WEST. WORLD.
WALTER JON WILLIAMS
The first thing that struck me about Barnaby Desfort was his wonderful skin—perfectly toned, perfectly taut, perfectly ageless. I had to think he must have begun a regimen of skin care when he was still in the womb.
Other than his perfectly exfoliated skin, Desfort was a fit man in his thirties, dark-haired, brown-eyed, strikingly handsome without being pretty—and like many film stars, he was a smallish man with a very large head. The camera likes big heads, and doesn’t really care how big your body is.
“Honestly,” he said, “I don’t know how to say these lines.”
“Just practice them,” said Oswald. “It’ll get easier. You’ve acted Shakespeare, haven’t you? This is no different.”
Desfort made an elaborate show of raising his tablet and reading from the screen. “‘I ain’t a-gonna git on that there danged stagecoach,’” he said. “‘An’ if’n yew put so much as a foot on board, I’m a-gonna jerk my iron and fill yew with lead from this here horse pistol.’” He looked up at the director. “Come on, Oz. How the hell am I supposed to say that?”
“The dialogue is authentic to the period,” said the director flatly.
“Well, then you’d better get an actor from the period to say these lines,” said Desfort, and then he leaned closed to Oswald, his face mocking, “because I ain’t a-gonna.”
“Usko!” shouted Oswald, only to give a start as I loomed up right over his shoulder.
“Yes, sir?” I said.
“Get together with Mr. Desfort,” Oswald said. “Work out which lines are giving him trouble, and then contact Aisha in Arizona and ask her to provide some alts.”
“Yes, Mr. Oswald,” I said. I looked up at Desfort. “Shall we do this now, or set an appointment for later?”
“Tomorrow,” Desfort said. “In the meantime, I want to go over the script very thoroughly so that I can fully express my discomfort at the words that Ms. Al-Fassi expects me to utter.”
Perkele, I swore mentally. My heart sank. It would be me, not Desfort, who sent the dismaying message to Aisha Al-Fassi, and when Aisha responded, it was I who was going to get blistered by the screenwriter’s flaming response.
I looked at my schedule, then looked at Desfort.
“Ten o’clock?” I said.
It had to be said that I was finding the glamorous world of cinema to be more like a regular job than I’d imagined, only working more hours and with less pay.
When I had been working toward my degree in Media Studies at Minerva College, I had followed the films of Oswalt Oswald, beginning with Triad. I thought Oswald was the best director currently working in cinema, and I took an interest as Oswald’s works moved from small, intimate films to big productions rivalling the spectacles produced on Earth. In school, I was also involved in making student films, one of which—now to my deep embarrassment—was an homage to Oswald. I hoped Oswald had never seen it.
One of my professors knew Oswald, and was able to recommend me to the great man for his latest project—and so to my delight and astonishment, I was hired as the second second assistant director of Oswalt’s new film, The Tall Rider.
As the second second—or “2nd 2nd AD” in moviespeak—I was expected to assist the second assistant director (“2nd AD”) in producing call sheets and acting as the backstage manager, but in practice I was expected to do any damn thing anyone in authority told me to do, which apparently included helping the lead actor insult the screenwriter.
Oswald and the Earth-based screenwriter Aisha Al-Fassi had kept the script in a constant state of revision up till now, and the actors were only just getting a look at their parts. I suspected that Oswald had been deliberately keeping the script from the actors in order to postpone their demands for rewrites.
I ain’t a-gonna git on that there danged stagecoach. Not that Barnaby Desfort didn’t have a point.
At ten o’clock, I was at Desfort’s apartment in Ptolemy Towers, possibly the most exclusive residence in Herschel City. Desfort’s assistant told me that Desfort was just getting out of bed after laboring on the script all night. I had to wait in the foyer while Desfort bathed and had breakfast, and during that time, the room began to fill up with other people who had business with Desfort that morning. It seemed to me that all of them were far more important than I was.
Saatana perkele. I was probably going to be here a long time, and I had about a thousand others things to do.
I texted the 2nd AD, telling her that I was waiting on Desfort because Oswald told me to, and would probably be some time.
GOD DAMN IT, she texted back. At least she wasn’t blaming me for the problem—not yet, anyway.
The smell of Desfort’s breakfast filled the apartment, scents of coffee and garlic and cured swine flesh. I waited in the foyer while the others were called in one by one to meet with Desfort. By the time the assistant called my name, it was midafternoon and my stomach was growling like an enraged animal. Desfort sat at his dining table, wearing a royal purple dressing gown, and I found myself gazing in hunger at the remains of the actor’s breakfast.
Is Desfort going to eat that roll? I wondered.
Desfort raised his tablet. “I’ve very carefully annotated the script,” he said. “And I also have some notes.”
Of course you do, I thought. Notes that would make Desfort’s part larger, his character more sympathetic, reduce other actors’ screen time, or all of the above.
“Just send this on to Aisha,” Desfort said.
I gave an inward sigh. Fortunately, Aisha was on Earth and something like five AU away from the Galileo Habitat right now, and it would take at least forty-five minutes for the signal to reach her, and another forty-five minutes for the explosive answer to return. Sufficient time to duck.
It then occurred to me that I could make it clear that I was following Oswald’s instructions, so maybe Aisha’s reply would be sent to Oswald, and his eyebrows would be singed, not mine.
“Can you send me the file?” I asked.
I was present at the meeting where Oswalt Oswald had unveiled his new project. I had been hired only two days before, and was both intimidated and impressed by the large boardroom table surfaced with polished asteroid material, the framed posters of Oswald’s films, and the wall of windows looking out over the Galileo Habitat’s great curved expanse.
Oswald was a tall, elegant man with bushy, prematurely gray hair. He sat at the head of the table, flanked by half a dozen assistants and flunkies. At the far end was Barnaby Desfort. Desfort’s wife, Kamala Shetty, sat as far from her husband as she could get without dislodging part of Oswald’s entourage—a sign of the trouble that would come later, if I had only known it.
I was near the middle of the table, which gave me a good view of Kamala. Talk about perfect skin! I had a hard time not staring. She was gorgeous in her films, true, but in person she was astoundingly beautiful, so incredibly ravishing that my entire limbic system did a little happy dance whenever I looked at her. She was so beautiful that the camera couldn’t contain her beauty, and only those of us who viewed her in person could fully appreciate her perfection.
Oskar Matheson, the line producer, sat disheveled near Oswald, a bit of white frosting perched on his upper lip where it had lodged after Oskar had eaten one of the pastries Oswald’s company had provided for its guests. 1st AD, 2nd AD, and 3rd AD were all present.
The others were mainly people who had provided money for the project. Investors had profited vastly from Oswald’s last film, Gravitational Constant, starring Desfort and Kamala, and had eagerly coughed up millions of plutons for the chance to profit from the next.
Oswald rose from his place and cleared his throat, which was enough to silence the room’s chatter. “My friends, I’m pleased to report that I’ve chosen my next motion picture. Based on an original screenplay by Aisha Al-Fassi, The Tall Rider will be epic in scope, and will feature my great friends Barnaby Desfort and Kamala Shetty.”
I’ll get to look at her nearly every day, I thought in rising delight.
“Through the medium of The Tall Rider,” Oswald continued, “we will continue to explore the themes we explored in Gravitational Constant—themes of the conflict between the independent pioneer and the settled, civilized citizen, the taming of a raw frontier, the problem of establishing justice on the rim of civilization where no justice system exists, and the conflict over resources.” The investors looked at one another in satisfaction. The picture seemed to be a replay of a winning formula, and I knew there was nothing investors liked better than putting money down on something that already had made a profit. Then Oswald dropped his bombshell.
“We also hope to revive the moribund Western genre,” he said.
The what? I wondered. Did he say “Western”?
There was no east or west in Galileo. There was north and south, arbitrary directions indicated by the poles of the Sun, or of planets and moons. There was upstation and downstation. There was spinward and antispinward. But east and west?
“A what genre?” said one of the investors, echoing my thoughts.
