John Varley - Red Lightning

by Red Lightning [lit]

  "Maybe I just haven't shared it with you," I said, stung by her words. But what stung the most was, she was right. "Anyway, you haven't told me what you plan to do with your life, either."

  "That's because I haven't come across it yet. But I know that when I do, I'll be ready." She can be maddening sometimes, because she can say things like that, and you just believe her.

  The traffic slowed, and slowed, and slowed again and then came to a complete stop. We didn't move again for two hours.

  7

  "Now you're seeing the real Florida," Dak said, as we inched forward along Autoway 4, along with hundreds of others. It turns out that one reason the traffic was flowing so well in Orlando was that a great many people were out of town.

  According to Dak, they were going in two directions. A lot of people were going east, like us, trying to get through the Red Line, which defined a zone that, in Florida, stretched as much as twenty miles inland. Basically, the part of the Eastern Seaboard that had been submerged by the wave was barricaded, off-limits to anyone but authorized personnel.

  "Lot of other folks are heading west," Dak said, moving us forward twenty feet and stopping again. "Mostly young people. Rumor is, the press gangs are moving west, too. Next stop, Orlando."

  I hadn't been paying much attention to that part of the story. With my Martian pass­port, I was immune to the press gangs. Plus, I was probably too young, though there was another rumor that they were going to start drafting people as young as sixteen into the Florida National Guard.

  "The U.S. Army is stretched too damn thin," Dak said. "All over the world, one war or another. We can't just pull 'em out, or that's what the President says. So the Guard has to take up the slack. Lots of folks would volunteer, I'm sure of it, but the fact is once they got you, even if you signed up to help the tsunami victims, you don't get out till they say you get out, and they haven't been sayin' that much for years now. Army's done turned into a career for a lot of folks didn't have no intention of being no soldier."

  Good information was hard to come by. It was amazing, when you thought about it. Sure, the power was out in the Red Zone, and would be for a long time yet, but there was what people were calling the Yellow Zone, and a lot of people lived there. Problem was, it was getting harder and harder to talk to them. Messages weren't getting through.

  More rumors. The government had turned on its big, its really big computers, the ones it was rumored to have – see what I mean? – that could monitor every byte of the zillions and zillions of gigabytes that flowed through the cybernet every day, and pick and choose what got through and what didn't.

  But why?

  "Cover their asses," Dak said, confidently. "Manny, Kelly, it's lots worse than any­body's been admitting. I've been along the Yellow Zone, thinking about trying to get in, and... well, you'll see when we get there."

  "But they can't cover it up forever," Dad protested.

  "Of course not," Dak agreed. "Shit, eventually folks gonna be able to get in and see it with their own eyes. But they let it out a little bit at a time, maybe they can salvage a little bit of the economy. Hope you folks got out of the dollar."

  "Long time ago," Mom agreed. "The trouble is, what do you put it into? In a world­wide collapse, no currency is likely to stay very stable. When the claims start coming in, I don't know how many insurance companies will be able to stay afloat."

  "They already failing," Dak said.

  The barricade at the edge of the Red Zone was manned by National Guard, not Homelanders, and most of them didn't look any older than I was. They were dressed in jungle camouflage and heavy body armor and the military version of stereos, which were three times as bulky as the civilian version. They carried the usual arsenal of weapons and unidentified but probably lethal gizmos, and they held them at the ready, covering each other, as if they expected armed terrorists to leap from one of the family wagons at any second. Come to think of it, I doubted the terrorist part, but it was a sure bet most of these people were well armed.

  They were not happy campers. It was a day for Bermuda shorts and tank tops, not Kevlar and khaki. The soldiers were pissed off about the duty, and the people in the cars were frantic with worry about their loved ones in the Red Zone.

  They directed us to a parking spot alongside dozens of others. It looked like it would be some time until they got to us. We all got out of our cars and stretched our legs, just like everyone else was doing. I felt every foot per second of the brutal gravity.

