Red Lightning

by John Varley

  We took an exit that had an animated arch over it, advertising the twenty or so theme parks in the Lake Buena Vista area. A few minutes later we were pulling up to a fanciful hotel that looked like a log cabin garnished with lollipops.

  “Here we are, kids,” Dad said. “This is where you get off.”

  I turned around and watched the brats tumble out along with their mother. Good riddance. I hoped the hotel would still be there when we returned. Then I turned back around and saw that Dad was looking right at me.

  “No fucking way!” I shouted.

  “Language, Ramon.”

  “My name is Ray, Dad, and there’s no fucking way I’m staying behind.”

  “Ray, we’ve discussed this and—”

  “Dad, I’m seventeen. Mom, you guys can’t do this to me.”

  “What about me?” Elizabeth wanted to know. “Are you dumping me, too?”

  “Ray, Elizabeth,” Mom said. “This is going to be dangerous. Dangerous, and very, very ugly. We have decided it wouldn’t be responsible to take you into this mess. You can stay here with Mrs. Redmond and her kids.”

  “Mom!” I was horrified to hear a note in my voice I’d tried to stop using when I was about twelve. Not satisfied with that, I went on with another childish argument. “This isn’t fair. If you were going to strand us here, why the hell did you drag us along in the first place? Why not hire a babysitter and leave us back home?”

  “Ray, you’re just going to have to accept this.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  Dak muttered something. I saw him grinning in the rearview mirror.

  “You say something, Dak?” Dad asked, dangerously.

  “I said, ‘Told ya.’ And I did.”

  “You stay out of this. You don’t have any kids.”

  “You’re right,” Dak said, not seeming to take offense. “But if I did, I’d hope they had the sort of balls Ray has.”

  “Dad,” I said, with no idea where I was going. Then I had it. “If you leave me here, you’d better tie me up. Because I’ll follow you.”

  “Oh? How?”

  “I’ll . . . I’ll get a taxi!”

  “And how will you pay for it?”

  “I’ve got money.” Not a lot. There was a trust fund for me that I would get when I turned eighteen, but my allowance was fairly generous, and I’d saved up a bit. Frankly, there’s not a lot of things I wanted to buy on Mars, after Dad bought my airboard.

  “How much cash?”

  That’s when it sank in. Cash? Cash? What would I need with cash? It’s practically obsolete back home. You pay for things with credit and a retina print. I had a stack of Martian redbacks back home in my closet. Why bring them?

  Because if you’re under eighteen a parent can shut down your savings account and/or line of credit in two seconds and not even have to get out of his chair. Isn’t modern banking wonderful?

  We glared each other down for a while. I knew the money business was a fight I couldn’t win, and he knew it, too.

  I’ll give him one thing. He didn’t look happy about it.

  “I’ll hitchhike,” I said.

  “No, you won’t,” Dak said. “Manny, this is—”

  “Stay out of this, Dak.”

  “No, man, I’m just saying. This is Earth, remember, and it’s scary times. There’s looters and rednecks and all kinds of nuts out to settle scores. Just plain maniacs. Ray, this ain’t going to be no trip to no ski resort.”

  “He won’t have to hitchhike,” Elizabeth said. “He can go with me.”

  “You’re not going anywhere, Elizabeth,” Mom said, sharply.

  My sister and I got along pretty well. I’d gone through a hell-raising stage, getting in small trouble here and there, rebellious, defiant, but mostly I was good, I didn’t do illegal things, and if I wanted to do something Mom and Dad wouldn’t have approved of, I just did it and made sure they didn’t find out.

  Not Elizabeth. As far back as I could remember she had been the perfect daughter. About the worst thing I ever saw her do was cover for me when I’d done something bad, and never a word of reproach from her except to make me promise never to do it again. Usually, I didn’t. We were close, until we got into our teens, when boys and girls turn to different interests.

  Elizabeth was the dream child. Beautiful, smart, obedient, helpful, cheerful, courageous. I couldn’t count the number of times I’d seen her stand up for younger or weaker kids against bullies. Sometimes that child was me, before I got my growth. I can’t think of any major faults she has, unless it’s to resist everyone’s attempts to call her Liz or Liza or Beth or Betty.

