Mother of Storms

^TWO VORTEX

JUNE–JULY 2028

THERE ARE FEW places on Earth more empty than 8N 142W. In latitude, 0 is the equator, 90 is the pole. In longitude, London is 0 and the International Date Line is 180.

So the point is about eight degrees north—not very far above the equator—and 142 degrees west—most of the way around from London. What is there, besides an intersection of imaginary lines, is water and air.

At the bottom of the sea, 4,800 meters below the water, there is only darkness, high pressure, and cold; the plains of mud rise and roll in low foothills that will become mountains farther to the west. There is a dribble of dead things from the surface, but not much even of that; the area above is a marine desert.

Temperature does not rise rapidly until you’re near the surface; the last 150 meters, suddenly, are part of the world of light and air above, but there is so little there for anything to eat that the water is clear, warm, and empty.

Above the water, laced with the extra methane, the air has gotten very, very warm during the long equatorial day; the water, heated by the sun, has given off its heat upward as infrared, but the methane is black as night to the infrared and the air has warmed and rewarmed, swirling around to reheat the water.

The sea surface is alive with small breezes and with the great swirl of the trade winds; here a bit of air rises and draws air toward itself, there cooled air slides back down to the sea and skids across its surface. It happens, by chance, that there are places where the air piles together, and just after sunrise—not long after six in the morning, here—that was happening at the sea surface. The warm air from the sea around blew inward to this crossing of imaginary lines, and a little mountain of warmer air began to form there.

This lumpy, invisible mountain of warm, wet air, at first, towered no more than ten thousand feet high. There are many taller peaks in the Rockies.

But above the warm, wet air of the sea surface, there is other air, cooler, dryer. Eighteen kilometers—a distance you could drive in ten minutes on a good highway—straight up, there is another imaginary line, the tropopause. Below the tropopause, the decreasing pressure and the increasing distance from the Earth’s warm surface make temperature fall with altitude; above the tropopause, hard ultraviolet light falling in from space heats the thin wisp of atmosphere, so that temperature rises with altitude, since the outermost air gets the most ultraviolet (and shades the air below it). Thus the tropopause is in one sense a line on temperature plot—it is only the height at which the air is coldest.

Yet the tropopause is not quite so imaginary as the lines of latitude and longitude. It has a real consequence; air below the tropopause cannot rise above it easily. Think of lumpy, irregular building blocks made of lead, wood, and plastic foam; if you pile them in that order, the system is stable and hard to turn over; if you put plastic foam on the bottom and lead on the top, the structure will fall over easily.

Cold air is heavy like lead; warm air is light like plastic foam. In the troposphere, the warm air is on the bottom and the system rolls over constantly; in the stratosphere, warm air is on the top, and thus the stratosphere resists being turned over. When a stream of warm air rises through the troposphere to the tropopause, it cannot turn over the stratospheric layers above it, and thus cannot rise farther; instead, it spreads out under the tropopause.

The underside of the tropopause, like the face of the ocean, is stirred constantly with winds and currents; sometimes they pile together, and sometimes they pull apart. It happened, at about 7:45 in the morning locally, that directly above the mountain of air piled together on the sea, the winds began to pull apart along the tropopause.

Thus the warm air below, already tending to rise, was being pushed from around its outside, and at the same time the pressure above it fell. Like a bubble breaking from the bottom of a boiling pot, the mountain of warm air broke from the face of the sea, rose to the tropopause, and was torn apart and scattered by the winds there.

Where the mountain of warm air had been, it left a hole—and more warm air rushed in to fill it, making a newer and bigger mountain, which in turn was drawn up into the troposphere and scattered, making another mountain—

For fifty kilometers around, at sea level, air began to rush toward 8N 142W, and at tropopause level, to flow away from it.

And as this happened, the Coriolis force—the force on moving objects on the Earth’s surface caused by the Earth’s rotation, familiar because it complicates missile flights and makes it hard to play Ping-Pong on a fast-moving merry-go-round-bent the north-moving air westward, and the south-moving air eastward; in either case, forcing the air to turn left, so that by 9:10 A.M. the air had begun to spiral as it fell inward to the center of low pressure. By now, air was coming from as far away as 100 kilometers.

As it spiraled inward, it picked up heat from the sea, sped up, packed in more closely around the central column; it became harder and harder for more warm air to push its way into the center and up the column, now kilometers thick, of rising warm air.

The carrying of so much warm air up into the cold air above has been having other effects too. As the air above spreads out, cools, and falls, water condenses, and big thick thunderheads have been forming all around the column of hot air, making it look a bit like a giant mushroom cloud; the falling cold air and the general agitation of the winds in the area have already lashed the cumulonimbus clouds into a storm, and their rapid circulation has separated big electric charges, so that the sea becomes dark under a bank of heavy clouds, and lightning flashes and warm rain are everywhere.

The moment comes now.

The inward-spiraling air piling up around the base of the rising column has become too thick for more air to force its way through; the ring of thick air around the column moves faster and faster as more air is added to it, and rises up the outside of the column, sheathing it in whirling, rising wind. The central column, deprived of its new air, empties until pressure is far below normal; the corkscrew of rising air around it reaches the tropopause and begins to pump the rising hot air out along the tropopause boundary with far greater efficiency.

As the top of the storm moves more air outward, the bottom sucks more in. The spiraling gets faster every minute. The distance from which the storm can draw new warm air increases just as quickly.

Clouds in the ring of fast-moving air are torn to shreds and form a fast-moving white wall; clouds in the column are pulled out of it and vanish, leaving a clear sky above a savagely foaming green sea.

The central column has become an eye, and the storm is now a hurricane.

The biggest problem with being lovelorn in Tapachula, Jesse decides, is that it’s such a damned friendly place that in a couple of weeks everyone not only knows about the final breakup with Naomi, but has significant advice for him. The advice seems to break down into the macho, which he gets from men, to the effect that it is time to forget the chica and get on with finding another one; the romantic, which comes mainly from older women, to the effect that all he needs to do is remain steadfast in his passion and that even if he doesn’t get Naomi he will still be a very beautiful boy; and the pragmatic, which he gets from the three teenage whores he walks past on his way home from work each evening, to the effect that getting over it can be accomplished physiologically by a few simple procedures they would be happy to demonstrate.

He always smiles politely and listens intently to the macho and romantic advice; the pragmatic advice gives him an occasional urge to try it out, but not enough to really consider the indignity.

Tapachula is otherwise not a bad place for a broken heart. The strange square-shaped topiary trees of the Zócalo create thousands of dark, deep shadows, perfect for staring into and imagining Naomi coming out of; there are cafés all the way around the east and south sides of the Zócalo, so that there are plenty of places for sitting and drinking while he nurses the broken heart.

Moreover, evenings bring the evening promenade. It doesn’t resemble the tourist guidebook descriptions of “gallant young men in colorful Latin high-fashion and flashing-eyed señoritas under the watchful gaze of dour chaperoning aunts”—but then, what tourist would come to see “guys who worked all day in the factory take a shower and put on their good clothes, and go out to flirt with young women who’ve done the same thing”? It would sound too much like going to the mall back home.

Yet if the promenade doesn’t much resemble the guidebooks, for Jesse it’s still very nice. Jesse looks like a juvenile lead in a twentieth sort of way; anyone looking at him can see him as the Rookie Cop, the Green Deputy, the Daring Kid Pilot, the Brilliant Young Doctor—in every case the hero-to-be, and as a result, most of the young women going by have been trained to find men who look like Jesse attractive, even though there aren’t many locally. Being broken-hearted is a lot more fun when every few minutes someone gives you an artful shake of long, thick black hair, or a sideways glance that reveals a cute smile, white flashing teeth, and—with the hips turned just right—a blouse pulled tight across a high, firm breast, or a short skirt clinging to taut young buttocks. For a broken heart it’s almost as good as the local beer.

And in its odd way it’s helping him in his work, because since he doesn’t respond to any particular girl, he doesn’t seem to induce any jealousy in any of the young men he works with. They seem to find his love life to be a sort of shared bond between them; it’s the kind of thing a young Mexican man might get into for a few months, though in the back of his head Jesse knows that it’s only his family income that lets him indulge it for so long—since he doesn’t have to get a wife to move out of his parents’ house, he doesn’t have to worry about any eventual opportunities passing him by while he wears his mask of melancholy.

There are other benefits, he knows. He’s finally really mastered the basic engineering curriculum, because he’s been teaching the equivalent of his freshman and sophomore years, one way and another, for two months now, in Spanish, and somehow the combination of having to put it into other words and other structures, plus having to repeat explanations of it so often, has ingrained it into his brain. He knows, without false modesty, that when he goes back to U of the Az, getting Masterys in his classes will be no great problem.

Most nights he sits in a sidewalk café and drinks at a nice steady three beers an hour, enough to get him good and drunk at the end of three hours so that, after eating cena, he can wander home and grab some sleep.

Often one of his students—maybe bored with the promenade, maybe curious about Jesse, or perhaps just hoping that by sitting next to Jesse he will fall into the field of vision of one of the women going by—will sit down and drink with him for a while. Usually that means getting drunker faster, since it almost always leads to a rivalry about who can buy whom more beer.

It’s on such nights that he gets more macho advice, and they sit and discuss the bodies on the women going by—along with Naomi’s body. Jesse sometimes thinks that ought to bother him, but it doesn’t really—and after all, how much did he ever really know about her besides that he liked her body and that to get at it he’d have to believe all kinds of strange Deeper shit?

This seems like an almost philosophic thought, and fortunately he has José, who is inclined to philosophy, to talk to tonight. It takes him a while to explain the question, about whether he should feel guilty or ashamed about not feeling guilty or ashamed, not because José is slow but because José is quite drunk—he started a while before Jesse and is working on it harder and faster.

Finally, Jesse gets the whole question explained carefully to José; does he owe it to Naomi to feel guilty that after all their time and conversations together, it’s not the conversations or her mind he misses, or even the big brown eyes and soft hair, but just the feel of her full, soft breast in his hand? Should Jesse try harder to feel more appropriate feelings?

José considers this a long time. Twice he holds up a finger as if to begin speaking, and once he sits back with an expression of someone who has finally solved a problem, but each time he hesitates and then does not speak.

Jesse nods emphatically, to show that he understands how difficult the question can be, and signals the tall waiter (who always appears to be smiling slightly, as if every customer had just done something a little bit amusing, or perhaps was dressed just a little wrong). Two more beers, the kind of slightly salty, tart lager they make around here to go with all the seafood, appear silently at Jesse and José’s elbows, as José continues to struggle with the problem of just how much guilt is owned to Naomi.

Jesse takes a small swallow of his, appreciating the cold clarity on his teeth, and realizes he’s not far from being drunk himself.

José’s focus gets suddenly sharper and clearer, and at last he speaks. “No.”

“No?”

“No, compadre, no.”

“You don’t think there’s anything wrong with just thinking of Naomi as a great body?”

“A great body?” Jose asks.

“You know. Big tits.”

“Yes, she does.”

Jesse begins to suspect something, and leans back to look at José more closely. It’s late in the day, and this dose to the equator it’s dark by seven-thirty even in the summer, so all he’s seeing are the highlights of José’s face in the flaring yellow of the candle; his eyes are in deep pools of shadow and unreadable. At last, Jesse asks, “Do you remember what the original question was?”

“No. But the answer is still no, compadre.” José grins at him. “Because for one reason or another, paco, the only questions you ask are should you do more about Naomi, and the answer to that, always, is no.”

Jesse nods slowly, a time or two, and says, “You are right.”

“I know I’m right.”

“I have been spending too much time here getting drunk and thinking about her, haven’t I?”

“Too much time thinking about her, anyway.”

“Perhaps early dinner and bed are what I should do this evening, then,” Jesse says.

“I will be sorry to lose the friend to drink with, but it’s your health, Jesse.” José’s face is unexpectedly serious. “Friendship matters, but it matters that you look after yourself too. If you go have a few days without hangovers, and get your strength and health back, then perhaps you and I will catch the bus over to the coast, do some fishing in the morning, then spend the afternoon on the beach looking for bored gringas in their tiny little bathing suits; you can do the talking and I will attend to the physical side. But you get better first, you haven’t been looking well.”

Jesse stands up and drops a little too much cash on the table, so that he’s covering his share and most of José’s, and says “I think I have better friends down here than I had realized.”

“We are better at friendship than you are, and we make better beer. On the other hand, you still have the best hamburgers and the best cop movies.” José says that with such pompous solemnity that Jesse all but falls back into his chair laughing. As his laughter subsides, José stands, completes the pile of cash on the table, and says, “Let’s walk together part of the way.”

As they go up the brightly lighted avenida, north along the side of the Zócalo, Jesse begins, for the first time, to really look back at some of the women looking at him; that seems to create flurries of giggles and looking away. He suspects that if he smiled at one in particular, they’d all stop looking at him entirely.

José notices and touches his shoulder gently. “You see how much easier it is to recover when you do it like a Mexican.”

They part company a block after leaving the Zócalo, and Jesse is pleasantly surprised to realize that he is not at all drunk and that he will probably get a lot of sleep tonight; it’s just barely time for early cena, and he’s not hungry, so he decides to go straight back to the little bungalow and get some sleep.

As he turns into one dim street, he sees that the woman coming his way has red hair. This is odd enough for him to turn and look at her in the light; thus he sees that she’s wearing a very loose flannel shirt over a big, floppy denim skirt and a pair of sandals. She looks like she’d fit right in at one of the centers or schools in the area, but Jesse knows practically every norteamericano for fifty kilometers around—the different social services outfits throw everyone together frequently—and he doesn’t recall seeing her.

Of course she just might be a tourist, but nobody wears the Left Uniform anymore unless they mean it, and nobody Left goes anywhere as a tourist—they always go somewhere to take a workshop or to work for some service. So chances are overwhelming she’s new… and if Jesse is any judge, one reason for the floppy clothes is that she’s built at least as well as Naomi. It’s not so much that a plan forms in his brain as that he sees an opportunity and jumps at it before it has time to slip away. “Hey, you’re not from around here,” he says, in English, taking the main chance that she’s from the States, Ontario, Pacificanada, or Alaska, rather than Quebec.

“No shit,” she says, but she smiles at him as she says it. There’s something familiar about the smile, and he takes a step closer to see if maybe it’s just someone he didn’t recognize.

She takes a step back and for a moment he thinks he’s frightened her—or then again maybe she doesn’t want him to see her clearly, since she’s just thrown a long shadow over her face. He can now see that her hair, backlit by the streetlight, is extremely red, one of those shades you get only by injection.

He doesn’t come any closer, but he does say, “Are you with any of the organizations operating down here? Everybody parties together all the time, so I’d have thought I’d recognize you, unless you’re new.”

“Well, I’m not new down here—I’ve been here for quite a while on vacation,” she says, “and the truth is that I’m wearing this outfit because it really hides my body, and I’ve got the kind that gets a lot of attention from the real machos around here, especially when you add in the hair and the pale skin. It’s just that usually I can take a walk in the evening, if I stick to safe streets, without getting bothered.”

“Oh—um, sorry,” Jesse says, and turns to go.

“That’s okay, I didn’t mean you, particularly. But if by any chance my figure is what caught your eye, I should probably tell you I’m an old woman. Past thirty—not even close to what you’re looking for.” She steps forward now, and Jesse sees that even though she’s obviously had them abraded regularly, there are little crow’s feet around her eyes, and some lines around her mouth, and—well, more than that, there’s something in her expression that just says she’s lived a while and a few things have hit her pretty hard. He suddenly feels like he’s three feet tall and wearing Dr. Denton’s.

She’s still great looking, though, and he finds himself blurting out, “Uh, I guess I’m too young if you say I am, but you are definitely not too old.”

That one gets a grin from her, and it’s so warm and friendly that he smiles back and relaxes. This little encounter might be kind of strange but it’s fun in its way.

The redhaired woman takes another step closer, and she’s flirting with him, but not in the way that he’s used to from girls his own age, with all the come here-go away come here-go away. The smile is open and warm, and he has a strange feeling that she might be more interested than he is; and he’s pretty interested.

“That’s a really sweet thing to say,” she says to him. “Can I ask—uh, this will sound arrogant and stupid—do you know who I am?”

“It doesn’t sound arrogant or stupid,” he says, taking another step. “You do look like someone I ought to know, maybe someone I knew a long time ago—”

“Did you ever experience the news via Rock or Quaz?”

His jaw drops; he’s never had that particular sensation before, but he’s lucky it’s only his jaw muscles that go loose, because he also feels weak in the knees and he just might want to faint.

“You’re Synthi Venture?” He can’t believe he’s asking her that, or that this is happening in a dusty little side street in Tapachula, of all places.

“At the moment I’m Mary Ann Waterhouse, and I’m on vacation. But yeah, that’s what I do for a living. So have you ever… um…” She stands with her legs a little apart and puts her hands behind her back; it thrusts her huge breasts forward and sways her pelvis as if to move it against him.

He’s glad it’s dark, because though he never thought anyone could make him blush, his skin is burning hot right now; he feels like a little boy. His voice comes out as sort of a dry squeak—“You were my favorite in high school.”

“And that was what, only three or four years ago?” she asks, a teasing smile opening up her face to him. “You know they do a light fuzzing on the images, don’t you, so that I still look only about twenty in those things?”

“Uh, you still look… um, really good—”

“Compliments are always welcome, but not too many on the state of my preservation, please.” Then, amazingly, she presses the shirt down on her stomach, so that he can see how huge, and how high, her breasts really are; she’s kind of a freak, and he’s not quite as turned on as he was a second before. “So are they any better in real life?”

“I—” He gulps. “I really…”

“Your line is ‘I really like them.’ Followed by a hint that you’d like to go somewhere alone with me.” She winks at him and licks her lips; her hands brush her thighs, pulling the skirt inward, and Jesse feels completely like a kid. Now she steps closer to him and says, “You do like the way I look, don’t you?”

He nods, confused and not sure at all what else he’s feeling.

“Then why don’t you come back to my place, so we can fuck?”

His first thought is that this is a prostitute who has had herself biomodified into a copy of Synthi Venture, and his second thought is that if so, she’s a good enough copy to be worth blowing a month’s salary on. But a high-priced celeb-copy prostitute isn’t likely to be in a backwater Mexican town and certainly wouldn’t be coming on to him like a streetwalker—hell, she’s cruder than the streetwalkers in front of his place.

But if it really is Synthi Venture—and the closer he stands to her, the surer he is—

She reaches up, takes his face in her hands, pulls his mouth down to hers, and kisses him, a big, wet, slobbery kiss with her lips completely open and slack and her tongue sliding deep into his mouth. He wasn’t ready for it, and he’s not sure he likes it, especially not when she begins to thrust against his leg, but at the same time he can feel an erection shoving against his jeans. He stops resisting and lets her do what she wants; her hand is inside his shirt, her fingers playing with his nipples, and then back outside, sliding over his belt, slim fingers tapping lightly on the thick denim, just enough so that he can feel her hand on his penis. He presses his crotch against her and she whispers, “Now, no talking. Back to my place. We’re going to do everything you always wanted to do with me, and then we can talk. Or not. I don’t really care if you don’t want to do anything except the physical.”

She takes his hand and he trails along like a zombie; it’s as if somehow he had just walked right out of real reality and into XV without noticing. This is the kind of thing that happens to Rock, maybe, or happened to Rock when he was younger—in fact, it’s almost exactly what happened to Rock in Assignment in Singapore, the long documentary in which Rock went undercover to investigate the trade in very-high-priced Caucasian prostitutes. But that was with Starla, the one whose career was cut short when she was murdered while plugged in, the “forbidden wedge” everyone claims to know someone who can get.

Distracted, trying to understand it all, he takes as much note as he can of the surroundings, as if one small unreal something, somewhere, might persuade him that he’s just having a vivid dream. The street is soft with dust—it’s been a day or two since it rained—and the air is warm, as evenings always are here. The houses stand back from the street and in this middle-class district of small, whitewashed houses behind white garden walls, they might as well be in Los Angeles—if LA were ever this quiet, or if you could ever see the stars between the lights there.

She guides his hand onto her shoulder, and this is almost like walking with Naomi or a dozen other girls—except that none of them took a hard, rude grip on one of his buttocks like that. He shies, but she slides farther under his arm, pulling his hand down onto the top of her breast.

He has a strange, strangled urge to laugh when he realizes that it is as big as her head. He just wishes that something so ridiculous weren’t also so exciting. “Ever squeeze a celebrity tit?” she asks him.

“N—no. Why are we—”

“Shh. No why just yet. See those two men coming?”

“Yeah.” They look like any two regular guys in this regular working town, he thinks to himself; probably they’ve just finished up work, gone home to play with the kids and talk to the wife a little, now they’re out for a little light meal and some beer together—

He really hopes she won’t involve them in this weirdness, whatever it is.

One voice in the back of his mind is pointing out that she doesn’t have him at gunpoint or anything, he can just say, “Uh, Synthi, Miss Waterhouse, whatever you’re calling yourself, this is just too weird and I’m going to walk away from it—”

And he knows he should, on another level. This kind of thing is okay in XV, but in the first place even though he has all his shots up to date, there are new kinds of AIDS and SPM and ARTS showing up every few months and he figures he’s never met anyone so likely to introduce him to the latest variety, from the way she’s acting. Shit, beside the risks, if she’s doing this, she’s at least half crazy, and god knows what she might do when they’re alone—hurt him, or pull out a Self Defender, a razor, or anything. He wonders what would happen if they found a Leftie with a bullet hole in him, a big XV star with traces of his sperm in her, and she said she did it after he raped her. Do the cops here even pick up the radio burst from a Self Defender?

He shudders, slightly, and she uses the motion—suddenly his hand is down inside her shirt, under her bra. He has a startled moment of realizing that it doesn’t feel soft and tender, like most big breasts, or even full and ripe the way Naomi’s do—it feels like a slightly underinflated automobile tire. He can feel a ridge or two under the skin that must be the artificial ligaments they put in there to keep these things up.

She bumps up against him, and the two men notice the way she’s moving and stare at them as she goes by. She’s squirming around, and she whispers to Jesse, “Come on, reach in.” As if he’s hypnotized, Jesse slides his hand forward, bringing that big mass of red hair close to his face—it smells funny and he realizes that she’s perfumed it with something, and used too much—and finds he is clutching a nipple as big as a Ping-Pong ball.

She squeals, straightens up under his arm, moans and gasps. Her hand, outside her shirt, closes over his underneath, and she rubs up and down, panting and then groaning.

The two men stare at them. Jesse wants to look at the dirt at his feet, but if he does, his attention will concentrate on the moaning in his ear and the huge tough-surfaced breast under his hand. So he does look up, and he sees the carefully polished shoes, the tailored pants, the spotless ironed white shirts—and the fascinated stare. They aren’t excited, particularly, or eager, or anything like that—what they are doing, he knows, is looking at another rude gringo couple that has no idea how to behave in public.

Synthi seems to be having a full-blown orgasm; they stare at her as if she were part of a sideshow, and one of them waves, almost shyly, at Jesse, as if in salute at his conquest. He wants to tell them this is not him, this is not what he’s like or who he is—but they’ve turned and gone already.

She subsides and takes his hand in hers again, holding it over her shoulder. “God, it feels good to fake an orgasm and not have ten million people over my shoulder knowing it’s fake. So how do you like the industrial knockers?”

“I, they’re—”

“They don’t feel much like real ones, do they? But wait till you see them slapping up and down while I ride you. Come on, the house I’m renting is right around the corner. Mind you, the servants are not going to approve—Mrs. Herrera is a dear, but really twentieth, and her husband Tomás is much more a gardener than a butler—no wink-and-nudge ability at all, if you know what I mean—”

He’s pulled around the corner, still not sure what he feels about all of this. The feeling in his stomach is mostly butterflies, as if he were going to throw up, and his legs feel rubbery, but on the other hand he can’t remember ever being this erect.

Abstractly, he thinks maybe it’s just a matter of years and years of programming to want this instead of a woman, and that if he could just step back for a minute and think, he wouldn’t be anywhere near this—

Another part of him is growling that this might be his only chance and he has to know what it’s really like.

The “little house” she is renting might make an apartment building for four Tapachulan families in the better part of town; in fact, he’s walked by here many times and if he’d thought about it that’s what he’d have assumed it was. As they approach the door, it opens—apparently the small, muscular, beautifully dressed man who opens the door has nothing more pressing to do than watch the path.

Despite her warning, the servant appears neither surprised nor disapproving; he nods and says, “Miss Waterhouse. Will you be—”

“We’re going directly to the master bedroom, Señor Herrera,” she says, “and after that, perhaps the gentleman will be staying to a late dinner.”

To Jesse it seems that they float up the long marble staircase, and into the big room that looks like nothing so much as an old movie set. There’s a lot of red velvet around, and maybe that was sexy once but what it looks like to him is a restored movie theater, the kind they fix up in Oaxaca or San Cristóbal for the tourist trade. His head is spinning—maybe he had a little more beer than he thought he did, and they went up that staircase pretty fast.

One advantage Jesse found out about long ago with what Leftie girls wear—it comes off in a flash and there are a lot of ways to get a hand under it. In this case it seems to take Synthi Venture, if it’s really her, only a breath to kick off the sandals, undo three or four buttons, and then whip off the shirt, unfasten the front catch on the bra, and yank down skirt and underwear together.

Jesse is stunned; the hair really is red, not the shade of normal human hair and not rough like most dye jobs make it, but natural, soft, wavy human hair the color that red hair is in an old comic book, and the little tuft of it that doesn’t quite hide her labia is a shade brighter. She gives a loud giggle, and for the first time he realizes that she’s really drunk, or high on god knows what (she can probably afford and get anything), or maybe she has just cranked up the happy center in her brain into the red zone, supposedly XV stars are wired to do that.

She does a little pirouette, and now he sees the thin white scars on her ass and her thighs where they sewed her into the “perfect” shape, and as she turns around he sees, ever so faintly, a kind of strange surface under the skin of her belly and knows that they put a sheath in there to hold her tighter than her own abdominal wall can.

And now that they are out in the open, the enormous, outsized breasts have visible scars too, places where they were reshaped and rebuilt. At fifty feet, or in dim light, or through the sort of vague gauze that is imposed by XV, she would look impossibly, magically perfect; but here, up close, in the plain light of the overdone bedroom, he can see how the trick is done, and once you’ve seen how it’s done the magic is over.

He thinks for an instant that he will lose his erection, and then he looks into her eyes. They are pale blue, and under the abraded crow’s feet, he sees a strange set to them, a kind of desperate look, and somehow or other the thought that forms in his mind is that—god knows why, but there it is—what she wants is him, that she’s so hungry for him that she’ll do anything, that if he turns and goes now she’ll weep for hours, and that she will be grateful if he just uses her.

She is coming on like a cheap whore behind schedule, not because she’s enjoying it but because she has to know whether he will reject her. All this comes to him in an instant, before he knows how he knows it.

He wants to think it’s empathy, that he can relate to rejection fear because of Naomi, but that’s not true at all. It’s knowing how little Naomi would approve of this, that it would make her feel shoddy to know that this crude horny old bitch was going to give him at least as much pleasure as all her sensitive gentleness.

It’s knowing that feeling of power, knowing that if he wanted to he could call Synthi a horny old bitch and she’d still do whatever he wanted just so he would take her in any way at all. And a part of him that he’d never thought about, too, is that he knows that in a month this woman can have more of everything than he can ever have in his life, that things he would have to plan and work for years to do, she can do on a whim—just plain sheer envy that she can get all that, and get it mostly from people like him, entirely with her cartoon body and crude acting. There’s the thought of at least making her pay for it by, just once, really giving him what he’s dreamed about through Rock and Quaz and all the others for so much of the last ten years.

It doesn’t come to him in words at all, but the feeling is deep and cold and lusts to hurt. He likes it. He grabs her hair close to her neck and mashes her mouth with a hard, chewing kiss, and she doesn’t even wince; she just pulls his other hand to her crotch, and he jabs his thumb into her vagina, hard, suddenly, wanting her to be dry so that she’ll scream—

Instead, she is wet and already open, and she flows around him and moans with pleasure. Her hands are on his belt, undoing his jeans, pulling his penis out, and she’s much too rough, hurting him, but he’s too excited to care. She stands up on her toes and slides down over it, so that the first time takes about one minute, and he doesn’t even get time to get his pants below his knees.

She doesn’t let him rest, or even look down to see if he’s scratched and bruised; she has him in her mouth at once, and yanks his jeans and underwear down to his ankles so fast and hard that he almost falls over.

The next half hour or so is a blur; she’s rough with him and crude, and he never seems to get a moment to breathe. His penis is so sore that he’s practically in tears, and there’s an empty ache in his scrotum from being drained repeatedly; he avenges himself by slapping those grotesque breasts, by choking her with deep thrusts of his penis, and toward the end of it all he gives her a sudden, hard fist up the anus just to see if there’s anything she will say no to.

Finally he is limp, sore, hurting, and her rough hand trying to bring him up again is unbearable. His head and stomach ache, and he has a vague feeling that if this goes on much longer he might throw up. As he looks at her now, with all desire pulled out of it—and with the red rage dying out of him as welt—he sees nothing but desperation and hunger, and abruptly pushes her hands away and backs off.

She stands there panting, frantic, and finally says, “Shit, are you okay?”

This is not exactly what he’s been expecting. He looks down to see that his penis is bruised and scraped, with a little bit of blood welling to the surface in a couple of places. All at once he can really feel it, and he leans forward, holding it. “Oh, god, oww w.”

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“Did anyone ever tell you you’re really fucked up, lady?” He’s had blood contact, so if she’s got anything he’s not vaccinated for then his chances of having it are really good, his dick feels like he’s had it in the blender, and he can’t believe what he’s just let himself get into. He needs out of here, and a doctor.

And to piss. They say you can piss stuff off your mucus membranes if you do it right away. He looks frantically, sees the private bath, rushes in and pisses like a horse, a big stream of it—beer and fear combined—and it bums like acid. “Shit, how many guys have you done this with? What the fuck is the matter with you?”

She’s starting to sob. “Just you. I mean really just you.”

“You expect me to believe that?” He’s yanking on his shirt and buttoning it frantically. “God, I can’t believe I did this, I can’t believe I let myself come here—”

Now she’s crying outright. “I don’t have anything, really, really, I don’t, you’re the first since I started this vacation and the net gives us a full set of prompt tests every three days. I’m sorry I hurt you but I haven’t killed you, I haven’t, uh—” She stares at him blankly.

His pants are in hand and he’s fishing his underwear out, but he hesitates a moment; at least she sounds like she means it.

“God, what the hell am I? I didn’t even ask you your name.”

“Jesse Callare.” He pulls the underwear out more slowly and asks, “Do you have any kind of ointment or something? I’m hurt.”

“Oh, shit, Jesse, I’m really sorry.” She dashes into the bathroom and brings out a tube of hemorrhoid painkiller, a spray antibiotic, and a disposable antiseptic wipe. “At least let me clean you up and put this on it. I’ll be gentle, I promise, I didn’t want to do that to you.”

She kneels in front of him, and before he can flinch away she has the wipe around it. It stings and he gasps, but she really is gentle and careful, cleaning him off quickly and neatly, then spraying on the antibiotic. “God, I hope all this happened to you after you were in my ass, there’s all kinds of things up there that can infect a cut or a scrape—do you have a doctor you can go to? You can use mine and I’ll pay—”

“You seem awfully concerned, considering,” Jesse says. What she’s doing, after the initial stinging, really is making it feel better, and there’s something comforting about her concern.

She puts on the cream, and it’s amazing how soothing it is; he almost relaxes. “Jesse, Jesse, I can’t believe I did any of that, are you okay?”

“I’ve been better,” he says, gently disentangling himself and continuing to dress. The pain is gone and he’s not nearly so scared.

“I suppose it sounds stupid but I wish you’d stay to dinner. I can try to explain all this and I’d really like to make it up to you.”

It’s a different kind of feeling from what he felt before, but there’s a certain similarity—he couldn’t leave now if his life depended on it, because he’s dying of curiosity. “Sure, I’ll stay. Nobody’s gonna believe what happened to me anyway, might as well have a completely wild story.”

“Just a moment while I slip into something more like me. Hope you don’t mind a baggy sweater and a baggy pair of pants, because that’s what’s comfortable, and I left all the gold lame back in Alaska.”

She’s pulling the stuff on as she says it. Now that they are clothed and know each other’s names, and Jesse is not in pain anymore, they don’t seem to have much to say.

There’s a long awkward silence, and then she says, “Lamb tacos oaxaqueños, is that okay?”

“Uh, what?”

“For cena. Señora Herrera is from Oaxaca province, somewhere up in the hills, so she tends to make those kinds of dishes. I ordered lamb tacos oaxaqueños before I went out and I told her husband, Tomás, that you might be staying to dinner as we came in—remember?”

He grins. “I remember. Yeah, it sounds wonderful. Uh—can I ask—”

“Anything at all, after dinner—but let’s go down and eat together just as if we didn’t know each other and we were only just getting acquainted.”

“Flat with me,” he says, and she reaches out and takes his hand. More than anything else what surprises him is how shy she is about doing that.

President Hardshaw was up most of the night, and when she then comes in early, Harris Diem knows something is up. He keeps right on working at his desk. The buzz in the back of his head is louder than ever, but last night he managed to resist going down to the basement. He derives no pleasure from his resistance.

She has been in the New Oval Office twenty minutes, with no communication with anyone else, when there’s a faint ring. He takes the phone from his belt and plugs it into his screen as he notes the call is coming from Hardshaw.

“Yeah, boss?”

She looks a bit disheveled; what the hell could the President be keeping from him?

“Drop by the office shortly, Harris, we’ve got some big work to do.”

“I’ll bring coffee,” he says, and cues his staff to have the usual pot with two cups waiting for him. He’s not sure why he and the President have kept this ritual all these years, of him bringing the coffee or the food, but he takes a strange comfort in it.

The comfort vanishes utterly when Hardshaw accepts the cup, motions him into a chair, and says, “I did it this morning, Harris, so there’s now no point in arguing. I thought about hundreds of millions dead, I thought about the whole species—and I thought about the fact that America has to live in the world.”

He feels a chill in his stomach. He takes a long sip of the coffee. “Then you spilled the beans to Rivera and the UN? They know the real numbers?”

“And they know that we could have sat on them, and they know that the original NOAA report was intended as a fake. They know it all.”

The buzz in his skull is so loud it feels strange that other people can’t hear it. He thinks for one instant of going down to his basement, selecting one of those wedges… but he fights the thought down. “Then, er—if you’ve already done it, why did you call me here? You must have known I would be opposed to it.”

“Because I need you here, and therefore the country needs you here, when Rivera calls. Which he should be doing any time now.”

As if to agree with her, the phone rings; when Hardshaw answers, the secretary announces, “Secretary-General Rivera, Ms. President.”

“Put him through.”

Rivera’s image pops up on the screen, and he says, “Ms. President, I must first congratulate you on a game well played, and thank you for deciding not to play it against us, for you surely would have succeeded.”

Exactly the thought that’s bothering me, Diem thinks.

Hardshaw nods. “Then you understand all the implications.”

“I do indeed. And I think we have been very fortunate. Not just the UN, but all of us. You have created an important opportunity.”

Hardshaw raises an eyebrow. “I don’t quite see how.”

“The opportunity to prevent Global Riot Two. And then, when the truth is revealed—as it will surely be, for your operation is bound to leak at some point—well, what is more credible than a leak, eh? Far more trustworthy than what any government says.” The Secretary-General is handsome and dapper even at this hour; what Diem had never noticed before was the strange gleam of humor. “You see, when my experts plugged this into our world model, we came up with a chance of around ten percent that there will be no sovereignty at all in the Northern Hemisphere by next year. If so, we want people to have fled the coasts and taken care of themselves. And to have the news believed—that is going to be a very difficult part. People will believe all sorts of absurdities, but not necessarily even the most rational truth if it demands they abandon their homes.”

Diem thinks for a moment, and sees the Sec-Gen’s point. “You believe, then, we should make this a semi-gray operation—try to keep it secret but let it slip out?”

“Exactly.”

Diem glances sideways at the President; she is nodding.

“Well, then,” he says, “perhaps I should just go and get started.”

Eight minutes later, back at his desk, he reflects that she’s done it again, and that his memoirs are getting harder to believe. Someone has to chronicle all this, but he’s not sure it will ever be him.

And the buzz in the back of his head is louder than ever.

The funny thing is, the Austin records are exactly what Randy needed, but they are not doing him any good at all. He’s found five men whose names he didn’t know before, all arrests who were clearly parts of the network that distributed the XV of Kimbie Dee’s murder, all high-level people not more than one or two people from the one he is after. The reason he had not linked them in before was that they didn’t happen to have the wedge of Kimbie Dee in possession at the time of arrest.

But now that he knows and has back-checked, it’s plain as day. They were all connected with at least seven or eight known distributors; they were the ones who sold the copies in bulk. Every one of them helped to finance the people who sent that deformed maniac, dying of cancer, to violate Randy’s little girl, alone in the locker room because she was too shy to shower with the others, and then to hang her from the shower head.

And the only little catch is, they’re all dead. All of them were executed for violations of the Diem Act.

He draws grim satisfaction from it, but for the first time he sees an argument against the death penalty—he’s so close, but he needs one associate of those men who can still talk.

It takes him days to finally come up with a name: Jerren Anders. Currently reprieved from execution, in a hospital for the criminally insane—will you look at this? Back in Boise. Back where it all started. Not ten miles from where Randy’s mobile home used to be.

The old car turns onto the interstate, and Randy is surprised and touched to find he has many more messages than usual—not information, but congratulations. The only ones he answers, just now, are the ones from other parents, brothers, sisters, husbands, boyfriends, wondering about the Austin connection; he sends those everything he has.

During the long night, as the car climbs up out of Colorado and into Wyoming to join I-80, he dreams of Kimbie Dee. She looks like she did in the morgue, but she sits next to him and tosses her blonde ponytail the way she did when she was alive, and says, “Daddy, Daddy, you be careful. You be careful. It might be worse than you think.”

“I’m going to find him,” he tells her.

“It might be worse than you think.” She gives him a little warm peck on the cheek, like she did every morning on her way out the door to school, but he feels that her lips are cold as the morgue’s cooler.

He wakes up shuddering, fixes coffee, sits in the backseat drinking it till the sun comes up as the car pulls into Salt Lake City. He decides to get breakfast and a shower, and have the car freshened, at the next available stop for it. The smell that builds up in these things can get unbelievable.

Later that day he heads up I-15. It’s been a couple of years since he’s been this way. He’s surprised how glad he is to see Idaho again.

Kingman Reef is almost an island; at low tide there’s land, at high tide, shallow water and a few patches of exposed rock; at very high tides, nothing. The steel and concrete towers that rise there now, the North American Orbital Services space-launch facility, have made the place an island indeed, and the population these days is clear up to a thousand people, including about a dozen children.

On Friday, June 16, about six P.M. local time, no one stirs outside the station. The sky is a frightening shade of gray-green, the sea a dirty black with whitish scum, churned into a frenzy. Beside the most distant tower, far out off the reef proper, the Monster sits half-fueled, only its uppermost quarter showing above the water. If it were fully fueled, it would be completely invisible—at launch, the great rockets take off from thirty meters under the sea surface.

In fact, with Hurricane Clem running in at them and the sun close to the horizon already, this close to the equator, Gunnar Redalsen, the Chief of Launch Operations, could not see the Monster, and isn’t looking out the window anyway, but it is there in his mind’s eye. At the moment he is talking to the four people he finds it most unpleasant to talk to on Earth, as a general rule, one of them sitting beside him and three via a communication link.

At his left is Akiri Crandall, who is almost an all-right guy, in Redalsen’s opinion. Crandall likes to be addressed as “Captain Crandall,” just as if this place were not tied down by long columns of reinforced concrete sunk into the reef below, but that pompous insistence on his own dignity is really the worst of it; Redalsen can understand that Crandall, coming up from the ghetto and then rising from enlisted ranks in the Navy, has a big chip on his shoulder and wants it acknowledged. What annoys him more than anything is that Crandall constantly forgets that this place exists to send up big rockets; Crandall wants every person-hour thrown into base construction and base ops, and if it were up to him there’d never be a launch. Every so often Redalsen wonders if Crandall doesn’t perhaps see him as the missile officer on this inexplicably slow-moving vessel.

Just at the moment, however, Crandall is the other voice of common sense, besides himself, that Redalsen can count on, and he’s feeling a bit fond of the pompous petty Napoleon, next to whom Redalsen himself sounds so reasonable.

“The base will live through it for sure if it is not blown up,” Crandall is saying, firmly. “And if we cast off the Monster now, or even launch it on a disposal trajectory as Mr. Redalsen suggests, then the Monster cannot blow us up. But if we leave it sitting less than three kilometers from Main Base, we have no guarantee it will not find its way here.”

The woman who sits listening intently to them, her face carefully composed for the phone screen, is Edna Wheatstone, who is mainly noted for being the only candidate for CEO that none of the board actively opposed. As Crandall is finishing and Redalsen is nodding vigorously, she speaks very carefully, as if she had something in her mouth she didn’t want them to catch a glimpse of. “But I thought that the launch tower was built to the southwest of the station so that if a rocket broke loose, the hurricane would carry it away from the station.”

Now, the fact is that she damned well knows the answer to that, and this is wasting time, but this way she can replay the tape of the conversation for the board.

“I have been through two hurricanes at sea,” Crandall says, “and I am about to be through another one, and in fact I helped write the chapter on all this for the Academy, and the first sentence in that chapter is ‘Hurricanes have regularities when considered as a population, but no predictability at all individually.’ This particular hurricane is veering all over the radar screen like a cat with its tail on fire, and it may strike us from any quadrant at its nearest approach, or even loop around and hit us twice. It is perhaps slightly more likely that the half-fueled Monster will float away from us than toward us… but only slightly. Not what I would want to bet a thousand lives on, Ms. Wheatstone.”

She sits tapping the arm of her chair and trying to look simultaneously concerned and as if she has gotten very close to the people responsible for the problem. Redalsen realizes that she is in this conversation entirely to make sure that whatever is done, it will not harm her career, and while he can understand and appreciate that, he also wants very much to get on with the real business of the meeting.

The government man has one of those names like Collins or Smith that you forget all the time, and all he wants to say is that the government will understand a launch delay, despite the problems that it might bring with fulfilling President Hardshaw’s commitments, but of course if there is to be a launch delay the government will expect to be compensated for the trouble, and that certainly the government is not going to buy two rockets to put up one satellite with the taxpayers’ money, so if this rocket is to be destroyed and another put in its place, then there is going to be compensation from somewhere, and in any case there is not going to be further money from the government until their satellite goes up.

And now the only important person is sitting there, thinking hard, looking down at the table as he tends to do. Redalsen knows that this guy has been with the insurance company now for more than sixty years, and was turning down retirement before some of the current crop of retirees joined the company. Like most people with his job, he is widely believed to be too mean to die. Redalsen has had a beer or two with him, and gradually came to realize that here was a man who had spent most of an ordinary lifetime thinking about ways things could go dreadfully wrong, and trying to figure out how to make them go only a little less wrong.

“Are there any qualified probabilities?” the insurance man asks, chewing on his lip and tugging on one mangled-looking ear.

“Nothing you can measure,” Redalsen says. “I know enough about the rocket to say that, if it is adrift in high seas and runs into anything, it is very likely to detonate, and we cannot safely de-fuel it in the time we have remaining.”

Crandall nods. “I think we may safely figure that for the next two hours it will drift away from us. We can put a transponder and a scuttling charge on it and blow it as soon as it is a safe distance from the launch tower and other facilities. Or, as Mr. Redalsen has suggested, if you wish to test the launch facility itself, apparently it is possible to send it up suborbitally and bring it down somewhere harmless, perhaps a few hundred kilometers to the north. Either will work splendidly—as long as that giant bomb gets away from my facility.”

“And you concur in this judgment, Mr. Redalsen?”

“Yes. Let me add, though, that our risk in future launches may go down if we can see how this one goes.”

“Understood.” The old man tugs at his ear, looks sideways, scratches his head; Redalsen has had dealings with him, one way and another, for twenty years, and during that whole time has never failed to wonder at how ape-like a human being can be. “You do all understand that even though Industrial Facilities Mutual usually takes my word for it, they might very well reverse me on something this big?”

“When was the last time you were reversed?” Redalsen asks.

“Nineteen ninety-eight, on an old Soviet nuclear reactor that they wanted to insure despite the risks. It never went up, so I guess they won the argument.”

