Red Lightning

by John Varley

  I never did find my other sock.

  I’M AT A loss to describe Mom’s reaction to all this when the family was finally reunited. If she’d been any angrier, steam would have come out of her ears.

  Dad was relieved to see her. They were a little later than us getting through the process, in fact they were some of the very last women to come out of the dressing room, and Dad muttered to me, “I hope she didn’t get herself arrested.”

  She didn’t, but Elizabeth told me later it was a close thing. That was much later, when we could laugh about it, sort of. Nobody was laughing that night.

  Some women would have been shouting, ranting, lashing out at everybody in sight. You know the type. I’ve seen a million of them at the hotel, and men, too.

  I’ve never been treated so shabbily in my life!

  Do you know who I am?

  I demand to speak to the manager at once!

  Mom didn’t say a word, though it looked like you could fry an egg on her forehead. In fact, it looked like someone had tried. Her hair was a wreck, and so was Elizabeth’s. Both of them were proud of their long, thick manes of hair, and had just had theirs styled aboard ship. It looked like somebody had gone though both hairdos with a dirty garden rake.

  I take it back. She did say one thing.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever feel clean again.”

  “Ditto,” Elizabeth said.

  We rented a little cart that held all four of us and our luggage. Dad let me drive it along a long hallway that took us to the departure gates for internal flights in the United States, and without much trouble we boarded a subsonic plane for Orlando.

  It was after two in the morning, local time, when the plane finally took off. Dad was asleep almost the moment he landed in his seat. I was sharing a row with Mom, and I looked at her cautiously. She had piled her hair on top of her head in a way that looked okay to me but probably didn’t satisfy her much. She seemed calmer, until you looked at her eyes.

  “So, what do we do when we get to Orlando?” I asked.

  “Play it by ear,” she said. She gave me a tight smile and squeezed my hand, then went back to brooding.

  I would have hated to be the next person who got in her way. In fact, I resolved not to be that person. Come to think of it, that’s sort of the way I’d lived my life so far. All night long she kept muttering words like police state, fascists, and Nazis. I didn’t disagree.

  I SPENT THE night brooding on a problem less futile than trying to figure out how to get back at the Homelanders, one that probably had an actual answer.

  What had hit the Earth in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean?

  At first everybody assumed it was some sort of asteroid. Most astronomers shook their heads on that one, but for a while everyone accepted it anyway. It was easy enough to find a couple talking heads with Ph.D.s to say it was an asteroid.

  Then people began adding up what we knew about it.

  It had been going at around 99.999 percent of the speed of light. That was a big problem right there. Nothing that size had ever been observed traveling even remotely that fast. In fact, the only things humans had ever observed traveling that fast were subatomic particles and starships. And we observed starships from the inside, which was different.

  Out at the far “edges” of the universe—and I put that in quotes, because the universe has no edges, and from any point inside of it you appear to be at the “center”—galaxies have been observed moving at maybe .9c relative to us. But that’s the problem, the word relative. From the point of view of a person on one of those galaxies, it was us that was traveling at .9c, away from him.

  There are systems in place ready to fire nuclear bombs at any asteroid that we detect on a collision course with the Earth. But with an object going this fast, what are you going to do? How are you going to detect it?

  Imagine an airplane coming at you at a hair under the speed of sound. You can see it, but you won’t hear a thing until it’s on top of you, because the sound is traveling along just a little bit ahead of the plane in the atmosphere. It’s the same with whatever hit Earth. It was traveling so close behind whatever light it emitted that by the time you can detect it, it’s far too late to react.

  Radar? Forget it, radar is even less use than emitted light in detecting something like that. The radar has to reach it and then bounce back.

  Okay, somebody said. We’ve never detected an object like this before . . . but maybe that’s why! Say it had passed harmlessly between the Earth and the moon, maybe a hundred thousand miles away. Would we have even noticed it? Remember, it’s not leaving a vapor trail or anything. Is it leaving any sort of trace of its existence at all?

