Mother of Storms (31 page)

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Authors: John Barnes

BOOK: Mother of Storms
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Oh, it’s going to be one of these. Jesse figured out a while ago that although they did a lot of conditioning to make her into Synthi Venture, there’s a lot of Mary Ann Waterhouse that never required any conditioning. For one thing, she tends to communicate in this sort of deep-emotion-speak made up of phrases from old movies. She rambles on a little about “getting it back together” and “refocusing her energies” and so forth, leading up to the conclusion that she sees Jesse “as a gateway person in my life.” He’s not sure what it all means except that she’s glad they’re together; he used to talk this way when he was trying to get girls into bed with the old sensitive-artistic-young-man routine, but it doesn’t feel like she’s particularly trying to seduce him.
He lets an arm slide up around her shoulders, feeling how small she
really is, and pulls her close to him. The street is all but deserted, with just two other couples walking far away from them. The street leads to a not-impressive little fountain that plays halfheartedly in the brilliant sunlight and he guides her to the rim of the fountain, and then they sit down, and he kisses her.
This is the first real kiss since that awful first night—he’s kissed her goodnight a few times but it’s just been a peck on the lips—and he’s surprised at how gentle, and how responsive, she is. She seems to want him to take the lead, her mouth soft and shyly probing at his. The kiss goes on for a long time, and when it’s over she’s smiling like a young kid after her first one.
“I haven’t been kissed that way in a long, long time,” she says. “I guess I’m a little surprised that I can still feel it.”
“Well, since you could, how was it?”
“Divine, dammit. Think I’d tell you if it wasn’t? Anyway, now that we’ve done the corny kissing-by-the-fountain routine, and the corny walking-around-hand-in-hand routine—”
“Fear not,” he says. “I have something just as corny up my sleeve. There’s a
licuado
stand around the corner. It’s run by the sister of one of my students, so she probably won’t slip us any rotten fruit.”
She blinks at him innocently. “What’s a
licuado?”
“Aha,” he says. “Wealthy tourist ladies don’t get out and mix with the people much, do they?”
“Just so it isn’t Spanish for ‘dog vomit,’ or something. I don’t want this to turn out to be anything like the Vegemite trick.”
Jesse grins at her. “Nope. Not in the least. And I’ve already fallen for Vegemite once, which is about as often as anyone could be expected to.”
“Me too. Rock is evil. He talked me into trying Vegemite while we were doing a story about the deterioration of the Great Barrier Reef.”
“Yeah, there were three Australian students at U of the Az who threw a ‘snacks around the world’ potluck; naturally they brought Vegemite and ate everyone else’s stuff. That wasn’t so disgusting, except that then they ate the Vegemite.”
“Now
that’s
disgusting. So a
licuado
is not some kind of prank?”
“Fresh fruit, milk, and sugar, run through a blender. But the thing is that the milk and the fruit are really fresh, like just bought in the market that morning. Haven’t even had time to get lonely for the tree or the cow. Come on—this requires your immediate attention.”
They round the corner into the broad
calle
, divided by long low brick planters in which palm trees grow.
Porfirio’s sister recognizes Jesse at once, and it’s obvious that she’s heard from Porfirio who Jesse is involved with, because she’s suddenly very shy
and formal around Mary Ann. Mary Ann is polite and warm in return—Jesse finds himself thinking,
Right, and this way Teresa will tell all of her friends what an average, normal, but muy bella woman Synthi Venture is
.
They get a single gigantic papaya licuado, an interesting purplish-pink shade since the papaya was very ripe and red, and share it using two straws. That means Mary Ann’s sun hat is severely in Jesse’s way, and after a few bumps she takes it off, letting that great mass of strangely red hair spill down into her lap.
“There’s a lot of that,” Jesse notes.
“Has to be—most of those styles they put me in involve wrapping it over all those funny foam supports. I just think of it as being the 3D equivalent of the old cardboard sheets they used to tape Cosmo models’ hair to.”
“Lady, I’m just glad they didn’t make
everything
synthetic.”
