Mother of Storms

by John Barnes

  Neither of them ever got along with people much, but people are what there is to work with, and now they understand a lot more about them than they used to. Louie and Carla Tynan work together, and they are content.

  For amusement he proposes a question to her—will people react negatively to being well taken care of, once they realize who is doing it and how it’s being done?

  Her answer is that though these people might, by the time people catch on they will be the sort of people whom the whole thing can be handed over to, if they really want to be bothered with their own economics and politics again.

  It’s a good joke, to them, and there’s laughter on ten thousand antennas. They decide that good as the joke is, they can’t let Mary Ann in on it. Anyway, they have lots of time to talk about it, more time than all of human history, before the crowd reaches the mountaintop and stands at Monte Alban.

  As Berlina Jameson sits huddled with the students in the Student Center, her arm around Naomi Cascade, her phone rings on the data line, and she uploads a group of files into the computer in her backpack.

  She is surprised to find that the topmost ones are from the FBI and Department of Justice, and she isn’t supposed to have any of them. Having gotten her download, she gets out of everyone’s way, finds a corner, and begins to read.

  It’s a series of orders pertaining to the assassinations, and though they are short and to the point, befitting a government still staggering back to its feet after the loss of most of its records, the remarkable thing is that they exist at all.

  There are people they’re looking for, evidence they plan to seize—it will probably be the biggest trial case of reconstruction, and Berlina is already figuring out her angles on it for Sniffings, which she suspects is why they sent her this.

  Her butt is uncomfortably cold on the tile floor, and she squirms a little. Naomi brings her a cup of hot soup, and she takes a too-big greedy gulp of it. The thing that’s fascinating is that somebody at some desk must have made a particular crusade out of this, because so many records were destroyed in Washington—right now on the opencast news President Grandma is asking all the postal employees to note down all the names that they can remember of people who were getting old-fashioned paper Social Security checks, so that they can reconstruct that part of the database. They’re also paying big rewards for anyone with illegal, hacked downloads of government databases, not so they can prosecute these people, but so they can buy back copies of their own data.

  So whoever the obsessed nut is, this particular obsessed nut somehow or other had memorized every key name, date, place, document number, fled Washington to Charleston, and then sat down and wrote out these orders. She’s in awe—what a reporter this guy (or more likely, woman—to Berlina, thoroughness means woman) might have been!

  Probably it’s whoever wrote this report titled “A Report on the Location of Key Witnesses And Evidence in the Assassinations of Harris Diem, Diogenes Callare, and Carla Tynan,” but unfortunately the signature line seems to have been deleted.

  She reads on, fascinated. There’re a few issues of Sniffings to come out of this, no question, and just possibly she will be able to take up Hardshaw’s offer of an interview when things settle down a bit.

  The short note from her bank records a bunch of deposits—some of the earlier editions of Sniflings are clear up to 100 million total viewers to date, and many of those viewers are now downloading more of the later editions (well, there isn’t much to do till the weather lets up, if they are inside and warm somewhere, so it makes sense, she thinks). For all practical purposes, she’s rich—and her bank is in nice, comfortable, safe, untouched Calgary.

  She drops her computer into her pack again and looks out across the parking lot, where she sees the furious rain still pouring off her new van, surging tire-high around it. She thinks of the house she’ll buy, moving Naomi into it, the wealth to back the lifestyle she wants.

  It is definitely an ill wind that blows no one good.

  It has stopped raining and gotten warmer a little—just enough so that it feels good to have their clothes drying. Mary Ann Waterhouse is genuinely enjoying the day as herself, and she certainly hopes all her “passengers,” as she’s begun to think of the audience, are enjoying it as well.

  Mary Ann, Carla’s voice thinks in her head. Got a moment for me?

  Of course.

  She senses, rather than hears in words, that Carla is telling everyone via the Passionet feed that Mary Ann is going to be off-line for a while, that there is something important and private to be dealt with, but that contact will be restored well before they reach Monte Alban. Then Carla is fully there. Let Jesse know we’ve got things to talk about.

