Mother of Storms (28 page)
Authors: John Barnes
And they have every right to ask this dismissability of it. If it were a normal hurricane, it would be expected to take the usual route north through the Pacific and hit in or near Japan; thousands of storm tracks have. Hurricanes in the Northern Hemisphere may move in any direction or even loop around, but normally they move to the north and the west, and thus far this one has been no exception to that rule, however exceptional it has been in every other regard.
Thus when it obstinately turns and heads east on the afternoon of the twenty-fifth-and then proceeds to gain speed and strength as it roars back across the Pacific, farther north than any hurricane, let alone a giant one, could normally be expected—the uproar in the scientific community finds little echo in the general media. No one lives out there, and the big hurricane story has been done; if it stays away from Hawaii, it will never make a prime slot again.
John Klieg has operated all over the world for the last ten years, or at least he thought it was all over the world. He realizes now that he has missed a lot of the sleazier corners, and he is beginning to hope that they won’t come any sleazier than Novokuznetsk, the capital of the Siberian Republic. He knew that it was a boomtown—hell, Siberia is a boom
nation
—but somewhere in the back of his mind he had envisioned something like the American or Alaskan frontier towns, or even like the rain forest frontier in Brazil—trashy and thrown up in haste, rough around the edges, but a place where stuff was getting done and built. There was some poem or other he’d read back in high school about cities with big shoulders, and that was kind of what he thought a boomtown should look like.
nation
—but somewhere in the back of his mind he had envisioned something like the American or Alaskan frontier towns, or even like the rain forest frontier in Brazil—trashy and thrown up in haste, rough around the edges, but a place where stuff was getting done and built. There was some poem or other he’d read back in high school about cities with big shoulders, and that was kind of what he thought a boomtown should look like.
He wasn’t prepared for this place. The downtown has all been thrown up in the last ten years, a long way from the old city center, so that the whole city seems to have fallen over sideways. Mostly, downtown is empty office buildings with exorbitant rents, because there’s a roaring speculation boom in office space going on at the moment. Land prices near the city at
any instant are either impossibly high or almost nothing, changing rapidly as the local and the national government policies veer around to favor different zipline routes.
any instant are either impossibly high or almost nothing, changing rapidly as the local and the national government policies veer around to favor different zipline routes.
The whole city has exactly six blocks of
working
zipline, all within the Abdulkashim Center, and although the whole route can be traversed in less than ten minutes on foot, the zipline itself runs on the hour, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday only.
working
zipline, all within the Abdulkashim Center, and although the whole route can be traversed in less than ten minutes on foot, the zipline itself runs on the hour, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday only.
What everyone in Novokuznetsk is doing is getting rights to things; Abdulkashim came to power on the back of the army, like the last eleven Siberian dictators, but he stayed in power because of the two promises he didn’t break—he kept building up the military forces and he kept reducing the size of everything else connected with the government. His rivals have no alternative program.
Novokuznetsk is not the first city on Earth to have all the buildings coated with thick coal soot, but it’s the latest, and more is being added all the time. When the sun breaks through, which is rarely, you see a city of recent construction already crumbling in its air pollution and strangling on traffic and bad sewers—but rates of construction are amazing, and every business that can is moving here to get out from under tax and regulatory loads.
Well, Klieg thinks to himself, that’s the way it is everywhere. He’s always a little amazed that people get upset by what businesses do; businesses do what you pay them to do and what you allow them to do, and both of those are up to the customers and the citizens.
The thing that he finds disconcerting is not the mess that this place has become, but the realization that it’s a mess that doesn’t produce anything. He’s not completely unaware that GateTech produces nothing and sometimes prevents others from producing anything; that doesn’t bother him by itself. But GateTech at least maintains comfortable, attractive facilities, places that look like college campuses, where his teams of scientists and engineers can enjoy working. Every place that GateTech owns is clean, safe, and humane, because Klieg knows that creative work flourishes in that kind of environment.
Novokuznetsk is not like that. The belching stacks are mostly the municipal power plants, which will be coming off line when the fusion plant finally opens (any year now—as soon as they quit switching primary contractors in exchange for fresh bribes, and allow some one contractor to finish the job, always assuming the contractor is competent and anyone can build a plant on that site after all the redesigns that have been thrown into the mix).
