Oddly, there was no news of the top downloads. I called Maimuna, and she said I’d just have to trust her. She recommended I listen to oldies, which I could call up on my room memory. So I did a little of that, and drifted off to sleep.
* * *
NEXT DAY THERE
was a familiar face waiting for me.
“Travis!” I shouted, and put my arms around him. He was the first one who hadn’t cried when he saw me, and I was grateful for that. Enough people cry over you and you start to think of yourself as a pitiful waif.
So what did I do? I started crying again. He was so
old!
Ten years ago he’d been in his eighties in calendar years, late sixties in “body time,” since he started skipping so many years. Now he looked well into his seventies. Healthy, hearty, with his usual crooked smile, but his hair was thin and his skin was mottled with age spots. He hadn’t spent the last decade in stasis, that was for sure. Well, of course not, with Grumpy rampaging around the solar system. He’d want to be awake and keeping an eye on that.
“Oh, Uncle Travis, I wanted to
marry
you!” I said. No kidding, my tongue was leading a life of its own.
He raised an eyebrow and gave me a dubious look, but he didn’t laugh, bless him.
“Well, I figure you’d have been too smart for that,” he said. “Just ask my ex-wife.”
“I had it all figured out. With you skipping years, eventually we’d be close to the same age. Now I’ve lost a whole decade.”
“Luckiest thing that ever happened to you if it put you farther away from me.”
He dried my eyes with a tissue. I felt like such a fool. Wisely, he didn’t say any more about that but threw me a conversational lifesaver.
“So, what have you been up to today?”
“Let’s see. This morning I climbed the south face of Olympus Mons with a four-man bobsled on my back. Oh, no, wait, what I meant was, I walked to the bathroom and back, which was harder.”
He laughed, and we went on like that for a bit, keeping it light and safe. But something was fluttering around on the edge of my memory, and I eventually netted it among the random flock of butterflies that was still taking the place of coherent thoughts in my shell-shocked brain.
“I heard your voice,” I said.
“That would be during the opening of your bubble.”
“You were there?”
“Just an observer. We recovered six bubbles from the wreckage. After we got it all back to Mars, I turned it over to the experts and I watched as each one was opened. If it wasn’t you, I had no further interest.”
I thought about that. There were a few questions I had to ask, even though I was pretty sure I wouldn’t get any answers yet.
“Who survived?”
“I’m not supposed to tell you that. Not yet.” But he hadn’t said he was forbidden, which is what everyone else had said.
“Ambassador Baruti?” I asked. There was a short pause. I glanced down at his lap, and saw his thumb was sticking up. I tried to stay as deadpan as he was.
“Come on, Travis. Senator Wu and Monet?” Thumb up.
“Slomo?” He frowned, and I realized he didn’t know the nickname. Hell, I didn’t know his
real
name. “The cameraman.” Thumb up.
“Tina?” Thumb up.
“Brynne?” The merest shake of his head, then he patted my hand.
“No more questions about that, okay? You know I’m forbidden to tell you. And I was warned not to wear you out, so—”
“I’m not tired,” I lied. “There’s one more thing I think I’ll go crazy if someone doesn’t tell me. Why did it take so long? Ten years, Uncle Travis, my god! Were we at the bottom of the ocean? Couldn’t they find us?”
“You were embedded in the ice, about a mile down,” he said. “And I shouldn’t have told you that, and that’s all I can say. You’ll know the whole story soon, so relax.”
“I can’t relax.”
“You need a pill?” Aunt Elizabeth called out from the next room. Jeez, can’t a girl get a little privacy?
“I’m fine. Travis, you’re right, I am tired. But could you run me through what happened? I mean, after they got me back here to Mars and … and opened the bubble. It was pretty confusing.”
“I’m sure it was. It’s confusing enough when you’ve planned for it, like I do. One day they open your bubble and here’s a bunch of nuts with their hands in the air, shouting, ‘Don’t shoot!’ “
I laughed, remembering Travis arriving at Gran’s stopper ceremonies.
My god, Gran! She’d been inside her bubble longer than I had … unless she was already out, which was something I’m sure they weren’t going to tell me yet.
So Travis ran me through the procedure, which was interesting, but I fell asleep before he was through. I learned more details later.
