Blue Mars (88 page)

Ann looked at him, scowled at the sight of him; presumably he was
a bloody mess. “Worth a try!” she shouted.

So Sax detached the protection bar from the emergency panel, and
with a final look at Ann—their eyes meeting, a gaze with some content he could
not articulate, but which warmed him—he put his fingers on the switches.
Hopefully the altitude control would be obvious when the time came. He wished
he had spent more time flying.

As the boat rose up the foamy face of each wave, there came a
nearly weightless moment at the top, just before the falldown into the next icy
trough. In one of these moments Sax flicked the switches on the panel. The boat
fell down the waveback anyway, hit the growlers with its usual jar— then
bounced right up and away, lifted, and tilted right over on its lee hull, so
that they were hanging in their restraints. Balloons entangled no doubt, the next
wave would capsize them and that would be that; but then the boat was dragging
away over ice and water and foam, almost free of contact, rolling them head
over heels in their restraints. A wild tumbling interval, and then the boat
righted itself, and began to swing back and forth like a big pendulum, side to
side, front to back—oops then all the way over again, topsyturvy—then righted,
and swinging again. Up up up, thrown this way and that, hold on—his shoulder
harness came free and his shoulder slammed against Ann’s, even though he had
been pressed against her. The tiller was bashing his knee. He held on to it.
Another crash together and he held on to Ann, twisted in his seat and clutched
her, and after that they were like Siamese twins, arms around each other’s
shoulders, in danger at every slam of breaking each other’s bones. They looked
at each other for a second, faces centimeters apart, blood on both of them from
some cut or other, or no it was probably just from his nose. She looked
impassive. Up they shot into the sky.

His collarbone hurt, where Ann’s forehead or elbow had struck it.
But they were flying, up and up in an awkward embrace. And as the boat was
accelerated to something nearer the wind’s speed, the turbulence lessened
greatly. The balloons seemed to be connected by rigging to the top of the mast.
Then just when Sax was beginning to hope for some kind of zeppelinlike
stability, even to expect it, the boat shot straight up and began its horrible
tumbling again. Updraft no doubt. They were probably over land by now, and it
was all too possible they were being sucked up into a thunderhead, like a hail
ball. On Mars there were thun-derheads ten kilometers tall, often powered by
howlers from far to the south, and balls of hail flew up and down in these
thunderheads for a long time. Sometimes hail the size of cannonballs had come
crashing down, devastating crops and even killing people. And if they were
pulled up too high they might die of altitude, like those early balloonists in
France, was it the Montgolfiers themselves it had happened to? Sax couldn’t
remember. Up and up, tearing through wind and red haze, no chance to see very
far—

BOOM! He jumped and hurt himself against his seat belt, came down
hard. Thunder. Thunder banging around them, at what had to be well over 130
decibels. Ann seemed limp against him, and he shifted sideways, reached up
awkwardly and twisted her ear, trying to turn her head so he could see her
face. “Hey!” she cried, though it sounded to him like a whisper in the roar of
the wind. “Sorry,” he said, though he was sure she couldn’t hear him. It was
too loud to talk. They were spinning again, but without much centrifugal force.
The boat was shrieking as the wind pushed it up; then they dove, and his
eardrums hurt to bursting, he wiggled his jaw back and forth, back and forth.
Then up again and they popped, painfully. He wondered how high they would go;
very possible they would die of thin air. Though maybe the Da Vinci techs had
thought to pressurize the cockpit, who knew. It behooved him to try to
understand the boat as blimp, or at least master the altitude adjustment
system. Not that there was much to be done against the force of such updrafts
and downdrafts. Sudden rattle of hail against the cockpit shell. There were small
toggles on the emergency panel; in a moment of less violent tumbling he was
able to put his face down near the bar and read the display terminal embedded
in it. Altitude ... not obvious. He tried to calculate how high the boat would
go before its weight caused it to level off. Hard when he wasn’t actually sure
of the boat’s weight, or the amount of helium deployed.

