PLEASURE DOMES OF MARS: A
PRIMER
I arrived on Mars
somewhat rattled, but physically none the worse for wear. Miss Feng
had rustled up a burnoose, djellaba, and antique polyester
two-piece for me from somewhere, so that I looked most dashing,
absolutely in character as a highly authentic Leisure Suit Larry of
Arabia. I tried to inveigle her into costume, but she demurred. “I
am your butler, sir, not a partygoer in my own capacity. It
wouldn’t be right.” She tucked an emergency vial of aftershave in
my breast pocket. It’s hard to argue with such certainty, although
I have a feeling that she only said it because she didn’t approve
of the filmy harem pants and silver chain-mail brassiere I’d
brought along in hope of being able to adorn Laura with them.
Edgestar we dressed in a rug and trained to spit on demand: he
could be my camel, just as long as nobody expected him to pass
champagne through his secondary reactor-coolant circuit. Jeremy
emerged from storage pallid and shaking, so Miss Feng and I
improvised a leash and decided to introduce him as the White
Elephant. Not that a real White Elephant would have menaced the
world with such a malign, red-rimmed glare—or have smelled so
unpleasantly fusty—but you can’t have everything.
A word about Abdul’s
digs. Abdul al-Matsumoto, younger brother of the Emir of Mars,
lives in a gothic palace on the upper slopes of Elysium Mons,
thirteen kilometers above the dusty plain. Elysium Mons is so big
you’d hardly know you were on a mountain, so at some time in the
preceding five centuries one of Abdul’s more annoying ancestors
vandalized the volcano by carving out an areophysical folly, a
half-scale model of Mount Everest protruding from the rim of the
caldera. Thus, despite the terraforming that has turned the crumbly
old war god into a bit of a retirement farm these days, Abdul’s
pleasure dome really is capped by a
dome, of the old-fashioned do not break glass,
do not let air out (unless you want to die)
variety.
Ground Control talked
Miss Feng down into the marina below the sparkly glass facets of
the dome, then sent a crawler tunnel to lock onto the door before
old Edgy could leap out onto the surface and test his vacuum
seals.
The door opened with
a clunk. “Let’s go, what?” I asked Jeremy. Jeremy sat down,
swiveled one jaundiced eye toward me, and emitted a plaintive honk.
“Be like that, then,” I muttered, bending to pick him up. Dwarf
mammoths are heavy, even in Martian gravity, but I managed to tuck
him under my arm and, thus encumbered, led the way down the tube
toward Abdul’s reception.
If you are ever
invited to a party by a supreme planetary overlord’s spoiled
playboy of a younger brother, you can expect to get tiresomely lost
unless you remember to download a map of the premises into your
monocle first. Abdul’s humble abode boasts 2428 rooms, of which 796
are bedrooms, 915 are bathrooms, 62 are offices, and 147 are
dungeons. (There is even a choice of four different Planetary
Overlord Command Bunkers, each with its own color-coordinated suite
of Doomsday Weapon Control Consoles, for those occasions on which
one is required to entertain multiple planetary
overlords.)
If the palace was
maintained the old-fashioned way—by squishy servants—it would be
completely unmanageable: but it was designed in the immediate
aftermath of the Martian hyperscabies outbreak of 2407 that
finished off those bits of the solar system that hadn’t already
been clobbered by the Great Downsizing. Consequently, it’s full of
shiny clicky things that scuttle about when you’re not watching and
get underfoot as they polish the marble flags and repair the
amazingly intricate lapis lazuli mosaics and refill the oil lamps
with extra-virgin olive oil. It still needs a sizable human staff
to run it, but not the army you’d expect for a pile several sizes
larger than the Vatican Hilton.
I bounced out of the
boarding tube into the entrance hall and right into the
outstretched arms of Abdul, flanked by two stern, silent types with
swords, and a supporting cast of houris, hashishin, and hangers-on.
“Ralphie-san!” he cried, kissing me on both cheeks and turning to
show me off to the crowd. “I want you all to meet my honored guest,
Ralph MacDonald Suzuki of MacDonald, Fifth Earl of That Clan, a
genuine Japanese Highland Laird from old Scotland! Ralphie is a
fellow skydiver and all-around good egg. Ralph, this
is—harrumph!—Vladimir Illich of Ulianov, Chief Commissar of the
Soviet Onion.” Ulianov grinned: under the false pate I could see it
was our old drinking chum Boris the Tsarevitch. “And this—why,
Edgy! I didn’t recognize you in that! Is it a llama? How very
realistic!”
“No, is meant to be a
monkey,” explained Wolfblack, twirling so that his false camel-skin
disguise flapped about. I opened my mouth to tell him that the
barrel Miss Feng had strapped to his back to provide support for
the hump had slipped, but he turned to Abdul. “You
like?”
“Jolly good, that
outfit!”
“Pip-pip,” said
Toadsworth, whirring alongside with a glass of the old neurotoxins
gripped in one telescoping manipulator. I think it might have been
a high-bandwidth infoburst rather than a toast, but due to my
unfortunate hereditary allergy to implants, I’m very bad at
spotting that kind of thing. “Which way to the bar, old
fellow?”
“That way,” suggested
Ibn Cut-Throat, springing from a hidden trapdoor behind a Ming
vase. He pointed through an archway at one side of the hall. “Be
seeing you!” His eyeballs gleamed with villainous
promise.
A black-robed figure
in a full veil was staring at me from behind two implausibly
weaponized clankie hashishin at the back of the party. I got an odd
feeling about them, but before I could say anything, Toadsworth
snagged my free hand in his gripper and began to tug me toward the
old tipple station. “Come on! Inebriate!” he buzzed. “All enemies
of sobriety must be inebriated! Pip-pip!” Jeremy let out a
squealing trumpet blast close to my ear and began to kick. Not
having a third hand with which to steady him, I let go and he shot
off ahead of us, stubby ears flapping madly in the low Martian
gravity.
“Oh dear,” said Miss
Feng.
“Why don’t you just
run along and see to my chambers?” I asked, irritated by the
thought that the bloody elephant might poop in the punch bowl (or
worse, dip his whistle in it) before I got there. “Leave the beast
to me, I’ll sort him out later.”
“Inebriate!
Inebriate!” cried Toadsworth, hurtling forward, the lights on his
cortical turret flashing frantically. “To the par-ty!”