Mother of Storms

by John Barnes

  “Isn’t that a good thing? I mean, won’t that repair the holes in the ozone layer?”

  “According to Carla it’ll do more than that—they haven’t had time to read the full paper, but according to the abstract the ozone layer is going to be much thicker than it’s ever been. That means a much more complete shut-out of ultraviolet light, and that means that a lot of pollinating insects, who see their way to the flowers by ultraviolet, aren’t going to be able to find the flowers they’re supposed to pollinate. So she’s giving notes on what can be expected as ecological impacts during the recovery.”

  “There’s definitely going to be a recovery?”

  “Carla thinks so, anyway. And if you count raw processing capability, she and Louie both have brains trillions of times the size of either of ours. I don’t see that we can do much but take her word for it.”

  Hardshaw leans back and finishes her coffee. She used to count cups of the stuff and try to make sure she didn’t consume too much; right now, too much doesn’t seem possible. Someone hands her a hot dog and she folds it into her jaws, swallowing all but mechanically. She glances up into the concerned face of a woman she hasn’t seen before, a gray-haired woman in a red apron; a closer look reveals that this woman is wearing the uniform of some convenience-store chain. “You okay, Ms. President?”

  “I’ve been better. So you’re catering for the government of the United States?”

  “Yep. When this is over, we’re going to have signs up every damn place saying ‘Presidential Hot Dogs and Cheese Nachos.’” The gray-haired lady grins at her, and Brittany Lynn Hardshaw grins back.

  “You know I worked at a convenience store when I was a kid?”

  “Think I remember reading that in the text news.”

  “You know, looking back—I’m still glad I didn’t stay with that job.” It’s not the best joke of Hardshaw’s life, but the gray-haired woman laughs. Hardshaw sees that her nametag says she’s “Lorraine.” “You have kids or grandchildren, Lorraine?”

  “Yep. Up the hill a bit, and we got a concrete foundation, and their dad’s with’em. They should be fine.”

  “Well, when all this is over, you tell them from me—” Hardshaw thinks for a long minute. To rebuild and go on? People do that. That she’s counting on them to rebuild America? Good question whether it will be America by the time it’s rebuilt; who knows what kind of government or politics will come out of all this. “To vote Republican,” she finishes.

  Lorraine laughs. “Their dad’ll shoot me, but I’ll tell them. Herman and me’s been canceling out each other’s vote for years.”

  She goes off chuckling to tend the hot dog machine and coffee urn, and Hardshaw turns her attention back to the matters at hand.

  “Boss?” One of the young men in a shirt that used to be white, still wearing a tie that used to be red, is signaling for her attention.

  “Yes?”

  “We’ve got private-channel contact with Mary Ann Waterhouse—Carla just called us up and gave us a data number to call, and it works.”

  “Put Ms. Waterhouse on.”

  The nice young man talks for a few moments more, and then brings over a scalpnet and goggles, and Hardshaw pulls them on.

  Her eyes clear in a moment, and she finds that she’s trudging up the trail beside Jesse. This road would have been moderately tough, at least for anyone out of shape, in dry weather, back before Clem, and now it’s more like wading upstream in ankle-deep water. The road that winds up from Oaxaca to Monte Alban is narrow, and though it wasn’t badly paved, it certainly wasn’t well-maintained. Hardshaw has a vague memory, from Mary Ann, of visiting this place back when she was just starting out in XV, and of looking down from the high mountain to the sprawling white city below. It must have been very beautiful, in the deep greens of the volcanic soils in the area, and perhaps it will be again some day.

  But for right now, the road is barely visible forty yards ahead. “This is the President, Jesse,” she says through Mary Ann’s body, and she feels somehow the billion people tuned in through her to the situation.

  “Hello,” he says. “It looks like we’ll be getting up there soon. Louie Tynan just plugged in to talk to me for a few minutes via Mary Ann; it sounds like he and Carla have been arranging something, up ahead, ever since they contacted us and redirected the parade. I don’t know how he’s doing it but somehow he’s been turning down the rain for the last minute or two, and he says the skies are going to clear just as we get there, but it won’t last long. I really don’t know what-all they’re up to.”

  “Neither do we. You mean Louie and Carla?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We can only hope they like us; between the two of them they can do whatever they like to the planet. How’s the march going?”

  “Well, we lost a lot of people who just wanted a roof and a cot in Oaxaca, but we gained a lot of others who either already had shelter or had given up hope. As far as people running back to check can find out, we’ve got a hundred thousand people with us. It should take about four hours for all of them to get into Monte Alban. After that, god only knows what’s going to happen.”

  “I understand, Jesse. No one’s expecting you to run this or control it. Just keep me up to date as best you can.”

