Red Lightning

by John Varley

  It was certain that at least half a million people were dead. There were rumors that the various governments involved, in particular the United States government, were suppressing casualty figures while they frantically tried to find a way to cope with the situation. There was no question that it would be handled, in time, that all the bodies would be gathered up and disposed of—there were rumors of mass graves, of vast funeral pyres. There was no question that all the debris would eventually be bulldozed out of the way and burned or recycled.

  One big question was, who was going to pay for all this? And another question: What are we going to do with the survivors who have lost everything, including the clothes on their backs? Until somebody had a better idea of the answers to those questions, those in power were trying to limit knowledge of just how bad the problem was. That was the buzz on the wires, anyway. And that, of course, just made the rumors buzz all the louder, and made them more and more dire. I heard a reputable newscaster speak of 20 million dead. Then I didn’t hear from him again.

  First, of course, there was the matter of digging in rubble for people who were trapped, and of flying in food and water. That had been easier in highly localized disasters, like Islamabad and New Delhi. This one was spread out over such a vast area that much of it was still chaos, and likely to remain that way for quite a while.

  We all watched tape of the wreckage from the Everglades to Cape Cod taken from aircraft, until they stopped showing it. “Out of respect for the dead,” was what the United States President said, but there were other opinions. Very little was coming from the ground. People would make their way out of the zone of destruction and post their personal tapes and someone would pick it up and it would be all over the cybernet for a while, then mysteriously vanish. Newscasters were reporting that big parts of the net were being shut down, those that weren’t already crippled by the wave itself.

  The net is mysterious in many ways to most of us. We experience it quite simply: Step One: we put on our stereos. There is no step two. Putting on your socks is quantum physics compared to entering cyberspace.

  But that’s because it’s evolved over the years. Mom and Dad tell me of when they were very young, and you used equipment so large it had to sit on a desk. You had to plug it in, or if it was battery-powered, you used a battery the size of a book, and had to change it or charge it every couple of hours. Before their time you had to run an actual wire to your computer. The data transfer rate was unbelievably slow. You couldn’t send moving pictures. Even before that, you couldn’t send pictures at all. People transferred data at the rate of two hundred bytes per second. I’d just as soon chisel my messages onto stone tablets and put them on the back of a mule.

  Because it’s so easy and invisible, we don’t think much about how it works. But it’s there, undercover, often underground, in the cellars of big buildings in cities, in broadcast towers in the country, and, of course, the satellites overhead.

  Only the satellites weren’t affected by the tsunami. Many central routing stations had been flooded, many towers knocked over. The rest of the system, trying to take up the slack in a period when traffic was almost ten times normal because of the disaster with everyone trying to access the same sources at once . . . well, it never completely crashed, but it was now chugging along like a steam engine patched with bubble gum and Band-Aids. There was no hope it would be back to anything like normal soon.

  More basic than that, the electrical grid was down for much of the East Coast of America. Even in places where the wave didn’t reach, the outages and disruptions had crashed the system. Many places within a hundred miles of the coast didn’t have electricity. As for the coast itself . . .

  The water had roared up river valleys and surged over floodplains, a term that now had a new definition, as places that hadn’t seen seawater in a million years or more were suddenly inundated with twenty feet of it. We had seen endless footage of it, and like the old footage of the wave of ’04, the first thing that often struck you was . . . where’s the water? What you saw was a tumbling wave of wreckage, cars and trucks and furniture and walls, surging, swirling, tumbling, breaking apart, crashing together, getting chopped finer and finer. We saw footage of the coastal cities with storm wrack floating at third-floor level, or fourth-floor. Or sixth floor.

  The Blast-Off annex was ten stories high. We looked and looked, no longer able to surf cameras on our own but dependent on what coverage there was from helicopter cameras, but never seemed to be able to spot it. We did see a lot of tall buildings in Florida that had fallen over, including a thirty-story condominium tower in Fort Lauderdale, and a few that were leaning, the backwash of the wave having sucked the sand out from under the foundations, many of which were later found to be not up to county building standards.

