John Varley - Red Lightning

by Red Lightning [lit]

  Peter pressed a button, and the airtight shutters drew back very quickly from a wide picture window. We all went over there and could see already that Mars had gotten smaller. I felt a lump in my throat. Sure, it sucks, but it's home... and I wasn't looking forward to getting to a planet which, truth be told, sucked a lot more.

  "May I ask..." Peter was saying, hesitantly. "May I ask, Mr. Garcia, if you have friends or relatives at risk in the tsunami zone?"

  I realized he was talking to me.

  "Call me Ray," I said. I'd spent all my life around porters, which are just like stewards only on land, and I wasn't about to let one older than me call me mister. "Yes, we know a lot of people in Florida, it's where my parents grew up. My grandmother is there..." I couldn't go on. Peter didn't say anything but left the room quietly.

  I went into the first bedroom, where Mom was busy already unpacking our stuff and stowing it away in the various closets and cupboards. I looked around. There was no wide window in here, just a round porthole. There were two folding bunks, like I once saw in a Pullman train car in an old movie. I think Cary Grant was in it. I presumed Elizabeth and I would be sharing the room. All in all, it wasn't as nice as the cabins I remembered from our trips when I was smaller. Now I was a typical Martian teenager, six feet six inches tall, and Elizabeth was about six-two, though she'd never say exactly. Martian girls have some trouble with that, especially around runty Earthie boys. I was pretty sure the bunks were about six feet long, which meant sleeping scrunched up or with my feet hanging over the edge.

  Oh, well. I'm sure Dad could tell me lots of stories about the hardships of growing up poor on Earth if I complained about it, so I wouldn't.

  That's when our roommates arrived.

  The cruise line has a policy of not allowing doubling up in accommodations, just as the Red Thunder Hotel does not allow groups of vacationing college students to share a single room. If you'd ever seen a room after a group of them were through with it, you'd know why.

  However, when Mom sets her mind to something she is a very hard woman to say no to, and while the rest of us were still running around like chickens with our heads cut off – do they really do that? – Mom was busy getting passage on the first flight leaving Mars not only for our family but for the families of other Red Thunder Hotel employees who had relatives in the tsunami zone.

  Others were sharing rooms, too, taking the ship a bit beyond what was the strictly legal complement of passengers, but silly rules are made to be broken, according to my mother. Silly rules, of course, are the ones she disagrees with or that get in her way. The extra souls aboard should have no effect on the ship, which carried enough food, water, and air to make several round trips from Earth to Mars without restocking.

  Well, there was the matter of the lifeboats, but even those could handle a few standees if it came to that, which it never had in the history of passenger space travel except for that fire aboard the Carolina, which was put out within an hour and everyone was off the lifeboats and back at their dinner an hour after that.

  Our suitemates were the Redmond family. I didn't know them very well. The father was a chef. I don't know what Mrs. Redmond did, but the whole family had come to Mars for the high wages.

  The most important thing about the Redmonds though, from my point of view, is that they had three children. There was Anthony, age six, and William, age eight. Then there was Evangeline, age sixteen, one year younger than me. She also just happened to be about six-foot-one, with straight, pale blonde hair and a pale complexion, deep brown eyes, and a real stunner.

  We worked out a shift system for sleeping. Elizabeth and Evangeline got the room from right after dinner to four in the morning, and the brats and I got it from four to noon. After the first night of them fighting in the upper bunk, I mostly wandered the ship while they were pretending to sleep and caught naps during the free hours between noon and eight, much to the annoyance of the maids who wanted to make up the room.

  And, okay, I admit it, I wasn't actually wandering all that time. During the times that Evangeline was awake, I might have been sort of following her around.

  It started as soon as they moved into the suite. Mr. Redmond was so apologetic that I was embarrassed for him. He kept thanking Dad and Mom. They just said, think nothing of it. The brats were running around like hurricanes, smearing the big window with their greasy fingers, knocking stuff over, and making it as awkward as possible for their mother and father to gracefully thank my mother and father.

  It was a bad scene, all around, and I could immediately see that of all of them, Evangeline was taking it hardest of all. She blushed furiously every time one of the little terrors did something noisy or rambunctious and did her best to corral them and make them shut up, which would last until she turned her back. Those kids were into every­thing. So it was What's in here? and How long till we get there? and Stop hitting me! and I didn't hit you! and, of course, always, Mom, Mom, he hit me! pretty much nonstop. And each time Evangeline would cringe.

  I hate this class business, but Dad says there's no way to get away from it. He was on the other end, growing up, not having any money, unable to go to a good school.

  Working class.

  Dad doesn't talk about it a lot. I know it annoys him to think back about it, he'd prefer to focus on the future, but I know it was also hard to have a rich and beautiful girlfriend. I think he wasn't sure of her love for a long time. I think sometimes even now he's not sure of it, though they've been together for years and years.

  Evangeline's family was working-class, no doubt about it, and it clearly bothered her. She went to Nelson Mandela High School, which I'm told is a fine place, certainly better than most public schools on Earth. I know they have a better basketball team than my school does; they beat us every year. Well, they have a larger enrollment. Basically, they have everybody who doesn't go to one of the private academies that the more-well-off Martians, like my family, can afford.

