Greenhouse Summer (19 page)

“—too risky—”

“Mmmm, the Chairman of the CCC,” muttered Monique, “this might be interesting,
how
did you say I record?”

“Uh . . . you record by keeping the cursor where it is and hitting Control R.” Eric said for the benefit of Ignatz.

“—sure the effects will be transient?”

“—define sure—”

“—certain—”

“—a mathematical impossibility as every failed attempt at a definitive model has proven—”

“Who are these guys, anyway?” Monique muttered.

Eric shrugged. His dataprompt identified them as Hideki Manimoto, a contract climatech engineer for an orbital mirror corp; bin Mohammed’s deputy at the Committee of Concerned Climatologists, Aubrey Wright; and the chairman of Erdewerke, Bernard Kutnik—but telling
her
that would of course be giving too much away.

“—numbers then—”

“—ninety-three percent—”

“—minimal risk, I’d say—”

“—famous last words—”

“—precisely what we’re trying to prevent—”

“—at a profit, of course, Bernie—”

“—a wise man does well by doing good—”

“Oh really!” Eric groaned, and he moved the cursor to another screen, where an unlikely threesome of the female captain of the sixteenth arrondissement’s Force Flic and two males, one a Bad Boys importer, the other a not-all-that-well-known actor, were sashaying arm-in-arm-in-arm down the corridor past the boudoir doors.

“—the Sun King’s?”

“—too retro—”

“I’ll place my bet on the sauna, Monique, what about you?”

“—the tree house—?”

“—missing one Jane—”

“Don’t you have
any
interests that aren’t prurient, Eric?”

“—the dungeon—”

“—what kind of boys do you think we are—?”

Eric leered at her languidly. “Give me a week and I’ll think of one,” he told her. “Don’t you have any that are?”

“—just a big enough overbid to stick them with the contract—”

It had taken Monique Calhoun less time to learn the simple command structure than it had to outlast Eric Esterhazy’s smarmy attempts to seduce her via voyeurism; in fact, she supposed a reasonably intelligent chimpanzee wouldn’t have taken much longer.

“—a smile like the Mona Lisa with nothing but hard vacuum behind it—”

“—cruel, Terry, really cruel—”

So the so-called technician Eric had summoned when he finally left her alone in the computer room was probably a minder who needed to know about as much about the equipment as she did about quantum mechanics to do the job.

“—tornadoes, more like superheated thermals, not a true atmospheric vortex—”

“—fits the model though—”

“—if no one’s looking too closely—”

At first, Monique had played along with the charade, calling out locations on the boat, and letting the “tech” enter them with the keyboard.

“—think they’re telling us everything—”

“—only what serves the
client’s
interests, Jean-Luc—”

But it soon became obvious that she could do just as well or better with the boat schematics and the cursor herself. And if her suspicions needed any confirmation, she got it from the way Eric’s minder raised no objection at all to handing over the controls, quite out of character for the techie type.

“—desperation, if you ask me, they’ve sucked the Lands of the Lost dry—”

“—still money to be made adjusting to the local adjustment, always will be—”

What was
not
obvious, upon reflection, was what she was supposed to be doing here, how she was supposed to do it, or why.

So she had learned to operate the surveillance equipment, but what was she supposed to be looking for? And even if she
knew
what she was looking for, how was she going to find and record it in this chaos of images and sound from hundreds of cameras and microphones?

And why me, anyway?

“—like dogs and cats, the nastiest backstage atmosphere I’ve ever seen—”

“—didn’t seem to hurt the production, though—”

She was supposed to be here running Bread & Circuses VIP services, not playing Mata Hari for Mossad. What would happen if she told Avi Posner just that? To piss off and let her do her real job?

But Monique knew in the pit of her stomach that it would not be a smart career move to try to find out. Meaning she was
afraid
to find out. Meaning she was over her head in waters she had never had a desire to swim in.
Political
waters, her grandparents’ waters, the Hot and Cold War.

“—a lot worse at the turn of the millennium, everything from flying saucer cults to the Second Coming—”

“—Jesus or Elvis—?”

“—both, and half of them didn’t know which one played the guitar—”

Monique had never considered herself a political person, whatever that might still mean in this largely post-sovereign world. From what she had seen in her travels, patriotism, emotional allegiance to a geographical or ethnic identity, sovereign or semi-sovereign, living or dead, was the hobgoblin of mesmerized minds.

“—the central Sahara, Kansas, Australia, need deserts to make it work—”

“—and the hottest spots to make it plausible—”

Her only true allegiance was to Bread & Circuses, the syndic of which she was a citizen-shareholder, and that wasn’t political in the bad old bug-brained sense. That was a confluence of her individual and its collective self-interest. That was enlightened syndicalism.

Never be a citizen of anything in which you would not want to hold shares.

“—most beautiful country left on the planet, and a climate to die for now that the rainfall’s under control—”

“—for
who
to die for is the usual question, White Man—”

So her heart was not made of emerald-green stone. So she had seen far too much of the Lands of the Lost not to feel True Blue inside. But that was
conscience
, wasn’t it, not politics?
Idealism
, if you wanted to get sloppy about it.

