Read Online Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning) by John Varley - Free Book Online Page A

to the ceiling. We were traveling down the middle of the main road through the warehouse, with broad aisles stretching away from us on each side to vanishing points. It was dimly lit and spooky in there, except in the few places where people were working, where sensors turned up the illumination. We saw a few forklifts picking things off high shelves, and a couple of flat transport crawlers with plastic crates stacked high.
    Some of those crates were just that: ordinary crates with stuff inside. It was all stuff that wasn’t perishable. Tools, raw materials, the thousand kilograms of personal belongings that each passenger of
Rolling Thunder
was allowed to take into their new life.
    But most of the crates contained black bubbles.
    BLINKLINK: STASIS BUBBLES : Invented by Jubal Broussard during his protective sequestration on the Falkland Islands. Often called “black bubbles” because of their complete lack of reflectivity. It is thought they are related in some way to compression bubbles, and are created through some as-yet-undescribed quantum effect, but this has been impossible to confirm. Stasis bubbles cannot, strictly speaking, be said to have an “inside,” topologically, but it is useful to describe them in those terms. Inside a bubble, no time passes. All chemical and physical reactions are suspended, down to the subatomic level. It is possible, in complete safety, to put living creatures inside. It is thought that whatever is enclosed in the bubble is suspended in a neighboring dimension where time exists differently than in our own universe, but this also has been impossible to prove.
    Inside those bubbles could be, literally . . . anything. You name it, we probably have it. Wouldn’t it be a bitch to get a dozen light-years from Old Sun and realize you’d forgotten to bring a can opener, or your asthma medication? Trust me, somewhere in the vast warehouses there are a thousand can openers and many gallons of any kind of medication known at the time we left Old Sun.
    The biggest bubbles contain water. I have no idea how much, but it is a lot. We conserve every drop, but there are always small losses. The water is in hundred-foot bubbles. It’s way more than we’ll ever use, but since we have storage space to spare and it masses nothing at all, why not bring it? Water is one of those things, you run out of it, you’re screwed. We also carry vast quantities of compressed gases.
    Inside some of those bubbles are plants and animals. We have a larger collection of flora and fauna than any natural history museum on Earth, and it’s not in glass cases or wooden drawers, dried or mounted on pins. It’s all alive. We have snakes and lizards, insects and snails, fish and anemones, birds, spiders, turtles, and mammals from shrews to giraffes. I’ve seen a lot of these creatures. In school, they can be brought out of their bubbles for biology and taxonomy lessons, just as vital and not one second older than when they went into the bubble twenty years ago. Wild and domestic, we have everything.
    Elephants? We have elephants. I love elephants, and I once asked Travis how many we had aboard. He said he thought it was about thirty of them. Why? Well, who knows when you might need an elephant? They are terrific if you need to move something heavy and no longer have fuel for your bulldozer. Plus, they make more elephants, unlike bulldozers. Some of the elephants are brought out on holidays, for parades and to give rides to children.
    “Noah was a piker,” Uncle Travis said. “He thought too small. He only brought two of everything. Genetically unsound.”
    It’s the same with plants. From trees to toadstools, we have samples of everything Uncle Travis could get his hands on. Somewhere, there are vast bubble granaries of wheat, soybeans, rye, millet, rice, oats, barley, corn, sorghum, spelt, you name it. Who knows what will flourish on our new home, and what will wither and die?
    Trees? Pines and plums and pecans,