by John Varley
No, let’s be honest here. This wasn’t just a tight throat and a few tears leaking from my eyes. This was just short of bawling out loud like a baby. It was on me in an instant, and before I knew it I was sitting on the ground. It was a sobbing, wrenching, snotty-nosed cry, more appropriate to a two-year-old than a high school senior. And I couldn’t seem to stop.
Humiliating? You bet. Soon I felt a pair of arms go around me and I looked up, unable to catch my breath, expecting to see Mom. But it was Evangeline, and soon Elizabeth was on my other side. They held me until I could breathe normally, and Evangeline used her sleeve, all she had available, to wipe my face before helping me to my feet. How wonderful. No better way into a girl’s affections than to snivel and whine over a dead tiger, right? I wondered if I’d ever be able to look her in the eye again.
Nobody said anything. The guys around the truck were all doing other things, careful not to look my way. It wasn’t the first time they’d witnessed a meltdown like that recently, and it wouldn’t be the last. Maybe some of them had even had a moment like that themselves.
I got back on the hood with my back to the rest of my family, my legs hanging over the side.
“Ready to go, Ray?” Travis asked. I nodded without turning around, Travis gave a tiny beep of the horn, and we were on our way again.
WE WERE ABOUT five miles away from Rancho Broussard when we finally ran out of gas. Travis nursed Scrooge along another quarter mile, sputtering, then pulled to the side of the road and called ahead.
In a few minutes three heavy vehicles pulled up beside us and six heavily armed men got out and held the doors for us and loaded Grandma’s stuff into the cargo spaces, and a few minutes after that we were driving through the gates and into a world of peace and quiet that hadn’t been touched by the destroying waters.
A huge meal had been prepared, and we all sat down at the table. Some of my family dug in heartily, but I didn’t have much appetite. Evangeline sat beside me, Mom on the other side, and I kept getting appraising glances from Mom when she thought I wasn’t looking.
I’m okay, Mom, honest I am.
Then there was a long, hot shower, soaping and shampooing myself three times and still not feeling totally clean.
Then there was a big bed in the guest room, with clean satin sheets.
Home. Or close enough.
THE NEXT DAY we checked into the Swan and Dolphin at Disney Universe. The Redmond family was reunited, and of course the stories of what the brats had been doing had to be gotten out of the way before we could fill Mrs. Redmond in on our boring adventures. They had managed to destroy only a few odd corners of the resort, apparently. The fire crews had things in hand, the injured had been taken to hospitals, and early reports said the park might be open again in a few days.
We intended to stay there only a night or two until we could arrange a flight to the Falkland Islands to see Uncle Jubal. Usually, it’s just a matter of calling him and telling him we’re on the way. But for some reason, Jubal was not answering his phone.
The first day Travis kept getting excuses that had to do with the disaster. Distribution nodes down, lines too busy, not enough bandwidth with all the emergency channels operating. Bullshit like that. It sounded fishy to all of us, but there wasn’t much we could do.
The second day I went with Elizabeth and Evangeline and the brats to a big water park and we rode the slides and surfed the waves all day. We’d explained over and over to the brats that you had to wear a bathing suit on Earth, but they kept forgetting. I spent half my time trying to locate their discarded duds.
The other half I spent admiring how good Evangeline looked in a bikini made of three scraps of orange cloth, none of which would have covered my palm. They had a great deal of trouble covering Evangeline, too, especially the top two, which had a lot to cover. The girls had bought them from a dispenser outside the changing rooms. When they came out they were giggling. I asked them what the joke was.
“Lots of flesh,” Elizabeth said. “Earth girls are fat!”
“And I never saw so much pubic hair,” Evangeline said. “Honest, three-quarters of them were bushy as . . .”
“Beavers?” Elizabeth said, and they collapsed laughing.
Martian girls depilate everything below the neck. The legs and underarms because that’s just what girls do, and the rest because it provides a tighter seal for the sticky device that is needed for urination in a pressure suit. And it doesn’t hurt so much when you rip it free.
