by John Varley
I had to get out of this horrible place. It was crippling me!
My uniform was hanging on the door, looking brand-new. Dressed and somewhat resembling a human being, I found my way to the commissary for a triple jolt of coffee. Say what you will about the Navy, one thing they do well is coffee. Always steaming hot, never prissied up with all the additives Earthies like to contaminate it with, and strong enough to bench-press two full-grown Martians a dozen times. I could practically feel my eyelids tightening.
Breakfast is another thing the Navy does reasonably well, though I’d advise you to stay away from the eggs. I stacked pancakes and drowned them in butter and syrup and finally began to feel something approaching okay as I sopped up the last of the mess and went looking for a place to wash my face. The girl that stared back at me in the mirror looked a little less like an internee in a concentration camp, but still not the perky Podster I had grown up with. I hoped to find that girl in free fall. That’s where I had left her.
“WHAT DO YOU mean, no bucket today?”
Okay, people can ask some pretty stupid questions when they’re blindsided and frustrated. Even me. The duty officer just stared at me, as her meaning had been pretty clear. What part of N-O don’t you understand, Podkayne?
I tried again.
“Why is there no bucket today?”
“The pilot broke his leg last night,” she said. “He’s still in the hospital, and I don’t have anyone to spare.”
“I could fly it with a broken leg. I could fly it with two broken legs.”
“You’re rated?”
I dug out my card and she plugged it in and scanned the information.
“Flying since you were six, huh?” I had moved up a few levels in her estimation. I don’t really know why. It’s not like flying a spaceship is hard, not like an airplane—which I learned to do first, by the way—but it’s surprising how many Martians never bother to put in the hours you need to be certified.
“It’s in my genes, I guess,” I said. “My grandfather flew the first spaceship to Mars.” Ordinarily I don’t bring up my family history. You get tired of hearing “You’re that Strickland-Garcia?” I hope to make my own mark on the world and not rely on my ancestors’ achievements. I try to keep the lies to what is socially necessary to avoid embarrassment and friction, too, and that part about Granddad flying the Red Thunder was not technically true, in the strictest sense. But when the situation requires it…
“Well, Lieutenant, if you want to take her up, I got no problem with that.”
THE FORMALITIES TOOK three minutes, and then I was outside in the smothering heat doing my walkaround.
It was a little daunting. I knew this ugly tub had been ferrying people back and forth from the desert to orbit since before I was born … which, come to think of it, had an upside and a downside. The bucket ships were reliable. As far as I knew, none had ever crashed except for a few incidents in horrible weather when landing struts had collapsed. The springs looked good. I checked the cradle holding the propulsion bubble for stress cracks, and eyeballed the mysterious web of titanium interrupters that would, in some way I didn’t understand, release the almost unlimited energies inside the bubble in a controlled thrust. It all looked okay.
I opened inspection panels and examined the main gyro, the backup, and the backup to the backup.
That was basically it. No airfoils to test, no fuel level to check. I stood back and craned my neck up at it and didn’t see any obvious cracks in the windows. My first Navy command, known only as Ferry 563, could desperately use a wash and a new paint job, but she’d get me off the ground.
I waved to my passengers waiting back at the dusty little shuttle bus. They joined me, a symphony in crimson, and I told them they could get aboard. There were four men and one woman, all outranking me according to the fruit salad on their sleeves and shoulder boards. One was a rear admiral. Suddenly this didn’t seem as much fun as it had a few minutes ago. Nobody wants big brass looking over her shoulder.
There were ten seats on the lower deck and ten seats on the upper. Everybody was in the basement, and I glanced at them to be sure they were buckling up. I didn’t much want to be the one to tell an admiral he had to strap in.
I made my way to the bridge and settled into the command chair, which, like the whole ship, had seen better days. One of the seams was sprung and a bit of cotton fluff peeked out. I powered up the systems and watched the indicators appear on the window in front of me as the ship performed a self-diagnosis. Oxygen tanks full. Pressurization system nominal. Radar okay. I activated the PA.