Then some kind of turbulence in the storm tossed them again. Up,
down, up; then down, for many seconds in a row. Sax’s stomach was in his throat,
or so it felt. His collarbone was an agony. Nose running or bleeding
continuously. Then up. Gasping for air, too. He wondered again how high they
were, and whether they were still ascending; but there was nothing to be seen
outside the shell of the cockpit, nothing but dust and cloud. He seemed in no
danger of fainting. Ann was motionless beside him, and he wanted to tug her ear
again to see if she was conscious, but couldn’t move his arm. He elbowed her
side. She elbowed back; if he had elbowed her as hard as that, he would have to
remember to go lighter next time. He tried a very gentle elbowing, and felt a
less violent prod in return. Perhaps they could resort to Morse code, he had
learned it as a boy for no reason at all, and now in his reborn memory he could
hear it all, every dit and dot. But perhaps Ann had not learned it, and this
was no time for lessons.

The violent ride went on for so long he couldn’t estimate it: an
hour? Once the noise lessened to the point where they could shout to each other,
which they did just because it could be done; there actually wasn’t much to
say.

“We’re in a thunderhead!”

“Yes!”

Then she pointed down with one finger. Pink blurs below. And they
were descending rapidly, his eardrums aching again. Being spit out the bottom
of the cloud, as hail. Pink, brown, rust, amber, umber. Ah yes—the surface of
the planet, looking not very different than it ever had from the air. Descent.
He and Ann had come down in the same landing vehicle, he recalled, the very
first time.

Now the boat was scudding along under the cloud’s bottom, in
falling hail and rain; but the helium might pull them back up into the cloud.
He pushed down a likely toggle on the panel, and the boat began to descend. A
pair of small toggles; manipulating them seemed to dip them forward or raise
them up. Altitude adjusters. He pushed them both gently down.

They seemed to be descending. After a while it was clearer below.
In fact they appeared to be over jagged ridges and mesas; that would be the
Cydonia Mensa, on the mainland of Arabia Terra. Not a good place to land.

But the storm continued to carry them along, and soon they were
east of Cydonia, out over the flat plains of Arabia.

Now they needed to descend soon, before they were flung out over
the North Sea, which might very well be as wild and ice-filled as Chryse had
been. Below lay a patchwork of fields, orchards—irrigation canals and curving
streams, lined by trees. It had been raining a lot, it looked like, and there
was water all over the surface of the land, in ponds, in canals, in little
craters, and covering the lower parts of fields. Farmhouses clustered in little
villages, only outbuildings in the fields—barns, equipment sheds. Lovely wet
countryside, quite flat. Water everywhere. They were descending, but slowly.
Ann’s hands were a bluish white in the dim afternoon; and so were his.

He pulled himself together, feeling very weary. The landing would
be important. He pushed down the adjusters hard.

Now they were descending more swiftly. They were being blown over
a line of trees, then down, rapidly over a broad field. At the far end it was
inundated, brown rainwater filling the furrows. Beyond the field stood an
orchard, and a water landing would be perfect anyway; but they were moving
horizontally quite fast, and still perhaps ten or fifteen meters over the
field. He shoved the adjusters full forward and saw the underhulls tilt down
like diving dolphins, and the boat tilted as well, and then the land came right
up at them, brown water, big splash, white waves winging away to both sides,
and they were being dragged through muddy water until the boat skated right
into a line of young trees, and stopped hard. Down the line of trees a group of
kids and a man were running toward them, their mouths all perfect round O’s in
their faces.

Sax and Ann struggled to a sitting position. Sax opened the
cockpit shell. Brown water spilled in over the gunwale. A windy hazy day in the
Arabian countryside. The water pouring in felt distinctly warm. Ann’s face was
wet and her hair stood out in stiff tufts, as if she had been electrocuted. She
smiled a crooked smile. “Nicely done,” she said.

PART
FOURTEEN

              
-----------

---Phoenix
Lake

              
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A gun shot, a bell rung, a choir singing counterpoint.

The third Martian revolution-was so complex and nonviolent that it
was hard to see it as a revolution at all, at the time; more like a shift in a
ongoing argument, a change in the tide, a punctuation of equilibrium.

The takeover of the elevator was the seed of the crisis, but then
a few weeks later the Terran military came down the cable and the crisis
flowered everywhere at once. On the shore of the North Sea, on a small
indentation of the coast of Tempe Terra, a cluster oflanders dropped out of the
sky, swaying under parachutes or shimmering down on plumes of pale fire: a
whole new colony, an unauthorized incursion of immigrants. This particular
group was from Kampuchea; elsewhere on the planet other landers were
descending, with settlers from the Philippines, Pakistan, Australia, Japan,
Venezuela, New York. The Martians did not know how to respond. They were a
demilitarized society, with no idea that something like this could ever happen,
with no way to defend themselves. Or so they thought.

