by John Varley
You see where I’m going with this? Though there was no way to validate the notion, either something happened while I was in the bubble, or my subconscious thought something should have happened, and was supplying these weird dreams to fill in the blank.
Since there is no time in these dreams, nothing can be said to actually happen, if you can understand that. Heck, I’m the one having the dreams, and I don’t really understand it, but let me keep trying.
I am a presence. I know who I am, but I can’t say that I have an actual name. I see nothing, I hear nothing, I feel nothing. I suppose it’s like being in an isolation tank, except even in a tank I’d expect to have thoughts, mental images, retinal flashes of light, the sensation of warm water on my skin. There’s none of that. This doesn’t disturb me, as the mere awareness of identity is enough. Perhaps it’s the ultimate Zen state. I don’t know. In fact, I know nothing, because … knowledge requires a place to put it, whether it’s on a bookshelf or in electronic storage, and there is no place here.
See? Even the word “here” implies a place. There is no here here.
It is all strangely relaxing. Well, why shouldn’t it be? To be unrelaxed, you have to be engaged in something. Dealing with a problem, and there are no problems here. Stimulated, either for good or bad, and there is no source of stimulation, nothing to stimulate, no use for the verbs stimulate, deal, or engage. No use for any of the thousands of verbs I used to know, nor the thousands of nouns and modifiers. This place simply is, apparently outside of space and time, with no further detail available than that.
But gradually … and that’s not right, because it implies a process, and a state of before and after, but it’s the best way I can put it … I realize I’m not alone. I’ve always known this, because every moment is the same as any other. But there are presences here that are somehow different from my presence. I don’t see them, I don’t feel them, I don’t hear them, but they are there. They are aware of me.
Then time begins. It’s only a nanosecond, but it’s the first tick of time there has ever been, anywhere (and before this there was no “anywhere” for time to exist in), and we all savor it. And now that there is time, there can be other things. So … in the beginning there was the Word …
… and the Word was, “Hello.”
Or maybe it was God. And maybe they’re the same thing.
ALL RIGHT. THE easy part is over. That’s right, that had been the easy part. From now on it gets grim.
Mom, Dad, Mike, and Travis gathered in my room, where I was practicing sitting up in a comfy chair instead of in bed. Aunt Elizabeth was there, too, with her machines, probably ready to sedate me if the stuff I was about to hear was too upsetting. The agreement was that we’d dispense with the year-by-year and just tell the whole story of the seven years I was still missing.
Mike pulled a chair up in front of me and hopped onto it. This was a new Mike, to me, dead serious, no playfulness about him at all.
“We talked it over,” he said, “and I asked to be sort of the moderator of this little show.”
Again, a new Mike. Being what he was, he had changed very little. When I left he was smaller than a normal ten-year-old child, and he was still about the same size, so he didn’t look any older, except around the eyes. And, of course, in body language and demeanor. He was clearly an adult, but my mind was having a devil of a time accepting that. It kept superimposing the happy-go-lucky, sweet little kid I knew over this tiny little man, and the cognitive dissonance was disconcerting.
“I suggested we find out if there are burning questions you want an answer to right now, before we get into the whole story. Some answers wouldn’t make sense unless you did know the whole story, naturally, but I can only try.” He lifted an eyebrow, and I got right to the first one.
“Who’s dead?” I asked.
“Aside from the people on Europa, who you already know about, your uncle Anthony died two years ago.”
I remembered him from the last time I saw him, at Gran’s farewell party. Chubby, stuffing himself at the free buffet, a big, affable, sweet-natured failure at everything he ever tried, a man impossible to dislike unless he owed you money. Which he did, to most of the family older than me.
“How did he die?”
“He and your cousin Luther were working at a rescue mission somewhere in Africa and were killed during a refugee riot.”
Luther, Luther, Luther. I could barely place the face, one of the sandrats at Gran’s farewell, running around, screaming and crying, maybe about twelve. I hadn’t known any of them well. Hadn’t known Anthony all that well, for that matter.
