Titanium Texicans

by Alan Black

  Valenzuela ran a hand-held portable scanner over Tasso. She made more tsking noises and showed the readout to Otto. She ignored Tasso’s interest in the readout. Otto wandered in and out of the room, bringing in tools and equipment. Neither the doctor nor her assistant bothered to answer any of Tasso’s questions about the items.

  Valenzuela had him stand still inside a large deep-scan medical unit. He stood still for what seemed like an eternity with his arms over his head. The machine whirled silently around him taking readings from every angle. He wiggled slightly when a scan receptor slid between his legs, up the gown and touched him at some hypersensitive spots. The doctor and Otto both sighed in unison and started the scan over again. He managed to hold still long enough on the third time through the scan.

  Tasso asked, “Why would you run a hand-held medical scanner and then run a big deep-scan right away? Wouldn’t the deep scan see anything the hand-held unit saw? Why not just do the deep scan?”

  Valenzuela and Otto didn’t answer.

  Grandpa always said the best way to learn was to ask questions. He’d explained some people thought experience was the best teacher. However, experience had a bad habit of teaching its life lessons at the point of the final exam. He’d pointed out that no one had ever died from asking questions. If Grandpa were here, Tasso would’ve pointed out that you can’t learn anything from asking questions if no one gives you any answers.

  “On your feet, please,” Valenzuela said. She didn’t look at Tasso, but her tone left no doubt that she wasn’t making a request and who she expected to follow the command.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Tasso slid to his feet. He kept one hand on the gap in the gown. The doctor still didn’t look at him, but Otto was standing behind him against the wall.

  Valenzuela grabbed his earlobe, turned his head sideways, and shoved a cold tool so deep in his ear he thought it would come out the other side. “Hold still, greenhorn. I’m going to have Otto hold you down, strap you down, or sit on you if you keep squirming around.”

  Tasso thought about letting someone know his name was not Greenhorn again, but clamped his teeth together. He stood still as the doctor poked him in both ears, up the nose, and gagged him with a flat instrument shoved halfway down his throat.

  Valenzuela shined a bright light in his eyes, shook her head, and said, “I don’t want to know what you’ve been eating. Good grief!”

  She thumped him a few times on his back, chest and even poked and prodded him between his toes. She slipped one of his feet into a boot-like med-scanner. A green light flashed on the boot and for the first time he could remember, Tasso’s athlete’s foot quit itching.

  “Okay, lift it up,” Valenzuela said. “Feet shoulder length apart and stand up straight.”

  “Um … what?” Tasso asked. “Lift up what?”

  “The gown, greenhorn,” Otto said from behind him. “Grab it and lift it waist high.”

  “Wait,” Tasso said. “First, my name is Tasso Menzies, it is not Greenhorn, whoever that may be. Second, you did more scans on me than I’ve had in the rest of my life combined. Won’t those scans tell you everything you need to know without this poking and prodding?”

  Valenzuela dragged up a short stool and sat down in front of Tasso. She shook her head. “Believe me, Tasso Menzies, I have other things I’d rather be doing than running a complete scan on a new recruit.” She snorted. “You’ve never had a complete physical in your life, so I’m going to check you from the tips of your ears to the ends of your toes. That’s my job. Your job is to do what you’re told.”

  “Yes, ma’am, but—” Tasso said.

  “No buts,” Valenzuela interrupted.

  Otto laughed, causing the doctor to laugh with him.

  “That is not what I meant, Otto,” Valenzuela said with a laugh. “Anyway, I am called Doctora, I am Valenzuela, I am Doctor Valenzuela, and if we become friends someday, you may call me Erendira. If you call me ma’am again, I’m going to have Otto get out the gag and strap you down to the exam table. Understand?”

  “Yes, Doctor,” Tasso said. “I wanted to ask, since it’s me who’s getting poked and prodded, I don’t see why you have to do it manually after the scans.”

  Valenzuela sighed. “If you had regular medical exams by a real physician, I wouldn’t have to do half of what we’re checking, but you haven’t. I’m doing a manual check because I think it’s the heart of foolishness to let a machine tell you what you can find out for yourself.”

