Mother of Storms

by Barnes, John

  “Makes sense to me,” he says.

  “Of course,” she says, “if every so often your adolescent immature side just wants to bone hell out of Synthi Venture, my middle-aged horny side might find a way to enjoy it.”

  “It sounds like something worth trying,” Jesse says, so they do. Mary Ann draws a deep breath, her eyes unfocus, and he realizes that now she is Synthi Venture. He takes her in his arms, and then it’s all wild energy and screaming for the next half hour.

  Jesse tells her afterward that Mary Ann is a better lay, though Synthi is a nice change of pace, and that seems to be the right thing to say.

  Next morning Jesse finds himself in the middle of what really ought to be a surrealistic dream. It’s a story conference for Passionet, with all the usual attendees, and that alone is something he’d never have expected to attend, but add to it two big-name professors of semiotics, a noted director of rock concerts, and two quiet guys in suits (one from the White House and one from the UN), plus “Synthi’s Representative Friends,” as one of the consultants keeps calling them, while talking about them as if they are not there. The “SRF’s” are just Jesse and the Herreras, but he and Tomas have already spent a coffee break arguing about whether the T-shirts should read “SRFs: Because the time to represent Synthi’s friends is NOW” or “SRFs World Tour 2028.”

  Two of the writers seemed to think the idea was “fun—something we can use a little later on. Keep that one, guys, we’ve got it marked as yours, there’ll be some cash if we use it.”

  “How much do you suppose they mean?” Tomás whispers to Jesse. “And are they really that desperate for ideas?”

  “Well, I’d guess enough to buy some beer,” Jesse says, a little awkwardly because as the norteamericano he should be the expert and he doesn’t have any more idea than Tomás does. “And as for desperate for ideas—have you seen XV?”

  Tomás stares at him, nods as if he’s just heard something very shrewd, and claps him on the back.

  The conference lasts a long time, and Jesse has a feeling that his old instructors from the required course in Interdisciplinary Communication were really understanding it when they constantly claimed that people in different fields never really hear each other. The government guys seem to think that all they have to do is give Mary Ann and the writers a list of ideas that will then be programmed into the waiting heads of all the experiencers out there, more or less like the anti-drug messages in the old sitcoms. The university semiotics guys seem to be mostly arguing that no matter what is presented, people will reinterpret it into the same old thing. The writers seem to be obsessed with coming up with things to “substitute for the violence so that it will have some story values.” Passionet execs appear to be trying to arrive at any solution that won’t cause anyone to get up and walk out.

  After a long hour of everyone repeating themselves, Mary Ann says, “If you all will allow me, there’s something I wish you’d notice.”

  They all nod at her, and she says, “Maybe the problem here is that you’re assuming that the material isn’t interesting. I mean, I think what I’ve lived through in the last few weeks, and what’s going on now, is a lot more interesting than what’s usually on XV.”

  There’s a very long pause, and then one of the execs says, “Tell us about it.”

  Mary Ann grins at him. “I can do better than that. If everyone would please put on a scalpnet, I could show you exactly what I feel about it all. I mean, that is the medium we will be using, right?”

  There’s a long pause, and then everyone is nodding. Because these things come up routinely in these meetings, Jesse supposes, there’s a box of scalpnets, goggles, and muffs at hand; it just takes a moment for him to see that the Herreras can get into theirs comfortably, then slip his own on.

  He has not been inside Mary Ann’s mind since getting to know her—indeed, he really hasn’t been inside Mary Ann’s mind at all, it’s always been Synthi Venture before. It’s a strange sensation, for at the moment she’s just waiting for everyone to get ready, so he sees the same room he is in, but from her point of view. Jesse is suddenly aware of half a dozen things—the way the metal chair presses through the too-small, too-high buttocks, the annoying pull of the huge breasts and the uncomfortably warm sweaty places under them, and that the huge pile of hair on top of her head feels like having it wrapped in a blanket.

