Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning) (2 page)

No answer. I was gaining speed, to the point that it was getting dangerous. The wings were shuddering a bit. Skycycles are built for maneuverability and short bursts of speed. More important, they are built for flying in zero gee, and I was feeling the insistent claw of gravity tightening around me as I descended.

There was a momentary flash of gold that might have been her, twenty degrees to my right and what I estimated was about a quarter mile below me. That was way too far below me. She must have been falling like a rock, no wings at all.

Then I saw a cluster of pinlights that I knew must have come from the edges of the emergency chute. But instead of being a nice, even circle, they were twisting around each other like a cluster of drunken fireflies. That had to mean the chute was opened but not deployed.

I swung in that direction and started pedaling hard.

Polly:

I groped around behind me. The chute handle should have been attached just over my left shoulder, where I could easily reach it in an emergency, but there was a slight chance I could deploy it accidentally. I could feel a torn patch in my jumper where it had been ripped away by something—not ripped in a way that would have deployed it, unfortunately, but just pulled free.

I twisted around as far as I was able and could just see the little yellow handle twisting in the breeze.

Not just a breeze by then, actually, more of a strong wind.

I was spinning now at a pretty good rate. I kept twisting back and forth into every position I could manage, trying to reach the handle. It was like trying to scratch that spot on your back, a few inches square, where your hand just will
not
reach.

Luckily, this spot was not stationary, but moving as the wind increased, twirling in a circle that brought it almost within my reach every few seconds. I timed it, determined to wrench my shoulder out of its socket if that’s what it took. I lunged, hearing the tendons crack . . . and I caught it.

With a great feeling of relief, I yanked on the handle. The bright orange sheet unfurled, the tiny pinlights on the edges began to blink. The radio would be sending out a distress signal.

And the chute snarled in the wreckage of my flycycle.

Well, there really wasn’t much else that could go wrong now. I was going to hit the ground. The only question was would I land on my feet, my ass, or my head.

The head seemed like the best idea, since it didn’t seem good for much else.

I have always maintained that if you manage to kill yourself on a flycycle, it’s because you did something wrong. No excuses. I didn’t doubt that when they unwrapped the wreckage from my lifeless body, they would find a weak spot on the frame that I hadn’t noticed—but should have—when I put it on. After all, how often do flycycle frames come apart in the air? I couldn’t recall the last time it had happened.

Right then, though, it seemed to me that the only mistake I had made was allowing that gosh-darn Cheryl Chang to sneak up behind me.

Okay, girl, get a grip. A fall from almost a mile wasn’t necessarily fatal, not in
Rolling Thunder
. I couldn’t recall at the moment just what terminal velocity was, theoretically, but it’s not as high as it would have been on Mars or Earth. Of course, hitting the ground at sixty or even fifty miles per hour is no joke.

Also on the bright side, the wind resistance of my remaining wing elements and the flapping remnants of my chute should slow me down some, sort of like a bird hit with a shotgun doesn’t quite drop like a stone, it flutters some. I’d better start seeing what I could do to make sure I
didn’t
land on my head. Because though my head may be hard, my neck was the weak point. I didn’t want to break it.

Trouble was, I just didn’t have that much control over my attitude. I was hoping to get oriented feet downward, figuring I could deal with broken ankles and legs a lot better than a broken spine or skull. Yet every time I thought I had it, the wind would catch another part of me and twist me around again.

During one of those rotations I thought I saw something I didn’t dare hope for. I thought I saw another flycycle, nose down, and a flash of gold. But I didn’t see how that was possible.

The ground was very near now. I made one more effort to get my feet under me, and for a while I had it. Then I felt myself starting to drift again.

That was when a hand grabbed the back of my jumpsuit and I jerked like a fish on a line, or really more like a felon at the end of a hangman’s noose. All the air went out of me and my neck popped. The ground was still rushing up, but it was slowing. I heard the hummingbird whir of a flycycle rotor. Then the hand slipped, and I was falling again.

“Shit,” somebody said. I knew that voice.

“Cassie!” I shouted.
“Help me!”

“What do you think I’m trying to do, you idiot?”

I was as helpless as a baby bird falling from the nest; even more helpless since I didn’t even have little wings to flutter.

Now I was falling facedown. It was dark down there, I couldn’t see much, but I knew it had to be less than a hundred meters.

Cassie’s hand grabbed me again, this time by the ankle. All the blood flowed to my head, and my hair came loose from its bun—somewhere in there I had lost my helmet, and I didn’t even remember it. All I saw was long blonde locks streaming in front of me.

My cycle-shoe came off in Cassie’s hand. I don’t know how she did it, but she managed to grab my bare foot. I felt my ankle pop, and I howled.

