Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning) (4 page)

Well, I have to say I’m a bit in sympathy with them. All us Thunder-born are quite aware of what life on Earth looked like—before the disaster—and what Mars still looks like. And the bright lights and fashions and huge concerts and stuff look like a lot of fun. But what’s the point of mooning over what you just can’t have? I get along okay with what we’ve got.

—

It wasn’t long until Mama Podkayne called us all to order.

We long ago decided not to make a big ceremony about turning off the bubble. Papa’s emergence was always the occasion for a party, but being the center of attention makes him uncomfortable. So we just all gather and somebody throws the switch; we pick Papa up from where he has fallen—you never know how the person inside is going to be oriented, which is why we have a soft pad under the bubble—and give him a short round of applause. Then somebody hands him a beer, and we carry on as normal.

Mom got everyone reasonably quiet, then gestured to me. It’s always me or Polly who presses the button. I thought it had been me last time, but what the hell. I knew this was no time to question Mom’s decision.

The percussion girl did a roll on a snare drum, and I pressed the button.

The bubble vanished without even a pop, and my father tumbled out and landed on his side. He was mumbling a Hail Mary, which is how he always goes into the bubbles. He was wearing a look of anxiety, which is his normal expression when he goes in, and therefore when he comes out.

But then he looked around and sat up with a big smile on his face . . .

. . . which lasted about three seconds. Then he looked horrified.

“Stop the ship!”
he shouted.

Which, seeing as how we were traveling at 77 percent of the speed of light, I guess you could call a party-killer.

Polly:

“Mom, what’s wrong with Papa?” I asked.

“Just stay calm, Polly,” she said. She was tugging Papa, looking a little dazed, toward their bedroom. Mom is six-foot-four, and Papa is just about exactly a foot shorter than that, though he’s wide enough to almost fill the hallway. Not fat wide, but muscular. The expression is “built like a fireplug.”

“You and Cass get back there and take care of our guests,” she added. “I’ll see to your father. Come on, don’t stand there gawking. Get a move on,
cher
.”

She pulled Papa through the bedroom door and closed it behind them. I looked over at my sister, standing there holding a leg of fried chicken.

“What’s going on, Cassie? Did he say stop the ship?”

“That’s what I heard.”

“But how? What do we do?”

She shrugged and took a bite of the chicken.

“I guess we turn the ship around and start slowing down. You want to take care of that while I see to our guests?”

Sometimes she drives me crazy. Her response to most emergencies is
“Whatever.”
Unless it requires immediate action, she’ll wait to see what happens. She’s just not a worrier. For some reason, it seems to work out that I do the worrying for both of us.

She looked at me, sighed, and took me by the shoulders. She turned me around and shoved me back in the direction of the family room.

“You heard Mom. Papa would be mortified to think there were guests in our house who weren’t being seen to. Now, you go put on a good show, and I’ll change out of this potato sack.”

So I stumbled forward, and I hope I managed to paste a smile on my face before I got back to the living room.

There was a muted murmur of conversation that paused for a moment when I entered, but quickly resumed. I hurried toward the band and made a rolling gesture with my hand. They got the message and started into another number.

I surveyed the crowd. Many of these people I only saw once or twice a year, when Papa came out of the bubble. They were mostly family, by blood or marriage, with a few good outsider friends.

There was Great-grandpa and Great-grandma Redmond, Jim and Audrey, ages ninety-four and ninety-three by the calendar, and almost the same by their body clocks. After a couple of years in a black bubble, they had elected to live in real time, even if it meant dying before we got where we were going. Some people feel that way. They feel that time is passing them by even though not much happens in the ship, most years.

Bottom line, my great-grandparents Redmond simply didn’t like the time jumps. They were content to do what they had always done on Mars, which is to run the best restaurant in town.

I chatted with them for a while, looked around for my other great-grandparents, Manny and Kelly, then remembered they were currently in time stasis. They tended to pop in and out at irregular intervals, taking to black-bubbling like born skippers. That’s what we call people who elect to skip over real time like stones on water. Skippers.

The result was that, although Great-grandfather Manny and Great-grandmother Kelly were almost the same age as my Redmond great-grandparents, by the calendar, they were only eighty by their body clocks, having spent a total of about seventeen years in black bubbles since the ship set out for the stars.

The next people I saw were two of my favorites, my uncle Mike and aunt Marlee. If you think my tall mom and short papa are a mismatched set, you should see Mike and Marlee.

