Rolling Thunder (12 page)

I opened the small envelope and took out the card, and read:

BOO!

THE STAFF AND MANAGEMENT

OF THE RED THUNDER HOTEL

WISH YOU AND YOURS A SCARY,

MERRY HALLOWEEN!!

Love, Granddaddy Manny and Kelly

Well, my heart just leaped, and I got choked up. I suddenly realized that I was way, way farther from home than I’d ever been, and though I’d not let myself think about it, I was lonely and even a little bit frightened about it all. Earth wasn’t like this. I’d hated Earth, but it was crowded, warm, and homey compared to Europa. The thoughtfulness of Manny and Kelly … no, though Kelly was good and thoughtful and always remembered important dates, it would never have occurred to her to send me something for Halloween. And if she did, it would have been something more tasteful. This one had Granddaddy written all over it. He knew what would cheer me up.

Take it easy, kiddo. This is just another hotel room, and this is just another planet. The Stricklands and Garcias and Redmonds have always pushed outward, and even if we’ve been afraid, we’ve been there for each other. You are loved.
I heard this all as distinctly as if he’d whispered it into my ear.

The plant was from Mom and Dad. Nothing fancy, just a Wandering Jew in a brass basket you could hang from the ceiling. I laughed. We’re not Jewish, but I sure felt like a wanderer.

For a moment I was struck with a sense of awe at these homey touches in such a place. I’m a child of the space age—the second,
real
space age, which began after chemical rockets were made obsolete. But that age is not that old yet, and my granddaddy could remember a time when a small city on a place like Europa was barely even a pipe dream, and he was still alive to talk about it. He wasn’t even that old. In less than fifty years humanity had come from one cobbled-together rocket, the old
Red Thunder
, to the point that Manny could order a basket of fresh fruit delivered to my little suite half a billion miles from my home planet.
Fresh
Europan fruit, from genetically engineered trees grown in real dirt by the environmental brigade of Clarke Centre. Just pick up the phone on Mars and order what you want, then wait an hour and a half for confirmation of the order as the transaction crawls a billion miles at the speed of light. Fruit, flowers, or a Wandering Jew.

I picked up the card stuck in the plant and opened it:

DECORATE!

Love, Mom

Perfect. Mom had been horrified at my videos of my Pismo apartment, which was much the same the day I moved out as it was the day I moved in. Mom’s one of those ladies who will transform any space she lives in within twenty-four hours, or die trying. I grew up surrounded by one of the finer collections of eclectic knickknacks, batik, pottery, and Boehm porcelains on Mars, not to mention a jungle of tropical plants. Maybe that’s why I never did anything to my place on Earth. Too much competition. That, and I never really wanted to see it as my home.

Maybe I’d feel different here. At least I’d be surrounded by Martians.

I’D NOTICED A
long window in the living room, but it was covered by the external blast shield, like all windows in Navy bases. It was easy to forget sometimes because the Martian Navy was not like most military organizations on Earth, with all the rank and drill and privation and sometimes flat-out torture—except in the commando units, which I wanted no part of—but we
were
military, and though it had long seemed unlikely that we’d ever be called on to fight, we had to be prepared for the possibility.

There was another, smaller window in the bedroom, just beyond the bed itself. For the first time I noticed something out of place in the impersonal neatness of the place. There was a square of yellow paper stuck to the inside of the window. I put one knee on the bed and reached over for it. It was a Post-it Note, and contained a short handwritten message that must have been faxed from Mars and printed out for William to attach where instructed. It said:

Enjoy Uncle Admiral

I reached for the window power button and Kahlua the cat jumped up on the bed and rubbed his head against my side. The shutters went up … and I gasped.

Let’s start up close and then pan out, shall we?

