by John Varley
Or I could ask him what it was like to fuck his mother.
While I was thinking over these options Mom stepped forward, still digging our papers out of her shoulder bag, tripped over her own feet, and fell. Dak, who was closest to her, grabbed at her arm but missed, and all our papers and some money scattered all over the hot asphalt.
Everybody but the soldiers scrambled to help her up, but she waved us off, preferring instead to move around on her hands and knees, gathering our papers and the other items that had been in her bag. Lucky for us there was no wind or our entire identities would have ended up in some swamp somewhere, and we’d probably have ended up in some camp for un-persons. I got down and helped her, grabbing at hundredeuro notes, van rental papers, insurance agreements, vaccination certificates, Homelander clearance cards, lipsticks, tissues . . . it was amazing what all she had in there.
Dak and Dad helped her to her feet and she shuffled all the papers together. Somehow, through some odd mix-up, a couple of bits of currency had gotten mixed up with the other stuff, just the corners peeking out. She handed it all to the soldier.
“Is there some problem, Officer?” Dak asked. “We were assured we’d be able to get through to DeLand.”
“Don’ call me officer,” the lizard said. “Corporal, me. Corporal Strunk.” His pink and peeling and sweat-coated brow was twisting with the unaccustomed effort of thought. I think he was trying to add the numbers on the corners of the bills and having a tough time of it.
“DeLand is only another twenty miles,” Dak was going on, smiling big. “We have the phone number of our friend. Maybe you’ve heard of him. Travis Broussard?”
It took a little time for the words to penetrate Corporal Lizard’s mathematical fog, but finally he frowned even deeper and looked at Dak.
“Broussard? The rich guy?” I held my breath. This idiot had already expressed a certain distaste for the rich. I hoped it only applied to rich Martians.
“That’s the dude. Here, look, we got his picture.” Dak held out a snap that clearly showed him and my father and mother and uncle Travis. Also myself, at a considerably younger age.
I’d have bet he wouldn’t have known Travis Broussard from Sir Isaac Newton, but I would have been wrong. Uncle Travis is one of the richest men on Earth, and though he doesn’t try to play the celebrity, there’s nothing he can do about it. Even a dimwit like Corporal Lizard had heard of him, and he was apparently impressed enough not to want to risk offending him if it came to that.
Which was a good thing, I later learned, as Mom had been trying to contact uncle Travis for the last hour and he wasn’t answering his phone.
Or maybe it was just the money. When he handed the papers back to Mom the money was missing. He jerked his head once in the direction we wanted to go and moved on to his next victim.
“Getting to be more and more like the third world every day down here,” Dak said, shaking his head as we drove away.
THE ROAD WAS clear for a few miles. We were paralleling the coast, about twenty-five miles inland. There was almost no traffic, and other than the columns of smoke to the east, no sign that just over the horizon was the biggest catastrophe of all time.
Dak was driving, of course. He used to be a professional race driver, making anything on two or four wheels go very, very fast. He showed no tendency for speed today, though. We started bumping over rough road.
“Tank tracks,” he said. They had torn up the road considerably, cutting gouges out of the asphalt surface that probably dated back to the twentieth century and hadn’t been in all that good repair for quite a while. We traveled through a few miles of this, then began to see the tanks themselves, great big black monsters with stealthy radar angles and giant cannons and turrets. The soldiers lounging around them were not National Guard slobs, but regular Army. They watched us go by with no particular hostility. A few even waved at us, and Dak honked back.
“Tanks?” Mom asked.
“Just the thing to turn back another tsunami, huh?” Dak said, dryly.
“What’s the point?” I asked.
“No very good point, far as I can see,” Dak said. “But the military commanders are really hyped on this alien invasion, warning shot deal. A lot of them are expecting another barrage any minute.”
“They’re worried about the refugees,” Mr. Redmond said, surprising us all. Not the idea, but the fact that he’d spoken at all. Mr. Redmond was not a man to put his thoughts forward, at least not around us.
