Rolling Thunder

by John Varley

  I sang for him. In fact, he told me I sang for him when I was four and that I put Shirley Temple to shame. I had to look her up (and have been drinking Shirley Temples ever since). When I was nine I was a lot better, since I’d been taking keyboard and voice lessons for five years by then and was something of a prodigy. I boned up on the music of his youth, about things called rap and hip-hop. It turned out he didn’t like that stuff, to my considerable relief. Listen to it sometime; you’ll be astonished.

  Then he was gone, and I waited another five years, like a lonely maiden in a tower. It was so incredibly romantic! I was saving myself for him.

  And one day he arrived, on a glorious white horse, to make me the happiest woman on Mars. That’s how I imagined it, anyway. I wasn’t invited to the opening, just adults, which should have told me something right there but didn’t. I was too infatuated. Plus, I was a temperamental, obnoxious, stuck-up, sarcastic, monstrously insecure bitch at the time. I know that now, of course, but at the time I thought I was sophisticated, vastly superior to my parents and all other adults in both intellect and taste, and irresistible to the opposite sex, in spite of a troubling lack of suitors. I was a sort of antianorexic, able to look in the mirror and see not the gawky beanpole with the bad complexion who was actually there but a steamy temptress oozing hot sex beneath the pancake makeup and thick mascara. Hormones had hit me over the head like Maxwell’s silver hammer, and my body had responded by growing like a weed without filling out at all (that came next year), and bursting out in enthusiastic acne that no treatment seemed able to do anything about. What the hormones had done to my brain doesn’t even bear thinking about.

  Hey, how sensibly did you behave during the storms of puberty?

  I put all my best, clumsiest moves on Travis when he got to our home, and he rebuffed them in a gentlemanly, avuncular manner until I finally wised up, after about three days. After that I was icily polite, only because Mike was with me and he worshipped the guy. Travis never spoke down to Mike, treated him like an adult, which even at the age of six Mike could almost pass for in some ways, and that’s probably the only reason I didn’t strangle Travis in his sleep.

  Then he abandoned me again, and I decided to become a tragic figure. I stopped eating. I vowed I’d never sing again. I thought about killing myself. (Doesn’t every teenager?) I even checked out convents, but that was going a bit too far even for someone as bereft as me. Besides, the clothes sucked.

  What can I say? I got over it. I put it all behind me. I grew up, I finished my primary education, I decided, like most Martians, to get my military service out of the way before college, I went to Earth …

  … and now I was back, and jumpin’ Jupiter! I was nine again!

  At least that’s what it felt like. Suddenly I felt like I couldn’t take a step without tripping over myself. Travis’s gaze didn’t linger, he only looked at me for a few seconds, but he took it all in. He had to, he couldn’t help himself. And though I no longer think of myself as a siren able to turn men into my sex slaves with no more than a sultry look, I have a more realistic body image, and I know I’m attractive though well short of being a cover girl. And I know something of the effect I have on Earthmen. With the heels I had seven inches on Travis, and looking up at women like that either scares Earth guys to death or gets them imagining the possibilities.

  Travis didn’t look scared.

  I know what you’re saying. Come on, spacegirl! Get real!

  I mean, he was in his sixties when I was born.

  On the other hand, he hasn’t gotten any older. He’s a good-looking sixtyish. He may very well not get any older, unless he stops skipping. Which is why the silly fantasy of that nine-year-old me was not entirely idiotic …

  I could wait for him.

  In forty years I’d be fifty-eight, and he’d still be sixtyish. That’s not such a horrible age gap, is it? I know it sounds like a silly science-fiction story, but you have to remember, our present was at one time somebody else’s science fiction. People from the turn of the century didn’t even have space travel to amount to anything, for heaven’s sake. They’d been to the moon six times, they had a pathetic little “space station,” and their rocket ships were still blowing up all the time. How could they have imagined that by now there would be almost a million people living on Mars, and that people could be stopped in time?

  Is she serious? you’re asking yourself.

