Rolling Thunder (34 page)

Mom met me at the door, along with Kahlua, who rubbed against my legs for a bit before darting outside to see who he had to do battle with to be the Pasha of Pellucidar.

“I hope you like it,” Mom said. “There were only three available, and the other two were … well, a bit tacky.”

“It’s great, Mom. Perfect.”

And it was. If you don’t mind the irony and excess of trying to duplicate California on Mars. I was embarrassed by it, especially after driving by the aluminum hovels of the refugee families. But I needed the maximum security, and any way you looked at it, it was better than a knife and a pair of overalls in 1094 Siberia.

I was introduced to Millie, who was to be my housekeeper. She was wearing a black-and-white uniform, and the first thing I asked her to do was change into her own clothes. I felt like I was in a French farce.

The place was pretty much furnished, with Mexican blankets and pottery and folk art, bright and cheerful. There was a round entryway with a spiral staircase that led up to the bedrooms. The rooms had hand-painted beamed ceilings and mullioned windows. I glimpsed a violet-green hummingbird feeding on a red flower outside.

All my stuff had been moved. My kitties were in a fancy display case. My posters of Billie, Barbra, and Baako had been framed and hung in the main room. All my clothes had been hung by color on wooden hangers, looking forlorn and lonely in the vast walk-in closet. My shoes were arrayed on a mahogany rack, all nine pairs in an area that could have held two hundred. The dressing room and bathroom were furnished with shampoos I’d never used and makeup I’d never worn.

I figured I’d get used to it. Right now it just felt like a bigger, more luxurious hotel room.

After Mom left, I rattled around in the place for a few hours, looking into nooks and crannies. Somebody had already thought of everything. Try as I might I couldn’t find anything I needed, except maybe more shoes and clothes to fill out the closet.

I called Mike.

“I hear I need a secret password to get into your new neighborhood,” he said, when he answered. “And they suggest crawling the last hundred yards to your door on my hands and knees.”

“Kissing my feet is optional,” I said. “What are you doing tonight?” Mike was a warrant officer fourth class, a civil defense specialist based in Thunder City, and his time was not always his own.

“I thought I might take off from the dizzying whirl of my social life and come over and hold your hand. Or maybe scrub your floors and shave your legs.”

“No, I have nine naked musclemen to do that. How about a little game of kickball in the rec room? You can be the ball.”

“Can’t turn down an offer like that. Can I bring a friend?”

A friend? Oh my, first I’d heard of that! I was going to have to stop thinking of my little brother as being ten years old.

They arrived a few hours later, in mufti. Her name was Marlee, and I was going to say she was on his arm, but she pretty much had to reach down to hold his hand. She was as tall as I was, wearing flats, and she was gorgeous, with long black hair and almond eyes and an impressive bust, dressed in a flowing apricot pantsuit. I looked her over suspiciously, since my feelings for Mike are as much maternal as sisterly, and if this bimbo was condescending to Mike in any way, if this was some sort of charity thing, a be-kind-to-dwarfs evening, she’d leave my house with cat scratches all
over
her face.

But aside from seeming a little nervous, she betrayed no signs of anything other than affection for Mike. And I eventually realized that the nervousness came from meeting
me.
So I worked hard at putting her at her ease, and soon we were old friends. In fact, the only person who didn’t do herself proud that evening was me. I’m afraid that I kept imagining Mike and this girl in bed, and having to mentally kick myself in the big, stupid butt to keep from giggling. I eventually got over it. And believe me, Mike would have no trouble satisfying Marlee. I’d seen him naked many times, of course, around the house, and Mike’s endowment was entirely normal, even a bit large. I knew Marlee would be impressed.

In fact, as the evening progressed, I began to wonder if I’d have to hose them down. Footsies under the table, adoring glances, that sort of thing. Good for you, Mike!

We ordered out for pizza, which was slightly less complicated than declaring a Stage Five National Alert, and the delivery boy almost dropped it when he met me at the door. I had to autograph the box top and tear it off for him. We spent the evening playing Scrabble. Marlee wiped the floor with both of us. No bimbo, this.

