Red Lightning (26 page)

Most of these things were hand-lettered and held on with adhesive tape. Strictly low-rent, and that's the way we liked it.

To tell you the absolute truth, I'd gotten lost myself more than once in the maze. Never on my way to my own place, but trying to find somebody else's. And that was okay, too. It's not like it was that big a place, just confusing.

I made it to my own cubicle without incident, stripped off my suit, and then my clothes, and shoved off a wall and toward the shower.

It looks just like an ordinary shower from the outside. A frosted plastic door that seals tight around the edges, like a refrigerator, lined with blue tile on the inside. That's where it all changes. You have to get the water heated to the right temperature before you turn on the water dispenser because you don't want a hot globule of water clinging to you. It can burn. You set a temperature on a digital gizmo, and in about a minute water starts to bulge out of openings at the narrow ends of the stall, what you might call the top and the bottom. You put on a pair of clear goggles because you don't want soapy water drifting into your eyes. Then you grab handfuls of water and splash them against your body to get wet, then add soap.

All this time there is a blower in operation to keep things moving, which is why I didn't hear the trailer door open or anything else until the shower stall door opened and I looked over to see a pair of naked feet right in front of my face. The toenails were painted a bright red, and they were attached to slender legs, which were attached to... the rest of Evangeline. Down at the bottom was her head, and all she was wearing was her big upside-down smile and a tiny pair of shower goggles.

"Oops!" she said, and twisted in the air, pulling herself inside and into my arms. She was already slick with suit sweat, and soon she was even wetter as we drifted among the water globules.

We didn't get much washing done for quite a while after that. Ah, yes. Life was good.

The thing to keep in mind about low-gee sex is to go slow. It takes a little practice and self-control, but it pays off in two ways: You don't get bumps and bruises or – it's been known to happen – broken bones or concussions.

And low-gee sex is the best sex there is.

Your biggest problem in doing
anything
in free fall is that your muscles were developed to hold you upright against a one-gee gravity field. Your legs in particular are more of a liability than an asset. They will deliver a hundred times more energy than you really need to get the job done, and do it when you least expect it. The muscles of the ankles are usually all you need to move around.

Don't use those thigh muscles at all!

So the basic, or "missionary" position in free fall is for the girl to wrap her legs around the guy and lock her feet together, and for the guy to hold his legs out straight and try not to let his curling and uncurling toes shove the two of you all over the place. Using a tether or a net is considered to be a sissy move.

That's how we started out, but Evangeline is adventurous, and soon we were deeply into positions emphatically not for the beginner. The shower stall was just high enough for one of my favorites, where I put my feet on the "floor" and she puts her feet on the "ceiling," pretty much the position she was in when she first opened the shower door and... well, you get the picture.

We worked our way through the free fall edition of the
Kama Sutra
, reached orgasm without injury, and then started washing each other. That's almost as much fun as sex. You can gather small globes of water into big globes and then mash them into little globes again, against her body. Surface tension helps it stick, and adding soap makes it slick, and it's just
lots
more fun than a regular shower. I washed her hair and she washed mine, then we turned the blowers on high to suck out the floating water. That gets chilly pretty quick, so we floated out and dried each other off with big fluffy warm towels.

By then my rendezvous probe was ready for another docking maneuver, and she guided me into her own fleshy capture latches, which were amazingly strong and versatile, and we did it all over again. Practice makes perfect.

After a long time, we fell asleep in each other's arms.

Evangeline and I had become an item on the ship on the way back from Earth. It took me a while to make my move on her, and when I did she was eager and willing. It was a few weeks later before I realized, with a laughing hint from Elizabeth, that she had been setting me up for it for a long time, since back on Earth. Women, huh?

I wouldn't say we were inseparable. We attended different schools, and she was a year behind me, but pretty soon we were spending a lot of time together. About every other night she spent the night in my room. Mom, the progressive, was fine with it. Dad was uncomfortable, but he liked her, and soon relaxed. Most Martians are fairly easy about things like that, anyway, except the Muslim kids and the hard-core Christians.

