by John Barnes
If you’re interested in hurricanes, there’s one isotherm you’ve got to know everything about. That’s the one for 27.5° Celsius.
A hurricane is a gigantic heat engine. That is, it converts a temperature difference into mechanical energy, like diesel, steam, gasoline, jet, rocket, or turbine engines. But whereas a diesel engine, for example, converts (some of) the heat of the burning fuel to motion of the piston by releasing (most of) the heat to the cooler environment, a hurricane works by moving heat from the hot ocean surface to the cold bottom of the stratosphere—converting some of it to wind along the way.
If the water is below 27.5° Celsius, more energy comes out of the wind to move the heat than the heat itself supplies, and the hurricane dies. But above 27.5°, a hurricane doesn’t just live… it grows. Each blast of cool air blowing over the warm, wet ocean grows warmer, rises, drops its load of evaporated water, and returns with a little more force each time.
So inside the isotherms marked “27.5°” on Carla’s map, hurricanes will grow; outside they will die. The areas inside the 27.5° isotherms are “hurricane formation zones.”
She looks at the map, and she’s never seen anything like it before. Normally there are two, or in a very warm summer three, hurricane formation zones in the Pacific—one by the Philippines, one lying under the bulge of Mexico, and late in a warm summer the South China Sea.
The models have been figuring that these zones would expand, and the formula they have used to expand them has been a very simple one—too simple as it turns out. No one checked to see if they might overlap, or if others might form. Not that she blames them—it’s not a particularly obvious point. And for that matter, if they did, maybe they didn’t believe what they saw—quite possibly they did check and then decided not to stick their necks out. Remembering her old outfit, Carla sighs. Not sticking your neck out was what it was all about.
Still, it’s there, and if they’d been more careful or more systematic, they’d have seen it.
There is now just one hurricane formation zone in the North Pacific—but it stretches from the Galapagos to Borneo, east-west, and the equator to Hokkaido, north-south. It’s 11,000 miles across and 3,500 miles wide.
Normally the force of a hurricane is determined by the temperature of the water it passes over (the warmer the more force) and by the length of time it spends passing over that 27.5° or warmer water (the longer, the more heat energy gets converted into wind). So the size of the hurricane formation zone limits the power of the hurricane, because it moves, on rare occasions as fast as 100 mph. Historically the hurricane formation zones have been 1,500 or 2,000 miles across at widest, so that few hurricanes stay in them for even twenty-four hours.
This new whole-ocean hurricane formation zone is vastly bigger than anything of the kind in recorded history.
She sits and watches as the computer does a set of quick and dirty runs, playing with random numbers to show a range of possibilities.
They all look frighteningly alike. She feels like just going to bed, hoping to get up in the morning and find it was all a bad dream.
Anyway, it won’t happen tonight. She can take MyBoat up to the surface and plug in, talk to Di or Louie or somebody.
She reaches for the autopilot control, sets running for “surface” and tells it to take her up gently. In a moment the thunder of the motors pushing water out the jets begins to sound slightly different as MyBoat begins to climb toward the surface. She gets back to the keyboard, and snips out the important bits into a file she can zap over to Di.
Of course, maybe he knows. Maybe he’s in on it. Well, if that’s the case, at least he can warn her to steer clear of this. And perhaps even tell her a little about what is really going on. On the other hand, if he’s been kept in the dark too… who’s running this show?
No doubt they’ll find out. All they have to do is reveal the findings and see who gets upset enough to try to suppress them. She grins at herself for thinking such melodramatic thoughts.
When the hull of MyBoat finally bursts out onto the Pacific Ocean, Carla has her download ready to go. She dials Di’s number at home before she remembers to check the time zone; fortunately, running submerged, she’s been keeping strange hours, and it’s only ten P.M. there, not unconscionable, although he does have young kids.
His wife, Lori, the mystery writer, answers. She’s always been just a little distant with Carla. When Di and Carla worked together, Di probably talked too much about her at home.
