Mother of Storms

by John Barnes

  Harris Diem nods. “And I’m afraid it will work, for that matter. If it does, we’ve got a dictator for the solar system—and one with a lot of popular support.”

  “Yeah.” Suddenly she laughs.

  “What is it?” Diem asks.

  “Oh, you know, I met Louie Tynan a few times. One thing I think any woman would notice about him is that he’s a horny guy; he really loved being the big space explorer because so many women would fawn all over him. If he ends up as dictator of the solar system… well. He’ll have them throwing themselves at him, and no way to do anything with any of them. Can you imagine that? All the access you want to whatever you want sexually, and no way to use it?”

  Diem smiles. “It doesn’t sound very pleasant.”

  From July 25 to August 2, Clem veers and wobbles eastward, in yet another defiance of normal hurricane behavior, riding the steering currents and its own outflow jet against the Coriolis forces. It hangs between the 35th and 40th parallels of north latitude, normally much too far north for a hurricane to go without dying, but also the part of the Pacific that exhibits the strongest differential—now a belt of hot water all the way across, from which Clem draws steadily more energy.

  Seeing it coming, and understanding what it means, makes an immense difference; the West Coast evacuates in a steady stream. On every interstate one lane is reserved for gasoline trucks heading west, and the rest are allocated to eastward traffic. Buses and vans cruise along in a reserved fast lane to carry those without automated cars—and to pick up those whose cars fail them. Tent cities and temporary settlements bloom all over the Rockies; Chugwater, Wyoming, finds itself a metropolis, with the Corps of Engineers working around the clock to get adequate sewers, roads, and power lines.

  To the north, in Pacificanada, Vancouver drains like a leaking balloon toward Calgary.

  But the coast is not empty on the afternoon of August 1 when the great waves slam into Puget Sound and begin to roll down the coast. Some people were still waiting, some have elected only to climb to high ground. A few stubbornly refused to believe it might happen, clinging to the idea that God or Nature could not be cruel enough to ravage the coast again.

  And some, like Old Robert and Old Bob, just never heard the news. Old Robert has been collecting junk for recycling for a long time, and Old Bob, his dog, has been following him all that time. The nicknames were chosen by Old Robert, who always talks about and to himself in third person.

  They’re walking out on the long fake pier that has the fancy seafood joints; for once no one is stopping them, and the cops are not hassling them. The water looks funny today, really choppy and high, but since folks ran off pretty fast, there’s lots of garbage for Old Bob to eat.

  Old Robert tries the door to a place called Acres of Clams, mostly because the guy on the sign has an old scraggly beard and old scraggly clothes just like Old Robert. It opens; somebody didn’t think it mattered. “Come on, Old Bob. Old Robert and you’s gonna eat.”

  “Eat” is just about the only word, besides his name, that Old Bob knows. He’s through the door in a flash.

  The building is one of those powerchip things, so it makes its own natural gas out of air and water—someone explained that to Old Robert a long time ago. He used to be a pretty fair cook, and he puts a big pan on, drops a stick of butter in it, turns the heat on underneath, and goes to the cooler. There’re big chunks of fish and some soft-shell crab, and he throws them in with the butter, along with handfuls of chopped onion. It’s never smelled so good in all the world.

  Old Bob gets whatever hits the floor instead of the pan, and that’s a lot.

  The big plate of hot food is wonderful, but it takes Old Robert a long time to finish it—he’s not used to such rich fare. In the end some of it goes into Old Bob, who isn’t so particular.

  There’s all kinds of wine around; Old Robert decides to have a little of that, just a bottle maybe, and feed a couple of steaks to Old Bob to keep him quiet.

  It takes a little digging to find the corkscrew, but he does. He flips the slab of raw bloody beef to Old Bob, who goes after it like a starving wolf, and then hoists the bottle. Outside it’s now raining like mad, and the wind is really picking up. Good day to be indoors.