“A Western,” Oswald enunciated. “A historical film taking place in the Western part of the United States in the last part of the nineteenth century.”
The investors looked blankly at one another. “You’re going to make this picture on Earth?” one said. “How much is that going to cost?”
“The picture will be made right here on Galileo,” Oswald said. “The American West is all suburbia now. We have plenty of empty spaces on this station, and we’ll build the Wild West right here.”
Which was true enough. The Galileo Habitat had been built to a colossal scale out of hundreds of Jupiter’s Trojan asteroids, so vast that much of the habitat hadn’t yet filled up.
The investors seemed encouraged by this. Then Desfort spoke up from the end of the table.
“Don’t Westerns generally have horses in them?” he said. “And aren’t the horses all on Earth?”
“CGI horses, surely,” one of the investors muttered.
“Horses will be shipped from Earth,” Oswald said. “We’ve looked into the cost, and it’s all within the proposed budget.”
“But CGI—” someone said.
“We’ll be striving for complete authenticity,” Oswald said firmly. “You can’t simulate the relationship between horse and rider on a computer—in the Old West, horse and rider depended on each other to survive, and the relationship was one of understanding and intimacy.”
Kamala Shetty looked dubious. “We’re supposed to be intimate with horses?” she said.
Desfort laughed. “I predict such jolly good fun for all of us,” he said.
It was going to be Oswald’s way or no way. He was the emperor of his little kingdom, and the rest of us were his nervous courtiers, all too aware that he could end our careers with a shake of his head.
I had never worked with a genius before. He was the sort of genius who knew exactly what he wanted, and he demanded we want the same thing—and to be geniuses, too, but only geniuses in service to his ideas, not our own.
A small herd of horses, plus their wranglers, trainers, and a veterinarian, were sent from Earth in a custom-designed module attached, with other cargo-carrying modules, to the spine of a plasma-propulsion freighter. Plasma propulsion guaranteed that the ship would be under acceleration or deceleration for the entire trip, which prevented the horses, or their droppings, from floating around in zero gravity, something that absolutely no one wanted.
Preproduction got under way while the horses were in transit. Sets were built. Costumes were fitted. Arguments continued over the script.
I made a point of watching a great many classic Western films. They seemed to be about toxic masculinity in all its forms, and it took me a while to realize that the filmmakers approved of this sort of behavior, with all the posing and punching that led to the deadly confrontation at the end.
The villains were stupid, stubborn, and greedy, I observed, and the heroes were stupid, stubborn, and strangely high-minded.
Yet the films were visually impressive, with characters that edged toward archetype. The protagonists generally managed to achieve some sort of rude justice at the end, even if it meant standing over a dozen corpses.
I hadn’t yet seen the script, and I had to wonder how Oswald was going to handle this dubious material.
In preparation, a great many guns were printed by the props department. Firearms are regarded with suspicion in space settlements, since no one wants punctures and depressurization in their homes, so the guns were built to fire only blanks. The metal in the barrels wasn’t tempered sufficiently to allow a real round to be fired—instead the gun would just peel apart.
Galileo’s Health & Safety Department would rather the film use ammunition composed of purest CGI, but they’d run up against Oswald’s stubbornness and insistence on authenticity. They took a great interest in the firearms and insisted on many test-firings. Oswald was on hand to film the Winchesters and Colts exploding under controlled conditions. In the end, Health & Safety insisted on one of their inspectors being present at all times whenever firearms were used on the production—and the film company was expected to pay for the inspector’s time. Oswald spent the next two days screaming at his assistants. I found a lot of work to do as 2nd 2nd AD, and kept out of his way.
The actors began to practice with dummy guns that couldn’t be fired and that didn’t need an inspector on call. Seeing actors running around the set, pointing toy guns at one another and calling out “Bang! Bang!” was so hilarious that I had to stifle my laughter with a towel.
I also recorded a number of these play-fights on my phone. I had the sense that Oswald would crucify me if I ever released any of that material, but I am a patient man, and can await the right moment.
It was then that the Great Tumbleweed Controversy erupted. Oswald wanted tumbleweeds blowing around his outdoor sets, just as they did in classic Western films, and he ordered a number of tumbleweeds printed by the props department, and then he experimented by filming them being pushed around the sets by wind machines. Then someone discovered that tumbleweeds weren’t actually present in the Old West, having been accidentally brought over from Russia late in the nineteenth century. The reason they were seen in old Western films was that the tumbleweeds were contemporary with the era in which the films were made.
Oswald was committed to an ideal of absolute authenticity, even to the point of spending millions of plutons having horses shipped up from Earth, but the Tumbleweed Controversy drove him frantic. Should he do something so inauthentic as to have out-of-period tumbleweeds bounding around in his movie?
In reality, he was the only person who cared about any of this, but that didn’t stop others from expressing their opinions. I didn’t give my opinion until he asked me, and then I had to overcome my astonishment at Oswald’s giving a damn what I thought.
“The question is whether tumbleweeds will make this a better picture,” I said. “Sure they’re evocative, but of what? Are the tumbleweeds some kind of metaphor for the character’s nomadic lives? Are they ghostly reminders of possibilities that are flying out of reach? Surely if they’re going to be in your picture, they have to mean something.”
He looked at me with surprise, as if he never expected a second second to know what a metaphor was.
Hah, I thought. I’ve been to college!
“What about authenticity?” he asked.
“You can be authentic to history, or authentic to cinema,” I said. “There are plenty of authentic Western films with tumbleweeds in them. If you want to be in that tradition, then you use the tumbleweeds.”
Eventually, Oswald agreed with me, though he was in anguish for several more days before he made up his mind.
The tumbleweeds were in.
There were other issues of authenticity that arose, having to do with things about the West that you never learned from Western films. How ninety percent of the people were young males, and how the clichéd figure of the “old-timer” was mainly a myth. Folks hadn’t been on the land long enough to grow old there—if there were old people, they’d come from the East, like everyone else.
Oswald had decided to set his story in 1869, which was before anyone had invented the cowboy hat. There were Mexican sombreros, and there was the early Stetson—but that particular Stetson, with its flat brim and flat crown, didn’t look like a cowboy hat at all, but rather a Spanish sombrero cordobés, which I learned is also called a “Zorro hat.”
What men mainly wore were bowler hats, or “derbies” as they were called in the States. So The Tall Rider would be full of young men wearing bowlers as they trotted over the plains—while heavily armed, of course.
Once I realized that the West was full of reckless young men, plenty of firearms, and few women or oldsters, I began to realize why the body count was so high.
Oswald was also mad about the authenticity of the firearms. Most revolvers in 1869 were cap-and-ball Colts, which had to be loaded by pouring black powder down each chamber of the revolver, with a bullet tamped down atop the powder, and a percussion cap set to ignite each cylinder as it moved under the hammer. Our armorer was already unhappy at having to work with the touchy picric acid used in the percussion caps when one of the stunt men discovered another problem, which was that the loose black powder in the Colts could easily communicate fire from one chamber to the next, so that all six cylinders could go off at once.
It was lucky that we weren’t firing actual bullets, otherwise the man might have had his hand blown off. Instead, he gave a yell and threw the revolver as far as he could—and because we couldn’t have a missing firearm off the set, I had to send out a search party to find it.
Between the black powder, the picric acid, and the explosive firearms, I couldn’t figure out how the West got settled without everyone blowing themselves up.
The Health & Safety people were about as happy about this as you can imagine. They wrote several notes to Oswald “expressing their concern,” as I believe they phrased it.
The Colts were in, along with the bowlers and the tumbleweeds.
But then Barnaby Desfort was out—not out from the picture, but out of his wife’s life. He moved out of their mansion in Lakelands to the apartment in Ptolemy Towers, and Kamala changed the locks. A whole mob of lawyers appeared as the couple’s existence was broken down, itemized, analyzed, and divided between the two of them. Figuring out who got the grand piano, the Magritte, and the late-nineteenth century popcorn-making cart was easy, but the intangibles caused more problem.
