Mother of Storms

by John Barnes

  On July 28, eight days after he pulled away from Earth orbit on the way out, Louie Tynan decides to take a vacation in his body.

  There seems to be so much of him in the machine these days that everything will run fine without him, at least for these routine tasks. His health monitors have been telling him bad things for a while, and thus he thinks he’d better get some exercise and regular sleep, and most of all, he wants to see a package go all the way through the funnel with naked eye observation.

  Now he sits in the observation bubble and watches. He’s tied down, thoroughly, because the acceleration that’s going to hit is going to rise up to almost four g’s pretty fast. Just as the physicists define speed as change in position over time, and acceleration as change in speed over time, Nemtin and other engineers back in the 1930s realized that change in acceleration over time also mattered, and named it “jerk.” What Louie is about to be subjected to is more jerk than he’s ever encountered before.

  Even after several days of this, he’s worried a lot more about the Good Luck than he is about himself. Strapped to the back wall of the observation bubble—which will presently momentarily become the “ceiling”—he will be thrown against the webs that he now comfortably floats in, his head will feel a bit squeezed in the retaining ring through which he looks, and he may feel blood rushing to his face, but everything holding him up and holding the observation bubble together is more than strong enough for the job. Besides, healthy human bodies have withstood much more than this.

  He can’t be sure till each try that the whole of Good Luck is ready to take the jerk. Things have broken, now and then, in these first few days, as packages went through, and just yesterday he lost two antennas off his communications equipment. If he were still plugged in, he would be able to do a lot of last-minute checks, which would at least keep him busy in the middle of all this, and he faintly resents how slow and stupid he feels when he isn’t plugged in.

  There was a time when the view through the observation bubble was a large part of why he stayed on board the Constitution for so long. Moreover, unlike the always-fascinating but now familiar view of Earth from orbit, this is a view he hasn’t had since the Mars expedition. Earth and Luna in the same sky, exhibiting the same crescent shape seemingly close together; his viewing position is perfect with the Earth and moon almost lined up with each other, the sun slightly to one side. At the moment he is about sixty-five times as far from the Earth as the moon is.

  Earth is not as impressive as it once was, now a mere speck showing a crescent if he peers at it hard enough, and the moon is more and more beginning to resemble a bright star, though he can still make out that it’s a comma rather than a period if he focuses on it carefully.

  He tries to recall how he would have felt back when this body was all he had, tries to summon the feelings he might have known had he been on this voyage only in this body.

  It’s no good. Though he knows intellectually that this is one of the most impressive sights he has ever seen with the eyes he was born with, those eyes are just not good enough anymore; the little swatch of the spectrum from red to violet that they can perceive, the bare 165-degree cone of vision, the narrow bandwidth of signal that can pass through a human optic nerve, the fact that only two independent sensors that differ by only a few inches’ position are being compared—and that his brain needs so much space to do even that—all these things, unchanged since the Paleolithic, leave him feeling crippled.

  If he could see it in all his radars, across every wavelength from radio up through hard X-ray, then it would be glorious… and he sees that all the time, with one small part of his mind, appreciating it fully while having the time to enjoy other things. To have this tiny, one-person brain is not merely to live more slowly and stupidly; because it cannot absorb the requisite data flows, it is also to feel blind and deaf.

  Apparently one can be stupid with a large brain too, for he had thought a package passing through would be more impressive with just his own organic brain and eyes. There isn’t time to unstrap and go get plugged back in, either, before the package comes through, so now he’s stuck here. He tries to make the best of it; who’d have thought you could find the view in space limited and dull?

  Out beyond the Constitution, there are many other silvery, glowing objects, in mad variety of shapes and glosses, and at first glance with the naked eye, in the total darkness of the vacuum and with the sun all but due astern, it appears that there is nothing holding them in place. But then the eye begins to catch the telltale sharp black lines that flit occasionally across the crescent Earth and moon, the black lines that sometimes cut across one of the shiny objects that seems to be flying in perfect formation with the Constitution, and then the more distant glints where the great coil, four hundred meters at its narrow point by Constitution, funnels out to a full kilometer, and abruptly the eye connects those bright patches and shadows across the black vacuum to form the image of a gigantic coil spring in space, six kilometers through the center, wide at the end pointed toward the sun, with all the other parts of the ship clinging to it.

  The arriving package is a mere bright dot. Moreover, it’s only about a hundred meters in diameter, so it has to get within twelve kilometers before it’s even as big as the moon in the night sky on Earth, and since it is only about six hundred meters long, it takes less than a heartbeat to pass through the coil of the Good Luck and continue on its way into space ahead. If he’d blinked or sneezed he might not have seen it at all.

  And since it is moving almost ten times as fast as the ship, what Louie sees with his own eyes is merely a bright streak; the human eye cannot resolve something moving that fast.

  His chief impression of it is only of being thrown against the web. The package passes through the coil, the superconducting magnets on its surface interact with the powerful field set up in the coil by electricity from the Good Luck’s plants and collectors, which causes the package to slow down by about twenty percent in that brief instant—and transfer all of that momentum to the Good Luck. The great coils contract and pulse back out, all of Constitution and the other modules are shaken like the tops of palm trees in a hurricane, and then the package is gone, hurrying on toward 2026RU ahead of him.

