Dark lightning thunder a.., p.37
Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning), page 37
“Let the elected civil authorities on New Sun take care of it,” he said. “I wash my hands of it.” He felt betrayed by an old friend and guilty that his elaborate safety measures had had just enough holes in them to allow that stinking son of a bitch to get away with as much as he did.
They would be let out of the bubbles sometime after we got there. And that was the scary part, for them. That sometime could be a long way off. Remember, the bulk of the colonists were already in bubbles, and they would not all be coming out at once. They would come out as their particular skills were needed. As Cassie pointed out to me a few days after the hearings, the need for mutineers would be quite small. I hadn’t thought of that. It was possible they would never come out.
Max made an angry statement before vanishing into an unknown future. He said we were all crazy to accept Papa’s calculations about the dark matter and dark energy. He called us all quitters, cowards, without the nerve to continue on to our new life. He cursed us if we decided to stop the ship, or turn it around. He singled out Cassie and me in the crowd and had a few nasty words to call us, which I won’t repeat here.
I smiled, and waved at him. Bye-bye, Max!
Cassie had a hand gesture for him that Papa would have frowned at. But of course, Papa wasn’t there. He was working on something.
My arm healed up nicely, with only a little scar. Why is it that I get all the scars? And why does Cassie keep winning that silly scissors-rock-paper game?
Cassie:
Life returned to normal fairly quickly. The damage from fires and such was not apocalyptic. If people had had guns, it would certainly have been much worse, like the pictures of bullet-riddled and bomb-blasted buildings I’ve seen from fighting on Earth. There were a lot of injuries from the hand-to-hand fighting with knives and clubs, broken bones and concussions and cuts and a few burns, but only seventeen people died. For people who aren’t used to close combat, closing in with a knife or even a sledgehammer is a scary thing to do. Most of them ran away as fast as they could, and I don’t blame them.
One of the dead, of course, was Cheryl Chang. Polly and I and all the skypool teams in the ship, boys and girls, attended her memorial service, in our uniforms. Mama was there, and Travis gave a moving speech. Her parents were brokenhearted but stoic. They were Buddhists. They believed she had moved on to a better life, or something like that. I don’t know much about religions. I hoped it helped.
Polly and I cried our eyes out. I still choke up when I think about it.
But we still had to decide what to do about the threat Papa had discovered and that he and I had left the ship to learn more about.
So one day, Travis summoned all the mayors of all the townships—except the one currently serving an indefinite sentence in stasis, awaiting trial many years from now—and had them assemble on the bridge. When Polly and I asked to be there, he said we had a right to be, no question. So we sat off to one side as the big shots took their seats on folding chairs and regarded Travis and Papa and something Papa had brought with him.
It was typical of one of Papa’s gizmos, though a little large. He had had time to work on it for a few weeks, so it didn’t have as much of the slapdash look of some of his creations.
How to describe it. It’s hard, because it didn’t have many parts you could call square, or spherical, or much of anything else. It slightly resembled some of those shapes I looked at once in a book on topology. Theoretical constructs that were twisted through some other dimensions, like a Möbius strip that had had a nervous breakdown.
It was mostly metal and glass, or plastic, with a few other things. It was about ten feet tall and four feet wide, bigger at the base, smaller here and there, with no rhyme or reason that I could see.
It didn’t do anything. It just sat there. No blinking lights, no emissions of steam, no sizzling Jacob’s ladders. Maybe it wasn’t turned on. Maybe it would put on a better show later. Right then, it looked like it would be more at home in a museum of “modernist” sculpture than on the bridge.
Polly and I whispered to each other, and our consensus was that it might be something that would shield us from the deadly sleet of dark lightning. That would be good. The thought of turning back gave me an ache deep in my heart. The thought of an extra fifty or sixty years getting there was almost as heartbreaking. I had to get to New Sun. There wasn’t much left back at Old Sun for an intrepid girl explorer.
We had talked to Papa, asking him what he was working on. He had let us get glimpses of it in various stages of construction. We asked him what the gizmo would do.
“Maybe nothing,” was all he would say.
It was taking a while to get going, so the sibling and I continued to whisper. What I was most concerned about at the moment was Patrick. I had asked the lovely boy out on a date, and he had said yes. Which was a big surprise. I had been sure that, with the intense time Polly and Patrick had spent together, they would have formed some sort of bond.
“You knew I took Patrick to a dance?” I asked her, cautiously.
“Somebody mentioned it. How did it go?”
“Okay. He’s a good dancer.”
“Yeah, I figured he would be.”
I knew her well enough to sense there was something she wasn’t telling me. If it had been me, even in the midst of the crisis, I would have made some sort of attempt to get closer to him. I mean, life goes on, right?
Could it be his acrophobia? I’ll admit I was a little surprised when I heard about that, him looking so strong and all, but none of us are responsible for our phobias. If you dropped a tarantula in my lap, I’d pee my pants. Papa’s got more phobias than I can count, and yet he’s the kindest, best person I know.
So I’ll continue to take a hack at Patrick.
