Mother of Storms

by John Barnes

  The submarine is barely on its way out of Pearl Harbor when Di Callare and his team are meeting with Harris Diem to answer the critical question: What happened at Kingman Reef? It’s still early in the morning—Di had to get on the zipline at five A.M. to make it to Washington from North Carolina and allow himself an hour to look at the data, which are not the most informative they’ve ever seen.

  “You want a hypothesis,” he’s saying now, “speculation for the press and all that? Okay, I think what got them was storm surge. They were built for a Beaufort twenty-two or so hurricane, and conditions outside when they went over were only about nineteen or twenty. That’s a wobbly number, and maybe local conditions just swung up to much worse, or maybe there was an ‘oopsie’ in the engineering somewhere, but say it was really a sound structure and conditions really weren’t worse than that. The assumption is that with a Beaufort twenty-plus hurricane, you’ve got to have the eye passing right over you to experience the full effect, and right in the eye the waves will be about thirty meters, max.

  “But they were nowhere near the eye—that’s plain both from their own reports and from the satellites. And that eye is huge, about as big as any on record. Suppose it isn’t a freak eye, as we thought, but a freak storm—”

  The little man at Diem’s side, who was introduced only as “my assistant” and who has been watching intently, gives off a little half-cough, and Di can feel everyone else pulling back. Well, the hell with it; he’s going to give them his best guess anyway, and they can fix it up later.

  “Suppose it’s a storm with a Beaufort of, oh, say, thirty-five at the eye. Yeah, I know that’s close to tornado wind velocities, and we’re talking about something that’s more than fifty kilometers across, not the less than one kilometer that a tornado averages. Then the waves coming out of the eye—which would be running out away from it, but still close to the storm—might easily be a hundred forty meters, especially given that you have unlimited fetch for every practical purpose—”

  The little man turns toward Diem and says, “Fetch?”

  “Distance wind blows across water,” Diem says. “Hundred-forty-meter waves, Dr. Callare? You realize you’re telling me that this thing is practically throwing off tsunami?”

  “Yep.”

  “And does your staff concur?” the little guy says, looking around with a calculated stare.

  Di Callare has never been so proud or grateful; they all are nodding. “If you look at the current temperatures in the North Pacific,” Gretch says, “there’s plenty of potential for a storm that big.” And then she says the most daring thing that any of them could have: “If you want an honest opinion and not the one you want us to have, this is it. This is the big storm we were talking about weeks ago. And it’s going to keep growing all the way to Asia.” She brushes her hair back from her face and sits tall, staring back at the little man.

  The little man ignores this, as he does everyone else. With the dam broken, Peter, Talley, Mohammed, and Wo Ping all point to the various bits of evidence. Harris Diem is unreadable—which probably explains how he keeps his job—but it’s clear that the little guy isn’t listening anymore, not to what the evidence is (and he probably wouldn’t understand it without a lot of explanation anyway). All he’s doing is noting that people are disobeying.

  The meeting breaks up with very little further word from the politicals; since his staff has backed him so thoroughly, Di returns the favor by saying in front of Diem and his shadow that they are going to pursue the investigation on the assumption that it was a storm surge and that this is not merely an unusually wide hurricane, but the biggest one on record. That seems to drive off Diem, the little man, and their secretary, as if they are afraid what more they might hear.

  It’s still only eight-thirty in the morning, a bit before anyone would normally be in, and now that Diem and company are gone, the adrenaline rush has gone with them and everyone seems to sag. It’s going to be a long day.

  “Let’s all go up the street for breakfast,” Di suggests. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but all I’ve had this morning has been this lousy coffee. And maybe we can brainstorm a little on what’s going to happen next with this thing.”

  It’s a three-block walk, and not a very interesting one; Di notices that in a way what they really look like is an overage neighborhood basketball team, the kind you were on when you were ten, with everyone dressed like a mess and everyone glad to be with each other. He wonders for a moment if it isn’t just his own longing for support that makes him see it that way, but no—Talley is striding along, head up and confident, arguing fiercely with Pete beside her, and Wo Ping and Mohammed are both keeping up with it, and all of them seem to be daring anyone in the passing traffic to argue with them.

  “The team’s gotten really tight, Dr. Callare,” Gretch comments.

  “We’ll need to be,” Di says, not wanting to sound gloomy but not feeling like lying about it. “I’m sure Diem understood us and will make our case, but I have no idea how much weight he actually swings—he’s supposed to be buddies with Hardshaw from way back, they call him the President’s Shadow, but for all we know, it’s Hardshaw that wants us to shut up.”

  “What’s going to happen if we don’t shut up?”

  “I think we’ll probably find out soon. This is quite a summer internship for you, isn’t it?”

  She snorts in agreement. “At least it’s a real look at what the job involves. I’m, er, thinking of applying to have the internship extended, if—”

  “Naturally I’ll write you a recommendation.”

