by John Varley
An announcement was made:
Your bases and all your ships are about to be destroyed. You have one hour to evacuate. All lifeboats leaving your ships and bases will be spared; all armed ships leaving your bases will be destroyed. Your one hour begins now.
Lifeboats began leaving in thirty minutes.
Two of the battlestars decided to fight it out. As soon as the first ship undocked, the bases and ships were surrounded by thousand-mile bubbles and compressed. Sixty minutes later, the three remaining bases asked for and were given one additional hour to evacuate. Then those empty bases were compressed, too.
The five squeezer bubbles were taken to high-Earth orbit, about ten thousand miles, and detonated where everyone on Earth could see it, and the Black Fleet returned to its hiding place.
In two hours, the nations and institutions of Earth went from being the most powerful force in space to being totally unarmed. From that moment, Earth became irrelevant to solar-system politics, a beggar planet.
Do I regret the lives lost on those battlestars whose commanders decided to fight? You bet I do. A lot of the people who died were certainly grunts like I had recently been, just serving out their terms of enlistment.
But if you want sympathy, go to the families of those civilians killed in the bombing of Thunder City. I’m fresh out.
LONG BEFORE THESE events, while I was still sleeping under the ice, something else was going on, quietly, under the radar. On Earth, on Luna, on Mars, everywhere, Travis’s agents were hiring.
“How did you keep it secret?” I asked him, once.
“Nothing secret about it. We just didn’t take out ads on the Net. It was mostly word of mouth. I let it be known I was building a ship and that I was looking for crew and passengers.”
They didn’t have to be rocket scientists—though some were—and they didn’t have to be ecologists, though he attracted plenty of them, too. Grumpy’s arrival had given Travis a sense of urgency concerning the Rolling Thunder. At that point no one had any idea if the crystals were going only to Earth, or if they’d hit Mars, Luna … everywhere. Having a ticket on the first ship out of the system, or maybe the only lifeboat leaving the Titanic, looked pretty attractive to a lot of folks.
There were conditions.
You worked for nothing but your food and lodging, and a ticket out of Dodge. Those few who had a problem with that were simply not taken on. Travis’s agents recruited carpenters, masons, steelworkers, anyone with a skill to help build the ship. Travis already knew that even his billions might not cover everything he needed in a project this size.
You didn’t have to be blue-collar, an artisan, a farmer, or a scientist. Travis recruited artists of all sorts, scholars, historians, librarians.
But there was one other condition. You had to be prepared to spend part or all of the voyage in a black bubble.
The capacity of Rolling Thunder to support life in its huge centrifugal terrarium was not unlimited. In fact, the ecologists told him there was a population cap that could not be exceeded, ever, or the whole thing might collapse. That number was a lot smaller than Travis would have liked.
“When we get to wherever we’re going,” he told me, “some Earthlike planet, the more people we have, the better our chances of survival are. I’d like to hit the beach with a hundred thousand, minimum. Twice that would be better. Maybe more. One thing I’ve got, though, is room.”
That’s when he took us down to the catacombs.
NOTHING DANK OR gloomy about these underground caverns. What we saw was a series of tunnels about a hundred feet in diameter, encased in insulation but still quite chilly. There was no need to heat them much, and cold seeped in from the surrounding rock. We were given warm clothing and taken on a tour, riding on railed vehicles equipped with grappling devices. The temperature was just above freezing.
The tunnels were arrow-straight, lit by overhead strips, and so long they seemed to reach to the geometrical vanishing point. All along each side of us were standard warehouse racks in all sizes from shoe box to Dumpster or even larger. They were not at all heavy-duty, because they didn’t have to be. All they supported were black bubbles. Thousands and thousands of black bubbles in nets to hold them in place.
Each net and each rack was clearly labeled with a description and a bar code.
“Once you’ve made the bubble, there’s no way of telling what’s inside,” Travis was saying, as we rolled swiftly by this fantastic … warehouse? Library? Attic? A little of all those, I guess. He stopped beside a row of some of the larger bubbles. One of them said: “Elephant, African, Male, about twenty years old,” and a lot of other information.