Uncle Mike was found by a roadside somewhere in Africa as an infant, during one of the many conflicts on that continent. Possibly his parents had been killed; there was a lot of that going around. He was adopted by Granddaddy Ramon Strickland-Garcia and Grandma Evangeline Redmond when he was two, taken to Mars, and raised by them and his older sister, our mother, Podkayne, who was eight years older than him at the time. He’s very dark-skinned, and four feet three inches tall. He’s an achondroplastic dwarf. He doesn’t like the euphemism “little person,” reasoning that a child is a little person, but they grow up. “I won’t grow up,” he says, and he’s okay with it. Mom says he was the best baby doll a little girl ever had. They’re very close.

He’s married to Marlee, who is only a little shorter than me, and even paler.

And maybe I shouldn’t add, but will, that our family is easy about nudity. We enjoy nothing more than a skinny-dip in the pond, and I can tell you that the short arms and short legs are the only thing short about him, if you get my drift. Some of my girlfriends have been bug-eyed, and very interested.

I hugged Marlee and Mike, talked with them for a while, then looked around to see if they had brought their son, Patrick.

They had. He was standing by the band with a few others, clapping his hands and doing a little dance step.

My heart did a somersault, as usual.

If Cassie and I were ever to kill each other, it would probably be over Patrick. When we were younger we used to share our toys. We share all our clothes, we share flycycles, we share homework—she does my math, I do her literature—but we’ve never shared boyfriends. Oh, once I pretended to be her and broke up with her boyfriend. It would have been hard for her, and it wasn’t for me, since I didn’t like the creep anyway. And once she pretended to be me, chatted up a guy I was interested in, setting the hook firmly, then handing him off to me to reel in because she’s better at flirting than I am. Other than that, if we ever go on a double date, it’s always clear who is with whom. We’ve never traded.

Patrick was the first time we were both smitten with the same boy at the same time. But the cold hard fact was that he seemed able to resist our previously irresistible charms. We didn’t know how to account for it.

“Gay,” Cassie said one evening after she had given it her best shot, practically rolling over on her back with her paws in the air and her tongue hanging out. But we both knew it was sour grapes. Great-grandpa Jim once told me that he remembered a time when a lot of people hid their homosexuality, and that
before
his time, almost everybody was “in the closet,” as he put it. I don’t know what closet that was, but it doesn’t sound like fun. And in school we learned that before that, it was actually
illegal
most places.

The things you learn in history class, huh?

But who would hide it now? Who cares? So I have to admit that at first Cassie’s snide remark gave me a little hope—a guy being unavailable was a lot easier to handle than the idea that he just wasn’t interested in
you
. And it was true that he didn’t seem to date, girls or boys. He was a bit of a loner, though not antisocial.

What does he look like? Think Michelangelo’s
David
, only light brown instead of marble white. His skin was a lovely bronze—half Aunt Marlee and half Uncle Mike, I guess—and his golden hair fell in finger curls down almost to his shoulders. His eyes were amber, almost yellow-gold in the right light.

My knees wobbled just to feel the breeze from him as he walked by.

Hope springs eternal. I made my way toward the bandstand to take another stab at chatting him up.

He was engrossed in the music and didn’t seem to notice me. So I cleared my throat and put my hand on his arm.

“Hello, Patrick.”

He looked around and gave me a neutral smile and nod.

“Hi. Which one are you?”

Before I could answer, something happened. I can’t say a hush fell over the room, but there was a change in the atmosphere, some new vibe it was hard to put my finger on. I saw heads turning, maybe that was it. My own head turned, and I saw Cassie enter the room.

I love my sister, I really do. Except when I want to kill her.

She had been out of my sight for maybe ten minutes, and in that time had managed to transform herself. Her hair was clean and done up in a flip. She wore a black off-the-left-shoulder toga that would have looked right at home in the Roman streets, if they wore Paris designer clothes in the streets of Rome, made of a shiny silk that flowed around her like water. Black sandals on her feet. One strand of Mom’s pearls around her neck, two big pearls hanging from her earlobes, and a pearl-and-gold bracelet.

There were three things that really steamed me about it. One, that was the outfit
I
had intended to wear
myself
, as soon as she was finished dressing. Two, we didn’t have another dress like that, so I couldn’t match her and join her—both twins being dressed like that having four times the impact of just one, as we had discovered a long time ago. And three, I couldn’t even cry foul because we
do
share all our clothes, and our rule has always been first-come, first dressed to kill.

So there I was, outfitted like a ragamuffin from a Charles Dickens novel, hair looking like a haystack, probably still smelling of pig poop. I figured I might as well kill myself. There was nothing left to live for.

