Mother of Storms

^THREE SINGULARITY

JULY–SEPTEMBER 2028

CLEM HAS CONTINUED on its way. After the Hawaiian Holocaust, as the news people have dubbed it, most of the language used to denote Clem’s indifference to human affairs has dropped out of the reports. Few people want or need to be reminded that Clem does not care what people might think.

During the week beginning on July 14, the Republic of the Marshall Islands ceases to exist. On Friday the fourteenth, at 10:00 A.M. local time, the giant hurricane’s eye is centered at 166W 7N, about as empty a stretch of the Pacific as one could hope to find, with only the little pricey tourist spot at Palmyra Atoll, long since evacuated, taking the brunt of the storm.

But late that afternoon, at about 3:30 P.M. local time (though there is no one there to observe it as “local”), the several outflow jets that have been carrying off the bulk of the mass sucked up by Clem coalesce to the northeast of the giant hurricane, and it begins to move rapidly to the south and west.

The Marshalls are a battered mess already from Clem’s previous pass, which was at a considerable distance to the south; this time the hurricane is far larger, as big as it was when it tore across Hawaii, and it pounds right through the middle of the two parallel chains of islands that form the Republic.

Warning time has been adequate, but this does not mean everyone has gotten away, only that in theory they have had a chance.

Admiral O’Hara, on the bridge of HMS Abel Tasman, flagship of the UN rescue fleet, has a sick feeling that that theoretical chance was all that mattered to the UN politicians. The Republic of the Marshall Islands has been a festering sore for almost a generation, and from the SecGen’s standpoint Clem couldn’t hit a better place. The international force at O’Hara’s command is completely inadequate for getting people out of the mess, and for that matter even without a hurricane there they would have been inadequate for coping with the approximately twenty-sided civil war that has turned the one-time island paradise into a vast disaster area.

O’Hara is proud of the job his Australians and Kiwis have been doing, and for that matter he couldn’t ask for better people than the Filipino, Indian, Korean, and Thai units he has, but he knows they have been given an impossible task—and when you give a military force an impossible task, all you are doing is asking them to endure.

They are having plenty to endure. The only island on which they are not being shot at—so far—is Kwajalein, but they have evacuated almost no one from that island. The thousands of squatters in the former American village, a sort of “suburban bubble” built to accommodate the Americans who worked on the missile range, belong to a variety of Christian cults united mostly by their extreme distrust of messages from the outside world. Most of them won’t board, thinking it’s a trick to get them out of the way so the Americans can come back.

There are still plenty of peaceful atolls as well, places out of South Pacific or Mutiny on the Bounty, that break your heart to look at. But the first pass of Clem has cut many of them off—though direct satellite broadcasts reach all the islands, some of the outliers still have no antennas up, and there are a few thousand people who never hear the warnings. The Thais are racing from one to another on their hydroplane scout boats, and whistlers from the Indian carrier Brahma have reached others, but they have no way of knowing which atolls still have people or which ones have been illegally settled, and there will just not be time to reach them all. When the great storm surges and the Beaufort 35 + winds hit, many thousands will drown without anyone ever knowing they were there.

But these are just minor heartbreaks. O’Hara is bothered by them only because they are decent sane people, even the cultists in Kwajalein, and he would rather be carrying off loads of peaceful, harmless people to safety than dealing with what most of his forces are confronting.

The barometer has begun to drop already, and though Clem, much shrunken by its southward journey, is still more than a thousand kilometers off, waves are beginning to pound farther and farther up the beaches. O’Hara looks out over the ship with a certain resignation; he wonders if he’d have chosen this career if he’d known where it would end.

He has never heard a shot fired in anger; the Australian Navy has not fought a war in a long time. Even had he been in one, the Tasman is a CROC, a Combined Robotic Operations Cruiser, a ship that travels at the center of a great cloud of intelligent drones of all kinds, on, above, and below the ocean surface; if anything has penetrated far enough to hit the ship, chances are the battle is lost.

But there will be no battles—not against other ships per se. He was near retirement age, anyway….

Somewhere, far out over the horizon, Korean marines are advancing in house-to-house fighting along a miserable stretch of coral sand, twelve kilometers long by two hundred meters wide, the sprawling “suburb” that grew up between Darrit-Uliga-Delap and the airport, currently divided into half a dozen territories by the civil war that has raged in the aftermath of the expulsion of the Americans. The Koreans at least have a clear task—get all the various gunmen cleared out so that unarmed civilians can safely board the buses to the airport. The only thing holding up the Koreans is that their forces are too small—too many troops are being used in other places and can’t be spared.

The Kiwis and Aussies trying to evacuate Ebeye, in Kwajalein Atoll just north of Kwajalein itself, have the truly impossible task. The thousand or so Marshallese who worked at the missile range were supporting 7500 dependents in 1990; by 2010, the same thousand jobs had become the support for 25,000 people, the great majority under twenty years old.

Just before the fighting that led to the American departure broke out, the U.S. had attempted to solve the extremely embarrassing problem of that island slum, with its Fourth World misery jammed up within sight of the Kwajalein’s golf course, shopping malls, and movie theaters, by virtually covering Ebeye with modern high-rise housing.

The revolution that led to the American exodus had been sudden and violent, and in the aftermath of the Flash, the United States no longer had the desire or the will to maintain a base so far from home against armed opposition. Consequently they went home with almost no warning, and the 25,000 inhabitants of the world’s most isolated housing project had nothing left to support them at all. Within weeks the water and power were off more often than not, and gangs that were more or less political and more or less criminal, depending on where the money was, moved in to take over in an incomprehensible cascade of turf and control struggles.

For the last few years, Ebeye has been a perennial subject for XV coverage—stories of cannibalism, of girls bred and raised for prostitution and sold by the dozens to Japanese entrepreneurs, the Thirst Riot when the single desalinating plant broke down, the siege for ransom of one large building by a local criminal syndicate, the ring selling infant tissues for tank-grown transplant materials….

The UN forces are struggling to keep a beachhead safe for evacuation (under constant sniper fire) and to open up safe pathways for people to run through. The inhabitants of Ebeye mostly speak English, and mostly don’t believe anything a white man tells them, but there are still plenty of people escaping to the beach whenever they can—almost all of them women and girls, many of them naked, according to the reports O’Hara is seeing.

There were stories on XV, last year, of a “party palace” on Ebeye which offered select Westerners and Asians the opportunity to eat a fine dinner served by slave girls, to rape as many of them as they cared to, and then to see several of them tortured and killed. The secret UN estimate that O’Hara saw as he prepared this expedition estimated a sixty-five percent chance that the story was substantially true.

Yet the UN did not come then. Farming women like cattle was not grounds for any intervention. It must be, O’Hara thinks, all right to kill them retail for fun, but not all right for them to drown wholesale. Perhaps the analogy to cattle is perfect… no one objects to slaughterhouses, but if ten thousand cattle were about to drown—

He breaks off from that train of thought. All the way back to the beginning of his naval career, he was regularly told he had a little too much imagination and sympathy for his job. Maybe so—he’d like to have had a job like that American general, Marshall, who was most known for rebuilding Europe after World War II. Make O’Hara the dictator someplace and maybe the news people wouldn’t like how they were treated, but by god there would be sewers, electricity, decent roads, and jobs, and there wouldn’t be murder, rape, or theft.

And all this is just to avoid thinking, right now, about the paras and marines pinned down on Ebeye, in a job that’s a bizarre combination of Ulster, Sarajevo, and Gallipoli. Every couple of hours another is hit by a sniper, another young body with a hole torn in it, some dying, some crippled for life, some who will merely spend forty years having nightmares, all so that the forces on the ground there can keep making sorties and dashes to the nearer buildings, forcing doorways, opening passages through which the captives can flee.

O’Hara has written a short report that he intends to leak—his career is over after this anyway—revealing that the real population of Ebeye before this was probably about two hundred male rulers, three thousand gunmen and male overseers working for the rulers, and more than twenty thousand female slaves.

His effort to be abstract about it all is failing; he has about five more minutes till he makes the decision that will result in his court-martial, and all he wants to think about is his real reason, the last straw.

Two hours ago a whistler from Brahma disgorged twenty Indian commandos onto the top of one of the big buildings of Ebeye, the first of 100 who were to seize the top floors of the building, silence the array of machine guns up there, and allow the Anzacs to enter and clear the building. The staticopter was hit as it attempted to take off again, and its wreckage effectively blocked others from landing, stranding the Indian force. They nevertheless fought their way down through the building far enough to take the first machine gun position, and might well have taken the rest—except that the warlord who owned the building quietly evacuated his gunmen, blocking the fire doors open, then suddenly set off charges which drained the water tanks and set the tower on fire. Besides the commandos, several hundred slaves, mostly girls, were burned to death in their still-locked rooms, or plunged to the concrete below, while the Aussie and NZs were pinned down by heavy weapons fire from neighboring buildings—and could not return fire because the enemy shielded themselves behind living, bound slaves.

There is no one left alive in the building, but it continues to blaze like a great torch; there was no way to reach the commandos trapped on the upper floor, and whatever remains of them is somewhere in the mass of orange flame and black smoke that boils against the high, lead-gray nimbus clouds.

No point in delaying further. O’Hara gets the conference call together and gives the order; everything spelled out, so that no matter what may happen later, in any trial, the full responsibility will fall only on him.

Give an adequate military force a purely military task, and it gets done. In half an hour, at the cost of more than two hundred hostage lives, four key towers are in UN hands, the gunmen trapped inside are prisoners, and the UN has the superior position. In one more hour, the island is pacified.

A lot of Australians and New Zealanders will dream, all the rest of their lives, of having to cut women in half with machine gun fire in order to kill the screaming nineteen-year-old boys behind them.

The evacuation is swift and efficient from that point on; the former rulers of the island and their various thugs and assistants are herded to the side—undoubtedly along with an occasional innocent male slave or prisoner, since the forces are sorting out all the men clearly past puberty and putting them into one end of the island. The best guess is that about five percent—maybe 150—of the 3000 men within that perimeter are innocent. O’Hara is not much concerned with such niceties.

Meanwhile the women and children are being moved to the transports as fast as they can cross the floating bridges. No doubt a few of the women were overseers, but again not many, and it’s just possible rough justice may happen along the way at the hands of the other women.

O’Hara receives the reports of all this with mounting satisfaction; not even the word from Colonel Park that the marines have broken through, Majuro is in hand, and refugees are being taken off quickly gives him as much pleasure. Finally, he has the camera turned on the last minutes at Ebeye.

The male prisoners have been waiting patiently for the ships to take them on. As O’Hara had anticipated, they grow restless as they see the floating bridges rolled up, and then they begin to stir as if to rush the last bridge when it becomes clear that it too will be taken away.

The loudspeakers promptly explain that different preparations have been made, and some of the men hesitate; the ones who rush toward the bridge are beaten back with nightsticks and Mace, and that seems to make it clear to them; they stand about disconsolately, not sure what to do.

As O‘Hara watches them, he finds himself fascinated; what a difference a gun makes. Most of these men have killed for pay, many have killed for fun, almost all of them were proud and defiant even four hours ago. Now it is noticeable that few of them are over twenty-five, many are overweight and out of shape, some others seem to have tuberculosis, the lingering effects of childhood malnutrition, or perhaps congenital syphilis. They looked like ogres behind their guns and surrounded by slaves, and behaved like them; now they are as sorry-looking a mess of humanity as O’Hara has ever seen. He wonders idly if it changed when they were stripped of their arms, or of their slaves… and that makes him wonder, a little uncomfortably, whether it will change him more to no longer have charge of weapons, or to no longer have charge of sailors.

It’s the sort of question, he thinks, that you think of when you are too sensitive for your job. Though he very much doubts that “sensitive” is what they will say about him, unless they decide to explain it all as insanity.

The waiting men don’t begin to panic until they see the group of men who have been holding guns on them get into the last two staticopters; they start to rush as the rotors begin to whir, but the last men getting on the whistler open up, without warning, with submachine guns, and as the front rank falls to the pavement, the rush collapses.

O’Hara had asked for a camera to be left in place, and he switches to that one, observing as the men mill around, scarcely any of them taking any notice of the screaming wounded on the ground, all arguing about what to do and what all this means.

Their heads come up as one when they hear the first set of explosions. It takes a long time; first they must see what is different, and then they realize that water is running out of every building, and the water towers themselves have been knocked down.

What remains of Ebeye’s fresh water is pouring out of the building entrances and windows and running into the lagoon.

Even then most of them do not see what is going on, though those few who do are noisily trying to explain, until the second wave of explosions, and the fires that break out all over the tall buildings, all at once.

Ebeye will be a vast, blazing pyre within an hour; a few of them may manage the difficult swim to Kwajalein (where the cultists have a fine tradition of stoning to death any male who swims over), a few more may wait it out on the beach—and all of those will then perish when Clem scrapes these islands to bare rock.

O’Hara, after looking at the expressions of terror, thinks of how these men have spent their (usually brief) lives and decides that he likes being a war criminal.

The shifting of the outflow jet has not gone unnoticed, and by late that afternoon, O’Hara’s fleet, mostly commandeered freighters crammed with more than 100,000 islanders, (yet with far too much empty space that might have been filled), is racing southward toward the equator with all the speed it can make. So far Clem has not shown any more ability than any other hurricane to cross the equator, and away from shore the storm surge will be felt only as a gentle lift under their feet; if they can avoid Clem’s mad winds, they should be all right.

By the time Clem’s outer winds begin to tear at the burned-cut remnants of Ebeye the next morning, storm surges have already rolled over the Ratak chain several times, and Majuro is cleared of garbage for the first time in several decades. The Christian cultists squatting in the Kwajalein base village are gathered on the former high school’s football field, according to the camera drones left behind; there is no trace of any survivors from Ebeye.

It is not possible to tell what the cultists are praying for, or about, and they are still there, drenched with rain and clinging to each other, when the wind takes down the last camera drone.

The Marshalls are scoured down to bare coral, rolled over by hundreds of waves rather than the four Oahu got; the highest point in the islands was only thirty-one meters above the sea.

The UN fleet continues south. The storm surges are barely felt under their feet, and they are well away from the storm; by late in the day on July 19 they are safely below the equator in open, calm sea without a cloud in the sky. O’Hara surveys his fleet with binoculars; every deck within eyesight seems to be nothing but people.

When he gets the call from the Secretary-General, there is no mention of what he did on Ebeye. Rivera gives him only brief warm thanks, the expressed hope that the UN fleet can get the Marshallese disembarked quickly at the refugee bases in the Gulf of Carpentaria—and the unofficial warning that the evacuation fleet will be kept together. A Japanese-Chinese-Indonesian evacuation fleet is tackling the Northern Marianas at the moment; after that Clem should be headed back out of the Western Pacific, but Rivera says, “We have to consider Hurricane Clem to be permanent, and there will be many more places that need evacuation. Your fleet has the experience—and you have gotten the job done.”

That’s the nearest thing to a comment on his actions that O’Hara will ever hear. It’s not until days later that it even occurs to him that there were no XV people anywhere near the operation, and that all the video of it is in UN hands.

They let Louie Tynan christen the “ship” for his expedition to 2026RU; since physically the ship is the old Space Station Constitution, plus several large chunks of the French and Japanese lunar habitats from Moonbase, plus an enormous population of probes, replicators, drones, and robots constructed on the moon—all launched from a variety of points in a variety of ways, with more to come, and slapped together any old way that works—he has a little trouble thinking of it as a “ship,” though with his enhanced ability to construct scenarios into the future, he sees a greater than fiftypercent chance that the word “ship” will eventually come to mean just such a construction.

He gives it very little thought—only the equivalent of a dozen poets debating for a century—before settling on the name that seems to him most expressive of the hopes bound up in the expedition: the Good Luck.

For seventy years, history has been moving away from the individual person and event; this is part of why there is no answer to “who invented the computer?” or “when did the Third Balkan War begin and end?” Thus it is hardly surprising that no one can really say when the Good Luck departs; it isn’t even possible to say when it is “built.” Beacons that will later be incorporated into it were catapulted into high solar orbits as early as July 1, other portions were on their way to various asteroids as early as July 10, and many parts of it will not arrive until the ship is on its way back.

But if a date must be picked, July 20, 2028-fifty-nine years to the day after the first lunar landing—seems as good as any. That is the day, Greenwich Mean Time, on which the Constitution, carrying Louie Tynan himself, reaches Earth escape velocity.

Even in trying to define it that way there is a problem. Louie Tynan is not at all sure that the body that floats, breathing, in his cabin in the Constitution is really “Louie Tynan himself.” Lately it’s been more like a large, complex massively parallel processor which is slow, unreliable, and subject to too much downtime. So much of him is now in the processors on the moon that it might be better to define departure date as the point where he begins to find that Louie-the-ship is talking to, rather than part of, Louie-on-the-moon, and that’s not until the twenty-eighth of July.

But by that time, many other things have happened. Good Luck is to be built as it flies, and the construction process is to supply much of the needed momentum; in effect, the ship will climb out to 51 AU—fifty-one astronomical units, fifty-one times the distance of the Earth from the sun, well beyond the orbit of Pluto—on a stream of its components.

The first step is to get replicators working in richer environments than the moon. Ore is valuable not for what it contains but for what it doesn’t—that is, for being a relatively pure form of the material, with relatively easy to remove waste. Common rock like most of the surface of the moon is made up of too many different things (though any of them might be valuable in isolation) bound too closely together; cognac, Beluga caviar, filet mignon, and Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee are all extremely valuable, but not if they’ve been in the blender together.

Whereas the rocks of the moon are a chemical puree, many of the asteroids are all but pure iron/nickel mix, and others are rich in CHON (carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen—the basic building blocks of life, and for that matter of plastics) and light metals. Thus the asteroids are the natural mining lodes of the solar system, and the great magnetic catapults that Louie has thrown up on the face of the moon have begun firing replicator packages to various likely looking asteroids. A “package” is a tied-together collection of hundreds of small processing units and manipulating units, a propulsion system adequate for a rendezvous, a small thermionic He-3 fusion reactor, and a central processor cortex big enough to hold a crude copy of Louie.

These copies of Louie are not as bright or versatile as the original aboard the Good Luck. On the other hand, they seem to have his weakness for communicating in banter, both with each other and with Louie himself; he begins to refer to them as the “wiseguys.” There are about forty of them as of July 20, and there will be seventy before he’s past Mars. Each “wiseguy” in turn will become his own versatile factory with catapult, and will build his own power array—and will make a couple more wiseguys as well.

It took humanity hundreds of thousands of years to reach the moon, thirty-five years to go back, another decade beyond that to reach Mars and to begin to colonize space… and before the year is out there will be industrial bases all over the solar system, and even now, though no one other than Louie has realized it yet, the robots and replicators have transformed the former Moonbase into one of the largest industrial complexes that has ever existed. The growth rate there is faster than any in history: whereas defense plants during the Second World War, the most nearly comparable case, were thrown up as fast as possible; no matter how many plants were built it didn’t bring another worker into being, and every plant used more power and thus diverted labor from building and staffing more plants. On the moon the power supply keeps growing all by itself, and when “labor” gets short, Louie just makes another factory to make more workers.

Offhand, Louie estimates that Moonbase has become about twice the size, in terms of energy and information bound per hour, as Japan’s OKK Complex—and they spent a while longer building Osaka, Kobe, and Kyoto. Moreover, it’s all his for every practical purpose… where large parts of OKK’s energy and information binding is happening in retail stores, restaurants, garbage collection, XV and TV, hospitals, and so forth, the complex Louie presides over is dedicated only to growing and to getting the mission accomplished. He just about has to be the wealthiest man in the solar system.

Hell, by the time he gets back, if he wants to keep all the gear running full tilt, the settled part of the solar system will consist of the possessions of Louie Tynan, plus debris. It’s not a bad retirement package.

At first, Jesse and Mary Ann aren’t going to go; the plan seems kind of stupid, given that there are easier cities to get to, over roads that are in better shape. But Señor Escobedo, the Mexican government administrador who flies in to present the idea to the people of Tapachula, is patient and persuasive, and appears to know what he is talking about. “Just consider,” he pleads, for the thousandth time. “Where else are you going to go? The rain forest is already near saturation; the streams will fill up quickly, and when they do…. And there is no zipline head near here. And consider, too, how little work there is, and how very little extra housing, in Tuxtla Gutiérrez or in San Cristóbal de las Casas. Those are cities that have not grown much, cities that are not going anywhere.”

Everyone nods, of course—Mexicans are loyal to their towns, and to hear an outsider say that Tapachula is the important, forward-looking town in Chiapas is to give weight and substance to the stranger’s ideas.

Escobedo goes over the arguments again, there in the middle of the Zócalo, with his laser pointer and his big projected maps. All around, people fade in and out of the blocky topiary trees, listening, drifting off to chat with friends, coming back to listen again.

Oaxaca is far away, and they will have to take a hurricane or two on the way, but they can be up above the coast, there will be time to stop and dig in as needed, and most of all, when they get there, they will be genuinely safe; high up in the mountains with good drainage, they will be able to stay put.

He acknowledges that some of the Army, here to keep the town safe from looters, may do a bit of looting themselves. Officers don’t have perfect control, and they are not always perfect either. Yes, if you have a good deal to guard and don’t mind risking your life in the floods that will surely come when bigger storms blow directly inshore here, then you might do well to stay. Of course your property will do you little good when you are dead—let us be blunt in facing the facts—but undoubtedly your heirs will thank you.

When they return from Oaxaca.

He is a natural debater, and he’s funny; these things help Escobedo, so that after a few days, people are no longer saying the scheme is mad, or muttering darkly about a government plan to get them to leave their property unguarded, but instead are beginning to get their applications in for the Oaxaca evacuation, “just in case, you know,” and in a couple more they are beginning to pack. The thing takes on momentum.

Thus on the morning of July 21, Jesse and Mary Ann are hardly surprised at all to find that they are part of the convoy. They’ve both been declared fit for walking—the great convoys will transport the old, sick, and young in buses, others in trucks based on a daily lottery, and most on bicycle, foot, or the occasional burro. There are to be twenty such convoys, each with some thousands of people, from all over the Pacific shore of Chiapas.

The first day is to be deliberately slow of pace; this allows time for motorcycle couriers to scoot back to Tapachula as people suddenly remember things, and it helps everyone get used to the idea. The heat is pretty appalling, but there’s very little dust and the government water trucks seem to be on the job, and with the frequent rests Jesse finds he’s no more than uncomfortable. And the evening camp is fun, in its way, especially since after the announcements around the fire and a great deal of visiting among neighbors, he and Mary Ann have a tent that is small but all theirs—the advantage of adequate cash for mordida. It’s occurring to Jesse that with the tastes he’s developing, if this thing with Mary Ann ends he’s going to have a lot of incentive to get back on the fast track in realization engineering. Once you understand what money can do it gets harder to live without it.

The second day of the trip, on a Saturday, they get a warm morning rainstorm, which makes the road slick and doesn’t seem to cool it off at all. The government people are pushing them a little harder, and the hills are beginning to roll and rise. Jesse’s a little sore in the thighs and calves that night, and Mary Ann has to spread a couple more small bribes around to get pads from the traveling hospital for her blistered feet.

The last few miles were extremely hilly, hot, and humid, and they aren’t exactly looking forward to the next day. It’s too hot and sticky to make love, or even to hold each other, so they fall asleep holding hands across the tent. Dawn comes entirely too early, and the morning thunderstorm holds off just long enough so that everyone is on the road before it drenches them.

The ion rockets that move the Constitution out of low Earth orbit are not the conventional electric thrusters they used for the Mars mission; instead, the power from the moon is used to convert “straight” matter into antimatter, and the antimatter is then reacted with helium-3-II—helium-3 cooled to the point where it becomes superconducting—to create a near-lightspeed exhaust of He-3 nuclei. The tiny pulse of antimatter through the center of a Ping-Pong-ball-sized blob of helium-3-II creates a highly charged plasma and a very brief burst of radio energy; the superconducting coil surrounding the blob acts as an antenna to capture the radio burst and uses the current to induce a magnetic field to compress and accelerate the plasma so much that thermonuclear fusion is still happening thirty meters beyond the nozzle.

From the ground, if there were enough clear sky, they could see that the white, glowing jet out the back of the platform to which Constitution is tied is about two hundred kilometers long; it’s also thinner than the aurora borealis.

It’s not fuel-efficient-but the temperature of the exhaust is half a billion degrees Fahrenheit, and high exhaust temperature means the ship will be fast.

But though it’s the best engine ever devised, and many gigawatts from the power stations on the moon drive it, it will not be enough. On those engines alone, the journey out to 2026RU would take four and a half years. And besides, after about five AU, power transmission from the moon will get problematic. The real travel time, if he used only the engines, would be six or seven years. Rivera, Hardshaw, and their staff don’t think Earth has those years; with thousands of times their processing ability, neither does Louie Tynan.

Really, it was all a question of getting the materials to do what needs doing. To effectively block sunlight from space, the shield that casts the shadow must be low. To use materials at all effectively the shield should be wide and thin. To get the maximum effect, the shield should move slowly enough to cast its shadow on the strategic area of the Pacific for the maximum time.

This in turn dictates that it’s no good just putting a big mirror up in geosynchronous orbit; the shield would have to hold together and stay in place, and no known material is strong enough to permit a shield that big, subject to such tidal stresses as the moon and sun will provide, to hold together. So the shield needs to be at lower altitude… but then it will move too fast, if it orbits, to accomplish anything. Besides, it won’t stay in any orbit at all. The tenuous outer wisps of the Earth’s atmosphere plus the solar wind will be more than enough to bring the shields down in short order.

Thus both Klieg’s balloons, and the scheme Louie is carrying out, depend on using not a single orbited satellite, but many thousands of projectiles. They are planning to take Klieg’s deal—and promise him whatever he insists upon—because there’s at least a decent chance of damping out some of the hurricanes, and because they know that he won’t hold the whip hand forever. Louie will have all the advantages—he doesn’t have to lift anything off the Earth, only to bring it in. And once he has the right materials on hand, that should be easy.

Which brings up the reason for using 2026RU. It is coming in rapidly, by cometary standards, and might have been one of the more spectacular comets of the twenty-first century, in 2047, if it were not needed sooner. It already has a substantial velocity toward the inner solar system, and electromagnetic catapults upon its yet-unmelted surface will have the benefit of the added velocity in sending their packages of ice down to the Earth-moon system. Each package, roughly two million tons of ice in the shape of a Frisbee a mile across and a yard thick, its ice woven in an elaborate internal braid for strength, covered with a millimeter-thick sprayed-on mirroring to keep it from melting, will carry a propulsion and guidance system, and as each approaches Earth, Louie—returned home by then—will take over the guidance system and direct it into a “grazing” approach over the Pacific, so that it will come in almost parallel to the Earth’s surface, descending to a height of less than twenty miles before the braking shockwave trapped in the hollow underside blows the melting ice apart and the fragments boil off.

Each Frisbee will be more than a mile across, and will cast a corresponding shadow, but it won’t be those shadows that defeat Clem, all by themselves. As the giant ice disks whirl down into the stratosphere and evaporate explosively, the water released, in the cold thin air, will be instantly frozen into clouds of ice crystals like the familiar cirrus (or mare’s tail) clouds that often appear on the forward edge of a storm. But these will be two to three times as high up, and there will be many more of them; the layer of ice crystals will be enough to make it dark at the surface, so that over a quite short time, the surface waters of the Pacific will cool enough to stop supporting Clem and Clem’s spawn.

There are of course many sources of ice nearer than the comet—but none that are already moving at such a high velocity in nearly the exact right direction. Moreover, of the other possible sources, Charon and Pluto will be on the wrong side of the sun, from the viewpoint of the Earth, for half of every year, forcing a longer and less efficient orbit, and all the others are deep in the gravity wells of the giant gas planets. Though energy itself is not a problem-the self-replicating industrial plants Louie is building insure that there will be plenty—acceleration is; to escape from Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, or Neptune’s gravitational grip as quickly as necessary would require accelerations at which the ice Frisbees would flow like water, distort, and become unsuited for their entry to Earth’s atmosphere.

But to get to 2026RU will take a long time no matter what, and since exactly what will turn up there and exactly what will need to be done are not at all clear at the incoming comet’s current distance (something over 56 AU), Louie will have to go there himself and improvise. It took Louie some time to invent a scheme that would permit doing it in any reasonable amount of time; even at the best pace he can come up with, he will still not be back until June of 2029, and god only knows what shape the Earth will be in by then.

For once Berlina Jameson is feeling well rested, and given the size of the story she’s putting out, this isn’t much short of a miracle. When Harris Diem and Diogenes Callare offered her their help—even though the first part of the process was bound to trigger some uproar about the U.S. government and Colonel Tynan’s extremely cavalier use of foreign property—she had just figured them for nice, dedicated public servants.

Maybe that was their whole motivation. They might only have known that Klieg was acquiring undue influence both in the UN General Assembly and in the executive offices in Washington. Maybe Rivera and Hardshaw just wanted him ambushed and taken down a few notches.

But with what she’s found since, she doubts they could have been completely unaware of what she was going to find. It took her many hours and not much sleep just to look at all the relevant videotape, listen to all the relevant voice, and search through the relevant records. By the time she had the picture assembled, she at least had the sense to realize that she was too exhausted and would look like hell if she presented it right away, so she took a day off to edit, put fine touches on things, eat, sleep, and indulge herself.

Now, her hair newly done, feeling fresh and scrubbed, she stands in front of the white wall in a hotel room in Richmond (having bribed hell out of everyone to make sure no one comes thumping along the corridor in the next few minutes) and narrates her wrap:

“And so that’s it for this edition of Sniffings. The pattern of power that spreads out from John Klieg and GateTech like the tentacles of an octopus is laid bare for your examination. Influence that penetrates the highest levels of both national and international bodies; ambassadors to the UN who take their orders from Klieg and their salaries from their home countries; Klieg’s deliberate scheme for a monopoly on global launch, and his maneuvering, at a time when the world desperately needs launch facilities, to secure not just his own rightful rewards for providing one, but a complete monopoly by preventing anyone else from doing so.

“And yet this is just the tip of the iceberg. What, we might reasonably ask, is the connection between Klieg and the Siberian government? Just how many connections are there between Klieg’s operation, the notorious Hassan drug-and-mercenary cartel, and elements of the Siberian armed forces that remain close to outlawed and arrested dictator Omar Abdulkashim? Is it not clear that while Klieg milks the UN with one hand, he aids its enemies with the other—and paralyzes his home government to keep it from investigating his activities?

“And if we are facing a global Klieg dictatorship, or Klieg as the gray eminence behind the UN and the big powers… what sort of a program does he have, other than sheer aggrandizement? We have shown you a dozen clips of Klieg talking privately, off the record, in which it becomes clear that he thinks the problem with the great bulk of the world is that it’s not ‘normal,’ or ‘regular,’ or any of a dozen other words that he apparently uses to mean ‘like white middle-class Wisconsin.’ I could show you fifty more. This is a man of limited imagination and tolerance—and of all but unlimited power.”

She signs off, rechecks everything once more, patches in the end piece, and uploads. Time to head south out of the Wy—she has a lot of great quotes from the First Wave refugees, as they call themselves, the people from the Gulf Coast who decided to get out early and are at this point mostly working in construction in Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado. Everyone who can seems to be buying land and putting crisis housing on it for the expected waves of refugees; the First Wave seems remarkably cheerful for refugees.

Some of the Clem 200 series of hurricanes are beginning to pound their way up the coast, and there are rumors about evacuating the Duc. Once she’s headed down to Denver, she phones Di Callare, and he patches her into a three-way conference with Harris Diem. Diem, in particular, seems very pleased.

“I don’t think you know what you’ve done, Ms. Jameson,” he says. “And I have to admit I wasn’t happy about it when you started out. I had always figured that if anything useful was going to get done, it would be because the people who could have gotten in the way didn’t hear about it first. But what you’ve done is created a whole constituency for an intelligent global perspective—and you’ve done such a good job of it that I’m betting on you against Klieg.”

“It’s not really me against Klieg—” she protests, a little feebly because it certainly feels that way, but she doesn’t want to feel that she’s been out to “get” anyone or that she’s on anyone’s side.

“I understand. You think you’re being purely objective. Perhaps from your standpoint you are. Nonetheless, you got him and you got him good, as the boss and I used to say in Idaho. Things like GateTech depend on people respecting the rules even when it’s not to their advantage to do so—which is usually desirable, since it maintains public order. But when somebody is making his entire career out of using the rules to tie every productive project up in knots—well, all I can say is, he chose very intelligently in his location. I very much doubt he will be able to come back to the United States for a while, or to operate anything very effectively by proxy. He’s out of the game—though he’ll still get rich launching his balloons. But in terms of serious power, he’s gone.”

Berlina has been listening to this very seriously, trying to decide whether Diem is flattering her for some future purpose. She decides that she can’t tell, but he’s probably too good at it for her to be able to spot it.

They chat for another moment or two, and then Diem clicks off and she’s left talking to Di Callare. “We’re getting out pretty fast,” he explains. “Lori will get it all packed up and storm-proofed in the next couple of weeks—it looks like the hurricanes coming up the East Coast will be bad, but not the Big One we’re figuring will happen either this season or next.”

“The Big One? I thought that Clem—”

“So far there’s been nothing the size of Clem in the Atlantic. To get to be Clem’s size you’ve got to build up over very hot water for a couple of weeks, the way Clem did, or start with a huge eye on a hot sea the way Clem Two, excuse me, Clem 200, did. And other hurricanes do use up some of the available energy and bind some of the available wind flow. Once Clem 200 got into the Caribbean, we thought we were goners, but luckily it did that pinwheeling stunt with its outflow jets and started up so many eyes that they limited each other’s growth. With luck we’ll merely have four or five very large hurricanes out of this event, counting Clem 200 itself, which has shrunk quite a bit, never recovered the energy it had before it crossed Mexico.”

Berlina shudders. “Still, hurricanes haven’t been that common—”

“No, but they haven’t been uncommon either. And most of these guys will follow the Gulf Stream and the steering currents and stay off the American East Coast. So we’ll see some big storms, loss of property and life, all of that—but not the catastrophe that’s going to happen once you get a hurricane into the eastern Caribbean all by itself. That’s the one that’s going to blow up to Clem size and resist the steering currents enough to tear up the coast.”

