TRUNK AND DISORDERLY
                            by Charles Stross

  Charles Stross has been in rehab since 2004, recovering from the
  bad attack of singularitis that led to the Accelerando outbreak. His
  doctors report that he is much improved since the excision of his
 dot-com gland, and may eventually be capable of writing normal SF
   again, under suitably controlled circumstances, although he is
  unlikely ever to return to his previous proto-Ballardian normality.
The following story was discovered cunningly encoded in a scarf he
was crocheting at the clinic; we believe it may cast some light on his
                                  illness.

                                     ****

1. In Which Laura Departs and Fiona Makes a Request

      “I want you to know, darling, that I’m leaving you for another sex
robot—and she’s twice the man you’ll ever be,” Laura explained as she
flounced over to the front door, wafting an alluring aroma of mineral oil
behind her.

       Our arguments always began like that: this one was following the
script perfectly. I followed her into the hall, unsure precisely what cue I’d
missed this time. “Laura—”

      She stopped abruptly, a faint whine coming from her ornately
sculpted left knee. “I’m leaving,” she told me, deliberately pitching her voice
in a modish mechanical monotone. “You can’t stop me. You’re not paying
my maintenance. I’m a free woman, and I don’t have to put up with your
moods!”

       The hell of it is, she was right. I’d been neglecting her lately, being
overly preoccupied with my next autocremation attempt. “I’m terribly sorry,”
I said. “But can we talk about this later? You don’t have to walk out right this
instant—”

       “There’s nothing to talk about.” She jerked into motion again, reaching
for the door handle. “You’ve been ignoring me for months, darling: I’m sick
of trying to get through to you! You said last time that you’d try not to be so
distant, but look how that turned out.” She sighed and froze the pose for a
moment, the personification of glittering mechanistic melodrama. “You
didn’t mean it. I’m sick of waiting for you, Ralph! If you really loved me you’d
face up to the fact that you’re an obsessive-compulsive, and get your
wetware fixed so that you could pay me the attention I deserve. Until then,
I’m out of here!”

      The door opened. She spun on one chromed stiletto heel, and swept
out of my life in a swish of antique Givenchy and ozone.

       “Dash it all, not again!” I leaned my forehead against the wall. “Why
now, of all times?” Picking a fight then leaving me right before a drop was
one of her least endearing habits. This was the fifth time. She usually came
back right afterward, when she was loose and lubed from witnessing me
scrawl my butchness across the sky, but it never failed to make me feel like
an absolute bounder at the time; it’s a low blow to strike a cove right before
he tries to drill a hole in the desert at mach twenty-five, what? But you can’t
take femmes for granted, whether they be squish or clankie, and her
accusation wasn’t, I am bound to admit, entirely baseless.

      I wandered into the parlor and stood between the gently rusting
ancestral space suits, overcome by an unpleasant sense of aimless
tension. I couldn’t decide whether I should go back to the simulator and
practice my thermal curves again—balancing on a swaying meter-wide slab
of ablative foam in the variable dynamic forces of atmospheric re-entry, a
searing blow-torch flare of hot plasma surging past, bare centimeters
beyond my helmet—or get steaming drunk. And I hate dilemmas; there’s
something terribly non-U about having to actually think about things.

       You can never get in too much practice before a freestyle
competition, and I had seen enough clowns drill a scorched hole in the
desert that I was under no illusions about my own invincibility, especially as
this race was being held under mortal jeopardy rules. On the other hand,
Laura’s walk-out had left me feeling unhinged and unbalanced, and I’m
never able to concentrate effectively in that state. Maybe a long, hot bath
and a bottle of sake would get me over it so I could practice later; but
tonight was the pre-drop competitors’ dinner. The club prefers members to
get their crashing and burning done before the race—something to do with
minimizing our third-party insurance premium, I gather—so it’s fried snacks
all round, then a serving of rare sirloin, and barely a drop of the old firewater
all night. So I was perched on the horns of an acute dilemma—to tipple or
topple as it were—when the room phone cleared its throat obtrusively.

      “Ralph? Ralphie? Are you all right?”

      I didn’t need the screen to tell me it was Fiona, my half-sister. Typical
of her to call at a time like this. “Yes,” I said wearily.
     “You don’t sound it!” she said brightly. Fi thinks that negative
emotions are an indicator of felonious intent.

     “Laura just walked out on me again and I’ve got a drop coming up
tomorrow,” I moaned.

       “Oh Ralphie, stop angsting! She’ll be back in a week when she’s run
the script. You worry too much about her, she can look after herself. I was
calling to ask, are you going to be around next week? I’ve been invited to a
party Geraldine Ho is throwing for the downhill cross-country skiing season
on Olympus Mons, but my house-sitter phoned in pregnant unexpectedly
and my herpetologist is having another sex change so I was just hoping
you’d be able to look after Jeremy for me while I’m gone, just for a couple
of days or maybe a week or two—”

      Jeremy was Fiona’s pet dwarf mammoth, an orange-brown knee-high
bundle of hairy malevolence. Last time I’d looked after Jeremy he puked in
my bed—under the duvet—while Laura and I were hosting a formal orgy for
the Tsarevitch of Ceres, who was traveling incognito to the inner system
because of some boring edict by the Orthodox Patriarch condemning the
fleshpits of Venus. Then there’s the time Jeremy got at the port, then went
on the rampage and ate Cousin Branwyn’s favorite skirt when we took him
to Landsdown Palace for a weekend with Fuffy Morgan, even though we’d
locked him in one of the old guard towers with a supply of whatever it is that
dwarf mammoths are supposed to eat. You really can’t take him
anywhere—he’s a revolting beast. Not to mention an alcoholic one.

      “Must I?” I asked.

      “Don’t whine!” Fi said brightly. “Nobody will ever take you seriously if
you whine, Ralphie. Anyway, you owe me a favor. Several favors, actually. If
I hadn’t covered up for you that time when Boris Oblomov and you got
drunk and took Uncle Featherstonehaugh’s yacht out for a spin around the
moon without checking the anti-matter reserve in the starboard gravity
polarizer....”

      “Yes, Fi,” I said wearily, when she finally let me get a word in
edge-ways: “I surrender. I’ll take Jeremy. But I don’t promise I’ll be able to
look after him if I die on the drop. You realize it’s under mortal jeopardy
rules? And I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to protect him from Laura if she
shows up again running that bestiality mod your idiot pal Larry thought it
would be a good idea to install on her when she was high on pink noise that
time—”
      “That’s enough about Larry,” Fi said in a voice dripping liquid helium.
“You know I’m not walking out with him any more. You’ll look after Jeremy
for two weeks and that’s enough for me. He’s been a little sulky lately but
I’m sure you’d know all about that. I’ll make certain he’s backed up first,
then I’ll drop him off on my way to São Paolo skyport, right?”

        “What ho,” I said dispiritedly, and put the phone down. Then I
snapped my fingers for a chair, sat down, and held my head in my hands
for a while. My sister was making a backup of her mammoth’s twisted little
psyche to ensure Jeremy stayed available for future torments: nevertheless
she wouldn’t forgive me if I killed the brute. Femmes! U or non-U, they’re
equally demanding. The chair whimpered unhappily as it massaged my
tensed-up spine and shoulders, but there was no escaping the fact that I
was stressed-out. Tomorrow was clearly going to be one of those days,
and I hadn’t even scheduled the traditional post-drop drink with the boys
yet....

                                    ****

2. The New Butler Calls

       I was lying on the bottom of the swimming pool in the conservatory at
the back of Chateau Pookie, breathing alcohol-infused air through a hose
and feeling sorry for myself, when the new butler found me. At least, I think
that’s what I was doing. I was pretty far-gone, conflicted between the need
to practice my hypersonic p-waggling before the drop and the urge to drink
Laura’s absence out of my system. All I remember is a vague rippling blue
curtain of sunlight on scrolled ironwork—the ceiling—and then a huge stark
shadow looming over me, talking in the voice of polite authority.

       “Good afternoon, Sir. According to the diary, Sir is supposed to be
receiving his sister’s mammoth in the front parlor in approximately twenty
minutes. Would Sir care to be sober for the occasion? And what suit should
Sir like to wear?”

       This was about four more sirs than I could take lying down. “Nnngk
gurgle,” I said, sitting up unsteadily. The breather tube wasn’t designed for
speech. Choking, I spat it out. “M’gosh and please excuse me, but who the
hell are you?”

       “Alison Feng.” She bowed stiffly, from the waist. “The agency sent
me, to replace your last, ah, man.” She was dressed in the stark black and
white of a butler, and she did indeed have the voice—some very expensive
training, not to mention discreet laryngeal engineering, went into producing
that accent of polite condescension, the steering graces that could direct
even the richest and most irritable employer in directions less conducive to
their social embarrassment. But—

      “You’re my new butler?” I managed to choke out.

      “I believe so.” One chiseled eyebrow signaled her skepticism.

      “Oh, oh jolly good, then, that squishie.” A thought, marinating in my
sozzled subconscious, floated to the surface. “You, um, know why my last
butler quit?”

     “No, sir.” Her expression didn’t change. “In my experience it is best to
approach one’s prospective employers with an open mind.”

      “It was my sister’s mammoth’s fault,” I managed to say before a fit of
coughing overcame me. “Listen, just take the bloody thing and see it’s
locked in the number three guest dungeon, the one that’s fitted out for
clankie doms. It can try’n destroy anything it bally likes in there, it won’t get
very far an’ we can fix it later. Hic. Glue the door shut, or weld it or
something—one of her boyfriends trained the thing to pick locks with its
trunk. Got a sober-up?”

       “Of course, sir.” She snapped her fingers, and blow me if there wasn’t
one of those devilish red capsules balanced between her white-gloved
digits.

