Red Lightning

by John Varley

  At least that’s what we hoped. If only we could get Jubal to curse and wave his arms around and protest that he’d get us fired, the picture would be perfect. But Jubal was sound asleep.

  DID I MENTION that sometimes my mom can be a little scary?

  She pushed into my trailer, glanced at Evangeline, who pointed forlornly at the far corner of the room. Mom looked over there, at Jubal snoring peacefully. I think her eyes widened a little bit. I can’t be sure. Then she faced me.

  She sighed.

  “Tell me about it,” she said.

  We filled her in on the story, such as it was. I’m sure glad we had Jubal there with us, or I wouldn’t have believed it myself. Mom heard us out and then was silent for a few minutes.

  “Okay,” she said, finally. “We’ve got to get him someplace secure.”

  “Preferably with some gravity,” I pointed out.

  “Evangeline, do you have any more of that dope?”

  “Mrs. Garcia, I—”

  “Hon, it’s Mrs. Strickland-Garcia, but if you’re going to be seeing my son, I’d prefer it if you’d call me Kelly.”

  Evangeline had a hard time, but eventually choked it out.

  “K-k-kelly, I don’t use that stuff, I don’t do any drugs, I just know—”

  “Evangeline, I don’t care about that right now. In fact, right now I’m glad you had the contacts. So do you have more?”

  “I can get it.”

  She handed Evangeline a wad of money. “If possible, get something that will sedate him without totally knocking him out. We need him able to answer questions, at least as much as he’s ever able to. Lord help me, I’m brokering a drug deal with a teenager. Never mind. While you’re out, rent a suit. Short, portly, would be my guess. And pick up a can of soup. Vegetable would be good. Unless you have some, Ray.”

  “Soup . . .”

  “Close your mouth, son, some of the garbage in this dump might drift in. Never mind. Soup, Evangeline. And scissors and a razor—”

  “That I’ve got, Mom.”

  She favored me with half a smile and touched my cheek. Well, I did need to shave. Sometimes every other day.

  Evangeline left and Mom and I extracted Jubal from the safety web. She set me to work shaving off his beard and cutting his hair short. I ended up with a completely different Jubal, one I’d never seen before. Nobody else had, either, which couldn’t hurt.

  “It will fool people, but it won’t fool scanners,” Mom said. “But I have an idea about that,” Lord, she hated those things. You never knew when one might be probing your eyes, scanning your irises like the UPC code on a packaged steak and comparing it to the universal identity database.

  Evangeline came back from her shopping trip, and we all worked together to stuff Jubal into the suit and get it fitted as best we could. His eyes were wandering around. As a precaution we tethered him in place with a few tie-downs hooked to rings on the suit.

  “What have you got, Evangeline?” Mom asked.

  “Pills. Still in the bottles.”

  Mom read a few labels, googled the names, and settled on a little pink one. Evangeline got a water bottle, and Mom gave Jubal the pill.

  “Stop her,” he said.

  “Stop who, Jubal?” I asked.

  He shook his head, looking groggy. He worked his mouth a few times, his eyes rolled around. He tried again.

  “Stop her.”

  We all looked at each other.

  “Not stop. Her,” he said, desperately. “Stop-per. Where my stopper?”

  “Does he mean a stopper, like a cork?” Evangeline asked us.

  “Don’t feel too good, me. My . . . stopper. Little box I brung with me. Maybe it’s under these silver pants . . .” He started groping futilely at the outside of the suit.

  I went to my shelf and got the little box he’d had with him inside the black bubble. I showed it to him. He reached for it. Mom put out her hand and stopped him.

  “Is this the thing that makes the bubbles Ray told me about?” she asked.

  “This is that thing,” he agreed.

  “I don’t think you should have it right now, Jubal, I think—”

  I thought he was going to cry.

  “Please, Kelly, I have to have that thing. I have to.”

  “Jubal, I don’t think it’s safe.”

