John Varley - Red Lightning

by Red Lightning [lit]

  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...

  RAY: So what did you ask for?

  TRAVIS: The main thing was privacy, like I said... first I got them to stop examining his mail, ingoing and outgoing... a small thing, but it was a major concession for them... who knows what he might have been sending out?

  RAY: He sent me a lot of stuff.

  TRAVIS: Like what?

  RAY: Just little gadgets. I'll show them to you.

  TRAVIS: See?... a lot of people were opposed to it because of just that... who knows what a "little gadget" Jubal made might do?... but I was able to convince them that if Jubal made anything important, I'd be the first one to let everybody know because I'm the one who would get rich on it... anything Jubal makes belongs to us... to US, god­dam it, not to anybody's government, not to the UN, not to the Power Company... I told them we're not fucking socialists, and if they didn't like it

  KELLY: You'd take your Tinkertoys and go home.

  MANNY: You'd take your Tinkertoys and go home.

  GRANDMA: You'd take your Tinkertoys and go home.

  RAY: What's a Tinkertoy?

  ELIZABETH: What's a Tinkertoy?

  The next thing Travis asked for was that Jubal's labs should be off-limits to observation, like his bedroom and bathroom. Then a lot of years went by.

  It is the security dilemma, according to Travis. You start out alert, whether it's just a shift guarding something or someone, or a career of guarding. But when you've been guarding something for over twenty years and nothing has happened... well, you start to assume that nothing will happen.

  That helped Jubal's escape. Another thing that helped was even more basic. He had never shown the slightest interest in escaping. They figured he bought his "protected guest" status, that if he wanted to leave, he'd ask.

  But when he decided to split, for reasons Travis either didn't know or hadn't revealed to us yet, he didn't ask anybody. He figured out how to do it himself.

  He built himself a spaceship and blasted right out of his laboratory.

  TRAVIS: I've made friends over the years... people have retired and moved into nice houses on what I paid them... Nobody I know on the Falklands knows the whole story, but some of them knew pieces... It seems Jubal was real upset when the wave hit... kept saying it was his fault... he tried to call me, tried to call you, Ray, but the phones were out... then he quieted down and seemed to accept his situation... what he was really doing was figuring out how to bust out of the joint... Jubal being Jubal, he seems to have taken the direct approach... he built the spaceship right there in his lab, single-handed... he must have built it strong, because he blasted right through the roof when he took off...

  KELLY: Is he okay? Do they know that?

  TRAVIS: They can't know... but the spaceship worked... it tore out of there at five gees... by the time they could mount a pursuit it was almost beyond radar range, heading Solar south...

  MANNY: South? There's nothing down there!

  TRAVIS: Part of the escape plan, apparently...

  We call ourselves spacefarers, and we've been to all eight or twelve planets (depending on who is defining what a planet is) and all the major asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, and all the moons worth visiting, and have even tracked down and landed on thirty or forty Centaurs, which are large bodies found between the orbits of Jupiter and Neptune... but we've only touched down on a few dozen of the comets in the Kuiper Belt, and as for the postulated trillion or so long-period comets in the Oort Cloud, we still don't even know within a hundred billion just how many are out there.

  Space is vast. We only travel in a tiny slice of it. Forget about galactic clusters 14 bil­lion light years away, forget about even our near galactic neighbors. Don't even think about stars on the other side of our own galaxy, or even in the next spiral arm over. In fact, aside from the exploratory ships that have gone out toward stars within a thirty-light-year radius of our sun, we don't even know what's to be found within half a light-year of us.

  And even there, except for a few scientific expeditions, we know only the plane of space where all the planets lie, what we call the ecliptic. A million miles above the Solar South Pole there is... nothing. No rocks, no planets, no human presence at all. Ten million miles, same deal. Keep going, and the next thing you'll hit will be another star system. There's just no reason to go there.

  Bring it in even closer. In the space around the Earth, the plane of the ecliptic where both the Earth and the moon spend all their time, space is fairly crowded. Near-Earth space is swarming... but only out to about a thousand miles. Ninety-nine percent of all orbital activity is equa
torial. GPS, weather, and photographic satellites are in polar orbits, but all those benefit from being close in. Go out twenty thousand miles above either pole, and you'll find practically nothing man-made, and nothing at all that's natural. The geo­synchronous circle, twenty-two thousand miles above the equator, is another swarming point, thousands of satellites, but still plenty of room for more. There are multiple habi­tats at the Lagrange points, before and after the moon in its orbit. And that's about it.