  No. Not really. Forty years is a long time, and I know I’ll have changed a lot by then if the last five years are any indicator. I’m sure I’ll get over him.

  Sigh.

  AFTER A FEW hours, Gran caught my eye and beckoned me over. I hurried to her side.

  “Tell everybody to shut up and sit down,” she said. She looked tired, but there was a twinkle in her eye. I realized she’d been enduring all this rather than enjoying it, that it was all for everyone else’s benefit.

  “Attention everybody!” I bellowed. And believe me, after fourteen years of voice training, I knew how to project. There was instant silence, and everybody turned in my direction. I kicked off my shoes and stood up on a chair.

  “Gran has something she wants to say,” I said in a more normal voice. “Please find chairs and sit down.” While everybody was shuffling around, some of them none too steady, Kelly hurried over with a mike, which she handed to Gran. When everybody was settled, Gran smiled around the room from her wheelchair and slowly stood up. Kelly reached to help her, but Gran waved her off.

  “I want to thank all y’all for coming,” she said, in a calm, clear voice. “The food’s been good, and the company’s been good, and even the music’s been fine.” She paused. “But not good enough. Not yet. I want to ask Poddy to sing for me before I go.”

  Well, I hadn’t been expecting it, but it wasn’t a complete surprise. I get asked to sing, sometimes ahead of time, sometimes impromptu, at parties like this. After all, it’s what I intend to do after I have this military foolishness out of the way. I’d even been thinking of volunteering to sing a song, and realized that the lyrics to Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top” had been circulating in my head for several minutes. Seemed like a nice send-off song. Of course, many people here wouldn’t know a Bendel bonnet from a glass of Ovaltine or a sheet of cellophane or an Arrow collar. Well, I googled them, so I know.

  So I put on my best Pepsodent smile (google it yourself ) and started for the bandstand, but Gran beckoned me to lean down close to her. She whispered in my ear.

  I was startled. Sure, it’s a great song, a terrific song, but was it right for this time and place? She must have seen the doubt in my eyes because she smiled up at me and said, “Go ahead, hon. It’s one of my favorites, and I think it’s perfect for here.”

  Okay. As I walked toward the bandstand I was finding the music and the chords, and as I stepped up I told the musicians which channel I was transmitting on. They got that faraway stare when you’re concentrating on the images coming up on your contact lens display, or on the nanodots attached to your cornea if you were using the latest accessing equipment. The lead guitarist nodded his head assuredly at me; he was familiar with the song, and I knew the others could fake it.

  Then I jumped back down and hurried over to my father, grabbed his hand, and pulled him up beside me. This one would be a lot better with vocal harmony, and he was the best singer in the house, other than me. I told him the song we were going to sing, and he smiled.

  Without further ado, we swung into “Long Time Gone,” by David Crosby.

  Gran was much too young for Cole Porter, though I knew she liked his music, as well as swingers like Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller. She had been a little girl during what we now call the Great Age of Rock, but during her musically formative years—and did you know that, for the huge majority of people, the music they hear when they’re in their teens and twenties is what they’ll listen to for the rest of their lives?— those hits of the 1960s and ‘70s were still getting a lot of play as “classic r
ock.” (They still get a fair number of downloads, even today.) So she knew them all.

  I sang the lead, but when it came to the harmonies I handled the Graham Nash part, which was a bit beyond Dad’s range.

  We were never going to rival the original recording, but I’m proud to say we didn’t murder it.

  It’s been a long time comin’

  It’s goin’ to be a long time gone

  And it appears to be a long

  Appears to be a long

  Appears to be a long time

  Such a long, long, long, long time before the dawn

  While I was singing it I immediately knew it was right, and everyone else seemed to agree, too. She might be a long time gone, but there was hope for another dawn.

  There was big-time applause when we were done, and I’m never one to be shy about an encore, so I looked to Gran and raised an eyebrow, and she gestured for me to go on. I sent the next song to the band, and we sang Lennon and McCartney’s “A Little Help From My Friends.” It went over well. Gran was laughing; her friends gave more than a little help by clapping and singing along with the chorus.