      “Ugh.” I took it and dry-swallowed, then hiccupped. “Fiona’s animal
tamer’ll probably drop the monster off in the porch but I’d better get
up’n’case sis shows.” I hiccupped again, acid indigestion clenching my
stomach. “Urgh. Wossa invitation list for tonight?”

      “Everything is perfectly under control,” my new butler said, a trifle
patronizingly. “Now if Sir would care to step inside the dryer while I lay out
his suit—”

      I surrendered to the inevitable. After all, once you’ve accepted
delivery of a dwarf mammoth on behalf of your sister nothing worse can
happen to you all day, can it?

      Unfortunately, I was wrong. Fiona’s chauffeuse did indeed deposit
Jeremy, but on a schedule of her own choosing. She must have already
been on the way as Fi was nattering on the blower. While Miss Feng was
introducing herself, she was sneakily decanting the putrid proboscidean
into the ornamental porch via her limousine’s airlock. She accomplished this
with stealth and panache, and made a successful retreat, but not before
she completed my sister’s act of domestic sabotage by removing the frilly
pink restraining rope that was all that kept Jeremy from venting his spleen
on everything within reach. Which he commenced to do all over great-uncle
Arnold’s snooker table, which I was only looking after while he was
out-system on business. It was the triumphant squeaking that clued me in
that we had problems—normally Jeremy manages to achieve a
preternaturally silent approach while he sneaks up on one with mischief in
what passes for his mind—as I headed toward the stairs to my dressing
room.

      “Help me,” I said, gesturing at the porch, from which a duet for Hell’s
piccolo and bull in a china shop was emanating.

     The butler immediately rose in my estimation by producing a bolas.
“Would this serve?” she asked.

     “Yes. Only he’s a bit short for a mammoth—”

      Too late. Miss Feng’s throw was targeted perfectly, and it would have
succeeded if Jeremy had been built to the scale of a typical pachyderm.
Alas, the whirling balls flew across the room and tangled in the chandelier
while Jeremy, trumpeting and honking angrily, raised his tusks and charged
at my kneecaps. “Oh dear,” said the new butler.

      I blinked and began to move. I was too slow, the sober-up still fighting
the residual effects of the alcohol in my blood. Jeremy veered toward me,
tusks raised menacingly to threaten the old family jewels. I began to turn,
and was just raising my arms to fend off the monster (who appeared
dead-set on editing the family tree to the benefit of Fiona’s line) when Miss
Feng leaned sideways and in one elegant gesture ripped the ancient lace
curtains right off the rail and swiped them across my assailant’s tusks.

      The next minute remains, mercifully, a confused blur. Somehow my
butler and I mammoth-handled the kicking and struggling—not to mention
squealing and secreting—Jeremy up the rear staircase and into the second
best guest suite’s dungeon. Miss Feng braced herself against the door
while I rushed dizzily to the parlor and returned with a tube of InstaSteel
Bulkhead Bond, with which we reinforced the stout oak partition. Finally my
stomach rebelled, quite outraged by the combination of sober-up and
adrenaline, at which point Miss Feng diffidently suggested I proceed to the
master bathroom and freshen up while she dealt with the porch, the
pachyderm, and my suit in descending order of priorities.
       By the time I’d cleaned up, Miss Feng had laid a freshly manufactured
suit for me on the dresser. “I took the liberty of arranging for a limousine to
your club, sir,” she said, almost apologetically. “It is approaching eighteen
o’clock: one wouldn’t want to be late.”

      “Eighteen—” I blinked. “Oh dear, that’s dashed awkward.”

      “Indeed.” She watched me cautiously. “Ah, about the agency—”

     I waved my hand dismissively. “If you can handle Jeremy I see no
reason why you couldn’t also handle great-uncle Arnold when he gets back
from Proxima Tau Herpes or wherever he’s gone. Not to mention the Dread
Aunts, bless ‘em. Assuming, that is, you want the job—”

      Miss Feng inclined her head. “Certainly one is prepared to assume
the role for the duration of the probationary period.” Sotto voce she added,
almost too quietly for me to catch: “although continuing thereafter
presupposed that one or both of us survives the experience....”

      “Well, I’m glad that’s sorted.” I sniffed. “I’d better trot! If you could
see the snooker table goes for repair and look to the curtains, I’ll be off,
what-what?”

      “Indeed sir.” She nodded as if about to say something else, thought
better of it, and then held the door open for me. “Good night, sir.”

                                      ****

3. The Dangerous Drop Club

       I spent the evening at the Dangerous Drop Club, tackling a rather
different variety of dangerous drop from the one I’d be confronting on the
morrow. I knew perfectly well at the time that this was stupid (not to mention
rash to the point of inviting the attention of the Dread Aunts, those intellects
vast and cool and unsympathetic), but I confess I was so rattled by the
combination of Laura’s departure, my new butler’s arrival, and the presence
of the horrible beast in room two that for the life of me I simply couldn’t
bring myself to engage in any activity more constructive than killing my own
brain cells.

     Boris Kaminski was present of course, boasting in a low-key manner
about how he was going to win the race and buying everyone who
mattered—the other competitors, in other words—as many drinks as they
would accept. That was his prerogative, for, as the ancients would put it,
there’s no prize for second place; he wasn’t the only one attempting to
seduce his comrades into suicide through self-indulgence. “We fly
tomorrow, chaps, and some of us might not be coming back! Crack open
the vaults and sample the finest vintages. Otherwise you may never know....
“Boris always gets a bit like that before a drop, morbidly maudlin in a
gloating kind of way. Besides, it’s a good excuse for draining the cellars,
and Boris’s credit is good for it—”Kaminski” is not his real name but the
name he uses when he wants to be a fabulously rich playboy with none of
the headaches and anxieties that go with his rank. This evening he was
attired in an outrageous outfit modeled on something Tsar Putin the First
might have worn when presiding over an acid rave in the barbaric dark ages
before the re-enlightenment. He’d probably found it in the back of his big
brother’s wardrobe.

       “We know you only want to get us drunk so you can take unfair
advantage of us,” joshed Tolly Forsyth, raising his glass of Chateau !Kung,
“but I say let’s drink a toast to you! Feet cold and bottoms down.”

      “Glug glug,” buzzed Toadsworth, raising a glass with his telescoping
sink-plunger thingie. Glasses were ceremoniously drained. (At least, that’s
what I think he said—his English is rather sadly deficient, and one of the
rules of the club is: no neural prostheses past the door. Which makes it a
bit dashed hard when you’re dealing with fellows who can’t tell a fuck from a
frappé I can tell you, like some high-bandwidth clankie heirs, but that’s what
you get for missing out on a proper classical education, undead languages
and all, say I.) Goblets were ceremonially drained in a libation to the
forthcoming toast race.

      “It’s perfectly all right to get me drunk,” said Marmaduke Bott, his
monocle flashing with the ruby fire of antique stock-market ticker displays:
“I’m sure I won’t win, anyway! I’m sitting this one out in the bleachers.”

       “Drink is good,” agreed Edgestar Wolfblack, injecting some kind of
hideously fulminating fluorocarbon lubricant into one of his six knees. Most
of us in the club are squishies, but Toadsworth and Edgestar are both
clankies. However, while the Toadster’s knobbly conical exterior conceals
what’s left of his old squisher body, tucked decently away inside his
eye-turret, Edgestar has gone the whole hog and uploaded himself into a
ceramic exoskeleton with eight or nine highly specialized limbs. He looks
like the bastard offspring of a multi-tool and a mangabot. “Carbon is the
new—” his massively armored eyebrows furrowed—”black?” He’s a nice
enough chappie and he went to the right school, but he was definitely at the
back of the queue the day they were handing the cortical upgrades out.
      “Another wee dram for me,” I requested, holding out my snifter for a
passing bee-bot to vomit the nectar into. “I got a new butler today,” I
confided. “Nearly blew it, though. Sis dumped her pet mammoth on me
again and the butler had to clean up before I’d even had time to fool her
into swearing the oath of allegiance.”

      “How totally horrible,” Abdul said in a tone that prompted me to glance
at him sharply. He smirked. “And how is dear Fiona doing this week? It’s
ages since she last came to visit.”

       “She said something about the Olympic skiing season, I think. And
then she’s got a few ships to launch. Nothing very important aside from that,
just the après ski salon circuit.” I yawned, trying desperately to look
unimpressed. Abdul is perhaps the only member of the club who genuinely
out-ranks Boris. Boris is constrained to use a nom de guerre because of
his position as heir to the throne of all the Russias—at least, all the Russias
that lie between Mars and Jupiter—but Abdul doesn’t even bother trying to
disguise himself. He’s the younger brother of his Excellency the Most
Spectacularly Important Emir of Mars, and when you’ve got that much clout
you get to do whatever you want. Especially if it involves trying to modify the
landscape at mach twenty rather than assassinating your elder siblings, the
traditional sport of kings. Abdul is quite possibly certifiably insane, having
graduated to orbital freestyle re-entry surfing by way of technical diving on
Europa and naturist glacier climbing on Pluto—and he doesn’t even have
my unfortunate neuroendocrine disorder as an excuse—but he’s a
fundamentally sound chappie at heart.

      “Hah. Well, we’ll just have to invite her along to the party afterward,
won’t we?” He chuckled.

      “Par-ty?” Toadsworth beeped up.

      “Of course. It’ll be my hundredth drop, and I’m having a party.” Abdul
smirked some more—he had a very knowing smirk—and sipped his
eighty-year Inverteuchtie. “Everyone who survives is invited! Bottoms up,
chaps?”

      “Bottoms up,” I echoed, raising my glass. “Tally ho!”

                                     ****

4. The Sport of Kings
      The day of the drop dawned bright and cold—at least it was bright
and cold when I went out on the balcony beside the carport to suit up for my
ride.

