“Kai? Report.”

“Young Dallas has exited the, erm, restaurant in a singularly dramatic fashion, Lord Morgan," Kai said, his voice soundng tinny and a bit scratchy over the comm embedded in Lord Morgan's desk. "He was escorted by both a Mister Hardin and, apparently, by his lady.”

“Does she still appear to be ‘his’ lady, Kai?”

“I perhaps misspoke, Lord Morgan. She was dressed and had not the appearance of a lady in any appreciable fashion that I am aware of. And the, ah, ‘gentleman’ appeared to be the authority figure in this situation.”

“That person does not concern me at the moment. What’s my son’s status?”

“He appeared to have been on the losing end of a fierce confrontation, according to the report of the gendarme I planted within viewing distance of the establishment. Young Dallas was picked up from the concrete curb, which he seemed unwilling at that moment to rise from on his own.”

“Who helped him?”

“A driver of a hireable aircar, known commonly as a ‘horse’ among the populace, my Lord. A run of the ‘horse’s’ identification number revealed it to be operated by one Gregor ‘Gab’ Hayes.”

“Where are they headed?”

“Mr. Hayes’ approach vector is consistent with the sector’s emergency medical services vendor.”

“Intercept?”

“I am sorry, my Lord. As you asked me to keep my men at a distance, we would not be able to stop his approach before he reached his destination. Unless we were to fire on the vehicle.”

“That will, of course, be unnecessary, not to say thoughts like that don’t occur to me at times like this.”

“Understandable, sir.”

Lord Texas Morgan, leader of the fortress city of New Avalon on the planetoid of the same name, sighed and rubbed his eyes. “Is it?” he said. “I have three sons, Kai, and none of them are what I raised them to be. Something must be wrong when I can tell an ambassador of the Corporates to go piss in a plasma pool, but I can’t steer my own sons to be the men my father raised me to become.”

“If I may, sir?” Kai said, the slightly older man’s voice losing for a moment its infamously clipped form of delivery.

“Proceed, Kai.”

“As you know, I am, to put it bluntly, not a religious man. But I do know this about your own faith: You believe that your creator made the first man and woman, a couple perfect in every way imaginable as we understand perfection. Correct?”

“Yes, true.”

“They were created perfectly, placed in an ideal environment, given tasks that their creation and temperament were ideally suited to: take care of the garden and produce children. There was only a single caveat, that they not eat the fruit of a particular tree. I trust I continue my record of accuracy?”

“Certainly.”

“And yet, despite having the perfect parent, ideal living arrangement and perfectly reasonable expectations, they still managed to disobey to the point that their utter and complete eviction was necessary.”

“Kai, I heard all this in Sunday School when I was a boy.”

“True, my Lord. My point is this: even as a man of no discernible religious faith, I cannot bring myself to put blame on the creator in the story. Even when given perfection, humans have a tendency to muck-up the works beyond a rational person’s ability to discern them. God did not blame Himself for the disobedience of his children, and you ought not blame yourself either for the actions of young Dallas, or the temperaments of your older sons.”

****

“So, whatcha wanna do if’n we have a quiet night, Zeke?”

The question came slowly, its speaker sitting at a desk with his head laying sideways on the desk. Addressed to another man leaning back in his chair with his wide-brimmed cowboy hat pulled over his eyes, the question was given in a bored voice familiar to bored students and workers for the last ten centuries.

“I dunno, Joe,” said the second man, his eyes hidden and his mouth being the only thing visible beneath his wide-brimmed stetson. “Shoot pool?”

“We did that yesterday," Joe said, slipping an orange ball cap over him head and pulling the brim down. "I’m bored.”

“In our line o’ work, thas’ a good thing, innit?”

“Not when we’re bored.”

“Speak fer yerself, pard. I was taking a very profitable nap when yuh woke me.”

The conversation, a near verbal mirror of several others in the past week, was uncharacteristically cut off by the sound of a quiet alert sounding, visually punctuated by a softly flashing red light.

“Well, looksalike we got us a customer!” Zeke said, rising from his leaned back semistupor. He quickly grabbed a white longshirt from a peg on the wall and slipped into it, covering the blue-checked collared shirt and denim jeans he’d come to work in that day. The long white fabric hung over his regular clothes, now showing him to be the professional he was in his line of work.

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He and Joe walked out of the self-sliding door to the landing pad, where a ‘horse had just touched down.

“Gabs!” Zeke said, as the portly driver emerged, “been a while!”

“Got a good one for you, Mr. Zeke,” Gregor the driver said, moving quickly from the driver’s door to the passenger side. “Poor kid got busted up and stomped on pretty bad.”

“Yuh want me to fire up Stitchy?” Joe said, also wearing his white coat and chewing a gumroot in his mouth.

“Hey, you boys are the professionals,” Gregor ‘Gab’ Hayes said, opening the passenger door to his ‘horse. “I just bring you these poor kids when they get in over their heads and life beats them to a pulp like this.”

By now, Gabs had gently lifted Dallas out of the back seat and pulled the younger man’s arm around his shoulder. Dallas’ eyes were open halfway, and his speech was still more than a little slurred. Bruises covered half his face, and his right lip was swollen and he had trouble seeing out of his eyes.

“Well, looks like a standard Saturday night in the 3rd Sector,” Zeke said. “Hey there, Pal! What train hit yuh tonight?” Zeke took out a small penlight and began checking what he could see of Dallas’ pupils while Joe took out a small tablet and began tapping the screen as data began filling it up.