Who got the trademarks? Their production company? Who got possession of the stories and scripts the two were jointly trying to produce? Who was allowed to say what about the divorce, and to whom, and on what medium?
More importantly, who was in charge of Desfort’s self-esteem? He thought it should belong to him, but she clearly disagreed. So she hit him with a restraining order, and then he couldn’t come within a hundred meters of her.
Considering that they were about to costar in a motion picture in which they played lovers, the restraining order was problematic.
All this was under continual negotiation among the lawyers, Oswald, Desfort, and Kamala, and I got dragged into the business as a messenger between the various parties. The only good part was that I got to see Kamala now and again, and occupy myself with the fantasy that, with Desfort out of the picture, Kamala would find herself itching for the altogether available body of the young, amiable second second.
No such luck. Kamala was all business.
“Tell my husband that halitosis on set is completely forbidden,” she said. “He is to employ breath mints before leaving his trailer.” And then, as I turned to leave, she added, “And I want to approve the breath mints ahead of time.”
Desfort had his own demands. “Tell my wife that I must have approval over the length of her heels. Nothing over six centimeters, certainly.”
Have I mentioned that Desfort is short? Kamala could destroy his self-esteem with a pair of slingbacks.
I occupied myself in passing these delightful little messages back and forth between the couple, or between their lawyers and Oswald…and then the horses finally arrived after a two-and-a-half-month journey, and Oswald, Oskar Matheson, Desfort, and the full set of ADs went to the airlock to welcome them to their new home.
The horses had been strapped into harnesses and snugged down in their stalls, because detaching their container from the plasma-propulsion freighter, then maneuvering their container into dock would result in periods of zero gravity. There had been a few similar periods earlier in the trip, and the horses had survived them well enough—better than expected, because horses turn out to be a lot more fragile than they look, and they can come down with a colic and die just like that, or so I was given to understand.
We stood in the foyer outside the big cargo airlock and waited for the signal that the tug had managed to dock the module. Galileo was rotating, of course, but it was a very large habitat, the docking module moved slowly, and it had been designed so that it could snatch passing vessels from out of space with a minimum of fuss.
Except that it didn’t. We heard an alarming cracking noise that echoed through the vestibule, followed by a rush of air. My heart leaped into my throat—if our air vented, that would be the end of us. If we didn’t die of anoxia, our hearts and lungs would be blown to pieces by embolisms.
But we heard no depressurization alarms, and instead the phones of Oswald’s assistants—all of them—began to ring. When the phones were answered, we heard anguished messages from the horse wranglers to help them retrieve their suddenly weightless charges.
It turns out that the station docking module blew out, and the air blasted in a stream out of the cargo-sized airlock to push the horse-module away and send it tumbling. The tug’s captain demonstrated his brand of courage by undocking from the tumbling container and scampering for safety. The wranglers were used to solid ground beneath their feet and had no notion of how to cope with a tumbling spacecraft. And I gathered that at least some of the horses had broken free and were floating in a panic.
I looked at the others. It seemed to be a situation of all hands on deck. I looked at Oswald, who stared back in a clench-lipped fury.
Once again, I thought, reality had failed to meet Oswald’s exacting standards.
“Where’s a shuttle?” I demanded. “A tug?”
Oswald turned to his assistants. “Find me a shuttle!” he screamed. “Find me a tug!”
Automated systems on the container itself were sending an alarm even as the assistants got busy on their phones, and a tug—a different one—was scrambled without our help. We ran to the tug’s dock and managed to get aboard just as the airlock doors began to roll shut.
When the tug arrived near the tumbling module, we watched out the windows at the module slowly turning over and over, the distant sun burnishing its metal hull. I could see the back of the captain’s head, and somehow without even viewing his expression, I knew that he was having second thoughts.
Oswald also fixed the back of the captain’s head with a laser-beam glare. “Well?” he demanded. “When are we going to dock?”
The captain was a beefy man with a nose that looked as if it had been broken multiple times. He seemed to know with perfect authority that he was the captain of this vessel, and that Oswald was not.
“You don’t mean when, you mean how,” he said. “It’s tumbling. There’s no way we can mate with a hatch that’s moving like that.”
“All you need is a little—” Oswald began.
“No,” the captain said firmly. “I don’t have a clue how to do this. I could damage my own ship.”
An expression of stiff-necked fury settled on Oswald. “How much?” he asked.
A hefty bribe was negotiated, and then the captain agreed to make the attempt. His tactic was to judge the tumbling motion of the container, then drift on an interception course to snatch the docking hatch when it passed close, and hope that his ship and the hatch remained in contact long enough to lock in place.
I was sure that this wasn’t going to work. But the wranglers in the module kept shouting for help, and we could hear shrieking and snorting horses in the background, and clearly something had to be tried.
But the pilot was very, very good, and he mated with the hatch on the fourth try. The tug gave a lurch as the much heavier module yanked us after it, and we were all thrown sideways in our seats. The captain got busy with his thrusters, and we were slammed in another direction, and then slammed again, and after a few minutes of having our brains and bodies cudgelled, he’d stabilized the module so that it was no longer tumbling, and we could unbuckle and make our way to the container.
I suppose because I was the most junior person on board, I was first through the hatch, and then I just gaped.
The smell struck me first, horse dung and horse sweat and horse panic and horse urine, all blended into a primeval acid reek that scalded the back of my throat. And then there was the demented sight of a dozen or more horses thrashing in zero gravity, legs kicking, eyes starting, foam flying from their nostrils, teeth bared, manes flying…They kicked at one another, at the walls, and at the three or four wranglers who were nearly as helpless as the horses.
Vittuperkele, I thought.
I wasn’t the station’s expert at maneuvering in zero gravity, but I’d had the training, as had everyone else raised in space. So I looked to see one of the wranglers a little apart from the flailing furball of horses, and I kicked out in his direction. Once I neared him I snatched out, hugged him close, and then tumbled toward the nearest wall. He struggled at first, then realized I was trying to help. Once we tagged the wall I kicked again, crossed to where the stalls had been set up, and snagged the topmost metal bar of one of the horse stalls.
The wrangler stared at me with panicked eyes. “We’ve got to get them back in their stalls!” he said.
“I thought they were tied down!” I said.
“They were!” he said. “But it’s hard to stop a five-hundred-kilogram horse from going where it wants to go, certainly not once it’s made up its mind. Once we started tumbling, they panicked and kicked their way free.”
“How do we round them up?”
He stared at me and shook his head. “Damned if I know! Lasso them and pull them to the stalls, maybe. Then me and some of the others can maybe snug them down.”
“A lasso is a rope?”
I watched a piece of hope die in the wrangler’s eyes.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s a piece of rope with a loop on it.”
“Where are your ropes, then?”
“We’ve been trying to use some of them, but they all sort of flew away—” Again he shook his head. “There are more in the locker. And halters, if we can get close enough to use them.”
“Let’s go to the locker.”
He tried to push off but ended up flailing. I grabbed his ankle and kicked off myself, compensating for his weight and trajectory, and brought us near to the lockers lined up against one wall. He gave me another gape-mouthed, wide-eyed stare. I pointed at the lockers.
“Get some lassos, and we’ll see if we can use them.”
He needed to actually make the lassos, putting the loop in them and so on, and I paused to look at my fellow rescuers, the ADs and Oskar and the rest. They were clustered by the hatch, watching the screaming horses and the flailing wranglers and casting nervous glances at one another. It’s hard to keep a five-hundred-kilogram horse from going where it wants to go. They looked as if they were realizing just that.
The wrangler handed me a lasso.
“What do I do with it?” I said.
“Get it around the neck of one of the horses,” he said, “and then we pull the horse into its stall.”
“How?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re used to leading a horse to its stall in gravity,” I said, “with both of you on the ground. But here there’s nothing holding either of you down. The horse weighs a lot more than you do, and tied together without gravity you’d just become a satellite orbiting the horse.”
I saw another piece of hope die in the wrangler’s eyes.
“I don’t know,” he said wearily. “I don’t know how to do it.”
