by John Varley
But Cinderella turns into a pumpkin, or breaks her glass slippers and cuts her feet to ribbons, or something like that. I can’t remember, but I know it wasn’t pretty.
I had avoided the worst of the pumpkin carving, though there were still a lot of people who wanted a piece of me. None of my closetful of new shoes were made of glass, though there was one sexy plexi see-through number with two-inch heels …
Never mind. Here the story takes a sharp turn toward Dante’s Inferno. A descent straight into Hell. But only as an observer, like Dante. And I didn’t even make it anywhere near the Ninth Circle.
THE SHIP THAT took me and my crew to Earth was the Guardian of Peace, and it didn’t bear much resemblance to any Navy ship I’d ever seen ten years ago. It was classed a cruiser, and we traveled with an escort of three destroyers, all built five years ago: Utopia, Elysium, and Isidis. Those smaller ships were purpose-built to be deadly, armed to the teeth with everything short of bubble generators. Before Grumpy, the Navy hadn’t been designed for ground combat, and we were still catching up. Most of our ships had been like the Guardian, intended to carry troops and smaller, more agile defending vehicles. Any hostilities, it had been assumed, would happen in space.
But now most Navy activities happened on the ground, on Earth, and the natives could be very hostile. So the Guardian was ugly, retrofitted with slapdash armor welded all over her once-lovely hull. It would stop small-arms fire, 50-caliber machine-gun rounds, grenades, and suffer only minimal damage from small ground-to-air missiles. Anything incoming bigger than that, in the air or on the ground, was supposed to be handled by her destroyer escort.
It made her heavy. Added weight was not a big problem with a bubble drive; you just increased the thrust and she could be as fleet as she ever was, but not nearly so nimble. The old bitch’s skin (and I’m not being disrespectful, that’s what the crew called her, with affection) was heavier than her frame had been designed for. When maneuvering, or on landing and takeoff, she creaked and groaned and popped like an arthritic knee joint and often sprung a small leak or two. This didn’t alarm the crew, so I didn’t let it worry me. Much.
We orbited for a while at ten thousand miles, and I spent some time at a port looking down on the Earth.
Spotted around the globe in all the oceans there were now permanent storms concealing the interlopers from Europa. The storms were as small—small!—as a thousand miles across, to as big as fifteen hundred miles. Wind speeds near the centers frequently reached three hundred miles per hour.
They’d begun to form when Leviathan arrived. You couldn’t help thinking that the obsidian monolith was acting as a coordinator for all this activity. They had been sitting there for almost two years now, each with a Europan crystal mountain at the center.
God, how I hated them.
The seven megastorms spun off lesser hurricanes at the rate of several per month, and most of those rated Category 3. Many were Category 5, with sustained winds of over 150 miles per hour. Those daughter storms themselves spawned tornadoes and, of course, brought torrential rains with them.
The storms were lifting prodigious amounts of water into the atmosphere, to the point that on most of my orbits I only got glimpses of land through the clouds. So much water was rising in the heat sources around the crystals that sea levels, rising for more than fifty years, had receded to levels not seen since the second decade of this century. Much of Florida was emerging from its watery grave. Not that it did anybody any good. Florida had been hit again by the tsunamis generated by the crystals landing in the Atlantic, and now endured hurricane hits at the rate of one every three months. There was no longer a “hurricane season.” They could arrive anytime.
We passed over Africa. The countries bordering the Mediterranean were unaffected by the waves, but no place was immune to the storms and rains. Crops often drowned in the fields. The Sahara was speckled with new lakes. Everything to the south of the former desert was no-man’s-land, ungoverned, lawless, starving, or dead. No one went there anymore, not even the United Nations relief agencies, not even Martians trying to keep the peace. Bleeding Africa was widely seen to be terminal.
