Rolling Thunder (40 page)

After the first two days Travis took off on some mysterious errand. I remember that from his visits when I was a child. We’d do things as a family, then he’d have to go somewhere on his ship, to handle some business he couldn’t talk about. Of course, he was always taking care of business of one sort or another, a billionaire’s day is seldom empty, but most of it could be done on the phone. No one knew what he was up to, but he’d return after a few weeks, spend some more time with us, then maybe take off again for a few weeks or maybe go back into his black bubble.

I didn’t really mind. Jubal was good company, and for some reason, he seemed to adore me. It was puppy love, which Travis told me was probably all Jubal was capable of, but that was okay, too.

He taught me to sing Cajun and zydeco style. Zydeco is like Cajun, often with the same instrumentation, but is dominated by a back beat like rock. It may come from the French word
haricot,
which means beans. Traditional Cajun can be a one-step, a Cajun jitterbug, or a waltz. Jubal played the button squeeze box and I learned some tunes on the fiddle, and we augmented with karaoke washtub and drums. Jubal had a strong baritone voice and a good ear. I picked up some French, which Jubal assured me would be almost incomprehensible to somebody from Paris. Every evening we had us a regular
fais-do-do.
We played everything from
“Les Haricots Sont Pas Salés”
and
“Jolie Blonde”
to “Diggy Liggy Lo” and “Iko Iko.” When we weren’t playing we listened to recordings of Boozoo Chavis, Clifton Chenier, Amede Ardoin, Shirley Ray Bergeron, BeauSoleil, and Buckwheat Zydeco. I went to sleep every night hearing the music and trying to see how some elements of it could fit into my sound.

But that was just for fun. There was something else we had to talk about, and we both knew it, but I was waiting for Jubal to bring it up and he didn’t seem to be in a hurry. I decided to wait him out.

The moment arrived when he asked me to sing some of my own material. So I pulled up the karaoke versions of our Pod People recordings and did the vocal parts live for him while he prepared the ingredients for what he called “the best jambalaya in Lafayette, Louisiana.” He seemed to be enjoying the songs, but his foot wasn’t tapping and his body wasn’t swaying to the music. Well, most of it isn’t foot-tapping music.

Then I started into “Jazzie’s Song,” and he stopped chopping okra and turned to face me. I almost stopped, but he motioned for me to go on. His concentration was complete, and after a few minutes he closed his eyes. Jazzie isn’t stomping music, either, though you can dance to it in several unlikely time signatures; but he was absolutely still as he listened.

When I finished, he said, “That’s the song.”
Dat de song.

“What do you mean, Jubal?”

“Sing it again,
ma jolie blonde.”

So I did. You’re never supposed to sing the same song exactly the same way twice, unless you learned it by rote, and I added a few little touches here and there, and found that he smiled every time I did it, no matter how minor the variation.

“Even better,” he said, when I was done. “I don’t axe for it again, right now, no, but could you might do it again for me, in the later time?”

“Anything you want, Jubal,” I said, and that seemed to be it for a while. I joined him at the counter and peeled shrimp.

Jubal and Travis’s kitchen was unique. It had to be the only one anywhere that took advantage of bubble technology for such a mundane task as food storage. There was no freezer, and only a small refrigerator. In their place was a giant pantry with racks and racks, each about three feet across, stacked with black bubbles. Each shelf was labeled with what was inside the bubble. That’s where the fresh okra had come from, and the shrimp, and the rice, which had come out still steaming and fresh after twenty years. I hoped Mom could see this someday. She so hates having to throw out so much fresh produce at the end of the day because it’s slightly wilted, not up to her high standards, and having to buy more the next morning.

We sat down and dined on fresh delicacies that very few Earthies or Martians had been able to taste for a long time. I didn’t think Jubal realized it, and I wasn’t about to tell him. Jubal would feel guilty.

Myself, I managed to keep my guilt in check and devoured two heaping bowls, pausing only to wipe the sweat off my forehead and toss some ice water down my burning gullet. Jubal liked his hot peppers, but so did I.

“YOU BEEN TO
the no-place place,” Jubal said. It wasn’t a question.

“I didn’t have a name for it,” I said. “But that will do.”

