Titanium Texicans by Alan Black

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