“Do you think they will reverse you?” the government man asks. “It is essential from our standpoint that one way or another—”

“Somebody else pays for it,” the insurance man finishes for him. “I can’t promise you that the government won’t get stuck with the bill, all I can do is recommend that NAOS takes action to minimize risk to the property, and recommend that we then pay for whatever damages happen. What we do is assurance, buddy, not reassurance.”

The government man and Wheatstone are plainly unhappy, but Redalsen has added the insurance man to his list of reasonable people. It’s a pity this isn’t a straight majority vote.

At last Wheatstone breaks the draw. “It sounds like my technical personnel and my external insurance advice are in favor of jettisoning the rocket. And we are at least not being warned that the insurance company won’t pay. Are there significant advantages to the jettison launch?”

“Only a chance to get some data we couldn’t otherwise get,” Redalsen says. “In theory, it duplicates what we get from computer simulations, but I’ve been at this business much too long to trust the computer simulations completely.” He knows this is bad politics—officially NAOS had wanted to man-rate the Monster without ever having fired one. But he also wants it someplace on the record, as long as everyone is so concerned about that, that they at least had the chance for a test launch.

“How long before you can jettison launch?”

“Fifteen minutes from your go.”

Her jaw sets and her head moves slightly to the left. “Then go.”

She looked very decisive doing that, Redalsen realizes. When the board sees it, they’ll approve the whole thing, probably.

They have to delay another two minutes so that the government man can stress, once again, that either NAOS or IFM is going to pay for this, because the government isn’t. But the deal is done, and that at least is a relief.

As they leave the room, Crandall asks, “Is it really going to be fifteen minutes?”

“Ten if I can manage it. Everything is modular and it’s just a matter of bringing things online—they should all be hooked up at the launch tower. If they’re not, then I guess we’ll have to get over there in the sub.”

Crandall nods. “Carry on.”

Redalsen doesn’t even feel like pointing out that he is not under Crandall’s command; it’s just such a relief to be able to act. A short elevator ride takes him to the control room; telemetry is still showing everything more or less normal, though the Monster is now jigging up and down more than a full meter with each wave.

“Well, then,” he says to the crew—it is now eight minutes since they began checkout—“do we have the abort trajectory?”

They do, just as he has asked them to. “All right then, if we’re not going to hit anything, start the short countdown and let’s get this bird gone.”

Two more minutes until they say “zero” and dozens more green indicators appear on the screens. There’s a rough moment as it pulls out of the water and a wave and wind shear torque it, but the Monster makes its way upward in the face of that, its guidance systems fighting madly, attitude jets firing flat-out bursts in all directions, and in a matter of minutes it’s on its way to an empty stretch of ocean south of Hawaii.

They watch it depart on radar. “I’ve been through more than a hundred launchings,” the technician at Redalsen’s left comments, “and this is the first time I haven’t heard one go.”

“Even if we could open the ports in this storm, the storm itself would hide the noise,” Redalsen comments. “It might as well be invisible on radar, anyway. We’re barely getting image off it, and it’s less than forty clicks downrange.”

“The clouds on radar are forming a weird pattern,” someone says—“look at that black spot right there—”

“It’s called the eye,” Crandall says, coming in. “Did you get anything for it, Mr. Redalsen, other than getting your giant bomb away from us?”

“Not one thing was different from the computer simulation,” he says, grinning, “but we did prove we can launch in seas a lot heavier than the Feds will let us.”

Crandall seems to permit himself a smile. “I don’t suppose that you were indulging any emotional feelings that a fueled rocket ought to be flown rather than sunk?”

“Oh, we sank it, Skipper. We just sank it farther away.”

The smile is almost human. “An excellent point. I came down to let you know what your radar is showing you—that thing is only going to dust us and it’s still going to be the worst storm we’ve ever seen. That eye is about eighty clicks across and the official estimate on the wind velocity at the eye wall is close to two hundred and twenty knots. Fortunately it’s missing us by quite a bit—so all we’re going to get is a Beaufort of about nineteen or twenty.”

The Beaufort scale is a scale of damage and physical effects; it was devised in part because people caught in severe storms don’t usually have time to read instruments. Officially Beaufort 12 is a hurricane; it’s about Beaufort 8 outside right now, and normally Redalsen wouldn’t have launched in a Beaufort 6. Redalsen gives a low whistle. “I bet you’d like us to stay powered up and record data for NOAA?”

“Actually I don’t care, but NOAA wants it and they’re prepared to pay NAOS for it. And at least that way you people won’t take up valuable room in the shelter down in the reef. But I should warn you, this place doesn’t normally get major hurricanes, so it was only built to take a Beaufort twenty-two—which is uncomfortably close, especially since that forecast of Beaufort twenty is plus or minus five. So if you’re willing to stay and keep the monitors up, NOAA and the company will appreciate it—but it’s at risk. Hazardous-duty pay for it, of course, if it makes a difference.”

Redalsen nods. “I’ll stick, and anyone else who wants to is welcome to. The rest of you head down to the shelter. Will people be reasonably safe there?”

“Should be—it’s embedded a hundred twenty meters below the reef itself. People inside there will probably not have the slightest idea what’s happening at the surface. I’ve already got the kids and everyone without a duty down there. I’ll expect your reports, then, from the bridge.”

“You’ll ride out the storm up there?” Redalsen asks. It’s a good forty meters higher up and thus that much more at risk.

“Have to. I wasn’t kidding about having written the book for Annapolis. And that was based on one experience with a Beaufort thirteen, and one with a Beaufort fifteen, which is pretty impressive—but I can’t pass up the chance to see this one. Might have to add a couple additional paragraphs.”

Redalsen can’t resist sticking in the needle. “Just remember to tell the cadets about the importance of having your ship stuck to the bottom with concrete pillars.”

“If we stay that way,” Crandall says, grinning back. “One way or another, the worst should have blown past by dawn—the damned thing is coming toward us faster than any storm, big or small, has a right to. Assuming the launch room, bridge, galley, and mess are still here, I’ll expect you at breakfast.”

He turns and goes, and Redalsen swallows the urge to salute. Most of the older techs, who have family here, elect to go below, but he’s got several young engineers who probably signed on for the extra pay with no place to spend it, so there’s not much trouble staffing up.

“Okay, major thing to do is make sure everything is recording, and watch your instruments for anything unusual.”

“Mr. Redalsen, sir?” Gladys Hmau has that slight look of mischief that always makes him a little nervous.

“Yes, Ms. Hmau?”

“What exactly is unusual in the middle of a huge hurricane?”

He laughs. “Oh, loss of sense of humor. Just everybody hang tight and watch for what you can find—radar doing funny things, wind shears on the tower, anything that looks like more than just a big storm.”

The hours take a long time to go by. At about eight P.M., a cook’s mate comes in with grilled cheese sandwiches and coffee on a cart, “compliments of the captain.” They all take a break of sorts, sitting back from their screens and ceasing, for fifteen minutes, the endless, redundant narration of reading the screen into the radio, in case for some reason (some reason best not thought about) the recorders on board are never read back, and because a trained eye may notice a digital readout bar jumping when a reviewer, months later, would let it go by.

Redalsen puts up the view from the cameras on the overhead screens. He turns the launch tower lights on, but what comes back is an all but solid white screen, only patches of dark green between the foam in the lower part telling them that the screen is anything other than white noise.

In another hour they begin to hear the storm through the walls. Officially the barometric pressure is now down close to eight hundred millibars. Seas are rising and the strain gauges on the launch tower show bars leaping up and down on their screens here, occasionally flickering red at their tips as wave shear tries to twist the launch tower from its steel moorings in the rock far below the churning sea.

Just past ten P.M., standing waves are forming in the cups of coffee that sit neglected by the engineers. Gladys Hmau looks sort of pale, and Redalsen touches her shoulder lightly as he looks over into the radar view. “The eye is still going to miss us by a wide margin,” he says.

“Yeah, but if this sucker goes over we’re just as dead,” she mutters. “Feel that under your feet?”

He stands quietly for a moment, and sure enough there is a noticeable swell running through the floor. “Impressive.”

“Not as impressive as what’s happening at the launch tower,” Silverstein says, from the other side. “We’re at solid reds now on shearing, boss; I think we’re going to lose her.”

“I wouldn’t like to, but better an empty tower than us. Got an idea of the break point?”

“Shear is maxed at about sixty meters below sea level. Not that sea level means much in the circumstances—”

There is a hard blow through the floor, and Redalsen falls to his knees. There are half a dozen small screams. As he pulls himself back to his feet, another one hits, just as hard, and there’s a brief flicker in the lights and on the screens. “Better get me the bridge. And cue up whatever’s left of the outside cameras on the launch tower.”

“Uh, about the launch tower—”

“Where’d it break?” Redalsen asks.

“Just above surface. They never go at the max strain point, do they?”

“I wouldn’t know, it’s the only launch tower I ever lost. And rockets go everywhere when they go. Can you get the bridge?”

“That line’s dead.”

“Great. Stay put, everyone else, I’m going up to see if we can get another com link in.” He’s out the door in a flash; he hopes what he said will keep them from thinking of the truth—that he is going up to see if there’s still a bridge.

As he starts up the stairs, he notes that at least they are still under regular lights. The stairs surge under his feet, once, and then again, but now that he’s used to it and nothing seems to be coming apart right away, it’s not as frightening as it was—at least not till he’s almost to the bridge, and hears the scream of wind somewhere inside the station. The spiral stairs in the great concrete tube lurch hard under his feet twice, and the lights go out; blue emergency lights spring to life in the tube, and what had been a high, thin scream is now a deep bass moan.

He pushes the door open to the corridor that leads to the bridge, and he can feel moving air as he makes his way through to the bridge door. He braces himself and yanks on the door; it flies open, all but knocking him backward.

He lunges in and, heaving with all his force, gets the door closed; immediately the fierce wind stops blowing, and he looks around to see Crandall and the bridge crew crouched behind consoles. In front of them, one of the great windows that look out to the east has cracked, the plastic-glass compound shearing in broken layers like a strain break in plywood, and there’s a hole about as big as a human arm, slowly widening.

“You’re just in time, Mr. Redalsen—we’re going to try to weld her, and we need one more hand pushing things into place.” Crandall’s shout is about as level as can be managed when yelling at the top of the lungs. “If you can rush forward with us and just put your hands where they’ll do the most good?”

Redalsen joins them, sees that what they have is a self-heating patch—which ought to fix it, but the patch will need to be held in place for about a minute to adhere. He nods, and they rush forward, keeping the big patch down low to the floor where the wind won’t make it so difficult to deal with, then swinging it up from the bottom, some of them pushing to keep it flush against the window and others pushing from down below until it’s entirely covering the hole. Crandall pushes the trigger, and the edges glow dull red as it melts its way onto the window. They all stay braced, pushing hard, but now there’s no wind, and though it’s just as hard physically, the absence of the cold, wet shrieking terror of the wind and spray that had been coming through the crack seems to give everyone strength.

The edges cease to glow red, and then become clear; the welding-cure process is endothermic, and soaks up most of the heat. After a minute Crandall presses a knuckle to the edges and says, “Cool all around. All right, let go on three, but stay out of the way because if it flies it will take down anyone in its way. One, two, three.”

Their hands leave it all at once, and then they all let a breath out as it holds.

“I presume you came up to let me know you’d lost the communication link to the bridge?” Crandall says, as he returns to his chair.

“Mainly that and to see what else was going on.”

“We’ve had a couple of freak storm surges. One of them came up as high as the third east gallery, and that’s eighty meters above normal high tide. But we’re taking them. I’d feel better if this giant bastard child of a drilling rig had a bow I could point into the sea, but we’re holding anyway, thus far, even though the big hydraulics in the legs are bottoming on every wave.” The screen in front of them clears and then pops up a list of damage-control reports. “What we have are broken windows—which do have to get fixed, they increase the drag and give the wind a place to tear at us—and a lot of severed conduits because the damned idiot architects had a lot of them running on outside surfaces, and they’re breaking wherever they were bridging a gap or running too close to a pinch point. How are things in launch control?”

“Well, there’s nothing to control anymore—the tower came down with the first big wave. Thank god we got rid of the Monster when we did. But things look all right down there. If you want I’ll get you some volunteers to help the damage-control crews—”

“Deeply appreciate it. We should be taking the peak right about now, but it will take hours to get things repaired, and if we don’t—”

The windows burst in, and Redalsen has one bare instant to realize that what is coming through them is not wind and spray, but solid water, before he is thrown to the wall and knocked unconscious; he does not even have time to notice the motion of the walls, and in this he is fortunate, for at least half the station crew are conscious as the next huge wave strikes, the reinforced concrete pilings shatter, and the whole station tips over into the ocean, bouncing and grinding its way down to the ocean floor; the least fortunate, perhaps, are those who find themselves in the slowly shrinking air pockets. When dawn breaks, late and dim, over the empty sea, there are still a few people alive in the wreckage far below it, as well as all those in the shelter; when a Navy submarine arrives to evacuate the shelter, two days later, they find the people in the shelter terrified but physically unhurt. They find no one alive in the shattered wreckage of the station itself. The divers refuse to talk about what they find, and the video they shoot is classified immediately.

The submarine is barely on its way out of Pearl Harbor when Di Callare and his team are meeting with Harris Diem to answer the critical question: What happened at Kingman Reef? It’s still early in the morning—Di had to get on the zipline at five A.M. to make it to Washington from North Carolina and allow himself an hour to look at the data, which are not the most informative they’ve ever seen.

“You want a hypothesis,” he’s saying now, “speculation for the press and all that? Okay, I think what got them was storm surge. They were built for a Beaufort twenty-two or so hurricane, and conditions outside when they went over were only about nineteen or twenty. That’s a wobbly number, and maybe local conditions just swung up to much worse, or maybe there was an ‘oopsie’ in the engineering somewhere, but say it was really a sound structure and conditions really weren’t worse than that. The assumption is that with a Beaufort twenty-plus hurricane, you’ve got to have the eye passing right over you to experience the full effect, and right in the eye the waves will be about thirty meters, max.

“But they were nowhere near the eye—that’s plain both from their own reports and from the satellites. And that eye is huge, about as big as any on record. Suppose it isn’t a freak eye, as we thought, but a freak storm—”

The little man at Diem’s side, who was introduced only as “my assistant” and who has been watching intently, gives off a little half-cough, and Di can feel everyone else pulling back. Well, the hell with it; he’s going to give them his best guess anyway, and they can fix it up later.

“Suppose it’s a storm with a Beaufort of, oh, say, thirty-five at the eye. Yeah, I know that’s close to tornado wind velocities, and we’re talking about something that’s more than fifty kilometers across, not the less than one kilometer that a tornado averages. Then the waves coming out of the eye—which would be running out away from it, but still close to the storm—might easily be a hundred forty meters, especially given that you have unlimited fetch for every practical purpose—”

The little man turns toward Diem and says, “Fetch?”

“Distance wind blows across water,” Diem says. “Hundred-forty-meter waves, Dr. Callare? You realize you’re telling me that this thing is practically throwing off tsunami?”

“Yep.”

“And does your staff concur?” the little guy says, looking around with a calculated stare.

Di Callare has never been so proud or grateful; they all are nodding. “If you look at the current temperatures in the North Pacific,” Gretch says, “there’s plenty of potential for a storm that big.” And then she says the most daring thing that any of them could have: “If you want an honest opinion and not the one you want us to have, this is it. This is the big storm we were talking about weeks ago. And it’s going to keep growing all the way to Asia.” She brushes her hair back from her face and sits tall, staring back at the little man.

The little man ignores this, as he does everyone else. With the dam broken, Peter, Talley, Mohammed, and Wo Ping all point to the various bits of evidence. Harris Diem is unreadable—which probably explains how he keeps his job—but it’s clear that the little guy isn’t listening anymore, not to what the evidence is (and he probably wouldn’t understand it without a lot of explanation anyway). All he’s doing is noting that people are disobeying.

The meeting breaks up with very little further word from the politicals; since his staff has backed him so thoroughly, Di returns the favor by saying in front of Diem and his shadow that they are going to pursue the investigation on the assumption that it was a storm surge and that this is not merely an unusually wide hurricane, but the biggest one on record. That seems to drive off Diem, the little man, and their secretary, as if they are afraid what more they might hear.

It’s still only eight-thirty in the morning, a bit before anyone would normally be in, and now that Diem and company are gone, the adrenaline rush has gone with them and everyone seems to sag. It’s going to be a long day.

“Let’s all go up the street for breakfast,” Di suggests. “I don’t know about the rest of you, but all I’ve had this morning has been this lousy coffee. And maybe we can brainstorm a little on what’s going to happen next with this thing.”

It’s a three-block walk, and not a very interesting one; Di notices that in a way what they really look like is an overage neighborhood basketball team, the kind you were on when you were ten, with everyone dressed like a mess and everyone glad to be with each other. He wonders for a moment if it isn’t just his own longing for support that makes him see it that way, but no—Talley is striding along, head up and confident, arguing fiercely with Pete beside her, and Wo Ping and Mohammed are both keeping up with it, and all of them seem to be daring anyone in the passing traffic to argue with them.

“The team’s gotten really tight, Dr. Callare,” Gretch comments.

“We’ll need to be,” Di says, not wanting to sound gloomy but not feeling like lying about it. “I’m sure Diem understood us and will make our case, but I have no idea how much weight he actually swings—he’s supposed to be buddies with Hardshaw from way back, they call him the President’s Shadow, but for all we know, it’s Hardshaw that wants us to shut up.”

“What’s going to happen if we don’t shut up?”

“I think we’ll probably find out soon. This is quite a summer internship for you, isn’t it?”

She snorts in agreement. “At least it’s a real look at what the job involves. I’m, er, thinking of applying to have the internship extended, if—”

“Naturally I’ll write you a recommendation.”

They come to a traffic light, and Di takes a moment to listen to the rest of the team. Talley is taking the conservative position and Pete the radical; she says that it’s a bigger storm than there’s ever been before, but that’s all, and he’s arguing that there’s at least twenty never-before-seen things it might be able to do besides. Good—put them together on a team and have them hammer out the short list of things to worry about.

Wo Ping is arguing a computational point with Mohammed; the fundamental question is at what level chaos gets into things and therefore which steps of the model have to be explored by Monte Carlo methods. That sounds like a question one of them could resolve—and then Di realizes that what it amounts to is Talley and Pete’s argument, but phrased in mathematics. Either way the question is, do we just scale up the numbers, or do we look for entirely new things that can happen?

They haven’t been to breakfast en masse at this little diner since budget week, but the waitress seems to recognize them and steers them to a table in the back room. Until the food gets there, they talk about family and sports and all the usual ritual; everyone asks how Lori’s book is going, even though only Mohammed reads mysteries, and everyone admires the latest batch of photos of Wo Ping’s kid.

Breakfast is good, and Di realizes a big part of it is that he knows there’s an uproar coming, that there is bound to be fallout from the defiance of this morning, and so maybe this is the last time the team will be together outside of work—and he’s been very happy with them. These are people he’d tackle any job with, and corny and sentimental though that seems, he wishes he had a good way to tell them.

And, too, there’s something good and productive in the feeling of sitting here too early in the morning, the big thing in the day already accomplished, but with so much still in front of them—assuming they don’t come back to the lab and find themselves all fired, of course.

Finally, as they hit the second cup of coffee after breakfast, Di voices his thinking, and he’s relieved to see the way they all nod agreement. Probably he could have leveled with them a while ago… out in public, where they might be monitored, is not the place to tell them about the private pipeline to Carla and the results coming out of there, and for everyone’s safety he will probably only share bits of that with each of them, but on the other hand, at least he can get them pointed in the right direction.

He decides at that moment to go farther than that. He’s going to spill a lot more of this to that reporter, Berlina Jameson, once he has the team pointed in the right direction. With a scientific team that knows the truth, and media sniffing around, it should be enough to keep them from covering it up any longer.

Part of him wonders about the safety of this. Four members of Congress were shot last year, and a lot of high-level civil servants. Officially, it’s because the citizens of Washington are crazy and furious; the rumor that runs everywhere, though, is that these things are manipulated. Is he making a widow of Lori and abandoning his kids?

Is that worse than abandoning the human race?

They are all staring at him. Probably he has a faraway look in his eyes; he stopped talking in mid-sentence, he realizes, a moment ago. He begins again. “All right, so the big question now is really just the same one, one step down, from the global warming problem we had before. When do effects no one has ever seen before set in? That’s right on the border between math and meteorology—or at least it is if we get the right meteorology described in the right math. So you guys are now officially in two teams, since we may not have a long time to work together. Talley and Mohammed, you’re team one, and your job is to come up with plausible never-before-seen effects—whatever you think in your heart is possible, this is about as much intuition as it is science. Peter and Wo Ping, team two, same job, but don’t look over team one’s shoulders too much. Gretch, you track both and keep reports coming to me. At the end of the week, the teams trade reports and then do their best to knock down each other’s ideas. By the middle of next week, if we’re all still working together and we haven’t been sent to six different cities, we should at least have a short list of what we think we ought to worry about, and have the ideas on it thoroughly vetted among ourselves. Once we have that I’ll tackle Diem again and see if I can stir him up toward at least getting the issues in front of the policy makers, and ideally toward going public.”

“Even if, uh—” Tally says, and doesn’t go on, but everyone seems to be hanging on the answer to her question.

“Yes, even if the news is bad and likely to cause riots. Hell, we can’t coddle people forever; what will we tell them when their cities blow down, ‘there’s no reason for alarm’? It’s about time we started telling the truth.”

The microphone/evaluator at the little diner where Callare and his people have breakfast puts out little packets of datarodents as fast as it can; Harris Diem reads the transcript with satisfaction, just seconds after each person speaks. The leaks are going to happen the way they are supposed to; he makes a note to dispatch a couple of “feeders”—datarodents that find other datarodents and feed them data, something the CIA uses in disinformation campaigns, and police departments of nations that officially don’t communicate use for tracking criminals between them. These will carry some provocative stuff to the datarodents associated with the New York Times, Scuttlebytes, and that new one, Sniffings.

It’s time to let Louie Tynan in on it too. Diem places the call.

As he might have expected from an old military officer, Tynan is irritated. “You mean you’ve known all along? Why the hell didn’t you just give Dr. Callare the resources he needed, and warn people about what was coming?”

“Because half of them wouldn’t believe us and the other half would panic. We need a rational response from the public.”

That mollifies Tynan—he has about the same trust for the public that Diem does—and he asks, “So what now? I don’t like lying to Carla, and I’m not good at it. And I don’t think—”

“Whoa, there, partner,” Diem says, grinning. “I’m going to spill the beans to everyone else as well. Not immediately, because what I need is a solid team in place before I sack a bunch of paper pushers—starting with Henry Pauliss, a name I’m sure you’re familiar with—in favor of people who can do the job. But just as soon as possible. Just keep passing on information, and if anyone is nervous about getting caught, tell them you want to keep doing it right up to the moment of your arrest or theirs—which you and I both know won’t happen.”

Tynan grumbles a bit but goes along with it; thank god for a habit of taking orders, Diem thinks, because Louie Tynan could clearly be the stubbornest person on Earth if he wanted to be.

In fact, that very stubbornness is why he’s not on Earth, and that’s an advantage too. “You’re going to like this next part better,” Diem adds. “There’s a major job we want you to do via telepresence at Moonbase, and you have carte blanche to get it done any old way you can.”

“So far, terrific. What’s up?”

“With the loss of Kingman, it occurred to some of our bright boys that it’s going to be a hurricane-prone summer, and they think that we might lose all our other space-launch facilities except air launch. And we are going to need weather satellites in quantity. Moonbase has mining operations and cadcam shops—we want you to automate it so that you can build the satellites for us, up there, and then bring them down to Earth orbit. We’ve got the technical specs pretty much ready to go on it.”

“How much longer do I stay up here?”

“Are you getting anxious for leave?” Diem asks. “I know you’re overdue for relief.”

“That’s not what I asked. How much longer do I stay up here?”

“Hmm. Well, I guess till it’s done. At least till fall.”

“Then you’ve got yourself a deal.”

As Diem hangs up, he thinks to himself, here’s a guy who sees everything going on, but just carries out people’s orders—and he wouldn’t think of leaving the job, not for anything. There’s no accounting for tastes.

As it always does, the phrase “there’s no accounting…” triggers a little buzz in the back of his brain, as if a tiny rattlesnake coiled there. He thinks of the racks of wedges in the basement, thinks of his elaborate rig down there—and pushes the thought away, again, as he has been doing almost every hour lately.

Jesse already knows that Mary Ann Waterhouse is an extremely fucked up woman—in fact that’s just about all he knows about her—but now that she’s over her mating frenzy, or whatever it was, she seems pleasant enough. And the soft tacos filled with rare lamb, raw onion, and tomato are pretty good, so at least he’s getting a meal out of this, even if he kind of suspects the whole experience is going to be too weird to get any of his friends to believe him.

She’s pretty, too, now that she’s changed into something soft and white and flowing, and with the candlelight she doesn’t look quite so old or so weatherbeaten.

After they’ve eaten for a bit, she says, “I guess I owe you some sort of explanation, but to tell you the truth, Jesse, I’m not sure I’ve got one. I’ve been spending a fair amount of time catching the bus over to Puerto Madero and just walking along the beach, crying and screaming when I felt like it. I really thought I was just going to go out and try to meet other people just like a regular person.”

Jesse feels pretty stupid even as he says it. “I guess your job is really a strain.”

“Yeah.” She chews for a minute, then swallows. “It’s pretty common knowledge, but they keep it off XV. You know about the fuzz?”

“Uh, I’ve heard the word. It’s supposed to be how you keep a private identity, right?”

She nods. “Yep, you’ve had the official story. Want to hear something nasty?”

He spreads his hands in resignation; if all this has been an elaborate routine to get someone to talk to, he’ll have to admit he’s interested—it’s like turning over a rock to look at bugs. And something in him insists on getting the whole story.

Meanwhile, Mary Ann has noticed Jesse’s response and read it very differently. She’d already been shocked at the way she had attacked—there really wasn’t any other word for it—this poor kid. In fact, this whole trip she’s wondered when she’s going to start coming back together again; her first week she bundled up, wore a wig, and went and did some touristy things like the gondola ride to the top of Tacana and the rain forest hike. Then she spent more and more time sitting and reading, and then she began to take the long walks on the beach… now she’s down to attacking boys on the street. She wonders if there’s some kind of bottom you hit in this.

She just wants to make sure that when he leaves he doesn’t hate her.

“The fuzz doesn’t matter much,” she says quietly. “It was just sort of an explanation because I thought I owed you one. We’re as sensitive as you are, but only a small part of what we’re feeling penetrates through the nervous system data interfaces. And it’s not like signal you can amplify… it’s more like fuzziness in a picture—turning the lights up doesn’t help much. So… well, to get the idea across we have to really overdo everything. And sometimes…”

“You hurt each other.”

“Well, and we get to be that way ourselves; small emotions don’t matter because you don’t get paid for them.” She looks down; this still isn’t taking the direction she wanted it to. “Look, this will sound stupid too—lately everything I say that’s not part of a script sounds stupid to me. But I am really tired of hearing myself talk. I would appreciate it a lot if you would tell me something about yourself.”

He makes a face, takes a bite of the taco—she wondered why Señora Herrera had made so many, but clearly Señora Herrera knows more about teenage male appetites than Mary Ann does—and says, “Well, that didn’t sound stupid, it sounded polite. Do you really want to know?”

“Most of the time everyone in the world knows what I’m feeling; what I want to know is what somebody who hasn’t gotten as fucked up as I have feels like. So tell me about yourself, please.”

He shrugs. “It’s going to sound clichéd, because the first thing I feel like saying is that there’s not a lot to tell. And the second thing I feel like saying is that… oh, well, see, I’m down here working at the Tapachula Community College, as a tutor in the pre-engineering curriculum. I’m an engineering student up at U of the Az, but I’m taking this term off. What I do is, I coach local kids who are trying to get ready for engineering school through their science and math classes… only…” His eyes seem to look over her shoulder to somewhere a thousand miles away.

“Only?” she asks, lightly, and part of her notes that there’s something in this scene that Synthi Venture would understand, maybe better than Mary Ann. The boy is certainly handsome—hell, he’s beautiful—and candlelight playing over his delicate, troubled face… this wouldn’t make a bad staging in a documentary about a Romantic poet….

“Only,” he says, finally, “there’s this girl.”

It’s a great story, in Mary Ann’s opinion, and what makes it truly a great story is that this boy is far more sincere than she, or anyone she ever worked with, could be. He really does have a single, burning true love and it’s really the only one he ever expects to have. And he looks so sad… and so beautiful.

Mary Ann prides herself on her intelligence and cynicism, and she’s right about both of them. But one thing she rarely admits to herself is that to really appeal to her audience, Synthi Venture has had to be able to feel the sort of thing they wish they could feel—and that means there was something of Synthi in Mary Ann to start out with, and a great deal more has gotten in. So although she knows it’s dumb and corny, she’s still swept away by the story of this poor kid’s love life, and consequently she does the most seductive thing a human being can do—she looks fascinated.

Jesse sees that and finds himself thinking that she’s an awfully good listener, and the first person who seems to understand about it all, and to feel a little touch of compassion for her—she’s clearly a very nice person who has been made a mess of by the life she’s had to lead. He’s very proud of his ability to forgive her… and hey, in the candlelight, he’s not sure he’s ever seen anyone quite so beautiful. “That’s enough about me, anyway,” he says. “All clichés, just like I said. Um… tomorrow’s my day off. Would you like to do something really dumb, like take a long walk on the beach together?”

“I’d adore it,” she says, and she smiles a deep, secret smile that seems to him to have centuries of pain in it, but a wonderful warmth as well. He realizes they are going to be very good for each other, and says, “Terrific.”

She loves the way he says “Terrific”—it puts her in mind of a couple of guys she went out with in high school—and she knows, suddenly, that they can both be very good for each other.

Louie Tynan has a pilot’s patience for medical officers—which is to say, none at all. And somehow they must sense that, because they always turn up right when things are way too busy already.

He’s been dealing with Dr. Wo for a long time, and sure enough, just when he’s about to take off for the moon, Wo calls him up and says he’s got to be plugged in for a checkup.

Space neurology is a pretty silly subject if you ask Louie—he’s never noticed any difference in what he thinks, only in his muscles and body weight and so forth—but no one is asking him. For an hour, he dutifully thinks of images Dr. Wo suggests, and reports back what he sees when signal comes in through the scalpnet, and generally lets the doc run his whole nervous system through a thorough checkout.

Usually Wo is one of those doctors who thinks “Any questions?” means “goodbye” and “Uh, one question, Doc,” means “run!” But this time, when the checkout is all done and Louie is at last permitted to unplug, Wo stays on the line, and says, “There’s another area that we need to discuss, Colonel Tynan.”

Louie nods. “I’m listening.”

Wo smiles slightly. “If I tell you that it isn’t something you could be grounded for, will you relax and listen carefully?”

Louie’s smile is wider. “Sure, Doc. What is it?”

Wo looks off to the side, as if thinking, and finally says, “You know, of course, that all modern computer systems are deliberately infected with optimizing replicating code—little programs that duplicate themselves as needed, and that modify other programs to improve them. For example, if another program is accomplishing what it does in seventy steps, and the optimizer sees a way to do it in sixty, perhaps because there are several unnecessary moves of data in and out of storage… the optimizer fixes it. Optimizers, of course, also fix each other, so none of us exactly understands how they do what they do. This is all review, yes?”

“It’s all review. And I’m not a computer, Doc.”

“Not yet, anyway. That’s what I’m trying to find a way to explain. The most recent generations of optimizers are no longer stopped by the barriers between operating systems; they are able to translate themselves and infect systems they were never designed for. That feature makes them more useful, obviously, in the global net, since they download themselves into any new machine and clean up its code.

“A couple of years ago we were experimenting with rabbit brains, and we discovered the most advanced of the optimizers could actually cross over into the brain. Where they began to… well—”

“Make the rabbit smarter? Are you telling me that by spending so much time telepresent I’m going to become brighter?”

“To some extent that’s what happened with the three human volunteers who tried it. But there were other effects as well. You might want to be careful—and call me if you notice anything unusual.” Wo takes a long moment to think about it. “For example, they stopped needing to sleep much. One function of sleep is a sort of sorting of the records and straightening out of the memory. Thus with optimizers running in the brain, since the memories stay straight and the records accurate, there’s less need for sleep.”

“You said one function,” Louie noted.

“Well, nature never leaves anything in just a single use for long. If you have to do something all the time, evolution will find ways to make it serve other functions. The immune system is immensely energy-consuming, so your body uses sleep as a time, when you aren’t using energy for much else, to get caught up on immune functions. If it should happen that you’re invaded by those programs, you’ll feel very little need to sleep, but you should still lie down and not move, unhooked from the system, for a few hours each day. Especially in an environment with a certain amount of hard radiation around, where there will be more damaged cells to clean out and where the disease organisms you carry with you are more apt to mutate.”

“Uh, yeah. Will I be able to sleep?”

“Better than ever,” Wo said, permitting himself a tiny smile. “When those programs cross over they optimize everything.” He hesitates for a long moment and then says, “So, again, if you notice anything unusual—even if it doesn’t seem to impair you—give me a call. Any questions?”

“I guess not,” Louie says, and the screen goes blank. Wo has hung up.

For more than a week after it smashes Kingman, the hurricane works its way to the west and north. Whatever world news media may make of its “behavior” and “personality,” it is just an oval of low pressure in the troposphere, fed and sustained by the warmth of the ocean below it, and thus the frequent note from news commentators and XV stars that the hurricane “takes no notice of human beings” is mere theatrics. A hurricane that took notice of human beings would be a different kind of thing.

It passes among the islands made famous in the Second World War, and its huge storm surge rolls far up the beaches, dragging many of them into new shapes. There are deaths running into the hundreds in the Carolines and the Marshalls, but coverage drops steadily—XV, like TV before it, thrives on novelty, and when you have seen one “island paradise” destroyed, you’ve seen all of them. This is particularly true because the evident poverty and squalor make it hard for media to portray the place as a paradise (and hence it is less shocking to see its destruction) and the destruction itself tends to happen in the pitch-dark driving wind and rain, where there’s little to see. So on island after island, wind and waves slaughter hundreds and level whole towns, but the coverage falls steadily during that time, by popular demand. An audience that has gotten used to experiencing war and violence through the eyes of the XV stars has been yawning and tuning out the events in the Pacific Islands.

It is not that the drowned people with their ruined houses have brown skin—by 2028, so do many of the audience for XV—but that they are far away, and although it is endlessly repeated that this is the biggest hurricane in human history, you can’t see it being the biggest from anywhere lower than orbit, and down on the ground where the human interest is, it’s just a lot of wind and rain and some big waves. There’s a two-day wonder when Kishima, biggest star on the Japanese XV Adventure Channel, announces that he will be set down by staticopter in the path of the surge and will then surf all the way to land, wherever it may take him, but that too becomes dull as people plugging into him discover only that he is getting tired, that cold water tastes very good to him, and that although he is frightened, he knows that pickup aircraft remain within short range of him.

They know Hurricane Clem is a big story and that there will be trouble if they don’t cover it, but TV and XV alike can’t find a way to make it entertaining.

The edge of Hurricane Clem grazes Saipan at about two in the morning on the night of June 21. Lance, one of the reporters for Extraponet, happens to be there, and he’s looking for any old shelter he can find—his net sent him out into the foul weather to “sample” it, he’s gotten separated from his bodyguards, and now he doesn’t have the foggiest idea where he is. His editor has been trying to get him located by transponder, but the directional antenna needed for the job is hopeless in the high wind. They stay linked, and Lance keeps looking for something he can recognize. He falls twice, and once he’s hit by a small, blowing board; eventually he is crawling, muddy water spraying furiously into his face.

There’s a vivid orange glow ahead, and he manages to wipe his eyes and make it out. “Conrad Hotel,” he reads, out loud.

The editor’s voice in his ear says, “Hah! Now we’ve got you placed.”

“Well, great, get me a taxi or something.”

“Right now nothing’s moving, Lance. You’d better see if you can get in there. The zipline is off its tracks and the roads are washed out between us and you—you’ll have to see if they’ll give you a room.”

“I don’t see a Vacancy sign,” he mutters as he crawls. The water is unbelievably cold around his hands and feet. He thinks he lost a shoe but he’s not sure.

“It’s not really a hotel, it’s an old folks’ home,” the editor replies. “But maybe they’ll let you have a room. They’re bound to like you there, old people experience a lot of XV, and the city directory says they’re mostly Americans anyway.”

When Lance enters the vestibule, the wind and rain stop abruptly; it’s like dragging himself out of a river. He’s gasping like a goldfish, and it takes an effort to haul himself to his feet. He knocks on the door and tries opening it. It swings open easily.

There are about a hundred of them standing there in the lobby; it takes Lance only a second to think the workers must have run off. Two or three of them look startled, as if they recognize him. He closes the door behind himself.

The place is at least a hundred years old, and he can feel the groans of the old building through his feet.

An older man, well-dressed with a jacket and bowtie, approaches him and asks, “Are you with the management here?”

“I’m a reporter,” Lance answers. “Covering all this for Extraponent. I came in to get out of the storm.”

“You won’t be out of it long,” an older lady in jeans and sweater says.

Ignoring her, the man says, “We’ve been trying to figure out whether we can get everyone down into the cellar. It’s not a very deep one but it’s better than up here. There’s at least as many people who won’t come out of their rooms, I’m afraid—we can’t do anything for them—and there’s a bunch on the ground floor who can’t move themselves. We were just about to vote to try to knock down the cellar door and get down there—they left it locked.”

Lance nods. There’s a moaning boom, and the old building shifts slightly. “Uh, I don’t know that I care about democracy. I’ll knock that door down for you.”

They lead him to it. It looks pretty solid, but the frame doesn’t seem to be anything special.

Four hard snap-kicks, like they taught him when he was training for this job, and the door flies open. They all applaud.

The power is still on, so he turns on the light. There is at least a foot of water throughout the basement.

“I don’t know,” one of the women says. She has the kind of piled mop of starched gray hair that Lance has always found particularly unattractive on old ladies. “Looks, like, totally gross.”

“Oh, shut up, Kristin,” the man with her replies, and starts to climb down the wet steps. “Shoes will dry.”

“All right, you’re, like, so grumpy,” she says, following him. They stagger down the steps, holding hands.

Most of the crowd is suspended between fear of the rocking and creaking hotel, and distaste for the flooded basement, Lance realizes; he starts to head down the steps himself. He knows, anyway, that he will—

No engineer would ever bother to analyze what happens next; it’s not a current or an interesting structure, like the Launch Facility was. The principle is simple; irregular surfaces, and surfaces with holes in them, have much more drag than smooth ones. Whether the roof lifts first, or a window breaks, or even just a door flies open, drag increases dramatically.

In a split second, more damage happens, and there are more holes and rough surfaces. In another split of the same second, the force on the building has multiplied many-fold.

The Conrad Hotel goes over sideways like a house of cards, slumping into a pile of lumber. Even Lance does not have time to move clear of it, and he is much the most agile person present. There are screams, thuds, crashes.

He finds himself pinned down in darkness. All around him there are cries and moans. A few people are calling names, most just crying out.

He tries to move his left arm, but it’s broken and numb. His right is pinned to his side. Something too heavy to move is on his chest, and he’s fighting to breathe.

Very slowly, the hole containing his head begins to fill with icy water. As it covers his ears, he loses the sound of people crying out in fear; it is a long time after that when his face is covered, and his last seconds are spent bucking against the intractable grip of the weight on his chest.

The editor gets every bit of it; it’s some of the best XV of the year, he figures. Eight hundred million people experience it live, or in one of the two replays later that day.

Two days later detectives from several XV nets have established that the rotten old retirement hotel was owned by a group of Hawaiian doctors and was in noncompliance with practically every applicable building code. Besides Lance, three hundred old people who had spent their savings to get there from Akron, Bakersfield, or Minot had perished.

Moreover, it turns out to be a small bonanza for the doctors who own it, since building, facilities, and old people are all heavily insured.

But that’s nothing compared to the bonanza it is for XV. Suddenly there are over a thousand suitably grieving relatives, and the heaps of gray-haired dead under the rotten hotel, and all of them from the country that created XV and consumes more of it than the rest of the world combined.

Passionet tries to get Synthi Venture to come back from vacation early to cover it. She won’t, but it doesn’t slow them down. Very shortly, Rock and Quaz are there as a team, both missing Synthi acutely, rivals for a new star, Surface O’Malley, their latest marketing of red hair to the Japanese market, doing a sort of recap of The Front Page as they investigate the “doctors’ ring” that maintained the “living hell of the hotel deathtrap.” The audience can feel the Rock’s righteous anger, Quaz’s cold determination to get to the bottom of this and nail the bastards, and Surface’s guts and determination to be part of the team.

Passionet flies in plenty of grieving relatives for Surface O’Malley to interview. She has a warm, tender quality that people open up to, and she’s extremely good at feeling torn between Rock and Quaz; naturally in this kind of story, the affair is doomed, and millions of experiencers weep with her as Rock and Quaz decide that they must not allow a woman to come between them when it is vital to run the story to the ground. (Not before Rock has taken her out to the storm-lashed beach for champagne and a lusty fucking by moonlight, and Quaz has torn her panties from under her lacy dress and had her in a back alley—Quaz having lost the coin toss for who has to be the bad-boy hero.)

Surface O’Malley is a big hit, and best of all from Passionet’s standpoint, she’s not too much like Synthi Venture but she’s enough like her so that they can build up a rivalry; there will be at least a year of catfights to alternate with the individual adventures before the two of them will find each other as best friends.

Meanwhile, Rock and Quaz uncover the vital evidence that Passionet’s detectives found the first day, and wave it in the faces of the Hawaiian doctors, who deny everything and threaten to sue. The men who experience Rock feel once again that they know their way around the world, and that a certain nobility adheres to them; the men (and a few women) who experience Quaz once again feel bitter existential despair, the knowledge that it is a cold and ugly world where every moment of joy is paid for at too high a price, but where a good-enough-for-this-world man like Quaz can take grim satisfaction in making a few of the bastards pay, and in the durable friendship of a guy like Rock—and the pleasures of occasionally knocking off a good piece like Surface.

The hurricane, still taking no notice, as the media continue to note, does not plow into Indonesia as expected, though its storm surges are still large enough to cause great damage there, and as far off as the Mekong Delta.

The Japanese weather station at Minami Tori Sima cannot be raised by radio for a full day, and there is a brief flurry of speculation about a “second Kingman Reef,” but they are dug into the island and come out with no harm done except for some instrument towers knocked over.

All the way from Kingman Reef, the storm has been slowly dwindling in force, and though it is still the biggest in history, it is beginning to drift down to the range of the conceivable. Scientists say this to the media; the media, who need to get another story someplace anyway, can now announce that it’s mostly over, even if the storm is still there, or at least it will be over until the storm again comes inshore, to clobber Kyushu or Honshu.

And they have every right to ask this dismissability of it. If it were a normal hurricane, it would be expected to take the usual route north through the Pacific and hit in or near Japan; thousands of storm tracks have. Hurricanes in the Northern Hemisphere may move in any direction or even loop around, but normally they move to the north and the west, and thus far this one has been no exception to that rule, however exceptional it has been in every other regard.

Thus when it obstinately turns and heads east on the afternoon of the twenty-fifth-and then proceeds to gain speed and strength as it roars back across the Pacific, farther north than any hurricane, let alone a giant one, could normally be expected—the uproar in the scientific community finds little echo in the general media. No one lives out there, and the big hurricane story has been done; if it stays away from Hawaii, it will never make a prime slot again.

John Klieg has operated all over the world for the last ten years, or at least he thought it was all over the world. He realizes now that he has missed a lot of the sleazier corners, and he is beginning to hope that they won’t come any sleazier than Novokuznetsk, the capital of the Siberian Republic. He knew that it was a boomtown—hell, Siberia is a boom nation—but somewhere in the back of his mind he had envisioned something like the American or Alaskan frontier towns, or even like the rain forest frontier in Brazil—trashy and thrown up in haste, rough around the edges, but a place where stuff was getting done and built. There was some poem or other he’d read back in high school about cities with big shoulders, and that was kind of what he thought a boomtown should look like.

He wasn’t prepared for this place. The downtown has all been thrown up in the last ten years, a long way from the old city center, so that the whole city seems to have fallen over sideways. Mostly, downtown is empty office buildings with exorbitant rents, because there’s a roaring speculation boom in office space going on at the moment. Land prices near the city at any instant are either impossibly high or almost nothing, changing rapidly as the local and the national government policies veer around to favor different zipline routes.

The whole city has exactly six blocks of working zipline, all within the Abdulkashim Center, and although the whole route can be traversed in less than ten minutes on foot, the zipline itself runs on the hour, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday only.