  They come to a traffic light, and Di takes a moment to listen to the rest of the team. Talley is taking the conservative position and Pete the radical; she says that it’s a bigger storm than there’s ever been before, but that’s all, and he’s arguing that there’s at least twenty never-before-seen things it might be able to do besides. Good—put them together on a team and have them hammer out the short list of things to worry about.

  Wo Ping is arguing a computational point with Mohammed; the fundamental question is at what level chaos gets into things and therefore which steps of the model have to be explored by Monte Carlo methods. That sounds like a question one of them could resolve—and then Di realizes that what it amounts to is Talley and Pete’s argument, but phrased in mathematics. Either way the question is, do we just scale up the numbers, or do we look for entirely new things that can happen?

  They haven’t been to breakfast en masse at this little diner since budget week, but the waitress seems to recognize them and steers them to a table in the back room. Until the food gets there, they talk about family and sports and all the usual ritual; everyone asks how Lori’s book is going, even though only Mohammed reads mysteries, and everyone admires the latest batch of photos of Wo Ping’s kid.

  Breakfast is good, and Di realizes a big part of it is that he knows there’s an uproar coming, that there is bound to be fallout from the defiance of this morning, and so maybe this is the last time the team will be together outside of work—and he’s been very happy with them. These are people he’d tackle any job with, and corny and sentimental though that seems, he wishes he had a good way to tell them.

  And, too, there’s something good and productive in the feeling of sitting here too early in the morning, the big thing in the day already accomplished, but with so much still in front of them—assuming they don’t come back to the lab and find themselves all fired, of course.

  Finally, as they hit the second cup of coffee after breakfast, Di voices his thinking, and he’s relieved to see the way they all nod agreement. Probably he could have leveled with them a while ago… out in public, where they might be monitored, is not the place to tell them about the private pipeline to Carla and the results coming out of there, and for everyone’s safety he will probably only share bits of that with each of them, but on the other hand, at least he can get them pointed in the right direction.

  He decides at that moment
to go farther than that. He’s going to spill a lot more of this to that reporter, Berlina Jameson, once he has the team pointed in the right direction. With a scientific team that knows the truth, and media sniffing around, it should be enough to keep them from covering it up any longer.

  Part of him wonders about the safety of this. Four members of Congress were shot last year, and a lot of high-level civil servants. Officially, it’s because the citizens of Washington are crazy and furious; the rumor that runs everywhere, though, is that these things are manipulated. Is he making a widow of Lori and abandoning his kids?

  Is that worse than abandoning the human race?

  They are all staring at him. Probably he has a faraway look in his eyes; he stopped talking in mid-sentence, he realizes, a moment ago. He begins again. “All right, so the big question now is really just the same one, one step down, from the global warming problem we had before. When do effects no one has ever seen before set in? That’s right on the border between math and meteorology—or at least it is if we get the right meteorology described in the right math. So you guys are now officially in two teams, since we may not have a long time to work together. Talley and Mohammed, you’re team one, and your job is to come up with plausible never-before-seen effects—whatever you think in your heart is possible, this is about as much intuition as it is science. Peter and Wo Ping, team two, same job, but don’t look over team one’s shoulders too much. Gretch, you track both and keep reports coming to me. At the end of the week, the teams trade reports and then do their best to knock down each other’s ideas. By the middle of next week, if we’re all still working together and we haven’t been sent to six different cities, we should at least have a short list of what we think we ought to worry about, and have the ideas on it thoroughly vetted among ourselves. Once we have that I’ll tackle Diem again and see if I can stir him up toward at least getting the issues in front of the policy makers, and ideally toward going public.”

  “Even if, uh—” Tally says, and doesn’t go on, but everyone seems to be hanging on the answer to her question.

  “Yes, even if the news is bad and likely to cause riots. Hell, we can’t coddle people forever; what will we tell them when their cities blow down, ‘there’s no reason for alarm’? It’s about time we started telling the truth.”

  The microphone/evaluator at the little diner where Callare and his people have breakfast puts out little packets of datarodents as fast as it can; Harris Diem reads the transcript with satisfaction, just seconds after each person speaks. The leaks are going to happen the way they are supposed to; he makes a note to dispatch a couple of “feeders”—datarodents that find other datarodents and feed them data, something the CIA uses in disinformation campaigns, and police departments of nations that officially don’t communicate use for tracking criminals between them. These will carry some provocative stuff to the datarodents associated with the New York Times, Scuttlebytes, and that new one, Sniffings.

  It’s time to let Louie Tynan in on it too. Diem places the call.

  As he might have expected from an old military officer, Tynan is irritated. “You mean you’ve known all along? Why the hell didn’t you just give Dr. Callare the resources he needed, and warn people about what was coming?”

  “Because half of them wouldn’t believe us and the other half would panic. We need a rational response from the public.”

