Mother of Storms (17 page)
Authors: John Barnes
She looks at the numbers; the energy bound in such a hurricane is twelve times the biggest hurricane on record.
And she still hasn’t figured how much
bigger
the hurricane formation zones themselves will be.
bigger
the hurricane formation zones themselves will be.
Still, there’s something she can do right now, and that’s what she does. She resets the autopilot, takes
MyBoat
down so that she can run undersea, and heads south as fast as she can. The North Pacific is about to become a bad place to be.
MyBoat
down so that she can run undersea, and heads south as fast as she can. The North Pacific is about to become a bad place to be.
“President Grandma” is feeling more like a grandmother—and less presidential—than ever. Brittany Hardshaw has seen and made hard decisions on
two minutes’ reflection, gotten them dead wrong, and spent years defending them when necessary; she knows that on at least one occasion she got an innocent man executed, and during her watch the United States has lost just over five hundred military people, mostly young men, in one corner of the world or another. She sent her close friend from Boise, Judge Burlham, to Liberia as a mediator, knowing it was dangerous, and on the television that night she saw him cut in half with a submachine gun at the airport. She would think she was hardened enough for any job.
two minutes’ reflection, gotten them dead wrong, and spent years defending them when necessary; she knows that on at least one occasion she got an innocent man executed, and during her watch the United States has lost just over five hundred military people, mostly young men, in one corner of the world or another. She sent her close friend from Boise, Judge Burlham, to Liberia as a mediator, knowing it was dangerous, and on the television that night she saw him cut in half with a submachine gun at the airport. She would think she was hardened enough for any job.
Harris Diem’s report is sitting on her desk. It carefully explains the trick that he and a small “Black Team” of NSA scientists were able to pull on the team at NOAA—feeding them doctored data, monitoring the models they built, copying those models down the street in a hidden basement, and then carefully feeding in the correct data. It was a small masterpiece of covert ops. The President of the United States now has in her hands the only accurate assessment of the global temperature situation.
Publicly, she will accept delivery of the NOAA scientists’ work in a couple of days, but this secret report is the truth—or as near to it as a computer model can get. Publicly, she will share the NOAA report with the UN, and Rivera will base policy on it.
Which means publicly, the policy will fail, because it is based on inaccuracies, and she will be in a position to use this to advantage.
The only problem now is that what is in her hands is so very much worse than she had imagined. One of the nice NSA men—a soft-spoken young African-American who looked like a bright law student or high school teacher—carefully explained to her that things did not scale up in a linear way, and that “not linear” meant “double the input does not mean double the output—it means, maybe, quadruple it, octuple it, cut it in half … the functions are complicated.”
So while the public version, on which the UN will act, shows that next summer will bring the twenty biggest hurricanes, typhoons, and cyclones in history, plus a blistering drought in the high latitudes and monsoons beyond historical experience in the tropics; while that report shows the snows of East Africa turning to glaciers and a real risk that the Colorado may stop flowing; while it shows world deaths from famine, flood, and storm running into the tens of millions—it’s all a fraud based on wishful thinking.
The real numbers show something more like seventy hurricanes, and many of them far beyond historical scale. There’s no drought, but the rain cycle accelerates tremendously—they’re going to lose some big dams, and many of the dry lake basins in the West will begin to fill. Between the storms and the change of climate, they can expect major blight outbreaks in the world’s forests, and plenty of crop failures. It probably isn’t possible to save
the Netherlands, and it is definitely not possible to save Bangladesh or most of the world’s delta populations. There’s no question that they’ll lose some populated Pacific Islands entirely, and it looks suspiciously like in the Southern Hemisphere the Antarctic glaciers will grow rapidly all through southern winter and then melt even more rapidly in October and November. There is no way yet to predict the consequences of that.
the Netherlands, and it is definitely not possible to save Bangladesh or most of the world’s delta populations. There’s no question that they’ll lose some populated Pacific Islands entirely, and it looks suspiciously like in the Southern Hemisphere the Antarctic glaciers will grow rapidly all through southern winter and then melt even more rapidly in October and November. There is no way yet to predict the consequences of that.
The real numbers show deaths running to 270 million worldwide by September.
More than a quarter of a billion people.
