Mother of Storms

by John Barnes

  It’s really a great team. He spent a long time getting them all. He just wishes he didn’t have such an impossibly complex task for them, but that wasn’t anything he, or Henry Pauliss, had any choice about. Hell, Harris Diem and President Hardshaw had no choice either.

  The message that says “Ring Di Callare’s phone if it’s not marked ‘Urgent Only’” bounces into Washington in four pieces, coming in from two satellites and two fibrop land links, merges at a substation six blocks from his office, slips into an open slot in the link to the White House—holds still there for three milliseconds as a datarodent disentangles from it and looks around—and enters the memory register of Di’s phone, which is underneath a printed statistical summary of the outcomes of a billion runs of the NOAA main model.

  The phone rings, he reaches for it, and phone and printout alike go into the wastebasket. He pulls the wastebasket over to fish out the phone, and says, “On hold with current project, please. Please pick up the call for me and put it up on screen and speakers.”

  His kid brother’s face pops up on the screen.

  “Jesse! What’s up?”

  “Oh, this and that. Uh, you have maybe ten minutes or so? It’s not super-important.”

  “Sure, I can use a break just at the moment.”

  Jesse gives him a little half smile, one that Di recognizes because Mom used to do it too, and then says, “I’m not asking you to tell me anything you’re not supposed to, or anything off the record, but I have an awful lot of friends who are wondering whether this methane thing is a big deal or not, and I kind of promised I’d ask, just in case there was something you could say that wasn’t officially on the news yet….”

  If Jesse is anything like he was at the same age, the awful lot of friends is probably one and probably female. “Well,” Di says, “it happens there’s a bit more that I can say than there was last time. It’s going out on public channels too, but it will probably disappear in the background noise of all the different outfits that are also speculating, plus probably what two astrologers, three Baptist ministers, and the Vegetarian League have to say. But we do have guesses and the news isn’t good.”

  “The methane is going to saturate the air and back up all the cow farts worldwide?”

  “We’ve pretty much discarded that hypothesis. No, we’re looking at five possible kinds of bad news. For sure it’s going to give us the hottest summer on record in the Northern Hemisphere, and it doesn’t even remotely look like it’ll be gone before it gives us the hottest summer on record in the Southern Hemisphere. So the things we’re investigating are all based on that. One, the air will warm up by enough to make it hold a lot more water, and that water won’t come from all the possible sources evenly. Might mean some major regional droughts—or extra-heavy rainfalls in other places.

  “Two, several years of extra-warm weather will accelerate the forest migration already in process, so the forests have to migrate north, then move back south, then head north again. And since a forest can only move a mile a decade by trees dying on the south side and seeds sprouting on the north—what really happens is that you get a smaller forest surrounded by two strips of extremely abnormal scrub. All kinds of ecological echoes from that.”

  “Ecological echoes?” Jesse is looking at him intently, as if taking notes.

  “Changes that cause changes that cause changes. The way the huge forest fire in 1910 in the Northwest altered forest ecologies in identifiable ways for more than a century afterward, even though almost none of the individual organisms lived that long.

  “Three, extra heat is extra energy, and one place atmospheric heat goes is into hurricanes, especially when you consider the interaction with surface water. Bigger hurricanes, more hurricanes, hurricanes where there’ve never been hurricanes… we have a team looking at that.

  “Four, maybe the extra heat melts a lot of snow fields early this spring and prevents their forming later in the fall, so the Earth’s albedo drops and you get a feedback effect, making the warming keep right on increasing out to the point where there’s no snow or ice left except on the Himalayas and the Andes. You know about albedo?”

  “Shininess. How much sunlight gets reflected back into space and how much stays here to turn into heat. Introduction to Astronomy and Planetary Science, Astro 1103, I got a Significant Achievement.”

  “Attaboy. Family tradition; I was a C-plus kind of guy myself in undergrad.”

  “How’d you end up with a doctorate?”

  “I got married and stopped spending so much time chasing tail. Okay, fifth, we get extra heat at the pole, so the air mass there doesn’t sink as it normally would, and therefore it doesn’t flow down into the middle latitudes. You get what’s basically a global inversion all summer long; the wind stops blowing, and storms stop forming and moving west to east. Global drought, not to mention that air pollution builds up over the cities like you wouldn’t believe. Then come winter you’ve got the interiors of North America and Eurasia dried out from drought, and the polar air mass finally breaks through. Big old windstorms hit those dried-out areas and you get a hemispheric dustbowl—followed by one or more things from options 1 to 4 the next year.”

  Jesse gives a long, slow whistle. “So no-bullshit, this is really a big deal? Worth getting worked up about?”

  “It’s a big deal, all right. Worth getting worked up about depends. The human race is not in a position to do anything about it, you know, and though I suppose you could join the nationalists and blame the UN for it, or turn uniter and demand that all power go to the UN, the truth is, no matter what people did, the same thing would have happened sooner or later. The seabed is lousy with methane clathrate all over the high latitudes. Sooner or later, nukes or antimatter weapons were going to go off in it, or an undersea lava flow would have melted it, or maybe a major meteor strike would have come down right in the middle of it. Or for that matter, at the rate global warming is going, all those methane clathrate fields might very well melt once the deep ocean warms up in a hundred years. I’ve got one paleontology team digging into the evidence—there were several superbrief warmings in the geological record, and this is probably what they were. It’s happened before, it’ll happen again.”

