by John Barnes
There’s a loud ping echoing through the stillness of the lunar day, and he realizes it’s time to get on with things back at the station. He has a moment of being a tall, spiky robot scratching its head—
And then he’s back in the station, pulling off the scalpnet, muffs, and goggles. He has a moment’s vision of the robot on the moon standing up abruptly and then very slowly and carefully, without anything like the precision it has when a person is steering it, walking back to its slot in the storage cave, tramping back with careful, heavy movements like a Harryhausen monster. It may take it the rest of the day to get home, but then, it has nothing but time….
Which is normally true for Louie, but not today. He grabs the handholds to drag himself to the “conference room,” the little piece of blank white wall that he stands in front of while he pretends to know what he’s doing with the weather reports.
There’s another ping. He hurries off to play scientist.
Berlina Jameson has been living on the line—what her grandparents would have called “on plastic,” back when you carried cards that could be stolen—now that she’s been fired for not turning back up at work, but she can still convince security at most places that she’s a reporter.
The Barrow Motel Two—a casket hotel that provides a public toilet and shower, a belongings locker, and a bed with lock-down cover—wants to bill her extra for parking, and at first she figures she’ll just pay it, but then she thinks about how long her line might have to stretch, and spends a pointless twenty minutes arguing with the clerical software. It puts her into a particularly foul mood, even after the good news of finding Di Callare this morning, so that when she finally gets into her little car, drives it onto the track, and sets it for the Duc, she’s all but weeping with frustration and self-pity. As the car picks up speed, she begins to fold the seats into “long drive” configuration—a bed with access to the little pocket refrigerator and the “squat pot”—and as she finishes, rather than get a nap or do any work, she just stretches out on the bed and cries until she stops.
Her net accounts show that absolutely no one has run any of her one-minute spots; her own home station hasn’t even been broadcasting them.
When it became clear that there wasn’t much recreation and practically no significant violence or sexual appeal up here, all the XV people left, except for a couple of the eggheaded ones who offer people the opportunity to experience being knowledgeable, witty, and deeply concerned… a peculiar taste that Berlina has never been able to fathom, but the NPXV audience seems to eat it up. She wonders, lying there idly with tears drying on her face, whether they’ll ever do combined events with the commercial channels, so that, say, Synthi Venture will find herself banging away with some guy who’s doing the Matthew Arnold routine about decaying civilization….
It makes her laugh, and suddenly, bitterly, she’s laughing at herself. Her, the next Edward R. Murrow? Why not the next Genghis Khan? It might be easier to conquer the world. Broadcast is dead, girl, except as a hobby. And even if broadcast were still alive, here she is crying… she can just imagine any of her heroes doing this! Murrow sobbing because he can’t get a clear moment of mike in the middle of an air raid… Cronkite in tears because NASA wouldn’t give them the right camera angles… Sam Donaldson holding his breath till he turns blue because Reagan won’t talk to him.
It helps to laugh.
She smears the tears out of her eyes with the heels of her hands. Well, what did she expect?
The car lurches, hard, which probably means it just collision-avoided a caribou or something. The animal’s timing was clearly off; most people figure that the animals wait to jump in front of cars until you either have an overfull coffee in hand, or are on the squat pot.
Most people think the world is out to get them, because they have all the evidence they need—they don’t get enough of what they want. But that doesn’t make it so.
She’s relaxed now, drying her eyes, thinking about all this. She’s got about another four days on the line before she hits the wall and can’t get more credit; fewer if it involves any more drives this long. She has a big story on tap, and perhaps Diogenes Callare will give her the last piece of the puzzle—she’s due to talk to him in an hour or so. If he does, she can scoop the majors with it; that won’t get her much—a week or two of very moderate fame and enough cash to keep her running a few months more—but other things can break. It’s a game against the clock, but what isn’t?
She gets her notes and thoughts in order for the interview. She just hopes that all the reporters who can afford jumplane haven’t gotten to Callare first, but she doubts it; every reporter except Haynes left Barrow last week, which is part of why she’s been lonely. Berlina really enjoyed the role of “cub reporter”—it made her feel like Jimmy Olsen. Oh, well, someday maybe some adoring cub will follow her around… she’s realizing, too, that a lot of the reporters enjoyed the attention they got from her.
There’s so much to get organized that she’s startled when the ping comes to remind her to call Diogenes Callare.
Much to her surprise, he seems friendly and relatively open. She knows he’s sticking close to what the press releases say, textually, but the man is a natural teacher, things come out as little micro-lectures, and with a bit of stitching together she can make it absolutely clear that the bland language of the press release is hiding a lot of important possibilities. “So it comes down to energy?” she asks once again, hoping he’ll repeat himself and give her a quote or two more.
She’s right, he does. “Well, look,” he says. “Energy is work, you had freshman physics, everyone does nowadays, right? And work is change. And we’re looking at huge changes here. Not so much if the additional heat the Earth is going to retain were all spread out evenly, of course, but that’s just the point. It’s a system where heat flows. Some of it’s going to pile up somewhere—and when it does, big things will happen.”
It’s a great quote, especially if she can jam it up against a few she has of various nonentities saying that any concern is premature.
