by John Varley
Let’s move right on to the Utopia Planitia Time Suspension Facility.
UTOPIA IS JUST a big depression in the northern hemisphere where there’s nothing really going on, like so much of Mars, only worse. There’s not even a lot of craters there, just a big flat plain with a rail line running straight through it. There’s a landing field that is used mostly by ambulances. Looking at the place, you’d never guess what lies beneath.
The favored euphemism for a graveyard is cemetery. A mausoleum if the remains are stored aboveground, a crypt if it’s underground or in a basement. A repository for ashes, or “cremains” as they like to call them, is a columbarium. Black bubble technology is fairly new, and there still isn’t consensus on what to call a place that holds humans in stopped time, but most seem to favor “vivarium.”
Gran was still ambulatory and hooked up to only a small number of machines that easily fit on a cart. We went under a rather grand marble archway into the vivarium. The floor was white marble, stretching off into the distance. Overhead signs flashed slightly ahead of us, directing the GARCIA PARTY to DEPARTURE HALL #40. I thought that was a rather tacky thing to call it, then we passed other halls with names like “Until We Meet Again,” “Bon Voyage!” and “Safe in the Arms of Jesus.” I kid you not. I couldn’t see Gran going for anything like that; the neutral #40 would appeal to her.
This farewell party was probably a challenge to Grandma Kelly, who had naturally organized it, since it’s all relatively new and social standards for something like this were still in flux. What do you wear, for instance? Nothing about the party should resemble a funeral, so black is out. On the other hand, it’s not exactly a luau, either. Leave the print dress with the pineapples and surfer dudes at home. It’s a send-off, no question, but most honorees don’t really want to go, and most of the guests are at least ambivalent about the whole thing: happy she’s going to be alive, but frightened that it may, in fact, be the last time you’re ever going to see her. What do you do with that? What’s a proper emotional response? Mostly confusion, if the others here were feeling anything like I was.
But come with me now into Departure Hall #40, which is all abuzz with people who’ve come ahead, friends of the family, waiting for the guest of honor. If I don’t introduce you to my family now, it’ll be too late, they’ll be lost in the crowd, and some of them will be drunk.
In any gathering on Mars, if she is in the room, your attention will immediately go to Kelly Strickland. I don’t know what it is. You could call it charisma. Cameras love her. She is attractive, but not in a movie-star way. Her clothes are ordinary, and she’s worn the same hairstyle all my life. When it started to go gray she let it, and now it’s a startling silver. She’s not an imposing figure, certainly not on Mars. Maybe a little bit less than average height for an Earth girl.
You could call it intensity. I’ve met people who can concentrate on one thing so exclusively you’d think their eyes could bore right through whatever it is they’re looking at. Grandma Kelly can do it to a whole room. She can juggle a dozen tasks at the same time and not neglect anything.
Whatever it is, it was enough to get her elected first president of Mars, and she might still be president if she had wanted to serve a third term and keep running, despite a dedicated minority who hate her intensely. A lot more people wish we had her back, and every election time there is a “Draft Strickland” movement, which she always politely turns down. When Grandma Kelly is done with something, she’s done. Oh, she’s still political, you’d better believe it. She just concentrates on individual causes now rather than trying to lead the whole planet. I respect her tremendously, am a bit in awe of her, dislike her much of the time. But I know that if I was in trouble—any kind of trouble—she would lay down her life for me, right behind my own mother and father.
So I guess I love her. Sort of. It’s not easy being the granddaughter of the George Washington of Mars.
She’s sixty-three now, looks forty-five, and has had a life I can only envy, when I read about it. And that’s what I usually have to do; she’s not one for reminiscence, never dwells on the past. It’s the future she’s interested in, and when I say she “has had” a life, I must emphasize thus far. No one who knows her thinks she’s going to settle down anytime soon. She was a bored little rich girl in a medium-sized town in Florida in the early twenty-first century when she met my grandfather, a poor half-white, half-Hispanic boy, and everyone assumed she was slumming. Myself, I think maybe she was. But Granddaddy Manny and his friends had a dream, and Grandma Kelly made it happen. I’ve never been sure if it was her dream, too, or merely the first thing that came along in her life that was worthy of her talents. For whatever reasons, they built the first ship to bring humans to Mars and return them to Earth, though Kelly almost died along the way.
