Red Lightning

by John Varley

  I SPENT ANOTHER day in the lockup and saw no one except the guy who brought lunch and dinner. I slept again. I woke up when someone opened the door and tossed some clothes into the room. They weren’t the clothes I’d been wearing under my suit, but they were mine.

  I dressed, and was met by two guys in the black uniforms I’d become familiar with. They led me down a curving hall and for the first time I was able to study the insignia on their chests and shoulders. Most of it didn’t mean anything to me, things like service ribbons or things indicating their ranks. There was nothing there with any writing on it. No HOMELAND SECURITY, no U.S. ARMY, no UNITED NATIONS or COMEUROPE. The most prominent patch was on the right shoulder and over the heart, and it was a white circle with a black lightning bolt flashing across it.

  Who were these guys?

  They took me back to the torture chamber. My main interrogator and the woman were sitting behind a table. I was taken to the single chair across from them and set down roughly in it. I just sat there, trying not to breathe hard, hanging on to what little dignity I could muster by not letting them know how terrified I was.

  The woman shoved a paper toward me.

  “Sign that,” she said.

  You want to know how beaten down I was? You want to know just how quickly and thoroughly they can crush the spirit out of you? I almost did. I had the pen in my hand and was about to scrawl something in the space marked SIGN HERE.

  Then I put the pen down and read it. It was short, and said that I agreed never to discuss anything about the events of the last seven (7) days, including but not limited to the conditions of my treatment, the manner of my incarceration, and the subjects of the “voluntary statements” I made.

  “Sign it,” the man said.

  “What if I don’t?”

  “The question doesn’t arise,” the woman said.

  “There is nothing voluntary about it, and you know it.”

  “Who cares?” the man said. “I’ll spell it out for you. You have no witnesses, and nobody would care if you did. What this is about, is you never mention that we asked you as to the whereabouts of Jubal Broussard. Not to anyone. As long as you live.”

  “What if I do? You throw me in jail?” I knew that wasn’t it as soon as I said it. The cat would already be out of the bag: Somebody has misplaced the most important man on Earth.

  “I told you this was stupid,” the woman said, not to me.

  I stared at them for a little longer. The man sighed.

  “What will we do to you? Nothing.”

  “We’ll kill your family,” the woman said. “You’ll watch. It will take a while. I will probably do it personally.” She pulled her stereo down to the end of her nose and looked at me over the top. It was the first time I’d seen her eyes.

  I never put a lot of stock in this “eyes” business. But her eyes definitely were different. Call it my continuing state of disorientation if you want, but the only word I can find for her eyes is reptilian. Nothing so obvious as slits for irises, but a blankness there, a predator without emotion. She didn’t blink. I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised if a forked tongue had slithered out of her mouth.

  I never saw the other guy’s eyes. He never took off his stereo. Probably would have turned me to ashes with his laser vision.

  “You’re getting a big break here,” the guy said, not unreasonably. “We could charge you with resisting arrest, assault and battery, but none of those guys want to press charges. We can bring them ourselves, though.”

  We. Who are you?

  Didn’t surprise me that the general didn’t want a fuss made about how a Martian girl kicked him in the nuts, though.

  “This is ridiculous,” the woman said, putting her stereo back in place and looking away, suddenly bored with the whole business. “The only way to deal with this is to kill them all, like I said.”

  “Your opinion has been noted,” the man said. “You were overruled.”

  I signed the paper.

  IT WASN’T JUST fear that made me decide to sign. No, really. I mean, I admit I was scared, I’d have done most things they might have told me to do. But signing a paper? Who the fuck cares about that, at this point? I might as well have recited the Boy Scout oath, spit in my palm, and sworn “Honest Injun!” It would have been equally meaningless. These people were way beyond legality. They didn’t care about any of that shit. Their authority extended from the barrel of a gun and the point of a needle.

  So why bother with the signature? Procedures, I guess. Dad told me once that fascists are sticklers for paperwork.

  Anyway, after that final and gratuitous humiliation the two guards frog-marched me out of the room and down the curving corridor. They bounced too high, like Earthies, and I was fairly sure I could put a move on them that would twist me free, disable them, and give them or somebody else a good excuse to blow my head off. At that moment, it didn’t seem like that awful an option. I didn’t know how I was going to face my family, knowing how poorly I’d stood up. I didn’t know how I was going to get to sleep, get up in the morning, eat, look myself in the mirror. There didn’t seem to be any point to any of it. They had broken me, no doubt about it. My spirit was a squashed dog on the freeway.

  They took me to an air lock whose inner door was standing open. They shoved me through, and I found I could still rustle up an interest in life, because for a moment I thought they were going to cycle me through into the outside. They slammed the inner door closed and the outer one started to open, and I braced myself for the killing cold.

  But no, there was a long flextube with lights strung along the top, about eight feet in diameter, sealed to the outer door of the lock. It stretched off fifty feet or more, curving slightly to the right. I followed it to another air lock and got inside it. I looked through the window and breathed a sigh of relief.

  It was the Grand Concourse, the “main street” of my hometown. I opened the inner door and stepped through.

