Leslie was instantly attracted to the male martian. Even though his body was the color of terracotta and covered in a coarse, rust-tinted fuzz, he had a face that made her long for the boys of her youth—the gosh, ma'am, you sure are pretty types that opened doors for her and then in the privacy of backseats peeled off her blouses like they were made of butterfly wings. Her nipples hardened at the sight of him bending down to lift the trap-door in the earth. His legs were shapely columns of muscle, his buttocks a tight W at the bottom of his torso. She went wet as he flexed his legs to spring into the hole the door had exposed in the earth. In another second she was alone with Paul on the warm, dead-looking surface of the planet.
"Christ," Paul said. "That thing had the biggest dick I've ever seen."
But that wasn't the weirdest thing about the creature. The people back home weren't going to believe this. Not only was America days away from deciding whether it would be the Kerry-Edwards ticket, leaving George Dubbleyew Bush out in the chilly D.C. night, or another four years of the same, but there had just gone a younger, orange version of the Democrats' wanna-be new Vice President, scrambling beneath the surface of Mars. A pure irony if Leslie had ever seen one, since it had been the Bush goal all along: Americans putting their feet into this rusty soil.
They made for the hole.
Beneath the surface, the martians had carved a world for themselves out of bare rock. But no cold and infertile land was this; instead, grass and trees grew over miles of precipices, stretching until Leslie's eyes gave out. A waterfall pushed over a cliff, filling a clear pool far beneath them all. And thousands of terracotta bodies stirred among each other, mixing on cobbled streets and before vendor booths. These bodies were soft, unlike the creature from the surface in their hairlessness (except along their Venus deltas), in their hourglass figures and pearlike breasts trembling with the smallest movements. Their heads were different also: suppository-shaped, with pointy chins and coarse mops of Ken-doll hair that flashed Leslie back to the previous summer of patriotism attacks and desperation.
She scanned the crowd for him, the martian they'd seen on the surface, but saw only one kind of face—that of the prim new President, the political other half of the beautiful creature she'd seen above ground.
"Where are all the men?" she asked.
"Servicing the court of Her Prevailing Greatness," said a female voice behind her. The female was at least six feet tall, broad-shouldered and ancient, with her carroty skin sagging around her breasts and buttocks. She carried a tall wooden stick with a swirl like a coiling snake at the top and used it to point out the palace's inner room, where they were to be received. "I am Ailia, leader of the council of elders. You must be the human delegates. Enter, please."
There was an orgy going on in the throne room. Not a simple group screw in the shadows of a velvet draped room, but a full-on fuckfest with orange bodies squirming, coiling, bucking, bending, arching, thrusting, bouncing and squeezing in a tangle of legs, arms, cocks and tits. They screwed on couches and on the cold tile floor; on tables, rugs of fine animal fur, and even the throne itself, where a lithe martian female wearing a gold circlet around her head was being pussy-eaten. She sat reared back on the throne with her feet propped on the throne's armrests and her legs bowed open wide. Ailia explained that the woman was the martian High Commander, recently installed after the death of her mother.
The other females in the room were her ladies in waiting—high-born women bred especially to live at court. The men were members of the Commander's harem, though Ailia used another word--one that reeked of exotic pleasures and dream-fulfillment. P'an-trasm. Leslie took a deep nose breath, trying to place the scent that was heavy in the room: spice, and a strange sweet musk—like something juicy cooked with too much cinnamon.
Paul tugged at Leslie's sleeve. "A matriarchal civilization to the extreme," he whispered, nerdily.
Among other annoying traits, Paul had a flair for affirming the obvious. He also had an increasingly jejune way about him, both in their working relationship and in the bedroom. Funny thing about space travel—one way or another, you always ended up getting stuck. In the pod, in the constantly unchanging view of the sparkling universe around you, and especially with each other. Whether you liked your podmate or not, there he was, and Leslie struggled with this. She hated Paul's guts most of the time, because of his incessant throat-clearing, his "nuke-yu-ler" mispronunciations; but after several weeks she realized he was the only thing she'd get her hands on for many months. She started seeing him as something he was probably, for the most part, not: a good-lucking scientist with a terrific cock.
Except that six months into this mission, their lovemaking was like exercise, with Paul's come-ons sounding more like a trainer's motivational speech than a lover's plea. Come on, Les. We haven't had it all week. We're going to forget how it's done. Their first several screws had been wild. Paul drove into her like a man possessed, filling her up with his hard thickness. Now when he came into her room looking for "a scrog," as he called it, she wished herself anyplace but inside that pod.
Leslie watched as the male martian stood up in front of the Commander and pushed his cock gently into her opening. He thrust meekly, like he was afraid of making a mistake—like she held something of his, possibly his life, in her hands. They finished with her coming first, making a series of high-pitched squeaks, and the male emptying his Creamsicle-colored jizz into a silver goblet next to the throne. When they were done, the Commander covered up in a gauzy pink robe and squinted at the visitors.
