John Varley - Red Lightning

by Red Lightning [lit]

  Now you could hardly find the original Hyatt, which had come within a hair of being torn down before my mother and some others led a campaign to save it as our first his­torical building. It was converted into our first, and so far only, museum. Next to it was the Red Thunder, which Dad now ran, and where I had lived for the last five years. It was still the tallest and most impressive freestanding building in Thunder City, but wouldn't be for long. I could see three new hotels in the works, all of which would be bigger.

  The city was built in an irregular line, which had grown to about seven miles. There were a lot of domes, both geodesic and inflatable, the biggest being a Bucky dome almost a mile in diameter. It was all connected by the Grand Concourse, of which an architec­tural critic had said, "It represents the apotheosis of the turn-of-the-century airport wait­ing room." Yeah, well. We can't have open-air promenades with old elm trees on Mars. So most of the trees on the concourse are concrete, with plastic leaves. It's all roofed with clear Lexan, and maybe it's tacky, and maybe it is nothing but a giant shopping mall, but it's home to me.

  The slightly zigzag line of the concourse pointed toward the Valles Marineris, five miles away. There was one hotel out there, on the edge, and I swung over the Valles as I deployed my composite fabric wings to complete my deceleration. Like the old Space Shuttle, the board wasn't capable of anything but a downward glide with those wings, but if you were good and had a head wind and maybe a thermal, you could stretch that glide pretty far. I went out over the edges of the Valles, which is just a fancy word for canyon. The Grand Canyon of Mars, so big that it would stretch from New York City to Los Angeles. You could lose whole states in some of the side canyons. I felt a little lift from the rising, thin, warm air. When I say warm, I mean a few degrees below zero. That's balmy on Mars. But I didn't linger. I banked again and soon was down to three thousand feet over my hometown.

  Other than the usual hotel construction there were three big things going on down there. Dad hated one of them, and Mom was opposed to all three. Dad was a confirmed Green and Mom was a passionate, some might even say rabid, Red.

  On Earth, a Red is a communist – and I admit I'm not too clear on just what a com­munist is since we don't seem to have any on Mars, or at least they don't call themselves that. Something about everybody sharing everything, everybody being equal. What's so bad about that? I don't know what all the fuss was about, but apparently Earthies spent most of the last century hassling over it.

  On Mars, a Red is a conservationist, usually a member of the Preservationist Party. "Keep Mars Red!" You'll see the posters everywhere you go.

  A Green on Earth is a member of one of the national ecology parties. They are against pollution, in favor of wildlife conservation and stuff like that. None of that matters a lot to a Martian Green or Red. There's pollution, but not much, and no wildlife at all. Here on the red planet, a Green is a terraformer.

  Got it? Red means leave it the way it is. Green means build more hotels, warm it up, and fill the air with oxygen.

  Myself, I'm a member of the Beer, Bang, and Rock n' Roll Party, and so is just about everybody else I know. We don't think about it much.

  So what do I think when I do think about it?

  A little of both, I guess. The Reds seem pretty stupid to me. I mean, who cares? We've been exploring Mars for over twenty years. If there was life anywhere, we would have found it by now. To my way of thinking, no life equals no ecology. Which means Mars is just a big ball of rock and ice and carbon dioxide, and who cares what somebody does to a big pile of rocks?

  Don't get Mom started on that subject, though. You've been warned.

  On the other hand, who do the Greens think they're kidding? They've got their test site running a few miles outside town and it's shooting thawed permafrost into the air at a rate that will eventually let us go outside wearing nothing but a very thick parka and take off our respirators for as much as ten minutes at a time.

  In about a hundred thousand years.

  I could see the plant sitting out there by itself, surrounded by a security fence to keep Red protesters out. Of course, they plan to build thousands of the things, much bigger. But even the most optimistic numbers I've seen won't turn Mars into an approximation of an Earth environment until long after I'm dead. And that environment would be like what you'd find at ten thousand feet over the North Pole.

  Again: Who cares?

  The other part of the Green philosophy is building stuff.

