Red Lightning

by John Varley

  I could be a historian. I’d already decided to take some courses in various areas of world history. Find out which place and period I was most interested in.

  I could be an English major. I know two English majors. One of them runs the local Shakespearean Society in his spare time, when he’s not mixing drinks. The other can recite page after page of Beowulf in Old English as he carries your bags to your room in the Red Thunder.

  Hard to see myself as any of those things. I knew what I really wanted. I wanted adventure. I wanted to do something like Mom and Dad did, something that people would remember. My one shot at adventure, so far, had been spent slogging through muck and seeing things I’d just as soon forget. A disaster is not an adventure, believe me.

  Ah, yes, the lazy, hazy days of summer. I decided to take a break from a day of not doing much in particular and take a ride up to Phobos and try to get out of my funk. Dammit, the days of adventure were over, and I missed them.

  And that’s how I missed the start when Earth invaded Mars.

  ONE MORE THING I like about Mars that you can’t get on Earth: We are allowed to use bubble drives on our personal vehicles.

  On Earth, you can’t power a car or truck or even a train with a Squeezer drive. For one thing, it would be impractical. It makes more sense to use the Squeezer bubbles at big central power stations and transmit the electricity. Plus, everybody’s paranoid about bubbles in private hands. Sure, it’s happened, no security system is perfect, but it stands to reason that the fewer bubbles people have to experiment on, the less chance anybody else will discover the secret of how to make them and then be able to hold the world hostage. Or blow it up.

  So the bubbles mostly go to power plants, where they can be guarded more easily. The only place where they’re used the way Jubal first used them, as direct power for a spaceship, is in space itself.

  But Mars is a spacegoing society. So are the settlements on the moon. Part of the covenant Travis and his lawyers worked out during the Orange Bowl Accord guaranteed that we could have our own bubble-manufacturing plant. Travis was thinking ahead, he didn’t want just one society—the Earth, or America, or whatever world government might be formed in the future—to have complete control of all the power in the world. So Jubal himself made just a few Squeezer machines. There are nine, total. Two on Mars, two on the moon, three immobile ones on the Falklands, and two mobile ones on the Earth for heavy excavation and such. Nine Squeezers for all of humanity.

  Some people say that’s at least four too many. That’s the Earthies.

  Some say that’s nine too many.

  Whatever they say, we have our two, and we’re not about to give them up. It sure makes life a lot easier. It also makes it more fun. Without personal Squeezer engines we couldn’t airboard.

  I SUITED UP and let the suit check itself and report to me that all was copacetic except I was about halfway down on air. I aired up without even thinking about it, though I wouldn’t be using much suit air. Rule One: You always start out with full tanks. You can never be sure just how long you’ll be out.

  I park my board out behind the hotel, under a hoist. I lowered it, unhooked from ground power, swung aboard, strapped in, switched from suit air to board air, and gave the handle a tiny twist. A puff of exhaust from the bubble raised a cloud of dust, and the board lifted three feet, then six. I shoved forward and was off into the sky, accelerating all the way. The ground dwindled under me. I felt good, maybe better than I had since returning from Earth.

  FLYING TO PHOBOS isn’t like driving to the corner grocery store, but it’s not all that daunting, really, not if you have the power. With the minibubble drive, I had power to spare. It’s not even like flying from, say, Los Angeles to San Francisco in a small plane. On Earth, unless the weather is bad, you can see your route, and your destination doesn’t move. Going to Phobos, you don’t aim at where it is, you aim at where it will be, and when you start off you can barely see it.

  Phobos is the only moon in the solar system that rises in the west and sets in the east. That’s because it’s in close, and Mars revolves relatively slowly. It takes Phobos just seven and a half hours to complete one orbit, so it rises twice every day. It’s only a little more than four thousand miles above the surface, just a little more than one Mars diameter. Orbital speed, just under five thousand miles per hour.

