Red Lightning

by John Varley

  “I’m going to check it out,” Travis said.

  “I’ll go with you,” I said, immediately. Travis looked at me, then at Dad. Dad hesitated a moment, then nodded.

  “Me, too,” he said.

  So we hurried down the stairs, each of us armed and with a canteen strapped to our belts, and I noticed it was easier than it had been the day before. Even Dad was moving a little better.

  The delivery had landed about twenty yards from what had been Atlantic Avenue, on a stack of debris. There were three men there already, wrestling it down toward the meandering north-south path that had been cleared in the wreckage, and that made travel possible at all.

  One of the guys took out a huge hunting knife when he saw us, or maybe he took it out and then saw us. I saw Travis’s hand go toward his gun. The three guys eyed us suspiciously. Neighborliness was pretty much dead in that part of Florida, and those guys knew that three guns trumped one knife.

  “We’ll share,” the guy said.

  Travis smiled at them. “Take it easy. We don’t want it, we just want to see what’s going on. We’ll even give you a hand.”

  They looked dubious, but then the guy bent over and started cutting the parachute shrouds with the knife. Travis clambered up and helped.

  The capsule was two plastic clamshells making a cylinder about ten feet long and four feet in diameter. It was heavy. Travis tossed the shroud ends to me and Dad, and we pulled as the others pushed, and it finally rolled down to level ground. Everyone gathered around it.

  It was embossed with the symbol for the International Red Cross. We found instructions for opening it in French, Spanish, Chinese, and about five other languages until we rolled it slightly and found the instructions in English. It opened fairly easily. What wasn’t so easy was figuring out what was inside. Travis spoke for us all.

  “What the fuck?”

  The biggest items in there were nested panels of blue plastic, about three by seven feet. There were other odd-shaped pieces of plastic, too, some white and some blue. Then there were some gallon bottles of a very bright blue liquid. We pulled some of this stuff out, and it finally began to make sense.

  “Port-a-potties,” one of the other men said. “We got a delivery of about half a dozen do-it-yourself crappers.”

  Nobody said anything about that for a moment. The disappointment was pretty severe. Then one of the men started to laugh, and there was just nothing to do but join him.

  “What’s in that cardboard box over there?” one of them asked. Another pulled it out and opened it. There were rolls of white paper in it.

  “Well, boys, we got about a hundred rolls of asswipes, too.”

  We laughed even harder, so hard it hurt.

  After that, we were all buddies. They were Wright, who was an accountant, Richard, who did something in the city government—“And will again, if I can find any city government”—and Lou, who was a fisherman who had come around in his boat to help out and search for his sister, ran into something big and hard as he tried to steer into the river, and almost drowned when his boat went down.

  We used Travis’s pocket radio—badly in need of recharging—to tell the girls back home of our find, and that we were going to walk down the beach a bit and see if anything more useful than toilets had been air-dropped.

  The next capsule was already surrounded by a dozen people. We got it down, got it open, and were staring at a whole lot of heavy-duty ten-pound canvas sacks of dry rice.

  A couple of people just seemed to snap. There was a scramble, and the rest of them, not wanting to miss out, started grabbing for the bags, too. Without thinking about it, I aimed my gun in the air and fired it. Everyone froze, and Dad looked startled. I kept my gun pointing at the sky and my finger on the trigger.

  “Let’s try to pretend we’re not animals, okay?” I said. “There’s enough here for everybody. Why don’t we form a line or something? We’ll share it out.”

  There was some muttering, but nobody pulled a gun. I thought it was over, then some guy had to speak up.

  “I know who you are. You’re with that bunch on top of the Blast-Off. The one with that trigger-happy bitch in charge. Why should you get—”

  He didn’t finish his sentence, as there was another gunshot and a hole appeared in the broken asphalt a few inches from his foot.

  “You go to the end of the line, asshole,” Travis said. He held his pistol negligently at his side, but that’s where it had been before he fired, too. “That bitch has been feeding starving people. Who have you been feeding?”

  The guy didn’t have anything to say to that. I looked at him and wondered what he had been before. A troublemaker? Or just a hungry, desperate man looking for someone to blame? Whatever, I figured him for a whiner. Nobody else had complained.

  “We’re not taking anything,” Travis went on. “But we’re not going to put up with any shit, either. So let’s divvy it up, okay?”

  Nobody had any problem with that. We all gathered around and divided it equally. In fact, when more people arrived everyone agreed that each person would get one sack of rice until it was all gone.

  “Be sure to boil your water,” Travis said to everybody who came by. “And sterilize your cooking pots.” When we got to the bottom of the capsule we found small bottles of water purifier with instructions in Spanish. Somebody translated the words, which were simple enough, and we passed them on to new arrivals until it was all gone.

  Some of the new people were carrying sacks with silvery MREs, military field rations, that they said had been in the next capsule down the beach. Some swapping was done, rumors were exchanged, and in general people seemed a little more optimistic than they had been.

  None of the rumors amounted to much. One I remembered was that the President had been assassinated, and a state of martial law had been declared in Florida and Georgia and maybe the Carolinas.

