Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning) (8 page)

TRAVIS:
Remember Einstein and his thought experiments? You don’t have to be able to do the math to understand them. Can you think of something like that?

JUBAL:
I dunno, Travis. I guess I can try.

[Long silence]

PODKAYNE:
Maybe we can narrow it down. Want to try that?

TRAVIS:
Is it something to do with the ship? Is . . . is there something catastrophic about to happen to the ship itself?

JUBAL:
No, nothing like that.

TRAVIS:
The engines, maybe? They’ve been blasting for twenty years. Can something go wrong with them if we keep blasting?

JUBAL:
No, the engines, they be fine.

TRAVIS:
We’re going mighty fast.

JUBAL:
Seventy-seven percent of the speed of light. I don’t think nobody has ever gone that fast, me.

TRAVIS:
Sure they have. All those ships that went out, years ago . . .

PODKAYNE:
And only one of them came back, Travis.

JUBAL:
That’s what it’s about. Why no one come back.

[Short silence]

TRAVIS:
I’m not sure I understand.

JUBAL:
I looked it up. It was 553. Some of ’em no more than a dozen passengers, no bigger than a big shrimp boat, accelerating at two gees so’s they could get where they goin’ in a hurry.

PODKAYNE:
Most of them were a lot bigger than that.

TRAVIS:
But none of them were nearly as big as
Rolling Thunder
. Does that have something to do with it?

JUBAL:
My head, it be hurtin’.

PODKAYNE:
You want to take a break? Get something to eat?

JUBAL:
I couldn’t eat,
cher
.

PODKAYNE:
So . . . it isn’t the size of the ship. What else is different?

JUBAL:
That ain’t it. Most of ’em were fair-size. And pretty much all of ’em was acceleratin’ at one gee.

TRAVIS:
What does that have to do with anything?

JUBAL:
Means they all got to three-quarters of the speed of light a lot quicker’n we done. We the slowest ship ever gone out.

TRAVIS:
Lowest acceleration, sure. Go on.

JUBAL:
So after not very long, they got up to 90 percent. ’Bout 170,000 miles per second. And I’m thinkin’ that’s where they started to get into trouble.

TRAVIS:
Trouble with what?

JUBAL:
With the ether.

[Long silence]

TRAVIS:
Help me here. I thought the idea of ether was disproved a long time ago. Wasn’t it the Michelson-Morley experiment?

JUBAL:
Not
that
ether. The other one.

PODKAYNE:
Guys, help
me
out here. You’re the scientists, I’m just a washed-up pop star.

TRAVIS:
I’m not a scientist, I’m a washed-up astronaut.

PODKAYNE:
I’ll bet you didn’t flunk Quantum Physics 101.

TRAVIS:
Back before Einstein, when they were just figuring out how light worked, and a lot of other things, they thought that space was filled with something they called ether. It was something that was supposed to serve as a medium to conduct light waves. Like water conducts waves, and air conducts sound waves. It made sense to think that light couldn’t travel through space without some medium to conduct it, though we had never detected it. You want to know how they proved there was no ether?

PODKAYNE:
Don’t patronize me, Travis. I’ve heard of ether, I just needed my memory refreshed. What they proved is, it doesn’t exist, right?

JUBAL:
That’s right. Poddy, Travis, don’t fight.

TRAVIS:
Sorry, Jubal. Yeah, Pod, they proved it didn’t exist. But it wouldn’t be the first time a basic law of physics got overturned. And Jubal would be the guy to do it. Is that the deal, Jubal?

JUBAL:
No, no. Well, not that way, no. I just picked that name up, me, because ain’t nobody using it.

TRAVIS:
So you dusted it off and plugged it in somewhere else.

JUBAL:
Dusted it . . .
[laughs]
Dusted it off! That’s funny, that is.

PODKAYNE:
Go on, hon.

JUBAL:
Okay. It be something
like
ether. It’s everywhere, only we can’t detect it. It be thinner in some places and thicker in others. Like the dust between the stars. We’ve knew it be there for a while, we can see some of the things it do, only nobody can put they finger on it.

TRAVIS:
Make it sit up and do tricks in the lab.

