Mother of Storms

by John Barnes

  Porter clicks into signal and feels…

  … Bill is more afraid than he wants Candy to know, and even though everyone at Passionet has been really nice to them for these first few weeks, he has to admit that he doesn’t have anyone in the company he feels is a friend. (Fuzz that into general anxiety, Porter thinks.) Bill wonders how the hell he got into this.

  Not that he wouldn’t have been here anyway—everyone in his family since his grandparents has always done a Hawaiian honeymoon, it’s what you do if you’re in the Sylvania Country Club and go to U of Toledo and come back to take over the family business, like being Presbyterian or Methodist, like voting Republican, like having season tickets to lots of things at your old schools.

  This is not an easy process for Bill to think his way through. He’d have been here anyway, but without Passionet… well, maybe they’d only have stayed a night or two at the Royal Hawaiian. Probably not even that. The truth is that he’s not sure what you really get for the inflated tab, the food doesn’t eat that much better than home, the beds are a little too firm, everything feels like a museum, and the outside of the building looks like the kind of pink concrete castle that they have at malls for toy stores. There’re lots of more modern places that aren’t far off the beach that would have suited him just fine.

  Candy’s trembling and it’s not because she’s cold.

  Why did he let that Porter guy, who always seems to be laughing at some damn thing or other that isn’t funny, talk them into staying here? Porter’s way to hell and gone up in the hills and now Bill’s down here with his wife…

  My wife, Bill thinks, and pulls Candy closer. That was probably it, he figured. You couldn’t go and look scared in front of her. She was counting on you to be the one that wasn’t scared. If he’d been talking to Porter by himself he might have managed to win the argument and get them on that bus out of town, up into the mountains, but in front of Candy… oh well, spilt milk and so on. He holds her closer and tries not to notice that he’s finding her presence very comforting.

  Porter fuzzes out the specifics again; damn it, Bill is having all kinds of great feelings, notably a bare veneer of control over stark terror, and a sort of wanting to curl up on a woman’s lap and hide thing that’s got a tasty bit of Oedipal kink to it, but he keeps fixating on how they happen to be there, and Passionet has to be kept in the background—the experiencers don’t like to be reminded that the stars are wired, or that someone wired them and is standing between star and experiencer.

  Flip over to Candy. Oh, now this is nice. She’s scared out of her mind and beginning to think that Bill is a complete fool, but she’s also feeling very much like a little girl and wanting him to be Daddy.

  Through her eyes he watches the big waves—nothing like the storm surges, they’re on the other side of the island from Clem, but just the echoes and stirrings of the surges are enough to produce record surf—rotting up into the lights along the beach out of the black ocean, coated with foam on all sides. Her breath catches as one rolls up farther than before and slaps a load of foam up onto Kalakaua Avenue, and it seems to her that through the thick carpet under her feet she can feel the building groan.

  She snuggles closer to Bill and tries to think positively; all her life that’s been the one thing she can always do. This is a great adventure and maybe there’s something in the contract or somewhere that they get more money for getting through something like this. This will be something for Bill and her to tell the kids about forever. This will all be over by dawn, and when they get up late they’ll find the hotel employees are already back at their posts and there’s a nice big breakfast—for Bill, of course.

  Porter snickers. Bill certainly eats and he’s going to be built like a side of beef, but Candy’s not that far behind him; her trim little tummy is soft and flabby, her breasts are high and perky only because they’re new, and in five years she’ll be subsiding into a soggy Midwestern lard meringue like her mother and sisters. He enjoys the snicker a lot—it makes him feel better, and relieves some of the fear that’s been leaking through from Candy. One problem with editing, especially when you’re getting signal off an untrained mind, is that like it or not, you end up sympathizing. And Porter doesn’t like it at all.

  He pops back to Bill and discovers the poor dumb bastard has screwed up some courage from somewhere and is managing to keep the tremble out of his arms and voice as he whispers to Candy that it’s going to be okay, really it is, and won’t they have something to tell the relatives about.

