Red Lightning

by John Varley

  Committees were formed. Delegations were sent to the commanding officers, demanding an explanation. They got diddly. More delegations were formed, demanding civil rights. What civil rights? the officers asked them. Mars is under martial law for the duration of the emergency; we control your civil rights.

  What emergency?

  We’re not authorized to reveal the nature of the emergency. Groups of angry people began to gather and discuss possible courses of action. A general strike was called on the third day but didn’t really go anyplace. People were still too confused. But they were starting to rethink their position on those cantankerous misfits who, when Big Brother hammered on their door and demanded Open up or we’ll break it down! shouted back, Break the fucker down, then!

  It’s a big symbolic thing, breaking into someone’s home. Be it ever so humble, it’s your castle, and it gets your back up. This whole thing might have eventually blown over, things might have gone back to more or less what they were before, except for that. There would have been outrage, a lot of muttering, but there’s work to be done, no use crying over a little invasion of privacy. It happens every day, right? They know everything worth knowing about you, right? So why get so upset that they came into your home and searched it?

  But finally, the general population got angry. Suddenly, 20 percent were refusing to passively open their doors. Then, overnight, it was 50 percent. And not long after that, you were seen as some sort of coward if you submitted quietly.

  Ironically, there was one more thing that made it a more attractive proposition to sit back in your living room and listen to the frustrated soldiers demanding, then wheedling, and finally almost pleading for you to let them in.

  In most cases, you didn’t even own the door.

  It was a symbol, it was the drawbridge over the moat into your castle . . . but technically, it belonged to your landlord. The company that owned your apartment building, the owner of the hotel that employed you and provided your housing as a necessary perk of the job. Somebody batters it down, it’s not your problem. The landlord had to fix it, just like if your water heater broke down. So it didn’t actually cost you anything to take a moral stand. When you realize it’s not going to cost you anything, it’s a lot easier to stand up for your rights, even if, technically, you don’t have any.

  And if you don’t have any rights, you start to wonder why you don’t, maybe for the first time.

  SOMEWHERE IN THERE my family and the Redmonds became the Red Thunder Ten. We became the rallying cry for . . . Martian independence!

  But independence from who? That’s what I most wanted to know.

  “Nobody is absolutely sure,” Mom said. “Things are pretty unsettled back on Earth. We think it’s some sort of coalition, and the United States is a big player. Or what’s left of it.”

  America was shattered. We all knew that. Casualties from the wave were 3 million, officially, even higher from other sources. No one would ever have a total count, only an order of magnitude. It was almost certainly the most disastrous couple of hours the human race had ever experienced.

  The rebellion in Idaho had been pretty much suppressed, with heavy loss of civilian life. No sooner was that situation over than rebel groups sprang up all over the South, many using guerrilla tactics. Some Army units stayed loyal, others defected to one competing faction or another. There was a President in the flood-damaged White House, and a competing President in Chicago, and states in the West weren’t paying much attention to either one. There were National Guard checkpoints at most state lines. The union was showing signs of fracturing, not North/South or even East/West, but into individual states or coalitions of states. There were various international alliances and feuds going on to complicate the situation. Canada had sealed the border to the north. California was dealing with Japan and China basically as an independent nation. Sacramento’s relations with Tokyo were a lot warmer than with either Washington or Chicago.

  There was corporate involvement in it all, as these days a lot of multinationals functioned basically like governments and were more powerful than many governments.

  Then there were the Rapturists. The majority of the people who had more or less dropped out of life with the arrival of the wave had given up and were trying to put their lives back together. Not easy, since most employers weren’t hiring anybody, especially those who had walked out on them in a time of crisis. These people were finding their homes and cars repossessed, their bank accounts empty or full of dubious currency because they hadn’t paid attention to the financial market catastrophe that arrived on the heels of the physical one.

  Served ’em right, as far I was concerned. I find it hard to be sympathetic to people who are rooting for Armageddon. In fact, I find it impossible.

