John Barnes - Mother of Storms

An inspiration hits Hardshaw. “Is there a way for me to maintain this phone link to Ms. Jameson while she and I both experience it on XV?”

“Er, I’m sure there is—” she looks sideways, listens intently, nods a couple of times—“Yes there is, for sure. Instead of normal XV goggles we’ll have you wear stereovisors. We’ll blank most of the screen so you get the same effect as the goggles, but we’ll give each of you an inset screen of the other in one corner of your vision.”

Berlina Jameson looks startled, to say the least, and that’s what Hardshaw had hoped for. When you run into smart, tough reporters, the thing to do is to co-opt them, and this will do it. “Well, fellow passenger,” Hardshaw says—“and that’s off the record because there are enough old voters out there who would confuse that with ‘fellow traveler’—shall we get on the ride and see where history is taking us?”

“With you all the way, Ms. President.”

Attagirl , Hardshaw thinks, that’s what I was hoping for.

The first sight of Monte Alban, from the road, is not impressive until you realize what you are looking at. The mountain, and the road with it, slope up sharply into the visitor center, one of those ugly little block buildings that could just as easily be a highway patrol office, a maintenance building for a cemetery, or the conjugal-visit facility for a prison, anywhere on Earth.

What rises behind the visitor center looks like just more mountain; then you realize that it’s man-made, and not by any modern men… and then you see the bits of ancient walls and surfaces, and realize how much the whole site towers above you.

The road winds after the visitor center, and if you take the turn to the right you find yourself among the Zapotec tombs outside the city proper, and come into Monte Alban itself by the back way; Mary Ann remembers more of it than she thought she would, and she doesn’t need to check with Carla except to confirm that they should go in by the main way.

This means a left turn on the trail, and another long, surprising rise, followed by the startling entrance into a central courtyard. By now, there’s more blue than white in the sky—Louie must really be bombing those clouds—and plenty of bright, early evening sunset.

There are two logical locations there for any really major event—the Southern Pyramid, which towers over the whole site, and the Northern Platform, with its superb view of the whole site and of the surrounding area. Which? Mary Ann thinks.

Neither. Use Building J, in the middle, Carla responds at once. The holo facilities are better set up there, too.

You’re not going to run those horrible holo films of human sacrifices and priestly orgies and all that? Mary Ann asks, her esthetic sense offended. Surely you know that —

We just need the projectors to help the effect, Carla says. Really, we’re not human anymore, but we’re not as inhuman as that!

Mary Ann laughs, and realizes that she can hear a billion people laughing along through Carla, in the distant way you can hear a party at the other end of a hotel corridor. Of course they all know pretty much what Mary Ann knows, and they’re going to see the place through her eyes; she supposes this absolutely ruins Monte Alban for any future romance-oriented XV. Just one more fringe benefit….

Jesse, beside her, says, “I suppose we’ll have to talk about what we do while the crowd is coming in? i supposed to be a hundred thousand of them, and even if you figure you can get twenty thousand into the city and another ten thousand or so watching on the Southern Pyramid and Northern Platform each, most people won’t be close enough to see. And it’s still going to take quite a while for them all to get in; the sun will be almost down before everyone has somewhere to be.”

Carla speaks through Mary Ann. “Not to worry. I’ve got a few hundred police I’ve borrowed one way or another, and one battalion of the Mexican Army, to get the crowd into place—they’re all on earphone direct to me. It will move pretty fast. Just get up there, watch it all, and try to relax and wait. Louie and I will let you know when we’re ready to start.”

They have to be content with that. Building J is a sort of lumpy rock pile, not like any other pre-Columbian building anywhere in the hemisphere—it’s asymmetrical, and tunneled all through like a kid’s fort. The holo system they’ve put in here does its “adults only” late-night show on this building, decking it with visions of flowers and then giving the Euro and Japanese tourists a sadistic version in which young, plump girls, breasts and buttocks jiggling, dance naked up the stairs to be brought to orgasm with huge stone dildos, their throats then slit and their corpses, still impaled on the dildos, thrown down into the well. There is absolutely no basis in fact for it but it’s probably Monte Alban’s biggest moneymaker, and certainly most tourist guides say it’s what you mustn’t miss.

Now as Jesse and Mary Ann climb the long stairs, she has a stray vision of how they might have used her in such a video, displaying her expensive body, rebuilt as she is, her outsized breasts slapping up and down as she runs up the steps, her too-taut, too-small buttocks exposing her labia, and feels a little ill at it; she knows the vision is leaking through to the rest of the world (the Passionet staff, in the old days, would just have loved that) and that god knows how many men are getting their switches thrown by it.

Well, she’ll never have an audience like this again. She sends them a solid wave of nausea; now that technology is allowing us to feel what others feel, let’s give them the whole works, shall we?

They reach the main upper surface; anything farther than this will require using their hands to climb, and Carla tells them they can stop here.

When Jesse and Mary Ann look back, they see that the crowd is coming in great numbers. “Do we even know anyone’s name anymore?” she asks. “The first few days there were so many, and I felt—oh, I don’t know, at one with them. Of course I know it was an illusion and I didn’t know anyone at all well… but I used to feel like most of these people were individuals, and like I had moved in among them, and now here I am seeing them as a big faceless Third World mass again.”

Jesse glances at her sideways. “I was thinking I’d really like to find Tomás. It would be fun to see this with him, and I’m not really any use to you.”

Mary Ann is about to say something when Carla’s voice comes through. “Sure, go ahead—we can find you afterward.”

Jesse kisses her, very nicely but very quickly, and he goes down the steps to fade into the great swirl of white shirts and white dresses made gray with rain. Mary Ann has a long moment of feeling very alone, and a deep wish to go down and do the same thing he’s doing; she looks up and away and sees that there are long lines of people snaking up the side of the Southern Pyramid, filling in the surface in great blocks, the blocks then turning lighter as more white shirts and white dresses join. “It will be all white soon,” she says.

No, each head and face forms a dark dot in it, see? And the dots move and change against each other, and you can see that individuals walk differently. They don’t completely disappear into a faceless mass unless you make the effort to see them that way, Carla’s voice says, in Mary Ann’s head.

Mary Ann sighs. She’s feeling very strongly that all she is here is an expensive piece of broadcasting equipment, and although for once it’s not her breasts but her rebuilt skull that they want, it comes down to the same thing.