by Fritz Leiber
Suddenly sacrificing what help-in-altitude the altar gave her, Rosa leaped down, sprinted at Rachel and at the last instant threw up her bare feet, so that she sailed through the air, a straight-legged projectile with heels aimed at her opponent’s midriff.
Rachel slipped aside with startling litheness, caught loose hold of Rosa’s waistband and gave a tug that accelerated her progress through the air; she also got in a slash with her crop.
But Rosa’s reaching sidewise with one of her slippers, ripped Rachel’s shirt across at the waist and scored the flesh beneath. Now she landed on the hard earthen floor in a painful skid, which she quickly turned into a roll and was on her feet again, instantly sprinting back toward her adversary, who stood crouched and ready.
Again at the last instant Rosa launched herself through the air, this time head-first. Again Rachel slipped to one side.
But Rosa had launched herself, not straight at her opponent, but toward one side — and she had picked the right one. At the instant her head thudded into Rachel’s belly, the Texan girl brought her hand down on Rosa’s neck in a vicious chop.
Rachel sat down heavily and turned a pale shade of green.
Rosa, rolling away, writhed on the dirt, clasping her neck and crying feebly, “Aii, aii, mi cabeza! Oh, my poor head!”
El Toro came running forward, called authoritatively, “All right, all right, fight’s over. Declared a draw! Now we get out there before the crowd riots.”
I told him about my weak batteries. He helped me over to Silver, and we made rapid replacements. I surged with electric power.
Meanwhile the girls were staggering painfully to their feet, both bent over.
“Come on, come on I” El Toro ordered. “I go first with Father Francisco; Rosa, you follow with Guchu. Lamar, you’re beside El Esqueleto — and get that cloak around you tight, camarado, and throw forward your hood — we don’t want to flash that skeleton until you start to speak.”
Rosa, still reeling a little and moaning and holding her head, took Guchu’s hand and inquired, “Does the back of my skirt still exist?”
“Sure does,” the Buddhist told her, “Though I can’t vouch the same for your underpants. But don’t worry, you look fine. Just spit on your hand and wipe the dirt off your face.”
Rachel, composing her features and holding herself erect with difficulty and I was sure some pain, took light hold of my hand, holding it shoulder high, as if we were about to dance a minuet. She said to me out of the corner of her mouth, “You loose-livin’, false-hearted dastard, you. I still think I’m going to upchuck.”
“If you do, play it straight,” I told her in the same fashion. “It will vastly impress the audience to learn that you are here despite serious illness. Come on now, make a good entrance. Turn-te-tum.”
“That’s right, the play’s the thing,” she replied.
Father Francisco, passing Rosa with his robes a-flap, said, “Fifty Hail Marys, my daughter, and fifty Our Fathers. Senorita Lamar,” he called, “examine your protestant conscience and please, do not again ride the horse into my church.”
The doors before us swung open, four bent-backs pushing each, and we walked down into a shallow sea of torchlight, swarthy faces and noise.
Table of Contents
- VII -
IN THE CEMETERY
Snugly wrapped in my black cloak and hood, I sat toward the back of the bandstand in the endmost of a row of chairs occupied by my new comrades from the church.
Outwardly I was serene. Inwardy I was critically furious at the performance being put on by the Revolutionary Committee.
It had no oomph. It lacked pazazz. In short, it was lousy theater.
And as for the rabble-rousing fieriness, well, it wouldn’t have ignited phosphorus.
It wasn’t that they didn’t have a big and potentially responsive audience. From the bandstand to the flower-embowered moonlit little houses, and spreading into the street on one side and the cemetery on the other, was a dense expanse of intent little faces, with here and there a torch streaming in the gusts of wind as fascinatingly as the candles had burned upward. And the crowd did respond at times, but only with scattered listless applause and weary cheers which I could tell were directed by a few dispersed claque-leaders. While like a burning evergreen forest, there wafted from them to us the piney odor of pot.