      Somewhat to my surprise, Miss Feng was already up and waiting for
me with a hot flask of coffee, a prophylactic sober-up, and a good-luck
cigar. “Is this competition entirely safe, Sir?” she enquired as I chugged my
espresso.

      “Oh, absolutely not,” I reassured her: “but I’ll feel much better
afterward! Nothing like realizing you’re millimeters away from flaming
meteoritic death to get the old blood pumping, what?”

       “One couldn’t say.” Miss Feng looked doubtful as she accepted the
empty flask. “One’s normal response to incendiary situations that get the
blood pumping is a wound dressing and an ambulance. Or to keep the
employer from walking into the death trap in the first place. Ahem. I assume
Sir intends to survive the experience?”

      “That’s the idea.” I grinned like an idiot, feeling the familiar pulse of
excitement. It takes a lot to drive off the black dog of depression, but
dodging the bullet tends to send it to the kennels for a while. “By the way, if
Laura calls could you tell her I’m dying heroically to defend her virtue or
something? I’ll see her after—oh, that reminds me! Abdul al-Matsumoto
has invited us—all the survivors, I mean—to a weekend party at his place
on Mars. So if you could see that the gig is ready to leave after my drop as
soon as I’ve dressed for dinner, and I don’t suppose you could make sure
there’s a supply of food for the little monster, could you? If we leave him
locked in the garret dungeon he can’t get into trouble, not beyond eating the
curtains—”

     Miss Feng cleared her throat and looked at me reproachfully. “Sir did
promise his sister to look after the beast in person, didn’t he?”

      I stared at her, somewhat taken aback. “Dash it all, are you
implying...?”

       Miss Feng handed me my pre-emptive victory cigar. She continued,
in a thoughtful tone of voice: “Has Sir considered that it might be in his best
interests—should he value the good opinion of his sister—to bring Jeremy
along? After all, Lady Fiona’s on Mars, too, even if she’s preoccupied with
the après ski circuit. If by some mischance she were to visit the Emir’s
palace and find Sir sans Jeremy it might be more than trivially
embarrassing.”
     “Dash it, you’re right. I suppose I’ll have to pack the bloody
pachyderm, won’t I? What a bore. Will he fit in the trunk?”

      Miss Feng sighed, very quietly. “I believe that may be a remote
theoretical possibility. I shall endeavor to find out while Sir is enjoying
himself not dying.”

      “Try beer,” I called as I picked up my surfboard and climbed aboard
the orbital delivery jitney. “Jeremy loves beer!” Miss Feng bowed as the
door closed. I hope she doesn’t give him too much, I thought. Then the
gravity squirrelizer chittered to itself angrily, decided it was on the wrong
planet, and tried to rectify the situation in its own inimitable way. I lay back
and waited for orbit. I wasn’t entirely certain of the wisdom of my proposed
course of action—there are few predicaments as grim as facing a
mammoth with a hangover across the breakfast table—but Miss Feng
seemed like a competent sort, and I supposed I’d just have to trust her
judgment. So I took a deep breath, waited another sixty seconds (until the
alarm chimed), then opened the door and stepped off the running board
over three hundred kilometers of hostile vacuum.

       The drop went smoothly—as I suppose you guessed, or I wouldn’t be
here to bend your ear with the story, what? The adrenaline rush of standing
astride a ten centimeter thick surfboard as it bumps and vibrates furiously in
the hypersonic air-flow, trying to throw you off into the blast-furnace tornado
winds of re-entry, is absolutely indescribable. So is the sight of the circular
horizon flattening and growing, coming up to batter at your feet with angry
fists of plasma. Ah, what rhapsody! What delight! I haven’t got a poetic
bone in my body, but when you tap into Toadsworth outside of the
club-house’s suppressor field that’s the kind of narcotic drivel he’ll feed
you. I think he’s a jolly good poet, for an obsessive-compulsive clankie with
a staircase phobia and knobbly protrusions; but, at any rate, a more
accurate description of competitive orbital re-entry diving I haven’t heard
from anyone recently.

       A drop doesn’t take long. The dangerous stage lasts maybe twenty
minutes from start to finish, and only the last five minutes is hot. Then you
slow to sub-sonic velocity and let go of your smoldering surfboard, and
pray to your ancestors that your parachute is folded smartly, because it
would be mortifying to have to be rescued by the referee’s skiff. Especially
if they don’t get to you until after you complete your informal enquiry into
lithobraking, eh?

      There was a high overcast as I came hurtling in across Utah, and I
think I might have accidentally zigged instead of zagging a little too firmly as
I tried to see past a wall of cloud ahead and below me, because when my
fireball finally dissipated I found myself skidding across the sky about fifty
kilometers off course. This would be embarrassing enough on its own, but
then my helmet helpfully highlighted three other competitors—Abdul among
them!—who were much closer to the target zone. I will confess I muttered
an unsportingly rude word at that juncture, but the game’s the thing and it
isn’t over ‘til it’s over.

      In the end I touched down a mere thirty-three thousand meters
off-base, and a couple of minutes later the referees ruled I was third on
target. Perry O’Peary—who had been leading me—managed to make
himself the toast of the match before he reached the tropopause by way of
a dodgy ring seal on his left knee. Dashed bad play, that, but at least he
died with his boots on—even if they were glowing red-hot and welded to his
ankles.

        I caught a lift the rest of the way to the drop base from one of the
referee skiffs. As I tromped across the dusty desert floor in my smoldering
armor, feeling fully alive for the first time in weeks, I found the party already
in full swing. Abdul’s entourage, all wearing traditional kimonos and
burnooses, had brought along a modified camel that widdled champagne in
copious quantities. He held up a huge platinum pitcher: “Drinks are on me!”
he yodeled as Tolly Forsyth and some rum cove of a Grand
Vizier—Toshiro Ibn Cut-Throat, I think—hoisted him atop their shoulders
and danced a victory mazurka.

      “Jolly good show, old son!” I called, ditching my helmet and gloves
gratefully and pouring a beaker of bubbly over my steaming head. “Bottoms
up!”

     “B’m’s up undeed!” Abdul sprayed camel flux everywhere in salute.
He was well into the spirit of things, I could tell; indeed, the spirit of things
was well into him.

       Ibn Cut-Throat’s kid brother sidled up behind me. “If Ralphie-sama
would care to accompany me to His Majesty’s Brother’s pleasure barge, we
will be departing for Mars as soon as the rest of the guests arrive,” he
intimated.

      “Rest of the guests? Capital, capital!” I glanced round in search of my
clankie doxy, but there was no sign of Laura. Which was dashed strange,
for she’d normally be all over me by this point in the proceedings: my nearly
being turned off in front of an audience usually turned her on like a
knife-switch. “Who else is coming?”

       “Lots of people.” Ibn Cut-Throat Junior looked furtive: “it’s a very big
party, as befits the prince’s birthday. Did you know it was his birthday...? It’s
a theme party, of course, in honor of the adoptive ancestors of his ancient
line, the house of Saud.”

      Abdul al-Matsumoto is as much an authentic prince of Araby as I am a
scion of the MacGregor, but that’s the price we all pay for being descended
from the nouveau richewho survived the Great Downsizing hundreds of
years ago. Our ancestors bought the newly vacated titles of nobility, and
consequently we descendants are forced to learn the bally traditions that go
with them. I spent years enduring lessons in dwarf-tossing and
caber-dancing, not to mention damaging my hearing learning to play the
electric bagpipes, but Abdul has it worse: he’s required by law to go around
everywhere with a tea-towel on his head and to refrain from drinking
fermented grape juice unless it’s been cycled through the kidneys of a
re-engineered dromedary. This aristocracy lark has its down side, you mark
my words.

      “A theme party,” I mused, removing my face from my cup: “that
sounds like fun. But I was planning on taking my gig. Is that okey-dokey, as
they say? Is there room in the imperial marina?”

      “Of course,” said the vizier, leering slightly as a shapely femme
wearing a belly-dancer’s costume sashayed past. I noticed with distaste his
hairless face and the pair of wizened testicles on a leather cord around his
neck: some people think too much testosterone makes a cove stupid, but
there’s such a thing as going too far, what? “Just remember, it’s a
fancy-dress party. The theme is the thousand nights and one night, in honor
of and for the selection of His Excellency’s newest concuboid. His
Excellency says you should feel free to bring a guest or two if you like. If
you need an outfit—”

      “I’m sure my household wardrobe will be able to see to my needs,” I
said, perhaps a trifle too sharply. “See you there!”

      Ibn Cut-Throat bowed and scraped furiously as he backed away from
me. Something odd’s going on here, I realized, but before I could put my
finger on it there was a whoosh and I saw the familiar sight of my gig—well,
actually it’s Uncle Featherstonehaugh’s, but as he’s not due back for six
years I don’t think that matters too much—descending to a perfect
three-point landing.
     I walked over to it slowly, lost in thought, only to meet Miss Feng
marching down the ramp. “I didn’t know you could fly,” I said.

      “My usual employer requires a full pilot’s qualification, Sir. Military
unrestricted license with interstellar wings and combat certification.” She
cleared her throat: “Among other skills.” She took in my appearance, from
scorched ablative boots to champagne hairstyle: “I’ve taken the liberty of
laying out Sir’s smoking jacket in the master stateroom. Can I suggest a
quick shower might refresh the parts that Sir’s friends’ high spirits have
already reached?”

      “You may suggest anything you like, Miss Feng, I have complete
confidence in your professional discretion. I should warn you I have a guest
tagging along, but he won’t be any trouble. If you show him to the lounge
while I change, we shall be able to depart promptly. I don’t suppose you’ve
heard anything from Laura?”