“Ah, this is …” I bogged down for a moment. Protocol said that, since I was flying this tub, I was the captain. The word stuck in my throat for a moment. Then I thought it over and smiled. My first command!
“This is the captain,” I said, thankful that my voice didn’t squeak. “Everybody hang on to your socks. We’re outta here.”
I eased the stick forward and heard the low rumble from below. A vast cloud of dust rose all around me. I moved it forward some more, and the exhaust sound grew louder. Under the ship, grains of sand would be melting into black glass. The contact lights went off for each of the landing legs, and I felt a little pressure pushing me back into my seat. All systems were go at one point two gees, and we started to climb out of the blast cloud.
One point five gees. One point seven. Two gees. I leveled the thrust out there, and settled back into the cushions.
I took my nameless ship straight up for eight miles, out of a lot of atmosphere, before vectoring the thrust to bring us into a forty-five-degree angle of pitch. Then I rotated the ship so I could look up at an ever-increasing slice of North America on my way into orbit.
To the naked eye it didn’t look a lot different than it would have a century ago. The air was now cleaner. They say that at the turn of the century there could be smog from coast to coast, some days. Today was crystal clear, only a few bands of clouds here and there, much like it must have been in 1950. Back then they were only getting started on the Interstate highway system, which ended up crisscrossing the entire country with ribbons of concrete and—get this—individually piloted vehicles! Everybody moving at seventy miles per hour or more, rain, snow, or darkness, and no central control. The carnage was incredible. Now those routes were the basis of the electric rail system. At night they’d light up like a vast jeweled spiderweb. It’s pretty. But by day you can barely see them. We were passing over the Rocky Mountains now, heading for the Great Plains. Over the bits of what once was the United States of America.
No more. The Big Wave had changed all that.
DURING THE GREAT Diaspora, when just about any country or even a wealthy group of people such as a corporation or church could build a starship, a bunch of fanatics hollowed out a small asteroid and set off for a nearby star. To this day no one knows for certain who it was, though there are three leading contenders, and each group has its advocates, so to speak. But there’s always the chance that any of these three groups may one day show up, listen to the story in shock and horror, and say, “Who? Us?” There’s no way to know, but we do know that at least two of these groups are totally innocent of atrocity.
Whoever they were, these people realized the godlike power inherent in a large ship moving at very high speed, something that a handful of alarmists had pointed out early in the bubble-drive era, but not early enough to make a difference.
Whoever they were, they’d had no regard for human life, their own or anyone else’s.
Whoever they were, they took their ship, their Death Star as many people now called it, and boosted it away from the sun for many years, then boosted again to slow it down. Once stopped, they boosted again, and just kept on going, heading straight for the Earth.
They were nudging the speed of light when they got here, which made them impossible to detect; any radar echo warning of their coming would arrive only fractions of a second before the ship itself. So there was no way to stop them.<
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But navigation at near-light speed presented them with some difficulties of their own, and it seems there was no one aboard who was really up to the problem. Due to relativity, time had slowed to a crawl for them. They would have experienced a journey from the orbit of Pluto to Earth, for instance, in only seconds.
It was apparently too much of a problem even for the ship’s computers. A single message was sent out, which was blue-shifted to the point that we almost missed it. It said, “Death to.”
That was it. Death to.
We’ll never be sure who they wished death to, though a strong case has been made that the impact point they were seeking was Washington, D.C. They came within a hair of missing the planet entirely, but close can count in things other than horseshoes. The Death Star grazed the planet, dipping into the atmosphere and then the Atlantic Ocean, before blazing off into space again in the form of superhot plasma. The collision created the largest tsunami in recorded history.
That wave killed somewhere between three and four million people. We will never have exact figures, as many were buried in mud and many more were swept out to sea. The islands of the Caribbean, the Bahamas, and the Eastern Seaboard of the United States from Florida to Cape Cod were all devastated. Among the hardest hit areas was the central Florida coast, where my great-grandmother, Betty Garcia, owned and operated the Blast-Off Motel.