  Who knows?

  NOTHING MUCH HAPPENED the next day. Just another typical day in Hell.

  ON THE NEXT day, more planes. More capsules dropped. Then a huge hovercraft shoved itself ashore no more than a quarter mile from us.

  I wanted to go, but sexual equality trumped me. Mom and Elizabeth went with Travis and Dak, and there wasn’t anything I could do about it.

  I watched from the roof. A ramp came down and some heavy military vehicles rolled ashore, along with about a hundred people in some sort of military uniforms. I later learned they were part of something called the Asian Compassion Corps, and they’d been waiting offshore for five days while sovereignty issues were ironed out. America, which has had troops posted in other countries for almost a century, and which was currently involved in fighting either five or six wars against terrorism, depending on who was counting, was not used to accepting foreign troops on its own soil. America, which had always been generous with aid to other countries experiencing a natural disaster or the aftermath of war, had little experience in accepting such aid. There were no bureaucratic mechanisms for it. Lots of people in Congress, which had been reduced to a sort of traveling road show meeting in hotel convention centers around the country on a day-by-day basis, were opposed to the whole idea. They even had a name for themselves: the Go-It-Aloners. The GIAs had even blocked the arrival of the units of the ACC for twenty-four hours due to a dispute about what they were going to call themselves. I don’t even want to think about how many injured survivors died in that time. Originally they were going to be the Asian Aid Force. The GIAs didn’t like that word “force.” This was after all the bullshit about what kind of weapons the AAF, later the ACC, could carry. When they arrived at Daytona, each soldier was carrying only a rifle.

  These troops were from India, but there were others from Indonesia, Vietnam, China, and most of the smaller countries in the area. In fact, most of the countries in the world that could afford to give any kind of aid at all were doing as much as they could. The British and French were dealing with what was left of the Bahamas, and with the Caribbean i
slands.

  The Indian soldiers of the ACC prepared a beachhead and started unloading supplies from an offshore cargo ship crammed to the scuppers, or whatever you cram a ship to, with the stuff the horrified people of India had scrounged up to give to starving, hurting American children. By that evening many of the isolated residents of what had been Daytona Beach’s exclusive beach communities were gathered around a roaring fire wearing brightly colored saris and baggy pants, eating fresh-baked chapatis, and saying “Please pass the curry.”

  And they were clean. One of the first things off the boat was a desalinization plant of the sort India had deployed to seaside villages all over the subcontinent. In a jiffy, or two jiffies at the most, a simple canvas structure had been erected and there were long lines of people munching fiery Gujarati burritos filled with meat they weren’t sure they could identify and didn’t want to. I was in that line, and was given a tiny bar of soap wrapped in paper that had TAJ MAHAL HOTEL, MUMBAI printed in gold lettering.

  A polite officer in a red turban showed up at the Blast-Off with a truck and five smiling men dispensing chocolate candy to all comers, and carrying what proved to be a cell phone transmitter, which they wanted to set up on our roof. Grandma welcomed them in, and we all watched as they set it up. Almost exactly at midnight one of them gave a thumbs-up, and I put on my stereo, and was connected again.

  SO WE STARTED to learn stuff.

  Gosh, where do I begin?

  First, the President hadn’t been assassinated. Not for sure, anyway. If he had, it had happened someplace where there were no cameras to catch the act, and so it didn’t count. The best I could determine was that nobody knew where he was, for security reasons, and something that looked very much like him was delivering daily broadcast speeches that were compassionate, defiant, determined, optimistic, worried, reassuring, comforting, and angry, sometimes all at the same time.

  Most people seemed to believe that he was alive, but the web being the web, rumors abounded. We had long passed the point where you could rely on anything that was shown on video. It was child’s play to morph a face onto a cyberframe and have it do and say anything you damn well wanted it to say. The software came built into your stereo. Until he appeared in public before a large crowd, in the open, all bets were off, and it didn’t seem like he was going to do that anytime soon. A tour of the stricken areas had been planned, announced, and canceled at least five times since the disaster, adding to the impression that the government was running around and around in circles without the faintest idea of how to handle a crisis of this magnitude.

  National Guard troops from the West Coast had been pulled back from the disaster area and redeployed to contain an uprising in Idaho, where various groups of crazies from white supremacists to millennialists to libertarians had united and decided the time was ripe to overthrow the federal government. Troops were said to be on the verge of retaking Boise.

  Martial law had indeed been declared in Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. Also in Virginia, Maryland, the District of Columbia, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts. The offices of governor in those states had been suspended for the duration, and the governors themselves appointed as Federal Disaster Relief Coordinators for their states, except in Georgia, where the governor had refused and had been arrested, whereabouts unknown. A gun battle had erupted on the floor of the Georgia State Senate in Atlanta, killing three Democrats and one Republican and one page, age fifteen. All police agencies in the affected states had been nationalized.

  Some of this just seemed to be formalizing a situation that looked as if it had already existed when we made our way into the Red Zone. To me, military was military, no matter what uniforms they wore, whether they were soldiers or cops, but the American people were deeply disturbed by all this, both the left and the right.