     She shook her head minutely. “Not so much as a peep, Sir.” She
stepped aside. “So, I’m to set course for Mars as soon as the guest is
aboard? Very good, Sir. I shall be on the bridge if you need me.”

     It appeared that Miss Feng was not only an accomplished butler, but
a dashed fine pilot as well. Would miracles never cease?

                                    ****

5. Miss Feng Serves the Wrong Beer

      Uncle Featherstonehaugh’s boat is furnished in white oak panels with
brass trim, ochre crushed velvet curtains, and gently hissing gas lamps. A
curving sofa extends around the circumference of the lounge, and for those
tiresome long voyages to the outer system there are cozy staterooms
accessible through hidden sliding panels in the walls. It is a model of
understated classical luxury in which a cove and his fellows can get
discreetly bladdered while watching the glorious relativistic fireworks in the
crystal screen that forms the ceiling. However, for the journey to Abdul’s
pleasure dome on Mars it suffered from three major drawbacks. For one
thing, in a fit of misplaced bonhomie I’d offered Edgestar Wolfblack a lift,
and old Edgy wasn’t the best company for a post-drop pre-prandial, on
account of his preferred tipples being corrosive or hypergolic, or both.
Secondly, Laura was still making her absence felt. And finally, as the icing
on the cake, so to speak, Miss Feng had locked Jeremy in the luggage
compartment. He was kicking up a racket as only a sober dwarf mammoth
with a hangover can, and I could barely hear myself think over the din.
      “Dash it all, how much beer did you give him?” I asked my butler.

      “Two liters, Sir,” Miss Feng replied. “Of the rather elderly Bragote
from the back of your uncle’s laboratory. I judged it the least likely to be
missed.”

      “Oh dear God!” I cried.

      “Bragh-ought?” echoed Edgy, as a plaintive squeal and a loud thud
echoed from the under floor bay. By the sound of things Jeremy was trying
to dash his brains out on the undercarriage. (Unfortunately a dwarf
mammoth’s skull is thick enough to repel meteors and small anti-matter
weapons.)

      “Was that a mistake?” Miss Feng enquired, unexpectedly tentatively.

     I sighed. “You’re new to the household, so I suppose you weren’t to
know this, but anything Uncle Featherstonehaugh brewed is best treated as
an experiment in creative chemical warfare. He was particular keen on the
Bragote: it’s a mediaeval recipe and it requires a few years to mature to the
consistency of fine treacle, but once you dilute the alcohol it’s an excellent
purgative. Or so I’m told,” I added hastily, not wanting to confess to any
teenage indiscretions.

      “Oh dear.” Her brow wrinkled. “One suspected it was a little past its
prime. There is another firkin in the hold, just in case it becomes necessary
to sedate Jeremy again.”

      “I don’t think that will work,” I said regretfully. “He’s not entirely stupid.
Uncle was working on a thesis that the Black Death of 1349 wasn’t actually
a plague but a hangover.”

     “Blackdeath? Is no posthuman of that nomenclature in my clade,”
Edgy complained.

      BUMP went the floor beneath my feet, causing my teeth to vibrate.
“Only two hours to Mars,” Miss Feng observed. “If Sir will excuse me, I
have to see to his costume before arrival.” She retreated into one of the
staterooms, leaving me alone with old Edgy and the pachydermal
punctuation.

                                       ****
6. 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 party-goer in my own capacity. It wouldn’t be right,” she said, tucking
an emergency vial of after-shave 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 chainmail brassiere I’d
brought along in hopes of being able to tempt Laura into 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 reactor’s
secondary 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 madly 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 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 on to
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 their own color-coordinated suite of Doomsday Weapon
Control Consoles, for those occasions on which one is required to entertain
multiple planetary overlords simultaneously.)

      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 hyper-scabies 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 re-fill 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 pro-mise.

      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
punchbowl (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!”

                                     ****

7. In Which Ralph Explains the Nature of his Relationship with Laura

       Now dash it all, it behooves a young fellow to remain discreet and
close-lipped about matters of an embarrassingly personal nature. But it’s
also true to say that this story won’t make a lot of sense without certain
intimate understandings—a nod’s as good as a wink to a deaf robot and all
that—and in any event, ever since the minutiae of my personal affairs
became part of the public gossip circuit following the unfortunate affair
involving the clankie dominatrix, the cat burglar, and the alien hive-mind, it
would be somewhat hypocritical of me to stand upon my privacy. So where
a more modest cove might hesitate, allow me to step in it and, at risk of
offending your sensibilities, explain something about my complex
relationship with Laura.

      I sometimes fancy that life must have been so much simpler back in
the days of classical Anglo-American civilization, when there were only two
openly acknowledged genders and people didn’t worry about whether their
intimate affairs were commutative, transitive, or reflexive. No
clankie/squishie, no U or Non-U, nothing but the antique butch/femme
juxtaposition, and that was pretty much determined by the shape of the
external genitalia you were born with. Perverts dashed well knew what they
were, and life was simple. Modern life is enough to drive a cove to drugs in
my opinion, but as a Butch U Squishie of impeccable ancestry I have the
social option of maintaining a mistress, not to mention the money, and that’s
where Laura comes in.

       Laura is very clankie and very frilly femme with it, but with a squishy
core and sufficiently non-U to make a casual relationship just barely
acceptable to polite society on the usual sub-rosa Morganatic basis. We
met on a shooting weekend at one of the Pahlavi girl’s ranches on Luna,
doing our bit for evolution by helping thin the herd of rampaging feral bots
during their annual migration across the Sea of Tranquillity. I’m not sure
what she was doing there, but I think it was something to do with working
her way around the Solar System on a cut-price non-U grand tour: laboring
as a courtesy masseuse in Japan and a topiarist on Ceres while saving up
the price of her next interplanetary jaunt. Her maternity factory or mother or
whoever was sending her a small allowance to help pay her way, I think, but
she was having to work as well to make ends meet, a frightfully non-U thing
for a cute little clankie princess to have to do. Our eyes met over the open
breech of her silver-chased Purdey over-and-under EMP cannon, and as
soon as I saw her delicately wired eyelashes and the refractive sheen on
her breasts, simultaneously naked and deliciously inaccessible in the
vacuum, I knew I had to have her. “Why, I do declare I’m out of capacitors!”
she fluttered at me, and I bent over backward to offer her my heart, and the
keys to the guest room.

      There is something more than a little bit perverse about a squish who
chases clankie skirt: even, one might suppose, something of the invert
about them; but I can cope with sly looks in public, and our butch/femme
U/non-U tuple is sufficiently orthodox to merely Outrage the Aunts, rather
than crossing the line and causing Offence. If she showed more squish
while being less non-U, I suppose it would be too risqué to carry on in
public—but I digress. I trust you can sympathize with my confusion? What
else is a healthy boy to do when his lusts turn in a not-quite-respectable
direction?

      Of course, I was younger and rather more foolish when I first clapped
eyes on the dame, and we’ve had our ups and downs since then. She was,
to be fair, unaware of my unfortunate neurohormonal problems: and I wasn’t
entirely clear on the costs, both mechanical and emotional, of maintaining a
clankie doxie in the style to which she would want to become accustomed.
Nor did I expect her to be so enthusiastic a proponent of personality
patches, or so prone to histrionic fits and thermionic outrages. I expect I
had some surprises for her, too. But we mostly seemed to bump along all
right—until that last pre-drop walk-out, and her failure to turn up at the drop
zone.

                                       ****

8. Jeremy Runs Amok; A Dreadful Discovery before Dinner

      Among the various manners of recovering from the neurasthenic
tension that accompanies a drop, I must admit that the one old Abdul had
laid on for us took first prize for decadent (that means good) taste. It’s hard
to remain stressed out while reclining on a bed of silks in a pleasure palace
on Mars, with nubile young squishies to drop pre-fermented grapes through
your open lips, your very own mouth-boy to keep the hookah smoldering,
and a clankie band plangently plucking its various organs in the far corner of
the room.

       Dancers whirled and wiggled and undulated across the stage at the
front of the hall, while a rather fetching young squishie lad in a gold lamé
loincloth and peacock feather turban waited at my left shoulder to keep my
cocktail glass from underflowing. Candied fruits and jellied Europan
cryoplankton of a most delightful consistency were of course provided.
“What-ho, this is the life, isn’t it?” I observed in the general direction of
Toadsworth. My bot buddy was parked adjacent to my bower, his knobbly
mobility unit sucking luxuriously conditioned juice from a discreet outlet
while the still squishy bits of his internal anatomy slurped a remarkably
subtle smoked Korean soy ale from a Klein stein by way of a curly straw.

      “Beep beep,” he responded. Then, expansively and slowly, “you
seem a little melancholy about something, old chap. In fact, if you had
hyperspectral imagers like me, you might notice you were a little drawn.
Like this: pip.” He said it so emphatically that even my buggy-but-priceless
family heirloom amanuensis recognized it for an infoburst and misfiled it
somewhere. “Indiscretions aside, if there’s anything a cove can do to help
you—enemies you want inebriated, planets you want conquered—feel free
to ask the Toadster, what?”

       “You’re a jolly fine fellow and I may just do that,” I said. “But I’m afraid
it’s probably nothing you can help with. I’m in a bit of a blue funk—did you
know Laura left me? She’s done it before several times, of course, but she
always comes back after the drop. Not this time, though, I haven’t seen
gear nor sprocket of her since the day before yesterday and I’m getting a
bit worried.”

      “I shall make inquiries right away, old chap. The clankie grapevine
knows everything. If I may make so bold, she probably just felt the need to
get away for a while and lube her flaps: she’ll be back soon enough.”
Toadsworth swiveled his ocular turret, monospectral emitters flashing
brightly. “Bottoms up!”

