Rolling Thunder (15 page)

This time I ordered a pair of extra-extra-extralong Levi’s, made for the tallest of Martians. So what did I get from him? A Victoria’s Secret bra in 54-DDDD, lace-trimmed but built like two Jovian hammocks. How did he
do
that? I’m wondering if he hacked my credit or something to see what I was getting him. He sent me a picture of him wearing the jeans, the legs rolled up like huge donuts, his feet peeking out the bottom, and the waist cinched around his neck. Message: pants too short, will exchange for longer. That arrived ten minutes after I sent him a picture of me wearing the bra with two basketballs stuffed in it. TOO tight, I wrote, and it was, but just barely. Volleyballs were too small, I tried them. And that meant our messages had crossed in space and he could
not
have known what kind of picture I was sending him unless he’s figured out a way to beat the speed-of-light time lag from Jupiter. Sometimes we are so close, we think so much alike, that it’s almost scary.

Swamp creatures set a true feast in the commons. Karma brought a lot of greenery from the farms and we made holly wreaths and decorated no less than 4 trees, one for each corner of the room. I baked 6 pecan pies. There were turkeys and hams and a suckling pig and a goose and egg nog with brandy and mulled wine with cinnamon sticks and fruitcake from Corsicana, Texas.

The local Cooking Collective sent samples of Christmas dishes from the various cultures we Martians come from, since we haven’t had time to evolve a truly Martian Christmas. If we do, it will probably involve decorating rocks.

There was bûche de Noël from France, buñuelos from Colombia, szaloncukor from Hungary, queso de bola and bibingka from the Philippines, hallaca from Venezuela, sorpotel from Goa, and Tourtière from Quebec. There was English figgy pudding, Ukrainian kutia, Lithuanian opłatek, Milanese panettone, Danish pfeffernüsse, Norwegian pin-nekjøtt, Nicaraguan pio quinto, Viennese vanillekipferl, German Spritzgebäck and Stollen, Portuguese massa sovada, and Mexican omeritos.

We gorged, we wassailed (is that a verb?), which involves dipping toast in hard cider heated with sugar, ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon, and a splash of brandy. I met a lot of people, made a lot of friends. Got moderately drunk.

Then we went caroling. Yes, diary! I never tell you much about the daily work that goes on here, much of it is scientific and I know nothing about it, and I’m only a lowly Madam, but this
is
a Navy base, and watches are maintained around the clock, and at least a quarter of the personnel don’t get Christmas off. So in the Navy if you
are
off duty you go around in costumes, except to the highest security areas, and sing, and bring buckets of food but no wassail.

Then it was off to the Grand Arena, our 2,000-seat basketball stadium, for the one custom that is as Martian as anything about a Martian Christmas—though we borrowed it from the Japanese!—which is the performance of the
Daiku,
or “Great Ninth,” Beethoven’s
Symphony Number 9 in D minor, opus 125,
the
Choral.
Most everybody attends, Christian, Jew, Muslim, atheist, what have you, because it’s nonsectarian and because the “Ode to Joy” is the music we’ve adopted as our national anthem.

I went to the tryouts for the soloists, listened for about an hour, and in that time heard both an alto and a soprano that could sing rings around me in opera, and left without singing. I know when I’m licked. Sure enough, on performance night I was in the middle of the chorus and looking at their backs.

We hadn’t had much rehearsal time, but everybody who can sing knows the Ninth. And Europa was not big enough to field a full orchestra of sufficient talent to tackle that monster, but the director found a talented person to handle every instrument and then augmented electronically. Hell, a good keyboardist can handle the whole symphony and vocode the voices, and that was what was happening that very night in thousands of smaller outposts and ships all over the System. In the very smallest places a recording had to do, but you can bet people were singing along.

We didn’t butcher it.

The tradition is to run through the fourth movement as Beethoven and Schiller wrote it:

Freude, schöner Götterfunken Tochter aus Elysium,

Wir betreten feuertrunken,

Himmlische, dein Heiligtum!

Then everybody stands and reprises the
An die Freude:

Mars! Thy name rings out like thunder,

Best hope of humanity.

God of war, now guard of peace

We dedicate our lives to thee!

