Heavy Weather

"They just couldn't stand it, that we were out here wreckin' stuff, and that we hadn't cleared out for good and gone exactly where the government said we should, when we should. That we didn't pay taxes, or get vaccinations, or have any rule books." She stirred her stew, and tasted it, and started crumbling a dried ancho pepper.

"Sure, every once in a while a few wrecker boys would get all liquored up and smash up some stuff in towns where there were still people livin'. That happened, and I'm not denyin' it. We weren't all perfect. But the Rangers used that as their excuse for everything. They came right after the wreckiñ' gangs, the Rangers did. They just wouldn't let us live. They broke us up, and they shot us and arrested us, and they put us away in camps."

"What did you do then?"

"Well, I didn't get arrested myself, so I went up to Oklahoma to meet some real Comanches."~

"Really?"

"Hell yes! There's more Comanches up in Oklahoma right now, after everything, than there were when the tribe was out riding the free range. That's the weirdest part of it. The Comanches didn't die out or anything. They just got changed and moved. They been up there multiplying, just like every other human being in the world. There's thousands of Comanches. They're farmers, and they got little stores and stuff... they're big on churches, y'know, big churchgoing people. None of that weirdo cult stuff, but good old-fashioned Christians. I wouldn't call 'em prosperous, they're pretty damned poor people for Americans, but you see a lot worse on TV."

"I see. So what did you learn from that?"

Ellen Mae laughed. "Well, I married one... . But they know about as much about living off the buffalo as you know about being a German spy, kid. I du

She sighed. "That's a long time. I mean, I grew up m West Texas. I was a nice girl from a decent ranchin' family, went to high school, went to church, watched TV, bought dresses and shoes and went to dances.... We thought we owned this land. How much of that life do you think is go

"Well, I wouldn't say that," Alex said. "After all, there's government records. The government's real goad about that. Databases and statistics. Stuff on platinum disks that they keep in salt mines."

"Sure, and in Anadarko there's American Indian museums where everything has got a nice tag on it, but it's gone, kid! The Comanches got smashed and blown away! We got smashed and blown away! First we did it to them.. And then we did it to the land. And then we did it to ourselves. And after we're gone for good, I don't know why the hell anybody is go

Alex was impressed. He'd seen old people talking openly about the declining state-of-the-world on old people's television talk shows, the crustier, more old-fashioned talk shows, without many video effects, where people never did very much. But old people usually seemed pretty embarrassed to bring up such matters right in front of young people. Probably because of the inherent implication that the world's old people were ecological criminals. Who probably ought to be hauled into court by a transgenerational tribunal and tried for atrocities against the biosphere.

Not that old people would ever allow this to happen, though. There were shitloads of old people still ru

Alex kinda figured that there might be some kind of reckoning someday. When everybody who might be tound guilty was safely dead and buried. It would probably be like it had been, back when the communist government finally fell in China. Lots of tribunals of guys in suits issuing severe public reprimands to lots of elderly dead people.

"Well, I can tell that you learned something useful," Alex said. "'Cause I never saw anybody eat like this Troupe eats."

"Off the land," Ellen Mae said, nodding. "It ain't easy, that's for sure. The old species balance, the original ecology, is completely shot out here. Believe me, it's nothing like the High Plains used to be, and it never will be again. There's all these foreign weeds, invader species, depleted soils, and the climate's crazy. But the West Texas flora was always pretty well adapted to severe weather. So there's still Comanche food around. Stuff like pigweed. Hell, pig-weed's an amaranth, it's a really nutritious grain, but it'll grow in a crack in a sidewalk. Of course, you'd never think to eat pigweed if you didn't already know what it was."

"Right," Alex said. He'd never seen pigweed-or, at least, he'd never recognized it. He felt a dreadful certainty that he was going to have to eat some of it pretty soon.

"It's been a long time since anybody was out here, gathering the wild forage. But now the grazing pressure is off the native plants. And there's no more plowing, or crops, or herbicides, or fertilizers. So even though the weather's bad, some of those native plants are coming back pretty strongly. Stuff like poppymallow, and devil's claw, and prairie turnip. There's nowhere near enough for a cityful of civilized people. But for a little tribe of lering nomads, who can cover a lot of ground, well, there's quite a lot of food out here, especially in spring and summer."

"I guess the Troupe was pretty lucky that you ended up g them," Alex said.

"No," said Ellen Mae, "there wasn't anything like luck to that."

AFTER JERRY AND Sam had pored over the forecast, and Joe Brasseur had run through a legal database of likely areas to squat, they picked a destination and a

The Troupe broke camp.

Joe Brasseur, the oldest member of the Troupe, had once referred to breaking camp as "labor-intensive." Jane found that a hilariously old-fashioned term, but she understood what it meant, all right-there was no way to shrug the work off onto machines, so everybody involved just plain had to sweat.

The Troupe pulled up all the carpets, beat a hundred kilos of dust out of them, and rolled them up neatly. They deflated the bubblepak, and rolled that up too. Peter, Martha, and Rick deftly unstacked the towers-a nerve-racking business to watch-while Greg and Carol and Mickey went after the instrumentation and the wind generator.

Then there were the tepees and the yurts to strip, collapse, and pack, and the systems to shut down and uncable and stow away. And then there would be the bonfire, and the last big meal in camp, and the ritual bath... . Jane pitched in headlong. She felt good after a day off, she felt alert and strong. There was a lot to do, but she knew how to do it. She was ready to work, and she would do it in one daylong blur of harnessed nervous energy, and when it was over, she would sleep in the Troupe bus in the moving dark, and she would feel very satisfied.

She was hauling a bundled stack of tepee poles to one of the trucks when she saw Alex slouching past her.

She scarcely recognized her brother at first: a strange, hunched, gnomelike figure, less like a Troupe wa