John Varley - Red Lightning

by Red Lightning [lit]

  They were instructed to remove all troops and ships from the surface of Mars, and to do it within two hours.

  "Figure that gives 'em enough time to get off those Martian whores, pull up their socks, and get back to their ships," Travis said.

  "Martian whores have better taste than that," Evangeline sniffed.

  They were to take the ships to Phobos, land, tether down, and await further orders. When we got word from people on the ground that that had been done, Travis ordered everyone off the ships and inside Phobos, where they would peacefully submit to being disarmed. And they would surrender all space suits. No need to put them in prison if they didn't have suits; the whole big tourist bubble in Phobos became their prison. Another four hours and it was confirmed that had been done.

  "Okay," Travis told his conference call audience. "Whoever those ships belonged to, company, nation, or individual, kiss 'em good-bye. They invaded Mars flying no flag, never revealing their identity, and under international law that makes them pirates. Well... if international law doesn't say that, it should. Anyway, the ships are forfeit. They are now part of the Martian Navy. The crews will be held for war crimes trial by the Martian authorities." He covered the mike with his hand and made a face at us. "Whoever that may be." Then back to the phone:

  "Here's how it's going to go. You guys rely on bubble power for everything. I reckon you could go back to oil and gas and solar and nuclear and woodstoves, for a while, but that will take a lot of time, and it'll all run out soon. You don't even want to think about what will happen to your economies and your big companies without bubble power. Anybody out there who doesn't understand that perfectly well? Or should I explain it more?"

  He waited for ten seconds, and no one on the other end had any questions.

  "Right now, all the working Squeezers in existence are on Mars, and the only guy who can make more is with me, and we're going to Mars. As I've just demonstrated, you don't want to mess with us. Understood?"

  Again, no objections, though I fancied I could almost hear the gears grinding in those powerful heads coming right over the radio, all of them trying to find an angle, an advantage... and a way to trip us up.

  "And that's the way it's going to be, for a while. I don't know how long. You'll be all right, we'll ship you bubbles, your machines and cars and microwave ovens and comput­ers will keep working. It won't be for free, the Martians are going to charge you for it, but it wasn't free before, either, it was just cheap. How cheap it stays will be up to the Mar­tians.

  Because that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to hand this all over to the Martians, who will be declaring their political independence real soon now, as soon as they can get organized from all the disasters you caused them. I don't know what they'll do with your Martian investments; that's up to them. Maybe they'll nationalize them, maybe they'll decide to work with Earth investors and owners like they have before. I suspect that most of them will just want to get back to work, to earning a living, like they did before you attacked them. They may want to extradite some of y'all and put you on trial. They'll have to work that out.

  I got shoved into this situation once before, and did the best I could, which wasn't enough. Y'all are too fractured down there, you got too much bad history, you got too many rivalries, too much bad blood. Too damn many people, too, and as far as I can see, not a damn 'democratic' country that still retains much democracy. I don't know what Mars will do, but I think they'll have sense enough to set up some sort of democracy, because lousy as it is, it's still the best system we've come up with. But maybe it'll need a dictatorship, maybe there needs to be a stronger hand at the controls of something this powerful. I don't know who I'd trust to do that, other than my cousin Jubal, and he's not... inclined to do it. Jubal's too nice. I don't even trust myself to handle it, not by myself. In fact, thinking it over, I realized that the only people I would trust to do the right thing – and there's only a handful of them – are all on Mars. My friends and my family. I'm hoping that most Martians are like that, enough divorced from the old political and social lines on Earth to be able to think like a human being, like a citizen of the solar system.

  That's why I'm renouncing my American citizenship, and all allegiance to the planet Earth, and intend to become a Martian just as soon as I set foot on Martian soil again... and as soon as those newly free people figure out just what it means to be a Martian. We're throwing our lot in with them, and I've just shown you we have the power to han­dle anything you throw at us and, as a last resort, take you all down with us. And don't think I wouldn't do it. Now, get your butts in gear."

  Previously, Travis had told them about his "Sword of Damocles." He said there was a Squeezer generator somewhere out there, waiting for a signal. If it got that signal... Earth would be enclosed in a bubble for all eternity. This was told only to the top dogs, not to the world in general. Travis didn't mind that most people on Earth might hate him, but there were limits. And it might cause a panic even worse than the one we'd already caused by our demonstration of power.

  Another bluff. There was no such device. But they could never know that.

  "One of those times when it would be better to just die, rather than 'win,' " Travis said. "All we've got going for us, right now, is that they don't know our limitations. An all-out assault would kill us, and they'd at least know that no one else had Squeezer power. But that's how their minds work. You have to have them by the balls before their hearts and minds will follow. And you have to understand that these guys, if they had something like this and knew they were going down... they would destroy the Earth. They would kill billions of people, so they can believe I would. It just makes sense to them."

