Well Shit!

...............................................................................

"Claudette is off the rails again."

"Well, shit. How bad?"

"Pretty bad. She's 'In the Mood' and on tour with her band, and I think she's in Sydney now, banging her way across Australia. We've tried to keep a lid on it, but word is leaking out. It's doubly hard, because the sex of her lovers doesn't matter to her. She's equal opportunity. Round numbers, about eighty men and over a hundred women, and the tour has only been going for eight months, and she hasn't hit the U.S. or Canada yet. If she keeps going, she'll be branded whore of the century, and we don't need people looking at her too closely. There are still pictures floating around of her as a flapper in the twenties, and a few more in the late seventies. Sooner or later someone will wonder why women almost a hundred years apart look exactly the same."

"I'll be there as quickly as I can charter a jet. I'll go up the coast, grab Quinn, and maybe Jane. I'll probably need their help."

"Good enough. In the meantime, I'll grab Ronnie, and Joy, if they're available."

"Thanks, Jimmy. Try to keep a lid on it until we get there."

"You got it, John."

...............................................................................................

I sat back and reflected. It had been pretty easy to blend in before technology boomed, but we had no one to blame but ourselves. Most of the tech coming out from the eighties until about a decade ago was ours to begin with. Some more mundane inventions stretched all the way back to the forties. Four of the scientists and engineers were at Oak Ridge, gently leading the others to discover atomic energy. It wasn't the only time we interfered. Basically, every major conflict and advanced weapons of destruction had been thwarted by us, although lately that was becoming a harder task.

Still, we took the lessons we had learned when we destroyed our own planet. It's what forced us to move.

If you haven't guessed by now. we "ain't from around here." We were honest to goodness Martians. Our own planet dying, our population dropping sharply, we abandoned ship and started leaving, to come here. Hey, it was the closest, although four megaships went to different galaxies, each carrying two hundred thousand of us to what were considered habitable planets. They had left when we did, a hundred years ago, and traveling at light speed, it would be another two hundred and eighty before the first arrived at their destination. They were to establish colonies, and if things went bad here, we all board our own transport vessels and join them. Our children will get there, the rest of us long gone. Still most Martians could live a hundred and fifty to two hundred twenty earth years, so there may be a few originals who get to see it as they get nearer before they die.

There were still almost a million of us still on Mars, mostly older people unwilling to leave, even though the projected demise of the planet was less than three centuries away. At the projected rate, there would be less than three hundred thousand still there in a hundred years.

..........................................................

When the Council decided a mass exodus was our only hope, fifty thousand were chosen, and we spent ten years learning the cultures and languages of Earth, their political processes, their code of laws, anything to help us blend in. The last three years of our training, we lived in pressurized pods to acclimate living in much denser gravity, breathing much richer air. It was literately the Martian version of hell, without the flames. Our lungs burned, our muscles ached, our appearances were altered slightly to blend in. Most of us had to have height reduction procedures. We settled for physiques on the large size of earth normal, but that meant losing a foot or better of our stature. It hurt like hell.

Oddly enough, our mating rituals resembled Earth couplings. Most of us were monogamous, though polygamy and polyamory were not uncommon and common enough not to be commented on, and our 'divorce' rate was very, very low, so it surprised me when my mate petitioned for us to be separated, a month before we were due to leave. I can't say it didn't hurt, but at the last minute she decided she wanted to go to one of the more distant galaxies, with one of the scientists working on the project. Just like Earth husbands, I never saw it coming. We didn't have children, so when we launched, I was alone, while many of my fellow passengers cried, hugged, and waved farewell.

Physically, we were quite compatible to humans, after some slight modifications, including sexually. Our people arrived in 1921, just before the Great Depression. It made some of us rethink our decision, but it never really hurt us. Mars had many of the same aspects of Earth, so we came well supplied with gold, platinum, and precious jewels. A big plus was how much farther along we were technologically, so we slowly introduced technology that was obsolete in our time, but cutting edge here on earth that earned us boatloads of money. We slowly bought our way into most of the cultures of the world, laying a false trail of our provenance. It was much easier to do back then, just some scribbles carefully inserted into various record repositories, and we were locals.

