Altered Seasons_MONSOONRISE

by Paul Briggs

  “Then somebody else came along and threw a monkey wrench in the deal. The state cotton growers went to their congressman and asked for a subsidy, so they could buy enough water to stay in business. It takes a lot of water to grow cotton, you know.”

  “And the subsidy went through,” said Morgan.

  Tejera nodded. “So that’s their situation. Families are learning to wash their dishes with sand, businesses are complaining that their employees are coming to work smelling like goats because nobody can afford to shower, golf courses are being shut down because even reclaimed water is running low or getting contaminated… and poor people are just getting on the bus and leaving. They can’t afford to live there anymore. But the cotton industry? Doing great. And all Swank can say is, ‘Hey, it’s not my fault. I didn’t ask for it.’”

  “Another few years like this and they’ll be growing cotton in New Jersey,” said Carrie.

  “Which reminds me…” Morgan took out her cell phone. “I better text my husband. Let him know if a video of me knocking that guy down turns up online, it’s okay to let it trend.”

  “Let it trend?” said Tejera.

  “You’re familiar with the American News and Media Foundation?” said Morgan. “Lucas—my husband—is one of the cochairs.”

  “That seems like it might be a conflict of interest.”

  “I like to think of it as a family working together for the greater good.” Morgan smiled in a way that was obviously trying to be sinister. “And did I notice you talking to Symcox earlier?”

  Carrie told them about Symcox’s proposition. “I like Sandy, but my advice would be not to get involved with her just yet,” said Morgan. “She’s a billionaire now, but she could be bankrupt next year. She’s got the whole diamond oligarchy against her, she’s got ex-coworkers suing her—suing for everything she’s got, not just a cut of her profits… I think this foundation is her way of protecting herself.”

  “Protecting herself how?”

  “Daring her enemies to steal bread from the mouths of widows and orphans or whoever. I mean, it’s running on her income stream.”

  * * *

  After dinner, Carrie went back to her hotel room with Morgan and some wine. She wasn’t sure if she liked Morgan yet. The governor of New York reminded Carrie a lot of girls she’d known in high school, girls who were the reason Carrie spent so much time hanging out with guys… but Carrie had come a long way from high school. Also, this was the first actual networking opportunity she’d had at what was supposed to be a networking event—trying to network at an event you were helping to run was like trying to get in a little swimming when you were a lifeguard.

  In an hour, Carrie was a bit buzzed. Brooke—they were now on a first-name basis—was rather more so. I never yet met a skinny bitch who could hold her liquor, thought Carrie smugly.

  Carrie had just gotten done talking about some anti-Semitic remarks she’d gotten online. “This is going to sound really insensitive, but… I can’t help envying you those enemies,” said Brooke. “I’d love to have somebody threaten to make soap or lampshades out of me. I could take their remarks and show them to everybody and say ‘See? This is the kind of person who doesn’t like me.’ Not in so many words, of course.”

  “I just block, report, and move on,” said Carrie. “Or rather, the girl who does this stuff for me does.”

  “That’s it?” Brooke shook her head. “God, those people are wasted on you. They’re cruel, they’re freaks—freakish by choice, I might add, so you can laugh at them without feeling guilty—they’re impotent in at least one sense and probably more, they’ve declared allegiance to one of the worst ideas in human history… you could do anything with enemies like that.”

  “Anything with them, or anything to them?”

  “As far as I’m concerned, either one. The courts may feel differently, of course… but think how good it would make you look just to try to do something about them.”

  Carrie laughed. “First, I came for the Nazis, and you said nothing—”

  “No, I said ‘Good riddance!’”

  “Next I came for… hmmm…”

  “Cyberstalkers. Do them next.”

  “Good idea. Next I came for the cyberstalkers…”

  “And I said ‘Look, there’s one over there! Let’s get him!’”

  “Then I came for… I don’t know, some other kind of trolls…”

  “And I said ‘Okay, I can see where this is headed, but at this rate it’ll be a while before she gets to anybody I care about.’”

  “Then I came for… I came for…” Carrie hesitated.

