Mother of Storms (41 page)

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Authors: John Barnes

BOOK: Mother of Storms
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So by the time Diem and Callare have read the reports, called each other, gotten people together, and in general begun to see what they can do about the crisis they had been dreading, the formation of Clem Two (Carla had suggested a new nomenclature because in her understated way she was trying to tell them that they would run out of alphabetic names for hurricanes long before the season was over), before President Hardshaw and Secretary-General Rivera are even fully aware that there is a Clem Two, Berlina has dubbed the thing “Clementine” and devoted a special issue of
Sniffings
to it.
 
 
Louie has begun to notice, lately, that it hardly seems worth staying in touch with his body while he works, and often he just cuts the damned thing largely loose by sending it off to sleep. The number of processors on which he runs on the moon is growing geometrically, so that every day there seems to be more and more of him there and less and less back on
Constitution
.
His body back on the station wakes up refreshed after hours of pleasant dreams, and indeed he’s been quietly tweaking the immune system a bit, since he accidentally discovered some access to it from the brain a few days ago. He downloaded a report about that to Dr. Wo and got back a short
note asking if he’d be willing to split the Nobel Prize in Medicine, so probably it was more than a stray thought. But he’s a little too busy to work on all that just now.
Even just getting a call from his body annoys hell out of him; he has to migrate back to Earth orbit to take the call. At first he thinks that he’s just let it go too long between taking dumps again, but then he realizes someone Earthside wants to talk. As he comes back into slow time Earthside, the call turns out to be from Carla. Quickly he reconfigures back to the moon, since she can think as fast as he can.
And what she wants to talk about with him is … well, it’s just wonderful, it will solve the whole mind-body problem for him, for good and all. He doesn’t realize, until she points it out, how strange his reaction is. “I thought you’d be excited at the chance to go thirty-five times deeper into space than anyone’s ever gone before.”
She says that, and he says something like “What? Oh, of course, you’re right, but …” and has weeks of normal mind time to think about it while his response crawls slowly on radio waves down to the antennas of Earth and her answer to his response limps its way back out to him at the speed of light. He has time for his life to run through his mind several times, and each time from a different angle, and it all boils down to this: There was a time when going where no one had ever gone before was the main thing he wanted to do, a time when he saw himself in competition with everyone from Hanno and Leif Eriksson forward. And that time lasted up until about two weeks ago in real time … .
Which was about eight thousand years ago in time as he knows it now. He uses billions of processors, in fact just about to be a trillion later this afternoon, and each of them is in turn massively parallel so that he runs millions of programs on each processor; he is up into quintillions of parallel programs … yet there is something in his own deep structure that insists on linearizing, insists on making things string out in time in a single chain, so that for the sake of his consciousness, and perhaps of his sanity, he finds it easiest to experience it as thinking for decades in every second (at an accelerating rate, for as he becomes more parallel he becomes faster, and not only new processors, but new processor-makers, and better processordesigners, join him constantly).
It is not that he doesn’t want to go elsewhere. It is only that there is now so much to know about where he already is. In idle moments he has run all the data—optical, radar, and thermal—ever taken on the Earth from orbit, and watched the myriad subtle changes in the global biosphere since 1960. He has regressed the Earth’s languages back to *World, and demonstrated to his own satisfaction that there are a dozen possible ancestral homelands for all human language. He has filled in holes in history by correlating
dozens of bits of evidence whose importance had not been noticed before, and he has dug new holes where the evidence compiled across generations has formed unstable bridges.
He has reprocessed everything about Mars, and knows it now in a way more intimate than he ever did when its iron sands crunched under his boots, and knows moreover not just the planet as it really is, but the planet in all the ways it has been dreamt. He could tell you things about the links between Viking and Barsoom that you could never imagine.
He has compiled data from all the unmanned probes, including the secret Chinese government and the covert Japanese private ones, so that he knows a great deal about every other planet out there, so that the asteroid belt is as familiar to him as the streets of Irish, Ohio, the little town where he grew up. He has read the classics, and the commentaries piled around them, not just the classics of European literature but of the world’s major cultures, and listened to recordings of the great musical traditions, and all this has been to avoid having idle processors—which, when they re-enter the processing stream after waiting for the data they need, he experiences as boredom.
Had he been really concentrating he could have advanced technology on the moon by a matter of fifty years beyond its levels on Earth, but at that point, no one on Earth would have known enough to use it intelligently. And besides, he’s been enjoying the spare time … .
And all of this time spent in cultivating his own intellectual garden has of course altered his feelings about exploring. Somewhat. He still wants to go and to find out, but there is so much more that he wants to know … .
The thing that most excited him was the idea of not being strung out between Earth and Moon anymore, not having to knock himself unconscious for the many long weeks that a second-and-a-half radio transmission gap is to him now.
All of this he manages to get down into what he calls a “terabyte haiku”—a huge poly/hypermedia document, extremely densely interconnected to get across the idea that his feelings are a gestalt, that he downloads to Carla to explain. Her processing capability is an order of magnitude smaller than his, not so much because of lack of processing space (she has all the surplus of Earth, which is huge, to draw from), but because she insists, every day, on a few hours of being unhooked and living in real time. He can’t imagine why she does that but she seems to enjoy it.
It takes her ten seconds or so to digest and read the “terabyte haiku.” The first thing she says afterwards is “I see.”
He waits through the ages of seconds before he realizes he’s now supposed to say something in return.
