Podkayne of Mars (14 page)

Clark ducked out and didn’t get his scratch tests until the next morning and I misdoubt he will die of Purple Itch or some such, were it not that his karma is so clearly reserving him for hanging. Uncle Tom refused the tests. He was through all this routine more than twenty years ago, and anyhow he claims that the too, too mortal flesh is merely a figment of the imagination.

So I am more or less limited for a few days to lavish living here in the Tannhäuser. If I go out, I must wear gloves and a mask even in the city. But one whole wall of the suite’s salon becomes a stereo stage simply by voice request, either taped or piped live from any theater or club in Venusberg—and some of the “entertainment” has widened my sophistication unbelievably, especially when Uncle Tom is not around. I am beginning to realize that Mars is an essentially puritanical culture. Of course Venus doesn’t actually have laws, just company regulations, none of which seems to be concerned with personal conduct. But I had been brought up to believe that Mars Republic is a free society—and I suppose it is. However, there is “freedom” and “freedom.”

Here the Venus Corporation owns everything worth owning and runs everything that shows a profit, all in a fashion that would make Marsmen swoon. But I guess Venusmen would swoon at how straitlaced
we
are. I know this Mars girl blushed for the first time in I don’t know when and switched off a show that I didn’t really believe.

But the solly screen is far from being the only astonishing feature of this suite. It is so big that one should carry food and water when exploring it, and the salon is so huge that local storms appear distinctly possible. My private bath is a suite in itself, with so many gadgets in it that I ought to have an advanced degree in engineering before risking washing my hands. But I’ve learned how to use them all and purely love them! I had never dreamed that I had been limping along all my life without Utter Necessities.

Up to now my top ambition along these lines has been not to have to share a washstand with Clark, because it has never been safe to reach for my own Christmas-present cologne without checking to see that it is not nitric acid or worse! Clark regards a bathroom as an auxiliary chemistry lab; he’s not much interested in staying clean.

But the most astonishing thing in our suite is the piano. No, no, dear, I don’t mean a keyboard hooked into the sound system; I mean a
real
piano. Three legs. Made out of wood. Enormous. That odd awkward-graceful curved shape that doesn’t fit anything else and can’t be put in a corner. A top that opens up and lets you see that it really does have a harp inside and very complex machinery for making it work.

I think that there are just four real pianos on all of Mars, the one in the Museum that nobody plays and probably doesn’t work, the one in Lowell Academy that no longer has a harp inside it, just wiring connections that make it really the same as any other piano, the one in the Rose House (as if any President ever had time to play a piano!), and the one in the Beaux Arts Hall that actually is played sometimes by visiting artists although I’ve never heard it. I don’t think there can be another one, or it would have been banner-lined in the news, wouldn’t you think?

This one was made by a man named Steinway and it must have taken him a lifetime. I played Chopsticks on it (that being the best opus in my limited repertoire) until Uncle asked me to stop. Then I closed it up, keyboard and top, because I had seen Clark eying the machinery inside, and warned him sweetly but firmly that if he touched one finger to it I would break all his fingers while he was asleep. He wasn’t listening but he knows I mean it. That piano is Sacred to the Muses and is not to be taken apart by our Young Archimedes.

I don’t care what the electronics engineers say; there is a vast difference between a “piano” and a
real
piano. No matter if their silly oscilloscopes “prove” that the sound is identical. It is like the difference between being warmly clothed—or climbing up in your Daddy’s lap and getting
really
warm.

I haven’t been under house arrest all the time; I’ve been to the casinos, with Girdie and with Dexter Cunha, Dexter being the son of Mr. Chairman of the Board Kurt Cunha. Girdie is leaving us here, going to stay on Venus, and it makes me sad.

I asked her, “Why?”

We were sitting alone in our palatial salon. Girdie is staying in this same hilton, in a room not very different nor much larger than her cabin in the
Tricorn,
and I guess I’m just mean enough that I wanted her to see the swank we were enjoying. But my excuse was to have her help me dress. For now I am wearing (Shudder!)
support
garments. Arch supports in my shoes and tight things here and there intended to keep me from spreading out like an amoeba—and I won’t say what Clark calls them because Clark is rude, crude, unrefined, and barbaric.

