Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning) Read Online Free PDF Page B

supply. It’s rationed out carefully, and it’s a good thing, because me and my sister could probably have run through the century’s worth of shrimp in a few months, and would weigh half a ton together.
    There was a small bandstand in a corner with a four-piece band—squeeze box, two fiddles, and a girl who played everything from triangle to washboard—thumping out a zydeco beat.
    It was a real
fais do-do
.
    The only jarring note was at the far end of the room. It was a black hole in space, about six feet in diameter. When I say black hole, that’s exactly what I mean. It was as if somebody had used four-dimensional scissors to cut a circle in our reality, and filled it in with . . . nothing. No reflection, no sense of depth, nothing. I knew that if I touched it, my hand would feel it, but even if I put my nose right up to it, I would see nothing but total blackness. It reflected not a single photon of light.
    I once asked Papa where all those photons went. He said they curved round and round ’bout a trillion time,
cher
, and then they done took off for some other universe somewheres. It’s a universe he spends a lot of his time in, when he’s thinking, and I know I’ll never be able to follow him in a thousand years. And that’s fine with me.
    It was a black bubble, and Papa was inside it, not a nanosecond older than when he went in.
    Those things give me the creeps. I know they’re perfectly safe; Papa has been in and out of them more times than I am years old, but Polly and I never have. I don’t know how sis feels about them, but I have always wished that at these parties they’d hide the damn thing behind a curtain until it’s time to uncork Papa Jubal and
laissez les bons temps rouler
. (“Let the good times roll,” if you’re Cajun French–challenged.)
    I tried to keep my back to it as I did my best to play cohostess, greeting an endless stream of friends and relatives.
    You’d think all the Broussard-Garcia-Strickland-Redmond clan was there, including third cousins, grandnephews, and assorted trailer trash, but it wasn’t even close. Great-grand-père Manny and Great-grand-mère Kelly were absent, both of them in a black bubble for five years now. Other family members, including some who had free passes to stay out all the time by virtue of being closely enough related to Captain Travis, had elected to hibernate, too.
    The fact was that Earth-born and Mars-born people often found life inside
Rolling Thunder
to be, well,
dull
.
    We’re definitely small-town in here. Our pleasures are bucolic, pastoral, not well suited to city folk who like to party on Saturday night. Oh, we party well enough, and there are dances and theater and music—mostly amateur—but some of it must look about as exciting as a barn dance or a quilting bee to the older folks.
    Well, I have to say I’m a bit in sympathy with them. All us Thunder-born are quite aware of what life on Earth looked like—before the disaster—and what Mars still looks like. And the bright lights and fashions and huge concerts and stuff look like a lot of fun. But what’s the point of mooning over what you just can’t have? I get along okay with what we’ve got.
    —
    It wasn’t long until Mama Podkayne called us all to order.
    We long ago decided not to make a big ceremony about turning off the bubble. Papa’s emergence was always the occasion for a party, but being the center of attention makes him uncomfortable. So we just all gather and somebody throws the switch; we pick Papa up from where he has fallen—you never know how the person inside is going to be oriented, which is why we have a soft pad under the bubble—and give him a short round of applause. Then somebody hands him a beer, and we carry on as normal.
    Mom got everyone reasonably quiet, then gestured to me. It’s always me or Polly who presses the button. I thought it had been me last time, but what the hell. I knew this was no time to question Mom’s decision.
    The