Rolling Thunder

by John Varley

  “I guarantee this is safe as a trip to the store. What I meant, you may need to line things up so you can get time off from your jobs.”

  “So what are we going to see?” somebody asked.

  “That’s why it’s called a Mystery Tour.”

  There were more questions, a lot of them, but Travis wouldn’t be budged. I caught Grandma Kelly’s eye, and she leaned over and whispered in my ear.

  “Same old Travis. He loves to be in control, and he loves surprises.”

  “Do you have any idea what he’s up to?”

  “Not a clue. How about Jubal? He know anything?”

  “Well, if Travis told him something in confidence, he wouldn’t tell anyone, not even me. But I don’t think he knows.” Which wouldn’t stop me from grilling him about it, tonight, in bed. We ladies have our methods.

  When the party broke up I didn’t have any sense of who would be going and who wouldn’t. Some were obviously interested, and some were dubious, and a few just couldn’t get away. I approached Jubal as he was kissing a cousin good-bye.

  “Will you go with me, cher?” he asked.

  “Whither thou goest,” I told him, secretly relieved that I wouldn’t have to cajole him into it. Jubal hates travel, but I wouldn’t have missed this for anything.

  A WEEK LATER, most of the people who had been at the party boarded the Second Amendment. It was a huge ship; everybody got a private cabin. We cruised for four days, accelerating for half, turning around and decelerating for half. Mars quickly got smaller, but the best clue was that the sun got smaller, too. That meant we weren’t going to Earth. And the turnaround time meant we weren’t going to Jupiter.

  That left the asteroid belt, and there were way too many of those for me to estimate which one might be our destination.

  We never lacked for things to do, and we ate like kings, dining on stuff most of us had seldom had since the crisis began, all taken from a bubble pantry like the one in the Fortress.

  But basically, not a lot happens on an ocean voyage or a space voyage. We had poker tournaments and I lost a few bucks. We worked out. Kelly appointed herself cruise director and organized lots of fun stuff to keep us all occupied.

  The rest of my biological family had a little time to adjust to me and Jubal as an established fact. Dad was the hardest sell, but the more he observed us, the easier he got with the idea. Granddaddy Manny was fine with it from the beginning.

  Mike was suspicious as hell. Jubal was a legend to him, like to so many other people, and he went around frowning at the thought of his big sister—his former big sister, now that he was as old as I was— involved with this geezer. Then one day he came up and apologized for being a jerk. It was a little like he was reading prepared lines, and later Marlee confided to me that she’d had to “slap him around a little.” Figuratively, of course. After that, he and Jubal hit it off famously.

  There was really only one thing of note that happened on the trip out. One night, as we were getting ready for bed, Jubal suddenly dropped to one knee and took my hand. He seemed upset, and I couldn’t imagine what the problem was.

  He stuttered around it for a moment, then inadvertently slipped into French. He stopped himself and finally managed to choke it out.

  “Podkayne, will you marry me?”

  I had to work very hard to stifle a laugh, which would have been one of sheer relief, because I knew it could be misinterpreted.

  I looked at him down there, looking desperately up at me, and then I got down on my knees and took both his hands.

  “I love you, Jubal. Of course I’ll marry you.”

  Once more, there was the rib thing as he hugged me and kissed me. I’d have to train him to be more careful, but just then I didn’t mind at all. What’s a cracked rib or two at a moment like that?

  Then Jubal leaped to his feet and went to the bedroom door, flinging it open. Travis was standing there, looking almost as nervous as Jubal, which meant he hadn’t been eavesdropping.

  “She say yes!” he shouted. Jeez, Jubal, wake up the whole ship, why don’t you?

  And about an hour later I was walking down the aisle …

  TRUTH: I HAD never imagined a ceremony. When it happened, I’d assumed we’d hop a train down to City Hall and fill out a civil contract. Jubal had confessed he wasn’t religious, and I sure wasn’t, and I wasn’t one of those girls who’d dreamed about a big wedding and designed her gown when she was eight.