Evangeline let me put suntan lotion on her back. I did it for Elizabeth, too, but it somehow wasn’t the same. At six-two and six-one respectively, Elizabeth and Evangeline turned a lot of heads at the water park when they walked by. I tried to tell myself that I did, too, but the fact is my strength is a wiry strength, and many of the Earth boys bulged with muscles.
Okay, I’m skinny. The only interested glance I noticed was from a guy.
But it was a great day. All the blue, chlorinated water and blazing sunshine seemed to wash and burn away a lot of the memories of filth and decay and wretchedness of the last days, and the sight of all the people splashing around and having fun reminded me again that life goes on.
At times, it struck me as just plain wrong. But why shouldn’t these people have fun? There just wasn’t room for everybody in the United States to go to the Red Zone and help out. In fact, they were asking people to stay away. These people had probably planned their vacations months ago, put down deposits. The people who worked here, and in the other parks, had to make a living—and attendance was down, way down. The park wasn’t crowded at all.
At the park’s entrance there were barrels for canned food donations, overflowing, and a big clear plastic cube bulging with money. Nobody had forgotten.
Life has to go on. Doesn’t it?
WHEN WE GOT back to the hotel room, still smelling of chlorine, Travis was stalking back and forth, cursing a blue streak. A lot of it was incoherent rage, but every once in a while he said something specific and eventually we figured out that he hadn’t been able to get through to Jubal.
“One excuse after another,” he shouted. “Overloaded circuits. Bullshit! Can’t be reached. Bullshit! He has ‘the flu.’ Bullshit! Storms. Storms, for chrissake, and the planes can’t land or take off. What kind of fucking idiot do they think I am?”
I knew the answer, and I think he did, too. They just didn’t care. They—whoever “they” are, in this case the IPA—were so used to lying they did it reflexively, and didn’t much care any more if anyone believed them. What were they going to do about it, anyway? They were the IPA, the Power Company. They ran the world.
Well, I thought they had picked the wrong enemy when they decided to fuck over Travis. Nobody fucked with Travis.
“All right, I’m chartering a plane, right now, and I’ll fly the sucker down there myself. They can’t do this to me, it’s in our contract.”
He was actually on his way out the door before Dad and Dak caught up with him and grabbed his arms and pulled him back into the room. They gentled him down some until he was willing to listen.
“They’ll shoot you down, Travis,” Dad said. “You know that.”
Travis shook them off, but then he relaxed. He nodded.
“What kills me is, I can’t figure out what they’re up to.”
“Some kind of security bullshit,” Dak said. “That seems to cover everything.”
“Yeah, but . . . why Jubal? Why are they doing this to him?”
WE WAITED AROUND for three more days. Travis never did get through to Jubal. On the fourth day he took off for Buenos Aires, and we boarded a spaceship to Mars.
The trip back was just another trip.
The weight gradually fell away. I spent most of the time aboard catching up with schoolwork, and with friends. Every day the time lag was less, until it was instantaneous again.
We talked to Travis every day. He rented a big boat and motored out to the Falklands, where he was met by an over-
flight of fighter planes firing across his bows, then a destroyer, which turned him back. It’s a good thing Travis didn’t have his own destroyer, or he might have started the Second Falklands War, and I’m not sure which side I would have bet on. But he did turn back.
Then we were on our way down, and on the train into town, and entering the familiar confines of the hotel.
I got back into my own room, which seemed somehow smaller. I dropped my suitcase on the floor.
Home.
11
SUMMERTIME ON MARS.
Yeah, right.
There is no logical explanation for why we have a “summer vacation” from school on Mars. There’s an explanation; it’s just not logical. The reason is, that’s the way it’s always been done.
Come to think of it, that’s the explanation for a lot of human behavior, isn’t it?
The actual Martian summer is determined by our distance from the sun, not by the tilt of the axis, as it is on Earth. The orbit of Mars is a lot more eccentric than Earth’s so we go way out there and get cold, then come way in and get . . . well, less cold.