But Lori knows her well enough to know the call must be something important. “Hi. I guess I’d better get Di. He’s asleep with the kids.”
“Thank you, Lori. I’m sorry to have to call so late.”
“It’s all right—if you’re doing it, it’s important. Can I ask you something before I get Di?”
“Of course.”
“How serious is all the stuff happening?” Lori glances to the side, probably checking to make sure that Di isn’t listening. “Di’s been talking in his sleep, thrashing around, coming home from work looking like hell—”
“I’m not surprised,” Carla says. “It’s very serious, Lori, and I’ve got some evidence that it’s even worse than what Di may be thinking.”
Lori nods soberly, and a change comes over her face. Carla thinks to herself, this is the kind of woman who hears it’s dangerous, so she gets a Self Defender. She hears that someone has managed to use AIRE to break a patent, or that fibrop prices have come down, and she knows exactly which stocks in the kids’ college portfolios have to be sold right away. She knows everything she can about the world she lives in and she’s ready to use the knowledge. If anyone should be able to get through this, it’s Lori—she’s what Carla’s boomtalking grandmother would call “a really together lady.”
“Can you tell me anything about it?” Lori asks.
“Well,” Carla says slowly, “I can easily imagine why Di hasn’t wanted to tell you. But I think you’re entitled to get ready for it. I’m afraid this really is a global disaster; a lot of people are going to die and a lot of things are going to change.”
“Is there anything we could do… to be safe?” Lori asks. “I don’t want to ask Di, because he worries enough… but the kids—”
“If I think of anything I’ll call you and tell you. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to spend the summer in the mountains, maybe—you’re only a few miles from the sea, right?”
“Right.” Lori nods like she’s going to start packing right now.
“But I could be dead wrong, Lori. If the Appalachians get the extra water we’re talking about, they might be worse than the coast—flash floods, storms, mudslides, hail, maybe even bad blizzards in July if enough cloud cover develops. We’re just not ready to say. That’s part of why Di is so upset these days, I’m sure—because we’re not ready to say, but we know for sure it’s going to be something big.” Or because he does know what it’s going to be, and he’s holding data back for some weird political reason, she adds, crossing her fingers mentally.
Lori nods. “Thanks for filling me in. I’ll go get Di.”
“Oh, and Lori?”
“Unh-hunh?”
“I loved Slaughterer in Green. My favorite so far.”
Lori beams at her. “Thanks.” She vanishes from the screen and a moment later Di comes onto the camera.
“Carla—what’s up?”
“A lot, I’m afraid. I was talking with Louie earlier today, and he happened to read me off some of the methane density results they’re getting with the satellite-to-satellite shots.”
“You two kids were always so romantic.”
“Oh, belt up. This is important. The numbers he gave me are way higher than the numbers I’ve been getting out of NOAA, and it’s a systematic error—somebody’s been dividing some key data by eight before reporting it. I want to know what’s going on and why this is being done—and if you’re not in on it, I want to give you the real numbers.”
Di looks like he’s been pu
nched in the gut, but he’d look that way whether he was surprised at the information or surprised that she knew it. “What are the numbers, then?” he asks.
She tells him and then drops the second of her three blockbusters. “Now, when you start plugging those numbers in, plot the isotherms on Pacific surface water temperature.”
“Why?”
“Because the thing that our model does is figure size of each hurricane formation zone individually. Generally that’s all that needs to be done and it works, because when you’re only messing with small changes the zones grow or shrink by a hundred miles or so at most.” She tells him about the whole Pacific being one formation zone.
“Think about it, Di, they get bigger the farther they run. Up till now you’ve never had one run two thousand miles through a formation zone. When a big one rips up the U.S. East Coast it’s dying before it clears Florida. But this summer there are some that might get in eight-thousand- or ten-thousand-mile runs before they pile into land… and a hurricane might pass New York City and be headed for Europe, still gaining energy.”
