Mother of Storms

by John Barnes

  “I wish my current country were similarly enlightened.”

  “You said it.” Klieg begins ticking things off on his fingers. “There’s a fair bit of concealed Japanese money in some of my operations, and that’s a favor I can call in—there’ll be a lot of trouble if it doesn’t stay concealed, and it won’t unless I see some protests and complaints about the American intrusion into the Japanese part of Moonbase. Same deal with the French, except that there I’ve got a couple of deputies in Paris, and there’s some more legislators in Brussels… and that’s before I start serious hassling in the General Assembly in New York.”

  Hassan nods. “My friend, I see what you are up to, but do you expect it to work?”

  After ransacking his memory, Klieg says, “To tell you the truth, Hassan, I don’t see why it won’t.”

  The other man nods solemnly; the effect on the phone is somehow more impressive than it would be in person. “It seems to me that with predicted deaths pressing upward toward a billion or more, as your last estimates show—and I assume theirs are similar—faced with the literal complete destruction of several nations like the Netherlands and Bangladesh, with catastrophic damage and the destruction of whole cities… and with the instructive example of Honolulu in front of them… well, my friend. Do you think they will do business as usual?”

  “Oh, only at first. And then it won’t matter. It’s like tying a guy’s shoelaces together. You haven’t crippled him, just slowed him down a little by making him stop to untie them. They’ll have to remove all my little obstructions—and any that you might throw in?”

  “I was just thinking on that point.”

  “Well, all we need are delays. A few of them. Once we have a head start, the public screaming for a solution will guarantee they’ll go with whatever’s fastest. And the PR goodwill from having done it should be just phenomenal—we can do just about anything we want from then on, for like ten years or so.”

  Hassan nods. “It seems worth a play. There are a number of small governments I’ve got a friend or two in; I think I can help you with the ‘hassle’ in the General Assembly, especially since several of those little governments are quite jealous anyway of their Second Covenant rights. Have you given consideration to the media?”

  “I’ve got my best person on it.”

  “Miss Gray?”

  “How did you know?”

  Hassan gives him a deep, beaming grin that shows a lot of teeth and doesn’t have a drop of humor in it. “Who is my best person?”

  “Pericles Japhatma, whom I’ve never met. I see. The point’s well taken.” Neither of them will ever again ask the other how he or she happens to know a thing. After a suitable pause, Klieg says, “Well, then, we seem to be agreed. The point is, hassles have to happen to this stupid idea of having the government do it. It’s really a matter of principle, too, you know—if you let the government, any government, do these things directly, it takes decades to get things on a private-enterprise profit-making basis again. Once you let socialism in…” Klieg sighs and spreads his hands.

  “Exactly,” Hassan says. “This very nation is still recovering after all these years. Well, then, shall we do the world some good—and ourselves as well?”

  “Only way to do it, buddy,” Klieg says, and this time the smiles exchanged are genuine. After Hassan clicks off, he works the phone hard all morning, and by the time Glinda calls with the other part set up, his calendar has a little flex in it.

  Diogenes Callare knows it’s completely irresponsible of him—he had two phone calls while he was on the zipline, just to begin with—but he needed to see Lori and the kids, and he needed the rest, so he slept on the zipline instead of doing work, and since Lori just finished Slaughterer in Yellow, they end up going out to a nice restaurant—one with child care—for a long meal. It’s an indulgence of sorts, but “half an hour’s sales in the first week will more than pay for it,” Lori points out, when he mentions the concern.

  “Yeah.” He swirls the warm red wine in his glass, looks at her over it. “It’s funny, you think about a lot of jobs—cops and firemen and soldiers and all—and none of those occupations see anything odd about the idea that you go out there to protect people like your own family, and your family gets protected along with all those strangers. But it’s not something you think about for weathermen.”

  “Eat your lasagna,” she says, “you’re getting morbid.”

  “Well, yeah, I am getting morbid,” he admits, “but the point is still valid.”