What everyone in Novokuznetsk is doing is getting rights to things; Abdulkashim came to power on the back of the army, like the last eleven Siberian dictators, but he stayed in power because of the two promises he didn’t break—he kept building up the military forces and he kept reducing the size of everything else connected with the government. His rivals have no alternative program.

Novokuznetsk is not the first city on Earth to have all the buildings coated with thick coal soot, but it’s the latest, and more is being added all the time. When the sun breaks through, which is rarely, you see a city of recent construction already crumbling in its air pollution and strangling on traffic and bad sewers—but rates of construction are amazing, and every business that can is moving here to get out from under tax and regulatory loads.

Well, Klieg thinks to himself, that’s the way it is everywhere. He’s always a little amazed that people get upset by what businesses do; businesses do what you pay them to do and what you allow them to do, and both of those are up to the customers and the citizens.

The thing that he finds disconcerting is not the mess that this place has become, but the realization that it’s a mess that doesn’t produce anything. He’s not completely unaware that GateTech produces nothing and sometimes prevents others from producing anything; that doesn’t bother him by itself. But GateTech at least maintains comfortable, attractive facilities, places that look like college campuses, where his teams of scientists and engineers can enjoy working. Every place that GateTech owns is clean, safe, and humane, because Klieg knows that creative work flourishes in that kind of environment.

Novokuznetsk is not like that. The belching stacks are mostly the municipal power plants, which will be coming off line when the fusion plant finally opens (any year now—as soon as they quit switching primary contractors in exchange for fresh bribes, and allow some one contractor to finish the job, always assuming the contractor is competent and anyone can build a plant on that site after all the redesigns that have been thrown into the mix).

What the power plants are driving, in turn, are giant advertising signs, office machinery in the skyscrapers of the new downtown, and lots of demonstration facilities that have been set up mostly to attract investors. The typical visitor to Novokuznetsk is a businessman who has dreams of a new high-profit frontier, and everything is set up to cater to that; they can visit the matrix metals facility (which has all the machines sitting out on a common shop floor like so many drill presses and table saws, because the sterile cleanrooms in which they would run were never built); the aircraft test field where they’re doing land-on-maglev tests (which was at Ohio State until Abdulkashim bought it and moved it; the new one, at Ohio State, is pursuing a much more promising line of research); or the nanosurgery facility (which is real enough but staffed mostly with surgeons who came here because they had to—typically the kind of doctor who just has a little problem with pills, the bottle, or patients’ genitalia). That typical visitor doesn’t know what he’s looking at—he knows money, not engineering or science—and so he sees all the feverish activity and concludes that Novokuznetsk is “real”—Klieg has heard the word used many times—and throws money into it.

That, too, makes Klieg shake his head. It’s not a problem he would ever have. He understands that money matters, data matters, the rules matter—the physical side of things doesn’t. But if you think it does, you ought to be able to tell fake from real.

Klieg knows the showpiece plants are powered up half an hour before each visitor arrives and powered down ten minutes after departure. The whole muddy, dirty, polluted, uncomfortable mess is only a lure for money. Nothing will ever be made here and very few services will ever be provided.

Geez, he’s thinking like one of those socialist channels that come out of the Third World—not that he’s a fan of them but his staff includes them in the mix of daily reports that crosses his reading window. But again, what do people expect? A business is to make money with—if there’s money in building things and serving people, they’ll do it, and if not, well, then obviously nobody wanted things built or people served, because if they had, they’d have paid for it.

The reason he’s thinking about how ugly and nasty all this is—aside from the fact that he has eyes and a nose—is that he’s really missing Glinda and Derry. A few weeks ago he just sort of noticed that Glinda was around, and knew she had a kid; now he hates being away.

There’s something philosophic about all of that, he supposes, but hell if he can see what it might be. The world changes under you as you get to understand things about it better. He’d known for a long time she was pretty and lonely; it hadn’t occurred to him before that he was lonely, or that she might be interested. That’s all.

Right now there’s a warm rain drenching Novokuznetsk, running black and greasy off the raw new buildings, puddling brown and gray with rainbow slicks all over the lumpy concrete roadway. The fuel-cell-driven cab he’s in has an obvious scream in its electric motors and seems to get lost every so often and wander for a couple of streets before it finds a working checkpoint, and to judge from the smell in here, the place has been a boudoir for a number of local prostitutes and First World suits recently.

He just wishes to god that he could be back in Florida; Derry’s in some kind of a riding contest today, and she and Glinda will call tomorrow morning, their time, which will be late in the evening his, to let him know how it went. He’s getting very fond of the kid, too—naturally they don’t want to spoil her, but he’s been having a good deal of fun getting various just-right things for her.

It’s been years since he’s had so much company and affection, and he’s already having a little trouble getting by without it. Glinda has just kind of opened up into his life, and all of a sudden things like eating dinner, or relaxing on the beach, or going shopping—stuff he’d been thinking of as “routine maintenance” for years—has all become the stuff he looks forward to most.

Not to mention sex. Klieg has tried all the fancy stuff but he really just likes to mess around a little, get excited, and fuck—and that’s just what Glinda likes, and she likes it about as often as Klieg does, which is much more often than it was a few months ago. Most weekend nights, and during the week whenever he sleeps over at her place, they take that extra ten minutes that feels so wonderful and end up sleeping curled against each other.

It has even occurred to Klieg that he could think about retiring, but a little more reflection led him to the conclusion that much as he loves his new-found uses for time off, he wouldn’t much like to spend all his time doing them. The mixture could maybe be adjusted one way or another—when the company is in more normal times and life gets dull he might spend a little more time away from it. For right now, this move into space launch needs his attention.

The biggest problem he failed to anticipate was caused by the publicity this miserable country had managed to generate for itself. He figured since they pretty much continuously bragged about the freedom for business they offered—unregulated gold standard banks, no environmental regs, practically no health and safety laws, no local investor participation required, and on and on—that he could just build the thing and start launching.

He was wrong. Instead of regulations per se, the government here requires permits for everything. Not that the permit requires you to do anything more than plunk down money, but you have to plunk down a lot of money, frequently, and they keep halting the work whenever you didn’t plunk it down in front of the right guy, which is a mixture of getting the mostly unwritten procedures right, bribing the right people to get you through to the people that the procedures say you should be dealing with, and then bribing the officials when you do get through to them so that they’ll accept the government’s fee. It would have been cheaper to build this somewhere else.

He reminds himself that the reason for building it here is, at this moment, whirling around out in the Pacific; it’s already taken down Kingman Reef, which was about to double world launch capacity, and last reports are that the storm surge is more than big enough to swamp the Japanese launch facilities at Kageshima and the Formosan Republic’s facility at Hungtow; that big right turn Hurricane Clem made threw what are practically tidal waves northward. Of the world’s five significant launch facilities, three will certainly be out of action before July and that’s a very good start.

Right now he’s off to meet this guy Hassan, who isn’t Siberian but is extremely influential, or so Klieg’s team has established; if Hassan can do what they say he can, then permits ought to start flowing pretty fast, and if he can’t, well, it’s only time and money.

The cab rounds a corner a little tight, almost scraping the curb, and throws up a cascade of black greasy puddle onto a girl who looks to be about Derry’s age, who had been posing by the curb, topless in a short skirt and heels. As she jumps back, screams, and swears, Klieg sees the tracks of a dozen different infections on her pale barely developing chest; she’s got the telltale purple blotches of ARTS and the raised, inflamed veins of SPM, plus what looks like a plain old ringworm. He can see from her open mouth that she’s already lost a few teeth, and her grimace suggests that ARTS is taking hold.

The gruesome thing, he thinks, as the cab pulls away and she flings a clod of dirt against its back window, is that if she’s trying to flag men in cabs like that, it probably means some of them are buying her. Well, if what she’s got doesn’t get her, no doubt she’s got some strain of AIDS or resistant clap, so she’ll probably be off the street—and under the ground—before she’s fourteen.

And undoubtedly there will be another one.

Capitalism in action, Klieg thinks, great system to stay on top of….

It does remind him that Glinda is being kind of a typical mother about Derry and not noticing that the kid is growing up; Derry has hinted now and then that she’s getting interested in boys and so forth, and Glinda has worked pretty hard at ignoring that. Not that Derry’s going to end up like that piece of thrown-off human garbage back there, of course, but you don’t have to go to cheap whores to get killer diseases, and the kid needs to be kept safe.

One more thing that, between money and power, Klieg can do. It makes him feel good, right now, that he can protect Derry that way; it’s not as good as sitting down to Glinda’s meat loaf (she’s programmed her cook to make it exactly right, something that Klieg has never been able to do with his), hearing about Derry’s day at school, then snuggling up for a movie and popcorn with Glinda, but it does make him feel better about being in this smelly potholed dump of a town.

The cab must be programmed to go the long way to everywhere, because by the time it pulls up at Hassan’s building, Klieg has passed through a couple of major intersections twice. Hassan has a whole floor on one of those empty skyscrapers, and at the door, Klieg is met by two big men who look like they might be contenders for the Siberian Olympic wrestling team. You can see that their coats—cheap, brightly colored, new—bunch around the armpits, and are a little tight through the shoulder. There’s a bulge on the left breast where you expect it. There seems to be about a two-inch gap between coat and shirt collars, and when the slightly shorter one says, “Meesser Klieg, please?” and sticks out a solid, slablike hand, the shirt cuff strains.

It’s a good act but not a great one. Klieg enjoys it (it’s like something out of an old movie) but figures that big, scary guys in suits are fairly cheap.

Amazingly, the elevator in this building runs smoothly, and when he steps off onto Hassan’s top-floor offices, everything appears to be clean, nice, new, and well-cared-for; that, more than the skyscraper or the goons, makes Klieg think he’s dealing with a pro here.

Hassan is well-dressed and not overdressed, and that’s another good sign. He’s a small man, square in the shoulders with the kind of good posture that suggests he did some hard physical work twenty years ago and has stayed in shape since. “Mr. John Klieg,” he says. His accent sounds more Oxbridge than Pakistani; Klieg’s research tells him that Hassan is neither, coming instead out of the complex system of orphanages, foster homes, and street gangs that has produced millions of people with no defined nationality in the rubble of thirty years of war in old Soviet Central Asia.

“I’m pleased to meet you,” Klieg says, and they go in to tea; Klieg’s already swallowed two decaffeinaters and a nifty little tab that will keep his bladder from filling for a few hours, because he’s been warned that there will be at least a gallon of tea involved in being polite.

The seating in Hassan’s private office is on the floor, on big soft cushions laid carefully around a small table on a thick, pricey-looking handmade rug. There’s a huge silver samovar on the sideboard, and Klieg’s larger goon quietly fills a cup for each of them and sets them on the table, then goes out as quietly as a sigh.

Klieg sits on one side of the table, Hassan on the other, and they both drink tea for a little bit, talking about the weather. This is a situation where it’s just not polite to get down to business right away, so they don’t. On the second cup, Hassan says, “I am told you have no family, Mr. Klieg.”

“None at the moment,” Klieg says. “I’m working on that.”

“Ah. There is a woman in your life? Some young beauty you’ve taken to as a pleasure of age?”

Klieg smiles and shakes his head. “An older beauty, who’s been bringing up a child by herself. Someone with a lot of common sense.”

Hassan gets up and fills both teacups, and as he brings them slowly back, he says, “I see that I was not misinformed; you are wise and prudent. And naturally”—he hands Klieg a cup—“very naturally indeed, Mr. Klieg, with such personal matters coming along, you have a certain concern for the future, a desire to see things become firmly established, so as to make a secure world for this new family of yours. I understand this, I share the impulse myself—I have four daughters and an infant son, and when I look at the sort of violence that flares up so much in this part of the world, and at how brutal and grinding poverty can be here, I feel my spine stiffen and my shoulders settle and I put myself to work, hard, to keep such things away from them. Is it not that way?”

Klieg had told himself to be careful about trusting his feelings in this conference—after all, if Hassan is going to be good at anything, he’s going to be good at being liked. But there’s no getting around the fact that the man is likable. “Yes,” Klieg says, “that’s exactly the way it is. You start to think about how to make a place that’s strong and safe, because it’s a nasty world out there.”

Hassan smiles, nods, and without the least leaning forward or even added intensity of gaze, he says, “And yet, Mr. Klieg, here you are in a country where people get shot frequently, in a dirty city of foul streets and fouler doings, arranging to build for yourself here the only thing in this whole wretched nation that is ever likely to be worth stealing, under the protection of whatever random thieves happen to be the government of this dirty little hole of a nation. This is the sort of speculation a poor man with one chance would dare. It is not all what a man who is already wealthy, who has already taken the world in hand, is apt to do. This interests me a great deal, as a student of human nature—and which of us in business is not a student of that? I wonder what can be inside you to make you take such chances.”

Klieg nods, takes a sip of tea, and thinks to himself that the old routine about Asian indirectness and American bluntness is pretty dated; Hassan has started the serious part of this with the most important question. Indeed, it’s not one Klieg is completely sure of his own answer to. He lets the tea roll over his tongue and then says, “As you’ve guessed, there are reasons. You do know what GateTech has been in the business of doing?”

“Yes—the blocking patent business.”

“I prefer to call them something other than blocking patents, because my feeling is that I block nothing—I merely build way stations and roads between the frontier and those who wish to reach it, and charge them to pass the way I have pioneered. But yes, my money has come out of that process. It has involved staying very close to what is happening, racing against many other teams of bright people. But the race is not as easy as it once ways….”

“When you began, you were the only one who knew there was a race; now they take your operations into account from the very beginning.”

“Exactly.”

“And so there is a change of strategy. This much I have deduced, Mr. Klieg, and it makes a great deal of good sense, if I may so compliment you. But it is there that I am stymied; clearly your next strategy would have been to begin to operate farther out toward the technical and scientific frontier than before, and to find ways to make the traffic run your way rather than just locating your ’way stations and roads’ where the traffic runs.

“But I do not see this. No, I see you working in this very dangerous environment, dealing with very difficult people, and doing all of this for a well-established and simple technology like space launch, something that has been around since the middle of the last century.

“And this tells me one of three things, I think.

“Either you are mad—and there is no evidence of this; or you are bored and looking for danger and excitement—and this new family you are hoping to find makes it seem very improbable, for to a man with a family the world is more than dangerous enough; or you know something that is not general knowledge in the world yet, and you are once again on the move to build a way station or a road, in a place the world will shortly be going. Of course that last is what I believe to be the case, because I greatly respect you.

“So, Mr. Klieg… as you know, I can help you a great deal. I have a cash price and that will be negotiated by underlings—indeed, your people are meeting mine at this very moment, as you know, and I’m sure we can reach some equitable arrangement on that matter. But there is something I want very much, and you will have to understand that I want it because I am already in that happy estate to which you aspire—I have a family to look out for.

“I want to know what you think is going to happen, and why this launch facility is likely to prove so important.” Hassan has leaned forward and now he does look eager. Klieg believes the man completely. There’s no question in his mind that Hassan is dead serious, and though anything could be an act, Klieg would bet that this is not.

For one thing, in Hassan’s shoes, it’s just what Klieg would want. Clearly the man is not hurting for money any more than Klieg is. And just as clearly, when a big mystery comes onto your territory, an inside pipeline to its source is what you really want.

Klieg takes a long sip and a calculated risk. “Let me place a call to see if the money and contract matters are going as well as we both expect. And if it would appear the partnership is satisfactory in every other regard, well, then, we’ll shake hands and I’ll tell you everything.”

Hassan nods, once, firmly, and somehow or other a goon comes in with a phone for Klieg. Klieg dials, asks a couple of questions, hears what he expected to. Hassan’s price is high but if it’s truly “one-stop shopping,” if they will no longer need to come up with each bribe, permit fee, and payment one at a time and on a negotiated basis, then Hassan will be much cheaper, even before you figure in all the time not lost to delays every time cops and soldiers come out to make them stop work. “Well, then, close with’em, Jerry, sounds like we have a deal,” Klieg says, clicks off, and turns to Hassan.

“A few weeks ago, when the big methane release happened…” he begins, and in thirty minutes Hassan not only knows everything, but is starting to smile with a warmth Klieg understands perfectly. It’s not every day that a global-monopoly-to-be walks in and asks for your help.

They agree to meet for dinner soon, and they talk of many different things; Klieg gets an inside look at the Siberian government and is no more appalled than he was when he began to understand Washington or the UN, but he notices how much cruder and more brutal the tactics are out here and resolves to keep himself out of trouble.

The rest of the morning goes into tea and talking about old movies; Hassan turns out to be an enthusiast for them, too. Or at least when he knew he would be meeting with Klieg, he became one, and he carries off the act well. That’s really all you can ask for.

“All right,” Di Callare is saying to Carla Tynan, over the phone link. “I can get you all the data you ask for. But this is not getting any easier.”

“Louie thinks they’re on his track too,” she points out. “And without him we’d have no real data to go on. So tell me, Di, what do you make of Hurricane Clem? He’s been moving east for longer and farther than any hurricane in Pacific history.”

“He’s also farther north,” Di points out. “We don’t know much about what a hurricane does when it stays well above the thirtieth parallel. It’s never been warm enough up there to keep them running, let alone gaining energy. For all we know this is perfectly normal behavior for a giant hurricane on a hot ocean.”

“It’s counter to the Coriolis force—”

“But it’s right in line with the steering current,” Di responds, impassively. “And now that it’s so far off the equator we aren’t getting the data we’d like—the satellites along the equator can’t look down into it, the Japanese are keeping their aerial data to themselves, the Siberians and Alaskans don’t seem to be flying anything, and we’re still trying to get a maneuverable satellite up there in a polar orbit—the government doesn’t want to spring for one, and since all the commercial load that was going to go through Kingman Reef has been shifted back to Aruba and Edwards, there’s not any space to spare unless they’re willing to commandeer it. So anything at all could be going on inside Clem—maybe there’s the biggest outflow jet in history.”

Carla leans back in her chair, rubbing her back; as a relaxing, comfortable semi-retirement, this whole business with MyBoat is a complete flop. She’s been short on sleep for days, her butt is just as chair-sore as it ever was in Washington, and the aftermath of Clem has left the Pacific too stormy and rough for her to get much time on the surface sunbathing. “Say that again,” she says.

“What, that maybe there’s the biggest outflow jet in history? It was just a thought that Gretch, our summer intern, had—she was doing mass balance for a hurricane that big, and the only way it didn’t strangle itself was—”

“Was that it was pushing a whole lot of wet air a long way from itself—of course! Hug that intern for me and don’t let her go back to school for the duration. You need her. I’ve got an idea, Di, and I’ll be back with you shortly.”

He gives her a little half-salute, half-wave, and they break contact. She wonders how he’s finding an excuse to go to a different pay phone twice a day, and whether her direct bounce to Louie is secure enough… and once again she wonders why anyone would want to get in the way of figuring out what’s going on. Well, politics was always Di’s gift, not hers.

An outflow jet is a peculiar thing some hurricanes have some of the time. As the air streams out of the top of the spiraling eye wall, sometimes instead of dispersing in all directions and coming down as rainy weather a long way away, the hot air will organize itself as a single stream moving in a single direction; that stream is called an outflow jet.

An outflow jet can carry much more mass than conventional dispersal—so it takes away one of the limits on the size of the hurricane, for only as much air can swirl in at the bottom as can flow out at the top, and since the outflow jet removes air more efficiently, the hurricane can be bigger.

But it has another and more significant effect; it all comes down in one place, on one side of the hurricane, and the addition of so much descending air there creates a high-pressure spot. Air moves from high to low pressure, and the eye of a hurricane is a low-pressure spot, lower than anywhere except the center of a tornado—thus the wind begins to blow from where the outflow jet descends toward the eye of the hurricane, and the hurricane in turn moves on the wind—opposite the direction of the outflow jet. The outflow jet works like the open end of a released toy balloon, blowing the hurricane around the ocean.

It works like a toy balloon blowing around the room in another sense too, for the outflow jet’s position is not stable with regard to the hurricane; just as the nozzle swings around the balloon as the balloon moves, the outflow jet wanders around the outside of the hurricane. Thus a hurricane with an outflow jet can quite suddenly move forward or backward, contradict the steering current (the winds at about 20,000 feet that normally determine the path of the hurricane), accelerate, or loop around. One hurricane can have more than one outflow jet. Bigger hurricanes are more apt to have outflow jets, which is why some of the biggest killers among hurricanes in history have been not only the ones with the strongest winds and storm surges, but also the least predictable ones and the ones that have suddenly lurched off their expected paths to slam into coasts they were supposed to bypass.

Carla has just realized that if the very biggest hurricanes are apt to have outflow jets—indeed, sometimes more than one outflow jet—then the biggest one in history is all but certain to.

It only takes her an hour playing with the model to see what’s going on. The biggest hurricanes on record up till now have outflow jets just strong enough to let them fight slowly upstream against a steering current. Almost always a hurricane follows the steering current, and the outflow jet, if there is one, modifies but does not control what happens. In a normal hurricane, that unpredictable outflow jet is a secondary force in the motion—the primary force is still the highly predictable steering current and the equally predictable Coriolis force.

But Clem is so much bigger, Carla realizes, and it’s another case where things don’t just scale up linearly, where bigger is different. Figure the outflow jet it must have just to move the mass of air to keep itself going—and figure the much bigger pressure gradient between where all that air comes down and the much lower pressure than normal in the eye—and all of a sudden the steering current and Coriolis force are secondary. The outflow jet is what’s moving the thing.

Outflow jets are not completely unpredictable. They tend to move around the hurricane in a counterclockwise fashion, though there’s a lot of wobble and variation in it and usually they don’t last long enough to establish a pattern. Further, when the hurricane does follow the steering current, it will tend to drag the outflow jet around behind itself, and thus end up running in the direction of the steering current anyway, though moving faster.

So she knows now—she hopes—both why Clem behaved in a fairly typical way, if you allow for his crossing the cold spot in the middle of the Pacific and getting bigger instead of shrinking, and why he’s now moving west to east in a completely unprecedented way. And if she really understands, she can do some predicting. Not only can Clem move west to east, for long periods of time, unlike a typical hurricane, because he has warm water so far north and an outflow jet to move him against the current when he has to….

They have all figured it will reverse any day now, wander up toward Siberia, hit the twelve-degree Celsius water south of the Bering, and die into thunderstorms, maybe striking a glancing blow at Hawaii or Japan on the way. But if she’s right, that’s not it at all.

She gets her data together, models, notes, the works—it takes the better part of four hours to get it all in a form where Di and the team will be able to follow it, and she’s red-eyed and exhausted by the time she sits down to make her introductory recording. She takes a big sip of water and says, “Cue in two.” The green light on the recorder comes up, and she begins, “Di, what follows is absolutely vital. By the time you get this, there won’t be much time. We’ve got to go public now. Clem is not going to turn back and do something ‘normal’—he’s going to head still farther east and then south, and he’ll keep picking up energy for quite a while. I can’t say where he’ll make his next landfall, but Clem could easily hit Hawaii square on, or tear down the whole West Coast. We needed to start evacuation planning a week ago; we might have as little as three days till Clem hits something.”

Then she sets her alarm to wake her in four hours. The whole inside of the little luxury submarine smells like her gym locker did back in high school, and she just can’t make herself care; there are clean sheets in a drawer under her bunk, and a shower six feet from it, and she cannot be bothered to use either. She has no memory of lying down; only of drifting into uneasy dreams until the alarm catapults her from the bunk, still tired but again able to focus.

The more Jesse thinks about it—and he tries not to—the crazier it seems that he’s still seeing Synthi, or Mary Ann, since that’s what she wants him to call her. It isn’t like they have a lot in common (though they do talk quite a bit), and it isn’t like the sex is especially wonderful (there isn’t any), and it isn’t like this thing is serious (though he notices that it seems to be subtly changing him, and that he finds the changes interesting).

For the first week of this strange little affair, he was too sore to try having sex with her again—and to tell the truth, till he got to know her better, he was also afraid of it. He doesn’t exactly know what was holding her back, if anything, maybe just his reluctance and maybe just another one of her unguessable whims.

But that wasn’t a bad week. They established the basic pattern early—he would come by her house, which is not far from the community college, for comida every day. Comida is a wonderful meal—to do it justice takes an hour, and then after that an hour of recovery, the traditional siesta, is virtually mandatory. Jesse had been here long enough to have fallen into the local patterns of dining, and he found that sitting and gossiping with Mary Ann—she seemed to be fascinated with the day-to-day trivia of his teaching and even with something of what he was teaching—plus receiving all that attention from such a beautiful woman, left him feeling pretty good. Then there would still be time for a nap, and napping with Mary Ann’s head lying on his chest, her body pressed against his, was a great pleasure as well, lying there looking up at the perfect blue sky over her courtyard, sometimes talking softly, about books, while he lightly stroked her hair.

Not that they shared much of a taste in books. Jesse tended to like things a little trashier than Mary Ann did, but it was something to talk about, and he was always afraid for that whole first week that they would run out of things to talk about.

After he returned to the community college and worked the last part of the day, Jesse would go back to his place, shower, put on good clothes, and go meet Mary Ann for a long walk in the city, hand in hand, chatting about everything and nothing. She told him a lot of stories about her early days as an actress, and almost nothing about anything that had happened since she was rebuilt into Synthi.

Jesse virtually stopped drinking.

In kind of an offhand way, he supposed Mary Ann didn’t know very many real people. He wasn’t sure what was more real about him than about her, but the “unreality” of show business people was so commonly talked about that he figured there had to be something in it. He got used to the idea of dating a celebrity and realized after a while that it wasn’t really any different from dating anyone else—if anything what was unusual in all this was dating an older woman who really knew what she wanted and didn’t mind being in charge. That was what was interesting.

The routine of meeting for comida, taking siesta together, meeting again for a long walk through town, then eating cena together, did not vary for their first week, Monday through Friday. In all that time they only held hands, cuddled, and kissed goodnight.

But today is Saturday, and it’s a half day, which means that since it’s now noon, Jesse is off for the day. On his way out, José, and his friend Obet, give Jesse a certain amount of teasing about being with an XV star (“Compadre, what can you be thinking of? You already know what it is like with this one—”), but the slight edge in it, the feeling that they might even be a little angry, tells him at once that they envy him.

“She’s not that different,” Jesse says, grinning, letting them think that perhaps she is. “And there’s certainly not the volume of crap you have to take with a twenty-year-old.”

José shakes his head sadly. “My good friend, my dear friend, it is not that you had to take that crap, it is that you did take it. What you have here is a woman old enough to know that you can walk away any time and that you do not have to take such crap, and therefore she is wise enough not to give it to you. She just does not know that you would be foolish enough to take it.”

“Could be,” he grins. “But you could get to like older women, you really could.”

“Ah, but when will we get the chance to try, with the great norteamericano conquering all the good-bodied women in the city?”

Jesse points at his chest and makes a face. “Me? I don’t sew them shut when I’m done, you know.”

That sends both his friends into gales of laughter; one great thing about his Mexican friends, they’re still capable of shock. Jesse figures it’s a lingering effect of Catholicism or something. Anyway, they don’t seem to be having any attacks of jealousy or envy anymore, so he says “Adiós” and heads up the street.

It isn’t so much that Tapachula is a city where nothing happens, he finds himself thinking, as that it’s a city where things get done instead of talked about. People work here. And like most people who are working, they’re glad enough for interruptions, but they also like to get done. So new gossip is always going to be a mixed blessing—better interruptions, but another thing in the way.

Or, then again, maybe bedding an XV star is something they can imagine happening only to a gringo, and it just seems like one more good thing in life that has been reserved for los norteamericanos. He’d like to tell them the truth—that he and Mary Ann have done it only once and he didn’t much care for it, that her body feels strange and mechanical, that he isn’t sure he has the nerve for another try—but deep down he doubts that they would believe him, and even if they did, probably they would only be angry that an opportunity like that was being wasted on him.

He rounds the corner onto her street; it’s very warm already, and the whitewashed buildings are hard to look at against the brilliant blue of the sky around the horizon. He can feel the heat washing off the buildings onto his skin, getting in under the little black crusher that he wears to keep the sun off his face. He takes a moment to sigh, as if pushing hot air out of himself, then walks the last few dozen steps to where the trees overarch her front yard, stepping into the shadows as if he were sliding into a cool pool of water in the jungle.

She comes out the door to greet him, wearing a white dress. After what they’ve done to her, it’s pretty hard for her to come up with anything pretty to wear that won’t call attention to her obscene body, but this is not a bad compromise. It swings out away from her in most places (though you can certainly still tell she’s huge in the bust), but it’s frilly and frivolous and looks more like a little-girl smock than anything else. She’s coiled her hair under a floppy sun hat as well, and she looks like nothing so much as the little girls in baggy clothing on an old calendar.

“You look terrific,” Jesse says, meaning it.

She beams up at him, and he notices that they either didn’t erase—or chose to leave—a light spray of freckles across her snub nose. He kisses her, shyly, on the cheek, and she hugs him, enthusiastically.

“I thought we’d just wander around the city, maybe take in a movie but probably just sit in a café or on a park bench,” she says. “There aren’t any other big attractions I know of.”

“If you want to be my date for it, I’m invited to a party tonight,” Jesse says. “Bunch of Lefties, everything from old-style Stalinistas to Deepers to plain-vanilla ULs. At least half of them will deplore your existence and the other half will want to talk to you about how exploited you are.”

“I deplore everyone’s existence and I love to talk about how exploited I am. Wallowing in self-pity is one of the things I do best. I’m used to handling myself in public, Jesse. And I wouldn’t mind meeting some new faces.”

“Well, then,” he says, “that’s at about nine tonight. Tapachula time, that means it won’t start till ten, and Leftie time, that means it won’t really get moving until close to midnight. So I’d say we still have quite a bit of wandering time ahead of us. Take my arm, madam?”

“Sure. Except when we’re crossing streets. I don’t want you to be mistaken for a Boy Scout.”

Stepping out of the shadows of her front yard is like stepping inside a tumed-on searchlight; it’s blazing hot and dry, and there’s piercing white light everywhere.

They spend an hour or so that afternoon wandering around the streets, looking at people enjoying their day off. Most of the time they walk hand in hand.

For some reason—maybe because out here they have to keep the subject of the conversation quiet—they talk quite a bit about sex. They’ve teased about it before, many times, Jesse pretending he’s afraid she’ll attack him again, Mary Ann asking him what it’s like to hump the Michelin Man. But this has an edge in it that suggests a certain seriousness.

Another reason for discussing it in low murmurs, out in public, is the endless interruptions that keep it from getting too intense; Jesse’s students stop to say hello and be introduced, and there are dozens of little carts with interesting food that has to be considered (and usually rejected), and sometimes the time is just better for walking along slowly and staring up the white street. Thus they are perpetually, pleasantly, called away from their flirting, and they don’t get back to that topic too quickly.

“Jesse, do you suppose we could ever have ended up together any other way?” she asks, abruptly. She isn’t looking at him.

He glances sideways, sees only the side of her sun hat. “I hadn’t thought about it at all.”

“Well, I have. And I’ve concluded this is absolutely the only way we could have ended up together. So I’m very glad it happened.” She sighs. Jesse notices a couple strands of flame red hair escaping from her sun hat, and brushes them back. She looks at him and smiles. “All I mean is it took strange circumstances to throw us together, but there was a lot I had forgotten and lost track of in my life….”

Oh, it’s going to be one of these. Jesse figured out a while ago that although they did a lot of conditioning to make her into Synthi Venture, there’s a lot of Mary Ann Waterhouse that never required any conditioning. For one thing, she tends to communicate in this sort of deep-emotion-speak made up of phrases from old movies. She rambles on a little about “getting it back together” and “refocusing her energies” and so forth, leading up to the conclusion that she sees Jesse “as a gateway person in my life.” He’s not sure what it all means except that she’s glad they’re together; he used to talk this way when he was trying to get girls into bed with the old sensitive-artistic-young-man routine, but it doesn’t feel like she’s particularly trying to seduce him.

He lets an arm slide up around her shoulders, feeling how small she really is, and pulls her close to him. The street is all but deserted, with just two other couples walking far away from them. The street leads to a not-impressive little fountain that plays halfheartedly in the brilliant sunlight and he guides her to the rim of the fountain, and then they sit down, and he kisses her.

This is the first real kiss since that awful first night—he’s kissed her goodnight a few times but it’s just been a peck on the lips—and he’s surprised at how gentle, and how responsive, she is. She seems to want him to take the lead, her mouth soft and shyly probing at his. The kiss goes on for a long time, and when it’s over she’s smiling like a young kid after her first one.

“I haven’t been kissed that way in a long, long time,” she says. “I guess I’m a little surprised that I can still feel it.”

“Well, since you could, how was it?”

“Divine, dammit. Think I’d tell you if it wasn’t? Anyway, now that we’ve done the corny kissing-by-the-fountain routine, and the corny walking-around-hand-in-hand routine—”

“Fear not,” he says. “I have something just as corny up my sleeve. There’s a licuado stand around the corner. It’s run by the sister of one of my students, so she probably won’t slip us any rotten fruit.”

She blinks at him innocently. “What’s a licuado?”

“Aha,” he says. “Wealthy tourist ladies don’t get out and mix with the people much, do they?”

“Just so it isn’t Spanish for ‘dog vomit,’ or something. I don’t want this to turn out to be anything like the Vegemite trick.”

Jesse grins at her. “Nope. Not in the least. And I’ve already fallen for Vegemite once, which is about as often as anyone could be expected to.”

“Me too. Rock is evil. He talked me into trying Vegemite while we were doing a story about the deterioration of the Great Barrier Reef.”

“Yeah, there were three Australian students at U of the Az who threw a ‘snacks around the world’ potluck; naturally they brought Vegemite and ate everyone else’s stuff. That wasn’t so disgusting, except that then they ate the Vegemite.”

“Now that’s disgusting. So a licuado is not some kind of prank?”

“Fresh fruit, milk, and sugar, run through a blender. But the thing is that the milk and the fruit are really fresh, like just bought in the market that morning. Haven’t even had time to get lonely for the tree or the cow. Come on—this requires your immediate attention.”

They round the corner into the broad calle, divided by long low brick planters in which palm trees grow.

Porfirio’s sister recognizes Jesse at once, and it’s obvious that she’s heard from Porfirio who Jesse is involved with, because she’s suddenly very shy and formal around Mary Ann. Mary Ann is polite and warm in return—Jesse finds himself thinking, Right, and this way Teresa will tell all of her friends what an average, normal, but muy bella woman Synthi Venture is.

They get a single gigantic papaya licuado, an interesting purplish-pink shade since the papaya was very ripe and red, and share it using two straws. That means Mary Ann’s sun hat is severely in Jesse’s way, and after a few bumps she takes it off, letting that great mass of strangely red hair spill down into her lap.

“There’s a lot of that,” Jesse notes.

“Has to be—most of those styles they put me in involve wrapping it over all those funny foam supports. I just think of it as being the 3D equivalent of the old cardboard sheets they used to tape Cosmo models’ hair to.”

“Lady, I’m just glad they didn’t make everything synthetic.”

“Maybe not synthetic, but the way it’s been treated it’s pretty callused.”

“I was talking about your heart.”

“Come to think of it, so was I.”

The walk back to her place goes very slowly, but neither of them is eager or reluctant; something has been settled. The all-but-psychic Señora Herrera has prepared a cold, buffet-style comida for them, which she sends up to Mary Ann’s bedroom.

This time it takes a long time, and it’s surprisingly gentle and friendly. Neither of them tunes in the news, and shouting outside in the street is so common that they don’t hear the news from Hawaii until the next morning.

On June 28, northwest of Midway, sixteen kilometers up, a torrent of wet air pours along the bottom of the tropopause—the outflow jet for Hurricane Clem. The jet is huge—it carries the mass flow of several large hurricanes all by itself. Yet it’s invisible; Louie Tynan, far to the south and high above, can barely perceive it, now that he knows what to look for, with infrared scanning.

Di Callare and his team, and Carla Tynan in MyBoat, have been aware of it for less than a week but now the outflow jet is occupying most of their thoughts.

Thus far Clem has been following the steering currents, the winds that circle clockwise over the North Pacific six kilometers up, rather meekly, like an elephant allowing itself to be led on a kite-string tether. But if Carla is right, then at any moment the outflow jet might swing around to some other point, or a new outflow jet might form, and in either case Clem might surge off in any direction at all.

When the moment comes, it is late afternoon in the North Pacific, and it’s mere coincidence that Louie is watching; by the time he’s reaching for the phone to tell Earth about it, the alarms are already sounding and data from the automatic cameras will be funneling into Houston and Washington in a matter of moments.

Still he calls; no one who works with high-tech equipment ever trusts it completely, and this is far too important to leave reporting it to the judgment of some Al. He uses the high-priority code to get through directly to Washington and is rewarded with the sleepy, grouchy face of Harris Diem, who had just gone to bed. “Yes?”

“Mr. Diem, this is Louie Tynan. The outflow jet has just precessed north. Clem is about to veer off track.”

“Processed—north. Where will it come in, do you have an idea yet?”

Louie looks down at the readout the AI is giving him. “Shit. We sure do. Looks like there’s an excellent chance Midway gets clobbered, and after that it’s about fifty-fifty that one or more of the Hawaiian Islands will get it.”

Diem looks down, confirms Louie’s numbers, looks back up at him. “Stick around and don’t go off to the moon for a bit. Someone might want you to look at some specific things unofficially. If you need to do anything to get comfortable for the next few hours, the next ten minutes would be a good time to do it.”

“Roger,” Louie says, and turns away from the phone as Diem hangs up.

The outflow jet has swung farther north—indeed, begun to swing to the east. It’s obvious to Louie just from naked-eye observation, for there’s a sharp edge biting into the spiral of Hurricane Clem, which is where the descending outflow jet is forming a high-pressure area.

He sends a copy of the basic results to Di’s team number, so that the data will be available once Diem or Pauliss wakes up Di Callare, and then copies Carla on it, though she’s probably too far submerged to get it for a while.

Then, long practice taking hold of him, he orders sandwiches and coffee from the automatic galley, and goes to the head. Diem is absolutely right—you never know.

As the outflow jet takes up its new position relative to the storm, the winds all around shift; air flows from high to low pressure, and there is no lower pressure at sea level than in Clem’s center, nor higher pressure than the descent point of the outflow jet. If Clem were a physical object, sheer mass would make the hurricane take a long time to slow down and change direction, but a hurricane is not an object, it’s a process: it converts the angular momentum of the inward spiraling air into the power of its winds, but it does not itself have momentum.

So when it suddenly turns 110 degrees to the right, swinging wildly into a new trajectory, it does not slow down and then accelerate like an ocean liner or a truck; it just changes direction.

The best news, from the standpoint of the world’s governments, is that it happens exactly when the North American East Coast is getting ready for bed, and that it takes a while for the significance of the story to become apparent, so by the time word is breaking on XV one of the big population belts has gone to bed.

Unfortunately this puts it on the morning news for Europe and the evening news for East Asia.

Thus Carla Tynan, surfacing for the last run into Pohnpei, is aware of the situation not long after it happens, sets her autopilot, and gets to work; Di, rousted from bed by Henry Pauliss’s phone call, apologizes to Lori, grabs the bag he has been keeping packed, and catches the zipline to DC.

At four in the morning, Di is at his desk, with a huge mug of coffee i front of him. Gretch runs over from the intern’s dorm and gets put in charge of point plotting and data patterning; Pete and Wo Ping arrive next, sharing a ride, then Mohammed. Just as they begin to worry, Talley comes in, a Self Defender protruding conspicuously from her purse. She lives in a bad neighborhood, she explains, and figured it was better to walk down the street with her hand visibly on that than to get delayed by anyone trying anything. “If I have to fire it, the radio signal would bring cop cars from everywhere and I’d end up talking to cops all night,” she says with a shrug.

She’s perfectly made up, and Di wonders for an idle moment if she was interrupted in a date or perhaps while out at a club. Strange that she never seems tired in the morning.

John Klieg catches it on the evening news and notes with grim satisfaction that another private space-launch company, Consolidated Launch, is based at Naalehu on the Big Island. It isn’t as important as the heavy-lift facility at Kingman, but anyplace that can’t put up a satellite is going to make Klieg richer and there’s a splendid chance that, with its exposed gantries sitting a full kilometer out in the sea, and its pipelines running down across the beaches, Naalehu will be out of action within days, leaving the USA with only the air launch facility at Edwards.

All in all, in two weeks since Clem formed, he’s cut the global supply of available launches by a very satisfying forty percent; Klieg knows it will be Hassan, with congratulations, when the phone rings. Too bad about all those people, but as Hassan says, compassion speaks well of its holder but does little for its recipient.

Brittany Hardshaw knows ten minutes after Harris Diem does, and she’s dressed and sleeping off and on in a cot by the Oval Office. The alarms are going out to Hawaii by every possible means, and at least it’s early evening there and it’s easy to get the word out. Remembering the pictures from Micronesia, the crashed space facility at Kingman, and all the XV coverage of the wrecked old folks’ home on Saipan, the Hawaiians are responding as she would have hoped, digging in and filling sandbags, getting everyone and everything that can be moved back into the mountains. Still, if any of the islands take the full force of Clem, it won’t be nearly enough.

The Navy decides to take no chances and works all night to evacuate Midway; fortunately the USS George Bush and its carrier group are at hand already, so they’re able to just shove everyone and anything aboard the carrier and everything else that will float, and run for Pearl Harbor, leaving the island unoccupied. When President Hardshaw gets word that the fleet has departed and is making all speed, she heaves a sigh of relief; it’s late afternoon now in Washington, and it looks like Clem is going to go through the Hawaiian chain right between Lisianski and Laysan—near enough to give Midway a pounding and to hit the main islands with monster waves, but a long way from Oahu, Maui, or Hawaii itself. And Admiral Singh on the Bush seems to think the carrier group can ride it out and still make it to Pearl. Bad enough—but they’ll make it.

Before he goes home for the day, Harris Diem finds he’s called into the New Oval Office one more time.

“It’s time,” Hardshaw says. “We need to get all the attention on Clem if Rivera and I are going to get the powers we need.”

“It still sounds strange for you to say ‘Rivera and I,’” Diem notes.

“You sound bitter.”

“Yeah, a little. May I sit, boss?”

“You don’t need to ask and you know it. What’s the matter?”

“I keep thinking, who are you, where is the real Brittany Lynn Hardshaw, and what have you done with her?” Diem sighs. “Somebody works for more than a decade to get us back out from under the UN thumb—and it hasn’t been easy, with them paying the bills at the start and our having to practically rent out the armed forces as peacekeeping units—the goal is within reach, and… what? You bring them back in. You know damned well we could dominate the world after Clem.”

“If there’s a world to dominate, Harris. That’s the big if. No point in being just the least wounded of the critical cases.”

He shrugs. “Oh, I understand the logic. And you’re maneuvering Rivera into our pocket, and that’s good too. But I just… well, a lot of this is sticking in my craw. I know when you said it’s time, you mean time to shaft Henry Pauliss. And he’s kind of an old friend and protégé. He trusts me. He won’t know what it’s about.”

“Harris, you and I have both sent friends to their death,” Hardshaw says softly. “I’m not sure that I’m the one who’s changing.”

Diem sighs and shrugs. “I used to understand in my guts what we were doing. Nowadays I just understand the reasons in my head. Boss, we’ve always delivered the goods to the people we served—they wanted crooks behind bars, we gave‘em that; they wanted to squirm out from under the UN, we gave’em that; they wanted us to rescue the Afropeans and we did it. We did it by getting our hands on the power we needed and using it. We didn’t do it by organizing great big ‘let’s hate the hurricane’ media campaigns, or trying to persuade people to take the problem seriously, or any of that. And we made sure that people either worked for us or regretted it. Now I see all this balancing and juggling, and, yeah, I know, I understand, it’s a different world, the planet could be at stake… but I just don’t understand it like I used to.”

She nods. “Fair enough. Can you still do what I ask? I need a big scandal, I need someone to stomp on, and it needs to be a scandal related to Clem. Can you give me Henry Pauliss to take the fall?”

“Yeah. No problem.”

In a curiously formal way, they shake hands before he goes. Diem heads home, goes down to the basement, and gives in to the craving, rampaging through half of his wedges; later, raw and sore, he falls into a deep, dreamless—but not at all refreshing—sleep.

The first news of it Jesse and Mary Ann get comes on the TV—not XV, Mary Ann won’t have that in the house—just as they are rising from the siesta, at about four in the afternoon. By that time things have been going on for quite a while, and there’s already footage (shot by a Navy staticopter out of Pearl on an emergency some-good-publicity-at-last basis) of the carrier group making all speed to the south and east. Analysts are explaining it all over the place, and besides Scuttlebytes, there’s a fresh edition of Sniffings.

