“You never unplug long enough to have that happen!” she says, and she sends him the image of the event—the moment each day when she plugs back in and finds that the other half (or really the other ninety-nine point many nines percent) of her consciousness has lived another few centuries and has a lot to tell her about it.
“Jeez. Never. Though come to think of it, it might be interesting to see if I can split myself between the moon and the processing modules on the
Constitution …
since both would keep building for the four months or so they’d be out of realtime contact … that would mean … sheesh. Remerging after something like ten million years, at the rate of expansion I’ve got planned.”
“I could probably write several hundred scientific papers within the next twenty-four hours without breathing hard, but …”
“Same here. In fact, don’t laugh at me, but I could do a couple of pretty good ones in comparative philology, history, maybe a few in literary criticism.”
She does laugh, but it sounds kind. “Interesting. I have some work in musicology I like, too. Louie, what’s happening to us? Are we turning into machines?”
“I’d say it’s more likely machines are turning into us.”
They talk for a long time afterward, about everything and anything, and rather than sever the link they leave a little backchannel running between them; it feels like the kind of telepathy old marrieds have, for each always has a quiet awareness of what the other is thinking. The two loners are not lonely anymore, and won’t be until Louie begins his long journey.
On July 6, Clem Two heads east for most of the day, occasionally angling a little to the south. Di’s best guess, confirmed by Carla, is that this is because the two hurricanes, mother and daughter, have outflow jets pointed at each other and are thus creating a high-pressure ridge that pushes them away from each other. President Hardshaw talks with about a dozen presidents, dictators, and chiefs of state in the possible pathway of the storm.
Berlina Jameson brings out a special edition of
Sniffings
about the approach of Clem Two. A majority of Americans polled are under the impression that since Clem Two is a “daughter” hurricane it is somehow tied to Clem, and must be smaller than Clem. She tries to get across the idea that once Clem Two’s eye was created by the motion of Clem’s outflow jet, there was no further relationship, and there is nothing to prevent Clem Two from going elsewhere or growing bigger than its parent. Berlina works longer on this
Sniffings
than on any other, and her work is pirated everywhere, especially in
Scuttlebytes,
but it doesn’t matter; people believe what they want to believe and when large percentages of them are plugged into XV, the tendency is increased; why believe anything that might lead you to unplug?
She calls Di Callare one last time, but he has no time to talk with her; all she gets out of the conversation is a sense of how much things are going to hell. The man sounds like he hasn’t been home in a week or asleep in days. She says she’s going to head to Mexico and then as far south as she can get, in hopes of getting better coverage of Clem Two’s impact on the coast; he tells her to avoid using roads too near either coast and to be careful when she hits the “drive yourself” zones.
Strangely enough, just as she’s checking out, the desk clerk hands her a piece of mail from the White House thanking her for her “role in alerting the public,” and enclosing a certificate for a “President’s award for journalism and citizenship.” She finds it a bit frightening that the President’s staff has nothing better to do, but she still pins the certificate to the ceiling of her car.
By July 7, Clem Two is angling a little to the north and is still obstinately headed east, in defiance of steering currents and the Earth’s rotation. Alerts are being issued in Mexico for all of Baja California Sur and for the mainland all the way from Los Mochis to Acapulco. Di realizes that Jesse is more than far enough south to be safe, and Tapachula is up high. Jesse should be fine if he doesn’t go down to Puerto Madero or try to run back to the States. Di calls him and talks to him about that briefly, discovers that Jesse is planning to stay put, along with his current girlfriend, and is merely a little worried about some former girlfriend—the one Lori called the political muffin?
It’s not easy for Di to keep track, he thinks with an envious grin after hanging up. But from Jesse’s explanation the girl is a bit farther to the north, and often has business on the coast—but since the Mexican Army is evacuating coastal towns as fast as they can, “that doesn’t seem like much to worry about—at worst she’ll have a few days in a refugee camp before someone Stateside wires money to her,” Di tells his brother.
Jesse nods. “Oh, I’m not worried a whole lot. Tomorrow would be the day she’d be going to Tehuantepec, and right now they haven’t decided to evacuate it, but Tehuantepec isn’t
right
on the coast—it’s like this place, up above—so I imagine she’ll be okay. Just a little normal worry about a friend is all.”
“I can understand that,” Di says. “Anyway, stay put—unless it does veer your way. If it really looks like it’s coming inshore in the Gulf of Tehuantepec, they’ll have less than twenty-four hours to get everyone evacuated. Don’t be on the last truck and don’t stay behind for heroics.”
“I do watch the news, big brother,” Jesse says. “I saw what happened to Oahu. My evacuation address will be on the Calle del Veinticinco Febrero in San Cristóbal de las Casas—if we have to go. The Army’s already assigned places for everyone. And the railhead for the zipline that will take us there is only thirty kilometers away—they didn’t quite finish last spring, but at least the railhead isn’t far away.”
There’s not much more to talk about; NOAA is going to have to provide assistance until Clem Two hits, but according to Carla as long as it hits well up the peninsula and moves west to east, as it looks like it’s going to do, the central spine of mountains ought to kill Clem Two, reducing it to mere thunderstorms. She has warned them that the exception to that is the isthmus; should Clem Two come ashore in the Gulf of Tehuantepec and then head north, the mountains may not be barrier enough to keep Clem Two from bursting out into the Caribbean—which will pour vastly more energy into the system.
With luck, it will be weeks yet before one of those monsters is loose in the Atlantic … but so far luck has not been with them.
