Rolling Thunder (16 page)

Io is the most tectonically active body in the solar system, which is one of the reasons so many scientists brave the radiation to study it. They’ve already learned enough about volcanic eruptions and earthquakes … Ioquakes? … to get a lot better at predicting them on Earth, where they regularly used to kill hundreds of thousands of people every year. They still kill, the geologists aren’t perfect, but they’re getting better, and mostly because they’ve been able to monitor shaky old Io continually for decades now.

That’s all fine with me, but on with the show!

I’m writing in the bus on the way from the Hotel Galileo, the best of the five major tourist hotels on Io, on a short hop to Loki Patera, which is a jumble of craters that lately have been most reliable at spouting ionized gas, flowing lava, and large chunks of Io itself into space. There’s always
something
spewing on Io, but the areas of the biggest spectacle change as Io’s molten guts are twisted by the gravitational tugs of Jupiter, Europa, and Ganymede. The whole rock flexes and stretches.

This can make for some tooth-jarring quakes, too, which is why all human habitations there are not only underground, but mounted on big shock absorbers and springs. These structures are at least a mile beneath the surface, in caves hollowed out by bubble makers in areas that aren’t tectonically active. Luckily, Io is all rock, no ice at all, because though your impression is that the whole surface is hellishly aboil, the actual temperature up there is between -300 and -100 degrees. That’s mighty cold rock. You wouldn’t want to touch it with your tongue!

Down at base level things are warmer, though not exactly cozy. The base is only 50 miles from the Hotel Galileo, and a train runs through a tunnel between them. The train doesn’t have a schedule. Few Navy people want to visit the small tourist city, and of course no tourists at all are allowed on the base, so you just get aboard and punch a button, like an elevator. Me and Joey and Cassandra were the only people aboard for the 5-minute trip. It was my only bad moment, too. I felt confident that the engineers had built the base and the hotel to stand up to any quake that might happen, but I wasn’t so sure about the tunnel.

Nothing happened, but I’m not looking forward to the trip back.

We of the MADDMN have a problem most other Navy personnel don’t have. We’d already learned it on Europa. It’s hard to get out and actually see the planet. Others have duties that take them to the exotic places I want to see. Our job is just to sing and dance, and base commanders can be stingy about letting Madmen deadhead, even if there’s plenty of room. “What do you think you signed up for, a joyride?” one superior officer told me when I asked to take a little trip to Cilix Base on my first day off, only 100 miles from Clarke Centre. Actually, I didn’t sign up for
anything
, asshole, as you well know. I was drafted, I wanted to say. My face was burning.

I didn’t say it.

Luckily, the commandant on Io is more relaxed about it, so long as you take civilian transport and pay your own way.

So we did. By regulations we had to do it in full-dress uniform, which stood out in the Galileo at least as much as it did on Earth. We are the only Navy on the bus with mostly Earthies and a few Loonies, but nobody has given us any trouble. Once again, the sidearms don’t hurt in that department.

The bus is a marvel of engineering. I don’t know all the details, but I get the impression it’s basically a hollowed-out ingot of lead. It flies, and when it gets there it lands and moves around on tank treads that can deal with the temperature differential, which can go from -300 to +500 degrees very quickly. Some kind of ceramic, I think the guide said. It’s got a heavily leaded polymer dome and thick shutters that can snap shut in a few seconds if the rads get too high inside.

We’re landing. Gotta go.

Thursday, March 20

Tunisian Independence Day. Legba Zaou in Haiti. Petroleum Day in Iran. International Frog Day.

If it’s Thursday, this must be Amalthea.

I don’t like Amalthea. It looks a lot like Phobos, and I’ve never been wild about that potato-shaped moon of my beloved home planet, either. I’m not sickened by free fall (or .0025 gee, the surface gravity of Amalthea, which might as well be the same thing), but I’m not like my mother, either, who is as at home in any gravity or no gravity as a fish in the sea. I’m fine with it, but I like to get a little gravity under my socks as soon as practically possible.

That’s not it, anyway. It’s Jupiter. It’s too damn close. Somewhere between Io and Amalthea Jupiter went from being big and impressive to being just
too damn big!
Of all the Jovian Navy bases, only the one on Metis is closer, and we’re not going there, I’m happy to say. I don’t even like to look at it from the windows of my room here in the settlement on the edge of Pan, the biggest crater on this miserable rock. I want to do our four shows and head for Ganymede.

