John Barnes - Mother of Storms

Randy figures the only way the man he is looking for will get caught is if someone with even more power—someone incorruptible—is after him, and any such investigation would have to stay secret, and out of usual channels. Not that it doesn’t occur to Randy that he might be the only person who is really looking anymore.

But if the secret investigation is being done by anyone, it will have to be connected to someone who is powerful, incorruptible, and passionately involved in the fight to stamp out murderpom XV—which can only be Harris Diem himself.

So Randy has datarodents constantly searching and replicating, looking for any connection to Diem. One of them knows Di Callare is an occasional back channel to Diem, and—having nothing better to do—decides to hitchhike along on one of Jesse’s packets. It delays the ringing of Di’s phone by almost three milliseconds, but it also locates a hitherto unsuspected back-channel node between the White House and the science agencies, a node that has a lot of old Harris Diem code hanging around in it. Not the most likely place, but what Randy is looking for won’t be in any likely place.

The datarodent looks around, decides this is good hunting, and dispatches packets to go find some of Randy’s other datarodents and have them send copies here. It doesn’t bother Randy about it, yet. If anything interesting comes through, it will.

At NOAA, Di Callare is sitting in his office with his feet up on the desk, looking at a chart that keeps knotting and untangling itself as he talks to the computer. What he’s trying to do is to put together a set of tasks to parcel out to his team.

Peter is a nice guy, and he has the best gut feel of anyone on the team for weather, but he’s a born plodder, one of those guys who’s afraid to draw even the most obvious conclusions. Talley has a lot of fire and imagination, and she’s often very innovative, but she’ll sometimes go out farther on a limb than she should and she has no political sense at all. Besides, because she’s exceptionally bright and witty, she makes Lori just a little jealous, and if Di works too closely with Talley for a few weeks, so that she’s in his conversation all the time, it makes a certain amount of trouble at home.

On the other hand, if he pairs her up with anyone else, she tends to drive them crazy. No one but Di seems able to say no to her; it’s undoubtedly because she’s beautiful, but Di doesn’t see why that should make her right all the time.

Mohammed and Wo Ping are mathematicians first and foremost, and they like working together. Normally that makes job assignments for them easy, but when they work together they also tend to throw away wilder speculations before reporting to anyone else… and he needs wild speculations just now. Maybe he can put Gretch, the summer intern, with them. Her math is lousy, so they won’t like her, but she’s got intuition nearly as good as Peter’s, and she doesn’t have enough experience to dismiss any idea as “too wild.”

It’s really a great team. He spent a long time getting them all. He just wishes he didn’t have such an impossibly complex task for them, but that wasn’t anything he, or Henry Pauliss, had any choice about. Hell, Harris Diem and President Hardshaw had no choice either.

The message that says “Ring Di Callare’s phone if it’s not marked ‘Urgent Only’” bounces into Washington in four pieces, coming in from two satellites and two fibrop land links, merges at a substation six blocks from his office, slips into an open slot in the link to the White House—holds still there for three milliseconds as a datarodent disentangles from it and looks around—and enters the memory register of Di’s phone, which is underneath a printed statistical summary of the outcomes of a billion runs of the NOAA main model.

The phone rings, he reaches for it, and phone and printout alike go into the wastebasket. He pulls the wastebasket over to fish out the phone, and says, “On hold with current project, please. Please pick up the call for me and put it up on screen and speakers.”

His kid brother’s face pops up on the screen.

“Jesse! What’s up?”

“Oh, this and that. Uh, you have maybe ten minutes or so? It’s not super-important.”

“Sure, I can use a break just at the moment.”

Jesse gives him a little half smile, one that Di recognizes because Mom used to do it too, and then says, “I’m not asking you to tell me anything you’re not supposed to, or anything off the record, but I have an awful lot of friends who are wondering whether this methane thing is a big deal or not, and I kind of promised I’d ask, just in case there was something you could say that wasn’t officially on the news yet….”

If Jesse is anything like he was at the same age, the awful lot of friends is probably one and probably female. “Well,” Di says, “it happens there’s a bit more that I can say than there was last time. It’s going out on public channels too, but it will probably disappear in the background noise of all the different outfits that are also speculating, plus probably what two astrologers, three Baptist ministers, and the Vegetarian League have to say. But we do have guesses and the news isn’t good.”

“The methane is going to saturate the air and back up all the cow farts worldwide?”

“We’ve pretty much discarded that hypothesis. No, we’re looking at five possible kinds of bad news. For sure it’s going to give us the hottest summer on record in the Northern Hemisphere, and it doesn’t even remotely look like it’ll be gone before it gives us the hottest summer on record in the Southern Hemisphere. So the things we’re investigating are all based on that. One, the air will warm up by enough to make it hold a lot more water, and that water won’t come from all the possible sources evenly. Might mean some major regional droughts—or extra-heavy rainfalls in other places.

“Two, several years of extra-warm weather will accelerate the forest migration already in process, so the forests have to migrate north, then move back south, then head north again. And since a forest can only move a mile a decade by trees dying on the south side and seeds sprouting on the north—what really happens is that you get a smaller forest surrounded by two strips of extremely abnormal scrub. All kinds of ecological echoes from that.”

“Ecological echoes?” Jesse is looking at him intently, as if taking notes.

“Changes that cause changes that cause changes. The way the huge forest fire in 1910 in the Northwest altered forest ecologies in identifiable ways for more than a century afterward, even though almost none of the individual organisms lived that long.

“Three, extra heat is extra energy, and one place atmospheric heat goes is into hurricanes, especially when you consider the interaction with surface water. Bigger hurricanes, more hurricanes, hurricanes where there’ve never been hurricanes… we have a team looking at that.

“Four, maybe the extra heat melts a lot of snow fields early this spring and prevents their forming later in the fall, so the Earth’s albedo drops and you get a feedback effect, making the warming keep right on increasing out to the point where there’s no snow or ice left except on the Himalayas and the Andes. You know about albedo?”

“Shininess. How much sunlight gets reflected back into space and how much stays here to turn into heat. Introduction to Astronomy and Planetary Science, Astro 1103, I got a Significant Achievement.”

“Attaboy. Family tradition; I was a C-plus kind of guy myself in undergrad.”

“How’d you end up with a doctorate?”

“I got married and stopped spending so much time chasing tail. Okay, fifth, we get extra heat at the pole, so the air mass there doesn’t sink as it normally would, and therefore it doesn’t flow down into the middle latitudes. You get what’s basically a global inversion all summer long; the wind stops blowing, and storms stop forming and moving west to east. Global drought, not to mention that air pollution builds up over the cities like you wouldn’t believe. Then come winter you’ve got the interiors of North America and Eurasia dried out from drought, and the polar air mass finally breaks through. Big old windstorms hit those dried-out areas and you get a hemispheric dustbowl—followed by one or more things from options 1 to 4 the next year.”