Mother of Storms

by John Barnes

  Hassan smiles, nods, and without the least leaning forward or even added intensity of gaze, he says, “And yet, Mr. Klieg, here you are in a country where people get shot frequently, in a dirty city of foul streets and fouler doings, arranging to build for yourself here the only thing in this whole wretched nation that is ever likely to be worth stealing, under the protection of whatever random thieves happen to be the government of this dirty little hole of a nation. This is the sort of speculation a poor man with one chance would dare. It is not all what a man who is already wealthy, who has already taken the world in hand, is apt to do. This interests me a great deal, as a student of human nature—and which of us in business is not a student of that? I wonder what can be inside you to make you take such chances.”

  Klieg nods, takes a sip of tea, and thinks to himself that the old routine about Asian indirectness and American bluntness is pretty dated; Hassan has started the serious part of this with the most important question. Indeed, it’s not one Klieg is completely sure of his own answer to. He lets the tea roll over his tongue and then says, “As you’ve guessed, there are reasons. You do know what GateTech has been in the business of doing?”

  “Yes—the blocking patent business.”

  “I prefer to call them something other than blocking patents, because my feeling is that I block nothing—I merely build way stations and roads between the frontier and those who wish to reach it, and charge them to pass the way I have pioneered. But yes, my money has come out of that process. It has involved staying very close to what is happening, racing against many other teams of bright people. But the race is not as easy as it once ways….”

  “When you began, you were the only one who knew there was a race; now they take your operations into account from the very beginning.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And so there is a change of strategy. This much I have deduced, Mr. Klieg, and it makes a great deal of good sense, if I may so compliment you. But it is there that I am stymied; clearly your next strategy would have been to begin to operate farther out toward the technical and scientific frontier than before, and to find ways to make the traffic run your way rather than just locating your ’way stations and roads’ where the traffic runs.

  “But I do not see this. No, I see you working in this very dangerous environment, dealing with very difficult people, and doing all of this for a well-established and simple technology like space launch, something that has been around since the middle of the last century.

  “And this tells me one of three things, I think.

  “Either you are mad—and there is no evidence of this; or you are bored and looking for danger and excitement—and this new family you are hoping to find makes it seem very improbable, for to a man with a family the world is more than dangerous enough; or you know something that is not general knowledge in the world yet, and you are once again on the move to build a way station or a road, in a place the world will shortly be going. Of course that last is what I believe to be the case, because I greatly respect you.

  “So, Mr. Klieg… as you know, I can help you a great deal. I have a cash price and that will be negotiated by underlings—indeed, your people are meeting mine at this very moment, as you know, and I’m sure we can reach some equitable arrangement on that matter. But there is something I want very much, and you will have to understand that I want it because I am already in that happy estate to which you aspire—I have a family to look out for.

  “I want to know what you think is going to happen, and why this launch facility is likely to prove so important.” Hassan has leaned forward and now he does look eager. Klieg believes the man completely. There’s no question in his mind that Hassan is dead serious, and though anything could be an act, Klieg would bet that this is not.

  For one thing, in Hassan’s shoes, it’s just what Klieg would want. Clearly the man is not hurting for money any more than Klieg is. And just as clearly, when a big mystery comes onto your territory, an inside pipeline to its source is what you really want.

  Klieg takes a long sip and a calculated risk. “Let me place a call to see if the money and contract matters are going as well as we both expect. And if it would appear the partnership is satisfactory in every other regard, well, then, we’ll shake hands and I’ll tell you everything.”

  Hassan nods, once, firmly, and somehow or other a goon comes in with a phone for Klieg. Klieg dials, asks a couple of questions, hears what he expected to. Hassan’s price is high but if it’s truly “one-stop shopping,” if they will no longer need to come up with each bribe, permit fee, and payment one at a time and on a negotiated basis, then Hassan will be much cheaper, even before you figure in all the time not lost to delays every time cops and soldiers come out to make them stop work. “Well, then, close with’em, Jerry, sounds like we have a deal,” Klieg says, clicks off, and turns to Hassan.

  “A few weeks ago, when the big methane release happened…” he begins, and in thirty minutes Hassan not only knows everything, but is starting to smile with a warmth Klieg understands perfectly. It’s not every day that a global-monopoly-to-be walks in and asks for your help.

  They agree to meet for dinner soon, and they talk of many different things; Klieg gets an inside look at the Siberian government and is no more appalled than he was when he began to understand Washington or the UN, but he notices how much cruder and more brutal the tactics are out here and resolves to keep himself out of trouble.

  The rest of the morning goes into tea and talking about old movies; Hassan turns out to be an enthusiast for them, too. Or at least when he knew he would be meeting with Klieg, he became one, and he carries off the act well. That’s really all you can ask for.

  “All right,” Di Callare is saying to Carla Tynan, over the phone link. “I can get you all the data you ask for. But this is not getting any easier.”

