Rolling Thunder

by John Varley

  “Hush, chile. I be back.” And he was off again. I started experimenting with just the tiny little built-in speaker. Squeaker, really, but it was all I needed. Next time I looked up, Jubal was hooking up a small speaker and amp, and my minicorder. He interrupted me only once, to spray the keyboard with some cleaning stuff and wipe it up and down with a dishrag. Arpeggios!

  I began.

  Eight hours later I had “Jazzie’s Return.”

  I shipped it off to Tina, Mike, and Quinn, and then Jubal led me to my bedroom and tucked me in, and I slept for twelve hours.

  IN THE MORNING, it was as if it had never happened. Was it my music, or was I just channeling something from those goddam crystals. I asked Jubal about it over breakfast.

  “Don’t know, cher. But if it was channelin’, they didn’t do it tru me, ‘cause I ain’t got a creative note in my head. It was you done the work.”

  “Yeah, but did they do something to me?”

  “I don’t think so. I think you just somehow tuned in to whatever it is they talk about, and you made your own thing out of it.”

  “So what are they talking about, Jubal? I keep getting the feeling you know more than you’re telling.”

  He shook his head.

  “You got the wrong idea, cher. I don’t know nothing more than you do.”

  “But you have some ideas?”

  He thought about it for a while.

  “I ain’t saying I know anything, me. I ain’t even sayin’ what they doin’ is talkin’, the way we know it. I don’t think they intelligent, not the way we measure it. I think they just is, like a animal is. They don’t got no plans, they ain’t doing nothing to us, not on purpose like. They just like big ol’ boar hogs wallowin’ in our oceans. It’s what they do.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Always when we think about meetin’ aliens, we figger we gonna talk to ‘em. Mebbe we fight ‘em, but that’s juss talkin’ wit’ you fists. We never figgered they wouldn’t even notice us.

  “Say they’s some sort of gas critters livin’ in the middle a the sun. A billion degrees down in there. They ain’t chemical, they’s nucular, that’s how they live. How we ever gonna talk to ‘em? But say they like to come to the surface now and again. Cool off, mebbe, or they like to mate up there in the thin gas. Or mebbe they just playin’, jumpin’ around like porpoises or otters. And we see ‘em, and we call ‘em solar provid … solar …”

  “Prominences.”

  “What you said. When what they is, is solar dolphins. And they kick up a heck of a racket, oh, my! Radiation all over the place. Northern lights, and satellites gettin’ burned out, and radios all fouled up. You think them gas critters know what they’re causin’, ninety million miles away? If they knew, you think they’d care what’s happenin’ on a little freezin’ cold speck o’ mud and salt water?”

  “I guess not.”

  “I think these crystals, they like that. And I think they done it befo’.”

  I thought about that.

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Not kiddin’.”

  “When, Jubal?”

  ” ‘Bout sixty million years ago.”

  Hoo, boy.

  IT WAS ACTUALLY around sixty-five million years ago, and you may have heard of it. Little thing called the Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction? Dinosaurs dying in a rain of flaming meteors? Ring a bell?

  At least that’s been the prevalent theory—collision with an asteroid, though there’re some who still hold out for other causes.

  Jubal had done some work on his own. He showed me a graph.

  “They’s six major skinkshuns the fossil people tell us,” he said. “Mebbe seven, if you count the one we’re in the middle of now.”

  “You mean Grumpy and the others?”

  “No, cher, the one been goin’ on for quite a while. Call it the …” He didn’t even try, but pointed at the word, which was Holocene. The ongoing extinctions caused by environmental changes brought about by man. Pollution, global warming, habitat loss, you know the drill.

  Here’s what the chart showed:

  65 million years ago Cretaceous-Tertiary Extinction

  –-

  200 million years ago Triassic-Jurassic Extinction

  250 million years ago Permian-Triassic Extinction

  –-

  360 million years ago Devonian-Carboniferous Extinction

  440 million years ago Ordovician-Silurian Extinction

  490 million years ago Cambrian-Ordovician Extinction

  ” ‘Cept for them two gaps,” Jubal said, “they’s been a big dustup ever fifty to eighty million years. And if you look at the graph, you can see little bumps there, about halfway through them gaps. It looks per … periodical to me.”