I met Murder by the way—
He had a mask like Castlereagh—
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:
All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
he tossed them human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.
“The Mask of Anarchy,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley
The crowd was so huge and the whole meeting so open that I asked Rachel, out of the corner of my mouth, “Darling Heart, how in Terra are you allowed to get away with gatherings like this? A deaf, blind man could smell it five kilometers off. Your Pa and the Rangers may be a little slow on the uptake, but — ”
“You faithless cad, how dare you speak to me?” she replied, likewise sotto voce. “Yeah, those greasers stink, all right. Come the revolution, they’ll scrub and take showers and like it! The fact is that Daddy and the others are convinced these meetings are just a harmless catharsis for Mexes, the emotional equivalent of Coca Cola, but — ”
And how right they are, sweetheart, I thought but did not say.
“ — but tonight we’ll show them different, won’t we, you blackguard?” she finished, squeezing my hand. The deeds and words of women engaged in the love game rarely match.
Beloved, you Haven’t the faintest dream of how different, I again thought without words, contenting myself with returning her squeeze. She permitted this for a long moment, then angrily jerked her hand away.
I blinked at a brightly haloed rather long flash of white light beyond some low hills beyond Greasertown. It was as if a brighter moon had started to rise there, then decided not to. I glanced around uneasily, moving eyes only, but no one else seemed to be concerned about the phenomenon.
A half minute or so later, there came a shattering boom and a great gust of wind out of Greasertown. I am stage-trained to show no reaction to loud sounds unconnected with the play, to scuffles in the audience, or even the smell of smoke, but this time it was hard for me to hold still, and I marveled that beyond a few jerks of startlement around me and brief overshoulder looks by members of the audience, a few rising to stare, there were no reactions from actors or observers. I touched Rachel Vachel’s hand and looked a baffled question.
“Blastin’ operations, I presume,” she whispered with a slight shrug. “You’ve got to expect those all the time in Texas, Scully. Most likely from one of those new outsize oilwells. They have been working on those twenty-four hours a day.”
And now my attention was riveted by a dark cloud, ghostly gray in the moonlight and shaped like a slender toadstool, risen from the point on the horizon where I had seen the flash. Even as I watched, it grew taller. A most menacing specter. It made me shiver. Yet no one around me seemed to take note.
I decided that Texans, and perhaps especially Mexican Texans, were stolid creatures indeed, and in addition permanently doped with weed. Which perhaps accounted, it occurred to me, for our revolutionary performance beginning and continuing as such a gutless turkey. First, Father Francisco had opened the meeting with a long, inaudible prayer, then delivered himself of some homilies conveying that the practice of revolution was something like going to church, a duty-enforced activity such as prayer, confession and masses for the dead.
Next Guchu had done his act, sprightlier at least. He kept waving his staff and bounding out of and, purely by accident I believe, back into the two spotlights the bandstand boasted, so that for the audience he was continuously appearing and disappearing. His orange and yellow robes flapping from being into non-be
ing. Likewise, he was using the mike half the time and not using it the other half, so that especially for those farther back than the tenth row, his voice was alternately a raucous roar and a faint screech. As for what he actually said, well, “Kill the ofay in crib and catafalque! Kill the ofay in yourselves. Red heavens and green hells and God a gray fume binding them,” might like his whole act have been barely acceptable in black comedy, but hardly here.
Even the female and child — and so presumably uncyborged — Mexes seemed more puzzled than amused by his antics.
Now El Toro was orating, and a little more to the point, too — that is, if what I took for a series of punchy but unrelated sentences cribbed from the writings of Marx and Lenin, rather poorly translated into Spanish, might be considered an oration. But he worked too close to the mike, so that his every fourth word blared out of recognition.