Was I in love with her? Honest truth, I wasn't sure. I liked her a lot, I liked being around her, liked making love with her. She was smart, gorgeous, we agreed on most things and could argue reasonably when we didn't agree. But from time to time she would make some innocent little statement that indicated she was thinking long-range. I was nervous about that. I don't apologize for it. I agree with both Mom and Dad that marriage is something you need to think about a long time, and it's best if you're closer to thirty than twenty. They had been younger, but statistics showed they were part of the lucky minority, still being together as long as they had been.

I'm not sure Evangeline agreed about that.

When I woke up that day I looked over at her, floating a few feet away from me. She was wearing her stereo now, no telling what she was reading, but it was probably something medical, connected to a summer course. She wanted to be a doctor, she said, and the best way to do that was to ignore the school year and keep at it year-round, because the competition is intense.

Evangeline is more comfortable in free fall than anyone I know. I'm one of the 90 percent who prefers a local vertical. That is, all my furnishings in the trailer are oriented the same way. There is one wall I think of as the "floor," and there are no posters or cupboards on it. The artwork I do have is all oriented the same way, with a top and a bottom.

She is one of the 10 percent who don't give a shit. If she could afford a trailer of her own – which she can't – it would be totally floor-free. She'd use all six walls as walls, and tape up her posters any old way. She is able to read upside down as well as right-side up, it makes absolutely no difference to her. Pictures, too. You handed her a photograph upside down, it would never occur to her to turn it around.

She's right and me and the 90 percent are wrong, of course, I know that. It's embarrassing, in a way, it sounds like an Earthie thing to do, but I'm more comfortable when there is a visual up and down to refer to. This phenomenon has been known since the earliest days of space, in Skylab and Mir and primitive places like that. Most astronauts preferred a local vertical, but a few didn't care.

It must be a brain thing. Something in the wiring, maybe. I can't interpret a face very well if it's upside down to me. Evangeline is often inverted when a group of people gather in Phobos, and doesn't turn around unless someone asks her to.

It may be a bit physical, too. Evangeline has long toes, and can use them almost like a second pair of hands. She is also incredibly limber. She's always up on the latest twists in free-fall dancing, and has invented more than a few moves herself. If she can't hack it in medicine, she might make a living as a contortionist in a carnival. The
Cirque du Soleil
company in the other Phobos bubble would be happy to have her.

I was lazily admiring the long, bare length of her when the doorbell rang. Evangeline twisted, touched a wall with one toe without even looking – and that's another thing, she always seems to know
exactly
where she is, to the inch, even if she's been drifting for an hour with her eyes closed – and headed straight as an arrow for the door button. One foot on the jamb, one hand on the handle, she pulled it open. There was a guy in an orange-and-purple uniform out there. He took her state of undress in stride, but with no lack of appreciation.

"FedEx," he said. "Somebody sign for a package?"

She signed his register with her left hand – she's ambidextrous, too, maybe that accounts for some of it – upside down, and it printed out a receipt card. He handed it to her and turned to go.

"Wait. That's it?"

"Too big a package, lady," he said. "My assistant is Earth-side, in Africa, and I'm not going to wrestle it into this mess alone. You'll have to pick it up yourself in the other bubble."

"Well, you don't get a tip for delivering a receipt," she said.

"I'll live without it. Good day to you."

If anybody could slam a door in free fall it would be Evangeline, but that was beyond even her talents. She eased it closed, looked at me – at about a forty-five-degree angle – and shrugged. I was still appreciating the shrug, which is a very different operation in a naked girl than it is in a boy, when I came completely awake and alert.

"Oh, shit," I said. "Where's my stereo?" She toed off and came up with it in the pile of clothes and suits in one corner. In the microgravity on Phobos, everything will drift into the same corner every time. She tossed the stereo, perfectly, of course, right at my hand. I put it on and checked the time, then ticked up my appointment book – not a thick document, nothing like Mom's – and saw what I'd expected.

