Heavy Weather

And there it sat, instantly gone as quiet as a coffee table, not ten meters away from them.

"All right," she said. "What is that thing?"

"It's a dope mule. From my friends in Matamoros."

"Oh, Jesus."

"Look," he said, "relax. It's just a cheaper street version of Charlie, your car! Charlie's a smuggler's vehicle, and this is a smuggler's vehicle. It's just that instead of having two hundred smart spokes and driver's seats and roll bars like that big kick-ass car does, it's only got one spoke. One spoke, and a gyroscope inside, and a global positioning system." He shrugged. "And some mega chip inside so it never runs into anything and no cop ever sees it."

"Oh," she groaned. "Yeah, this is great, Alex."

"It'll carry, I du

"Why didn't you tell me about this?"

"Are you kidding? Since when do I ask your permission to do anything?" He walked up to the mule.

She hurried after him. "You'd better not."

"Get away from there!" he yelped. "They're hot-wired." Jane jumped back warily, flinching, and Alex chuckled with pleasure. "Tamperproof! Put in the wrong password, and the sucker explodes on the spot and destroys all the evidence! And what's more-if you're not, like, their friend? Or they're tired of dealing with you? Then sometimes they just booby-trap it, and blow you away the second you touch the keypad."

He laughed. "Don't look so glum. That's all just legend, really. Doper brag talk. The dope vaqueros hardly ever blow anyone up. You and me both know the border doesn't mean anything anymore. There are no more borders. Just free and open markets!" He chuckled merrily. "They can send me whatever the hell they want. Dope, explosives, frozen human hearts, who cares? They're just another delivery service."

Alex punched a long string of numbers, with exaggerated care, into a telephone keypad welded into the top of the mule. The robot mulled the matter over, then hissed open on a stainless-steel hinge, showing a big rubber 0-ring around its midsection.

Alex started pulling out the goods. Lots of plastic-wrapped cloth. A pair of cowboy boots. A yellow cylinder tank. A plastic jug. Designer sunglasses in a shockproof case. A handgun.

Alex tried the sunglasses on immediately, clearly delighted with them. "Here, you can have this," he said, tossing her the handgun. "I'm not interested."

Jane caught it with a gasp. The handgun was all injection-molded ceramic and plastic, a short-barreled six-shot revolver. It felt hard as a rock and utterly lethal. It weighed about as much as a teacup. It would pass any metal detector in the world and had probably cost all of two dollars to make.

"You're full of shit!" she said. "If the Rangers found out about this, they'd go ape."

"Yeah, and the Houston cops wouldn't like it either, if the vaqueros were dumb enough to send a mule bouncin' right down the streets of Houston, but they're not go

"Carol isn't going to approve of this-"

"Oh, get off it!" Alex snapped. "Carol is bent! Carol loves this!" He gri

"I've never seen Carol or Greg commit any act of vandalism," Jane said with dignity.

"Yeah," he scoffed. "Besides helping you break into Mexican hospitals." He shook his head. "You're just pissed off because I didn't get you anything, aren't you? Well, there's a nice handgun for ya! If boyfriend gets wandering eyes, blow him away!" He laughed.

Jane stared at him. "You think this is fu

"Janey, it is fu

He kicked the paper suit off his feet, then stood on top of the paper and pulled off his right shoe. "The border is lucked, and the government is flicked!" He pulled off the left shoe and flung it aside. "And society is flicked, and the climate is really fucked. And the media are lucked, and the economy is lucked, and the smartest people in the world live like refugees and criminals!" He ripped the plasticwrap off a pair of patterned silk boxer shorts and stepped into them. "And nobody has any idea how to make things any better, and there isn't any way to make things better, and there isn't go

Alex climbed into a satiny pair of brown jeans, carefully tucking in the denim shirttails. "And what's more, right now I've got myself a really nice shirt. And real nice pants too. And boots too, look, these boots are hand-tooled Mexican leather, they're really beautiful." He unrolled a pair of thick cotton boot socks.

"The Troupe aren't go

"Janey, I don't give a rat's ass what your friends think about my goddamn clothes." He stepped into the socks, jammed his feet in the boots, then walked over to the robot mule, looked into its empty cavity one last time, and slammed its top.

After a three-second pause, the mule suddenly whipped its tripod shut and fired itself into the air. "If it were up to you and your friends," Alex said, watching it bounce madly away, "I'd be wearing plastic toilet paper the rest of my life. I'm not a weather refugee, and I'm not go

THE RANGER POSSE showed up at three that afternoon. Jane was unhappy to see them. She was never happy to see Rangers, and worse yet, she had a yeast infection and was ru

It wasn't the first time she'd had yeast. Yeast was common. The pollution from overuse of broad-scale antibiotics had made candida fiercer and scarier, the same way it had supercharged staph and flu and TB and all the rest. Candida hadn't bootstrapped its way up to the utter lethality of, say, Bengali cholera, but it had gotten a lot more contagious, and nowadays it actually was a genital infection that you could catch off a toilet seat.

A few discreet inquiries around camp established that none of the other Troupe women had yeast, so it had to be a repeated flare-up of her old curse, the yeast she'd caught back in 2027. That one had flared up in sullen little bouts of nastiness for almost six months, until her immune system had finally gotten on top of it. She'd hoped she had the yeast knocked down for good, but yeast was a lot like staph or herpes, it was always there lurking low-level, and it went crazy when it got a good excuse.