by John Varley
He chattered on for a while about things that would be important only to me and him, like where I should go to college after I graduated from good old Burroughs High. Then he sighed deeply, as he always does when he’s about to sign off.
“Well, I be goin’, Ray, my friend,” he said. Then he did a double take and smacked himself on the forehead with the flat of his palm, another gesture that was pure Jubal. He hates it that some functions of his brain are not like they used to be. Well, wouldn’t you? “Almost forget, me. I sent you another package, few days ago. It ain’t nothing much special, no, but don’t worry about it. Jus’ a little gizmo I made. Don’t do much, that thing, but it maybe can open things that nothin’ else can open. An maybe one of dese days I be sending you something else. Can’t tell right now, me. Anyway, you take care, and don’t take no wooden alligators. Bye.”
He laughed, as he always did at his ridiculous sign-off. There’s no way to really explain the joke; it has to do with something that happened between him and my father a long time ago.
Sending me something? He did that all the time. Sometimes it was ridiculous stuff, toys of one sort or another. Jubal had trouble keeping track of time. Sometimes he seemed to think I was still twelve, or even six. He was almost devoid of social skills. Travis had told me that had been true even before his injuries. He had something called Asperger’s Syndrome, which I gathered was a point on a line called the “Autistic Spectrum.” Some autistics aren’t able to function at all, while others are true geniuses with some social deficits. Some people think Newton, Einstein, Tesla, and a lot of other great people of the past had Asperger’s.
Anyway, Jubal was always sending me stuff. He was a pretty good artist, so sometimes it was drawings, usually of the Louisiana bayou country. Or he’d send me or my sister, Elizabeth, flowers. Other times it would be some little gadget he’d made, some clockwork fancy or flamboyantly useless machine. Once he saw this old plastic box at an online auction site. What it did was, you flipped a switch and a little plastic hand came out of the box, grabbed the switch, and turned it off. A machine whose only function was to turn itself off. Loved it. So, a little gizmo, don’t do much, that thing. Pure Jubal.
I checked the systems on my board and saw I had a few minutes, so I immediately ticked COMPOSE and started talking.
“Hi-de-hi, Uncle Jubal,” I said. “All the wooden alligators here are frozen, as usual. I’m looking forward to the new gadget. The stuff you send me is always fun, you are one of the funniest guys I know. Nothing much doing here, just schoolwork and hanging out on the weekends, wasting time. The new band isn’t doing so well. In fact, I think you could say we’ve broken up. No big loss, the guy on lead synth is a real a—a real awful person. And like I told you a while ago, I’ve finally realized I’m never going to be a big star and have to beat off all the adoring women with a big old stick. But it’s fun. I’ll send you some downloads next time. Right now I’m about to be pretty busy, since I left Phobos about fifteen minutes ago and the air is starting to get thick. Oh, did you get the pics of my low-gee pad up here? Pretty neat, huh? Stay well my friend, and take care of the penguins. Over and out.”
I ticked off, silently cursing myself. I almost said “asshole,” and profanity or obscenity upset Jubal horribly. You’d think that after all these years it would be second nature to clean up my mouth when I’m talking to him, and I haven’t slipped since I was ten and saw how hurt he was. Close call.
And I was cutting it a little close on the reentry, too. The board started to make a few odd beeps and boops, and if I didn’t see to it soon, the computer would take over and report it to Mom and Dad and I’d be grounded for a month, at least.
NO QUESTION ABOUT it, one of the things that doesn’t suck about Mars is airboards. And it may be the one thing Earthie kids my age envy us. You can’t use them on Earth—please!—and to use one on Mars you have to be a Martian. In fact, if a lot of Martian parents had their way, nobody would be able to use them at all. Hence the computer beeping at me, and less obvious safety measures.
We call them boards to be cool, to fit in with surfboards, which we obviously can’t use on Mars, and skateboards, which we can and do use, and are able to do tricks nobody could even think of on Earth.
What they actually look like is a snowmobile or a Jet Ski, sitting on a longer, wider surfboard. You straddle the engine and air tanks, sitting on a motorcycle seat, and there’s a clear Nomex aerodynamic shield in front of you, but other than that, you’re in open space, nothing but your suit to protect you from vacuum.
