by John Varley
Suddenly the day seemed a lot brighter. I wanted to shout something, but confined myself to taking his hand and bringing it to my lips and kissing it.
“Thanks, Uncle Bill.”
“That’s Admiral Bill to you,” he said, pulling his hand away and pretending to be stern. “And kissing superior officers is frowned on.”
“Well, seeing as how we’re related, I figured it wouldn’t be right to go ahead with the customary blowjob.”
He tried to keep a straight face, but the laughter forced itself out explosively.
“You’re a pill, Podkayne, but don’t ever talk like that when there are other Navy people around. They don’t like jokes, and I don’t need to be tailhooked.”
If you haven’t served your hitch yet, that’s Navy slang for being accused of sexual harassment below your rank. It’s rare, but it still happens. If it happened to me, I doubt I’d tailhook anybody. I’d kick him in the balls, admiral or not. We have a nut-kicking tradition in my family. My mom once planted her foot in a general’s crotch so hard it lifted him right out of his boots. Or so my dad says.
“What’s the deal with the promotion, though?” I asked. “Just a routine bump?”
“Well, you’re still a little ways from that. But based on your recruitment record, I was able to get you a little slack there, too.”
“What recruitment record? I didn’t send many Earthies here.”
“Practically none,” he agreed. “Those few who got by you are all A-one citizen prospects. You didn’t think you were sent to Hell to send the demons to Mars, did you?” He looked at me, and I expect my mouth was open in amazement, because that’s what I was feeling. He laughed. “Good lord, what are they telling you these days? They don’t put it in the manual, but we figure you all know that you’re there to persuade marginal cases not to emigrate. We don’t want more people, certainly not from Earth.”
Well, excuse me! How was I to know? If they were still posting us in pairs, like they used to in Western America, maybe we’d have picked up on the straight skinny. But they dump you in an isolated wasteland all by yourself with nothing but a tutorial on how to fill out the forms.
“You haven’t asked the next question yet,” he said.
“What question is that?”
“About your next posting. Something became available, and I managed to slip your name into the queue. I can always pull it back out again if you don’t want to go.”
“Are you going to make me torture you for the information?”
“How does Europa sound?”
“Europa?” This time I couldn’t restrain myself. I shouted something right at the top of my considerable range—whoopee, hallelujah, golly gee; I can’t remember—and threw my arms around Admiral Bill and kissed him, hard. No tongue, he was a relative. Then I said the first thing that came into my head.
“When I get home, I’m burning all my bras.”
6
FROM PODDY’S BOOK of Places I’d Like to Go:
#1) Europa:
Second and smallest of the Galilean moons of Jupiter: Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto. You can see them through a small telescope from Earth; even better from Mars. The moon Europa was named after a beautiful Phoenician princess for whom the continent of Europe was named, so I’m going to be sentimental here and refer to it as “she.” The poor thing was seduced or raped, depending on who’s telling the story, by Zeus in the form of a white bull. Those Greek gods were real party animals, weren’t they?
Diameter: 1,940 miles.
Distance from Jupiter: 417,000 miles.
Albedo: .67. That makes her the fifth most reflective body in the solar system, after Saturn’s moons Enceladus at .99, Tethys at .80, Mimas at .77, and Neptune’s moon Triton at .76. To give you an idea of how bright that is, Venus is .65, Jupiter is .52, Earth is .36, and Mars is .15. Albedo (since you asked) is the ratio of light coming in to light reflected back. The reason for Europa’s high reflectivity is that the surface is entirely covered in water ice.
Europa is one of only six moons with an atmosphere. It’s not much, but it’s all oxygen. It comes from the ice evaporating and ionizing into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen is too light to get retained, and blows off into space.
It’s one of the densest bodies in the solar system. The list goes like this:
Earth
5.5 g/cm3
Mercury
5.4 g/cm3
Venus
5.2 g/cm3
Mars
3.9 g/cm3
Io
3.5 g/cm3
Europa
3.01 g/cm
I’m not counting asteroids, so if you live on Juno, Vesta, Eunomia, Interamnia One, or other places like that which are a bit denser, I’m sorry, okay? I’m making a point here, and it has to do with surface gravity.