  “Typical Florida,” Dad said.

  I DON’T WANT to be prejudiced here, and I know that, although America got it bad, the Caribbean got it worse. Some little islands were scoured almost down to the rock. The Bahamas were in terrible shape, survivors coming down from the highest ground many days after, starving and thirsty and injured. There were deaths in Africa from Guinea to Morocco, and in the Canary Islands, and Portugal, and even in England and Ireland. There were some passengers from those places, and we commiserated with them just as they did with us. But most of us were from America, born or naturalized, and that’s where we looked the most. And again, though water had surged up the Potomac and the Hudson, though the wave had swept through the financial district of Manhattan and killed many people on Staten Island and in Brooklyn, and the coasts of Connecticut and Rhode Island, the worst damage was in a horrible swath from the Florida Keys to the Chesapeake Bay. And in the middle of that was Daytona Beach.

  HOUR BY HOUR we got heavier.

  At first it was easy bouncing up forty decks to the dining room in the morning for breakfast, and just a little bit harder for lunch, and just a tad harder for dinner. But by the time of turnaround (which took ten minutes in weightlessness and resulted in the usual quota of scrapes and bruises) we were up to .75 gee, and breakfast was getting to be a bit of a slog. At lunchtime I was breathing pretty hard by the time I reached the seventieth deck, and even coming down wasn’t a walk in the park.

  About the only consolation: Mom was looking a bit haggard, too.

  By breakfast the next morning I was starting to get a bit worried about Dad. He was covered in sweat and almost too tired to eat by the time the waffles and eggs Benedict and bacon was set before him.

  “Which is part of the problem,” Mom said quietly, as she dug into her oatmeal. Dad glared at her but didn’t say anything. Mom isn’t a nagger, I’ll give her that, at least not where Dad is concerned. She’ll say something like that once, then not mention it again. “He can dig his own grave if he wants to,” she once told me, when she was particularly angry about how Dad would slack on the daily exercise.

  Any Martian with any sense will be under a doctor’s care during a return trip to the Earth. Dad has sense; it’s just that he’s like me, he hates to exercise, and since he’s an adult without Mom cracking the whip over him, he can get away with it. Last time we went to Earth he worked hard for three months before we boarded ship. This time caught him off guard, and his heart didn’t like it.

  The Sov didn’t have anything like a fully equipped hospital, designed as it was for trips never taking longer than eight days. But there were two doctors on staff, and three Martian doctors going home for the emergency. We visited every day, as a family, as it was a bit of a cattle call with all the people needing to be monitored. So Mom and Elizabeth and I all got to stand in the diagnostic machines and get a clean bill of health, and we all—plus everybody else who might happen to be standing around—got to hear the doctor tut-tut the way some doctors do and tell Dad he had only himself to blame for his shortness of breath. He wasn’t a Martian doctor; a Martian would have been more understanding.

  “You’re basically quite healthy for a man of your age, M
r. Garcia,” the doctor said on our visit shortly after turnaround. “But you need to lose about twenty-five pounds, and you know that will feel like sixty extra pounds when you get home. You don’t need to worry about your heart right now, but if you keep up this way for another ten years, you will. For now, I recommend you take it easy and be sure to get plenty of fluids when you get to Florida. Heat exhaustion is your chief peril.”

  What an asshole. Dad stood there and took it, and the next morning he had a bowl of cereal and spent an hour in the gym.

  CLOSE YOUR EYES. Be very quiet. You are getting very sleepy. I want you to imagine that your arms and legs are getting heavier. Heavier and heavier. Imagine yourself lying in a warm bed (forget about those two brats running around the room) . . . okay, imagine a bubbling brook, surf lapping gently on the beach. You’re getting heavier. Your eyelids weigh five pounds. Your face weighs ten pounds. Your arms weigh a ton. Your head weighs ten tons. Now sleep, sleep, sleep, and it will all go away . . .