“Do you believe the stuff she puts in that?” Mary Ann asks Jesse, curling against him and pulling his hand into her waist.

“Quite a bit of it. She interviewed my brother once, and he was pretty impressed. She occasionally calls him for background info.”

“Really? I always have trouble believing the news in Sniffing.”

Jesse nods. “What did you find so hard to believe?”

“I suppose just its take on the world. I don’t see what she’s getting at, what kind of story she thinks it is. Instead, it’s always like she’s so dedicated to being flat that she takes the voice and the story out of it; she might as well be reading a stock ticker or something. And she doesn’t look like much, you know; I mean, her appearance is professional but she doesn’t do anything to make herself very grabbing, and anyway it’s all these interviews and graphs and things. You can get a lot about what’s happening and stuff—if you believe what she’s saying—but you can’t get anything about how it all hooks together, and if it doesn’t hook together it doesn’t feel real.”

“I suppose,” Jesse says. “Di says my old man is a big fan of hers. In fact, it says on the news a lot of the old people think she’s great. I guess because it’s more like the news was like when they were kids.”

“Ugh. I don’t remember the old TV news from the first time it was out very much, but by the time I was in high school we used to watch a lot of old news programs in history class, and I remember how dull that was.”

Jesse thinks and nods. “I see what you mean. The news didn’t used to say much, did it?”

“Exactly. It didn’t. And this bunch of ships in the middle of the ocean—”

“Running like hell from a hurricane,” Jesse says. “That’s pretty dramatic. And there’re kids and moms and so forth on the carrier—they had a little school and apartment complex on Midway Island for dependents.”

“Yeah, but we don’t have any sense of who they are except people in a news story,” Mary Ann points out. She’s now sitting up and very alert; Jesse realizes that they’re on her home territory here and naturally she has a lot to say. “That’s the basic insight that Doug Llewellyn had, the thing that made Passionet big is that what’s important to people is people they know. Lots of people used to watch the old news just to see the old-style anchormen, which made sense. The way you feel that something is important and know what it’s about is by watching how someone important to you reacts. After all, that’s how we all learned to react to the news as kids. The trouble with the old kind of news was that it could show you pictures of things but it couldn’t put you there. I mean, imagine if the Holocaust had been covered letting people feel like they were the guards—”

“Or like they were going into the ovens themselves,” Jesse suggests, feeling morbid.

“Well, since you put it that way, yeah. And for that matter, imagine what it might have been like to be in the astronauts’ heads for the first spaceflights.”

“Well, we all know what it was like to be in Colonel Tynan’s head for the Mars landing, anyway. Yeah, I suppose you’re right—the people on that ship are kind of faceless to me. On the other hand, I’m still pretty interested in whether or not they make it.”

“Yeah, but think about what it would be like to be standing on the deck.” Her eyes are faraway and a little sad; Jesse recognizes the melodrama in it—she is striking one of her “I must get back to work someday” poses.

“You could get killed,” Jesse says firmly, as he does every time she does this.

“Ah—but the royalties my estate would make on that!” She grins at him. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to abandon you to drab, wretched reality all that soon. But I am starting to think about the biz again… and that’s kind of the way you have to think. It is dangerous, you know… always has been. Ernie Pyle didn’t die in bed.”

“He never met you.”

She snorts, hits him with a pillow from the sofa, and then they get into a tickle fight; by the time they look back at the screen the station is showing baseball scores.

Half an hour before Mary Ann and Jesse watch the television clip of the evacuation of Midway, Clem’s outflow jet kicks around again, to almost due northwest. By now Clem’s eye is centered near 169W 31N, and its outer winds are tearing into Midway, hundreds of kilometers away, with a Beaufort scale force of 19—more than enough to tear down buildings and hurl small boats up onto the shore; what the Japanese air raids of 1942 could not do is accomplished in a matter of a few minutes on the evacuated base. Strong buildings stand, but with their windows shattered and often with their roofs stripped off like peels from bananas; weaker buildings, poles holding wires, piers, and all the other structures exposed to the full fury of the wind are ripped into pieces and scattered out to sea or hurled against what is still standing. Every palm tree on the island is laid flat, and by the time the immense wave rolls over the wreckage, there is little enough left standing to knock down.

The wave was just a by-blow, however, a mere sideswipe, for Clem is already on its way south and west, and the part of the wave that struck Midway was only a corner of the main body. The base is scoured off the face of Sand Island, and the World War II ruins still remaining on East Island disappear with it; when the sun comes out again, still days away, it will show smaller islands, with the sand islets gone. The only signs of life will be the bare faces of the airstrips on each island, and the foundations of Pan Am’s old Midway Hotel. By that time, no one will be interested in looking.

The hurricane is moving roughly parallel to the southeastward sweep of the Hawaiian Islands, but not perfectly so, and all lines that are not parallel eventually converge; the question now is where those lines are going to converge, and whether Clem will stay on his. Di Callare does not go home; Lori sends him a packed lunch and some clean clothes, and he showers at work, changes, gratefully eats the lunch, and is working again before he really knows that he has been taking any time off, with just a vague impression that Lori is out there and that she loves him.

Darkness crawls across the Atlantic toward America, reaches Brazil, marches on up the face of South America, rolls across the Caribbean and North America, and Clem, still basking in the sun of late afternoon in the Pacific, continues to gather speed and to swing inward toward the islands. It is now too late to hope that major damage can be avoided—if you take the distance at which the winds fall to Beaufort force 12, the standard definition of a hurricane, then Hurricane Clem is just under 3,000 km in diameter—that is, it is about four times as big in area as Alaska.

But the great majority of that area is merely hurricane; that is, not bigger or worse than most typhoons or hurricanes. It is only the relatively small area around the eye that is producing the giant waves, and though no instruments have yet survived long enough to report, from the size of the waves it is inferred that at the eye wall the wind must be of tomadic velocities—half a Mach or so. Hawaii will take a hurricane, and because Clem is big and takes a long time to pass even at its extraordinary speed, Hawaii will take that hurricane for a longer than usual time—but it may be just a hurricane, if they are lucky.

Already they have been lucky in that the true tsunami-sized waves emerging from Clem’s core have been largely running parallel to the islands; their tips have battered the rocky coasts of the northwestern sides of the islands, but though the waves are preternaturally big, that side of Hawaii is steep and strong, and little harm has been done—a coastal road washed out here, a narrow beach there, one lighthouse destroyed, but nothing like what could have happened had the waves come from the other side.

The immediate concern is rain. Clem is throwing vast amounts of it into the whole chain, and Hawaii is steep; the bare mountaintops of most of the islands are guiding the rain down onto lower slopes in hundreds and thousands of suddenly formed fast-flowing rivers, blocking and cutting roads that are vitally needed to evacuate the north and east sides of the islands.

Hardshaw wonders if any president since Roosevelt or Truman has even been aware of the existence of Hawaii 11; yesterday she had no concern at all with whether Hawaii even had any state highways, but that particular road has been washed out by flash floods and mudslides at four points between Hilo and Pahala, and worse yet many of the traffic control stations on it are down, so that not only is the evacuation from Hilo to South Kona blocked up (the Corps of Engineers has crews out on all those places, trying to get temporary bridges up in the howling wind and blinding rain, and somewhere she already has a list of six soldiers who’ve died in the effort), but insofar as people can move, they are having to drive themselves on bad roads—and many younger drivers have never had real manual control of a car except briefly in driver’s ed. There are accidents all up and down the line, and each of them traps more motorists on a highway liable to more washouts….

We’re going to lose a few thousand lives at least, Hardshaw thinks to herself. Inconceivable; to be the President of the USA, in time of peace, to have so many resources at her disposal, and to be unable to do one damned thing.

She feels herself relax; she has thought the worst, and now she will be all right. Yes, she is going to lose several thousand citizens. Many of them will die on that highway, due to the Federal evacuation orders, but many more who have elected to stay put will die in Hilo. The blame will not fall too hard in any one direction; Hardshaw’s political team can have most Americans saying “It’s a terrible thing, but what can anyone do?” in short order, if they aren’t already.

She looks over her listing of other news. The evacuation fleet from Midway has turned to run away from the storm—she remembers something vaguely about it being better to take a storm on the stern or the bow rather than broadside—and will try to get around far enough to make a run for Yokohama. Every aircraft that could make it out before weather closed the airports has headed for the West Coast, and since what could be packed onto them were mainly the dependents of servicepeople, there will be thousands of young wives and their children clogging the airports, desperate for news, from San Diego up to Portland. She posts a quick note that local military commanders are to “render humanitarian assistance” and that it’s particularly important, notes Harris Diem has already written a similar note.

It’s dark outside now, and the night is going to be long. Sometime tomorrow whatever is the worst will have happened; Brittany Lynn Hardshaw is praying, more sincerely but with less faith than she has in many years, for an anticlimax.

Darkness moves on, crossing the West Coast, grinding its way on to the Pacific. XV communications require such enormous bandwidth, and so many links to Hawaii have been lost by wind-smashed antennas, that only television and telephone are now going through.

That doesn’t absolve Ed Porter from his job; one of Passionet’s best editors, he is based in Honolulu to handle the Pacific traffic, and even though he can’t get anything from the rest of the world, there is plenty happening right here on Oahu. He turned down the offer of evacuation because he figured that up here, above the city in Dowsett Highlands, is probably about as safe as anywhere they’re evacuating people to.

Right now there are just two people wired to transmit to Passionet on Oahu, which would normally mean Porter would be assembling a pretty thin documentary for eventual distribution. But Candy and Bill are a special case if ever there was one, and another example, Ed thinks, that Doug Llewellyn knows what he’s doing.

Much as Ed hates to admit it, because working on “Dream Honeymoon” has been one royal pain in the ass.

Bill and Candy are unmodified; Candy’s breasts and buttocks are the ones that grew naturally, Bill’s muscles are not the least bit enhanced, and neither of them has been given any training in maintaining an untransmitted persona.

The gimmick was a promotion, originally—let us wire you three months before the wedding, and you get a year’s luxury honeymoon on us. There was a certain discreet kind of rigging in the contest, too, not in the selection but in carefully making sure that most of the entrants would be like Bill and Candy, solid-citizen young Heartlanders who dressed a little behind the fashions and believed in doing everything the old-fashioned way.

Candy’s hairstyle is about five years behind what’s currently flat and a bit overdone, her cosmetics are ten years behind and way overdone, and her favorite topics of conversation are how much they spend at each place on the way and what there is to eat. Bill dresses like what he is—an assistant manager of data patterning for a bank, and complains about the food in a good-natured way—he’d live on steak, pizza, and tacos if he could, because he hates “foreign food.” He is always a bit disgruntled to discover that yet another foreign place is nothing like Sylvania, Ohio.

Ed Porter thinks that they are the two most boring people he’s ever taken signal from, but “Dream Honeymoon” is selling like nothing before or since, and this special recording can be dropped into the regular news, thus boosting sales still further.

Right now Bill and Candy are still in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, the last people left there except for a couple of managers who are closing the place down preparatory to running for the hills. Ed figures that the Royal Hawaiian has managed to survive a long time, even located right down on the beach at Waikiki, and thus probably Bill and Candy are safe… and of course, if they’re not—Porter banishes the thought. Of course they are.

But if they aren’t, Passionet will have the monster hit wedge of the decade.

Right now they’re standing by their pricey window, facing the beach. Ed had suggested they dress in clothes they could run away in, if it came to that, but of course neither of them has the hiking clothes that would be appropriate, and besides, he’s persuaded Bill it’s pretty safe, so Candy is in one of those little look-at-my-body nighties made of cheap, shiny fabric that have been de rigueur for newlyweds since the 1970s. She’s got jeans, sneakers, underwear, and a tight little knit top that may not be practical but is at least informal stacked by the door, presumably so that if the hotel begins to fall down she can change clothes before running out of it.

Bill has his own pile of pants, shirt, shorts, socks, and shoes next to hers. He’s standing there in his bikini briefs, and Ed finds himself chuckling. Not only does Candy figure she’ll have time to dress to flee, Bill figures he’d better change his undies, too.

Porter clicks into signal and feels…

… Bill is more afraid than he wants Candy to know, and even though everyone at Passionet has been really nice to them for these first few weeks, he has to admit that he doesn’t have anyone in the company he feels is a friend. (Fuzz that into general anxiety, Porter thinks.) Bill wonders how the hell he got into this.

Not that he wouldn’t have been here anyway—everyone in his family since his grandparents has always done a Hawaiian honeymoon, it’s what you do if you’re in the Sylvania Country Club and go to U of Toledo and come back to take over the family business, like being Presbyterian or Methodist, like voting Republican, like having season tickets to lots of things at your old schools.

This is not an easy process for Bill to think his way through. He’d have been here anyway, but without Passionet… well, maybe they’d only have stayed a night or two at the Royal Hawaiian. Probably not even that. The truth is that he’s not sure what you really get for the inflated tab, the food doesn’t eat that much better than home, the beds are a little too firm, everything feels like a museum, and the outside of the building looks like the kind of pink concrete castle that they have at malls for toy stores. There’re lots of more modern places that aren’t far off the beach that would have suited him just fine.

Candy’s trembling and it’s not because she’s cold.

Why did he let that Porter guy, who always seems to be laughing at some damn thing or other that isn’t funny, talk them into staying here? Porter’s way to hell and gone up in the hills and now Bill’s down here with his wife…

My wife, Bill thinks, and pulls Candy closer. That was probably it, he figured. You couldn’t go and look scared in front of her. She was counting on you to be the one that wasn’t scared. If he’d been talking to Porter by himself he might have managed to win the argument and get them on that bus out of town, up into the mountains, but in front of Candy… oh well, spilt milk and so on. He holds her closer and tries not to notice that he’s finding her presence very comforting.

Porter fuzzes out the specifics again; damn it, Bill is having all kinds of great feelings, notably a bare veneer of control over stark terror, and a sort of wanting to curl up on a woman’s lap and hide thing that’s got a tasty bit of Oedipal kink to it, but he keeps fixating on how they happen to be there, and Passionet has to be kept in the background—the experiencers don’t like to be reminded that the stars are wired, or that someone wired them and is standing between star and experiencer.

Flip over to Candy. Oh, now this is nice. She’s scared out of her mind and beginning to think that Bill is a complete fool, but she’s also feeling very much like a little girl and wanting him to be Daddy.

Through her eyes he watches the big waves—nothing like the storm surges, they’re on the other side of the island from Clem, but just the echoes and stirrings of the surges are enough to produce record surf—rotting up into the lights along the beach out of the black ocean, coated with foam on all sides. Her breath catches as one rolls up farther than before and slaps a load of foam up onto Kalakaua Avenue, and it seems to her that through the thick carpet under her feet she can feel the building groan.

She snuggles closer to Bill and tries to think positively; all her life that’s been the one thing she can always do. This is a great adventure and maybe there’s something in the contract or somewhere that they get more money for getting through something like this. This will be something for Bill and her to tell the kids about forever. This will all be over by dawn, and when they get up late they’ll find the hotel employees are already back at their posts and there’s a nice big breakfast—for Bill, of course.

Porter snickers. Bill certainly eats and he’s going to be built like a side of beef, but Candy’s not that far behind him; her trim little tummy is soft and flabby, her breasts are high and perky only because they’re new, and in five years she’ll be subsiding into a soggy Midwestern lard meringue like her mother and sisters. He enjoys the snicker a lot—it makes him feel better, and relieves some of the fear that’s been leaking through from Candy. One problem with editing, especially when you’re getting signal off an untrained mind, is that like it or not, you end up sympathizing. And Porter doesn’t like it at all.

He pops back to Bill and discovers the poor dumb bastard has screwed up some courage from somewhere and is managing to keep the tremble out of his arms and voice as he whispers to Candy that it’s going to be okay, really it is, and won’t they have something to tell the relatives about.

It seems to put some heart in her, for she turns back to him and smiles. “We can’t tell them, honey, they’ve already been there and been us.”

Bill snorts. “Guess you’re right at that. Well, at least we’ll really have something to be for them.”

She snuggles back against him, and his hand strokes the slick fabric that covers the small of her back; the little spaghetti straps on her shoulders tighten, and her breasts rise just a fraction. God, it couldn’t get more perfect… these kids have such limited imaginations that with a little luck they are really going to—“And you know,” she says, “it’s just common sense that we’re perfectly safe here anyway, hon. They aren’t going to lose all they’ve invested in us.”

Nitwit bitch, Porter thinks. Have to fill in there with footage of the monster waves rolling in, and maybe get an actor to overdub some kind of fear onto it, and it still won’t work.

Bill grins. “On top of everything else, you really have guts, honey. I’m so glad we got married and had the chance to do this. Even if it does mean…” He grins, feeling mischief rising, his fear sinking away, and looking into Bill’s mind, Porter laughs with elation. Yes! We are going to get the full effect—right out of From Here to Eternity. Pity I can’t figure out a way to make him take her down to the beach and hose her where there’s a chance of them being swept out to sea.

All those blonde curls and that overdone makeup swirl in a little pose that Porter figures she must have learned from experiencing Synthi Venture—though, god knows, this one could never be one percent of the pro Synthi is. But then, not being a pro is the point of this whole stupid exercise in bucolic sentimentality….

“Now what does that mean?” she says, pouting just a little and unconsciously tugging her nightie down a bit, so that she pops out of it a little more. Porter concedes that the little cow does have a nice set of udders.

“Oh, just… well, I sure wasn’t the only guy who was ever interested in you, and now if they want to know… uh, what it’s tike—”

She giggles. “Oh, god, Bill, you know all they get to find out is what I’m like with you. I’d never be that hot with anyone else, lover, and you know it.”

“Maybe,” he murmurs, letting his hand slide up her thigh.

The window thumps as if a body had been thrown against it, but it doesn’t break; an instant later they hear a screaming crash and the howl of the gust breaks on them from the eaves. Both jump and their terror returns instantly.

Shit, Porter thinks, that was one great spike of fear but he’d really like to have some more sex in the mix….

“Sounds like they lost a gutter into the parking lot,” Bill says, making himself sound a lot more casual than he’s feeling. “Glad our rental’s insured.” His heart is halfway up his throat but he can tell Candy needs him to be calm and he’s going to be.

Zap, let’s get the Candy view—wow, Unfuckingreal. The poor bimbo is going for it. Porter plugs straight on in and gets the full load. Candy is looking at this big, square, back-slapping halfwit who’s never had a thought in his life, with his fake good-sport qualities and his unformed good looks shortly to vanish under wattles of fat, and somehow she’s seeing Superman. This bovine lump looks like a hero to her….

Candy has never seen Bill like this before. She can hear the strength and calm in his voice, and now she really does know it’s perfectly safe. She’s sorry she jumped like that, considering that he was probably working his way around to some loving and she could really use that just now. So she winks and says, “Well, at least since everyone else has run off, we don’t have to pull any shades if I want to show you something….”

“Show me what?” he asks. Porter hops back and finds that, as sometimes happens, playing brave has gotten rid of Bill’s fear. They are going to. Wow, this couldn’t get more perfect. Passionet is going to ship billions.

She shows him, pulling her nightie shyly high enough to reveal her tidy, carefully shaped patch of pubic hair. Porter makes sure both sides are recording—they’ll want a men’s and a women’s version of this part—and feels the surge of Bill’s erection answering.

Bill is unexpectedly rough with her, which is just fine from Porter’s standpoint—less need to amp the sensations, which always adds so much distortion—and for some odd reason she likes it this time. Probably because he seems like more of a big strong man when he’s grabbing her by the breasts, surprisingly soft and baggy to the touch, and pushing her back against the wall. He jabs his penis, so stiff it trembles, forward between her thighs, misses, grunts with the pain of bending it a bit against a plump buttock, and she reaches down and guides it into her completely relaxed and sopping wet vagina. He thrusts his penis in and out of her furiously, gasping with the speed and exertion.

Porter, editing together a Bill track, a Candy track, and a both-together track on the fly for three different editions, is far too busy, but this is hot even for him, with all his experience of experiencing. He doesn’t have a hand free to help himself but he still comes when Candy has her first explosive orgasm.

And it’s not just hot, both of them are giving this wonderful scattershot montage of all sorts of feelings and thoughts about each other, as if somehow…

… their lives were passing before their eyes, Porter realizes, as he starts to come down off the induced high. They’re still banging away, Candy’s head bouncing back off the wall (she’ll wonder why it hurts later, Porter figures) and Bill pushing into her with all the force of his thighs, all but lifting her off the floor.

It’s a pointlessly morbid thought. Their lives are not passing before their eyes, and besides, Porter has edited dozens of wedges that included right-up-to-death material and that never has happened.

He dismisses it and focuses on getting all those memories to edit into a more composed montage. Who’d have thought these two lumps of cheese would have all this stuff in them? Vintage Heartland Americana mixed with good solid porn—

Candy hanging out in some student bar and Bill’s first sight of her, as she looked over her shoulder at him and he got one of those perfect hair-tit-butt shots that a hundred years of movies, TV, and XV have taught most of the women on Earth to do—and poor old stupid Bill reacted as if neither he nor anyone else had ever seen such a thing before—

Long corny walk in Oak Openings Park on one of those rare October days when the sun shines and the leaves look decent in Ohio, holding hands, itching to get some privacy and scrog till they’re sore but delaying it because both of them thought this was a happy moment, and surprise, it was… amber sunlight hitting Candy’s rather ordinary enhanced-blonde hair and turning it into a movie gold.

Bill’s moment of terror on Christmas Eve when he reached into his pocket and couldn’t find the engagement ring and wondered how he’d ever explain the minuscule heap of gifts he had for her—and the moment of relief as he found it. His pleasant surprise to realize that that moment was going to be the worst of it, asking her wasn’t half as scary… and then going to the Methodist Church together and singing carols by candlelight and the hot chocolate afterward (Porter is finding this all so Mom and Pop American that he wants to vomit, but he knows the audience out there will eat this right up)—and then, fabulous! the memory includes a stolen kiss and Bill realizing he can smell his own semen on her breath—

Candy has an explosive, crying, screaming orgasm, and before it’s over Bill is spurting into her. Porter gleefully logs the works. Passionet will be making money off this a hundred years from now.

They sink slowly to the carpet, still holding each other, very tenderly now, just beginning to feel how sore they will be. Bill cradles Candy’s head in his hands and kisses her; her mouth is slack and open, and as Porter pops over to her mind he finds that she’s all but unconscious with bliss, little aftershocks of pleasure still rolling up from her aching vulva.

Then the first peak gust hits. In the high winds of a hurricane, wind can gust to double and triple velocity. This gust, coming in from the sea, shatters the windows on the building, all at once. The two newlyweds have just time enough to look up and see the windowpanes hit the pink wall and burst into dust; Candy draws breath for a scream.

Ed Porter catches the jag of fear and is himself terrified, for one moment, before he can detach to notice what a grand and gorgeous piece of material he has grabbed here.

Candy’s scream and Bill’s moan of terror are drowned as the door bursts out into the hallway—there is a terrible thunder as all the internal doors shatter or fall through.

The force exerted on a structure by wind is a function of two things: the square of the speed of the wind, and the relative roughness of the surface presented to the wind. Anything that makes the flow turbulent will increase the drag and hence the delivered force of the wind. This is why a car with open windows must burn so much more gasoline to maintain the same speed as one with closed windows—the open windows split up and mix the airflow, pit it against itself, make it turbulent.

The gust is already dwindling back to the original wind speed, but it is too late for Bill and Candy. The force on the outside of the Royal Hawaiian Hotel would be six times what it was at the moment of their orgasm—but that was before air began to circulate through the shattered windows and the myriad doorways and corridors of the interior. The additional turbulence increases the coupling—the percentage of energy from the wind that goes into the structure instead of passing over it—by many times.

Before their lungs empty with their shrieks of fear, the soft pink walls of the Royal Hawaiian shred and break, the great central tower cracks and begins to fall back away from the sea, the interior walls and floors, hit by aerodynamic lift in a dozen directions, break from the studs to fly against each other, and the blacktop roof peels up like the lid of a sardine can and sails away inland like a loose bedsheet in a thunderstorm, bursting into pieces as it goes.

The lurches prove too much for the structural members, and the Royal Hawaiian collapses, the great winds tearing off pieces as big as automobiles to hurl through the neighboring blocks of shops and restaurants and onto the Ala Wai Golf Course.

Bill and Candy do not have a chance to be aware of any of this. The blast of air through their room sucks the floor up and the ceiling down; Bill does not even have time to register horror or to understand what he is seeing when Candy’s head is flattened like a pumpkin on a sidewalk by the slap of the ceiling against it, for he is sailing across the room—they are still holding each other—and his head hits the wall where there’s a stud, shattering his skull instantly.

Ed Porter has it all on tape. Passionet is going to love him. And he’s way up here away from it all. He does a little dance, and, to relieve feelings he’s built up, he loops that last passionate intercourse (along with their memories of several other times) into a nonstop orgasm series of Candy, putting in the image of her head shattering between each surge. Passionet won’t want this but Ed has his connections and he knows there are some places where this will be a best-seller of a completely different kind; he plays the tape, masturbates, ejaculates over and over at the intercut of bovine ecstasy and death like a sledgehammered steer—

He is still sitting there, pulling on his now-sore penis, trying to get one more orgasm out of Bill and Candy, half an hour later, when a piece of old flagpole, torn from a downtown monument, pierces the Passionet offices, creating a hole for the wind to work on; moments later the building begins to crumble, but by now Ed Porter, impaled through the chest by the flagpole, his pants still around his knees, is past caring. Within an hour the records of the last of Bill and Candy are immersed, stirred violently, and float away (wedges are light and they are stored in airtight plastic), never to be found.

They’re getting low on movable satellites, and only Edwards and Baikonur, right now, can give them polar launches. The Kazakhs have been as helpful as possible, but their facility is old (hard to believe that it first launched well before President Hardshaw was born), and the Edwards launch facility was never really intended to do more than put up the occasional military package.

It’s also hard to find anything that can penetrate Clem well enough to tell what’s going on. As it scraped eastward down the northern side of the Hawaiians, winds curling in against the sheltered shores, available bandwidth fell steadily all night, so that, first, commercial XV had to go, and then television had to be switched to old-style low-def, and then phones went to audio only…. They now have occasional odd voice lines, and whenever they do get a satellite over at low altitude there are a few hams on Lanai and Molokai reporting what they can see—but the weather is far too rough for them to keep an outside antenna up, so their signal is barely reaching to low orbit, less than 100 miles away.

Admiral Singh reports immense seas and that the carrier group has had to fight for its life, but he’s drawing steadily away from Hurricane Clem and the best guess is that the Midway refugees, anyway, will be brought in alive.

Stirred by Clem, there are heavy thunderstorms up and down the West Coast, but most of the Hawaii refugee flights got in before the worst of it hit, and again there were no fatal accidents there. Jumplanes go high enough so that trans-Pacific flights are not interrupted, and there’s reportedly a booming trade in people trying to get a left-side window seat to see Clem from 100 miles up.

Hardshaw looks at the sheet in front of her and sighs. Nominally everything is going well—but this is only because absolutely no information is coming out of Hawaii. The major storm surge that has rolled out of Clem, after this change of direction, will probably roll along the south coast of Mexico, but that’s mostly high rocky coast, with just a scattering of resorts, and the Mexican government should be able to get it evacuated. The surge that was on its way before is nearing the coasts of Washington and British Columbia, and low-lying areas are being evacuated there, hampered by the heavy rain.

And none of that answers the question “What has happened to Hawaii?” The major islands dropped off the communication links in neat order, Kauai going first, the Big Island last, hours ago—in fact, one bright boy at FEMA has arrived at what he calls the Silence Number—Beaufort 28. That is, when the winds reach Beaufort force 28, no regular communication can be expected from that site.

Oahu seems to have held on up to 29, and Nihau went out at 25, but as rules go it seems to hold true.

But right now, the peak wind force has just passed Oahu, with its majority of the state’s population. There is little question that many people must have been trapped on the highways, and the peak wind force was around Beaufort 35, more than enough to pick up and hurl automobiles, so there are unquestionably tens of thousands dead. In many places, roads ran near the coast; very likely some whole traffic jams were swept out to sea and are now on the bottom.

Radar seems to show ten- and twenty-meter waves forming in a circular pattern following Clem’s winds, in which case the sheltered shores have been battered to flinders. Rainfall—but again, all there is to go from is satellite radar—is so dense that it’s possible that people outside would drown, and there’s little question that there must be huge floods pouring off the central volcanoes of each island.

So there are immense numbers of dead, and many more will die of exposure, treatable injuries, and water-bome bacterial disease before adequate help can be gotten there. No structure on Earth, except those few underground military facilities supposed to be nuke-proof, was ever designed for winds like that, so although there are undoubtedly freak survivors, every bridge and building must be assumed down. All this they can know without being able to see.

Beaufort on Kauai is already down to 18—merely a very big hurricane—but nothing is back on the air and there’s no evidence that anything is moving down there except for the waters and winds. A couple of hotshot Army staticopter pilots, trained and accustomed to rough landing conditions, will try to set down in Lihue, the first big town where it’s even remotely feasible—by the time they get there the wind should be down to Beaufort 12, making it merely very difficult rather than impossible. Theoretically, with their hundreds of electrostatically charged blades, and ten replacements per blade available, staticopters are all but impossible to bring down as long as the power source holds out—or the air doesn’t move faster than the staticopter.

She wishes them all the best of luck. She has nightmare visions of conditions suddenly ripping out all the blades, and then ten generations of replacements, within a second or so, and of air crews falling into the black storm. She knows staticopters have been out in Beaufort 13 and 14 winds, and the pilots are good—but right now it’s easier to worry about ten young men who might die than to think about tens of thousands of people who must already be dead.

In the dark and storm of Clem’s passing, a thousand possibilities have crossed Hardshaw’s desk. There may be immense waves confined to the super-hurricane radius, so that the whole coast of each island might have been scraped by hours of roaring water, high enough to erase Honolulu and most of the other cities; there’s even a suggestion from a couple of fuzzy radar images that such a wave might have torn across the low part of Oahu, ripping through Pearl Harbor and across Wheeler AFB at the crest, eventually flowing out through Waialua in the northwest.

Anything could be happening in there, but nothing good.

Hardshaw gets up from her chair and groans. She has been awake too long, sitting still too long. She’s had too much coffee and she’s going for more. This isn’t the first time she’s felt like President Grandma—hell, the job will make anyone feel like an old lady, it probably made Kennedy feel like an old lady.

All right, old woman, quit the griping, you could have been turning over burger or helping ranchers sue each other. She stretches and turns to see Harris Diem coming in. His face is a sort of sick gray, and she’s not sure she’s ever seen him without a necktie before. Certainly never with his hair so uncombed and such bags under his eyes.

“UN,” he says. “Rivera wants to talk to you. We’ve given him a ten-minute stall in case you want to get presentable.”

“That’ll take more than ten but let’s see what I can do.” She gets into the bathroom, thinks a moment, decides that Rivera can get used to waiting for the President, and strips out of her suit, yanks on a shower cap, and turns on the shower. She has only a glorious minute or so under the furious blast of hot water, barely time to rub a little soap here and there and to shake her head vigorously before she has to step out into the sauna, grab the big fluffy towels, and get herself dry, but she makes sure she enjoys every moment of it. At the end of the process she still feels like an old lady, but she feels like a clean old lady, and she grabs one of the spare suits from its hanger with almost a sense of victory.

She has kept Rivera waiting three whole extra minutes. That’s about what you can manage as the most powerful nation on Earth these days, she supposes. Let’s stretch him clear out to fifteen, five more than he planned on. Make him see his power is limited… she checks makeup, redoes a point here and there, hits the hair once again with a brush….

It’s really just a sign of tiredness to have her sense of humor kicking in like this, but she imagines a special slot in the “careers” section of the XV magazine shows that are aimed at teenage women—“Your career as Head of State of a major world power. As always, good grooming and sensible fashion choices are a MUST!!!!”

The little laugh still makes her feel better, and when she emerges she feels ready for whatever is to come next. Rivera will have something he wants to wring out of the situation, and he will be unfailingly polite about doing so. “Always leave them their dignity; after all, it has no resale value,” her father used to say, after skinning some poor tourist in some bit of shade-tree auto mechanicking.

When she sits down at the screen, Harris is doodling on a pad beside her; she glances at the pad and reads “He’s spent the last five minutes making stale jokes about women who can’t get dressed on time.” She checks to see that their video is muted, then scrawls on Harris’s pad “Nobody would bother getting dressed for him. What Dorothy Parker Said.”

Diem grins and winks and they bring the video up to talk to Rivera.

He begins without preamble. “Ms. President, I’ve been working on getting an aid package put together for your disaster.”

“We accept,” Hardshaw says.

“You—er, would you care to hear what’s in the aid package?”

“Food, medicine, help of all kinds, whatever you could get the Rim countries to kick in, I should imagine. And I know perfectly well that UN disaster relief is always offered without strings. Normally of course we turn it down because it’s needed more urgently elsewhere in the world and we know your resources are scarce; it makes more sense for us to take care of our own. But right now we need all the help we can get.”

Rivera nods slowly. “I see. And will you—er, that is, do you have any information for us on the scope of the disaster?”

Hardshaw nods at Diem, who says, “We can have a report on as much as we know within a half hour if you need it. But the short answer is that we’re completely out of communication with the islands. We’re getting a little bit from hams but all they can tell us is that it’s raining like mad, the wind is blowing the rain almost horizontal, and they’re cut off where they are. In about three hours an Army team will try to touch down on Kauai. But until somebody who’s able to move around picks up the phone at the other end, we really don’t know anything.”

“I’ll see what we can get the Japanese and Chinese to share. I’d bet that you haven’t had any significant data from either nation, but UNSOO assures me they’ve both made a couple of satellite passes. And naturally we’ll give you what UNSOO has, but that’s very little.”

“We realize that,” Harris Diem says, “and we’re grateful for your help.”

Rivera says, “After all, finally, it is all one planet. I am glad we can be of service to you. I’ll be in touch.” He nods to them and raises the tips of his fingers off the table in an almost-wave that could be read either as a salute or a dismissal. The screen goes dark before Hardshaw says goodbye.

She leans back in the chair. “Whoa, a shower, a change of clothes, and a bastard to deal with, and now I feel fresh as a daisy. Order us up coffee and grilled cheese sandwiches, Harris, and then let’s have a talk about what’s going on here.”

She goes back to her desk to look through the fresh piles of printout. A ham radio operator has been raised on Oahu, but he’s a sixteen-year-old Eagle Scout at Pupukea; he has a forty-year-old Ford pickup truck and two fourteen-year-olds at his disposal, the road is too washed out for any hope of getting down off the mountain soon, and anyway he’s just about as far as it’s possible to be from anywhere that they really need to know about. But he has managed to rig an antenna that will probably not blow down, so they do have continuous contact with him, and there were some unbroken weather instruments there at the camp, so he’s able to confirm for them that pressure fell below 700 mb for three straight hours.

“What’s that mean in English?” Hardshaw mutters, before she sees the scrawled note—it’s that NOAA weatherman, Callare; as soon as this current uproar is over and they’ve given Pauliss the shaft, they will have to let Callare in on what’s going on—to the effect that if the barometric pressure was that low at a distance of 220 km from the center of the eye, then the eye wall—the innermost ring of the hurricane before the still air of the eye itself, currently about 140 km across—must have winds of around Beaufort force 46, or 146 meters per second, about 330 mph (Hardshaw is grateful for that last number, since she’s never really learned to think in metric terms), “in good accord with other observations and with theory.”

“What a relief,” Hardshaw says out loud. “I’d hate to see a theory collapse for one lousy Eagle Scout.”

Diem sets a plate of sandwiches and a pot of fresh coffee down on the President’s desk, takes a seat himself without asking, and says, “All right, what are we going to make of the SecGen?”

“Well, he probably intended to dangle a big aid package as bait and then get us to agree to coordinate—which is to say, surrender—our scientific agencies. But since I accepted before he could mention the rest of the deal, and since that call wasn’t even remotely secure, now he’s stuck and may have to do us some good. And we managed to get it logged that as a matter of general principle we don’t have to have this. That should keep him frustrated for a bit—but at the same time make it impossible for him to take revenge on us by slowing things up. Does UNSOO have anything of any value?”

“Not them, but if Rivera really has some leverage with Japan then we are sure as hell in luck, because Di Callare and Henry Pauliss assure me the Japanese have some kind of multiple scanning system that would let them look down through the storm in slices, so they could tell us how high the water got and how fast the air and water were moving any time a satellite of theirs went over. Assuming the satellite was equipped with groundscanning multiple-frequency radar, of course.”

“All right. So we played that one pretty well.” Brittany Hardshaw leans back in her chair and looks hard at Harris Diem. She can remember back when he was just her clerk and intern at the Idaho Attorney General’s office, and she can remember a lot of dark and bright days since then. In the way that’s common with people at the top, she’s rarely wondered much about what he gets out of all this, preferring instead to leave that to him. But she can’t help wondering… if her long-winding path from dirt-road Idaho had not carried her here, or somewhere similar, would he have stayed with her the whole time?

Irrelevant, of course. He’s here whatever the reason. Still… “You look terribly tired,” she says.

“So do you, boss. And if you want to feel tired-er, I’ve got a little note from Carla Tynan that’s kind of a worry too.”

Hardshaw groans quietly, grabs another sandwich, pours another cup of coffee. “This stuff is wonderful.”

“Mom’s recipe. Velveeta and Wonder Bread—hard stuff to get anymore but worth it. You’re stalling, boss.”

“Yeah, well…” Hardshaw grins at him. “How many times have you and I stayed up all night together?”

“Is the Fifth Amendment still in force?”

She gestures for him to eat.

When they have each finished a sandwich she says, “All right, let’s have it. I know you don’t give me small worries just to get them off your desk, so if you mentioned it, it’s important.”

Diem nods, and says, “You want all the science or do you want just the upshot?”

“Upshot, please, with maybe enough science to reassure me that Carla isn’t making it up. Jesus, how’d we ever let her get out of Federal service? She’s worth twenty times what a paper pusher like Henry Pauliss is.”

Diem makes a face, but he has gotten and kept this job mostly by swallowing hard and telling the truth when needed. “Well, to remind you, right after the Global Riot it became very important to make sure nobody at NOAA was going to mouth off to the media in a bad situation, especially not a bad situation that we were trying to keep wrapped up to prevent another Global Riot. So we closed down the Anticipatory Section because that was where the most scare stories were coming out of.”

Hardshaw leans back and says, “Remind me why that wasn’t stupid at the time.”

“It wasn’t stupid at the time, boss, because we’d never had a global weather catastrophe before, and there was no evidence that something a little bigger than previous, or a little more violent, was going to be different in kind. And the long-range forecasters had been crying wolf about droughts and things like that for a long, long time. We had a definite ten million dead to weigh against that.”

She nods. “Well, I hereby officially declare that the decision was a big mistake. Make a note that if anyone asks us that’s what we say.”

“Going with honesty as your basic carrier?”

“Carrier” is media-jock slang for the reason why people will believe what you say. The appearance of blunt honesty is one kind of carrier; wish-fulfillment is another, close fit to known facts is another, and so forth. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the truth, if the truth is even known, and this is why Brittany Lynn Hardshaw, who still remembers the taste of a bar of Irish Spring jammed into her mouth for lying, hates the term. She has never told Diem this and never would. It is part of his job to think about carriers.

She looks up to see the first bare white glow of daylight striking the office window, and to note that several staff are rotating out to be replaced by their daytime equivalents. She nods hellos to everyone, waves, acts the part of the gracious host, sends the unconsumed sandwiches around (enjoying Diem’s wince at the luxury goods going to low-level staffers).

Finally she sits down and says very quietly, “Harris, it’s like this. I think the big mistake is that we let people get away with the Global Riot. There’s got to be some kind of approximation, no matter how rough, to personal responsibility! We could have cracked down a lot of ways—used the regular Army right away in force in the big cities, had all the governors roll the Guard, arrested the execs of the XV networks and held them until they agreed to shut off the damned signal—”

“You’d have faced one hell of a set of court cases—” he begins.

Her hand chops downward fast, as if she’s taking the head off a chicken. It’s a gesture Diem used to see her make in court a lot. “And since when has an old lawyer with nineteen cases of her own in front of the Supreme Court been afraid of that? Would’ve been the first clear-and-present-danger case to come up since XV became commercial—and what a fight that would have made, eh? But this is all still reviewing the past.” She gulps more of the coffee; it’s cooler now, and she takes it like a drug, not the relaxing comfort it was before. “What matters is this: We’ve got to realize that not only can I not be everywhere in this crisis, I can’t even be in touch with everywhere. Right now we don’t even know if the American Army can land an aircraft in an American state, or for that matter if the Navy can even get into Pearl Harbor.

“Harris, the one thing that has kept me awake nights is that if the NSA is right, and if the little ‘secret’ cabal around Callare and the Tynans is right, then there could be a big enough catastrophe to completely take down any government anywhere. Some governments will still be on their feet, somewhere, but no one can say which. Millions of people will have every modern device torn away from them, and have to fend for themselves. And I don’t think people are ready for that. I think after a few centuries of modern government everyone will be waiting for the whistlers to show up with doctors and hot soup and tents. But you see how powerless we already are in Hawaii. And we won’t even begin to get cleanup and rescue underway before Clem comes around again.

“So people are going to have to do what they can do on their own, and that means we’ve got to trust them with the information to do whatever they need to do.”

“And if they misuse that information?”

“Then we slap them down—if we can reach them. And if we can’t reach them they are no longer our problem. But understand, Harris, we have to consider how the American people, and for that matter, the world’s people, will survive if we all perish here. And I can’t see that their chances will be enhanced by leaving them a legacy of misinformation or pure ignorance.

“So here’s your problem, Harris. Whatever you’re about to tell me, whatever new bad news Carla has, we’re going to make it available to everybody. The UN, other nations, Congress, all the parties, all the candidates for president, all the corporate heads—even the people. And from now on the order is that everything except weapons secrets and military ops plans gets declassified. We can only count on a few more months of the government functioning—and after that, like it or not, the people will have to rule. Sovereignty is about to drop back into their laps for good or ill. And if they can’t govern, well, it was a good two-hundred-and-fifty-year experiment. But the mess that just happened in Hawaii is probably only the start—there are months left in hurricane season—and it’s time to admit that since we can’t help, we might as well give people the information they need and then stay out of their way.”

Harris Diem starts to laugh. “Okay, boss, I’ll just figure this isn’t a stroke or something. But I’ll feel a lot better if you change your mind when you hear this. Clem’s not only not over, and not close to being over—there’re going to be a lot more Clems within a week or two.”

President Hardshaw has braced herself just a little—she knows even her trusted longtime friend and assistant cannot see it when she does that—and the result is that there is no wince in her face and no ripple in her coffee. She doesn’t seem to hesitate before she says, “You’d better explain that in detail, and then we’d better get it out on the news.”

She is rewarded by a tight-lipped smile and a tiny headshake from Harris Diem. She knows him well enough to understand at once that this is becoming another story, in his mind, of why he has served her for twentynine years, that someday in his memoirs he will write that she changed years of policy in a three-minute decision without batting an eye. And as he starts to tell her the latest, he has already re-oriented himself to the new policy, and will carry it out with vigor and passion, tired though he is, opposed to it, perhaps not understanding it.

Loyalty like that frightens her; it is an all but impossible job to try to steer the greatest military power on Earth and the fate of a quarter of a billion people, but something in her recoils from holding a complete human soul in her hands. It’s been a long time since Idaho.

She concentrates on what he says, and in ten minutes she’s on the line to Secretary-General Rivera, to President Questora of Mexico, and to as many as can be gotten on line of the Central American presidents, dictators, and generals—she can never keep their titles straight without the little prompt displayed across their faces. Just after she clicks off, the news comes from Hawaii that the Army expedition touched down, and one staticopter flipped with the loss of six lives. The weather is still too rough for them to be able to move from the base camp. It seems anticlimactic, like a small bit of old business.

The thing is, Randy Householder knows the business. He’s been tracking it for more than a decade. He talks the right talk, walks the right walk, uses some of his carefully hoarded stash of cash, and in no time at all he’s got himself a forced extraction rig.

He looks at the thing and shudders. There are brownish spots on it that tell him it has been used before.

It takes him another four days to determine that Jerren Anders is in the minimum-security wing and not considered dangerous; he had some kind of breakdown at the time of his arrest, convinced a judge and jury, got better, and now he’s being taken care of for life.

Randy has decided to take care of him, period. It’s the simplest and cleanest.

