Elizabeth Moon
I. The Dude
Josiah Horatio Titweiler arrived at Wichita Station in Open Range wearing a mask. That was the first problem. It wasn’t in period; it was a modern, non-western, rebreathing mask with little doohickeys on the sides. He said he had allergies.
His horse was the next problem. Yes, a range-riding, rock-herding rancher had to have a horse. Bio or mechanical or whatever…it had to be vaguely horse-shaped, of a horselike color, and it had to have its name painted on the front. Black, with or without white trim, was good. Pink and silver was not. Tan with white trim was good. Green with blue spots was not. As for names, Silver was good. Aluminum was not. Trigger was good. Barrel was not.
Titweiler did not understand the underlying logic, and it was not something he could ask anyone at the factory building his custom horse. He decided he would go with “laughable” to undermine suspicion. After all, one of the tropes in the books and vids was the idiot who wasn’t an idiot, who gained respect by proving it and then was trusted and befriended.
His horse slid out of the freighter’s belly looking like any other Tesper 1700 except for being painted in a swirling pattern of turquoise and lavender. The swirling pattern also concealed the custom modifications for Titweiler’s unusual anatomy and need for firepower. The cartoon horse on the nose with the name Sunnydancing in curly letters around it was bright purple. Big green eyes. Sparkling silver hooves, mane, and tail.
In his carefully tailored suit, Titweiler knew he stood out among the other passengers claiming their belongings: they wore work clothes, rumpled and stained, and their horses being unloaded included only two Tespers—both older models—and a dozen mixed of Gorins, Pedins, and Dolloks in various shades of brown and rough-patched scars. All with realistic horses painted on their noses in black, some shade of brown, or tan with black trim. Names like Buckshot, Bullet, Lightning, Stormy.
Eyes stared at him, looked at each other, nodded, looked again at the shiny and obviously new Sunnydancing and back to him. Sizing him up. Sizing the horse up as she sat unscarred on the pad. The clerk at the desk called, “Titweiler! Josiah Horatio Titweiler!” He stepped forward, careful to walk neatly to the counter, and there receive the keys to Sunnydancing. “You want we should have that thing moved around to launch for you?” The woman’s eyes were laughing.
“I have a certificate,” he said, pulling out the case and showing it. “But perhaps it would be better—it is crowded here. I’ll be staying at the Grande Lodge.”
“That’ll be two hundred for a tow,” she said. “Seventy-five for a bounce.”
“Tow, please,” he said. The choice of someone who did not want his horse scratched up by the other rough mounts. The choice of someone who might have a piloting certificate but wasn’t that skilled. She entered the order, and his card, with the corner of her mouth puckered tight to hide a smile.
He walked back past the others and had just reached the compartment hatch when one of them said “You call that a horse, mister?”
He turned and smiled, keeping his lips down over his store-bought teeth. “That is what the catalog called it.”
Various sounds reached him he assumed were humorous at his expense. Excellent. Everything was going according to plan. From behind him he heard “—bought a horse from a catalog! Can you believe—” and then the hatch shut, and he was moving swiftly along the passage to “lodging.”
The Grande Lodge had fake log walls; every fake window had videos of mountain vistas. The bar boasted both a bucking bull ride and a bucking rockethorse ride, though both were unoccupied when Titweiler entered, an hour after checking into his room. A few cowboy types slouched in booths around the sides, vacuum suits hung on foot-long pegs and jeans tucked into their boots. Plenty of time for some of the locals who’d seen Sunnydancing arrive to show up here.
“Well, if it isn’t that fellow from the landing bay,” one of them said loudly. “Hear about him? He bought a horse from a catalog!”
“No!”
“He did. Purty thing, too, if you like something that belongs in a little girl’s bedroom.” He looked at Titweiler. “Hey, whyn’t you show us how you can ride on that’n over there?”
“Uh…no thanks. I just came in for a lemon soda. Say, do you know how I can find the Ranch Exchange?”
“He wants the Ranch Exchange…imagine that.”
“What ya gonna do, buy a ranch, sonny?”
“Actually I…I have one.” Titweiler smiled at them, and they didn’t flinch, so he was doing it right.
“You? Have a ranch? Where is it?”
“Whatcha gonna do with it?”
“I’m going to herd…um…boulders.” He sipped his lemon soda.
“He’s going to herd boulders!” one said to another, loudly, and then, “You gonna herd boulders with that fancy-pants little pony you brought in?”
“They said it would do everything I needed,” Titweiler said, spreading his hands carefully. Only five tentacles…er…fingers on each. “I won it,” he said. A half truth, as it happened. “The ranch, not my, uh, horse.”
