Zach Hughes - For Texas and Zed

"Where do you hurt?" she asked, leaning over him anxiously.

"Hurt?" he asked stupidly.

At last she recognized his dazed look. "Oh, you," she said, popping him on the chest, hard, with her fist.

And then she was gone, turning, skirt flaring to show lovely thighs.

"Miss, miss," Lex wailed, seeing her back retreating from him. She paused, turned. "Don't go, please don't go."

"There's nothing wrong with you," she said.

"I'm hurting. The fall."

She approached his bed warily. She looked at him with her big eyes squinted. "I can give you a shot." "I don't hurt anymore," he said. "Don't go," he said, as she turned.

"Look," she said. "I have work to do." "Give me the shot," he said. "You don't need a shot." "I need to—look at you." "You can do that every day when I make the rounds." She smiled, the skies opening up after a dark,

northern storm. "No extra charge for looking." Her name, he discovered, was Riddent. In Old English that meant "laughing." It was, he felt, a beautiful name, a descriptive name, for just seeing her made him want to laugh, to sing, to do things like leaping on

an airors and gunning it to all-out and making low passes at the hills. And there were no rings on her fingers. Not even a promise ring. "Riddent?" "Yes?" Patient. Eyes so large, so deep. "Don't go." His hip tingling from another shot. With perverse female joy, she seemed to like punching him with

needles. "I have work to do." Another day. "Riddent, have lunch with me." "Sorry, I have a date." He sneaked into the dining hall, ambulatory to a limited extent, to see her lunching with a doctor, a

youngish doctor, but old enough to be her father. He guessed her age at eighteen.

"He's too old for you," he said, next time she rolled him onto his stomach. She slapped his bare hip, drove the needle ouchingly deep into his flesh, and then wiped the sting with a cool, damp something. "Who?" "That man. The doctor." "That's none of your business." But as she left the room, she turned, gave him a pixie grin. "He's my father." And, another day, the rain clouds rolling down from the big northern emptiness, gusty winds making

themselves heard inside the room, fat drops running down the glass. "I'm a San Ann girl. Grew up in the shadow of the hospital."

"And you wanted to become a doctor?" "Not a doctor. Yeeech. Cutting into people." "You shouldn't have any qualms about cutting people the way you drive that needle into me." "For that, smart ass, I'm going to put laxative in your afternoon milk." And she did. "Damn, Riddent," he complained. "Well, it was doctor's orders." "And you just doubled the dosage." She grinned. "No. You do me an injustice." "Well, I'm sorry." "I tripled it," she said, fluffing his pillow and smiling so sweetly that he forgave her immediately, even as

his stomach cramped again and he went white, sweat popping out on his brow as he tried to wait until

she was gone. Recovered, emptied, he watched her, next morning, come through the doorway with his breakfast, a big,

sweet-limbed Texas girl with a mouth which opened wide when she smiled. Her hair was pulled into a

neat mass at the back of her head. Her ears were delicately formed. "Something wrong?" she asked, as she saw him following her every move avidly. "No." "You're still angry about the laxative." "Not angry, but you're going to have to make retribution." "It was a dirty trick, wasn't it?" she asked, with a girlish giggle. "Filthy." "Horrid." "Terrible." "What can I do, sir, to make it up to you?" she asked, not very seriously. "Marry me," she heard him say.

"Not a chance."

"You owe me that much," he said. "Come back in five years." "You'll be old and out of shape, past your prime." "Tough," she said. "If you don't marry me I'll tell your father you poisoned me. A good nurse doesn't poison her patients." "It's hospital fever. All patients fall in love with their nurses. You're getting out tomorrow. You'll go ;;way

and find another girl and," she was hamming it up, making her voice tragic, "you'll forget all about me."

"You won't marry me?"

"Not today."

"Why not?"

"You've got too many holes in your hide from needles and your insides will all run out, leaving only an

almost empty husk. I don't want to marry a husk, co you?"

"If you won't marry me, go swimming with me."

"OK."

"Tomorrow?"

"Sorry."

"When?"

"I'm off Saturday."

"That's five days away," Lex said. "I can't stand it."

"Tough."

"I'll have a relapse and stay here until Saturday."

"You do and I'll give you twelve shots a day."

"I'll come back Saturday."

She gave him her comnum. He hadn't touched her, except when she helped him get back into bed the day he fell with his pajamas down around his knees. He reached out and put one finger on the back of her hand. It was delicately veined, warm. She looked down at his finger making a little white indentation in her brown skin.

"I shouldn't go with you," she said.

"Why?"

"You're a man of experience."

"You're—"

"No," she said, "I was at the port when you came back, with her."

"Oh," Lex said.

"But since I won't marry you, I don't care. Just don't think—"

"I wouldn't dare," Lex said, grinning. "Saturday?"

"Against my better judgment," she said, leaving him.

When he was cleared from hospital he looked for her, but she was assisting her father in delivering a new Texican up on the third floor.

Chapter Eight

The new uniform of the Texas fleet added inches to his height. Janos Kates of Dallas City designed it. It was a man's outfit, made of a tight-fitting but stretchy material, a masculine light tan in color, colored by unit insignia and rank badges. The meacrhide boots were heeled and soft to the touch and made authoritarian clicks on walking. You saw it everywhere. You saw it on the streets and in the training sessions and at dinner—Murichon was a General. Not that Texas was suddenly a militaristic society, just that when a Texican was faced with a job he attacked it with a single-mindedness designed to see the job through.

Lex was a Captain, and as such, ranked high enough to command a ship, although he was steadfastly refused a ship. He was too valuable at headquarters. He was in constant demand for conferences on Empire methods and technology. He protested, and asked repeatedly to be assigned to the same battle group in which Hilly Bob had a ship and where Arden Wal, his thought monitor at last removed, wore the Texican uniform with his proud flair and sported the insignia of a full General. In that same battle group Captains Form and Jakkes served, Jakkes having spent some few weeks on his new ranch only to report in as the reports of the spy ships told of massive buildups of Empire force in the periphery. Form, knowing nothing but the service life, was senior in rank to Jakkes and was in charge of battle group maintenance, having adapted to Texican methods with a pleasing rapidity.

And all the time the battle group was doing its turn on patrol and training Lex was talking to gray-haired politicians and generals in headquarters with scarcely enough time to continue his courtship of Riddent, much less take time off for an airors ride.

Out in the galaxy, the Empire was swarming like angry biters driven from their mud shells. At some risk, a Texican scout, equipped with the new bunk power, the latest advance from the Blink Space Works, observed an encirclement of a dead planet and reported the efficiency of the Empire fleet in urgent blink-stats, adding that the culmination of the exercise was planet-blasting, total destruction.

President Belle Resall was worried. She'd lifted breeding restrictions temporarily, messing up the new administration's generation plan to a point of total despair, but she and all her advisers felt that Texas would not be so lucky in the next battle. There would be casualties. The casualties would be male, of course, since males fight wars. So, every Texican woman of breeding age was trying for a boy and if the first sperm wasn't the proper sort the fertilization was negated and Texican women tried again, and again until a male union of sperm and egg was achieved and there was, in the minds of the moralists, something musky in the atmosphere.