Catching up:

I was too busy to write after we got to Loki on Io. It was everything the tourist brochures bragged about and more. We witnessed huge boiling eruptions, with house-sized boulders flung into the air like sand grains, and great bubbling pots of lava overflowing onto the plains below. Going from such heat to such cold produced quite a show in itself, with the lava crystallizing into towering, fantastic shapes before being pushed over by pressure from behind. Every once in a while hot sand and glowing pebbles would rain down on the bus itself, which gave a nice whiff of danger, but the guide assured us we needn’t worry about one of the big ones coming down on us, as their trajectories were well-known and we were a safe distance beyond them … and all the same we were monitoring the big ones on radar and would have plenty of time to get out of the way if one fell toward us in the low gravity. In fact, one did splash down only about half a mile away, right into the catena we were overlooking.

Then it was up and over Daedalus and Heiseh Pateras, both of which were relatively inactive at the moment, and north across a series of deep valleys and mountain ridges, and north again to the Lei-Kung Fluctus, where we landed and weaved our way through a literally hellish landscape of boiling lakes of sulfur.

Fluctus means flow terrain, and it’s too rugged to drive over, but some of the flow is solidified sulfur and sulfur compounds, of which there are thousands, and those areas are fairly smooth in places. Sulfur is bright yellow, and it burns with a blue flame, but there is no oxygen on Io, so it doesn’t burn there. But when hot and mixed in a slurry of other minerals, it can make a whole lot of interesting chemicals, very few of which you’d like to have in your lungs.

Io has been described as either a diseased orange or a super-duper-sized pizza. I like the pizza analogy, myself, and it’s a pizza with
everything
on it, and Lei-Kung is the pizza kitchen, or maybe a whole damn pizza factory, and it has exploded many times. Every surface is draped with the quick-frozen results of those explosions, in more colors than I can describe, and to see them you drive through lakes of boiling yellow brimstone. The tourist come-ons call this region the Devil’s Paintbox.

Me and Joey and Cassandra soon discovered that there were a lot of people who took that description literally. There were a dozen of them on the big bus, and as soon as we arrived at the Paintbox their leader got them down on their knees and had them shouting prayers. See, certain people, when they saw pictures of Lei-Kung Fluctus, decided they had been provided with the actual physical location of Hell. These were the Rapturists, the fruitcake sect that has taken over so much of the mid-Mississippi and lower-Appalachian regions of Heartland America. They expect Satan to begin marshaling his troops on the surface there any day now; they see it as the behind-the-lines staging area for Armageddon. Some of them had lurid pictures they pressed on us showing demons emerging from the brimstone. But mostly they prayed, which for some of them took the form of rolling in the aisles, jabbering, frothing at the mouth, and in at least one case, wetting her pants.

It was embarrassing.

I was never clear on just what they were there for, what they were praying for, since most of them were speaking in tongues and we all stayed as far away from them as possible. I was relieved to see most of the other Earthies stayed away, too. The back of the bus became, for a while, a sort of insane asylum. But were they praying to keep Satan
in
the pool of brimstone, or were they asking him to come out and fight like a demon? Did they want to rassle with him? My understanding of Armageddon and the Rapture (to the extent that they can be understood at all by a rational being) is that the outcome is preordained, the game is fixed, Jeez and the Saved are going to win, and the only real question is who is on the home team and who gets to boil in Hell.

But I didn’t care enough about the answer to ask any of them. They might have told me.

Musical Update: Things went very well on Io. All our gigs were well attended, some of them were sold out, and we got a lot of compliments afterward. They danced to the dance numbers, listened to the others, and a good time was had by all.

We tried one of the potential download numbers again and Cassandra suggested a few things that pepped it up considerably. I’m not ready to say it’s ready for release, but it’s getting there.

Gotta go. Onstage in 10 minutes, need time to throw up.

Sunday, March 30

Pohnpei in Micronesia. Baptist Liberation Shouter Day in Trinidad and Tobago. Boganda Day, Central African Republic. Easter.