  Hmmm . . .

  There is the matter of its mass. Not its inertial mass, but the relativistic mass. It gets a little confusing, and my physics knowledge doesn’t go much beyond the basic concepts of relativity and quantum mechanics. A basic principle is that, the faster an object moves, the greater its inertia. If I were to toss a bullet at you, it would bounce off your chest. But if I fire it out of a gun, it has lots of inertia and can blow right through you. That’s because you’ve put a lot of energy into it: Newton’s First Law.

  Einstein changed that. He found out that your actual mass increases as your velocity increases. You don’t notice it except at very high speeds. But the reason a physical object can’t ever reach the speed of light, no matter how much energy you put into it, is that its mass would become infinite, and you can’t have infinite mass. Not even a black hole has infinite mass, just great density.

  Confusing, huh?

  Anyway, all that moving mass, even if it’s going by so fast you’d never spot it, has perturbing effects on the objects it passes. It’s not going to shake the Earth or the moon out of their orbits, but if it passes close enough to a small satellite, it ought to give it a tug. Not a big one. Extremely tiny, in fact, but there were enough man-made orbiting objects the killer asteroid must have passed that scientists were looking for those tiny orbital wiggles that might tell us more. Right now there were too many unknowns in the equations, but we’re pretty good at detecting very tiny effects these days. That’s how we first detected gravity waves, which caused a two-mile laser beam to expand and contract less than the width of one proton.

  The verdict on that was far from being in yet. To me, it seemed entirely possible that the universe was lousy with objects like the one that had grazed the Earth. There might be hundreds of them passing through the solar system every day, and we’d never know it, even if they came equipped with headlights and had them on high beam. The chances of a collision with anything were small. The most likely object they might hit would be the sun, which we’d never notice, either. The chances of one hitting the Earth would be even smaller.

  Which did sort of present a problem, at least to a suspicious mind.

  I have a suspicious mind.

  One had hit the Earth. Something had hit the Earth.

  Which brought up the second theory. The only large objects we know of that approach the speed of light are . . . starships.

  And a lot of people just didn’t want to go there.

  I won’t even mention the second, third, fourth, and nine hundred ninety-ninth theories about what the object was, nor their almost infinite variations. The nature of the cybernet, since the time we were calling it the internet, is chatter, and anybody can do it. Crackpots breed like lice on the web. You can find support for absolutely any proposition on the web. Naturally, the big impact had generated a lot of noise.

  I take it back, I will mention the third most popular explanation for what it was: The Wrath of God. Actually, some polls put it in the number two spot, with a bullet.

  Most of the Rapture people had already packed their bags, those who hadn’t already packed when Tel Aviv and Cairo were bombed. Figuratively, of course, since they expected to be Raptured physically out of their cars and clothes and lifted straight to heaven while the rest of us remained on Earth to
duke it out with Satan. (What about us Martians? I’m hoping we can sit on the sidelines and wait till it’s over.)

  Plenty of other religions saw it as God’s revenge for one thing or another. Many Muslims thought it was September 11 on a bigger scale, and thanked Allah.

  Personally, I discount all supernatural explanations until more data is in.

  But if it was a starship, that meant one of two things:

  Aliens, or one of ours.

  Which is where the various governments of Earth were pretty much united. They really didn’t want to go there, in either case.

  Aliens? What can you say? We haven’t encountered any so far, but not many of our starships have come back yet, and space is vast. It seems almost beyond question that there are other intelligences out there, and if we can find a way to get to the stars, I’m sure they can, too.

  But like I said, with aliens you got nothing but questions, all of them unanswerable because we don’t have the faintest notion how aliens would think.

  Why would our first contact with them be an attack? Why not land at the United Nations and say howdy-do?

