"Thanks, mister."
"What can you buy with that around here?"
"Not much," he conceded. "But I'm saving up, for later."
"How old are you?"
"Ten. Are you really a Marsman?"
"We prefer to call ourselves Martians, Earthling."
He laughed. "Cool. I've never met a Martian before."
"Where is... I mean, who's taking care of you?"
"They got me in the orphan cage until my mama shows up. But I busted out."
I wasn't going to touch that. The kid, whose name turned out to be Dustin, took me to the "orphan cage." It was a large area of the lot surrounded by a chain-link fence. Inside was a lot of brightly colored plastic play equipment, castles and playhouses and the like, and the fence had been painted gay colors with childish artwork pinned to it; but it still looked like what it was: a cage for children. A few children were on swings, and some others sat around a teacher who was reading them a story, but there was not the activity you expect from kids who ranged from toddlers to a bit older than Dustin. Mostly they sat listlessly or stood at the fence watching for their parents.
"You're leaving here soon, aren't you, Mr. Martian?"
"I'm Ray. Yeah, I'll be going soon."
"You see my mama, tell her I'm here, okay'?"
"You got it." We exchanged numbers, he writing my info on a forearm already covered with notes like that. Then I shook his hand and got out of there before I lost it.
Evangeline and her father joined us at Scrooge as we prepared to shove off again. They were going back with us. Jim Redmond had a job, and Evangeline had school. The rest of his family were taken care of now, and would be staying to see to the remains of dead family members and await news on the missing. Jim's cousin Frank tried to prevail on him to stick around for the funerals, but Jim shook his head.
"I don't do funerals," he said. "Stopped going when I was in the Army. We'll remember them in our own way, Frank." That seemed to end it, and they all embraced, and we got on board. Travis livened it up a little by playing a tune on Scrooge's horn, which, believe it or not, sounded a lot like what I imagined a duck's fart would sound. Everybody laughed through the tears. Mourning would go on, but recovery had begun.
As we waddled slowly down the road nobody was talking very much, and I had a lot of time to think about what we'd just done. One thing came to mind immediately. What good had we done? Did we really have to come here?
The short answer: Yes, we did.
Not for any practical, justifiable reason. It was easy to prove that we hadn't made much of a difference to anybody.
A month ago, I would have asked Dad to explain it to me, why I felt so good having done so little, when you got right down to it. We'd risked our lives, after all, the whole family. Was that smart?
Maybe it wasn't smart, but that's what human beings do. If there's a chance, ever so small, that you can do some good for your family, you do it. If there's even the smallest chance that, by not doing something, your family will suffer, then you don't allow that chance to pass.
It may be bad logic; but if you aren't prepared to drop everything and charge into danger when your loved ones are threatened, there's something missing in you. If you don't have anybody you'd do that for, or who would do that for you, I feel sorry for you and advise you to find more friends.
It was only a short trip down the road before we saw the tiger.
He was strapped to the hood of somebody's pickup truck with a lot of bullet holes in him, his rough pink tongue lolling out of his huge mouth. Flies were swarming around his eyes. Half a dozen people were gathered around him, laughing and talking. Two children were rubbing his orange-and-black fur.
"Sucker just came walking by, calm as you please," one of the men was saying to the others. "Hardly even looked at me. Scared the hell out of me, though, I don't mind telling you."
Travis had pulled over, and I jumped down from the hood. I wasn't really aware of what I was doing. My feet seemed to be leading a life of their own.
"No zoos around here I know of," another man said. "Probably somebody's pet. You ask me, people shouldn't be allowed to keep animals like that."
I was at the tiger now. I touched its head. The men fell silent.
I have no idea where it came from, or why there or why then, but I felt it rising up in me and it was unstoppable. Everything, just everything. I began to cry.