  She speaks aloud and he feels the voice forming in her throat, knows the intention an instant before the words form. “All right, everybody wave if you can hear and see through my eyes.”

  They all wave, a very awkward movement because it’s so difficult to do it when your own body’s feedback is being overridden. Jesse watches his own arm jerk up and down spasmodically but barely feels it through Mary Ann’s override; the Herreras appear to be extremely startled.

  “All right, now just lean back and let me look around and remember some things to you,” Mary Ann says. She gets up, leaves the Passionet tent, walks past the staticopter that brought them in, and climbs a low rise to where she can see the whole column moving by. There are many thousands of people, the weaker ones on buses and trucks, a few on bicycles (private cars were impossible because gas tanker trucks couldn’t have kept the column supplied over the all-but-ruined roads of the Isthmus), almost everyone else on foot. A couple of clumps of people are singing as if on their way to a picnic, some are plodding along like shell-shocked refugees, most are just walking and looking around them.

  For many of the poor, this is the farthest they have ever been from home. The canteens set up for each meal are the most reliable food they’ve ever known; they are worried about the little homes they left behind, of course, but this is also, for them, a vacation and an adventure, and that’s exciting.

  Through Mary Ann’s eyes, they see Tapachuta—the real city, its people—walking north; they remember the warm dark nights there, the ordinary town full of ordinary people who “just” worked and raised families, the scent of dust in the streets and the blaze of the sun overhead … .

  Her mind skips over dozens of people she knew there, shopkeepers and workmen, vegetable stall sellers and sidewalk painter, children and beggars she saw every day. She calls to mind all sorts of small memories: the especially beautiful garden of one house (she never saw the gardener but surely he’s on the march with them), the Café Sante which served a few anemic French dishes and a great deal of good Chiapas home cooking, the smell of dozens of open-air charcoal grills around the time for comida, the smile on one sidewalk vendor who sold wonderful garlic-y lamb tacos—

  And then, suddenly, vividly, so hard that she sways a little as she does it, she plunges them into the hurricane, the shattering of the community, the terror and hope, the two children she saw reunited with their mother, the way the water flowed so thick over the windows, the endless days of digging out—all set among these people she has expressed in such detail.

  The ending of the town, and this march to a new life; the long days on the road, the shared effort, the petty jealousies and greeds but also the sharing of a great adventure—all of this she throws into it. And now as they look at the huge chain of trucks, buses, and people slowly winding its way along the old two-lane road among the deep green volcanic slopes, they feel how much of it there is, how every one of these people is unique … .

  She jacks out. A moment later they are all pulling off goggles, scalpnets, and muffs, sighing and rubbing their faces as Mary Ann Waterhouse strides back into the tent. She looks around at them, and without a trace of a smile or of begging to please, she asks, “Good?”

  The director and writers seem to recover first. Every sentence begins with “I feel” or “I felt” and they all talk at once; Frank Capra, Norman Rockwell, and “Americana” seem to be the buzzwords, until they suddenly begin to say “very international, very get back to the world beat feeling” … “My image of it is of a visionary kind of, well, of seeing people in this amazingly real kind of a way, totally positive,” the direc
tor finally says, and all the writers begin to nod vigorously and say, “That’s it, you’ve got it.” They seem happy.

  The government guys look at each other and nod their heads. “I think we can say it’s going to work.” The one from Washington even smiles a little and says, “I ought to add, Miss Venture, that you’re the one who appears to have been listening to us; that’s exactly the message we wanted.”

  “Very polycentered,” the UN guy says. “In fact I don’t think the word ‘Americana’ would be appropriate to describe it at all.”

  The Passionet execs all glare at the writer who used the term, a slender, intense fellow with a brownish beard that he is now stroking very quickly. “Oh, of course, I’m sorry, I didn’t make the context clear, what I meant is that this is the sort of thing that could do for the planet as a whole, the kind of thing that old-time Americana did just for the United States, sort of—you know, ‘My Planet ‘Tis of Thee,’ people feeling more at home with the idea of global loyalty, global identity, more whole-Earth-minded—”

  “Ah, I see,” the UN guy says. “But I certainly hope you don’t mean that this would tend to damage, degenerate, or deprivilege any of the legitimate cultural aspirations of any of the world’s peoples. We have to be sensitive to that.”