“—used by artists and scientists and mystics to enhance their consciousness—”

“—and brain-burn cases to get wasted—”

Something that was not an obvious feature of the revenant capitalist corporations displaying their climatech wares in the Grand Palais. Cool this place down, heat that one up, cloud cover here, burn it away from orbit there—their only allegiance was to what they had called in the age of capitalism the sacred bottom line. They did it for the money.

“—never been so disgusted in all my life—”

“—de gustibus non vomitorium, my dear—”

Big Blue was a mercenary outfit.

Everyone knew that.

Didn’t they?

So what does that make me?

Just a cog in the gearing of the Big Blue Machine. A pawn in some game I don’t even understand. Upon which the fate of the Earth might hang. Or just a lot of fat contracts.

Do I really want to know?

Does it matter?

Not really, Monique realized sourly, because either way it leaves me right where I already am.

The choice had never been hers to make.

This was politics.

And like it or not she was in it.

“Summon Prince Eric to key me out of here,” she told her faux-techie minder. “I do believe I need a breath of fresh air.”

GIVEN THE MEDIA SPOTLIGHT TURNED ON THE United Nations Annual Conference On Climate Stabilization by the sudden advent of the so-called white tornadoes and the obvious self-interest of Bread & Circuses and the client in turning it up even higher than such a harbinger of planetary doom might naturally inspire, Monique Calhoun was prepared for the pandemonium that greeted her as she arrived at the Grand Palais for the emergency plenary session of UNACOCS.

There was a large and raucous crowd of demonstrators on the Avenue Churchill sidewalk across from the Grand Palais, held back by Force Flic horsemen, and waving placards bearing such slogans as
COOL THE EARTH NOW!
,
STOP CONDITION VENUS!
, and
A BLUE WORLD OR NONE!
though mercifully neither
REPENT NOW!
nor
THE END IS NIGH!
”

What Monique had not quite been prepared for was such
well-organized
pandemonium.

Not only were the placards slickly printed, they seemed limited to about half a dozen slogans, and although the color of the type varied, the print font did not. There were even computer-enhanced stills from the only extant TV footage of a white tornado.

The
same
still cloned dozens of times.

The entrance to the Grand Palais itself was being kept clear by a functional semicircle of flics on foot armed with electric wands, but the horsemen holding back the crowd across the street were Garde Républicain in full fancy kit—plumed steel helmets, cloaks, costume swords—available for ceremonial occasions only at a hefty premium.

The gutter itself was jammed with camera crews who threatened to outnumber the demonstrators, and although it was a bright sunny afternoon, they turned on brilliant white shooting lights to herald the entry of major players, cuing shouting, screaming, and pro forma surging against the Force Flic lines, and pro forma gooses with electric wands by the flics, who made a pro forma show of displeasure. Even Monique got her share of eye-killing glare and incoherent shouting as her pass got her inside.

The vast trade show floor, on the other hand, was eerily empty of people, even camera crews, except for those streaming through the exhibits toward the makeshift auditorium and the guards at the canvas enclosure hiding the mysterious whatever.

The atmosphere inside the Grand Palais was oppressively grim and electric. It took Monique a long moment to realize that this was at least in part due to a deliberately created visual special effect.

The smart glass panels of the roof had been adjusted so that the bright blue sky outside became the sinister luminescent gray of an impending thunderstorm in which the sun was bleached but undimmed to roughly simulate a schematic version of the furnace vortex of a white tornado.

And when you entered the makeshift auditorium itself, your eye was immediately drawn to a loop of video footage of the real thing cycling on the big screen behind the stage:

Mirage-shimmering desert that could’ve been the Sahara or central Australia or Nevada or the sere empty waste at any low-latitude continental heartland under a bleached-out cloudless sky. In the middle distance, a whirling white maelstrom abruptly rises from the desert floor, corkscrewing upward, sucking sand and rock with it, rising up into the stratosphere for all the camera eye can tell, persists for a minute or so, then like footage of the birth of a conventional tornado run backward, disappears
upward
into the empty sky.

And again, and again, and again, endlessly.

By all accounts, the white tornadoes were quite transient, at least so far, and occurred only in the hottest of hot spots long since all-but-abandoned by humans, so this brief footage shot by a scientific expedition who had chanced to be on the scene of one was all there was.

But there had been anecdotal accounts of distant sightings. And satellite instruments had picked up a few of the white tornadoes from on high. And measured their temperature and internal wind velocities.

The white tornadoes seemed to be superheated columns of air, monster thermal updrafts that developed a vortex whirl as they rose through the atmosphere, then, cooled by the upward expansion, destabilized at their base and disappeared skyward.

That was about as much as was known about the white tornadoes. As to what was causing them to appear now, how many there had been, whether the phenomenon might continue, what might happen next, there were a thousand theories, all of which when translated into screaming news headers came out: “CONDITION VENUS! END OF THE WORLD!”

“End of the World” or not, however, Jean-Luc Tri made no hypocritical attempt to hide his glee when Monique reached the reserved Bread & Circuses seats in the otherwise standing-room-only auditorium.