Rolling Thunder

by John Varley

  I heard glassware rattling and looked at the bar. I saw all the bottles were secured behind a rail, like on a ship at sea. All in all there wasn’t a lot that wasn’t tied down in some way, other than us.

  Still, you can’t tie down everything. A jar of olives came bouncing toward me, was fielded by a table, and smacked out into center field. Ice fountained up from behind the bar from a cabinet that hadn’t been secured properly. The bartender was scrambling to lock it down. A small amp and a mike stand bounced off the low bandstand and lodged under a bench.

  The biggest part of the debris was Cosmo Wills. Naturally he had not bothered to read the stuff we were all given when we arrived at Taliesen, and had been utterly baffled when the quake started. Instead of grabbing something, he had tried to run, overdid it, and flew into the air. I saw the ceiling swat him. His head went through an acoustical tile up there, and then he tore loose and somehow managed to squirm around in the air so that he hit the floor with his head, too. He put his hands out to protect himself, which only meant that he was shoving off the floor with his arms instead of his legs when he hit, and bounced high again, and this is almost impossible to believe, but he managed to turn around in the air again, and hit his head into a light fixture. He held on to something this time, and hung there, howling, for the rest of the quake.

  Which was a fine place for him, in my opinion. Does that make me a bad person?

  IT SEEMED HE’D got his head jammed up into some wiring. It was sort of fun getting him back down.

  He hung on to the acoustic tile cross bracing, kicking his feet at first, but he finally realized that wasn’t making it any better. So he started shouting about how sorry we were all going to be that we’d ever been born, how he was going to sue everybody at the base for everything they owned, he was going to take the Navy apart with his bare hands. But with his head stuck up there in the sound baffles, we couldn’t hear him too well.

  The chief systems engineer was brought in to assess the problem. He took his time. It seemed to take even more time to find a ladder. In fact, nobody seemed to be in a big hurry about anything, and the only problem most of us were having was trying not to bust a gut laughing. Tina was doubled over, both hands over her mouth as she desperately tried to stifle her hysterical giggle, which was all too identifiable.

  “I don’t think he can hear you,” I whispered to her. “Let it out.”

  This only made matters worse for her, as I’d intended. She grew so red in the face I began to worry about her. She took a deep breath, tried to steady herself, and finally collapsed in a giggling fit again.

  “Can he sue the Navy?” I asked Captain Stone.

  “We’re lawsuit-proof, as an institution,” she said, with satisfaction. “It’s in the constitution. It’s possible to sue individual officers for dereliction of duty, things like that, but he signed a release. He probably doesn’t remember it.”

  I felt better. I knew that if he could sue, he would sue.

  They called in more engineers. It began to seem like it was the most difficult problem they’d ever encountered. Every now and then one would have to turn away to stifle a laugh. Oh, but they were careful. Nothing they did could be seen as deliberate procrastination, nothing worse than excess caution, and who could complain about that? Nobody but Cosmo, and he did enough complaining for the whole planet.

  I noticed that Slomo wasn’t laughing, but he had a small smile on his face. Then I noticed something else, and sidled over to him.

  “Are you getting all this?” I whispered.

  “Every second of it,” he said, pointing to the camera he held at his hip. “Even better, I got the whole thing, him bouncing around, banging his head. Screaming and whimpering like a child.”

  “I don’t think he’ll want to use it.”

  “He won’t even see it. But this chip goes into my most secure file, and someday he might get a look. Call it job security. Or maybe, if I’m pissed off enough, a way to get a little respect. I might ask him to imagine how he’d like to see this on download, available to the whole world.”

  “My lips are sealed,” I assured him, and spent the next ten minutes enjoying myself, imagining that footage on the news.

  AND I LIED, I told Tina about it. And I think she told Aldric. Oops!

  After they got Cosmo out of the ceiling, hardly the worse for wear except for a knot on his forehead and a broken nose that had bled freely—when he saw it he shrieked, and almost passed out—Captain Stone called up a detailed simulation of Grumpy’s south face on a wallscreen. She indicated a vertical area that was about a mile wide and was represented in a different color.

