John Varley - Red Lightning

by Red Lightning [lit]

  Blame it on the web, like so much else. These days you could attend classes virtually. The universities resisted it, but eventually they were confronted by a de facto situation, and gave in. You no longer have to go to Boston to attend Harvard. If you know enough to log on to online classes you can become a web freshman. No entrance exam necessary. Hooray for equality!

  Of course, there's equal, and then there's equal.

  And there's practical, and there's impractical. There's nothing to prevent you from attending an advanced seminar at the Sorbonne, everything but some highly select honors courses is webcast these days. That doesn't mean you will understand what they're talking about. So all but a few supergeniuses start out in the traditional way, with Physics 101 or Introduction to African History, and work their way up. When you think about it, it's good for everybody. The geniuses can proceed at their own pace, and they can do it from Manhattan or the rudest sheet-metal hut in Calcutta. People who never had a chance to see so much as a blackboard in the past are now able to get an Ivy League education, if they're up to it. Excellence can now actually select itself in academia, at least until the point where you actually arrive on campus and are faced with prejudice and politics and academic bullshit. Or so I've read, in researching the pluses and minuses of web school. Mostly pluses, to my way of thinking, the big one being I could stay on Mars for a few more years, at least, just like that boy or girl in Calcutta doesn't have to figure out how to pay for transportation to and lodging in Paris.

  But eventually, the different levels of equality come into play. You can get a degree from Stanford and never leave your igloo in Nome, but it's not quite the same kind of degree you'd get if you'd lived in the ivy-covered dorms. The sheepskin itself will look identical, but simply by googling the student you can find out if he or she actually attended in the flesh. So, people being what they are, an Attending Degree, or AD, was more prestigious than a Web Degree, or WD.

  But there's a remedy for that, and so far as I can tell it adds up to what Mom calls "that rarest of human institutions: a meritocracy."

  You can start out as I plan to, attending classes via the web. You get graded like eve­rybody else. Then, if you look like Hah-vahd material – that is, if you are smarter than some of the legacy admissions already there – you will be invited to attend in corpore. Doesn't matter if you're our boy from Calcutta, or a girl from Chad, or some poor child who actually lives in Boston but never had a chance to attend a good school.

  As for picking a school, there's another alternative these days, and it's what I'm lean­ing toward.

  Don't pick.

  If I'm going to be on Mars anyway, what do I care about singing "The Whiffenpoof Song" with a lot of drunken Elis? I'd never make the rowing team to bring glory to dear old Cambridge. I don't give a hoot about either American football or real football. Other than reasons like that I don't see the point of identifying myself with any particular school. In this academic strategy, you simply attend the classes that appeal to you. On Monday morning you can be in a class in Johannesburg, follow it up with a seminar in California, and that afternoon attend lectures in Japan and Buenos Aires.

  If a certain professor turns out to be boring or incompetent, just stop going. Professors hate this, they call it the Nielsen Rating system of education. It's mostly the ones whose web attendance is low who complain, though.

  You can cobble together your own educational strategy, chart your own path, design your own specialty, if you wish. You may not even want to pursue a degree, you may just want to learn stuff and go from there.

  Tentatively, that's what I planned to do. Do what I want to do. There was just one small problem. What do I want to do? Problem... I hadn't yet felt what you'd call a real passion for anything other than what all boys my age feel. That is, girls. How do you make a career out of girls?

  I didn't have to worry about money. I could pick some area that didn't necessarily pay much. I could be a Martian geologist, sifting through rocks with no intrinsic worth. There's no diamonds or seams of gold or uranium on Mars, it's not tectonically active enough to have formed such things. There's no oil, and no market for it if there was. And there's nothing else here that can't be had more cheaply and easily on Earth. But there's still plenty to learn about the history of Mars through studying its rocks. I've been col­lecting them since I first got here.

  I could be a historian. I'd already decided to take some courses in various areas of world history. Find out which place and period I was most interested in.