“Scans are mostly pos’tive” Joe mumbled, “wish Morgan’d let folks have the medi-nanites in their blood like the core worlds do. Make our jobs lots, lots easier.”

“Well, bunch of contusions,” Zeke said, changing the subject. “Swelling- where’d you dig this poor li’l bug up, Gabs?”

“He had a little disagreement with a machine over on the First and Second Base.”

“Ah. What machine?”

“Hardin.”

Zeke snorted as he packeted his pen, then shielded his eyes against the flashing neon cross that stood outside their clinic. “Lemme guess,” he said, “Triana?”

“Nope. Secunda.”

“Oh, this is that guy?” Joe said, clicking off his datapad and putting it away. “Here, let’s get ‘im. C’mere, pard- thaaaat’s it…” he said, transferring the shambling, still semi-stunned form of Dallas Morgan from Gregor’s shoulder to his own. “The pad says we won’t need Stitchy to cut this one open, but we’ll get the beamer for his ribs to fix those little cracks and breaks. You should be out in an hour, right pard?”

“Feh.”

“Yeah, sounds about right, after a dustup with Hardin. I swear, we get so many folks here after fights with him, we oughta put that little gutter rat on the payroll.”

----

Dallas winked out of consciousness for a few minutes. When he opened his eyes again, the guy in the white coat with the orange ball cap had pulled up Dallas' shirt and was scanning it with a white wand with a wide point on the end. Slight pain followed where the wand’s blue beam touched the bruised skin on Dallas’s ribs, and the tech would go back and wave the wand over the spot several times until the bruises were wiped away.

“Thank you,” Dallas said. His lips and eyes were no longer swollen, and movement and talking were easier now.

The tech looked up and smiled. “Jes’ doin’ my job, pard,” he said. “Zeke was just about to fire up Stitchy, our A.I. that does surgery, once we got you in here and saw what a number Hardin did on your ribs. But it looks like this oughta patch you up jes’ fine. There! A record, if I say so m’self! Thirty-four minutes to treat an’ street, Mr. Morgan.”

“You know who I am?”

“Your daddy keeps the highes’ tech outta here, so we don’t got nanites in our blood ‘nor pumps in our faces. But it only took a drop o’blood from one’a your scrapes for Stitchy to check your ladder and see you who were with a call to the genebank. Don’t worry none, though; confidentiality an’ all that, we ain’t gonna snitch to the screamsheet nor your poppa. Bad for business, an’ all.”

“How much do I owe you?”

“You ain’t no sidewinder, so’s we ran yer card and yer all set. There! Good as gold on a sodbuster’s weddin’ day.”

Dallas struggled to rise, and did so without much difficulty from the white covered operating table/bed he’d been laying on. “What time is it?” he asked.

“A little after three in the mornin’.” Joe said, motioning with his hand that Dallas an he should begin walking down the hall to the front of the small, independent clinic. “Bes’ time fer you to hightail it home an’ snuggle down,” he said as he opened the door for Dallas.

“I don’t think I’ll be doing that right away,” Dallas said, taking cautious steps. The pain in his chest was nearly gone, but still there for now. “Or anytime soon.”

“You’re all healed up. If you gotta home to go to, it’s bes’ to go there now. MedTechie’s orders an’ all that.”

“I’m not totally healed; you know how to fix a broken heart, Joe? Or a broken rep?”

“Yeah, heard ‘bout that.”

“You and the rest of the city, it seems, from Gregor in his horse to my brother’s high-society friends.”

“Ayup. Heard you gotta broken heart to mend, and a rep to recover, too. But, I’m ‘fraid they don cover neither of those where I went ta school.”

“Any advice at all?”

“Look around.”

“What?” Dallas said. They arrived at the entrance door that they’d brought Dallas in earlier.

“Look around. Bes’ way to fix a hangover is to keep drinkin’. Bes’ way to fix a broken heart is to look at other fillies in the pasture. And bes’ way to fix a broken rep is ta do something big an’ great, after you’ve laid low awhile.”

“What’s big and great?” Dallas asked.

Joe smiled, opened his hands and stretched out his arms halfway in a ‘what do I know?’ kind of gesture. “Like I said, schoolin’. Mine didn’t tell me that part. Yer gonna hafta figger it out for yerself, pard. Happy trails!”

“Happy trails,” Dallas said walking out.

“Oh, wait!” said another voice behind Dallas. It was the tech who’d shone the light in Dallas’ eyes earlier, the one that Gregor had called Zeke. “You forgot this, pard!”

Dallas blinked, and suddenly slapped his hand on his belt.

His grandfather’s swordhilt was gone.

Looking up, Dallas saw Zeke running up to him with the hilt in his hand. “This stayed on- you’ve gone one really tough magna belt, there- but we hadda remove it when we treated you. Here you go.”

Dallas smiled, slapped the hilt onto his belt, thanked the techs and walked out into the cold night air.

Thankfully, Gregor and the ‘horse he’d rode in on were still waiting.

Zeke and Joe watched Dallas enter the ‘horse, which rose up into the air and disappeared quickly over the city skyline.

“Think he’s goin’ home?” Joe asked.

“Not unless he’s goin’ all the way around the planet first,” Zeke said. “First sector, where his family lives? “S in t’other direction.”

“Where’s he goin’ then?”

“That way? Lone Starport. He’s goin’ for a walkaround.”

The two men, not much older than Dallas himself, looked out into the night sky in the starport’s direction for a short while.

“Lucky fella,” Joe said.

“Maybe,” Zeke answered, and went inside to get his lunch from storage.