Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning) (17 page)

“You can call me Sheila.”

“Sheila it is.”

I sat down and immediately knew that I could sleep like a puppy dog in a chair like this. When I got my own home, it would have a chair like this. When I was ancient and spindly-legged and gray, I’d want to drool away the days in a chair like this.

“Your father wishes to find a point half a million miles from
Rolling Thunder
, and slow to a standstill there, relative to the ship. Correct?”

“That’s about it, yeah.”

“That’s easy enough. Is there anything else I should know? Such as the purpose of the trip? If there are any extra dangers involved?”

Some AI programs are a lot smarter than others. I figured Sheila was about as smart as they come. It was typical of Travis that he’d want the best for his little ship, so Sheila was subtle enough in her thinking to sense that something else was going on. Or at least that she hadn’t been told every part of the story. She would be completely loyal to her captain—in this case, me!—no matter what she was told to do.

“You’re one smart cookie,” I told her. I’ve never been sure if flattering an AI had any effect at all, but I figured it couldn’t hurt. “This
is
an unusual mission, and I’ll fill you in on all I know and try to get Papa to explain what he knows. In the meantime, why don’t we get under way?”

“We’re not really ready to get under way until you and your papa are strapped in. I understand the need to minimize the gee stresses on your papa, but a short period of free fall is unavoidable.”

So I went back to the lounge, where Papa was still tinkering. I went down on one knee beside him.

“It’s time to get going, Papa.”

“Oh, lawsy,
cher
. I hate that, me.”

“It’ll be just for a minute. Here, I’ll secure your invention here, so it doesn’t float away.”

He fumbled with his seat belt, and I watched to be sure he had it fastened right. Then I looked around. There had to be something . . .

Aha. In a small drawer under the seat were containers little changed since the days of the Wright Brothers, I guess. Barf bags. I looped the string on one of them behind his head.

“Just a short time, Papa.” I patted his leg, which was trembling, and hurried back to the cockpit. I sat down and strapped in.

“The sooner, the better,” I said.

—

The doors in front of us moved quickly back and we rolled into the launch area. I could hear the doors closing behind us.

I heard a faint
pop
as the very thin air around us was blown out. For just a moment, the little bit of water vapor still around crystallized into very dry snow, but then it was gone.

“Launching.” And just like that, I was weightless. I heard a moan from back in the cabin.

The forward port arched over my head, so I looked up and saw the rectangular opening of the launch bay rapidly shrinking away from us. It looked like a door in an infinite black wall. That would be the outer surface of the ship. But that view lasted only about five seconds, and the ship rotated quickly through 180 degrees.

Then, no more than ten seconds after we dropped away, the engines came on, fore and aft, and gently boosted us up to one gee in no more than another ten seconds.

“Are you okay back there, Papa?”

“A little green,
cher
,” he called back. “Didn’t have to use that bag, though.” He sounded proud of that, and I smiled. I was proud of him, too. People can’t help motion sickness, and I’ve never thought it was funny. I just thank fate that it’s never affected me.

“Dim the lights, please, Sheila.”

After a few moments, my pupils dilated enough to see the stars in all their harsh grandeur. And it was a sight I wouldn’t soon forget.

When we go to the bridge, we see a dome of stars, a simulation of what the sky would look like if you weren’t still quite a ways underground. But it’s false. It is a representation of what the stars would look like if we were motionless relative to those stars. In other words, some are brighter and some are faint, none of them twinkle, a few of the brighter ones show some color other than diamondlike white, and, most important, they are more or less evenly scattered across the sky. The reasoning is that it just looks better that way, and it is an accurate projection of where we are in space.

The way it really looks is deeply disturbing. Because the universe
should not
look like that.

The ship was oriented with
Rolling Thunder
’s bow to my right, the stern to my left. We were blasting away from the big ship, but we weren’t going up like the traditional rocket ship, nose up, tail down. The thrust was coming from the front and rear, balanced, and thrusting away from the deck that was now our floor. That way, instead of being pressed backwards into our seats and needing a ladder to get from the nose to the tail, we were able to get up and walk around normally.

