9

Of course, literary-minded purists like Jane were not the only Martians who did not teep. There was also a class of Martians—considered degenerates by the rest of Martian society—among whom resistance to teeping was more common. These degenerates were what the Martians called addicts.

The Martian concept of addiction is notoriously incomprehensible. Indeed, most scholars now believe that the Martians themselves did not have any clear idea of it. Undoubtedly, the term referenced a compulsive behavior, most often centered around the ingestion of some substance. The great difficulty in understanding this concept comes not from what the Martians thought it was, but what they liked to believe it wasn’t.

For, you see, the Martians seemed to arbitrarily agree that some addictions didn’t count, while others did. The result was that in the former cases, the Martians created a society that supported the pursuit of the addiction, and that attempted to deal with its adverse effects, while in the later cases, they ensured that the addiction would ruin lives.

As an example, I will point to the curious case of what they called sugar. This substance was refined from the stalk of a species of grass that grew in swampy areas. At the time of First Contact, most Martians were addicted to this substance with sweeping consequences. Consuming it in the highly refined form that was most popular resulted in a host of health problems which they had created an elaborate industry to mitigate and manage. Yet, they never made any real effort to reduce its consumption in their society.

The list of these addictions that they denied was indeed quite lengthy; certainly, none of them admitted that they were addicted to language. Instead, the Martians liked to point to a relatively small group of people whose addiction to certain chemicals the society chose not to support at all, but to actively amplify its negative effects. The result was that these people appeared to have very little control over their life circumstances.

Such an addict was the Martian, John Rae.

Although most people are familiar with Rae as the star of Buffalo Bill’s Outer Fringe Show, or perhaps as the terrorist leader of the Martian resistance, relatively few are familiar with the interesting events of his career prior to becoming the most famous Martian to visit the Alien homeworld.

He was born in a rural place they called Alaska, and was raised by his father in a small cabin in the woods. Rae was a talkative child who had no one to talk to. So he talked to trees, and that kept him sane, but as he passed through adolescence, he began to fear that he was unimportant.¹ And so he decided that he wanted to talk to someone else. He ran away from home. In Martian society, it was expected that youths maintain a role of subservience until their elders determined that they were an adult and set them free. When a child attempted to seize this freedom for themselves, and this is what was termed running away.

Rae traveled south toward the great Martian metropolises. He had no money, but he survived by talking. Rae talked to everyone he met. His unpretentious friendliness endeared him to most, and his rude wilderness practicality made friends of the rest. But alcohol was the true lamp unto his feet. This toxic substance, native to many Martian societies, was manufactured by fermenting vegetable matter. When consumed, it produced in the Martians a brief euphoria followed by lethargy and depression.

It is likely that Rae had a fondness for alcohol before he ran away. However, he certainly consumed alcohol copiously once he began to travel, and after he realized that it wasn’t that difficult to live on his own, camping in the woods or on a beach or beneath a bridge. He wandered about for some years, and became an alcoholic because he did not have strong motivations in any other direction. Alcohol won by default.²

Eventually he arrived in the city called Los Angeles. This Martian city was famous for its pleasant weather and the great number of celebrities who resided there. Rae settled in Los Angeles for neither of these; he fell in love with a woman.

Her name was Sara and he met her one afternoon in a hole beneath the roadway. The hole was accessed by crawling through a broken grate that was hidden behind dead thornbushes. It was known as Dave’s hole, and was kept delightfully cool by the mysterious workings of some subterranean pipe, even though the roadway above was usually quite hot. Rae and several other people lived in this hole because they did not have domiciles of their own.

It seems that it was a great disgrace in this Martian society to be without access to a domicile. The reasons for this taboo are somewhat of a mystery. The most likely explanation is that the Martians used houses to store and display the wide array of material they were forever collecting—what they called their stuff—and when one did not have access to a domicile, it severely curtailed this Martian ability to hoard.

Indeed, it was just this Martian [tendency] to hoard that the Aliens used as their entree into Martian society. The Aliens recognized that the Martian backwardness would have made them suspicious of teeping if they weren’t already familiar with the Aliens. Selling useless junk to the Martians proved to be exactly the cultural bridge required to access the Martian attention markets.

Whatever the case, Rae spent most of his days drinking alcohol in Dave’s hole. Consuming alcohol was the bond that brought Rae and Sara together. She came down to Dave’s hole because the man she was currently with had been invited down by Albert One-Eye. Albert One-Eye told this man to come down because he knew that the man had just bought a liter of rum. He lied to the man, saying that they had a bunch of beer down there, calculating—correctly—that once the man came down out of the dreadful afternoon heat, he wouldn’t want to leave.

Dave’s hole was dark except for the weak light of someone’s electronic screen, which was continually switching off. By these fleeting glances Rae first saw Sara, and did not remark her any more than the man she was with. But as the afternoon wore on and the rum in the jug went down, he began to appreciate her calm silence. She was not a person given to speech. After the jug was empty and everyone else had succumbed to the toxins in the alcohol and lost consciousness, Rae sidled over to her and asked, ‘You want to go out and get some beer with me?’

‘Okay,’ she said.