by John Varley
“The Bahama Islands, Puerto Rico and the British and American Virgin Islands.
“Anguilla, St. Martin, St. Barts . . . in fact the entire chain of the Leeward and Windward Islands.” I winced, recalling that just a few moments ago I was thinking of those places as “flyspecks.” That’s what they are, on the map, but those flyspecks were inhabited by human beings.
“The Dominican Republic. Haiti. The Turks and Caicos Islands. The eastern provinces of Cuba.
“But first . . .” She paused, and put down the paper she was reading from. “Sorry, I should have skipped right to this part, things have been happening very fast, and the warning is already out, automatically, so . . .” She paused, took a deep breath, and we could all see just how shaken she really was.
“First, the residents of the Bahamas are in the worst danger. The highest waves seem to be propagating in their direction. We offer the following advice:
“First, if you are able, get to high ground. The initial wave is in the eighty-to-one-hundred-foot range, possibly larger. We can’t see much because of the atmospheric storm forming over the impact site. You need to get higher than one hundred feet above sea level, the higher the better, as the wave will have considerable inertia. We realize that the Bahamas are low-lying islands, and high ground may not be an option. Failing that, get to the highest floors of a reinforced-concrete building. Experience in the Indian Ocean has shown that these structures are quite likely to survive.
“Do it now! The sirens are sounding. Do not delay. If you are in a vehicle, I understand the roads are already clogged. Abandon your vehicle and look for the sturdiest structure in your vicinity. Estimated time of arrival of the first wave is twenty minutes for San Salvador Island, Cat Island, and Eleuthera, shortly thereafter for the eastern regions of Grand Bahama Island.
“Once in a safe location, stay there. There may be more than one wave, as there have been in past tsunamis.
“The first sign of the wave’s approach will be a rapid recession of the ocean. Observers describe it as a ‘sucking away.’ Much of the seafloor may be exposed. Then the wave will arrive, and eventually begin to recede, but do not return to flooded areas until you hear the all clear from the local authorities.”
One of the taller men standing beside her leaned over to whisper in her ear. She looked harried, nodded, and went on.
“Right . . . ah, as a precautionary measure, we are recommending the immediate evacuation of coastal areas and river estuaries from . . . from the Florida Keys to New York City and Long Island. Please get away from the ocean at once, and seek high ground or the highest shelter you can find.”
My heart seemed to stop for a moment. I looked at Elizabeth, and she was looking right at me, and at that moment I could read her mind.
High Ground? In Florida?
“Grandma!” we shouted at the same time, and turned and began to run.
3
THE PLANET EARTH probably has ten video cameras for every inhabitant. They cover virtually every area where people live, street by street, block by block.
Okay, that’s an exaggeration. There are still villages and towns and maybe even a few cities in Asia and Africa where there’s no monitoring cameras. But where this tsunami was expected to hit, coverage was virtually total.
What I was doing as I ran, and I assume Elizabeth was doing the same thing, was calling up beachcams in the Daytona area. Fixed views, pan-and-scan, caller-operated, you name it.
It was hard. The traffic must have been enormous, the servers were being overloaded. Time and again as I tried to tick on the next one down the beach, hit-or-miss, I’d get “Unable to complete connection. Please try again later.”
I had the code number of one of the beachcams on top of the Blast-Off Motel somewhere in memory, but I was hurrying too fast to find it and work the stereo at the same time, so I had just entered DAYTONA BEACH and started ticking through the available cams. I got a view of the ocean from, I thought, about a half mile south of the motel. There was nothing to see but beautiful blue sky and shining sea and glistening white sand. It was late on a February evening, peak tourist season . . . and no one was on the beach. There were plenty of towels and umbrellas and coolers. Then I saw a few tiny figures here and there, and they were all running. One couple was loaded down with beach gear, stumbling along in dry sand. What, were they trying to save a ten-dollar umbrella and a two-dollar cooler when doom was approaching, just over the horizon? A few others seemed to be frantically searching for other people. My breath caught in my throat when I saw a child, five or six, standing alone and crying. Oh, god, I don’t want to see this. I ticked to another cam.
