Mother of Storms (18 page)
Authors: John Barnes
“Mom still is young,” Derry points out loyally.
At least it settles what they’re doing next; there’s a little screening-room place across the road where they can see
101 Dalmatians
on the big screen, and it happens that the place also has Junior Mints, which is Klieg’s favorite candy. This has really been a day for indulgence—he’s going to need to put some time in on the track.
101 Dalmatians
on the big screen, and it happens that the place also has Junior Mints, which is Klieg’s favorite candy. This has really been a day for indulgence—he’s going to need to put some time in on the track.
While they wait for the movie to be downloaded from the central bank, he asks Glinda, “So—it’s not likely we’re bugged here. What’s this great idea you’ve got?”
She pops a Junior Mint in her mouth, savors it a moment, and then says, “Well, it was just the thought that if we’re going into launch services that can’t be interrupted, chances are it’s better to be close to the pole—the hurricanes won’t get up there, right?”
“I don’t know, we’ll pay some meteorologist to tell us that.”
“Well, anyway, so we need to build a major space-launch facility without drawing too much attention to what we’re really up to. Now, who would want that done? Who that’s close to the pole?”
He beams at her. “Siberia! Yeah. And since the Prez is backing anyone who bucks the UN, we’ll get plenty of support for doing it from our home nation. Not bad, kiddo, not bad at all.”
“Thought you might like it. Do I get a kiss or are you still getting up your nerve?”
Truth is, he hadn’t even been thinking that far ahead, but now that she mentions it, it’s not a bad idea. He kisses Glinda; halfway through the kiss, he sees her open her eyes, look over at Derry, and cover Derry’s eyes with her hand. They’re all still laughing like idiots when the movie starts to run, and sure enough, it’s as good as they remembered, and the kid loves it.
Even if he weren’t about to take a trillion-dollar plunge into a new business, with a real chance to end up as Earth’s richest man, this would still be the best day of the decade, as far as Klieg is concerned. After they return to Glinda’s place, and Derry is steered off to bed, they get back to kissing, and it’s nice to find out how much they both still remember about it.
Everyone always says when couples break up that everyone else should still stay friends, and this is a chance to find out if anyone ever means it. Besides, Jesse wants to know if Little Miss Values can be made jealous.
Unfortunately, she hasn’t shown up at this party.
Without Naomi on his arm, towing him around and clarifying things for people, he is getting to talk to a lot of them, and there are a few things he’s noticing. One is the number of guys who seem to be very sincere but don’t exactly believe in anything. Another is the number of people who seem too ineffectual to have gotten out of bed in the morning; most people know the United Left is more a lifestyle than a position anymore, but when he thinks that these people, or others like them, were ever accused of having engineered the Flash … well, it’s just silly.
The most interesting thing to him is that he seems to be getting along really well with the women. He hadn’t realized how much he’d absorbed from Naomi—he can follow most of the political discussion pretty well, and by just staying a little noncommittal, he can get amazing amounts of
attention from young women who want to bring him around to their point of view.
attention from young women who want to bring him around to their point of view.
He’s not sure, all of a sudden, that dumping him wasn’t the biggest favor Naomi ever did him.
Not that these are exactly what he would have thought of as real honeys, back in his unenlightened high school days. They all look like sort of living fossils, cast up from the middle of the twentieth century; in a sosh class once the prof explained that when a movement becomes fixated on impossible causes or on issues that the great majority of society finds completely irrelevant, it takes on more of the aspect of a cult or religious community, including a distinctive style of dress and speech. He remembers a couple of young women with long loose hair, baggy skirts, sandals, and a lot of beads got up and walked out at that.
What he’s noticing now is that, all right, nobody’s even wearing makeup, but thanks to Naomi he’s used to that, and he’s also used to figuring out body shapes even under all the tenting. Many of these women have fabulous little bodies—and an acute interest in getting him to come to meetings and have things explained to him. He suspects he’s not the only person who would like to see Naomi consumed with jealousy.
