Rolling Thunder

by John Varley

  Quinn asked me to move in with him again. Told him NO WAY!! I like my privacy. He got a little insistent, doesn’t like traveling between places. A great big half a mile! What a wimp. Q??? Quinn a mistake? Need fixing? Soon?

  Monday, November 18

  Flag Day in Uzbekistan. Moroccan Independence Day. National Day in Latvia and Oman. Vertieres’ Day in Haiti. Mickey Mouse’s Birthday, systemwide.

  Rick’s is dark on Mondays and Tuesdays, but Podkayne and the Pod People (3P, for short) needed the stage time, so we signed up for the free evening festival in Robinson Park. This was a longtime tradition in Clarke Centre, beginning at 6 PM and running until midnight, every day, rain or shine. (Ha! It rains in Robinson Park every morning at 0800 and again at 1400, after lunch, for 5 minutes.) It’s open mike, a mixture of pros with nothing better to do and wannabes, anybody can perform for 15 minutes, encores to be decided by a sound meter with a big red arrow. There can be 1000 people there. There can also be 20. About 500 were there that evening as we set up under the flags of Oman, Haiti, Latvia, Morocco, and Uzbekistan. We all put on our mouse ears and commenced to boogie, starting out with numbers we knew would fly and then trying out a couple we were still working on. We were well received, to the point that some of the performers who had played before came up onstage and jammed with us. It was an hour before “Major Bowes” rang the gong, and then only because 1 hour was the limit; nobody was allowed to be stage hogs.

  Afterward Karma took us on a tour through the bioenvironments of Clarke Centre, hydroponic farms and old-fashioned dirt farms. Turns out you need earthworms to grow crops, and bees are still the most efficient way to pollinate flowers and some vegetables. Who knew? Plus, you get honey. They grow snails there, too. I like earthworms only slightly more than I like bees, and if I never see another snail except on my plate, drenched in butter, I’ll be quite happy. But I put on a brave face as she took us through her personal jungle.

  Tuesday, December 10

  Constitution Day in Thailand. Foundation Day in the African Coastal Republic. Interplanetary Human Rights Day. Nobel Prize Day in Sweden. Settlers’ Day in Namibia. Ganga-Bois Day in the Voudon faith.

  14 shopping days left until Christmas!

  (12 days to high-gee shipping deadline, Europa/Mars.)

  So Quinn is seeing someone else. Question: Does that bother me? I never intended it to be a long-term relationship, I always saw it as a posting romance. Maybe that’s the problem, spacegirl. Maybe he wanted something more. Well, he could have said so, couldn’t he? Why won’t guys talk about these things?

  Trouble is, I got to caring for him a little too much. That happens, I guess, though so far, not to me. Get a grip, Podkayne. He’s a drummer, what did you expect?

  Answer to question above: Yes, it bothers me.

  Wednesday, December 11

  Proclamation of the Republic, Burkina Faso.

  Question: Can the band survive this?

  Wednesday, December 25

  Tuntematon Sotilas Day in Finland. First day of Christmas.

  No partridge, no pear tree from Quinn. Quinn is history. Quinn is so over with. We hashed it out last night, amicably, civilly, like adults. Or at least I put on my best adult face. Sometimes I have to remind myself, you’re only 18, girl, and there’s probably a lot you still have to learn about human relationships. That’s what they say, anyway, and they also say that at your age you feel like every little setback is the end of the world. Well, I know it ain’t the end of the world, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. But I didn’t cry, not even when he gave me that smile, the one that won me away from my common sense in the first place, and asked if I was in the mood for a farewell … well, you know what he said. (Drummers should be kept in cages, fed raw meat, and only let out when you desperately need a back beat.) In fact, I even kept smiling as I shook my head, but I must admit that if he’d had his drumsticks with him he’d be visiting a proctologist right now for a bit of deep excavation. I kept the smile in place until the door closed, and then I cried a little. Kahlua was upset, so I quit.

  Bastard.

  We agreed the band should stay together. Let’s hope that works. We’ve been getting better and better, and the audiences keep coming, and growing.