I looked at the lasso in my hand, then at the nearest stall, which was made of horizontal and vertical metal bars. “How long is this rope?” I asked.
I called the rescue squad over to the stalls. They all came except for Desfort, who was filming the whole thing with his data pad from the safety of the hatch. The tail end of the rope was pulled through the metal bars of one of the stalls, and the rescuers grabbed it after anchoring themselves with legs or arms hooked through the bars of the stalls. Then I took the end with the loop and looked for a horse to capture.
“Try to get the boss mare,” the wrangler said. “Once she’s in the stall, the others may come more easily.”
I looked at the herd of horses thrashing through the air. “Which one’s the boss mare?”
“She’s a bay.”
I looked at him. “What’s a bay?”
He just shook his head. “Just grab the nearest one if you can.”
I judged the trajectories of the nearest horses, then launched. I had spread the loop wide, hoping it would at least catch on something, and when I came near a cream-colored horse I threw the loop at it. I was hoping to lasso the neck, but instead the loop went around a foreleg. The wrangler gave a yell.
“Pull! Pull her in! Fast!”
The rescuers hauled on the tail of the rope, the loop tightened down on the leg, and then the rescuers were all slammed into the side of the stall as the rope took the horse’s weight. But at least they held onto the rope, and they were able to start hauling the suddenly very lively horse toward a stall.
As for me, I was drifting right into the furball of flailing horses. I gave a tentative wave. “Boss mare?” I said. “Uh, we’re friends, right?”
The boss mare didn’t reply, unless it was to scream an angry challenge, but then half the horses were screaming and doing their best to kill the other half. By sheer luck I managed to avoid the flashing hooves. I collided with one brown horse and then kicked off from the horse’s side in the general direction of the stalls. I didn’t give myself a good takeoff and tumbled, and pain shot through my back as I crashed into one of the stalls. I clutched at one of the metal bars and hung there, watching as the horse was hauled in. Our team was inexperienced and uncoordinated, but they did manage to get the horse partway into the stall.
Then the wrangler went to work and succeeded in getting a halter on the horse, then tied the halter down to immobilize the animal. Once tied down, the horse quieted and was packed away in its harness. When the work was done, the wrangler looked at me.
“Well,” he said. “Let’s do it again.”
It was harder the second time, and I missed more than once with the lasso before I succeeded in roping a horse by its hind leg, but eventually the second horse was pulled in and secured.
I got back to the stalls safely, retrieved my rope, and set out again. Having had some practice, I succeeded in getting the lasso around the neck of a horse, then floated on into the sea of panicked animals while the rescue crew hauled the horse to its stall. To my utter amazement, I saw that one of the wranglers had actually succeeded in getting astride of one of the horses, and was hanging onto its mane and kicking its flanks, trying to steer it in the direction of the stalls. This was an utter failure of course, but he kept at it, and the horse was equally persistent in trying to throw him off.
I was watching this with such fascination that I lost track of where I was going, and I landed head-first on something soft, which I assumed was a horse until I rebounded a bit and saw that I’d head-butted a woman in her midsection. I made a grab for her and managed to clutch an ankle as I drifted away. We were kept from floating free by the fact that she was anchored by one hand on a hook that otherwise held a leather bag containing what I later learned were leg wraps.
“Sorry,” I said.
“No problem,” she said, gasping a little. I gave a gentle tug to her booted ankle, which enabled me to slowly drift to another hook holding some other bag of horse gear.
“Are you a wrangler?” I asked. She seemed to be somewhat better dressed than the wranglers I’d seen so far.
She was a redhead, with braids tucked up into her collar. She wore a black slouch hat that had somehow stayed on her head in the wild melee.
“I’m the riding instructor,” she said in an accent I couldn’t quite place. “I’m supposed to teach your actors how to be cowboys.”
“I’m guessing there are no instructors for a situation like this one.” I glanced over my shoulder and saw my last capture being hauled to its stall.
“I roped the boss mare,” she said. “But she cracked the whip on me and threw me clean off.”
As I’d predicted, she’d become a satellite of the much heavier horse, and been whipped off when the horse spun or collided with something else.
“Which one is she?” I asked.
“She’s a bay.” Just as I was about to ask her what a bay was, she added, “A bay with a lasso around her neck.”
That made it easier. I peered into the furball and saw a snarling, twisting, kicking horse with a long rope dangling from its neck.
“Bay” means brown, in case you were wondering.
The boss mare was drifting in the general direction of the stalls, so I decided to let her continue. “If you think you can manage it,” I said, “you can follow me when I kick off from here. Otherwise, just hang on, and we’ll rescue you after things quiet down.”
“Thanks.”
I tucked my legs under me, on either side of the hook that I still grabbed with one hand.
“My name’s Mardy, by the way,” she said. “Mardy Urquhart.”
“Usko Anttila,” I said.
“No kidding!” I heard her say as I kicked off.
I grazed the ceiling with my belly as I shot along, which set me off on a trajectory that allowed me to grab the boss mare’s trailing rope. I tucked as I crashed into the gate of one of the stalls, then quickly wrapped the rope around one of the metal bars.
“Help me!” I said. “We’ve got a live one here!”
There was a crash as the mare’s weight came onto the line, and I thought for a moment that the gate was going to tear right off the stall. Instead, I heard a bellow of outrage from the boss mare, and I looked up to see her red-eyed glare directed at me.
By this point there was a little slack in the line, so I pulled it free, shot into the stall, and wrapped the tail securely around another one of the metal bars. The 2nd AD was there to help me grab the rope, and when weight came on it again, we held on, and now the boss mare was in a kind of orbit around us instead of the other way around.
We hauled her in, the wrangler got her calmed and safely swaddled, and once the boss mare was no longer trumpeting her rage and kicking at everything that moved, things got easier. I noticed that Mardy Urquhart had joined the rescuers, and I gave her a wave. She touched the brim of her big hat.
Hauling in the rest of the horses, I got kicked in my thigh and floating ribs, and by the end of the day I was badly craving painkillers.
One of the horses was dead with a broken neck, and two others were badly injured and didn’t survive the day, but we saved the majority, and incidentally saved Oswald’s vision, not that he thanked us. The tug maneuvered us to Galileo and found a docking module that didn’t break on first contact. The horses were startled when the container started rotating along with the habitat and gravity returned, but by and by they remembered that they liked gravity, and grew much calmer.
At that point I had a pretty good idea that I should step out of the module and into the tug, and I took Mardy’s shoulder and drew her in with me, which meant we were the only members of the party not to suffer a rain of horse dung and urine when gravity resumed. Not that I was smelling sweet as a daisy—we were all battered and soiled, but at least I didn’t have a cake of horse flop on my head, like Oswald.
The horses didn’t shift to Galileo right away. They had to be calmed and washed and curried and fed first. I took part in this, not because I was particularly interested in learning how to curry a horse, but because I thought I could maybe clean myself a bit while I was hosing down the animals. Which I did, with a degree of success. I was very wet, but I smelled a lot sweeter.
Desfort continued to record our labors with his data pad. He didn’t pitch in to help (and I suppose I never expected him to), but I did appreciate the horse muck that spattered his immaculate jacket, along with what I believe was human vomit—apparently someone had got space sick from the absence of gravity.
Eventually—very late in the day—a little convoy of horses was led out of the docking vestibule, onto trucks, and on to the stables that had been built on the film set. I found myself near Desfort, who was still filming and looking thoughtful. He put down his data pad and muttered, “I’m supposed to ride these mad beasts?”
“Mister Oswald wants you to become intimate with yours.” I couldn’t quite resist the reply.
Desfort twitched his upper lip. “Oswald can stuff himself,” he said.
I gave Mardy a wave as she boarded, and only then saw Kamala watching from nearby. She’d missed all the excitement, but arrived in time to view her husband tracking horse flop into the habitat. She beckoned me over, and spoke in a loud, clear voice.
“Tell my husband that he’s violating the restraining order by being within a hundred meters of me,” she said.
Desfort turned and addressed me over his shoulder.