And in a subculture where there’s not supposed to be any flirting, they all end up being much more overt than the girls Jesse grew up with. They stand close, they pose, they smile and stare into his eyes. A guy could get used to it.
He has a lot more trouble talking to the guys, even though everyone’s being polite enough. They don’t follow sports, they don’t do outdoors stuff directly (and Jesse’s never gotten used to XV wilderness experiences—too much like being on a hike with five college professors who talk too much). Besides, most of them are so careful not to dominate their female friends that they won’t exactly say what they think about anything in the presence of a woman. There are a few safe subjects—everyone agrees that technology is responsible for ARTS because it allowed people to survive AIDS, and for SPM because it was the evolutionary pressure of antibiotics that forced syphilis into developing its symptom-suppressing behavior. Everyone agrees that Doug Llewellyn and Passionet are responsible for degrading mass consciousness beyond redemption. Everyone agrees that because nobody cares about the race, the United Left really does have a shot at the presidency this year, even if they don’t settle on a candidate by November.
He’s a little startled at how much attention he’s getting from Gwendy, but not so startled that he can’t figure out what to do about it. After a while they are talking together in a corner, and she’s sitting closer and closer. He finds that by talking about Tapachula and the TechsMex job, he seems to get even more attention.
It ends up being a very late night for him; it turns out that Naomi tends to tell her friends everything, and moreover Naomi is the conscience Gwendy wishes she had. So she’s severely torn between what Naomi told her about sex in the desert at night, and the fact that Naomi still doesn’t approve of the Lectrajeep. In that sense it’s not any easier than getting Naomi to fuck; but when, finally, at two A.M., Gwendy is naked in the Lectrajeep in the desert, Jesse gets a chance to rediscover two things he had all but forgotten—laughter and enthusiasm.
It’s too bad he had to impress her with the Tapachula thing; now he’ll have to go do it, right when she was making the idea of Tucson so much more appealing.
Carla Tynan has been up for much too long, and she’s getting strung out.
MyBoat
is pounding along, using up her antimatter charge faster than intended—though it would still take her clear around the world, if it came to that. The hull is vibrating noticeably with the extra speed she’s crowded on. But the autopilot can do all that; the only time Carla’s skills are called for is when she’s coming into a port, and since she’s still six hundred miles northwest of Nauru, that’s going to be a long while.
MyBoat
is pounding along, using up her antimatter charge faster than intended—though it would still take her clear around the world, if it came to that. The hull is vibrating noticeably with the extra speed she’s crowded on. But the autopilot can do all that; the only time Carla’s skills are called for is when she’s coming into a port, and since she’s still six hundred miles northwest of Nauru, that’s going to be a long while.
She’s feeling a little ashamed of having dropped and run when she realized the magnitude of effect that was happening; a real scientist, she chides herself, would have headed a little north and way east, over into the hurricane formation zone off of southern Mexico, to get a better look. But all the same, she’s a pleasure craft, not a research vessel, and no doubt the big powers are getting some serious gear into that area already. Most likely if she’d decided to head there, she’d have been intercepted by the American or the Mexican navy and interned.
Anyway, what she’s finding here is bad enough. Correct for the true atmospheric mix, and you get something between fifty and a hundred big hurricanes and god knows what else. She has the equivalent of six old-time Crays in her little ship (she can remember back when you had to rent time on such things, and nowadays some rich people use microsupers to run their houses), but that’s not nearly enough to run the full model at any reasonable speed.
Thus she’s forced to do what they never have to do at NOAA (or at NSA, which she doesn’t know about). She has to set up the parts of the model that she can do by graphics and instinct, plug in values from that, and then run the parts for which she doesn’t have a gut feel. It’s woefully imprecise, and if her gut feelings are wrong at any point she’s going to get nonsense, but it’s what’s available if she wants the answer before the storm hits.