She survived, and went to Mars to live with her family, and now I was going home because she was dying.
THE BIG WAVE was the biggest catastrophe other than war ever to hit humanity. It accomplished what the American Civil War had not: It shattered the Union.
Civil order in the Red Zone broke down quickly. Martial law was declared, and over several years, the country began to break apart. There was starvation and riots, and political chaos. Washington was a sewer, knee-deep in mud and rotting bodies. Competing governments were established in Chicago and in New York, which was north of the area of total devastation, and later in Los Angeles. A decade of civil wars, secessions, religious fanaticism, and sheer terrorism finally settled into the uneasy borders I could now see crawling below me on my visual political overlay.
We were just passing over the boundary of Western America, which includes the former states of California and Arizona, most of Washington and Oregon, and much of Nevada and New Mexico. Up to the north was the Free State of Idaho, a continuing war zone largely taken over by Pure White Christians. The wall the Canadians had been forced to put up was too far north for me to see. We passed quickly over the Mormon State of Deseret and soon were looking down on the vast expanse of Heartland America, with parts of the Second Republic of Texas visible to the south.
I suppressed a shudder. There were worse postings than Western America.
There were eight splinter nations that used to form the United States of America, and three of those had an official state religion. In Heartland America it was an uncompromising form of Christianity I wouldn’t wish on a dog. I didn’t even like flying over the place, but it stretched from eastern Montana to the parts of Florida outside the Red Zone, and north to the Truce Line that bisected the former states of Illinois, Indiana, and Ohio.
Over the northern horizon would be East America, hugging the Great Lakes, from Minnesota to New York, reaching up to Maine and south to Maryland.
North America had been chaotic for years, and was only now mostly settled down. There had been mass migrations of whole classes of people who no longer felt welcome in their home regions, and some who were actually in grave danger. The worst was in Idaho, where thousands of people had vanished in a few bloody White Purity weeks. Elsewhere, Blues had moved to the coasts, Reds had moved to the middle, and everybody who could sneak out before the DMZ was established had fled from the Red Zone, which extended from Florida to Chesapeake Bay.
Washington was inhabited again, and north of that things were as close to back to normal as they would ever be. But to the south, up to fifty miles from the ocean that had turned from friend to mass killer in only a few hours, there was very little civilization.
Now the land was going, too. If you knew just what you were looking for, you could see it with the naked eye, in the former barrier islands now awash in seawater after half a century of global warming. Florida was a lot skinnier than it had been. The Gulf Coast towns had been crawling inland and northward for decades now as block after block, street after street, the waters advanced, and people built anew on what had been the edges of the city. New Orleans was gone.
In the Pacific, El Nino, the little boy, had become a teenager with a severe attitude problem. Melted Antarctic ice had resulted in local cooling and sinking of waters that meant the seasonal streams seldom reached where they used to. Fisheries had died out or moved, devastating the economies of western South America. Air temperatures and wind patterns had changed, resulting in an average yearly increase of up to fifteen degrees, regionally, as far north as Oregon. Pismo Beach, that furnace I’d recently escaped, used to be pleasant, or so I’m told. Now it sweltered in the summer, with even worse temperatures inland.
The parts of the Amazon rain forest that had not already been cut down withered and died when the rains didn’t come.
Category 5 Atlantic hurricanes now hit the Atlantic and Gulf coasts at the rate of four or five a year. Pacific typhoons were even worse, and there were a lot more of them. Japan was hit by climatic Godzillas several times a year.
Sea level had increased twenty feet since my grandparents’ day. Twenty feet wasn’t much in Pismo Beach, where the land rises rapidly from the sea. But in the Ganges delta, along the Mississippi and the Amazon, and in countless floodplains around the world, the teeming populations had been relocated at great expense, and over a billion people lived in temporary camps now twenty years old and more. Much of Earth’s most fertile land was now under salt water.