She thanks Di—mentally congratulating herself again on getting to first names with him so quickly—and clicks off.
If Glinda Gray could look in from somewhere else, she would be patting herself on the back. She had told Klieg that this day, or the next, the media would catch on to the “purloined letter”—the realization that right out in plain sight, the Feds were admitting catastrophe was on the way.
Time to put it together. If she’s going to do this thing, she might as well do it. And there’s nothing wrong—financially scary, yes, but nothing wrong—with going independent. Ben Franklin, I. F. Stone, Tris Coffin… it can be done. She thinks about it for a moment… Berlina Jameson’s Methane Report… sounds like a natural gas newsletter. How Berlina Is Not Being Told the Truth… not the thing either; The Jameson Report is pompous… what she really wants to tell the potential reader is that she’s smelling something important, that she’s not being dismissed the way they dismiss nuts at government facilities, but brushed away from the single big question: What’s going to happen because of this? Why doesn’t anyone appear to be preparing for anything?
I Smell Gas?
Not exactly right either… what she’s reporting is… Sniffings.
It’s not dignified, it smells too much of the New Journalism, it has the gut feel of Geraldo Rivera and Sally Jessy, spiritual parents of XV—
She doesn’t care. Barely four days of credit left. Sniffings it is—and it’s no worse a title than Scuttlebytes. The title alone is odd enough that some people will access it; now all she has to do is be interesting enough to make them access it twice.
She grabs the autodictator and her notepad; time enough to clean up and set up a little later. Meanwhile, she needs to turn this into copy, real copy.
“This is Berlina Jameson, on the road from Barrow, Alaskan Free State, to Washington, the Duc, USA. For the past three weeks, I have been handled with the utmost courte
sy by Alaskan and United Nations officials, by scientists from the USA, Pacificanada, Mexico, and Quebec, and by a wide variety of public relations people. Occasionally I have even been told a piece or two of the truth—a piece which was promptly denied or dismissed by other sources.
“All this has happened because I have been asking, over and over, the simple question that everyone wants an answer to: now that a UN military operation—”
That ought to boost the ratings. UNSOO is officially a peacekeeping, not a military, organization, despite what it actually does. Calling it a military operation will cause an automatic warning flag from UNIC—they won’t kill the story but they will suggest that peace-loving decent citizens not read it. The nationalists will promptly read it because of that. The United Left will send her hate mail, and that will register as traffic and draw attention from the critics. True, she doesn’t especially want to encourage the nationalists… or the critics, for that matter. But they pay access charges the same as anyone else….
“DICTRON BACK UP AND MERGE. -now that a UN military operation has accidentally released one hundred and seventy-three billion tons of methane into the atmosphere, given the evidence of the geological past that such releases have produced brief periods of intense warming, what is going to happen to us? Should we be evacuating half of humanity up into the mountains? Will we lose the Netherlands, Florida, and Bangladesh as the seas rise? Will new Saharas form where grain grows now, and will we see global famine? Are we facing flood, famine, or storm?
“No one will say, and I have come to realize that what they are covering up is not some disaster of awesome proportions, but that they themselves do not know; despite all the advances of science, we are waiting between the lightning and the thunder—”
No, strike that, it’s melodramatic. No, keep it. Melodrama is what we want… melodrama always made money, and the line is getting pretty short. But it’s not the right metaphor.
“DICTRON BACK UP, MERGE, ERASE. -despite all the advances of science, we must simply wait for it—but the one thing they are sure of is that the effect will be big. We have whacked Nature hard, with a hammer, and now we stand facing her while she makes up her mind what to do about it.”
This is beginning to roll. It will need work, but it’s a damned sight livelier than the stuff she’s been doing up until now.
It ends up being a long day spent entirely in the car; she puts it on auto-gas, so that it just pulls over at automated stations when it needs to and fills up. The story goes through six drafts and when she’s done, “Sniffings” is a very nice little twenty-minute program with all kinds of up-close footage of people evading the issues, and some really good animated graphics. For her own narration, she uses the little rig that she bought used, ages ago, that lets her hang the teleprompter and camera from the ceiling, pointing down at her as she lies on the bed, with a pale blue reflector underneath her. Edit out the reflector and superimpose the “Sniffings” graphic she came up with, and damn if it doesn’t look at least as good as what was on the old networks themselves as recently as thirty years ago.
It’s in the can. “DICTRON: POST TEXT SNIFFINGS ONE, PUBLIC NET UNDER COPYRIGHT, ACCESS FEE SET TO BERLINASTAND-ARD—”
“ADJUST FOR INFLATION?” the Dictron asks.
“ADJUST FOR INFLATION,” she confirms. She really will have to revise her rate schedule sometime soon. “NOTE HEADER—SNIFFINGS TO BE A FREQUENT RELEASE AT TWENTY-MINUTE LENGTH. REBROADCAST AUTHORIZED IN NONCOMPETING MARKETS AND IN TRANSLATION, AT ACCESS FEES SET TO BERLINASTANDARD. ADJUST FOR INFLATION.”
“CONFIRM?” It reads back her release order; she confirms it; it goes out to the net.