JUBAL:
It ain’t never been in no lab.

PODKAYNE:
Listen, honey, you said that people have known about this stuff, this new ether, for a long time. Right?

JUBAL:
Yeah.

PODKAYNE:
So like the British used to say, what is it when it’s at home? What did they call it before?

JUBAL:
Oh, my, that where I should have started off, ain’t it?

PODKAYNE:
That’s okay. So what do they call it?

JUBAL:
They call it dark energy.

[Long silence]

TRAVIS:
So you’re saying you know something about—

PODKAYNE:
Hang on a minute, Travis.

[Sounds of a wooden chair being set on the floor. A short pause, and then . . .
BLAAAAAT!!!!
]

We snatched the pieces from our ears. That
hurt
!

“What the hell was that?” Cassie whispered.

“Spacegirl,” I said, “I think that was the sound of our lives crashing and burning. Let’s get the heck out of here.”

We scrambled to the hatch and opened it. I looked down . . . straight into the eyes of Mama. She stood there with her arms crossed in a posture no child could ever fail to understand.
You’re in a world of hurt, kid.

“Rats in the attic, Travis.”

“Rats? We never let . . . Oh, no. Rugrats?”

“You might as well come down headfirst,” Mama said. “Then I can call an ambulance instead of kill you.”

Don’t worry, it was an empty threat. Neither Mama nor Papa has ever laid a hand on us.

“I can’t believe I forgot about their little spy outpost,” Mama was saying as we came down. “I guess it was the stress of the day. Plus, they haven’t been up there listening in for years.”

I saw Cassie’s jaw drop. Mine probably did, too.

“Yeah, your dumb old mama ain’t as dumb as you thought,” she said, glaring at us. “I picked up on your spying probably three days after you set it up. I put a simple little switch under your station. When somebody was up there, your weight closed it and lit up a pinlight on the wall.”

“But why didn’t you . . .”

“Tear it out?” She laughed. “You kids don’t know much about spying. When you discover a mole, or a bug, it’s much better to leave them in place. That way you can control the information. You girls learned exactly what I wanted you to learn. Nothing more.”

“Girls,” Travis said, sternly, “I’m ashamed of you.” But one corner of his mouth turned up the least little bit, and his eyes were twinkling. Mama looked at him suspiciously but sighed and returned her attention to us.

“I know I should have taken it out after you stopped using it. But I was . . . What’s the word? Nostalgic? I thought in my old age I might go up there and root through the old furniture and keepsakes, and get a laugh out of your antics. I never expected you to be perfect, Cassie Ann and Polly Sue. God knows I wasn’t. The thing is, if you’re going to spy, you shouldn’t
get caught
.”

All I was seeing was everybody’s feet. I felt about two inches tall. I heard my sister speak.

“Does . . . does Papa . . .”

“Papa knows nothing. You know Papa loves you more than anything in the universe. And you know he doesn’t notice a lot of things. He thinks different from us, and he couldn’t imagine that you would betray him. If he understood that you had . . . well, we all know how much it would hurt him.”

My face felt hot enough to melt.

“Ease up a little, Podkayne,” Travis said.

I looked up, and he was holding his palms out as if expecting a blow from Mama. Say what you want about Mama Podkayne—and I’ve said plenty over the years—there is no mama bear in the forest who would fight more fiercely for her daughters. And that includes unwanted parenting advice. Travis had always steered clear of it, in her presence, though he would sometimes give us a wink or sneak us a treat when we were banished to our room.

I was expecting more fireworks, but this time she just sighed.

“Maybe you’re right. I couldn’t take the chance, though. When I needed to talk to him about things these little monsters shouldn’t hear, I took him to the music room.” She glared at us again. “Which I checked very carefully for bugs.”

Another heavy sigh. We were such a trial for her, I admit it.

“Okay, here’s what’s going to happen. You’ve already learned more than I wanted you to know. There’s not much point in keeping you from hearing the rest of it, whatever it is. And it might be very bad, you understand that?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“I guess it’s time I started treating you as adults. Trying to, anyway, though it would help me out if you would every once in a while
behave
like adults. Got it?”