We were hurrying through the lobby, dodging people standing still as statues as they watched their own personal newscasts in their personal stereospace. I’d seen it a few times before, when some big news was breaking—last time it was the incredibly important flash that Hollywood heartthrobs Brad and Bobby Gonzalez were breaking up. It’s called a freeze crowd. If you aren’t wearing your own stereo, or if you didn’t give goose crap about the affairs of two empty-headed pretty boys, it looked like time had stopped, or that somebody had sprayed everyone with liquid nitrogen. A few others were hurrying, like us. Most likely they had relatives on the American East Coast or Caribbean islands, like us.
See, our grandmother lived in Daytona Beach.
I mean, right on the beach.
The Blast-Off was bigger than it had been in my dad’s day, but it was still a mouse among elephants. The “Blast-Off Tower Wing” had been added to the old two-story structure the year I was born, though Grandma admitted it was a grandiose word for a building whose neighbors were twenty-five and thirty stories high.
Which would stand up to a tsunami better? I wondered. A ten-story mouse or a thirty-story elephant?
And they’d said to get up high.
How high is high?
WE CAME TEARING around the side of the front desk at a speed that normally would have earned us a chewing out even from Dad. NO RUNNING, JUMPING, OR SKATEBOARDING IN THE LOBBY! The signs were posted everywhere, you couldn’t miss them, and right under it NONRESIDENTS MUST WEAR HELMETS AT ALL TIMES! It was for Earthies, who are always hurting themselves or somebody else by something as simple as trying to turn a corner too fast without leaning over far enough. As for jumping . . . there’s a reason why all the ceilings in the Red Thunder Hotel are padded.
We didn’t wear no stinking helmets, of course. Not since we were eight. We’d have died of shame.
Actually, only one staff member noticed us at all. The rest were staring at the various news channels on the walls behind the desk. Nobody was getting checked in or out, but that was okay; nobody was trying to. The freeze crowd effect was still working for most of them.
As we barreled around the corner Elaine, a beautiful Indonesian clerk who I’d had a crush on since I was old enough to have crushes, and our best friend on the day staff, looked over at us with an expression of concern on her face. She knew where our grandmother lived. And I suddenly remembered that she was a survivor of the ’04 tsunami in the Indian Ocean. She had told us about it once, I couldn’t remember the circumstances. She had been three, and her whole family was wiped out. She was found in the branches of a tree, barely alive, three days later. No wonder she looked concerned.
We ran down the ramp in the narrow hallway. The Owner’s Suite is in the Frank Lloyd Wright prairie style, like the rest of the Red Thunder, and if that doesn’t make a lot of sense to you, you’re not the only one. The decor is all wood, angular and spare, and the big room is dominated by a floor-to-ceiling wall of what looks like glass panes, angled inward at the top. It shows a nice vista of hotel row, which is a long line of whimsical towers and attached pleasure domes that reminds a lot of people of the Las Vegas Strip.
It’s actually just vidpaper. We were standing about ten feet below ground level; there was nothing but concrete beyond the glass. But it fools the eye. Just as good as the view from the very
expensive penthouse suites.
When we get tired of it, we switch it to some Earth scene.
Dad doesn’t wear stereos. Never. He hates them, and would be a lot happier if they’d never been invented. He’d be a lot happier if no one in his family ever wore them, but he knows that’s a battle he can’t win. He gets even by making the desk clerks use old-fashioned screens and keyboards. “This is a first-class establishment,” he says. “Our clients don’t want to see a bunch of people wearing space cadet goggles.” That was years ago, when stereos really did look sort of goofy. The ones me and Elizabeth and most other people wear these days are slim, formfitting, you’d hardly know them from regular wraparound bubble sunglasses except for the thicker frames and wings, and the strap that keeps them on your head. Stereos are tough, and not as expensive as they used to be, but you don’t want them dropping on a hard floor too often at four hundred euros a lens.
