Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning) (12 page)

“But what
is
space?” I asked.

“If I knew that, I’d really know somethin’,
cher
. I been nibblin’ at the edges of this idea most of my life, me, and I done come up with some things. Just little tricks you can do even though you don’t really understand it all, but if you have a sort of hint where these other dimensions might be hiding.”

“Little . . . tricks?” I said.

“Yessum, ways to twist parts of our universe into the other universe, or little bits of the other ones into this one.”

It dawned on me that he was talking about squeezer bubbles, which supplied virtually all the power to all the humans back at Old Sun and, of course, here in
Rolling Thunder
, too.

I glanced at the twin, and she silently bugged her eyes and dropped her jaw. She had gotten it, too.

I put it out of my mind for now. We still hadn’t reached the important stuff, the things I was sure Papa had brought us out on the boat to talk about.

“So, back to this medium, Papa . . .”

“Okay, right.” He paused, gathering his thoughts. He noticed for the first time that something was tugging on his line, though I had seen it several minutes before. I hadn’t wanted to interrupt his thoughts. He reeled it in, meeting little resistance, and came up with a sheepish-looking koi with a distinctive gold patch between his eyes.

“Well, hello, Boudreaux,” he greeted the fish. Not all our koi have names, but many of the biggest and most distinctive of them do, most of them named by Papa. All our koi are Cajuns, oddly enough. “Wouldn’t be a good day of fishin’ if we didn’t catch you once or twice.”

“Dumb old fish,” Polly said, reaching over with the wire cutters to snip the barb off the hook. Old Boudreaux hung there in the water for a moment, possibly waiting for some fish pellets, then swam slowly away.

“Don’t be too hard on him,
cher
. He older than you are, and he do pretty good for not having a brain much bigger than a BB.”

“I don’t know, Papa,” she said. “If koi tasted as good as bass, he’d have been fried up a long time ago.”

“Well, then it was plumb smart of him and the other koi to taste so bad, wasn’t it?”

“Can’t argue with that, Papa,” I said. He noticed that Polly and I had taken in our lines—we’d both done it fifteen minutes before, but he’d been in his other universe, where the dark lightning dwelled. He put his pole down into the rack beside ours and shipped the oars. He started rowing us slowly back toward the dock.

“Need any help, Papa?” Polly said. “I’d be glad to row us, but I’ve got this broken arm. I’m sure Cassie would be glad to help.”

Papa doesn’t like the classic raised-middle-finger gesture, but he doesn’t mind the good old fist and forearm jerk, so I laid one on her. Papa laughed.

“No, girls, this help me keep my thoughts in order.”

“The medium, Papa,” I prompted him.

“Right, the medium. Well, water be a medium. A pretty thick one. See how it fights me when I stroke an oar through it? I gotta push a lot of water out the way with these here paddles to move the boat in the other direction. And when I stop rowin’, the boat stops pretty quick. How come?”

“Friction,” I said.

“Friction,” he agreed. “But we movin’ through another medium, and that be the air. Only it don’t fight us so hard, right? If I be rowin’ real hard, we can feel it. If a breeze come up, we can feel that. But it ain’t nothing like the thickness of the water.

“Now, you girls never been on the bayou, so you don’t know just how hard a wind can blow. But b’lieve me, my darlin’s, it can blow mighty hard in a hurricane. I done lived through three of ’em, name of Earl, Katrina, and Peggy. Earl and Peggy weren’t much, but Katrina, she a real nasty one. Hundred and fifty miles per hour, she blew, and washed out the levees and a bunch a people got killed. Y’all got no ’sperience of bad weather, y’all probably can’t imagine it.”

“Probably not,” I agreed. Just thinking about it gave me chills. Weather like that was the new normal back on Earth.

“Well, girls, air can be even worst than that. When an old-time spaceship like Apollo or the Space Shuttle or the VentureStar come back into the atmosphere, that ol’ friction like to burned ’em up.
Did
burn up a couple of ’em. Nothin’ but air, and pretty thin air, at that. Even on Mars you can’t hit the air goin’ real fast and not burn up, less you got somethin’ to radiate that friction heat away.

“So now we got this new medium, this . . . what I’m callin’ dark lightnin’ ether. It be thin . . . oh, my, real thin, not much thicker’n the space between the stars, and we don’t even have no instruments that can ’tect that we be passin’ through it. But it be there . . . and I’m workin’ on somethin’ to find me some.”

“So . . . what’s the problem, Papa?”

“I wonder why things get old, why they wear out. Life be a delicate thing, girls, it be a lot of real complicated chemicals, long strings of DNA, there’s plenty that can screw it up. Only takes a little bit a regular radiation. So I wonder . . . maybe this dark lightning ether could be why we get old and stop fixin’ ourselves. Why we grow awhile, then we stop growin’, and get sick, and die a old age. Even when it ain’t hittin’ us all that hard, back on Earth.