  “This is turning into the worst porno ever.”

  Carrie burst into spluttering laughter.

  “I love your whole persona,” said Brooke. “It’s so… warm and safe. Obviously, it wouldn’t work for me, but it seems to be working for you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Brooke was silent for a moment, collecting her thoughts as best she could.

  “There’s a saying I’ve heard. ‘A politician is an actor who plays only one character.’ When you’re out there, you’ve got to pick a persona and stick with it. You can’t be reinventing yourself all the time, or people aren’t going to feel like they know you.

  “And you can get away with a lot if the people feel like they know you. When Bill Clinton got caught messing around, we never really got mad at him because it never felt like a betrayal. We knew what he was like when we voted for him. It was no great surprise… The point is, whatever role you’re playing, it works for you.”

  “I don’t think of it as playing a role,” said Carrie. “You’ve got to be yourself when you’re up on the podium. The best possible version of yourself, anyway.”

  “Exactly. ‘The best possible version of yourself.’ Your persona can’t be completely fake—it has to be at least based on the real you. But the audience has to be able to recognize and relate to it. In your case… you’re everybody’s mom. Or the mom they wish they’d had. I mean, we’re both mothers but you’re a mom. People look at me and they think ‘She had a child? Let me guess—she had it mesquite-grilled and served on a bed of shiitake mushrooms and wild rice?’”

  Carrie laughed.

  “See, we’re both archetypes,” Brooke continued. “You’re the earth mother. I’m the ice queen. You’re that one teacher they always wanted to make happy—I’m that one teacher who always scared the hell out of them. Pundits have been writing editorials comparing me to Angela Merkel or Margaret Thatcher, but what I really am is the dominatrix. Sometimes I’m tempted to show up at a fundraiser in skin-tight black leather and stiletto heels and swinging a whip around, just to get the point across.”

  Carrie laughed some more. For an ice queen, Brooke could be fun to be around.

  “And we can both use the personas we’ve got to get things done. You can raise taxes and people will hate it, but they’ll figure it’s for the best because they trust you with the money. If I raise taxes… they’ll still hate it, but they’ll figure I’m giving them what they deserve.

  “But here’s the thing. Dominatrixes… dominatrices… what’s the plural of ‘dominatrix’?”

  “I think the plural is ‘ouch.’”

  “No, that’s the group name. The collective name. ‘An ouch of dominatri…’” Brooke hesitated for a moment. “More than one dominatrix. The point is, a dominatrix is performing a service for money. She acts like she’s in charge, she makes you pretend she’s in charge, you might even start to think of her as being in charge… but at the end of the day, she’s doing what you want her to do because you’re paying her to do it.”

  Carrie nodded. Brooke was going somewhere with this, but damned if Carrie could tell where.

  “Can you keep a secret?”

  “Of course.”

  “I mean a real secret. Don’t tell anybody. Because this… this could kill me politically if it ever got out.”

  “I promise,” said Carrie, her imagi
nation already trying to picture the scandalous misdeeds Brooke was about to confess to.

  Brooke took a deep breath.

  “I hate the voters.”

  Carrie paused for a moment.

  “I… can see why that would be a problem politically.”

  “Think about it, Carrie,” she said. “This is a democracy, right?”

  “Technically it’s a republic.”

  “Conceded. The point is, the voters are the boss. We’re just the office girls. We’re the executive assistants. They hire us, they can fire us… Doesn’t an office girl have the right to hate her boss?”

  Carrie nodded. She personally thought “branch manager” would be a better metaphor than “executive assistant”—a certain amount of authority, not too much day-to-day oversight, but ultimately answerable to the home office—but this wasn’t the time to quibble. Brooke sounded sincere in a way that Carrie hadn’t heard before.

  “And I don’t hate them just because they’re the boss,” Brooke continued. “See, there are good bosses out there. I’ve had them, you’ve had them… They’re the ones who pay attention. The ones who step up and accept responsibility. The ones who try to understand everything they’re in charge of, because that’s their job. They notice right away if you’re slacking off, but they also notice if you’ve got problems. And when you tell them the truth, they listen, and they thank you, even if it’s something they don’t want to hear.”