The virtual Martian summer begins when it’s the end of May on Earth, when summer begins in the Northern Hemisphere. They tell me the reason schools break for summer on Earth is because that’s when children have to be on hand for the planting, and later for the harvest. Which makes about as much sense as calling a holiday in December because that’s when the mammoths come through on their annual migration, and we have to kill a few to smoke and store in our cave. Come on, it’s the twenty-first century.
So it was August. Yeah, right.
The Martian year is longer than the Earth year. Almost twice as long: 697 Earth days. But we don’t use Martian years. Nobody I know states their age in Mars years, we all use Earth years. Birthdays are on the Earth calendar, and so is just about everything else. We can’t keep Earth time, but we do the next best thing. We run on a twenty-four-hour clock, and use the same minutes and seconds as you do on Earth.
... but wait. How can that be? The Martian day is twenty-four hours thirty-nine minutes, and thirty-five seconds. So how do we deal with the extra minutes?
Simple. We ignore them.
It’s a messy solution to a messy situation, but the fact is that Mars is a very tiny cultural tail wagging behind a very big dog, which is Earth. In many ways, what’s happening on Earth is more important than what’s happening on Mars. So it’s advantageous for us to live by Earth years and months. We’d live by Earth days if we could—and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard tourists complain that we have a longer day. Some of them seem to expect us to speed up the rotation of the planet so they can have their normal Earth day.
When you think about it, what were our alternatives? Well, there have been a thousand proposals for a Martian clock, most of them metric, and some of them even make a certain amount of sense. Twenty hours in a day, for instance, or only ten. Divide each hour into one hundred minutes. Then divide each minute into . . . what? Problem is, a “second” is a standard of measurement of everything. Do we really want a Martian second? I don’t think so.
Luckily, nobody uses mechanical clocks anymore, and computer clocks can easily be instructed to pause for 39.583333 . . . minutes before resuming again. At first, when people were getting together to thrash all this out, after we’d been living here a while and it was obvious we needed to tell time in a different way if twelve noon wasn’t going to work its way around the day, so we’d all be eating lunch in the middle of the night sometimes, they just called it “the Pause.” They set it at midnight. All the clocks would stop for 39.5 minutes when it was celestial noon on the far side of Mars from the big human settlements. That way, the Pause would happen while 99 percent of the people on the planet were sleeping.
Then somebody like Mom, who wanted to celebrate the differences between Mars and Earth instead of slavishly imitating our big sister, started a drive to move the Pause from a place where nobody noticed it to a place where you couldn’t miss it. Make it a truly Martian thing, something you could talk about when you got home. Come to think of it, the Pause Debate was one of the first really hot political issues to interest the Martian population.
Nobody can get by without politics, but we have a minimum of it on Mars. Basically the things that aren’t handled by the owning companies back on Earth, or that they could care less about, are handled by the City Council. It’s elected, and everybody over the age of fifteen can vote, even if you just got off the ship. The Council just sort of grew, and I can’t really say it’s grown that much. Which is the way a lot of people like it. Many of the people who came to Mars to stay, so far, are a lot like native Alaskans, who are famous for not liking other people telling them what do to.
Anyway, moving the Pause had a lot of support . . . but move it where? That was debated for almost a year. Almost any daylight hour had some supporters, and plenty of the evening hours, too. But at last we voted to stop the clocks at 3 P.M., 1500 hours, and to call it the Siesta.
Close second: Happy Hour. After all, we are a planet of innkeepers.
IT WAS THREE months after our trip to the Red Zone. I had graduated high school with honors in English and history and adequate grades in everything else. I had to decide where I was going for my higher education. What should it be? Harvard or Yale? I’d never been to sunny California, so maybe I’d go to Stanford or UCLA. Cambridge and Oxford didn’t interest me, as I’d heard the English climate was just awful, plus I’d have to listen to those British upper-class accents all day.