I fired the jets for the last time as I felt the very thin atmosphere begin to tug slightly on my board. Below me, Mars was spread out like a giant plate of lasagna. Sorry, but that’s really the best analogy I can come up with. Orange tomato sauce and cream-colored pasta, with a few smears of black olive here and there. The only things that didn’t fit the picture were the single, monumental peak of Olympus Mons and the perfect row of Ascraeus, Pavonis, and Arsia Mons east of the big boy. All four gigantic extinct volcanoes showed white caps of frozen water and carbon-dioxide ice.
I checked all my helmet displays, and everything was copacetic. Airboarding is fun, but you don’t want to forget that you can reach some serious high temperatures on the way in, and that you’ve got a reentry footprint you don’t dare ignore. Too high and you’re okay, you’ll skip out and have to try it again, a long way from your target, and endure the merciless ridicule of all the people you know when you get down. Too low, and you can toe right into the soup, decelerate at a killing rate, and fry. Falling off your board on Mars is not an option.
You do have to do a little skipping, but the best way to kill your velocity is slaloming. You have handlebars on the front, and of course you’re strapped down tight, so you hang on and shift your body left and right, maybe hang five, which means putting one foot out into the airstream for a few moments. Wear your heavy boots for that one.
I swooshed left, toward Olympus, traveled for a while almost parallel to the triple peaks, which might have been put there by the god Ares as a flight path indicator. When you get over Pavonis, it’s time to jog right again.
The gee forces were building up, shoving me down into the seat, and a faint ghost of a shock wave was curling over the top of the windshield and buffeting my helmet. That air was cold when it hit the windshield, and pretty hot when it left. The clear material began to glow light pink.
I was getting to the hottest part of the trip, pulling about a gee, which was easy. I dug a little deeper into the air and pulled a bit more. Then I started getting a little blue color in the air. That was a very tiny bit of the ablative coating of the board bottom burning off. About every fifth or sixth trip you had to spray some more on it, sort of like recapping a bald tire on Earth. But you could mix in some chemical compounds that didn’t have anything to do with slowing you down, like strontium or lithium salts for red, barium chloride for green, strontium and copper for purple, magnesium or aluminum for intense white. Same stuff you use in fireworks. Not a lot of it, and the resulting firetail is not as spectacular as a Landing Day display, but it’ll do.
If you’ve got bubble-drive power, you can theoretically start off at any time of day for any destination, and the same on your return. But it can take a long time, even accelerating all the way. The most practical thing is to take off for Phobos during a launch window that lasts about an hour, and when you return there’s an ideal time to leave to get to Thunder City—which is just about the only place worth going on Mars.
That means that a lot of people were reentering at the same time I was. Off to each side of me I could see multicolored flame trails as other boarders showed their stuff. As usual, there were varying degrees of skill. I watched as much as I could while still keeping my eyes on all the telltales and keeping my feel for the board. To my left I saw a board getting a little too close. I saw on the display that I was about half a mile ahead of him, which by the rules of the air gave me the right of way. He
kept coming, and I got a yellow light on the heads-up. Jerk. I punched the console and a yellow flare arched out in his direction. In about a second he saw it and banked away from me. A window popped up on my display and I saw a kid about fifteen years old, his face distorted by the gee forces he was pulling.
“Sorry, space,” he said.
“Stay cool,” I said, which he could take any way he wanted.
Below, about fifteen thousand feet, I saw Thunder City, and I banked again and went into a long, altitude-killing turn. Looking out to the side, I got a wonderful view of what had been my hometown since I was five.
My, how it had grown.
When my family arrived the first hotel on the planet, the Marineris Hyatt, which my father was to manage, was still under construction. People were still new at this, at constructing buildings in an environment as hostile as Mars. The hotel was finished almost a year behind schedule. But it was full on opening day, and Earthies were clamoring for more rooms. So we built them.
Now you could hardly find the original Hyatt, which had come within a hair of being torn down before my mother and some others led a campaign to save it as our first historical building. It was converted into our first, and so far only, museum. Next to it was the Red Thunder, which Dad now ran, and where I had lived for the last five years. It was still the tallest and most impressive freestanding building in Thunder City, but wouldn’t be for long. I could see three new hotels in the works, all of which would be bigger.
The city was built in an irregular line, which had grown to about seven miles. There were a lot of domes, both geodesic and inflatable, the biggest being a Bucky dome almost a mile in diameter. It was all connected by the Grand Concourse, of which an architectural critic had said, “It represents the apotheosis of the turn-of-the-century airport waiting room.” Yeah, well. We can’t have open-air promenades with old elm trees on Mars. So most of the trees on the concourse are concrete, with plastic leaves. It’s all roofed with clear Lexan, and maybe it’s tacky, and maybe it is nothing but a giant shopping mall, but it’s home to me.
The slightly zigzag line of the concourse pointed toward the Valles Marineris, five miles away. There was one hotel out there, on the edge, and I swung over the Valles as I deployed my composite fabric wings to complete my deceleration. Like the old Space Shuttle, the board wasn’t capable of anything but a downward glide with those wings, but if you were good and had a head wind and maybe a thermal, you could stretch that glide pretty far. I went out over the edges of the Valles, which is just a fancy word for canyon. The Grand Canyon of Mars, so big that it would stretch from New York City to Los Angeles. You could lose whole states in some of the side canyons. I felt a little lift from the rising, thin, warm air. When I say warm, I mean a few degrees below zero. That’s balmy on Mars. But I didn’t linger. I banked again and soon was down to three thousand feet over my hometown.
Other than the usual hotel construction there were three big things going on down there. Dad hated one of them, and Mom was opposed to all three. Dad was a confirmed Green and Mom was a passionate, some might even say rabid, Red.
On Earth, a Red is a communist—and I admit I’m not too clear on just what a communist is since we don’t seem to have any on Mars, or at least they don’t call themselves that. Something about everybody sharing everything, everybody being equal. What’s so bad about that? I don’t know what all the fuss was about, but apparently Earthies spent most of the last century hassling over it.
On Mars, a Red is a conservationist, usually a member of the Preservationist Party. “Keep Mars Red!” You’ll see the posters everywhere you go.
A Green on Earth is a member of one of the national ecology parties. They are against pollution, in favor of wildlife conservation and stuff like that. None of that matters a lot to a Martian Green or Red. There’s pollution, but not much, and no wildlife at all. Here on the red planet, a Green is a terraformer.
Got it? Red means leave it the way it is. Green means build more hotels, warm it up, and fill the air with oxygen.
Myself, I’m a member of the Beer, Bang, and Rock n’ Roll Party, and so is just about everybody else I know. We don’t think about it much.
So what do I think when I do think about it?
A little of both, I guess. The Reds seem pretty stupid to me. I mean, who cares? We’ve been exploring Mars for over twenty years. If there was life anywhere, we would have found it by now. To my way of thinking, no life equals no ecology. Which means Mars is just a big ball of rock and ice and carbon dioxide, and who cares what somebody does to a big pile of rocks?
Don’t get Mom started on that subject, though. You’ve been warned.
On the other hand, who do the Greens think they’re kidding? They’ve got their test site running a few miles outside town and it’s shooting thawed permafrost into the air at a rate that will eventually let us go outside wearing nothing but a very thick parka and take off our respirators for as much as ten minutes at a time.
In about a hundred thousand years.
I could see the plant sitting out there by itself, surrounded by a security fence to keep Red protesters out. Of course, they plan to build thousands of the things, much bigger. But even the most optimistic numbers I’ve seen won’t turn Mars into an approximation of an Earth environment until long after I’m dead. And that environment would be like what you’d find at ten thousand feet over the North Pole.
Again: Who cares?
The other part of the Green philosophy is building stuff.
