Rolling Thunder

by John Varley

  She wagged a finger at me and shook her head.

  “It would be a mistake to think that. You will have the information, but it will take considerably longer to integrate it. Trust me on this. Even if the ten missing years were relatively uneventful, if you were at all connected to the larger events of politics—and I know you are, not like some of the gameheads I get who couldn’t name three countries on Earth or the current president of Mars—it will take some time. And one thing I can tell you, without getting into specifics, is that these ten years have not been uneventful.”

  “Grumpy,” I said.

  “That’s all I can say, but of course you were there at the beginning of that event.”

  “A pretty big event,” I ventured. But she wouldn’t say any more.

  So I was reduced to trying to trick snippets of information out of my little brother. He loved it, the bastard. He’d start to say something, then clap his hand over his mouth and look alarmed. But it was never anything, he was just yanking my chain.

  We finished the sherbet and I longed for a cheeseburger.

  “So, do you know when I get my cybers back?” I asked him.

  “Same time as last time you asked me. When the reorientation is finished.” He smiled. “Feeling a little Net withdrawal?”

  I was, a little. You grow up with the newest corneal screens and wearing your computing and connecting equipment either as accessories or implanted somewhere around your ear, you get used to being able to answer a lot of questions with a few simple tics. Even as simple a question as “What time is it?” You look down into the corner of your vision and there’s your clock, ready to tell you the time in any zone of Mars, Earth, or any other inhabited planet, plus the speed-of-light time between any two places. Or you want to know who wrote the lyric to a song, you google it, and there’s a new window.

  My corneas had been wiped clean as part of the nanosurgery, and I had no Net access at all for the first time I could remember.

  “I can’t even get a weather forecast,” I complained. “I like to get the daily temperatures from Pismo Beach, so I can be happy I’m not there.”

  “Might tell you too much,” Mike said, and grinned again. Oh, right.

  “That might tell me too much about how climate change is progressing on Earth,” I guessed.

  “Sure. It’ll all come in time, Podkayne. Just be patient.”

  So I was, but patient isn’t something I do well. The next day they finally activated the wallscreen and showed me the first tape.

  I might as well summarize. After all, for everyone else this happened a long time ago; it’s old news. Everyone else had time to adjust to it day by day. But I got it 365 days at a time, and the experience is different that way, more like reading a book or watching a movie than living real life. And, I realized, that’s how it would always be. There was no way of getting my ten years back.

  Grow up, Podkayne. Would you rather still be at the bottom of the ocean on Europa … or wherever it was you spent the last ten years?

  No thank you.

  PODKAYNE, THE LOST DECADE: YEAR ONE

  TOP STORY: Grumpy erupts. Like I had guessed, Grumpy didn’t just jump, didn’t just pop up and then fall back down. That big red bastard had leaped from the ice of Europa and into space. It took up an elliptical orbit around Jupiter, dipping right into the atmosphere three times, where many astronomers ended up with egg on their faces after predicting it would burn up and be swallowed like a strawberry gumdrop in a whale’s belly. Instead, it seemed to thrive on the heat and friction, accelerating and finally leaving the area altogether, followed by a whole fleet of Martian Navy vessels.

  Taliesen was a shambles. Forward Base and the NEMO station vanished, crushed by the waves of broken ice. Main Base sank. Only the crew at the ELF Base managed to escape with their lives. I watched some satellite video taken of the event, then had to pause it while I cried. All those people. Captain Scott, Dr. Land, Captain Stone …

  Could they be alive? For now, they were simply listed as “overdue,” like the NEMO sub October.

  When I started the video again I was startled to see Bus 54, a shiny steel bug, crawling over the ice. Resolution was not quite good enough to see faces in the windows, but it gave me a bad turn, let me tell you. I saw the ice wave hurl us into the sky, watched us flip over and over until the camera lost us.

  Clarke Centre had had time to batten down a bit, but still suffered damage. Twenty-seven people died and about a hundred were injured. Normally I would have googled a casualty list, but this was old-fashioned TV, noninteractive. I thought of all my friends there. Stupidly, I thought of Kahlua, the cat who had adopted me. Were they okay? I’d find out later, in carefully measured doses. All nonessential personnel were evacuated from Europa to Ganymede and Callisto, leaving only combat troops and scientific observers.

