by John Barnes
So the world finally gets a chance for a fully rational space program, and one lousy reporter….
He’s so angry he can’t quite speak, he realizes. You’d think that Jameson bitch, being in business for herself, relying as she does on the mostly private net, would have some appreciation for his position. And she had seemed to, back when she was helping him shut down those thieving socialist pirates and that crazed astronaut….
But they didn’t get shut down, now did they, and she wasn’t much help, was she? The big thing she did was snoop into his relations with every friend he had in government everywhere. His contacts in Tokyo, Paris, New York, and Brussels are pessimistic about getting any of the relevant governments to complain, let alone really make a case out of it. Hardshaw and Rivera are giving everyone a good cut of the deal, and there you have it.
Well, after all, he philosophizes, just try starting your own post office if you think it’s ever any different. He’ll still get a year or so of his launch monopoly, and by god he’ll charge what he likes for it.
He’s looking forward to his meeting with Hassan this afternoon. One thing old Karl Marx was right about, the bourgeoisie really is the international class; Hassan’s gotten to be one of Klieg’s best friends in the world, because say what you will about the businesses he’s in (and what’s wrong with them, really, except that he’s selling something people want on one end, and competing with governments in providing soldiers on the other?), Hassan’s got a head for business all the way through.
Klieg still has a few minutes, so he goes into the back chambers to say hi to Glinda and Derry. Derry’s been glued to XV since Global Riot Two started—and when are they going to arrest that damned Jameson and try her for that? Especially since there must be millions of kids jacking in to watch the riots, but not closely supervised like Derry is, so that they’re not just riding along with cops and fire crews and watching responsible people cope with the disaster, but experiencing looting and rape… what kind of goofy world is it that makes that available to kids, anyway? And why the hell isn’t Berlina Jameson in jail someplace, or better yet slated for a short trial and a short rope, considering how many people are dead because of her?
He realizes he’s walked in on his family-to-be still seething with rage, and that’s not a good thing to do. He lets out a long exhale and says, “I just came in to say hi. Sorry to come in in such a state—it’s nobody’s fault here.”
Glinda smiles at him and says, “John, don’t you dare apologize. What they’re putting you through would try the patience of a saint.”
Derry winks at him and gives him the old fist-up power salute. It makes him feel like a hero.
He hugs them both and goes down to catch the cab for his meeting with Hassan. He’s meeting his partner at the Hole-in-Corner, their usual little restaurant where they can get a back room to themselves. He and Hassan always assume that the secret police are listening to everything there, which is why they use the place for meetings—the worst thing that could happen right now would be for the secret police to think that the partners were holding out on them.
At the Hole-in-Corner, the silent, withered old headwaiter guides Klieg back through the muffling tapestries and hangings to the back room. Hassan starts as Klieg enters. Klieg’s first thought is, I’ve never seen him so nervous. He’s like a four-year-old in a doctor’s waiting room.
“There are so many rumors now that no one can tell what will happen,” he says, scratching his right wrist with his left hand. “So many of our people are being arrested abroad, so many organizations suddenly folding up, it’s not even possible to tell which pieces are still on the board. I must tell you, Mr. Klieg, my friend, I am worried. If things should overturn suddenly, we might be caught in very bad positions.”
“That’s always the risk you run,” Klieg says, firmly, because that phrase has never failed to reassure him.
Hassan nods, sighs, and says, “Oh, I know and I quite agree. But there is a difference nonetheless. The risk where you come from is merely the risk of going broke. Here it can be more substantial and more personal.”
Involuntarily Klieg shudders; he doesn’t think they would dare to touch him, let alone Glinda or Derry, but one can never be sure, and certainly Hassan has no such protection.
The real key in all of this is Abdulkashim. They got involved with him in the first place because key elements of the armed forces were still loyal to him, and until he decided that the all-weather space launch program would go forward even if he returned to power, they were a powerful passive roadblock.
Since Abdulkashim has endorsed them, they’ve been getting a lot of unexpected help, but how long that will continue is anyone’s guess. Right now the government is made up of anti-Abdulkashim nationalists, the only possibility acceptable to the UN, but there are half a dozen factions, unable to govern and unable not to reach for power, moving and squabbling in the wings.
Hassan talks much of these things as they sip fruit juices and ice water. “If we must be sent to our respective paradises, my friend, let us go with clean kidneys,” he says as they take yet another bathroom break, each of them going to the men’s room in turn under the watchful eyes of Hassan’s bodyguards. Klieg refrains from wondering whether the bodyguards watch him in the rest room to protect him or to make sure he isn’t smuggling a weapon in somehow. Realistically, probably both.
After all, he thinks as he settles onto the commode, when you come right down to it, it’s just six more days. Then he launches the first test shot, and once that works, since it’s the only thing that may abate Clem’s fury, nobody’s going to allow GateTech launches to be hassled. They’ll be perfectly safe in a few days.
There’s a sharp crack outside, and he has just enough time to know that it’s a gunshot before the door bursts open; he’s yanking his pants up but not fast enough as two big men shove the flimsy stall door aside and grab him by the armpits.
