Rolling Thunder (28 page)

But they stuck to their guns.

OTHER NEWS:
Not worth mentioning.

THEY PUT ME
on a walking machine that day, and I crept along on it for ten minutes at a pace that would have done a 110-year-old woman proud.

Why a walking machine? Why not the corridor outside my room?

Why not back and forth
within
the room? Oh, well, we don’t question doctor’s orders.

Aunt Elizabeth was no longer rooming with me. She checked up for about an hour that day and left me in the hands of a nurse.

Who promptly conked out on the couch.

Here was my chance! The screws were sleeping, the tunnel was complete, I’d carved a gun out of a bar of soap … I could be under the wire and out into the trees in five minutes, ten if I had to fight off the dogs and the odd Nazi perimeter guard …

Instead I settled for swinging my legs over the side of the bed and pulling my brand-new aluminum walker over with one foot and slowly, slowly putting my weight on it. I shuffled across the thick carpet. Snails would have sneered at my pace. Earthworms could have run rings around me.

I couldn’t help it. I was going stir-crazy. I had to see outside.

There was a single small rectangle of window in the room, which told me I was in the old, historic part of the Red Thunder. It used to be open to the elements, hence the stingy port, from back in the days when we were still learning about pressurized environments. The old wing was now enclosed under the Mile-High Dome, but nothing had been changed. You didn’t get the nice views of the dome you’d get from your open balcony in the newer parts of the hotel, but people paid premium prices to stay here. Silly, but I understood it. We don’t have a lot of history on Mars, and this is about as far back as it goes.

I was winded when I got there. There was an old-fashioned blind over it, and I pulled the cord cautiously, aware of their tendency to clatter down if you didn’t do it right. Then I leaned to the window to take a look outside, annoyed that my distance vision was still a bit fuzzy.

First impression: sort of dark. Second:
very
dark, and not many people around. The Mile-High is a flurry of gardens, fountains, pools, arcades, and shops, and at night like it was now under the transparent dome it should have been blazing with artificial light.

Instead, there was the bare minimum of streetlights on the paths and only a few people walking, or riding bikes or scooters. Across the small plaza outside the hotel a single vidboard showed a commercial for breakfast cereal. I looked down.

I figured I was on about the tenth or twelfth floor, out of twenty. The plaza itself was crowded with people, maybe a thousand. Hard to make them out in the semidarkness. Many of them were carrying candles, and I thought they might be singing. No sound at all came through the triple-thick Lexan. All around the people, covering the plaza from side to side, were flowers. Millions of flowers. Where they were heaped under the streetlights I could see a riot of colors. There were huge arrangements, and there were piles and piles of simple bouquets in cellophane.

Suddenly there was a commotion. Somebody was pointing, then more people, and then they were all on their feet. Some were applauding, others were waving, some were doing handsprings and backflips and other signs of unrestrained joy in .38 gee.

It looked like there was a big celebrity staying at the hotel, probably somewhere above me, judging from where people were pointing. It was frustrating. I’m no celebrity hound, but it would have been nice to know who it was. Then I remembered this was ten years later, and I might not even know the name. There’d been time for a lot of old famous faces to grow obscure, and a whole new crop of tabloid fodder to arise.

I hadn’t learned much and I was tired, but it was nice to have seen something beyond these six walls. I was about to head back to bed when I noticed the scene had changed on the vidboard across the way. There was a crawl line across the bottom but I couldn’t read it. It looked like a promo for a horror movie. It showed the face of a blond woman who might have been moderately attractive if she’d put on a little makeup and did something about the dark circles under her eyes. Her hair was a fright, stiff and tangled and standing up on one side like she’d slept on it. I wouldn’t be caught dead going out in public like that. I watched her, waiting for something to happen.

She looked vaguely familiar.

Finally I shrugged and turned away.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the ugly hag on the screen shrug and turn. I turned back … and so did she.

I let out a shriek that levitated the sleeping nurse two feet off the couch, to bounce once on the floor and leap to her feet, groggy and frightened.

That was me.

* * *

I’M AFRAID I
wasn’t very nice about it. When Aunt Elizabeth arrived I told her I wanted the whole story, or I wanted a lawyer. Was I a prisoner here, or what?

It took half an hour, but finally much of the family was assembled in my room, most of them looking uneasy but none of them looking guilty. They still thought they were doing the right thing for me. I was going to disabuse them of that.

Mom and Dad and Mike were there, and all four grandparents. I’d seen them all before, separately, and though I can’t say I was
used
to seeing my parents in their late forties and their parents in their early seventies, I knew it was true.

Also present was Uncle Bill, resplendent in the uniform of—yikes!— a fleet admiral. At least I guessed that’s what that circle of five stars on his shoulder boards and lapels meant; I’d never seen a fleet admiral before.

Senator Wu was there with his daughter Monet. I was surprised to discover how happy I was to see them. They had been relatively uninjured in the crash, nothing more than bumps and bruises and, in Monet’s case, a broken arm. So they weren’t in recovery, like me, but I assumed they were still going through the reorientation process and would be in the dark as to most current events. It felt good that there were two people there who were probably as disoriented as I was, who had shared the nightmare and now the aftermath. I looked forward to putting our heads together.

But the big surprise was Quinn and Cassandra, my old Pod People. Quinn had already been five years older than the rest of us, and was looking more than ten years older now. Cassandra didn’t look all that changed, but it might have been skillful makeup and maybe a touch of surgery.

I made a silent bet with myself on who would be the first to speak, and what that speech would be. Ten dollars per bet.

