Rolling Thunder

by John Varley

  The second village was Japanese. Paper walls, enclosed gardens, a Shinto temple, cherry trees.

  In the distance I could see what looked like a riverside town built on stilts on the edge of a dry riverbed. The houses had corrugated tin roofs. Cajun? South American? Indonesian? I couldn’t tell without a closer look.

  After a while we pulled into a station that might have been built in the early part of the twentieth century. It was made of wood planks, painted yellow with white trim. Travis told us this was our destination, and we all got out and gawked some more. The curving effect was even more impressive—and disorienting—when you were standing outside. And there was another funny thing that made it even worse. The station platform was not quite level. I had thought the train listed a little to the right, too, but I couldn’t be sure. Now the tilt was obvious. Everyone around me seemed to be standing at a slight angle, as if bending into wind. It probably wasn’t more than five degrees, and it was always toward the back of the cylinder, against the direction we had been traveling.

  “Come this way, friends,” Travis said. “And watch your step. Until you get your ship legs, this tilt can trip you up.”

  I was already feeling too heavy, and the tilt didn’t help. Jubal didn’t appear to like it much, either. I held his hand and we made our way behind Travis.

  We crossed a cobblestone street and entered Anytown, U.S.A.

  That’s just what I called it, but it wasn’t, not really. It wasn’t a California town, nor would it have fit well in Heartland America. I did a search and match, and found this was a darn good replica of a New England town. Vermont, maybe, or New Hampshire.

  Travis led us along a street filled with the sounds of nail guns and power saws and the sweet smell of sawdust and the sharper smell of paint. People waved to us as we passed, but no one joined us.

  We emerged onto a green town square. There was a finished white church with a tall steeple, a hulking granite bank, two-story buildings still being erected. The square was edged by towering trees that must have been dug up entire and transplanted. I thought they might be maples, though all I knew for sure is they weren’t pines. That’s about the extent of my knowledge of trees.

  There was a cannon, probably from the American Civil War, and a flagpole with an American flag hanging limp. In the center was a bandstand draped with red, white, and blue bunting, and sitting there were two dozen men and women in bright blue coats with gold braid and white pants and shoes. The conductor on his podium tapped his music stand, and the band started playing “The Stars and Stripes Forever.”

  I leaned over to Jubal.

  “Pinch me, darling. I think I’m dreaming.”

  “Me, too, cher.”

  “You didn’t know anything about this?”

  “Not a drop, me.”

  There were chairs, and we found seats. The band finished, and we applauded, and then Travis marched up onto the bandstand. He spread his arms wide.

  “So … what do you think?”

  Nobody had anything to say. He grinned.

  “I know y’all probably think this is all pretty extravagant, maybe even silly.”

  “You’re a mind reader, Travis,” Grandma Kelly said, to general laughter, including Travis’s.

  “Well, we have a little time before y’all can start exploring. There’s going to be a picnic here in about an hour. So relax, and I’ll tell you a story.”

  TRAVIS HAD STARTED work on Rolling Thunder about twenty-five years ago. It didn’t have a name then, and no real purpose. Travis just had more money than he knew what to do with, even after all the charities he contributed to. And he was getting damn tired of being one of the most hated men alive. No matter how many good works he did, no matter how much food and medicine he donated to poor countries, he was and always would be the man who had threatened to squeeze Planet Earth down to the size of a bowling ball.

  Oh, he had his supporters. Most Martians loved him, and he could move freely there. But on Earth the ones who hated him most were the most powerful. They were the ones who had waged the war on Mars with the intent of stealing bubble technology, and were largely still anonymous since no one had ever stepped forward to claim responsibility for the two opposed waves of black military ships that had attacked us. These men owned the media and paid the wages of the people who formed public opinion, and Travis never stood a chance against them.

  “I guess most of you realize that this was meant to be a starship,” he said. “It’s patterned on the larger ones that were built in the years after we first went to Mars, when space travel became cheap and easy and not limited by weight. They built about a hundred of these things, but this one is about twice as large as the biggest one. And they set out for the stars.”

  “And never came back,” somebody pointed out.

  “Yeah, and that’s always been a problem for me.”

  No kidding. It was a big problem for anybody who thought about the Great Diaspora, possibly the biggest fizzle in human history. Of all those ships only one, the Death Star, had returned, and it had never reached the stars. It just went out far enough that it could be traveling at nearly light speed, then it crashed into the Earth, causing the Big Wave.

  Where were those ships? Not all of them planned to return, but several had carried smaller ships, manned or unmanned, whose purpose was to come back and report on what they’d found. None had done so. What had they found? Something so horrible that return was impossible, or something so wonderful that they didn’t care to return? Most people assumed it was the first, and no starships had departed for a long time now.

  “Like I said, at first it was just something to do. I figured I could live in this place in peace, inviting only friends to share it. I thought Jubal might be happy here, too. Or if I got disgusted enough with the human condition, I could just fly off into the great black yonder.”