“In you dreams, or in you wakin’?”

“Both.”

I told him about my fainting spells, which came as a surprise to him. Jubal had been subject to petit mal seizures, sometimes called absence seizures, since his father beat him in the head with a board studded with nails. He would black out now and then, from a few seconds to a few minutes. With him, it was most often a fugue state. Most of the time he didn’t even fall down; he might just sit there staring into space and uncommunicative, or even sort of sleepwalk. It was so much a part of his life that no one was likely to notice if they came in any sort of pattern, not even him.

He was immediately fascinated by the periodicity of my episodes.

“When the nex’ one be?”

It had been something I’d worried about, and had been preparing to tell him, anyway, so it wouldn’t come as a shock—though I’d thought about locking myself in the guest bedroom. The fact was, my next one was due in about an hour.

When he heard that, Jubal went into a frenzy of excitement. He led me into his laboratory, which didn’t look at all like Dr. Frankenstein’s, but was mostly a lot of workbenches, metalworking tools, and bins of what looked like junk salvaged from some very old electronics. I looked around while he rummaged on shelves and in drawers, raising a cloud of dust wherever he went. He hadn’t used the place since Travis last woke him, some years before, and it hadn’t been cleaned in a longer time than that. Jubal didn’t trust the cleaning robots to put everything back where it belonged.

When Jubal had gathered all the stuff he needed and turned it all on and tested it, he sat me down in what looked suspiciously like an old dentist’s chair and began attaching stuff to me.

“Okay, I’ll talk!” I said, as he fitted a headband. “I’ll tell you anything you want, just don’t pull out any more fingernails. I just got a manicure.”

He looked confused for a moment—he did that a lot when people spoke to him, since the main thing he lost from his father’s rude psychosurgery was language skills—then he smiled and giggled.

“You jokin’ wit’ me, yes,” he said.

“Well, I sure hope so.”

“Nuttin’ to worry about,
cher.
All this stuff just to listen.” He flipped various switches, looking more like a mad scientist than he had before, probably because of the excited gleam in his eye. Everybody knows Jubal is a genius; they tend to visualize him sitting around thinking. We forget that he is and always has been an experimenter. He makes stuff, and he likes to explore.

While I waited, I watched quite a show on a big old flatscreen he rolled into place. There were a dozen views of my face. There was a regular video camera. There was something that showed what I assumed was my brain. There was a long electronic bar graph above it, measuring activity like the meters on a soundboard. There was a much more complex 3-D, rotating, color-coded representation of my entire head that was being sliced and diced at different angles. It made me uncomfortable to look at it. All those bones, all those muscles, tongue, tonsils, sinus cavities … who wants to see that?

I settled instead on one that showed my face surrounded by multicolored flames, sort of like solar prominences. Or maybe a hairdo like the Bride of Frankenstein with a Tesla coil shoved up her ass.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“Curly aura. Curlin’ aura. I can’t think of the word, me.”

I found it. (Two minutes till blackout.) The word was Kirlian, and the description of it read like a lot of bushwa to me. Actually, it read like bullshit, but I knew Jubal was offended by bad language, and I was practicing.

“Mostly bushwa, I think,” he said, and I laughed. “But I been lookin’ into it, me, and ain’t figgered out just
what
it is.”

“So what are you looking for?” (One minute to blackout.)

“Lookin’ for a connection, me.”

“To the no-place place?”

“That’s it. See, Podkayne, that music you sing, and the things I feels when I’m in that bubble … uh-oh, here we go. You skeered?”

I wasn’t skeered; I’d been through it too many times before. But I was a little nervous about all the machines. I shook my head.

Then I woke up to see Jubal leaning over me. He was holding one of my eyelids open, shining a light and peering in as if gazing down a deep well.

I felt great, as always.

“I’m back,” I said. He straightened up. “Didn’t you used to be partially bald?” I don’t know where that came from. Giddiness? His hand went to the front of his head.

“Almost to the top my head, me,” he admitted. “Then I use some stuff, you rub it on, I got hair again.” He looked away, embarrassed. Why are so many men afraid to admit they can be as vain as women?

“Looks good,” I said, sitting up, starting to remove all the hardware.

