Juliette of Mars

None of us had ever been outside, so we talked a little bit about what that meant. It seemed pretty straightforward. If you got out of the truck while it was outside, or if the truck lost pressure somehow, you were going to suffocate, or freeze, or a little bit of both, pretty fucking quick. Other than that, no big deal.

I was the only one who had ever driven a truck, so I got assigned to drive, which was okay with me. I figured it'd be pretty damn boring to just sit there and be a passenger while someone else drove.

The Flea gave the others a few minor errands to run, but I wanted to rest up, so I went back to the Atlantis Club.

After a couple of hours, Frankie came home. He seemed sort of nervous, even for Frankie. Juliette wasn't back yet. "Uh, Melvin," he said hesitantly, "There's something I've been meaning to talk to you about."

Uh, oh, I thought. Not a good sign when he calls me by my real name.But I didn't say anything. I just looked at him and tried to keep my expression as blank as possible.

"I've been thinking about... Did you hear that there's a bunch of people going to try to reopen Borealis?" It was a tiny colony way up north which had been abandoned after the flu.

"Yeah," I answered. "But they sound like a bunch of soddy nut cases. They're all into that 'back to nature' shit, as if that makes any sense here on Mars. Having people living here at all is about as natural as a bim with a second set of tits on her back."

"Um, actually, I saw that the other day," said Frankie, seeming even more nervous than when he walked in.

"Wow," I enthused. "How the hell did that happen?"

"Uh, I guess there's this operation..."

"See!" I shouted. "That's exactly my point. It's not natural. But we do it anyway because we're fucking stuck on this god-forsaken, friggin' frigid, airless sand dune of a so-called planet. How the hell..."

"Yeah, yeah, I know," Frankie broke in, "But they're not really so much back to nature. They're more about being pure. You know, pure food, pure water, pure air, no drugs, especially no 'phro-mone. And only 'tro sex, no 'mo stuff. They want to start families and have children and take care of them the right way...like Mom and Dad would have done for us. They know they can't be completely natural, Not even close. But they think that they can be happier if they're as natural as they can be, you know, under the circumstances."

"Well," I said slowly. "That's quite a speech. You even brought Mom and Dad into it. But what's it got to do with us. And what's it got to do with why you're so nervous."

"Well, like I said, I've been thinking. And I sort of think I might want to go up there. But there are a lot of start-up costs and they're asking anyone who wants to go to contribute 35,000 docs. We're each going to make at least 25,000 tomorrow night, so I was sort of hoping you'd, you know, lend me your share."

"Holy shit," I mumbled in a low voice, trying to keep myself under control. "You want to break up what family we have left and move to a place where it's even colder and shittier than here? And you want me to give you money so you can do it?"

"I'm miserable, man," he moaned. "I wake up miserable. I'm miserable all day and I go to sleep more miserable than I woke up. I've got to get out of here. If I don't, I'm going to kill someone, like you did, or die from an overdose or get killed by the cops. I don't have a choice. I have to find a way out.

"And I'm not leaving you behind," he continued. I'll be making money and I'll pay you back. Then you can come too. They've got a whole plan to turn Borealis into the most prosperous colony on Mars. They're going to reopen the mines, grow top grade, pure crops the other colonies will pay a premium for. They're going to..."

"I'm not leaving Ohio," I interrupted angrily. "And you've got some fucking nerve to expect me to. And if you think I'm going to give you 10,000 docs to..."

"20,000," he said quietly. I need 20,000."

"But...," I began.

"I've been thinking of taking someone with me," he broke in, then fell silent.

I looked at him and waited. He squeezed his eyes tightly closed and cringed, as if waiting for someone to hit him.

"I give up. Who?" I finally said, fear beginning to mix with my anger. "It's obviously not Boof. He's not about to give up his 'mo sex life. It ain't me. Soooo...," I trailed off.

He opened his mouth like he was trying to talk, but nothing came out. He cleared his throat and tried again, "Juliette," he finally croaked. "It's Juliette. I want her to go with me."

It was obvious. She was the only possibility. But I still didn't believe it. "You're kidding me. You're fucking kidding me, right?" I said sharply. "No, I guess not," I continued, my voice rising steadily, "Because you're not fucking laughing and you'd be laughing if you were kidding me. So you must be crazy, completely, totally fucked-up insane. Did you even ask her?" I demanded, my anger turning to fury.