“Got it,” Cassie whispered, and I nodded, unable to speak.

“Okay. Let’s go see your father.” She started off, then turned around quickly and glared at us once again. “Go clean up. You’re filthy.” Then she grinned, slowly. “And when we’re through here, you’ve brought it to my attention that the attic hasn’t been cleaned up since shortly after you were born. While you’re up there dismantling your spy equipment, later, I want you to make it sparkle. I’ll be inspecting it with white gloves.”

She turned away too fast to hear our a cappella groans.

—

Papa has his little laboratory out back, Mama has her music room.

Their bedroom is at the back of the house, up against a low hill. Like everything else in the interior, the hill is fake. It conceals the lower level, which is reached by a door in their bedroom that leads to eight steps going down and a soundproof door at the bottom. Beyond the door is Mama’s recording studio and the bulk of her collection of musical instruments.

She started it when she got rich. I doubt she has an example of
every
kind of instrument there is, but she has a lot. There’s everything from harmonicas (about fifty of them) and ocarinas, all eight kinds of saxophone (soprillo, sopranino, soprano, alto, tenor, baritone, bass, and contrabass, as we learned one day), violins, violas, a cello and a stand-up bass, hundreds of percussion instruments, and two Steinway concert grand pianos. She can at least make a creditable sound on almost all of them. She’s best on keyboards, which she has been taking lessons on since before we were born.

A small part of her collection, what she likes the best, became the bedroom theme when she was decorating. Her prizes are either in display cases or mounted on the walls. It’s pretty to look at; musical instruments have their own strict logic but are also works of art in themselves. There is an electric guitar once used by somebody in a band called the Beatles, an accordion—“squeezebox” to Papa—that was Clifton Chenier’s, and a lot of other historical axes.

What Mama had done was grab Dizzy Gillespie’s bent trumpet off the wall, stand on a chair, put the bell up to the knothole in the ceiling, and nearly pop our eardrums. I could have wished she had used Mozart’s harpsichord instead. My ears were ringing for hours.

—

After a quick cleanup, we joined them in the bedroom.

“Jubal, you want to take up where you left off?”

Well, Papa did
want
to do that, but his language skills are never quite up to just telling a story in a meaningful sequence. That brilliant brain that understands quantum physics like I understand the sprockets on a flycycle just leaps from one thing to another without much logical sense behind it. Maybe that’s what makes his mind able to make those leaps in mathematical and scientific logic that no one else can follow. All the remaining language logic circuits in his brain are already tied up in other stuff.

So there is not much point in my trying to set it all down as he told it. It took two hours to get it all in a form the other four of us could follow, if not completely understand. A summary will work much better.

This is what Papa told us:

—

The universe,
cher
, it be a strange place . . .

We figure that the observable universe is about 93 billion light-years across. It’s 13.5 billion years old. There are hundreds of billions of galaxies, maybe even a trillion, though that’s a tough number to pin down, and it refers only to the “observable universe,” which is that part of the universe we can theoretically interact with. There are probably parts—maybe even the majority of it—that we can never interact with, even if we were traveling at the speed of light, because the universe can expand
faster
than the speed of light. As we head for the edge of it, I guess, the edge gets farther and farther away. If it
has
an edge, which it probably doesn’t.

All this, according to Papa. I’ll take his word for it.

So, say a trillion galaxies. Our Milky Way has about four hundred billion stars in it. Most of the others do, too, or even more. That comes to about one hundred sextillion stars. Some are much, much bigger than Old Sun, some are much smaller. Say Old Sun is about average in mass—I have no idea if it is, but just say. It masses about two octillion tons.

Two octillion tons (2 times 10
27
) times one hundred sextillion stars (10
23
) equals two hundred quindecillion tons (2 times 10
50
), the mass of all the stars in the observable universe. You can throw in all the planets, asteroids, comets, and such and not affect the final total much; it’s like tossing a few pennies in a bucket of hundred-dollar coins. (There’s also a hell of a lot of neutrinos, but let’s not even go there. I don’t like neutrinos; their very existence offends me.) I like to write out numbers like that, because it gives me a better sense of just how huge they are. Two hundred quindecillion looks like this: