Mother of Storms

by John Barnes

  It’s afternoon in the Western Pacific and the weather is pleasant and warm. Carla Tynan has brought her yacht up to the surface to spend a while sunbathing on the deck. A few years ago, when she had the NOAA job, she put most of her savings from her software patents into getting her skin cancer-proofed, so she could enjoy the sun no matter what happened to the ozone, and into MyBoat, her submersible yacht.

  That meant she was officially broke, which badly upset Louie, her husband at the time, though she certainly hadn’t touched his money or even asked for any of it.

  She slides her big, eye-covering glasses up her nose, scratches all over (nothing like the privacy of mid-ocean), and resolves not to think about Louie again for a while. Maybe she’ll think about a couple of papers she’s been noodling on… it’s about time to get her plate warmed up over on the non-profit side of the table, because if you’re going to freelance as a scientist, you’ve got to keep the other scientists saying that you’re a real one. Not paying his non-profit dues is exactly how poor old Henry Pauliss got stuck in government.

  Then again, she hasn’t done accounts in a while, and it may be time to do a little private-sector systems design or algorithmics and make some cash. There are a couple of add-on gadgets she’d like for MyBoat and she still hasn’t paid off her last purchases from the cadcam shop in Tanzania. Anyway, she’s been goofing off for weeks, not doing much more than experiencing romance wedges, sunbathing, and fishing. It’s her third trip around the world on MyBoat, and this time she just went straight from Zanzibar to Singapore without bothering about landfalls… she’s begun to admit to herself that once you’ve seen this particular planet a few times, there may be plenty of unvisited places left, but there’s a discouraging sensation that all you’re doing is filling in the holes.

  Well, now, wasn’t that what made Louie so attractive in the first place? Be honest, Carla… he was one of eight people who’d been to another planet. Not that he talked about it much, and the thing that seemed to impress him most was “how alone it was”—nearest thing to poetry she’d ever heard out of that man.

  She raises up on her elbows and looks over her body, chuckling a little. You wouldn’t think anything quite this thick and muscular—she was a weight lifter in college, and she’s run to fat a bit since—would have gotten the attention of the Assistant Mission Commander for Martian Operations; god knew there were a lot of eager little tight bodies ready for him when he got back, but no, less than two years after his return, there he was on top of Carla Schwarz, Girl Scientist.

  Carla’s mother pegged the trouble two hours after she met Louie: “Both of you want somebody to take care of, and both of you would rather die than be taken care of.”

  It looks like Mom was right about whether the marriage would work out, because here Carla is: MyBoat, with room only for her and her work, does not seem small to her, and there Louie is—come to think of it, he may be passing overhead right now for all she knows—tending watch solo on the USA’s last space station. They’ve got a date for “five good dinners and a lot of time in bed” next time he hits dirt and she’s near a port; that might be a year or two from now, but neither of them is in any hurry.

  Maybe she’ll treat herself to calling Louie later this evening. He usually seems glad of the conversation when she does, and it’s been a few weeks.

  So much for the resolution not to think about him.

  The phone tied to her wrist rings. It’s Henry Pauliss, and the news is pretty astonishing; at least she won’t have to decide what to do with her time for the next few weeks.

  When XV was introduced in 2006, it was denounced roundly for being even more attention-absorbing than television. It was also praised highly because it allowed anyone to have the experience instantly of knowing how to do a thing and of doing it. You could plug a kid from the urban ghetto into the head of an engineer, give him a sense of the pleasure that came with finding a successful design for a turbine blade, and the pure joy of holding the actual object in his hand, fresh from the cadcam shop, then dump him back into the classroom and say “And that’s why you want to learn math.” You could take a fat, shy, laughable nebbish and give him the experience of being physically beautiful and confident, then haul him out and say “This can all be yours, really yours, if you’ll get to the gym and the personality development courses.”

  You could take a psychopath with no empathy and give him the experience of being a victim. That was the experiment that revealed the flaw.

