Red Lightning

by John Varley

  “We don’t know precisely when the wave will arrive,” the reporter went on, “but I don’t mind telling you I’m a little nervous.” She didn’t have to tell us. She was very pretty, as TV reporters usually are, and was wearing a bathing suit with a light shirt pulled on over it, like she had been relaxing in the sun when her phone rang and hadn’t had time to change into more sober clothes, and her face was shiny with sunburn lotion, and given the location and the way she and the other people on the roof were dressed, it was probably quite warm up there. But she was shivering.

  “We’re on the roof of a six-story building here, and I’ve been assured it sits on a concrete foundation and is made of steel and concrete, so—”

  Behind her, some of the people looking over the railing began to point and shout. The reporter jumped, then her instincts took over and she hurried over to the edge. Somebody cleared a space for her, and the camera operator panned until we could see over her shoulder. There was a thick line of white drawn on the water halfway to the horizon.

  “Look! Look down there!” somebody was shouting. The cameraman moved to the rail and pointed his camera down. The water was being sucked away like a giant bathtub draining. It was fast! The beach extended out a hundred feet, then three hundred, then more and more until it seemed it would reach the distant white line. The camera zoomed in on the wet sand and rock, and I could see fish flopping around, including a big shark of some sort. There was some more shouting, then everything got very quiet as people were overcome by the sight of an ocean that had vanished. I heard some people crying, a woman shouting something unintelligible. Maybe a prayer.

  “This is . . . uh . . . what we were told to expect,” the reporter said. “This suction effect is the first thing we were told to expect . . . I’m repeating myself . . . Jerry, are we getting this? Jerry . . .”

  The line of white in the distance began to swell, and was no longer completely straight. It was hitting shallower water, starting to pile up, and it was doing it unevenly, responding to differences in the ocean bottom that we couldn’t see.

  “We can see it now. Are we getting this, Jerry? It’s not what I expected, I thought we’d see a green wall, rearing up like in a surfing video . . .”

  As she spoke, the line of water did begin to rear up. It was hard to tell how tall it was, there were no boats out there to give us a scale. But I could hear people shouting. My guess was it was forty feet high, maybe. I think they got waves like that in Hawaii sometimes. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad.

  Then I estimated it might be more like eighty feet. It began to curl over at the top, and now it reared up even more. We could hear it roaring.

  “My god,” the reporter said. “They told me it might sound like a freight train, but this is a thousand freight trains, all of them coming right at us. It’s so fast! It’s almost to the beach now . . . eighty, maybe ninety feet high . . .”

  The curling part broke, but the sea was noticeably higher behind it. No way to tell how high. By the time it crashed on the beach it was partly concealed by a crown of foam and spray. A hundred feet high? Maybe more.

  “My god, is it . . . it looks like it might be higher than the building! No, no, it’s . . . I can’t tell, I can’t see . . . here it comes . . . Mother, I love you, I love you . . .”

  At that point the camera operator was running, and he dropped his equipment. It landed sideways, and then the lens was spotted with water and the sound was incredible and I saw some running bare feet.

  The screen went black.

  I DON’T KNOW when Mom joined us on the couch. She was just there, squeezing my hand so tight it hurt, but I was squeezing back. The four of us sat there, stunned, not saying anything.

  The next few minutes seemed like a kaleidoscope. I’m a member of the stereo generation, as they call it, and I’m pretty good at opening five or six or a dozen virtual windows and parking them somewhere in my peripheral vision and just leaving them on, semitransparent, but if something interesting happens in any of them I’ll quickly tick it over into the center, and all the time I’m watching or reading that window I’ll be aware of the other ones. People who are alarmed by this call it permanent sensory overload. People who can handle it call it multitasking. Both sides of the argument think my generation’s minds are wired differently.

  Whatever. I’d never had a problem with it, but until that day I’d never been confronted with maybe fifty or sixty different windows, all clamoring for my attention. The problem was, everything was happening at once. The house computer’s discriminator was being overloaded by the number of news images, each with a top-priority rating. They were coming in from all the islands of the Bahamas, from stationary spycams and personal stereocams, from helicopters and airplanes and hi-rez satellites. They were filling the telewall of our apartment with a rolling crazy quilt of disaster.

