Red Lightning

by John Varley

  He was right about that. I’d read about it in history class. A lot of nations, not all of them with much of a history of engineering excellence, had built starships and launched them soon after it became possible to do so without busting the national budget. Some nations who couldn’t afford it, piss-poor countries headed by strongmen, military dictators, or just flat-out psychotics like the people who ruled North Korea at the turn of the century, went ahead and did it anyway, as a matter of “national pride.” They’d hire an astronomer to pick out a star known to have planets that nobody else was heading for already, hire engineers who hadn’t made the grade in other jobs, slap something together fast and cheap, and set out for the glory of the Great State of Fuckupistan.

  Energy was unlimited, so size was not a problem. The fastest and cheapest way was to find a smallish asteroid, hollow it out with Squeezer bubbles, and use the squeezed matter to boost the ship. Build your crew quarters and hydroponic farms inside the hollow.

  A few of those ships were overdue. Nobody knew how many, because beyond a few light-years communication was impossible, and because nobody knew how long an exploratory crew would choose to stay. Maybe some of them had landed on Earth-like paradises and had no intention of returning to Fuckupistan and its glorious leader.

  But most starships hadn’t returned yet because they were probably still on their way out. Even at the speed of light, star travel takes time, and we knew from the ships that had returned that there were no habitable planets within ten light-years.

  “There were plenty of groups with a grievance who made hollowed-out asteroid starships, too. You could buy one for only about 100 million dollars, unfurnished. I’ve been looking at those to see who could have done it, too. It had to be a big one, not one of those economy jobs the real nutcases took off in. Even at the speed of light, the Second Amendment wouldn’t have nearly enough mass to do the damage that was done. Neither would a ship the size of the Sovereign. It had to be a fairly big rock.”

  “But it could have been an accident, right?” I asked.

  Travis shook his head.

  “I wanted to believe that. And the one thing that bothered me about the suicide-flier scenario was that there was no message attached. Something that big, you want people to know it was you who did it. But nobody stepped forward to claim responsibility.” He waved his hand. “Check that. A hundred groups of nuts have claimed responsibility, just like they always do, but not a one of them has any credibility. Nothing but wannabes. If there was somebody on the ground who knew this was going to happen, it would have made sense to brag about it a day or two before it happened. It’s not like flying an airplane into a building, you can’t shoot it down. You can’t even see it coming, it’s moving so fast. So why not taunt the people you are planning to hit? Why not get your message out, hit us, and then say ‘I told you so, and here’s what we want you to do or we’ll bring down the wrath of fill-in-the-blank again.’”

  “Nobody ever said terrorists are smart,” I said.

  “Amen to that. But still . . . anyway, I moved on to—”

  “Wait a minute,” Evangeline blurted. Everybody turned to look at her. A few hints of body language told me she was wishing she’d kept her mouth shut. She needed to work on her self-confidence, at least when it came to subjects like this. But she plowed on. “Maybe . . . well, I just thought, maybe these guys . . . say they’re a small group, and they can’t afford to buy their own ship. So they get a group of them aboard as passengers, and sometime later they take it over. Kill everybody aboard.”

  “Gas would do it,” Travis said.

  “You’ve already thought of this,” she said.

  “Go on. I want your thinking.”

  “Well, they take over the ship. Turn it around and . . . do what they did.”

  “Why no announcement?” he asked.

  “That’s what just occurred to me. Say they’re a small group, a few dozen, a few hundred, I don’t know. The hijackers have to go a long way out, then they have to slow down, like we did. Then they have to build up speed again. They probably took off a long time ago.”

  “Maybe as long as twenty years ago. Go on.”

  “Okay, while they’re doing all that . . .”

  “The group goes belly-up!” I said.

  “That’s what I was going to say.”

  “Let her tell it, Ray.”

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay. Anyway, like you said, they don’t have to be very smart, and the trip doesn’t seem very long to them, because during a lot of it time is hardly passing at all because of the . . . what’s the word?”

  “Lorentz-FitzGerald contraction?” I said.

  “No, that obsolete,” Jubal said. “You talkin’ about time squeezin’.”

  “Yeah. They’re gone twenty years, but it only feels like a year to them. They get back to the solar system and their group is dead . . . and they don’t even know it.”

  “And there’s no way for them to find out,” Travis said, smiling. “No way for them to communicate, call Uncle so-and-so and even see if what they’re hoping to accomplish might even have already happened.”

  “Idiots,” Jubal muttered.

  “Exactly. It works out as a classic 9/11 situation. One relatively good planner who got away with it because nobody was expecting it. Maybe a dozen others who are mainly idiots, plus some aggrieved idiots on the ground who may have blown themselves up in a bomb factory, or all got caught at something, or just got old and tired of the whole terrorist lifestyle. It’s a young idiot’s game, not an old idiot’s. Anyway, like you say, Evangeline, that answered my question of why there was no warning on the ground.”

  He let us think that one over for a while.

  “On the ground,” I said, finally.

