Free Dark Lightning (Thunder and Lightning) by John Varley Page A

handrails. The ceiling will become the floor in thirty seconds.”
    “Song about that,” Papa said, as Polly and I turned him carefully. His forehead was covered in beads of sweat, and I could feel him trembling.
    “Sorry, Papa,” Polly said. “What was that?”
    “Song, an old song. Can’t ’member the name. ‘One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor.’”
    “Paul Simon,” Mama said. “The album was
There Goes Rhymin’ Simon
.” Never heard of him. It didn’t surprise me that Mama knew it even though it was way before her time. There’s not much about music that Mama doesn’t know.
    The weird thing was, Papa might have heard it when it was new. Papa was eighteen at the turn of the century. How weird must
that
be, living in
Rolling Thunder
, halfway to the stars, when you can remember a time when humans hadn’t even landed on Mars?
    Mama was reaching into her purse. She took out a pressure injector and bit off the tip. She was gently turning him around so his feet would point the right way. I eased closer and helped her. I whispered in her ear.
    “Didn’t you give him his pill?” I asked.
    “Two of them,” she said. “I knew this was going to be bad, but it’s worse than I feared. I know the signs. And it’s fixing to get worse.”
    She pressed the end of the injector to his upper arm.
    “Jubal, honey, there’s gonna be a little popping sound.”
    “Popping?”
    She flicked the button, and we all heard it. The drug was forced through his skin, almost painlessly. He didn’t seem to notice it.
    “Prepare for deceleration.”
    All of us but Papa grabbed the handrails and pressed our feet to the wall that would soon be the floor. Mama and I each held on to one of Papa’s arms. Polly had edged over in front, and was holding Papa’s feet to the floor. The deceleration built quickly, and for a moment we all seemed to be standing. Papa looked confused and started to move away from the wall.
    “This be our floor?”
    “Not yet, hon. We’ll hold on to you.”
    “’Kay.”
    The car came to a halt, and we were almost weightless again.
    “Let’s get him turned before the door opens,” Mama said. Good idea, I realized. When it opened, the room beyond would seem upside down. We gently swung him through 180 degrees. I heard the elevator door open behind us.
    “Okay, Jubal,” Mama said. “This is where we get off,
cher
.”
    We turned him around and moved slowly out onto the bridge.
    —
    Most Thunderites (or Rollers, or Rockenrollers; there are several schools of thought on the matter) have never been to the bridge.
    The things that keep
Rolling Thunder
thunderously rolling (albeit silently) are managed from different control rooms scattered around beneath the inner surface, out of sight. Atmosphere monitoring, power, water, sewage, recycling, ground ecology, crop rotation, fertilization, weather control, warehousing, the jail, some other things I don’t know much about, and subsystems of all of them each have underground central stations, and some have local ones. Human factors such as policing, courts, schools, scheduling of meetings and entertainment and elections, are all located in civic buildings on the inner surface.
    The bridge is concerned solely with propulsion and navigation.
    The computers do all the heavy lifting—which, at this point in the trip, consists mainly of small course corrections—so there really isn’t all that much to do, and for that reason and for security purposes, only a handful of trained technicians have clearance to go there regularly.
    And, of course, family of the captain.
    The great majority of the work is done, as elsewhere, by automated systems. The ring of six almost infinitely powerful squeezer bubbles at the stern is held in place by gigantic scaffolds that must be constantly monitored for heat, but mostly for stress.
    There is just one workstation for astrogation, known as the Captain’s Chair, and it is manned twenty-four/seven. Uncle Travis