  We watched in silence, or sometimes turned away with a moan, as the waves arrived at Samana Cay, Acklins Island, and Crooked Island. No sooner had those cameras gone abruptly to black screen than the wave was assaulting Long Island, Rum Cay, and San Salvador. And the Turks and Caicos Islands.

  Cat Island, Great Exuma, Eleuthera.

  The Dominican Republic, Haiti, Puerto Rico.

  Anguilla, St. Martin, St. Barts, Sin Maarten, St. Kitts and Nevis.

  Cuba.

  Places I’d never heard of, places I’d barely been aware of, and places I’d heard of but knew little about. All of them full of people living in tropical splendor, or taking a vacation from colder climates, people just like us, sitting in front of their telewalls or old flatscreens or even old box TVs, or watching out from their windows, or fleeing for their lives, or trying desperately to find their loved ones before the hammer of God descended on them. People who had had hopes and dreams and plans, people who might have worried about hurricanes or fires or car wrecks or falling off a boat and drowning but had never expected the horror that was bearing down on them. It was the first time in my life that I realized just how quickly everything could change, how one minute you could be strolling down some sunny street in the Bahamas and the next you could be staring death in the face.

  It was somewhere between the impacts on Andros and Abaco and the arrival of the wave front at Grand Bahama Island that I noticed something in the one window I had kept functioning on my stereo. It was down in the left-hand corner of my field of vision, where I always parked it. It was the log of my incoming calls. There were forty or fifty names of friends who wanted me to log on to a group chat.

  I guess it was the Earth icon that caught my eye. I’ve got a fair number of chathogs on Earth, but by the nature of the time lag they were more like old-fashioned pen pals—it was seldom important to get back to them right away. But this one was marked FLORIDA, USA, and any of the people I knew in Florida might be writing their last words to me at that moment.

  I ticked on the icon, and when the number came up I shouted and got to my feet without even realizing I was doing it.

  “It’s Grandma!” I said, and quickly ticked the incoming window over to the house computer with an ultra-urgent priority. A window opened up right on the center of the wall. The picture formed, and was chaotic for a moment, then settled down. At first I didn’t know what I was looking at, then saw it was an old laptop computer sitting on a chair. Grandma’s face was on the screen. She looked a little harried, but calm.

  “—how much time we have left, but I had to take a moment to do this,” she was saying. I found Mom and Dad and Elizabeth were standing beside me. I felt Dad grab my hand.

  “There’s never enough time to tell everyone you love how much you love them, is there? I know, I’ve told you all. But trouble is coming, and they’re saying it may be big trouble, maybe the biggest of all, and I have a lot of things to do, but I have to take a moment to do the most important thing of all in case . . . well, in case this is the last chance I have to tell you.”

  Dad squeezed my hand so hard it hurt, but I didn’t complain. Elizabet
h took my other hand.

  “Kelly, I am proud to have you for a daughter-in-law. I haven’t told you before, but I never thought it would last, you being . . . well, from a different sort of people.” She laughed. “People with money. There, I said it. I thought you were slumming, and you proved me wrong. I’ve never been so happy to be wrong in my life.”

  I heard Mom sob, and she sat down hard on the couch, like her legs had been cut out from under her. Dad sat beside her and hugged her, and Elizabeth and I were left standing. I didn’t look back at my parents. I don’t like to see my parents cry. In fact, I don’t think I’d ever seen it before. Surely not when Mom’s father died. The only thing I ever heard her say about that was “Well, now they’ve got a Mercedes dealership in Hell. But they better keep their hands on their wallets.”

  Mom and her late father hadn’t gotten along.

  “Ramon and . . . sorry, Ray, my big boy, and Elizabeth, I’m so proud of you guys I could just bust when I think about you. I wish y’all could have come to visit me more often, and I wish I’d had the guts to take a trip to see y’all on Mars, but watching y’all grow up in the videos you sent me was the next best thing, and I guess it may have to do. I love you so much.”

