John Varley - Red Lightning

by Red Lightning [lit]

  "Good thinking, Ray," she had said. "You're really using your head."

  That made me feel good.

  What was less comforting was the thought that, at the rate we were accelerating, we'd be a billion miles away a lot sooner than I'd like.

  The hours stretched out. We realized that the critical parameter was food and water and oxygen.

  We took inventory. The oxygen would last us about two weeks. There was a good amount of water and a tiny toilet, a dry one, so we wouldn't be wasting water with that. Food was going to be a problem. Remember, if we didn't hear from Travis there was only one thing we could do. We'd have to turn ship, blast until we were motionless relative to the solar system, then start accelerating again. Halfway there we'd have to turn again and decelerate. We had to get back with enough oxygen.

  We did the math, and found that we could blast for only three days, to leave a safety margin. Twelve days, out and back. We'd be mighty hungry when we got back.

  Food was just not something they stored much of on these tourist buses. People brought their own picnic lunches and warmed them in the microwave. There was a little pantry and a little fridge.

  "Let's see. We got plenty of olives." Evangeline held up a gallon jar.

  "Have they got dem red things in 'em?" Jubal asked.

  "Pimentos. Also almonds. Also unpitted."

  "I like the pimentos," Jubal said. "I suck 'em out."

  There were lots of nuts, cashews, trail mix, dried fruit mix. Nachos, Cheetos, bags of candy, and bars of chocolate.

  "God, by tomorrow I'll be one big zit, I eat stuff like this," Evangeline said..

  There were also big cans of caviar, a dozen kinds of dip, and lots of boxes of crackers of various kinds. Potted cheese. Marmalade. I hate marmalade. There were a dozen kinds of mineral water, soft drinks, tonic water, ginger ale.

  What we were best supplied with was liquor, all of it in those tiny little bottles. Evangeline studied the list, a small bottle of Jack Daniel's in her hand.

  "Jeez! Look what they charge for this! Highway robbery."

  "Outrageous," I agreed, and didn't tell her that the Red Thunder charged twice as much. Hotels make a fortune selling stuff like that.

  "Gimme that lil bottle, cher," Jubal said. "We got ice?"

  "Ice we got," she said, opening the ice maker. "We got enough ice to get to Alpha Centauri and back."

  "So what's your drink... ah..."

  "Evangeline," she said, gently.

  Jubal smacked himself in the forehead.

  "Oh, I am a polecat idiot! You too young, right, cher?"

  "You going to card me, Jubal?"

  He thought about that for a moment, then laughed, that big hearty roar I hadn't heard in a long, long time, and had wondered if I'd ever hear again.

  "None of my business, Evangeline. That's a nice name, Evangeline. Acadien!"

  "Mais oui! And my drink is vodka, rocks, a twist of lemon peel rubbed around the edge. Toss me that Absolut."

  We all fixed drinks and sat around the little fold-down table and wrote out an inven­tory. We argued rationing, tried to figure out menus of the rich but scarce stuff we had. After a while I wasn't focusing too well, and we were laughing a lot more than the situa­tion warranted. It was better than the alternative, which was worrying about what might have happened to Elizabeth. No word on that yet, and most of the news channels didn't reach us out where we were. Correction. They could have reached us, would have done so if we'd been in any kind of decent ship, but the piddling little shuttle was only equipped for reception in near-Arean space, and we were getting next to nothing.

  Two days passed.

  There was one deck of cards in a drawer and a Monopoly set. We used Monopoly money when we played poker, and it's a damn good thing, as I would have lost most of my inheritance in the first twenty-four hours. My own damn fault for playing cards with the smartest man in the world, right?

  Wrong! Evangeline cleaned both of us out. I wondered if Jubal was being gallant, let­ting her win, but I don't think so. Jubal just isn't that subtle, and the look on his face as he tossed in three eights he was so confident in, only to have it stomped on by Evangeline's full house... well, Jubal just wasn't that good an actor.

  We got our revenge, though. She had no luck at all at Monopoly. You should have heard Jubal cackling when she landed on his Boardwalk hotel.