  Well, maybe they’ve been watching us and seeing how warlike we can be. Maybe they wanted to get our attention. They sure got it, if they’re out there, but why not show up afterward and tell us about it. Otherwise, what’s the point?

  Answer: We don’t know. They’re aliens.

  That’s the answer to all the questions about aliens. We don’t know. So there’s not much point in worrying about it until they show themselves.

  But if it was one of ours, the possibilities multiply.

  One theory floating around the net was pretty simple. Starship arrives at Planet Mongo, lands, explores, finds it’s not worth staying, and heads home. Somewhere along the way an alien virus kills everybody on board. The autopilot keeps it on course. When it gets to Earth, there’s nobody alive on board to slow it down.

  Could happen, I guess, but a lot of experts doubted it. More likely the autopilot would turn around at the halfway point and the ghost ship would automatically take up a parking orbit around Jupiter, where all starships have departed for fifteen years, by international agreement. On the other hand, there was nobody with the authority to mandate what kind of electronics and programs an interstellar vehicle shipped out with. Some of the countries that sent out ships back when it was a point of national or religious pride were pretty poor; they might have cut corners.

  You can come up with a hundred accident scenarios without breaking a sweat, and I’d read dozens of them in my spare time aboard the Sov.

  Then there was the scariest possibility of all.

  Maybe it wasn’t an accident.

  SOMEWHERE IN THOSE nightmare scenarios I guess I drifted off to sleep. Weak orange morning sunlight was in my face when Mom shook my shoulder, and I looked out to the east as the plane descended into Orlando.

  The sky was black with smoke.

  6

  I HAD MEANT to look at Disney World and all the related attractions as we flew over them, to see if I could spot the final landfall of Red Thunder in one of the vast parking lots. There was some kind of monument. But I kept looking at the smoke as we descended into a sooty black layer of air.

  As far as the eye could see—which wasn’t all that far, that awful morning—columns of smoke rose into the air. At some point they reached winds in the upper atmosphere and swirled and merged into a thick layer. Soon we descended into it, and the morning darkened. By the time our wheels touched on the runway it looked like twilight, not morning. The sun was an orange ball near the horizon. You could look right at it.

  We were going into that?

  I realized I didn’t have much of an idea just what we were going to do when we got off the plane. Last time I landed in Orlando I got on a train and was in Daytona Beach an hour later. Somehow I didn’t think it would work that way this time.

  Mom and Dad hadn’t told me much about their plans. I’m not blaming them; I hadn’t asked. Now I was kicking myself because I realized I’d been acting like a little kid, letting the parents handle everything. I hated it when they still treated me like a kid. I hated it even worse when I gave them an excuse to do it. I resolved to get more involved in the family. Not going to be easy, I realized, because I’d spent the last four or five years distancing myself from them.

  Uncle Dak was waiting for us as soon as we got off the plane. Dad gave him a bigger smile than I’d seen from him in days, and they hugged each other, then Dak hugged Mom. He was going to hug me and Elizabeth, but pulled back, looking alarmed.

  “My god, you guys are sure growing ’em tall on Mars. This can’t be little Ramon and Elizabeth?”

  “Ray, Uncle Dak,” I said, and took his hand. He was fairly tall himself, for an Earthie—and I’d have to remember not to use that term too freely while I was actually here—but I had three inches on him.

  “And Elizabeth, holy sh—you must have to beat ’em off with a stick. The fine young men, I mean.”

  Elizabeth shook hands solemnly, and Uncle Dak seemed to remember why we were here, because he dropped the glad-handing immediately.

  “No news since we spoke, my friends,” he said. “It’s a fu—it’s unbelievable over there. Worst thing I ever saw.”

  Uncle Dak was the same age as Dad, still skinny as a rail, with long-fingered hands, dark skin, and a forehead a lot higher than I remembered. The hair he had left he wore naturally kinky and short-cropped, against the current fashion for trendy Africans worldwide. There was a lot of gray around the temples.