“Now wait a minute, Carla, it’s bad but it’s not that bad. Hurricanes move east to west. They’ll hit land eventually—”
Time for her third blockbuster. “They also move toward the pole. And once you’re up at thirty-two degrees north or so, the steering currents will tend to push them toward the east. You might very well see one or more of them circling around out there and not dying all summer.”
It is characteristic of information that it can be stolen an all but unlimited number of times. When it became clear that one particular senior meteorologist at NOAA might be sitting at the focal point, that clarity—that little note that “this is what probably matters”—became information in and of itself, and was worth stealing. A dozen monitoring programs stole it at once, and dozens more stole from each of them, and from the places they passed it on to, until by now practically everyone who matters knows that Diogenes Callare matters. One of the few who doesn’t know is Diogenes Callare.
He hasn’t noticed his superiors treating him with kid gloves, though they are, or the FBI men who watch him constantly.
What he has noticed is how much seems to be kept from him, as if no one wants him to figure anything out. So Carla Tynan’s phone call finally makes it click into place, and he’s been in Washington for far too long not to realize that if so much is being kept from him, it’s because he’s more important than he thinks he is. It’s a long step down the road to paranoia, but it’s been a proverb for a hundred years that being paranoid does not mean that they aren’t out to get you.
As he hangs up, he thinks of a dozen little details… an instrument report or two that he had discarded as too far out of bounds—and which had disappeared later. One or two people at NOAA whom he had thought were new hires, people he’d never seen before, who seemed to spend all the time they were not in meetings on the phone and didn’t seem to know a lot of meteorology. Having overheard one new supervisor getting an explanation about methane being CH4 and opaque in the infrared from another of the new hires.
He knows, very suddenly, that there have been many, many datarodents in the nodes near him, with more arriving all the time. He doesn’t know about the four guardians in the shadows around his house—or the two watchers who watch the guardians, waiting for a slip—but he will notice them when he comes out the door in the morning.
Di Callare stands and runs his hands through his hair. He thinks back to all the bland, boring years while not much happened; to the night when nuclear fire tore a hole in the capital, and the long year afterward as they swiftly rebuilt, and the slow realization that the Blue Berets might never be going home; and to the way that Washington went from being merely dangerous and dirty to a city of intrigue, like Vienna, Berlin, or Bucharest, a place where power swirled and congealed in dark corners, a place where Di could remember four acquaintances who died in odd accidents and three people who had disappeared.
“Even at fucking NOAA,” he mutters under his breath, and then looks around and is relieved to remember that Nahum is asleep and hasn’t picked up that one. He sighs once more, deeply, and goes in to see how Lori is doing.
She’s hunched over the keyboard, beating away at it. He’s given up on asking why she insists on using a keyboard when dictation equipment is so fast and accurate nowadays; her explanation—that readers of books like hers read fast and that they don’t hear the words, so to write orally is to write the wrong rhythm—hasn’t made much sense to him, but then he knows that his attempts to explain the jet stream to her haven’t gotten much of anywhere either. Let it just be that she knows what she’s doing.
He creeps softly up behind her and sees that she’s typing but there was no one to hear her scream, however loud she might, not even as the man with the big, kind eyes began to slit the skin around her breast with his matte knife—
Di Callare winces, brushes her hair back, kisses her neck. Normally she hates to be interrupted while she’s working, and normally he respects that, but right now he needs her touch badly, and he has to hope she’ll understand.
When she turns to kiss his cheek, her face is wet with tears. “Bad news from Carla?” she asks.
“The worst. Did you hear?”
“She told me it was going to be bad.” Lori explains, whispering in his ear. His mouth sets in disapproval—he’d have thought Carla would have more sense than to tell Lori something like—“Don’t blame her, I asked. She’s one of your best friends, you know—maybe not your closest, but one of your most loyal. I love her for that.”
