by John Barnes
Had he been really concentrating he could have advanced technology on the moon by a matter of fifty years beyond its levels on Earth, but at that point, no one on Earth would have known enough to use it intelligently. And besides, he’s been enjoying the spare time….
And all of this time spent in cultivating his own intellectual garden has of course altered his feelings about exploring. Somewhat. He still wants to go and to find out, but there is so much more that he wants to know….
The thing that most excited him was the idea of not being strung out between Earth and Moon anymore, not having to knock himself unconscious for the many long weeks that a second-and-a-half radio transmission gap is to him now.
All of this he manages to get down into what he calls a “terabyte haiku”—a huge poly/hypermedia document, extremely densely interconnected to get across the idea that his feelings are a gestalt, that he downloads to Carla to explain. Her processing capability is an order of magnitude smaller than his, not so much because of lack of processing space (she has all the surplus of Earth, which is huge, to draw from), but because she insists, every day, on a few hours of being unhooked and living in real time. He can’t imagine why she does that but she seems to enjoy it.
It takes her ten seconds or so to digest and read the “terabyte haiku.” The first thing she says afterwards is “I see.”
He waits through the ages of seconds before he realizes he’s now supposed to say something in return.
“So how long before they authorize it? I can be working on it part time until they do.”
“They probably haven’t gotten it out of the President’s printer yet. For some reason she insists on hard copies. But I thought you and I might think about it together a little. There is an issue here and there that needs to get worked out.”
Louie assents, and the two of them begin to trade information, statistics, projections, “what-ifs” at a rate that would move the Library of Congress every two to three minutes; for both of them, it “runs in background”—that is, they are only dimly aware of it, as they go on about their other work, giving it full attention every now and then as something important comes up.
This leaves Louie time enough on the moon to keep the robots working at high speed; now that he knows he will be leaving, he needs to get a system set up so that Earth can order a new satellite by radio and have it built and launched here. Of necessity that also means deciding which parts he wants to build fresh and which to take with him….
There’s a deep sense of pleasure growing inside him as he contemplates the job. Right now he could duplicate the original Moonbase—as it was two weeks ago, after almost twenty years of European, Japanese, and American effort—in two days’ construction. And as capacity improves… well, if they ask him to do what Carla proposes three days from now, he’ll be at the point where the whole thing can be accomplished within a week, the big thruster shipped down to Constitution along with the thousands of microrobots and replicators and the three trillion processor packages that he’s decided will be enough (especially since he can build some more on the way). While he’s at it, he can also get some nice big chunks of shielding down there, and the food recycling gadget he’s got from the hydroponics package….
It would really be better to design and build a habitat for his body for the voyage, but though designing it would be easy, there are too many materials he needs from Earth, and no reliable launch from anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. The Aussies could probably ship things to him, but for the next week or so Clem will be ripping along a few degrees north of the equator, so that whatever he ordered would have to be flown to the Cape of Good Hope and then across the Indian Ocean to be sure of getting it there—
No, Carla was right. If he’s going to go grab and dissassemble a comet for this job, he’ll just have to take the whole space station with him. That means some reinforcing that he hasn’t thought about yet, if he wants it to take the acceleration….
Something is disturbing him and he’s not sure what. It’s a long moment or two before he gets it nailed down to something coming from Carla….
And something pleasant…
Abruptly he has a second and a half blank and catapults back into his body in Earth orbit, where he finds himself overwhelmed by memory and fantasy, his penis in Carla’s hands, mouth, vagina, anus, the way she shrieks in orgasm, the furious pleasure of pressing their sweaty bodies together on that long hike in the Cascades the last time he hit dirtside, the first time he saw her and realized that nobody else was ever going to understand it but he had to have that one and realized she had seen him feeling that way….
His orgasm is huge, shaking—and very wet and sloppy. In a weightless environment, of course, this means his semen forms little floating spheres all over the cabin.
In his mind, he feels Carla shrieking to him from ten thousand processor cortexes and antennas all over the Earth.
“Shit,” he says, speaking aloud. “You are one shameless wench. I just hope the government wasn’t bugging that.”
She gasps and laughs, then answers him on voice, even though he can still feel the presence of her mind on his through all the myriad portals of connection; they are knotted together physically through millions of transmission links, and logically through billions of input-output subroutines, but at this kind of moment it is much too pleasant to forgo talking in the old, slow, acoustic mode. He feels her assent to this even as her first word comes over the voice link. “They either deal with us or with John Klieg,” she says, “and I don’t think his sex life is nearly as interesting. But as a matter of fact, they were bugging it in a few places…. It will take them a week to figure out what all that was, though, and in the great majority of the signal we’re still talking about optimizing the design for the ship. One way to have privacy is to just drown out what you’re keeping private with enough other signal. Sort of like turning up the stereo in the dorm room.”