  But there were still hard-core Rapturists waiting for Jesus (hey, he died in A.D. 33; get over it!), and a lot of them had been elected to public office in the past decades. Where that was the case, sometimes nothing was being done at all. Police weren’t policing, firefighters weren’t fighting fires, taxes weren’t being collected because of some crazy business about “the number of the beast.” Mayors weren’t mayoring. I guess nobody was complaining much about the tax situation except those whose salaries were tied to taxes. But here and there people were angry about no police and no firefighters. Here and there they had held new elections, at the end of a rope.

  So that was the national situation, as well as I can sum it up. That was the merely alarming news. On the East Coast, things were bad.

  Through some slow but inevitable process, the devastated East Coast communities had changed, in the minds of the rest of the country, from people in need to The Enemy. Sure, they had a bad break, but things are tough for us all. We gave and we gave, we sweated our hearts out, and now all our political institutions have betrayed us, we don’t know which flag to salute or who to call Mr. President, our money has gone into the toilet and other currencies are shaky, my last paycheck was late or I don’t have a job at all, food prices have tripled, meat is hard to come by, and you say you’ve got problems? Live on the goddam beach, build yourself a shack. Only rich assholes could ever afford to live where you lived, anyway, so I should worry about you? Besides, I’m thinking of moving to California and voting with the Secessionists.

  I SPENT THE night in my own bed, happy to be back but wondering who was watching as I tossed and turned. In the end I had to take a pill, something I didn’t want to do, until Dad told me that even Mom had taken one, that first night, and she hates mood-altering drugs. This one was pretty good. I dropped off in ten minutes, and if I dreamed, I don’t remember it.

  The next day we all relaxed together. Dad didn’t go in to work. We avoided all press interviews, which made a lot of people pretty pissed off. It also wasn’t in Mom’s nature just to let this slide, every bone in her body wanted to be out there organizing, protesting, and she had a marvelous platform to speak from, being one of the Ten. But there were all those things she couldn’t talk about, all those questions she’d have to answer with “no comment.” It would have to wait.

  THE NEXT DAY, Dad decided to have the apartment painted.

  Dad called in the crash crew, the guys who dealt with a suite after musicians had stayed in it. They whisked all the furniture out of the place in half an hour. All our possessions went with it, neatly boxed and labeled. Then, with all that stuff out of the way, Mom decided the carpets were looking a little faded and worn. I thought they looked fine, but nobody asked me.

  The painters ripped out all the light fixtures. Then they applied a coat of new paint to every surface. Then a second coat, then a third. They put down the new carpet, and then Mom decided she didn’t like our old furniture and had it all put in storage.

  Okay, so I’m a little slow to catch on. I thought it was just a flurry of activity to get our minds off of what we’d just gone through. When the crew started moving new furniture into my room I noticed a little guy doing something with a small electronic
instrument, going over the walls inch by inch.

  When it was all done Dad and Mom called me and Elizabeth into the guest room, which had been left utterly bare, every surface completely painted, no carpet on the floor, no windows. The little guy was there. He was just an ordinary guy, with an indefinable Earthie look about him. I was a foot and a half taller than he was.

  “I’m going to give you my standard disclaimer,” he said. “Technology today is such that there can never be a hundred percent guarantee that a place is not bugged. The best I can give you is 99 percent.”

  “Go on,” Dad said.

  “I found two cameras in every room. Here’s one.” He dug in his pocket and took out a metal sphere the size of a BB with one glassy surface. “This is the smallest I’ve ever seen. They are very good, but they can’t see through paint. But remember, these are the big guys, and although I think I’m very good, too, I’m only a private detective.”

  A private detective! I didn’t even know we had any on Mars. But I guess anywhere you go, people want to spy on other people. This guy looked about as far from Philip Marlowe or Spenser as it was possible to be.