He lifts Lori out of her chair and carries her to their bedroom; in happier times when he has done this, mostly just to prove he still can, she’s referred to it as “a moment out of the classic movies, that moment when the leading man carries away the leading lady and we see what they both really want—just before the train goes into the tunnel, or biplanes show up—”
The remembered joke makes him smile. They take a very long time about making love, as if they were trying to memorize everything.
The third week he’s teaching in Tapachula, Jesse persuades Naomi to come down for a long visit. At first it seems like a blazing success; she seems very pleased with his tutoring work and with the little place he’s found, and congratulates him on getting into a much better mode of existence than he had before. At least he’s got her fooled into thinking he’s a real Leftie.
But that night, as they sit on his couch and he very tentatively tries to kiss her, she says, “Oh, god, Jesse, no, no, I can’t. Really. I had such a hard time getting over you the first time.”
“Well, then don’t get over me and just enjoy this.”
“I wish I could.”
“Why can’t you?”
For the first time ever, he sees her lose her temper. “Because just maybe you’re the kind of guy who wants me to just enjoy it, all right? It’s bad enough that you don’t think of anyone but yourself but you don’t want me to think of anyone but myself, either! I can’t believe you’re trying to talk me into being selfish and centered and linear!”
They end up talking philosophy for hours. When Jesse finally goes to sleep, he’s not only exhausted, but the apartment is so tiny that he doesn’t even have the option of masturbating to relieve himself. The next day Naomi gets on the little jumplane, which shoots straight up into the brilliant blue tropical sky and is gone. She’ll be touching down on the runway in Tehuantepec before the combino can get Jesse out of the airport traffic.
Still, he manages to get her to come down once more, and then, in the middle of one of the cafés that fronts on the Zócalo, just because he suggests that a little pleasure in her life would surely not damage the good things she does, she starts to cry, and she hits him (not hard, that takes practice she’s never had). Lunging across the table in a clatter of dishes, she dumps a pitcher of beer on him, flags down a taxi, and is gone while he is still trying to rub his eyes clear of the salty, sticky mess dribbling
down from his hair.
He checks his contract with TechsMex and discovers that unless he can give them twice the price of a new car right away, he’s here for at least six more months. Probably he’d have missed his students, anyway. They’re great people—as evidenced by the fact that three of them witnessed that last incident with Naomi, and yet he never hears a thing about it. It’s as if the whole collective memory, the great gossip bank, of Tapachula, has all been subjected to a Flash.
With Jesse in the role of the ruins of the Duc.
“And that’s all,” Glinda Gray is saying to John Klieg. “Just emphasize that when you talk to the Siberians. There’s Ariane 12, Delta Clipper III, the Japanese K-4, a bunch of military space planes that can’t lift much more than their own crews, and no real heavy lift until NAOS gets the Monster flying. Theoretically, the Russians or Chinese could start building big boosters again but it would be from scratch.
“And that couldn’t be more perfect. Ariane flies from the Caribbean, Delta Clipper III from Edwards AFB, K-4 from Kageshima. All places that are vulnerable—but not nearly as vulnerable as the NAOS Monster flying out of Kingman Reef. Meteorology’s estimate is that by late June everything that can lift more than a two-man crew should be shut down completely.”
“Got it,” Klieg says. He looks Glinda up and down; she is in a perfect pink leather suit and matching shoes. It shouts “Expensive!” and for the Siberians that’s what you have to do. “Remember what the culture coach said. Do your best to look in awe, like you’re completely enslaved sexually.”
Glinda grins at him. “If anyone could do that to me, darling….”
His heart gives a funny thump. This meeting is for all the marbles if ever there was one—they’ve got half the significant officials in the Siberian Republic flying in to Islamabad, the nearest place where discretion could be assured and Western comforts were available. Just chasing this deal so far has cost Klieg four times what it did to start GateTech.