  In short, if a neutered house cat had suddenly growled like a Bengal tiger I could hardly have been more surprised. I looked back over my shoulder and saw something I’d hardly ever seen before. My big sister was angry.

  You wouldn’t have known it unless you knew her as well as I did. Her face wasn’t twisted up, she wasn’t glaring at anyone, just looking at Mom calmly, but with absolutely no give to her. It was the way she looked when she saw an injustice, and the look meant, to anybody with any sense, that they’d better retreat to the bunkers because a world of hurt was about to descend on them.

  “Elizabeth, be reasonable,” Mom said.

  “I am being reasonable, Mother.” Not Mom. I smiled. This was the equivalent of Elizabeth calling me Ramon, which she never did, except when I’d screwed up big-time.

  “This is not open to discussion,” Mom said.

  “If that’s the way you want it,” Elizabeth said, calmly. She opened the car door and got out. “Are you coming, Ray?”

  I piled out after her, so Dad got out, and then Mom. I could see Dad working to control his anger, and I could see the wheels turning in Mom’s head, figuring the angles, what arguments to use, which angles to try. She was looking increasingly frustrated. She had forgotten one crucial fact, probably because she’d never really had to face it before.

  Elizabeth was happy to point out the flaw in her reasoning.

  “It’s really very simple, Mother. I am nineteen. You don’t control my money anymore. You should either have left us at home—in which case I would have bought tickets on the next ship out—or discussed this on the way here. I’m on Earth now. I intend to rent or buy a vehicle of some sort, and hire a driver, and take off for Uncle Travis’s place as soon as you are gone. If you leave Ray here I’ll take him with me. Look for us in your rearview mirror. I don’t know how you can stop Ray from going. You can’t tie him up, you can’t arrest him. About the only option I can see is for you to give him such a guilt trip he’d probably end up hating you. Did I miss anything?”

  Anybody else, this speech would have a high raspberry factor. You know, a Bronx cheer, phooey on you. Elizabeth simply laid it out there as if it were the most reasonable thing in the world, I’m resorting to this more in sorrow than in anger. And you know what? I believed her.

  Apparently Mom did, too. She sighed.

  “Get back in the car, kids.”

  “Kelly, I don’t think . . .”

  “Manny, darling, if you have a better idea, let’s hear it. I think she’s got us backed into a corner.”

  He looked like he was about to get angry, then gave it up.

  “Look at it this way, Dad,” I said, taking a chance. “If Grandma had put her foot down when you decided to build Red Thunder, none of us would be here.”

  “Don’t push your luck, young man. That was different.”

  Sure. It’s always different, isn’t it?

  That’s when Evangeline spoke up.

  “I’m going, too.”

  WE ONLY WASTED about five minutes arguing about that one. Mr. Redmond tried, but his heart wasn’t in it. So we waved good-bye to Mrs. Redmond and the brats. There were some tears, but not from Evangeline. She didn’t have any more use for the brats than I did.

  Soon we were hurtling down the autoway again. Elizabeth was wedged between me and Evangeline in the very b
ack of the bus. I turned to Elizabeth.

  “Thanks for what you did,” I said.

  “No need. It wasn’t fair.”

  “I was . . . sort of surprised. Not you standing up for me, you standing up to Mom. You don’t do that a lot.”

  She thought about that for a while.

  “Elizabeth the compliant little mouse, you mean?” she asked.

  “You know I don’t think of you like that.”

  “A lot of people do. I don’t mind. Uncle Jubal told me a story a long time ago that you might consider the next time you find yourself about to get into an argument.” I saw Evangeline’s face perk up at that. To most people, Jubal Broussard was a semimythical figure, the most famous person in the world that nobody ever saw. The general impression people had was that he made Einstein seem about as bright as Spongebob Squarepants. Naturally, Evangeline was all ears. She didn’t know that Uncle Jubal is just a simple country boy, mostly.