  “About a hundred feet,” she said. “Not too bad of a shake for that amount of movement.”

  “That wasn’t a bad shake?” I asked.

  “Moderate. And now TECP-40 is a hundred feet taller.” She seemed to take a certain satisfaction in that. I guess it made sense. There was so little they knew about these things that it was good to have a nice, solid fact you could measure.

  “It grows faster and more often than any of them,” she said. “That’s why we call him Grumpy.”

  If that was a moderate one, I hoped to be back home before the old Grumpster got really temperamental.

  11

  AS IF GOD wanted to be sure we experienced the full spectrum of oddness in and around Taliesen, our bus broke down on the way home. Worse, it wasn’t even the bus that would take us back to Clarke but the one ferrying us from our rockin’ appearance at Forward back to Taliesen Main. Of course it sent Cosmo ballistic once again. I thought about killing him. Then I thought about putting a round from my sidearm into his left knee, then his right one, then watching him bleed. Can’t prosecute me for my thoughts.

  He was a real sight, with a big bandage over his nose, one eye black, his forehead still a bit swollen.

  “What a fuckin’ zoo!” he was shouting. “I’m going to find out who’s responsible for this fucking mess, and I’m going to hang him out to dry. Driver, what the fuck are you doing down there?”

  He was leaning over the hatch the driver had opened. No steam was coming out of it or anything dramatic like that, but I heard a clanking noise. The good old sledgehammer cure?

  I thought about planting my boot in his butt, but the gravity was so low he’d have no trouble recovering before he fell in. That’s when Senator Wu Zheng Han walked over to him and tapped him on the shoulder.

  Cosmo straightened … and Senator Wu pinched Cosmo’s broken nose between his thumb and finger, and squeezed. The sound that came out of Cosmo was halfway between a honk and an oink.

  “Curb your tongue, sir,” he said, reasonably. He gave another pinch—we heard another honk/oink—and let him go. Cosmo stood there, stunned.

  “You have done nothing but whine and complain for this entire trip. I have tolerated it, but I will not countenance language like that around my daughter.”

  I looked at Monet, who rolled her eyes. I happened to know his daughter used language a lot stronger than that … but not around her father. And who cared what the excuse was? It was high time somebody put this asshole in his place. I only regretted I hadn’t had the courage to do it myself. But the amazing thing was that the man to do it was the senator, who had been quiet as a mouse for most of the trip.

  “Where the fuck do you get off—honk!”

  “I take no pleasure in your public humiliation, sir,” the senator went on. “But since the offense was a highly public one, you left me no choice. I am a man of peace, but will fight if provoked. If you demand satisfaction for this insult, I will meet with your representatives as soon as we return to Mars.”

  Things got very quiet. Dueling had first been proposed as a way to settle public insults in the Republic only about five years ago, and won by a narrow margin. Not with guns or swords or anything deadly, and not willy-nilly, people calling each other out just for meanness, or for some imagined insult. It had to be approved by a board of your peers, and it was closely
monitored. In fact, there were so many rules and regulations and handicaps (no three-hundred-pound bruiser against a ninety-eight-pound woman) that there were only two or three duels every week. But the hassle of going through the process even to get turned down before it came to actual fisticuffs was enough to keep most people at least a teeny bit more polite.

  Of course, when the blood did start to fly, it was great spectator sport. Ratings were usually high, and they’d be through the roof for a fight between a senator and Cosmo.

  I could see Cosmo doing the math. Senator Wu was a tad shorter, and maybe fifteen years older. But he was known to be a practitioner of some martial art or another. So there was that. Cosmo would not relish getting his butt whipped in public. But he was also just smart enough to realize that, if it came before the board, he had no friends here. I sure as hell knew how I would testify. There was a very good chance he could be made to look like the aggressor, and a fool, which was worse, and the senator a man just offering a reasonable response to provocation.

  There was also a certain look in Senator Wu’s eye that I would describe as a deadly calm. So Cosmo swallowed hard.