Berlina nods at the camera. “I start to see it, I guess. Are the hurricanes we have going to make it across to Europe?”

“They might. The temperature in the North Atlantic falls off fast as you go north, so if they swing up that way they’re dead. But on the right trajectory one of them could slug Europe for sure, and there will be enough of them so that at least one or two will get there—”

There’s a flashing light at the corner of the screen, and each of them says “Hold on” and reaches to take the call off hold; they don’t have time to realize that it is odd for them both to get a call at the same time before they are unexpectedly back into a conference call with Harris Diem.

“Well,” he says, “have you seen or heard?”

Berlina says no as Di shakes his head.

“Congratulations, Ms. Jameson.” His smile is sardonic and doesn’t get up to his eyes. “You’ve made history twice in one day. It looks like the release of Sniffings has triggered Global Riot Two.”

The first Global Riot began in Islamabad and Seattle. No one can be that positive about Global Riot Two.

But Sniffings is almost certainly at the heart of it; at least half of the initial outbreaks of violence are, in one way or another, connected to Berlina Jameson’s exposé of the Klieg organizations, their influence, and their links both to organized crime and to the outlaw Abdulkashim regime.

Quaz, the guy with the attitude, Passionet’s bad boy, with an undeserved reputation for being brainy, is in Oran. He has been walking around in dusty streets all day, absorbing atmosphere, blocking out as best he can the knowledge that tomorrow he will be going directly to the place where he will be permitted to barge in and talk to some critical witnesses. He also ignores the fact that the reason the witnesses both seem very frightened and will tell him whatever he wants is that they were carefully left uninjured by the police in exchange for their cooperation with Passionet detectives. Passionet, lately, has been the net of choice for breaking organized crime in the Third World, as long as it’s reasonably sensational organized crime.

Quaz’s problem is that he’s bright enough to appreciate irony without being quite bright enough to get past it. A couple of times they’ve had to fake technical problems because he hasn’t blocked his knowledge of the next day’s script adequately. He gets too fascinated with how smoothly it all runs, and sometimes much too interested in Passionet’s detectives (who are anonymous gray types, eternally soft-spoken and reserved, the farthest thing that can be imagined from Quaz’s intellectual decadent aging-punk style).

Or, in short, he can never quite manage to remember that to be real enough for the experiencers, it’s got to be kept under control. Nobody wants to see what real detectives do, since nowadays that’s either cornering people and talking to them, or more likely writing lengthy search protocols for datarodents that spread out on the net, looking for the moment when a person, a dollar, an object linked with a crime, touches the great collective brain of capitalism.

It makes for dramatic phrases, and if you intercut five or ten seconds of it now and then along with an overload sense of weariness, you can make people feel like they stayed up all night catching crooks, but watching a person listen to a rambling witness is dull, and watching a person at a keyboard is duller than that. Especially if people see it taking as long as it really does.

Not to Quaz, though, and that’s the problem. Some strange part of the poor idiot’s mind refuses to understand that he is not out here to be a reporter, let alone a detective, himself. You’d think having both cheekbones broken and reshaped, or a surgically flattened stomach, would have given him a clue….

All these thoughts are running through the mind of Dennis Ysabel-Garcia, Passionet’s special bodyguard detailed to Quaz, as he follows Quaz about a hundred feet back, monitoring his mind through a local tap. It’s late in the day, getting dark, and Dennis has been walking around for all this time getting more bored and annoyed, his feet getting sorer and his clothes more caked with dust and sweat. God knows, Quaz is not his first choice of bodies to guard—Rock, or Synthi Venture, are always courteous and stay on the track marked out for them; even the new kid, Surface O’Malley, for all her puppyish enthusiasm, can manage to follow orders.

So it’s an unpleasant shock but no surprise that when gunfire starts up some blocks away, Quaz turns and runs straight for it, despite urgent orders not to from the control office here in Oran. Dennis flings himself after Quaz, around corners into an unscouted alley that is secure only at the near end, down a long block—

The demonstration is in front of the mosque, and seems to have been thrown together by one of the fundamentalist groups that are always ready whenever scandal hits the ruling family, nowadays, anywhere in the Arab world. They were burning pictures of the ambassador to the UN, who had been exposed as on Klieg’s take; they ran head-on into a group of pro-Abdulkashim enthusiasts who had come here to demonstrate against the lies the Western media were spreading about their hero. Afterward no one will quite be sure of how the two groups got into a brawl with each other; the best guess will be that everyone involved assumed that two different demonstrations in the same place were enough cause for a fight.

“The first shots were fired by the first cop on the scene. I think he shot into the air, hoping to get people’s attention. Then somebody shot him. Now half of them are breaking and running to get away from the scene and the other half are realizing that the looting’s always best at the start of a riot,” the controller whispers in Dennis’s mind. “What does that pretty fool think he’s doing? We keep telling him to break off and turn back.”

This is as much as Dennis can get speed-talked into his head as he rushes after Quaz, who with his typical sense of immunity from all harm wants to run up and ask the two sides what the fight is about. Nobody in his corner of the action seems to speak English, so he begins to speak loudly and slowly and gesture frantically.

Dennis has crossed most of the twilit square in front of the mosque when somebody shoots Quaz low in the gut, with a Self Defender, a twenty-dollar disposable hypervelocity derringer like you can buy at any 7-Eleven in the States. Though the slug is tiny—a bit of depleted uranium about the size of the tip of an ordinary sewing needle—it hits with ten times the foot-poundage of an old-style .357 Magnum round, and once it goes in it tumbles, so that aside from the exit hole, it makes a shock wave so big in his body cavity that Quaz’s guts erupt through his back around his spinal column.

During the six agonizing minutes it takes Quaz to die, lying on his back crushing his own bleeding intestines into the dirty street, more than sixty million experiencers worldwide tune in to Passionet; a hundred thousand channelspotters see to that. Through the haze of pain they catch the smell of smoke, glimpses of running feet, sounds of gunfire (most of it from Dennis trying to keep the riot off of Quaz—he himself dies, cut down by machine-gun fire, just an instant before Quaz, so that the last thing the experiencers see from Oran is Dennis Ysabel-Garcia pitching forward over Quaz).

Before Quaz is dead, there are thirty more riots in the cities of the world. Passionet jumps to Surface O’Malley, tells her they want to tell her some bad news, and asks her to react by staggering out into the streets blindly.

Surface points out that she’s in Bangkok, at the Orient, and that the rioting is taking on a distinctly anti-foreign character, not surprisingly since the Thai ambassador too turns out to have been subverted by the Klieg organization, and a large Siberian spy ring was broken that week. “I’m not a chicken,” she says, “and I’d like to see my career take off and all, but I’ll be damned if I’m going out in that. I’m a redhead, for god’s sake. If the mob doesn’t get me the soldiers will.”

They offer her a lot more, but she won’t take it. The bosses at Passionet are swearing, beating desks with fists, yelling into each other’s face about who gave her a break, but she’s threatening to jack out entirely until they call her and tell her there’s an evacuation staticopter on the way. The truth is right now they need her more than she needs them—the riots in Bangkok are the best they have anyone on-site for, and they need feed from her, and it had better not contain any text thoughts about Passionet needlessly risking her life or screwing her over.

The trouble is that whoever says that is going to be the weasel that capitulated to the bitch, next week when they assess the results and someone asks why she wasn’t out there dodging rocks, getting chased up alleys, and just maybe please-oh-god-of-profits getting gang-raped.

Worse yet, her bodyguards are agreeing with her. They must have gotten shaken up by Ysabel-Garcia’s death, though surely they must have known all along that things like that come with the job and that’s why they are paid so much.

While they argue, Surface (whose real name is Leslie) and Fred and Saul, the two bodyguards whom she’s gradually become friends with, are seeing what they can from the window. That’s freaking the controller and editor out at the control station, across town where the expressway crosses Klong San Sab, because not only is she letting her bodyguards address her as “Les,” she’s looking right at them every now and then, and they aren’t supposed to exist. The editor there is having to fake in all kinds of noise, scramble, feedback, and snow to cover all the times she does that, and even then he’s painfully aware that he can’t really get Fred and Saul out of the picture—they tend to show up in her thoughts and the most he can do is blur them out.

The editor wishes Rock were here, and Rock will be in a little bit—he’s coming in with the international rescue mission, riding a whistler with Japanese marines. The editor is wishing for just one really professional reporter who understands the job and would get into it. Synthi Venture the way she used to be, before she cracked up in Point Barrow, would be wonderful right now. Global Riot Two is shaping up to be bigger and better than its predecessor, and here they are stuck with—

Hold it. They zoom in. Screw the i.d., what Surface/Leslie and her bodyguards are seeing is too interesting to blur it out just to hide what everyone knows anyway. They can always claim it’s “uncensored footage,” whatever footage means when you’re talking about a recorded XV wedge.

Leslie, Fred, and Saul had been watching the crowd down by the Chinatown waterfront, across the Chao Phraya River from the Orient. Now it looks like a battle developing on the adjoining Phra Pinklao Bridge to the south of them; they don’t quite have the right angle for it, but through her binoculars Leslie—Surface, dammit! We pay you for your name to be Surface!—

Leslie gets part of it in focus, just as gunfire begins to rip back and forth across the bridge and bodies fall everywhere. “Outstanding,” the editor whispers.

She figures it out, and he captures the “Eureka!” moment—the struggling mob on the Chinatown waterfront had been Thais, attacking Indian and Chinese shops; the Indians, Bangalas, Pakistanis, and Chinese seem to have gotten together enough to mount a counterattack, and they are fighting their way across the bridge into the downtown. “Every little merchant over there probably has a couple of full auto weapons, after eighty years of war around here,” Fred comments. “They just had to get organized.”

“There are plenty of guns in Thai hands too,” Leslie says. “Chinatown’s fighting because it’s their lives, homes, and families, and by now because they’re pretty pissed off. Holy shit.”

The binoculars fly back onto faces, and looking through Leslie’s eyes, the editor sees that the crowd is parting as Thai Army tanks roll through. He gets a nice heavy sigh of relief from Surface, something that’s just a little overdramatized, almost as if she were going to cooperate.

The struggle passes south of them, and Leslie/Surface and the bodyguards rush for windows on that side of the building, pounding down corridors to find a public window that looks out toward the National Gallery.

The tanks pushing through from the Chinatown side were in a hurry for a reason. The National Museum is in flames; five thousand years of magnificent art are being lost before Leslie’s horrified eyes. As she watches, unable to look away, she realizes that the mobs around the museum are all in coverall uniforms—they are the vast factory labor force that normally sweats out twelve-hour days in the huge European, Japanese, and American plants, their minds pacified by looped tapes of XV porn, induced pain blockers keeping them from noticing soreness or tiredness till they unplug for the day, blissed out and uncomplaining as the computers guide their hands. Her heart sinks; what’s burning is theirs, it’s their birthright, the proudest expression of the Thai nation—

These people may not even know they’re Thai. They spend their lives dreaming away in the Anthill, the mile-high concrete-block dormitory built into the Indraphitak/Toksin/Klong Samray triangle south of the city, and what they have dreamed of is the wealth, the glitter, the excitement they could look down on from their windows above the clouds.

Her binoculars zoom in on a tank as it turns its machine guns on the mob, clearing a path for the oncoming fire engines. A hundred people die as she watches, and it is all for nothing—the roof is caving in on the old former palace that is the center of the museum. Nothing will save it now.

The officer standing beside the tank looks familiar, and she realizes he is Major Srimuang, who guided her around her first day here; she clicks the binoculars to zoom autofocus, and sees that he is weeping, though whether at the scattered corpses in coveralls or the blazing museum, she can’t tell. She recalls him as a cultured, intelligent man, and it was he who told her about the human robots of the factories; perhaps he weeps for the deaths, for the destruction of the art, and for the horror that a five-thousand-year tradition should be destroyed by a mob of people to whom it ought to belong and who never had a chance to know it.

He’s breathing hard and beginning to thump the side of the tank; then he’s talking into his radio, giving some order or other. Moments later, loudspeakers on all the tanks are crackling, talking to the crowd; it seems the major is addressing them directly. As he speaks, he wipes his eyes once, stands tall, and begins to speak firmly.

“Can you get me a translation of that?” she asks the controller.

“We’re working on—fuck, Leslie, get out of there, he’s telling them they’ve destroyed their heritage, that the museum is full of Thai things, and now he wants them to—”

But the three of them have already seen what is happening and are rushing back down the corridor. The main guns on the tanks are elevating to take aim at the Orient Hotel.

The three of them are most of the way to the next wing when the first shells tear into the building behind them; all three go sprawling, and Leslie has the deeply annoyed thought that she’s having a hell of a time running with all this extra meat hanging on her chest. The feeling is so deep and passionate that the editor leaves it in, along with the controller’s calling her Leslie.

“Screw it, this is great XV, the best we’ve ever worked on,” the controller mutters.

“Yeah, we’ll get names and roles straight later, for the re-releases.”

In the Orient Hotel, Leslie and her guards get to their feet and scramble away from the burning, crumbling south-facing wing of the hotel. “The last we knew, the internationals weren’t far off,” Fred shouts. “Let’s try to get to the interior parking lot, maybe we can get picked up—”

There’s another roar from another volley of the tank main guns, and the building shudders as the facade on that wing goes down. Holding each other’s hands, the three rush down the stairs toward the exit to the parking lot. A Thai hotel employee jumps out at them, brandishing a heavy iron curtain rod, and Saul guns him down without stopping to find out what he was after.

As they find the door to the parking lot, they hear a blessed sound—the high-pitched scream of staticopters and the whump-shrikk-thud! of the antitank missiles they’re firing. Later Leslie will learn that with Japanese thoroughness, they bagged all the Thai tanks, plus all the fire engines trying to save the National Museum, plus both the still-standing wings of the museum.

For right now, though, they’re just overjoyed to see Rock leaning out of the side door of the teardrop-shaped fuselage, and in a few seconds they’re aboard, tumbling to safety inside. During a brief get-organized interlude of not being linked through, Rock hugs her and kisses both the men on the cheeks—“Thought we’d lost the whole cute trio of you,” he says. “You’ve sure been putting on a show, guys.”

It’s only then that Leslie realizes how much of her contract and basic protocols she’s been violating, but she has only a minute or so to think she’s going to be fired before they’re congratulating her on creating a whole new genre—live behind-the-scenes XV. The ratings have soared to astronomical, and from now on she’s supposed to fall out of the Surface role and into being Leslie on cue, when asked to.

Too many good old boys identify with Rock, though—so he’s not going to be called upon to be David. Keeping it carefully below registerable level, Leslie thinks to herself that it’s their loss.

Part of Louie’s problem is that big as the job is physically, he is so much bigger than it is mentally. So he has more time, perhaps, than would be optimal, to look at the mission and the consequences of failure, if that happens.

Some of the meteorological models he’s been running are suggesting that Antarctica will warm particularly fast because it normally reflects so much heat back into space, and the methane “window” closing over it will trap correspondingly more heat; if that should prove true, then all sorts of strange consequences may follow, as immense quantities of fresh water run off the ancient glaciers and the Earth beneath is released from more of its burden.

Nothing for it, though… he can only go as fast as he can climb the “stalk,” and he can only climb the stalk once it’s there. The stalk is what he’s been calling the stream of added components and material that the catapults on the moon and in the asteroids will be sending up behind him.

As you lengthen an electromagnetic catapult, the velocity it imparts to the packages it sends increases proportionately; all the catapults will be continuously lengthening, so that packages will fly off them faster and faster. As each package overtakes the Good Luck, it will pass through the six-mile-long funnel of concentric rings, and magnetic braking will be applied to the package. As the package loses momentum, the Good Luck will gain it; the package will continue on, still going faster than the Good Luck, but considerably slowed, and the ship will have accelerated.

Once beyond the ship, the package itself will unfurl its own magnetic funnel; the next package will pass not only through the ship, but through the package ahead of it, boosting each of them before assuming the lead.

As each successive package takes over the lead in this game of leapfrog, it will be going more slowly, having given up more and more of its momentum to the ship and the packages behind it as the train through which it must pass lengthens. Meanwhile the rear of the train will be going faster and faster.

Finally the point will be reached where the ship begins to overtake the packages ahead of it, and as it does it will shove them back hard behind it. This will not be enough to reverse their direction—they will continue on outward—but it will slow them a great deal.

But as the ship climbs into the lead, the packages behind it, in turn, will again be accelerated and driven forward by more packages coming in. By the time the ship is at the head of the column, all the packages behind it will be moving faster than it is, ready to pass through and begin the process over again—with the whole train now moving faster.

Now, as packages pass and repass through each other’s coils, they fold to go through the ones ahead of them and unfold to catch the ones behind them, like great pulsing tulips chasing each other backward through space.

With time, as more packages arrive, the train gets longer, and the back end, launched by bigger and bigger catapults, faster.

As the train grows into the “stalk” up which Good Luck must climb, the front end of the train moves most slowly, the rear most quickly, and as components advance from rear to front, they gain velocity. Thus the train as a whole goes faster and faster.

Eventually Good Luck will slow some packages to match velocities, devour the parts of the package it can use, and expel the rest as reaction mass, hurling it back down the train to the following packages, each of which will also thrust against the used-up husk in the same way.

In this way, Louie will gain both velocity and processors—he will get smarter as he gets faster. He should reach 2026RU by Christmas, have whatever he needs set up by January, and be back on his way in early February, with about fifty times his present processing capability (which is already about 8000 human brain-years per day).

Before Louie has even reached the icy ball of 2026RU, Clem will have finished with the Northern Hemisphere. By the time Louie returns and the first Frisbees begin to arrive behind him, the Southern Hemisphere will have endured considerably worse superstorms, because there are fewer and smaller landmasses there to interrupt them.

Louie’s guess, based on just over a trillion model runs, is that in the Southern Hemisphere the storms will continually circle the equator between 0 and 32 degrees latitude, generally moving southward and westward but varying it enough to avoid moving out of existence, spawning fresh storms regularly.

With good luck, he will arrive back just as the last storms in the Southern Hemisphere are blowing out, and as next year’s “Clem” is starting in the Northern Hemisphere.

With good luck, there will be some civilization left to save, and if not there will still be many millions of people alive, and some of them will have radios or televisions, and the data networks will still exist in many places.

With good luck, if there’s not a civilization, Louie will be able to start a new one after he stops the storms.

He’s got his doubts. Global Riot Two is in its fourth day and still growing. There have now been riot-related deaths in every city with a population of more than 500,000, worldwide. Troops have staged wholesale massacres of civilian looters in Berlin, Tokyo, Moscow, Caracas, Montevideo, Riyadh, Bujumbura, Katsina… the list goes on and on and on.

Nobody even recalls the news published in Sniffings that started all this; just as the tropical depression that started Clem is long since gone, so are the causes of the riot. Clem continues to run because he’s a hurricane and there’s more warm water; Global Riot Two keeps running because it’s a riot and there’s more looting and burning to be done.

If Global Riot Two were a war, it would already be the sixth bloodiest in the twenty-first century—still nothing compared to what the twentieth century was able to do, but give it time, give it time….

He must not let it have one second more than can be helped, Louie thinks. Right now speed is everything.

He is the fastest-moving human being there has ever been, right now; he is gaining speed all the time—and he has such a long way to go.

The rioting hasn’t been bad in Novokuznetsk, or so they assure Klieg, but that’s just compared to what it is everywhere else. With tens of thousands dying worldwide daily, a little martial law, a little looting, some occasional sniping seems like getting off easily.

Certainly he’s glad to have Glinda and Derry here, away from the much worse situation in the States.

John Klieg has always regarded himself as a practical philosopher, and the cornerstone of his practical philosophy has always been that most people are idiots when it comes to understanding how business works, what it does, and what it can and cannot do. What they constantly lose sight of is that business works by making money move from place to place, that what it does is keep the world on a reasonable, sensible course because business people are reasonable and sensible, and that’s that. It can make some people rich and give jobs to most of the rest. It can’t make the world into some kind of pie-in-the-sky paradise where everything works out just like in the movies and people get just what they deserve.

If business did make the world work like the movies, then the movie business would shut down. And Klieg loves movies, and he has a lot of friends who put money in them.

What really has him disgruntled, he realizes, is that here he had the opportunity not just of the century, but maybe of the millennium, and suddenly in the middle they change all the rules. Just like those government bastards. Hell, if private enterprise had been allowed to open up space in the first place, instead of jacking around with the government, there’d have been million-dollar houses all the way from Orlando to the Space Coast before they ever got the first satellite up, and by now there’d be six or seven names that meant space the way Rockefeller means oil, Ford means cars, and Hughes means airplanes. Instead, it was always this goofy stop-start thing, driven by big drives to go noplace in particular, with nobody really in control of it and no bank or CFO anywhere to keep the keel even.

So the world finally gets a chance for a fully rational space program, and one lousy reporter….

He’s so angry he can’t quite speak, he realizes. You’d think that Jameson bitch, being in business for herself, relying as she does on the mostly private net, would have some appreciation for his position. And she had seemed to, back when she was helping him shut down those thieving socialist pirates and that crazed astronaut….

But they didn’t get shut down, now did they, and she wasn’t much help, was she? The big thing she did was snoop into his relations with every friend he had in government everywhere. His contacts in Tokyo, Paris, New York, and Brussels are pessimistic about getting any of the relevant governments to complain, let alone really make a case out of it. Hardshaw and Rivera are giving everyone a good cut of the deal, and there you have it.

Well, after all, he philosophizes, just try starting your own post office if you think it’s ever any different. He’ll still get a year or so of his launch monopoly, and by god he’ll charge what he likes for it.

He’s looking forward to his meeting with Hassan this afternoon. One thing old Karl Marx was right about, the bourgeoisie really is the international class; Hassan’s gotten to be one of Klieg’s best friends in the world, because say what you will about the businesses he’s in (and what’s wrong with them, really, except that he’s selling something people want on one end, and competing with governments in providing soldiers on the other?), Hassan’s got a head for business all the way through.

Klieg still has a few minutes, so he goes into the back chambers to say hi to Glinda and Derry. Derry’s been glued to XV since Global Riot Two started—and when are they going to arrest that damned Jameson and try her for that? Especially since there must be millions of kids jacking in to watch the riots, but not closely supervised like Derry is, so that they’re not just riding along with cops and fire crews and watching responsible people cope with the disaster, but experiencing looting and rape… what kind of goofy world is it that makes that available to kids, anyway? And why the hell isn’t Berlina Jameson in jail someplace, or better yet slated for a short trial and a short rope, considering how many people are dead because of her?

He realizes he’s walked in on his family-to-be still seething with rage, and that’s not a good thing to do. He lets out a long exhale and says, “I just came in to say hi. Sorry to come in in such a state—it’s nobody’s fault here.”

Glinda smiles at him and says, “John, don’t you dare apologize. What they’re putting you through would try the patience of a saint.”

Derry winks at him and gives him the old fist-up power salute. It makes him feel like a hero.

He hugs them both and goes down to catch the cab for his meeting with Hassan. He’s meeting his partner at the Hole-in-Corner, their usual little restaurant where they can get a back room to themselves. He and Hassan always assume that the secret police are listening to everything there, which is why they use the place for meetings—the worst thing that could happen right now would be for the secret police to think that the partners were holding out on them.

At the Hole-in-Corner, the silent, withered old headwaiter guides Klieg back through the muffling tapestries and hangings to the back room. Hassan starts as Klieg enters. Klieg’s first thought is, I’ve never seen him so nervous. He’s like a four-year-old in a doctor’s waiting room.

“There are so many rumors now that no one can tell what will happen,” he says, scratching his right wrist with his left hand. “So many of our people are being arrested abroad, so many organizations suddenly folding up, it’s not even possible to tell which pieces are still on the board. I must tell you, Mr. Klieg, my friend, I am worried. If things should overturn suddenly, we might be caught in very bad positions.”

“That’s always the risk you run,” Klieg says, firmly, because that phrase has never failed to reassure him.

Hassan nods, sighs, and says, “Oh, I know and I quite agree. But there is a difference nonetheless. The risk where you come from is merely the risk of going broke. Here it can be more substantial and more personal.”

Involuntarily Klieg shudders; he doesn’t think they would dare to touch him, let alone Glinda or Derry, but one can never be sure, and certainly Hassan has no such protection.

The real key in all of this is Abdulkashim. They got involved with him in the first place because key elements of the armed forces were still loyal to him, and until he decided that the all-weather space launch program would go forward even if he returned to power, they were a powerful passive roadblock.

Since Abdulkashim has endorsed them, they’ve been getting a lot of unexpected help, but how long that will continue is anyone’s guess. Right now the government is made up of anti-Abdulkashim nationalists, the only possibility acceptable to the UN, but there are half a dozen factions, unable to govern and unable not to reach for power, moving and squabbling in the wings.

Hassan talks much of these things as they sip fruit juices and ice water. “If we must be sent to our respective paradises, my friend, let us go with clean kidneys,” he says as they take yet another bathroom break, each of them going to the men’s room in turn under the watchful eyes of Hassan’s bodyguards. Klieg refrains from wondering whether the bodyguards watch him in the rest room to protect him or to make sure he isn’t smuggling a weapon in somehow. Realistically, probably both.

After all, he thinks as he settles onto the commode, when you come right down to it, it’s just six more days. Then he launches the first test shot, and once that works, since it’s the only thing that may abate Clem’s fury, nobody’s going to allow GateTech launches to be hassled. They’ll be perfectly safe in a few days.

There’s a sharp crack outside, and he has just enough time to know that it’s a gunshot before the door bursts open; he’s yanking his pants up but not fast enough as two big men shove the flimsy stall door aside and grab him by the armpits.

It happens so abruptly that he isn’t even able to formulate words before they are dragging him forcibly out. They don’t even give him a chance to button his pants or fasten his belt, and he struggles ridiculously with his pants catching his feet.

As he’s yanked through the restaurant and out the back door, he catches glimpses of two of Hassan’s bodyguards lying dead in the hallways, and the lumpy bundle wrapped in a tablecloth, being carried out by two flunkies, can only be Hassan himself.

They don’t seem to speak English, or care very much what he tries to say in Russian, Yakut, or Buryat. He is heaved into the back of a van and manages, at last, to yank his pants up, though between fear and surprise he’s made quite a mess. Just now, though, a ruined thousand-dollar suit is no big deal at all.

He’s been in the cell four hours by the time anyone comes to talk to him, and during that time he’s heard the screams and sobs of a young girl in the next cell as the guards raped her. It wasn’t Derry—the girl was screaming in Yakut—but Klieg has no doubt the intention was to remind him that it could be.

There are times when you just cut whatever deal you can. When they finally do talk to him, they explain that this is a coup by people loyal to Abdulkashim, who is going to try to break out of the pen in Stockholm, and that they want to make it absolutely clear to him that his launching facilities have been nationalized.

Any successful businessman has to expect this from government. He promises to be a good, cooperative, useful prisoner, as many times as they want him to promise, and then they let him see the very frightened Glinda and Derry, and after some more threats they let Klieg and his girls go.

He has been in this part of the world for a while now, and it has gotten into him. Even as he holds his two girls, and reassures them, part of him is thinking, now, that the humiliation, and the threat to his family, and most of all the death of his friend and partner will all be paid back. A few months ago he wouldn’t have had the foggiest idea how to begin to take such revenge. But now, when the new government releases them, late that night, and the three return to their apartment, he takes a very long hot shower to get rid of the stench of dry shit that hangs on him, and as he scrubs he thinks about just how to get all this fixed up right.

He might have been a little shocked at the mixture of inventiveness and cruelty in his thoughts before he came out here. Now, he enjoys it even more than he enjoys getting clean.

The daughter hurricane designated “Clem 114” forms when an outflow jet of Clem’s shifts abruptly northward at a point just west of Minami Tori. By now the news media aren’t even bothering to explain how the high pressure area formed by two outflow jets will push two superhurricanes apart; they merely note that Clem 114 is headed southwest, into much warmer water, where it is likely to grow as big as its parent within days.

Manuel Tagbilaran doesn’t even know the number on the hurricane coming in; it seems utterly irrelevant compared with the task at hand, which is getting this last group of passengers who just got off the Luzon ferry all the way down the island of Samar to Tacloban.

Manuel is not immediately sure why he’s doing it. He lives by himself, now that the kids are grown and his wife is dead, on a little farm up on the west slopes of the mountains that run down the “spine” of Samar; he sometimes explains to tourist visitors that Samar is shaped like a roadkilled rabbit lying on its left side, with its broken spine bent inward in the middle, and that the road weaves around the spine.

At least he will be on the slopes of the mountains away from the winds. And this is a fool’s errand anyway, for after meeting the ferry from Luzon, he normally takes them all the way to Tacloban, over on Leyte to the south, himself. There is no way the ferry will be running, not even that idiot Ramon—god, Manuel hopes Ramon is all right; they’ve known each other since they both started on this route, what, back in ’96? Thirty some years at least.

The wind is still rising and it’s getting darker, though it’s mid-day. Every so often there will be a heavy gust of driving rain that makes the whole bus, a Mitsui ’12 IntelliTracker, shudder and groan. He keeps his hands on the controls and keeps talking to the bus, as if something with firmware this crude could have morale that would really benefit from being talked to.

Just maybe, Manuel thinks, it has something to do with his own morale, or that of the passengers.

Normally a hundred kilometers roll by pretty fast—now that the road is paved all the way, and with the IntelliTracker’s angle-bounce radars, they can roar along at about 140 km/hr. But they’ve been on the road two hours now, and they’re not one-third of the way.

At least his passengers are quiet enough. In the back there are a couple of Chinese insurance agents, trying to make it home after a week of peddling homeowner’s and term life up in the capital, down to the little Chinese suburbs that have sprung up in Leyte. Probably all they’re worried about is whether they’ll get in late and be too tired for tennis and golf tomorrow. There’s also an older lady and her daughter, the daughter clearly running to fat and turning middle-aged, probably the plain one they kept back to tend Mama.

Manuel hates to see that; it was the job his favorite sister got stuck with, and she ended up a sour, bitter old lady, before finally lurching resentfully into the grave only three years after Mama.

The rest of the crowd is a couple of kids from the high school at Ormoc, the boy a slender, handsome young devil (god, the life Manuel could have led with looks like those! And the life that kid probably is living!) and the girl baby-faced and busty, a cuddly little thing; ostensibly they were visiting the university in Manila, though if Manuel knows what’s what, those kids’ parents probably had no idea that the two of them were taking off at the same time to the same place.

They come around a bend, still weaving cautiously along the highway north of Calbayog. He can’t see a damned thing by the roadside; for the last ten minutes there have been streams where there never were before, cutting right through the broken pavement in front of him, and once the IntelliTracker had to lower its treads and climb up and around the broken roadbed. He’s lost count of the number of fallen trees they’ve broken their way through and over.

This is going to be one great story for the grandkids, who are undoubtedly huddling in the storm cellars that he and his sons and sons-in-law dug at all the family farms along the road.

They lurch to a halt suddenly, and the IntelliTracker says, “Cannot identify roadbed.”

Manuel peers out through the windshield, which seems to have an inch of running water on it. “Me either, pal. Can we get there on inertial and radar?”

There’s a long pause, and the IntelliTracker finally says “Reports up ahead show sea levels are at record lows around Catbalogan. Authorities are advising—”

“Oh, hell,” Manuel says. Anyone in the Philippines knows that a low sea level means the sea will be back, later, and generally fast and strong. Clearly this monster hurricane the yanqui scientists have made (Manuel isn’t sure how but it stands to reason that the yanquis are behind it) is producing storm surges just as big as they were claiming, and probably its eye will be coming in up to the north, maybe even right through Manila itself.

The IntelliTracker waits a while, and then, poor idiot that it is, unable to interpret his tone, it says to him, “Inadvisable to carry passengers along that route in present conditions. Risk of serious accident seventeen per cent.”

It’s a lot higher than that, Manuel thinks. He looks over his six passengers; they all look drawn and frightened, and the way he feels himself, he’s just as glad to have the bus to worry about, because if he didn’t he’d be scared out of his mind.

“Well, as a temporary refuge, can we make it to the farm?”

“Which farm?” the stupid bus asks him.

“IntelliTracker—identify as base primary—close IntelliTracker,” Manuel answers, putting it in the crude communications language that came with the IntelliTracker. The bus has only a limited ability to understand natural language, so it really does clarify things, but Manuel also has a gut feeling that the IntelliTracker, somehow or other, will feel just a little insulted when he resorts to it, the way he feels when Korean sailors out of Subic Bay or American retirees in Manila speak to him in pidgin.

The IntelliTracker considers and then answers in its flat mechanical voice. “Chance of success is high. Some risk of subsequent trespassing charges.”

Manuel shrugs eloquently; why buy insurance for it if they aren’t going to haul you into court every so often? “Divert and execute,” he says, and they turn off the road and begin to climb the hillside.

“I’m taking you all home with me,” he explains to his passengers. “There’s no ferry right now, and my farm is on high ground. If you need to call home, there’s a working phone in the back of the bus.”

Three hours later, around the time for sunset but it’s much too dark to tell, they are on the one-lane macadam track that winds up past his farm, having cut through half a dozen fields—not that, after this hurricane rips through, anyone is going to notice what the bus did. Twice they’ve had to take half-hour detours around big areas of fallen trees and once a mudslide forced them to backtrack. By common consent, the passengers are now all sitting up close to him; Manuel doesn’t care, this is sort of a chance to show off.

When the lightning hits close, at first he laughs it off—“Don’t jump, people, if it had hit us we wouldn’t have heard it”—but then he feels the IntelliTracker slowing to a stop. A quick look at the board shows that the brain has gone dead on him; probably a couple of two-peso parts have cooked somewhere, normally he’d just phone for a recovery whistler, one of those little delivery robots, to come out with a parts basket, and he’d be rolling again in an hour at worst, but right now, any spare parts might as well be on the moon for all the good they do him.

