John Barnes - Mother of Storms

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….