Mr. E & the Cave Inside Mars
A pink wall & a faster drive
OK, so what do you want me to do? Use public transportation?
How about an Uber?
I was sick and tired of buying over-priced tickets to Mars, not to mention Ganymede or Ceres! You try traveling that way on some dilapidated old Starship with 99 other crazy fucks either throwing up or doing goofy zero-g acrobatic selfies. I couldn't care less.
I’m Alphonse Aloisus Edgerton-Jones, Private Investigator for Aliens: “Just call me Mr. E.” (It really is easier to say.) I travel a lot, tracking down extraterrestrial lovers and spouses all over this damn solar system, finding beings who don’t want to be found, business partners scarfing up ill-gotten loot, and the occasional murderer, too.
In the old movies, all the Aliens were either bloodthirsty invaders (as if our backwater Earth was such a goddamned prize,) or wise beneficent beings out to save us from our stupid selves. Well, guess what? When the actual Aliens finally showed up, we found that not only is life universal in this galaxy, but stupidity is, too.
And that’s why I have such a thriving business!
Our little out of the way solar system turns out to be a perfect stop for refueling on the Galactic Silk Road. Interstellar freighters, diplomatic ships, even goddamned Alien cruise ships… (Would you believe it?)… They all get lined up to top off their fusion tanks from the cloud tops of Jupiter or Saturn. They claim that the hydrogen compounds on Neptune or Uranus are just a bit too cold, but I think there’s something they’re not telling us.
They are still keeping how their Interstellar Drives work a secret, though they claim to be all fairest to all.
And the Soviet Union was a Workers Paradise that just needed walls to keep the workers from leaving.
**************
So, like I said, I travel. My latest client, though, got me thinking….
“Mr. E, you have been recommended to me most highly.”
“By whom, if I can ask?” Actually, I wasn’t quite sure where to ask. The Alien who had just entered my office was not exactly contained (in a body.) She (or at least that’s the frequency of voice she used) seemed to emanate from a pink, delightfully scented cloud that hovered, filling the office entirely on the other side of my beat-up, gray, gunmetal desk.
“Lois von Dirksen said you were trustworthy — and very thorough.”
That worried me. Lois was a friend of my Ex. Delphina knew every unflattering fault in my character, most of which I admit to being completely true. Trust wasn’t at the top of Dee’s list of Alphonse “stay away from this” warnings to her friends.
Not that I could blame her, though. Your work tends to rub off on you, and being around interstellar low-lifes and scumbags hadn’t improved the lack of morals I had already developed. But I had done Lois a big favor once.
Her husband was having an affair with a Venusian acid lap dancer, and that was weird! He would come home smelling from sulfur and rotten eggs and didn’t even try for an excuse.
I have to explain things, I guess. Everyone knows it rains sulfuric acid on Venus, the surface temperature melts lead, and the only life there floats high in the clouds in the stratosphere. And that’s where Lloyd hung out. Lois and Lloyd, kind of cute, huh? More like Bonnie and Clyde, I’d say.
Could you even put up with yourself, hanging out in cloud top strip joints above Venus and watching pole dances from vaguely humanoid Aliens from 30 light-years away, who just happened to like to bathe in sulfuric acid showers? Well, I wouldn’t. But the Traveling Woo-Kandorinas also had acid buffering pills you could swallow (for a price, of course) that made it all work.
But that’s what I told you! Aliens are no different from us. They all seem to like money, sex, and power in totally familiar ways, and they keep me in business, nicely.
“Yes, ma’am,” I volunteered. “Lois and I go way back.”
“She said if anyone can find my Heroneetus, it would be you.”
“What happened?… And I can call you…?”
“The Pink Wall. PW is OK, though. Well, Mr. E (Lois said that’s what you prefer,) Heroneetus is one of my 12 husbands, and I think he’s hiding in some Martian desert cave with my hairdresser from back home.”
“Where’s home?”
“We’re from the Escalanté Skim.”
Now things were starting to make sense. I had only heard about the Skimmers. I had never met one before. They are tough customers. Don’t let the pink perfumed mist fool you. They live by sucking radio waves out of the air. They really love FM. They say it’s a balanced diet. Who am I to say? All I know is that Howard Stern’s grandkids tried to ban them from New York.
“Why a cave on Mars? And is a hairdresser some sort of euphemism? I mean, you ain’t got none.”
“Mr. E! Mr. E! Please… I’m insulted. What just looks like pink mist to you is as powerful as a woman’s absolute center would be on any world you know of. We keep ourselves groomed, you know.”
I wasn’t being entirely honest with her. I had already started to swoon.
“OK, she tends your cloud, I guess. Why is your husband in some Martian cave with her?”
“They’re trying to have children. We need radio silence to procreate, and a deep Martian cave is pretty quiet.”
“Why can’t you just go there yourself?”
“He’d kill me. He’s really in love with her. She’s purple.”
Oh god, I thought, trying to take a Skimmer guy from a fucking purple Skimmer woman is a death sentence for any fool who tried.
“PW, I’m going to charge a lot.”