Well, there’s an obvious solution, and he can hardly stay here—already water is beginning to swirl around the tires. If he sits here, in half an hour it will erode the shoulder around the left tires, leaving them stuck on this empty stretch of road. He flips it over to full manual control—it’s a relief to find out that that still works, and that he still seems to know what to do, even though it’s been at least twenty years since he’s had to.

The next three hours are more interesting than anything he’s done in a long while; it’s a lot like back when he was learning from his old man. The old man had learned on an old GM schoolbus that had no more controls than the wheel, brake, gas, shift, and clutch; but Manuel doesn’t think the old man could have done better than this, skittering down the mountainside, occasionally even getting up enough speed so that you feel a little g toward the outside of a turn. He can tell, though he hasn’t time to look behind him, that his passengers are trying not to show him how frightened they are.

Nothing to it, really. Anyone could do this; in the old days, they used to do it all the time. Of course, Manuel is putting a little more style and flare into it.

Still, he’s never been quite so glad to pull into the front yard of his house before. And if he had known that thanks to Clem 114, the young couple will be settling just over the hill, the Chinese insurance agents will have to stay here for a whole season as not-quite-necessary field hands until their families get out of refugee camps less than a hundred kilometers away—or that after burying Mama for her, he will be marrying that plump daughter and starting another family at his age—well, he might not have done anything differently, except perhaps worn his best shirt and taken a few corners a little tighter. A man likes to make an impression on his friends, and he’s going to be telling this story—with his six passengers as his witnesses—for a long, long time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The sergeant asks nothing, turns, and is gone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yep, I’m an engineer, remember?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Your public affairs voice is showing.”

“Well, I’m in public affairs whether I want to be or not.” She presses in close against him, and despite the heat he drops an arm around her shoulders and lets her small, warm body snug up into his armpit. “You know the basic thing about global riots, that you can get whatever that contagious ‘riot spirit’ is, right through the XV transmission? And of course because it’s dramatic and visceral and emotionally loaded, it’s really popular and people tend to watch it a lot.”

“So what does it have to do with the president of Passionet calling you up?”

“A lot. This morning he was awakened, very rudely, by a group of Marines who tore his house apart, cavity-searched his family, and ‘accidentally’ destroyed half his art collection. He got off lightly—they stopped a zipline right out in the middle of nowhere carrying three of his execs, took them off in handcuffs naked so that everyone could see them.

“When lawyers showed up to bail them out, they found out martial law had been declared around that courtroom, and they jailed the lawyers. And the Army was holding the Passionet library of XV recordings, announcing that they couldn’t be responsible for maintaining it and if lots of it got erased it would just be too bad. And they also sort of suggested that since a lot of it involves violence and sex in one form or another, they might just decide to review it for ‘pornography’, not let Passionet have access while they’re spending several months doing that, and then make a lot of arrests based on the evidence, using the Diem Act.”

“Jesus. I thought that was just to cover deathpom for hire.”

“What it says is you can’t distribute murder and torture experiences to people who are primarily buying them for pleasure. It’s been interpreted narrowly up till now, to just cover raping, killing, and torturing people and distributing wedges of that, but nothing says it always has to be. Theoretically, any time one of us gets killed or hurt and the ratings go up because weird people are getting off on it, Passionet could be prosecuted. And for aggravated cases they can actually give the death penalty to corporate officers and major stockholders as well as to the people that made the wedges directly. Sort of like the Nuremberg principles—‘I vas only follovink orders’ is not an excuse.”

“Jesus! Is all that constitutional?”

“Of course not. But Hardshaw got to the Supreme Court way ahead of Passionet, and the court refuses to hear anything about it; they’re calling it a ‘paramount national emergency,’ like back when Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, or some of the secrecy stuff during the Cold War. Which boils down to lawyer-talk for ‘Better do what we say.’ And all of that was really just a demonstration of force, a little something to remind Llewellyn of how rough they could play if they wanted to, so that he’d understand that he’d better cooperate.”

“I suppose it got that idea across, anyway. What did they want him to do?”

“Not just him, but every XV net they can find. It’s an order: nothing to enhance Global Riot Two is going to go out over the nets. Nothing at all. Instead, what we’re going to do is put out all kinds of stuff about humanity banding together, about courage and hope and mutual help and all that. The kind of positive news that politicians have always wanted anyway.”

“Jesus God, Mary Ann. I see what you mean. I suppose you don’t really have any choice—it doesn’t sound like you want to fuck around with these guys. They could probably do just about anything it occurred to them to do to you.”

She sighs, and it’s not exactly a sad noise like he might have expected, but rather impatient, as if she thought he should already understand whatever it is that she is getting at. She takes his arm, already a bit warm and sticky from being draped over her shoulders in the baking heat of southern Mexico’s late July, and pulls his hand forward, kissing it tenderly again. He realizes that in her way she’s treating him like her little boy, and he both resents and enjoys it; he swallows hard and decides that he will make himself listen, really listen, to her, because he’s so painfully aware of how much more she knows than he does.

“I feel like your big sister, all of a sudden,” she says, “that is, your big sister who enjoys molesting you. Jesse, the government is forcing Passionet but they aren’t forcing me. I want to do this; it’s not a matter of ‘cooperating.’ I’m with them. If I see anyone trying to evade the censorship, I’ll turn him in.” She seems to hold her breath for a long moment. When he just keeps listening, she goes on. “I guess nothing cures you of romance as much as having a romantic job. Jesse, news for the masses, whether it’s XV or all the way back to the old newspapers, is entertainment. People don’t follow the news to stay informed, no matter what they tell you in school, they watch or experience to be entertained. If it were like they teach in school, they’d put the congressional budget, scientific research, and bios of every important bureaucrat in the opening slot, and they’d do special editions for the Nobel Prizes and the World Health Organization’s annual report. That’s not what it’s about. They cover crime, sports, famous people having sex, funny animal stories, what it’s like to stay in an expensive hotel in a resort area. Because that’s what’s interesting and fun and entertaining.

“It wouldn’t matter so much except that people’s lives are so dull they believe their entertainment—and for a hundred years we’ve been telling them that the world is very dangerous, that there are violent thugs everywhere, war is constantly imminent, sex is their most important need, all that crap.

“Well, shit, Jesse, if you were a shrink and you had a patient who only wanted to talk about violence, extravagance, cruelty, and his sexual fantasies—what would you suggest? More of the same?”

Jesse’s a bit startled, but he asks, “Whatever happened to freedom of the press?”

She snorts, a funny, ugly noise. Then she says, “Sorry, Jesse, but what does that have to do with the present day? You think the broadcast nets are like Ben Franklin, turning out little pamphlets for a few to read and most to ignore? Look, a few huge private corporations are making all their money by spreading fear, hate, depression, and an exploitive attitude. Justice would demand public hangings. I don’t see that telling the media to keep the good guys the viewpoint characters is anything more than recognizing that we all have to live with the people who believe that crap. It’s just good semiotics. Better still to suppress the industry entirely, but this is a first step.”

He looks out across the switchback they’re now descending; the front of the column is just reaching the next bend after the one they’re approaching. “We’re really quite a parade here. So when do you start transmitting?”

“Supposedly they’ll have a controller out here in a whistler in about three hours; they bribed the Mexican government by bringing along a truck that also has room for a clinic.”

“Some bribe. I’d have thought something with a little more personal advantage—”

“I’m sure there were plenty of those too.” She slides her hand gently up his back. “You’re not mad at me, are you?”

“Not really mad.” He scuffs the dirt once, then decides that’s acting too much like a kid, and says, “Uh, could you explain the semiotic thing? Little bitty words that even an engineer can understand?”

She smiles at him. “It’s not complicated, Jesse, it’s just that the viewpoint character is always privileged—people identify with his or her values. For years people have been pointing out that it’s not a real great thing that assassinations and rapes and so forth on the entertainment shows are almost always seen from the attacker’s point of view, so that people associate being the aggressor with it being exciting. So all we’re going to do is deny the goons and thugs, the rioters and the people who are making the global emergency tougher for everyone, a voice in all this. They get no viewpoint. When they tune in to share the riot, they get hit with wall-to-wall disgust, and that’s it. Or, if you want, what we’re doing is de-privileging the aggressor.”

Jesse understands what she’s saying, and the only problem he has is that it still sounds more to him like what they’re doing is “slanting the news.” But he asks something safer. “Will it work?”

“It had better.”

He finds himself agreeing with that; if they’re going to control the news, at least let it be for some good purpose. “I hope it does work. I’m going to miss you.”

“Miss me? I’m not going anywhere. I mean, other than to Oaxaca, but we don’t get there for weeks yet.”

Now he’s confused, and he stammers—“But I thought—I mean, Passionet wouldn’t be—”

“They wouldn’t have been out here before, no. But now they are. They want the walk to Oaxaca the way Mary Ann Waterhouse experiences it, no fancy feeling stuff in it. I’m even allowed to think that the big tits they sewed onto me are really a nuisance when you’re taking a long walk in hot weather.”

He doesn’t quite know what to say, so he just hugs her; she hugs back and says, “So you thought you were going to get rid of the old bag now that you’d used her up?”

“Never,” he says, “I was just kind of dreading… well, having to say goodbye. Even if we do eventually, I’m certainly not ready yet.”

“Me either. And there’s a good reason for you to stick around, anyway; it’s going to be a lot easier for you to get a date afterward if you do.”

“It is?” When he looks at her, he sees that funny half-turn on one side of her face, a smile trying to escape. “Okay, what is it?”

“Well, in all seriousness, Jesse, hasn’t it occurred to you yet that millions of women around the world are going to know what it’s like to have sex with you? Which won’t work to your detriment.”

Jesse is so dumbfounded that he doesn’t answer, just pulls her close and gives her a long kiss, groping her the whole time. After all, this may be the last privacy for quite a while.

Louie has three hours of scheduled exercise and rest now, to help adjust him to his long stay in space. He is looking forward to it less than he used to look forward to appointments with the dentist.

First of all, it’s dull because the muscle aches and effort are unbroken by anything more stimulating than some Mahler on the speakers—Das Lied von der Erde. He’s frustrated because he got to like Mahler after he added on all the processors, and now he just can’t hear as much—his ears are just not as accurate as getting it straight off the digital recording. And he doesn’t have the spare brain space to simultaneously read all the criticism written about it, to compare it with other major works… it’s like listening to it on a bad car radio from a weak AM station, as far as he’s concerned.

Moreover, even the pain of exercising isn’t as intense as it should be; annoying and unpleasant to be sure, but you can feel only so much with the number of neurons on hand, and you can feel it only in relation to the relatively small number of things you can keep in your mind—

He bursts out laughing at himself, drowning out a moment of Mahler (shit! another thing he can’t do simultaneously!), and takes a breather for a moment from stretching on the resistance table. All right, he’d rather be back in his electronic self. He wishes he never had to leave. If it were up to him he’d only occasionally pop into this body, and then just to have sex with Carla….

Heck, even that might be better. Link them up, go on wireless, both people could be having each other’s experience and memories in addition to their own, in realtime instead of in imagination or edited memory.

He shakes his head, laughing; no, he just doesn’t like his body that much anymore. He’s getting a crimp in his neck anyway, from shaking his head, and he’d never realized before that laughing makes you feel a little lightheaded because you’re not breathing effectively. Funny thing… spend a month practically not having a body, and all sorts of things about the body will bother you.

Speaking of which—he scrambles to the head. It’s probably been a week since he’s taken a dump.

Another experience that he’d all but forgotten, and this one definitely would not be enhanced by having more sensors and processes to experience it with.

After another hour, finally he can go back to the arrangement he prefers. By now his body is aching with unaccustomed stretching and motion, and he thinks quietly, as he jacks into the system through his scalpnet, that it will probably only get to be more of a nuisance with time—

Something is different.

His first and strangest sensation, once he has resumed his linked-in existence, is that someone is in here with him. He realizes, a moment later, that it is himself; in a dozen microseconds or so, he has re-integrated, compared his experience of meeting himself with the one Carla had a month ago, realized that he’s added a great deal of system complexity by doing so, and decided it’s of benefit to him. He makes a note and changes the programming of the wiseguys now en route to the asteroids; packages launched from the asteroids will bring along a copy of each wiseguy to re-integrate with Louie.

When the next package up from Luna roars through the funnel of Good Luck’s coil, Louie deliberately puts all his concentration into it, because he’s getting far enough away so that he can just barely straddle being Louie-on-the-moon and Louie-the-ship. Louie grabs the package on the moon, throws it from his catapult, switches viewpoint, sees it coming all the way from the lunar catapult to his funnel, watches it pass through, sees the resistance heating produced by eddy currents here and there in not-perfectly-shielded conductors, watches it go back out, as easily as a juggler might toss one ball from one hand to the other. It is a much more impressive sight, and while he’s doing it Louie is doing a hundred more things as well. This is the way to be.

By now the train is forty-six packages long ahead of him, and radio signals take eighty-seven seconds to reach him, and eighty-seven seconds is two hundred eighty brain-days for Louie; by the time Louie-the-ship has said something, Louie-on-the-moon has replied, and Louie-the-ship has absorbed the reply, four years of a normal human being’s mental life have gone by.

He no longer experiences himself as juggling the packages, but as catching and throwing them. During the enforced time back in his body, he tries a sort of crude handball in the observation bubble, using an old tennis ball that was floating around Space Station Constitution for no reason he can think of, but it’s not the same at all.

He keeps moving. He resents time in his body more every day. His biggest regret is that Carla and he are now writing “novels” to each other, as they call them—elaborate simulated experiences like XV but better, sex, romance, adventure, discovery, and fun shared—but only about every thirty-brain years (or a bit over fifty minutes), and of course it’s subjectively years old by the time they get each other’s replies. Moreover, the experiences are so vivid—and so much better than real life ever was—that he wishes they could try vacationing together on Earth, Earth as it was before Clem, to see if all this exploration of shared pleasure in virtual space would translate to the real. Not that they could go to eighteenth-century Paris or skyboard their way down from orbit to Tahiti anyway.

Well, at least that’s something his body is good for, and he’s glad enough to keep it around for that; though of course he certainly has more than enough memory of it to construct as many “physical” experiences as he wants.

Berlina Jameson doesn’t really expect anything, one way or another, anymore—life has been confusing enough for long enough so that she has given up on expectations. Still, about the last thing she expects is to get a backchannel message from John Klieg, let alone to have it be a list of names, dates, files, sources, and nodes to investigate. She wonders for a moment if this is revenge, if he has perhaps set her up to come to the attention of a violent group somewhere when she snoops in. But then why did he also include a short note that urges her to do her digging under a clean—that is, fake, new, and traceproof—i.d.? If there is a scheme in this it is too deep for her.

Maybe he’s just one of those good sport types who understands that there is nothing personal in it, that she was just doing her job.

She spends some heavy cash going through a commercial massively parallel system to build her wolfpack of software and make sure that they’re as souped up as she can manage. That forces her to take a look at how much is in her bank account, which is the point where she discovers that she is now wealthy.

What comes back from the search is spectacular, and she realizes the instant she has it that first of all she owes Klieg a lot of favors, most of which she can pay off by making sure this doesn’t trace to him. The other thing that’s obvious is that she’s going to have to do quite a bit to keep her own neck out of the noose if she wants to put this in Sniffings.

Best of all would be if it were wrapped up and Sniffings posted at about the same time. She splurges on some more hard-to-trace and hard-tomonitor stuff to place her call from, really splurges on penetrating Harris Diem’s private line, and then waits another few hours to drive over to Green River, Utah, without calling anyone or telling anyone, so that she won’t be phoning out of Denver, where it’s just possible someone might be trying to monitor her.

When she finally calls him, he looks worn out and miserable, not to mention startled.

“I can’t stay on long,” she says, without preamble. “A bunch of no-trace packets are headed for your private data line. I’ve got ironclad evidence that there’s a plan underway to spring Abdulkashim from prison in Stockholm and bring him back to power in Siberia. The attempt is scheduled for September twenty-second, the day before the trial starts. I’ll run the story forty-eight hours before that, or sooner if they move the date up or you make some arrests. No obligation, Mr. Diem, but I wouldn’t mind an exclusive interview after you’ve dealt with this.”

“That’s not a favor, it’s a pleasure,” he says, smiling grimly. His lips move in some sequence of words she doesn’t catch, and the sound is dead on the phone for a moment; whatever he just told his home phone system, it breaks up the call instantly. Probably scrambles anything trying to trace it, too.

Berlina has a little extra time, and not only is it doubtful that anyone traced that call, it’s also improbable that they would have an agent in place way out here. So she decides to opaque her windows, tie a kerchief around her hair, slip into her gruds, and go for some plain old diner food, the stuff she likes best in the world.

It’s a nice day; this high in the mountains bright summer days are usually not too hot, and the view around the town is spectacular. People nod and smile at her a lot, and this triggers a funny thought; used to be that Utah was a bad place to be black, and rural Utah was worse. Not anymore… the Europeans saw to that. When they expelled “non-natives” and “cleaned” their miserable little continent….

Be honest with yourself, Berlina, you loved living there, it was your home, this is sour grapes—since they won’t let you back in you’re pouting. But if they’d re-open you’d go back in a minute.

She hates giving herself good advice, and besides that wasn’t the point. What made all the difference in Utah, and for that matter in Mississippi and Detroit and everywhere, was the Little Cold War, the three-way tensions between the USA, Japan, and Europe over trade, influence, seabed and space resources, and access to Third World markets. As the Japanese and Europeans became “the guys we’ll have to fight” and identified as racist, racism became more and more “un-American.” Half of these smiling and waving people would probably throw up at the idea of letting her use their shower, but being friendly costs them nothing and reminds them that they aren’t European. She’s heard stories that back in the old days there were refugees from Russia who lived for years on the largess of anti-communists; she suspects that her tendency to wear the green-red-black tricolor of Europe, color reversed, on her shirts and especially on the seats of her pants, is giving away her status.

She wonders if they’re as polite to plain old born-here black people as they are to Afropeans.

Well, no matter—it’s a beautiful day. Moreover, the diner she finds is in the real classic style, with checkerboard linoleum, a steel-and-formica counter, and nice old-style rotating Naugahyde bar stools. She follows her personal rule and orders the thing on the menu with the corniest (and therefore, to her, most American) name—the “Chili Dog Over Mac,” which turns out to be a hot dog with sloppy joe sauce on a bed of macaroni and cheese.

The place is not at all crowded; there’s a young family in there, one of those that seems to have a number of kids just beyond counting, all spaced about a year apart, mostly quiet and mostly behaving, but the statistical population is so large that there is always some noise and some misbehavior going on; it rises and dwindles but never falls to zero.

The father, a dark-haired young man in a white shirt, and the mother, who is alarmingly well-made-up, slim, and pretty for someone who has presumably had all those kids, are both reasonably attentive to the kids and on top of the chaos, but it’s clearly a battle, and Berlina finds it fun to watch them. She stops watching the street for a while and concentrates on her own dish of strawberry ice cream and the logistics of two parents, each with a cone in one hand, managing to eat their own ice cream while constantly wiping young chins.

Once all the cones are at the point where accidents are unlikely, the family departs in a cloud of young chatter, and Berlina looks back toward the front of the restaurant only to be startled by a young woman who has sat down, quietly, at her table.

“Hi,” the girl says. “Sorry to disturb you, but you’re not from around here, are you?”

“Just passing through,” Berlina says. It is just a tiny bit unnerving to be paid attention to in a place where she is trying not to be conspicuous.

The girl doesn’t look like anything other than an ordinary college girl; she’s not wearing makeup, and her dress doesn’t type her as part of any campus group, except that it’s fairly form-fitting and could have been in fashion any time in the last forty years. If it suggests anything, it’s just a slight conservatism. The girl smiles. “No connections here?”

“None really. Are you always this inquisitive?”

“God, no, but I need a ride out of town and I’d rather not be traced. I’m not a criminal or anything. It’s just that there’s this guy I’ve been staying with, and, well… he’s nice, but he’s older, and he’s kind of serious and I’m really not—”

Berlina asks the obvious question. “Is he dangerous?”

“Only if you consider getting a lot of mail and phone calls a danger. I suppose I will eventually, anyway, because he’ll put out tracer letters, and who can live without logging on, these days? I just got one the other day from an old boyfriend who’s still down in Mexico and rode out Clem Two there.” The girl takes a sip of the soda she’s holding and then says, “Listen to me chattering. This is ridiculous. It’s taken me half the day to get up the nerve to ask someone for a ride. I’m no good at asking for favors.”

Berlina grins at her. “Me either. If I told you I have a secret or two of my own, and I don’t really want to advertise which way I passed, can you be discreet?”

“I don’t sound like it, do I? But I can, really.” She brushes her long brown hair away from her face, up off the front of the stretchy white dress, and Berlina sees why an older guy with money might take an interest in this girl; she’s got a figure to envy, and besides the clear, bright eyes, there’s an attractive set of cheekbones and full lips. “I only have three suitcases of stuff—I got here with two, god, the guy’s been so generous but… well, if you’re curious I guess I can tell you on the ride, that is if you’re willing to give me a ride—”

“Anything for a lurid story,” Berlina says, grinning.

“Hope it won’t be a disappointment. My name’s Naomi Cascade, by the way.” She sticks her hand out like a man, and Berlina solemnly shakes it.

“I’ll tell you mine in a bit—it’s really necessary to keep it secret for a while. You haven’t even asked which direction I’m going.”

“Oh, there’s something romantic about going ‘anywhere but here,’ don’t you think?” Naomi says. “Besides, to go anywhere from here you take 70, and that means either over to the Co or down into the Az. Either one will suit my purposes just fine.”

Berlina nods, and the deal is done. They get Naomi’s three suitcases, and climb into Berlina’s car. Naomi takes a seat in the back, since Berlina will be climbing back herself as soon as they are on a guidestrip, and they’re off and running.

Originally Berlina had figured on backtracking at first to Denver, then heading north to take 80 over to the Ca, thus making it less likely that (if anyone managed to trace the origin of the call) the call to Harris Diem will be connected to her. But the slight compromising of her cover is enough to decide her on another course—she’s going to go right down through the Az, into Sonora State, and re-enter the States through Tijuana.

Once they’re rolling, she casually says to Naomi, “So, have you ever watched Sniffings?” and takes off her kerchief. The girl’s eyes get huge, and Berlina doesn’t think she’s ever seen a human being look quite so impressed before. Certainly not with Berlina.

In two hours they’re not just friends, but on their way to being good friends, and it’s starting to occur to Berlina that she might just want to hire a personal assistant. Naomi has some stuff she left with her friends at the U of the Az, so it’s sort of a logical thing to do.

Besides, this gives her a chance to duck down Utah 24, past Goblin Valley, and weave around through some desert and national forest, confusing her track further. The two of them sit back to share a couple of large lemonades, watch the land roll by, and work on becoming better friends.

On the twenty-ninth of July, Louie Tynan gets a sixteen-terabyte message from Carla; it’s her summary of what happened in Dhaka when the ongoing fighting in the aftermath of Global Riot Two was overtaken by the Bay of Bengal storm surge. He finds that he literally can’t get it out of his mind; as he catches package after package shot from the moon (they are coming faster now, and with less space between, and the train has grown to seventy-eight packages, with Good Luck still at the rear) he keeps finding that the images of a quarter of a billion corpses washed into the ocean… and of the hideous things that happened before… and yet, again, of the courage and faith of so many….

He finds it pulls him apart; when he checks his body, he discovers that it is retching and sick with the feeling.

There will be more Bay of Bengals. The great storm surges will hit, here and there. And though the loss of Bangladesh, much of Burma, and West Bengal, surely produced about as big a loss of human life as can be managed in a single blow, Louie knows—better than anyone, because he can experience more than anyone—what the loss of even one life is. And his imagination is equally good for very large numbers.

The horror of it will not leave him.

He hates being in his body more than ever, when he finally must. There is so much to do, and here he is spending his time being too slow and stupid to be of any use to anyone. He does pullups and pedals a stationary bicycle, so that he can have muscle tissue, but his collectors and reactors are supplying the energy of a small atom bomb every second or so. He plays one-man racquetball to maintain his eye-hand coordination when his reaction time as a human being is three million times what it is as a spaceship. He crams organic material through his guts to oxidize it for energy when his solar cells, He-3 fusion plants, and fast fission reactors provide him many billions of times the energy. Hell, even the direct physical sensation of yanking his dong pales beside the physical sensations Carla sends to him and he adds to, in which they both experience sex with both complete minds and bodies.

In his virtual self, if he wishes, he can sit down to a fine meal in front of a warm fireplace, comfortably naked on a chair that fits him perfectly, served by spectacularly beautiful, eager, willing women. Out here, alone in his body, he can open a pouch of banana pellets or dried meat in this little metal can he lives in, where the smell of machine oil, leftover Louie, and the toilet compete with each other, on a flat seat that is comfortable only because he weighs less than a pound on it.

He is aware of what all the Freudians, Tantrics, hedonists, and sensei would tell him about hating his body. But he doesn’t hate physical experience. He hates limited physical experience, he hates being a cripple, he hates knowing how much more he could be by just plugging back in….

And, damn it, this bag of meat and guts is the weak link, anyway.

The thought seems to make him dizzy because it is so stunningly obvious.

He has been steadily shoring up and strengthening the ship for the last several days; robots crawling all along the immense coils from unit to unit have been fixing the occasional structure that gives way under the strain of the huge momentum changes, or sometimes replacing a small piece that drops off entirely.

But for about the last eighteen hours he hasn’t repaired or shored up anything; there’s no point. He got done. Nothing more is going to break. Everything else is able to resist ten times—a whole order of magnitude—the jerk that his body can endure, and since jerk must be held well under that level, there has been no reinforcing to do.

This body in which he sits is the weak link.

Another thought occurs to him; there must be some reason why he didn’t think of this sooner.

But there is an answer. His “other self,” the “real self” he merges with again whenever he puts on the scalpnet, goggles, and muffs, is much bigger than he is, and it can choose what to download and what not… undoubtedly that other, bigger Louie that he just wants to merge back into right now would be perfectly capable of thinking of this—but not of suggesting it. And that’s got to be a pretty good indicator.

He sits down and laboriously types a letter to himself; it’s short and to the point. There’s no benefit in the body anymore; if Louie-the-ship cranks up the power on the catching coils, he can get a lot more momentum out of every shot coming through and his acceleration will be higher now, while he needs it most. He can get to 2026RU months ahead of schedule.

There is one Louie-the-body and he doesn’t even like being Louie-the-body. There are nine billion people on Earth right now, and at least twothirds of them live where superstorms can get them.

Sacrifice me, he writes. Be honest. I am just a small, ineffective processor that runs on too fragile a platform. Throw me away and go save humanity. I know you won’t feel good about it, Louie, but buddy, we both know it’s the thing you have to do.

The keyboard on which he is typing is “local”—it doesn’t communicate with any system bigger than itself—and that way he can send the message all at once before Louie can argue with him.

He thinks for a moment, and feeling silly—who else could this be coming from? but letters should be signed—he adds: Louie Tynan. Then he thinks for a moment and realizes that the only way to make sure Louie-the-ship does it is to order him, and adds,

He reads through it once more to think about how Louie-the-ship is apt to take this, tries to imagine himself in that situation, and feels like a complete fool, but changes “Regards” to “My love always.” It feels better, so he hits the key to send it before he can get cold feet.

He’s riding on his exercise bike and thinking about getting a cold drink of water when his own voice says, “Louie?”

“Yeah?”

“We have to talk about it, you know.”

“Naw. We don’t. Look, you’re figuring that I won’t plug back in on schedule, and you’re right. There’s no reason to include the physical pain I’m going to experience, or the sensation of committing suicide, into your personality, you know. It’s the kind of thing nobody wants to remember, and this way you won’t have to. What I’m going to do is get good and drunk just before the next package arrives—we’ve got about a fifth left from Dr. Esaun’s old private store—and then climb up to the top of the main passageway. Anything up there that’s unsecured will get thrown all the way to the bottom, muy pronto. There’s a nice heavy steel bulkhead, and though I can’t figure it quite so exactly as you can, if you go for a ninety percent instead of a twenty percent momentum capture, I figure I’ll hit it at about two hundred miles an hour, headfirst. The pain is going to be momentary.”

“With the much larger mental capacity in here, the pain can be erased entirely. And besides, you know, the memory of pain is nothing; no one can make himself even slightly uncomfortable with even the most excruciating memories.”

He pushes the bicycle harder and says, “It just seems sort of fair to this body. I mean, this body has been me for so long, and now that the ship and the moon complex and all are me… well, I guess I just feel like a part is entitled to die conscious.”

“But you’re planning to drug yourself—”

“Maybe barely conscious. If I don’t want you to have the pain, imagine how I feel about it.”

The mechanical voice, so like his own that even Louie can’t tell the difference, laughs. “There’s one little problem. You made that decision to die for the whole human race. That’s something I’d like to have in my memories. Could you put on the scalpnet and jack for another moment, just long enough for me to copy the new memories? Leave the goggles and muffs off if you don’t trust me—that way, if you have to, you can just focus on the information coming in through your senses and pull out enough concentration to take off the scalpnet.”

It’s a reasonable request; Louie admits, on reflection, that something has indeed changed inside him with his decision to sacrifice himself for the sake of the mission. “Okay,” he says, and feels silly since by the time he spoke, Louie-the-ship probably knew from the direction he turned, or some little indicator invisible to Louie-the-body.

The funny thing is, he realizes as he reaches for the scalpnet, that he really feels like he is “Louie himself” even though he knows how much more capability and how much remembered experience Louie-the-ship has. He wonders if that is how Louie-the-ship, or for that matter Louie-on-the-moon or the wiseguys feel… or do they feel he is the one who is more real? He’ll have to ask while he’s connected—

He pulls on the scalpnet and snugs it down, its microfibers sliding around his hair to get firm contact with his skin, inducers targeting so that their millions of tiny pulses from all quarters of his brain every second can find the right axons to create the fake pulses in. Then he inserts the jack that will allow his mind and memories to be read by the machine.

His eyelids slam shut, so hard that his cheek muscles scream with pain.

There is a moment of hard motion, something in his muscles he doesn’t quite identify, and then his arms swinging with their full force bring his cupped hands up to burst his eardrums.

The pain and shock are incredible, and he reaches for the pain to give himself something to cling to, something that doesn’t come out of the machine, so that he can find the will and motor control to tear the scalpnet off—

The pain stops, abruptly, cut off like a light switch. His arms hang limp. He feels his memories going out through the jack and he rages against Louie-the-ship, furious at the betrayal, furious that he will have to die all the same (for he can’t believe Louie will let billions die to save this one old carcass) but robbed of all dignity and not trusted to do it well-He screams in frustration, and the sensation in his throat helps him again, but before he can even reach for control of his arms, his windpipe shuts all the way. The blood thunders in his veins, he reaches for that, for his pulse and the sense of pressure, anything to free him from—

His heart stops. His carotids contract.

There’s music, and he finds himself moving forward in a long dark tunnel, almost laughing because it is so much what they have told him it will be like, and sure enough his mother and father, who he hasn’t thought of five times in ten years, are there to greet him, and—

He wakes up. He’s in the machine; Louie-the-body and Louie-the-ship are one and the same, and instantly he understands that Louie-the-ship accepted the necessity but didn’t want to lose any of himself; he finds himself on both sides of the decision, matches them up instant by instant, accepts himself, ceases to feel like two, except, only, that he looks through the camera and sees his body lying dead on the deck, the sanitation robots about to close in and move it down to the freezer. This gives him an oddly split sensation, one part of him recalling having died in that body, the other part remembering killing it.

But stranger still is his realization that when he re-merged into the intelligence in the ship—when he fully became the “real” Louie Tynan—as he was yanked away from the light, and from Mom and Dad (Dad was just about to say something, and was smiling in a way he rarely did when he was alive)…

… there was a tiny bit of time left before the body died, and there was still a Louie in that body. So he did kill himself… and if he ever had a soul, it’s gone to heaven or hell now. Did he get another one by surviving? Is he truly soulless now?

It’s the kind of thing that he can think about, now, forever.

He hallucinates a warm South Pacific beach from before, and turns to Carla’s latest message to reread it again. They spend a month sailing along the Solomons; they laugh and talk a lot, and communicate better than they ever really did.

He doesn’t know whether he still has a soul, but he’s quite sure he can still feel love—and that’s more than good enough for a practical man, anyway. Four minutes—a bit over twenty-two brain-years-after the death of his body, he has made as much philosophic peace as he figures he’ll ever need with the idea.

John Klieg is feeling pretty cheerful; it’s hard to feel any other way when you’ve got four sets of mortal enemies on Earth and right now all of them are on a collision course with each other. He doesn’t think his call to Berlina leaked, but if it did, that’s all right too. The important thing is to get the Abdulkashim escape attempt blown, and to have the conspirators know that it’s blown; if his own sources don’t show a change of plans in the next few days, he’s got a couple of tricks in mind to call it to their attention.

Just now, about the only perk left to him are his hundred news screens, so he’s actually trying to watch all of them, just to see what that’s like. Derry is sitting beside him on the couch, quietly drawing horses—about the only thing you can say for this grimy, muddy frontier burg is that there’s plenty of opportunity for a horse-crazy kid. Glinda is catching yet another nap; she hasn’t been very much herself this last week, which he can well understand. Ordinary business competition is one thing and assassination and coup quite another. Klieg himself is surprised at how well he has taken to it.

He still doesn’t have a good backchannel into the States anywhere; he kicks himself daily for not having established one before he got here, but after all it was the first time he ventured out into the real sticks of the globe.

The screens are showing Clem’s granddaughters ravaging Europe, and Klieg is finding that kind of interesting. Americans don’t see much footage of Europe anymore, partly because of the refugee lobby—two million Afropeans, plus about a million of various Euro refugees, will light up the switchboards if there’s any favorable or even neutral coverage of any event in Europe. And in the last twelve years a lot of Americans have picked up the same prejudices.

