Mother of Storms

by John Barnes

  Before he goes home for the day, Harris Diem finds he’s called into the New Oval Office one more time.

  “It’s time,” Hardshaw says. “We need to get all the attention on Clem if Rivera and I are going to get the powers we need.”

  “It still sounds strange for you to say ‘Rivera and I,’” Diem notes.

  “You sound bitter.”

  “Yeah, a little. May I sit, boss?”

  “You don’t need to ask and you know it. What’s the matter?”

  “I keep thinking, who are you, where is the real Brittany Lynn Hardshaw, and what have you done with her?” Diem sighs. “Somebody works for more than a decade to get us back out from under the UN thumb—and it hasn’t been easy, with them paying the bills at the start and our having to practically rent out the armed forces as peacekeeping units—the goal is within reach, and… what? You bring them back in. You know damned well we could dominate the world after Clem.”

  “If there’s a world to dominate, Harris. That’s the big if. No point in being just the least wounded of the critical cases.”

  He shrugs. “Oh, I understand the logic. And you’re maneuvering Rivera into our pocket, and that’s good too. But I just… well, a lot of this is sticking in my craw. I know when you said it’s time, you mean time to shaft Henry Pauliss. And he’s kind of an old friend and protégé. He trusts me. He won’t know what it’s about.”

  “Harris, you and I have both sent friends to their death,” Hardshaw says softly. “I’m not sure that I’m the one who’s changing.”

  Diem sighs and shrugs. “I used to understand in my guts what we were doing. Nowadays I just understand the reasons in my head. Boss, we’ve always delivered the goods to the people we served—they wanted crooks behind bars, we gave‘em that; they wanted to squirm out from under the UN, we gave’em that; they wanted us to rescue the Afropeans and we did it. We did it by getting our hands on the power we needed and using it. We didn’t do it by organizing great big ‘let’s hate the hurricane’ media campaigns, or trying to persuade people to take the problem seriously, or any of that. And we made sure that people either worked for us or regretted it. Now I see all this balancing and juggling, and, yeah, I know, I understand, it’s a different world, the planet could be at stake… but I just don’t understand it like I used to.”

  She nods. “Fair enough. Can you still do what I ask? I need a big scandal, I need someone to stomp on, and it needs to be a scandal related to Clem. Can you give me Henry Pauliss to take the fall?”

  “Yeah. No problem.”

  In a curiously formal way, they shake hands before he goes. Diem heads home, goes down to the basement, and gives in to the craving, rampaging through half of his wedges; later, raw and sore, he falls into a deep, dreamless—but not at all refreshing—sleep.

  The first news of it Jesse and Mary Ann get comes on the TV—not XV, Mary Ann won’t have that in the house—just as they are rising from the siesta, at about four in the afternoon. By that time things have been going on for quite a while, and there’s already footage (shot by a Navy staticopter out of Pearl on an emergency some-good-publicity-at-last basis) of the carrier group making all speed to the south and east. Analysts are explaining it all over the place, and besides Scuttlebytes, there’s a fresh edition of Sniffings.

  “Do you believe the stuff she puts in that?” Mary Ann asks Jesse, curling against him and pulling his hand into her waist.

  “Quite a bit of it. She interviewed my brother once, and he was pretty impressed. She occasionally calls him for background info.”

  “Really? I always have trouble believing the news in Sniffing.”

  Jesse nods. “What did you find so hard to believe?”

  “I suppose just its take on the world. I don’t see what she’s getting at, what kind of story she thinks it is. Instead, it’s always like she’s so dedicated to being flat that she takes the voice and the story out of it; she might as well be reading a stock ticker or something. And she doesn’t look like much, you know; I mean, her appearance is professional but she doesn’t do anything to make herself very grabbing, and anyway it’s all these interviews and graphs and things. You can get a lot about what’s happening and stuff—if you believe what she’s saying—but you can’t get anything about how it all hooks together, and if it doesn’t hook together it doesn’t feel real.”