“So how long before they authorize it? I can be working on it part time until they do.”
“They probably haven’t gotten it out of the President’s printer yet. For some reason she insists on hard copies. But I thought you and I might think about it together a little. There is an issue here and there that needs to get worked out.”
Louie assents, and the two of them begin to trade information, statistics, projections, “what-ifs” at a rate that would move the Library of Congress every two to three minutes; for both of them, it “runs in background”—that is, they are only dimly aware of it, as they go on about their other work, giving it full attention every now and then as something important comes up.
This leaves Louie time enough on the moon to keep the robots working at high speed; now that he knows he will be leaving, he needs to get a system set up so that Earth can order a new satellite by radio and have it built and launched here. Of necessity that also means deciding which parts he wants to build fresh and which to take with him … .
There’s a deep sense of pleasure growing inside him as he contemplates the job. Right now he could duplicate the original Moonbase—as it was two weeks ago, after almost twenty years of European, Japanese, and American effort—in two days’ construction. And as capacity improves … well, if they ask him to do what Carla proposes three days from now, he’ll be at the point where the whole thing can be accomplished within a week, the big thruster shipped down to
Constitution
along with the thousands of microrobots and replicators and the three trillion processor packages that he’s decided will be enough (especially since he can build some more on the way). While he’s at it, he can also get some nice big chunks of shielding down there, and the food recycling gadget he’s got from the hydroponics package … .
It would really be better to design and build a habitat for his body for the voyage, but though designing it would be easy, there are too many materials he needs from Earth, and no reliable launch from anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. The Aussies could probably ship things to him, but for the next week or so Clem will be ripping along a few degrees north of the equator, so that whatever he ordered would have to be flown to the Cape of Good Hope and then across the Indian Ocean to be sure of getting it there—
No, Carla was right. If he’s going to go grab and dissassemble a comet for this job, he’ll just have to take the whole space station with him. That means some reinforcing that he hasn’t thought about yet, if he wants it to take the acceleration … .
Something is disturbing him and he’s not sure what. It’s a long moment
or two before he gets it nailed down to something coming from Carla … .
And something pleasant …
Abruptly he has a second and a half blank and catapults back into his body in Earth orbit, where he finds himself overwhelmed by memory and fantasy, his penis in Carla’s hands, mouth, vagina, anus, the way she shrieks in orgasm, the furious pleasure of pressing their sweaty bodies together on that long hike in the Cascades the last time he hit dirtside, the first time he saw her and realized that nobody else was ever going to understand it but he had to have
that
one and realized she had seen him feeling that way … .
His orgasm is huge, shaking—and very wet and sloppy. In a weightless environment, of course, this means his semen forms little floating spheres all over the cabin.
In his mind, he feels Carla shrieking to him from ten thousand processor cortexes and antennas all over the Earth.
“Shit,” he says, speaking aloud. “You are one shameless wench. I just hope the government wasn’t bugging that.”
She gasps and laughs, then answers him on voice, even though he can still feel the presence of her mind on his through all the myriad portals of connection; they are knotted together physically through millions of transmission links, and logically through billions of input-output subroutines, but at this kind of moment it is much too pleasant to forgo talking in the old, slow, acoustic mode. He feels her assent to this even as her first word comes over the voice link. “They either deal with us or with John Klieg,” she says, “and I don’t think his sex life is nearly as interesting. But as a matter of fact, they were bugging it in a few places … . It will take them a week to figure out what all that was, though, and in the great majority of the signal we’re still talking about optimizing the design for the ship. One way to have privacy is to just drown out what you’re keeping private with enough other signal. Sort of like turning up the stereo in the dorm room.”
Louie relaxes and laughs. “You yanked me back into Earth orbit, I’m afraid. There’re some things that work better in the liveware.” Yet even as he says it, he can feel the vast processes—delayed, but there—moving and changing on the moon. He realizes, too, that he’s never treated himself to looking at Moonbase from the observation bubble since he started building it.
“What gave you the idea?” he asks. “It’s the kind of thing we just might want to do again.”
“You’re insatiable!” she says, and by now he’s realized that they are talking out loud mostly to enjoy the separation and the suspense of not
knowing what the other will say or how the other will form the thought.
“Well, not right away,” he says. “The liveware wouldn’t take that. But soon all the same. Did you notice that we, um—gee, there’s not exactly a word for it, feeling your own body with the other person’s consciousness?”
“Notice it? What do you think finally set me off? My god, Louie, it’s incredible. I suppose if we wanted to we could always run a little of that in background—”
“Nothing doing, lover. I’ve always put my full attention into it whenever I’m doing it. My big regret is that it’s still going to be months before we can try it with all the processor networks linked
and
doing it physically. Preferably in weightlessness.”
“I’m not space-rated—”
“By the time I get back I’ll have a little ship’s launch that can just set down at sea, make its own fuel from air and water, and pick you up from
MyBoat
. I’m not sure what USSF and NASA will think about my bringing up a date, but I’ll point out to them that it won’t cost them a dime and it’s cheaper than giving me shore leave. I’m really thinking I might never get back to Earth.”
She chuckles. “It’s a date, sailor. And I guess that’s an example of how different we are … I have to have a few hours a day in real experience. It’s just different for me. And besides, don’t you find it’s kind of fun to meet yourself?”
He has a long, confusing moment, because when he was a teenager, to “meat” a girl was one of a thousand expressions they had for fucking; his mind dips into the net and realizes what she said, then realizes he doesn’t know what she means—at about the same moment she does.

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