  Legally it took them some years to get cleared to try it on a prisoner. The first time, it was merely the accident that an XV reporter had been raped, mutilated, and left for dead while the recorder was running. Many experts confidently predicted that if habitual violent criminals were exposed to that tape, and really understood what they were doing to their victims, they would stop doing it.

  In fact, once they had felt the terror and pain themselves, inflicting it on others gave them more of a thrill than ever. It was the effect they had been hoping they were having. One former model prisoner became so excited by the XV tape that he raped an unarmed male guard on his way back to his cell block.

  The human race’s great past cynics, everyone from Lao-tzu through Ben Jonson to Simone de Beauvoir, could have told them this would happen, but cynicism is a sensible, civilized view. To live in the midst of endless violence one must have sacred principles with which to endorse the violence. By the end of the twentieth century, the most brutal in human history, there were only idealists left. Even when forced-memory extraction and vicarious rapefor-hire emerged, XV, like all other information channels, had become effectively impossible to censor. Technology—and the cravings of thousands of proselytizers of all stripes—forbade it.

  Berlina Jameson is having a bad day. Charlie, the idiot station manager, gave up on yelling at her, which was good, but then he got Candice, the station owner, to get on the phone and yell at her, which was discouraging, especially since it’s all the same yell—she’s not going to get time off, or expense money, or anything at all for “this insane idea.”

  She doesn’t want to quit the job, because her resignation will instantly hit the public databases, and Berlina is extremely close to the edge on credit, so they’ll be all over her if she quits her fourth job in three years.

  Yet the idea itself is so, so sweet. She hears the familiar voices in her head again, even as Candice goes on at her…

  “This is Edward R. Murrow reporting from London. Another raid by German bombers, in greater numbers than we’ve seen before…”

  “This is Walter Cronkite, from Houston. Tonight if all goes well men will land on the moon…”

  “Wendy Lou Bartnick reporting—I’m about four miles from the glowing crater that used to be Port au Prince. The only light is from the blazing sky—there is no electricity and no sign of a headlight other than my own…”

  These tapes all play in her head, as they have played on her audio and video systems for more than half her life, so often that she can recite them word by word, frame by frame. A lot of younger kids brag that they can experience XV without needing goggles and muffs to shut out the real world, that they can live real and virtual simultaneously. Berlina figures she can go them one better—she can get television and radio in her head, all the great broadcasts of the last ninety years, followed by the seductive murmur of one more opener:

  “This is Berlina Jameson, reporting from—”

  Her name right up there with Murrow, Shirer, Sevareid, Cronkite, Donaldson, Walters, Bartnick….

  She does her best to forget that Bartnick is not old, but has already been forced into retirement, only a few years after the Port au Prince newscast made her an anchor for CNN. XV wiped out television news.

  Nor did anyone cross over. XV is everything the old news wasn’t. That guy who was deservedly fired for getting hysterical about the Hindenburg blowing up would have received a big whacking raise if he’d been on XV. XV is about feeling it in your glands… glands
start pumping place gets jumping, the Dance Channel… don’t see it be it, Extraponet… news you can dance to, Passionet.

  This chain of thoughts is old, but it’s something else to think about instead of listening to Candice.

  “Berlina, I don’t understand why I can’t get across to you that this is not nineteen-fucking-sixty-eight, and there is no point in pointing a camera or a microphone at the action when XV takes people there direct.” Candice blows a big cloud of smoke; Berlina once sneaked a look at her biochemtailored cigarette prescription and found it was a mix of tranquilizers and muscle relaxants with just enough CNS enabler to keep her from getting stupid while she relaxed. Maybe not enough.