  They talk for a minute or two more; it sounds as if the crowd size roughly doubled in Oaxaca, because so many people from the surrounding valleys poured in there to wait to join them. Oaxaca itself came through in surprisingly good shape—far enough up in the hills to get nothing more than the terrible drenching everywhere else is getting, and some high winds. What Jesse could see of the old town looked surprisingly good; the Zócalo was holding up well, and if—or when, if Carla and Louie could be believed—the sun ever returned to Oaxaca, it would be as comfortable as ever. Hardshaw feels Mary Ann’s memory of sitting out there in the early morning sunshine, the bright light and warm wind filling the square with a kind of vibrating life, the intricate wrought ironwork of the central structure etched in pure white against the deep blue of the sky, and thinks to herself that when all this is over she might just decide to go down there and sit on a bench in the sun herself.

  She hopes that didn’t filter through to the billion people, for she’s not sure that she wants that much company for the occasion.

  “Jesse,” she adds, “just to let people know… the capital of the United States is temporarily in Charleston, West Virginia. As soon as we can get transportation we’ll try to move north and west, probably to Pierre, South Dakota, which has the facilities we need and doesn’t seem to be too badly damaged. For those of you who are worrying still, all I can tell you is that we’re only just beginning to get reliable reports back from the rest of the USA and from the world. Satellite radar imaging shows that large parts of Florida are probably gone, and we’ve only got a scattering of reports from the northern part of the state. We think the St. Lawrence has broken through the Mohawk Valley—at least there are reports of the Mohawk River running backwards—and is now flowing out through the Hudson. Manhattan’s still there but the water is up to the fourth story on the few buildings still standing.

  “California and the West Coast generally have to be figured at a total loss up to the Sierras. There are undoubtedly millions of people still alive west of the Sierras, and the governors of the mountain states are setting up receiving stations on the highways and will—hopefully—be able to mount rescue operations in force over the mountains sometime in the near future. Meanwhile, however, if you are in those areas, stay put until you find a means of traveling safely to the east, and then get east. There is safety, food, and shelter over the mountains.

  “Let me also warn any nation or authority that may wish us ill that the United States does not renounce claims to any of its former territory, and we will oppose by force any unauthorized entrance into that territory by the armed forces of any other nation.

  “And for the rest of it—I wish you all well, and to the best of my ability I wi
ll continue to do my job until I am relieved of it by legal authority. Good night and good luck.”

  She feels Mary Ann reacting inside, and it’s a good reaction, one that seems to indicate that Hardshaw has hit the right tone.

  She talks with Jesse a bit longer; the great horde of people streaming up the mountainside continues to wind its way up toward Monte Alban. The rain is warm, at least, and thinning as they go; she knows there are a thousand things that need her attention, but even being warm and sweaty, she loves being in a young body, climbing a mountain in a strange country, wondering what everyone around her is thinking. She can feel, though, that Mary Ann is getting a bit impatient at having a more than passive passenger, and in all fairness, after all, it’s Mary Ann’s life. So with a sigh inside, and a final flash of gratitude to Mary Ann, Brittany Lynn Hardshaw returns to the dark, stormy afternoon in Charleston, West Virginia.

  The crews with bulldozers and sandbags are beginning to win the battle; the streets are now roaring torrents, but they are controlled torrents, carrying water off, and they are no longer threatening to rise above their sandbag-wall banks. Somehow in the past few minutes, a dozen or so messages trickling in from the city have begun to tell the story; Charleston is going to make it, and with Charleston, the Federal government. They’re still in touch with thousands of little offices everywhere, and with about half the defense bases.

  Hardshaw stands up, groaning, accepts another cup of coffee and a lot of warm praise for her speech. She reflects that she still has a United States a lot bigger, in people and land area, than Lincoln did. And if the storm is going to stop—and Louie and Carla say it is—then there will be a frontier again, the empty lands between the mountains and the new coastlines. With a bit of luck, maybe there’s still something about Americans that will respond well to a frontier….

  Perhaps next week she’ll sweet-talk Congress into doing something about the damned silly Twenty-Second Amendment. She wouldn’t mind being the first third-term president since FDR, not if there’s all this rebuilding to do, and a new frontier to develop.

  They all look startled to see the President of the United States, bowl of convenience-store chili in one hand and immense cup of coffee in the other, laugh out loud. She doesn’t tell them what it’s about. It doesn’t matter. They respond to the motion, not to the direction, and are comforted.

  By nightfall, two hours later, desks are piled with papers and a steady stream of orders is flowing out through the net to Federal officials everywhere. Right now, they’re mostly just counting the dead and the lost, and they don’t even know for sure where the Mississippi is entering the Gulf of Mexico—or where the Gulf of Mexico has bulged in to—but they’re on their way. The Federal Reserve is the chairman plus eight volunteers from the UWV Business School and forty computers; DoD has fewer generals than President Monroe got through the War of 1812 with; State, Interior, and Commerce are departments trying to find their subject matters—but it’s all there. It hasn’t fallen.

  And at one small corner of a hotel, near the freeways on the edge of town, the Charleston office of the FBI is now officially the FBI. There are four agents, only one of whom was in Washington before the storm, arguing about what they can usefully do in the next few days, when suddenly their one computer beeps.

  They turn to look at the screen, and they see what is being downloaded into memory: A REPORT ON THE LOCATION OF KEY WITNESSES AND EVIDENCE IN THE ASSASSINATIONS OF HARRIS DIEM, DIOGENES CALLARE, AND CARLA TYNAN, DEPOSITION BY CARLA TYNAN.