  Now wake up!

  Too bad. It wasn’t a dream after all. You swing the iron diver’s weights on your feet over the side of the bed, only there are no weights there, sit for a moment while your chub-bier identical twin settles himself on your shoulders with his hands holding your cheeks to pull them downward, struggle to your feet, and thud your way across the room under one full gee of deceleration. You go to the window and press your forehead to it and look down at the Earth, which looks like a blue-and-white beach ball. It would look a lot prettier if you could forget that it would pull at you just as viciously as this deceleration is pulling at you, they aren’t going to ease up on it just for a bunch of Martians who would really appreciate it.

  You singin’ dem One Gee Blues, as the great Martian folksinger Spider Anson laments. Oh, Lord, why won’t you lighten up?

  I met Peter the room steward on my way out that last morning. He looked sympathetic, which is more than you could say for most of the Earthie passengers, who liked to pretend they were enjoying the returning weight.

  “Anyone in here need a wheelchair today, Ray?” he asked.

  “I’m fine, but if you could get one for the dude on my back I’d appreciate it.”

  He’d probably heard it before, but he laughed anyway. I made a note to remind Dad to be extra generous tipping Peter.

  I made it five decks up the stairs, thought about the twenty-five still to go, and mentally told my mother what she could do with her lousy stairway rule. I got on the elevator for the first time . . . and was horrified to find myself graying out just a little bit as we accelerated up toward the dining room. It made me a little sick to my stomach. I’m not sure what it was all about. I had a clean bill of health. But I skipped the regular breakfast and went straight to Starbucks for a coffee and a biscotti.

  There had only been a few people in wheelchairs the day before. Today there were dozens. Some of them would stay in the chairs until they returned to Mars, permanent residents whether they wanted to be or not. The body adapts, and that’s not always a good thing. Past a certain age, what you lose you are unlikely to ever get back. I tried to look on the bright side. At least I was walking. I could probably even do a few chin-ups, though not with one arm.

  I joined Elizabeth and Evangeline at a table with a big double latte. They were thick as thieves, and even more so today for some reason. They had some shopping bags on the floor beside them.

  “What up?” I asked.

  “Breasts,” Elizabeth said, and Evangeline giggled.

  “How’s that?”

  “We’ve been shopping. Got some support shoes.” She took a pair of brown, businesslike hiking boots out of the bag and plopped them on the table between us, almost upsetting my drink. “You might want to do that, too. Those deck shoes aren’t going to do you much good where we’re going.”

  “Good idea. You think they sell anything on the ship to deal with water moccasins?”

  “No, nor water-purifying tablets, nor chain saws, nor emergency flares, nor electric hovercraft. We’ll have to get all those things when we get there, if they aren’t already sold out. But they have figured out the one item Martian girls are likely to need and probably didn’t bring with them because they don’t own one.” She reached into another bag from Victoria’s Secret and brought out a pink bra.

  The three of us broke up laughing.

  “I swear, I don’t know how Earth girls put up with it,” Elizabeth said, reaching a thumb under her blouse and hooking it under a bra strap. I realized both girls were wearing them. You could hardly tell . . . but I guess I could have told if they weren’t. “I’ve got to get something more practical; these things cut into your shoulders something fierce. Why do they make the straps so skinny?”

  “Sexy,” Evangeline said.

  “You think so? Ray, you think that’s sexy?”

  “You’re asking the wrong dude. I don’t know from bras.”

  “Aw, come on,” Evangeline said, and nudged me with her elbow. “How about this one?” She lifted her blouse and displayed a fetching blue number, and created a bit of a stir among the few Earthies in the place. We Martians are easier about dress than Earthies are. We spend most of our lives indoors, have to wear insulated and heated air bags when we do go out, so clothes are for decoration first and modesty second. There are in fact no laws concerning nudity on Mars, just rules about where it’s appropriate. Earth boys get a big kick out of that when they go swimming.

