Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning) (11 page)

As if on signal, the sun dimmed quickly and shut off. Streetlights came on, including one just over our heads.

“Come on, Poll, turn around and let me take another look at your ass.”

“You can kiss it while you’re down there.” But I turned. She squatted and lifted the hem of my shorts. She clucked her tongue.

“Shit, babe, you’re bleeding.”

“How bad is it?”

“Well, it hasn’t reached your sock.”

Cassie pulled off her halter and ran it up the back of my leg. She showed it to me, and it wasn’t too bad, though I never like seeing my own blood.

She lifted the back of the leg of my shorts and poked around a little.

“What’s it look like?”

“
Big
bruise. Covers most of your cheek. The dressing is coming off. We need to change it. This might not have been the best idea we ever had. I’m amazed you got this far, dude.”

She stood up and came around by my side. She pulled my uninjured arm over her shoulder and took a lot of my weight.

We hobbled on home.

—

At the end of the dock we stripped off and took our customary plunge into the warm waters of the pond. Well, Cassie plunged and I lowered myself carefully, not wanting to get the cast on my arm wet. I hung on to the dock as I dunked, paddled around a bit, then waded ashore with Cassie. We squeezed the water out of each other’s hair and hurried to the big live oak.

Our tree house is a wonderful sight to behold. “Swiss Family Robinson,” Papa Jubal said when he finished building it. It’s two stories high, with a terrace on each level. Living room below, bedroom above, tiny kitchen off to one side. When we were young it was a play kitchen, suitable for baking mud pies, but later we put in a hot plate, a microwave, and a small cooler. A long set of stairs leads to a crow’s nest so high up that it sways in a gentle breeze.

Access is by rope ladder. We climbed it, and Cassie pulled it up behind her. We had never put up a sign saying
NO BOYS ALLOWED
, but that was the idea. In fact, we had never invited anyone but a few of our best girlfriends up there. Once it was finished, Papa never came up unless he was invited or was adding something on, and Mama Podkayne only did a monthly safety inspection when we were very young. She hadn’t done that in years. The tree house was our refuge, our own private place.

It was cozy inside. A little too cozy, in fact. Papa had built it without realizing his daughters would top out at over six feet. These days we brushed our heads if we stood up straight.

With typical
Rolling Thunder
artfulness, Papa had built it on the outside to look like the “dilapidated” bait house we lived in, with wood weathered gray and looking slightly out of kilter, and a rusty tin roof that sagged in the middle. The windows all looked like they had been salvaged from other buildings, none of them matching.

Inside was a different story. It was all fine woods that glowed warmly yellowish in the light from what looked like hurricane lamps. There were nice carpets on the floor. The walls were lined with shelves and cabinets that held dolls and dollhouses, popguns and bows and arrows, train sets, and lots and lots of books. The kitchen was a ship’s galley. The back deck looked like the prow of a sailing ship, with a mast, ropes leading up to cross sprits, and a bowsprit pointing out over the pond. Under that was a painted figurehead that looked a lot like Mama Podkayne, and on the deck were two small cannons that made enough smoke and noise to drive Mama crazy some days.

Inside again, a spiral stairway led up to the bunkroom. Oh, yes, we’d had it good growing up.

We grabbed towels and dried off, and Cassie went upstairs and threw down some fresh clothes, shorts and tops. I was nosing around the kitchen. There wasn’t much in the freezer but a frozen pizza. I sniffed it dubiously.

“How old do you think this is?”

“No more than two years,” Cassie said. “Let’s eat it.”

It was tough as leather, but we wolfed it down and chased it with cans of cold Dr Pepper. We dumped the dishes into the pneumatic trash bin, where they would be whisked away to the central washing facility, sterilized, and shipped off to who-knows-where. We once tried marking a couple of them to see if we ever got the same ones back, and got a nasty mail back from Housekeeping telling us we’d ruined the dishes. Another thing we got, of course, was a lecture from Mama.

Cassie treated and redressed my wounded behind
almost
painlessly. By then we were both yawning, so we climbed the stairs to the bedroom, the most girly place in the tree house. There were tons of stuffed animals, lots of lacy trimmings, two vanities where we had played with makeup and dress-up. There were closets and dressers for our clothes.

“I’ve had it,” Cassie said.

“Long day,” I agreed.

“Long, strange day.” She paused for a moment. “What do you think’s going to happen?”

“I think we’re going to keep accelerating for a while. Papa finally agreed that he doesn’t think we’re right on the edge of whatever critical speed it is that will kill us all.”

