Rolling Thunder

by John Varley

  By the way, diary … I got laid. Last performance, I could have had my pick of half a dozen acceptable prospects. Like, if I was a guy and they were girls, sort of thing, I’d have been showered in panties with phone numbers written on them. Podkayne has groupies! Hurray!

  Last few numbers I started making eye contact with a guy in the front row, about my height, Mars-born (I can almost always tell), curly blond hair, slight build, and the sweetest green eyes. And long, narrow hands that looked gentle. By the last encore I felt a connection had been made, if not between our hearts, then at least between certain lower, moister parts. So I bought him a drink, and invited myself up to see his room (he was shy; please don’t let him be gay!). Once there he took over, though. He was a great kisser, and the hands were all I had hoped they would be. I told him I wasn’t a sexual athlete, that I preferred gentleness and slow rhythms, and then proceeded to batter him within an inch of his life. Where did that come from? Too much enforced abstinence, I guess. He didn’t complain, and the second time was more Podkayne and less Nadia the Nymphomaniac. Still, we did about everything two humans without major fetishes can do without rubber hoses and a jar of molasses. As is my custom, dear diary, I won’t go into details, preferring to relive them in total privacy, even from you. I’m sure they won’t fade away, and play-by-plays are for tennis.

  After the fourth and seemingly final set, not even my most ardent attentions could get his little soldier to stand at attention again, though it was fun to try. Can you feel anything when I do this? Flip, flop. (Actually, the GI in question was far from a PFC, though a bit short of a major general. Call him a lieutenant colonel. I don’t require the top brass, don’t even like them, but have to admit to a prejudice against enlisted men.)

  With nothing else to do, and unable to sleep for a while—he didn’t roll over and start to snore, not even after what I put him through—we talked a bit. His name was Michigan. First name, no need for last ones here, not unless we meet again. And yes, diary, I knew that before I fucked him. What do you think I am? Don’t answer that, and I don’t care what you think, anyway. I’m a healthy 19-year-old, almost old enough to drink liquor in Western America, and it is the twenty-first century.

  The name was dumped on him because his parents came from Grand Rapids, in East America. I told him I liked it, which was true; people with names like Podkayne and Michigan should glory in it and give thanks we’re not just another Tiffany or Brandon.

  He was eager to get back home, and he was short, only 3 months to go on his mandatory hitch. He’d been posted here the whole time, with only two leaves back home, and a few furloughs to Ganymede and Cal-listo. He hadn’t been impressed by either place.

  But he was reasonably happy. He was able to be a full-time student since there was so little to do out here, carrying a full load at universities as diverse as Oxford, UCLA, and the University of Beijing. I thought about telling him that my father is an historian, but held back. Once I let something like that out he might be wanting to meet Dad, and I didn’t know him well enough to invite him home. After all, I said Sinope was a post for fuckups, didn’t I? I’m sure they’re not all losers, but he might be one. As you well know, diary, I’ve got a tendency to pick out the loser in any group of ten decent-looking guys. Remember Quinn?

  So I held back, and we exchanged numbers and said we’d look each other up when we both got back home. Only he might not be home very long, as he was planning to go to Earth to meet and take some classes from some professors in China, which reminded him, since he was still not sleepy, that he was behind on the 3 hours of exercise he had to do every day if he was to have any hope of surviving Chinese gravity in a few months, so he floated out of bed and started in on those.

  I watched him for a while, naked and muscular. Gosh, I do love sweat on a man, as long as it’s fresh. Makes me want to sweat, too, so I suggested an alternative exercise that would burn up almost as much as he was doing, and we could do it together, and he said if I could get the lieutenant colonel interested while he continued working out it was fine with him, and I did, without even touching either of them, just exercising the parts that guys like to look at most, which I learned to do just shortly after I attained those parts and realized their power.

  And with our usual modesty we will break off the narrative here, dear diary, except to note it was the most gratifying exercise session I can recall.