  Travis pointed his finger at me. “Bingo. I thought about myself sitting in the control room of a starship that’s moving so fast you can’t see anything out the front window. Only way you know you’re approaching Earth is the ship’s computer says you are. It’s tough to put yourself into the head of—”

  “Wait a minute,” Evangeline said. “Why can’t they see anything out the front window?” She looked around at us. “Maybe I’m dumb . . .”

  “No, cher, not dumb,” Jubal said, with a chuckle. “Every-thin’ up front been blue-shifted. No more visible light.”

  “Okay, I am dumb. What’s blue-shifted mean?”

  “Have you heard of the red shift?” Travis asked.

  “I think somebody mentioned that in science class. Something about all the galaxies moving away from us?”

  “That’s right. All the galaxies we can see are moving away from us, and the way we can tell is that the light coming from them is shifted into the red end of the spectrum. It’s like when a train goes by—”

  “It sounds higher when it’s coming toward you, and lower when it’s going away. I remember that.”

  “Works the same way with light. The light gets stretched out, it becomes redder. The farther away it is, the faster it’s moving away from us. Out at the edge of the universe, some of them are moving away at close to the speed of light, and the light is shifted way down into the infrared. If it’s coming toward us—”

  “Wait a minute. I’ve never understood why they’re all moving away. Why aren’t some of them coming toward us? Those galaxies, way out there, they’ve been moving away from us for a long time, right? So what happened. Did some really, really big dinosaur fart?”

  There were a few seconds of silence, then Jubal whooped. Did I mention that Jubal has what you might call a low sense of humor? He’s not much for jokes or puns, but he loves a whoopee cushion. And once you get him started . . .

  He roared, he giggled, he literally fell on the floor and rolled. After a weird moment, Travis began to laugh, too, then me and Evangeline, though her face was pretty red, wondering if we thought she was stupid. I kept trying to tell her it was okay, but I was laughing too hard, and she eventually realized nobody was
laughing at her. It was one of those situations where you feel you’ve almost got it under control, then somebody will laugh again, and you start all over. Laughter is a real contagious thing, sometimes, and after a while it becomes painful, but still you laugh. Until finally you are all sitting there, worn-out, still being hit by little waves of giggles.

  I know. It wasn’t that funny. But you had to be there. You had to have been through what we’d been through, and probably you had to be facing the bleak choices we were facing. Anyway, it helped. Lord, how it helped. I felt more emotionally cleaned out than anytime since . . . well, since I cried after seeing that dead tiger.

  Travis finished his lesson, Red Shift 101, and then moved on.

  “Blue shift is exactly the opposite,” he said. “Something is coming toward you real fast, the light waves get compressed, they get bluer. They go into the ultraviolet, then into X-rays, and finally gamma rays when you’re moving really fast.”

  “Same thing with radio waves,” I said.

  “Bingo again. So I started . . . well, let’s go back to the bridge of that starship, the SS Tsunami. A human can’t fly it. Forward, you can’t see anything, the light has been shifted up out of the visible spectrum. You’ve got a computer that’s making some really, really tough calculations. It’s putting together some sort of image from the hard radiation coming from in front, it knows where the sun is, and has an idea where the Earth should be. But it’s not getting as much information as it’s used to. Probably not anything usable from the solar navigation arrays.”

  “Those are the satellites in solar orbit,” I said, “like the global positioning—”

  “Got it,” Evangeline said.

  “He’s flying by dead reckoning and inertial records and probably a lot of prayers to whatever god he worships.

  “But how accurate can he be? Jubal worked on that problem, and I got some other friends to work on it, too, and the answer we came up with independently was . . . he was lucky to have hit the Earth at all. If lucky is the word.

  “One, he’s been traveling for a long time, a long distance. Determining your current position is everything. And if you’re off by a few feet a light-year away, it’s going to add up to thousands of miles at your destination.

  “Two, things are happening fast. He’d be crossing the distance from the Earth to the moon in less than a second, every second. He will, or the computer, actually, will try to make course corrections as far out as possible, because it will have more effect out there. You try to deflect something the size of an asteroid from a point close to your target, you’ll need a lot of thrust.

  “Three, not only is it moving fast, but he’s slowed down. Time has contracted for him. Every second for him—and for the computer—is a week for us on Earth. The computer is compensating for that, but it’s one more thing to complicate the equation.”

  “Jee . . . oh, man,” I said. “I don’t see how he managed to hit his target at all.”

  “I don’t think he did,” Travis said. “Or not the one he was aiming for, anyway. Take a look at this.”

  He turned and called up an image of the Earth on a big screen. A line appeared, and I was taken back to that awful moment in the gym when it all began. It was the image left by the remains of the starship and some cubic miles of seawater that had instantly smashed into hot plasma with the impact. Travis worked a cursor and the line extended itself down to the southwest.

  “Here’s the incoming path. Here’s the point of impact. Now draw a diameter around the Earth, at right angles to the path.” That all happened, and then the picture zoomed in and the globe turned a bit. “Now I’m going to move the point of impact over Washington, D.C.” That happened, and the line that traced the path of the ship moved with it. “What do you think?”

