Mother of Storms

by John Barnes

  It started with deciding to see what this was like; and then it was easy to copy confiscated wedges. Before this stuff, Diem had always just figured he was sort of sexless—college experiments with a couple of young women and one young man had left him bored. It was easier to just stay home and masturbate, and before he found parallel experience he never fantasized about anything… at least not with any awareness that it was turning him on—

  Well, there you had it. He supposes he could have gone to see an analyst. There have been some successes with treating all this. But that would mean confessing to a lot of things, including that his “experiments” in college had all been stranger rapes in distant cities….

  The country might well have been worse off, he thinks, honestly. Brittany Lynn Hardshaw has been one of the most effective leaders of the last fifty years, and that’s not just his opinion—to do his job Diem has had to know how to judge accurately rather than with his loyalty. Even if he didn’t trust his own judgment, there’s also the nearly universal opinion of the historians and political scientists, even the ones who hate her guts.

  And so many people know that part of her greatness was her Shadow….

  He finds himself sinking to the floor of the shower, and starts rattling off accomplishments. He would guess that between one action and another that he’s managed, he’s put three million people into homes, thirteen million into jobs, gotten justice for another couple of million who would never have seen it otherwise—

  His one term in Congress led to the Diem Act, and more than a thousand people have been put to death for making wedges like the ones locked in his cabinet. He even saw to it that a few specific ones he had contact with came to the notice of the cops… did he want to get caught? Or just want them to get caught?

  He’s still ill; the pain from the convulsions that ripped through his groin earlier, the soreness leaking from where the merkin abraded his penis and where he forced himself down so hard on the butt plug, all of that is mixing with overpowering nausea. He barely gets out of the shower to the toilet in time to heave up several times, heavy retching that leaves him feeling wrung from chest to ass, his legs trembling, head aching, like the worst flu he’s ever had.

  A really bad reaction tends to follow a really intense session. The unbearable demanding buzz at the base of his skull isn’t there, won’t return for weeks or months. But now there is something else he can’t shut out.

  What he can’t shut out just keeps coming back at him; he gets under the shower again, scours off the flecks of his own vomit, dries in haste and pulls on the bathrobe. On good nights, the ritual of the shower works like a baptism, bringing him back into the world feeling clean again, if wrung out and in pain; on bad nights, it just goes on and on.

  What he can’t shut out has its grip on him tonight. He staggers upstairs, stops for one long moment at the landing because he must go back and string the filament of rubber cement, then carefully memorize its shape for the next time—

  God, the next time. D.C. itself may be washed away, Diem is slated for the last part of the government to leave and he may be killed here like those poor bastards in Hawaii… and it doesn’t matter, he’s got to make sure this place is secure. No one must know—

  He makes himself look long and hard at the thin string of drying rubber cement, remembers the unique shape of its bumps. Once someone breaks that they’ll never successfully copy it into place, and he’ll have at least some warning—

  Then he feels his legs bending and buckling. What he can’t shut out comes howling up the stairs like a vicious dog at his heels. He turns, slams the door, locks it, flees up the back stairs that are forbidden to servants, enters his own bedroom. The bathrobe flies off him like a great winged bat and lands on his writing desk, currently holding three books he was reading weeks ago before it all got crazy.

  He throws himself between the soft sheets of the big waterbed and buries his head under the covers, pausing only a quarter-breath to say “Room lights off” to the house computer.

  What he can’t shut out is this:

  All the wedges except the three “specials,” the ones he experienced tonight, are copies of parallel-experience porn that was confiscated from people who were dealing this stuff. He prosecuted some of them himself.

  Three wedges—the three he played tonight—are different. He commissioned those.

  Each of these three wedges cost him four times as much as his car.

  And just before he falls asleep he hears it, what he can’t shut out, his own voice cutting into him, as if he had himself on the witness stand:

  Mr. Diem, surely you know that these wedges are made by forcible short-term memory extraction after the rape has been committed, and the extractor is then left in place for the killing itself.

