Rolling Thunder (5 page)

Who knows where it will end? I myself favor the theory that in a hundred years the equator will be a wasteland, never dropping below a hundred degrees at night, and most humans will live north and south of the tropics, including Antarctica.

Or on other planets. Why not? We’re doing fine on Mars, with much harsher conditions. More people are moving to the moon. Then there are the asteroids. Even if we totally wear out the Earth—and nobody really thinks that will happen, life of some sort will adjust, just as it did after the dinosaurs died—something will survive. Maybe it will only be cockroaches, but something will survive.

Always look on the bright side, that’s my philosophy. Though it’s a little depressing to think of cockroaches as the bright side.

EARTH PORT THREE WAS
a standard orbital environment, pretty much like the other three circling endlessly about ten thousand miles over the equator. Picture a can of creamed corn. Peel off the label and paint it Navy red. Now blow it up so the diameter at each end of the cylinder is about a thousand yards. Set it spinning at a rate that will produce .38 gees inside. Now extend pipes out each end along the spin axis and stud it with docking collars, and you have a stable long-term space environment. Navy regs don’t allow personnel to stay in zero gravity for more than three months at a time, which would mean a lot of hassle moving people back and forth from Mars for R&M leaves, so we have to have access to spin gravity.

I could have let the autopilot dock us, but I wanted to test my rusty piloting skills, so I kept my hand on the stick as I eased her in. Just like riding a bicycle, they say, and they were right. It was as easy as if I’d done it only yesterday. I got a satisfying clank, flipped a few switches, and looked at a row of green lights.

“This is your captain speaking,” I said, with no little satisfaction. “We have docked with Earthport Three … six minutes ahead of schedule. You may now unfasten your seat belts and exit the vehicle through the lock on the control deck. Please check around your seat for any items you may have forgotten you brought aboard. Thank you for choosing the Martian Navy for this flight. Please contact us again for all your Earth-to-orbit transportation needs.”

I was bundling my hair into a manageable mass and wrapping an elastic band around it when my passengers came floating up through the deck and toward the airlock in the docking collar. One guy was looking a little green. An ensign looked at me and smiled, gave me the thumbs-up, but the commander didn’t seem so happy, probably pissed off by my docking announcement. Probably a lifer asshole. Screw him. I didn’t ask to be in this woman’s Navy; I was drafted, like most everybody else. Gold braid didn’t intimidate me, unless it was being worn by somebody in the chain of command over me.

4

SO WE’VE SPENT
a little time together now. You’ve been with me from Pismo Beach to Earth orbit. I wouldn’t say we’re actually dating, but I think you know me well enough now that it’s time to meet my family.

Let’s don’t do it at Deimos Base, though that’s where a lot of them met me. You know how chaotic those scenes are, and I just hate them, don’t you?

(FYI, the trip home was a total bust in terms of male companionship. The crew was too busy or paired up, at least for the duration, and as for the passengers, I never saw such a collection of total losers. It’s what comes of universal conscription, we girls agreed. They have to take
everybody.)

Let’s move right on to the Utopia Planitia Time Suspension Facility.

UTOPIA IS JUST
a big depression in the northern hemisphere where there’s nothing really going on, like so much of Mars, only worse. There’s not even a lot of craters there, just a big flat plain with a rail line running straight through it. There’s a landing field that is used mostly by ambulances. Looking at the place, you’d never guess what lies beneath.

The favored euphemism for a graveyard is cemetery. A mausoleum if the remains are stored aboveground, a crypt if it’s underground or in a basement. A repository for ashes, or “cremains” as they like to call them, is a columbarium. Black bubble technology is fairly new, and there still isn’t consensus on what to call a place that holds humans in stopped time, but most seem to favor “vivarium.”

Gran was still ambulatory and hooked up to only a small number of machines that easily fit on a cart. We went under a rather grand marble archway into the vivarium. The floor was white marble, stretching off into the distance. Overhead signs flashed slightly ahead of us, directing the
GARCIA PARTY
to
DEPARTURE HALL #40
. I thought that was a rather tacky thing to call it, then we passed other halls with names like “Until We Meet Again,” “Bon Voyage!” and “Safe in the Arms of Jesus.” I kid you not. I couldn’t see Gran going for anything like that; the neutral #40 would appeal to her.

This farewell party was probably a challenge to Grandma Kelly, who had naturally organized it, since it’s all relatively new and social standards for something like this were still in flux. What do you wear, for instance? Nothing about the party should resemble a funeral, so black is out. On the other hand, it’s not exactly a luau, either. Leave the print dress with the pineapples and surfer dudes at home. It’s a send-off, no question, but most honorees don’t really want to go, and most of the guests are at least ambivalent about the whole thing: happy she’s going to be alive, but frightened that it may, in fact, be the last time you’re ever going to see her. What do you do with that? What’s a proper emotional response? Mostly confusion, if the others here were feeling anything like I was.

But come with me now into Departure Hall #40, which is all abuzz with people who’ve come ahead, friends of the family, waiting for the guest of honor. If I don’t introduce you to my family now, it’ll be too late, they’ll be lost in the crowd, and some of them will be drunk.

In any gathering on Mars, if she is in the room, your attention will immediately go to Kelly Strickland. I don’t know what it is. You could call it charisma. Cameras love her. She is attractive, but not in a movie-star way. Her clothes are ordinary, and she’s worn the same hairstyle all my life. When it started to go gray she let it, and now it’s a startling silver. She’s not an imposing figure, certainly not on Mars. Maybe a little bit less than average height for an Earth girl.

You could call it intensity. I’ve met people who can concentrate on one thing so exclusively you’d think their eyes could bore right through whatever it is they’re looking at. Grandma Kelly can do it to a whole room. She can juggle a dozen tasks at the same time and not neglect anything.