So Dad was standing and staring at the wall opposite the “view” windows, which was also vidpaper but divisible into different electronic windows. He had a dozen of them going, his eyes darting back and forth.
Dad isn’t an imposing figure, in his slightly stuffy and definitely out-of-fashion navy blue suit with the Red Thunder emblem on the chest. He’s of medium height, getting a little thick around the waist, and his dark hair has receded right to the top of his head and is gray on the sides. Once we were standing side by side at a mirror so he could see how tall I’d grown (I topped out at six-foot-six, which is not tall for a Martian child—the low gravity lets us shoot up like beanstalks—and I wasn’t even Mars-born; no telling how big some of those kids are going to grow), and he muttered “I used to look like Jimmy Smits. Now I look like Cheech Marin.” I didn’t know who either of those guys were, but I googled them and I have to say he wasn’t entirely wrong.
Mom, on the other hand . . .
My parents are different in so many ways I have sometimes wondered what it is that keeps them together. Dad’s a Green, Mom’s a Red. Dad hates stereos. Mom . . . well, whoever first invented the wearable computer, he probably had my mother in mind. Mom has always got fifteen things going at once. She has always had the newest hardware, the newest programs. Dad says she changes computers more often than a lot of people change their underwear, and Mom says he should change his underwear more often. Then they laugh. Usually.
She was on the move, which is the normal state for her. Elizabeth says that when Mom isn’t on the move, she’s either sleeping, sick, or dead, and she never allows herself to get sick and doesn’t even sleep much.
She doesn’t show any marks from her hectic lifestyle. Her face has a few more wrinkles than she had in those pictures from the Red Thunder days, there are streaks of gray in her hair, and her skin is much paler than it used to be when she lived in the Florida sunshine because she never has time for sitting under a sunlamp. Of course, wearing a stereo, you can get all sorts of work done sitting down, but if it’s a tan you’re trying to get done, you’ll end up looking like a raccoon. But even working on the stereo she’s a multitasker and a pacer. Simply working on the stereo when she could be doing something else at the same time is never enough for her, so she’s usually in movement around the apartment or her office doing physical chores or getting from point A to point B, even if there was nothing wrong with being in point A in the first place. Dad says that when they were going together on Earth he hated to be in a car when she was driving. She was always doing several things at the same time, like talking on her cell phone, thumbing the controls of her pocket computer, eating a sandwich because she didn’t have time to stop for lunch . . . “I never actually saw her painting her toenails while she was driving,” Dad told me, “but I wouldn’t have been surprised.” She banged up a few fenders. Luckily, her father was a car dealer with a body shop.
Their arrangement seems to be that he runs the hotel and she runs everything else. She pretty much does what she wants to do, which probably would have been harder for my Latino dad if he’d grown up with a father in the house. He doesn’t seem to mind. When something is really, really important to him he will speak up about it, and Mom will work out a compromise and make a promise, and that seems to satisfy him. He knows Mom usually gets her way, but he also knows she never breaks a promise.
“Elizabeth, Ramon, you have to start packing, right now,” Mom said. I’ve been Ray, had started insisting on it, since I was ten but every once in a while I was Ramon again to my parents, and most of the time it meant I was in big trouble.
“Why?” Elizabeth asked.
“Because we have a ship to catch, and it leaves in four hours.”
“A ship . . .” I stopped myself. I was going to ask where, but the answer was obvious.
“Mother,” Elizabeth said, “how can you think of packing at a time like this? We need to see what’s—”
“I can think of it because somebody had to take care of the details, Elizabeth, and because it was hard to get these tickets so quickly, I had to call in a lot of favors to bump a few tourists, and . . . shush!” She held out her hand and listened to someone she was talking to on her stereo.