  But Jubal wanted a ceremony, and I had no objections.

  Travis had had a week to set it up, “Just in case you said yes,” he later told me. Nobody else knew except Mom, who had to be in on it because she provided the wedding dress, which had been hers when she married Dad. A few alterations, and it fit me like a glove. It was white, and floor-length. I couldn’t believe what I saw when I looked in the mirror. Why, Poddy, you’re glowing!

  Travis must have bought some sort of wedding-in-a-box, because he had everything. There was no “aisle” on the Second Amendment, so he brought along some church pews and cleared out the biggest room and set them up to make one. There were tons of flowers all around the room. Later, there was a simply monstrous cake. There was the “Bridal Chorus” from Wagner’s Lohengrin. I wouldn’t have been surprised if Travis had popped a flower girl out of one of his bubbles to strew rose petals in my path.

  Jubal was resplendent in a black-and-white tux. Granddaddy Manny was his best man because Travis, in his capacity as captain, had to perform the service. Admiral Bill was in full-dress uniform. I had Broussard bridesmaids whose names I couldn’t even remember. Grandma Kelly was Matron of Honor. I had a corsage to toss.

  Dad walked me down the aisle to where Jubal was standing … on a box! I almost burst out giggling, but by a supreme effort of will maintained my dignity. In place of an altar there was a table draped in the Martian flag, so it was clear this was a civil ceremony. Jubal had written the vows himself, with help from Travis and others, and mercifully they hadn’t put together one of those awful, sappy, breathless, embarrassing ego trips I’d seen at other secular weddings. Basically they’d just taken the traditional vows and stripped out the religious stuff. If Travis had asked me to “love, honor, and obey” I had brought a (borrowed) pencil to rewrite the contract, but it was “love, honor, and cherish.” Nobody’s going to obey in my marriage; we’ll talk things out like civilized people, and then I’ll get Jubal to do what I want him to do.

  The dress was old, the veil was new, and the flowers were violets. Close enough for jazz.

  When Manny handed the ring to Jubal I practically fainted, and had to interrupt the proceedings just for a moment.

  “Jubal, that rock is enormous!” I whispered. “It’s as big as the Hope Diamond.”

  “It is the Hope Diamond,” Travis whispered, and shrugged when I gaped at him. “When the United States went bankrupt after the Big Wave, I picked up some bargains at the Smithsonian disaster sale. Had it remounted, in case I ever found the right girl.” Fat chance. Travis had had many girlfriends in the course of a long and colorful life, and they always dumped him.

  “The stone don’t matter,” Jubal said. “Only the love matters. With this ring, I thee wed.”

  And that was about it. We didn’t do a recessional, just started partying right there. Dad was crying, Mom was misty-eyed. Travis lit a cigar, shocking a few people, then passed out more. Luckily, the ship’s air system sucked the illegal poison away almost instantly.

  Pretty silly, huh? Only the best day of my life.

  IF IT HAD a name, I never heard it. More likely it just had one of those generic asteroid names like 22 Kalliope, or a number and the name of the discoverer, or just a number. People still tend to think of the asteroid belt as choked with rocks, but the fact is it’s so diffuse you can blast right through it with barely a care. Total mass of the belt is about 4 percent of Luna. Just the biggest four—Ceres, Vesta, Pallas, and Hygiea—are over 50 percent of the mass of the whole belt.

  Ceres
is the only one big enough to be round. All the others are lumpy in one way or another. The mostly common way to describe these rocks, of which there are over three million half a mile or more in size, is “potato-shaped.” This one was a big Idaho spud, a rough ellipsoid seven miles long on one axis, about four, maybe five miles in the other, with a few lumps and a few shallow craters.

  The only thing a little odd about it as we approached was that it seemed to be rotating around its long axis. No reason why it shouldn’t, but just eyeballing it, the spin seemed to be exactly along that axis, like somebody had aligned it that way.

  Which is exactly what Travis had done, of course. Was he taking us to a bigger and better Fortress of Solitude?