What surprised a lot of people was that she stuck with Granddaddy. I love my Granddaddy Manny as much as any man in the solar system—for a while there, when I was being difficult, I loved him even more than my father—but he’s not the sort of mate you’d expect for a human dynamo like Kelly.
Maybe that’s his attraction. Look at him over there, on the other side of Gran Betty from Grandma Kelly, carefully holding her arm like she was a piece of delicate crystal. He’s gentle, courtly, a little old-fashioned. He looks older than Kelly though they are the same age. He’s balding, a little paunchy, his clothes are out of date. If you had to guess his occupation, you might say bookkeeper, or you might say hotel manager.
Bingo! That’s where they met, at the famous Blast-Off Motel in Daytona Beach, now just a sad memory in the worst part of the Red Zone. According to Granddaddy Manny, it was not a roach motel, Betty never let it sink so low, but it was struggling. Manny grew up there, fatherless, and it was pretty much his life … and he hated it. He dreamed of being an astronaut, and through a combination of amazing pluck, luck, and sheer courage, he got to be one …
… for a few weeks. That’s when he found that he and his best friend, Dak, were subject to crippling falling sickness, something that afflicts him to this day. Nothing to be ashamed of; it happens, though seldom to the Mars-born.
So he ended up in hotel management, but this time as manager of the first, and for a long time the biggest and swankiest, hotel on Mars, the Red Thunder. He was good at it. Still is, though he’s largely retired now. While he was running the Red Thunder you could be assured that you would get the best, no matter what it took. And during the Martian War he performed heroically, though with little fanfare. Dad told me there were at least two hundred people, guests and employees of the hotel, who wouldn’t be alive today except for Granddaddy Manny.
These days he serves on a lot of committees and doesn’t seem to miss working at all. He’s devoted to his two children and to his grandchildren. He was never the kind of sugar daddy who would give you anything you happened to want—and believe me, I tested him every chance I got—but if there was something you really needed, he would always be there with it.
That guy with the neatly trimmed beard, towering over Manny and slightly behind him, the one in the tweed jacket that might as well have college professor embroidered across the back … that’s my daddykins, Ray (don’t call me Ramon) Strickland-Garcia, Ph.D. He is thirty-eight, young to be the head of the History Department at Marinaris University, but we’re a young planet and a young university. Dad is the foremost expert, anywhere, on Martian history. I am the light of his life, the sun rises and sets on me, and all the planets orbit around me. And you’d better believe I took full advantage of that during my childhood. I actually did call him Daddykins for a while there—I read it in a book somewhere, and isn’t it disgusting?—and he’d wiggle like a puppy when I did. I had him wrapped so tightly around my little finger it curled his hair.
Alas, no more. There seems to be a different set of rules after you pass eighteen, and I’m still figuring them out.
Standing next to him there, five inches shorter than his six and a half feet, is my
mommykins, Evangeline Redmond. Though I never called her that. Mom and I have a businesslike relationship. I love her and all, and she was always there to kiss a skinned knee or console me when my heart was broken … but sometimes it was a bit after the fact, long after Dad had already had the first shot. That’s because she’s a workaholic, like Kelly. She works in the family business, which is Redmond’s, the best restaurant on Mars. And believe me, in a tourist destination like Thunder City, where the clientele expects top service and food, that’s saying something. The menu is French, Creole, Cajun, and what we call Martian Fusion, which is anything Mom and her parents say it is.
