Juliette of Mars

It's strange to think that, if anyone ever reads this little history, which I doubt anyone ever will, it might be in a very different place and a very different time, and it might make no sense at all. That's okay. I'm not writing for an audience anyway. I'm writing because I've got things to say, even if no one ever hears them. And I'm writing to pass the time.

But obviously,youare reading this, and there's one thing you should know up front. If you're looking for romance, you can stop reading now and go find yourself a different story. Because there ain't no romance in this one. There's damn little anywhere on Mars anyway. Now, if you're looking for sex kicks, there's some of that, especially if you're as sick and twisted as me. But that's not what the story is about. It's about how I got where I am, waiting to die in this shitty, bug-infested cage. And Juliette. And how, if someone can learn from our mistakes, maybe they won't wind up like us, which is dead, or soon to be. But who learns from someone else's mistakes anyway?

The worst part of the whole thing is Juliette. I don't know if I loved her, but I sure miss her. I think about just being with her, and I think about fucking her. She fucked like a real bim. That's because she was a bim. She looked like one, she talked like one and she sure fucked like one. But we just really enjoyed each other - talking, eating, doing 'phro-mone, whatever. And as slutty as Juliette was, she had the heart of a little girl. And she was never a whore. Never. Not once. Could have made a whole lot of money that way, though.

I'm not going to tell you much about my childhood, if you can call it that. My real name is Melvin Booker. I probably had a middle name too, but I don't know what it was. Everyone calls me "Stones" anyway. It doesn't have anything to do with taking drugs. Everyone does that. They call me that mostly because I usually make good decisions under pressure and it seems like I never get freaked. I do, of course. I get just as scared as anyone else. Sometimes more. I just don't show it. But I do like the reputation.

I'm twenty in Earth years, but we started using Martian years here a while ago, so I'm really only ten and a half. And let me tell you, it's been ten and a half long, mostly shitty years.

I don't remember much about when I was really young, just some laughing and some hugging. That much is always there, way in the back of my mind, like a warm, dull light. My older brother, Frankie, remembered a lot more and was always talking about things that happened with Mom and Dad that I'd forgotten about.

Then, when I was four, my mother and father both died in the hog flu that wiped out ninety per cent of the colonists. It got my sister and my two other brothers, too. After that, there was no school and not much government. The cops, who were the only ones who had guns, took over, and Frankie and me were pretty much on our own. They had "homes" for kids like us, but they sucked big time. The bastards who ran them either made you work 'til you died or fucked you up the ass 'til you ran away.

Clever kids like us were better off on their own anyway. We learned how to steal anything that wasn't nailed down. And in those days, there was a lot of stuff that wasn't nailed down. To begin with, there was ten times too much space for the number of people left alive. And ten times too much food and clothes and holovisions and everything else. So living was easy at first, but you couldn't sell the things you stole 'cause everyone already had more than they needed.

In fact, there was so much food at first that the government actually laid off some of the farm workers who hadn't died. The ones that were left were just harvesting the stuff that was already growing, not planting anything new. But then all that fresh food started going rotten and the preserved food ran short. There were food riots and the paranoid, disorganized government couldn't get anything right. They closed the planet, turned the ships from Earth back, and the first famine hit. That's when we stopped using Euros and started printing our own money, Martian Dollars - MDs, or "docs" for short.

And when the food ran short is when Frankie and me had to learn to steal something we could sell, like brix and red magic, 'phro-mone, gliders bug-eyes and clear days. Valuable shit like that. Drugs and other stuff thatwasnailed down. So we stole it, and we sold it. And we used it too when we had extra, which was often enough.

And that's how I met Juliette - at a 'phro-mone mingler. We call them "minglers" to mock the boring tea parties that cops and rich people have. A mingler is like an orgy, a wild dance party and a drug binge, all rolled into one.

