Authors: John Barnes
Mother of Storms (60 page)
She sighs, and it’s not exactly a sad noise like he might have expected, but rather impatient, as if she thought he should already understand whatever it is that she is getting at. She takes his arm, already a bit warm and sticky from being draped over her shoulders in the baking heat of southern Mexico’s late July, and pulls his hand forward, kissing it tenderly again. He realizes that in her way she’s treating him like her little boy, and he both resents and enjoys it; he swallows hard and decides that he will make himself listen, really listen, to her, because he’s so painfully aware of how much more she knows than he does.
“I feel like your big sister, all of a sudden,” she says, “that is, your big sister who enjoys molesting you. Jesse, the government is forcing Passionet but they aren’t forcing me. I want to do this; it’s not a matter of ‘cooperating.’ I’m with them. If I see anyone trying to evade the censorship, I’ll turn him in.” She seems to hold her breath for a long moment. When he just keeps listening, she goes on. “I guess nothing cures you of romance as much as having a romantic job. Jesse, news for the masses, whether it’s XV or all the way back to the old newspapers, is
entertainment
. People don’t follow the news to stay informed, no matter what they tell you in school, they watch or experience to be entertained. If it were like they teach in school, they’d put the congressional budget, scientific research, and bios of every important bureaucrat in the opening slot, and they’d do special editions for the Nobel Prizes and the World Health Organization’s annual report. That’s not what it’s about. They cover crime, sports, famous people having sex, funny animal stories, what it’s like to stay in an expensive hotel in a resort area. Because that’s what’s interesting and fun and entertaining.
entertainment
. People don’t follow the news to stay informed, no matter what they tell you in school, they watch or experience to be entertained. If it were like they teach in school, they’d put the congressional budget, scientific research, and bios of every important bureaucrat in the opening slot, and they’d do special editions for the Nobel Prizes and the World Health Organization’s annual report. That’s not what it’s about. They cover crime, sports, famous people having sex, funny animal stories, what it’s like to stay in an expensive hotel in a resort area. Because that’s what’s interesting and fun and entertaining.
“It wouldn’t matter so much except that people’s lives are so dull they believe their entertainment—and for a hundred years we’ve been telling
them that the world is very dangerous, that there are violent thugs everywhere, war is constantly imminent, sex is their most important need, all that crap.
them that the world is very dangerous, that there are violent thugs everywhere, war is constantly imminent, sex is their most important need, all that crap.
“Well, shit, Jesse, if you were a shrink and you had a patient who only wanted to talk about violence, extravagance, cruelty, and his sexual fantasies—what would you suggest? More of the same?”
Jesse’s a bit startled, but he asks, “Whatever happened to freedom of the press?”
She snorts, a funny, ugly noise. Then she says, “Sorry, Jesse, but what does that have to do with the present day? You think the broadcast nets are like Ben Franklin, turning out little pamphlets for a few to read and most to ignore? Look, a few huge private corporations are making all their money by spreading fear, hate, depression, and an exploitive attitude. Justice would demand public hangings. I don’t see that telling the media to keep the good guys the viewpoint characters is anything more than recognizing that we all have to live with the people who believe that crap. It’s just good semiotics. Better still to suppress the industry entirely, but this is a first step.”
He looks out across the switchback they’re now descending; the front of the column is just reaching the next bend after the one they’re approaching. “We’re really quite a parade here. So when do you start transmitting?”
“Supposedly they’ll have a controller out here in a whistler in about three hours; they bribed the Mexican government by bringing along a truck that also has room for a clinic.”
“Some bribe. I’d have thought something with a little more personal advantage—”
“I’m sure there were plenty of those too.” She slides her hand gently up his back. “You’re not mad at me, are you?”
“Not really mad.” He scuffs the dirt once, then decides that’s acting too much like a kid, and says, “Uh, could you explain the semiotic thing? Little bitty words that even an engineer can understand?”
She smiles at him. “It’s not complicated, Jesse, it’s just that the viewpoint character is always privileged—people identify with his or her values. For years people have been pointing out that it’s not a real great thing that assassinations and rapes and so forth on the entertainment shows are almost always seen from the attacker’s point of view, so that people associate being the aggressor with it being exciting. So all we’re going to do is deny the goons and thugs, the rioters and the people who are making the global emergency tougher for everyone, a voice in all this. They get no viewpoint. When they tune in to share the riot, they get hit with wall-to-wall disgust, and that’s it. Or, if you want, what we’re doing is de-privileging the aggressor.”
