For Texas and Zed

then there'd be hell to pay, because Billy Bob, taking after his distant grandfather a few times removed, was always coming up with something new. Billy Bob thought he owned all airorses because his distant forebear had developed the blink drive back on the old Earth when they said that all inventions were possible only through the work of a well-financed research team. Old man Blink had built the first blink drive in his garage workshop on the out-skirts of Houston in a prime example of individual initiative which was still being taught to Texas schoolchildren six hundred years later. Lex knew the story well. Having built a machine which could reduce space, any known length of it, to nothing, he offered it to the government, but all of the Congress and everyone else was too interested in trying to impeach a President named Wixon or something; no one would listen to a gray-haired thirty-year-old TV repairman from Texas. So old Zed Blink installed his drive in a 1954 Lincoln Continental and emerged it into the restricted air space over the White House, which was the place of the President of the United States then, andthat got some attention. Then the armed forces wanted an exclusive on the drive and there was one hell of a hassle about it until Blink gave the drive, outright gave it, to six domestic airlines and in doing so gave up a sure fortune. Well, it was an old story and Lex just happened to think about it while be was watching Billy Bob win his heat and while he was tinkering withZelda getting her ready. Because Billy Bob had seemed to inherit the scientific abilities of the Blink boys and was always coming up with something new for his airors. All Lex had going for him was his natural skill and a nerve which allowed him to hug the pylons closer and fly faster and withstand the g forces of the right-angle turns better than most. After all, the rules made it so that the final limiting factor was physical ability, not tinkering knowledge to soup up an airors.

Billy Bob won his heat handily. He didn't use anything new and startling, just solid racing ability and the finely tunedClean Machine's basic functions. There was only one accident. The racecourse was two parallel rows of pylons set a hundred feet apart stretching down the strand, and one boy from up in the Bojacks lost his airors and put her nose into the surf and tumbled six times before sinking slowly into the shallow water. He came up spitting salt and waving a hand to show that he was OK.

Speed wasn't everything. Some of the old-timers said that the race was patterned after an event back on the old Earth which had riders on animals guiding them around barrels and it was turning ability as much as anything which made the race, for the pylons were close together and you had to cut each one of them. Miss one and you got a penalty.

It was a fine Texas day with Old Zed—the star named after Zed Blink, who led the people out of red-tape democracy to find a solitary star way out in the big lonesome—hot and fierce and the sweat felt good as it cooled not too rapidly on the forehead and then Lex was getting ready and the first two boys to make the run both missed a pylon and then he took the course going slow and sure, because his competition wasn't too keen, and he won it by a few seconds.

Billy Bob won his second heat as if he'd beenthe Blink. Actually, it was his great- great-grandfather who had developed the mnemonic brains of an airors. Billy Bob was good. He rode in the prescribed style, hands free, giving orders to his airors with knees and body movements and the almost uncanny empathy which can develop between a good airors and a good rider. It was almost as if theClean Machine were a living thing reading Billy Bob's mind. Well, sometimes you felt almost as if an airors were a living thing. Out on the boonies, the Bojacks, you spent a lot of time with it, and you got to the point of talking to it and it responded, that funny, complicated brain learning new things; and while herding a wingling meacr you sometimes wondered if that damned machine didn't know more about it than you did. A wingling is swift and shifty and sometimes the airors seemed to anticipate a darting turn before you did and that was the kind of thing you had to have to be able to do the job and to be able to win a race and Billy Bob had it. He'd won more races than any other young stud on Texas and the next one to him was one Lex Burns, who won his prelim heats and then, sweating, drinking a cool brew, eager, a little nervous, watched Billy Bob really turn it on to best the best time of the day by a full five seconds, eliminating everyone but Lex from the finals.

Lex took his run, his first, all out, leaning, twisting, feeling the hard pull of the g's as he cut a pylon, a force which, had he not been strapped in, would have thrown him ass over teakettle into the sand or the surf. He was counting off the ticks of the clock as he went down course and he knew he was behind Billy Bob's time by at least half a second and one odd run back up the course to make it up. He powered the Zelda beyond human ability to ride her and leaned horizontal on the turns and stirred up sand as his boot tip dragged he was flying so low. He could hear the rush of the wind and his own grunts of effort as he fought the g's, sometimes feeling the blood pushed out of his brain and going a little soft in the head but recovering in time to push theZelda hard down the last straightaway to tie Billy Bob's time to the tenth of a second.