We thrived in our new home. Most of us came with mates, but no children. The few children in our species had been taken on the longer voyages, just in case it became a generational trip. It seemed the atmosphere here was more conducive to breeding, and we had a raft off babies. I think, as a species, we were never happier.

Others of us took mates from the locals. That's when we discovered something unexpected. Our pheromones were probably twenty times the volume of the natives, and it took us a while to control it. A long while. Things got interesting. When we discovered it, we made efforts to keep it contained, but sometimes it slipped out.

Some reveled in it. Mata Hari was one of ours. So was Marilyn Monroe. Michelle Phillips of the musical group The Mommas and The Pappas became notorious in the music industry for her sexual appetite. Most movie stars of the thirties through the fifties were ours, and they reveled in the lifestyle. Men like Errol Flynn, Clark Gable, Cary Grant, Rock Hudson, the list goes on and on. Because they were performers known for Bohemian lifestyles, it was mostly overlooked, especially in the early years when media was much more primitive and easier to control. Hedda Hopper and most of the old-style gossip columnists were ours, which made it easier.

The fact that about 30% of us were bisexual didn't help. There again, it was a lot easier to control back then. It wasn't until years later, when a lot of tell all books were released, that the general public got an inkling of their adventures.

The problem was the ones of us who chose normal lives, that would slip once in a while. In the seventies, Quinn got divorced, and it hit him badly, so he set a goal to have sex with as many women as he could in the part of the state, he lived in. 138 before we got him calmed down. It was sheer luck that only ten got pregnant, and we handled them with utmost discretion, all but two. Compensation was dispensed, and the whole thing was brushed under the rug as an example of the 'free love movement'. He's forbidden from ever joining a DNA webpage.

Then he met a woman, fell in love, and has been monogamous for almost fifty years. She was entering the end of her lifespan, and Quinn had carefully modified his appearance to match hers. When she passed, he would reinvent himself, but I doubted he would ever have a life mate again. His gift assured that he could have all the sex he wanted, but it would take a while for him to recover from mourning his wife.

We assimilated into the world. Most of us chose to be white, but some went for black, or ethnic identities, like Asian or Pacific Islander. I sighed as I called Quinn. I hadn't talked to him in almost twenty years, but that was like last week to us.

"Can you get away?"

"What's happened?"

"Claudette."

"Shit. How bad?"

"Bad. She's drawing a lot of attention. We need to talk her down before it gets any farther along. I'm calling Milly next. Paul is in New Zealand, and Ronnie is in the South Pacific somewhere, so maybe we can call on them. I'll apprise Mark, Scott, George, and Steve. They're in Europe, they'll probably meet us there."

"Have you talked to Wilson?"

"I left a message, but he's on the course this time of day, and you know he won't even look at his phone until he's on the nineteenth hole. He may call back before I can get to you. I'll pick you up at your local airport in five hours. Is that enough time?"

"No, but it will do. See you then."

I looked at the picture on the phone and grinned. Without bragging, we styled all of our new bodies to attract mates, and Quinn must have missed the memo. He matched our height, but that was about it. He was about forty pounds above average weight, and was bald. I can't think of a single one of us who didn't have a full head of hair except him, and his features were about as average as possible. Still, his particular repository of our pheromones was off the charts, even for us Claudette came the closest to matching it, but obviously Quinn had learned to manage it. He also had the gift of gab, so all he had to do was chat someone up, give her a tiny blast, and she was hooked.

We talked one night, four or five of us, the first time were we're together in almost thirty years. Ronnie was the smartest of the group, with five doctorates, and she kept an eye on our people, and after a few strong drinks, she gave us her thoughts. "I think we're regressing. I think we've brought back 'The Mood.' If it has, it won't end well."