  The usual gifts from most of the family, some useful, some small luxuries, pretty much like the stuff I sent them, all of it ordered online, wrapped and delivered to me from stores on Europa and to them from stores on Mars, to save shipping charges. I miss the actual shopping, it all feels impersonal, but this is the first Christmas I’ve spent away from my family.

  Different with Mike. We always try to outdo the other with gifts no one else would dare give and that most people would be shocked to see.

  This time I ordered a pair of extra-extra-extralong Levi’s, made for the tallest of Martians. So what did I get from him? A Victoria’s Secret bra in 54-DDDD, lace-trimmed but built like two Jovian hammocks. How did he do that? I’m wondering if he hacked my credit or something to see what I was getting him. He sent me a picture of him wearing the jeans, the legs rolled up like huge donuts, his feet peeking out the bottom, and the waist cinched around his neck. Message: pants too short, will exchange for longer. That arrived ten minutes after I sent him a picture of me wearing the bra with two basketballs stuffed in it. TOO tight, I wrote, and it was, but just barely. Volleyballs were too small, I tried them. And that meant our messages had crossed in space and he could not have known what kind of picture I was sending him unless he’s figured out a way to beat the speed-of-light time lag from Jupiter. Sometimes we are so close, we think so much alike, that it’s almost scary.

  Swamp creatures set a true feast in the commons. Karma brought a lot of greenery from the farms and we made holly wreaths and decorated no less than 4 trees, one for each corner of the room. I baked 6 pecan pies. There were turkeys and hams and a suckling pig and a goose and egg nog with brandy and mulled wine with cinnamon sticks and fruitcake from Corsicana, Texas.

  The local Cooking Collective sent samples of Christmas dishes from the various cultures we Martians come from, since we haven’t had time to evolve a truly Martian Christmas. If we do, it will probably involve decorating rocks.

  There was bûche de Noël from France, buñuelos from Colombia, szaloncukor from Hungary, queso de bola and bibingka from the Philippines, hallaca from Venezuela, sorpotel from Goa, and Tourtière from Quebec. There was English figgy pudding, Ukrainian kutia, Lithuanian opłatek, Milanese panettone, Danish pfeffernüsse, Norwegian pin-nekjøtt, Nicaraguan pio quinto, Viennese vanillekipferl, German Spritzgebäck and Stollen, Portuguese massa sovada, and Mexican omeritos.

  We gorged, we wassailed (is that a verb?), which involves dipping toast in hard cider heated with sugar, ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon, and a splash of brandy. I met a lot of people, made a lot of friends. Got moderately drunk.

  Then we went caroling. Yes, diary! I never tell you much about the daily work that goes on here, much of it is scientific and I know nothing about it, and I’m only a lowly Madam, but this is a Navy base, and watches are maintained around the clock, and at least a quarter of the personnel don’t get Christmas off. So in the Navy if you are off duty you go around in costumes, except to the highest security areas, and sing, and bring buckets of food but no wassail.

  Then it was off to the Grand Arena, our 2,000-seat basketball stadium, for the one custom that is as Martian as anything about a Martian Christmas—though we borrowed it from the Japanese!—which is the performance of the Daiku, or “Great Ninth,” Beethoven’s Symphony Number 9 in D minor, opus 125, the Choral. Most everybody attends, Christian, Jew, Muslim, atheist, what have you, because it’s nonsectarian and because the “Ode to Joy” is the music we’ve adopted as our national anthem.

  I went to the tryouts for the soloists, listened for about an hour, and in that time heard both an alto and a soprano that could sing rings around me in opera, and left without singing. I know when I’m licked. Sure enough, on performance night I was i
n the middle of the chorus and looking at their backs.

  We hadn’t had much rehearsal time, but everybody who can sing knows the Ninth. And Europa was not big enough to field a full orchestra of sufficient talent to tackle that monster, but the director found a talented person to handle every instrument and then augmented electronically. Hell, a good keyboardist can handle the whole symphony and vocode the voices, and that was what was happening that very night in thousands of smaller outposts and ships all over the System. In the very smallest places a recording had to do, but you can bet people were singing along.

  We didn’t butcher it.

  The tradition is to run through the fourth movement as Beethoven and Schiller wrote it:

  Freude, schöner Götterfunken Tochter aus Elysium,

  Wir betreten feuertrunken,

  Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!

