A Specter Is Haunting Texas

by Fritz Leiber

  TO BE CONCLUDED

  Table of Contents

  A SPECTER IS HAUNTING TEXAS

  FRITZ LEIBER

  © GALAXY, Sep 1968

  Part 3 of 3

  There are only two things in life you can be sure of:

  Death and Texas.

  — Old Texian proverb

     WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE -

  Alter a nuclear world war, Texas engulfs the USA and, except for the black nations of California and Florida, dominates North America from Guatemala to a fluctuating Russo-Texan boundary in the Yukon. The Texans take a hormone which makes them 8 or more feet tall, towering above their servile Mexes, Injuns and poor whites.

  For 100 years Earth’s nations have banned contact with Circumluna, a self-sustaining moon-satellite, which refused to join in the Great Atomic War. It is chiefly inhabited by Russian and American scientists and engineers, along with various hippie and artistic types living in a duraplastic annex called the Sack.

  When relations are resumed between Circumluna and Terra, the first Sackabond to drop down the gravity well is Christopher Crockett La Cruz, known as Scully, a young actor seeking, funds to save his father's theater in the Sack by asserting a family claim to the Lost Crazy-Russian Pitchblende Mine near Yellowknife.

  Scully is an 8½ foot Thin — most of his muscles are too weak to function in Terran gravity. So he wears a battery-powered titanium exoskeleton. (His jaws, fingers and toes alone are abnormally strong.) By accident he is landed in Dallas, Texas, Texas — heart of the Lone Star Continent — where he is befriended by Elmo Oilfield Earp, a garrulous minor politician.

  Through Elmo he meets Governor Lamar of Texas, Texas and is innocently used by Lamar’s clique in the successful assassination of President Austin of Texas.

  On the same day Scully falls in love with (1) Rosa Morales, called La Cucaracha, and (2) Rachel Vachel Lamar, theater-minded daughter of the governor. The two girls induce him to join the Bent-Back Revolution, a Mex revolt against the Texans.

  There is a greaser legend that one day the dread figure of Death (El Esqueleto, or for short Esquel) will come striding from nowhere to lead the revolt against the gringos. With his cadaverousness, black suit and gleaming exoskeleton, Scully is a natural for the part. He enjoys portraying Death and making revolutionary speeches, but his chief reason for turning rebel is his desire to get to Amarillo Cuchillo (Texan for Yellowknife), where it is planned the “revolutionary tour” will end.

  After brushes with the Texas Rangers, the tour gets underway, led by El Toro, an amiable young Mex. With them also go the two girls; a priest, Father Francisco; Cassius Krupp Fanninowicz, an unbalanced Texo-German scientist who has a monomaniac interest in Scully’s exoskeleton; and Guchu, a black Zen Buddhist, who is an agent of the Pacific Black Republic. They travel in kacks — elusive combo air-cushion and copter vehicles.

  A mystery develops as to what industrial enterprise the Texans are carrying out inside certain closely guarded huge towers scattered across the land. Working in the towers are hordes of temporarily cyborged Mexes, whose memory for their work is artificially blacked out.

  At Kansas City, Missouri, Texas, the revolutionary company barely escapes by river submarine from a surprise raid by the Rangers on one of their big meetings. Three days later they are encamped in an abandoned coal mine near the atomized ruins of Evansville on the Ohio River.

  Table of Contents

  - XI -

  IN THE COAL MINE

  “Infierno de los diablos!” El Toro cursed genially but seriously behind me in the silvery dark. “What are you doing up here, Esquel? Hunting for Texas owl-planes? I assure you, they will spot you first. Your exo will stand out in their radar like a metal tree.”

  I did not remove the borrowed binoculars from my orbits, but lowered their electronic gain best to observe the dark-and-glinting speck somewhere between my eyes and Luna’s bright, crinkled border. When the almost point-tiny spangle had climbed a low mountainside and off the moon, I knew for certain it was Circumluna and the Sack in transit. I shifted my field to the stars around Luna. From the pale few I could see — so different from the multitude of the Sack’s blazing nights — I recognized Taurus by the doubles around Aldebaran on one side of the moon and the Pleiades on the other. That meant that for the Sack, Terra lay at the heaven’s antipodes in Scorpio, beneath my feet.