      I made no comment on the evident fact that if the Toadster ever did
get himself arse over gripper he’d be in big trouble righting himself, but
merely raised my glass in salute. Then I frowned. It was empty! “Boy?
Where’s my drink?” I glanced round. A furry brown sausage with two
prominently flared nostrils was questing about the edge of the bower where
my cocktail boy had been sitting a moment before.

      “Grab him!” I swore at the lad, but I fear it wasn’t his fault: Jeremy had
already done him a mischief, and he was doubled over in a ball under the
nearest curtain, meeping pathetically. Jeremy sucked the remains of my
Saturnian ring ice-water margaritas up his nose with a ghastly slurping
noise, and winked at me: then he sneezed explosively. An acrid eruction
slapped my face. “Vile creature!” I raged, “What do you think you’re
doing?”

      I’m told that I am usually quite good with small children and other
animals, but I have a blind spot when it comes to Jeremy. He narrowed his
eyes, splayed his ears wide, and emitted a triumphant—not to say
alcohol-saturated—trumpet-blast at me. Got you, he seemed to be saying.
Why should you two-legs have all the fun? I made a grab for his ears but
he was too fast for me, nipping right under my seat and out the other side,
spiking my unmentionables on the way as I flailed around in search of
something to throw at him.

      “Right! That does it!” People to either side were turning to stare at
me, wondering what was going on. “I’m going to get you—” I managed to
lever myself upright just in time to see Jeremy scramble out through one of
the pointy-looking archways at the back of the hall, then found myself
eyeball to hairy eyeball with Ibn Cut-Throat’s administrative assistant.

      “Please not to create so much of a noise, Ralphie-san,” said the
junior under-vizier: “His Excellency has an announcement to make.”

      And it was true. Human flunkies were discreetly passing among the
audience, attracting the guests’ attention and quieting down the background
of chit-chat. The band had settled down and was gently serenading us with
its plucked vocal chords. I glanced after Jeremy one last time: “I’ll deal with
you later,” I muttered. Even by Jeremy’s usual standards, this behavior was
quite intolerable; if I didn’t know better, I’d swear there was something up
with the blighter. Then I looked back at the stage at the front of the room.

      The curtain sublimed in a showy flash of velvet smoke, revealing a
high throne cradled in a bower of hydroponically rooted date palms. His
Excellency Abdul al-Matsumoto, younger sibling of the Emir of Mars, rose
from his seat upon the throne: naked eunuch bodyguards, their skins oiled
and gleaming, raised their katanas in salute to either side. “My friends,” old
Abdul droned in a remarkably un-Abdul like monotone: “It makes me more
happy than I can tell you to welcome you all to my humble retreat tonight.”

       Abdul wore robes of blinding white cotton, and a broad gold
chain—first prize for atmosphere diving from the club, I do believe. Behind
him, a row of veiled figures in shapeless black robes nudged each other.
His wives? I wondered, or his husbands? “Tonight is the first of my
thousand nights and one night,” he continued, looking more than slightly
glassy-eyed. “In honor of my sort-of ancestor, the Sultan Schahriar, and in
view of my now being, quote, too old to play the field, my elder brother,
peace be unto him, has decreed a competition for my hand in marriage. For
this night and the next thousand, lucky concubines of every appropriate
gender combination will vie for the opportunity to become my sole and
most important sultana.”

       “That’s right, it’s not just a date!” added Ibn Cut-Throat, from the
side-lines.

       “I shall take the winner’s hand in marriage, along with the rest of their
body. The losers—well, that’s too boring and tiresome to go into here, but
they won’t be writing any kiss-and-tell stories: they should have made
backups before entering the competition, that’s not my problem.
Meanwhile, I ask you to raise a toast with me to the first seven aspiring
princesses of Mars, standing here behind me, and their intelligence and
courage in taking up Scheherazade’s wager.” He sounded bored out of his
skull, as if his mind was very definitely busy elsewhere.

      Everyone raised a toast to the competitors, but I was losing my
appetite even before Ibn Cut-Throat stepped to the front of the stage to
explain the terms of the competition, which would begin after the banquet. I
may come from a long line of Japanese pretenders to the throne of a
sheep-stealing bandit, but we’d never consider anything remotely as
blood-thirsty and mediaeval as this. The prospect of spending a night with
dashing young Abdul gave a whole new and unwelcome meaning to losing
your head for love, as I suppose befitted a pretender to the crown of Ibn
Saud—never mind the Sassanid empire—by way of Mitsubishi Heavy
Industries. “I don’t think this is very funny,” I mumbled to Toads-worth. “I
wish Laura were here.”

     Toadsworth nudged me with his inebriator. “I don’t think you need to
worry about that, old chap. I spy with my little hyperspectral telescopic
imager—”

      —Ibn Cut-Throat was coming to the climax of his spiel: “gaze upon
the faces of the brave beauties!” He crowed. “Ladies, drop your veils!”

      I gaped like a fool as the row of black-garbed femmes behind the
prince threw back their veils and bared their faces to the audience. For
there, in the middle of the row, was a familiar set of silver eyelashes!

      “Isn’t that your mistress, old boy?” Toadsworth nudged me with his
inebriator attachment. “Jolly rum do, her showing up here, what?”

     “But she can’t be!” I protested. “Laura can’t be that stupid! And I
always forget to remind her to take her backups, and she never
remembers, so—”

     “‘M ‘fraid it’s still her on the stage, old boy,” commiserated the
Toadster. “There’s no getting around it. Do you suppose she answered an
advertisement or went through a talent agency?”

     “She must have been on the rebound! This is all my fault,” I lamented.

     “I disagree, old fellow, she’s not squishy enough to bounce. Her
head, anyway.”

      I glanced up at the stage, despondent. The worst part of it was, this
was all my fault. If I’d actually bothered to pull myself out of my pre-drop
funk and talked to her, she wouldn’t be standing on stage, glancing
nervously at the court executioners standing to either side. Then I saw her
turn her head. She was looking at me! She mouthed something, and it didn’t
take a genius of lip-reading to realize that she was saying get me out of
here.

     “I’ll rescue you, Laura,” I promised, collapsing in a heap of cushions.
Then my mouth-boy stuck a hookah in the old cake-hole and the situation
lost its urgent edge. Laura wasn’t number one on the old chop-chop list, it
appeared. There’d be time to help her out of this fix after dinner.

                                     ****

9. An After-Dinner Show; Discussions of Horticulture

      Dinner took approximately four hours to serve, and consisted of
tiresomely symbolic courses prepared by master chefs from the various
dominions of the al-Matsumoto empire—all sixty of them. The resulting
cultural mélange was certainly unique, and the traditional veal tongue
sashimi on a bed of pickled jellyfish cous-cous a l’Olympia lent a certain
urgency to my inter-course staggers to the vomitorium. But I digress: I
barely tasted a single bite, so deeply concerned was I for the whereabouts
of my cyberdoxy.

      After the last platter of chili-roast bandersnatch in honey sauce was
cleared and the dessert wine piped to our tables, the game show began.
And what a game show! I sat there shuddering through each round, hoping
against hope that Laura wouldn’t be called this time. Ibn Cut-Throat was
master of ceremonies, with two dusky-skinned eunuchs to keep track of the
score cards. “Contestant Number One, Bimzi bin Jalebi, your next question
is: what is his Excellency the Prince’s principal hobby?”

     Bimzi rested one elaborately be-ringed fingertip on her lower lip and
frowned fetchingly at the audience. “Surfing?”

      “A-ha ha ha!” crowed Ibn Cut-Throat. “Not quite wrong, but I think
you’d all agree she had a close shave there.” The audience howled, not
necessarily with joy: “so we’ll try again. Bimzi bin Jalebi, what do you think
his Excellency the Prince will see in you?”

     Bimzi rested one elegant hand on a smoothly curved hip and jiggled
seductively at the audience: “my unmatched belly-dancing skills and—”
wink—”pelvic floor musculature?”

      “I’m asking the questions around here!” mugged the vizier, leering at
the audience. Everybody ooh’d. “Did you hear a question?” Everybody
ooh’d even louder.

      “Pip pip,” said Toadsworth, quietly. He continued: “I detect speech
stress analyzers concealed in the pillars, old boy. And something else.”

      “Let me remind you,” oozed the Vizier, “that you are attending the
court of his Excellency the Prince, and that any untruth told before me, in
my capacity as grand high judicar before his court, may be revealed and
treated as perjury. And—” he paused while a ripple of conversation sped
around the room—”now we come to the third and final cut-off question
before you spend a night of delight and jeopardy with his Royal Highness.
What do you, Bimzi bin Jalebi, see in my Prince? Truthfully now, we have lie
detectors and we know how to use them!”

      “Um.” Bimzi bin Jalebi smiled, coyly and winningly, at the audience,
then decided that honesty combined with speed was the best policy:
“a-mountain-of-gold-but-that’s-not-my-only—”

      “Enough!” Cut-Throat Senior clapped his hands together and her
a-borning speech was arrested by the snicker-snack of eunuch katanas and
a bright squirt of arterial blood. “To cut a long story short, his Excellency
can’t stand wafflers. Or gold-diggers, for that matter.” He glanced at one
particular section of the audience who, standing under guard, were white
with shock, and smiled toothily: “And so, now that we’re all running neck and
neck, who’d like to go first?”

      “I can’t bear this,” I groaned quietly.

      “Don’t worry, old fellow, it’ll be all right on the night,” Toadster nudged
me.

      To prove him wrong, Ibn Cut-Throat hunted through the herd of
candidates and—by the same nightmare logic that causes toast to always
land buttered-side down except when you’re watching it with a notepad and
counter—who should his gaze fall on but Laura.