That’s them not far away, Jim and Audrey Redmond, quiet and unobtrusive like Granddaddy Manny. Jim is checking out the long table groaning with food, which he catered, naturally. Grand-mère Audrey runs the business, Grand-père Jim rules the kitchen with an iron oven mitt, and Mom … well, Mom is the real reason Redmond’s is the best. She’s the one who created both the style and the term Martian Fusion, and the one who keeps inventing new stuff to keep the rich folks coming back. After all, there are a jillion French restaurants, several hundred just on Mars, and likewise Creole and Cajun. But where else are you going to get filet of thoat or stuffed sorak? Nowhere, that’s where, because Mom trademarked both names. I’m not going to tell you what those “Barsoomian” animals really are, it’s a trade secret, but if you don’t have a moral objection to genetically engineered meat, try the sorak in white wine sauce. You’ll never forget it.
Over there by the buffet, where he always is when the food is free, is Anthony Redmond, my uncle Tony, piling a plate. He’s twenty-eight, masses around three hundred pounds, and is currently failing at his third career, having already gone bankrupt twice. He’s a burden to Jim and Audrey, but it’s hard to dislike him because he’s so cheerful and outgoing. My advice: Let him guide you to all the most fun places in Thunder City, and even buy him drinks, but never loan him any money.
Not far from him, the handsome guy with the short military haircut, looking like the offspring of a cardinal and a peacock in his full-dress uniform, is Rear Admiral William Redmond, NMR, my uncle Bill. He’s thirty, which might seem young for a proctologist (belowdecks slang for a rear admiral; get it?), but as well as being a young republic, we are a pretty nonmilitaristic one. We don’t have a warrior culture to speak of. People from Earth find that surprising, as Mars and Switzerland are the only places where military service is mandatory for everyone, but the huge majority of us are only in the Navy for the one year (one Martian year: 669 Martian days, 687 Earth days, 1.88 Earth years) and spend the rest of our lives in the reserves. Lifers are rare, as the pay is bad, the chances for combat are remote if you’re the kind who wants that, and the social status almost nil. But you do get to wear a bright red uniform to all formal occasions.
Uncle Bill has always been kind to me and was probably responsible for me entering my year of misery as a jg.
Standing there at his side, like the good Navy wife she is, you can see Aunt Amelia, probably the most domestic woman I know. That’s not to say domesticated; so far as I can tell she and Uncle Admiral Bill have a good marriage of equals. It’s just that she’d have been right at home in the 1950s in Dubuque or Cedar Rapids or Charleston or someplace awful like that, reading Betty Crocker Magazine, dressing in calico pinafores or whatever they wore back then, and popping out babies like a gumball dispenser. Various of her sandrats, my cousins, are swarming around her and the other guests, biting at their ankles, threatening to tip over the punch bowl, tossing stuffed grape leaves and fricasseed frog legs at each other, and generally creating a blur of random activity. Some women are just born to reproduce. Amelia was a good candidate for Trans-Mars Champeen. I could never remember just how many Redmond cousins I had, possibly because at least once a year the number changed. There was one in a pram, and one in her arms, and one, as they say, in the oven.
Me, I love babies. I don’t recall ever talking to a girl who didn’t love babies. I don’t mind the crappie nappies and the spit-up and the occasional crying jag. It’s probably a hormonal thing, we’re just programmed that way. Somewhere on that double-X chromosome is a gene that makes us look at a squirmy little recently postfetal human and squinch up our mouths and coo things like “Awwwww, isn’t little snooky-ookums so booootiful!”
But I also love puppies and kittens, for the same reason.
Allow me a short digression on the subject of babies. As of now, I don’t plan to have them. Don’t look so shocked. I’ve got two good reasons.
One is that I’ve babysat most of Amelia’s kids at one time or another, plus others. Spending money, what are you gonna do? I’ve dealt with them at all ages from a few months to early teens, and I’ve observed that all of them, at one age or another, turn into creatures that should be consigned to a zoo. Sometimes it’s a stage, sometimes it seems to be permanent. With some, it’s the Terrible Twos. With others it’s the Frightening Fives. And don’t forget the Sickening Sevens or the Nasty Nines. Girls are marginally better than boys, until they reach the Terrifying Twelves, then they’re worse. Somebody once said that teenagers should be raised in a barrel and fed through the bunghole, then decanted when they’re twenty. I should know; I admit it, I was a prime candidate for en-cooperage (I just made that up, means put into a barrel) until recently.