“And you got a license to fly…yanno, sonny, you oughta join up with the Big C.”
“Is that near the Ranch Exchange?”
Hoots and grunts, quickly suppressed. “Where’s your ranch?”
“I—I am not certain until I’ve been to the Ranch Exchange. It was the lottery, you see. The angles were given, and the range stated to be unencumbered, but I was told I’d get the coordinates after checking in with the exchange.”
Glances exchanged again among the other men. One of them stood up. “How ’bout I show you just where it is, so you don’t get lost. This is your first time on a big station, isn’t it? The gravity shifts can get to you, ’til you’re used to them.” The man—tall for a man, he could tell—looked him up and down. “How far in you come from?”
“Mars,” he said. “I worked for Allied Metals, in the accounting department, and there was this lottery—”
“Sure, sure, we know about lotteries. You got any duds but that suit? Not too comfortable to ride in, is it?”
“It is not, to be honest, but I have the right…um…outfit. Jeans, boots—”
“Good vacuum suit? Gotta have a good vacuum suit.”
“Oh, yes. I asked Tesper when I ordered Sunnydancing, and they directed me to a catalog that had complete outfitting for the aspiring rancher.”
The others had stood up by now, and he had five new friends, or the local syndicate equivalent, who escorted him to the Ranch Exchange. They waited in the front lounge, chatting with a woman with bleached hair and a fringed skirt who had greeted them with, “Why aren’t you boys out on the range?” while a more subdued clerk ushered him into the back room for New Properties. There, Titweiler handed over the packet he’d obtained from the former Titweiler, who really had been an accountant with Allied Metals, and in return was given a pair of saddlebags. In one were the deeds to his ranch and the code to signal the boundary beacons that he was legit. In the other were books on local regulations and communication codes he might need.
“It’s a repo,” the man behind the desk said. “That’s mostly what lotteries offer, is repos. But the guy who had it was a claim jumper, and he didn’t really herd his own; he was all the time sneakin’ in on other folks and rustlin’ their rocks. So he didn’t have it long, and before that it was in legal limbo until they found the heirs of the guy before that, and none of them wanted it. Nor anyone else for awhile. It’s farther out than most want, so aside from claim jumpers—and they mostly stay in close so they can sell and run—it scans as nicely populated with Class III to V types, and they’re small enough to herd easy. You got your horse yet?”
“Yes. A Tesper 1700, new. And my certificate.”
“A new horse? You are aware new horses attract thieves—?”
“Surely not here? Isn’t there a marshal here?” It had been in his briefing: Wichita had a law officer, called a marshal, named Bart Manley.
“The marshal’s office is back on Main. You’d better register your horse right away.”
Titweiler noticed that two of his new friends found a reason not to come along to the marshal’s office, but the others did, having endorsed the Ranch Exchange’s warning about horse thieves. “Sunnydancing is not a common color,” Titweiler said. “That would make her hard to steal, wouldn’t it?”
“Nothing a kill pen couldn’t get rid of in an hour or less,” said the one called Slim, who was not. “You get your mount registered and chipped—official chip, o’ course—and frankly you oughta add in a custom chip only you know the code for.”
Titweiler nodded, though he knew Sunnydancing already had custom chips with many more functions than just proving his ownership. But time enough for that later. His game was more complex than these simple cowhands could guess. Up ahead he spotted the marshal’s office with a gold-lettered sign in the window: OPEN RANGE, WICHITA TERRITORY, MARSHAL OFFICE.
Marshal Manley, slouching back in an old-fashioned banker’s chair, was paunchy, age-wrinkled, and garrulous. More important, he seemed helpfully unsuspicious, handing over a tracking chip for Sunnydancing immediately. Clearly a third-rate lawman at best, Titweiler thought, though something about the man tickled his instincts.
Back at the Lodge, Titweiler changed into his ranch clothes: snug jeans, plaid shirt, vest, leather jacket heavily fringed, glittering stones edging the pockets and cuffs, and cowboy boots elaborately patterned with turquoise, purple, and black leather. With his vacuum suit over his arm, he checked out and went to get Sunnydancing out of the corral where all the guests’ rockethorses were kept. His new friends came with him, to help carry his luggage, they said, and they headed off with it. Then he stepped into his vacuum suit, custom-made back home though designed to look the same as others, and hitched it at his waist. He wanted his fringed jacket to show as he walked down to the corral.
When he went through into the Customer Waiting Lounge, his friends all pinched their mouths against smiles and nodded. “Lookin’ good. We got your luggage loaded on that mule.” The mule was nothing but a trailer all sealed up, its towline coiled in front.