  “He told me about this boy who grew up and never talked,” Elizabeth went on. “When he was two, his parents were just a little worried. They figured he’d talk when he was ready. By the time he was four they were going crazy. He didn’t speak a word. They took him to doctors, who couldn’t figure it out.

  “He got older, and never talked, and they eventually resigned themselves to it.

  “Then one day his mother was making breakfast, and she burned the toast. She was in a hurry, so she put the burnt toast on his plate beside the grits and scrambled eggs and catfish. The boy took one look at it, and he said”—and here Elizabeth dropped into a pretty good imitation of uncle Jubal’s deep-bayou fractured Cajun dialect that’s like no one else’s in the world—“ ‘I cain’t eat dis toas’, me! Dis toas’ is boint!’

  “Well, de boy mama, she jus’ ’bout lost it rat dere. She jump up and down and she shoutin’ hallelujah, she shoutin’ praise de lawd! Den she stop, and she look at her boy, her, and she axe him, ‘How come you never talk before?’

  “An’ he say, ‘Up to now, everything been okay.’”

  After we’d stopped laughing, I thought about it.

  “You’re saying, save your energy for the fights that matter?”

  “Ray, you waste a lot of time and energy bitching about things you can’t change. Or worrying about trivia. You say you hate living on Mars, but you’ve never done anything that will lead you away from it. You just coast a lot. You’re smart, but I’ve never heard you say anything about what you want to do with your life.”

  “Maybe I just haven’t shared it with you,” I said, stung by her words. But what stung the most was, she was right. “Anyway, you haven’t told me what you plan to do with your life, either.”

  “That’s because I haven’t come across it yet. But I know that when I do, I’ll be ready.” She can be maddening sometimes, because she can say things like that, and you just believe her.

  The traffic slowed, and slowed, and slowed again and then came to a complete stop. We didn’t move again for two hours.

  7

  “NOW YOU’RE SEEING the real Florida,” Dak said, as we inched forward along Autoway 4, along with hundreds of others. It turns out that one reason the traffic was flowing so well in Orlando was that a great many people were out of town.

  According to Dak, they were going in two directions. A lot of people were going east, like us, trying to get through the Red Line, which defined a zone that, in Florida, stretched as much as twenty miles inland. Basically, the part of the Eastern Seaboard that had been submerged by the wave was barricaded, off-limits to anyone but authorized personnel.

  “Lot of other folks are heading west,” Dak said, moving us forward twenty feet and stopping again. “Mostly young people. Rumor is, the press gangs are moving west, too. Next stop, Orlando.”

  I hadn’t been paying much attention to that part of the story. With my Martian passport, I was immune to the press gangs. Plus, I was probably too young, though there was another rumor that they were going to start drafting people as young as sixteen into the Florida National Guard.

  “The U.S. Army is stretched too damn thin,” Dak said. “All over the world, one war or another. We can’t just pull ’em out, or that’s what the President says. So the Guard has to take up the slack. Lots of folks would volunteer, I’m sure of it, but the fact is once they got you, even if you signed up to help the tsunami victims, you don’t get out till they say you get out, and they haven’t been sayin’ that much for years now. Army’s done turned into a career for a lot of folks didn’t have no intention of being no soldier.”

  Good information was hard to come by. It was amazing, when you thought about it. Sure, the power was out in the Red Zone, and would be for a long time yet, but there was what people were calling the Yellow Zone, and a lot of people lived there. Problem was, it was getting harder and harder to talk to them. Messages weren’t getting through.

  More rumors. The government had turned on its big, its really big computers, the ones it was rumored to have—see what I mean?—that could monitor every byte of the zillions and zillions of gigabytes that flowed through the cybernet every day, and pick and choose what got through and what didn’t.

  But why?

  “Cover their asses,” Dak said, confidently. “Manny, Kelly, it’s lots worse than anybody’s been admitting. I’ve been along the Yellow Zone, thinking about trying to get in, and . . . well, you’ll see when we get there.”

  “But they can’t cover it up forever,” Dad protested.