No, let's be honest here. This wasn't just a tight throat and a few tears leaking from my eyes. This was just short of bawling out loud like a baby. It was on me in an instant, and before I knew it I was sitting on the ground. It was a sobbing, wrenching, snotty-nosed cry, more appropriate to a two-year-old than a high school senior. And I couldn't seem to stop.
Humiliating? You bet. Soon I felt a pair of arms go around me and I looked up, unable to catch my breath, expecting to see Mom. But it was Evangeline, and soon Elizabeth was on my other side. They held me until I could breathe normally, and Evangeline used her sleeve, all she had available, to wipe my face before helping me to my feet. How wonderful. No better way into a girl's affections than to snivel and whine over a dead tiger, right? I wondered if I'd ever be able to look her in the eye again.
Nobody said anything. The guys around the truck were all doing other things, careful not to look my way. It wasn't the first time they'd witnessed a meltdown like that recently, and it wouldn't be the last. Maybe some of them had even had a moment like that themselves.
I got back on the hood with my back to the rest of my family, my legs hanging over the side.
"Ready to go, Ray?" Travis asked. I nodded without turning around, Travis gave a tiny beep of the horn, and we were on our way again.
We were about five miles away from Rancho Broussard when we finally ran out of gas. Travis nursed Scrooge along another quarter mile, sputtering, then pulled to the side of the road and called ahead.
In a few minutes three heavy vehicles pulled up beside us and six heavily armed men got out and held the doors for us and loaded Grandma's stuff into the cargo spaces, and a few minutes after that we were driving through the gates and into a world of peace and quiet that hadn't been touched by the destroying waters.
A huge meal had been prepared, and we all sat down at the table. Some of my family dug in heartily, but I didn't have much appetite. Evangeline sat beside me, Mom on the other side, and I kept getting appraising glances from Mom when she thought I wasn't looking.
I'm okay, Mom, honest I am.
Then there was a long, hot shower, soaping and shampooing myself three times and still not feeling totally clean.
Then there was a big bed in the guest room, with clean satin sheets.
Home. Or close enough.
The next day we checked into the Swan and Dolphin at Disney Universe. The Redmond family was reunited, and of course the stories of what the brats had been doing had to be gotten out of the way before we could fill Mrs. Redmond in on our boring adventures. They had managed to destroy only a few odd corners of the resort, apparently. The fire crews had things in hand, the injured had been taken to hospitals, and early reports said the park might be open again in a few days.
We intended to stay there only a night or two until we could arrange a flight to the Falkland Islands to see Uncle Jubal. Usually, it's just a matter of calling him and telling him we're on the way. But for sonic reason, Jubal was not answering his phone.
The first day Travis kept getting excuses that had to do with the disaster. Distribution nodes down, lines too busy, not enough bandwidth with all the emergency channels operating. Bullshit like that. It sounded fishy to all of us, but there wasn't much we could do.
The second day I went with Elizabeth and Evangeline and the brats to a big water park and we rode the slides and surfed the waves all day. We'd explained over and over to the brats that you had to wear a bathing suit on Earth, but they kept forgetting. I spent half my time trying to locate their discarded duds.
The othe
r half I spent admiring how good Evangeline looked in a bikini made of three scraps of orange cloth, none of which would have covered my palm. They had a great deal of trouble covering Evangeline, too, especially the top two, which had a lot to cover. The girls had bought them from a dispenser outside the changing rooms. When they came out they were giggling. I asked them what the joke was.
"Lots of flesh," Elizabeth said. "Earth girls are fat!"
"And I never saw so much pubic hair," Evangeline said. "Honest, three-quarters of them were bushy as..."
"Beavers?" Elizabeth said, and they collapsed laughing.
Martian girls depilate everything below the neck. The legs and underarms because that's just what girls do, and the rest because it provides a tighter seal for the sticky device that is needed for urination in a pressure suit. And it doesn't hurt so much when you rip it free.
