Rolling Thunder (10 page)

Most mutations in your body aren’t going to hurt anything. But there is a certain very small number of very large cells that can lead to disaster if damaged by radiation. I’m speaking of the ova, the human eggs released by the ovaries.

For a while, in the early days, just about the only females who dared to visit Jupiter were those who had passed out of the reproductive cycle and were menopausal, and women who had already had all the children they wanted or who didn’t want any children at all. It was just too dangerous.

These days we had a much more elegant solution: oophorectomy. That’s a fancy word for removal of the ovaries. Spaying.

It’s a recent development. If you take them out and pop them into a freezer, you risk as much damage as you’re trying to avoid. But then Uncle Jubal invented the black bubbles. Now you can just cut out the ovaries, bubble them, and a few years later you take them out and hook them back up to the fallopian tubes. With nanosurgery, this is about as dangerous as wart removal.

But no girl wants to spend very much time without her ovaries unless she fancies herself with a beard, singing baritone. They produce the hormones that make us the graceful, double-breasted, big-butted, almost hairless sopranos that men find irresistible, for some reason.

No worries, mate. We just replace them with vat-grown, universal-donor artificial ovaries that secrete just the right mixture of femaleness, and at the same time greatly reduce menstrual flow, cramps, and PMS. If you wonder why I didn’t have this done long ago, turning “the curse” into “the mild epithet,” it’s simple. My periods are not cataclysmic. I seldom bite anyone when premenstrual unless they
really
have it coming.

They can do the equivalent thing with guys, too … but for some reason, not a lot of guys want to have it done. In fact, the ratio of sexes in high-radiation environments like Jupiter has just about reversed from what it used to be. A lot of guys don’t want to have their testicles replaced with synthetic ones, even though it’s impossible to tell the difference.

I’ve pondered that, worrying at that eternal mystery that makes life both so exciting and so frustrating. The best I can say about it is that if my gonads were hanging precariously outside my body where I had to see them every day, badly packaged and horribly vulnerable, maybe I’d be obsessed about them, too.

The other thing I can say is a lot simpler: Boys are weird.

SOMEBODY ONCE TOLD
me you can sum up the solar system this way: There’s the sun, there’s Jupiter, and there’s other stuff. You might include Saturn if you were feeling generous. Jupiter dominates the planetary system.

I can’t say that it knocked my socks off as we approached it. Any good 3-D movie can give you a more awesome show than what you see from a spaceship window, and Navy ships bound for Jupiter don’t have many windows, and those are small. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying I wasn’t impressed. There is a world of difference in seeing a movie and looking out a window and seeing it
right there,
but it’s a feeling in your gut more than a visual spectacle.

SO ALONG ABOUT
now you might be wondering how did I, Pod-kayne etc. etc., raw recruit, the silver bar and red globe on my shoulders about ten minutes old, get a berth to Europa? Bright, shiny, mysterious Europa, where no tourists are allowed and only scientists from the Martian Academy and a very few of the best and the brightest from other planets are welcome? And, of course, the Navy contingent to enforce the protective blockade. You probably figure it was Admiral Bill, and I wouldn’t call you a liar if you said that, but that isn’t the whole story.

I know, it’s not fair, trading on your relations like a lot of slim-talent actors and musicians I could name who get a career because they’re the son or daughter of somebody who’s really good. But the fact is, a
no-talent
offspring of a big celebrity isn’t going to have a very
long
career. People will stop coming once the novelty wears off. Usually, all being from a famous family with someone in a position of influence will get you is a foot in the door. After that, it’s up to you. What Admiral Bill had gotten me was a chance to reaudition. I was going to Europa to be a Madam.

If you’re not from Mars and if you have a dirty mind, you probably think that has something to do with prostitution. Not so. Mars has its fair share of prostitutes, mostly to service the tourist trade, and they do tour Navy bases for those poor folks who have a hard time connecting with another Navy person to fulfill their sexual needs.