Jesse understands what she’s saying, and the only problem he has is that it still sounds more to him like what they’re doing is “slanting the news.” But he asks something safer. “Will it work?”
“It had better.”
He finds himself agreeing with that; if they’re going to control the news, at least let it be for some good purpose. “I hope it does work. I’m going to miss you.”
“Miss me? I’m not going anywhere. I mean, other than to Oaxaca, but we don’t get there for weeks yet.”
Now he’s confused, and he stammers—“But I thought—I mean, Passionet wouldn’t be—”
“They wouldn’t have been out here before, no. But now they are. They want the walk to Oaxaca the way Mary Ann Waterhouse experiences it, no fancy feeling stuff in it. I’m even allowed to think that the big tits they sewed onto me are really a nuisance when you’re taking a long walk in hot weather.”
He doesn’t quite know what to say, so he just hugs her; she hugs back and says, “So you thought you were going to get rid of the old bag now that you’d used her up?”
“Never,” he says, “I was just kind of dreading … well, having to say goodbye. Even if we do eventually, I’m certainly not ready yet.”
“Me either. And there’s a good reason for you to stick around, anyway; it’s going to be a lot easier for you to get a date afterward if you do.”
“It is?” When he looks at her, he sees that funny half-turn on one side of her face, a smile trying to escape. “Okay, what is it?”
“Well, in all seriousness, Jesse, hasn’t it occurred to you yet that millions of women around the world are going to know what it’s like to have sex with you? Which won’t work to your detriment.”
Jesse is so dumbfounded that he doesn’t answer, just pulls her close and gives her a long kiss, groping her the whole time. After all, this may be the last privacy for quite a while.
Louie has three hours of scheduled exercise and rest now, to help adjust him to his long stay in space. He is looking forward to it less than he used to look forward to appointments with the dentist.
First of all, it’s dull because the muscle aches and effort are unbroken by anything more stimulating than some Mahler on the speakers—
Das Lied von der Erde
. He’s frustrated because he got to like Mahler after he added on all the processors, and now he just can’t hear as much—his ears are just not as accurate as getting it straight off the digital recording. And he doesn’t have the spare brain space to simultaneously read all the criticism written about
it, to compare it with other major works … it’s like listening to it on a bad car radio from a weak AM station, as far as he’s concerned.
Das Lied von der Erde
. He’s frustrated because he got to like Mahler after he added on all the processors, and now he just can’t hear as much—his ears are just not as accurate as getting it straight off the digital recording. And he doesn’t have the spare brain space to simultaneously read all the criticism written about
it, to compare it with other major works … it’s like listening to it on a bad car radio from a weak AM station, as far as he’s concerned.
Moreover, even the pain of exercising isn’t as intense as it should be; annoying and unpleasant to be sure, but you can feel only so much with the number of neurons on hand, and you can feel it only in relation to the relatively small number of things you can keep in your mind—
He bursts out laughing at himself, drowning out a moment of Mahler (shit! another thing he can’t do simultaneously!), and takes a breather for a moment from stretching on the resistance table. All right, he’d rather be back in his electronic self. He wishes he never had to leave. If it were up to him he’d only occasionally pop into this body, and then just to have sex with Carla … .
Heck, even that might be better. Link them up, go on wireless, both people could be having each other’s experience and memories in addition to their own, in realtime instead of in imagination or edited memory.
He shakes his head, laughing; no, he just doesn’t like his body that much anymore. He’s getting a crimp in his neck anyway, from shaking his head, and he’d never realized before that laughing makes you feel a little lightheaded because you’re not breathing effectively. Funny thing … spend a month practically not having a body, and all sorts of things about the body will bother you.
Speaking of which—he scrambles to the head. It’s probably been a week since he’s taken a dump.
Another experience that he’d all but forgotten, and this one definitely would
not
be enhanced by having more sensors and processes to experience it with.
not
be enhanced by having more sensors and processes to experience it with.
After another hour, finally he can go back to the arrangement he prefers. By now his body is aching with unaccustomed stretching and motion, and he thinks quietly, as he jacks into the system through his scalpnet, that it will probably only get to be more of a nuisance with time—
Something is different.
