Rolling Thunder (20 page)

TCBP-45 (DOC) IS
a faceted cliff of purest daffodil yellow, a giant lemon jujube with white frosting on top. It is three miles high, which is almost a mile taller than it was when humans first photographed it in the previous century, and half a mile higher than it was when Forward Base was established.

Europa’s mountains are in clusters, not chains, each of them lozenge-shaped and steep-sided, pretty much vertical in some places.

We speak of human time and “geologic time,” in which we as individuals and even as a race are the merest flickers, nanosecond ticks on the cosmic clock. Geologic time on Europa, in the mountains, anyway, is like a runaway racehorse.

Imagine a time-lapse film of the Himalayas being formed, with one frame every thousand years. At twenty-four frames/sec. it would run over thirty minutes.

There
are
such films of the growth of the Taliesen mountains, one frame every
day,
and you can
see
them grow.

Our route from Main Base took us on a winding path through five of the seven dwarfs, which come in all the primary colors and all the variations of any mineral you can imagine. Some, like Doc, seem uniform and clear as glass. Some are multicolored, or streaked with wavy lines of a different color, or contain inclusions of various sorts, some up to a mile across.

And inside them, things glow, and move.

HAPPY IS YELLOW,
too, but it’s more of a yellow-gold fading to bronze at the south end, and there’s a big area of blue-green cabochons, “like moles, or beauty spots if you prefer, on a Chinese whore’s cheek,” as our driver put it. Since he himself was of Chinese ancestry, I guess that was okay. And I have to admit, it was gaudy and brassy as a whore’s makeup.

Sleepy is blue all over, a vast sapphire only partially seen behind a slope of supercold cracked ice and snow. Sleepy is not as steep as some of the others, and flatter on top, so the snow clings.

Sneezy bulges at the top, a green jelly bean almost free of snow and ice. As we drove by it, a berg the size of Anchorage, Alaska, slid down the side and smashed into the ground in low-grav slow motion. When it impacted it sent a plume of snow fifty miles into the air.

Everybody
oohed
and
aahed,
and Brynne let out a fetching little squeak. Slomo crowded us all in his eagerness to capture it on camera. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought he might have had an erection. Asexual, but turned on by spectacle. He’d probably cream his jeans if we were struck by an asteroid.

Larger chunks, the size of city blocks, came crashing down between us and the mountain, sending up their own flowers of white. After a while, as we were hotfooting it out of there, ice pebbles started to rain down on the top of the bus, followed by larger bits, including one that made the whole bus ring like a bell.

“Don’t worry,” the driver said. “This buggy is built to handle it.”

I have to admit, it certainly looked like it. We only got a brief glimpse of it from the outside, but it was heavily armored, a cylinder on ceramic tracks, with walls over three feet thick layered with more armor and insulation.

There were only twenty seats in the bus, and our party, with guide, filled only twelve. But there was a separate room behind the passenger compartment and in there I could see piles of stuff held in place by cargo netting. About half of that was supplies for Forward Base, but the rest was spare parts.

“I could practically build this baby from the ground up from what I’ve got back there,” the driver boasted when I asked him. “Just about anything that can go wrong, I got a part back there that’ll fix it.”

“Just about?”

He grinned at me. “Can’t prepare for
everything,
now, can you?”

“So do you get breakdowns often?”

“Oh, every other trip, on average. It’s the Fubar Factor.” That’s what the people at Taliesen called the tendency for things to go wrong in the vicinity of the dwarfs. I didn’t like it because I happen to know that FUBAR stands for Fucked-Up Beyond All Repair.
Beyond all repair?

Oh, well. I had my Swiss Army knife and a few hairpins. There’s not much you can’t fix with that.

FORWARD BASE WAS
moveable. I’m not saying it was like a mobile home, just disconnect the water, power, and oxygen and tow it along a well-paved four-lane highway to a new campsite with a better view of the Valles Marinaris. It was on skids, and if you hooked up three gigantic tug vehicles, you could slide it to a different location at the blistering rate of about twenty hpm. That’s hours per mile. The whole damn minicity, population 254, bus terminal, landing pad, dormitories, research labs, gym, two taverns, three sex workers, thirty-one dogs, eighteen cats, and Cosmo (complete with entourage), and Podkayne, et al., if they happened to be aboard. Which we were.