The flashes of light were cameras, of course, taking pictures of me from all possible angles. X-rays, infrared, MRI, HGH, who-knows-what, putting together a densely detailed picture of my predicament as the slush drained out of my little sphere of catastrophe. The information gathering took less than ten seconds, then I was popped back into the bubble.
All that was fed into a computer, which made models, then technicians from robot arm programmers to medical personnel like Aunt Elizabeth came up with a plan of action. When they opened the bubble the next time everything was ready, including the painkilling injections. I remembered it all with a shudder. Then I fell asleep.
PODKAYNE, THE LOST DECADE: YEAR TWO
TOP STORY:
Doc erupts!
That caught me completely by surprise. If Grumpy could do it, it of course implied that
any
of the crystal mountains could do it, but I hadn’t given it a thought. But others had. The researchers still on Europa had studied the seismology surrounding all the mountains and concluded that, if any of them were going to repeat the performance, it would be Doc, and sure enough, seven months later that big yellow bastard lifted itself into space and headed for Jupiter, just like his slightly smaller brother had done. Three trips around, dipping into the atmosphere each time and speeding up instead of slowing down, as it should have, and Doc was off to the races, too. He didn’t follow the exact path of Grumpy—Jupiter had moved on in its orbit—but both appeared to be headed in the general vicinity of the sun.
If more of them were going to take off, Dopey and Happy were usually mentioned as the most likely candidates, along with some that hadn’t had names before.
Were people still calling them by those stupid names? Apparently so.
Early on the more sedate news organizations had tried the official acronyms and numbers, but TECP-40 just doesn’t have any punch to it. People needed personification, and the names were already handy.
So someone dug around in the history books and found that the Disney people had considered no less than fifty names when creating the dwarfs, and these were applied to those TECPs that didn’t have one yet, and that’s what people called them. Among them were Blabby, Jumpy, Shifty, Snoopy, Awful, Biggy, Blabby, Dirty, Gabby, Gaspy, Gloomy, Hoppy, Hotsy, Jaunty, and Nifty.
What were they up to? Nobody knew anything. How did they do what they did? How did a trillion tons of crystalline matter free itself from the gravity of a small planet with no visible expenditure of energy? Vague theories were trotted out, possibly some use of the galactic magnetic field, whatever that is. Dark matter and dark energy were mentioned, darkly.
God was mentioned. God always seems to get into the game.
Bottom line: Nobody knew anything.
POLITICAL NEWS:
Back to God again. The Rapturists were stirring from beneath the rocks and in all the damp, wet, moldy places of the mind and spirit in Arkansas and Alabama and Tennessee and all those other vacation wonderlands in Heartland America. They’d had some hard times after the tsunami hadn’t turned out to be the clarion call to Armageddon, but true believers never die, they just annotate their beliefs and raise more true believers. Massive rallies were held all over the Heartland. The exact nature of Grumpy and Doc was debated, sometimes with thumped Bibles, sometimes with shotguns. The consensus was they were archangels coming to summon the faithful, but since the Bible apparently didn’t mention Archangel Grumpy, just who
were
they? Most agreed that “Grumpy” was Gabriel. Top candidates for “Doc” were Michael, Uriel, and Zadkiel. Stay tuned to this heavenly channel for more news.
Over in the world of Islam, the Imams currently stirring up the most trouble were speaking of the “Sword of Allah.” They expected Grumpy and/or Doc to wipe out all the infidels. According to them, the Big Wave was just the Big Guy getting the range on his target. Oddly enough, terror attacks were down for the year, and the one before. Lots of Muslims wanted to stick around for the show.
CULTURAL NEWS:
What culture? More movies, books, art … and once more, no music news. I was beginning to see this as highly suspicious. Were they hiding something from me? Had people given up on music as a bad job? Was Elvis back from the dead?
MY NEXT VISITOR
announced himself by leaping onto my chest and bumping my nose,
hard,
accompanied by the sound of a large vibrator.
“Kahlua!”
I shouted. He just regarded me with those narrow blue eyes, bumped noses again to mark me with his scent, then curled his paws on my chest, wrapped his tail around his hind end, and seemed to drift off to sleep.