  “You think this has happened before.”

  “Six times, at least. Mebbe more, ‘cause before that there wasn’t a lot of critters around that left fossils.”

  “But the gaps …”

  He shrugged. “Like I said, you can see a bit of a rise in each of ‘em. Mebbe the conditions wasn’t quite so bad them times. Or mebbe they flat didn’t come. Mebbe they didn’t need to, those cycles.”

  “You’re talking about life cycles.”

  “Yessum. The critters we know, certain time a the year they come into … well, they get so’s they want to …”

  “Come into heat. Breed.”

  “Yessum.” His face was a little pinkish. “Ever critter has its own way a goin’ about it. Some cicadas, they stay underground seventeen years, then they come out to mate. They around a few days, lay they eggs, and die.”

  “You think the crystals are mating?”

  “Could be sumpin like that. Could be sumpin else we won’t never understand. Whatever they doin’, they doin’ it on a big scale, because they be big. Say they makin’ a nestin’ place, gonna have little kids and bring ‘em up. They’s changin’ stuff around, makin’ the environment better.”

  “Terraforming,” I whispered.

  “Well, unterraformin’, you wanna get technical. When they done, Earth might be a lot more like Europa. Planetary engineering, in a hurry.”

  Terraforming is the fairly wacky idea of turning a planet that’s not really suitable for human habitation into one that is. It’s engineering on a giant scale, and some of the ideas would boggle your mind. And that’s about all it had been up to now: boonboggled. There were a few pilot plants on Mars that dumped oxygen into the atmosphere at the rate of thousands of tons per day. And one day they might give us a marginally breathable atmosphere, say about like the top of Mount Everest in the winter. Last estimate I saw: about ten thousand years. Nobody’s built a new one since before I was born.

  Jubal looked at me solemnly.

  “These little spikes in the graph. They don’t look like much. Looks like somethin’ hit hard, and then went away quick. And I guess that’s right, when you look at the whole big picture. But they’s quick, and they’s quick. These things live on a different time scale than we do. Fact is, these skinkshuns lasted for thousands a years, and it was a different world every time, after. Looks like we might of got out just in time, us.”

  BY “GOT OUT,” Jubal meant that humanity had established itself on other worlds, pretty much independent of Mother Earth. Unless the crystals had designs on Mars and Luna, the species would probably survive.

  But would we survive on Earth?

  Certainly not in the numbers we had attained before this started; in fact, our population was already significantly reduced. But I didn’t see why a lot of people couldn’t survive underground, burrowing into the rock, no matter how harsh things got.

  After all, that’s one of the ways we live on Mars. Would Earth end up with a harsher environment than Mars? Not if this extinction went like the previous ones. The dinosaurs died off, but remember that a certain number of species survived every one of the mass extinctions. Then they evolved to fill the niches left behind by the ones that couldn’t adap
t.

  I guess it was possible that one of the surviving species would adapt to fill the gap left by bipedal big-brained apes.

  THE NEXT DAY Jubal said he wanted to play a game. It turned out to be a lot more game than he bargained for … but I’m getting ahead of myself.

  “Somethin’ been bothering me since way back yonder in Florida, with your grand-père and grand-mère, when they built that ship and flew it to Mars. When I made that first bubble machine. Ever since then, people, they been gettin’ mad at me ‘cause I can’t ‘splain how I done it. So I wanted to try it wit’ you.”

  I couldn’t have been more floored if he’d asked me to come up with the Grand Unification Theory Einstein couldn’t figure out, or read Chinese.

  “Me? Jubal, that’s crazy. I got a D in calculus, and I can’t even recall how I managed that. I have to take off my shoes to count to twenty.”

  “It ain’t math … at least, math behind it, but it only be part of it.”

