John Barnes - Mother of Storms

Louie figures the major reason he’s been able to keep this job—maybe the only reason—is a sense of humor. When he joined the Astronaut Corps, in 2009, there were over two thousand of them; three years later, when it officially became the United States Space Force and added a bunch of Navy and Air Force stuff, there were forty-five hundred men and women who were qualified for missions, and about six thousand Americans had flown in space. The First UN Mars Expedition had two USSF officers aboard, and had the Second through Ninth ever been flown, there would have been a round dozen Americans who had set foot on Mars.

But after the first landing, repeating the same thing that had happened after the moon landings, most of the world’s nations, especially the U.S., retreated from space. There are now forty-four active astronauts, and where fifteen years ago there were almost always forty or fifty or so in space at any given time, now there’s just Louie. The seniority from going on the Mars mission lets him pull a lot of strings, or they wouldn’t have him up here on Space Station Constitution , last of the five American manned space stations to remain active.

He leans back and looks at the Earth some more. If you count the moon, he’s seen three worlds from orbit close up, and there are just fourteen other people alive who can say that.

I suppose if you haven’t seen it for yourself, if all you have are the photos, and if you don’t look too closely or pay much attention, then after a while this must get dull . Exploration goes on, of course… there are permanent robot stations orbiting everything from Mercury out to Saturn, and one on the way for Uranus, and there are robot ground installations all over the Jovian moons and a robot dirigible cruising the skies of Titan. You can even buy continuous tape from some of their cameras, so that you can sit in your living room and climb the side of Olympus Mons, or make a deep-dive orbit of Jupiter.

There are not enough people around who can explain why that is not the same.

The sun is just coming up on the Western Pacific, which means it’s probably lighting the ocean surface half a kilometer up from Carla; she usually takes MyBoat down below when she sleeps, or when she wants to concentrate on some academic project and let the autopilot steer.

Maybe he’ll call her again… no, not a good thing to do, he called last time and it’s her turn, and she’ll probably call in a few days anyway.

He grins and swallows another bite. What he has going with Carla is a complicated dance devoted mostly to making sure they don’t get together on any permanent basis anymore. Look at them both, living in steel cocoons a long way from the rest of humanity… mating eagles is probably easier.

So, the space program is still being taken over by robots, the only person he really likes is another hermit-in-a-can, and he’s soaking up enough rads, what with eating in here all the time, that they’ll probably ground him for a while when he gets back and put him on preventive anticancer drugs. He’s really the last of his kind, and the old planet rolling around below him has about seven and one-half billion people who don’t understand him. Last week he was interviewed on Dance Channel—he still has the XV jack from the Mars Expedition—and when he got the program back he didn’t recognize his own experiences from their editing.

The most exciting thing he got to do this month was set a methane plume on fire, at the request of UNSOO.

On the other hand, the food is still good—way better than what it was on the way to Mars—and you can’t beat the view. Probably worth continuing to live and work, he decides. He puts his mouth up to one of the monitors, lets loose a grand, gut-ripping belch, redolent of chicken liver and raw onion, grins broadly, and goes back to the telescope for the afternoon’s work.

What have you gotten yourself into this time, Brittany Lynn?

Brittany Lynn Hardshaw, President of the United States, remembers that when she was little, her father used to ask that about once a day, and normally the answer was something like “the old motor oil in the bam,” or “an open can of house paint.” It’s eight-thirty in the morning and she’s looking at the confidential report from NOAA that Harris Diem left for her last night, and wondering if she can trust it at all.

The trouble is, she’s spent a long time getting the government under control, with Diem as her right hand… and now she’s not sure there’s anyone left who’s likely to tell her the truth. And this time that’s what she needs.

She gets up and walks to a window, looking out on Pennsylvania Avenue. When they rebuilt after the Flash, they closed the whole area to vehicle traffic, nominally for environmental reasons and actually to make it that much tougher to bring a nuke close to the New White House or Capitol and repeat the decapitation shot.

The other part of the Flash, the bomb that went off sixty miles above Kansas City, wouldn’t have much effect this time; everything everywhere is in Faraday cages, and all signal is on fibrop.

But the center of government is permanently vulnerable, Hardshaw thinks. We’re made out of meat. We have to be in contact with many thousands of people.

The street before her is jammed with pedestrians, most with briefcases, scurrying about like ants. If three of them had parts for a cram bomb, they could wipe out the Federal government this morning, and no one would stop them. Maybe if they did it again, this time they would announce who they were, or at least explain why they did it.

In her mind’s eye Hardshaw sees Washington rise from the swamps, go down in the flames set by the British troops a few years later, rise again to bustle and pulse when President Lincoln looked out of the house that once stood here, shrink back into a sleepy backwater before growing again, explode into a great city during depression, war, and cold war, deteriorate into a slum until the Flash, rise from the nuclear catastrophe….

Into a provincial capital for the UN, she admits to herself. Not that she blames her predecessors, and she hopes that the two who are still living don’t blame her.

She thinks, I am looking forward to retirement. It’s been a long time since she was a dirty-faced kid living in a mobile home on a dirt road in the mountains of Idaho, next to the log house it took her father six years to finish—not unusual for a man who worked part time and drank full time. It’s been a long time since she was a white trash student at a third-rate university, and even since her upset victory to become Idaho Attorney General….

All right, President Grandma, let’s not write our memoirs just yet. She’s only ten months from retirement, anyway. Wonder if XV will even cover the election? There’s no longer much at stake in being the President of the United States. The Republicans are running a Hawaiian nonentity, the guy Hardshaw picked for Commerce; the Democrats are running yet another governor of New York, this time the first black woman; and the United Left is running TBA—a slate of electors who will pick a President if enough of them win.

Back to work, Brittany Lynn, now. She remembers how her father used to say “now”—the word implied an oncoming spanking.

That association, at last, draws her attention back to the job. Liu, the UN’s Ambassador to the U.S., also likes to start off on a scare note. This time it was a threat that there was sentiment in the General Assembly to further disarm the independent national forces, down to a ten-percent-of-UN level. She knew that wasn’t what they were after, but when it sprang it was almost as bad.

They want NOAA, NASA, the Department of Energy, the scientific branches of EPA… the list goes on and on. All the usual reasons—better coordination and more equitable sharing of global resources—and all the usual promises about all the information remaining equally accessible and all the employees receiving just the same pay and benefits. Nothing to complain about there….