       “You! Yes, you! It could be you!” cried the ghastly little fellow: “Step
right up, my dear! And what’s your name? Laura bin, ah, Binary? Ah, such a
fragrant blossom, so redolent of machine oil and ceramics! I’d spin her
cams any day of the week if I still had my undercarriage,” he confided to the
crowd as my pale person of pulchritude clutched a filmy veil around her and
flinched. “First question! Are you the front end of an ass?”

     Laura shook her head. The crowd fell silent. I tensed, balling my
hands into fists. If only there was something I could do!

      “Second question! Are you the back end of an ass?”

       Laura shook her head again, silently. I tried to catch her eye, but she
didn’t look my way. I quailed, terrified. Laura is at her most dangerous when
she goes quiet.

      “Well then! Let me see. If you’re not the front end of an ass, and
you’re not the back end of an ass, doesn’t that mean you’re no end of an
ass?”

     Laura gave him the old fish-eye for an infinitely long ten seconds then
drawled, in her best Venusian butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth accent:
“Why, I do declare, what is this ‘ass’ you speak of, human, and why are you
so eager for a piece of it when you don’t have any balls?”

        I was on my feet, staggering uncertainly toward the stage, as Ibn
Cut-Throat raised his fists above his head: “We have a winner!” he
declared, and the crowd went wild. “You, my fragrant rose, have passed the
first test and go forward to the second round! My gentles, let it be known
that Laura Binary has earned the right to an unforgettable night of ecstasy in
the company of his Excellency the Prince!” Sotto voce to the audience:
“Such a shame she won’t live long enough to forget it afterward.”

       I saw red, of course: dash it, what else is a cove to do but stand up
for his lady’s honor? But before I could take a step forward, meaty hands
descended on each of my shoulders. “Bed time,” rumbled the guard
holding my left arm. I glanced at his mate, who favored me with a
suggestive leer as he fingered the edge of his blade.

      “Flower bed time,” he echoed.

       “Ahem.” I glanced at the stage, where Laura was struggling vainly as
a cadre of guards as grotesquely overaugmented as old Edgy wrapped her
in delicate silver manacles: “If you don’t mind, old fellow, I’ve got a jolly
good mind to tell your master he can take your daisies and push them—”

       “Bed time,” Miss Feng hissed urgently behind my right ear. “We need
to talk,” she added.

      “Okay, bed time,” I agreed, nodding like a fool.

     Guard number two sighed dispiritedly as he sheathed his sword.
“Petunias.”

      “What?”

      “Not daisies. Petunias.”
        “Bed time!” Guard number one said brightly. I think he had a one-track
mind.

     “We were supposed to bury you under the petunias if you resisted,”
Guard number two explained. “It’s so hard on the poor things, they don’t get
enough sunlight out here and the soil is too acidic—”

     “No, no, see, he’s quite right, if we bury him he’s supposed to be
pushing up daisies,” said Guard number one, finally getting hold of the
conversation. “So! Are you going to bed or are we going to have to tuck
you—”

     “I’m going, I’m going,” I said. The homicidal horticulturalists let go of
me with visible reluctance. “I’m gone,” I whimpered.

        “Not yet, Sir,” said Miss Feng, politely but forcefully propelling me
away from the ring of clankie guards surrounding the stage. “Let’s talk about
it in private, shall we?”

                                     ****

10. Miss Feng makes a series of Observations

       The guards escorted me out of the dining pavilion and up two flights
of stairs, then along a passageway to a palatial guest suite which had been
made available for the members of the Club. Miss Feng followed, outwardly
imperturbable, although I heard her swear very quietly when the guards
locked and barred the main door.

      “Dash it all.” I stumbled and sat down on a pile of cushions. “I’ve got
to rescue her before it’s too late!”

      Miss Feng looked at me oddly. “Indubitably, Sir. Although we appear
to be locked in a guest suite on the second floor of a heavily fortified
palace built by a paranoid lunatic, with guards standing outside the door to
prevent any unscheduled excursions. Perhaps Sir would consider an after
dinner digestif and a post-prandial nap instead?”

      But I was too far gone in my funk to notice: “This is my fault! If only I’d
talked to her instead, she wouldn’t be here. This isn’t like Abdul, either. I
know him, he’s a good egg. There must be some mistake!”

     “If Sir will listen to me for a minute—” Miss Feng drew a deep and
exasperated breath, her chest swelling beneath her traditional black jacket
in a most fetching manner—”I believe the key to the problem is not
rescuing Miss Laura, but making a successful escapeafterward. Sir will
perhaps recall the planetary defense grasers and orbital arbalests dug into
the walls of the caldera? While I am an adequate pilot, I would much prefer
our departure from the second-most-heavily fortified noble house on Mars
to be facilitated by traffic rather than fire control. And—” she raised one
eyebrow, infinitesimally—”Sir didpromise his sister to take care of her
mammoth.”

     “Dash it all to hell and back!” I bounced to my feet unsteadily: “Who
cares about Jeremy?”

     Miss Feng fixed me with a steely gaze: “Youwill, if your sister thinks
you’ve mislaid him on purpose, Sir.”

       “Oh.” I nodded, crestfallen, and ambled over to the screen of
intricately carved soapstone fretwork that separated the central lounge from
the inner servants’ corridor. Small thingumabots buzzed and clicked
outside, scurrying hither and yon about their menial tasks. “I suppose you’re
right. Well, then. We need to rescue Laura, retrieve Jeremy from whatever
drunken escapade he’s got himself into, andtalk our way out of this. Bally
nuisance, why can’t life be simple?”

      “I couldn’t possibly comment, Sir. Compared to covering for one of
Prince W the thirteenth’s little escapades this should be a piece of cake.
Incidentally, did you notice anything odd about the Sheikh Abdul tonight?”

      “What? Apart from his rum desire to butcher my beloved—”

    “I was thinking more along the lines of the spinal parasite crab
someone has enterprisingly planted on him since the race, Sir.”

     “The spinal what? Dear me, are you telling me he’s caught something
nasty? Do I need to take precautions?”

      “Only if Sir wishes to avoid having his brain hijacked by a genetically
engineered neural parasite, his prefrontal lobes scooped out and eaten,
and his body turned into a helpless meat puppet. Mr al-Matsumoto’s
burnoose covered it incompletely, and I saw it when he turned round: you
might have noticed he’s not quite himself right now. I believe it is being
controlled by Toshiro ibn-Rashid, the vizier.”

      “Oops.” I paused a moment in silent sympathy. “Bloody poor show,
that.”

      “I’ve seen more than one attempted coup d’etat in my time, Sir, and it
occurs to me that this is an unhealthy situation to be in. The banquet
continues for three more days, and Sir might usefully question the wisdom
of staying to the end. After all, his Excellency’s puppet master didn’t throw a
party and invite all of the prince’s personal friends along for no good
reason, did he?”

     “Then I suppose we’ll just have to rescue Laura and make our
escape.” I stopped. “Um. But how?”

      “I have a plan, Sir. If you’d start by taking this sober-up, then I’ll
explain....”

                                       ****

11. A Meeting in the Tunnels

       Miss Feng’s Plan was certainly everything you could ask for. One
might even suspect her of black ops training, but experience has taught me
that it is best to never knowingly underestimate the lethality of a sufficiently
determined butler. I confess I harbored certain misgivings about the nature
of her proposed offensive—but with stakes this high I was prepared to work
to any plan.

      However, it was after midnight before we could start, when the guards
opened the doors to direct a shambolically intoxicated Edgestar and a
thoroughly inebriated Toadsworth into our company. “Pip Paaarrrrrp,”
Toadsworth burped, drifting to a bumpy halt in the middle of the floor: his
cortical turret spun round twice with the force of the belch, as his lights
strobed down through the spectrum and went dark.

      “Am being pithed,” said Edgestar, shambling into a pillar and
collapsing onto two legs. “Huuuurk!”

      “Let me help you with that,” I said, stepping forward to relieve him of
his camel-hair coat—and the full firkin of Bragote that Miss Feng had
secreted beneath it. I nearly dropped the cask: nine gallons of ale is quite
an armful, especially when it’s bottled up in corrosion-proof steel and
biohazard warning stickers.

      “Aaah, that’s better,” mumbled Edgestar, another leg retracting with a
hiss of hydraulics and a brief stink of chlorine. “‘M tired. G’night.”
       “Quietly,” Miss Feng reminded me, as I lowered the deadly cylinder to
the tiles. “Excellent. I’ll take care of this.” She rolled it on its side, directing it
toward the door, as she palmed a pre-emptive sober-up. “I’m sure it will be
quite the hit at the squishie servants’ party,” she added, with something very
like a shudder.

      I tip-toed away from the door as she knocked on it, then dived into my
room to hide as the bolts rattled. As a servant, Miss Feng stood a better
chance of avoiding suspicion than I—but she had other tasks in mind for
which Edgestar, Toadsworth, and I were clearly well-suited. And so I
swallowed my misgivings, picked up the sober-up spray, and approached
Toadsworth.

      “Excuse me old chap,” I essayed, “but are you up for a jolly jape?”

      “Bzzzt—” The cortical turret turned toward me and I confronted a
red-rimmed eye stalk: “In-ebriate? Par-ty?”

     “Jolly good show, Toadster. But I think you might enjoy this first,
what?” I flicked the sober-up at him. “Don’t want to let the side down, do
we?”

      There was a muffled explosion, his cortical turret spun round three
times, and steam hissed from under his gasket. “You unspeakable
bounder!” He buzzed at me. “That was below the belt!” His lights flashed
ominously. “I’ve a good mind to—”

     “Whoa!” I held up a hand. “I’m terribly sorry, and I’ll happily
demonstrate the depth of my gratitude by groveling in any way you can
imagine afterward, but we need to rescue Laura from the harem, and then
we need to make our escape from the evil vizier and his mind control
minions.”

