Mother of Storms (14 page)

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Authors: John Barnes

BOOK: Mother of Storms
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Glinda smiles a little at that. “So, how do you feel?”
“Somewhere between terrified and happy. Anyway, what’s your idea of a good place to eat? Or what’s Derry’s, if they’re not compatible?”
She wags her finger at him. “Ah, ah, if we’re going to fulfill this child’s fantasies, you have to guide me to some perfect little café where they have three special dishes that only you know about and everyone knows you by your first name.”
“Well … there is a place where everybody knows my name. I eat there every other day or so. But I wouldn’t say it had any special dishes, certainly not any that only I know about.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, but it’s not exactly a perfect little café, it’s um … it’s a Shoney’s, actually. They don’t know I’m the president of GateTech, but everyone knows me.”
Glinda gapes at him. “You eat at Shoney’s?
Why?
”
“Well, not just
any
Shoney’s, this particular one. And I’ve got three good reasons. One, in the early days when I traveled a lot, for some odd reason I always had good luck with that chain—and when you’re putting in your sixth straight three-hundred-mile day, it’s nice to have something really predictable. So I got hooked on it that way—it’s just a very comforting
place for me to go. Two, it’s self-reinforcing. Once you’ve been going to a place for a while and they know you, you get friendly service and they treat you well.”
There’s a long pause.
“And what’s the third reason?” Glinda asks.
“I like the food.”
They laugh more from the broken tension than from the feeble joke. John Klieg leans back farther—he is too old to trust automatic guidance on cars, and won’t let his hands get far from the wheel or his foot move away from the brake—looks at her sideways, and says, “I hate to tell you this, but your boss doesn’t have an ounce of class. I’m solid twentieth in everything but business.”
“Even including using old-fashioned expressions like ‘solid,’” Glinda says, pulling her legs up and turning to sit facing more toward him. She’s always known he was handsome, kind, and considerate, but she’s beginning to realize how much more attention he has been paying to her than she has to him.
“Especially using old-fashioned expressions like ‘solid,’” Klieg agrees. “If I hadn’t stopped myself, I’d have said ‘stone.’ I wrote editorials for my high-school paper defending Dan Quayle. Now, about this daughter of yours—do we have to take her somewhere pretentious by the water to make her happy?”
“Only if we want to convince her we’re serious,” Glinda says, “and I’m still working on believing this isn’t some vivid dream. She’d probably be happy at Shoney’s, for that matter.”
“Well, for a bizarre suggestion—start high end and work low? Maybe go to a café for lunch, then to her riding session—maybe you and I could have drinks and some conversation while she rides?—then Shoney’s for dinner and then movie for three? With the possible option of covert handholding under the popcorn?”
“I think we can make a deal of this,” Glinda says, “as long as the movie either has monsters or is set in space.”
“Is that what Derry’s into?”
“Not for her; for me,” Glinda says. “Life is boring enough and contains enough unhappiness. If I’m going to see a movie I want to see something that will either scare me silly or get my mind up in the clouds.”
John Klieg beams at her. “Gee, if a guy was to know you, say, for sixteen years or so, he might finally notice you had a pretty good idea of fun.”
She smiles at him; she’s recognizing the style of speech. “So, John, where are you from?”
“Little town you never heard of—Winona, Minnesota. Southeastern part of the state, across the river from Wisconsin.”
An hour’s drive from where Glinda grew up. Maybe she can get away with saying “You bet” after all.
 