That high density is because the bulk of Europa and her nearest neighbor, Io, are rock with an iron core, more like terrestrial planets than any other moons in the solar system. That high density means that, in spite of its relatively small size, it has a surface gravity of .134 gee.
So if you weighed, say, 100 pounds on Earth, you will weigh 37 pounds on Mars, and only 13.4 pounds on Europa. More important to me, considering where I just came from, if your left breast weighed 5 pounds on Earth (I’m just naming a figure, not bragging), it would be a bit less than 2 pounds on Mars, and … well, you do the math. But that was the reason for my silly remark about bra-burning. With any luck, I’d never have to wear one of the damn things again.
Around the turn of the century unmanned space probes went into orbit around Jupiter and started some serious studies of the giant planet and its moons. They discovered that Io looked like a pizza and had more active volcanoes than zits on a teenager’s face, but had almost no craters, because the surface was constantly being renewed by stuff upwelling from below. Some of that stuff was molten rock at 3000 degrees Fahrenheit, and some of it was lakes of boiling sulfur. Io has people living on it, but has not been extensively explored. It’s a tourist destination for its great views of Jupiter, and for the excitement and danger of exploring around the volcanoes.
Ganymede, Callisto, and Europa are all ice-and-rock worlds.
Callisto is heavily cratered and tectonically dead. It’s covered with an ice sheet and beneath that is a relatively thin layer of liquid water. It doesn’t have a defined core.
Ganymede has an iron-and-rock core, but it has a lot more water and a very thick ice sheet covering it, which makes it much less dense than Europa. Surface gravity on Ganymede is just a hair higher than on Europa, though Ganymede is much bigger.
All three are about the same temperature on the surface—100 to 120 degrees Kelvin, say about 260 below zero, Fahrenheit—but down below the surface it’s another matter. All moons are subject to tidal flexing. That means they are distorted by the pull of the primary, Jupiter in this case, and in multimoon systems, by the pull of the other moons as they pursue their different orbits. This tugging produces energy as heat.
If a Jovian moon is in real close, like Io, you get a volcanic hell. If you’re way the hell and gone, like Callisto, you get a ball of slush. A little closer in, like Ganymede, you don’t get so much internal heating, but it’s enough for tectonic processes to work. Plates slide over each other, collide, chasms and ridges are formed. But that was all a long time ago. Many craters on Ganymede are very old, like the ones on the moon and Mars.
They told me in science classes that the situation is comparable to Venus, Earth, and Mars. Too close to the sun and you get a choking-hot planet like Venus. Too far out and you get a cold planet like Mars, where all the water has been frozen for billions of years, mostly deep under the poles. Right in the middle you get Earth, warm and comfy.
Or you could think of Goldilocks and the three bears and the porridge. Io would burn your mouth, and you’d spit out Ganymede because it was too cold. Europa would be just right.
Just right for what? Why, for life, of cou
rse. And that’s just what we found when we got there. Or something very much like it. We think.
SETTING OUT FOR the Jovian system isn’t quite like getting a visa and updating your immunizations and boarding a liner for a trip to Earth. If you intend to stay awhile and not just make a few orbits and snap a few pictures to show the folks back home, you need some more elaborate preparations.
Jupiter has a magnetosphere so big that, if you could light it up somehow, seen from the Earth, it would be five times the width of the full moon. There’s a lot of radiation in it. Our ships and bases are well shielded, but if you planned to stay in the area of Jupiter for any length of time, it would be best to take some prophylactic measures.
Most mutations in your body aren’t going to hurt anything. But there is a certain very small number of very large cells that can lead to disaster if damaged by radiation. I’m speaking of the ova, the human eggs released by the ovaries.
For a while, in the early days, just about the only females who dared to visit Jupiter were those who had passed out of the reproductive cycle and were menopausal, and women who had already had all the children they wanted or who didn’t want any children at all. It was just too dangerous.