  Money's a bitch. I'm sure glad we have it, but it doesn't bring people together, except within their own class, and that's not good, is it?

  It's especially bad when you think you might be falling in love, and the girl you want to be with is so ashamed of her baby brothers she can hardly bear to look at you.

  I'd have to talk to Elizabeth about it.

  Even for a trip as short as Mars to Earth, you get into a shipboard routine very quickly. Pretty soon, it seems like you've been doing it all your life.

  Memorial and prayer services replaced the normal shows for the first twenty-four hours. But you can only mourn so long, so normal entertainment was resumed fairly quickly. The comedians in the lounges even found they were getting more than the nor­mal amount of laughs, though the audiences were smaller. Not all the passengers were going back to look for survivors, of course. The rest maintained a respectful distance from the emergency passengers at their dinner tables, but they had paid a lot of money for their tickets, and you couldn't expect them to give up their merrymaking just because some people had died on Earth.

  But how many? That was the question. We knew we would not be likely to know much about specific survivors until we got there, but we'd expected to learn more about the scope of the disaster in the first day or two.

  It didn't happen.

  That was almost as shocking as the disaster itself, in some ways. We live in the information age, we're used to a steady stream of it. Sure, in the first hours after a big event the news is dominated by rumors or flat-out inaccuracies, but usually the true story begins to emerge fairly soon.

  We were learning some things. No tsunami can keep helicopters and airplanes out of the air. But governments can.

  Many of us were gathering in a Starbucks near the observation lounge that had been converted into a meeting place that was more or less restricted to those of us "going home" to see about our loved ones. We found it was better to sit together and watch the news on the multiplex screens on the wall rather than explore in the isol
ation of our personal stereos. The coffee was better, too.

  It was certain that at least half a million people were dead. There were rumors that the various governments involved, in particular the United States government, were sup­pressing casualty figures while they frantically tried to find a way to cope with the situa­tion. There was no question that it would be handled, in time, that all the bodies would be gathered up and disposed of – there were rumors of mass graves, of vast funeral pyres. There was no question that all the debris would eventually be bulldozed out of the way and burned or recycled.

  One big question was, who was going to pay for all this? And another question: What are we going to do with the survivors who have lost everything, including the clothes on their backs? Until somebody had a better idea of the answers to those questions, those in power were trying to limit knowledge of just how bad the problem was. That was the buzz on the wires, anyway. And that, of course, just made the rumors buzz all the louder, and made them more and more dire. I heard a reputable newscaster speak of 20 million dead. Then I didn't hear from him again.

  First, of course, there was the matter of digging in rubble for people who were trapped, and of flying in food and water. That had been easier in highly localized disas­ters, like Islamabad and New Delhi. This one was spread out over such a vast area that much of it was still chaos, and likely to remain that way for quite a while.

  We all watched tape of the wreckage from the Everglades to Cape Cod taken from aircraft, until they stopped showing it. "Out of respect for the dead," was what the United States President said, but there were other opinions. Very little was coming from the ground. People would make their way out of the zone of destruction and post their per­sonal tapes and someone would pick it up and it would be all over the cybernet for a while, then mysteriously vanish. Newscasters were reporting that big parts of the net were being shut down, those that weren't already crippled by the wave itself.

  The net is mysterious in many ways to most of us. We experience it quite simply: Step One: we put on our stereos. There is no step two. Putting on your socks is quantum physics compared to entering cyberspace.

  But that's because it's evolved over the years. Mom and Dad tell me of when they were very young, and you used equipment so large it had to sit on a desk. You had to plug it in, or if it was battery-powered, you used a battery the size of a book, and had to change it or charge it every couple of hours. Before their time you had to run an actual wire to your computer. The data transfer rate was unbelievably slow. You couldn't send moving pictures. Even before that, you couldn't send pictures at all. People transferred data at the rate of two hundred bytes per second. I'd just as soon chisel my messages onto stone tablets and put them on the back of a mule.

  Because it's so easy and invisible, we don't think much about how it works. But it's there, undercover, often underground, in the cellars of big buildings in cities, in broadcast towers in the country, and, of course, the satellites overhead.

  Only the satellites weren't affected by the tsunami. Many central routing stations had been flooded, many towers knocked over. The rest of the system, trying to take up the slack in a period when traffic was almost ten times normal because of the disaster with everyone trying to access the same sources at once... well, it never completely crashed, but it was now chugging along like a steam engine patched with bubble gum and Band-Aids. There was no hope it would be back to anything like normal soon.

  More basic than that, the electrical grid was down for much of the East Coast of America. Even in places where the wave didn't reach, the outages and disruptions had crashed the system. Many places within a hundred miles of the coast didn't have electric­ity. As for the coast itself...

