Dark lightning thunder a.., p.11
Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning), page 11
“This dark lightning.”
“Whatever. So, with us and all the animals dead, what happens in here? The plants grow wild. It continues to rain on schedule. The sun goes on and off every day. The pumps keep working, so the rivers keep flowing, bow to stern. I wonder how long it would all keep working.”
“Travis built it pretty well,” I said. “But it all needs maintenance. A few decades, maybe, before it starts to all fall apart?”
“I guess so. The pumps would silt up and stop. I guess all the water would pool in the stern. The rain would stop, the plants would die.”
“Then one day,” I said, “the sun would fail. Blow up, or just stop coming on. It gives me the creeps to think of this great big empty space, totally dark, totally dead, rushing out to the stars.”
Cassie shivered, then shook her head.
“Screw it. I don’t need to think about that yet. That’s still in the future. How about we go for a run, get it off our minds?”
That’s Cassie for you. If it ain’t on the horizon, it ain’t worth worrying about. Sometimes it drives me crazy, and other times I envy it. What would it be like, not to be a worrier? Oh, hell. Why not?
“Where’s my running shoes?”
—
We got into our running shorts and halters—bright orange for me, yellow for Cassie—and running shoes, tied our hair back with scrunchies, and did a few stretches. We walked down to the road.
“The usual route?” Cassie asked.
“Sure, why not?”
When we were in training we did at least one circuit a day. Rolling Thunder provides some of the longer circular running tracks ever built, only they wouldn’t look circular to a planet person because they go more or less straight ahead until you get back to where you started.
It’s six and a quarter miles around the cylinder. When Travis was instructing the architects who laid out the interior, he told them not to use a perfect grid. He wanted hills here and there, and said the roads should go around them. The roads meandered, crossing small streams and the three rivers at angles. It made a pleasing pattern when you looked up the curve, a colorful quilt but not a strict geometric one.
Our route quickly took us into the village of Freedonia, capital of our home township of Freedonia. That may be a little confusing to people who aren’t from here.
The awake population of Rolling Thunder is around twenty thousand. It’s pretty evenly distributed through the townships, which gives each one about 1,350 souls. That’s a density of around 540 per square mile or, as Travis once put it to me, about the density of Delaware before the tsunami.
It doesn’t feel crowded. The capital of each township is always the town with the largest concentration of people, though none of them would qualify as much of a town back on Earth, or even much of a village. Travis compares the population centers to old English villages, and from the pictures I’ve seen, he’s right. Not that they all look English, but they all are rural villages with only a few medium-sized buildings. There are apartment houses, but about half the population has living quarters underground, or else it would start to look crowded.
We’ve always had it easy, not having to live underground, I know that. And I don’t feel particularly guilty about it. We chose our parents well, as Cassie likes to say.
South of Freedonia is the township of Mayberry, and north is Dogpatch. Since he was building and paying for the whole thing, Travis got to name anything he chose to name, and he decided on famous fictional places that he liked. From time to time—from residents of places like Dogpatch and Frostbite Falls—there is a movement to change the names, and Travis never opposes them, but the names seem to be entrenched by now, with a majority of residents proud of them.
Freedonia Township is a cluster of buildings with five streets paved with cobblestones. Mama says the theme of the buildings is Medieval Balkan, whatever that means. Many of the roofs are steep and thatched with (fireproof) straw. A stream runs through town, and there’s a real stone-grinding mill powered by a waterwheel under some towering chestnuts.
There’s a market, a cheese shop, a bicycle shop (called a blacksmith, and she does shoe horses), a few dozen other small businesses. All businesses on the interior are small. We have no big corporations here.
The second and, occasionally, third floors above the ground-level businesses are all apartments.
There’s an old stone multidenominational church, brought in from somewhere in the Balkans and reassembled, a town hall, a constable’s office, and the three-room schoolhouse we went to for twelve years, with a gym and athletic fields. There is a little theater which puts on shows twice or three times a year. Cassie and I played Blanche Dubois, alternating nights, last summer, to pretty good reviews.
