The Convert by Simon Ings

Author:Simon Ings [Ings, Simon]
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Sci-Fi Short
Published: 2010-03-07T18:58:15.765000+00:00

ENHANCED NORTH ATLANTIC AVHRR COLOR COMPOSITE

NOAA SATELLITE IMAGERY

NAVAL ATLANTIC METOC COMMUNITY

CINCLANTFLT SUPPORT

NLMOC

JMV AREAS

NAVSPECWAR

Absently, I sipped at his tea.

"NavSpecWar" turned out to be a shortening of "naval special warnings." All those terrifying-sounding acronyms belonged to nothing more sinister than military weather stations. McVaugh was sky-watching.

It was an innocent enough pastime, but incomprehensibly dull. What was it to McVaugh, what sea conditions were like in the mid-Atlantic?

"We were looking at all the wrong things."

I nearly dropped his tea.

"Don't you think?" McVaugh came and sat down at his desk. "Money!" he sneered. "Who cares about money?"

"Sorry," I said. "I couldn't resist a play."

He back-buttoned to Johns Hopkins.

"Professor Florianopolis," he said. "She told me once that she had a dog. She plugged it into the London Weather Center. It sensed storms."

"That's what she says now, " I replied. "You should read the original pa-pers, they're pretty inconclusive. Whatever claims she makes now."

"I have read them," he said, patting his keyboard.

Oh yes. Of course. The Worldwide bloody Web. I went and sat on his bed. My heel caught the edge of a bottle: It rolled under the bed, noisily. I didn't know whether to acknowledge it or not.

"Seeing Money—what a facile enterprise! There's so much else to see in the world, isn't there?"

"Sure," I said.

"What would you have liked to see? If you'd had the choice? If me and my people hadn't been so damned keen to see Money?"

"Oh, I don't know," I said. "Magnetism. Air pressure. I don't know. There's so much to choose from."

He drank off half his tea. "Air pressure!" It was scalding: how did he do that? "What if you could see pressure?" He sat forward in his chair, hands clasped: every inch the earnest student. "Barometric pressure, the move-ments of the air?"

"Mmm," I said.

"Have you ever gone hang-gliding?"

I shook my head.

He ignored me; he was off on an imaginary flight of his own. "Imagine sensing all that! Imagine seeing the sky lit up with information about itself ! The seas even—imagine seeing all the changes in its motion and pres-sure!"

"Maybe one day," I said: a parent, fielding the enthusiasm of a child. If only there were money enough, and time, there was no limit to the number of follies Sylvia might have led him into. He wasn't listening. He stared into his cup. I imagined him reading the leaves in the bottom.

"If the sky thinks," he said, "maybe the sea thinks, too." The next day, we ate breakfast together in the square. He didn't drink. He was very quiet, but he wasn't brooding, I remember: his smiles came easily enough.

I said, "I'm going to go back to England."

"I thought you might."

"I'm sorry we—I'm sorry the project didn't give you what you wanted." He was gallant: he tried to let me off the hook.

"What did I want?" he said.

I remembered Mantis Woman. "Your staff were very keen on us at first." His laugh was short and without humor. "They never had the right kind of imagination. They just treated you like this year's gizmo.

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