“From now on I’m calling you Noah,” Grandma Kelly said.
“Noah was a piker,” Travis said. “Two by two isn’t enough for genetic diversity. I’ve got dozens.”
“Why elephants?” Dad asked.
“Why not? They’re extinct in the wild now, and nobody on Earth is going to have the time or resources to care for captive ones. Do I think we’ll need elephants where we’re going? I doubt it. But they cost me nothing. Nothing to transport since they have no mass, nothing to feed since they’re frozen in time. When we get where we’re going, there may already be something like elephants filling that ecological niche. We may never open these bubbles. But I don’t like a world without elephants. I think it’s a poorer world. All the big mammals on Earth will soon be extinct. I’m saving everything I can.”
“Sounds good to me,” Mom said.
“I’ve got little blue poison-dart frogs. I’ve got rats and snakes and dragonflies. I’ve even got mosquitoes, because, who knows, maybe they’re necessary for the ecology in here. We’re playing a lot of this by ear.”
“I hope we don’t need skeeters,” someone said.
“Me, too.”
We didn’t go all the way down that tunnel. There was a cross tunnel with a curving floor, and we took it to the next storage tunnel to the west.
“Books,” Travis said. “Some are cataloged, some are just what could be salvaged, tossed into big bins and then put in bubbles. They won’t deteriorate.”
He took us to bigger tunnels that held boats, aircraft, land vehicles, all in bubbles. Zero maintenance, zero dry rot, zero deterioration of any kind.
The last tunnel we visited—though there were many more— contained people. There were already a lot of them in there, but there were endless empty slots.
Everyone was quiet as we rolled down the tunnel. It was silly, of course. These people were alive, or at least potentially alive. But the atmosphere was that of a mausoleum, and respectful quiet seemed to be called for.
Travis stopped the vehicle and we all got out and browsed. You could shop for people here. Need somebody who could work in decorative ceramic tiles? Just enter the job description and three names and locations pop up. Can’t remember where you left your son, Skipper? Enter his name, and the machines retrieve the proper bubble for you. It was all a little creepy, especially when I thought of myself sleeping in one of them for a decade, but it was the best solution to a bad problem, and I’d have to get used to it. It was going to be a big part of my life for some time to come.
I wandered, reading the labels. So many names, so many occupations, and yet such anonymity.
/Tranh Van Minh. Age 35. Occupation, rice farmer.
/“Peasant, really,” Travis said, from behind me. “But that sounds condescending.”
“You know him?”
“Never met the dude. But here.” He called up the bar code, and I saw a picture of a small, smiling man. There was a picture of his wife and his three children. Then there was an extensive written biography.
“I ask them all to write about themselves,” Travis said, quietly. “A biography, as long as they’d like to write it. And hopes, dreams, stuff like that. Poetry. Anything.”
“He wrote this?”
“And his family. We only accept literate people.”
“In English?”
�
�That doesn’t hurt, but it’s not necessary. We want to bring as many languages with us as possible, and keep them in use. But English will be the working language.”
We were still quiet as we climbed back aboard, and not much was said as Travis took us to the inner surface, boarded us on the train, and we rolled back to the ship.
Everyone had a big decision to make.
THERE CAME A time when all the decisions had been made.
All the preparations had been made. All the people we were interested in taking were loaded aboard, peacefully, timelessly sleeping. Everything that we could afford had been bought and stored away.
Travis was broke. I was broke. Neither of us cared. I was glad to be shut of the money, to tell you the truth. There had been far more of it than I could ever have used, my tastes being fairly simple.
I did one last tour, going only to Martian locations, saying good-bye to the planet of my birth. It was no secret that I was leaving. There was no resentment, no hard feelings. Most of the people in the audience were related to someone or knew someone who was going with us. I donated all the proceeds to Earth rescue operations. Soon, no ships would be going to Earth at all. They would have to fend for themselves.