'Phro-mone is short for something else - aphrodisiac and hormone or pheromone or something like that. It's a stew of sex smells that all kinds of people give off: male, female, 'mo, 'tro, everything all mixed together. They get it from genetically engineered animals back on Earth. The mix makes you horny as hell, and the more of it you breathe, the hornier you get. It comes as a liquid and you throw it into a vaporizer, add in a little psychedelic, like some red magic, or a mood enhancer, like a glider or two, which they also get from animals. Then you round up your friends or charge admission, put on a little music, turn on the vaporizer, and POOF - instant sex maniac, drug-dance rampage.

I guess on Earth they're hip-deep in genetically engineered shit like that. Some of it's pretty weird, but still useful, like talking cows and plants that can walk around and take simple instructions. Some is just freaky junk, like a giant nose - no face, no head, just a living nose - and chickens with twelve heads. And there are a lot of silly toys for rich people, like bunnies that lay Easter eggs, crap like that.

Engineering humans is theoretically illegal, but there's plenty of it happening Earthside anyway, stuff like size-adjustable breasts for women who might want small tits at work, but huge melons for their boy friends. Here on Mars, we don't allow any genetic engineering at all, except for plants, which are mutated to improve the crop yield or nutritional value. But 'phro-mone, psycho-drugs and a few other high demand items get smuggled in from Earth regardless.

So one day I walked into this mingler - it was already in full swing – threw my 10 docs in the bucket and left my pants at the door. Then here's this absolutely gorgeous bomb – Juliette, of course - getting fucked by three guys at the same time. And there were at least five more guys who were so hot for her that they were just sitting around and watching her get fucked and waiting their turn while they beat off or got sucked off by some other slut, who maybe was getting fucked by some other guy. Even if 'phro-mone had never been invented, I would have had an instant boner.

She was slim, small tits, average height. But she was all legs and arms with gigantic green eyes and thick, wild, bright red hair. She hadn't bothered to take all her clothes off, but probably hadn't been wearing much to begin with. Her tiny, pink pleated skirt was flapping around her waist, and she was wearing matching pink shoes with really high spike heels. Anything else she might have had on when she arrived had long since disappeared into the pile of clothing on the floor.

This particular mingler was in an unused storeroom on the seventh level of the mostly abandoned Ohio sector. The room was about 200 square meters, give or take, and there were probably 30 people there: about fifteen guys (half of them all over Juliette) and ten girls. Plus another five I wasn't sure about, because I couldn't tell from their appearance and couldn't see their equipment.

Oh yeah, and there was one dead guy. A lot of older men, like in their 20s, get over-excited at minglers and cash it in. This particular guy couldn't have been dead long because his huge cock was still showing a healthy, rock-hard response to the 'phro-mone. Stiff as he was, he couldn't cum, and that actually made him pretty popular with a few of the girls, probably more than when he'd been alive.

At a 'phro-mone mingler you don't have to wait for introductions to stick your cock into an empty hole. But I couldn't get anywhere near Juliette that night. She was always mobbed by other guys. And I was only nine and a half at that point. Not exactly large for my age either. So I wasn't about to force my way through a crowd of sex-crazed men. But, you know, I'd be damned if I was going to just stare at her and jerk off, so I fucked three or four other girls. I was always watching Juliette out of the corner of my eye though.

I remember the first girl specially well: a short, pretty, dark-skinned bim with long golden hair and bright blue eyes. She had big breasts and wide hips, sturdy arms and legs and not a speck of fat on her body. When I first saw her she was lying face-up on top of a big guy whose thick cock seemed to be five centimeters further than all the way up her gorgeous ass. She was wearing nothing but high-heeled boots and heavily-jeweled earrings that hung down to her shoulders. Her eyes were squeezed shut and she was tossing her head from side to side and clenching and opening her hands in some kind of ecstatic fit.

Everything after that must have been at least partly the result of the drugs - I think it was black sun that time - but some of it had to be real, too.

Her brown, little cunt was opening and closing like a tiny, frantic mouth, and suddenly I realized I could read lips. "Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me," it pleaded silently. I looked again. "Oh, God, stick it in! Fill me up! Stretch me 'til I rip!" her pussy begged. Her super-stiff, twitching clit was pulsing and glowing as if it were about to burst.

