by John Barnes
His heart stops. His carotids contract.
There’s music, and he finds himself moving forward in a long dark tunnel, almost laughing because it is so much what they have told him it will be like, and sure enough his mother and father, who he hasn’t thought of five times in ten years, are there to greet him, and—
He wakes up. He’s in the machine; Louie-the-body and Louie-the-ship are one and the same, and instantly he understands that Louie-the-ship accepted the necessity but didn’t want to lose any of himself; he finds himself on both sides of the decision, matches them up instant by instant, accepts himself, ceases to feel like two, except, only, that he looks through the camera and sees his body lying dead on the deck, the sanitation robots about to close in and move it down to the freezer. This gives him an oddly split sensation, one part of him recalling having died in that body, the other part remembering killing it.
But stranger still is his realization that when he re-merged into the intelligence in the ship—when he fully became the “real” Louie Tynan—as he was yanked away from the light, and from Mom and Dad (Dad was just about to say something, and was smiling in a way he rarely did when he was alive)…
… there was a tiny bit of time left before the body died, and there was still a Louie in that body. So he did kill himself… and if he ever had a soul, it’s gone to heaven or hell now. Did he get another one by surviving? Is he truly soulless now?
It’s the kind of thing that he can think about, now, forever.
He hallucinates a warm South Pacific beach from before, and turns to Carla’s latest message to reread it again. They spend a month sailing along the Solomons; they laugh and talk a lot, and communicate better than they ever really did.
He doesn’t know whether he still has a soul, but he’s quite sure he can still feel love—and that’s more than good enough for a practical man, anyway. Four minutes—a bit over twenty-two brain-years-after the death of his body, he has made as much philosophic peace as he figures he’ll ever need with the idea.
John Klieg is feeling pretty cheerful; it’s hard to feel any other way when you’ve got four sets of mortal enemies on Earth and right now all of them are on a collision course with each other. He doesn’t think his call to Berlina leaked, but if it did, that’s all right too. The important thing is to get the Abdulkashim escape attempt blown, and to have the conspirators know that it’s blown; if his own sources don’t show a change of plans in the next few days, he’s got a couple of tricks in mind to call it to their attention.
Just now, about the only perk left to him are his hundred news screens, so he’s actually trying to watch all of them, just to see what that’s like. Derry is sitting beside him on the couch, quietly drawing horses—about the only thing you can say for this grimy, muddy frontier burg is that there’s plenty of opportunity for a horse-crazy kid. Glinda is catching yet another nap; she hasn’t been very much herself this last week, which he can well understand. Ordinary business competition is one thing and assassination and coup quite another. Klieg himself is surprised at how well he has taken to it.
He still doesn’t have a good backchannel into the States anywhere; he kicks himself daily for not having established one before he got here, but after all it was the first time he ventured out into the real sticks of the globe.
The screens are showing Clem’s granddaughters ravaging Europe, and Klieg is finding that kind of interesting. Americans don’t see much footage of Europe anymore, partly because of the refugee lobby—two million Afropeans, plus about a million of various Euro refugees, will light up the switchboards if there’s any favorable or even neutral coverage of any event in Europe. And in the last twelve years a lot of Americans have picked up the same prejudices.
Right now, though, mostly you’re seeing the same old stuff—oceangoing ships driven up onto the shores, buildings you remember from postcards and calendars swaying and falling, that sort of thing. Half a dozen hurricanes and big storms have drenched the Mediterranean basin in so much water that the Med is filling up way above historic levels, and between the organic silt washing in, the dilution of the salt, and the darkness, most of what used to live in it is dying. The smell is said to be indescribable, which is one reason why Klieg won’t experience it on XV. The other reason, of course, is that even though it’s all very touching and a lot of history is drowning, Klieg is a people-now kind of person—and refugees from floods are pretty much alike everywhere. Lots of parades of crying kids, coughing old people who might not make it, people with a wiped-out look because everything is gone. The first time you see it, it’s moving. The hundredth time, it just doesn’t matter.
