Rolling Thunder (2 page)

I stripped off my fatigues—the hideous rust-and-pink baggy shirt and pants I was required to wear when on duty and best not described in too much detail lest one lose one’s lunch—and applied SPF 45 sunscreen from my hairline to my toenails. Then I put on the little scraps of cellophane and dental floss Earthies require you to wear for modesty’s sake, and an oversized aloha shirt that screamed with bright-colored racing cars and surfboards.

I hit Pomeroy Street and it hit me right back, with a blast of air in the high nineties. There wasn’t as much of Pomeroy left to hit as there had been fifty years ago. Surf now crashed about four blocks inland of where it had at the turn of the century. This was due to what the Heartlanders called the “temporary global climate fluctuation.”

The old wooden pier was sheltered by a fairly new breakwater, made from demolished buildings. There were only a few watercraft tied up in the slips. My ride,
Rosinante,
was not quite a boat and not quite a Jet Ski. She was a sort of trimaran, broad and stable. She had won my heart as soon as I saw her nested in morning-glory vines in an Arroyo Grande backyard. I boarded and kicked the old engine into life.

THE SKY WAS
vast, the ocean was vast, the horizon was far, far away, much farther than it could ever be on Mars. It felt like, on a really clear day, you could see Japan. The sea was calm, long, slow rollers about three feet high, and
Rosinante
ate them up with hardly a bounce, which was why I preferred her over a conventional ski.

The sunshine was glorious! Of course, it could burn you raw, but I was covered with enough sunscreen to deflect a blowtorch, and if you spent your time thinking of what a hostile environment the Earth was becoming, you wouldn’t go out at all. When I got back to Mars I’d have the only souvenir of Earth that ever impressed any Martian: a tan you just couldn’t get under UV lamps.

I called up my karaoke program and flicked through the thousands of accompaniments stored there, then clicked on “Born to Be Wild,” written by somebody with the delightful name of Mars Bonfire, first recorded by Steppenwolf. I fed it to
Rosinante
‘s music system, and soon the sounds of heavy metal thunder were blasting out of the speakers, lead vocal by yours truly.

I followed it with “Give Me Another Reason,” a Tracy Chapman hit from the thirties, then switched to Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Poor Wand’ring One,” from
The Pirates of Penzance.

Taking a deep breath, I launched into Musetta’s aria,
“Quando me’n vo soletta per la via,”
from
La Boheme.
It was a stretch for me. I have an extra octave available to me on top of my normal contralto, like Julie Andrews had; I can be a mezzo-soprano if I work at it, but I don’t usually try it in public. Here, nobody but the great white sharks would be offended.

To cool down I swung into
“L’amour est un oiseau rebelle que nul ne peut apprivoiser,”
the famous habanera from
Carmen.
I was grinning broadly. From John Kay to Tracy, to Mabel, to Musetta, to Carmen. Quite a musical evolution for one morning.

I dropped a sea anchor and did a quick visual inspection of my hide, looking for patches of lobster red. I suppose a blonde really has no business exposing her pearly white skin to the lethal rays of Sol from a distance of only ninety million miles or so, but the sunshine was the only thing about Earth I liked. So I risked radiation burns, but carefully. I took off my big hat, and the shirt, and the bikini, and stretched out on
Rosi-nante’s
postage-stamp deck.

Two minutes later, my phone rang.

I said, “Accept call.”

A man in Navy uniform appeared floating above the sea. The ident line below his face named him Captain J. K. Carruthers, CID, WAM, MD. That meant Commander, Immigration Division, West America Region, Martian Delegation.

“Lieutenant Strickland, how are you?”

“Fine, sir.”
Until you called.

“Ah … it seems your grandmother is ill.”

“Grandma Kelly?” I asked. I only had one living grandmother, but I had to say something, or I felt I’d stop breathing.

“Pardon me?” He was frowning. “Oh, I see now. This says Garcia—”

“Granddaddy? What’s happened to Granddaddy?”

“If you’ll let me finish. Apparently it’s your great-grandmother.”

“Gran?” I squeaked.

“Here, I’ll forward the message to you.”

Dad’s face replaced the captain’s.

“Honey, I might as well get right to the bad news. Granny Betty is very ill. It seems to be some new variant of the autoimmune disorders, and the doctors say they can’t do anything about it.”

He paused, then tossed his hair back in a gesture that was very familiar to me. He looked exactly like what he was: Ray Strickland-Garcia, Ph.D., an academic, a history professor at the university, probably the foremost authority on the colonization of space. Disheveled, a bit absentminded, usually up to his eyeballs in downloads of forgotten files playing on his old-fashioned external stereo.

“They can’t tell us exactly how long she might live, but it’s a matter of weeks. A month at the most. She has elected to go into time suspension. She wants to see the whole family before she does this, and since you are the only one so distant right now, she insists she’ll take the chance and wait until you can get here. Your grandmother has secured you a thirty-day compassionate leave, so I hope you’ll lose no time.”

“Of
course
I’ll hurry, Dad,” I said, uselessly. Even if he was still on the line, it would be quite a while before my words could have reached him on Mars. I found myself trying to twist the
Rosinante’s
accelerator even more, but she was already going flat out.

“Your mother sends her love. I … I love you, too. Hurry home.”

I was already consulting the train schedules while I pulled
Rosinante
into her slip at the dock and hit the ground running. I ran as fast as the relentless gravity would allow, up Pomeroy toward my apartment. With the heat of the day waning, there were a few people here and there on the street, and I got a few stares. Actually, more than a few. It wasn’t until I was getting into the elevator that I realized I had forgotten to put my bathing suit back on.

Earthies, you are so weird. I hope you enjoyed the show.

2

WHEN I BOARDED
the maglev for Los Angeles a few minutes later, everyone on the train turned to stare at me. Not all at once, but as I moved down the car I created a wave of turning eyeballs. This time it wasn’t because of showing too much skin, nor was it my stunning beauty, nor my height. (I lied about the six-foot-two business; I’m six-four. As for the beauty, I’m not Miss Red Planet, but the face doesn’t stop clocks and the body is within acceptable parameters.) No, this time it was the uniform.

Mars is the Red Planet, right? So our flag, our spaceships, and pretty much everything else associated with government just has to be red. If you want my opinion, I’d tell you that the human eye can distinguish millions of shades, and there’s no crime in using one of them that doesn’t fall into the short end of the spectrum now and then.

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.