The Mood was what our historians called one of the sexual cycles our people went through in our history. The closest comparison to earth would be when the females of most of the species went into what was called heat, a sexual explosion that led every specie to mate vigorously. It also made them stupid. Think of the deer, elk, and most other antlered species on the planet. For eleven months of the year, they were elusive as ghosts, but when the rut hit, they would literally run out into traffic, almost as if all sense of survival was gone. It was kind of the way earth men and women were a lot of the time, except it was year-round now.

We had weeded it out, the last case on our home planet was almost two centuries ago. Oddly, something about earth made us regress, especially in the children who shared only half our heredity. Even though we would never admit it, our children formed the basis of the free love movement in the early 1970's.

And now it appeared The Mood was being manifested way too often.

................

One of the things we had to get used to here was working. Oh, back home, we all had tasks, but there were no social strata to speak of. No one was keeping up with the Jones, clawing their way to the top of the pyramid. We all had duties, but money was nonexistent. All our needs were taken care of, we all lived extremely well by Earth standards. If you needed something, you put a request in and got it.

We took jobs on all levels, but inexorably rose through the ranks. Some, like Quinn, lived a simple life as a farmer. Farming was all done in hydroponic chambers at home, so the idea of sticking a seed into the local dirt and seeing it grow into something that could feed us was a novel concept.

Even more novel was the idea of owning tracts of land large and small, that no one else would be allowed to use. Real estate was a foreign concept to us, and I enjoyed it so much I became a really successful realtor, selling land in five states. Another concept we had a hard time grasping was war. We'd battled ourselves to the brink of destruction centuries ago before we finally realized the ones of us left better stop, or there would be no one left.

There were a lot of warriors among us, and with better reflexes and superior brains, our ratio of casualties for our species vs native born was only about ten per cent of the total.

Another big field for us was medicine and teaching, though that career path had waned quite a bit in the last three decades. Of course, there were a lot of techies because of our past. One or two had gone power mad with the vast amounts of money they were accumulating, and using our old technology where they could, were building their own personal rockets. It made me wonder why, then the squabbles came about over the valuable resources on our red ball of dirt, and we knew what the end game was. If it were up to them, the whole planet would be one big mining operation. The Council was watching closely, but so far hadn't interfered. I'm sure that would be an interesting meeting when the time came.

.......................................................

Quinn hadn't changed much, except his beard was white now, and he had started shaving his fringe of hair off, leaving him bald. He threw his carryall in the jet, and we were away. We caught up, and I was surprised that so many of us had passed.

"Think about it," Quinn said. "At home we had eliminated almost all our natural enemies, but down here the stupidest thing can get you killed. Wild animals, snakes, natural poisons, car crashes, plane crashes, even some plants and trees can do you in. Australia is the absolute worst. I'm surprised so many of us settled there."

"I think because the desert reminds them of home. I like things green, myself. And you forgot the apex predator, the beast at the top of the food chain. Humans."

"You're right, Weapons are getting progressively more complex and deadly, and we found out pretty fast we aren't bulletproof. The sad thing is it isn't just us. They seem to take joy in killing."

"Don't be so quick to judge. Look how many of us went into service in the countries we settled. If you get right down to it, we're kind of vicious."

He was right about that. Our kind held a disproportionate number of medals and decorations in the various branches of service they were in. I often wondered why, and Terry once clued us in.

"We hadn't fought each other in almost seven hundred earth years. There was no need. By then, the wars we had before had put us into where we ended up. There was just too few of us to make it viable or productive. Then we came here, and the emotions, the raw adrenaline spikes, the thrill of actually dying drew us in like moths to a flame. I think we regressed a thousand years in a span of decades."

I thought about that for a while, and realized he was right. We spent hundreds of years just living, without feeling really alive. Then we came here, got exposed to all kinds of human conditions and situations we weren't really prepared for, despite our research and training.