“Yeah, but he isn’t sure.”

“Of course not. He has to do more experiments, he said. Anyway, you don’t just stop the ship overnight. If we have to turn around, it’s going to be a nightmare. So many things to do.”

“Yeah, well, we would have had to do all that eventually, even with our original flight plan. But still . . . I don’t want to go back, Polly.”

“Neither do I.”

Last we heard, the Earth was still trying to cope with the alien invasion from Europa, and not doing well at it. Mars was better, but still overwhelmed by refugees, even with 95 percent of them in black-bubble suspension. It was a horror story we had grown up listening to, and it had made a deep impression on our young minds.
Rolling Thunder
was fleeing a catastrophe, there was no other way to put it. Old Sun was a scary place to me and my sister.

—

We put on our jammies and crawled into bed.

From the time we were old enough, which was about six, we spent two or three nights every week in the tree house.

Cassie pulled a thin sheet over herself, fluffed up her pillow, and closed her eyes. In thirty seconds, I could hear her soft snore.

It drove me crazy, how she could get to sleep so fast. Somehow, she can just turn off the worry machine inside her head, the same machine that can keep me sleepless for hours before a skypool match or a big date.

About an hour later, I fell asleep, too.

—

When I woke, I was alone. Another thing about Cassie: She’s an early riser, and I’m not. She’s bright-eyed in the morning, and I’m not. She’d go so far as to say I’m grumpy. I climbed out of bed and went down the stairs to the main room. Cassie was out there, sitting on the deck with her legs hanging over the side. The clock said the sun had been on for about half an hour. There was a steaming mug of coffee beside her, and I could smell a pot in the kitchen, so I went in there and poured my own mug. It is cylindrical and rather tall, has my name on it, and a map of the interior of the ship glazed on the side. A crude map, I admit it; we all made and fired our own mugs as a class project when we were ten.

I eased down beside Cassie, wincing when my butt touched the deck.

“You need a pillow?” she snickered. “Maybe I can find you one of those inflatable things like a donut, for old folks with sore rectums.”

Things were back to normal.

“I need you to put a plug in your piehole, or I’ll see if this mug will fit into
your
rectum, sideways.”

Content to have gotten the day started with mutual insults, we sipped the coffee and looked out over the pond. There were a few dozen ducks swimming out there, dabbling for the algae that grows in the shallows: mallards, wood ducks looking like they had been hand-painted, some redheads and mergansers. Travis was a sucker for the prettier species of most animals and plants. There were a couple of the live-oak branches that hung out over the water. If we walked out on those branches, we could count on the ducks assembling under us and making a lot of noise about it. Right now, they were mostly quiet, and so was the rest of the world.

“You ever wish we had been born and grown up on Mars?” Cassie asked.

“Not really. Why?”

“Oh, I don’t wish that. But I do sort of wish I could have seen it. Or Earth, for that matter. I’d like to know what it’s like to be on the outside of a planet instead of the inside.”

“You can go outside if you want. As long as you hold on tight.”

“Sure, go out there, see the stars, it’s great. But I’d like to see a starry night from Mars, or the Earth.”

“Not many starry nights on Earth,” I said. The invasion of the giant crystal beings from Europa before we were born had left Earth’s weather so violent and erratic that it was dangerous to even go outside most of the time.

“Why are you always so negative? I’m just freewheelin’ here. And with what’s happening, there’s a chance we may be going back.”

She was right about that.

“Just what would you like to see on Earth, other than the stars, which you can see right here?”

“Sunrise,” she said. “Sunset. They look so beautiful.”

Again she was on the money. I had to admit that I had sort of thought from time to time that it would be nice for the sun to come up in the west and sink slowly in the east. Or was it the other way?

“The moon,” I said, suddenly. “I wonder what that looks like in the sky? How big do you think it would be?”

“There’s some way to simulate it,” she said, “but I can’t recall what it is. Is it holding your arm out straight and looking at your thumbnail?” She suited her action to the words, and we both looked at her thumbnail. Somehow, I’d always thought the moon seen from the Earth would be bigger than that.

“Or two moons on Mars,” she went on. “A lot smaller but moving a lot faster.”

“Jupiter from Europa,” I said. “
That
must be something to see.” Mama Podkayne had spent some time on Europa, and in fact had been there when the Europan crystals began their once-in-sixty-million-year voyage of destruction to the Earth.