  “Happy days!” he shouts to Old Bob. Startled, the dog drops the steak and then frantically scrabbles about trying to get it back into his mouth. That’s so funny half the wine comes out of Old Robert’s nose.

  The dog seems to get the joke and dances around like a complete idiot, barking. Old Robert laughs, and then they get down to the wine and the steak. Man, man, man, it doesn’t get any better than this. What did they say in the old days? Groovy. It’s a pretty groovy afternoon.

  They never see the towering wave roll in, or hear the building grinding, or feel it all come down on them. They are both in a stupor, Old Bob with his head on Old Robert’s chest, when it comes. The restaurant is caught in the undertow and dragged out into Puget Sound; their bodies are never found.

  “Incredible,” Berlina is saying on August 5. She and Naomi have pulled into Portland, where the big surge that burst a hundred miles up the Columbia smashed right over Jantzen Beach and Hayden Island, tore a new channel to the Willamette, and slowly drained back, pulling down the Montavilla Arcology as it did so. “They were warned, they were told, there were a thousand pictures of what was going to happen, they knew backwards and forwards that their damned concrete turtle wouldn’t hold against a wave half a mile high, and they stayed.”

  She’s saying this to Naomi Cascade, who is hand-operating the camera and is in her second week as Berlina’s part-time employee and full-time admirer. Before them stretches a great oval of concrete and rebar rubble, half a mile across, what remains after the shock of the wave’s impact exploded the air trapped inside the thirty-story-tall structure.

  Naomi shrugs. “Most of them left. It was just a couple of old people and some who were watching XV—”

  “That’s what I mean. God, it’s a terrible thing for a reporter to feel sorry for a bureaucrat, but it worries hell out of me that the government couldn’t get them to evacuate because they couldn’t promise XV on the buses. People didn’t want to be away from Synthi Venture, because it’s too interesting to watch her evacuate.”

  “People are weird,” Naomi says. “Maybe they could have gotten her to say something like, ‘Hey, all you idiots in Portland, move your butts!’”

  “She would have, too. She’s the only XV person I’ve got any use for. Your old boyfriend has good taste. We’ve got enough of this for backdrop, anyway, and we want to get back before the Army decides it shouldn’t have permitted us into the area and sends staticopters after us.”

  “Yeah.” Naomi shuts down, stops, looks at the vast wasteland of mud and shattered construction with her own eyes and not the eyes of the camera. “You know,” she says, “I don’t think this really would go into words at all.”

  They are packed in ten minutes, into the new van that Berlina bought, having put her tiny old car into honorable retirement as a souvenir, now that she is wealthy. There are no guidelines but this thing has full inertial navigation, so Berlina just tells it where to go and it starts to drive itself, checking directions and position with satellites overhead.

  “Good thing we came when we did,” Berlina says. “In another day as the temperature comes up—you’re not going to believe what places like this will smell like.”

  Naomi nods very seriously and works on squaring the gear away. Berlina sits back, thinks to herself that getting an employee was the smartest decision she ever made, and grins a little at what she’s just done. Nothing like some gruesome, hard-bitten remark to put some romance into the heart of a—

  She all but laughs aloud with delight. She had been about to think, into the heart of a cub reporter. Which is just what Naomi is turning into, and what that means is that Berlina Jameson is not the last of the newscasters. She wonders if maybe she should call up Wendy Lou Bartnick and tell her
that she’s a grandmother.

  The van rolls east—miraculously, despite all the wind and rain, the way through Bennet Pass, past Mount Hood, is still open. They make hot sandwiches and coffee and sit up front to look at the devastated forest and small towns as they travel through. As the sun goes down, their lights are the only ones visible. Ruins, smashed trees, and the occasional human, deer, bear, or cow corpse swims up in the lights and rolls back behind them. After a while, they sleep.

  Ever so carefully, exchanging a neutral signal here, a stray thing that could be made to look like line noise there, a datarodent from outside the system probes at the van’s onboard processor net, finding its way in through the navigation system, then crossing over until finally it is able to recover stored electronic media and Berlina’s rough script for the next Sniffings. Then it quietly erases its tracks and vanishes.