  One of them is on the phone to the Attorney General immediately, only to find that she already has it. Whatever Louie and Carla are now, neither of them has any more patience with procedures and chains of command than they ever did.

  The quietest patch of sky in the Northern Hemisphere is the one right above Novokuznetsk; there’s not even cloud cover. John Klieg and Glinda Gray are sitting outside now, in the early summer sunlight. “So it’s not ours anymore? Don’t they have to pay us anything?” She doesn’t really seem as bewildered as her question; he realizes she’s just checking.

  “I’m afraid not. The U.S. Constitution—if there’s still a U.S.—wouldn’t let them take property without compensation, but we sure aren’t in the U.S. anymore. Always the danger in doing business overseas—getting nationalized.”

  “Are they going to let us leave?”

  “Probably, but if you check the news I’d just as soon stay put a while. Right now everyone’s still giving us credit; with a little luck we can wait till the storm blows over, then get back to the States.” He reaches out and takes her hand. “You might figure that what we’re going to do is take a long vacation—or a honeymoon, if we can find someone to marry us. Maybe one of these Siberian guys with the horns on his hat will shake a rattle over us or something.”

  She glances sideways at him, letting her hair fall onto her face, and it gets to him like it always does. “Is that a proposal, boss? Are you aware of the sexual harassment laws?”

  “We’re outside the United States, remember?”

  “Well, damn, then I guess I’ll have to accept. So we stick around here and let the restaurants and hotels give us credit because they all figure we’re rich—”

  “And because the American government is hiring us to get space launches flying, so we will have a paycheck. And before our welcome is entirely worn out, we’ll skip town and leave our debts behind us.”

  “Why, Mr. Klieg, how appalling.”

  “You bet. Back to the States, I think. They’re going to be doing a lot of rebuilding—which means lumber and concrete and steel, all that stuff, is going to be flowing around the economy. All I have to do is borrow some money here and there—and god knows there are enough bankers with faith in me—and get control of some of that stuff, and we’re on our way again. I would bet that owning all the cement plants, or all the railroad yards, in an area where they’re trying to rebuild, is going to be worth a pile. Hell, they’ll want a domestic space launch facility soon enough, and I’m experienced at building an uninterruptible launch service.”

  She leans against him and he lets his arm slide around her. It’s a funny thing, he knows that many people have suffered a lot these last few months, and he’s lost a trillion bucks himself—has to be the first private businessman in history to do that—but somehow or other he doesn’t mind a bit. It’s the building up, not the having, that matters to him.

  “You just don’t despair, do you, John?”

  “Not a damn bit. As long as there are two people out there who can do things for each other, there’s a way for me to get between them and get a piece of it. Things are going to be moving around in the USA again—they’ve got new frontiers in all directions—and if you read your history, it’s the guys like me who got rich off it. If you know where you got your money, you always know where you can get more.” He kisses her tenderly. “Might be a lot of fun, to tell the truth; things had gotten a little dull this last decade, after we got too big to have to scramble. And one thing this last year has taught me is to love things that are real and tangible—like you, and Derry, and spending time with each other—instead of putting all my attention on silly abstractions like patents. I don’t think I’ll bother with technology again—it was all right in its way, but they can take it away from you so easily. When a man wants know-how, he can always just take it, use it, and not pay you; when you’ve got the only rail line, or the only steel mill or electric power plant or antimatter generator, anywhere near him, he’ll pay you and be damned glad to do it.”

  Glinda snuggles closer. “Why, boss, you’re making speeches. And besides, until yesterday you had the only working space launch facility on Earth—”

  “But in Siberia. That’s why we’re going back to the States, sweetheart. It’s not the kind of place where they’d ever take your railroad or your steel mill away from you.”

  They sit for a long time, and talk mostly about how they’ll get things together enough for the trip back to t
he United States. Already he’s gotten enough off the net to know that Las Vegas is making it through just fine—and west of there, right now, there’s almost nothing reporting. He’s found the frontier—all he has to do is get there and get his toll gates up and his imprint on things people need. There might be a couple of tight years, but Derry—and maybe a brother or sister or two—will never have to work a day in her life, and isn’t that what life is all about? Building a secure future?

  Above them, the blue skies of August roll on, occasional fluffy white clouds never blotting out the sun, and they stick around, like a couple of kids, to watch the first test shot, a morning satellite launch, rise on a pillar of flame and leave a white contrail streaking across the deep blue.

  They’re getting near the top, and Mary Ann and Jesse are holding hands and talking as they walk. “Can you feel them inside you right now?” Jesse asks.

  “Carla comes and goes. She’s very nice, really—quite courteous about the whole thing. Louie is a little abrupt but I like him.” She pushes stray hair away from her face. With no makeup and her dirty jeans and T-shirt plastered to her by the rain and sweat, Mary Ann still has a cartoonish body, but she looks oddly human, as if with just a bit more effort she might blend right back into the human race she was dragged out of. Jesse likes that.