Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning) (18 page)

When I realized we were thrusting toward
Rolling Thunder
, I reflexively looked up, thinking I’d see the outside of my home. If we had been in a solar system, it would have been easy. The ship is not particularly reflective, but at half a million miles an eight-mile oblong rock would have been visible as a star as bright as a planet. Out here there was just starlight, and it wasn’t nearly enough to light it up.

So I went back to the cabin and sat down across from Papa. He was still fiddling with his detector.

“Learned anything new, Papa?” I asked him.

“Oh, sure,
cher
. I’m always learnin’ something new, ever minute of every day.”

“So what do you know now that’s new?”

“I know that the background of dark lightning is steady out to three hundred thousand miles. No change so far. In a minute, I’ll know if it changes in three hundred and twenty thousand miles. See?” He pointed to a screen where there was a line on a graph. It was almost straight, with just a few small bumps above or below the line.

“What are those little variations?”

“Not important, within the samplin’ error. What’s really puzzlin’ me,
cher
, is that it be passin’ through the big bubble out front of us. It shouldn’t be doing that. I got to figger out
why
it’s doin’ that. And how. And I got to see if all of it’s gettin’ through, or just some of it.”

“Which is why we’re out here.”

“Like I said, I learn a lot more about this stuff every minute. I ’spect we’ll be learnin’ even more when we get out to the boundary line, out past the shadow bein’ cast by the big bubble out there.”

“I assume you’ll be careful, Papa.”

“Oh, always,
cher
. I’d never risk my sweet Cassie on anything dangerous. Me and Sheila, we done worked out a careful plan when we get out there. We’ll take it a step at a time.”

—

Pretty soon I was bored out of my mind. So I checked my mail.

There were more anonymous nasty ones, more than I had expected, actually. The more reasonable ones asked me when the hell my family was going to tell everyone more about what the hell was going on. Others alleged a conspiracy. What the purpose was, I have no idea. Did they think Papa
wanted
to turn the ship around?

I got an urgent ping from the captain himself. I moved back to the cockpit to take the call. Travis popped up front and center on my corneal screen. And it wasn’t a pretty sight. He was scowling at me.

“Cassie, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

I was shocked. He was blaming
me
for something?

“Just what I was told to do, Uncle Travis. Helping my father try to find a way to save all our asses.”

“That’s ridiculous. I don’t want him out there, it’s not safe.”

Well, what about me? I had a momentary feeling of uncertainty, but then I remembered what Papa had said.

“You’re the one who’s being ridiculous. Papa told me he would never put me in danger, and I believe him.”

“But he doesn’t know what’s out there! How can he be sure he’s not putting himself in danger?” Pause. “And you, too, of course.”

Of course.

He went on. “I want you to turn that ship around and come back, right now. I’ll take his gizmo out there myself and get his readings for him.”

I thought about that for a moment and wondered if I should go back and tell Papa what Travis wanted. But I didn’t want to get him more upset, and besides, I’d had just about enough of this shit.

“No can do, Travis. You’re not in charge here. Papa is.”

I’d read of people “sputtering,” in books, but I don’t think I’d ever seen it in real life until that moment. I’d also read of people so mad that steam seemed to be coming out their ears and wondered if I’d be treated to that sight.

“It’s my ship!” he sputtered.

“No question. But I’m the acting captain. Sheila?”

“Yes, Cassie?”

“Am I or am I not in charge of this ship?”

There was a long, long pause, which made the tiny hairs stand up on the back of my neck, something else I’d read about. I was just reflecting on how much thinking an AI could do in a nanosecond, and she was taking half a minute?

“You are the acting captain,” she finally said.

“Sheila!” Travis shouted. “You know damn well I’m the captain.”

“Not the only captain, sir. My programming, which you approved, provides, and in fact requires, that when you are not aboard, someone must be in charge. As Jubal is not competent to make the sort of decisions that might need to be made, Cassandra is the only other option. Without her aboard, I would not have been authorized to take this voyage.”