Then there was the tundra. Melting ice was one thing; it raised sea levels and disrupted ocean currents and weather patterns. But in Siberia and Alaska and Canada there had been millions of square miles of tundra, frozen ground. It was frozen no longer. Most of it was melted now, which sounds like a good idea, except all that tundra held billions of tons of carbon dioxide and methane.
Populations, human and animal, had shifted north and south to cooler climes. Thousands of species had gone extinct in the last decades, and many of the larger African mammals now survived only in big reserves in North America and Asia.
Poor old Planet Earth.
On the other hand, it’s an ill wind indeed that blows no good. The Amazon and Indonesian and Southeast Asian rain forests are pretty much gone, but parts of the Sahara and the Australian outback are now getting forty or fifty inches of rain every year. Ultraviolet-resistant crops thrive where there was only sand a decade ago.
Who knows where it will end? I myself favor the theory that in a hundred years the equator will be a wasteland, never dropping below a hundred degrees at night, and most humans will live north and south of the tropics, including Antarctica.
Or on other planets. Why not? We’re doing fine on Mars, with much harsher conditions. More people are moving to the moon. Then there are the asteroids. Even if we totally wear out the Earth—and nobody really thinks that will happen, life of some sort will adjust, just as it did after the dinosaurs died—something will survive. Maybe it will only be cockroaches, but something will survive.
Always look on the bright side, that’s my philosophy. Though it’s a little depressing to think of cockroaches as the bright side.
EARTH PORT THREE WAS a standard orbital environment, pretty much like the other three circling endlessly about ten thousand miles over the equator. Picture a can of creamed corn. Peel off the label and paint it Navy red. Now blow it up so the diameter at each end of the cylinder is about a thousand yards. Set it spinning at a rate that will produce .38 gees inside. Now extend pipes out each end along the spin axis and stud it with docking collars, and you have a stable long-term space environment. Navy r
egs don’t allow personnel to stay in zero gravity for more than three months at a time, which would mean a lot of hassle moving people back and forth from Mars for R&M leaves, so we have to have access to spin gravity.
I could have let the autopilot dock us, but I wanted to test my rusty piloting skills, so I kept my hand on the stick as I eased her in. Just like riding a bicycle, they say, and they were right. It was as easy as if I’d done it only yesterday. I got a satisfying clank, flipped a few switches, and looked at a row of green lights.
“This is your captain speaking,” I said, with no little satisfaction. “We have docked with Earthport Three … six minutes ahead of schedule. You may now unfasten your seat belts and exit the vehicle through the lock on the control deck. Please check around your seat for any items you may have forgotten you brought aboard. Thank you for choosing the Martian Navy for this flight. Please contact us again for all your Earth-to-orbit transportation needs.”
I was bundling my hair into a manageable mass and wrapping an elastic band around it when my passengers came floating up through the deck and toward the airlock in the docking collar. One guy was looking a little green. An ensign looked at me and smiled, gave me the thumbs-up, but the commander didn’t seem so happy, probably pissed off by my docking announcement. Probably a lifer asshole. Screw him. I didn’t ask to be in this woman’s Navy; I was drafted, like most everybody else. Gold braid didn’t intimidate me, unless it was being worn by somebody in the chain of command over me.
4
SO WE’VE SPENT a little time together now. You’ve been with me from Pismo Beach to Earth orbit. I wouldn’t say we’re actually dating, but I think you know me well enough now that it’s time to meet my family.
Let’s don’t do it at Deimos Base, though that’s where a lot of them met me. You know how chaotic those scenes are, and I just hate them, don’t you?
(FYI, the trip home was a total bust in terms of male companionship. The crew was too busy or paired up, at least for the duration, and as for the passengers, I never saw such a collection of total losers. It’s what comes of universal conscription, we girls agreed. They have to take everybody.)
