Rolling Thunder (37 page)

“What? Are you crazy?”

“I was wrong and you were right. You hired me to be right, all the time.”

“Don’t be silly. What are you talking about?”

“I was wrong to try to change you. This is better, this is you. I won’t try to mold you again.”

“Okay, but it was fun while it lasted. I just couldn’t keep it up.”

She leaned in closer to my ear.

“I’ll tell you something. Tomorrow, the next day, half a dozen of these women will be wearing outfits that look a lot like what you’re wearing. Trust me on this.”

We laughed, and I figured she was kidding.

She wasn’t, and she was right.

I GOT RID
of almost all the new clothes and shopped for what pleased me. Confession: I kept the shoes. Throw out perfectly good shoes? Get real.

ALL THIS PREPARATION
was really in aid of The Concerts. I knew I was going to have to perform in public again, and I had the worst case of stage fright I’ve ever had, and I wasn’t even onstage.

There were going to be five concerts. As soon as they were announced, the orders started coming in. Soon there were a hundred thousand people standing in an electronic line for the two-thousand-seat auditorium. More than ninety-eight thousand people were going to come up empty.

When I saw the ticket prices I screamed. I told Tina we should charge less than that. She said that a lot of them were going to be scalped, anyway, for prices five to ten times what we were charging. I didn’t know what to say, except to suggest that there should be a random drawing. She said that would be unfair to those who had been alert enough to get their orders in fast.

Something just didn’t feel right about making that much money for five nights’ work. Would I have felt differently if I’d grown up poor? My nuclear family was always comfortable, and some of my family qualifies as being rich. But I was rich now, and didn’t feel the need to get richer, especially considering what was happening on Earth.

Mike came up with the solution. We established the Podkayne Foundation, and I donated my share of the gate for all the concerts. I felt better.

IT ALL WENT
well. The Pod People had been augmented with six more sidemen, all the very best, and we rehearsed for two weeks. We worked up a few new numbers, but would be relying mostly on my “posthumous” hits in a more traditional vein, mostly because I was still very insecure with Pod music. I just didn’t feel it in my soul yet, and was wondering if I ever would.

Baako broke her retirement to sing a duet with me. We had an excellent opening act. All in all, I should have been happier about it than I was. The audiences were totally uncritical, and the critics were mostly kind, except for a few who pointed out—correctly—that I had nothing new to say. Even they were nice about my performances of the old stuff, which I felt could have been a
lot
better.

And then it was done, my recuperation period was at an end, and the Navy took over my life again. They promptly sent me and the band to Earth for a “Goodwill Tour.” I never in my wildest nightmares thought I’d be eager to go to Earth, but to tell the truth, it felt a little like an escape. I was itching to go.

18

SO WERE THE
last several months a Cinderella story, or what?

I said it felt like an escape to leave, but the prison was really velvet-lined. Let’s not bitch and moan. Believe me, I had a very good idea of just how lucky I’d been.

But Cinderella turns into a pumpkin, or breaks her glass slippers and cuts her feet to ribbons, or something like that. I can’t remember, but I know it wasn’t pretty.

I had avoided the worst of the pumpkin carving, though there were still a lot of people who wanted a piece of me. None of my closetful of new shoes were made of glass, though there was one sexy plexi see-through number with two-inch heels …

Never mind. Here the story takes a sharp turn toward Dante’s
Inferno.
A descent straight into Hell. But only as an observer, like Dante. And I didn’t even make it anywhere near the Ninth Circle.

THE SHIP THAT
took me and my crew to Earth was the
Guardian of Peace,
and it didn’t bear much resemblance to any Navy ship I’d ever seen ten years ago. It was classed a cruiser, and we traveled with an escort of three destroyers, all built five years ago:
Utopia, Elysium,
and
Isidis.
Those smaller ships were purpose-built to be deadly, armed to the teeth with everything short of bubble generators. Before Grumpy, the Navy hadn’t been designed for ground combat, and we were still catching up. Most of our ships had been like the
Guardian,
intended to carry troops and smaller, more agile defending vehicles. Any hostilities, it had been assumed, would happen in space.

But now most Navy activities happened on the ground, on Earth, and the natives could be very hostile. So the
Guardian
was ugly, retrofitted with slapdash armor welded all over her once-lovely hull. It would stop small-arms fire, 50-caliber machine-gun rounds, grenades, and suffer only minimal damage from small ground-to-air missiles. Anything incoming bigger than that, in the air or on the ground, was supposed to be handled by her destroyer escort.

It made her heavy. Added weight was not a big problem with a bubble drive; you just increased the thrust and she could be as fleet as she ever was, but not nearly so nimble. The old bitch’s skin (and I’m not being disrespectful, that’s what the crew called her, with affection) was heavier than her frame had been designed for. When maneuvering, or on landing and takeoff, she creaked and groaned and popped like an arthritic knee joint and often sprung a small leak or two. This didn’t alarm the crew, so I didn’t let it worry me. Much.

We orbited for a while at ten thousand miles, and I spent some time at a port looking down on the Earth.

Spotted around the globe in all the oceans there were now permanent storms concealing the interlopers from Europa. The storms were as small—small!—as a thousand miles across, to as big as fifteen hundred miles. Wind speeds near the centers frequently reached three hundred miles per hour.

They’d begun to form when Leviathan arrived. You couldn’t help thinking that the obsidian monolith was acting as a coordinator for all this activity. They had been sitting there for almost two years now, each with a Europan crystal mountain at the center.

God, how I hated them.

The seven megastorms spun off lesser hurricanes at the rate of several per month, and most of those rated Category 3. Many were Category 5, with sustained winds of over 150 miles per hour. Those daughter storms themselves spawned tornadoes and, of course, brought torrential rains with them.