  “Unh-hunh. And the lasagna is still hot.”

  She’s right, it’s very good. After a while he takes her hand and says, “It’s just… well, you know, I love spending time with you. I never realized before this month how much I like usually being able to work at home. And since the methane levels in the air are going to stay elevated for ten years—”

  “That’s close to shoptalk,” she warns him, smiling and pressing her index finger on his nose. “Eat. Or talk about trivia. Or flatter your wife, considering I only knew an hour ago that you were coming home, I asked you out then, and here I am, stunning.”

  He can hardly help smiling at that, and the truth is, to him, she is stunning. He studies her carefully for a long minute, taking in the sweep of blonde hair, the big twinkling eyes… letting his eyes run over her pink sweater (it really does flatter her)… “Well, yeah,” he says. “In fact, I think you’re the best-looking person in the joint.”

  “That’s more like it. I know you’re worried about the hurricane coming into the Caribbean, and for that matter I suspect what’s really worrying you is Jesse, Di.”

  He shrugs with one shoulder, a little gesture that doesn’t mean much except that he’s heard what she’s said. “He’s a grown-up, at least sort of, and he can probably deal with whatever comes his way, at least as long as he doesn’t do anything dumb to start out with. I wish I knew what was up with him, but chances are at the moment he’s sitting on his duff in a not-verycomfortable shelter, hoping things will calm down soon. At least if civilization manages to survive the storms, he’ll have a good set of stories to tell. Meanwhile I can’t do a thing for him, and he’s okay, more likely than not.” He notices he has just drunk his glass of wine a bit faster than he intended to.

  Lori sighs and takes his hand. “You don’t really have to look after the whole world, love. You really don’t.”

  He grins, squeezes her hand. “It wasn’t shoptalk before, you know,” he says. “As long as there’s so much extra methane in the air, we’ll have giant hurricanes, and NOAA will be on this crisis footing—”

  She puts her hand on his lips again, and when she is sure she has silenced him, she pours him another glass of wine. “Drink.” Her head tilts a little to the side and she seems to look at him like a robin that isn’t quite sure whether the object in front of it is an earthworm. “Now,” she says, “listen carefully to your spouse. There are two possibilities here. One, civilization doesn’t survive the storms, and you and I and the kids have to make our way through the mess. Very tough and frightening, but it’s not going to be improved by your passing up the pleasures of a civilized dinner tonight. Two, civilization survives but the hurricanes go on for years. Then all this becomes routine—and once it’s routine, you’ll have time off again. That’s all.”

  It makes sense, and he nods and eats. Every so often he steals a glance at her, trying to catch her looking sad or pensive, but whether she’s being stubborn, or it’s just her natural optimism, she keeps right on smiling at him, and between the wine, and the love, and not having to sleep over in a hotel in D.C. tonight, he’s actually very cheerful by the evening’s end. They even dance a couple of times to the little band up on the upper floor, before they reclaim the kids, pile into the car, and set it for home, all of them sleeping in a sprawl as the car drives them home. The only trouble with how wonderful it feels to be in his own bed with Lori is that he’s not aware of it for long—he falls asleep quickly.

  B
y the time he’s on the zipline the next morning, he is all but ready to think of the problem as tractable.

  Because the eye of Clementine misses them, Jesse, Mary Ann, the Hererras, and the kids never have an interval when they can go outside, but it matters very little. It occurs to Jesse that there’s a good chance that neither the Herreras nor their grandchildren, nephews, and nieces have ever lived this well before.

  They have forty-eight fairly dull hours, with the windows revealing nothing but immense torrents of water and day and night separated only by the difference between almost and completely dark. The booming and roar of the storm are constant, and every so often something sizable hits the side of the house, but other than that there’s not a lot to distract them outside.

