Mother of Storms (38 page)
Authors: John Barnes
These are more words out of Dr. Wo than Louie has heard in twenty years of knowing him. “I suppose the answer is it depends on what
they
think.”
they
think.”
“That’s the only answer that makes any sense. I’d say if we alter someone that much, and he or she changes name, friends, everything, and starts a new life, it’s probably a different person—but the person might not feel that way. And if he or she keeps everything pretty much the same but changes a couple of old habits, it’s the same person—but the person might not feel that way. And I suppose I’m old-fashioned enough to think that the person involved ought to be the one who says who he or she is. Anyway, if you’ll permit us to run some checks—some on you and some on the processors on the moon—”
Louie nods, swallows hard, and says yes. They set a time and Wo clicks off.
Well, here he is. The process is probably not reversible. He returns to the moon in a moment or two, looks around, feels that again things are different, and better. As to who he is, or who he will be—the question is both more and less than academic. More because it’s real—he can feel them in there, fixing and correcting, there’s an odd clarity to his memory and his concentration is better. Less because he can’t undo it.
Well, whether he is Louie-2, or just Louie-1.1, he’s got a job to do. He’ll think about it when he gets some time.
The supply rocket launches go beautifully, so now he has a launch system, and he puts the network of programs and machines onto the job of copying the stock weather-satellite design sent up from Earth. He decides
it can’t hurt to tell them to leave the interface compatible but optimize the rest for function … as long as USSF seems to have optimized him, he might as well optimize them right back. He can feel the net thinking about the problem in the back of his brain as he pulls back into the
Constitution
. He’ll be coming up on the Pacific soon and no doubt they’ll want him to take some observations.
it can’t hurt to tell them to leave the interface compatible but optimize the rest for function … as long as USSF seems to have optimized him, he might as well optimize them right back. He can feel the net thinking about the problem in the back of his brain as he pulls back into the
Constitution
. He’ll be coming up on the Pacific soon and no doubt they’ll want him to take some observations.
It’s only then, reading his mail, that he finds out that Hawaii is all but scoured to rock; the estimates are that nine out of every ten people alive on the islands two days ago are dead now, but that’s based on the little the Army has been able to reach and the few surviving hams have been able to tell them. It looks very much like not one, but four great waves went all the way across Oahu.
Carla Tynan had been expecting to have some time for a little friendly talk with Louie, but first he called to say that between all the weird stuff he was doing on “the big project”—she’s afraid to ask him what it is since he seems to think she knows, but whatever it is he’s doing it mostly via telepresence on the moon—and because of all the other observations they want him to take, on this and the next Pacific pass, they probably won’t get time. He’ll try to get to her on satellite link sometime in the next day or two.
She wonders idly why, given that she’s never going to see him anyway, she ever bothered divorcing him.
And then, instead of giving her some privacy and some time to work, Di Callare calls up, along with his useless boss Henry Pauliss, and Harris Diem, who is White House Chief of Staff but is also useless, and they all want her to hold the line while they get something together.
Obviously it’s the President, and Carla can imagine plenty of reasons the President might want to talk to her, but nothing that Carla could say couldn’t be expressed better by a well-written report.
Moreover, the constant sitting and waiting by the phone—every few minutes Di, or Pauliss, or Diem asks if she’s still there—destroys her concentration, so that she can’t get any work done in the interval.
She sits on her sunbathing deck, looking at the wide horizon, enjoying the sun on her face, arms, and bare legs. She’s realizing too that she and Louie have been talking every two or three days—the “weekly” call “just to keep in touch” plus one or two “I forgot to mentions”—for the last year or so, while she’s been at sea and he’s been in space, and you never know what you’re going to miss until it’s gone, now, do you? Now she wishes deeply that she could spend a lazy afternoon just hanging around with him.
Frankly, she’d like to have some conversation, strange as that is for a
hermit like Carla Tynan. In front of the suits Di won’t talk meteorology freely (for fear of being misunderstood? or for fear of being understood? Carla would like to know). Pauliss, after all, is the guy who fired her, and now that she’s proving vital, she knows enough of Washington to suspect that the last thing he wants to do is be anywhere near the President when the subject of Carla Tynan comes up. And Diem is utterly bland and noncommittal.
hermit like Carla Tynan. In front of the suits Di won’t talk meteorology freely (for fear of being misunderstood? or for fear of being understood? Carla would like to know). Pauliss, after all, is the guy who fired her, and now that she’s proving vital, she knows enough of Washington to suspect that the last thing he wants to do is be anywhere near the President when the subject of Carla Tynan comes up. And Diem is utterly bland and noncommittal.