“I can afford it. I just want him back. My other eleven husbands miss him, too, and… I know it’s hard for you humans to visualize what sex is like for us, but, when our clouds interpenetrate, it’s so exquisite….”
“PW, since you broke the ice, can you tell me why purple is so powerful for your species? I’ve never understood.”
“Well, Mr. E, pink, for an Escalanté woman is not bad. Our scent is like cotton candy at a fair: fragrant, sweet, and airy. But purple is primordial. We used to not be purple before we went into space. Can you believe it? No one even knew that intensity was doable! But when we first got the Interstellar Drive, one of my ancestors, Clarissa the Impossible, ended up inhaling pure synth in the royal court on Iskander Prime, and it happened. We’ve never been the same since.”
“I didn’t know that history. Thank you. OK, PW, I’m guessing: Your hairdresser got some black market synth, went up twelve wavelengths to purple, trapped hubby #12 in a cave on Mars, and is pumping him for kids…”
“To inherit all my money.”
I told you how just like us the Aliens are. I should have guessed.
**************
So here I was, trying to figure out how I could get this fuck back to PW — without getting myself killed in the process. Lightbulb!
“PW, normally, I travel coach. I don’t mind. It’s not that I’m particularly important in the grander scheme of things, but here’s what I’m seeing: I’ll need to scoop in fast to their cave on Mars, and get out fast, as well. If I have to rely on getting your hubby and me onto a commercial flight from Elonville, I don’t think it’ll work.”
“What do you need?”
“My own ship.”
I knew I was hitting for the bleachers here, but wtf? I thought she was loaded. And might lose it all if this purple bitch succeeded.
“Mr. E, I know you’re shrewd. That’s why I’m here. Normally, in the business my family and I are in, I’d have you thrown out an airlock for questioning our authority and dominance, but the more I see you here, even though this crappy office you have on the backside of the Moon is not exactly congenial, well, you’re growing on me, and I like you. I can do it. But you better deliver.”
Wow. Sometimes my chutzpah works.
So that’s how I ended up in Gallup, New Mexico, talking to Kwanita Rodriguez of the Zuni Inter-Planetary Drive Corp. We sat down for coffee and dickering in Richardson’s rug room.
“No one will notice us here,” she said. The red, tan, and turquoise geometrical patterns of thousands of Navajo rugs hanging on the walls, and piled 50 deep in stacks on the floor, melded in my brain with the sharp, unique scent of all the wool, and hit me like an organic psychedelic testament to space itself. Shoppers wandered through the stacks, touching, looking, feeling; and she was right: No one paid attention to us.
I had gone to the best, and the most secretive, spaceship company on Earth: ZIP DC. The Zuni have lived in this part of the American Southwest for almost a thousand years. No one knows where they really came from. Their language is an isolate, unrelated to any other Native American language. It has strange similarities to Japanese.
And they make the best damn spaceships between here and the Oort Cloud.
“I need it to be fast and light,” I told her. “Money is no object.” Damn, I loved that part.
“What kind of range?” she asked.
“Saturn and back to Earth, without refueling.”
“You’re asking a lot. I’m glad we’re talking at Richardson’s because I don’t want this to get out, yet. We have an experimental model I’d like to sell you. I can give you a discount for helping us. It has a new kind of drive.”
“Tell me more. I’m curious.”
“Well, as you know, we’re limited to travel mainly in the inner Solar System now. No one has been able to figure out how the Aliens’ Interstellar Drives work, but we’re trying out a new angle at ZIP.”
“You want me to be a guinea pig.”
“And your atoms might get smeared from here to Ganymede if it doesn’t work.”
ZIP is the best, and she didn’t even care to lie. I knew what I was asking for, that kind of range. Kwanita also knew me from some shady work the company had hired me for a while back. We fit. And the rugs muffled our voices.
“So what are you working on?” I asked her.
“Well, E, as you know, all of our propulsion systems work on a standard Epstein fusion plant. They’re fast, but not very reliable, and they eat fuel like nobody’s business. We can’t run the fusion drives all out ’cause the acceleration would kill you. We’ve been looking at the Aliens’ ships, and, honestly, they haven’t made any sense. We see them coming from maybe a light-year out, but they’re just limping along like it would take them 50 years just to get to Pluto.”
“And then suddenly they’re here.” I knew. We all did.
“It all has to do with time,” she said. “They have hydrogen fusion drives that really don’t appear that different from ours, but they’ve got a control module powered by the fusion reactor that siphons 20% of the energy away from the drive, and I think we finally know what it does.”
“Which is?”
“Time warping. They’re pumping fusion energy into empty space.”
“Empty?”
“You really are smarter than you look, E. I’m glad you and I already know each other because, no offense and all of that, you look pretty dumb.”
“It helps me in my PI work. They don’t suspect.”
“Right, E. I remember that night we had on Callisto…”
“At the Crystal Bar.”
“I love you still, E. Some things just don’t quit.”
She was right. And so was the turquoise dyed wool in those rugs, cold like the stratosphere, but warm on your feet. Holding me up so I could taste the sweet salt on her lips.
But that’s the rug room at Richardson’s! It’s easy to get carried away.