“Think so?” Dak asked.
“From what I’ve been hearing. Not on the net. Nothing is coming out through the net. But people are getting out, and stories are getting out by old-fashioned word of mouth. Of course, you can’t believe everything you hear, but if a tenth of it is true, they’ve got good reason to be worried.”
“How come?”
“Riots. There have been some big ones in Miami and Savannah.”
It turned out Mr. Redmond had learned a lot more than we had. He wasn’t forthcoming at first, but the more we questioned him the more we learned. All of it subject to the caution he kept repeating: By its very nature, this is all rumor. Some of it will be exaggerated. Don’t believe everything you hear.
Around then, all our stereos went dead.
AS WE APPROACHED the high stone wall that surrounded the old part of Rancho Broussard we passed a small area where the ten-foot, well-maintained electrified fence took a jog to the left, then right, right again, and left again, cutting out about half an acre that had no fence around it at all. On that little plot were the two ricketiest, most ramshackle structures I’d ever seen. Both of them were “mobile homes,” one of them a double-wide with what passed for stained-glass windows cut out of it. It was just colored cellophane taped to the glass. There was a big wooden cross on the roof.
But you could hardly see the buildings for the forest of signs, hand-lettered with house paint on plywood, that sprouted like a colorful crazy quilt along the roadway. The biggest one said:
NEVER MIND THAT
HEATHERN OVER YONDER!
JESUS IS YOU’RE LORD!
COME AND WORSHIP!
“The Holy Reverend is still there, I see,” Dak said, as he turned into a driveway next to it.
“You’re kidding,” Dad said. “The same one? He’s still alive?”
“Far as I know it’s the same dude. I thought he was older’n dirt when we first started coming here.”
The Holy Reverend was the source of one of the most-told stories in our family. He had briefly converted to a belief in space aliens after inadvertently viewing one of Uncle Jubal’s early bubble experiments, but had since gone back to Jesus. It’s a pretty funny story; Dad covers it in his book. He and Travis hadn’t gotten along too well before that, and after that the Holy Reverend thought Travis was the Devil himself. I thought Travis hated him back, but Mom said no.
“The funny thing is,” she told me once, “Travis owns the land the church sits on. The Holy Reverend doesn’t have two dimes to rub together. Travis pays the taxes and even contributes anonymously. He likes the old coot.”
We came to a stone guardhouse and gate. A heavily armed man came out, smiling, waving at Dak. Dak stopped the vehicle and told us to roll down the windows. The guard asked all our names, paying particular attention to Mr. Redmond and Evangeline. I couldn’t help noticing the whole process was nothing like the wringer the Homelanders had put us through. We were known to the guard of course, and I knew that Uncle Travis didn’t really want to live in a guarded compound at all, but he had no choice. He can handle himself, he’s quick and accurate with a gun, but he wouldn’t stand a chance in a determined kidnap or murder attempt, both of which had been tried more than once. But he instructs the guards to keep the fascist stuff to a minimum, be polite, and only shoot to wound if at all possible. If you knew my uncle Travis, you’d find this an amazingly liberal attitude.
We drove through virgin piney woods and pulled to a stop on what had once been a baske
tball court. Dak shut off the engine, and for a few moments nobody spoke. Then, amazingly, my mother began to sing.
“ ‘Seems like old times ... ’” Mom used to be a killer karaoke bar performer, according to my father, but you had to get a few drinks into her. It’s the one thing I know of that she’s shy about, and I don’t know why, because she has a soothing contralto voice that is one of my favorite childhood memories, back when she was singing me to sleep.
Dak and Dad laughed, and I knew why. I’d seen plenty of pictures of Rancho Broussard back in the days when Uncle Travis was a drunk rotting away in it and Uncle Jubal was a retarded (so everybody thought) idiot savant tinkering in his big prefab metal barn and supporting them both with his crazy inventions.
