Mother of Storms

by John Barnes

  Actually, that’s an interesting question. What does Naomi want? Naomi wants to not want anything, she thinks, that’s what I was raised to want, not to need or want anything that might require precious resources.

  But she doesn’t even know what she’s refraining from wanting.

  Something—god knows what, part of a car or a fence or a giant hailstone or maybe just a rock—goes right through the wall seven feet above them and about five yards to the left. The wind going through the hole makes a deep bass whistle that sets the whole wall and ground vibrating.

  At least she thinks that’s what happened, and that’s the explanation she’s trying to shout in the children’s ears. Jesse said something about things with holes in them have more drag, or drag more, in the wind, she’s not sure which, but it seems to be true because she does feel the wall bow inward very slightly just before it bends back to upright, and the thunder she feels through her legs and buttocks suggests that a big part of the wall just broke away and fell in.

  Far off—inches from her ears—she can hear Luisa shrieking, Compañero shouting what she suspects is a prayer. María, pressed against her back, is sobbing or laughing hysterically—something that makes her breath come in shaky gasps, anyway—and Linda, leaning in close on her other side, is the only one who seems to be quiet at all, but the heavy way she is lying suggests that she has fainted—or perhaps she’s been hit by something penetrating the wall? No, surely there’d be whistling or roaring from the hole.

  Time goes on in the thundering dark, and nothing more happens except that the noise goes on and it continues to be dark. Naomi wonders how long they’ve been there; it became fully dark around two in the afternoon, perhaps, remembering the last time she looked at her watch was about noon….

  She brings the watch up to her face, carefully not letting go of Luisa, who is clinging to her like a baby possum, and manages to press the light button. It says 4:57 P.M. Three hours of this thus far. Perhaps she has managed to sleep and dream.

  There is more dark and more time, all in the deep thunder of the wind. Naomi has no way of knowing how far down the wall is eroding, but she tries to think it through the way Jesse might have, concludes that the erosion must have slowed or stopped because if it hadn’t, they’d already have had their portion of the wall torn away. The watch says 5:48 when she looks again. This time she must have been awake longer.

  She plans meals she is going to eat, things she will go and see. She promises herself that just once, in some town where no one knows her, she will go into a Full Makeover—yes, right into a low-rent chain store—and have herself made into a male fantasy object and walk around the town getting stared at by men for a few days, just to know what that’s like. After all, when she finds out she hates it she can go right back to being herself.

  She will go hiking on foot without XV commentary. She will make love in the desert again, maybe with somebody other than Jesse. Maybe with Jesse and several somebodies, she thinks, and giggles. She wonders why, faced with the possibility that she might be smashed like a bug on a windshield at any moment, she is deriving so much pleasure from thinking about things she shouldn’t think about.

  Experimentally she thinks about dumping toxic waste in pristine wilder ness and killing the last great apes on earth with a club. She still finds both those thoughts disgusting. This is a relief; it seems to her that she’s just selfish, not evil.

  She was always taught they’re the same thing. She hopes she remembers, when she gets out of all this, that they’re not.

  The next time a guy tries to pick her up at a party by listening seriously to her feelings and responding with careful, nuanced criticism to her thoughts, she’s going to tease him for a while and then leave with some guy who wants to go out and dance, and they will stand out in the middle of the street at three A.M. singing and waking people up.

  There has been a shortage of fun in her life. She’s going to have a lot of it if fate gives her a chance.

  Come to think of it, she’s also going to read a lot of books that are on the “centric/linear” list, the one that various Deeper groups circulate to alert members to “superficially convincing works that perpetuate dangerous ideological convictions.” Maybe Huckleberry Finn; the only thing she knows about it is that two guys drift downstream in a raft and that her images of it seem to all involve warm, sunny, summer days as they’re doing it. The idea of a whole book full of warm, sunny summer days intrigues her more than she can imagine.

  Fly fishing. She is going to try fly fishing. It seems like something very quiet.

  And she might start reading books about science or something. She’s not good at it but she just thinks it would be neat to know it.

  There are so many things she can do for Naomi if she decides to. And she can still do more than her share of things for other people.

  She has a feeling her parents won’t like it. Tough shit.

  A last, strange moment of thunder is followed by blinding light. Her first thought is that it’s a lightning flash, her second thought that it’s some strange effect you get when you’re dead, and then she realizes that it’s . . sunlight.

  With a patter and many thuds, a rain of bricks and rubble comes out of the sky. They all huddle against the wall closely, but only Maria is hit, by a small stone on the ankle; it seems to be nothing serious, though she screams when it happens. A few feet away, a chunk of wall, several CBS blocks still joined by mortar, plunges into the ground, cratering the mud and spraying all of them. They wait another long minute, then stand up and begin to wipe off.

  The five of them look up again, in wonder. The opposite exterior wall of the building blew down entirely, though just which of the crashes they felt and heard it might have been, they’ll never know; Naomi congratulates herself on her choice of walls. The Cathedral, across the street, pokes up from behind great, sculpted drifts of rubble, the belltower gone, the roof mostly sheared off, but still standing.

