W. Thompson: Out of the Waste Land

She needed a half-dozen trips to remove all the supplies from the drum and carry them to the ledge. Geisler started cooking dinner while she worked, and he had the camping rations ready by the time she had finished. “Bet you’ve worked up an appetite,” Geisler said, as he handed her a Styrofoam cup of stew.

“I don’t know,” she said, after she had sat down. She felt awkward about making conversation; using her icons made it impossible to maintain eye contact as she talked. “My implants only give me surface sensations. Touch, pressure, temperature. I can’t tell if I’m hungry.”

“Yeah? Well, you’d better eat like you’re hungry. Tomorrow’s going to be worse, count on it.” There had been an envelope in the drum. He took a bite of beef jerky, then chewed on it as he opened the envelope and looked at the map it contained. “Great. Cache number two is only eight miles from here, and when it’s that close you can bet it means we have to do something stupid to reach it. Those idiots in Westwood love that scavenger-hunt stuff.” He stuffed the map into his pants pocket. “I just had to get mixed up with this therapy business.”

Margaret stopped eating long enough to ask a question. “Why?”

“Money,” Geisler said. “You know how much it takes to keep a Harley in gas, insurance, and parts? Plus my medical bills, and room and board? At least this job lets me ride when I like and live where I want. Plus, every so often I get to meet some good-lookin’ babes.”

That sounded strange; she knew how the helmet had changed her appearance. “You think I’m good-looking?” she asked.

“Yeah. That helmet kinda makes you look like the queen of the Amazons.” He chuckled. “I used to ride with a gal that wore a helmet like that. You ever ride a Harley?”

“No. I’m a librarian.”

“Yeah? I met some librarians at Sturgis last year. That’s a big biker rally in South Dakota. You might like it.” He looked at the horizon. “Hey, we’d better recharge before the Sun goes down.”

“I know.” She put her stew down, opened her pack and got out her recharger. She unrolled the solar-cell foil on the dusty ground and clipped its wire to a strip on her helmet’s rim. A yellow message blinked in the corner of her eyeplate: Recharging. Battery level: 85%. The battery held enough power to last several days, but she felt more secure with a full charge. She wished she could have kept the recharger hooked up while she was walking, but if she fell down or stumbled into something she might wreck it.

Geisler had taken off one of his battery belts and plugged it into his own solar panel, a bigger, dunkier version of her recharger which he had propped against a boulder to catch the Sun better. His old-fashioned prosthetics were nothing like hers, she knew. Underneath his trousers, a network of electrodes would stimulate his muscles with power from the batteries, making the muscles contract in galvanic response. That consumed more power than her system, and it was more vulnerable to damage and breakdowns. “Why don’t you use implants?” she asked in her flat voice.

“What, and let some mad scientist wire a computer into my brain?” He snorted in derision. “The only way anyone is gonna play games with my head is if they cut it off and dribble it like a basketball.” Then he looked abashed. “I guess you didn’t have much choice.”

“No.” She didn’t want to talk about what had happened to her. “What was wrong with putting the cache in the ravine?”

“Two things,” he said. “One, there’s vandals. Some punks ride their dirt-bikes along the trail, see a pile of stones pointing up a ravine, and get curious. Next thing you know, they steal what they like and mess up the rest, and we’re up the creek without a paddle. Or without a creek, out here.” He chuckled nastily. “It’s a long, dry walk home. They shouldn’t be so obvious about marking a cache. The next one might be gone.”

Margaret didn’t like the sound of that. “We could phone for help,” she said.

“Out here?” Geisler made a rude noise. “Maybe a cellular phone would work if you climbed to the top of a hill, but I wouldn’t count on it. Phone service is spotty out here.”

“So we’re on our own.”

“Yeah, well, that’s the general idea.” He picked up a stone and chucked it at the trail. It landed in a puff of dust. “Second thing that’s wrong with using a ravine is rain. The other day they choppered in the supply barrels and cached them here and there. If we’d had a good thunderstorm before we got here, that barrel would have been washed halfway to Barstow, and we’d be back up the dry creek.”

“That mich water?” she asked. She realized she was tired; although she felt no fatigue, exhaustion was making it difficult for her to work the speech icons. “Storms give inch of rain. Or less.”

“Exactly,” Geisler said. “And out here it doesn’t take much rain to make a real gully-washer. It just rolls off the slopes and funnels into the ravines, and the next thing you know there’s a real blast running through all these ravines. See how the dirt and gullies spread out there?” He waved a hand at the ground below the mouth of the valley. “That’s an alluvial fan, made from dirt washed out by different storms. Those boulders were moved by water and gravity, too, and you can guess how big a flood it took to move rocks that size. That’s why we’re camping up here,” he went on. “If a storm blows up while you’re sleeping in an arroyo, the flood will smash you into the rocks so hard that you won’t live long enough to drown.”

“Oh,” Margaret said. She tried to pick out the icons carefully. “Does it rain often?”

“It varies,” Geisler said. “Last year was bone dry. This year, though—” He shrugged. “The California Current shifted last winter and we’re getting these killer storms out of the tropics. The satellite shots didn’t show anything moving our way this morning, but that can change by tomorrow.” He shrugged again. “Look, it’s June. The odds are that we won’t get any rain this late in the year. I just don’t believe in taking airheaded chances.”

“Oh.” Margaret returned her attention to her dinner. The stew had grown cold, but she didn’t care. She had lost her sense of taste and smell, and all food was equally bland to her. Eating was a chore similar to recharging her helmet battery.

Later, as the Sun went down, she unrolled her sleeping bag and inflated its pillow. She needed it to support her helmet, which was surgically attached to her skull; too much weight or pressure might have dislodged the connections between the computer and her brain. Geisler had no such problem. He spread his bedroll on the dirt and went to sleep at once.

Margaret lay awake for a while. At first she regretted not having her tent. It was only a simple plastic tube and a few collapsible poles, she told herself; she could have carried its extra pounds. There were poisonous insects out here, as well as snakes and coyotes, and she would have felt more secure with a roof of some sort over her head. It was cold, too; now that the Sun was down the desert heat fled into the clear black sky.

As she looked at her eyeplate she decided to program in a new movement icon. Blinking and moving her eyes with practiced ease, she called up several menus and selected specific items from each of them: contract both trapezius muscles to raise the scapulae and clavicles. Spread both hands slightly, palms out, with a slight turn of the radius and ulna in both arms. Then, create an icon and add it to the appropriate screen, to be called up and clicked on as needed.

She closed her eyes. All this, she thought, just so she could shrug.

The sunlight woke her at dawn, and after they had breakfast Geisler filled their canteens and finished recharging his batteries. He insisted on having all of their refuse packed into the steel drum, and Margaret made several trips up and down the hillside to clean up the ledge. “Junk lasts forever out here,” Geisler said as she finished, “and I live here.”