by John Varley
Dad grinned. “Maybe even because of it. You know Travis, he doesn’t like to be told what he can’t do. But your grandma helped steer him to it. She knows how to handle Travis, always has. By the time she got through with him he was so outraged I thought he’d explode. He told us he’d bring you back, whether to hug or to bury.”
I made a note to myself to cut Grandma Kelly some slack the next time she got on my nerves.
“It took him most of a year to outfit his ship for the job,” Dad said.
“The Second Amendment?”
He smiled. “Yeah, the good old Second Amendment.”
“What does that mean, exactly? I never asked.”
“The Second Amendment to the old United States Constitution was the one about the right to keep and bear arms. When the split came, East and Western America got rid of it. Heartland America still has it, but they call it the First Amendment now, since they repealed the original First.”
“Probably the only thing Travis likes about the Heartlanders,” Mom said, with a wink. She had what I thought was a nostalgic gleam in her eye. The Second Amendment was the ship she and Dad and Travis and Jubal were on when they forced the most powerful people and institutions on Earth to back down and stop their wars over Mars and bubble tech.
“Wasn’t it dangerous?” I asked. “Did the Navy shoot at him?”
“We didn’t think it was likely they would. We figured that if we came up dry, we’d be arrested when we got back to Mars. But if we pulled you and the others out, they wouldn’t dare touch us. And we might even get up some momentum for others to go back and dig out the people at the Taliesen bases.”
It had taken a moment for it to register, but I eventually heard it.
“You said ‘we.’ You went with Travis, Dad?”
Nobody said anything, but a lot of significant looks were exchanged. I sighed.
“Mike? You, too?”
“Guilty,” he said.
“But you’re in the Navy.”
“Drafted, like everybody else. Grandma pulled a few strings … as in ‘had a word with Fleet Admiral Redmond,’ and got me a furlough. So nobody knows I went along, and it’s probably best if you don’t noise that around.”
“My brother is like everyone else in the Navy,” Mom said. “He wants to get those shipmates out of there, but he has to follow orders. He’s hoping what happened with you will change public opinion, and he can go back with a fleet to go down and get the others. And it wouldn’t be right if your brother wasn’t along with the rest of us. So he turned a blind eye, and guaranteed the blockade ships wouldn’t shoot. It wasn’t too hard to get the captains to go along with it.”
“‘The rest of us?’ ” I said. “All right, come clean. Who all went to Europa with my crazy uncle Travis?”
“Well, there was your crazy grandma Kelly and granddaddy Manny,” Dad said.
“And your crazy mom and dad,” Mike added.
“And your aunt Elizabeth,” Mom said, “who nobody ever called crazy. And your grand-père and grand-mère, and your aunt Amelia and all your cousins who weren’t deployed elsewhere, since most of them are in the Navy or the Army now.” She shrugged. “Pretty much the whole family.”
“That’s what families are for,” Mike said, quietly.
Well, I lost it. I just plain lost it. When they had me calmed down, Mike took up the tale.
“It wasn’t as hard as you might be thinking,” he said. “Of course, we couldn’t have done it without Travis’s ship, and his money.”
“Money doesn’t mean anything to Travis when he has something he needs to do,” Dad said.
“No, that’s Uncle Travis, all right,” Mike said. “But once we got past the blockade, I never felt we were in any danger.”
“Did you have any malfunctions?”
“A few. But we dealt with them. Anyway, finding you was easy, with radar, since we knew where to look from the satellite photos. You were a mile down. We could count the black bubbles on the radar, so we knew it was worth going down. Then it was just a matter of melting our way down there, grappling with the wreckage, and hoisting it to the surface. We brought the whole bus back to Mars and started opening the bubbles … and there you have it. You were in the third one we opened.”
Something told me it wasn’t that simple, but it was just another saga I’d missed. I decided I’d wait and get the whole story from the family at some later date.
DURING MY SOLITARY day, a technician came in with portable machines and installed the cybers they’d removed during my treatment. Not the same stuff, naturally. Moore’s Law was still working, more or less, meaning that the stuff they gave me was about thirty times better than what I’d had in terms of speed and capacity, and one-thirtieth the size of the equipment I’d had ten years before. Cheaper, too.
It used to be an all-day ordeal. They implanted various dinguses in the flesh around your ear. I got my first true cyber when I was six. It bulged a bit, but of course everybody else’s did, too, so nobody cared. They fixed that in the next generation, but you still had to wear an induction charger on your head a few hours every week to keep the batteries up to speed.
The cybers I’d been wearing when I got stopped were powered by body heat, which was nice. The new stuff didn’t even require an incision, just a very big needle (and a topical anesthetic). They jabbed it into my temporal area and injected some cyberstuff that congealed and then organized itself into the different things it needed to be: CPU, memory, transmitter, all that stuff. I’m not a cyberhead, I never tweak the stuff, couldn’t even tell you what most of it is or what it does. I never jabber to others about yottabytes and zettaflops. I just maintain the firewall and continuously download the latest virus protection and leave it at that. I store important things off-site in a totally secure, hackproof facility that you have to physically go to if your data ever needs to be restored, which has happened only once in my life.
