Red Lightning by John Varley Read Free Book Online Page A

I estimated it might be more like eighty feet. It began to curl over at the top, and now it reared up even more. We could hear it roaring.
    "My god," the reporter said. "They told me it might sound like a freight train, but this is a thousand freight trains, all of them coming right at us. It's so fast! It's almost to the beach now... eighty, maybe ninety feet high..."
    The curling part broke, but the sea was noticeably higher behind it. No way to tell how high. By the time it crashed on the beach it was partly concealed by a crown of foam and spray. A hundred feet high? Maybe more.
    "My god, is it... it looks like it might be higher than the building! No, no, it's... I can't tell, I can't see... here it comes... Mother, I love you, I love you..."
    At that point the camera operator was running, and he dropped his equipment. It landed sideways, and then the lens was spotted with water and the sound was incredible and I saw some running bare feet.
    The screen went black.
     
    I don't know when Mom joined us on the couch. She was just there, squeezing my hand so tight it hurt, but I was squeezing back. The four of us sat there, stunned, not saying anything.
    The next few minutes seemed like a kaleidoscope. I'm a member of the stereo generation, as they call it, and I'm pretty good at opening five or six or a dozen virtual windows and parking them somewhere in my peripheral vision and just leaving them on, semitransparent, but if something interesting happens in any of them I'll quickly tick it over into the center, and all the time I'm watching or reading that window I'll be aware of the other ones. People who are alarmed by this call it permanent sensory overload. People who can handle it call it multitasking. Both sides of the argument think my generation's minds are wired differently.
    Whatever. I'd never had a problem with it, but until that day I'd never been confronted with maybe fifty or sixty different windows, all clamoring for my attention. The problem was, everything was happening at once. The house computer's discriminator was being overloaded by the number of news images, each with a top-priority rating. They were coming in from all the islands of the Bahamas, from stationary spycams and personal stereocams, from helicopters and airplanes and hi-rez satellites. They were filling the telewall of our apartment with a rolling crazy quilt of disaster.
    We watched in silence, or sometimes turned away with a moan, as the waves arrived at Samana Cay, Acklins Island, and Crooked Island. No sooner had those cameras gone abruptly to black screen than the wave was assaulting Long Island, Rum Cay, and San Salvador. And the Turks and Caicos Islands.
    Cat Island, Great Exuma, Eleuthera.
    The Dominican Republic, Haiti, Puerto Rico.
    Anguilla, St. Martin, St. Barts, Sin Maarten, St. Kitts and Nevis.
    Cuba.
    Places I'd never heard of, places I'd barely been aware of, and places I'd heard of but knew little about. All of them full of people living in tropical splendor, or taking a vacation from colder climates, people just like us, sitting in front of their telewalls or old flatscreens or even old box TVs, or watching out from their windows, or fleeing for their lives, or trying desperately to find their loved ones before the hammer of God descended on them. People who had had hopes and dreams and plans, people who might have worried about hurricanes or fires or car wrecks or falling off a boat and drowning but had never expected the horror that was bearing down on them. It was the first time in my life that I realized just how quickly everything could change, how one minute you could be strolling down some sunny street in the Bahamas and the next you could be staring death in the face.
    It was somewhere between the impacts on Andros and Abaco and the arrival of the wave front at Grand Bahama Island that I noticed something in the one window I had kept functioning on my stereo. It was down in the left-hand corner of my field of