  El Toro pounded lightly with his fist against my leg, just above my knee-motor. “I understand now, Esquel,” he said. “It is the first night the weather has let you see the cold silver sun around which your little world revolves.”

  I nodded, but the point seemed to me that he couldn’t possibly understand, not to any degree. For instance, my almost painful surge of relief at knowing the real date, not this grotesque Spindle-top fourth, but the real date: sunth of Leo, terranth of Scorpio, lunth of Capricorn.

  The scientific Circumlunans still measure time by Greenwich — an invisible line a quarter million miles away earthward and infinity away starward. But we Sackabonds depend primarily on the times it takes sun, earth and moon to move across one of the twelve constellations of the zodiac — sunth, terranth and lunth. Our lunth is about half an earth-hour, making our sackday about six earth-hours long, the time it takes Circumluna to orbit the moon. Twelve lunths make a sackday, ten sackdays make a terranth, twelve terranths make a sunth (earth’s month), twelve sunths make a starth, our Sack name for year. It’s an impossible system if you try to make it precise, but okay and highly esthetic if you’ve grown up with it. Who needs minutes and seconds? — except in the clutches, and then you need only speed. Besides, any good actor can count stage-seconds perfectly in his head.

  Or what could El Toro know about the momentary shivering illusion of free fall I felt as I permitted myself a final glimpse of the dark sequin that was my home?

  I lowered my binoculars and surveyed Terra’s horizon from the low hillock where I stood: Southward, the silent Ohio River, gleaming like a black nebula; Eastward, the blackened steel and masonry stumps of Evansville thrusting up through the undergrowth; Northward, prairie; Westward, the ruined works of the abandoned coal mine which was our camp.

  Rapping again above my knee, El Toro said, “Come on now, Esquel. You’ve tempted the Texan bull long enough, and we have a job for you.”

  I looked down at his swarthy, handsome face. A wide grin showed the pearls of his teeth. I envied him his chunky vigorous body that stood its full four foot ten with ease in the killing terragrav, while my eight foot six sagged in its frame. I nodded and started down through the dusk, taking short careful steps.

  “You are tired, Esquel,” he said. “Your exo stands straight, but sometimes you hang from it — God pardon me — like the Crucified One.”

  “I am neither a religious nor secular hero, not even of the dubious revolutionary breed,” I told him somewhat brusquely. “In fact I spit on all such. I am just an actor working his way toward Spaceport Yellowknife. As for yokes, your cyborged countrymen must carry theirs. Mine carries me. Who is the better off? If you have to work out your somewhat grandiose sympathies — you really belong in grand opera! — light me a reefer.”

  I was sharp with him because my support bands truly were cutting me cruelly. The three days since Kansas City had marked and drained me. To a person unused even to one lunagrav, six play hob with the gut, packed into the belly like a length of limp pipe the Creator did not even bother to coil. Kansas City, Columbia, St. Louis, Carbondale — four revolutionary one-night stands without a layoff. Surely Terran actors of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century must have been a hardy breed.

  Columbia. My memories of our brush with the Rangers at KC had made me shake so that my exo rattled — until I made my entrance.

  St. Louis. A gargantuan, half-lived-in graveyard, its skyscrapers a cemetery of melted behe-mothian tombs from the Atom War. But the biggest audience yet.

  Carbondale. A whistlestop, except for a host of cyborgs working in two of the gigant
ic tower-masked drilling rigs, from each of which a twisting trail of giant rock-laden trucks centipeded day and night, to build a wall somewhere north — Diana knows why! Or most likely she doesn’t.

  A long a path that zigzagged through undergrowth, El Toro and I felt our way to the ramp leading down into the shallow, worked-out coal mine. Ahead and below, a small, squat rectangle of light glowed. I sipped my stick, drinking deep of the evergreen smoke and holding it in my lungs, but although our footsteps began to syncopate, there was no soothing of pain.

