John Varley - Red Lightning

by Red Lightning [lit]

  You singin' dem One Gee Blues, as the great Martian folksinger Spider Anson laments. Oh, Lord, why won't you lighten up?

  I met Peter the room steward on my way out that last morning. He looked sympa­thetic, which is more than you could say for most of the Earthie passengers, who liked to pretend they were enjoying the returning weight.

  "Anyone in here need a wheelchair today, Ray?" he asked.

  "I'm fine, but if you could get one for the dude on my back I'd appreciate it."

  He'd probably heard it before, but he laughed anyway. I made a note to remind Dad to be extra generous tipping Peter.

  I made it five decks up the stairs, thought about the twenty-five still to go, and men­tally told my mother what she could do with her lousy stairway rule. I got on the elevator for the first time... and was horrified to find myself graying out just a little bit as we accelerated up toward the dining room. It made me a little sick to my stomach. I'm not sure what it was all about. I had a clean bill of health. But I skipped the regular breakfast and went straight to Starbucks for a coffee and a biscotti.

  There had only been a few people in wheelchairs the day before. Today there were dozens. Some of them would stay in the chairs until they returned to Mars, permanent residents whether they wanted to be or not. The body adapts, and that's not always a good thing. Past a certain age, what you lose you are unlikely to ever get back. I tried to look on the bright side. At least I was walking. I could probably even do a few chin-ups, though not with one arm.

  I joined Elizabeth and Evangeline at a table with a big double latte. They were thick as thieves, and even more so today for some reason. They had some shopping bags on the floor beside them.

  "What up?" I asked.

  "Breasts," Elizabeth said, and Evangeline giggled.

  "How's that?"

  "We've been shopping. Got some support shoes." She took a pair of brown, business­like hiking boots out of the bag and plopped them on the table between us, almost upset­ting my drink. "You might want to do that, too. Those deck shoes aren't going to do you much good where we're going."

  "Good idea. You think they sell anything on the ship to deal with water moccasins?"

  "No, nor water-purifying tablets, nor chain saws, nor emergency flares, nor electric hovercraft. We'll have to get all those things when we get there, if they aren't already sold out. But they have figured out the one item Martian girls are likely to need and probably didn't bring with them because they don't own one." She reached into another bag from Victoria's Secret and brought out a pink bra.

  The three of us broke up laughing.

  "I swear, I don't know how Earth girls put up with it," Elizabeth said, reaching a thumb under her blouse and hooking it under a bra strap. I realized both girls were wear­ing them. You could hardly tell... but I guess I could have told if they weren't. "I've got to get something more practical; these things cut into your shoulders something fierce. Why do they make the straps so skinny?"

  "Sexy," Evangeline said.

  "You think so? Ray, you think that's sexy?"

  "You're asking the wrong dude. I don't know from bras."

  "Aw, come on," Evangeline said, and nudged me with her elbow. "How about this one?" She lifted her blouse and displayed a fetching blue number, and created a bit of a stir among the few Earthies in the place. We Martians are easier about dress than Earthies are. We spend most of our lives indoors, have to wear insulated and heated air bags when we do go out, so clothes are for decoration first and modesty second. There are in fact no laws concerning nudity on Mars, just rules about where it's appropriate. Earth boys get a big kick out of that when they go swimming.

  "It suits you," I admitted. What I didn't admit was that by its very novelty it was turn­ing me on quite a bit. More, in fact, than her bare breasts would have. After all, I'd seen her naked when she came out of the shower in our cabin.

  "Well, it's a new one for me," Elizabeth said. "I didn't have boobs when we left Earth. Now I feel like I've got too much of a good thing."

  "I doubt the Earth boys will think that," I said.

  "Count on it." Evangeline laughed.

  "The saleslady tried to sell us girdles, if you can believe that," Elizabeth said. "I said no thank you. I said, my butt's behind me; if it's gonna go south, at least I don't have to watch it sag."

  Evangeline thought this was the most hilarious thing she'd ever heard, and soon Eliza­beth and I did, too.

  5

  We came in at night. I saw the lights of Las Vegas, Lake Mead, Boulder Dam, then it got too dark to see much. I got a glimpse of the sprawling runway lights of the Area 51 North American Continental Spaceport, and then we were down, and taxiing, and pulling up to the gate.

  Customs took four hours.

  The whole time we were covered by at least three soldiers of the Homeland Security Enforcement Corps in their black uniforms and black Darth Vader helmets, who were almost as well armored as American football players and carried weapons that looked able to shoot down combat helicopters and surely would have atomized everybody standing there if they were ever fired.

  One by one we were shown into private rooms and matched with our luggage, which had already been MRIed and chemically analyzed and scanned for microelectronics and peed on by dogs.

  My stereo was taken from me and I watched as they plugged it into an analyzer and started running exploration programs to see what was inside. I'd known this was going to happen, so I'd cleansed all the stuff that was illegal on Earth, or in America anyway, and archived it back home.

  A customs officer behind a thick shield of Plexi told me to open both my bags and unpack them. I did, item by item, was told to unfold all the clothes and lay them flat on a conveyor. All the other items went through another conveyor. Then I was told to strip and put my clothes on the first conveyor and lie down flat on a third conveyor, which fed me into a tube and out the other end. When I came out I was in a small room with a rack of disposable paper hospital robes.

