Mother of Storms

by John Barnes

  Back and forth, back and forth… white wall to white wall, five steps. The whole trick now is that machines, especially those replicator gadgets—which are going to get one huge boost from what that Tynan asshole tax-sucking civil servant has done—will do the physical producing, and artificial intelligences can probably do a lot of the design and inventing. So the real grunt labor, the true cleaning-toilet jobs, are going to be financial… time to get out of financial control? Do what, just own information? It’s not the most implausible idea he’s ever had, but he has no idea how to do it.

  He sits on his bunk edge and seriously considers trying to fall asleep with the lights on. Trouble is, he’s not really in the mood….

  The real reason why people sometimes do major intellectual work in prison, John Klieg figures, is because if you’ve got any brains, you can’t stop thinking for very long. He stretches out and considers… in a world of datarodents and reverse-engineering artificial intelligence, how is he supposed to keep hold of anything? Legal rights and permissions won’t matter either.

  Maybe the world will change enough? No telling what a world battered by Clem and the daughters might need, but if he can figure it out and corner that… the trouble is, of course, just when you have a lock on something everyone needs, some politician starts a crusade because everyone needs it and you’ve got a lock on it. It hardly seems fair that the better the deal the more likely they are to beat you up for it.

  A distant clang and thud. More noise. A pounding sound. As he does whenever there are unusual sounds, Klieg makes sure his shoes are tied and that the few possessions he was permitted to keep are in his pockets, especially his reading glasses.

  This time the noise goes on for quite a while, so he stands away from the door (but in plain view of it), ready to raise his hands. The two possibilities, always assuming that’s not just a bunch of clumsy deliverymen, are that it’s another coup and he’s about to be seized as a valuable asset, in which case he wants to cooperate with whoever is nearest him with a gun so as not to get shot in a crossfire, or—

  Something thuds hard against the door, and cracks appear in the surfacing around the frame. He backs up and puts his hands all the way up over his head.

  Another crash, and this time the door shudders; definitely they’re getting him out with some kind of hydraulic gadget, he can hear it pressurizing between blows. Got glasses, pockets loaded, shoes tied so he can run, pants pulled high enough not to trip on cuffs—

  With a boom, the door flips flat onto the floor, and Klieg sees the little ram they used to take it down, a gadget on a heavy iron tripod that looks more like a giant sliding latch for a door than anything else.

  The man who steps through the door and says “Mr. John Klieg?” is wearing a powder-blue UN uniform.

  “Yes, sir. Ready to go.”

  “Good. Follow me.”

  There are sirens and bells everywhere now, and the smell of smoke. In other parts of the building Klieg can still hear gunfire. But neither he, nor his rescuer—if that’s what this is—says anything. They hurry down the hall. Explanations can wait.

  “We can get you excused from that, you know,” a voice is saying in Mary Ann’s brain. “This is not something Synthi Venture has to do.”

  If you think that, you really don’t understand crap about all this, Mary Ann thinks back at the voice. Then she replays the exchange on the conscious level so that it goes out to all the experiencers.

  “Please don’t do that, it spoils the composition—”

  Exactly. What we don’t need around here is composition. She grips her shovel again. Now shut up and let me work. She wades back into the long ditch that she and several hundred others are digging. On August 6, at about 16N 135W, Clem spawned Clem 500, which has been wandering around to the south and east ever since. In the last thirty hours it has surged due north for the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and the evacuation columns from Tapachula have been ordered to dig in. Aircraft and trucks have been getting stockpiles of food, fresh water, and chemical toilets in as quickly as possible, and the long dugouts are growing everywhere. Jesse is over at the temporary airfield—due to his technical training they’ve made him a radar jock, based on about twenty minutes’ practice, serving an “air traffic controller” who once did the job at a small civil aviation field in the States, twenty years ago.

  Meanwhile, unskilled hands, like Mary Ann’s, are doing the rough work of getting the shelters dug.

  It’s a good feeling in her back and shoulders as she works; she’s in pretty decent shape these days. Besides, there’s a certain amount of pleasure in working on a gang with other women; she lets herself wonder if maybe it would be better if they started whistling at and harassing young men, and is rewarded with a scandalized squawk from Passionet about the thought.

  One of the conditions she insisted on before going back on Passionet was that she have ten minutes to herself every hour, and it took her some effort to make it clear to them that “to herself” did not mean “available for conversation.”

  So when she finds a foreign thought invading during her break she’s just plain furious. There’s a long pause, and then the voice says, “I’m sorry, I had no idea it was your break, but I’m not Passionet, and I was trying to get in touch with you when they weren’t online with you.”

  You’re not—there’s no way to hack a brain protocol—

  “I wouldn’t say that. I’d just say it’s kind of tough. Look, my name is Carla Tynan—have you heard that—”

  You’re the meteorologist they had a lot of trouble getting back onto the government payroll.

  “That’s me.” Quickly, Carla explains about her unlimited net access and her presence in the net most of the time. “What I’m talking to you about is just that I think there are some things you ought to know.”

  Well, sure. What are they?

