John Barnes - Mother of Storms

Louie Tynan is busy for the first time in months, and he doesn’t know whether to be happy or not. They’ve put up four polar-orbit satellites, which rise and set relative to his own equatorial-orbit space station at least seven or eight times per day. Every time one does, at a precisely calculated instant, the satellite sends a laser pulse that passes through the Earth’s atmosphere, at varying altitudes, and is then received for spectrographic analysis on the station. The thirty or so lasers that send each pulse have precisely known wavelengths and power; if the light were only passing through a vacuum, you could figure out how much power would arrive at what wavelength, down to parts in ten billion.

But although air is transparent, it’s not perfectly transparent; it’s subject to minor variations (look down a hot road on a summer day), and not all the variations are neutral with respect to wavelength (consider a sunset).

So instead of the predicted set of exactly known values for power at each wavelength, the laser light coming into Louie Tynan’s “camera,” as he thinks of the gadget, is altered by the air it passes through, and the exact way in which it alters tells them quite a bit about methane.

Louie’s job, all day, has been to power up a remote manipulator, a little tractor with an arm that crawls around the outside of the station on tracks, take the spectrographic camera out of storage, put it in the airlock, use the remote manipulator to put it in place and hook it up… and sit back and pretend to know what he was doing, besides making sure that some little lights stayed green through the first twenty tries.

Right now Louie is taking a break in the observation bubble. They don’t really need a man to do these observations at all—they could do the whole thing on robotics—but as long as they have a crewed space station, and one crusty old fart on it who doesn’t want to come down, might as well get some work out of him. It may not be the most productive way to do the thing, or even the most productive use of the astronaut, but this way NASA PR guys can make noises in public about quick responses and being able to get on top of a breaking situation.

And because they’re doing that, he also has to print out graphs derived from the results every so often, and then make a set of notes about the graphs and read his results back to ground control. This bit is pure showboating; the sad fact is that in the first place, not being a meterologist, he doesn’t have any more understanding of what the graphs mean than what they told him in a three-hour tutorial the week before, and anyway, the people who do know what they mean are getting copied on all the data instantly on the ground. The only purpose is for the taxpayers on the open channel to hear their most expensive single employee earning his keep.

Some bored grad student on an internship has been set up down there to ask him questions that everyone already knows the answers to, so that he can appear to be expressing an opinion and judging the situation. Louie’s job is essentially a several-day-long publicity stunt.

On the other hand, it’s more news than crewed space exploration has gotten in months. He thinks of Congressperson Henry Loamer, UL-LA, who has occasionally referred to the space station as the “orbiting retirement home” and to Louie himself as “our single most expensive Federal employee, who is doing just what Federal employees usually do, sitting on his butt and soaking up tax money.” It will be weeks before old Henry realizes all this could be done cheaper and better by robot, and meanwhile he’s shut up.

Besides, Louie’s got to admit that this has been good for him. Having to do visuals every few hours, sitting in front of a camera and reading off the report, has made him shower, shave, all that easy-to-overlook stuff. He may not be the height of elegance, but at least he’s freshly showered and wearing a clean coverall, and he has more than one clean coverall.

He takes another bite of the sushi—funny thing, the Japanese spent a fortune developing all sorts of amenities for their unit, which is sitting down there at the end of Truss Two empty and powered down. They sent up five crews for a few months each, and then got bored or something, leaving behind the tissue culture tanks that let you grow pieces of fish without having to grow the whole fish.

The stuff isn’t bad, and it’s at least variety from the usual sandwiches.

The Japanese gave up. The Chinese flew some missions into low orbit, and they still do. The Russians are long gone from space, and the French make three flights a year—they treat the Euromodule as sort of a hotel room, where their guys sleep between fixing robots, or on their way to and from their tiny moonbase while they assemble their ships here. Last time they didn’t even bother with that, just went straight from low Earth orbit to the moon.

And as for his own country… Louie is it, and he’s mostly here for publicity.

Yet the solar system is now crawling with humanity’s robots. Not counting all the replicators that were built there before they shut that experiment down, there are hundreds of little crawlers exploring the moon.

Louie just noticed the other day that one of the many relays on the station was handling traffic for the University of Wyoming Lunar Rover and the Ralston-Purina Checkerboard Lunar Orbiter. It turned out that the former was a senior engineering-school project and the latter a breakfast cereal promotion, where they claimed they’d buy you a square foot of the moon (a very safe promotion, because the UN has put all claims except those within one kilometer of a permanently crewed facility into abeyance) and send you a picture of it.

Where his crew of eight walked a hundred miles or so across the face of Mars, there is now a robot railway that drags a camera back and forth, toward the Martian North Pole and back, sending a continuous picture that a few million people on Earth display on the TVs that hang on their bedroom walls. Even Mars is already getting to be less popular than the view from the Jupiter Orbiter Feed, which Louie has, right now, in his sleeping quarters.

He looks down at the Earth below him. So far it doesn’t look any different. You can no more see an extinct species or a too-warm ocean than you can tell that there are no longer any dark-skinned people in Europe as it rolls away below him. And certainly sixty-five years or so of pictures from up this high have made the sight of Earth from space familiar….

Well, hell with it. He still likes the way the old planet looks. He holds up a squeeze bulb of Kirin—another great Japanese innovation—in a toast to her. She’s pretty battered around the edges, but he still likes to see her like this. It’s not his job to decide whether or not he’s too expensive to maintain up here. If they’re willing to send him, he’s willing to stay.

As he takes a sip of the beer, he thinks of Carla, and the notion that he is thinking of her just after looking at the battered old planet nearly sends the beer squirting out his nose. She’d love that comparison.

They haven’t talked in almost a month and it’s still forty minutes till the next observation. Moreover he happens to look decent, so he might as well take advantage of it. From where the terminator line is on the Earth, it’s about three o’clock in the afternoon in the western Pacific, and the weather is clear. Chances are MyBoat is surfaced and taking phone calls.

He shifts around to face the camera and screen and dials her number. It rings a couple of times and then she answers it on voice only, so his first thought is that she’s getting it over a Very Low Frequency receiver and the signal is going to be lousy—he was really looking forward to seeing her face—then she laughs. “Oh, it’s you, Louie. Let me get a towel on.”