  “Carla’s come online and shut me off from Passionet,” she says to Jesse. God, he’s a handsome kid, walking beside her. They step carefully over a gushing runnel that has cut all the way through the pavement, only a long step wide but you have to make sure the other side will carry the weight, and Jesse reaches out and takes her hand as she takes the step. His hand is young and strong, smooth and warm, and she feels a little tingle again. He smiles into her eyes. “Hi, Carla, what do we need to talk about?”

  Carla speaks through Mary Ann’s voice; the slight flat Midwestern drawl of the dead scientist feels, in Mary Ann’s mouth, like a hard, squashed little egg. “I can tell you who killed your brother, and why, if you’d like to know. It’s going to come out anyway—I’ve given the FBI the data—but I thought you might want to know ahead of time.”

  “Yeah, I’d like to.” Jesse’s eyes are all but expressionless; from within her body, Mary Ann wants to reach out and hold his hand.

  A last gust of rain spatters down over them, and Carla adds, “Louie says sorry about that—he’s bombing the clouds above with a lot of frozen nitrogen, and every so often he can’t avoid having a little shower come your way. But he’ll have the sky clear and blue by the time you get up there.”

  “That’s okay,” Jesse says. “Tell me about who killed Di.”

  Carla’s voice has a strange tone of contempt to it. “You could call it a procedural error. Ever hear the phrase ‘Use it or lose it’? Well, the Siberian government was just as plugged in as anyone else, and they were having him followed exactly because it had become clear he was important. Naturally that meant they tracked who he talked to most, officially, and that was me and Diem.

  “So it occurred to somebody there that since he was a vital resource, and sometimes if you can’t keep a resource yourself the best thing you can do is to deny it to others—like a bridge in wartime—well, then, there needed to be a contingency plan for getting rid of him. And being the military types they are, they put it into one of their high-level-top-secret-rapid-deployment-ready-to-go-yes-sir files.”

  It’s strange that Carla’s style of humor remains, but it doesn’t always stay in the places in the conversation that it probably once did. Or perhaps Carla feels she can joke because after all she’s describing the same thing that led to her own murder. Mary Ann wonders about that for only a moment before Carla sends her a burst of instant understanding—that she never did have much in the way of people skills, and she was always too clever with words for her own good.

  “Anyway, the trouble was that it was in that kind of a military options package. Military guys are always afraid that if command and control get disrupted, they won’t be able to get anyone to carry out plans, so quite often they build in a provision that, under specified circumstances, will activate a plan if communication is lost.”

  “But… you don’t mean they just automatically set it to… well, to go off if they couldn’t get each other on the phone?”

  “Not exactly. There was a sliding scale of relative severity of action, and at each level more dangerous policies were authorized. After Abdulkashim was knocked out, his successors didn’t bother to learn what was on the scale—they just understood it as up, up, and up. And being fairly typical of people in over their heads, whenev
er they didn’t know what to do, they escalated. The real mystery is this—I can’t find any evidence anyone gave the order. Something set them off, but I don’t know what it was. Diem was killed first, and the other teams were set to go if their datarodents detected Diem’s death. So that’s how Di and I died. But there’s no evidence that either the Siberians watching Diem got an order to kill him, or that they lost touch with their main base. The thing that started it all rolling is just… gone.”

  Jesse walks beside her for a long time, head down, hands in pockets. The sky is getting lighter, and the clouds are farther above them; in the clear white light, his color seems washed out, and even the bright reds and deep blues of the stones he keeps kicking out of his way seem more pale and washed out.

  “So, anyway, something or other happened to put it in motion, the bureaucracy just kind of crunched, and the Siberian agents came and murdered my brother?”