  “I suppose,” Jesse says. “Di says my old man is a big fan of hers. In fact, it says on the news a lot of the old people think she’s great. I guess because it’s more like the news was like when they were kids.”

  “Ugh. I don’t remember the old TV news from the first time it was out very much, but by the time I was in high school we used to watch a lot of old news programs in history class, and I remember how dull that was.”

  Jesse thinks and nods. “I see what you mean. The news didn’t used to say much, did it?”

  “Exactly. It didn’t. And this bunch of ships in the middle of the ocean—”

  “Running like hell from a hurricane,” Jesse says. “That’s pretty dramatic. And there’re kids and moms and so forth on the carrier—they had a little school and apartment complex on Midway Island for dependents.”

  “Yeah, but we don’t have any sense of who they are except people in a news story,” Mary Ann points out. She’s now sitting up and very alert; Jesse realizes that they’re on her home territory here and naturally she has a lot to say. “That’s the basic insight that Doug Llewellyn had, the thing that made Passionet big is that what’s important to people is people they know. Lots of people used to watch the old news just to see the old-style anchormen, which made sense. The way you feel that something is important and know what it’s about is by watching how someone important to you reacts. After all, that’s how we all learned to react to the news as kids. The trouble with the old kind of news was that it could show you pictures of things but it couldn’t put you there. I mean, imagine if the Holocaust had been covered letting people feel like they were the guards—”

  “Or like they were going into the ovens themselves,” Jesse suggests, feeling morbid.

  “Well, since you put it that way, yeah. And for that matter, imagine what it might have been like to be in the astronauts’ heads for the first spaceflights.”

  “Well, we all know what it was like to be in Colonel Tynan’s head for the Mars landing, anyway. Yeah, I suppose you’re right—the people on that ship are kind of faceless to me. On the other hand, I’m still pretty interested in whether or not they make it.”

  “Yeah, but think about what it would be like to be standing on the deck.” Her eyes are faraway and a little sad; Jesse recognizes the melodrama in it—she is striking one of her “I must get back to work someday” poses.

  “You could get killed,” Jesse says firmly, as he does every time she does this.

  “Ah—but the royalties my estate would make on that!” She grins at him. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to abandon you to drab, wretched reality all that soon. But I am starting to think about the biz again… and that’s kind of the way you have to think. It is dangerous, you know… always has been. Ernie Pyle didn’t die in bed.”

  “He never met you.”

  She snorts, hits him with a pillow from the sofa, and then they get into a tickle fight; by the time they look back at the screen the station is showing baseball scores.

  Half an hour before Mary Ann and Jesse watch the television clip of the evacuation of Midway, Clem’s outflow jet kicks around again, to almost due northwest. By now Clem’s eye is centered near 169W 31N, and its outer winds are tearing into Midway, hundreds of kilometers away, with a Beaufort scale force of 19—more than enough to tear down buildings and hurl small boats up onto the shore; what the Japanese air raids of 1942 could not do is accomplished in a matter of a few minutes on the evacuated base. Strong buildings stand, but with their windows shattered and often with their roofs stripped off like peels from bananas; weaker buildings, poles holding wires, piers, and all the
other structures exposed to the full fury of the wind are ripped into pieces and scattered out to sea or hurled against what is still standing. Every palm tree on the island is laid flat, and by the time the immense wave rolls over the wreckage, there is little enough left standing to knock down.

  The wave was just a by-blow, however, a mere sideswipe, for Clem is already on its way south and west, and the part of the wave that struck Midway was only a corner of the main body. The base is scoured off the face of Sand Island, and the World War II ruins still remaining on East Island disappear with it; when the sun comes out again, still days away, it will show smaller islands, with the sand islets gone. The only signs of life will be the bare faces of the airstrips on each island, and the foundations of Pan Am’s old Midway Hotel. By that time, no one will be interested in looking.