  Me, I’m a Martian, I don’t know much about government. Maybe we should get ourselves one someday. Mom says so, but from seeing how well they work on Earth I’m dubious.

  Then there were the Rapturists.

  In various places all over America, but more in the South, huge numbers of people had gathered in churches and stadiums and even in open fields to wait for the Rapture. I googled it and . . . well, frankly, it was almost impossible to believe that people bought into it, but apparently millions did. They thought this was the time of the Biblical Apocalypse. They were waiting for the forces of Satan—an actual army, I gathered, with tanks and airplanes and probably atomic bombs—to attack America. Then they expected Jesus to appear and win the battle, and for everyone to be bodily taken up into Heaven.

  Most of those millions of Rapturists thought it was pointless to help out the victims of the wave. Jesus would be here soon, and he would take care of them. At the same time, these were the very people who were most opposed to accepting any international help. They were worried that the forces of Satan would disguise themselves in these foreign armies. That, or the armies themselves were the forces of Satan. It didn’t help that most of the countries trying to help out weren’t Christian.

  I didn’t pay much attention to the economic news, but Mom did, and summed it up for us. Not frequently; once the stereos came back on she spent many, many hours managing our accounts and assets. But she’d give us reports now and then, and mostly she was smiling.

  Bottom line: We weren’t broke. We had taken a hit, but almost everyone had, and some were way, way worse off than we were.

  “Short of the end of civilization, the end of all economic activity,” she told us, “there is nothing that can happen that doesn’t benefit someone in the pocketbook.”

  I asked her who would benefit from something as horrible as this, and she pointed out something so obvious I felt stupid for not thinking of it.

  “The people who make modular housing. So I’m putting a lot of our money into the Martel Corporation.”

  I think I may have actually gasped. I could hardly have been more surprised if she had said she planned to sell Elizabeth into white slavery so she could buy a new dress. She hates the Martels that much.

  “I know. But there’s something you may not know about them. They’ve been at work on cheap, prefab structures like the rooms in those awful hotels back home. They can make a cheaper model that doesn’t have to stand up to Mars low pressure and temperature and be turning them out by the thousands almost overnight. Better than your standard Red Cross tent, and hook several of them together and you have a house.

  “So, the company comes off looking good at both ends of this crisis. Short-term with those damn Martel rooms, long-term with housing that’s cheap and goes up quickly and is actually nice to live in.

  “Plus, if they’re busy putting the things up down here, maybe they won’t have a lot of time to plant more of them back home.”

  Mom’s mind works in funny ways, but sometimes you just have to admire how she could manage to get three things done at once.

  NOT THAT MOM was having an easy time of it. The New York stock exchanges were shut down, not because they couldn’t open up—their data was stored multiple places, so what had happened to Wall Street the place didn’t have to have affected what happened to Wall Street the institution—but because everybody was afraid to allow trading to begin again. Too many of the stocks traded there had gone belly-up, and a huge number of others were in a sort of financial limbo. Nobody knew what their shares were worth, but everybody thought a lot of them were probably more useful for starting fires than selling for cash money.

  Some of the other big financial markets had suspended trading, too, but a few were open, and trading was brisk, according to Mom. She was spending a lot of her time watching quotes from Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur, and St. Petersburg. Futures, bonds, shares, funds, all sorts of things we hadn’t covered much in economics class, or that I hadn’t paid much attention to, or that I flat out didn’t understand.

  I saw on my own stereo that gold was at an all-time high, hard to even buy at all, and ex
pected to go higher.

  “Do we have any gold, Mom?” I asked her.

  “Yes, honey, we have some gold. I bought as much as we could before we even left Mars.”

  “That’s good, then.”

  “Yes, dear, that’s good.” I felt like a puppy who had learned sit up but wasn’t quite ready for roll over, so I didn’t ask her about any more details.

  One of the many things nobody knew for sure was just how much the damages would add up to and how much of it was insured. I read estimates as low as 5 trillion euros, ranging up to 40 trillion. This was way bigger than the entire gross economic product of the EU.

  None of which mattered much to me. I’m sorry, I just didn’t have it in me to worry much about the state of the economy of another planet. My planet had one industry, and that was tourism, and short of total economic collapse tourism will always do okay. Somebody, somewhere, will have extra money to spend. Mom agreed with me. She didn’t expect a lot of softness in the tourism business.

  Not on Mars, anyway, though Florida was sure going to suffer for a while.

  I hope I don’t sound cold. I hurt a lot, seeing people who had lost all their worldly possessions. And I felt sympathy for those who lived in other places and had lost their money, some of them all their money. But there’s only one way to deal with that. You see it time after time in news coverage after a tornado has swept through, or an earthquake. They interview the survivors, and they take comfort that at least they’re alive. That’s what you had to do. Weep for your dead, recover what you can, take a deep breath, and move on. You draw closer to your family and your friends, and you do what you need to do. I didn’t know that before, I’d never faced adversity—wasn’t facing it yet—but I felt I had a better understanding of it. None of the people at the Blast-Off were despairing, nobody had given up.