  Warm sunlight plays everywhere on the broken walls and in the scoured streets, and Naomi’s eyes fill with tears. It’s just too beautiful….

  “Mama?” Luisa says tentatively. She reaches up and takes Naomi’s hand. The kids had been at the Social Services Building, and they were the four whose parents hadn’t picked them up before movement got impossible; Naomi stayed with them in hopes that the evacuation buses that never came would come by here to check for strays, because she didn’t have an official evacuation point in Tehuantepec itself—her address is up in Oaxaca.

  Naomi squats down. “We’ll see if we can find your mother,” she explains, in Spanish, “and everyone else’s parents, too, but we only have an hour or two before the storm starts again. And before it starts we want to get into some nice, safe basement with some food and water and a toilet.”

  Squatting, and mentioning the toilet, has made her realize what her own most urgent need is, and there’s a five-minute break while she and the girls relieve themselves on one side of the wall, and Compañero presumably does the same on the other. Events really change people, she realizes; Compañero is the sort of nasty little boy who normally would have been sneaking around to peek at the gringa and the girls. Maybe he just really had to go.

  The city of Tehuantepec is gone, she realizes, as they set out for where Luisa’s house was. Lanes blown clear by winds along the ground resemble streets, though they don’t always run where the streets did; streets have filled with rubble to depths of three and four meters. Every so often the corner of a curb, poking up from the mess, with its inset tiles giving street names, tells her where they are, but they circle a long time, calling and shouting, before they have to admit that though they’ve probably been close to it, they have no hope of finding Luisa’s house.

  Naomi wishes Luisa would cry. The girl’s eyes get huge and solemn, her thumb goes into her mouth, and she grips Naomi by the wrist, but that is all.

  Compañero’s father’s house was large; parts of the walls are still standing. And she fina
lly gets to find out Compañero’s name when the boy’s father, clearing rubble away from a basement door, looks up and shouts “Pablo!”

  She holds Luisa very close while father and son hug and the two of them babble an explanation; she allows herself to feel just a little proud when Compañero’s—no, Pablo’s, she will call him by name from now on—when Pablo’s father shakes her hand fervently. Better still, he has a deep basement, he’s shored up the top of it with timbers and tied down the floor, and he’s managed to get several auto batteries rigged up so that there’s at least a dim light down there, plus there are three thousand liters of drinking water in a tank, a lot of dehydrated food he “liberated” from a tourist store nearby, and a crude chemical toilet he’s managed with a bucket, a chair frame, and several gallons of bleach.

  They quickly decide that Pablo will stay and help set things up, then make a quick trip around the neighborhood to find people who need a safer shelter. Naomi will try to locate the family of Maria and Linda—the two are cousins who lived in the same large house. She’ll also bring back anyone she finds who needs a place; the shelter will easily accommodate fifty for the time that it must, especially if in the remaining hour or so before the storm hits again they get enough people working on stocking it.

  She hurries away with the three girls. God, it’s unbelievably hot this evening. The sky above is deep blue and the heaped and drifted rubble is gray-white, and that’s most of what Tehuantepec’s color scheme usually is; it takes her a moment to realize that what is missing is the deep, vivid green of the trees, the planters, and the watered squares, lawns, and parks. All that has been stripped away; there are no palm trees standing and the few bushes not uprooted and thrown away are stripped to bare branches.

  People are beginning to emerge everywhere, from basements and from interior rooms that backed up on thick walls. Some modern buildings withstood the shock, mostly those that had been built in copies of the traditional southern Mexican styles, with reinforced concrete inside the heavy walls and with few or no windows on the southern and western sides. She stops to talk with many of them, but most have not been out of their shelters long enough to know anything of what’s going on. One man has managed to get a video signal from one of the overhead satellites, through the opening provided by the eye, by running out a long piece of metal clothesline in a circle on a slope that faces toward the satellite.

  This gives Naomi one more thing she wishes she knew enough to be able to do, but the man has only been able to find out that the outside world knows this is happening and that the center of the eye hit the coast about twenty kilometers to the north of here. The current estimate, as far as he can figure out with a map and a calculator, is that Clementine is moving a bit more slowly and that they might have as long as an hour and ten minutes before the Beaufort 40 + winds of the eye wall are on them again.

  María and Linda find an aunt, or a cousin, or a cousin of one and an aunt of the other, and they split off to join their family in some large shelter that they’ve all improvised together.

  This leaves only Luisa, and as soon as the other girls are gone, Luisa starts to cry. Naomi mutters, “No llores,” before deciding that that’s stupid, the little girl needs to cry, and after all it’s not like Luisa is slowing them down by crying. She heads back for Pablo’s house.

  The sky is blue, and it’s warm, and if it weren’t for the sobbing child with her—and for the landscape of shattered rubble all around, like an old flat photo from the last century, Berlin or Hiroshima or Port au Prince, or like Washington right after the Flash—Naomi might almost find herself enjoying the warmth and the light. She drinks it in, in the same way she does a cup of clean water offered by a woman who is carrying big buckets—greedily, getting every bit of it into her, against what she knows is to come.