  It seems to put some heart in her, for she turns back to him and smiles. “We can’t tell them, honey, they’ve already been there and been us.”

  Bill snorts. “Guess you’re right at that. Well, at least we’ll really have something to be for them.”

  She snuggles back against him, and his hand strokes the slick fabric that covers the small of her back; the little spaghetti straps on her shoulders tighten, and her breasts rise just a fraction. God, it couldn’t get more perfect… these kids have such limited imaginations that with a little luck they are really going to—“And you know,” she says, “it’s just common sense that we’re perfectly safe here anyway, hon. They aren’t going to lose all they’ve invested in us.”

  Nitwit bitch, Porter thinks. Have to fill in there with footage of the monster waves rolling in, and maybe get an actor to overdub some kind of fear onto it, and it still won’t work.

  Bill grins. “On top of everything else, you really have guts, honey. I’m so glad we got married and had the chance to do this. Even if it does mean…” He grins, feeling mischief rising, his fear sinking away, and looking into Bill’s mind, Porter laughs with elation. Yes! We are going to get the full effect—right out of From Here to Eternity. Pity I can’t figure out a way to make him take her down to the beach and hose her where there’s a chance of them being swept out to sea.

  All those blonde curls and that overdone makeup swirl in a little pose that Porter figures she must have learned from experiencing Synthi Venture—though, god knows, this one could never be one percent of the pro Synthi is. But then, not being a pro is the point of this whole stupid exercise in bucolic sentimentality….

  “Now what does that mean?” she says, pouting just a little and unconsciously tugging her nightie down a bit, so that she pops out of it a little more. Porter concedes that the little cow does have a nice set of udders.

  “Oh, just… well, I sure wasn’t the only guy who was ever interested in you, and now if they want to know… uh, what it’s tike—”

  She giggles. “Oh, god, Bill, you know all they get to find out is what I’m like with you. I’d never be that hot with anyone else, lover, and you know it.”

  “Maybe,” he murmurs, letting his hand slide up her thigh.

  The window thumps as if a body had been thrown against it, but it doesn’t break; an instant later they hear a screaming crash and the howl of the gust breaks on them from the eaves. Both jump and their terror returns instantly.

  Shit, Porter thinks, that was one great spike of fear but he’d really like to have some more sex in the mix….

  “Sounds like they lost a gutter into the parking lot,” Bill says, making himself sound a lot more casual than he’s feeling. “Glad our rental’s insured.” His heart is halfway up his throat but he can tell Candy needs him to be calm and he’s going to be.

  Zap, let’s get the Candy view—wow, Unfuckingreal. The poor bimbo is going for it. Porter plugs straight on in and gets the full load. Candy is looking at this big, square, back-slapping halfwit who’s never had a thought in his life, with his fake good-sport qualities and his unformed good looks shortly to vanish under wattles of fat, and somehow she’s seeing Superman. This bovine lump looks like a hero to her….

  Candy has never seen Bill like this before. She can hear the strength and calm in his voice, and now she really does know it’s perfectly safe. She’s sorry she jumped like that, considering that he was probably working his way around to so
me loving and she could really use that just now. So she winks and says, “Well, at least since everyone else has run off, we don’t have to pull any shades if I want to show you something….”

  “Show me what?” he asks. Porter hops back and finds that, as sometimes happens, playing brave has gotten rid of Bill’s fear. They are going to. Wow, this couldn’t get more perfect. Passionet is going to ship billions.

  She shows him, pulling her nightie shyly high enough to reveal her tidy, carefully shaped patch of pubic hair. Porter makes sure both sides are recording—they’ll want a men’s and a women’s version of this part—and feels the surge of Bill’s erection answering.