  It sounded so much like his grandfather that he shut his mouth.

  Valenzuela said, “So, lift the gown. You don’t have anything I haven’t seen. Or rather, if you do, that is what I’m looking for.”

  The room went from cold to hot and stuffy as Tasso grabbed the hem of the gown and lifted it to his waist. He stood with his legs about shoulder width apart. He tried to stand up straight, but he was startled when Valenzuela grabbed his testicles. He wanted to back away from her, but his backside was already against the table and Otto was behind that.

  He wanted to look at what Valenzuela was doing and he also wanted to look away. He ended up closing his eyes. He willed her to quit before he got excited. His eyes shot back open, and without thinking, he looked down as she gave a quick tug on both testicles. She let loose, just as he felt the beginnings of an erection. He tried to stop it, but the more he thought about it the worse it got.

  Valenzuela shoved a finger in a place where no finger should go.

  Tasso gasped. His erection died before it reached full bloom.

  Valenzuela said, “Turn your head and cough.”

  Tasso did as commanded.

  “Again,” Valenzuela commanded.

  Tasso coughed. He felt her grab the hem of the gown and pull it down. He almost sighed, thinking the worst was over.

  He was wrong.

  “Turn around. Bend over and grab your knees,” Valenzuela said.

  Tasso was beyond complaining. He turned and faced Otto, but the man was thumbing through a dataport, barely paying attention.

  Valenzuela tapped him on one butt cheek. “Okay, young man, spread ‘em and give me a big smile.”

  Tasso sputtered, “What?”

  Otto looked up. “Reach back and spread your cheeks for the rectal exam.”

  Tasso did as he was told. He wasn’t sure what Valenzuela was looking for and he was too embarrassed to ask.

  Otto smiled, “Thank your lucky stars you’re too young for a prostate exam or a colonoscopy.”

  Tasso wasn’t sure what they were and he was certainly too embarrassed to ask.

  “Okay,” Valenzuela said. “We checked every bug bite, every scratch, and every crevice from the back of your ears to between your toes.” She left the room, but tossed “might as well get dressed” over her shoulder on the way out.

  He looked around, but his clothes were still gone.

  “This,” Otto said. He tossed coveralls at Tasso.

  The one-piece uniform was blue cotton with pockets everywhere. ‘Menzies’ was stitched on the chest and across the back. He looked for underwear and saw extra cloth sewn into the inside of the coverall. The outfit was amazingly comfortable and seemed to fit him much better than his own clothes. He was used to wearing his grandfather’s old clothes, even if they had become a bit too short over the last year.

  Otto handed him a pair of shoes. These weren’t like his hand-sewn jack-o’-lantern hide boots. These were soft, but felt sturdy at the same time. Otto pulled open a cabinet and set Tasso’s bag by a chair in the corner. “Your old clothes are in there. They’re clean and folded. You can keep them or throw them away. Try not to wear them again. Damn! Those rags have more holes in them than they were designed to have. That ancient shotgun of yours is down in the ship’s armory on Deck K. You can get it anytime you have a need for it.”

  As Otto left the room, he pointed at a chair in the corner. “Sit and don’t move.”

  After a few short moments of doing nothing, he began to
feel nervous. After a few more moments, he began to feel drowsy. He hadn’t eaten in quite a while and he hadn’t slept for longer. Back at his family’s graves, dreams of the jack-o’-lantern Ol’ Ben had filled his sleep. He hadn’t had a restful sleep since the morning he found Grandpa dead.

  He could hear his grandfather’s voice ringing in his head about burning daylight. He didn’t know how to tell time on a spaceship or even how to tell day from night without the sun. The time on his dataport was still set for planetary time. He doubted the crew kept Saronno time. For all he knew, everyone around him thought the time was high noon.

  He pulled out his dataport and fished around for a manual to read. He was tempted to re-read the manual for the rock-jack. That was his favorite, as the writer was a person with a sense of humor. He’d read it so often he almost had it memorized. He thought briefly about going back to the flitter manual, but after the crash and repair of the aircraft, he was as familiar with its guts as the manual could make him.