Once again it was May a who pulled them into action, playing the
wrist like Frank used to, calling everyone in the open Mars coalition and many
others besides, orchestrating the general response. Come on, she said to Nadia.
One more time. And so through the cities and villages the word spread, and
people went down into the streets, or got on trains to Mangala.

On the coast of Tempe, the new Kampuchean settlers got out of
their landers and went to the little shelters that had been dropped with them,
just as the First Hundreds had two centuries before. And out of the hills came
people wearing furs, and carrying bows and arrows. They had red stone eyeteeth,
and their hair was tied in topknots. Here, they said to the settlers, who had
bunched before one of their shelters. Let us help you. Put those guns down.
We’ll show you where you are. You don’t need that kind of shelter, it’s an old
design. That hill you see to the west is Perepelkin Crater. There’s already
apple and cherry orchards on the apron, you can take what you need. Look,”here
are the plans for a disk house, that’s the best design for this coast. Then
you’ll need a marina, and some fishing boats. If you let us use your harbor
we’ll show you where the truffles grow. Yes, a disk house, see, a Sattelmeier
disk house. It’s lovely to live out in the open air. You’ll see.

All branches of the Martian government had met in the assembly
hall in Mangala, to deal with the crisis. The Free Mars majority in the senate,
and the executive council, and the Global Environmental Court, all agreed that
the illegal incursion ofTer-rans was an act of aggression the equivalent of
war, which had to be responded to in kind. There were suggestions from the
floor of the senate that asteroids could be directed at Terra, as bombs that
would be diverted only if the immigrants returned home and the elevator went
back to a system of dual supervision. It would only take one strike to have a
KT event, and so on. UN diplomats on the scene pointed out that this was a
sword that could cut boths ways.

In these tense days there came a knock on the door of the assembly
hall in Mangala, and in walked Maya Toitovna. She said, “We want to speak.”
Then she ushered in a crowd waiting outside, pushing them up onto the stage
like an impatient sheepdog: first Sax and Ann, walking side by side; then Nadia
and Art, Tariki and Nanao, Zeyk and Nazik, Mikhail, Vasili, Ursula and Marina,
even Coyote. The ancient issei, come back to haunt the present moment, come
back to take the stage and say what they thought. Maya pointed to the room’s screens,
which showed images of the outside of the building; the group on the stage now
extended in an unbroken line through the halls of the building out onto the big
central plaza facing the sea, where some half-million people were assembled.
The city streets were also stuffed with people, watching screens to see what
was happening in the assembly hall. And out in Chalmers Bay there sailed a
fleet of townships like a startling new archipelago, with flags and banners
waving from their masts. And in every Martian city the crowds were out, the
screens were on. Everyone could see everyone else.

Ann went to the podium and said quietly that the government of
Mars in recent years had broken both the law and the spirit of human
compassion, by forbidding immigration from Earth to Mars. The people of Mars
did not want that. They needed a new government. This was a vote of no
confidence. The new incursions of Tenon settlers were also illegal, and
unacceptable, but understandable; the government of Mars had broken the law
first. And the number of new settlers in these incursions was no greater than
the number of legitimate settlers who had been illegally barred from coming by
the current government. Mars, Ann said, had to be open to Tenon immigration as
much as could be, given the physical constraints, for as long as the
population-surge years might last. The surge years would not last much longer.
Their duty now to their descendants was to get through the last of these packed
years in peace. “Nothing on the table now is worth war. We have seen it, and we
know.”

Then she looked over her shoulder at Sax, who stepped up next to
her to the microphones. He said, “Mars has to be protected.” The biosphere was
new, its carrying capacity limited. It did not have the physical resources of
Earth, and much of its empty land would of physical necessity have to stay
empty. Tenons had to understand that, and not overwhelm local systems; if they
did, Mars would be no use to anyone at all. Clearly there was a severe
population problem on Earth, but Mars alone was not the solution. “The
Earth-Mars relationship has to be renegotiated.”