“Sell them,” she snapped. A short pause, then, “I don’t care if they’re at fifty percent of what I paid for them. By the time the sell order gets to New York they’ll probably be down another ten percent, and after that . . . well, who knows. I need to have that sale registered at once, in case . . .”
For a moment I didn’t get it, and then my jaw dropped.
In case . . .
In case New York isn’t answering the telephone in another few hours. In case Wall Street is ten stories deep in seawater.
Mom was selling stocks. Too bad everybody on Earth had a twenty-minute jump on her. I wondered for a moment what stocks you’d sell if you knew a tsunami was on the way. Insurance companies, I guess.
But maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.
“Mother, we want to see what’s going on.”
“Elizabeth, that’s what stereos are for.”
I went and stood beside my father. He put his arm up around my shoulder, absently, never taking his eyes off the screens on the wall.
“Ten thousand remote cameras on the Florida coast,” he was muttering. “Maybe twenty thousand . . . why can’t I find . . . ?” He looked down at the remote in his hand, and his shoulders slumped. He tossed the remote onto the couch behind him, and sat down. Actually, it was more like a collapse. He sat there with his shoulders slumped and his face in his hands. I was about to sit beside him and offer what comfort I could, when he suddenly leaped to his feet and shouted.
“Dammit, Kelly, how can you do that at a time like this?”
There was dead silence for a moment. Mom stopped moving and took a deep breath.
“I’m sorry, hon, but there’s not a damn thing we can do about what’s happening there, except what I’ve already done.”
“I know, I know . . .” Dad didn’t seem to know how to express what he was feeling at the moment. I didn’t either, but I think I could feel it.
“Manny, children . . . I don’t want to seem cold, but you know we can’t do anything about Betty’s situation. But I know this. She’s a smart woman. She’s a survivor. If this is survivable, she will survive it. What we have to do as a family is get there as fast as we can. I’ve already arranged for that. And while we’re waiting, I want to try to salvage what I can from some investments that are likely to be affected by this before they shut down the markets.”
“What would those be, Mom?” Elizabeth asked.
“That’s the tough part. People are unloading different things. I don’t know. What I do know is, something this big impacts economies and affects people who are nowhere near ground zero. Banks and insurance companies fail under the kind of pressure this wave may represent. Governments may fall. I don’t know how to protect us from that, but I’m trying to figure it out. Can I go ahead? Please?”
She wasn’t being sarcastic. Dad didn’t say anything, and Mom too
k that as a yes, but when she continued she went to a corner of the room and kept her voice down. Elizabeth and I joined Dad on the couch, on either side. We put our arms around him.
We didn’t have long to sit. A computer-simulated wave was reaching Mayaguana Island, which they had calculated was the first place the effects of the tsunami would be seen. There was a reporter stationed on top of the highest tower on a resort on the easternmost point of the island, and she was standing in front of the camera with the blue ocean behind her. She looked a bit nervous. I figured she had every right to be. There was still a chance, according to the stories we’d been seeing, that this whole thing would be a giant fizzle, but that opinion was losing support as new satellite data came in.
“The reports I’m hearing from the news center,” she was saying, “tell me that satellite imaging is being hampered by a storm that has formed over the site of the impact. An infrared camera is being moved as I speak, and it should be able to make a better calculation as to how much energy was delivered by the object. The impact was not, let me repeat, not, registered by seismographs, which leads the oceanographers to believe that it did not strike the seabed. That’s the good news. The bad news is that if it was energetic enough, if there was enough . . . ah, kinetic energy in whatever it was that struck the Earth a short time ago, and if enough of that energy was transferred to the water . . . well, we might be in for quite a wave in the next few minutes.
“I’m told that the ocean is deep to the east of my position on Mayaguana Island, that we are on the edge of the Bahamian Rise, so we may not see much of the wave’s approach until it gets here.”
A computer graphic appeared on half the screen, showing how a tsunami can travel over deep water and hardly be seen or felt, then how it would pile up as it reached shallow water.