Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning) (10 page)

“Just about the one thing that all starships had in common, other than being powered by the squeezer drive, was that they boosted at one gee. A few of the larger ones boosted lower than that, but otherwise, why not one gee? It’ll get you nudging the speed of light pretty quick, and for the middle part of your trip, your clocks have slowed down, so saving time wasn’t really a factor. No matter how far you were going, the middle part of your trip, still boosting all the time, was going to be relatively short, to the crew, though centuries might go by back on Earth.

“But to these guys, speed
was
a factor. That’s what they claimed, anyway, that they intended to spend as little time as possible between the stars, vulnerable to whatever mysterious thing was destroying starships. So they intended to boost at two gees.”

He paused for a moment to let that sink in.

“Certainly it could be done, several years in twice the gravity you’re used to. But imagine the backaches, the fallen arches, the sagging flesh, the sore muscles and aching joints. Even a minor fall could cause a lot of injury. Imagine having your twin brother sitting on your shoulders all day, sleeping on top of you every night.”

My twin sister and I glanced at each other. She made a face.

“The thought is a frightful one,” came a voice. There was a momentary ripple of laughter, because the speaker was Max Karpinski, who was reputed to be and almost certainly was the fattest man in
Rolling Thunder
. He was a friend of the family, especially of Papa, and had spent a lot of time in our house when we were growing up. He always remembered our birthday, and was always there with presents, always something sweeter than we should really be eating, according to Mama, but since it was only once a year, and because she liked Max, she let it slide. He was okay with his corpulence (when you’re around Max you learn words like corpulence) and frequently made jokes about it. I would say he’s around sixty real years, masses in the neighborhood of four hundred one-gee pounds, and, after Papa, is the smartest man in the ship. He’s the Chief Relativist. If anyone could frolic with Papa through the quantum leaps of bubble theory, Max was the one. Though the idea of Max’s leaping made me smile.

Travis grinned at him, and even Papa looked up briefly from his gloom.

“We don’t know who they chose, Max,” he went on, “but I’ll bet three of them could fit in your pant leg. Skinny would definitely be best. And these guys were martyrs; they probably liked suffering. What they said was, the main purpose of the trip was that the first men to return from the stars should be true believers in Islam. When they got there, for instance, if they found a planet, and if it had intelligent beings on it, they intended to tell them about the Prophet and the One True Faith. And, I don’t know, maybe kill them all if they didn’t convert.

“They took off with little fanfare, but you know how carefully and thoroughly we monitor solar space, looking for the signature of squeezer drives. And how long we keep the records, which I guess will be forever, or until the Earth is destroyed. Researchers were able to go back and see the trace on old records, heading smack-dab for Centauri, at a backbreaking two gees. We’ve known that about them for some time.

“Everyone had always assumed they had intended to boost at two gees out to the midpoint, when they’d be damn close to the speed of light, then turn around and proceed at two gees deceleration for the same period until they got there. However, there are now some new techniques for analyzing some of that old data. It’s pretty amazing stuff, and I don’t know how they do it, but they can learn things from those old records, and one thing they were finally able to see was that, yes, the
Mejd Allah
did accelerate at the rate of two gees . . . for about a week. Then somebody turned on the afterburners, so to speak, and the rate moved up to four gees.”

Travis paused again. Polly and I knew some of this, from sitting in on Papa talking about what had come to him while he was in the bubble. Which, by the way, is pretty mysterious, because time doesn’t pass in the bubble. Not even a trillionth of a trillionth of a picosecond. It takes much, much longer than that for a synapse to fire in the human brain, so how did Papa get an idea while no time was passing?

I had asked about that, and Mama said they knew it was possible for something to happen during that no-time, and that she would tell us about it one day soon, and for now why don’t you just shut up? I did.

“Two gees I can believe. Three, I guess it
might
be done, but I don’t think there would be much left of you when you got there. Four . . . I can’t see it.”

“I’d weigh almost a ton,” Max put in.

