The Mars Cowboy

Part 1: A Duel

He hadn’t done anything yet. He knew what he was but he hadn’t proved himself. He was incomplete.

A dull noise reached him. As he looked up towards it, the purple red and blue lights from the ad-walls surrounding him slid back and forth on his Stetson. Maybe this damn elevator is near the top, he thought, but he knew he was wrong. He was whizzing by the ad-walls, which meant that these were the cheap ads, only visible to the audience on the off chance the camera happened to switch to you in a dull moment the camera happened to switch to you. The elevator would slow down for the more expensive ads, near the top.

He flipped his poncho over his right shoulder and pulled one of his two six-shooters out of its holster. He flicked out the cylinder and took some bullets from his belt. He wore two gun belts. One on each side, angled so that they looped above his hip and dropped to the opposite leg. Their mars-red leather was more like a cowboy’s than a police officer’s. Like a gunslinger’s, he liked to think.

The light sliding across him as he nudged a shell into its chamber advertized Gilea’s Leauge!

Gilea conceived of competitive dueling. She liked people to think that her determination had built this stadium. Determination was a better word than thugs.

The noise continued to grow. He could now distinguish the Duelist’s Chant, a combination of quick claps and discordant “la’s,” from the noise. Chants accompanied every event in Gilea’s League. The Duelist’s Chant was naturally the loudest and most iconic.

Gilea would sit in her executive box, and tap a button embedded in her chair. Then the word DRAW lit up every single screen in the stadium. Both men drew, and one died.

He slid another slug into place.

Only once had the men not fired on one another. An apparent show of protest. An affront to Gilea. She shot both down from her booth. The camera found her, standing at the edge of her box with a golden-plated flintlock in each hand, and a cold look in her eyes. The crowd exploded. She gave them a quick smile, holstered her weapons and sat back down. Gilea’s League: you win or you’re shot.

He slid another slug into its place.

The ultimate test, Gilea was fond of saying. Man against man. It’s just you and him and your guns. Except sometimes, it wasn’t. By carefully orchestrating the outcomes of key matches, Gilea could ensure her friends made big bets at just the right time.

He slid another slug into place.

You couldn’t fix a duel in the traditional way of course. No man wants to lay down his life for someone else to make a few bucks. The fix was in the technology. Because each dueler watched the screen across from him, behind his opponent’s head, it was the simplest thing in the world to set off one screen a quarter of a second early. Not much time, but in a duel, it might as well be a decade.

He slid another shell into its chamber.

He was not there for the fixing. He was a walk-in. His match wouldn’t be fixed. He wasn’t there for some great-and righteous-vendetta ,either. He knew about the fixing, but he didn’t feel the need to stop it. He was there to look straight into another man’s eyes and pull the trigger.

He put in the sixth and final shell.

He was there because when he heard others talk of dueling, of putting themselves on the line to prove something, of being a man, he wanted to discredit them. He was the real deal, and they weren’t. But he couldn’t say anything-he hadn’t done anything yet, and so he couldn’t say anything.

He needed to do something to become what he was.

He snapped the revolver together, and slid it back into its holster. Then, he took his poncho and laid it back down by his side.

The ads around him transitioned to big-shot companies and his elevator began to slow down. The elevator shaft went right up into the arena floor. It paralleled another elevator on the other side, so that two combatants would be elevated right into the duel. The elevators were one of Gilea’s best ideas. The audience could watch the next duelers rise up in a swirl of ads and angst. The shots built tension and revenue.

His elevator platform slowed to a halt. He looked up to see an identical platform above him. The elevator platforms were clear, and he could see a pair of feet planted 10 feet above where his were.

He could hear the whole crowd now, as if he were in the stadium already. The Duelist’s Chant was a deafening Spanish twang. Thousands of people banded together to scream and clap as they awaited a murder. A bang, and an almost simultaneous roar from the crowd. He looked up to a dark smudge on the glass. He looked back down. The dead man’s elevator slid through a hole on the wall where it would be cleaned and then sent back down to the bottom to pick up new duelist.

He was pulled up into the stadium.

The elevator brought him into the eye of a hurricane of neon and noise. There were Martians and Humans and Hephestians and Moon Men and Ayneans…every race he could think of in the crowd clapping and bellowing the chant. Gilea was there in her box, with her button. An amplified voice announced the duel: The Dark Man versus The Mars Cowboy. The Mars Cowboy? he thought.

His eyes locked on his opponent. A human as well, but shorter and fatter than he was--sniveling. He flipped his poncho over his shoulder again and adjusted his hat. His hand dropped to his holster and waited.

The screens behind the other man grew dark. The crowd grew louder.

The other man moved just a fraction of an inch and instantly he realized the fix was in.

The other man had his gun out of the holster by the time the “DRAW” in white, three-story letters appeared on the wall…

Bang.

He looked down at himself. Un-punctured. He looked at the gun in his hand and back up to his opponent. The other man clutched his stomach and looked at Gilea. He had beaten the fix.

He shot the other man again, dismissively. The crowd bellowed their approval.

He looked over at Gilea, who raised her eyebrows. That was it, he thought. Now I’ve done something, but he wasn’t convinced. He looked at his six-shooter for a bit. Then put it back in its holster. He lowered his poncho back into place. He tipped his hat to the crowd, and left the arena, still incomplete.