These days we had a much more elegant solution: oophorectomy. That’s a fancy word for removal of the ovaries. Spaying.
It’s a recent development. If you take them out and pop them into a freezer, you risk as much damage as you’re trying to avoid. But then Uncle Jubal invented the black bubbles. Now you can just cut out the ovaries, bubble them, and a few years later you take them out and hook them back up to the fallopian tubes. With nanosurgery, this is about as dangerous as wart removal.
But no girl wants to spend very much time without her ovaries unless she fancies herself with a beard, singing baritone. They produce the hormones that make us the graceful, double-breasted, big-butted, almost hairless sopranos that men find irresistible, for some reason.
No worries, mate. We just replace them with vat-grown, universal-donor artificial ovaries that secrete just the right mixture of femaleness, and at the same time greatly reduce menstrual flow, cramps, and PMS. If you wonder why I didn’t have this done long ago, turning “the curse” into “the mild epithet,” it’s simple. My periods are not cataclysmic. I seldom bite anyone when premenstrual unless they really have it coming.
They can do the equivalent thing with guys, too … but for some reason, not a lot of guys want to have it done. In fact, the ratio of sexes in high-radiation environments like Jupiter has just about reversed from what it used to be. A lot of guys don’t want to have their testicles replaced with synthetic ones, even though it’s impossible to tell the difference.
I’ve pondered that, worrying at that eternal mystery that makes life both so exciting and so frustrating. The best I can say about it is that if my gonads were hanging precariously outside my body where I had to see them every day, badly packaged and horribly vulnerable, maybe I’d be obsessed about them, too.
The other thing I can say is a lot simpler: Boys are weird.
SOMEBODY ONCE TOLD me you can sum up the solar system this way: There’s the sun, there’s Jupiter, and there’s other stuff. You might include Saturn if you were feeling generous. Jupiter dominates the planetary system.
I can’t say that it knocked my socks off as we approached it. Any good 3-D movie can give you a more awesome show than what you see from a spaceship window, and Navy ships bound for Jupiter don’t have many windows, and those are small. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I wasn’t impressed. There is a world of difference in seeing a movie and looking out a window and seeing it right there, but it’s a feeling in your gut more than a visual spectacle.
SO ALONG ABOUT now you might be wondering how did I, Pod-kayne etc. etc., raw recruit, the silver bar and red globe on my shoulders about ten minutes old, get a berth to Europa? Bright, shiny, mysterious Europa, where no tourists are allowed and only scientists from the Martian Academy and a very few of the best and the brightest from other planets are welcome? And, of course, the Navy contingent to enforce the protective blockade. You probably figure it was Admiral Bill, and I wouldn’t call you a liar if you said that, but that isn’t the whole story.
I know, it’s not fair, trading on your relations like a lot of slim-talent actors and musicians I could name who get a career because they’re the son or daughter of somebody who’s really good. But the fact is, a no-talent offspring of a big celebrity isn’t going to have a very long career. People will stop coming once the novelty wears off. Usually, all being from a famous family with someone in a position of influence will get you is a foot in the door. After that, it’s up to you. What Admiral Bill had gotten me was a chance to reaudition. I was going to Europa to be a Madam.
If you’re not from Mars and if you have a dirty mind, you probably think that has something to do with prostitution. Not so. Mars has its fair share of prostitutes, mostly to service the tourist trade, and they do tour Navy bases for those poor folks who have a hard time connecting with another Navy person to fulfill their sexual needs.
No, I’m talking about the Music, Arts, and Drama Division, Martian Navy. That acronyms as MADDMN. I suppose the best way to pronounce that is Mad Damn (sometimes inverted to Damn Mad), or Madmen, and that’s what the male troupers call themselves, but we ladies prefer Madams. Google USO and you’ll get an idea of what I’m talking about, though the USO was volunteer entertainers visiting the troops during wartime, some of them big stars, others just singers and dancers. Martians learned a long time ago that food, water, pressure, and oxygen aren’t all you need in the hostile environment of space. Put a man in a tin can with all the oatmeal, water, and oxygen he can eat, drink, and breathe, and pretty soon he’ll go crazy. People need a space of their own, they need good food, many of them need contact with plants and especially animals, and most of all, they need art.
