Rolling Thunder (43 page)

“Terraforming,” I whispered.

“Well, unterraformin’, you wanna get technical. When they done, Earth might be a lot more like Europa. Planetary engineering, in a hurry.”

Terraforming is the fairly wacky idea of turning a planet that’s not really suitable for human habitation into one that is. It’s engineering on a giant scale, and some of the ideas would boggle your mind. And that’s about all it had been up to now: boonboggled. There were a few pilot plants on Mars that dumped oxygen into the atmosphere at the rate of thousands of tons per day. And one day they might give us a marginally breathable atmosphere, say about like the top of Mount Everest in the winter. Last estimate I saw: about ten thousand years. Nobody’s built a new one since before I was born.

Jubal looked at me solemnly.

“These little spikes in the graph. They don’t look like much. Looks like somethin’ hit hard, and then went away quick. And I guess that’s right, when you look at the whole big picture. But they’s quick, and they’s
quick.
These things live on a different time scale than we do. Fact is, these skinkshuns lasted for thousands a years, and it was a different world every time, after. Looks like we might of got out just in time, us.”

BY “GOT OUT,”
Jubal meant that humanity had established itself on other worlds, pretty much independent of Mother Earth. Unless the crystals had designs on Mars and Luna, the species would probably survive.

But would we survive on Earth?

Certainly not in the numbers we had attained before this started; in fact, our population was already significantly reduced. But I didn’t see why a lot of people couldn’t survive underground, burrowing into the rock, no matter how harsh things got.

After all, that’s one of the ways we live on Mars. Would Earth end up with a harsher environment than Mars? Not if this extinction went like the previous ones. The dinosaurs died off, but remember that a certain number of species survived every one of the mass extinctions. Then they evolved to fill the niches left behind by the ones that couldn’t adapt.

I guess it was possible that one of the surviving species would adapt to fill the gap left by bipedal big-brained apes.

THE NEXT DAY
Jubal said he wanted to play a game. It turned out to be a lot more game than he bargained for … but I’m getting ahead of myself.

“Somethin’ been bothering me since way back yonder in Florida, with your grand-père and grand-mère, when they built that ship and flew it to Mars. When I made that first bubble machine. Ever since then, people, they been gettin’ mad at me ‘cause I can’t ‘splain how I done it. So I wanted to try it wit’ you.”

I couldn’t have been more floored if he’d asked me to come up with the Grand Unification Theory Einstein couldn’t figure out, or read Chinese.

“Me? Jubal, that’s crazy. I got a D in calculus, and I can’t even recall how I managed that. I have to take off my shoes to count to twenty.”

“It ain’t math … at least, math behind it, but it only be part of it.”

“Nobel Prize winners couldn’t follow you, and you expect me—”

“We got somethin’ special, you and me,” he said, raising his voice just a trifle, which for Jubal was like grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking. I shut up and listened.

“We was both in the no-place place at the same time … in this universe, anyway. Now, the
math
says no information kin be exchanged if no time has passed, but me, I got a lots of information. Your face, your name … even a feelin’ that I knew you.” He looked down, then up at me from the corner of his eye. We were sitting side by side on the couch, facing a lot of weird-looking junk he’d brought in from his lab. I didn’t know what was making him uncomfortable, but I kept silent. He’d get to it.

“I felt like … if I met you, I’d like you. Like I was in your head.”

“Jubal, you like pretty much everybody, don’t you?”

He shook his head.

“I don’t
not
like many people, ‘less they done somethin’ awful to me or mine. Mos’ people, I don’t think about ‘em one way or t’other.”

“I think we’re all like that, except the most evil people.”

“I think you right. So I ain’t all that different from anybody else.” He seemed to take comfort in that thought. The crown of eccentric genius sat as heavily on his head as the burden of brain-damaged, language-challenged idiot savant weighed upon his back.

“The onliest way I can ‘splain how the data, the information … the
feelin’s
got transferred from you to me is that we got tangled.”

“Entangled? Like the quantum stuff you were talking about?”

“Something like that.”