  The hurricane is moving roughly parallel to the southeastward sweep of the Hawaiian Islands, but not perfectly so, and all lines that are not parallel eventually converge; the question now is where those lines are going to converge, and whether Clem will stay on his. Di Callare does not go home; Lori sends him a packed lunch and some clean clothes, and he showers at work, changes, gratefully eats the lunch, and is working again before he really knows that he has been taking any time off, with just a vague impression that Lori is out there and that she loves him.

  Darkness crawls across the Atlantic toward America, reaches Brazil, marches on up the face of South America, rolls across the Caribbean and North America, and Clem, still basking in the sun of late afternoon in the Pacific, continues to gather speed and to swing inward toward the islands. It is now too late to hope that major damage can be avoided—if you take the distance at which the winds fall to Beaufort force 12, the standard definition of a hurricane, then Hurricane Clem is just under 3,000 km in diameter—that is, it is about four times as big in area as Alaska.

  But the great majority of that area is merely hurricane; that is, not bigger or worse than most typhoons or hurricanes. It is only the relatively small area around the eye that is producing the giant waves, and though no instruments have yet survived long enough to report, from the size of the waves it is inferred that at the eye wall the wind must be of tomadic velocities—half a Mach or so. Hawaii will take a hurricane, and because Clem is big and takes a long time to pass even at its extraordinary speed, Hawaii will take that hurricane for a longer than usual time—but it may be just a hurricane, if they are lucky.

  Already they have been lucky in that the true tsunami-sized waves emerging from Clem’s core have been largely running parallel to the islands; their tips have battered the rocky coasts of the northwestern sides of the islands, but though the waves are preternaturally big, that side of Hawaii is steep and strong, and little harm has been done—a coastal road washed out here, a narrow beach there, one lighthouse destroyed, but nothing like what could have happened had the waves come from the other side.

  The immediate concern is rain. Clem is throwing vast amounts of it into the whole chain, and Hawaii is steep; the bare mountaintops of most of the islands are guiding the rain down onto lower slopes in hundreds and thousands of suddenly formed fast-flowing rivers, blocking and cutting roads that are vitally needed to evacuate the north and east sides of the islands.

  Hardshaw wonders if any president since Roosevelt or Truman has even been aware of the existence of Hawaii 11; yesterday she had no concern at all with whether Hawaii even had any state highways, but that particular road has been washed out by flash floods and mudslides at four points between Hilo and Pahala, and worse yet many of the traffic control stations on it are down, so that not only is the evacuation from Hilo to South Kona blocked up (the Corps of Engineers has crews out on all those places, trying to get temporary bridges up in the howling wind and blinding rain, and somewhere she already has a list of six soldiers who’ve died in the effort), but insofar as people can move, they are having to drive themselves on bad roads—and many younger drivers have never had real manual control of a car except briefly in driver’s ed. There are accidents all up and down the line, and each of them traps more motorists on a highway liable to more washouts….

  We’re going to lose a few thousand lives at least, Hardshaw thinks to herself. Inconceivable; to be the President of the USA, in time of peace, to have so many resources at her disposal, and to be unable to do one damned thing.

  She feels herself relax; she has thought the worst, and now she will be all right. Yes, she is going to lose several thousand citizens. Many of them will die on that highway, due to the Federal evacuation orders, but many more who have elected to stay put will die in Hilo. The blame will not fall too hard in any one direction; Hardshaw’s political team can have most Americans saying “It’s a terrible thing, but what can anyone do?” in short order, if they aren’t already.

  She looks over her listing of other news. The evacuation fleet from Midway has turned to run away from the storm—she remembers something vaguely about it being better to take a storm on the stern or the bow rather than broadside—and will try to get around far enough to make a run for Yokohama. Every aircraft that could make it out before weather closed the airports has headed for the West Coast, and since what could be packed onto them were mainly the dependents of servicepeople, there will be thousands of young wives and their children clogging the airports, desperate for news, from San Diego up to Portland. She posts a quick note that local military commanders are to “render humanitarian assistance” and that it’s particularly important, notes Harris Diem has already written a similar note.

