Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning) (13 page)

Somebody had unfolded a black-and-gold flycycle and put it on a stand in the bleachers. When the photographer dismissed the kickers, he gathered us together and studied us critically.

“Young ladies, I’ll be setting you up in several different groupings. If you all listen to me and do as I say, quickly, this can all be over before you know it, and with very little pain. First we’ll do the A-Team, as a matter of right. Then we’ll group all of you together, regardless of age and team status. Okay?”

“First of all, Ms. Click and Ms. Clack, you two are the tallest here. I’d like you as fenceposts, corralling the group. One of you to one end, the other over there.”

We’d heard them all, Chip and Dale, Dum and Dee, Dumb and Dumber, even Scylla and Charybdis. We were used to it. I moved to one side and was immediately joined by Pippa and Jynx Molloy.

“Okay, that works,” the photographer said, and turned his attention to placing the other team members. It seemed to me that Pippa and Jynx were almost jostling for position beside me. Jynx is part Australian aboriginal and part Chinese, at least according to her. Neither of those gene pools was prone to produce basketball players, and she came up to just above my shoulder. The shape of her eyes was Chinese, but a little something else must have crept in there somewhere, as the eyes themselves were a startling blue. She styled her hair in kinky spikes, and her skin was as black as anyone’s I’d ever seen. Her face was knockout gorgeous, and her figure outstanding. She was our power forward because she didn’t know how to be anything but aggressive in the playing globe.

Or anywhere else, for that matter.

“So I heard your old man is out of the black again,” she said. I looked past her and saw Pippa roll her eyes. I figured they had some sort of plan to double-team me and get my attention while one of them sneaked up on my blind side. That’s how Pippa would have done it, but Jynx just couldn’t constrain herself.

“So how’s he doing?”

“Oh, you know. Papa never likes going black. He’s a little upset, but he’ll get over it. He always does.”

“That’s not what I heard,” Pippa said, abandoning all hope of subtlety. “I heard he was really upset about something.”

“That’s what they’re saying,” Jynx confirmed.

“Who’s
they
?”

“You know. People talking. My mother heard it from somebody, and I overheard her talking to a friend of hers about it.”

“That’s how wild rumors get started, spacegirl. Don’t you—”

“Ladies! Ladies!” Coach Peggy shouted. “Can we knock off the gabbing for just a minute here, and all of you face the camera and at least
pretend
that you’re a team who will soon be battling for the bronze medal?”

Maybe that’s why we all felt a little uninvolved. Due to our recent loss to the Hillbillies, they would be meeting the Maycomb Finches for gold and silver, while we had to be satisfied with a shot at the Castle Rock Queens for third place. Normally, I’d have been even more upset than the rest of us, because it was my mishandling of the evil Cheryl Chang that had caused the loss, but now I had other, more important things on my mind.

“All right,” the photographer said, “say ‘orthodonture,’ and . . . Okay. Hold your positions. Now, this time, I want big smiles,
serious
smiles. There are thirty-two teeth in the human mouth, girls. There are eight of you. I want to see all 256 choppers when you smile.”

“If you’ve still got all thirty-two,” Cassie piped up from the other end, “you’re not playing hard enough.” That got a laugh, and the photographer took a picture. She’s lost three teeth and I’ve lost two. That’s about standard, if you’re any good. I like the new ones better. They’re stronger.

“Not in this bunch,” Coach Peggy called out. “Four of those are wisdom teeth, and these girls don’t have them. You can’t have wisdom and play skypool.”

That got a big cheer, and the camera snapped again.

“Okay,” the coach sang out. “Enough of that smiling happy crap. I want a few with your
game faces
on. I want you to mean business. I want you to look so fierce you’d scare a junkyard dog back into the doghouse. I want you to make my hair stand on end, and all the fleas jump out and run for their lives. Let’s hear you growl, Gators!”

We did the best we could, and I think the photographer was impressed. He snapped three quick ones, then called all the skypool players in, which meant just about the whole school, male and female. The A-Team boys had changed into their tights, which were even sexier than the football uniforms. You never saw so many tight butts and ripped calves.

