might long for an open outpouring of his love, even while knowing it might destroy them both.
Presently, striding through fragrant grasses on his promised heading, Quantrill heard a familiar soft drone in his helmet sensors and, almost at the same moment, 'Gotcha,' from Grenier in his commset. Moments later he was snapping carabiners, exhaling slowly through his nose to keep swirling grass chaff out of his personal pipes. A sneezing fit was a common hazard when you ran beneath a sprint chopper. The snatch was clean; Grenier did not accelerate until Quantrill had been winched entirely within the fuselage and the belly hatch indicator winked out.
The rover found a litter awaiting him; all three couches were occupied by a team of regulars, all lighthearted, all disgustingly fresh for the night's work. Quantrill snapped on his harness and tried for a few minutes of sleep. Sanger was not among the crew, but he had not really expected that pleasure.
CHAPTER 6
Ralph Gilson's disappearance might best be blamed on midlife crisis, that recurrent panic provoked by bald spots, occasional impotence with a wife who is munching celery in bed, and the fear that one's mistress can honestly ask, 'Ralph who?' two weeks after he dies.
In Gilson's case there was no mistress and no bald spot — though his wife chewed gum at the damnedest times. In 1997, Ralph Gilson had been S/Sgt. Robin Gilbert, one of a hundred thousand troops who had survived the Bering Shoot and refused to stop retreating in Alaska.
For the first time in his life Gilbert had rebelled; had put Army training to its ultimate test, making his way back through Canada to California by shank's mare and cadged rides. But he found Mexican citizens occupying most of the California coast, and rumors that they carried Chinese plague. Gilbert did not want to be a citizen of Alta Mexico; he did not even care much to be Robin Gilbert, deserter.
So he became Ralph Gilson, modestly successful jobber of holovision equipment in Ft. Collins, Colorado. With so many records destroyed during the nuke strikes and the shrinkage of national boundaries, it was an easy matter to generate a new identity so long as you stuck to it. After three years came the onset of internal crisis; and for the second time — it would be his last — Gilbert/Gilson rebelled.
Gilson was a twice-a-year Methodist who believed the holo warnings about the threat New Israel would become, when the Israeli Ellfive orbital colonies were complete. He was not too sanguine about Catholics, either; it was Mexican Catholics who occupied the ruins ringing the dead sites of L. A. and San Francisco. But above all, he began to mistrust a government that made it gradually more difficult for jews and Catholics to share meetings or media exposure.
First came the tax on holo unscramblers, which 'coincidentally' were needed now for all but the major media networks. Gilson owned a little stock and knew how, for example, the Federal Broadcasting Network skipped to the tune of IEE, which pirouetted for Blanton Young's Federalist party and the LDS church. Gilson was not too surprised when the second turn of the screw prohibited unscramblers.
Montana stations were now — temporarily, both governments maintained — Canadian. Tucson stations hewed to regulations of Alta Mexico. In the Wild Country of South Texas and most of New Mexico, stations did as they pleased since neither Streamlined America nor distended Mexico had much success ruling those sun-crazed gunslingers in Wild Country. In this time of reconstruction, the new Southwest was becoming much like the old West of an earlier reconstruction. President Young sought to save the American people from radio and holocasts that might interfere with his peculiar vision of a new, and uniformly Mormon, Zion. Since most LDS and gentile voters might not understand how necessary those measures were, the President elected to mask them in committee recommendations. Of course, a few seditious sons of perdition smuggled unscramblers in from Wild Country. More serious measures would have to be taken; more summary justice.
Gilson could hardly miss the rumors shared by his illegal contacts. In Idaho Falls, now near the Canadian border, 'justice' had caught up with a thirty-third-degree Mason whose lodge formed a nucleus of dissent. In the deep-water port of Eureka not far from Alta Mexico, a bloated body had washed ashore, its dentition matching that of a good Mormon who had felt a calling to reorganize a longshoreman's union.
The bishop of the New Denver Diocese had perished, with other prominent Catholics, in the cellar collapse of a Colorado monastery — and rumor insisted that the collapse was preceded by an explosion.
Ralph Gilson had nothing against Mormons — well, nothing much, anyway — in general. A hell of a lot of them had bought his unscramblers, and a few were willing to joke about the unsaintliness of the 'Lion of Zion', Blanton Young, whom one liberal Mormon had dubbed the Lyin' of Zion. But support for Young at the polls was the final punchline, and his reconstruction policies were steadily clotting the individual have-nots into groups of rebels.
Ralph Gilson's rebellion had put self-esteem into his step, and cash into his pocket. And eventually, an S & R rover on his ass. Gilson was the fifth smuggler to receive Quantrill's attention. He was the only one, however, to have unloaded over a quarter of a million illegal unscramblers by making the price attractively low.
CHAPTER 7
Gilson's contraband had run from Matamoros to Piedras Negras in Mexico, to Junction and Big Spring in Texas, to New Denver. Bits of it tended to flake off en route, like blocks of salt from a camel caravan, tribute to whichever bandits wore the badges during passage. Edwards County, Texas, a weathered piece of South Texas Wild Country, boasted twenty-four hundred people and twice that many limestone caverns honeycombing the heights of Edwards Plateau. Corrugated like Dakota badlands, covered with shrubs, it was an ideal setting for shipment and storage of contraband by the barnload. Gilson never new the debt he accumulated from folks in Edwards County. Anybody with a holo there could afford an unscrambler.
Seventeen-year-old Sandra Grange lived in broken oak-and-cedar land East of Rocksprings, the Edwards County seat, and swapped a three-kilo string of dried peppers for her unscrambler. In the current barter system, two kilos would have been fairer; but barter is more personal than money, and it was understood that Sandy Grange must always pay a bit more. The way that young woman spoiled her mute child, the women whispered, was a crime; and to come down from Sutton County insisting the spindly sprat was her sister! No big sister treated young'uns so well. The comely corn-silk-haired Sandy, they concluded, was simply too proud to tell the truth; claimed she was only seventeen but was probably twenty if she was the mother of silent, big-eyed, five-year-old Childe.
Had there been no Childe, Sandy's age would still have been suspect. She showed great patience but scant interest to the young ranchers around Rocksprings, clearly bored by their efforts to court her. She coveted dictionaries, earned a few twenty-peso pieces and household tools correcting notices and ads for a printer in town, and accepted the town's mild disapproval without complaint. Sandy Grange had known much worse during the war.
On the night of Ralph Gilson's disappearance, Sandy treated herself to an hour of holovision, wheeling her Lectroped into the snug soddy, the kind locals called ‘two rooms and a path'. The two-wheeler's storage batteries yielded steadier power than her creaky fabric-bladed windmill, and furnished a reading lamp too.
The Ciudad Acuna station came in clear. Her voice soft-husky with affection, she called at the door:
'Come on in, Childe, and watch holo with me.' Childe, with the most unlikely playmate on Edwards Plateau, had ridden piggyback quite enough for one day.
After a moment the plank door swung open and Childe, slender where Sandy had once been plump, bounded into the half-submerged soddy. Childe was a houseful of kid, a dancing delight radiating affection for those few she trusted. 'Want your lap,' she piped, and swarmed up to sit on Sandy's legs, sidesaddle. In infancy, Childe had lived the life of an Apache; blistering heat, freezing 'blue northers', malnutrition, and hostile strangers comprising her enemies. She remembered no mother but Sandy, and no other human companion. Childe knew the value of silence in the presence of danger, and by now she was thought mute by all but Sandy and one other. The sisters made a symbiotic pair: Sandy the sturdy thoughtful leader, Childe the spindly little scout who knew the languages of Wild
