Mother of Storms

by John Barnes

  A few hours after crossing Neptune’s orbit, he flips 2026RU over and begins deceleration. With the speed he has built up as he raced in from the outer darkness, he will have to “stand on the brakes” most of the way, just to get recaptured by the sun.

  By that time, Earth’s luck is running out.

  From the San Francisco Bay right down to Ensenada in Baja, there is so little still standing and there are so few survivors from previous passes that neither the American nor the Mexican governments pay much attention to Clem’s rampage down that coast. The news media follow suit. Far to the south, Mary Ann and Jesse have almost reached Oaxaca, and that’s more newsworthy.

  The extra rain breaks the Colorado open, partly fills the Grand Canyon, and helps the storm surge break through to rejoin the Gulf of California to the Salton Sea.

  Randy Householder watches the news with a certain fascination. Even he has to admit that it’s a big deal. At least, after the flash floods tore through Boise, and with so many other disasters happening, even if they’ve traced him they’re not looking for him yet. He will have lots of time to track down Harris Diem.

  The trouble is, a guy who works in the White House, physically close to the President, is just about the hardest of hard targets.

  Randy passes the time, sitting in his car anyplace where he can watch for Diem, by experiencing Synthi Venture. She’s a great lady, and that boy with her is a nice kid.

  He wonders if Kimbie Dee would have turned out that nice. Probably, he decides. Similar backgrounds and all. Beautiful girls that fought their way to the top.

  He sighs. He really wishes he could put on the goggles and muffs and experience this more thoroughly. It’s been a long time since he’s lived in a world of love, hope, and courage. But without his eyes and ears, there would be little point.

  Diem will come home sooner or later. All these guys do; their rigs are in their houses. Randy managed to strike up a conversation with the cleaning woman and ascertained that Diem is alone in the house at night, when he’s home—which hasn’t been for four days. Between stress and no time to come home to relieve it, Diem’s craving must be killing him right now.

  When he comes home, it’s going to be fairly easy. He’ll use the rig—Randy has studied these people too much to have any doubt about that. While he’s plugged in he’s helpless.

  There’s a Self Defender in Randy’s glove compartment. It will summon the police, and that’s what he wants it to do; if he can kill Diem, it’s a good start, but if the world can know why… well, it’s just justice, that’s all. Just plain justice after all these years. More than Kimbie Dee ever got.

  Synthi Venture, or Mary Ann, whichever, is climbing a hill just now, and part of Randy’s brain fills with warm Mexican sunlight and a road leading up into the sky, with hundreds of good, strong, brave friends all around her. It’s so beautiful and peaceful; why the hell can’t people get addicted to this?

  Then again, addiction may not be the best thing anyway. A couple of weeks ago, while he was crossing up his path and generally making himself hard to find, he stayed in a camp in Wyoming, where he made damn good money because he seemed to be one of about a dozen people who would dig a latrine or peel potatoes. Everyone else was too busy with XV, experiencing Synthi Venture—as she dug latrines and peeled potatoes. They kept upping the bonuses at the camps for that.

  Strange. Of course, there are lots of people who’d rather experience an actor playing at a stakeout than be Randy just now. If he’d had any choice, he’d have done something else with his life than be Randy.

  A light rain is starting, and it’s not even near dark. Harris Diem probably isn’t coming tonight, either—but until “probably” is “definitely,” Randy is sitting right here.

  “Yes, I talked with Mary Ann at length,” Harris Diem said, “and she’s aware of the problem and trying to do something about it. We don’t want them to switch off from her totally, though, because she’s the major thing keeping us from having to fight huge civil disorders, and besides much of her message is desirable. We just want them to take some action on their own behalf and not go off to live in Synthi Venture Land. The trouble is that her version of reality is a lot more fun, right now, than other people’s.”

  Hardshaw nods and says, “All right, next report I need—Di, I think you and Carla said you have bad news?”