  He will catch up with it again sometime on the other side of Jupiter, strip it for parts, and throw the rest backward as reaction mass.

  Captain Musharaf is painfully aware that no one cares much about the town of Khulna. It’s another one of those cities in the world that nobody goes to for fun, but where the world’s work gets done. As far as he knows, there is no one in this city of two and a half million who is even jacked for XV; when the blow falls, no one will record it.

  Just now he’s supervising as much evacuation as can be managed; civil government collapsed a while ago here, and Musharaf’s colonel and major cut and ran three days ago, during the rioting. The other captains in the regiment elected him, and to the extent that he gets any orders from Dhaka, they seem perfectly willing to send them to him.

  After all, what difference does it make what they tell him? How could they possibly enforce their will?

  The regiment hasn’t been able to pacify the whole city; things have gotten too berserk for that. As in so many other parts of Asia, the international corporations’ use of mindslavery for factory labor has resulted in a population with no particular loyalties and nothing except a desire to get their hands on what they think of as the good things in life; a million people of both sexes, from age six to eighty, have been toiling in the big skyscraper plants built where Garden Park and the stadium used to be.

  Musharaf grew up here, and it’s never really occurred to him before how much he resented the Koreans for buying out the whole public part of the town to put their three-hundred-story assembly works there, let alone for turning so many of his neighbors into zombies who barely even know they’re Bangala.

  Well, if there was ever a time to do anything about it, that was a long time ago. Right now Mu
sharaf and his company are only trying to hold the ghat, the steps leading down to the River Rupsa, with a perimeter wide enough to allow some kind of orderly boarding of the hovercraft that are going to try to make the dash for high ground in Assam Province of India, as others have been doing for three days since it became apparent that Clem 114 was going to burst into the Bay of Bengal.

  Outside Musharaf’s perimeter there are tens of thousands of people, some throwing rocks and screaming, some just apathetically staring in toward the ghat, many wearing scalpnets and illegal amplifier boxes so that while they’re here, they’re also cracking skulls in London, burning a family out of its shop in Dayton, or robbing the dead in Manila.

  There’s been very little sniper fire, though, because Bangladesh is so poor that practically no one can afford guns. That’s some consolation.

  He checks the computer again; things haven’t changed. He can put about 1200 more children and mothers onto the hovercraft sitting at the ghat, before they have to lift and run, in only about another eight minutes. The big wave from the storm surge of Clem 114 is already on its way inland, and he can no longer raise any of the army posts in the Sundarbans, the great mangrove swamps that form the southern coast of Khulna Division.

  A thought occurs to him; he nods to his company sergeant, who salutes. He wonders what this man thinks of him. Well, in fourteen minutes it will not matter.

  “Find me a mullah,” Captain Musharaf says. “Now. From somewhere close.”

  The sergeant asks nothing, turns, and is gone.

  Musharaf is reasonably sure that the mob doesn’t know what is about to happen. The poverty-stricken wetland where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra run together and dribble out to the sea has more people per square meter than any other nation. It is no longer among the Earth’s poorest nations—as he always does, when he thinks of that, Musharaf gets a little surge of pride when he realizes that Bangladesh has climbed so fast in the last thirty years that it has passed places like Zambia and Paraguay that had a much longer head start. But its demographics and its accomplishments are not noteworthy to the global audience, and so they might as well be invisible here. The two-kilometer-high wave now roaring up toward them, pushed to far greater heights because the continental shelf extends so far down into the Bay of Bengal, will not be described or discussed on any channel, and it will fall as a complete surprise to anyone not listening to local news.

  When he was a boy, he was here every day—his mother sold sringala, little bits of meat folded into a triangle of some vegetable and deep-fried, at a stand in the Bazar, just south of here, and more often than not he tended the stand while she cooked. It was a shrewd choice, for sringala is nourishing enough so that she could feed whatever was left over to the family; they sometimes went to bed broke, but seldom hungry.

  He would give up half his remaining minutes to be at his mother’s stand again, nostrils full of the familiar odor of onions and peppers, schoolbook propped up in front of him because she insisted that he study while he worked, eating the leftover sringala with her and his sisters when the day ended.

  Two of his sisters are already in Assam, and one married a rich German, who, when Europe expelled non-whites, emigrated with her to Ontario. He has three nephews he will never see… but at least they’re in Toronto, and surely that’s a safe place.

  The sergeant arrives with the mullah, and in a low voice Captain Musharaf explains the situation. The mullah agrees at once, and runs off to the mosque nearest at hand. It occurs to Musharaf that it’s a good thing this is a fairly young, agile mullah.

  As the mullah rounds the corner and passes out of sight, the last hovercraft’s engines are dying off in the distance; now people wait patiently for the next one. Only Musharaf, the mullah, and now his sergeant know that there will be no more.

  There are four minutes left when the muezzin—about an hour early, but few of these people will check—issues the call to prayer. Across that part of the city, the drifting mob, last dregs of Global Riot Two, kneels to pray; the patient refugees, and Musharaf himself, spread their prayer rugs if they have them, or merely bow and pray if they don’t, facing west toward Mecca.