  Head to the north or the south, and you're in very empty space. No one would expect a spaceship to go there. Why would it? It's like some nasty Earthie once said about Mars: There's no there there!

  TRAVIS: The only stuff that's prepared to accelerate like that is military, and that's mostly on Earth, in close-Earth orbit, or on the moon... A few interceptors gave chase, I think, but it was fifteen, twenty minutes before they scrambled... By then Jubal was already out of reach and... when they lost him on radar he was still accelerating, still going in a straight line... bottom line, there's just too much space out there to search... so... take your pick.

  ELIZABETH: Pick from what?

  TRAVIS: Worst case, the ship came apart... best case, he shut it down himself and he's coasting, he figures to get well out of range before he decelerates... how long he could wait would depend on how much air and water and food he brought along.........

  GRANDMA: Okay, break this long silence. You look like you've thought of a third possibility, Travis.

  TRAVIS: Yeah... maybe he just intends to... keep going...

  15

  We had several other meetings in the safe room, but basically, that was all we learned. Jubal had busted out, and nobody, not even Travis, knew where he was.

  There was one huge problem with the idea of Jubal leaving the Falklands in a space­ship, though.

  Jubal doesn't fly.

  Not on spaceships, not on airplanes. When they took him to the Falklands, he went on a military ship. In fact. Jubal's list of phobias could probably be used as a reference for a diagnostic manual. Of the most common ones about the only ones he misses are arachno­phobia and herpetophobia. Jubal likes all animals except people. He doesn't like heights, or small spaces, or crowds, or cities, or strangers. Basically, what he likes are solitude in the outdoors, preferably a swamp or river or lake; boats; inventing things; his family, and my family.

  We were all having a hard time imagining him getting into the sort of small spaceship he could build secretly in his lab, much less taking off in it. We tossed around other ideas, but none of them made any sense. Stowing away on a supply boat? Getting on it would have been impossible in the first place, and he would have been missed in twenty-four hours, and how far could a ship go in that time?

  Submarine? No way it could sneak into those protected waters. No way he could build one, launch it, and get far enough away to not get recaptured. Besides, a submarine is claustrophobic.

  Disguise? Pretend to be someone else? Don't make me laugh.

  Travis came up with the only other possible explanation, and it wouldn't have made sense for anyone but Jubal.

  TRAVIS: Maybe he invented a teleporter and beamed himself up to join Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock.

  RAY: Who's Captain Kirk?

  Things gradually got back to normal. It's amazing how quickly you sort of adapt to living in a police state.

  Not that we didn't resent it. Nobody likes to see troops in black uniforms with giant guns posted at every intersection. Once we knew for sure that they had orders not to shoot unless physically attacked, it became fashionable to spit toward their boots every time you walked past one. At the end of a shift you didn't want to walk too near them. Slip­pery.

  Taunting was popular, too. Wise guys outdid each other coming up with insults, chants, nasty signs. Groups gathered to insult them. Mooning was popular and, since most of them were males and no Martian woman would be caught dead keeping company with them, not even the prostitutes, groups of high school girls liked to get together and pull up their shirts or drop their pants and challenge their manhood.

  Funny, we'd never had a demonstration before they came, and now we had three or four of them every day. Most of them didn't amount to much more than "Earthies Go Home!" but there were more thoughtful people who had come to see the invasion as a political opportunity.

  The word most people were using was "participation." Martians wanted more say in our destiny. Up to then, most people thought of "Martian destiny" as making as much money as possible. Down deep, most of us still thought of ourselves as Earthies. The invasion started changing that.

  Only a few things happened worth mentioning during the next month. Travis told us the real reason the Power Company was so upset about losing Jubal, and we had our second and third invasions.

  It was starting to look like they were lining up out there to invade us. "All nation-states, corporations, power-mad billionaires, and disgruntled liberation groups wishing to invade Mars please take a number and wait your turn," as a popular comedian put it.