  Candice keeps nattering, so Berlina mentally tunes back in… “I don’t know where the hell you got this fixation from. You’re on for twenty minutes a day and the only reason I hire you, babe, is that the movie nuts would rather catch their news between movies. Suppose it’s more twentieth or something. Your job is not to cover the news, not to make the news, not to be there for the news. Your job, Berlina”—here Candice takes a huge drag on the cigarette, enough to knock over a rhino, and tousles her hair in a very twentieth kind of way, no surprise since she lived more than half her life in it—“and I mean your only job, is to look good in a sweater while you read the news. There is no such thing as a TV reporter anymore, Brenda Starr.”

  Berlina has no idea who Brenda Starr is. Probably boomtalk and not a compliment. “Yeah,” she says. “So how about… hah. Listen, I just broke up with my s.o., and it was a registered relationship. I wasn’t going to use the required five days off without pay, but if I wanted to drive up to the North Slope—”

  Candice shakes her head at her. “You know how much labor-law trouble it will be if you work on a recovery break?”

  “I can put it together for myself, as a hobby. Then if you want to air it, fine. All I want is a station credential to show—and I’ve got that anyway, just by working here.”

  Candice sighs. “You know we’re going to have to get a Kelly Girl or something in here to read for you for the week? Aw, hell.” She blows another cloud of medicated smoke. “Bet you have your own gear?”

  “Yep.”

  “Then go do it. I guess if I air it, the chances are pretty good you won’t turn me in.” She shakes all that hair around again—why in god’s name, Berlina thinks, do so many old women insist on having those mountains of starched hair with avalanches of curls down their back? “And good luck, kid. If TV reporting doesn’t work out, maybe you can be a Viking or a blacksmith or something else there’s no use for anymore.”

  Berlina thanks her, hoping to hit just the tone that will kiss the old bitch where it’s good, without too obviously slurping it. She seems to have, because she gets two minutes of “when I was your age I was just as feisty,” the kind of story that business people who went somewhere pretty small love to tell about themselves.

  Berlina doesn’t mind; it’s a payback of sorts. She manages to leave with a smile.

  In the parking garage, she tosses her bag and coat into her little car, enters the keycode for getting rolling, pulls it out of the parking space and onto the painted blue stripe that marks the guide track, and flips it to automatic to take her home. She wishes she could afford a smarter car that could leave the track and park itself.

  She leans back and smiles to herself again. Banff is a longish commute from Calgary, but it’s worth it every time she gets home, and at least now that she’s done her daily unparking ritual the car will get her the rest of the way home.

  “Home” has been a pretty elastic concept in Berlina’s mind. She’s Afropean, to begin with; Alfred Jameson was a black American GI, identified by DNA records, who paid not to ever see her. Her mother was a German prostitute. Berlina’s earliest memories are all of a school for abandoned Afropean children, where she was called “Frances Jameson” by the sisters, and “nigger” by the mobs that gathered outside.

  Things were already getting dicey in Europe for anyone half-breed, so she was only supposed to learn English and get shipped back to the States as soon as she was of age. She ran away at thirteen, out of the cold dark school and out of the cruelty of Bavaria, and lived free, cold, and dirty for a few years in Berlin.

  At nineteen, she’d named herself after the city she loved, but it was a last gesture. Berlin as she knew it was gone, its streets full of troops from elsewhere, now that Europe was consolidated and “culturally edited,” to use their expression for it. She gave herself the name as she filled out a form on board a staticopter taking her to the USS George Bush, during the last frantic week of the Expulsion.

  Before Parti Uno Euro won the election and rewrote the European constitution, Berlin had been a place full of anachronism, where nobody wanted to see anything new, the one thing that united all of the different artistic movements from the Protonihilists to the Prelectors. She’d gotten hooked on broadcast news when she was putting together a sampler mix for a dance performance group that played bits and pieces of old reportage over a drum machine and screamed whatever they were getting over XV into the mix.

  When the Edict of 2022 expelled her and all the other Afropeans, most of them ended up in North America, a strange sort of coming home to her father’s country. She has bounced around a lot from job to job, forever being told what Candice has just told her.