  “Nobel Prize winners couldn’t follow you, and you expect me—”

  “We got somethin’ special, you and me,” he said, raising his voice just a trifle, which for Jubal was like grabbing me by the shoulders and shaking. I shut up and listened.

  “We was both in the no-place place at the same time … in this universe, anyway. Now, the math says no information kin be exchanged if no time has passed, but me, I got a lots of information. Your face, your name … even a feelin’ that I knew you.” He looked down, then up at me from the corner of his eye. We were sitting side by side on the couch, facing a lot of weird-looking junk he’d brought in from his lab. I didn’t know what was making him uncomfortable, but I kept silent. He’d get to it.

  “I felt like … if I met you, I’d like you. Like I was in your head.”

  “Jubal, you like pretty much everybody, don’t you?”

  He shook his head.

  “I don’t not like many people, ‘less they done somethin’ awful to me or mine. Mos’ people, I don’t think about ‘em one way or t’other.”

  “I think we’re all like that, except the most evil people.”

  “I think you right. So I ain’t all that different from anybody else.” He seemed to take comfort in that thought. The crown of eccentric genius sat as heavily on his head as the burden of brain-damaged, language-challenged idiot savant weighed upon his back.

  “The onliest way I can ‘splain how the data, the information … the feelin’s got transferred from you to me is that we got tangled.”

  “Entangled? Like the quantum stuff you were talking about?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Jubal, I told you that stuff is way over—”

  “You don’t have to understand it, cher. All you have to do is feel it.”

  “Okay. Feeling I can do. I got a Ph.D. in feeling.”

  He grinned. “That’s funny. I like that. A Ph.D. in feeling. Wish more folks had one, it would save us all a passel a trouble.” He got serious again.

  “Anyways, all I wants to do is try a little spearmint. It just be a game, really. I want you to look at some stuff, and see what you see.”

  “Okay, I can do that, too. I’m real good at seeing what I see.”

  He got up and did some things to the equipment he’d brought in. Hooked up the thingamabob to the whatchamacallit, checked to see the doohickey was synchronized with the absquatulator. Made sure the mimsies were borogroving frabjously.

  “First time I made me a bubble generator, I was studyin’ on this new …” He paused, his brow furrowed, and he said, carefully, “heuristic”—he breathed a sigh of relief—“chip. It was somethin’ different, and I’d made me some changes to it, see what it could do. I used to do that sometimes, to relax.”

  Some folks put their feet up in front of the TV with a cold brew. Jubal stares at microscopic computer chips. Takes all kinds.

  “I got a little drowsy, me, and I went all … sort of cross-eyed. And all at once it all tumbled right into place, and I was lookin’ at this thing I’d made, me. And it weren’t like anything else I ever seen, no.”

  “The singularity, right?”

  “That’s what I called it, but I ain’t sure that’s what it be. It’s a twist in space, and I was skeered of it, tell you the truth. But I figgered out how to handle it.”

  “And all this has … what to do with me?”

  “It be the mind that make ‘em, Podkayne. And you and me, we had our minds tangled. So I was wonderin’ if mebbe you could make ‘em, too.”

  Oh, brother. Sounded pretty wacky to me. But what the hell. What did I have to lose? I settled into the couch and Jubal brought up an image on the big screen that was part of his equipment. It was a real mess, ultrathin lines intersecting with tiny dots, curving things that looked like tubes. I couldn’t make any sense of it.

  “This was an early heuristic chip,” he said. “Them dark things are nanotubes, made out of strands of carbon molecules, and the dots are buckyballs, little geo …”

  “Geodesic?”

  “What you said. Named after Bucky Fuller. This was the first chip that tried to work like the human brain, with lots a connections, instead of a bunch a transistors. A silicon chip, once you make it you can’t mess around with it or it just stop workin’. These new chips, you can fiddle around with ‘em.”

  I knew a tiny, tiny bit about this stuff. I knew it was the basis for all modern computers, and the stuff implanted in my head was decades more advanced than this picture. Which didn’t help me a bit because the picture meant nothing to me.