  “I apologize,” he muttered, and stomped off to the back of the bus to sulk. Tina later told me that it wasn’t the first time Cosmo had had to back off from a duel, and given his temperament, it certainly wouldn’t be his last. Another certainty was that he would make life hell for his employees for the next few weeks.

  The driver popped his head out of the hatch and looked at us, oblivious to the lovely scene he had just missed.

  “Well, you want the good news or the bad news?” he asked, cheerfully.

  I think we all groaned.

  “Just give it to us straight, Doc, we can take it,” Aldric said.

  “Okay. I can move this baby, but only at about one mile per hour. The tranny’s pretty much fried, except for low gear.” He shook his head. “I inspected that sucker myself, just before we left. Didn’t see the hairline crack.” Or the fickle finger of mishap, I thought, which seemed to point directly at Taliesen most of the time.

  “We’d have to wait for a part, except“—and here he grinned—“it’s only about a mile and a half to NEMO. I’m pretty sure I can swap out a part from one of their buggies.”

  “So how long?” Tina asked, glancing back at Cosmo.

  “Hour and a half over there. Say three hours to fix it.” He grinned even wider. “Also, I got a girlfriend at NEMO, so add another … say an hour.”

  “Say two hours,” I suggested, to general agreement.

  NEMO STANDS FOR Navy Europa Mobile Oceanautics. We tend to forget, standing on a sheet of ice that’s as deep as thirty miles in some places, that beneath it is a mineral-saturated ocean three hundred miles deep. The areas around the freckles also appear to be hot spots on the silicate rock that forms the bulk of Europa’s core. Those hot spots are caused by the deep molten iron core being stirred with the gigantic run-cible spoon of the tides of Jupiter, Io, and Ganymede.

  For whatever reason, the ice around Taliesen is thinner than at any place on Europa, only about two miles. A mere crust, a rime, an eggshell. I’m surprised we don’t all fall through like incautious skaters. That makes it the ideal site for the daredevils of NEMO, who regularly dive into an environment that may be the harshest humans have ever attempted to invade.

  It was even smaller than Forward Base, dominated by the large dome that housed the submarines. When we went down the ramp in the bus bay we were met at the bottom by the base commander, Captain Glenn Scott, who seemed happy enough to see us.

  Captain Scott gave us a tour of the base. NEMO was only a year old. They were doing something here that had never been done, and were still pretty new at it, according to Captain Scott. They were still learning. We ended up in the submarine bay.

  “There are maybe a dozen small harbor patrol craft, based on Earth,” the captain told us. “Other than that, these are the only boats in the Martian Navy.”

  I learned that submarines were traditionally called boats, even the underwater aircraft carriers of East and Western America, China, and the European Union. These little fish were nothing like that. They were made on Earth, which had the expertise to do it, and were about forty feet long, fat and stubby, but sleek as dolphins. They were all a Day-Glo yellow with orange stripes.

  They were hanging from racks, in a row, and could be trundled out to the center of the dome, where the entrance hole was now covered with a metal cap. There were five subs, each with NEMO and a Roman numeral painted on the side, but there was no NEMO-III. The space where it would have been was empty.

  “Nautilis, Turtle, Plongeur, Kairyu, and Crocodil,” he said, with proprietary pride. “The toughest little ships in the solar system. Turtle is mine. Named after the first American submarine, designed by David Bushnell, 1775.”

  There was a name written above the empty berth: OCTOBER.

  “So October is on a dive?” I asked.

  “October is overdue,” Captain Scott said.

  “How long?” Monet asked.

  “About six months now.”

  Well, that was a bit of a conversation stopper, considering he’d already told us that the maximum submersion time for these NEMOs was forty-eight hours. It seemed rather callous to me, too, until I realized he was dead serious.

  “No ship under my command will ever be listed as ‘lost’ unless I see the wreckage with my own eyes,” he said. “We know she’s down there, we just aren’t able to dive that deep. Yet. We’re working on it.”