Suddenly, there it was. The ground. I squealed and put my hands out in front of me. That was probably a bad idea, but
you
try to keep your hands at your side when the ugly, muddy ground is coming up at you.

It was muddy, all right, and smelly, too. I hit face-first, then Cassie landed on top of me, driving me into the ground and huffing all the air out of my lungs. Which was no fun, as my face was buried in muck and I couldn’t inhale.

I heard the snapping sounds of Cassie getting out of her rig as I finally managed to lift my head up. It was pretty dark, but the farmer on whose grounds we landed had a few lights up on poles. It was enough so I could see my sister sitting up, taking her helmet off, ass deep in mud. She looked at me, pointed her finger, and howled.

“Oh, lord, I wish I had a camera! If you could see yourself . . .”

She was unable to finish, convulsed with laughter. And she was still pointing.

“Look . . . oh, my, Polly, just look behind you!”

I did. There was a huge, pale shape, not a foot away from me. For a moment I couldn’t identify it, then it moved forward and nudged me with its snout. It was a pig. We had landed in a pigsty. And that meant that the stuff I had landed face first in was not just mud, it was full of . . .

The big porker nudged me again, and snorted.

“I think he’s in love,” Cassie said. And howled again.

At last she got up and held her hand out to me. I yanked, intending to bring her down in the muck with me, but she knows that trick and was ready for it. What I wasn’t ready for was the grinding pain in my forearm.

“I think I broke my arm,” I said, and passed out.

Cassie:

My sister is
such
a drama queen.

After I pulled her into a sitting position and slapped her around a little until she woke from her
swoon
, she howled loud enough to frighten the pigs and wake the farmer and his family. He shined a bright light on us.

“Is she hurt badly?” he asked.

“Not as bad as it sounds,” I assured him.

“Call an ambulance, darn you!” That, of course, was Polly. It was unusually nasty language for her, too.

“Where does it hurt, sis?”

“My arm, and my behind!”

“Sure you can tell one from the other?”

I got her to her feet by pulling the other arm. Sure enough, there was a piece of her flycycle frame sticking out of her butt. I touched it, and she howled again.

“Hold on, let’s get a look at this.”

“I’ll call the ambulance,” the farmer said.

“Wait a minute,” I told him. Then I turned to Polly. “How badly do you want to be hazed tomorrow at school?” I asked her. “Right now, you might just get a little respect, since that crash was the most spectacular I’ve ever seen. How did you manage to totally destroy a flycycle? I didn’t think that was possible.” And I hadn’t. Those suckers are
strong
.

“It wasn’t my fault,” she whined. “It was that Cheryl Chang! She—”

“Hold on, let me expose the wound.” I got two fingers into the hole in her jumper and pulled. It ripped open, exposing most of her butt. It’s a great butt, perfectly formed, drives the boys wild. I should know, because it’s exactly like my own.

One thing you can never do if you have an identical twin is say bad things about her looks.

Unless she’s covered in pigshit, of course.

“Good thing you landed facedown,” I told her. “Both times. When you hit, and when you fainted. I wouldn’t want to get any of that nasty . . . mud in the wound.”

“It’s more than just mud, and you know it.”

“I know. I’m trying not to think about it too much.”

Without warning her—she just would have pissed and moaned and worried—I yanked on the strut, and it came free. She was so surprised and shocked, she didn’t even cry out at once.

“Darn you! Is it bleeding?”

“Hardly at all. It’s just fat, not much blood in there.”

“My ass is not fat.”

“Did I say that? Not
too
fat, but everybody’s ass has fat in it. Still want that ambulance? Or can we walk out of here?”

She sighed in her best put-upon way. She knew as well as I that if medical help came there, somebody would have a camera, and pictures of us covered in poop would be all over the news tomorrow.

I’d look stupid, too, but I’m not the one who had it all over her face.

I started laughing again, couldn’t help myself. And I’d be able to torment her with this night for
years
. But not at once. This one was worth saving for a really golden moment. I’d let her relax, let her guard down, wait until she thought I’d forgotten about it. I could hardly wait.

In fact, about the only downside for the night is that we lost the skypool match to those stinking Hillbillies. With Polly and me both out of the game, our team didn’t stand a chance.

—

The farmer—a nice man named Mr. Nguyen—hosed us down. We tossed the ruined jumpers in the trash. Mr. and Mrs. Nguyen didn’t have anything to offer us to wear, being about five feet tall on tiptoes and their children ages four and seven. So she loaned us some nice blankets. They were both too polite to laugh out loud, but I saw them turn away from time to time, obviously stifling a chuckle. Their kids just stared wide-eyed at us. I suspected Farmer Nguyen and wife were considering hiring the matched set of tall, skinny blondes as scarecrows when we came back with the blankets.

