It was 2031 now. The music was distant now, like a whiff of good rice wine at the bottom of an empty bottle. It still touched something inside her, but it didn't touch all of her. It didn't touch all the new parts.
ALEX WOKE IN wind and darkness. Rapid warbling music was creeping up his shins. The music oozed like syrup into his skull and its beat gently pummeled him into full consciousness. With awareness came recognition: Thai pop gibberish. No other noise had quite that kind of high-pitched paralyzing sweetness.
Alex turned his head-with a painless squeaking dee p in the vertebrae of his neck-and he saw, without much real surprise, his sister. Barely lit by the tiny amber glow of a map light, Juanita sat perched in the driver's seat. Her head was thrown back, her elbows were propped on her bare, hairy knees, and she was munching government-issue granola from a paper bag.
The sky above them was a great black colander of stars.
Alex closed his eyes again and took a slow deep breath. His lungs felt truly marvelous. Normally his lungs were two wadded tissues of pain, two blood-soaked sponges, his life's two premiere burdens. But now they had somehow transmuted into two spotless clean-room bags, two crisp high-tech sacs of oiled wax paper, two glorious life-giving organs. Alex had a savage cramp in his lower back, and his feet and hands were so chilled by the whipping night wind that they felt like the feet and hands of a wax dummy, but that didn't matter. That was beside the point.
He couldn't believe how wonderful it felt just to sit there breathing.
Even his nose was clear. His sinuses. His sinuses felt as if they'd been steam-cleaned. He could smell the wind. There was sage in it, the fervent bitter reek of a ten-thousand-year-old Texas desert gone mad with repeated heavy rains. He could even smell the sweet reek of federally subsidized dietary sucrose on Juanita's munching teeth. Everything smelled so lovely.
Except for himself.
Alex shifted in the seat and stretched. His spine popped in four places, and blood began to tingle back into his numbed bare feet. He coughed. Dense liquid shifted tidally, deep within his chest. He coughed again, twice. Dregs of goo heaved and fizzed within his tubercles. The sensation was truly bizarre, and remarkably interesting. The slime they'd pumped into him tasted pretty bad, oiling the back of his tongue with a thick bitter nastiness, but its effect on his lungs and throat was ambrosial. He wiped happy tears from his eyes with the back of his wrist.
He was wearing a paper refugee suit. He'd never actually worn one before, but he'd certainly seen plenty of them. Paper suits were the basic native garb of the planet's derelict population. A modern American paper refugee suit, though utterly worthless and disposable, was a very high-tech creation. Alex could tell, just by stirring around inside it, that the suit's design had absorbed the full creative intelligence of dozens of federal emergency-management experts. Whole man-years, and untold trillions of CAD-CAM cycles, had vanished into the suit s design, from the microscopic scale of its vapor-breathing little paper pores, up to the cunning human ergonomics of its accordioned shoulder seams. The paper suit was light and airy, and though it flapped a little in the night wind, it kept him surprisingly warm. It worked far better than paper clothing had any natural right to work.
But, of course, it was still paper clothing, and it still didn't work all that well.
"Nice fashion choice," Alex said. His larynx had gone slick with oil, and his voice was a garbled croon.
Juanita leaned forward, turned up the interior lights, and shut off her music.
"You're awake now, huh?"
Alex nodded.
Juanita touched another button at the dash. Fabric burst from a fat slot above the windshield and flung itself above their heads. The fabric hissed, flopped, sealed itself, and became a roof of bubbled membrane. A sunburned dome of stiff ribbed fabric that looked as dry and brown and tough as the shell of a desert tortoise.
Juanita turned to him in the sudden bright windless silence inside the car. "How d'you feel?"
"I've been worse," Alex whispered gluily, and grinned a little. "Yeah. I feel pretty good."
"I'm glad to hear that, Alex. 'Cause it's no picnic, where we're going."
Alex tried to clear his throat. Blood-hot oil clung to his vocal cords. "Where are we?"
"Highway 83, West Texas. We just passed Junction, headed toward San Angelo. I'm taking you where I live."
Juanita stared at him, as if expecting him to crumble to pieces on the spot. "Actually I don't live anywhere, anymore. But I'm taking you to the people I stay with."
"Nice of you to ask permission, Janey."
She said nothing.
This was a different kind of silence from his sister. Not irritated silence. And not barely controlled fury. A deep, steely silence.
Alex was nonplussed. He'd never been on good terms with his sister, but in the past he'd always been able to come in under her radar. He'd always been able to get at her. Even when worse came to worst, he could always successfully catch some piece of her in his teeth, and twist.
"You shouldn't be doing this, you know," he said. "They were helping me."
Silence.
"You can't stop me from going back there if I want to."
"I don't think you're gonna want to go back," Juanita told him. "That clinic won't be happy to see you again. I had to break you Out. I structure-hit the building and I glue-gunned a guard."
"You what?"
"Ever seen a guy get glue-gunned? It's not pretty. Especially when he takes it right in the face." Juanita knocked back a palmful of granola. "He'd have yelled, though, if I hadn't glued him," she said, munching deliberately. "I had to clear his nose with acetone, once I had him pinned. Otherwise he'd have smothered to death right there on the spot." She swallowed, and laughed. "I'd bet good money he's still stuck to the wall."
"You're kidding, right?"
She shook her head. "Look, you're sitting here, aren't you? How do you think you got into this car? Did you think those hustlers were just gonna let you go? When I broke into your clinic room, you were upside down, naked, unconscious, and strapped to a metal rack."
"Jesus," Alex said. He ran his hand through his hair and shivered. His hair was filthy-he was filthy all over, a mess of fever sweat and human grease. "You're telling me you broke me out of the clinic? Personally? Jesus, Janey, couldn't you have sued them or something?"
"I'm a busy woman now, Alex. I don't have time for lawsuits." Juanita pulled her feet Out of her trail boots, dropping the boots onto the floorboard and crossing her sock-clad legs in the seat. She looked at him, her hazel eyes narrowing. "I guess there might be some trouble if you went back and informed against me to the local authorities.
"No way," he said.
"You wouldn't sue me or anything?"
"Well, I wouldn't rule out a lawsuit completely," Alex said, "not considering Dad's idea of family finances.
But there's no way I need Mexican police to deal with my own sister." He rubbed his greasy, stubbled chin. "At least, I never did before. What the hell has gotten into you?"
"Plenty. A lot." She nodded. "You'll see."
"What did you do to your hair?"
She laughed.
"You gave up dyeing it," he concluded. "That's its natural color, right? Brownish. Did you stop paying people to cut it?"