  We lost our taste for olives pretty quickly. Jubal still enjoyed sucking on them, and we dutifully ate them as part of the skimpy meals we had planned out. After nursing moder­ate hangovers following our first sleep period, we rationed the booze, too. None of us were heavy drinkers.

  We tried not to look at the radio too often.

  I had established the channel to monitor from Mom, and if she had contacted Travis as she felt sure she could, he would know where to transmit and on what freq. We got nothing. The silence of the radio could make me sweat, if I thought about it much. It just underlined how very, very far away we were from anything human. When I thought about that, I tossed the dice and brought myself back to cutthroat capitalism. What were the chances of Jubal tossing a nine next turn, ending up right on Illinois? Is it worth my while to put up another house before he gets there? Did I have enough cash? These questions came to seem very important.

  Jubal had been sleeping well. His adjustment to being in a tin can a billion miles from nowhere was just short of miraculous, if you'd known him before. Gravity seemed to make all the difference, even if it was acceleration gravity. And, as Einstein observed, there is absolutely no way to tell one from the other unless you look out the window. We had pulled the shutters on all the windows long ago.

  Then the third night I heard him sobbing.

  "All my fault," he was moaning. "All my fault."

  I sat up and switched on a reading light. We'd folded up most of the chairs, made the rest into bunks. Evangeline and I had, of course, remained chaste, sleeping apart, because we were unmarried, and Jubal had old-fashioned ideas about that.

  The bunks were lumpy, but in .4 gee just about anything is comfortable enough.

  "All my fault."

  I got up and gently shook Jubal by the shoulder. His eyes snapped open, and he gasped, but quickly got himself under control.

  "You were having a bad dream, Jubal."

  He rubbed his eyes and looked up at me with a wan smile.

  "No dream, Ray. No dream."

  "You want to talk about it?"

  He glanced over at Evangeline, who was sitting up., She swung her legs over the side of the seats and walked over to the fridge and got three glasses filled with ice. She set them on the table and Jubal and I joined her.

  "Last bottle of Jack," she said, pouring it over the ice for Jubal, then a vodka for her­self and another for me. I didn't really want it, but what the heck? We were only a few hours from the time we'd have to stop accelerating and start slowing down. I no longer looked at the ship's computer very often. I just didn't much like the speed figure, and I liked the distance from home even less.

  "Thanks you, cher, I need it." Jubal took a big drink and made a face.

  "So what did you mean, Jubal, my friend? The invasion?"

  He shrugged. "I guess that my fault, too. I thought I run away, I might stop the killin'. But I'm not good at that kind of thinkin', me. Should listen to Travis, he always tells me right."

  "Jubal, that escape was pretty good thinking. I mean, it was a good plan."

  "It was?"

  "Sure. I'd have thought it was impossible to get away from that place. They were watching you all the time..."

  "Not all the time." He looked a little smug. "I figgered I could use those little bitty times Travis worked it out so I'd have some, what he called, dignity. Privacy. But I couldn'ta done it without I invented that stopper."

  "Stopper?" Evangeline asked.

  "That what I call the other bubbles. The reg'lar kinda bubble, it squeezes. Them black bubbles, they stop."

  "Stop time?"


  "Weeell... it ain't exactly time. I mean, there's different kindsa time, see? The kind we use, you can't stop it and you can't turn it around. But there's two other kinds of time, and... oh, man, Ray, I can't 'splain it real good."

  "That's okay, Jubal. No matter how you went at it, I wouldn't understand it, anyway."

  "Well, what it look like, and what it feel like, is that time stops inside that stopper bubble, so that's what I called 'em."

  "So, for all practical purposes..."

  Jubal thought about it. "Yeah, I squinched up real tight, me, and I turn on de stopper bubble, and soon as I touch that button... dere I am wit' you guys, and I'm fallin', and pukin'... sorry about that."

  I thought about it.

  "What if I hadn't thought to use that little gizmo you sent me?"

  Jubal smiled.