  POLITICAL NEWS: Not worth mentioning. Some new leaders on Earth, same as the old ones. Same old hatreds brewing, some of them centuries old. Nobody got nuked, which made it a good year for the Earth.

  CULTURAL NEWS: The usual celebrity divorces and custody squabbles. Blah, blah, blah. A lot of blockbuster movies I wouldn’t want to see. Some people won Oscars, and most people probably had already forgotten who they were.

  Oddly, there was no news of the top downloads. I called Maimuna, and she said I’d just have to trust her. She recommended I listen to oldies, which I could call up on my room memory. So I did a little of that, and drifted off to sleep.

  * * *

  NEXT DAY THERE was a familiar face waiting for me.

  “Travis!” I shouted, and put my arms around him. He was the first one who hadn’t cried when he saw me, and I was grateful for that. Enough people cry over you and you start to think of yourself as a pitiful waif.

  So what did I do? I started crying again. He was so old! Ten years ago he’d been in his eighties in calendar years, late sixties in “body time,” since he started skipping so many years. Now he looked well into his seventies. Healthy, hearty, with his usual crooked smile, but his hair was thin and his skin was mottled with age spots. He hadn’t spent the last decade in stasis, that was for sure. Well, of course not, with Grumpy rampaging around the solar system. He’d want to be awake and keeping an eye on that.

  “Oh, Uncle Travis, I wanted to marry you!” I said. No kidding, my tongue was leading a life of its own.

  He raised an eyebrow and gave me a dubious look, but he didn’t laugh, bless him.

  “Well, I figure you’d have been too smart for that,” he said. “Just ask my ex-wife.”

  “I had it all figured out. With you skipping years, eventually we’d be close to the same age. Now I’ve lost a whole decade.”

  “Luckiest thing that ever happened to you if it put you farther away from me.”

  He dried my eyes with a tissue. I felt like such a fool. Wisely, he didn’t say any more about that but threw me a conversational lifesaver.

  “So, what have you been up to today?”

  “Let’s see. This morning I climbed the south face of Olympus Mons with a four-man bobsled on my back. Oh, no, wait, what I meant was, I walked to the bathroom and back, which was harder.”

  He laughed, and we went on like that for a bit, keeping it light and safe. But something was fluttering around on the edge of my memory, and I eventually netted it among the random flock of butterflies that was still taking the place of coherent thoughts in my shell-shocked brain.

  “I heard your voice,” I said.

  “That would be during the opening of your bubble.”

  “You were there?”

  “Just an observer. We recovered six bubbles from the wreckage. After we got it all back to Mars, I turned it over to the experts and I watched as each one was opened. If it wasn’t you, I had no further interest.”

  I thought about that. There were a few questions I had to ask, even though I was pretty sure I wouldn’t get any answers yet.

  “Who survived?”

  “I’m
not supposed to tell you that. Not yet.” But he hadn’t said he was forbidden, which is what everyone else had said.

  “Ambassador Baruti?” I asked. There was a short pause. I glanced down at his lap, and saw his thumb was sticking up. I tried to stay as deadpan as he was.

  “Come on, Travis. Senator Wu and Monet?” Thumb up.

  “Slomo?” He frowned, and I realized he didn’t know the nickname. Hell, I didn’t know his real name. “The cameraman.” Thumb up.

  “Tina?” Thumb up.

  “Brynne?” The merest shake of his head, then he patted my hand.

  “No more questions about that, okay? You know I’m forbidden to tell you. And I was warned not to wear you out, so—”

  “I’m not tired,” I lied. “There’s one more thing I think I’ll go crazy if someone doesn’t tell me. Why did it take so long? Ten years, Uncle Travis, my god! Were we at the bottom of the ocean? Couldn’t they find us?”

  “You were embedded in the ice, about a mile down,” he said. “And I shouldn’t have told you that, and that’s all I can say. You’ll know the whole story soon, so relax.”

  “I can’t relax.”

