Slaves of Mars

Is this Mars, or the place in Hades

set aside for sodomites...?

No warning. Head bounces off the reflex-padding, hits the control flexure at an impossible angle, then ricochets back. Caught in a lightning stress-field where living weaving light stabs through the cabin, silver jointless fingers scratch out black shadow, knives ripping black silk, squiggling in a nest of wriggling worms. The shuttle upends, loses the last of its spin, hurtles itself surface-wards under increasing acceleration. Wall becomes ceiling, ceiling becomes floor in a shrill screech of alien atmosphere and retro thunder. Gnawing his lower lip until it bleeds, the sound of heartbeat loud in his ears, Homer Tresco frantically fights bucking controls, trying to steady the abrupt back-flip somersault trajectory. A burst of incandescent flame above and ahead. A slight braking. Orange-red terrain hurtles up into towering sapphire cliffs. There's barely space for thought before impact. It wasn't meant to be this way. Blackness has the texture of dark heavy cloth.

Fire-alert pulses. Sparks dance and flare in recycled air. To come all this way, just to get crisped. But wait, the lock is smashed open. He should have torturously depressurized and be freeze-dried already. His fear stinks of choking acid. He rams debris and flaring wires clear to heave himself up, rips his jacket, and clambers out. No suit. No insulation. EVA was spaced to follow safe touchdown on a more leisurely schedule. Not like this.

Too warm for comfort. Flames scorch back of him. He runs and keeps running, feet sinking deep in slithering spongy grit at every step. Once clear, he stops. Turns, facing his own footsteps, curving away back. The shuttle is smouldering nose-deep in storming sand. In a wild and wavy tract of moss-crusted heath, with wobbling ochre fern tongues, blotched into explosions of vivid orange lichen, with skeletal trees set far apart, tall yellow darts topped with whispering foliage.

Mars? This is not possible. The shock stress-field impact must have jerked the shuttle through a random time scramble, a meaningless wrench out across some dimensional event horizon. To where? To when? And how long until he's pulled back into his own space-time?

But even as he watches there are two figures out of narcotic nightmare, evidently attracted by his explosive arrival. Extravagantly garbed, but red-skinned humans, riding a huge multi-legged scorpion beast with a crab-like gait, its vicious barbed sting-tail curled high above the armoured rear rider. They dismount and begin poking around the wrecked ship.

Edgar Rice Burroughs, thou shouldst be here at this hour.

When they begin to smash at the discs and aerials, Homer Tresco lurches forward, yells 'Stop!' This equipment is his lifeline to the mothership, if it's still up there, still orbiting in this alien continuum.

They spin, blades drawn. As he closes he can see they wear gold amulets and armbands, with ornate greaves, their dark hair coiled in dreadlocks, but otherwise naked.

'Wait, you don't understand what you're doing' he gasps, reaching out in appeal. They obviously consider the ship just raw material from which to loot blades and rods for fashioning into weaponry. Lower Martian gravity should enable athletic feats of strength and daring, yet his limbs have yet to learn that lesson.

The two grinning... what to call them? Martian warriors, separate, circle around him from both sides, he's glaring wildly from one to the other. Their well-muscled bodies are hairless and bronzed. Either from natural pigmentation, or exposure to raw unshielded radiation. He's trained, but weak from zero-gravity and shock. The huge beast cranes its terrible head so scarily close he can smell its foul breath. They're taunting with sword-thrusts, laughing at his obvious distress. He lunges, kicks out. They dodge aside with contemptuous mocking ease, and catch him a vicious blow across the temple with a sword-hilt. He's retching, down on his knees in the grit, their blades cutting away what's left of his uniform. They're gripping him tight, holding him down. No. No.

Wrenching his legs apart. They are sexually aroused, lubricating with saliva. He screams. There's no relief. Bucking and writhing in terrified desperation as the first one takes him. Then the other. Absurdly, his own body reacts to the enforced intimacy. The long months of celibacy while spiralling out from Earth, bursts unleashed like a roaring drug through his bloodstream. Not since that smooth-skinned overnight friend in Fort Lauderdale two weeks before lift-off. He's gasping and groaning out the sensations that shock through every cell of his body. The orgasm leaves him sobbing in foetal nudity.