His first and strangest sensation, once he has resumed his linked-in existence, is that someone is in here with him. He realizes, a moment later, that it is himself; in a dozen microseconds or so, he has re-integrated, compared his experience of meeting himself with the one Carla had a month ago, realized that he’s added a great deal of system complexity by doing so, and decided it’s of benefit to him. He makes a note and changes the programming of the wiseguys now en route to the asteroids; packages launched from the asteroids will bring along a copy of each wiseguy to re-integrate with Louie.
When the next package up from Luna roars through the funnel of
Good Luck’s
coil, Louie deliberately puts all his concentration into it, because he’s
getting far enough away so that he can just barely straddle being Louie-on-the-moon and Louie-the-ship. Louie grabs the package on the moon, throws it from his catapult, switches viewpoint, sees it coming all the way from the lunar catapult to his funnel, watches it pass through, sees the resistance heating produced by eddy currents here and there in not-perfectly-shielded conductors, watches it go back out, as easily as a juggler might toss one ball from one hand to the other. It is a much more impressive sight, and while he’s doing it Louie is doing a hundred more things as well. This is the way to be.
Good Luck’s
coil, Louie deliberately puts all his concentration into it, because he’s
getting far enough away so that he can just barely straddle being Louie-on-the-moon and Louie-the-ship. Louie grabs the package on the moon, throws it from his catapult, switches viewpoint, sees it coming all the way from the lunar catapult to his funnel, watches it pass through, sees the resistance heating produced by eddy currents here and there in not-perfectly-shielded conductors, watches it go back out, as easily as a juggler might toss one ball from one hand to the other. It is a much more impressive sight, and while he’s doing it Louie is doing a hundred more things as well. This is the way to be.
By now the train is forty-six packages long ahead of him, and radio signals take eighty-seven seconds to reach him, and eighty-seven seconds is two hundred eighty brain-days for Louie; by the time Louie-the-ship has said something, Louie-on-the-moon has replied, and Louie-the-ship has absorbed the reply, four years of a normal human being’s mental life have gone by.
He no longer experiences himself as juggling the packages, but as catching and throwing them. During the enforced time back in his body, he tries a sort of crude handball in the observation bubble, using an old tennis ball that was floating around Space Station
Constitution
for no reason he can think of, but it’s not the same at all.
Constitution
for no reason he can think of, but it’s not the same at all.
He keeps moving. He resents time in his body more every day. His biggest regret is that Carla and he are now writing “novels” to each other, as they call them—elaborate simulated experiences like XV but better, sex, romance, adventure, discovery, and fun shared—but only about every thirty-brain years (or a bit over fifty minutes), and of course it’s subjectively years old by the time they get each other’s replies. Moreover, the experiences are so vivid—and so much better than real life ever was—that he wishes they could try vacationing together on Earth, Earth as it was before Clem, to see if all this exploration of shared pleasure in virtual space would translate to the real. Not that they could go to eighteenth-century Paris or skyboard their way down from orbit to Tahiti anyway.
Well, at least that’s something his body is good for, and he’s glad enough to keep it around for that; though of course he certainly has more than enough memory of it to construct as many “physical” experiences as he wants.
Berlina Jameson doesn’t really expect anything, one way or another, anymore—life has been confusing enough for long enough so that she has given up on expectations. Still, about the last thing she expects is to get a backchannel message from John Klieg, let alone to have it be a list of names, dates, files, sources, and nodes to investigate. She wonders for a moment if
this is revenge, if he has perhaps set her up to come to the attention of a violent group somewhere when she snoops in. But then why did he also include a short note that urges her to do her digging under a clean—that is, fake, new, and traceproof—i.d.? If there is a scheme in this it is too deep for her.
this is revenge, if he has perhaps set her up to come to the attention of a violent group somewhere when she snoops in. But then why did he also include a short note that urges her to do her digging under a clean—that is, fake, new, and traceproof—i.d.? If there is a scheme in this it is too deep for her.
Maybe he’s just one of those good sport types who understands that there is nothing personal in it, that she was just doing her job.
She spends some heavy cash going through a commercial massively parallel system to build her wolfpack of software and make sure that they’re as souped up as she can manage. That forces her to take a look at how much is in her bank account, which is the point where she discovers that she is now wealthy.
What comes back from the search is spectacular, and she realizes the instant she has it that first of all she owes Klieg a lot of favors, most of which she can pay off by making sure this doesn’t trace to him. The other thing that’s obvious is that she’s going to have to do quite a bit to keep her own neck out of the noose if she wants to put this in
Sniffings
.
Sniffings
.
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