  That mollifies Tynan—he has about the same trust for the public that Diem does—and he asks, “So what now? I don’t like lying to Carla, and I’m not good at it. And I don’t think—”

  “Whoa, there, partner,” Diem says, grinning. “I’m going to spill the beans to everyone else as well. Not immediately, because what I need is a solid team in place before I sack a bunch of paper pushers—starting with Henry Pauliss, a name I’m sure you’re familiar with—in favor of people who can do the job. But just as soon as possible. Just keep passing on information, and if anyone is nervous about getting caught, tell them you want to keep doing it right up to the moment of your arrest or theirs—which you and I both know won’t happen.”

  Tynan grumbles a bit but goes along with it; thank god for a habit of taking orders, Diem thinks, because Louie Tynan could clearly be the stubbornest person on Earth if he wanted to be.

  In fact, that very stubbornness is why he’s not on Earth, and that’s an advantage too. “You’re going to like this next part better,” Diem adds. “There’s a major job we want you to do via telepresence at Moonbase, and you have carte blanche to get it done any old way you can.”

  “So far, terrific. What’s up?”

  “With the loss of Kingman, it occurred to some of our bright boys that it’s going to be a hurricane-prone summer, and they think that we might lose all our other space-launch facilities except air launch. And we are going to need weather satellites in quantity. Moonbase has mining operations and cadcam shops—we want you to automate it so that you can build the satellites for us, up there, and then bring them down to Earth orbit. We’ve got the technical specs pretty much ready to go on it.”

  “How much longer do I stay up here?”

  “Are you getting anxious for leave?” Diem asks. “I know you’re overdue for relief.”

  “That’s not what I asked. How much longer do I stay up here?”

  “Hmm. Well, I guess till it’s done. At least till fall.”

  “Then you’ve got yourself a deal.”

  As Diem hangs up, he thinks to himself, here’s a guy who sees everything going on, but just carries out people’s orders—and he wouldn’t think of leaving the job, not for anything. There’s no accounting for tastes.

  As it always does, the phrase “there’s no accounting…” triggers a little buzz in the back of his brain, as if a tiny rattlesnake coiled there. He thinks of the racks of wedges in the basement, thinks of his elaborate rig down there—and pushes the thought away, again, as he has been doing almost every hour lately.

  Jesse already knows that Mary Ann Waterhouse is an extremely fucked up woman—in fact that’s just about all he knows about her—but now that she’s over her mating frenzy, or whatever it was, she seems pleasant enough. And the soft tacos filled with rare lamb, raw onion, and tomato are pretty good, so at least he’s getting a meal out of this, even if he kind of suspects the whole experience is going to be too weird to get any of his friends to believe him.

  She’s pretty, too, now that she’s changed into something soft and white and flowing, and with the candlelight she doesn’t look quite so old or so weatherbeaten.

  After they’ve eaten for a bit, she says, “I guess I owe you some sort of explanation, but to tell you the truth, Jesse, I’m not sure I’ve got one. I’ve been spending a fair amount of time catching the bus over to Puerto Madero and just walking along the beach, crying and screaming when I felt like it. I really thought I was just going to go out and try to meet other people just like a regular person.”

  Jesse feels pretty stupid even as he says it. “I guess your job is really a strain.”

  “Yeah.” She chews for a minute, then swallows. “It’s pretty common knowledge, but they keep it off XV. You know about the fuzz?”

  “Uh, I’ve heard the word. It’s supposed to be how you keep a private identity, right?”

  She nods. “Yep, you’ve had the official story. Want to hear something nasty?”

  He spreads his hands in resignation; if all this has been an elaborate routine to get someone to talk to, he’ll have to admit he’s interested—it’s like turning over a rock to look at bugs. And something in him insists on getting the whole story.

  Meanwhile, Mary Ann has noticed Jesse’s response and read it very differently. She’d already been shocked at the way she had attacked—there really wasn’t any other word for it—this poor kid. In fact, this whole trip she’s wondered when she’s going to start coming back together again; her first week she bundled up, wore a wig, and went and did some touristy things like the gondola ride to the top of Tacana and
the rain forest hike. Then she spent more and more time sitting and reading, and then she began to take the long walks on the beach… now she’s down to attacking boys on the street. She wonders if there’s some kind of bottom you hit in this.

  She just wants to make sure that when he leaves he doesn’t hate her.

  “The fuzz doesn’t matter much,” she says quietly. “It was just sort of an explanation because I thought I owed you one. We’re as sensitive as you are, but only a small part of what we’re feeling penetrates through the nervous system data interfaces. And it’s not like signal you can amplify… it’s more like fuzziness in a picture—turning the lights up doesn’t help much. So… well, to get the idea across we have to really overdo everything. And sometimes…”

  “You hurt each other.”

  “Well, and we get to be that way ourselves; small emotions don’t matter because you don’t get paid for them.” She looks down; this still isn’t taking the direction she wanted it to. “Look, this will sound stupid too—lately everything I say that’s not part of a script sounds stupid to me. But I am really tired of hearing myself talk. I would appreciate it a lot if you would tell me something about yourself.”