No, I’m talking about the Music, Arts, and Drama Division, Martian Navy. That acronyms as MADDMN. I suppose the best way to pronounce that is Mad Damn (sometimes inverted to Damn Mad), or Madmen, and that’s what the male troupers call themselves, but we ladies prefer Madams. Google USO and you’ll get an idea of what I’m talking about, though the USO was volunteer entertainers visiting the troops during wartime, some of them big stars, others just singers and dancers. Martians learned a long time ago that food, water, pressure, and oxygen aren’t all you need in the hostile environment of space. Put a man in a tin can with all the oatmeal, water, and oxygen he can eat, drink, and breathe, and pretty soon he’ll go crazy. People need a space of their own, they need good food, many of them need contact with plants and especially animals, and most of all, they need art.

That’s why everyone in a remote outpost gets a room of her own, from the admiral down to the lowest ensign. It just works better that way. Of course, the admiral has a suite and the ensign has more of a closet-type thing, but still.

That’s why we allow dogs and cats and birds in faraway places. That’s why there are endless organized activities for off-watch hours, from Ping-Pong tournaments to talent shows to karate matches to yoga classes. That’s why we celebrate not only Christmas and Hanukkah and Eid and Arbor Day and Beethoven’s Birthday, but Finnish Independence Day (December 6), Thai New Year (April 13-15), Australia Day (January 26), Brazilian
Nossa Senhora de Conceição Aparecida
Day (October 12), and Haitian Sovereignty and Thanksgiving Day (May 22). Of course, most places have a bigger to-do around Christmas than, say, Tibetan Paranirvana Day. Every day’s a holiday for
somebody,
and the Navy will observe any of them if someone is interested enough and bored enough and silly enough to suggest it.

The thing is, living in a cramped environment a billion miles from civilization where your surroundings are always trying to kill you is not only dangerous, not only potentially nerve-wracking, but, more than anything,
boring
. You have to have entertainment beyond movies and recorded music. It is
necessary.
Ask any veteran.

And a talent show will get you only so far. In fact, there have been cases that can be summed up as “If I hear that fumble-fingered asshole play that lousy song on his out-of-tune guitar
one more time
… !” Well, it can lead to blows. Nothing can really take the place of a live stage show, whether it’s
Hamlet, Showboat,
or just a jazz trio. Thus the Madams and Madmen.

Many people believe the cushiest assignment in the MADDMN is in one of the military bands, or the Navy Orchestra, which compares favorably with the Thunder City Philharmonic. Reason: They mostly stay home. All of them do tours of the outer postings, but you can view that as a road trip. Your official posting is Mars. My talents aren’t suited for a large ensemble like that, and anyway, I didn’t want to be posted at home. Just anywhere but Earth.

The acting troupes are always on tour and seldom see home until their enlistment is up. After all, even repertory groups don’t usually have more than five or six plays rehearsed up to snuff, and you can only see
King Lear
so many times before you want a taste of something else.

VOICE IS MY
main instrument, but I’m pretty good on keyboards, and competent on just about any plucked string instrument you throw at me. Guitar, lute, dulcimer, ukulele, dobro, mandolin, banjo, zither, autoharp, hurdy-gurdy, samisen … give me an hour to pick my way through the chord changes and refresh my memory and I won’t disgrace myself on any of them, though I’m far from concert quality on all of them.

I can handle myself well on a lot of percussion instruments. I’m a demon on the castanets, maracas, triangle, hosho, lithophone, taiko, washboard, and congas.

I’m not much into wind instruments, though I play a mean harmonica, jug, kazoo, and ocarina. I can play the bagpipe, but I’m usually not asked to. Let me correct that: I’m usually asked
not
to. But of course I’m not the only one …

So, you may be asking yourself, with all that musical talent welling out of your pipes like ball lightning, why didn’t you pass the audition the first time?

Two words: I choked. Three more: I blew it. I stunk up the place. I croaked, I basted in flop sweat, I had a panic attack so bad I could hardly breathe. For the first time since I was eight I got hit with something I could barely remember: stage fright. I didn’t actually wet myself, but it was a close thing. For a while there I was sure I was going to vomit all over the stage.

