by John Barnes
“So here’s your problem, Harris. Whatever you’re about to tell me, whatever new bad news Carla has, we’re going to make it available to everybody. The UN, other nations, Congress, all the parties, all the candidates for president, all the corporate heads—even the people. And from now on the order is that everything except weapons secrets and military ops plans gets declassified. We can only count on a few more months of the government functioning—and after that, like it or not, the people will have to rule. Sovereignty is about to drop back into their laps for good or ill. And if they can’t govern, well, it was a good two-hundred-and-fifty-year experiment. But the mess that just happened in Hawaii is probably only the start—there are months left in hurricane season—and it’s time to admit that since we can’t help, we might as well give people the information they need and then stay out of their way.”
Harris Diem starts to laugh. “Okay, boss, I’ll just figure this isn’t a stroke or something. But I’ll feel a lot better if you change your mind when you hear this. Clem’s not only not over, and not close to being over—there’re going to be a lot more Clems within a week or two.”
President Hardshaw has braced herself just a little—she knows even her trusted longtime friend and assistant cannot see it when she does that—and the result is that there is no wince in her face and no ripple in her coffee. She doesn’t seem to hesitate before she says, “You’d better explain that in detail, and then we’d better get it out on the news.”
She is rewarded by a tight-lipped smile and a tiny headshake from Harris Diem. She knows him well enough to understand at once that this is becoming another story, in his mind, of why he has served her for twentynine years, that someday in his memoirs he will write that she changed years of policy in a three-minute decision without batting an eye. And as he starts to tell her the latest, he has already re-oriented himself to the new policy, and will carry it out with vigor and passion, tired though he is, opposed to it, perhaps not understanding it.
Loyalty like that frightens her; it is an all but impossible job to try to steer the greatest military power on Earth and the fate of a quarter of a billion people, but something in her recoils from holding a complete human soul in her hands. It’s been a long time since Idaho.
She concentrates on what he says, and in ten minutes she’s on the line to Secretary-General Rivera, to President Questora of Mexico, and to as many as can be gotten on line of the Central American presidents, dictators, and generals—she can never keep their titles straight without the little prompt displayed across their faces. Just after she clicks off, the news comes from Hawaii that the Army expedition touched down, and one staticopter flipped with the loss of six lives. The weather is still too rough for them to be able to move from the base camp. It seems anticlimactic, like a small bit of old business.
The thing is, Randy Householder knows the business. He’s been tracking it for more than a decade. He talks the right talk, walks the right walk, uses some of his carefully hoarded stash of cash, and in no time at all he’s got himself a forced extraction rig.
He looks at the thing and shudders. There are brownish spots on it that tell him it has been used before.
It takes him another four days to determine that Jerren Anders is in the minimum-security wing and not considered dangerous; he had some kind of breakdown at the time of his arrest, convinced a judge and jury, got better, and now he’s being taken care of for life.
Randy has decided to take care of him, period. It’s the simplest and cleanest.
The exercise field is not walled or fenced; they count on the transponder ankle cuff to keep them in, or to track them down if they run. Anders is an old bastard, and he jogs every day. There’s about a thirty-second chance to do it, but it’s not complicated, really, just a matter of getting the timing down.
The day is bright and sunny when Randy steps from behind a tree, knocks Anders down, points a gun at his chest, and says, “Withers, Wallace, and Brown say hi. You’re coming with me.”
“I don’t do that shit anymore—”
“Then I’ll kill you.”
Anders stands up, raising his hands. Randy quick-marches him to the car; fortunately they can’t track the individual vehicle yet, those civil liberties types are good for something. They get in the car and Randy gives an address; the car rolls away.
“What are you going to—”
Randy shoots Anders with a paralyzer. Not that he cares, but it will also act as an anesthetic.
Then he takes the crowbar and begins breaking up Anders’s feet bones. Anders’s eyes get wide, and tears run down his face, but he can’t move and all he can do is moan.
If you cut the ankle cuff, they stop looking for the cuff. They have the idea that since you can’t pull it off over the foot, you can’t take it off. That would be true if you were escaping on your own behalf. Or if you were in a position to object to having the bones crushed.
But matters are a little different. Randy swings the crowbar hard and fast—he has only about five minutes to work—and the old brittle bones crack and shatter under the blows. The cracking sound of the first few blows gives way to wet thuds. The keening from Anders’s slack mouth is really annoying but there’s no time to gag him just yet.
When the foot, wrapped in a plastic bag, feels like jelly, Randy grabs the cuff and yanks it off over the sodden, bloody mess. The car is now doing what it’s supposed to do—cutting into a robot freighter yard—and Randy rolls down the window.
There. One of the robot tractors is just pulling out, towing three container/trailers behind it, and there’s room to catch it. Randy takes manual control—he’s glad he learned to do this way back when—and shoots forward. The middle trailer carries cattle, their faces huge and stupid as he comes up close and tosses the ankle cuff in among them.
He whips down an un-guide-stripped alley; halfway down it he flips the control back to automatic and tells the car to take a long route around before it gets back on guidestrips. It will take them weeks to correlate guidestrip records with the motion of the ankle cuff and trace it all back to him—and long before that, Randy plans to be done.