“Maybe not synthetic, but the way it’s been treated it’s pretty callused.”
“I was talking about your heart.”
“Come to think of it, so was I.”
The walk back to her place goes very slowly, but neither of them is eager or reluctant; something has been settled. The all-but-psychic Señora Herrera has prepared a cold, buffet-style
comida
for them, which she sends up to Mary Ann’s bedroom.
This time it takes a long time, and it’s surprisingly gentle and friendly. Neither of them tunes in the news, and shouting outside in the street is so common that they don’t hear the news from Hawaii until the next morning.
 
 
On June 28, northwest of Midway, sixteen kilometers up, a torrent of wet air pours along the bottom of the tropopause—the outflow jet for Hurricane Clem. The jet is huge—it carries the mass flow of several large hurricanes all by itself. Yet it’s invisible; Louie Tynan, far to the south and high above, can barely perceive it, now that he knows what to look for, with infrared scanning.
Di Callare and his team, and Carla Tynan in
MyBoat
, have been aware of it for less than a week but now the outflow jet is occupying most of their thoughts.
Thus far Clem has been following the steering currents, the winds that circle clockwise over the North Pacific six kilometers up, rather meekly, like an elephant allowing itself to be led on a kite-string tether. But if Carla is right, then at any moment the outflow jet might swing around to some other point, or a new outflow jet might form, and in either case Clem might surge off in any direction at all.
When the moment comes, it is late afternoon in the North Pacific, and
it’s mere coincidence that Louie is watching; by the time he’s reaching for the phone to tell Earth about it, the alarms are already sounding and data from the automatic cameras will be funneling into Houston and Washington in a matter of moments.
Still he calls; no one who works with high-tech equipment ever trusts it completely, and this is far too important to leave reporting it to the judgment of some Al. He uses the high-priority code to get through directly to Washington and is rewarded with the sleepy, grouchy face of Harris Diem, who had just gone to bed. “Yes?”
“Mr. Diem, this is Louie Tynan. The outflow jet has just precessed north. Clem is about to veer off track.”
“Processed—north. Where will it come in, do you have an idea yet?”
Louie looks down at the readout the AI is giving him. “Shit. We sure do. Looks like there’s an excellent chance Midway gets clobbered, and after that it’s about fifty-fifty that one or more of the Hawaiian Islands will get it.”
Diem looks down, confirms Louie’s numbers, looks back up at him. “Stick around and don’t go off to the moon for a bit. Someone might want you to look at some specific things unofficially. If you need to do anything to get comfortable for the next few hours, the next ten minutes would be a good time to do it.”
“Roger,” Louie says, and turns away from the phone as Diem hangs up.
The outflow jet has swung farther north—indeed, begun to swing to the east. It’s obvious to Louie just from naked-eye observation, for there’s a sharp edge biting into the spiral of Hurricane Clem, which is where the descending outflow jet is forming a high-pressure area.
He sends a copy of the basic results to Di’s team number, so that the data will be available once Diem or Pauliss wakes up Di Callare, and then copies Carla on it, though she’s probably too far submerged to get it for a while.
Then, long practice taking hold of him, he orders sandwiches and coffee from the automatic galley, and goes to the head. Diem is absolutely right—you never know.
As the outflow jet takes up its new position relative to the storm, the winds all around shift; air flows from high to low pressure, and there is no lower pressure at sea level than in Clem’s center, nor higher pressure than the descent point of the outflow jet. If Clem were a physical object, sheer mass would make the hurricane take a long time to slow down and change direction, but a hurricane is not an object, it’s a process: it converts the angular momentum of the inward spiraling air into the power of its winds, but it does not itself have momentum.
So when it suddenly turns 110 degrees to the right, swinging wildly into a new trajectory, it does not slow down and then accelerate like an ocean liner or a truck; it just changes direction.
The best news, from the standpoint of the world’s governments, is that it happens exactly when the North American East Coast is getting ready for bed, and that it takes a while for the significance of the story to become apparent, so by the time word is breaking on XV one of the big population belts has gone to bed.
