by Fritz Leiber
Meanwhile the wheels of the cat-wagon, the hooves of the burro and hormoned horse and the trotting six horny soles of the Mexicans’ feet were carrying us past a most interestingly different expanse. All metal, glass, and plastic were gone. In the distance was a veritable forest of tiny hutments bowered and lined by bursts of bright color — flowers, it occurred to me with pleased surprise. Between them and our street was a crowded city of pastel homes — pale violet, blue, and pink — but too tiny even for Mexicans. Then I realized that this was a graveyard.
Between the palely colorful homes of the dead was hobbling toward us, helped by a long staff, a figure robed like myself, but in yellow and orange and about five feet tall, while his hood held only blackness. My exoskeleton suddenly felt cold to my sack-suited skin. I stopped the cat-wagon and sat up.
“Greasertown,” Elmo explained succinctly.
With an effort I forced my eyes to scan away from the figure which disturbingly held them. Ahead, bordered on two sides by the cemetery and on one by our street and backed by a structure of pastel arches I took for a church, was an even more colorful metal construction consisting of a large, round, empty floor ten feet off the ground, approached by several stairways and shaded by a rippling canopy supported by slim rainbow pillars ten meters tall.
A quick nod from La Cucaracha told me that my first thought was correct — it was the bandstand of our evening assignation.
But the romantic leaping in me was chilled as my gaze returned to the advancing robed one. I still could not discern a face inside the hood. I asked myself if it were only the bright sunshine making shadows blacker, or if —”
“here comes one of them consarned nigra Zen Buddhists from: one of them consarned tidewater anarchies — California most like, which has been predominately black fever since the assassination of Ronald the Third,” Elmo observed. “Although their Zens are troublesome little locos, forever ranting and mooching and setting themselves afire, we let them wander freely through Texas out of the greatness of our tolerance and —” his voice dropped — “for diplomatic reasons.”
Now I could see the slit-eyed, anger-contorted, almost inky-black face inside the hood. Because of intermarriage, such extreme skin colors have vanished from the Sack and even Circumluna.
Some of my apprehension disappeared, but only some.
He stopped two meters from me. Now that he limped no longer, but stood only, he gained a foot in height, or seemed to. His eyelids flew open wide, disclosing great orbs of madness, like bloodshot moons. An unseen power emanated from him and gripped me.
“O white dirt from the sky!” he cried gratingly at me. “Arise and shoulder your Karma.”
I nervously cleared my throat.
Grasping his staff two-handed by one end, he brought it straight down on my head before I could think to defend myself.
My titanium head-basket rang with a muffled but sonorous bong! I wasn’t hurt, but I was jarred, numbed and startled.
“Arise, I command you! — you miserable construct of flesh and metal, you abominable offspring of ofay and engine,” he growled on. “Arise and accept the Great Destiny of which you are totally unworthy!” And he swung back his staff for another bash. I felt powerless to defend myself.
La Cucaracha was kicking her burro toward him, but it was Elmo’s whip that took him around the shoulders. There was a crackle and a faint bluish flash, and then he was writhing on his back in the dirt, shaking his fists and gurgling unintelligible words, presumably of anger.
With a most expert flick of the same whip, Elmo wound its tip around the staff, flipped it toward himself, caught it in a hamlike hand and pitched it javelinwise far into the graveyard. Then the whip returned to strike sparks from the ground near the twisting figure.
“Vamoose, you nameless son of Nirvana, or I declare I’ll grill you before you can get out your gasoline to do it yourself!” he roared.
The Buddhist scrambled to his feet and hobbled off through the gravestones with great shoulder-bobbings, using a fisted stiff arm for staff, but looking back across his sullied robes to glare and curse, or so it sounded.
“What was he talking about?” I asked in a voice driven by anxiety almost baritone-high.
Elmo shrugged. “Oh, those hash-blasted Zens always talk that way. With them, destinies and karmas and ’carnations are a penny a peck. Trouble is, tfiey’re always banging people over the skull — to emphasize their senseless statements, they say. Lucky you got that half-helmet, Scully. I’d run the maniac in, except we don’t want to waste no time.” “A black bee-bonnet, Senor La Cruz,” my darling chimed in. “Filth beneath your feet. Think no more of Him.”
