Rolling Thunder (26 page)

My final thought?

Yes, sir. One
hell
of a bus ride.

13

THEY’VE MADE AMAZING
advances in medicine since my greatgrandmother’s day (otherwise I wouldn’t be here), but one thing that’s pretty much the same as in the twentieth century is general anesthesia. You don’t just pop out of it. It’s a gradual process.

I have vague memories of nurses in isolation suits, and of doctors poking and prodding and sampling. The standard indignities. I remember wanting to pee so badly it hurt, trying to tell someone that I needed to go, finally letting loose and realizing there was a catheter in. Duh.

The first thing I remember more or less clearly is Mike. He was sitting on the bed, holding my hand, asleep sitting up. I don’t know how he does that, but he does. I gave his hand a hearty squeeze, which wouldn’t have crushed a bug. His eyes snapped open. My vision was a bit blurred, and I could only concentrate on one thing at a time. I couldn’t even see all his face at once; it was like looking through a crazy lens.

“Podkayne!” he shouted, and started to embrace me. Then he stopped himself. “All right, my girl, no more lollygagging. I know you’ve been faking it. So get up, get dressed, and let’s get out of here!”

“Sure,” I mumbled. “Clothes … ?” I looked around vaguely, and when I looked back the first thing I saw were the tears streaming down his face.

“Oh, Poddy,” he moaned. “I swore I wouldn’t cry.”

“Give us a hug, baby boy,” I said, and he put his arms around me. I expected it to hurt, but it didn’t. He didn’t squeeze hard. After a while he drew back, snuffling.

“You look terrible,” he said, wiping his nose.

“Just what a girl wants to hear. Mike, am I…”

“You’re going to be fine, Pod. Just fine. You looked like something dragged out of a trash compactor when they brought you in, but they’ve got you all fixed up. That’s no bullshit, the doctors tell us you’ll be just as awful as you ever were in a few weeks.”

“Weeks?” I yawned.

“Well, months, with rehab.”

“That’s nice. I think I’ll sleep now.” I frowned. There was something I wanted to know, but I couldn’t remember what it was. Then I had it.

“What’s the date?”

“December first.”

Oh, good. I’d have time to get my Christmas shopping done.

And I drifted off. My last thought … Mike was wearing red. Mike hates red. Was my little brother in uniform? What was
that
all about?

SWIMMING BACK INTO
consciousness, as from the bottom of a deep well …

Familiar faces. Family. Mom, Dad, Mike. Aunt Elizabeth.

“Back with us, Podkayne?” Elizabeth asked, brightly. It was her bedside manner, I guess. She was wearing goggles of some sort, and looking at a lot of machines that I imagine were telling her a lot more about my poor abused body than I’d ever want to know.

The bed was high. Mom only had to bend at the waist to put her face close to mine and kiss me. There were lines at the corners of her eyes and around her mouth that I hadn’t noticed before. My mom is a beautiful woman—I must have gotten it from somewhere, right?—but she looked a lot older. I must have caused them a lot of worry. I felt all choked up inside as she kissed me again and wiped away a tear. Then Dad was there, too.

“How’s my girl?”

“A little woozy.”

“That’s to be expected,” Aunt Elizabeth said, from behind them. She had something in her hand, but kept her distance. I looked at Dad again. His face looked a lot older, too. A
lot
older, and it wasn’t wrinkles. His hairline, which had been receding since I was ten, was
way
back from where it had been less than a year ago …

Okay. Blame the drugs.

“How long?” I asked.

Mom looked me right in the eye and didn’t dissemble.

“Ten years and a bit,” she said. A tear made its way down her cheek. “And we’re so glad to have you back.”

“Ten years …”

“Which means I’m older than you, now,” Mike said, with a smile. But he couldn’t keep it in place.

“Ten years …”

Aunt Elizabeth pressed something against my neck, and there was a hiss. The rising panic I’d been feeling fell away, and I sank back into welcome darkness.

