Free Mother of Storms by John Barnes Page B

nonexistence gradually, in the kind of grim retreat and perpetual compromise that marked the last two centuries of Rome.
    Eisenstein found out that all you had to do was cut from the thing to the face that seemed to be seeing it, take the pieces of the story and put them together with a simple splice, and it would stick together just as if some Dickensian narrator had said “And so, dear reader …”; the storyteller was no longer at the center of the story.
    Einstein found out that you could pick any old place to be the center.
    Gertrude Stein found out that the more times rose was rose, the less it had to do with anything pink and sweet-smelling, and the freer it was to be like Bums’s luve, or like every other rose.
    RAND Corporation demonstrated that in the event of a nuclear war, a state without a head cannot be decapitated, and gray corporate gnomes transformed into the playful sprites of the nets.
    Hitler, Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill tried to rebuild the center, but to do it they had to let radios into everyone’s house, and there is no point in being Pope if you’ve got to touch the beggars personally; the increased contact of the center with the periphery only hastened its dissolution.
    The old centralized Communist Party was so ineffective at opposing the Korean War that many Americans didn’t know there was a war, but thirty thousand mimeographs and two thousand college radio stations carried the struggle against the Vietnam War into the farthest corners of the country, and while the reporters from the centralized broadcasting services interviewed the supposed heads of the supposedly national supposed organizations, the ground shifted under them. By 1980, the slogan was “Think Globally, Act Locally,” and few were bothering with the global part. Even the Department of Defense came up with AirLand Battle, which you might call cooperative local-action violence.
    By 2028, things have gone farther. The center is wherever you are standing.
     
     
    When Harris Diem gets done talking to the President, he’s tired, and it’s still early in the morning. Another ten-minute conversation, another major chunk of history, he thinks to himself. The hardest thing about his memoirs is going to be explaining to people that it really happened that way, all the time—you walked into Brittany Lynn Hardshaw’s office, she asked you six questions, and you suddenly had orders to change all of American history.
    Assuming it works.
    He thinks about it, rubbing his temples at his desk, rolling and stretching his neck. He will need a reliable fall guy, and there’s hardly a better one than Henry Pauliss. He’ll need to make elaborate arrangements to covertly monitor about forty completely loyal NOAA people. That’s not a problem either.
    He needs to go spend some time in his basement. He hasn’t in weeks … .
    Time for it tonight if he wants to. Interesting phrase, “wants to.” If his house burned down tomorrow and everything hidden down there were destroyed, he would probably weep with relief … until that buzzing started at the base of his skull, and there was no relief possible for that.
    He can hear it now, like a doorbell in a dream: no hallway ever leads to the door, and you know that when you open the door something will kill you … and you cannot do anything except endlessly search the halls for the door, so that you can open it.
    Harris Diem sighs. Whenever things get fraught like this, the buzzing starts, and it’s as if the basement calls him, begs him to come down. Back when the Afropean Expulsion happened, when the Navy stood off Jutland and Admiral Tranh was calling every three hours to ask for more Marines, more air cover, and more space cover, because if shooting started he didn’t think he could hold back his local commanders and there was going to be war … that whole long week, the buzz was like a blade cutting through his scalp. And when he had finally scratched the itch, it had left him so