  Tuesday, June 24

  Discovery Day in Newfoundland and Labrador. Fête Nationale in Quebec. Fisherman’s Day in Zaire. Inti Raymi in Peru. Manila Day in the Philippines. Latvian and Estonian Midsummer Festival. St. Jean’s Day. St. John the Baptist Day.

  Home!

  Yes! Europa will do for home, after a trip like that!

  Hello, Karma! Hello, Kahlua! My, but you look pretty. Stop scratching my legs, I didn’t have any choice but to abandon you.

  Hello, Swamp, and all you disreputable riparian residents! I love you all!

  Good-bye, Joey, Cassandra, and especially you, Quinn, I don’t want to see any of your ugly faces for at least a week. Practice be damned!

  The Swamp creatures love a party, and they threw a nice coming-home celebration for me. I got a bit more tiddly than I’m used to and came close to doing something I’d regret in the morning with at least three guys who’d never turned my head before. Alcohol has this amazing ability to make people more attractive. Everybody except the one who’s drinking it.

  There was dancing and singing—but not by me, even though I was asked several times. I was really serious about hanging it up for at least a few days. Can you overdo something you really love? Answer: Yes.

  But best of all, there were two things waiting that were beyond price. The best was a message from Mike, timed to be waiting for when I got back from the tour. He said he’d been listening to a few of our tracks, and that he thought they were okay … “If you like old-folks music.”

  Good try, Mike, but I know you better than that. He had listened to them all, just as he always has, multiple times. Part of our mutual nongushing pact is that we never admit we like something the other one has done, but he’s my number one fan. I know it, and he knows I know it.

  The second thing was a pass during my next furlough—which starts today!—to the highly restricted base by the Big Rock Candy Mountains. I was going to get to see what very few people, even those in the Navy, ever get to see.

  Yes!

  9

  THERE WAS A small quake as our bus neared the Alphesiboea Linea on the way to the Taliesen region of Europa. The Linea is a crack in the surface ice caused by tidal flexing as Europa is pulled this way and that by Io, Ganymede, and, most of all, by Jupiter. There’s also the fact that the rocky core of Europa, way down there under the ice and the incredibly deep sea, rotates at a slightly slower rate than the ice does. The core gradually falls behind, at the rate of one complete rotation every ten thousand years. This messes with things, too.

  Our driver stopped and waited it out. I gripped the armrests of my seat and made sure I was buckled in tight. The springs under us creaked, and the bus slued a little sideways. Then it stopped and I cautiously checked my panties: dry, thank the lord.

  We had landed just shy of the Linea and would proceed on the surface from there, because strange things happened around Taliesen and it was better to be on the ground if you had to deal with them.

  I’ll come clean. It was right there, at the start of the journey I’d so much wanted to take, that I began to wonder what the hell I was doing here.

  * * *

  LENTICULAE. WHICH IS Latin for “freckles,” a term I prefer. The Big Rock Candy Mountains. Europan jelly beans. They either contain life of a form so alien that we don’t have much of a grip on it after twenty years of cautious study, or they are the source or focus of forces we don’t yet understand and can’t even detect. The best minds of Mars and Earth had studied them intensively to the extent that they could, watched them and listened to them, and we still don’t kno
w much more than when we started: They are huge, strange things happen around them, and they sing.

  That they are huge is something that was known ever since the first Voyager and Galileo automated spacecraft flew by and photographed them in the 1970s and ‘90s.

  The strange things go way back to the days of the initial ground expeditions, and include gruesome death.

  The singing is a recent discovery.

  THEY KNEW THE freckles were emitting very powerful radio waves in what is called ELF, for Extremely Low Frequency. This band is usually described as being from three to thirty Hertz—that’s Hertz, singular, not megahertz or gigahertz!—but some of the signals coming from the freckles were even lower than that. It took a while to find that out because, after all, who’s listening down that low in the electromagnetic spectrum? And once the waves were detected, they were pretty much dismissed as having no realistic use, because …

  Well, let Admiral Autrey explain it:

  “These frequencies are used by the United States Navy and others with large submarine fleets,” the admiral told us. “Most radio waves won’t penetrate very much water or soil. When the subs are running deep, there is no way to contact them except by ELF.”