I hate them. But at 84 percent of one standard gee, I need them despite all that exercise I took aboard ship. This alone is reason enough not to live on Venus, or on Earth, even if they were as delightful as Mars.

Girdie did help me—she had bought them for me in the first place—but she also made me change my makeup, one which I had most carefully copied out of the latest issue of
Aphrodite.
She looked at me and said, “Go wash your face, Poddy. Then we’ll start over.”

I pouted out my lip and said, “Won’t!” The one thing I had noticed most and quickest was that
every
female on Venus wears paint like a Red Indian shooting at the Good Guys in the sollies—even Maria and Maria wear three times as much makeup just to work in as Mother wears to a formal reception—and Mother doesn’t wear any when working.

“Poddy, Poddy! Be a good girl.”

“I
am
being a good girl. It’s polite to do things the way the local people do them, I learned that when I was just a child. And look at yourself in the mirror!” Girdie was wearing as high-styled a Venusberg face-do as any in that magazine.

“I know what I look like. But I am more than twice your age and no one even suspects me of being young and sweet and innocent. Always be what you are, Poddy. Never pretend. Look at Mrs. Grew. She’s a comfortable fat old woman. She isn’t kittenish, she’s just nice to be around.”

“You want me to look like a hick tourist!”

“I want you to look like Poddy. Come, dear, we’ll find a happy medium. I grant you that even the girls your age here wear more makeup than grown-up women do on Mars—so we’ll compromise. Instead of painting you like a Venusberg trollop, we’ll make you a young lady of good family and gentle breeding, one who is widely traveled and used to all sorts of customs and manners, and so calmly sure of herself that she knows what is best for her—totally uninfluenced by local fads.”

Girdle is an artist, I must admit. She started with a blank canvas and worked on me for more than an hour—and when she got through, you couldn’t see that I was wearing any makeup at all.

But here is what you could see: I was at least two years older (real years, Mars years, or about six Venus years); my face was thinner and my nose not pug at all and I looked ever so slightly world-weary in a sweet and tolerant way. My eyes were enormous.

“Satisfied?” she asked.

“I’m
beautiful!
”

“Yes, you are. Because you are still Poddy. All I’ve done is make a picture of Poddy the way she is going to be. Before long.”

My eyes filled with tears and we had to blot them up very hastily and she repaired the damage. “Now,” she said briskly, “all we need is a club. And your mask.”

“What’s the club for? And I won’t wear a mask, not on top of this.”

“The club is to beat off wealthy stockholders who will throw themselves at your feet. And you will wear your mask, or else we won’t go.”

We compromised. I wore the mask until we got there and Girdie promised to repair any damage to my face—and promised that she would coach me as many times as necessary until I could put on that lovely, lying face myself. The casinos are safe, or supposed to be—the air not merely filtered and conditioned but freshly regenerated, free of any trace of pollen, virus, colloidal suspension or whatever. This is because lots of tourists don’t like to take all the long list of immunizations necessary actually to
live
on Venus; but the Corporation wouldn’t think of letting a tourist get away unbled. So the hiltons are safe and the casinos are safe and a tourist can buy a health insurance policy from the Corporation for a very modest premium. Then he finds that he can cash his policy back in for gambling chips any time he wants to. I understand that the Corporation hasn’t had to pay off on one of these policies very often.

Venusberg assaults the eye and ear even from inside a taxi. I believe in free enterprise; all Marsmen do, it’s an article of faith and the main reason we
won’t
federate with Earth (and be outvoted five hundred to one). But free enterprise is not enough excuse to blare in your ears and glare in your eyes every time you leave your own roof. The shops never close (I don’t think anything ever closes in Venusberg) and full color and stereo ads climb right inside your taxi and sit in your lap and shout in your ear.