Even Dad has started to worry about that part of the Green point of view. Not the Grand Canal, he likes that part just fine. That’s the second big new thing you see from the air. What they’re doing is, they’re digging a ditch from Thunder City to Olympus Mons. One day in a few years they plan to sell rides to the Olympus ski runs on big sleds, jet-powered iceboats, instead of flying people there. You can put restaurants on big iceboats, and you can’t on small passenger rockets. They envision a leisurely two-day trip, extracting your last dime in the casino. It’s sort of a pseudoretro thing. Mars never had canals, but wouldn’t it have been swell if it had? In about three years we’ll have one.
We already had part of it. The first fifteen miles were complete, almost half a mile wide, straight as a stick, full of water and frozen solid. It continued inside to meet the Grand Concourse, where it was actual warm water suitable for swimming, lined with exotic plastic “Martian” plants and architecture from a 1930s science fiction magazine cover. It was already very popular.
Then there were the Martels, and for once Mom and Dad agreed on something. I could see them sprawling out to the north, into the less desirable real estate beyond the city, like a bad case of acne with multicolored pimples. Dad would give anything to pop them.
The big travel companies finally realized there is a great hunger for off-Earth travel among the middle classes who can’t afford the Red Thunder, and who find Luna too black, too underground, and too boring. A few years back somebody built the first of what have come to be called Martels, just glorified tents, really. You can have them up and running in a week.
And there goes the neighborhood.
Sure, they look sort of okay now, from the ground, with none of them more than three years old. Your typical Martel room has a queen-sized bed and a dresser and a stereo and a little curtained area where you can shower and brush your teeth and not much else. Sort of like Boy Scout camp, only you don’t have to work for merit badges in suit maintenance and knot-tying. All they are is triple-insulated domes of heavy-duty plastic held up by air pressure and crossed fingers, mass-produced in Ghana or Ecuador and shipped out here by the thousands to sprout on the red dirt like psychedelic mushrooms—they come in twenty-four loud color combinations—whose main purpose seems to be to make Mom hiss and spit every time she sees them.
They’re all freestanding units, like teepees for Martian Indians, which some Earth motels actually used to be—teepees, I mean—like I’ve seen in Dad’s co
llection of postcards of old motels. Their one luxury is a big triple-paned Lucite picture window offering a great view of red dirt, in the calm season, or of red dust when it blows, which is frequently. Oh, yeah, and a view of pink sky when it’s calm. When it’s blowing you lose even the pink sky, since during a good howler visibility is reduced to about a centimeter. And the howlers can last for . . . well, for a lot longer than your honeymoon vacation package deal. Yeah, Mom and Dad, we spent five days and four nights on the goddam rock ball and didn’t even see the goddam pink sky.
The last thing worth mentioning in the rooms other than the tacky lithograph glued to the curving wall is a staircase leading down to your front door, which takes you to the tunnel corridor that can stretch up to half a mile of no-pile insulated carpet until it gets to the big central dome—the Vacation Fun Center! in Martel-speak—which consists of a bored clerk working his way through Marineris U., the No Lifeguard On Duty! Olympic-size pool (if there was a ten-meter freestyle event in the Olympics), and a TV/game room where your kids will spend all their time between bouts of whining Can we go home yet? Oh, yeah, and in the mornings, the “Complimentary ‘Ancient Martian’ Breakfast.” Until the Martels arrived none of us new Martians knew that the ancient Martians liked to start the day with weak coffee and stale muffins. In fact no one had ever discovered the slightest trace of any ancient Martians at all, so you can’t say the arrival of the Martels hasn’t done some good. Who knew?
“Yeah, but just wait until those cheap plastic toilets start to overflow,” Dad says when the subject comes up. “Wait till the duct tape springs a leak some night when it’s 125 below. Wait till one whole wing blows out entirely and fifty or a hundred guests try to breathe the air. In five minutes we could have a big disaster on our hands, a whole lot of frozen bodies to ship back home, and how is that going to look for the whole industry?”
You notice Dad doesn’t spend a lot of time grieving over the potentially dead Earthies. He claims to love ’em, they’re his livelihood, but he doesn’t expect much of them except rudeness, impossible demands, lack of common sense, and about six concussions per week from refusing to wear their helmets indoors.
