Authors: John Barnes
Mother of Storms (74 page)
She laughs, not because it’s funny but because he’s a nice guy and clearly wants her to like him. He steps a little closer and looks down into the street as well. “Look at them. Can’t they figure time? They won’t get off the island before the worst of it hits. The surge is already on its way down the river.”
“How high will it come?”
“Call it a hundred feet or so. That’s what the meterology guys call an
order-of-magnitude estimate. They mean more than ten and less than a thousand.”
order-of-magnitude estimate. They mean more than ten and less than a thousand.”
She sighs. “Is there anything we can all do?”
“I’m afraid most of you are just passengers,” Johnny says. “Naw, I’m just looking to see if the streets are clear so that—shit.”
At his voice, she looks and sees it too, even in the dim gray shapes up toward Times Square: a wall of water and people running from it. There is nothing at all for anyone to do; Johnny is on the phone telling his people to get out of the lower floors if they’re there, but all that Karen sees is the gray-black surge below her, washing up to the third story, sweeping people along in it like struggling insects. There is a faint shudder through her feet as the surge wraps around the building.
“Suzette? Is that door holding?” Johnny is asking. “Okay, is everyone out? Check in with me!”
There’s a very long pause.
“Okay,” he says. “Go with the plan. No sense waiting any longer—no one else is coming through the lower doors.”
“Er, what’s the plan?” Karen asks.
“Anhh?” He hasn’t heard her because she spoke very softly. Outside, there is now a rushing river in the streets; Broadway is filled with dark boiling water in the lights that shine down on it from the Dance Channel Tower.
“Uh, what plan? Just curious.”
“Hang on—” he says, and raises a finger. He listens to the phone, says, “Good, right, okay,” several times, and finally sighs. “Well, that’s that. The plan is, we’re flooding the lower floors, using the water from the rain pipes and the power drains. So we’re putting clean water into the building up to a bit past 100 feet. With luck it will equalize pressures, to some extent, and make us a bit less likely to get cut off at the base and go over in the storm.”
“Doesn’t it kind of damage things?”
“Not like having the building fall over would.” He grins at her, and she smiles back. When did she get this shy? Obviously he’s hanging around because he wants to talk to her, and he’s a nice guy.
Her phone rings, and she lifts it from her belt. She turns it on to find—“Mary Ann!”
“Yeah, I’m taking one of my breaks to see if you’re okay. Did you get out of Manhattan?”
“No, but I don’t think I could be any safer,” she says. “Nowhere on the East Coast is safe, but at least I’m in a building that should stand up to this.”
“That’s something. Take care of yourself if you can.”
“You too.”
They chat for a few minutes; one thing you have to say for her, though
Mary Ann changed a lot as she became Synthi Venture and her career took off, she didn’t get stuck on herself and she stayed in touch. There’s not a lot to say—and there’s always the possibility that this is their last conversation, Karen realizes, something Mary Ann is being careful not to mention—but they don’t need to say much.
Mary Ann changed a lot as she became Synthi Venture and her career took off, she didn’t get stuck on herself and she stayed in touch. There’s not a lot to say—and there’s always the possibility that this is their last conversation, Karen realizes, something Mary Ann is being careful not to mention—but they don’t need to say much.
When they click off, minutes later, Johnny is still standing awkwardly in the hall, and finally he says, “I couldn’t help overhearing, uh, and seeing a little of your screen, and, uh—”
“Mary Ann Waterhouse used to work next to my desk. We used to go to Equity calls together, back when I still thought I had a career on Broadway,” Karen says, a little proudly. “I knew her a long time before she was Synthi Venture.”
Johnny nods, clearly impressed, and now it looks like
he’s
a little shy.
he’s
a little shy.
She glances out the window, and says, “Of course, nowadays you could have a career on Broadway running a submarine.”
Now it’s his turn to give a nervous laugh. They stand there for a long time, watching the water get up to the eighth floor; there’s nothing much for either of them to do. The powerchips will keep the building running, and hardly anyone needs data patterning.
Eventually someone shouts about what’s happening on the downtown side of the building, and they run around to see what the searchlights can show them. Buildings as tall as forty stories are going over, but the World Trade Center seems to be holding firm.
Around dawn they eat; the water is still rising, but slowly, and finally they stagger off—to separate apartments, Karen thinks a little wistfully—and fall asleep.
She need not have worried; there will be plenty of time. It is not until October third, ten days later, that the water will fall far enough, and enough rubble will be cleared, for them to leave the building. By that time, millions of New Yorkers will be dead, and the world changed utterly, but Johnny and Karen’s greatest discomfort during the whole thing will be that, during the last week, the building ran out of soda, peanut butter, and mayonnaise.