“Hi, Podkayne,” came a voice from the door. Karma, who I’d seen a little more than a week ago and who hadn’t seen me in ten years.
“You’re looking good, Kar,” I said, stroking Kahlua’s fur. I noticed she was in Navy uniform. Once again, what was that all about? Do the necessary and get out, that had been Karma’s philosophy.
“You mean for my age?” she said.
“Bring me up to date,” I said.
“Well, you know it can only be personal details …”
In short: Married, to someone I’d never met. Two children, three and five. She looked tired. I guess kids will do that to you, combined with a life in the Navy. I wanted to ask her about that, but sensed that I wouldn’t get any answers. So we talked about safe things.
Of which there weren’t many. You know, listening to older people, I realize there are decades and then there are decades. We all know that the distance between ages nine and nineteen is immense. Granddaddy Manny once told me that the difference between age fifty and sixty is really not that much. By then you’re pretty much who you’re going to be. But nineteen and twenty-nine is quite a gulf. I had no idea what I’d be doing in ten years, and I found that exciting. Karma, I quickly discovered, had a pretty good idea what she would be doing—or at least what she hoped to be doing—for the next twenty or thirty. Her life had taken shape. Mine was still fluid.
I realized, with a pang, that it would be that way with
all
my friends. Good lord, what would the Pod People be like today? Who would they be jamming with, what would they be playing? I could be sure it wouldn’t include poor, poor, pitiful Podkayne.
There was a story behind the cat; otherwise, we’d have had very little we could talk about or would even want to talk about.
“We rode out the quake pretty well,” Karma said. “I don’t think it even woke Kahlua up. Then I was busy with the rescue parties …” A momentary pause there, and a faraway look. But for her, the horror of that day was long ago, and there were no tears now. “Anyway, when we were being evacuated I couldn’t find the damn cat. I looked everywhere, but we weren’t given a lot of time. I figured he was a goner when I got aboard the ship, and when I settled down in my seat … there he was, rubbing against my leg and purring. I don’t know how he does it.”
“He’s a spook,” I said, and rubbed his head. He opened one eye enough to glare at me, then started that maddening thing he does of exercising his claws against my chest.
“Anyway, I brought him back to Mars, and I remembered you had an uncle who was an admiral. So I looked him up and told him about your cat. He was upset … we were all pretty upset at the time … but he took Kahlua.”
“You must be a pretty old fellow by now, huh?” I told the cat. He ignored me.
“That’s what I’m telling you. He’s not old. Your uncle had him put in stasis, and I just got him out this morning. You probably thought he had a pretty good memory, going right up to you like that, but for him it’s the same as you. For him, it’s only been days since he’s seen you. You can pick up with him right where you left off.”
I took a great deal of comfort from that. Probably because I knew there was very little else I could pick up where I left off.
ONE GOOD THING
about enforced bed rest: I had a chance to catch up on my reading. Real paper books, too, since all my cyber inputs were shut down. I finally read that book my parents stole my name from, which was called
Podkayne of Mars.
What a horrible book!
What a mean old man! He spends the whole book getting you to like this sweet little airhead, and then he does terrible things to her. Don’t you hate it when an author does that? I’m not reading any more of
his
books, I promise you!
PODKAYNE, THE LOST DECADE: YEAR THREE
TOP STORY:
This time it was … Sneezy. Formally known as TECP-12, Sneezy was a wee bit smaller than Grumpy and Doc, only about four miles long, and dominated by the color green. So now we had a yellow one and a blue one and a green one falling toward the sun, and three big holes in the Taliesen surface, already frozen quite deep, of course, and quickly filling in from landslides caused by the still-nervous crust and tidal stresses. Grumpy was getting quite close to the sun, and by the end of the year had gone within the orbit of Mercury. Navy fleets were still following it, and the others, in rotating shifts. At the rate Grumpy was going, they’d have to break off early in the new year. We have bases on Mercury and have ventured a lot closer, but Grumpy was on a course to take it too close to the primal fires for any ship we had.
I had to keep reminding myself that, not only had this all happened already, but so had the next seven years. I was beginning to get a little annoyed at that. What was the harm of just letting me know how it all came out? Obviously civilization hadn’t been destroyed. Why not skip to page 500 and let me know what the situation was now?