The storms were lifting prodigious amounts of water into the atmosphere, to the point that on most of my orbits I only got glimpses of land through the clouds. So much water was rising in the heat sources around the crystals that sea levels, rising for more than fifty years, had receded to levels not seen since the second decade of this century. Much of Florida was emerging from its watery grave. Not that it did anybody any good. Florida had been hit again by the tsunamis generated by the crystals landing in the Atlantic, and now endured hurricane hits at the rate of one every three months. There was no longer a “hurricane season.” They could arrive anytime.

We passed over Africa. The countries bordering the Mediterranean were unaffected by the waves, but no place was immune to the storms and rains. Crops often drowned in the fields. The Sahara was speckled with new lakes. Everything to the south of the former desert was no-man’s-land, ungoverned, lawless, starving, or dead. No one went there anymore, not even the United Nations relief agencies, not even Martians trying to keep the peace. Bleeding Africa was widely seen to be terminal.

Arabia and the Middle East. With one of the ship’s excellent telescopes I could pick out the ghost cities and palaces of the old Emirates and the House of Saud. Down there were palaces vast and luxurious almost beyond imagination, looted and empty now, abandoned since the years when oil suddenly became almost valueless. Down there were three of the ten highest skyscrapers on Earth, man-made islands, all being slowly buried in the wind-whipped sand, now turning to mud in the monsoons that had begun falling, bringing more rain to the area in a week than it usually saw in a decade.

I didn’t train the telescope to the north even once. Too many melted-glass, radioactive scars, too many weeping sores on the planet from Cairo to New Delhi.

India. Mumbai and Calcutta, flattened and now washing away. Indonesia, with its remaining population trying to scratch out a living at the higher elevations. The Indian Ocean was brown with topsoil.

Down south, Australia, one of the least affected places on Earth. The shifting ocean currents and wind patterns and storms had largely spared it. The outback was getting enough rain to grow crops. For the first year the Aussies gave away a lot of food. Now, with the unpredictable winds, hailstorms, and deluges, there was no telling if a harvest would be bountiful or nonexistent, and they had sealed themselves off and were trying to be self-sufficient, with their navy patrolling the Timor Sea, the Arafura Sea, the Torres Strait, and the Coral Sea, turning back refugee boats from Southeast Asia, sinking those that kept coming. Not that there were many boats left after the waves, but human ingenuity can always make new ones.

The vast blue Pacific. The Philippines devastated, all the tiny islands and atolls scattered across Polynesia and Melanesia and Micronesia all empty. Bare, uninhabited.

South America … I had no Virgil to guide me, only the Net, which was erratic on Earth these days. The Andes created a sheltering wall from the storms that swept the Pacific, and the Amazon Basin, which had been drying out, was green again.

Europe was drowning in rain.

Some of the Rapturists were finally reinterpreting their Bibles. Maybe they
weren’t
going to be swept bodily into Heaven, but this sure as Jesus looked like
some
sort of Apocalypse. I couldn’t argue with them about that.

ALL THE SPACE
on the
Guardian
that wasn’t taken up with living quarters and our portable stage and things like that was full of food. Mostly it was rice and flour, vegetable oil, corn meal, soy protein. But there were some luxuries like frozen vegetables and canned fruit, and most of all, candy. The Navy had found that there was no morale raiser for a hungry band of refugees quite as good as candy. We had tons of the tooth-rotting stuff. On Earth, sugar was now more valuable than gold.

It was all grown in the vast, relatively new hydroponic farms deep underground on Mars, Deimos, Phobos, and some asteroids. I hadn’t visited them, but I took a virtual tour, and was astonished. They stretched for miles, lit by bubble-generated electricity. With a bubble generator you could do some serious tunneling in bedrock at incredible speed. Just squeeze the rock down to little silver globes. It was warmer down there, too—some of the farms were as deep as ten miles. There was a huge labor force of refugees, most of them eager for something to do. It wasn’t enough to feed a fraction of the Earth’s remaining population, but it fed Martians and refugees on Mars, with enough left over that every ship that left for Earth did so stuffed to the scuppers with the surplus.

I was glad we had the food, because the only other thing we had to offer was … me. And I figured that if I was on an enforced twelve-hundred-calorie-per-day diet, I’d choose a sweet or even a soyburger every time.

I was wrong. We were a smash everywhere we went.

We’d land, set up our defensive perimeters with the destroyers arrayed around the
Guardian
, and sweep into town like the circus train. If they had a big arena we’d set up in there. If they didn’t, we’d set up our covered stage and do the show outside. About half the time, it rained, but we didn’t cancel any shows because of that. The people were used to rain. I’d look out at a sea of yellow slickers. If there was a big storm, we sometimes had to postpone, but we never canceled, we just waited for it to blow over.

I was safe and warm and dry behind my huge plexi bulletproof shield, which was also used to project special effects. I would stand there in my glitzy outfit, bathed in light, backed up by my band and towers of speakers, and look out over people huddling in the wind and rain, and listen to them roar their approval of my silly little songs. And I’d think,
What am I doing here?
Look at all those people in the rain and the wind and the mud, and they’re loving every minute. What must their lives be like
outside
this little island of glamour? In what way was this
better
?

I googled some of the songs of the Great Depression. For every “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime” there were ten like “Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries,” “We’re in the Money,” or “Let’s Have Another Cup of Coffee.” Total fantasies, and I guess that’s what you need when your life is grim. So we gave them all the fantasy I could dish out, and ended each concert with “Jazzie’s Song.” They were on their feet every time.