Rolling Thunder (29 page)

Then you take a trip to the Catskills for your health. You’re walking around the forest primeval, humming this little ditty that’s been running through your head, which you scribbled on a scrap of papyrus and gave to your main man, Joseph Haydn, before you left.
“Freude, schöner Götter-funken,”
then something, something, something, something. That’s all you’ve got, just those eight quarter notes, but you know a good theme when you hear one, and you think this might get some serious downloads.

Suddenly you’re struck by lightning and collapse in a stupor under the tree right next to Rip Van Winkle’s. You wake up; a hundred years have gone by. (Things happened slower back then.)

There’s a guy there, says his name is Gustav Mahler.
Yo, Bee, baby, we’re so glad you’re back.
Then he tells you that, while you were sleeping, people began to
really
take a listen to that little First Symphony of yours.

They found stuff in it even you didn’t know was there. You are, in fact, the Father of the Romantic Movement in music.

In fact, people call it “Bee music” in your honor.

He’s got some sides with him, and he plays some of it for you. The
Emperor
Concerto, by some Pole named Chopin.
Fidelio,
by Richard Wagner. The
Moonlight
Sonata by Franz Liszt. A
Pastoral
Symphony by Anton Bruckner. A
Choral
Symphony by Felix Mendelssohn. Plus some stuff by some crazy Russians: Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mussorgsky, Rachmaninoff.

None of it sounds familiar, except a little bit of the Mendelssohn.

Even worse, most of it doesn’t make a damn bit of sense to you. These guys have taken your basic idea and run with it, and now they’ve elaborated it past your capacity to dig it. It might as well be Ravel, or Copland, or Bernstein, or Schoenberg.

For all your understanding of this music, you might as well be … well, deaf.

All resemblance between me and Beethoven stops right there, of course. He was a musical genius; I’m a damn good singer, end of story. But in my little scenario of him, and in my real life, we were both baffled, deafened, deprived of the work we might have created. There would never be enough time to catch up and resume where you left off, because the musical world had left you sleeping under an oak tree. Or a mile of Europan ice.

So I was the Godmother of Pod music. So what?

On that note, I fell into a troubled sleep. I dreamed.

I CAN’T SAY
for sure when the recurring dreams began. I suspect it was while I was under the nanoknives, and sedation, but it might have been before that … and I know that doesn’t make sense, but hear me out.

I hate it when authors describe dreams in books. It seems lazy to me. Dreams are full of symbolism, and they aren’t logical or orderly. Scraps of your life are tossed into the air of your subconscious and glued together any old which-way, if you follow one theory. They might be ordered according to symbols or paradigms or archetypes or engrams, depending on who else you talk to.

I don’t think anybody really knows, but we’ve all had them, and we know they have things in common. There’s the caught-naked dream, which happens even to nudity-tolerant Martians. (There are places you go nude, and places you don’t.) There’s the running-in-place dream, where you’re moving through molasses. There’s the falling dream—so I’m told; I’ve never had one. Dozens or hundreds of others.

They usually involve people you know, in unlikely situations. They usually are set in places you’re familiar with.

These dreams were nothing like that. They are very hard to talk about, because I don’t have the verbs and nouns to describe the experience.

For one, there is a sense of no time. Not no time
passing.
No time at
all
, if that makes any sense. Maybe what it was like before the Big Bang, when everything existed as a single point and the Cosmic Stopwatch hadn’t started running yet. Or inside a stopper bubble, which is the only place I can think of where we
know
time doesn’t move.

You see where I’m going with this? Though there was no way to validate the notion, either
something
happened while I was in the bubble, or my subconscious
thought
something
should
have happened, and was supplying these weird dreams to fill in the blank.

Since there is no time in these dreams, nothing can be said to actually
happen,
if you can understand that. Heck, I’m the one having the dreams, and
I
don’t really understand it, but let me keep trying.

