Rolling Thunder (31 page)

Famine stalked the planet. Much of the best agricultural land was inundated with receding salt water, useless for crops. What was left was intensively cultivated with grains. Most domestic food animals were slaughtered and eaten and no one expected to raise any more in the near future. Meat animals consume more energy than they provide as food. For now, pretty much everyone but the very rich became vegetarians. There was no choice in the matter. For the duration, it was going to be rice, wheat, corn, and soybeans for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Vegetables were a luxury, something for Sunday. Cans of Spam sold for a thousand dollars, in gold only.

In most of Africa and many other places, even rice and bread were luxuries.

And all this was done in a spirit of international and interethnic cooperation, right? It’s us against the aliens, we all have to pull together, let’s not worry about money and irrelevant things like that, let’s put aside our old hatreds and grudges.

All you need is love. Give peace a chance. Imagine no religion.

Right?

Thanks for the nice thoughts, Mr. Lennon, but if you thought that, you’re as naive about the human condition as I was.

I
wanted
that to happen, I
needed
it to happen, this was all too awful to contemplate without the normal inhumanities of man added on top like a big turd on a dog corpse squashed on the road.

And there was a lot of that, at first. Truces were declared. Many rich people gave until it hurt. There were so many volunteers to succor the displaced, the orphaned, the bereaved, that it was hard to coordinate all their efforts. The human urge to help out a downtrodden neighbor is the glue that holds civilization together, and it’s very powerful.

Then it settled into the daily slog of survival and backbreaking work and always being a little hungry. Other, baser urges began to dominate. I’m all right, Jack, screw you all. Why is my nation getting the short end of the stick? Why is my city, my tribe, my clan, my family, suffering while those folks over there are doing just fine?

Countries are fragile things, as the Big Wave taught America. They can fall apart if they’re hit with something big enough. Many did. Most rich countries on Earth have large ethnic minorities of one kind or another, often a lower, laboring class imported to do the work the natives were too rich to do. Resentments run deep. Other countries were cobbled together after a war, or in the aftermath of colonialism, and the mismatched groups within their borders hated each other.

Things got ugly pretty soon.

I WANTED TO
quit there because I was pretty certain there was worse to come.

My world had been altered out of all recognition in just a few hours, and I’d never left my bedroom. First I was rich and famous, then a good part of Earth was devastated, millions dead. Then my home planet was transformed into a vast cattle pen—I’m sorry, but the great majority of the refugees were folks who would never have been accepted for citizenship before, having no useful skills for living on Mars—and an armed camp.

And that was only strike one. Doc and Sneezy still hadn’t come up to bat.

* * *

A LITTLE LESS
than a year later Doc arrived, and for the first time one of the crystal mountains did exactly as you might have expected. The only difference was that it landed in the Indian Ocean. Low-lying Bangladesh pretty much ceased to exist. More earthquakes, more volcanoes. More death and misery.

Still no Rapturists rising into the sky. By now they had decided these were not angels come to redeem the righteous but devils sent to punish mankind’s many sins. They were rechristened Asmodeus, Beelzebub, and Mammon.

NEXT YEAR. SNEEZY
arrived, South Atlantic. Look at a map, I’m not going to list the countries that the wave swept.

Meanwhile, back on Europa, TECP-52 took off. It had never had an informal name. Grumpy was red, Doc was yellow, Sneezy was green. TECP-52 was a brownish yellow. He was christened Dirty, after one of the dwarfs that didn’t make the Disney cut. Rapturists, millennialists, and an increasing number of just plain Christians called it Wormwood.

OVER THE NEXT
year three more mountains left Europa.

TECP-13, deep purple, christened Shifty. Or Azazel.

TECP-70, blue, Awful. Or Belial.

TECP-76, the smallest of the bunch, only three miles long, black as obsidian, called Jumpy. Or Leviathan.

Frankly, by that time I was getting a little tired of the cute names, myself. Leviathan beats the hell out of Jumpy, don’t you think?

During the years after that, they all landed on Earth. The last one, Leviathan, landed precisely at the South Pole. Unlike the others, which lay lengthwise and half-submerged, Leviathan landed on its end. It melted the ice right down to the bedrock. Then it stood there, a dark, irregular tower about two miles high.

Like the others, it did nothing. It just sat there. You could walk up close to Leviathan, sitting in its moat of melted ice. You could pilot a boat up close to the others—though some of those who did died, of “natural” causes, and many of the boats developed engine trouble.

Then they began to sing.

Shortly after that, the weather began to change.

15

NONE OF US
said anything for a while after I’d seen all the videos. It was all old news to them, but they realized it would take me a while to learn to cope with it all, if I ever did.

“Seven of them?” I finally said. “Did I count right?”

“You did,” Dad said. “No one knows if any more are coming, of course, but it’s been a while, and Taliesen is quiet.”

“Does that … do you think that…
means
anything?”

“Maybe it means they saw
Snow White,”
Mike said, with a grin. “Nu-merologists are having a lot of fun with it. Seven is the number of perfection or completeness in Egyptian mythology. It’s a Mersenne, a Lucas, and a Woodall prime number. It’s a ‘happy’ number. It’s the number of the Pleiades, the Shabbat, the number of Heavens and Earths in Islam, the number of deadly sins
and
virtues, sacraments, joys and sorrows of Mary, the number of the yang, the number of Lucky Gods in Japan. Also samurai, seas, continents, Ptolemaic spheres, days in the week, and rings given to the dwarf lords.”

“It’s the preferred number base for people missing three fingers,” Travis chimed in. “The most likely number when you’re throwing dice, and the number on the back of Mickey Mantle’s jersey. All of which are about equally likely to have anything to do with why there are now seven Europan mountains sitting on the Earth.”