Besides, El Toro spent too much time flexing his biceps, sometimes one — simultaneously showing off his unimpressive profile — sometimes both together, accompanied by a white-toothed glare. He may have thought he was symbolizing the strength of the working, or rather cyborged, class. To the audience, I think, it gave the impression that he intended to conduct the entire revolution without assistance, in the fashion of the primitive cartoon character Mighty Mouse, or else that he was advertising a course in body-building. It made me think of some of our worst athletic types in Circumluna, forever showing off their bulk of unneeded, unesthetic, striated muscle.
Neither of the women had spoken, I suppose in accordance with the ancient habit of Latin males of hogging all the available lamplight. I was sure La Cucaracha could have done a snappier job than any of them, while even one of Rachel Vachel’s recitations of one of her revolutionary poems would have been preferable. I was sure she must, in her spare moments, have dashed off a whole lingerie drawer full of them, beginning with lines like, “Shuck off, ye Mexes all, your servile yokes,” and rhyming that with such gems as, “And take at tyrant Texans healthy pokes.”
Just then I heard El Toro saying, “And now, comrades, it is my great privilege and colossal pleasure to introduce one who though from another sphere —”
He was introducing me. And he was going to take a half hour to do it, as is the custom with all masters of ceremony, whether ragged revolutionaries or reactionaries clad in as somber stylishness as banks. During that thirty minutes he would say badly everything I intended to say, putting the audience totally to sleep, and leaving me nothing to do but take one bow, or conceivably two.
Filling my chest, I stood up and let off with a growl intended to shiver and split the tombstones in the cemetery. Then I walked forward, deliberately stamping my titanium footplates on the bandstand’s aluminum floor, so that it rang out like a cacophonous gong and was surely dented.
I kicked over the mike, placed myself precisely at the convergence of the spotlights, threw back my hood and cloak, and said in my saturate-the-Sack voice, spacing the words rather widely and the sentences even more so, “Yo soy la Muerta. Perro la Vida tambien. Que Vida!”
My audience, who looked like a beach of dark pebbles each topped with darker sea-moss, shrank in terror, gasped in awe, and burst into laughter.
I offer no explanation as to how I could achieve this merely by saying, “I am the Death. But also the Life. What Life!” accompanying the last with a shrugging of the shoulders, a spreading of the unturned hands, and a certain cocking of the head which gave the impression I had winked, though actually I had not.
The actor’s high art is a mystery.
Naturally El Toro, misjudging everything, thought the laughter showed I’d wrecked the scene, and naturally he tried to circle in front of me to save it, though in that stage position he would have been well underneath the beams of both spots.
I rammed him into his chair, not with a contact shove, which if successful merely moves the body and often has unforseen comic consequences, such as an overturned chair plus pratt-fall — but with a faked, or theatrical shove, which never touches the body, but stuns the mind and is foolproof.
Grinning widely at my audience, I confided to them in a voice which carried to the back row as clearly as did my gleaming teeth, “Comrades of the Revolution! As you well know, I come from a very far country and over an electrified fence which only I can cross — a fence high as the sky and dark as all mystery. It was a long and hungry journey. The pickings were slim, as you can see for yourselves.” I somewhat elaborately indicated my gleaming skeleton and the hardly less slender, black rest of me. “But now, comrades,” I continued ogreishly, leaning forward, “now that I am in Texas, I intend to feed well.” And I gave them another long flash of my teeth, somewhat hastily adding — for several of my audience appeared about to run, “All of us shall feed well, comrades.”
I faked tossing something into the air. I thought of it as a small human head, so presumably my audience did too. I narrowly watched its ascent and fall, and at the last moment ducked my skull sideways and snapped my jaw on it, with a canine growl that I made suggest also a crunch.
I chewed with relish, then swallowed with a head-rocking bob of Adam’s apple. “That was Chaparral Houston Hunt, Vice-Commander-in-Chief of the Texas Rangers,” I explained. “Tough, but juicy.”
My audience also ate it up — my acting, I mean — ate it up so much that I repeated that bit with the fancied heads of Sheriff Chase and Mayor Burleson. Then I decided it was time to state my simple revolutionary platform.