The exercise field is not walled or fenced; they count on the transponder ankle cuff to keep them in, or to track them down if they run. Anders is an old bastard, and he jogs every day. There’s about a thirty-second chance to do it, but it’s not complicated, really, just a matter of getting the timing down.

The day is bright and sunny when Randy steps from behind a tree, knocks Anders down, points a gun at his chest, and says, “Withers, Wallace, and Brown say hi. You’re coming with me.”

“I don’t do that shit anymore—”

“Then I’ll kill you.”

Anders stands up, raising his hands. Randy quick-marches him to the car; fortunately they can’t track the individual vehicle yet, those civil liberties types are good for something. They get in the car and Randy gives an address; the car rolls away.

“What are you going to—”

Randy shoots Anders with a paralyzer. Not that he cares, but it will also act as an anesthetic.

Then he takes the crowbar and begins breaking up Anders’s feet bones. Anders’s eyes get wide, and tears run down his face, but he can’t move and all he can do is moan.

If you cut the ankle cuff, they stop looking for the cuff. They have the idea that since you can’t pull it off over the foot, you can’t take it off. That would be true if you were escaping on your own behalf. Or if you were in a position to object to having the bones crushed.

But matters are a little different. Randy swings the crowbar hard and fast—he has only about five minutes to work—and the old brittle bones crack and shatter under the blows. The cracking sound of the first few blows gives way to wet thuds. The keening from Anders’s slack mouth is really annoying but there’s no time to gag him just yet.

When the foot, wrapped in a plastic bag, feels like jelly, Randy grabs the cuff and yanks it off over the sodden, bloody mess. The car is now doing what it’s supposed to do—cutting into a robot freighter yard—and Randy rolls down the window.

There. One of the robot tractors is just pulling out, towing three container/trailers behind it, and there’s room to catch it. Randy takes manual control—he’s glad he learned to do this way back when—and shoots forward. The middle trailer carries cattle, their faces huge and stupid as he comes up close and tosses the ankle cuff in among them.

He whips down an un-guide-stripped alley; halfway down it he flips the control back to automatic and tells the car to take a long route around before it gets back on guidestrips. It will take them weeks to correlate guidestrip records with the motion of the ankle cuff and trace it all back to him—and long before that, Randy plans to be done.

The keening grows louder in the backseat as Randy climbs back to deal with the next problem. He trusses up Anders, then releases him from the paralyzer.

Anders is babbling now, saying he’ll tell him anything, the kind of stuff you’d expect.

Randy asks the big question. “You remember a wedge you probably were the go-between on, little blonde girl, fourteen years ago—?”

“Fuck, man, not that one, no, fuck, you can’t do anything to me worse than they’ll do to me—”

Randy holds up the forced extraction kit. “Wanna bet?”

Anders finally tells him without forced extraction. But this is too important to leave a possibility that the old thug may be lying, so Randy beams at him and says, “Oh, by the way, I lied,” and drives the forced extractor into the old man’s forehead. The man screams and foams as Randy reads off keywords and his recorder grabs everything for the wedge.

That night the body of Jerren Anders goes down a deep, wet ravine, just off of U.S. 93. Randy gets a report that seems to show, anyway, that his datarodents have made their way into Idaho State Highway Patrol records, and he may have more time than he thought.

He takes a long nap before he experiences that wedge. All kinds of shit will be in there, and he steels himself to look for the right one. Four days later he’s still reading through fragments of girls and women raped, mutilated, and killed, through Winston’s terrifying threats, through Brown selling him the drugs again and again….

Randy realizes he’s just avoiding it, and that’s all there is to it. He doesn’t want what Anders said to be true, and he knows what part of the wedge it will or won’t be in. He takes the sedatives.

She was right, in that dream. It’s really bad. He gets flashes of their surveillance of her, flashes as they figure out that she always showers by herself and no one waits for her. He gets Anders’s nasty little wet dreams from spying on Kimbie Dee.

Once, before he can stop it, he gets a secondhand memory of the wedge they made, Kimbie Dee trying to cover herself with her hands when that monster they turned loose on her walks into the shower, then the sight of the huge, hideous man pulling out a gun and pointing it at her, the shame as she brought her shaking hands down from her breasts and let him stare at them….

He pops out of that, almost vomiting, but he felt something else in the memory, and the next time he goes back in he gets it.

He has a name, and it’s a name he already knows well. But not for being a buyer of this stuff, let alone for commissioning it.

But there’s no mistake, Randy thinks. Jerren Anders, at the very least, thought that this was who he was working for, thought that that was why there were so many death sentences when the ring broke up.

The access for this is not going to be easy. He’s glad the datarodents are buying him time at the Idaho State Highway Patrol—because he’s going to need a lot of time.

Perhaps the real reason that the results come when they do is that Carla Tynan has gotten enough rest for the first time in days. She is finally well below the equator in her run to the Solomons, submerged to run faster. Something in her will not let her take breaks for sunbathing and sitting out on the surface while she is working.

Di’s team at NOAA is doing a first-rate job, there’s no question about that, in modeling the physics of how the outflow jet moves the hurricane. Get NOAA pointed in the right direction and they do good work….

But, Carla reflects, still lying in her clean, warm bunk and only idly thinking of getting up and doing anything, that was part of the problem back when she had a regular job there; once the concept was right she had a lot of trouble getting interested in the micro-details, except as they confirmed the concept. When she was feeling good about herself, she usually explained this as the “Daniel Boone Syndrome”—as soon as she’d seen what was over a hill, and led others to it, she wanted to get over the next one. When she was down on herself, which was often back in those days, she thought it was a combination of a real creative gift with genuine laziness—she knew that her ideas were good enough to keep her employed, and therefore she kept having those, letting other people do all the hard work.

As was so often the case, it was Louie who, though not terribly introspective himself, had given her some doorways into how she really functioned. “Look, silly, it’s not laziness. When you’re after the idea you work twenty hours a day, you know? And it’s not pioneering drive, because when you’re not after an idea, you hang around reading trash or go shopping—it isn’t like you chase after ideas. I think it’s just that you can’t stand for there to be something that you don’t know. When you get an idea, you can’t rest until you’re fairly sure whether it’s true or not. And when you don’t have one you just do the things you enjoy doing. What’s the big crime? Why does anything about you have to make you into a saint or a criminal?”

She drifts back through that scene mentally—it could lead to a very nice erotic dream, but mostly what she’s really enjoying is remembering that Louie understands her, even if no one else does. Besides, lately when she thinks about sex with Louie, she gets reminded that they will have to put off getting together for months, since his stay in space is being extended indefinitely. Groaning, she rolls out of the narrow bunk, steps into the shower (a shower before bed and a shower after—now there’s a major indulgence) and lets the scalding hot water relax her neck and scalp.

The NOAA team is on top of it, and despite all the computing power she has on board and all the nets she’s able to access, they are way, way ahead of her in capabilities, so there’s really no reason for her to continue working on the outflow jet problem.

Except that somebody—some science fiction writer way back before she was born, she remembers her dad used to quote the guy—always said you can’t do one thing.

She shakes her short hair, spraying water around, and lets the hot flow surge down her back, rubbing the small of her back where the tension often concentrates. You can’t do one thing. So what else does an outflow jet do, besides create a high-pressure area that the hurricane moves away from? What else does an outflow jet cause?

Tornadoes over land, and waterspouts over water—hurricanes spawn tornadoes all around themselves. There’s a big cluster of them that forms to the right of the hurricane’s direction of motion, and a smaller cluster where the outflow jet comes down. First-year meteorology: the big wind shears that happen in the strong winds of a hurricane can get rotated into the horizontal plane by all the cumulonimbus convection that is found around the edges.

A wind shear is what happens when the ground slows the wind that touches it; the wind above continues at speed—this curls the wind downward into a rolling cylinder, the way a trip wire makes a runner curl over by stopping his lower body and letting the rest of him continue. Then the strong updrafts around a thunderhead pull the rolling cylinder of air vertical, where it becomes a tornado.

Where the outflow jet comes down it fills the air with moisture and creates an area that the wind has to blow away from. Thus it makes a lot of wind shears, and a lot of cumulonimbus clouds, and cumulonimbus ctouds—thunderheads—have strong updrafts. Conditions are perfect, right where the outflow draft comes down, for getting air rotating around spots of low pressure—for tornadogenesis.

All this became really clear sixty years ago, after the first really big hurricane to be tracked on radar, so that they could see all those cumulonimbi, tornadoes, and the eye itself. Hurricane Beulah, way back in the 1960s, a big one driven far inland by a powerful outflow jet, had sprayed tornadoes around behind itself like tin cans blowing off the back of a garbage truck.

So what Clem’s outflow jet will give you is… bigger wind shears. And a high-pressure area close to the ground. More tornadoes and waterspouts….

And that outflow jet moves. When it’s gone, there’s suddenly no more high-pressure air coming down from above. The pushed-down, swirling air at the sea surface will rise….

…like a bubble from the bottom of a hot kettle. Like a Cartesian diver when you take your finger off the rubber membrane—Carta remembers a present from her father, when she wasn’t more than six, a sealed glass bottle of water with a little glass scuba diver inside; there was an air bubble in the diver, and when you squeezed the bottle, the pressure compressed the bubble, the diver’s density increased, and he sank; when you released the bottle, the high pressure went away, the bubble inside the diver got bigger, and he rose.

A big bubble of air. Rising up from the middle of a savagely churning warm sea. Powerful wind shears all rolling surface-level air inward toward where the bubble rises….

If the outflow jet moves quickly, so that the high-pressure area expands vertically fast enough, what you have is the model of hurricane formation. It doesn’t happen in ordinary hurricanes—there, when the outflow jet moves, the high-pressure spot is still close enough to the eye of the hurricane, and the released air just flows inward to the center, feeding the hurricane. But in something the size of Ctem—where the outflow jet can be coming down many hundreds of kilometers away….

It takes her only about an hour to rough out a model and see that just maybe this could happen. As she’s finishing up—and why are her fingers always so clumsy, her brain always so slow, the right sources never to hand when she has a good idea?—she notices that she’s cold and realizes that she sort of forgot to towel off after her shower. At least this time she remembered to turn it off.

She’s also tied her back in knots. Well, no doubt there’s hot water in the shower again… so she gets her third shower, and this time she makes herself relax, and towels off, and gets dressed in something comfortable that she sort of likes (well, okay, Louie once told her she looked like a hot piece in it, and since then she’s lost a little weight so it’s loose and baggy, so now it’s just about her favorite jumpsuit. What’s not to like? And what’s wrong with some happy memories? She didn’t divorce the man because she didn’t like him, she divorced him to keep liking him, as she explained to him at the time).

God, god, god, Louie on the brain and a real problem right here in front of her. Yes, it’s a plausible outcome, but no, it’s not the only plausible one. Clem might have kittens or might not, and no one will know till that outflow jet swings suddenly—which it may not do for a while.

But the outflow jet did swing suddenly, once—just before Clem ripped off toward Hawaii. Only a few hours ago. And come to think of it, Carla has been paying no attention to the news—she has no idea whether or not Clem is hitting Hawaii, or if he is, what is happening there.

MyBoat surfaces just hours after sunset; it’s a beautiful starlit night, and her radar shows no ships within many kilometers, so Carla climbs up on the deck, taking a scalpnet and output plug with her to direct-access the data she needs. With a jet of high-pressure air, she dries the sunbathing deck and stretches out in the dark, lying on her back and looking up at the stars, counting the occasional meteors and enjoying the glory of a really dark, clear sky. Strange to think how many people never see this except via XV; stranger to think how many more stars there are for Louie. No wonder they can’t keep him out of the observation bubble despite all the warnings about radiation.

With a sigh, she pulls on her scalpnet and inserts the plug into the side of her head. Time to work, Carla.

The dark night, the blazing beauty of all the stars, and the gentle rock of MyBoat on the waves, felt as rhythmic shoving of the padded deck against her back, all become ghostly presences in the back of her brain, like the fragments of a dream just after waking. Instead, she senses lists of thousands of options, thinks of what she wants, plugs in to learn that Hawaii has been cut off from all but a few voice signals already, swings back into the public channels to get satellite data and raw weather station data….

When the outflow jet from Clem swung hard around, it swung out over water that was just below 20 degrees Celsius in temperature. Too cold for a hurricane to start. Too cold even for one to be sustained.

Even so, there was a good-sized depression produced, which seems to have become an extratropical cyclone—a large storm, large in area, that is, though nothing like Clem for windspeed or rain, now moving toward British Columbia, which will be dumping loads of rain all over Pacificanada.

She notices a Japanese military satellite in a polar orbit might well have shot some pictures right in the critical eight minutes when the outflow jet switched off on one side of the hurricane, and a new outflow jet formed immediately ninety degrees away.

She quietly pops into several thousand software libraries, looking for any old penetration software she can find; her vast storage and fast-system capabilities can assemble all the little pieces and bits into a sort of super gang-assault on the closed nodes around Tokyo. It’s only a matter of seconds, but she finds herself wriggling and stretching, back in ghostly “real” reality, as she notices how extended she is feeling, how much her consciousness seems to have spread out from her little submarine yacht.

The data are not terribly secure; the Japanese apparently assume this satellite feed is being tapped. It takes little time to break in, find what she wants, pop out.

They have some kind of a radar gadget that lets them shoot cross sections of the atmosphere, and it was turned on while they flew over. This is better data than she could have hoped for—she extrapolates from it instantly—

And finds the bad news. No question. If this had happened over warmer water, a fast-rising column of warm air would have been produced, in the middle of all those swirling waves, currents, winds, and thunderheads: the same kind of column that gave birth to Clem, or starts any other hurricane.

Louie is getting used to walking around on the moon in the silly robot; so used to it that more and more he lets the robot run on autopilot, until he needs to manipulate something himself. The first day was the worst; the manipulations involved in getting some of the “general assembler” machinery back up and running, getting it to make data busses and connector cables for all kinds of things that were never supposed to be hooked to each other, and so forth, were a major pain.

The second-and-a-half delay between him and the robot means the robot is useless for fine manipulations, except by letting it work independently—which means that every time something has to be screwed into place, but not too tightly, he has to take it partway down, then stop using direct interface, tell the robot how much force is allowable, wait to see if that did the job… taking six recessed Phillips screws out of one lousy plate, in order to get at two stupid switches, took him more than an hour.

He’s been quietly stealing all sorts of things from the French. If they don’t like it they can come up and arrest him; they’ve been cutting back too and he doubts they’ll even notice.

But after the systems were generally integrated and robots started up, matters moved pretty fast. The Pentagon zapped up all sorts of Computer Optimized Design software to him, and he’s had it running in the main system for a couple of days now. Later today, if all goes well, he’ll be able to launch a couple of small transport rockets, designed and built by himself and the machine right here on the moon, to bring some of the stored food from the French supplies back to a rendezvous with the Constitution. He’s not yet in any danger of starving but it will be nice to have some variety, and as a test project it’s not too complicated.

He’s also begun to like walking around on the moon in the last few days. The little replicators are now all “slaved”—no longer running loose but under tight control—and they scurry about busily; the astonishing sharp shadows and black sky still delight him.

He wishes he could be back here in person, making his own bootprints in the lunar soil that has lain undisturbed for billions of years, and indeed he’s already dropped them a plan for that. Between the capabilities already on the moon and those he is building now, one of the things he can do is rig up a propulsion system to move all of Constitution—slowly, because the trusses that hold it together won’t take more than a twentieth of a g—out to orbit around the moon. Hell, out to anywhere, though he’s damned if he likes the idea of spending all his time in the Bank Vault, which he’d pretty much have to do for a long voyage.

But all the same… Constitution will be able to go anywhere, once he gets it equipped. He feels like he’s sixteen and modifying the old ’94 Geo for rally driving again.

The odd thing about every task up here—and he now realizes how conservative the French and Japanese were being in their approach—is that you need to work hard only at first. The machines learn, and once they learn they optimize, so that if you get one to do something right once, in a short while it will be doing it brilliantly and faster than you. On this little rocket project, it took the better part of a day to get the throat of the nozzle figured and optimized for the solid fuel… but then it took only an hour to finish the rest of the engine.

Well, time to get on with the work. He turns to the rocket design—

It is completely different. It doesn’t look remotely like what it did the last time he worked on it. Moreover, he knows intuitively it is better—and then, as he looks at it, he understands it completely. Of course that geometry doesn’t let heat build up as much in the throat; naturally if the struts are set up like that, they form strong, stable triangles everywhere—

It looks like he fixed everything in the back of his mind. Now that he doesn’t unhook very often, preferring to leave things running in background, it’s as if all the various tasks that are turning this into a new kind of facility are somehow thoughts in the back of his mind, and as if his mind is enlarging to take care of the additional load.

He has been unplugging only to sleep, and he’s been noticing lately that he doesn’t need to sleep much.

Not sleeping much is one of those unusual things he’s supposed to call Dr. Wo about. It goes against all training and experience, but Louie calls the neurologist; something about it all is giving him the creeps.

Wo gets back to him in five minutes; obviously Louie is a valued guinea pig. In a few short sentences, Louie tells Dr. Wo about it all.

“And you were not aware of consciously thinking about this? The robots just modified it into this newer, better design, and when you came back you understood it?”

“Yeah, that’s pretty much it. And I haven’t been sleeping much. And lately, too, I notice that when I think of things from the past, my memory is clearer… is it the optimizers?”

“I’d say there’s no doubt.”

“So what happened? Did my subconscious design and build that rocket?”

Wo nods. “Good question. I think the answer is probably that you did, but not the ‘you’ I’m talking to. One way the optimizers work is that they copy valuable, effective code at one point, and then move it to other places where it’s needed. My best guess—and we’ll have to run some tests to confirm it, I know that’s a scary phrase but bear with it—my best guess is that what the optimizers are doing is copying parts of your mind into programs running on the other processors, including the ones on the moon. You’re sort of dispersing through the system. That’s why you understood it as soon as you looked at it—all those fragments of yourself ‘came home.’ Well, this is very interesting… it would appear that the net you are plugged into is not only optimizing you, it is becoming you. At the same time that you become optimized.”

Louie swallows hard and asks the question he really wants answered. “Doc, am I going to be the same guy?”

Wo sits down, the phone camera lurching as it tracks him, and scratches his head. This might be a major display of emotion; one problem with doctors in military research programs, given that part of their job is to study the patient to see why he’s still alive, is that they don’t have a very wide range of emotional expression. Though he’s known him for many years, Louie doubts that he has ever known what Wo felt about anything.

At last the neurologist speaks. “Well, that’s an interesting question. But it’s over toward philosophy rather than in science proper. Offhand I would say that none of us is exactly the same person we were before, but there’s a continuity, and at the least you will maintain continuity. Would you still be Louie Tynan if you trimmed your toenails and got a haircut? Surely. Would you be you with a heart transplant? You’d be different because the experience itself is traumatic, but you’d still be Louie Tynan. And with a brain transplant? How about half a brain? Are you the same guy if you have a religious conversion? And is software the same program if you install an upgrade?”

Louie scratches his head, too—whichever organizations are bugging this must think they both have lice—and says, “I guess my answers to those questions would be maybe, maybe, and maybe.”

“One of our human test subjects, in the optimization work, discovered that he told the truth a lot more—apparently he’d always had a habit of white lies and flattery. His friends were able to notice the difference, but he and they agreed he was the same guy, just more truthful. In other words, telling the truth wasn’t part of him, it was peripheral, like having blue eyes or favoring white shirts. But suppose we infected the Pope with a program that made him a Mormon, or Medal of Honor winners with something that totally destroyed their courage, or gay men with something that turned them straight. Suppose in addition to that we put them in a whole new body, one that wasn’t human as we know it. Would they feel themselves to be the same person? Ever known an Alzheimer’s patient well, before and after, or a schizophrenic? Are they the same or aren’t they?”

These are more words out of Dr. Wo than Louie has heard in twenty years of knowing him. “I suppose the answer is it depends on what they think.”

“That’s the only answer that makes any sense. I’d say if we alter someone that much, and he or she changes name, friends, everything, and starts a new life, it’s probably a different person—but the person might not feel that way. And if he or she keeps everything pretty much the same but changes a couple of old habits, it’s the same person—but the person might not feel that way. And I suppose I’m old-fashioned enough to think that the person involved ought to be the one who says who he or she is. Anyway, if you’ll permit us to run some checks—some on you and some on the processors on the moon—”

Louie nods, swallows hard, and says yes. They set a time and Wo clicks off.

Well, here he is. The process is probably not reversible. He returns to the moon in a moment or two, looks around, feels that again things are different, and better. As to who he is, or who he will be—the question is both more and less than academic. More because it’s real—he can feel them in there, fixing and correcting, there’s an odd clarity to his memory and his concentration is better. Less because he can’t undo it.

Well, whether he is Louie-2, or just Louie-1.1, he’s got a job to do. He’ll think about it when he gets some time.

The supply rocket launches go beautifully, so now he has a launch system, and he puts the network of programs and machines onto the job of copying the stock weather-satellite design sent up from Earth. He decides it can’t hurt to tell them to leave the interface compatible but optimize the rest for function… as long as USSF seems to have optimized him, he might as well optimize them right back. He can feel the net thinking about the problem in the back of his brain as he pulls back into the Constitution. He’ll be coming up on the Pacific soon and no doubt they’ll want him to take some observations.

It’s only then, reading his mail, that he finds out that Hawaii is all but scoured to rock; the estimates are that nine out of every ten people alive on the islands two days ago are dead now, but that’s based on the little the Army has been able to reach and the few surviving hams have been able to tell them. It looks very much like not one, but four great waves went all the way across Oahu.

Carla Tynan had been expecting to have some time for a little friendly talk with Louie, but first he called to say that between all the weird stuff he was doing on “the big project”—she’s afraid to ask him what it is since he seems to think she knows, but whatever it is he’s doing it mostly via telepresence on the moon—and because of all the other observations they want him to take, on this and the next Pacific pass, they probably won’t get time. He’ll try to get to her on satellite link sometime in the next day or two.

She wonders idly why, given that she’s never going to see him anyway, she ever bothered divorcing him.

And then, instead of giving her some privacy and some time to work, Di Callare calls up, along with his useless boss Henry Pauliss, and Harris Diem, who is White House Chief of Staff but is also useless, and they all want her to hold the line while they get something together.

Obviously it’s the President, and Carla can imagine plenty of reasons the President might want to talk to her, but nothing that Carla could say couldn’t be expressed better by a well-written report.

Moreover, the constant sitting and waiting by the phone—every few minutes Di, or Pauliss, or Diem asks if she’s still there—destroys her concentration, so that she can’t get any work done in the interval.

She sits on her sunbathing deck, looking at the wide horizon, enjoying the sun on her face, arms, and bare legs. She’s realizing too that she and Louie have been talking every two or three days—the “weekly” call “just to keep in touch” plus one or two “I forgot to mentions”—for the last year or so, while she’s been at sea and he’s been in space, and you never know what you’re going to miss until it’s gone, now, do you? Now she wishes deeply that she could spend a lazy afternoon just hanging around with him.

Frankly, she’d like to have some conversation, strange as that is for a hermit like Carla Tynan. In front of the suits Di won’t talk meteorology freely (for fear of being misunderstood? or for fear of being understood? Carla would like to know). Pauliss, after all, is the guy who fired her, and now that she’s proving vital, she knows enough of Washington to suspect that the last thing he wants to do is be anywhere near the President when the subject of Carla Tynan comes up. And Diem is utterly bland and noncommittal.

So the available subjects for chit-chat are Di’s family: Lori is fine and almost done with Slaughterer in Yellow, Mark is a pleasant but not precocious kid, Nahum is precocious. And not particularly pleasant, Carla suspects, if what she hears between the lines is true.

Diem interrupts a Nahum story to say, “You mean you’re doing that—I forget what it’s called, but the system where you take naps with them and let them go to sleep anytime they want?” There’s a sort of deep shock in his voice, not entirely masked.

Di Callare is clearly short of sleep himself, for he snaps just a little at this man who holds so much power. “As a matter of fact, yes, we do use the London Method, and we’ve never had a fight about bedtime, and the children do seem much calmer than most. Of course we don’t let them have XV at all or TV much, so that may be the real reason.”

Diem nods grudgingly. “I suppose it’s hard to argue with results, and after all I never had kids, so I sure don’t have any basis for arguing with you. I was just thinking how different it is from when I was growing up. Other than making sure I studied, keeping me working in the old man’s restaurant in Boise—and seeing that I had food and ctothes—I can’t recall ever receiving that much interest from my parents. They just kind of raised us kids any old way.”

Henry Pauliss asks a classic suck-up question. “And how’d you turn out?”

“Oh, I went through law school at night and then paid for the education for the others. My brother went to Harvard Med, the oldest of my three kid sisters went to Purdue for engineering. And then of course the other two dropped out of high school and became streetwalkers.”

Pauliss’s jaw drops. “You—uh, er, that is—”

“Not really,” Diem says, “but I didn’t want to make it sound like ignoring the kids is the best way to raise them. I was just kind of thinking that sometimes the damndest things work.”

Di chuckles, Carla laughs outright. Henry Pauliss is now turning an odd shade of red; if Harris Diem is willing to undercut him by setting him up for laughter like that, in front of underlings, then Henry is on his way out the door, and will probably be given a hard kick as he goes. Everyone present knows this, so not only is Pauliss getting his termination notice, but he is being given it in front of Carla and Di, deliberately.

Carla might wish she were the kind of nice, non-vindictive person who wouldn’t enjoy this, but as it happens, she isn’t. She’s delighted to see the bastard find out what it’s like to get nailed for just doing what was asked of him. It almost makes the long silly wait for the President (whom they are not supposed to know they are waiting for) worthwhile.

When Hardshaw finally does turn up the first thing that she says to Carla is, “I’m told that you’re always right about the weather.”

Carla snorts. “If I were always right about the weather I’d have gotten rich in commodities futures. I’m pretty good. My feel for it is better than most meteorologists’, and I’m good at the math, and I guess right a lot. But I’m not infallible. And the major reason I’ve been right several times in this crisis is that I haven’t had a job to protect, so I could say what other people were only thinking.”

President Hardshaw grins at her—the kind of grin that you use to lock a vote down forever, Carla realizes, just as she also realizes that it’s certainly working on her. When the President speaks, Carla is still a little dazzled. “Well, then, here’s the question, and if it happens to be a really stupid question, the important thing is that we don’t let it leak that I asked it. Not even at a party over a drink, to impress your date. Because just now the President of the United States cannot afford to look like a ninny, and unfortunately she squandered her youth on law rather than meteorology.”

“Understood,” Carla says. “I won’t talk—I don’t like most people that much.”

“So Harris tells me. All right, then. Is there, in principle at least, any way in which we can intervene to turn this thing off? Since it was a human action that set it running, is there anything we could do to get rid of it?”

Carla draws a breath as she thinks, changes her mind as she’s drawing it, draws more breath, finally lets it out without quite having decided on an answer. “It’s a physical process. So in principle it can be modified. But it involves immense amounts of energy across vast areas, so the means to modify it may be beyond us.”

“Suppose you talk principles first.”

“All right. One, if we could make the outflow jet move around to due south and keep it there, we could drive the thing right up the Bering Strait or across Siberia, whichever you prefer, and let it die in the cold like a normal hurricane. I suppose it might do that of its own accord anyway.

“Two, if we could make the water cold in front of it, it would die. Removing methane from the air would work but would take a long time; it would be better to turn off the sunlight.

“And that’s about it. To kill a hurricane you cool off its feet. I suppose you could warm its top, too—perhaps with a huge solar mirror—but frankly this thing is so big I’d be worried about giving it a chance to break through the tropopause and extend all the way up into the stratosphere. We might be removing the current constraint on its size by doing that. No, I think if you want to kill it you have to get it over a cold surface—either by moving the hurricane or by cooling the surface. It is moving randomly, you know, and it will probably find a surface big enough to cool it sooner or later.”

“But isn’t every other hurricane this year going to grow to this size?” Henry Pauliss asks. “In fact, we’ve been lucky so far not to have one in the Atlantic, which has actually warmed up a little more than the Pacific. We could have another Clem there anytime.”

“Or something like it,” Carla admits. “You’re right, of course. Given their tendency to circle—assuming that Clem is typical, and generalizing from a sample of one is stupid and I hate it but I guess we have to—if Clem is typical and most such hurricanes do circle, then there’s little question that they’re going to last longer. And if they last longer, they’ll overlap each other more in time—you won’t have any weeks when there aren’t one or two or more of them tearing up some part of the world. No, I suppose if you can do something about them, then just letting them die naturally isn’t good enough.”

“It certainly isn’t,” Hardshaw says. “So you think the best route would be to, as you say, turn off the sunlight?”

“Sure. If you could give the Earth a moon in geosynchronous, inclined orbit so that it moved north and south in a tight figure eight, and set it up so that the northern part of its motion coincided with daytime… and if that moon was big enough to cast a shadow a few hundred kilometers across… after a while you’d have a nice belt of cold water for Clem to run into and die in. But it would have to be an awfully big moon. Geosynchronous is one-tenth as far as the moon is, the natural moon, I mean, and you’d need a shadow fifty times what the moon casts in a total eclipse… whatever it was would be huge in the sky, seven full moons across. Physically it would be bigger in diameter than the Earth.”

“So a Mylar balloon—”

“Would work, sure, if you could keep it in position. And if you could inflate something thousands of kilometers across. Is that what you’re thinking of using?”

President Hardshaw would be a tough lady to play poker with. She doesn’t blink, she doesn’t wince, she doesn’t check to see if Diem has reacted—he hasn’t but Pauliss has, and look here, poor old Di, never really one for intrigue, sits up straight. Obviously Ms. President has made them all swear blood oaths or something that they won’t even vaguely think about telling her what they really want to know, and now she’s spilled it herself.

The only thing Carla has ever learned to like about dealing with power is how easy it is to embarrass people who have it.

After a long instant, Hardshaw says, “Well, that cat’s out of that bag. Yes, we’re thinking of using Mylar balloons, though not in the way you describe.”

“I’m a meteorologist, not a payload specialist.”

“We have an offer to put many thousands of them into highly elliptical orbits, with twenty-four-hour periods, with perigee falling across the North Pacific in daylight. And they’d be a couple hundred kilometers across, but they’d be coming down to within a hundred fifty kilometers of the surface, so they’d probably make only two or three approaches before they burned up on re-entry. But if they were timed right…”

“You’d need a lot of them,” Carla wams.

“Understood. But could it work?”

“With the right coordination, and with enough of them,” she says. She’d been impressed with Hardshaw up till now, but really she keeps asking the same question over and over. “Do you want me to work on exactly how you’d do it?”

Hardshaw says, “On that we’ll have to get back to you. We have what amounts to a bid in hand to do the job, and I will really want your input about that bid. May we send you a copy for your review?”

“Certainly.”

“Good. I will look forward to hearing your report—and I do mean hearing; let Harris Diem know when you’re ready to talk about it, and he’ll set you up in conference with me. And thank you, Carla, the country already owes you a great debt and I think we will owe you more before this is over.”

Yeah, but can I collect it and take it to the bank? one part of Carla thinks. She stifles it and says, “I’m flattered, Ms. President.”

When she hangs up, there’s a short call from Louie. The poor big dumb lug is missing her, too. Everybody seems to need Carla today.

She’s not sure she likes it.

After they click off from Carla Tynan, and from Di Callare and Henry Pauliss, President Hardshaw turns to Harris Diem and says, “I can certainly see why Pauliss chose to give us that particular head on a plate three years ago.”

“Irritating, isn’t she?” Diem says.

“Not at all.” Hardshaw stands up, stretches, groans. “She’s blunt and she’s effective and she understands the physical world. For that matter, she understands politics. Before I was officially on, while I was just watching, you saw that little smile of pleasure when you slapped Pauliss in front of her? She knew exactly what was happening to him.”

Diem spent the last hour of work last night on the phone to Henry Pauliss, assuring him that no one was out to get him and that everyone understood that all he had ever done was to carry out policy decisions from higher up. He’s known Pauliss for ten years or so and the two have consistently been on warm personal terms; they’ve shared an occasional social evening because Harris Diem, a bachelor who doesn’t date, is constantly out to dinner, sports, or theatre with all sorts of people, generally people that the Administration has some reason to like.

So last night, when it was becoming clear to Pauliss that he was going to be the goat for NOAA, Pauliss called Diem and did his best to find some safe hiding place in the Chief of Staff’s shadow, and Diem made soothing noises and said he would do what he could.

Diem had meant it, too; there is a loyalty owed to the people who work for you, just as much as to the people you work for—unless they conflict. And Hardshaw told him to spend some time on the line with the meteorologists and with Pauhss—and to make sure Pauliss was embarrassed and shaken.

“Well,” Diem says, tentatively, “I suppose you mean you can see why she’d irritate someone like Pauliss.”

“Yes, exactly. Poor Henry Pauliss. Used to be a real scientist and got turned into a yes-man, and now the damned President is demanding real scientists. Not his fault at all.”

“So is he going to take the fall for us? Berlina Jameson has been nosing around—”

“Berlina—oh, Sniffing. Good little show.”

She’s showing her age in that, Diem thinks, for only people of “President Grandma’s” generation and older still call video documents “shows.” But he only says, “Well, it’s well-presented and it’s popular. And Jameson certainly does her research—”

“She’s like a throwback to the people I grew up watching,” Hardshaw agrees. “People like Dan Rather… and of course you know Rather got his start ripping into the Nixon White House. Which the Nixon White House happened to have coming. So I imagine you’re afraid that I might be planning to throw Pauliss to Berlina Jameson to keep the heat off us?”

Diem shakes his head emphatically. “I don’t think you’re dumb enough for that, boss. That kind of thing always smells like a cover-up, and if you have video reporters on it, it’s bad enough, but if there’s any strong hint that there might be a cover-up, you’ll have detectives from every XV channel in the world crawling all over us to find it. And finding god knows what else on the way. ‘Intrepid reporter penetrates cover-up’ is what they feed on—look what happened to those poor stupid bastard doctors after their old folks’ home blew down.

“No, I’m more afraid that Henry Pauliss might panic and decide that he’s going to be thrown to the wolves. In which case he’s smart enough to run to Berlina Jameson and tell her everything he knows.”

“And what does he know?” Brittany Hardshaw sits back, fixing Diem with a mild, easy gaze. “He knows that we decided to get rid of Anticipatory Section to reduce the chances of Global Riot Two, since the first one had happened after one of their reports. He knows that if we’d still had an Anticipatory Section we might have known how much trouble we were in much sooner. And that’s about all.

“Give him some reassurance, and then call Jameson yourself and dump the story in her lap. Offer her an interview if you can give her the time. Make it clear that we really blew it, but we blew it for good reasons, and don’t hold anything back.”

“Boss, this openness obsession of yours is going to cause a lot of trouble.”

Hardshaw gestures at the huge pile of paper, the “summary report” on the loss of millions of lives in Hawaii and the estimates of the time needed to repopulate—indeed to resettle—the islands. “We’re already in a lot of trouble, Harris, I don’t think you’ll even notice this little bit more. Now, second and more important on our agenda—get me Rivera; we need to talk about this proposition Klieg is throwing at us.”

Henry Pauliss walks out of his office and considers. He has an ex-wife who has married again. There are two secretaries he sometimes has sex with, and one young woman he’s been courting without success for a while. Other than that, ball games with Diem and a few members of Congress have been his social life.

He has no kids. There’s a large pile of cash in the bank, but Pauliss has never really figured out what to do with it. His will is still made out to his ex, but that doesn’t matter much to him.

He considers all the usual things—that he could delay for a last fling of luxury, a good meal, a good bottle, maybe even a good prostitute? None of it appeals to him. He could resign (they’ll want that anyway) and have a religious conversion, or just take his pile of money and go fishing somewhere. There are some places he hasn’t seen and things he hasn’t done.

But if he ever cared about them, he stopped caring quite a while back. Probably the Pauliss who cared about taking the time to really see Europe or to hike the Appalachian Trail would also have cared enough to resign during the months when they covered up the real data. Certainly if he had wanted a real life with real friends, he’d have wanted it before now. There’s just not much reason to continue to go on….

It’s a complete cliché, he knows, but it works. He walks into a convenience store, presents his i.d., and buys a Self Defender. The little hypersonic pistols are designed purely as weapons against street crime; they contain only twenty rounds and can’t be reloaded, each of them carries a chemical dye packet that stains the hand that fires it with a unique identifier (matching an i.d. capsule in the rounds it fires), and when it fires, it also sends out a “radio scream” that police direction finders can instantly spot. If a woman is attacked in a deserted street, and uses it, not only does it stop the attack, but it also summons help.

But because of its identifier features and its “scream,” it’s useless for robberies, gang murders, or assassinations.

What the designers never anticipated was that it does have another use, and that’s the cliché Henry Pauliss is counting on. If you shoot yourself, it is always possible that failure of nerve, physical weakness, a mistake, or sheer bad luck may lead to your only being wounded. And if that happens, chances are that you’ll be in quite a bit of pain. Even if you’re going to try again, you want the ambulance to get to you right away.

Use a Self Defender, and the ambulance is right there.

Pauliss walks over to Memorial Park, on the site of the old Capitol, and sits down on one of the walls of rubble, like any of the bums and drunks out there at this time of day. Then he pulls out the Self Defender, places the muzzle back against his upper palate, and squeezes the trigger.

The ambulance is there in less than two minutes, just as he had planned, but Henry Pauliss is already dead.

It is not normal for a hurricane to move away from a pole or in the direction of the Earth’s rotation—at least not for a normal hurricane. Not that hurricanes don’t. Just that the physics tends to drive them to move toward the pole and to the west. Toward the west, because the Earth turns under them, dragging its envelope of air eastward with it, and the hurricanes are a bit more resistant to being dragged than the air around them. Toward the pole, because the Coriolis force is stronger as you move farther from the equator, so the spinning winds curl more tightly on the poleward side, the pressure is just that much lower on that side of the eye, and thus the eye itself tends to creep that way.

Moreover, in most of the Northern Hemisphere’s great hurricane formation zones—the Pacific near southern Mexico and in the area south of the Philippines, the Bay of Bengal, and the Caribbean Sea—it happens that the steering currents blow to the north and to the west, so the hurricane is usually being guided by the steering current and is following its own inclination.

But Clem is not usual or normal. The outflow jet has driven it to the south of Hawaii; in that area the steering currents are generally due south. For a while the outflow jet continues to push the hurricane eastward, and the steering current carries it south, so that it passes the American West Coast and Baja at a great distance, creating the best surfing seen on those coasts in years, sending unseasonably heavy thundershowers into the coast for a day or so, but not much disturbing the rhythm of life.

The outflow jet, sputtering around, at last finds its way back to lining up with the steering current. And thus it is that Clem accelerates to the south, and once again behaves like a normal hurricane, driven to the west. Clem is headed back for his birthplace—and for another rampage through the Pacific.

On July 5, about an hour after sunrise reaches the empty stretch of the Pacific Clem has moved into, the giant hurricane is at 16N 124W, and is now headed almost due south. Louie Tynan, working by telepresence on the moon, is asked to hurry along the first of the weather satellites he’s building, if he can. There doesn’t seem to be any way, so he says he will see what he can do.

Di and Carla are watching Clem, but not as closely as before. Di has a lunch meeting in Washington with leaders of various other NOAA teams, just a few moments away, and so he’s mainly worried about his notes for his presentation. And it’s still only two in the morning in the Solomons, where Carla has at last come into port.

She’s not exactly asleep but she’s not exactly awake, either. She’s lying on a too-sloshy waterbed in her room in the Mendana Hotel, allegedly as good a room as you can get in Honiara, but her newly upgraded data socket (surgery courtesy of an American government slush fund) is plugged into one of about twenty working current-generation universal data jacks on the whole island of Guadalcanal, and what she’s doing is letting herself drift and doze, randomly associating her way through the vast regions of open net.

If she were paying for this herself the cost would be astronomical, but she’s not—it’s another gift of Uncle Sam’s, who seems to be treating her as a favorite niece these days. Unlimited data access is something she’s wanted to mess around with in just this way for a long time, because her best ideas often come to her in the edges of sleep. So she’s half dreaming, half awake, as she inventories the world’s resources and the scope of Clem, looking for a way to match up what can be launched with the shadows it must cast, trying to find out if Klieg’s scheme will work the way his team of “experts” say it will.

The thing is, at any one time there aren’t even three thousand people who do global weather forecasting or modeling for a living, and Klieg’s experts include only two of them, neither of whom has any reputation. But the lack of names or even of specialists on Klieg’s team does not by itself make that team wrong. And what they’re proposing to do—cool the water in one broad band across the Pacific to twenty degrees Celsius or below, so that there’s a place for Clem, and all the Clems to come, to die harmlessly rather than continue on for weeks or months—is not the problem. If the cold water is wide enough and cool enough, it will work.

The problem is mostly with what will happen to other things; are they creating another problem? And will what Klieg is proposing make a big enough difference to justify the price Klieg is asking?

Carla turns over in her sleep. That thought is really bothering her.

There’s no other word for it—Klieg is blackmailing, or rather trying to blackmail, the UN, into ratifying his launch monopoly, giving him a permanent, dominant position in space launch worldwide. He will in effect own the doorways off planet.

She winces and turns uneasily; if any observer could see the whole net at once, he would see the odd phenomenon of short, microsecond-long interrupts scattering and proliferating across billions of processors in response. Carla does not yet notice this; she herself does not yet understand the power of being plugged in and not having to pay.

It’s not exactly what she’s supposed to be working on but it’s close, so she gives up her resistance to the problem and lets herself play it through, constructing models that are not of weather but of the future. She finds herself sliding forward to 2050; global data take shape and….

She falls forward into the simulation. She is in Times Square, and in front of her there’s a gigantic picture of Klieg. The street is very, very clean… and everything seems to be well organized. She realizes that people are walking between painted lines on the sidewalk, steps over to examine a line, and a policeman approaches her. This frightens her enough to make her run—

The policemen all wear the blue beret and there are thousands of them. And every shop she runs past has a large black “K” in the window, indicating that it is authorized to receive space-manufactured materials… and by now, she realizes, that’s everything of any significance, Klieg is making the world’s steel, glass, and aluminum up there, growing the food—

The cops close in on her. She notices that no one bothers to look. They have an oddly bland expression, not unlike that of Klieg on the building.

They are all white.

She wakes up, is hurled back into her hotel room on Guadalcanal, the waterbed bouncing under her, her fingers crawling at the jack in her head. She makes them relax and tug smoothly, and now she is back in her own brain, nobody in here in her head but herself, shuddering. The dream was surely just a vivid metaphor; a little like trying to see something in the distance and leaning over a high railing too far, she thinks, that’s all that happened. She was trying to visualize what the data were saying and there she was in the middle of the data. Her own imagination and paranoia, and her natural distrust of a businessman like Klieg, overwhelmed her.

But a part of the back of her brain is saying something else entirely. She realizes that she knew on another level what was happening in the simulation even as she lived it, and that among other things a dozen processors around the globe dedicated themselves to scanning all of the available bio and footage on Klieg and Rivera and half a dozen important people in the world, running them forward; that was Times Square as Klieg, with his bland Midwestern sensibility, would remake it, and his sense of order was being enforced. And it is true that the global economy is just at the point where space-based resources might expand very quickly, and if Klieg were to have a monopoly on the gateway….

Why was everyone white? Did the system pick up on some latent prejudice in Klieg? Did it pick up on some nightmare of hers? When Carla was young, she had an old great-uncle who was bluntly, vocally racist and used to terrify her by describing how he wanted to kill some of the black children Carla played with, his voice filled with terrible relish as he recounted tales of long-ago lynchings he had heard from elder relatives. He had a Midwestern accent, not unlike Klieg’s… was that the reason for the association?

She looks down and realizes she is still holding the data jack. And now that she’s wide awake it should be all right.

Carla plugs back in, stretching out again, trying to make herself relax but determined not to fall asleep again. The whine of mosquitos outside the surrounding netting blends into the whine of the electronics in the net—

And she receives an odd shock. There is a presence out there looking for her, a felt sensation that someone wants to talk to her. She recoils from it instinctively, then turns to face it as she recognizes—

Herself?

She has a strange sense of facing herself in a mirror, and then of moving closer, closer until she touches her image and she is abruptly merged with it. At once she knows what happened. She did not stop the billions of parallel programs running in millions of processors. And to them the physical Carla is merely one big processor, one large node in the net… a processor dropped out, but they kept running.