So there came a time …
WE WERE ALL assembled on the village green, of the village that still had no name. None of them did, they were just Village 1 or Village 20; there hadn’t been time for frivolities. Places were going to be named by the people who lived in them after we made sure the place wasn’t going to fall apart. They were mostly in suspended storage now. The asteroid that had become Rolling Thunder was sturdy rock, through and through, but acceleration was going to stress it.
No bands played, though there was food and drink. It was not a festive occasion. You might have expected Travis to be excited, pumped by the culmination of this long project, but he was gloomy, almost despondent. For once, it was Jubal who had to try to cheer him up, not the other way around.
“We’re leaving with our tails between our legs,” he moaned at one point. Travis hates to lose, and he hates to run.
“No, cher, no. We doing the smart thing. We seen how dangerous a place can get, practically overnight. We need to be other places, too.”
Travis knew he was right, logically—hell, he was the one who started this thing in the first place. But logic doesn’t always mesh with emotion. Some part of Travis really did think he was Superman, or at least he ought to be, or the combination of his daring and Jubal’s brains should be. And Superman never ran from a fight. He never gave up. He never lost.
And he lived in a comic book.
There was the traditional countdown. Though it was hardly necessary, I saw people bracing themselves as the clock neared zero. I realized I was doing the same thing. Travis was sitting at a control console, and we were all watching from a drone camera about a mile away, focused on the stern of Rolling Thunder. At zero, the scene lit up. Eight fantastically bright lights in a circle around the axis of rotation, balanced around the center of mass, began to shove the huge rock. These were the bubble engines, powered by the unimaginably compressed rock excavated from the asteroid. There was enough energy in those bubbles and the many others aboard to keep firing for ten thousand years. Total mass/energy conversion is a frightening thing, if you do the math with the good old E=mc2. Nuclear bombs only release a small fraction of the energy in matter. Bubbles convert it all, but luckily for us, they could do it a little at a time.
We felt nothing at first. You don’t want to hit a big rock like Rolling Thunder with a croquet mallet; you want to ease it forward. But gradually we began to feel a shift beneath our feet. The rock was still rotating, of course, providing two-thirds of a gee, and it always would rotate. But now we were getting another thrust vector. The ground that had formerly had a slight slope to it now became level.
“Point oh five gees,” Travis announced. “One-twentieth of a gravity. It may take us a while, but we’ll get there.”
By “there,” he meant near-light speed. Jubal explained it to me, how it doesn’t really matter how fast you accelerate, as long as you can do it forever. It just keeps building and building and building; why be in a hurry? If we boosted at one gee, we’d have to have decks perpendicular to the axis of thrust. This way, we got all our serious “gravity” from the spin, and a little extra at right angles from the thrust.
Once you reached a big fraction of light speed—you could never actually reach it, according to relativity, and confirmed to me by my genius husband—it hardly mattered how far you were going, unless you were planning on coming back. Time would slow down relative to the rest of the universe, and the miles would just race by. A thousand-light-year trip wouldn’t take much longer than a ten-light-year trip. Of course, there would be a lot of changes if you went back to Earth …
There were thousands of strain gauges throughout the rock beneath us, and soon the computers reported that all was well. No cracking, hardly any bending. They estimated that we could pile on ten times the acceleration and still have a nice safety margin.
I’d asked Travis at one point why he had decided on two-thirds gee for the centrifugal gravity.
“I don’t want to get there with a bunch of weak-legged Martians,” he said, and grinned when I scowled at him. “I know you’d prefer Martian gravity, but we have no idea what our new planet will mass. It might be a bit more than one gee—but not a lot, I don’t want us all to get hernias—or it might be less, in which case we’ll all be the stronger for it.”
Which made sense, but I didn’t have to like it. I’d been thinking about getting another bra—I’m sure Travis has some somewhere, probably the low-cut, push-up kind—but Jubal doesn’t think it’s necessary. I’ll defer to his judgment, for now.
