Rolling Thunder (42 page)

“You think on it, Jubal, that’s what you’re good at.”

“I think them crystal things live in that no-place place. And you bein’ so close to them, and all, I think they connected to you, and you still tangle up with ‘em.”

“Tangled?”

“It’s a quantum thing. A particle can be tangle with another particle, don’t matter how far apart they are, they influence each other.”

“That sounds spooky.”

“That’s what Einstein said, too. ‘Spooky action at a distance,’ he said. But it’s the real deal, no doubt about it.”

So what did this mean to me? I wanted to know. He shrugged.

“Mebbe it jus’ means you gonna pass out ever t’ree and a haff days. But I been wondering if you might be the onliest one who ever has contacted them critters.”

“But I didn’t contact anyone! Anything?”

“That song of yours.”

” ‘Jazzie’s Song’? That was just me fiddling around with—”

He was shaking his head. “It be the music of the spears,
cher
. I think it may have some of that no-place place in it, if we study on it. I don’t know nothin’ bout music, me, ‘cept a few old Cajun stomps. But I know this is different.”

“But Jubal … what are you saying? … you think they’re trying to contact me? Us? Humans?” I sure as hell didn’t need this. But he was shaking his head.

“I don’t think they even notice us,
cher.
But you done listened in to ‘em, and some whichaway that got you tangle with ‘em.”

Long silence. Deep sigh, from me.

“So what does it mean?”

“Like I done said, mebbe nothin’. I thought and I thought and thought about it, the first time Travis woke me up, and I don’t have no idea a tall how to do anything about them things. All I know is, you the onliest one ever touched ‘em some way, and something about that touching tuned you in to ‘em, and made it doable for you to reach out to me or me to reach out to you, in the no-place place.”

And that was it, for that day. I had plenty to sleep on, and I wasn’t happy with any of it.

20

I’D NEVER BEEN
hypnotized before, but Jubal was good at it. It wasn’t what I’d expected. I didn’t get all goofy, and I was fully awake and aware, but some things seemed different. My head seemed clearer. If he’d asked me to walk around flapping my arms and clucking like a chicken, would I have done it? I don’t know, maybe I would have, to humor him (and I later learned that that’s what hypnotic subjects often thought they were doing), but he didn’t ask. I don’t think I was under all that deep, at least the first time.

He kept the first session short and asked me to imagine myself back in the no-place place. We didn’t get very far. My recollections of the dreams and episodes, if there was any difference, were still hazy.

The second time I figured it didn’t work, because I fell asleep there on the couch. I don’t mean your standard psychiatrist’s couch; this was just your normal soft-leather overstuffed sofa where Jubal and I often sat together in the evenings watching classic movies, since most of the HD3D stuff made in the last fifty years was too much of a sensory overload for him. But when I woke up, Jubal seemed happy, and told me I’d been in a deeper trance. I looked at him suspiciously.

“You didn’t make me do anything stupid, did you?”

He didn’t seem to understand at first.

“You know. Parlor tricks. I saw a stage hypnotist once. He had people acting crazy, and stuff.”

He looked shocked.

“Cher,
I would never … oh, my, no, Podkayne,
ma cher
… maybe I oughta should set up a camera, something, and then you could—”

I put my hand on his, which always cut off the awkward flow of words, the few times I’d done it. We didn’t touch much. Jubal didn’t touch
anybody
very much, including Travis. I wondered if he confused touching with pain, given his terrible childhood.

“I trust you, Jubal,” I said.

“I jus’ don’t want you to think I’d do anything … I mean, I wouldn’t take any … I wouldn’t touch …” His tongue finally was completely knotted, and I patted his hand and then withdrew mine. I thought the fact that he said he’d never touch me meant that he’d been
thinking
about it. I knew with absolute certainty that he never would, but the idea that such thoughts entered his mind was intriguing. Somewhere in that lost little boy, that incredibly damaged and abused child, was a man, with all that implied.

THE BEST SESSION
of all was the next time I was due for an episode. We both thought it would be interesting if I was in a trance state when it hit. Would it apply some sort of double whammy to my perceptions? I was game to try it.

But I began to think we’d started too late. Thirty minutes before I was due to keel over, Jubal was still patiently droning at me and I was still trying to make my mind a blank, but I was too nervous about it. Losing consciousness is never a lot of fun, even if you know you’re going to feel great when you wake up. It’s too deathlike, not at all like sleep. So I was resisting, unconsciously.

So when I woke up, refreshed and feeling very hungry for some reason, I shrugged and sighed.

“Didn’t work, huh?”

He smiled at me.

“You was deep as you ever been, ten minutes before the time, you,” he said. “What was it like?”

I thought about it.

“I wish I could tell you something spectacular … but I didn’t notice anything different. It’s all still so vague; it’s like trying to grab smoke.”

He looked disappointed, but then he brightened.

“Sleep on it,
cher.
It’s dreamland, the no-place place. And I get mos’ of my best ideas when I’m asleep.”

SO THAT’S WHAT
I did. And I woke up in the middle of the night with music playing in my head. Blasting in my head, filling me with a sense of urgency I hadn’t felt since that crazy time—trancelike, I realized, now that I had something to compare it to—when Jazzie first came to me.

I stumbled out of bed in my nightgown and made my way to the main room, where my recording equipment was. No keyboard, no guitar, not even a kazoo.

“Somet’ing wrong,
cher?”
Jubal was standing there in his pajamas. They had little cartoon alligators on them.

“I need a keyboard, Jubal.” Lord, Podkayne, you sound like a junkie.

“A …”

“Keyboard.” I mimed playing one, and I was so far in the zone I could actually hear the chords I was hitting, on the bare wood of the table in front of me.