After three games they left, a little tipsy from the two bottles of wine we’d opened, and the door closed, and the silence of exclusive Pellucidar descended around me. My footsteps echoed like I was in a haunted house as I climbed the stairs.

I did a few laps around the bubble-filled bathtub, brushed my teeth, and climbed into the huge bed.

I cried myself to sleep. I wanted to go home.

MY SECOND VISITOR
sort of made up for a lot of the shortcomings of being a virtual prisoner in paradise. There was a knock on my door, and I beat Millie to it and threw it open. Standing there, in a shapeless print dress and looking like she wanted to borrow a cup of sugar, was Baako Williams. The greatest female singer of my parents’ generation, in her seventies now and more barrel-shaped than ever, smiled at me and asked if she might come in. She thrust a homemade chocolate cake into my hands and I looked over her shoulder to see if Billie Holliday and Barbra Streisand were there, too, in what I assumed was a dream. I mean, I had this lady’s picture on my wall, and I’d been listening to her adoringly since I was two.

Turns out she lived a few houses down from me. She had retired the year before I started my military service, and came to Mars because the low gravity agreed with her arthritic knees.

I told her I had all her downloads, had them all memorized, while frantically signaling for Millie to brew some coffee, rustle up some snacks … anything to stop me from babbling.

She wanted a tour of the house, which she said she had thought about buying a few years ago when it went on the market. I wanted to
give
it to her, free. Luckily, I didn’t say so.

She finally said the real reason she’d come over was because she liked my work. She was talking about the popular stuff I’d done with the Pod People before “Jazzie’s Song.” She said she hadn’t understood Pod music at first, but was experimenting with it and even thought she might record a few things she was working on … and she asked, a little shyly, I thought, if I might be interested in jamming with her a little.

Does an elephant have a big nose?

So that’s how I spent the second day in Pellucidar, listening to Baako’s ideas about Pod music, desperately trying to convince her I understood it … and by the end of the day, thinking that maybe I did, a little. Midway through one song—and let me tell you, her pipes are still the finest around, retirement or not—she called up a few studio sidemen she’d known forever, an amazingly talented group of those people that only the people in the business know, and they all came over and we tossed ideas around.

It was the beginning of my first post-Grumpy friendship.

I didn’t cry that night. I danced down the Yellow Brick Road in a blue gingham dress and ruby slippers, with the White Rabbit and Wendy Darling and Frodo at my side. And I wasn’t
smoking
anything!

MY NEXT VISITORS
called from the gate the next day. The guards wouldn’t let them in. When I saw who it was, I told security it was okay … and they
still
wouldn’t let them in. All my visitors had to be on an approved list. I decided this was a good time to try out my car. I’d never had a car before, never driven one, but I could drive a spaceship. How hard could it be?

So I got in—it’s a six-seat electric dingus that I guess you’d call a golf cart, open-sided, with a canvas cover with a fringe on top—opened the garage door, put it in gear, stepped on a pedal, and nothing happened except some red lights went on in the back. Ah. Brakes. So I stepped on the other pedal and lurched backwards into a tool cabinet. Clue number one: R probably means “Reverse,” not “Ride,” as I had assumed. The tool cabinet was going to need some work. I looked for a gear named G, for “Go,” but there wasn’t one. I tried D, for “Dear me, this is harder than I thought,” and away I went. Out of the garage, down the driveway, turn the wheel to the left—going up on two wheels for an exciting moment— stomped on the brake and almost went through the windshield. But now I had the hang of it. I tooled down the curving drive, and if that guy coming in the other direction wanted to play chicken, I could do it as well as him, and all that honking was uncalled-for and rude, I thought.

Let him get on the right side of the road … or was it the left? In California they drove on the right. Was it the same on Mars?

For some reason the ride was very noisy. There was a clattering sound coming from the back and I couldn’t figure out what it was. While I was trying to troubleshoot this I sort of hit a mailbox. Okay, I demolished it. Well, it was purely ornamental, nobody sent actual paper mail anymore. I made a note to see about getting a new one, though. I didn’t want to piss off my new neighbors.

