“You’re altering the climate all over the world,” Bob translated, “to make a profit on a portfolio of real estate that is limited to Houston.”
“The numbers check out,” T.R. confirmed. “Those of y’all who don’t live in Houston may wish to make calculations of your own. ‘Sea level’ is the same everywhere.” He checked his watch. The afternoon was getting on. “Oh. And as long as I dragged y’all out here into the heat, don’t forget to collect your party favor.” T.R. indicated a solitary boxcar that had been parked on a nearby side track. A canopy had been set up next to it. Beneath that was a table staffed by a highly presentable young woman whose white cowboy hat made for an incongruous combo with the earthsuit that covered everything from her jawline down to her cowboy boots. Saskia, sans earthsuit, was nearing the limit of how long she could remain outdoors, but decided to venture over.
The boxcar looked as if it had been chosen specifically to stand as a visual emblem of decrepit Industrial Revolution tech. It looked like it had traveled a million miles during its career, survived a few derailments, and finally reached the end of the line.
Rust was blooming through old faded graffiti. No part of it was flat or straight. It was full to overflowing with coal, and excess coal had spilled out on the ground all around it.
As Saskia drew closer to the blessed shade of the canopy, she saw a row of bell jars on the table, similar to the ones T.R. had displayed last night at dinner. Each sat on a wooden pedestal. Each contained a golden cube that Saskia would have mistaken for half a stick of butter had she not spent so much time in the last two days looking at, and talking about, sulfur.
“Welcome, Your Majesty; would you like to take your parting gift? I can have it packed for travel and delivered to your lodgings.”
“You are too kind,” Saskia said. She’d now drawn near enough to read the words engraved on the brass plaque attached to the wooden pedestal:
TEXAS GOLD
THIS AMOUNT OF PURE SULFUR
neutralizes the global warming caused by
ONE BOXCAR OF PURE CARBON.
Each shell fired from Pina2bo carries 20,000 times this amount of sulfur.
“Such propaganda!” said a nearby voice. Saskia turned to see that Cornelia had followed her over. The tone of her voice was somewhere between disdain and admiration. She had admitted defeat and traded any pretense of fashionable attire for an earthsuit. But thanks to that her face looked a lot cooler than Saskia’s probably did. Saskia was in Face Zero, which was what she basically used for gardening and swimming.
“He has a gift for the catchphrase,” Saskia said. “One can easily imagine him hawking these on YouTube. Texas Gold.”
“Jumpsuit Orange, if he’s not careful.”
“I have no idea as to the legalities. Do you?”
“No.”
“Presumably there’s not a specific law against shooting bullets straight up in the air and letting them fall back down on your own property.”
“In Texas? No, there won’t be any such law,” Cornelia scoffed. “The feds will try to get him on the airspace violation. Something like that.”
“Unless he has a permit. Which he did today.”
“They’ll stop issuing them!”
“And then he’ll go over their heads. To Congress. To the president. And he’ll take it to YouTube.”
“And . . . to you, Your Majesty,” Cornelia said. “What was the lord mayor’s unattractive phrase? The eight-hundred-pound gorilla.”
“The gorilla is hot,” Saskia said, “I’m going inside.”
> T.R. said something that reminded me of you.
> ???
> Lift over drag. Sorry. Private joke. Probably not funny.
The text hit Rufus’s phone from an unknown number with some kind of weird area code. He was peeling the foil from a burrito in a sort of food court that occupied the middle of the area that these people called Bunkhouse.
> Who this?
> Sorry. Saskia. Are you available for a chat? Leaving for NL early tomorrow.
> Half an hour okay? Going to take a shower.
> Of course, I am taking a bath!
Rufus consumed the burrito a little more quickly than had been his original plan, then found the men’s locker room, which included a row of shower stalls. Everything about this place put him in mind of the army. It was, in fact, made of army surplus housing modules that they hadn’t bothered to repaint. This was what the military threw together when they needed an outpost in some place like Afghanistan. Though, to be honest, most parts of that country were more hospitable than West Texas. Nothing was fancy, but everything was okay—at least up to the standards that many enlisteds could expect in the kinds of places where they lived stateside. Rufus had walked away from that deal after he’d put in his twenty years and hadn’t missed it. But it sure made it easy to find his way around the so-called Bunkhouse here at Pina2bo. He