Mother of Storms Read Online Free

The apartment and the homework are looking farther and farther away every minute.
    Gwendy’s guy, a tall skinny bad case of acne whom Jesse normally would remember the name of, tries to get an objection in, but Naomi mows it down before he can open his mouth. “No, listen, ” she says. “The point is, people have to take charge of wherever life puts them, and I don’t care if he is the SecGen, he’s still responsible. If you allow your situation to be one where there are no moral options, and then you go and choose between them, you’re still choosing to do something wrong. I mean, otherwise there’s nobody to blame.”
    Sibby tentatively ventures that maybe this applies, too, to Abdulkashim.
    “Oh, sure, right,” Gwendy barks, turning on Sibby. “Blame a guy whose country just lost most of its weapons, a guy who’s probably being thrown into jail right now if the UN cops haven’t already killed him, like he really wanted to have all this happen. That is so simplistic.” Gwendy’s jaw is sticking far enough forward to protrude beyond the heavy blonde curtains of her hair, she’s glaring into Sibby’s eyes (as much as anyone can tell from the side), and she’s doing what old guys like Jesse’s dad call “invading personal space”—standing close to Sibby and moving closer.
    All this is putting a nasty want-to-fight gleam in Naomi’s eye. Jesse knows many people find her obnoxious when she’s like this, but it’s also exactly what gets him horny.
    The first thing he noticed about her in Values and Self class, the one required course at the U of the Az, was that gleam when she started picking on the three bewildered Afropean guys for not being feminist-ecoconscious.
    The second thing was that under all the baggy clothing she had a wonderful body.
    Jesse’s roommate Brian, who moved out when it became clear that Jesse was getting serious about her, had rather casually suggested that since what turned Jesse on was all that fury wrapped up in that male-fantasy body, maybe he should “just rape her and get over it, Jess, wouldn’t that be simpler? It would confirm everything she thinks about you and you’d still get to find out what it’s like.”
    Jesse had been shocked. The next several times he had sex with Naomi he couldn’t stop fantasizing that he was raping her. If there was a Diem Act for fantasies like there is for wedges, he’d be facing the death penalty.
    Does he really like her? He doesn’t know—it seems irrelevant.
    He’s not listening, which is probably just as well, but Gwendy and Sibby are both in tears and Gwendy’s guy seems to be trying to get them pulled out of there. They beat some kind of retreat, and by now anyone who was
waiting to talk to Naomi seems to have vanished, so Jesse has her outside almost at once. They walk together quietly in the cool desert dark before Jesse ventures to speak. “Listen,” he says, “don’t give me a speech about it, but I’d really like to take the Lectrajeep out into the desert tonight. We could sit back and look at the stars and I’d listen to whatever you want to talk about.”
    He knows this is likely to start a fight. She doesn’t like the Lectrajeep. Deepers don’t want to disturb the wilderness, so they get it on XV instead. Never mind that with the big soft balloon tires and the QuaDirecDrive, the Lectrajeep doesn’t leave as much track as a hiker in lightweight boots; Naomi’s parents have filled her full of horror stories about what the old four-wheelers of fifty years before did, and that’s what she sees when she looks at Jesse’s Lectrajeep.
    The one time he tried taking her out into the desert, she didn’t know her way around without the XV team there. In XV, the body you ride on is some highly trained athlete, so that you move easily through the wild country, and you have constant back-of-the-mind contact with a wilderness poet, a naturalist, an activist, and a shaman. Without them there to whisper into her mind,