  “It safe, I promise, me. Oh, it real safe.” Then he mumbled something.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  “My fault,” he said “All my fault. But this, it safe. Can’t hurt nothing, this.” He let out a weak laugh. “Harmless, this. Safe, this.”

  Mom looked dubious, but she handed it to him. He flipped a switch on the side, and Mom winced. Nothing happened.

  “Safety,” he explained. “It turned off, now, this thing.” Then he wrapped his hand around it and curled up and seemed to go to sleep.

  That’s when somebody started pounding on the door.

  “You expecting anybody?” Mom asked.

  “Nobody who pounds.” I admit it, my heart was in my throat.

  “Back door,” Evangeline said, and headed toward it. She was still in motion when somebody started pounding on that one, too. For the first time I saw Evangeline disconcerted in free fall, flailing wildly and smacking one hand painfully against a shelf as she tried to twist and somehow claw her way through the air back toward us. In a cartoon it would have worked, but in real life she had to wait until her feet hit the back door, and she pushed off from it like it was on fire, coming back toward us too fast. I caught her in my arms and hugged her. She was shivering, and didn’t seem to notice that she was bleeding from a small cut on her pinkie.

  “Open this door at once. I repeat, open this door at once.”

  Mom started toward the door. I reached for her, not wanting her to be behind it if shooting started, but she was just out of my reach. She opened the little peephole and took a quick look, then slammed it closed.

  “A soldier,” she said, quietly.

  “Just one?” I asked.

  “How many do you need, if he’s armed and we’re not?” Mom asked.

  “At least one at the back door, too,” Evangeline pointed out.

  I was in no mood to give in without a fight. I had to have a plan. The pounding started again, making it hard to think.

  “Open this door at once,” the voice said.

  “If they blow that door, somebody’s going to get hurt,” Mom said. And I knew the fight was over. And really, what sort of fight could I have put up? The closest thing I had to a weapon in that trailer was a kitchen knife.

  “I’m going to count to three,” the voice said.

  “Don’t bother,” Mom shouted. She looked at me. “Unless you have a better idea?”

  “No, Mom,” I said, quietly. I put my arms around her, gave her a hug.

  “You get the back door, I’ll get the front.” She started to turn, then looked back at Evangeline. “Honey, that was brave, what you did when the invasion started. But no ball-kicking this time, okay?”

  “No, ma’am. I promise.”

  Mom nodded sadly, and we went to open the doors. I’d just opened the back one when the guy at the front shoved his way in past Mom, cracking her on the side of the head in his haste to get in. I thought I might explode, watching it. But Mom shot me a look that clearly said to leave it alone. I swallowed bile, and did.

  The second guy came in more cautiously. I wondered who was the leader, the backdoor guy or the cowboy? Both were large, male, and decked out in the full black fascist regalia of our conquerors, helmeted, visored, in full body armor, following their weapons into my home and pointing them at everything in sight.

  “You, asshole, get over there with the women,” the cowboy said. I realized he was talking to me. “Cover them,” he said to the other guy. He shoved his way past me and poked at Jubal with his weapon.

  “What hav—”

  And he was instantly replaced by a five-foot black hole.

  I saw
the corporal start to turn around, looking over his shoulder.

  He said “What the fu—”

  “—ust do it, Jubal, goddam it!” Mom was screaming.

  Or at least that’s how I saw it.

  Evangeline and Mom swarmed over me from only a few feet away, and Jubal was out of his nest of cargo webbing. My stomach lurched. The sense of dislocation was enormous, unprecedented, completely outside of my experience.

  I’d had a few minutes snipped out of the filmstrip of my life.

  WHAT HAD HAPPENED was, Jubal missed with his second shot. Seldom had anything looked less like a weapon. But most things can be used as a weapon, and this was a singularly nonviolent one. What it did was to postpone the violence.