“Well, we don’t really have to wonder about it because the last we could detect them, they had upped the ante to ten gees. No one could survive that for more than a few minutes. There’s just no way, short of a black bubble, and no one has ever had that technology but us.”

“So, you’re saying there was no one aboard?” That was George Bull.

“There might have been, at first. Men willing to die, to commit suicide before the gravity crushed them painfully. Testing out the ship, making sure it was reliable at high gees, is the theory we’re working with.
If
there were men aboard, I feel sure they must have sucked the gas pipe, or hung themselves, or whatever a martyr does to off himself when there are no innocent women and children to take along with him.

“Personally, I think there were men aboard. According to the gossip we heard before we fell out of contact, I’m in the minority. Most people back home feel that it was an automated ship from the start.

“It doesn’t really matter, since it was certainly an automated ship by the time it arrived back home and kissed the Atlantic Ocean long enough to kill twenty million people. The last thing the people back home learned about the ship came from using those new techniques to analyze data from observatories out beyond Pluto. And it’s the most startling of all.

“Back shortly after the impact, the exhaust trail of the incoming
Mejd Allah
was too faint to detect from the distances we’re talking about. It was moving as close to the speed of light as anything we’ve ever seen. And apparently it reached that speed rather quickly, as we now think it was accelerating at the rate of fifty to one hundred gees.”

“Fifty . . .” Max Karpinski had stood so quickly that he knocked his chair over.

“That’s right, Max. Somewhere in there. They wanted to squeeze out every ounce of relativistic mass they could. It’s impossible to figure out how long they accelerated away from the sun at ten gees or more, or how long it took them to slow down. Too many variables. They might have accelerated at fifty gees on the way out, too, or kept it at a steady ten gees. They might not have been standing on the accelerator, so to speak, at a full fifty gees all the way in.

“It doesn’t really matter. We know they were dead by that time—if they were even aboard. We know the ship must have been automatically guided, probably from shortly before they stepped it up to four gees, on the way outward. And I think we can assume that fifty to one hundred gees must have put a tremendous strain on such a large spaceship. Even before the squeezer drive, back in the 1970s, we made a missile, the Sprint, that accelerated at one hundred gees, but it was only twenty feet long and four feet wide, and it only boosted for five seconds. The
Mejd Allah
was much bigger than that, at least three hundred feet long. I wouldn’t want to try to engineer a spaceship that size that could stand up to a hundred gees over a sustained period. With those kind of stresses, something was bound to go wrong eventually.”

“Maybe that’s why it missed,” Governor Wang suggested. “Well, almost missed.”

“Almost was bad enough, but yeah, if it had hit dead on, it would have been much worse. And I agree with you. However long it was boosting, something snapped, something failed under all that weight.”

Travis stopped and sighed deeply.

“But I got sidetracked a little there. Sorry about that. The main thing we can take away from all this new information is that it seems clear now that
no one living
aboard that evil ship ever got anywhere
near
the speed of light. They were all dead long before the ship got up and over .9c. Which means that we have
no
evidence that
anyone
has
ever
traveled at a speed higher than .9c and lived to tell about it. Or come back to tell about it, anyway.

“Did their ships blow up for some reason? The
Mejd Allah
didn’t, worse luck. Were they captured by space aliens? Jubal thinks he may have the answer, and it’s not a good one for us. It’s so bad, in fact, that he wants us to turn around, stop the ship, and go back.”

This pause went on a lot longer. Max collapsed back into his chair and contemplated his enormous gut. Mayor Ngoro got up and started pacing. Rachel Walters, a mathematician and one of Travis’s brain trust, was looking skeptical, while the other mayors wore looks that ranged between baffled and frightened.

“Naturally, such an extreme step will have to be discussed, debated, eventually told to everyone, But for now, I’d like to keep it in this little group until we learn a little more. Can we agree to that?”

He got nods from most of them. A few still looked like they would need a lot of convincing. Well, hell, so would I, not that I thought my opinion amounted to much compared to Papa’s.

“All right. Now I’ll try to explain the problem, as best I can.