  Some of these folks had been coming out here every day since the wave and getting the same runaround. Still far too dangerous to let the general public in. Show a press pass from an "accepted" media outlet, or papers from an authorized relief agency. Give us a verifiable phone number for someone living in the Yellow Zone that you intend to visit, and hope that he's got power so he can take the call and okay you.

  Otherwise, turn around and get your butt back to Orlando.

  Which is what was happening to about 90 percent of the cars out there. I could hear heated arguments and see angry citizens shouting and making obscene gestures at the soldiers, who reacted either with weary boredom or some quick and startling violence. No shots were fired, but one guy got a rifle butt in the face and quite a few kicks while he was down. The officer in charge watched while his soldiers tossed the bleeding and unconscious guy into the backseat of his car. His wife burned an inch of rubber off her tires in her hurry to get out of there.

  "Florida, huh?" I told Dak, as we watched.

  "This is bad even for Florida," Dak said, softly. "Tempers are fraying, my man. Lis­ten, you hear shooting, you hop back in that bus, right? It'll probably stop the lead most of these citizens carrying. Not those military guns, though."

  "Then throw myself over the women and children, right?"

  "Heck, no, throw yourself over me, 'cause I'll already be in there." He grinned and patted my shoulder. "Don't worry, it'll be all right."

  After about an hour a team of three soldiers approached our vehicle and asked us for our papers. While we were getting them all together one of the guardsmen came over and looked me up and down. He was a huge mix of muscle and fat, his face burned a bright pink and his eyes showing about as much intelligence and compassion as your average lizard.

  He nudged me with the barrel of his rifle. Pissed me off something terrible, but I know a little about choosing my fights, so I didn't kill him.

  "How old you are, boy?" he wanted to know. Or at least I think that's what he said. He had a very thick accent. His intention was clear though. If I'd been an American, I'd have been slapped into a uniform and handed a gun in about two seconds.

  "He's a Martian citizen," Dad said, holding out our four passports. Lizard boy grinned and poked at me with the rifle again.

  "Fuckin' red boy, huh? My old man says the gummint be wastin' all our money on that Mars shit. He say we oughta bring all y'all rich folks back down here where God-fearin' folks live and put y'all to work." He grinned, showing at least three teeth, none of which had any close neighbors.

  I thought about explaining that the gummint hadn't spent much money on space since before I was born, except for orbiting weapons platforms. I considered explaining that the vast majority of the infrastructure on Mars was paid for and built by Earth corporations, that the whole space travel and space tourism industry provided thousands of high-tech jobs to Earthies and over a billion dollars in taxes to Earth governments every year.

  Or I could ask him what it was like to fuck his mother.

  While I was thinking over these options Mom stepped forward, still digging our papers out of her shoulder bag, tripped over her own feet, and fell. Dak, who was closest to her, grabbed at her arm but missed, and all our papers and some money scattered all over the-hot asphalt.

  Everybody but the soldiers scrambled to help her up, but she waved us off, preferring instead to move around on her hands and knees, gathering our papers and the other items that had been in her bag. Lucky for us t
here was no wind or our entire identities would have ended up in some swamp somewhere, and we'd probably have ended up in some camp for un-persons. I got down and helped her, grabbing at hundred-euro notes, van rental papers, insurance agreements, vaccination certificates, Homelander clearance cards, lipsticks, tissues... it was amazing what all she had in there.

  Dak and Dad helped her to her feet and she shuffled all the papers together. Some­how, through some odd mix-up, a couple of bits of currency had gotten mixed up with the other stuff, just the corners peeking out. She handed it all to the soldier.

  "Is there some problem, Officer?" Dak asked. "We were assured we'd be able to get through to DeLand."

  "Don' call me officer," the lizard said. "Corporal, me. Corporal Strunk." His pink and peeling and sweat-coated brow was twisting with the unaccustomed effort of thought. I think he was trying to add the numbers on the corners of the bills and having a tough time of it.