***************
Kwanita’s engineers at ZIP thought they had solved it: The Aliens were pumping significant fusion energy into empty space, and why? They were catching virtual quantum time particles as they were zipping in and out of existence. Time is quantized, too. Did you know that? How do you think the universe moves from one moment of time to the next? It’s not smooth! Time is quantized just like everything else, and that means that time jumps from one allowed state to the next — and, in between those moments when the universe exists… it doesn’t.
Those damn Aliens. They were getting from star to star, not by moving unbelievably fast, or by going through some sci-fi warp space, but by messing with time itself. They were channeling 20% of a standard Epstein drive to mess with those virtual time particles in so-called empty space, and Kwanita and her engineers figured we could do it, too.
“I’m willing to try.”
“I knew you would, E.”
She knew me better than my Ex. That was part of why Delphina had left. I heard, though, that Dee had married an insurance exec. I was happy for her. At least, she could have the illusion of safety now. Kwanita and I know better.
***************
“PW, I think I’ve got the ship I’ll need. And it’s going to cost a lot less than I thought it would.”
“You’re a good man, E,” her pink wall said. I could even smell her over the video link from her ship orbiting the Moon. Some things are impossible to ignore. And she is one of them.
“Meet me at my office on Friday at noon.”
“Thanks, E. I know you can bring him back.”
Well, maybe I could. But a good ship had upped the odds.
**************
I found them both in a Martian cave, swathed in radio silence. Husband #12 emerged from what looked like a roomful of purple opaque mist, and the lavender smell was so intense that I started to float away myself….
Oh! I didn’t mention that the Escalanté Skimmers… The women are amorphous walls of thick mist that suck you in, but the men are these little turtle shelled creatures with big wide eyes that just melt you in a moment with their helpless seeming sadness! This guy, though, he looked like a hookah dream from Alice’s Adventures. He seemed happy!
“I knew you were coming,” he told me. “I knew it wouldn’t last. I knew why she wanted me, too. I’m no fool.”
The cave I found them in was about 1200 meters deep under a Martian crater that had once held a water lake. Strange stalactites oozed a shiny brine in the steady purple light emanating from the She Wall he had just walked out of.
“I thought you’d want to stay, Hero. I mean, she’s purple. She’s the ultimate.”
“She is, E.”
“How do you know my name?”
“You think you’re the only one who knows about Richardson’s? Come on! I might look like a turtle to you humans, but I’m not.”
“Really.”
“You should know that, creep.” Heroneetus looked like a turtle, but he had guts.
I don’t mind being called a creep. I am, in a way. I’m a private eye for Aliens. I grab people who don’t want to be grabbed. I uncover the secrets they don’t want anyone to know. It’s all sex and money and god knows what, but I’ve got the best spaceship a human has ever had, 10 thermoses full of Martian Brine Ooze (See one of my other tales for that!)… a girlfriend who builds spaceships, and a real Escalanté Skimming Pink Wall who asked me out for a weekend (if I manage to get back…)
“I didn’t mean to insult you, Hero. I know you only look like a turtle.”
“Accepted. I don’t care to argue.”
“But I was certain your woman here wouldn’t let you go.”
“You didn’t ask me, fuck!” A booming voice like the Cave of Forgotten Dreams surrounded me then, and I knew it was that purple augmented woman I had feared.
“I wasn’t ignoring you.”
“Like hell you weren’t. But I’m done with him. He can go. I’ve milked him for a hundred kids, and he’s so exhausted that I’ve lost interest, anyway.”
I knew there was even more to it than Madame Purple realized. Martian Brine Ooze may be the most powerful aphrodisiac in 30 megaparsecs, and I could smell and taste it through that whole cave. I knew it would be there. I brought 10 thermoses to take some back. LOL! They were both exhausted.
Purple, you met your match on ol’ human Mars.
**************
So I’m back home now. I survived another crazy case. Maybe I’m lucky that Dee got rid of me. My girlfriend builds spaceships, and Alien sex bombs somehow find me attractive.
Hey, you know where my office is on the far side of the Moon. My desk is pretty beat up, but I’ve got the fastest Earth-made spaceship in the Solar System now. I don’t know who the next client who walks in the door will be.
But I’m ready.
Visit me, really!
I’ll tell you a story you won’t believe.
_________________
Also, if you ever are in Gallup, do visit Richardson’s. Their Rug Room actually exists.
The Zuni Pueblo is 20 miles south of Gallup. Only Hopi is a bit older as a continuously occupied abode in North America. The Zuni have lived there since about 1300 CE. The Zuni language really is an isolate, unrelated to any other Native American language, and bears odd similarities to Japanese. Here is one anthropologist’s speculations on the subject: The Zuni Enigma.
According to the Zuni, we live in the 4th World, a world of light, as well as air. There are 3 deeper layers below us, which, in my mind, anyway, correspond to Freud’s Unconscious, Jung’s Collective Unconscious, and the Cosmic Unconscious, which deep meditators eventually get to.
The Zuni know spirits are to be found in the Earth, and that the Kachinas release our energy into the air through dance.
__________________
© “John” Lesly Levin 2021