  Carla Tynan got what she needed, at Louie-on-the-moon’s request, and it’s no surprise when he then asks her to go into the research files and silently kill four or five phrases that might lead Jameson to the cometoid retrieval project.

  She switches on an onboard camera and looks around briefly. Naomi Cascade is sleeping nude on the lower bunk on one side, and light reflecting in from the headlights is enough to outline her body. Geez, Carla thinks, I usually did okay with guys but if I’d been built like that—

  She turns her attention to Berlina Jameson and catches the reporter very quietly watching the sleeping Naomi. As Carla watches, Berlina slides a hand down to between her own legs, and begins to play with herself, rolling over to see Naomi better as she does.

  Carla clicks out; she hadn’t intended to pry. And she finds, too, that much as she has to interfere with Jameson’s covering the story, keep her from learning about Louie’s expedition… she likes the reporter, and just now she feels very sorry for anyone who is longing to touch a particular human body that isn’t accessible.

  On August 5, GMT, just 390 hours after he reached Earth escape velocity, Louie Tynan crosses the orbit of Mars, 1.57 AU from the sun. The first time he did this, on the UN Mars Mission, it took nine months.

  He wasn’t supposed to be here until late September; he is truly making time now. The lunar catapults are longer than ever, firing harder, and he has added laser-boost: as each packet leaves the catapult, powerful lasers burn off a solid hydrogen plug inside an open-ended cylinder at its rear, producing high-velocity exhaust and further accelerating the package.

  He is up to eleven brain-years per minute and gaining; if he can be counted as human, not exactly having the body anymore to prove it with, then he is now the fastest-moving human being ever to live, moving along at an astronomical unit every ten days, four times the speed for this day in the originally planned mission. He can’t help feeling congratulations are due.

  The news from Earth is bizarre to him; after all the supposed impossibilities, it took one good XV program to end Global Riot Two. Maybe he’s not all that sure he wants to be human, after all. He also notes with some pleasure that he likes Jesse and Mary Ann, and then realizes that that’s the point of the whole thing; everyone who doesn’t have anything to do stays home to root for the hero. Since you can’t depend on people to help, at least it gets them out of the way. That is just, perhaps, a little bit depressing.

  Carla seems to have forgiven him for sacrificing his body, though he won’t feel really forgiven until they are back in realtime contact and able to truly share each other’s feelings. But it’s a good sign, anyway, that she’s not angry at him anymore.

  He is now just about five light-minutes from Earth, which means that one hundred ten years of thinking go by, subjectively, between sending a message to Carla and hearing what she thinks of it. Figure since he no longer sleeps at all it’s effectively one-third longer, and you get 146 years. That’s a lot of thinking; Carla’s getting faster too, and that’s a good thing.

  Louie has chewed out a lot of philosophic issues, and gnawed others down to the kernel of sheer personal taste and temperament at their hearts. Never much given to philosophy before, he has been doing only this because it does seem to be the most effective way he can find of using up processing time, and he needs ways to use it up; otherwise, memories come to the fore, he starts linking them together, and before long he has emotional reactions out of any connection to his present circumstances.

  He wondered for a while where his emotions were coming from, and finally settled on hysteresis. In a normal human body emotions are the way they are because of the chemical component of mental process; the chemicals hit every cell of the nervous system indiscriminately, and it takes longer to scrub out chemicals than switch off electrical signals. Thus one tends to have a pervasive feeling about the world as a whole (even when the signals are disparate) and feelings are never completely aligned with the present moment, because there are always some spare chemicals lying around from before.

  In Louie’s case, hysteresis—the self-induction that makes it impossible to turn off current in a conductor instantaneously—is a bit longer, in terms of his mental process, than the chemical delay was in his old body. This is partly because there is so much of him, partly because it’s so spread out, and mainly because he is so massively parallel that he runs far faster than the electronics that hold him together in a single personality. And somewhere in that little gap between starting a change of current and finishing it… he has feelings.