  “No, no, I um—don’t mean that, I mean a kind of global loyalty and consciousness built around being very individual, very tribal, very national.”

  The UN guy nods, smiling. “That’s exactly what I had in mind.”

  “Are you making a note of this?” a Passionet exec asks Mary Ann.

  “Of course. I think we can address that concern pretty easily.”

  “Great! She says we can address it easily.”

  Everyone nods. They ask the two university professors for their comments, and the two of them fall into a violent argument in which Frank Capra crops up a lot more. Jesse listens to that politely; his brother Di is a big Frank Capra fan, and even talked Jesse into watching one of those old black-and-white things once. It bored him out of his mind. Maybe the idea is to get everyone to go to sleep instead of rioting.

  After a long time the university professors stop waving their hands, and everyone thanks them. A Passionet exec asks Mary Ann if she can implement that, and she says “No problem.”

  Everyone now nods solemnly, and thanks everyone else. The UN guy wants to know what the Herreras and Jesse thought, and all three of them say they liked it a great deal.

  Jesse has been here long enough to know that in this country a polite person says what other people, especially other people whose social status is higher, want him to say. When he first came here it seemed dishonest to him; now it’s common sense.

  Since everyone has agreed to everything, the Passionet execs are all nodding their heads, and they tell Mary Ann, the writers, and the director to get on with it. The professors, bureaucrats, and execs get up, staff starts to break down the tent, and Mary Ann, the director, and the writers rejoin the column, all talking vigorously to each other.

  Jesse and the Herreras quietly join up a little behind them, so whenever Mary Ann is done Jesse can rejoin her. After a time, Tomás says, “I didn’t understand a word of that.”

  “Me either,” Jesse says.

  “I thought perhaps you had. You would have convinced me.”

  “You convinced me too,” Jesse says.

  When Di Callare comes home, it’s really just to pack, but at least they get one day before they have to start that. It’s been agreed that if he gets a one-hour briefing and then gives them his opinion every day, that will be enough until the Klieg system is flying. The Klieg system is more important than before because, apparently, Colonel Tynan has gone nuts and is accelerating at rates that ought to have killed him—in fact he has claimed a couple of times to be dead—and while he seems to be on a trajectory to get him to the comet early, god knows what he will do when he gets there.

  Both kids at once have decided, in the last couple of days, that they are just too big to need to have Mom and Dad to sleep, and Mark is setting a bedtime for himself and getting to bed then. Di seriously thinks of phoning his father just to tell him that one, but he’s sure his father will find a way to see this as a bad thing and to make it be Di’s fault, so why bother?

  At any rate, this leaves Di and Lori a good deal more time and privacy, and right now they are lying next to each other on the bed, talking after making love. “Slaughterer in Yellow came out fine,” she says. “I suppose if the predictable thing happens, we’ll be able to buy a new house, even if the insurance company is broke.”

  “Good to know,” he says, “and I think it’s likely. There’s an awful lot of activity and we’re just coming into August and September, which are usually the worst hurricane months in the Northern Hemisphere, and the differential is wider this time.”

  “If that’s not part of a car, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says, and kisses his nose.

  “Sorry. Finally get a day at home and I start talking shop.” He rests a hand on the curve of her waist. “So what does a differential do on a car?”

  “Modern cars don’t have them. They have separate electric motors,” she says.

  “What did the differential use to do?”

  “What the electric motors do now.”

  He hits her with a pillow; she giggles. “And you want to know the worst of it, Di?”

  “Oh, sure.”

  “I really did want to know. I just kissed your nose because it was fun.” Her eyes are shining and she has a wonderful smile.

