Mother of Storms Read Online Free PDF Page A

body and moral turpitude.”
    “Yeah. At least I hope his muffin only has that aggressive tight-mouthed expression because she’s a Deeper and not because she has ARTS.”
    “Turpitude,” Nahum says, distinctly. He adds, “She has ARTS.”
    “Oops,” Lori says. “Maybe he’ll forget it before Mom comes to visit.”
    Di winks at her and she grins back, and the thought crosses his mind that the kids will be expiring soon, Lori usually finishes up around 1:30 A.M. when the kids are in the depths of their longest sleep, and it might be nice to slide between the sheets with a grownup tonight.
    Lori wets her lips with the tip of her tongue, turns to stick her bottom and chest out, and gives him the grin she always does when she says “Not bad for an old broad,” another phrase they’d had to lose since the time two months ago when Nahum expressed the view that Grandma was not bad for an old broad.
    You never know, really, what kids are picking up on, but Mark hugs Di’s leg and says, “Time for bed?”
    “Beds!” Nahum agrees, and just as current thinking says, there’s no problem at all with getting the two of them onto the big, comfortable, low bed, and by now they’re so secure that Di or Lori need only join them for most naps, not for every one.
    A cynic might note that Di is often a bit short of sleep and that the new-fashioned way really only functions because Lori works at home. A deeper cynic might ask when parents have ever been other than short on sleep.
    Still, tonight the kids go right to bed and shut up. Better still, Lori sits down next to him on the couch instead of going back to work. “So what do you think?” she asks.
    “The floor of the Arctic Ocean is about as irrelevant a place as you can find for weather forecasting,” Di says, accepting the brandy she hands him. “I mean, temperatures down there have something to do with absorbing global warming—when the deep ocean gets warm, then one of the brakes on the system will be gone, but it won’t get warm for another generation or so if the computer is right. And by that time we should have emissions really under control and might have even started the re-cooling everyone seems to think we want to do.
    “No, I just get bothered by the politics. I mean, you and I grew up pre-Flash. We know how weird it is to have the UN having any say in all this. And they’re not doing much of a job. If they hadn’t forced Russia to grant Siberian independence, or the USA to grant Alaskan independence, would all this have happened? And then not to check what was behind what they were shooting at. Typical UN operation. That’s all. If President Grandma or Harris Diem were running this show there’d have been no shooting and it wouldn’t have made the news at all—Abdulkashim would be out with no fuss. This guy Rivera is smart but he’s a show-off and he likes to see the planes fly and the bombs fall. One of these days we’ll get a smarter aggressor or a dumber SecGen, and then we’ll be in the soup.
    “But as for the meteorology—nothing to worry about, I don’t think. The heat being released down there won’t bring up the bottom temperature by even one one-hundredth of a degree once it’s spread over the whole ocean.”
    She snuggles against him and says, “I did not knock off early to talk meteorology, actually.”
    He feels what he’s going to say on his tongue just as the phone rings, and it’s the ring from the NOAA office, so he has to answer. Probably the same question Jesse asked but less politely framed.
    He knows it’s big when he sees it’s Henry Pauliss on the screen, and his boss looks freshly shaken out of bed. Probably the UN has had something weird happen down there and wants NOAA to figure it out, because the USA still has the best Weather Bureau there is … which is why there’s been stuff in Scuttlebytes all the time about a UN bid to take over NOAA.
    As if to forestall Di’s irritation, Henry opens with a sigh.