  Carrie nodded. That was the sort of boss she tried to be.

  “And then there’s the other kind of boss—I’m sure you’ve had some of them too. The big spoiled children. The ones who never pay any attention to what’s going on until something blows up in their faces, and then they lash out at whoever happens to be in the office at the time instead of trying to figure out what the hell just happened. They don’t want to think about the consequences of their actions, so they don’t. If you lie to them and flatter them, they reward you, and if you try to tell them the truth they punish you. And they never, ever accept the blame.

  “Now here’s my question, Carrie. If the American people were a boss, what kind of boss would they be?”

  Carrie didn’t have an answer to this.

  Or rather, she did, but not one she wanted to say out loud. Or even inside her head.

  Brooke got to her feet, slowly. “I need to get back to my room,” she said. “I’ve had enough to drink.”

  She went to the door, picked up her purse, then turned. The expression on her face was strangely like loathing.

  “I really do hate them, you know.”

  Carrie nodded.

  “Look at me,” Brooke said. “They turned me. Into. This. Thing.”

  For just a moment, as Brooke was walking away, Carrie felt a moment of empathy. But then the thought crossed her mind: You chose this life, Brooke. You chose it, and you really can give it up any time you like. You’re tall, blonde, good-looking, smart, and rich as all hell—you’ll get by no matter what you do. And here you are doing something you hate. Why?

  Is it just the power? Is that all? How satisfying can that be if you end up feeling like an employee? Or like the voters’ plaything? Did you get into this hoping it would be more fun?

  Are you doing this out of a sense of obligation? Do you really think if you don’t step up, there won’t be anyone who can take your place? What am I, chopped liver?

  Do you even know why anymore?

  After a little more thought, Carrie decided it really wasn’t her concern. Her concern was finding something to do next year. And assuming Symcox’s foundation would still be around then, that offer sounded pretty good.

  This year, the Northern Monsoon appeared as a continuous band of rain around the northern hemisphere, thicker in some places than in others. In the North Atlantic, the warped and weakened jet stream—described as a “negative phase in the Arctic Oscillation”—altered the courses of winds all over the ocean, drawing many storms to the north. Most of these blew themselves out over water, but in mid-September, a post-tropical depression poured its heart out onto the Vatnajökull in Iceland. Near the beginning of October, another storm hit the southern tip of Greenland. Rain can destroy a glacier like almost nothing else. By the time the season ended, vast amounts of ice had been either melted or broken off by erosion and carried into the sea. Smaller rain zones appeared, as usual, in northern Norway and northern Alaska.

  But of more immediate concern were the three bands of particularly heavy rain that once again formed. One was over the eastern Pacific, but stretched west to include Japan, Korea, and parts of China and Siberia. Central Manchuria, South Korea, and the island of Honshu were hit by heavy rains and flash flooding in the mountains, but they were not completely devastated… unlike North Korea, eastern Manchuria, Hokkaido, the lower Amur, and the Vladivostok area.

  The second band of rain stretched from Bavaria to the Caspian Sea. It was most extreme on the north slopes of the Alps, the Carpathians, and the Caucasus. The Elbe, the Oder, and the Vistula saw the worst flooding in their recorded history—but it looked tame next to the flooding of the Danube and the Sava. Hungarians, Croats, and Serbs by the millions had to evacuate, usually into parts of Europe where they weren’t in the least welcome. Incidents of ethnic violence flared all over the sodden Balkans.

  The third band of rain formed over the northern United States and southern Canada…

  * * *

  Henry Pratt didn’t like Cabinet meetings, and didn’t hold them unless he had no other choice. This was how he preferred to do his job:

  • A Cabinet secretary or someone else he had appointed came to him and informed him of the situation.

  • He listened to them and made his decision.

  • That someone then went forth to implement his decision.