“But out here, it be passin’ through us like a real hurricane. The faster we go, the worst it will get.”

I felt a chill run down my spine.

“So how fast is too fast, Papa?”

He looked up at us, not happily.

“I don’t know for surely yet, me. But I figure it ain’t much faster.”

We bumped gently into the dock, and I hopped out and tied off the line. Papa got out, too, but Polly just sat there for a moment, looking sad. She looked up at us.

“I’m just thinking about the rabbit,” she said. Right. The poor little rabbit. I had thought about him, too.

At the Council meeting, Uncle Max had wanted to know why we didn’t just send out a probe with a guinea pig on it. It would forge ahead of us, and when the guinea pig died, we would know if Papa’s theory was right or not.

“Already being done,” Travis had said. “I’ve got some guys slapping something together, about ready to go. There’s a rabbit aboard, and a lot of food and water, and an automatic cleaning system. But we don’t want to boost it over one gee. Might kill the rabbit. So it’s gonna take a while for it to pass whatever the threshold is. Jubal isn’t sure, he says he needs to do more testing. And there are other variables he hasn’t been able to take into account. Bottom line, if the rabbit dies, we could already be right up against whatever the speed limit is. You can’t give us any better information, Jubal?”

“Not without more testing,” Papa had said, sadly. Now, we all three fell silent. The rabbit would accelerate away from us, to live or to die. Either way, he wouldn’t be coming back.

“I wish there was another way,” Polly said. Well, I did, too, but I wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it. But Polly would. She’s maybe a little too sentimental.

“I thought about goin’ out myself,” Papa said. “Acceleratin’ at one gravity, I wouldn’t get space sick, like I do. Then, if I died, I’d come back and tell y’all about it.”

I looked at him, waiting for the punch line. Then I realized there wasn’t one. I looked at Polly, and she shrugged.

That’s the thing with Papa. He is the world’s champion genius when it comes to physics and math, and the world’s best at love and sweetness. But his mind is childlike in other ways. He is often unable to detect a simple contradiction like that, and I’m not sure he understands death any more than a six-year-old does.

He needs looking after, he needs protecting. But that’s what Polly and Mama and I are there for.

Polly:

Hail, hail to Bayouville, hurrah for the old gold and black!

Hail, hail to Bayouville, our friendship will ye never lack!

Ever faithful, ever true, as we sing our song of you!

Black and gold, we’re all true blue, all hail to Bayouville!

Okay, it ain’t “La Marseillaise.” It ain’t even “The Star-Spangled Banner.” But it’s the old school song. (We’re not as old as Yale, not even twenty, but in our defense I’ll say it’s not as dumb as “The Whiffenpoof Song.” What was
that
all about?) It’s the anthem of the institution of which I will soon be an alumna—summa cum laude, no less! I’ve been singing it five mornings a week for twelve years, and as the day of graduation grows nearer, I find I now sometimes get a little thrill in my heart when we sing it. I guess that’s because I won’t be hearing it from now on unless I go to skypool or football games and, down the line a bit, PTA meetings. It’s nice to be a part of something, to have school spirit and root for or play hard for your team. There’s a lot of good memories tied up in the school, and I realize that at this point in my life, it’s all I’ve known, and that the future is a big question mark, an unknown zone for the first time in my life, which has been so secure with my loving family and the school to give it structure.

Of course, until a week before, when Papa came out of the bubble, the biggest unknowns concerned what course of study would I take for my further education, what career did I want to pursue, did I want to move away from home (tentative answer: no, not yet), would I find a boy and fall in love with him. Little things like that.

Today the question was, would I have
time
for any of that?

They say teenagers think they are immortal, and I wouldn’t have argued much about that a month ago. I didn’t spend much time worrying about death. That was a long ways in the future.

But I’m not stupid. I know we all could die. Maybe growing up in a structure that is visibly limited, unlike the seeming infinite vistas of planet-surface people, we all know we are vulnerable, even us oblivious teens. It’s not hard to imagine some catastrophic accident that could destroy us all.

My sister would say, why worry about something you can’t do anything about? I know she’s right, but I’m a worrier by nature, and now I had a lot more to worry about.

And the worry was beginning to spread.

—

Travis has told us what schools were like when he was a boy.

They were great big buildings with hundreds, sometimes thousands of students. And those were just the elementary and high schools. The colleges and universities sometimes had tens of thousands. When he graduated from high school, they were barely using computers, which were pretty new.

It’s hard for me to imagine.