“Remind my wife that our lawyers negotiated an exception allowing us to work together.” His upper lip twitched again. “But if she finds my presence offensive, she is welcome to take herself off.”
“Tell my husband,” Kamala responded, “that his halitosis is so dreadful that I can smell it from here, and that he should take some of his breath sweetener.”
Desfort laughed. “Tell my wife that my breath is as sweet as a bed of roses, but that I smell of horses, and that we’re both going to be smelling of horses for weeks to come.” He laughed again. “I hope she enjoys the stench as much as I do.”
The horses were given a few days to find their feet, as it were, and then the 2nd AD and I sent out the first call sheet for the stables, so that the actors could begin to learn to ride.
The stables smelled a good deal more wholesome than the transport, with the scent of hay, leather, and saddle soap. The horses weren’t floating in the air trying to kill one another, their by-products weren’t raining on our heads, and none of the beasts had tried to kill us yet. It was, I supposed, the best we could hope for.
First, the actors learned how to approach the horses and make friends, feeding them tidbits and stroking their heads and necks. “Talk to them,” Mardy said.
“About what?” Desfort asked.
“Anything you like. Sports. The weather, assuming you have weather here. Recite Shakespeare, if that’s what you like.”
“Hm. A waste of the Bard, if you ask me.” Desfort cautiously approached his horse, murmuring about how “‘A heavier task could not have been imposed.’” His horse, a palomino named Chuck, watched him with what seemed a degree of skepticism. But Chuck snuffled at Desfort’s hand, took the bite of carrot when offered, and stretched out his neck to be scratched. Desfort scratched for a while, and then Chuck tossed his head in approval and Desfort jumped three feet.
“Usko,” said Kamala, “tell my husband that he’s a chickenshit.”
“You didn’t see those beasts go mad,” Desfort said.
“‘A coward dies a thousand times before his death,’” Kamala said, “‘But the valiant taste of death but once.’”
“Yes,” Desfort said, “and the fellow who said that got butchered before the act was out.”
He looked at Chuck and shrugged. “A doubtful warrant of my immediate death,” he muttered, and equipped himself with carrots from the Craft Services table.
Soon everyone, even Desfort, appeared to be making friends with his chosen animal. I wasn’t going to ride in the film, so I hadn’t been assigned a horse—I was supposed to supervise everyone and make sure the caterer delivered lunch when he was supposed to.
“Just get to know your horse a little longer,” Mardy instructed. “Keep talking to them. Be friendly.”
I approached her, and looked at her slouch hat with the four symmetrical dents in the tall crown, what I had learned was called the “Montana pinch.” “You kept your hat on during the horse riot,” I said. “How’d you manage it?”
She looked at me with amusement in her green eyes. “I told it to stay in place. I’m good at training things, and that includes hats.”
“That’s a very well-trained hat. What is it—a Stetson?”
She laughed. “It’s a lemon-squeezer.”
“If you say so.”
“A New Zealand campaign hat,” she said. “From our army.”
“Ah. I couldn’t place your accent.” I looked at the hat. “So you were in the army?”
“Not exactly, but I trained their ceremonial horse guard.”
“Oh. An interesting job?”
“It gave me experience in dealing with obsolete military gear, which should be useful on this picture.” Her green eyes inspected me. “I’ve never encountered anyone with your name before. What is an ‘Usko,’ exactly?”
“An Usko is Finnish,” I said. “I was born into a family mining collective headquartered in the Belt. I came to Galileo to study to become a mining engineer, but I shifted to Media Studies, and here I am. I’ll never have to go into a mine tunnel again, not unless it’s part of a film set.”
“Congratulations,” Mardy said. “What is your job here, when you’re not wrangling horses in zero gee?”
“I’m the second second assistant director.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Second second?”
“That’s the principal assistant to the second AD.”
She laughed. “Is there a third third? Or a second third?”
“Only the second gets a second second. And no, I don’t know why—it’s a time-honored system, and since it means I get a job, I’m not going to ask questions.”
“Hard out!” she said approvingly, then glanced over her charges. “Time to move to the next lesson, eh?”
Next, the actors learned to bridle and saddle the horses. I tried not to laugh at Desfort’s attempt to put a bridle on Chuck, ducking low and creeping toward the horse as if to sneak up on him. This made Chuck nervous, and he backed away while tossing his head and snorting, which made Desfort more jumpy, and this feedback loop would have gone on if Mardy hadn’t intervened and told Desfort he’d better go back to making friends with his horse again.
Eventually, bridles were on, and the riders walked their horses out of the stables and into a big ring in the paddock outside. There, Mardy announced she would teach them how to saddle their horses.
“Don’t we have grooms for this?” Desfort asked.
“You’re going to learn everything about riding,” Mardy told him. “Just like a real Westerner.”
“How authentic are we going to get?” Desfort said. “Will we have to take our shits behind a bush?”
The saddles used were enormous, heavy Western saddles, with great horns in front and big dangling stirrups. Mardy put a blanket on her horse—she rode Jessie, the boss mare—then heaved the saddle up onto its back and cinched it in place—there was some complicated business tying something called a “latigo,” which ended up looking something like a necktie. This had to be demonstrated several times, and then when the actors began saddling their horses, Mardy had to go from one to the next to show them the procedure.
Everyone was trying not to watch Barnaby Desfort during this exercise, and everyone failed. The saddle seemed bigger than he was, and awkward, and again Desfort looked as if he were trying to sneak up on his palomino, though possibly he was just bent under the saddle’s weight. Again his nervousness was transmitted to his horse, and Chuck shied away when Desfort tried to heave the saddle atop him. This happened several times, and then Desfort threw the saddle down and turned to Mardy. His face was blazing red.
“For heaven’s sake!” he said. “Either hold the damn horse still or shoot him—I don’t care which!”
Mardy got one of the grinning wranglers to hang onto Chuck’s bridle while Desfort picked up the saddle and managed to get it more or less across the horse’s back. The wrangler tidied it up, getting the stirrups deployed properly, and then Mardy came and demonstrated the proper use of the latigo.
Once saddles were in place, mounting blocks were brought out, and the proper method of mounting a horse was demonstrated. It wasn’t intended for the actors to actually ride the horses anywhere, and instead they were supposed to get comfortable in the saddle and practice getting on and off. Desfort got on his saddle and glared at everyone, until Chuck shifted his weight a bit, and Desfort suddenly realized he was atop a live animal that outweighed him six or seven to one, and he clutched at the saddle horn for dear life.
Kamala, meanwhile, had got on her horse and urged it into motion, walking around the paddock. “Miss Shetty,” Mardy called, “you’re not supposed to—”
“Oh, it’s easy!” Kamala called. “I found instructions online!” She looked at her husband and laughed. “You just can’t be a chickenshit, that’s all!”
She looked absolutely stunning on horseback. Kamala rode Samantha, a red chestnut with a blond mane and tail, a perfectly beautiful horse. With her eyes sparkling and her dark hair flowing from under her sombrero cordobés, Kamala looked as if she’d been born in the saddle.
At which point Desfort decided he had enough, and he tried to get off his horse. I don’t know what went wrong, because I was watching Kamala along with every other male in the paddock, but Desfort ended up hanging off the flank of the horse, with one hand clutching the saddle horn and a leg thrown up over the cantle, while the other two limbs dangled. He began to curse the horses, the production, Oswald, and cinema generally, and then we reluctantly took our eyes off Kamala, and Mardy and I came to his rescue, detached him from his horse, and set him on his feet.
Wow, I thought as I set him upright. He really does have halitosis.
Desfort gathered the shreds of his dignity and stalked off. Fortunately, the catering truck drove beneath the ranch gate at that point, and I turned to Mardy.
“Better break for lunch,” I said.
She nodded, and the actors walked their horses back to their stalls, then took off their saddles and bridles and brought them some hay. By this time, the caterers had set up their tables. Cooking smells floated over the yard.
Desfort was nowhere to be seen. Someone said he’d left the set and gone home.