  Bill is unexpectedly rough with her, which is just fine from Porter’s standpoint—less need to amp the sensations, which always adds so much distortion—and for some odd reason she likes it this time. Probably because he seems like more of a big strong man when he’s grabbing her by the breasts, surprisingly soft and baggy to the touch, and pushing her back against the wall. He jabs his penis, so stiff it trembles, forward between her thighs, misses, grunts with the pain of bending it a bit against a plump buttock, and she reaches down and guides it into her completely relaxed and sopping wet vagina. He thrusts his penis in and out of her furiously, gasping with the speed and exertion.

  Porter, editing together a Bill track, a Candy track, and a both-together track on the fly for three different editions, is far too busy, but this is hot even for him, with all his experience of experiencing. He doesn’t have a hand free to help himself but he still comes when Candy has her first explosive orgasm.

  And it’s not just hot, both of them are giving this wonderful scattershot montage of all sorts of feelings and thoughts about each other, as if somehow…

  … their lives were passing before their eyes, Porter realizes, as he starts to come down off the induced high. They’re still banging away, Candy’s head bouncing back off the wall (she’ll wonder why it hurts later, Porter figures) and Bill pushing into her with all the force of his thighs, all but lifting her off the floor.

  It’s a pointlessly morbid thought. Their lives are not passing before their eyes, and besides, Porter has edited dozens of wedges that included right-up-to-death material and that never has happened.

  He dismisses it and focuses on getting all those memories to edit into a more composed montage. Who’d have thought these two lumps of cheese would have all this stuff in them? Vintage Heartland Americana mixed with good solid porn—

  Candy hanging out in some student bar and Bill’s first sight of her, as she looked over her shoulder at him and he got one of those perfect hair-tit-butt shots that a hundred years of movies, TV, and XV have taught most of the women on Earth to do—and poor old stupid Bill reacted as if neither he nor anyone else had ever seen such a thing before—

  Long corny walk in Oak Openings Park on one of those rare October days when the sun shines and the leaves look decent in Ohio, holding hands, itching to get some privacy and scrog till they’re sore but delaying it because both of them thought this was a happy moment, and surprise, it was… amber sunlight hitting Candy’s rather ordinary enhanced-blonde hair and turning it into a movie gold.

  Bill’s moment of terror on Christmas Eve when he reached into his pocket and couldn’t find the engagement ring and wondered how he’d ever explain the minuscule heap of gifts he had for her—and the moment of relief as he found it. His pleasant surprise to realize that that moment was going to be the worst of it, asking her wasn’t half as scary… and then going to the Methodist Church together and singing carols by candlelight and the hot chocolate afterward (Porter is finding this all so Mom and Pop American that he wants to vomit, but he knows the audience out there will eat this right up)—and then, fabulous! the memory includes a stolen kiss and Bill realizing he can smell his own semen on her breath—

  Candy has an explosive, crying, screaming orgasm, and before it’s over Bill is spurting into her. Porter gleefully logs the works. Passionet will be making money off this a hundred years from now.

  They sink slowly to the carpet, still holding each other, very tenderly now, just beginning to feel how sore they will be. Bill cradles Candy’s head in his hands and kisses her; her mouth is slack and open, and as Porter pops over to her mind he finds that she’s all but unconscious with bliss, little aftershocks of pleasure still rolling up from her aching vulva.

  Then the first peak gust hits. In the high winds of a hurricane, wind can gust to double and triple velocity. This gust, coming in from the sea, shatters the windows on the building, all at once. The two newlyweds have just time enough to look up and see the windowpanes hit the pink wall and burst into dust; Candy draws breath for a scream.

  Ed Porter catches the jag of fear and is himself terrified, for one moment, before he can detach to notice what a grand and gorgeous piece of material he has grabbed here.

  Candy’s scream and Bill’s moan of terror are drowned as the door bursts out into the hallway—there is a terrible thunder as all the internal doors shatter or fall through.

  The force exerted on a structure by wind is a function of two things: the square of the speed of the wind, and the relative roughness of the surface presented to the wind. Anything that makes the flow turbulent will increase the drag and hence the delivered force of the wind. This is why a car with open windows must burn so much more gasoline to maintain the same speed as one with closed windows—the open windows split up and mix the airflow, pit it against itself, make it turbulent.

