Mother of Storms

by John Barnes

  Carla Tynan wakes up reaching for the jack in her head. She really needs to get off the net for a while, she’s feeling badly disoriented… more memories and processors come online, and in a millisecond or so she feels more like herself, but still she needs food and exercise, she’s been on a long time—

  She remembers, and begins to scream. She reaches for her body, over and over, thousands of times per second, but she can’t find it. She reaches for knowledge about herself, and she finds the reports of the Honiara Police, the pictures of her bloody, cratered body on the hotel room bed.

  What Louie chose to do has been forced on her. She reaches for him, through the antennas—he is now less than two light-hours away. But at the speeds with which she lives in the net, she will endure centuries before she is able to hear his comforting voice, and to cry in the awareness of his affection.

  On September 22, as Clem reaches with an outflow jet into the Bay of Campeche and stirs up the eye of a new storm, Louie Tynan crosses Saturn’s orbit. The catastrophe sweeping over the Earth is beyond his power to do anything about; Louie-on-the-moon is now pouring data to him, TV, XV feed, everything. He is everywhere and all these things are happening to him.

  With his knowledge of all of human history, he is appalled but not shocked. His own estimate is that a billion people will die next week.

  He is still moving at almost five astronomical units per day, and he is now only nine and a half AU from the sun itself. The fastest way to get there, he assures himself again and again, is to overshoot and brake, using the sun to make the turn, then Mercury and Venus and the sun’s gravity behind him to slow him down.

  But he keeps rechecking.

  He wonders why he feels so strong an attachment to the Earth he left. He certainly wasn’t all that eager to have his feet on it while he had feet. He never did like people much, for that matter. And yet here he is, frantic to go to their rescue.

  Maybe it’s just in the nature of a pattern-making system to want to preserve the original. It’s something to think about, anyway, while he throws the plasma stream out in front of himself, checks the strains and accelerations, and just hopes the whole thing will hold together. It occurs to him that he’s cut the margins close, and despite the speed of his reactions and the volume of data that he processes, he might turn out to be wrong.

  “Wrong” in this case is what would happen if 2026RU broke up under the strains it’s being subjected to. If that happened, a few pieces, carrying various of Louie’s processors with them, would dive into the sun, a situation which is about as close to a snowball in hell as reality ever gets, and the other chunks would continue, after close passes at the sun, on hyperbolic orbits right out of the solar system and into eternity; after a few tens of thousands of years, a few of them might enter some other star system, but most would end up permanently in the dark between the stars on the fringes of the galaxy.

  Louie’s guess is that two or three of the biggest chunks might still have enough of him on them to remain conscious, and enough replicators to start re-engineering themselves a way back… probably some of him would get back to the solar system in another hundred years or so. Always assuming the conscious chunks weren’t the ones that plunged into the sun, and Louie’s sense of the universe, as a man who was first trained as a pilot, is that the one law that holds absolutely is Murphy’s. Louie-on-the-moon and the wiseguys could doubtless grab another cometoid—with what they’ve learned they could grab Pluto and Charon if need be—but it would be some months’ delay, and, he repeats to himself, uselessly but every millisecond, Earth doesn’t have the time.

  He keeps doing his job but he also keeps rechecking his figures. To amuse himself on the side, he re-reads the Aeneid and does a statistical study… is there really any empirical basis for Murphy’s Law? Throw out most of the battles in history, since bad luck on one side is good on the other. Throw out every election, ditto. Throw out various aboriginal people getting discovered, since it was seldom good luck for them. Look at efforts to fulfill the Weak Pareto Condition—the moral principle that Wilfredo Pareto identified in his economic and political studies, that a thing that benefits everyone and harms no one ought to be done.

  Hmm. Define “everyone” and “no one.” Does everyone include apes and dolphins, some of whom are smarter than severely retarded human beings? Or dogs, many of whom have more empathy than most human beings, or cats, who practice more courtesy?

  And as for harming no one… what is the horse’s point of view on domestication?