The keening grows louder in the backseat as Randy climbs back to deal with the next problem. He trusses up Anders, then releases him from the paralyzer.
Anders is babbling now, saying he’ll tell him anything, the kind of stuff you’d expect.
Randy asks the big question. “You remember a wedge you probably were the go-between on, little blonde girl, fourteen years ago—?”
“Fuck, man, not that one, no, fuck, you can’t do anything to me worse than they’ll do to me—”
Randy holds up the forced extraction kit. “Wanna bet?”
Anders finally tells him without forced extraction. But this is too important to leave a possibility that the old thug may be lying, so Randy beams at him and says, “Oh, by the way, I lied,” and drives the forced extractor into the old man’s forehead. The man screams and foams as Randy reads off keywords and his recorder grabs everything for the wedge.
That night the body of Jerren Anders goes down a deep, wet ravine, just off of U.S. 93. Randy gets a report that seems to show, anyway, that his datarodents have made their way into Idaho State Highway Patrol records, and he may have more time than he thought.
He takes a long nap before he experiences that wedge. All kinds of shit will be in there, and he steels himself to look for the right one. Four days later he’s still reading through fragments of girls and women raped, mutilated, and killed, through Winston’s terrifying threats, through Brown selling him the drugs again and again….
Randy realizes he’s just avoiding it, and that’s all there is to it. He doesn’t want what Anders said to be true, and he knows what part of the wedge it will or won’t be in. He takes the sedatives.
She was right, in that dream. It’s really bad. He gets flashes of their surveillance of her, flashes as they figure out that she always showers by herself and no one waits for her. He gets
Anders’s nasty little wet dreams from spying on Kimbie Dee.
Once, before he can stop it, he gets a secondhand memory of the wedge they made, Kimbie Dee trying to cover herself with her hands when that monster they turned loose on her walks into the shower, then the sight of the huge, hideous man pulling out a gun and pointing it at her, the shame as she brought her shaking hands down from her breasts and let him stare at them….
He pops out of that, almost vomiting, but he felt something else in the memory, and the next time he goes back in he gets it.
He has a name, and it’s a name he already knows well. But not for being a buyer of this stuff, let alone for commissioning it.
But there’s no mistake, Randy thinks. Jerren Anders, at the very least, thought that this was who he was working for, thought that that was why there were so many death sentences when the ring broke up.
The access for this is not going to be easy. He’s glad the datarodents are buying him time at the Idaho State Highway Patrol—because he’s going to need a lot of time.
Perhaps the real reason that the results come when they do is that Carla Tynan has gotten enough rest for the first time in days. She is finally well below the equator in her run to the Solomons, submerged to run faster. Something in her will not let her take breaks for sunbathing and sitting out on the surface while she is working.
Di’s team at NOAA is doing a first-rate job, there’s no question about that, in modeling the physics of how the outflow jet moves the hurricane. Get NOAA pointed in the right direction and they do good work….
But, Carla reflects, still lying in her clean, warm bunk and only idly thinking of getting up and doing anything, that was part of the problem back when she had a regular job there; once the concept was right she had a lot of trouble getting interested in the micro-details, except as they confirmed the concept. When she was feeling good about herself, she usually explained this as the “Daniel Boone Syndrome”—as soon as she’d seen what was over a hill, and led others to it, she wanted to get over the next one. When she was down on herself, which was often back in those days, she thought it was a combination of a real creative gift with genuine laziness—she knew that her ideas were good enough to keep her employed, and therefore she kept having those, letting other people do all the hard work.
As was so often the case, it was Louie who, though not terribly introspective himself, had given her some doorways into how she really functioned. “Look, silly, it’s not laziness. When you’re after the idea you work twenty hours a day, you know? And it’s not pioneering drive, because when you’re not after an idea, you hang around reading trash or go shopping—it isn’t like you chase after ideas. I think it’s just that you can’t stand for there to be something that you don’t know. When you get an idea, you can’t rest until you’re fairly sure whether it’s true or not. And when you don’t have one you just do the things you enjoy doing. What’s the big crime? Why does anything about you have to make you into a saint or a criminal?”
She drifts back through that scene mentally—it could lead to a very nice erotic dream, but mostly what she’s really enjoying is remembering that Louie understands her, even if no one else does. Besides, lately when she thinks about sex with Louie, she gets reminded that they will have to put off getting together for months, since his stay in space is being extended indefinitely. Groaning, she rolls out of the narrow bunk, steps into the shower (a shower before bed and a shower after—now there’s a major indulgence) and lets the scalding hot water relax her neck and scalp.
The NOAA team is on top of it, and despite all the computing power she has on board and all the nets she’s able to access, they are way, way ahead of her in capabilities, so there’s really no reason for her to continue working on the outflow jet problem.
Except that somebody—some science fiction writer way back before she was born, she remembers her dad used to quote the guy—always said you can’t do one thing.
She shakes her short hair, spraying water around, and lets the hot flow surge down her back, rubbing the small of her back where the tension often concentrates. You can’t do one thing. So what else does an outflow jet do, besides create a high-pressure area that the hurricane moves away from? What else does an outflow jet cause?