That called for a runoff and the crowd had grown and it seemed that all of New Galveston was out to see them break the tie. Lex had to go first and he went down all out and blacked out for what seemed to be an eternity as he rounded the last pylon, losing a precious tick as he went wide and then recovering to burn up the course, blowing sand silently in the wake of the flashingZelda , but he knew he'd blown it down there on the far turn, and sure enough, when Billy Bob came in he was a tenth of a second faster and, once again, Lex had to settle for a second.

'I been running hind tit to you all my life,' he told Billy Bob. 'One of these days I'm gonna get tired of it and beat on you a little.'

'Bring your lunch,' Billy Bob said. 'It'll be a long day's work.'

Herding, now, was a separate breed of cat. In herding, it usually went the other way, with Lex's slightly lighter weight adding to his maneuverability and his rapport with his machine giving him another slight edge. The contest was a simple one drawn directly from the work life of a male Texican. It all started way back when the settlers found out that the meacr made better, juicier, more tender steaks than the various breeds of Earth cattle which had been brought out in the original settlement fleet. The meacr was smaller than, say, a whiteface or a Charolais, and he bred like an old Earth rabbit, having twins twice a year, cute little critters with wings which, after a few days, hardened up like a bat's wing and grew to massive length to carry the chunky little body of the wingling up into the auto sport and play and look for insects and small rodents, things which made up his diet until the change, when the wings shrank into two swollen appendages used for flicking bisects and which made the finest, tastiest soup this side of galactic core. In his flying form the meacr was unpredictable. He was as likely to soar a thousand miles as he was to stay put on the range where he belonged, with an owner's brand on his hide, until his wings set and he started to grow and eat a few tons of grass to make him fat, placid and highly edible. While he was in flying form, the meacr needed herding to keep him on his proper range and that was where the airors came into its own. The meacr wingling wasn't fast, but he was tricky. It took some dude to stay with him, herd him back where he belonged. Fortunately, the wingling was gregarious, soaring in groups of six to twenty, and he played follow the leader. Herd the leader and the rest followed.

There weren't that many Texicans that a man could go through life without doing a hitch on the Bojacks and both Billy Bob and Lex had done their year. There were, of course, professional herdsmen who made a lifetimes work of it, but they were, for the most part, loners who loved the big, empty nighttime skies of Texas, lit only by the two small moons, the galaxy itself mist in the southern sky on summer evenings. Some of them were men who had lost out in the competition for the scarce women of Texas. Some of them were just ne'er-do-wells who couldn't hack it in the towns and some just liked it.

Lex had liked it well enough. It was a pleasure to have it all to yourself, all the Bojack country stretching away flat and green to make an inverted bowl of horizon all around you, the meacrs gentle and quiet, making only those soft, sweet humming sounds after they fed enough for the day, the winglings being restless and pesky, the occasional old, grizzled farl sneaking up to cut down a stray for his dinner. But Lex, being the son of Murichon Burns, had been off planet twice, once when he was just thirteen, on a scouting trip into Cassiopeian territory to determine the feasibility of trade routes into the galaxy. And once you've seen space, well, herding winglings becomes just a sport for a Sunday afternoon and the year of enforced service drags and then you begin to know what girls represent and you're given the loot and a new suit and sent into Miss Toni's in Dallas City and after that the Bojacks have lost their charms.

But doing it for sport, herding, is fine; and Lex was ready and eager as he took his turn in the chute and a wingling with a ring on its tail to put life into it was released a few yards in front of him to take to the air like a salt-shot beagle. He was off with a whoop and hadZelda on the wingling's nose in a wink and had the critter going the right way when he made a slip and the wingling zapped a left and then it was full g's getting him again and not much time lost and the circle down there coming up. He forced the frustrated wingling to