  Then everybody stands and reprises the An die Freude:

  Mars! Thy name rings out like thunder,

  Best hope of humanity.

  God of war, now guard of peace

  We dedicate our lives to thee!

  When we finished there was hardly a dry eye, including mine. And I realized something. I’d been homesick. Not as bad as on Earth, but homesick all the same. And now I wasn’t. We Martians are a far-flung race. Go to Mercury, go deep into the Oort Cloud, and what do you find? Martians. We control the means of space travel, and we tend to be stingy with it; there’s no other way for us to survive, and we make sure most of the ravening hordes of the home planet do their ravening Earthside. Only on Luna do Earthies outnumber Martians. Everywhere else, Earth-ies are limited to a strict quota … except for tourists, of course, but tourists aren’t really human beings in any real sense, except that you can’t kill them. Tourists are walking bags of liquid assets to be wrung dry and sent home poorer but happy.

  In a sense, where there are Martians, there is Mars. Singing the Daiku showed me that. We or our ancestors came from every country on Earth. We were multicultural in a way that the American New World had often boasted of but never really was. Young though we were, almost 50% of us had been born there.

  And something else. There are now children being born in the Martian colonies. On Ceres, on the Jovian moons, on Triton, and even on Pluto, there are people who have lived there a long time now, and a lot of them don’t intend to go back. I don’t think anyone is yet thinking of herself as Cerean or Plutonian, but that day will come, won’t it? We’re the oldest family on Mars, and Mom and Dad were both Earth-born. The Japanese word for them would be Issei. I’m Nisei, and I’m just entering childbearing age. But I see children four or five years of age here at Clarke Centre, and they were born here, on Europa. Will they want to go back to Mars, where they’ll be too heavy? Will they keep up with their exercises, or simply accept that they can never go to Earth … or maybe even to Mars, which they have never seen and may not even have any interest in? Soon, there will be different kinds of Martians, as there used to be different kinds of Americans: Maine Yankees, Florida crackers, Texans, Sooners. Now they all live in different countries. Will Europa one day be a country on its own?

  It’s something I’ve never considered. I’ll never be Europan, even if I stayed here the rest of my life. I’ll always be Martian; I don’t plan to settle on any of the outposts. But soon, there will be Europo-Martians, and Pluto-Martians, and Cereo-Martians, if there aren’t already.

  So, maybe I’m not homesick anymore because Europa feels like … home? Could it be home?

  Well, it’ll do for now.

  Wednesday, January 1

  Independence Day in Cameroon and Sudan. Junkanoo. St. Basil’s Day.

  Down in the dumps again, moody and irritated. Stayed in my room all day, missed the New Year celebrations. Don’t amount to much, anyway. Though we all still operate mostly by the Earth calendar because it’s convenient, Mercury gets a new year every 88 days, Mars every 686, and out here the year is 4333 Earth days. So what’s the big whoop? If I’d been born here, I wouldn’t even be 2 years old.

  Saturday, January 11

  International Thank-You Day (Thanks, everybody!). National Unity Day in the (disputed) Chinese province of Nepal. Albanian Republic Day. Sir John A. Macdonald’s Birthday.

  3P has been together long enough now that we figured we had a few numbers worth recording. I mean, laying down tracks and working with them, not the normal recording every band does at every concert. For the next week we plan to spend every spare moment in the studio in the hope that we can cobble up 6 presentable tracks. Most anybody with the bare minimum of talent can upload 1 or 2 tracks and make them sound reasonable, and everybody says ho-hum; 6 really sharp ones at once is considered to be the reasonable benchmark to announce that you have arrived and probably won’t be going away for a while.

  We started with a list of 40 we felt we could really groove on—3P’s Top 40!—and whittled it down to 12, then to 8 with minimal amounts of blood being shed. After that, no one would budge, so we agreed to try all 8.

  Sunday, February 2

  Festa de Nossa Senhora dos Navegantes in Brazil. Swedish KyndelsmÃssoda-gen. Bolivian Fiesta de la Virgen de Candelaria. Groundhog Day.

  We don’t have a groundhog at Clarke Centre, but the sun was out, and I’d be willing to bet that if we had one, and if he stuck his head out of his burrow, he would have seen his shadow. Verdict: 6 billion more years of winter. Squirrels, gather your nuts while you can! You’re going to need plenty!