Refugee riots in Africa? Obviously that was part of the bigger picture, which I had long ago figured out was not good.
“Gran?” I said.
“Still in suspension. Everyone’s been far too busy to work much on the sort of medical problem she has. There’s been a lot more progress on the sort of medical problem you had.”
Meaning violent accidents, or maybe not accidents. All those Navy uniforms, Karma still in the service, the lack of lights or tourists under the Mile-High. It was sounding more and more like war.
Just for a moment, I didn’t want to hear any more. Don’t bring me no bad news! The military wife claps her hands over her ears when she sees the solemn officer approaching her house. If she doesn’t hear the awful news, then it didn’t happen, or she could pretend it didn’t happen for a little longer. Let’s rewind this tape, all the way back to before the trip to Taliesen, and let’s take a different path to a different future. Like when Mom and Dad saw the first video of the Big Wave, like when people saw the Twin Towers falling in New York, like when an even earlier generation heard the news about Pearl Harbor on the radio … you knew that a moment had arrived that would forever divide your life between before it happened and after it happened.
For me, it hadn’t happened yet. Grumpy had erupted, sure, I’d been there, I’d seen it as close as anyone had. But the aftermath hadn’t arrived yet, for me, and like a little child I didn’t want it to arrive. Make it not happened, Mommy! Because I knew that the flight of Grumpy and the others was one of those turning points, and I knew the news was bad. Probably very bad.
The only place you can escape history is inside a stopper bubble, and I didn’t want to go back inside. Next time I was de-stasized, if ever, my family might not be there, and right now, they were all I had to cling to.
But I put it off just a minute longer.
“Jubal?” I asked.
“Only Travis knows that,” Mike said, and looked at Travis, who spread his hands wordlessly.
“Still in stasis,” he said. That surprised me. Jubal’s genius had saved Mars once, and I had figured Travis would have him out and working on this problem, whatever it was.
So I sighed, and gestured to Mike.
“Let’s hear it,” I said, and settled back in my chair with Kahlua on my lap.
Mike stood up and started pacing.
“Grumpy circled the sun three times …”
… AND HEADED STRAIGHT for the Earth.
At the velocity it was moving, and with a mass of almost a trillion tons, the results would make the Big Wave seem like dropping a ball bearing into Lake Superior. The sun’s gravity would slow it some, but as it approached Earth it would speed up again. Minimum impact speed of a body falling from infinite space: twenty-five thousand miles per hour.
Earth had had about two months to prepare.
It was the most massive movement of population in human history. Coastal areas were evacuated, giant refugee camps were established at higher elevations. It was summer in the northern hemisphere, so the most populous areas of the planet were at least temperate. But there were not enough tents, globally, to handle a fraction of the refugees.
Civil strife, everywhere, but worse in some places than in others. People who were already living in places like Denver and Geneva and central India and Africa and Asia were not always happy to see these hungry,
homeless hordes, and often there was fighting for scarce space and food and shelter. Martial law, mass killings, starvation. Half a dozen cities vanished overnight in nuclear explosions.
Heroic examples of people working together for the common good, craven examples of people at their worst, stealing and raping and murdering.
The only people who were happy about it were the Rapturists, who had definitely settled on Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael as the real names of Grumpy, Doc, and Sneezy. They expected that Gabriel (Grumpy) would elevate them right out of their clothes and directly into Heaven, while the rest of us fought it out for the seven years of the Tribulation.
The Martian Republic was torn. Suddenly every Earthie who could afford it wanted to book passage to Mars, or anywhere else, most of which were Martian colonies. Some people who were already here wanted to go home to be with loved ones, but a lot more wanted to stay past their visas.
But what were we going to do? There weren’t enough ships in the entire system to transport even a tiny fraction of the people who wanted to travel, and not a thousandth of the space that would be needed to house them when they got here.