What the power plants are driving, in turn, are giant advertising signs, office machinery in the skyscrapers of the new downtown, and lots of
demonstration facilities that have been set up mostly to attract investors. The typical visitor to Novokuznetsk is a businessman who has dreams of a new high-profit frontier, and everything is set up to cater to that; they can visit the matrix metals facility (which has all the machines sitting out on a common shop floor like so many drill presses and table saws, because the sterile cleanrooms in which they would run were never built); the aircraft test field where they’re doing land-on-maglev tests (which was at Ohio State until Abdulkashim bought it and moved it; the new one, at Ohio State, is pursuing a much more promising line of research); or the nanosurgery facility (which is real enough but staffed mostly with surgeons who came here because they had to—typically the kind of doctor who just has a little problem with pills, the bottle, or patients’ genitalia). That typical visitor doesn’t know what he’s looking at—he knows money, not engineering or science—and so he sees all the feverish activity and concludes that Novokuznetsk is “real”—Klieg has heard the word used many times—and throws money into it.
demonstration facilities that have been set up mostly to attract investors. The typical visitor to Novokuznetsk is a businessman who has dreams of a new high-profit frontier, and everything is set up to cater to that; they can visit the matrix metals facility (which has all the machines sitting out on a common shop floor like so many drill presses and table saws, because the sterile cleanrooms in which they would run were never built); the aircraft test field where they’re doing land-on-maglev tests (which was at Ohio State until Abdulkashim bought it and moved it; the new one, at Ohio State, is pursuing a much more promising line of research); or the nanosurgery facility (which is real enough but staffed mostly with surgeons who came here because they had to—typically the kind of doctor who just has a little problem with pills, the bottle, or patients’ genitalia). That typical visitor doesn’t know what he’s looking at—he knows money, not engineering or science—and so he sees all the feverish activity and concludes that Novokuznetsk is “real”—Klieg has heard the word used many times—and throws money into it.
That, too, makes Klieg shake his head. It’s not a problem
he
would ever have. He understands that money matters, data matters, the rules matter—the physical side of things doesn’t. But if you think it does, you ought to be able to tell fake from real.
he
would ever have. He understands that money matters, data matters, the rules matter—the physical side of things doesn’t. But if you think it does, you ought to be able to tell fake from real.
Klieg knows the showpiece plants are powered up half an hour before each visitor arrives and powered down ten minutes after departure. The whole muddy, dirty, polluted, uncomfortable mess is only a lure for money. Nothing will ever be made here and very few services will ever be provided.
Geez, he’s thinking like one of those socialist channels that come out of the Third World—not that he’s a fan of them but his staff includes them in the mix of daily reports that crosses his reading window. But again, what do people expect? A business is to make money with—if there’s money in building things and serving people, they’ll do it, and if not, well, then obviously nobody wanted things built or people served, because if they had, they’d have paid for it.
The reason he’s thinking about how ugly and nasty all this is—aside from the fact that he has eyes and a nose—is that he’s really missing Glinda and Derry. A few weeks ago he just sort of noticed that Glinda was around, and knew she had a kid; now he
hates
being away.
hates
being away.
There’s something philosophic about all of that, he supposes, but hell if he can see what it might be. The world changes under you as you get to understand things about it better. He’d known for a long time she was pretty and lonely; it hadn’t occurred to him before that he was lonely, or that she might be interested. That’s all.
Right now there’s a warm rain drenching Novokuznetsk, running black and greasy off the raw new buildings, puddling brown and gray with
rainbow slicks all over the lumpy concrete roadway. The fuel-cell-driven cab he’s in has an obvious scream in its electric motors and seems to get lost every so often and wander for a couple of streets before it finds a working checkpoint, and to judge from the smell in here, the place has been a boudoir for a number of local prostitutes and First World suits recently.
rainbow slicks all over the lumpy concrete roadway. The fuel-cell-driven cab he’s in has an obvious scream in its electric motors and seems to get lost every so often and wander for a couple of streets before it finds a working checkpoint, and to judge from the smell in here, the place has been a boudoir for a number of local prostitutes and First World suits recently.
He just wishes to god that he could be back in Florida; Derry’s in some kind of a riding contest today, and she and Glinda will call tomorrow morning, their time, which will be late in the evening his, to let him know how it went. He’s getting very fond of the kid, too—naturally they don’t want to spoil her, but he’s been having a good deal of fun getting various just-right things for her.
It’s been years since he’s had so much company and affection, and he’s already having a little trouble getting by without it. Glinda has just kind of opened up into his life, and all of a sudden things like eating dinner, or relaxing on the beach, or going shopping—stuff he’d been thinking of as “routine maintenance” for years—has all become the stuff he looks forward to most.
Not to mention sex. Klieg has tried all the fancy stuff but he really just likes to mess around a little, get excited, and fuck—and that’s just what Glinda likes, and she likes it about as often as Klieg does, which is much more often than it was a few months ago. Most weekend nights, and during the week whenever he sleeps over at her place, they take that extra ten minutes that feels so wonderful and end up sleeping curled against each other.