Arabia and the Middle East. With one of the ship’s excellent telescopes I could pick out the ghost cities and palaces of the old Emirates and the House of Saud. Down there were palaces vast and luxurious almost beyond imagination, looted and empty now, abandoned since the years when oil suddenly became almost valueless. Down there were three of the ten highest skyscrapers on Earth, man-made islands, all being slowly buried in the wind-whipped sand, now turning to mud in the monsoons that had begun falling, bringing more rain to the area in a week than it usually saw in a decade.
I didn’t train the telescope to the north even once. Too many melted-glass, radioactive scars, too many weeping sores on the planet from Cairo to New Delhi.
India. Mumbai and Calcutta, flattened and now washing away. Indonesia, with its remaining population trying to scratch out a living at the higher elevations. The Indian Ocean was brown with topsoil.
Down south, Australia, one of the least affected places on Earth. The shifting ocean currents and wind patterns and storms had largely spared it. The outback was getting enough rain to grow crops. For the first year the Aussies gave away a lot of food. Now, with the unpredictable winds, hailstorms, and deluges, there was no telling if a harvest would be bountiful or nonexistent, and they had sealed themselves off and were trying to be self-sufficient, with their navy patrolling the Timor Sea, the Arafura Sea, the Torres Strait, and the Coral Sea, turning back refugee boats from Southeast Asia, sinking those that kept coming. Not that there were many boats left after the waves, but human ingenuity can always make new ones.
The vast blue Pacific. The Philippines devastated, all the tiny islands and atolls scattered across Polynesia and Melanesia and Micronesia all empty. Bare, uninhabited.
South America … I had no Virgil to guide me, only the Net, which was erratic on Earth these days. The Andes created a sheltering wall from the storms that swept the Pacific, and the Amazon Basin, which had been drying out, was green again.
Europe was drowning in rain.
Some of the Rapturists were finally reinterpreting their Bibles. Maybe they weren’t going to be swept bodily into Heaven, but this sure as Jesus looked like some sort of Apocalypse. I couldn’t argue with them about that.
ALL THE SPACE on the Guardian that wasn’t taken up with living quarters and our portable stage and things like that was full of food. Mostly it was rice and flour, vegetable oil, corn meal, soy protein. But there were some luxuries like frozen vegetables and canned fruit, and most of all, candy. The Navy had found that there was no morale raiser for a hungry band of refugees quite as good as candy. We had tons of the tooth-rotting stuff. On Earth, sugar was now more valuable than gold.
It was all grown in the vast, relatively new hydroponic farms deep underground on Mars, Deimos, Phobos, and some asteroids. I hadn’t visited them, but I took a virtual tour, and was astonished. They stretched for miles, lit by bubble-generated electricity. With a bubble generator you could do some serious tunneling in bedrock at incredible speed. Just squeeze the rock down to little silver globes. It was warmer down there, too—some of the farms were as deep as ten miles. There was a huge labor force of refugees, most of them eager for something to do. It wasn’t enough to feed a fraction of the Earth’s remaining population, but it fed Martians and refugees on Mars, with enough left over that every ship that left for Earth did so stuffed to the scuppers with the surplus.
I was glad we had the food, because the only other thing we had to offer was … me. And I figured that if I was on an enforced twelve-hundred-calorie-per-day diet, I’d choose a sweet or even a soyburger every time.
I was wrong. We were a smash everywhere we went.
We’d land, set up our defensive perimeters with the destroyers arrayed around the Guardian, and sweep into town like the circus train. If they had a big arena we’d set up in there. If t
hey didn’t, we’d set up our covered stage and do the show outside. About half the time, it rained, but we didn’t cancel any shows because of that. The people were used to rain. I’d look out at a sea of yellow slickers. If there was a big storm, we sometimes had to postpone, but we never canceled, we just waited for it to blow over.
I was safe and warm and dry behind my huge plexi bulletproof shield, which was also used to project special effects. I would stand there in my glitzy outfit, bathed in light, backed up by my band and towers of speakers, and look out over people huddling in the wind and rain, and listen to them roar their approval of my silly little songs. And I’d think, What am I doing here? Look at all those people in the rain and the wind and the mud, and they’re loving every minute. What must their lives be like outside this little island of glamour? In what way was this better?