  When the great wave strikes, it comes from the southeast, behind them, and it is on them before people can do much more than stand up. Musharaf’s last thought is that surely, for getting into Paradise, dying in the midst of prayers must count for something.

  Whether it does or not, it’s over very fast; the black wave, already frothing with corpses, pounds on northward. It will be many kilometers before it sinks down far enough to begin leaving any survivors behind it.

  They are in Progreso, a little village not far south of Pijijiapan, when Passionet finally catches up with Mary Ann. She’s been thinking seriously of just resigning, Jesse knows, but she also figured that since they had made her rich, she owed it to them to at least talk things over a little. He goes over to play with Tomás’s grandkids for a while—there’re a couple of them who are pretty decent little soccer players, and Jesse played soccer all the way through high school, so they have a nice little three-way game on a bit of triangular ground, and after a while he has all but forgotten the intrusion of the real world into his adventure.

  He’s almost startled when Mary Ann comes over to talk to him; the whistle has sounded the ten-minute warning till they are to move again, but now that the road has toughened him a bit, Jesse doesn’t feel any big need to do more than gulp some extra water before they get back on the road. This stretch, where the road follows the first big ridgeline in from the coast, is a terrific place for a long hike, and even those who are abandoning homes they may never see again seem to be enjoying themselves.

  “Well,” she says, “I know what they want and it’s really different. I’m not sure how to explain it to you. Did you catch any of Surface O’Malley’s work in the last few months? She’s the new girl that’s been filling in for me, and though they’re too polite to say it, she’s probably also the one they had in mind to replace me.”

  “No, I haven’t. What’s she got to do with all this?”

  “Well, a few days ago in Bangkok, she managed to do everything we’re not supposed to do within one hour, and the audience loved it. So naturally, now it’s a stroke of genius and they want us all to do it.” She explains it all to Jesse during the next hour on the road, as they wind back toward Federal Highway 200; for a day or so they’ve been on the thin, badly paved Chiapas state highway that runs parallel to the great Federal highway, to leave the main road clear for more urgent convoys. At the speed they’re moving, it hasn’t made much difference, except that it’s much quieter and more pleasant, and for some reason farmers and locals seem to be more willing to come out, say hello, and sell them melons and corn.

  “So you think you’ll take them up on it?” Jesse finally asks. “Are you up to faking being sincere underneath faking being fake?” His description comes out more sarcastically than he had intended; he looks out over the deep greens of the valleys around him, now slashed with streaks of black mud where landslides and floods from Clem Two tore up the hillsides, under the deep blue of the equatorial sky, and he realizes it’s just resentment at being dumped back out of this little personal paradise, the special adventure that’s just him and Mary Ann.

  She laughs at his description, but it’s clearly just a polite noise she’s making to avoid a fight. “I guess if you really pushed me I’d say I have to do it, Jesse.” She takes his hand, and that’s the same as ever, the terrific moment of looking over and seeing one of his adolescent fantasies smiling at him, and at the same time knowing that it’s good old reliable Mary Ann, his friend and partner in so much trouble and danger so far….

  He shrugs and grins. “It’s a duty? Who do you think you are, Berlina Jameson? I thought Passionet was just entertainment.”

  “I thought so too, and I think Passionet did. One reason I was over there for so long was that since I got the call from Doug Llewellyn—the president of Passionet—I
knew something pretty strange was up. Usually people with my job don’t talk to even a vice president twice in a year. We may be the most public aspect of Passionet but we sure don’t rate much in real importance within the company—I guess we’re just too easy to replace.” She lifts his hand in her own two small ones and kisses his fingers. “One of the reasons I get so much pleasure out of being treated like a human being is working with the people at Passionet teaches you how unusual that can be. Anyway, so when it was Llewellyn who made the call, I knew something big was up they weren’t telling me, and I insisted on knowing before I agreed to anything. They finally had to patch through David Ali—that’s Rock to you, he’s sort of my best friend in the biz—and let him explain some of it too.

  “You know how everyone says nowadays you can’t censor because there are so many alternate pathways, and because packetized data can leak in through so many different ways and then reassemble?”

  “Yep, I’m an engineer, remember?”

  She makes a face at him. “If you want this explained, you have to let me do it my way. Okay?”

  “’Kay.” He holds her hand tightly, and scuffs along the road a little.

  She lifts his hand again, toys with it, smiles, and then says, “Well, it turns out you can still be a pretty effective censor if you’re just willing to play rough enough. Have you followed the news enough to know about Global Riot Two?”

  “I know there is one and they aren’t sure when it’s going to end. I guess there have been a lot of deaths.”

  “Unh-hunh. Nineteen million dead as of this morning, not counting a few million more who didn’t manage to evacuate before hurricanes hit, because they were pinned down by the riots. Twenty governments collapsed entirely. They just lost all of Bangladesh—the storm surge in front of Clem 114 finished off what the riots started. They claim ten million more people could have been evacuated there if troops and transport weren’t tied up in maintaining civil order.”