Harsh Oases (25 page)

The fellow was about six feet four, possessed of an enormous red beard matched in impressiveness only by his beer gut. He wore a one- piece outfit that looked like the inner lining of a taikonaut’s suit, with various hookups and jacks.

For a moment, Amy was frightened. But then she noticed that there were tears in the man’s eyes.

The stranger seemed to want to address her, so Amy deactivated her iPod to allow them to talk.

“Honey,” said the man, “I ain’t thought of that song in nigh on fifteen years, since my Mama died. She loved that song, and used to sing it pert near every day. ’Course, she could actually nurse a tune, not strangle it like you. Nonetheless, it done my heart good to hear you attempt it Pertickly here, ’midst all these Chardonnay-swillers.”

Amy chose to ignore the insult to her singing abilities, as well as the blanket categorization of her fellow New Austinites as foreign-wine imbibers—especially since the latter accusation was true. The man seemed friendly enough, and might know some way of getting her across the border.

“Thanks, mister. I’m purely sorry to hear you lost your mama, even iffen it were a hound dog’s age ago.”

Amy was surprised to find herself falling into the speech patterns and diction of the stranger, a mode of speech that resembled the vernacular of the songs she loved. She had never allowed herself to indulge in such an affectation before, for fear of ridicule by her peers. But now that she had cut loose from her old life, nothing seemed more natural than to talk this way.

“I appreciate the sentiment, little lady.” The man extended his hand. “Bib Bogardus is the name, and I hail from Pine Mountain, Georgia. What’s yourn?”

“Amy Gertslin.”

“Pleased to meet you, Amy.” Bib lowered his bulk precariously into a seat at her table. “Now, just call me a nosy nelly if I’m stepping on any toes with my curiosity, but what brings you out to this place all alone at this hour?”

Amy hesitated a minute, then decided to confide everything to this friendly ear.

Bib listened to her story attentively and without condemnation. When she had finished, he said, “Waal, I can’t say I’d be totally happy iffen my own daughter upped and hit the road. She’s just about your own age, you know. Name of Jerilee. But I can unnerstand how a young’un has to find her own destiny. Especially when you’re trapped in such a hellhole as New Austin. Why, did you know that you can’t even buy a Lone Star beer in this whole territory anymore?”

Emboldened by Bib Bogardus’s sympathy, Amy leaned toward him. “Is there any way you could help me scoot past these revenooers, Bib? What do you do anyhow? How come you’re here?”

“I drive a big rig, Amy. Carrying a load of tomacco from Mexico to Oklahoma City.”

“Why, that’s just where I’m going! I figure on hitching a ride from there straight to Nashville. I’m gonna try to get into the music biz.”

Bib scratched his beard ruminatively. “Hmmm, best you concentrate on being a producer or songwriter, with them pipes. But hail, who’m I to say what you can do, once you put your mind to it. They got plenty of tricks to sweeten up anyone’s voice these days. Just look at thet there little Simpson gal. If it weren’t for her mother, Ashlee, pushing her, she’d probably be serving grits at a Waffle House. Or whatever similar place they got in Agnostica. Caviar at the French Embassy, I guess.”

“So you’ll help me?”

Bib got to his feet. “I sure will. C’mon with me, darling.”

Amy, holding her pack by the straps, followed Bib outside to Bib’s rig, an enormous, streamlined, diesel-powered tractor-trailer combo bearing the proud name
Dixie Belle
on its prow in cherry-red letters. Amy was awed.

“Does this actually run on
fossil fuels
?”

“You bet, honeychile. I know that’s an illegal substance in Agnostica, but they give us truckers an exemption so long as we’re just passing through. You won’t catch me driving one of those water-farting hydrogen creepers, no sir! Take me twice as long just to break even on my routes.”

Bib opened the passenger-side door and removed a crinkly silver suit identical to the one he wore.

“Here, darling, slip into this.”

“Do I have to get naked?”