      “Really?” The Toadster froze in place for a moment. “Did you say evil
vizier? With minions? My favorite kind!”

     “Top hat, old boy, top hat!” I waved my hands encouragingly. “All we
need to do is get old Edgy awake—”

      “Some’buddy mention nominative identifier?” With a whine of
overstrained hydraulics Edgestar Wolfblack began to unfold from his heap
on the floor. One foot skidded out from under him and ended up scuttling
around the skirting board, barking furiously until the Toadster was forced to
shoot it to death with his Inebriator. “Hurrrrk. Query vertical axis of
orientation?”

      “That way,” I said, pointing at the ceiling. Edgy groaned, and began to
quiver and fold in on himself, legs and arms retracting and strange panels
extending to reveal a neat set of chromed wheels.

      “Vroom,” he said uncertainly. “Where to?”

     “To the harem! To rescue Laura and the other contestants, while Miss
Feng poisons the squishie servants with Uncle Featherstonehaugh’s
Bragote,” I explained. “If you’d be so good as to follow me, chaps....”

     I pulled on the black abaya Miss Feng had procured for me, then bent
down to tap on the robot servitor’s hatch, clutching the identity beacon Miss
Feng had acquired from one of the waitrons during dinner. The hatch
deigned to recognize the beacon and opened, for which I was duly grateful.

      The servants’ tunnel was built to a more than human scale: not all the
bots were small bleepy things. I screwed my monocle firmly into place and
hurried along the dank, roughly finished tunnel, blessing my foresight in
remembering to download the map. I don’t mind admitting that I was
sweating with fright, but at least I was in good company, with Edgestar
whizzing alongside like a demented skateboard and the Toadster gliding
menacingly through the darkened tunnel, his trusty Inebriator raised and
ready to squirt.

       Miss Feng’s plan was clear. The unlucky ladies would almost certainly
be languishing under lock and key in the harem. Moreover, the harem’s
main entrance would be guarded by palace eunuchs, or possibly
chaperone-bots. However, she speculated, the servants’ passage would
still be open—if we could get past the inevitable guard on the back
passage. We would find the chaperone-bot, I would pretend to be a fainting
misplaced maiden, and Edgy and the Toadster would play the part of
Palace security guards who had found me and were taking me back inside.
Getting out would be a little harder, but by then Uncle Featherstonehaugh’s
tipple should have taken effect....

      Something moved in the tunnel ahead of me and I froze, knock-kneed
in fear. I don’t lack moral fiber, it just gives me the runs: I swore under my
breath and stopped dead in my tracks as Toadsworth ran over my hem.
“What is it?” He buzzed, quietly.

      “I don’t know. Shh.”
      Holding my breath, I listened. There was a faint shuffling noise, a
breathy whistling, and then a clicking noise from the dark recesses of a
twisty little side-passage. A shadow moved across the floor, and paused. I
sniffed, smelling an unholy foulness of stale sweat and something else,
something familiar—I then blinked, as two evil, red-rimmed orbs brimming
with pure, mindless hate loomed out of the darkness toward me.

       “Jeremy!” The delinquent dwarf reared back, waving his tusks
drunkenly in my face, and I could see his trunk begin to flare, ready to blow
a betraying blast on the old blower. There was only one thing for it—I
reached out and grabbed. “Hush, you silly old thing! If they hear you, they’ll
kill you, too!”

        Grabbing a mammoth by the trunk—even a hung-over miniature
mammoth who’s three sheets to the wind and tiddly to the point of
winking-is not an act I can recommend to the dedicated follower of the quiet
life. However, rather than responding with his usual murderous rage at the
universe for having made him sixteen sizes too small, Jeremy blinked at me
tipsily and sat down. For a moment I dared to hope that the incident would
pass without upset—but then the gathering toute came out suite, and the
foul little beast sneezed a truly elephantine blast of beer-smelling spray in
my direction. I let go instinctively: he struggled back to his feet and began
to reverse shambolically into the tunnel, with a mistrustful glare directed
over my left shoulder. I tried to scuttle after him, only to be brought up short
by the Toadster, who was still parked on my skirt. “Dash it all, men, follow
that mammoth!”

      With a brain-rattling crash, a fiendishly stealthed black chaperone-bot
jumped over my suddenly stationary form, slipped on the snot-lubed floor,
tumbled head-over-heels into the far wall, and crashed to the ground in a
shower of spiked armor and vicious stabby bits. I nearly jumped right out of
my skin—indeed, I believe separating me from my integument had been
the sole purpose of its acrobatic display.

      Before I could gather my disguise and my wits and run, Edgestar
revved up to speed and whizzed past me. Vrooming like a very vroomy
thing, he jumped on the bally bot in a most unfriendly manner! It was a sight
to see, I can assure you. The chaperone-bots of al-Matsumoto look a lot
like Edgestar in humanoid form, only less convivial and disinclined to a
discreet afternoon tipple when they could be out and about, briskly ripping
unfortunates limb from limb. But being bots, they lack the true élan and
esprit of a clankie, and even a hung-over tea-trolley posthumanoid is a
fearsome thing to behold when it gets its cricket box on. Jeremy
scampered off into the bowels of the palace honking tunelessly;
meanwhile, old Edgy bounced up and down on the combat robot’s
abdomen, squeaking furiously and spinning his wheels. They had cute little
cutting disks on their inner rims! The chaperone-bot lay on its back,
stiletto-tipped legs curling over and inward to stab repeatedly at the
assailant on its abdomen, but Edgy was too fast for it. Presently it stabbed
too enthusiastically for its own good—and Edgestar yanked hard, pulling
the stinger under the edge of a gaping inspection panel. With a triumphant
squeal of brakes he leapt off the chaperone-bot just in time, transforming
back into humanoid form in mid-air as sparks began to fly and an acrid
smoke poured from its joints.

      “Jolly good show, that transformer!” I exclaimed.

      “Pip-pip!” said the Toadster, regaining some of his joie de vivre.

      I consulted my map again. “The back door to the harem is just around
the corner! I say old chap, I think you’ve cleared the last obstacle. Let’s
shuftie, shall we? If we’re to be home by tea it behooves us to get our
move on.”

                                     ****

12. I Find Laura in Questionable Company

       Well, to cut a long story short, there I was in the harem of the Emir of
Mars’s younger brother, surrounded by adoring femmes, while my two
fellows from the Club made themselves scarce. “Darling,” Laura trilled,
reclining in my arms, “I do confess, I am so touched! Hic.”

      “I know, my dear, but we can’t stay here.” I quickly outlined what I
knew. “Miss Feng thinks the evil Vizier is conspiring to build resentment
against the oppressive and harsh autocracy of the al-Matsumoto clan, and
intends to use it to foment a revolt.”

      “But the al-Matsumotos aren’t harsh and autocratic!” complained one
of the ladies, a cute blonde bimbettebot in filmy harem pants and tank top:
“they’re cute!” The room descended into giggles, but I frowned, for this
was no laughing matter.

      “They’ll be harsh and autocratic by the time Ibn Cut-Throat’s spinal
crab is through with Abdul! Dash it all, do you want to be decapitated?
Because that’s what’s going to happen if the Vizier seizes power! He won’t
have any use for you—he’s the chief eunuch! He’s an ex-man, and his
special power is chopping off heads! He probably thinks testosterone is
something you catch from sitting too many exams.”

       “Oh, I’m sure I can fix that,” a dusky six-armed beauty informed me
with a flick of her aristocratic nose: “I didn’t study regenerative medicine for
nothing.” Her arch look took in Laura: “Why don’t you take yourself and your
tin-plate tart and leave us to sort out the matter of succession? She was
only going to go down hard in the talent show round, anyway.”

      “Pip-pip!” called Toadsworth, sailing from one vaulted side-chamber
to another in pursuit of a giggling conical debutante, a silk favor knotted
around his monocular. “Party back at my pad, old chap! Bring a knobbly pal!
Inseminate! Inseminate! Bzzt!” I looked away before the sight of his new
plug-in could scar my retinas for life. You can’t take these clankie stallions
anywhere in polite company, they can’t so much as wink at a well-lubed
socket without wanting to interface with it—

     “She’s right, darling, we must be going.” Laura laid her elegant head
on my shoulder and sighed. “Oh I do declare, my feet are killing me.” I
scooped her up in my arms, trying to see over a faceful of frills.

     “I’ve missed you so much,” I told her. “But what are you doing here
anyway?”

       “Hush.” She kissed me, and for a moment the world went away: “My
brave, butch, bullish Ralphie!” She sighed again. “I was going to hold out
until after the race! But I had just checked into the Hilton when I received a
telephone call saying there was a gentleman waiting to see me in the
lobby.”

      Jealousy stabbed at me. “Who was it?” I asked, cringing and glancing
away as Edgestar rolled past, having transformed himself into a tentacularly
enhanced chaise lounge for the amusement of the blonde bimbettebot,
who appeared to be riding him around the room using his unmentionables
as a joystick.

      “I don’t remember,” she said dreamily. “I woke up here, waiting for my
prince—you! I do declare—but Toshiro said he was arranging a surprise for
you, and there’d be a party, and then it all went a little vague—”

      I can tell you, I was freezing inside as I began to realize just how
disoriented she was. “Laura, what’s gotten into you?”

      “Not you, not lately!” she said sharply, then lapsed back into dreamy
incoherence: “But you came to rescue me, Ralphie, oh! He said you would.
I swoon for you! Be my love rocket again!”

      I saw a small, silver receptacle on a nearby table, and my heart sank:
she’d clearly been at the happy juice. Then I sneaked a peek at the sockets
on the back of her neck, under her hairline, and gasped. Someone had
planted a hedonism chip and a mandatory override on her! No wonder she
was acting out of sorts.