....................................................................................................

Milly was her bubbly self when we picked her up, updating us on her life. She was married now, which surprised us, because for almost a century she hadn't chosen a mate, but she gushed over him like a thirteen-year-old with her first crush.

"Ours?" I asked.

"Half, but he doesn't know it. He's pretty smart, though, and suspects there's something different about him. I just hope he doesn't put it together."

Quinn grinned. "What could he do? Announce there's been aliens among them for a hundred years? It would sound like a bad sci-fi movie. He'd have to have hard evidence, and as far as I know everything that could out us has been erased. "

It turned out there were a lot of us who chose writing as a career. Besides those who did it professionally, many dabbled on the multitude of free sites available. Asimov was one of ours, and sometimes he skated a little close to the line. In one of his novels from the late forties he described satellites, and they were still decades away. If you look closely, there were a lot of tells in his work about us, and when some of the things he wrote about happened, he smiled and shrugged his shoulders. "If you want to know what the future is like in twenty years, read the science fiction of the day. We research our books, well, I do at least, and most of what I write is based on actual progress or the research currently going on. Besides, if I had known satellites were going to be real, don't you think I would have protected the idea? I'd be worth a lot of millions now if I had."

He had enough salient points that they accepted what he said. We got on to him for it, but he'd just grin. "Maybe I should write a chronicle of us. No one would believe it, and it would make great fiction."

Ray Bradbury took it up a notch with The Martian Chronicles.

Then comic books graduated from something mostly 13-year-old boys read, and went mainstream. And yes, Stan Lee was one of ours. He was actually 210 years old when he died, a record, even for us. He was also a sly jokester, and when the rumors about a silver suited alien riding a surfboard through space started, it was just him in his suit, coming back from one of the supply ships with some material he needed for research. It would have been easier just to get it electronically, but where was the fun in that?

Most of the guys in comics were ours at the beginning, but soon recruited a really talented bunch of writers and illustrators, and it became the multibillion-dollar business it is today, especially after they started making the movies. Except for those actually involved in the business, none of us made money off it.

.....................................................................................................................

We picked up the others, or met the ones coming from other locales, in New Zealand, for a strategy session before we did our 'intervention' with Claudette. Most of us hadn't seen each other in decades, so there was a lot of catching up. One of the subjects was over how increasingly hard it was to remain hidden.

Ronnie and Steve offered a new opinion they had obviously been discussing for a while.

"Why don't we just out ourselves? What can they do? Deport us? We've been here a hundred years, intermarried, had children, assimilated into their cultures, been good citizens, well, mostly, and contributed to their advancement. If we had wanted to take over, we would have done it long ago."

Quinn snorted. "I'm sure they would be ecstatic about the revelation. I can see world leaders now, working out how to use us for their advantage, and the corporate types would immediately plot on how to exploit our technology, if they ever got a look at our ships. And the militaries, they would lose their minds, drooling about the weapons of mass destruction they could construct from our materials and knowledge. I say leave it alone."

"We've developed contingencies for every scenario."

"Even Murphy's Law?"

In the end, after endless debate, we decided to convene The Council, our governing body here on Earth, present the arguments, and let them decide. There were forty-three surviving members, and we would, as always, abide by their ruling. Then we turned to focus on more pressing things, like Jet, Claudette's stage name.

Our people were very gifted, musically. Gershwin was one of us, as well as two of the Beatles. I'll let you guess which two. That's right, Ringo and George. Taylor Swift was a child of two of us, so her lineage was pure Martian, but she would never know. So was Ed Sheeran, Dave Grohl, the list was pretty extensive. Coolio was ours, as well as Snoop Dog.

"I think we should talk to her, then leave her alone. So, what if she gets branded Slut of The Century? It's still rock and roll. Maybe the conservatives will burn her cd's and albums, but that would only generate more sales than before. She's still not as bad as some."