They began that renegotiation. They asked a UN representative to
come up and explain the incursions. They argued and debated and expostulated;
and shouted in each other’s faces. Out in the outback, locals confronted
settlers, and some of them on both sides threatened violence; and others
stepped in and started talking, cajoling, scolding, wrangling, negotiating; and
shouting in each other’s faces. At any point in the process, in a thousand
different places, things could have turned violent; many people were furious;
but cooler heads prevailed. It remained, in most places, at the level of
argument. Many feared this could not continue, many did not believe it possible;
but it was happening, and the people in the streets saw it happening. They kept
it happening. At some point, after all, the mutation of values has to express
itself; and why not here, why not now? There were very few weapons on the
planet, and it was hard to strike someone in the face, or stick them with a
pitchfork, when they were standing there arguing with you. This was the moment
of mutation, history in the making, and they could see it right before them, in
the streets and on the human hillsides and on the Screens, history labile right
there in their hands—and so they seized the moment, and wrenched it in a new
direction. They talked themselves into it. A new government. A new treaty with
Earth. A polycephalous peace. The negotiations would go on for years. Like a
choir in counterpoint, singing a great fugue.

Eventually that cable was going to come back to haunt us, that’s
what I said all along. You did not, you loved the cable. The only complaint you
had was that it was too slow. You can get to Earth faster than you can get to
Clarke, you said. That’s true, you can, it’s ridiculous. But not the same as
saying the cable was going to come back and haunt us, you have to admit.
Waiter, hey waiter! We’ll have tequilas all around, and some lime wedges. We were
working the Socket when they came down, the inner chamber didn’t have a chance
but the Socket is a big building, I don’t know if they had a plan and it didn’t
work or if they didn’t have a plan at all, but by the time their third car came
down the Socket was sealed off and they were the proud masters of a
37,000-kilometer dead end. It was stupid. It was a nightmare, these foxes kept
coming in and at night only, so that they looked like wolves only a lot faster.
And they went right for the throat. A plague of rabid foxes, man, it was a
nightmare. Like 2128 all over again, I don’t know if that’s true or not but
there they were, Terran police in Sheffield, and when people heard they all
came out into the streets, the streets were packed, really packed, I’m short
and sometimes my face was squished right into people’s backs or women’s
breasts. I heard about it from a neighbor in the next apartment only about five
minutes after it happened, she had heard from a friend living out near the
Socket. The response of the people to the takeover of the cable’s lower
facility was rapid and tumultuous. Those UN storm troopers didn’t know what to
make of us, a detachment tried to take over Hartz Plaza and we just flowed
around them, moving out from in front of them but shoving in at the sides so
that it was like a kind of vacuum pull. This snarling foam-toothed rabid demon
at my throat, it was a fucking nightmare. Took them right out to rim park and
these goddamned starship troopers couldn ‘t have moved a centimeter at that
point, not without slaughtering thousands of people. People in the streets,
that’s the only thing governments are afraid of. Well, or term limits. Or free
elections! Or assassination. Or being laughed at, ah, ha-ha-ha! And there were
hookups to all the other cities and giant street parties in every one of them.
We were in Lasswitz and everyone went down to the river park and stood with
candles in their hand, so that cameras could shoot down from the overlook and
see this sea of candles, it was great. And Sax and Ann standing there together,
it was amazing. Amazing. Unbelievable. They probably scared the UN to death
saying each other’s lines like that, the UN probably thought we had
brain-transfer devices all ready to zap them. • What I liked was later when Peter
called for a new election for the Red party leadership, and challenged Irishka
to hold it right then and there on the wrist. Those party things are basically
heavyweight challenges, mano a mano, if Irishka had refused to call a vote then
she would have been finished anyway, so she had to call it no matter what, you
should have seen the look on her face. We were in Sabishii when we heard the
call for a Red vote and when Peter won we went wild, Sabishii was an instant
festival. And Senzeni Na. And Nilokeras. And Hell’s Gate. And Argyre Station,
you should have seen it. Well wait a second, it was only about a sixty-forty
vote, in Argyre Station it went crazy because there were so many Irishka
backers spoiling for a fight. It’s Irishka who saved Argyre Basin and every dry
low spot on this planet if you ask me, Peter Claybome is just an old nisei, he
never did anything., Waiter, waiter! Beers all around, weiss beers, bitte.