  It’s dark outside now, and the night is going to be long. Sometime tomorrow whatever is the worst will have happened; Brittany Lynn Hardshaw is praying, more sincerely but with less faith than she has in many years, for an anticlimax.

  Darkness moves on, crossing the West Coast, grinding its way on to the Pacific. XV communications require such enormous bandwidth, and so many links to Hawaii have been lost by wind-smashed antennas, that only television and telephone are now going through.

  That doesn’t absolve Ed Porter from his job; one of Passionet’s best editors, he is based in Honolulu to handle the Pacific traffic, and even though he can’t get anything from the rest of the world, there is plenty happening right here on Oahu. He turned down the offer of evacuation because he figured that up here, above the city in Dowsett Highlands, is probably about as safe as anywhere they’re evacuating people to.

  Right now there are just two people wired to transmit to Passionet on Oahu, which would normally mean Porter would be assembling a pretty thin documentary for eventual distribution. But Candy and Bill are a special case if ever there was one, and another example, Ed thinks, that Doug Llewellyn knows what he’s doing.

  Much as Ed hates to admit it, because working on “Dream Honeymoon” has been one royal pain in the ass.

  Bill and Candy are unmodified; Candy’s breasts and buttocks are the ones that grew naturally, Bill’s muscles are not the least bit enhanced, and neither of them has been given any training in maintaining an untransmitted persona.

  The gimmick was a promotion, originally—let us wire you three months before the wedding, and you get a year’s luxury honeymoon on us. There was a certain discreet kind of rigging in the contest, too, not in the selection but in carefully making sure that most of the entrants would be like Bill and Candy, solid-citizen young Heartlanders who dressed a little behind the fashions and believed in doing everything the old-fashioned way.

  Candy’s hairstyle is about five years behind what’s currently flat and a bit overdone, her cosmetics are ten years behind and way overdone, and her favorite topics of conversation are how much they spend at each place on the way and what there is to eat. Bill dresses like what he is—an assistant manager of data patterning for a bank, and complains about the food in a good-natured way—he’d live on steak, pizza, and tacos if he could, because he hates “foreign food.” He is always a bit disgruntled to discover that yet another foreign place is nothing like Sylvani
a, Ohio.

  Ed Porter thinks that they are the two most boring people he’s ever taken signal from, but “Dream Honeymoon” is selling like nothing before or since, and this special recording can be dropped into the regular news, thus boosting sales still further.

  Right now Bill and Candy are still in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, the last people left there except for a couple of managers who are closing the place down preparatory to running for the hills. Ed figures that the Royal Hawaiian has managed to survive a long time, even located right down on the beach at Waikiki, and thus probably Bill and Candy are safe… and of course, if they’re not—Porter banishes the thought. Of course they are.

  But if they aren’t, Passionet will have the monster hit wedge of the decade.

  Right now they’re standing by their pricey window, facing the beach. Ed had suggested they dress in clothes they could run away in, if it came to that, but of course neither of them has the hiking clothes that would be appropriate, and besides, he’s persuaded Bill it’s pretty safe, so Candy is in one of those little look-at-my-body nighties made of cheap, shiny fabric that have been de rigueur for newlyweds since the 1970s. She’s got jeans, sneakers, underwear, and a tight little knit top that may not be practical but is at least informal stacked by the door, presumably so that if the hotel begins to fall down she can change clothes before running out of it.

  Bill has his own pile of pants, shirt, shorts, socks, and shoes next to hers. He’s standing there in his bikini briefs, and Ed finds himself chuckling. Not only does Candy figure she’ll have time to dress to flee, Bill figures he’d better change his undies, too.