Free Mother of Storms by John Barnes

recognize his own experiences from their editing.
    The most exciting thing he got to do this month was set a methane plume on fire, at the request of UNSOO.
    On the other hand, the food is still good—way better than what it was on the way to Mars—and you can’t beat the view. Probably worth continuing to live and work, he decides. He puts his mouth up to one of the monitors, lets loose a grand, gut-ripping belch, redolent of chicken liver and raw onion, grins broadly, and goes back to the telescope for the afternoon’s work.
     
     
    What have you gotten yourself into this time, Brittany Lynn?
    Brittany Lynn Hardshaw, President of the United States, remembers that when she was little, her father used to ask that about once a day, and normally the answer was something like “the old motor oil in the bam,” or “an open can of house paint.” It’s eight-thirty in the morning and she’s looking at the confidential report from NOAA that Harris Diem left for her last night, and wondering if she can trust it at all.
    The trouble is, she’s spent a long time getting the government under control, with Diem as her right hand … and now she’s not sure there’s anyone left who’s likely to tell her the truth. And this time that’s what she needs.
    She gets up and walks to a window, looking out on Pennsylvania Avenue. When they rebuilt after the Flash, they closed the whole area to vehicle traffic, nominally for environmental reasons and actually to make it that much tougher to bring a nuke close to the New White House or Capitol and repeat the decapitation shot.
    The other part of the Flash, the bomb that went off sixty miles above Kansas City, wouldn’t have much effect this time; everything everywhere is in Faraday cages, and all signal is on fibrop.
    But the center of government is permanently vulnerable, Hardshaw thinks. We’re made out of meat. We have to be in contact with many thousands of people.
    The street before her is jammed with pedestrians, most with briefcases, scurrying about like ants. If three of them had parts for a cram bomb, they could wipe out the Federal government this morning, and no one would
stop them. Maybe if they did it again, this time they would announce who they were, or at least explain why they did it.
    In her mind’s eye Hardshaw sees Washington rise from the swamps, go down in the flames set by the British troops a few years later, rise again to bustle and pulse when President Lincoln looked out of the house that once stood here, shrink back into a sleepy backwater before growing again, explode into a great city during depression, war, and cold war, deteriorate into a slum until the Flash, rise from the nuclear catastrophe … .
    Into a provincial capital for the UN, she admits to herself. Not that she blames her predecessors, and she hopes that the two who are still living don’t blame her.
    She thinks, I am looking forward to retirement. It’s been a long time since she was a dirty-faced kid living in a mobile home on a dirt road in the mountains of Idaho, next to the log house it took her father six years to finish—not unusual for a man who worked part time and drank full time. It’s been a long time since she was a white trash student at a third-rate university, and even since her upset victory to become Idaho Attorney General … .
    All right, President Grandma, let’s not write our memoirs just yet. She’s only ten months from retirement, anyway. Wonder if XV will even cover the election? There’s no longer much at stake in being the President of the United States. The Republicans are running a Hawaiian nonentity, the guy Hardshaw picked for Commerce; the Democrats are running yet another governor of New York, this time the first black woman; and the United Left is running TBA—a slate of electors who will pick a President if enough of them win.
    Back to work, Brittany Lynn, now. She remembers how her father used to say “now”—the word implied an oncoming