“I’ll just stay on Earth and Mars in this dream if you don’t mind,” Cassie said. “If we end up back there, I’d like to see mountains and glaciers. And the sea, of course, I have a hard time imaging the sea.”

She wasn’t the only one. It just seems so outrageous, all that water in the Pacific Ocean. And all the creatures in it, most of which we couldn’t bring along because we had no environment where they could thrive.

“Deep-sea diving,” I suggested.

“Riding around in hot cars.” We’d seen all this stuff in movies from Old Sun. Lots of it looked like fun. “With boys.”

“Well, of course, with boys. Only I’d want it to be my car, and I’d want to drive.”

“Hell, yes.”

“But there’d be no skypool.”

“Shit, you’re right.” She shook her head. “Well, screw it then.”

We both laughed.

“I’d always hoped to see those things, or things a lot like them, when we get to New Sun.”

“Yeah, New Earth might have its own spectacular stuff,” Cassie agreed.

“Well”—I sighed—“let’s hope so. If we have to turn around, we’ll be eighty years old by the time we get back, unless we go into a bubble.”

“There you go again, Little Miss Bummer. We’re not going to turn around. Papa Jubal will think of something.”

As if her words had summoned him, Papa Jubal came out the back door of the house. He was carrying a metal box with a handle on the top and steam coming out of some holes on the side.

“Hi, my darlings,” he called out. “I thought y’all might like some breakfuss.”

Cassie:

I lowered a rope and Papa attached the box to it and I reeled it up.

“Avast below!” I called out, and Papa stood to the side as I kicked the rope ladder over the side of the terrace. Polly carried the box to the table inside as Papa clambered up. I held out a hand to help him, but he didn’t need it. He gave me a big hug, and I felt good in his powerful arms.

Papa spends a lot of time in his boat when he’s visiting us, either sitting there with a fishing pole or, more often, rowing endless laps around the pond. His big hands are tough as leather, and he once described his arms as “Like Popeye the sailor man!”

He says it helps him think, and it also helps him deal with stress. I wouldn’t have been surprised that morning to see him out rowing, as I doubt he’d ever been as stressed as he was yesterday.

But another thing he does to deal with it is cooking, and he’s good at it. Much better than Mama. The difference is that he loves it, and she doesn’t. When Papa is in the bubble, half of our meals are delivered from restaurants all over the interior, or even from the commissary, where we take potluck of whatever’s on the steam tables that day. One more reason to be happy to see our father, as if we needed another.

When Papa makes breakfast he doesn’t stint on it. He’s a firm believer that the day should be started with food that “sticks to the ribs.” You will not find yogurt and fruit or a slice of dry toast on our breakfast table (though you will find plenty of fruit in the other two meals). You will find heaps of crisp bacon, andouille sausage, and eggs scrambled with peppers, garlic, onions, tomatoes, Tabasco, and cheese.

That’s what we filled our plates with that morning of the second day of Papa’s return from the bubble.

Not much was said as we scarfed it all down, but we exchanged a lot of looks and smiles. It was good to get Papa off with just the two of us, no Mama or Uncle Travis to take up his time. I intended to do everything I could to ease his transition into this new part of his life, where once again something he thought of looked like it was going to revolutionize the world. Or our little world, anyway.

So after breakfast we stuffed the dishes into the pneumo and dressed in grubbies: khaki shorts with lots of pockets, tie-dyed tees, deck shoes, and old baseball caps—Miami Mariners for me, Orlando Disneys for sis—and hopped into our flat-bottomed boat, the
Bayou Queen
, and rowed out into the pond for a day of fishing.

And that’s what we did for the first two hours. Fish. We opened bottles of cold soda and sat there with hooks dangling in the water. Papa had never been into all that fancy casting stuff. “Too much like work,
cher
.” As usual, I had to put the minnows on the hooks for pukin’ Polly, who couldn’t stomach it. I’ll admit I don’t exactly
enjoy
hurting the little buggers, but I sort of figure it’s a minnow’s destiny to be bait. I’m sure a minnow would disagree.

Our fishing is mostly catch and release. We hook into bass and catfish, with the occasional perch. There are lakes for pike and walleye, but we don’t frequent them.

For us, there’s a Goldilocks fish. Not too small, not too big. We’re easy graders when it comes to the little ones, tossing anything back that wouldn’t fill a frying pan. Same goes for the honking big cats and bass, fish that might have been alive for the whole trip of
Rolling Thunder
. We call them old-timers, and treat them with respect.