  Jesse teaches the kids to play Monopoly and is a little appalled at how easily they take to it; he wonders if Naomi would think of him as a bad influence on youth. Surely she was smart enough to stay up in Oaxaca? They can’t get anything on broadcast so there’s always the possibility that Oaxaca was hit harder than expected, or that the coast to the north is safe, but since no new information has come in, Jesse just continues to hope based on what the situation was before.

  He’s been getting kind of a funny feeling out of watching Mary Ann play with the kids, too. He knows this thing with her is probably not permanent. It’s not a matter of her being older or that she has vastly more experience of various kinds—catching up has been a lot of the fun.

  The real trouble is with Jesse. Like many Americans in their early twenties, he just hasn’t absorbed the concept of permanence yet, and thus he can be deeply attached and passionate, but not exactly ever in love. As long as he’s around people of his own age the difference doesn’t show up, but where Mary Ann Waterhouse—if she found the right person, and not until—could easily contemplate waking up with that person every day until one of them died of old age, and thus imaginatively can live far into the future (and imagine having a connection to the past that long), Jesse is still in the child’s eternal present. He can be very attached to someone and want to see them again, but the sorts of questions an adult in love asks—including the important one of whether or not it would be a good idea to stay in love—never come to Jesse.

  But though he’s not old enough for love, he’s old enough to know he’s not old enough, and when he sees Mary Ann happy with kids, Mary Ann typing away at an old-fashioned keyboard while she works out a list of things to do… he realizes that if he were ready, he’d take her in a minute.

  If she’d have him—after all, she’s really the one with most of what there is to offer in the relationship, not just financially but in terms of wisdom, experience, and for that matter, sexual joy. This is a slightly painful realization.

  Late that evening, Jesse and Mary Ann are upstairs, naked in the tub together by candlelight, taking turns scrubbing each other, looking up into the skylight at the way the water rolls deep and fast across the glass overhead, occasionally illuminated by the candle flickers. Jesse guesses there’re probably a couple of inches up there, maintained entirely by the wind and water pushing more over the skylight constantly. From here it seems like the ocean bottom.

  Her head rolls back against his arm, and Jesse notes with some pleasure that though the red hair is still the funny cartoonish shade, there’s a bit of straw blonde at the roots now; she’d have to get a crewcut to be back to her natural color, but she could.

  Washing her back, he notices again how tiny she really is, that they picked her for being fine-boned and slim. Under his hands, as he rubs her with the foaming soap, he finds the surgically shortened ribs, the interior girdle, the added ligaments to hold up the enormous breasts, the healed slits where they went in to crank her bottom tight. He tries to figure out how he feels about all of the scars, marks, and bumps that make her so strange to his touch; it would be nice to say he likes it because it’s all part of her, but that’s not true—nor does he necessarily feel outrage at what was “done to her,” since after all she decided to have it done and was extremely well paid for it. Sometimes he thinks he likes to touch her scars and alterations because it makes her feel more like a doll to be used, but that’s not completely true either—he feels less like that with her body than he has with most women’s.

  Probably he just likes to touch Mary Ann, and tends to touch the places where she’s most unusual.

  In her turn, she washes him thoroughly and just a little roughly—he’s often told her he feels “scrubbed” after she’s done, and she’s just as often pointed out he seems to enjoy it. They have just finished toweling off and are stretching out on the bed, their hands beginning to stay more and more often at chests and crotches, little nipping kisses starting, when they both sit upright, startled by a sound—

  It’s the spatter of heavy rain on the walls, and the whistle of wind, Jesse realizes, and in a hurricane what do you expect?

  Then he gets it. “It’s slacking off out there,” he says, “probably already no worse than a bad thunderstorm. Maybe by morning we’ll be able to see out.”

  She gives a little whoop and rolls over onto him, kissing him deeply; he feels his erection stiffen against her, an instant before she has it in her hand, stroking it quickly, making sure he is hard before she sits carefully onto it. As the thunder outside transforms into a mere wild stormy night, she rides him joyously, masturbating as she does it.