  Grandma never even liked to go out on a boat on the ocean, and she hated to fly, so she’d never set foot on a spaceship, even though her son had helped build the first really good one. My throat was hurting something awful, and my nose was stopped up. Yeah, I was crying pretty good, I guess.

  “And Manny . . . oh, Manny. You’ve done your mother proud, young man. I can’t tell you—”

  I thought I was about to burst, and suddenly the camera moved. I gasped, thinking My god, the building is falling over! It jerked around for a while, then showed Grandma’s face. She was holding the little camera at arm’s length, looking into it. She looked very tired.

  “Okay, you’ll get that as a message attachment if you get it at all. Let’s get practical here.” She set the camera on something steady and backed up a little bit. We could see her from the knees up, and I realized she was standing on the roof of the Blast-Off Tower. There were other people in the picture, none of them familiar. Grandma was wearing an automatic pistol in a holster on her hip and had a serious-looking rifle over her shoulder.

  “It’s been chaotic, but I expect it’ll get worse.” She smiled grimly and patted the handgun. “For now, we’ve just opened our doors to anybody who’s in the area. I’d say we’re at about twice capacity right now. Most of the people seem to have gone to the bigger hotels. They might be surprised later. I figure anybody who’s in here when the wave comes is my guest. I’ve shut off the water in the tank up here on the roof, and turned off the gas, and the tank of diesel is full, and the generator is tested. You know I keep my emergency hurricane supplies up here where they won’t get flooded, so I’ve got enough food to keep this bunch going for at least a week, and I’ve had volunteers bringing up stuff from the restaurant.

  “So the only question is . . . how big is it? If the building holds up, I figure we’ll be okay. I’ve been thinking back to ’04. Manny, you’re too young to remember it well, I guess, but it was a pretty big deal. I wondered what it would be like if it hit here. I figure that help will arrive a lot quicker, but it will still be pretty hairy for the first week or so. So I just wanted to let you know I’m prepared . . .”

  She looked off to one side and smiled.

  “See, Manny,” Mom said. “I told you she was a survivor.”

  “She’s a tough old broad, all right.”

  Grandma was beckoning to someone off camera.

  “Come on, Maria, you have to say hello, at least. Come on!”

  My aunt Maria came reluctantly into the picture, moving slowly with a cane, camera-shy as always. She wrote to me frequently, but never sent videos, scoffing at all that newfangled nonsense. I was shocked at how old and fragile she looked. She had always been . . . well, Mom says she’s an “ample” woman, which means at least chubby. Not a lot over five feet tall, dark-skinned, her hair all white now. She wasn’t exactly thin, but her skin seemed to hang off her.

  “My god, she’s lost thirty pounds,” Elizabeth whispered to me. Her tone wasn’t happy, it was clear to both of us this wasn’t a healthy weight loss. Was something happening to her that no one had told me about?

  Aunt Maria was no sooner in the picture than Grandma looked off to her left. I could hear people shouting.

  “I think it’s coming,” she said. She faced the camera again. “I’m going to move the camera again, so y’all can see this. We may not be talking for a while, so let me say again I love you all, I love you so—”

  The screen went blank.

  4

  LARGE INTERPLANETARY PASSENGER liners don’t have to be streamlined because they never land anywhere. The ship does have to withstand acceleration of one gravity for extended periods, so it can’t be spidery and insubstantial like so many Earth- and Mars-orbiting satellites, but as long as you distribute the mass evenly along the axis of acceleration you’ve got pretty much a free hand in design. So you’d think that interplanetary ships would be inner-oriented: that is, the outside would reflect what’s on the inside and nothing else. Sort of like the old Lunar Excursion Module, the first human vehicle that never had to operate in air.

  You’d be wrong. They mostly look like Buck Rogers or Walt Disney.

  The ship that would take us to Earth, the Sovereign of the Planets, was run by Royal Caribbean, which seemed ironic to me considering what we’d witnessed a few hours before in our home.

