Mother of Storms

by John Barnes

  Meanwhile the women and children are being moved to the transports as fast as they can cross the floating bridges. No doubt a few of the women were overseers, but again not many, and it’s just possible rough justice may happen along the way at the hands of the other women.

  O’Hara receives the reports of all this with mounting satisfaction; not even the word from Colonel Park that the marines have broken through, Majuro is in hand, and refugees are being taken off quickly gives him as much pleasure. Finally, he has the camera turned on the last minutes at Ebeye.

  The male prisoners have been waiting patiently for the ships to take them on. As O’Hara had anticipated, they grow restless as they see the floating bridges rolled up, and then they begin to stir as if to rush the last bridge when it becomes clear that it too will be taken away.

  The loudspeakers promptly explain that different preparations have been made, and some of the men hesitate; the ones who rush toward the bridge are beaten back with nightsticks and Mace, and that seems to make it clear to them; they stand about disconsolately, not sure what to do.

  As O‘Hara watches them, he finds himself fascinated; what a difference a gun makes. Most of these men have killed for pay, many have killed for fun, almost all of them were proud and defiant even four hours ago. Now it is noticeable that few of them are over twenty-five, many are overweight and out of shape, some others seem to have tuberculosis, the lingering effects of childhood malnutrition, or perhaps congenital syphilis. They looked like ogres behind their guns and surrounded by slaves, and behaved like them; now they are as sorry-looking a mess of humanity as O’Hara has ever seen. He wonders idly if it changed when they were stripped of their arms, or of their slaves… and that makes him wonder, a little uncomfortably, whether it will change him more to no longer have charge of weapons, or to no longer have charge of sailors.

  It’s the sort of question, he thinks, that you think of when you are too sensitive for your job. Though he very much doubts that “sensitive” is what they will say about him, unless they decide to explain it all as insanity.

  The waiting men don’t begin to panic until they see the group of men who have been holding guns on them get into the last two staticopters; they start to rush as the rotors begin to whir, but the last men getting on the whistler open up, without warning, with submachine guns, and as the front rank falls to the pavement, the rush collapses.

  O’Hara had asked for a camera to be left in place, and he switches to that one, observing as the men mill around, scarcely any of them taking any notice of the screaming wounded on the ground, all arguing about what to do and what all this means.

  Their heads come up as one when they hear the first set of explosions. It takes a long time; first they must see what is different, and then they realize that water is running out of every building, and the water towers themselves have been knocked down.

  What remains of Ebeye’s fresh water is pouring out of the building entrances and windows and running into the lagoon.

  Even then most of them do not see what is going on, though those few who do are noisily trying to explain, until the second wave of explosions, and the fires that break out all over the tall buildings, all at once.

  Ebeye will be a vast, blazing pyre within an hour; a few of them may manage the difficult swim to Kwajalein (where the cultists have a fine tradition of stoning to death any male who swims over), a few more may wait it out on the beach—and all of those will then perish when Clem scrapes these islands to bare rock.

  O’Hara, after looking at the expressions of terror, thinks of how these men have spent their (usually brief) lives and decides that he likes being a war criminal.

  The shifting of the outflow jet has not gone unnoticed, and by late that afternoon, O’Hara’s fleet, mostly commandeered freighters crammed with more than 100,000 islanders, (yet with far too much empty space that might have been filled), is racing southward toward the equator with all the speed it can make. So far Clem has not shown any more ability than any other hurricane to cross the equator, and away from shore the storm surge will be felt only as a gentle lift under their feet; if they can avoid Clem’s mad winds, they should be all right.

  By the time Clem’s outer winds begin to tear at the burned-cut remnants of Ebeye the next morning, storm surges have already rolled over the Ratak chain several times, and Majuro is cleared of garbage for the first time in several decades. The Christian cultists squatting in the Kwajalein base village are gathered on the former high school’s football field, according to the camera drones left behind; there is no trace of any survivors from Ebeye.