I’m proud of my country and what we did, which was, simply, everything we could, and as fairly as possible.
People already here were allowed to stay. People who wanted to go home were allowed to do that, on ships that were pretty empty Earth-bound. And at spaceports all over Earth, lotteries were conducted. We didn’t intend to fill up with only rich Earthies. Anyone who could make it to a spaceport—and we had no control over that, and the carnage on the roads and in the terminals was terrible—got a chance. If you won, you got to take your family with you … but not your friends. The lottery forms specified immediate family only. I can only imagine the heartrending scenes; I didn’t watch any of the video of that.
Ships were hot-bunked, with three people sharing each bed in eight-hour shifts. The finest luxury liners became overcrowded cattle cars, gourmet meals vanishing in favor of macaroni and rice and oatmeal.
At home, all tourism activity was suspended. Nobody was spending money on luxuries, anyway, though a lot of people wanted the casinos kept open in an eat-drink-and-be-merry spirit. No dice … so to speak. Soon families were sleeping on the craps tables. Under the craps tables, too. This came to be known as a “Martian bunk bed.”
All the hotels were rapidly converted to barracks. We jammed them in there like sardines, as many as each room could take. And there were always more, as each and every passenger ship that could be pressed into service shuttled back and forth between Earth and Mars and some of the asteroid colonies at a steady one gee of boost. Many Navy ships that had even corridor space for sleeping bags were shuttling, too. We moved almost a million people in two months.
And of course it was a drop in the bucket. Billions were left behind.
There was a very strong chance that all those billions would die. High ground or low ground, nothing was going to save them if the impact was as hard as it was expected to be. It would be an extinction event, as bad as the one that killed the dinosaurs. The sky would blacken and stay that way for many years. The ground would open and swallow entire cities, whether coastal or mountainous.
It was going to be Hell on Earth for everybody but the Rapturists.
WHILE GOVERNMENTS AND other bodies were concerning themselves primarily with rescue operations, the military branches of these entities were not entirely inactive.
As soon as Grumpy’s course became clear, two possible means of salvation presented themselves, and both of them had to be put into action as soon as possible if they were to have any effect.
Plan A: Divert it. Tall order.
Plan B: Blow it up. The idea was that smaller chunks might cause less damage, some would miss the Earth entirely, and the rest might be easier to divert.
There were voices raised, pointing out that attacking these things, in view of their incredible power, might not be a wise idea. What if we merely managed to piss them off? But most people with the capacity to do something about it decided that you could hardly be more pissed off than to aim a trillion-ton object at an inhabited planet.
I’m not a big advocate of shooting if there’s anything else you can do, but I had to agree, retrospectively. Why not try it?
So they went with Plan B first, simply because they could do it at once and Plan A took some preparation.
One of the largest weapons in somebody’s nuclear arsenal was put aboard a rocket and accelerated at a constant five hundred gees right at the heart of Grumpy, and everybody crossed their fingers.
Result: nothing. It didn’t go off. The Curse of Taliesen strikes again. Probably. I mean no nuke had ever failed before, when used in anger.
Two days later there was no farting around. A salvo of one hundred nuclear-tipped missiles was fired. All Earth and all Mars and all the outer planets watched hopefully as they approached and began to go off.
Half of them failed, but half did detonate, and it was horribly beautiful. Tiny little pinpricks of dazzling light sparkled all around Grumpy, then expanded into perfect white spheres, and slowly faded away. Where they had been, the surface of the giant crystal glowed a lovely red.
Billions cheered.
Then the data came in. Grumpy had not deviated one foot. We could have hit it with thousands more, but what would be the point?
By then Plan A was just about ready. A dozen very large bubble engines had been constructed and loaded onto our largest cargo ships. The Martian Navy hurried them into position—if you’re going to try to divert an object heading for you, the sooner you start pushing it the more course change you’ll get for every erg of energy expended. They were equipped to attach themselves to one side of Grumpy and begin firing. If they could fire long enough and hard enough, it just might work.