  Carla Tynan has never wasted a lot of words in getting her point across. She tells Mary Ann quickly about what Louie is up to. “So there is help on the way, even if the government refuses to believe him and publicize it. That’s what I wanted you to know. Also, I can keep feeding you information from around the globe.”

  Why me? Mary Ann thinks.

  “Because you are Synthi Venture, and Synthi Venture is the mind that everyone is hearing this through. And if I warn you in advance about what’s coming, and give you time to think about it and see that it’s really something wonderful, people won’t be so frightened, or do anything stupid before they get used to the idea. The way you tell the story is the way it’s going to be in people’s minds. Probably forever. And I think you’ll tell the story better, give people a better handle on things and a better chance of understanding them, if you know more about how it’s likely to come out. Just remember, if you want to help, you don’t tell them till we’re ready.”

  Who’s “we”? And if it’s so wonderful, then show me.

  Carla does; it leaves Mary Ann breathless, so that she has to take a little extra time before she lets them log back on. As she works, joking, gossiping, and generally just sharing the time with the other women on her crew, the back of her mind, below what will register for XV, works on what Carla has told her. If it’s true, Clem is really not the biggest thing going on right now.

  “They got Klieg out,” the young man in uniform says, looking up from his keyboard. “There’s been a delay due to some bad crosswinds and it looks like a guidance satellite mistook a stadium under construction for a key landmark, so they aren’t at the launch sites yet.”

  Tension fills the crisis center. No one needs to say that if they don’t get the launch facility intact, the whole raid is truly for nothing, however better they might feel having gotten Klieg back.

  Hardshaw finally sighs, turns to the general at her right, and says, “So how did this happen?”

  General Tim Bricker is a tall, thin man, with a Southern drawl, younger than you’d expect; one of those ambitious, rising stars drawn to staff jobs because they’re a p
lace to find and impress patrons. Hardshaw chose him partly because he’s the kind of guy the job needs, someone who can handle the public political aspects and understands about deal-making and compromise, but also partly because he had a few years as captain of an infantry company and has seen combat twice, in the little brushfire rescue operations like this one.

  Bricker slowly closes his pad and leans forward to her. “Ms. President, this happened through a process we call a clusterfuck. Several things that normally would have worked happened not to. Some of the people in the field tried things to fix them, and because they didn’t have real good information, some of what they did made things worse. A lot of times bad things add up. So if your question is ‘What chain of events caused this?’ I have to tell you I don’t know just yet, we’re still trying to find out. But if your question is ‘Who’s fault is it so I can drop the bastard before he damages me?’ then I’d have to say it’s probably nobody’s fault, and if you want a fall guy, you’ll have to frame somebody.”

  His tone is hostile, even rude, and Hardshaw feels an urge to retaliate, but she’s spent enough hours with hostile witnesses before now. “General,” she says, “if you like, the question was rhetorical and I withdraw it. Just let me ask you this: Whenever someone proposes one of these things, why don’t I hear about possible clusterfucks beforehand?”

  “Because if we knew it could happen we’d have it blocked. There’re always surprises.” He stays right where he is, not backing an inch, and their eyes lock on each other.

  “Not what I meant, General, my fault.” She says it softly, gently, almost purring; Harris Diem might recognize the tone from some hard-fought cases long ago, but no one else in the room would. “I meant to ask you why you say ‘probability of success is x per cent,’ but you don’t add ‘And then of course we might accidentally shell our own troops after leaving them on a beach, or two staticopters could collide, or we might accidentally shoot up a schoolbus, or maybe thirty of our men will be captured and mutilated.’ Just to mention examples going back a few years.”

  “Because you don’t ask us and you don’t want to hear it. Ms. President, all I’m saying is that this kind of thing can happen. It does happen. You’re dealing with split-second timing and human reactions that have to be perfect in an environment with flame, smoke, noise, explosions, gunfire—shit happens. And you’ve been in office a while, and been through a rescue or two before. How can you sit there and pretend that you had no idea this could happen?”

  Hardshaw leans back and looks hard at the general. There are several problems here; first of all, he’s mostly right, and many of the people here know that, so she can’t just brush him off. Secondly, he’s being right in an insubordinate way, which might be either strategy or total loss of patience, but either way she can’t let him get away with it. Having dealt with Bricker for about a year now, her guess is that it’s strategy, probably getting himself down as the man who defended the armed forces from President Grandma, a plain blunt-spoken soldier, and thus a good pick for the next administration.

  None of which means he doesn’t have a point.

  She can’t let this stretch on any longer, so she says, finally, “The problem is noted. Please note also my request that henceforth I wish to be reminded of the possibility of a clusterfuck in any contigency plan or operations proposal submitted for my attention. In fact—” She smiles at him. “We’re going to call this the Bricker Requirement, to make sure that you get proper credit. Just make sure that you don’t lose the terminology by prettying it up, General. If you’re going to remind me that a clusterfuck can happen, I want the word ‘clusterfuck’ used in the reports.”

  “Noted,” Bricker says. His reaction is now unreadable; maybe he’s satisfied at having the problem addressed, more likely he’s trying to figure his next move.

  Three minutes later they get word. The Siberians had enough time. They blew up towers, control rooms, the deep accelerator tubes that Klieg was counting on for all-weather launch. If help is going to come, it will have to come from Louie Tynan.