  Admiral James Autrey was a thin man with an upper-class British accent and a twinkle in his blue eyes. He was tall for an Earthie, which he had to be since he was at least sixty. I was maybe two inches shorter than him.

  Me and the others who made up the guest party at Taliesen Base had been shown into his office immediately upon arrival. Others in our party included Wu Zheng Han, a Martian senator, and his daughter Mei-Ling, better known as “Monet.” There was Yahya Al-Wakil, a manufacturing millionaire, and his son—known as Dekko—from Ceres City, and Mandela Baruti, the ambassador from the Southern African Confederation.

  Most of all there was the host of a popular talk show and his five-person crew and entourage, there to tape a show about the nonclassified aspects of the only ETL project that the public was likely to have any interest in. (Mars has its own Extraterrestrial Life, of course, but no one but exobiologists was very interested in the interstitial lichenous organisms and anaerobes that represent the last survivors of the glory days of Mars, over a billion years ago.) Europan “life” was big, mysterious, and awesome to look at … and still debatable, as scientists tried to come up with a definition of life that would include both Terran biota and these massive crystals.

  “The problems of ELF,” Admiral Autrey went on, “are twofold. First, it takes a great deal of power and a very large antenna to send a detectable signal. The U.S. Navy built one such antenna in the state of Michigan that was thirty miles long. It ate vast amounts of power, but it would transmit around the world, and deep into the oceans.

  “The bigger problem is bandwidth. With ELF, it’s almost nonexistent. We’re used to transmission rates of trillions of bits per second. An ELF system takes several minutes to send one character. Extremely inefficient.”

  I had been surprised when I realized that the admiral himself was not only going to welcome us to his base, but actually give us the orientation lecture. Of course, we were all Important People in one way or another … insert modest cough here … but it seemed out of character. Most admirals are too self-important for stuff like that.

  I had a private moment with Admiral Autrey later—a little too private—and he admitted he did it because he was bored. “Base takes care of itself, mostly,” he said. “My job’s mostly paperwork and riding herd on a lot of boffins with big egos. Way out of my field, frankly.” At this point I gently eased his hand off my butt. Again. All hands was our Admiral Autrey, something I’d suspected during his initial talk when he’d consistently made eye contact mostly with me and the senator’s daughter, who was in her early twenties and almost as pretty as me.

  Actually, it was only fleeting eye contact, as a large part of his lecture was delivered directly to our breasts. And actually again, she might have been a tad prettier than me. But I didn’t hold it against her after she looked at me, made a face, rolled her eyes, and made a jack-off motion with her fist. Amen, sister!

  “So the rate is slow,” the admiral went on, “but information can be transferred. And after our computers had been monitoring the ELF waves for about five years, they informed us that patterns were emerging.”

  “Doesn’t prove anything,” said the talk-show host. Oh, very well, I’ll name him. It was Cosmo Wills, known to his admirers as simply “Cosmo,” and to the rest of us as “that loudmouthed asshole.” I considered him an irresponsible rabble-rouser—Earth-born but somehow a Martian citizen (everybody assumes money changed hands), whose political hobbyhorses all center around the Martian Republic being dissolved and becoming a part of the Greater Earth Coalition, that great jabbering society that exists mainly to pry the secret of the bubble drive out of its Martian conservators. He wants us to become just another province of Earth.

  For the last three years there’s been an annual referendum to revoke Cosmo’s citizenship, but he’s always squeaked by in spite of the votes of me and all my family. (Unfortunately, our votes count no more than anybody else’s. Grandma Kelly really ought to do something about that.) (Just kidding.) As the constitution currently exists—but keep checking back, it could change!—it takes a two-thirds vote to kick someone off the planet.

  Free speech? Sure, we have it. You’re free to criticize our way of life all you want to … from someplace else.

  “Of course not,” said the admiral. “Patterns exist in nature independent of life. Crystals themselves are patterns.”

