by Fritz Leiber
“Well, yes,” I said truthfully. “I mean no . .”
She gave another of her chilling laugh’s. “You menfolk—” she began. Then her eyes, scanning my forehead, showed sudden concern. “You’re hurt, my lover.”
Evidently the shotgun ricochet had drawn blood. “It’s nothing,” I told her.
“It had better be,” she told me seriously, “because you got a lot more to do tonight. Pull your cloak and hood around you, your bones gleam too bright. And hang on tight now,” she added, turning front again and picking up the reins. “Oh you can feel me up a bit if you get the chance — wow, your skeleton’s still like ice. But hang on for your life — because it’s a far greater cause than even my lover’s precious existence that’s now at stake!”
She touched with her heels the great white beast’s flanks, and we were soon going through tree shadows and silvery spaces at a ponderous gallop, which caused me to jounce considerably and not only lock my arms hand to elbow around her waist, but also steady my flapping legs by clenching them against the great heaving white barrel below me. In my brain there had gathered a certain bewilderment.
“Where are we going?” I asked innocently.
She replied, “To the central point of tonight’s riotous revolutionary assembly, which happens to be the bandstand corner of the Greasertown cemetery.”
We galloped on through the moonlit night, my mind now truly a welter of confusion.
TO BE CONTINUED
Table of Contents
A SPECTER IS HAUNTING TEXAS
FRITZ LEIBER
© GALAXY, Aug 1968
Part 2 of 3
The tall grim reaper, the tall grim reaper,
Tall as all of liberty,
And he is coming, yes, he is coming
Here from far eternity.
Sir Skeletony, Sir Skeletony
Wants to travel Texas through,
Because he’s hunting, because he’s finding
Many gringo’s bones to chew.
And we will follow, yes, we will follow
Death to where the oceans curl,
And we’ll be killing, yes, we’ll be slaying
Texans, every man and girl.
WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE -
After a nuclear world war, Texas engulfs the USA and, except for the black nations of California and Florida, dominates North America from Guatemala to a fluctuating Russo-Texan boundary in the Yukon. The Texans have a hormone which makes them 8 or more feet tall, dominating their “bent-back” Mex, Injun and poor-white servile populations.
For 100 years Earth’s nations have banned contact with Circumluna, a self-sustaining moon satellite, which refused to join in the Great Atomic War. It is chiefly inhabited by American and Russian scientists and engineers, along with various hippie and artist types living in a duraplastic annex called the Sack.
When relations are resumed between Circumluna and Terra, the first Sackabond to drop down the gravity well is Christopher Crockett La Cruz, known as Scully, a young actor seeking funds to save his father’s theater-of-the-sphere by asserting a family claim to the Lost Crazy-Russian Pitchblende Mine neat Yellowknife.
Scully is an 8½ foot Thin. Most of his muscles are too weak to function in Lunar let alone Terran gravity. So he wears a battery-powered titanium exoskeleton. By accident he is landed in Dallas, Texas, Texas — heart of the Lone Star Continent — where he is befriended by Elmo Oilfield Earp, a garrulous minor politician. In one day he meets Cotton Bowie Lamar, Governor of the state of Texas; Chaparral Houston Hunt, Vice Commander-in-Chief of the Texas Rangers; Big-Foot Charlie Chase, Sheriff of Dallas; Atomic Bill Burleson, Mayor of Dallas; and Prof. Cassius Krupp Fanninowicz, a Texo-German scientist who at first sight falls in love with the space man’s exoskeleton.
Scully also immediately falls in love with (1) La Cucaracha, a tiny Texo-Mex girl who is Elmo’s sociable secretary, and (2) Rachel Vachel Lamar, theater-minded daughter of the governor.
There is a Mexican legend that one day the dread figure of Death will come marching out of nowhere to lead a revolution against the gringos. With his cadaverousness, black suit, and gleaming exoskeleton, Scully might be a natural for the part.