  The technical crew had entered the room discreetly as I was singing, approached Gran, and one of them bent down to ask her something. She nodded, looking tired but happy, and they got her back in her chair and up on the short riser. I watched, still singing, one of the few in the room who was aware of what was going on over there. Kelly saw, and Elizabeth, and went to Gran’s side.

  They were about ready when I finished, and I knew I had to sing one more.

  “Anybody got a keyboard?” I asked. The bass player tossed me one, and I unrolled it on a table and stood behind it. I waited for the applause to die down and the room to grow silent, then played the opening notes of Paul Simon’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”

  If I say so myself, it’s one of my best numbers. It’s the only spiritual I know that doesn’t mention any sort of God, which I knew Gran liked, because after the Big Wave she told me she lost whatever religion she had. When you’re weary, you need a little help from your friends, because it’s goin’ to be a long time gone.

  And with all due respect to Mr. Garfunkel’s angelic, sweet tenor, I think I sang it that day as well as it’s ever been sung. I was transported, I was somewhere else entirely, and then I came back and found myself playing the last bars and the band behind me, having slowly increased the intensity, following my lead, thundering through the last chords, filling in through the magic of synthesized sound for the full orchestra of the original … and then silence.

  There was prolonged applause. I was dry-eyed. I never cry when I’m in the zone, no matter how deeply I get into a song. I don’t get tired, either. I felt like I could have sung all night long, but I knew this was the time to stop. I made a sweeping gesture toward Gran. You’ve got top billing here, Gran. The floor is yours …

  “Thank you, honey,” she said, simply. She was holding a small box in her hand. It had a single button on it, and her thumb was on the button.

  “I figure I’ll be coming out of here someday,” she went on. “And when I do, I’ll be doing exactly what I’m doing right now, when I’m going in. So I wondered why I should be saying good-bye. Well, they tell me that in Hawaii, aloha means both hello and good-bye. So I figured that’s what I’d say.” She waved her hand at us, slowly.

  “Aloha, y’all. Aloha, aloha, al

  And instantly there was nothing there but a big black hole.

  Dammit, there goes my mascara.

  THE TRAIN BACK to Thunder City wasn’t crowded, even with our clan and friends aboard. The drunker passengers were in the bar car, getting drunker still. A few were already sleeping it off. I had no trouble finding a seat by myself. I settled in by the window and watched the eternal cold desert flash by.

  I was a roiling mixture of emotions. I was glad to be home, but sad that I’d soon be going back. I was sad to see Gran go, but there was an excellent chance that I’d see her again one day. And I was going through my usual after-performance blues, a very strange mixture of elation that I’d done well, depression that it was over, and self-doubt. Did I really have a career ahead of me as a singer? It is a brutal field, there are many, many very talented people out there, and talent is far from enough. You’ve got to have determination, a lot of luck, and some indefinable charisma I was far from sure I had. A good agent doesn’t hurt, either.

  And on top of it all, I still had quite a term to serve in the Navy before I could even really try my wings at a singing career.

  Plus, there was still the question if I should try to make a living in music at all. Dad was urging me to go on to higher education first. Mom said, “Go for it. You’re only young once.”

  I knew how to read music and I didn’t intend to sing grand opera. I wasn’t sure what college courses could teach me about singing that I didn’t already know. But I wouldn’t know that until I gave it a try, would I?

  Others talked about the school of hard rocks, about paying your dues, singing for handouts in the Thunder City mall or train stations, working in little live clubs instead of looking for that big download contract.

  You could always just put your stuff out there on the freemart and hope you started getting some attention. But that worked best for singer-songwriters, and I was still working on the songwriting part of the act. Just one more area of insecurity: Could I really write a killer song? I had a thick songbook already, of course; everybody’s got a songbook. I knew most of them ranged from hackneyed to mediocre.

  Well, give me time. I’m young.