There was a second shift that had come in with the catering truck, stuntmen and actors’ doubles who needed to learn to ride, and I leaned over to Mardy. “Make sure Desfort’s double gets very good at riding,” I said. “I have a feeling we’re going to use him a lot.”
She nodded. “I’d already worked that out.”
The second shift was fewer than the first, and that left two horses without riders. I didn’t think I’d enjoy kicking my heels while watching others take riding lessons for the second time, so I asked Mardy if I might learn to ride.
“Good on you, mate,” she said. “But if you’re going to keep this up, you’d better get a proper pair of boots.”
She assigned me a bay named Carlton, and together the horse and I had a pleasant afternoon. Making friends with Carlton was easy, and so was everything else—I secured the latigo without assistance, then got up into the saddle without the need for a mounting block. I was tempted to urge Carlton into a little jog, but decided not to put Mardy’s patience to the test.
After all, I wasn’t a big film star.
“What sort of hat should I get?” I asked her as we led our horses back to their stalls.
“A bowler, apparently,” Mardy said. “What do Finns wear on their heads?”
“Stocking caps, I suppose,” I said. “But I’ve never been to Finland.”
“Just get the strangest hat you can find,” Mardy said. “I’m sure someone in the Old West wore something like it.”
I went to Wardrobe for my riding outfit. I told them I needed to learn to ride to keep up with the actors and stuntmen in the field, and I ended up with the full outfit, from boots to one of those Zorro hats, and the cost was billed to the production.
I was tempted to follow Mardy’s suggestion and get a strange hat—a cocked hat, I thought, like Napoleon. But on further thought, I decided that a Napoleon hat was better suited to Oswald.
Desfort proved to be our worst rider, and Kamala the best. I found riding comfortable and fun, and was able to keep up with Kamala when she put her chestnut into a gallop. It was mainly, I thought, a matter of relaxing.
Desfort couldn’t relax, not around horses. He demanded another horse, got one, and fared no better. He was absolutely miserable in the saddle, and he miscued his horse often enough to bollix up the simplest maneuvers. I was almost sorry for him.
I was sorrier for me, though, and for Mardy. We had to put up with his tantrums. He was the star, and every human being on the set knew they had to do their best to please him, but the horses hadn’t got the memo. They weren’t deferent enough, and he hated them, and those of us on the crew took the heat.
After three weeks, most of our riders were relaxed enough to be able to play cowboys—and then lights and cameras appeared, along with Oswalt Oswald, and The Tall Rider—by now a profoundly ironic title—began its eight-week shoot.
I disappeared into the world of call sheets, of making sure all props were where they needed to be, and of trying to wrangle actors and horses to make sure they were where they were expected. I missed my daily ride, and I hoped Carlton was missing me.
For his close-ups while riding, Desfort rode a dummy horse set on the back of a truck, with the scenery jouncing in the background as the truck bounded over the countryside. The rest of the time Desfort was filmed getting on and off his horse, and most actual riding was done by his double.
Kamala played a Mexican woman who had married an American rancher and then been widowed, after which she faced a host of troubles, including a greedy neighbor who wanted her land. Desfort played the Stranger Who Comes to Town. He was good in the part so long as it had nothing to do with horses, and he and Kamala still had enough of their old chemistry to make the love scenes work.
Oswald’s obsession with perfection was evident on the first day, when he put Desfort through forty-nine takes in order to get a scene right. Not to be outdone, the next day Desfort insisted on twenty-seven takes because he didn’t feel the early takes were up to his standard. I couldn’t fault either one for wanting the scenes to be right, but it meant the entire crew had to stand around while the takes went on and on—and Desfort’s retakes were hard on Kamala, who was in the scene with him, and who had to deliver twenty-seven identical performances so that her own acting would be on the money whenever Desfort finally delivered.
I wondered if Desfort had blown takes deliberately so that he could annoy his ex-wife. Or Oswald. Or both.
Oswald’s drive for perfection was intense enough to set everyone’s teeth on edge. He railed at people for failing to understand his instructions, or for failing to appreciate his vision, or simply failing to do their job—which happened often, because we all had about a dozen jobs, and we couldn’t do them all at once.
I got through it by remembering what Oswald looked like with a horse pat drooling down his head.
After a few days, I was no longer gaping in breathless admiration at the very sight of Kamala. Instead of being a stunning icon of physical perfection worthy of adoration, she’d become the package I had to shift on time from the indoor set in Herschel City to the outdoor ranch we’d built in the boonies. She was aloof, interested only in her job and in tormenting her ex. I never saw her with anyone who wasn’t part of her entourage—assistants, publicists, stylists, lawyers—or unconnected with the production. She was in constant communication with a host of underlings, but only to give them instructions. I wondered if she had any friends at all.
I saw why she liked riding. The horse did what she told it to do.
I asked Oskar Matheson about Desfort’s bad breath. “He’s a big star,” I said. “Surely he can afford to get his bad teeth fixed, or whatever.”
“It’s his diet,” Matheson said. “He’s trying to stay slim on a ketogenic program, and it’s given him ketosis and permanent bad breath.”
“There must be better diets available,” I said.
“You can try to convince Desfort of that,” Matheson said. “I, on the other hand, prefer to keep my job.”
I wondered if Kamala had split with Desfort over his horrid breath. I could think of a great many worse reasons.
About ten days into the production, we finally got a day off, and I slept in late, then went to the stables to renew my acquaintance with Carlton. I saw members of Kamala’s entourage there, and I wondered what was up.
It turned out that Kamala had gone riding, and her entourage was present only to sit on hay bales and breathlessly await her return. She’d gone out with Mardy, and so I saddled Carlton and rode out on their trail.
The uninhabited area of Galileo Habitat had been given topsoil, and planted in grass and trees in order to help maintain the station’s environmental balance. It was pleasant to ride through the green country, and I steered for the Western town set we’d built. I could see from a distance that the set builders and dressers didn’t have the day off, and were preparing the set for the next day’s shoot. A crane towered above the false fronts of the Victorian shops, placing lights on platforms, and a camera atop a spindly tower. The tower could telescope up and down and sat on the back of a truck, so it could be shifted from place to place, or driven out of sight if it was appearing in the shot. The tower’s advantage was that it provided a more stable camera platform than a drone, and avoided the whirring noise of the propellers.
I could see the two women on horseback on the main street: Mardy chatting with some of the set builders, and Kamala working with her phone, probably sending more instructions to her underlings.
Then I saw light glinting on falling metal and glass, and there was an enormous crash and a roiling cloud of dust. Dashing out of the ruin came Kamala on her chestnut Samantha, its blond mane flying while Kamala clutched at the horse for dear life.
It took me a moment to realize that the camera tower had fallen, and that Kamala’s horse had spooked and run away with her, and that because of the dust, it was possible that no one had seen this but me.
It’s hard to keep a five-hundred-kilogram horse from going where it wants to go, I remembered.
Cinema had prepared me for what happened next. The hero would come galloping up and save Kamala, and then she would reward her cavalier in some pleasant and personal way.
It took me another moment to realize that, in this case, I was the hero. Or rather, that there was no hero but me.
“Perkele,” I said.
I wasn’t sure I was suited to my new role, but I did my best to overcome my doubts, clapped my heels to Carlton’s flanks, and urged the bay onto an intercept course. It was a rough ride, even over the flat ground. My teeth rattled, and it was hard to keep my mind focused on Kamala’s survival and not my own. I was bent so low over Carlton’s neck that his mane was lashing my face, giving me small cuts and making it hard for me to see.
But Carlton had a better idea of what to do than I did, and in moments we were thundering right alongside Kamala. Her eyes were wide and staring as she clutched the chestnut’s blond mane with both hands. I saw that she’d lost the reins, which probably fell from Samantha’s neck when the horse bolted—Kamala’d had her phone in her hands and hadn’t been able to snatch the reins in time.
Well. Either I was a hero or I wasn’t, and it was time to find out. I kicked Carlton to bring me within reach of Samantha’s head, and I leaned over to clutch at the nearest rein. To my surprise, I snatched up the rein on the first try, and I managed to straighten in the saddle without Samantha yanking me off.