  On Wednesday, August 16, Louie is farther away from Earth than any human being has ever been. According to data he’s getting via Louie-on-the-moon, there are at least half a billion people, many of whom never had access to XV before the free headsets were distributed, who spend all day long, now, plugged into Synthi Venture, listening to the news and walking with her. The destruction of Klieg’s launch facilities seems to have led to only a single brief day of civil disorders, mostly because Synthi Venture disapproved so strongly of looting and fighting and everyone was tuning back into her.

  For whatever reason, Hardshaw and Rivera and all have decided to keep word of the 2026RU expedition out of the media, which is not an easy job. If it were not for Carla stalking Jameson (and the dozen imitators she has by now) through the nets, the secret would be long since out.

  Louie wonders why they’re keeping his mission secret, letting it appear there is no hope when that’s not so. Maybe it’s because he’s dead. He doesn’t really understand why that should be held against him. After all, it isn’t like he smells bad.

  He has noticed, however, that nobody seems to want to talk to him directly anymore, and his lunar and asteroidal spawn agree with him about that. Does it make them nervous that he’s dead or that he’s still alive? Or that they can’t tell him from the living?

  He wonders if maybe the universe is going to be lonelier than he had thought it would, because just possibly there will be very few people who want to be friends with a dead guy.

  Carla’s last letter rather gently chided him about self-pity. Maybe he should take her seriously about that.

  It will be okay as long as he doesn’t have to be lonely.

  He has so much surplus processing capacity, in this stage of things, that he begins to ask his lunar self for all the spare data it can get, and there are enough systems up and running on Earth to feed his hunger. He gets the Library of Congress and seriously considers reading the whole thing; he gets weather reports and satellite data, raw field notes of university researchers, some of them on video—these, he finds, seem to be the best. Though he knows that every camera was pointed by someone or something, he likes the feeling that whoever it was didn’t compose everything, that though he can’t be entirely sure what’s accidental and what’s not, much of it must be.

  Louie watches people who have never seen anyone other than the forty people in their little tribe meet the great wide world. He watches animals copulate, kill each other, grow old and die. He watches ponds become climax forest and revert to ponds; catches the immense complexity of a condor in flight and the simplicity of the nitrogen cycle.

  He finds that he likes this a lot. One of the most interesting things that the creativity researchers found out (and Louie suddenly begins to wonder about creativity, and within a few minutes he has put together every study ever done on it, read them all, and formed his own view) was that esthetic pleasure is linked, on some deep level, to the complexity of what we see—sometimes to the complexity of its interrelations rather than to the complexity of the object itself.

  One reason nature pleases us is its endless use of a few simple principles: the cube-square law; fractals; spirals; the way that waves, wheels, trig functions, and harmonic oscillators are alike; the importance of ratios between small primes; bilateral symmetry; Fibonacci series, golden sections, quantization, strange attractors, path-dependency, all the things that show up in places where you don’t expect them… these rules work with and against each other ceaselessly at all levels, so that out of their intrinsic simplicity comes the rich complexity of the world around us. That tension—between the simple rules that describe the world and the complex world we see—is itself both simple in execution and immensely complex in effect. Thus exactly the levels, mixtures, and relations of complexity that seem to be hardwired into the pleasure centers of the human brain—or are they, perhaps, intrinsic to intelligence and perception, pleasant to anything
that can see, think, create?—are the ones found in the world around us.

  It looks like a good deal to Louie that we are constructed to like the world in which we find ourselves. He has looked at a lot of art by now and so much of it seems to be about how to see, and now that he knows how to see, he looks at art less and nature more. There is time for all sorts of things; for drops of dew on leaves, forests crawling up burned mountainsides, the breaking of surface tension around a duck’s feet as it takes off, and the sucking down of the Earth’s crust into mantle.

  The amusements are endless; he augments them with data from the other planets, by comparison, and even squeezes a few orbiters into the launch schedule so that by the time he is on his way back he will have continuous monitoring of every major body in the solar system. But he already knows, somehow, that Earth is his favorite planet… Earth with its living things, of course, and with an oxidizing atmosphere, plate tectonics, and water cycle to endlessly change the shape of its seas and coasts, where a tiny variation in temperature can make such a huge difference—

  He sees that if Clem and Clem’s daughters are let alone, they will not put an end to Earth or life, and probably not even to human beings. With his own lifespan now extending to infinity (for he can repair and recopy himself as long as he cares to), Louie could, if he chose, sit back and watch the world re-invent complexity as it filled its empty niches, and the niches between the newly filled niches, and the new niches that created—

  He could but he’d rather have Earth as it is. Call it a sentimental attachment.

  On August 20, Louie Tynan crosses Jupiter’s orbit, a bit more than five astronomical units from the sun. The giant planet itself is nowhere nearby, of course; it’s a purely arbitrary boundary, the imaginary line that marks an ellipse in the black vacuum. Still, it’s the first of the gas giants, the four huge planets of the outer solar system that formed far enough away from the sun to keep their original loads of hydrogen and helium. He is now truly out in the cold and the dark.