  “But what about the stuff moving around in them?” Cosmo wanted to know. “Surely that debate was ended long ago.”

  “A popular misconception,” the admiral replied, putting the contemptuous spin on the word “popular” that the British can do so much better than anyone else. Cosmo didn’t have much of a reputation for accuracy. “Things can be seen to move in the mountains. They move in patterns that, so far, have defied our attempts to assign meaning to them. Rivers move, as do glaciers. Ocean currents move in interesting patterns, but so far as we know, they are not alive.”

  “So you’re saying you don’t think they’re alive?”

  “I said nothing of the sort. I myself am convinced they are alive, in some way we don’t yet understand. But there are cogent arguments on the other side. As you might imagine, it is the subject of a lively debate around here. Remember, not long ago the huge majority of astrophysicists subscribed to the Big Bang theory of cosmic origins. Recent discoveries concerning dark energy have cast some doubt on that scenario.”

  “Some people still believe the Earth is flat, too,” Cosmo sneered.

  “Many of them in your audience, I shouldn’t wonder, Mr. Wills,” the admiral said, which was one of the reasons I only moved his hand off my ass later instead of slapping him. I liked him, horndog though he was. Besides, I don’t expect men to always be able to resist my endearing young charms.

  “Actually, now that I think back,” I piped up, “last time I was there it looked pretty flat to me.” I knew that “Mr. Wills” business had riled the little idiot. He wants everyone to call him by his brand name, Cosmo. It’s copyrighted.

  “Maybe you should go back and research it, Cosmo,” said Monet, the senator’s daughter. “It might take years. Decades, even.”

  This dig went right over his head. I gave the girl a thumbs-up.

  “What I’m interested in is a lot more serious,” Cosmo said, seriously. Seriousness is also a trademark of his; he seems to have no sense of humor.

  “You’re speaking of the statistical anomalies,” Admiral Autrey said.

  “If that’s what you want to call death, disability, and destruction, yes I am,” Cosmo said. Even I had to admit he had a point.

  YOU APPROACH TALIESEN on the ground because spaceships fall out of the sky if they try to fly there. Not all of them, of course, but we’ve been using flying buses on Mars and other planets for a long tim
e now, and they’re very safe.

  Not around Taliesen. At first you attribute the accident rate to random chance. No connection could be found, no common failing that had caused the first four bus crashes, years ago. In each case it was the failure of a small, rather insignificant part, often a piece of electronics or programming, that led to a chain of failures that resulted in catastrophe. It all seemed so reasonable. The engineers shook their heads and chalked it up to sheer bad luck. Flights continued to Taliesen because the freckles were the most fascinating objects in the solar system, and everybody knew that whoever figured them out would be in the history books forever.

  Then another three buses crashed. Finally, the engineers listened to what the actuaries had been telling them all along, one of the basic principles of life, though you won’t find it in any science book.

  Once is bad luck.

  Twice is coincidence.

  Three times is enemy action.

  Seven times … well, nobody knew what was going on, but it was clear that something was out of the ordinary. All flights were grounded for a radius of one hundred miles, and that interdiction remains in force to this day. There were no more crashes …

  … but a high percentage of buses coming and going broke down on the ground. The closer you got to the crystal mountains, the more malfunctions of all kinds happened. Often it was a part that seldom, if ever, had failed before. Computer programs developed glitches. Okay, computer programs always develop glitches, it’s in their nature, but these were too frequent and too odd to be just chance mishaps. Enemy action? Nobody knew. Nobody knows to this day. But you have to act as if it is.

  There was something else about the place, something much more disturbing. Machines were not the only things that broke down in Taliesen. People did, too.

  Of the first team to actually go to one of the big crystal mountains, many years ago now, one suffered a stroke two days after arrival, and another had a heart attack the day after returning to Forward Base. Of the seven people in the first primitive exploratory mission, which lasted thirty days, five were dead within the year, all from “natural causes.” The trouble was, most of them were too damn young to die of what killed them, and none had shown any warning signs, nor did they have any family history. They just dropped dead.