Afterwards they calmly squat down, ransacking panniers slung over the beast's horny back and produce packs of food they begin eating. One of them tosses a grey-brown chunk across to him. Suddenly wracked by desperate hunger he crouches up and tries it warily. It tastes of compressed fungus, tangy, not unpleasant. He bites it back and swallows. It induces a vague giddiness, a sense of drunkenness detachment. They pass him a flask of lukewarm water he gratefully gulps at.

At least it's evidence they don't intend killing him. Not yet. Unless he's already dead, and none of this is real? If he's still concussed, sprawled over the shuttle console, oxygen-starvation feeding him nightmare dreams? WAKE UP! WAKE UP! Or this world is the final flicker of awareness in his dying brainstem, a few moments of objective time distorted into surreal imaginings that endure a subjective lifetime? How is it possible to know? Can the dead taste food? Can the dead feel this moist inner ache left by their physical invasion of his body?

On that awful teenage day when his Mom came home unexpectedly to discover him and his schoolfriend lying naked on his bed, alternately dipping their heads to suck each other, she'd screamed 'There's a place in Hades set aside for sodomites.' That curse stayed with him. That terrible warning. He was tormented by big guilty fears with no names, all his life he'd fought his own cravings, his own skin-crawling needs. Perhaps she'd been right all along, and now he's paying for his sins, and this ghastly place is the Hades set aside for sodomites?

They tether his wrists, attach the cord so it's hooked around the creature's saddle. Then they mount up and resume their interrupted journey, dragging the prisoner in their wake. As though he's property. The beast's scuttling pace is not great, but relentless. Several reptilian shapes circle in a predatory way far above them, burned black against the sky. His eyes have difficulty adjusting to the odd quality of its bright sunlight. Gauzy drifts of spherical bladders ride the desert thermals. While each dragging step takes him further from the shuttle. If the mothership sensors pick up its traces, he'll no longer be there.

Wending torturously above the sheltering level of sapphire cliffs they emerge onto vast desert emptiness. An ochre land that stretches all the way to the mauve sky. The possibility of colour reduces. Strange birds circle, taking stock of them. If he were to escape here, there's nowhere to escape to. Only to return to the shuttle and await a rescue that will likely never come. A rescue across a mesh of alternate worlds?

The last rags of cloud melt away. From the tops of each dune a fire-spray of sand smokes against the sky. Even the colours are different now, and there are less of them. They are surrounded by endlessness. An inclination to think that the dunes slope and curl away into endless permutations that merge, eventually, only into horizon. Yet his captors must be heading purposefully somewhere, they must have had a destination in mind when they were distracted by the blazing comet of his shuttle, and detoured to investigate. So it's worth hanging with them. At least until a better opportunity presents itself.

Yet eventually, visible far off across the flat and sour desolation, he can discern the shell of what had once been a massive rambling stronghold straddling a steep natural crag, one great tower collapsed in avalanche down towards a straggling tumbledown town of dour grey stone huddled around it like a beaten dog awaiting new kicks, where furtive window-slits watch wary of fresh dangers. The knife-cut of two dry canals converge in the rubble-strewn dryness. An intersection that provides evidence of former trade and prosperity. He's exhausted, his feet cut and bleeding from tramping the grit. The pathway winds beside the dirt-silted waterway between the fallen and scattered remnants of other earlier structures, once galleries, unpaced staircases, part-reinforced with cyclopean stone cannibalised and dragged from the towers.

Before going further they tether the beast outside the ruins of an empty villa where it contentedly crops at spiny weed tangles, while the three men rest within the shadows, feeling the old stone cool against their naked flesh. Inside there are tombs descending into a complex of dusty catacombs and subterranean crypts, while above them, the bare bones of roof-supports bend inwards like crooked knees, or thrust apart like wide appealing arms, depending on your perspective. They're speaking in the rapid clipped dialogue he'd learned to recognise. Indicating him every now and them, as though they're discussing his fate. When they indicate they want oral sex Homer no longer has the strength or the will to resist, and simply crouches compliantly to satisfy their demands. Their pulsing warmth fills some of the aching void within him. Night falls into a sky crazy with vivid stars -- the pendant blue spark of distant Earth, and the rush of two small moons. He sleeps a fatigued dreamless sleep, disturbed only by shadows moving in the crypt's deeper darkness.