I am a presence. I know who I am, but I can’t say that I have an actual name. I see nothing, I hear nothing, I feel nothing. I suppose it’s like being in an isolation tank, except even in a tank I’d expect to have thoughts, mental images, retinal flashes of light, the sensation of warm water on my skin. There’s none of that. This doesn’t disturb me, as the mere awareness of identity is enough. Perhaps it’s the ultimate Zen state. I don’t know. In fact, I know nothing, because … knowledge requires a place to put it, whether it’s on a bookshelf or in electronic storage, and there is no
place
here.

See? Even the word “here” implies a place. There is no
here
here.

It is all strangely relaxing. Well, why shouldn’t it be? To be unrelaxed, you have to be engaged in something. Dealing with a problem, and there are no problems here. Stimulated, either for good or bad, and there is no source of stimulation, nothing to stimulate, no
use
for the verbs
stimulate
,
deal
, or
engage
. No use for
any
of the thousands of verbs I used to know, nor the thousands of nouns and modifiers. This place simply
is,
apparently outside of space and time, with no further detail available than that.

But gradually … and that’s not right, because it implies a process, and a state of before and after, but it’s the best way I can put it … I realize I’m not alone. I’ve
always
known this, because every moment is the same as any other. But there are presences here that are somehow different from my presence. I don’t see them, I don’t feel them, I don’t hear them, but they are there. They are aware of me.

Then time begins. It’s only a nanosecond, but it’s the first tick of time there has ever been, anywhere (and before this there was no “anywhere” for time to exist in), and we all savor it. And now that there is time, there can be other things. So … in the beginning there was the Word …

… and the Word was, “Hello.”

Or maybe it was God. And maybe they’re the same thing.

ALL RIGHT. THE
easy part is over. That’s right, that had been the easy part. From now on it gets grim.

Mom, Dad, Mike, and Travis gathered in my room, where I was practicing sitting up in a comfy chair instead of in bed. Aunt Elizabeth was there, too, with her machines, probably ready to sedate me if the stuff I was about to hear was too upsetting. The agreement was that we’d dispense with the year-by-year and just tell the whole story of the seven years I was still missing.

Mike pulled a chair up in front of me and hopped onto it. This was a new Mike, to me, dead serious, no playfulness about him at all.

“We talked it over,” he said, “and I asked to be sort of the moderator of this little show.”

Again, a new Mike. Being what he was, he had changed very little. When I left he was smaller than a normal ten-year-old child, and he was still about the same size, so he didn’t
look
any older, except around the eyes. And, of course, in body language and demeanor. He was clearly an adult, but my mind was having a devil of a time accepting that. It kept superimposing the happy-go-lucky, sweet little kid I knew over this tiny little man, and the cognitive dissonance was disconcerting.

“I suggested we find out if there are burning questions you want an answer to right now, before we get into the whole story. Some answers wouldn’t make sense unless you did know the whole story, naturally, but I can only try.” He lifted an eyebrow, and I got right to the first one.

“Who’s dead?” I asked.

“Aside from the people on Europa, who you already know about, your uncle Anthony died two years ago.”

I remembered him from the last time I saw him, at Gran’s farewell party. Chubby, stuffing himself at the free buffet, a big, affable, sweet-natured failure at everything he ever tried, a man impossible to dislike unless he owed you money. Which he did, to most of the family older than me.

“How did he die?”

“He and your cousin Luther were working at a rescue mission somewhere in Africa and were killed during a refugee riot.”

Luther, Luther, Luther. I could barely place the face, one of the sandrats at Gran’s farewell, running around, screaming and crying, maybe about twelve. I hadn’t known any of them well. Hadn’t known Anthony all that well, for that matter.

Refugee riots in Africa? Obviously that was part of the bigger picture, which I had long ago figured out was not good.

“Gran?” I said.

“Still in suspension. Everyone’s been far too busy to work much on the sort of medical problem she has. There’s been a lot more progress on the sort of medical problem
you
had.”

Meaning violent accidents, or maybe not accidents. All those Navy uniforms, Karma still in the service, the lack of lights or tourists under the Mile-High. It was sounding more and more like war.