I rounded another curve and there was the gate, and the guardhouse, and I thought I should start thinking about slowing down. No reverse thrusters, so I looked down for the brake, then looked up. Oops! The guards were diving out of the way. I stepped on the brake and came to a halt pretty much where they’d been. No harm done.

I got out, and the car started rolling backwards. Well, what was
that
all about? One of the guards managed to stop it. Should I have thrown out an anchor, or something?

My guests were waiting inside the guardhouse. No handcuffs or drawn guns, mercifully, but they had a sort of hangdog look of prisoners. They were Tina, Slomo, Quinn, and Cassandra.

I spent a few moments straightening out the guards, giving them a piece of my mind. I said I didn’t care what their rules were, my rules were that my guest list was and would remain a work in progress. I had the instinctive feeling that if I didn’t put my foot down early and strongly, they could easily come to think of themselves as my jailers rather than my protectors. Baako later told me I’d done exactly the right thing.

So I signed for the prisoners and took them out to the car. They were showing a strange reluctance to get in. Slomo walked around the back and squatted down. He yanked on something and came up with a big piece of fiberglass that had formerly been my back bumper. Attached to it was a bright orange electrical cord, and wrapped around that was a red metal toolbox, open and empty.

“Maybe you’d let me drive, Podkayne,” he said. “You’re probably still feeling weak.”

“Oh, I’m fine,” I said, getting into the driver’s seat. “I’m getting the hang of this, now that I’ve got the pedals figured out.” They got in, a bit reluctantly. I looked behind me, stepped on the go pedal, and crunched into the corner of the guardhouse.

I SAT IN
sullen silence as Slomo drove us at a ridiculously low speed back to my house. It was slow because of the little signs that said 15 that were posted along the way, which meant the speed limit was fifteen miles per hour. How was I to know? It was
ridiculously
slow because Tina was walking along beside us, gathering up wrenches, hammers, levels, and saws that had spilled out of the toolbox. Nobody said anything as we drove by the wrecked mailbox.

“I’m truly sorry,” I told Cassandra.

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s not broken.” She examined the bloody towel one of the guards had given her. She held a clean corner of the towel to her nose and it came away clean. “I think the bleeding’s stopped.”

Slomo’s shoulders were shaking.

“If anybody laughs, I’m going to kill them,” I said.

“Just a momentary chill in the air,” he said, without looking back. He coughed loudly, then again. It was Tina who broke first. She plain doubled over, like she was in pain, and then went to her knees, howling. Which broke Slomo’s will, and he started giggling, too, and then Cassandra did, which started her nose bleeding again.

I glowered at them, which just made them laugh all the harder. Okay, so I couldn’t drive a goddam golf cart. I’d almost—
almost
!—flown that crippled bus to safety.

“If that parking brake hadn’t been on,” Slomo said, “you’d have gone right
through
that guard shack!”

“I’ll bet those guards are going to put in for hazard pay!”

Ha, ha, another county heard from. You want to make something of it?

“CASTILLO ENCANTADO?”
SLOMO
asked, as he eased us into the driveway.

“What are you talking about?”

“The name of your place,” he said, pointing. Sure enough, there was a small sign swinging from a wrought-iron stand. I hadn’t noticed it when I arrived the first time.

“My house has a name?”

“All houses in Pellucidar do,” Tina said, proving she knew more about my new neighborhood than I did. “No street numbers here.”

“What’s it mean?” I asked.

“Enchanted castle, I think,” said Cassandra.

“Or haunted castle. Seen any ghosts?”

“Yuck. I hate that.”

“So come up with a new one.”

We tossed that around for a bit, and the best we came up with was Pod’s Pad. It would do until something better came along.

Kahlua came bounding up, ready to repel invaders if necessary, sniffed shoes, then started rubbing against his old friends. I bent over to scratch his head, and that’s apparently when I passed out.

I WOKE UP
stretched out on my couch with a damp cloth being held to my forehead. A doctor was checking my pulse. I started to sit up, but he pushed me back down, gently. I couldn’t figure out what the problem was, though I couldn’t remember how I got there. But I felt fine.

“I’d like to take her in and run some tests on her,” the doctor announced.