This gathering was pretty informal, just grouping more or less by size, with the very young ones (who played 2-D kiddiepool on bicycles on the ground until they understood the rules and were ready for flycycles) out in front, and us short-timers in the back. I did my best to shake off Jynx and Pippa, but they clung to me like leeches. Cassie had figured out what was happening, and she joined me, but she had picked up a lamprey of her own, in the person of Milton Kaslov. Milton is one of the few boys in school who is taller than us, so naturally, with a stunning lack of imagination, he soon picked up the moniker of Milt the Stilt. He’s about six-nine, with a big shock of unruly black curls and a honking beak of a nose. But when they were handing out chins, he really got shortchanged.

He’s a pain in the ass.

It’s not because he’s not much to look at, honestly. I know a few boys that look worse than him, and we get along fine. He’s very bright, but it’s not because he’s a nerd, I have no prejudices on those lines. It would be pretty silly to disrespect smart people with the father I have.

It’s that he’s as boring as a whole colony of termites, one of those species that I
don’t
believe we brought along. If we need termites at New Sun, I guess we’ll just die.

Travis once said that somebody can be like a knife, keen on one side and dull on the other, and not have a point to him at all. A person can be real smart and thick as a brick, all at the same time. One of my friends once suggested that Milt the Stilt lies somewhere on the autistic spectrum, maybe with Asperger’s, which would mean he has a disability, and would make me a mean person. If he does, it would be in his academic records somewhere, and confidential, but I don’t buy it. None of the teachers have ever given him any special-needs attention, he’s just in the advanced academic group for all the science subjects. Plus, I read up on it, and scientists agree that you can be an Aspie and a nice guy, or an Aspie and an asshole.

That’s not how they put it, but you get the point.

Talking to Milt for ten minutes made you have thoughts of suicide. We all avoided him, but he was oblivious, and would walk right up to you and start talking about the first thing that came into his head. He would actually reach out and grab you when you tried to move away, and have no idea that the reason you wanted to leave was that you were afraid your head was going to explode if you hung around one more second.

I had tried to like him, I really had, when we were all younger. When that didn’t work out, I had tried to feel sorry for him, but couldn’t manage that, either. Then I tried just to not dislike him and failed at that, too. Three strikes and you’re out, which I think is a term from cricket, a game we don’t play in
Rolling Thunder
.

Lately, it had gotten even worse. He had become fixated on us. It was clear it didn’t matter to him which one succumbed to his masculine charm and rapier wit. In fact, he had hinted that he wouldn’t be averse to having both of us in bed at the same time. (Which is something we discussed, once, after seeing a fairly shocking lesbian video, and quickly agreed was definitely
not
for us.) So in addition to being boring and overbearing and obnoxious in many other ways, he had now added creepy to his list of endearments. He had done everything but come up and hump my leg, and I had tried every variant of the word no I could think of, including a slap on the face. I figured the next way to say no would be a kick in those dangly bits that boys are so proud of.

But today he wasn’t looking to get laid. He was after the same thing Jynx and Pippa wanted, which was gossip.

“They say your dad thinks the ship is going to blow up,” he said. Subtle as a ball-peen hammer, our Milt.

“‘They’ are doing a lot of talking,” Cassie said. “The way I heard it, we’re about to fall into a black hole.”

“No shit? Man, we better . . . Aw, you’re just jerking my dick.”

“There’s an appetizing thought. I’d have to find it first, though.”

“Come on, Cassie. Everybody knows something’s going on. They say he’s really upset about something. He was up in the control room. What was he doing up there?”

“I’m Polly, you jerk,” Cassie said. We do that to keep people on their toes, especially people we don’t like. Looked like somebody at the Council meeting had blabbed. Well, Travis hadn’t exactly sworn them to secrecy. Not that he could have even if he’d wanted to.

“You were up there, too,” Pippa said.

“And your father wasn’t in very good shape,” Jynx added.

“Good grief!” I exploded. “Why is everyone suddenly so concerned about Papa? Everybody knows he is easily upset. It’s just the normal anxiety he gets when going into the black, that’s all. And is there some kind of law against his going up in the control room? The control room of the ship that
wouldn’t even be here
if it weren’t for his inventions?”