“Yes, comrades, you and I shall feed well, once the revolution is won. Free banquets for all! No more work! Free clothing — wardrobes of the most beautiful! Travel everywhere! Homes too luxurious for anyone to wish ever to leave! Two women for every man! And,” I added, since I could see dark feminine frowns in the first rows, “a wholly faithful and ever attentive husband, gallant as a grandee, for every woman!”
A diversion was needed before they puzzled too long over that amazing paradox. Accordingly, a dog yelped, as though demanding food, or more food. I looked about to see where the hungry animal was. My audience began to do so too. I glanced under the chairs of my comrades on the bandstand. I even knelt and looked under the bandstand itself, my lips open all the while, as if in wonder, but unmoving. I shaded my eyes, gazing into the distance. The yelps continued. My audience was consumed with curiosity.
Then I faced front and smiled, raising my eye brows and one finger in the fashion of one who has suddenly discovered the solution to a problem. I tossed up another imaginary head. The yelping became wildly eager. I caught the head with a crunch of my side-teeth, and the yelps changed to snarly, greedy mouthings.
I am by no means the Luna-Terra pair’s greatest ventriloquist, but I have as much command of that limited art as is proper for its greatest actor. I also sing and dance and do the freefall equivalent of juggling, which involves bouncing resilient objects off a surface.
At any rate I pleased my simple audience, who were altogether charmed to discover that the yelping dog had deceived me by hiding inside me. When their laughter and applause began to fade, I explained, “That was Governor Lamar,” and I tossed up another head and captured it with my mouth, this time omitting the crunch. I grinningly rolled it about inside my cheeks and finally swallowed it without chewing.
“And that was his beautiful daughter, who spends your rightful wealth in tinseled theatrical displays,” I announced, licking my lips. “Very tasty.”
Through the renewed laughter, chiefly male, I spotted Rachel Vachel’s gasp and stifled giggles behind me. If they had been any louder, I’d have thrown something at her, probably the mike at my feet. An actress who breaks up because of private onstage jokes doesn’t deserve the name. Of course I probably shouldn’t have started making gags like that so soon, but at times one must instantly follow all inspirations of the muse.
I decided I could new risk feeding my audience a little more brain-food. “Silencior I decreed, and when they had quieted, I said, “Comrades, you are genial and generous. Fa
r too generous. It concerns you that one mangy dog go hungry, and delights you that he be fed. Think equally of yourselves, I command. Think of your own empty bellies, I say.” (Since it was well past supper-time I knew most of them would be feeling a bit hungry.) “For two hundred and fifty years you have been starved, enslaved, and exploited by the white Texans. That is something not to be endured — not by you and certainly not by me. It is to demand, in your name and with your help, payment in full — aye, and time and a half for overtime and double time on Sundays and holidays — for that quarter millennium of distasteful servitude — it is to achieve those things, I say, that I have come striding from my far country!”
And purely for the sake of variety, I drew myself up tall as I said that and drew close around me my cloak, reversed to show only its scarlet lining.
Instead of being soberly impressed, or rather in addition to being impressed, my audience all laughed hugely.
Leaning toward La Cucaracha, who sat at the opposite end of the chair-row from Rachel Vachel, I asked under cover of the joyful noise, “Why am I getting a laugh on the red cloak?”
“Because our bill collectors traditionally wear a red suit,” she replied with commendable brevity, beaming at me.
“Go, man, go!” Guchu cried encouragingly.
“I think he goes too far,” Father Francisco also took advantage of the opportunity to put in, mutteringly. “I think he is of the devil.”
“Contrary to my first expectations, you’re doing excellently,” El Toro assured me. “Only harken to the wise father. Don’t go too far.”
“What sort of revolutionaries are you?” I demanded of them in a contemptuous hissing whisper. “Too far? You haven’t seen anything yet. And you, padre, just watch my devil’s smoke!” And in a swirl of red cloak I turned my back on them before any could reply.