  By the time I was allowed into a room with hundreds of men wearing paper coats and boots just like mine, I was beginning to wonder how much all this cost and how much extra security it provided. I saw Dad standing by another long conveyor so I joined him and asked him.

  "Who knows?" he said, with a tired shrug. Hours of standing around had taken a lot out of him. He looked like his feet were sore. "Last time through it was rough, but noth­ing like this. They seem to have found another dozen things to be afraid of since we were here last."

  "Technology's gotten better, hasn't it?"

  "Sure, on both sides," he said. "The bad guys..." He chuckled. "The 'evil ones,' who­ever they are this year, are better at what they do, and so are the Homelanders. It seems like every year the people of Earth are willing to accept less and less risk and more and more police."

  The last conveyor belt in this particular circle of Hell cranked into operation and started delivering our possessions. The clothing we'd been wearing was hanging from a moving rack.

  "Just like the old dry cleaners," Dad said.

  At the same time the bags were appearing through a small door. They looked the worse for wear. Some were sprung open, everything inside spilling all over the place. Some looked like they'd been examined by an elephant.

  There was surprisingly little grumbling. The Earthies just sighed in resignation, and we Martians expected no less from Earthies. That's not to say it went smoothly. There were arguments, and one degenerated into a fistfight. There were no Homelanders around to break it up, I guess that at this point they figured we were officially decontaminated and no longer their responsibility. A regular security cop watched until both the fighters were pretty exhausted, then moved in to break it up.

  When I got my shirt I saw that a bottom seam had been ripped open. Damn, they probably got all my microfilm and illegal drugs. Like all my other stuff when I tore it out of the plastic wrappings, it had a chemical smell I didn't want to think about. I figured I was now louse-fr
ee, and who cared if my shorts glowed in the dark? I got my suitcases and opened them to check if everything was there, but who could tell? It was just tossed in, mashed into place, and forced shut.

  I never did find my other sock.

  I'm at a loss to describe Mom's reaction to all this when the family was finally reunited. If she'd been any angrier, steam would have come out of her ears.

  Dad was relieved to see her. They were a little later than us getting through the pro­cess, in fact they were some of the very last women to come out of the dressing room, and Dad muttered to me, "I hope she didn't get herself arrested."

  She didn't, but Elizabeth told me later it was a close thing. That was much later, when we could laugh about it, sort of. Nobody was laughing that night.

  Some women would have been shouting, ranting, lashing out at everybody in sight. You know the type. I've seen a million of them at the hotel, and men, too.

  I've never been treated so shabbily in my life!

  Do you know who I am?

  I demand to speak to the manager at once!

  Mom didn't say a word, though it looked like you could fry an egg on her forehead. In fact, it looked like someone had tried. Her hair was a wreck, and so was Elizabeth's. Both of them were proud of their long, thick manes of hair, and had just had theirs styled aboard ship. It looked like somebody had gone through both hairdos with a dirty garden rake.

  I take it back. She did say one thing.

  "I don't think I'll ever feel clean again."

  "Ditto," Elizabeth said.

  We rented a little cart that held all four of us and our luggage. Dad let me drive it along a long hallway that took us to the departure gates for internal flights in the United States, and without much trouble we boarded a subsonic plane for Orlando.

  It was after two in the morning, local time, when the plane finally took off. Dad was asleep almost the moment he landed in his seat. I was sharing a row with Mom, and I looked at her cautiously. She had piled her hair on top of her head in a way that looked okay to me but probably didn't satisfy her much. She seemed calmer, until you looked at her eyes.

  "So, what do we do when we get to Orlando?" I asked.

  "Play it by ear," she said. She gave me a tight smile and squeezed my hand, then went back to brooding.

  I would have hated to be the next person who got in her way. In fact, I resolved not to be that person. Come to think of it, that's sort of the way I'd lived my life so far. All night long she kept muttering words like police state, fascists, and Nazis. I didn't disagree.

  I spent the night brooding on a problem less futile than trying to figure out how to get back at the Homelanders, one that probably had an actual answer.

  What had hit the Earth in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean?

  At first everybody assumed it was some sort of asteroid. Most astronomers shook their heads on that one, but for a while everyone accepted it anyway. It was easy enough to find a couple talking heads with Ph.D.s to say it was an asteroid.

  Then people began adding up what we knew about it.

  It had been going at around 99.999 percent of the speed of light. That was a big prob­lem right there. Nothing that size had ever been observed traveling even remotely that fast. In fact, the only things humans had ever observed traveling that fast were subatomic particles and starships. And we observed starships from the inside, which was different.

  Out at the far "edges" of the universe – and I put that in quotes, because the universe has no edges, and from any point inside of it you appear to be at the "center" – galaxies have been observed moving at maybe .9c relative to us. But that's the problem, the word relative. From the point of view of a person on one of those galaxies, it was us that was traveling at .9c, away from him.