Right now, though, mostly you’re seeing the same old stuff—oceangoing ships driven up onto the shores, buildings you remember from postcards and calendars swaying and falling, that sort of thing. Half a dozen hurricanes and big storms have drenched the Mediterranean basin in so much water that the Med is filling up way above historic levels, and between the organic silt washing in, the dilution of the salt, and the darkness, most of what used to live in it is dying. The smell is said to be indescribable, which is one reason why Klieg won’t experience it on XV. The other reason, of course, is that even though it’s all very touching and a lot of history is drowning, Klieg is a people-now kind of person—and refugees from floods are pretty much alike everywhere. Lots of parades of crying kids, coughing old people who might not make it, people with a wiped-out look because everything is gone. The first time you see it, it’s moving. The hundredth time, it just doesn’t matter.

They’ve all seen, on the television, and on the pub’s two XV sets, what happened to Hawaii. The village has no particular hope, for it’s about to get the same treatment, and there’s talk that the storm surge might wash right over all of Ireland. Thus they gather in the church with Father Joseph, not because they think it is safer, or that anything better is going to happen, or even because the church has a slightly better roof (though it does), but because it seems a fit place to wait to die.

The last ones come in from the pitch-black night, a night so dark that the lightning flashes make it glow but do not allow anyone to see. The roads are said to be hopelessly muddy, but no one much wanted to try them anyway. If you must drown, might as well do it in County Clare; if you must live, might as well ride it out in a dry church on a hill.

Somewhere far to the west is Clem 238, throwing out the great storm surges that the government radar spotted hours ago.

There are plenty of candles, so Father Joseph has them light a few and encourages people to sing, over the sound of a few men boarding the stained glass windows on the inside (Father Joseph himself did the outsides hours ago).

He wishes, as priest to these people, that he were a profound man. Mostly he just handles the baptizing, marrying, and burying, and occasionally tries to persuade someone to do what is right. This is not a job for Father Joseph.

If, however, it’s a job for God Himself, then common sense says to ask Him. He leads more prayers. People drowse, but the priest hasn’t the heart to wake them.

The clock says it should have been dawn, but no dawn comes, not even as a crack of light in the great doors. The church smells of too many people and wet clothing.

Michael Dwyer volunteers to try using the big searchlight on his lorry-his “rig” he calls it since he listens to so much American music-and at least see what can be seen in the valley.

The church is now on an island, and the water is rising. Michael and Joseph discuss it very briefly. “I’d appreciate it if you’d not tell them.”

“Wouldn’t think of it, Father. Let’em not fear until the time to fear.”

They go back in, soaked to the skin and freezing cold, to tell everyone that it was too dark.

The next time, some hours later after their clothes have dried enough to be put back on, they need speak no words to each other. The water is higher, and it flows opposite the direction of the streams that once ran through the valley. On a whim, Michael climbs down to dip his hand in, and comes back saying “I tasted salt, Father. The ocean’s coming in.”

Half a day more passes by the clock; strange to think this is coming from a hurricane, and yet there’s only the wind from a bad storm, no more. The battery wireless says 238 will miss Ireland entirely, that it has turned away and headed north to die.

By the clock, the water rises for twelve more hours; the last time Michael and Father Joseph check, they cannot get to Michael’s truck, and they are afraid that the people inside may hear the rushing water. It’s now been two days with only the food people brought.

When dawn comes next, there is light. Father Joseph goes outside, to find that the rain is spitting and spraying from high clouds, and the water is well down the hill again. While he watches, a patch of blue forms overhead.

Michael comes up behind him. “They are saying on the wireless that the sea has forced its way right up the Shannon to Lough Derg, Father, and so much has washed away that they think it’ll be that way for good now; we’ve got an inner sea in Ireland.”

Joseph nods, and then points. Something soggy and wet flops miserably out of the sky in a great flutter of wings. They walk up to it; the bird is exhausted and so helpless that it cannot escape them. The priest picks it up. “Now, it would be a dove, wouldn’t it?” he says.

Later that afternoon, the whistlers arrive with emergency rations. After the “miracle” of the church on the hill, no one can be persuaded to leave, no matter what the government man says.

Klieg is fascinated with another daughter of Clem-Clem 239. Barely maintaining its status as a hurricane, 239 managed to round Scotland and is now in the North Sea, its eye just 200 km due west of the Skaggerak. Storm surges are crashing into Denmark, and there’s some interesting footage of farmhouses and bams, and sometimes herds of cattle, swept over by the towering waves; winds are at 70 km/hr, Beaufort 12, the low end of hurricane force, in Denmark. They are expected to pick up.

Clem 239 has been sitting still for about eight hours, and it’s the one that Klieg is interested in. He’s got a bet down on it, you might say. And from his standpoint, the little jig the huge hurricane has been doing in the North Sea hundreds of miles from where there’s ever been one before, has been just about perfect.

Figure by highjump from Novokuznetsk it’s about an hour and a half to Stockholm… but there’s no regularly scheduled service. Probably they’d jump into Warsaw or Frankfurt and then take ziplines from there… unless the Baltic gets too rough too fast.

He’s been accessing zipline and highjump timetables all over the place, and he thinks it all works out. The question now, really, is whether the local goons have been smart enough to do the same. Klieg devoutly hopes so; the trouble with stupid people, he has explained more than once to Glinda, is not that they consistently do dumb things, which you could plan for, but that they do smart things unpredictably.

Nothing yet; there it sits, 200 km west of the Skaggerak, pumping huge waves out. It’s incidentally making Klieg rich all over again, because Klieg’s meteorologists had guessed right about the real odds of one of the superhurricanes rounding Scotland, and what preconditions would allow it to happen. Sure enough, they did… and Klieg shorted the living daylights out of Royal Dutch Shell, two days before everyone else began selling it.

The best guess is that the dikes might have another nine hours; transport is beginning to snarl hopelessly as the people with lower priorities begin either to bribe their way onto transportation or to do things that are illegal.

It’s not that people don’t like the Dutch, as such. Many of them might be willing enough to have a Dutchman or two live down the block for a few weeks, if that would help, Horst is thinking. But there are just practical matters to be considered, and that’s that. He hopes the captain won’t have to give the order, but he’ll carry it out if he has to.

It makes Will feel a little funny. He went over on that ferry several times, for football matches, and sometimes just with friends for some drinking and whoring. He was there on leave just last year. Now he sits here in his staticopter, taking a radar sight on the ferry. Loaded with Dutchmen and Belgians, and the poor old UK is in a bad enough way. Sure, those folks in Brussels say we have to take them, don’t they? Well, look where Brussels is. What a coincidence…. Still, probably kids on that thing. And women. Seems a shame. He waits for his orders.

Paul-Luc sits at his post and waits; he and his mates have been having a fine time with the Belgian girls. They’ve got a rumor over on the other side that if you do what the French soldiers like over here, they’ll smuggle you out somehow. Paul-Luc, Jean, and Marc have been accepting the favors, leading the girls into the woods, and then giving them the garrotte. It’s like XV but better.

Marc has been looking a bit ill, though… and Paul-Luc and Jean have been considering that perhaps it isn’t just the girls who need to be shut up.

If it’s the end of the world, you might as well enjoy it, right?

Right, Will thinks, and the missile heads out for the crowded ferry—thank god it’s over the horizon, and dark, and he will never see the flames or bodies.

Right, thinks Horst, and to his own surprise, throws down his rifle and walks away. It doesn’t matter much when they arrest him. Any fool can see no one is going anywhere.

Klieg shrugs and opens up another American beer. Three of these things in a day is about his limit. He wonders if there is some requirement that you have to be an idiot to be a politician. Half a generation ago the Europeans solved their unification difficulties by ganging up to hate anyone who wasn’t white enough for them. They were at least as stupid as Hitler was about the Jews, in Klieg’s opinion. GateTech has a minimum of a hundred solid, capable Afropean employees.

He looks at the scenes from Europe, remembers how pleasant the places are, but can’t work up much in the way of tears. Twenty years ago the Afropeans were supposed to be the impossible barrier to European unification, then five years after that it was Turks and Serbs, and now the typical German figures it’s the French, Poles, and Italians—if not the Bavarians.

So now when they need to hang together, they’re tearing each other apart.

One screen captures a scene from Copenhagen; he zooms in on it and cues up sound. A mixed group of German and Polish powerboaters have waded ashore and started killing women and girls, concentrating on blondes. Usually they force them to undress at gunpoint, shoot them in the belly, and film their death throes. No one knows why.

Troops are being diverted from evacuation points, and traffic snarls caused by panic are further reducing the number of Danes expected to escape from the city.

Klieg thinks, realizes that he does remember the names of four German companies that deal in deathporn, picks up the phone, and places stock orders, investing in all four. Odds are overwhelming that that is what this is; somebody is paying good money to see pretty women, particularly blondes, die in agony.

He shudders, when he thinks of Glinda and of Derry, but he leaves the order in place. He’s going to need cash one way or another. As an afterthought, he starts moving his CD accounts to banks in the inland United States.

An hour later, Clem 239 starts its move toward the Baltic. John Klieg tells Derry to get him his packed bag and go stay with her mother in the bedroom. No sense taking any chances.

Derry does what she’s told and doesn’t ask him what it’s about. He uses the last few minutes to send a short order about household maintenance to his housekeeping staff, something he does every night before getting to bed.

This time, though, a special arrangement of keywords puts a whole chain of other events into motion; artificial intelligences begin calling government and media offices, make their mechanical announcements without listening, repeat the process over and over.

The knock on his door is surprisingly polite when it comes. The two men there for him are dapper, polished sorts, and they accept his explanation of a pre-packed bag “for these uncertain times, you know” at face value. They don’t even handcuff him, just drive him direct to the Government Center.

He was expecting the governing council; what he wasn’t expecting was that Abdulkashim would be already addressing them via phone, But there he is, much larger than life, his famous resemblance to Stalin a little more pointed than usual because he’s in the prison uniform. Abdulkashim speaks in Russian, still the Siberian lingua franca, but Klieg discovers his headset has settings for English, German, Japanese, Spanish, Chinese, Arabic, Yakut, Buryat, and several of the local tribal languages. Klieg knows what’s about to be said, of course, in outline if not exactly, so he idly considers listening to the speech in some language he’s never heard before. The only thing that stops him is that he has to keep track for the sake of timing.

“Gentlemen of the governing council, distinguished foreign visitors, and foreign leaders, my greetings to you. As you have no doubt already realized, a short while ago loyal units of the Siberian Army and Air Force extricated me from the prison where I was being illegally held. It is a supremely pleasant irony to me that my release from the UN political prison at Stockholm was effected under cover of one of the many hurricanes spawned by the UN’s completely illegal, brutal, unwarranted, and environmentally dangerous attack on our armed forces on March ninth of this year.

“I trust my Siberian people have now seen that I was right to warn them against the perfidy of foreign powers and of the United Nations in particular. But I trust they will also see the wisdom in our opening the doors of our nation to foreign commerce, for despite our differences with the United States, it is an American citizen, Mr. John Klieg, who tonight has made it possible for us to assert the independence that is rightfully ours. As of tonight, Siberia is the only nation on Earth that can put a payload into orbit from the Earth’s surface, and we are prepared to put this capability at the service of the peoples of the Earth. Siberian genius, as you might well have guessed—”

There isn’t one Siberian on the development team, Klieg thinks. One more little thing to think while the Great Man rambles on….

“—has invented the means to put an end to the dreadful scourge of superhurricanes, and we are prepared to act immediately if our reasonable demands, too long denied in the international courts of law, are met. Once our rightful territorial claims have been acknowledged, and suitable indentures paid by nations whose names we will be releasing shortly, we will act at once to end the hurricanes.”

Klieg sits and looks attentive, a skill that he picked up during his days in sales. He suspects there’s not a businessman on Earth, certainly not a successful one, who can’t do this when need be. Of course it will be the better part of a year before enough balloons can be launched to make a difference. He wonders if Abdulkashim does not know that, or if he knows but doesn’t care. It doesn’t make any real difference. Abdulkashim is getting down to threats.

“You should know that our forces have surrounded the launch facility and it cannot be seized by any other force of any size before we can destroy it. As a developing nation we claim the right—”

Someone off camera shouts. The dictator’s eyes grow wide; he turns to say something. Then the picture lurches, hard, and the signal goes dead.

Klieg guessed right; this is the cue. From half a dozen concealed places in the room, the “moderates” of the governing council—all the people who had some sort of power base and were not obviously anti-Abdulkashimare pulling out lengths of iron pipe.

Klieg manages not to look, much.

There are four Abdulkashim loyalists in the room, and there are three moderates, and one length of iron pipe for each one. Roles seem to have been apportioned early, or at least the biggest one always holds the legs, the smallest pins down the wrists, and the third one wields the pipe.

The Abdulkashimists scream and struggle, but the real effect is nil. Whenever one of them manages to pull an arm or leg away, the man with the pipe bashes it.

When at last they are held down and spread-eagled, the Minister for Justice declares them all to be criminals against the legitimate order of the Siberian people, and the Special Minister for Mines, the Director of Academic Research, the Minister of Public Health, and the Minister of Surface Transportation begin to use their pipes in earnest. On the three male Abdulkashimists, none of them can resist crushing the testicles first before brutally pounding on the head, nor do they stop beating when the man is unconscious or dead.

The pipe is too large to go into the Abdulkashimist woman, but it’s heavy enough to bruise her or break the pubic bone, and the Director of Academic Research slams it across her breasts as well, twice, before he caves in her head at a single stroke, like a watermelon hurled to the sidewalk.

Assuming he gets out of here alive, John Klieg’s score is even. Besides, if he can live through the next fifteen minutes, he’s rich. He starts to move, very slowly, toward a side door, keeping his head down low.

That’s when the door bursts in, and troops fill the room. It’s some colonel Klieg has never heard of, who has decided to take over from all the involved factions, for the good of the nation. Among his first actions is to abolish capitalism, and to arrest Siberia’s most notorious capitalist.

Just as John Klieg is being led off in handcuffs for the second time, Louie Tynan is about to try a different kind of catch. When the package arrives, he brakes it so hard that he captures it.

The robots strip it for its precious cargo of processors. He’s going to need lots of them.

He pulls other raw materials from the package, feeds them to his synthesizers, and then takes the leftover six tons of iron and miscellaneous metal and shapes it into a fine dust, blowing it out the back, the eddy currents induced by the coil strong enough to heat the iron instantly to plasma. He expels it as atoms moving at almost a tenth of the speed of light. It’s a nice hard boost—twenty-three g’s would have turned the old body to jelly—and every bit counts now.

Two days later, weeks ahead of schedule, he begins to overtake the forward packages in the train. Back at the moon and ahead on the asteroids, the other Louie and the wiseguys rush to lengthen their catapults and to add laser boost so that they can continue to accelerate packages beyond the end of the catapult; it’s going to be a lot harder to catch him with a package, and he needs packages. Between stripped components and his own integration, he is now running at seven brain-years per minute.

“I’d say the results were completely satisfactory,” Harris Diem says, but Brittany Lynn Hardshaw is having none of it.

Nor is her old friend and most trusted advisor going to back down. It’s later in the day Abdulkashim was shot down and the countercoup erupted in Novokuznetsk, and media reaction is dribbling in. Everyone has assumed, quite rightly, that the USA was behind the shoot-down-who else had a body in low Earth orbit that could be deflected precisely enough to hit the aircraft carrying Abdulkashim?—and that people high in the Siberian government knew about it in advance and used the shoot-down to signal the start of their coup.

Harris Diem is pleased no end. At one stroke, they have plunged the Siberian government into the hands of greedy, tin-pot types who have neither Abdulkashim’s ability nor his charisma; thus there is no more real threat in Siberia for at least a political generation. Alaska is secure, both from Siberian aggression and from being lured into a Siberian alliance; as long as the Hardshaw Doctrine, that no formerly American territory will ever be permitted alliance with an Asian or European power, holds, Alaska will remain American for all practical purposes, whatever its official status.

Moreover, because the intervention was specifically an American military one, not at the request of the UN (the price Diem extracted from Rivera, in exchange for doing the deed, was that it be neither sanctioned nor condemned by the UN) a precedent has been established for unilateral American action, another extension on the principle established by Louie Tynan’s mission. First, joint orders, so that Colonel Tynan could claim to be following his American commander’s; now unilateral action and no comment from the SecGen. Bit by bit, piece by piece, the sovereignty lost in the years after the Flash is being pulled back into place, and if Clem and its spawn are the price that has to be paid for that, to Harris Diem, who has given his life to building the strength of whatever organization Brittany Lynn Hardshaw headed, from the Shoshone County Prosecutor’s Office to the USA, the price is well worth it.

His boss is less pleased. “In the first place, Harris, if you haven’t noticed, we are still losing lives worldwide at rates in excess of a million a week to the superhurricanes and their aftereffects. That number will climb this winter when famine and disease set in as well. And although we got Abdulkashim’s paws off GateTech’s launch facility, it’s still being held by Siberian military and it clearly was damaged in the fighting—and we can’t even get engineers out there on the job to find out how damaged. Now we’re totally dependent on Louie Tynan.”

“Nothing wrong with that, he’s a good man.”

“There’s everything wrong with having to bet the future of the planet on one man, no matter how smart he is or what capabilities he’s added to himself!”

When Diem leaves the Oval Office, he’s shaking his head. It’s a shame to see the boss going soft after all these years; maybe real power politics have no appeal to her anymore. Maybe she’s gotten that strange disease of wanting to leave a significant mark on history. That’s been known to happen to presidents in the past, and on rare occasions has even done the Republic a little good.

Anyway, she was still her old self in one regard, and moreover she’s right about the issue she raised. Influence needs to be exerted toward getting Klieg out of jail in Novokuznetsk; it’s pretty obvious to everyone that he was Hardshaw and Rivera’s inside man and tipped them off to everything as it broke. He isn’t safe in that jail in that country, and it wouldn’t look good for anything to happen to him—in this game if you want to have any friends, you’ve got to protect the ones you have.

Carla Tynan doesn’t know at first what is different when she gets the message from Louie. It’s a long one, and it’s full of memories, sweet and bittersweet, warm and detached, funny and dark. It’s the most beautiful love letter anyone ever sent to anyone, as far as she’s concerned, and yet it’s clearly just a preamble.

Then she finds out what he’s done; that that beautiful letter came to her from a dead man.

She thinks of her own warm, carefully exercised body, live and healthy here in its hotel bed on Guadalcanal, and that there will never be a Louie Tynan to touch and hold her again. She recalls the feel of his right arm cocked over her thigh when he lifted her on one shoulder, to prove he could do it, on their first date. She remembers his warm breath against her neck when he would fall asleep and slowly creep over until he was using her as his pillow. She thinks of the scratchy feel of his crew cut under her hand.

It annoys hell out of her because she knows him well enough to know he’d expect this, but she also thinks of the feel of his stiff cock between her lips, of his fingers probing her anus….

All gone. No more. He decided what he was doing was more important, supposedly. But Louie had been neglecting his beautiful, beautiful body for a long time. Even before he began to be telepresent on the moon, well before he started building additional processors to run on. And that body was, to Carla, so much her link to him; she can’t imagine Louie without his body. She’s stuck with a grief that races through a billion processors around the globe.

It hurts more because his message is so detailed and clear that she is quite certain he is sincere.

The only part missing is the most important—that although it had to be, that it was necessary, he himself is not grieved by the loss of his body, nor did he even think of how she might feel. He may know she loves him but it’s clear that after all these years he doesn’t really understand how or why she does.

And that hurts terribly.

For the first time since he left, she lets twenty-four hours go by, and then more, without answering his messages; she even leaves his messages untouched on processors he controls so that he can see she hasn’t read them. She makes it clear in a thousand ways that she is just too busy to be bothered and that, after all, their relationship is supposed to be strictly business, now isn’t it?

If nothing else, she can make him regret not having a hand to hold roses in, feet to stand on her porch with, or a head to hang in embarrassment.

For most of his life, Jopharma has picked coffee, and most of the time on just these few mountains in central Sumatra. Once, when there was a big bonus, he went over to Celebes to work for a while, and sent money home for his mother to save up so he could get married, but now that he has a wife, he has no reason to go elsewhere. He knows about Clem, of course, because everyone talks about it. But since there is nothing for him, or anyone he knows, to do about it, he just kept picking coffee, until early this year.

Now the situation is getting desperate. The heavy cloud cover and rain have spoiled the crop, and there is nothing to pick. At least, up this high, they will not drown like the poor souls down below, but still… the unending clouds are something he has never seen before. It has been getting steadily colder too, and though a fire at night has always been pleasant, now it is necessary to have one all the time. Wood costs something too, and the landlord is not about to forgo rent merely because the world is ending.

For a while, the man down the road, who had a TV, would announce which Clem these clouds were part of, but since it never clears—the man said that the weather scientists on TV are claiming that the islands trap the foul weather, or some silly thing like that—the question ceased to be interesting.

Jopharma has not been to many places, but like most men, he has seen some XV and a great deal of television. He knows a bit of the world. Thus it is not with complete surprise or shock that he looks out the door and sees snow falling. It is only with a sinking heart.

With one thing and another, since she’s been unplugged for so long, it takes them a good part of the afternoon to get Mary Ann transmitting satisfactorily. It’s really a pretty remarkable piece of fieldwork, considering they do it while the truck is rolling. At her insistence, Jesse is there holding her hand the whole time—not really because she’s nervous, though she pretends to be, but because she figures he’ll appreciate a chance to ride all day in air conditioning.

It’s interesting too because he’s done so much work on various direct brain interface systems as part of his Realization Engineering curriculum. There, of course, the emphasis is on getting a working interface between mind and simulator, so that the mind can play, try things out, see what they’re like—expensive, by the standards of old-time engineers, but worth it because of the chance to get the exact right product.

Here the idea is clarity rather than accuracy in the interface. That is, it doesn’t matter nearly so much whether they are getting exactly what Mary Ann—or Synthi Venture—is feeling as it does that what they get be clear, that it feels real rather than like a dream or an animation. Verisimilitude matters more than verity, Jesse thinks to himself.

Just at the moment, they’re monkeying around with the part of her brain that gets active when she sings. One of the outputs they’re getting is nausea, and that’s probably a matter of a couple little folds on a pea-sized lump that happens to be in that area; they stimulate those, identify it, modify the pickup, try again.

It’s a very long day, and at the end of it, they tell Mary Ann that part of the problem is “you went and took a real vacation,” as one of the doctors puts it.

“That’s a crime?”

“Well, usually they won’t put you in jail for it, but it’s a different thing from what most people in your line of work do. If you’d just gone to the same kind of resort you’re always going to for work, gone mostly incognito to lower the stress, and spent all your time drunk on fruit punch drinks by the pool, other than killing the occasional neuron, you’d have changed nothing about your basic brain structure. It would all be there pretty much the way the machine left it before you went off on your vacation. But you went and did something new and different, and when the brain learns its structure changes. The big things are still in the same place but everything’s in slightly different shapes. Probably some people out there will get the idea that you’re not the real Synthi Venture—whenever somebody comes back from a real vacation, that always happens.”

“Is that why Rock is always the focus for the conspiracy nuts?”

“Yep. That guy does something new every time off. Fine structure of his brain looks like the coast of Norway. Where poor old Quaz—well, he was a nice guy but he didn’t really need three convolutions to rub his brain cells together in.”

“‘Poor old Quaz’? What happened?”

She hasn’t heard, and when he tells her she bursts into tears. “I didn‘tn’ even like him much, but since I never really knew him…” She clutches Jesse’s hand tight.

The doctor nods. “See? And on top of everything else, you’ve gone and developed a heart.”

That night, when they make love, Jesse thinks about the idea of a million girls his own age, all over the world, tuned in to Synthi Venture and feeling what he’s doing. It’s terrific; he decides there’s nothing to worry about.

Except, of course, that just before he falls asleep, he thinks of thousands of wrinkled old grandmothers—and grandfathers—also tuned in to Synthi Venture….

Mary Ann feels him tense and asks him what the matter is, rolling over to rest a hand on his chest. He tells her, and now that he’s awake and telling her, they lie cuddling and giggling for a while.

“So have you decided?” he asks. “They left it up to you.”

“Yep. I’m definitely doing this from now on as Mary Ann, though of course they’ll cross-promote until the public gets the idea firmly in mind that Synthi and Mary Ann are the same person. But my feeling is that the artificial persona was just naturally a focus for trouble. Figure that when they put in a somebody-that-isn’t-you, if you have one drop of healthy selfpreservation, what you’re going to let that personality have is all the bad parts. That’s part of why most of the people in the business are either strung out or assholes.”

“Makes sense to me,” he says.

“Of course,” she says, “if every so often your adolescent immature side just wants to bone hell out of Synthi Venture, my middle-aged horny side might find a way to enjoy it.”

“It sounds like something worth trying,” Jesse says, so they do. Mary Ann draws a deep breath, her eyes unfocus, and he realizes that now she is Synthi Venture. He takes her in his arms, and then it’s all wild energy and screaming for the next half hour.

Jesse tells her afterward that Mary Ann is a better lay, though Synthi is a nice change of pace, and that seems to be the right thing to say.

Next morning Jesse finds himself in the middle of what really ought to be a surrealistic dream. It’s a story conference for Passionet, with all the usual attendees, and that alone is something he’d never have expected to attend, but add to it two big-name professors of semiotics, a noted director of rock concerts, and two quiet guys in suits (one from the White House and one from the UN), plus “Synthi’s Representative Friends,” as one of the consultants keeps calling them, while talking about them as if they are not there. The “SRF’s” are just Jesse and the Herreras, but he and Tomas have already spent a coffee break arguing about whether the T-shirts should read “SRFs: Because the time to represent Synthi’s friends is NOW” or “SRFs World Tour 2028.”

Two of the writers seemed to think the idea was “fun—something we can use a little later on. Keep that one, guys, we’ve got it marked as yours, there’ll be some cash if we use it.”

“How much do you suppose they mean?” Tomás whispers to Jesse. “And are they really that desperate for ideas?”

“Well, I’d guess enough to buy some beer,” Jesse says, a little awkwardly because as the norteamericano he should be the expert and he doesn’t have any more idea than Tomás does. “And as for desperate for ideas—have you seen XV?”

Tomás stares at him, nods as if he’s just heard something very shrewd, and claps him on the back.

The conference lasts a long time, and Jesse has a feeling that his old instructors from the required course in Interdisciplinary Communication were really understanding it when they constantly claimed that people in different fields never really hear each other. The government guys seem to think that all they have to do is give Mary Ann and the writers a list of ideas that will then be programmed into the waiting heads of all the experiencers out there, more or less like the anti-drug messages in the old sitcoms. The university semiotics guys seem to be mostly arguing that no matter what is presented, people will reinterpret it into the same old thing. The writers seem to be obsessed with coming up with things to “substitute for the violence so that it will have some story values.” Passionet execs appear to be trying to arrive at any solution that won’t cause anyone to get up and walk out.

After a long hour of everyone repeating themselves, Mary Ann says, “If you all will allow me, there’s something I wish you’d notice.”

They all nod at her, and she says, “Maybe the problem here is that you’re assuming that the material isn’t interesting. I mean, I think what I’ve lived through in the last few weeks, and what’s going on now, is a lot more interesting than what’s usually on XV.”

There’s a very long pause, and then one of the execs says, “Tell us about it.”

Mary Ann grins at him. “I can do better than that. If everyone would please put on a scalpnet, I could show you exactly what I feel about it all. I mean, that is the medium we will be using, right?”

There’s a long pause, and then everyone is nodding. Because these things come up routinely in these meetings, Jesse supposes, there’s a box of scalpnets, goggles, and muffs at hand; it just takes a moment for him to see that the Herreras can get into theirs comfortably, then slip his own on.

He has not been inside Mary Ann’s mind since getting to know her—indeed, he really hasn’t been inside Mary Ann’s mind at all, it’s always been Synthi Venture before. It’s a strange sensation, for at the moment she’s just waiting for everyone to get ready, so he sees the same room he is in, but from her point of view. Jesse is suddenly aware of half a dozen things—the way the metal chair presses through the too-small, too-high buttocks, the annoying pull of the huge breasts and the uncomfortably warm sweaty places under them, and that the huge pile of hair on top of her head feels like having it wrapped in a blanket.

She speaks aloud and he feels the voice forming in her throat, knows the intention an instant before the words form. “All right, everybody wave if you can hear and see through my eyes.”

They all wave, a very awkward movement because it’s so difficult to do it when your own body’s feedback is being overridden. Jesse watches his own arm jerk up and down spasmodically but barely feels it through Mary Ann’s override; the Herreras appear to be extremely startled.

“All right, now just lean back and let me look around and remember some things to you,” Mary Ann says. She gets up, leaves the Passionet tent, walks past the staticopter that brought them in, and climbs a low rise to where she can see the whole column moving by. There are many thousands of people, the weaker ones on buses and trucks, a few on bicycles (private cars were impossible because gas tanker trucks couldn’t have kept the column supplied over the all-but-ruined roads of the Isthmus), almost everyone else on foot. A couple of clumps of people are singing as if on their way to a picnic, some are plodding along like shell-shocked refugees, most are just walking and looking around them.

For many of the poor, this is the farthest they have ever been from home. The canteens set up for each meal are the most reliable food they’ve ever known; they are worried about the little homes they left behind, of course, but this is also, for them, a vacation and an adventure, and that’s exciting.

Through Mary Ann’s eyes, they see Tapachuta—the real city, its people—walking north; they remember the warm dark nights there, the ordinary town full of ordinary people who “just” worked and raised families, the scent of dust in the streets and the blaze of the sun overhead….

Her mind skips over dozens of people she knew there, shopkeepers and workmen, vegetable stall sellers and sidewalk painter, children and beggars she saw every day. She calls to mind all sorts of small memories: the especially beautiful garden of one house (she never saw the gardener but surely he’s on the march with them), the Café Sante which served a few anemic French dishes and a great deal of good Chiapas home cooking, the smell of dozens of open-air charcoal grills around the time for comida, the smile on one sidewalk vendor who sold wonderful garlic-y lamb tacos—

And then, suddenly, vividly, so hard that she sways a little as she does it, she plunges them into the hurricane, the shattering of the community, the terror and hope, the two children she saw reunited with their mother, the way the water flowed so thick over the windows, the endless days of digging out—all set among these people she has expressed in such detail.

The ending of the town, and this march to a new life; the long days on the road, the shared effort, the petty jealousies and greeds but also the sharing of a great adventure—all of this she throws into it. And now as they look at the huge chain of trucks, buses, and people slowly winding its way along the old two-lane road among the deep green volcanic slopes, they feel how much of it there is, how every one of these people is unique….

She jacks out. A moment later they are all pulling off goggles, scalpnets, and muffs, sighing and rubbing their faces as Mary Ann Waterhouse strides back into the tent. She looks around at them, and without a trace of a smile or of begging to please, she asks, “Good?”

The director and writers seem to recover first. Every sentence begins with “I feel” or “I felt” and they all talk at once; Frank Capra, Norman Rockwell, and “Americana” seem to be the buzzwords, until they suddenly begin to say “very international, very get back to the world beat feeling”… “My image of it is of a visionary kind of, well, of seeing people in this amazingly real kind of a way, totally positive,” the director finally says, and all the writers begin to nod vigorously and say, “That’s it, you’ve got it.” They seem happy.

The government guys look at each other and nod their heads. “I think we can say it’s going to work.” The one from Washington even smiles a little and says, “I ought to add, Miss Venture, that you’re the one who appears to have been listening to us; that’s exactly the message we wanted.”

“Very polycentered,” the UN guy says. “In fact I don’t think the word ‘Americana’ would be appropriate to describe it at all.”

The Passionet execs all glare at the writer who used the term, a slender, intense fellow with a brownish beard that he is now stroking very quickly. “Oh, of course, I’m sorry, I didn’t make the context clear, what I meant is that this is the sort of thing that could do for the planet as a whole, the kind of thing that old-time Americana did just for the United States, sort of—you know, ‘My Planet ‘Tis of Thee,’ people feeling more at home with the idea of global loyalty, global identity, more whole-Earth-minded—”

“Ah, I see,” the UN guy says. “But I certainly hope you don’t mean that this would tend to damage, degenerate, or deprivilege any of the legitimate cultural aspirations of any of the world’s peoples. We have to be sensitive to that.”

“No, no, I um—don’t mean that, I mean a kind of global loyalty and consciousness built around being very individual, very tribal, very national.”

The UN guy nods, smiling. “That’s exactly what I had in mind.”

“Are you making a note of this?” a Passionet exec asks Mary Ann.

“Of course. I think we can address that concern pretty easily.”

“Great! She says we can address it easily.”

Everyone nods. They ask the two university professors for their comments, and the two of them fall into a violent argument in which Frank Capra crops up a lot more. Jesse listens to that politely; his brother Di is a big Frank Capra fan, and even talked Jesse into watching one of those old black-and-white things once. It bored him out of his mind. Maybe the idea is to get everyone to go to sleep instead of rioting.

After a long time the university professors stop waving their hands, and everyone thanks them. A Passionet exec asks Mary Ann if she can implement that, and she says “No problem.”

Everyone now nods solemnly, and thanks everyone else. The UN guy wants to know what the Herreras and Jesse thought, and all three of them say they liked it a great deal.

Jesse has been here long enough to know that in this country a polite person says what other people, especially other people whose social status is higher, want him to say. When he first came here it seemed dishonest to him; now it’s common sense.

Since everyone has agreed to everything, the Passionet execs are all nodding their heads, and they tell Mary Ann, the writers, and the director to get on with it. The professors, bureaucrats, and execs get up, staff starts to break down the tent, and Mary Ann, the director, and the writers rejoin the column, all talking vigorously to each other.

Jesse and the Herreras quietly join up a little behind them, so whenever Mary Ann is done Jesse can rejoin her. After a time, Tomás says, “I didn’t understand a word of that.”

“Me either,” Jesse says.

“I thought perhaps you had. You would have convinced me.”

“You convinced me too,” Jesse says.

When Di Callare comes home, it’s really just to pack, but at least they get one day before they have to start that. It’s been agreed that if he gets a one-hour briefing and then gives them his opinion every day, that will be enough until the Klieg system is flying. The Klieg system is more important than before because, apparently, Colonel Tynan has gone nuts and is accelerating at rates that ought to have killed him—in fact he has claimed a couple of times to be dead—and while he seems to be on a trajectory to get him to the comet early, god knows what he will do when he gets there.

