After the Collapse Read Free

endless eulollypop forest, faster than a baseline human. Thirty seconds later, a rich, resonant, hair-raising caterwaul of triumph made both A.B. and Gershon Thales jump.
    Thales said drily, “Caught a mouse, I suppose.”
    A.B. laughed. Maybe Thales wasn’t such a stiff.
    A.B. jacked the trundlebug into one of the convenient stepdown charging nodes in the transmission cable designed for just such a purpose. Even an hour’s topping up would help. Then he broke out sandwiches of curried goat salad. He and Thales ate companionably. Tigerishka returned with a dab of overlooked murine blood at the corner of her lips, and declined any human food.
    Back in the moving vehicle, Thales and Tigerishka reclined their seats and settled down to a nap after lunch, and their drowsiness soon infected A.B. He put the trundlebug on autopilot, reclined his own seat, and soon was fast asleep as well.
    Awaking several hours later, A.B. discovered their location to be nearly atop the 54 th parallel, in the vicinity of pre-Crash Minsk.
    The temperature outside their cozy cab registered a sizzling thirty-five, despite the declining sun.
    “We’ll push on toward Old Warsaw, then call it a day. That’ll leave just a little over eleven hundred klicks to cover tomorrow.”
    Thales objected. “We’ll get to the farms late in the day tomorrow—too late for any useful investigation. Why not run all night on autopilot?”
    “I want us to get a good night’s rest without jouncing around. And besides, all it would take is a tree freshly down across the road, or a new sinkhole to ruin us. The autopilot’s not infallible.”
    Tigerishka’s sultry purr sent tingles through A.B.’s scrotum. “I need to work out some kinks myself.”
    Night halted the trundlebug. When the door slid up, furnace air blasted the trio, automatically activating their plugsuits. Sad old fevered planet. They pulled up their cowls and felt relief.
    Three personal homestatic pods were decanted, and popped open upon vibbed command beneath the allée. They crawled inside separately to eat and drop off quickly to sleep.
    Stimulating caresses awakened A.B. Hazily uncertain what hour this was that witnessed Tigerishka’s trespass upon his homeopod, or whether she had visited Thales first, he could decisively report in the morning, had such a report been required by Jeetu Kissoon and the Power Administration Corps, that she retained enough energy to wear him out.
    3.
    The Sands of Paris
    The vast, forbidding, globe-encircling desert south of the 45 th parallel depressed everyone in the trundlebug. A.B. ran his tongue around lips that felt impossibly cracked and parched, no matter how much water he sucked from his plugsuit’s kamelbak.
    All greenery gone, the uniform trackless and silent wastes baking under the implacable sun brought to mind some alien world that had never known human tread. No signs of the mighty cities that had once reared their proud towers remained, nor any traces of the sprawling suburbs, the surging highways. What had not been disassembled for re-use elsewhere had been buried.
    On and on the trundlebug rolled, following the superconductor line, its enormous wheels operating as well on loose sand as on rammed earth.
    A.B. felt anew the grievous historical impact of humanity’s folly upon the planet, and he did not relish the emotions. He generally devoted little thought to that sad topic.
    An utterly modern product of his age, a hardcore Rebooter through and through, Aurobindo Bandjalang was generally happy with his civilization. Its contorted features, its limitations and constraints, its precariousness, and its default settings he accepted implicitly, just as a child of trolls believes its troll mother to be utterly beautiful.
    He knew pride in how the human race had managed to build a hundred new cities from scratch and shift billions of people north and south in only half a century, outracing the spreading blight and killer weather. He enjoyed the hybrid