It happens so abruptly that he isn’t even able to formulate words before they are dragging him forcibly out. They don’t even give him a chance to button his pants or fasten his belt, and he struggles ridiculously with his pants catching his feet.
As he’s yanked through the restaurant and out the back door, he catches glimpses of two of Hassan’s bodyguards lying dead in the hallways, and the lumpy bundle wrapped in a tablecloth, being carried out by two flunkies, can only be Hassan himself.
They don’t seem to speak English, or care very much what he tries to say in Russian, Yakut, or Buryat. He is heaved into the back of a van and manages, at last, to yank his pants up, though between fear and surprise he’s made quite a mess. Just now, though, a ruined thousand-dollar suit is no big deal at all.
He’s been in the cell four hours by the time anyone comes to talk to him, and during that time he’s heard the screams and sobs of a young girl in the next cell as the guards raped her. It wasn’t Derry—the girl was screaming in Yakut—but Klieg has no doubt the intention was to remind him that it could be.
There are times when you just cut whatever deal you can. When they finally do talk to him, they explain that this is a coup by people loyal to Abdulkashim, who is going to try to break out of the pen in Stockholm, and that they want to make it absolutely clear to him that his launching facilities have been nationalized.
Any successful businessman has to expect this from government. He promises to be a good, cooperative, useful prisoner, as many times as they want him to promise, and then they let him see the very frightened Glinda and Derry, and after some more threats they let Klieg and his girls go.
He has been in this part of the world for a while now, and it has gotten into him. Even as he holds his two girls, and reassures them, part of him is thinking, now, that the humiliation, and the threat to his family, and most of all the death of his friend and partner will all be paid back. A few months ago he wouldn’t have had the foggiest idea how to begin to take such revenge. But now, when the new government releases them, late that night, an
d the three return to their apartment, he takes a very long hot shower to get rid of the stench of dry shit that hangs on him, and as he scrubs he thinks about just how to get all this fixed up right.
He might have been a little shocked at the mixture of inventiveness and cruelty in his thoughts before he came out here. Now, he enjoys it even more than he enjoys getting clean.
The daughter hurricane designated “Clem 114” forms when an outflow jet of Clem’s shifts abruptly northward at a point just west of Minami Tori. By now the news media aren’t even bothering to explain how the high pressure area formed by two outflow jets will push two superhurricanes apart; they merely note that Clem 114 is headed southwest, into much warmer water, where it is likely to grow as big as its parent within days.
Manuel Tagbilaran doesn’t even know the number on the hurricane coming in; it seems utterly irrelevant compared with the task at hand, which is getting this last group of passengers who just got off the Luzon ferry all the way down the island of Samar to Tacloban.
Manuel is not immediately sure why he’s doing it. He lives by himself, now that the kids are grown and his wife is dead, on a little farm up on the west slopes of the mountains that run down the “spine” of Samar; he sometimes explains to tourist visitors that Samar is shaped like a roadkilled rabbit lying on its left side, with its broken spine bent inward in the middle, and that the road weaves around the spine.
At least he will be on the slopes of the mountains away from the winds. And this is a fool’s errand anyway, for after meeting the ferry from Luzon, he normally takes them all the way to Tacloban, over on Leyte to the south, himself. There is no way the ferry will be running, not even that idiot Ramon—god, Manuel hopes Ramon is all right; they’ve known each other since they both started on this route, what, back in ’96? Thirty some years at least.
The wind is still rising and it’s getting darker, though it’s mid-day. Every so often there will be a heavy gust of driving rain that makes the whole bus, a Mitsui ’12 IntelliTracker, shudder and groan. He keeps his hands on the controls and keeps talking to the bus, as if something with firmware this crude could have morale that would really benefit from being talked to.
Just maybe, Manuel thinks, it has something to do with his own morale, or that of the passengers.
Normally a hundred kilometers roll by pretty fast—now that the road is paved all the way, and with the IntelliTracker’s angle-bounce radars, they can roar along at about 140 km/hr. But they’ve been on the road two hours now, and they’re not one-third of the way.
At least his passengers are quiet enough. In the back there are a couple of Chinese insurance agents, trying to make it home after a week of peddling homeowner’s and term life up in the capital, down to the little Chinese suburbs that have sprung up in Leyte. Probably all they’re worried about is whether they’ll get in late and be too tired for tennis and golf tomorrow. There’s also an older lady and her daughter, the daughter clearly running to fat and turning middle-aged, probably the plain one they kept back to tend Mama.
Manuel hates to see that; it was the job his favorite sister got stuck with, and she ended up a sour, bitter old lady, before finally lurching resentfully into the grave only three years after Mama.
The rest of the crowd is a couple of kids from the high school at Ormoc, the boy a slender, handsome young devil (god, the life Manuel could have led with looks like those! And the life that kid probably is living!) and the girl baby-faced and busty, a cuddly little thing; ostensibly they were visiting the university in Manila, though if Manuel knows what’s what, those kids’ parents probably had no idea that the two of them were taking off at the same time to the same place.
