Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning) (3 page)

BOOK: Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning)
5.05Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

“It’s not funny,” Polly fumed. Which was so untrue, with her bent over naked with her hands on her knees, that we all got started again.

“The Sherlock Holmes part of me has already deduced that this was a flycycle accident,” Elizabeth said when we had control of ourselves again. “Don’t bother asking; I never reveal my methods. Someday, I’ll have you tell me how you two somehow always manage to avoid the manicured golf courses of life and land in the pigsties instead. Right now, it’s too much information.”

“The pigsty was probably a lot softer,” I pointed out, spreading some strawberry jam on a piece of toast and taking a big bite.

“Yes, but how many pigs died of heart failure? Hang on, this is going to hurt.”

Polly howled as Aunt Elizabeth squirted a jet of disinfectant into the wound. She kept it going for a while, until nothing that looked like manure was coming out.

“All done here,” she said, slapping Polly’s ass. She sighed.

“All right,” she went on. “Here, swallow these for now, and while you’re cleaning up I’ll send out for a nano. Dorothy, can you find a few dresses for them in my bedroom? Will your shoes fit them?”

“If their feet were any bigger, they could walk on water.”

“Oh, we can already do that,” I said.

“We’re still working on the raising-the-dead bit,” Polly said. She held up her good hand, and I gave her the high five. Dorothy sighed and turned away. She knows better than to mess with us when we gang up.

“But there’s no need to go to the trouble, Aunt Elizabeth,” I said, stepping right into it. “We can just walk home. Myself, I could do with a snooze.”

She gave me that under-the-eyebrow look again.

“Apparently your tiny brains can only hold on to one thought at a time. You seem to have forgotten what day it is.”

There was a short pause, and Polly slapped the side of her head.


Cassie!
This morning is—”


Ohmigawd!
Papa’s coming out of the bubble! What time is it?”

We only had ten minutes, it turned out.

We both crammed in the shower and scrubbed as hard as we could, jumped out, and put on the clothes Dorothy had found for us. The dresses would be the height of fashion if calico flour sacks ever came back in style. Aunt Elizabeth knows about as much about clothes as I know about surgery.

Dorothy had also found some flip-flops that would do. I slipped into my pair. Was that pig manure under my toenails? Too late to worry.

Back downstairs, the custom nano-dose had arrived by pneumatic mail. Polly swallowed the little metal pill that would release about a million ultratiny machines that would go to her busted arm and start pasting the bone back together.

We both had to take an antibiotic.

“What time is it?” In all the excitement, I had never turned my net connection back on. Can’t have it on during a game, too many opportunities to cheat if you’re plugged in. I blinked the clock on and groaned. There was no way we’d make it on time.

“Mom’s going to kill us,” I said. “How about a suicide pact instead? You want to go first?”

“I’d rather watch you and make sure you do it right.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Dorothy said. “As soon as I saw you two standing at the door, I knew it was trouble. Come on, let’s go.”

She herded us all outside, and sitting at the curb was an ambulance.


Aunt Elizabeth was not one for breaking rules, but Dorothy had no such qualms. She’s a doctor, too, a psychiatrist.

Emergency services are just about the only powered flying vehicles in the ship. After all, nothing is more than a little over six miles from anything else, and the trains run every five minutes, twenty-four/seven. Why fly?

The only good excuse is when time is critical. Our uncle Travis, the Supreme Exalted Admiral of
Rolling Thunder
, has a personal flyer, and our elected officials can use one from time to time, but mostly they don’t, as it doesn’t sit well with the voters. This would be my first trip in a powered flying machine, if you don’t count the powered flycycles I’ve used a few times when officiating at a skypool game.

I found I didn’t like it much.

It was a boxy contraption, roomy enough for all of us inside though the walls were packed with medical gear.

Outside, it had no wings, just four humming fans in nacelles that twisted and turned for vertical takeoff and landing, then were in constant movement to adjust to the ship’s quirky atmosphere. There was a big windshield up front, and Polly and I sat facing it.

You wouldn’t think that a girl who loved nothing better than flying a mile over the ground would suffer from a fear of heights, and I don’t think that was exactly what it was, but the ground was going by underneath us too damn fast. I had never traveled that fast in the air, and probably not on the ground, either, for that matter. We just never speed in
Rolling Thunder
 . . . if you don’t count the fact that we’re moving at .77c relative to Old Sun.