  “The worst, I’m afraid. Surface temperatures in the Caribbean are now at thirty-seven Celsius and rising. That’s more than enough to take a hurricane over the line into supersonic winds, if our estimates are right. And of course Clem is making another near pass, so the likelihood of one spawning is pretty high.”

  Hardshaw nods. “Any suggestions?”

  “Well, if we had Colonel Tynan’s comet or John Klieg’s balloons, sure. We ought to chill the Caribbean. Otherwise, no. We don’t have any idea of how big it might get, just ‘bigger.’ And to tell you the truth, I was going to ask for permission to go down to North Carolina and get my family moved right away, because within forty-eight hours is probably too late.”

  “Do it and go now,” the President says. “I won’t keep you here when there’s nothing of any value for you to do. While we’re at it, Harris, go home and get a night’s rest. Carla, call me if there’s anything that involves action. But I’m going to bed early too, and I’m going to try to get caught up on sleep. Might as well start out this thing rested and fed.”

  Di is surprised at how hard it is to say goodbye to his staff. Most of them are acting like they’ll never see him again. Gretch is in the first wave headed up to Charleston tomorrow morning, so this really is goodbye, but Talley and Peter go a week later, and he expects to see them again. Mohammed and Wo Ping, with families to worry about, are already on temporary leave—the new NOAA headquarters will be the old NORAD facility at Cheyenne Mountain, and they’re there for setup.

  He will miss them all till they’re together again, and he says so. Everyone gets choked up, even Peter.

  Ten minutes after that he is on the zipline and phoning Lori. It is September 22, Clem is passing near the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and Jesse and Synthi Venture are most of the way to Oaxaca—they should get there tomorrow if they aren’t held back by the thundershowers trailing in Clem’s wake. So the kid will be all right. Dad is in a refugee camp up near Flagstaff, and cranky.

  It’s strange, he thinks as the zipline shoots out into the evening, that even though the details of the map of the United States are already quite changed, the seat, the zipline, all the familiar geography of his life, are just the same. Perhaps when he gets to one of the camps in the West, it will begin to sink in.

  He begins, finally, to read the copy that Lori had given him of Slaughterer in Yellow. It really is one of her best, although he’s sort of surprised about how little violence there is. She’s been saying lately she doesn’t have the stomach for butchering people that she once did.

  Harris Diem feels like his head is one loud ringing doorbell. He’s tired, he’s still confused by how the world has changed, and he’s trying to persuade himself to just head for bed rather than down to the basement.

  Not a chance.

  The robe, the clean sheets, the ecstasy of choice… tonight he will do his three special girls, starting with the pretty little cheerleader, the kind of girl you were so hot for at fourteen and couldn’t get because for you life was all study and work—

  Not true, he admits to himself. He is a monster, and a pervert, but he is not self-deluded. Or not about that. If he had been able to do what he wanted with a girl like Kimbie Dee when he was fourteen, he’d have raped and killed her. It’s what he understands.

  “All right,” he whispers, speaking aloud, “little blonde white-trash mallchick, here we go—”

  He is just watching the hands slide away from the perfect little tits to her shaking sides, just hearing that first delicious sob of shame and seeing the tears rolling from the blue eyes—

  Just uncovering and feeling utterly nak
ed and helpless, wishing Daddy were here, he’d kill this creep—

  It goes blank. It is dark and quiet.

  Can’t be a power failure—the house is on a powerchip.

  He clicks the release, slides the goggles and muff off. The man standing there….

  “Whose father are you?” Diem asks, very quietly and calmly. He wants to know; mustn’t scare this guy into pulling the trigger too soon.

  “Kimbie Dee Householder’s.” The man is keeping a Self Defender leveled at Diem’s face.

  Diem’s mouth is dry; part of him is still expecting some orgasms, a hot shower, some guilt, some sleep. Another part is wondering what the hypersonic round will feel like. “Anything you want to know before you kill me?”

  “If you got a reason why, you can tell me.”

  Diem shrugs slightly. “I was born this way. Maybe someday they’ll be able to detect whatever I have, and abort the fetus.”

  “You bought any more of this stuff?”