  It was all crushingly familiar, but just a little off. There were not many people around for midday, and many of those I saw had a hurried, furtive look. That was the Earthies. The Martians I saw looked . . . I wasn’t sure, but they seemed angry, determined. Pissed off, in a word. I guess they had reason to be. I had no idea what had gone on during my incarceration, but it must not have been fun.

  Most of the Martians were moving in one direction. Some were carrying signs attached to metal poles, but not waving them around, and not saying anything.

  I got my bearings. All the hotels had grand entrances branching off the Concourse to the buildings themselves, and I was three hotels from home. About a mile.

  I trudged along, feeling lower than a snake’s belly, as I once heard Travis say. People kept passing me. I was getting closer to home, and to having to tell my tale of cowardice and surrender.

  There’s a big computer-controlled fountain in the middle of the Concourse about a hundred yards from the road to the Red Thunder that has been a teen hangout since they built it, when I was a kid. The skateboard pits and roller rinks were not too far away. We used to play games dodging the moving jets, which you could only do for so long before you got soaked. Later, older, we’d just hang and shoot the shit. Mostly guys without steady girlfriends; the girls hung out in the nearby hamburger joint in gaggles. Or is a group of young girls a giggle?

  I spotted a group of three slackers who basically seemed to live there, hassling some of the younger kids, including me until I got older and too big. They were in their early twenties now and seemed to have no ambition in life except to keep hanging. Elaborate skateboards they seldom actually used were propped against the fountain. I knew what they were doing. They were running the Strip-her program. A silly little bit of software that turns your stereo into X-ray glasses. Or seems to. It makes a 3-D real-time image of whoever you’re looking at, but it strips away the clothes and makes them appear to be naked. Just a guess, of course. It won’t show if she’s wearing a navel ring or if she has tats. Ch
ildish, very childish.

  Okay, I did it, too, but that was years ago.

  “Space!” one of them shouted. I looked over, saw it was Joe Chan, more or less the leader of the group. Too lazy to be really mean, well on his way to alcoholism.

  “Joe,” I said back.

  “Spaceman, is that really you? Ray?”

  “It’s me, Joe. I haven’t got time for any trouble.”

  “No trouble, my friend. Look, they’re carrying your picture.”

  That made no sense at all, so I started to go on, but I saw he was twisting his head around till it was sideways, then even farther. What? Was he trying to stand on his head?

  “That’s you,” he said, and pointed.

  I turned around and found myself twisting just like him. One of the people going by was holding a sign, the pole pointed to the ground so the thick cardboard was upside down. It was two-foot-by-three-foot posterboard. At the top was a picture of me, what looked like my graduation photo. At the bottom was a message:

  FREE THE RED

  THUNDER TEN!

  I was in no shape to make sense of that. The Red Thunder Ten what? Some kind of promotion? A giveaway at the casino?

  “It’s him, space,” Joe was saying to one of his homeys.

  “What’s going on, Joe?” I asked. “Why is that man carrying a picture of me?”

  “You a hero, man!” he said. Then he snickered, to show how unimpressed he was. “Yo, can I have your autograph?”

  Things were happening too fast and making no sense. I was suffering from humiliation, sensory deprivation, and maybe a panic attack. My head felt like it was filled with sludge. I was vaguely aware of a noise building up from the street leading home, the sound of hundreds, maybe thousands of voices, like in a sports stadium, where it’s just a roar, and you can’t pick out words. And people began to pour out of the street and around the corner ahead of me. They were all Martians, from the way they moved, and they were moving very fast, and all toward me.

  “There he is!” someone shouted.

  “It’s him!”

  With my wits about me I’d have known what had happened. Joe Chan had IMed his friends, such as they were, and they had passed it on, and within ten seconds of him identifying me the whole crowd ahead knew where I was.

  Right then all I saw was several hundred emotional people charging in my direction, waving signs and shouting, and all they needed was burning torches and maybe a noose or two to look like the angry villagers in a Frankenstein movie.

  I turned and ran.

  Didn’t do me any good. The people on that side had the news, too, and now they recognized me and closed in from all sides. Next thing I knew I was being lifted onto the shoulders of two strangers and others were reaching out to touch me. I finally perceived they were smiling, laughing, joyful. Quite a few were even crying.

  So they carried me around the corner and down the smaller concourse past all the flashing signs advertising the delights to be had at the Red Thunder, and into what was the largest crowd I’d ever seen on Mars outside of the soccer stadium. They carried signs, and I saw my face again, and Mom’s and Dad’s and Evangeline’s and Mr. Redmond’s and Grandma’s and . . . good god, there were the two Redmond brats, too.

  A big stage had been set up in the public space leading to the lobby and it was covered with red flags with a paler pink circle in the middle of them, crisscrossed with lines. I realized it was one of those old drawings by Lowell, or somebody, showing the Martian “canals” and “seas.” Over it all was a huge banner that read:

  MARS FOR THE MARTIANS!

  There were television cameras, and they were all pointed at me, and flashes from still cameras, and I could see myself from different angles up on half a dozen big screens erected all around the crowd. Other screens held familiar talking heads, Martian journalists, mostly, and they all looked excited.