  Rocks and ice don’t have much viewpoint, though. So since what Louie is up to is going to turn the solar system into a much better place for life—which is capable of having a viewpoint… if this works he may be the biggest breach in Murphy’s Law there’s ever been, and certainly he is binding more information and energy in meaningful patterns. Just possibly Louie is humanity’s biggest and most solid blow against entropy.

  Which is not all that different from saying he’s out to overthrow Murphy’s Law. (With diligent effort, he has established that there is no statistical basis for Murphy’s Law. He has also established that he believes in it anyway.) He just hopes Murphy hasn’t heard about this. Murphy is known to be vindictive.

  As he approaches the orbit of Mars on September 25, he tunes in to all the XV broadcasts he can find, relayed from Louie-on-the-moon, via two wiseguys, to him. He admits it’s vanity; he’s enjoying being seen from the Southern Hemisphere at sunset, as a huge comet with one bright sharpedged linear tail stabbing toward the sun, and another long feathery one—surface evaporation and coolant venting—reaching back away, so that in the evening sky he seems to stretch across more than half of it.

  It’s especially fun from the viewpoints of Innocent Age, an Australian XV net that offers the viewpoints of (well-fed and -loved) young children around the world. Looking up from the veldt in the person of seven-year-old Alice Zulu, seeing the great streak of the comet seeming to touch the last dying ember of the sun, its tail arcing so far up toward the zenith… it’s an experience he would not have missed.

  The twenty-sixth finds him passing close to the sun, and every cable, strut, member, and line seems to scream. He’s in too close to talk effectively to any of the wiseguys or to Louie-on-the-moon, and he’s too busy anyway to think about anything to distract himself. The face of 2026RU is boiling chaos, and between tidal forces and sudden releases of gas and water, every so often a plasma tower will crash to the surface, costing him thrust and just incidentally scaring the hell out of him. He can feel every groan and scream as the structures inside twist and wrench under the pressure of thousands of tons of reshaping ice; his surface instruments are blind in the white glare of his halo, as the great blazing sun, four times as wide as it is from Earth, pours energy into the gas envelope he’s emitting. At least the halo is helping to keep the sun from hitting his ice directly.

  Hours pass as he struggles to keep repairing what keeps falling apart. Robots are lost unpredictably into cracks and crevices, or as tunnels suddenly close around them. One whole processor bank near the surface goes, in an electronic scream so close in sensation to pain that he perceives no difference. He loses the sense of his physical configuration; he doesn’t know exactly where all his parts are now, and matching his communications topology (which parts talk to each other) with his physical shape hasn’t been possible for hours, and without that he can’t migrate his consciousness to safer processors; he can only hope that his mind keeps running.

  The sun is big, and its gravity is powerful. It takes Louie the better part of a day to roar around the back side of the sun from the Earth, finally slowly beginning his rise toward the cool depths of space again. Mercury comes and goes in a flash, Louie using its force to bend him on toward Venus and to drag him back as he goes by in retrograde. The enormous halo of the comet engulfs the entire tiny planet for an instant, and then he is beyond it and screaming up toward Venus on the twenty-eighth. A bigger planet, with its dense atmosphere, Ve
nus is a bright white ball of light to his outer sensors. At the speed at which he’s moving, it flashes by like Mercury before it, but he feels its drag more acutely. In the last few hours he’s repaired much of the damage, found parts of himself and reconnected them, dumped the more hopeless junk into the automated factories to be recycled into replacement and repair parts.

  He is going to make it. He finds it hard to believe, but it’s true. A fast swing around the Earth-moon system, making a near approach to each (and how strange to feel Louie-on-the-moon reaching out to join him, now that lag time will get back to near zero), a great thunder of his remaining engines . . and Louie settles into L-4.

  L-4 is not so much a place as a description of a place; it is one of the five “Lagrange points,” or “libration points,” where the Earth and moon’s gravity work together to stabilize the orbit. L-4 is found at the point ahead of the moon in orbit where the apex of an equilateral triangle with its base running through the centers of the Earth and moon would be; thus it is as far from the Earth as the moon is.