“But how did he know I was from space?”
Once more Elmo shrugged, screwing up his big face like a giant pepper. “Those nigras got odd ways of knowing things, now and again,” He admitted.
“He also knew, despite my cloak and hood, that I combined metal and flesh.”
“That’s true. Maybe there’s something here needs watching. Kookie, you take Gonzales and Company and find out what that black bugger’s up to. But don't nervous him. He really might set himself afire, though he’s black as a cinder already. Then report home.”
“Ah ha, I knew it would come!” my dear one cried, her dark eyes snapping with anger, real or assumed. “I knew you would once again find an excuse not to take me to the Governor’s Ranch. Is it that you fear my boldness will embarrass you?"
“Now, Kookie — ”
“Or is it that you are afraid one of higher rank will demand me of you on a trade, and you lack spirit to refuse?”
“Kookie! You hop it now without no back talk, or I swear I’ll ante you up first hand of my next poker game.”
“Agreed! And they will have to send to the girl-shops of Ciudad Mexico or New Orleans at least to match your bet. Pedro, Pablo, Pablito! Vamanos!”
As she spun her burro toward the graveyard, the three bent-backs trotting behind her, she spared me one more eye-flash, and with three fingers she pitter-patted the pleasing bump on the left side of her chest, to indicate the feelings of the organ beneath.
Elmo said to me, “Scully, time’s a-wasting. You must have got the hang of that cat-wagon by now, so let’s press a bit.” And with that he removed his immense hat, swung it twice in a circle, cried, “Ki-yi-yipee!” and heeled his mount into a gallop.
Gritting my teeth, which I do with great power, I thumbed the last go-button at my elbow and sped after him, bouncing about a bit on my flatbed. As we raced by the bandstand neck-and-neck, the depression that had gripped me from first sight of the orange-yellow monk now lifted entirely. My spirits soared. I would fulfill my mission on Terra, yes I — but with even greater certainty, memorizing the route from now on, I would return to the romantically hued cemetery tonight at moon-rise, even if I had to adapt jets to my exoskeleton and compute for the first time a gravity-atmosphere parabola!
A few brown-robed figures poured from the church as we passed it. Perhaps they thought my vehicle was a runaway hearse, complete with shrouded corpse, and so their responsibility, since it fell within their traditional area of birth and baptism, confirmation, marriage, mortal illness and death. But we soon outdistanced them.
Table of Contents
- III -
GOVERNOR’S RANCH
My exoskeleton responding to its myoelectric orders with purring efficiency, I speeded up at the last instant and entered the state-patio of the Governor’s ranch Beau Astonishment a long stride ahead of Elmo and the scuttling bent-back houseboys in violet kneepants and lace-trimmed, violet jackets, but barefoot as Gonzales and Company. These came in two converging clusters through the greaser doors closely flanking the gringo door.
Then I stopped dead, standing perfectly erect, and let them all pile up clumsily behind me. I had learned how to steal an entrance before I ever played Tom Sawyer, Odd John, Jommy Cross, or Little Lord Fauntleroy.
As Elmo began my introduction in suddenly subdued and alm
ost faltering tones with a “Governor Cotton Bowie Lamar, your honor . . . and gentlemen . . . other gentlemen,” I ceased listening carefully to him and rapidly scanned the scene without moving an exoskeletal link.
I was in a spacious area roofed by the sky, walled on three sides by metal walls four stories high and of many colors, and flag-toned by an even more rainbow jigsaw puzzle of polished minerals, marbles perhaps from many quarries, most of the pieces mosaic-small. In the flat distance were a few trees and many slender towers in the form of truncated cones. Two of these were five times the height of the rest, wider in proportion and they looked much newer. They all cast long, late afternoon shadows.