Evangeline let me put suntan lotion on her back. I did it for Elizabeth, too, but it somehow wasn't the same. At six-two and six-one respectively, Elizabeth and Evangeline turned a lot of heads at the water park when they walked by. I tried to tell myself that I did, too, but the fact is my strength is a wiry strength, and many of the Earth boys bulged with muscles.
Okay, I'm skinny. The only interested glance I noticed was from a guy.
But it was a great day. All the blue, chlorinated water and blazing sunshine seemed to wash and burn away a lot of the memories of filth and decay and wretchedness of the last days, and the sight of all the people splashing around and having fun reminded me again that life goes on.
At times, it struck me as just plain wrong. But why shouldn't these people have fun? There just wasn't room for everybody in the United States to go to the Red Zone and help out. In fact, they were asking people to stay away. These people had probably planned their vacations months ago, put down deposits. The people who worked here, and in the other parks, had to make a living – and attendance was down, way down. The park wasn't crowded at all.
At the park's entrance there were barrels for canned food donations, overflowing, and a big clear plastic cube bulging with money. Nobody had forgotten.
Life has to go on. Doesn't it?
When we got back to the hotel room, still smelling of chlorine, Travis was stalking back and forth, cursing a blue streak. A lot of it was incoherent rage, but every once in a while he said something specific and eventually we figured out that he hadn't been able to get through to Jubal.
"One excuse after another," he shouted. "Overloaded circuits. Bullshit! Can't be reached. Bullshit! He has 'the flu.' Bullshit! Storms. Storms, for chrissake, and the planes can't land or take off. What kind of fucking idiot do they think I am?"
I knew the answer, and I think he did, too. They just didn't care. They – whoever "they" are, in this case the IPA – were so used to lying they did it reflexively, and didn't much care any more if anyone believed them. What were they going to do about it, anyway? They were the IPA, the Power Company. They ran the world.
Well, I thought they had picked the wrong enemy when they decided to fuck over Travis. Nobody fucked with Travis.
"All right, I'm chartering a plane, right now, and I'll fly the sucker down there myself. They can't do this to me, it's in our contract."
He was actually on his way out the door before Dad and Dak caught up with him and grabbed his arms and pulled him back into the room. They gentled him down some until he was willing to listen.
"They'll shoot you down, Travis," Dad said. "You know that."
Travis shook them off, but then he relaxed. He nodded. "What kills me is, I can't figure out what they're up to."
"Some kind of security bullshit," Dak said. "That seems to cover everything."
"Yeah, but... why Jubal? Why are they doing this to him?"
We waited around for three more days. Travis never did get through to Jubal. On the fourth day he took off for Buenos Aires, and we boarded a spaceship to Mars.
The trip back was just another trip.
The weight gradually fell away. I spent most of the time aboard catching up with schoolwork, and with friends. Every day the time lag was less, until it was instantaneous again.
We talked to Travis every day. He rented a big boat and motored out to the Falklands, where he was met by an overflight of fighter planes firing across his bows, then a destroyer, which turned him back. It's a good thing Travis didn't have his own destroyer, or he might have started the Second Falklands War, and I'm not sure which side I would have bet on. But he did turn back.
Then we were on our way down, and on the train into town, and entering the familiar confines of the hotel.
I got back into my own room, which seemed somehow smaller. I dropped my suitcase on the floor.
Home.
11
Summertime on Mars.
Yeah, right.
There is no logical explanation for why we have a "summer vacation" from school on Mars. There's an explanation; it's just not logical. The reason is, that's the way it's always been done.
Come to think of it, that's the explanation for a lot of human behavior, isn't it?
The actual Martian summer is determined by our distance from the sun, not by the tilt of the axis, as it is on Earth. The orbit of Mars is a lot more eccentric than Earth's so we go way out there and get cold, then come way in and get... well, less cold.
The virtual Martian summer begins when it's the end of May on Earth, when summer begins in the Northern Hemisphere. They tell me the reason schools break for summer on Earth is because that's when children have to be on hand for the planting, and later for the harvest. Which makes about as much sense as calling a holiday in December because that's when the mammoths come through on their annual migration, and we have to kill a few to smoke and store in our cave. Come on, it's the twenty-first century.