  I couldn’t help noticing I looked a little goofy, sort of like somebody had just brained me with a sledgehammer, which is pretty much how I felt, so I tried a tentative smile and a wave, and the crowd roared.

  Jesus Christ, what have I gotten myself into?

  Then I was passed from hand to hand over the heads of the crowd and set more or less on my feet on the edge of the stage. There were people up there, and they were all shouting and clapping and slapping me on the back, putting their arms around me and smiling for the cameras, wanting to be on the news, I guess. I recognized some of them, political figures mostly, such as we have on Mars.

  There were a few media stars, too. A few live on Mars, and a lot of them visit. They like to be seen on the ski slopes on Olympus Mons . . . I guess they like to be seen just about anywhere. I found myself shaking hands with some pretty famous people.

  I was still too stunned to be asking any of the questions I wanted to ask, and it apparently wasn’t expected of me. Nobody was trying to quiet the crowd, nobody was stepping up to the podium to speak.

  But finally the dynamic of the crowd changed. I can’t exactly put my finger on it, but it was another stereo thing, and I didn’t have my stereo. (In fact, I never got that one back. Probably still stored in some evidence locker on Earth.) Anyway, everybody started looking in the same direction, back behind the stage toward the hotel. I looked up at the screens and on one of them I saw my mom, running. She was running a little faster than the cameraman was backing up, actually, and I saw her face twist as she stiff-armed the asshole and then I had a great view of the ceiling. Served him right.

  I broke free of the crowd on the stage and dashed to the rear and jumped down in time to see her closing the last twenty yards or so. A couple other people got in her way and she handed out a few more body checks. She was implacable, which I’m used to, but she was sobbing, which I’m not. She flew into my arms and just held me for a moment, squeezing hard enough to leave bruises. I was doing the same.

  But this wasn’t the place. Her mind started working again, and she broke the embrace and tugged on my hand. I didn’t need any more urging. I pulled ahead of her and started pushing my way through the crowd. In a minute we were in the middle of four husky guys in the red blazers of the Red Thunder security detail, guys she had outrun on her way to the stage.

  We crossed the lobby to more cheers from the staff, and a lot of them were crying, too. But they stayed at their posts and gave us our space as we made it to the corridor leading back to our living quarters.

  14

  IT WAS THE strangest reunion you could imagine.

  All of the “Red Thunder Ten” were there. I was the last of us to be released, probably because of us all I’d spent the most time corresponding with Jubal. The Redmonds had been released first, after only four days. Another instance of crossing all the I’s and dotting all the T’s? I mean, they’d never talked to Jubal, never met him.

  The brats, too. They took the brats into custody. Unbelievable.

  They said later that nobody was rough with them. Mostly they sat around with some adults and played with toys. Doctors examined them and found no needle marks and the boys confirmed they hadn’t been injected with anything. But there were traces of some drug in their blood. It was an inhibition-reducing substance and they probably put it in their ice cream. The boys said they ate a lot of ice cream, and then people got them to play with cool toys to tell the story of all the time they spent with us, the interplanetary terrorists, the Strickland-Garcia family.

  Ice cream. Nothing I saw in Florida compared with that.

  I learned all this later, because after the first round of hugs and kisses Dad hugged me again and put his lips to my ear.

  “There is a name we will not mention for now. And we won’t discuss what happened to us.”

  I looked around. I was at home. At home. I started to mouth something, and Dad shook his head and whispered into my ear again.

  “Read my lips,” he said. And I suppose somebody could, if we were all on camera. And we had to assume we were.

  THEY BROUGHT ME up t
o date. Back on Earth, they were aware of the invasion of Mars, but it wasn’t making a lot of news. Some sort of peacekeeping operation was what they were getting from official sources.

  It was a very big deal on Mars. Maybe the biggest deal since the spaceship Red Thunder landed. For the first time most of us were thinking of ourselves as Martians. We did think of Mars as home, and more important, each of us had a home here, even if it was usually only a temporary apartment. But these invaders had come and, without so much as a pretty please, had searched the whole place.

  I mean everything. Every hotel room, every private apartment, every broom closet.

  That takes a lot of soldiers and a lot of determination. You don’t kick down a door on Mars. Believe me, you don’t; 90 percent of the people opened their doors and stepped aside when the official knock came, but the 10 percent who didn’t presented a problem. Doors on Mars are strong. They are pressure-capable, by law. They are built to keep you alive if there is a blowout on the other side. Fire most weapons at these doors and the bullets will just ricochet. Fire something with armor-piercing bullets, and you may kill the people on the other side. The only way to get through a Martian door with somebody on the other side who didn’t want to let you in is to use small shaped charges and blow off the hinges.

  Here’s how it went, and I’m so sorry I missed it all:

  At first the diehards, the ones who forced the soldiers to blow their doors, were looked at as nuts. What’s the big deal? They come in, they look around, they make a mess, and then they go away. A nuisance, but it’s over. Then it became clear they weren’t going to stop until they’d patted down the entire planet.