  “Louie thinks they’re on his track too,” she points out. “And without him we’d have no real data to go on. So tell me, Di, what do you make of Hurricane Clem? He’s been moving east for longer and farther than any hurricane in Pacific history.”

  “He’s also farther north,” Di points out. “We don’t know much about what a hurricane does when it stays well above the thirtieth parallel. It’s never been warm enough up there to keep them running, let alone gaining energy. For all we know this is perfectly normal behavior for a giant hurricane on a hot ocean.”

  “It’s counter to the Coriolis force—”

  “But it’s right in line with the steering current,” Di responds, impassively. “And now that it’s so far off the equator we aren’t getting the data we’d like—the satellites along the equator can’t look down into it, the Japanese are keeping their aerial data to themselves, the Siberians and Alaskans don’t seem to be flying anything, and we’re still trying to get a maneuverable satellite up there in a polar orbit—the government doesn’t want to spring for one, and since all the commercial load that was going to go through Kingman Reef has been shifted back to Aruba and Edwards, there’s not any space to spare unless they’re willing to commandeer it. So anything at all could be going on inside Clem—maybe there’s the biggest outflow jet in history.”

  Carla leans back in her chair, rubbing her back; as a relaxing, comfortable semi-retirement, this whole business with MyBoat is a complete flop. She’s been short on sleep for days, her butt is just as chair-sore as it ever was in Washington, and the aftermath of Clem has left the Pacific too stormy and rough for her to get much time on the surface sunbathing. “Say that again,” she says.

  “What, that maybe there’s the biggest outflow jet in history? It was just a thought that Gretch, our summer intern, had—she was doing mass balance for a hurricane that big, and the only way it didn’t strangle itself was—”

  “Was that it was pushing a whole lot of wet air a long way from itself—of course! Hug that intern for me and don’t let her go back to school for the duration. You need her. I’ve got an idea, Di, and I’ll be back with
you shortly.”

  He gives her a little half-salute, half-wave, and they break contact. She wonders how he’s finding an excuse to go to a different pay phone twice a day, and whether her direct bounce to Louie is secure enough… and once again she wonders why anyone would want to get in the way of figuring out what’s going on. Well, politics was always Di’s gift, not hers.

  An outflow jet is a peculiar thing some hurricanes have some of the time. As the air streams out of the top of the spiraling eye wall, sometimes instead of dispersing in all directions and coming down as rainy weather a long way away, the hot air will organize itself as a single stream moving in a single direction; that stream is called an outflow jet.

  An outflow jet can carry much more mass than conventional dispersal—so it takes away one of the limits on the size of the hurricane, for only as much air can swirl in at the bottom as can flow out at the top, and since the outflow jet removes air more efficiently, the hurricane can be bigger.

  But it has another and more significant effect; it all comes down in one place, on one side of the hurricane, and the addition of so much descending air there creates a high-pressure spot. Air moves from high to low pressure, and the eye of a hurricane is a low-pressure spot, lower than anywhere except the center of a tornado—thus the wind begins to blow from where the outflow jet descends toward the eye of the hurricane, and the hurricane in turn moves on the wind—opposite the direction of the outflow jet. The outflow jet works like the open end of a released toy balloon, blowing the hurricane around the ocean.

  It works like a toy balloon blowing around the room in another sense too, for the outflow jet’s position is not stable with regard to the hurricane; just as the nozzle swings around the balloon as the balloon moves, the outflow jet wanders around the outside of the hurricane. Thus a hurricane with an outflow jet can quite suddenly move forward or backward, contradict the steering current (the winds at about 20,000 feet that normally determine the path of the hurricane), accelerate, or loop around. One hurricane can have more than one outflow jet. Bigger hurricanes are more apt to have outflow jets, which is why some of the biggest killers among hurricanes in history have been not only the ones with the strongest winds and storm surges, but also the least predictable ones and the ones that have suddenly lurched off their expected paths to slam into coasts they were supposed to bypass.

  Carla has just realized that if the very biggest hurricanes are apt to have outflow jets—indeed, sometimes more than one outflow jet—then the biggest one in history is all but certain to.

  It only takes her an hour playing with the model to see what’s going on. The biggest hurricanes on record up till now have outflow jets just strong enough to let them fight slowly upstream against a steering current. Almost always a hurricane follows the steering current, and the outflow jet, if there is one, modifies but does not control what happens. In a normal hurricane, that unpredictable outflow jet is a secondary force in the motion—the primary force is still the highly predictable steering current and the equally predictable Coriolis force.

  But Clem is so much bigger, Carla realizes, and it’s another case where things don’t just scale up linearly, where bigger is different. Figure the outflow jet it must have just to move the mass of air to keep itself going—and figure the much bigger pressure gradient between where all that air comes down and the much lower pressure than normal in the eye—and all of a sudden the steering current and Coriolis force are secondary. The outflow jet is what’s moving the thing.

  Outflow jets are not completely unpredictable. They tend to move around the hurricane in a counterclockwise fashion, though there’s a lot of wobble and variation in it and usually they don’t last long enough to establish a pattern. Further, when the hurricane does follow the steering current, it will tend to drag the outflow jet around behind itself, and thus end up running in the direction of the steering current anyway, though moving faster.

