The Road to Mars: A Post-Modem Novel (1999) (2 page)

Red Nose, White Face, then, the classic struggle. Not quite a friendship, not exactly a marriage, not even a brotherhood, let’s call it a polarity, a tension of opposites. Like positive and negative. Providing they kept their distance, they held a comfortable balance. On stage together they were dynamite.

The Circuit. Endless mining stations, space platforms, the satellites of Saturn and of Jupiter. Nothing exciting. Somewhere a million miles away, the Planet Disney. Way beyond that, Mars: the home of show biz, with its endless eager audiences. Something to aspire to. Make it there, you hit the jackpot.

A ship, the
Johnnie Ray
, named after an obscure twentieth-century torch singer, built inside like a British movie set (early Merchant Ivory) in fashionable good taste, with fires and wood and leather and deep comfy sofas in William Morris fabrics (the Pre-Raphaelite designer, not the Hollywood agency). None of your
Star Wars
High Aztec bleakness here, this was a ship built for comfort. There’s a lot of space out there, and a hell of a lot of time.

And then there’s Carlton. The extraordinary. A humanoid with no sense of humor writing a study of comedy. I knew there was a book in it the minute I came across him. But I haven’t told anyone about him. Not even Molly. Molly’s my girlfriend at the moment, live-in, significant other, partner, mistress, whatever. She’s a researcher, doing life science, DNA and behavior, that sort of thing.

She’d eat Carlton up. So I haven’t shared him with her yet. He’s my secret. You have no idea how much theft goes on in pure research.

It’s not that I’m afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.

—
Woody Allen

It’s New Year’s Eve on Saturn. Ring out the old, ring in the new. You’ve heard the adage. So this is where we start. This is the crisis that pitches them forward into the story (as they tell you at all story conferences). This is the moment of attack. You have met the principals, the protagonists are engaged, what is going to happen? I’ll tell you.

The crisis that began Carlton’s long journey from a tin dresser to a potential place in history (if I have anything to do with it) began on New Year’s Eve. A year is a relative concept. It describes the period of a planet’s orbital revolution around the sun. On Earth that is 365.25 days. On Venus it is 243 days. On Mercury a sprightly 88. So that when I am fifty on Earth, that same time would make me over 200 years old on Mercury. With the outer planets it works the other way. The orbital period of Jupiter for example is 11 years, 10 months, and 14 days, and out by Saturn, where this incident took place, New Year’s Day occurs only once every 29.5 Earth years. So at 50 you aren’t yet even 2. You can imagine how wild they went on New Year’s Eve.

Carlton had booked them into a gig on Rhea, a bleak world of constant hydrogen drizzle, a damp, dark, soggy environment full of surly miners and their pale families. A place of little hope, mining settlements, and container people, redeemed only by an unsurpassable view of Saturn and its rings occupying almost a quarter of the sky. From here the sun was a medium small spot half a billion miles away and sunrise was a nonevent, but to watch the huge disc of Saturn sailing up over the horizon, preceded by its delicate multicolored rings, was a truly awesome sight.

They were booked into the Alexandra Palace Hotel, built by an overoptimistic tour operator with more money than sense. It was a place people normally paid to avoid, but hell, if you only got two New Year’s Eves in your life, then chances were good everything was fully booked. Chances were damn good this night, for the place was packed to the rafters. The Alexandra’s gilded opulence mocked the morose black coal landscape in which it sat. Hydrogen drizzle and grey clouds obscured even the great gas giant around which they were revolving. Two smouldering vehicles in the parking lot ought to have warned them to turn back, but hey, they had played worse places and they shrugged and went on in anyway.

Muscroft and Ashby were booked to perform well before midnight, but things were running late as they so frequently do, with the heady mix of miners, tourists, and troublemakers attracted by the carnival atmosphere and potential revelry. After all, if you’re not going to see another New Year’s Eve till you’re over fifty, think you’re going to miss the party?

The event was scheduled to begin promptly at eight. By nine the place was out of control. The shouting, stamping, laughing, and whistle-blowing was growing louder by the minute. It wasn’t so much an audience as a baying gang of yahoos. The management were reluctant to start, but were convinced by the authorities that if they canceled there would be a riot, and in that event they, the police, would be the first out of there. Imagine New Orleans at Carnival, combined with Trinidad, multiplied by Rio de Janeiro and you still don’t quite have the fervor of what is happening out there on this desolate moon of Saturn.