  At the end of the trailer where Jubal had been there were now two black bubbles, held down with the cargo netting. Inside them were one fascist who had been about to roust Jubal, and one fascist who had just seen his buddy get swallowed up by a black hole. At some point in the “future”—if that word meant anything in the face of Jubal’s newest invention—they would feel exactly the way they had been feeling when they were encapsulated. That could be minutes from now, like what had happened to me, or months from now, as Jubal had experienced.

  Or millions of years from now.

  Or never.

  During the confusion as Mom and Evangeline made their way toward Jubal, things got sort of confused. By the time they realized what had happened, there was no way to be sure which bubble had me inside.

  Turning off a bubble was simplicity itself, as I’d shown by accidentally setting Jubal free. But once one had formed, there was no way to tell what was inside, or to tell one from another unless they varied greatly in size.

  Jubal and Mom thought I was in one of them. Evangeline was adamant I was in another one.

  The problem, of course, was that if they picked the wrong one what was going to come out of it was a very confused and soon-to-be-angry man with a weapon powerful enough to destroy the whole trailer.

  For once in her life, Mom lost the argument. Evangeline was so sure which one I was in that she actually shouted at my mom. That probably wouldn’t have done any good, but then Evangeline reminded her of the stories I’d told of her uncanny sense of orientation in free fall and, reluctantly, Mom gave in.

  So they armed themselves with the only useful weapons they could find, which were thick plastic shelves ripped from the walls, and stationed themselves on opposite sides of the bubble . . . because there was also no way to tell the position of the person inside the bubble. Would the soldier emerge facing them, or facing away? Upside down? Sideways? They decided if they saw a lot of black, they’d start swinging, and Jubal was standing by to make a new bubble if the wrong guy came out.

  It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was all they had. Luckily, Evangeline was right.

  “They won’t be the last ones,” Mom said. “When these guys don’t report back, somebody will come check on them. We’ve got to get moving.”

  We did. Mom answered the riddle of the vegetable soup by ripping open the pouch and squirting the chunky yellow-brown stuff onto the inside of Jubal’s faceplate and smearing it around. It made very convincing vomit. We spattered the outside of his suit with it, too. When we clapped it over Jubal’s head and sealed it he was too far withdrawn to protest. In fact, he seemed to feel a little more secure in a space suit, something he had never worn, and didn’t mind at all that he couldn’t see out.

  WE TRIED TO think of a way to get one of the soldiers’ weapons, but didn’t waste a lot of time on it. Even in hindsight, I don’t know how we could have, with the resources at hand, nor what real good it would have done us. They’d come out of their bubbles armed, dangerous, and raging mad. We decided that Evangeline and I would escort Jubal to the air lock, where Mom had a rented shuttle waiting.

  When we left the trailer a few faces popped back into their trailers . . . then slowly emerged again, like prairie dogs. There were some other people hanging around at the first corner we came to.

  “No problem,” I told them. “Just a drunk.”

  “No business of mine, space,” my next-door neighbor said. Obviously most of these people had heard the pounding on my door, and some of them had seen the soldier. So some of them knew a black trooper had entered and not come out. There were probably people around my back door, wondering when that guy would come out. Nobody seemed upset at the idea that something bad might have happened to the dude, but you never know what’s in someone’s heart.

  “You think there’s any squealers in that bunch?” I whispered to Evangeline.

  “Nobody who plans to ever call himself a Martian again,” she said.

  “Still.”

  “You’re right. Let’s hurry.”

  We made good time to the air lock, Mom following a little bit behind, not obviously associated with us. She would be able to keep watch on our backs to see if anyone was after us.

  We got into the air lock. I held the door for Mom, and we all cycled through. The outer door opened, and we piled out, Evangeline and I tugging Jubal between us.

  “Over this way,” Mom said on the private channel we’d chosen. We shoved off through the parking lot, past hundreds of airboards, to the part where private vehicles were tied down. Mom had arrived in a red-and-white Avis Sport Utility, about the size of a small city bus on Earth, the kind of thing the more adventurous tourists rent to explore the outback for a few days, comfortable and idiot-proof when the autopilot is engaged.