It was a ranch-style rambler that sprawled through the wild tropical plantings that hadn’t been trimmed back in years and almost concealed it completely. The basketball court had been cracked and weed-choked, the swimming pool empty except for leaves and sludge.
It looked pretty much the same today. It had looked pretty much like that the last time I visited, years ago.
After a while my eyes began to pick out differences. There were actual nets in the basketball hoops. The concrete was still cracked, but it looked like somebody had hit the plants growing there with a weedeater.
The pool was still empty, Travis preferred to swim in his little lake. But it was reasonably clean, and there was stuff down there wrapped in tarps.
The house was still almost concealed by growth, but it had been painted at least once. Travis figured that cutting the lawn once a year was about enough, same with trimming the bigger plants. He liked the wild look.
It was a nice house, but not what you’d expect from a multibillionaire. It was not as imposing as the McMansions of his new neighbors, and you just knew that if those folks ever got a look at it, they’d crap their pants. There goes the neighborhood! Never mind that he was there first.
Dak and Mom and Dad marched right up to the sliding glass doors that led from the patio to the main room but they weren’t locked, as always. We walked in.
“Travis, are you decent?” Mom called out.
“Dressed, maybe, but never decent,” Dak said.
We didn’t get an answer for a moment. The room was clean, and the disorder was under control.
“Nobody home,” Dak said.
“Nobody but us ghosts,” came a voice, and we all jumped. A big wall screen came to life, and Travis’s face appeared on it, sweaty and grease-covered. “I’m glad to see y’all made it. I’m over in the warehouse. Got some food here, too. Come on over.” The screen went blank.
We all trooped outside again and walked through the muggy Florida heat and crushing Earth gravity toward Jubal’s old barn.
This was one of two things that had really changed since the voyage of Red Thunder.
There was a big iron fence around it, and a lot of big signboards that were turned off now, but on visiting days showed old films of Red Thunder and her crew, the famous footage of the takeoff that melted the barge the ship was sitting on. There was a little concrete-block building where the volunteer do-cents hung out between tours.
Uncle Travis bitches and moans about the building being declared a National Historic Site, and even more about being required to open it to the public one day every week, but I think he is secretly pleased. Or at least he realizes that the building is an important part of the human scientific heritage, right up there with Edison’s lab and the Apollo 11 launch pad.
The other building was the same type, a poured-concrete foundation and steel beams and sheet metal, but in the large economy size, maybe five or six times as big as Jubal’s old digs. It was windowless and painted a pale green. Massive air conditioners throbbed as we made our way along the concrete path to a human-sized door set close to a giant garage door. This was where Uncle Travis kept his toys.
I don’t know how many billions of euros Uncle Travis had. Some people say he was the richest man in the world. Travis laughs when he hears that, but he doesn’t deny it. He gives away several billion euros every year and he told me he doesn’t figure he’ll run out before he dies. Compared to other billionaires he doesn’t spend much money on himself. All you had to do was take a look at Rancho Broussard to see that. He has a house on Mars where he stays when he comes to visit (not often enough), and a working ranch out in Montana somewhere, and that’s it. What he likes, his only real luxury, is fine machines, many of which will go very, very fast.
Do I need to say he had been my favorite uncle when I was here last time? Uncle Jubal was fun and a genius and a great man . . . but Travis was a pilot and an astronaut and a race car driver, and when Mom and Dad weren’t around he let me sit on his lap and steer his ’65 Shelby Mustang around the dirt road of the ranch. What boy could ask for more?
He takes good care of his toys, too. He has a hangar somewhere to keep his airplanes. This building was where he kept his land vehicles. It felt great to go through that door. I could still use a shower, but feeling the sweat drying out was a lot better than feeling it dripping down my ribs.
There were several hundred vehicles in there. My favorite was a Rolls-Royce that had been converted into a pickup truck. Uncle Travis actually used that one to haul things around the ranch, at the infrequent times he was actually hauling stuff. Nevertheless, it was sparkly clean, like all his vehicles. He had a full-time staff whose job was to keep everything polished and tuned up.