  “That’s just about it exactly. Same reason they killed me.” Carla uses Mary Ann’s voice to sigh; Mary Ann can feel that it’s only partly sincere, and receives, for that feeling, a warning from Carla not to share that perception with Jesse. “Jesse, it was a terrible thing, and we’re going to deal with it. The whole Siberian spy system in the United States and Europe is going to be rolled up and caught, and the new revolutionary government there is going to catch and execute everyone remotely connected with this. And of course it won’t bring Di back or help Lori or your nephews get over it. Any message for them, by the way? I’ve located them at a shelter in Grand Island, Nebraska, up on high ground—they’re safe and comfortable and I should have a phone link there soon.”

  “I guess you can tell them that I love them and I’ll come and see them as soon as I can,” Jesse says.

  “I thought you were entitled to know. I’ll keep Mary Ann shut off for another half hour or so, but after that, as we near Monte Alban, we’ll have to plug back into the net.”

  “What’s going to happen there?” Jesse asks suddenly. “And why have you taken such an interest in us? I mean, we aren’t the only people out there you could talk to, and you could just talk to everyone directly. What’s going on?”

  Carla chuckles dryly. “Louie and I are new at this. Think of this as burning a bush to get your attention.”

  And then Mary Ann is alone in her body. She reaches to take Jesse’s hand, and stumbles a little. Instead, her arm goes around his waist, and his comes around her shoulders to steady her. He looks down into her eyes and sees that she’s just Mary Ann, no one else in there, and kisses her forehead as gently as she imagines him kissing his nephews.

  The warm wind blows around them, and it still smells different; she lifts her lips to kiss his mouth, and the kiss goes on for a long time. As they break apart, her eyes open to see patches of blue sky blowing in over the mountain, and a shaft of wet, runny yellow sunlight stabbing down into the white buildings and wide squares of Oaxaca below.

  She also notices that the vanguard to the crowd has come around the corner and is cheering wildly. She turns and waves—not like a celebrity, she hopes, but just as if they were all her friends from high school—and when she turns to take Jesse’s hand, she’s got a big, completely un-Hollywood grin, which she can feel but is not seeing in her mind’s eye. They walk a little faster, not to lose the crowd, but because it’s getting close, and whatever it is that will happen on the mountain, they now trust in Louie and Carla enough to want it to happen.

  Brittany Lynn Hardshaw has had several very productive hours, and she’s now good and tired, but whatever this thing at Monte Alban might be, she will want to know about it. They haven’t been able to raise Mary Ann Waterhouse via the net—Carla has told them that Mary Ann needs a little privacy, and then that after that Louie and Carla will need her full time.

  The closest thing to a big story in the last few hours has been that they’ve been able to make contact with a lot of the UN agencies, here and there around the planet, and that although the central authority is gone, most of them seem to be content to keep functioning anyway; several of them are getting help and advice from Carla and Louie, and the mood in the places that can be contacted, anyway, seems upbeat. It’s not so much that they expect things to come back together or to “get back to normal,” but that there seems to be a growing sense in the world that life is going to go on, and once people are convinced of that, they have a way of seeing that it does.

  There’s a ping in the intercom, and Hardshaw picks it up. It’s one of those nice White House kids that she brought along; unfortunately, the fact that they are now the White House staff for all practical purposes means that they’re already acquiring the characteristic arrogance and irreverence. She has no doubt that within a few days they’ll be offending Congress like professionals. “Ten minutes till we start getting signal from Monte Alban,” the young woman says, ticking off from a notepad. “And I’ve got something that’ll surprise you—a request for an interview and comments from Berlina Jameson, that reporter who puts together Sniffing. She says it doesn’t need to take long and she knows you’re busy, but she’s got to get tape in the can soon and she’d like to have comments from you directly—the FBI and Attorney General have already given her short statements.”

  “FBI? I didn’t even know they were still functioning. And this sounds like a criminal justice matter—which I didn’t think we’d have anyone working on right now.”

  “There are eight of them, and so far they’re functioning. They probably wouldn’t be doing criminal justice, except that Carla dropped them a long roster of witnesses and evidence for investigating the assassinations. Abdulkashim’s Siberians again, by the way—Carla’s throwing about half of the gang to us and the other half to their own revolutionary government.”