Directly in front of me and above me, there were very few stars at all. They got more and more attenuated, more separated from each other, the more I looked to my left. It was a vast blackness, a blackness so deep it seemed to draw my eye down into the depths of infinity.

Then, as my eye moved more to the right, I began to pick up a few faint stars. The more I looked to the right, the denser they became, until when I was looking right in the direction of
Rolling Thunder
’s forward motion, the stars became like a thick soup of light. They were crowded together, the brightest ones nearest the center of the region, the others getting fainter and redder the more distant they were from that area.

Right in the center of the brightest light was a perfectly round circle of blackness. It was big, covering a large area of the star soup, but there were plenty of superbright stars all around it.

It looked like nothing so much as a monster black hole. It looked like something was pulling every star in the universe down into its devouring maw. It looked like the end of the world, the end of space and time.

What it was, was the million-mile squeezer bubble floating in front of us, protecting us from the impacts of interstellar gas and dust. Beyond that bubble would be even more stars, more crowded, more intense.

—

I’m the one who’s good at physics, but I’m not that good. The phenomenon is known as “aberration.” This is a relativistic effect whereby, somehow, the light from stars that are actually
behind
you impacts your eye from such a direction that it seems like the star is
ahead
of you. For a further explanation, consult a physics text or ask my papa.

We don’t do constellations in
Rolling Thunder
. They keep changing. They change at Old Sun, too, but over thousands of years. In my world, you can see some star displacement in just months.

These days, as we’re traveling at .77c, soon to pass the .78c mark, the huge majority of stars are near celestial north, which is defined as the direction we’re traveling. They are squeezing together tighter and tighter. Everything in that area has been significantly blue-shifted, which means that if a star is actually a red giant, it now looks like a blue giant. But some of them have shifted right out of the single octave the human eye can see. Those stars that started out blue have now been shifted into a higher wavelength, in the ultraviolet, and are no longer visible to the naked eye. But they’ve been replaced by stars that used to be red, and are now yellow or orange.

This sky, this squeezed version of the natural order, which was an even spread of stars in all directions, brought it home viscerally just how incredibly fast we were moving. It’s one thing to call up the little speedometer app in your vision and get a number. It was something else entirely to see with my own eyes just what our speed had done to the universe around us.

From the frame of reference of Old Sun, our clocks were going slower, and the length of the ship was much shorter than when we began.

Scary thoughts, those.

—

After staring at that narrowing universe of stars for a few minutes, I unbuckled and went out of the cockpit and into the main cabin. Papa was engrossed in his gizmo. He was so wrapped up in his work that he had forgotten to take off the barf bag, which still dangled from his chin, covering his white Santa Claus beard. I sat beside him and pulled it over his head. He didn’t even notice at first, then he glanced at me.

“Thanks,
cher
. I didn’t mess it up, me.”

“If I may interrupt,” Sheila said. “A few moments ago I detected a stomach rumbling. Maybe I could fix a meal, as we have several hours to kill. I am able to prepare most of the simpler foods.”

I realized with an embarrassed shock that it had probably been my tummy that had rumbled. I hadn’t really noticed it during all the preparations, but I was really hungry.

“How about a sandwich?” I asked.

“I make a pretty mean bacon cheeseburger with thin-sliced purple onions and succulent beefsteak tomato slices, accompanied by steak fries and a special dipping sauce.”

I managed not to drool, but suddenly I could smell the burger.

“I like mine with some sliced jalapeño peppers melted into the cheese, if you have ’em,” Papa said.

“I have ’em,” she said. “Toasted buns?”

“That’d be great,” I said. “Do you have any bleu cheese?”

In ten minutes, the console next to Papa’s chair opened and delivered two plates almost covered with big hamburgers, a wicker basket heaped with fries, and two Dr Peppers. There were little bowls for mayo, mustard, pickle relish, and catsup. It was something like getting meals from the community kitchens, delivered by pneumo tube, only much, much nicer.

Only the best for my uncle Travis.