“Jubal, I told you that stuff is way over—”

“You don’t
have
to understand it,
cher.
All you have to do is feel it.”

“Okay. Feeling I can do. I got a Ph.D. in feeling.”

He grinned. “That’s funny. I like that. A Ph.D. in feeling. Wish more folks had one, it would save us all a passel a trouble.” He got serious again.

“Anyways, all I wants to do is try a little spearmint. It just be a game, really. I want you to look at some stuff, and see what you see.”

“Okay, I can do that, too. I’m real good at seeing what I see.”

He got up and did some things to the equipment he’d brought in. Hooked up the thingamabob to the whatchamacallit, checked to see the doohickey was synchronized with the absquatulator. Made sure the mimsies were borogroving frabjously.

“First time I made me a bubble generator, I was studyin’ on this new …” He paused, his brow furrowed, and he said, carefully, “heuristic”—he breathed a sigh of relief—“chip. It was somethin’ different, and I’d made me some changes to it, see what it could do. I used to do that sometimes, to relax.”

Some folks put their feet up in front of the TV with a cold brew. Jubal stares at microscopic computer chips. Takes all kinds.

“I got a little drowsy, me, and I went all … sort of cross-eyed. And all at once it all tumbled right into place, and I was lookin’ at this thing I’d made, me. And it weren’t like anything else I ever seen, no.”

“The singularity, right?”

“That’s what I called it, but I ain’t sure that’s what it be. It’s a twist in space, and I was skeered of it, tell you the truth. But I figgered out how to handle it.”

“And all this has … what to do with me?”

“It be the mind that make ‘em, Podkayne. And you and me, we had our minds tangled. So I was wonderin’ if mebbe you could make ‘em, too.”

Oh, brother. Sounded pretty wacky to me. But what the hell. What did I have to lose? I settled into the couch and Jubal brought up an image on the big screen that was part of his equipment. It was a real mess, ultrathin lines intersecting with tiny dots, curving things that looked like tubes. I couldn’t make any sense of it.

“This was an early heuristic chip,” he said. “Them dark things are nanotubes, made out of strands of carbon molecules, and the dots are buckyballs, little geo …”

“Geodesic?”

“What you said. Named after Bucky Fuller. This was the first chip that tried to work like the human brain, with lots a connections, instead of a bunch a transistors. A silicon chip, once you make it you can’t mess around with it or it just stop workin’. These new chips, you can fiddle around with ‘em.”

I knew a tiny, tiny bit about this stuff. I knew it was the basis for all modern computers, and the stuff implanted in my head was decades more advanced than this picture. Which didn’t help me a bit because the picture meant nothing to me.

“What I want you to do,
cher,
is not so much look
at
it, as look
tru
it.” He looked at me with raised eyebrows.

“Can you give me a little more help?”

“You know them pitchers, they look all screwy, little bits and pieces a stuff, and you look at ‘em and you don’t see nothin’, then … you see somethin’?”

Googling …

“Stereograms.” I pulled one up out of memory and attempted to link it to Jubal’s implants … and recalled, for the third or fourth time, that he didn’t have any. Jubal had ” ‘splained” that he “didn’t like to be cut on, no.” No point in telling him the surgery was about as intrusive as having your ears pierced; he didn’t like needles, either. So I tossed the image to the computer in his jackleg setup, and it came up on the screen.

“Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about, me!”

It was a random pattern of multicolored dots.

“You stare at it for a while, kind of walleyed, and somethin’ll pop out at you.”

I’d seen them before, had no idea how they worked, but I knew how to do it. I stared, and let my eyes relax, and there it was, a leaping dolphin with colored spots all over it. It stood out maybe six inches from the background dots.

“You see it?”

“I see it.”

“Now, try the same thing with the other one.”

So I did. I stared and stared, and nothing happened.

“Do
you
see anything?” I finally asked.

“Not yet.” So we stared some more. After a good while, Jubal sighed, and did something with his machines.

“Let’s try with the new one,” he said, and another image appeared on the screen. This was even denser than the first. I sort of recognized it from pictures of modern cyberstuff, the liquid kind that crammed impossible amounts of circuitry into something the size of a pea.