So it was August. Yeah, right.
The Martian year is longer than the Earth year. Almost twice as long: 697 Earth days. But we don't use Martian years. Nobody I know states their age in Mars years, we all use Earth years. Birthdays are on the Earth calendar, and so is just about everything else. We can't keep Earth time, but we do the next best thing. We run on a twenty-four-hour clock, and use the same minutes and seconds as you do on Earth.
...but wait. How can that be? The Martian day is twenty-four hours thirty-nine minutes, and thirty-five seconds [note: the correct value is 24:37:22]. So how do we deal with the extra minutes?
Simple. We ignore them.
It's a messy solution to a messy situation, but the fact is that Mars is a very tiny cultural tail wagging behind a very big dog, which is Earth. In many ways, what's happening on Earth is more important than what's happening on Mars. So it's advantageous for us to live by Earth years and months. We'd live by Earth days if we could – and I can't tell you how many times I've heard tourists complain that we have a longer day. Some of them seem to expect us to speed up the rotation of the planet so they can have their normal Earth day.
When you think about it, what were our alternatives? Well, there have been a thousand proposals for a Martian clock, most of them metric, and some of them even make a certain amount of sense. Twenty hours in a day, for instance, or only ten. Divide each hour into one hundred minutes. Then divide each minute into... what? Problem is, a "second" is a standard of measurement of everything. Do we really want a Martian second? I don't think so.
Luckily, nobody uses mechanical clocks anymore, and computer clocks can easily be instructed to pause for 39.583333... minutes before resuming again. At first, when people were getting together to thrash all this out, after we'd been living here a while and it was obvious we needed to tell time in a different way if twelve noon wasn't going to work its way around the day, so we'd all be eating lunch in the middle of the night sometimes, they just called it "the Pause." They set it at midnight. All the clocks would stop for 39.5 minutes when it was celestial noon on the far side of Mars from the big human settlements. That way, the Pause would happen while
99 percent of the people on the planet were sleeping.
Then somebody like Mom, who wanted to celebrate the differences between Mars and Earth instead of slavishly imitating our big sister, started a drive to move the Pause from a place where nobody noticed it to a place where you couldn't miss it. Make it a truly Martian thing, something you could talk about when you got home. Come to think of it, the Pause Debate was one of the first really hot political issues to interest the Martian population.
Nobody can get by without politics, but we have a minimum of it on Mars. Basically the things that aren't handled by the owning companies back on Earth, or that they could care less about, are handled by the City Council. It's elected, and everybody over the age of fifteen can vote, even if you just got off the ship. The Council just sort of grew, and I can't really say it's grown that much. Which is the way a lot of people like it. Many of the people who came to Mars to stay, so far, are a lot like native Alaskans, who are famous for not liking other people telling them what do to.
Anyway, moving the Pause had a lot of support... but move it where? That was debated for almost a year. Almost any daylight hour had some supporters, and plenty of the evening hours, too. But at last we voted to stop the clocks at 3 P.M., 1500 hours, and to call it the Siesta.
Close second: Happy Hour. After all, we are a planet of innkeepers.
It was three months after our trip to the Red Zone. I had graduated high school with honors in English and history and adequate grades in everything else. I had to decide where I was going for my higher education. What should it be? Harvard or Yale? I'd never been to sunny California, so maybe I'd go to Stanford or UCLA. Cambridge and Oxford didn't interest me, as I'd heard the English climate was just awful, plus I'd have to listen to those British upper-class accents all day.
Just kidding. I could "attend" any of those grand old places, but at the freshman level I might as well select my institution of higher learning by what I thought of their basketball team, or even their school colors. And weather wouldn't be a problem, because I wouldn't be going to Earth. Not yet, anyway.
John Varley - Red Lightning Page 18