  Progress was slow at first. The actual hollowing-out took only a week or so, but the rest was detail work. But there was no hurry. Travis hired workers, supervisors, scientists, bought cargo ships, went shopping on Earth for things like locomotives, churches, the Hope Diamond, livestock, forests, several cubic miles of Mississippi delta mud, exemplars of plant and animal species. Anything the ecologists said he’d need to keep the biome healthy and functioning, and anything that caught his fancy. Then he went into a black bubble and popped out every five years to check on the progress.

  And I’d thought he came out to visit me. Well, not really, but it was my girlish fantasy. Now I knew where he disappeared during those times he spent out of the bubble.

  Then came Grumpy and his destructive companions, and things took on a new urgency and gave him a whole new outlook.

  “What you’re looking at now, my friends, it my solution to the problem of the Europan crystals.”

  There was a momentary silence.

  “So,” somebody said, “you plan to trap ‘em in here, Travis?” There was general laughter.

  “Would if I could, nephew. I’d blow ‘em all to hell and gone if I could, but that’s been tried. I’d shrink ‘em down to the size of a BB, but that didn’t work, either.”

  “So what you gonna do?”

  “Run like hell.”

  Long silence.

  “When you said ‘solution,’ I was hoping you had figured out a way to kill the damn things,” Dad said. “I was hoping you’d figured out a way to fight them.”

  “Believe me, Ray, I tried. Jubal tried. We saved the world once, you and I and Evangeline and Jubal—mostly you, it was your idea, and Jubal, it was his brains. But I am sorry to admit that I only seem to have one world-saving in me. I can’t do it over and over; I’m not Superman.”

  “You live in the Fortress of Solitude,” I pointed out, which got a laugh. I was bursting with pride about what he’d said about Mom and Dad. How many girls had parents who faced up to the most powerful people on Earth … and won?

  “This ship is now a lifeboat,” he said. “An escape capsule. Believe m
e, my friends, it hurts me, physically. I can feel it like a pain in my gut, what these things are doing to my beloved home planet. And they’re not even fighting us! Jubal thinks they’re just doing what comes naturally to them, and we happen to be in the way. Every bone in my body wants to stand and fight them … and every ounce of my brain tells me … well, I get an image in my mind when I think about fighting them. Two dung beetles in the path of an elephant’s foot. The foot is on the way down. And one beetle says to the other one, ‘Okay, here’s my plan … ’”

  There was no laughter. We all knew too well that he was right.

  “We have fought them with everything we have. When you’re losing that badly, the only sane thing you can do is retreat and regroup.”

  “Travis,” Grandma Kelly said, “so far they’ve only hit the Earth. We’re still doing okay on Mars. Why run?”

  He winced at that word but nodded.

  “I’m not saying all humans are going to die from this. Not even on Earth, maybe. But it’s going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Frankly, I’m surprised Mars hasn’t been attacked yet. Y’all did the right thing, sheltering as many as you did, but it’s not nearly enough.”

  “What do they expect of us?” somebody asked.

  “Miracles. Everything. You’re doing well back on Mars—relatively speaking—and they’re dying by the millions. People don’t think logically in a situation like that. Somebody’s going to make a move on you, and you’re probably going to have to call in your own black ships to deal with it. It won’t be pretty, and a lot of innocent people will die along with the guilty. I don’t have any solution to that, either, but I don’t want to stick around to see it.”

  Travis sighed and spread his hands to indicate the vast interior.

  “I’ve done what I could. This place will be ready to move in about a year, less if we hurry, but I’ve just about run out of money. I don’t give a damn about that, but I’d hate to take off with less than we need.

  “What I’m offering y’all—and a bunch of others you haven’t met yet—is passage on the good ship Rolling Thunder … to the stars.”

  There was a long silence. I looked at Jubal, and we made a decision wordlessly, just by me raising my eyebrows and Jubal nodding.

  “Travis,” I said. “I’ve got money.”

  23

  ONCE UPON A time there was a Martian named Patricia Kelly Elizabeth Podkayne Strickland-Garcia-Redmond-Broussard.

  Singer. Songwriter. Ex-Navy. Ex-celebrity. And now, ex-Martian.

  Jubal and I and most of my friends and relatives are now citizens of the galaxy.

  TRAVIS WAS RIGHT, the last year wasn’t pretty.

  Nobody knew if the new Martian immigration policy started the war, or if it had been coming anyway. Shortly after we got back from the Rolling Thunder, the government and the electorate made an offer to the people still on Earth—still a billion or two—that some thought was more than fair and some thought was an outrage. Mars would now take anybody, absolutely anybody … but they had to be in a black bubble.

  The same offer was made to the huge majority already living as refugees on Mars. Go into a bubble, or go back home. We can’t feed and house you all.

  The remaining immigration offices on Earth were immediately swamped with volunteers. These were what I viewed as the rational ones, who had thought it out, weighed the alternatives, looked at their starving children, and understood that this was the only chance at survival.

  Things were much worse on Earth now, and the situation was deteriorating. Average winds in most places now exceeded sixty miles per hour, with many places suffering even worse. Rainfall was nearly constant. The only crops surviving were those being grown in the vast underground farms tunneled into bedrock, and it wasn’t enough to feed a tenth of the population. Stored food was almost gone. The people already living underground were fighting the ones remaining on the surface, as it became clear there was not going to be enough room for everyone.