  This was all said with Jubal out of the room, not doing too well with more stomach upset. And to tell you the truth, I had a hard time believing what he said. Would people really do that? We had the power to do it, and we had never even considered it, not for a nanosecond. It was altogether more insight into the dark side of humanity than I wanted to think about... but Travis had seen a lot more than I had, and I had to consider that he might be right. History tells me that, for many decades, the whole benighted green globe of Earth was gripped by a horror called "Mutual Assured Destruction," the idea that if one country launched a massive nuclear attack, enough missiles would survive the first strike to guarantee the destruction of the aggressor nation. It worked, I guess... but what if it hadn't? If America had sustained an attack that killed 300 million people, would the gnomes down in the silos and deep underwater and in the bombers follow orders and kill 300 million Russians, just out of hatred?

  "Bet on it," Travis said, and I knew he was right.

  So we went home and were welcomed as conquering heroes. They staged parades for us, carried us around on their shoulders...

  Dream on.

  We stole in like thieves in the night, managing to miss the swarms of media and sneak into my home in the Red Thunder. We glimpsed the damage on our way in, and it was painful to look at, but nothing like the pain I felt when I saw how much it had all aged my dad. He'd never lost a paying customer before, except to suicide, and dealing with it all had taken a lot out of him. But his welcoming hug was strong. There were tears and laughter, and a big feast that no one ate much of.

  Then it was back to reality.

  For a while I thought it might come to blows between Dad and Travis. There was bad feeling between Mom and Dad, too, and between Mom and the Redmond family. I'd never seen her so subdued. Even though it had all worked out well – so far, anyway, though none of us thought it was all over yet – the burden for placing us two "youngsters" in danger was falling on her shoulders.

  I tried to protest that it had been my own decision, and so did Evangeline, but we quickly saw that was just making the situation worse, so we retreated from the battlefield with Elizabeth.

  "I'm with you guys," she whispered. "I just wish I'd really been with you."

  "You had your own little adventure," Evangeli
ne said. "Let me see that hand."

  I was horrified. I figured Elizabeth would be devastated by the whole thing, and I hadn't planned to talk about it at all unless she brought it up.

  But Elizabeth rolled up her shirtsleeve and undid a strap, and handed her new hand and forearm to Evangeline. The stump was wrapped in a soft bandage.

  "Almost healed up," she said. "The implants inside are still programming themselves to my nervous system. They say it takes a few months to get really fine control. Watch."

  The prosthetic Evangeline was holding made a fist, then, slowly, the middle finger extended at us. Evangeline laughed, then began to cry. Elizabeth put her good arm around her and hugged her.

  "Don't worry about me, sister," she said, calmly. "The way things are going, I expect I'll have a cloned hand one of these days soon. And this one isn't all that bad. Hell, it's a concealed weapon. It's an iron fist in a plastic glove."

  She had a point there. I touched it, and it was warm and soft like human flesh. Still, I wouldn't have traded, and I don't think she would have, either, if she'd had a choice. But that was Elizabeth, making the best of a bad situation.

  The family squabbling settled down fairly quickly. None of us were the type who tended to stay mad just because they wanted to be mad. And there was too much good history between them all. Mr. Redmond's heart never had seemed to really be in the argument, considering what our family had done for him, and I think he was actually proud of how well his daughter had done in a crisis. Mrs. Redmond was a little more steamed and never completely cooled off, but she was mad at Mom and Travis, not me, so I wasn't too worried. Mom would eventually bring her around.

  By the end of our first day back home, everyone seemed ready to put past mistakes behind them and move on to the considerable problems ahead with a minimum of recriminations. After all, it had all worked out well, hadn't it?

  Well... not exactly.

  So the family reception was a little rough. But the part about the parades and stuff, my fellow Martians would have done all that, if we hadn't been staying out of the public eye to retain a little privacy, right?

  Well, yes and no.

  The fact was, this was a lot to drop into the laps of Martians, who hadn't asked for it. Suddenly we were a world power. Sure, everybody and his idiot cousin on Earth had an atomic bomb, and it would only take one of them to wipe us out – and believe me, a lot of people brought that up in the discussions that followed. And we couldn't tell anybody about Travis's Damoclean bluff, which probably wouldn't have helped, anyway. Half of the people would probably believe there was such a thing and that Travis would use it to protect his cousin.

  In the end, it was the invasions that finally made the birth of the Martian Republic a necessity, and a sure thing. Nothing could have united us more than the contempt those acts had implied, both for human life and for us as a people. Martians were mightily pissed, our honored dead were hardly cold in their graves, and a good half of them proba­bly would have used the Sword of Damocles if it had existed and we were attacked. I mean, not only had they killed Martians, they had killed tourists. They had interfered with our business. Our hotels were empty, the casinos were quiet. It was going to take a while to get our economy going again.

  The Squeezer was suddenly the only thing we had to sell. And most people were in favor of making "those damn Earthies" pay through the nose.

  So in the end, everybody rolled up their sleeves and got to work. It's what Martians do, and I say that with considerable pride.

  The usual civic leaders stepped forward and tried to take the reins of power... and we turned them down. There were endless meetings, rallies, passionate speeches, protests from every imaginable interest group. But in the end it was all decided on the web. We threw it open for discussion, and boy, did we ever discuss.