Ganymede. Maybe I’ll have time to see some of it if we ever get a rest. Our fame seems to be spreading out here in the Jovian hinterlands. They’ve kept us very busy, adding appearances, and in the evenings we try out new material in out-of-the-way bars and clubs.

Oh, and it’s Easter. What does a grown-up do for Easter? Hunt eggs? Go to church? I’m sure plenty of people did the latter, but there are no children here in the radiation belt, and the holiday pretty much went by unnoticed by the likes of me.

Monday, March 31

Mouloud (Birth of the Prophet). Cesar Chavez Day in Western America.

We’ve been here on Ganymede for almost 2 weeks now, and I finally had a chance to take a brief surface tour. Conclusion: Ganymede looks a lot like Europa, though not quite as smooth. Jupiter looks smaller.

And that’s all I have to say about Ganymede.

Oh, I’ve seen plenty of Ganymede from a jumper window. We’ve been bouncing all over the damn place, like the silver orb in a pinball machine. Ganymede is the most populated of the Jovian moons, and the most popular tourist destination since Europa is off-limits and Io is only for the daring and the religious, and very expensive. The Navy has five major bases on Ganymede, and there are a dozen major tourist centers. Then there are the small research facilities, some of them top secret. I don’t know what they could be doing that’s so important out there in those lonely bases, and when we left them, we were none the wiser. Everyone was very close-mouthed. Well,
be
that way!

It’s been great, in terms of the reception we’re getting, and also a little wearing. We’ll play all evening, then jam with whoever comes around until the wee hours, stumble into bed, then get up for a late breakfast and practice, practice …

It’s paying off, too, I think. In our copious spare time (HAH!) we’ve managed to lay down 3 more tracks I wouldn’t be ashamed to play for the Ghost of Judy Garland. I wouldn’t say we’re quite there yet, the A Train still has a few more stops to make, but Harlem is in sight.

Wednesday, April 9

Chinese Tomb Sweeping Day. Drop of Water Is a Grain of Gold Day in Turkmenistan. International Tartan Day. Mikael Agricola Day in Finland.

Today we’re in … just a minute, I had to look, one lonely rock begins to seem just like any other … Pasiphae. My Baedekeronline tells me that Pasiphae is pronounced pa-SIFF-ay-ee, but everybody here just says pacify. I also learn that it is currently 20 million miles from Jupiter (that’s 1/5 of the distance from the Earth to the sun!), travels around Jupiter in a retrograde direction every 764 days in a highly inclined orbit, which gives it a whole different perspective on the primary … but it’s so far away who really cares? It’s about 35 miles in diameter, has no gravity to speak of, and was discovered in 1908.

Population: about 4000. What they’re doing out here I have very little idea. Something to do with the bow shock wave and the magnetosphere.

And that’s all I have to say about Pasiphae.

Monday, May 5

Kokumin-no-Kyujitsu in Japan. Czech Kvetnove Povstani Ceskeho Lidu. Nationale Bevrijdingsdag Liberation Day in Holland. Indian Heritage Day in Guyana. Cinco de Mayo.

Ka-ching, ka-ching! Bang, bop, pow! Pachinko! Round and round and round she goes, where she stops … not even she knows anymore! Yes, sir, keep your eye on the little green Ps and put your money down! Which cup are the 3Ps under?

Where am I? Somewhere in space.

If this was a video diary my tongue would be hanging out, my bloodshot eyes would be rotating like pinwheels, and my hair would be smoking.

That’s how I imagine myself, anyway, though I’m glad to report that the mirror doesn’t show anything except maybe a bit of darkness under my eyes.

I always used to sneer at musicians who bitched in their autobiographies about how tough life was on the road. How hard could it be, traveling around in a bus with groupies waiting for you at every concert?

Well, diary, it’s a lot harder than it sounds.

I’ve never felt I was particularly rooted to a place. I’ve always wanted to travel, which is why I jumped at the Europa posting. But for the last weeks I’ve been longing for my own bed. Either of them. The one back home on Mars would be okay, but the one in the Swamp would be even better, and is beginning to seem a distant memory. I want Kahlua to curl up on my chest and make me sneeze. I want to look at my things, maybe move them around a little. I want to paint the walls again.