And what they were all doing collectively was simulating Carla. No, scratch that thought, they were Carla, in some sense, an extended version of her. So while she was unplugged, they kept working—tens of thousands of times faster than she could. There is a complete report now, which they give to her in very high-speed summary so that it comes to her like the best of her flashes of intuition: the evidence that Klieg’s impulse toward the world will be to homogenize it (though the “all white” version was probably just an error in the first simulation run, because Klieg appears to be indifferent to skin color as long as other people act just like Klieg’s idea of proper behavior), and the evidence that if he is allowed to rescue the world from Clem and Clem’s daughters, he will have that kind of power.

The system has even modeled possible degeneration of Klieg’s moral structure and ethics under the pressure of such power, and concluded that he probably wouldn’t change much—his view of the world is too stable to be altered by even so large a change of circumstances. This is not altogether a positive thing, since it clearly implies that his economic dictatorship is apt to be benign, even friendly—he would probably shut down a large number of ethnic conflicts in an extremely even-handed way, for example—and thus will not generate much rebellion until it is far too late for the world to shake it off.

As she re-merges with her report, she discovers something else. Louie had been suggesting she plug into some optimizer software with the note that he had found it made big differences in his work on the moon—for example, the weather satellites he’s now launching are an enormous leap in technology, and Louie is neither a design engineer nor a meteorologist.

His suggestion must have been somewhere in her mind when she unplugged, for the software has been optimized in many ways, not all of which she understands. One that is clear, however, is that it is now no longer sending the bill to a U.S. government account. It had to stop doing so because the bill was going to be far too large, but rather than shutting down, it has found its way around the accounting programs. She is running on stolen time from thousands upon thousands of systems worldwide, and her tracks are being covered even as she moves through the net.

She is now independent of the people who pay her, and free to decide what’s best… but then, hasn’t it always been that way?

Back to work. The question is, who else or what else could do the job Klieg is proposing to do? Her simulations seem to show that if Rivera and Hardshaw turn down the offer from Klieg (probably on grounds that it is “tainted” by the close interconnections with the Siberian government), then Klieg and the Siberians will go public with the offer—and the public will force the UN to take the deal.

Global public opinion is a new thing, something that didn’t exist even ten years ago—but then ten years ago there couldn’t have been a global riot, either.

She lets herself drift, only to discover that she doesn’t feel drowsy anymore when she does this. Part of her, without effort, finds a confidential report in a NASA file and reads about what happens when cross-systemcapable optimizer viruses invade a mind. She discovers that Louie, too, has lost the need to sleep for mental rest, though he needs much more bed rest to keep his immune system functioning, given the large blood sugar demands made by his active brain and the high-radiation environment. Well, she’s already in bed, and it will be hours—which she can experience as millennia if she wishes—before daylight, when she can go get a huge breakfast. Meanwhile she has more time than she’s ever had before to just think—and she realizes this will be with her for the rest of her life. She glories in the thought of how much time she has.

And so does Louie, she realizes. She won’t even have to be lonely.

She turns her eyes—satellites of several nations, including theoretically closed military ones, seaborne instruments, instruments on aircraft—onto Clem, and watches as the outflow jet suddenly kicks around, creating the pressure release she had feared. The great bubble of air, twenty kilometers across and a thousand kilometers from Clem’s eye, blisters upward and tears open; at sea level, the whirling winds, at hurricane force even this far from the eye, split around the upwelling air, merge, begin to flow faster—

In less than ten minutes, a hurricane eye has been formed, and begins to gather a storm around it. It’s the reverse of what’s always been seen in nature before, but there is no question—Clem has given birth to an eye, and the eye is accreting a hurricane. Moreover, the two hurricanes are putting out enough air together to create a high pressure spot between them, and thrust them apart—which means this daughter will head for the Americas.

Carla reaches for her own voice back in Honiara, but before she moves herself it occurs to her that it’s just as easy to compose a message in text, so she sends that to Di, and to Harris Diem, who is supposed to be the White House contact for weather matters. As she composes each word of the message she runs thousands of models to improve her view of what’s about to happen; virtually all the possible news is bad.

Diogenes Callare and Harris Diem get word at the same time, shortly after Berlina Jameson’s datarodents have pirated Carla’s report.

By late afternoon, when the two men return from Henry Pauliss’s funeral, shirts damp with the sweat of D.C. in July, a new edition of Sniffings has been out for hours.

Berlina is proud and getting prouder. The distributors are sending her demogs that show she has three separate core audiences, which is a good place to be, because it means she can occasionally offend one of them.

Her most loyal fans are old people who remember Bartnick, Arnott, Rather… heck, some of them probably remember Cronkite—and who find it comforting to get the news the way Berlina gives it. Fair enough—classical forms draw classicists.

But there also are the people in the United Left who like it because it seems lower-tech to them (though just what’s low tech about putting together television documentaries from the rear seat of your car, while the car drives itself, Berlina would like to know) and because it seems like it’s the inside track on the kind of thing they always suspect (rightly) is going on. And that’s okay too—the Left of any kind, whether it thinks it’s United or not, has a long affinity with the news media in any country in which the media are independent of government control.

Then there’s that other group, which she can’t quite figure out… there are a substantial number of young subscribers who say they like it because it’s “flat,” which is sort of the generic word for “good,” the way “cool” is in boomtalk.

That’s okay, except that by “flat” they also mean it’s emotionally uninvolving, and Berlina would love to know how they can feel that. She intercepted Army video coming out of the first whistler that got over Honolulu after visibility cleared up, and popped in a closeup of the huge pile of bodies on Kalei Road, students from a shelter at the university that burst open only during the washback of the fourth giant wave, sucking the students out of the shelter and crushing and drowning them between the walls of a wrecked shopping mall two miles away. She covered President Hardshaw’s sidestep of the traps in Secretary-General Rivera’s aid package, got UN and U.S. officials both on camera denying things that were patently true, even caught a little footage of one UN official from Ecuador pounding the table and telling his subordinates that “this is when we settle with the yanqui bastards once and for all.” She doesn’t exactly understand how they can feel it’s “flat,” but since they do, she’s glad it makes them watch.

Then again, she thinks for the thousandth time over the thousandth cup of coffee, perhaps everything is flat compared to XV. Maybe the use of the word “flat” among the more bohemian fringe of the young bodes something good about the future, that people are going to turn their backs on those damned hallucinations, or at least insist on a context that lets you evaluate it rather than get sucked into the story.

She talked, the other day, on one of the ubiquitous bulletin board systems, with a professor of communications who was explaining to her that she was “Brechtian” while the XV was “Craigean.” That wasn’t totally fruitless—she looked up who Bertolt Brecht and Gordon Craig were, and it might come in handy to impress people at a foundation dinner or something—but when you came right down to it, all it meant was that Berlina would rather persuade people than overwhelm them. Which she knew in the first place.

This latest capture isn’t high drama by itself, but in context it will be interesting enough for her audience. There’s a new hurricane forming and headed for Central America (or, given the time it has to get there, and the way the things can veer around, possibly for Colombia’s Pacific Coast or even for Baja). It looks like anything as big as Clem can spawn other ones… which swiftly grow to Clem’s own size. The potential for scare stuff in this story is wonderful, but she’s going to deliver it the way that Berlina does, the way that people turn to Sniffings to get—“Hat, rad, and cool,” as she likes to say to herself.

It feels so good to know that there is really an audience out there, and that they really want to look at what she wants to do, that she sits in the back of her speeding car hugging herself, just feeling happy about everything, instead of working. In a few minutes she’ll have to get down to the difficult business of snipping together information, and of mastering yet more meteorology—who ever thought that the boring old weatherman’s slot would be the one she wishes she’d had? In the last three days she’s learned more about outflow jets than she used to know about the Ways and Means Committee.

So by the time Diem and Callare have read the reports, called each other, gotten people together, and in general begun to see what they can do about the crisis they had been dreading, the formation of Clem Two (Carla had suggested a new nomenclature because in her understated way she was trying to tell them that they would run out of alphabetic names for hurricanes long before the season was over), before President Hardshaw and Secretary-General Rivera are even fully aware that there is a Clem Two, Berlina has dubbed the thing “Clementine” and devoted a special issue of Sniffings to it.

Louie has begun to notice, lately, that it hardly seems worth staying in touch with his body while he works, and often he just cuts the damned thing largely loose by sending it off to sleep. The number of processors on which he runs on the moon is growing geometrically, so that every day there seems to be more and more of him there and less and less back on Constitution .

His body back on the station wakes up refreshed after hours of pleasant dreams, and indeed he’s been quietly tweaking the immune system a bit, since he accidentally discovered some access to it from the brain a few days ago. He downloaded a report about that to Dr. Wo and got back a short note asking if he’d be willing to split the Nobel Prize in Medicine, so probably it was more than a stray thought. But he’s a little too busy to work on all that just now.

Even just getting a call from his body annoys hell out of him; he has to migrate back to Earth orbit to take the call. At first he thinks that he’s just let it go too long between taking dumps again, but then he realizes someone Earthside wants to talk. As he comes back into slow time Earthside, the call turns out to be from Carla. Quickly he reconfigures back to the moon, since she can think as fast as he can.

And what she wants to talk about with him is… well, it’s just wonderful, it will solve the whole mind-body problem for him, for good and all. He doesn’t realize, until she points it out, how strange his reaction is. “I thought you’d be excited at the chance to go thirty-five times deeper into space than anyone’s ever gone before.”

She says that, and he says something like “What? Oh, of course, you’re right, but…” and has weeks of normal mind time to think about it while his response crawls slowly on radio waves down to the antennas of Earth and her answer to his response limps its way back out to him at the speed of light. He has time for his life to run through his mind several times, and each time from a different angle, and it all boils down to this: There was a time when going where no one had ever gone before was the main thing he wanted to do, a time when he saw himself in competition with everyone from Hanno and Leif Eriksson forward. And that time lasted up until about two weeks ago in real time….

Which was about eight thousand years ago in time as he knows it now. He uses billions of processors, in fact just about to be a trillion later this afternoon, and each of them is in turn massively parallel so that he runs millions of programs on each processor; he is up into quintillions of parallel programs… yet there is something in his own deep structure that insists on linearizing, insists on making things string out in time in a single chain, so that for the sake of his consciousness, and perhaps of his sanity, he finds it easiest to experience it as thinking for decades in every second (at an accelerating rate, for as he becomes more parallel he becomes faster, and not only new processors, but new processor-makers, and better processordesigners, join him constantly).

It is not that he doesn’t want to go elsewhere. It is only that there is now so much to know about where he already is. In idle moments he has run all the data—optical, radar, and thermal—ever taken on the Earth from orbit, and watched the myriad subtle changes in the global biosphere since 1960. He has regressed the Earth’s languages back to *World, and demonstrated to his own satisfaction that there are a dozen possible ancestral homelands for all human language. He has filled in holes in history by correlating dozens of bits of evidence whose importance had not been noticed before, and he has dug new holes where the evidence compiled across generations has formed unstable bridges.

He has reprocessed everything about Mars, and knows it now in a way more intimate than he ever did when its iron sands crunched under his boots, and knows moreover not just the planet as it really is, but the planet in all the ways it has been dreamt. He could tell you things about the links between Viking and Barsoom that you could never imagine.

He has compiled data from all the unmanned probes, including the secret Chinese government and the covert Japanese private ones, so that he knows a great deal about every other planet out there, so that the asteroid belt is as familiar to him as the streets of Irish, Ohio, the little town where he grew up. He has read the classics, and the commentaries piled around them, not just the classics of European literature but of the world’s major cultures, and listened to recordings of the great musical traditions, and all this has been to avoid having idle processors—which, when they re-enter the processing stream after waiting for the data they need, he experiences as boredom.

Had he been really concentrating he could have advanced technology on the moon by a matter of fifty years beyond its levels on Earth, but at that point, no one on Earth would have known enough to use it intelligently. And besides, he’s been enjoying the spare time….

And all of this time spent in cultivating his own intellectual garden has of course altered his feelings about exploring. Somewhat. He still wants to go and to find out, but there is so much more that he wants to know….

The thing that most excited him was the idea of not being strung out between Earth and Moon anymore, not having to knock himself unconscious for the many long weeks that a second-and-a-half radio transmission gap is to him now.

All of this he manages to get down into what he calls a “terabyte haiku”—a huge poly/hypermedia document, extremely densely interconnected to get across the idea that his feelings are a gestalt, that he downloads to Carla to explain. Her processing capability is an order of magnitude smaller than his, not so much because of lack of processing space (she has all the surplus of Earth, which is huge, to draw from), but because she insists, every day, on a few hours of being unhooked and living in real time. He can’t imagine why she does that but she seems to enjoy it.

It takes her ten seconds or so to digest and read the “terabyte haiku.” The first thing she says afterwards is “I see.”

He waits through the ages of seconds before he realizes he’s now supposed to say something in return.

“So how long before they authorize it? I can be working on it part time until they do.”

“They probably haven’t gotten it out of the President’s printer yet. For some reason she insists on hard copies. But I thought you and I might think about it together a little. There is an issue here and there that needs to get worked out.”

Louie assents, and the two of them begin to trade information, statistics, projections, “what-ifs” at a rate that would move the Library of Congress every two to three minutes; for both of them, it “runs in background”—that is, they are only dimly aware of it, as they go on about their other work, giving it full attention every now and then as something important comes up.

This leaves Louie time enough on the moon to keep the robots working at high speed; now that he knows he will be leaving, he needs to get a system set up so that Earth can order a new satellite by radio and have it built and launched here. Of necessity that also means deciding which parts he wants to build fresh and which to take with him….

There’s a deep sense of pleasure growing inside him as he contemplates the job. Right now he could duplicate the original Moonbase—as it was two weeks ago, after almost twenty years of European, Japanese, and American effort—in two days’ construction. And as capacity improves… well, if they ask him to do what Carla proposes three days from now, he’ll be at the point where the whole thing can be accomplished within a week, the big thruster shipped down to Constitution along with the thousands of microrobots and replicators and the three trillion processor packages that he’s decided will be enough (especially since he can build some more on the way). While he’s at it, he can also get some nice big chunks of shielding down there, and the food recycling gadget he’s got from the hydroponics package….

It would really be better to design and build a habitat for his body for the voyage, but though designing it would be easy, there are too many materials he needs from Earth, and no reliable launch from anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. The Aussies could probably ship things to him, but for the next week or so Clem will be ripping along a few degrees north of the equator, so that whatever he ordered would have to be flown to the Cape of Good Hope and then across the Indian Ocean to be sure of getting it there—

No, Carla was right. If he’s going to go grab and dissassemble a comet for this job, he’ll just have to take the whole space station with him. That means some reinforcing that he hasn’t thought about yet, if he wants it to take the acceleration….

Something is disturbing him and he’s not sure what. It’s a long moment or two before he gets it nailed down to something coming from Carla….

And something pleasant…

Abruptly he has a second and a half blank and catapults back into his body in Earth orbit, where he finds himself overwhelmed by memory and fantasy, his penis in Carla’s hands, mouth, vagina, anus, the way she shrieks in orgasm, the furious pleasure of pressing their sweaty bodies together on that long hike in the Cascades the last time he hit dirtside, the first time he saw her and realized that nobody else was ever going to understand it but he had to have that one and realized she had seen him feeling that way….

His orgasm is huge, shaking—and very wet and sloppy. In a weightless environment, of course, this means his semen forms little floating spheres all over the cabin.

In his mind, he feels Carla shrieking to him from ten thousand processor cortexes and antennas all over the Earth.

“Shit,” he says, speaking aloud. “You are one shameless wench. I just hope the government wasn’t bugging that.”

She gasps and laughs, then answers him on voice, even though he can still feel the presence of her mind on his through all the myriad portals of connection; they are knotted together physically through millions of transmission links, and logically through billions of input-output subroutines, but at this kind of moment it is much too pleasant to forgo talking in the old, slow, acoustic mode. He feels her assent to this even as her first word comes over the voice link. “They either deal with us or with John Klieg,” she says, “and I don’t think his sex life is nearly as interesting. But as a matter of fact, they were bugging it in a few places…. It will take them a week to figure out what all that was, though, and in the great majority of the signal we’re still talking about optimizing the design for the ship. One way to have privacy is to just drown out what you’re keeping private with enough other signal. Sort of like turning up the stereo in the dorm room.”

Louie relaxes and laughs. “You yanked me back into Earth orbit, I’m afraid. There’re some things that work better in the liveware.” Yet even as he says it, he can feel the vast processes—delayed, but there—moving and changing on the moon. He realizes, too, that he’s never treated himself to looking at Moonbase from the observation bubble since he started building it.

“What gave you the idea?” he asks. “It’s the kind of thing we just might want to do again.”

“You’re insatiable!” she says, and by now he’s realized that they are talking out loud mostly to enjoy the separation and the suspense of not knowing what the other will say or how the other will form the thought.

“Well, not right away,” he says. “The liveware wouldn’t take that. But soon all the same. Did you notice that we, um—gee, there’s not exactly a word for it, feeling your own body with the other person’s consciousness?”

“Notice it? What do you think finally set me off? My god, Louie, it’s incredible. I suppose if we wanted to we could always run a little of that in background—”

“Nothing doing, lover. I’ve always put my full attention into it whenever I’m doing it. My big regret is that it’s still going to be months before we can try it with all the processor networks linked and doing it physically. Preferably in weightlessness.”

“I’m not space-rated—”

“By the time I get back I’ll have a little ship’s launch that can just set down at sea, make its own fuel from air and water, and pick you up from MyBoat. I’m not sure what USSF and NASA will think about my bringing up a date, but I’ll point out to them that it won’t cost them a dime and it’s cheaper than giving me shore leave. I’m really thinking I might never get back to Earth.”

She chuckles. “It’s a date, sailor. And I guess that’s an example of how different we are… I have to have a few hours a day in real experience. It’s just different for me. And besides, don’t you find it’s kind of fun to meet yourself?”

He has a long, confusing moment, because when he was a teenager, to “meat” a girl was one of a thousand expressions they had for fucking; his mind dips into the net and realizes what she said, then realizes he doesn’t know what she means—at about the same moment she does.

“You never unplug long enough to have that happen!” she says, and she sends him the image of the event—the moment each day when she plugs back in and finds that the other half (or really the other ninety-nine point many nines percent) of her consciousness has lived another few centuries and has a lot to tell her about it.

“Jeez. Never. Though come to think of it, it might be interesting to see if I can split myself between the moon and the processing modules on the Constitution… since both would keep building for the four months or so they’d be out of realtime contact… that would mean… sheesh. Remerging after something like ten million years, at the rate of expansion I’ve got planned.”

“I could probably write several hundred scientific papers within the next twenty-four hours without breathing hard, but…”

“Same here. In fact, don’t laugh at me, but I could do a couple of pretty good ones in comparative philology, history, maybe a few in literary criticism.”

She does laugh, but it sounds kind. “Interesting. I have some work in musicology I like, too. Louie, what’s happening to us? Are we turning into machines?”

“I’d say it’s more likely machines are turning into us.”

They talk for a long time afterward, about everything and anything, and rather than sever the link they leave a little backchannel running between them; it feels like the kind of telepathy old marrieds have, for each always has a quiet awareness of what the other is thinking. The two loners are not lonely anymore, and won’t be until Louie begins his long journey.

On July 6, Clem Two heads east for most of the day, occasionally angling a little to the south. Di’s best guess, confirmed by Carla, is that this is because the two hurricanes, mother and daughter, have outflow jets pointed at each other and are thus creating a high-pressure ridge that pushes them away from each other. President Hardshaw talks with about a dozen presidents, dictators, and chiefs of state in the possible pathway of the storm.

Berlina Jameson brings out a special edition of Sniffings about the approach of Clem Two. A majority of Americans polled are under the impression that since Clem Two is a “daughter” hurricane it is somehow tied to Clem, and must be smaller than Clem. She tries to get across the idea that once Clem Two’s eye was created by the motion of Clem’s outflow jet, there was no further relationship, and there is nothing to prevent Clem Two from going elsewhere or growing bigger than its parent. Berlina works longer on this Sniffings than on any other, and her work is pirated everywhere, especially in Scuttlebytes, but it doesn’t matter; people believe what they want to believe and when large percentages of them are plugged into XV, the tendency is increased; why believe anything that might lead you to unplug?

She calls Di Callare one last time, but he has no time to talk with her; all she gets out of the conversation is a sense of how much things are going to hell. The man sounds like he hasn’t been home in a week or asleep in days. She says she’s going to head to Mexico and then as far south as she can get, in hopes of getting better coverage of Clem Two’s impact on the coast; he tells her to avoid using roads too near either coast and to be careful when she hits the “drive yourself” zones.

Strangely enough, just as she’s checking out, the desk clerk hands her a piece of mail from the White House thanking her for her “role in alerting the public,” and enclosing a certificate for a “President’s award for journalism and citizenship.” She finds it a bit frightening that the President’s staff has nothing better to do, but she still pins the certificate to the ceiling of her car. By July 7, Clem Two is angling a little to the north and is still obstinately headed east, in defiance of steering currents and the Earth’s rotation. Alerts are being issued in Mexico for all of Baja California Sur and for the mainland all the way from Los Mochis to Acapulco. Di realizes that Jesse is more than far enough south to be safe, and Tapachula is up high. Jesse should be fine if he doesn’t go down to Puerto Madero or try to run back to the States. Di calls him and talks to him about that briefly, discovers that Jesse is planning to stay put, along with his current girlfriend, and is merely a little worried about some former girlfriend—the one Lori called the political muffin?

It’s not easy for Di to keep track, he thinks with an envious grin after hanging up. But from Jesse’s explanation the girl is a bit farther to the north, and often has business on the coast—but since the Mexican Army is evacuating coastal towns as fast as they can, “that doesn’t seem like much to worry about—at worst she’ll have a few days in a refugee camp before someone Stateside wires money to her,” Di tells his brother.

Jesse nods. “Oh, I’m not worried a whole lot. Tomorrow would be the day she’d be going to Tehuantepec, and right now they haven’t decided to evacuate it, but Tehuantepec isn’t right on the coast—it’s like this place, up above—so I imagine she’ll be okay. Just a little normal worry about a friend is all.”

“I can understand that,” Di says. “Anyway, stay put—unless it does veer your way. If it really looks like it’s coming inshore in the Gulf of Tehuantepec, they’ll have less than twenty-four hours to get everyone evacuated. Don’t be on the last truck and don’t stay behind for heroics.”

“I do watch the news, big brother,” Jesse says. “I saw what happened to Oahu. My evacuation address will be on the Calle del Veinticinco Febrero in San Cristóbal de las Casas—if we have to go. The Army’s already assigned places for everyone. And the railhead for the zipline that will take us there is only thirty kilometers away—they didn’t quite finish last spring, but at least the railhead isn’t far away.”

There’s not much more to talk about; NOAA is going to have to provide assistance until Clem Two hits, but according to Carla as long as it hits well up the peninsula and moves west to east, as it looks like it’s going to do, the central spine of mountains ought to kill Clem Two, reducing it to mere thunderstorms. She has warned them that the exception to that is the isthmus; should Clem Two come ashore in the Gulf of Tehuantepec and then head north, the mountains may not be barrier enough to keep Clem Two from bursting out into the Caribbean—which will pour vastly more energy into the system.

With luck, it will be weeks yet before one of those monsters is loose in the Atlantic… but so far luck has not been with them.

On July 8, Clem Two stops dead and stands still for almost four hours, about 300 km west of the tip of Baja. Huge storm surges are pumped up the Gulf of California, and American authorities around the valley of the lower Colorado and the Imperial Valley give urgent orders to evacuate. There’s a riot when busloads of Mexicans—actually just being moved by the nearest available highway to the higher ground of Nogales, Sonora—cross the border at Mexicali. A rumor had spread among the Anglo and black citizenry that the busloads of refugees were to be given American passports and allowed to settle permanently.

The riot goes away because Rock gets on the scene for Passionet and millions of men find themselves thinking how stupid all this is; his disgust bleeds through every moment of the coverage. Surface O’Malley is with him, and she rapidly comes to see it his way (the script calls for her to adore him as an older and wiser man of the world on this trip). Rioters running home or using portables to catch themselves on XV are startled by the sensations of anger and nausea directed at them. Those who went home don’t return to the riot. Those who had portables quietly slink away.

FBI agents undercover within Passionet note all this and relay it upward; apparently XV can calm a population as well as inflame it. Millions of people seem to be disappointed by the failure of Global Riot Two to happen and take it out on Passionet by switching to other systems; the letter of commendation from President Hardshaw, and the granting of a brief personal interview that brings back viewers, arrive just in time to save Surface and Rock from getting fired.

Very, very slowly, but with gathering speed as the night wears on, Clem Two begins to move south. At first it is hoped that this means Clem Two is about to follow the steering currents, which would mean a move to the west—and bad as Clem Two might be over there, especially as an aftermath to the original Clem, which has just thundered across the now-empty Kingman Reef again, if Clem Two should turn west they will at least have a breathing space.

At dawn on July 9, Clem Two picks up speed and moves in a great, sweeping eastward hook into the Gulf of Tehuantepec.

Jesse and Mary Ann are already packed—evacuees are permitted just one small bag. Within minutes of the alert they are waiting out front for the Army trucks. But the Army doesn’t come, and doesn’t come, and the hours crawl by. The wind from Clem Two coming in has only just begun to rise, and so it is like any breezy summer day with a rainstorm coming in on the wind. After a long wait they decide to reserve their packed lunches for later, and go around the corner to discover that many of the little cafés have reopened; “I can always just turn off the stove if the Army shows up,” one of the owners explains.

The news broadcasts report that big waves are beginning to come inshore and that buses have been commandeered to move the population on the coasts first. There is reassuring footage of soldiers helping people pack into buses.

Or it’s reassuring until Jesse sees. “Mary Ann—that’s not Puerto Madero.”

“How do you know it’s not?”

“Because I know the building they’re doing that in front of, and that building is in Tuxtla Gutiérrez. I don’t know what’s really going on, but there’s no evacuation down in Puerto Madero, that’s for sure.”

“Why would they be—”

Jesse shrugs. “Could be anything. They don’t want people to panic but they just had a mutiny. Things are coming in so fast that they can’t pick people up, so they’re trying to keep them calm till it hits. Different factions feuding one place or another. Or if you ask me, they’re badly delayed but still planning to come for us, and they want to make sure everyone stays near an evacuation point. Like if the zipline is down—which happens fairly often—then they don’t want people piling up at the linehead; it will just make loading the zipline harder, and there’s no shelter at the zipline head anyway.”

Mary Ann grins at him. “You’re really something, you know. You think about explanations like that. Most of the people I’ve ever known in my life would just have said ‘It’s typical’ or ‘Oh, what can you do?’ but you think up twenty things it could be.”

“All of which are probably wrong.”

“Oh, sure, but that doesn’t matter. I was just thinking that you actually do that—explain things—instead of just giving it to me from a script.” Mary Ann pulls a bandanna from her back pocket and wipes her sweatcovered face. “I don’t like how warm and still it’s getting, and I really don’t like the green color in the sky.”

“Me either.” They move close to each other, so that their shoulders touch; it’s even warmer, but Jesse would rather be in contact as they look at the green-brown wash of thunderheads now boiling their way across the sky, chasing the last blue off to the east behind them.

They finish lunch and have another cup of coffee. “This is going to blow in suddenly,” Jesse says, “and an outdoor café under an awning is not the place for it.”

“The assembly point is all the way outdoors.”

“True, but your house is about thirty steps from the assembly point. And from your second-floor window we can watch for the bus.”

She sighs. “I suppose the problem is that till the wind and rain start, I’m not going to get over the feeling that they just need to matte in a nicerlooking sky. All right, let’s get going.”

As they walk the short block back, Jesse sees what she means; there is something about the faraway look of the evil green thunderheads, their black anvil bases sailing like bargeloads of coal high above, that seems unconnected with the world below. The air gets more and more still, and the dark clouds roll over thicker and heavier.

He’s trying to remember all the terms Diogenes taught him. He knows the big, heavy clouds are cumulonimbus and they get that pattern of dark base and fluffy top because there’s a warm updraft pouring from the base up into the sky, and that the whole thing acts like a big Van de Graaff generator, so that there are charges being separated up there and the potential for lightning is building up. And that row of thunderheads is called the squall line? Seems right. And somewhere back behind that there’s an actual front… no, that’s just in regular storms back home, he thinks. Still, somewhere out there the wind is about to pick up—

They are already going up the garden path when the rain hits—and “hits” is the only word for it—it feels like a cold firehose turned suddenly on them. A moment later the wind is whipping up fiercely, and though they run and Mary Ann has the key in her hand, in their ten steps they are soaked to the skin.

“I can’t see three feet out this window,” Mary Ann points out.

“There’s no bus coming in this, anyway,” Jesse says. “Glad you got a high-rent place; hope you had to pay extra for the walls.”

“The place was redone for security but I didn’t pay much attention to what they did,” Mary Ann says, and leans against him. He puts an arm around her, doing his best to be reassuring, and very grateful to have someone whom he has to reassure, since that seems to keep his teeth from chattering.

The rain hits the windows in sheets, like water on the windshield in a car wash.

“Guess we better ride it out in an inside room,” Jesse says. “There’s not really anything to see here.”

She nods. “The house has a powerchip, and there’s plenty of food in the fridge. We can sit out a few days if the storm doesn’t manage to get in here at us.”

“What about the windows?”

“Passionet worries about snipers, believe it or not—ever since what’s-her-name, the blonde who appealed to low-end markets—ever since Kimber Lee Melodion got shot. So these are a lot tougher than regular windows.”

The water is surging, thumping on the window; the view through the window (which reveals nothing but gray light and something grayly green beyond it) is like looking up from the bottom of a river. “Uh, did they do anything special with your window frames?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Then let’s get to an interior room.”

The wind and the rain are loud; they don’t even realize anyone else is in the house until they get into the kitchen. But it makes sense that it’s Señora Herrera, her husband Tomás, and a bunch of children. “I am sorry, madame—” she begins at once.

“Nonsense,” Mary Ann says. “The bus didn’t come, this place has power and it’s a good place to ride out the storm, and it was only sensible for you and Tomás to come here. And I think even with all the young appetites there’s probably enough food for everyone for a week. But, er—I’d no idea you had so many—that is, are all these children yours?”

Señora Herrera translates for Tomás, who speaks no English, and he laughs, before she turns back to explain to Mary Ann. “No, ours are grown. These are nieces and nephews and grandchildren, madame.”

There are six of them, now that Jesse’s had a chance to count. He knows the fridge is huge and it was well stocked just beforehand, so he’s not worried about food supply, and since Mary Ann is taking a generous attitude about her house, he can hardly complain. Still, he’s just a little jealous; he had been sort of hoping to have the whole place and Mary Ann just for himself.

That triggers a guilt attack and nowadays guilt always reminds him of Naomi. Well, if she had any sense she stayed out of Tehuantepec today and if she was really smart she went up to Oaxaca; there might be some danger there from floods when Clementine’s rains hit the volcanic slopes around the city, but chances are that Oaxaca will come through it with minor wind damage—in fact, the news (his brother Di seems to be on the television news every night, maybe because that reporter, Berlina Jameson, keeps interviewing him) was talking about the storm dying when it got up to the mountains.

The wind outside booms against the walls, and there’s a low shudder that runs through their feet. Tomás turns to Jesse and says, in Spanish, “The two of us could tie down the roof. I don’t believe it is, and it needs to be.”

Jesse doesn’t know what Tomás is talking about, but figures Tomás knows more than he does. So he says, “All right; what do we use to tie it down?”

“There is”—a Spanish word that Jesse doesn’t know—“in my truck outside; I will flip a coin and one of us will run for it—”

“I’m already wet,” Jesse says. “And what is—?”

It takes them a long couple of minutes to figure out that the English for what they are talking about is “airplane cable”—lightweight wire rope. Tomás needs the big roll of it; he has already brought in his toolbox, which has the necessary wirecutters, wrenches, and saddles. He had been about to make the dash when Jesse and Mary Ann turned up.

The truck is parked behind the house, sheltered from the direct fury of the rain. Running for the cable is like diving into a cold swimming pool; Jesse is drenched in just one step. Then the wind hits him from behind, and he is thrown to his hands and knees on the rain-slick cobbles before he can adjust his balance. The cold water sluices around his wrists and legs for a long second as he bends his head inward to draw a breath; then Jesse rushes forward to the truck and his cold, numb hands sting as he is thrown against its door. It’s lucky this thing has a sliding door because he doubts he could open a door that swung out against the wind.

Gasping, he opens the truck door with a hard yank, climbs inside, and slides it closed behind him, not fast enough to prevent everything getting soaked in the brief second or so. He brought a flashlight in his back pocket—even though it’s only about one in the afternoon—and now he’s glad he did. It’s darker in here than it would be on an ordinary night.

He finds the big coil of aircraft cable where Tomás said it would be, and pulls it onto his shoulder.

The truck rocks hard a couple of times; the wind isn’t strong enough to pick it up or roll it, but more than enough to make it bounce on its shocks. He draws a breath—

It’s much worse getting back to the house—he has to run face-first into the storm. He doesn’t lose his balance, but his feet slip and give under him as if he were wading upstream in a mountain river, and the rain pounds flat against his chest so hard that he holds his breath. As he starts his run, the house, less than fifty feet away, is not much more than a blur, and he’s so blinded by the rain that he hits the wall next to the door before he slips in sideways.

Tomás grins at him. “That will save you a few years of bathing.”

Jesse heaves a long breath and says, “Shall we place bets on how long till the truck goes to San Cristóbal without us?”

Tomás laughs. “I have an idea about that too. The roof won’t blow off in the time it will take you to change clothing, though, so why don’t you do that—”

“Well, if we’re going to do something about the truck, why don’t I do it while I’m still wet?”

“Because it seemed too heartless to send you back out into that, especially with the difficulty of crawling underneath the van to stretch cargo straps under the frame—”

“You were thinking of tying it down? Why not just back it up close to the house and then weight it?”

Tomás stops, scratches his head, thinks. “That would make more sense,” he admits. “But what can we weight it with?”

“There are empty fifty-five-gallon drums in the room with the washer, right? So if I back up close to there, and we put four drums in the truck and fill them with water, that’s about a ton of added weight. And there’s no shortage of water just now.”

Tomás claps him on the shoulder. “Señor Callare, you are a brilliant ingeniero. And you did mention that you’re already wet.”

It’s not quite so bad this time, because he knows he won’t be running back through the water; he’s impressed with Tomás’s maintenance—the truck starts right up. He’s going from memory about where the garden, curb, and utility-room door are, and there’s a nasty bump as he goes over the curb into the slick goo that’s about all that’s left of the roses, mulch, and compost, but though the tires spin for an instant, they catch, and he gets backed up against the wall, just two quick steps from the door.

As he bursts in, Tomás says, “May I ask you something, Señor?”

“Call me Jesse. I think we can declare democracy till the storm’s over, at least.”

“Then may I ask you something, Jesse?”

“Sure.”

“Why didn’t it occur to either of us to do this first, so that you didn’t have to run the whole way three times, or carry that roll of cable?”

Jesse’s jaw drops, and then they’re both laughing.

It’s still something of a battle to get the empty drums across the gap of a few feet into the truck, and there’s a lot of water on the utility-room floor by the time they’re done, but once the drums are in it’s just a matter of running a hose out to the van to fill the drums.

As the drums are filling, they go upstairs, pick several likely points, and fasten tight loops of aircraft cable around the rafters of the house and through eyebolts driven into the roof. It will now take a great deal more lift before the roof comes off.

As they’re working they take breaks to run down and move the hose from drum to drum, so that house and truck are secured at about the same time. With as much safety secured as they can manage, Tomás goes into the main bathroom, and Jesse goes upstairs to change.

Mary Ann hands him three towels and a change of clothing. “At least with the powerchip, as long as the house stands up we have a washer and dryer.”

“What about water supply?”

“We’re on a cistem.” She gestures at a window, and Jesse whacks himself on the side of the head. He takes a quick, hot shower, then steps into the hot, dry sauna in her bathroom and relishes getting really dry and warm.

Naomi Cascade did go to Tehuantepec, and she knew the whole way there that it was against common sense, but something in her wouldn’t let her stay put in safety when so many people she knew were in danger, and so she went. She got there just in time to realize, along with everyone else, that the evacuation wasn’t going to happen.

At the moment that Jesse is getting into a hot shower just over two hundred miles to the southeast, she’s huddled with a bunch of kids from the school, their backs to a wall on the side away from the wind. She has had a hard time not screaming: first when the roof came off, lifting like a single immense kite and then bursting into pieces flying away downwind; then when the interior wall they were facing went over in an explosion of lath and plaster against the far wall of the building, leaving nothing but a scoured area between the walls; and now as the wall above is visibly eroding down toward them. There are four children clinging to her, and she can’t possibly hang on to them if they are directly exposed to the wind.

As soon as the wall above has eroded far enough, they will be exposed to the wind.

As far as she can tell the wind is still rising. The last news she’d heard was that Tehuantepec was going to take the eye directly.

She wishes vaguely for Jesse, because her gut says that as the wall wears down closer to the ground it will wear more slowly, but she isn’t sure enough, and she suspects her Science Guy, as she used to think of him, would be able to tell her. If the wall won’t erode all the way down to them—and she thinks it won’t, she thinks it won’t, she keeps telling the children it won’t—then they might as well stay here till the eye arrives and then run for better cover. But if the wall is going to keep on wearing down, they need to crawl down to the end of it before the wind gets any stronger, and then somehow get across the street to the little cathedral—surely that can’t have been knocked down—a few dozen feet away. She has no idea how to get these kids there without being blown off into the wind or hit by rubble that she can hear and feel slamming like bullets and cannonballs into the other side of the wall.

She always loved Tehuantepec, though the zócalo there is not particularly fine, there’s no especially lovely architecture, the local seafood dishes are good but no better than what you can get anywhere up and down the coast, it’s just a small city where people passing through change buses and people who live there work serving the road and the neighboring farms… a small town like any other….

That phrase, “small town,” makes her think of Jesse again. She has to admit, though he probably is no better at such situations than anyone else would be, there’s something about his small-town world-by-the-tail attitude, the way that he figures since he can fix a flat or climb a rock he ought to be able to fly a rocket or build a nuclear reactor, that would be so reassuring right now. Besides, he might have a better idea about what to do than she does.

She’s grateful that her mother can’t hear her thinking.

Luisa, the smallest one, curls more tightly against her and asks, screaming above the wind, if they’re going to die. Naomi strokes the child’s hair, resists the urge to say “Not yet,” and instead shouts back that it will be okay, but they’re going to get very wet and dirty. She’s not sure that Luisa hears her over the booming thunder of the wind and rain.

A big chunk breaks loose overhead, and gravel rattles down on them, but the piece of the wall—two feet by four, it must weigh a hundred pounds—sails off into the dark rain all but horizontally. Naomi doesn’t hear it hit anywhere. Maybe it landed too far away or maybe the roar in her ears from the wind is louder than she had thought.

The kids huddle closer, and Naomi tries to slide as far down the wall as she can without extending her body too far away from it. The sky grows darker, and the roaring louder, until finally she is left alone, except for the press of the smaller bodies against her, with her thoughts.

She finds she has many. Though the roar, the rubble pounding the wall, the gravel rattling down around them, and the dark are terrifying in one sense, the fact that she is not in pain at the moment but merely uncomfortable, the absence of anything effective she can do, and the inability to do anything for the children, other than be there, leave her with a great deal of time on her hands. She wishes she could sleep—if she lives through this she will want to have rested, and if not it might be easier to die in her sleep.

She replays an argument she had with Jesse and has to admit he was right; this would have happened sooner or later anyway. There’s plenty of methane clathrate on the ocean floor and in the tundra permafrost, and sooner or later a volcanic eruption, or a major meteor strike, or even just the slow progress of global warming itself, was going to release it. Truly no one knew this would happen, and it seems doubtful that any of the world leaders involved had any acceptable options.

Sitting here behind this crumbling wall, she’s learning quite a bit about what “not having any acceptable options” means.

The kid everyone just calls “Compañero”—Naomi doesn’t know his name, but he’s the son of the chair of the local Communist Party and a real trouble-maker at the center—is shaking, with fear or cold or something, and she gently strokes his hair.

If she lives through this she is going to violate all her principles and have kids of her own. She was brought up believing that global population must diminish very rapidly, only three percent of the population at most should have children and the rest should be sterilized… but despite all the pressure from her parents, she never had it done. So, fuck them, here she is with a bunch of other people’s kids, and if she gets through it she wants her own. Besides, before all this is over, the world will get a lot more depopulated.

Actually, that’s an interesting question. What does Naomi want? Naomi wants to not want anything, she thinks, that’s what I was raised to want, not to need or want anything that might require precious resources.

But she doesn’t even know what she’s refraining from wanting.

Something—god knows what, part of a car or a fence or a giant hailstone or maybe just a rock—goes right through the wall seven feet above them and about five yards to the left. The wind going through the hole makes a deep bass whistle that sets the whole wall and ground vibrating.

At least she thinks that’s what happened, and that’s the explanation she’s trying to shout in the children’s ears. Jesse said something about things with holes in them have more drag, or drag more, in the wind, she’s not sure which, but it seems to be true because she does feel the wall bow inward very slightly just before it bends back to upright, and the thunder she feels through her legs and buttocks suggests that a big part of the wall just broke away and fell in.

Far off—inches from her ears—she can hear Luisa shrieking, Compañero shouting what she suspects is a prayer. María, pressed against her back, is sobbing or laughing hysterically—something that makes her breath come in shaky gasps, anyway—and Linda, leaning in close on her other side, is the only one who seems to be quiet at all, but the heavy way she is lying suggests that she has fainted—or perhaps she’s been hit by something penetrating the wall? No, surely there’d be whistling or roaring from the hole.

Time goes on in the thundering dark, and nothing more happens except that the noise goes on and it continues to be dark. Naomi wonders how long they’ve been there; it became fully dark around two in the afternoon, perhaps, remembering the last time she looked at her watch was about noon….

She brings the watch up to her face, carefully not letting go of Luisa, who is clinging to her like a baby possum, and manages to press the light button. It says 4:57 P.M. Three hours of this thus far. Perhaps she has managed to sleep and dream.

There is more dark and more time, all in the deep thunder of the wind. Naomi has no way of knowing how far down the wall is eroding, but she tries to think it through the way Jesse might have, concludes that the erosion must have slowed or stopped because if it hadn’t, they’d already have had their portion of the wall torn away. The watch says 5:48 when she looks again. This time she must have been awake longer.

She plans meals she is going to eat, things she will go and see. She promises herself that just once, in some town where no one knows her, she will go into a Full Makeover—yes, right into a low-rent chain store—and have herself made into a male fantasy object and walk around the town getting stared at by men for a few days, just to know what that’s like. After all, when she finds out she hates it she can go right back to being herself.

She will go hiking on foot without XV commentary. She will make love in the desert again, maybe with somebody other than Jesse. Maybe with Jesse and several somebodies, she thinks, and giggles. She wonders why, faced with the possibility that she might be smashed like a bug on a windshield at any moment, she is deriving so much pleasure from thinking about things she shouldn’t think about.

Experimentally she thinks about dumping toxic waste in pristine wilder ness and killing the last great apes on earth with a club. She still finds both those thoughts disgusting. This is a relief; it seems to her that she’s just selfish, not evil.

She was always taught they’re the same thing. She hopes she remembers, when she gets out of all this, that they’re not.

The next time a guy tries to pick her up at a party by listening seriously to her feelings and responding with careful, nuanced criticism to her thoughts, she’s going to tease him for a while and then leave with some guy who wants to go out and dance, and they will stand out in the middle of the street at three A.M. singing and waking people up.

There has been a shortage of fun in her life. She’s going to have a lot of it if fate gives her a chance.

Come to think of it, she’s also going to read a lot of books that are on the “centric/linear” list, the one that various Deeper groups circulate to alert members to “superficially convincing works that perpetuate dangerous ideological convictions.” Maybe Huckleberry Finn; the only thing she knows about it is that two guys drift downstream in a raft and that her images of it seem to all involve warm, sunny, summer days as they’re doing it. The idea of a whole book full of warm, sunny summer days intrigues her more than she can imagine.

Fly fishing. She is going to try fly fishing. It seems like something very quiet.

And she might start reading books about science or something. She’s not good at it but she just thinks it would be neat to know it.

There are so many things she can do for Naomi if she decides to. And she can still do more than her share of things for other people.

She has a feeling her parents won’t like it. Tough shit.

A last, strange moment of thunder is followed by blinding light. Her first thought is that it’s a lightning flash, her second thought that it’s some strange effect you get when you’re dead, and then she realizes that it’s . . sunlight.

With a patter and many thuds, a rain of bricks and rubble comes out of the sky. They all huddle against the wall closely, but only Maria is hit, by a small stone on the ankle; it seems to be nothing serious, though she screams when it happens. A few feet away, a chunk of wall, several CBS blocks still joined by mortar, plunges into the ground, cratering the mud and spraying all of them. They wait another long minute, then stand up and begin to wipe off.