  That probably sounds fast, if you’re an Earthie. Nobody on Earth ever drives anything that fast except spaceship drivers and military pilots, and not many of those. I’ve been doing it since I was fifteen.

  There’s a fast way up and a slow way. Nobody I knows takes the slow way. How you do that, you build up your speed as soon as you’re safely out of the atmosphere, then you cut your engine and coast until you reach where Phobos is with just enough energy to tangent the orbit, then you speed up some more or gravity will pull you back down. That’s how the old chemical rockets used to do it, because it’s the most efficient.

  I didn’t need to worry about that. The way I did it was to blast to the halfway point, then turn around and blast until I was motionless relative to Phobos. Total travel time was about an hour. To put it another way, less time than it would take you to drive from one side of Los Angeles to the other.

  There’s a fairly loose launch window to do this, because of the power available to us, but there was no point in starting out when Phobos was on the other side of the planet and trying to catch up with it. So twice a day, a lot of people take off for Phobos within about twenty minutes of each other. I saw half a dozen others rising on their boards, one close enough to wave to, which I did. He or she waved back.

  I was quickly out of the atmosphere. I called up a navigation window on my faceplate, saw the big curve of Mars moving slowly away from me, the little dot of Phobos chugging along behind me, and the tiny speck that was me right in the center, with several suggested trajectories and one yellow radar alert that meant one of the boarders would get within a mile of me in about ten minutes. No biggie; I adjusted my course a little and the other boarder went green. I leaned against the backrest under an easy one-sixth gee acceleration, set the navigator to beep me ten seconds from turnaround, and ticked up some music to travel by. Selected a nice oldie, “Daytripper,” by the Beatles, a group Grandma favored and had turned me on to.

  Life was good again.

  PHOBOS LOOKS LIKE a big baking potato. On one side is a really huge crater, half as big as the rock itself, like somebody had scooped it out to put in the sour cream and chives. That crater is called Stickney. I rendezvoused pretty much in the dead center of Stickney and tied my board down.

  I entered the air lock with half a dozen other arrivals and we all watched the air gauge, then popped our helmets and took off more or less as a group, though I didn’t know any of them, and we pulled our way down a series of corridors with the hand ropes anchored into the walls, fighting off as usual the occasional baffled Earthie going in the wrong direction despite the huge arrows painted prominently on every wall.

  Phobos is an irregular carbonaceous chondrite with a long axis of about seventeen miles. It’s not much, but it has to do us for a moon, as our other one, Deimos, is even smaller and farther away.

  Building big zero-gee habitats in Earth orbit was a lot cheaper with the Squeezer drive than it ever had been before, but still not cheap. Lift costs were of course way down, but space is a harsh environment, and you can’t build your space stations out of tinfoil and bubble gum. Also, it’s dangerous, particularly heavy construction. People die regularly building stuff like that in free fall.

  But with the Squeezer, mining is easy. They bored into the middle of the big rock and then squeezed out a hollow about a mile in diameter. They sprayed the inside with absorbent foam and put in an air system. Phobos became a necessary side trip on your trip to Mars. Buses left every five minutes at the appropriate launch windows. Inside were big attractions and small businesses, carny-type things but adapted to free fall. (Actually, ELG, Extremely Low Ge
e, since Phobos does have gravity, just not enough to matter, but we use the terms interchangeably.) You could try low-gee drinks, take classes in gymnastics and dancing, watch low-gee shows, and, of course, the thing everybody wants to try: weightless sex. You can rent rooms by the hour, and if you didn’t bring a companion, one could be found either at the singles bars or commercially. Nobody ever got around to outlawing prostitution on Mars, and as long as you don’t get too aggressive and get yourself arrested for disturbing the peace—the basic no-no in Martian society—you can sell what you please.

  Everybody who didn’t blow lunch in five minutes loved it.

  Martians hated it. It was full of Earthies. No Martian would go there unless he had a job there.

