John Barnes - Mother of Storms

This chain of thoughts is old, but it’s something else to think about instead of listening to Candice.

“Berlina, I don’t understand why I can’t get across to you that this is not nineteen-fucking-sixty-eight, and there is no point in pointing a camera or a microphone at the action when XV takes people there direct.” Candice blows a big cloud of smoke; Berlina once sneaked a look at her biochemtailored cigarette prescription and found it was a mix of tranquilizers and muscle relaxants with just enough CNS enabler to keep her from getting stupid while she relaxed. Maybe not enough.

Candice keeps nattering, so Berlina mentally tunes back in… “I don’t know where the hell you got this fixation from. You’re on for twenty minutes a day and the only reason I hire you, babe, is that the movie nuts would rather catch their news between movies. Suppose it’s more twentieth or something. Your job is not to cover the news, not to make the news, not to be there for the news. Your job, Berlina”—here Candice takes a huge drag on the cigarette, enough to knock over a rhino, and tousles her hair in a very twentieth kind of way, no surprise since she lived more than half her life in it—“and I mean your only job, is to look good in a sweater while you read the news. There is no such thing as a TV reporter anymore, Brenda Starr.”

Berlina has no idea who Brenda Starr is. Probably boomtalk and not a compliment. “Yeah,” she says. “So how about… hah. Listen, I just broke up with my s.o., and it was a registered relationship. I wasn’t going to use the required five days off without pay, but if I wanted to drive up to the North Slope—”

Candice shakes her head at her. “You know how much labor-law trouble it will be if you work on a recovery break?”

“I can put it together for myself, as a hobby. Then if you want to air it, fine. All I want is a station credential to show—and I’ve got that anyway, just by working here.”

Candice sighs. “You know we’re going to have to get a Kelly Girl or something in here to read for you for the week? Aw, hell.” She blows another cloud of medicated smoke. “Bet you have your own gear?”

“Yep.”

“Then go do it. I guess if I air it, the chances are pretty good you won’t turn me in.” She shakes all that hair around again—why in god’s name, Berlina thinks, do so many old women insist on having those mountains of starched hair with avalanches of curls down their back? “And good luck, kid. If TV reporting doesn’t work out, maybe you can be a Viking or a blacksmith or something else there’s no use for anymore.”

Berlina thanks her, hoping to hit just the tone that will kiss the old bitch where it’s good, without too obviously slurping it. She seems to have, because she gets two minutes of “when I was your age I was just as feisty,” the kind of story that business people who went somewhere pretty small love to tell about themselves.

Berlina doesn’t mind; it’s a payback of sorts. She manages to leave with a smile.

In the parking garage, she tosses her bag and coat into her little car, enters the keycode for getting rolling, pulls it out of the parking space and onto the painted blue stripe that marks the guide track, and flips it to automatic to take her home. She wishes she could afford a smarter car that could leave the track and park itself.

She leans back and smiles to herself again. Banff is a longish commute from Calgary, but it’s worth it every time she gets home, and at least now that she’s done her daily unparking ritual the car will get her the rest of the way home.

“Home” has been a pretty elastic concept in Berlina’s mind. She’s Afropean, to begin with; Alfred Jameson was a black American GI, identified by DNA records, who paid not to ever see her. Her mother was a German prostitute. Berlina’s earliest memories are all of a school for abandoned Afropean children, where she was called “Frances Jameson” by the sisters, and “nigger” by the mobs that gathered outside.

Things were already getting dicey in Europe for anyone half-breed, so she was only supposed to learn English and get shipped back to the States as soon as she was of age. She ran away at thirteen, out of the cold dark school and out of the cruelty of Bavaria, and lived free, cold, and dirty for a few years in Berlin.

At nineteen, she’d named herself after the city she loved, but it was a last gesture. Berlin as she knew it was gone, its streets full of troops from elsewhere, now that Europe was consolidated and “culturally edited,” to use their expression for it. She gave herself the name as she filled out a form on board a staticopter taking her to the USS George Bush, during the last frantic week of the Expulsion.

Before Parti Uno Euro won the election and rewrote the European constitution, Berlin had been a place full of anachronism, where nobody wanted to see anything new, the one thing that united all of the different artistic movements from the Protonihilists to the Prelectors. She’d gotten hooked on broadcast news when she was putting together a sampler mix for a dance performance group that played bits and pieces of old reportage over a drum machine and screamed whatever they were getting over XV into the mix.

When the Edict of 2022 expelled her and all the other Afropeans, most of them ended up in North America, a strange sort of coming home to her father’s country. She has bounced around a lot from job to job, forever being told what Candice has just told her.

She misses Berlin more than ever. She’s been in four American states and two Pacificanadian provinces—

The Ma, the Ny, the Wa,

The Bic, the Nid, the Pa,

Last the Az and now the Ab,

as she likes to chant it to herself. She figures she can’t go anywhere else because nowhere rhymes with Ab.

As the little car winds its way up the mountains to Banff, a furious spring snowstorm pours over the windshield and away behind her into the night. At least she doesn’t have to try to keep the car on the road herself. She flips over to XV, looking for a really neutral reporter and never finding one; for one awful instant her hand stops on Passionet and she is experiencing Synthi Venture. She finds herself snuggled in the rock-hard protective arm of Quaz, who is escorting Synthi these days, out in the howling blizzard of Point Barrow, preparatory to going inside, having wonderful sex in front of a fireplace, running back to Rock (with whom she is triangling) and having Rock explain meteorology to her.

The horrible thing is, she thinks as she switches to Extraponet, which has a reporter riding a UN overflight of the Arctic Ocean, nobody cares anymore that Synthi has read the script in advance; they want to know what’s going to happen next, they like Synthi describing experiences to herself before she has them.

The plane carrying the Extraponet reporter comes over a pressure ridge. A huge flare of gas reaches miles into the sky dead ahead. Deliberate roller-coaster effect, Berlina sneers. They must have known it was there and arranged to fly in low to surprise people.

The plane veers to the side, well short of the flare. The viewpoint reporter is in a forward bubble, and the pilot hasn’t told him much. As they circle the immense gas flare, the polar ice below a brilliant shimmer of gold, amber, and yellow, she gets the basic information she wanted—the flaring operation isn’t going to take care of the problem, and everyone knows it.

This XV reporter is usually on the environmental beat, to judge by his thoughts, and Berlina thankfully absorbs the basics—greenhouse gas, more of it than anyone would have thought possible, spring the worst time for it, White House and New York reports much too circumspect, so it’s worse than they’re saying….