Zach Hughes - For Texas and Zed

"Honey," Miss Pitty said, "I've devoted my life to serving the needs of lonely Texicans, and only a few times have I really turned myself loose, you know what I mean? I mean, well, you have to conserve yourself, like, in this work, and if I let myself go all the time I'd burn myself out in a year, you know what I mean?"

"No ma'am," Lex said.

But in the dawn's early light he knew as he staggered weakly out of Miss Toni's and supported Billy Bob on his arm and went down the cool, crisp, early-fall-aired street humming to himself and wondering if it would be too rotten to have a snort before breakfast.

It wasn't too rotten, but breakfast sort of cleared his head and then they went and got Zelda and the Clean Machine and blinked up and down to land on a deserted strand way down south where the desert came up to the sea and there was no one within five hundred miles, save maybe a prospector out in the big lonesome. They ate sandwiches and swam and washed away the liquor of the night and then lay in the blazing sun, brown, tall, young.

"I'm going with you," Billy Bob said, after a light nap.

"Wish you could, boy."

"I can."

"Not a chance." Lex turned and squinted out over the light-dancing waters. "First time some Empire non-com told you to wash out the John you'd lay one on him."

"I can do anything you can," Billy Bob said. "You can take it I can. Hell, a man—" He paused, swallowed, on the brink of saying something sentimental. "Well, you're ugly and you ain't much, but we been friends, I mean—"

"I know what you mean," Lex said, "and I appreciate it. I really do."

"We could, like, maybe take over a ship once we were on the line. Then we could fly her home."

"No," Lex said. "Look, you're all set up to go into the business after you finish tech school, right? Hell, Texas needs you here more than it needs you out there keeping me company. You got a knack for things, mechanical things. You might come up with something important, something—" He paused.

A batgull flew low, eyeing them. Seeing that they were too big to eat, he went off on a wing toward the water.

"In a few years, when you're of age, you'll go out and court that little blond up north of New Galveston—"

"Won't be fun without you for competition," Billy Bob said.

"Least, this way, you'll have a chance," Lex said.

"Ho, ho."

Billy Bob threw a handful of hot, dry sand stingingly against Lex's bare lower parts and then there was a tumble of bodies, straining, matched well, neither able to get the advantage. They struggled to their feet, arms locked, fell heavily with mighty grunts, rolled in the sand. Lex got Billy Bob by the short hair, yanked and produced a roar of pain and then he broke away and ran, laughing, with Billy Bob after him, into the surf, rolling and slipping now as they wrestled, wet, naked.

A big comber with a reach of thousands of miles came in from nowhere and they tumbled, came up caught in the suds, coughing, laughing, to crawl to the sand and lie panting with the sun hot on their wet backs. They raced home at ground speeds, just off the deck, daring each other to swoop the hills closer, closer.

Then it was over and he was off to San Ann. There, in a dinky white hospital gown, he suffered the indignities of complete physical tests which proved him to be in the pink and then into the psych section with a bearded head man and his fat, female cohort and they mucked around in his brain and then he was in isolation, a part of his memory altered. Going home, he felt as if a part of him were missing, because, although he could remember everything about his growing up, his childhood, his dead mother, his dad, all the fellows, try as he might he couldn't think where he was from. Oh, he knew he was a Texican, but he had this lost feeling, even then, still on the planet, because where Texas once was, fixed on the mental map of the galaxy in his brain, was one great, deep mystery. They said it had to be that way. There were these two great powers out there gobbling up the galaxy world by world, fighting over each life-zone planet, letting everything go to hell while they spent all their energy on breeding and building new fleets and new weapons and intellectualizing mightily over which system was best, the tight, central control of the Empire or the allied dictatorships of the Cassiopeian sectors. Either one of them would love to get claws into Texas, because it takes manpower and dirt to grow food with a good, natural taste, and not all planets are suited. You can take a rock and make it livable by making an atmosphere, but you can't create good dirt, and aside from Texas' good dirt, her billions of meacrs, her bountiful harvest of grains and other foodstuffs, just the fact that she existed, independent of either of the great systems, would be justification enough for either to send a space fleet to "liberate" the planet into themselves.

It was just the kind of thing that had been going on when man first began to expand out from Earth. Organization. Red tape. The individual pushed down into the masses. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. That wasn't the Texas way. Texicans thought a man found his own niche in the scheme of things and hung onto it with tooth and claw and gave a friendly hand to a less able fellow, but not to the point of being ridiculous about it, not to the point of killing Mother Nature's way of making man better and better.

He had a smattering of all that from his schooling, and in the last week, he was force-fed more of it as people came to the ranch and gave him the benefit of all the knowledge available about the Empire and its ways.

History: In the old days, back on Earth, men built fabulous machines and atom bombs and began to find out what made the universe tick, but were, seemingly, unable to develop a pleasant, easy, sure method of birth control. Overpopulation bred poverty, starvation, wars, the rape of a planet. And most of them didn't learn, but went out into space and began all over again, the "East" and the "West" fighting it out out there in the near stars, vying for the most fertile planets, breeding like sand flies to provide more settlers and more fighters. And, meantime, with misguided kindness, they tried to make all men equal in fact, when, in fact, man is born equal not at all, not in ability, not in physique, not in mind. Somewhere back there they lost sight of the fact that nature operates with a sort of natural artfulness to make life in the first place—intelligent, humanoid life had existed only on the old Earth—lifting some chemical compound to a state of near life and then working it, kneading it, torturing it with all manner of hardships and tests to make it develop into a form which can fight the inhospitable conditions of an unfeeling universe.

It wasn't that Texicans believed strictly in the survival of the fittest. Life was, perhaps, more sacred to Texicans than to any bleeding heart who moaned, back in the distant past, about the sanctity of the life of an unborn fetus. In all of Texas history there had never been an execution. But each Texican, while he was just a mixture of chemicals and a few cells in his mother's womb, was scanned and probed and if he didn't measure up, he didn't exist, for all you had to do was look at the pictures the spy ships brought back from the galaxy to see the sorry state of the race when breeding was indiscriminate and uncontrolled and people were allowed to be born with twisted limbs and damaged minds to be loved and pampered and revered as sacred life.

"They'll call you a fascist," said Professor Emily Lancing, a specialist in galactic civilization. "That is an antique name going back about six hundred plus years. They might even compare you to a man called Hitler, who believed that his nation was peopled by a super-race, that they were superior to all other peoples of Earth. This Hitler, among other things, tried to exterminate an entire religious sect by starvation and murder. Your answer to this, should you care to make an answer, is that you have not, nor has any Texican or group of Texicans, tried to exterminate anyone. But you don't want to appear too peaceful. We've deliberately left in your mind the facts concerning a certain incident in Cassiopeian space when we sent in a small fleet to pull out that prospector who was taken by the Cassiopeians. We want them to know that only a dozen Texican ships were involved, that the ships of the Cassiopeians were wasted not by the Empire but by Texas and that the incident precipitated the battle of Wolfs Star. How much do you know about the Darlene space rifle?"