Authors: John Barnes

Mother of Storms (20 page)

BOOK: Mother of Storms

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It’s dark in the middle of Kansas, but Randy doesn’t mind. He switches off the terminal, and after a while, he falls asleep. In front of him, the headlights search the blackness, and find only the road.

TWO

VORTEX

JUNE–JULY 2028

T
HERE ARE FEW places on Earth more empty than 8N 142W. In latitude, 0 is the equator, 90 is the pole. In longitude, London is 0 and the International Date Line is 180.

So the point is about eight degrees north—not very far above the equator—and 142 degrees west—most of the way around from London. What is there, besides an intersection of imaginary lines, is water and air.

At the bottom of the sea, 4,800 meters below the water, there is only darkness, high pressure, and cold; the plains of mud rise and roll in low foothills that will become mountains farther to the west. There is a dribble of dead things from the surface, but not much even of that; the area above is a marine desert.

Temperature does not rise rapidly until you’re near the surface; the last 150 meters, suddenly, are part of the world of light and air above, but there is so little there for anything to eat that the water is clear, warm, and empty.

Above the water, laced with the extra methane, the air has gotten very, very warm during the long equatorial day; the water, heated by the sun, has given off its heat upward as infrared, but the methane is black as night to the infrared and the air has warmed and rewarmed, swirling around to reheat the water.

The sea surface is alive with small breezes and with the great swirl of the trade winds; here a bit of air rises and draws air toward itself, there cooled air slides back down to the sea and skids across its surface. It happens, by chance, that there are places where the air piles together, and just after sunrise—not long after six in the morning, here—that was happening at the sea surface. The warm air from the sea around blew inward to this crossing of imaginary lines, and a little mountain of warmer air began to form there.

This lumpy, invisible mountain of warm, wet air, at first, towered no more than ten thousand feet high. There are many taller peaks in the Rockies.

But above the warm, wet air of the sea surface, there is other air, cooler, dryer. Eighteen kilometers—a distance you could drive in ten minutes on a good highway—straight up, there is another imaginary line, the tropopause. Below the tropopause, the decreasing pressure and the increasing distance from the Earth’s warm surface make temperature fall with altitude; above the tropopause, hard ultraviolet light falling in from space heats the thin wisp of atmosphere, so that temperature rises with altitude, since the outermost air gets the most ultraviolet (and shades the air below it). Thus the tropopause is in one sense a line on temperature plot—it is only the height at which the air is coldest.

Yet the tropopause is not quite so imaginary as the lines of latitude and longitude. It has a real consequence; air below the tropopause cannot rise above it easily. Think of lumpy, irregular building blocks made of lead, wood, and plastic foam; if you pile them in that order, the system is stable and hard to turn over; if you put plastic foam on the bottom and lead on the top, the structure will fall over easily.

Cold air is heavy like lead; warm air is light like plastic foam. In the troposphere, the warm air is on the bottom and the system rolls over constantly; in the stratosphere, warm air is on the top, and thus the stratosphere resists being turned over. When a stream of warm air rises through the troposphere to the tropopause, it cannot turn over the stratospheric layers above it, and thus cannot rise farther; instead, it spreads out under the tropopause.

The underside of the tropopause, like the face of the ocean, is stirred constantly with winds and currents; sometimes they pile together, and sometimes they pull apart. It happened, at about 7:45 in the morning locally, that directly above the mountain of air piled together on the sea, the winds began to pull apart along the tropopause.

Thus the warm air below, already tending to rise, was being pushed from around its outside, and at the same time the pressure above it fell. Like a bubble breaking from the bottom of a boiling pot, the mountain of warm air broke from the face of the sea, rose to the tropopause, and was torn apart and scattered by the winds there.

Where the mountain of warm air had been, it left a hole—and more warm air rushed in to fill it, making a newer and bigger mountain, which in turn was drawn up into the troposphere and scattered, making another mountain—

For fifty kilometers around, at sea level, air began to rush toward 8N 142W, and at tropopause level, to flow away from it.

And as this happened, the Coriolis force—the force on moving objects on the Earth’s surface caused by the Earth’s rotation, familiar because it complicates missile flights and makes it hard to play Ping-Pong on a fast-moving merry-go-round-bent the north-moving air westward, and the south-moving air eastward; in either case, forcing the air to turn left, so that by 9:10 A.M. the air had begun to spiral as it fell inward to the center of low pressure. By now, air was coming from as far away as 100 kilometers.

As it spiraled inward, it picked up heat from the sea, sped up, packed in more closely around the central column; it became harder and harder for more warm air to push its way into the center and up the column, now kilometers thick, of rising warm air.

The carrying of so much warm air up into the cold air above has been having other effects too. As the air above spreads out, cools, and falls, water
condenses, and big thick thunderheads have been forming all around the column of hot air, making it look a bit like a giant mushroom cloud; the falling cold air and the general agitation of the winds in the area have already lashed the cumulonimbus clouds into a storm, and their rapid circulation has separated big electric charges, so that the sea becomes dark under a bank of heavy clouds, and lightning flashes and warm rain are everywhere.

The moment comes now.

The inward-spiraling air piling up around the base of the rising column has become too thick for more air to force its way through; the ring of thick air around the column moves faster and faster as more air is added to it, and rises up the outside of the column, sheathing it in whirling, rising wind. The central column, deprived of its new air, empties until pressure is far below normal; the corkscrew of rising air around it reaches the tropopause and begins to pump the rising hot air out along the tropopause boundary with far greater efficiency.

As the top of the storm moves more air outward, the bottom sucks more in. The spiraling gets faster every minute. The distance from which the storm can draw new warm air increases just as quickly.