  “A lot like a traffic accident, though.” Jesse looks a little shaken. “No matter how predictable it is, you wish it wouldn’t happen to you.”

  “Yeah, pretty much. Anyway, in less than ten years it will all be over; by that time the extra methane will be absorbed in the ocean and eaten by the microbes, burned up in lightning flashes, zapped apart by ultraviolet in the high atmosphere, all that kind of thing.”

  “Well, gee, that’s a lot to absorb,” Jesse says at last. “There doesn’t seem to be anything that anyone can do about it—”

  Di shrugs. “We could be urging people to get ready for bad news. That’s about all. Heat is energy, and more energy in the system means whatever happens, it’s going to be a big one. Hope I was some help.”

  “You always are. You’re the flattest big brother I’ve got. Say hi to Lori and the kids.”

  It takes Di a second to remind himself that flat is a positive word.

  When they hang up, there is no “broken connection” as people imagine; throughout their long call, each little piece of data has been running through the trillions of possible pipes all on its own, only rejoining at the other end. All that happens is that no more of them go running through the maze.

  At the substation near Di’s office, where Jesse’s incoming words and picture were assembled and where Di’s outgoing words and picture were fragmented, there were more than thirty interested datarodents.

  When ordinary voice-visual phone went to digital packetized transmission, the newspapers had been full of the dangers and potentials for “viruses”—the boomtalk pejorative for self-replicating software—on the phone system.

  As usual, the word was far behind the news. The replicating code that carried messages to reprogram nodes could be duplicated
and modified, intelligence added, and the whole turned into a datarodent (so called because it listened and ratted on whoever it could). Datarodents crouch in the nodes near anything important and listen as the little data-pieces come back together to form the conversation; they make copies of messages to send back to their masters.

  Within a decade of the first datarodents showing up, human masters were no longer needed. The masters were programs themselves, artificial intelligences that could recognize enough to tell important from not.

  After a while longer, datarodent and master alike began to replicate themselves and to move about on the net, always looking to colonize a node they had not yet infected. In 2028, the datarodents have gnawed away every bit of privacy.

  As long as los corporados got paid when datarodents did this, the only people who cared were the sort of isolated nuts who sent paper mail to congressmen complaining about “invasions of privacy.”

  It’s obvious to a lot of different organizations—especially after the Global Riot—that important things come out of NOAA. So the listener programs have been breeding in the nodes around NOAA like mosquitos in a swamp. In a way it’s a miracle that only thirty families of datarodents run out to carry the news elsewhere.

  One little gang dashes only a scant mile or two—though it does it via nodes in Boston, Cleveland, and Trinidad, in part—into the FBI’s phone analysis program, which scans quickly and concludes that Di has divulged nothing that should be confidential, then calls up the dossier on Jesse, spots the connection to Naomi, concludes that she can make no use of the information either except to gain influence among the campus organizations, connects that with the FBI assessment of her as uncharismatic and therefore harmless, or at least preferable to several other possible campus leaders. It makes the note, records the data and the assessment, and closes the file.

  Most of the other datarodents work for data-gathering organizations, and these clip the relevant parts of what Di said, note that it’s semantically all but identical to material that NOAA sent over the wire as a press release forty-five minutes ago, and gain from it two useful pieces of information: the name Di Callare and the fact that NOAA is not currently lying.

  At about the point where Jesse is unsticking his phone’s camera and screen from the compartment wall of the zipline, and Di has had time to exhale and look back up at the chart—those facts are weighted, included into the database, and priced. If anyone wants them, they’ll be there, for a fee.

  Three small and crude datarodents—ones that bear all the marks of underfunding—scuttle off with data for the three presidential campaigns. The only conclusions they lead their masters to are that the campaigns are still being kept in the dark. The Republican candidate’s office fires off a plaintive letter complaining to President Hardshaw and appealing to her party loyalty. It is such a routine matter that they have a form letter for it.

  One purely commercial, barely tailored datarodent fires off a record of the whole conversation to Berlina Jameson, currently at the Motel Two in Point Barrow, Alaska. It lacks even the intelligence to decide whether a thing is important or not, but because so many things it is looking for were mentioned frequently, it tags the record as top priority.

  One datarodent is not like the others—it’s very big and very smart. It fragments itself into a million chunks for the journey to GateTech headquarters at Cape Canaveral, and slips into the net a chunk at a time like a water moccasin swimming out from a bank. Besides a full recording of the conversation, the attached indexing and cross-referencing to other calls, and the snippets of material from it, there is a whole structure of thoughts and questions, and it is about the size (if it were somehow written out in text) of twenty of the old, paper Encyclopedia Britannica.

  Eleven milliseconds later, at Cape Canaveral, one of the artificial intelligences that Glinda Gray has created and put to work drops a note into her electronic hopper, saying it may have found a significant piece of information. By now it has written a summary report of only five pages, though it still contains the name “Diogenes Callare.”