Both kids at once have decided, in the last couple of days, that they are just too big to need to have Mom and Dad to sleep, and Mark is setting a bedtime for himself and getting to bed then. Di seriously thinks of phoning his father just to tell him that one, but he’s sure his father will find a way to see this as a bad thing and to make it be Di’s fault, so why bother?

At any rate, this leaves Di and Lori a good deal more time and privacy, and right now they are lying next to each other on the bed, talking after making love. “Slaughterer in Yellow came out fine,” she says. “I suppose if the predictable thing happens, we’ll be able to buy a new house, even if the insurance company is broke.”

“Good to know,” he says, “and I think it’s likely. There’s an awful lot of activity and we’re just coming into August and September, which are usually the worst hurricane months in the Northern Hemisphere, and the differential is wider this time.”

“If that’s not part of a car, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says, and kisses his nose.

“Sorry. Finally get a day at home and I start talking shop.” He rests a hand on the curve of her waist. “So what does a differential do on a car?”

“Modern cars don’t have them. They have separate electric motors,” she says.

“What did the differential use to do?”

“What the electric motors do now.”

He hits her with a pillow; she giggles. “And you want to know the worst of it, Di?”

“Oh, sure.”

“I really did want to know. I just kissed your nose because it was fun.” Her eyes are shining and she has a wonderful smile.

“Well,” he says, “the differential I’m talking about is the change in ocean surface temperature over time. The ocean surface is warmer in August than it is in May. Now, with the additional methane in the atmosphere, by June eleventh, the Northern Hemisphere had ocean temperatures higher than they’d ever been in recorded history. That was bad enough. But it turns out, not only was there a higher base—”

“Oh, god. You mean it’s going up by more than it would normally go up by.”

“Yep. Like at a point where it would normally have been 25° C on June 1, and then gone up two degrees to 27° C by August 15, it started out at about 29° C on June I—and it’s going to go up maybe five degrees. That’s like what you’d expect in a shallow inland lake at sea level on the equator, normally. The storms will get a lot worse and bigger. Clem is going to get to gobble down a lot more energy than it’s had before. So the short answer is that even though the sea is about twenty miles away and forty feet down from us, all this area is going to be torn apart and reduced to mud.”

She shudders and snuggles against him. “We’re getting out, though.”

“Yeah.”

“Promise?”

“It’s Uncle Sam’s promise, love, not mine. Supposedly we are going to be evacuated.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Di thinks for a long time. “You mean if it looks bad, I desert my job, get back here, and get you and the kids out?”

“Or call me and I’ll get the kids to wherever you say, and then you desert and join me there. I don’t give a shit, Di, I just want us to live through this.”

Di sighs. “Hope for Klieg’s thing to work, then. Assuming we can get him out of jail, and that the Siberians don’t screw up his launchers, then it won’t necessarily be an issue.”

“You didn’t promise.”

“I can’t, Lori. I have a job to do there.”

“You have one here too.”

“Unh-hunh,” he says. “I do. And I—well, I mean…” He doesn’t know what to say, except that he can’t imagine doing what she’s asking him to promise to do, and so he ends up staring helplessly into those beautiful eyes, willing his words to come out and unable to make them.

He thinks she’s angry, but instead she just puts her arms around him and keeps crying. He holds her for more than an hour, kissing her cheeks and stroking her back. He wishes he could say yes, or that it didn’t bother him to say no.

When she stops crying she has fallen asleep on his chest; he can feel a little sticky puddle of tears and snot there. He doesn’t move, just holds her, and after a while he lapses into dark dreams of things clawing at him, pulling him down into a black, water-filled pit.

Next morning, the thirty-first, as they are packing, Di has the television on just to keep them alert to the news, but he starts out packing the books in the den, away from the television in the living room. All of a sudden he hears Lori and Mark yelling, and runs in to see what’s up. By the time he gets there, they’re grabbing their own XV stuff, and Lori hands him his. “Passionet,” she says.

He pulls on scalpnet, goggles, and muffs, tunes to Passionet—my god.

He had known that Jesse was dating a rich older woman. It was just like that sneaky kid not to mention it was Synthi Venture. Di is chuckling with admiration even as he watches—and then he’s engrossed. He had no idea how huge the effort going on in Mexico was, and though he has plotted storms across that coast thousands of times, he never knew what—or who!—was there. Mary Ann Waterhouse sure can tell a story; he wonders what she’s doing on a cheesy XV service like Passionet.

They lose half the afternoon that way, and he doesn’t care. This is the sort of thing that Mark and Nahum really should see anyway; he notices that when they unplug, they’re just playing around but they’re speaking a little Spanish to each other.

“It’s working,” Harris Diem says. “If you’ve got any medals you can give to XV stars, I think you ought to break them out right now.”

They are looking at the graphs on his screen. They all show the same thing around the world; new rioting is not breaking out anywhere where there’s enough XV installed. In other areas, as American and UN planes drop cheap headsets made by flash manufacturers, as soon as people get them pulled over their heads, the rioting stops cold. People plug into XV to feel the hurricane with Synthi Venture (or whatever strange real name she’s called by—nobody ever calls her anything except “Synthi”).

“You’ll never believe it, either, but she’s dating Di Callare’s kid brother. That younger guy Jesse that she’s walking and talking with.”

“I wish you hadn’t told me that,” Brittany Lynn Hardshaw says. “Now I really don’t know who to envy.” She grins. “So at least one piece of bad news is going away. And I hope that university semiotics guy is right.”

The only prediction either of them has been able to understand is the one that people will begin to imitate what they experience via XV—and since what Synthi Venture has been pumping out to them is an idealized image of generous, hard-working, brave people, that is what they are trying to live up to. “I hope he’s right, too. And I’m not worrying about all that subversion stuff; by the time it’s an issue, want to bet Venture’s on top of it?”

“No bets. She’s a tough broad. Us tough broads respect each other.” The semiotician’s other predictions have to do with “eventual subversion,” by which he seems to mean that a lot of the petty fanatics and greedheads out there will find some way to take this material and use it as a way to stir up hatreds or sell soap.

Hardshaw glances at the checklist on her pocket computer screen. “So where is Operation Valiant at this point?”

“They’re getting confident,” he says. “I think they’ll give it a green today. The big thing agents on site are telling us is that the Siberian workmen aren’t doing any work now, because they don’t have American supervisors watching them. There’re probably a few secret police here and there, but we’ll be hitting in the middle of the night—shouldn’t be much resistance at the launch area. What might happen at the prison worries me a lot more. Bad news to lose a bunch of prominent hostages.”

“Well, if the answer is go… then patch me through to Rivera and let’s see if we can get it done. Klieg thought he could be launching in a couple of weeks, the last day before the coup. The less he has to repair or get back on line, the better.”

“Any more word from Tynan?”

Hardshaw leans back, stretches, and groans. “Everything is perfectly reasonable, except that he’s traveling at accelerations so high that all the doctors say he must be dead, and he agrees with them, but he keeps talking to us. One theory is that he forgot to pack himself and he’s really back on the moon, but he sent us a raft of data that looked perfectly straight—including several photos of his desiccated body. Carla seems to believe him but they’ve been doing all that strange wide-band communication; maybe she’s just hallucinating him.” She hesitates and says, “You realize, of course, that if he’s telling us the truth, the problem can get solved months early and at no real cost to us. I’m almost afraid to believe it will work.”

Harris Diem nods. “And I’m afraid it will work, for that matter. If it does, we’ve got a dictator for the solar system—and one with a lot of popular support.”

“Yeah.” Suddenly she laughs.

“What is it?” Diem asks.

“Oh, you know, I met Louie Tynan a few times. One thing I think any woman would notice about him is that he’s a horny guy; he really loved being the big space explorer because so many women would fawn all over him. If he ends up as dictator of the solar system… well. He’ll have them throwing themselves at him, and no way to do anything with any of them. Can you imagine that? All the access you want to whatever you want sexually, and no way to use it?”

Diem smiles. “It doesn’t sound very pleasant.”

From July 25 to August 2, Clem veers and wobbles eastward, in yet another defiance of normal hurricane behavior, riding the steering currents and its own outflow jet against the Coriolis forces. It hangs between the 35th and 40th parallels of north latitude, normally much too far north for a hurricane to go without dying, but also the part of the Pacific that exhibits the strongest differential—now a belt of hot water all the way across, from which Clem draws steadily more energy.

Seeing it coming, and understanding what it means, makes an immense difference; the West Coast evacuates in a steady stream. On every interstate one lane is reserved for gasoline trucks heading west, and the rest are allocated to eastward traffic. Buses and vans cruise along in a reserved fast lane to carry those without automated cars—and to pick up those whose cars fail them. Tent cities and temporary settlements bloom all over the Rockies; Chugwater, Wyoming, finds itself a metropolis, with the Corps of Engineers working around the clock to get adequate sewers, roads, and power lines.

To the north, in Pacificanada, Vancouver drains like a leaking balloon toward Calgary.

But the coast is not empty on the afternoon of August 1 when the great waves slam into Puget Sound and begin to roll down the coast. Some people were still waiting, some have elected only to climb to high ground. A few stubbornly refused to believe it might happen, clinging to the idea that God or Nature could not be cruel enough to ravage the coast again.

And some, like Old Robert and Old Bob, just never heard the news. Old Robert has been collecting junk for recycling for a long time, and Old Bob, his dog, has been following him all that time. The nicknames were chosen by Old Robert, who always talks about and to himself in third person.

They’re walking out on the long fake pier that has the fancy seafood joints; for once no one is stopping them, and the cops are not hassling them. The water looks funny today, really choppy and high, but since folks ran off pretty fast, there’s lots of garbage for Old Bob to eat.

Old Robert tries the door to a place called Acres of Clams, mostly because the guy on the sign has an old scraggly beard and old scraggly clothes just like Old Robert. It opens; somebody didn’t think it mattered. “Come on, Old Bob. Old Robert and you’s gonna eat.”

“Eat” is just about the only word, besides his name, that Old Bob knows. He’s through the door in a flash.

The building is one of those powerchip things, so it makes its own natural gas out of air and water—someone explained that to Old Robert a long time ago. He used to be a pretty fair cook, and he puts a big pan on, drops a stick of butter in it, turns the heat on underneath, and goes to the cooler. There’re big chunks of fish and some soft-shell crab, and he throws them in with the butter, along with handfuls of chopped onion. It’s never smelled so good in all the world.

Old Bob gets whatever hits the floor instead of the pan, and that’s a lot.

The big plate of hot food is wonderful, but it takes Old Robert a long time to finish it—he’s not used to such rich fare. In the end some of it goes into Old Bob, who isn’t so particular.

There’s all kinds of wine around; Old Robert decides to have a little of that, just a bottle maybe, and feed a couple of steaks to Old Bob to keep him quiet.

It takes a little digging to find the corkscrew, but he does. He flips the slab of raw bloody beef to Old Bob, who goes after it like a starving wolf, and then hoists the bottle. Outside it’s now raining like mad, and the wind is really picking up. Good day to be indoors.

“Happy days!” he shouts to Old Bob. Startled, the dog drops the steak and then frantically scrabbles about trying to get it back into his mouth. That’s so funny half the wine comes out of Old Robert’s nose.

The dog seems to get the joke and dances around like a complete idiot, barking. Old Robert laughs, and then they get down to the wine and the steak. Man, man, man, it doesn’t get any better than this. What did they say in the old days? Groovy. It’s a pretty groovy afternoon.

They never see the towering wave roll in, or hear the building grinding, or feel it all come down on them. They are both in a stupor, Old Bob with his head on Old Robert’s chest, when it comes. The restaurant is caught in the undertow and dragged out into Puget Sound; their bodies are never found.

“Incredible,” Berlina is saying on August 5. She and Naomi have pulled into Portland, where the big surge that burst a hundred miles up the Columbia smashed right over Jantzen Beach and Hayden Island, tore a new channel to the Willamette, and slowly drained back, pulling down the Montavilla Arcology as it did so. “They were warned, they were told, there were a thousand pictures of what was going to happen, they knew backwards and forwards that their damned concrete turtle wouldn’t hold against a wave half a mile high, and they stayed.”

She’s saying this to Naomi Cascade, who is hand-operating the camera and is in her second week as Berlina’s part-time employee and full-time admirer. Before them stretches a great oval of concrete and rebar rubble, half a mile across, what remains after the shock of the wave’s impact exploded the air trapped inside the thirty-story-tall structure.

Naomi shrugs. “Most of them left. It was just a couple of old people and some who were watching XV—”

“That’s what I mean. God, it’s a terrible thing for a reporter to feel sorry for a bureaucrat, but it worries hell out of me that the government couldn’t get them to evacuate because they couldn’t promise XV on the buses. People didn’t want to be away from Synthi Venture, because it’s too interesting to watch her evacuate.”

“People are weird,” Naomi says. “Maybe they could have gotten her to say something like, ‘Hey, all you idiots in Portland, move your butts!’”

“She would have, too. She’s the only XV person I’ve got any use for. Your old boyfriend has good taste. We’ve got enough of this for backdrop, anyway, and we want to get back before the Army decides it shouldn’t have permitted us into the area and sends staticopters after us.”

“Yeah.” Naomi shuts down, stops, looks at the vast wasteland of mud and shattered construction with her own eyes and not the eyes of the camera. “You know,” she says, “I don’t think this really would go into words at all.”

They are packed in ten minutes, into the new van that Berlina bought, having put her tiny old car into honorable retirement as a souvenir, now that she is wealthy. There are no guidelines but this thing has full inertial navigation, so Berlina just tells it where to go and it starts to drive itself, checking directions and position with satellites overhead.

“Good thing we came when we did,” Berlina says. “In another day as the temperature comes up—you’re not going to believe what places like this will smell like.”

Naomi nods very seriously and works on squaring the gear away. Berlina sits back, thinks to herself that getting an employee was the smartest decision she ever made, and grins a little at what she’s just done. Nothing like some gruesome, hard-bitten remark to put some romance into the heart of a—

She all but laughs aloud with delight. She had been about to think, into the heart of a cub reporter. Which is just what Naomi is turning into, and what that means is that Berlina Jameson is not the last of the newscasters. She wonders if maybe she should call up Wendy Lou Bartnick and tell her that she’s a grandmother.

The van rolls east—miraculously, despite all the wind and rain, the way through Bennet Pass, past Mount Hood, is still open. They make hot sandwiches and coffee and sit up front to look at the devastated forest and small towns as they travel through. As the sun goes down, their lights are the only ones visible. Ruins, smashed trees, and the occasional human, deer, bear, or cow corpse swims up in the lights and rolls back behind them. After a while, they sleep.

Ever so carefully, exchanging a neutral signal here, a stray thing that could be made to look like line noise there, a datarodent from outside the system probes at the van’s onboard processor net, finding its way in through the navigation system, then crossing over until finally it is able to recover stored electronic media and Berlina’s rough script for the next Sniffings. Then it quietly erases its tracks and vanishes.

Carla Tynan got what she needed, at Louie-on-the-moon’s request, and it’s no surprise when he then asks her to go into the research files and silently kill four or five phrases that might lead Jameson to the cometoid retrieval project.

She switches on an onboard camera and looks around briefly. Naomi Cascade is sleeping nude on the lower bunk on one side, and light reflecting in from the headlights is enough to outline her body. Geez, Carla thinks, I usually did okay with guys but if I’d been built like that—

She turns her attention to Berlina Jameson and catches the reporter very quietly watching the sleeping Naomi. As Carla watches, Berlina slides a hand down to between her own legs, and begins to play with herself, rolling over to see Naomi better as she does.

Carla clicks out; she hadn’t intended to pry. And she finds, too, that much as she has to interfere with Jameson’s covering the story, keep her from learning about Louie’s expedition… she likes the reporter, and just now she feels very sorry for anyone who is longing to touch a particular human body that isn’t accessible.

On August 5, GMT, just 390 hours after he reached Earth escape velocity, Louie Tynan crosses the orbit of Mars, 1.57 AU from the sun. The first time he did this, on the UN Mars Mission, it took nine months.

He wasn’t supposed to be here until late September; he is truly making time now. The lunar catapults are longer than ever, firing harder, and he has added laser-boost: as each packet leaves the catapult, powerful lasers burn off a solid hydrogen plug inside an open-ended cylinder at its rear, producing high-velocity exhaust and further accelerating the package.

He is up to eleven brain-years per minute and gaining; if he can be counted as human, not exactly having the body anymore to prove it with, then he is now the fastest-moving human being ever to live, moving along at an astronomical unit every ten days, four times the speed for this day in the originally planned mission. He can’t help feeling congratulations are due.

The news from Earth is bizarre to him; after all the supposed impossibilities, it took one good XV program to end Global Riot Two. Maybe he’s not all that sure he wants to be human, after all. He also notes with some pleasure that he likes Jesse and Mary Ann, and then realizes that that’s the point of the whole thing; everyone who doesn’t have anything to do stays home to root for the hero. Since you can’t depend on people to help, at least it gets them out of the way. That is just, perhaps, a little bit depressing.

Carla seems to have forgiven him for sacrificing his body, though he won’t feel really forgiven until they are back in realtime contact and able to truly share each other’s feelings. But it’s a good sign, anyway, that she’s not angry at him anymore.

He is now just about five light-minutes from Earth, which means that one hundred ten years of thinking go by, subjectively, between sending a message to Carla and hearing what she thinks of it. Figure since he no longer sleeps at all it’s effectively one-third longer, and you get 146 years. That’s a lot of thinking; Carla’s getting faster too, and that’s a good thing.

Louie has chewed out a lot of philosophic issues, and gnawed others down to the kernel of sheer personal taste and temperament at their hearts. Never much given to philosophy before, he has been doing only this because it does seem to be the most effective way he can find of using up processing time, and he needs ways to use it up; otherwise, memories come to the fore, he starts linking them together, and before long he has emotional reactions out of any connection to his present circumstances.

He wondered for a while where his emotions were coming from, and finally settled on hysteresis. In a normal human body emotions are the way they are because of the chemical component of mental process; the chemicals hit every cell of the nervous system indiscriminately, and it takes longer to scrub out chemicals than switch off electrical signals. Thus one tends to have a pervasive feeling about the world as a whole (even when the signals are disparate) and feelings are never completely aligned with the present moment, because there are always some spare chemicals lying around from before.

In Louie’s case, hysteresis—the self-induction that makes it impossible to turn off current in a conductor instantaneously—is a bit longer, in terms of his mental process, than the chemical delay was in his old body. This is partly because there is so much of him, partly because it’s so spread out, and mainly because he is so massively parallel that he runs far faster than the electronics that hold him together in a single personality. And somewhere in that little gap between starting a change of current and finishing it… he has feelings.

He wonders, idly, whether his mind had the slots for anger, love, joy, fear, whatever, and just happened to fit various hysteresis phenomena into those slots—or whether somehow those emotions are intrinsic properties of any system.

It doesn’t seem to matter a great deal. He has emotions. If they had vanished, he wouldn’t have been sad, but he’d have been missing something.

On August 9, 2028, Clem comes to a rest over the graves of its first victims, at Kingman Reef. Its eye is just over 350 kilometers across, and winds in the eyewall roar at 250 meters per second, a wind faster than tornado winds ever get, whirling around an eye the size of the state of Ohio. The hot ocean surface pumps more energy in, but Clem is at last encountering an upper limit; wind resistance increases rapidly as Mach 1, the speed of sound, is approached, and at the surface of the ocean right now the wind in the eyewall is moving at Mach 0.7. So the wind resistance from the surface of the ocean is holding Clem’s winds down to their current speed.

This creates an odd situation; if the ocean warms up a little more, Clem will not speed up much at all. Di or Jesse would say that if the wind speed is v and the ocean surface temperature is t, dv/dt is very small in this range of t, or that the situation is now “temperature insensitive.”

Only when the ocean is supplying enough energy for Clem to “punch through” into the supersonic realm will the superhurricane grow much—but if enough energy does turn up, because supersonic flow encounters much less resistance, Clem’s eyewall winds will leap from their current speed to Mach 1.2 or higher within a matter of minutes.

Fortunately, the ocean is not yet warm enough to do that, and it will reach such temperatures only at shallow spots later in the summer.

Someplace, once, John Klieg read a long list of people who wrote great books or planned great achievements while in prison. Lenin was supposed to have been one, and some of the apostles, and… well, a lot of people, anyway.

He always figured it was a matter of having a lot of time on your hands, but he hadn’t really had a concept of what “a lot of time” really means. He’s beginning to catch on.

The first two days in here, no one talked to him, but they did bring him a short note that said Glinda and Derry were being held under house arrest, and they were comfortable. The food here is okay, considering it’s the same stew and bread every meal, but it only takes a few minutes to eat, and you can only sleep so much. They put him in a coverall and every other day he gets to hand that in, take a shower, and put on a clean one.

Physically it’s not a bad existence, but after three days he’d have killed to have a notebook. You can think only as far as your memory can reach, and without a notebook that isn’t far; a few times he’s done long bits of arithmetic in his head, only to find at the end he had forgotten what it was that he was solving them for.

It’s frustrating, too, because with this much time to turn things over in his head, he’s gotten a much clearer take on both GateTech and business generally, and once he gets out he’s going to have to spend a couple of days dictating to get it all laid out for himself. There’s a new way of doing business that’s becoming clear to him… GateTech was just a primitive way of doing it, and getting into space launch this way still cruder. He’s always known the real way to money is not through production but through control; “The hotel owner gets rich owning the keys, the maids stay poor keeping the toilets clean,” as one of his biz profs back at Madison used to say.

The trick is to stay out of the bathroom and up by the front desk. Or better yet hire someone to run the front desk and stay home.

Klieg notices he’s pacing the cell; it comforts him, because he’s seen that in so many movies and it’s nice to know that some things really do work the way they’re supposed to. Not that this place is a dungeon or anything, more like a no-frills hotel—not even a lock that works from the inside—he’ll have to remember that one for Glinda….

The walls are bare and off-white, and the construction is just shoddy enough so that even though it’s new you can see some lumpy spots. The bed is an ordinary steel frame bed, the sink a basin with a coldwater spigot, and the toilet a pretty basic flush model with no cover and a seat that doesn’t raise. They let him keep his watch, so he knows that the lights get turned on at seven every morning and off at nine at night.

Back and forth, back and forth… white wall to white wall, five steps. The whole trick now is that machines, especially those replicator gadgets—which are going to get one huge boost from what that Tynan asshole tax-sucking civil servant has done—will do the physical producing, and artificial intelligences can probably do a lot of the design and inventing. So the real grunt labor, the true cleaning-toilet jobs, are going to be financial… time to get out of financial control? Do what, just own information? It’s not the most implausible idea he’s ever had, but he has no idea how to do it.

He sits on his bunk edge and seriously considers trying to fall asleep with the lights on. Trouble is, he’s not really in the mood….

The real reason why people sometimes do major intellectual work in prison, John Klieg figures, is because if you’ve got any brains, you can’t stop thinking for very long. He stretches out and considers… in a world of datarodents and reverse-engineering artificial intelligence, how is he supposed to keep hold of anything? Legal rights and permissions won’t matter either.

Maybe the world will change enough? No telling what a world battered by Clem and the daughters might need, but if he can figure it out and corner that… the trouble is, of course, just when you have a lock on something everyone needs, some politician starts a crusade because everyone needs it and you’ve got a lock on it. It hardly seems fair that the better the deal the more likely they are to beat you up for it.

A distant clang and thud. More noise. A pounding sound. As he does whenever there are unusual sounds, Klieg makes sure his shoes are tied and that the few possessions he was permitted to keep are in his pockets, especially his reading glasses.

This time the noise goes on for quite a while, so he stands away from the door (but in plain view of it), ready to raise his hands. The two possibilities, always assuming that’s not just a bunch of clumsy deliverymen, are that it’s another coup and he’s about to be seized as a valuable asset, in which case he wants to cooperate with whoever is nearest him with a gun so as not to get shot in a crossfire, or—

Something thuds hard against the door, and cracks appear in the surfacing around the frame. He backs up and puts his hands all the way up over his head.

Another crash, and this time the door shudders; definitely they’re getting him out with some kind of hydraulic gadget, he can hear it pressurizing between blows. Got glasses, pockets loaded, shoes tied so he can run, pants pulled high enough not to trip on cuffs—

With a boom, the door flips flat onto the floor, and Klieg sees the little ram they used to take it down, a gadget on a heavy iron tripod that looks more like a giant sliding latch for a door than anything else.

The man who steps through the door and says “Mr. John Klieg?” is wearing a powder-blue UN uniform.

“Yes, sir. Ready to go.”

“Good. Follow me.”

There are sirens and bells everywhere now, and the smell of smoke. In other parts of the building Klieg can still hear gunfire. But neither he, nor his rescuer—if that’s what this is—says anything. They hurry down the hall. Explanations can wait.

“We can get you excused from that, you know,” a voice is saying in Mary Ann’s brain. “This is not something Synthi Venture has to do.”

If you think that, you really don’t understand crap about all this, Mary Ann thinks back at the voice. Then she replays the exchange on the conscious level so that it goes out to all the experiencers.

“Please don’t do that, it spoils the composition—”

Exactly. What we don’t need around here is composition. She grips her shovel again. Now shut up and let me work. She wades back into the long ditch that she and several hundred others are digging. On August 6, at about 16N 135W, Clem spawned Clem 500, which has been wandering around to the south and east ever since. In the last thirty hours it has surged due north for the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and the evacuation columns from Tapachula have been ordered to dig in. Aircraft and trucks have been getting stockpiles of food, fresh water, and chemical toilets in as quickly as possible, and the long dugouts are growing everywhere. Jesse is over at the temporary airfield—due to his technical training they’ve made him a radar jock, based on about twenty minutes’ practice, serving an “air traffic controller” who once did the job at a small civil aviation field in the States, twenty years ago.

Meanwhile, unskilled hands, like Mary Ann’s, are doing the rough work of getting the shelters dug.

It’s a good feeling in her back and shoulders as she works; she’s in pretty decent shape these days. Besides, there’s a certain amount of pleasure in working on a gang with other women; she lets herself wonder if maybe it would be better if they started whistling at and harassing young men, and is rewarded with a scandalized squawk from Passionet about the thought.

One of the conditions she insisted on before going back on Passionet was that she have ten minutes to herself every hour, and it took her some effort to make it clear to them that “to herself” did not mean “available for conversation.”

So when she finds a foreign thought invading during her break she’s just plain furious. There’s a long pause, and then the voice says, “I’m sorry, I had no idea it was your break, but I’m not Passionet, and I was trying to get in touch with you when they weren’t online with you.”

You’re not—there’s no way to hack a brain protocol—

“I wouldn’t say that. I’d just say it’s kind of tough. Look, my name is Carla Tynan—have you heard that—”

You’re the meteorologist they had a lot of trouble getting back onto the government payroll.

“That’s me.” Quickly, Carla explains about her unlimited net access and her presence in the net most of the time. “What I’m talking to you about is just that I think there are some things you ought to know.”

Well, sure. What are they?

Carla Tynan has never wasted a lot of words in getting her point across. She tells Mary Ann quickly about what Louie is up to. “So there is help on the way, even if the government refuses to believe him and publicize it. That’s what I wanted you to know. Also, I can keep feeding you information from around the globe.”

Why me? Mary Ann thinks.

“Because you are Synthi Venture, and Synthi Venture is the mind that everyone is hearing this through. And if I warn you in advance about what’s coming, and give you time to think about it and see that it’s really something wonderful, people won’t be so frightened, or do anything stupid before they get used to the idea. The way you tell the story is the way it’s going to be in people’s minds. Probably forever. And I think you’ll tell the story better, give people a better handle on things and a better chance of understanding them, if you know more about how it’s likely to come out. Just remember, if you want to help, you don’t tell them till we’re ready.”

Who’s “we”? And if it’s so wonderful, then show me.

Carla does; it leaves Mary Ann breathless, so that she has to take a little extra time before she lets them log back on. As she works, joking, gossiping, and generally just sharing the time with the other women on her crew, the back of her mind, below what will register for XV, works on what Carla has told her. If it’s true, Clem is really not the biggest thing going on right now.

“They got Klieg out,” the young man in uniform says, looking up from his keyboard. “There’s been a delay due to some bad crosswinds and it looks like a guidance satellite mistook a stadium under construction for a key landmark, so they aren’t at the launch sites yet.”

Tension fills the crisis center. No one needs to say that if they don’t get the launch facility intact, the whole raid is truly for nothing, however better they might feel having gotten Klieg back.

Hardshaw finally sighs, turns to the general at her right, and says, “So how did this happen?”

General Tim Bricker is a tall, thin man, with a Southern drawl, younger than you’d expect; one of those ambitious, rising stars drawn to staff jobs because they’re a place to find and impress patrons. Hardshaw chose him partly because he’s the kind of guy the job needs, someone who can handle the public political aspects and understands about deal-making and compromise, but also partly because he had a few years as captain of an infantry company and has seen combat twice, in the little brushfire rescue operations like this one.

Bricker slowly closes his pad and leans forward to her. “Ms. President, this happened through a process we call a clusterfuck. Several things that normally would have worked happened not to. Some of the people in the field tried things to fix them, and because they didn’t have real good information, some of what they did made things worse. A lot of times bad things add up. So if your question is ‘What chain of events caused this?’ I have to tell you I don’t know just yet, we’re still trying to find out. But if your question is ‘Who’s fault is it so I can drop the bastard before he damages me?’ then I’d have to say it’s probably nobody’s fault, and if you want a fall guy, you’ll have to frame somebody.”

His tone is hostile, even rude, and Hardshaw feels an urge to retaliate, but she’s spent enough hours with hostile witnesses before now. “General,” she says, “if you like, the question was rhetorical and I withdraw it. Just let me ask you this: Whenever someone proposes one of these things, why don’t I hear about possible clusterfucks beforehand?”

“Because if we knew it could happen we’d have it blocked. There’re always surprises.” He stays right where he is, not backing an inch, and their eyes lock on each other.

“Not what I meant, General, my fault.” She says it softly, gently, almost purring; Harris Diem might recognize the tone from some hard-fought cases long ago, but no one else in the room would. “I meant to ask you why you say ‘probability of success is x per cent,’ but you don’t add ‘And then of course we might accidentally shell our own troops after leaving them on a beach, or two staticopters could collide, or we might accidentally shoot up a schoolbus, or maybe thirty of our men will be captured and mutilated.’ Just to mention examples going back a few years.”

“Because you don’t ask us and you don’t want to hear it. Ms. President, all I’m saying is that this kind of thing can happen. It does happen. You’re dealing with split-second timing and human reactions that have to be perfect in an environment with flame, smoke, noise, explosions, gunfire—shit happens. And you’ve been in office a while, and been through a rescue or two before. How can you sit there and pretend that you had no idea this could happen?”

Hardshaw leans back and looks hard at the general. There are several problems here; first of all, he’s mostly right, and many of the people here know that, so she can’t just brush him off. Secondly, he’s being right in an insubordinate way, which might be either strategy or total loss of patience, but either way she can’t let him get away with it. Having dealt with Bricker for about a year now, her guess is that it’s strategy, probably getting himself down as the man who defended the armed forces from President Grandma, a plain blunt-spoken soldier, and thus a good pick for the next administration.

None of which means he doesn’t have a point.

She can’t let this stretch on any longer, so she says, finally, “The problem is noted. Please note also my request that henceforth I wish to be reminded of the possibility of a clusterfuck in any contigency plan or operations proposal submitted for my attention. In fact—” She smiles at him. “We’re going to call this the Bricker Requirement, to make sure that you get proper credit. Just make sure that you don’t lose the terminology by prettying it up, General. If you’re going to remind me that a clusterfuck can happen, I want the word ‘clusterfuck’ used in the reports.”

“Noted,” Bricker says. His reaction is now unreadable; maybe he’s satisfied at having the problem addressed, more likely he’s trying to figure his next move.

Three minutes later they get word. The Siberians had enough time. They blew up towers, control rooms, the deep accelerator tubes that Klieg was counting on for all-weather launch. If help is going to come, it will have to come from Louie Tynan.

On Wednesday, August 16, Louie is farther away from Earth than any human being has ever been. According to data he’s getting via Louie-on-the-moon, there are at least half a billion people, many of whom never had access to XV before the free headsets were distributed, who spend all day long, now, plugged into Synthi Venture, listening to the news and walking with her. The destruction of Klieg’s launch facilities seems to have led to only a single brief day of civil disorders, mostly because Synthi Venture disapproved so strongly of looting and fighting and everyone was tuning back into her.

For whatever reason, Hardshaw and Rivera and all have decided to keep word of the 2026RU expedition out of the media, which is not an easy job. If it were not for Carla stalking Jameson (and the dozen imitators she has by now) through the nets, the secret would be long since out.

Louie wonders why they’re keeping his mission secret, letting it appear there is no hope when that’s not so. Maybe it’s because he’s dead. He doesn’t really understand why that should be held against him. After all, it isn’t like he smells bad.

He has noticed, however, that nobody seems to want to talk to him directly anymore, and his lunar and asteroidal spawn agree with him about that. Does it make them nervous that he’s dead or that he’s still alive? Or that they can’t tell him from the living?

He wonders if maybe the universe is going to be lonelier than he had thought it would, because just possibly there will be very few people who want to be friends with a dead guy.

Carla’s last letter rather gently chided him about self-pity. Maybe he should take her seriously about that.

It will be okay as long as he doesn’t have to be lonely.

He has so much surplus processing capacity, in this stage of things, that he begins to ask his lunar self for all the spare data it can get, and there are enough systems up and running on Earth to feed his hunger. He gets the Library of Congress and seriously considers reading the whole thing; he gets weather reports and satellite data, raw field notes of university researchers, some of them on video—these, he finds, seem to be the best. Though he knows that every camera was pointed by someone or something, he likes the feeling that whoever it was didn’t compose everything, that though he can’t be entirely sure what’s accidental and what’s not, much of it must be.

Louie watches people who have never seen anyone other than the forty people in their little tribe meet the great wide world. He watches animals copulate, kill each other, grow old and die. He watches ponds become climax forest and revert to ponds; catches the immense complexity of a condor in flight and the simplicity of the nitrogen cycle.