When that was done, the tech propped my eyelids open—the most uncomfortable part of the whole process—and I looked into a weird optical machine and was told to stare at the white dot. It flashed and I felt a tiny breeze against my eyes. I was stone blind for about ten seconds, and that was it. Trillions of pixels had been blasted into my corneas, reducing my visual acuity by .5 percent—so I was told—and light-gathering capacity by 1 percent. Not enough to notice.
The tech spent ten minutes calibrating everything, having me move around so the cybers could read my nervous system, generating tones in my ears and test pictures in my eyes, making sure all the plugs were plugged in and screws tightened down, ran a quick diagnostic, and voilà! I was ready to surf. The old familiar clock was down there in the southeast corner of my peripheral vision, and all the other toolbars had their icons ready to be called up into my central vision as needed.
I logged on to my server.
Hello, Podkayne. We’ve missed you here at Marsdotnet. You have 4,785,607 messages. Shall I sort them into text and visual?
Holy … I was tempted to just send them all to the garbage. Your mailbox can get pretty full in ten years. I hadn’t realized how full.
But then I did a quick analysis, and of course hardly anybody was messaging me when I was frozen on Europa. Not even after I got famous because of the music. All that mail had arrived in slightly over a month, since Travis and my family rescued me. That was more than a hundred thousand messages per day.
Holy mother of god.
THE NEXT DAY I graduated to crutches. I put in my time on the treadmill and the stair machine and managed ten minutes of upper body exercises. I was still weak as a kitten, and starting to hurt more, rather than less. The thing about nanosurgery is, you don’t look all that bad when they’re done with you, no Frankenstein scars or even excessive bruising. But there’s still a lot of damage on the cellular level, especially in the muscles, and the process of cleanup takes a few weeks, during which your pee smells funny and you are prone to diarrhea.
Still, I knew I had to wor
k through the pain. I didn’t take any dope, other than a few hits of some really powerful Phobos Red for attacks of nausea.
I went to the window once, this time making sure my makeup was on right and my hair was presentable. The crowd down there had actually grown. I had no idea how I was going to deal with that. I waved at them, and they went wild. Weird, and a little scary, but I smiled and waved like Little Miss Mars.
My first visitors of the day were Uncle Bill and Aunt Amelia. He looked haggard, older than his years. I’d learned that he was in charge of what they were calling the Home Fleet, which was dedicated to the defense of Mars. There were two other fleets, Inner and Outer, the first being by far the largest, since it was responsible for Earth and its environs. Those three reported only to the Admiral of the Navy and the Minister of War.
Aunt Amelia looked … sad. I’d expected her to look awful, the loss of a child being, according to the shrinks, the very worst thing that can happen to a person. I remembered that Luther’s and Uncle Tony’s deaths had been five years ago now. They’d had time to adjust, as much as you ever can to something like that.
“I have some news, and a request,” the admiral said after the usual inanities.
“Name it,” I said, aware of how much I owed this man.
“First the news. You’ve been promoted to the rank of commander, and you’re going to be awarded the Navy Cross for bravery.”
I must have been getting used to having stuff like that dropped on my head. I hardly broke a sweat. Commander was two full pay grades above my current rank. I’d wear three bars and a gold star. But…
“Navy Cross? I didn’t do anything.”
“The review board thinks differently.” He held up a hand. “I had nothing to do with this, the promotion or the medal. You were nominated by Senator Wu, and the board studied the tapes, and concluded your actions were in the best traditions of the Navy.”
The best traditions of the Navy. I felt my heart swell up a bit. I am not now, nor will I ever be, a “Navy” girl. And frankly, the Navy is young enough that its best traditions aren’t exactly a roll of heroism comparable to the British Army or the United States Marine Corps. But it still felt good, though undeserved.
“As a commander in the MADDMN you won’t be in the military chain of command,” he went on. “It’s a dirtside rank, but it’s the equivalent of captain.”
“Well, thanks, Uncle Bill.”
“Like I said, don’t thank me. I had nothing to do with it. Now the request.” He looked embarrassed and glanced at his wife. “Normally the promotion would be just a matter of a small ceremony in an admiral’s office, and the medal would be given out in the Red House by the president. There would be press, of course, but no big hype.”
He was finding it difficult to go on, and suddenly it clicked for me.
“You want a big ceremony,” I said.
Aunt Amelia looked grateful.
“The thing is, Podkayne, your uncle is under some scrutiny for his role in your rescue. The Navy is behind him solidly, but the—”
“The politicians want his hide,” I guessed.
“That’s about the size of it. Public opinion is still iffy on whether or not going to Europa was a good idea, and a majority still is against any more recovery missions. Your uncle—”
“I’ll speak for myself, dear,” Uncle Bill said, with a grim smile. “If I had it to do all over again, I’d do exactly what I did. But there’s some question of contravention of orders, and hearings are scheduled. Your heroism and … frankly, your celebrity, are about all I’ve got going for me to get this off my back. In other circumstances I’d take the demotion quietly and do the best I could at my new job, but the woman in line to take my place as commander of the Home Fleet is … how can I put it …”
“Incompetent?” Amelia suggested. “Totally political? Earth-born, and of suspicious loyalty?”