  In theory, meetings of the full Cabinet ought to work the same way. In practice, they were a mess. Everyone listened to everything, and everyone felt entitled to contribute, interrupting and talking over each other, assuming expertise in areas well beyond their fields of specialization. The system rewarded those who were there to expand their own power and influence at the expense of those who were just there to do the jobs they’d been appointed to do.

  But today there was no way around it. Too many departments were involved in the current disaster. They had to coordinate. Everybody had to know the whole plan and their part in it. And the meeting had to be held in the White House Situation Room, the only place where the disaster could be properly monitored.

  Pratt glanced around the table. Commerce, Transportation, Agriculture, Treasury, HUD… all here. His press secretary was in the hospital undergoing a biopsy, so her deputy was here instead.

  He looked to the woman at his right hand. The mental image most people had of a president’s chief of staff, if they had one at all, was of a gnarled, hard-bitten old political operator who kept the cabinet in line by sheer force of unpleasant personality. Thirty-five-year-old Wendy Czeczelski was a short, friendly woman with thick glasses, skinny arms and legs and an almost spherical torso. She was also efficient and well-organized. And she was useful for detecting problem children—someone who would take one look at her and decide it was safe to treat her with disrespect was someone who probably needed to go.

  Finally, Pratt looked at his old friend at the far end of the table. Terry Walther had shaggy gray hair, heavy eyebrows, and a face with a few deep laugh lines. He looked less like the Secretary of the Treasury than an aging rock musician trying to dress and act respectable for his daughter’s wedding.

  “Where’s Simon?” said Terry.

  Pratt gestured to Wendy, letting her answer. You couldn’t show favoritism to your friends in a meeting like this.

  “Swanston is in a discussion with Ahn right now,” she said. “Ahn just got back from the summit, and he wanted to speak with Swanston directly en route to the White House. They’ll be with us later this morning.”

  There was a long moment while everybody in the room
digested this and got heartburn. For the past week, Secretary of State Ahn had been in an emergency summit with the heads of several Balkan states, followed the very next day by another emergency summit with the leaders of China and North Korea. Whatever had happened over there, he apparently wanted Secretary of Defense Simon Swanston to hear about it ASAP, even before the president. That could not possibly be a good sign.

  Pratt raised his voice to address the room. “I’m going to start by outlining the basic questions we’re here to answer,” he said. Wendy stood up, went to one of the screens and tapped it. Four bullet points appeared on it:

  At a gesture from Pratt, Secretary of Commerce Helen Bird, a short, stout woman in a tan pantsuit, stood up and approached the screen at the end of the room with the expression of someone staring into the depths of Hell.

  Pratt sympathized. Bird was an expert in international trade, not meteorology. Serving under her was the Deputy Secretary of Commerce, an expert in infrastructure development. Serving under him was the Under Secretary of Commerce for Oceans and Atmosphere, Matthew Minsky, a business executive brought in from Wall Street for the specific purpose of overseeing the privatization of the National Weather Service. The bill authorizing that privatization had died in the Senate, quietly snuffed by senators worried about the Midwestern drought, the heat wave in the South and the wildfires out west. Serving under him was the director of the National Weather Service… nobody. Pratt had left that office vacant.

  Which meant Bird was about to deliver a briefing in which she had no idea what she was talking about and was forced to rely on the expertise of people who had personal reasons to hate the administration. If I’d known this was going to be the year the sky declared war on America, thought Pratt, I would have done things differently. The whole point was not to remind people of you-know-who.

  In addition to being completely outside her area of expertise, Bird wasn’t much of a public speaker. Nonetheless, she managed to get the point across, mostly using terms borrowed from the insurance industry. There were different ways to measure flooding—inches of rainfall, the height of the water—but one of the more useful ways was to classify a flood by the odds of it happening in any given year. According to Bird, the IPCC had given up on being able to do this, but the NWS hadn’t. If there was a 10 percent chance of a flood that size, it was a 10-year flood. If there was only a 4 percent chance, it was a 25-year flood. So if you were building something to last 50 years, it should at least be able to handle a 50-year flood. Just to be on the safe side, it should be able to handle a 100-year flood, since there was an even chance of that happening.