Rolling Thunder Read online

  That’s not the problem. I can wear red, I look good in red, with my blond hair and fair complexion. The little red beret in particular is quite fetching on me. But whatever you call it, the uniform is bright and loud. Those are two things I prefer not to be when I go out in public on Earth.

  See, a lot of Earthies don’t like us very much.

  So there I was in full-dress ceremonial uniform, two inches taller in my shiny black boots, a great leggy cardinal if you’re being charitable, a grotesque gawky flamingo if you’re not, moving down a row of people whose glances varied from freak-show interest to glaring dislike. Orders were that we were to “show the flag” when traveling. I wish whoever had written that policy was on the train with me as I tried to make myself small. Showing the flag is one thing. Wearing it is beyond the call of duty.

  I found an empty seat and tried to lift the small bag I’d packed into the overhead rack. It didn’t contain much, just stuff I’d tossed in that I couldn’t do without and a couple changes of clothes. Even so, the Earth gravity defeated me on the first try. A guy in the seat in front of me jumped up to help. I had a good seven inches on him, but he tossed the bag into the rack easily, then wanted to sit beside me. I cooled him off politely. As soon as I was settled, two college guys from Cal Poly tried hitting on me, and I frosted them with a gaze I’d been working on in the mirror. It also didn’t hurt when I shifted a bit to bring my sidearm more prominently into view. That was also policy: Never appear in uniform without your weapon. Nothing like a loaded Glock in a leather holster to put a little respect into overeager frat boys.

  IT WAS THE express train, so we stopped only in Santa Barbara and Ventura and some dreadful place in the San Fernando Valley before pulling into the downtown transit center in the City of Angels.

  The Transit Center is vast, and underground. I had no trouble finding the right platform, having lived most of my life without exterior reference points, but by the time I made it there I was wishing I’d swallowed my pride and taken the handicapped tram. My boots were pinching my toes, and the gravity threatened to collapse my arches.

  Soon I was on the nonstop maglev to the Area 51 spaceport, and for the first time I saw some other red uniforms. I felt like a dying woman staggering out of the desert to an oasis as I joined them, two girls and a guy, all jaygees like me, and we spent the short trip exchanging Earth horror stories. When they found out I was going Up and Out … going home! … they tried their best to conceal their envy—after all, it was compassionate leave, someone in my family was in trouble—but couldn’t quite do it. We traded horror stories about Earthies until the train pulled in at the port. Then we went our separate ways, and I never saw any of them again.

  I found my way to the departure gate for the connector bus to the Martian Navy base ten miles away from the port. I was the only one waiting at the boarding gate, and when the bus came, I was the only one to board. Five minutes later I was zipping through the Nevada desert, stretched out across two hard seats. I watched a landscape roll past that most Earthies would probably call barren, desolate. Hell, I could see hundreds of yucca trees, sagebrush, a dozen kinds of cactus, even some tiny little flowers hugging the ground. A jackrabbit darted for cover as the bus cruised by. Barren? The place was a tropical rain forest, teeming with life, compared to my home planet.

  Marsport 6 was just a big flat place in the desert, with half a dozen prefab metal buildings lined up along the edge. Functional, unadorned, Navy red. A Martian flag hung listlessly in the still air. Nothing moved. Nobody with any sense would be outdoors with the rattlesnakes and the tarantulas and the blistering heat. Most work around here was done at night, when the temperature sometimes dropped as low as ninety.

  As the bus pulled up to the headquarters building I counted three bucket ships sitting in the distance, also painted Navy red, but not recently. They were pink and patchy, like they had a skin disease.

  The bus stopped and I got out, ready to hurry into the main building, but I was stopped by a loud roar. I looked behind me and saw one of the buckets rising on a pillar of white smoke. I’d missed the last bucket of the day by five minutes.

  Why do they call them bucket ships? They looked sort of like buckets. Just squat cylinders, wider than they were tall, with two rows of windows in a circle showing where the two decks were. A dome on top for the pilot to sit in, a metal cat’s cradle underneath to hold the bubble drive. Three landing legs, nonretractable.