There was the normal amount of traffic as we jogged into town. Lots of people on foot, a few on cycles of one sort or another—we have a big variety of foot-powered vehicles—and three horses tied to rails in front of the market. Some of the trees had turned to fall colors—I don’t know how the ecologists manage that since we don’t really have an “autumn” here, but they do—and there were red and gold leaves blowing around in the gentle breeze. The smell of fresh bread and cinnamon rolls was coming from the bakery beside the mill, and I heard music coming from some of the upstairs windows. One of them was playing an old load from our mother, who was a very big deal in the music business back on Mars. I smiled when I heard it. It was one she used to sing to us to get us to go to sleep.
Naturally, we knew almost all the people in town, and acknowledged those we saw with a hand wave. People know not to bother us when we’re on what they call the “hamster wheel,” our run around the circumference.
In no time at all we were back into the countryside. The fields around us were mostly planted in grains destined for the mill. Wheat, barley, oats, rye, buckwheat, millet. Again, there is no particular season for harvesting in our ship. The ecologists get three or four crops every “year” out of most of the land. And what we were seeing was only a part of what was actually grown in the ship. Down below in huge, low-ceilinged rooms with harsh lighting, the bulk of our daily diet was grown hydroponically, and much of the livestock was raised. But many people felt it wasn’t the same and were willing to pay a premium for “surface-raised” food.
Before long we were in Grover’s Mill Township, though you wouldn’t know it if you hadn’t seen the carved stone announcing that fact. Off to the right was Maycomb, and to our left was Castle Rock.
“Ready to pick up the pace a little?” Cassie asked me.
“Go for it.” I was being thrown off my stride by the sling around my arm but was slowly adjusting to it. It didn’t hurt too much, but I wondered if it might be a problem around mile four or five.
“How’s your ass?”
“Prettier than your face.”
She snorted and pulled ahead of me slightly. The truth was that the wound in my butt was throbbing a little. I sure didn’t want to give up before we’d completed the revolution, but I was already resigned to the fact that I was going to lose in the last quarter mile, which we always turned into a sprint race. I thought I could tough it out to the finish line, but I didn’t have all that much in reserve.
I got a short reprieve when the weather alarm sounded in my head. I blinked on the heads-up display and saw that a rain shower was scheduled to start in two minutes. Grover’s Mill was 1920s art deco. Curved corners on stucco buildings, pastel colors, and lots of little architectural flourishes I’ve always liked. Travis says the buildings are patterned on old hotels in Miami Beach, where he used to spend a lot of time. In fact, one of them, the Breakwater, used to be a hotel in Miami Beach. It had been dismantled and moved to Las Vegas, and so escaped the destruction of the Big Wave, and was later bought by Travis and moved here. It’s lovely, bright white with blue and yellow trim.
The town was arranged around a square with a bandstand, a fair amount of grass, and a lot of palm trees of various sorts. We took shelter in the bandstand and watched parents rounding up their children from the playground. Some of them joined us on the bandstand, and others found refuge under picnic shelters.
The sky opened up and gave us a real downpour.
You can just see the clear plastic rain pipes that interlace the sky in the interior, but you have to know what to look for and where to look. They are a few thousand feet up, suspended from a wire lattice.
It would have probably made more sense to have all the crop water delivered by ground-level irrigation, either sprinklers or drip lines, but Travis said, as a Florida boy, he’d miss the daily tropical rains. So his engineers figured out this system, and I’m glad they did. The rain washes everything clean.
As it was, the rain came down in sheets for almost five minutes. Cassie jogged in place, while I rested my uninjured butt cheek on the wood railing of the bandstand. I watched the rain pelting off the brightly colored playground equipment. In the center of it was a twenty-foot-high sculpture on three springy legs. At the top was a silly, cartoonish “Invader from Mars.” Every twenty minutes or so it would bounce around and shoot out rays of light, and bellow “Surrender, Earthlings!” There were other signs of alien invasion around town, which was named after a fictional place where Martians landed in a story by H. G. Wells, back in the early twentieth century, and were quickly up to no good. Or so I’m told.