  El Toro said, “You draw apart from us, Esquel. You hug your hurt and loneliness. The girls in particular are distressed. I am sure that if you spoke a few gallant and sugary zeros into the ear of either — well, we have a saying that one night’s sleep with is more restorative than a week’s sleep without. That is, if a man can imagine the latter.”

  I did not tell him of Rachel’s and Kookie’s trick of the one interrupting us whenever I was alone with the other, nor of my determination to hold out against them both until one or the other surrendered unconditionally.

  I said instead, harshly, “For me this is a business trip, not a romance, either with giddy, easily-won females or the Bent-Back Revolution, which appears to be killing a hundred Mexes for every Tex. And acting, done in professional fashion, is the most tiring business.”

  I unintentionally kicked a bit of gravel that clattered down the slope. Instantly a near-blinding searchbeam shot up from the depths. Around it I made out the blurs of armed guards. I was both reassured and irked by this evidence of revolutionary preparedness.

  El Toro observed, using hand to shade his eyes from below, “It is odd to think that even Death should become weary.”

  “So my performances are falling off,” I replied, quick to catch at any hint of criticism. “Soon, instead of firing your revolution, I shall be a cold rocket-tube that coughs once and dies forever, reeking of hydrazine.”

  “No, no, no!” he protested, a little too much. “Why, only last night I was admiring your new chiste — I mean, gag — of pretending a duel with Ranger Hunt and President Lamar.”

  We’d had certain news that Governor Lamar had been made president of Texas in a hurry-up inauguration. Rachel-Vachel had said this advancement of her Daddy meant certain doom for the Lone Star Republic. I was doubtful. Apart from his idiot involvement with his daughter and his compulsive lint-picking, Lamar had seemed to me a shrewd man and suave for a Texan.

  El Toro went on eagerly, “The gag made my mind buzz. How would it be if we had two tall dummies representing el presidente y el jefe? Inside the empty clothes of each would be a nimble comrade moving the hated head on a pole. Besides providing extra realism, they would give the audience something to throw things at!”

  “Not a bad idea,” I told him, breaking it gently. From what I had seen of the marksmanship of most Mexes, they would be hitting me as often as the dummies. “If you can figure out a foolproof way for the men inside to see out uninterruptedly, so they don’t fall off the stage. And if they’ll follow my directions to the letter. And if you have foamed plastic or even papier-mache to make the heads. And if you have a good caricaturist sculptor.” I did not mention that I was an expert at the last.

  “Enough ifs!” El Toro protested. “You always drown anyone else’s ideas — especially if they involve you sharing the stage with another.”

  I looked down at El Toro. It was the first even mildly spiteful remark I had ever heard him make. Had he caught acting in only a week? But it is a most infectious profession, and with it go its vain and gossipy habits. Besides, a star must alway expect jealousy.

  “Not so,” I told him mildly. “I have already suggested that the Senoritas Lamar and Morales —”

  “And I have told you why that is impossible!” he shot back. “Women on the stage! Unheard of. Oh, in the comic or erotic perhaps, but this is serious revolutionary drama!”

  “Serious revolutionary farce,” I corrected. “Also, there is one fatal objection to your excellent idea. The dummies of Lamar and Hunt would have to wield swords back at me, else it would be only cruel slaughter.”

  “But my people enjoy cruel slaughter. Consider the bullfight.”

  “The bull has horns,” I reminded him.

  “Nevertheless I could manage it. Observe!” he retorted, striking a position. “With my left hand I hold the headed pole upright, so,” he continued with great earnestness. “With my upstretched right I manage my sword, which is lashed to the end of a pole. While my eyes peer through a large oneway transparent window in the middle of Lamar’s robe. Hunt could be played by El Tacito,” he added, mentioning a Mex who acted as my bodyguard, though tonight I had eluded him.

  Someone laughed — Guchu, it was — and I was myself hard-put to avoid grinning at the image of El Toro as the working mechanism of a giant puppet. We were now past the guards and searchlight, which had been turned off, and in a vast gallery of the mine, so low I had to duck a little, and dotted with massive crunch-ended posts of ancient wood supporting spooky megatons of solidity.