“Nobody’s saying your dad doesn’t have the right to be there,” Jynx said. “It’s just that he never goes there. Something else everybody knows is, he hates weightlessness.”

“And I’m hearing that your uncle Travis is out, too,” Pippa piped up. “Quite a bit ahead of schedule.”

“How would you know what his schedule is?” Cassie wanted to know. “That’s a secret, always has been.”

“Not to your family,” Milt said, darkly.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Cassie turned on him and gave him a shove in the chest. He backpedaled and almost fell on his butt. “Our family business is just that. Private family business and no concern of anyone else. You know the rules. We live close together in here, and we’re all entitled to privacy.”

“No one’s saying you aren’t,” Jynx said, quietly.

“Yeah, then why are the three of you giving us the third degree?” A small crowd had gathered, some of them pretending to not be eavesdropping, some of them not even bothering to hide it.

“And all the rest of you!” she shouted. “Butt out, okay? There’s nothing wrong with Papa, and there’s nothing wrong with the ship.”

“You’re a poor liar, Polly,” Pippa said. “Oh, excuse me, I meant Cassie.”

“Come on, sis,” I said, not committing myself to which of us she was, though it was obvious that Pippa knew. “Let’s leave this gossip group to get along without us.”

“Yeah, they seem to be doing fine without any actual facts,” she said.

We turned and headed back to the school building. I glanced over my shoulder to see if anyone was following. No one was, but most of them were looking at us.

“I feel like we’re making our escape, somehow,” I said.

“Yeah, like any minute they’ll break and start running after us.”

“With torches and nooses, maybe.”

“Shit, sis, let’s really make our escape. I don’t have any finals today. How about you?”

“Nothing important. Got an essay to write.”

“Do it at home. Let’s blow this joint, then.”

“Suits me.”

—

We hustled into the gym and changed back into street clothes, then outside to our bicycles. We made it down the road without being seen.

We weren’t supposed to be home at that time of day, and Papa would have been disappointed in us if he’d known we were cutting class—something we almost never do, by the way—and neither of us liked lying to him, so there was the problem of where to go. Without a clear destination in mind, we found ourselves headed south into Mayberry Township, where there are a lot of fish farms, going down many levels. The ones on the surface are long, concrete tanks with water constantly bubbling, and fish in different stages of growth in each tank. It’s mostly trout and salmon. Somehow, the genetics people have modified salmon so they don’t need to go into a saltwater ocean to grow, and all the fish have been altered so that they grow faster and have more edible flesh. But they still look pretty much like the wild salmon and trout I’ve seen in pictures from Earth. Mayberry is not a really attractive place, with all the geometric lines of the tanks, but it makes you feel good with the sound of the bubbling water and all the negative ions in the air. And the sardine tanks are pretty, with silver flashes everywhere.

We were about halfway across Mayberry, still with no real destination in mind other than we knew we would soon be in Fantasyland, when we saw another cyclist in the distance, coming toward us on the hard-packed dirt road. We were just moseying along, sitting upright.

I could soon distinguish that he was male, and he was moving along at a pretty good clip, bent over the handlebars and pumping hard with his legs. When he got a little closer and looked up ahead of him, my suspicions were confirmed. It was our cousin Patrick. I felt my heartbeat accelerate, and a little flash of heat just under my belly button. That seemed a funny place for passion to manifest itself, but there it was.

When he saw us, he straightened up and stopped pumping hard. He glided up beside where we had stopped to wait for him, took off his helmet, wiped his brow with a red kerchief, and smiled at us. He was wearing skintight spandex in black and green stripes, short-sleeved and reaching to midthigh. It looked very good on him, outlining the definition of every muscle like an anatomy lesson. He wasn’t one of those pumped-up freaks with biceps like beach balls and a neck that angled from the jawline straight to the shoulder. He was wiry, and hard-muscled. Looking at him, you just wanted to put your arms around him and feel that hardness against you, and maybe reach around and squeeze that tight butt.

“I was just going to see you girls.”

The twin curse again. “You girls.” A
set
. With someone like Patrick, you didn’t want a sister around, and you wanted him to address you by name. But what could you do?