  He selected a manual on the Rumsfelt .55 caliber hand-held auto cannon. He’d never seen a Rumsfelt .55 caliber hand-held auto cannon. That didn’t really matter. The repair manual was on his list to read, so he began reading. He was barely into the first chapter when Valenzuela came back in. She pulled up the short stool and sat next to him. She had her dataport out with the display blacked out on the backside so he couldn’t see what was there.

  “What are you reading?” she asked.

  Instead of answering, Tasso grabbed the reader display from where it hovered in the air and twisted it so she could read it. She whistled and said, “A little light reading to pass the time, huh?”

  Tasso shrugged, “It’s on my reading list, so I read.”

  Valenzuela said, “Well, I don’t approve of your reading list any more than I approve of your diet over the last few years. Your parents should be horsewhipped.”

  Tasso tensed up, but held his tongue. This woman may not know anything about him or his family, so it might not be a deliberate insult. Tasso looked the woman in the eyes as Grandpa always said he should when answering an adult. “My parents are dead, Doctor.”

  “Oh. I am sorry. You were raised by …?” She let the question hang in the air. Tasso decided she had an irritating habit of leaving questions unfinished and throwing in a verbal question mark at the end of the sentence. Still, she was the first woman he could remember who had tugged on his testicles, so he was going to let her small bad habit slide. Family questions set his teeth on edge more than a dangling question ever would.

  “I was raised by my grandfather. He’s dead too, so if you’re looking to whip someone with a horse, you’re too late.”

  “I’m sorry again. Grandmother deceased? Yes?”

  Tasso nodded, “Grandmother died a few months after my mother … died.”

  “Starting with your grandparents the causes of death were …?”

  Tasso sighed. “Is this really necessary?”

  Valenzuela smiled, “I realize many planets have developed cultures that prize personal privacy. We have no such nonsense aboard a spacecraft. Everyone in the communal showers shares your athlete’s foot. If you play your banjo too loud, everyone on deck knows you can’t strum a B-flat to save your life. If you fart, everyone on board ends up breathing it.”

  “I do have athlete’s foot, I don’t know what a banjo is, and I don’t know how to stop … um, passing gas.”

  Valenzuela laughed, “You used to have athlete’s foot. We fixed that already. The banjo is for a later conversation. And explosive methane generation and expulsion is something we can fix with a pill if it becomes too bad, but on a ship where half our diet is beans … well, we mostly live with it.”

  She looked at Tasso. “Now, grandparents …?”

  Tasso sighed, “My grandfather died of a stroke and my grandmother had heart failure.” He tapped open his dataport and showed her the medical scan recordings of their deaths.

  Valenzuela shook her head, “Plaque buildup in both cases. I’m sorry they died so young, Tasso. From these scans, it appears the plaque buildup was dietary and not hereditary. Still, it explains much of what we saw in your scans. What was your last meal?”

  Tasso thumbed through his dataport until he found the volume on Saronno’s fauna and called up a picture of a yapikino. He showed the doctor the dataport. “I boiled one of these with some taters … potatoes.”

  “Oh my … that is ….”

  Tasso shrugged, “They have more meat on them than they look, plus they aren’t too hard to trap.”

  “I was more surprised at its appearance than its nutritional value. I’ve got to say that the first man to eat one of those must have been ravenous.” Valenzuela shook her head. “Now your parents …?”

  Tasso clenched his teeth and said, “My mother … died … of a … in a jack-o’-lantern attack.”

  “A what?”

  He called up a picture of a jack-o’-lantern. “This is one.” He showed her the dataport.

  “Good grief!” The doctor looked shocked. “Do all of the creatures on your planet come from the mind of a hell-bound psychopath?”

  Tasso scanned through his personal data until he found his pictures of Ol’ Ben. “And this is the one that did it.”

  Valenzuela was shocked, “You have a vid of the creature that killed your mother?”

  Tasso shrugged, “Why not? Grandpa says it doesn’t make sense to blame a jack-o’-lantern for doing what a jack does. It isn’t like a person who can choose what it does or doesn’t do. Ol’ Ben just does what he does.”