Texas is a serene superstate stretching from the Equator to Siberia. Bordered by the trivial tumultuous black anarchies of the seaweed regions, he inspires and tolerantly dominates the top half of the New World, of the vast ranges of which he occupies 99.9 percent, an area greater than that of the King Ranch.
- Lone Star Continent
by Sam Houston Lipinsky,
University of Texas
at Minneapolis Press
Lamar, Mirabeau Buonaparte, 1798-1859, first vice president (1836-38) and second president (1838-41) of Texas, a poetry-writing, history-bemused, personally charming Georgia newspaper editor, who arrived in Texas swora in hand, inquired his way to Sam Houston's little army, and became one of the heroes of the battle of San Jacinto, April 21, 1.836, where he commanded the cavalry. As president he ousted the Cherokees and Comanches from the infant nation (although Houston was a blood-member of the former tribe), secured Texas' recognition by Britain, France, the Lowlands and the German States, guided her through the Pig War of 1840, created the piratical Texas Navy, set aside vast leagues of land for educational and cultural purposes, achieved for the Lone Star Republic even vaster, credit-building debts, and also conceived the goal of Big Texas, foreshadowing Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.
—Thumbnail Texans
Beginning in the middle distance and ending twenty meters away, was a vast rippling rectangle reflecting the sky’s blue. If it were water, there was, I decided, enough for a lake — far more even than in Circumluna’s largest swimming-volume. From a platform next to it a large, long board extended, which made me think of pirate tales of “walking the plank”.
But perhaps it was petroleum, I reminded myself, unrolling from my memory a map of Terra’s resources, where areas rich in fossil animal fats were colored blue.
Nearer at hand, each occupying his own many-pillowed couchlike structure with low tables on either side, were a half dozen male Texans more elegantly or at least more neatly clad than Elmo and all with noble craggy faces; it was as if I had walked into a quality western, circa 1950. (Circumluna’s and the Sack’s microfilmed and taped records of Earth’s arts are said to be better than those of Terra herself.) Like Elmo’s, their legs were the heaviest part of them — it takes great columns indeed to support in six lunagravs the mass matching an eight-foot height. Their gleamingly polished boots were vast.
All held or had beside them glasses of amber fluid, while most puffed long reefers — there was a scent like plastics under heat-treatment. Bent-backs scampered about noiselessly, serving and erranding.
All the recumbent ones radiated an aura of power even greater than that of physical elegance, and all had one or more of the behavioral quirks which traditionally go with power’s possession. The nearest held in one halfclosed hand a stack of gleamingly yellow rounds and clinked them in waltz time.
Another of them had inserted three fingers under his gleaming white shirt and with them was scratching his solar plexus in another rhythm. A crop-haired one had a seven-second facial tic which with each convulsion threatened to dislodge, but never quite did, the large monocle occupying his left orbit. Yet, as I say, all had matinee-idol profiles, circa 1900.
I noted with approval that as they listened to Elmo, their gaze was on me.
Elmo wound up with “. . . and he has large mining interests in North Texas,” which irked me considerably. The guesser and loose-mouth! (Yet it was truly I who had first been waggy-tongued when coming out of sedation.)
Without the least flourish I removed my hooded cloak and dropped it on the nearest houseboy. It covered him totally, but I did not pause to note how he handled this problem.
With the least bow, I slowly rotated my face like a panoramic camera from one end of the recumbent group to the other, meanwhile saying in my lowest audible voice, resonant with nerve-gripping subsonics. “Most potent, grave, and reverend signors, my very noble and approved good masters, I come to you bearing greetings from the outside universe.”
(Father had always advised me about vanity-mad humans, which includes the entire species, terrestrial and spatial — even I have touches of conceit — “Lay the flattery on with a trowel, Christopher, and never hesitate to borrow from the Bard. He was Himself the Prince of Borrowers.”)
I could tell that my deep voice and slim, soldierly bearing impressed them. Sure stage-sense had led me to use the lines of Venice’s great captain, Othello.
Next I turned and bowed a trifle more — but only a trifle — to the man who Elmo had first addressed.
