Zach Hughes - For Texas and Zed

"Don't be."

He wasn't, really. The second kiss was longer.

"It isn't bad," she said, "because I want it too, you see? I want you to remember. I want you to think of me as Texas, all Texas girls, and the sky and the winds and all of it."

In a way it was bad, not evil bad, but bad for him, because, in her arms, feeling the natural slickness, the strength of her, the pushing and yearning and answering and a gale of pure emotion, he knew what he was going to miss. It was no disrespect when he thought of the girl in his school, the one with the short, curly hair of desert tan who smiled athim and let him kiss her, once , behind the trees in the park. He thought of how he'd determined then that he'd go looking for her when the time came, pit himself against the others who would be vying for her, win her. In his arms the teacher became that girl, all Texas girls, the girl he'd never court, the girl he'd never win, and it was a bittersweet victory when, together, they rode the tail of a comet down, down, down and then up to heights which, even with Gwyn, he'd never reached.

And because it was so beautiful, he lingered, close, joined, dampened by exertion and nature, and put his head down into the hollow of her shoulder and wept like a baby because, even if he didn't have to go out into the Empire, even if he could stay, it would never again be the same for him, because she was older and would choose again, a man of her own age, her own sort, not a seventeen-year-old boy not yet ready to go courting. She understood and didn't laugh at him because he cried and when he said, "Don't tell. Not ever. Not anyone," she kissed him atop his tousled head and soothed him.

"No, no, never."

He watched her as she dressed and felt a sense of the most devastating loss as she was, gradually,

systematically, covered, hidden from his eyes. He kissed her once more.

"Emily?"

"Yes, darling?"

"Thanks."

"You don't have to say that."

"Not for, well, not for—" He swallowed, suddenly shy, now that she was fully clothed. "I mean for letting me cry on your shoulder."

"You cried because it was beautiful," she said.

Well, that wasn't all of it, but he was grateful to her for saying it.

"I hope you never lose the ability to cry over beauty," she told him. "Remember it, even when things are rough. Remember how it was so beautiful and how it made you feel so full you had to cry. It wasn't unmanly. Didn't you ever feel your eyes mist over at a particularly brilliant sunset, or when the bloodflowers are blooming on the plains?"

"I know what you mean," he said.

"And Lex?"

"Ummmm?"

"Don't ever come to think you did something wrong here today. Don't ever blame yourself. We did it together. We did it because we needed each other. I needed you as much as you needed me. For a moment, we were one. That makes it something special. Don't ever let it become dirty. Promise?"

"You don't even have to ask."

And then it was more information being force-fed into his reeling brain and a string of other professional people talking, drawing out ideas, telling him what they wanted to know about the Empire when he came back. He didn't see Emily Lancing again, but he had a mind picture of her to carry with him as he went to the huge, noisy, crowded spaceport outside of Dallas City to watch the ships being collected and laden with frozen meacr meat. He'd never seen so many Texican ships in one place at one time. He guessed that the entire fleet was gathered there and his questions proved him to be not far from right. Outside of a thin line of patrol ships guarding the approaches to the planet, lest a stray galaxy ship come wandering in, the meat fleet represented all the spaceworthy hulls on Texas.

Day and night the sounds of alteration came to him as workers pressed into service from all over the planet installed freezers, ripped out bulkheads, carefully preserving any salvageable metals, prepared the fleet for the trip into the periphery.

Once he went to the slaughterhouse and saw the countless meacrs being herded into chutes and this, too, was another first, because he'd never seen death in such wholesale lots before. He was saddened. He had, of course, killed a meacr himself now and then and he was no stranger to hunting for meat, but to see thousands of the pleasant, mild little animals being pushed to slaughter made him a bit mad at the Empire for being so hungry and set him to wishing that Texas didn't need Empire metals. But necessity was necessity and he left the slaughterhouse with a sick feeling to load his few belongings aboard the flagship and settle into his cabin to get the feel of it.

Billy Bob and a half dozen studs from his school came out, the night before lift-off, to wish him well. He sot frightfully drunk and he was carried bodily into his cabin and woke up the next morning in space with a lead as big as old Zed himself.

The last thing he remembered about Texas, and that only dimly, was his father standing over his bunk looking as if he'd been in a dust storm, his eyes red.

"You're not a boy anymore, Lex," Murichon had said. "Remember that. And remember that you're doing this for Texas and Zed."

Chapter Four

In relation to the total cube of the space occupied by the galaxy, matter makes up a small part of the total. Far out in the rim there are multiples of cubic parsecs of space which contain less than nothing, it seems, for empty space can be more than nothing, and the vast spaces between the hard, bright stars become an enormous black hole. Evenly distributed, the entire mass of the galaxy would place matter equaling one tenth of the mass of old Sol, the sun of Earth, in each cubic parsec, and that's one hell of a big emptiness.

Texicans were on a first-name basis with bigness. It was a part of their heritage. In their folklore were stories about the original Texicans back on Earth: These two Texicans were out walking and came to a bridge over a river. Needing to relieve themselves, they halted, unzipped their flies and proceeded. "Damn," said the first Texican, "that water is cold."

"Sure is," said the second Texican, "and deep, too, with rocks on the bottom."

Big planet, big space. Seen edge on, the galaxy is not as idealized as in the ancient photographic imitations which showed a neat disc with a bulging center made out of millions of suns, but is more ragged, messier. There is a definite disc and a definite core and spewing out from the shape, spread into parsecs of intergalactic space and allied to the galaxy only by gravitational attraction, are clusters and isolated, lost suns and out there, in the darkness, in empty space, safe from the casual explorer, Texas and its sun, old Zed, swims the darkness, orbiting the galaxy in something like 8 X 1046years, a period of time which can have no meaning to anyone, not even a Texican with his sense of bigness.

A mote in nothing. A brightness which, to be seen from the inhabited worlds of the Empire, needs to be discovered accidentally with the most powerful of telescopes. Yet, big as it was, the world was insignificant in relation to the occupied worlds of the Empire segment of the galaxy.

It was necessary to enter the periphery by a circumspect route, for Empire ships with sophisticated instruments were waiting, stationed on the outskirts, all systems alert, searching for the first blinking signal sent ahead by the Texican meat fleet.

Thus, Admiral Crockett Reds sent the fleet into Cassiopeian space, after a long, boring detour, in single file, spaced seconds apart. To emerge into Empire pace from the Cassiopeian line was the purpose, for the multitude of Cassiopeian ships would furnish a confusing background for Texican movement and add tothe mystery of Texas by showing the Empireites that a fleet could be moved through the territory of the Empire's enemy with impunity.