It was still about an hour till sun-on. We trudged along the little dirt farm road, Polly favoring her left leg and cradling her right arm, which she was sure was broken.

“What’s the big deal?” I asked her. “You’re left-handed. You’ll still be able to masturbate after the boys kiss you good night at the door.”

She didn’t bother to answer that.

We soon reached the stone-paved circumferential road—a C-road because it goes round and round the inside of the ship—and saw the streetcar just a little ways up the curve to counterspinward. It was there in less than a minute, sensed our presence, and stopped with a merry clang of its bell.

When Uncle Travis built his space ark and started stocking it with plants and animals and all the other stuff we’d need for a long journey to the stars, he first used prefabricated buildings and other cheap, undistinguished things. The result, he once told me, was something like an Antarctic station, something like a cheesy housing development, something like a refugee camp. He hated it. So he stopped doing that and began shopping for buildings. He brought a lot of them intact from the Earth and a few from Mars. Others were torn down and reassembled when they got here. The main thing he was looking for was that they be architecturally “tasty,” as he put it. His tastes leaned toward art deco, Victorian, and Japanese, with a smattering of other cultures. There would be no Bauhaus in
Rolling Thunder
, he decreed. I blinked up Bauhaus, and I have to say I’m with him. Ugly stuff; about all you could say was that it was functional.

Later, when the Earth was in a really bad way from the Europan invaders, prices went down drastically on all sorts of things. He looted museums around the world. Uncle Travis was very, very rich, and he was a hell of a shopper. By the time we launched, he was broke.

One of the things he liked was old railroads and streetcars. There were to be no private cars in
Rolling Thunder
, other than farming machinery, and after looking at tubes from the first part of this century, I could see why. Insanity! Millions of cars stuck on the road, not moving.

So we have streets in the ship, good paved ones, on which you will see only pedestrians, riders on horses or wagons pulled by them, various human-powered contraptions on one to six wheels, trains, and streetcars. The streetcars are antiques refurbished and converted to battery power and automatic operation, and you never know for sure what you’re going to get.

This time it was two San Francisco cable cars hooked together. They were green and gold, and a small brass plaque announced they were from the 1920s. Over 170 years old, and looking like they’d just rolled out of the factory.

I like cable cars, they’re so cute.

“All aboard,” the cable car said, and we climbed in. We usually ride on the outside footboard, hanging on to the bar, leaving the cabin for the old folks, but the night was chilly and our blankets didn’t give us a lot of protection, so we went into the cabin. The seats were padded leather, with wicker backs. There was patterned carpet on the floor, and crystal bud vases with fresh flowers. There was no one else in either car. I took a seat and Polly remained standing as the
Thunderville Trolley
rang its bell again and took off.

Here’s another effect you don’t get on a planet. Since we were headed to spinward, and traveling at a speed faster than walking pace, we got heavier. Though it was a long way from being unpleasantly heavy, like it is in the gym down below, you could feel it, like when an elevator starts going up. But as soon as an elevator reaches its top speed, the feeling of weight goes away.

Not on the trains. As long as they move—and their top speed is about fifty miles per hour—you stay heavy. That’s because you’re adding your speed to the speed of the spinning ship. Your angular momentum becomes greater.

If you’re going to counterspinward, of course, the effect is reversed. You get lighter the faster you go. If you go fast enough—230 miles per hour, a pretty good clip, and much faster than our trains go—you become weightless. The train, too. It could float right off the tracks.

Polly was standing with one foot barely touching the floor, favoring her injured gluteus muscle. Her forearm and wrist were swelling up, and she was sweating, in spite of the cool night air. Maybe I had underestimated her hurt.

“All kidding aside, sis,” I said, “how bad is it?”

“The puncture, not so bad, but I’m real worried about infection. The arm . . . well, it hurts real bad. I can’t make a fist. I’d flip you the bird, but it hurts too much.”

“Don’t let that stop you, Lefty.”

So she used her other middle finger. She even chuckled a little. Polly and I are highly competitive, often at loggerheads; sometimes we even come to blows. We love getting each other’s goat, but anyone who knows us knows we love each other in our own way. They know that messing with me is the same thing as messing with her, and vice versa. You come at one of us, and two of us are going to come back at you. One of us will hit ’em high, and the other will hit ’em low. Count on it.

“Maybe you better sit down.”

She gave her head half a shake, then thought better of it, and sat. I put my arm around her.

“We’ll be there soon.”