“Governor Lamar, your excellency,” I said, “I bring you the especial salutations of Circumluna and the Bubbles Congeries.” (Sack seemed to lack sufficient dignity in this situation.) And then I eyed him commandingly.
Almost as if hypnotized (Who knows my full powers? — not I), the Governor slowly got to his feet, meanwhile abstractedly picking from his dark coat two bits of invisible lint — that was his idiosyncrasy. He was the slenderest of the lot — which isn’t saying a great deal — and by a shade the most distinguished looking.
“Mister La Cruz,” he said, “I’m grieved at the inconvenience your ill-informed pilot caused you — perhaps he understandably assumed Dallas the port of space entry for all points in our vast nation — but I’m pleased at the opportunity of welcoming you to Texas, Texas. We see few space dwellers, sir, and —” He broke off to capture between finger and thumb something unseen on his left elbow.
“And I, sir,” chimed in the clinker of gold pieces, copying Lamar in rising, “as Atoms Bill Burleson, mayor thereof, welcome you to Dallas.” his gray-eyed gaze wandered up and down me. “Pardon me, sir, I mean no offense, but I’ve never seen a man slender as — no, pardon me further, emaciated as yourself and still in the land of the living. We've heard of the terrible tortures practiced by the intellectuality-drunken autocrats of Circumluna, from whose tyranny I assume you’re in flight, but I never guessed that simple starvation continued for years, nay, surely decades —”
I silenced him with a lifted hand and intoned, “Given energy and mass, even of the slightest, to manipulate, man can survive in any environment, including internal ones. Only a minimum of muscle and fat is required in sol-heated nullgrav or free fall. We become Thin or Fats, or maintain large muscles by non-grav exercises, as suits our temperaments — asthenic, pyknic, or athletic. I, myself, sir, am fairly clearly a Thin. But I do not understand the mention of tyranny. Circumluna and the Bubbles Congeries are a technocratic democracy.” “Another of the power-men asked me, this one without getting up, “We’ve always understood that Circum and the Sack were inhabited solely by Longhairs. Now I’m a plain speaker. Are you one of those, Mister La Cruz?” This one was the burliest and the most burly-legged of the lot, and his eccentricity was squeezing lengthwise between thumb and forefinger a black column which lengthened to two decimeters or shortened to nothing without changing diameter — an odd toy, but I had his question to reply to.
“Let my shaven pate be your answer, Mister—?” I saw no point in mentioning the shoulder-length' blond wig in my baggage.
I eyed him commandingly, but with him it didn’t work, at least he didn’t rise.
Another of the non-risers broke in, the stomach-scratcher, with whom Elmo, I now noted, had been talking privately. “I gather you got mining investments in North Texas,” he
said, continuing to scratch, “but who are you with, stranger?”
“I am with myself,” I instantly replied with a shrug. “And to be sure, I am with Mister Earp there, who most kindly befriended me at the spaceport.”
“That’s right, that’s right,” Elmo put in hastily and also defensively. “That’s the truth, simple as put-and-take poker.”
I glared at him. He only stared back injuredly, but Lamar at least comprehended the meaning of my look.
“I’m sure that none of us intended to question Mister La Cruz’s word,” he said soberly. “By the by, I should have introduced —” But he broke off to flick suspiciously and several times with the backs of his fingernails at an apparently spotless area of his knife-pleated trousers.
“As for those mining investments,” I seized the chance to say, “I have none. Mr. Earp misinterpreted one of my remarks. The matter I have to settle in Amarillo Cuchillo is purely an old family affair.”
“Of honor?” Lamar resumed softly, a gleam coming into his eyes and also into those of the gold-chinking Burleson. But before I could answer, the Scratcher again broke in loudly.
“And you mistook one of my meanings, stranger. When I asked you who you was with, I didn’t mean who you had around you, or anything complicated like that. I just meant who are you with?”
“I do not think I understand you,” I said courteously. “When? Where?”
“Anywhere. Any time. But especially now. Who are you with?”
I looked around somewhat helplessly, yet with a bravely jesting small smile calculated to win the sympathy of any audience. “Is it a riddle, gentlemen?” I asked at last.