They’ve all seen, on the television, and on the pub’s two XV sets, what happened to Hawaii. The village has no particular hope, for it’s about to get the same treatment, and there’s talk that the storm surge might wash right over all of Ireland. Thus they gather in the church with Father Joseph, not because they think it is safer, or that anything better is going to happen, or even because the church has a slightly better roof (though it does), but because it seems a fit place to wait to die.
The last ones come in from the pitch-black night, a night so dark that the lightning flashes make it glow but do not allow anyone to see. The roads are said to be hopelessly muddy, but no one much wanted to try them anyway. If you must drown, might as well do it in County Clare; if you must live, might as well ride it out in a dry church on a hill.
Somewhere far to the west is Clem 238, throwing out the great storm surges that the government radar spotted hours ago.
There are plenty of candles, so Father Joseph has them light a few and encourages people to sing, over the sound of a few men boarding the stained glass windows on the inside (Father Joseph himself did the outsides hours ago).
He wishes, as priest to these people, that he were a profound man. Mostly he just handles the baptizing, marrying, and burying, and occasionally tries to persuade someone to do what is right. This is not a job for Father Joseph.
If, however, it’s a job for God Himself, then common sense says to ask Him. He leads more prayers. People drowse, but the priest hasn’t the heart to wake them.
The clock says it should have been dawn, but no dawn comes, not even as a crack of light in the great doors. The church smells of too many people and wet clothing.
Michael Dwyer volunteers to try using the big searchlight on his lorry-his “rig” he calls it since he listens to so much American music-and at least see what can be seen in the valley.
The church is now on an island, and the water is rising. Michael and Joseph discuss it very briefly. “I’d appreciate it if you’d not tell them.”
“Wouldn’t think of it, Father. Let’em not fear until the time to fear.”
They go back in, soaked to the skin and freezing cold, to tell everyone that it was too dark.
The next time, some hours later after their clothes have dried enough to be put back on, they need speak no words to each other. The water is higher, and it flows opposite the direction of the streams that once ran through the valley. On a whim, Michael climbs down to dip his hand in, and comes back saying “I tasted salt, Father. The ocean’s coming in.”
Half a day more passes by the clock; strange to think this is coming from a hurricane, and yet there’s only the wind from a bad storm, no more. The battery wireless says 238 will miss Ireland entirely, that it has turned away and headed north to die.
By the clock, the water rises for twelve more hours; the last time Michael and Father Joseph check, they cannot get to Michael’s truck, and they are afraid that the people inside may hear the rushing water. It’s now been two days with only the food people brought.
When dawn comes next, there is light. Father Joseph goes outside, to find that the rain is spitting and spraying from high clouds, and the water is well down the hill again. While he watches, a patch of blue forms overhead.
Michael comes up behind him. “They are saying on the wireless that the sea has forced
its way right up the Shannon to Lough Derg, Father, and so much has washed away that they think it’ll be that way for good now; we’ve got an inner sea in Ireland.”
Joseph nods, and then points. Something soggy and wet flops miserably out of the sky in a great flutter of wings. They walk up to it; the bird is exhausted and so helpless that it cannot escape them. The priest picks it up. “Now, it would be a dove, wouldn’t it?” he says.
Later that afternoon, the whistlers arrive with emergency rations. After the “miracle” of the church on the hill, no one can be persuaded to leave, no matter what the government man says.
Klieg is fascinated with another daughter of Clem-Clem 239. Barely maintaining its status as a hurricane, 239 managed to round Scotland and is now in the North Sea, its eye just 200 km due west of the Skaggerak. Storm surges are crashing into Denmark, and there’s some interesting footage of farmhouses and bams, and sometimes herds of cattle, swept over by the towering waves; winds are at 70 km/hr, Beaufort 12, the low end of hurricane force, in Denmark. They are expected to pick up.
