John Barnes - Mother of Storms

“So I’ve signed on with the Natural Ways Reclamation Project and I’ll be going down to Tehuantepec in Oaxaca State for a few months, to work on spreading correct values and on learning them from people who haven’t been polluted so much by centric and linear thinking. It was really fun and I guess I should thank you, except that the fun could have led me to act against my values, so instead I’ll just say I’ll miss you, because I think you’ll like that and it’s true.”

As she’s saying the last sentence, there’s a distinct force in the compartment, pushing Jesse back into his seat cushions and making Naomi lean forward. Ziplines are so quiet and vibrationless that you only really notice motion when you’re stopping or starting.

As she finishes, she stands up—almost losing her balance for a moment—and says, “And I’ve asked to be on the AIDS-ARTS-SPM patientassistance shift instead of the tutoring shift this time, so we won’t be working next to each other. Gwendy and Sibby and Foxglove are going by our place—I gave them a key—to get me moved out while we’re gone, so we don’t have to see each other after this, which I know would be painful for both of us. Not that pain to me matters, but it would be painful for you and I shouldn’t be selfish.” There are tears all over her face now and what she really looks like, to Jesse, is someone in an old flat movie who has been tortured into confessing to something she didn’t do. Then she leans forward and kisses his cheek, getting her tears on his face, and at that moment the car comes to a stop, the door opens into the exit passage, and she’s gone.

Jesse’s first thought is that she must have rehearsed the speech to know exactly how long it would take, so that she could get the door timed like that. That’s Naomi, always thorough….

He takes a long, deep breath, and suddenly realizes he has no desire at all to help barrio kids with their arithmetic today. He puts his thumb on the readerplate and says aloud, “This compartment back to Tucson.”

“That will be two dollars and five cents for a trip of three hundred fifty kilometers or two hundred eighteen miles,” the car replies. “A single person riding in a double compartment incurs a surcharge of fifty-five cents because of the wasted space and resources. You may cancel this order and move to a single compartment for a refund at any time until the car begins to move. Thank you and have a pleasant journey.”

The door slides closed. Jesse leans forward to press his face against the seat Naomi just vacated. There are two long strands of her hair there, and he runs his fingers over them; she never wore scent, but the seat is warm from her presence on it, and he imagines he can smell her on it.

He stays there as the car begins to move, its acceleration shoving his face against the seat cushions.

When she gets upset, the Deeper-speak gets pretty thick, but he got enough of it to understand, anyway, that although she is dumping him, it’s because she loves him too much, but doesn’t think he’ll fit with her ideals.

He can fix this. When he gets back to Tucson—better not go home just yet or he’ll have to deal with her friends—he will get himself educated, active, and involved. In a few months with some effort he’s quite sure he can be one of the biggest activists at the U of the Az. He knows he’s bright, articulate, and hardworking; he just has to put those resources to work in the right direction. By the time she’s back from Tehuantepec, he can be a totally different person, if that’s what she wants. It might cost him some time (but he can drop some classes), and some money (but he can live on the line a while), but what else can he do?

He leans back and lets Naomi’s hair lie on his thigh, so he can look at it. He thinks about her in the desert, and he remembers her saying that he gave her overpowering orgasms… and quite unbidden, the pictures of him comforting her like a child, and of her big breasts shaking while she cried, come to him as well. Before he knows it, he’s so horny that he’s squeezing his penis through his jeans, masturbating right here in the compartment, the way dirty old men supposedly do, and he doesn’t give a crap because he just can’t think straight until this gets relieved.

It does in a moment, a brutal heave as if he were vomiting from his testicles. He sees the strand of her hair lying on his leg. The compartment air conditioning must be acting up, because it seems terribly cold in here, and somehow that sharpens the smell of his semen and the loneliness of the little space. He presses his head to the cushion where her beautiful butt was, just minutes ago, but it’s cold now.

He has never felt so in love.

After a while, though, the semen drying in his underwear is proving to be a fairly effective glue, the seat pressed against his face is less than comfortable, his eyes are stinging from his tears, and he just plain doesn’t think he can keep this up much longer. There really isn’t anything to do here, during the forty minutes back to Tucson.

He gets out his lunch and eats early—it’s packed with all sorts of blodgy, gooey, grainy stuff that he doesn’t like much, most of it to be given away to little Mexican kids who will try a bite or two and then politely toss it when he’s not looking. This time he eats it all himself, which is probably a mistake. That kills about ten minutes. He uses one of the wet napkins to wash his face, tries not to notice that he’s feeling better (except in his stomach), and seriously thinks about this plan to become the leading activist on campus.

Heck, if it doesn’t get Naomi back, there’s a couple of her friends who look like they’d be fun. There seem to be organizations dedicated to every possible course of action about the methane release (except maybe one to demand more methane). Once there’s an official report out of NOAA or UNESCO, the one or two campus organizations whose viewpoints are still relevant are going to grow like mushrooms.

So if he joins the right one now….

He chews himself out for a moment or two. He tries not to notice that in his self-criticism he is imitating Naomi. Jesse just doesn’t have the knack for it; he has never managed to dislike himself as much as Naomi dislikes herself. But he should be joining an organization because he believes in it and wants to work for it, out of a selfless love for….

Oh, well, anyway, he will want to work for an organization that is on the right track, he knows he doesn’t want to work for one that isn’t, and since he has a reasonable way of finding out which is which, he should use it. Maybe Di can tell him something that will help.

He unrolls a mirror from his wallet, sticks it to the wall, and, using the remaining wet napkins and his comb, cleans up enough to be reasonably sure that he won’t look obviously upset or worked up, because unfortunately Di is just the kind of dumb, affectionate big brother to get upset about what Jesse is feeling, rather than sticking to the issue of what Jesse would like to know. Then he takes his phone from his belt, slaps the video pickup onto the wall facing him, and calls.

He puts it on a priority just high enough so that the call will reach Di at work, as long as Di hasn’t pressed the Urgent Only button. It will interrupt him at routine tasks but not in the middle of a meeting or anything; it will go over whichever lines and services are instantaneously cheaper in the complex dance of competing software, so that the signal is actually scattering over the Earth’s surface in little packets of a few milliseconds each. Jesse thinks about none of these things, but they happen anyway.

Randy Householder doesn’t even trust people he admires. He figures it takes somebody big to have kept the investigation of Kimbie Dee’s death from getting anywhere. Violent-felony-for-forced-extraction is so ferociously prosecuted under the Diem Act that most organized crime won’t touch distributing those wedges—they even turn it in when they find it. So whoever’s behind it swings a lot of weight.