Bringing food out to these little Terrans, didn’t have any idea. Nirgal shaking
hands with every one of them. So the doctor says, how do you know you’ve got
the quick decline? It was a fucking nightmare. It was a surprise Ann working
with Sax, that looked like a sellout. Not if you had paid attention, they been
traveling together and everything, you must have been on Venus or something. Or
something. The browns, the blues, it’s stupid. We shoulda done something like
this a long time ago. Well, why worry so much, they’re goners, there won’t be a
single one left in ten years. Don’tbe too sure about that. Don’tbe too happy
about that, you’re only a few years younger than them, you idiot. Oh it was a
most interesting week we have been sleeping in the parks, and everyone was most
kind. Werteswandel, the Germans call it. They’ve got a word for everything.
Bound to happen, that’s evolution. We’re all mutants at this point. Speak for
yourself jack. Speak to the waiter. Six years! That’s great news, I’m surprised
you’re sober. Oh I’m not, ah-ha-ha, I’m not! Little red people charging around
on red ants, think they’re helping out, whoops, right over the edge of the rim,
better hope they’re flying ants. No wonder I’ve been getting so many ants. So
the man says, Well, doc—Yes, and? That’s the end of the joke, he only just gets
to say Well doc and then he dies, quick decline get it? Very funny. That’s
right it is funny! All right, all right, ha-ha, it’s not worth getting hot over
it. Anytime you have to threaten people to get them to laugh at your joke you
have to consider it less than successful, okay? Fuck you. Oh clever. So anyway
there we were when the troops kind of make like they want to go back to the
Socket. They go at it very gently, single file behind a little electric hotel
cart they got their hands on, and everyone moves a little and lets them go, and
they were passing through us looking nervous, and then people were shaking
their hands like they were all Nirgal at the gates, and asking them to stay,
leaving them alone if they couldn’t handle it, kissing them on the cheeks, leis
piled up till they couldn’t see over them. Right hack into the Socket. And why
not since they made their point and threatened us enough for the goddamned
traitor government to fold without a fight? This joker doesn’t seem to
understand the principles of jujitsu. Of what? What? Hey just who the hell are
you? I’m a stranger in town. What? What? Excuse me miz, could you bring us
another round ofkava? Well, yes, we’re still trying to get it into the
parts-per-billion range, but no luck yet. Don’t give me Fassnacht, / hate Fassnacht,
the worst day of the year to me, they killed Boone on Fassnacht. They
firebombed Dresden on Fassnacht. No end of evil to atone for. They were sailing
in Chryse when a howler picked up their boat and threw it all the way over the
Cydonia Mountains. That’ll be the kind of experience that brings you closer
together. Oh please, who is this guy. It’s no big deal there’s blimps every
week get blown around a bit, it’s no big deal. We got caught out in that same
howler, but we were just outside Santorini, I mean to tell you the water’s
surface was torn to smithereens to a depth of about ten meters, I’m not
kidding. The boat we were in the Algot scared and took us under right down into
another boat that was already down there, so we banged into this boat and it was
like the end of the world, boom, everything dark, the AI went insane, scared it
to death I swear. It probably just broke. Well I broke my collarbone. That’ll
be ten sequins please. Thanks. Those howlers are dangerous. I was in one in
Echus and we all had to sit down on our butts and even then we were kind of
scraping along. I had to hold on to my glasses or else they would have been
torn right off my ears. Cars flipping like tiddlywinks. The whole marina
cleared of every single boat, it was like some kid took his toy harbor and
knocked it across the room. I too experienced this storm at its utmost fury. I
was visiting the township Ascension, in the North Sea near Korolev Island. Hey
that’s where Will Fort surfs. Yes, here as I understand it the waves on Mars
reach their greatest heights, and in this storm they towered a hundred meters
from trough to crest, no, I do not jest. Waves much taller than the sides of
the township, which on these dire rolling black hills appeared no larger than a
lifeboat to those of us on it. We were a veritable cork. The animals were
unhappy. And to compound our difficulties, we were being cast onto the south
point of Korolev. The waves were breaking completely over the final cape into
the sea beyond. So every time we rose up the gigantic face of each wave, the
pilot of the Ascension turned the township south, and it slid across the face
of the wave for some distance before losing the crest and falling back into the
next trough. On each wave we moved a little faster and farther, for as we
approached the point of the island the wave faces grew steeper and bigger. The
very tip of the point curves off to the east, so that the waves were breaking
left to right as we looked ahead, crashing onto the rocks and then onto the
