Rolling Thunder (14 page)

“I don’t see it,” Meiko said.

“Maybe I do.” That was Cassandra. I kept my mouth shut.

“I’ve done research on this, believe me,” Quinn went on. “I’ve studied music history and the evolution of musical taste for a long time, and I can show you the data. But what you want to know is the bottom line. Can we form a group around Podkayne? Can we cover half a dozen styles but stay away from the easy, sure things that the great majority of the groups here at Pavonis are going to gig with? Can we bring this stuff to a new audience? Can we be really,
really
good at what we do?”

Meiko and I stared at each other, but neither of us said anything. Then she got up and left, without a word to any of us. The silence stretched out, and I kept my mouth shut.

“What I can’t figure,” Cassandra said, at last, “is what she was doing here in the first place.”

Joey had been intently studying his shoes, or the floor, or something down there between his knees as he slumped in his chair. He raised his hand.

“That would be me,” he admitted. “She and I … we’ve been … thought she might be able to fit in …”

“And she’s really good in bed, right?” Cassandra asked.

He looked up, and his expression was so sorrowful that we all laughed, and pretty soon he did, too.

Jim said he was looking for something deeper in his musical roots, and we all wished him well, and that’s how Podkayne and the Pod People was born.

And we were good. We were really,
really
good.

DESPITE ALL MY
misgivings, Karma and I quickly became best friends, the Mutt and Jeff of the Swamp.

In addition to our height, we had a lot of other things in common:

Karma was tone-deaf, couldn’t carry a tune in a wheelbarrow. I have perfect pitch and a four-octave vocal range.

She was one of the best dancers I’ve ever seen, and a gymnast and acrobat of no mean skills. She had almost made the Martian Olympic team. I am a total klutz, can’t walk across a room without stumbling over my own feet.

She was a chatterbox, never at a loss for words. I am what you might call reserved unless the talk is about music.

She was instantly at home in any social situation, without inhibitions, modesty, self-doubt, or the slightest inkling of inferiority. I’m … reserved.

I like anchovies on my pizza, and she likes artichoke hearts. I say to-
may-to
and she says
to-maah-to.

We both, however, love to shop.

That first day she dragged me to the mall. First stop: Bed, Bath, and
Way
Beyond. We spent a few hours arguing amiably about sheets and towels and things like that, settling on a color scheme for each room of my new home. Over lunch at Pablo’s Mexican Grill—chosen because it did
not
feature a view of Jupiter and the surface—we debated the relative merits of paint and wallpaper. She favored smart paper because you could dial up any color or pattern you wanted; I told her I’d had it in my room at home on Mars, and years went by without my changing the color by a single wavelength. So we went to the hardware store and bought a few pints of eight different colors to try out.

During that day we learned a lot about each other. She was delighted but not overawed to learn who my family was.

“I’ve eaten a few times at your mom’s restaurant. Wonderful stuff, but a bit spendy for my family. And both my parents voted for your grandmother.”

She came from the middle class of Mars. Both her parents were Earth-born, naturally, the two of them managing a small ski resort on Olympus Mons.

“I could ski before I could walk,” she said.

She had made one trip to Earth, when she was fifteen, a month of vacation with her family.

“I loved it!” she said. “I mean, I loved the Earth; nobody likes Earthies. But I didn’t see a lot of them.”

“What about the gravity?”

“Didn’t bother me after the first day. We shorties deal with it better than you tall folks. We went up the Amazon, up to where there’s still jungle. It was all the life! An explosion of life, everywhere I looked. We went for hikes in the jungle and I realized that everything I was seeing was alive. On Mars, everywhere you look, everything is dead.”

“Sounds like maybe you should have been an Earthie.”

She withered me with a look.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean it as an insult.”

“No, you’ve got a point. I’ve even thought about it, after my hitch is up. I thought about going to school and being an entomologist.”

“What’s that?”

“Somebody who studies insects.”

Bugs!
Oh, yuck! She was smiling at me.

“Okay, we’re even. I’m an agoraphobe, but you’re an entomophobe. Both very Martian things to be.”

“Something I don’t get,” I said. “If you’re afraid of open spaces, how did you manage it on Earth?”

“I don’t get it, either,” she admitted. “I was real worried before we went, and I didn’t do too well in the cities. I didn’t like to get out of the car or the train. I wanted a roof over my head! But when we got to the jungle, it just all went away. You ever been in a jungle?”

I shook my head. I guess it would be better than a walk in my underwear from Pavonis to Olympus, but not by much. A bug under every leaf …

“Something about it. Pretty soon I loved it.”

She was an apprentice agronomist here on Europa, looking to learn all she could in the ultracontrolled environments of the hydroponic and dirt farms, orchards, and municipal parks, so that when her hitch was over she could go to Brazil and get her degree. I wished her well.

8

EXCERPTS FROM PODKAYNE’S JOVIAN DIARY:

Saturday, November 9

Hindu Festival of Light. Día de Caman in Peru. Cambodian National Independence Day. Día de Virgen de la Almudena in Spain.

Rehearsing heavily for big opening at Rick’s next week. Karma helped with preparations for the housewarming party. Got all the painting and most of the decorating done just in time. Made 6 of Grandfather Jim’s pecan pies and gallons of Uncle Jubal’s jambalaya recipe, also lots of Mom’s canapes. All got snarfed down in the first hour, had to send out for cold cuts and pizza. Most of the Swamp critters showed up for at least a few minutes, plus the band and all their friends, and Karma’s friends from all over Clarke Centre. People spilled out into the hallway and neighbor Chan opened the adjoining door to his apartment to take the excess; must find a way to pay him back, nice man. Sang a few songs near the end of the evening, got some people to sing along. Must find a way to discourage Karma from singing. Horrible!