The computer that flew the ambulance had one prime command, and that was to get from Point A to Point B in the fastest possible time. You couldn’t ask it to slow down.

Luckily, the trip was only about a minute and a half. Otherwise I might have had to look around for an airsickness bag, and Polly would have never let me forget it. She seemed to be doing just fine.


We landed at our home, the Broussard Mansion, on the edge of the small town of Bayouville. The ambulance set down on Seven Acre Pond, which we own but share with the town, and turned itself into a hovercraft, then gently bumped us up against our dock. It was so sweetly done, I doubt if it even disturbed the turtles. We all piled out and hurried down the dock, past Papa’s pirogue and our canoe and the rowboat suspended in the little boathouse. Waiting for us at the far end was our mother, Podkayne, with her arms crossed and an angry look on her face. But she looked concerned when she spotted the cast on Polly’s arm.

“Can’t you limp a little more?” I whispered.

“That hasn’t worked with her since we were six.”

“What have you done to yourself this time?” Mom asked.

“Whatever happened to ‘Are you all right, my darling daughter?’”

“Don’t you get smart with me, Pollyanna Broussard.”

“She fell off her flycycle,” Aunt Elizabeth said. “Don’t worry, it was a minor fracture. I’m more worried about the possibility of infection from—”

Before she could say pigshit—or feces, more likely—I jumped in.

“We’re not actually
late
, Mom. It’s still . . .” I glanced at my clock. “. . . a few seconds to sun-on.”

On cue, the tube down the center of the ship began to glow. It takes about a minute for it to reach high noon, but already it was bright enough to turn off the pole lights strung on the dock.

“And what’s the deal with the ambulance?” Mom wanted to know.

“Don’t fret about it, Poddy,” our aunt said. “We were delayed a little while I treated her. And we did make it on time.”

With a rising hum, the ambulance lifted off and threw itself into the sky. Mom didn’t look happy, but she turned and went back into the house. No hugs today, at least not until Papa came out of his bubble.


When I say “Broussard Mansion,” I’m being ironic. That’s what we call it, that’s the address you’d write down if you were sending us a package, but it’s nothing like a mansion, not in size and especially not in looks. But as with many things in the ship, appearances can be deceiving.

From the outside it looks like a run-down bait shack. Or at least that’s what I’m told, since I’ve never seen a real one. The back end—which is the front end, to me, because I seldom use the front door—is on pilings over the water. The house has a steep tin roof with a lot of “rust spots,” is clad in pine siding weathered a lovely gray, and has a screen door on a spring. Most times when Polly and I hit it on the way outside to play, we’d hear Mom shout “Don’t let the door slam!” and one of us would do a quick reverse and make a diving catch.

The long dock widens to become our covered back porch. Papa says in Louisiana it would be screened in if the owner could afford it. We don’t need that because we don’t have skeeters in
Rolling Thunder
.

The porch has a big picnic table where we eat most of our meals, and is usually cluttered with fishing poles, nets, tackle, crawdad traps, and coolers. There is a live bait well full of minnows and a box for night crawlers, an ice machine, and a drink dispenser where you lift the lid and see the various kinds of soda in glass bottles hanging by their necks. It says RC Cola on the side. I usually choose the Grapette, Polly prefers Orange Crush, and Papa goes for Hires root beer. Mom likes Vernor’s ginger ale, a “Yankee drink,” according to Papa. We all like Dr Pepper.

They’re all zero calorie, by the way. I think some of those brands are no longer made back at Old Sun. Our beverage factory can whip up anything you like.

So, what I’m saying, from the outside the house looks like it’s about one big gator bite from falling into Seven Acre Pond. That’s all illusion, all for fun, done to keep everything in the ship from looking like everything else. The house is actually sturdy enough to weather hurricanes if we were dumb enough to have them.

The house is roomy enough. It’s all on one level, three bedrooms, one for Mama and Papa and one each for us twins. The parental units were not the sort to make twins dress identically, and they both thought that one’s own private room was important.

There’s a quite large family room with a raftered ceiling and room to seat several dozen on couches and around tables and window seats. There’s a big kitchen, Papa Jubal’s realm since Mama Podkayne doesn’t know which end of a wooden spoon to grab and which to stir with. She can somehow manage to make our smart toaster burn the bread, something the manufacturer claims is impossible. We learned to make our own breakfasts on the first day of school, when we were five.