  We were all gathered in the main room, watching the approach on a big screen because we were decelerating, ass backwards to our target. The ship was in autodocking mode, no pilot necessary. We were getting nearer quickly and would soon go into free fall. I was holding Jubal’s hand tightly. He hates free fall. He had been weaning himself off of his tranquilizing medication—he’d been drug-free for the wedding—but had taken an extra dose today.

  “But you my best trank, Poddy,” he had said, and he was proving true to his word, so far, with hardly a shiver as we neared the moment of main engine cutoff.

  “Are you ready to spill the beans, Travis?” Kelly asked.

  “Soon, soon,” Travis assured her.

  I was focusing on something I’d spotted on the side of the big potato.

  Something white and far too regular to be a natural feature. It looked like writing, and it had rotated into view several times as we neared it.

  “Travis, could you give us a better view of that white patch?” I asked.

  “Sure thing.”

  The camera zoomed in, and I tilted my head to read the letters, which must have been a quarter of a mile high. Because of the unevenness of the surface, they were slightly askew, like the famous Hollywood sign, now long gone.

  It said ROLLING THUNDER.

  Well, it was rolling, all right, but naturally it was doing it in the total, eerie silence of space. I timed the rotation—I was beginning to have some idea of what this thing was—and gave the number to Jubal and asked him to work out what the centrifugal “gravity” would be inside it, if it was hollowed out, as I suspected.

  “Have to know how much is hollow, cher,” he said. “Futher out you get from the axis, the more gravity you get.”

  “It’s two-thirds of a gee,” Travis said.

  “Then you got a hollow in there about … two miles wide,” Jubal said.

  “Exactly two miles,” Travis said, sounding a little annoyed. He liked his surprises. “I hope you all have been keeping up with your exercises. You’re going to weigh a little less than twice what you do on Mars.” We’d been boosting at half a gee, which isn’t unpleasant. Two Mars gees would actually be three-quarters of an Earth gravity. Two-thirds Earth gees would be heavier than I like, but not nearly as onerous as Pismo Beach.

  Nobody said much as the main engines cut off. Jubal was holding my hand tightly, barf bag in the other hand. He looked a little green for a few minutes, but came through it okay. Then there were little pushes and shoves as the ship’s computer eased us into a vast docking bay and pressure doors closed behind us. A passenger tube extended itself and locked on to us, and Travis led the way out. I tugged Jubal along like a toy balloon.

  Travis led us down a few corridors and into a big chamber with seats in concentric circles. He instructed us to strap in, and when we did, the room started to move.

  We gradually built up weight, and not in a pleasant way. Something seemed to be pulling me to one side. I realized it was the … googling … Coriolis force. We were going down, but also in a circle. Even I, with what I thought of as good space legs, felt a little queasy. Jubal quietly filled the barf bag, looked sheepishly at me, and patted my knee.

  “I be okay now.”

  We were soon at the bottom of the elevator shaft. I started to get up, and fell back in my seat. Whew! Point six six gees took a little getting used to. Jubal gave me his hand and hoisted me to my feet.

  The elevator doors yawned wide, and we were in a semicircular tunnel about fifty feet wide and twenty-five feet high. The floor was flat, the ceiling arched over us. And right before us was … a choo-choo train.

  I’m not using the word lightly. It looked like it had been assembled by a child with no sense of history at all. Up front was a simply massive black locomotive, with polished chrome work, pipes running all over the place, and wheels as tall as I am. There were painted highlights of red and orange. Every surface gleamed.

  “Is that a steam engine, Travis?” Granddaddy Manny asked.

  “Used to be. Southern Pacific Number 4449. Runs on bubble power now. This is more of the stuff I picked up at the United States disaster sale. Cheap.”

  Hooked behind it was a long silver observation car with a glass bubble on top. It was clearly from another era. After that was an even older car, made mostly of wood. And at the end was … what else? A cheerful little red caboose.

  I looked down the tracks behind the train and saw that the rails split and entered a larger area, where I could see other cars. Travis had always liked to collect things. After he became a multibillionaire, his toys just got larger. I had a feeling we were standing inside the largest toy of all.