  Evangeline and I stared at it. The line began in D.C., and passed over Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston.

  “You’re kidding,” Evangeline breathed.

  “I wish I was. I can’t be sure, of course. But it looks to me like this guy, these guys, wanted to impact Washington. I’m no physicist, but I figure the whole city would be vaporized. How far that damage would reach, I don’t know. It might depend on how shallow the impact was. It might skim right along the surface, plasma hot as the middle of the sun, all the way to Boston. Instead of 3 million dead, we might have had . . . I don’t know, 50 million? 100 million? Plus, you might still get a tidal wave that would hit Europe. I just don’t know, I can’t make my mind wrap around that much evil . . . but I think he missed.”

  We pondered that for a while. He was right. It was hard to even imagine.

  “So we got lucky?”

  “Almost. Just a little bit more inaccurate, and he’d have missed us entirely. My gut feeling, he got lucky to hit us at all. But he wanted to do more.”

  I remembered something else.

  “Wait a minute. You said you knew this was intentional. So far all I’ve heard is speculation. He probably did this, he might have done that, he got lucky.”

  Travis nodded.

  “The message,” Evangeline said.

  “Bingo three times. I imagined him in there, he’s busy as a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest, trying to keep it all straight in his tiny little head, monitoring the computer, probably worrying every time the computer set off a correcting boost, saying his prayers. The seconds are ticking down, a week at a time. Then . . . oh my god! I forgot to send out the message. They have to know who did this. I, whatever my name is, the greatest terrorist mastermind and hero of my people or my cause, dealing out death to those who deserve it. How else will they sing my praises? So he sends the message out at the last minute.”

  “And we got it?”

  “Some people did. It took them a while to figure out where to look, and when they had it, they kept it to themselves. They don’t know how to deal with it. If they’d asked me, I could have told them. You can’t deal with it. There’s no way. We don’t even know if this guy was the first. Anybody less accurate than this guy was, we’d probably never have even seen him pass through the solar system, not even if he only missed by a thousand miles. If one was on its way right now, this instant, we could do nothing. We’d have a fraction of a second response time. The people in control, the handful who know the full story, they just hate that. Hate it worse than normal people do, because control is everything to them. I think that’s another reason they want Jubal back so badly. They think he’s the only one who can find an answer.”

  Jubal shook his head, sadly. “Ain’t found one so far, me.”

  “But how did you find out?” I asked.

  “Same way things usually get done. Connections. I know a lot of people at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. I realized that if a message was sent out, it would arrive as X-ray or gamma ray bursts. So I found an old friend, and he didn’t want to tell me, but I can be persuasive. Turns out they went back and checked some astronomical instruments that look for those things. There was a burst just before the impact. It was in Morse Code. They had to process it a lot before the message came out.”

  He stopped and looked down at his hands.

  “Okay, I’ll ask,” Evangeline said. “What was the message? Who did it?”

  “The message was ‘Death to.’”

  We waited. Slowly, realization dawned on me.

  “That’s it? Death to?”

  “You probably ought to put three dots after it, or maybe a dash, whatever you do when somebody is cut off. He got out two words, and then he crashed.”

  I DON’T KNOW how the others spent that night, but I kept turning it over and over in my mind. A cosmic joke. Proof that God has a sense of humor, though a pretty rough one.

  Well, we always knew that. Read the Old Testament.

  Travis told us he had made a stab at figuring out what group might have been behind it all. It was almost impossible. Something like eight hundred large starships had gone out over the years, only a few dozen had yet returned. He started by elimi
nating the seven octants of space where the ship did not come from. It had arrived from south of the sun, from the solar southwest, but that had been a popular area for adventurers, it had a lot of stars with known planets.

  He had it down to about ninety possibles. That is, ships that had gone out in that direction. Among these were three groups Travis thought might have decided on a destructive suicide pact.

  One was a Brazilian millennialist cult supported by a billionaire who had left their town deep in the Amazon, whose theology included the idea that the Earth would soon be destroyed by “The Hammer of God,” and who thought that would be a good thing. Had they decided to be the Hammer? It didn’t seem to jibe with the words “Death to . . .” which sounded more angry than jubilant, but who knows?

  There was a group of Muslim extremists from Indonesia. Muslims were always going to be suspect in a thing like that since 9/11/2001, and they had a long history of suicide attacks.

  Then there were the anti-Federal extremists from the American Northwest who had often said things like the only thing wrong with that guy who blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City last century was that he hadn’t used a nuke, and he hadn’t set it off at the U.S. Supreme Court. They had taken off in that direction with the announced intention of forming their own perfect, all-white, all-Christian utopia and returning someday to restore America to its original glory, which I presume would have included black slavery.

  Take your pick.

  And there was always the “small cabal” theory, of a group taking over a spaceship and turning it into an instrument of mass murder. Maybe even one person could have done it, your classic “lone gunman.”

  That’s the theory I was leaning toward. The only good thing I could see in the whole awful mess was that no one would ever know his name.

  21

  THE NEXT DAY we all met again to try to hash out our two big problems:1. Where to go, and

  2. What to do when we got there.