  "DeLand is only another twenty miles," Dak was going on, smiling big. "We have the phone number of our friend. Maybe you've heard of him. Travis Broussard?"

  It took a little time for the words to penetrate Corporal Lizard's mathematical fog, but finally he frowned even deeper and looked at Dak.

  "Broussard? The rich guy?" I held my breath. This idiot had already expressed a cer­tain distaste for the rich. I hoped it only applied to rich Martians.

  "That's the dude. Here, look, we got his picture." Dak held out a snap that clearly showed him and my father and mother and uncle Travis. Also myself, at a considerably younger age.

  I'd have bet he wouldn't have known Travis Broussard from Sir Isaac Newton, but I would have been wrong. Uncle Travis is one of the richest men on Earth, and though he doesn't try to play the celebrity, there's nothing he can do about it. Even a dimwit like Corporal Lizard had heard of him, and he was apparently impressed enough not to want to risk offending him if it came to that.

  Which was a good thing, I later learned, as Mom had been trying to contact uncle Travis for the last hour and he wasn't answering his phone.

  Or maybe it was just the money. When he handed the papers back to Mom the money was missing. He jerked his head once in the direction we wanted to go and moved on to his next victim.

  "Getting to be more and more like the third world every day down here," Dak said, shaking his head as we drove away.

  The road was clear for a few miles. We were paralleling the coast, about twenty-five miles inland. There was almost no traffic, and other than the columns of smoke to the east, no sign that just over the horizon was the biggest catastrophe of all time.

  Dak was driving, of course. He used to be a professional race driver, making anything on two or four wheels go very, very fast. He showed no tendency for speed today, though. We started bumping over rough road.

  "Tank tracks," he said. They had torn up the road considerably, cutting gouges out of the asphalt surface that probably dated back to the twentieth century and hadn't been in all that good repair for quite a while. We traveled through a few miles of this, then began to see the tanks themselves, great big black monsters with stealthy radar angles and giant cannons and turrets. The soldiers lounging around them were not National Guard slobs, but regular Army. They watched us go by with no particular hostility. A few even waved at us, and Dak honked back.

  "Tanks?" Mom asked.

  "Just the thing to turn back another tsunami, huh?" Dak said, dryly.

  "What's the point?" I asked.

  "No very good point, far as I can see," Dak said. "But the military commanders are really hyped on this alien invasion, warning shot deal. A lot of them are expecting another barrage any minute."

  "They're worried about the refugees," Mr. Redmond said, surprising us all. Not the idea, but the fact that he'd spoken at all. Mr. Redmond was not a man to put his thoughts forward, at least not around us.

  "Think so?" Dak asked.

  "From what I've been hearing. Not on the net. Nothing is coming out through the net. But people are getting out. and stories are getting out by old-fashioned word of mouth. Of course, you can't believe everything you hear, but if a tenth of it is true, they've got good reason to be worried."

  "How come?"

  "Riots. There have been some big ones in Miami and Savannah."

  It turned out Mr. Redmond had learned a lot more than we had. He wasn't forthcom­ing at first, but the more we questioned him the more we learned. All of it subject to the caution he kept repeating: By its very nature, this is all rumor. Some of it will be exag­gerated. Don't believe everything you hear.

  Around then, all our stereos went dead.

  As we approached the high stone wall that surrounded the old part of Rancho Broussard we passed a small area where the ten-foot, well-maintained electrified fence took a jog to the left, then right, right again, and left again, cutting out about half an acre that had no fence around it at all. On that little plot were the two ricketiest, most ramshackle struc­tures I'd ever seen. Both of them were "mobile homes," one of them a double-wide with what passed for stained-glass windows cut out of it. It was just colored cellophane taped to the glass. There was a big wooden cross on the roof.

  But you could hardly see the buildings for the forest of signs, hand-lettered with house paint on plywood, that sprouted like a colorful crazy quilt along the roadway. The biggest one said:

  Never Mind That

  Heathern Over Yonder!

  Jesus Is You're Lord!

  Come and Worship!