  He wonders, idly, whether his mind had the slots for anger, love, joy, fear, whatever, and just happened to fit various hysteresis phenomena into those slots—or whether somehow those emotions are intrinsic properties of any system.

  It doesn’t seem to matter a great deal. He has emotions. If they had vanished, he wouldn’t have been sad, but he’d have been missing something.

  On August 9, 2028, Clem comes to a rest over the graves of its first victims, at Kingman Reef. Its eye is just over 350 kilometers across, and winds in the eyewall roar at 250 meters per second, a wind faster than tornado winds ever get, whirling around an eye the size of the state of Ohio. The hot ocean surface pumps more energy in, but Clem is at last encountering an upper limit; wind resistance increases rapidly as Mach 1, the speed of sound, is approached, and at the surface of the ocean right now the wind in the eyewall is moving at Mach 0.7. So the wind resistance from the surface of the ocean is holding Clem’s winds down to their current speed.

  This creates an odd situation; if the ocean warms up a little more, Clem will not speed up much at all. Di or Jesse would say that if the wind speed is v and the ocean surface temperature is t, dv/dt is very small in this range of t, or that the situation is now “temperature insensitive.”

  Only when the ocean is supplying enough energy for Clem to “punch through” into the supersonic realm will the superhurricane grow much—but if enough energy does turn up, because supersonic flow encounters much less resistance, Clem’s eyewall winds will leap from their current speed to Mach 1.2 or higher within a matter of minutes.

  Fortunately, the ocean is not yet warm enough to do that, and it will reach such temperatures only at shallow spots later in the summer.

  Someplace, once, John Klieg read a long list of people who wrote great books or planned great achievements while in prison. Lenin was supposed to have been one, and some of the apostles, and… well, a lot of people, anyway.

  He always figured it was a matter of having a lot of time on your hands, but he hadn’t really had a concept of what “a lot of time” really means. He’s beginning to catch on.

  The first two days in here, no one talked to him, but they did bring him a short note that said Glinda and Derry were being held under house arrest, and they were comfortable. The food here is okay, considering it’s the same stew and bread every meal, but it only takes a few minutes to eat, and you can only sleep so much. They put him in a coverall and every other day he gets to hand that in, take a shower, and put on a clean one.

  Physically it’s not a bad existence, but after three days
he’d have killed to have a notebook. You can think only as far as your memory can reach, and without a notebook that isn’t far; a few times he’s done long bits of arithmetic in his head, only to find at the end he had forgotten what it was that he was solving them for.

  It’s frustrating, too, because with this much time to turn things over in his head, he’s gotten a much clearer take on both GateTech and business generally, and once he gets out he’s going to have to spend a couple of days dictating to get it all laid out for himself. There’s a new way of doing business that’s becoming clear to him… GateTech was just a primitive way of doing it, and getting into space launch this way still cruder. He’s always known the real way to money is not through production but through control; “The hotel owner gets rich owning the keys, the maids stay poor keeping the toilets clean,” as one of his biz profs back at Madison used to say.

  The trick is to stay out of the bathroom and up by the front desk. Or better yet hire someone to run the front desk and stay home.

  Klieg notices he’s pacing the cell; it comforts him, because he’s seen that in so many movies and it’s nice to know that some things really do work the way they’re supposed to. Not that this place is a dungeon or anything, more like a no-frills hotel—not even a lock that works from the inside—he’ll have to remember that one for Glinda….

  The walls are bare and off-white, and the construction is just shoddy enough so that even though it’s new you can see some lumpy spots. The bed is an ordinary steel frame bed, the sink a basin with a coldwater spigot, and the toilet a pretty basic flush model with no cover and a seat that doesn’t raise. They let him keep his watch, so he knows that the lights get turned on at seven every morning and off at nine at night.