She detached all her tools from the webbing belt, carefully set the tools and the belt into the metal kit box in back.
The car crossed before the Mercado Maclovio Herrera, heading toward the old international bridge. She hoped nobody was in the mood to take any special notice of Charlie. On a dark night, the car could pass for a standard smuggler's vehicle, a vehicle rather too common to notice in towns either side of the border.
Jane pulled into the darkest corner of a parking lot, beside a gigantic, thriving supermarket tobacconist's. Even at midnight, rings of Yankee addicts were steadily packing their lungs with smoke. Jane yanked another paper refugee jut from the U.S. government carton, and in a seven minute determined struggle, she crammed Alex's arms and into the suit and zipped him up to the neck. She didn't ye any shoes for Alex. She should have thought about goddamned shoes.
When they crossed the flood-swollen Rio Grande, Jane grabbed the car's roll bar, stood up in her seat, and flung all the criminal evidence over the railing. Let them arrest her for littering. Or maybe for illegal discharge into an aquifer.
Jane pulled over at a U.S. Customs booth. An elderly customs officer emerged, with long snow-white hair, a walrus mustache, and a hand-carved mahogany cane. He tottered over to her car.
When Jane saw how proudly and carefully the old gentleman had darned and brushed his U.S. Customs jacket, she took an instant liking to him.
"Nice car," he drawled.
"Thank you, sir."
The officer tapped one of Charlie's spring-mounted antennas with his cane. "Ex-military stuff?"
"Yeah!" Jane told him brightly. "Actually it's a knock-off of an American Special Forces all-terrain vehicle." Jane paused. "It's been kind of modified."
"Looks that way..." He nodded, moving spryly around it. There wasn't room inside Charlie for any serious amount of contraband. Unlike the usual smuggler's vehicle, Charlie didn't have a trunk. It had a short flatbed, now empty, and the car's engine was grafted into the axles, spokes, and hubs. Charlie basically resembled a double glass coffin mounted onto a wheeled spider.
"You're letting this car drive itself tonight, miss?"
The old man had actually called her "miss." Jane couldn't recall anyone calling her "miss" since she'd turned twelve years old. She was charmed by the Customs man's stately anachronism. She smiled at him.
"It's got a license," Jane said. "Want to see it?"
"That's okay," he grumbled. "What's with Junior here?"
"Big party in town," Jane said. "He overdid it tonight, and he's passed out. You know how it is with kids these days."
The Customs officer looked at her with pity. "You didn't mean to tell me that, did you, miss? You meant to tell me the truth, and say that he's sick, didn't you?"
Jane felt her face go stiff.
The old man frowned. "Miss, I can recognize this situation. God knows we see it often enough, down here. Your friend there is sick, and he's wasted too, on who-knows-what.... We don't allow that kind of goings-on here on American soil... . And there's some dang good reasons why it's not allowed up here...
Jane said nothing.
"I'm not telling you this just to hear myself chatter, y'know."
"Look, Officer," Jane said. "We're American citizens. We're not criminals." She held up her bare wrist. "If you want to turn us back from here, then we'll go back to Mexico. But if I had anything I really wanted to hide from you, then I wouldn't even stop here at all, would I? I wouldn't even take the road. This is an all-terrain vehicle, okay? I can ford the river anywhere I want, and be in San Antonio in two hours."
The Customs officer tapped the toe of his polished shoe with his cane.
"If you want to lecture me, Officer, okay, that's fine. I'm listening. I even agree with you. But get real."
He stared briefly into her eyes, then looked aside and rubbed his mustache. "It floats too, huh?"
"Of course this car floats. It swims! I know it looks like solid steel, but that's all foamed metal there. Without the batteries, the whole car only weighs ninety kilos. I can deadlift this car all by myself!"
Jane stopped. The old man seemed so crushed that she felt quite sorry for him. "Come on, Officer. I can't be telling you anything new here, right? Haven't you ever caught one of these things before?"
"To tell you the truth, miss, we don't even bother catching 'em nowadays. Not cost-effective." He peeled off an adhesive sticker and attached it to Charlie's front roll bar. "Y'all take care now." He waved them on: Jane let the car drive. They were through Laredo and onto the highway in short order. Even with the prospect of a ten-hour drive in darkness, Jane felt far too wired to sleep. She knew from experience that she was about to pull another all-nighter. She'd be up and jumping till 8:00 A.M., then grab maybe three hours' doze, and be back up and after it again, with nothing to show for it but a sharpened temper. She'd never been much good at sleeping, and life around Jerry Mulcahey's people had only wound her up tighter.
As the city lights of Laredo faded behind her, stars poured out overhead. It was a clear spring night, a little mare's-tail cirrus on the western horizon. She'd once heard Jerry say that it bothered him to ride a car in complete darkness. Jerry was thirty-two, and he could remember when people did most of their own driving, and even the robots always left their headlights on. Jane, by contrast, found the darkness soothing. If there was anything really boring about the experience of driving at night, it was that grim chore of gripping a wheel with your own hands and staring stiff-necked for hours into a narrow cone of glare. In darkness you could see the open sky. The big dark Texas sky, that great abyss.
And you could hear. Except for the steady rush of wind, Charlie was almost silent; a faint whir of tough plastic tread lightly kissing the highway, the frictionless skid of diamond axles. Jane had taped or glued everything on the car that would rattle. Jane did not permit her machines to rattle.
Jane heard Alex gurgling as he breathed. She turned on a small interior light and checked her brother again. In the feeble amber glow he looked very bad. At his best, Alex was not an attractive young man: gaunt, hollow-chested, pop-eyed, with a thin bladelike nose and clever narrow bird-claw hands. But she'd never seen him look this supremely awful. Alex had become a repulsive physical presence, a collapsed little goblin. His matted blond hair stood up in tufts across his skull, and he stank. Not just sweat reek-Jane was used to people who stank of sweat and camp smoke. A light but definite chemical stench emanated from her brother's flesh. They'd been marinating him in narcotics.
She touched his cheek. His skin was chilly and damp now, like the skin on a tapioca pudding. The paper refugee suit, still fresh from the carton but already badly wadded, made him look like a storm victim in deep shock, someone freshly yanked from wreckage. The kind of person whose demand for your help and attention was utter, total, immediate-and probably more than you could bear.
Jane turned on the radio, heard a great deal of en-cry p ted traffic from banks, navigation beacons, and hams, and turned it off again. Funny what had happened to the broadcast radio spectrum. She turned on the car's music l~ox. It held every piece of music that had ever meant anything to her, including stuff from her early childhood that she'd never managed to erase. Even with sixteen-digit digital precision, everything she'd ever recorded took up only a few hundred megabytes, the merest sliver in the cavernous memory of a modern music box.
Jane played some Thai pop music, cheerful energetic bonging and strumming. There'd been a time, back in design school, when Thai pop music had meant a lot to her. When it seemed that a few dozen wild kids in Bangkok were the last people on earth who really knew what it meant to have some honest fun. She'd never figured out why this lovely burst of creativity had happened in Bangkok. With AIDS still methodically eating its way into the vast human carcass of Asia, Bangkok certainly wasn't any happier than most other places. Apparently the late 2020s had just somehow been Bangkok's global moment to shine. It was genuinely happy music, bright, clever music, like a gift to the world. It felt so new and fresh, and she'd listened to it and felt in her bones what it meant to be a woman of the 2020s, alive inside, and aware inside.