I googled some of the songs of the Great Depression. For every “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime” there were ten like “Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries,” “We’re in the Money,” or “Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee.” Total fantasies, and I guess that’s what you need when your life is grim. So we gave them all the fantasy I could dish out, and ended each concert with “Jazzie’s Song.” They were on their feet every time.
Meanwhile, I retired to my dressing room for a stiff drink. Maybe two.
WE ALWAYS MADE time to visit the children in the refugee camps. I would arrive with a sack bulging with candy, and I’d talk to them and to their parents. A lot of them didn’t look so good, though no one was starving in the places I visited. Not that plenty of people weren’t starving; it just wasn’t safe to go there. Many of the children looked far too old. Hollow-eyed. They’d seen too much, lost too much. All of Earth was now a war zone, and we were losing, and nobody had the smallest idea of what to do about it.
After these visits I’d retire to my dressing room for a stiff drink. Maybe three.
WE PLAYED CHICAGO, and we played Katmandu. We played Geneva, and we played Alice Springs. We played Denver, Paris, Moscow, Yakutsk, Vientiane, Lucknow, Poona, Chongqing, Brazilia, Mexico City, Quito, La Paz, Manchester, Bloemfontein, Pretoria, Luxor, Las Vegas, Dallas, Budapest, Berlin, Bucharest, and Belgrade.
And a lot of other places. We were on the road for six months.
What was it like? Pretty much all the same.
You’re kidding, right? I hear you say. Just how is Katmandu like Manchester? Well, in the sense that I usually couldn’t see much through the rain in my armored limo, and in the sense that, everywhere I went, what I mostly saw was the inside of concert venues and the ubiquitous, sprawling refugee housing where the people fleeing the coasts now lived. There are probably Buddhist temples somewhere in Katmandu, but I never saw them. I’m sure there’s something distinctive about Manchester, too, but it was all a blur seen through a tinted window to me.
What was that like? In a word: ugly. Back when Grumpy was approaching, people evacuated coastlines and lived in tents, or simply out in the open when the tents ran out. Later they built temporary shelters from whatever was at hand, varying with the wealth of the country, mostly fiberglass (rich countries), plywood (medium-sized countries), and scrap wood, corrugated tin, and cardboard (everybody else). Years later, before the arrival of Leviathan and the beginning of the wind and rain, many people were still living in these “temporary” quarters, in their own shit. Then the storms began and blew the houses away, like the first two little pigs. People began replacing their homes with ones made of stone, brick, or concrete, whatever was available locally, like the third little pig.
The developed nations started building sturdier shelter much earlier, and when the weather hit, most people were living in poured concrete boxes that had the sole virtue of being quick and cheap to build. They were on the outskirts of every place I visited, with absolutely nothing to distinguish one project from another except the smells of food cooking and the various types of cultural squalor. It produced a sense of disorientation in me that lasted for the whole trip.
I HAD A new wardrobe that Tina helped me pick out, this time suitable for the new and only slightly improved Podkayne. I’d had to buy a lot of bras, which I’d thought I’d never have to do again. They ranged in design from spiderweb to cantilever bridge to armored gun turret, depending on the outfit. I tried on a girdle and shouted too much! I’d do like the Earth girls and just let my ass go wherever it wanted to go. Which was south.
I had fifty pairs of shoes and not one of them was comfortable in one gee. They’d all been fine at home. My feet hurt all the time, even bare, but never more than by the end of a concert spent (mostly) standing up.
Gripe, gripe, gripe. I know, I know. It could have been worse. Worse was all around me, everywhere I went. That’s why I was needing a drink or four to get to sleep at night.
But something else was happening. I was still having my … fainting spells, episodes, dreams. I got away with covering them up for a while, because I wasn’t socializing except to rehearse and to eat meals in the ship’s mess. Later, I even started bringing my food back to my cabin, and still later asking to have it delivered, the one instance of “diva” behavior I will cop to. Nobody seemed to have a problem with it. I just didn’t want to be around people. Everyone respected it, wrote it off to moodiness. We “artists” are allowed to be moody, even difficult; everybody understands.
