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**"Exhausted Hearts Under Thin Skies"**
*(A Martian Romance with Tapes and Terminalia)*
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The sun on Mars never warmed anything, really, but it painted the red dust gold for a moment. And in that moment, two mufflers—chrome-scarred, rattling old things—met for the first time outside the abandoned biodome near Elysium Planitia.
They had names, or at least resonances.
**Hzzzz-Tikk** was the sleeker one, recently unbolted from a forgotten rover.
**Clankaline** had served a drillbot that no longer drilled.
They didn’t speak at first, just idled gently beside one another, letting the rust curl in the wind. Then Hzzzz-Tikk popped in the first of five c90 tapes from the **RAH IBIE "All Hall Be Vell"** box set—Tape A: *Subvocal Aether-Litany*.
The tape loop warbled like leaking memory. The insert, jammed between their brackets, flapped gently.
> “So…” Clankaline began.
> “You got a catalytic converter, or are you just happy to excrete residual particulates?”
They laughed—mechanical, but true.
Over Tape B (*Ooze Canticles for the Lost Appendix Dorsalis*), their talk deepened.
> “Generally,” Hzzzz-Tikk murmured, “the first seven abdominal segments of adults lack appendages.”
> “Right,” Clankaline sighed, “But in apterygotes? Bristletails? Total outliers. They’ve got *styles*. Little leg-things. Cute, honestly.”
> “And don’t forget their *exsertile vesicles*,” Hzzzz-Tikk added, vibrating slightly. “Derived from the coxal and trochanteral endites of ancestral abdominal bits.”
The third tape melted into the Martian breeze—looping static interspersed with whispers of insect gills and whisperier longing.
> “You ever think about cerci?” Clankaline asked suddenly.
> “Those annulated filament things on segment 11?”
> “Yeah. Some of them got modified into forceps. For *holding on*.”
They were silent. Dust scoured their chassis. A distant wind scraped across rusted habitat shells.
Tape D: *Terminalia Waltz in Two Segments and One Broken Spring.*
It played slowly, as if aware of its surroundings.
> “Segment 8 and 9 bear the genitalia,” Hzzzz-Tikk whispered.
> “Segment 10 just shows up to be seen,” Clankaline returned, a faint shimmer in her tailpipe.
> “And segment 11… is for holding on.”
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As Tape E (*Echoes from Segment Eleven*) looped a final time, the two mufflers leaned closer, venting softly.
There were no real appendages, no glands or ducts or epiprocts. Just rusted metal, tuned to Martian silence.
But they touched.
Somehow.
And in that brittle air, the median appendix dorsalis of love arose—not from ancestry or structure, but from sound.
**All Hall Be Vell.**
Edition of 1 copy.