I was halfway through devouring the burger before I felt like talking again.

“How’s it going, Papa?” I said. “Is that thing going to work?”

“Hmmm? Oh, yeah, just makin’ some final adjustments.”

“Maybe you could tell me how it works,” I ventured.

He looked at me, sadly. “I cain’t tell you that, darlin’. Some of it ain’t real clear to me, even. But I can tell you what it does.”

“Perhaps it would help,” Sheila put in, “if I had an idea what you’re looking for, as well. To better understand the purpose of this mission.”

Papa thought about it for a moment.

“What it does, I hope, it measure the difference between how much dark lightnin’ we’re gettin’ in the ship, and how much there is outside. And then if there be any difference with how much is outside the shield.”

“Dark . . .” Sheila trailed off.

“Dark matter,” I clarified. “Or dark energy. Or maybe both. Right, Papa?”

“Maybe two different sides of the same thing,
cher
. One of the things I’m hopin’ to find out, me.”

“I am familiar with both concepts, of course,” Sheila said. “I didn’t know that a detector had been invented.”

“I didn’t know m’self until a few days ago,” Papa said, and laughed. “But if I’m right, this here t’ing should do the job. If I’m right.”

—

Sheila and Papa spent the next half hour talking about dark lightning. I sat there, quiet as a mouse (however quiet that may be; we have no mice in the ship, except probably in time stasis) and listened intently at first, then with increasing dismay, and finally with a profound sense of inferiority as they tackled matters that maybe Einstein could have followed. And maybe not. I soon had a headache. I thought I could feel frown lines permanently etching themselves into my forehead.

I took a break, going back to the bridge and pulling up some music. I listened to some of Mama’s greatest hits, and some from my own time, and, gradually, I felt better.

When I got back to the main cabin, they were still at it. We had been boosting for about an hour and a half. There was still another hour of boosting away, then two and a half more of decelerating. I wondered if anyone was interested in a few hands of gin rummy.

No, not really. A screen had popped up from a table and was displaying rows of equations. I settled back in my comfortable chair and considered calling up a movie or a book. This was supposed to have been an adventure, but so far it was about as exciting as watching a tennis match with no ball.

Then a call came in. I blinked receive, but didn’t get a picture. Naturally, it was Polly, checking up on me.

“’Sup, sis?” I answered.

“Well,” she said, with an unmistakable tone of resentment, “so far it’s about as exciting as a meeting of the Alzheimer’s Remembrance League. How about you?”

“Oh, not much happening,” I said, “after we fought off the attack of the fleet of star destroyers and dodged our way through the kryptonite meteor swarm. Papa thinks he can repair the burned-out megatron inverter if he can only find a bobby pin.”

“You should never leave home without a bobby pin, stupid.”

“The truth is, other than eating a world-class burger and fries, I haven’t had a damn thing to do. Papa and Sheila have been jabbering fluent Inuktitut and writing Sanskrit.”

“Sheila?”

“The resident AI. A great cook, and apparently an even better mathematician.”

“It couldn’t be more boring than what’s happening here. Mama and Travis and most of our family and friends are talking, talking, talking. And when that’s done, they talk some more. I took a break to powder my nose. I guess I’d better get back . . . Uh-oh, Patrick just came out of the room, and it looks like he’s looking for me. Gotta go.”

Chalk one up for the evil twin. Here I was rocketing away at dizzying speed from all that was near and dear to me, on an errand I had not much faith in. There she was, ready to dig her claws into my beloved. I felt the blood rush to my face.

I would have thought that sleep would be impossible, but I was wrong. I wasn’t even aware that I had fallen asleep until Sheila announced that we were fifteen minutes from our destination.

—

We had been decelerating for two hours and fifteen minutes. At some point, Sheila had flipped over and instead of our exhaust pointing back at the ship we were moving away from, we had been blasting away from the ship, slowing down.

It’s possible to turn the ship while still thrusting evenly. Sheila could adjust her thrust so finely that no one would feel it at all. And that was the case. Papa hadn’t even been aware that we had turned ship.