  "The Holy Reverend is still there, I see," Dak said, as he turned into a driveway next to it.

  "You're kidding," Dad said. "The same one? He's still alive?"

  "Far as I know it's the same dude. I thought he was older'n dirt when we first started coming here."

  The Holy Reverend was the source of one of the most-told stories in our family. He had briefly converted to a belief in space aliens after inadvertently viewing one of Uncle Jubal's early bubble experiments, but had since gone back to Jesus. It's a pretty funny story; Dad covers it in his book. He and Travis hadn't gotten along too well before that, and after that the Holy Reverend thought Travis was the Devil himself. I thought Travis hated him back, but Mom said no.

  "The funny thing is," she told me once, "Travis owns the land the church sits on. The Holy Reverend doesn't have two dimes to rub together. Travis pays the taxes and even contributes anonymously. He likes the old coot."

  We came to a stone guardhouse and gate. A heavily armed man came out, smiling, waving at Dak. Dak stopped the vehicle and told us to roll down the windows. The guard asked all our names, paying particular attention to Mr. Redmond and Evangeline. I couldn't help noticing the whole process was nothing like the wringer the Homelanders had put us through. We were known to the guard of course, and I knew that Uncle Travis didn't really want to live in a guarded compound at all, but he had no choice. He can handle himself, he's quick and accurate with a gun, but he wouldn't stand a chance in a determined kidnap or murder attempt, both of which had been tried more than once. But he instructs the guards to keep the fascist stuff to a minimum, be polite, and only shoot to wound if at all possible. If you knew my uncle Travis, you'd find this an amazingly liberal attitude.

  We drove through virgin piney woods and pulled to a stop on what had once been a basketball court. Dak shut off the engine, and for a few moments nobody spoke. Then, amazingly, my mother began to sing.

  " 'Seems like old times...' " Mom used to be a killer karaoke bar performer, according to my father, but you had to get a few drinks into her. It's the one thing I know of that she's shy about, and I don't know why, because she has a soothing contralto voice that is one of my favorite childhood memories, back when she was singing me to sleep.

  Dak and Dad laughed, and I knew why. I'd seen plenty of pictures of Rancho Brous­sard back in the days when Uncle Travis was a drunk rotting away in it and Uncle Jubal was a retarded (so everybody thought) idiot savant tinkering in his big prefab metal barn and supporting the
m both with his crazy inventions.

  It was a ranch-style rambler that sprawled through the wild tropical plantings that hadn't been trimmed back in years and almost concealed it completely. The basketball court had been cracked and weed-choked, the swimming pool empty except for leaves and sludge.

  It looked pretty much the same today. It had looked pretty much like that the last time I visited, years ago.

  After a while my eyes began to pick out differences. There were actual nets in the basketball hoops. The concrete was still cracked, but it looked like somebody had hit the plants growing there with a weedeater.

  The pool was still empty, Travis preferred to swim in his little lake. But it was rea­sonably clean, and there was stuff down there wrapped in tarps.

  The house was still almost concealed by growth, but it had been painted at least once. Travis figured that cutting the lawn once a year was about enough, same with trimming the bigger plants. He liked the wild look.

  It was a nice house, but not what you'd expect from a multibillionaire. It was not as imposing as the McMansions of his new neighbors, and you just knew that if those folks ever got a look at it, they'd crap their pants. There goes the neighborhood! Never mind that he was there first.

  Dak and Mom and Dad marched right up to the sliding glass doors that led from the patio to the main room but they weren't locked, as always. We walked in.

  "Travis, are you decent?" Mom called out.

  "Dressed, maybe, but never decent," Dak said.

  We didn't get an answer for a moment. The room was clean, and the disorder was under control.

  "Nobody home," Dak said.

  "Nobody but us ghosts," came a voice, and we all jumped. A big wall screen came to life, and Travis's face appeared on it, sweaty and grease-covered. "I'm glad to see y'all made it. I'm over in the warehouse. Got some food here, too. Come on over." The screen went blank.