He was backing away from me now, sobbing and whimpering, with his arms covering his head, and I followed him. "Do you really think she'd leave Ohio, leave me and go off with you and a bunch of goody-two-shoes to grow fucking parsnips and freeze her tits off? No, of course you didn't ask her. Because you know she's say 'no', don't you? You're pathetic."

"I didn't ask her yet because I wanted to be sure we'd have the money first," he gasped between sobs. Then he straightened slightly. "I love her," he said, defiance edging into his voice. "I know you and she really like each other and have something special in bed, but I love her. ....And I want...I want...to make a....family with her. I'm not sure you know how to love. And I don't want her to wind up dead, like that other poor girl."

"You didn't ask because you knew what her answer would be, and you didn't want it to ruin your pathetic, little fantasy. And kids? Kids? You think a fine bim like Juliette wants to spend her time chasing around after a bunch of snot-nosed brats?" I shouted.

I was really pissed. But I was also really scared. Scared that somewhere deep down Juliette might really want to have children. Scared that she might say 'yes' to Frankie. Scared that she might end up like Adorable if she didn't. Big-time scared that Frankie might leave, or even worse, that I might lose control and do to him what I did to the three guys at the mingler. And very, very scared about a whole lot of stuff I couldn't even identify. "Get out. Get the fuck out right now," I screamed.

And he did. Without another word, he slunk out the door, shivering and shaking and blubbering like a little girl.

He was dead wrong about at least one thing. I do know how to love. I loved him. And the more I think about it, the more I think I may have loved Juliette, too. It's just that my lust for her was so overwhelming, it was hard to notice the love.

That's when I should have figured out that my life wasn't really about the brix, the 'phro-mone, the money it took to buy to them, or the schemes it took to steal them. It was about Frankie and Juliette and what we had done together and what we were going to do. And, actually, it wasn't as much about exactlywhatwe did together ashowwe did it. But I didn't figure any of that out 'til way too late.

After a little while, Juliette came home. She asked where Frankie was and I said I didn't know, which was true. I got a little cranky and asked why she cared. She said she was worried about him.

"He's not like you," she added. "He's sweet and sensitive."

She must have said that to piss me off, because she knows I'm not as hard as I seem. But what it did was tell me that there really was a chance that she might take Frankie's offer seriously, if he ever got up the guts to make it. She might go off to Borealis with him. She might leave me alone.

I didn't get much sleep that night. The sound of the waves, which usually puts me to sleep, kept me awake.

That night, Juliette had another one of her dreams. She told me she dreamed that she was giving me a blowjob and took my cock eagerly into her throat. Then it turned into a thick black snake. At first she didn't mind and was enjoying sucking on the snake, pretending that it was my cock. But then it slithered in even further. She couldn't breath and she couldn't scream. She struggled with it but couldn't pull it out. She woke up terrified and gasping for breath. I held her and comforted her. I figured she must still be upset about what happened to Adorable and told her so.

The next day we pretty much just waited around for Frankie to show up and for it to be time to meet at the truck. But there was no sign of Frankie.

Finally, it was time to go. We went over to the meeting place in the freight tunnel, hoping Frankie would be there. The truck and the papers were right where The Flea had said they'd be, and Boof was there, but he hadn't seen Frankie.

We waited, getting more worried by the minute. We couldn't leave without him. No one else could pick the warehouse lock. And we couldn't wait much longer because our transport papers were only good until midnight. We waited, all of us knowing what would happen if we had to abandon the job and not wanting to talk about it. Then, just as I was about to break the silence, in stumbles Frankie, drunker than I've ever seen him.

What an asshole! We've got plenty of drugs safer and better at making you forget than alcohol, but he had to go and glug down most of a liter of cheap gin, which tastes like shit, by the way. We don't have real juniper berries (whatever the hell they are) here on Mars. Probably don't have them on Earth any more either. So they use synthetic juniper berries (whatever the helltheyare). Probably doesn't taste a whole lot better with real berries either. Anyway, Frankie showed up good and drunk, and still working on the rest of the liter, and that pissed the crap out of the rest of us.