  To many people like that, trapped on the surface with the winds never-ending, their children dying of starvation, the chance of going into a black bubble with a full belly (they got a week’s free room and board and medical attention before going in) didn’t look so bad.

  Then there were the irrationals. Some had been crazy all their lives, for religious reasons; others had been driven mad by the rain and wind and lack of food. Many viewed it as black magic, Satan’s work, against the will of Allah, you name it. Rumors flew wildly, the main one being that it was plain and simple murder. The black bubbles would kill you, or if they didn’t, the Martians had no intention of ever letting anyone out again.

  I must say, that last accusation may have been closer to the truth than anyone wanted to admit. I don’t believe for a moment that Martians intended to encapsulate the refugees forever … but I understood that, once they were inside, they were a problem solved, and it might be a long, long time before anyone got around to solving the secondary problem of what to do with them. I didn’t know what to think of their chances. But I do know that, if we could convince the doomed people to cooperate, we could store the entire population of Earth in an amazingly small volume. A human doesn’t take up much space if you don’t have to feed him and can stack him like a weightless cannonball.

  The immigration officers had a volunteer Martian go into a bubble, stay an hour, and emerge unharmed to demonstrate that the bubbles did not kill.

  That worked with the rationals, but didn’t do a thing for the others.

  You can’t reason with a conspiracy theorist, especially a hungry and desperate one. There were riots, pitched battles, offices stormed and burned. Still, millions were encapsulated and shipped off to Mars.

  The same thing happened on Mars itself, on a smaller scale. The riots were quickly contained, though Thunder City became an armed camp, ugly and militarized. But in the end, only a few elected to return to Earth.

  THE ATTACK CAME two months after we returned to Mars. I’m lucky to be alive. My whole family is lucky to be alive.

  Ships from Earth streaked for Mars at high acceleration. This time we weren’t caught napping, though.

  The Inner Fleet fought a larger Earth fleet equipped with nuclear rockets that accelerated at thousands of gees. Naval battles used to be fought side to side, blasting away with cannons. By the 1940s the great battleships and aircraft carriers never even came in sight of each other, but compared to the Battle of 20 Million Miles those World War Two ships were practically rubbing the paint off each other.

  The battle was fought over five days. Though outnumbered, our Navy had weapons of our own in the form of bubble missiles. These were a lot cheaper than nukes, and thus we had a lot more of them. They were simply bubbles containing several thousand tons of rock squeezed down to the size of a grapefruit, and were actually a lot more powerful than nukes. We used them at a frightening rate, but there were a lot of targets, and they were moving fast.

  We destroyed their entire invasion fleet, but some missiles got through. The Home Fleet fought a desperate last-ditch battle against these and got most of them. This was a battle we could have actually seen in the sky, except we were all hunkered down as deep as we could get, watching on TV.

  Four missiles made it through. Three were diverted to a greater or lesser degree. Two landed harmlessly in the outback, harming no one. One hit three miles from Thunder City and rocked us pretty good. There were blowouts, and 1,439 people died.

  One hit Deimos Base. It cracked off a large chunk, and the devastation inside was enormous. Over 2,000 Navy personnel lost their lives.

  One of them was my uncle, Fleet Admiral William Redmond. He died at his post, directing the combat operations.

  We buried him with full military honors, his closed casket draped with the Martian flag and his posthumous Medal of Valor. Inside with what was left of him was my Navy Cross. I didn’t want it anymore.

  All hail Admiral Redmond! All hail the Martian Navy!

  OUR VENGE
ANCE WAS not swift, but it was terrible.

  It took a while for our own Black Fleet to descend like nightmare bats on the solar system from their distant orbits. They existed as a deterrent, like the massed nuclear weapons that nations stockpiled after 1945, and the promise was implicit: You fuck with us, and we will destroy you. The crews of the Black Fleet were carefully chosen, and thought to be reliable if punishment had to be meted out. That punishment could include the squeezing of entire cities, but not, contrary to what the powers on Earth were told, the squeezing of the entire planet. We would not destroy the planet … but we’d do almost anything up to that point. That threat had held the Earth powers in line for a long time, but no more.

  As in the previous wars, it was far from clear who had attacked us. No declaration of war had been made; no one had announced who they were before they started shooting. That made it easier to deny responsibility if things went bad.

  The political situation on Earth was far too complex for me to follow, but the military situation was fairly simple. Very few military ships were landing or taking off from Earth. The winds were usually so strong that going through the atmosphere was extremely hazardous to all forms of aviation. The Martian Navy had lost several ships over the past year.

  The generals on Earth had solved the problem several years earlier, when the climatic trend became clear. They based their fleets in orbit, mostly at the Lunar Lagrange points, ahead of and behind the moon’s orbit. I’m sure these huge bases had formal names, but everybody called them “battlestars.” There were five of them, all run by a Byzantine consortia of nations and corporations and individual power brokers—many of whom were more powerful than nations. Alliances shifted constantly.

  It proved impossible to determine which battlestar or combination of them had launched the attack, and they all stood together, neither admitting anything nor ratting out any of the others.

  So we destroyed them all.