Rolling Thunder (51 page)

I know it sounds weird. Everything about black bubbles is weird, and that’s only part of it.

With the majority of the people aboard spending a lot of time in suspension, we were all going to get slightly out of synch, except for “friends,” who would be able to choose to hibernate in a group and thus remain about the same age, relative to each other. Our family had already talked about it, and had some tentative plans. Again, the baby might throw that a little out of whack, but we’ll figure it out.

For most people the dislocation could be a bit more severe. Everybody was going to be going by two clocks: internal time and calendar time. (Don’t even
think
about back-in-the-solar-system time, you’ll make my head hurt.) Of course, we’re not going to separate families temporally, but you might not always be awake at the same time as all your friends.

Our hope was that the little interior world of
Rolling Thunder
wasn’t going to be too exciting. Excitement we didn’t need, because it almost always meant trouble. We were hoping for bucolic, even boring, at least in comparison to the last decade. We were hoping that the biggest events would be more in the nature of gossip. Who’s going with whom, who just had a baby, who got married, who died. How Farmer John’s pigs broke into Farmer Fran’s rose garden and rooted it up. What went on at the square dance, the town meeting, the football game, whose prize heifer won the blue ribbon at the Rolling Fair. Nice rural stuff that had kept rural folk satisfied for thousands of years. That way, bringing the newly awakened up to speed wouldn’t be lengthy or too traumatic. Just hand them a big file of newspapers and let them read for a while.

But I could imagine conversations in the coming years.

“Were you awake when …”

“I’ve been sleeping the last six years …”

“I’m twenty-five internal years, forty-one calendar …”

“What year were you born, and how old are you?”

It was likely to be confusing, but I thought we’d adjust.

Travis seemed confident that we would. He was still awake, but soon he planned to go on a fifty-one-weeks-off, one-week-on schedule. He had three subcommanders who he trusted who would take care of ship’s business while he slept. Then he’d wake up and get brought up to date, do a stem-to-stern inspection, savor being lord of all he surveyed, then go back into a bubble.

Sounded like a good plan to me. Most of us couldn’t take Travis for more than a week at a time, anyway.

THERE WAS A
possibility, small but real, because you never knew with Jubal, that we wouldn’t
have
to adjust. That somewhere along the way Jubal would figure out the new problem he was working on.

“I been studyin’,” he had told me, before he went into the bubble again … still chanting his Hail Mary. When Jubal starts “studyin’,” I prick up my ears. Not that I’ll understand what he’s studyin’ about, but so I can take it to a physicist and see if there’s anything useful in there. With Jubal’s approval, of course; he knows he’s way short in the practicality department.

“I been studyin’ on it, and I got to wonderin’ why we have to take so long to get to wherever it is we’re goin’.”

“Well … we can only go so fast. And we can’t go faster than the speed of light. At least that’s what you said.”

“And it the truth,
cher.
But maybe we don’t have to go no speed at all, and don’t have to go nowheres at all. Maybe we can bring the some-wheres to us.”

“You’ve lost me.”

“I been studyin’ it since we got connected in the no-place place. We been there, you and me, and we know that everythin’, it be in contact with everythin’ else. We got tangled, like quantums. Didn’t matter we were millions of miles apart. Wouldn’t a mattered we been a billion light-years apart. We was touchin’, see?”

“Mebbe.” He had me doing his accent now.

“So I was wonderin’, could we make a way to get from over
here
to over
there
without no time and no space. Mebbe we could make a sort of tunnel in the sky, pop right through that sucker, and save us a lot of time.”

“That would be nice. Do you think you can do it?”

“I dunno, me. I’ll study on it while I’m a-sleepin’. I think I do my best thinkin’ while I’m sleepin’ in the no-place place.”

So there was really no telling but that the next time he woke up, Jubal might have a way to get us to the stars in an instant. I’m not holding my breath, but stranger things have happened around my husband.