  "Well, then, if de guys say the universe will stop blowin' itself up, if the whole she­bang come to a stop and then start to fall back in on itself, in 50 billion years or so, and it all fall back into a new cosmic egg all ready to be born again... why, there'd I'd be, sittin' right on top of that cosmic egg, me, halfway tru a Hail Mary."

  That brought a moment of silence. Evangeline broke it.

  "And that... that didn't worry you?"

  "Why worry?" Jubal wanted to know. "Time, it ain't flowin', ain't no way to worry, nor nothin' to worry 'bout. Course, I did wonder what would happen to my soul. Do souls care about time? I ain't figgered that one out yet, me. And anyhow... not ever comin' out that bubble be better than sittin' aroun' the way I was. I had to stop all the killin'. Like I said, it's all my fault."

  "The invasion..."

  "No, Evangeline, cher. Oh, that probably my fault, too, they was tryin' to ketch me." I remembered that Jubal didn't know we'd been invaded not once, but three times, and decided that wasn't something he needed to know. Not just yet, anyway. That we had all been picked up and tortured was something he didn't need to know, ever.

  "And anyway, I never went to Mars. It's the other thing that's all my fault."

  "What would that be, Jubal?"

  "Why, the big wave. The sumammy."

  I looked at Evangeline and saw she was looking at me.

  "Jubal..." I began.

  "It was a ship, Ray. One of them starships went out a long time ago."

  "You're sure of that?"

  "Nothin' else it could be. Somebody went out there, long, long way, and stopped his­self, turned hisself around, and headed back home. Then something go bad. Maybe all the people on that ship, they get sick and die. I dunno. Whatever, the ship just keep on going. Brain in that ship, it probly navigate its way home, but don't nobody tell it to stop. Ain't no way it hit the Earth on a accident. Take good aimin', hit a planet at that speed. Real good aimin'. I shoulda thought of that, me, before we give it to the world. All we thought about was, don't let no crazy people get hold of no bubbles so's they can 'splode 'em. Shoulda thought of that thing. Those bubbles, they aren't a good thing. Wish I'd of never thought of 'em. All my fault."

  So we were back to the old argument. Were Einstein and friends responsible for Hiro­shima and Islamabad, et cetera? Up to you, judge it for yourself. Personally, I couldn't hold Jubal responsible for the "sumammy." Of course, some would.

  "Do you have any idea of who it was, Jubal?" Evangeline asked.

  "No idea, me. Maybe Travis will know. Last time we talked, just before they cut us off and I started plannin' to bust out, he said he'd look into it, him."

  That would have been a good time for Travis to call, but in fact it wasn't for another two hours, as I was just getting back to sleep, that the phone rang.

  19

  I'd set the ship's com unit to an old-fashioned ring, since none of us saw the point in wearing our stereos when we had no net connection. It rang once, and I sat up with a jerk, and then it began its message.

  "Travis Broussard, calling for Ray Garcia-Strickland and Evangeline Redmond. Come in Ray and Evie. Travis Broussard, calling for..." and repeat. I hurried to the front of the shuttle and grabbed the mike.

  "Ray calling Travis, Ray calling Travis. Come in, Travis. We're reading you loud and clear." I said that several times, then shook the sleep out of my brain and set the trans­mitter to repeat the short message. No telling how far away he was, but it could be very far, indeed, if he was using a directional antenna pointed at our extrapolated position. There could be quite a time lag. There was also no telling when he'd be close enough to pick up our weak signal, but Travis always had the best equipment available, and if any ship could pick us up from out here, he'd be the one.

  He was also the best space pilot I'd ever known, something I'd held close to me in the darkest hours of doubt, early in the morning, for the last few days. He'd get to us.

  It was ten minutes before the reply came.

  "I'm reading you, Ray. Good job of flying, my man! You're within about a half mile of the line I projected, and only about ten thousand miles farther away than I expected you to be." I had nothing to say to that. With a computer and an autopilot anybody can be a great pilot, as long as you're traveling in a straight line. Travis's job, it turned out, had been a lot harder.

