by John Varley
We worked our way through the free fall edition of the Kama Sutra, reached orgasm without injury, and then started washing each other. That’s almost as much fun as sex. You can gather small globes of water into big globes and then mash them into little globes again, against her body. Surface tension helps it stick, and adding soap makes it slick, and it’s just lots more fun than a regular shower. I washed her hair and she washed mine, then we turned the blowers on high to suck out the floating water. That gets chilly pretty quick, so we floated out and dried each other off with big fluffy warm towels.
By then my rendezvous probe was ready for another docking maneuver, and she guided me into her own fleshy capture latches, which were amazingly strong and versatile, and we did it all over again. Practice makes perfect.
After a long time, we fell asleep in each other’s arms.
EVANGELINE AND I had become an item on the ship on the way back from Earth. It took me a while to make my move on her, and when I did she was eager and willing. It was a few weeks later before I realized, with a laughing hint from Elizabeth, that she had been setting me up for it for a long time, since back on Earth. Women, huh?
I wouldn’t say we were inseparable. We attended different schools, and she was a year behind me, but pretty soon we were spending a lot of time together. About every other night she spent the night in my room. Mom, the progressive, was fine with it. Dad was uncomfortable, but he liked her, and soon relaxed. Most Martians are fairly easy about things like that, anyway, except the Muslim kids and the hard-core Christians.
Was I in love with her? Honest truth, I wasn’t sure. I liked her a lot, I liked being around her, liked making love with her. She was smart, gorgeous, we agreed on most things and could argue reasonably when we didn’t agree. But from time to time she would make some innocent little statement that indicated she was thinking long-range. I was nervous about that. I don’t apologize for it. I agree with both Mom and Dad that marriage is something you need to think about a long time, and it’s best if you’re closer to thirty than twenty. They had been younger, but statistics showed they were part of the lucky minority, still being together as long as they had been.
I’m not sure Evangeline agreed about that.
When I woke up that day I looked over at her, floating a few feet away from me. She was wearing her stereo now, no telling what she was reading, but it was probably something medical, connected to a summer course. She wanted to be a doctor, she said, and the best way to do that was to ignore the school year and keep at it year-round, because the competition is intense.
Evangeline is more comfortable in free fall than anyone I know. I’m one of the 90 percent who prefers a local vertical. That is, all my furnishings in the trailer are oriented the same way. There is one wall I think of as the “floor,” and there are no posters or cupboards on it. The artwork I do have is all oriented the same way, with a top and a bottom.
She is one of the 10 percent who don’t give a shit. If she could afford a trailer of her own—which she can’t—it would be totally floor-free. She’d use all six walls as walls, and tape up her posters any old way. She is able to read upside down as well as right-side up, it makes absolutely no difference to her. Pictures, too. You handed her a photograph upside down, it would never occur to her to turn it around.
She’s right and me and the 90 percent are wrong, of course, I know that. It’s embarrassing, in a way, it sounds like an Earthie thing to do, but I’m more comfortable when there is a visual up and down to refer to. This phenomenon has been known since the earliest days of space, in Skylab and Mir and primitive places like that. Most astronauts preferred a local vertical, but a few didn’t care.
It must be a brain thing. Something in the wiring, maybe. I can’t interpret a face very well if it’s upside down to me. Evangeline is often inverted when a group of people gather in Phobos, and doesn’t turn around unless someone asks her to.
It may be a bit physical, too. Evangeline has long toes, and can use them almost like a second pair of hands. She is also incredibly limber. She’s always up on the latest twists in free-fall dancing, and has invented more than a few moves herself. If she can’t hack it in medicine, she might make a living as a contortionist in a carnival. The Cirque du Soleil company in the other Phobos bubble would be happy to have her.
I was lazily admiring the long, bare length of her when the doorbell rang. Evangeline twisted, touched a wall with one toe without even looking—and that’s another thing, she always seems to know exactly where she is, to the inch, even if she’s been drifting for an hour with her eyes closed—and headed straight as an arrow for the door button. One foot on the jamb, one hand on the handle, she pulled it open. There was a guy in an orange-and-purple uniform out there. He took her state of undress in stride, but with no lack of appreciation.
“FedEx,” he said. “Somebody sign for a package?”
She signed his register with her left hand—she’s ambidextrous, too, maybe that accounts for some of it—upside down, and it printed out a receipt card. He handed it to her and turned to go.
“Wait. That’s it?”
“Too big a package, lady,” he said. “My assistant is Earthside, in Africa, and I’m not going to wrestle it into this mess alone. You’ll have to pick it up yourself in the other bubble.”
“Well, you don’t get a tip for delivering a receipt,” she said.
“I’ll live without it. Good day to you.”
If anybody could slam a door in free fall it would be Evangeline, but that was beyond even her talents. She eased it closed, looked at me—at about a forty-five-degree angle—and shrugged. I was still appreciating the shrug, which is a very different operation in a naked girl than it is in a boy, when I came completely awake and alert.