That’s why everyone in a remote outpost gets a room of her own, from the admiral down to the lowest ensign. It just works better that way. Of course, the admiral has a suite and the ensign has more of a closet-type thing, but still.
That’s why we allow dogs and cats and birds in faraway places. That’s why there are endless organized activities for off-watch hours, from Ping-Pong tournaments to talent shows to karate matches to yoga classes. That’s why we celebrate not only Christmas and Hanukkah and Eid and Arbor Day and Beethoven’s Birthday, but Finnish Independence Day (December 6), Thai New Year (April 13-15), Australia Day (January 26), Brazilian Nossa Senhora de Conceição Aparecida Day (October 12), and Haitian Sovereignty and Thanksgiving Day (May 22). Of course, most places have a bigger to-do around Christmas than, say, Tibetan Paranirvana Day. Every day’s a holiday for somebody, and the Navy will observe any of them if someone is interested enough and bored enough and silly enough to suggest it.
The thing is, living in a cramped environment a billion miles from civilization where your surroundings are always trying to kill you is not only dangerous, not only potentially nerve-wracking, but, more than anything, boring. You have to have entertainment beyond movies and recorded music. It is necessary. Ask any veteran.
And a talent show will get you only so far. In fact, there have been cases that can be summed up as “If I hear that fumble-fingered asshole play that lousy song on his out-of-tune guitar one more time … !” Well, it can lead to blows. Nothing can really take the place of a live stage show, whether it’s Hamlet, Showboat, or just a jazz trio. Thus the Madams and Madmen.
Many people believe the cushiest assignment in the MADDMN is in one of the military bands, or the Navy Orchestra, which compares favorably with the Thunder City Philharmonic. Reason: They mostly stay home. All of them do tours of the outer postings, but you can view that as a road trip. Your official posting is Mars. My talents aren’t suited for a large ensemble like that, and anyway, I didn’t want to be posted at home. Just anywhere but Earth.
The acting troupes are always on tour and seldom see home until
their enlistment is up. After all, even repertory groups don’t usually have more than five or six plays rehearsed up to snuff, and you can only see King Lear so many times before you want a taste of something else.
VOICE IS MY main instrument, but I’m pretty good on keyboards, and competent on just about any plucked string instrument you throw at me. Guitar, lute, dulcimer, ukulele, dobro, mandolin, banjo, zither, autoharp, hurdy-gurdy, samisen … give me an hour to pick my way through the chord changes and refresh my memory and I won’t disgrace myself on any of them, though I’m far from concert quality on all of them.
I can handle myself well on a lot of percussion instruments. I’m a demon on the castanets, maracas, triangle, hosho, lithophone, taiko, washboard, and congas.
I’m not much into wind instruments, though I play a mean harmonica, jug, kazoo, and ocarina. I can play the bagpipe, but I’m usually not asked to. Let me correct that: I’m usually asked not to. But of course I’m not the only one …
So, you may be asking yourself, with all that musical talent welling out of your pipes like ball lightning, why didn’t you pass the audition the first time?
Two words: I choked. Three more: I blew it. I stunk up the place. I croaked, I basted in flop sweat, I had a panic attack so bad I could hardly breathe. For the first time since I was eight I got hit with something I could barely remember: stage fright. I didn’t actually wet myself, but it was a close thing. For a while there I was sure I was going to vomit all over the stage.
It happens. But I hope it never happens again to me.
Clutching a remnant of pride around myself, let me point out that, bad as I was, the vote on the seven-member judging panel was four to three against me. If that’s what I scored on my worst day, ever, I knew that if I could only get another shot, I could ace it. But you’re supposed to have to wait a year before a second audition.