  But you ordered the wedges, Mr. Diem. He who bids a thing done by others, does it himself. And at the prices you paid, Mr. Diem, you know what they did. They made those wedges special for you. And what they did to those three young girls was exactly what you wanted them to do.

  And if you don’t believe that, Mr. Diem, remember that the final orgasm, the big one, the one you’ve got to have, comes not with the horrible torture of Kimbie Dee, Michelline, and DeLana… not even with their wretched disgusting deaths at the hands of those ghouls… no, Mr. Diem. That’s not what makes you come.

  You come from knowing that it all really happened, don’t you?

  Blackness descends. He oversleeps the next morning. When he does get up, it’s past ten, the day is gray and dreary, and there’s a note from President Hardshaw asking him to take a day off and recover from his overwork.

  Berlina Jameson often wishes that she were more of an old hand. If the world ran the way it is supposed to, then she’d have spent ages covering school board meetings and standing in front of car wrecks with a camera pointed at her before she got her big break, and so she’d have lots of experience talking with biz types. But as it is, she’s going to have to wing it.

  Glinda Gray, the person from GateTech who has one of those strangely unexplanatory job titles that mean either she’s a flunky or a real power and you’re supposed to be kept guessing, is not telling the whole truth. Berlina is sure of that much. She’s also sure that if she just had ten years or so of experience at this, she’d know exactly what it was that she wasn’t being told. Unfortunately she not only doesn’t have enough experience to sort that out—she also doesn’t have enough experience to comprehend what seems to be a series of hints that Ms. Gray is sending at her.

  Well, gee, what would Edward R. Murrow or Morley Safer have done? Berlina thinks. She’s rolling south toward the Gulf Coast just now, en route to getting some stock footage shot for the before-and-after sequences that are sure to come. But just now she’s not thinking of getting footage of the soon-to-be-destroyed areas; she is stretched out in the back of the car, looking into a sterovisor and assembling the images of the two of them virtually, so that what she sees looks like the inside of a TV studio but she has to be careful not to stick her arm through a potted plant. It’s clear that Glinda Gray is at least as at home in the environment as Berlina Jameson.

  When in doubt, try the truth. “So,” Berlina Jameson says, “the documentation is pretty convincing. The USSF and NASA are completely illegally looting the Japanese and European parts of Moonbase, and what’s more they’ve had NSA assistance in cracking security codes so that they’re also using all sorts of privately owned equipment without paying for it. I’ll certainly go with that material, but there’s at least two questions you haven’t answered. The first one is why you picked Sniffings rather than Scuttlebytes, and the second is, What’s in all this for GateTech?”

  Glinda Gray brushes her graying-blonde hair back from her face, and Jameson notes with envy just how polished the woman seems, as if Gray had been playing the role of herself for many years. “Well, we think Sniffings is likely to be interested for two reasons, and you can quote me on either of them. First of all, Scuttleby
tes has, let’s say, a very adolescent attitude about business and capitalism—they like to tweak business just because there’s a certain amount of money and prestige in the private sector and because business people tend to be kind of conservative. And more importantly, we have a pretty good idea about why the Feds and the UN are doing this. It’s because most of the governments of the Earth failed to foresee that there might be a need for space launch that could stand up to severe weather conditions; our own country is a perfect example; first we built at Canaveral on a coast that gets hurricanes, then we moved to Kingman Reef, where there’s even less dry land and even more storm vulnerability. But the other nations haven’t done much better.

  “So naturally when the catastrophe anyone should have seen was possible comes along, what happens? There’re two possibilities—they can either launch using the facilities that private enterprise built on speculation against just such a day, or they can do what they’re doing—appropriate private property without compensation, infringe on other nations’ facilities, do everything that if we did it would rightly be called theft, piracy, or barratry, all of that just to avoid letting private enterprise solve the problem. There’s an anti-business bias in government that runs deep and strong, Ms. Jameson, and that’s what you’re seeing here. Frankly we’re tired of it; all we want is a chance to compete fairly, and what we’re seeing here is a situation where we have to play by the rules and they don’t.”

