by John Varley
They built a habitat for him. Some people called it the Jubal Zoo, but of course people couldn’t go look at him. It was a circular mile of a damn good imitation of Louisiana swamp-land. There was a lake, and bayous, and little creeks. Whole huge cypress trees were imported and planted, and the waters were stocked with alligators and birds and fish. The alligators had to be taken out; they were a bit too frisky in Martian gravity. But the rest of it worked well enough. Jubal lived there in a two-room shack with a woodstove and no television.
Nobody visited him but family. Evangeline and I dropped by at least once a week, and Travis practically lived there. We’d row out in the lake and fish, and talk about things. He never complained, never talked about his feelings, but some days he didn’t say much of anything at all. All he ever asked about the outside world was when Travis was with us, and then he wanted to know how the Squeezer project was going. If it was “finished.”
Finished? I hadn’t known there was an endpoint. I figured Jubal would just keep working, and we’d all just stay on our toes. It had worked for twenty years on Earth. All that was different now was Jubal was in a new place, right?
Actually, there was a lot that was different. The despair that had driven Jubal to escape in the first place was still there, and stronger than ever. There was only one thing in the world Jubal really wanted, though he seldom talked about it.
He wanted to go home.
The Jubal-Dome was a nice try, but no cigar. The fact was, he hated Mars. He hated pretty much every place except Louisiana. He’d not even been that wild about living in Florida, but it was acceptable. Mars was definitely not.
ONE DAY ABOUT a year after our adventures Travis summoned Evangeline and me to the dome, and the four of us went out fishing. We both noticed the change in Jubal. He was laughing and talking. We relived old times, and he told a lot of his childish jokes. If you squinted, you could believe you were actually far up a bayou. The bass were practically leaping into the boat.
When the artificial sun set—just a light on a track, but amazingly bright—crickets and frogs chirped as we rowed back to Jubal’s dock. Travis filleted and skinned the fish, which we fried up in hot oil and corn bread batter, and stuffed ourselves with fish, okra, hush puppies, and a fiery Cajun sauce.
After the meal, Jubal grew increasingly nervous. Evangeline and I kept exchanging glances. We knew something was up, but we had no idea what. At last Jubal cleared his throat and spoke.
“I wanted y’all here so’s I could say good-bye,” he said, looking at his shoes.
“Where are you going, Jubal?”
He smiled at us.
“On a big adventure, me. I’m goin’ to the future.”
We both waited for the punch line.
“Course, we all goin’ to the future, one second at a time. I’m just gonna skip a lot of ’em.”
“You’re going to skip . . .” I got my first inkling of what he had in mind.
“I done all I need to do here,” he went on. “Travis can keep things going, and you young folks got lots to do. Me, I’m not happy here, no.”
“We knew that, Jubal,” Evangeline said. “I wish there was—”
“There ain’t nothing, cher. ’Less you can lift this burden off my back.” He pointed to his head, to the knowledge he held in there that was so unimportant to him and so vitally important to so many powerful people.
“Ain’t no big deal,” he said, with a shrug. “Nobody don’t get exactly what they want in this life, no. I thought . . . I thought for a while of committin’ a real big sin.”
“He wanted to kill himself,” Travis said, quietly. “Jubal wanted you two to know about what we decided to do instead. In fact, you’re part of it.”
SO THAT’S HOW we ended up in the living room of Jubal’s cabin that night. It was homey, with a comfortable couch, lace curtains in the windows. The room was lit with kerosene lamps. There were old rugs on the floor.
In the center a space had been cleared for a single chair that was hung in the middle of a ball made of thick metal struts. There were springs on the wires, as if whoever was sitting in the chair in the middle expected there might be some violent motion in his future.
His future. Never had anyone’s future been more up for grabs. Jubal was truly going on an adventure.
“’Member, Travis,” he said, dithering around, trying to put it off. “None of y’all are s’posed to open me up, ’less I can go home.”
Open me up. Those words brought home the enormity of what Jubal was proposing to do.
“That’s not what I agreed to,” Travis said. “And it’s not what you asked them to agree to. I told you, I’d turn off the bubble under only two conditions. One, we all agree that it’s safe for you to go back home, without anyone bothering you.”