“I’m exercising the emergency override,” Travis said, gritting his teeth slightly, I thought.

“I’m sorry, Travis, but I have had to weigh several competing mandates in determining that Cassie must remain in control until I return to the ship. One is that, having worked with Jubal for a while now, I recognize that no one but he is able to keep his jury-rigged detector working properly for the length of time needed to take his measurements.”

“He can come back and we can take a little time to make a better one. Then I can go out and get his data for him.”

“I also feel that he is more competent than you to judge the urgency of the situation. And lastly, his daughter is more able to keep him steady and working toward what he wants to find out than even you would be.”

“Travis,” I said. “What are you so uptight about? You know Papa wouldn’t risk my life. He would risk his if he thought it was important, but me, or Polly, or Mama? Never. He never would, and you know that.”

He sighed and looked away from me for a moment.

“Goddam uppity AIs,” he said. “When did they start refusing orders from humans? There’s something not right about that.”

Travis gave us another of his long-suffering sighs and capitulated.

“Okay, you two. If you’re gonna gang up on me, I guess I’ll have to let it go. But when you get back, Sheila, expect me to meet you with a pair of pliers and a soldering iron. You need some adjustments. Cassie, you take care of him.”

“Travis, he’s my
father
, okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, you’re right. I’ve gotta go. The meeting’s dragging on. I expect to see you in a few hours.”

“You will see her in as long as it takes,” Sheila said.

“Goddam AIs.”

—

The rest of the trip out to the edge of the “safe” zone (we would soon see just how safe it was) was uneventful. Arriving there was not.

Papa knew that weightlessness was going to screw him up big-time. Sheila eased us to a stop at the point she had calculated was right on the edge of the safe shadow, about half a million miles from
Rolling Thunder
. There was nothing different to see with your eyes.

“Cassie,
cher
,” Papa muttered, as we lost the last few pounds of apparent weight. “Cassie, come here, I need to talk to you.”

“Sure, Papa.” I kicked gently and floated over.

“I’m gonna be very, very sick, me,” he said. I could see the effort he was putting into keeping his gorge down. Clearly, eating that hamburger had been a bad idea, but it was also true he would have been throwing up even if his stomach held nothing but bile.

“
Cher
, I might not be in my right mind,” he wheezed. “I mean, I may not be able to run this machine I made.”

“What can I do, Papa?”

“There be some things me and your mama didn’t ever get around to tellin’ y’all,” he said. “I ain’t got time to fill you in now, and anyways, I always knew your mama would have to do the tellin’. All I can say right now is that it takes one of us to use this here gizmo. Me, Poddy, Polly, or you. That’s why I come out here. But it lookin’ like I ain’t gonna be no good at all. So it have to be you, my sweet Cassie.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but I tried not to let it show in my face. He didn’t need any extra worry.

“Okay, Papa, just tell me what to do.”

For the next couple of minutes he fought his way through the nausea and showed me a few things about the “gizmo.” There wasn’t much to learn. It was much simpler than many other devices I had mastered. Just a few buttons, a few dials, a touch pad, and a screen that was recording the intensity of whatever dark lightning was.

He drew a wavering line on the screen with a fingernail. There was already a line there, generated by a computer, showing the intensity so far. It was almost straight.

“If it get to this line here, I want you to come and get me, no matter how sick I be. Okay?”

“Sure, Papa.”

“Now, Sheila know what to do with the ship. We goin’ out to about a hundred thousand miles and stop, and you take a reading.”

“Got it, Papa.”

“Now,
cher
, I think I’m gonna be really sick, so I best go to the head.”

He got up . . . or tried to, then seemed to discover something in his right hand. He looked at it like he’d never seen it before, then whacked his head with his other hand.