Louie relaxes and laughs. “You yanked me back into Earth orbit, I’m afraid. There’re some things that work better in the liveware.” Yet even as he says it, he can feel the vast processes—delayed, but there—moving and changing on the moon. He realizes, too, that he’s never treated himself to looking at Moonbase from the observation bubble since he started building it.
“What gave you the idea?” he asks. “It’s the kind of thing we just might want to do again.”
“You’re insatiable!” she says, and by now he’s realized that they are talking out loud mostly to enjoy the separation and the suspense of not knowing what the other will say or how the other will form the thought.
“Well, not right away,” he says. “The liveware wouldn’t take that. But soon all the same. Did you notice that we, um—gee, there’s not exactly a word for it, feeling your own body with the other person’s consciousness?”
“Notice it? What do you think finally set me off? My god, Louie, it’s incredible. I suppose if we wanted to we could always run a little of that in background—”
“Nothing doing, lover. I’ve always put my full attention into it whenever I’m doing it. My big regret is that it’s still going to be months before we can try it with all the processor networks linked and doing it physically. Preferably in weightlessness.”
“I’m not space-rated—”
“By the time I get back I’ll have a little ship’s launch that can just set down at sea, make its own fuel from air and water, and pick you up from MyBoat. I’m not sure what USSF and NASA will think about my bringing up a date, but I’ll point out to them that it won’t cost them a dime and it’s cheaper than giving me shore leave. I’m really thinking I might never get back to Earth.”
She chuckles. “It’s a date, sailor. And I guess that’s an example of how different we are… I have to have a few hours a day in real experience. It’s just different for me. And besides, don’t you find it’s kind of fun to meet yourself?”
He has a long, confusing moment, because when he was a teenager, to �
��meat” a girl was one of a thousand expressions they had for fucking; his mind dips into the net and realizes what she said, then realizes he doesn’t know what she means—at about the same moment she does.
“You never unplug long enough to have that happen!” she says, and she sends him the image of the event—the moment each day when she plugs back in and finds that the other half (or really the other ninety-nine point many nines percent) of her consciousness has lived another few centuries and has a lot to tell her about it.
“Jeez. Never. Though come to think of it, it might be interesting to see if I can split myself between the moon and the processing modules on the Constitution… since both would keep building for the four months or so they’d be out of realtime contact… that would mean… sheesh. Remerging after something like ten million years, at the rate of expansion I’ve got planned.”
“I could probably write several hundred scientific papers within the next twenty-four hours without breathing hard, but…”
“Same here. In fact, don’t laugh at me, but I could do a couple of pretty good ones in comparative philology, history, maybe a few in literary criticism.”
She does laugh, but it sounds kind. “Interesting. I have some work in musicology I like, too. Louie, what’s happening to us? Are we turning into machines?”
“I’d say it’s more likely machines are turning into us.”
They talk for a long time afterward, about everything and anything, and rather than sever the link they leave a little backchannel running between them; it feels like the kind of telepathy old marrieds have, for each always has a quiet awareness of what the other is thinking. The two loners are not lonely anymore, and won’t be until Louie begins his long journey.
On July 6, Clem Two heads east for most of the day, occasionally angling a little to the south. Di’s best guess, confirmed by Carla, is that this is because the two hurricanes, mother and daughter, have outflow jets pointed at each other and are thus creating a high-pressure ridge that pushes them away from each other. President Hardshaw talks with about a dozen presidents, dictators, and chiefs of state in the possible pathway of the storm.
Berlina Jameson brings out a special edition of Sniffings about the approach of Clem Two. A majority of Americans polled are under the impression that since Clem Two is a “daughter” hurricane it is somehow tied to Clem, and must be smaller than Clem. She tries to get across the idea that once Clem Two’s eye was created by the motion of Clem’s outflow jet, there was no further relationship, and there is nothing to prevent Clem Two from going elsewhere or growing bigger than its parent. Berlina works longer on this Sniffings than on any other, and her work is pirated everywhere, especially in Scuttlebytes, but it doesn’t matter; people believe what they want to believe and when large percentages of them are plugged into XV, the tendency is increased; why believe anything that might lead you to unplug?
She calls Di Callare one last time, but he has no time to talk with her; all she gets out of the conversation is a sense of how much things are going to hell. The man sounds like he hasn’t been home in a week or asleep in days. She says she’s going to head to Mexico and then as far south as she can get, in hopes of getting better coverage of Clem Two’s impact on the coast; he tells her to avoid using roads too near either coast and to be careful when she hits the “drive yourself” zones.
Strangely enough, just as she’s checking out, the desk clerk hands her a piece of mail from the White House thanking her for her “role in alerting the public,” and enclosing a certificate for a “President’s award for journalism and citizenship.” She finds it a bit frightening that the President’s staff has nothing better to do, but she still pins the certificate to the ceiling of her car. By July 7, Clem Two is angling a little to the north and is still obstinately headed east, in defiance of steering currents and the Earth’s rotation. Alerts are being issued in Mexico for all of Baja California Sur and for the mainland all the way from Los Mochis to Acapulco. Di realizes that Jesse is more than far enough south to be safe, and Tapachula is up high. Jesse should be fine if he doesn’t go down to Puerto Madero or try to run back to the States. Di calls him and talks to him about that briefly, discovers that Jesse is planning to stay put, along with his current girlfriend, and is merely a little worried about some former girlfriend—the one Lori called the political muffin?