  So she knows now—she hopes—both why Clem behaved in a fairly typical way, if you allow for his crossing the cold spot in the middle of the Pacific and getting bigger instead of shrinking, and why he’s now moving west to east in a completely unprecedented way. And if she really understands, she can do some predicting. Not only can Clem move west to east, for long periods of time, unlike a typical hurricane, because he has warm water so far north and an outflow jet to move him against the current when he has to….

  They have all figured it will reverse any day now, wander up toward Siberia, hit the twelve-degree Celsius water south of the Bering, and die into thunderstorms, maybe striking a glancing blow at Hawaii or Japan on the way. But if she’s right, that’s not it at all.

  She gets her data together, models, notes, the works—it takes the better part of four hours to get it all in a form where Di and the team will be able to follow it, and she’s red-eyed and exhausted by the time she sits down to make her introductory recording. She takes a big sip of water and says, “Cue in two.” The green light on the recorder comes up, and she begins, “Di, what follows is absolutely vital. By the time you get this, there won’t be much time. We’ve got to go public now. Clem is not going to turn back and do something ‘normal’—he’s going to head still farther east and then south, and he’ll keep picking up energy for quite a while. I can’t say where he’ll make his next landfall, but Clem could easily hit Hawaii square on, or tear down the whole West Coast. We needed to start evacuation planning a week ago; we might have as little as three days till Clem hits something.”

  Then she sets her alarm to wake her in four hours. The whole inside of the little luxury submarine smells like her gym locker did back in high school, and she just can’t make herself care; there are clean sheets in a drawer under her bunk, and a shower six feet from it, and she cannot be bothered to use either. She has no memory of lying down; only of drifting into uneasy dreams until the alarm catapults her from the bunk, still tired but again able to focus.

  The more Jesse thinks about it—and he tries not to—the crazier it seems that he’s still seeing Synthi, or Mary Ann, since that’s what she wants him to call her. It isn’t like they have a lot in common (though they do talk quite a bit), and it isn’t like the sex is especially wonderful (there isn’t any), and it isn’t like this thing is serious (though he notices that it seems to be subtly changing him, and that he finds the changes interesting).

  For the first week of this strange little affair, he was too sore to try having sex with her again—and to tell the truth, till he got to know her better, he was also afraid of it. He doesn’t exactly know what was holding her back, if anything, maybe just his reluctance and maybe just another one of her unguessable whims.

  But that wasn’t a bad week. They established the basic pattern early—he would come by her house, which is not far from the community college, for comida every day. Comida is a wonderful meal—to do it justice takes an hour, and then after that an hour of recovery, the traditional siesta, is virtually mandatory. Jesse had been here long enough to have fallen into the local patterns of dining, and he found that sitting and gossiping with Mary Ann—she seemed to be fascinated with the day-to-day trivia of his teaching and even with something of what he was teaching—plus receiving all that attention from such a beautiful woman, left him feeling pretty good. Then there would still be time for a nap, and napping with Mary Ann’s head lying on his chest, her body pressed against his, was a great pleasure as well, lying there looking up at the perfect blue sky over her courtyard, sometimes talking softly, about books, while he lightly stroked her hair.

  Not that they shared much of a taste in books. Jesse tended to like things a little trashier than Mary Ann did, but it was something to talk about, and he was always afraid for that whole first week that they would run out of things to talk about.

  After he returned to the community college and worked the last part of the day, Jesse would go back to his place, shower, put on good clothes, and go meet Mary Ann for a long walk in the city, hand in hand, chatting abou
t everything and nothing. She told him a lot of stories about her early days as an actress, and almost nothing about anything that had happened since she was rebuilt into Synthi.

  Jesse virtually stopped drinking.

  In kind of an offhand way, he supposed Mary Ann didn’t know very many real people. He wasn’t sure what was more real about him than about her, but the “unreality” of show business people was so commonly talked about that he figured there had to be something in it. He got used to the idea of dating a celebrity and realized after a while that it wasn’t really any different from dating anyone else—if anything what was unusual in all this was dating an older woman who really knew what she wanted and didn’t mind being in charge. That was what was interesting.

  The routine of meeting for comida, taking siesta together, meeting again for a long walk through town, then eating cena together, did not vary for their first week, Monday through Friday. In all that time they only held hands, cuddled, and kissed goodnight.

  But today is Saturday, and it’s a half day, which means that since it’s now noon, Jesse is off for the day. On his way out, José, and his friend Obet, give Jesse a certain amount of teasing about being with an XV star (“Compadre, what can you be thinking of? You already know what it is like with this one—”), but the slight edge in it, the feeling that they might even be a little angry, tells him at once that they envy him.

  “She’s not that different,” Jesse says, grinning, letting them think that perhaps she is. “And there’s certainly not the volume of crap you have to take with a twenty-year-old.”