John Barnes - Mother of Storms

And in a subculture where there’s not supposed to be any flirting, they all end up being much more overt than the girls Jesse grew up with. They stand close, they pose, they smile and stare into his eyes. A guy could get used to it.

He has a lot more trouble talking to the guys, even though everyone’s being polite enough. They don’t follow sports, they don’t do outdoors stuff directly (and Jesse’s never gotten used to XV wilderness experiences—too much like being on a hike with five college professors who talk too much). Besides, most of them are so careful not to dominate their female friends that they won’t exactly say what they think about anything in the presence of a woman. There are a few safe subjects—everyone agrees that technology is responsible for ARTS because it allowed people to survive AIDS, and for SPM because it was the evolutionary pressure of antibiotics that forced syphilis into developing its symptom-suppressing behavior. Everyone agrees that Doug Llewellyn and Passionet are responsible for degrading mass consciousness beyond redemption. Everyone agrees that because nobody cares about the race, the United Left really does have a shot at the presidency this year, even if they don’t settle on a candidate by November.

He’s a little startled at how much attention he’s getting from Gwendy, but not so startled that he can’t figure out what to do about it. After a while they are talking together in a corner, and she’s sitting closer and closer. He finds that by talking about Tapachula and the TechsMex job, he seems to get even more attention.

It ends up being a very late night for him; it turns out that Naomi tends to tell her friends everything, and moreover Naomi is the conscience Gwendy wishes she had. So she’s severely torn between what Naomi told her about sex in the desert at night, and the fact that Naomi still doesn’t approve of the Lectrajeep. In that sense it’s not any easier than getting Naomi to fuck; but when, finally, at two A.M., Gwendy is naked in the Lectrajeep in the desert, Jesse gets a chance to rediscover two things he had all but forgotten—laughter and enthusiasm.

It’s too bad he had to impress her with the Tapachula thing; now he’ll have to go do it, right when she was making the idea of Tucson so much more appealing.

Carla Tynan has been up for much too long, and she’s getting strung out. MyBoat is pounding along, using up her antimatter charge faster than intended—though it would still take her clear around the world, if it came to that. The hull is vibrating noticeably with the extra speed she’s crowded on. But the autopilot can do all that; the only time Carla’s skills are called for is when she’s coming into a port, and since she’s still six hundred miles northwest of Nauru, that’s going to be a long while.

She’s feeling a little ashamed of having dropped and run when she realized the magnitude of effect that was happening; a real scientist, she chides herself, would have headed a little north and way east, over into the hurricane formation zone off of southern Mexico, to get a better look. But all the same, she’s a pleasure craft, not a research vessel, and no doubt the big powers are getting some serious gear into that area already. Most likely if she’d decided to head there, she’d have been intercepted by the American or the Mexican navy and interned.

Anyway, what she’s finding here is bad enough. Correct for the true atmospheric mix, and you get something between fifty and a hundred big hurricanes and god knows what else. She has the equivalent of six old-time Crays in her little ship (she can remember back when you had to rent time on such things, and nowadays some rich people use microsupers to run their houses), but that’s not nearly enough to run the full model at any reasonable speed.

Thus she’s forced to do what they never have to do at NOAA (or at NSA, which she doesn’t know about). She has to set up the parts of the model that she can do by graphics and instinct, plug in values from that, and then run the parts for which she doesn’t have a gut feel. It’s woefully imprecise, and if her gut feelings are wrong at any point she’s going to get nonsense, but it’s what’s available if she wants the answer before the storm hits.

Thus she sets up the screen to show her the new isotherms in the Pacific. An isotherm is an imaginary line along which the temperature is constant; most people have seen them on TV weather maps, usually as bands of color on “high today” or “low today” maps.

If you’re interested in hurricanes, there’s one isotherm you’ve got to know everything about. That’s the one for 27.5° Celsius.

A hurricane is a gigantic heat engine. That is, it converts a temperature difference into mechanical energy, like diesel, steam, gasoline, jet, rocket, or turbine engines. But whereas a diesel engine, for example, converts (some of) the heat of the burning fuel to motion of the piston by releasing (most of) the heat to the cooler environment, a hurricane works by moving heat from the hot ocean surface to the cold bottom of the stratosphere—converting some of it to wind along the way.

If the water is below 27.5° Celsius, more energy comes out of the wind to move the heat than the heat itself supplies, and the hurricane dies. But above 27.5°, a hurricane doesn’t just live… it grows. Each blast of cool air blowing over the warm, wet ocean grows warmer, rises, drops its load of evaporated water, and returns with a little more force each time.

So inside the isotherms marked “27.5°” on Carla’s map, hurricanes will grow; outside they will die. The areas inside the 27.5° isotherms are “hurricane formation zones.”

She looks at the map, and she’s never seen anything like it before. Normally there are two, or in a very warm summer three, hurricane formation zones in the Pacific—one by the Philippines, one lying under the bulge of Mexico, and late in a warm summer the South China Sea.

The models have been figuring that these zones would expand, and the formula they have used to expand them has been a very simple one—too simple as it turns out. No one checked to see if they might overlap, or if others might form. Not that she blames them—it’s not a particularly obvious point. And for that matter, if they did, maybe they didn’t believe what they saw—quite possibly they did check and then decided not to stick their necks out. Remembering her old outfit, Carla sighs. Not sticking your neck out was what it was all about.

Still, it’s there, and if they’d been more careful or more systematic, they’d have seen it.

There is now just one hurricane formation zone in the North Pacific—but it stretches from the Galapagos to Borneo, east-west, and the equator to Hokkaido, north-south. It’s 11,000 miles across and 3,500 miles wide.

Normally the force of a hurricane is determined by the temperature of the water it passes over (the warmer the more force) and by the length of time it spends passing over that 27.5° or warmer water (the longer, the more heat energy gets converted into wind). So the size of the hurricane formation zone limits the power of the hurricane, because it moves, on rare occasions as fast as 100 mph. Historically the hurricane formation zones have been 1,500 or 2,000 miles across at widest, so that few hurricanes stay in them for even twenty-four hours.

This new whole-ocean hurricane formation zone is vastly bigger than anything of the kind in recorded history.

She sits and watches as the computer does a set of quick and dirty runs, playing with random numbers to show a range of possibilities.

They all look frighteningly alike. She feels like just going to bed, hoping to get up in the morning and find it was all a bad dream.

Anyway, it won’t happen tonight. She can take MyBoat up to the surface and plug in, talk to Di or Louie or somebody.