Venusian buffalo? It’s really a twelve-foot-long reptile covered with grayish-green fur for camouflage, and a head like an Earth alligator. But don’t you worry, the meat looks just like regular old beef and tastes great when you mix it in with potatoes and carrots and some of my special New New Orleans hot sauce! But first, we gotta skin it. Either of you two ladies care to help me with that?”
“Sure thing,” said Katie. “Daddy showed me how to do the butchering when I could hardly walk. Bet I can do it faster than you!”
“Attagirl! That’s my kind of lady!” Jack punched her on the shoulder. Then, glancing back, he hastily amended, “’Cept for Martian princesses, of course. One particular Martian princess, to be exact. Rachel, why don’t you two get acquainted while Katie and me fix dinner?” He gave Rachel a second, long look from head to foot that made her feel weird inside, shivery and melty at the same time. “You know, Katie is right, you really do look an awful lot like Anya. Well, have fun, girls!”
And Rachel was left alone with her creation. Of course, Jack was hers too, and so was this jungle and the whole planet she was standing on, and maybe Katie as well. But nothing was so completely and obviously hers as Anya, who really did look like an idealized version of herself—a little taller, a little bustier, a lot better proportioned overall, with a much thinner scattering of freckles on her cheeks and jade-colored eyes that positively glowed, even in the muted sunlight. The princess gestured at a fallen log, and Rachel sat down beside her after carefully checking to make sure it wasn’t some other creature she might not have made up.
To Rachel’s consternation, Anya seemed shy and diffident. She struggled with her words, starting to speak and stopping herself several times before she said in Polish, “I am so happy to have found a fellow Martian here in the Venusian jungle, of all places. Things are worse than ever back home.”
Even her voice was a better version of Rachel’s, low and soothing and doubtless very sexy to Jack and any other man in range. Rachel tried to remember what she’d written about Anya’s home world. The princess’s family were the rightful rulers of the Red Planet, but they’d been overthrown more than twenty-five years earlier (fifty Earth years ago). Her father was leading the resistance to “Lord Ares II,” and it had been Rachel’s vague plan to write a novel in which Jack and Anya helped him overthrow the fun-loving but cruel usurper’s son, while also rescuing Jack’s brother Jim “in the nick of time.” Okay, so far, so good.
Rachel said, “Worse? How could it be worse?” Maybe Ares II was holding wild drunken parties on the holy Mount Olympus, or something.
Anya gave her a funny look. “The original Ares at least cared for the outward beauty of our precious Mars, though he crushed our people’s spirit. I admit that some saw it as poetic justice when an unknown soldier of fortune murdered his drunken wastrel of a son and took the throne as Ares III last year.…”
What’s this all about? Better just keep quiet and find out.
“I’d take a fool whose only interest is pleasure over a real tyrant like the new Ares any day,” Anya said. “All he talks about is conquest—‘let the Fatherland regain its glory as the Star of War’—but meanwhile he’s turned the people into slaves and wounded the beautiful desert with mines and factories to build his warships!”
Tears streamed down the princess’s face, and she seized Rachel’s hands. “He uses the Grand Canal to dump toxic waste from his weapons plants!” she whispered. “He’s turned Valles Marineris into a giant prison for those who dare cross him! My own parents may be there—I was tipped off they had been arrested and so I fled the planet before Ares could catch me too. And there are rumors”—she paused and lowered her voice still further, so Rachel had to lean forward to hear—“there are rumors he’s building an altar for human sacrifice on the peak of Olympus Mons, the holy mountain!”
“No!” Rachel gasped. Is this all my fault? It must be! I’m the one who dreamed up this world. What did these horrors say about her imagination? She’d thought she was escaping the world of Hitler and Stalin when she wrote about the jungles of Venus and the deserts of Mars, but wasn’t the “new” Lord Ares really just another two-bit dictator? She closed her eyes and shuddered, imagining what he must look like when he was ranting away in front of his goose-stepping army. When she opened her eyes she saw Anya through a blurry lens of tears. “I will help you,” she whispered, squeezing the princess’s hands. “Of course I will help you! Together, we’ll overthrow the tyrant and put your father on the throne where he belongs!” At that they embraced.
“Come and get it!” Katie hollered.
Jack was right, Venusian buffalo stew was tasty. Not that it would have mattered to Rachel if it wasn’t. Everyone watched in amazement as she put away an entire haunch the size of a Thanksgiving turkey. Well, they couldn’t know what it was like to have to survive for years on bread stretched with sawdust and moldy potatoes, how it could turn a noble, cultured man like her father into an animal scrabbling for survival. Anything that filled the hole where her stomach used to be was a good thing, so let the others stare. As soon as she finished eating, Rachel almost collapsed from exhaustion. It was all she could do to crawl into the leaf-tent Jack had set up before her eyes shut. A few seconds later, it seemed, she woke to Katie shaking her shoulder vigorously.
“Lemme sleep,” she muttered.
“Huh? Don’t talk foreign, Rachel, I can’t understand it.”
“It’s not foreign, it’s Polish,” Rachel snapped. The light seemed unchanged. Oh, right. Venus’s day was actually longer than its year. How odd. When was she going to wake up to the sensible, normal, everyday world of the Warsaw Ghetto? And see her parents again.… She blinked away tears. Maybe the shock of losing them drove me crazy and I’m hallucinating all this. But there was so much detail, and the texture of everything seemed so real. Take that caterpillar crawling along her upper arm. It looked like a thick, gaudy orange crayon, complete with paper wrapper, but it was soft and fuzzy and flexible and moving like an inchworm toward her elbow, opening its mouth to reveal gleaming teeth the size of thumbtacks.…
Rachel’s shrieks brought Jack running, zap-gun at the ready. But when he saw what was the matter he dropped the gun and doubled over laughing, his hands on his knees.
“Aww, you didn’t have to stomp all over a little furbug like that!” he said when he had caught his breath. “Them things only want to play! Those teeth may look scary, but they can’t use them on anything bigger than a moosquito!”
“You mean a mosquito,” said Katie, whose boots had reduced the furbug to orange paste.
“No, a moosquito. Hey, there’s one right now!” He pointed at Rachel’s neck. Rachel slapped frantically, reducing Jack to more helpless laughter. She glared at him. A loud droning in her ear brought her up short. She winced and dodged violently to the side, knocking her head into the sturdy stick that served as the tent’s central support and bringing the whole thing down around her. It was like being smothered by a giant mint leaf.
In rescuing her Jack was treated to an earful of Polish profanity. He raised an eyebrow as he helped her to her feet. “Now I never been to Mars myself, but we have some Martian exiles hangin’ around Afro-Port, and I can tell you I ain’t never heard language like that except from some of the roughest, toughest, meanest astronaut types as ever sailed a freighter out of Phobos. Certainly not out of a lady like you.”
Rachel blushed. “You don’t think the princess heard, do you?”
“No, she’s attending to her toilet on the other side of the clearing. But I hope you watch your language around her in the future, Miss Rachel.”
“I don’t normally talk like that. It’s just that everything here is so—Jack, what’s that on your neck?”
“This?” Jack let something that looked like an enormous wasp with water-bug legs crawl onto the back of his hand. “This, here, is a moosquito like the one that made you knock down the tent. Listen.” He flicked the part that looked like a stinger with his finger and it