Wireless (38 page)

“I shall make inquiries right away, old chap. The clankie grape-vine 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 that pachyderm!” I shouted 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 front legs, 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 make so much of a noise, Ralphie-san,” said the junior undervizier. “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 chitchat. The band had settled down and was gently serenading us with its plucked vocal cords. 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 a date!” added Ibn Cut-Throat, from the sidelines.

“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: if they forgot to make 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 laird, but we’d never consider anything remotely as bloodthirsty and medieval 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 Toadsworth. “I wish Laura was 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 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.

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.