There is nothing the United States, or the United Nations, can do to save most of them. The USA does not have the economic weight and muscle anymore to lead the world … hasn’t had it in a long time, but that’s something Hardshaw learned early that you never say in front of a voter. For twelve years since the Flash, when the government and at least threequarters of all the financial records in the country ceased to be, she has been struggling to put American power back together again, first as American Ambassador to the UN, then as Attorney General, and finally as President.
She’s fought to preserve what is left of American national sovereignty, to get any momentary advantage that can keep the Republic from being pulled down into a tight orbit around the UN. She has preserved big enough armed forces to act unilaterally, allied herself with any and all powers willing to take on the Secretary General, squeezed every bit of wriggling room from the UN—at the same time that, after the terrorist nuking of Washington, the Federal government was running a third of its budget on UN loans.
Once again, Harris Diem has been her right hand in this. He put the operation together like a pro. Even the developing leak between Carla and Louie Tynan is happening days later than he thought it would, and not affecting their plans at all.
And now, finally, she has in her hand real information—real information that she knows the UN does not have and needs badly.
Let the UN get it wrong, and it will go down. The Global Riot showed that clearly enough, and this is much bigger than any mere public scandal. She can do a lot more than just regain American sovereignty—she can collapse the “world government that dare not speak its name,” as she and her circle have called it for many years.
For fifteen years she has worked to put the United States back where it belongs, beyond the command of any foreign power.
All she need do is put together the secret team that will be ready for the real situation. They will still lose New Orleans, Tampa, Miami, Corpus Christi, but they’ll get through it. And the rest of the world will go to hell. Unless the UN figures out the truth and acts on that.
And if the UN does get it together … there goes the American bid for supremacy, probably forever.
The NSA tells her that they can’t predict what the UN will do if she gives them the accurate report. In any case, in a few months, when it’s probably too late, they’ll know they’ve been had, and perhaps as they go down they can pin the blame on her. That will be all right; if it comes to that she’ll walk right into the General Assembly and let them shoot her with a short pistol, put the whole blame on her—as long as the UN goes down and America comes back up.
But probably, NSA says, if the UN gets things together—they can hold deaths down to 100 million people worldwide. So if Brittany Lynn Hardshaw chooses to do what she had been planning to do—170 million unnecessary dead.
It will certainly put her in the history books. She’ll beat Hitler, Stalin, and Mao combined.
And if she hands the UN the truth—that involves telling NOAA the real numbers and probably admitting what the original plan had been, with impeachment likely to follow if Congress wants to save the shreds of American autonomy. More than that, it throws away the very last shot at full American independence.
She looks up at the portraits hanging on the walls; she picked them carefully—Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison, because they founded American independence; Lincoln, who saved the Republic; Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy, who armed it to the teeth. In fairness, perhaps, she should have included Franklin Roosevelt for the same reason—but he founded the UN.
“So what would you all do?” she asks them, and jumps at the sound of her own voice. She hadn’t meant to speak aloud.
The two reports lie side by side on the desk, and she looks at their all-but-identical covers for a long time, trying to see any other choice.
After the awkward way things started, Klieg would never have bet that this first date with Glinda Gray could go so well. She was exactly right—Derry seems to be delighted to have him interested in her mother, and the “luncheon at a little café where the crab is real and the atmosphere phony,” as he described it to them, was a big success. Now he and Glinda, having decided to just sit and watch Derry go by on a horse every so often, are out on the “parents’ patio” and having a drink together; mostly they’ve been talking about growing up in the middle of America, and about how few people anymore seem to have any real ambition or drive for wealth.
They’ve also been flirting a lot, and in one bold moment—grinning to make it a joke, but doing it anyway—she slid her high-heeled pump up his trouser leg. He grinned back to show he got the joke, but at just that moment he might have done anything for her.
There are flies all around—this close to horses it’s inevitable—and the two of them are constantly swinging and slapping at them. He doesn’t know what it makes him look like, but it makes Glinda’s blonde hair flip around in interesting ways—which he doesn’t get much of a chance to observe since he’s pretty busy swinging at flies himself. His best guess, from the way she smiles every so often, is that he looks pretty awkward doing it.