  There are systems in place ready to fire nuclear bombs at any asteroid that we detect on a collision course with the Earth. But with an object going this fast, what are you going to do? How are you going to detect it?

  Imagine an airplane coming at you at a hair under the speed of sound. You can see it, but you won't hear a thing until it's on top of you, because the sound is traveling along just a little bit ahead of the plane in the atmosphere. It's the same with whatever hit Earth. It was traveling so close behind whatever light it emitted that by the time you can detect it, it's far too late to react.

  Radar? Forget it, radar is even less use than emitted light in detecting something like that. The radar has to reach it and then bounce back.

  Okay, somebody said. We've never detected an object like this before... but maybe that's why! Say it had passed harmlessly between the Earth and the moon, maybe a hun­dred thousand miles away. Would we have even noticed it? Remember, it's not leaving a vapor trail or anything. Is it leaving any sort of trace of its existence at all?

  Hmmm...

  There is the matter of its mass. Not its inertial mass, but the relativistic mass. It gets a little confusing, and my physics knowledge doesn't go much beyond the basic concepts of relativity and quantum mechanics. A basic principle is that, the faster an object moves, the greater its inertia. If I were to toss a bullet at you, it would bounce off your chest. But if I fire it out of a gun, it has lots of inertia and can blow right through you. That's because you've put a lot of energy into it: Newton's First Law.

  Einstein changed that. He found out that your actual mass increases as your velocity increases. You don't notice it except at very high speeds. But the reason a physical object can't ever reach the speed of light, no matter how much energy you put into it, is that its mass would become infinite, and you can't have infinite mass. Not even a black hole has infinite mass, just great density.

  Confusing, huh?

  Anyway, all that moving mass, even if it's going by so fast you'd never spot it, has perturbing effects on the objects it passes. It's not going to shake the Earth or the moon out of their orbits, but if it passes close enough to a small satellite, it ought to give it a tug. Not a big one. Extremely tiny, in fact, but there were enough man-made orbiting objects the killer asteroid must have passed that scientists were looking for those tiny orbital wiggles that might tell us more. Right now there were too many unknowns in the equations, but we're pretty good at detecting very tiny effects these days. That's how we first detected gravity waves, which caused a two-mile laser beam to expand and contract less than the width of one proton.

  The verdict on that was far from being in yet. To me, it seemed entirely possible that the universe was lousy with objects like the one that had grazed the Earth. There might be hundreds of them passing through the solar system every day, and we'd never know it, even if they came equipped with headlights and had them on high beam. The chances of a collision with anything were small. The most likely object they might hit would be the sun, which we'd never notice, either. The chances of one hitting the Earth would be even smaller.

  Which did sort of present a problem, at least to a suspicious mind.

  I have a suspicious mind.

  One had hit the Earth. Something had hit the Earth.

  Which brought up the second theory. The only large objects we know of that approach the speed of light are... starships.

  And a lot of people just didn't want to go there.

  I won't even mention the second, third, fourth, and nine hundred ninety-ninth theories about what the object was, nor their almost infinite variations. The nature of the cybernet, since the time we were calling it the internet, is chatter, and anybody can do it. Crackpots breed like lice on the web. You can find support for absolutely any proposition on the web. Naturally, the big impact had generated a lot of noise.

  I take it back, I will mention the third most popular explanation for what it was: The Wrath of God. Actually, some polls put it in the number two spot, with a bullet.

  Most of the Rapture people had already packed their bags, those who hadn't already packed when Tel Aviv and Cairo were bombed. Figuratively, of course, since they expected to be Raptured physically out of th
eir cars and clothes and lifted straight to heaven while the rest of us remained on Earth to duke it out with Satan. (What about us Martians? I'm hoping we can sit on the sidelines and wait till it's over.)

  Plenty of other religions saw it as God's revenge for one thing or another. Many Mus­lims thought it was September 11 on a bigger scale, and thanked Allah.

  Personally, I discount all supernatural explanations until more data is in.

  But if it was a starship, that meant one of two things:

  Aliens, or one of ours.

  Which is where the various governments of Earth were pretty much united. They really didn't want to go there, in either case.

  Aliens? What can you say? We haven't encountered any so far, but not many of our starships have come back yet, and space is vast. It seems almost beyond question that there are other intelligences out there, and if we can find a way to get to the stars, I'm sure they can, too.

  But like I said, with aliens you got nothing but questions, all of them unanswerable because we don't have the faintest notion how aliens would think.

  Why would our first contact with them be an attack? Why not land at the United Nations and say howdy-do?

  Well, maybe they've been watching us and seeing how warlike we can be. Maybe they wanted to get our attention. They sure got it, if they're out there, but why not show up afterward and tell us about it. Otherwise, what's the point?

  Answer: We don't know. They're aliens.

  That's the answer to all the questions about aliens. We don't know. So there's not much point in worrying about it until they show themselves.

  But if it was one of ours, the possibilities multiply.

  One theory floating around the net was pretty simple. Starship arrives at Planet Mongo, lands, explores, finds it's not worth staying, and heads home. Somewhere along the way an alien virus kills everybody on board. The autopilot keeps it on course. When it gets to Earth, there's nobody alive on board to slow it down.