“Almost forgot the most important thing, me,” he said, swallowing hard. I expected him to vomit at any moment. He handed me the item. I took it, and studied it. It was a shiny cylinder of metal. I have never seen a real cigarette, but I’ve seen them in movies, and if you chrome-plated one of them, it would be about that size. There was about an inch of flexible wire coming out of one end that looked like an antenna of some sort. Papa had apparently been concealing it in his big paw.

“You got to hold on to this, Cassie,” he said. “It don’t work at all ’less you be holdin’ it. You understand?”

“I understand what you said, that’s easy enough. But I don’t understand why.”

“I’d try to ’splain it to you, but I think I’m runnin’ out of time, me. I gotta get to the bathroom, right now.”

Once more he tried to stand, and since I had quietly unfastened his seat belt while he was talking, this time he rose out of his chair and banged his head on the ceiling.

I’d been ready for it because he always overreacted in zero gee. I was holding his hand, and I pulled him down and grabbed a rail with my free one and propelled us down the passageway to the door to the head, pulling him along like a big inflatable Santa Claus. I kept waiting for the eruption to hit me in the back, but it never came.

I got the door open, twisted in the air, and shoved him into the small water closet.

“Handholds right here on either side,” I said. I pushed his head a little closer to the opening. It was so sparkling clean you could have used any surface in the head for surgery. It smelled a little like lemons. “Keep your head close, Papa. I’ll get this done as soon as I can, and we’ll head for home.” I brushed the switchplate that turned on the fan. I could immediately feel the breeze passing through the room from ceiling to toilet.

“Thank you, Cassie. I think I be sick now.”

I pushed out and closed the door. Instantly I heard him retching.

Poor Papa.

—

We accelerated out of the cone of safety.

It doesn’t take long to cover a hundred thousand miles when you’re boosting at one gee. When the weight came on and pressed me back into my seat, the nasty sounds from the head slowed down a bit but didn’t completely stop. Then the engines cut out and we turned, and I could hear Papa moaning and barfing again. More acceleration—actually,
de
celeration, but it feels just the same—and then we were weightless again.

“The joystick, Cassie,” Sheila said.

“The what?”

“That’s what your father calls the little cylinder you’re supposed to be holding.”

“Oh great, spacegirl,” I chided myself. I’d forgotten all about it. I picked it up from the clasp on the table which had prevented it from getting lost floating around the cabin. With it grasped firmly in my sweaty palm, I peered at the screen.

There had been no change. I turned a few of the knobs this way and that, as Papa had showed me. I depressed the intercom button on the console beside me.

“No change, Papa. The line wavers a bit, but just as much up as down. It’s pretty much where it was when we were in the safety zone. Nowhere near the line you drew.”

“No change. Huh. Okay,
cher
, on to the next station.”

We traveled another hundred thousand miles. He seemed to get even sicker when we were motionless again, two hundred thousand miles from
Rolling Thunder
.

When we came to a weightless halt again I gripped the “joystick” tightly. And the line continued right across the screen.

“Nothing, Papa. No change.”

“No change.”

“Let’s go back, Papa. There’s not going to be any change.”

“I concur,” Sheila said.

“Okay. Let’s do that.”

—

Shortly after we started boosting again and a slightly uncomfortable—for me—one gee settled in over my body, I crept quietly to the head. I eased the door open and saw Papa with his arms around the toilet. He was sound asleep. He was snoring like a buzz saw. But he woke up and looked at me.

“No change,” he said, and scratched his fingers through his beard. His eyes had taken on an intensity I hadn’t seen since we boarded the ship.

“That be interesting,” he said.

You bet. And when Papa says something is interesting, there’s no telling what he’s going to think of next.

Polly:

As Cassie likes to tell me, there is usually a good side and a bad side to everything, and I tend to see the bad side first. Though I really hate to agree with her when she’s talking about me, I have reluctantly concluded that she is right.

My first reaction when I lost the scissors-paper-rock game was to mope because she was going to be taking a trip outside the ship, having an adventure, while I was going to be stuck with the family having a meeting about this ruckus stirred up by what Papa had said. I mean, is there anything more exciting than sitting around a table with your relatives, talking about stuff most of them, including me, don’t even understand?