“Whoa! Whoa!” I tried getting Samantha to respond to my vocal commands while I was doing my frantic best to remember what Mardy had told me about the “one-rein stop”—one rein, after all, was all I was going to get. The idea was to pull the horse’s head to one side to get it to circle, but even though I was a beginner, I had my doubts about the wisdom of pulling a horse into a turn while it was still galloping. It would be like yanking the wheel over in a car going 150 kilometers per hour—the car would flip over and roll, and so would the horse, with our star on top.
I did my best, though, pulling on the rein gently—and to my dismay I discovered that a horse is perfectly capable of charging in a straight line even if it’s looking in an entirely different direction.
“Whoa! Whoa, Samantha!” Like that was going to work.
I was at a loss. I thought maybe Kamala could be useful, so I looked at her terrified face, and I said, “Ride, Kamala! Just ride her!”
I had no idea what I meant by that, but Kamala nodded as if I’d made sense, and I saw determination enter her eyes, and she began talking to the horse in a low voice, trying to break through Samantha’s terror with calming words.
I looked at Samantha and then at Carlton, and I saw that their movements were in perfect synchrony—their hooves beat the ground at the same instant, and they were even breathing, or rather gasping, in synch. The horses had fallen into an unvoiced communion, galloping side by side, and so I decided to do my best to enter that communion, a third party possibly able to impose his will on the others.
I began to breathe in the horses’ tempo, tried to enter the rhythm of their existence, and then I gradually drew on the rein—not pulling Samantha’s head to the side, but rather up. I knew that I’d accomplished something merely by the fact that I succeeded—Samantha was strong enough to yank the rein right out of my hand if she wanted to.
I drew Samantha’s head upward, her neck bending, her eyes looking to neither side but a little downward. She began to check her speed. “Whoa, Samantha!”
Little by little, the frantic galloping slowed, first to a hand gallop, then to a canter, a trot, and finally to a walk. I took a relieved breath of air that smelled of turf, dust, and horse sweat.
Samantha and I were both trembling all over. Carlton walked alert with both ears pricked forward, as if he rescued movie stars every day of the week.
Kamala straightened in her saddle and gave me a shaky grin.
“Thank you, Justo!” she said.
“Usko,” I said.
“Thank you so much!”
There was the sound of galloping, and Mardy came dashing up on Jessie, her eyes fierce beneath the brim of her lemon-squeezer. “Kamala!” she said. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” Kamala said. “Thanks to Justo.”
“Usko,” I said.
Mardy rode up to Samantha, picked up the lost rein, and handed it to Kamala. I handed over the other rein, and Kamala brought the chestnut to a stop by herself.
“Was anyone hurt on set?” I asked Mardy.
“No. The crane operator made a mistake and knocked the tower off the truck, but no one was standing under it.” She turned to Kamala. “I didn’t realize Sam had gone up the boohai with you. There was a huge cloud of dust, and then when I finally worked out what had happened, I had to detour around the wreckage of the tower, and—”
“That’s all right!” Kamala said. “Justo was right on the spot.”
I decided not to bother to correct her on the matter of my name. Kamala had invented this person named Justo, and would be telling people about him, and probably he would get all the credit, while I would not. There didn’t seem to be any chance of this turning out any other way.
Once the horses had a chance to catch their breath, we turned and went back to the set, because Kamala wanted to find her phone. It was still lying in the road where it had fallen, and Mardy retrieved it for her.
The tower lay across the road like a broken-backed whale. “That’s tower’s right puckarood,” Mardy said.
“I reckon,” I said.
“You’ve lost your hat,” Mardy said. I put a hand to my head and saw that my Stetson was missing.
“I guess you’re right,” I said. “I hadn’t noticed.”
“I’ll get you a new one.”
“I think I deserve a cocked hat.”
She grinned. “Sweet as!”
The strange thing—or perhaps not so strange once you think about it—was that I became a much better rider after this. The sort of Zen synchrony that I’d entered with Carlton became a part of my toolkit—I could meld with Carlton whenever I rode him, and if I were riding another horse, I could enter the Zen fugue after a little practice.
We walked our horses back to the stable, where Kamala told her entourage about her rescue by this Justo person, and if anyone there knew my real name, they didn’t mention it. Some of them glared at me—I wasn’t worthy of rescuing Kamala, that glare said; rescuing Kamala was their job. Kamala thanked me again, very nicely, and then took off along with her gaggle of attendants.
Mardy and I bathed and brushed the horses. We were spattered with water and soap, and ooze soaked into our boots. The horses were led to their stalls and fed. Then Mardy looked at my face, cut by Carlton’s lashing mane. “Let me clean you up,” she said.
She carefully washed my face and disinfected the cuts, and then she leaned forward and kissed me. We kissed for a long time, and I put my arms around her.
There was no one around. There were blankets to stretch out on. And so I got my reward after all.
I called Wardrobe and told them to get my cocked hat ready.
The next day dawned in a blizzard of new call sheets, because the fall of the tower and the camera atop it was going to result in much of the action being reblocked, since now we had to have drones and operators for the high-angle shots that Oswald planned. The big scene planned for the town was postponed, and instead we shot in the indoor set in Herschel City.
I’d got my cocked hat from wardrobe and wore it on set. The 2nd AD looked at me in amazement. “Who the hell are you supposed to be?”
“Justo, apparently,” I said.
As the production went on, I discovered the difficulties of conducting an on-set romance. I was working sixteen hours per day, and Mardy was training stunt riders and looking after horses. We were both exhausted, we spent very little time together—and worse, after the production wrapped Mardy would return to Earth. I was elated when I was with her, depressed and anxious when I wasn’t, and bone-weary every hour of the day.
We went back to the outdoor town set, and I spent a lot of time on horseback, trying to wrangle actors and extras and make sure they were in place at the right time. Though I wasn’t supposed to be in the picture at all, it turned out that I appeared in a number of shots, and one morning Oswald came to talk to me about it.
“When we look at the dailies,” he said, “people in the screening room keep asking about the man in the cocked hat.”
Terror flooded my veins at the realization that I was about to lose my job. “I’m very sorry, Mister Oswald,” I said. “I hope I haven’t ruined any scenes.”
He gave me a strange look. “No,” he said. “No, what you’ve done is make the picture more interesting. People want to know about your character.”
“My character?” I said. “I don’t have a character. I just have a funny hat.”
“But people are interested in the cowboy with the funny hat,” Oswald said. “So we’re going to give your character more screen time.”
I stared at him. “You want me to act?” Which, for the record I had never done, not even in school productions.
He gave me one of his intense, unsettling looks. “You can learn a few lines, yes?”
I blinked at him. “I’ll do my best.”
“And you’ll be paid scale.”
Well, it was a little more money.
“Does this mean I have to start paying attention to skin care?” I asked Mardy.
She looked at me and grinned. “Yes,” she said, “if you don’t want your acting career to end with a series of roles playing creepy old wrinkled people.”
I already had a costume. Oswald suggested I grow a beard in hopes it would make me look less like a college student. I managed to produce some stubble, but I don’t think it made me look anything other than unkempt.
The lines they gave me were enigmatic. “That ain’t no Richard that I know.” “I’m fixin’ to hunt me some scrapple.” “When does this barn dance begin?” And most oddly, “A woman is only a woman, but a good cigar is a smoke,” spoken as I step outside a frontier brothel and reach for a stogie.
I thank God I didn’t actually have to smoke the thing. I would probably have choked to death.
I think I did all right in the part. I knew I wasn’t an actor, and somehow that allowed me to relax, because I knew I’d be absolute paska, and there was nothing I could do about it. But relaxing, I’ve been told, is the key to acting for the camera.
The climactic gun battle, with the Stranger Who Comes to Town mopping up the more unruly of the district’s gangs, was filmed last, over nearly two weeks. Script pages and revisions were coming fast, sometimes three or four per day, and so it came as a surprise when I found out my character—known in the script as Cowboy With Big Hat—was going to be shot dead. He was going to be on the roof of the two-story brothel, give a signal to Desfort that Kamala was galloping in with reinforcements, then get shot and pitch over the gable into the street. I sought out the 1st AD.