That’s it for the house. Then there’s the boathouse, and a separate building with a guest bedroom, a study/lab/machine shop for Papa to do his work concerning picking apart the structure of the universe, and a music room for Mom. There’s a storage shed that looks as ramshackle as the other buildings, and isn’t. There’s a three-room Victorian playhouse that Polly and I can barely squeeze into anymore, and a two-story tree house in our huge Spanish moss–draped live oak, both of them built by Papa and the envy of all our friends when we were young.

And that’s about it for the grounds of Chez Broussard.

The main room of the Broussard Mansion was jam-packed when we entered. I figured that was a good thing. It would keep Mom’s mind off her kids. Wood smoke drifted in from the open windows, from dozens of chickens and racks of ribs out on the grill, being tended to by our grand-père Jim, who at the age of ninety-four clock time (eighty-four body time) still runs the best Martian restaurant in
Rolling Thunder
. He was responsible for the heaping bowls of jambalaya, dirty rice, andouille sausage, hush puppies, okra, and boiled crawdads on the tables all around. There were also a few platters of a real delicacy: jumbo peeled shrimp. It’s something that appears on our table only at Thanksgiving, and on very few other tables in the ship.

We farm all sorts of fish, but almost all of it is freshwater. We make some fairly good imitations of shrimp and crab, and we raise oysters, but we just don’t have the room to cultivate ocean fish or crustaceans. Neither Papa nor Uncle Travis wanted to face life without ever tasting shrimp or crab or redfish again, so they laid in what they called a hundred-year supply. It’s rationed out carefully, and it’s a good thing, because me and my sister could probably have run through the century’s worth of shrimp in a few months, and would weigh half a ton together.

There was a small bandstand in a corner with a four-piece band—squeeze box, two fiddles, and a girl who played everything from triangle to washboard—thumping out a zydeco beat.

It was a real
fais do-do
.

The only jarring note was at the far end of the room. It was a black hole in space, about six feet in diameter. When I say black hole, that’s exactly what I mean. It was as if somebody had used four-dimensional scissors to cut a circle in our reality, and filled it in with . . . nothing. No reflection, no sense of depth, nothing. I knew that if I touched it, my hand would feel it, but even if I put my nose right up to it, I would see nothing but total blackness. It reflected not a single photon of light.

I once asked Papa where all those photons went. He said they curved round and round ’bout a trillion time,
cher
, and then they done took off for some other universe somewheres. It’s a universe he spends a lot of his time in, when he’s thinking, and I know I’ll never be able to follow him in a thousand years. And that’s fine with me.

It was a black bubble, and Papa was inside it, not a nanosecond older than when he went in.

Those things give me the creeps. I know they’re perfectly safe; Papa has been in and out of them more times than I am years old, but Polly and I never have. I don’t know how sis feels about them, but I have always wished that at these parties they’d hide the damn thing behind a curtain until it’s time to uncork Papa Jubal and
laissez les bons temps rouler
. (“Let the good times roll,” if you’re Cajun French–challenged.)

I tried to keep my back to it as I did my best to play cohostess, greeting an endless stream of friends and relatives.

You’d think all the Broussard-Garcia-Strickland-Redmond clan was there, including third cousins, grandnephews, and assorted trailer trash, but it wasn’t even close. Great-grand-père Manny and Great-grand-mère Kelly were absent, both of them in a black bubble for five years now. Other family members, including some who had free passes to stay out all the time by virtue of being closely enough related to Captain Travis, had elected to hibernate, too.

The fact was that Earth-born and Mars-born people often found life inside
Rolling Thunder
to be, well,
dull
.

We’re definitely small-town in here. Our pleasures are bucolic, pastoral, not well suited to city folk who like to party on Saturday night. Oh, we party well enough, and there are dances and theater and music—mostly amateur—but some of it must look about as exciting as a barn dance or a quilting bee to the older folks.

BOOK: Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning)
5.05Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Crown Thief by David Tallerman
Aftermath of Dreaming by DeLaune Michel
The Zompire by Brown, Wayne
Anécdotas de Enfermeras by Elisabeth G. Iborra
Napoleon's Last Island by Tom Keneally
The Pike River Phantom by Betty Ren Wright
The Big Thaw by Donald Harstad
The Bradshaw Variations by Cusk, Rachel
His Abductor's Desire by Harper St. George