They come around a bend, still weaving cautiously along the highway north of Calbayog. He can’t see a damned thing by the roadside; for the last ten minutes there have been streams where there never were before, cutting right through the broken pavement in front of him, and once the IntelliTracker had to lower its treads and climb up and around the broken roadbed. He’s lost count of the number of fallen trees they’ve broken their way through and over.
This is going to be one great story for the grandkids, who are undoubtedly huddling in the storm cellars that he and his sons and sons-in-law dug at all the family farms along the road.
They lurch to a halt suddenly, and the IntelliTracker says, “Cannot identify roadbed.”
Manuel peers out through the windshield, which seems to have an inch of running water on it. “Me either, pal. Can we get there on inertial and radar?”
There’s a long pause, and the IntelliTracker finally says “Reports up ahead show sea levels are at record lows around Catbalogan. Authorities are advising—”
“Oh, hell,” Manuel says. Anyone in the Philippines knows that a low sea level means the sea will be back, later, and generally fast and strong. Clearly this monster hurricane the yanqui scientists have made (Manuel isn’t sure how but it stands to reason that the yanquis are behind it) is producing storm surges just as big as they were claiming, and probably its eye will be coming in up to the north, maybe even right through Manila itself.
The IntelliTracker waits a while, and then, poor idiot that it is, unable to interpret his tone, it says to him, “Inadvisable to carry passengers along that route in present conditions. Risk of serious accident seventeen per cent.”
It’s a lot higher than that, Manuel thinks. He looks over his six passengers; they all look drawn and frightened, and the way he feels himself, he’s just as glad to have the bus to worry about, because if he didn’t he’d be scared out of his mind.
“Well, as a temporary refuge, can we make it to the farm?”
“Which farm?” the stupid bus asks him.
“IntelliTracker—identify as base primary—close IntelliTracker,” Manuel answers, putting it in the crude communications language that came with the IntelliTracker. The bus has only a limited ability to understand natural language, so it really does clarify things, but Manuel also has a gut feeling that the IntelliTracker, somehow or other, will feel just a little insulted when he resorts to it, the way he feels when Korean sailors out of Subic Bay or American retirees in Manila speak to him in pidgin.
The IntelliTracker considers and then answers in its flat mechanical voice. “Chance of success is high. Some risk of subsequent trespassing charges.”
Manuel shrugs eloquently; why buy insurance for it if they aren’t going to haul you into court every so often? “Divert and execute,” he says, and they turn off the road and begin to climb the hillside.
“I’m taking you all home with me,” he explains to his passengers. “There’s no ferry right now, and my farm is on high ground. If you need to call home, there’s a working phone in the back of the bus.”
Three hours later, around the time for sunset but it’s much too dark to tell, they are on the one-lane macadam track that winds up past his farm, having cut through half a dozen fields—not that, after this hurricane rips through, anyone is going to notice what the bus did. Twice they’ve had to take half-hour detours around big areas of fallen trees and once a mudslide forced them to backtrack. By common consent, the passengers are now all sitting up close to him; Manuel doesn’t care, this is sort of a chance to show off.
When the lightning hits close, at first he laughs it off—“Don’t jump, people, if it had hit us we wouldn’t have heard it”—but then he feels the IntelliTracker slowing to a stop. A quick look at the board shows that the brain has gone dead on him; probably a couple of two-peso parts have cooked somewhere, normally he’d just phone for a recovery whistler, one of those little delivery robots, to come out with a parts basket, and he’d be rolling again in an hour at worst, but right now, any spare parts might as well be on the moon for all the good they do him.
Well, there’s an obvious solution, and he can hardly stay here—already water is beginning to swirl around the tires. If he sits here, in half an hour it will erode the shoulder around the left tires, leaving them stuck
on this empty stretch of road. He flips it over to full manual control—it’s a relief to find out that that still works, and that he still seems to know what to do, even though it’s been at least twenty years since he’s had to.
The next three hours are more interesting than anything he’s done in a long while; it’s a lot like back when he was learning from his old man. The old man had learned on an old GM schoolbus that had no more controls than the wheel, brake, gas, shift, and clutch; but Manuel doesn’t think the old man could have done better than this, skittering down the mountainside, occasionally even getting up enough speed so that you feel a little g toward the outside of a turn. He can tell, though he hasn’t time to look behind him, that his passengers are trying not to show him how frightened they are.
Nothing to it, really. Anyone could do this; in the old days, they used to do it all the time. Of course, Manuel is putting a little more style and flare into it.
Still, he’s never been quite so glad to pull into the front yard of his house before. And if he had known that thanks to Clem 114, the young couple will be settling just over the hill, the Chinese insurance agents will have to stay here for a whole season as not-quite-necessary field hands until their families get out of refugee camps less than a hundred kilometers away—or that after burying Mama for her, he will be marrying that plump daughter and starting another family at his age—well, he might not have done anything differently, except perhaps worn his best shirt and taken a few corners a little tighter. A man likes to make an impression on his friends, and he’s going to be telling this story—with his six passengers as his witnesses—for a long, long time.