Yeah, right, I thought. Like that’s going to happen.
“The other condition is . . . we need you, cher. You agreed, if something real bad comes up, we can open the bubble.”
Jubal wouldn’t look at Travis, but at last he sighed and nodded.
“’Kay. But make sure it’s big important.”
We all embraced Jubal, one at a time. I didn’t know how to feel. Jubal wanted this. He hated his life so much that he intended to skip as many years as necessary to reach a better one. He was going to get into that contraption in the middle of the room, and he was going to switch on the stopper bubble . . . and there would be nothing left of him but a black hole in space.
How long? Many years, surely. As for an emergency . . . I could think of plenty of things that might come up that would lead Travis to “open him up.” So maybe it wouldn’t be a long time before we saw him again.
On the other hand, we might never see him again.
He climbed into the metal sphere, and Travis helped him strap in. Good thinking. Who could tell what might be waiting for him in a time that, to him, would be no time at all. If it was me, I’d have wanted to be sitting there with a gun in my hand, but that wasn’t Jubal’s way. I know he expected to be uncorked, if he ever was, and meet a smiling circle of his friends, a bit older but still his friends, welcoming him back.
If he was ever opened at all, and he was prepared to take that risk.
He was sweating. He held a rosary in one hand and the little device that would generate the bubble in the other and he made eye contact with us, one at a time. Then he started mumbling.
“Hail Mary, Full of Grace, The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of death.”
He squeezed his eyes shut tight.
“Hail Mary, Full of Grace, The Lor
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Some events in this book were obviously inspired by the atrocities of September 11, 2001. Over a couple of years I speculated what would happen if a large object, traveling at a very high velocity, crashed into the Earth. Not an asteroid or a comet; that’s been done many times, in movies and books. A deliberate hit.
By December of 2004 I was a good ways into writing about it. I had the object striking in the Indian Ocean and creating a huge tsunami. I was hampered in my writing by the lack of images of what such a wave would look like. The historical accounts of tsunami I found included few photographs. I imagined it arriving as a breaking wave, of the sort so memorably depicted in the movie Deep Impact. Not quite that big, but big enough to do a lot of damage. By Christmas I was well into the description. I had the tsunami devastating Indonesia, Thailand, Sri Lanka, India, and Bangladesh.
Then the day after Christmas I woke to see the images I had been looking for all over the television news. To say I was disturbed is putting it mildly. I got out the maps, and discovered that the earthquake epicenter was less than five hundred miles from the point I had selected for the impact of my fictional large, light-speed object.
I was so spooked I considered abandoning the whole idea. I was afraid people might accuse me of cashing i
n on the human misery I was seeing day after day, as the magnitude of the disaster became clear. I have never been one to claim that science fiction writers predict anything. We’re not even all that good at predicting technological advances, a few notable exceptions aside. No writer I know claims any special insight into the future. To have been so amazingly, horribly right about something like this was not what I had in mind when I started writing.
But it was still a good idea. I thought it over, and decided that I couldn’t subject the good people of Indonesia, etc., to another tsunami, not even in fiction. So I moved the point of impact, which changed the shape of the story considerably. I believe it made it a better story because it brought it closer to home. To my home, the USA.
I know how unlikely this all sounds, but there it is. You can believe it or not, it’s up to you. I can only say that it happened.
As I write this note, in September of 2005, Hurricane Katrina has just swept through the Gulf Coast, and once again I am stunned. I had postulated a breakdown in civil order, but the event I imagined dwarfs Katrina. I had no idea that the scenes I described some months before would occur in such a (comparatively) small disaster, and as quickly as it did. I guess I should have known better. It is always perilous to underestimate the inefficiency of government, particularly one that is in the process of being made small enough to be “strangled in a bathtub.”
Today, September 11, 2005, I began writing the last chapter of this book.
So you are holding a book that was inspired by one horror, and the writing of it was bookended by two others. I don’t believe in omens, and if I did I wouldn’t know how to interpret this one. I just thought you might like to know.
John Varley
Oceano, Cahleefornia
September 11, 2005
Visit John Varley
at www.varley.net