“Oh, shit,” I said. “Where’s my stereo?” She toed off and came up with it in the pile of clothes and suits in one corner. In the microgravity on Phobos, everything will drift into the same corner every time. She tossed the stereo, perfectly, of course, right at my hand. I put it on and checked the time, then ticked up my appointment book—not a thick document, nothing like Mom’s—and saw what I’d expected.
“I’ve got a lunch date with a counselor in two hours,” I said.
“Go for it.”
“You want a ride?”
Her face lit up, and she started tossing clothes at me. She was pressuring me to teach her to board, and I guess one of these days I would, though I didn’t relish riding the sissy bar.
We dressed and suited up and were out the door in five minutes. I followed her through the maze, into the Big Bubble, and out to the board park. We strapped in and I eased up very slowly from the parking area, and when my suit told me I was out of the No Turbulence zone I twisted hard on the handle and turned left. Below me and to the sides, the attitude jets got me aimed in the right direction, and the displays in my helmet showed I was a little late for optimal descent.
“How much can you take?” I asked Evangeline.
“At least as much as you can, big guy. Let ’er rip.”
“Okay. Hang on to your helmet.”
I eased up to half a gee deceleration, then a gee, then a gee and a half.
“Whee!” Evangeline hollered.
Phobos was dwindling. We were going far too slow to stay in any kind of orbit around Mars, but it would take a while for us to fall all that way, and it would leave us a few hundred miles from home when we got there. So I inverted us until Mars was directly over our heads and accelerated again. Up to two gees for a little while, until the external pressure gauge began to twitch just a little.
“Double whee!” Evangeline squealed as she looked up. I turned us back over and used the helmet display to adjust our angle of attack for optimum heat dispersal. In a minute we were showing a wake.
I swung to the north, at about a thousand miles per hour. We could see Olympus Mons almost directly ahead of us as the orange glow built up around us. Then back south, toward the smaller peak of
Pavonis.
I deployed the Kevlar wings on their long, composite rods and extended the glide. From below we’d look something like a bat, something like a kite. We could plainly see the complex of hotels and homes that was Thunder City and I was setting up for my final approach when our radios started shouting at us. Just about blasted our ears off, to tell you the truth, and I hastily ticked the volume down.
“Attention! Attention! You have entered restricted airspace. You have entered restricted airspace. All nonmilitary aviation is forbidden in this area until further notice. You are directed to land at once or be fired upon.”
It’s hard to describe on how many levels this didn’t make sense. Restricted airspace? The only such place on Mars was a zone around the bubble generators, and those were on the other side of the planet. Nonmilitary aviation? All air traffic on Mars was nonmilitary. We don’t have an army or an air force. I couldn’t have been more flummoxed if I’d been sitting in the bathtub and a periscope popped out of the drain and somebody told me to heave to or be torpedoed.
“I don’t know who you are,” I said, thinking it had to be some joker who had hacked the air traffic radios. “But are you sure you’ve got the right planet?”
“Ray!” Evangeline shouted. “Behind us!”
I glanced at my rearview window. Where my firetail had been a few minutes ago there was now something long and black with a bulge in the middle, and it was growing at incredible speed. My collision alarm began to beep, and the display told me the thing was coming up on me at five hundred miles per hour.
There really wasn’t anywhere to go. Left, right, up or down, it was too late to avoid the thing, whatever it was. So I did the only thing I could.
“Hang on tight!” I shouted, and this time I felt her arms squeeze around me right through the suit.
There wasn’t a lot of noise as it passed, not a hundred feet over us. The air is too thin to carry sound that well. I got a fleeting glimpse of a black airplane, and then the wake turbulence and jet blast hit us. Hard. The left wing fabric more or less exploded and the right wing flapped like a tent in a hurricane. We bobbed up, and then down, and then were caught in a barrel roll, over and over and over on our longitudinal axis. We were wrenched so hard that my hands were pulled off the handlebars, and as the right hand came off it twisted the grip, which opened the jet ports below us to about 50 percent thrust.
If we’d been anywhere but over the Valles, we’d have been dead. I banged my head several times against the padding inside my helmet, and was woozy for a second or two. When I saw clearly again, we were headed straight down, still spiraling in a crazy motion from the thrust below. I kicked at the alttitude jets with both feet and got the nose up, but gee forces were keeping me from reaching the handlebars again. If I couldn’t reach them, I’d have to steer with my feet, and that wasn’t good.
“Push me forward!” I told Evangeline, and immediately I could feel her hands on my back. She was leaning back against the sissy bar, so she had some leverage, and after a few seconds I was able to wrap both hands around the grips and get to work. I don’t recall thinking about it, my training and instincts took over, and I slued left, away from an approaching canyon wall, got us upright again, and applied full thrust. We pulled five or six gees for a few moments, close to blacking out, and then rose above the rim of the canyon to about a hundred feet. I cut the drive and we were weightless, in a slow arc that would take us to the ground in about a minute. Ahead was the town, and way beyond that was the black aircraft, banking hard and looking like it was coming in for another run at us, this time head-on.
“I’ll kill that fucker!” I shouted, with more bravado than sense. But the fact is, if I’d had guns mounted on the board, I’d have been blazing away.
“We’d better get down on the ground,” Evangeline said. “He’s bigger than you, and I’ll bet he’s got guns.”