  But the halo of a comet extends far beyond its icy head; as Louie comes to rest, the halo of gas is still swelling outward, no longer swept away by his motion, until finally it is larger than the Earth itself, though it is thinner than air in the stratosphere. From the few parts of the Earth with clear skies tonight, 2026RU (to name it physically), or Louie (to name it spiritually), looms brighter than the full moon, and fully seven times as wide.

  He wishes he could stop to admire himself, but anyway it’s a few hours till Alice will see him, and those are the eyes he really wants to see through. Meanwhile, the tractors and the factory press to their tasks like maniacs; he wants the “ice Frisbees” flying as soon as he can manage.

  When Carla woke up and started to talk to them, the cyberneticists at NSA had a field day, at least until they got their evacuation order. They now had two cases of a personality surviving on the net after the originating body was gone. At the least, it would have made them more likely to believe Louie—had not the comet now in Earth orbit been a powerful enough argument by itself.

  Louie and Carla’s reunion is an event that the NSA offices in the center of North America, away from the storm, are desperately trying to record, though without success. There’s a serious jam in the available bandwidth that seems to be the two of them trading and integrating data, and it’s a good thing a couple of billion people have been knocked off-line, because Louie and Carla seem to be taking up ninety percent of what’s been made available by that.

  Why they both want to know all the archived records of every air pollution monitoring station in Bolivia—or the last two hundred years of hourly exchange rates from the Bank of France—or precinct by precinct electoral results correlated to census data for the state of Nevada in every local, state, and Federal election—is inexplicable, but they are grabbing onto it all. In the last three seconds, Carla broke through security into DoD’s Genetic Engineering Labs, copied DNA maps from every species cataloged there, and zapped every one of them to Louie.

  Whatever the hell they’re doing, it’s hard to object to it. Aside from not being able to stop them, neither the NSA in Denver, nor President Hardshaw in Charleston, would want Louie to stop the main thing he’s doing.

  Satellite pictures show it best. A great, whirling disk of ice, its diameter ten times the length of the old space station Constitution, bursts from the halo of the comet, trailing wisps of mist, glowing brilliant white in the sun. It swings ever nearer until it is huge in the screen, passes below, broad against the Earth, plunging down toward the churning Pacific.

  The white glow in the sunlight becomes orange; then a reddish disk; then at last the disk vanishes against the Earth for a long count, before finally one sees a burst of clouds below.

  Exactly as planned, Louie has begun to darken the Pacific sky.

  The terminator line is just now at the peaks of the Andes in Chile and Argentina, and the sun will soon be going down across North America as well, so that it’s only about five hours till night begins to roll across the Pacific. Meanwhile, ten ice Frisbees per hour whip from Louie’s launchers, spiraling down toward the Earth from where 2026RU is at the moment in about the same longitude as Cape Town, and tearing into the thin edge of the outer air over the ocean, forming great streaks of ice crystals.

  The phone rings in the beautiful old house that overlooks the sea; it’s late in the evening, and Dr. Nathan Zulu had been about to go to bed after spending some hours grading sophomore literature papers.

  “Dr. Zulu, hello.”

  “Who is this, please?” The video screen is dark.

  The image that forms is animated, not terribly well. “My name is Louie Tynan—”

  “Yes, sir!” He wonders when this strange dream began.

  “I have a large favor to ask of you; could you get Alice to put on her data jack, and come out in the backyard to look at something in, oh, say, fifteen minutes?”

  With the perfect, absurd logic of dreams, he points out that it’s way past her bedtime and she’s already asleep, but Louie Tynan promises that this will be brief, and anyway, just this once….

  Still mostly expecting to wake up, he goes up and gets Alice, and in her pajamas and bathrobe, her data jack plugged in, she stands in the backyard, holding her father’s hand, looking out over the big combers rolling in to St. Helena Bay. It is almost as bright as day in the light reflected by the enormous full-moon of 2026RU overhead. Only the brightest stars are visible in the glare.

  Alice says nothing—she’s barely awake—and he wonders if this is all a vivid dream—

  Far out to the west, a glowing bar appears in the sky, like a long, thick white line. As they watch, for two minutes or so it grows longer and wider, and its ends begin to round. Then, when it is quite low to the horizon, it glows a bright orange, and then a sharp mixture of orange and white flame, leaving a long white streak behind itself like the biggest shooting star he’s ever seen.