  The gust is already dwindling back to the original wind speed, but it is too late for Bill and Candy. The force on the outside of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel would be six times what it was at the moment of their orgasm—but that was before air began to circulate through the shattered windows and the myriad doorways and corridors of the interior. The additional turbulence increases the coupling—the percentage of energy from the wind that goes into the structure instead of passing over it—by many times.

  Before their lungs empty with their shrieks of fear, the soft pink walls of the Royal Hawaiian shred and break, the great central tower cracks and begins to fall back away from the sea, the interior walls and floors, hit by aerodynamic lift in a dozen directions, break from the studs to fly against each other, and the blacktop roof peels up like the lid of a sardine can and sails away inland like a loose bedsheet in a thunderstorm, bursting into pieces as it goes.

  The lurches prove too much for the structural members, and the Royal Hawaiian collapses, the great winds tearing off pieces as big as automobiles to hurl through the neighboring blocks of shops and restaurants and onto the Ala Wai Golf Course.

  Bill and Candy do not have a chance to be aware of any of this. The blast of air through their room sucks the floor up and the ceiling down; Bill does not even have time to register horror or to understand what he is seeing when Candy’s head is flattened like a pumpkin on a sidewalk by the slap of the ceiling against it, for he is sailing across the room—they are still holding each other—and his head hits the wall where there’s a stud, shattering his skull instantly.

  Ed Porter has it all on tape. Passionet is going to love him. And he’s way up here away from it all. He does a little dance, and, to relieve feelings he’s built up, he loops that last passionate intercourse (along with their memories of several other times) into a nonstop orgasm series of Candy, putting in the image of her head shattering between each surge. Passionet won’t want this but Ed has his connections and he knows there are some places where this will be a best-seller of a completely different kind; he plays the tape, masturbates, ejaculates over and over at the intercut of bovine ecstasy and death like a sledgehammered steer—

  He is still sitting there, pulling on his now-sore penis, trying to get one more orgasm out of Bill and Candy, half an hour later, when a piece of old flagpole, torn from a downtown monument, pierces the Passionet offices, creating a hole for the wind to work on; moments later the building begins to crumble, but by now Ed Porter, impa
led through the chest by the flagpole, his pants still around his knees, is past caring. Within an hour the records of the last of Bill and Candy are immersed, stirred violently, and float away (wedges are light and they are stored in airtight plastic), never to be found.

  They’re getting low on movable satellites, and only Edwards and Baikonur, right now, can give them polar launches. The Kazakhs have been as helpful as possible, but their facility is old (hard to believe that it first launched well before President Hardshaw was born), and the Edwards launch facility was never really intended to do more than put up the occasional military package.

  It’s also hard to find anything that can penetrate Clem well enough to tell what’s going on. As it scraped eastward down the northern side of the Hawaiians, winds curling in against the sheltered shores, available bandwidth fell steadily all night, so that, first, commercial XV had to go, and then television had to be switched to old-style low-def, and then phones went to audio only…. They now have occasional odd voice lines, and whenever they do get a satellite over at low altitude there are a few hams on Lanai and Molokai reporting what they can see—but the weather is far too rough for them to keep an outside antenna up, so their signal is barely reaching to low orbit, less than 100 miles away.

  Admiral Singh reports immense seas and that the carrier group has had to fight for its life, but he’s drawing steadily away from Hurricane Clem and the best guess is that the Midway refugees, anyway, will be brought in alive.

  Stirred by Clem, there are heavy thunderstorms up and down the West Coast, but most of the Hawaii refugee flights got in before the worst of it hit, and again there were no fatal accidents there. Jumplanes go high enough so that trans-Pacific flights are not interrupted, and there’s reportedly a booming trade in people trying to get a left-side window seat to see Clem from 100 miles up.