At my feet was the sprawl of sparkling lights that was Clarke Centre, mostly low but with a few tall structures dotted here and there. I could count six giant geodesics with green trees inside. These would be where the stuff in my fruit basket had come from, and they doubled as city parks. There were many more long, low greenhouses with transparent roofs where truck and hydroponic gardening was done. Hence fresh flowers, fresh tomatoes, fresh eggs, and milk. The roofs of these structures bristled with lights to supplement the very weak sunshine 5 AU from Sol, only 1/25 of what Earth got.

Beyond that was a stretch of almost perfectly flat ice, white even at night. It was like the whole city had been set down on the surface of a giant cue ball. But not all
that
huge; the horizon was close, much closer than it would have been back home on Mars. But that was just the enchanting setting for the star of the show.

The Big Boy. Jupiter.

From Europa, Jupiter covers about twelve degrees of the sky. That may not sound like much, considering that the sky is 180 degrees across … but how much of the sky do you think Earth’s moon covers? Most people are surprised at the answer. It’s only half a degree. That means that Jupiter is twenty-four times the width of a full moon.

But the
area
Jupiter covers from Europa is the square—twenty-four times twenty-four
—or five hundred and seventy-six times
the size of Luna seen from Earth. Believe me, that is one gigantic Christmas tree ornament sitting there on the horizon.

It took my breath away. This was the view Uncle Bill had had when he was posted here, and he was sharing it with me. I couldn’t imagine there was a better view in all of Clarke Centre, maybe all of Europa.

You look at Jupiter from that close, and the impression is one of immense violence. And yet I didn’t feel intimidated by it, and of course I was not threatened by it. It was violence frozen in place. Time-lapse will show you just how active those storms really are, hurricanes bigger than Planet Earth and three or four times as windy. Below that swirling cloud layer, lots of hydrogen and a little helium, both in a gaseous state, gradually turning into liquid hydrogen under enormous pressure, then into metallic hydrogen—and I don’t even know what that is, but the pressure has to be even greater to produce it—and finally a small rocky core.

Kahlua jumped up on the window ledge and joined me in enjoying the view. He batted at the glass with a paw and rubbed his nose against it, which is a sure sign that a cat likes something and wants to mark it so everybody knows it’s his.

“Don’t get snot on the window, doofus,” I told him, and made a stack of pillows so I could lie back and just let the view wash over me.

I woke up a few minutes later with Kahlua standing on my chest and bumping noses with me. He was purring like a chain saw. He only weighed a few pounds here. I rolled over and spilled him onto the bed, which didn’t seem to bother him at all.

I thought about getting up, getting out of my clothes, taking a shower. Then I thought about not doing it. I yawned, curled up, and felt Kahlua find a place to nestle against me. I took one long last look at Jupiter out my window, and closed my eyes.

Home?
Could be.

7

I LET THE
waves of applause wash over me as the lights came up on the band, took a slow bow, turned it into a curtsy that I hoped had sort of a Barbra Streisand thing going, but felt pretty sure it was more Fanny Brice, and smiled.

“Thank you ladies, gentlemen, aliens, and others,” I said. “We are Podkayne and the Pod People. Tell your friends. We’ll be appearing here nightly for the rest of the week before starting our triumphant world tour, by popular demand … and orders from Madman Central Command.” This got a ripple of laugher from the mostly Navy crowd—all my crowds these days were mostly Navy.

They were still applauding, and some were standing. A few were doing double or triple flips in the air, as they sometimes do on Europa.

“Let’s hear it for the Pod People,” I shouted. “On winds, Joey ‘Lips’ Farrell. On the real imitation-wood imitation-Steinway, the genuine accept-no-substitutes Cassandra Alonzo. And sitting behind the drums, the genius of everything you can whack with a stick, Quinn the Eskimo, the
mighty Quinn.
Give it up for the hardest-working band on Europa.”