  I could be an English major. I know two English majors. One of them runs the local Shakespearean Society in his spare time, when he's not mixing drinks. The other can recite page after page of Beowulf in Old English as he carries your bags to your room in the Red Thunder.

  Hard to see myself as any of those things. I knew what I really wanted. I wanted adventure. I wanted to do something like Mom and Dad did, something that people would remember. My one shot at adventure, so far, had been spent slogging through muck and seeing things I'd just as soon forget. A disaster is not an adventure, believe me.

  Alt, yes, the lazy, hazy days of summer. I decided to take a break from a day of not doing much in particular and take a ride up to Phobos and try to get out of my funk. Dammit, the days of adventure were over, and I missed them.

  And that's how I missed the start when Earth invaded Mars.

  One more thing I like about Mars that you can't get on Earth: We are allowed to use bubble drives on our personal vehicles.

  On Earth, you can't power a car or truck or even a train with a Squeezer drive. For one thing, it would be impractical. It makes more sense to use the Squeezer bubbles at big central power stations and transmit the electricity. Plus, everybody's paranoid about bubbles in private hands. Sure, it's happened, no security system is perfect, but it stands to reason that the fewer bubbles people have to experiment on, the less chance anybody else will discover the secret of how to make them and then be able to hold the world hostage. Or blow it up.

  So the bubbles mostly go to power plants, where they can be guarded more easily. The only place where they're used the way Jubal first used them, as direct power for a spaceship, is in space itself.

  But Mars is a spacegoing society. So are the settlements on the moon. Part of the covenant Travis and his lawyers worked out during the Orange Bowl Accord guaranteed that we could have our own bubble-manufacturing plant. Travis was thinking ahead, he didn't want just one society – the Earth, or America, or whatever world government might be formed in the future – to have complete control of all the power in the world. So Jubal himself made just a few Squeezer machines. There are nine, total. Two on Mars, two on the moon, three immobile ones on the Falklands, and two mobile ones on the Earth for heavy excavation and such. Nine Squeezers for all of humanity.

  Some people say that's at least four too many. That's the Earthies.

  Some say that's nine too many.

  Whatever they say, we have our two, and we're not about to give them up. It sure makes life a lot easier. It also makes it more fun. Without personal Squeezer engines we couldn't airboard.

  I suited up and let the suit check itself and report to me that all was copacetic except I was about halfway down on air. I aired up without even thinking about it, though I wouldn't be using much suit air. Rule One: You always start out with full tanks. You can never be sure just how long you'll be out.

  I park my board out behind the hotel, under a hoist. I lowered it, unhooked from ground power, swung aboard, strapped in, switched from suit air to board air, and gave the handle a tiny twist. A puff of exhaust from the bubble raised a cloud of dust, and the board lifted three feet, then six. I shoved forward and was off into the sky, accelerating all the way. The ground dwindled under me. I felt good, maybe better than I had since returning from Earth.

  Flying to Phobos isn't like driving to the corner grocery store, but it's not all that daunt­ing, really, not if you have the power. With the minibubble dr
ive, I had power to spare. It's not even like flying from, say, Los Angeles to San Francisco in a small plane. On Earth, unless the weather is bad, you can see your route, and your destination doesn't move. Going to Phobos, you don't aim at where it is, you aim at where it will be, and when you start off you can barely see it.

  Phobos is the only moon in the solar system that rises in the west and sets in the east. That's because it's in close, and Mars revolves relatively slowly. It takes Phobos just seven and a half hours to complete one orbit, so it rises twice every day. It's only a little more than four thousand miles above the surface, just a little more than one Mars diame­ter. Orbital speed, just under five thousand miles per hour.

  That probably sounds fast, if you're an Earthie. Nobody on Earth ever drives anything that fast except spaceship drivers and military pilots, and not many of those. I've been doing it since I was fifteen.