  It’s like something out of XV porn, he realizes, just in time to know that that is what she wants to give him, not what she is but his fantasy of her, and the crashes of thunder and wind outside, the flickers of lightning over her body in the warmth of the candlelight, drive him on, bucking upward to meet her as she climaxes again and again, in a triumphant, joyful surge.

  “Mind you,” she says, leaning forward and letting his still-sensitive limp penis slide out of her, “this is likely to happen anytime we survive something big. Just wanted you to know there’s an incentive to survive.”

  Shortly after, she’s asleep under his arm, her back against him and his hand resting on her strangely hard, unyielding belly, fingers idly finding the seams in the internal girdle. They’ve blown out the candles, and now there is only the wind and the rain, both blowing down into gusts. He is tired, and comfortable, and he’s just had wildly satisfying sex, but he’s kept awake by one thought—that while he had just kept on doing what seemed appropriate, and not showing the fear he did have around the Herrera kids, it was Mary Ann who had the real measure of the situation.

  Jesse tries to imagine his own death and fails; but he knows the woman he holds in his arms imagined hers, lived with it, and let him see none of her fear. She is, he thinks, not merely older or more fully formed as a person. She’s too big and too marvelous for him.

  He decides to try to live up to her, and stays awake just a little longer wondering if he can. When sleep comes to him, it’s deep and full of dreams, but he remembers none of them. They wake in the mid-moming when they hear the Herreras shouting—they too had slept late, and thus had missed the first real dawn in days. It is still storming outside, but unmistakably there is daylight.

  Compared to the first passage under Clem Two’s winds, Naomi finds this one a breeze. The power runs out about halfway through, but in this deep basement there is food, there are other people, there’s safe water to drink and even a toilet… and most of all, there’s very little fear. She is even able to use some of the time to catch up on sleep.

  In the dark, people sing or play word games. Naomi’s Spanish isn’t particularly good, but this seems to lead to good-natured amusement, and whenever she does manage to participate successfully they give her a big round of applause. And singing together is fun.

  By the time the wind seems to have settled down to gusts and the rain to a spatter, it’s night, and their host suggests they all spend the night inside before venturing out; there’s no sign of any life out there right now.

  So they all curl up once more, huddled near each other for warmth and
comfort. It’s very quiet and pleasant, and Naomi resists sleep a little while just because she wants to consciously enjoy it.

  She knows, too, in an abstract way, that if she were in her usual state of scrubbed cleanliness, she would find the smell down here dreadful, not so much from the mixture of shit and bleach in the imperfectly sealed toilet buckets as from the smell of many bodies that have missed some washings. But at the moment she smells just like everyone else, and somehow that’s so… well, it’s democratic.

  Then she wonders if perhaps worrying about how people smell isn’t some sort of residual racism, and for a moment, curled there on a couple of old beach towels up against a bookcase, she is wide awake with worry—especially because she knows that the people around her are clean anyway, the evening shower is at least as much part of their lives as it is of hers—

  And now she wonders if knowing about the fact that this is a culture with a cleanliness habit isn’t also suppressed racism.

  Then she remembers she promised herself she wouldn’t think about things like this, just two days ago when she thought she was going to be torn to scraps of meat any moment. And here she is, back with people. Time to start living her new life, whatever that’s going to be. The happy thought sends her drifting off into warm sleep.

  When she wakes people are beginning to move around, and there’s a long moment before they all realize what’s different; they can’t hear any rain or wind at all. She jumps up, intending to be among the first to help, and then realizes again. It’s going to be a while to get over these habits, she decides, but she’s going to.

  Meanwhile, she will pull her fair share, but she won’t act like she’s got to be the most helpful person on the planet.

  Besides, the big job right now is getting the outer door pried open, and that’s mostly big-muscle work. Fortunately there are several large grown men in the group, and once they figure out that it’s just something heavy lying on the slanting cellar doors, they know that some hard heaves are likely to get them free.