I suddenly noticed a series of glowing tattoos. Small, multi-colored, down-pointing arrows, starting at her bellybutton, lit up one after the other, running across her pubic area and ended at her dripping cum-dump. I got the hint. My cock was so bloated, it turned a shining, psychedelic blue.

Her hips were pumping quickly up and down, making her cunt a moving target. I positioned myself between her widely spread legs, aimed and pressed the tip of my cock against the wet mouth. Instantly, her hips stopped moving. Her eyes flew open, locked on mine and began to draw me in, like some sci-fi tractor beam. Millimeter by millimeter, her hungry pussy slowly swallowed my hard cock as if it were a snake eating its trembling prey alive.

Things only got more intense from there. Alternately, I was a wild animal violently taking a frenzied mate, a dying star giving off cosmic bursts of energy, a thermonuclear missile hurtling toward a rich city-paradise.

I never saw the face of the guy who was fucking her ass, but we got to know each other pretty well. Our pricks met and communicated through the thin membrane separating them. They wordlessly exchanged fantasies, coordinated their thrusts and generally arranged their activities so as to provide maximum pleasure to all three of us.

We all came at the same time, and there are no words to directly describe the bliss we experienced. There are only metaphors, and even they don't do justice to the power of the euphoria or the depth of the satisfaction. While the orgasms lasted, they seemed like they had gone on forever. After they were over, it seemed like they had happened in another life.

After resting a minute or two, I danced with, then fucked, a tall, curvy brunette whose cunt had been surgically tightened. It was almost impossible to get in but, once youwerein, it was even harder to think of a reason not to spend the rest of your natural years there. After her, it got hard to tell the difference between what I was doing and what I was watching, but I think I might have gotten a blow job and fucked somebody's asshole, hopefully, a girl's.

Then, when the vaporizer broke down and the drugs wore off and everyone else collapsed from exhaustion, I still had some energy left because I hadn't been there so long. I walked over and picked Juliette up in my arms. Even though she was pretty much unconscious, she was able to point to a couple of items of clothing she wanted me to take for her. They probably weren't hers, but no one really cared.

She smiled vaguely, snuggled mostly naked against my shoulder and fell back to sleep. And I carried her to a safe sleeping place that only Frankie and me knew about. Mars is a real shit-hole, but there's one good thing about it. There's not a lot of gravity, so even a runt like me can pick up a girl and carry her off to his cave. And that's how I met Juliette. Okay, so I lied about the no-romance thing. But I promise there ain't no more after this.

Our sleeping place was there in Ohio, on a level one level down from the lowest level. It was so special that Frankie and me promised each other not to tell nobody about it. We found it one day when we were exploring the lowest level, looking for something to eat or something to get high on or something to sell, and we saw a door that just seemed to be out of place. Things are set up in a real organized way here on Mars. The sectors mostly have the same layouts and the residential and commercial parts of each sector are set up in repeating patterns. And there shouldn't have been a door there, but there was.

It was locked, but Frankie picked it and, when it opened, we saw a set of stairs leading down. We went in and closed the door behind us. At the bottom was a short stretch of corridor and then another door. This one was double wide. Over it was a big sign, which at one time must have been all lit up, saying, "Atlantis Club".

We'd obviously stumbled on what used to be an illegal drinking club. For a while, during one of the famines, alcohol had been banned because they thought it was a waste of grain, which was in short supply. There'd been a lot of places like this in the fringe sectors. This one must have been abandoned when drinking became legal again because, by then, Ohio Sector was pretty much empty except for the human trash, like Frankie and me. And we're not exactly your high-rent club customers.

At the door the corridor turned to the left and disappeared into darkness. Frankie tried to pick the door, but it was tricky and even he would have had to work at it for a minute or two. So instead, we walked into the darkness. After a while, the corridor turned to the right. Then it ended at another door. This one Frankie could pick right away. We walked into a small, dark kitchen. The power was out, so when I hit the switch, nothing happened. Frankie lit one the candles he always carried when we were exploring, and we walked through and into the main room of the club.

Frankie held his candle high and we saw a pretty large room with a bar, ten or twelve tables and an equal number of booths lining the walls. The really amazing part was on the walls, but we couldn't see it yet. Still, we decided right from the start to keep the place secret.