MEANWHILE, WE WERE
not out of contact with the folks back home, and wouldn’t be for some years. Though the time lag is getting longer and longer …

Eventually the Doppler effect and the time dilation will make communication very interesting, but that’s still a long way off. That’s what happens as you approach the speed of light. The radio waves you’re sending back to Mars get stretched out, and so do the ones coming at you. You start out broadcasting at a certain frequency but your message gets there on a lower one. Something to do with the red shift, I think. The engineers know how to cope with it, they say. Also, though our clocks on the ship will be running normally from our “frame of reference,” if we compared them to clocks on Mars, they’d be running a lot slower. We won’t notice a thing, but time will be stretching out.

I probably completely bumbled that explanation, but it gives you an idea.

So we still got news from back home. Most of it was bad. There were still people alive on Earth, perhaps millions of them, but we were in contact only by radio. Things were looking up on Mars, though. People were no longer living elbow to elbow, and the economy was thriving. They were entirely independent.

I just referred to Martians as “they,” didn’t I?

Well, it’s true. I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for the planet of my birth, but I was no longer a Martian. I was a … what? A Roller? A Thunderite? I think of myself as a rolling stone. We’re all rolling stones now.

How does it feel to be on your own? It feels pretty damn good, with a good man at my side.

And I still have a career. I write only for myself, but I perform in all the little clubs scattered around the interior. I’ve jammed with many other people, and we have some very talented musicians here. We have a famous trio, and we have a complete symphony orchestra, and everything in between. We have opera!

I send everything back to Mars, where Tina and Quinn elected to stay. I am still extremely popular, I’m still raking in the money at a fabulous rate, and Tina is distributing it all to charities as fast as I make it, minus her commission. It won’t last, and I won’t miss it, but it feels good to be making a difference, even this far away.

I’M SITTING IN
a rocking chair of an evening on our back porch, which is over the big pond. Jubal is beside me, his hand resting on my belly. It’s a warm night. It almost always is. Neither of us is wearing anything. My feet are up on the porch railing. I wiggle my toes. Hello, toes! I haven’t seen you for months, when I’m standing up.

I look like I swallowed a friggin’ pumpkin. You could drop a coin on my tummy and it would bounce halfway to the other side of the pond. My belly button is sticking out, and my breasts are full and a little sore. My back hurts, my ankles are swollen. I’m a week away from the Cesarean.

I’ve never been happier in my life.

We both have fishing lines hanging from cane poles propped on the porch railing. There are big, hungry catfish down there, and if we catch any, Jubal has promised to blacken up a mess of ‘em. But neither of us much cares if we catch a fish.

Hard to believe this peaceful scene is hurtling outward from everything we’ve ever known at a speed I don’t even like to think about, toward a destination still very much in doubt.

I know a story is not supposed to end this way, but my story is still a long ways from its end, I hope. Still, all those loose ends …

Did the crystals communicate with me? If they did, was it intentional, or just a side effect of being in the no-space they know like a fish knows water, and which is still largely mysterious to everyone but Jubal?

I don’t know. Sorry.

What were the boojums? I don’t know. Ask Lewis Carroll.

When we get to our new star, will we find the New Earth populated by people like us, or occupied by vast, slow, crystalline life-forms like Europans? Again, I don’t know, but as Jubal pointed out, the crystals back home seem to only cause trouble every sixty million years or so, and only for a relatively short time. What are the chances we’d hit New Earth just as those crystals were doing their thing? The odds seemed pretty good for us, and if we do find a body like Europa with vast seas under thick ice, we’ll damn well steer clear of it.

We now know two types of life. One is carbon-based, and much more vulnerable than we ever imagined. The other is crystalline, and totally alien to us. We never even managed to say howdy, as Jubal put it. Who knows what life-forms might be lurking beneath the clouds of Jupiter, or Saturn, or Neptune? We might never meet them, because we sure can’t go down there to look.

If we’re
lucky
we may never meet them. The last alien contact didn’t go too well.

Who knows if creatures of billion-degree plasma might be frolicking in the center of the sun, like Jubal speculated? If they’re there, I’m pretty sure we don’t want to shake hands with them.