As so often happens on these occasions, things began to go wrong early. Not starting the show on time meant that the crowd was angrier and drunker than they should have been. Allowing them anywhere near liquor was lunacy. There were of course plentiful supplies of illegal substances available around the fringes of the venue, which, ingested in massive amounts, only served to stoke the alcohol. This was a mob fast growing out of control. In a misguided attempt to calm them down, the management sent on the Space Ballet, billed as “a gravity-free group of girls in diaphanous drapery.” Big mistake. Sending on twenty-four half-dressed females floating in synchronized space routines was red rag to a bull. The crowd began to bay. Instead of sitting back pretending it was art while secretly enjoying the titillation (the secret of the Space Ballet’s usual success), they found it failed as raunch and began to yell for total nudity and more action. Some sections of the crowd chanted obscenities. Others concentrated on taunting individual girls. It was nasty stuff, I can tell you. Most of them were in tears when they came off, and several had been manhandled. Donald and his artificial donkey were officially billed as next, but Donald took one look at the crowd and bailed, bagged his ass and was out the door before anyone noticed.

“He’ll never work again,” said management darkly.

“At least he’ll live,” said Lewis.

Many of the crowd were there to see the Amazing Keith, a technology-dependent magic show which combined loud rock music and robots with spectacular explosions. Running amidst the chaos with his wild hair, his mad eyes, and his scrawny body squeezed into spangly tights, the Amazing Keith would pop up in the least likely places from the most amazing explosions. But sadly the Amazing Keith wasn’t supposed to be on till midnight and he was nowhere to be seen.

The defection of Donald and his donkey (a wise pro-life choice on his part) had a similar effect on many of the artistes. The Gay Guys Galleria, a singing chorale, decided they would rather mingle with the audience than attempt to silence them with selections from Viennese operetta. Reg Butterworth and Marge wisely determined that plate-spinning and standing on piles of glasses was way beyond the intellectual range of this crowd. The Nigerian Marching Band were concerned for the safety of their instruments and decamped en masse. This left only the comedians and Keith’s Magic Finale. It promised to be the shortest show on record. Alex, optimistic as ever, was all for going on. Lewis was for going home. He was even now arguing with management, an irascible sod named Horner who was sweating profusely and waggling several legal pages under his nose.

“Your contract stipulates twenty minutes.”

“Yeah, well it promised us an audience, not a riot.”

“It’s a signed agreement. I’ll sue if you don’t go on.”

“They’re totally out of control.”

“Oh, they’re just happy.”

“Happy? They’re legless.”

“You can’t refuse or they’ll tear the place apart.”

“They’ve already started.”

In the middle of this argument Alex walked on stage. There is in comedians a kind of foolish nerve which will lead them straight towards trouble. Where the normal human response is to run away, a comic will often as not head directly towards the danger. Mad buggers, all of ’em. So conditioned by rejection in childhood they constantly seek to face it down as grown-ups, I guess. Maybe Alex felt he could tame them, that they would listen to him because he was funny; comics are that arrogant—they have to be. Alex was a rare combination of barely muzzled anger, breathtaking fearlessness, and extraordinary timidity. A wasp could reduce him to a furry ball of panic. How he could be so afraid of daily life when he had the balls to walk out alone on stage in front of 3,000 drunken people to try and make them laugh is something I shall leave to the shrinkbots to explain. Whatever the reason, he emerged into the light wearing a slight smile and waving gently to the crowd. From the wings Carlton watched for a second in horror and then ran for Lewis. He had just emphatically ripped up their contract in front of an apoplectic Horner when he spotted Carlton racing towards him.

“He’s on,” yelled Carlton, dodging round the ropes and the machinery.

“What?”

“He’s gone on.”

“That loony.”

“Well, thank goodness at least one of you recognizes his responsibilities,” said management.

“My ass. If anything happens to him, I’m gonna nail you, Horner.”