Of the big stuff, I guess the most impressive was an M1A1 Abrams tank. He’d let me drive that once, too, and even fire off a blank round.
But the center of interest today was a long, wide, brightly painted thing I hadn’t seen before. It looked like a squared-off boat with wheels on it, six of them, two in front and four in back, on two axles. It had high roll bars and a white canvas awning stretched over them. The side facing me had huge lettering spelling out DUCK TOURS in a racing motif, and a picture of Donald Duck water-skiing. But as we approached, one of Uncle Travis’s assistants came around the back and started spraying it with olive drab.
“It’s called a Duck,” came a voice, and Uncle Travis’s head popped up near the back. “Spelled D-U-K-W, for some reason known only to the United States Army. Built in 1943 for amphibious landings, only they tended to sink in high waves.” He bent over again, and we heard the engine start up. It revved a few times, a deep-throated rumble like a marine engine. He stood up again, grinned at us, and shut the engine off.
“I replaced the standard engine with something that has a little more authority. It should get us where we’re going. How y’all doing?” He moved to the side of the thing and vaulted over the edge, which I winced to see, because the side was about seven or eight feet high, and I knew that doing that myself would practically kill me. It didn’t do him any good, either. He landed a little harder than he would have liked and stood stooped over for a minute.
“Be careful, old man,” Mom teased him, and helped him up and put her arms around him. He held his hands out to his side and grinned down at her. “Is that all the hug I’m going to get, after all these years?”
“I’m filthy, hon. And not that old.”
“I love you anyway, and you think I’m going to get through this without getting filthy, too? Kiss me, you fool.”
Uncle Travis grinned even broader, put his arms around her, and kissed her on the forehead. Then he hugged Manny and Dak and Elizabeth, was introduced to Mr. Redmond and Evangeline, then was facing me.
How’s the weather up there? Earthies love to say that, and I’m pretty sure he thought about it, him being a good eight inches shorter than me. But he just looked me in the eye and shook my hand, firmly but not a knuckle-breaker, though I don’t doubt he could have thrown me over his shoulder if he wanted to.
So I returned the favor, and didn’t tell him how much older he looked.
Not that he looked bad. His hairline had receded, but he still had more hair than my dad, though all of it was white
. His face was lined and leathery from the sun, with a few little white spots where skin cancers had been frozen off. It was a strong face, with a twinkle in the blue eyes, and at the right angle he looked a little like that old action film star. What was his name? Bruce something. Dad liked his movies.
“So you talked them out of it, huh?” he said to me. It took me a second to understand what he meant.
“Oh. No, actually, Uncle Travis. That was Elizabeth.” I felt stupid as soon as I said it, the poor little brother. “She’s older, she can do what she wants.”
“I’ll bet she can. Just like her mother.”
“Only quieter,” Dad said.
“Quiet can get the job done, too. Sometimes better than noise. Not everybody’s cut out to be an in-your-face asshole like me. Come on, I’ll show you what I’ve got done so far. I need more ideas on what to bring along.” He stopped and put a hand on my shoulder. “And you can stop calling me uncle, Ray, unless you really want to. Call me Travis.”
“Okay, Travis.” It sounded odd, but I liked it. I wondered if I could start calling Dad Manny someday.
Nah.
There was a ladder alongside the Duck that Travis could have used if he hadn’t been so macho as to risk breaking an ankle. We all trooped up and inside.
It was quite nice. The Duck had originally been a war vehicle, sold as army surplus, then refurbished and put to work puttering around in the Halifax River—which is not really a river, to my way of thinking, but a salty strip between the barrier island and the mainland, but they do things differently in Florida—with a dozen or so tourists. It could launch itself on any boat ramp, or simply slosh through marsh to the water’s edge and into the drink.
Travis had pulled out a few rows of seats to make room for all the gear he planned to take along, and there was still enough seating for all of us, plus a little tent he’d arranged in the back with a cot inside where we could take turns taking naps.