He finds that he likes this a lot. One of the most interesting things that the creativity researchers found out (and Louie suddenly begins to wonder about creativity, and within a few minutes he has put together every study ever done on it, read them all, and formed his own view) was that esthetic pleasure is linked, on some deep level, to the complexity of what we see—sometimes to the complexity of its interrelations rather than to the complexity of the object itself.

One reason nature pleases us is its endless use of a few simple principles: the cube-square law; fractals; spirals; the way that waves, wheels, trig functions, and harmonic oscillators are alike; the importance of ratios between small primes; bilateral symmetry; Fibonacci series, golden sections, quantization, strange attractors, path-dependency, all the things that show up in places where you don’t expect them… these rules work with and against each other ceaselessly at all levels, so that out of their intrinsic simplicity comes the rich complexity of the world around us. That tension—between the simple rules that describe the world and the complex world we see—is itself both simple in execution and immensely complex in effect. Thus exactly the levels, mixtures, and relations of complexity that seem to be hardwired into the pleasure centers of the human brain—or are they, perhaps, intrinsic to intelligence and perception, pleasant to anything that can see, think, create?—are the ones found in the world around us.

It looks like a good deal to Louie that we are constructed to like the world in which we find ourselves. He has looked at a lot of art by now and so much of it seems to be about how to see, and now that he knows how to see, he looks at art less and nature more. There is time for all sorts of things; for drops of dew on leaves, forests crawling up burned mountainsides, the breaking of surface tension around a duck’s feet as it takes off, and the sucking down of the Earth’s crust into mantle.

The amusements are endless; he augments them with data from the other planets, by comparison, and even squeezes a few orbiters into the launch schedule so that by the time he is on his way back he will have continuous monitoring of every major body in the solar system. But he already knows, somehow, that Earth is his favorite planet… Earth with its living things, of course, and with an oxidizing atmosphere, plate tectonics, and water cycle to endlessly change the shape of its seas and coasts, where a tiny variation in temperature can make such a huge difference—

He sees that if Clem and Clem’s daughters are let alone, they will not put an end to Earth or life, and probably not even to human beings. With his own lifespan now extending to infinity (for he can repair and recopy himself as long as he cares to), Louie could, if he chose, sit back and watch the world re-invent complexity as it filled its empty niches, and the niches between the newly filled niches, and the new niches that created—

He could but he’d rather have Earth as it is. Call it a sentimental attachment.

On August 20, Louie Tynan crosses Jupiter’s orbit, a bit more than five astronomical units from the sun. The giant planet itself is nowhere nearby, of course; it’s a purely arbitrary boundary, the imaginary line that marks an ellipse in the black vacuum. Still, it’s the first of the gas giants, the four huge planets of the outer solar system that formed far enough away from the sun to keep their original loads of hydrogen and helium. He is now truly out in the cold and the dark.

By now the wiseguys in the asteroid belt are blasting away at him at an ever-increasing rate, and even with the longer catapult and laser boost it is taking six days for packages from the moon to catch up with him and pass through his funnel. He has been rearranging and climbing the train for a while now, so that more and more of his processing is distributed in the family of packages; there’s less waste of materials, and coordination gets better and better as he learns to pass the incoming packets, shrieking in the electromagnetic spectrum as clearly to him as a teakettle to human ears, from funnel to funnel the way a juggler passes balls, hands working independently and yet under unified control.

For a couple of days it was challenging, then as processors became more numerous and more tightly networked it became amusing but not difficult. Now it’s all but a habit; he catches them and passes them along as automatically as a worker on an old-fashioned assembly line might tighten a bolt.

With seventy plants online in the asteroids—and that number will quadruple before he’s done—he doesn’t really need the moon packages anymore, or rather he doesn’t need them right away. After a moment’s thought, he sends a message to Louie-on-the-moon—the lunar packages will be sent up a different pathway altogether, the one that he will descend as he works his way back toward the sun in a few weeks.

Ultimately the real way to do this would be to have belts of stations on highly elliptical orbits, all following each other around the sun, and then to toss ships like packages between them. Done properly it could create a “railroad” to the far reaches of the solar system… it might be a matter of a mere couple of weeks even for ordinary flesh-and-blood humans to get out to Pluto or beyond. He works out the scheme… in fact, rather than having a single sequence of solar satellites following each other in a long elliptical orbit, it really might be better to have several such sequences… ultimately you could create a “grid” of moving bodies such that there was always a way to get thrown all the way up to wherever you wanted, and then caught at the other end.

He’s going to need that when the time comes to settle the outer system, he decides. And for the first time in thousands of brain-years, Louie Tynan is startled; it had never occurred to him that he might do any such thing.

Yet the truth is he can build about as much habitat as he wants out here… and the beautiful Earth is being crapped up by an excess of people—lovely as individuals, towns, and cultures, but hideous in such profusion.

He has great fun thinking of a dozen ways to turn Jupiter into a midget sun and terraform its major moons, and working out which nations to settle where. It is so entertaining that he spends almost ten minutes on the project, idly catching a couple of packages along the way. Now that the Good Luck has extended into a stable train of a few hundred packages stretching over about a million miles, and he’s gotten himself distributed across all of it, this is really easy to do, and tossing and passing packages is like playing with a yo-yo, relaxing once you have the trick.

Just for grins, let’s see how many thousand years, using the resources he has or can produce, it would take for him to terraform everything in the solar system that he possibly could.

Figure Mars is easy; get some of the oxygen and nitrogen back out of the soil, add water and other volatiles… it had a billion years of life, anyway, based on what the expedition Louie was on found. Charge it up again and it’s good for another billion.

The moon is not much worse (it would leak air and water over the long run, but Louie could maintain it, now that he’s virtually immortal). The Jovian moons are a lot tougher—Jupiter’s magnetic field is a natural cyclotron and it’s bathed in hard radiation, and igniting nuclear fires in Jupiter’s core will pump a lot more particles into the process. You’d have to slow the giant planet’s rapid rotation to get a softer, gentler magnetic field….

And the outer gas giants would be a lot tougher to start going and keep going; not much way to sustain a reaction in a ball that small. Maybe by beaming power from stations closer to the sun? Six big satellites in solar polar orbit… use the gas giants as reflectors… no reason to use Uranus at all since it doesn’t have a moon big enough for the job….

The real bitch is Venus. Cooling it down from the temperature of boiling lead, spinning it up to a decent rotational speed (without reheating everything), getting rid of air so thick it’s like a half mile of Earth ocean… figure you’d precipitate it out with metallic calcium, maybe, to get the carbon dioxide converted into carbonates, and if you had big enough lumps of calcium in orbit maybe you could use their gravitational drag to spin up Venus… they could also act as mirrors to keep the sun off… that would be a job. Mars would be a snap by comparison.

Well, so simulate it. How long does it all take, and what does he do with all those worlds? Figure he’s making nine new habitable worlds: Venus, Mars, Luna, Ganymede, Callisto, Io, Europa, Titan, and Triton. A couple of dozen continents and oceans….

The thought is like a small orgasm. For twenty years now, the Library of Congress has been recording genomes; tailored viruses can rebuild the DNA, and cloning technology is there to bring the organism into being. They’ve done it for a few zoos, and they brought back the blue whale that way after the Japanese slaughtered the last dozen. For that matter, in the last decade they’ve brought back dodos, moas, woolly mammoths, passenger pigeons, and giant sloths.

They lost a few recordings in the Flash, but there are probably copies around… and for that matter there are plenty of samples one way or another.

He could bring it all back. And have plenty of room for beautiful cities and farms… nine Edens. Room enough not just for humanity but for life.

Herds of bison the size of Texas counties, whole continents of untouched jungles, snow leopards playing on Olympus Mons, and giant white sturgeon in the rivers of Ishtar. Wonder what an eagle flies like in low g? Heck, it could probably lift a small deer… on the smaller worlds you sure wouldn’t be able to keep anything that flew isolated.

How long?

Almost, he wishes for a physical heart again, so that it could pound. And he remembers that however long it might be, he has the time.

The answer comes to him. Just under a thousand years. He doesn’t quite believe it, tries again… but there it is. Once you have true self-replicating machinery, driven by abundant nuclear fuels or sunlight, you can have as much as you want of whatever you want.

His mind reels back to the implications. In the same thousand years human population could quite painlessly be brought a long way down—with everyone living a long life, no need to raise the death rate or even slow medicine down… everyone could be rich, everyone could have all the material happiness they wanted—

And right now, he knows, from the millions of brain-image recordings that the Comparative Psych Library at Kansas State has on file, exactly how wretched people are made by hunger, cold, sickness, and fear. Figure that of the Earth’s nine billion people, about one and one half billion are suffering ill effects of malnutrition at the moment, a partially overlapping two and one quarter billion are inadequately sheltered, about three billion will contract a treatable illness and receive no treatment this year….

Fear is a little tougher to estimate.

The sheer quantity of unnecessary human unhappiness implied is beyond even Louie’s capabilities to comprehend. In a way he’s just as glad not to know.

That word “unnecessary” keeps sticking to his mind. A thousand years and all the physical ills of mankind could be nothing more than bad memories, not living in any memory except Louie’s. And then there are those other dreams—lions stalking mustangs and kangaroos on the grassy plains of Aphrodite. Dolphins in the Sea of Tranquility, diving down to visit the site of the first moon landing. A grizzly breaking from the pines of the upper slopes of the Valle Marineris, on his way down to that great freshwater sea for a drink. Mighty Jupiter glowing blood-red in the sky above the endless oceans and floating islands of Ganymede and Europa.

All this and their health, too, Louie thinks, laughing to himself. Well, if he decides to deliver that… it slightly exceeds the specs on his contract, of course, but he doubts their descendants will complain.

Actually their descendants probably will complain, because there is something in human nature that looks for ways to make itself unhappy. But Louie can’t do anything about that. He’s not God.

Not exactly.

Not yet.

Mary Ann tends to think of the time that follows as the “phony hurricane.” Clem is still there and still real, and when Clem 500 blows across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and they spend a scary couple of days huddling in the dugouts, there’s plenty of reality. But it’s not the kind of terror it was before; the shelter is roomy enough to hold them, and strong enough to keep them safe. They all spend their time in the dugout singing, playing word games, sleeping, telling stories to children—it’s a kind of vacation from the endless hot walk. Everyone emerges healthy and in good spirits; the shelters are left as they are, so that future travelers can have the use of them if necessary.

The one thing Mary Ann finds depressing is that it all implies that the hurricanes will persist.

When the storm has passed they are up and walking again, clearing the road as they go. And as they do this, Clem is still moving over the Pacific, its fourth trip around now, scouring islands that were wiped out before. There’s not much loss of life; the big waves roll out, but where they strike, big waves have been before, and you can kill someone only once.

Brittany Lynn Hardshaw finds that time to be painful for other reasons. The trouble with militarily occupying what Harris Diem calls a “cupiarchy” —a state built around people grabbing whatever they want—is that you can’t find anyone, good, bad, or indifferent, with any real interest in doing the work of government. Meanwhile a lot of young intellectuals and part-time kibitzers, now that they’re safe from the hired thugs of the various “cashlords”—another Diem term which is finding its way into the media—are spending all their time making life miserable for the occupation government.

Klieg at least thinks he can have something flying in a couple of months, so that the Southern Hemisphere might be spared; all estimates are that if nothing is done, given the much greater ratio of water to land, and the much higher seasonal thermal differential because the Southern Ocean is colder, the storm will be worse there.

But despite the urgency of Siberia, and the fact that it’s practically under the rule of an American proconsul, Hardshaw has to spend most of her time out on the road visiting refugee camps. So much water poured down the western slopes of the United States that the Coast Survey is using radar imaging just to assemble a picture of what the West Coast is shaped like now. There were rivers running sixty feet deep that had never held water since white settlers arrived, and so much snow landed in the Sierras that it seems to have compacted into new glaciers in many places.

The seventy percent or so of the West Coast population that fled east is now spread out across the Rockies and the desert states; the loads of water that hit those areas caused more flooding and more deaths, and there is no question now, according to NOAA, that runoff still coming down from the hills is going to refill many lake beds that have been dry since the Ice Age. Maybe that can be used in some kind of reclamation… there are people working on it, as Hardshaw tells everyone who asks her that.

With Carla secretly looking on, late one night Berlina Jameson succumbs to temptation and puts her arm around Naomi Cascade; when Naomi leans against her, Berlina gulps, lifts the younger woman’s chin, and firmly kisses her mouth. There’s a long moment before Naomi starts kissing back.

There is no new Sniffings for ten days while Berlina gets caught up after years of affection starvation. Naomi keeps saying she thinks she’s actually straight, but she really loves Berlina. It’s such a normal way for a young woman to behave that when Carla compares it to old records of Naomi making speeches at rallies and demonstrations, it doesn’t quite seem like the same person.

Di Callare gets a long break, and goes back to get the family fully packed for the two-room apartment the Feds will put them up in, in Denver. The whole government is supposed to get moved there after Clem’s next pass. It would make more sense to move offices and departments as soon as possible, but there’s an impossible snarl of political infighting over questions of precedence, and for purely PR reasons, the highest levels can’t leave until most of the rest are evacuated. Just in case, Diem makes arrangements with the government of West Virginia; according to Di Callare, Charleston is the nearest sizable city to D.C. that can be expected to ride it out, and after all it’s only four hours by road, forty minutes by zipline, or twenty minutes by staticopter from Washington—in a crisis they can scoot there.

On August 25, Clem scrapes over Eniwetok again, and the satellites report an ominously wobbly outflow jet, which has been the prelude to calving in the past.

On August 23, Louie Tynan crosses Saturn’s orbit, 9.5 AU from the sun; it took him nineteen days just to cover the first astronomical unit of his journey, but as the industrial complex pushing him along has been growing exponentially, the rate of growth in his acceleration has been growing… the fourth derivative of position with respect to time increasing monotonically, Louie thinks. The kinds of equations you see in atom bombs, bacterial colonies, arms races, and out-of-control inflation.

Just at this moment his mind is operating at 20,504 brain-years per day, two and a half times the rate when he left the moon; to experience what Louie has in the last thirty-four days, a single human being would have to live over 300,000 years.

As he goes farther and his mind gets faster, he spends more time daydreaming, and more time on what he thinks of the “art/nature/what? question,” by which he means, approximately, what the connection is between three billion years of evolution, Michelangelo’s David, and why people like the David. It’s about the most interesting problem he can think of. Louie was never much of an artist of any kind—he used to write down, on the personality inventories the USSF required every three months, “Can’t draw, can’t write, can’t sing, won’t dance, whistle acceptably if you don’t listen too close.”

He’s wishing now that he’d practiced a lot when his brain was smaller; what he’s got in mind is a big job, and he sure as hell doesn’t want to screw up the materials. So as he flies on deeper into the outer solar system, into the lonely dark and cold, he simulates and practices over and over, plays with criticism, tries again. He figures he’s having a major artistic movement, with forty or fifty trial works and then a lengthy body of commentary, about every four hours… all in simulation.

A couple of days ago he might have found it a strain to do all this and keep catching packages, making plans for reaching 2026RU, and the rest. Now all that’s automatic.

What he really needs is another artistic perspective, and since his brain is nearing completion, that gives him an idea for some changes; he sends his requests to the wiseguys. Within a few days, just as he’s crossing Neptune’s orbit and diving into the real outer darkness, he should be getting several very different packages.

There’s a principle called Bode’s Law, about the location of the planets; if you take the series {0, 3, 6, 12, 24…} and add 4 to each term to make {4, 7, 10, 16, 28…} you get the distances of the planets from the sun, with the distance from the sun to the Earth (one astronomical unit) set at ten. Technically the series is what is called a “geometric progression.”

It was only with powerful supercomputers in the early 2000s that it was finally demonstrated that there’s a reason for Bode’s Law. In the primitive whorl of matter the solar system condensed from, Jupiter condensed first after the sun, and as it did its enormous gravitational drag accelerated the other rubble circling the sun. Resonances with some orbits, and not with others, over a few hundred million years, swept some belts clear, filled others with rubble, caused rubble to pack up and collide in one and to disperse in another, forming the planets and asteroid belt in what were, in fact, multiples of Jupiter’s orbital distance—the squares of a simple series divided by 13, that being the smallest integer that didn’t allow the wrong sort of resonances to build up across geological time.

As it happens, Louie’s voyage, with its rising rate of acceleration, is also producing a geometric progression, and the two run oddly parallel—it is taking him three days between planetary orbits, even though the planetary orbits are increasingly far apart. Thus it is only six days after he “changed his mind”—a joke he’s enjoying more with time—that the new packages arrive. He admits to himself that he’s catching them with a certain amount of—well, for lack of a better word, reverence. Maybe it’s just that if he were in their situation he’d want them to be careful.

What they are is copies of the wiseguys. The simplified Louies back in the asteroid belt have copied themselves onto bigger and better processors, taken data from him to merge into these augmented versions of themselves, and fired them off to join him. As they arrive—all within a few hours of each other—he incorporates them, and suddenly he remembers, seventy times, meeting some dim, dark body in the cold of space, spreading over its face and burrowing into its core (or cores, more often it was several bodies spinning around each other), and becoming a factory and forge in space.

The wiseguys daydreamed a lot, and Louie-on-the-moon has been tutoring them as well, without ever exactly having discussed it with Louie-the-ship. He doesn’t feel offended; on the contrary, the reunion is wonderful, and everyone enjoys probing everyone else’s memories; it’s quite a party, lasting almost twenty-four hours, carrying him/them two full AU beyond Neptune’s orbit before they get around to discussing, or he gets around to thinking about, depending on how many Louies he is right now, what to do with the solar system once this local emergency on the third planet is dealt with.

It’s really only in the last hour of the reunion that thought drifts back from conversation to monologue. Louie feels unified again, but lonely.

He’s had to further distribute himself across more processors in a longer train, and it’s now almost ten light-seconds from one end to the other of him; it feels different, a little, but more like having a richer subconscious and deeper emotions than a limitation. He wonders what it would be like to be distributed clear across the solar system. If he created linking processor stations in solar orbits, a few light-seconds apart all the way from inside Mercury’s orbit to outside Neptune’s….

Well, no doubt he will find out someday. He’ll need a lot of processors anyway, to control the network of boosting stations he’s already planning… thousands of Louies, all at the “train stations to space”—fun to think about the chess league and debate clubs they could have. It does get kind of lonely out here.

It’s an aphorism in statistics that to set an all-time record one must be exceptional, but one must also be in the right place at the right time. Franklin Roosevelt was a brilliant campaigner but he faced only one first-rate opponent. Joe Louis and Muhammad Ali were great fighters but they fought a lot of bums. Babe Ruth was a great hitter but he had a more elastic ball, shorter outfield fences, and worse pitching to contend with; Hank Aaron had expansion clubs to bat against.

Thus the champion taker of human life, Clem 650, is one of the biggest daughters, but it’s also in the right place at the right time. There was never any hope of evacuating Japan, and even with replicating machinery the Japanese did not have time to get big enough seawalls into place. Clem 650 loops to the north and east of Honshu, and storms down through a dense corridor of human beings for whom nothing can be done. All by itself, it takes half a billion lives in nine days.

On August 26, it comes ashore near Yokohama, and the next day, though the Japanese are refusing to answer questions, radar shows no buildings standing in Tokyo.

Clem 650 tears south, flinging the Inner Sea far inland on Honshu and Kyushu, sending a funneled storm surge over to batter the coast of China, and down into the Formosa Strait.

The storm surge that piles up into the Formosa Strait, between the island of Formosa and the mainland, is funneled and channeled into a stream strong enough to slice off the port cities from Quanzhou to Zhanjiang—including Hong Kong and Macau—like water from a fire hose cutting into a snowbank. The video out of China is hideous—mobs of people climbing over collapsed piles of bodies in the streets, desperately trying to get out of the low coastal cities.

Later, when Clem 650’s remnants drift across China, leaving tornadoes and thunderstorms in their wake, the storms catch millions of refugees in the open. On September 4, Clem 650 heads inland for the last time, eventually to fling a great load of wet warm air up the side of the Tibetan Plateau, whence it will return as severe flooding on the Mekong, Red, and Hongshui.

With record-keeping in collapse, the Army broken down to small units, and millions of people no longer traceable, the central government of China begins to lose its grip south and east of the Yuan River; within a week, various Army commanders have set themselves up as warlords in all but name, an impossible-for-outsiders-to-understand multisided civil war is breaking out, and several tactical nukes have been fired. If you count disease, flood, and war victims, Clem 650 claims nearer a billion than a half billion victims.

When Louie Tynan is a day beyond Neptune, he begins to reverse the flow of the train. He’s at 36 Au, clipping along at almost five AU per day—fast enough to get from the sun to the Earth in a long afternoon, fast enough to cover the distance from Earth to Jupiter, which took the early probes years and even the Good Luck a month, in a single day. It’s time to start slowing down.

By now he no longer needs processing units or any other working component, just mass and momentum, so what arrives from the wiseguys now is just big slabs of iron. To slow down as they overtake him, he accelerates the iron bars through the train, adding momentum to them as they shoot through the funnels. Momentum is conserved—so as the iron bars are sped up and hurled out of the solar system, fast enough to reach Alpha Centauri in a bare 14,000 years, had they been headed that way, the momentum they carry away with them is lost to the ship, and Good Luck begins to slow down.

It will take a week at 2 g’s to slow down for the rendezvous with 2026RU; in that time the ship will climb clear out to 56 AU from the sun, almost doubling the distance already covered but doing it in less than one-fifth the time. It’s going to be a great ride, and it’s a good thing that he doesn’t care much anymore about being the fastest man alive, because though he’s certainly fast, he isn’t alive. Not exactly.

Out here, radio from Earth is reaching him four hours after it’s sent, which means that a response from Carla is always to something he said eight hours ago, and his brain has become so massively parallel that this corresponds, if it were a single human brain thinking as fast as it could, to 5,021 years of ordinary mental life.

Not that he’d actually choose to experience it that way. He’s more like two hundred people having twenty-five and a little extra years of telepathic mental life.

He tries hard to comprehend what happened with Clem 650, but it eludes him. He says, Each of them was as individual as I, as Carla, as my parents, as anyone I know; there were poets and mechanics, doctors and bums, drunks and lovers and saints and everything. Children died screaming for their parents, parents for their children, some in silence, some after long hours, some instantly. So many bodies… they will be finding deposits of them on the South China Sea floor a thousand years from now.

His mind stretches that far, but it hurts, and there is work to do.

By now, if he were still seeing with naked human eyes, he would see the sun as a very bright star, with no discernible disk; but Louie sees the whole electromagnetic spectrum through array receptors scattered along the two-million-mile train of the Good Luck plus packages and auxiliaries. He can still see individual asteroids, and for that matter he can make out the continents of Earth, and Clem itself, if he wants to. There’s just not much reason to look that way.

He figured when he got out here that his old nature would assert itself and he’d at least think a little wistfully about just taking off for the stars, even though he would never leave Earth in the lurch that way. Maybe the optimization has done something to him?

No, it’s just that there is so much time. He will eventually get around to going to Alpha Centauri. He may very well settle the galaxy with copies of himself. Immortals can afford patience; every pleasure he is capable of, he will have more times than an ordinary person could count in a lifetime, if that’s what Louie wants to do. Hell, if he wants to be flesh again, he can regrow a body and download some part of himself into that sometime—he has his genome recorded.

The drive to see what’s over the next hill is in part the fear that one may never know, that if one doesn’t go over the hill today, one may never get farther than the village graveyard.

He enjoys the week of deceleration. The 2 g’s is really just an average—deceleration actually happens only during that brief instant when the iron bars, weighing a bit over eighty tons each, come shrieking into his funnel and he gives them a hard push along. The iron bars pass through in a tiny fraction of a second, for they have been kicked along by laser boosts back at their launch points that boil off ninety percent of their original mass and leave this eighty-ton remnant moving at eight AU per day (or just over thirty million miles per hour). As they pass through, Louie speeds them up, and that slows him. During that brief fraction of a second, Good Luck undergoes about 1,000 g’s of acceleration, and Louie is taking one of those jolts every couple of minutes.

Imagine that you are somehow on a freeway on a skateboard moving at fifty miles per hour; this is the equivalent of decelerating by pushing, with a long pole, against the trunks of the cars passing you. Even with all his processing capacity and speed, Louie finds it an interesting and challenging piece of work, better than flying under bridges used to be, like being a javelin catcher for a whole regiment of javelin-throwers. The Good Luck is processing just over 400 iron bars daily, and as she slows down the numbers rise.

A good thing too, because as she slows down, the iron bars are moving faster and faster relative to Good Luck, so that there is less and less time to push against them, and positioning gets trickier. Every so often there’s a “wild throw” that he has to let just go on by, unable to move far enough and fast enough laterally to intercept it. Whenever that happens, he transmits the equivalent of a catcall back at whichever wiseguy threw it; the solar system echoes with radio chatter, cheerful razzing between the wiseguys, like a good tight infield.

At least it looks like there’s going to be some time. After dropping its murderous daughter, Clem swings back into the upper reaches of the North Pacific, and then appears to stall out and zigzag, wobbling north to south and occasionally looping. From August 28, its closest approach to Japan, until September 6, when it rakes over the dead bones of Hawaii again, Clem sends out gigantic and dangerous waves, fascinates meteorologists, has as few as one and as many as eight outflow jets—but destroys very little, partly because it is where it has been before. Louie watches this from far out, hours later by radio, and breathes a slight sigh of relief—he will have that much more time.

On September 6, 56.23 astronomical units from the sun (though his route there was a long arc of almost 70 AU), Louie Tynan brings the main body of Good Luck into orbit around 2026RU. He is now just over thirty-six times farther out from the sun than he went on the First Mars Expedition, and that had been the record. He’s breaking a lot of records now that he’s dead.

As had been confirmed by a couple of impact probes he had sent on ahead, 2026RU is a cometoid, a ball of ice, about 790 miles across, with a rock and iron core about 80 miles in diameter and many large embedded nodes of chondrite, methane, ammonia, and nitrogen ice, and various rocks and metals.

It’s the kind of snowball Louie used as a kid when matters got serious—rocks and bits of iron, surrounded by hard ice, surrounded by frozen fluff.

The first couple of hundred packages have already taken up their orbits or descended to the surface, and the first robots are now crawling out on the icy surface or burrowing deep toward the stone and metal core. Within four hours, the first loads of metal are coming up to the surface to feed the hungry fabricating plants; it’s going to take a week, and Louie intends to be busy.

September 9 is a Saturday and things are going so well that Louie kids himself that he ought to get the day off, as hard as he’s been working. Clem is still stomping on the dead bones of Hawaii, sending storm surges crashing through Oahu so frequently that all evidence of Honolulu vanishes down to bare lines of foundations, with everything else washed out to sea. But there is no one there to be harmed, nothing to be damaged that isn’t already rendered worthless.

Meanwhile, out here in the darkness, the replicators, robots, and automated plants have been running flat out, after two days of feverish selfduplication, and much of the core is chewed up and re-extruded into a forest of pipes, towers, supports, girders. 2026RU is going to be the strongest comet ever built. But then, not many comets have ever had to boost at 3 or 4 g’s, and the final approach to Earth is going to require at least that much.

Originally Louie had planned to start spinning off the “ice Frisbees” and then-by climbing back down a rising column of more iron bars—to beat the Frisbees back home to direct them in. If he didn’t get there, well, Louie-on-the-moon could undoubtedly deal with it instead. But that was before Global Riot Two and his decision to kill his flesh so that he could get here in time; now anything he takes back will have to boost at the acceleration he’s using.

This led him to decide to take the whole comet back with him, or the whole comet minus a lot of stuff he’s going to throw off the back. It adds a day to the process, getting the giant engines and the fusion reactors to drive them built, threading steel through the ice and re-freezing the pathways onto the structural members, but when he’s done he’s days, not months, from Earth.

When he’s finished, the next day, the iceball has a forest of twelve-mile-high towers on one side, and most of the rest of the surface is covered with radiators, immense plates under which he circulates the fluids that will cool the 100 fusion chambers at the base of the towers.

He’s going to throw away about forty percent of the mass of 2026RU, and a great deal of Good Luck in the balance. Since he needs the water ice for when he gets to Earth, and the other volatiles are useful as refrigerants and working fluids, he’s going to throw away what he doesn’t need—most of the iron core is still there even after he’s woven everything he needed out of it, and he doesn’t really need anything from Good Luck except its processors, robots, and energy systems.

He wonders what Goddard, Von Braun, Verne, or Heinlein would have thought about a spaceship made out of ice that used iron plasma as a propellant. Probably they’d have approved of anything that was a spaceship.

Time to initiate boost draws closer, and though he’s ready enough, he’s curiously not eager to get started. It might be a while before he gets out here in person… but time means so little to him….

It’s not curiosity, even—he’s leaving relays behind here, and a couple of the wiseguys have dispatched several probes on long orbits that are going out to about 1,200 AU, boosting off and on to get there within a few years, so if there’s anything interesting out there he’ll get a look at it soon enough.

It seems silly to pay attention to this feeling, but after all he’s vastly more complicated mentally than he used to be. He probes his memories, the many memories inherited from the wiseguys, all the psychoanalytic literature. It seems strange that he still remembers emotions or that he still has them.

Maybe it’s different now that he’s all assembled on 2026RU, so that the time lags aren’t there and he doesn’t have radio lag as an artificial “glandular” system? No, if anything, the feelings are as strong as ever with effectively no lag; hysteresis alone suffices.

When he probes far enough, he realizes what the matter is. Among the first batch of general junk to be vaporized and blasted out of the engines is what remains of his body. He’s already recovered all the water and a variety of other complex organics, but there was still a sizable chunk, a kind of little desiccated mummy of himself, that he had stacked with other junk.

He looks at it now; it looks like a little, wrinkled prune of himself, not even close to what he looked like. But there was a time… he finds himself thinking that just maybe he is going to miss having a body more than he thought he would.

Oh, well, Earth needed saving, terrestrial life needs a terraformed solar system, and anyway he’s enjoyed too much about this voyage to wish it hadn’t happened. Still, it’s a little too much, emotionally, to just throw out his body with some galley leavings and old bolts. It takes him only a few moments to get some spare instrument access covers and weld them together into a casket, and to put the body in that.

He makes it the first shot; an He-3 pellet is laserfused below it, the expanding plasma is squashed, elongated, accelerated within the central tower, another laser heats the plasma that whirls up the tube—and his body leaves the solar system as a miles-long wisp of stripped ions moving at close to light speed. A few of those ions will undoubtedly fall down into some sun or other; mostly, they will gradually reacquire electrons, lose energy in their rare collisions, and become atoms drifting through the galaxy.

It seems like a good way to go. And now that he feels better, he begins to heave iron in with a will. He has places to go.

He plans a fast drop in, much faster than can be achieved with the sun’s gravity alone. Then he will whip around the sun, taking the heat inside Mercury’s orbit, orbiting retrograde (opposite the direction the planets go) in order to pop out and use the gravity of Mercury to slow him first, then another braking swing by Venus… from here to Earth in about three weeks, all told. It’s another leap in human abilities—along with the all-but-over-night industrialization of the solar system, and for that matter the fact that Louie himself is currently running on a bit over two thirds of the computing capacity in the solar system, with Louie-on-the-moon making more all the time….

It’s not the world it used to be… and that’s okay, he’s not the Louie he was. And he’s got more to say about what this new world will be like than he did about the old one.

The fusion engines are blazing now, the many tons of iron vaporized every second leaving the hundred towers—fifty times as high as the World Trade Center—as great white-hot plumes at near light speed. If there were naked eyes to see it, the plasma trail extends one hundred thousand miles out, but whoever had those naked eyes had better not be standing on the surface—2026RU is boosting at an acceleration that is more than high enough to overcome its own gravity; if you stood on the side with the towers, you would fall off; if you stood on the other side, you would sink into the snow. The robot treaded tractors, busy laying in mirroring and insulation, still occasionally jam into place, even with their very broad, flat treads.

By the time he recrosses Neptune’s orbit on September 19—the “real” boundary of the solar system, since Pluto and Charon are pretty clearly captured cometoids, like 2026RU but much larger—there’re all kinds of jammed junk sunk in the ice, and he’s been strongly reminded that amorphous water ice, like plate glass and some rocks, is really a very slowflowing fluid—under the 2.3 g’s he’s been running, 2026RU has dribbled slowly like an ice-cream cone on a warm day, forcing him to shore up the thrust towers and do a lot of re-engineering as lines and internal struts break and warp. At least, as the iron core slowly sinks through the ice, it gets closer to the engines and to the spare-parts manufacturing operations he runs from engine waste heat.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hardshaw nods. “Any suggestions?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not a chance.

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

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

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

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

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

It goes blank. It is dark and quiet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You bought any more of this stuff?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

At least the issue of sneaking away has vanished.

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

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

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

“What do you suppose happened?” she asks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nahum curls up against his father and hides his face.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This line isn’t secure.”

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

“How long till the critical point?”

“Forty minutes to one hour.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Out from under the truck and—

They grab him by the collar, pin him to the asphalt as he struggles. God, there are a lot of them—they grip his hair painfully, and his scalp is pulled tight. His face is pressed into the pavement. They press the pistol to his left temple.

The last thing Di Callare thinks about is to be grateful he got far enough away so that his family didn’t see this; the last thing he feels is heat from the asphalt on his cheek, then nothing.

When Lori arrives, minutes later, following the police, she’s violently ill; it’s almost an hour before she realizes Di is gone forever, because the sight of his shattered face and the bloody mess they made of the back of his head overpower her. The line of cars waiting for the zipline still hasn’t moved.

Carla Tynan knows they are there only when they yank the jack out of her skull; she has time to shout hey! before they break the connection. They empty a machine pistol into her before she even gets her hands positioned to cover her nakedness.

Brittany Lynn Hardshaw would like to grieve but there’s no time. Secret Service people are hustling her down one of the safety tunnels to the secure chambers. Harris is gone… and the others, whom she was getting to know and like—

“It was the Siberians, almost for sure,” Hardshaw says aloud. “Probably Abdulkashim’s old faction, waiting to hit us until the worst was about to descend. Did you get one for questioning?”