“Podkayne,” Grandma Kelly said, making me ten dollars richer, in theory, “we understand why you’re upset. Anyone would be. But we still think you should stick with the program, follow your doctor’s orders.”

And that made me twenty dollars richer. I noticed a few people shifting around. I wondered if a vote had been taken, and if it was unanimous. But I didn’t really care.

“Grandma Kelly,” I said, coming down maybe a little harder than necessary on the first word, “I’m going to be frank. I don’t give a sand-rat’s ass what you think. You, or all of you. I’m going to find out why I’m being held here, and what’s going on outside. One way or another. Your choice here is to tell me or lock me in and tie me down.”

There was a short silence, and I looked at Mom and Dad.

“So, parental units. What’s it going to be?”

Mom smiled.

“What I knew it would be when I came in here. We’re going to do a deal. Right, Elizabeth?”

Aunt Elizabeth didn’t look happy—doctors are like that, they like to be in charge—but she nodded.

“Here it is,” Mom went on. “You know from what you saw that things have changed in a big way in the ten years you’ve been gone. Part of that is systemwide in scope and affects all humanity.”

“And involves Grumpy and Doc and Sneezy.”

“Yes. The other part is personal. We’re going to tell you the personal part now, and save the rest for another day.”

“How about tomorrow?”

Mom looked at Dad, and then at Elizabeth, and they both nodded.

“If you want. What I can tell you right now is, you are probably the most famous person in the solar system.”

I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t that. Sure, I’d figured out all those people out there were holding a candlelight vigil for me, but I thought it just had something to do with the accident, and they were just happy I’d been lucky enough to make it through alive.

Well, I
had
been the only one to do much about the emergency, me and Slomo. Maybe that was it. I was the story of the day, the chump-of-the-moment, the news footnote of the month. The Warhol Girl, entering her fifteen minutes. Maybe I was being built up as a hero.
How did it
feel,
Podkayne, when the driver’s brains spattered on your face?
Oh, that should be glorious. Gag me.

It didn’t feel right. None of that would make me the most famous person in the solar system, as Mom had put it.

“But what did I do?” I asked.

* * *

WHAT I DID,
was “Jazzie’s Song.” No kidding.

I had completely forgotten that I’d shipped off the finished product to Mike, and to Quinn. Shortly after that, Grumpy exploded, and I vanished into the Europan ice.

Mike and Quinn had corresponded and became good friends. Quinn and Cassandra had fiddled with it, tweaked it here and there, but mostly left it alone. Then they went to work, copyrighting it, downloading it, promoting it.

Sometimes someone is simply at the right place and in the right time with the right product. I don’t know—no one will ever know—if Jazzie would have taken off or even got much listening if it hadn’t been so intimately associated with the Europan situation, if the base material hadn’t come from the crystals themselves, via ELF recording and manipulation. But it was, and if I say so myself, and as proven by the reaction of the first people to hear it as I performed it live, a very nice piece of music. It was like nothing anyone had ever heard before, and it was a human interacting with the crystals, and in the prevailing nervous mood affecting all humanity, it was what they wanted to hear.

Which was great news. I was famous, and I was rich. And I “died” young, which is often a good career move, as I was saying to Elvis and John Lennon just the other day.

How rich? Very rich. “Jazzie’s Song” had been the top download for
three consecutive years.
And it was all mine, less a collaboration fee for the Pod People and Mike, as my de facto manager.

All amazing, all hard to take in. And just the beginning.

There was just the one “Jazzie’s Song,” but there were the sides we burned on the tour, and once you’ve got one big hit, the public clamors for more. Quinn and Mike doled them out, and each became a hit. So the Pod People got some money, too, which made me happy. Ten years later, we were well into the point where people were trading “bootlegs” of the stuff I’d recorded before I was famous.
(Famous!
It was going to take a while to get used to that.) Like so much of that sort of ephemera, a lot of it was stuff I wouldn’t have released if I was around to have any say about it, but it wasn’t
awful,
and it made me a lot more money, so who’s complaining?

But wait!
as they say on hard-sell TV commercials.
There’s more!

Jazzie was so popular that the public wanted more of it. But there wasn’t any … for a while, anyway. But all that ELF music was available, public domain, and anybody with a mixer and a mike could experiment with it. It wasn’t long before people were making their own variations, finding stuff in there that I told myself I would have found if I hadn’t been in deep freeze.

Within a year there was a whole new genre of music. For a while they called it “crystal music,” but the label that stuck was … get ready for it …

Pod music.

The Big New Thing in music, not related to rock or pop or anything that came before it, really. Ten years later it was still going strong, as hard to kill as disco or rap.

And it was all my doing. I’m not getting a swelled head here, honestly I’m not. But it was
just me,
sitting on my bed waiting for something exciting to happen, mixing and discarding and listening … and then singing.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Podkayne, back from the dead!

Thank you, thank you! I am the inventor of Pod music, the Pod-o-rama, the Podster herself! I am the Princess of Mars, the Tsarina of the Sun and Moon, the Queen of the Earth, the Empress of Ice Cream!

I am the bee’s kneecaps and the kitty’s jam jams!

I am Champagne Charlene, I am me
and
Bobby McGee!

I am woman, hear me roar!

I am the freaking
walrus
!

And I don’t have a clue what Pod music is all about.

14

SAY YOU’RE BEETHOVEN.
It’s 1800, you’ve just published your First Symphony, and you’re running around Vienna trying to get the DJs to spin your piano concertos and a string quartet or two, hoping to generate a buzz in the Viennese chat rooms. Just starting to
really
learn your composing chops, in other words.