  And as for the crew, they had KYAGs, so there was at least a chance that they were still alive down there, encased in stopper bubbles, in suspended time. I patted the little unit attached to my own belt.

  Captain Scott came up to me with a look in his eyes that I thought I recognized. And to tell you the truth, I wouldn’t have been averse. He was a good-looking guy, though two inches shorter than me and balding almost to the top of his head. I liked that he didn’t try for a comb-over, or even bother with transplants. That indicated confidence in his manhood, in my eyes. And he had strong arms and friendly blue eyes. Ships that pass in the night … I’m not opposed to that, if it’s an attractive ship. I could feel my heart thumping a little faster.

  “Say, Lieutenant …” he began.

  “Podkayne, if it’s not too informal.”

  “We’re very informal around here. Podkayne, then. I was wondering …”

  I batted my eyelashes in a way I’d practiced in the mirror since I was twelve.

  “Well, since you’re going to be here awhile, would you mind dropping by our canteen and favoring us with a few songs?”

  I hoped my smile looked genuine. Ah, the perils of fame. No doubt the man was too overwhelmed by my star power, my charisma, to even consider me as a bed partner. Well, I shouldn’t be daunted. Soon, no doubt, the situation would be reversed, and I’d have to hire a platoon of hefty guys to surround me and keep the legions of handsome young men from smothering me with their worship. Sigh.

  But enough regrets. My public awaits!

  “I MUST BE out of my mind to do this,” Captain Scott said, gloomily.

  No, we weren’t in his bed, sorry to say, but the next best thing. I was sitting in the jump seat behind the pilot, Captain Scott, of the MNV Turtle. We were about to take a dive. A really deep dive.

  I’m not sure exactly where I got the nerve to ask for the trip. Maybe my star power really was going to my head, because suddenly I knew I could convince this man to do something he knew he really shouldn’t. And I did it. I told him I’d be happy to entertain his troops, if he’d give me a ride in his little motor scooter. His multimillion-dollar motor scooter.

  He dithered awhile, he called up his copilot, and ten minutes later the deal was done. I did a one-hour set in the canteen, enthusiastically received, and ten minutes later we were in the big fish.

  By “we” I mean myself, Slomo, Ambassador Baruti, Dekko, Captain Scott, and Dr. Nadine Land, a tiny Earth
ie in her midthirties, oceanographer and submersible expert on loan from the East America Navy, the woman who had taught Scott and all his other pilots everything they knew about driving these things.

  The pressure was enormous down there, higher than at the bottom of the deepest ocean trench on Earth. I decided I didn’t even want to know how much. These little crafts had made it halfway to the bedrock, and could go farther, but you did this sort of thing in increments. These boats were never going to reach the rock below, but the next generation might.

  Captain Scott maneuvered the arm holding Turtle suspended in the air out over the lock leading to the water. Dr. Land was watching Scott’s every move while trying not to be too obvious about it. It was clear to me that she still regarded him, and probably all the other pilots, as drivers in training.

  Slomo was aboard because we all knew he’d kill the rest of us if he was denied a seat if that’s what it took. No way he was going to miss filming this. Baruti and Dekko were there because of a coin toss. NEMOs seated six, absolute maximum, and were crowded at that.

  I wasn’t scared. Really, I wasn’t. Well, maybe a bit nervous. We wouldn’t be going to any great depth, just a quick pop down under the ice, and a quick look around. And forever after I could have bragging rights about having been to the most remote and hostile location humans had ever penetrated.

  “Any chance of seeing a boojum?” I asked.

  Captain Scott jerked his head around and stared at me.

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  I shrugged. “It’s common knowledge at Clarke. Not even all that hard to come by in Thunder City.”

  He looked a little pissed off. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought it up. He concentrated on his controls, and we started lowering toward the sealock.

  “It’s not exactly top secret, Glenn,” Dr. Land pointed out. The high-pressure door was rolling away beneath us. I could see this through the lower porthole near my feet. “Why do you think we call them boo-jums?” she asked.