  We wrestled Jubal inside the lock, which was just big enough for two people. Mom was the smallest, so she squeezed in beside him and cycled the lock. When it opened again Evangeline and I went through.

  Mom had taken Jubal’s helmet off and was cleaning it out, and he was waving feebly.

  “No, don’ do dat thing,” he said. “Leave it on. I like it better, me.”

  I looked at Mom, who shrugged, and clamped it back down, not what you’d call clean inside but not opaque, either. All I could figure was, claustrophobia or not, the suit and helmet might be a comfort. It’s a womblike feeling, being in a suit, and most people take well to it.

  “You drive, Ray,” Mom said. I went to the front and settled into the pilot seat, strapped in, with Mom and Evangeline close behind me. There was plenty of room up there, and a wide wraparound windshield.

  “Where are we going?” I asked Mom.

  “Just . . . out, for now. I’ve got a call in to Travis, but until we can rendezvous with him in something bigger than this little jitney I think it’s best if we put a few million miles between us and—”

  She looked past me and frowned. I followed her eyes and saw a bright light down near the surface of Mars. It expanded rapidly.

  “Oh, no,” Evangeline whispered.

  And that was the first shot of the third invasion of Mars from those goddam idiots from Earth.

  EVANGELINE AND I had now seen space combat from the middle, from the bottom, and from the top. These were the best seats, in a horrifying way. But if we’d had a chance, we would have missed it entirely.

  I had the ship in manual mode and tried to give it the little jog that would start me moving away from Phobos.

  “I’m sorry,” came an automatic voice. “All traffic is currently grounded. Please be patient until the current alert is ended.”

  We watched the battle unfolding. It had a certain lethal beauty. Ships’ exhausts drew bright white lines across the night surface of Mars, which was three-quarters of the globe from where we were, which was almost over the city.

  On the other hand, after a few hours you began to think, when you’ve seen one space battle, you’ve seen them all.

  Trying to make sense of it, stuck and unable to get out of there, we speculated about what we were seeing. We analyzed some of the trajectories and decided that a lot of those ships were robot-controlled. Humans couldn’t stay conscious during some of the maneuvers they were making, and probably couldn’t even survive the most
extreme ones. Some of those ships were accelerating at fifty gees.

  So maybe nobody was dying. At first.

  Most of it was happening well away from the city. All three of us were following everything we could on our suit faceplate stereos, naturally, and I have to say the Martian news media had gotten a lot better at this, whether or not the invaders had. They had reporters all over the place, in the deserted malls, down in the shelters, up on the surface getting some spectacular night shots of the battle when a ship or a missile streaked overhead. It looked pretty risky to me, but I guess newspeople always think they’re invulnerable, and always have their eyes on the prize. Pulitzer Prize.

  There were long periods when nothing seemed to be happening, and we wondered if it was all over. Maybe they were regrouping for the next attack. Nobody had any idea who was winning and who was losing. There were six hours of that. We had to give Jubal another pill when we heard him whimpering back there.

  Bottom line, after eight hours of sitting in the same place and watching a lot of strangers trying to kill each other, we really could have cared less who won. The ideal outcome would have been if they all killed each other off. Then something hit Phobos, about a mile away from us.

  Later it was determined to be a stray missile. It made quite a flash, and sent up a plume of rocky debris. Not like an explosion on Earth, where the dirt goes up for a bit and then splashes back down. Everything just kept moving. A few seconds later we felt a small tremor jolt the ship.

  There had been a few dozen people visible on the surface around us. Now they all headed back toward the air lock, as fast as they could go.

  None of us said anything. Something pinged off the windshield. Evangeline pointed, and I saw a tiny star-shaped pit in the supertough Lexan. It couldn’t have come from the explosion. Anything traveling fast enough to chip our windshield would be halfway to Deimos by now.

  “Lots of debris flying around out there,” I said. You’d better believe it. Even when there was no actual shooting going on, the most spectacular display was of millions and millions of tiny particles from the explosions and the impact on Phobos entering the atmosphere and burning up.