Bib laughed. “Well, you would if you were planning to drive 24/7 like yours truly. Then you’d want to be hooked into the
Dixie Belle
’s waste-recycling system, epidermal scrubber, nutrient feeds and booster drips. But since we’re only gonna use this suit to fool the federales, it just needs access to one of your veins. So roll up your right sleeve.”

Amy did as requested, then snugged into the suit, which seamed invisibly at the rear and automatically shrunk to fit her. Then she and Bib got into the tractor cab.

“Wow! This looks like the inside of the
Long March
Mars ship!”

“Waal, we ain’t going quite so far as Mars, but I do believe in comfort and technology. Jack yerself in at that port there—”

Once Amy’s suit was plugged into the dash, she felt a deft pinprick on her arm. She worried for an instant that Bib was going to drug her and deliver her to the harem of some Yemeni prince. But when nothing happened to her as the big man started the mighty yet purring engine of the truck, she relaxed.

“Just let me do the talking at Customs, ’kay?” u p r>

Sure.

The
Dixie Belle
ambled throatily up to the crossing.

On the New Austin side, the border was protected by a variety of biological barricades, many of them with Batchelder Bioengineering pedigrees: hedges of thorny plants, troops of fire ante, pods of mini-shoggoths. On the Georgetown, Faithland, side, the barriers were strictly inanimate: robot lenses and gun muzzles, monomolecular wire, gluball anti-personnel mines. This natural-artificial interface was as clear a political statement of the differences between Agnostica and Faithland as any tract

Two New Austin inspectors came up to the stopped truck. The first, a short, stocky Latina, led a redacted dog, a Rhodesian Ridgeback with a hypertrophied snout. This mutant canine proceeded to sniff all around the tractor and trailer, while the woman inspected the intelligent seals placed on the trailer at its point of origin. The second inspector, an African-Agnostican with a jaunty goatee, came around to Bib’s door.

“Blood sample, please.”

“Sure thing, officer.” Bib extended his hand and pressed his thumb into the sampling pad on the inspector’s ViewMaster. Then the guardian of the gates came around to Amy’s side, and she did the same, stifling her reluctance to reveal her identity.

Surely the game was up now …?

In a few seconds, both inspectors seemed satisfied.

“You and your daughter go safe now, Mr. Bogardus.”

“Will do, compadre!”

Once through the New Austin arch, the
Dixie Belle
sailed beyond the corresponding Georgetown gate and its comparable procedures just as easily.

Once they were a few miles down Route 35, Amy finally felt it was safe to speak.

“‘Daughter?’ How did you—?”

Bib patted the dashboard affectionately. “The ol’
Dixie Belle
has a handful of useful genomic codes on file. She just injected you with a batch of silicrobes that had a tropism for the cells of your thumb. Once they got there, they started scavagening up all your original blood cells and making replacement blood with different DNA in it. For a second or two, your thumb belonged to somebody else. Then they put everything right again and croaked. Otherwise, you woulda had one helluva immune reaction.”

Now that Bib had explained things to her, Amy could sense a faint soreness in her thumb. “Oh. So I can’t pull that trick again?”

“Nuh-huh. Not unless you’re hooked up to the
Dixie Belle
. ’Fraid you’re on your own otherwise.”

“Well, I guess I’ll just have to hope I don’t have any more run-ins with the federales on my way to Nashville.”

“Not too likely. Faithland’s perty quiet these days on the homeland security front, ever since President O’Reilly unleashed that sweet little global virus.”

Amy remembered learning about this Faithland anti-terrorist measure in school. Forgetting to employ her new accent and diction, she said, “You mean the Glowworm Patch? The one that spreads by touch and retroengineers into humans a luciferase gene that’s activated by certain high-order brain chemistry patterns?”

“That’s the one, honeychile. Mighty hard to commit terrorism when thinking about it make you glow bright blue in public.”

Amy gave vent to a huge yawn at this point.

Bib regarded Amy tenderly. He paid no attention to the road, since the
Dixie Belle
was on cyber-control. “Maybe you should get some sleep now, honeychile.”

“You wouldn’t mind …?”

“No, I’ll just punch up some Government Mule in my earbuds and do my road-warrior thing.”