  With the ship dwindling at the end of a long vapor trail, the only sound now was the thrumming of the big air-conditioning units sitting by the prefabs. I realized I was dripping sweat, standing out in the desert with no sunscreen and a fractured ozone layer high above me. I hurried into the main building.

  The staff confirmed that there would be no more departures until 0800 hours tomorrow, when I had a chance of making the 1200 sailing of the MNS Rodger Young.

  I asked if there were any rooms in the Motel 6 and they said take your pick, so I trudged down a hallway to the first open door, room 101. I didn’t even have the strength to toss my bag on the dresser. I let it drop to the floor and collapsed on the bed. I just wanted to sleep for a few hours, but I knew there was something I had to do first.

  I had three messages from Mars in my call-waiting queue. None of them were flagged red, which may sound odd given the emergency nature of my trip, but why should they be red-flagged? You don’t have a conversation with people on Mars, you have a correspondence. Right then, as I was lying there, my home was 190 million miles … thataway. Ahead of the Earth, which was catching up. That meant that any phone call I made wouldn’t arrive at home for seventeen minutes, and there could be no reply for another seventeen. Still, I felt a little guilty at not even having looked at the messages. So I clicked the first one. It was from Mom. She started right in.

  “We hated to just drop this whole mess on you so suddenly, Poddy, but there really is no time to lose. Gran is very sick. The doctors think she can hold out until you get here, but it might be a close thing. So … I know there’s no way to hurry a ship, I know you’ll do all you can do to get here in time …”

  She stopped, and took a deep breath.

  “That’s what the family has decided, anyway. Mostly Kelly, of course. This is for your ears only, from your mother who loves you, from me to you.

  “If you don’t want to come … don’t come. When you think about it, what’s the difference? She’s not going to die, not now, anyway, and I suggested that they stop her and then, next time you’re here, they can take her out for ten minutes or an hour or whatever she wants, and you can say what you need to say then.

  “Oh, I don’t know what I’m saying, this has been a surprise to me, too, and some angry things have been said. But I wanted you to know that if you’d rather not be dashing about for no good reason, I’ll support you all the way. That’s all I have to say. Good-bye, Poddy sweet. I love you.”

  Well. I found it tough to sort all that out at once.

  For one thing, Mom visits an entirely different Earth than I do. I’m Mars-born. I’m tall and slender, and a simple walk in the park makes my feet hurt and my back ache. Mom still loves the Earth. She was born here, and she and Dad make a pilgrimage back every year, at first going to Florida to try and help out; later, when things deteriorated too much in the Zone, they went to California or Mexico or Rio or anyplace with a beach. They love the wind and the blue sky and the forests and … just about anything about the Earth except the people, who almost no one on Mars can abide. She keeps herself in shape, so after the first few days, she doesn’t even mind the gravity.

  So she thought she was doing me a favor by giving me an out, a reason not to abandon my long summer vacation on the world of melting ice caps.

  Oh, Mom, I love you, but sometimes you haven’t got a clue.

  Then there were the “family discussions,” and the “angry words.” That would be Kelly, of course. Kelly “Don’t call me Grandma!” Strickland. You may have heard of her. F
irst president of Mars? Ring any bells?

  I love Kelly, too … in my own way. I don’t think anyone loves Kelly in quite the way they love anyone else, except Grandpa Manny.

  Being the granddaughter of a former president of Mars is not quite the deal it would be if my grandma was, say, ex-president of Western America. We’re small potatoes, nation-wise, except for the power thing and the Navy thing. There’s not even a million of us; big-city mayors down here on Earth have more responsibility, in some ways. Of course, they don’t have the means to cut off the power to Earth’s billions …

  Grandma Kelly tends to take over any situation she finds herself in, and that can include her daughter-in-law’s life. They’d locked horns more than a few times.

