John Barnes - Mother of Storms

She’s amazed at the wounded feeling that comes to her from Carla at that. I hope we haven’t made you feel that way. We like you a lot, Mary Ann, and we know a lot about you, you know—we’ve looked at every bit of the record, including all the transcripts that Passionet kept on you. No one has ever known you better, and you were our choice for this because we preferred to work with you.

Mary Ann sits down on one of the blocks of stone, hugging herself. The water from the cool stone is soaking through her jeans, but she’s already so wet that it doesn’t matter much. It’s not a matter of feeling used, she realizes, but a matter of feeling herself vanish into something much bigger than merely a crowd. No matter how much by choice, hers and others’, she is standing right here, and everything flows out from this moment—

She feels Carla laughing gently, and Louie joining in. There’s empathy in it, because, she suddenly realizes, certainly neither of them would have chosen to be what they have become… and a sense of comedy rooted in the fact that no, it’s not true at all that it all depends upon her—if this doesn’t work out, there are many, many more experiments to try, so there is much to be gained but little to lose, except that both of them feel somehow that it might be better drama, a better story, if it happens today, on the day that—

My god. Clem’s eye will breach in a matter of—minutes. The superhurricanes are beginning to succumb to the ice Frisbees. So that’s what they’re here for? To celebrate?

Partly, Louie admits. Seems like people might enjoy having that announced. But also because this is a good setting, we like and trust you, and so it seemed like the time and place to do this.

The crowd outside by now has reached the point where the gates and pathways into the ruined city are clogging, so that there are great pileups of people waiting on the rain-wet green slopes, and then a clot at each entryway, and finally a relatively open, swift-moving flow after the gate.

“Why are they all in white?” Mary Ann asks suddenly.

They’re not. If you look around you’ll see the occasional suit and now and then a dress in bright colors. But for most of them, white is their best clothes, what you wear when something special happens—and so they found a way to change into their best clothes before they came up here. They are doing all of us considerable honor, Carla explains.

Mary Ann had understood that much, but it hadn’t been what she meant. The question was why this should be anything to honor. She didn’t necessarily see any reason why these people should feel happy or even interested in the chaos that had been made by people like her. Without the squabblings of power and the fussings of the media—and for that matter without the whole silly business of making things matter by making them happen to a woman with red hair, taut butt, and huge teats—wouldn’t they be better off?

The clathrates were always down there waiting to be unlocked—they have done it in the past and they will do it again. Carla’s voice is infinitely patient, but then given that Carla may very well be holding thousands of humanyears of conversation with Louie between each word she speaks to Mary Ann, undoubtedly she can afford to be patient. As for the rest… people make too much of that. They find you important because you are on XV, and they find XV important because it’s interesting and something they have to go into the big town to try—the idea of having it in their homes, like los norteamericanos, is still strange to them. But none of that means they think they themselves are a faceless mass, and none of it means that they see themselves only in the light of the media from the wealthy nations.

Mary Ann sits and thinks, her arms clutching hard at the long calves that she thinks probably are what got her here. It’s true, of course, that like so many others, she always assumed that what people saw of themselves was how they thought of themselves… but then the thought comes to her, again and again, now that Carla has suggested it, that perhaps the image they had of themselves is the kind of thing that mattered, not to the people who swing the picks and wait the tables, but to the people sitting at the tables watching them do it. And if that should be the case, then… maybe people like Mary Ann, or no, dammit, let’s keep a little dignity and say people like Synthi Venture, have had a slightly exaggerated notion of their own importance for a long time?

She looks up into the now-blue sky and sees how the surrounding valleys are bathed in sunlight, but also that Louie is holding the clouds all around back by main force, so that on the horizon in all directions there is a long, low blue streak like an inky smear that someone has put along the horizon of a painter’s landscape. The low sun is warming everything rapidly, and sunlight dances on the water coating the ancient stones.

She laughs. Though water has run off these stones many times before, now that it’s doing it in front of her, and people everywhere are seeing it through her eyes, it means something—it’s the way that everyone will remember it forever. It’s too much like what her old Uncle Jack, actually her father’s uncle, used to say—“That goddam media makes too big a deal out of things.”

But surely there are such things as big deals? Just because there were eight billion people on the planet—down from nine and a half billion six months ago—and on any given night, what was for their individual dinners mattered more to them than dynasties, economies, and all of religion and art… that didn’t mean those things went away, and after all, those things also, partly, determined what was going to be for dinner or if there would be a dinner at all.

She sits up here and thinks to herself, All that a billion people will get of this moment is what they get through me, and most of them will then take what they get through me and plug it into themselves. But all I will get is what I see, plus of course… my own feelings and experiences, which all of them get. They will eventually get up from the XV and think about things their fathers said fifty years ago, or smell the sauce of something cooking, or turn back to shoring up the sandbag walls of their shelters, but I will see and perceive less than anyone else here; I’m the only person here who will have only the media experience and nothing else.

I am the least qualified person present.

She hears Carla and Louie laughing merrily in her head—and she finds herself joining them. It’s a sudden, strange thought that two beings who for practical purposes can live a million years in a day, and who both have heard and laughed at every possible joke in every language, can still be surprised by a perception and laugh at it. Well, Carla says, maybe the best thing to do is to get the show underway—Louie tells me that it’s getting to be more and more work to keep the hole in the sky open. And no matter how late we start, there will still be people filing in.

Mary Ann grins and says aloud, “Then you’ve worked in theatre, too.”

She is rewarded for the second time with making the gods laugh. Then Carla says, Can you let me drive now? and Mary Ann turns over control. She finds herself standing and walking to the platform edge; at once many thousands of heads turn toward her, and she hears the quiet purr of the holographic projectors moving into place. It is showtime.

She never feels herself begin to speak—just, suddenly, there she is.

The words themselves are not a speech—they resemble an induction of sorts, and the back of Mary Ann’s mind wonders for an instant if maybe Carla and Louie are going to hypnotize everyone. There’s a faint change in the tone of the holo projectors, and now we are into the story —