  "I was on my way back to Earth, see about finding out some things, when your mom's message came in. Sorry I couldn't be faster. I had to cut a chord across a lot of empty space. Lonely out here, huh? Over."

  "Elizabeth," Evangeline hissed in my ear, her fingers digging into my arm. I nodded. I'd been there already.

  "Roger that, Travis. How is Elizabeth? Over."

  Long silence. I forgot to turn on the timer, but it turned out to be around thirty seconds before we heard from him again. So he was closer than I had thought.

  "Elizabeth will be all right, you guys. Ah... hell, she was working with a volunteer rescue crew and she... she was working her way through some debris to get to a guy who... ah, turned out to be dead. She had to have known he probably was, but she kept at it, and she picked up... a tear in her glove. Got a pressure sleeve on it, got hung up trying to get out... hell, there's no easy way to say this. She may lose the hand."

  Long silence. Then...

  "Over," he said.

  I gulped and looked at Evangeline, who was crying. "Copy that, Travis. Is everyone else okay? Over." Thirty seconds.

  "All your family members are okay. They were all pretty busy last time I talked to them. There was a lot of damage, lots of stuff to clean up. I don't know if you've heard a casualty report. Last I heard, it was over a hundred, with a few dozen still missing and presumed dead. Most of them are natives. Sorry, I mean Martians. Over."

  "My god," Evangeline said. I couldn't think of anything to say for a moment. That was okay, because Travis resumed in a few seconds, in spite of the 'over' business.

  "Ah, might as well give you some more information. Your countrymen are not taking it lightly. Some of the black ships have landed again, and they're not being welcomed with open arms. There have been riots. A few of the troops were killed in the blowouts, and Martians got their guns, so the locals are not entirely unarmed now. They've killed a few of the soldiers, and the soldiers have killed a few Martians. I wouldn't call it an all-out fight, there's too much damage to clean up, and too much worry about causing more blowouts. But tempers are, as they say, running high. I wouldn't wear any black clothes if I was out there in public pressure. In fact, most people are wearing red. Over."

  I glanced at Jubal, who had popped another pill after his disturbing dreams. Just as well. I'd be able to tell him that Travis was coming to the rescue without upsetting him with more stories about death and... injuries. Oh, my poor sister.

  "Roger. Ah, Travis, I don't know what Mom told you, other than to come get us. Over."

  Twenty-nine seconds silence.

  "She didn't say much, except that y'all had to run. I assumed it had something to do with the invasion. Over."

  "It does, in a way. You know the thing we don't ever talk about? I probably shouldn't say any m
ore over an open channel. Over."

  Twenty-nine seconds. Then thirty-five. Then forty. I was about to call again.

  "No fucking way," he finally said. There was a small note of hope in his voice.

  "Way," Evangeline said.

  He'd hear that in fourteen seconds, but he went on – or had gone on, considering that we were hearing his words fourteen seconds after he spoke them.

  "Okay," he said, taking a deep breath. "Okay, this is great news, if you're saying what I think you're saying. But I'm afraid I have... oh, hi, Evangeline, nice to hear your voice. Like I was saying, I've got some bad news. I have company.

  Ah, I don't know where they picked me up, but I've got three black warships only a few miles behind me. I've been pulling two gees for two days, I should catch up to you in a few hours."

  "Should I..." I shut up because he was still going on.

  "They'll be catching up at pretty much the same time. Obviously they've been follow­ing me to find you, and, hell, they're listening, so we might as well say it. Is what we don't talk about aboard? Over."

  "Roger that, Travis. Should I keep boosting? Should I cut the drive? You should know that he will get very sick and very scared if I cut the boost. Over."

  Pause.

  "Fuck me if I know how he's surviving the trip at all. You must be a miracle worker. No, you might as well keep boosting. You don't have to worry about consumables any­more, I've got plenty on board for all of y'all. Not that it'll matter much, because as soon as I get there I expect we'll all be captured. Right, Captain whoever-the-fuck-you-are on that command ship?" Short pause, but no one on the black ships answered him. "Over," he said, sounding infinitely sad and tired.

  "But Travis... can't we do something? I mean... we've come so far... over."