  It’s a great bunch of quotes, Berlina consoles herself, and the fact that something smells funny about all this can always be looked into later. It’s almost enough to make her wish she had invested in a head jack so that she could go two-way with some databases, but you have to know what questions to ask to do that and it’s awesomely expensive.

  She gets a couple more minutes with Glinda Gray, but no better material. They have the usual polite off-record exchanges at the end; the most interesting thing she gets out of that is that John Klieg himself is a fan of Sniffings, which Gray mentions with an odd air of embarrassment, as if it were unusual for her to know that about her boss.

  Well, well, then perhaps the rumors that she’s been serving under her boss with distinction are true… but private biz really is a different game. Whereas a senator boffing his legislative assistant is dynamite, people in private business can and do screw pretty much whomever they like, and absolutely nobody in that community seems to think much about it. Berlina is not sure she can get the hang of such a different world.

  Well, one rule that has worked for her is: When you don’t understand what you’ve got, get more. Who can she talk to? She’s had a few short conversations with Harris Diem over the past few weeks, but that is probably not enough for her to just call him up.

  Di Callare does not strike her as the hardheaded business type either, but at least he’ll have something to say and he’s easy to talk to.

  He all but explodes; it takes her a while to sort out the basic issues—that Klieg is just taking advantage of the situation. “Look at the permit and build dates, look when he started moving to Siberia, what he did was take a gamble that this would happen and then get the right piece of dirt from people who had to give him a cheap deal….”

  She makes the note herself. What was Klieg’s timing? Did he have any way to know or suspect something like Clem was about to happen? It’s one thing to be a farsighted road-builder, she thinks, and another to sprint up the road ahead of a crowd of refugees and open a tollbooth… and certainly, too, Klieg’s connections to the all-but-outlawed Siberian regime also bear some checking into.

  She thanks Di for his trouble and time, makes sure he feels they’re still friends, and clicks off. Di has said nothing she wants to quote, but at least via him she has some idea what Diem might say, or Hardshaw if she gets that lucky.

  She has an ominous feeling that all she has here is something the Klieg organization wants to plant in the media, and she doesn’t know why. Of course until she releases it she doesn’t know what they’ll do with it-And that thought gives her the answer. She makes her preparations and then leaves a short note for Glinda Gray, informing her that the next Sniffings will feature the story as its lead. Then she records a much longer voice-and-video message for Harris Diem.

  She knows she did the right thing when he calls her back that night.

  Jesse and Mary Ann managed to get on the same crew for the dig-out; it’s not like Tehuantepec here in Tapachula, they were far enough away so that it was no more than an unusually bad hurricane, and even with the Army not showing up, most of Puerto Madero managed to evacuate itself before the storm surges hit. That little town and beach are gone, and the inhabitants have been added to the homeless in Tapachula, but they’re alive, and besides Tapachula has plenty of buildings standing. Even some of the shacks that ringed the town managed to hold somehow, and enough public buildings to provide everyone a place to sleep—which may be better than it was before Clementine ripped over them.

  Not that there isn’t plenty to do, but deaths here run to dozens, not to hundreds, and when a rubble pile has to be looked into, there are plenty of hands available. Mary Ann is standing in the right place to see two small, dirty, frightened boys freed from house wreckage, and then to hear the shriek of joy from their mother.

  Sourly, she finds herself thinking that if she were working, she would have had to crank her feelings up to fever pitch—just so the experiencers could understand that it was good to have seen that.