Longhorn Elijah Austin, President of the vast Texas Republic, his White House in Dallas, is seeking to become a dictator. To protect himself from assassination, the usual fate of most Texas presidents, he has broken all relations with the Texas Rangers and armed his Mexican houseboys.
Governor Lamar and his power-clique make use of Scully to frighten away Austin’s guards, so that the President can be killed. Scully is saved from a like fate by Rachel Vachel, who reveals herself as secretly being the Black Madonna of the Bent-Back Underground. She rides with him to the bandstand corner of the Greasertown cemetery, the same place he had earlier made a date to meet La Cucaracha, and which he now learns is to be the scene of a revolutionary uprising.
Table of Contents
- VI -
IN CHURCH
Rachel dashingly reined in our mount and walked up the broad low steps before the church, whose pink and pastel blue walls were now only two shades of silver in the moonlight. The night was eerily silent. I saw no signs of life in the cemetery — a good thing under these lonely circumstances, I suppose — or around the bandstand or even in the church itself. It made me wonder at her talk of a “riotous, revolutionary assembly.” I was, however, rather glad not to see La Cucaracha. After a half hour of rocking embrace with Rachel, my titanium jaw-shelf often resting on her shoulder, close to her neck, my desire was focused almost entirely on her, even though our closeness came chiefly from the necessity of my riding pillion. And the thought of my earlier infatuation with a .. . well, midget, had come to seem almost grotesque. Moreover, I wasn’t at all sure of how Rachel Vachel would have welcomed La Cucaracha. Or La Kootch Rachel, for that matter. And if “welcomed” is the word. Women are apt to develop toward each other strange animosities, in which the best interests of the man involved are totally ignored.
The tall doors of the church opened to a wide slit, spilling out dusky yellow light and three barefoot bent-backs in brown hoods and hitched-up brown robes. The first two carried a light stair of three steps and set it beside the horse so that one of my footplates brushed it. The third crossed his arms and looked up at Rachel, dignity and pride in his searching eyes, fanaticism in the clench of his swarthy jaws.
“How’s the night?” he intoned.
“Dirty and dark,” she said.
“And what lines the way?”
“Danger and death'.” After a pause she continued, “I bring him whose coming is foretold. You’ve been informed, Father Francisco?”
“Guchu and Rosa Morales brought word.”
With a small snort of contempt which I did not understand, Rachel said, “Well, he’s here now anyhow. Climb down, darling!”
“But ...” I began, then realized I had too many questions to choose between. I should not have let her con me into spending our ride reciting “Lepanto” in her pale seashell ear, with “The Congo” for encore. I ended by asking tamely. “Aren’t you staying?” as I steadied myself on the brick pavement by catching hold of the back of her saddle. Between my ears I was still rocking from the gallop.
“No, sweetheart,” she told me, leaning down, “I gotta maintain my persona as the fibbertigibbet Honorable Miss Lamar.” She grasped my head by my ears, a not unpleasant sensation if one goes along with it, and faced our faces at each other, close. “Look, Scully, you just trust in me and do as you’re told, but don’t take crap from anybody and — ” she shook my head, not entirely pleasant — “don't have anything to do, you hear me, with that man-eatin' Rosa Morales!”
“But I don’t even know a woman named — ” I began. Suddenly her face tilted, her lips pressed mine at an angle of 90 degrees, speech gave way to a subtler mode of communication, our arms went round each other. Time halted in mid tread. Then as suddenly Rachel Vachel pushed away from me with a somewhat extr
avagant and alarming, “Until doom, my Captain!” and a more sensible, “hasta manana!” and, wheeling her horse, made off down the steps. A tail of my cloak had caught in the harness, and I was spun around I — one hundred and fifty-seven pounds isn’t much inertia — before it tore loose, so that my “hasta luego!” and wave of farewell were a rather drunken-looking performance as My Lady of Sudden Death galloped off into the black and silvery night.
The experience left me somewhat dizzy, so that I was grateful for the limited support of two of the little brown friars as they walked on tiptoe and with arms upstretched to touch my elbows and guide me through the slit between the doors, which were closed at once behind us.