      I plucked the ghastly thing out and dropped it on the floor. “Laura,
stand up!” I cajoled. “We’ve got to be leaving. There’s a party to be going
to, don’t you know? Let’s go.”

        “But my—” She wobbled, then toppled against me: “Whoops!” She
giggled. “Hic.” I might have pulled the chips out of the fryer but my fish was
still thoroughly pickled.

       I hadn’t expected this, but Miss Feng had insisted I take a reset pill,
just in case. I hated to use the thing on her—or rather, Laura hated it, and
this invariably led to a fight afterward—but sobriety is a lesser evil than
being trapped in a castle by a mad vizier while subjected to mood-altering
implants, what? So I pressed the silver cap against the side of her neck
and pushed the button.

       Laura’s jaws closed with an audible click, and she tensed in my arms
for a second. “Ouch,” she said, very quietly. “You bastard, you know I hate
that. What’s going on?”

      “You’re on Mars and we’re in a bally fix, that’s what’s going on. This
Ibn Cut-Throat fellow’s a thoroughly bad egg. He’s sneaked a spinal crab
onto old Abdul, I think he picked you up because he wants a handle on me,
and doubtless that’s why the rest of the Club’s all here—we’d be first to
notice a change in our boy Abdul’s behavior, wouldn’t we? The cad’s
obviously set up the sticky wicket so he can bowl us all out in one inning.”

      “Dear me.” Laura stood up straight and took a step away from me.
“Well, then we’d better be going, darling.” She straightened her attire and
looked around, raising one sculpted eyebrow at my dishevelment. “Do you
know how to get out of here?”

     “Certainly.” I took her hand in mine, and led her toward the central
lounge. “I’m sure there must be a way out around here somewhere....”

      “Over there,” offered bin-Sawbones, pointing: “you can’t miss it, head
for the two hulking eunuchs and the evil vizier.” She pushed me hard in the
small of my back. “Sorry, but business is business and when you’re trying
to marry the second richest man on Mars you can’t be too picky, eh?”

                                    ****

13. Jeremy Pulls it off

     The exit was unfortunately obstructed by Ibn Cut-Throat and his merry
headsmen—with Abdul in tow, glassy-eyed and arms outstretched,
muttering about brains. And Ibn Cut-Throat had spotted us!

      One thing I will credit the blighter with: his sense of spectacle was
absolutely classical. “Ah, Mister MacDonald!” he cried, menacingly twirling
the anti-chemwar vibrissae glued to his upper lip. “How disappointing to see
you here! I must confess I hoped you’d have sense enough to stay in your
room and keep out of trouble. I suppose now you hope I’m going to tell you
all my plans, then lock you in an inadequately secured cell so you can
escape? I’m afraid not: I shall simply have you cut off shortly, chop-chop.
My game’s afoot, and none will stop it now, for the ineluctable dialectic of
history is on my side!”

      “I don’t care what your dastardly scheme is, I have a bone to pick with
you, my man!” I cried. The two headsmen took a step forward, and Laura
clung to me in fear—whether feigned or otherwise I could not tell. “How
dare you kidnap my concubine on the eve of a drop! That’s not cricket, or
even baseball, and it’ll be a cold day in hell before I see you in any of my
clubs, even by the tradesmen’s entrance!” Meanwhile, Laura thrust a
shapely arm inside my abaya and was fumbling with something in my dinner
jacket pocket; but my attention was fixed on the villain before me.

       “Clubs.” The word dropped from his lips with stony disinterest. “As if
the degenerate recreations of the class enemy would be of any interest to
me!” I shuddered: it’s always a bad sign when the hired help starts talking in
polysyllables. One of his nostrils flared angrily. “Clubs and sports and jolly
capers, that’s all you parasites think of as you gobble down our surplus
wealth like the monstrous leeches you are!” I’d struck a nerve, as I could
see from the throbbing vein in his temple and the set of his jaw. “Bloated
ticks languishing in the lap of luxury and complaining about your parties and
fashions while millions slave for your banquets! Bah.” Laura unwrapped her
arm from my robe and covered her face, evidently to shield herself from
the scoundrel’s accusations. “When we strive to better ourselves you turn
your faces away and sneer, and when we give up you use us as beasts of
burden! Well, I’ve had enough. It’s time to return your stolen loot to the
toiling non-U proletarian masses.”

       My jaw dropped. “Dash it all, man, you can’t be serious! Are you
telling me you’re a...?”

       “Yes,” he grated, his eyes aflame with vindictive glee: “the crisis of
capitalism is finally at hand, at long last! It’s about seven centuries and a
Great Downsizing overdue, but it’s time to bring about the dictatorship of
the non-U and the resurrection of the proletariat! And your friend Abdul
al-Matsumoto is going to play a key role in bringing about the final raising of
class consciousness by fertilizing the soil of Olympus with the blood of a
thousand maidens, and then crown himself Big Brother and institute a reign
of terror that will—”

      Unfortunately I can’t tell you how the Ibn-Cut Throat Committee for the
Revolution intended to proceed, because we were simultaneously
interrupted by two different people: namely, by Laura, who extended her
shapely hand and spritzed him down with after-shave: and then by Jeremy.

        Now, it helps to be aware that harems are not exactly noted for their
testosterone-drenched atmosphere. I was, of course, the odd squishie out.
Old Edgy was clearly hors de combat or combat des whores (if you’ll
strangle my French) and the Toadster was also otherwise engaged,
exploring conic sections with the fembot he’d been chasing earlier. But
aside from myself and Ibn Cut-Throat—and, I suppose, Abdul, if he was
still at home upstairs what with that crab-thingie plastered to his
noggin—they were the only remotely butch people present.

       Jeremy had been in smelly, sullen retreat for the past week. Not to put
too fine a point on it, he was in musth, that state in which a male mammoth
or elephant hates and resents other males because the universe acquires a
crystal clarity and his function in life is to ... well, Edgestar and Toadsworth
got there first, minus the trumpeting and displays of aggression, but I’m
sure you understand? There were no other small male mammals present,
but Jeremy was well aware of his enemy, and his desperate need to assert
his alpha-male dominance before he could go in search of cows to
cover—and more importantly, there was one particular scent he associated
with the enemy from long mutual acquaintance. His enemy smelled like me.
But I was shrouded in a blackly occlusive robe, while Ibn Cut-Throat had
just been doused in my favorite splash. And whatever Jeremy’s other faults,
he’s never been slow to jump to a conclusion.

     I do not know what passed through the 80 percent of Jeremy’s cranial
capacity that serves as target acquisition and fire control, but he made his
choice almost instantly and launched himself straight for where Ibn
Cut-Throat’s crown jewels had once resided. Proboscideans are not usually
noted for their glide ratio, but, in the weaker than accustomed Martian
gravity, Jeremy was positively aerobatic, as he jumped with grace and
elegance and tusks, straight for Toshiro’s tushie.

      “Tally ho, old boy!” I shouted, giving him the old school best, as Laura
took two steps smartly forward and, raising her skirts, daintily kick-boxed
headsman number one in the forehead with one of her most pointed
assets—for her ten centimeter stiletto heels are not only jolly fine pins,
they’re physical extensions of her chrome-plated ankles.

      Now I confess that things looked dicey when headsman number two
turned on me with his axe and bared his teeth at me. But I’m not the Suzuki
of MacDonald for nothing, and I know a thing or two about fighting! I threw
the abaya back over my head to free my arms, and pointed Toadsworth’s
Inebriator—which he had earlier entrusted to my safekeeping in order to
free up a socket for his Inseminator—at the villain. “Drop it! Or I’ll drop
you!” I snarled.

      My threat didn’t work. The thug advanced on me, and as he raised his
blade I discovered to my horror that the Toadster must have some very
double-jointed fingers in order to work that trigger. But just as the barber of
Baghdad was about to trim my throat, a svelte black silhouette drew up
behind him and poured a canister of vile brown ichor over his head!
Screaming and burbling imprecations, he sank to the floor clawing at his
eyes, just in time for Laura to finish him off with a flamenco stomp.

        Miss Feng cleared her throat apologetically as she lowered the empty
firkin to the floor. (The brightly painted tiles began to blur and run where its
damp rim rested on them.) “Sir might be pleased to note that one has taken
the liberty of moving his yacht round to the tradesmen’s entrance and
disabling the continental defense array in anticipation of Sir’s departure.
Was Sir planning to stay for the bombe surprise, or would he agree that this
is one party that he would prefer to cut short?”

       I glanced at Ibn Cut-Throat, who was still writhing in agony under
Jeremy’s merciless onslaught, and then at the two pithed headsmen. “I
think it’s a damned shame to outstay our welcome at any party, don’t you
agree?” (Laura nodded enthusiastically and knelt to tickle Jeremy’s trunk.)
“By all means, let’s leave. If you’d be so good as to pour a bucket of cold
water over Edgy and the Toadster, I’ll take Abdul in hand and we can drop
him off at a discreet clinic where they treat spinal crabs, what-what?”
      “That’s a capital idea, Sir. I shall see to it at once.” Miss Feng set off
to separate the miscreants from their amorous attachments.

      I turned to Laura, who was still tickling Jeremy—who by now was lying
on his back, panting—and raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t he sweet?” she sang.

       “If you say so. You’re carrying him, though,” I said, ungratefully. “Let’s
hie thee well and back to Castle Pookie. This has been altogether too much
of the wrong kind of company for me, and I could do with a nightcap in
civilized company.”

     “Darling!” She grabbed me enthusiastically by the trousers: “and we
can watch a replay of your jump together!”

        And indeed, to cut a long story short, that’s exactly what we did—but
first I took the precaution of locking Jeremy in the second best guest
suite’s dungeon with a bottle of port, and gave Miss Feng the night off.

      After all, two’s company but three’s jolly confusing, what?