  “I would buy more if I had the nerve. I would do those things if I could get away with it.” Something strange is striking Diem; he knows he is dead, and finally he can say out loud what runs through his head. He looks at the washed-out blue eyes, grizzled gray beard—poor bastard can’t even afford injections to keep his hair its regular color—and the run-down clothes. Here’s a guy whose best house was a mobile home, one of those people whom Diem has climbed up and over on the way to the top. “You understand that? No reason. I loved comholing that little bitch with a mop handle.”

  Saying it brings him erect, lifting the still-attached merkin.

  Householder twitches slightly. The Self Defender barks. Blood sprays.

  God, Diem thinks, what a way to go. He is still looking at the blood spurting from his shattered genitals, reveling in the agony as he chews his lips bloody, when Householder’s second shot takes him between the eyes.

  Randy Householder sits down to wait for the cops. Figure he jiggered the security system to get in, and it’s a Self Defender pulse fired from inside a key White House official’s home; that ought to get some attention pretty fast.

  He has just sat down and opened an orange juice when the door opens, but the men who come in are wearing stocking masks on their heads. He doesn’t have time to say “What—” before he is sprayed with bullets; he falls onto the floor, his guts in flames, the world getting dark, and he hears gunfire and—no mistake, grenades going off. It sounds like a fucking war, like somehow Randy has started a fucking war.

  The zipline whizzes on toward North Carolina, and Di looks up from Slaughterer in Yellow to think a little about the time ahead. Most of their possessions went west weeks ago, but Lori and the boys have stayed in the nearly empty house. Lori has been completely unreasonable about it—she won’t go unless he’s coming along—so what Di has in mind here is just a slight trick… he’s going to get them onto a zipline for the West without going himself, letting them think he is with them till the last moment. He doesn’t think Lori will take the boys back into danger once they are out of it.

  Still, this is not going to be easy. Di is not really the type for lying to his wife. On the other hand, he’s really opposed to leaving her to die, and that’s what the alternative is.

  Cops, coal miners, firemen, Marines… those are the kinds of jobs where you have to look for a wife who can deal with the possibility you might not come back. Meterologists didn’t used to be one of them. Even public officials weren’t.

  Lori is beautiful, talented, and intelligent, and she isn’t bad in a crisis, for that matter. But she doesn’t have the faintest understanding of how Di can be loyal to anything outside his household. The moral universe ends, for her, with her family.

  What kind of world has it gotten to be where that’s such a bad thing?

  His thoughts are interrupted by a call from Carla. She’s trying to give him a head start. Clem has an outflow jet reaching like a tenuous tentacle over the Isthmus of Tehuantepec on the Pacific side to the Bay of Campeche off the Gulf of Mexico. That jet will cut off at any time—Clem has already begun to move away—and when it does it will leave a low-pressure center.

  The surface temperature in the Gulf, in that southerly part, is just over 38°C—warmer than human blood. Di thinks that’s enough to lift the hurricane through the supersonic barrier, and Carla is sure of it.

  At least the issue of sneaking away has vanished.

  For the rest of the trip, Di answers no phone calls. When he gets home he finds the family packed and waiting, and as he hurls luggage into the car he explains the situation to Lori as quickly as he can. “We’ve got to get over the mountains, at least, and preferably all the way to the middle of the continent,” he says.

  They climb into the car; Nahum is sniveling, Mark is sullen, but really, they’re not being bad in the circumstances. Fifteen minutes to the zipline station. Ten minutes to buy a ticket. Half-an-hour wait at worst, and then they’re on their way—

  Eight minutes later they are sitting in a long, long file of automobiles, not moving at all. Nahum is quietly sobbing, Mark is whining, and Lori is knotting her hands.

  “What do you suppose happened?” she asks.

  “Well, making a guess… nowadays, with datarodents and other things like that, nothing stays secret very long. Probably when I found out there were fewer than a hundred people who had seen the data—but that was half an hour ago. Mark, please, quiet, guy, your mother and I are talking—”

  “Climb up front and sit on my lap, hon, and Nahum, do you want to sit on your dad’s lap?” Lori reaches back to help them come forward.