I stopped and learned back against them, tonguing down pills and drink. As my visiom cleared, I studied the remarkable sight before me.
I was in a long room a few feet more than Texan tall. Its violet, pink and pale blue walls and its darker blue ceiling studded with silver and gold five-pointed stars were lit by flames, which are perhaps the strangest and most beautiful of gravity phenomena, though they can be reproduced in nulgrav in a carefully controlled wind tunnel. The flames rose from white cylinders and spread a spicy aroma as well as light.
The walls were lined with somewhat crudely carved and colored plastic, or perhaps even wooden figures, derived about equally from Medieval European art and Mayan and Aztec forms.
Centered on the far wall was the Crucified Savior, Mexican small, the short horizontal arms of the Cross suggesting the cyborg’s yoke.
To either side of the pitiful earth-brown figure were two figures tall as the roof, indeed serving almost as karyatids to support the flat blue heaven. By the symbols carved in large on them of angel, winged lion, winged ox and eagle, they were clearly the Four Evangelists. But though barefoot and clad in simplest robes, they looked like Texans. Their serene and somber features had on second glance a subtly gloating or menacing cast, while their casually positioned hands had as if by accident the attitudes of those to draw pistols or crack whips, though there were no weapons depicted.
The remaining figures along the side walls seemed more inspired by the great Amerind cultures and were chiefly crouching or bent. Human males, females, gods, demons, angels, devils, animals — I was frequently unable to tell which was intended. Their colors were predominantly dark with flashes of red, yellow, bright green and gold, chiefy in the eyes and often-fanged mouths.
Randomly grouped, a score of Mexes in shirts and short pants knelt toward me on the floor of pounded earth. Hams on heels, arms crossed on forward-bent torsos, heads acutely upturned to show eyes white-circled with dread, they reminded me of those early Mexican forms in which a stocky human figure is compressed into a block.
Behind the altar, which either regularly stood or had been dragged out from the far wall, four persons sat widely spaced on the only chairs to be seen in the room.
The first was Father Francisco, who, having hurried back, now reoccupied his chair.
The second was a burly young Mex, built as a bull though looking no taller than the four-and-a-half-foot Mex maximum. Even at the distance I noted the white flash of his teeth in his dark face as he gave me a confident, challenging smile.
The third was a wild-eyed Negro in orange and yellow robes — yes, by Diana, he was the same babbling Zen Buddhist who had earlier drubbed my head-basket.
The fourth was La Cucaracha. She had kept her rendezvous after all, though in a fashion quite unexpected. It burst on me that from her first seductive smile she had been planning to use me in this preposterous revolution. She was as bad as Elmo or Governor Lamar. But somehow in her I forgave it. Love has an infinitude of beginnings.
Father Francisco leaned toward and spoke briefly to the young man beside him, who raised toward me a fist on out-thrust arm and called, “I am El Toro, comrade. Please to come forward.”
I complied — though with a mental reservation on the “comrade” part. Yet I felt theatrically at home in the place. My grotesque figure matched the carved ones, which lacked a good conventional representation of Death.
The bent ones hobbled out of my way on their knees, keeping faced toward me as I moved. Their dread seemed if anything to increase. It must be a very great power that kept them from staggering to their feet and hobbling off.
Standing very tall, I placed my hands on the altar table, leaning slightly against it, and looked the four back and forth with grim dignity.
Not for long. La Cucaracha sprang up onto the altar, threw her arms around my Head, drew it down and showered my face with kisses.
I should have been repelled, I suppose, especially after spending a very exciting, most romantic evening with a girl my own size. Why, I had even been thinking of La Cucaracha with contempt as a midget and my earlier infatuation with her an aftereffect of spaceflight-drugging. And I now knew she was also a political opportunist.
But somehow having her here in the flesh — and Rachel Vachel away until tomorrow — made all the difference. Once again I sensed her dancing aliveness, her wholly feminine muscularity. I even found myself comparing her swifter kisses with Rachel’s, and they came off very well. As for size, that is a tricky business. Although almost as tall as myself, Rachel Vachel had a mass three times my own. While mine and La Cucaracha’s masses were approximately equal.