It has even occurred to Klieg that he could think about retiring, but a little more reflection led him to the conclusion that much as he loves his new-found uses for time off, he wouldn’t much like to spend all his time doing them. The mixture could maybe be adjusted one way or another—when the company is in more normal times and life gets dull he might spend a little more time away from it. For right now, this move into space launch needs his attention.
The biggest problem he failed to anticipate was caused by the publicity this miserable country had managed to generate for itself. He figured since they pretty much continuously bragged about the freedom for business they offered—unregulated gold standard banks, no environmental regs, practically no health and safety laws, no local investor participation required, and on and on—that he could just build the thing and start launching.
He was wrong. Instead of regulations per se, the government here requires permits for everything. Not that the permit requires you to do anything more than plunk down money, but you have to plunk down a lot of money, frequently, and they keep halting the work whenever you didn’t plunk it down in front of the right guy, which is a mixture of getting the
mostly unwritten procedures right, bribing the right people to get you through to the people that the procedures say you should be dealing with, and then bribing the officials when you do get through to them so that they’ll accept the government’s fee. It would have been cheaper to build this somewhere else.
mostly unwritten procedures right, bribing the right people to get you through to the people that the procedures say you should be dealing with, and then bribing the officials when you do get through to them so that they’ll accept the government’s fee. It would have been cheaper to build this somewhere else.
He reminds himself that the reason for building it here is, at this moment, whirling around out in the Pacific; it’s already taken down Kingman Reef, which was about to double world launch capacity, and last reports are that the storm surge is more than big enough to swamp the Japanese launch facilities at Kageshima and the Formosan Republic’s facility at Hungtow; that big right turn Hurricane Clem made threw what are practically tidal waves northward. Of the world’s five significant launch facilities, three will certainly be out of action before July and that’s a very good start.
Right now he’s off to meet this guy Hassan, who isn’t Siberian but is extremely influential, or so Klieg’s team has established; if Hassan can do what they say he can, then permits ought to start flowing pretty fast, and if he can’t, well, it’s only time and money.
The cab rounds a corner a little tight, almost scraping the curb, and throws up a cascade of black greasy puddle onto a girl who looks to be about Derry’s age, who had been posing by the curb, topless in a short skirt and heels. As she jumps back, screams, and swears, Klieg sees the tracks of a dozen different infections on her pale barely developing chest; she’s got the telltale purple blotches of ARTS and the raised, inflamed veins of SPM, plus what looks like a plain old ringworm. He can see from her open mouth that she’s already lost a few teeth, and her grimace suggests that ARTS is taking hold.
The gruesome thing, he thinks, as the cab pulls away and she flings a clod of dirt against its back window, is that if she’s trying to flag men in cabs like that, it probably means some of them are buying her. Well, if what she’s got doesn’t get her, no doubt she’s got some strain of AIDS or resistant clap, so she’ll probably be off the street—and under the ground—before she’s fourteen.
And undoubtedly there will be another one.
Capitalism in action, Klieg thinks, great system to stay on top of … .
It does remind him that Glinda is being kind of a typical mother about Derry and not noticing that the kid is growing up; Derry has hinted now and then that she’s getting interested in boys and so forth, and Glinda has worked pretty hard at ignoring that. Not that Derry’s going to end up like that piece of thrown-off human garbage back there, of course, but you don’t have to go to cheap whores to get killer diseases, and the kid needs to be kept safe.
One more thing that, between money and power, Klieg can do. It makes him feel good, right now, that he can protect Derry that way; it’s not as good as sitting down to Glinda’s meat loaf (she’s programmed her cook to make it exactly right, something that Klieg has never been able to do with his), hearing about Derry’s day at school, then snuggling up for a movie and popcorn with Glinda, but it does make him feel better about being in this smelly potholed dump of a town.
The cab must be programmed to go the long way to everywhere, because by the time it pulls up at Hassan’s building, Klieg has passed through a couple of major intersections twice. Hassan has a whole floor on one of those empty skyscrapers, and at the door, Klieg is met by two big men who look like they might be contenders for the Siberian Olympic wrestling team. You can see that their coats—cheap, brightly colored, new—bunch around the armpits, and are a little tight through the shoulder. There’s a bulge on the left breast where you expect it. There seems to be about a two-inch gap between coat and shirt collars, and when the slightly shorter one says, “Meesser Klieg, please?” and sticks out a solid, slablike hand, the shirt cuff strains.
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