“It thicker, too. Used to be blow-away.” He ran his fingers through his hair in an absent sort of way, then smiled.

Good lord, was he flirting with me?

“Looks good on you, the way you’ve trimmed it. And the beard, too.” Better question:
Good lord, was
I
flirting with
him? “Why’d you do it?”

“Got tired of lookin’ like Santy Clause, I guess.” We both laughed. “Lost me some weight, too, when I was in prison on that island, and on Mars, later on.” The island was in the Falklands, where he’d been isolated for his own protection for many years. “Mostly it because I didn’t eat much anymore, me. But I always got my exercise.”

Granddaddy Manny said Jubal used to work out his frustrations with hours of rowing, which accounted for his huge arms.

“I hear you used to almost live on donuts, sometimes.”

“Krispy Kremes,” he said. “Bad fo’ me, I know that. But they made me feel better, so I et ‘em. Hadn’t had one in … what de date? I forget, me.”

I told him what year it was. It didn’t seem like an odd question anymore.

“Thirty years.”

“Calendar time.”

“Right, right. Less than a year, Jubal time. Wish I had me one now.”

So we trooped into the pantry and found the black ball marked Krispy Kreme and opened it. I was instantly hit by the amazing aroma of warm donuts. We each grabbed one and closed the bubble again, so they’d be fresh out of the cooker next time we opened it, tomorrow night … or thirty years from now.

We finished, licked our fingers, and eyed each other.

“Just this once,” I said, and we scrambled, jostling each other on the way to the pantry, giggling like kids.

THAT EVENING HE
blackened some catfish for me. When he opened the catfish bubble there were dozens of honking big ones, and they were still flopping around! Can’t get much fresher than that.

He cut off their heads and skinned them and filleted them. At least I assumed he did all that. As he was cutting the first one I abandoned ship. I’m not used to being quite that intimate with my food. It was great stuff, served with fresh corn bread made from scratch and something called dirty rice.

I finally got him to start talking while we were doing the dishes. And yes, we did them by hand. It was a low-tech kitchen, no microwave or blender or other power appliance (though there was a waffle iron, and Jubal made yummy waffles), just a stove with burners and an oven, and lots of hand utensils. Jubal
liked
washing dishes, liked chopping stuff by hand. Well, Mom was the same way, except the dishes part.

At last we sat down in the living room, groaning from full stomachs, and for once Jubal got right to the point.

“Podkayne, you been to the no-place place,” he said again.

“I’ve been somewhere, Jubal, in my dreams or visions, or whatever you want to call them. What I’ve been figuring is, my head must have got whacked when I was tumbling around in that bus, and some of my neurons aren’t firing like they used to.”

Travis and I had taken him through a mild version of the bus crash. It upset him, but then lots of things do. Jubal is too sensitive for his own good; ultraempathetic, he
hurts
when other people hurt.

“That’s what I used to figger, too. I always getting these little bads, these petit mals, the doctors call ‘em. And wit’ me, it was probly true. But I don’t think that’s what happen to you, no.”

“Is this really important, Jubal?”

“I think it is, me.”

“Tell me why.”

He took a deep breath and looked off into space. As I said, Jubal is terrible with words. When he has complex thoughts to express he tries to string them together in his head first in some sort of logical order, then put them into the damaged word-processing part of his brain. Which sometimes works, and sometimes doesn’t. Now, he took a deep breath.

“I think it all connected, me. The no-place place, and the place I go to when I makin’ the bubble machines, and the big ol’ rocks droppin’ in from … from …”

“Europa,” I said. Until Jubal’s pronounced a word a half dozen times—even if he mangles it—he can’t file it in those rusty file cabinets he uses for word memory.

“Ropa. E-you-ropa.”

“Europa.”

“You-ropa. That cold moon a Jupiter, Europa. Those things, they got a holt on you mind some whichaway, and mebbe on me, too.”

“I figured. But they don’t seem to be doing anything to me. I mean, I don’t have any urges to help them destroy the Earth, or anything.”

“It ain’t like that. It … a window. I don’t think they even see us; we too small and quick for ‘em. But I think they live in that no-place place. They own it, like we own this … this continumum.”
Continuum.