  Two things at first surprise her: that there are so few takers, only about ten people, for the offer of a good shelter, and that there doesn’t seem to be much of anyone trying to rescue people from the rubble. Finally she asks a tall, muscular man whom she remembers vaguely as the vice-president of the local tenants’ union, and he sighs. “I wondered that too. But now that I think of it, very few people are looking for better shelter because to have lived through the storm thus far, their shelters usually are pretty good; if they were not, the people who were in bad shelters or not sheltered are… well, not here. And suppose you dig out your relative or your friend. If he or she is alive, do you have a doctor, do you have medicine, do you have any way to help? And more likely he or she is not alive… and then what do you do with a corpse? You cannot bring it into the shelter for fear of disease. You cannot lay it out in the street—the wind will carry the body somewhere, never to be found. And you haven’t time to dig a grave. So the bodies are best where they are… and if there are living people under the rubble… well, they will be bodies soon enough. Or they will have to live until we can dig for them. It is very hard, but there is no way around it.”

  She nods, and as she walks off, Luisa says, “Our house had a big glass window on the south side, and aluminum siding from Sears that Mama was very proud of, but it wasn’t put on very well, the people from Sears said there was nothing to attach it to….”

  Naomi folds her arms around the child and lets her sob against her. “I am here and you can stay with me. And perhaps we can find your mother. Some shelters, the door got buried and the people are fine inside but can’t get out right away. But you have a home, with me, as long as you need it. And as long as you are with me we will look for your mother together.”

  Luisa doesn’t exactly stop crying, but she does drift off into sniffles. The two of them hurry together toward the shelter; already in the distance, the black face of the eye wall is crawling over the land, and the sun is about to set behind it.

  When she gets done with all this, Naomi thinks, she is going to spend two whole weeks doing nothing but silly things that she enjoys but used to feel embarrassed about enjoying. And every night she will phone her parents and horrify them with describing it all. She laughs at her own joke, not caring if anyone sees her or misunderstands. There’s nothing like nearly dying to make you appreciate living.

  John Klieg gets the report from Mexico with not much more than a smile. The Mexican government’s launch facility wasn’t able to put up packages of any real size and besides it was just a standard-model Japanese franchise launch port. No, the real prize is what his meteorologists are telling him—Clem Two’s eye is going to make it over the Isthmus of Tehuantepec just fine, move into the Bay of Campeche, and then set all hell loose. For all practical purposes, the clear pathway across the isthmus is marked on the map—Federal Highway 185 follows the low ground.

  Thus far his little team—thrown together by the completely invaluable Glinda—has been matching NOAA and (because they’ve been working on a more tightly focused problem) occasionally beating them.

  And if they’re right—then the Atlantic is more than ripe for a “cascade” of hurricanes. Clem Two should have an outflow jet soon after getting back over warm water. In the weak steering currents of the western Caribbean, Clem Two will sputter and spin, giving birth to many more hurricanes—and they in turn will give birth to more. The Atlantic is going to be boiling with them soon, and the methane injection has warmed it enough to allow hurricanes a full run along the Gulf Stream until they finally pound Europe itself.

  The one fly in all this ointment, of course, is that Glinda is still at Canaveral, though that will be fixed quickly. She’s seeing to the evacuation of GateTech’s central team, which is being moved partly to Birmingham, Alabama (not quite out of hurricane reach but up where there’s a good chance of riding it out), and partly to here, Novokuznetsk. With a bit of luck it will all be done in two days, and then she and Derry will be here like lightning.

  It’s a funny thing. He misses Glinda’s personal efficiency, and her sense of humor, and Derry’s little adventures and discoveries, and he certainly misses sex with Glinda, but mor
e than anything else what he really misses is that sense of completeness, the sense that he’s building something for someone. He wonders how he lived without that for so many years.

  He turns back to the wall of screens that he’s had built for himself here. It’s just as useless as the one at Canaveral, but since for most of his business career Klieg has been photographed in front of such a setup, it seemed like a good idea to to keep the locals reminded of who he was. Another Glinda inspiration… he ought to ask her if anything could be done to cause somebody to open up an English-speaking Shoney’s here.

  There’s a blip on one screen, and he glances that way; the flashing icon means something significant has come in, and he stops to read it.

  He purses his lips, whistles, and grins. Time to start playing hardball, no question. So, by a lot of fancy jockeying, not to mention a pretty elastic concept of property at Moonbase, they think they’re going to come up with a competing launch service, building and launching satellites in space? And no doubt they’ve also got something up their sleeves, now that his technical people have told them how, for getting a big dark shadow over the Pacific, using the same facility.

  His first call is to Hassan. It’s not so much a matter of respect—the two of them respect each other but neither would have thought about that—or of getting additional input; it’s just that Hassan runs at least as many lines of influence as Klieg runs, all the time, and they need to stay coordinated on this point.

  It takes him only moments to fill his partner in, and then Klieg explains, “Just offhand, there’s about a dozen congresspeople I can count on to tie things up in the States—our Congress usually makes sure the government buys from private business, even when that costs a lot more, because businessmen are the backbone of the country.”