The Mating of the Moons — A Reader’s Guide

Don had heard her. His smile was uneasy, though politely tolerant, as all good hosts were to rich tourists. "You're hard to please, Miss Ericson. Maybe too hard." His lingering glance stopped just short of crudity. But the look made it clear that if she wanted the romance all women were assumed to expect at Martian Haven, he could provide it, as he did everything else--discreetly, efficiently and most memorably.

Mrs. Ericson giggled. She had long since abandoned any hope of Madeleine being, even by stretching the norm, a well-adjusted girl. But much faith had been placed in a Martian vacation, and hope that it would provide Madeleine with some sort of emotional preoccupation, even an affair, if need be--something, anything, that would at least make her seem faintly capable of a normal relationship with a male. Even this fellow Don. For Madeleine was past thirty-five--how far past no one discussed any more--and was becoming more tightly withdrawn every day.

Don shouted. "All right, folks! Now we wend our way back to Martian Haven, over a trail that's the oldest in the Solar System, a trail that was once a mighty highway stretching from the inland city to the great ocean that once rolled where now there is only thousands of miles of wind-blown sands!"

The long line of exclaiming and sickeningly gullible tourists, either too young and wide-eyed to know better, or too old and desperate to admit the phoniness, ooohhhed and ahhhhed, and the rickshaws and camels, plus a few hardy adventurers on foot, turned with him as Don twisted his own beast toward Martian Haven.

Even the Ruins, she thought--they were like imported props lying in the sand, like old abandoned bits of a set for a TV production.

"Madeleine," her father said, still trying to be a big brother after years of failure. "I really don't understand this at all. Coming all the way to Mars, and you act like--well--like we'd just stepped around the corner in Chicago to some ridiculous carnival!"

"I am cursed," she whispered. "I'm tortured."

"What?" her mother said, and stared, with that child-like curiosity with which she had greeted Madeleine's advent into the world, and which she had never lost.

"Tortured by the insight that both enables and compels me to see through the sham and pretense."

Her father grunted and blinked twice. He almost always blinked twice when she began sounding pedantic like that. He suspected that she did it deliberately to show off his ignorance.

"Funny," she said, mostly to herself, "that I allowed myself to be sold this--Mars--the biggest piece of ersatz junk of all!"

"Madeleine!" her mother exclaimed.

"The advertisers got here first," Madeleine said, glancing at Don. "The hucksters." She stopped talking. Mars offered none of itself, but the others didn't understand. Mars was only what the hucksters wanted it to be.

She wondered how she could hang on to the end of the season--even though it was only three more days. They had committed themselves to a rigidly-planned schedule, a clockwork program that had them and the other "vacationing" tourists jumping and squeaking like automatons: Exotic Martian sports. Martian tennis played on a hundred-yard court with the players hopping through the rarified air and lower gravity with an almost obscene abandon. Swimming in a strangely buoyant water, called, of course, Martian water. Sandsled racing. Air-hopping with the de-gravity balloons. Spectator sports, including gladiators who leaped into the phony canals and fought to the death against the hideous-looking Martian rat-fish. There were many other "activities", in none of which Madeleine had been able to interest herself.

This last three days promised something called the "Martian Love Ritual under the Double Moons." And a climactic treasure hunt among the subterranean Martian labyrinths. They too, Madeleine was sure, were artificial.

Mrs. Ericson adjusted her polaroid glasses and waved her rickshaw boy into his harness, where his thighs tensed for the long haul. He was an incredibly huge man, taller even than those specially-bred movie stars, who averaged eight feet tall. Madeleine felt faint and clung to her camel. The Martian camels were coughing and wheezing and the sun glared horribly in the early afternoon.

Mr. Ericson looked with guarded apprehension at the six-legged camel. Don pulled him aboard. "What a helluva beast!" laughed Ericson. Earth camels specially bred by the big travel agencies to have a so-called "unearthly" appearance. Sad creatures with two extra, dangling limbs and a single, half-blind, blood-shot eye, watery and humbly resentful.

Pathetic mutation, Madeleine thought. Like those horrid rat-fish, like the canals and the games and the ruins and those silly rituals. All ersatz.

The caravan moved along the high ridge, a narrow trail that wound back toward Martian Haven along the edge of the eroded cliffs.