  Even Dad has started to worry about that part of the Green point of view. Not the Grand Canal, he likes that part just fine. That's the second big new thing you see from the air. What they're doing is, they're digging a ditch from Thunder City to Olympus Mons. One day in a few years they plan to sell rides to the Olympus ski runs on big sleds, jet-powered iceboats, instead of flying people there. You can put restaurants on big iceboats, and you can't on small passenger rockets. They envision a leisurely two-day trip, extract­ing your last dime in the casino. It's sort of a pseudoretro thing. Mars never had canals, but wouldn't it have been swell if it had? In about three years we'll have one.

  We already had part of it. The first fifteen miles were complete, almost half a mile wide, straight as a stick, full of water and frozen solid. It continued inside to meet the Grand Concourse, where it was actual warm water suitable for swimming, lined with exotic plastic "Martian" plants and architecture from a 1930s science fiction magazine cover. It was already very popular.

  Then there were the Martels, and for once Mom and Dad agreed on something. I could see them sprawling out to the north, into the less desirable real estate beyond the city, like a bad case of acne with multicolored pimples. Dad would give anything to pop them.

  The big travel companies finally realized there is a great hunger for off-Earth travel among the middle classes who can't afford the Red Thunder, and who find Luna too black, too underground, and too boring. A few years back somebody built the first of what have come to be called Martels, just glorified tents, really. You can have them up and running in a week.

  And there goes the neighborhood.

  Sure, they look sort of okay now, from the ground, with none of them more than three years old. Your typical Martel room has a queen-sized bed and a dresser and a stereo and a little curtained area where you can shower and brush your teeth and not much else. Sort of like Boy Scout camp, only you don't have to work for merit badges in suit maintenance and knot-tying. All they are is triple-insulated domes of heavy-duty plastic held up by air pressure and crossed fingers, mass-produced in Ghana or Ecuador and shipped out here by the thousands to sprout on the red dirt like psychedelic mushrooms – they come in twenty-four loud color combinations – whose main purpose seems to be to make Mom hiss and spit every time she sees them.

  They're all freestanding units, like teepees for Martian Indians, which some Earth motels actually used to be – teepees, I mean – like I've seen in Dad's collection of post­cards of old motels. Their one luxury is a big triple-paned Lucite picture window offering a great view of red dirt, in the calm season, or of red dust when it blows, which is fre­quently. Oh, yeah, and a view of pink sky when it's calm. When it's blowing you lose even the pink sky, since during a good howler visibility is reduced to about a centimeter. And the howlers can last for... well, for a lot longer than your honeymoon vacation pack­age deal. Yeah, Mom and Dad, we spent five days and four nights on the goddam rock hall and didn't even see the goddam pink sky.

  The last thing worth mentioning in the rooms other than the tacky lithograph glued to the curving wall is a staircase leading down to your front door, which takes you to the tunnel corridor that can stretch up to half a mile of no-pile insulated carpet until it gets to the big central dome – the Vacation Fun Center! in Martel-speak – which consists of a bored clerk working his way through Marineris U., the No Lifeguard On Duty! Olympic-size pool (if there was a ten-meter freestyle event in the Olympics), and a TV/game room where your kids will spend all their time
between bouts of whining Can we go home yet? Oh, yeah, and in the mornings, the "Complimentary 'Ancient Martian' Breakfast." Until the Martels arrived none of us new Martians knew that the ancient Martians liked to start the day with weak coffee and stale muffins. In fact no one had ever discovered the slight­est trace of any ancient Martians at all, so you can't say the arrival of the Martels hasn't done some good. Who knew?

  "Yeah, but just wait until those cheap plastic toilets start to overflow," Dad says when the subject comes up. "Wait till the duct tape springs a leak some night when it's 125 below. Wait till one whole wing blows out entirely and fifty or a hundred guests try to breathe the air. In five minutes we could have a big disaster on our hands, a whole lot of frozen bodies to ship back home, and how is that going to look for the whole industry?"

