Rolling Thunder by John Varley Read Free Book Online Page A

dispenser. Various of her sandrats, my cousins, are swarming around her and the other guests, biting at their ankles, threatening to tip over the punch bowl, tossing stuffed grape leaves and fricasseed frog legs at each other, and generally creating a blur of random activity. Some women are just born to reproduce. Amelia was a good candidate for Trans-Mars Champeen. I could never remember just how many Redmond cousins I had, possibly because at least once a year the number changed. There was one in a pram, and one in her arms, and one, as they say, in the oven.
    Me, I love babies. I don’t recall ever talking to a girl who didn’t love babies. I don’t mind the crappie nappies and the spit-up and the occasional crying jag. It’s probably a hormonal thing, we’re just programmed that way. Somewhere on that double-X chromosome is a gene that makes us look at a squirmy little recently postfetal human and squinch up our mouths and coo things like “Awwwww, isn’t little snooky-ookums so boooo tiful!”
    But I also love puppies and kittens, for the same reason.
    Allow me a short digression on the subject of babies. As of now, I don’t plan to have them. Don’t look so shocked. I’ve got two good reasons.
    One is that I’ve babysat most of Amelia’s kids at one time or another, plus others. Spending money, what are you gonna do? I’ve dealt with them at all ages from a few months to early teens, and I’ve observed that all of them, at one age or another, turn into creatures that should be consigned to a zoo. Sometimes it’s a stage, sometimes it seems to be permanent. With some, it’s the Terrible Twos. With others it’s the Frightening Fives. And don’t forget the Sickening Sevens or the Nasty Nines. Girls are marginally better than boys, until they reach the Terrifying Twelves, then they’re worse. Somebody once said that teenagers should be raised in a barrel and fed through the bunghole, then decanted when they’re twenty. I should know; I admit it, I was a prime candidate for en-cooperage (I just made that up, means put into a barrel) until recently.
    But that pales in comparison to the other reason to not have babies.
    Part of your education on Mars is witnessing a live birth. We do it when we’re fifteen. The idea is to appreciate the joy and the beauty of the event. We watch through a one-way mirror as the mother (a volunteer, naturally) sweats and screams and bleeds.
    Lovely. Joyous. Beautiful.
    I fainted dead away, along with two boys. How humiliating.
    When I got back home me and my vagina had a serious talk. (Hey, why should that sound weird? Some boys name their penises, or so I’ve heard.) The conversation went something like this:
    ME: But babies are so cute !
    MS. V: Honey, you need to get a tape measure. Measure me, then measure a baby’s head. Then … you do the math.
    ME: Oh.
    Not a pretty picture. In Homeland America there is an accepted church dogma called “intelligent design.” I can call the whole wacky theory into question with one word: testicles. And if you need another example, tell me why a human baby should be expected to emerge from an opening that can’t accommodate a lemon without discomfort.
    Design, maybe, but not intelligent. If that was God’s intent, then God is a dunce.
    We’re almost done here, then the ceremony can begin.
    And we’re getting to the best of what you might think an odd bunch. You’re not supposed to have favorites in families, but everybody does, and Elizabeth Strickland-Garcia, M.D., is one.
    She’s Dad’s sister, older by two years. She went with the families to the Red Zone in search of Gran and came out unscathed. Then she returned to Mars with them, in time for the war with Earth. Naturally she was a member of the Volunteer Pressure Brigade, and during the bombing she crawled into some wreckage where no one else would go, pulled out a few survivors, and then was trapped, her right hand pinned by a shift in the debris. Her suit was punctured