  We got 5 tracks down and decided we were unlikely to improve them with more tinkering. And the consensus … actually, it was unanimous, was that they aren’t good enough yet. They lack something, and though there is a lot of language to describe music, there aren’t words for some of it. It’s a case of you know it when you hear it. Or more to the point, you know it when you don’t hear it, and none of us were hearing it. That final spark that takes a piece of music from being competent to being inspired, gives it that last boost so that, even from the first bars, you know this is it.

  I am discouraged. We know we won’t be together forever; probably we only have time together as a band until the first of us gets through her mandatory enlistment—that would be Cassandra, who has just less than a year to serve. But she is also the main steadying influence on us, and she thinks we can still reach that point, and if we do, we can get back together when all of us have served our time. Well, all of us but Quinn, who has signed up for a 10-year hitch. He likes the Navy. Go figure.

  In the meantime, practice, practice, practice.

  Saturday, March 1

  Yap Day in Micronesia. Heroes Day in Paraguay. Bulgarian Baba Marta. St. David’s Day. International Nuclear Victims Remembrance Day. Podkayne’s Birthday.

  Today I am 19. Whoop-ti-do.

  Actually I’m not 19, not on any calendar I know of. Actually, like Frederick in The Pirates of Penzance, I’m only 4 and a little bit over. A most ingenious paradox, or a stupid Earthie pain in the ass, take your pick. My actual birthday was February 29, but there wasn’t one this year. I’m a leapling. Gioacchino Rossini, Jimmy Dorsey, Dinah Shore, and Aubergine were all leaplings.

  Of course, if you go by Martian years, I’m 10.

  The Swamp creatures gave me a party today. Mike and I exchanged gifts, too, as we always do. We don’t know exactly when he was born, but it was during a leap year, and February 29 is plausible.

  The best present I got, though, was not just for me, but for all the Pod People. We’ve been selected to make the Grand Jovian Tour, and it will occupy us for some months. The schedule hasn’t been finalized yet, and we aren’t in charge of it, and in fact a lot of it will remain up in the air until we actually start. You don’t get a tour bus when you’re in the MADDMN, you hitch rides with ships as they become available. But we will be visiting all the Galilean moons, and a lot of the littler ones. Amalthea is on the list, very close in to Jupiter. We’ll be going to Ananke, Carme, and Pasiphae. Some of them I’d never even heard of, had to look them u
p in an atlas. Callirrhoe, Taygete, Eukelade, and Harpalyke are not exactly household words, not even in a Martian household. (Where do they get those names?) We don’t have bases on every one of the little chunks of rock that are Jupiter’s 300-some satellites, but there’s somebody on most of them, and the minimum staff size of a Navy base is 100, to help prevent insanity.

  So I’ve got a lot of packing to do. We leave in a week! Bon voyage!

  Monday, March 10

  Commonwealth Day. San Juan de Dios in Peru. Forty Martyrs of Sebaste. Buffy the Vampire Day.

  Arrive on Io. Yikes! Jupiter is huge!

  Strictly speaking, humans have no business on Io. It’s too radioactive. To go there you take a course of antiradiation drugs, which made me a little sick for a day.

  We probably couldn’t have gone to Io at all except for the bubble drive. Regular rockets couldn’t have lifted enough of the heavy shielding ships require to make a safe haven for humans when the radiation really kicks up, which is every other day or so.

  But scientists go there because Io is just so damn fascinating. And for the same reasons, tourists go there, too. Of all the places humans go off Earth, Io is by far the most spectacular.

  For one thing, there’s that amazing view of Jupiter, almost twice as big as when seen from Europa. Then there’s the auroras. Io has a very thin atmosphere of sulfur dioxide, just a billionth of an atmosphere, but it’s enough to create auroras that shame anything you’d see in Alaska or Antarctica. And they aren’t just at the poles, they are planetwide, and continuous, 42.6 hours per day, which is also the time Io takes to circle Jupiter. Oddly, that’s exactly half the length of the Europan day, and V4 the length of a day on Ganymede. These are called Laplace-resonant orbits, or so I’m told. I learn something new every day.