“What it boils down to is, Jubal thinks it’s not possible for living beings to travel beyond a certain speed. Not and remain living beings, anyway. He thinks all those other ships are still speeding away from us, with a cargo of corpses.”

Polly:

After the meeting was adjourned, the family returned to the house. You would never have known there had been a big, messy party there earlier in the day. There was not even a dirty dish. Mama took Papa into their room, putting her finger to her lips and looking sternly at us, signaling that she needed peace and quiet to try to settle Papa down. I nodded, and we went out the screen door and onto the dock.

There at the end of the meeting, when he was doing his best to explain his crazy theory, he had been seized by a panic attack so strong that Aunt Elizabeth had to be called to give him a sedative. So no one knew all the details of what had scared him so badly, though before he freaked out, he had managed to give everyone a general idea.

Me and the clone were at a loss as to what to do with ourselves. For once, motormouth Cassie didn’t have anything to say. I didn’t, either. We strolled to the end of the dock, and I sat down and patted the water gently. A couple of the huge, gold-and-white carp that live in the pond came swimming over. Some of the biggest ones are older than I am. I lifted the lid of the bucket we keep out there and took out a handful of fish pellets. I tossed a few pellets in to get their attention. Then I lowered my hand into the water with some pellets and let them swim up and eat them out of my hand. I looked out over the pond, up and around the curve. Trees, buildings, the straight rows of farmed fields, rivers, small lakes.

Home.

It was horrible to think that this lovely, peaceful place could soon become a giant coffin, hurtling out toward the edges of the universe with no one alive to see it.

What was time like then, relativistically speaking? Didn’t Einstein speak of time in terms of the observer? What if there was no observer? Is it like the tree falling in the forest with no one to hear it? Is that cat in the box in the famous quantum thought experiment alive, or dead, or both at the same time? And what does that feel like to the cat? Is the cat allowed an opinion?

“Hard to think of all this being dead,” my twin said.

“Papa says it wouldn’t necessarily affect the plants. At first.”

“I don’t think he knows for sure.”

“Neither do I.”

We were quiet for a moment, and I got to my feet.

“The way he said it, the animals would die first.”

“The brain first, he said. He thinks it’s more vulnerable to this stuff.”

“This dark lightning.”

“Whatever. So, with us and all the animals dead, what happens in here? The plants grow wild. It continues to rain on schedule. The sun goes on and off every day. The pumps keep working, so the rivers keep flowing, bow to stern. I wonder how long it would all keep working.”

“Travis built it pretty well,” I said. “But it all needs maintenance. A few decades, maybe, before it starts to all fall apart?”

“I guess so. The pumps would silt up and stop. I guess all the water would pool in the stern. The rain would stop, the plants would die.”

“Then one day,” I said, “the sun would fail. Blow up, or just stop coming on. It gives me the creeps to think of this great big empty space, totally dark, totally dead, rushing out to the stars.”

Cassie shivered, then shook her head.

“Screw it. I don’t need to think about that yet. That’s still in the future. How about we go for a run, get it off our minds?”

That’s Cassie for you. If it ain’t on the horizon, it ain’t worth worrying about. Sometimes it drives me crazy, and other times I envy it. What would it be like, not to be a worrier? Oh, hell. Why not?

“Where’s my running shoes?”

—

We got into our running shorts and halters—bright orange for me, yellow for Cassie—and running shoes, tied our hair back with scrunchies, and did a few stretches. We walked down to the road.

“The usual route?” Cassie asked.

“Sure, why not?”

When we were in training we did at least one circuit a day.
Rolling Thunder
provides some of the longer circular running tracks ever built, only they wouldn’t look circular to a planet person because they go more or less straight ahead until you get back to where you started.

It’s six and a quarter miles around the cylinder. When Travis was instructing the architects who laid out the interior, he told them not to use a perfect grid. He wanted hills here and there, and said the roads should go around them. The roads meandered, crossing small streams and the three rivers at angles. It made a pleasing pattern when you looked up the curve, a colorful quilt but not a strict geometric one.

Our route quickly took us into the village of Freedonia, capital of our home township of Freedonia. That may be a little confusing to people who aren’t from here.