  So we made another hole, the same size, and made it off-limits to anyone who wasn’t a Martian. Most Earthies didn’t even know it was there. We didn’t really have a formal name for the place, though some called it the Hideaway. An Earthie would have to get pretty lost to even stumble over the entrance, as it is behind a series of doors marked EMPLOYEES ONLY. One of the perks of being a native.

  Very few adults came to the Hideaway, so most of the people you saw were teenagers. This was the place we used instead of a mall or a strip or drag to cruise around in and show off our cars and girlfriends and have a beer and just generally hang around to bullshit and brag and meet chicks and think of ways to piss off adults and now and then get into a fistfight. It was fairly tame, actually. There was more of the old malt shop to it than the old roadhouse. It was more YM/WCA than street rumble. But it was our ’hood, and we liked it.

  I said hi to various friends but didn’t linger with anyone. Most of them were out of their suits, and I wanted to be, too.

  The thing about pressure suits, especially the ones that you can use both on Mars and in vacuum, is that they have to be ready to keep you warm or cool you off, and that’s a lot to ask of a machine you can wear.

  When you’re out on the surface, cold is the problem, even at midday during the real summer. At night, forget about it. Nobody goes out at night if they can help it. In vacuum it’s a different story. They talk about the cold of outer space, but space is really no temperature at all. But if you’re in the sunshine—and that’s most of the time—even out at Mars’ orbit, you tend to overheat. So the suit has to protect you from that heat and at the same time dump the heat your body is producing.

  Like I said, it’s a lot to ask.

  When Mom and Dad flew Red Thunder to Mars, the secondhand Russian space suits they bought cost them as much as the ship itself; there was no way they could have built a useful suit themselves. Suits are cheaper these days because they are made by the thousands, but they still set you back more than a small car would on Earth. Lots of Martians couldn’t afford one at all on their wages, so it’s part of the contract when they come here. Use of a suit is a basic civil right.

  The main thing you should know about a suit is this: They are almost always a little too cool or way too hot. Not broiling-in-the-desert hot, but warmer than you’d like. You fiddle with the thermostat all you like, you never get it quite right. And they’re better on the surface than in space. An hour in one on the way to Phobos and you’ll be sweaty when you arrive.

  So I headed for the shower. Luckily, I had my own.

  WHEN YOU’RE TUNNELING with a Squeezer, you can hollow out a space in any shape you want . . . so long as it’s a perfect sphere.

  At each of the cardinal points of the compass, and at the north and south poles of the Big Bubble, tunnels had been made that led to much smaller hollows, a few hundred yards in diameter. I didn’t really know how big they were, since by the time I started coming all six of them were already at least half-full, you couldn’t see the rock walls anymore.

  What they were full of was Martian trailers. That’s what we called them, anyway, though they usually only made one journey, from the prefab plant on the surface up to the Big Bubble. They were actually modular housing, made in four different standard sizes. They were shaped like loaves of bread, the most common size being eight-by-eight-by-fifteen. They were made of plastic, with insulation sandwiched between two layers, for noise rather than temperature, as they were meant only for use in an environment like the Bubble, and were not meant to provide shelter but privacy. Each was prewired for electric and web, had plumbing and sewage, air circulation and heating, and its own pumps. After that, you were on your own. You could put the door anywhere you wanted, in any of the six walls. You could get a model with a shower and a toilet, and you could have a low-gee kitchenette.

  That’s what I had, a deluxe Model-B with all the trimmings. Mine was in the North Quadrant. Elizabeth had one just like it in the East Q. We northerners like to think we were a bit above those equatorial people . . . but they thought the same of us.

  I’m not saying the North or any other Q was where the rich kids went, or anything like that. It was more of a neighborhood thing, almost but not quite like turf. We didn’t fight any battles over it.