  It is not possible to tell what the cultists are praying for, or about, and they are still there, drenched with rain and clinging to each other, when the wind takes down the last camera drone.

  The Marshalls are scoured down to bare coral, rolled over by hundreds of waves rather than the four Oahu got; the highest point in the islands was only thirty-one meters above the sea.

  The UN fleet continues south. The storm surges are barely felt under their feet, and they are well away from the storm; by late in the day on July 19 they are safely below the equator in open, calm sea without a cloud in the sky. O’Hara surveys his fleet with binoculars; every deck within eyesight seems to be nothing but people.

  When he gets the call from the Secretary-General, there is no mention of what he did on Ebeye. Rivera gives him only brief warm thanks, the expressed hope that the UN fleet can get the Marshallese disembarked quickly at the refugee bases in the Gulf of Carpentaria—and the unofficial warning that the evacuation fleet will be kept together. A Japanese-Chinese-Indonesian evacuation fleet is tackling the Northern Marianas at the moment; after that Clem should be headed back out of the Western Pacific, but Rivera says, “We have to consider Hurricane Clem to be permanent, and there will be many more places that need evacuation. Your fleet has the experience—and you have gotten the job done.”

  That’s the nearest thing to a comment on his actions that O’Hara will ever hear. It’s not until days later that it even occurs to him that there were no XV people anywhere near the operation, and that all the video of it is in UN hands.

  They let Louie Tynan christen the “ship” for his expedition to 2026RU; since physically the ship is the old Space Station Constitution, plus several large chunks of the French and Japanese lunar habitats from Moonbase, plus an enormous population of probes, replicators, drones, and robots constructed on the moon—all launched from a variety of points in a variety of ways, with more to come, and slapped together any old way that works—he has a little trouble thinking of it as a “ship,” though with his enhanced ability to construct scenarios into the future, he sees a greater than fiftypercent chance that the word “ship” will eventually come to mean just such a construction.

  He gives it very little thought—only the equivalent of a dozen poets debating for a century—before settling on the name that seems to him most expressive of the hopes bound up in the expedition: the Good Luck.

  For seventy years, history has been moving away from the individual person and event; this is part of why there is no answer to “who invented the computer?” or “when did the Third Balkan War begin and end?” Thus it is hardly surprising that no one can really say when the Good Luck departs; it isn’t even possible to say when it is “built.” Beacons that will later be incorporated into it were catapulted into high solar orbits as early as July 1, other portions were on their way to various asteroids as early as July 10, and many parts of it will not arrive until the ship is on its way back.

  But if a date must be picked, July 20, 2028-fifty-nine years to the day after the first lunar landing—seems as good as any. That is the day, Greenwich Mean Time, on which the Constitution, carrying Louie Tynan himself, reaches Earth escape velocity.

  Even in trying to define it that way there is a problem. Louie Tynan is not at all sure that the body that floats, breathing, in his cabin in the Constitution is really “Louie Tynan himself.” Lately
it’s been more like a large, complex massively parallel processor which is slow, unreliable, and subject to too much downtime. So much of him is now in the processors on the moon that it might be better to define departure date as the point where he begins to find that Louie-the-ship is talking to, rather than part of, Louie-on-the-moon, and that’s not until the twenty-eighth of July.

  But by that time, many other things have happened. Good Luck is to be built as it flies, and the construction process is to supply much of the needed momentum; in effect, the ship will climb out to 51 AU—fifty-one astronomical units, fifty-one times the distance of the Earth from the sun, well beyond the orbit of Pluto—on a stream of its components.

  The first step is to get replicators working in richer environments than the moon. Ore is valuable not for what it contains but for what it doesn’t—that is, for being a relatively pure form of the material, with relatively easy to remove waste. Common rock like most of the surface of the moon is made up of too many different things (though any of them might be valuable in isolation) bound too closely together; cognac, Beluga caviar, filet mignon, and Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee are all extremely valuable, but not if they’ve been in the blender together.