  She misses Berlin more than ever. She’s been in four American states and two Pacificanadian provinces—

  The Ma, the Ny, the Wa,

  The Bic, the Nid, the Pa,

  Last the Az and now the Ab,

  as she likes to chant it to herself. She figures she can’t go anywhere else because nowhere rhymes with Ab.

  As the little car winds its way up the mountains to Banff, a furious spring snowstorm pours over the windshield and away behind her into the night. At least she doesn’t have to try to keep the car on the road herself. She flips over to XV, looking for a really neutral reporter and never finding one; for one awful instant her hand stops on Passionet and she is experiencing Synthi Venture. She finds herself snuggled in the rock-hard protective arm of Quaz, who is escorting Synthi these days, out in the howling blizzard of Point Barrow, preparatory to going inside, having wonderful sex in front of a fireplace, running back to Rock (with whom she is triangling) and having Rock explain meteorology to her.

  The horrible thing is, she thinks as she switches to Extraponet, which has a reporter riding a UN overflight of the Arctic Ocean, nobody cares anymore that Synthi has read the script in advance; they want to know what’s going to happen next, they like Synthi describing experiences to herself before she has them.

  The plane carrying the Extraponet reporter comes over a pressure ridge. A huge flare of gas reaches miles into the sky dead ahead. Deliberate roller-coaster effect, Berlina sneers. They must have known it was there and arranged to fly in low to surprise people.

  The plane veers to the side, well short of the flare. The viewpoint reporter is in a forward bubble, and the pilot hasn’t told him much. As they circle the immense gas flare, the polar ice below a brilliant shimmer of gold, amber, and yellow, she gets the basic information she wanted—the flaring operation isn’t going to take care of the problem, and everyone knows it.

  This XV reporter is usually on the environmental beat, to judge by his thoughts, and Berlina thankfully absorbs the basics—greenhouse gas, more of it than anyone would have thought possible, spring the worst time for it, White House and New York reports much too circumspect, so it’s worse than they’re saying….

  XV is a bit like being there, i concedes, and a bit like being more knowledgeable than you really are, but what it’s really like is like waking up where the news is happening with a bad case of amnesia and a brainwashing team trying to force a viewpoint on you.

  She clicks off and tosses down her scalpnet, muffs, and goggles. The snow outside is beginning to glow, which means the sun is just beginning to peek over the Rockies. Still, it’s three hours t
ill she would normally go to bed, and by that time everything can be hurled into the car, and she can sleep on the way, getting caught up on rest for the days ahead while the Alaska Highway rolls under the tires at three hundred kilometers per hour.

  “Never mind,” she says. “Once I remind people what real news was like, XV will be dead as the town crier, or newspapers.”

  Synthi, you are not plugged into real life anymore, Mary Ann Waterhouse is thinking to herself. She has finally been allowed to switch out from the net for a few blissful hours, the jack in her head no longer plugged to receive Synthi’s every quivering passion, and though her head has an ache no aspirin can touch, and her whole body is bruised and sore, she’s so relieved to have ten hours off that tears are running down her face.

  Mary Ann always tries to remind herself that she is the same old girl, just re-engineered into what a lot of women want to look like (which was pretty much what a lot of men want them to look like), just made rich beyond her dreams, just with this other little personality installed, but right now she looks in the mirror and misses herself.

  She had a pretty good body—turned a lot of heads—before they gave her the cartoon-character breasts, before they sewed her already-shapely butt into an impossible curve, before they microzapped every bit of fat from her legs and put artificial sheathing like an internal girdle into her stomach.

  Not to mention the monthly injections that turn her hair flame-red from its natural straw-blonde.

  “I used to just be pretty. I kind of liked that,” she says to herself, out loud, and dammit. She’s crying again. This has been happening for at least the first hour every time she goes off line, for the last couple of months, and she’s pretty sure it is not supposed to. Offtime is precious. She doesn’t want to waste it this way.