Sunday, November 10

Cry of Independence in Palau. Maputo City Day in Mozambique. Militsiya Day in Russia. Potosi Festival in Bolivia. Sadie Hawkins Day in East and Western America and Second Republic of Texas.

First thought: seal door, abandon apartment, live in basement. But Quinn and Karma helped, and in an hour the place looked habitable again. And I didn’t even have to do the dishes!

Thursday, November 14

Readjustment Day in Guinea Bissau and Algeria. Birthday of Hussein I in Jordan. National Day of Mourning in Germany.

I don’t know if Kahlua has adopted me or if he feels he owns my apartment. Either way, he spends a lot of time here. I never wanted a cat, but he’s not bad. Doesn’t jump up on the counters, never pesters me for food. I know he can get a meal at any of a few dozen places in the Swamp. Spends his nights here, at the foot of the bed or sometimes snuggled up beside me. When I go out he follows, jumps up and pushes the elevator button, looks back at me smugly. He has other tricks. Once downstairs he might go with me, might not. No telling where he goes on his own, but he always finds his way back. Cats and dogs have the run of the place here except for some off-limits areas. Not like at home, no leash laws. Problem dogs get shipped out
at once!
No territory marking allowed! All are spayed or neutered, naturally. If a mouse or a rat got loose in Clarke Centre, he’d live about 5 seconds.

Quinn asked me to move in with him again. Told him NO WAY!! I like my privacy. He got a little insistent, doesn’t like traveling between places. A great big half a mile! What a wimp. Q??? Quinn a mistake? Need fixing? Soon?

Monday, November 18

Flag Day in Uzbekistan. Moroccan Independence Day. National Day in Latvia and Oman. Vertieres’ Day in Haiti. Mickey Mouse’s Birthday, systemwide.

Rick’s is dark on Mondays and Tuesdays, but Podkayne and the Pod People (3P, for short) needed the stage time, so we signed up for the free evening festival in Robinson Park. This was a longtime tradition in Clarke Centre, beginning at 6 PM and running until midnight, every day, rain or shine. (Ha! It rains in Robinson Park every morning at 0800 and again at 1400, after lunch, for 5 minutes.) It’s open mike, a mixture of pros with nothing better to do and wannabes, anybody can perform for 15 minutes, encores to be decided by a sound meter with a big red arrow. There can be 1000 people there. There can also be 20. About 500 were there that evening as we set up under the flags of Oman, Haiti, Latvia, Morocco, and Uzbekistan. We all put on our mouse ears and commenced to boogie, starting out with numbers we knew would fly and then trying out a couple we were still working on. We were well received, to the point that some of the performers who had played before came up onstage and jammed with us. It was an hour before “Major Bowes” rang the gong, and then only because 1 hour was the limit; nobody was allowed to be stage hogs.

Afterward Karma took us on a tour through the bioenvironments of Clarke Centre, hydroponic farms and old-fashioned dirt farms. Turns out you need earthworms to grow crops, and bees are still the most efficient way to pollinate flowers and some vegetables. Who knew? Plus, you get honey. They grow snails there, too. I like earthworms only slightly more than I like bees, and if I never see another snail except on my plate, drenched in butter, I’ll be quite happy. But I put on a brave face as she took us through her personal jungle.

Tuesday, December 10

Constitution Day in Thailand. Foundation Day in the African Coastal Republic. Interplanetary Human Rights Day. Nobel Prize Day in Sweden. Settlers’ Day in Namibia. Ganga-Bois Day in the Voudon faith.

14 shopping days left until Christmas!

(12 days to high-gee shipping deadline, Europa/Mars.)

So Quinn is seeing someone else. Question: Does that bother me? I never intended it to be a long-term relationship, I always saw it as a posting romance. Maybe that’s the problem, spacegirl. Maybe he wanted something more. Well, he could have said so, couldn’t he? Why won’t guys talk about these things?

Trouble is, I got to caring for him a little too much. That happens, I guess, though so far, not to me. Get a grip, Podkayne. He’s a
drummer,
what did you expect?

Answer to question above: Yes, it bothers me.

Wednesday, December 11

Proclamation of the Republic, Burkina Faso.

Question: Can the band survive this?

Wednesday, December 25

Tuntematon Sotilas Day in Finland. First day of Christmas.

No partridge, no pear tree from Quinn. Quinn is history. Quinn is
so
over with. We hashed it out last night, amicably, civilly, like adults. Or at least I put on my best adult face. Sometimes I have to remind myself, you’re only 18, girl, and there’s probably a lot you still have to learn about human relationships. That’s what they say, anyway, and they also say that at your age you feel like every little setback is the end of the world. Well, I know it ain’t the end of the world, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. But I didn’t cry, not even when he gave me that smile, the one that won me away from my common sense in the first place, and asked if I was in the mood for a farewell … well, you know what he said. (Drummers should be kept in cages, fed raw meat, and only let out when you desperately need a back beat.) In fact, I even kept smiling as I shook my head, but I must admit that if he’d had his drumsticks with him he’d be visiting a proctologist right now for a bit of
deep
excavation. I kept the smile in place until the door closed, and then I cried a little. Kahlua was upset, so I quit.

Bastard.

We agreed the band should stay together. Let’s hope that works. We’ve been getting better and better, and the audiences keep coming, and growing.

The usual gifts from most of the family, some useful, some small luxuries, pretty much like the stuff I sent them, all of it ordered online, wrapped and delivered to me from stores on Europa and to them from stores on Mars, to save shipping charges. I miss the actual shopping, it all feels impersonal, but this is the first Christmas I’ve spent away from my family.

Different with Mike. We always try to outdo the other with gifts no one else would dare give and that most people would be shocked to see.