“Now, could I put you in a light trance?”

“Have at it.”

I went under easily now, and recognized that semidetached state where things were just a little more vivid, just a little sharper than normal consciousness. Colors were intense, but sounds were muffled, except for Jubal’s voice.

I tried to let my mind go blank, as Jubal requested. When I felt it was as blank as it could get without a lobotomy, I focused on the pattern … then tried not to focus.

And what can I say? I don’t know how to describe what turned out to be almost an hour of staring, except to say that I stared. I don’t think I even blinked much.

A few times I felt like I was starting to slip into something. If you’ve ever looked at a stereogram, you know the frustrating feeling of being
right on the edge
of seeing something, of feeling that the image is trying to come out, that that incredible soft, wet calculating machine behind your eyeballs is working furiously to decode the image the stereogram is trying to send you, but it remains as elusive as a will-o’-the-wisp. (What is a will-o’-the-wisp, anyway? Googling … ah. Swamp gas.)

Then the balloon popped. No, make that a soap bubble because it wasn’t startling; just one moment I was deeply into the picture, and the next moment I wasn’t.

I found myself sitting very close to Jubal. Our hips were touching. We were both leaning forward, and our heads were inclined toward each other. My right arm, apparently leading a life of its own, was draped over his shoulders. I felt the solid muscle beneath his shirt, beneath his skin, and I inhaled the scent of him.

I guess the bubble popped for Jubal, too, because he shook his head just a little bit, and then turned to look at me, his eyes slowly swimming into focus.

I leaned forward and kissed him, gently, on the lips. Then I moved back, waiting.

Time really is relative. A couple seconds can stretch out almost eternally, as you realize that this moment could change your life forever. The rest of the world went away, and I stared into his eyes, looked at his lips, gently smoothed his hair. It all depended on him.

He moved forward, just an inch. That was all I needed. I moved against him, pressing my lips to his. He closed his eyes and let it happen. I opened my mouth, and put my other arm around him. His hand came up, tentatively, and brushed ever so gently over my hair. I took the hand and pressed it to my cheek, and he finally began to kiss me back.

I moved his hand down to my breast, and when he squeezed it I felt something explode inside me. I heard moaning, and realized it was me. My skin felt flushed and moist. It was suddenly too hot in the room. I pulled back for just a moment and tore my blouse off and put his hand back where it had been.

Never breaking the kiss for more than a second, I got his pants down and mine off, and I straddled him.

What followed was about as close to rape as a woman could do to a man. But of course to be raped you have to be unwilling, and he was not unwilling. He was just shy and tentative. His hands touched, but barely skimmed over me. I broke the kiss and whispered in his ear.

“I won’t break, Jubal,
cher.”

Be careful what you wish for. He hugged me, and I thought a rib was going to crack. He squeezed my butt and I knew I’d have bruises, but I didn’t care. He arched upward and almost threw both of us over the back of the couch, but I clung like a cowgirl on a bucking bronco.

Then he cried out, and again, and again. It had all lasted about two minutes, and I had been on the edge, and I hadn’t made it over, but I didn’t care about that, either. Because now I was deathly afraid.
What on Earth possessed you, Podkayne?
This was a badly damaged man, uneasy with his own emotions. How would he react to this, now that it was over?

Over temporarily, if I had anything to say about it.

I gently eased away from him and looked down at his face. Tears were leaking from his eyes.
Oh, god, what have I done?

“What’s the matter,
cher
?” I whispered.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“Sorry? Sorry for what?”

“I don’t know nothin’ about this, me. About … sex. But I know it ain’t supposed to be that quick.”

I stopped myself from laughing and spent the next little while kissing away his tears, loving the saltiness of him.

“Honey, I’m guessing it’s been a long time for you,” I said.

“It been forever.”

I took his face in my hands and stared at him.

“This was your first time?” He nodded. “Oh, Jubal,
cher,
that’s so wonderful!” I hugged his face between my breasts, then let him go and grinned down at him.

“It is?”

“Of course it is. I’m so proud of us.”