  The water had roared up river valleys and surged over floodplains, a term that now had a new definition, as places that hadn't seen seawater in a million years or more were suddenly inundated with twenty feet of it. We had seen endless footage of it, and like the old footage of the wave of '04, the first thing that often struck you was... where's the water? What you saw was a tumbling wave of wreckage, cars and trucks and furniture and walls, surging, swirling, tumbling, breaking apart, crashing together, getting chopped finer and finer. We saw footage of the coastal cities with storm wrack floating at third-floor level, or fourth-floor, Or sixth floor.

  The Blast-Off annex was ten stories high. We looked and looked, no longer able to surf cameras on our own but dependent on what coverage there was from helicopter cameras, but never seemed to be able to spot it. We did see a lot of tall buildings in Flor­ida that had fallen over, including a thirty-story condominium tower in Fort Lauderdale, and a few that were leaning, the backwash of the wave having sucked the sand out from under the foundations, many of which were later found to be not up to county building standards.

  "Typical Florida," Dad said.

  I don't want to be prejudiced here, and I know that, although America got it bad, the Caribbean got it worse. Some little islands were scoured almost down to the rock. The Bahamas were in terrible shape, survivors coming down from the highest ground many days after, starving and thirsty and injured. There were deaths in Africa from Guinea to Morocco, and in the Canary Islands, and Portugal, and even in England and Ireland. There were some passengers from those places, and we commiserated with them just as they did with us. But most of us were from America, born or naturalized, and that's where we looked the most. And again, though water had surged up the Potomac and the Hudson, though the wave had swept through the financial district of Manhattan and killed many people on Staten Island and in Brooklyn, and the coasts of Connecticut and Rhode Island, the worst damage was in a horrible swath from the Florida Keys to the Chesapeake Bay. And in the middle of that was Daytona Beach.

  Hour by hour we got heavier.

  At first it was easy bouncing up forty decks to the dining room in the morning for breakfast, and just a little bit harder for lunch, and just a tad harder for dinner. But by the time of turnaround (which took ten minutes in weightlessness and resulted in the usual quota of scrapes and bruises) we were up to .75 gee, and breakfast was getting to be a bit of a slog. At lunchtime I was breathing pretty hard by the time I reached the seventieth deck, and even coming down wasn't a walk in the park.

  About the only consolation: Mom was looking a bit haggard, too.

  By breakfast the next morning I was starting to get a bit worried about Dad. He was covered in sweat and almost too tired to eat by the time the waffles and eggs Benedict and bacon was set before him.

  "Which is part of the problem," Mom said quietly, as she dug into her oatmeal. Dad glared at her but didn't say anything. Mom isn't a nagger, I'll give her that, at least not where Dad is concerned. She'll say something like that once, then not mention it again. "He can dig his own grave if he wants to," she once told me, when she was particularly angry about how Dad would slack on the daily exercise.

  Any Martian with any sense will be under a doctor's care during a return trip to the Earth. Dad has sense; it's just that he's like me, he hates to exercise, and since he's an adult without Mom cracking the whip over him, he can get away with it. Last time we went to Earth he worked hard for three months before we boarded ship. This time caught him off guard, and his heart didn't like it.

  The Sov didn't have anything like a fully equipped hospital, designed as it was for trips never taking longer than eight days. But there were two doctors on staff, and three Martian doctors going home for the emergency. We visited every day, as a family, as it was a bit of a cattle call with all the people needing to be monitored. So Mom and Eliza­beth and I all got to stand in the diagnostic machines and get a clean bill of health, and we all – plus everybody else who might happen to be standing around – got to hear the doc­tor tut-tut the way some doctors do and tell Dad he had only himself to blame for his shortness of breath. He wasn't a Martian doctor; a Martian would have been more under­standing.

  "You're basically quite healthy for a man of your age, Mr. Garc
ia," the doctor said on our visit shortly after turnaround. "But you need to lose about twenty-five pounds, and you know that will feel like sixty extra pounds when you get home. You don't need to worry about your heart right now, but if you keep up this way for another ten years, you will. For now, I recommend you take it easy and be sure to get plenty of fluids when you get to Florida. Heat exhaustion is your chief peril."

  What an asshole. Dad stood there and took it, and the next morning he had a bowl of cereal and spent an hour in the gym.

  Close your eyes. Be very quiet. You are getting very sleepy. I want you to imagine that your arms and legs are getting heavier. Heavier and heavier. Imagine yourself lying in a warm bed (forget about those two brats running around the room)... okay, imagine a bubbling brook, surf lapping gently on the beach. You're getting heavier. Your eyelids weigh five pounds. Your face weighs ten pounds. Your arms weigh a ton. Your head weighs ten tons. Now sleep, sleep, sleep, and it will all go away...

  Now wake up!

  Too bad. It wasn't a dream after all. You swing the iron diver's weights on your feet over the side of the bed, only there are no weights there, sit for a moment while your chubbier identical twin settles himself on your shoulders with his hands holding your cheeks to pull them downward, struggle to your feet, and thud your way across the room under one full gee of deceleration. You go to the window and press your forehead to it and look down at the Earth, which looks like a blue-and-white beach ball. It would look a lot prettier if you could forget that it would pull at you just as viciously as this decelera­tion is pulling at you, they aren't going to ease up on it just for a bunch of Martians who would really appreciate it.