John Barnes - Mother of Storms

So he leans back in the big control chair—it reminds visitors of the idea of a “mission commander” and of high achievement, but it also supports Klieg’s bad back—and gives himself permission to let the philosophizing run its course. Perhaps he can learn something.

Alexander wept at the thought of no more worlds to conquer, and Alexander hadn’t conquered nearly as much as he thought he had.

The thought is unbidden. Klieg looks down across his trim body; he’s graying a little and refusing to give in to that. He lets his thoughts wander.

What is it about empire, Alexander, conquest? A very poor metaphor for what he’s done. GateTech is not any of those things. Cold realism led him to put it together, the realization that he knew how to make money in a new way and that the first major corporation on the field would dominate it if it were played right.

Okay, take stock, Klieg, back to basics, he tells himself. GateTech really does four things. One, it studies what research other businesses are doing. Two, it does R&D in those fields and takes out patents as quickly as it can. Three, it forces other companies to pay GateTech for access to the technology they’ve been developing.

Four, it lobbies Washington, Tokyo, Brussels, Moscow, and the UN to maintain the laws that allow it to do that.

He explained it once to a distant cousin’s kid; if he’d been alive at the time of James Watt, he would have sought to patent, not a steam engine, but the boiler and the piston; if he’d been alive in Edison’s day, he’d have sought to patent tungsten wire and glass bulbs; if he’d been around at the beginning of computers he’d have tried to patent the keyboard. And the biggest secret….

Aha. That’s the parallel to empires and Alexander and all that. I’m thinking about the fact that GateTech has never manufactured one object or performed one service for anyone; that’s the secret of our success. We get in their way and make them pay to get us out of their way, that’s all. We function like the ancient empires that didn’t care about local customs as long as taxes got collected. Like Alexander or Caesar, we keep everyone doing what they were doing before, what they would do without us, and we take a cut.

But nowadays a lot of them are defending themselves better. Just last week MitsDoug beat us to patenting the new charge-deformable plastics, and now they can make their damned shape-shifting airliner without paying me a dime to do it. How many billions have I just been done out of?

Don’t get mad, and don’t waste time getting even.

Get ahead.

That was the key. He lost a lot in the Flash, but while other companies spent fortunes suing the banks, trying to get their lost accounts re-created, GateTech merely moved in on every technology needed for data recovery. He made back a lot more than he lost.

He lost a lot when Parti Euro Uno took over and “Europeanized” foreign holdings, but he gained a lot more by taking on every highly skilled Afropean he could after the Expulsion.

For twenty years, a bit of industrial espionage and a little forethought have told him how to get the critical patent six months or a year ahead, just close enough to make them pay GateTech to “infringe.”

He almost laughs aloud at how much thinking he’s had to do. Couldn’t he have just looked at the current business plan and said the time horizon needed to move outward?

Nope. That’s what he pays flunkies to do. “Glinda,” he says, speaking aloud. He takes two deep breaths, exhales slowly… she will come in . . now.

A door glides open and Glinda Gray comes in. It’s not that she’s been sitting outside waiting for his voice—he wouldn’t pay anyone to do that—or that she’s dropped anything vital to answer his call. She is one of seventeen Special Operations Vice-Presidents, and Glinda was top of the queue of those he hadn’t already assigned to anything specific. But if he’d had to pick the perfect person for this job, it would be Glinda. Two reasons—one, she’s a perfectionist negative-thinking nut. Her report always contains everything that could go wrong.

Two, she never asks very many questions when he throws her at a new job.

She stands in front of him and he mentally describes her the way a TV news broadcast would if she lost her house in a hurricane, got murdered, or wrote a best-seller: a “pretty, blonde divorced mother.” Her skin is freckling and roughening, and he suspects a touch of the needle is keeping the silver out of the gold in her hair. She has a slightly tired look around the eyes and from the way she stands he suspects the pink pumps are already hurting her feet this morning.

She finished her last big project three weeks ago and she always looks a little tense when she’s trying to come up with a new one, because although John Klieg wouldn’t part with her for anything, he can never convince her of that.

“Have a seat,” he says, “this is going to take a while. I’ve got a new priority-one project for you, and I want you to know that if you weren’t at the top of the queue already, I’d’ve jumped you up the ladder to give you this task.”

She nods, firmly, once, and sits down. “Tape on?”

“Yes.”

“Systems please record access highest,” she says, forcefully, and a mechanical voice responds, “Recording.”

Klieg smiles at her, and makes it as warm as he can manage. “I have a gut feeling that we are not working enough long-range stuff, and especially we’re passing up chances to find master patents that will block lots of technologies instead of little patents that jam up just one corporation’s key project.”

“Fourteen years ago,” she reminds him, “you set the policy of always blocking a specific project somewhere; you used to say a master patent would be too easy to get around and might not still be in force when they got there.”

He nods; he doubts she’s thought about that policy ten times in the interim, but he also knows she could give him, accurately, the whole history of debate over it and the rationale for the decision, even if it was fourteen years ago.

“Call this a change of policy,” he says. “We’re a lot bigger now and we can do better research and fight more expensive legal actions, and there’s a lot more body of case law in our favor. The question is, should we make this change? My gut says the answer is yes, but find out for me.”

He leans back and lets his eyes wander over the screens; this is something they are good for, they jog his memory. “Three test cases to apply it to. Number one, the continuously optimized product—see if we can get the whole nascent COP industry by the balls. Number two, the ongoing studies on getting antimatter motors down in price to compete in the Third World market. And number three… ummm… hah. Any ideas?”

Once again Glinda doesn’t disappoint him.

“Have you caught the news this morning?” she asks. “I can think of a perfect test case, a need that’s not yet specified but likely to happen.”

He sits forward. “Tell.”

“Have you heard about the North Slope methane release?”

He shakes his head, and notices that color is coming back into her cheeks and the tiredness is falling away. Glinda will be in great shape for months now. He wonders for an instant why that’s so important, decides once again she’s irreplaceable, and listens as she begins to explain.

I wonder when space became boring , Louie Tynan thinks. He’s sitting in the view bubble—there’s an OSHA standard notice by the door telling him he’s likely to take more radiation than he should, and subconsciously that adds to his pleasure—having an onion bagel with chopped liver and watching the Earth roll by down below. Yesterday there was really a view—the UNSOO ships glowing red as they screamed back down into the atmosphere, the detonations that made the ice bump and shimmer, and then later the flaring methane reflecting off the ice. There are a couple of flares still burning, but it’s daylight in that area now, and it’s not as impressive.