—
I was hurting by the time we got to Lake Wobegon Township.
The arm was okay, but the wound in the butt was throbbing with every step I took. I wondered if it was bleeding. But sis and I are so competitive, and have trained so much together, that neither of us liked to admit that we had any quit in us.
Off to my left I could see Grand Fenwick, home of a lot of dairy cows and producer of the best cheese in the ship. We crossed a bridge over Brink Creek. I could see it meandering along among smooth stones, cascading over a few little waterfalls. Not far away to my right, the capital city of Tottering Township was situated on the waterway. Crossing that Brink Creek Bridge was always a welcome sight on these hamster runs because it meant we were less than a mile from the finish line.
With our huge old live oak in sight, we passed the flat rock that had WELCOME TO FREEDONIA chiseled into it, under cartoon images of Groucho, Chico, and Harpo Marx. We have watched a couple of their films and I’m afraid I don’t understand a lot of the jokes, and I think most of the music is pretty awful, though I did laugh a lot at the scene where they were stuffing people into the small cabin of an ocean liner. It was the signal that we had only a quarter mile to go, and it’s where we always forced ourselves into a sprint to the tree, and home.
Cassie started out in a sprint, and I labored to keep up with her, but it was no use, the pain was too great. After about a hundred yards of watching her ponytail bounce at an increasing distance in front of me, I gave in. I limped to the side of the road.
Ahead of me, Cassie looked back and slowed to a walk, then turned around and came back to me.
“Don’t start,” I gasped.
“I wasn’t going to say anything,” she said, leaning over with her hands on her knees, breathing hard. “I’ll tell you the truth, spacegirl, I was beginning to worry that you were going to outlast me, busted butt and all.”
I had to laugh.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” she added, standing up straight. “You think we’re just too worried about Papa?”
“I don’t know, Cass. A lot has happened today. I can hardly believe that last night we played a skypool match.”
As if on signal, the sun dimmed quickly and shut off. Streetlights came on, including one just over our heads.
“Come on, Poll, turn around and let me take another look at your ass.”
“You can kiss it while you’re down there.” But I turned. She squatted and lifted the hem of my shorts. She clucked her tongue.
“Shit, babe, you’re bleeding.”
“How bad is it?”
“Well, it hasn’t reached your sock.”
Cassie pulled off her halter and ran it up the back of my leg. She showed it to me, and it wasn’t too bad, though I never like seeing my own blood.
She lifted the back of the leg of my shorts and poked around a little.
“What’s it look like?”
“Big bruise. Covers most of your cheek. The dressing is coming off. We need to change it. This might not have been the best idea we ever had. I’m amazed you got this far, dude.”
She stood up and came around by my side. She pulled my uninjured arm over her shoulder and took a lot of my weight.
We hobbled on home.
—
At the end of the dock we stripped off and took our customary plunge into the warm waters of the pond. Well, Cassie plunged and I lowered myself carefully, not wanting to get the cast on my arm wet. I hung on to the dock as I dunked, paddled around a bit, then waded ashore with Cassie. We squeezed the water out of each other’s hair and hurried to the big live oak.
Our tree house is a wonderful sight to behold. “Swiss Family Robinson,” Papa Jubal said when he finished building it. It’s two stories high, with a terrace on each level. Living room below, bedroom above, tiny kitchen off to one side. When we were young it was a play kitchen, suitable for baking mud pies, but later we put in a hot plate, a microwave, and a small cooler. A long set of stairs leads to a crow’s nest so high up that it sways in a gentle breeze.