  “Well,” he says, “the differential I’m talking about is the change in ocean surface temperature over time. The ocean surface is warmer in August than it is in May. Now, with the additional methane in the atmosphere, by June eleventh, the Northern Hemisphere had ocean temperatures higher than they’d ever been in recorded history. That was bad enough. But it turns out, not only was there a higher base—”

  “Oh, god. You mean it’s going up by more than it would normally go up by.”

  “Yep. Like at a point where it would normally have been 25° C on June 1, and then gone up two degrees to 27° C by August 15, it started out at about 29° C on June I—and it’s going to go up maybe five degrees. That’s like what you’d expect in a shallow inland lake at sea level on the equator, normally. The storms will get a lot worse and bigger. Clem is going to get to gobble down a lot more energy than it’s had before. So the short answer is that even though the sea is about twenty miles away and forty feet down from us, all this area is going to be torn apart and reduced to mud.”

  She shudders and snuggles against him. “We’re getting out, though.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Promise?”

  “It’s Uncle Sam’s promise, love, not mine. Supposedly we are going to be evacuated.”

  “That’s not what I asked.”

  Di thinks for a long time. “You mean if it looks bad, I desert my job, get back here, and get you and the kids out?”

  “Or call me and I’ll get the kids to wherever you say, and then you desert and join me there. I don’t give a shit, Di, I just want us to live through this.”

  Di sighs. “Hope for Klieg’s thing to work, then. Assuming we can get him out of jail, and that the Siberians don’t screw up his launchers, then it won’t necessarily be an issue.”

  “You didn’t promise.”

  “I can’t, Lori. I have a job to do there.”

  “You have one here too.”

  “Unh-hunh,” he says. “I do. And I—well, I mean …” He doesn’t know what to say, except that he can’t imagine doing what she’s asking him to promise to do, and so he ends up staring helplessly into those beautiful eyes, willing his words to come out and unable to make them.

  He thinks she’s angry, but instead she just puts her arms around him and keeps crying. He holds her for more than an hour, kissing her cheeks and stroking her back. He wishes he could say yes, or that it didn’t bother him to say no.<
br />
  When she stops crying she has fallen asleep on his chest; he can feel a little sticky puddle of tears and snot there. He doesn’t move, just holds her, and after a while he lapses into dark dreams of things clawing at him, pulling him down into a black, water-filled pit.

  Next morning, the thirty-first, as they are packing, Di has the television on just to keep them alert to the news, but he starts out packing the books in the den, away from the television in the living room. All of a sudden he hears Lori and Mark yelling, and runs in to see what’s up. By the time he gets there, they’re grabbing their own XV stuff, and Lori hands him his. “Passionet,” she says.

  He pulls on scalpnet, goggles, and muffs, tunes to Passionet—my god.

  He had known that Jesse was dating a rich older woman. It was just like that sneaky kid not to mention it was Synthi Venture. Di is chuckling with admiration even as he watches—and then he’s engrossed. He had no idea how huge the effort going on in Mexico was, and though he has plotted storms across that coast thousands of times, he never knew what—or who!—was there. Mary Ann Waterhouse sure can tell a story; he wonders what she’s doing on a cheesy XV service like Passionet.

  They lose half the afternoon that way, and he doesn’t care. This is the sort of thing that Mark and Nahum really should see anyway; he notices that when they unplug, they’re just playing around but they’re speaking a little Spanish to each other.

  “It’s working,” Harris Diem says. “If you’ve got any medals you can give to XV stars, I think you ought to break them out right now.”

  They are looking at the graphs on his screen. They all show the same thing around the world; new rioting is not breaking out anywhere where there’s enough XV installed. In other areas, as American and UN planes drop cheap headsets made by flash manufacturers, as soon as people get them pulled over their heads, the rioting stops cold. People plug into XV to feel the hurricane with Synthi Venture (or whatever strange real name she’s called by—nobody ever calls her anything except “Synthi”).