But as the guests began to arrive I realized there was a silver lining to the cloud. Mike and Marlee came walking down the driveway and right behind them came Apollo. Excuse me, I meant Patrick.

And where was my sister? Why, about a hundred thousand miles away and receding fast.

Eat your heart out, bitch. I’ve got him all to myself.

I smiled at him as I held the back door open for them, but I didn’t overdo it. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake Cassie had made, throwing myself at him, practically dropping my knickers and waving my ass at him. What I decided to do was sneak up on him, insinuate myself into his space as if accidentally, and see what developed.

I wished I had a better idea how to do that. Not to toot my own horn, but though we may not be exactly the
most
gorgeous girls in the ship, we’re attractive enough that we’ve seldom had to make a play for a particular guy. They usually come on to us if we just wait. Now I was wishing I’d more carefully studied the techniques of the handful of real flirts in our social circle.

“Everybody’s gathering in the music room,” I told them, and watched Patrick pass through the kitchen and turn right to go down the hallway. The dude looked good from every angle. Fantastic buns.

Mama Podkayne had assigned me the role of greeter and bartender, and that’s what I did for the next hour as guests arrived at the back door.

Travis was already back there with Mama.

Granddaddy Ramon and Granny Evangeline came in together, followed quickly by Aunt Elizabeth and Dorothy. I offered everyone beverages and plates to fill with the snack items Mama had ordered from the commissary. Granddaddy asked for a beer, Granny wanted a glass of white wine, Aunt Liz opted for sparkling water, and Dorothy asked if we had any of that eighteen-year-old Glenlivet (now thirty-eight-year-old, since there was no point in storing hard liquor in time suspension), and I told her of course we did. Although Travis is an admitted alcoholic, for many years now he has been able to drink as long as he keeps it to one glass of Scotch per week, when he’s out of the bubble. We always stock it.

I fixed the drinks, taking a sip of our ship-grown Chablis and finding it acceptable. Scotch tastes like medicine to me.

While I did that, Great-grandpa Jim and Great-granny Audrey arrived, and I poured some more of the wine for them.

There were more relatives arriving and more drinks to fix, then Patrick came into the kitchen with orders from Travis (Scotch), Mama (Dr Pepper), Marlee (gin and tonic), and Uncle Mike (Singapore sling). That last was Uncle Mike busting my balls, challenging me to see if I could make one. I had to look it up, and I had to place a quick order to the liquor store for cherry brandy and Benedictine, and they arrived within five minutes.

(Want to make one? Two parts gin, one part cherry brandy, one part pineapple juice, one part lime juice, one-half part Cointreau orange liqueur, one-half part Benedictine herbal liqueur, a little grenadine syrup, a dash of bitters. Pour into a shaker over crushed ice and do the cha-cha-cha until the shaker is frosted, strain into a tall glass, and add a stick of pineapple and a cherry. Then
you
drink the whole mess. It sounds awful to me.)

I found a little paper cocktail umbrella and set it afire, blew it out, and stuck the twisted remains into the cherry, making sure to get a little bit of the ashes on the surface of the drink. That’s me busting
his
balls.

It got a little frantic there for a while. I hadn’t realized there were going to be so many friends and relatives at the meeting. There were third cousins I only saw on rare occasions, like when Papa came out of his bubble.

In addition to family, most of the people who had been present at the meeting in the Common Council chamber showed up. There was Governor Wang (sparkling water), Mayor Bull (Pernod, I had to order out again), Mayor Ngoro (just plain tap water, please, how about a slice of lemon with that, okay, thank you sweetheart), Rachel Walters (white wine), and Max Karpinski (vodka and red wine, yuck). I soon picked up an assistant, my ten-year-old cousin Katy (strawberry soda). I didn’t allow her near the alcohol, but she seemed to enjoy taking the tray in and distributing the drinks as I mixed them. She had a big grin after taking the drink to Uncle Mike.

