Read Online Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning) by John Varley - Free Book Online
Authors: John Varley
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behind you. Soon you are traveling in a bubble of light that takes you right down to a steel door, which also opens to Mama’s fingerprint.
On the other side is a dark tube, about ten feet in diameter, stretching off dimly in both directions, toward the bow and stern. North and south. A single rail runs right down the middle of the tube.
The door shut behind us and a sign on the other side of the tube lit up.
CAR COMING. ARRIVAL IN 1:35.
We stood on the little platform, not saying anything. The numbers counted down, and the car arrived, decelerating rapidly to come to a standstill right in front of us.
The car resembled the golf carts I’ve seen in movies from back at Old Sun, except for the lack of wheels. A squat metal body had three pairs of seats, a plexi windshield, and a flat top. It hovered a fraction of an inch above the floor, and the four-inch-high vertical mag rail fit neatly into a slot in the front. Inside, the seats were bare plastic.
Mama and Papa took their seats in the front, and the sib and I got in the second row.
“Take us to the Bridge,” Mama said. We were on our way.
I had only ridden on these cars three times in my life. I don’t even recall why we took the trips. The subways were just another of Uncle Travis’s paranoid precautions, a place to go if things got very unsettled, politically. He has hundreds of these fallback plans, including some serious weaponry if it came to that. I don’t know the half of them; none of the family do, as far as I know. That’s how Travis works.
We came to a big open space, one of the warehouses. Basements, if you prefer, because they are underfoot, and they store stuff.
Rolling Thunder
is like a big block of Swiss cheese. It began life as an asteroid, remember, five billion years or so ago. It had a tumultuous youth, being pulled this way and that by other planets and asteroids, trying along with its neighbors to form a real planet but robbed of that accomplishment by the huge influence of Jupiter, which stripped away the bulk of the mass in the space between itself and Mars and doomed the little planetoids to wander the vast spaces, airless, waterless, devoid of life.
It was very hot at first, and the rock and nickel and iron melted into a solid mass. During those early years, it was repeatedly bombarded with smaller rocks, so that its exterior is pockmarked with craters. That lasted maybe a billion years. Then things settled down, and the asteroid assumed its place in the stately, uneventful dance around and around the sun, in the main part of the asteroid belt, until Uncle Travis came along.
He had the interior living space excavated by means of compressing the rock into enough squeezer bubbles to power the ship out to the edge of the universe, if we cared to go there. If one blew up, they’d see it easily in the Andromeda Galaxy in 2.5 million years. So much power that, after twenty years of shoving this great big rock at one-twentieth of a gee, we have not even had to replace the first set of bubbles. We’re still running with the ones installed back at Old Sun and don’t anticipate needing to swap them out before we arrive at our new home.
But that big empty space, the one we all live in, is not all that’s inside the ship. There are hundreds of other spaces, not nearly so huge, but still pretty big from a human perspective.
Some of them contained large machinery: pumps, fans, sewage-treatment facilities, recycling centers. These were automated wherever possible but usually contained a few human workers. We had toured many of them on school outings. It was the mechanical underbelly to the agricultural and residential uses of the living space. These places tended to be noisy, and not completely clean because of their functions.
The one we were in was a warehouse, and it gleamed as spotless as an operating room.
The ceiling was about a hundred feet above us, dotted with pale white LED lights high above. All around us were shelves reaching
On the other side is a dark tube, about ten feet in diameter, stretching off dimly in both directions, toward the bow and stern. North and south. A single rail runs right down the middle of the tube.
The door shut behind us and a sign on the other side of the tube lit up.
CAR COMING. ARRIVAL IN 1:35.
We stood on the little platform, not saying anything. The numbers counted down, and the car arrived, decelerating rapidly to come to a standstill right in front of us.
The car resembled the golf carts I’ve seen in movies from back at Old Sun, except for the lack of wheels. A squat metal body had three pairs of seats, a plexi windshield, and a flat top. It hovered a fraction of an inch above the floor, and the four-inch-high vertical mag rail fit neatly into a slot in the front. Inside, the seats were bare plastic.
Mama and Papa took their seats in the front, and the sib and I got in the second row.
“Take us to the Bridge,” Mama said. We were on our way.
I had only ridden on these cars three times in my life. I don’t even recall why we took the trips. The subways were just another of Uncle Travis’s paranoid precautions, a place to go if things got very unsettled, politically. He has hundreds of these fallback plans, including some serious weaponry if it came to that. I don’t know the half of them; none of the family do, as far as I know. That’s how Travis works.
We came to a big open space, one of the warehouses. Basements, if you prefer, because they are underfoot, and they store stuff.
Rolling Thunder
is like a big block of Swiss cheese. It began life as an asteroid, remember, five billion years or so ago. It had a tumultuous youth, being pulled this way and that by other planets and asteroids, trying along with its neighbors to form a real planet but robbed of that accomplishment by the huge influence of Jupiter, which stripped away the bulk of the mass in the space between itself and Mars and doomed the little planetoids to wander the vast spaces, airless, waterless, devoid of life.
It was very hot at first, and the rock and nickel and iron melted into a solid mass. During those early years, it was repeatedly bombarded with smaller rocks, so that its exterior is pockmarked with craters. That lasted maybe a billion years. Then things settled down, and the asteroid assumed its place in the stately, uneventful dance around and around the sun, in the main part of the asteroid belt, until Uncle Travis came along.
He had the interior living space excavated by means of compressing the rock into enough squeezer bubbles to power the ship out to the edge of the universe, if we cared to go there. If one blew up, they’d see it easily in the Andromeda Galaxy in 2.5 million years. So much power that, after twenty years of shoving this great big rock at one-twentieth of a gee, we have not even had to replace the first set of bubbles. We’re still running with the ones installed back at Old Sun and don’t anticipate needing to swap them out before we arrive at our new home.
But that big empty space, the one we all live in, is not all that’s inside the ship. There are hundreds of other spaces, not nearly so huge, but still pretty big from a human perspective.
Some of them contained large machinery: pumps, fans, sewage-treatment facilities, recycling centers. These were automated wherever possible but usually contained a few human workers. We had toured many of them on school outings. It was the mechanical underbelly to the agricultural and residential uses of the living space. These places tended to be noisy, and not completely clean because of their functions.
The one we were in was a warehouse, and it gleamed as spotless as an operating room.
The ceiling was about a hundred feet above us, dotted with pale white LED lights high above. All around us were shelves reaching
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