Like I say, the power was disconnected down there when we moved in. The big problem with that was that it was freakin' cold. So the first thing we did was tap into a power cable on the level above to get the heat going. That's when the holo-displays came up on the walls and blew us away. We were surrounded by three-dimensional images like nothing I had ever seen. Water, endless water in all directions. And blue sky above. In the foreground on one wall were good-looking people, houses, shops, animals and old cars and shit moving around, going about their business. But in the background, and on the other three sides, everywhere you looked there was waves and rippling, surging, moving water.

Now there's not much water on Mars. I heard there used to be. But not anymore. The most water I ever saw all in one place was a couple hundred liters at an illegal distillery over in Kansas Sector. So being right in the middle of so much liquid scared me shitless at first. But as we hunted around the place, I got used to it. So did Frankie. Then we discovered the display could be set for different kinds of waves. You could have gentle, little waves, or great, big crashing surf, or a storm, or even a tidal wave (what Frankie called a "sue-naa-me"). We started liking it, and pretty soon we decided to make the Atlantis Club our new sleeping place. That's when Frankie got serious and made me swear never to tell anyone else about it.

What made the club so important was that Ohio is such a dangerous place. It's mostly ruled by criminals and gangs. And don't bother calling the cops if you're robbed or get biffed up. We don't see much of them, except for the occasional mass raid or unless one of them comes around to buy drugs for their own personal use. But the Atlantis Club was a safe place. A place where we could sleep, or hide, or just relax. And safe places are rare in Ohio.

So Frankie was really pissed when he woke up and saw me carrying an unconscious Juliette into the club. But he didn't say anything at first. He just stood up, walked to the center of the room, clenched his jaw and gave me that I'm-going-to-melt-you-with-my-eyes stare of his.

I smiled weakly and said, "I know, Frankie. I know. I shouldn't have brought her here. But I had to. I don't know why. I just had to. I didn't have a choice."

"What's her name?" he asked without unclenching his jaw.

I couldn't tell him I didn't know. Not in the mood he was in. And I certainly couldn't tell him that I hadn't even fucked her or spoken to her. "Juliette," I lied, borrowing the name of a popular soap opera holo-vid star.

"Well, get Ju-li-ette out of here before she wakes up." He spoke her name slowly and carefully, like it was a magic spell which, if he said it just right, would make her disappear.

"I know I should, Frankie," I said, trying not to whine, "But I can't. I really, really can't. I'm sorry. I'll make her promise to keep the secret too. And she's really nice. I'm sure she'd never tell anyone."

Frankie didn't say anything. He just walked back to his bed and laid down. But he didn't close his eyes. He just kept staring at me.

I can be hard as nails with anyone else, but not Frankie. He's the only family I've got and the thought of him turning against me frightens the crap out of me. Which is funny, because I'm supposed to be the tough one. Even though he's a year older, he's even smaller than me. Plus, he reads a lot and he's more sensitive, like a girl or something. But, when he's mad at me, I turn to jelly.

I guess it's because of all I owe him. He's always been the responsible one, remembering the things that needed to be remembered, doing the things that needed to be done, and being there to save my neck every time it needed saving. The thought of having to choose between Juliette and Frankie almost made me sick.But, hey, I thought,maybe I'll get lucky for once. Maybe she'll hate me, or Frankie will like her. Either way, I won't have to choose.

Frankie and me each had our own bed at the club. We'd ripped out the tables from two of the booths on opposite sides of the room. The plastic bench seats were solid to the floor, so filling the space between them with mattresses, blankets, pillows and stuff made cozy, almost private sleeping spaces, enclosed on three sides.

Frankie liked candles better than electric lights. So, when we were at the club, we usually had dozens of candles burning, casting weird and flickering shadows and constantly changing the way the water looked. Frankie also rigged up a number of recorded background sounds, like crashing surf, gently lapping waves, a moaning, echoing sound he called "foghorn" and other stuff like that. He switched back and forth between them depending on the time of day, his mood and other things I couldn't keep track of.