Well, I don’t suppose it’s really respectful to put a painful hook into their lips and jerk them roughly out of their element, but I have to figure it’s better than the pan.

My feeling about fishing is that if it’s too icky for you, then be a vegetarian. More power to you.

After two hours and with three big cats on the string, Papa broke out the oyster po’boys and we dug in. These were smoked oysters, not from Papa’s precious reserve of bubble-fresh raw ones, but they were good. Papa makes the sandwiches wet, with lots of mayo, cayenne, and remoulade, hot enough to turn your face red. You need a bib if you care about your clothes, and afterward you need a good hand-washing in the pond.

We really had enough fish for the night’s meal, but none of us were eager to head for shore, so we baited hooks and dropped them. But after that, it was a lucky day for anything we caught. A minute to admire and take a picture of a big one, and then back to Davy Jones’s locker with a horror story to tell your friends.

“Can I talk to y’all about something?”

It startled me. Sure we’d talked a little in the last hours, but it was about ordinary stuff, all the things Papa wanted to hear about after a spell in the bubble. What we’d learned in school, where we’d gone, what we’d done, how old friends were doing, any new friends. We were careful talking about boyfriends and dates because Papa worried about that. He wanted to hear play-by-plays of all our skypool games though he had never attended one because he was too afraid for us. Naturally, he was horrified at Polly’s fall and injury, though we were both careful to minimize it, laugh it off.

But his tone of voice was quite different just then. Just like we know when Mama’s about to give us a blistering, we know when Papa is worried about something.

“Anything, Papa,” Polly said.

“Y’all know it’s hard for me, ’cause I can never talk right.”

“We can always figure it out,
cher
.”

He smiled at us, and nodded.

“That true. I don’t know how y’all do it, untying my tongue and all. But I’m gonna do my best, me, to tell you something I don’t even rightly understand myself.”

Well,
that
was going to be a challenge.

“I’m all ears, Papa,” I said.

“Well, y’all know that when somebody’s in a black bubble, ain’t no time passes. No time at all.”

“That’s what you always told us,” Polly said.

“An’ it be true. In one way. But not true in another.”

“Is it some sort of quantum thing, Papa?” I asked.

“No, honey, it’s different. What I know for sure is that
something
going on in wherever it is we go when we go in a bubble.”

“And where is that?” I asked him.

“That, I still don’t know for sure,
cher
. I’m working on it. But it seem like it a multidimensional space that ain’t really like our space, and ain’t really like our time. I don’t figure it may actually be in our universe at all.”

“But you can go there and not be hurt?” Polly said. “I mean, you come out the same as you went in, right? As least, as far as I can tell you do.”

“Far’s I can tell, me, too.”

“So, Papa, the one thing different is that you . . . you had some sort of
idea
. Something must have changed in your
mind
, because you were feeling fine when you went in the bubble and you weren’t fine when you came out.”

“
Exackly
, sweetness. And it done happened before, too.”

“When was that, Papa?” Polly wanted to know.

Papa frowned and bit his lip.

“It was back when your mama was in the bubble her ownself. You know about that, don’t you?”

Oh, yes, we knew.

—

Mama was under the Europan ice, in a black bubble, when the giant crystal beings began their migration to Earth. No one knows why they did it, but it seems they had been doing it almost since the beginning of the solar system, causing huge numbers of extinctions. Every sixty million years or so, they erupted from Europa and went to Earth. It seems likely they killed the dinosaurs, among other creatures.

During the ten years Mama was under the ice, Papa was also in a black bubble. He spent much of his time there. Otherwise, he would probably be dead by now, or alive at the age of 112. As it is, his internal clock is reading fifty-seven. Papa didn’t find life on Mars very satisfying. He longed for his familiar surroundings in Florida or Louisiana. The big habitat Travis constructed for him on Mars felt like just that: a habitat, like in a zoo. No one was staring at him or throwing him peanuts, but that’s how he felt.

He couldn’t go back to Earth; he was too famous, too much a target for those who were convinced they could pry the secret of the bubbles out of his poor, abused brain.

So he and Mama were in their own separate bubbles at the same time. No big deal, right? After all, at any given time there were many thousands of people inside black bubbles, in suspended time for one reason or another. At that time it was mostly people with fatal diseases hoping for a cure sometime in the future. Now, it’s millions of refugees from Earth in vast, underground, Martian vaults, and no one really knows when they will be taken out.

If they will
ever
be taken out. There’s no room for them on Mars, and Earth is less habitable every day.