On July 8, Clem Two stops dead and stands still for almost four hours, about 300 km west of the tip of Baja. Huge storm surges are pumped up the Gulf of California, and American authorities around the valley of the lower Colorado and the Imperial Valley give urgent orders to evacuate. There’s a riot when busloads of Mexicans—actually just being moved by the nearest available highway to the higher ground of Nogales, Sonora—cross the border at Mexicali. A rumor had spread among the Anglo and black citizenry that the busloads of refugees were to be given American passports and allowed to settle permanently.
The riot goes away because Rock gets on the scene for Passionet and millions of men find themselves thinking how stupid all this is; his disgust bleeds through every moment of the coverage. Surface O’Malley is with him, and she rapidly comes to see it his way (the script calls for her to adore him as an older and wiser man of the world on this trip). Rioters running home or using portables to catch themselves on XV are startled by the sensations of anger and nausea directed at them. Those who went home don’t return to the riot. Those who had portables quietly slink away.
FBI agents undercover within Passionet note all this and relay it upward; apparently XV can calm a population as well as inflame it. Millions of people seem to be disappointed by the failure of Global Riot Two to happen and take it out on Passionet by switching to other systems; the letter of commendation from President Hardshaw, and the granting of a brief personal interview that brings back viewers, arrive just in time to save Surface and Rock from getting fired.
Very, very slowly, but with gathering speed as the night wears on, Clem Two begins to move south. At first it is hoped that this means Clem Two is about to follow the steering currents, which would mean a move to the west—and bad as Clem Two might be over there, especially as an aftermath to the original Clem, which has just thundered across the now-empty Kingman Reef again, if Clem Two should turn west they will at least have a breathing space.
At dawn on July 9, Clem Two picks up speed and moves in a great, sweeping eastward hook into the Gulf of Tehuantepec.
Jesse and Mary Ann are already packed—evacuees are permitted just one small bag. Within minutes of the alert they are waiting out front for the Army trucks. But the Army doesn’t come, and doesn’t come, and the hours crawl by. The wind from Clem Two coming in has only just begun to rise, and so it is like any breezy summer day with a rainstorm coming in on the wind. After a long wait they decide to reserve their packed lunches for later, and go around the corner to discover that many of the little cafés have
reopened; “I can always just turn off the stove if the Army shows up,” one of the owners explains.
The news broadcasts report that big waves are beginning to come inshore and that buses have been commandeered to move the population on the coasts first. There is reassuring footage of soldiers helping people pack into buses.
Or it’s reassuring until Jesse sees. “Mary Ann—that’s not Puerto Madero.”
“How do you know it’s not?”
“Because I know the building they’re doing that in front of, and that building is in Tuxtla Gutiérrez. I don’t know what’s really going on, but there’s no evacuation down in Puerto Madero, that’s for sure.”
“Why would they be—”
Jesse shrugs. “Could be anything. They don’t want people to panic but they just had a mutiny. Things are coming in so fast that they can’t pick people up, so they’re trying to keep them calm till it hits. Different factions feuding one place or another. Or if you ask me, they’re badly delayed but still planning to come for us, and they want to make sure everyone stays near an evacuation point. Like if the zipline is down—which happens fairly often—then they don’t want people piling up at the linehead; it will just make loading the zipline harder, and there’s no shelter at the zipline head anyway.”
Mary Ann grins at him. “You’re really something, you know. You think about explanations like that. Most of the people I’ve ever known in my life would just have said ‘It’s typical’ or ‘Oh, what can you do?’ but you think up twenty things it could be.”
“All of which are probably wrong.”
“Oh, sure, but that doesn’t matter. I was just thinking that you actually do that—explain things—instead of just giving it to me from a script.” Mary Ann pulls a bandanna from her back pocket and wipes her sweatcovered face. “I don’t like how warm and still it’s getting, and I
really
don’t like the green color in the sky.”
“Me either.” They move close to each other, so that their shoulders touch; it’s even warmer, but Jesse would rather be in contact as they look at the green-brown wash of thunderheads now boiling their way across the sky, chasing the last blue off to the east behind them.
They finish lunch and have another cup of coffee. “This is going to blow in suddenly,” Jesse says, “and an outdoor café under an awning is not the place for it.”
“The assembly point is all the way outdoors.”
“True, but your house is about thirty steps from the assembly point. And from your second-floor window we can watch for the bus.”
She sighs. “I suppose the problem is that till the wind and rain start, I’m not going to get over the feeling that they just need to matte in a nicerlooking sky. All right, let’s get going.”
As they walk the short block back, Jesse sees what she means; there is something about the faraway look of the evil green thunderheads, their black anvil bases sailing like bargeloads of coal high above, that seems unconnected with the world below. The air gets more and more still, and the dark clouds roll over thicker and heavier.
He’s trying to remember all the terms Diogenes taught him. He knows the big, heavy clouds are cumulonimbus and they get that pattern of dark base and fluffy top because there’s a warm updraft pouring from the base up into the sky, and that the whole thing acts like a big Van de Graaff generator, so that there are charges being separated up there and the potential for lightning is building up. And that row of thunderheads is called the squall line? Seems right. And somewhere back behind that there’s an actual front … no, that’s just in regular storms back home, he thinks. Still, somewhere out there the wind is about to pick up—
They are already going up the garden path when the rain hits—and “hits” is the only word for it—it feels like a cold firehose turned suddenly on them. A moment later the wind is whipping up fiercely, and though they run and Mary Ann has the key in her hand, in their ten steps they are soaked to the skin.
“I can’t see three feet out this window,” Mary Ann points out.
“There’s no bus coming in this, anyway,” Jesse says. “Glad you got a high-rent place; hope you had to pay extra for the walls.”
“The place was redone for security but I didn’t pay much attention to what they did,” Mary Ann says, and leans against him. He puts an arm around her, doing his best to be reassuring, and very grateful to have someone whom he has to reassure, since that seems to keep his teeth from chattering.