Unfortunately this puts it on the morning news for Europe and the evening news for East Asia.
Thus Carla Tynan, surfacing for the last run into Pohnpei, is aware of the situation not long after it happens, sets her autopilot, and gets to work; Di, rousted from bed by Henry Pauliss’s phone call, apologizes to Lori, grabs the bag he has been keeping packed, and catches the zipline to DC.
At four in the morning, Di is at his desk, with a huge mug of coffee i front of him. Gretch runs over from the intern’s dorm and gets put in charge of point plotting and data patterning; Pete and Wo Ping arrive next, sharing a ride, then Mohammed. Just as they begin to worry, Talley comes in, a Self Defender protruding conspicuously from her purse. She lives in a bad neighborhood, she explains, and figured it was better to walk down the street with her hand visibly on that than to get delayed by anyone trying anything. “If I have to fire it, the radio signal would bring cop cars from everywhere and I’d end up talking to cops all night,” she says with a shrug.
She’s perfectly made up, and Di wonders for an idle moment if she was interrupted in a date or perhaps while out at a club. Strange that she never seems tired in the morning.
John Klieg catches it on the evening news and notes with grim satisfaction that another private space-launch company, Consolidated Launch, is based at Naalehu on the Big Island. It isn’t as important as the heavy-lift facility at Kingman, but anyplace that can’t put up a satellite is going to make Klieg richer and there’s a splendid chance that, with its exposed gantries sitting a full kilometer out in the sea, and its pipelines running down across the beaches, Naalehu will be out of action within days, leaving the USA with only the air launch facility at Edwards.
All in all, in two weeks since Clem formed, he’s cut the global supply of available launches by a very satisfying forty percent; Klieg knows it will be Hassan, with congratulations, when the phone rings. Too bad about all those people, but as Hassan says, compassion speaks well of its holder but does little for its recipient.
Brittany Hardshaw knows ten minutes after Harris Diem does, and she’s dressed and sleeping off and on in a cot by the Oval Office. The alarms are going out to Hawaii by every possible means, and at least it’s early evening
there and it’s easy to get the word out. Remembering the pictures from Micronesia, the crashed space facility at Kingman, and all the XV coverage of the wrecked old folks’ home on Saipan, the Hawaiians are responding as she would have hoped, digging in and filling sandbags, getting everyone and everything that can be moved back into the mountains. Still, if any of the islands take the full force of Clem, it won’t be nearly enough.
The Navy decides to take no chances and works all night to evacuate Midway; fortunately the USS
George Bush
and its carrier group are at hand already, so they’re able to just shove everyone and anything aboard the carrier and everything else that will float, and run for Pearl Harbor, leaving the island unoccupied. When President Hardshaw gets word that the fleet has departed and is making all speed, she heaves a sigh of relief; it’s late afternoon now in Washington, and it looks like Clem is going to go through the Hawaiian chain right between Lisianski and Laysan—near enough to give Midway a pounding and to hit the main islands with monster waves, but a long way from Oahu, Maui, or Hawaii itself. And Admiral Singh on the
Bush
seems to think the carrier group can ride it out and still make it to Pearl. Bad enough—but they’ll make it.
Before he goes home for the day, Harris Diem finds he’s called into the New Oval Office one more time.
“It’s time,” Hardshaw says. “We need to get all the attention on Clem if Rivera and I are going to get the powers we need.”
“It still sounds strange for you to say ‘Rivera and I,’” Diem notes.
“You sound bitter.”
“Yeah, a little. May I sit, boss?”
“You don’t need to ask and you know it. What’s the matter?”
“I keep thinking, who are you, where is the real Brittany Lynn Hardshaw, and what have you done with her?” Diem sighs. “Somebody works for more than a decade to get us back out from under the UN thumb—and it hasn’t been easy, with them paying the bills at the start and our having to practically rent out the armed forces as peacekeeping units—the goal is within reach, and … what? You bring them back in. You know damned well we could dominate the world after Clem.”

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