Read Online Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning) by John Varley - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: John Varley
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some full-grown, with wrapped root-balls, some seedlings, and lots of seeds.
But the things we brought along that matter most to me, who has only known the voyage and for whom the destination is still a faraway, seldom-thought-of promised land, are the perishables. Blackberry pies still steaming from the oven. We can’t grow blackberries, they’d soon take over the whole biome. Calamari, still squirming and shooting jets of ink. Chocolate. Maple syrup. The shrimp we had just set out on the table at the party for Papa. Things we either can’t produce inside or could make only in severely limited quantities.
“None of the ecologists I hired could
guarantee
this great big terrarium could be self-sustaining for a hundred years,” Travis once told me and Polly when the family was sitting down to dinner with him. “Some kind of bug could mutate and kill all the plants. Poisons could accumulate in the soil or in the air. Something no one had thought of at all could spring up and screw us big-time. So I made sure that, worse came to worst, we could store a lot of the passengers and have enough food in bubbles to feed us all for a couple of centuries. Besides,” he said, cracking open a huge Maine lobster claw, “I’ve gotten used to traveling first class.”
—
We passed through two more warehouses and one wastewater-treatment plant before the car began a slow, upward climb that gradually grew steeper. I knew we were now under the North End, headed toward the pole. The higher we got, the less we weighed, until when the car eased to a stop, we were very close to the axis and didn’t weigh very much.
In fact, we weighed one-twentieth of a gravity. My 140 pounds of mass had turned into just seven pounds.
We were getting no weight from the ship’s spin, but there was that steady, gentle but relentless push from the ship’s engines, which had been thrusting nonstop for twenty years, since before I was born. That meant that the floor, or the “local vertical” as we spacegirls say, was ninety degrees from the axis of thrust, and the bulk of the ship, including all the interior living space, was directly below us.
There was a room at the end of the train line. It had a big round window . . . in the floor. There was a brass railing running all around it, for those with vertigo, but there was an opening for those who dared. I recalled our first visit to this room, when we were about three or four. It was a good memory, of standing out there on the clear plastic and looking down. I couldn’t resist. As soon as we moved carefully off the car, I headed for the window, followed closely by Cassie. We toe-walked—which is the only safe way of travel when you weigh seven pounds—touching the floor very gently, out to the center of the window.
We were slightly offset from the axis of rotation, because that’s where our “sun” runs the length of the living space. Part of the window was polarized, so that the big, hot, bright tube that serves us as a sun didn’t burn out our retinas.
Looking to one side, we couldn’t see anything of the inside of the North Pole, because it was ninety degrees to our position. Down at the rim, inside, what we would see was a huge mural, with forced perspective that made it look like the interior of the ship was a lot longer than it actually was. The best way to see from this position was to lie down, prone, and put your face against the plastic. Polly and I did that.
The surface curved away from us gradually, until about a third of the way down, when the spin gravity was big enough to be an appreciable factor, water gushed out from big outlets spaced 120 degrees around the North Pole. These were the sources of the three rivers that meandered through the living space, then plunged back underground on the flats before the upward curve of the South Pole. There was more false perspective there, in the form of sculpted “mountains” with snow painted on their peaks. The mountains were not
But the things we brought along that matter most to me, who has only known the voyage and for whom the destination is still a faraway, seldom-thought-of promised land, are the perishables. Blackberry pies still steaming from the oven. We can’t grow blackberries, they’d soon take over the whole biome. Calamari, still squirming and shooting jets of ink. Chocolate. Maple syrup. The shrimp we had just set out on the table at the party for Papa. Things we either can’t produce inside or could make only in severely limited quantities.
“None of the ecologists I hired could
guarantee
this great big terrarium could be self-sustaining for a hundred years,” Travis once told me and Polly when the family was sitting down to dinner with him. “Some kind of bug could mutate and kill all the plants. Poisons could accumulate in the soil or in the air. Something no one had thought of at all could spring up and screw us big-time. So I made sure that, worse came to worst, we could store a lot of the passengers and have enough food in bubbles to feed us all for a couple of centuries. Besides,” he said, cracking open a huge Maine lobster claw, “I’ve gotten used to traveling first class.”
—
We passed through two more warehouses and one wastewater-treatment plant before the car began a slow, upward climb that gradually grew steeper. I knew we were now under the North End, headed toward the pole. The higher we got, the less we weighed, until when the car eased to a stop, we were very close to the axis and didn’t weigh very much.
In fact, we weighed one-twentieth of a gravity. My 140 pounds of mass had turned into just seven pounds.
We were getting no weight from the ship’s spin, but there was that steady, gentle but relentless push from the ship’s engines, which had been thrusting nonstop for twenty years, since before I was born. That meant that the floor, or the “local vertical” as we spacegirls say, was ninety degrees from the axis of thrust, and the bulk of the ship, including all the interior living space, was directly below us.
There was a room at the end of the train line. It had a big round window . . . in the floor. There was a brass railing running all around it, for those with vertigo, but there was an opening for those who dared. I recalled our first visit to this room, when we were about three or four. It was a good memory, of standing out there on the clear plastic and looking down. I couldn’t resist. As soon as we moved carefully off the car, I headed for the window, followed closely by Cassie. We toe-walked—which is the only safe way of travel when you weigh seven pounds—touching the floor very gently, out to the center of the window.
We were slightly offset from the axis of rotation, because that’s where our “sun” runs the length of the living space. Part of the window was polarized, so that the big, hot, bright tube that serves us as a sun didn’t burn out our retinas.
Looking to one side, we couldn’t see anything of the inside of the North Pole, because it was ninety degrees to our position. Down at the rim, inside, what we would see was a huge mural, with forced perspective that made it look like the interior of the ship was a lot longer than it actually was. The best way to see from this position was to lie down, prone, and put your face against the plastic. Polly and I did that.
The surface curved away from us gradually, until about a third of the way down, when the spin gravity was big enough to be an appreciable factor, water gushed out from big outlets spaced 120 degrees around the North Pole. These were the sources of the three rivers that meandered through the living space, then plunged back underground on the flats before the upward curve of the South Pole. There was more false perspective there, in the form of sculpted “mountains” with snow painted on their peaks. The mountains were not
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