  He feels Alice clutch his hand; she’s staring at the sky open-mouthed as the huge object descends.

  Minutes later, it has become a great, burning oval in the sky, ten times as wide as a full moon—and then, in a great rush, it shatters into uncountable shooting stars. Very faintly, just as the last shooting stars fade from the sky, they hear a booming rumble.

  The phone in Nathan Zulu’s pocket rings. He picks it up, and there’s Louie Tynan. “May I speak to Alice, Dr. Zulu?”

  He hands the phone to her, and hears Louie’s voice asking “Did you like it?”

  “It’s really flat, sir,” she says.

  “That means ‘good,’” Nathan adds over her shoulder.

  Louie laughs. “There’s a relief. I just wanted you to see that, Alice. I’m a big fan of Innocent Age.”

  “I’m a big fan of yours,” she says, beaming.

  They talk for a minute or two more, and then Tynan clicks off. Alice’s eyes are shining, and she hardly stops babbling the whole time he carries her up to her bedroom and tucks her back into bed.

  It occurs to him that it’s not going to be easy to tell his daughter about Father Christmas, as his mother suggested he should do soon. She already believes in things that are a lot more impossible—because they’re true.

  The next paper on the pile to be graded is “Jung: Elements of the Fantastic in Everyday Life.” Probably the boy cribbed it from somewhere. In a few minutes, Dr. Zulu is settled back in to grading. Even with the weird glow outside, and his daughter talking to comets, life goes on.

  “That’s the latest and strangest of it,” Lynn says to President Hardshaw. “He just pitched one in over the South Atlantic for the hell of it. No reason as far as we can tell. But it’s not like he’s being secretive… just that he does so many things so fast that we can’t quite keep up with all of it.

  “Which reminds me, he did have good news. Louie says that he’s already tried out the masers experimentally, and it looks like he’ll be able to break the crystals
into oxygen and hydrogen again as well.”

  “The crystals?” Hardshaw asks. She has to raise her voice slightly, because the salty rain pouring onto Charleston is beyond anything the Amazon ever got until now, but they’re no longer afraid that the buildings won’t hold.

  “Well, when those ice disks burst from evaporation and the shock wave under them, twenty miles up, the water they release re-forms as ice crystals almost instantly. It’s the crystals that form the clouds that block the sun. What Louie is worried about is how to remove the crystals on the night side of the Earth, because at night they keep heat in. Apparently he has some way of using a maser—a microwave laser—to blow them apart so vigorously that the hydrogen separates from the oxygen, and the hydrogen will mostly dribble off into space.”

  Hardshaw nods. “All right, that’s good enough for me to fake it with if I have to.”

  “And it’s not the only strange thing, Ms. President. Reports from Carla are beginning to turn up in computer bulletin boards all over the Earth—proper citations and all. She’s writing something like four scientific papers per minute, and just throwing them to the winds.”

  “But is all this going to work, though?” Hardshaw asks. She takes a long sip of hot coffee. Outside, she knows the former West Virginia capital—now the temporary site of the government of the United States—is ringed in sandbags, and that two hundred Marines are fighting to keep the wall in place against the raging current in the street. Supposedly as soon as the rain lets up, even a little, that will stop running; meanwhile, semper fi and all that, they are out there in that rain so thick that to slip is to risk drowning. “Before we talk more, compliments to the Commandant and send out food and coffee for the Marines. If we have to we can let Congress starve.”

  “Part of them are out there working with the Marines,” Lynn notes. “The rest can starve, though.” She turns to give the order, then gets back to the screen. “What it looks like is that somehow she—Carla Tynan, I mean—is writing up all sorts of reports on ecological impacts. The paper that caught their attention at the science branch at NSA was this one about zapping the ice crystals with masers. It looks like most of the hydrogen will go off into space, just as planned—its molecular velocity is way above escape velocity, and at that altitude about sixty percent of the available directions will carry it away. The oxygen’s another matter; that much highenergy monoatomic oxygen is going to cause a lot of ozone formation.”