Waking is like coming up from dream itself. The nightmare that should have been blinked away, continues. His captors re-tether his wrists behind his back, attached to a shortened leash, and they prod him out into the vicious Martian dawn. They head in towards the still-living centre of the town, gathered fearfully around the base of the immense fortress. At first there are hovels adapted from gaps in older ruins with screens of woven colour, then newer structures with sagging awnings and lazy pennants announcing trade and barter. Although his attention is drawn to five bulbous towers that give every evidence of more recent construction. Before he's tugged away into a bustling market square at the centre.

A crowded circle of craft emporia, metal-shapers, bone-carvers, chronometer-tinkerers, blade-sharpeners, lens-polishers, sellers of spy-glasses, gems and textiles. There are people bartering and haggling for baskets of multihued fruit and jugs of wine. Three musicians on the corner play endlessly strange ululating music on a variety of curved pipes. Other people sit around in animated conversation or play games of skill with carved white figures. Boys steal fruit from the stall when the grocer is looking away, and oldsters wrapped in shawls squat cross-legged in the shade and drowse.

It's only gradually that Homer becomes aware that they're all male, even those in diaphanous gowns with lurid painted faces and outlandishly coiffed hair styled with tiny bells. They're all of the same red-skinned Martian race, and they're all male. A few of them look up in idle curiosity at the pale naked Earthian dragged into their midst. None of them spare more than a glance. He's nudged across the square towards a kind of holding pen, where his captors get into deep conversation with a huge hulk of a man he later learns is named Al-Thurl. They keep pointing at Homer while gesticulating. The hulk approaches him, making a close appraisal, as though he's purchasing a horse, forcing his mouth open to check his teeth, running fingers down his spine experimentally, forcing a finger deep into his rectum. Homer stands stock still, his feet braced. Enduring the humiliation.

Then they get into more intense dialogue, thumping fists on the table for emphasis. Until they erupt into backslapping laughter. A small jingling purse is passed across. The deal has been finalised. His two former captors strut away towards what appears to be a tavern to celebrate their good fortune, while the leash is transferred to the obscenely-grinning new man. Homer experiences a moment of fresh panic, events are moving too fast, he'd almost become reconciled to his enslavement, now it was changing. With new uncertainties. Homer submits to be dragged away sideways down a narrow alley and in through a barred door into an enclosed villa beyond. There's a pleasant coolness within. There are vivid mosaics on the walls showing startlingly explicit homo-erotic art, and rich maroon carpets underfoot. Through an arched portal there's an enclosed cloistered garden with what had once been an ornamental fountain. Until water shortages intervened.

Standing confused, finding it difficult for his senses to adjust, his eyes throb in the back of his skull, as two smiling youths emerge, hairless and naked, guiding him through off a side-corridor into a wet-room. They ease him down into a soft spray. His body aching and dry with desert sun, until their sensual sponging touch ignites ripples of rejuvenating pleasure. He closes his eyes and allows it to flow over him. Water is at a premium on this old arid world. Afterwards they massage lotions into his sores with eagerly probing fingers, sniggering and giggling in a contagiously conspiratorial way.

From there he's led off to a small cell with a single bed, where he sprawls. The door behind him is locked. He lies still staring at the ceiling as understanding dawns. As waves of sobbing fatigue and misery submerge him. As he slips into deep sleep he hears moans, whimpers and sobs of pain from other adjoining cells. His Mom had condemned him to a place in Hades set aside for sodomites. If so, this is the hell she'd cursed him to. He's been sold into a male brothel on a cruel planet. There will be no rescue. This is now his life.

At first the clientele consider his smooth pale complexion an enticing novelty. And as word spreads a sequence of men enter the cell to use him, leaving him aching and sore. Over the coming weeks he's allowed to leave the cell, but not the villa. There are four other cells, plus a reception area where visitors can make their selection of catamites while being served drinks or finger-food. Every now and then a trade caravan arrives in the square, midpoint on its journey across the deserts, and the house is filled with travellers hungry for sex, using him ruthlessly until he's sobbing in wretched misery and flecked with bodily fluids. Weeks blur into months. There's a sparse tree in the corner of the cloistered garden, he watches it bud, then erupt into a glitter of tiny white blooms, as though a constellation of stars has descended to alight on its tired branches. New growth, new hope... even here. He listens. He watches. He memorises phrases, and slowly links them into concepts. He dares befriend a couple of the other inmates, his fellows, until he's able to muddle his way through basic conversations.