Tornadoes over land, and waterspouts over water—hurricanes spawn tornadoes all around themselves. There’s a big cluster of them that forms to the right of the hurricane’s direction of motion, and a smaller cluster where the outflow jet comes down. First-year meteorology: the big wind shears that happen in the strong winds of a hurricane can get rotated into the horizontal plane by all the cumulonimbus convection that is found around the edges.
A wind shear is what happens when the ground slows the wind that touches it; the wind above continues at speed—this curls the wind downward into a rolling cylinder, the way a trip wire makes a runner curl over by stopping his lower body and letting the rest of him continue. Then the strong updrafts around a thunderhead pull the rolling cylinder of air vertical, where it becomes a tornado.
Where the outflow jet comes down it fills the air with moisture and creates an area that the wind has to blow away from. Thus it makes a lot of wind shears, and a lot of cumulonimbus clouds, and cumulonimbus ctouds—thunderheads—have strong updrafts. Conditions are perfect, right where the outflow draft comes down, for getting air rotating around spots of low pressure—for tornadogenesis.
All this became really clear sixty years ago, after the first really big hurricane to be tracked on radar, so that they could see all those cumulonimbi, tornadoes, and the eye itself. Hurricane Beulah, way back in the 1960s, a big one driven far inland by a powerful outflow jet, had sprayed tornadoes around behind itself like tin cans blowing off the back of a garbage truck.
So what Clem’s outflow jet will give you is… bigger wind shears. And a high-pressure area close to the ground. More tornadoes and waterspouts….
And that outflow jet moves. When it’s gone, there’s suddenly no more high-pressure air coming down from above. The pushed-down, swirling air at the sea surface will rise….
…like a bubble from the bottom of a hot kettle. Like a Cartesian diver when you take your finger off the rubber membrane—Carta remembers a present from her father, when she wasn’t more than six, a sealed glass bottle of water with a little glass scuba diver inside; there was an air bubble in the diver, and when you squeezed the bottle, the pressure compressed the bubble, the diver’s density increased, and he sank; when you released the bottle, the high pressure went away, the bubble inside the diver got bigger, and he rose.
A big bubble of air. Rising up from the middle of a savagely churning warm sea. Powerful wind shears all rolling surface-level air inward toward where the bubble rises….
If the outflow jet moves quickly, so that the high-pressure area expands vertically fast enough, what you have is the model of hurricane formation. It doesn’t happen in ordinary hurricanes—there, when the outflow jet moves, the high-pressure spot is still close enough to the eye of the hurricane, and the released air just flows inward to the center, feeding the hurricane. But in something the size of Ctem—where the outflow jet can be coming down many hundreds of kilometers away….
It takes her only about an hour to rough out a model and see that just maybe this could happen. As she’s finishing up—and why are her fingers always so clumsy, her brain always so slow, the right sources never to hand when she has a good idea?—she notices that she’s cold and realizes that she sort of forgot to towel off after her shower. At least this time she remembered to turn it off.
She’s also tied her back in knots. Well, no doubt there’s hot water in the shower again… so she gets her third shower, and this time she makes herself relax, and towels off, and gets dressed in something comfortable that she sort of likes (well, okay, Louie once told her she looked like a hot piece in it, and since then she’s lost a little weight so it’s loose and baggy, so now it’s just about her favorite jumpsuit. What’s not to l
ike? And what’s wrong with some happy memories? She didn’t divorce the man because she didn’t like him, she divorced him to keep liking him, as she explained to him at the time).
God, god, god, Louie on the brain and a real problem right here in front of her. Yes, it’s a plausible outcome, but no, it’s not the only plausible one. Clem might have kittens or might not, and no one will know till that outflow jet swings suddenly—which it may not do for a while.
But the outflow jet did swing suddenly, once—just before Clem ripped off toward Hawaii. Only a few hours ago. And come to think of it, Carla has been paying no attention to the news—she has no idea whether or not Clem is hitting Hawaii, or if he is, what is happening there.
MyBoat surfaces just hours after sunset; it’s a beautiful starlit night, and her radar shows no ships within many kilometers, so Carla climbs up on the deck, taking a scalpnet and output plug with her to direct-access the data she needs. With a jet of high-pressure air, she dries the sunbathing deck and stretches out in the dark, lying on her back and looking up at the stars, counting the occasional meteors and enjoying the glory of a really dark, clear sky. Strange to think how many people never see this except via XV; stranger to think how many more stars there are for Louie. No wonder they can’t keep him out of the observation bubble despite all the warnings about radiation.
With a sigh, she pulls on her scalpnet and inserts the plug into the side of her head. Time to work, Carla.
The dark night, the blazing beauty of all the stars, and the gentle rock of MyBoat on the waves, felt as rhythmic shoving of the padded deck against her back, all become ghostly presences in the back of her brain, like the fragments of a dream just after waking. Instead, she senses lists of thousands of options, thinks of what she wants, plugs in to learn that Hawaii has been cut off from all but a few voice signals already, swings back into the public channels to get satellite data and raw weather station data….