When we finished there was hardly a dry eye, including mine. And I realized something. I’d been homesick. Not as bad as on Earth, but homesick all the same. And now I wasn’t. We Martians are a far-flung race. Go to Mercury, go deep into the Oort Cloud, and what do you find? Martians. We control the means of space travel, and we tend to be stingy with it; there’s no other way for us to survive, and we make sure most of the ravening hordes of the home planet do their ravening Earthside. Only on Luna do Earthies outnumber Martians. Everywhere else, Earth-ies are limited to a strict quota … except for tourists, of course, but tourists aren’t really human beings in any real sense, except that you can’t kill them. Tourists are walking bags of liquid assets to be wrung dry and sent home poorer but happy.

In a sense, where there are Martians, there is Mars. Singing the
Daiku
showed me that. We or our ancestors came from every country on Earth. We were multicultural in a way that the American New World had often boasted of but never really was. Young though we were, almost 50% of us had been born there.

And something else. There are now children being born in the Martian colonies. On Ceres, on the Jovian moons, on Triton, and even on Pluto, there are people who have lived there a long time now, and a lot of them don’t intend to go back. I don’t think anyone is yet thinking of herself as Cerean or Plutonian, but that day will come, won’t it? We’re the oldest family on Mars, and Mom and Dad were both Earth-born. The Japanese word for them would be Issei. I’m Nisei, and I’m just entering childbearing age. But I see children four or five years of age here at Clarke Centre, and they were born
here
, on Europa. Will they want to go back to Mars, where they’ll be too heavy? Will they keep up with their exercises, or simply accept that they can never go to Earth … or maybe even to Mars, which they have never seen and may not even have any interest in? Soon, there will be different kinds of Martians, as there used to be different kinds of Americans: Maine Yankees, Florida crackers, Texans, Sooners. Now they all live in different countries. Will Europa one day be a country on its own?

It’s something I’ve never considered. I’ll never be Europan, even if I stayed here the rest of my life. I’ll always be Martian; I don’t plan to settle on any of the outposts. But soon, there will be Europo-Martians, and Pluto-Martians, and Cereo-Martians, if there aren’t already.

So, maybe I’m not homesick anymore because Europa feels like … home? Could it be home?

Well, it’ll do for now.

Wednesday, January 1

Independence Day in Cameroon and Sudan. Junkanoo. St. Basil’s Day.

Down in the dumps again, moody and irritated. Stayed in my room all day, missed the New Year celebrations. Don’t amount to much, anyway. Though we all still operate mostly by the Earth calendar because it’s convenient, Mercury gets a new year every 88 days, Mars every 686, and out here the year is 4333 Earth days. So what’s the big whoop? If I’d been born here, I wouldn’t even be 2 years old.

Saturday, January 11

International Thank-You Day (Thanks, everybody!). National Unity Day in the (disputed) Chinese province of Nepal. Albanian Republic Day. Sir John A. Macdonald’s Birthday.

3P has been together long enough now that we figured we had a few numbers worth recording. I mean, laying down tracks and working with them, not the normal recording every band does at every concert. For the next week we plan to spend every spare moment in the studio in the hope that we can cobble up 6 presentable tracks. Most anybody with the bare minimum of talent can upload 1 or 2 tracks and make them sound reasonable, and everybody says ho-hum; 6 really sharp ones at once is considered to be the reasonable benchmark to announce that you have arrived and probably won’t be going away for a while.

We started with a list of 40 we felt we could really groove on—3P’s Top 40!—and whittled it down to 12, then to 8 with minimal amounts of blood being shed. After that, no one would budge, so we agreed to try all 8.

Sunday, February 2

Festa de Nossa Senhora dos Navegantes in Brazil. Swedish KyndelsmÃssoda-gen. Bolivian Fiesta de la Virgen de Candelaria. Groundhog Day.

We don’t have a groundhog at Clarke Centre, but the sun was out, and I’d be willing to bet that if we had one, and if he stuck his head out of his burrow, he would have seen his shadow. Verdict: 6 billion more years of winter. Squirrels, gather your nuts while you can! You’re going to need plenty!

We got 5 tracks down and decided we were unlikely to improve them with more tinkering. And the consensus … actually, it was unanimous, was that they aren’t good enough yet. They lack something, and though there is a lot of language to describe music, there aren’t words for some of it. It’s a case of you know it when you hear it. Or more to the point, you know it when you
don’t
hear it, and none of us were hearing it. That final spark that takes a piece of music from being competent to being inspired, gives it that last boost so that, even from the first bars, you know this is
it
.