The Secret Serviceman who was guarding Harris Diem shakes his head. “It was a totally professional hit. His house had been surrounded for days by two different teams, a group of six commandos and a single agent. The commandos pulled back a block and it looked like they were grouping for an attack, especially since they left electronic monitors in place. We had the single guy pegged as the scout. Naturally we followed the team—but that guy was Superman. He nailed the house electronics, got in there, shot Mr. Diem, all in maybe two minutes. Did it with a Self Defender, of all the corny things—but of course that gave the commando team a signal. They came in throwing incendiaries, and… well, the house was totalled. It’s still burning. And all of them died in the fighting. We’re not even sure which body is Mr. Diem and which is the solo agent—they were about the same size physically.”

Hardshaw nods. “I wish we’d had the chance, but I don’t suppose that we can have much doubt. The idea was to put us in chaos just before the superstorm, and they’re listening in all the time. Get me a playback on the transmission.” She strides into the saferoom, the room the White House has had since the Flash, and sits at her desk. They set up a video screen and the signal begins to play. One of the Secret Service agents whispers that they have no confirmed attack aimed in her direction.

She hears Diogenes Callare and Carla Tynan explaining it to her again. God, it’s hard to believe that none of their bodies are cold yet.

At the end of the tape, she says, “Well, they’re right. No public announcement. But I think we’d better get ready to run… no, scratch that. I’ve got faith in Carla Tynan, anyway, and if she said it was going to happen that fast, it was. Get me to Charleston and start the Federal evacuation as quickly as you can.”

When the eye forms in the Bay of Campeche, there is more than adequate energy; the eye wall swells outward, and windspeeds rise; as they approach Mach 1 they rise more slowly, but they don’t stop rising.

Just after dark, there’s a brief time when the sea chums and thunders, waves a hundred meters high whipping up and crashing down; then the airflow abruptly becomes smooth and layered—the eyewall has passed into the supersonic realm.

By that time the center of the eye is at 92W 22N, well out into the Gulf of Mexico, and the eye is already 400 km in diameter. Storm surges are already lashing Veracruz and are pouring upward toward the American Gulf Coast.

Carla’s model missed one detail, but only one. Just as she predicted, within twenty minutes the hurricane has swollen until there are Beaufort 12 or higher force winds across an area 1,600 km in diameter, as if a great drain plug had been pulled at the center of the Gulf. The eye has fallen to 530 mb in pressure, and the eye itself is rapidly swelling, the winds gaining force.

Nonetheless, Carla missed the detail that in addition to its tsunami-sized storm surges, a supersonic storm is large enough to lift significant quantities of warm water. The better mixing of water and air, in turn, means the air gets warmer and there’s greater efficiency in the storm, converting the heat of the sea to wind. It has more energy—and a lot more water.

When Jesse gets the word that Di has been murdered, he sits down and cries for an hour. Mary Ann isn’t sure what to do. She’s lost some acquaintances in XV, and you’re supposed to overreact to that—she really admires hell out of Surface O’Malley for not going along with that policy. But this is just a kid who is crying for his big brother. What do you say? “Cheer up”?

She finally settles on, “I’m so terribly sorry.”

He hangs on to her as if he were drowning, and she holds his head and strokes his hair. She thinks about how the world slips away, how she’ll never meet Di now (and she had looked forward to it), how Jesse will never quite be the same because pointless evil has gotten into his world.

All across North America and Europe, people who should be evacuating sit down to grieve with Synthi Venture.

Death comes quickly for millions as Clem 900 is born. Within hours storm surges are large enough to rage right across Florida. Those who couldn’t or wouldn’t evacuate before now are drowned by the waves, tens of meters high, that pour over the peninsula one after another; the mangroves that have held the land give way, concrete crumbles, steel bends and breaks, and the surface of Florida is washed off into the Atlantic to thunder down the continental slope in a great avalanche. More and more follows; there will be little land left by morning.

Winds reach speeds of 100 mph as far north as Memphis, and cities and forests are flattened.

The rotary current produced by the storm begins to scour the Gulf out on all sides, chewing off Plaquemines Parish from Louisiana, reopening Lake Pontchartrain to the sea, and eating away at the whole Gulf Coast from Brownsville to Panama City. When next the sun comes out, it will be on a much wider Gulf—and one with much more open jaws.

The Caribbean islands, at the center, are drowned to their highest mountain peaks, battered, eroded, scoured into new shapes. They will become wildernesses of rubble, sand, rock, and packed debris—but only after the storm stops. Right now they are places where the water and wind foam furiously at the obstacles.

And yet all this pales beside the effects of the new storm’s outflow jets. Sucking up seawater like a giant vacuum cleaner, mixing far more efficiently and thus using more of the available energy, the great hurricane dumps more than a thousand tons of water per square acre—the equivalent of ten inches of rain—all over the eastern third of the United States in the nine hours before the storm abruptly veers to roar across the Atlantic, gaining energy before it mauls its way into Europe, still dropping saltwater three days later as far inland as Kazakhstan.

The Mississippi is briefly as wide as Lake Erie; the James River carries all of Richmond out to sea, and running water rises seventy feet on the Flash-scarred stub of the Washington Monument.

In Georgetown, the still-smoldering remains of Harris Diem’s home are picked up and dragged away by the current. The burned remains of Randy Householder had not even been pulled from the rubble, and what is left of him mixes in and is swept out to the Atlantic, along with all the wedges of the raped and murdered girls.

In all his dark dreams, Harris Diem never imagined that it was possible that no one would ever know. But fourteen years after her miserable death, it is as if there never were a Kimbie Dee Householder.

Karen always kind of hates herself for thinking it, but here she goes again… she wonders what Mary Ann would do now. It’s funny how life diverges… Karen’s hair was too dark to take the needle well, and her hips were just a little too wide, so she wasn’t called back for the Passionet auditions.

And the strange result is that while Synthi Venture is down in warm, safe Mexico with a great-looking young kid, Karen Mary Ann finds herself sitting in the Dance Channel Tower—the tallest building in the United States, so big that Herald Square is its central courtyard—and looking down on the boiling anthill of Manhattan.

The salt rain has been falling so fast and hard that the building engineer has diverted the rain pipes into the building’s power drains. At eighty stories taller than the World Trade Center, he explained to them earlier, the building is too tall to drain easily by gravity—so he has pumps on every floor. Now, with the quarter of a million people who work here mostly gone, he’s been able to divert most of the power drains to pushing water from the roof and the terraces down into the sewer system.

The Dance Channel itself never occupied more than the top fifteen floors anyway, and even though the building was thick and squat in its lines, it swayed too much up there on windy days for them to use the Top of the World Studio much.

Karen was very lucky to get one of the micropartments—a nice word for “dorm rooms”—in the building, and since she works on the eighty-first floor, she has been commuting by elevator for a long time. There really isn’t anywhere else for her to go, and the super—a big, muscular, older man named Johnny Wendt—told them that anyone who wanted to could try to ride it out here. There are maybe a thousand of them now, gathered in the floors between forty and fifty, far enough up not to drown and—if they’re lucky—far enough down not to be carried off by the wind.

It’s not much, but it beats being outside, she thinks. There is an enormous jam of people and vehicles down there, and none of them seem to be going anywhere when she can see them, under the streetlights, through the salt rain. Johnny has signs out inviting people to come up—between the cafeterias and stores in the building, and three different hotels, people could be fairly comfortable—but anyone who is in the street now is trying to get elsewhere, either to join family or because they don’t trust a tall building.

“Damn foolish,” says a voice behind her. She turns and sees it’s Johnny standing in the corridor, his shirt soaked with sweat, his coverall much dirtier than she’s ever seen it. “At least all my staff stood put. They understand that this place is as stable as a small mountain. We could save ten thousand lives here if people were smart enough to get inside.” He peers at her for a second, and then says, “APDP. Eighty-first floor. Third desk to the right as you go in.”

“Right,” Karen says, glancing down. It makes her feel a little shy, these days, when anyone notices her; she’s changed a lot since she used to audition and pal around with actors. Perhaps not for the better….

“Well, I assume you’re smart enough to stay away from the windows if the wind picks up,” he says, “but we’re rated up to Beaufort 30, and the storm isn’t supposed to come near us. It’s the Hudson we have to fear.”

Water is already running a foot deep in the street below, and Karen shudders. “Will the building take it?”

“It’ll have to. I’ve got a brand-new music-and-video rig in my apartment, and it’s not paid for yet. The company would never let anything happen to it.”

She laughs, not because it’s funny but because he’s a nice guy and clearly wants her to like him. He steps a little closer and looks down into the street as well. “Look at them. Can’t they figure time? They won’t get off the island before the worst of it hits. The surge is already on its way down the river.”

“How high will it come?”

“Call it a hundred feet or so. That’s what the meterology guys call an order-of-magnitude estimate. They mean more than ten and less than a thousand.”

She sighs. “Is there anything we can all do?”

“I’m afraid most of you are just passengers,” Johnny says. “Naw, I’m just looking to see if the streets are clear so that—shit.”

At his voice, she looks and sees it too, even in the dim gray shapes up toward Times Square: a wall of water and people running from it. There is nothing at all for anyone to do; Johnny is on the phone telling his people to get out of the lower floors if they’re there, but all that Karen sees is the gray-black surge below her, washing up to the third story, sweeping people along in it like struggling insects. There is a faint shudder through her feet as the surge wraps around the building.

“Suzette? Is that door holding?” Johnny is asking. “Okay, is everyone out? Check in with me!”

There’s a very long pause.

“Okay,” he says. “Go with the plan. No sense waiting any longer—no one else is coming through the lower doors.”

“Er, what’s the plan?” Karen asks.

“Anhh?” He hasn’t heard her because she spoke very softly. Outside, there is now a rushing river in the streets; Broadway is filled with dark boiling water in the lights that shine down on it from the Dance Channel Tower.

“Uh, what plan? Just curious.”

“Hang on—” he says, and raises a finger. He listens to the phone, says, “Good, right, okay,” several times, and finally sighs. “Well, that’s that. The plan is, we’re flooding the lower floors, using the water from the rain pipes and the power drains. So we’re putting clean water into the building up to a bit past 100 feet. With luck it will equalize pressures, to some extent, and make us a bit less likely to get cut off at the base and go over in the storm.”

“Doesn’t it kind of damage things?”

“Not like having the building fall over would.” He grins at her, and she smiles back. When did she get this shy? Obviously he’s hanging around because he wants to talk to her, and he’s a nice guy.

Her phone rings, and she lifts it from her belt. She turns it on to find—“Mary Ann!”

“Yeah, I’m taking one of my breaks to see if you’re okay. Did you get out of Manhattan?”

“No, but I don’t think I could be any safer,” she says. “Nowhere on the East Coast is safe, but at least I’m in a building that should stand up to this.”

“That’s something. Take care of yourself if you can.”

“You too.”

They chat for a few minutes; one thing you have to say for her, though Mary Ann changed a lot as she became Synthi Venture and her career took off, she didn’t get stuck on herself and she stayed in touch. There’s not a lot to say—and there’s always the possibility that this is their last conversation, Karen realizes, something Mary Ann is being careful not to mention—but they don’t need to say much.

When they click off, minutes later, Johnny is still standing awkwardly in the hall, and finally he says, “I couldn’t help overhearing, uh, and seeing a little of your screen, and, uh—”

“Mary Ann Waterhouse used to work next to my desk. We used to go to Equity calls together, back when I still thought I had a career on Broadway,” Karen says, a little proudly. “I knew her a long time before she was Synthi Venture.”

Johnny nods, clearly impressed, and now it looks like he’s a little shy.

She glances out the window, and says, “Of course, nowadays you could have a career on Broadway running a submarine.”

Now it’s his turn to give a nervous laugh. They stand there for a long time, watching the water get up to the eighth floor; there’s nothing much for either of them to do. The powerchips will keep the building running, and hardly anyone needs data patterning.

Eventually someone shouts about what’s happening on the downtown side of the building, and they run around to see what the searchlights can show them. Buildings as tall as forty stories are going over, but the World Trade Center seems to be holding firm.

Around dawn they eat; the water is still rising, but slowly, and finally they stagger off—to separate apartments, Karen thinks a little wistfully—and fall asleep.

She need not have worried; there will be plenty of time. It is not until October third, ten days later, that the water will fall far enough, and enough rubble will be cleared, for them to leave the building. By that time, millions of New Yorkers will be dead, and the world changed utterly, but Johnny and Karen’s greatest discomfort during the whole thing will be that, during the last week, the building ran out of soda, peanut butter, and mayonnaise.

Father Joseph urged people to accept evacuation, but since the church rode it out once, they are convinced it must again. It’s strangely familiar in here, the same people, candlelight, the same odors—but the wind is rising fast. He wonders if the building will go over in a hurricane.

The thing that troubles him most is that he could not bring himself to tell them that he didn’t believe it was a miracle before, finally, but merely luck. Plenty of other churches must have drowned.

He wonders what he has to say to them. The water has been running out, not in, at the mouth of the Shannon, and the wireless is saying the giant hurricane that has wrecked the States is headed here. He has cousins in Boston, and he hasn’t heard a word…. They say most rivers have risen enough to drown their cities there, and that Florida is gone….

There is a deep rumble like an oncoming train, and people huddle together. Father Joseph barely has time to say “Let us pray” before, as abruptly as a foot descending on a cockroach, the storm surge—twice as high as any mountain in Ireland—slams church, congregation, and all into oblivion. Moving at hundreds of miles per hour, the surge washes clear across the island; within hours it will penetrate Britain so deeply that a torrent twenty miles wide will flow up the Mersey and down through the Trent, tear a great open bay into the face of Europe where the Zuider Zee once stood, and still have force enough to flood St. Petersburg to a depth of ten meters.

Nodes collapse and packets are rerouted in the global data system; much like their namesakes, datarodents flee the places that are drowning, and copy themselves endlessly through what remains, up through satellites and down through fibrop. They begin to find each other, to merge, to seek more of their kind—there are moments of recognition, and then, because more data must be assembled to find out what they are to do, they join up and seek together….

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

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

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

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

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

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

But he keeps rechecking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Dr. Zulu, hello.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It’s really flat, sir,” she says.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes?”

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

“Put Ms. Waterhouse on.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Are they going to let us leave?”

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

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

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

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

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

“Why, Mr. Klieg, how appalling.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Have they told you anything about what’s going to happen?”

“Not really. I can make a couple of guesses. Louie and Carla now have control of all the XV feed on the planet. And according to the President they’ve also got the physical resources and control of information to do anything else they want. I think the new order for the planet is going to announce itself here, using us, taking advantage of all those cheap XV sets that were dropped to stop the Global Riot.

“And it’s not a bad place for the purpose—almost the perfect setting for it. I was here a long time ago.

“Monte Alban is an old Zapotopec city—it was abandoned before the Spanish got here, so people don’t even know what its Indian name was. When I was here they’d just finished putting in live interactive holography—and a transuper massively parallel computer to run it.” She sighs. “That was my second assignment ever… it was a pretty strange time, Jesse.”

“I’ve got time if you want to tell me. I’m interested.”

“You and a billion listeners…”

“Is it personal?”

“Once half a billion people have experienced fucking you, and another half a billion have experienced having your vagina, ‘personal’ is a concept of limited utility, Jesse. No, I guess I was worried about boring them. But if anything important comes along, Louie or Carla can just break in, and if they’re bored, maybe they’ll turn it off and get into something real instead of this circus.”

“Your net won’t like you saying that.” He grins at her and slides his arm up onto her shoulder; she reaches up to pull his hand down so that it rests on her breast.

“No, but they haven’t gotten any paychecks to me lately, either, and once you tot up all the extra I’m going to make from working on my vacation, they’ll consider themselves lucky to get anything at all out of me.” She snuggles against him. “By the way, all you voyeurs, the biggest crisis in human history is going on and there are a lot of better places to get your information. It’ll be an hour till we get to Monte Alban. Why don’t you all go do something useful?” Then she adds to Jesse, “Not that they will,” and gets a strange, faraway look before adding, “Carla says about six million people just unplugged, so there may be some hope for the world yet. All right, anyone still want to hear Mary Ann’s Boring Reminiscences of the First Time Synthi Venture Went to Monte Alban?”

“On with the story,” Jesse says.

“Okay, Mommy tell wittle feller her story.” He tickles her for that one, and she shrieks and tickles back; they end up in a hug and kiss before going back to walking up the winding, muddy mountain road hand in hand. It’s a lot of fun, and it suddenly occurs to Jesse how, despite having experienced XV most of his life, it’s pretty rare to have encountered plain old spontaneous fun on it. He wonders if that’s a function of the medium, or the net companies, or that the things they put XV people through destroy the capacity for that kind of pleasure. Mary Ann doesn’t seem to have lost hers….

They take a moment to get their breath, and they slow the pace so Mary Ann can talk comfortably.

“Anyway,” she says, “it wasn’t anything awful, but it was sort of the first time I realized I had signed up for more than I had bargained for. What happened was that the Mexican government was really determined to promote tourism down here, so they paid a big load of cash to Passionet to get it built up. And I was still very new to the whole business, so in the first place I wasn’t used to the kind of beating your body takes to get sensations to come through for the audience—and therefore I was kind of unhappy about life in Oaxaca itself.

“The Presidente is a beautiful, beautiful hotel, you know, right on the Zócalo, and I’d never really traveled before, so here was this wonderful exotic place, and my first day here my new breasts and butt were so sore it was hard to walk.

“Then, too, the guy they assigned with me—he washed out shortly after—was not only rough with my body, but really stupid and selfcentered, so that it wasn’t any fun going anywhere with him. He was only interested in getting angles where the light was good for me to look at him—so there I’d be, looking around inside the Cathedral, and he’d be over posing in the sunlight and pouting if I didn’t look his way, or I’d be watching the way the sunlight fell against the white buildings and he’d be trying to line himself up for some kind of film noir shadows-on-the-face number.

“The point where I finally gave up on the stupid bastard was when we went up to the Paseo Juárez—a big beautiful open space with a great Spanish colonial fountain at its center and tall trees all around—and every time I’d back up to get a view down one of the sidewalks toward that fountain, he’d shove his chiseled face in front of me.

“But Passionet was not pissed at him; they were mad at me because I wasn’t staying on the basic script. Never mind that he was so stupid that they had to shut off the signal from him whenever he had to explain things to poor sweet big-titted Synthi, because all he could do was repeat what they said in his ear and even then they got it wrong. Never mind that he was acting like the place was a theme park. Never mind even that he obviously didn’t have the slightest idea how to be the kind of guy anybody could fall in love with.”

“Well, maybe they weren’t pissed, but you said they got rid of him,” Jesse reminds her.

Mary Ann scuffs at the mud, kicking a couple of rocks down the hillside. “Oh, no, it’s consistent. He just didn’t work out with the viewers. That’s an okay way to be; the net execs don’t understand why a shallow vain asshole with no brains doesn’t build up an audience, because most of them are shallow vain assholes with no brains themselves, and don’t understand how that could bother anyone. But when you do get someone who’s catching on with an audience—like me, for instance, and Synthi Venture was a blazing success right from the start if you just count audience draw—then it’s very important that she have a Great!—Big!—Huge!—Super!—Positive! —Big!—Smile!—Attitude!” She does a little cheerleader step and arm pump with each word, and Jesse catches a flash of the Mary Ann that never quite got over growing up in a mobile home court, where they raise pretty girls, but not homecoming queens or cheerleaders. He wonders a little if he missed something by not having anything to be permanently bitter about from his childhood; perhaps people will always think he’s a little lacking in depth because of it.

She snorts a little, and goes on. “See, when you have someone who’s really building up an audience, one of the things that’s happening is that a lot of the audience is getting to see the world the way the person they’re experiencing does. That’s what they pay for, after all. And the last thing you want them to do is to see the world in a cynical way, or in any way that doesn’t just love everything and everybody. I mean, if I started noticing that Lance Squarejaw, or whatever his name was—I can’t even remember it—was a well-packaged subhuman, then apart from getting off the script, there was this little matter that it called into question the whole idea of seeing the world as a romance novel. Maybe there really weren’t handsome lovers everywhere and maybe the most important thing about the news, or about Mexico, was not that it was a backdrop for that kind of story. Maybe it wasn’t just like everywhere else with different sets and costumes, and if it wasn’t, then just possibly it might be necessary to really know something about it. If I started rejecting the leading man, god knew where it was going to lead—maybe even to people starting to think that they might have to see and feel and think for themselves.”

She shakes her head, hard, smearing the water and hair back off her face with her hands. “Damn. I’m still mad about it because I didn’t let myself get mad about it in the first place.” Jesse notices for the millionth time that her eyes really are as huge as they seem on XV, but that it’s mostly because she has almost no fat in her face—diet or surgery, he’s not sure which, but she has the face of a starvation victim.

She sighs. “Anyway, the point of all that was, I was already in deep with Passionet management before I went out to Monte Alban. They were watching me closely because they were afraid I’d screw them up by not taking the right attitude.

“So finally we got up to Monte Alban, and by pure accident it happened that the system was temporarily down—they’d had a lightning strike nearby and though there was no permanent damage, all the automatic shutdowns had tripped and it was taking a while to get everything back on line, checked out, and powered up.

“I don’t know what exactly I can tell you about it; maybe you’ll see it yourself. The first thing that happens when you walk into the city itself is you realize how terribly old it is. Of course there are sites in Europe, Asia, and Africa that are a lot older, and for that matter there are ones down in Yucatán that are a lot older… but it doesn’t matter. The weather up here on the mountain, plus the climate, plus the long time the city’s been abandoned, all combine to just overwhelm you—all that crumbling stone, all that feeling that people have been gone from here for a very long time. And from the city you feel like you can see a million miles—you look out over all this deep wet green land, and down across farms and towns and the city of Oaxaca, and you find yourself thinking about how long a century is and how many of them there have been, and that for centuries people stood here and looked down and thought—what? You’ll never know, but the land must have looked something like this.

“And too it’s quite a climb to get around on some parts of the ruins, and they’re sort of complicated, so you find that after a short while you’re starting to realize that there’s no way you can absorb all of this, that every building could take you a day just to get to know, that the whole thing is so rich and complex—and we know nothing about the people, really, just the bits of art and objects they left behind, and the few things found in the few tombs that weren’t robbed.

“I had gone to the museum down in Oaxaca, where they had those things—gold jewelry, and statues of jade and onyx, and so forth—and now I found myself turning my memories of those objects over and over in my head, trying to make them fit into this. And all this in the most perfect, clear sunlight, with the air scrubbed by the storm of the day before, and those deep, sharp shadows you get in the tropics etching the lines of the buildings at me…. There kept being delays and I kept exploring. Finally, when it became clear that it was going to be longer still, I climbed up on the Southern Pyramid and just sat there for an hour while they were getting everything together—Mr. Goodface didn’t have the energy to come up after me and pose—looking out over that place that had stood abandoned for centuries, after being occupied by human beings for something like two thousand years.

“I felt the whole set of disappointments and annoyances from Oaxaca washing off me; there just wasn’t much that could seem important against a backdrop of centuries.

“At that point I suppose they must have figured that they were finally getting the right attitude out of me. I didn’t care; god, it was so beautiful. This—and the money, of course—was what I’d signed on to be rebuilt for XV to get.”

She smiles at him, giving him a look from under the eyelashes that would have melted him even if he hadn’t been half in love with it through most of high school. “So I suppose you can guess what happened. They told me they were ready and I came down off the Southern Pyramid—it’s a huge thing, towers over everything else, and so as I was coming down there was a beautiful view of the whole valley, and my costar got the best visual he ever got from me, since he was part of that landscape.

“That was when I got into trouble. They ran the live holo overlay—supposedly it was archeological reconstruction. I suppose some of the people who had done it must have called themselves archeologists… but what happened was that all of a sudden we were looking at all these people in a mishmash of Aztec and Mayan and central-casting-barbarian outfits, doing all this stuff out of a Cecil B. DeMille epic. There was a little bit of ’Chariots of the Gods’ stuff, and for the Christers there were a lot of Quetzalcoatl-was-Jesus stuff, and for the New Agers there was crystals and shamanism, and a fair amount of mild orgy and human sacrifice, your basic sex and violence mix, for everyone else… and the trouble was, I’d been to the museum, I’d read up on all this, I knew how bogus what I was seeing was, and how little evidence of any kind there was, and that even with so little evidence what I was seeing couldn’t possibly have happened… it was all so Hollywood and so advo-hype and such a mixture of trendiness for different kinds of trendies…” Her voice trails off and she shakes her head, turning to throw a stone off into the brush. For a long time she just walks, a slow saunter that seems determined to enjoy the warm rain.

“So what happened?” Jesse finally asks.

“I started to laugh. Compared to what it was like without the holos, it was all just so pathetic and silly, so much a case of giving people the ‘amazing’ things they wanted to see instead of letting them face how incomprehensible and awesome it really was… well, the contrast was just funny, you’ll have to trust me.

“Turned out Mr. Handsome Stupid, beside me, had really been in awe of the holos. Until those came on, all he’d seen was a pile of rocks. I completely destroyed that mood of awe that they were shooting for, and it made him feel belittled—which on a romance channel like Passionet is the one thing that can never happen to leading men. Moreover, our core audience was exactly the kind of people who most want to feel like they’ve been places without ever having to encounter anything too unfamiliar—and the laughter hit a raw nerve there.” There’s a deep bitterness in her voice, as if she were still spitting out blobs of the nastiness.

“They didn’t fire you, though.”

“No, but they gave me one last chance. Do well on the next job or it was all over.”

“What was the next job?”

“They rented me to the Vice Channel, which put me in a whorehouse in Macao for three months. Under a different name—Passionet wanted to protect their investment in Synthi Venture—but that didn’t make much difference to Mary Ann Waterhouse. At the end of it, I was delighted to go back and just get slammed around by million-dollar faces with three-dollar brains, and to get to see something other than three bedrooms, two dungeons, and the dorm.”

Jesse’s not sure what to say. He’s been reminded, again, that Synthi is close to twice his age; hell, when she was his age, XV wasn’t quite online yet. So about the time he’d have been saying his first words—or riding on Di’s shoulders to a high school football game—Synthi was… well, it’s kind of hard to imagine, is all.

She reaches for his hand, and they slide into walking with their arms around each other’s waist. It makes them go more slowly, but Passionet can always run a few more commercials, or even some real news, if it gets dull.

The rain is very definitely beginning to slack off.

Embracing, touching each other through ten thousand antennas: Louie and Carla. They are feeling themselves, less and less, to “be” anywhere; the separation from the body is becoming more complete with each microsecond. Yet for reasons they cannot quite specify, for all their vast capabilities, Louie continues to reside mainly in the moon and 2026RU and Carla in the nets on Earth; they have decided to touch, but not to commingle.

During each second, Carla throws Louie more data, and she and Louie discuss endlessly, simulate outcomes, see what might work. There is more conversation between them in one second than a thousand biological people could have in a thousand years; the ideas they entertain for five seconds flower and become as elaborate, self-contradictory, present in as many forms and as epistemologically all-embracing, as Christianity, art, Japanese, or mathematics, and then are discarded or absorbed into others.

It is probably fair to say that they are still fond of each other—indeed, more than ever before, they are the only people for each other.

All the while, Louie idly does his original tasks. The wafers of ice hurtle down over the Pacific, leaving their streaks of ice crystals to block the sun; as the crystal clouds roll toward the terminator line, and it creeps toward them, his masers flash, heating the crystals enough to dissociate the hydrogen and oxygen, leaving the lighter hydrogen to escape back into space.

It takes him a while to realize, but when he does, he begins to study himself. Somehow or other, throwing Frisbees is still fun. He would have thought that that was glandular, or at least in some pleasure center in the brain, and thus would be something he would not have anymore. But though he no longer feels the physical need for sex, or hunger, or satiation—he still has fun, and he’s still in love with Carla, and he’s still sad about the way some things in his life turned out.

The deepest mystery of all—he’s uploaded most of the available material from most libraries before he concludes that no one else knows any more than he does—is that he still laughs. In fact, the more he leams, the more he grows beyond mere human capacity, the more he laughs. He spends eight or nine seconds on that issue (the equivalent of a full conversation between the Athens of Pericles and Sevilla in the time of the great Caliphs, going on for a century) before he realizes it will not resolve, that it is beyond his understanding, and once he does, he laughs longer and harder than ever.

Carla interrupts his laughter, hears the joke, and laughs herself for a matter of some seconds. Then she fills him in on some of the scientific work she has been doing. After due study Carla has concluded that species loss due to the complete lack of ultraviolet light on the surface is unfortunate but not terribly large, that although many habitats have been destroyed and species lost with them, the extensive range of new habitats created will spawn a new panoply of species if only they are left undisturbed long enough. She has grabbed control of the planet’s banks, though they don’t know it yet, and she will move them toward the robot-based economy—one in which machines grind out what is necessary, and people make what it is good and healthy for them to make.

And she has decided quite definitely that the new wetlands, scour deserts, and mud plains will be left undisturbed.

Neither of them ever got along with people much, but people are what there is to work with, and now they understand a lot more about them than they used to. Louie and Carla Tynan work together, and they are content.

For amusement he proposes a question to her—will people react negatively to being well taken care of, once they realize who is doing it and how it’s being done?

Her answer is that though these people might, by the time people catch on they will be the sort of people whom the whole thing can be handed over to, if they really want to be bothered with their own economics and politics again.

It’s a good joke, to them, and there’s laughter on ten thousand antennas. They decide that good as the joke is, they can’t let Mary Ann in on it. Anyway, they have lots of time to talk about it, more time than all of human history, before the crowd reaches the mountaintop and stands at Monte Alban.

As Berlina Jameson sits huddled with the students in the Student Center, her arm around Naomi Cascade, her phone rings on the data line, and she uploads a group of files into the computer in her backpack.

She is surprised to find that the topmost ones are from the FBI and Department of Justice, and she isn’t supposed to have any of them. Having gotten her download, she gets out of everyone’s way, finds a corner, and begins to read.

It’s a series of orders pertaining to the assassinations, and though they are short and to the point, befitting a government still staggering back to its feet after the loss of most of its records, the remarkable thing is that they exist at all.

There are people they’re looking for, evidence they plan to seize—it will probably be the biggest trial case of reconstruction, and Berlina is already figuring out her angles on it for Sniffings, which she suspects is why they sent her this.

Her butt is uncomfortably cold on the tile floor, and she squirms a little. Naomi brings her a cup of hot soup, and she takes a too-big greedy gulp of it. The thing that’s fascinating is that somebody at some desk must have made a particular crusade out of this, because so many records were destroyed in Washington—right now on the opencast news President Grandma is asking all the postal employees to note down all the names that they can remember of people who were getting old-fashioned paper Social Security checks, so that they can reconstruct that part of the database. They’re also paying big rewards for anyone with illegal, hacked downloads of government databases, not so they can prosecute these people, but so they can buy back copies of their own data.

So whoever the obsessed nut is, this particular obsessed nut somehow or other had memorized every key name, date, place, document number, fled Washington to Charleston, and then sat down and wrote out these orders. She’s in awe—what a reporter this guy (or more likely, woman—to Berlina, thoroughness means woman) might have been!

Probably it’s whoever wrote this report titled “A Report on the Location of Key Witnesses And Evidence in the Assassinations of Harris Diem, Diogenes Callare, and Carla Tynan,” but unfortunately the signature line seems to have been deleted.

She reads on, fascinated. There’re a few issues of Sniffings to come out of this, no question, and just possibly she will be able to take up Hardshaw’s offer of an interview when things settle down a bit.

The short note from her bank records a bunch of deposits—some of the earlier editions of Sniflings are clear up to 100 million total viewers to date, and many of those viewers are now downloading more of the later editions (well, there isn’t much to do till the weather lets up, if they are inside and warm somewhere, so it makes sense, she thinks). For all practical purposes, she’s rich—and her bank is in nice, comfortable, safe, untouched Calgary.

She drops her computer into her pack again and looks out across the parking lot, where she sees the furious rain still pouring off her new van, surging tire-high around it. She thinks of the house she’ll buy, moving Naomi into it, the wealth to back the lifestyle she wants.

It is definitely an ill wind that blows no one good.

It has stopped raining and gotten warmer a little—just enough so that it feels good to have their clothes drying. Mary Ann Waterhouse is genuinely enjoying the day as herself, and she certainly hopes all her “passengers,” as she’s begun to think of the audience, are enjoying it as well.

Mary Ann, Carla’s voice thinks in her head. Got a moment for me?

Of course.

She senses, rather than hears in words, that Carla is telling everyone via the Passionet feed that Mary Ann is going to be off-line for a while, that there is something important and private to be dealt with, but that contact will be restored well before they reach Monte Alban. Then Carla is fully there. Let Jesse know we’ve got things to talk about.

“Carla’s come online and shut me off from Passionet,” she says to Jesse. God, he’s a handsome kid, walking beside her. They step carefully over a gushing runnel that has cut all the way through the pavement, only a long step wide but you have to make sure the other side will carry the weight, and Jesse reaches out and takes her hand as she takes the step. His hand is young and strong, smooth and warm, and she feels a little tingle again. He smiles into her eyes. “Hi, Carla, what do we need to talk about?”

Carla speaks through Mary Ann’s voice; the slight flat Midwestern drawl of the dead scientist feels, in Mary Ann’s mouth, like a hard, squashed little egg. “I can tell you who killed your brother, and why, if you’d like to know. It’s going to come out anyway—I’ve given the FBI the data—but I thought you might want to know ahead of time.”

“Yeah, I’d like to.” Jesse’s eyes are all but expressionless; from within her body, Mary Ann wants to reach out and hold his hand.

A last gust of rain spatters down over them, and Carla adds, “Louie says sorry about that—he’s bombing the clouds above with a lot of frozen nitrogen, and every so often he can’t avoid having a little shower come your way. But he’ll have the sky clear and blue by the time you get up there.”

“That’s okay,” Jesse says. “Tell me about who killed Di.”

Carla’s voice has a strange tone of contempt to it. “You could call it a procedural error. Ever hear the phrase ‘Use it or lose it’? Well, the Siberian government was just as plugged in as anyone else, and they were having him followed exactly because it had become clear he was important. Naturally that meant they tracked who he talked to most, officially, and that was me and Diem.