Things eased up, and I managed to get down to the music room to see what was going on. Mama and Travis had been kept busy moving the pianos and harpsichords and display cases and replacing them with folding chairs from the basement. She had dragooned two cousins to help out. It was lucky that the room was large, even bigger than our huge family room, because it was almost filled up. I’d say there were sixty or more people sitting around, chattering. It seemed more like a sedate cocktail party than a critical meeting, and I saw Travis pacing impatiently in one corner, eager to get things started. I checked the snack table and saw that, while it had been attacked by the mob, it was still holding up okay. It was pretty noisy in there, between the talking and the crunching of potato chips.

I spotted Patrick across the room, talking to another cousin. I believe her name was Natalie, one of the huge Broussard clan. I assayed her critically and reluctantly decided that she had all the goods, and they were all in the right places. But I was pleased to see she didn’t know how to dress. She was wearing some dreadful leather shirt with fringes that swayed back and forth as she moved.

Unfortunately, it’s well-known that most boys don’t give a damn how we dress. They are much more interested in getting us out of our clothes.

I looked down at myself. I hadn’t had time to change into something nice, and there was a dark stain on my shirt where I’d spilled something. Should have worn an apron.

I decided to take a break. Mama has strict ideas on hostessing and feels no one should have to make their own drinks, but screw that. I wasn’t a servant. Let them fend for themselves for a while.

I made a pit stop, and when I got off the pot, I had a great idea to break up the boredom and break somebody
else’s
balls, namely the carbon copy. I phoned Cassie and shot the breeze with her for a bit, then dropped my bombshell.

“Uh-oh, Patrick just came out of the room, and it looks like he’s looking for me. Gotta go.”

And then I hung up, and turned off my phone. I had a big, silly grin on my face. That should keep her worried. Now, to make it come true.

—

I took a quick shower, then hit the closet.

What would be the most effective counterpoint to Natalie’s pioneer-mother covered-wagon Annie Oakley duds? Well, a cocktail dress would shut her down for sure, but obviously it was the wrong setting for that. I needed something casual.

I flirted with the 1950s, not the pleated skirt, silly hat, high heels, pointy-boobs bra and girdle look, but bohemian. Beatniks, they were called, and the girls wore tight pedal pushers and loose, sloppy sweaters or sweatshirts.

Nah.
Too
casual.

But just a decade later, everything changed. Women’s clothing loosened up. Hair got long and straight instead of permed and teased. Bras became less confining, or vanished altogether. Sandals replaced foot-ruining high heels. Some women wore very short skirts known as minis, some wore long, flowing ones with peasant blouses.

I went with some faded jeans and a tie-dyed top that was a beautiful riot of color. Combed my hair out, put on a headband with peace signs around it. Tied a knitted belt on to cinch in and show off my waist. Stepped into a pair of light brown soft leather moccasins. Some feathered earrings, a couple of bracelets, a gold necklace—accessorizing is critical!—and I was almost ready. I freshened my makeup and looked myself over. Go get him, girl. All of this took about twenty minutes.

I left the bedroom and went back down the hall to the music room. Inside, they still weren’t down to business. Patrick was still talking to Cousin Natalie. I decided her drink refill would be rum and Coke and a lot of Tabasco sauce.

Uncle Travis was off in one corner, talking into his antique radio-telephone, something almost a hundred years old. Or the shell was, anyway, though I doubted the insides were original.

He looked pretty upset, pacing back and forth, gesturing with his free hand, all while trying to keep his voice down. I edged around the room and tried not to look snoopy as I trained an ear on him. I couldn’t make out many words, but a few names came through. There was Jubal, and Sheila, the AI. But the name I heard most often was Cassie, and it was clear he wasn’t happy with her.