reef offshore. On our final wave the Ascension was pitched down the steep face
of the wave. At the bottom of the face the pilot turned the township right, and
the great raft made the cut at the bottom and drifted back up onto the face,
moving across it at a speed we could not calculate. It was like flying. Yes—we
were surfing a hundred-meter-high wave, on a raft as big as a village, just
over the rocks of the reef below. For a second we flew in the tube of the
breaking wave. Then we were out, onto the shoulder of the wave, which was back
in deep water, and no longer breaking. And so we passed the island. So the
doctor says, how do you know? How? So pretty. Yes, it was a moment to remember.
I’m going to take my fund and retire, it just ain’t the same anymore. These
people are thugs. Heard she went out on one of those star-ships, that’s what I
heard. You really saw her? You got to get you a better translator, I did not
say Never mind doctor I am feeling better. What the hell kind of machine.
Waiter! Villages just like the ones back home, except no caste. If they want
caste they have to carry it in their heads. Some issei try but the nisei go
feral. The way I heard it is that the little red people finally got sick of all
our nonsense, and they were hot to do something having recently domesticated
the red ant, and they started this whole campaign so that they could come
charging to the rescue when the Terrans invaded. You might think they were
being overconfident, but you have to remember that the biomass of red ants on
this planet is closing in on a meter thick if averaged, so much biomass they’re
going to throw us out of orbit they should try ants on Mercury, and every ant
has a whole tribe of the little people riding around on it in howdah cities or
whatever, and so they weren’t so overconfident after all. There’s strength in
numbers. So they deliberately made the government act stupid to spark this
confrontation. I wondered what excuse those fools had, they need an excuse, why
it is that people go to Mangala and immediately turn into rapacious corrupt
morons, it’s a mystery to me. Went down for us. Why is it always the little red
people, whatever happened to Big Man, I hate these little red people and their
twee little folktales, if you’re going to be so stupid as to tell folktales at
all, the truth being much more interesting, then at least they could be big
tall tales, Titans and Gorgons duking it out with spiral galaxies like
razor-edged boomerangs, zip, zip, zip! Hey watch it there, slow down, guy, slow
down. Waiter, get this mo-tormouth some kava, will you? He needs to mellow. Be
calm, agitated sir. Be calm. Throwing nova bombs back and forth! Boom! Kapow!
KA BOOM! Hey! Hey! Calm oneself oh agitated one. I’m sick of these little
people. Get your hands off me. It’s a sorry excuse for a government anyway. It
always gets back to the same old thing, power suckers sucking power. I told
them to stick with tents, no global government, so there wouldn’t be so much
power to suck, but did they listen to me? They did not. You told them. Yeah I
told them, I was there. Nirgal, sure. Nirgal and I go way back. What do you
mean, honored old one, are you not the Stowaway? Why yes, I am. So you are
Nirgal’s father, you should go way back as you say. Yeah well in Zygote it
didn’t always work that way. I tell you that bitch pulled the wool over your
eyes your whole life if you let her. Have you living in a closet for years on
end. Ah come on, you’re not Coyote. Well what can I say. Not many people
recognize me. And why should they? I bet he is. You can’t be. If you’re
Nirgal’s dad then why is he so tall and you’re so short? I’m not short. Why are
you laughing? I’m five feet five inches tall. Feet? Feet? Holy ka, here’s a man
measures his height in feet! In feet! Oh my God you must be kidding, five feet?
Feet? Hey you look like it would take more feet than that, just how long were
these feet? A foot was about a third of a meter, a little less. This is how
they measured? A little less than a third of a meter? No wonder Earth is so
messed up. Hey what makes you think your precious meter is so great, it’s just
some fraction of the distance from Earth’s North Pole to its equator, Napoleon
chose the fraction on a whim! It’s a bar of metal in Paris France and its
length was determined by the whim of a madman! Don’t you be imagining you’re
more rational than the old ways. Oh stop, please, I’ll die laughing, please.
You people have very little respect for your elders, I like that. Hey give the
old Coyote another drin\, what’re you having? Tequila, thanks. And some kava.
Oh oh! This guy knows how to live. That’s right I do know how to live. These
ferals got it figured out, as long as you don’t take it too far. They’re
copying me but they’ve gone too far. Don’t walk, drive. Don’t hunt, buy. Sleep
every night on a gel bed, and try to have two naked young native women as your
blankets. Oh, oh, oh! Whoo! You old lecher! Oh honored sir. Indecent. Well, it
works for me. I don’t sleep that well but I’m happy. Thanks, don’t mind if I
do, thanks. I appreciate it. Cheers. Here’s to Mars.