Access is by rope ladder. We climbed it, and Cassie pulled it up behind her. We had never put up a sign saying NO BOYS ALLOWED, but that was the idea. In fact, we had never invited anyone but a few of our best girlfriends up there. Once it was finished, Papa never came up unless he was invited or was adding something on, and Mama Podkayne only did a monthly safety inspection when we were very young. She hadn’t done that in years. The tree house was our refuge, our own private place.
It was cozy inside. A little too cozy, in fact. Papa had built it without realizing his daughters would top out at over six feet. These days we brushed our heads if we stood up straight.
With typical Rolling Thunder artfulness, Papa had built it on the outside to look like the “dilapidated” bait house we lived in, with wood weathered gray and looking slightly out of kilter, and a rusty tin roof that sagged in the middle. The windows all looked like they had been salvaged from other buildings, none of them matching.
Inside was a different story. It was all fine woods that glowed warmly yellowish in the light from what looked like hurricane lamps. There were nice carpets on the floor. The walls were lined with shelves and cabinets that held dolls and dollhouses, popguns and bows and arrows, train sets, and lots and lots of books. The kitchen was a ship’s galley. The back deck looked like the prow of a sailing ship, with a mast, ropes leading up to cross sprits, and a bowsprit pointing out over the pond. Under that was a painted figurehead that looked a lot like Mama Podkayne, and on the deck were two small cannons that made enough smoke and noise to drive Mama crazy some days.
Inside again, a spiral stairway led up to the bunkroom. Oh, yes, we’d had it good growing up.
We grabbed towels and dried off, and Cassie went upstairs and threw down some fresh clothes, shorts and tops. I was nosing around the kitchen. There wasn’t much in the freezer but a frozen pizza. I sniffed it dubiously.
“How old do you think this is?”
“No more than two years,” Cassie said. “Let’s eat it.”
It was tough as leather, but we wolfed it down and chased it with cans of cold Dr Pepper. We dumped the dishes into the pneumatic trash bin, where they would be whisked away to the central washing facility, sterilized, and shipped off to who-knows-where. We once tried marking a couple of them to see if we ever got the same ones back, and got a nasty mail back from Housekeeping telling us we’d ruined the dishes. Another thing we got, of course, was a lecture from Mama.
Cassie treated and redressed my wounded behind almost painlessly. By then we were both yawning, so we climbed the stairs to the bedroom, the most girly place in the tree house. There were tons of stuffed animals, lots of lacy trimmings, two vanities where we had played with makeup and dress-up. There were closets and dressers for our clothes.
“I’ve had it,” Cassie said.
“Long day,” I agreed.
“Long, strange day.” She paused for a moment. “What do you think’s going to happen?”
“I think we’re going to keep accelerating for a while. Papa finally agreed that he doesn’t think we’re right on the edge of whatever critical speed it is that will kill us all.”
“Yeah, but he isn’t sure.”
“Of course not. He has to do more experiments, he said. Anyway, you don’t just stop the ship overnight. If we have to turn around, it’s going to be a nightmare. So many things to do.”
“Yeah, well, we would have had to do all that eventually, even with our original flight plan. But still . . . I don’t want to go back, Polly.”
“Neither do I.”
Last we heard, the Earth was still trying to cope with the alien invasion from Europa, and not doing well at it. Mars was better, but still overwhelmed by refugees, even with 95 percent of them in black-bubble suspension. It was a horror story we had grown up listening to, and it had made a deep impression on our young minds. Rolling Thunder was fleeing a catastrophe, there was no other way to put it. Old Sun was a scary place to me and my sister.
—
We put on our jammies and crawled into bed.
From the time we were old enough, which was about six, we spent two or three nights every week in the tree house.
Cassie pulled a thin sheet over herself, fluffed up her pillow, and closed her eyes. In thirty seconds, I could hear her soft snore.
It drove me crazy, how she could get to sleep so fast. Somehow, she can just turn off the worry machine inside her head, the same machine that can keep me sleepless for hours before a skypool match or a big date.