The drone engines approached within a mile, half a mile, one hundred feet … and touched the surface.
And vanished. One moment they were there, the next moment they were gone. Slow-motion cameras revealed they simply sank into the surface as if it were Jell-O.
The next six went out with volunteer human pilots. By then it was iffy as to whether they’d do any good even if they worked, as Grumpy was a lot nearer the Earth now and closing fast.
But they tried. They tried … and now there is a statue of those four men and two women in the Plaza just outside my window.
Because they reached Grumpy, and vanished. If there were living beings inside those goddam crystals, they really were boojums.
So it was time for Plan C.
THE MARTIAN NAVY’S ultimate weapon is the Broussard Bubble, in both its varieties. The Republic of Mars owns all the bubble-making facilities, which is what prevented our takeover when my parents were kids and the Martian War was fought. We’d have gotten our butts kicked—we did get our butts kicked, with hardly a shot fired from our side; the fireworks were all from competing factions squabbling over who got to conquer us—but for Mom and Dad and Uncle Travis and Uncle Jubal going to Earth and threatening to squeeze the whole nasty planet down to the size of a pea if they didn’t cut it out!
They did, and most Martians agree that the only reason we aren’t paying taxes to some Earth country and the Earthies haven’t taken the bubble technology from us is that they’re still afraid of being squeezed.
There aren’t many of the bubble factories because, incredible as it seems, only Uncle Jubal knows how to make them. Only Jubal can make them, I guess I should say. He tried to teach others how it’s done because being the only human who can do it made his life intolerable, but it doesn’t seem to be a knack that can be taught. So every installation that can make the machines that make the bubbles was built by Uncle Jubal.
How many of them there are is classified far above my petty rating. It’s a state secret, jealously guarded, and the only non-Martian citizen who knows is Travis, who isn’t a citizen of anything, now that the United States is fragmented.
Most of the bubble machines
are on Mars. A few are closely guarded and supervised—by the Martian Navy—on Earth. But an unknown number are aboard our Black Fleet, which hovers tens of billions of miles to the north or south of the sun—no one knows which, or if it’s both—like the deep-sea nuclear subs of Earth nations, perpetually combat-ready, able to deliver an object lesson or vengeance if we are attacked again.
The Republic doesn’t like using these ships for anything other than a threatening presence. We don’t even like them to be seen; they are based on Eris, which never gets as close to the sun as Pluto’s maximum distance, and around which the Navy maintains a billion-mile spherical exclusion zone.
But this was clearly a special case. One of the black ships was called in, with the intention of surrounding Grumpy with a stopper bubble and taking it far, far away, before it could hit the Earth.
Long story short: It didn’t work.
Why didn’t it work? I get tired of saying this, but … no one knows. It’s especially frustrating because no one knows why the bubble generators work at all. I’m not even sure if Uncle Jubal knows, since he’s not able to explain it. Maybe it’s just something he does with his mind, like a … a psychic, or something, though I don’t believe in psychics or poltergeists or levitation or any of that woo-woo crap. But the fact remains, Uncle Jubal can build a bubble machine and it works. Anyone can be shown how to operate it. Someone else can build a bubble machine exactly the same way … and it just sits there. As far as I know they are the only machines ever built that can’t be duplicated, that only work for one man.
Poor man. Jubal Broussard, doomed to be the goose that laid the silver egg.
This time, the bubble generator itself just sat there. They can operate from a great distance—classified, but it’s many millions of miles, and may even be infinity—but no matter how far away they tried it, nothing happened. No squeezer bubbles, no stopper bubbles. Of course they tested the machines, and found they had no trouble forming either sort of bubble, even at several million miles away. But not if it was surrounding Grumpy, or any part of him. They tried it on Doc, too, with the same result.