So the available subjects for chit-chat are Di’s family: Lori is fine and almost done with
Slaughterer in Yellow
, Mark is a pleasant but not precocious kid, Nahum is precocious. And not particularly pleasant, Carla suspects, if what she hears between the lines is true.
Slaughterer in Yellow
, Mark is a pleasant but not precocious kid, Nahum is precocious. And not particularly pleasant, Carla suspects, if what she hears between the lines is true.
Diem interrupts a Nahum story to say, “You mean you’re doing that—I forget what it’s called, but the system where you take naps with them and let them go to sleep anytime they want?” There’s a sort of deep shock in his voice, not entirely masked.
Di Callare is clearly short of sleep himself, for he snaps just a little at this man who holds so much power. “As a matter of fact, yes, we do use the London Method, and we’ve never had a fight about bedtime, and the children do seem much calmer than most. Of course we don’t let them have XV at all or TV much, so that may be the real reason.”
Diem nods grudgingly. “I suppose it’s hard to argue with results, and after all I never had kids, so I sure don’t have any basis for arguing with you. I was just thinking how different it is from when I was growing up. Other than making sure I studied, keeping me working in the old man’s restaurant in Boise—and seeing that I had food and ctothes—I can’t recall ever receiving that much interest from my parents. They just kind of raised us kids any old way.”
Henry Pauliss asks a classic suck-up question. “And how’d you turn out?”
“Oh, I went through law school at night and then paid for the education for the others. My brother went to Harvard Med, the oldest of my three kid sisters went to Purdue for engineering. And then of course the other two dropped out of high school and became streetwalkers.”
Pauliss’s jaw drops. “You—uh, er, that is—”
“Not really,” Diem says, “but I didn’t want to make it sound like ignoring the kids is the best way to raise them. I was just kind of thinking that sometimes the damndest things work.”
Di chuckles, Carla laughs outright. Henry Pauliss is now turning an odd shade of red; if Harris Diem is willing to undercut him by setting him up for laughter like that, in front of underlings, then Henry is on his way out the door, and will probably be given a hard kick as he goes. Everyone present knows this, so not only is Pauliss getting his termination notice, but he is being given it in front of Carla and Di, deliberately.
Carla might wish she were the kind of nice, non-vindictive person who wouldn’t enjoy this, but as it happens, she isn’t. She’s delighted to see the bastard find out what it’s like to get nailed for just doing what was asked of him. It almost makes the long silly wait for the President (whom they are not supposed to know they are waiting for) worthwhile.
When Hardshaw finally does turn up the first thing that she says to Carla is, “I’m told that you’re always right about the weather.”
Carla snorts. “If I were always right about the weather I’d have gotten rich in commodities futures. I’m pretty good. My feel for it is better than most meteorologists’, and I’m good at the math, and I guess right a lot. But I’m not infallible. And the major reason I’ve been right several times in this crisis is that I haven’t had a job to protect, so I could say what other people were only thinking.”
President Hardshaw grins at her—the kind of grin that you use to lock a vote down forever, Carla realizes, just as she also realizes that it’s certainly working on her. When the President speaks, Carla is still a little dazzled. “Well, then, here’s the question, and if it happens to be a really stupid question, the important thing is that we don’t let it leak that I asked it. Not even at a party over a drink, to impress your date. Because just now the President of the United States cannot afford to look like a ninny, and unfortunately she squandered her youth on law rather than meteorology.”
“Understood,” Carla says. “I won’t talk—I don’t like most people that much.”
“So Harris tells me. All right, then. Is there, in principle at least, any way in which we can intervene to turn this thing off? Since it was a human action that set it running, is there anything we could do to get rid of it?”
Carla draws a breath as she thinks, changes her mind as she’s drawing it, draws more breath, finally lets it out without quite having decided on an answer. “It’s a physical process. So in principle it can be modified. But it involves immense amounts of energy across vast areas, so the means to modify it may be beyond us.”
“Suppose you talk principles first.”