 
Louie Tynan is busy for the first time in months, and he doesn’t know whether to be happy or not. They’ve put up four polar-orbit satellites, which rise and set relative to his own equatorial-orbit space station at least seven or eight times per day. Every time one does, at a precisely calculated instant, the satellite sends a laser pulse that passes through the Earth’s atmosphere, at varying altitudes, and is then received for spectrographic analysis on the station. The thirty or so lasers that send each pulse have precisely known wavelengths and power; if the light were only passing through a vacuum, you could figure out how much power would arrive at what wavelength, down to parts in ten billion.
But although air is transparent, it’s not
perfectly
transparent; it’s subject to minor variations (look down a hot road on a summer day), and not all the variations are neutral with respect to wavelength (consider a sunset).
So instead of the predicted set of exactly known values for power at each wavelength, the laser light coming into Louie Tynan’s “camera,” as he thinks of the gadget, is altered by the air it passes through, and the exact way in which it alters tells them quite a bit about methane.
Louie’s job, all day, has been to power up a remote manipulator, a little tractor with an arm that crawls around the outside of the station on tracks, take the spectrographic camera out of storage, put it in the airlock, use the remote manipulator to put it in place and hook it up … and sit back and pretend to know what he was doing, besides making sure that some little lights stayed green through the first twenty tries.
Right now Louie is taking a break in the observation bubble. They don’t really need a man to do these observations at all—they could do the whole thing on robotics—but as long as they have a crewed space station, and one crusty old fart on it who doesn’t want to come down, might as well get some work out of him. It may not be the most productive way to do the thing, or even the most productive use of the astronaut, but this way NASA PR guys can make noises in public about quick responses and being able to get on top of a breaking situation.
And because they’re doing that, he also has to print out graphs derived from the results every so often, and then make a set of notes about the graphs and read his results back to ground control. This bit is pure showboating; the sad fact is that in the first place, not being a meterologist, he doesn’t have any more understanding of what the graphs mean than what they told him in a three-hour tutorial the week before, and anyway, the people who do know what they mean are getting copied on all the data
instantly on the ground. The only purpose is for the taxpayers on the open channel to hear their most expensive single employee earning his keep.
Some bored grad student on an internship has been set up down there to ask him questions that everyone already knows the answers to, so that he can appear to be expressing an opinion and judging the situation. Louie’s job is essentially a several-day-long publicity stunt.
On the other hand, it’s more news than crewed space exploration has gotten in months. He thinks of Congressperson Henry Loamer, UL-LA, who has occasionally referred to the space station as the “orbiting retirement home” and to Louie himself as “our single most expensive Federal employee, who is doing just what Federal employees usually do, sitting on his butt and soaking up tax money.” It will be weeks before old Henry realizes all this could be done cheaper and better by robot, and meanwhile he’s shut up.
Besides, Louie’s got to admit that this has been good for him. Having to do visuals every few hours, sitting in front of a camera and reading off the report, has made him shower, shave, all that easy-to-overlook stuff. He may not be the height of elegance, but at least he’s freshly showered and wearing a clean coverall, and he has more than one clean coverall.
He takes another bite of the sushi—funny thing, the Japanese spent a fortune developing all sorts of amenities for their unit, which is sitting down there at the end of Truss Two empty and powered down. They sent up five crews for a few months each, and then got bored or something, leaving behind the tissue culture tanks that let you grow pieces of fish without having to grow the whole fish.
The stuff isn’t bad, and it’s at least variety from the usual sandwiches.
The Japanese gave up. The Chinese flew some missions into low orbit, and they still do. The Russians are long gone from space, and the French make three flights a year—they treat the Euromodule as sort of a hotel room, where their guys sleep between fixing robots, or on their way to and from their tiny moonbase while they assemble their ships here. Last time they didn’t even bother with that, just went straight from low Earth orbit to the moon.
And as for his own country … Louie is it, and he’s mostly here for publicity.
Yet the solar system is now crawling with humanity’s robots. Not counting all the replicators that were built there before they shut that experiment down, there are hundreds of little crawlers exploring the moon.
Louie just noticed the other day that one of the many relays on the station was handling traffic for the University of Wyoming Lunar Rover and the Ralston-Purina Checkerboard Lunar Orbiter. It turned out that the former was a senior engineering-school project and the latter a breakfast cereal promotion, where they claimed they’d buy you a square foot of the
moon (a very safe promotion, because the UN has put all claims except those within one kilometer of a permanently crewed facility into abeyance) and send you a picture of it.
Where his crew of eight walked a hundred miles or so across the face of Mars, there is now a robot railway that drags a camera back and forth, toward the Martian North Pole and back, sending a continuous picture that a few million people on Earth display on the TVs that hang on their bedroom walls. Even Mars is already getting to be less popular than the view from the Jupiter Orbiter Feed, which Louie has, right now, in his sleeping quarters.
He looks down at the Earth below him. So far it doesn’t look any different. You can no more see an extinct species or a too-warm ocean than you can tell that there are no longer any dark-skinned people in Europe as it rolls away below him. And certainly sixty-five years or so of pictures from up this high have made the sight of Earth from space familiar … .
Well, hell with it. He still likes the way the old planet looks. He holds up a squeeze bulb of Kirin—another great Japanese innovation—in a toast to her. She’s pretty battered around the edges, but he still likes to see her like this. It’s not his job to decide whether or not he’s too expensive to maintain up here. If they’re willing to send him, he’s willing to stay.
As he takes a sip of the beer, he thinks of Carla, and the notion that he is thinking of her just after looking at the battered old planet nearly sends the beer squirting out his nose. She’d love
that
comparison.
They haven’t talked in almost a month and it’s still forty minutes till the next observation. Moreover he happens to look decent, so he might as well take advantage of it. From where the terminator line is on the Earth, it’s about three o’clock in the afternoon in the western Pacific, and the weather is clear. Chances are
MyBoat
is surfaced and taking phone calls.
He shifts around to face the camera and screen and dials her number. It rings a couple of times and then she answers it on voice only, so his first thought is that she’s getting it over a Very Low Frequency receiver and the signal is going to be lousy—he was really looking forward to seeing her face—then she laughs. “Oh, it’s you, Louie. Let me get a towel on.”
“For what?” he says. Caught her sunbathing; it figures.
“So the tabloids can’t do another story about perverted astronauts looking at their naked ex-wives over the phone and talking nasty, that’s why. You’ve got an image to protect, Captain America.”
“They promoted me a long time ago,” he reminds her.
“You’ll always be Captain America to me,” she says, and the screen comes on. “Is there news or is this just a hello call?”
“Oh, just a hello. Timed to get a look at your body, of course.”
She grins and moves as if to flash him. One of the several counselors
they’d gone to had pointed out to them that they were both “socially retarded, as tends to be common in bright people, and that’s why you act like a couple of teenagers around each other.” It took Louie and Carla days to realize the counselor thought there was something wrong with it.
He gives her his best construction-worker whistle. She asks, “So they’re keeping you busy for once, you bottomless pit for taxes, you?”
“Yeah. Although to tell you the truth,
I’m
starting to wonder if I’m actually doing anyone any good by being up here.”
“Not your worry, love, it’s really not. We’ve talked about all this before. If it weren’t for the scientists, the whole world might as well disappear up its own virtual-reality asshole. If there’s no exploration, that’s just what will happen. And robots do not explore, they just go and look. Somebody’s got to be there to feel like bold Cortez upon a peak in Darien.”
“You’re quoting poetry at me again.”
“Well, it’s not a dirty limerick, so I’m sure you haven’t heard it before, but yes, I have been exposing you to poetry. It’s part of that continuing process that ran through our courtship and marriage, love—you know, eating with utensils, washing yourself—say, speaking of which, you’re looking pretty spruce today. You must be doing a lot of interviews or something.”

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