“I’m amazed I survived.” She paused a moment, then glanced at me. “I guess I’d better thank you for saving my life.”

“Aw, shucks, ma’am. Just doin’ my job.”

She punched me on the shoulder. We both knew it was unlikely her life had been in danger, but a more serious injury had been possible.

Replaying it all in my mind, there on the cable car, I slowly became aware of a pain in my hand. I looked down at it.

“Shit!” I cried. “I tore a fingernail.”

—

For some reason, Aunt Elizabeth decided to treat Polly’s broken arm before she even looked at my painful finger.

“Get it fixed at the beauty parlor,” she suggested. “Or go see a vet.”

So I shut up. I had been kidding, of course, but though Aunt Liz has a decent sense of humor, it doesn’t extend into medicine.

Aunt Elizabeth Strickland-Garcia is really our great-aunt, the older sister of our maternal grandfather, Ramon Garcia-Strickland. She’s an M.D., a nanosurgeon, mostly, though she’s also good at putting iodine on a scraped knee, which she did many times for both of us. She lost her right hand during the First Earth War. Her suit got punctured while she was trying to reach what she hoped were survivors of a bombing, and before she could be pulled out, the hand froze solid.

The hand might have been saved, but it would never have been as skilled as it had been. Her career in surgery would have been over. So she elected to have it replaced with a prosthetic, which was just as good or even better. She’s had half a dozen new ones over the years. With the current one, she can read the date on a Mandela dollar, with a touch so gentle she can put a smile on Nelson’s face.

She lives with her spouse, Dorothy, in Bedford Falls, in a small Victorian with a large yard where she breeds roses that win the blue ribbon at the township fair every year, and usually the All-Thunder Fair as well.

I presume she sleeps, but I couldn’t vouch for it personally. Polly and I have never managed to wake her up, no matter how early or late we show up at her door with a new owie to treat.

She opened the door at thirty minutes till sun-on, sighed, and beckoned us in.

Dorothy, dressed in a nightgown and buttering some toast, smiled at us as we were led through the kitchen to Aunt Elizabeth’s small surgery overlooking the rose garden. Her office never smells medical; it’s always full of fresh-cut roses in every color of the spectrum, including a few that are blacker than Dorothy’s face.

“I’m not even going to ask how you bumbling puppies got banged up yet again,” she said. “Polly, let’s see that arm.”

She probed it gently, then got out her MRI. It was rolled up in a little box, four inches wide and long enough to wrap around a whole body. She only used a small part of it to take a look into Polly’s forearm. All three of us leaned closer to look at the 3-D color image. We could easily see the crack in the ulna.

“Okay, no big deal,” Aunt Elizabeth said.

“No big—”

“Hush, child.”

“Don’t be a crybaby,” I said.

“You hush, too, or I’ll spank you both. I’ll just immobilize it and start an internal bonding agent.” It took two minutes to spray on a cast from wrist to elbow and suspend the busted flipper from a sling.

“You should be good as new in forty-eight hours. Okay, turn around, drop that blanket, and bend over.”

Polly did, just as Dorothy entered the room with a tray of tea, jam, and toast.

“Woo-woo!” she warbled. Polly looked over her shoulder and blushed.

“This wound is filthy. Where did it happen?”

“Uh . . . sort of in a pigsty,” I admitted.

“Well, that explains the smell.”

I guess I’d been smelling it long enough that it wasn’t registering anymore.

“Can I go take a shower?” I asked.

“I’d recommend dunking them in a big jar of mouthwash,” Dorothy said.

“I’d prefer formaldehyde. Hold them under for ten minutes, then screw on the lid. Future generations will thank me.”

Aunt Elizabeth was looking at me from under her eyelids in that way she has of making you feel about five years old, and you’ve disappointed her once again.

She’s in her mid-seventies, and has never been inside a black bubble, so that’s both her real age and her virtual age. Her hair is snow-white and she has some wrinkles in the corners of her eyes, but like they say, seventy is the new forty. Gene therapy has extended human life expectancy quite a bit since my great-grandparents made the first trip to Mars. Regenerative techniques have done wonders for skin, too, and put a lot of plastic surgeons out of work. My aunt is a handsome woman with rather sharp features and a no-nonsense attitude. For most of her life she has been so dedicated to medicine that no one was even sure she was gay until she was in her fifties.

“I have done many odd things in my career,” she was saying as she prepared to disinfect the wound, “but digging pig manure out of somebody’s ass is a new one for me.”

Then she couldn’t help herself, she burst out laughing. Dorothy joined in. I tried to stop myself—honest I did, I already knew I was going to get enough grief from Polly—but in the end, I couldn’t help myself, either.