“I’m going to fall off a roof?” I asked.
“Not you, idiot,” the 1st AD said kindly. “We have stuntmen for that.”
So I had the privilege of standing behind the camera and watching myself die—die three times, as Oswald wasn’t satisfied with the first two takes.
Afterward, I retrieved my hat from the stuntman, punched it back into shape, and thanked him for making my death look good.
“Warn’t nuthin’,” he said. Somewhere during the last weeks he seemed to have absorbed period dialect.
The bigger shock came later that day. We had to film a scene in which Desfort, at the head of a posse, rode into the town to ambush a bunch of bad guys who were intending to ambush him. First his double came roaring in on a frothing horse, firing a six-gun, the camera shooting from just above his eye line, at an angle where the brim of his hat half-covered his face. Then Desfort mounted and gingerly maneuvered his horse to its mark, drew his pistol, and fired a few shots for the close-up. He dismounted his horse, with crew standing by just off-camera in case he fell off, and then he reloaded his pistol—not by pouring powder into each of the six chambers and ramming a ball on top, but by swapping his empty cylinder with a fully-loaded one kept in his pocket. That’s how you did a speed reload in 1869.
Having given himself six more shots, Desfort charged off-camera into combat.
A few minutes later, while waiting for the next setup, Desfort strolled past me to his horse.
“Enjoy this while you can,” he said to the horse. “In two weeks, I’ll be having a relaxing massage in my apartment, and you’ll be dog food.”
My blood froze. I hadn’t considered what might happen to the horses after the production wrapped, and had vaguely assumed that they’d be shipped back to Earth. But that, of course, would cost millions of plutons, money the backers and producers would be unwilling to spend.
I had to work for the rest of the day, and then issue call sheets for the next day’s production, which at least gave me a chance to talk to Oskar Matheson. “Do you know what happens to the horses after we wrap?”
He shrugged. “They’ll be sold. We spent a fortune getting them here from Earth, and we can’t afford to send them back.”
“Who’s going to buy them?”
Matheson shrugged again. “No idea.”
“A slaughterhouse, maybe?”
He looked at me. “Whoever makes the best offer.”
Laboring over the next day’s call sheets meant that it was late in the evening before I could get together with Mardy. We shared take-away at her apartment, and I told her what I’d learned.
“I already have my ticket back to Earth,” Mardy said. “I always assumed they’d send the horses back, with the wranglers to look after them.”
“That’s not going to happen,” I said. “They could get sold to a slaughterhouse.” I looked at her. “I won’t let that happen to Carlton.”
“I won’t let it happen to any of them,” Mardy said.
We put our heads together and tried to work out what it would cost to buy the herd ourselves, and what we could possibly do with it once we owned it. We’d have to board them at stables that didn’t exist. It was possible to find feed for them—Galileo’s agricultural areas had their own herds of cows, sheep, pigs, and goats, who all required fodder at least part of the time—but it wouldn’t be cheap.
“Suppose we start a riding stable?” Mardy asked. “When The Tall Rider comes out, it might spark interest in riding. I can teach people to ride, and you can…well, you can do something.” She laughed. “Wear your big hat, maybe.”
“We’d have to build the stable first,” I said. “And it will be at least a year before the picture is released to drive demand, and we’ll have to support the herd during all that time.”
We ran the numbers until they blurred before our eyes, and the project seemed impossible. I could maybe afford to save Carlton, but I’d still have to find a place to board him.
“Mennȁ pȁin vittua!” I snarled.
Mardy blinked at me. “One of these days you should teach me what these colorful phrases of yours mean.”
“You don’t want to know that one,” I said. “Trust me.”
I stared at the figures again, and then I had a brainstorm.
“We already have a stable built,” I said. “We have a whole Western set. What happens to it after the production? It’s built on undeveloped land, just standing out there by itself.”
Her green eyes brightened. “You mean turn it into a movie ranch?”
“A what?”
“A permanent outdoor set that you rent out to production companies. There used to be dozens of them in California.” She nodded. “I bet you could get the set for cheap. It will save them from having to demolish it, eh?”
I gave it some further thought. “The production company doesn’t own the land, they’re renting it from the government. Maybe we can buy it—Galileo lets land go cheaply if you can develop it.”
“Hard out!” Mardy said approvingly. “I think we might pull this off.”
“Still some questions unanswered,” I said, “but I’ll try to find out starting tomorrow.” I took her hand. “We seem to be partners. I hope you don’t mind.”
She grinned. “Why would I mind?”
“You’re the Stranger Who Comes to Town. I’m glad you’re staying.”
I kissed her. I had a feeling the partnership would last a long time.
I was still busy with the production, so I had to hire a lawyer to do all the legwork. The government was intrigued by the project, and gave us good terms on the land. The production company gave us the outdoor buildings for free, because we saved them the expense of having to demolish them. Mardy sold her ticket to Earth—worth about half a million plutons—and financed the purchase of the ranch, the stable, and the horses themselves.
By that point we already had some customers, a production company that wanted to shoot a quickie Western to be released a few weeks before The Tall Rider and take a free ride on its publicity. I got myself hired on as 2nd AD, so that was more income—and also more work, because the budget didn’t allow for hiring a second second to assist me, and I had to do all the work myself.
Mardy and I had made long-term plans. In addition to the riding school, we’d fix up buildings on the set so that we could rent them to visitors, and then we’d have a dude ranch. We’d ship up frozen horse sperm from Earth—a lot cheaper than sending grown horses—and expand the herd as demand increased.
We also thought we’d buy a herd of cows, not as a backdrop for the dude ranch, but for profit. After all, we were surrounded by what amounted to open range, and could graze them anywhere outside the urban areas. Grass-fed beef was a rarity in Jupiter space.
We attended the premiere of The Tall Rider, and I laughed at the sight of Kamala and Desfort being chummy and glamorous and beautiful together, as if they hadn’t spent the whole production locked in mortal combat. I was reminded that they were successful actors playing the parts of successful actors, and that the best-friends act was just that, a part they adopted until something new came up.
Kamala, I noticed, wore the tallest heels I’d ever seen, and towered over Desfort. So I think she won their war on points.
I walked over to Kamala to greet her and to let her know that Mardy and I had opened a stable, and that she could come over and ride Samantha anytime. She brightened and thanked me.
She not only came to ride, but she made her posse learn, so that they could all go on riding expeditions together, and she could tell them what to do and how to do it. Many of the entourage glared at me as they rode off. The glares said, This is all your fault.
The drinks table was serving champagne shipped all the way from Earth—Galileo hadn’t got around to planting grapevines yet. When I was recharging my glass, I found myself next to Desfort.
“So you’re an actor now?” he said. “Assistant director, actor, rescuer of runaway maidens. You’re quite the renaissance man.”
“Oh, I’m more than that,” I said. “Mardy and I own stables now. You can come over and ride Chuck anytime you want.”
He paled, mumbled something, and wandered off. I smiled.
I’m taller, too, I thought.
We trooped into the theatre, and I viewed my acting for the first time. Oswald had made me look good, and with careful editing and masterful attention to lighting and camera work had crafted my amateur acting into an eccentric performance of the sort called “quirky.” It was the sort of performance that would attract attention, and maybe more work as an actor.
I’d been taking good care of my skin, just in case I got some offers.
Oswald hadn’t spent all his time crafting my performance. He’d turned The Tall Rider into a magnificent film, expansive, epic, and iconic. I remembered that Oswald wasn’t just my annoying, demanding boss, but a creator who was an actual genius.
The entertainment industry is full of people who consider themselves geniuses, and in this business, “You’re a genius” is just another way of saying hello. It was encouraging to be reminded that some people actually merited the title.
The capper came when the credits rolled, and I discovered that the Cowboy With Big Hat was played by one Justo Anttila.
“Saatana perkele!” I swore.
Our movie ranch, we decided, would be called Rancho Justo.