"I've got a lunch date with a counselor in two hours," I said.

"Go for it."

"You want a ride?"

Her face lit up, and she started tossing clothes at me. She was pressuring me to teach her to board, and I guess one of these days I would, though I didn't relish riding the sissy bar.

We dressed and suited up and were out the door in five minutes. I followed her through the maze, into the Big Bubble, and out to the board park. We strapped in and I eased up very slowly from the parking area, and when my suit told me I was out of the No Turbulence zone I twisted hard on the handle and turned left. Below me and to the sides, the attitude jets got me aimed in the right direction, and the displays in my helmet showed I was a little late for optimal descent.

"How much can you take?" I asked Evangeline.

"At least as much as you can, big guy. Let 'er rip."

"Okay. Hang on to your helmet."

I eased up to half a gee deceleration, then a gee, then a gee and a half.

"Whee!" Evangeline hollered.

Phobos was dwindling. We were going far too slow to stay in any kind of orbit around Mars, but it would take a while for us to fall all that way, and it would leave us a few hundred miles from home when we got there. So I inverted us until Mars was directly over our heads and accelerated again. Up to two gees for a little while, until the external pressure gauge began to twitch just a little.

"Double whee!" Evangeline squealed as she looked up. I turned us back over and used the helmet display to adjust our angle of attack for optimum heat dispersal. In a minute we were showing a wake.

I swung to the north, at about a thousand miles per hour. We could see Olympus Mons almost directly ahead of us as the orange glow built up around us. Then back south, toward the smaller peak of Pavonis.

I deployed the Kevlar wings on their long, composite rods and extended the glide. From below we'd look something like a bat, something like a kite. We could plainly see the complex of hotels and homes that was Thunder City and I was setting up for my final approach when our radios started shouting at us. Just about blasted our ears off, to tell you the truth, and I hastily ticked the volume down.

"
Attention
!
Attention
! You have entered restricted airspace. You have entered restricted airspace. All nonmilitary aviation is forbidden in this area until further notice. You are directed to land at once or be fired upon."

It's hard to describe on how many levels this didn't make sense. Restricted airspace? The only such place on Mars was a zone around the bubble generators, and those were on the other side of the planet. Nonmilitary aviation?
All
air traffic on Mars was nonmilitary. We don't have an army or an air force. I couldn't have been more flummoxed if I'd been sitting in the bathtub and a periscope popped out of the drain and somebody told me to heave to or be torpedoed.

"I don't know who you are," I said, thinking it had to be some joker who had hacked the air traffic radios. "But are you sure you've got the right planet?"

"
Ray
!" Evangeline shouted. "Behind us!"

I glanced at my rearview window. Where my firetail had been a few minutes ago there was now something long and black with a bulge in the middle, and it was growing at incredible speed. My collision alarm began to beep, and the display told me the thing was coming up on me at five hundred miles per hour.

There really wasn't anywhere to go. Left, right, up or down, it was too late to avoid the thing, whatever it was. So I did the only thing I could.

"Hang on tight!" I shouted, and this time I felt her arms squeeze around me right through the suit.

There wasn't a lot of noise as it passed, not a hundred feet over us. The air is too thin to carry sound that well. I got a fleeting glimpse of a black airplane, and then the wake turbulence and jet blast hit us. Hard. The left wing fabric more or less exploded and the right wing flapped like a tent in a hurricane. We bobbed up, and then down, and then were caught in a barrel roll, over and over and over on our longitudinal axis. We were wrenched so hard that my hands were pulled off the handlebars, and as the right hand came off it twisted the grip, which opened the jet ports below us to about 50 percent thrust.

If we'd been anywhere but over the Valles, we'd have been dead. I banged my head several times against the padding inside my helmet, and was woozy for a second or two. When I saw clearly again, we were headed straight down, still spiraling in a crazy motion from the thrust below. I kicked at the altitude jets with both feet and got the nose up, but gee forces were keeping me from reaching the handlebars again. If I couldn't reach them, I'd have to steer with my feet, and that wasn't good.