And what’s the deal with my fainting episodes? I’m still having them, timed to some Jovian cycle, and we’re a very long way from Europa. Will I still be having them when we’re five light-years away? Twenty?

I don’t know.

Why is Jubal the only person who can create a bubble maker, a Broussard Singularity? Is it because it’s named after him?

Well … this time I’ll share a little secret with you. Or part of it. Two days ago I was doing my mental concentration exercises. That’s right, I was still doing them, trying to stare
through
some optical illusion Jubal thought might twist my brain in such a way that my brain could twist space, just a tad, just enough to make a pinch in space that could, in turn, fold space in a way that produced a squeezer bubble. I can’t tell you what happened because I don’t understand it myself, but suddenly it all fell into place. You know how you feel when you cross your eyes? Magnify that through the seventh or eighth dimension. Imagine crossing your third eye, your inner eye, falling into some Zen contemplative space—what is the sound of one hand clapping? How do you cross one eye?—where there is no space and no time … and then there it is. Floating above the picture you’ve been staring at, the most incredibly beautiful, incredibly minute, very frightening, tiny little whirlpool. An eddy in space.

Jubal nearly fainted. He did some things with some devices of his to trap it. I won’t tell you what devices, or how he used them. Trade secret. I won’t tell you what I was staring at. And I won’t tell you if it takes a year of staring, half an hour a day, like I did, either, because I don’t know, but I wouldn’t tell you if I did know.

Did it really have to do with having been inside a black bubble? If it does, then there are many millions of people who might be able to do it now, given proper guidance. I don’t think we’re ready for that. Or did it have to be a black bubble in close proximity to the Europan crystals, such that one became “tangled” with Jubal’s mind?

Don’t know that, either.

Then there’s probably the biggest question of all. Why didn’t any of the old starships come back? We will probably find out, one of these days. Is it because of some new force we aren’t aware of, some interstellar factor we’re not taking into account? Dark matter? Dark energy? Something we haven’t even postulated yet?

Is there some sort of malevolent Galactic Empire out of a bad science-fiction novel our ships fell afoul of? If so, why haven’t they come for us?

Is it something even stranger? We know now that the universe is a stranger place than we had ever imagined. We’ve always known that man is a very small, very delicate animal. We need conditions within an extremely small set of parameters to survive in this hostile universe at all. If we can’t find them on a planet like Earth, we have to re-create them on a planet like Mars, or in an artifact like
Rolling Thunder.
And now we know how easily those parameters can be upset on a planetary scale. We were learning about it even
before
the catastrophe, because what was global warming but Europan-style planetary engineering in slow motion?

Rolling Thunder
is even more vulnerable. If Earth is a tiny grain of sand circling a pinpoint of light and heat,
Rolling Thunder
is a molecule rushing through spaces so vast and so hostile it doesn’t bear imagining. When you think about it, it hardly seems we have a chance. We
are
fleeing, after all; this is not a triumphant voyage but a hasty retreat. Travis was right about that. We can’t even kid ourselves that we put up a good fight. Stories of alien invasion aren’t
supposed
to end that way, you know. In the end, we’ve always assumed humanity would triumph.

Aha! Water kills the alien creatures!

Thank God, we’re saved, the aliens
—
Martians!—were killed by the common cold virus!

Didn’t happen that way, not in this story, not in Podkayne’s story.

So do we have a chance? I don’t know, but I’ll tell you what we
do
have.

We have Manny Garcia and Kelly Strickland, who with Travis and Jubal and two friends built and flew the first interplanetary ship to Mars and back.

We have Jim Redmond, my grand-père, Evangeline Redmond, my mother, and Elizabeth and Ray Strickland-Garcia, who with Travis entered the Red Zone right after the Big Wave and brought Gran out alive, and then Mom and Dad and Travis fought off a fleet of Black Ships and brought the Planet Earth to its knees.

We have the spirit of Betty Garcia, who held off looters and saved about a hundred survivors while waiting for Mom and Dad to get there.

We have Jubal Broussard, quite possibly the smartest living human, and Travis Broussard, possibly the gutsiest. Sometimes the most obnoxious.