John Barnes - Mother of Storms

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.