  Hardshaw gives a low, animal grunt of satisfaction; the part of her that has never gotten over being a prosecutor says, “Just make sure that the most guilty ones go to the revolutionary government—so far, they have no Bill of Rights over there, and they can deal with it better than we can.”

  “Got it, boss.” The young woman grins back at her. “So what should I tell Ms. Jameson? She’s calling you, by the way, from her car, in the parking lot of the U of the Az, in Tucson.”

  U of the Az. Hardshaw mentally drafts a note to all staff that henceforth White House staff will distinguish itself from the rest of its generation by not pronouncing postal abbreviations, on penalty of being put in charge of liaison to the governor of the Wy for the next six years.

  But time enough for that later—in fact, right now, with so much still not working and so much information about what is working not yet collected and collated, she does have time on her hands, and it never hurts to have good relations with the press, whoever they might be.

  “Sure, get me Ms. Jameson—just let her know that we’ll have to stop when whatever it is that’s going to happen at Monte Alban happens.”

  It’s less than a minute later when the two of them are linked up, and by that time Hardshaw knows what she has to say. “Well, obviously, we’ve had the case dropped into our lap, and we’re going to pursue justice by whatever means we can. That will mean some arrests and prosecutions in the United States, seeking extradition in some other cases, and cooperating with Siberian and other law enforcement authorities.”

  “Does that include working with the United Nations?”

  “If there is one. That organization’s continued existence is not yet certain, though I have no doubt many of its agencies will continue, just as several of the old League of Nations entities were passed on to the UN.”

  Jameson nods, smiling at the remark; she and Hardshaw both know that if the UN proves unexpectedly resilient, it will cause no trouble, but if, as seems more likely, the UN is really gone, then it makes no commitments and expresses no regrets.

  Hardshaw uses that instant to assess Jameson and decides that she likes her—according to the file she’s an Afropean, so her nationalist credentials are impeccable, and the polite
but very direct questions are a pleasure to answer—if there are any traps in them, they’re obvious ones.

  Then Jameson smiles, an engaging self-deprecating smile that gives Hardshaw the feeling that she’s being taken into a confidence, made a best buddy of. Hardshaw recognizes that smile—it’s the same one that one of her better investigating detectives used to use when he was working hard for a confession. For that matter it’s the same one that—back when TV news was the big news—used to show up on the faces of network political reporters. It’s a good thing, Hardshaw thinks, that she’s a generation older than Berlina, and has dealt with exactly that kind of reporter in her younger days, because nowadays about the only place that you see it is on the XV channels that feature Plucky Girl Reporters.

  “And if I may, Ms. President, as long as I have you here, do you have any idea what is going on at Monte Alban, or why it has suddenly become so important? So far all I can get from anyone who works for you is that they are watching the situation closely, and that’s not exactly news since everyone is watching it closely, given that we’re all experiencing through Synthi Venture.”

  “She wants to be known by her real name, Mary Ann Waterhouse,” Hardshaw says. “Very pleasant and intelligent person, by the way.” It’s a classic evasion step; let’s see if Jameson really can do this big-deal network reporter shtick.

  “So can we say that you’ve had some private contact with her?” Jameson says. “Can I quote that—and may I ask if you were able to find out what’s going to happen?”

  Yessir, Hardshaw thinks, Jameson can do it. She scrawls a tiny note to herself—put Jameson on the special list of reporters the President talks to unofficially; here’s a good person to leak to when she needs one.

  “Those are several different questions. Yes, I’ve talked with Mary Ann Waterhouse—she and her companion, Jesse Callare, are just fine. And they don’t know what’s planned, either. Louie and Carla are doing their own thing with it. Mary Ann happens to be useful because through her Passionet link she’s a way for Carla and Louie to send us whatever it is that they want to send us. But Jesse and Mary Ann aren’t in charge of it—they’re more passengers than anything else.”