John Barnes - Mother of Storms

There’s another ping. He hurries off to play scientist.

Berlina Jameson has been living on the line—what her grandparents would have called “on plastic,” back when you carried cards that could be stolen—now that she’s been fired for not turning back up at work, but she can still convince security at most places that she’s a reporter.

The Barrow Motel Two—a casket hotel that provides a public toilet and shower, a belongings locker, and a bed with lock-down cover—wants to bill her extra for parking, and at first she figures she’ll just pay it, but then she thinks about how long her line might have to stretch, and spends a pointless twenty minutes arguing with the clerical software. It puts her into a particularly foul mood, even after the good news of finding Di Callare this morning, so that when she finally gets into her little car, drives it onto the track, and sets it for the Duc, she’s all but weeping with frustration and self-pity. As the car picks up speed, she begins to fold the seats into “long drive” configuration—a bed with access to the little pocket refrigerator and the “squat pot”—and as she finishes, rather than get a nap or do any work, she just stretches out on the bed and cries until she stops.

Her net accounts show that absolutely no one has run any of her one-minute spots; her own home station hasn’t even been broadcasting them.

When it became clear that there wasn’t much recreation and practically no significant violence or sexual appeal up here, all the XV people left, except for a couple of the eggheaded ones who offer people the opportunity to experience being knowledgeable, witty, and deeply concerned… a peculiar taste that Berlina has never been able to fathom, but the NPXV audience seems to eat it up. She wonders, lying there idly with tears drying on her face, whether they’ll ever do combined events with the commercial channels, so that, say, Synthi Venture will find herself banging away with some guy who’s doing the Matthew Arnold routine about decaying civilization….

It makes her laugh, and suddenly, bitterly, she’s laughing at herself. Her, the next Edward R. Murrow? Why not the next Genghis Khan? It might be easier to conquer the world. Broadcast is dead, girl, except as a hobby. And even if broadcast were still alive, here she is crying… she can just imagine any of her heroes doing this! Murrow sobbing because he can’t get a clear moment of mike in the middle of an air raid… Cronkite in tears because NASA wouldn’t give them the right camera angles… Sam Donaldson holding his breath till he turns blue because Reagan won’t talk to him.

It helps to laugh.

She smears the tears out of her eyes with the heels of her hands. Well, what did she expect?

The car lurches, hard, which probably means it just collision-avoided a caribou or something. The animal’s timing was clearly off; most people figure that the animals wait to jump in front of cars until you either have an overfull coffee in hand, or are on the squat pot.

Most people think the world is out to get them, because they have all the evidence they need—they don’t get enough of what they want. But that doesn’t make it so.

She’s relaxed now, drying her eyes, thinking about all this. She’s got about another four days on the line before she hits the wall and can’t get more credit; fewer if it involves any more drives this long. She has a big story on tap, and perhaps Diogenes Callare will give her the last piece of the puzzle—she’s due to talk to him in an hour or so. If he does, she can scoop the majors with it; that won’t get her much—a week or two of very moderate fame and enough cash to keep her running a few months more—but other things can break. It’s a game against the clock, but what isn’t?

She gets her notes and thoughts in order for the interview. She just hopes that all the reporters who can afford jumplane haven’t gotten to Callare first, but she doubts it; every reporter except Haynes left Barrow last week, which is part of why she’s been lonely. Berlina really enjoyed the role of “cub reporter”—it made her feel like Jimmy Olsen. Oh, well, someday maybe some adoring cub will follow her around… she’s realizing, too, that a lot of the reporters enjoyed the attention they got from her.

There’s so much to get organized that she’s startled when the ping comes to remind her to call Diogenes Callare.

Much to her surprise, he seems friendly and relatively open. She knows he’s sticking close to what the press releases say, textually, but the man is a natural teacher, things come out as little micro-lectures, and with a bit of stitching together she can make it absolutely clear that the bland language of the press release is hiding a lot of important possibilities. “So it comes down to energy?” she asks once again, hoping he’ll repeat himself and give her a quote or two more.

She’s right, he does. “Well, look,” he says. “Energy is work, you had freshman physics, everyone does nowadays, right? And work is change. And we’re looking at huge changes here. Not so much if the additional heat the Earth is going to retain were all spread out evenly, of course, but that’s just the point. It’s a system where heat flows. Some of it’s going to pile up somewhere—and when it does, big things will happen.”

It’s a great quote, especially if she can jam it up against a few she has of various nonentities saying that any concern is premature.

She thanks Di—mentally congratulating herself again on getting to first names with him so quickly—and clicks off.

If Glinda Gray could look in from somewhere else, she would be patting herself on the back. She had told Klieg that this day, or the next, the media would catch on to the “purloined letter”—the realization that right out in plain sight, the Feds were admitting catastrophe was on the way.

Time to put it together. If she’s going to do this thing, she might as well do it. And there’s nothing wrong—financially scary, yes, but nothing wrong —with going independent. Ben Franklin, I. F. Stone, Tris Coffin… it can be done. She thinks about it for a moment… Berlina Jameson’s Methane Report … sounds like a natural gas newsletter. How Berlina Is Not Being Told the Truth … not the thing either; The Jameson Report is pompous… what she really wants to tell the potential reader is that she’s smelling something important, that she’s not being dismissed the way they dismiss nuts at government facilities, but brushed away from the single big question: What’s going to happen because of this? Why doesn’t anyone appear to be preparing for anything?

I Smell Gas?

Not exactly right either… what she’s reporting is… Sniffings.

It’s not dignified, it smells too much of the New Journalism, it has the gut feel of Geraldo Rivera and Sally Jessy, spiritual parents of XV—

She doesn’t care. Barely four days of credit left. Sniffings it is—and it’s no worse a title than Scuttlebytes. The title alone is odd enough that some people will access it; now all she has to do is be interesting enough to make them access it twice.

She grabs the autodictator and her notepad; time enough to clean up and set up a little later. Meanwhile, she needs to turn this into copy, real copy.

“This is Berlina Jameson, on the road from Barrow, Alaskan Free State, to Washington, the Duc, USA. For the past three weeks, I have been handled with the utmost courtesy by Alaskan and United Nations officials, by scientists from the USA, Pacificanada, Mexico, and Quebec, and by a wide variety of public relations people. Occasionally I have even been told a piece or two of the truth—a piece which was promptly denied or dismissed by other sources.