  Valenzuela said, “That is an astonishing perspective. And you haven’t wanted to hunt it down and take revenge?”

  Tasso shook his head. “I wouldn’t have to hunt far. Do you see that building there? That’s my house. I shot this video when I left home yesterday. No, it was the day before. Anyway, you don’t so much hunt a jack-o’-lantern as you let it hunt you, and then you try to kill it before it kills you.”

  Valenzuela shook her head as if she were trying to clear the image of Ol’ Ben from her brain, “Your father is dead …?”

  Tasso said, “I recently found out he’s dead. My uncle told me today. I, um … never met the man.”

  “You never knew the … ah. Well, I knew my father. He was a mean S.O.B., a drinker and womanizer. I would’ve been better off without him.”

  Tasso shook his head, “Grandpa says we are what our experiences make us. You are who you are because of your father. I am who I am because of the absence of my father. Still, I would’ve liked to have at least met him.”

  Valenzuela said, “Living relatives …?”

  “I have an uncle. He’s my mother’s older brother. He’s the one who signed me up for this training cruise.”

  “The word about that has spread through the senior staff. Your uncle sold you off to us. No offense meant. The captain wants to see you when I’m done with you, to talk about it.”

  “So everyone knows about me? The senior staff, you said?”

  “Oh, everyone on board knows who you are. Your little episode with the taco on the observation deck has been primetime viewing on the shipnet for a couple of hours now.”

  “Viewing …?” Tasso realized he was starting to dangle his questions in imitation of the doctor.

  “Yes. I’m sure you’ll see it yourself, eventually. Engineering has actually set the whole thing to music already. It must be slow in engineering after the launch. The only thing the senior staff and the captain know is that your uncle signed you on board for a voyage. Everything you’ve told me is between us. I’ll never tell anyone. The only way anyone will know these personal details is if you tell them. Anyway, I’ve one more thing before I have Otto run you up to see the captain.”

  Valenzuela reached into a pocket and pulled out a silver and glass tool. It looked like a small pistol. Without hesitation, she jabbed the muzzle against his neck and pulled the trigger. A muscle spasm twisted Tasso’s head around and he fell t
o the floor, writhing in pain.

  CHAPTER 10

  TASSO CRADLED his head in his arms. The pain radiated around his neck. His shoulders stiffened and cramped. He squeezed his eyes shut to stop the pain. Even the light hurt. Then, the pain hit his stomach. He would have vomited if there was anything to throw up. His calf muscles twitched, curling his feet and toes. The pain began to ease, but his stuffy nose was so plugged up he could barely breathe. His vision cleared enough so that he could see Valenzuela staring down at him with curiosity.

  “Why?” Tasso croaked.

  “Why what …? Oh, this?” She held up the gun-like tool. “I figured since you’ve never seen a hypo before, I’d jam it in and explain later. Besides, this would’ve hurt worse if you’d tensed up before I shot you with it.”

  Tasso wasn’t exactly crying, but he had water leaking from his eyes. He couldn’t stop the leaking, no matter how many times he wiped his eyes. He couldn’t clear his stuffiness no matter how many times he blew his nose. He was sitting up, still on the floor, but upright, when Otto stuck his head in the door.

  “Ready, Doc?” Otto asked. “Captain Rojo is getting cranky. She’s made her third call down here.”

  Valenzuela nodded. “If she calls again, you tell her that I’ll come up there and kick her ass all over again if she keeps bothering us. I’ll send him up there when he is ready, and not before.”

  Otto laughed, “You kicked the captain’s butt?”

  Valenzuela laughed with him, “Maybe I shouldn’t have said that. We were in third grade and I caught her holding hands with Quique Fuentes at recess. I thought he was supposed to be my boyfriend. Anyway, it must be getting late, I’m babbling.”

  Otto, still laughing, said, “The captain mentioned something about it being after midnight and past her bedtime.” He looked down at Tasso. “You ready, kid? All joking aside, when the captain calls, we hop to it.” He grabbed Tasso’s arm and lifted him bodily to his feet. “Come on, greenhorn. It doesn’t hurt that bad. A few nanites are a good thing.”