Our schools are very different. There are fifteen of them, one for each township. They are all much alike, some a little larger than Bayouville, some a little smaller. They are each contained in one building. Ours has three classrooms, some have as many as five. In addition, there will be an auditorium, a gym, a pool, and extensive athletic grounds. Don’t picture a one-room schoolhouse like the ones Travis showed us. The classrooms are large and free-form, with study stations that can be assembled into groupings as needed. We move from one to another as we finish work, and so do the teachers, who will typically number between ten and fifteen.

Do the math. There are fifteen townships, each with a waking population of between ten and fifteen hundred. Of those, only a few hundred will be of school age at any one time. We don’t need big schools. Our graduating class will number eighteen, which is considered large.

One of the ship’s regs is that, once you start school at age six, you and your family can’t be put into a black bubble until you graduate, or fall so far behind academically or become such a problem of discipline that you are considered hopeless. Nobody, including Travis, thought it would be a good idea to have classmates vanishing for three or four or ten years, only to pop back into reality as young as they went in. Adults have to learn to cope with that, but not children.

Of course, when you turn eighteen, you’d better have some way of making yourself useful, or your whole family might be chronologically pickled until we arrive at New Sun. There are several effects of this rule, the most important being that it is one
hell
of an incentive for keeping your grades up. The second effect is that it encourages families to have children. You could raise them in security, then all go into a bubble upon the graduation of the youngest one.

Or not.

As that day drew near, I was feeling more guilty than I had ever been about my special status. I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, and ordinarily that could have been a problem for me and Cassie and Papa and Mama Podkayne. Not a
huge
problem, since going into a bubble was a common occurrence; most people in
Rolling Thunder
expected to spend some time in there. Some of them even
wanted
to. There were thousands and thousands of passengers who would arrive at New Sun that way, some of them having spent almost no time in “real” time. We’d just have to resign ourselves to missing the rest of the trip, not coming out until the journey was over.

But we were “family of the captain,” and thus exempt.

What bothered me was, it seemed there was really nothing special about me, other than a talent for skypool, and there’s nowhere to go with that. We have adult leagues but no professionals.

I couldn’t sing, be an entertainer like Mama. I wasn’t a supergenius like Papa. I had friends who were planning to go into medical training, ecology, and many other fields. I knew two girls who were already paired up, one of them married and the other one pregnant. (Seemed to me to be a little early to start a family, but to each her own, and she was ensuring the next eighteen years in real time.)

I wondered a lot about Patrick. As the son of Mike and Marlee he had a pass, just like me, but I somehow knew it wouldn’t be necessary for him. He was always studying, I knew that, and it seemed certain he had a plan in mind for his future.

Why the hell didn’t I have one for mine?

—

We don’t formally segregate by age or sex at our schools—except for athletic teams at puberty because boys get bigger and stronger. Naturally six-year-olds are not taught together with seniors, but we might all be in the same room in different groups, with the teachers moving among us. There’s very little difference between a second-grader and a fifth-grader, socially. Boys mix with girls a lot more easily than they seem to have done in the old movies I’ve seen about schools on Earth. Naturally a junior is unlikely to hang out with a first-grader, but the junior will
know
the first-grader, and probably help in teaching the little one.

We don’t have summer vacations, but instead have three one-month breaks spread through the year.

We don’t get off for Christmas, Yom Kippur, Ramadan, or any other religious holiday.
Rolling Thunder
is strictly nonsecular. Anyway, would you celebrate those holidays according to the calendar back at Old Sun, or our own internal calendar? They’re quite a way apart now. Muslims, Christians, and Jews differ among themselves on that question.

At least the Muslims don’t have a problem with facing Mecca. It’s back
thataway
, many light-years. Kneel facing the South Pole, and you’re fine.

There is no real reason why we start primary schooling at age six and move on to higher education at eighteen except that that was how it was in Travis’s day.

Early on in the trip, an educator felt that we might be becoming a little too insular in our education, and the exchange program was instituted. Someone once said it was a bit like the customs in some Earth tribes of marrying outside of one’s immediate tribe, thus ensuring genetic diversity. I don’t know about that, but the effect was good, in my opinion. So for one month out of the year, each of us attends another school. I always enjoyed these sojourns. Except for the very youngest, who might sorely miss their parents, we were shipped off away from our friends, our usual social circle, and even our homes. We stayed with families in the new township, and got to know new people. I made a lot of friends that way, and among the exchange students who spent time at Bayouville. I spent time in twelve of the townships, missing only Bedrock, Bedford Falls, and Dogpatch.

Another good thing was that it separated Cassie and me for a while each year. Twins can tend to become too reliant on each other, or so we both felt. I enjoyed getting away from her, and I enjoyed reuniting. So it all worked out pretty well.

So, there’s a broad overview of our education system. It will serve to give you an idea of how really small-town we all are, and there are things that all small towns have in common. One of them is that news, even secrets, travels fast.