  But Mom is no wimp, and Dad backs her up one hundred percent, and if it comes to it, Grandpa Manny will have a word with Kelly, and that’ll be the end of that. So I appreciated the gesture on Mom’s part, but frankly, I’d have gladly abandoned my post at Pismo on a much flimsier excuse. It’s not as if the ravening barbarian hordes of the Zone or the Christian Armies of the Heartland were just looking for the opportunity of Podkayne being away from her desk to establish a beachhead in the holy war against Redboy Hegemony.

  I recorded a telegraphic “message-received” thing: Doing everything possible, expect departure oh eight hundred hours, rendezvous Rodger Young, ETA Deimos Base such-and-such a date, over and out. PS, I love you. Not much, I know, but a lot better than my last message: Earth price$ are ridiculou$! $end money!

  Next message. A tough one.

  She began the way she always does.

  “I hate talking this way. I don’t know why they don’t do something about this time lag thing.” Gran wasn’t stupid, she knew there was nothing to be done to speed up radio signals, but she would never be comfortable with the time lag, even if she were around for another ninety years … which she might very well be, as I had to keep telling myself.

  She still didn’t look her ninety-three years. There were good effects of her almost twenty years on Mars, some of which slow the aging process. Some put you at risk for problems the human body wasn’t evolved to encounter. Wrinkles form a lot slower, but you may need to have your arteries nanorooted every two years instead of every five.

  Gran didn’t look ancient. She looked sort of translucent, like her skin was wax and there was a candle inside her that was slowly melting her away. Her hair was thin. If I’d had to guess her age, I’d have said a young seventy.

  “Poddy, dear, the first thing is, I don’t want you to worry. If you want to come, then come. If you don’t, then I’ll understand that, too. It’s not like it’s that big a deal. I’ll see you again. The only question is, how old will you be when I see you? When you see me again, whenever that is, I’ll be just like this. A rag, a bone, and a hank of hair, but still full of enough piss and vinegar to keep me going for another week.

  “I’m not in any pain. My immune system is shot to hell, they tell me, but they’ve cleaned me up like an old Ford getting ready for a Sunday drive, so I’m not likely to pick up any bugs. Mostly what I am is tired. Can’t seem to gather any energy, even in this wimpy stuff you call gravity up here. Walking from the bed to the toilet is like going up ten flights of stairs … but listen to me. One thing I swore was I’d never turn into that kind of old woman who can’t talk about anything but her symptoms.

  “I don’t know much about what this is that’s fixin’ to punch my ticket. I gather they didn’t even have it when I was young. Poddy, I think it’s just old age, and I think when they tell me they figure they can cure it eventually, they’re full of shit.

  “But maybe they aren’t, and what’s rolling the dice gonna cost me? I think the world—the one you’re on—is swirling around the toilet bowl, and I don’t much care whether I live to see the final flush or not. But for a chance to spend some more time with my family … hell, maybe for the chance to see your grandkids … I think I’ll give it a shot. Maybe they’ll uncork me just in time for us all to bend over and kiss our asses good-bye … but at least I’ll have that.

  “Hope you don’t think I’m a silly old woman. Don’t bother to call back. I’ll see you when I see you. Love you, dear. Bye.”

  I wiped away a tear and blew my nose. I knew it was the wise thing to wait for some privacy to see this stuff.

  So … heard from Mom, heard from Gran. The next message should have been from Grandma Kelly, organizing every detail of my trip from Pismo to her front door.

  But it wasn’t. I ticked the last blinking message light in my field of vision, and there was my favorite little brother, Mike. Also my only little brother, or sibling of any sort, but even if I had others he’d probably be my favorite. He came into my life when I was ten.

  “Hey, Pod-breath,” he said, getting the mandatory insult out of the way, but his heart wasn’t in it. He’s just learning to mask his feelings like growing little boys seem to feel they should, but he couldn’t hide anything from me. Still, he soldiered on.

  “Thought you were rid of me, didn’t you?” he said. “Thought you’d escaped to the balmy shores of Pismo Beach. Never hear from you. Are you too busy saving Mars from the Earthie hordes? I don’t know what we’d do back here at home without girls like you guarding the gateways, Pod, but I want you to know we all appreciate it.”