Thus she sets up the screen to show her the new isotherms in the Pacific. An isotherm is an imaginary line along which the temperature is constant; most people have seen them on TV weather maps, usually as bands of color on “high today” or “low today” maps.
If you’re interested in hurricanes, there’s one isotherm you’ve got to know everything about. That’s the one for 27.5° Celsius.
A hurricane is a gigantic heat engine. That is, it converts a temperature difference into mechanical energy, like diesel, steam, gasoline, jet, rocket, or turbine engines. But whereas a diesel engine, for example, converts (some of) the heat of the burning fuel to motion of the piston by releasing (most of) the heat to the cooler environment, a hurricane works by moving heat from the hot ocean surface to the cold bottom of the stratosphere—converting some of it to wind along the way.
If the water is below 27.5° Celsius, more energy comes out of the wind to move the heat than the heat itself supplies, and the hurricane dies. But above 27.5°, a hurricane doesn’t just live … it grows. Each blast of cool air blowing over the warm, wet ocean grows warmer, rises, drops its load of evaporated water, and returns with a little more force each time.
So inside the isotherms marked “27.5°” on Carla’s map, hurricanes will grow; outside they will die. The areas inside the 27.5° isotherms are “hurricane formation zones.”
She looks at the map, and she’s never seen anything like it before. Normally there are two, or in a very warm summer three, hurricane formation zones in the Pacific—one by the Philippines, one lying under the bulge of Mexico, and late in a warm summer the South China Sea.
The models have been figuring that these zones would expand, and the formula they have used to expand them has been a very simple one—too simple as it turns out. No one checked to see if they might overlap, or if others might form. Not that she blames them—it’s not a particularly obvious point. And for that matter, if they did, maybe they didn’t believe what they saw—quite possibly they did check and then decided not to stick their necks out. Remembering her old outfit, Carla sighs. Not sticking your neck out was what it was all about.
Still, it’s there, and if they’d been more careful or more systematic, they’d have seen it.
There is now just one hurricane formation zone in the North Pacific—but it stretches from the Galapagos to Borneo, east-west, and the equator to Hokkaido, north-south. It’s 11,000 miles across and 3,500 miles wide.
Normally the force of a hurricane is determined by the temperature of the water it passes over (the warmer the more force) and by the length of time it spends passing over that 27.5° or warmer water (the longer, the more heat energy gets converted into wind). So the size of the hurricane formation
zone limits the power of the hurricane, because it moves, on rare occasions as fast as 100 mph. Historically the hurricane formation zones have been 1,500 or 2,000 miles across at widest, so that few hurricanes stay in them for even twenty-four hours.
zone limits the power of the hurricane, because it moves, on rare occasions as fast as 100 mph. Historically the hurricane formation zones have been 1,500 or 2,000 miles across at widest, so that few hurricanes stay in them for even twenty-four hours.
This new whole-ocean hurricane formation zone is vastly bigger than anything of the kind in recorded history.
She sits and watches as the computer does a set of quick and dirty runs, playing with random numbers to show a range of possibilities.
They all look frighteningly alike. She feels like just going to bed, hoping to get up in the morning and find it was all a bad dream.
Anyway, it won’t happen tonight. She can take
MyBoat
up to the surface and plug in, talk to Di or Louie or somebody.
MyBoat
up to the surface and plug in, talk to Di or Louie or somebody.
She reaches for the autopilot control, sets running for “surface” and tells it to take her up gently. In a moment the thunder of the motors pushing water out the jets begins to sound slightly different as
MyBoat
begins to climb toward the surface. She gets back to the keyboard, and snips out the important bits into a file she can zap over to Di.
MyBoat
begins to climb toward the surface. She gets back to the keyboard, and snips out the important bits into a file she can zap over to Di.
Of course, maybe he knows. Maybe he’s in on it. Well, if that’s the case, at least he can warn her to steer clear of this. And perhaps even tell her a little about what is really going on. On the other hand, if he’s been kept in the dark too … who’s running this show?