  The trailers came with attachment points that you could hook onto other trailers, make a real multiroom house if you wanted to, but hardly anybody did that. It was seen as ostentatious. The Model-A was smaller, and the bigger units were usually shared, common space for dancing and whatever. No, we used the attachments to hook onto other people’s units, and made irregular 3-D honeycomb arrangements that would have given a zero-gee bee a psychosis. There was no rhyme or reason to it, except that you knew the units closest to the walls were the oldest residents.

  What you did was, you ordered one, it was delivered on a freighter a few days later, and you and a friend wrestled it through the corridors and into the Q you wanted to live in. Then you bolted it to somebody else’s unit, hooked up, powered up, and you had a cozy little nest. No formalities at all, except you couldn’t block access.

  If you ever wander into one of the Qs, don’t look for the color-coded arrows you’ll see everywhere else on Phobos. What you’ll see instead are graffiti-covered surfaces in every color of the rainbow, complicated enough to dazzle your eye even if you’re solidly planted on two feet in one gee. They range from murals showing varying degrees of talent to web marks and web numbers and obscene poetry and icons and here and there a slapped-on notice:

  ⇑THIS WAY TO THE SWAMP

  ABANDON HERE, ALL YE WHO HOPE!!!!!! CINDY’S BAT MITZVAH, 3 PM SAT. !!!!!

  Most of these things were hand-lettered and held on with adhesive tape. Strictly low-rent, and that’s the way we liked it.

  To tell you the absolute truth, I’d gotten lost myself more than once in the maze. Never on my way to my own place, but trying to find somebody else’s. And that was okay, too. It’s not like it was that big a place, just confusing.

  I made it to my own cubicle without incident, stripped off my suit, and then my clothes, and shoved off a wall and toward the shower.

  It looks just like an ordinary shower from the outside. A frosted plastic door that seals tight around the edges, like a refrigerator, lined with blue tile on the inside. That’s where it all changes. You have to get the water heated to the right temperature before you turn on the water dispenser because you don’t want a hot globule of water clinging to you. It can burn. You set a temperature on a digital gizmo, and in about a minute water starts to bulge out of openings at the narrow ends of the stall, what you might call the top and the bottom. You put on a pair of clear goggles because you don’t want soapy water drifting into your eyes. Then you grab handfuls of water and splash them against your body to get wet, then add soap.

  All this time there is a blower in operation to keep things moving, which is why I didn’t hear the trailer door open or anything else until the shower stall door opened and I looked over to see a pair of naked feet right in front of my face. The toenails were painted a bright red, and they were attached to slender legs, which were attached to . . . the rest of Evangeline. Down at the bottom was her head, and all she was wearing was her big upside-down smile and
a tiny pair of shower goggles.

  “Oops!” she said, and twisted in the air, pulling herself inside and into my arms. She was already slick with suit sweat, and soon she was even wetter as we drifted among the water globules.

  We didn’t get much washing done for quite a while after that.

  Ah, yes. Life was good.

  12

  THE THING TO keep in mind about low-gee sex is to go slow. It takes a little practice and self-control, but it pays off in two ways: You don’t get bumps and bruises or—it’s been known to happen—broken bones or concussions.

  And low-gee sex is the best sex there is.

  Your biggest problem in doing anything in free fall is that your muscles were developed to hold you upright against a one-gee gravity field. Your legs in particular are more of a liability than an asset. They will deliver a hundred times more energy than you really need to get the job done, and do it when you least expect it. The muscles of the ankles are usually all you need to move around.

  Don’t use those thigh muscles at all!

  So the basic, or “missionary” position in free fall is for the girl to wrap her legs around the guy and lock her feet together, and for the guy to hold his legs out straight and try not to let his curling and uncurling toes shove the two of you all over the place. Using a tether or a net is considered to be a sissy move.

  That’s how we started out, but Evangeline is adventurous, and soon we were deeply into positions emphatically not for the beginner. The shower stall was just high enough for one of my favorites, where I put my feet on the “floor” and she puts her feet on the “ceiling,” pretty much the position she was in when she first opened the shower door and . . . well, you get the picture.