  It’s a long day, and it’s a bit longer because, since the landlord isn’t around to object, Mary Ann has turned her rented house into an emergency shelter, so that besides the indispensable Herreras, they have about twenty refugees scattered around the place. That means a certain amount of work in getting everyone bedded down, but at least Señora Herrera was able to screen the incoming guests, and she seems to have been willing to take only those who want to work for their bed and supper. If anything the place is cleaner and more orderly than before.

  It leaves Jesse and Mary Ann with only the master bedroom and its bath to call their own, but that doesn’t much matter; it’s kind of cozy, like having the largest and best room in a dormitory.

  That evening Jesse is messing around with the terminal; links to the outside world, and via that to the rest of Mexico, seem to be in good shape, though everything is going via satellite between north and south Mexico—Clementine tore a swath that ripped out all but the few buried fibrop cables, and for practical purposes Mexico is now two nations divided by the wild chaos of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

  He has kind of ambiguous feelings about it, but he decides that seeing if he can contact Naomi is the least he can do. He writes a quick “hope you’re okay” letter to Naomi and puts it in a tracer packet aimed at her net i.d.—a little program that will hang around in the nets looking for her until she logs on again.

  While he’s at it, he puts out a “mention search” tracer as well; this is a program that will capture everything that mentions Naomi. He tells it to just hang out on the servers and processors in the states of Oaxaca and Chiapas. That way, if—he flinches a bit at the thought—well, if she’s in the hospital, or in a busload of refugees, or something like that, his tracer will find out and let him know.

  They’ve got limited phone service available for contacting relatives, and he hasn’t used any of his authorized calls yet. Probably he ought to call Dad, but phoning Di is about as good—Di will pass word on to Dad—and Di is a lot easier to talk to.

  To his surprise, Di is on the screen almost at once. “Kid! I’ve been trying to get something out of Mexico for two days about you! What’s up? Are you okay? Do you need money or clearance to get anywhere or anything?”

  “I’m fine, Di, really. I’ve got a rich girlfriend, and she’s got a house that’s built like a fort. We rode it out here and there was no big trouble at all. They just got phone service up a couple of hours ago. My old place was smashed up pretty badly but I was fine, and most of my stuff was over here an
yway. I was just calling to let you know I’m okay.”

  “God, I’m glad to hear that!”

  Jesse looks closer at the screen, and says, “You look really tired, Di. Aren’t they giving you any breaks?”

  “They are but I’m not taking them. Have you had time to check the news?”

  “Just enough to know Salina Cruz is gone and most of the coast resorts got clobbered by storm surge. And of course the country’s practically cut in half at the Istmo.”

  “That’s pretty much the story,” Di agrees. “It’s not yet public, but the Mexican government has made a decision that I wish our President would. They’ve declared the situation as good as permanent—with so many Clems forming out there, and with our forecasts saying every summer will be like this for at least six years, they’re going to try to organize mass migrations to safer areas, and take advantage of the big rainfalls to grow grain in the desert to feed everyone. So if you can get out of there soon, you should—otherwise your way out is likely to involve spending a month or so in a refugee column going farther up into the hills.”

  “The Chiapas rain forest might not even notice the hurricanes, if it doesn’t get hit directly,” Jesse responds. It’s funny—last month he’d have been hysterical about not getting back to the Az on schedule, but now he can look at it calmly enough. “It rains a lot here. But—a lot of Clems—”

  “A lot. Clem’s had two babies and is still headed west in the Pacific, with one of them trailing behind and the other running parallel and to the north; Clem Two, or ‘Clementine,’ as Berlina dubbed it, is kicking up such a fuss in the Gulf that we aren’t even sure how many storm eyes there really are there—it’s got about four outflow jets popping around and they’re all starting eyes everywhere. We’ve started a new designation system; Clem itself is Clem 100, Clem Two is Clem 200, and the two independent daughters in the Pacific are 300 and 400; mostly they’ll be named after their direct ancestors. Our guess is that there’re going to be at least a Clem 210, Clem 220, and Clem 230 coming out of the Gulf.”