They don’t do this often, maybe once or twice a year when something crops up they want a closer look at, so I felt lucky to see it.

Not that there was a lot to see. If Europa had snails they could have given Forward Base a run for its money. Turtles would have run rings around it.

After we de-bussed, Captain Kate Stone awaited us in full-dress uniform. She was an attractive white-haired Earth-born about my mother’s age. She had what looked to be a sincere smile on her face. Well, Cosmo would soon take care of that. I shoved my way to the front and made sure I was the first out of the bus. I came to attention as well as anyone can in the low gravity, and snapped her my smartest salute.

“Lieutenant Podkayne, Music Division, reporting to base, Captain.”

“At ease, Lieutenant. You’re on furlough, and we’re pretty informal around here. I’m a big fan of your father’s books. Bit of a history buff myself. And I worked with your grandmother as a very junior aide on the naval procurement committee, some years back. I doubt she’d remember me; we spoke maybe three or four times.”

“Oh, she’ll remember you, ma’am,” I told her. “She never forgets anybody. She’ll have a file on you somewhere, probably more detailed than the Navy’s.”

She laughed, then totally surprised me.

“I wanted to be here to ask you if you’d be willing to entertain my troops tonight, before you leave in the morning,” she said. Well, that wasn’t the surprise. They sure didn’t get much live entertainment here at Forward. But then she went on.

“I think I’m going to be a big fan of yours, if you keep going the way you have been. I’ve downloaded all your stuff so far, and I have to tell you, I just love it. So does most everyone around here. So I was wondering …” And she held out a glossy picture of me and the band, me out in front standing with my booted feet set far apart, in black leather with a very short skirt, looking windswept and just a wee bit dominatrix. “Would you mind signing this? For my daughter back home.”

My God!
A fan!

For a moment I was too nonplussed to say anything, then I remembered what my first voice teacher had always said about being onstage.
Remember, Poddy, smile, smile, smile!
So I flashed the old choppers and told her it would be my pleasure, and she probably had no idea just how true that was.

♥ With all my love to Jennifer ♥

Podkayne

It looked weird, lying there on the page in the pink marker the captain had given me, but I thought I could get used to it.

Then Cosmo broke in between, literally shoving his way past me, and started bitching about everything that had gone wrong—for him—on this trip. As if she had anything to do with it. He kept on in that vein for quite a while, and Captain Stone listened, more or less blankfaced. I drifted away, cringing inside, hoping none of his boorishness would rub off on the rest of us. Finally, from across the bus bay, I saw him stalk off and Tina and Aldric move in, talking rapidly.

Shoveling shit behind the elephant.

FORWARD BASE WAS
moving along the south face of Grumpy to a new position three miles east of its previous location. You couldn’t tell it from inside. The floor didn’t rumble beneath our feet. If you set a glass of beer on the table, no ripples appeared.

We were sitting by the windows, Tina and Dekko and Ambassador Baruti and I, the windows being in Dopey’s Bar, the more intimate of the two watering holes on Forward. We were looking out at Grumpy. It was a bright day outside, or as bright as it gets on Europa, so far from the sun, and would be for another twenty hours. The light hit the multifaceted walls and made them sparkle like fine rubies, or glasses of fine claret. In fact, two regions of the towering cliff faces had names reflecting those very images. A geometrically faceted area almost directly in front of us was called the Jewelry Store. If you mounted one of those stones, you’d need a ring quite a bit larger than a cricket pitch to hold it. Off to the east there was an area that undulated in sine waves; from some angles you could imagine bottles standing side by side, and thus, the Wine Cellar. There were areas that looked basaltic, and others smooth as a mirror.

Grumpy was a canvas three miles high and seven miles wide, with an irregular surface, painted by an abstract expressionist who liked red.