When Travis was sure the multiple computers had the situation well in hand—as if they had needed his guidance at all—he moved to another console, which controlled all the interior machinery. Again, computers would handle it, but they needed him to push a button first.
“Here we go, folks,” he said. “Let’s hope this works.”
I didn’t see what could go wrong. It was just pumps, and they were brand-new and thoroughly tested, though quite large. They were Martian-made, and we Martians know a lot about pumps.
We all looked to the “north,” which was the bow of the big ship. Mountains had been sculpted all around the hollow hemisphere at that end, a ring of mountains where pine trees grew. Some of the mountains were half a mile high, and would make for good hiking. The higher you went, the lighter you’d get! Now water began to gush from some of them, and flow down their sides, slowly at first, then faster as it moved into regions of higher gravity. By the time the streams reached the surface, they were going over waterfalls, sections of white water, deep pools. We’d be putting trout in there.
Over a few hours the method behind the system of cliffs built into the floor became apparent. There were depressions where lakes formed, then the stream would dash or trickle over the low cliffs and into a new environment. There were three rivers moving slowly south, filling in low areas as they went. We’d have to name them soon. There was going to be a lot of naming going on. We watched them brim over, getting closer and closer to us, and we all walked a short distance to where a wooden mill had been built over a dry creek bed paved with natural rock. Inside the millhouse was a real grinding stone, and outside was a big wheel. We would make flour there. Travis figured we all needed to learn “rural skills,” though I’d believe he was willing to lend a hand at tasks like that when I saw it.
The water came flowing down, and soon the streambed became a burbling brook, and the big wheel began to turn. Something about it made my city girl’s heart swell. I felt Jubal hug my waist, and I knew he felt it, too. My eyes teared up, then I was applauding, along with everybody else.
We were under way.
ROLLING THUNDER IS a living, breathing organism. Each day I’m struck by its incredible beauty, not just around me, not jus
t in the distance, but overhead!
There were forests. There were “mountains.” Quiet streams and rushing rivers. I quite liked it. Jubal and I had picked out a home in the little tin-roof town built out on stilts in a marshy area where bullfrogs the size of house cats filled the evening with their song.
Every few days Kahlua would bring in a brightly colored songbird and lay it solemnly at my feet. Yuck! But I guess it’s the thought that counts. There were no mice, no rats. We had them in storage—never know what you might need!—but I hoped they remained in the category of mosquitoes: Got ‘em, don’t want to use ‘em.
We did have June bugs and other insects deemed essential to the ecology. I was slowly getting to the point where I didn’t freak out every time one landed on me. Jubal even had me handling one for a short time.
Everybody was calling the town Jubalville, over Jubal’s protests. He wanted to call it New Lafayette.
We’re getting to know our neighbors, who are either unimpressed by Jubal’s great brain and my notoriety, or are damn good at acting that way. Which is fine with me. Baako lives two doors down from us. The other night we had a crawfish boil. Baako and I sang “Allon a Lafayette” and other numbers appropriate to the setting. I’ve learned about a hundred words of Cajun French and can almost make a sentence.
As the central light pole dims—our equivalent of nightfall—I can still see tractors halfway up the slope tilling soil for corn planting. A little to the south is an orchard, with both full-grown trees, brought here intact and transplanted, and seedlings. Apparently I’m going to learn to farm. I’m going to be a farmer in the sky. A singing farmer, but a farmer nonetheless. Not what I had set out to be, but life takes some strange twists. I’ve found I enjoy tending our little patch of garden out back. I’ll enjoy it even more if I conquer my horror of earthworms. You should taste my tomatoes. To die for!
SINCE IT IS a living, breathing organism, Rolling Thunder is subject to both the joys and sorrows of the human condition. To everything there is a season. A time to plant and a time to uproot. A time to mourn and a time to dance. A time to weep and a time to laugh. A time to die, a time to be born.