  The point of the joke was that we didn't know who the second and third waves of invaders were. We still didn't have much of an idea who our occupiers were, though theories abounded, and most people agreed it was an extragovernmental coalition of corporations.

  If who was in dispute, why was even more problematic, except to members of my family and the Redmonds, who couldn't talk. There were rumors that Jubal was dead, vigorously denied by all concerned and backed up by some excellent videoshopped news stories that showed a smiling Jubal working happily in his lab and talking to some visi­tors, casually referring to various current events. Anyone who knew Jubal knew in an instant that it was bullshit – it took an event the size of the tsunami to get Jubal's attention at all – but nobody but my family and the staff in the Falklands really knew Jubal, so they got away with it.

  It's on Mars. Who cares? We got problems of our own.

  Evangeline and I just happened to have a front-row seat for the second invasion. Well, I guess we did for the first one, too, but it's not the one I would have picked, seeing as how we almost got killed.

  We had been coming out onto the roof of the Red Thunder in the evenings. We'd sit together, watch the sunset. Martian sunsets are pretty, if you like pink. No, we didn't get it on, nobody's figured out how to do that in a pressure suit. It was night, you understand, and basically, Martians don't go out at night unless it's an emergency. What you do if you have to go out after dark is put on an insulated oversuit, stay in groups of three or more, and get back inside as soon as you can. And still you get cold.

  What we'd do those summer evenings was sit on electric pads, lean back against our airpacks, hold hands, and watch the stars come out. Watch Phobos move across the sky, see the blazing exhausts of ships blasting for Earth or the outer planets. Watch for mete­orites burning up. Sometimes we talked about anything and everything under the sun, sometimes we hardly said anything. We'd stay out there until our feet and hands started getting cold, then we'd hurry inside and down to my room and jump under the covers until we'd generated some heat.

  Dad and Mom didn't know where we went those evenings. It wasn't permitted, strictly speaking, and it was just a wee bit dangerous, though we were always within ten seconds of the pressurized and heated freight elevator. Sometimes you just wanted to get away from people, you know?

  Then one night, all ten of the black ships that had surrounded the city for just over a month blasted into the air.

  "Whoa!" Evangeline breathed, and we both sat up straighter. We were almost blinded by the light of their bubble-drive exhausts, bright enough to partially polarize our face­plates. "What's going on?"

  "You got me."

  The black saucer-shaped ships were soon invisible against the black sky, but the exhausts were still there, and dwindling fast.

  "They must be pulling five gees," she said. "What's the hurry?"

  "Beats me. Maybe they just got tired of pushing people around and decided to
go home." She was looking at me, trying to decide if I was kidding. She laughed.

  "Yeah, right. Well, good riddance." She pointed a middle finger skyward and let out a whoop. "Take that, you fuckers! And never come back!"

  That was the moment that one of the black ships exploded. We stared at it, stunned, a huge white flower like a fireworks burst. We could actually, see bits of it twisting and turning, trailing fire.

  Evangeline was still standing there, finger extended like she didn't quite know what to do with it.

  "Don't ever point that thing at me, okay?" I told her.

  "That's not funny."

  It was miles and miles away by then. We watched until most of the wreckage had fallen beyond the horizon. For the next fifteen minutes we watched the first space battle in history develop over our heads.

  Being Martians, and having spent quite a few nights out there on the roof, we thought we knew spaceships. These ships were behaving like ships in a bad sci-fi movie from last century, twisting, deking, slowing, and accelerating. It was an actual dogfight. At the speeds they were moving, it must have been brutal for the crews.

  "Those things were purpose-built," I told Evangeline at one point.

  "What do you mean?"

  "Your normal ship has just the one drive, at the back. It's built to take acceleration stresses from just one direction. There's little attitude jets, but they couldn't put a ship into a turn in vacuum like we're seeing here. For that, they must have side drives, forward-facing drives, all of them highly maneuverable. These things are to normal spaceships like a fighter jet is to the Sovereign."

  They were armed like fighters, too. We'd see one of them streaking along, a thin line of expanding light, and suddenly there would be a series of flashes and the tinier lines of air-to-air missiles being launched. Actually, space-to-space, I guess, though I'd never heard the term. Aside from a few satellite shoot-downs, the military guys had never been allowed to play their deadly games in space because of international treaties.