But that pales in comparison to the other reason to not have babies.
Part of your education on Mars is witnessing a live birth. We do it when we’re fifteen. The idea is to appreciate the joy and the beauty of the event. We watch through a one-way mirror as the mother (a volunteer, naturally) sweats and screams and bleeds.
Lovely. Joyous. Beautiful.
I fainted dead away, along with two boys. How humiliating.
When I got back home me and my vagina had a serious talk. (Hey, why should that sound weird? Some boys name their penises, or so I’ve heard.) The conversation went something like this:
ME: But babies are so cute!
MS. V: Honey, you need to get a tape measure. Measure me, then measure a baby’s head. Then … you do the math.
ME: Oh.
Not a pretty picture. In Homeland America there is an accepted church dogma called “intelligent design.” I can call the whole wacky theory into question with one word: testicles. And if you need another example, tell me why a human baby should be expected to emerge from an opening that can’t accommodate a lemon without discomfort.
Design, maybe, but not intelligent. If that was God’s intent, then God is a dunce.
We’re almost done here, then the ceremony can begin.
And we’re getting to the best of what you might think an odd bunch. You’re not supposed to have favorites in families, but everybody does, and Elizabeth Strickland-Garcia, M.D., is one.
She’s Dad’s sister, older by two years. She went with the families to the Red Zone in search of Gran and came out unscathed. Then she returned to Mars with them, in time for the war with Earth. Naturally she was a member of the Volunteer Pressure Brigade, and during the bombing she crawled into some wreckage where no one else would go, pulled out a few survivors, and then was trapped, her right hand pinned by a shift in the debris. Her suit was punctured and there was a slow leak. The pressure loss wasn’t a problem; she had enough bottled air to replace the lost stuff for twenty minutes, and they got her out before that. But her heating system failed in that arm and her hand froze solid to the wrist in only ten minutes.
Well, kiss that piano-playing career good-bye, right?
Not my Aunt Elizabeth. Step one was learning to be left-handed while her stump healed. I understand that took her about three days. Step two was getting used to the prosthetic hand they gave her. State of the art for the time, pretty primitive by today’s standards. Step three was medical school at Harvard. Top of her class. Internship, then time to pick a specialty. General practice, right? Maybe Ob-Gyn. Think again. Surgery.
Today she is the best nanosurgeon on Mars. Not
surprising, because she practically invented the field.
Oh, yeah, and she’s a damn good piano player.
That’s her over there perched on a tiny chair at a big round low table in the corner where the kids are supposed to be corralled, with half a dozen youngsters watching as she does a few of her best tricks. Onehanded (her “bad” hand) she could fold origami animals while her left hand pulled all sorts of crazy stuff out of thin air.
Wait a minute, wait a minute … who is that ravishing blonde just entering the room over there? She’s about average height for a Mars-born, six-four or so, plus she’s wearing three-inch heels. Her hair is up in a tight bun on top of her head, revealing her slender white neck. She’s wearing a wispy golden chiffon thing that reaches about to her knees, strapless, flattering to her figure without being overly provocative. A string of matched pearls and pearl studs in her ears. Light makeup, a greenish frosting thing going on around her eyes and on her lips, very fashionable, very up-to-date.
Why … it’s Podkayne!
Okay, I take back the “ravishing” part. That’s a judgment call, and I wouldn’t want to prejudice you. I try for mysterious, but seldom achieve more than a gawky, coltish, and—I hope—endearing young charm. The slightly turned-up nose always gets in the way of my attempts at sophistication. I sometimes feel I haven’t quite grown into my body yet, that I’m playacting at being a grown-up woman.
I think I should have gone with the little black dress, with a longer skirt.
The hair is good, though, you can’t deny that. And I have a Pismo Beach tan. As for the high heels, I hardly ever wear them and would sooner walk on hot coals than wear them on Earth, like Earth girls do, where they don’t seem to mind mutilating their feet. But on Mars it’s no problem. Besides, they do great things for my legs.