I looked back to Patrick, and he was smiling. A nice, big smile, much warmer than anything I’d ever gotten from him.

I decided to table the suicide motion for the time being and turned to the next item on the agenda, which would be murder. Sororicide, to be specific. Not a word you see every day.

Cassie made her way across the room, stalling conversations left and right, somehow managing to look spontaneous, at ease, unaware of the stir she was causing, with the bearing of a princess and just the right amount of concern—one tiny wrinkle in her brow—over Papa’s worrisome announcement. Whereas I knew that every step and gesture was as carefully calculated as the kata of an aikido master.

She paused here and there for a word or two with someone, greeted Mike and Marlee, and obviously turned the conversation to their son. When informed that he was present and near the bandstand, she looked surprised—as if she hadn’t seen him on the screen in her room while sharpening her claws and putting on her war paint—looked over at him, and waved. The crowd parted as she made her way over. The whole band was watching, and somehow the fiddle player managed to break a string.

Cassie held her hand out. Not vertically, as though to shake, but—I swear this is true—limp at the wrist and about at chest level, drawing his eyes down to the cleavage she was showing, which was a lot. Or as much as we had, anyway; we’re slightly shortchanged in the bosom department.

He hesitated a moment, then gave her a wry smile, took her hand, and kissed it.

My world fell apart. Murder first,
then
suicide. Definitely.

—

I made my exit unnoticed, which was not difficult at all, and slunk (slinked? slank?) back to my room. I wanted to slam the door, but Cassie would hear it, and I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction.

I wrapped a plastic bag around my cast and hopped in the shower. I scrubbed savagely at every inch of my skin. My arm hurt, and my ass hurt, but I didn’t care. I washed my hair four times, rinsed four times. I still felt that I smelled like pig poop.

When I finally felt reasonably clean, I poked lackadaisically through our closet—
our
closet! That was going to have to stop!—for something to wear. There was nothing there. Oh, sure, there were a few hundred outfits. Cassie and I had never stinted when it came to spending our allowances on clothes. There were no designer labels from Paris or Beverly Hills or Rio or Moscow like there were on Earth, though there were a lot of copies of Earth and Mars fashions.

For the last few years, since we lost contact with Old Sun, the boutiques where we do our shopping had been forced to design their own stuff, which I guess was a good thing. Now we only had to keep up with girls from around the curve instead of imitating Old Sun fashions.

I turned my mind back to the closet. It opens into both our rooms. There was a lot of stuff neither of us had worn for two years or more and that was ready to be boxed up and sent to the secondhand shops or the recycler. There was even more we had grown out of and just hadn’t bothered to take off the rack. You know how closets get.

What it came down to was I realized I was looking for the
next best thing
. Cassie was wearing the number one outfit. I was looking for number two. And when you do that, you’re licked before you even begin, right?

I put on something. I don’t even recall now what it was, and if you knew me, you’d realize how really depressed I was. I
always
remember what I wore to any kind of party, that’s just the way I am. I like clothes, okay?

I dragged myself to the bedroom door and slouched through it, and stumbled toward the party. I thought my heart couldn’t sink any lower, but as soon as I came into the room I saw my sister and Patrick. They were dancing. She looked radiant. I looked for a hole in the floor I could sink through, all the way into the black, absolute zero emptiness of interstellar space. Let me be flung into the starry void on an eternal trajectory of misery. It’s my party, and I’ll cry if I want to.

Cassie says I overdramatize, but I don’t think so.

Well, if life was indeed to go on, I’d just have to gather up the remains of my broken heart, somehow stitch them together, and join the party with a brave face. I was getting ready to do that when I heard the parental bedroom door creak open. Mama Podkayne came out, wearing the scowl I knew well, and that usually meant I was in big trouble. I would have been running for the poles—which is what we do instead of heading for the hills—except I was pretty sure it wasn’t aimed at me. And I was right.

“Polly, go in and sit with your father,” she growled. “He’s upset.”

“Sure, Mom, but—”

“Do as I say.”

She shouldered past me and down the short hallway, and stood facing the crowd. I lingered, and heard her shout. Mama Podkayne was and is a singer. When she wants to be heard, she can shatter not only glass, but steel.

She wanted to be heard.

The crowd quieted instantly, and so did the band.

“Friends and neighbors, I hate like hell to be so rude, but as you probably guessed, something has come up. I’m afraid I’ll have to ask y’all to leave. My husband is very upset about something. I don’t know what it is, but he’s made me understand that something must be done about it.