In fact, that was almost the only color he liked. There were traces of purple here and there, swirls and splotches, and maybe a hint of chocolate filling oozing from some mile-high cracks. Other than that, it was red … brick, russet, vermilion, damask, cerise, burgundy, carmine, magenta, coral, mars, crimson, fuchsia, garnet, rose, rust, maroon, scarlet, titian, cardinal, vermeil, cherry, puce … Red.

There were telescopes fixed to the floor along the outer wall. Here I’ll have to confess something, and I hope it doesn’t make me seem shallow. I can only be awed by scenery for a limited time.

Grumpy was one of the most spectacular things I’d ever seen, and certainly the most mysterious, but in the end, it’s just sitting there. Most of the time, anyway, and right now it wasn’t moving. It was like the to-die-for view out my window at the Swamp. Eventually it’s just The View. I glance at it when I come home to see that Jupiter is still there— yup, there it is—and then I sit down and start practicing.

I felt less guilty after Cosmo wandered into the room for the first time. He stopped, looked at the amazing sight for all of seven seconds, then sniffed and went on his way. Been there, done that, didn’t bother with the T-shirt. At least I was a long way from
that
degree of selfinvolved indifference.

Those of us who were interested and didn’t have anything else to do spent about an hour exploring Grumpy’s surface. If we found something interesting we’d slave all the telescopes to the one with the object of interest.

“That looks like a face to me,” the ambassador said at one point. He was a solemn old guy, a career diplomat long past retirement age who had been happy to accept the job as ambassador to Mars.

My telescope swung to where his was looking. I didn’t see much of anything.

“The chin is to the southwest,” he said. “Then see the line of the mouth? He has a rather cruel upper lip. He looks Roman …”

I had it. It was very facelike. Like the “face” on Mars, which people still go to, for reasons that elude me. There’s a little souvenir kiosk selling posters of the original photograph, taken back in the twentieth century, a meaningless artifact of the light.

THE SESSION THAT
night at Dopey’s went well. Actually, I wouldn’t be bragging to say it went fabulously well. I did a set accompanying myself on the piano, to wild applause. Then I jammed with two local musicians, who were not bad.

All night long I had to keep reminding myself,
These people are starved for entertainment, Podkayne. Don’t let it go to your head.

I couldn’t help it. It did. I was floating on air.

MOST OF US
from the bus and quite a few residents hung around for the sunset. Even Cosmo showed up, briefly. For the next forty-two hours Forward Base would be treated to the strangest show in the solar system: the fairy lights of Taliesen.

Sunset on an airless moon isn’t like it is on Mars or Earth. It’s like a light switch. It’s on, then it’s off. Instantly it was pitch-dark, nothing visible at all except the base’s perimeter lights illuminating the surrounding hundred yards of snow. Captain Stone spoke into a wrist mike, and the lights were extinguished.

It took a moment for my eyes to adjust, and then there they were. Thousands of red fireflies, some barely moving, others racing around in patternless frenzy.

Wait a minute, I’ve never seen real fireflies but I googled them and it seems they blink on and off. These didn’t, but they waxed and waned. Some would get very bright, then fade away almost to invisibility, then come back again.

This time I felt no encroaching boredom, no urge to move on to whatever was next on the tour. I felt I could have watched them all night.

“How could anyone doubt they’re alive?” Monet asked. I hadn’t seen her approach in the darkness.

“I don’t,” Captain Stone said. “But there are other possible explanations.”

“Like what?”

“Some sort of electrical phenomenon. The best candidate is piezoelectricity. It’s been known for a long time, as far back as the 1820s. Crystals under stress produce a voltage. There are millions of applications in radio, sound—”

“Loudspeakers,” I said. I’d heard Quinn use the term once.

“Exactly. Those mountains are under an incredible amount of gravitational stress, just like the whole moon is. The surface of the mountains certainly is rock crystal, but as for inside … our radar doesn’t penetrate far, but we have some data that indicates the density gets less the farther you go in. Some models even predict a center filled with gas. They could very well be less dense than ice.”

“Gas?” Monet said. “You mean they could be hollow?”

“I know what you’re thinking. It would be easier for us to understand a form of life that lived in, even
made,
big bubbles of air. But we don’t know. We don’t even have a very clear idea of what the surface is made of.”