They talk on about all sorts of things. The last serious girlfriend that Klieg had, years ago, used to complain that all he talked about was “business, food, and the best brand of everything.” There was a certain amount of justice in it, he had to admit, but the great thing is that that seems to be what Glinda talks about as well. They talk about what kind of cars they’re going to get next year—they’re both eager readers of
Consumer Reports
—and where to get good cheap Mexican food that doesn’t put you at any risk of spoiled ingredients, and the relative merits of Denny’s versus Shoney’s when eating out of town. They talk about new carpeting, which both of them have gotten within the last couple of years, and about whether or not the newer editions of
The Joy of Cooking
are as good as the “classic” version.
Consumer Reports
—and where to get good cheap Mexican food that doesn’t put you at any risk of spoiled ingredients, and the relative merits of Denny’s versus Shoney’s when eating out of town. They talk about new carpeting, which both of them have gotten within the last couple of years, and about whether or not the newer editions of
The Joy of Cooking
are as good as the “classic” version.
They make a number of dumb jokes about all the flies, and they both laugh more than the jokes are worth.
He can’t remember when he’s had this much fun, or felt so comfortable with a woman. When Derry finally heads in to the stable—they have a shower in there, so the kid can freshen up before she comes out to meet them at the car—Klieg and Glinda stand up and just naturally take each other’s hands.
“Mashed potatoes,” she says. “That’s something it’s hard to get made right anymore. Restaurants don’t want to put in enough butter and milk.”
“You’re right about that,” Klieg says. “Took me forever to train my cook on that—even with the non-digestible fat versions, the cook tended to get upset and think that I was developing bad dietary habits. Kept ratting on me to Public Health till I restricted its modem access and made it strictly obedient. And I swear to god, it never cooked as well afterward, as if it were sulking. I don’t suppose you have servants—”
“Just an occasional live one,” she says, “but when you’ve had a few cleaning women you understand about how hard it is to get the help to do what you want it to do. Makes you appreciate how poor old NASA felt when the replicators were going to eat Moonbase.”
Derry sees them holding hands and her freckled face breaks down into a broad grin; she runs toward them, strawberry blonde braids flying. She
looks like one of the paintings Klieg got because he liked it, by some classic American painter—Norman Podhoretz? Something like that.
looks like one of the paintings Klieg got because he liked it, by some classic American painter—Norman Podhoretz? Something like that.
With a great scuffing and crunching of gravel, she comes to a stop in front of them. “That was fun! What are we going to do now?”
“Oh, well, your mom and I have just had a hardworking afternoon drinking on the patio, so maybe some dinner for the appetite we’ve worked up,” Klieg says. “After that, who knows?”
He knows Glinda’s humoring him, but Derry seems to like that they end up going to his favorite Shoney’s. And Fawn, the waitress—an older lady who looks quite a bit like the President—makes a big fuss over her, which seems to be fun for everyone. They have burgers, fries, and apple pie, and as they lean back, Glinda says, “I’ve got a dreadful confession to make, John. I’ve thought about something connected with business, and I think I have an idea.”
He mimes switching hats. “In that case, call me ‘boss.’” Derry giggles at the silliness; Klieg can tell he’s getting along great with the kid, as well as her mother. Definitely he should have thought of this years ago.
“Maybe I’ll wait for that until we get into the car,” Glinda says. “You eat here all the time and it’s always possible someone would bug Shoney’s.” She turns to Derry and adds, “Honey, you know enough to keep quiet about what Mr. Klieg and I talk about—”
“Is there a big corporate raider trying to take over GateTech or something?” Derry asks. Klieg sees what Glinda means about the kid o.d.’ing on television and XV.
“Why sure,” he explains. “Her name is Cruella DeVille, she’s a kidnapper, a datavandal, a spy, and a Leftie, and she’s this incredibly tall thin brunette babe who always dresses in long black slinky things—”
Derry is raising an eyebrow at him—she’s got a quizzical expression that’s so funny that he cracks up, just as Glinda does. “What’s so funny?” Derry demands. “Is Cruella DeVille a real person?”
That’s even funnier, but he can tell that Derry’s feelings will be hurt if someone doesn’t explain soon. “No, she’s a character in a movie. Your mother and I would have seen it back when we were young.”
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