“So it occurred to somebody there that since he was a vital resource, and sometimes if you can’t keep a resource yourself the best thing you can do is to deny it to others—like a bridge in wartime—well, then, there needed to be a contingency plan for getting rid of him. And being the military types they are, they put it into one of their high-level-top-secret-rapid-deployment-ready-to-go-yes-sir files.”

It’s strange that Carla’s style of humor remains, but it doesn’t always stay in the places in the conversation that it probably once did. Or perhaps Carla feels she can joke because after all she’s describing the same thing that led to her own murder. Mary Ann wonders about that for only a moment before Carla sends her a burst of instant understanding—that she never did have much in the way of people skills, and she was always too clever with words for her own good.

“Anyway, the trouble was that it was in that kind of a military options package. Military guys are always afraid that if command and control get disrupted, they won’t be able to get anyone to carry out plans, so quite often they build in a provision that, under specified circumstances, will activate a plan if communication is lost.”

“But… you don’t mean they just automatically set it to… well, to go off if they couldn’t get each other on the phone?”

“Not exactly. There was a sliding scale of relative severity of action, and at each level more dangerous policies were authorized. After Abdulkashim was knocked out, his successors didn’t bother to learn what was on the scale—they just understood it as up, up, and up. And being fairly typical of people in over their heads, whenever they didn’t know what to do, they escalated. The real mystery is this—I can’t find any evidence anyone gave the order. Something set them off, but I don’t know what it was. Diem was killed first, and the other teams were set to go if their datarodents detected Diem’s death. So that’s how Di and I died. But there’s no evidence that either the Siberians watching Diem got an order to kill him, or that they lost touch with their main base. The thing that started it all rolling is just… gone.”

Jesse walks beside her for a long time, head down, hands in pockets. The sky is getting lighter, and the clouds are farther above them; in the clear white light, his color seems washed out, and even the bright reds and deep blues of the stones he keeps kicking out of his way seem more pale and washed out.

“So, anyway, something or other happened to put it in motion, the bureaucracy just kind of crunched, and the Siberian agents came and murdered my brother?”

“That’s just about it exactly. Same reason they killed me.” Carla uses Mary Ann’s voice to sigh; Mary Ann can feel that it’s only partly sincere, and receives, for that feeling, a warning from Carla not to share that perception with Jesse. “Jesse, it was a terrible thing, and we’re going to deal with it. The whole Siberian spy system in the United States and Europe is going to be rolled up and caught, and the new revolutionary government there is going to catch and execute everyone remotely connected with this. And of course it won’t bring Di back or help Lori or your nephews get over it. Any message for them, by the way? I’ve located them at a shelter in Grand Island, Nebraska, up on high ground—they’re safe and comfortable and I should have a phone link there soon.”

“I guess you can tell them that I love them and I’ll come and see them as soon as I can,” Jesse says.

“I thought you were entitled to know. I’ll keep Mary Ann shut off for another half hour or so, but after that, as we near Monte Alban, we’ll have to plug back into the net.”

“What’s going to happen there?” Jesse asks suddenly. “And why have you taken such an interest in us? I mean, we aren’t the only people out there you could talk to, and you could just talk to everyone directly. What’s going on?”

Carla chuckles dryly. “Louie and I are new at this. Think of this as burning a bush to get your attention.”

And then Mary Ann is alone in her body. She reaches to take Jesse’s hand, and stumbles a little. Instead, her arm goes around his waist, and his comes around her shoulders to steady her. He looks down into her eyes and sees that she’s just Mary Ann, no one else in there, and kisses her forehead as gently as she imagines him kissing his nephews.

The warm wind blows around them, and it still smells different; she lifts her lips to kiss his mouth, and the kiss goes on for a long time. As they break apart, her eyes open to see patches of blue sky blowing in over the mountain, and a shaft of wet, runny yellow sunlight stabbing down into the white buildings and wide squares of Oaxaca below.

She also notices that the vanguard to the crowd has come around the corner and is cheering wildly. She turns and waves—not like a celebrity, she hopes, but just as if they were all her friends from high school—and when she turns to take Jesse’s hand, she’s got a big, completely un-Hollywood grin, which she can feel but is not seeing in her mind’s eye. They walk a little faster, not to lose the crowd, but because it’s getting close, and whatever it is that will happen on the mountain, they now trust in Louie and Carla enough to want it to happen.

Brittany Lynn Hardshaw has had several very productive hours, and she’s now good and tired, but whatever this thing at Monte Alban might be, she will want to know about it. They haven’t been able to raise Mary Ann Waterhouse via the net—Carla has told them that Mary Ann needs a little privacy, and then that after that Louie and Carla will need her full time.

The closest thing to a big story in the last few hours has been that they’ve been able to make contact with a lot of the UN agencies, here and there around the planet, and that although the central authority is gone, most of them seem to be content to keep functioning anyway; several of them are getting help and advice from Carla and Louie, and the mood in the places that can be contacted, anyway, seems upbeat. It’s not so much that they expect things to come back together or to “get back to normal,” but that there seems to be a growing sense in the world that life is going to go on, and once people are convinced of that, they have a way of seeing that it does.

There’s a ping in the intercom, and Hardshaw picks it up. It’s one of those nice White House kids that she brought along; unfortunately, the fact that they are now the White House staff for all practical purposes means that they’re already acquiring the characteristic arrogance and irreverence. She has no doubt that within a few days they’ll be offending Congress like professionals. “Ten minutes till we start getting signal from Monte Alban,” the young woman says, ticking off from a notepad. “And I’ve got something that’ll surprise you—a request for an interview and comments from Berlina Jameson, that reporter who puts together Sniffing. She says it doesn’t need to take long and she knows you’re busy, but she’s got to get tape in the can soon and she’d like to have comments from you directly—the FBI and Attorney General have already given her short statements.”

“FBI? I didn’t even know they were still functioning. And this sounds like a criminal justice matter—which I didn’t think we’d have anyone working on right now.”

“There are eight of them, and so far they’re functioning. They probably wouldn’t be doing criminal justice, except that Carla dropped them a long roster of witnesses and evidence for investigating the assassinations. Abdulkashim’s Siberians again, by the way—Carla’s throwing about half of the gang to us and the other half to their own revolutionary government.”

Hardshaw gives a low, animal grunt of satisfaction; the part of her that has never gotten over being a prosecutor says, “Just make sure that the most guilty ones go to the revolutionary government—so far, they have no Bill of Rights over there, and they can deal with it better than we can.”

“Got it, boss.” The young woman grins back at her. “So what should I tell Ms. Jameson? She’s calling you, by the way, from her car, in the parking lot of the U of the Az, in Tucson.”

U of the Az. Hardshaw mentally drafts a note to all staff that henceforth White House staff will distinguish itself from the rest of its generation by not pronouncing postal abbreviations, on penalty of being put in charge of liaison to the governor of the Wy for the next six years.

But time enough for that later—in fact, right now, with so much still not working and so much information about what is working not yet collected and collated, she does have time on her hands, and it never hurts to have good relations with the press, whoever they might be.

“Sure, get me Ms. Jameson—just let her know that we’ll have to stop when whatever it is that’s going to happen at Monte Alban happens.”

It’s less than a minute later when the two of them are linked up, and by that time Hardshaw knows what she has to say. “Well, obviously, we’ve had the case dropped into our lap, and we’re going to pursue justice by whatever means we can. That will mean some arrests and prosecutions in the United States, seeking extradition in some other cases, and cooperating with Siberian and other law enforcement authorities.”

“Does that include working with the United Nations?”

“If there is one. That organization’s continued existence is not yet certain, though I have no doubt many of its agencies will continue, just as several of the old League of Nations entities were passed on to the UN.”

Jameson nods, smiling at the remark; she and Hardshaw both know that if the UN proves unexpectedly resilient, it will cause no trouble, but if, as seems more likely, the UN is really gone, then it makes no commitments and expresses no regrets.

Hardshaw uses that instant to assess Jameson and decides that she likes her—according to the file she’s an Afropean, so her nationalist credentials are impeccable, and the polite but very direct questions are a pleasure to answer—if there are any traps in them, they’re obvious ones.

Then Jameson smiles, an engaging self-deprecating smile that gives Hardshaw the feeling that she’s being taken into a confidence, made a best buddy of. Hardshaw recognizes that smile—it’s the same one that one of her better investigating detectives used to use when he was working hard for a confession. For that matter it’s the same one that—back when TV news was the big news—used to show up on the faces of network political reporters. It’s a good thing, Hardshaw thinks, that she’s a generation older than Berlina, and has dealt with exactly that kind of reporter in her younger days, because nowadays about the only place that you see it is on the XV channels that feature Plucky Girl Reporters.

“And if I may, Ms. President, as long as I have you here, do you have any idea what is going on at Monte Alban, or why it has suddenly become so important? So far all I can get from anyone who works for you is that they are watching the situation closely, and that’s not exactly news since everyone is watching it closely, given that we’re all experiencing through Synthi Venture.”

“She wants to be known by her real name, Mary Ann Waterhouse,” Hardshaw says. “Very pleasant and intelligent person, by the way.” It’s a classic evasion step; let’s see if Jameson really can do this big-deal network reporter shtick.

“So can we say that you’ve had some private contact with her?” Jameson says. “Can I quote that—and may I ask if you were able to find out what’s going to happen?”

Yessir, Hardshaw thinks, Jameson can do it. She scrawls a tiny note to herself—put Jameson on the special list of reporters the President talks to unofficially; here’s a good person to leak to when she needs one.

“Those are several different questions. Yes, I’ve talked with Mary Ann Waterhouse—she and her companion, Jesse Callare, are just fine. And they don’t know what’s planned, either. Louie and Carla are doing their own thing with it. Mary Ann happens to be useful because through her Passionet link she’s a way for Carla and Louie to send us whatever it is that they want to send us. But Jesse and Mary Ann aren’t in charge of it—they’re more passengers than anything else.”

Jameson bites her lip. “I know I’m doing my first Presidential interview, because I just thought of a question I’m a little afraid to ask.”

Hardshaw grins at her, a big, toothy beaming grin that looks superficially friendly and that Hardshaw has cultivated for a long time—because it can also look as if she’s baring her teeth and getting ready to spring. Hardshaw remembers what her first supervisor at the County Prosecutor’s office told her: “When you’re in politics, reporters should be your spaniels, so you pet them on the head, and you throw things out for them to chase, and you tell them what good doggies they are—but you’ve got to hit them with the newspaper every now and then, or they’ll pee on your carpet.” It’s about time to make sure this reporter feels a bit threatened. “Well, if I don’t like the question, I can always kill the interview.”

“God knows, I’m aware of that, Ms. President, but if I don’t try I’ll kick myself tomorrow.” Jameson’s grin back is just as predatory. My, yes, there is going to be a third-term campaign, and here is someone Hardshaw is going to talk to. Jameson lets it hang just long enough, and then says, “You said Jesse and Mary Ann are more passengers than anything else? But isn’t that—well, what all of us are, and most especially you?”

It’s a great question. Now all Hardshaw needs is a great answer. She does the usual stall—sits back, takes a deep breath, looks as thoughtful as she can. Finally she resorts to the oldest tactic of all, telling the truth. “I hadn’t thought of it that way, but you’re right. And it’s been getting to be that way for a long time. In some way that we don’t really understand, for decades the old system where ‘I say to a man go, and he goeth’ has been collapsing, so that nowadays we all talk and act, talk and act, in ceaseless communication, with nobody at the top of the ladder, and what gets done is what gets done. And now we’ve got a whole new world to build—not quite starting from scratch, but near enough—and there are half a dozen things we’ve never had before, starting with Louie and Carla themselves, out there to be gotten used to. I guess what we do, all of us, most especially including me, is stay loose and do what seems right wherever our reach extends—and recognize that that is not very far.”

There’s a ping and a small inset screen appears in the larger screen where she’s been talking to Jameson. It’s the same young woman. “Boss, Mary Ann Waterhouse is back online and they’re in the final approach up the hill to Monte Alban. Things should be starting, whatever ‘things’ are, in a few minutes.”

An inspiration hits Hardshaw. “Is there a way for me to maintain this phone link to Ms. Jameson while she and I both experience it on XV?”

“Er, I’m sure there is—” she looks sideways, listens intently, nods a couple of times—“Yes there is, for sure. Instead of normal XV goggles we’ll have you wear stereovisors. We’ll blank most of the screen so you get the same effect as the goggles, but we’ll give each of you an inset screen of the other in one corner of your vision.”

Berlina Jameson looks startled, to say the least, and that’s what Hardshaw had hoped for. When you run into smart, tough reporters, the thing to do is to co-opt them, and this will do it. “Well, fellow passenger,” Hardshaw says—“and that’s off the record because there are enough old voters out there who would confuse that with ‘fellow traveler’—shall we get on the ride and see where history is taking us?”

“With you all the way, Ms. President.”

Attagirl, Hardshaw thinks, that’s what I was hoping for.

The first sight of Monte Alban, from the road, is not impressive until you realize what you are looking at. The mountain, and the road with it, slope up sharply into the visitor center, one of those ugly little block buildings that could just as easily be a highway patrol office, a maintenance building for a cemetery, or the conjugal-visit facility for a prison, anywhere on Earth.

What rises behind the visitor center looks like just more mountain; then you realize that it’s man-made, and not by any modern men… and then you see the bits of ancient walls and surfaces, and realize how much the whole site towers above you.

The road winds after the visitor center, and if you take the turn to the right you find yourself among the Zapotec tombs outside the city proper, and come into Monte Alban itself by the back way; Mary Ann remembers more of it than she thought she would, and she doesn’t need to check with Carla except to confirm that they should go in by the main way.

This means a left turn on the trail, and another long, surprising rise, followed by the startling entrance into a central courtyard. By now, there’s more blue than white in the sky—Louie must really be bombing those clouds—and plenty of bright, early evening sunset.

There are two logical locations there for any really major event—the Southern Pyramid, which towers over the whole site, and the Northern Platform, with its superb view of the whole site and of the surrounding area. Which? Mary Ann thinks.

Neither. Use Building J, in the middle, Carla responds at once. The holo facilities are better set up there, too.

You’re not going to run those horrible holo films of human sacrifices and priestly orgies and all that? Mary Ann asks, her esthetic sense offended. Surely you know that—

We just need the projectors to help the effect, Carla says. Really, we’re not human anymore, but we’re not as inhuman as that!

Mary Ann laughs, and realizes that she can hear a billion people laughing along through Carla, in the distant way you can hear a party at the other end of a hotel corridor. Of course they all know pretty much what Mary Ann knows, and they’re going to see the place through her eyes; she supposes this absolutely ruins Monte Alban for any future romance-oriented XV. Just one more fringe benefit….

Jesse, beside her, says, “I suppose we’ll have to talk about what we do while the crowd is coming in? i supposed to be a hundred thousand of them, and even if you figure you can get twenty thousand into the city and another ten thousand or so watching on the Southern Pyramid and Northern Platform each, most people won’t be close enough to see. And it’s still going to take quite a while for them all to get in; the sun will be almost down before everyone has somewhere to be.”

Carla speaks through Mary Ann. “Not to worry. I’ve got a few hundred police I’ve borrowed one way or another, and one battalion of the Mexican Army, to get the crowd into place—they’re all on earphone direct to me. It will move pretty fast. Just get up there, watch it all, and try to relax and wait. Louie and I will let you know when we’re ready to start.”

They have to be content with that. Building J is a sort of lumpy rock pile, not like any other pre-Columbian building anywhere in the hemisphere—it’s asymmetrical, and tunneled all through like a kid’s fort. The holo system they’ve put in here does its “adults only” late-night show on this building, decking it with visions of flowers and then giving the Euro and Japanese tourists a sadistic version in which young, plump girls, breasts and buttocks jiggling, dance naked up the stairs to be brought to orgasm with huge stone dildos, their throats then slit and their corpses, still impaled on the dildos, thrown down into the well. There is absolutely no basis in fact for it but it’s probably Monte Alban’s biggest moneymaker, and certainly most tourist guides say it’s what you mustn’t miss.

Now as Jesse and Mary Ann climb the long stairs, she has a stray vision of how they might have used her in such a video, displaying her expensive body, rebuilt as she is, her outsized breasts slapping up and down as she runs up the steps, her too-taut, too-small buttocks exposing her labia, and feels a little ill at it; she knows the vision is leaking through to the rest of the world (the Passionet staff, in the old days, would just have loved that) and that god knows how many men are getting their switches thrown by it.

Well, she’ll never have an audience like this again. She sends them a solid wave of nausea; now that technology is allowing us to feel what others feel, let’s give them the whole works, shall we?

They reach the main upper surface; anything farther than this will require using their hands to climb, and Carla tells them they can stop here.

When Jesse and Mary Ann look back, they see that the crowd is coming in great numbers. “Do we even know anyone’s name anymore?” she asks. “The first few days there were so many, and I felt—oh, I don’t know, at one with them. Of course I know it was an illusion and I didn’t know anyone at all well… but I used to feel like most of these people were individuals, and like I had moved in among them, and now here I am seeing them as a big faceless Third World mass again.”

Jesse glances at her sideways. “I was thinking I’d really like to find Tomás. It would be fun to see this with him, and I’m not really any use to you.”

Mary Ann is about to say something when Carla’s voice comes through. “Sure, go ahead—we can find you afterward.”

Jesse kisses her, very nicely but very quickly, and he goes down the steps to fade into the great swirl of white shirts and white dresses made gray with rain. Mary Ann has a long moment of feeling very alone, and a deep wish to go down and do the same thing he’s doing; she looks up and away and sees that there are long lines of people snaking up the side of the Southern Pyramid, filling in the surface in great blocks, the blocks then turning lighter as more white shirts and white dresses join. “It will be all white soon,” she says.

No, each head and face forms a dark dot in it, see? And the dots move and change against each other, and you can see that individuals walk differently. They don’t completely disappear into a faceless mass unless you make the effort to see them that way, Carla’s voice says, in Mary Ann’s head.

Mary Ann sighs. She’s feeling very strongly that all she is here is an expensive piece of broadcasting equipment, and although for once it’s not her breasts but her rebuilt skull that they want, it comes down to the same thing.

She’s amazed at the wounded feeling that comes to her from Carla at that. I hope we haven’t made you feel that way. We like you a lot, Mary Ann, and we know a lot about you, you know—we’ve looked at every bit of the record, including all the transcripts that Passionet kept on you. No one has ever known you better, and you were our choice for this because we preferred to work with you.

Mary Ann sits down on one of the blocks of stone, hugging herself. The water from the cool stone is soaking through her jeans, but she’s already so wet that it doesn’t matter much. It’s not a matter of feeling used, she realizes, but a matter of feeling herself vanish into something much bigger than merely a crowd. No matter how much by choice, hers and others’, she is standing right here, and everything flows out from this moment—

She feels Carla laughing gently, and Louie joining in. There’s empathy in it, because, she suddenly realizes, certainly neither of them would have chosen to be what they have become… and a sense of comedy rooted in the fact that no, it’s not true at all that it all depends upon her—if this doesn’t work out, there are many, many more experiments to try, so there is much to be gained but little to lose, except that both of them feel somehow that it might be better drama, a better story, if it happens today, on the day that—

My god. Clem’s eye will breach in a matter of—minutes. The superhurricanes are beginning to succumb to the ice Frisbees. So that’s what they’re here for? To celebrate?

Partly, Louie admits. Seems like people might enjoy having that announced. But also because this is a good setting, we like and trust you, and so it seemed like the time and place to do this.

The crowd outside by now has reached the point where the gates and pathways into the ruined city are clogging, so that there are great pileups of people waiting on the rain-wet green slopes, and then a clot at each entryway, and finally a relatively open, swift-moving flow after the gate.

“Why are they all in white?” Mary Ann asks suddenly.

They’re not. If you look around you’ll see the occasional suit and now and then a dress in bright colors. But for most of them, white is their best clothes, what you wear when something special happens—and so they found a way to change into their best clothes before they came up here. They are doing all of us considerable honor, Carla explains.

Mary Ann had understood that much, but it hadn’t been what she meant. The question was why this should be anything to honor. She didn’t necessarily see any reason why these people should feel happy or even interested in the chaos that had been made by people like her. Without the squabblings of power and the fussings of the media—and for that matter without the whole silly business of making things matter by making them happen to a woman with red hair, taut butt, and huge teats—wouldn’t they be better off?

The clathrates were always down there waiting to be unlocked—they have done it in the past and they will do it again. Carla’s voice is infinitely patient, but then given that Carla may very well be holding thousands of humanyears of conversation with Louie between each word she speaks to Mary Ann, undoubtedly she can afford to be patient. As for the rest… people make too much of that. They find you important because you are on XV, and they find XV important because it’s interesting and something they have to go into the big town to try—the idea of having it in their homes, like los norteamericanos, is still strange to them. But none of that means they think they themselves are a faceless mass, and none of it means that they see themselves only in the light of the media from the wealthy nations.

Mary Ann sits and thinks, her arms clutching hard at the long calves that she thinks probably are what got her here. It’s true, of course, that like so many others, she always assumed that what people saw of themselves was how they thought of themselves… but then the thought comes to her, again and again, now that Carla has suggested it, that perhaps the image they had of themselves is the kind of thing that mattered, not to the people who swing the picks and wait the tables, but to the people sitting at the tables watching them do it. And if that should be the case, then… maybe people like Mary Ann, or no, dammit, let’s keep a little dignity and say people like Synthi Venture, have had a slightly exaggerated notion of their own importance for a long time?

She looks up into the now-blue sky and sees how the surrounding valleys are bathed in sunlight, but also that Louie is holding the clouds all around back by main force, so that on the horizon in all directions there is a long, low blue streak like an inky smear that someone has put along the horizon of a painter’s landscape. The low sun is warming everything rapidly, and sunlight dances on the water coating the ancient stones.

She laughs. Though water has run off these stones many times before, now that it’s doing it in front of her, and people everywhere are seeing it through her eyes, it means something—it’s the way that everyone will remember it forever. It’s too much like what her old Uncle Jack, actually her father’s uncle, used to say—“That goddam media makes too big a deal out of things.”

But surely there are such things as big deals? Just because there were eight billion people on the planet—down from nine and a half billion six months ago—and on any given night, what was for their individual dinners mattered more to them than dynasties, economies, and all of religion and art… that didn’t mean those things went away, and after all, those things also, partly, determined what was going to be for dinner or if there would be a dinner at all.

She sits up here and thinks to herself, All that a billion people will get of this moment is what they get through me, and most of them will then take what they get through me and plug it into themselves. But all I will get is what I see, plus of course… my own feelings and experiences, which all of them get. They will eventually get up from the XV and think about things their fathers said fifty years ago, or smell the sauce of something cooking, or turn back to shoring up the sandbag walls of their shelters, but I will see and perceive less than anyone else here; I’m the only person here who will have only the media experience and nothing else.

I am the least qualified person present.

She hears Carla and Louie laughing merrily in her head—and she finds herself joining them. It’s a sudden, strange thought that two beings who for practical purposes can live a million years in a day, and who both have heard and laughed at every possible joke in every language, can still be surprised by a perception and laugh at it. Well, Carla says, maybe the best thing to do is to get the show underway—Louie tells me that it’s getting to be more and more work to keep the hole in the sky open. And no matter how late we start, there will still be people filing in.

Mary Ann grins and says aloud, “Then you’ve worked in theatre, too.”

She is rewarded for the second time with making the gods laugh. Then Carla says, Can you let me drive now? and Mary Ann turns over control. She finds herself standing and walking to the platform edge; at once many thousands of heads turn toward her, and she hears the quiet purr of the holographic projectors moving into place. It is showtime.

She never feels herself begin to speak—just, suddenly, there she is.

The words themselves are not a speech—they resemble an induction of sorts, and the back of Mary Ann’s mind wonders for an instant if maybe Carla and Louie are going to hypnotize everyone. There’s a faint change in the tone of the holo projectors, and now we are into the story—

The great white eye, crawling across the Pacific, comes to us as a series of pictures, radar, infrared, visible light, and as a series of instrument maps, overlaying and flexing, and as this happens, Louie’s voice in Mary Ann’s mind speaks rapidly, just at the edge where her throat and lips can keep up with him, explaining what it is that is being looked at, how the great spot of low pressure moves heat from the too-warm oceans into the upper atmosphere. Then suddenly we see it from a plunging disk of ice, one of the Frisbees Louie has been throwing in their billions, to which he has—attached a camera? Is he simulating this? She has no way to know or ask and it’s probably not important.

The great white mass wobbling in the Pacific draws nearer and nearer, and then there is a moment of flashing heat as the Frisbee vaporizes in the upper atmosphere, a blurring instant as thirty miles of ocean and storm below flick across the point of view before the camera flicks off. The image is brought back again, and we see the long, straight white shadows everywhere; and then we pull back to see the vast stream of Frisbees on the way… and we feel the scale of the shadow being woven of ice crystals, like jet contrails forming a gridwork umbrella over the Pacific.

The images flicker and dissolve again, and Mary Ann is distantly aware of a low moan running through the crowd. It sounds like people at the county fair, back in West Virginia when she was a kid, watching the fireworks and reacting to the sudden wonderful bursts of color. She wonders if out in the electronic world there are a billion “oohs” resounding, and very quietly Carla assures her there are—You would be surprised at how many people have never thought of their home world as a planet; we are getting indications through the marketing feedback servers that people had never thought of the air as thin before, or realized that everything that lives, lives within six miles below or six miles above sea level. And at another whole set of minds reeling with the awareness that a planet is big….

Now Louie backs them up and tells them the story of the event from the methane release forward. They see the heat accumulate, watch as the sky becomes all but opaque to the infrared wavelengths, see the Pacific warming…

And then suddenly it is no longer about the storm; a part of Mary Ann, hearing the words she is speaking, makes the long leap of intuition just as Carla takes over for Louie in the narration. That little lurch lets Mary Ann get a momentary glimpse and see apparent-depth screens forming a hexagon around Building J, and transparent only to Mary Ann, so that everyone sees into one screen with full depth, and sees Mary Ann inside it. She didn’t know they could do that with holograms—

Not till now, Louie says, with a warm chuckle in her mind. Had to develop physics quite a bit to do it, in just this last hour. Helps that you and your clothes aren’t too close to the stone or the sky in color. Now don’t worry—we’re going onward….

The story shifts again, and Carla takes them through human history—everything since Homo sapiens burst out of Africa—six times, one after another:

First we see humans squabbling and fighting, understand that among the first tools were the ones for killing each other, watch as the quarrelsome species spreads across the Earth, endlessly dividing itself into smaller and smaller segments of faith and language and endlessly finding in those self-made divisions a reason for butchering each other. We see the tools of butchery improved constantly, not just in cutting and puncturing screaming flesh but in organization and planning, so that the making of corpses becomes ever more efficient on an ever bigger scale. Nor is this made a tale of horror—or not entirely—for the images that flicker by share in the pleasures of this as well, the release from the boredom of daily work and slow accumulation of goods to a world where furor rages unbounded, where bodies are there to be cut, hurt, raped, where there are only victims and brutes and to know that one is a brute is an orgasm. The resources needed to do the job are grabbed from everywhere, torn from below the ground, cut out of the forests; whatever is needed for more slaughter is taken and turned to the purpose, and on that great flow of matériel all of human economy is founded, so that humanity grows ever more rich as it falls ever more deeply into danger. The moment that brings us to the present, where the Earth itself can no longer contain the drive for slaughter, where the endless exultation of violence is on the brink of sending the system hurtling down into a collapse of life itself….

And then, suddenly back to Africa, to see the story again, and this time we see humans making, creating, changing, ceaselessly taking the useless and random stuff of nature and turning it to beauty and use, the turning of the planet from a place where not more than fifty million human beings could live into one where billions live in comfort, from one where thoughts were barely more than images of the next day’s hunt to one filled with stories and pictures, to a world alive with meaning where before there was only incoherent silence, until again the sea erupts with methane, and the world has reached the point where—like a whale caught in thin bindings of nylon that weigh only a tiny fraction of what it does—nature is inside meaning; the organization of the world has reached around and become the world, and from here on—

The story begins again. Humans go over the next hill, and there is new land; some stay to turn it into a place, and others go over another hill, and another. Each place found is finally made into a place encompassed, known, and understood—and then escaped from—partly to return with new eyes, and partly just to see the new. Finally, they all see through Louie’s eyes as they walk the empty iron sands of Mars, and then look out into the heavens and see the cryogenic stormworlds that circle the gas giants, and beyond that, the near-absolute-zero balls that hang in the void on a tether of thin gravity, the comets of the Oort Cloud… and beyond that, the stars….

The story begins again. Human beings learn the secret of separating labor from laborer, and then of binding the energies of nature, and then the conquest extends until—

The story begins again. Nature, pure and sweet, is slowly eaten and fouled—

The story begins again. And again, and again, and as each is told, Mary Ann—and the billion people who are living through her—feels each of them to be true, the way that things really happened, until finally….

The truth is that every story finishes. Every one of these tales will find its way to its end, some as comedy and some as tragedy and some merely as a thing that happened. Yet some are more true than others; to see the world as a fall from purity into corruption, one must first learn to imagine a nature that never was, to paint over the real, blind, struggling, merciless, meaningless chaotic surface with smooth Disney technicolor that puts big eyes onto herbivores and bushy immigrant eyebrows onto the predators. To see the world as a quest to go over the next hill, one must first learn to ignore the vast uncountable number of human beings who by choice never go anywhere, to focus on the lone misfit who can’t stay home and to ignore all the things people do so that we can look at a man sticking out against unclaimed land like an old-time actor against a painted backdrop….

There is no lens that doesn’t distort, no two lenses that can be true at once, and yet some distort less than others; and yet, again, however much the story and the picture might bend, seen through any of them, the story will finish in all of them.

And finally, with that understood, there comes the rest of the story, but unlabeled and meaningless, except that Mary Ann sees how it fits into the end of all the stories, like a plug into a socket, as if it were made for it.

Louie and Carla tell this part of the future together, so that Mary Ann is truly alone in her head, hearing the words come out of her mouth as the pictures scroll by. She sees Clem breaking up into a thousand tinier squalls and storms, scattering onto the land—it is going to be a long, foul winter in the Northern Hemisphere, but only a long, foul winter. She sees human beings moving back down onto the coastal plains and new cities rising, some on the sites of the old, some where new coastlines have shaped new harbors and river mouths.

And she sees Louie—or his physical manifestation in the one-time space station—making his way out again, to gather more comets and more material, to build up more replicators, and then—

Life spreads onto Mars first, and then Venus is spun up to rotational speed, cooled and seeded, and the moon itself is given a continuously replenishing supply of air (indeed, there is already a trace of air there now from what has drifted off 2026RU, and there will be much more—as she watches, she sees, a thousand years from now, the fall of rain on the lunar plains, and the green and blue moon that will rise in the skies of Earth).

She sees the many thousands of ships depart for distant stars; she sees the Earth become richer and more comfortable, and as industry moves into space, sees the green return to the Earth….

And she understands that none of this is what must be (except that Louie seems determined to turn the solar system green), but only what human beings can choose to do—and the story moves on again. The time has come, finally, when the world is one whether it likes it or not, when every voice can be heard—indeed, every voice that speaks must be heard, forever. It all rests with the billion people experiencing directly, and with all those who will come to know of this in the next few days.

She understands now, too, that when the image stops, she will cease to be a witness and listener—cease to be the channel for all of this—and then finally she will be alone, for their last gift to her will be to turn off the transmitters in her head permanently. She is about to be alone, along with all the Earth’s billions again.

It makes her think for a moment, while she can still see with god’s eyes, and she sees Jesse, standing in the crowd and drinking it all in but unable to form it into words, a small brown child on his shoulders because the boy couldn’t see and Jesse helps as naturally as he breathes, the boy’s family around him—he is not, and never will be, one of them, but they can stand together. She looks beyond that to see Berlina Jameson and Brittany Lynn Hardshaw looking over the shoulders of the world, feels the sense of their own unimportance washing over the reporter and the President… and beyond them, she looks into the eyes of Louie and Carla….

“You are gods,” she breathes quietly, and is rewarded with a roar of laughter from them. We aren’t even fully human, Louie explains.

And Carla adds, Oh, no you don’t. We’ve shown you the whole big Earth, and the universe beyond, and put it in your hands. You don’t get to hand it back. We’ll hang around to help out and see what you do—at least until we get bored—but we’re not taking responsibility for this show. You want gods, make somebody else be god—and make it somebody bigger than yourself, not just smarter or stronger.

Otherwise, Louie adds, we might just decide to do a little idol-smashing. We’re very glad we were once human and we wouldn’t have missed it, so if you dummies don’t appreciate being human, we just might decide to make you appreciate it.

And with that they are gone from her head, and the holograms vanish. Mary Ann is standing alone on the roof of Building J, the stones laid thousands of years ago under her feet, looking out across the huge crowd. The last of the blazing red sunlight is just bouncing off the great wall of clouds around the space, and the valley below is dark—darker than it has been in a hundred years, for the power is still off in Oaxaca and the villages.

The vast crowd around her seems to be looking at her, but she isn’t even sure how many of them, in the dim light of sunset, can pick her out from her background.

She is plain old Mary Ann Waterhouse again, though given what’s been done to her body she will probably have a problem with backaches, a butt too scrawny to sit comfortably on, and pestering men for quite a while, at least until she gets some surgery.

There is a loud stir in the crowd, as if many thousands of people had turned, seen, and shouted, and then a roar as everyone turns to see. There is a great light in the clouds, and her first thought is that it’s the moon—but it’s much too big for the moon—and then the clouds roll away, and it’s there.

2026RU, from which Louie is throwing Frisbees, in its libration-point orbit out in front of the moon, looms seven times as big as the full moon, for though the core of rock and ice is only a few hundred miles across, the thin cloud of gas and dust it gives off—too thin to breathe, and up close you wouldn’t see it at all—reflects the sunlight brilliantly.

The great, dead city of Monte Alban, where once the heavens were worshipped, and where tens of thousands have just seen a vision of matters as they are, resounds with cheering as the new moon climbs into the sky.