  You notice Dad doesn't spend a lot of time grieving over the potentially dead Earthies. He claims to love 'em, they're his livelihood, but he doesn't expect much of them except rudeness, impossible demands, lack of common sense, and about six concussions per week from refusing to wear their helmets indoors.

  Dad knows a bit about cheap motels. He is the fourth generation in the hospitality industry in our family. My great-great-grandparents opened a little two-story drive-up just down the road from Cape Canaveral and called it the Seabreeze. About the time John Glenn took his first trip into space, they renamed it the Blast-Off Motel. My grandmother inherited it, and my dad spent all his early life there. In that time it went downhill quite a bit. It was never very fancy, but by the time Dad met Uncle Travis and Uncle Jubal, Grandma was about to go bankrupt. And then the whole Red Thunder thing happened, and it changed his life.

  Mine, too. Without that trip, I'd surely be growing up as an Earthie.

  Makes me shiver just to think about it.

  Because when all is said and done, the only place that sucks more than Mars does, is the Earth.

  2

  Reason #2 that Mars sucks: exercise.

  Mom says I shouldn't complain. If I was on Earth, she says, I'd be doing the same thing, only it would be spread out over the whole day, including the nighttime, when I was asleep. Did I say Mom can find the bright side of anything? Well, she can. I mean, she does have a point, but adding in the extra exercise I'd get just by inhaling and exhal­ing at night as a cherry on the top of the hot fudge sundae of life is exactly what I'd expect of Mom.

  Like I said before, since the chances of you being an Earthie are overwhelmingly bet­ter than the chance of you being a sensible person, I'll explain what I'm talking about.

  The fact is, more than once I've run into Earthies who got here and didn't know Mars has less gravity than the Earth does. The surface gravity of Mars is a little more than one-third of a gee. Thirty-eight percent, to be precise. A gee is the acceleration of gravity on Earth. I mass about 180 pounds. That means I weigh about 68 pounds on Mars.

  Mom's point being, if I was on Earth I'd be carrying that full 180 around all day long. Everything would be almost three times as hard to do as it is here. Walking upstairs to the top of the Red Thunder Hotel, twenty stories, would leave most people breathing hard. I thought for a long time that's one of the reasons why so many of the Earthies that come here are real, real fat. It must be tough for them at home, but here they can dance and jump and run... though it's not a pretty sight. Mars must be a delightful place to visit for fat people. I pictured travel agencies advertising for real porkers. But Mom said no, it's just that more Earthies are fat than Martians. (Well, she didn't say Earthies, she never does. Some people think it's an insulting term. She says "People from Earth," or "Earth­lings." The funny thing, an Earthie once told me they don't like being called Earthlings. She said it was creepy. Go figure.)

  So by now you're wondering what's the big problem. I'll admit, it's not immediately obvious. I see vids of people walking around on Earth, and they just look... weary. Not their faces; they may be smiling and laughing, having fun. It's their body language. They move like people who are exhausted, plodding along, tromp tromp thud thud. Gravity pulls their faces down. By the time they're thirty, they're starting to look old. Gravity kills, no question about it, and you don't have to fall off a building to know that. Just look at a fifty-year-old Earthie.

  The fact is, if you never went back to Earth – went "back home" as most of the grown-ups put it – it wouldn't be a problem. Get it now? Some people here have emi­grated for their health, they'd be dead already if they'd stayed in a one-gee field. They're never going "home," Mars is home, whether they like it or not. If they like it, they can be perfectly happy here with just the reasonable exercise that their doctors recommend, though a lot of them admit that they're homesick.

  For the rest of us, it's a choice we have to make. Some people say it's easy, no big deal, but they're wrong. I've been here since I was five. Mars is home to me. But I have some memories of Earth, I've been back four times, and for many decades to come, Earth is going to be the place. You know what I mean?

  The place. The place where it's happenin', dude, as Dad would say.

  The place where most of the interesting people are. The place where the new stuff comes from. Sure, we've got our music here, some fairly good groups. The Red Brigade had a few tunes that scored some heavy downloads – you say "Red Brigade" and most English-speaking kids on Earth would know who you're talking about – but most of them aren't much more than pressurized garage bands.