Clem 239 has been sitting still for about eight hours, and it’s the one that Klieg is interested in. He’s got a bet down on it, you might say. And from his standpoint, the little jig the huge hurricane has been doing in the North Sea hundreds of miles from where there’s ever been one before, has been just about perfect.
Figure by highjump from Novokuznetsk it’s about an hour and a half to Stockholm… but there’s no regularly scheduled service. Probably they’d jump into Warsaw or Frankfurt and then take ziplines from there… unless the Baltic gets too rough too fast.
He’s been accessing zipline and highjump timetables all over the place, and he thinks it all works out. The question now, really, is whether the local goons have been smart enough to do the same. Klieg devoutly hopes so; the trouble with stupid people, he has explained more than once to Glinda, is not that they consistently do dumb things, which you could plan for, but that they do smart things unpredictably.
Nothing yet; there it sits, 200 km west of the Skaggerak, pumping huge waves out. It’s incidentally making Klieg rich all over again, because Klieg’s meteorologists had guessed right about the real odds of one of the superhurricanes rounding Scotland, and what preconditions would allow it to happen. Sure enough, they did… and Klieg shorted the living daylights out of Royal Dutch Shell, two days before everyone else began selling it.
The best guess is that the dikes might have another nine hours; transport is beginning to snarl hopelessly as the people with lower priorities begin either to bribe their way onto transportation or to do things that are illegal.
It’s not that people don’t like the Dutch, as such. Many of them might be willing enough to have a Dutchman or two live down the block for a few weeks, if that would help, Horst is thinking. But there are just practical matters to be considered, and that’s that. He hopes the captain won’t have to give the order, but he’ll carry it out if he has to.
It makes Will feel a little funny. He went over on that ferry several times, for football matches, and sometimes just with friends for some drinking and whoring. He was there on leave just last year. Now he sits here in his staticopter, taking a radar sight on the ferry. Loaded with Dutchmen and Belgians, and the poor old UK is in a bad enough way. Sure, those folks in Brussels say we have to take them, don’t they? Well, look where Brussels is. What a coincidence…. Still, probably kids on that thing. And women. Seems a shame. He waits for his orders.
Paul-Luc sits at his post and waits; he and his mates have been having a fine time with the Belgian girls. They’ve got a rumor over on the other side that if you do what the French soldiers like over here, they’ll smuggle you out somehow. Paul-Luc, Jean, and Marc have been accepting the favors, leading the girls into the woods, and then giving them the garrotte. It’s like XV but better.
Marc has been looking a bit ill, though… and Paul-Luc and Jean have been considering that perhaps it isn’t just the girls who need to be shut up.
If it’s the end of the world, you might as well enjoy it, right?
Right, Will thinks, and the missile heads out for the crowded ferry—thank god it’s over the horizon, and dark, and he will never see the flames or bodies.
Right, thinks Horst, and to his own surprise, throws down his rifle and walks away. It doesn’t matter much when they arrest him. Any fool can see no one is going anywhere.
Klieg shrugs and opens up another American beer. Three of these things in a day is about his limit. He wonders if there is some requirement that you have to be an idiot to be a politician. Half a generation ago the Europeans solved their unification difficulties by ganging up to hate anyone who wasn’t white enough for them. They were at least as stupid as Hitler was about the Jews, in Klieg’s opinion. GateTech has a minimum of a hundred solid, capable Afropean employees.
He looks at the scenes from Europe, remembers how pleasant the places are, but can’t work up much in the way of tears. Twenty years ago the Afropeans were supposed to be the impossible barrier to European unification, then five years after that it was Turks and Serbs, and now the typical German figures it’s the French, Poles, and Italians—if not the Bavarians.
So now when they need to hang together, they’re tearing each other apart.