  “You need a pill?” Aunt Elizabeth called out from the next room. Jeez, can’t a girl get a little privacy?

  “I’m fine. Travis, you’re right, I am tired. But could you run me through what happened? I mean, after they got me back here to Mars and … and opened the bubble. It was pretty confusing.”

  “I’m sure it was. It’s confusing enough when you’ve planned for it, like I do. One day they open your bubble and here’s a bunch of nuts with their hands in the air, shouting, ‘Don’t shoot!’ “

  I laughed, remembering Travis arriving at Gran’s stopper ceremonies.

  My god, Gran! She’d been inside her bubble longer than I had … unless she was already out, which was something I’m sure they weren’t going to tell me yet.

  So Travis ran me through the procedure, which was interesting, but I fell asleep before he was through. I learned more details later.

  The flashes of light were cameras, of course, taking pictures of me from all possible angles. X-rays, infrared, MRI, HGH, who-knows-what, putting together a densely detailed picture of my predicament as the slush drained out of my little sphere of catastrophe. The information gathering took less than ten seconds, then I was popped back into the bubble.

  All that was fed into a computer, which made models, then technicians from robot arm programmers to medical personnel like Aunt Elizabeth came up with a plan of action. When they opened the bubble the next time everything was ready, including the painkilling injections. I remembered it all with a shudder. Then I fell asleep.

  PODKAYNE, THE LOST DECADE: YEAR TWO

  TOP STORY: Doc erupts!

  That caught me completely by surprise. If Grumpy could do it, it of course implied that any of the crystal mountains could do it, but I hadn’t given it a thought. But others had. The researchers still on Europa had studied the seismology surrounding all the mountains and concluded that, if any of them were going to repeat the performance, it would be Doc, and sure enough, seven months later that big yellow bastard lifted itself into space and headed for Jupiter, just like his slightly smaller brother had done. Three trips around, dipping into the atmosphere each time and speeding up instead of slowing down, as it should have, and Doc was off to the races, too. He didn’t follow the exact path of Grumpy—Jupiter had moved on in its orbit—but both appeared to be headed in the general vicinity of the sun.

  If more of them were going to take off, Dopey and Happy were usually mentioned as the most likely candidates, along with some that hadn’t had names before.

  Were people still calling them by those stupid names? Apparently so.

  Early on the more sedate news organizations had tried the official acronyms and numbers, but TECP-40 just doesn’t have any punch to it. People needed personification, and the names were already handy.

  So someone dug around in the history books and found that the Disney people had considered no less than fifty names when creating the dwarfs, and these were applied to those TECPs that didn’t have one yet, and that’s what people called them. Among them were Blabby, Jumpy, Shifty, Snoopy, Awful, Biggy, Blabby, Dirty, Gabby, Gaspy, Gloomy, Hoppy, Hotsy, Jaunty, and Nifty.

  What were they up to? Nobody knew anything. How did they do what they did? How did a trillion tons of crystalline matter free itself from the gravity of a small planet with no visible expenditure of energy? Vague theories were trotted out, possibly some use of the galactic magnetic field, whatever that is. Dark matter and dark energy were mentioned, darkly.

  God was mentioned. God always seems to get into the game.

  Bottom line: Nobody knew anything.

  POLITICAL NEWS: Back to God again. The Rapturists were stirring from beneath the rocks and in all the damp, wet, moldy places of the mind and spirit in Arkansas and Alabama and Tennessee and all those other vacation wonderlands in Heartland America. They’d had some hard times after the tsunami hadn’t turned out to be the clarion call to Armageddon, but true believers never die, they just annotate their beliefs and raise more true believers. Massive rallies were held all over the Heartland. The exact nature of Grumpy and Doc was debated, sometimes with thumped Bibles, sometimes with shotguns. The consensus was they were archangels coming to summon the faithful, but since the Bible apparently didn’t mention Archangel Grumpy, just who were they? Most agreed that “Grumpy” was Gabriel. Top candidates for “Doc” were Michael, Uriel, and Zadkiel. Stay tuned to this heavenly channel for more news.