Don’t ask me how this horrid illusion is produced. The engineer who invented it probably flew off on his own broom. This red devil about a meter high appeared between us and the partition separating us from the driver (there wasn’t a sign of a solly receiver) and started jabbing at us with a pitchfork. “Get the Hi-Ho Habit!” it shrieked. “Everybody drinks Hi-Ho! Soothing, Habit-Forming. Dee-
lishus!
Get High with Hi-Ho!”

I shrank back against the cushions.

Girdie phoned the driver. “Please shut that thing off.”

It faded down to just a pink ghost and the commercial dropped to a whisper while the driver answered, “Can’t, madam. They rent the concession.” Devil and noise came back on full blast.

And I learned something about tipping. Girdie took money from her purse, displayed one note. Nothing happened and she added a second; noise and image faded down again. She passed them through a slot to the driver and we weren’t bothered any more. Oh, the transparent ghost of the red devil remained and a nagging whisper of his voice, until both were replaced by another ad just as faint—but we could talk. The giant ads in the street outside were noisier and more dazzling; I didn’t see how the driver could see or hear to drive, especially as traffic was unbelievably thick and heart-stoppingly fast and frantic, and he kept cutting in and out of lanes and up and down in levels as if he were trying utmostly to beat Death to a hospital.

By the time we slammed to a stop on the roof of Dom Pedro Casino I figure Death wasn’t more than half a lap behind.

I learned later why they drive like that. The hackie is an employee of the Corporation, like most everybody—but he is an “enterprise-employee,” not on wages. Each day he has to take in a certain amount in fares to “make his nut”—the Corporation gets all of this. After he has rolled up that fixed number of paid kilometers, he splits the take with the Corporation on all other fares the rest of the day. So he drives like mad to pay off the nut as fast as possible and start making some money himself—then keeps on driving fast because he’s got to get his while the getting is good.

Uncle Tom says that most people on Earth have much the same deal, except it’s done by the year and they call it income tax.

Dom Pedro Casino is like that. Lavish. Beautiful. Exotic. The arch over the entrance proclaims EVERY DIVERSION IN THE KNOWN UNIVERSE, and from what I hear this may well be true. However, all Girdie and I visited were the gaming rooms.

I never saw so much money in my whole life!

A sign outside the gambling sector read:

I said, “Girdie, there really is somebody named Dom Pedro?”

She shrugged. “He’s an employee and that’s not his real name. But he does look like an emperor. I’ll point him out. You can meet him if you like, and he’ll kiss your hand. If you like that sort of thing. Come on.”

She headed for the roulette tables while I tried to see everything at once. It was like being on the inside of a kaleidoscope. People beautifully dressed (employees mostly), people dressed every sort of way, from formal evening wear to sports shorts (tourists mostly), bright lights, staccato music, click and tinkle and shuffle and snap, rich hangings, armed guards in comic-opera uniforms, trays of drinks and food, nervous excitement, and money everywhere—

I stopped suddenly, so Girdie stopped. My brother Clark. Seated at a crescent-shaped table at which a beautiful lady was dealing cards. In front of him several tall stacks of chips and an imposing pile of paper money.

I should not have been startled. If you think that a six-year-old boy (or eighteen-year-old boy if you use their years) wouldn’t be allowed to gamble in Venusberg, then you haven’t been to Venus. Never mind what we do in Marsopolis, here there are just two requirements to gamble: a) you have to be alive; b) you have to have money. You don’t have to be able to talk Portuguese or Ortho, nor any known language; as long as you can nod, wink, grunt, or flip a tendril, they’ll take your bet. And your shirt.

No, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Clark heads straight for money the way ions head for an electrode. Now I knew where he had ducked out to the first night and where he had been most of the time since.

I went up and tapped him on the shoulder. He didn’t look around at once, but a man popped up out of the rug like a genie from a lamp and had me by the arm. Clark said to the dealer, “Hit me,” and looked around. “Hi, Sis. It’s all right, Joe, she’s my sister.”