  “Of course not,” Dak agreed. “Shit, eventually folks gonna be able to get in and see it with their own eyes. But they let it out a little bit at a time, maybe they can salvage a little bit of the economy. Hope you folks got out of the dollar.”

  “Long time ago,” Mom agreed. “The trouble is, what do you put it into? In a worldwide collapse, no currency is likely to stay very stable. When the claims start coming in, I don’t know how many insurance companies will be able to stay afloat.”

  “They already failing,” Dak said.

  THE BARRICADE AT the edge of the Red Zone was manned by National Guard, not Homelanders, and most of them didn’t look any older than I was. They were dressed in jungle camouflage and heavy body armor and the military version of stereos, which were three times as bulky as the civilian version. They carried the usual arsenal of weapons and unidentified but probably lethal gizmos, and they held them at the ready, covering each other, as if they expected armed terrorists to leap from one of the family wagons at any second. Come to think of it, I doubted the terrorist part, but it was a sure bet most of these people were well armed.

  They were not happy campers. It was a day for Bermuda shorts and tank tops, not Kevlar and khaki. The soldiers were pissed off about the duty, and the people in the cars were frantic with worry about their loved ones in the Red Zone.

  They directed us to a parking spot alongside dozens of others. It looked like it would be some time until they got to us. We all got out of our cars and stretched our legs, just like everyone else was doing. I felt every foot per second of the brutal gravity.

  Some of these folks had been coming out here every day since the wave and getting the same runaround. Still far too dangerous to let the general public in. Show a press pass from an “accepted” media outlet, or papers from an authorized relief agency. Give us a verifiable phone number for someone living in the Yellow Zone that you intend to visit, and hope that he’s got power so he can take the call and okay you.

  Otherwise, turn around and get your butt back to Orlando.

  Which is what was happening to about 90 percent of the cars out there. I could hear heated arguments and see angry citizens shouting and making obscene gestures at the soldiers, who reacted either with weary boredom or some quick and startling violence. No shots were fired, but one guy got a rifle butt in the face and quite a few kicks while he was down. The officer in charge watched while his soldiers tossed the bleeding and unconscious guy into the backseat of his car. His wife burned an i
nch of rubber off her tires in her hurry to get out of there.

  “Florida, huh?” I told Dak, as we watched.

  “This is bad even for Florida,” Dak said, softly. “Tempers are fraying, my man. Listen, you hear shooting, you hop back in that bus, right? It’ll probably stop the lead most of these citizens carrying. Not those military guns, though.”

  “Then throw myself over the women and children, right?”

  “Heck, no, throw yourself over me, ’cause I’ll already be in there.” He grinned and patted my shoulder. “Don’t worry, it’ll be all right.”

  After about an hour a team of three soldiers approached our vehicle and asked us for our papers. While we were getting them all together one of the guardsmen came over and looked me up and down. He was a huge mix of muscle and fat, his face burned a bright pink and his eyes showing about as much intelligence and compassion as your average lizard.

  He nudged me with the barrel of his rifle. Pissed me off something terrible, but I know a little about choosing my fights, so I didn’t kill him.

  “How old you are, boy?” he wanted to know. Or at least I think that’s what he said. He had a very thick accent. His intention was clear though. If I’d been an American, I’d have been slapped into a uniform and handed a gun in about two seconds.

  “He’s a Martian citizen,” Dad said, holding out our four passports. Lizard boy grinned and poked at me with the rifle again.

  “Fuckin’ red boy, huh? My old man says the gummint be wastin’ all our money on that Mars shit. He say we oughta bring all y’all rich folks back down here where God-fearin’ folks live and put y’all to work.” He grinned, showing at least three teeth, none of which had any close neighbors.

  I thought about explaining that the gummint hadn’t spent much money on space since before I was born, except for orbiting weapons platforms. I considered explaining that the vast majority of the infrastructure on Mars was paid for and built by Earth corporations, that the whole space travel and space tourism industry provided thousands of high-tech jobs to Earthies and over a billion dollars in taxes to Earth governments every year.