The five of them look up again, in wonder. The opposite exterior wall of the building blew down entirely, though just which of the crashes they felt and heard it might have been, they’ll never know; Naomi congratulates herself on her choice of walls. The Cathedral, across the street, pokes up from behind great, sculpted drifts of rubble, the belltower gone, the roof mostly sheared off, but still standing.

Warm sunlight plays everywhere on the broken walls and in the scoured streets, and Naomi’s eyes fill with tears. It’s just too beautiful….

“Mama?” Luisa says tentatively. She reaches up and takes Naomi’s hand. The kids had been at the Social Services Building, and they were the four whose parents hadn’t picked them up before movement got impossible; Naomi stayed with them in hopes that the evacuation buses that never came would come by here to check for strays, because she didn’t have an official evacuation point in Tehuantepec itself—her address is up in Oaxaca.

Naomi squats down. “We’ll see if we can find your mother,” she explains, in Spanish, “and everyone else’s parents, too, but we only have an hour or two before the storm starts again. And before it starts we want to get into some nice, safe basement with some food and water and a toilet.”

Squatting, and mentioning the toilet, has made her realize what her own most urgent need is, and there’s a five-minute break while she and the girls relieve themselves on one side of the wall, and Compañero presumably does the same on the other. Events really change people, she realizes; Compañero is the sort of nasty little boy who normally would have been sneaking around to peek at the gringa and the girls. Maybe he just really had to go.

The city of Tehuantepec is gone, she realizes, as they set out for where Luisa’s house was. Lanes blown clear by winds along the ground resemble streets, though they don’t always run where the streets did; streets have filled with rubble to depths of three and four meters. Every so often the corner of a curb, poking up from the mess, with its inset tiles giving street names, tells her where they are, but they circle a long time, calling and shouting, before they have to admit that though they’ve probably been close to it, they have no hope of finding Luisa’s house.

Naomi wishes Luisa would cry. The girl’s eyes get huge and solemn, her thumb goes into her mouth, and she grips Naomi by the wrist, but that is all.

Compañero’s father’s house was large; parts of the walls are still standing. And she finally gets to find out Compañero’s name when the boy’s father, clearing rubble away from a basement door, looks up and shouts “Pablo!”

She holds Luisa very close while father and son hug and the two of them babble an explanation; she allows herself to feel just a little proud when Compañero’s—no, Pablo’s, she will call him by name from now on—when Pablo’s father shakes her hand fervently. Better still, he has a deep basement, he’s shored up the top of it with timbers and tied down the floor, and he’s managed to get several auto batteries rigged up so that there’s at least a dim light down there, plus there are three thousand liters of drinking water in a tank, a lot of dehydrated food he “liberated” from a tourist store nearby, and a crude chemical toilet he’s managed with a bucket, a chair frame, and several gallons of bleach.

They quickly decide that Pablo will stay and help set things up, then make a quick trip around the neighborhood to find people who need a safer shelter. Naomi will try to locate the family of Maria and Linda—the two are cousins who lived in the same large house. She’ll also bring back anyone she finds who needs a place; the shelter will easily accommodate fifty for the time that it must, especially if in the remaining hour or so before the storm hits again they get enough people working on stocking it.

She hurries away with the three girls. God, it’s unbelievably hot this evening. The sky above is deep blue and the heaped and drifted rubble is gray-white, and that’s most of what Tehuantepec’s color scheme usually is; it takes her a moment to realize that what is missing is the deep, vivid green of the trees, the planters, and the watered squares, lawns, and parks. All that has been stripped away; there are no palm trees standing and the few bushes not uprooted and thrown away are stripped to bare branches.

People are beginning to emerge everywhere, from basements and from interior rooms that backed up on thick walls. Some modern buildings withstood the shock, mostly those that had been built in copies of the traditional southern Mexican styles, with reinforced concrete inside the heavy walls and with few or no windows on the southern and western sides. She stops to talk with many of them, but most have not been out of their shelters long enough to know anything of what’s going on. One man has managed to get a video signal from one of the overhead satellites, through the opening provided by the eye, by running out a long piece of metal clothesline in a circle on a slope that faces toward the satellite.

This gives Naomi one more thing she wishes she knew enough to be able to do, but the man has only been able to find out that the outside world knows this is happening and that the center of the eye hit the coast about twenty kilometers to the north of here. The current estimate, as far as he can figure out with a map and a calculator, is that Clementine is moving a bit more slowly and that they might have as long as an hour and ten minutes before the Beaufort 40 + winds of the eye wall are on them again.

María and Linda find an aunt, or a cousin, or a cousin of one and an aunt of the other, and they split off to join their family in some large shelter that they’ve all improvised together.

This leaves only Luisa, and as soon as the other girls are gone, Luisa starts to cry. Naomi mutters, “No llores,” before deciding that that’s stupid, the little girl needs to cry, and after all it’s not like Luisa is slowing them down by crying. She heads back for Pablo’s house.

The sky is blue, and it’s warm, and if it weren’t for the sobbing child with her—and for the landscape of shattered rubble all around, like an old flat photo from the last century, Berlin or Hiroshima or Port au Prince, or like Washington right after the Flash—Naomi might almost find herself enjoying the warmth and the light. She drinks it in, in the same way she does a cup of clean water offered by a woman who is carrying big buckets—greedily, getting every bit of it into her, against what she knows is to come.

Two things at first surprise her: that there are so few takers, only about ten people, for the offer of a good shelter, and that there doesn’t seem to be much of anyone trying to rescue people from the rubble. Finally she asks a tall, muscular man whom she remembers vaguely as the vice-president of the local tenants’ union, and he sighs. “I wondered that too. But now that I think of it, very few people are looking for better shelter because to have lived through the storm thus far, their shelters usually are pretty good; if they were not, the people who were in bad shelters or not sheltered are… well, not here. And suppose you dig out your relative or your friend. If he or she is alive, do you have a doctor, do you have medicine, do you have any way to help? And more likely he or she is not alive… and then what do you do with a corpse? You cannot bring it into the shelter for fear of disease. You cannot lay it out in the street—the wind will carry the body somewhere, never to be found. And you haven’t time to dig a grave. So the bodies are best where they are… and if there are living people under the rubble… well, they will be bodies soon enough. Or they will have to live until we can dig for them. It is very hard, but there is no way around it.”

She nods, and as she walks off, Luisa says, “Our house had a big glass window on the south side, and aluminum siding from Sears that Mama was very proud of, but it wasn’t put on very well, the people from Sears said there was nothing to attach it to….”

Naomi folds her arms around the child and lets her sob against her. “I am here and you can stay with me. And perhaps we can find your mother. Some shelters, the door got buried and the people are fine inside but can’t get out right away. But you have a home, with me, as long as you need it. And as long as you are with me we will look for your mother together.”

Luisa doesn’t exactly stop crying, but she does drift off into sniffles. The two of them hurry together toward the shelter; already in the distance, the black face of the eye wall is crawling over the land, and the sun is about to set behind it.

When she gets done with all this, Naomi thinks, she is going to spend two whole weeks doing nothing but silly things that she enjoys but used to feel embarrassed about enjoying. And every night she will phone her parents and horrify them with describing it all. She laughs at her own joke, not caring if anyone sees her or misunderstands. There’s nothing like nearly dying to make you appreciate living.

John Klieg gets the report from Mexico with not much more than a smile. The Mexican government’s launch facility wasn’t able to put up packages of any real size and besides it was just a standard-model Japanese franchise launch port. No, the real prize is what his meteorologists are telling him—Clem Two’s eye is going to make it over the Isthmus of Tehuantepec just fine, move into the Bay of Campeche, and then set all hell loose. For all practical purposes, the clear pathway across the isthmus is marked on the map—Federal Highway 185 follows the low ground.

Thus far his little team—thrown together by the completely invaluable Glinda—has been matching NOAA and (because they’ve been working on a more tightly focused problem) occasionally beating them.

And if they’re right—then the Atlantic is more than ripe for a “cascade” of hurricanes. Clem Two should have an outflow jet soon after getting back over warm water. In the weak steering currents of the western Caribbean, Clem Two will sputter and spin, giving birth to many more hurricanes—and they in turn will give birth to more. The Atlantic is going to be boiling with them soon, and the methane injection has warmed it enough to allow hurricanes a full run along the Gulf Stream until they finally pound Europe itself.

The one fly in all this ointment, of course, is that Glinda is still at Canaveral, though that will be fixed quickly. She’s seeing to the evacuation of GateTech’s central team, which is being moved partly to Birmingham, Alabama (not quite out of hurricane reach but up where there’s a good chance of riding it out), and partly to here, Novokuznetsk. With a bit of luck it will all be done in two days, and then she and Derry will be here like lightning.

It’s a funny thing. He misses Glinda’s personal efficiency, and her sense of humor, and Derry’s little adventures and discoveries, and he certainly misses sex with Glinda, but more than anything else what he really misses is that sense of completeness, the sense that he’s building something for someone. He wonders how he lived without that for so many years.

He turns back to the wall of screens that he’s had built for himself here. It’s just as useless as the one at Canaveral, but since for most of his business career Klieg has been photographed in front of such a setup, it seemed like a good idea to to keep the locals reminded of who he was. Another Glinda inspiration… he ought to ask her if anything could be done to cause somebody to open up an English-speaking Shoney’s here.

There’s a blip on one screen, and he glances that way; the flashing icon means something significant has come in, and he stops to read it.

He purses his lips, whistles, and grins. Time to start playing hardball, no question. So, by a lot of fancy jockeying, not to mention a pretty elastic concept of property at Moonbase, they think they’re going to come up with a competing launch service, building and launching satellites in space? And no doubt they’ve also got something up their sleeves, now that his technical people have told them how, for getting a big dark shadow over the Pacific, using the same facility.

His first call is to Hassan. It’s not so much a matter of respect—the two of them respect each other but neither would have thought about that—or of getting additional input; it’s just that Hassan runs at least as many lines of influence as Klieg runs, all the time, and they need to stay coordinated on this point.

It takes him only moments to fill his partner in, and then Klieg explains, “Just offhand, there’s about a dozen congresspeople I can count on to tie things up in the States—our Congress usually makes sure the government buys from private business, even when that costs a lot more, because businessmen are the backbone of the country.”

“I wish my current country were similarly enlightened.”

“You said it.” Klieg begins ticking things off on his fingers. “There’s a fair bit of concealed Japanese money in some of my operations, and that’s a favor I can call in—there’ll be a lot of trouble if it doesn’t stay concealed, and it won’t unless I see some protests and complaints about the American intrusion into the Japanese part of Moonbase. Same deal with the French, except that there I’ve got a couple of deputies in Paris, and there’s some more legislators in Brussels… and that’s before I start serious hassling in the General Assembly in New York.”

Hassan nods. “My friend, I see what you are up to, but do you expect it to work?”

After ransacking his memory, Klieg says, “To tell you the truth, Hassan, I don’t see why it won’t.”

The other man nods solemnly; the effect on the phone is somehow more impressive than it would be in person. “It seems to me that with predicted deaths pressing upward toward a billion or more, as your last estimates show—and I assume theirs are similar—faced with the literal complete destruction of several nations like the Netherlands and Bangladesh, with catastrophic damage and the destruction of whole cities… and with the instructive example of Honolulu in front of them… well, my friend. Do you think they will do business as usual?”

“Oh, only at first. And then it won’t matter. It’s like tying a guy’s shoelaces together. You haven’t crippled him, just slowed him down a little by making him stop to untie them. They’ll have to remove all my little obstructions—and any that you might throw in?”

“I was just thinking on that point.”

“Well, all we need are delays. A few of them. Once we have a head start, the public screaming for a solution will guarantee they’ll go with whatever’s fastest. And the PR goodwill from having done it should be just phenomenal—we can do just about anything we want from then on, for like ten years or so.”

Hassan nods. “It seems worth a play. There are a number of small governments I’ve got a friend or two in; I think I can help you with the ‘hassle’ in the General Assembly, especially since several of those little governments are quite jealous anyway of their Second Covenant rights. Have you given consideration to the media?”

“I’ve got my best person on it.”

“Miss Gray?”

“How did you know?”

Hassan gives him a deep, beaming grin that shows a lot of teeth and doesn’t have a drop of humor in it. “Who is my best person?”

“Pericles Japhatma, whom I’ve never met. I see. The point’s well taken.” Neither of them will ever again ask the other how he or she happens to know a thing. After a suitable pause, Klieg says, “Well, then, we seem to be agreed. The point is, hassles have to happen to this stupid idea of having the government do it. It’s really a matter of principle, too, you know—if you let the government, any government, do these things directly, it takes decades to get things on a private-enterprise profit-making basis again. Once you let socialism in…” Klieg sighs and spreads his hands.

“Exactly,” Hassan says. “This very nation is still recovering after all these years. Well, then, shall we do the world some good—and ourselves as well?”

“Only way to do it, buddy,” Klieg says, and this time the smiles exchanged are genuine. After Hassan clicks off, he works the phone hard all morning, and by the time Glinda calls with the other part set up, his calendar has a little flex in it.

Diogenes Callare knows it’s completely irresponsible of him—he had two phone calls while he was on the zipline, just to begin with—but he needed to see Lori and the kids, and he needed the rest, so he slept on the zipline instead of doing work, and since Lori just finished Slaughterer in Yellow, they end up going out to a nice restaurant—one with child care—for a long meal. It’s an indulgence of sorts, but “half an hour’s sales in the first week will more than pay for it,” Lori points out, when he mentions the concern.

“Yeah.” He swirls the warm red wine in his glass, looks at her over it. “It’s funny, you think about a lot of jobs—cops and firemen and soldiers and all—and none of those occupations see anything odd about the idea that you go out there to protect people like your own family, and your family gets protected along with all those strangers. But it’s not something you think about for weathermen.”

“Eat your lasagna,” she says, “you’re getting morbid.”

“Well, yeah, I am getting morbid,” he admits, “but the point is still valid.”

“Unh-hunh. And the lasagna is still hot.”

She’s right, it’s very good. After a while he takes her hand and says, “It’s just… well, you know, I love spending time with you. I never realized before this month how much I like usually being able to work at home. And since the methane levels in the air are going to stay elevated for ten years—”

“That’s close to shoptalk,” she warns him, smiling and pressing her index finger on his nose. “Eat. Or talk about trivia. Or flatter your wife, considering I only knew an hour ago that you were coming home, I asked you out then, and here I am, stunning.”

He can hardly help smiling at that, and the truth is, to him, she is stunning. He studies her carefully for a long minute, taking in the sweep of blonde hair, the big twinkling eyes… letting his eyes run over her pink sweater (it really does flatter her)… “Well, yeah,” he says. “In fact, I think you’re the best-looking person in the joint.”

“That’s more like it. I know you’re worried about the hurricane coming into the Caribbean, and for that matter I suspect what’s really worrying you is Jesse, Di.”

He shrugs with one shoulder, a little gesture that doesn’t mean much except that he’s heard what she’s said. “He’s a grown-up, at least sort of, and he can probably deal with whatever comes his way, at least as long as he doesn’t do anything dumb to start out with. I wish I knew what was up with him, but chances are at the moment he’s sitting on his duff in a not-verycomfortable shelter, hoping things will calm down soon. At least if civilization manages to survive the storms, he’ll have a good set of stories to tell. Meanwhile I can’t do a thing for him, and he’s okay, more likely than not.” He notices he has just drunk his glass of wine a bit faster than he intended to.

Lori sighs and takes his hand. “You don’t really have to look after the whole world, love. You really don’t.”

He grins, squeezes her hand. “It wasn’t shoptalk before, you know,” he says. “As long as there’s so much extra methane in the air, we’ll have giant hurricanes, and NOAA will be on this crisis footing—”

She puts her hand on his lips again, and when she is sure she has silenced him, she pours him another glass of wine. “Drink.” Her head tilts a little to the side and she seems to look at him like a robin that isn’t quite sure whether the object in front of it is an earthworm. “Now,” she says, “listen carefully to your spouse. There are two possibilities here. One, civilization doesn’t survive the storms, and you and I and the kids have to make our way through the mess. Very tough and frightening, but it’s not going to be improved by your passing up the pleasures of a civilized dinner tonight. Two, civilization survives but the hurricanes go on for years. Then all this becomes routine—and once it’s routine, you’ll have time off again. That’s all.”

It makes sense, and he nods and eats. Every so often he steals a glance at her, trying to catch her looking sad or pensive, but whether she’s being stubborn, or it’s just her natural optimism, she keeps right on smiling at him, and between the wine, and the love, and not having to sleep over in a hotel in D.C. tonight, he’s actually very cheerful by the evening’s end. They even dance a couple of times to the little band up on the upper floor, before they reclaim the kids, pile into the car, and set it for home, all of them sleeping in a sprawl as the car drives them home. The only trouble with how wonderful it feels to be in his own bed with Lori is that he’s not aware of it for long—he falls asleep quickly.

By the time he’s on the zipline the next morning, he is all but ready to think of the problem as tractable.

Because the eye of Clementine misses them, Jesse, Mary Ann, the Hererras, and the kids never have an interval when they can go outside, but it matters very little. It occurs to Jesse that there’s a good chance that neither the Herreras nor their grandchildren, nephews, and nieces have ever lived this well before.

They have forty-eight fairly dull hours, with the windows revealing nothing but immense torrents of water and day and night separated only by the difference between almost and completely dark. The booming and roar of the storm are constant, and every so often something sizable hits the side of the house, but other than that there’s not a lot to distract them outside.

Jesse teaches the kids to play Monopoly and is a little appalled at how easily they take to it; he wonders if Naomi would think of him as a bad influence on youth. Surely she was smart enough to stay up in Oaxaca? They can’t get anything on broadcast so there’s always the possibility that Oaxaca was hit harder than expected, or that the coast to the north is safe, but since no new information has come in, Jesse just continues to hope based on what the situation was before.

He’s been getting kind of a funny feeling out of watching Mary Ann play with the kids, too. He knows this thing with her is probably not permanent. It’s not a matter of her being older or that she has vastly more experience of various kinds—catching up has been a lot of the fun.

The real trouble is with Jesse. Like many Americans in their early twenties, he just hasn’t absorbed the concept of permanence yet, and thus he can be deeply attached and passionate, but not exactly ever in love. As long as he’s around people of his own age the difference doesn’t show up, but where Mary Ann Waterhouse—if she found the right person, and not until—could easily contemplate waking up with that person every day until one of them died of old age, and thus imaginatively can live far into the future (and imagine having a connection to the past that long), Jesse is still in the child’s eternal present. He can be very attached to someone and want to see them again, but the sorts of questions an adult in love asks—including the important one of whether or not it would be a good idea to stay in love—never come to Jesse.

But though he’s not old enough for love, he’s old enough to know he’s not old enough, and when he sees Mary Ann happy with kids, Mary Ann typing away at an old-fashioned keyboard while she works out a list of things to do… he realizes that if he were ready, he’d take her in a minute.

If she’d have him—after all, she’s really the one with most of what there is to offer in the relationship, not just financially but in terms of wisdom, experience, and for that matter, sexual joy. This is a slightly painful realization.

Late that evening, Jesse and Mary Ann are upstairs, naked in the tub together by candlelight, taking turns scrubbing each other, looking up into the skylight at the way the water rolls deep and fast across the glass overhead, occasionally illuminated by the candle flickers. Jesse guesses there’re probably a couple of inches up there, maintained entirely by the wind and water pushing more over the skylight constantly. From here it seems like the ocean bottom.

Her head rolls back against his arm, and Jesse notes with some pleasure that though the red hair is still the funny cartoonish shade, there’s a bit of straw blonde at the roots now; she’d have to get a crewcut to be back to her natural color, but she could.

Washing her back, he notices again how tiny she really is, that they picked her for being fine-boned and slim. Under his hands, as he rubs her with the foaming soap, he finds the surgically shortened ribs, the interior girdle, the added ligaments to hold up the enormous breasts, the healed slits where they went in to crank her bottom tight. He tries to figure out how he feels about all of the scars, marks, and bumps that make her so strange to his touch; it would be nice to say he likes it because it’s all part of her, but that’s not true—nor does he necessarily feel outrage at what was “done to her,” since after all she decided to have it done and was extremely well paid for it. Sometimes he thinks he likes to touch her scars and alterations because it makes her feel more like a doll to be used, but that’s not completely true either—he feels less like that with her body than he has with most women’s.

Probably he just likes to touch Mary Ann, and tends to touch the places where she’s most unusual.

In her turn, she washes him thoroughly and just a little roughly—he’s often told her he feels “scrubbed” after she’s done, and she’s just as often pointed out he seems to enjoy it. They have just finished toweling off and are stretching out on the bed, their hands beginning to stay more and more often at chests and crotches, little nipping kisses starting, when they both sit upright, startled by a sound—

It’s the spatter of heavy rain on the walls, and the whistle of wind, Jesse realizes, and in a hurricane what do you expect?

Then he gets it. “It’s slacking off out there,” he says, “probably already no worse than a bad thunderstorm. Maybe by morning we’ll be able to see out.”

She gives a little whoop and rolls over onto him, kissing him deeply; he feels his erection stiffen against her, an instant before she has it in her hand, stroking it quickly, making sure he is hard before she sits carefully onto it. As the thunder outside transforms into a mere wild stormy night, she rides him joyously, masturbating as she does it.

It’s like something out of XV porn, he realizes, just in time to know that that is what she wants to give him, not what she is but his fantasy of her, and the crashes of thunder and wind outside, the flickers of lightning over her body in the warmth of the candlelight, drive him on, bucking upward to meet her as she climaxes again and again, in a triumphant, joyful surge.

“Mind you,” she says, leaning forward and letting his still-sensitive limp penis slide out of her, “this is likely to happen anytime we survive something big. Just wanted you to know there’s an incentive to survive.”

Shortly after, she’s asleep under his arm, her back against him and his hand resting on her strangely hard, unyielding belly, fingers idly finding the seams in the internal girdle. They’ve blown out the candles, and now there is only the wind and the rain, both blowing down into gusts. He is tired, and comfortable, and he’s just had wildly satisfying sex, but he’s kept awake by one thought—that while he had just kept on doing what seemed appropriate, and not showing the fear he did have around the Herrera kids, it was Mary Ann who had the real measure of the situation.

Jesse tries to imagine his own death and fails; but he knows the woman he holds in his arms imagined hers, lived with it, and let him see none of her fear. She is, he thinks, not merely older or more fully formed as a person. She’s too big and too marvelous for him.

He decides to try to live up to her, and stays awake just a little longer wondering if he can. When sleep comes to him, it’s deep and full of dreams, but he remembers none of them. They wake in the mid-moming when they hear the Herreras shouting—they too had slept late, and thus had missed the first real dawn in days. It is still storming outside, but unmistakably there is daylight.

Compared to the first passage under Clem Two’s winds, Naomi finds this one a breeze. The power runs out about halfway through, but in this deep basement there is food, there are other people, there’s safe water to drink and even a toilet… and most of all, there’s very little fear. She is even able to use some of the time to catch up on sleep.

In the dark, people sing or play word games. Naomi’s Spanish isn’t particularly good, but this seems to lead to good-natured amusement, and whenever she does manage to participate successfully they give her a big round of applause. And singing together is fun.

By the time the wind seems to have settled down to gusts and the rain to a spatter, it’s night, and their host suggests they all spend the night inside before venturing out; there’s no sign of any life out there right now.

So they all curl up once more, huddled near each other for warmth and comfort. It’s very quiet and pleasant, and Naomi resists sleep a little while just because she wants to consciously enjoy it.

She knows, too, in an abstract way, that if she were in her usual state of scrubbed cleanliness, she would find the smell down here dreadful, not so much from the mixture of shit and bleach in the imperfectly sealed toilet buckets as from the smell of many bodies that have missed some washings. But at the moment she smells just like everyone else, and somehow that’s so… well, it’s democratic.

Then she wonders if perhaps worrying about how people smell isn’t some sort of residual racism, and for a moment, curled there on a couple of old beach towels up against a bookcase, she is wide awake with worry—especially because she knows that the people around her are clean anyway, the evening shower is at least as much part of their lives as it is of hers—

And now she wonders if knowing about the fact that this is a culture with a cleanliness habit isn’t also suppressed racism.

Then she remembers she promised herself she wouldn’t think about things like this, just two days ago when she thought she was going to be torn to scraps of meat any moment. And here she is, back with people. Time to start living her new life, whatever that’s going to be. The happy thought sends her drifting off into warm sleep.

When she wakes people are beginning to move around, and there’s a long moment before they all realize what’s different; they can’t hear any rain or wind at all. She jumps up, intending to be among the first to help, and then realizes again. It’s going to be a while to get over these habits, she decides, but she’s going to.

Meanwhile, she will pull her fair share, but she won’t act like she’s got to be the most helpful person on the planet.

Besides, the big job right now is getting the outer door pried open, and that’s mostly big-muscle work. Fortunately there are several large grown men in the group, and once they figure out that it’s just something heavy lying on the slanting cellar doors, they know that some hard heaves are likely to get them free.

They end up using a spare basement timber as a battering ram, hoping to make whatever it is tip over. No one seems to be much worried—it isn’t urgent to get out of the shelter at this very moment, and anyway there will no doubt be a party of rescuers along soon enough.

When all the men are set on the little flight of steps up to the door, five of them holding the timber endwise to the door, they start to swing it in their arms, bringing it sharply into the steel door on every third swing: “Uno, dos, tres!” boom! and then there’s the rattle of gravel and other things sliding down the door over the next “uno, dos, tres!”

As the eighth boom! echoes through the cellar, sinking dully into the earthen walls, there is a blinding flash from the door, and the men stagger back, crying out and dropping the timber as they cover their eyes. There is a moment of terrible stillness as everyone wonders what could be out there; the fear of what they will see merges with tens of thousands of images of the nuked cities of the world, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Port au Prince, Cairo, Damascus, Washington, and for one dreadful moment the thought that somehow there has been a nuclear war—

“El sol,” says an old woman next to Naomi, and then everyone, as if not quite understanding yet, says “el sol,” a mass whispering in the dim cellar—and then everyone laughs.

The bright sunlight outside dazzles eyes that have been in the dark for many hours. Looking away from the door to shield their eyes, the men swing the heavy timber again, twelve swings, four impacts—and with the fourth there is a groan and rumble like distant thunder, and something goes scraping and bouncing down the face of the door, and falls with a crash outside.

One of them puts his hands on the door and pushes, and it flies open.

Everyone groans as the brilliant glare pours in, and they cover their eyes, but the warmth and dryness pull them forward, still shielding their faces and looking down at the ground.

Naomi staggers forward with the rest, her forearm across her eyes, watching only the motion of her sneakers at her feet and following the crowd more by her sense of touch than anything else. The first step comes under her feet, and she steps up.

There is such a diversity of noise, after the tomb-silence of the shelter and the ear-battering storm roar, that it is not easy to sort out the sounds ahead of her.

But just as she gets to the top, she realizes people are crying out and it’s not a happy sound. She drops her arm, and sees the wreck in front of her.

It’s a little self-driving car, and if the bodies in the backseat are any indication, probably what happened was that the two children in it were trying to get home and didn’t know that with the access to the guidance grid cut, the car couldn’t steer itself. There’s a safety cutoff—the little localized radar/ultrasound system that lets the car find somewhere where traffic isn’t moving and stop there without running into anything—but sometimes things like that aren’t working anymore, especially if a car is usually driven on manual control, and then again maybe the car did bring the kids to a safe stop and then the wind got it and rolled it.

They weren’t belted in, and from the look of the roof and hood, the car was rolled a lot. It’s all mud and wind-sanded metal now; Naomi can’t see what color it was originally.

The kids look like bent dolls; nothing in the spinning, bouncing car pierced their bodies, but they were slammed around in it like mice in a shaken glass jar, and they are visibly bruised everywhere; clotted blood stains their shirts. Legs and arms are not so much bent as reshaped; the bone must have been broken up so much that the limbs hang as if made of rags.

The faces are not recognizable; first the facial bones were crushed, and then blood flowed freely under the skin, so that both of them seem to be blue-black in color and their faces are at an oddly crushed repose, like rubber masks left lying faceup.

Others around Naomi are crying out as well, and there’s some argument about exactly what to do. A moment later the question is settled; two policemen come over a rubble pile.

People are being asked to go to their own property and secure it, and to “avoid the appearance of looting,” which means to stay put and not look like they are stealing anything. Supposedly the Army will at last be here tomorrow morning; the policía have only shrugs for the question about what might have delayed them so long, and rolls of the eyes when a couple of people press the question. Who, after all, can explain the Army?

Volunteers, or those with nothing to retrieve from their own property, are welcome to go to the Zócalo to join rescue workers.

Naomi has nothing here, so she drifts to the Zócalo naturally, and yet even this is different, because when she gets there, she realizes most of the people there are not volunteering. Rather, they are sitting around, some disoriented, some in despair, but many just sitting, waiting for someone or something to take care of them. She wonders if that ought to bother her. It’s hard to tell the people who can’t help out, or even help themselves, from those who for various reasons just won’t.

She also notices that the Zócalo is now warm and bright with sunlight, and the awesome winds have scoured it bare, so that there are great heaps of rubble in all directions—Tehuantepec does indeed look like one of the great war ruins in pictures—and the palms that once sheltered the little square are gone, shorn off into splinters a bare meter above the dirt, but the ground itself is warm and pleasant, and the thought occurs to her that it might be very nice to stretch out and take a long nap in the sun here.

Well, she hasn’t changed that much; she’s already bored, and greatly relieved, five minutes later, when the volunteer truck swings by again.

She’s put on a rescue crew with a group of other women. The job is to listen at rubble piles, climbing around on them with bowls or pans to place their heads against so that they can listen for anyone moving or crying for help.

The rubble piles are all brand-new, and in the fierce winds they have been sculpted like dunes into high peaks. Without the wind to hold them up any longer, most of them are beginning to slide and slump. Moreover, many of the objects in the piles are less than stable. So there’s a constant crumbling, and things are moving, falling, and bumping in the piles all the time. After they have searched only a couple of piles they realize that right now the search is hopeless unless they hear someone calling or crying, and that therefore the best hope of saving any lives is to cover as many piles as they can as quickly as they can.

It has been more than a dozen piles—Tehuantepec has become a landscape of walls cut off at ground level and row on row of these dunes of rubble—when they hear the sobbing sound. With picks, shovels, and prybars, the women work together, silently, afraid of what they may find—will it be someone hurt too badly to survive the rescue, or even to know a rescue happened? Will they find some pathetic child on top of its mother’s body?

They find a corpse; it’s a man, probably older to judge by the gray hair on what remains of his head; if whatever hit him there is what killed him, he surely didn’t suffer long.

He’s very heavy, and the body is soft and flexible; Naomi thinks she read somewhere that rigor mortis doesn’t last very long, or perhaps being buried in the wet rubble is what did it. There’s not yet much of a smell, but he feels cold and slimy under their hands as they lift him up. It takes four of them—he couldn’t have weighed much less than 250 pounds—and Naomi has him by the knees, which is hard work. They lug him down into one of the wind-ripped passageways between the rubble and put him in one of the body bags that the Tehuantepec police sent out with the digging crews.

“Should we say anything over him?” one of the women asks.

“Leave it for the priests—they will be along soon enough,” another answers, and the party goes back to assist the others, who have been digging steadily.

They are almost there when they hear the wail—a baby’s cry? Did a baby somehow survive under that? It occurs to Naomi that she’s seen all kinds of junk used as bassinets, and if the baby was in a metal footlocker, say, or even a washtub—

They all run forward, eager to be there when they find a living one.

“Under this piece of iron!” one of the women cries, and now they are all there, carefully moving rubble from the rusted corrugated iron, clearing the weight off so that they can lift it straight up. It seems to take forever to get everything cleared, even as fast as they are working. Finally they all get around it to lift the iron—

With a slow, steady heave, they pull it up and flip it over onto the rubble slope beside them.

A cat runs out, meowing frantically. That’s all. As often happens, its cry was mistaken for that of a baby.

They dig four more times when they hear noises during the rest of the day. Twice they are stymied by objects too heavy for their crew, and are forced to phone for men with treaded tractors, cranes, and power winches; each time as soon as the new crew is there, they take off to look for more. Once the noise turns out to be a pig. Once the pile collapses as they work and the noises stop; they dig frantically but they cannot find the source of the sound.

They find so many more corpses that they have to send back for additional body bags twice. Toward the end of the day as the heat soaks into the rubble, the bodies begin to smell more strongly; Naomi had a roommate once who only pretended to be vegetarian, who accidentally left behind a cooler with a pound of hamburger in it when she moved out, and that’s what the bodies smell like when you first bring them out; contact with the air seems to bring out the strong stench of shit and the iron tang of blood, so that the three smells mingle around her. She suspects the smell is in her hair and clothes, along with her own sweat, and she longs for a bath more than she has ever wanted anything.

When they return to the Zócalo at dusk, they find the Army has already arrived, and there are communal showers in tents and a field kitchen with soup and bread. As far as Naomi is concerned, the only problem with the shower is that you can’t stand under it all night; with all of them scrubbing in there, it’s like the freshman dorm.

As it becomes fully dark, Naomi is sitting with her back to the wall of the cathedral, a military ration plate in front of her. Like many others, she’s been back for seconds and thirds—they may have gotten here late, but they came with plenty. Or perhaps the Army hadn’t realized how many of the people here would be dead.

A man is loudly reading messages off a display screen in Spanish, so that everyone can hear that Clem Two has broken through into the Caribbean and is rampaging around among the islands, spitting off another hurricane every few hours.

She finds herself thinking of Jesse’s brother Di, and wonders if the poor guy is going to get a chance to see his kids this week. Then she thinks about the number of dead kids she’s seen today, and the hundred or so lost kids whose parents are very probably dead who sit huddled together in a large tent on the other side of the Zócalo while a kind-voiced older sergeant goes among them asking the same questions over and over.

She’s embarrassed but she starts crying, right there, and when the older woman beside her puts an arm around her, Naomi just falls right into the embrace and cries until she’s through. She still feels sniffly and miserable when she curls between blankets on the ground.

All that night she dreams of Tehuantepec before, how the streets were dusty but the little houses were kept with such pride, the softness of the voices, the warm browns and reds against the dark sky at night—and in her dreams she wanders an empty town where in front of every house there is a little thicket of white crosses. She wants to call someone’s name, to bring someone alive out of a house, but although she worked here for so many months and knows the town intimately, the only name she can think of is her mother’s.

The dreams fade toward dawn, and at last she gets a few hours of gracious unconsciousness, before the soldiers wake them again to give them a quick desayuno of sweet rolls, fruit drink, and coffee. She refrains from the sausage, but she has never been so tempted by the smell of meat before. It seems like a feast, and after what she ate last night, how can she be so hungry that she finishes it all? Maybe she was right all along about how powerful the life force is… and maybe she had only neglected to realize what it is really interested in.

After breakfast she has two choices—stay and work with the volunteers for another two days, and thus earn herself a spot to ride all the way on the trucks that will be rolling back up to Oaxaca City, or join the refugee parties walking the thirty-five kilometers up the highway to Ixtepec, where there’s a zipline head. They say the zipline will be working later today.

The question, of course, is whether the Army, which she at least knows has trucks, or the government zipline monopoly, which may or may not have a working zipline, is more apt to keep its word. She decides to walk, partly because the Army already let her down and now she wants to give Lineas Rápidas Mejicanas their chance to let her down, and mainly because now that she’s decided to make some room in her life for selfishness, she doesn’t feel like she owes them any more time digging out corpses. Maybe when she gets to Oaxaca she’ll call Father and tell him she’s all right; he probably won’t lecture her about how he doesn’t care about her any more than about anyone else on Earth, that all life is precious to him and she is important but that Earth itself must be more important, the way Mother would.

That decision made, she joins a party and starts the long hike out of town. At the top of the first big hill, there used to be a good view of the town—she used to love the sight of it early in the morning, when her bus would come in at about six A.M., with the warm sun turning the city gold against the deep blue sky. Now she looks back and finds she has a fine view of the ruins.

It’s not scoured to rock the way Hawaii was, at least. That takes a storm surge, and Mexico is lucky enough to be high and rocky, though what happened to the beach and port communities down below on the coast is better not thought about, just now.

The Cathedral stands, and six or seven other buildings—and that’s all. Tehuantepec, otherwise, is a wasteland of shards and fragments strewn over foundations. There will be another town here, she thinks—it’s a natural junction in the natural places to run a road, and the roads are still here—but that town will be Tehuantepec only in name.

It’s already getting hot, but still the dusty road won’t be as bad as mining for bodies was. She runs to catch up with her party.

By noon she’s tired; her group has set a pace that’s too much for her, and she doesn’t want to tell them that, because they don’t like her. The group seems to be made up of university students from Ciudad de Mexico and their hangers-on from Juárez University, and though one might think that students are the truly international people, especially in this age when jumplanes and ziplines have put most parts of the world within budget, and the vast net of data and XV links has tied not just voices but brains themselves together, the reality is that students are also the most politicized and least civilized travelers, not yet having gotten the habit of going along and being accommodating.

Out of the eight in her group, there are four who seem to believe that the yanqui is the cause of the hurricanes, and each wants to explain to her exactly why and how. Before, she’d simply have agreed with them, beginning each of her replies with “Es verdad” and then going on to express her understanding of their feelings, then finally correcting their values and analysis. Now, she doesn’t give a shit.

Also, she’s not formulating what to say next, and thus she’s paying more attention to what they say, where she is, and what’s going on. It may be good in the abstract, but here in the concrete—or on the concrete, she thinks sourly—it’s wearing. They seem to enjoy being angry with her and abusing her. She can’t help but notice that the denunciations of imperialismo are being mixed with a lot of staring at the way her breasts bounce around in her blouse, and where a couple of days before she’d have tried to link all that in an analysis that would show the unity of oppression, now she has a feeling that she’s being hassled just because she’s a woman and these guys don’t really give a damn about imperialismo. Or indeed much of anything other than priority one (getting back to Oaxaca) and priority two (checking out the tits on the gringa).

And punishing her for simultaneously not being available and being a puta. She’s also thinking that there are plenty of real victims of imperialismo around—she spent a lot of time working with them—but these kids owe their whole position in their society to being mediators between the Eurocentric capitalist power structure and the peasant underclass. If the industrialized world went away tomorrow, these guys wouldn’t matter a fart in a windstorm, to use a Jesse-ism she’s gotten to like.

She’s never noticed before that people are angry in political discussions, that much of the anger is personal, and that it often intentionally hurts feelings. Hers, for example.

The road thus far has been empty and quiet, and despite what the lieutenant at the start point said about roving packs of looters and the danger to anyone, particularly any woman walking by herself, she hasn’t seen anyone in the past few hours, her thighs are getting sore from trying to keep up with these guys, and she’s getting out of breath. Plus there’s still plenty of time to make it to Ixtepec by daylight walking at a pace that is comfortable for her.

Naomi gulps. This is the tough part. She has to do something entirely for herself; nobody else in the party seems to be tiring or to be getting harassed, so she can’t defend anyone except herself. That seems to stick in her throat and she doesn’t say anything for a whole additional kilometer after she makes her decision, but finally she remembers something Jesse told her once—the first time he had an orgasm with a woman, he had to pretend he was being stimulated by his own hand. She tries pretending that she is defending someone else. Like Naomi is another person, a woman being abused by these men….

She tells them. They don’t even try to persuade her to stay with them; they pick up their pace and are gone over the hill in a matter of minutes as she slows to a comfortable, sustainable saunter.

Now that she can slow down, she can notice that it’s a hot, uncomfortable day, but not unusually so for the time of year; at least it’s sunny. The forest that once covered the hillsides has been battered and torn, with big bare muddy scars from blowdowns, flashfloods, and avalanches on every slope around her, and individual trees not sheltered by their fellows have been stripped of their leaves, so that what remains are blobs of deep green among the blacks and browns of the water- and wind-chewed hillsides.

Much of what she’s seeing was once small farms, tucked in wherever the ground was level enough; it will be a long time, she thinks, before the farmers have anything growing again. If there are still farmers.

She’s put four more kilometers behind her at this comfortable pace, and has smeared on sunblock from her pack and tied her outer shirt around her waist, when she hears the car on the road behind her. The guide transponders are still out, and not supposed to be back on till further notice, so it’s someone driving on manual, probably just an Army jeep.

The tank top she’s wearing is cut a little low and of course it shows her shoulders completely; she wonders if maybe she should pull the overshirt back on, but it seems like a lot of trouble.

What comes over the hill behind her is not a jeep, nor an official limousine or rescue vehicle. It’s just about the last thing she’d expect to see—a brand-new, apparently freshly washed GM Luxrover, one of those big go-anywhere luxury-interior sedans much favored by the more imperialistic corporados and by various economic and political bigshots. It has international plates designating it as an American car that’s been a lot of places, and tinted windows so she can’t see anything of who or what is inside. It comes roaring over the hillside, going like it has somewhere to go, but as it passes Naomi, it suddenly slows and pulls to the side ahead of her.

She keeps walking toward it because she can’t think of what else to do. Odds are overwhelming that it’s some nice tourist, probably male, who saw the pretty girl and thought she might like a ride; of course it could be just about anything else at all, and she’s a little afraid, but she’d rather run the risk of the less-probable danger than insult the more-probable nice guy. And besides, if it is a ride, chances are that it’s a ride with air conditioning and a comfortable seat, and her feet are beginning to burn in a way that’s telling her she’ll have blisters by the time she makes Ixtepec.

What the hell, she survived Clem Two, she can probably deal with one little old crazy rapist if it comes to that.

The Luxrover’s door opens, and the driver steps out. He’s about thirty and he’s wearing a perfectly impeccable summer suit, the kind that the little cadcam studios in Oaxaca turn out, but made from—yep, as she gets closer she judges it’s silk. And that’s probably a real, fresh yellow chrysanthemum in his lapel. If he’s wearing a yellow flower, then he’s probably not Mexican and hasn’t been here long—

He’s also wearing huge dark shades. His blond hair is cut very short and he doesn’t have much of a nose, and like the rest of him his neck looks painfully thin. The total effect makes him look like a large bug.

“Hi, do you need a ride?” he asks, in English. His voice has that kind of whiny, reedy quality that she associates with unsuccessful salesmen.

“You’re American,” she says, though she knows already. It seems like a good stall until she gets a better look at him.

“I bet you wonder what I’m doing here.”

“No shit,” she says. She always found it irritating when Jesse said that to her, and she wants to annoy this guy just a little, so that if he’s got any romantic ideas they won’t start blossoming in the first five minutes.

“Well, I was taking a long drive, seeing the country and all that bullshit while I did biz over the net. Now there’s no net and no transponders so I’m just getting my ass back to the States. And I kind of thought giving a ride to a cute girl might be fun. Since you’re not dressed like a Mexican—”

“What’s wrong with a Mexican girl?” Naomi asks. The guy has just descended a point or two with her.

“Nothing except she probably doesn’t speak English.”

“Don’t you speak Spanish?”

“Not a word. I just drive from resort to resort and I hardly ever get out of the car; when the transponders are up, the car gets me there and I get everything I want by looking out the window.”

She feels like saying something judgmental, except that it’s occurring to her that all she’s seen, really, has been some barrios and various small towns. There are different ways of being narrow, perhaps. And besides, she’s close enough now to feel the cold blast from the air conditioner. “I suppose,” he adds, “that you’re down here to work on poverty or something like that.”

“Something like that,” she says.

“Not my kind of thing. But I wouldn’t mind listening while you tell me about it; I’m pretty bored with what’s in the audio library and I can’t do any XV or video when I have to drive the car.”

Time to flatter him a little, she decides; there’s been some distance established, and he appears to be exactly what he says he is—a gringo biz guy who likes pretty Mexican scenery and beautiful Mexican beaches but not Mexico. She can handle this for long enough to get back to Oaxaca—or even, she realizes, back to the States. Not a bad idea at all, really. “There’s not that much to tell about me,” she says. “I’m afraid you figured me out at the first glance. And can you really drive this thing yourself? I had to pass manual driving in high school but I haven’t used it since. You must have reflexes like a fighter pilot.”

He grins a little; with the dark shades hiding the rest of his expression, he could be laughing at the flattery or for that matter getting ready to bite her neck, but she makes herself choose to see it as friendly and as appreciating her admiration. “Heck, your grandparents all drove manual.”

She stifles the urge to tell him that her grandparents were early Deepers and never drove at all after they were in their thirties, just as they never touched meat or animal products. Instead, she says, “Well, I could use a ride. I was going to Ixtepec so I could catch the zipline to Oaxaca.”