Clouds in the ring of fast-moving air are torn to shreds and form a fast-moving white wall; clouds in the column are pulled out of it and vanish, leaving a clear sky above a savagely foaming green sea.

The central column has become an eye, and the storm is now a hurricane.

The biggest problem with being lovelorn in Tapachula, Jesse decides, is that it’s such a damned friendly place that in a couple of weeks everyone not only knows about the final breakup with Naomi, but has significant advice for him. The advice seems to break down into the macho, which he gets from men, to the effect that it is time to forget the
chica
and get on with finding another one; the romantic, which comes mainly from older women, to the effect that all he needs to do is remain steadfast in his passion and that even if he doesn’t get Naomi he will still be a very beautiful boy; and the pragmatic, which he gets from the three teenage whores he walks past on his way home from work each evening, to the effect that getting over it can be accomplished physiologically by a few simple procedures they would be happy to demonstrate.

He always smiles politely and listens intently to the macho and romantic advice; the pragmatic advice gives him an occasional urge to try it out, but not enough to really consider the indignity.

Tapachula is otherwise not a bad place for a broken heart. The strange square-shaped topiary trees of the Zócalo create thousands of dark, deep
shadows, perfect for staring into and imagining Naomi coming out of; there are cafés all the way around the east and south sides of the Zócalo, so that there are plenty of places for sitting and drinking while he nurses the broken heart.

Moreover, evenings bring the evening promenade. It doesn’t resemble the tourist guidebook descriptions of “gallant young men in colorful Latin high-fashion and flashing-eyed señoritas under the watchful gaze of dour chaperoning aunts”—but then, what tourist would come to see “guys who worked all day in the factory take a shower and put on their good clothes, and go out to flirt with young women who’ve done the same thing”? It would sound too much like going to the mall back home.

Yet if the promenade doesn’t much resemble the guidebooks, for Jesse it’s still very nice. Jesse looks like a juvenile lead in a twentieth sort of way; anyone looking at him can see him as the Rookie Cop, the Green Deputy, the Daring Kid Pilot, the Brilliant Young Doctor—in every case the hero-to-be, and as a result, most of the young women going by have been trained to find men who look like Jesse attractive, even though there aren’t many locally. Being broken-hearted is a lot more fun when every few minutes someone gives you an artful shake of long, thick black hair, or a sideways glance that reveals a cute smile, white flashing teeth, and—with the hips turned just right—a blouse pulled tight across a high, firm breast, or a short skirt clinging to taut young buttocks. For a broken heart it’s almost as good as the local beer.

And in its odd way it’s helping him in his work, because since he doesn’t respond to any particular girl, he doesn’t seem to induce any jealousy in any of the young men he works with. They seem to find his love life to be a sort of shared bond between them; it’s the kind of thing a young Mexican man might get into for a few months, though in the back of his head Jesse knows that it’s only his family income that lets him indulge it for so long—since he doesn’t have to get a wife to move out of his parents’ house, he doesn’t have to worry about any eventual opportunities passing him by while he wears his mask of melancholy.

There are other benefits, he knows. He’s finally really mastered the basic engineering curriculum, because he’s been teaching the equivalent of his freshman and sophomore years, one way and another, for two months now, in Spanish, and somehow the combination of having to put it into other words and other structures, plus having to repeat explanations of it so often, has ingrained it into his brain. He knows, without false modesty, that when he goes back to U of the Az, getting Masterys in his classes will be no great problem.

Most nights he sits in a sidewalk café and drinks at a nice steady three
beers an hour, enough to get him good and drunk at the end of three hours so that, after eating
cena,
he can wander home and grab some sleep.

Often one of his students—maybe bored with the promenade, maybe curious about Jesse, or perhaps just hoping that by sitting next to Jesse he will fall into the field of vision of one of the women going by—will sit down and drink with him for a while. Usually that means getting drunker faster, since it almost always leads to a rivalry about who can buy whom more beer.

It’s on such nights that he gets more macho advice, and they sit and discuss the bodies on the women going by—along with Naomi’s body. Jesse sometimes thinks that ought to bother him, but it doesn’t really—and after all, how much did he ever really know about her besides that he liked her body and that to get at it he’d have to believe all kinds of strange Deeper shit?

This seems like an almost philosophic thought, and fortunately he has José, who is inclined to philosophy, to talk to tonight. It takes him a while to explain the question, about whether he should feel guilty or ashamed about not feeling guilty or ashamed, not because José is slow but because José is quite drunk—he started a while before Jesse and is working on it harder and faster.

Finally, Jesse gets the whole question explained carefully to José; does he owe it to Naomi to feel guilty that after all their time and conversations together, it’s not the conversations or her mind he misses, or even the big brown eyes and soft hair, but just the feel of her full, soft breast in his hand? Should Jesse try harder to feel more appropriate feelings?

José considers this a long time. Twice he holds up a finger as if to begin speaking, and once he sits back with an expression of someone who has finally solved a problem, but each time he hesitates and then does not speak.

Jesse nods emphatically, to show that he understands how difficult the question can be, and signals the tall waiter (who always appears to be smiling slightly, as if every customer had just done something a little bit amusing, or perhaps was dressed just a little wrong). Two more beers, the kind of slightly salty, tart lager they make around here to go with all the seafood, appear silently at Jesse and José’s elbows, as José continues to struggle with the problem of just how much guilt is owned to Naomi.

Jesse takes a small swallow of his, appreciating the cold clarity on his teeth, and realizes he’s not far from being drunk himself.

José’s focus gets suddenly sharper and clearer, and at last he speaks. “No.”

“No?”

“No,
compadre
, no.”

“You don’t think there’s anything wrong with just thinking of Naomi as a great body?”

BOOK: Mother of Storms

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