  We got our first glimpse of it in free fall after a three-gee boost up from Marsport. Dad was looking a little green in the face despite the antinausea drugs, which are a lot better now than when he was young. Not that they took any with them on the voyage of Red Thunder. The one thing that never occurred to him and my uncle Dak was that they’d get spacesickness. So naturally they both spent most of their free-falling time heaving up their guts, while Mom and Uncle Travis and Alicia got along just fine. He laughs about it now, but it’s best not to tease him. I think he’s deeply ashamed that he never became a good space traveler. A hard blow for a boy who grew up crazy about space and eager to be an astronaut.

  The thing about luxury interplanetary travel is, if people have a choice between a nondescript, tossed-together collection of nuts and bolts that you can hardly tell from a bulk cargo carrier and a fantasyland traveling glitter dome that looks part Arabian nights and part Buck Rogers, they’ll go for the fantasy every time. People like sleekness, even if it isn’t there for any aerodynamic purpose. They like luxurious colors, they like sexy curves.

  Bottom line, when they get on a spaceship they want it to look like something that can really go vrooooooooom!

  There’s really no point in getting into a long description of the Sov. You can get pictures at the Royal Caribbean cybersite. The main body of the ship is graceful and tapered at both ends, like a real rocket ship. Things stick out for no real reason: big swept-back fins and art deco ornamentation and toward the front a stylized statue of Mercury, the corporate logo of RC Deep Space Lines, that’s only about half the size of the Statue of Liberty. The colors are silver with crimson racing stripes. Heck, if it would sell more tickets, they’d gladly fit the ship out with big headlights like a ’56 Pontiac and big mag wheels with racing tires. As it was, the thing glittered with lights that raced around the hull in a continual light show, sometimes pausing to spell out the names of the acts who would be performing that night in the theaters and clubs and pictures of the delights to be had at the Mercury Buffet.

  PAI-GOW POKER!

  FOUR-STAR DINING IN THE ROTUNDA,

  RESERVATIONS RECOMMENDED!

  CELINE DION TWICE NIGHTLY IN THE INTIMATE STARZ

  CABARET!

  “MEMORIES OF HIP-HOP” IN THE MAIN THEATER!

  24-HOUR ROOM SERVICE!

  They didn’t advertise anything for my generation while I watched the message board
s, my generation mostly didn’t have the money for a stateroom on the Sov, so it was heavily tilted toward the old farts, older even than Mom and Dad. That’s okay. Get six or seven of my generation together in a room with our stereos on, and we can make our own entertainment.

  The Sov was large, but she wasn’t the biggest ship in space. She was built for the Earth-Mars run, four to eight days out, four to eight days back at one gee, depending on the positions of the two planets. I’d call her pretty big, as opposed to huge, like the liners that go to the outer planets, or gigantic, like starships.

  The docking was about as exciting as the Staten Island Ferry pulling into its berth—less exciting; I’d have enjoyed riding a water ferry, something I’ve rarely done. The flight attendants strung the safety line down the center aisle of the shuttle and then bounced around snapping everybody’s tethers to it, all the time chanting the mantra for space-stupid Earthies: “Please remain seated and do not remove your seat harnesses until you are requested to. Departure will be in strict order, from the front to the back of the spacecraft. Blah blah blah blah . . .”

  I resented the hell out of being treated like a clueless Earthie, but what can you do? Instead, I sat there beside Elizabeth, and when our turn came we meekly unbuckled and allowed ourselves to be handled like baggage, passed slowly and carefully down the line at a very low rate of speed, one hand on the safety line as we were instructed. One plus: no carry-on luggage in a free-fall transfer. Nothing but the clothes on your back and whatever you could carry in your pockets and your stereo, buckled to your face. You don’t even want to imagine what it might be like with 150 Earthies swinging backpacks and briefcases and small suitcases around just as though gravity would rescue their careless asses like it always did back home. Talk about your deadly missiles!

  Into the ship, and I’ll admit it was a little disorienting, going into a strange place in free fall can do that to you. Not really that much to see, anyway, between the shuttle and the assembly room, which would be reconfigured when we boosted and become the main theater, right near the stern of the ship, but which right now was set up to hold the entire complement of passengers. Just ordinary corridors, most of them curving slightly with the hull of the ship, with stewards stationed at every turn to slow passengers who’d gotten too enthusiastic and get them headed in the right way without any broken bones.