“‘Kay. Thanks …”

Before she knew it, Amy was asleep.

When she awoke, daylight reigned outside, and they were approaching a major metropolitan area.

“Is that—?”

“Oklahoma City? Sure enough. Here’s where you and me gotta part ways, I fear. I’m gonna drop you off at the Greyhound terminal. I figger you prolly got enough cash for a ticket to Nashville. Or do you need some bits on your chop?”

“No, no, I’m all set, Bib. Thank you so much for all you’ve done. You been—you been sweeter to me than mama’s ice tea.”

“Waal, Amy, you done reminded me of my own little princess, so warn’t no way in God’s creation I could let you be disappointed. You take care now, y’hear, on the rest of your trip. Faithland’s a mighty safe place for the most part, but there’s always folks out there looking to score.”

Stripped of the truck’s passenger suit, wearing her backpack, Amy stood on the sidewalk outside the bus terminal, waving goodbye to the
Dixie Belle
.

So much for all the horrible things the Agnosticans liked to say about the Faithlanders. Amy felt confirmed in her decision to leave the elite enclave into which she had been born.

She looked around now at the streets of the first Faithland city she had ever visited, expecting to see immense differences from home. Truth to tell, however, many of the same franchises occupied various storefronts, although a few names were new to her. She wondered if JENNA’S PEIGNOIRS was equivalent to VICTORIA’S SECRET.

It would’ve been nice to explore a little, but Nashville beckoned.

The ticket to Nashville took almost fifty of Amy’s euros, which she exchanged for forty dollars at an ATM in the terminal. She even had a few dollars left over for breakfast at the terminal café.

A few hours later, Amy was on her bus, heading east. She had taken what appeared to be the seat with possibly the most congenial companion: an Asian woman not much older than Amy herself. Although conventionally pretty, the woman had chosen to downplay her looks with a lack of makeup, severe hairstyle and drab clothing.

After a dozen miles of mutual silence, the woman turned to Amy and introduced herself in a perky manner.

“Hi, there, my name’s Cindy Lou Hu.”

The woman’s English was excellent, but accented. After Amy volunteered her own name, she asked, “Are you from, like, another country?”

“Yes, of course. Shanghai, China. I’m here to visit Brother Ray’s Gospel Mission in Nashville.”

“Huh?”

Cindy Lou explained that her family had been evangelical Christians for two generations, ever since adopting the creed from American missionaries. Now she was returning to the source of her faith for instruction in spreading the gospel even further.

“Faith is one of your country’s last, best exports. No one sells religion abroad like Faithland. Brother Ray and his peers are everywhere around the world. They might assign me to Latin America or Africa or Mongolia even. It all depends. Wherever I can do the most good bringing the word of Jesus to unbelievers. Are you a believer, Amy?”

Amy began to squirm. This kind of conversation was never encountered in Agnostica. “Uh, well, I guess I’m kind of a, um, secular humanist.”

Cindy Lou’s smile did not waver, but definitely acquired a steely gleam. “Oh, you must read some of these tracts I happen to have with me. Right now. And then we’ll talk about them. We’ve got tons of time.”

Fifteen hours later, as the bus pulled into Nashville, Amy’s brain felt as if it had been extracted, pureed and reinserted into her skull. She was convinced that the friendly “dialogue” on Jesus and all matters Biblical that Cindy Lou had subjected her to was a form of torture banned by the Geneva Convention.

Still, Amy had not crumbled. She managed to refuse Cindy Lou’s repeated importunings to stay at Brother Ray’s mission. And engaging in a mass baptism was definitely ruled out. So as the two women parted around midnight outside the Nashville terminal, Amy was finally left extensively on her own, for the first time since she had escaped from New Austin.

The first thing she did was find cheap lodgings with her ViewMaster. In the Ikea capsule hotel on Commerce, not far from the Cumberland River, Amy gratefully rested her head on her thin pillow the size of a handkerchief—a Snooli, according to its label—knowing that she was only a short distance away from all the famous musical sites she had come so far to see.