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 todger—”
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 left to her own devices 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. Not without pulverizing her head first, 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 predrop funk and talk to her, she wouldn’t be standing onstage, glancing nervously at the court executioners on 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, after all. There’d be time to help her out of this fix after dinner.
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 couscous 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 scorecards. “Contestant Number One, Bimzi bin Jalebi, your next question is: what is His Excellency the Prince’s principal hobby?”
Bimzi rested one elaborately beringed fingertip on her lower lip and frowned fetchingly at the audience. “Surfing?”
“Aha 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 oohed. “Did you hear a question?” Everybody oohed 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 cutoff 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 aborning 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—standing under guard and white with shock—and smiled toothily. “And so, now that we’re all running neck and neck, who’d like to go next?”
“I can’t bear this,” I groaned quietly.
“Don’t worry, old fellow, it’ll be alright 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, while 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 fisheye 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, “Unforgettable because she won’t live terribly long afterward—but it’s the thought that counts, heh heh!”
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. Laura struggled vainly while 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 alkaline—”
“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 continue this discussion in private, shall we?”
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 raised one thin eyebrow. “Indubitably, sir. However, we appear to be locked in a guest suite on the second floor of a heavily fortified palace built by a paranoid emperor, with guards standing outside the door to prevent any unscheduled excursions. Perhaps Sir would consider an after-dinner digestif and a postprandial nap instead?”
But I was too far gone in my funk to take heed. “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 escape afterward. Sir will perhaps recall the planetary defense gras ers 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 control rather than fire control. And”—she raised one eyebrow, infinitesimally—“Sir did promise 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. “
You will, 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, and talk 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 XIII’s little escapades, this should be a piece of cake. Incidentally, did you notice anything odd about His Excellency 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 . . .”
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 never knowingly to 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 rare.
However, we had to wait until after midnight before we could start. That was 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 with the force of the belch, and 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 behind 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 preemptive 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 tiptoed 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 eyestalk. “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, then we need to make our escape from the evil vizier and his mind-control crabs.”
“Really?” The Toadster froze in place for a moment. “Did you say evil vizier? With crabs? 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. It barked furiously until the Toadster shot 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 servitors’ 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 skate-board and the Toadster gliding menacingly through the darkened tunnel, his trusty inebriator raised and ready to squirt.
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