Another bond-slave is the dour but learned Borastan, with his long oblong face and high forehead, the copper-skin of his head shaved. An intelligent face, calm and controlled, but with fellatio skills in which he excels. One of the youths who'd helped him bathe is the bright playful Arri, with a tangle of dark hair, he's slightly-built, with a blunt slender penis that sways attractively as he walks. Words are fluid. Understanding is a slippery thing. When Homer sings remembered songs of distant Earth as best he can in cracked baritone, Arri listens, his big limpid eyes catching the yearning sadness. Homer initially understands that Arri is talking about his 'family' who eke out a living on a dirt-farm. But how drought and crop-death had driven them to auction him off as a survival strategy. He accepts their decision without rancour or resentment. But family is the wrong word. Eventually he settles on 'assigned group'.

Borastan was an antiques and curios dealer who made a series of poor investments that left him in debt to powerful interests. His only option was to sell himself to Al-Thurl in ten-year bond-slavery. This town, he says, is called Jeddarh, he scrounges a map from an old book, and indicates their location at the intersection of the two canals. Homer recognises many of the geographical features. In his own future-time there's a Valles Marineris research station. The huge valley gouge is there, visible as a scar across the face of the planet. There are features familiar from probe-data and earlier expeditions. They'd detected evidence of running surface water that existed on ancient Mars, even shallow seas. Here he was living those earlier times.

Human history on Earth is vast, measured in thousands of years. On Mars it endures millions of years, encompassing the rise and fall of entire cultures and warring species that goes back into a mythical past that even they've forgotten. An ancient history of extinctions and devolutions, followed by a gradual crawl back into a new age of cities. With grotesque biota that result from perverted sciences. There are other features he doesn't recognise. The web of irrigation canals that extend from the polar regions, designed to halt the inexorable desertification. The ghosts of Percival Lowell's dreams. And the cities that centre on their nexus-points. Down to the great city of Solis Lacus.

They assume Homer has come from the 'southern hemisphere', where there are still marshland lakes and rumours of strange lost tribes. They have no conception of other worlds. Even when he tries to point out the gleaming sapphire of Earth in the Martian night sky. That strange distant Earth.

'Why are there no females?' he asks.

Borastan ponders the question. As though it's too obvious to be expressed. 'Perhaps it is different in your land? Perhaps you are not aware?' He grunts in deep preoccupation. 'You saw the five towers as you came into the square?'

He nods. 'I saw the towers.'

'The gender imbalance is due to only one birth in a hundred results in a female. Hence they are confined, to exist in the towers, protected, continually drip-fed semen in order to ensure our racial survival. Yet each generation is fewer than the previous one. Such is our fate. This is a dying world. We find solace as and when we can. Which is why we are here, pale-skin Homer.'

Lost of a desolate sadness, Homer takes his comfort with Arri, their limbs entwined, tracing the contours of his smooth hairless body, tasting his moist mouth, the urgent penis. Waking into a confusion of night-darkness, and he's back with the overnight friend in Fort Lauderdale, during his weeks counting down towards lift-off. The breathtaking sex pulsing and raging through his every nerve-end. Which is real? Was there ever another life he lived in a place named Florida? The very word sounds strangely unfamiliar on his tongue. Was that the dream he's waken from?

There's a caravan due. They prepare for an influx of new clientele. But the traders arrive, replenish their supplies, and head out straight away. They're unsettled by stories that spread like wildfire. The Cybrax horde are descending from the polar rim, looting and burning their way through already impoverished desert communities. Some people opt to flee Jeddarh immediately, and join the caravan with creaking over-loaded carriages piled high with their valuables, others talk of retreating into defensible areas of the ruined fortress on the crag while they send out appeals for assistance. A false calm settles over the community. Small groups continue to slip away intent on hiding in secret concealment in remote valleys. An unnatural silence settles across the square. There are few visitors to Al-Thurl's.