Boof grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him. Reflexively, I moved closer, in case I had to intervene to protect him. He may have been the biggest fool on Mars, but he was still my brother.

He pulled Frankie up close to his face. "What the fuck do you think you're doing," he hissed, spraying him with his foul spit. "How the hell are you going to do your job now? And where does that leave us? If you're too fucking drunk to pick that lock, The Flea is going to be looking for all of us, not just you."

"Pick it in my shleep," Frankie slurred quietly, eyes mostly closed. "Pick it if I'm drunk. Hell, pick it if I'm fuckin' passed out unconscious and sleepin' on the floor, or dreamin', or dead, or way up in Borealis, or fuckin' a girl, or..."

"Oh, shut up," Boof barked, and looked at me.

"Maybe," I said. "We could take a chance."

"Don't have a fucking choice, do we," he growled, and let go of Frankie's shoulders. Frankie would have slid to the floor if I hadn't caught him.

The truck was a standard pressurized model. It consisted of a flat bed with four seats, two forward and two just behind them. An open cargo area was behind that. A clear plastic bubble formed the sides and top of the truck. That way the driver could see clearly in all directions and the cargo could be inspected from outside. To minimize pressure leakage, there were only two doors, the cargo door at the back and the passenger door next to the driver.

Like I said, I got to drive because I was the only one who'd ever run a truck before. But I had only driven a couple of times, in the freight tunnels, never outside. We strapped in, Boof next to me and Juliette and Frankie in back, and I headed for the airlock. I was ready to stop and display our papers, but the cop on duty just waived us in. The inside door slid closed. The pumps hummed as they sucked out the air, and then the outside door opened.

I accelerated out into the night and the most amazing experience of my life, at least up to that point. The sky was the blackest black I have ever seen, against which the tiny, uncountable stars burned with a cold and angry brilliance. In the thin Martian atmosphere, they don't twinkle. They glare with frightening intensity, like a billion impossibly distant lasers, all pointed directly at you. The Milky Way swept overhead like a beautiful, magical, terrible archway. The sight was even more astonishing than the first time the holo-displays came up at the Atlantis Club.

All at once, I didn't want to be the thieving, grubby, uneducated orphan of a couple of decent people who died of the flu. I wanted to feel as clean as the stars. I felt like I might have a small place in this universe, and I wanted to find it. I wondered if it were possible to fall upwards, into the sky, and suddenly I realized that I was forgetting to breathe.

At exactly the same moment, Boof realized that I was also forgetting to steer. "Shit!" he screamed and grabbed the wheel to keep us from going off the road. "What the fuck are you doing?" he demanded. "If you rack this buggy up, we'll lose pressure and die. Or if we don't, the cops will arrest us and shoot us. Or if they let us go, The Flea will hunt us down and he'll shoot us. So keep your fucking eyes on the fucking road."

He was right, of course. But that instant changed me forever. I felt like I had a glimpse of where I might fit. The real sky was more wonderful than anything I had ever seen under the influence of gliders or black suns or bug-eyes. Going to Borealis didn't sound so crazy any more. I managed to pay attention to my driving, but the whole time I felt like the galaxies were waiting patiently above.

We were afraid that if Frankie fell asleep, we might not be able to wake him until he had slept it off. So Juliette kept him talking and playing word games while he worked at finishing the gin.

We made the half hour trip to Tokyo Sector, displayed our papers and passed through the air lock without incident. We checked the big map just inside to locate Warehouse 17F and found it easily.

The security station at the warehouse consisted of a keypad below a glass plate, which was about 25 centimeters square, set into the wall next to the door. Anyone wanting to enter had to type an alphanumeric code into on the keypad, then place his hand against the glass so that the device could read his fingerprints and compare them to a catalogue if people authorized to enter.

What Frankie had to do was use one instrument to try to remotely "read" the security circuitry and a second to generate a series of micromagnetic fields, which would induce a set of tiny electrical pulse which told the station first, that the correct code had been entered, then that a handprint match had been made.

It took both science and artistry to pull it off, and Frankie had both. The science lay in interpreting the readings from the first instrument, the artistry in using them to craft exactly the right sequence of magnetic fields and pulses. Any slight miscalculation would be disastrous. If the security device detected that false signals were being induced, it would trigger a very loud alarm and a general sector lock-down. Security personnel would respond to the scene within seconds.