On top of that, Papa and Mama were separated by somewhere between a billion and half a billion kilometers from each other, depending on where Mars was in its orbit.

But apparently distance didn’t matter when you were in a bubble. At that time, Mama and Papa had never met. But when Travis brought Papa out of the bubble to see if he could do anything about the Europan invasion, the first thing he asked for was Podkayne.

Well, he’d heard her name and for some reason was asking for her, right?

Nope. Mama wasn’t even born when Papa went into the bubble.

Somehow, in a way Papa said he still doesn’t completely understand, he made contact with Mama while no time was passing. He did something, or she did something, or
something
did something to
them
 . . . in other words, something
happened
in a place that isn’t even really a place, a place where nothing
can
happen, by definition.

—

“So that’s now I met my sweet Poddy, my darlings. The fallin’ in love part, that come later.”

Papa had told us the whole story many times. Neither of us minded. We liked all his stories, and this was one of our favorites. It was like when we were children and he or Mama would read us a story from our little library of paper books, like
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
or
If I Ran the Zoo
, only better, because these stories were true. Well, most of them were, though Papa later admitted he had made some of them up.

“I been puzzlin’ on it for a long time, me, and I figure it may be the one thing I need to . . . the one thing that will . . .” He trailed off.

“Is it that key to everything you’ve talked about, Papa?” Polly asked.

“That’s it. The thing that locks everything together, you know?”

I did know, in general terms. People have been working on it since at least Einstein, the “Theory of Everything” that would tie together all the fundamental forces of nature, of the strings that might be at the heart of quarks, of gravitation and electricity and matter and energy, quantum mechanics and relativity, dark matter, and dark energy. In science class we learned that Archimedes might have been the first one to set out on that path, but Einstein was the first one who had enough useful information and enough tools to make a good start on the problem. Others have advanced it over the years, including Papa, but the final equation remains elusive.

“So it done happened once,” he went on. “Something happened to me and your mama while we was suspended. And now it done happened again. When I come out of that thing, it just hit me all at once. I knew something I didn’t know before. I seen how another part of the puzzle fitted together. But it wasn’t like I figured anything out. It was . . . it was just
there
. Like someone done pulled the handle on a adding machine and the tape come up, and it said we was in big trouble.”

I didn’t know what he meant by the handle on an adding machine, so I had to blink it. I got a picture in the corner of my eye of a boxy contraption with a lot of buttons on the front, like the cash registers I’d seen in old movies. A hand pulled the crank on the side, and some metal bars came up and printed a number on a strip of paper. Pretty ingenious, how they managed to work around the lack of electronics in the ancient days. It was for people who didn’t know how to use an abacus, I guess.

“See, the thing about this dark lightning stuff . . . you know I told y’all about the different dimensions that might be out there. The three regular ones, and time, then other space dimensions? I’ve figured for quite a while that the dark lightning is hidin’ in one of those other universes, which normally we can’t get to at all. It’s other stuff over there, I don’t know what to call it, so I guess callin’ it what we call what it does . . . I mean, we call it dark matter and dark energy, but that’s only its shadow, the shadow of this other stuff. I’m gettin’ tongue-tied again.”

He stopped. Neither of us said anything. In a normal conversation, both of us were good at offering gentle suggestions that usually got him over a verbal roadblock, but this? How do you help him when he’s talking about the shadows of some stuff that ain’t matter and ain’t energy, and is hiding in the eighty-seventh dimension? I glanced at Polly, who gave me a tiny shrug that meant “It’s way beyond me, too, spacegirl.”

“But this stuff,” he finally went on, “they’s so much of it that it reaches over into our universe some whichaway, and it show itself as a different kind of energy and a different kind of gravity. We ain’t got nothing can detect it except by lookin’ at far-off galaxies and stuff like that. But it’s there, and it’s all around us, all the time, yes indeed. It’s passing through us right now, lots of it.”

“So what’s so bad about it?” I asked.

“Most of the time, ain’t nothing bad about it at all. Only when you get goin’ fast enough, it’s a different story. Here’s the deal. Way back, they done proved that there ain’t no ether. Space ain’t water or air, and we don’t need a medium to carry light waves, which ain’t really waves, anyway. And that still holds up. But this new stuff, this dark lightnin’ . . .

“This stuff just be there, all over the place. It look like it’s thicker in some places than in others, but it’s there. It leakin’ over from some other universe, and it be the most important stuff
in
our universe. I don’t think there could
be
any regular space without it. I think it may be what creates space its
own
self.”