  “I found plenty of listening devices and took them all out. But be aware that a lot of electronic equipment can conceal a listening device that can record and save, and be tapped later, so there’s no radio signal.”

  “We understand that,” Dad said. “Thank you, Basil. You can send your bill to the hotel.”

  The man ducked his head for a moment.

  “Begging your pardon, sir, I think it would be best if you paid me now.”

  There was an awkward pause, and Dad nodded. He produced a credit card and made a funds transfer on the spot.

  “Sorry,” Basil said, “but things being the way they are . . .”

  “I understand,” Dad said. I wasn’t sure if he meant the shaky condition of the financial markets—lots of people were asking for cash these days and hoping that the cash would retain its value—or the uncertain status of our own freedom.

  “Okay,” Dad said, after Basil the Detective left. “New house rules. Only family and close friends in this apartment. I’m not going to install a metal detector or pat anybody down before I let them in here. I’m not going to let them push me that far. But until we figure this all out, we need to keep everything close, okay?”

  Elizabeth and I agreed.

  “This room”—he pointed to the door to our former guest room—“is secure. And it’s going to stay that way. Nobody but family gets in there, for the duration. Okay?”

  We all nodded.

  “In fact, I don’t even want you and Elizabeth in there, Ray. Kelly and I won’t be going in, either. It’s the only way to keep it clean.”

  “Clean for what, Dad?” Elizabeth asked.

  “We’ll talk about that later. Things have changed, people. We have to be on guard, and that means no idle talk about any of this. I don’t know what the hell is going on, but we’re working on it. We’ll tell you when the time comes. Okay?”

  So we set about the task of putting things back together. And it was a sobering one. In my room, every box I opened, every object I took out, was no longer the old friend I had left there a week ago. Now it was a suspect, a possible spy. I put each object through a third degree, asked it to account for itself.

  You look like an old copy of Winnie-the-Pooh that used to belong to my father, but are you really? Are you harboring a parasite? Or are you really a book at all, but actually a clever replacement? I looked through the pages, bent the spine, and peered down into the space there. I shook things, looked at them with a magnifying glass. I started throwing stuff away. There was no point, I knew that, but suddenly I didn’t want to own so much stuff. I had no use for most of it anyway. I kept only sentimental objects and things I couldn’t do without.

  In that first category, most of it was from Jubal. I lined up all his little gizmos on the shelf where they had been, including the last one, the one he had sent me on the day of the tsunami. I hadn’t even had a chance to open it until I got back from Earth.

  It wasn’t as impressive as most of the stuff he’d sent me, in fact, it was quite small, just a flat black plastic rectangle an inch on a side, with a red button on it. They called them holosnaps, you could buy them for five dollars down at the gift shop of the Red Thunder, record a message to use as a keepsake. Usually they had a graphic on the back: Greetings From (fill in tourist destination). This one was blank.

  I pressed the little red button and set the unit on the table. A little holograph of Jubal’s face grinned at me.

  “Just a little lucky charm for my main man, Ray! Keep dis wit’ you an’ you always have good luck! See you soon, me!”

  Weird, huh? It was such a pointless little bagatelle.

  THEN ONE DAY Travis walked in the front door, looking grim, sparing only a short hug and kiss for each of us. He looked a lot older than he had when we’d parted in Florida. His hair seemed grayer, he had more worry lines on his face.

  He was carrying an ordinary plastic packing box, which he took to the newly fortified guest room and set inside. We all joined him and sat on cushions, the only things in the room. Travis got a small lamp out of his box. It was battery-powered. He set it in the center of the circle, and Dad closed the door. I noticed for the first time that there were no light fixtures left in the room. He started removing small boxes from the big boxes and handed one to each of us. They were small e-mail inputs, just keyboards and screens. We turned them on. Again, battery-powered. He took out a small black metal box and set it beside the lamp in the middle, and handed us each a patch cord. He connected his keyboard to the box and showed us that we should all do the same.