The awake population of
Rolling Thunder
is around twenty thousand. It’s pretty evenly distributed through the townships, which gives each one about 1,350 souls. That’s a density of around 540 per square mile or, as Travis once put it to me, about the density of Delaware before the tsunami.

It doesn’t feel crowded. The capital of each township is always the town with the largest concentration of people, though none of them would qualify as much of a town back on Earth, or even much of a village. Travis compares the population centers to old English villages, and from the pictures I’ve seen, he’s right. Not that they all look English, but they all are rural villages with only a few medium-sized buildings. There are apartment houses, but about half the population has living quarters underground, or else it
would
start to look crowded.

We’ve always had it easy, not having to live underground, I know that. And I don’t feel particularly guilty about it. We chose our parents well, as Cassie likes to say.

South of Freedonia is the township of Mayberry, and north is Dogpatch. Since he was building and paying for the whole thing, Travis got to name anything he chose to name, and he decided on famous fictional places that he liked. From time to time—from residents of places like Dogpatch and Frostbite Falls—there is a movement to change the names, and Travis never opposes them, but the names seem to be entrenched by now, with a majority of residents proud of them.

Freedonia Township is a cluster of buildings with five streets paved with cobblestones. Mama says the theme of the buildings is Medieval Balkan, whatever that means. Many of the roofs are steep and thatched with (fireproof) straw. A stream runs through town, and there’s a real stone-grinding mill powered by a waterwheel under some towering chestnuts.

There’s a market, a cheese shop, a bicycle shop (called a blacksmith, and she does shoe horses), a few dozen other small businesses.
All
businesses on the interior are small. We have no big corporations here.

The second and, occasionally, third floors above the ground-level businesses are all apartments.

There’s an old stone multidenominational church, brought in from somewhere in the Balkans and reassembled, a town hall, a constable’s office, and the three-room schoolhouse we went to for twelve years, with a gym and athletic fields. There is a little theater which puts on shows twice or three times a year. Cassie and I played Blanche Dubois, alternating nights, last summer, to pretty good reviews.

There was the normal amount of traffic as we jogged into town. Lots of people on foot, a few on cycles of one sort or another—we have a
big
variety of foot-powered vehicles—and three horses tied to rails in front of the market. Some of the trees had turned to fall colors—I don’t know how the ecologists manage that since we don’t really have an “autumn” here, but they do—and there were red and gold leaves blowing around in the gentle breeze. The smell of fresh bread and cinnamon rolls was coming from the bakery beside the mill, and I heard music coming from some of the upstairs windows. One of them was playing an old load from our mother, who was a very big deal in the music business back on Mars. I smiled when I heard it. It was one she used to sing to us to get us to go to sleep.

Naturally, we knew almost all the people in town, and acknowledged those we saw with a hand wave. People know not to bother us when we’re on what they call the “hamster wheel,” our run around the circumference.

In no time at all we were back into the countryside. The fields around us were mostly planted in grains destined for the mill. Wheat, barley, oats, rye, buckwheat, millet. Again, there is no particular season for harvesting in our ship. The ecologists get three or four crops every “year” out of most of the land. And what we were seeing was only a part of what was actually grown in the ship. Down below in huge, low-ceilinged rooms with harsh lighting, the bulk of our daily diet was grown hydroponically, and much of the livestock was raised. But many people felt it wasn’t the same and were willing to pay a premium for “surface-raised” food.

Before long we were in Grover’s Mill Township, though you wouldn’t know it if you hadn’t seen the carved stone announcing that fact. Off to the right was Maycomb, and to our left was Castle Rock.

“Ready to pick up the pace a little?” Cassie asked me.

“Go for it.” I was being thrown off my stride by the sling around my arm but was slowly adjusting to it. It didn’t hurt too much, but I wondered if it might be a problem around mile four or five.

“How’s your ass?”

“Prettier than your face.”