Then in the middle of one concert—and I honestly can’t recall where we were—I passed out onstage.
It was apparently pandemonium. I, of course, don’t recall it. As usual, all I recall is that space that wasn’t space, and time that wasn’t time, and the awareness of presences all around me in directions I could not understand. There were many thousands of them, disembodied, not speaking but making their presence known in some way. Angels? Spirits of the dead? Souls in limbo? I had no idea. These spirits didn’t talk, other than to make me aware of their presence. And if I had to guess, I had the feeling that they were as clueless as I was as to where they were and what they were doing there.
As always, I came out of it peacefully in ten minutes, to find I was backstage with a battalion of medical teams hovering over me, debating what to do. Whew, just in time, I figured, before somebody decided to do exploratory surgery! I sat up, to general shock and dismay, and was pushed down again and urged to be quiet. I sat up again and tossed off the blanket that had been wrapped around me.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“I think you should take it easy,” the ship’s doctor said.
“I know what I’m doing, Doc, trust me. Now, I’ve got a show to finish.” It was one of my finer moments, I have to say. I probably should have put on a brave face, staggered just a little, maybe held the back of my hand to my brow tragically, because it was obvious from the expressions all around me that everyone present thought they were witnessing a great moment in musical entertainment, as the exhausted but scrappy Podkayne refused to let a little thing like a possible stroke get in her way. The show must go on! Nobody ever told me exactly why it must go on … but I did feel it. Those people out there had come for a show, and I’d give them one.
But the joke was that I really did feel fine. Better than before I passed out, which was always the case with these episodes.
Afterward, back in the ship, Tina knocked on my door. I knew what was coming, and had decided it was time to come clean.
“Podkayne, we’ve got to talk.”
“You’re right.”
“I’ve seen it before, I should have stayed closer to you, should have been a better friend.”
“What’s that?”
“The drinking, Pod. It’s time to admit you have a problem.”
I laughed, then stopped quickly when I saw the look on her face. I reached over and touched her hand.
“I’m sorry, I can see how you’d think that. I do drink at night, sometimes too much. But I never, never, never drink during the day, and certainly not before a performance.”
“Then what …” She suddenly lo
oked stricken. “Oh, my God. What is it, Podkayne? How bad is it?”
I shrugged. “Nobody knows, but the doctor I saw wasn’t alarmed. It’s just fainting spells, Tina, and I get them from time to time since the accident. And I’ll see the surgeon about it today.”
I did, and he examined me and pronounced me fit as a Fender. Then he sent me to the ship’s shrink, and we talked for a while.
“Stress,” she decided. “Nothing to be alarmed about, as such, but the source of the stress should be addressed.”
“That’s easy. It’s a killing schedule. I could use a rest.”
“Yes, that’s a problem,” she said. “I see a lot of it with troops on the ground, and, of course, there’s nothing I can do. I have some pills that might help. But they might affect your performance.”
“No thanks.”
Sometimes the episodes came at night, and no one but me noticed. Sometimes they came during the day, and I’d fall over like I’d been hit with a hammer, and be perfectly okay ten minutes later. What’s that all about?
I did my best to reconstruct the days since they’d started happening. It wasn’t easy, and there were big gaps when I simply couldn’t remember. But I fed all the data into the computer and the clever little rascal noticed a pattern at once. It even gave me a little graph to ponder.
The fainting spells with associated altered state of consciousness were coming three and a half days apart. That figure seemed oddly familiar.
So I did a little experiment. I knew to the second when the last one had happened. I had the concert tape, with a counter down in one corner. I made sure to be in my room with a video on me when three and a half days had passed. And sure enough, I conked out. There they were again, the floating points of light/not-light in the space/no-space and time/no-time. I sensed a feeling I can only describe as warmth from one of them. There were others, somehow far away and yet contiguous with all the rest of us, and they seemed to be angry spirits. (I don’t know what other term to use.)