  The last thing out of Travis’s magic box was a small music player. He turned it on and it began to play something I wasn’t familiar with. He turned the sound level up a bit. Then he looked at all of us.

  “This stuff was all randomly selected, off the shelf. I’m working on the thesis that they can’t bug everything on Mars. No more talking. The planet’s smallest chat room is now open for business.”

  TRAVIS: Maybe this is all a waste of time . . . maybe we could sit around and quietly discuss this like free human beings.

  KELLY: I think it pays to be careful.

  MANNY: Agree. They told me not to talk about Jubal. I’m not going to, to anyone else. But we have to discuss it as a family. They made threats.

  KELLY: They told Manny and me they would kill our children while we watched.

  RAY: Ditto.

  ELIZABETH: Everybody thinks I was raped. I’d almost have preferred rape to the drugs. It was mind rape.

  KELLY: Ditto. Ray, did they

  RAY: They wired my balls, Mom. But they didn’t use it.

  ELIZABETH: Ditto. My labia.

  KELLY: Same here.

  TRAVIS: I think we can assume we were all treated about the same.

  MANNY: You, too?

  TRAVIS: Oh yeah . . . they appeared to enjoy it . . . my money didn’t help me . . . nor did my American citizenship . . . I don’t even know where they took me . . . they kept me for seven days . . . I was sure I was a dead man . . .

  KELLY: They need us. They expect us to lead them to Jubal.

  ELIZABETH: What the fuck is happening, Travis?

  TRAVIS: What is happening is . . . Jubal has escaped . . . the powers that be thought we knew where the most valuable man in the world is . . . maybe we should get some refreshments in here . . . this is going to take some time . . .

  Escaped. Incredible.

  Jubal was the most carefully guarded person on Earth. With modern surveillance techniques, the sort we were hiding from at that very moment, it was possible to keep an eye on anybody, twenty-four/seven, no matter where they went. How hard could it be to keep one strange little fat guy secured on an island a thousand miles from anywhere? If Jubal had pulled it off, and it looked like he had, then the Prisoner of Zenda and Houdini and Jean Valjean had nothing on him.

>   TRAVIS: Things on the Falklands are not quite what you may have thought they are . . . Jubal has been a virtual prisoner for 22 years . . . but virtual is the key word . . . they always know where he is, but that doesn’t mean they are actually looking at him . . .

  KELLY: What’s the difference?

  TRAVIS: He’s not under surveillance, physically, all the time . . . he was at first, but we protested . . . it pissed me off, I thought he deserved privacy . . . so I made a fuss . . .

  MANNY: How do you make a fuss with those people? We’ve just seen how powerful they are. I figured they just do what they want to do.

  TRAVIS: Looks like they do now, whoever they are . . . but it was different until recently . . . and you’re right, I’ve got a lot of money, I’ve got some power, but you don’t push these guys around . . . what you do, you play them against each other . . . there’s different nations with different interests, and I learned all the conflicts between them . . . when I needed something, I’d set India against China, or Japan against Germany, or almost anybody and everybody against the US . . . and I could usually get my way . . . as long as it wasn’t something big . . . I kept saving that one . . . I thought of it as the nuclear option . . .

  ELIZABETH: ?

  TRAVIS: Old slang for the threat of last resort . . . I could always tell them that if they didn’t treat Jubal well, we’d take our Tinkertoys and go home . . .

  KELLY: You could do that?

  TRAVIS: Legally, yes, anytime he wanted to, Jubal could just leave . . . Jubal was a voluntary exile, he’s a free man, theoretically . . . I figured it would be fought out in the courts, unless some big nation decided to kidnap him, which could be done with, say, the American Atlantic Fleet . . . but plenty of people would have gone to war over that . . . oh, hell, it gets confusing, politically . . . just believe me that I had some leverage down there, and the big boys were a lot happier not fighting so long as the things I asked for weren’t real important . . .