There was a moment, just a tiny moment out there, when Alex held the attention of the beast. It swung its baleful eyes towards him and slowly registered that there was a man on stage. It looked at this sad figure like a tyrannosaur might have eyed a small tasty mammal. This was meat, and it was hungry.

Of course if this was a Hollywood movie, they would all fall silent and he would emerge in triumph. But it’s not and that’s all bullshit anyway. The fact is, the audience was too drunk to hear anything. The first bottle fell well short of him, but the second caught him a nasty glancing blow on the forehead. By the time Carlton ran on stage to protect him, the bottles were raining down. If Lewis hadn’t had the presence of mind to switch off the artificial gravity, Alex would have been a dead duck, but as it was, thanks to his magnetized gravity boots, Carlton was able to walk across the stage, grab him, and carry him bleeding into the wings pursued by a floating mass of out-of-control drunks.

They ran for their lives, while the drunken crowd flowed onto the stage, banging and barging into each other like molecules near boiling point. Stagehands grappled with the mob, but it was a losing battle. Unfortunately gravity had been restored and now the mob began to pour backstage and out to the tiny encampment of trailers and containers which housed the unfortunate stars of this unfortunate show.

Alex and Lewis had just reached their trailer when the first of the hooligans burst into the clearing and set about breaking in. Carlton had dropped Alex on the bed and was reaching for the first-aid box when the trailer suddenly began to rock. Fortunately, Lewis had locked the door behind them. He could see six or seven of the yahoos, leaning on its titanium sides trying to push it over.

“Stand back,” said Carlton, and, inserting his fingers into the power socket, he sent a powerful blast of electrical current through the metal walls. There was an angry scream from outside as they leapt back, but it served only to enrage them, and they ran for poles and wooden props to push and batter at the thin walls of the trailer.

Inside their metal prison they felt the whole structure totter, then to their horror they heard a tremendous explosion. The shouting and inhuman screaming of the rioters temporarily ceased, as a section of the metal wall began to curl and melt as if it were cardboard. Someone was burning open the trailer with an acetylene torch. Carlton stepped forward, raising a heavy spike. A face appeared in the burned wall, a face with popping eyes and wild hair.

“Keith,” yelled Lewis, “what the hell are you doing here?”

“Saving your ass, man,” said The Amazing Keith, levering open the gap so they could step through it. Carlton hoisted Alex onto his back and they ran across the muddy surface to the shuttle bus, where another angry mob faced them.

“Stand back,” said Keith as he hurled a cherry bomb into the crowd. The explosion stunned and terrified the drunken rioters.

“Oh, this is great,” said Keith. “Let’s do it again next year.”

“You are seriously crazy,” said Lewis.

“Thanks, man,” said Keith sincerely.

Leaving the shuttle to the mob, they ran for the safety of their tender. Carlton propped the bleeding Alex on the bed, while Lewis jumped for the controls. The Amazing Keith looked around wildly and jumped out of the door.

“Hey, where you going?” yelled Lewis. “You not coming back to the ship?”

“No thanks, man, some other time. I gotta party, this promises to be a wild night.”

“Oh right,” said Lewis, “gotta party,” as he watched The Amazing Keith disappearing into the mob, his wild hair flying in all directions.

With a roar the afterburners of the tender ignited and, not a moment too soon, lifted them off the ground.

“Hey,” said Alex, suddenly sitting up, “did you get the money?”

Comedy is a serious business. Not being paid and being plunged into life-threatening situations had a sobering effect on Lewis. Nothing concentrates a man’s mind more than the prospect of his imminent death, said Samuel Johnson. Lewis didn’t mind dying onstage, but he hated being killed for it. He was a comedian, not a gladiator. So as soon as they were back in the
Johnnie Ray
and parked safely in Saturnian orbit, he called a conference.

“Okay, that’s it for me,” said Lewis.

Alex looked up sharply. Was he quitting?

“We’re leaving. We’re outta here.”

“The Road to Mars?”

“Why not?”

“What about bookings?”

“We’ll play the Jovian moons and pick up a little pocket money and then see if we can’t hitch a cruise ship to Mars. Any votes against?”

“Not me,” said Alex.

“Right then, passed
nem. con
.”

“
Nem
. what?”