  Dak was introduced to the Redmond family, and we set off down the concourse, past long rows of slot machines and shops and restaurants and a chorus line of dancing Mickey Mouses. After about a mile Dak started to look concerned.

  “Dude, you want me to get y’all a cart?” he asked.

  “I might as well get used to it,” Dad said, huffing and puffing.

  “Is that a yes or a no?”

  “Get used to walking, I mean. In one gee.”

  “Like God intended,” Dak said, with a grin. “I told you you’d regret it, living the soft life on that damn place.”

  Dad gave him a dirty look. I knew there was some sort of history there, but I didn’t know much about it. Dak and Dad had been best friends for some years when they were my age, and for a while after they got back from their first trip to Mars, but they hadn’t actually gotten together since my family moved to Mars. I don’t think they even talked on the phone anymore, which was why I was a little surprised to see him waiting for us.

  “So how is your father?” Dad asked him.

  “Retired to California, two years ago. Sold the speed shop, got good money for it. He still tinkers with the cars out there, but mostly he putters.”

  “Putters?”

  “In the garden. Yeah, I know, the man knows bupkis about plants, he used to could kill a lawn just by walking over it, and he’s not doing much better out there in the golden west, but he seems to enjoy it. Christmas, he FedExes me a box of oranges from his trees. I figure they cost him about fifty bucks each, and they ain’t as good as the ones they grow here and sell for five bucks a pound. Or used to. Who knows what they’re going for now?”

  Everybody knew the American economy was in the toilet, and had been for over a decade. All the bills coming due, Mom said, and nothing to pay them with. According to Dak, the tsunami had hit the financial world almost as hard as it hit the beaches of America.

  AFTER WE PASSED out of the security zone we reclaimed our luggage and stepped out into the pleasant air of Florida.

  I’m kidding. It was ghastly.

  Even in the wintertime Florida can be blistering or, even worse, smothering. Consider that I’d spent most of the last ten years in a totally temperature-controlled environment. It hit us like a hammer. Ninety in the shade. Temperature and humidity. In five minutes my shirt was sopping.

  There was a long line of people just outside the entrance, and I figured we’d h
ave to join that one, too. In fact, I was headed that way already, just like a docile American, when Dak called me back.

  “No need, Ramon. . . . sorry, Ray. That’s for weapons.”

  “Weapons?” I’m pretty good at feeding the straight line sometimes.

  “Folks who feel naked without a piece. They can’t bring ’em on airplanes, so they send ’em ahead.”

  I looked at people retrieving packages, mostly small ones but a few long and thick. Some of them unwrapped them right there on the sidewalk and stored them away in shoulder holsters or purses.

  “Does everybody go armed now?” I asked him.

  “Pretty much.” He pulled back his light windbreaker and showed me a big ugly lump of metal stuck into his waistband. He grinned at me. “You gotta remember, Ray, you ain’t on Mars anymore. You in America. Worse than that, you in Florida.”

  THE ROAD AWAY from the airport was lined with stores that all seemed to have the same name: GUNS! Okay, there were a few liquor stores, too.

  Dak had taken us to a rental agency, where we picked up a vehicle large enough for the nine of us and Dak. We loaded it with our stuff and he punched in a destination and the vehicle moved automatically onto the web of autoways that crisscrossed and ringed Orlando. The adults were in front, Dak and Mom and Dad reliving old times, the Redmonds mostly staying quiet. Elizabeth and Evangeline were talking to each other, and the brats were busy plotting the downfall of human civilization, leaving me with not much to do but look out the window.

  Naturally, there are no road signs on the autoways, since no manual driving was allowed, but it seemed to me we were going in the wrong direction. I’ve got a pretty good navigator in my head, but it’s not much use in strange terrain when you can’t see the sun. So I opened a GPS window and confirmed my hunch: We were heading west on State Autoway 528, not north on Interstate 4. Looked to me like we should have been going north on 417 . . . but what did I know?