  There's a fast way up and a slow way: Nobody I know takes the slow way. How you do that, you build up your speed as soon as you're safely out of the atmosphere, then you cut your engine and coast until you reach where Phobos is with just enough energy to tangent the orbit, then you speed up some more or gravity will pull you back down. That's how the old chemical rockets used to do it, because it's the most efficient.

  I didn't need to worry about that. The way I did it was to blast to the halfway point, then turn around and blast until I was motionless relative to Phobos. Total travel time was about an hour. To put it another way, less time than it would take you to drive from one side of Los Angeles to the other.

  There's a fairly loose launch window to do this, because of the power available to us, but there was no point in starting out when Phobos was on the other side of the planet and trying to catch up with it. So twice a day, a lot of people take off for Phobos within about twenty minutes of each other. I saw half a dozen others rising on their boards, one close enough to wave to, which I did. He or she waved back.

  I was quickly out of the atmosphere. I called up a navigation window on my faceplate, saw the big curve of Mars moving slowly away from me, the little dot of Phobos chug­ging along behind me, and the tiny speck that was me right in the center, with several suggested trajectories and one yellow radar alert that meant one of the boarders would get within a mile of me in about ten minutes. No biggie; I adjusted my course a little and the other boarder went green. I leaned against the backrest under an easy one-sixth gee accel­eration, set the navigator to beep me ten seconds from turnaround, and ticked up some music to travel by. Selected a nice oldie, "Daytripper," by the Beatles, a group Grandma favored and had turned me on to.

  Life was good again.

  Phobos looks like a big baking potato. On one side is a really huge crater, half as big as the rock itself, like somebody had scooped it out to put in the sour cream and chives. That crater is called Stickney. I rendezvoused pretty much in the dead center of Stickney and tied my board down.

  I entered the air lock with half a dozen other arrivals and we all watched the air gauge, then popped our helmets and took off more or less as a group, though I didn't know any of them, and we pulled our way down a series of corridors with the hand ropes anchored into the walls, fighting off as usual the occasional baffled Earthie going in the wrong direction despite the huge arrows painted prominently on every wall.

  Phobos is an irregular carbonaceous chondrite with a long axis of about seventeen miles. It's not much, but it has to do us for a moon, as our other one, Deimos, is even smaller and farther away.

  Building big zero-gee habitats in Earth orbit was a lot cheaper with the Squeezer drive than it ever had been before, but still not cheap. Lift costs were of course way down, but space is a harsh environment, and you can't build your space stations out of tinfoil and bubble gum. Also, it's dangerous, particularly heavy construction. People die regularly building stuff like that in free fall.

  But with the Squeezer, mining is easy. They bored into the middle of the big rock and then squeezed out a hollow about a mile in diameter. They sprayed the inside with absorbent foam and put in an air system. Phobos became a necessary side trip on your trip to Mars. Buses left every five minutes at the appropriate launch windows. Inside were big attractions and small businesses, carny-type things but adapted to free fall. (Actually, ELG, Extremely Low Gee, since Phobos does have gravity, just not enough to matter, but we use the terms interchangeably.) You could try low-gee drinks, take classes in gym­nastics and dancing, watch low-gee shows, and, of course, the thing everybody wants to try: weightless sex. You can rent rooms by the hour, and if you didn't bring a companion, one could be found either at the singles bars or commercially. Nobody ever got around to outlawing prostitution on Mars, and as long as you don't get too aggressive and get your­self arrested for disturbing the peace – the basic no-no in Martian society – you can sell what you please.

  Everybody who didn't blow lunch in five minutes loved it. Martians hated it. It was full of Earthies. No Martian would go there unless he had a job there.

  So we made another hole, the same size, and made it off-limits to anyone who wasn't a Martian. Most Earthies didn't even know it was there. We didn't really have a formal name for the place, though some called it the Hideaway. An Earthie would have to get pretty lost to even stumble over the entrance, as it is behind a series of doors marked Employees Only. One of the perks of being a native.

