Free Mother of Storms by John Barnes Page A

spanking.
    That association, at last, draws her attention back to the job. Liu, the UN’s Ambassador to the U.S., also likes to start off on a scare note. This time it was a threat that there was sentiment in the General Assembly to further disarm the independent national forces, down to a ten-percent-of-UN level. She knew that wasn’t what they were after, but when it sprang it was almost as bad.
    They want NOAA, NASA, the Department of Energy, the scientific branches of EPA … the list goes on and on. All the usual reasons—better coordination and more equitable sharing of global resources—and all the usual promises about all the information remaining equally accessible and all the employees receiving just the same pay and benefits. Nothing to complain about there … .
    Except that if Hardshaw goes for it, when the SecGen says something is happening out there in the global environment, she won’t have the
foggiest idea whether or not he’s telling the truth. And the major area in which the UN has been restricting national sovereignty, for the past twenty years, has been in global environmental questions.
    She can even see it in Rivera’s lights, when she tries; UNESCO and its many spinoffs don’t supply the quality of information that he needs, and he ends up acquiring it mainly from the scientific agencies of the Big Five. And if you were the SecGen, Brittany Lynn, you’d have to wonder all the time if maybe something was being put over on you, or something was being hidden.
    But she isn’t the SecGen, and it’s not her lookout. She stretches, smooths her skirt, picks up the phone, and tells them to get Harris Diem and bring him in—she knows he’s been at his desk for at least an hour by now.
    The irony of it all, she thinks, is that in her seven years of struggle with the UN she’s been forced to make the Federal government speak with just one voice, made it a better implement for governing than the country has ever had before—and she has, now, even less real authority than the Presidents between Jackson and Lincoln.
    And the deeper irony is that as she has extended her authority, she has diminished her ability to get the truth, instead of what people think she wants to hear. This document on her desk is the result of that, and she’s too smart not to see the chickens returning to roost.
    She can’t tell what the people at NOAA think the release of so much methane will do, because they were trying to tell her whatever would make things go smoothly for NOAA.
    And just this once, she wants the truth.
    If you’re going to get all worked up about what’s true and what’s not, you’re never gonna be President like I’m grooming you for, Brittany Lynn, her father used to say, once she’d gotten old enough to start to catch him out in all those lies—the lost Spanish city somewhere in the Hoodoo River gorge, the aliens he had met on the road to Sand Point, Bigfoot, that the house would be beautiful when it was finished, and he was going to stop drinking for his little girl.
    This job isn’t quite the fun she might have hoped for, back then, but it still beats hell out of spending her life behind a cash register at a McDonald’s in Boise. She was just kind of wondering, for a minute there, by how much?
    The soft chime tells her Harris is on his way in. She composes herself, goes back to the desk, flips the report open to a random page. When he comes in, she skips the greeting and starts with, “Harris, you greasy old hack, why in hell did you hand me a report that doesn’t say anything?”
    “Because, boss,” he says, setting down his briefcase and leaning across the desk at her, “we don’t know anything.”
    They laugh because they have been friends for twenty years. Nothing is funny but each is glad the other is here.
     
     
    Yeats fussed about things falling apart and the center not being able to hold. What really happened was that the center ceased to exist altogether.
    It fell into