Father Joseph urged people to accept evacuation, but since the church rode it out once, they are convinced it must again. It’s strangely familiar in here, the same people, candlelight, the same odors—but the wind is rising fast. He wonders if the building will go over in a hurricane.
The thing that troubles him most is that he could not bring himself to tell them that he didn’t believe it was a miracle before, finally, but merely luck. Plenty of other churches must have drowned.
He wonders what he has to say to them. The water has been running
out, not in, at the mouth of the Shannon, and the wireless is saying the giant hurricane that has wrecked the States is headed here. He has cousins in Boston, and he hasn’t heard a word … . They say most rivers have risen enough to drown their cities there, and that Florida is gone … .
out, not in, at the mouth of the Shannon, and the wireless is saying the giant hurricane that has wrecked the States is headed here. He has cousins in Boston, and he hasn’t heard a word … . They say most rivers have risen enough to drown their cities there, and that Florida is gone … .
There is a deep rumble like an oncoming train, and people huddle together. Father Joseph barely has time to say “Let us pray” before, as abruptly as a foot descending on a cockroach, the storm surge—twice as high as any mountain in Ireland—slams church, congregation, and all into oblivion. Moving at hundreds of miles per hour, the surge washes clear across the island; within hours it will penetrate Britain so deeply that a torrent twenty miles wide will flow up the Mersey and down through the Trent, tear a great open bay into the face of Europe where the Zuider Zee once stood, and still have force enough to flood St. Petersburg to a depth of ten meters.
Nodes collapse and packets are rerouted in the global data system; much like their namesakes, datarodents flee the places that are drowning, and copy themselves endlessly through what remains, up through satellites and down through fibrop. They begin to find each other, to merge, to seek more of their kind—there are moments of recognition, and then, because more data must be assembled to find out what they are to do, they join up and seek together … .
Carla Tynan wakes up reaching for the jack in her head. She really needs to get off the net for a while, she’s feeling badly disoriented … more memories and processors come online, and in a millisecond or so she feels more like herself, but still she needs food and exercise, she’s been on a long time—
She remembers, and begins to scream. She reaches for her body, over and over, thousands of times per second, but she can’t find it. She reaches for knowledge about herself, and she finds the reports of the Honiara Police, the pictures of her bloody, cratered body on the hotel room bed.
What Louie chose to do has been forced on her. She reaches for him, through the antennas—he is now less than two light-hours away. But at the speeds with which she lives in the net, she will endure centuries before she is able to hear his comforting voice, and to cry in the awareness of his affection.
On September 22, as Clem reaches with an outflow jet into the Bay of Campeche and stirs up the eye of a new storm, Louie Tynan crosses Saturn’s orbit. The catastrophe sweeping over the Earth is beyond his power to do
anything about; Louie-on-the-moon is now pouring data to him, TV, XV feed, everything. He is everywhere and all these things are happening to him.
anything about; Louie-on-the-moon is now pouring data to him, TV, XV feed, everything. He is everywhere and all these things are happening to him.
With his knowledge of all of human history, he is appalled but not shocked. His own estimate is that a billion people will die next week.
He is still moving at almost five astronomical units per day, and he is now only nine and a half AU from the sun itself. The fastest way to get there, he assures himself again and again, is to overshoot and brake, using the sun to make the turn, then Mercury and Venus and the sun’s gravity behind him to slow him down.
But he keeps rechecking.
He wonders why he feels so strong an attachment to the Earth he left. He certainly wasn’t all that eager to have his feet on it while he had feet. He never did like people much, for that matter. And yet here he is, frantic to go to their rescue.
Maybe it’s just in the nature of a pattern-making system to want to preserve the original. It’s something to think about, anyway, while he throws the plasma stream out in front of himself, checks the strains and accelerations, and just hopes the whole thing will hold together. It occurs to him that he’s cut the margins close, and despite the speed of his reactions and the volume of data that he processes, he might turn out to be wrong.
“Wrong” in this case is what would happen if 2026RU broke up under the strains it’s being subjected to. If that happened, a few pieces, carrying various of Louie’s processors with them, would dive into the sun, a situation which is about as close to a snowball in hell as reality ever gets, and the other chunks would continue, after close passes at the sun, on hyperbolic orbits right out of the solar system and into eternity; after a few tens of thousands of years, a few of them might enter some other star system, but most would end up permanently in the dark between the stars on the fringes of the galaxy.