  Whereas the rocks of the moon are a chemical puree, many of the asteroids are all but pure iron/nickel mix, and others are rich in CHON (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen—the basic building blocks of life, and for that matter of plastics) and light metals. Thus the asteroids are the natural mining lodes of the solar system, and the great magnetic catapults that Louie has thrown up on the face of the moon have begun firing replicator packages to various likely looking asteroids. A “package” is a tied-together collection of hundreds of small processing units and manipulating units, a propulsion system adequate for a rendezvous, a small thermionic He-3 fusion reactor, and a central processor cortex big enough to hold a crude copy of Louie.

  These copies of Louie are not as bright or versatile as the original aboard the Good Luck. On the other hand, they seem to have his weakness for communicating in banter, both with each other and with Louie himself; he begins to refer to them as the “wiseguys.” There are about forty of them as of July 20, and there will be seventy before he’s past Mars. Each “wiseguy” in turn will become his own versatile factory with catapult, and will build his own power array—and will make a couple more wiseguys as well.

  It took humanity hundreds of thousands of years to reach the moon, thirty-five years to go back, another decade beyond that to reach Mars and to begin to colonize space… and before the year is out there will be industrial bases all over the solar system, and even now, though no one other than Louie has realized it yet, the robots and replicators have transformed the former Moonbase into one of the largest industrial complexes that has ever existed. The growth rate there is faster than any in history: whereas defense plants during the Second World War, the most nearly comparable case, were thrown up as fast as possible; no matter how many plants were built it didn’t bring another worker into being, and every plant used more power and thus diverted labor from building and staffing more plants. On the moon the power supply keeps growing all by itself, and when “labor” gets short, Louie just makes another factory to make more workers.

  Offhand, Louie estimates that Moonbase has become about twice the size, in terms of energy and information bound per hour, as Japan’s OKK Complex—and they spent a while longer building Osaka, Kobe, and Kyoto. Moreover, it’s all his for every practical purpose… where large parts of OKK’s energy and information binding is happening in retail stores, restaurants, garbage collection, XV and TV, hospitals, and so forth, the complex Louie presides over is dedicated only to growing and to getting the mission accomplished. He just about has to be the wealthiest man in the solar system.

  Hell, by the time he gets back, if he wants to keep all the gear running full tilt, the settled part of the solar system will consist of the possessions of Louie Tynan, plus debris. It’s not a bad retirement package.

  At first, Jesse and Mary Ann aren’t going to go; the plan seems kind of stupid, given that there are easier cities to get to, over roads that are in better shape. But Señor Escobedo, the Mexican government administrador who flies in to present the idea to the people of Tapachula, is patient and persuasive, and appears to know what he is talking about. “Just consider,” he pleads, for the thousandth time. “Where else are you going to go? The rain forest is already near saturation; the streams will fill up quickly, and when they do…. And there is no zipline head near here. And consider, too, how little work there is, and how very little extra housing, in Tuxtla Gutiérrez or in San Cristóbal de las Casas. Those are cities that have not grown much, cities that are not going anywhere.”

  Everyone nods, of course—Mexicans are loyal to their towns, and to hear an outsider say that Tapachula is the important, forward-looking town in Chiapas is to give weight and substance to the stranger’s ideas.

  Escobedo goes over the arguments again, there in the middle of the Zócalo, with his laser pointer and his big projected maps. All around, people fade in and out of the blocky topiary trees, listening, drifting off to chat with friends, coming back to listen again.

  Oaxaca is far away, and they will have to take a hurricane or two on the way, but they can be up above the coast, there will be time to stop and dig in as needed, and most of all, when they get there, they will be genuinely safe; high up in the mountains with good drainage, they will be able to stay put.