  A short silence, then a sigh.

  “Enough of that. I don’t know why I called you, I can’t think of anything to say and you’re probably real busy right now … but I was just feeling really sad.” There was a catch in his breath, and he looked away for a moment. Ten-year-old boys want so desperately to act like grownups, especially if they’re very, very smart.

  “So hurry home. Goose those rocket jockeys and tell ‘em to boost two gees all the way, okay? You’ve been down there long enough, you must be muscle-bound enough to take it. You probably look like Mr. Western America by now. And if you don’t, you aren’t working hard enough. Anyway, see you soon.”

  I blinked REPLY and smiled for the camera.

  “Hell, peewee, I’ve got enough muscles in my eyebrows now to throw your flabby little ass right over Marinaris. And if I need any help I’ll just ask one of the bronzed beach boys I’m bringing back with me as pets to lend a hand. Have to beat them off with a stick every time I go to the beach. I have a wonderful tan; I’m going to be the envy of every girl on Mars, just like I already am the envy of all the little Earth girls.”

  I paused. Did I dare depart from the kind of banter we usually exchanged? Would that just worry him more? Tell the truth, my heart hadn’t been in the last bit of nonsense, but he was so far away, and he sounded like he needed me, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do about it. You can’t hug with a thirty-four-minute time lag.

  “You hang in there, Mike,” I said. “Take care of everyone until I get there. I know you can do it. Over and out.”

  Then I cried for a little bit.

  MY GOOGLE TELLS me that a Motel 6 was a budget chain that, when it got started, offered you a reasonably clean room for six US dollars. Navy people don’t pay for the rooms, they’re free, a bonus of your mandatory enlistment and just about worth the price. Our Motel 6 had tiny slivers of soap in plain wrappers, one-piece toilets that gurgled and splashed when flushed, and shower stalls barely high enough for a girl to stand erect in and narrow enough to skin your elbows when you turned around.

  I took a tepid shower after first almost scorching myself when one of the handles came off in my hand. I could feel the Pismo salt and sand washing down my body and into the drain. Then I dried off, more or less, with the table napkin provided for that purpose, wound my damp hair up in a bun on top of my head, and gathered up my uniform. I took it all down to the desk and handed it to the duty officer along with a plea to have it cleaned and pressed by 0600, as it was the only dress uniform I had. He looked me up and down.

  “You want some company?” he asked.

  “Is this sexual harassment?”

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sp; “Just an offer. Lonely out here all night long.” So I looked him up and down, and thought I might have been interested at another time, except for him being about ten years older than me and a career officer, but I shook my head and went back to my room.

  The mattress was about the same quality as the rest of the accommodations, but then no mattress on Earth would be comfortable for me. I dragged this one onto the floor, which evened out the lumps a little, and sprawled out on it, on my back. My heels touched the floor. I moved up a little, and my head hung over the edge. They bought this stuff on Earth to save money, and it was all Earthie-sized. I got as comfortable as I could on the various gym equipment that seemed to have been stored in the ticking and figured I’d be asleep in five minutes. Hell, I was so tired I thought I could fall asleep on spikes.

  And I did.

  3

  I WOKE WITH a bad gravity hangover. There’s no way explain it to someone from Earth. I don’t drink; it has nothing to do with alcohol. It’s the curse of the Mars-born. We just never completely adjust to one gee. Unless I get a nap in the afternoon, take an opportunity to rest my legs and back several times a day, and spend an hour in carefully controlled exercise—swimming is about the only thing that doesn’t just about kill me—I wake up the next morning with a splitting headache, feeling like I’ve been worked over with a length of steel pipe.

  I gobbled aspirin, not that I had much hope they would help, tried to make myself presentable in the tiny bathroom, surveyed the result in the steamed mirror, and wondered how Earthies did it. If this is what six months in one gee did to a girl with good skin, nice muscle tone, to-die-for cheekbones, clear blue eyes, and okay breasts, what would I look like in ten years? My eyes were more red than blue. Were those brown bags under my eyes, or garden slugs? And could that be the beginning of … jowls?