She snorted and pulled ahead of me slightly. The truth was that the wound in my butt was throbbing a little. I sure didn’t want to give up before we’d completed the revolution, but I was already resigned to the fact that I was going to lose in the last quarter mile, which we always turned into a sprint race. I thought I could tough it out to the finish line, but I didn’t have all that much in reserve.

I got a short reprieve when the weather alarm sounded in my head. I blinked on the heads-up display and saw that a rain shower was scheduled to start in two minutes. Grover’s Mill was 1920s art deco. Curved corners on stucco buildings, pastel colors, and lots of little architectural flourishes I’ve always liked. Travis says the buildings are patterned on old hotels in Miami Beach, where he used to spend a lot of time. In fact, one of them, the Breakwater, used to
be
a hotel in Miami Beach. It had been dismantled and moved to Las Vegas, and so escaped the destruction of the Big Wave, and was later bought by Travis and moved here. It’s lovely, bright white with blue and yellow trim.

The town was arranged around a square with a bandstand, a fair amount of grass, and a lot of palm trees of various sorts. We took shelter in the bandstand and watched parents rounding up their children from the playground. Some of them joined us on the bandstand, and others found refuge under picnic shelters.

The sky opened up and gave us a real downpour.

You can
just
see the clear plastic rain pipes that interlace the sky in the interior, but you have to know what to look for and where to look. They are a few thousand feet up, suspended from a wire lattice.

It would have probably made more sense to have all the crop water delivered by ground-level irrigation, either sprinklers or drip lines, but Travis said, as a Florida boy, he’d miss the daily tropical rains. So his engineers figured out this system, and I’m glad they did. The rain washes everything clean.

As it was, the rain came down in sheets for almost five minutes. Cassie jogged in place, while I rested my uninjured butt cheek on the wood railing of the bandstand. I watched the rain pelting off the brightly colored playground equipment. In the center of it was a twenty-foot-high sculpture on three springy legs. At the top was a silly, cartoonish “Invader from Mars.” Every twenty minutes or so it would bounce around and shoot out rays of light, and bellow “Surrender, Earthlings!” There were other signs of alien invasion around town, which was named after a fictional place where Martians landed in a story by H. G. Wells, back in the early twentieth century, and were quickly up to no good. Or so I’m told.

—

I was hurting by the time we got to Lake Wobegon Township.

The arm was okay, but the wound in the butt was throbbing with every step I took. I wondered if it was bleeding. But sis and I are so competitive, and have trained so much together, that neither of us liked to admit that we had any quit in us.

Off to my left I could see Grand Fenwick, home of a lot of dairy cows and producer of the best cheese in the ship. We crossed a bridge over Brink Creek. I could see it meandering along among smooth stones, cascading over a few little waterfalls. Not far away to my right, the capital city of Tottering Township was situated on the waterway. Crossing that Brink Creek Bridge was always a welcome sight on these hamster runs because it meant we were less than a mile from the finish line.

With our huge old live oak in sight, we passed the flat rock that had
WELCOME TO FREEDONIA
chiseled into it, under cartoon images of Groucho, Chico, and Harpo Marx. We have watched a couple of their films and I’m afraid I don’t understand a lot of the jokes, and I think most of the music is pretty awful, though I did laugh a lot at the scene where they were stuffing people into the small cabin of an ocean liner. It was the signal that we had only a quarter mile to go, and it’s where we always forced ourselves into a sprint to the tree, and home.

Cassie started out in a sprint, and I labored to keep up with her, but it was no use, the pain was too great. After about a hundred yards of watching her ponytail bounce at an increasing distance in front of me, I gave in. I limped to the side of the road.

Ahead of me, Cassie looked back and slowed to a walk, then turned around and came back to me.

“Don’t start,” I gasped.

“I wasn’t going to say anything,” she said, leaning over with her hands on her knees, breathing hard. “I’ll tell you the truth, spacegirl, I was beginning to worry that you were going to outlast me, busted butt and all.”

I had to laugh.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she added, standing up straight. “You think we’re just too worried about Papa?”

“I don’t know, Cass. A lot has happened today. I can hardly believe that last night we played a skypool match.”