Rolling Thunder

by John Varley

  Turn, turn, turn.

  A TIME TO die …

  We woke Gran Betty on Mars before most of the family settled down in the ship. We gave her a condensed version of the horrors of the last ten years, but she was no fool. She understood how bad it really was. When told Rolling Thunder would depart in a few weeks, she asked to be put back in the bubble and then awakened again when we got moving. When she came out again she surprised us all.

  “I’m not going in again,” she said, to the assembled family of which she was the matriarch.

  “But Mama …” Granddaddy Manny said.

  “Hush, son. They didn’t figure out how to cure what I’ve got in ten years, right? And Travis, be honest with me. How much advanced medical research is going to be happening in this big old rock?”

  “Well, Elizabeth is aboard, and—”

  “I said be honest, you old bastard.”

  “Practically none,” he admitted.

  “I thought so. Y’all are going to be too busy making a living, and that’s as it should be. I think I’ve already lived my allotted time. That’s what it feels like, anyway. I don’t want to wake up in a few hundred years to find all y’all are my age or dead. I’m going to let nature take its course.”

  And that’s what she did. She died a week later, sitting in a rocking chair on my front porch, Manny and Kelly at her side, a lot of heroin coursing through her veins and a fat joint handy in an ashtray. Letting nature take its course didn’t mean you had to die in agony.

  Her last words to us were spoken with a smile as she looked up at the bountiful land arching over her head. With the last of her strength, she lifted her hand to it.

  “Look at this, children,” she whispered. “Not bad for a little girl from Florida. I was born before men walked on the moon, and I’ve gone from running a cheap motel to traveling on a starship. I wish I could get there with you.”

  “You’ll be there with us, Mama,” Manny said.

  “In spirit. In spirit. I’m so happy.”

  An hour later she was gone. It was the second time I ever saw Grandma Kelly cry.

  A TIME TO be born …

  Four months into the journey, Marlee gave birth to a perfect little boy. I guess all fathers are proud, but Mike seemed ready to explode with pride. He makes light of his short stature, and I tease him mercilessly about it because I know that’s the way he wants it, but I know it hurts. It would hurt on Earth, and it’s worse on Mars, where I’m considered only slightly tall for my sex. Being a father was important to him.

  I’m sitting on my front porch, alone, babysitting. Mike and Marlee are off somewhere learning about pruning fruit trees, I think, then they plan to have dinner together in a restaurant that just opened up a few miles from here. I look after little William once a week so they can have some time alone, baby-rearing being a sometimes stressful job. I don’t mind.

  William is three months old, gurgling at me, his tiny brown hand gripping my finger tightly.

  I’m a little distracted, wondering when is the best time to tell Jubal I’m pregnant.

  Oh, yeah, I know what I said before. But I never really ruled out having babies, did I? Jubal and I had never talked about it, but we didn’t have to. There was just something about Jubal that told me it would be the best news he’d ever received. So I wasn’t worried about that, not a bit.

  I’d had another girl-to-girl talk with my vagina.

  ME: Yeah, I know Marlee opted for that “natural childbirth” nonsense. Never saw so much sweating and hollering in my life. And the blood!

  MS. V: Yeah, and what about me?

  ME: All you have to do is handle the fertilization part, and I know you like that.

  MS.V: Well, sure, but …

  ME: No buts. They can cut it out. Doesn’t even leave a scar anymore.

  MS. V: Now you’re talking! Let’s get fertilizing!

  So I stopped taking my birth control, and my reinstalled ovaries did their egg-dropping thing, and Jubal’s little wigglers did their thing with their usual enthusiasm. And here I am, three months gone, puking every other morning, just almost, sort of, beginning to show, and looking at myself in the mirror every morning to see if I have that fabled motherly glow. No sign of it yet. Aunt Elizabeth is the only one who knows so far, and she says everything is looking very good, and that’s after about a hundred tests.

  So, now, when to tell Jubal? See, he’s sleeping …

  NOTHING IS EVER going to entirely solve the age problem between us, if problem it be, which I don’t concede. But life aboard Rolling Thunder is going to be different, very different in a lot of ways. Consider black bubble hibernation.

  The star we’re headed for doesn’t really have a name, just a catalog number. I don’t know how Travis’s panel of astronomers chose it, except that the giant telescopes on Luna confirm there’s a planet circling it at about the right distance from the star, and it definitely has water and oxygen. I am not going to name the star because Travis asked us all never to do that. He’s worried someone might still come after Jubal, and I can’t say he’s wrong. So, we’re not currently aimed at that star; we’re going to change course a bit as soon as we’re comfortably out of the range of telescopes.

  But the trip is going to take about forty years. That’s ship’s time; I don’t know how much time will pass back home, but it will be a lot more.

  There are some people aboard who would be perfectly happy to spend that entire time awake and working. Maybe they’ll be allowed to; that hasn’t been worked out yet. But most of us will be spending greater or lesser amounts of time in hibernation. No one will be spending all their time in a bubble. Part of the signing agreement is that everyone gets a little time outside, though with the last, relatively unskilled ones rounded up more or less to provide strong backs, a population base, and genetic diversity when we land, that time will be short, a few weeks here and there to stretch their legs, as it were.

  Others—skilled workers, administrators, engineers, and “friends of the captain,” which means my family and Travis’s friends—will be out for longer periods. We friends will be able to choose what we want to do. I know, unfair, but it’s his boat and he gets to make the rules. Travis is the Supreme Captain of Rolling Thunder, and though we are forming a civilian government (with Grandma Kelly in the thick of it), his word is the final law. That’s always the way it’s worked on ships, and I wouldn’t change it.

  Jubal and I don’t plan to spend the next forty years awake. He’d likely be dead before we ever reached the new star.

  We had tentatively worked out a schedule for the first few years, though. I was going to stay awake, and he would sleep three weeks out of every four. I’d be gaining ground on him, age-wise, at a ratio of four to one. I’d never catch him, but this plan would mean he would be gone for three weeks—which I knew I could handle—and then I’d have him for a week. He’d have me all the time, by his clock. At some point we’d both go into hibernation for five or ten years, then reassess when we came out.

  The baby was going to disrupt that plan, but that was okay. I expected to stay awake until I gave birth, then Jubal and I would talk it over. My preference would be to stay awake another four or five years, and I fully expected Jubal would want to do the same, so the child could grow up with both of us. Then we could all three hibernate for a while, and decide how much time to stay awake until we got to our destination. I was thinking we should give the child enough awake time—with both of us, of course—so that he or she (don’t know yet, and don’t care) would be almost grown when we arrived. Say fourteen or fifteen waking years, out of forty ship’s years.

  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 ha
d 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.