One screen captures a scene from Copenhagen; he zooms in on it and cues up sound. A mixed group of German and Polish powerboaters have waded ashore and started killing women and girls, concentrating on blondes. Usually they force them to undress at gunpoint, shoot them in the belly, and film their death throes. No one knows why.
Troops are being diverted from evacuation points, and traffic snarls caused by panic are further reducing the number of Danes expected to escape from the city.
Klieg thinks, realizes that he does remember the names of four German companies that deal in deathporn, picks up the phone, and places stock orders, investing in all four. Odds are overwhelming that that is what this is; somebody is paying good money to see pretty women, particularly blondes, die in agony.
He shudders, when he thinks of Glinda and of Derry, but he leaves the order in place. He’s going to need cash one way or another. As an afterthought, he starts moving his CD accounts to banks in the inland United States.
An hour later, Clem 239 starts its move toward the Baltic. John Klieg tells Derry to get him his packed bag and go stay with her mother in the bedroom. No sense taking any chances.
Derry does what she’s told and doesn’t ask him what it’s about. He uses the last few minutes to send a short order about household maintenance to his housekeeping staff, something he does every night before getting to bed.
This time, though, a special arrangement of keywords puts a whole chain of other events into motion; artificial intelligences begin calling government and media offices, make their mechanical announcements without listening, repeat the process over and over.
The knock on his door is surprisingly polite when it comes. The two men there for him are dapper, polished sorts, and they accept his explanation of a pre-packed bag “for these uncertain times, you know” at face value. They don’t even handcuff him, just drive him direct to the Government Center.
He was expecting the governing council; what he wasn’t expecting was that Abdulkashim would be already addressing them via phone, But there he is, much larger than life, his famous resemblance to Stalin a little more pointed than usual because he’s in the prison uniform. Abdulkashim speaks in Russian, still the Siberian lingua franca, but Klieg discovers his headset has settings for English, German, Japanese, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Yakut, Buryat, and several of the local tribal languages. Klieg knows what’s about to be said, of course, in outline if not exactly, so he idly considers listening to the speech in some language he’s never heard before. The only thing that stops him is that he has to keep track for the sake of timing.
“Gentlemen of the governing council, distinguished foreign visitors, and foreign leaders, my greetings to you. As you have
no doubt already realized, a short while ago loyal units of the Siberian Army and Air Force extricated me from the prison where I was being illegally held. It is a supremely pleasant irony to me that my release from the UN political prison at Stockholm was effected under cover of one of the many hurricanes spawned by the UN’s completely illegal, brutal, unwarranted, and environmentally dangerous attack on our armed forces on March ninth of this year.
“I trust my Siberian people have now seen that I was right to warn them against the perfidy of foreign powers and of the United Nations in particular. But I trust they will also see the wisdom in our opening the doors of our nation to foreign commerce, for despite our differences with the United States, it is an American citizen, Mr. John Klieg, who tonight has made it possible for us to assert the independence that is rightfully ours. As of tonight, Siberia is the only nation on Earth that can put a payload into orbit from the Earth’s surface, and we are prepared to put this capability at the service of the peoples of the Earth. Siberian genius, as you might well have guessed—”
There isn’t one Siberian on the development team, Klieg thinks. One more little thing to think while the Great Man rambles on….
“—has invented the means to put an end to the dreadful scourge of superhurricanes, and we are prepared to act immediately if our reasonable demands, too long denied in the international courts of law, are met. Once our rightful territorial claims have been acknowledged, and suitable indentures paid by nations whose names we will be releasing shortly, we will act at once to end the hurricanes.”
Klieg sits and looks attentive, a skill that he picked up during his days in sales. He suspects there’s not a businessman on Earth, certainly not a successful one, who can’t do this when need be. Of course it will be the better part of a year before enough balloons can be launched to make a difference. He wonders if Abdulkashim does not know that, or if he knows but doesn’t care. It doesn’t make any real difference. Abdulkashim is getting down to threats.