  This line of cars won’t move for a couple hours at least. Probably parking has overflowed at the zipline station and they’re having to route cars elsewhere and then bus passengers back to get on the line. It might be a lot longer.

  This would be an incredibly bad place to get caught in a hurricane, he thinks, and then half-laughs at himself; the hurricane is just beginning to form, a good deal more than two thousand miles away. He’ll try to confine his panic to what’s plausible.

  Once the kids have settled onto their laps, Di explains, “What I bet happened is that the data leaked all over the place, and quickly, and everyone phoned his family on the East Coast, and they called people, and they called people, and pretty soon—voilà. Everyone is going to the zipline station.” He sighs. “I think we’ll get out but it’s going to be a while. Anyway, I started Slaughterer in Yellow. Better than your last couple, I think, but you sure don’t dish out the gore like you used to.”

  “Effect of being a mother. Once you’ve felt childbirth it’s hard to romanticize pain, and after you’ve patched twenty or thirty small wounds, big ones aren’t as interesting either.”

  “Can I read them when I’m big, Mom?” Mark asks, and as always they tell him yes, he can, and no, he’s not nearly big enough yet.

  The phone rings. Di answers it. “Hello?”

  “Hello, Dr. Callare.” It is President Hardshaw. “Sorry to be a pain about this, but we badly need your advice, and it’s going to be four hours before they clear enough space to move anyone through, so you’ve got a while. Is that your son?”

  “That’s what Lori says,” he says, smiling. Lori socks him on the arm. “This is Nahum. Nahum, this is the President.”

  Nahum curls up against his father and hides his face.

  “A lot of people feel that way,” the President says. “Anyway, we want to multilog you in with Carla. The eye has formed and it’s moving north into the warm water.”

  Di whistles. “Bad news for sure. Okay.”

  He pulls out his computer, sets the phone screen to Overlay so he can see faces and graphs against each other, and logs in. Nahum settles comfortably about his neck.

  “Cute kid,” Carla says, appearing on the screen. It takes him a moment to realize she has animated herself rather than sent her actual image. Probably with as much time as she’s spending plugged in, she looks like hell and doesn’t want th
em to see her.

  Carla rolls the simulations for him and shows him the parameter estimates. As she finishes, Di asks, “So where do we go from here?”

  “Well, if you guys would believe Louie, we’d just hope he gets here fast. But I see nothing else we can do. If we publicize it, all we do is fill the highways and kill people there instead of at home. I say let’em be surprised if we can.”

  “This line isn’t secure.”

  “I know. If only some of them hear, some of them may get out. But I’d say it’s hopeless anywhere south of Gainesville.”

  “How long till the critical point?”

  “Forty minutes to one hour.”

  Hardshaw gasps, breathes hard, and then says, “My god. Both of you, right now—Harris Diem has been assassinated, and your offices were bombed, Dr. Callare—”

  “Hey!” The shout is Carla’s, and the line goes dead.

  There’s a long silence. “Carla?” he asks. “Carla?”

  Diogenes Callare looks up to see the men running down the road between the cars. “They got out of a staticopter,” Lori whispers, “while you were talking—”

  Di tosses Nahum down to Lori’s feet, pushes the door open, tumbles out, and starts to run. If they could get to Harris Diem, who is critical personnel, then they’re operating in force—

  Duck behind that van, around the bus, keep running, Jesus it’s hot in Carolina late on a fall evening, just don’t let them—

  If they got to Harris Diem in his office in the New White House, they got through the fence, the guards, two steel doors, and two more guards. Fast enough to prevent alerting Diem—

  Roll under the truck, crawl forward, if they didn’t see him it might put them Off—

  And to get Carla and him at the same time… and the tab—god, he hopes everyone had gone home—this is no tinpot terrorist outfit. Funny, all those years you take your antiterror training and then it all comes to you. Got to get off the highway but not while they’d have a clear shot at him and it’s all open fields here—