More applause, rimshots, chords, a reprise of the last bars of “Memory,” the showstopper we’d been ending with the last two nights. This was our torch song set: a little Billie, a little Nina Simone, Patti LuPone, Diana Krall, a touch of Wendy Dare, some Baako, and a dash of Butterfly, who I’d met once. The first set of the night had been dedicated to Ella and Barbra: “How High the Moon,” “In the Still of the Night,” “I’m Beginning to See the Light,” “Cry Me a River,” “Soon It’s Gonna Rain,” “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,” “My Man.” Stuff like that. It was hard on the vocal cords, ending with the Lloyd Webber, but it was worth it; there’s seldom been a crowd pleaser like that one.

Somebody threw a pair of panties on the stage. Well, it looked like I’d pleased
someone
, but not my cup of tea. I snagged them with one foot and tossed them over my shoulder to Lips. Then I waved and headed backstage. My first step took me a foot in the air and I had to try to look dignified while waiting to come down.

Almost a month on Europa, and I was still “Mars-footed,” as the longtime residents put it. “Mars-headed” meant either a helmet or a bandage on the crown of your head from leaping too high too often in moments of excitement, and the end of the last set of a night that had gone very well sure qualified. I’m an applause slut, I never denied it. It’s better than food, sex, or drugs (I imagine). But I had to get my legs under control. Hitting your head on the ceiling is something
Earthies
do.

“Let’s hear it for Podkayne, Europa’s answer to all those great chanteuses of yesteryear!” It was “Rick,” owner of Rick’s Cafe Americain, a pudgy, balding guy whose name wasn’t really Rick and who did a terrible Bogart imitation and had roaming hands to boot until I showed him what a spike heel could do to an instep—he was still limping a little—in his white tux and elevator shoes. We hated each other, but the Pod People were filling his club, so we pretended we didn’t. “Get back out here, Pod, take another bow, maybe you could favor these folks with another number!”

Asshole. I was done for the night, but I knew my obligations, so I returned from behind the curtain at the rear and took his offered hand— sweaty, like his forehead—did another bow, blew a few kisses, and did a vanishing act.

Pretty soon I was joined in the small dressing room by the rest of the band. Beers were cracked, instruments packed, shoes kicked off. The zipper in back of my blue satin gown was stuck, and I asked Quinn to help me with it. He did, and his hand continued down inside and cupped my bare behind. Squeezed.

I let him. A shipboard fling had turned into something a little more serious, though a long way from permanent.

That’s right. I’d done the silliest thing you can do in the world of popular music. I was sleeping with the drummer.

THAT FIRST MORNING
in my room at Clarke Centre I was awakened by Kahlua bumping noses, and gradually realized someone was knocking on the door. Better not be Prince Charming, I thought, realizing I was still in my wrinkled travel clothes and probably didn’t smell all that good. But you don’t need much energy to bounce out of bed on Europa, so I bounced, and stumbled my way to the door.

When I opened it, nobody seemed to be there.

“Trick or treat!” somebody said.

Then a hand rose into view, holding a cup of steaming coffee. I reached for it reflexively, it smelled so good, then I looked down on an elf.

That’s what she looked like, anyway, in a green top and billowy pants and soft brown moccasins, blond hair in a pixie cut. Peter Pan, maybe, though the figure was far from boyish. She’d have fit neatly under my armpit. No, actually she didn’t quite rise to that level. Four-foot-eleven, I later learned.

“Trick or treat in reverse, actually,” she said. “I come bearing sweets and caffeine, and to check on the cat. May I come in? You don’t get any coffee and donuts unless you invite me in.”

I mumbled something that she must have taken for an invitation, and maybe it was, though I still wasn’t awake enough to be sure. I took a sip of the coffee. It was wonderful. I mumbled something else.

“Yeah, I’m finicky about my coffee. That’s from Kenya.” I decided she was damn good at interpreting my mumbles.

“Hi, baby!” That wasn’t addressed to me but to Kahlua, who had leaped to her shoulder—not much of a leap, actually—and was rubbing himself all over her and purring like an outboard motor. “This is Kahlua, if you haven’t been introduced,” the elf went on.