Ten years.

“NO WAY ARE
you older than me,” I said.

“Way.”

“Mike, I’m twenty-nine.”

“Only if you go by the calendar. You know and I know that you’re still nineteen. And I was twenty-one in February. Well, on March the first.”

“Actually, you were five.”

“Which makes you a bit less than five,” he said, smugly.

We were back to normal—or as back to normal as we’d ever be, with him the same age as me—joshing each other. He was sitting in his usual place on my bed, spoon-feeding me raspberry sherbet. I had just about enough strength to lift the spoon, but not enough coordination to get it to the right spot on my face, as red blotches on my nose and cheek testified. I was on a liquid and ice-cream diet until my digestive system recovered from the trauma of many days of nanosurgery.

There was so much Mike and I couldn’t really get into yet, so many things for me to sort out … it was going to be a time for sorting out, that was for sure.

“So you’re really going to take this ‘oath of secrecy’ business seriously,” I asked him, for the third or fourth time.

“Have to, Poddy. Gave my word. And you know ‘The word of a Martian Patrol Space Commander—’ “

” ‘—is as good as gold.’ ” It was a game we’d played when he was young.

There’s a lot of questions you could ask when you come out of a coma—medically induced, and lasting about a month, one of the few details anyone had seen fit to give me. I hadn’t asked any of them, as such; I was too woozy for the first three or four days. But I’d pieced together a few things.

Where am I?

Mars. The good old Red Thunder Hotel, the family business. I was in a small suite, with Aunt Elizabeth installed in a spare bed in the living room and in twenty-four-hour attendance. Why the hotel? Why not a hospital? No one was willing to tell me.

What happened?

I knew what happened up to the point I pulled the plug. I remembered it all quite well, every agonizing moment, including a lot I’d much rather forget. But what happened after that? No one was saying. They’d all taken the Martian Patrol Space Commander Oath.

Why not just tell me and get it over with?

Ah, at last, a question they were willing to answer.

They had a lot of experience with taking people out of time stasis. They’d tried a lot of different methods, including just answering any questions the
stasee
(new word: someone freshly out of stasis, also known more idiomatically as Rips, as in Van Winkle) asked, in the order she asked them. Usual result: confusion, anxiety, mild sedation. For instance, one question that soon arose in a long-term stasis (five years or more), especially if a familiar face wasn’t there, was … who died?

So protocols had been developed. Only the closest relatives were allowed to see the stasee at first. Then recent history, including the macro kind (what are countries doing?), the personal kind (what are my friends and family up to?), and yes, even the popular kind (what are the hit downloads?), is doled out in bites the “reintegration counselor” thinks the stasee—oh, the hell with it, I hate that word!—the
Rip
can handle.

My RC was a tiny little Earth-born—Nigeria, I believe—named Maimuna. She explained all this to me, and listened patiently while I told her it was stupid,
Come on, Doc, I can handle it!
I realized she’d heard the same old song and dance a hundred times, then I surprised myself by realizing she might know more about this than me. So I shut up.

“We’ve prepared summaries of world events,” she said. “They’re pretty standard. We will show them to you at the rate of one per day. In a week and a half—”

“—I’ll be all caught up.”

She wagged a finger at me and shook her head.

“It would be a mistake to think that. You will have the information, but it will take considerably longer to integrate it. Trust me on this. Even if the ten missing years were relatively uneventful, if you were at all connected to the larger events of politics—and I know you are, not like some of the gameheads I get who couldn’t name three countries on Earth or the current president of Mars—it will take some time. And one thing I can tell you, without getting into specifics, is that these ten years have not been uneventful.”

“Grumpy,” I said.

“That’s all I can say, but of course you were there at the beginning of that event.”

“A pretty big event,” I ventured. But she wouldn’t say any more.

So I was reduced to trying to trick snippets of information out of my little brother. He loved it, the bastard. He’d start to say something, then clap his hand over his mouth and look alarmed. But it was never anything, he was just yanking my chain.