  “What I want you to do, cher, is not so much look at it, as look tru it.” He looked at me with raised eyebrows.

  “Can you give me a little more help?”

  “You know them pitchers, they look all screwy, little bits and pieces a stuff, and you look at ‘em and you don’t see nothin’, then … you see somethin’?”

  Googling …

  “Stereograms.” I pulled one up out of memory and attempted to link it to Jubal’s implants … and recalled, for the third or fourth time, that he didn’t have any. Jubal had ” ‘splained” that he “didn’t like to be cut on, no.” No point in telling him the surgery was about as intrusive as having your ears pierced; he didn’t like needles, either. So I tossed the image to the computer in his jackleg setup, and it came up on the screen.

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about, me!”

  It was a random pattern of multicolored dots.

  “You stare at it for a while, kind of walleyed, and somethin’ll pop out at you.”

  I’d seen them before, had no idea how they worked, but I knew how to do it. I stared, and let my eyes relax, and there it was, a leaping dolphin with colored spots all over it. It stood out maybe six inches from the background dots.

  “You see it?”

  “I see it.”

  “Now, try the same thing with the other one.”

  So I did. I stared and stared, and nothing happened.

  “Do you see anything?” I finally asked.

  “Not yet.” So we stared some more. After a good while, Jubal sighed, and did something with his machines.

  “Let’s try with the new one,” he said, and another image appeared on the screen. This was even denser than the first. I sort of recognized it from pictures of modern cyberstuff, the liquid kind that crammed impossible amounts of circuitry into something the size of a pea.

  “Now, could I put you in a light trance?”

  “Have at it.”

  I went under easily now, and recognized that semidetached state where things were just a little more vivid, just a little sharper than normal consciousness. Colors were intense, but sounds were muffled, except for Jubal’s voice.

  I tried to let my mind go blank, as Jubal requested. When I felt it was as blank as it could get without a lobotomy, I focused on the pattern … then tried not to focus.

  And what can I say? I don’t know how to describe what turned out to be almost an hour of starin
g, except to say that I stared. I don’t think I even blinked much.

  A few times I felt like I was starting to slip into something. If you’ve ever looked at a stereogram, you know the frustrating feeling of being right on the edge of seeing something, of feeling that the image is trying to come out, that that incredible soft, wet calculating machine behind your eyeballs is working furiously to decode the image the stereogram is trying to send you, but it remains as elusive as a will-o’-the-wisp. (What is a will-o’-the-wisp, anyway? Googling … ah. Swamp gas.)

  Then the balloon popped. No, make that a soap bubble because it wasn’t startling; just one moment I was deeply into the picture, and the next moment I wasn’t.

  I found myself sitting very close to Jubal. Our hips were touching. We were both leaning forward, and our heads were inclined toward each other. My right arm, apparently leading a life of its own, was draped over his shoulders. I felt the solid muscle beneath his shirt, beneath his skin, and I inhaled the scent of him.

  I guess the bubble popped for Jubal, too, because he shook his head just a little bit, and then turned to look at me, his eyes slowly swimming into focus.

  I leaned forward and kissed him, gently, on the lips. Then I moved back, waiting.

  Time really is relative. A couple seconds can stretch out almost eternally, as you realize that this moment could change your life forever. The rest of the world went away, and I stared into his eyes, looked at his lips, gently smoothed his hair. It all depended on him.

  He moved forward, just an inch. That was all I needed. I moved against him, pressing my lips to his. He closed his eyes and let it happen. I opened my mouth, and put my other arm around him. His hand came up, tentatively, and brushed ever so gently over my hair. I took the hand and pressed it to my cheek, and he finally began to kiss me back.

  I moved his hand down to my breast, and when he squeezed it I felt something explode inside me. I heard moaning, and realized it was me. My skin felt flushed and moist. It was suddenly too hot in the room. I pulled back for just a moment and tore my blouse off and put his hand back where it had been.

  Never breaking the kiss for more than a second, I got his pants down and mine off, and I straddled him.