Time to celebrate. Sniffings 1 is a damned fine piece of work, even if no one ever looks at it—and she feels in her bones that at least a few people somewhere will look at it.
She pulls over at a rest area, plugs the car into a fresher that will vacuum out the dust and accumulated body smell, swap out the squat pot, and zap the whole works with ultraviolet and microwaves so that it will smell like a car rather than a monkey pen when she gets back. Tote bag on her shoulder, she goes into the public showers; a cleanup, a change of clothes, and a good meal are the rest of the agenda, to be followed by a good long sleep in the car.
What the hell, it’s better than Ernie Pyle usually got. After she hangs up from Louie, Carla Tynan finds it’s a little difficult to get back to her peaceful sunbath. In the first place, that damned rocket jockey has gotten her horny, and even though there’s no one out here on the Pacific, with a featureless horizon in all directions, to see her, she can’t quite bring herself to masturbate outside. Growling to herself for a silly prude, she goes below to get a little relief.
Afterward, with MyBoat rocking gently on the surface, she starts to compare the numbers from Louie with the ones NOAA gave her in more detail. She isn’t surprised that that gang of political hacks has been holding the numbers down, but she is surprised at how much they’ve been holding them down.
Well, one of the pleasures of being her own person is the ability to do her own work. She has several “baby” global weather models available on her computer, and a system she’s come up with for linking them. She pulls out the set of speciality fibrop cables, still in their wrappers from the cadcam shop, and starts patching the systems together.
First thing, work out what the real methane concentrations must be to account for Louie’s data. That only takes a minute or so, and the results pop back at her.
She gives a long, low whistle. It’s piercing and echoing in the little submarine, and she tries to remind herself not to do that again, but painful as it was, the situation earned it. Methane is not six times normal, but nineteen times normal.
Since she’s been assigned to the “hurricane problem,” she does a quick and dirty plug-through. That much more methane traps this much more energy; forty percent of it ends up in ocean surface water; so the surface water in hurricane formation zones gets anywhere from one to six degrees Celsius warmer, usually with the more drastic warming being farther north, and thus that much more energy is available for a hurricane.
She looks at the numbers; the energy bound in such a hurricane is twelve times the biggest hurricane on record.
And she still hasn’t figured how much bigger the hurricane formation zones themselves will be.
Still, there’s something she can do right now, and that’s what she does. She resets the autopilot, takes MyBoat down so that she can run undersea, and heads south as fast as she can. The North Pacific is about to become a bad place to be.
“President Grandma” is feeling more like a grandmother—and less presidential—than ever. Brittany Hardshaw has seen and made hard decisions on two minutes’ reflection, gotten them dead wrong, and spent years defending them when necessary; she knows that on at least one occasion she got an innocent man executed, and during her watch the United States has lost just over five hundred military people, mostly young men, in one corner of the world or another. She sent her close friend from Boise, Judge Burlham, to Liberia as a mediator, knowing it was dangerous, and on the television that night she saw him cut in half with a submachine gun at the airport. She would think she was hardened enough for any job.
Harris Diem’s report is sitting on her desk. It carefully explains the trick that he and a small “Black Team” of NSA scientists were able to pull on the team at NOAA—feeding them doctored data, monitoring the models they built, copying those models down the street in a hidden basement, and then carefully feeding in the correct data. It was a small masterpiece of covert ops. The President of the United States now has in her hands the only accurate assessment of the global temperature situation.
Publicly, she will accept delivery of the NOAA scientists’ work in a couple of days, but this secret report is the truth—or as near to it as a computer model can get. Publicly, she will share the NOAA report with the UN, and Rivera will base policy on it.
Which means publicly, the policy will
fail, because it is based on inaccuracies, and she will be in a position to use this to advantage.
The only problem now is that what is in her hands is so very much worse than she had imagined. One of the nice NSA men—a soft-spoken young African-American who looked like a bright law student or high school teacher—carefully explained to her that things did not scale up in a linear way, and that “not linear” meant “double the input does not mean double the output—it means, maybe, quadruple it, octuple it, cut it in half… the functions are complicated.”
So while the public version, on which the UN will act, shows that next summer will bring the twenty biggest hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones in history, plus a blistering drought in the high latitudes and monsoons beyond historical experience in the tropics; while that report shows the snows of East Africa turning to glaciers and a real risk that the Colorado may stop flowing; while it shows world deaths from famine, flood, and storm running into the tens of millions—it’s all a fraud based on wishful thinking.
The real numbers show something more like seventy hurricanes, and many of them far beyond historical scale. There’s no drought, but the rain cycle accelerates tremendously—they’re going to lose some big dams, and many of the dry lake basins in the West will begin to fill. Between the storms and the change of climate, they can expect major blight outbreaks in the world’s forests, and plenty of crop failures. It probably isn’t possible to save the Netherlands, and it is definitely not possible to save Bangladesh or most of the world’s delta populations. There’s no question that they’ll lose some populated Pacific Islands entirely, and it looks suspiciously like in the Southern Hemisphere the Antarctic glaciers will grow rapidly all through southern winter and then melt even more rapidly in October and November. There is no way yet to predict the consequences of that.
