Zach Hughes - For Texas and Zed

Class of '72 reunited. Twenty high-spirited young Texicans in tight-fitting jeans and some swimsuits and brown shoulders and big arms and whoops of greeting and backslapping and more brew until Lex finally got loose from the mob and singled out old Billy Bob Blink and said, "Got something to show you."

They walked behind a dune and Lex showed him Gwyn's little costume. He held up the misty thing in front of him and said, "How about that?" Billy Bob's eyes went wide and he tried to touch it but Lex pulled it away.

"You're kidding," Billy Bob said.

"Right on the streets they wear 'em," Lex lied. "All of 'em sticking out all over the place."

"You're kidding," Billy Bob said.

"She gave this to me," Lex said.

"The one you brought back?"

"Her."

"Holy Hopping Hornies." Billy Bob was openly impressed. "When you gonna marry her?"

"Well," Lex said, looking up to see a lone beagle soaring up there looking for dinner. "I guess I'll have to think it over a little."

"They say she's pretty."

"She's all right," Lex admitted, wondering how the hell the word had spread all the way to New

Galveston in just a day and a night, but knowing how, because big as it was Texas was a close-knit community and if you put the hood and the air on an airors you could make it from Dallas City to New Galveston in ten minutes with one blink up and one blink down and the communicators were free to all and everyone was everyone else's cousin, so when you stopped to think it wasn't strange at all to know that New Galveston knew that Lex Burns had brought home an Empire gal.

"What are you gonna do today?" Billy Bob asked, after he'd watched Lex put the little misty thing away in his pocket.

"Oh, racing and herding, I guess," Lex said.

"Try to get into different heats at first so we won't knock one another out early," Billy Bob said. "That way you'll at least make the finals."

"You mean that way you'll make the finals," Lex said, grinning.

They walked back and joined the group and they were drawing lots for the first racing heats. Lex held back and Billy Bob went first and then when the heat which Billy Bob had drawn was full, Lex took his number. He was up against some good boys, but he'd seen Billy Bob Blink in action before and he knew that when it came down to the final run it'd be his Zelda against Billy Bob's Clean Machine and then there'd be hell to pay, because Billy Bob, taking after his distant grandfather a few times removed, was always coming up with something new. Billy Bob thought he owned all airorses because his distant forebear had developed the blink drive back on the old Earth when they said that all inventions were possible only through the work of a well-financed research team. Old man Blink had built the first blink drive in his garage workshop on the out-skirts of Houston in a prime example of individual initiative which was still being taught to Texas schoolchildren six hundred years later. Lex knew the story well. Having built a machine which could reduce space, any known length of it, to nothing, he offered it to the government, but all of the Congress and everyone else was too interested in trying to impeach a President named Wixon or something; no one would listen to a gray-haired thirty-year-old TV repairman from Texas. So old Zed Blink installed his drive in a 1954 Lincoln Continental and emerged it into the restricted air space over the White House, which was the place of the President of the United States then, and that got some attention. Then the armed forces wanted an exclusive on the drive and there was one hell of a hassle about it until Blink gave the drive, outright gave it, to six domestic airlines and in doing so gave up a sure fortune. Well, it was an old story and Lex just happened to think about it while be was watching Billy Bob win his heat and while he was tinkering with Zelda getting her ready. Because Billy Bob had seemed to inherit the scientific abilities of the Blink boys and was always coming up with something new for his airors. All Lex had going for him was his natural skill and a nerve which allowed him to hug the pylons closer and fly faster and withstand the g forces of the right-angle turns better than most. After all, the rules made it so that the final limiting factor was physical ability, not tinkering knowledge to soup up an airors.

Billy Bob won his heat handily. He didn't use anything new and startling, just solid racing ability and the finely tuned Clean Machine's basic functions. There was only one accident. The racecourse was two parallel rows of pylons set a hundred feet apart stretching down the strand, and one boy from up in the Bojacks lost his airors and put her nose into the surf and tumbled six times before sinking slowly into the shallow water. He came up spitting salt and waving a hand to show that he was OK.

Speed wasn't everything. Some of the old-timers said that the race was patterned after an event back on the old Earth which had riders on animals guiding them around barrels and it was turning ability as much as anything which made the race, for the pylons were close together and you had to cut each one of them. Miss one and you got a penalty.

It was a fine Texas day with Old Zed—the star named after Zed Blink, who led the people out of red-tape democracy to find a solitary star way out in the big lonesome—hot and fierce and the sweat felt good as it cooled not too rapidly on the forehead and then Lex was getting ready and the first two boys to make the run both missed a pylon and then he took the course going slow and sure, because his competition wasn't too keen, and he won it by a few seconds.

Billy Bob won his second heat as if he'd been the Blink. Actually, it was his great-great-grandfather who had developed the mnemonic brains of an airors. Billy Bob was good. He rode in the prescribed style, hands free, giving orders to his airors with knees and body movements and the almost uncanny empathy which can develop between a good airors and a good rider. It was almost as if the Clean Machine were a living thing reading Billy Bob's mind. Well, sometimes you felt almost as if an airors were a living thing. Out on the boonies, the Bojacks, you spent a lot of time with it, and you got to the point of talking to it and it responded, that funny, complicated brain learning new things; and while herding a wingling meacr you sometimes wondered if that damned machine didn't know more about it than you did. A wingling is swift and shifty and sometimes the airors seemed to anticipate a darting turn before you did and that was the kind of thing you had to have to be able to do the job and to be able to win a race and Billy Bob had it. He'd won more races than any other young stud on Texas and the next one to him was one Lex Burns, who won his prelim heats and then, sweating, drinking a cool brew, eager, a little nervous, watched Billy Bob really turn it on to best the best time of the day by a full five seconds, eliminating everyone but Lex from the finals.

Lex took his run, his first, all out, leaning, twisting, feeling the hard pull of the g's as he cut a pylon, a force which, had he not been strapped in, would have thrown him ass over teakettle into the sand or the surf. He was counting off the ticks of the clock as he went down course and he knew he was behind Billy Bob's time by at least half a second and one odd run back up the course to make it up. He powered the Zelda beyond human ability to ride her and leaned horizontal on the turns and stirred up sand as his boot tip dragged he was flying so low. He could hear the rush of the wind and his own grunts of effort as he fought the g's, sometimes feeling the blood pushed out of his brain and going a little soft in the head but recovering in time to push the Zelda hard down the last straightaway to tie Billy Bob's time to the tenth of a second.