No doubt they’ll find out. All they have to do is reveal the findings and see who gets upset enough to try to suppress them. She grins at herself for thinking such melodramatic thoughts.
When the hull of
MyBoat
finally bursts out onto the Pacific Ocean, Carla has her download ready to go. She dials Di’s number at home before she remembers to check the time zone; fortunately, running submerged, she’s been keeping strange hours, and it’s only ten P.M. there, not unconscionable, although he does have young kids.
MyBoat
finally bursts out onto the Pacific Ocean, Carla has her download ready to go. She dials Di’s number at home before she remembers to check the time zone; fortunately, running submerged, she’s been keeping strange hours, and it’s only ten P.M. there, not unconscionable, although he does have young kids.
His wife, Lori, the mystery writer, answers. She’s always been just a little distant with Carla. When Di and Carla worked together, Di probably talked too much about her at home.
But Lori knows her well enough to know the call must be something important. “Hi. I guess I’d better get Di. He’s asleep with the kids.”
“Thank you, Lori. I’m sorry to have to call so late.”
“It’s all right—if you’re doing it, it’s important. Can I ask you something before I get Di?”
“Of course.”
“How serious is all the stuff happening?”
Lori glances to the side, probably checking to make sure that Di isn’t listening. “Di’s been talking in his sleep, thrashing around, coming home from work looking like hell—”
Lori glances to the side, probably checking to make sure that Di isn’t listening. “Di’s been talking in his sleep, thrashing around, coming home from work looking like hell—”
“I’m not surprised,” Carla says. “It’s very serious, Lori, and I’ve got some evidence that it’s even worse than what Di may be thinking.”
Lori nods soberly, and a change comes over her face. Carla thinks to herself, this is the kind of woman who hears it’s dangerous, so she gets a Self Defender. She hears that someone has managed to use AIRE to break a patent, or that fibrop prices have come down, and she knows exactly which stocks in the kids’ college portfolios have to be sold right away. She knows everything she can about the world she lives in and she’s ready to use the knowledge. If anyone should be able to get through this, it’s Lori—she’s what Carla’s boomtalking grandmother would call “a really together lady.”
“Can you tell me anything about it?” Lori asks.
“Well,” Carla says slowly, “I can easily imagine why Di hasn’t wanted to tell you. But I think you’re entitled to get ready for it. I’m afraid this really is a global disaster; a lot of people are going to die and a lot of things are going to change.”
“Is there anything we could do … to be safe?” Lori asks. “I don’t want to ask Di, because he worries enough … but the kids—”
“If I think of anything I’ll call you and tell you. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to spend the summer in the mountains, maybe—you’re only a few miles from the sea, right?”
“Right.” Lori nods like she’s going to start packing right now.
“But I could be dead wrong, Lori. If the Appalachians get the extra water we’re talking about, they might be worse than the coast—flash floods, storms, mudslides, hail, maybe even bad blizzards in July if enough cloud cover develops. We’re just not ready to say. That’s part of why Di is so upset these days, I’m sure—because we’re not ready to say, but we know for sure it’s going to be something big.”
Or because he does know what it’s going to be, and he’s holding data back for some weird political reason
, she adds, crossing her fingers mentally.
Or because he does know what it’s going to be, and he’s holding data back for some weird political reason
, she adds, crossing her fingers mentally.
Lori nods. “Thanks for filling me in. I’ll go get Di.”
“Oh, and Lori?”
“Unh-hunh?”
“I loved
Slaughterer in Green
. My favorite so far.”
Slaughterer in Green
. My favorite so far.”
Lori beams at her. “Thanks.” She vanishes from the screen and a moment later Di comes onto the camera.
“Carla—what’s up?”
“A lot, I’m afraid. I was talking with Louie earlier today, and he happened to read me off some of the methane density results they’re getting with the satellite-to-satellite shots.”
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