Just kidding. I could “attend” any of those grand old places, but at the freshman level I might as well select my institution of higher learning by what I thought of their basketball team, or even their school colors. And weather wouldn’t be a problem, because I wouldn’t be going to Earth. Not yet, anyway.
Blame it on the web, like so much else. These days you could attend classes virtually. The universities resisted it, but eventually they were confronted by a de facto situation, and gave in. You no longer have to go to Boston to attend Harvard. If you know enough to log on to online classes you can become a web freshman. No entrance exam necessary. Hooray for equality!
Of course, there’s equal, and then there’s equal.
And there’s practical, and there’s impractical. There’s nothing to prevent you from attending an advanced seminar at the Sorbonne, everything but some highly select honors courses is webcast these days. That doesn’t mean you will understand what they’re talking about. So all but a few supergeniuses start out in the traditional way, with Physics 101 or Introduction to African History, and work their way up. When you think about it, it’s good for everybody. The geniuses can proceed at their own pace, and they can do it from Manhattan or the rudest sheet-metal hut in Calcutta. People who never had a chance to see so much as a blackboard in the past are now able to get an Ivy League education, if they’re up to it. Excellence can now actually select itself in academia, at least until the point where you actually arrive on campus and are faced with prejudice and politics and academic bullshit. Or so I’ve read, in researching the pluses and minuses of web school. Mostly pluses, to my way of thinking, the big one being I could stay on Mars for a few more years, at least, just like that boy or girl in Calcutta doesn’t have to figure out how to pay for transportation to and lodging in Paris.
But eventually, the different levels of equality come into play. You can get a degree from Stanford and never leave your igloo in Nome, but it’s not quite the same kind of degree you’d get if you’d lived in the ivy-covered dorms. The sheepskin itself will look identical, but simply by googling the student you can find out if he or she actually attended in the flesh. So, people being what they are, an Attending Degree, or AD, was more prestigious than a Web Degree, or WD.
But there’s a remedy for that, and so far as I can tell it adds up to what Mom calls “that rarest of human institutions: a meritocracy.”
You can start out as I plan
to, attending classes via the web. You get graded like everybody else. Then, if you look like Hah-vahd material—that is, if you are smarter than some of the legacy admissions already there—you will be invited to attend in corpore. Doesn’t matter if you’re our boy from Calcutta, or a girl from Chad, or some poor child who actually lives in Boston but never had a chance to attend a good school.
As for picking a school, there’s another alternative these days, and it’s what I’m leaning toward.
Don’t pick.
If I’m going to be on Mars anyway, what do I care about singing “The Whiffenpoof Song” with a lot of drunken Elis? I’d never make the rowing team to bring glory to dear old Cambridge. I don’t give a hoot about either American football or real football. Other than reasons like that I don’t see the point of identifying myself with any particular school. In this academic strategy, you simply attend the classes that appeal to you. On Monday morning you can be in a class in Johannesburg, follow it up with a seminar in California, and that afternoon attend lectures in Japan and Buenos Aires.
If a certain professor turns out to be boring or incompetent, just stop going. Professors hate this, they call it the Neilsen Rating system of education. It’s mostly the ones whose web attendance is low who complain, though.
You can cobble together your own educational strategy, chart your own path, design your own specialty, if you wish. You may not even want to pursue a degree, you may just want to learn stuff and go from there.
Tentatively, that’s what I planned to do. Do what I want to do.
There was just one small problem. What do I want to do?
Problem . . . I hadn’t yet felt what you’d call a real passion for anything other than what all boys my age feel. That is, girls. How do you make a career out of girls?
I didn’t have to worry about money. I could pick some area that didn’t necessarily pay much. I could be a Martian geologist, sifting through rocks with no intrinsic worth. There’s no diamonds or seams of gold or uranium on Mars, it’s not tectonically active enough to have formed such things. There’s no oil, and no market for it if there was. And there’s nothing else here that can’t be had more cheaply and easily on Earth. But there’s still plenty to learn about the history of Mars through studying its rocks. I’ve been collecting them since I first got here.