  Very few adults came to the Hideaway, so most of the people you saw were teenagers. This was the place we used instead of a mall or a strip or drag to cruise around in and show off our cars and girlfriends and have a beer and just generally hang around to bull­shit and brag and meet chicks and think of ways to piss off adults and now and then get into a fistfight. It was fairly tame, actually. There was more of the old malt shop to it than the old roadhouse. It was more YM/WCA than street rumble. But it was our 'hood, and we liked it.

  I said hi to various friends but didn't linger with anyone. Most of them were out of their suits, and I wanted to be, too.

  The thing about pressure suits, especially the ones that you can use both on Mars and in vacuum, is that they have to be ready to keep you warm or cool you off, and that's a lot to ask of a machine you can wear.

  When you're out on the surface, cold is the problem, even at midday during the real summer. At night, forget about it. Nobody goes out at night if they can help it. In vacuum it's a different story. They talk about the cold of outer space, but space is really no tem­perature at all. But if you're in the sunshine – and that's most of the time – even out at Mars' orbit, you tend to overheat. So the suit has to protect you from that heat and at the same time dump the heat your body is producing.

  Like I said, it's a lot to ask.

  When Mom and Dad flew Red Thunder to Mars, the secondhand Russian space suits they bought cost them as much as the ship itself; there was no way they could have built a useful suit themselves. Suits are cheaper these days because they are made by the thou­sands, but they still set you back more than a small car would on Earth. Lots of Martians couldn't afford one at all on their wages, so it's part of the contract when they come here. Use of a suit is a basic civil right.

  The main thing you should know about a suit is this: They are almost always a little too cool or way too hot. Not broiling-in-the-desert hot, but warmer than you'd like. You fiddle with the thermostat all you like, you never get it quite right. And they're better on the surface than in space. An hour in one on the way to Phobos and you'll be sweaty when you arrive.

  So I headed for the shower. Luckily, I had my own.

  When you're tunneling with a Squeezer, you can hollow out a space in any shape you want... so long as it's a perfect sphere.

  At each of the cardinal points of the compass, and at the north and south poles of the Big Bubble, tunnels had been made that led to much smaller hollows, a few hundred yards in diameter. I didn't really know how big they were, since by the time I started coming all six of them were already at least half-full, you couldn'
t see the rock walls anymore.

  What they were full of was Martian trailers. That's what we called them, anyway, though they usually only made one journey, from the prefab plant on the surface up to the Big Bubble. They were actually modular housing, made in four different standard sizes. They were shaped like loaves of bread, the most common size being eight-by-eight-by-fifteen. They were made of plastic, with insulation sandwiched between two layers, for noise rather than temperature, as they were meant only for use in an environment like the Bubble, and were not meant to provide shelter but privacy. Each was prewired for electric and web, had plumbing and sewage, air circulation and heating, and its own pumps. After that, you were on your own. You could put the door anywhere you wanted, in any of the six walls. You could get a model with a shower and a toilet, and you could have a low-gee kitchenette.

  That's what I had, a deluxe Model‑B with all the trimmings. Mine was in the North Quadrant. Elizabeth had one just like it in the East Q. We northerners like to think we were a hit above those equatorial people... but they thought the same of us.

  I'm not saying the North or any other Q was where the rich kids went, or anything like that. It was more of a neighborhood thing, almost but not quite like turf. We didn't fight any battles over it.

  The trailers came with attachment points that you could hook onto other trailers, make a real multiroom house if you wanted to, but hardly anybody did that. It was seen as ostentatious. The Model‑A was smaller, and the bigger units were usually shared, com­mon space for dancing and whatever. No, we used the attachments to hook onto other people's units, and made irregular 3‑D honeycomb arrangements that would have given a zero-gee bee a psychosis. There was no rhyme or reason to it, except that you knew the units closest to the walls were the oldest residents.