Jubal asked no more questions but ran toward his laboratory. Meanwhile I was hunting feverishly for a pencil and paper. Music can be such an evanescent thing, it can be here one minute and gone the next unless you write it down or record it. Right now this stuff existed only in my head, which wasn’t a very good storage medium.

I had my head in my hands, trying to keep the musical string in my mind, a haunting theme that I just knew, when I pulled on that string, would let loose a torrent of sounds that would flow through me … and then Jubal unceremoniously grabbed me by the upper arm and pulled me toward the kitchen. I followed, and he sat me down at the big, high oak preparation table and brought up a barstool and sat me down on it. He had a keyboard in his hand, and when he unrolled it dust flew.

“Gee, Jubal, you’ve got a bit of
everything
in there, don’t you?”

“Hush, chile. I be back.” And he was off again. I started experimenting with just the tiny little built-in speaker. Squeaker, really, but it was all I needed. Next time I looked up, Jubal was hooking up a small speaker and amp, and my minicorder. He interrupted me only once, to spray the keyboard with some cleaning stuff and wipe it up and down with a dishrag. Arpeggios!

I began.

Eight hours later I had “Jazzie’s Return.”

I shipped it off to Tina, Mike, and Quinn, and then Jubal led me to my bedroom and tucked me in, and I slept for twelve hours.

IN THE MORNING,
it was as if it had never happened. Was it my music, or was I just channeling something from those goddam crystals. I asked Jubal about it over breakfast.

“Don’t know,
cher.
But if it was channelin’, they didn’t do it tru me, ‘cause I ain’t got a creative note in my head. It was you done the work.”

“Yeah, but did they do something to me?”

“I don’t think so. I think you just somehow tuned in to whatever it is they talk about, and you made your own thing out of it.”

“So what are they talking about, Jubal? I keep getting the feeling you know more than you’re telling.”

He shook his head.

“You got the wrong idea,
cher.
I don’t know nothing more than you do.”

“But you have some ideas?”

He thought about it for a while.

“I ain’t saying I know anything, me. I ain’t even sayin’ what they doin’ is talkin’, the way we know it. I don’t think they intelligent, not the way we measure it. I think they just
is,
like a animal is. They don’t got no plans, they ain’t doing nothing
to
us, not on purpose like. They just like big ol’ boar hogs wallowin’ in our oceans. It’s what they
do.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Always when we think about meetin’ aliens, we figger we gonna talk to ‘em. Mebbe we fight ‘em, but that’s juss talkin’ wit’ you fists. We never figgered they wouldn’t even notice us.

“Say they’s some sort of gas critters livin’ in the middle a the sun. A billion degrees down in there. They ain’t chemical, they’s nucular, that’s how they live. How we ever gonna talk to ‘em? But say they like to come to the surface now and again. Cool off, mebbe, or they like to mate up there in the thin gas. Or mebbe they just playin’, jumpin’ around like porpoises or otters. And we see ‘em, and we call ‘em solar provid … solar …”

“Prominences.”

“What you said. When what they is, is solar dolphins. And they kick up a heck of a racket, oh, my! Radiation all over the place. Northern lights, and satellites gettin’ burned out, and radios all fouled up. You think them gas critters know what they’re causin’, ninety million miles away? If they knew, you think they’d care what’s happenin’ on a little freezin’ cold speck o’ mud and salt water?”

“I guess not.”

“I think these crystals, they like that. And I think they done it befo’.”

I thought about that.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Not kiddin’.”

“When, Jubal?”

” ‘Bout sixty million years ago.”

Hoo, boy.

IT WAS ACTUALLY
around sixty-five million years ago, and you may have heard of it. Little thing called the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction? Dinosaurs dying in a rain of flaming meteors? Ring a bell?

At least that’s been the prevalent theory—collision with an asteroid, though there’re some who still hold out for other causes.

Jubal had done some work on his own. He showed me a graph.

“They’s six major skinkshuns the fossil people tell us,” he said. “Mebbe seven, if you count the one we’re in the middle of now.”

“You mean Grumpy and the others?”

“No,
cher,
the one been goin’ on for quite a while. Call it the …” He didn’t even try, but pointed at the word, which was
Holocene.
The ongoing extinctions caused by environmental changes brought about by man. Pollution, global warming, habitat loss, you know the drill.

Here’s what the chart showed:

” ‘Cept for them two gaps,” Jubal said, “they’s been a big dustup ever fifty to eighty million years. And if you look at the graph, you can see little bumps there, about halfway through them gaps. It looks per … periodical to me.”

“You think this has happened before.”

“Six times, at least. Mebbe more, ‘cause before that there wasn’t a lot of critters around that left fossils.”

“But the gaps …”

He shrugged. “Like I said, you can see a bit of a rise in each of ‘em. Mebbe the conditions wasn’t quite so bad them times. Or mebbe they flat didn’t come. Mebbe they didn’t need to, those cycles.”

“You’re talking about life cycles.”

“Yessum. The critters we know, certain time a the year they come into … well, they get so’s they want to …”

“Come into heat. Breed.”

“Yessum.” His face was a little pinkish. “Ever critter has its own way a goin’ about it. Some cicadas, they stay underground seventeen years, then they come out to mate. They around a few days, lay they eggs, and die.”

“You think the crystals are mating?”

“Could be sumpin like that. Could be sumpin else we won’t never understand. Whatever they doin’, they doin’ it on a big scale, because they be big. Say they makin’ a nestin’ place, gonna have little kids and bring ‘em up. They’s changin’ stuff around, makin’ the environment better.”