  Another datarodent belongs to Industrial Facilities Mutual, a large industrial insurance consortium, and it is perhaps the second smartest datarodent in the substation. It hurries off to headquarters in Manhattan, carrying with it the assessment that the risk of severe weather has been badly underestimated.

  Artificial intelligences there study the issue, agree with the datarodent, and re-prioritize. Engineer inspections are scheduled based on priority—a factory in a dry California canyon is inspected for fire risk more often than one on the Oregon coast, for example—and thus they step up the priority on all severe weather risks: broadcast towers, aboveground power lines, factories with flat roofs where snow tends to accumulate, shops in floodplains….

  The new priorities go out four seconds later to the individual engineers. The engineer for Hawaii is still asleep while his software receives the new orders, checks through the list of places he inspects, and sends out a notice of early inspection to NAOS, the corporation that operates the new Kingman Reef Heavy Launch Facility.

  The notice of an early inspection is thus the first thing seen at breakfast by Kingman’s two heads. Akiri Crandall, chief of general operations, who is overseeing both the remaining construction and the daily operations, is exasperated; not for the first time, he wishes he were back in the Navy with his old destroyer command. The inspector will be climbing all over the station for a full day, and wherever he goes, all work will cease, and rumors will fly.

  Gunnar Redalsen, chief of launch operations, was already in a bad mood; lately he gets up in bad moods. The Monster is the biggest rocket ever to fly, the first test launch is just three months away and already they’re ten days behind schedule, and the last thing he needs is another delay.

  Crandall and Redalsen don’t get along, which is unfortunate, and they are known not to get along, which is worse. Within three hours of the day shift beginning, partisans of each side are constructing rumors in which the early inspection is somehow the fault of the other, and petty sniping and harassment are beginning to fly between launch ops and general ops. By lunchtime, Crandall and Redalsen find they have to hold a “peace conference” (for a “war” neither of them was fighting) and order people to cut the crap and get back to work.

  All afternoon, those people who are inclined to nurse slights and injuries do, and by evening there are marital spats, upset children, and many people going to bed a little angry.

  During the whole long day, the Pacific rolls on outside as it has for thousands of years, but because fine clear warm weather is so normal, and going outside the station so rare, no one pays much attention except a few sunbathers who have the day off. Waves roll in over the western horizon, splash up the sides of the concrete pillars, and roll out over the eastern horizon; with the tides, the water rises a little on the sides of the station, and sinks a little, and that is all. As night falls, the stars in their thousands come out to dance, but no one sees them.

  Inside, Crandall tosses and turns, trying to get to sleep. He knows the inspection is going to upset Redalsen and there will be more trouble. The Monster, now bobbing quietly by its launch tower, not to be fueled for months yet, will get off on time—Redalsen will see to that—but Crandall knows there are going to be a lot more squabbles.

  Redalsen falls asleep wondering why Crandall doesn’t understand that the point of a launch facility is to launch things.

  After he talks to his brother, Jesse Callare leans back in the zipline compartment and considers. Becoming an influential activist on campus is not likely to work. Besides, it will be months until Naomi gets back, and then she’ll have to notice him, and notice he has changed, and—well, it would all just take too long, is the problem. On the other hand, he doesn’t think she’ll appreciate it if he just follows her to Tehuantepec.

  But he is an engineering student. And TechsMex, the group that sends engineers and interns south to teach, always has openings. G
oing to Tehuantepec might be a bit overt, but he can go somewhere in the same part of the country—

  He dials up TechsMex and scans the openings. Not as easy as he’d thought—there are ten jobs he could do but most are in Ciudad de Mexico or farther north….

  The only one that is in the far south, anywhere near Tehuantepec—and “near” is very much a relative term—is tutoring preengineering students at a comunity college in Tapachula, almost at the Guatemalan border. Even by air, that’s 220 miles to Tehuantepec, and there’s no zipline that far south yet.

  But another part of his mind points out that he could be down near the equator, doing something valuable in a quiet little border town… and he won’t have to see any of his old friends. Running away after a flopped love affair may be something a character in a book would do, but one reason they might do it is that it might work.

  He decides to decide that night. Meanwhile, there’s at least a chance to catch up on the news. For the hell of it, he decides to do something trashy, and he pulls out the scalpnet for his phone and plugs into XV, deliberately choosing a real lowbrow channel. He’s just in time to get to be Rock, and get it into Synthi Venture (he used to love to do that as a teenager) one more time before she goes off on vacation. It’s great, especially once he sets it to pulse back and forth between her and him; there’s so much passion and violence in the ecstasy of the intercourse that when it’s finally over, Jesse can’t help thinking that the Christian XV guys have a point when they say that if the Diem Act were strictly enforced, Doug Llewellyn, the president of Passionet, would long since have gone to the chair.

  The doors open at Tucson Station and the zipline wishes Jesse a pleasant day. He shoulders up his pack and walks back into the bright sunlight. It’s hours until the party tonight, hours until he can do anything effective. Maybe he’ll study.