  All the other cool stuff comes from the Blue Planet, too. For a while there kids on Earth were wearing stereos that had been designed on Mars, but other than that, the things people are wearing come from where they've always come from: Los Angeles, Tokyo, St. Petersburg, Shanghai, Bombay. The cool places.

  If you're interested in history, like I am, most of it's on Earth. We've got exactly one real historic spot on Mars: the Red Thunder landing site, where they built a replica of the ship. Everybody goes there to get their picture taken. All the earlier robot landers were gathered up and put in the museum to prevent vandalism.

  So what are you going to do? It's a documented fact: Every year you stay on Mars makes it harder and harder to ever return to Earth. Well, harder to return and lead any­thing like a normal life.

  So that awful day I was doing what I have done two hours per day for most of my life. Working out. There's two places to do that. There's a gym at school, and one beneath the hotel where me and my sister, Elizabeth, and other hotel workers and their children do our sweating, in the basement, beneath the big gym with a view where the Earthie guests are encouraged to exercise and usually don't. I seldom go there. It's no fun watching a little Earthie girl press twenty pounds more than you can. I'd finished my hundred with my right arm and was up to fifty or so with my left.

  I'm not one to wear my stereo when I work out. No special reason, I just don't like to, and neither does Elizabeth. So I was on the chin bar with my eyes bare naked, as we say, when I saw something I'd only seen a couple of times before. Everybody in the gym stopped what they were doing and stared off into cyberspace.

  "Uh-oh," I said. Beside me, Elizabeth paused with her chin just over the bar and glanced at me.

  "What?"

  I gestured with my head, and we both dropped to the mat and scrambled for our gym bags. I got out my brand-new MBC V‑Crafter 2030 stereo with the cool gold-tinted bug-eye lenses and the black-and-gold Burroughs school colors tiger-stripe pattern on the wings. While I was doing that I heard a few people gasping. Somebody assassinated? A spaceship crash? A blowout? I put them on and ticked the flashing red News icon. A window opened in the middle distance, the stereo effect making it seem to hang motion­less over the running track. In the center of the window was a view of Planet Earth, hanging there like a blue agate with swirls of white.

  Only there was something wrong with it. Somebody had made a fine white scratch mark on it, straight as a jet contrail, right over the Atlantic Ocean.

  Only... the scratch extended out to the northeast, right to the edge of the wind
ow. A rocket launch?

  Then I realized that if I could see the scratch from that distance – and the window superscript said this picture was from a camera on the moon – it had to be a big scratch.

  You can't see the pyramids from the moon. You can't see the Great Wall of China, no matter what they might tell you. You can see Manhattan Island and Hawaii with a pair of good binoculars and a steady hand; I know, I've done it.

  You could have seen this scratch with your bare eyes.

  Big.

  I wasn't getting any sound. I looked around and saw several people cupping their ears, like you do when you're listening intently to your stereo. Were they not hearing anything, like I was, or just concentrating, blocking out external sounds? I smacked the side of the left wing of the set and heard static, and that irritated the sore spot on my temple, under the wing, where the little vibrator with the bio-battery (guaranteed for twenty years!) had been implanted at the store when I bought the set. Simple as an ear-piercing, they told me. For some reason I'd had a bad reaction on that side – "I swear, Ray, this is the first time this has ever happened!" – and I'd had to wear a little donut-shaped pad over there until a few days before. One more smack...

  Hah! Now it was working. No moving parts, and about the highest tech of all high tech until they figure out how to implant the whole stereo-computer display right into your head and eyeballs, and yet a good whack fixes it sure as it fixes a balky washing machine. One of life's mysteries.

  "We have calls in to the Lunar Observatory, but the system seems to be overloaded at this time," the female announcer's voice was saying. "The image you are seeing is live, from the Armstrong Observatory in the Sea of Tranquility." As she spoke that relativistic lie, the camera began a zoom in toward the white line, giving me a view that was some­where between three and twenty minutes old.