John Barnes - Mother of Storms

“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.