  Over in the world of Islam, the Imams currently stirring up the most trouble were speaking of the “Sword of Allah.” They expected Grumpy and/or Doc to wipe out all the infidels. According to them, the Big Wave was just the Big Guy getting the range on his target. Oddly enough, terror attacks were down for the year, and the one before. Lots of Muslims wanted to stick around for the show.

  CULTURAL NEWS: What culture? More movies, books, art … and once more, no music news. I was beginning to see this as highly suspicious. Were they hiding something from me? Had people given up on music as a bad job? Was Elvis back from the dead?

  MY NEXT VISITOR announced himself by leaping onto my chest and bumping my nose, hard, accompanied by the sound of a large vibrator.

  “Kahlua!” I shouted. He just regarded me with those narrow blue eyes, bumped noses again to mark me with his scent, then curled his paws on my chest, wrapped his tail around his hind end, and seemed to drift off to sleep.

  “Hi, Podkayne,” came a voice from the door. Karma, who I’d seen a little more than a week ago and who hadn’t seen me in ten years.

  “You’re looking good, Kar,” I said, stroking Kahlua’s fur. I noticed she was in Navy uniform. Once again, what was that all about? Do the necessary and get out, that had been Karma’s philosophy.

  “You mean for my age?” she said.

  “Bring me up to date,” I said.

  “Well, you know it can only be personal details …”

  In short: Married, to someone I’d never met. Two children, three and five. She looked tired. I guess kids will do that to you, combined with a life in the Navy. I wanted to ask her about that, but sensed that I wouldn’t get any answers. So we talked about safe things.

  Of which there weren’t many. You know, listening to older people, I realize there are decades and then there are decades. We all know that the distance between ages nine and nineteen is immense. Granddaddy Manny once told me that the difference between age fifty and sixty is really not that much. By then you’re pretty much who you’re going to be. But nineteen and twenty-nine is quite a gulf. I had no idea what I’d be doing in ten years, and I found that exciting. Karma, I quickly discovered, had a pretty good idea what she would be doing—or at least what she hoped to be doing—for the next twenty or thirty. Her life had taken shape. Mine was still fluid.

  I realized, with a pang, that it would be that way with all my friends
. Good lord, what would the Pod People be like today? Who would they be jamming with, what would they be playing? I could be sure it wouldn’t include poor, poor, pitiful Podkayne.

  There was a story behind the cat; otherwise, we’d have had very little we could talk about or would even want to talk about.

  “We rode out the quake pretty well,” Karma said. “I don’t think it even woke Kahlua up. Then I was busy with the rescue parties …” A momentary pause there, and a faraway look. But for her, the horror of that day was long ago, and there were no tears now. “Anyway, when we were being evacuated I couldn’t find the damn cat. I looked everywhere, but we weren’t given a lot of time. I figured he was a goner when I got aboard the ship, and when I settled down in my seat … there he was, rubbing against my leg and purring. I don’t know how he does it.”

  “He’s a spook,” I said, and rubbed his head. He opened one eye enough to glare at me, then started that maddening thing he does of exercising his claws against my chest.

  “Anyway, I brought him back to Mars, and I remembered you had an uncle who was an admiral. So I looked him up and told him about your cat. He was upset … we were all pretty upset at the time … but he took Kahlua.”

  “You must be a pretty old fellow by now, huh?” I told the cat. He ignored me.

  “That’s what I’m telling you. He’s not old. Your uncle had him put in stasis, and I just got him out this morning. You probably thought he had a pretty good memory, going right up to you like that, but for him it’s the same as you. For him, it’s only been days since he’s seen you. You can pick up with him right where you left off.”

  I took a great deal of comfort from that. Probably because I knew there was very little else I could pick up where I left off.

  ONE GOOD THING about enforced bed rest: I had a chance to catch up on my reading. Real paper books, too, since all my cyber inputs were shut down. I finally read that book my parents stole my name from, which was called Podkayne of Mars.

  What a horrible book! What a mean old man! He spends the whole book getting you to like this sweet little airhead, and then he does terrible things to her. Don’t you hate it when an author does that? I’m not reading any more of his books, I promise you!