It was worth a small chuckle, which was about all I was capable of at the moment.

“Any more questions?” Mike asked.

“Only about a thousand,” I said. “I can find most of them out for myself, once I get online again. And that will be … ?”

“Tomorrow, if you wish,” Aunt Elizabeth said.

“I wish.” Then something else occurred to me. “Why so long?”

Several eyebrows were raised. But Mike nodded.

“Why did it take so long to dig you out of the ice,” he said.

” ‘Scuse me, folks,” Uncle Travis said. “I’ve got to see a man about a spaceship.” He came over and leaned down and kissed my cheek. Then he was out the door.

“What was that all about?” I wondered.

“It was Travis being modest,” Dad said.

“Travis?”

“Well, you owe him,” Mike said, “we all do, and that embarrasses him.”

“This is
Travis
we’re talking about?”

“Yeah … but this time … let’s say people are feeling a little ambivalent about him at the moment.”

I LOVE MY
uncle Travis, but I won’t argue with anyone who describes him as a loose cannon. He does what he wants to, what he thinks is best, and luckily for humanity, his instincts are good. Sometimes what is needed is somebody who is willing to cut through the bullshit.

That’s why I’m not still lying frozen under the Europan ice. Travis finally said, “Enough of this shit!” The only surprise is that he waited so long. I’m not complaining, mind you. No one else had the courage to do it at all.

Here’s the deal … After Grumpy took off, the Navy interdicted the whole of Europa. Because one of the questions that was asked very soon was, were we responsible? It was a very dangerous question, and a very political one. When Grumpy and the others began devastating Earth, it grew even more important. Did human activity stir these things up? A lot of people were dead, a planetary catastrophe was under way, and it’s human nature to want to blame somebody for that. Even among Martians, tough questions were being asked. Had we been playing with fire? Prodding a sleeping giant?

Inquiries were begun. What 99 percent of the scientists concluded was simple. Examining photos that went all the way back to the very first probes of Jupiter, enhancing them with computers, comparing them to subsequent pictures taken before humans ever landed, it was clear that the “freckles” of Taliesen had been growing for a long time. Conclusion: Whatever had happened and was happening on Europa, it had not been caused by human presence.

Most Martians accepted that, but of course since we were the accused, that was to be expected. Most rational Earthies accepted it, too … but my conclusion is that rationality is in short supply on Earth. Maybe because most of the rational people there have already come to Mars.

Google “Europa disaster,” and you’ll get tens of thousands of sites that “prove” it was human meddling that caused the eruptions. Try “Europa conspiracy,” and you’ll get at least that many that inform you that not only are Martians responsible, but that we are in cahoots with Grumpy and company, that we
asked
them to go to Earth and wreak havoc.

The upshot of all the investigations was that the ban on landing on Europa should be extended. Just to be on the safe side. Despite the massive evidence that what had happened was the result of a process that had certainly been going on for centuries, maybe eons, before humans ever looked at Europa. Despite the fact that, so far as anyone could tell, the crystals hadn’t noticed us at
all,
any more than a brontosaurus might have noticed the aphids on a fern his tail whacked a hundred feet behind him.

The interdiction made a lot of people feel safer, in a time when feelings of safety were in short supply. It displeased only a handful of people, including scientists who still hoped to learn more about the nature of the beasts and the survivors of those entombed in the various bases around Taliesen.

Not to mention Bus 54, which had a real-life celebrity aboard, plus the granddaughter of a former president of the Republic.

Years went by, and the majority of the public was adamant: Don’t Fuck Around With Europa. The Navy followed the orders of its political leaders, though many if not most wanted desperately to go down and search for their missing comrades. An organization was formed, headed by—guess who?—Grandma Kelly, called MIND: Missing Is Not Dead. They didn’t make a lot of progress.

Then they de-stasized Uncle Travis for the third time since Gran went into the bubble. That’s right. They woke him up when Grumpy took off, naturally, as that event easily qualified as “something big,” as he’d specified in his papers when he first started skipping. He stayed out of the bubble for several years that time. But there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it … so he skipped again, this time with instructions to take him out in only three years.

Jeez. Only my uncle Travis, huh? Planetary catastrophe wasn’t interesting enough for him. But the thing was, he couldn’t do anything about
anything,
he was arrayed against cosmic forces this time, not human evil, and he just couldn’t stand that.

When next Groundhog Travis popped his head out of his hole, things had gone from bad to worse. Mars had become a giant refugee camp, and civil unrest among these unwanted—and, it seemed to Martians, frequently ungrateful—guests was building. They had formed their own political groups by then, hampered by the fact that they came from all over Earth, from different cultures, without a common language. One group wanted to go home … but Earth didn’t want them; they had enough problems taking care of their own mammoth refugee problems. Another group wanted citizenship, and Martians were overwhelmingly opposed to that.

It wasn’t a pretty situation. Travis looked around, said “screw this,” and went back into his bubble.

Three years later he came out again.

“WHEN HE HEARD
that you were still under the ice, maybe alive, maybe dead, he blew up,” Dad told me that day of revelation. “Finally, here was a task worthy of his talents.”

“In spite of the blockade?”

Dad grinned. “Maybe even because of it. You know Travis, he doesn’t like to be told what he can’t do. But your grandma helped steer him to it. She knows how to handle Travis, always has. By the time she got through with him he was so outraged I thought he’d explode. He told us he’d bring you back, whether to hug or to bury.”

I made a note to myself to cut Grandma Kelly some slack the next time she got on my nerves.