  He acknowledges that some of the Army, here to keep the town safe from looters, may do a bit of looting themselves. Officers don’t have perfect control, and they are not always perfect either. Yes, if you have a good deal to guard and don’t mind risking your life in the floods that will surely come when bigger storms blow directly inshore here, then you might do well to stay. Of course your property will do you little good when you are dead—let us be blunt in facing the facts—but undoubtedly your heirs will thank you.

  When they return from Oaxaca.

  He is a natural debater, and he’s funny; these things help Escobedo, so that after a few days, people are no longer saying the scheme is mad, or muttering darkly about a government plan to get them to leave their property unguarded, but instead are beginning to get their applications in for the Oaxaca evacuation, “just in case, you know,” and in a couple more they are beginning to pack. The thing takes on momentum.

  Thus on the morning of July 21, Jesse and Mary Ann are hardly surprised at all to find that they are part of the convoy. They’ve both been declared fit for walking—the great convoys will transport the old, sick, and young in buses, others in trucks based on a daily lottery, and most on bicycle, foot, or the occasional burro. There are to be twenty such convoys, each with some thousands of people, from all over the Pacific shore of Chiapas.

  The first day is to be deliberately slow of pace; this allows time for motorcycle couriers to scoot back to Tapachula as people suddenly remember things, and it helps everyone get used to the idea. The heat is pretty appalling, but there’s very little dust and the government water trucks seem to be on the job, and with the frequent rests Jesse finds he’s no more than uncomfortable. And the evening camp is fun, in its way, especially since after the announcements around the fire and a great deal of visiting among neighbors, he and Mary Ann have a tent that is small but all theirs—the advantage of adequate cash for mordida. It’s occurring to Jesse that with the tastes he’s developing, if this thing with Mary Ann ends he’s going to have a lot of incentive to get back on the fast track in realization engineering. Once you understand what money can do it gets harder to live without it.

  The second day of the trip, on a Saturday, they get a warm morning rainstorm, which makes the road slick and doesn’t seem to cool it off at all. The government people are pushing them a little harder, and the hills are beginning to roll and rise. Jesse’s a little sore in the thighs and calves that night, and Mary Ann has to spread a couple more small bribes around to get pa
ds from the traveling hospital for her blistered feet.

  The last few miles were extremely hilly, hot, and humid, and they aren’t exactly looking forward to the next day. It’s too hot and sticky to make love, or even to hold each other, so they fall asleep holding hands across the tent. Dawn comes entirely too early, and the morning thunderstorm holds off just long enough so that everyone is on the road before it drenches them.

  The ion rockets that move the Constitution out of low Earth orbit are not the conventional electric thrusters they used for the Mars mission; instead, the power from the moon is used to convert “straight” matter into antimatter, and the antimatter is then reacted with helium-3-II—helium-3 cooled to the point where it becomes superconducting—to create a near-lightspeed exhaust of He-3 nuclei. The tiny pulse of antimatter through the center of a Ping-Pong-ball-sized blob of helium-3-II creates a highly charged plasma and a very brief burst of radio energy; the superconducting coil surrounding the blob acts as an antenna to capture the radio burst and uses the current to induce a magnetic field to compress and accelerate the plasma so much that thermonuclear fusion is still happening thirty meters beyond the nozzle.

  From the ground, if there were enough clear sky, they could see that the white, glowing jet out the back of the platform to which Constitution is tied is about two hundred kilometers long; it’s also thinner than the aurora borealis.

  It’s not fuel-efficient-but the temperature of the exhaust is half a billion degrees Fahrenheit, and high exhaust temperature means the ship will be fast.

  But though it’s the best engine ever devised, and many gigawatts from the power stations on the moon drive it, it will not be enough. On those engines alone, the journey out to 2026RU would take four and a half years. And besides, after about five AU, power transmission from the moon will get problematic. The real travel time, if he used only the engines, would be six or seven years. Rivera, Hardshaw, and their staff don’t think Earth has those years; with thousands of times their processing ability, neither does Louie Tynan.