Mother of Storms (66 page)
Authors: John Barnes
“Modern cars don’t have them. They have separate electric motors,” she says.
“What did the differential use to do?”
“What the electric motors do now.”
He hits her with a pillow; she giggles. “And you want to know the worst of it, Di?”
“Oh, sure.”
“I really did want to know. I just kissed your nose because it was fun.” Her eyes are shining and she has a wonderful smile.
“Well,” he says, “the differential I’m talking about is the change in ocean surface temperature over time. The ocean surface is warmer in August than it is in May. Now, with the additional methane in the atmosphere, by June eleventh, the Northern Hemisphere had ocean temperatures higher than
they’d ever been in recorded history. That was bad enough. But it turns out, not only was there a higher base—”
they’d ever been in recorded history. That was bad enough. But it turns out, not only was there a higher base—”
“Oh, god. You mean it’s going up by more than it would normally go up by.”
“Yep. Like at a point where it would normally have been 25° C on June 1, and then gone up two degrees to 27° C by August 15, it started out at about 29° C on June I—and it’s going to go up maybe five degrees. That’s like what you’d expect in a shallow inland lake at sea level on the equator, normally. The storms will get a lot worse and bigger. Clem is going to get to gobble down a lot more energy than it’s had before. So the short answer is that even though the sea is about twenty miles away and forty feet down from us, all this area is going to be torn apart and reduced to mud.”
She shudders and snuggles against him. “We’re getting out, though.”
“Yeah.”
“Promise?”
“It’s Uncle Sam’s promise, love, not mine. Supposedly we are going to be evacuated.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
Di thinks for a long time. “You mean if it looks bad, I desert my job, get back here, and get you and the kids out?”
“Or call me and I’ll get the kids to wherever you say, and then you desert and join me there. I don’t give a shit, Di, I just want us to live through this.”
Di sighs. “Hope for Klieg’s thing to work, then. Assuming we can get him out of jail, and that the Siberians don’t screw up his launchers, then it won’t necessarily be an issue.”
“You didn’t promise.”
“I can’t, Lori. I have a job to do there.”
“You have one here too.”
“Unh-hunh,” he says. “I do. And I—well, I mean …” He doesn’t know what to say, except that he can’t imagine doing what she’s asking him to promise to do, and so he ends up staring helplessly into those beautiful eyes, willing his words to come out and unable to make them.
He thinks she’s angry, but instead she just puts her arms around him and keeps crying. He holds her for more than an hour, kissing her cheeks and stroking her back. He wishes he could say yes, or that it didn’t bother him to say no.
When she stops crying she has fallen asleep on his chest; he can feel a little sticky puddle of tears and snot there. He doesn’t move, just holds her, and after a while he lapses into dark dreams of things clawing at him, pulling him down into a black, water-filled pit.
Next morning, the thirty-first, as they are packing, Di has the television
on just to keep them alert to the news, but he starts out packing the books in the den, away from the television in the living room. All of a sudden he hears Lori and Mark yelling, and runs in to see what’s up. By the time he gets there, they’re grabbing their own XV stuff, and Lori hands him his. “Passionet,” she says.
on just to keep them alert to the news, but he starts out packing the books in the den, away from the television in the living room. All of a sudden he hears Lori and Mark yelling, and runs in to see what’s up. By the time he gets there, they’re grabbing their own XV stuff, and Lori hands him his. “Passionet,” she says.
He pulls on scalpnet, goggles, and muffs, tunes to Passionet—my god.
He had known that Jesse was dating a rich older woman. It was just like that sneaky kid not to mention it was Synthi Venture. Di is chuckling with admiration even as he watches—and then he’s engrossed. He had no idea how huge the effort going on in Mexico was, and though he has plotted storms across that coast thousands of times, he never knew what—or who!—was there. Mary Ann Waterhouse sure can tell a story; he wonders what she’s doing on a cheesy XV service like Passionet.
They lose half the afternoon that way, and he doesn’t care. This is the sort of thing that Mark and Nahum really should see anyway; he notices that when they unplug, they’re just playing around but they’re speaking a little Spanish to each other.
“It’s working,” Harris Diem says. “If you’ve got any medals you can give to XV stars, I think you ought to break them out right now.”
They are looking at the graphs on his screen. They all show the same thing around the world; new rioting is not breaking out anywhere where there’s enough XV installed. In other areas, as American and UN planes drop cheap headsets made by flash manufacturers, as soon as people get them pulled over their heads, the rioting stops cold. People plug into XV to feel the hurricane with Synthi Venture (or whatever strange real name she’s called by—nobody ever calls her anything except “Synthi”).
“You’ll never believe it, either, but she’s dating Di Callare’s kid brother. That younger guy Jesse that she’s walking and talking with.”
“I wish you hadn’t told me that,” Brittany Lynn Hardshaw says. “Now I really don’t know who to envy.” She grins. “So at least one piece of bad news is going away. And I hope that university semiotics guy is right.”
The only prediction either of them has been able to understand is the one that people will begin to imitate what they experience via XV—and since what Synthi Venture has been pumping out to them is an idealized image of generous, hard-working, brave people, that is what they are trying to live up to. “I hope he’s right, too. And I’m not worrying about all that subversion stuff; by the time it’s an issue, want to bet Venture’s on top of it?”
“No bets. She’s a tough broad. Us tough broads respect each other.” The semiotician’s other predictions have to do with “eventual subversion,” by
which he seems to mean that a lot of the petty fanatics and greedheads out there will find some way to take this material and use it as a way to stir up hatreds or sell soap.
which he seems to mean that a lot of the petty fanatics and greedheads out there will find some way to take this material and use it as a way to stir up hatreds or sell soap.
Hardshaw glances at the checklist on her pocket computer screen. “So where is Operation Valiant at this point?”
“They’re getting confident,” he says. “I think they’ll give it a green today. The big thing agents on site are telling us is that the Siberian workmen aren’t doing any work now, because they don’t have American supervisors watching them. There’re probably a few secret police here and there, but we’ll be hitting in the middle of the night—shouldn’t be much resistance at the launch area. What might happen at the prison worries me a lot more. Bad news to lose a bunch of prominent hostages.”
“Well, if the answer is go … then patch me through to Rivera and let’s see if we can get it done. Klieg thought he could be launching in a couple of weeks, the last day before the coup. The less he has to repair or get back on line, the better.”
“Any more word from Tynan?”
Hardshaw leans back, stretches, and groans. “Everything is perfectly reasonable, except that he’s traveling at accelerations so high that all the doctors say he must be dead, and he agrees with them, but he keeps talking to us. One theory is that he forgot to pack himself and he’s really back on the moon, but he sent us a raft of data that looked perfectly straight—including several photos of his desiccated body. Carla seems to believe him but they’ve been doing all that strange wide-band communication; maybe she’s just hallucinating him.” She hesitates and says, “You realize, of course, that if he’s telling us the truth, the problem can get solved months early and at no real cost to us. I’m almost afraid to believe it will work.”
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.”
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.
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.”
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