We finished the sherbet and I longed for a cheeseburger.

“So, do you know when I get my cybers back?” I asked him.

“Same time as last time you asked me. When the reorientation is finished.” He smiled. “Feeling a little Net withdrawal?”

I was, a little. You grow up with the newest corneal screens and wearing your computing and connecting equipment either as accessories or implanted somewhere around your ear, you get used to being able to answer a lot of questions with a few simple tics. Even as simple a question as “What time is it?” You look down into the corner of your vision and there’s your clock, ready to tell you the time in any zone of Mars, Earth, or any other inhabited planet, plus the speed-of-light time between any two places. Or you want to know who wrote the lyric to a song, you google it, and there’s a new window.

My corneas had been wiped clean as part of the nanosurgery, and I had no Net access at all for the first time I could remember.

“I can’t even get a weather forecast,” I complained. “I like to get the daily temperatures from Pismo Beach, so I can be happy I’m not there.”

“Might tell you too much,” Mike said, and grinned again. Oh, right.

“That might tell me too much about how climate change is progressing on Earth,” I guessed.

“Sure. It’ll all come in time, Podkayne. Just be patient.”

So I was, but patient isn’t something I do well. The next day they finally activated the wallscreen and showed me the first tape.

I might as well summarize. After all, for everyone else this happened a long time ago; it’s old news. Everyone else had time to adjust to it day by day. But I got it 365 days at a time, and the experience is different that way, more like reading a book or watching a movie than living real life. And, I realized, that’s how it would always be. There was no way of getting my ten years back.

Grow up, Podkayne. Would you rather still be at the bottom of the ocean on Europa … or wherever it was you spent the last ten years?

No thank you.

PODKAYNE, THE LOST DECADE: YEAR ONE

TOP STORY:
Grumpy erupts. Like I had guessed, Grumpy didn’t just jump, didn’t just pop up and then fall back down. That big red bastard had leaped from the ice of Europa and into space. It took up an elliptical orbit around Jupiter, dipping right into the atmosphere three times, where many astronomers ended up with egg on their faces after predicting it would burn up and be swallowed like a strawberry gumdrop in a whale’s belly. Instead, it seemed to thrive on the heat and friction, accelerating and finally leaving the area altogether, followed by a whole fleet of Martian Navy vessels.

Taliesen was a shambles. Forward Base and the NEMO station vanished, crushed by the waves of broken ice. Main Base sank. Only the crew at the ELF Base managed to escape with their lives. I watched some satellite video taken of the event, then had to pause it while I cried. All those people. Captain Scott, Dr. Land, Captain Stone …

Could they be alive? For now, they were simply listed as “overdue,” like the NEMO sub
October.

When I started the video again I was startled to see Bus 54, a shiny steel bug, crawling over the ice. Resolution was not quite good enough to see faces in the windows, but it gave me a bad turn, let me tell you. I saw the ice wave hurl us into the sky, watched us flip over and over until the camera lost us.

Clarke Centre had had time to batten down a bit, but still suffered damage. Twenty-seven people died and about a hundred were injured. Normally I would have googled a casualty list, but this was old-fashioned TV, noninteractive. I thought of all my friends there. Stupidly, I thought of Kahlua, the cat who had adopted me. Were they okay? I’d find out later, in carefully measured doses. All nonessential personnel were evacuated from Europa to Ganymede and Callisto, leaving only combat troops and scientific observers.

POLITICAL NEWS:
Not worth mentioning. Some new leaders on Earth, same as the old ones. Same old hatreds brewing, some of them centuries old. Nobody got nuked, which made it a good year for the Earth.

CULTURAL NEWS:
The usual celebrity divorces and custody squabbles. Blah, blah, blah. A lot of blockbuster movies I wouldn’t want to see. Some people won Oscars, and most people probably had already forgotten who they were.