Mother of Storms by John Barnes

sick that he very nearly torched his own house. He could have pretended he did it for the insurance and resigned in disgrace. He should have done it. Someday he will.
    Right now, the boss needs him. As soon as this crisis is over … he’ll go down to the basement. Then he’ll think of some way to get it all over with for good.
    It’s a promise he’s made himself many times before.
     
     
    The biggest problem with zipline is that it’s like taking an elevator to everywhere; there is a window you can look out of, but since the car moves at four hundred miles per hour, they’ve got it running between high, fenced earth berms most of the way, so there’s nothing to see, and on the rare occasions when it shoots across a gorge or goes up to an elevated roadbed, the zipline is moving so fast that most people become ill. So after a few times when you’re a little kid, you don’t unshutter the window.
    Since practically anyone can afford a private cabin, the zipline has become the major place for temporary privacy. When he was a teenager, Jesse used to take girls from Tucson to dates in LA, Albuquerque, or even
Dallas, just to have them alone in the compartment for that long, and it seems like every fifth XV drama is about a couple that meets regularly during a commute for a bit of adultery.
    The other cliché is that couples have their fights on the zipline, and that’s the cliché Jesse and Naomi are acting out.
    Jesse does not know what this one is about. A week ago, after they watched the UN missiles get blown up, they drove out in the desert and they made love in the back of the Lectrajeep, the top thrown back so that it was all by bright starlight. They lay together afterward, touching and whispering, and she asked him a lot of things about growing up in the desert.
    It was the first time he ever felt like she wanted to know something about him without correcting it.
    After they got back, they made love more often in the next three days than they had in months. They didn’t go to any meetings, and he had lots of time to study.
    But since this morning they’ve been having this fight. It’s one of those really frustrating ones where Jesse can’t get Naomi to admit that it’s a fight; she calls it a “clarification.” As far as he can tell, the feelings she is clarifying for him at the moment are the ones that have to do with dumping him because she really likes him. He says so.
    “I knew you’d take it that way!”
    This does not reassure him. The two-person zipline compartments are barely large closets—their knees are almost touching and they can only lean back to get about three feet of separation at best, and Jesse’s shoulders touch both the wall and the door. So they are having this fight right in each other’s face.
    “I don’t understand,” he says.
    “I’ve told you, you’re not going to get what I’m saying if you try to understand it. Try to feel it, Jesse, can’t you?” She brushes her hair back from her face, and he sees that her eyes are wet, which startles him—somehow he had missed the point that all this is painful for her, too, and he’s embarrassed by that, so he stops arguing and listens for a moment.
    The hair comes farther back and he can see how pale her skin is around her freckles. Her eyes are huge wet pools and there’s a catch in her voice.
    “You probably thought we were just getting along great, didn’t you? I mean after we went out in the desert?”
    He doesn’t see where this is going.
    “I guess I should have explained but it didn’t seem like it would work if I did, Jesse. I—well, at the meeting, where everyone was watching the Siberian missiles get blown up, I was feeling so tired. I didn’t ever want to see any of that stuff again. And … well, you know, I got involved with you
partly because it seemed like, oh, sort of a duty, I mean, you were intelligent and you liked me and I thought I could help you get your values clarified.”
    Jesse had not