Travis’s calling the meeting to order put an end to my speculation. I’m going to leave out all the niceties and formalities he engaged in and get right to the meat of the matter.
“So once more, let me go through our options at this point,” he said.
“One, we continue as we have been, accelerating to the midpoint, where we will be moving at well over 98 percent of the speed of light, turn the ship around, and decelerate until we get there. In other words, our original plan. Jubal, do you have a better fix on when you think that would kill us all?”
“Nothin’ exack,” he said, looking very troubled. He was medicated to the eyeballs, doing better than usual in the low gravity, and still able to function. “But it be soon. Another couple a months at the most.”
“Okay. Option two. We shut down the engines, drift at this speed, which Jubal thinks might be safe. Might be. When we get to the right point in space, we decelerate until we arrive.
“Option two A, decelerate some right now, to be on the safe side. That adds about seventy years to our trip. More years with option two A.
“Option three. We start decelerating right now, do that for twenty years until we are motionless relative to the sun, accelerate another twenty years to this speed, turn around again and decelerate another twenty years until we arrive back home, tails between our legs. Total, sixty years wasted, in addition to the twenty years we’ve already wasted.”
So, tell us which option you really hate, Travis, why don’t you? Duh. But Travis still had a trick or two up his sleeve.
“I rule out option one. I have never known Jubal to be wrong about something like this. I believe him completely. If we just keep going, we will all be dead, and soon. Just for my information, can I have a show of hands of anyone who also believes as I do?”
Just for his information, huh? A little clue that this was not going to be a consensus decision. This was going to be a captain’s decision. The final word aboard an ocean ship, an airplane, and a spaceship.
I was relieved to see most of the hands go up. At least a three-quarters majority. Not that it was going to change Travis’s decision; that much was obvious to anyone who knew him.
“Thanks,” he said. “I hate option three so much I can hardly express it. Starting something like this, spending so much time on it already, then turning around and going home . . . the whole idea of it makes me sick. Is there anyone here who thinks that’s what we should do? Don’t be shy, I won’t be mad at you.”
No one raised a hand.
“Thanks for that, too. I would be surprised if any of you had wanted to go back. None of you were selected because you are quitters.
“That would seem to leave some variation on option two. It’s not one I or any of you like, taking that long to get there, and I worry a bit about the ship. So far there have been no major technical problems, nothing unexpected except this ‘dark lightning’ flux that no one could have known about, I guess. But as the best of bad options, it’s what I had intended to do.”
He paused, then smiled.
“Until Jubal provided me with a fourth option.”
There was considerable murmuring about that. Polly and I looked at each other, and I’m sure my eyebrows were raised as high as hers were.
Travis walked to the gizmo in the middle of the round room. He gave it a little time for our curiosity to build up. For a moment I glanced up at the huge screen that simulated what we would see outside if we weren’t under a quarter mile of rock. The view forward. New Sun in the center, no brighter than any other star in the scrunched-up universe. If it hadn’t been in the exact center, it would have been impossible to pick it out from any of the others. Our destination, still many long years away, even at our present speed. My new home, someday.
“Jubal, I know you have trouble explaining things like this, but I’d like you to lay it out for them, just as you told it to me. I think they need to hear it from you.”
Papa looked intensely uncomfortable, but he started to speak, looking down at his folded hands the whole time.
“It be all about space-time,” he said. “It ain’t solid, like a piece of wood. It be stretchable, like a sheet of rubber. What we could do, we could stretch that stuff. Behind the ship, we stretch the space-time out. In the front, we scrunch it up, like a wadded-up piece of paper. With the space-time spread out behind us, or sort of piled up, like a wave . . . sorry, I ain’t good at this . . . we could ride that wave. There wouldn’t be no acceleration. You might even say we ain’t really movin’, not like we’re used to movin’. We just go, and when we get there, we just stop. People knowed about this for a long time, but there ain’t been nothing we could do about it.”
I looked at some of the other faces in the room. No one looked any more enlightened than I felt.
“Tell them why, Jubal,” Travis said, gently.
“Oh, yeah, because it take a lot of power. A lot of power. If you took the planet Jupiter and converted it to energy, about that much power.”
That got a rise. Even the power in any of the silver bubbles we carried for fuel and power wouldn’t give that much power. I guess, theoretically, Papa could squeeze the actual planet Jupiter down to the size of a Ping-Pong ball, but then what would happen to Jupiter’s moons, where plenty of people were living? And how would you apply all that power without blowing up the whole solar system? And what would you do when you wanted to do it again? Squeeze Saturn? You could use up a lot of solar systems that way.
“But you think you found a way, Jubal?” Travis prompted.
“A way? Oh, yeah. It be all that dark lightning.”
Travis could see that many of them were lost. I would have been, too, if Papa hadn’t talked about it some while we were away from the ship. So he explained about the dark matter and dark energy that makes up 95 percent of the stuff in the universe.
If it is actually in the universe, in the way we understand that. Because the way Travis put it, trying to clarify the things Papa said, Papa thought it wasn’t, exactly.