I am discouraged. We know we won’t be together forever; probably we only have time together as a band until the first of us gets through her mandatory enlistment—that would be Cassandra, who has just less than a year to serve. But she is also the main steadying influence on us, and she thinks we can still reach that point, and if we do, we can get back together when all of us have served our time. Well, all of us but Quinn, who has signed up for a 10-year hitch. He
likes
the Navy. Go figure.

In the meantime, practice, practice, practice.

Saturday, March 1

Yap Day in Micronesia. Heroes Day in Paraguay. Bulgarian Baba Marta. St. David’s Day. International Nuclear Victims Remembrance Day. Podkayne’s Birthday.

Today I am 19. Whoop-ti-do.

Actually I’m not 19, not on any calendar I know of. Actually, like Frederick in
The Pirates of Penzance
, I’m only 4 and a little bit over. A most ingenious paradox, or a stupid Earthie pain in the ass, take your pick. My actual birthday was February 29, but there wasn’t one this year. I’m a leapling. Gioacchino Rossini, Jimmy Dorsey, Dinah Shore, and Aubergine were all leaplings.

Of course, if you go by Martian years, I’m 10.

The Swamp creatures gave me a party today. Mike and I exchanged gifts, too, as we always do. We don’t know exactly when he was born, but it was during a leap year, and February 29 is plausible.

The best present I got, though, was not just for me, but for all the Pod People. We’ve been selected to make the Grand Jovian Tour, and it will occupy us for some months. The schedule hasn’t been finalized yet, and we aren’t in charge of it, and in fact a lot of it will remain up in the air until we actually start. You don’t get a tour bus when you’re in the MADDMN, you hitch rides with ships as they become available. But we will be visiting all the Galilean moons, and a lot of the littler ones. Amalthea is on the list, very close in to Jupiter. We’ll be going to Ananke, Carme, and Pasiphae. Some of them I’d never even heard of, had to look them up in an atlas. Callirrhoe, Taygete, Eukelade, and Harpalyke are not exactly household words, not even in a Martian household. (Where do they get those names?) We don’t have bases on every one of the little chunks of rock that are Jupiter’s 300-some satellites, but there’s somebody on most of them, and the minimum staff size of a Navy base is 100, to help prevent insanity.

So I’ve got a lot of packing to do. We leave in a week! Bon voyage!

Monday, March 10

Commonwealth Day. San Juan de Dios in Peru. Forty Martyrs of Sebaste. Buffy the Vampire Day.

Arrive on Io. Yikes! Jupiter is huge!

Strictly speaking, humans have no business on Io. It’s too radioactive. To go there you take a course of antiradiation drugs, which made me a little sick for a day.

We probably couldn’t have gone to Io at all except for the bubble drive. Regular rockets couldn’t have lifted enough of the heavy shielding ships require to make a safe haven for humans when the radiation really kicks up, which is every other day or so.

But scientists go there because Io is just so damn fascinating. And for the same reasons, tourists go there, too. Of all the places humans go off Earth, Io is by far the most spectacular.

For one thing, there’s that amazing view of Jupiter, almost twice as big as when seen from Europa. Then there’s the auroras. Io has a very thin atmosphere of sulfur dioxide, just a billionth of an atmosphere, but it’s enough to create auroras that shame anything you’d see in Alaska or Antarctica. And they aren’t just at the poles, they are planetwide, and continuous, 42.6 hours per day, which is also the time Io takes to circle Jupiter. Oddly, that’s exactly half the length of the Europan day, and V4 the length of a day on Ganymede. These are called Laplace-resonant orbits, or so I’m told. I learn something new every day.

Wednesday, March 12

Arbor Day, various nations. International Girl Scout Day. Independence Day in Mauritius. Moshoeshoe’s Day in Lesotho. Renovation Day in Gabon. Youth Day in Zambia.

Quinn came down with old-fashioned traveler’s trots the day we landed, probably exacerbated by the antirad drugs, and we had to cancel two gigs. Not a good start. But it did give the rest of us a chance to take an early look at the main thing, Jupiter and the auroras aside, that most people came to Io to see: volcanoes.