It’s not easy for Di to keep track, he thinks with an envious grin after hanging up. But from Jesse’s explanation the girl is a bit farther to the north, and often has business on the coast—but since the Mexican Army is evacuating coastal towns as fast as they can, “that doesn’t seem like much to worry about—at worst she’ll have a few days in a refugee camp before someone Stateside wires money to her,” Di tells his brother.
Jesse nods. “Oh, I’m not worried a whole lot. Tomorrow would be the day she’d be going to Tehuantepec, and right now they haven’t decided to evacuate it, but Tehuantepec isn’t right on the coast—it’s like this place, up above—so I imagine she’ll be okay. Just a little normal worry about a friend is all.”
“I can understand that,” Di says. “Anyway, stay put—unless it does veer your way. If it really looks like it’s coming inshore in the Gulf of Tehuantepec, they’ll have less than twenty-four hours to get everyone evacuated. Don’t be on the last truck and don’t stay behind for heroics.”
“I do watch the news, big brother,” Jesse says. “I saw what happened to Oahu. My evacuation address will be on the Calle del Veinticinco Febrero in San Cristóbal de las Casas—if we have to go. The Army’s already assigned places for everyone. And the railhead for the zipline that will take us there is only thirty kilometers away—they didn’t quite finish last spring, but at least the railhead isn’t far away.”
There’s not much more to talk about; NOAA is going to have to provide assistance until Clem Two hits, but according to Carla as long as it hits well up the peninsula and moves west to east, as it looks like it’s going to do, the central spine of mountains ought to kill Clem Two, reducing it to mere thunderstorms. She has warned them that the exception to that is the isthmus; should Clem Two come ashore in the Gulf of Tehuantepec and then head north, the mountains may not be barrier enough to keep Clem Two from bursting out into the Caribbean—which will pour vastly more energy into the system.
With luck, it will be weeks yet before one of those monsters is loose in the Atlantic… but so far luck has not been with them.
On July 8, Clem Two stops dead and stands still for almost four hours, about 300 km west of the tip of Baja. Huge storm surges are pumped up the Gulf of California, and American authorities around the valley of the lower Colorado and the Imperial Valley give urgent orders to evacuate. There’s a riot when busloads of Mexicans—actually just being moved by the nearest available highway to the higher ground of Nogales, Sonora—cross the border at Mexicali. A rumor had spread among the Anglo and black citizenry that the busloads of refugees were to be given American passports and allowed to settle permanently.
The riot goes away because Rock gets on the scene for Passionet and millions of men find themselves thinking how stupid all this is; his disgust bleeds through every moment of the coverage. Surface O’Malley is with him, and she rapidly comes to see it his way (the script calls for her to adore him as an older and wiser man of the world on this trip). Rioters running home or using portables to catch themselves on XV are startled by the sensations of anger and nausea directed at them. Those who went home don’t return to the riot. Those who had portables quietly slink away.
FBI agents undercover within Passionet note all this and relay it upward; apparently XV can calm a population as well as inflame it. Millions of people seem to be disappointed by the failure of Global Riot Two to happen and take it out on Passionet by switching to other systems; the letter of commendation from President Hardshaw, and the granting of a brief personal interview that brings back viewers, arrive just in time to save Surface and Rock from getting fired.
Very
, very slowly, but with gathering speed as the night wears on, Clem Two begins to move south. At first it is hoped that this means Clem Two is about to follow the steering currents, which would mean a move to the west—and bad as Clem Two might be over there, especially as an aftermath to the original Clem, which has just thundered across the now-empty Kingman Reef again, if Clem Two should turn west they will at least have a breathing space.
At dawn on July 9, Clem Two picks up speed and moves in a great, sweeping eastward hook into the Gulf of Tehuantepec.
Jesse and Mary Ann are already packed—evacuees are permitted just one small bag. Within minutes of the alert they are waiting out front for the Army trucks. But the Army doesn’t come, and doesn’t come, and the hours crawl by. The wind from Clem Two coming in has only just begun to rise, and so it is like any breezy summer day with a rainstorm coming in on the wind. After a long wait they decide to reserve their packed lunches for later, and go around the corner to discover that many of the little cafés have reopened; “I can always just turn off the stove if the Army shows up,” one of the owners explains.
The news broadcasts report that big waves are beginning to come inshore and that buses have been commandeered to move the population on the coasts first. There is reassuring footage of soldiers helping people pack into buses.
Or it’s reassuring until Jesse sees. “Mary Ann—that’s not Puerto Madero.”