  “You mentioned a job for me,” I reminded El Toro.

  The acting-light died in his eyes. He pointed at two stringily muscular bent-backs, one old, one older, crouching by Guchu and regarding me with considerable apprehension.

  He said, “here are two who have worked in the great towers which you — and we too — want to know about. Perhaps you will try your hypnotic skills on them, as you did on Pedro Ramirez.”

  I moved toward them, curving my lips in a friendly smile. I noted, in the ears of both, the callosities of the cyborged. Their ragged dothing revealed many burn-scars — some pale and stretched, others lumpy and twisting.

  Death is not the ideal figure for a hypnotist, though he eventually summons each of us offstage with a mesmeric command. Few find his presence sympathetic or reassuring.

  I got the old man under, but I was unable to get past the block on his memories of the work he did in the towers, except that he began barely audibly droning an unintelligible chant in the same rhythm as the two “dig and delve” lines I had got out of Pedro Ramirez. He kept it up faintly even when I told him to sleep.

  Perhaps the older man, being closer to Death himself, was not so intimidated by me. Perhaps he even felt a certain curiosity. At any rate, he eyed me bravely and when I questioned him about his work in the great towers, his mouth eagerly formed words.

  But no sounds accompanied them, and none of us, including El Toro, could lip-read them.

  I had broken the block for his upper-speaking parts, but not for his vocal cords and lungs, perhaps because of a literal interpretation on the part of his unconscious mind of some prior hypnotic command such as “keep silent.” He could form words, because he wanted to, but he could not make a noise.

  Then I had an inspiration. I quietly said to him, “When I say, ‘Go,’ Federico, do the things you would do on a working day in one of the great towers. Perform each action fully, but move on to the next action when I say, ‘Next.’ Begin at the doorway to the tower. Go!”

  He got to his feet, his bent spine more noticeable now, the muscles of his torso and legs stiffening a little as if from the weight of the yoke, and he took three steps in a straight line.

  “Next,” I said as he was making the fourth step.

  Federico made a quarter turn and stopped, gazing respectfully at emptiness. Then he straddled his legs, held out to either side his arms with hands hanging limply, and opened his mouth wide. It occurred to me that he might be submitting himself to a medical examination or more likely a search.

  He turned in the direction he had first been going. Guchu guided him deftly past a post. We all followed. It was an eerie performance in the low-ceilinged, dim-lit forest of dead tree sections.

  This time I said “Next,” on his fifth step. He stopped and stood relaxedly, right hand lightly gripping something at shoulder level. At first I thought it a tool, then as he made no further movement, except to sag apathetically
, I decided that it was a support by which he steadied himself.

  Yet he was making other movements — tiny squirmings and hunching, as if accommodating himself to other beings moving past and next to him.

  Gradually his legs pressed together and his elbows close to his sides — the imaginary support was almost at his shoulder now. I saw him as one of a tight-packed crowd of beings. Texomex cyborgs like himself, I presumed. I could almost hallucinate them, so strong was the illusion.

  Without warning he straightened up, his neck stretched, and his head was thrown back a little. At the same time he stood almost on tiptoe. And yet he seemed to exert no muscular effort to do all of this, or somehow the effort was cleverly masked. Truly the body’s memory can do wonderful, perhaps miraculous things under hypnotic suggestion. It can create illusions.

  I knew what the illusion was at once, for I know free fall when I see it. Inside the great tower his imagination had recreated, Federico was falling — and almost certainly with a group of others in an elevator accelerating downward swiftly. Probably almost at a terragrav, for the illusion was strong that he almost floated, right hand loosely linked around invisible grip.

  I realized I did not know how long he had been falling, and I was pleased to see an associate of El Toro, one Carlos Mendoza, holding a wristwatch between himself and Federico.

  Suddenly Federico’s feet were flat on the ground, his knees bent, the extensor muscles of his legs bulged. His free arm clapped across his guts, his other dragged heavily on the imaginary support. His jaws — his whole face — clenched together.