“All right. One, if we could make the outflow jet move around to due south and keep it there, we could drive the thing right up the Bering Strait or across Siberia, whichever you prefer, and let it die in the cold like a normal hurricane. I suppose it might do that of its own accord anyway.
“Two, if we could make the water cold in front of it, it would die. Removing methane from the air would work but would take a long time; it would be better to turn off the sunlight.
“And that’s about it. To kill a hurricane you cool off its feet. I suppose you could warm its top, too—perhaps with a huge solar mirror—but frankly this thing is so big I’d be worried about giving it a chance to break
through the tropopause and extend all the way up into the stratosphere. We might be removing the current constraint on its size by doing that. No, I think if you want to kill it you have to get it over a cold surface—either by moving the hurricane or by cooling the surface. It is moving randomly, you know, and it will probably find a surface big enough to cool it sooner or later.”
through the tropopause and extend all the way up into the stratosphere. We might be removing the current constraint on its size by doing that. No, I think if you want to kill it you have to get it over a cold surface—either by moving the hurricane or by cooling the surface. It is moving randomly, you know, and it will probably find a surface big enough to cool it sooner or later.”
“But isn’t every other hurricane this year going to grow to this size?” Henry Pauliss asks. “In fact, we’ve been lucky so far not to have one in the Atlantic, which has actually warmed up a little more than the Pacific. We could have another Clem there anytime.”
“Or something like it,” Carla admits. “You’re right, of course. Given their tendency to circle—assuming that Clem is typical, and generalizing from a sample of one is stupid and I hate it but I guess we have to—
if
Clem is typical and most such hurricanes do circle, then there’s little question that they’re going to last longer. And if they last longer, they’ll overlap each other more in time—you won’t have any weeks when there aren’t one or two or more of them tearing up some part of the world. No, I suppose if you can do something about them, then just letting them die naturally isn’t good enough.”
if
Clem is typical and most such hurricanes do circle, then there’s little question that they’re going to last longer. And if they last longer, they’ll overlap each other more in time—you won’t have any weeks when there aren’t one or two or more of them tearing up some part of the world. No, I suppose if you can do something about them, then just letting them die naturally isn’t good enough.”
“It certainly isn’t,” Hardshaw says. “So you think the best route would be to, as you say, turn off the sunlight?”
“Sure. If you could give the Earth a moon in geosynchronous, inclined orbit so that it moved north and south in a tight figure eight, and set it up so that the northern part of its motion coincided with daytime … and if that moon was big enough to cast a shadow a few hundred kilometers across … after a while you’d have a nice belt of cold water for Clem to run into and die in. But it would have to be an awfully big moon. Geosynchronous is one-tenth as far as the moon is, the natural moon, I mean, and you’d need a shadow fifty times what the moon casts in a total eclipse … whatever it was would be
huge
in the sky, seven full moons across. Physically it would be bigger in diameter than the Earth.”
huge
in the sky, seven full moons across. Physically it would be bigger in diameter than the Earth.”
“So a Mylar balloon—”
“Would work, sure, if you could keep it in position. And if you could inflate something thousands of kilometers across. Is that what you’re thinking of using?”
President Hardshaw would be a tough lady to play poker with. She doesn’t blink, she doesn’t wince, she doesn’t check to see if Diem has reacted—he hasn’t but Pauliss has, and look here, poor old Di, never really one for intrigue, sits up straight. Obviously Ms. President has made them all swear blood oaths or something that they won’t even vaguely think about telling her what they really want to know, and now she’s spilled it herself.
The only thing Carla has ever learned to like about dealing with power is how easy it is to embarrass people who have it.
After a long instant, Hardshaw says, “Well, that cat’s out of that bag. Yes, we’re thinking of using Mylar balloons, though not in the way you describe.”
“I’m a meteorologist, not a payload specialist.”
“We have an offer to put many thousands of them into highly elliptical orbits, with twenty-four-hour periods, with perigee falling across the North Pacific in daylight. And they’d be a couple hundred kilometers across, but they’d be coming down to within a hundred fifty kilometers of the surface, so they’d probably make only two or three approaches before they burned up on re-entry. But if they were timed right …”
“You’d need a lot of them,” Carla wams.
“Understood. But
could
it work?”
could
it work?”
“With the right coordination, and with enough of them,” she says. She’d been impressed with Hardshaw up till now, but really she keeps asking the same question over and over. “Do you want me to work on exactly how you’d do it?”
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