It all had to do with superstring theory. My knowledge of strings is limited to yo-yos and Mama’s guitars, and of superstrings I know nothing. It seems they are incredibly, incredibly tiny things. Compared to them, a proton would be as big as the Earth. Maybe bigger. They are folded through about eleven dimensions. Seriously, eleven, I’m not just picking a number out of the air! If you can unfold them a little, you can have access to a lot of power. Me, I got stuck trying to imagine five dimensions, and I wasn’t sure I really had the fourth one down pat.
Papa thought all that dark energy was hiding in one of those dimensions. He thought the way to get at it involved the same kind of things he had discovered when he invented the squeezer bubbles and the black bubbles. He thought he could unlock it, and we would have virtually unlimited energy at our disposal. All around us, in interstellar space, it was just hanging around out there, around a corner of space-time where we couldn’t see it and it didn’t affect us much. Except for exerting gravity on regular matter, which is how we discovered dark matter, and for speeding up the expansion of the universe, which is how we discovered dark energy.
Until we got up around 70 percent of the speed of light, and the rules changed. Tapping into all that energy would be enough to squeeze and stretch space-time in front of us and behind us without having to destroy Jupiter in order to do it.
That’s what he thought, anyway.
We could all see where this was going. All eyes turned to the gizmo sitting there like an eight-hundred-pound gorilla. This must be the space warper.
Somebody asked, “So you’re telling us that this thing can get us to New Sun faster, and without exceeding your speed limit?”
“That’s right,” Papa said, pleased to have been understood. “Real quick-like.”
“How quick?” someone else asked. Papa frowned.
“Very quick. A few hours? Even a few minutes? I’ll have to try it out first, see just how it works.”
“It might be even quicker than that, right Jubal?” Travis prompted him. “Isn’t that what you told me?”
“I don’t wanna say that, me. It’s one way it might work out.”
“This sounds crazy to me,” said a third person. There were some murmurs of agreement.
“It does, doesn’t it,” Travis agreed. “Jubal, turn the machine on.”
Papa got up and went to the machine. The murmurs got louder. There was a switch on the side, and Papa threw it.
Now that’s more like it! The thing began to glow here and there, and a screen came alive with complex geometrical shapes. I smelled ozone, and felt a low vibration in the floor. There was a sense of suppressed energy pulsing though the room. I think we all felt it.
“Now, my friends,” Travis said. “There’s really no other way to see if this thing works than by testing it right now. Jubal, what happens if you throw that other switch?”
“Either we get where we goin’ real quick, or nothin’ happens at all if I ain’t built it right.”
“No other possibility? It won’t blow us all up?”
“Cain’t,” he said with total assurance. “It ain’t built that way. It’ll either channel all that energy around us, or it won’t work at all. No.”
“Now wait,” one of the doubters said. (I’m not using anyone’s names here, to avoid embarrassment. Their concerns were real.) “Shouldn’t we discuss this? Maybe put it to a vote?”
“The people should hear about this,” someone agreed. “I think we should put it to a referendum.”
Travis sighed.
“In a lot of situations, I’m all for democracy. When we get there, we can have all the democracy you want. I’ll be pleasantly retired, and you folks can fight it all out among yourselves. But this is going to be an executive decision. As far as I’ll go is to ask for another show of hands. Those who trust Jubal’s judgment, let’s see them.”
There was a long, pregnant pause, and slowly the hands began to go up. Two, three, then five. A few more. It wasn’t as ringing an endorsement as the first vote had been, but it was a slim majority. I was surprised, frankly. I would have voted yes if I had a vote, but in some ways it seemed to be moving all too quickly.
“Throw the switch, Jubal,” Travis said. I found myself on my feet, alongside Polly, and we weren’t the only ones.
Without even a pause, Papa threw the switch.
And the lights went out on the overhead screen. All of them. All the stars, just gone.
It’s just a screen, I told myself. Maybe we’re in some sort of limbo, and after a few weeks or a few months we would come out of it. Meanwhile, life seemed to be going on as normal. I was breathing. We weren’t heating up or cooling down, at least not that we could sense.
All eyes were on the overhead screen. I think it was dark for around half a minute. Then it lit up again, with a simple message that stretched from one side to the other:
RECALCULATING
I guess that’s how long it took the ship’s navigating computer to assess all the new data and figure out where we were. That message was up there for maybe ten seconds, then all the stars came out again. Only right in the center of the screen was a blazing yellow star, brighter than any star I had ever seen, even Old Sun, looking back when I was young.
It was New Sun, and it was close.
But even that wasn’t the star of the show. Off to one side, big as a beach ball tossed in the air, was a half-moon shape, vividly striped on the side facing New Sun. There was a faint system of rings around it, and I could see some smaller half moons here and there. It looked like pictures of Jupiter.
Travis was communing with his navigation console. He looked up, grinning.
“That would be New Sun Zeta, the sixth planet from New Sun. We’ve known about it and a lot of the others for decades. It’s about 50 percent larger than Jupiter and has six moons that we know of . . .” He looked up, and smiled again. “And I can see a seventh, just from here.”
There was a lot of cheering, a lot of backslapping. It felt like an occasion for champagne, but no one had brought any.