Whatever it is, it was enough to get her elected first president of Mars, and she might still be president if she had wanted to serve a third term and keep running, despite a dedicated minority who hate her intensely. A lot more people wish we had her back, and every election time there is a “Draft Strickland” movement, which she always politely turns down. When Grandma Kelly is done with something, she’s done. Oh, she’s still political, you’d better believe it. She just concentrates on individual causes now rather than trying to lead the whole planet. I respect her tremendously, am a bit in awe of her, dislike her much of the time. But I know that if I was in trouble
—any
kind of trouble—she would lay down her life for me, right behind my own mother and father.

So I guess I love her. Sort of. It’s not easy being the granddaughter of the George Washington of Mars.

She’s sixty-three now, looks forty-five, and has had a life I can only envy, when I read about it. And that’s what I usually have to do; she’s not one for reminiscence, never dwells on the past. It’s the future she’s interested in, and when I say she “has had” a life, I must emphasize
thus far.
No one who knows her thinks she’s going to settle down anytime soon. She was a bored little rich girl in a medium-sized town in Florida in the early twenty-first century when she met my grandfather, a poor half-white, half-Hispanic boy, and everyone assumed she was slumming. Myself, I think maybe she was. But Granddaddy Manny and his friends had a dream, and Grandma Kelly made it happen. I’ve never been sure if it was her dream, too, or merely the first thing that came along in her life that was worthy of her talents. For whatever reasons, they built the first ship to bring humans to Mars and return them to Earth, though Kelly almost died along the way.

What surprised a lot of people was that she stuck with Granddaddy. I love my Granddaddy Manny as much as any man in the solar system—for a while there, when I was being difficult, I loved him even more than my father—but he’s not the sort of mate you’d expect for a human dynamo like Kelly.

Maybe that’s his attraction. Look at him over there, on the other side of Gran Betty from Grandma Kelly, carefully holding her arm like she was a piece of delicate crystal. He’s gentle, courtly, a little old-fashioned. He looks older than Kelly though they are the same age. He’s balding, a little paunchy, his clothes are out of date. If you had to guess his occupation, you might say bookkeeper, or you might say hotel manager.

Bingo! That’s where they met, at the famous Blast-Off Motel in Daytona Beach, now just a sad memory in the worst part of the Red Zone. According to Granddaddy Manny, it was not a roach motel, Betty never let it sink so low, but it was struggling. Manny grew up there, fatherless, and it was pretty much his life … and he hated it. He dreamed of being an astronaut, and through a combination of amazing pluck, luck, and sheer courage, he got to be one …

… for a few weeks. That’s when he found that he and his best friend, Dak, were subject to crippling falling sickness, something that afflicts him to this day. Nothing to be ashamed of; it happens, though seldom to the Mars-born.

So he ended up in hotel management, but this time as manager of the first, and for a long time the biggest and swankiest, hotel on Mars, the Red Thunder. He was good at it. Still is, though he’s largely retired now. While he was running the Red Thunder you could be assured that you would get the best, no matter what it took. And during the Martian War he performed heroically, though with little fanfare. Dad told me there were at least two hundred people, guests and employees of the hotel, who wouldn’t be alive today except for Granddaddy Manny.

These days he serves on a lot of committees and doesn’t seem to miss working at all. He’s devoted to his two children and to his grandchildren. He was never the kind of sugar daddy who would give you anything you happened to want—and believe me, I tested him every chance I got—but if there was something you
really needed,
he would always be there with it.

That guy with the neatly trimmed beard, towering over Manny and slightly behind him, the one in the tweed jacket that might as well have college professor embroidered across the back … that’s my daddykins, Ray (don’t call me Ramon) Strickland-Garcia, Ph.D. He is thirty-eight, young to be the head of the History Department at Marinaris University, but we’re a young planet and a young university. Dad is the foremost expert, anywhere, on Martian history. I am the light of his life, the sun rises and sets on me, and all the planets orbit around me. And you’d better believe I took full advantage of that during my childhood. I actually
did
call him Daddykins for a while there—I read it in a book somewhere, and isn’t it disgusting?—and he’d wiggle like a puppy when I did. I had him wrapped so tightly around my little finger it curled his hair.

Alas, no more. There seems to be a different set of rules after you pass eighteen, and I’m still figuring them out.

Standing next to him there, five inches shorter than his six and a half feet, is my mommykins, Evangeline Redmond. Though I
never
called her that. Mom and I have a businesslike relationship. I love her and all, and she was always there to kiss a skinned knee or console me when my heart was broken … but sometimes it was a bit after the fact, long after Dad had already had the first shot. That’s because she’s a workaholic, like Kelly. She works in the family business, which is Redmond’s, the best restaurant on Mars. And believe me, in a tourist destination like Thunder City, where the clientele expects top service and food, that’s saying something. The menu is French, Creole, Cajun, and what we call Martian Fusion, which is anything Mom and her parents say it is.

That’s them not far away, Jim and Audrey Redmond, quiet and unobtrusive like Granddaddy Manny. Jim is checking out the long table groaning with food, which he catered, naturally. Grand-mère Audrey runs the business, Grand-père Jim rules the kitchen with an iron oven mitt, and Mom … well, Mom is the real reason Redmond’s is the best. She’s the one who created both the style and the term Martian Fusion, and the one who keeps inventing new stuff to keep the rich folks coming back. After all, there are a jillion French restaurants, several hundred just on Mars, and likewise Creole and Cajun. But where else are you going to get filet of thoat or stuffed sorak? Nowhere, that’s where, because Mom trademarked both names. I’m not going to tell you what those “Barsoomian” animals really are, it’s a trade secret, but if you don’t have a moral objection to genetically engineered meat, try the sorak in white wine sauce. You’ll never forget it.