“I’m going to Oaxaca,” he says, “and from there up through Mexico City and all the way out through Nogales. If you’ve been following the news, it looks like a good time to relocate to the Rockies, and I’ve got a vacation home up near Green River, Utah. You can ride along as far as you like or at least as far as we can stand each other. If we’re getting along at Oaxaca we can stop and get whatever stuff you have.”

She’s not sure how far they will be able to stand each other, but she says, “Everything I have in Oaxaca will go into two suitcases, and my parents live in Grand Junction. I’d love to ride with you.”

And then, like some suave guy in some old movie, he walks all he way around his car and opens the door for her with a little bow. She smiles—hell, at the thought of air conditioning and the fact that she can see there’s a fridge in there, probably with things to drink, she practically simpers. If this didn’t look so wonderful, she’d be ashamed of herself.

As they overtake the still-walking Mexican college students a few minutes later, he says, “I’m no judge of people in this country—do you think we should give them a ride?”

“Naw,” she says, “I wouldn’t. That’s a bad-looking crowd.” They roar right by them, and the only thing that spoils her pleasure is that they probably can’t see her through the tinted glass.

“My name’s Naomi,” she says.

“I’m Eric,” he says. “Help yourself to orange juice from the fridge—you look like you could use it and you’re too polite to ask.”

As she takes the first wonderful, cold swig—and thinks of the guys back there still walking the road, she says, “You certainly know how to treat a lady, Eric. You sure you don’t have a white charger in the trunk or something?”

He grins again, under the sunglasses. “I’ve always figured money is the best armor.”

Harris Diem, one day, would like to open his basement door and find a bare concrete wall, rather than steps leading down. In fact, it would be better still to find no basement door. If that were to happen, then one of two things would happen to Harris Diem—either he would heave a great sigh of relief, or he would feel a scream in his nerves, a rattlesnake at the base of his skull that wouldn’t leave him alone. Most likely he’d feel that scream, just as he feels it, mildly now, and then he’d have to do insanely risky things.

But if all he felt was the relief… if only that. It seems too much to imagine.

And of course his basement door is still there. He told them at his office in the White House that he had to get home tonight, that he was stressing out, and that much was true; what he didn’t tell them, what was none of their business, what would destroy him if they knew, was just what kind of stress it is and just how he is going to unwind.

The basement door closes behind him and he heaves a little sigh of relief; the thin filament of rubber cement that he normally leaves stretched across the stairs here, so slight that you can’t see it except by pointing a flashlight in the right direction, as he is doing now, is undisturbed. The cleaning help has not been down here (his major worry) and no covert op has had a peek either (his minor worry).

He walks down the steps, turning on the low, orange lighting in the windowless room, and looks around with a little satisfaction; he wishes all this were not here, he wishes he had no desire ever to come down here, and yet money and power have had their advantages—it’s one great setup.

The couch is carefully padded with a restraint system that will hold him only as long as he’s not conscious of it. The scalpnet has a comfortable soft satin cover; the powered merkin and butt plug, with their neural stimulator surfaces, are state-of-the-art; the large-muscle stimulators in the restraint cuffs are precise down to a hundredth of a newton in replicating a sensation.

As always, he opens the refrigerator, takes out a bottle of mineral water, and drinks it down; he’s going to be on the bed for three hours or so if this is a typical night, and the extra fluids help.

He hangs his bathrobe on its hook, and removes all of his clothing, putting it into the small laundry bag he used to bring down the bathrobe. The bathrobe is clean and soft, and he buries his face in the terrycloth for just a moment, making sure that he doesn’t touch it with the tip of his penis, which he can feel is already damp with that first secretion.

Diem lets go of the robe, letting it swing back silently to the wall. He walks to the little washer-dryer and pulls out the sheets, freshly washed from the last time he was down here.

He reminds himself once more that he doesn’t actually have to do this, that if he decides to he can just go back upstairs and call it a night right now, getting a lot of the extra sleep that he really does need; and turns with a light, happy step and presses his thumb to the print-reading lock on the cabinet.

The door swings open, and he looks over the inventory of recorded XV. Most of the wedges are in plain white boxes, and on the sides of the boxes he has written, in his neat draftsman’s slanted characters, various women’s names.

Girl’s names, really, he reminds himself, and that thought alone makes his penis rise a little. “Allie” is at the upper left corner; “Zulika” is at the lower right. Tonight, though, he wants something very special. After all, it may be the last for a long time, and, if what is about to boil out of the Gulf of Mexico is any indication, perhaps the last ever—this room, or Diem himself, or perhaps both, may be gone within a few days.

Well, “special” really only means one of three things, doesn’t it? Kimbie Dee, Michelline, or DeLana. Kimbie Dee is a perky little blonde, about fourteen, and the man is an old janitor with a hideous facial deformity who catches her alone in the locker room; it has its moments. Michelline is a red-haired, angelic-looking child, not yet in puberty, and it’s her drunken father late at night, with no one to hear her screams…. He reaches for DeLana.

She’s black, and that’s part of the reason. He wonders, if he were ever found out, if there would be any way they could find out that this is the wedge he likes best. He wonders if that would have any political repercussions that would be different from the ones with the white girls. If so, he thinks to himself, which would be worse? A guy of Vietnamese ancestry who likes the idea of raping black girls (hello, traditional hatreds between ethnic ghettos) or white girls (hello, wrong race and white women)?

Well, whatever may come, he’s here tonight, and he wants DeLana first. Then he’ll do Michelline, then Kimbie Dee, and finally back to DeLana. He sets them up, programs the deck to begin on his voice cue, and stretches out on the table. The butt plug goes into his anus, the merkin fits over his penis, the scalpnet onto his head. He stops to fasten his legs and the waistband, then lies back after making sure the other straps are lying where he needs them. Muffs on, goggles on, fasten head strap, press arms into restraint calipers… ready to go—

“Cue ready. Cue up,” he says.

He is DeLana, and he is the man who abducts her from the street. He clutches her hair in his fist and feels the agony in her scalp; tastes the gun barrel thrust into her mouth and feels his finger vibrating, ever so slightly, on the trigger; screams for her mama at the moment that he comes into her anus. He feels the miserable soreness in her breasts the day after and gloats at the dark bruises, feels her will break and her resistance crumble as she is forced to submission, tastes the shit licked from Master’s asshole, feels her little wet tongue cleaning him—and finally… no, no, no cut away, not yet….

Ah. Michelline. Struggling, squirming under the covers, terrified because Dad has done this before but never so hard and it hurts; Dad feeling her come alive as she struggles to get away—

The objects he puts in become bigger and rougher, as blood covers her thighs (feeling it bleed, feeling her blood on her slick thighs)—and then the moment when her head is snapped back against the headboard, and the Michelline channel goes dead, literally, utterly blank, and Dad climbs into bed on top of the little, still-warm body.

Diem ejaculates hard at that, his scrotum twisting and aching, and slides into stalking Kimbie Dee down a hallway after she has been working out alone in the gym, feels the warm water of the shower on her as he closes in, revels in the hour during which the maimed janitor batters her small breasts, forces the mop handle into her, rapes her on the cold floor, knots the bra around her neck as she lies keening with pain—now Diem is coming dry and fast, over and over, knowing his penis will be sore for days afterward—and watches as her nude body drops from the showerhead, the shocked expression still on her face as the makeshift noose catches—and feels the noose grab the throat, the sobs of shame squeezed shut forever—

And Diem drops back to hurling DeLana from the high window, and the feel of the subzero wind screaming by her nude body, the intensity of the headache from the beating and the effects of the cold on her skull—the pavement rushing up toward her, the incomprehension that what will happen next—

There is a great burst of terrible pain and he is alone in the dark.

Diem ejaculates now, or tries to, there’s no fluid left but he rears and screams against the bonds, and the contractions feel like he’s tearing himself in two between his loins. As always, he passes out completely and falls into a dreamless dead sleep, waking about an hour later.

He releases his bonds and sits up; as usual he uses the spray painkiller, and then the warm soft oil, on his penis before he does anything else. Somewhere in all of it he lost bladder control, so he is covered with his own urine; he never remembers how or when that happens but it seems to intensify the feeling.

The room has a poisonous stench that he wants to flee, to hand off to someone to clean up for him, but of course he can’t do that; he’s exhausted and the painkiller isn’t quite working, he’s all but hysterical with guilt and relief, but he must spend this next half hour on the cleanup.

The sheets go into the washer-dryer, and he turns it on. The little gadget will get the blood, shit, semen, sweat, and urine out again, though the sheets are getting old and stained.

God, his arms ache and he’s never been this tired before while doing this, but he racks the wedges up and locks the cabinet, then takes the disinfectant and wipes down the bed, restraints, and fittings. He’s so tired he drops the bucket and it spills, running into a floor drain; his heart sinks at the thought of mopping, and then he realizes he won’t have to, it will dry on the waterproof floor, he can mop it some time when he has the time.

At last he can have his shower. It’s hot and there’s plenty of it, and the disinfectant body shampoo smells wonderful to him; he’s all but weeping with pleasure because it’s over—

But unlike other nights, perhaps just because this was so intense, there is a thing he can’t quite get out of his mind. As Diem works the pounding warm water over his scalp, his mind drifts back to the beginning, to when the first “parallel experience” pom was showing up, back during Brittany Lynn Hardshaw’s first stint as a Federal prosecutor, and then when she was Idaho Attorney General.

God, how had anyone discovered it? It was obvious in retrospect… but what kind of person would have thought of it in the first place? Rapists and molesters enjoyed what they were doing because they did know what they were doing to the victim—that was part of why it was so common for abused children to grow up to be abusers—so rape-porn enthusiasts got far more excitement from sharing the event from both viewpoints.

Almost there was a kind of business genius behind it.

For that matter, what kind of brain wiring had been installed in men like… well, like Diem himself? He scours his back with the long-handled loofah, hard enough to turn it pink and achy. He still doesn’t feel clean, and he’s so tired….

It started with deciding to see what this was like; and then it was easy to copy confiscated wedges. Before this stuff, Diem had always just figured he was sort of sexless—college experiments with a couple of young women and one young man had left him bored. It was easier to just stay home and masturbate, and before he found parallel experience he never fantasized about anything… at least not with any awareness that it was turning him on—

Well, there you had it. He supposes he could have gone to see an analyst. There have been some successes with treating all this. But that would mean confessing to a lot of things, including that his “experiments” in college had all been stranger rapes in distant cities….

The country might well have been worse off, he thinks, honestly. Brittany Lynn Hardshaw has been one of the most effective leaders of the last fifty years, and that’s not just his opinion—to do his job Diem has had to know how to judge accurately rather than with his loyalty. Even if he didn’t trust his own judgment, there’s also the nearly universal opinion of the historians and political scientists, even the ones who hate her guts.

And so many people know that part of her greatness was her Shadow….

He finds himself sinking to the floor of the shower, and starts rattling off accomplishments. He would guess that between one action and another that he’s managed, he’s put three million people into homes, thirteen million into jobs, gotten justice for another couple of million who would never have seen it otherwise—

His one term in Congress led to the Diem Act, and more than a thousand people have been put to death for making wedges like the ones locked in his cabinet. He even saw to it that a few specific ones he had contact with came to the notice of the cops… did he want to get caught? Or just want them to get caught?

He’s still ill; the pain from the convulsions that ripped through his groin earlier, the soreness leaking from where the merkin abraded his penis and where he forced himself down so hard on the butt plug, all of that is mixing with overpowering nausea. He barely gets out of the shower to the toilet in time to heave up several times, heavy retching that leaves him feeling wrung from chest to ass, his legs trembling, head aching, like the worst flu he’s ever had.

A really bad reaction tends to follow a really intense session. The unbearable demanding buzz at the base of his skull isn’t there, won’t return for weeks or months. But now there is something else he can’t shut out.

What he can’t shut out just keeps coming back at him; he gets under the shower again, scours off the flecks of his own vomit, dries in haste and pulls on the bathrobe. On good nights, the ritual of the shower works like a baptism, bringing him back into the world feeling clean again, if wrung out and in pain; on bad nights, it just goes on and on.

What he can’t shut out has its grip on him tonight. He staggers upstairs, stops for one long moment at the landing because he must go back and string the filament of rubber cement, then carefully memorize its shape for the next time—

God, the next time. D.C. itself may be washed away, Diem is slated for the last part of the government to leave and he may be killed here like those poor bastards in Hawaii… and it doesn’t matter, he’s got to make sure this place is secure. No one must know—

He makes himself look long and hard at the thin string of drying rubber cement, remembers the unique shape of its bumps. Once someone breaks that they’ll never successfully copy it into place, and he’ll have at least some warning—

Then he feels his legs bending and buckling. What he can’t shut out comes howling up the stairs like a vicious dog at his heels. He turns, slams the door, locks it, flees up the back stairs that are forbidden to servants, enters his own bedroom. The bathrobe flies off him like a great winged bat and lands on his writing desk, currently holding three books he was reading weeks ago before it all got crazy.

He throws himself between the soft sheets of the big waterbed and buries his head under the covers, pausing only a quarter-breath to say “Room lights off” to the house computer.

What he can’t shut out is this:

All the wedges except the three “specials,” the ones he experienced tonight, are copies of parallel-experience porn that was confiscated from people who were dealing this stuff. He prosecuted some of them himself.

Three wedges—the three he played tonight—are different. He commissioned those.

Each of these three wedges cost him four times as much as his car.

And just before he falls asleep he hears it, what he can’t shut out, his own voice cutting into him, as if he had himself on the witness stand:

Mr. Diem, surely you know that these wedges are made by forcible short-term memory extraction after the rape has been committed, and the extractor is then left in place for the killing itself.

But you ordered the wedges, Mr. Diem. He who bids a thing done by others, does it himself. And at the prices you paid, Mr. Diem, you know what they did. They made those wedges special for you. And what they did to those three young girls was exactly what you wanted them to do.

And if you don’t believe that, Mr. Diem, remember that the final orgasm, the big one, the one you’ve got to have, comes not with the horrible torture of Kimbie Dee, Michelline, and DeLana… not even with their wretched disgusting deaths at the hands of those ghouls… no, Mr. Diem. That’s not what makes you come.

You come from knowing that it all really happened, don’t you?

Blackness descends. He oversleeps the next morning. When he does get up, it’s past ten, the day is gray and dreary, and there’s a note from President Hardshaw asking him to take a day off and recover from his overwork.

Berlina Jameson often wishes that she were more of an old hand. If the world ran the way it is supposed to, then she’d have spent ages covering school board meetings and standing in front of car wrecks with a camera pointed at her before she got her big break, and so she’d have lots of experience talking with biz types. But as it is, she’s going to have to wing it.

Glinda Gray, the person from GateTech who has one of those strangely unexplanatory job titles that mean either she’s a flunky or a real power and you’re supposed to be kept guessing, is not telling the whole truth. Berlina is sure of that much. She’s also sure that if she just had ten years or so of experience at this, she’d know exactly what it was that she wasn’t being told. Unfortunately she not only doesn’t have enough experience to sort that out—she also doesn’t have enough experience to comprehend what seems to be a series of hints that Ms. Gray is sending at her.

Well, gee, what would Edward R. Murrow or Morley Safer have done? Berlina thinks. She’s rolling south toward the Gulf Coast just now, en route to getting some stock footage shot for the before-and-after sequences that are sure to come. But just now she’s not thinking of getting footage of the soon-to-be-destroyed areas; she is stretched out in the back of the car, looking into a sterovisor and assembling the images of the two of them virtually, so that what she sees looks like the inside of a TV studio but she has to be careful not to stick her arm through a potted plant. It’s clear that Glinda Gray is at least as at home in the environment as Berlina Jameson.

When in doubt, try the truth. “So,” Berlina Jameson says, “the documentation is pretty convincing. The USSF and NASA are completely illegally looting the Japanese and European parts of Moonbase, and what’s more they’ve had NSA assistance in cracking security codes so that they’re also using all sorts of privately owned equipment without paying for it. I’ll certainly go with that material, but there’s at least two questions you haven’t answered. The first one is why you picked Sniffings rather than Scuttlebytes, and the second is, What’s in all this for GateTech?”

Glinda Gray brushes her graying-blonde hair back from her face, and Jameson notes with envy just how polished the woman seems, as if Gray had been playing the role of herself for many years. “Well, we think Sniffings is likely to be interested for two reasons, and you can quote me on either of them. First of all, Scuttlebytes has, let’s say, a very adolescent attitude about business and capitalism—they like to tweak business just because there’s a certain amount of money and prestige in the private sector and because business people tend to be kind of conservative. And more importantly, we have a pretty good idea about why the Feds and the UN are doing this. It’s because most of the governments of the Earth failed to foresee that there might be a need for space launch that could stand up to severe weather conditions; our own country is a perfect example; first we built at Canaveral on a coast that gets hurricanes, then we moved to Kingman Reef, where there’s even less dry land and even more storm vulnerability. But the other nations haven’t done much better.

“So naturally when the catastrophe anyone should have seen was possible comes along, what happens? There’re two possibilities—they can either launch using the facilities that private enterprise built on speculation against just such a day, or they can do what they’re doing—appropriate private property without compensation, infringe on other nations’ facilities, do everything that if we did it would rightly be called theft, piracy, or barratry, all of that just to avoid letting private enterprise solve the problem. There’s an anti-business bias in government that runs deep and strong, Ms. Jameson, and that’s what you’re seeing here. Frankly we’re tired of it; all we want is a chance to compete fairly, and what we’re seeing here is a situation where we have to play by the rules and they don’t.”

It’s a great bunch of quotes, Berlina consoles herself, and the fact that something smells funny about all this can always be looked into later. It’s almost enough to make her wish she had invested in a head jack so that she could go two-way with some databases, but you have to know what questions to ask to do that and it’s awesomely expensive.

She gets a couple more minutes with Glinda Gray, but no better material. They have the usual polite off-record exchanges at the end; the most interesting thing she gets out of that is that John Klieg himself is a fan of Sniffings, which Gray mentions with an odd air of embarrassment, as if it were unusual for her to know that about her boss.

Well, well, then perhaps the rumors that she’s been serving under her boss with distinction are true… but private biz really is a different game. Whereas a senator boffing his legislative assistant is dynamite, people in private business can and do screw pretty much whomever they like, and absolutely nobody in that community seems to think much about it. Berlina is not sure she can get the hang of such a different world.

Well, one rule that has worked for her is: When you don’t understand what you’ve got, get more. Who can she talk to? She’s had a few short conversations with Harris Diem over the past few weeks, but that is probably not enough for her to just call him up.

Di Callare does not strike her as the hardheaded business type either, but at least he’ll have something to say and he’s easy to talk to.

He all but explodes; it takes her a while to sort out the basic issues—that Klieg is just taking advantage of the situation. “Look at the permit and build dates, look when he started moving to Siberia, what he did was take a gamble that this would happen and then get the right piece of dirt from people who had to give him a cheap deal….”

She makes the note herself. What was Klieg’s timing? Did he have any way to know or suspect something like Clem was about to happen? It’s one thing to be a farsighted road-builder, she thinks, and another to sprint up the road ahead of a crowd of refugees and open a tollbooth… and certainly, too, Klieg’s connections to the all-but-outlawed Siberian regime also bear some checking into.

She thanks Di for his trouble and time, makes sure he feels they’re still friends, and clicks off. Di has said nothing she wants to quote, but at least via him she has some idea what Diem might say, or Hardshaw if she gets that lucky.

She has an ominous feeling that all she has here is something the Klieg organization wants to plant in the media, and she doesn’t know why. Of course until she releases it she doesn’t know what they’ll do with it-And that thought gives her the answer. She makes her preparations and then leaves a short note for Glinda Gray, informing her that the next Sniffings will feature the story as its lead. Then she records a much longer voice-and-video message for Harris Diem.

She knows she did the right thing when he calls her back that night.

Jesse and Mary Ann managed to get on the same crew for the dig-out; it’s not like Tehuantepec here in Tapachula, they were far enough away so that it was no more than an unusually bad hurricane, and even with the Army not showing up, most of Puerto Madero managed to evacuate itself before the storm surges hit. That little town and beach are gone, and the inhabitants have been added to the homeless in Tapachula, but they’re alive, and besides Tapachula has plenty of buildings standing. Even some of the shacks that ringed the town managed to hold somehow, and enough public buildings to provide everyone a place to sleep—which may be better than it was before Clementine ripped over them.

Not that there isn’t plenty to do, but deaths here run to dozens, not to hundreds, and when a rubble pile has to be looked into, there are plenty of hands available. Mary Ann is standing in the right place to see two small, dirty, frightened boys freed from house wreckage, and then to hear the shriek of joy from their mother.

Sourly, she finds herself thinking that if she were working, she would have had to crank her feelings up to fever pitch—just so the experiencers could understand that it was good to have seen that.

It’s a long day, and it’s a bit longer because, since the landlord isn’t around to object, Mary Ann has turned her rented house into an emergency shelter, so that besides the indispensable Herreras, they have about twenty refugees scattered around the place. That means a certain amount of work in getting everyone bedded down, but at least Señora Herrera was able to screen the incoming guests, and she seems to have been willing to take only those who want to work for their bed and supper. If anything the place is cleaner and more orderly than before.

It leaves Jesse and Mary Ann with only the master bedroom and its bath to call their own, but that doesn’t much matter; it’s kind of cozy, like having the largest and best room in a dormitory.

That evening Jesse is messing around with the terminal; links to the outside world, and via that to the rest of Mexico, seem to be in good shape, though everything is going via satellite between north and south Mexico—Clementine tore a swath that ripped out all but the few buried fibrop cables, and for practical purposes Mexico is now two nations divided by the wild chaos of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

He has kind of ambiguous feelings about it, but he decides that seeing if he can contact Naomi is the least he can do. He writes a quick “hope you’re okay” letter to Naomi and puts it in a tracer packet aimed at her net i.d.—a little program that will hang around in the nets looking for her until she logs on again.

While he’s at it, he puts out a “mention search” tracer as well; this is a program that will capture everything that mentions Naomi. He tells it to just hang out on the servers and processors in the states of Oaxaca and Chiapas. That way, if—he flinches a bit at the thought—well, if she’s in the hospital, or in a busload of refugees, or something like that, his tracer will find out and let him know.

They’ve got limited phone service available for contacting relatives, and he hasn’t used any of his authorized calls yet. Probably he ought to call Dad, but phoning Di is about as good—Di will pass word on to Dad—and Di is a lot easier to talk to.

To his surprise, Di is on the screen almost at once. “Kid! I’ve been trying to get something out of Mexico for two days about you! What’s up? Are you okay? Do you need money or clearance to get anywhere or anything?”

“I’m fine, Di, really. I’ve got a rich girlfriend, and she’s got a house that’s built like a fort. We rode it out here and there was no big trouble at all. They just got phone service up a couple of hours ago. My old place was smashed up pretty badly but I was fine, and most of my stuff was over here anyway. I was just calling to let you know I’m okay.”

“God, I’m glad to hear that!”

Jesse looks closer at the screen, and says, “You look really tired, Di. Aren’t they giving you any breaks?”

“They are but I’m not taking them. Have you had time to check the news?”

“Just enough to know Salina Cruz is gone and most of the coast resorts got clobbered by storm surge. And of course the country’s practically cut in half at the Istmo.”

“That’s pretty much the story,” Di agrees. “It’s not yet public, but the Mexican government has made a decision that I wish our President would. They’ve declared the situation as good as permanent—with so many Clems forming out there, and with our forecasts saying every summer will be like this for at least six years, they’re going to try to organize mass migrations to safer areas, and take advantage of the big rainfalls to grow grain in the desert to feed everyone. So if you can get out of there soon, you should—otherwise your way out is likely to involve spending a month or so in a refugee column going farther up into the hills.”

“The Chiapas rain forest might not even notice the hurricanes, if it doesn’t get hit directly,” Jesse responds. It’s funny—last month he’d have been hysterical about not getting back to the Az on schedule, but now he can look at it calmly enough. “It rains a lot here. But—a lot of Clems—”

“A lot. Clem’s had two babies and is still headed west in the Pacific, with one of them trailing behind and the other running parallel and to the north; Clem Two, or ‘Clementine,’ as Berlina dubbed it, is kicking up such a fuss in the Gulf that we aren’t even sure how many storm eyes there really are there—it’s got about four outflow jets popping around and they’re all starting eyes everywhere. We’ve started a new designation system; Clem itself is Clem 100, Clem Two is Clem 200, and the two independent daughters in the Pacific are 300 and 400; mostly they’ll be named after their direct ancestors. Our guess is that there’re going to be at least a Clem 210, Clem 220, and Clem 230 coming out of the Gulf.”

“Jesus.”

“Unh-hunh. And we’ve got Tropical Depression Donna forming way out west in the Atlantic near the equator. Bet on it, Jesse, if you stay in Mexico you’ll ride out at least five more hurricanes this summer and fall. For that matter we’re betting on three big ones for the Chesapeake.”

Jesse shakes his head, trying to make the thoughts whirling there settle down. “Is there anywhere safe?”

“Siberia, I guess, ought to be okay. In the States, Kansas maybe, though there’s going to be a lot of rain in the Rockies so I wouldn’t set up camp anywhere near a river. Utah, as long as you don’t get hit with flash floods, and some of our models are showing that the dry lake beds are going to refill all over the basin and range country—there’s going to be a chain of salt lakes all down there by October.”

Jesse finds his voice, and he says, “Well, then, shit, Di, tell me… is there anything that can be done? Is anyone trying?”

Di shrugs. “Of course people are trying.”

It doesn’t sound encouraging. There’s really no reason to try to go back. Here in Chiapas, he knows his neighbors and he’s worked beside them. And the mountains and rain forest above are not the worst place in the world to live, if it came to that. He has a strange feeling that he might be deciding where his grandchildren will live. There’d be a place for him—he’s healthy and doesn’t mind work, his Spanish has gotten very fluent in his time here, and he’s got a bunch of skills that are likely to be needed, though realization engineering may not be important for a while. “Then I think I’ll stick down here, Di. There’s a place for me and it’s apt to be safer.”

“It’s, uh, not because of some girl, is it?”

“You know my evil habits. No, not really, I think her employers will probably call her back onto the job pretty soon. And I’d really say ‘woman’ rather than girl. She’s, uh, probably nearer your age than mine.”

Di whistles and gives him a wink. “Coo coo ca choo, Mrs. Robinson.”

“What?”

“I don’t know what it means either, but Dad used to say that whenever he saw a younger guy with an older woman. Some kind of boomtalk, I guess.”

“He must have given that up before I came along.”

“Right. Theoretically I should get back to work but all we’re doing right now is documenting that horrible mess in the Gulf, and I don’t mind telling you it’s a relief to talk to anyone about anything else at all. There’s nothing we can do and it just keeps building….” Di sighs. “Anyway, enough of that. You take care. You sound pretty grown-up to me, but you’re still my kid brother. This old grandmother you’re shacked up with—”

“Hey!”

“—is she anyone I might know?”

Jesse decides that if he tells Di, most likely his brother will start calling psychiatric authorities, so he says, “Probably not. Ever meet an actress named Mary Ann Waterhouse?”

“Never heard of her. Tell her to take good care of my brother, okay?”

“Deal. You keep an eye on my nephews.”

They give each other a little wave that turns into a mock salute, and then the call ends. Jesse sits back and thinks; that really sounded a lot like a goodbye, and he doesn’t like that. And yet—well, the satellites are still up there and the weather doesn’t touch them, and plenty of fibrop lines are buried… chances are that even if civilization collapses the net will stay up for a long time.

Which gives him the vision of himself and Mary Ann hoeing a garden patch in the jungle with a sharp stick, with Mary Ann plugged in so that all over the world, millions of people sitting in their huts, their own gardens neglected, can share the experience of hoeing with a sharp stick.

“What are you laughing about?” Mary Ann says, coming out of the shower. The sculpture they have made of her body still astonishes him.

“Oh, I got through to my brother. He’s a funny guy.”

By the time they stop to get her stuff from her little bungalow, Naomi is beginning to realize just how differently Eric sees the world from the way she does. She’s not at all sure how to feel about it—he’s polite and appears interested in what she says, but since she’s sworn off values-educating people, she suddenly realizes how little she has to talk about. She’s been to a lot of places, but mostly she’s gone straight from the zipline to some pocket of misery, and so she can tell him what squalor is like everywhere, but not anything else—and squalor is alike, wherever you go.

There’s a short letter from Jesse; she means to reply, then figures she can do it later—Eric is scrambling up and down the stairs with her stuff and she doesn’t want to let him do all the work.

Driving out of town, Eric talks about the museum at Oaxaca, which holds a lot of the stuff that they dug up from Monte Alban. He seems a little worried about whether it’s been damaged.

She is ashamed to have to admit that though she’s had weeks of opportunity, and several days off, she’s never seen either the museum or Monte Alban itself. She always had to go to meetings and work on values clarification; besides, she realizes guiltily, she wouldn’t really have seen it anyway because she’d have been too busy (at the museum) experiencing what a beautiful culture it was that had passed away and how much the linear and centric Euroculture had lost—

They are driving out through Oaxaca; it’s now late in the day, but there’s an intact set of transponders on Federal Highway 190, so the car can drive itself as soon as they’ve got it on the highway up toward Ciudad de Mexico. She notices that one tree blew over by the big fountain in the Paseo Juárez, but that’s the worst she’s seen here; Clem Two made sort of a right turn after Tehuantepec, which was part of why it blew over so quickly there but lashed Chiapas for so much longer.

“So the museum’s three blocks away, right over there,” she said. “Gee, I wonder if I’ll ever be back to see it.”

“Stick with me, kid, I love this town,” Eric says, grinning. They take a fast right at Calle Niños Heroes de Chapultepec, and now they’re on their way out of the city, headed up to the junction with 190.

She liked being called “kid.” If Jesse had done that she’d have screamed at him. Part of her is shocked—what’s it going to be next, “baby”? “Sweet Butt”?

Another part tells her that it means he likes her and finds her attractive, and to hell with it if it’s not how she’d like him to express it; if it gets to be an issue, she’ll just tell him. He seems to be a nice guy and he probably won’t call her anything she doesn’t want to be called.

A few minutes later, he throws the switch for full auto, sets the destination for a hotel in Mexico City—leaning over to see where he’s set it for, she’s shocked to realize that she recognizes the place. It’s one of the giant new earthquake-proof palaces that start at more for a night than she’s ever made in a month. “Er,” she says, “um… I guess I’ll need a place to stay and I can’t afford—”

“No problem,” he says. “I booked a two-bedroom suite. And it’s on me, like the ride. I like you, Naomi. I’m not going to pretend I wouldn’t like to share the bed with you when we get there, but I’d rather be invited than try to pressure my way in.”

Keep it up, she thinks, and I just might invite you. Wonder what it’s like to have sex with a guy just because I want to? And then not educate him at all, not even try?

She’s really startled by her train of thought, so she says, “You know, I ought to confess, if I had gone to the museum, I’d have gone knowing what I thought about non-European cultural artifacts, and I’d never have seen it. I haven’t been very, uh, open to experience, I guess—though the funny thing is that I’ve been trying to feel at one with the world all my life.”

He smiles. “Why not just be at one with the parts you like?”

She grins at him. “I could say it’s an extremely negative values decision. But I don’t know, why not just be in love with the parts you like about your lover? It wouldn’t seem much like love to me but I guess you could do it.”

“Well, that’s my philosophy,” he says. “I mean, you do realize that you’re one of the people who has made being in business in the U.S. a pain in the ass for the last few generations, don’t you? You’ve probably done all sorts of things and worked for all sorts of causes I would resent like hell. True?”

“True.” She feels like adding that she’s sorry, and then feels angry because she has nothing to apologize for, and then feels stupid because he hasn’t asked her to apologize. It doesn’t matter anyway, because he keeps talking.

“Well, I won’t even ask you not to talk about it. What I will do is concentrate on liking the way that you smile, and that you’re very pretty and have a nice body, and that you’re a good listener. And while we’re at it, you have a very tough, funny sense of humor when you’re talking to a guy, and you make me half crazy with wanting to please you, believe it or not. But I also know as a practical matter that I can’t please you by agreeing with you, because you’ll know that I’m lying, so what you’re likely to like about me is that I’m generous and polite.”

“You can add that you’re handsome and you’ve got a lot of experiences that I like hearing about,” she says, “as long as that doesn’t give you any ideas.”

“None that I haven’t had for a while anyway. Let’s move into the back, where there’s a little more room, and I’ll dig out some food from the fridge. Your family are Deepers, so I guess you’re probably a vegetarian—”

“Uh, I’m afraid so. And—hmm. I know most people call us Deepers, but we call ourselves Values Clarified, or VC.”

Eric nods very politely. “Well, I’ve got some fresh fruit, a salad or two, and some plain yogurt. All shipped-in American, so I doubt you’ll have any trouble with it if you’ve been eating native for months. I hope you won’t mind that I’ve also got ham sandwiches and I’m planning to eat a couple of them.”

“One of the values I’m going to try getting less clarified about is the thing about property rights being less important than the right to be educated,” Naomi says, smiling broadly. “It was just occurring to me that it’s your car, it’s your ham sandwich, and I’m a guest here.”

They have a long, slow supper, talking about things like childhood and what it’s like to play commodities or plan a demonstration, and it gets dark outside the tinted windows. The car’s temperature control works perfectly, and Naomi realizes that she hasn’t felt bumps in the road, either, that the car is driving around the big ones and taking up the rest in its shock system. She’s not sure she’s ever been anywhere quite so comfortable.

It’s still about three hours to Mexico City; they stop briefly at an automated Pemex for gas, getting out of the car into the chilly mountain night just long enough to use the rest rooms. When Naomi comes back outside, he’s waiting for her in the cold.

“You should have gotten back in the car,” she says. “Jesus, it’s freezing out tonight.”

“I’m being gentlemanly,” he says. “One of those things that happens when you let a boy turn into an Eagle Scout.”

“My folks wouldn’t let my brother join the Scouts. Uniforms are militarist and camping out damages wilderness.”

“Besides, if you help old ladies across the street, the old ladies go on taking up valuable resources,” he adds, opening the door for her.

“They’d have used that argument if they’d thought of it. You almost put your arm around me, didn’t you?”

“Almost.” He closes the door and comes around to the other side, gets in, and says, “Gay Deceiver, voice command on. All passengers are back inside, lock up and continue. Gay Deceiver, voice command off.”

The car responds in a woman’s voice. “You got it, boss. Nice honkers on the chick,” and then starts rolling down the driveway to the highway.

It’s so unexpected that Naomi howls with laughter. Eric appears to be trying to hide in the seat. “I’m sorry,” he says, “I forgot to reset from the custom message base and—”

“Why do you call your car Gay Deceiver?”

“From my favorite book when I was a kid. Thoroughly useless mindrotting garbage, I assure you—exactly what kids like. There was a car with that name in it, and—oh, well, anyway, I’m sorry, I have this sort-of not-serious girlfriend back in Utah—”

“Oh,” Naomi says.

“No—it’s—well, hell, let’s call her. I think I was sort of getting somewhere with you, and I want you to know it’s all right.”

“And you can call her up at this hour?”

The car slides around a tight turn, and he says, “We’ve been friends since high school, and she’s been married twice in that time. Anyway, this old girlfriend was a big fan of the same book, and since Gay Deceiver in the book has a tendency to get rude, she gave me that voice module for Christmas.”

She turns out to be named Zoe Matson. She’s gracious and friendly and immediately tells Eric that “it’s a good thing you left me a key. I’ll get right over to your house and suppress the evidence of what you live like, you filthy pig, and round up any other underage girls I find, give’em a ride into town and a bus ticket, and make it respectable—”

Naomi likes Eric a little better for having this friend, and it’s clear that it really is all right. They click off from Zoe, and Naomi asks, “Are you still, um, having thoughts about me?”

“Well, yes,” he says. “I mean, I’m still a gentleman—”

“I know that, sport,” she says, and—not believing that she’s doing it, laughing at herself at the same moment that she’s enjoying it tremendously—she turns on the overhead light in the car so that he can see, and slides her top down. “So—want to check out the honkers on the chick?”

She’s amazed and touched.

When she decided to do that she figured he’d probably pounce on her and maybe be a little rough, but after the scare about Zoe, she realizes she really does want him and it seemed like the last step in her personal liberation to just cut right through the crap. So she was prepared to have him come at her like a caveman, and to enjoy it anyway.

Instead, he leans forward very slowly, takes her chin in his hand, lifts her mouth to his, and kisses her firmly; his hand strokes her neck, wanders tenderly over her shoulder and the soft flesh by her armpit, and finally brushes up the side of her breast to place just a finger on her erect nipple. Breaking the kiss, he whispers, “Thank you for this.”

She kisses his cheek and brings both his hands to her breasts. “Make love with me,” she says. “Just make love, we’ll spend hours talking—later.” She feels like she’s on XV, and she adores feeling that way, and she adores everything else that happens, and she adores Eric. She’s not sure she’s ever, in her life before, permitted herself to adore anything.

The car rolls on north, without a bump or a sound; fortunately the program is smart enough to wake them up in time to get dressed before they pull into the hotel parking garage.

Naomi would never have guessed they still had it in them, but there’s something about a bed that size and a room that nice… they don’t get out of Mexico City for a whole additional day, and they have to call up Zoe to let her know they’ll be late. Naomi even likes being teased about that.

Maybe Passionet is hiring, she thinks.

The results are back, and Berlina Jameson heaves a sigh of relief. The tattletales she let loose in the net have done their job; ten minutes after she told Glinda Gray that the “USSF: Space Pirates?” story would be the lead in the next Sniffings, there were over seventy brief messages to UN ambassadors, congressmen, Europarliament reps, Japanese Diet members… what she has here, she realizes, is the structure of Klieg’s influence. These are the people who will deliver a space launch monopoly to John Klieg and GateTech, probably in return for various services rendered or perhaps for plain old money.

She puts that in as a special, follow-on edition of Sniffings. It’s late, so she shuts off her connections to other communication services for the night. She has enough footage, now, of the Gulf, for later when she will cover the disaster that is bound to happen there; the most gratifying thing is the sheer number of people who, one way or another, have decided to just bag it and head to places farther north and higher up.

It occurs to her that as of yet there are no refugee camps. A lot of people seemed to be leaving for the Rockies, probably figuring you couldn’t get higher than that, so she decides to see how the refugees are doing—it might make another great Sniffings, and she’s on a roll. She points the car toward Wyoming, stretches out to go to sleep, and roars on into the night.

The day begins badly, with Diem wanting to resign.

First of all, he finds that Hardshaw has cleared everyone to talk to Berlina Jameson, and that she’s getting all kinds of assistance from White House offices, and he wasn’t told that. And then, as Chief of Staff, Diem should have known about her meeting with Rivera; having been cut out of the loop is intolerable, it’s something she would do just before firing him or to discipline him, and she never hits her top people in such a crude way—

Her eyes soften a little and she says, “I made the appointment while you were on your way in, Harris. If you’d gone straight to your desk, instead of bursting in here, you’d have seen it. It’s not a slap at you, honestly. And I truly don’t understand why you are upset about Jameson. We wanted her to find Klieg’s web of influence and play up the Hassan connection, and she will.”

“But the way you’re doing it, it will all be exposed… there’s no leverage. We can’t threaten them with exposure. Hell, a lot of them will be right out of the game.” He sits down, sighs, lets calm come back into his system. “All right. I’m going to be rational. Explain to me how the game works, because this is all new to me. I thought you had set up a brilliant situation for leaning on Klieg and half a dozen governments worldwide. Clearly that was not what you intended at all.”

“You spent a day at home but you didn’t relax.” Her chiding is gentle but she means it.

“Oddly enough, I thought I had relaxed. You’re not going to make me do it over again, are you, boss?”

“Shouldn’t be necessary. All right, here’s what we’ll be doing with Rivera—”

It’s a single sheet of paper. On it there are four numbered sentences. Harris Diem reads it, reads it again, looks up and says “May I keep this?”

“For what?” she asks.

“For my memoirs.” He reaches into his briefcase, brings out a document holder, and slides it in, smoothing it flat. “I would put this somewhere between the Gettysburg Address and Roosevelt’s Day of Infamy speech. Maybe a bit more significant than the Day of Infamy.”

“It might be a long time before your memoirs can be published,” she says.

“Once I’m dead, I can afford to be patient.”

She grunts and nods; whatever she was about to say next is lost forever, because the secretary announces that the Sec-Gen is on the line.

The pleasantries are short but seem more sincere than usual, at least to Harris Diem. At last, Rivera says, “Ms. President, I think we may as well do this quickly as slowly. Historians may like us better if we deliberate more, but I for one always favored getting into cold water by diving in headfirst.”

“Agreed,” Hardshaw says, “and it may be the last thing we agree on. Have you drafted your proposal?”

“I have, as we discussed. Let’s transmit, read, and discuss.”

Hardshaw pushes a button. The four sentences that Harris Diem is holding the original copy of appear on the Sec-Gen’s screen; four sentences from him appear on President Hardshaw’s screen, and she and Diem lean forward to read.

In less than a minute, both are looking up toward each other hopefully, and with just a trace of a smile. Diem is shaking his head. “I suppose it was inevitable. What needs to be done is so clear—unless, of course, we want Klieg, Hassan, and the Siberians to hold the levers of power in the post-Clem world—that it’s no surprise at all that three of the four points are identical between you. Did you both agree there would be four points?”

“No,” Rivera said, “but those are obvious as well. Ms. President, can we then agree that Colonel Tynan is to proceed with the expedition to the Kuiper Belt immediately for the purposes discussed, that he is to accept no further orders for recall or modification but may at his judgment modify the plan in accord with the original goals—I like your phrasing better than mine—and that he will receive his orders to do so from both you and me and send an acknowledge to both of us?”

“That’s it,” she says. “It’s not a legal document in any sense of the word, so precision doesn’t matter. Now about the point of the dispute: what would you say if I said we’re going to hand ourselves in? We’ll announce that taking over all that Japanese and French stuff on the moon was an act of deliberate aggression and offer reparations, but we’ll concede they’d be justified in declaring war.”

Rivera grins. “Then I would say—you and I are both old lawyers, Ms. President—that I will see you in court. The Secretary-General has seized all property in space for the duration of the emergency—and unlike your American Constitution, the UN Second Covenant lets me declare the emergency retroactively and seize property without compensation—and thus Colonel Tynan, acting under my orders, has behaved in an entirely legal fashion. Will you at least recognize the jurisdiction of the World Court?”

“Hell yes. I might argue the case myself.”

Rivera’s eyes widen, and he says, “Ms. President, I beg you—don’t do that.”

It’s not often that Brittany Lynn Hardshaw looks confused or discomfited. “And why not? If your decision stands, then all I am is a UN provincial administrator anyway; I might as well use all that time on my hands productively.”

Rivera shakes his head, and that’s when Diem sees the twinkle in his eye. “The difficulty, Ms. President, is that if you insist on arguing the United States’ case, I shall be unable to resist the temptation to match wits with you in court on a case of such magnitude—and the world cannot afford to have both of us tied up doing that.” He smiles more widely. “Besides, the irony is too appealing. You win on your sovereignty case if you are convicted of illegal seizure of Japanese and French property. You will be in court trying to prove you’re a pirate; the UN will be there trying to prove you’re innocent.”

She nods. “See you in court, then. And I’m guilty as hell.”

“Ms. President—you are not. I take it we have no further business and we should get this underway?”

“Right. My regards to your family—”

“And I’m delighted for this chance to talk with you,” he says. Once again, things have slid into formality, but Diem can’t help feeling that there’s warmth underneath it. The Secretary-General’s office clicks off. There’s a brief flicker of the blue-and-white UN logo, and then the screen goes blank.

As she turns back to him, she says, “I checked it out, of course, over a scrambled channel, and Tynan really is ready to go. Would have looked pretty stupid if he’d had to hang around in Earth orbit for three weeks while everyone sued everyone else. So I guess we send the signal—get it rolling, Harris. Here’s the tape you can transmit up to Tynan.”

Diem accepts it and looks down at the cassette; the thought occurs to him that this object, someday, will probably sit in the Smithsonian, if there is a Smithsonian. “Oh, and Harris?” she adds.

Diem glances up.

“You might be right about significance, but the real parallel is the Great White Fleet. And unlike Teddy Roosevelt, I don’t have to worry about Congress deciding to just strand the colonel out there.”

“You do have to worry about impeachment.”

She stands up, stretches, and he suddenly realizes how old and tired she looks; her eyelids droop a little, her skin is gray, and she stands as if a few muscles were not quite behaving themselves. “Worry? Harris, I’m looking forward to it.”