It happens. But I hope it never happens again to
me
.

Clutching a remnant of pride around myself, let me point out that, bad as I was, the vote on the seven-member judging panel was four to three against me. If that’s what I scored on my worst day, ever, I knew that if I could only get another shot, I could ace it. But you’re supposed to have to wait a year before a second audition.

That’s
where Uncle Admiral’s influence helped me. He moved me up the line. Thanks again, Admiral; I’ll try to make you proud.

AS YOU APPROACH
it, Europa goes from being a blazing white globe to looking more like a softball with the cover ripped off. A big ball of twine with dirt ground into some of the creases between the strings.

Europa is, in fact, the smoothest, most perfectly globular body in the solar system. The “strings” wrapping the softball are called linea, and they are cracks where the surface has fractured under a force called tidal flexing. It is subject to incredible gravitational stresses from the primary and the other three major moons, which stretches it and causes the icy crust to break and slide. Internal pressure forces salt water or slush to the surface, where it spreads out and fills in any craters that form. So we say she has a “young” surface, like Earth. Mars and Luna have old surfaces. The ice layer averages about ten miles thick … but that’s an average, and in some places it’s only two or three miles before you get to water. And in these places you will find the Europan “freckles.”

That’s what they called them when the first pictures came back from the Galileo spacecraft, which got there in 1995. The formal term is lenticulae … which is just Latin for freckles, so why be fancy? The freckles were reddish brown in color, lozenge-shaped, and they ranged from four to six miles across. It could be clearly seen that these were not impact craters but high points on the Europan surface. In the early pictures from above, they look like big rubber bands scattered across the surface, white in the middle and white around the edges.

What geological process had produced them? The best guess was they were like bubbles in a lava lamp, warmer ice working its way up through the crust.

For a long time people had wondered if this was the place in the solar system most likely to harbor life in its vast, dark oceans. The first manned ship landed in an area of the northern hemisphere between Minos and Cadmus, two of the widest, longest linea, and in the center of an area thick with freckles.

The term “freckles” didn’t survive long once that ship was down. From then on, that Europan range was called the Big Rock Candy Mountains.

I COULD SEE
them as we passed over the North Pole, but not for very long and not at a very good angle. In photos, they look a bit like Uluru, formerly Ayers Rock, in Australia, if it ever snowed enough there to cover the thing with a hundred feet of the white stuff. I watched them until they vanished over the horizon since I knew there was the possibility that I’d never get this close to them again. Most visitors to Europa—and there aren’t many of those except Navy—never get much closer than the fifty-mile exclusion zone. As a Madam I had a better shot than most to make it to the forward research base, Clarke Centre, but I couldn’t count on it.

They looked like giant jelly beans dropped from a great height and half-embedded in the ice and frosted on top.

Yummy.

One thing was quite clear to the naked eye. They were no longer the ridges with depressions in the center that had been seen on those long-ago Galileo flybys. They had grown. The largest ones were now two miles high and getting higher every day.

WE’RE USED TO
temperatures on Mars that give Earthies the heebie-jeebies. On a sweltering midsummer noon it can get up to the mid-60s Fahrenheit, but watch out for those winter nights at the pole. Minus 220 is not uncommon.

The
high
temperature of the surface ice on Europa is -235. On the nightside, eclipsed by Jupiter, it can get down to -370, cold enough to freeze oxygen and nitrogen. This presents engineering problems in buildings and especially spaceports. But we Martians are good at insulation; we know how to not waste heat.

Everything has to be built up on stilts driven or melted into the ice. You have to be especially careful with landing pads. A bubble ship backing down for a landing generates terrific amounts of heat; it would melt and then boil a lot of ice, your ship would come down in it, and a few seconds after you turned off the drive you’d be frozen up to the portholes.

I don’t know how the first ships to arrive on Europa managed it, but they did. People are clever that way. Slowly, the various bases were built up, each with a landing pad raised fifty or more feet above the ice and capable of supporting from one to a dozen large Navy ships.