—

Bayouville School is a round building with stucco sides and a conical roof that is ridged and painted to suggest straw thatch. There are lots of windows and skylights. At the top of the roof is a peaked cupola with a bell hanging inside. I had rung that bell many times myself; it’s considered an honor and a treat. It was ringing now, as it did every morning at eight, as Cassie and I parked our bicycles in the rack and entered the gym.

The interior of the building is divided into five equal rooms, each taking up 72 degrees of the circumference. The three classrooms take up three-fifths of the space, with the auditorium and gym accounting for the other two pie wedges. The pool is outside, surrounded by a tall cyclone fence, and it is entered through the gym. It is Olympic-sized, but it has a deep end with a high diving board.

We’re allowed to design our own schedules of study, and Cassie and I and a few of our best friends had been scheduling gym period at the first of the day for several years. When we entered the girls’ locker room, I could see that most of the team were already there.

I had hardly sat down in front of my locker before Pippa Mendez sat on the bench beside me. She had brought her gym clothes, apparently intending to chew the fat while we got dressed.

“Well, if it isn’t Polly-wanna-cracker,” she said. “It
is
Polly right? Not Castor Oil?”

“How’re they hangin’, Pimpa?” I asked.

“Fabulous outfit, Pol.”

“Thanks.” I was wearing pumpkin gypsy trousers that billowed around the ankles, with a cornflower embroidered top that Mama had given us two years ago and neither of us had worn recently. I thought the combo worked pretty well.

“So how’s your ass?”

“Prettier than your face.” She tried to punch me on the arm, but I grabbed her wrist and wrestled her to the ground. She got up, laughing, and resumed her seat on the bench. I slipped out of the pants and turned around.

“See anything you like?”

“That’s a bad bruise,
hermana
. But it’s fading out. Wait, wait! Is that the face of Jesus I see?”

“Jesus . . .”

“. . . my ass!” we both said at the same time. It had been a catchphrase for a while.

“I heard a rumor about some pigs,” she said, pulling off her shoes and grabbing her gym socks. She had a pretty good image of the
Mona Lisa
on one of her great toenails. Pippa is one of those girls who are into nails. Me, I stick to one color.

Pippa is the same age as me, with lovely olive skin and lustrous, long black hair. She helped us learn Spanish for three years, to the point where we’re both competent if not exactly fluent.

“Be careful what rumors you listen to,” I said.

“
Es verdad.
But I heard another—”

I didn’t get to hear what else she had heard, at least not then, because a loud voice interrupted us.

“Listen up, all you flyin’ fools.”

It was Coach Peggy, standing on a stool in the middle of the room. She was dressed, as always, in her white track suit. She needs the stool because she’s just a hair over four feet tall. She can also arm-wrestle me to humiliation, probably throw me over the top of the schoolhouse, and is absolutely deadly in any number of martial arts. When the boys’ coach needs to break up a fight among the testosterone-poisoned humans who were now in the other dressing room, all he had to do was threaten to sic Coach Peggy on them, and that was usually enough to stop the hassle in its tracks. We were all terrified of her on one level, and we all loved her—even the boys—on another.

“Today is group-picture day for all you skypool ladies,” she went on. All coaches should have big, authoritative voices, and Coach Peggy did, though it was hard to figure out where she kept it in that tiny body. She seldom needed a bullhorn. “So before we work out, I want you all in your playing uniforms. Let’s get going, then, sweethearts. Pour those lumpy bodies into that spandex, chop-chop.”

I was already in my gym shorts and sports bra, and there was a problem. My uniform was in a pigsty somewhere in Duckburg. I put two fingers between my lips and whistled our
Mayday
whistle. Cassie hurried over from across the room.

“I don’t have a spare uniform,” I whispered to her. “Can I borrow yours?”

“No,” she whispered back. When I gave her the stink eye, she smiled just a little and leaned near my ear. “But you can rent it.” She kissed me on the forehead and quickly got out of kicking range, then sashayed back to her locker. She snagged a passing sixth-grader and handed her the black-and-gold jumpsuit, pointed her in my direction.

“Thanks,” I told the little one. When the evil twin “rents” me something, she’s not talking about money. Someday soon there would be something she wanted of me, some unpleasant task most likely. And I’d be honor-bound to do it. I’d done it to her often enough, but we’re both so competitive we hate to be behind in getting-even accounts.

We assembled in the football field, at the small grandstand. The photographer was just finishing up with the boys football A-team, eleven of our finest sides of beef in lovely black silk shorts and gold tunics, only three of whom I’d kick out of bed. In fact, I’d hooked up with two of them, but they were brief affairs. Well, I figure if you don’t practice, you won’t be very good at it when you find Mr. Right.