And then, where would we go? We might be able to hide somewhere in the warehouse dome for an hour, two at the most, but they have tracking and location equipment that would find us pretty quick. And, even if we could get out of the dome with the truck, we'd have only two choices: take the road back to the main Marineris dome or head out cross-country. If we stayed on the road, they'd catch us right away. A typical security transport makes about 50 kph, three times faster than our truck. Or they'd just arrest us when we got to the airlock at Marineris. If we left the road, we'd disable it in about half a klick, because it's not built to go off-road. Then we'd be stuck waiting to see if the cops would pick us up and arrest us for execution before we ran out of air or heat or both.

So, it was important for Frankie to get it right on the first try.

He took a slim instrument out of his bag, flipped open the cover and held it against the wall between the plate and the keypad.

I sidled over to him and whispered, "Frankie, that looks a lot like your phone."

"Bullshlit," he replied, a small flow of saliva drooling from the left corner of his mouth, and pressed some buttons producing the characteristic set of beeps of a phone number being dialed.

He quickly flipped it closed and slid it into his pocket. "It's not jusht a phone. I've installed pre-rec..., pre-circuit recog..nition...circuitry...components," he stammered as he dug through his bag and pulled out an instrument that didn't look anything like his phone.

Somehow, though, he pulled it off. The warehouse door silently slid open. We told Frankie to wait in the truck and the rest of us crept quietly toward the guard room. Sure enough, when we got there, we found the guard sound asleep. Boof grabbed him from behind, and Juliette held her hand over his mouth until I could gag him and tie him up.

We started looking around for the 'phro-mone. Most of the warehouse was one large, open area. But way at the back, there was a door fastened with an old-fashion padlock. That seemed promising. We forced the lock and went in. There, in a small room, just as promised, we found six crates marked "DANGER – Synthetic Aphrodisiacal Pheromone – For Research Use Only." I was surprised and a little disappointed to find contraband so clearly labeled. Sort of took some of the romance out of smuggling, I thought.

Boof began to pry the top off one of the crates to make sure it was what it was supposed to be.

There were four other crates there too, big ones, more than a meter long, each marked simply with the circle and erection symbol for "male" or "Mars". While Boof was checking on the 'phro-mone, I decided to take a quick look to see what else qualified for the extra security of a locked room, not to mention the mysterious markings. Did the symbol just indicate the crates' destination? Or was it a reference to their contents?

I grabbed a screwdriver and jimmied the top off of the nearest box. It was stuffed full of what looked for all the world like about 100 limp dicks, in a wide assortment of shapes, colors and sizes. I picked up a pinkish one to look at it more closely. As I did, it moved slightly.

"Holy shit, it's alive," I exclaimed, dropping it as fast as I could.

Juliette was keeping watch at the door, but Boof set down the case of 'phro-mone vials he'd been inspecting and came over. The thing I had dropped had fallen back into the crate and was slowly writhing on top the pile. Some of the ones under it were beginning to stir, too.

"I think I've read about these things," he said. "If I'm right, they're brand new, just becoming available on Earth. Not supposed to be any on Mars yet. And,ifI'm right, they'd be worth a fortune." He began to get pretty excited. " You could probably sell just one of these cute little buggers for as much as a whole crate of 'phro-mone. We could all be really, really rich." He seemed to be estimating the size of the crates. "Good thing we've got extra room in the truck. It saves us from having to make a very tough decision. Let's get a move on. We gotta get this stuff in the truck and..."

"Whoa – wait, wait, wait," I interrupted. "What do you think those things are, and what tough decision are you talking about?"

"I read about them a couple of days ago. They're called 'dildrones'." He picked up a big black one. "They're like dildos, but they're actually alive. I mean, I know it sounds crazy, but they're really guys, you know, actual men. They've been engineered to shrink everything but the cock. See, it's got these little, tiny arms." He held the swelling penis by the shaft and pointed to two stick-like appendages, each about 5 centimeters long, sprouting from the base, just above the scrotum. "It can walk around a little on its hands, or use the arms to grab onto something.