“Well, I wouldn’t go that far, but—”
I held up my hand, palm forward.
“I don’t care,” I said. “Whatever you need, I’m up for it. Family, right?”
They both looked relieved. Truth: I wasn’t thrilled by the idea of stepping out in public just yet—all those people outside, those millions of messages, it was all a bit overwhelming. But screw that. They needed me, and I wouldn’t be sitting there listening to them if Uncle Bill hadn’t bent some rules to the breaking point. What else did I need to know?
SO FOUR DAYS later I ventured out of the Red Thunder for the first time.
There were half a dozen Navy guards in the hallway as I crutched my way along, and each stood at attention and saluted me as I walked past. I couldn’t return their salutes, but I tried to smile and nod at everybody. It seemed an excessive honor guard, but I learned later they’d been outside all the time I’d been in residence. There was no one else on the floor, which was remarkable in refugee-crowded Thunder City. The doors at the end of the corridor were retinal-print secured. At least a dozen reporters and twice that many determined fans had been arrested in various schemes to get in and get the first interview with me, or to get my autograph, or give me flowers … or possibly to give me the gift Mark what’s-his-name gave John Lennon.
Yes, sir, my life had changed. I now needed bodyguards. What was next? A staff? An entourage?
We went out through the kitchen, which was deserted, and the back door, where an armored and black-windowed bus was waiting for us. I was hustled inside and we took off down the street.
WE DROVE THROUGH Thunder City, preceded and trailed by police on cycles with flashing blue lights, just like an Earthie ambassador or head of state on her way to a conference. There was no traffic, which was no surprise, as vehicles like this bus were normally used only for the disabled.
It was a very different Thunder City from the one I’d left, not that long ago, and ten years ago.
There was trash. Not a lot of it, but it was a shock, anyway. All the parks had prefab dwellings in them, and little bolt-together shacks lined the malls, too. The shops that had sold luxury goods to the tourists were either shuttered or had been converted to the sale or dispensation of more ordinary merchandise.
It was a cleaner, less packed, high-tech Calcutta.
“These are the earliest refugees,” Uncle Bill said, “the ones who’ve been here the longest. Most of them lost hope of ever going home a long time ago. Now they’re losing hope of ever getting citizenship.”
I saw lots of children of all colors playing, with Oriental, Polynesian, and Hispanic faces predominant. These were Grumpy’s victims. They looked clean and well nourished. The adults didn’t look so good. Most of them were sitting, doing not much of anything, and they had a defeated look to them.
“Many of these people were desperately poor back on Earth,” Uncle Bill said. “They didn’t have jobs where they came from, and they have no qualifications for jobs on Mars. Unemployment is eighty percent. Materially, they’re better off here, and they still have fragments of their cultures to cling to. Most of them have better medical care than they did where they came from. But a lot of them die, and a lot commit suicide.”
What were we supposed to do? Welcome all of the Earth’s teeming billions? “Give me your tired, your poor, your tempest-tossed.” Your unskilled, your desperate, your illiterate, your criminal, your psychotic. Emma Lazarus never got to that part of the deal. A huge number of Earthies still lived the life of a peasant … and those were the lucky ones, who at least had land to work. Even more in Africa, Asia, and South America had nothing, already displaced by climate change, interminable wars, sold out by government corruption and disinterest. Some were the tenth generation of hopelessness, and some had nothing to cling to but the irrationalities of their religions, which told them to suffer in silence or to go out and slay the infidel.
In the “developed” nations things often weren’t much better, having raised generations of consumers with the morals of a pit viper. We didn’t ask for any of them, but here they were.
Behind the stage hung the biggest Martian flag I’d ever seen.
It all got off to a rousing start with a speech by the president of Mars, a rotund little Earth-born I’d met several times over dinner at our place. He seemed a nice enough guy, and Grandma Kelly said his politics weren’t completely awful. He took the opportunity to deliver a rousing speech urging his fellow Martians to stay the course, be patient, stand up for your fellow man, even if he was an ignorant Earthie. Stuff like that.
Behind him was more brass than you’d see at a John Philip Sousa concert, basically all the admirals who were not actually out with the various fleets.
I’ll give him this: With the ‘cast going out live, not having to worry about sound bites, he still kept it short, which is remarkable for a politician. In five minutes he was starting in on me, my “heroic” exploits, da dum da dum da dum. Behind him, the Martian flag was lifted and some tape Slomo had shot was shown. I looked away. I wasn’t ready to see that stuff yet.
Finally, with a flourish …
“Ladies and gentlemen, I give you … Podkayne.”
At the last minute I decided to put the crutches aside. Taking it carefully, I stepped out onto the stage and shuffled over to the podium, amid riotous applause, trying not to squint in the spotlights. I look like a prune when I squint. I made it to the president’s side, and snapped off a salute. He took my hand in both of his, that officeholder’s handshake that makes you want to account for your jewelry, and maybe your fingers, afterward. Then it was time to smile for the cameras.