Just for a moment, I didn’t want to hear any more.
Don’t bring me no bad news!
The military wife claps her hands over her ears when she sees the solemn officer approaching her house. If she doesn’t hear the awful news, then it didn’t happen, or she could pretend it didn’t happen for a little longer. Let’s rewind this tape, all the way back to before the trip to Taliesen, and let’s take a different path to a different future. Like when Mom and Dad saw the first video of the Big Wave, like when people saw the Twin Towers falling in New York, like when an even earlier generation heard the news about Pearl Harbor on the radio … you knew that a moment had arrived that would forever divide your life between
before
it happened and
after
it happened.

For me, it hadn’t happened yet. Grumpy had erupted, sure, I’d been there, I’d seen it as close as anyone had. But the aftermath hadn’t arrived yet, for me, and like a little child I didn’t
want
it to arrive.
Make it not happened, Mommy!
Because I knew that the flight of Grumpy and the others was one of those turning points, and I knew the news was bad. Probably very bad.

The only place you can escape history is inside a stopper bubble, and I didn’t want to go back inside. Next time I was de-stasized, if ever, my
family
might not be there, and right now, they were all I had to cling to.

But I put it off just a minute longer.

“Jubal?” I asked.

“Only Travis knows that,” Mike said, and looked at Travis, who spread his hands wordlessly.

“Still in stasis,” he said. That surprised me. Jubal’s genius had saved Mars once, and I had figured Travis would have him out and working on this problem, whatever it was.

So I sighed, and gestured to Mike.

“Let’s hear it,” I said, and settled back in my chair with Kahlua on my lap.

Mike stood up and started pacing.

“Grumpy circled the sun three times …”

… AND HEADED STRAIGHT
for the Earth.

At the velocity it was moving, and with a mass of almost a trillion tons, the results would make the Big Wave seem like dropping a ball bearing into Lake Superior. The sun’s gravity would slow it some, but as it approached Earth it would speed up again. Minimum impact speed of a body falling from infinite space: twenty-five thousand miles per hour.

Earth had had about two months to prepare.

It was the most massive movement of population in human history. Coastal areas were evacuated, giant refugee camps were established at higher elevations. It was summer in the northern hemisphere, so the most populous areas of the planet were at least temperate. But there were not enough tents, globally, to handle a fraction of the refugees.

Civil strife, everywhere, but worse in some places than in others. People who were already living in places like Denver and Geneva and central India and Africa and Asia were not always happy to see these hungry, homeless hordes, and often there was fighting for scarce space and food and shelter. Martial law, mass killings, starvation. Half a dozen cities vanished overnight in nuclear explosions.

Heroic examples of people working together for the common good, craven examples of people at their worst, stealing and raping and murdering.

The only people who were happy about it were the Rapturists, who had definitely settled on Gabriel, Michael, and Raphael as the real names of Grumpy, Doc, and Sneezy. They expected that Gabriel (Grumpy) would elevate them right out of their clothes and directly into Heaven, while the rest of us fought it out for the seven years of the Tribulation.

The Martian Republic was torn. Suddenly every Earthie who could afford it wanted to book passage to Mars, or anywhere else, most of which were Martian colonies. Some people who were already here wanted to go home to be with loved ones, but a lot more wanted to stay past their visas.

But what were we going to do? There weren’t enough ships in the entire system to transport even a tiny fraction of the people who wanted to travel, and not a thousandth of the space that would be needed to house them when they got here.

I’m proud of my country and what we did, which was, simply, everything we could, and as fairly as possible.

People already here were allowed to stay. People who wanted to go home were allowed to do that, on ships that were pretty empty Earth-bound. And at spaceports all over Earth, lotteries were conducted. We didn’t intend to fill up with only rich Earthies. Anyone who could make it to a spaceport—and we had no control over that, and the carnage on the roads and in the terminals was terrible—got a chance. If you won, you got to take your family with you … but not your friends. The lottery forms specified immediate family only. I can only imagine the heartrending scenes; I didn’t watch any of the video of that.