  Travis produced a train conductor’s hat from somewhere and put it on his head, then ushered everyone into the passenger car. Up ahead, I could see a man leaning out of the cab of the locomotive. I wondered who he might be.

  When we were all seated under the dome, the train blew its whistle and slowly pulled forward. We passed under hanging strip lights, and then through a pressure door. I could see it close behind us. In a quarter mile or so, another set of doors opened. We passed through three sets of doors, then through the last one, which took us into the interior of the Rolling Thunder.

  I knew places like this existed, though there weren’t many of them and this may have been the largest. I had never been inside one. No stereo hi-rez video can even begin to prepare you for it.

  “Six miles long,” Travis was saying. “Two miles in diameter. Six and a quarter miles around the cylinder, thirty-seven and a half square miles of land area. That’s twenty-four thousand acres, almost ten thousand hectares. Volume is twenty cubic miles of air.”

  Picture being inside a cylinder six miles long and two miles in diameter. It’s rotating around the central axis fast enough to produce .66 gee, but there is no sense of spinning. Wherever you are, down is directly below you, though you can see the ground curving gently upward in two directions; call them east and west. Look due north and south along the spin axis, the ground is flat right in front of you, but curves upward at the sides until it meets overhead. That is, I know it did meet, but I couldn’t see it because a long light source ran right down the center of the cylinder, where it was weightless. I guess that was what was going to pass for the sun in here.

  The ends of the cylinder were rounded, like a tank for holding high-pressure gas, like propane or maybe liquid oxygen. That was because this giant cavern was made by squeezer machines taking big round bites out of the surrounding rock and compressing it down to whatever size you wanted it to be. You could dig out this entire space in an afternoon.

  Filling it with stuff would be another matter.

  It took me a while to notice, because at first we were all gawking at how the ground curved up, around, and over, but from time to time we passed groups of people working. The engineer would toot his whistle, and the work crews would look up and wave to us. Some were driving bulldozers and other heavy equipment. Some were building structures out of metal, stone, or wood. I saw one group stringing barbed-wire fences, and another herding cattle, if you can believe it. I saw goats and sheep, I saw ducks swimming in a pond. We passed through a “forest” where all the trees were about ten feet tall, tied to stakes. For a while a dog ran alongside the tra
in, barking happily.

  But mostly it was the people I noticed. They were about equally divided between men and women, and there were even a few children. One woman carried a baby on her back, papoose style.

  Who were these people?

  THE TRAIN FOLLOWED a corkscrew path. Looking ahead, it seemed like you were about to take a ride on a roller coaster, but when you got there, of course, it was perfectly level. We went over bridges that crossed dry streambeds with rocks at the bottom. We clattered over switch points where other tracks crossed our line. There were grade crossings where various vehicles waited for us to pass.

  The land we traveled through was oddly formed. Every quarter mile to half mile we ran along a low trestle that took us up to a ridge, from fifty to maybe a hundred feet high, where the land seemed to begin to slope gently down again. It was hard to be sure because being inside the giant cylinder distorted my perceptions. But I could see that the interior was lined by these ridges, sort of like the ribs of a really huge whale. They curved away on each side and met overhead, a series of rings, one after the other, stretching from one end of the cylinder to the other. I thought it might be some sort of artifact of the squeezing process, as successive bites were taken out of the solid rock and metal. Turns out it was something different. I’ll get to that later.

  We went through two villages, and I could see more up the sides and overhead. They were completely different, architecturally. I recognized the styles, since Martian architecture, at least in the tourist places, was modeled on various Earth fantasies; many of the casinos and hotels were themed to one region or another, but nicely Disneyfied. The first village was Merrie Olde England, with half-timbered homes and shops with thatched roofs, a few horse-drawn vehicles, and a partially completed stone church. All around the church were more stones, carefully numbered, and some tall stained-glass windows, and masons were putting more stones in place as we watched. It looked like Travis had bought an entire village and took it apart, for reassembly here.