Lady Slings the Booze

A SPREE GROWS IN BROOKLYN ...

... at Lady Sally's, the House that *is* a home—the interplanetarily notorious bordello where customers need not necessarily be human, as long as they have good manners.

Lady Sally McGee (wife of time-traveling bartender Mike Callahan) has designed her House for "equal opportunity enjoyment," helping clients of all erotic tastes—and species—celebrate life, liberty, and the pursuit of ecstasy.

Small wonder, then, that she encounters people as unique and memorable as Joe Quigley, a brilliant but unlucky private dick in grave danger of going public . . . Arethusah, the telepathic blonde who's twice the woman she appears to be ... genius Nikola Tesla, the forgotten father of the 20th Century, back from the dead . . , and the terrifying nuclear terrorist known as The Miner....

Doing for sex what his famous Callahan's Place series did for drink, multiple-Hugo-winner Spider Robinson offers adventure, and a vision of what eroticism might be like if humans were a sentient species.

"Nobody's perfect. But Spider comes pretty damned close." _Ben Bova

"Robinson is the hottest writer to hit science fiction since Harlan Ellison." —Los Angeles Times

Cover art by Gary Ruddell

Paperback

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

First printing, December 2002

Distributed by Simon & Schuster
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN: 0-7434-3578-8

A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises
P.O. Box 1403
Riverdale, NY 10471
http://www.baen.com

Production by Windhaven Press
Auburn, NH

Electronic version by WebWrights
http://www.webwrights.com

This book is dedicated, with respect and gratitude, to

David S. Alberts, D. M. Bennett, James Buckley, Larry Flynt, Ralph Ginzburg, Maurice Girodias, Alvin Goldstein, Bob Guccione, William Hamling, Hugh Hefner, E. H. Heywood, Jack Kahane, Ed Lange, Charles Mackey, Marvin Miller, Edward Mishkin, Lew Rosen, Barney Rosset, Samuel Roth, Harold Rubin, Henry Steinborn, George Von Rosen

and all the courageous others who served or risked prison time for the right of all Americans to possess and enjoy pornography (literally: "writings of harlots"—such as this story) and other erotica.

Acknowledgments

This book contains homage to (or, as Woody Allen says, "outright theft from") Donald Westlake, John D. MacDonald, Leslie Charteris, Stephen J. Cannell, Roy M. Higgins, Juanita Bartlett, Raymond Chandler, Robert Parker, Marco Vassi, and John Cleve. In addition to them, and to all those heroes cited in this book's dedication, the author wishes to thank:

—G.P. Putnam's, the first major mainstream American publisher to print a work deemed obscene by many (Vladimir Nabokov's LOLITA in 1958);

—Philip José Farmer, Robert A. Heinlein, and Theodore Sturgeon, who created the first sf characters with genitalia and a disposition to use them;

—Kristine Kathryn Rusch and Dean Wesley Smith, the only magazine editors in contemporary sf who were willing to serialize any of the Lady Sally McGee stories;

—Susan Allison and Peter Heck of Ace Science Fiction (corporate descendent of the above-mentioned G.P. Putnam's), who published those stories in book form;

—my agent Eleanor Wood, who got Susan and Peter to pay more than they wanted for the privilege;

—David Myers, who turned me on to Nikola Tesla, with Margaret Cheney's remarkable biography TESLA: MAN OUT OF TIME (Laurel, 1981), and the Jugoslavian film Nikola Tesla (with Orson Welles as J. P. Morgan!);

—Mary Mason and Mike Doellman, who provided other invaluable research data pertinent to this book;

—Amos Garrett, Harry Connick, Jr., Holly Cole, "Spider" John Koerner, Ray Charles, Paul McCartney, Dexter Gordon, and the entire catalog of Holger Petersen's Stony Plain Records and Tapes, which music kept me sane and productive during this book's creation;

—Richard "Lord" Buckley, for having stomped upon this sweet, swingin' sphere;

—and of course, my wife Jeanne and daughter Terri, sine qua nihil . . .

This book would not have been possible (or near as much fun) without all these people and their ilk.

A harlot with sincerity and a square egg:
they both do not exist.

—Japanese proverb

Writing is not necessarily something
to be ashamed of.
But do it in private,
and wash your hands afterward.

—Woodrow W. Smith

BAEN BOOKS by SPIDER ROBINSON

The Star Dancers
(with Jeanne Robinson)

Starmind
(with Jeanne Robinson)

Deathkiller
Lifehouse
User Friendly
By Any Other Name
Telempath
Callahan's Lady
Lady Slings the Booze