  Anybody could participate. No age limit, all you had to do was be able to read and write. Any language, as computers could instantly translate into the Martian de facto language of English.

  We went through the age-old possibilities. Direct democracy has a strong, gut attrac­tion to individualists like us, and it works fine... until "The People" vote for some damn-fool thing that just can't work. Representative democracy has its attractions... until you look at any number of horror stories from Earth and see how easily money can buy the whole shooting match. Even the royal system can work pretty well... until the wise king dies and power moves to his idiot son.

  In the end, after six months of shouting, we ended up with the first open-source con­stitutional government. Anybody could write the laws and constitution, but nobody could be sure his bright ideas would stay there. We started out with some of the noblest docu­ments of civilization: The Declaration of the Rights of Man, the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights, the United Nations Charter, the Geneva Conventions. Every sentence was passionately argued, with a deadline, and revotes happening all the time. After a while they were debating the fines for not picking up doggie poop.

  At the end of six months the constitution was frozen, and we had to live with it for a year. One Martian year, if you please. Then we could start rewriting it again, to fix the things we screwed up. I figure we'll be doing a lot of rewriting, but what's so bad about that?

  We ended up with a Prime Minister and a small parliament. There was provision for a cabinet, and last time I looked Mom was ahead in the polls for Finance Minister.

  And we actually had a Navy! In fact, with most of the powerful nations on Earth stripped of their secret fleets, which had violated dozens of international treaties, we had the most powerful space force of any nation.

  Manning it wasn't a problem. The day it was announced, most of the male population of Mars between eighteen and twenty-five and more than half of the women that age went and volunteered. We didn't need nearly that many, and those who got in were instant heroes in their snappy new uniforms.

  I didn't volunteer. I'd had enough of space combat.

  And then there was the problem of Jubal.

  To put it bluntly: Mars didn't really want him. And at the same time, we couldn't get along without him. He was our biggest danger and our cornucopia. As long as he was alive and on Mars, there would be the constant threat of attack from Earth. But if he left, we would be just another pissant little settlement.

  Luckily for Jubal, his fate was not up for a vote.

  Jubal talked to nobody, was hardly even aware of all the controversy swirling around him. People tried to influence Travis, instead, but he wouldn't get into any arguments about government.

  "I'm a cranky old bastard when it comes to government," was all he'd say. "When y'all come up with a system, let me know. I'll take a look at it, and if it looks like it will protect Jubal, then we'll stay. Otherwise, we're off for Pluto and points outward."

  Travis did agree to stay until the government was established. The Martian Navy was on patrol by then, and nobody on Earth was showing any signs of wanting to upset the new status quo. Most of them had a lot on their plates already. The United States was still seriously crippled, nobody knowing from one day to another just who was in charge. There had been several military coups. Many other countries weren't much better off than that. Several world leaders had been impeached, or overthrown. Civil wars raged every­where. The Earth economy was barely staggering along. Nobody wanted to think about how much worse things would get without cheap Squeezer power. Even billionaires can be made to see sense now and then: If society collapses, your money ain't worth squat. So, by and large, people Earthside were happy with the new situation.

  Martians settled down and accepted it, too.

  In the end, the only one who wasn't happy was... you guessed it. Jubal was miserable.

  The only time he was reasonably happy was when he was in his lab, making primary Squeezer units. I don't know much about that, it was shrouded in secrecy by Travis and the guards he hired. That was fine with me, I didn't want to know anything about how many they were making, where they were going
, what security would surround them, what sort of nasty stuff Jubal was building into them to prevent them being of any use if somebody managed to steal them. The lab was located all the way on the other side of the planet, down by the South Pole.

  They built a habitat for him. Some people called it the Jubal Zoo, but of course people couldn't go look at him. It was a circular mile of a damn good imitation of Louisiana swampland. There was a lake, and bayous, and little creeks. Whole huge cypress trees were imported and planted, and the waters were stocked with alligators and birds and fish. The alligators had to be taken out; they were a bit too frisky in Martian gravity. But the rest of it worked well enough. Jubal lived there in a two-room shack with a wood­stove and no television.

  Nobody visited him but family. Evangeline and I dropped by at least once a week, and Travis practically lived there. We'd row out in the lake and fish, and talk about things. He never complained, never talked about his feelings, but some days he didn't say much of anything at all. All he ever asked about the outside world was when Travis was with us, and then he wanted to know how the Squeezer project was going. If it was "finished."

  Finished? I hadn't known there was an endpoint. I figured Jubal would just keep working, and we'd all just stay on our toes. It had worked for twenty years on Earth. All that was different now was Jubal was in a new place, right?

  Actually, there was a lot that was different. The despair that had driven Jubal to escape in the first place was still there, and stronger than ever. There was only one thing in the world Jubal really wanted, though he seldom talked about it.

  He wanted to go home.

  The Jubal-Dome was a nice try, but no cigar. The fact was, he hated Mars. He hated pretty much every place except Louisiana. He'd not even been that wild about living in Florida, but it was acceptable. Mars was definitely not.