I didn’t know what to make of that. Normally, I wouldn’t worry much about Sis’s getting chewed out, but she was way, way out there, and Papa was with her. The sort of trouble you could get into out there was not something to be flip about.

I was trying to get closer, but he hung up.

The meeting got started, with Travis grabbing a tambourine said to have been used by Janis Joplin out of a display case and hammering the skin with his fist—which caused Mama to wince. Well, the thing was getting on to 150 years old, and that skin was delicate. But it held up, and he put it down and raised his hands over his head as the noise quieted down.

He asked everyone to take a seat, which most everyone did, with a lot of murmuring and scraping. Governor Wang and George Bull and Max Karpinski and Rachel Walters joined him, standing on each side of him. There were two other people who I didn’t know, and I assumed they were either scientists or from the government. I leaned back against the wall far to one side, near the door, as befitted my role as hostess. Mama did the same on the other side of the room.

“Thank you all for coming,” Travis said. “As you all know, we have a big decision to make in the coming days. Jubal Broussard is at this moment probing the edges of what we call the ‘safety zone,’ that area that is cleared of the very thin gas and dust of interstellar space.”

That caused a lot of surprised reactions from the crowd, and not everyone looked happy to hear it.

I got a better chance to gauge the crowd now that I wasn’t hustling back and forth with drinks and bowls of snacks. I saw now that there were a lot of people not of the family. I knew the names of some of them, like the minister of education and the chief engineer, and I knew others by reputation or from appearances on the news or entertainment shows. There was Fiona Kelly, the head newsreader for RTBS, and two of the prominent reporters. Some faces were familiar, but I couldn’t put names to them. By their dress, I assumed some of them were businesspeople and others were community leaders of one sort or another. You really can tell a lot about the majority of people by the clothes they wear to a meeting like this.

After a quick and informal head count, I estimated that about half the room was relatives and the other half movers and shakers in the ship. For the first time, that struck me as a little odd. It’s a quite different circumstance from anything that existed back at Old Sun, to live in a world that is actually
owned
by someone, that someone being my beloved uncle Travis and, by extension, his family.

In other words, by me. I actually own shares of the Rolling Thunder Corporation. I don’t know exactly how many—it’s never seemed important to me—but it’s not a lot compared to Mama and Papa and the other older members of the family. But if it came to a decision by the corporation, I’d have to vote those shares.

It was a sobering thought. A very important decision was going to be made soon, and I wasn’t sure which was more important: the elected representatives or the corporation. Looking at the faces of the people gathered there, I saw concern, and fear. I figured the meeting might get interesting after all.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Oh, there were differing opinions expressed, but after a half an hour it seemed to me that nothing was really getting accomplished. It was civilized, no shouting, no finger-pointing. If they wanted to keep things as they were, they found it easy to believe that Papa was wrong.

If they feared dying from this strange stuff Papa said he had discovered more than they feared the upheaval stopping the ship would cause, they trotted out all the great things he had done. If not for him, we might still have hardly made it to Mars, much less the other planets, and here we were, light-years from Old Sun, using engines invented by Papa.

But what about Jubal? said the go-ahead faction. He’s always been a little bit crazy, right? Papa is crazy, no question. It’s his own wonderful brand of crazy. But what if he’s losing it? He has too many phobias to count, the naysayers pointed out. How can we tell this isn’t just another one? He shouts “Stop the ship!” What the hell? How does he go into the bubble cool and calm and collected and come out of it
with zero time elapsed
babbling nonsense about some mysterious “dark lightning”?

And so forth.

I’ve found that most meetings are like that. People stake out a position at the outset and keep repeating the same arguments over and over, as if by saying them twenty times they will convince everyone to see it their way. I have also found, in everything from meetings of the Girl Guides to the solemn deliberations of the Council, that very few minds are ever changed.

But that doesn’t stop them from talking.

I kept my eye on Travis, wondering what his strategy was. He kept quiet, listened politely to what everyone had to say, content to let Governor Wang chair the meeting.