“Thank you,” he said. “I’m all set now—”
But the corral attendant disagreed. “Bein’ as you’re a new customer, we want to be sure you’re actually safe to ride through our nearspace on that overpowered horse you got there. We require every new customer to take a riding test on our equipment.”
“But Sunnydancing is a custom—”
“I know that. But it’s the rule. Now we got a nice, safe arena, guaranteed to contain any mistakes, where you can take Old Smokey and show us you know how to handle a horse. A circle or two, a figure eight, stop, back him up, walk back to the start. Simple. Otherwise, it’s eight thousand to tow you out to your ranch, plus another four thousand if you’re one of the outliers, which Ranch Exchange says you are.”
So it was here and now, the test of riding. He glanced at the others. They’d known. Slim nodded at him. “You’ll be fine, Titsy, it’s just Old Smokey. Remember what they told you in your flight training.”
“He can be a bit cranky; you really have to get after him to get him moving, but then he wakes up,” Tiny added. Tiny, who overtopped him by a handbreadth.
“Fine, then,” he said. “I want to get home as quick as I can. Let’s get this over with.” He pulled his vacuum suit up all the way, easing the helmet over his head, and sealed up.
Smokey certainly looked old; a dark gray covered with dents and streaks of something that might be corrosion; the control bubble with its saddle had scratches and streaks on the inside. Titweiler climbed up from the mounting block, patting the dirty skin with one glove as if this were a live horse. In the headphones he heard what might’ve been a suppressed chuckle.
Once in the saddle, Titweiler ran through the checklist: power, steering, controls, electrical faults, gravity stability, while in Preflight Mode. The long neck extended and retracted, the head went up and down, rotated sideways. The grippers opened and shut. Landing legs moved, joints worked as designed. The little control bubble smelled faintly of something nasty, but his own sensors detected nothing actually toxic. Titweiler slid his customized control pod out of its holster and held it in the two lateral tentacles of one hand, with the other four on the throttle. He held the other hand up, visible proof he wasn’t grabbing leather. “Ready,” he said, to the corral attendant, and the man grinned and switched the horse to Flight Mode.
There was a moment of stillness. Titweiler pushed the throttle forward to “walk.” A grinding noise, a slight shift to the left, a jerk forward maybe a meter, and then Smokey reared up, the long neck swinging back over the cab and the rear legs shooting forward. Classic trick. Titweiler countered easily, his legs gripping the seat as Smokey turned upside down and then rotated its rear legs to push off against the arena fence. Meanwhile, Titweiler’s other lateral tentacles sank into the control panel, sending codes that modified the horse’s programmed bucking pattern. Smokey shuddered to a jerky halt, drifting across the arena.
Now all he had to do was analyze—
An electric shock broke his contact with the seat, and Smokey rolled sharply right. Titweiler shoved his toes out the ends of his custom boots, both leather and vacuum suit, and his sucker pads clung to the cab deck. The rockethorse bucked wildly, changing its pattern repeatedly as his lateral tentacles sent code after code deep into its system.
He took what would have been bruises for a human from the inside of the cab, but his sucker pods held, and eventually he had control of the yaw and was able to damp the acceleration in the vertical—that bouncing up and down had put his head on the canopy more than once. He had that down to short jerky movements, and the horizontal whirl down to mere twitches. Now he moved Smokey around the arena, almost level, controlling the pitch axis to a canter-like rocking movement, first in big circles, then a figure of 8, a full stop in the middle, then backing up, then going to the docking tube, lining up with the mounting block, and holding it still. He put Smokey back in Docking Mode, retracted his tentacles back into his boots and his left glove, and called in. “Well?”
“I never saw anything like it,” the corral attendant said. “You got Old Smokey acting like a show pony in under a minute. How’d you do that?”
“I rode a lot of sims,” he said, which was true.
“Well, mister, you can take your Sunnydancing any time you want. Come on back through when you’re ready.”
Titweiler checked that all his tentacles were now imitating human digits again, and the toes of his vacuum suit boots had properly resealed, then opened the canopy and climbed down to the mounting station, patting Old Smokey as if thanking him for a good time, simultaneously retrieving nanites he’d put on when he mounted. Then back through the tube, into the Customer Waiting Lounge, where several screens were replaying his ride over and over for others. His erstwhile friends insisted on buying him a drink from the Lounge bar, and he insisted on buying a round for them, and they gave him a new cowboy nickname, Buck, before he hitched the mule to Sunnydancing, mounted up, and rode off into the darkness, there being no sunset within many, ...
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