“She’s cool. Come on.” He hurried the man away towards the doors. The shorter man looked like he was about to explode. After they disappeared Cally surreptitiously checked the sidearm Reefer had left for a full magazine and a round in the chamber, carefully smudging her prints as she set it back down. Not that hers were recorded anywhere, but it didn’t pay to take chances.
He came back out alone with a large bucket of salt water and shoveled a bunch of soporific crabs into it, muttering under his breath as he hefted the full load. “It’s, like, okay, Marilyn. It’s all cool. My… friend, he’s, like, shy, you know? We’ll be totally back on the road in five minutes.”
Her body language was casual and relaxed, but very still, until he came back out alone, emptier backpack on his shoulder, closed the back of the van, and came to the driver’s side, motioning her to move over. She kept one eye on the mirrors while she did it, relaxing infinitesimally after they made it onto 275 headed out of town.
“Like, excuse me for that scene back there, and thanks once again for righteously saving my ass. With the driving thing, you know?” He looked across at her, speculatively. “You know, you’re pretty cool in a pinch, Marilyn. You ever get, like, tired of college life and want a job, you come look me up. Little training and you could be pretty good at this.”
“Why, thank you, Reefer.” She looked out the window and bit her lip softly. “I’m hoping to make it on my art or my music, but you know what life’s like. I’m really flattered. I guess I’ll feel better knowing I’ve got a potential job if things, you know, don’t work out.”
He grunted and popped another piece of gum and they lapsed into silence as they followed the road through the deep cuts of the Smokies, some with loose gray shale Galplased in place, with a line of drainage holes down at the base, some of deep, black coal, rising from a Galplased base in great open hills of midnight, turning to a thin brown layer of topsoil mere inches from the upper surface of scrub and trees.
“Makes you understand the economics of strip mining,” she commented, waving one hand at the mountain of coal cut open by the interstate’s passage.
“Oh, for sure. Completely bogus for the environment, though.”
“So were the Posties.”
“Still are, man. Like, the long term damage from the grat and abat alone. Totally bogus. Damn aliens.”
“Oh, are you a humanist? I didn’t take you for the type, Reef.” She looked at him, interested.
“Well, I mean, the Crabs once you get past that whole bouncing thing seem like pretty laid back dudes. Conceited, but you get the feeling that they’re really going after the whole enlightenment thing. And the little green guys are just shy. The Frogs kind of creep me out, though. It’s like you never know if you’re being watched. The Darhel are… too corporate, you know? And, well, we all know about the Posties. I just think Earth was, you know, better, before any of them showed up. I mean, I’m glad we didn’t get eaten, but I kinda wish they’d go away now. I’m not, like, a card-carrying humanist or anything, but, I can, like, see their point. You know, we saved each other, now go the hell away. But I don’t, like, say so in public too much. Unhealthy.”
“I suppose. We’ve got humanists on campus, but it’s always seemed too much like conspiracy stuff to me.” She shrugged.
“Yeah, well, you’re what, about twenty? I’m twice that, man. If you had, like, lived and seen the saner-sounding humanists die off young, and the lunatic fringe doing just fine, and some of the accidents and such taking the sane ones looking… funny. Like, man, it smells so totally bogus… I just, you know, keep my eyes open and my mouth shut. Oh, I don’t, like, buy into that whole Darhel conspiracy theory stuff. I think it’s probably more the big corporations trying to grab as much money as they can — the military industrial complex all over again, you know. The only way to, like, fight the whole establishment thing is to drop out, you know? Sometimes I feel like the only way to get back to, you know, the garden this planet could be is for all the aliens to pack up and go home and then, you know, make the big corporations illegal. Then we could all, like, live free, you know? But all I can do is, like, live as free as I can and, like, try not to run my mouth enough to wind up on the corporations’ list, you know?”
“I guess I can see both sides. I mean, I had this pretty cool art ethics class that talked about the pressures we could expect in various kinds of jobs and their effect on creative authenticity. On the other hand, one of the most coveted class spots on campus is the live modeling ‘Aliens in Art.’ I still can’t believe I got in. They have to keep the numbers of students really small. The thikp… tchpith… crab was really funny. Said something about thinking the peaceful pursuit of art was good therapy for bloodthirsty carnivore barbarians.” She grinned. “Only he was so hard to draw, because they can’t stay still, you know?”
He chuckled and they drifted off into silence again, him concentrating on the road and her reading another of Marilyn’s romance novels.
Eventually the mountains gave way to rolling foothills of cedar, different kinds of leafy trees she couldn’t have named if you’d paid her, and the occasional weeping willow. The less mountainous the terrain got, the more the hills were covered with strips of white or black board fences with horses or ponies grazing in the fields of lush grass, many of them females with foals. She had been disappointed the first time she visited Kentucky to find that the grass was not at all blue. Even now that she knew better it was vaguely disappointing.
The extraterrestrial market for horses had been one of the stranger outcomes of contact with the Galactics. The Indowy had been delighted with the intelligent, sociable herbivores, and even the Tchpth had been known to comment that perhaps Earth had an incipient intelligent and civilized species. While the Himmit didn’t actually buy pets, they seemed fascinated by the interaction between equine and Indowy. The result was that the horse farms of Kentucky occupied more acreage in the state than ever and were currently selling as many animals as they could breed, particularly ponies and miniatures, as pets — making the industry one of the more reliable planetary sources of FedCreds. Once, they even passed a field where a couple of ponies were being inspected by an Indowy buyer, who seemed not the least perturbed that the mare and her foal were gently lipping its fur.
Reefer had phoned ahead as soon as they started to get into horse country, so when they pulled off the interstate into a Waffle House parking lot on the way through Lexington, he parked behind the restaurant right next to an ancient green SUV, whose driver put down his PDA and walked around to open the back glass.
“Why don’t you go in and get us a seat? Might as well grab lunch while we’re here.” The deadhead nodded towards the restaurant. It was a busy, major street with a lot of restaurants, but he had parked to minimize the number of people who’d see him make his sale. Unfortunately, that meant she was hit in the face with a strong reek of Dumpster as she got out onto the hot asphalt, and she couldn’t help looking a bit longingly at the upscale Italian chain restaurant across the street on the next block as she walked around to get to the Waffle House entrance.
She was seated at the counter, a seat saved beside her, had already gotten her coffee and was picking at a pecan waffle when he came in. It didn’t take him long to wolf down an omelet and Coke, then they were back on the road. Even though they didn’t go into the center of the city, almost all of Lexington was certified historic. Her throat felt a bit funny and she wondered if maybe she was coming down with a touch of a cold, or maybe allergies. It was like driving through a tiny slice of prewar Earth, and she focused determinedly on her screen as the landscape flashed past the windows at speed, slowing down occasionally when a chirping from somewhere under the dashboard betrayed the highly illegal piece of equipment hiding underneath.