John Barnes - Mother of Storms

Carla speaks through Mary Ann’s voice; the slight flat Midwestern drawl of the dead scientist feels, in Mary Ann’s mouth, like a hard, squashed little egg. “I can tell you who killed your brother, and why, if you’d like to know. It’s going to come out anyway—I’ve given the FBI the data—but I thought you might want to know ahead of time.”

“Yeah, I’d like to.” Jesse’s eyes are all but expressionless; from within her body, Mary Ann wants to reach out and hold his hand.

A last gust of rain spatters down over them, and Carla adds, “Louie says sorry about that—he’s bombing the clouds above with a lot of frozen nitrogen, and every so often he can’t avoid having a little shower come your way. But he’ll have the sky clear and blue by the time you get up there.”

“That’s okay,” Jesse says. “Tell me about who killed Di.”

Carla’s voice has a strange tone of contempt to it. “You could call it a procedural error. Ever hear the phrase ‘Use it or lose it’? Well, the Siberian government was just as plugged in as anyone else, and they were having him followed exactly because it had become clear he was important. Naturally that meant they tracked who he talked to most, officially, and that was me and Diem.

“So it occurred to somebody there that since he was a vital resource, and sometimes if you can’t keep a resource yourself the best thing you can do is to deny it to others—like a bridge in wartime—well, then, there needed to be a contingency plan for getting rid of him. And being the military types they are, they put it into one of their high-level-top-secret-rapid-deployment-ready-to-go-yes-sir files.”

It’s strange that Carla’s style of humor remains, but it doesn’t always stay in the places in the conversation that it probably once did. Or perhaps Carla feels she can joke because after all she’s describing the same thing that led to her own murder. Mary Ann wonders about that for only a moment before Carla sends her a burst of instant understanding—that she never did have much in the way of people skills, and she was always too clever with words for her own good.

“Anyway, the trouble was that it was in that kind of a military options package. Military guys are always afraid that if command and control get disrupted, they won’t be able to get anyone to carry out plans, so quite often they build in a provision that, under specified circumstances, will activate a plan if communication is lost.”

“But… you don’t mean they just automatically set it to… well, to go off if they couldn’t get each other on the phone?”

“Not exactly. There was a sliding scale of relative severity of action, and at each level more dangerous policies were authorized. After Abdulkashim was knocked out, his successors didn’t bother to learn what was on the scale—they just understood it as up, up, and up. And being fairly typical of people in over their heads, whenever they didn’t know what to do, they escalated. The real mystery is this—I can’t find any evidence anyone gave the order. Something set them off, but I don’t know what it was. Diem was killed first, and the other teams were set to go if their datarodents detected Diem’s death. So that’s how Di and I died. But there’s no evidence that either the Siberians watching Diem got an order to kill him, or that they lost touch with their main base. The thing that started it all rolling is just… gone.”

Jesse walks beside her for a long time, head down, hands in pockets. The sky is getting lighter, and the clouds are farther above them; in the clear white light, his color seems washed out, and even the bright reds and deep blues of the stones he keeps kicking out of his way seem more pale and washed out.

“So, anyway, something or other happened to put it in motion, the bureaucracy just kind of crunched, and the Siberian agents came and murdered my brother?”

“That’s just about it exactly. Same reason they killed me.” Carla uses Mary Ann’s voice to sigh; Mary Ann can feel that it’s only partly sincere, and receives, for that feeling, a warning from Carla not to share that perception with Jesse. “Jesse, it was a terrible thing, and we’re going to deal with it. The whole Siberian spy system in the United States and Europe is going to be rolled up and caught, and the new revolutionary government there is going to catch and execute everyone remotely connected with this. And of course it won’t bring Di back or help Lori or your nephews get over it. Any message for them, by the way? I’ve located them at a shelter in Grand Island, Nebraska, up on high ground—they’re safe and comfortable and I should have a phone link there soon.”

“I guess you can tell them that I love them and I’ll come and see them as soon as I can,” Jesse says.

“I thought you were entitled to know. I’ll keep Mary Ann shut off for another half hour or so, but after that, as we near Monte Alban, we’ll have to plug back into the net.”

“What’s going to happen there?” Jesse asks suddenly. “And why have you taken such an interest in us? I mean, we aren’t the only people out there you could talk to, and you could just talk to everyone directly. What’s going on?”

Carla chuckles dryly. “Louie and I are new at this. Think of this as burning a bush to get your attention.”

And then Mary Ann is alone in her body. She reaches to take Jesse’s hand, and stumbles a little. Instead, her arm goes around his waist, and his comes around her shoulders to steady her. He looks down into her eyes and sees that she’s just Mary Ann, no one else in there, and kisses her forehead as gently as she imagines him kissing his nephews.

The warm wind blows around them, and it still smells different; she lifts her lips to kiss his mouth, and the kiss goes on for a long time. As they break apart, her eyes open to see patches of blue sky blowing in over the mountain, and a shaft of wet, runny yellow sunlight stabbing down into the white buildings and wide squares of Oaxaca below.

She also notices that the vanguard to the crowd has come around the corner and is cheering wildly. She turns and waves—not like a celebrity, she hopes, but just as if they were all her friends from high school—and when she turns to take Jesse’s hand, she’s got a big, completely un-Hollywood grin, which she can feel but is not seeing in her mind’s eye. They walk a little faster, not to lose the crowd, but because it’s getting close, and whatever it is that will happen on the mountain, they now trust in Louie and Carla enough to want it to happen.

Brittany Lynn Hardshaw has had several very productive hours, and she’s now good and tired, but whatever this thing at Monte Alban might be, she will want to know about it. They haven’t been able to raise Mary Ann Waterhouse via the net—Carla has told them that Mary Ann needs a little privacy, and then that after that Louie and Carla will need her full time.

The closest thing to a big story in the last few hours has been that they’ve been able to make contact with a lot of the UN agencies, here and there around the planet, and that although the central authority is gone, most of them seem to be content to keep functioning anyway; several of them are getting help and advice from Carla and Louie, and the mood in the places that can be contacted, anyway, seems upbeat. It’s not so much that they expect things to come back together or to “get back to normal,” but that there seems to be a growing sense in the world that life is going to go on, and once people are convinced of that, they have a way of seeing that it does.

There’s a ping in the intercom, and Hardshaw picks it up. It’s one of those nice White House kids that she brought along; unfortunately, the fact that they are now the White House staff for all practical purposes means that they’re already acquiring the characteristic arrogance and irreverence. She has no doubt that within a few days they’ll be offending Congress like professionals. “Ten minutes till we start getting signal from Monte Alban,” the young woman says, ticking off from a notepad. “And I’ve got something that’ll surprise you—a request for an interview and comments from Berlina Jameson, that reporter who puts together Sniffing. She says it doesn’t need to take long and she knows you’re busy, but she’s got to get tape in the can soon and she’d like to have comments from you directly—the FBI and Attorney General have already given her short statements.”