“Who the hell is he?” I said.
“I have no idea. But if you fight him, you’re going to lose.”
She had a point. Still raging inside, but feeling more rational, I brought the board down to the ten-foot level and scuttled—that’s what it felt like, anyway—over the loose stones to the back of the Red Thunder.
No more than a hundred yards from the door another craft of the same design came swooping out from behind a building, positioned itself in front of us, and hovered there. There was a dark plastic bubble in the front and two things I was pretty sure were machine guns aimed at us.
They were sending us the warning again, but I could hardly hear it over the various alarms my board was giving me, and I didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter, anyway. Hovering like that, his downdraft was terrific, and once more the board twisted out of my control. I was still too high to just cut power, so I wrestled with it and managed to bring us to a sliding halt on the left rim of the heat shield . . . and then the wind caught the remaining wing and blew us over. I yanked my left leg up just in time to keep it from getting pinned, and cut power to all systems except the air.
“You okay?” I asked as I struggled with my safety belts.
“No. I think I . . . may be in trouble here.”
I didn’t like the note of fear I heard in her voice. I managed to get myself free and off the board and turned around. Her leg was trapped under the edge of the board.
Mass and weight. You don’t think about it on Earth, you’re used to it being the same thing. So though my board massed about as much as a big Harley motorcycle, it weighed a lot less on Mars, and one guy could set it upright.
But because of its mass, its inertia remained the same as on Earth. That means, if you got in its way while it was moving, it would hit you just as hard as that same mass would on Earth. Not something to trifle with. But we hadn’t been moving very fast when we hit, so I hoped none of her bones were broken.
I started to tilt the board off of her and pull her out.
“Don’t!”
“What’s the problem?”
“I don’t think I’m hurt, but it feels real cold there. I think I may have a leak.”
That word set off a series of actions that had been drilled into me so well that it almost felt like a reflex. I noticed a faint mist in the air around her calf, and some ice rime forming on her suit fabric. I realized the weight of the board was pressing her leg against the ground, and that was probably closing the puncture, at least a little. Leave it there until I was ready, as she’d already realized. I slapped the pocket on the front of my leg and the suit dispensed a patch about the size of my hand. The protective skin peeled itself away from the sticky side, and I knelt beside her.
“Ready?” She nodded, and I shouldered the board off her and dragged her a few feet away with one hand. There was now a pronounced jet of mist.
“Cold,” she said.
“I’ve got it.” There was a rock embedded in the suit fabric, about the size of a grape. I brushed it off, and there was a burst of vapor. Bad puncture. I slapped the patch on, held it tight with one hand while sealing the edges with the fingertips of the other. That should hold it, but better safe than sorry. I opened the tiny cargo space under the board’s seat and grabbed a duct tape dispenser.
We call it duct tape, and that’s pretty much what it is, but you can’t buy it on Earth. It’s stickier, and resists cold and vacuum. I made three winds around her calf, then a fourth for good measure. The mist was no longer coming out.
“Okay?” I asked her.
She smiled at me behind the helmet glass. I saw her eyes scanning the data there, invisible to me.
“Yeah, all systems go. But my whole leg feels cold. That’s going to leave a chilblain.”
“Sissy,” I said, and held out my hand. She took it, and I pulled her to her feet, and she promptly winced and raised her foot off the ground.
“Ouch. The ankle. May have sprained it. But I can walk on it.”
“What’s the point?” I said, and picked her up and hurried to the emergency lock door, thinking about
who I was going to kill first, the pilot of the first plane or the second one. Far as I was concerned, they were dead men.
WE DON’T REALLY have hospitals as such on Mars, in the sense of big buildings devoted to nothing but medicine. We have any diagnostic or operative equipment you can find anywhere on Earth, but it’s scattered. We’re too small to need more than one gene therapy lab or organ-growing facility, so the costs of big-ticket items like that are shared among the various corporations that own the tourist facilities.
What we do have is a first-aid station right next to every air lock. Some of them are not much more than a cupboard of medical supplies and a hot phone to call for help, which will be there in two minutes, maximum. But the big locks, the ones used by large numbers of people every day, have full-scale emergency rooms attached.
I cycled through the lock and turned right and went through the emergency room door. The nurse on duty took in the situation at a glance and we both helped Evangeline out of her suit. She only cried out once, when we eased off the boot. The ankle was starting to swell. The nurse briefly examined the site of the puncture on Evangeline’s calf, pronounced it to be no problem, and spread a cream on it. Then she wrapped an electric blanket around Evangeline’s leg and switched it on.
“We’ll X-ray that ankle,” she said, “but it doesn’t look too bad.”
“What the hell is going on out there?” I asked her. She looked up at me, and for the first time I noticed she looked scared.
“Where have you been?”
“Phobos.”
“Okay. I don’t know much. Nobody does. About an hour ago those ships landed, and they started ordering people around. They say there’s bigger ships in orbit.”
“Who are they?”
“Soldiers. They’re dressed in black, and they’re carrying big weapons. Everybody’s been instructed to return to their rooms or their homes. I stayed here, and nobody’s bothered me yet.”