I showered kisses back at her. “My silver bones-man! My most estimable and passionate!” she cried as we took breath. “Ah', querido, I knew you would choose to become a hero of the revolution, the — how do you say? — supreme figurehead of the Bent-Back Underground!”
I had no intention whatever of becoming any such thing. I was still fully determined to fulfill my mission on Terra as quickly as possible and then get up out, no matter what amorous interludes might embellish the period. Of course by running away from the President’s manse with two stunned Rangers behind me, I’d probably cooked my chances of that jet-special trip to Amarillo Cuchillo tomorrow, if there’d ever been any chances. No, of course there hadn’t — that had just been part of the bait — I’d been thinking like a fool. Still, I’d find a way —
But by then we were kissing again.
“Cease this improper behavior at once!” a stern voice drove into our building rapture. It was that of Father Francisco. “A church is for worship only, or for the plotting of revolt blessed by God. It is not for the arousal and enactment of carnal desires Rosa Morales!”
I felt a small surge of apprehension and even a speck of guilt at realizing that La Cucaracha was the “man-eater,” against whom Rachel Vachel had warned me. The Governor's daughter would doubtless cut me forever, if she could see what I was doing, and maybe try to cut me apart. Still, she wasn’t seeing, she’d be away until tomorrow — I wasn’t even losing my chance at her by my present actions. Besides, her prohibition only made La Cucaracha more desirable, gave an added zest to my desires. What man doesn’t love a man-eater?
“Pah!” Rosa informed the outraged religious, turning toward him, her fist on her hip, but her other arm still around my neck. “If a church is not for love, padre, what is it for? The bending of the knees to you? The frightened mumbling of understood prayers and petitions? The silly shy behavior of the white Texan Sunday school?”
While Rosa chattered on and Father Francisco fumed, El Toro was watching us with a white-flashing, amiable, but impatient grin, his fists on table edge with elbows up. He now said, laughingly yet sharply, “Rosa, I have warned you many times revolution and passion do not mix. Especially passion directed at one chosen to play the role of almost a god in our uprising.”
“Oh you hypocrite!” Rosa cried out at him. “Especially when your own continuing role in the revolution depends on a feature involving at least two peasant girls per night. Do not bark to him, mi amigo,” she told me. “he merely hates me because I refuse to fall into his arms along with his trembling, shyly adoring, illiterate, 15-year-old stupids!” And she snapped finger and thumb contemptuously at the brawny Mex.
Ho
wever, it did seem to me that El Toro had made at least one valid point. I glanced back to see how my “worshipers” in the body of the church were taking my display of all-too-human behavior. To my surprise, they were kneeling toward me as frightened-eyed as ever.
Rosa drew my face back toward hers with soft fingers on my cheek. “Do not believe the jealous and censorious ones, amadisimo Senor Christopher La Cruz. Revolution and the making of love go together like rice and beans, like meat and chili sauce. It is only the joys of amorousness that make endurable the exhausting meetings, the interminable plottings-around-tables, the unceasing danger of discovery. Ai Mi, that is the truest, Cristobal quieridisimo.”
And she brazenly resumed her kissings and embracings, and I went on brazenly enjoying them. We hardly heard the padre’s doleful, “Oh my daughter, my poor daughter dancing with her high-heeled shoes and painted lips toward Hell,” or El Toro’s controlledly bland, “What I do not understand, in truth, is what of erotic interest you discover in a living skeleton, Rosa. Now a man of flesh and muscle, a strong man, a man muy hombre ...”
But we were shocked apart by a roar-screeched, “Stoppit! You’re driving me out of my skull! For freedom’s sake, I can consider collaborating with a metal construct from which dangles the simulacrum of humanity like a hanging jumbee, but to be forced to watch firm flesh embrace such' ofay offal dropped from the sky — ”
It was, of course, the Buddhist, his arms waving, his contorted mouth a-hang with loops of spittle.