  Yeah, and how old was Bob Dylan when he wrote “Desolation Row”? Older than me, but only a little.

  “Nice tan.”

  I looked up and saw Uncle Bill standing in the aisle.

  “There’s something to be said for a fractured ozone layer, Admiral,” I said.

  “Yeah. I always thought it was ‘malignant melanoma.’ ” He sat beside me without being invited, which was his right both as my uncle and superior officer. And anyway, I didn’t mind. It broke up my rather gloomy train of thought.

  Uncle Bill is a few inches over seven feet, on the tall side even for a Mars-born. His knees touched the seat in front, even in the generous space provided by Martian transport. For a while he just watched the passing scenery with me.

  “So how’s Pismo Beach?” he finally said.

  “I don’t know how it is now, but when I left it was hot, heavy, humid, hellish. I suspect it’s still pretty much the same.”

  “Hellish?”

  “Only the Second or Third Circle. Could be worse. I hear Heartland America is Seventh Circle, sliding rapidly toward the Eighth.”

  “I’m not much on the geography of Hell,” he said, and lapsed into silence again for a while. Then he sighed, and faced me again.

  “I suppose you blame me for that posting,” he said. I was surprised. I mean, I did, a little, but only in the sense that I wished he’d used more of his considerable pull in the upper reaches of the Navy, realms mysterious to most of us draftees, to get me something somewhere else. Like I said, I knew it could have been worse.

  “Hate Earth, myself,” he said. “Maybe I’m being unfair. I didn’t see her at her best. All I remember is being left behind at Disney World while everyone else went off on a big adventure. I’m afraid I and my brother behaved rather badly.”

  Dad has told me about what holy terrors Uncle Tony and Uncle Bill had been when they were sandrat-sized. It was hard to imagine, looking at this dignified and sometimes even diffident man, so spiffy in his uniform, that he could have been a brat. But looking at me in my current state of adult sophistication and dignified self-assurance, you’d never have known that only a few short years ago I was an awkward, confused, sullen brat myself.

  “Later, when I understood where the others had gone and what they’d gone through, I was glad to have been left behind.” He was talking about the horrors immediately postwave, where my family and Travis had gone
in search of Gran. To this day Dad won’t talk about a lot of it, except for one story about being scared out of his wits by a tiger that had escaped from a zoo and was later shot by survivors. He makes it into a very funny story, about how close he came to crapping in his pants, and then ends it on a poignant note, the sense of loss he felt when he saw the grand, wild creature laid out preparatory to being skinned, but I know it was an important moment in his life. Of the rest of it, he says nothing at all. Mom will tell me stories of her own journey—they weren’t even engaged back then, but that’s when they fell in love—after she and Grand-père Redmond split from the others to find their family, which was mostly a case of wandering among refugees asking as to the whereabouts of people, just as thousands of others were doing. But of the thousands of bodies floating in the sea, of the decaying corpses in wrecked cars he had to move out of the way, of the dead children, the vacant-eyed survivors, the fighting … of the stench, my father speaks not at all.

  He doesn’t have to. I’ve read the accounts, I’ve seen the pictures and tapes.

  “Never been back,” Uncle Admiral went on. “But I want you to know, Podkayne, that if I could have spared you a tour on Earth, I would have. That’s one thing that is pretty much set in stone these days. Your first half year must be spent at an Earthside post. ‘Know your enemy’ is the theory.”

  It was actually potential enemy—we weren’t at war—but everybody knew that if more hostilities came, they would be from that degenerate, worn-out old planet, so encrusted with the hatreds of thousands of years of more or less continuous wars. The Republic of Mars got along well with everybody else.

  “I got to know them pretty well,” I said, thinking of little illiterate Glinda. If we ever had to fight a War on Ignorance, she could be in the front of the enemy lines, but she’d have to shoulder aside a lot of her fellow Earthies to get there.

  “Well, you’ll be relieved to know that your lessons are over. Seeing as you’re already here, I was able to get the rest of your term on Earth waived, and a promotion to a full lieutenancy.”