  “It suits you,” I admitted. What I didn’t admit was that by its very novelty it was turning me on quite a bit. More, in fact, than her bare breasts would have. After all, I’d seen her naked when she came out of the shower in our cabin.

  “Well, it’s a new one for me,” Elizabeth said. “I didn’t have boobs when we left Earth. Now I feel like I’ve got too much of a good thing.”

  “I doubt the Earth boys will think that,” I said.

  “Count on it.” Evangeline laughed.

  “The saleslady tried to sell us girdles, if you can believe that,” Elizabeth said. “I said no thank you. I said, my butt’s behind me; if it’s gonna go south, at least I don’t have to watch it sag.”

  Evangeline thought this was the most hilarious thing she’d ever heard, and soon Elizabeth and I did, too.

  5

  WE CAME IN at night. I saw the lights of Las Vegas, Lake Mead, Boulder Dam, then it got too dark to see much. I got a glimpse of the sprawling runway lights of the Area 51 North American Continental Spaceport, and then we were down, and taxiing, and pulling up to the gate.

  Customs took four hours.

  The whole time we were covered by at least three soldiers of the Homeland Security Enforcement Corps in their black uniforms and black Darth Vader helmets, who were almost as well armored as American football players and carried weapons that looked able to shoot down combat helicopters and surely would have atomized everybody standing there if they were ever fired.

  One by one we were shown into private rooms and matched with our luggage, which had already been MRIed and chemically analyzed and scanned for microelectronics and peed on by dogs.

  My stereo was taken from me and I watched as they plugged it into an analyzer and started running exploration programs to see what was inside. I’d known this was going to happen, so I’d cleansed all the stuff that was illegal on Earth, or in America anyway, and archived it back home.

  A customs officer behind a thick shield of Plexi told me to open both my bags and unpack them. I did, item by item, was told to unfold all the clothes and lay them flat on a conveyor. All the other items went through another conveyor. Then I was told to strip and put my clothes on the first conveyor and lie down flat on a third conveyor, which fed me into a tube and out the other end. When I came out I was in a small room with a rack of disposable paper hospital robes.

  BY THE TIME I was allowed into a room with hundreds of men wearing paper coats and boots just like mine, I was beginning to wonder how much all this cost and how much extra security
it provided. I saw Dad standing by another long conveyor so I joined him and asked him.

  “Who knows?” he said, with a tired shrug. Hours of standing around had taken a lot out of him. He looked like his feet were sore. “Last time through it was rough, but nothing like this. They seem to have found another dozen things to be afraid of since we were here last.”

  “Technology’s gotten better, hasn’t it?”

  “Sure, on both sides,” he said. “The bad guys . . .” He chuckled. “The ‘evil ones,’ whoever they are this year, are better at what they do, and so are the Homelanders. It seems like every year the people of Earth are willing to accept less and less risk and more and more police.”

  The last conveyor belt in this particular circle of Hell cranked into operation and started delivering our possessions. The clothing we’d been wearing was hanging from a moving rack.

  “Just like the old dry cleaners,” Dad said.

  At the same time the bags were appearing through a small door. They looked the worse for wear. Some were sprung open, everything inside spilling all over the place. Some looked like they’d been examined by an elephant.

  There was suprisingly little grumbling. The Earthies just sighed in resignation, and we Martians expected no less from Earthies. That’s not to say it went smoothly. There were arguments, and one degenerated into a fistfight. There were no Homelanders around to break it up, I guess that at this point they figured we were officially decontaminated and no longer their responsibility. A regular security cop watched until both the fighters were pretty exhausted, then moved in to break it up.

  When I got my shirt I saw that a bottom seam had been ripped open. Damn, they probably got all my microfilm and illegal drugs. Like all my other stuff when I tore it out of the plastic wrappings, it had a chemical smell I didn’t want to think about. I figured I was now louse-free, and who cared if my shorts glowed in the dark? I got my suitcases and opened them to check if everything was there, but who could tell? It was just tossed in, mashed into place, and forced shut.