. It was obvious that she'd discussed all this before. Probably this was a standard lecture she gave all the Troupe wa

Normally, in a discussion of this sort, Alex would have pitched right in with a few devil's-advocate arguments, just to mess everything up and kinda make it more interesting. Under the circumstances, though, he thought it was wisest to let Ellen Mae talk it out. A good idea, for instance, not to mention the many other places in the world where relocations had been a hundred times worse than in West Texas. After all, the people in West Texas had had the giant, well-developed United States to help them. So that they didn't starve on the spot. They didn't break out in eye-gouging, street-to-street, structure-hitting, down-and-dirty little ethnic wars. And they weren't wiped out by massive septic plagues, all the little predatory bugs that jumped out of the woodwork whenever people got seriously disorganized: dysentery, cholera, typhus, malaria, hantavirus.

It had been pretty damned stupid to dry up the aquifers in West Texas, but it didn't really compare in scale with the planet's truly monumental ecoblunders. Slowly poisoning the finest cropland in China, Egypt, and India with too much salt from irrigation, for instance. Clear-cutting the jungles in Indonesia and Brazil. The spread of the Sahara.

But why bring all that up? It wouldn't make Ellen Mae feel any better. If you lost everything, it didn't really ease your pain much to know that other people, somewhere else, might be hurting even worse. People who wanted to judge your pain by your privileges were mean-spirited people-the kind of people who thought it must be big fun to be an invalid, as long as you were rich. Alex knew better. Sure, if he'd been poor, he'd have been dead long ago-he knew that. He wasn't poor. He was a rich kid, and if he had any say about it, he was going to stay that way. But that didn't make his life a picnic. Let her talk.

"When I figured that much out," Ellen Mae said, "I decided I was go

"How come?"

She paused. "Alex, there are twokin~ of people in this world. The people who don't wa

Alex grunted. He was of a different kind, personally. He was the kind who didn't mind knowing, but didn't feel up to devoting much energy to finding out.

"So I read a lot about Comanches. I mean, with the towns empty and the cattle gone, it was a lot easier to understand that kind of nomad life... . That's one good thing about living nowadays. You can read about anything, for nothing, anywhere where there's a laptop screen. So, I read all these on-line books about Comanches, and how they lived, while I was living off the backs of trucks, hunting, and gathering scrap metal.

"And that's when I started to really understand this land. For instance, why us wreckers got so much heat from the Texas Rangers. Why the Rangers used to just show up out here, and chase down our convoys, and shoot us. They had databases and cell phones and all, but there wasn't anything cute and modern about the goddamned Texas Rangers-the Rangers in the 2020s were exactly the same as the goddamned Texas Rangers in the 1 880s! And if you were some nomad, living out of a tent in West Texas, then the Rangers just weren't go