Louie’s guess is that two or three of the biggest chunks might still have enough of him on them to remain conscious, and enough replicators to start re-engineering themselves a way back … probably some of him would get back to the solar system in another hundred years or so. Always assuming the conscious chunks weren’t the ones that plunged into the sun, and Louie’s sense of the universe, as a man who was first trained as a pilot, is that the one law that holds absolutely is Murphy’s. Louie-on-the-moon and the wiseguys could doubtless grab another cometoid—with what they’ve learned they could grab Pluto and Charon if need be—but it would be some months’ delay, and, he repeats to himself, uselessly but every millisecond,
Earth doesn’t have the time.
Earth doesn’t have the time.
He keeps doing his job but he also keeps rechecking his figures. To
amuse himself on the side, he re-reads the
Aeneid
and does a statistical study … is there really any empirical basis for Murphy’s Law? Throw out most of the battles in history, since bad luck on one side is good on the other. Throw out every election, ditto. Throw out various aboriginal people getting discovered, since it was seldom good luck for them. Look at efforts to fulfill the Weak Pareto Condition—the moral principle that Wilfredo Pareto identified in his economic and political studies, that a thing that benefits everyone and harms no one ought to be done.
amuse himself on the side, he re-reads the
Aeneid
and does a statistical study … is there really any empirical basis for Murphy’s Law? Throw out most of the battles in history, since bad luck on one side is good on the other. Throw out every election, ditto. Throw out various aboriginal people getting discovered, since it was seldom good luck for them. Look at efforts to fulfill the Weak Pareto Condition—the moral principle that Wilfredo Pareto identified in his economic and political studies, that a thing that benefits everyone and harms no one ought to be done.
Hmm. Define “everyone” and “no one.” Does everyone include apes and dolphins, some of whom are smarter than severely retarded human beings? Or dogs, many of whom have more empathy than most human beings, or cats, who practice more courtesy?
And as for harming no one … what is the horse’s point of view on domestication?
Rocks and ice don’t have much viewpoint, though. So since what Louie is up to is going to turn the solar system into a much better place for life—which is capable of having a viewpoint … if this works he may be the biggest breach in Murphy’s Law there’s ever been, and certainly he is binding more information and energy in meaningful patterns. Just possibly Louie is humanity’s biggest and most solid blow against entropy.
Which is not all that different from saying he’s out to overthrow Murphy’s Law. (With diligent effort, he has established that there is no statistical basis for Murphy’s Law. He has also established that he believes in it anyway.) He just hopes Murphy hasn’t heard about this. Murphy is known to be vindictive.
As he approaches the orbit of Mars on September 25, he tunes in to all the XV broadcasts he can find, relayed from Louie-on-the-moon, via two wiseguys, to him. He admits it’s vanity; he’s enjoying being seen from the Southern Hemisphere at sunset, as a huge comet with one bright sharpedged linear tail stabbing toward the sun, and another long feathery one—surface evaporation and coolant venting—reaching back away, so that in the evening sky he seems to stretch across more than half of it.
It’s especially fun from the viewpoints of
Innocent Age,
an Australian XV net that offers the viewpoints of (well-fed and -loved) young children around the world. Looking up from the veldt in the person of seven-year-old Alice Zulu, seeing the great streak of the comet seeming to touch the last dying ember of the sun, its tail arcing so far up toward the zenith … it’s an experience he would not have missed.
Innocent Age,
an Australian XV net that offers the viewpoints of (well-fed and -loved) young children around the world. Looking up from the veldt in the person of seven-year-old Alice Zulu, seeing the great streak of the comet seeming to touch the last dying ember of the sun, its tail arcing so far up toward the zenith … it’s an experience he would not have missed.
The twenty-sixth finds him passing close to the sun, and every cable, strut, member, and line seems to scream. He’s in too close to talk effectively to any of the wiseguys or to Louie-on-the-moon, and he’s too busy anyway to think about anything to distract himself. The face of 2026RU is boiling
chaos, and between tidal forces and sudden releases of gas and water, every so often a plasma tower will crash to the surface, costing him thrust and just incidentally scaring the hell out of him. He can feel every groan and scream as the structures inside twist and wrench under the pressure of thousands of tons of reshaping ice; his surface instruments are blind in the white glare of his halo, as the great blazing sun, four times as wide as it is from Earth, pours energy into the gas envelope he’s emitting. At least the halo is helping to keep the sun from hitting his ice directly.
chaos, and between tidal forces and sudden releases of gas and water, every so often a plasma tower will crash to the surface, costing him thrust and just incidentally scaring the hell out of him. He can feel every groan and scream as the structures inside twist and wrench under the pressure of thousands of tons of reshaping ice; his surface instruments are blind in the white glare of his halo, as the great blazing sun, four times as wide as it is from Earth, pours energy into the gas envelope he’s emitting. At least the halo is helping to keep the sun from hitting his ice directly.
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