Greenhouse Summer (22 page)

“But literate,” said Jean-Luc Tri.

“Is Chaos the condition of Lao’s Tao?”

“Third Force gibberish!” someone shouted from the audience, to general cries of agreement.

This seemed to bring Davinda back from somewhere.

“The . . . the results were not anticipated,” he stammered. “The initial iteration was only partial.”

“Get off!”

“The full implementation will not be demonstrated until—”

“Get him off!”

“Get him out of there!”

The learned audience now began to stamp its feet like a boorish soccer crowd. Lars Bendsten moved to the podium, put a gentle hand on Davinda’s shoulder.

“I didn’t know!” Davinda shouted.

Bendsten pulled at him rather less gently. And Davinda fairly roared, his voice now an eerie amalgam of his own and that of his strange computer-like alter-non-ego.

“All will be known when I become the Whirlwind’s Voice!”

And with that, John Sri Davinda, or whatever peyote demon from a fractured id had been seeking to possess him, or both, seemed to deflate like a collapsing balloon, leaving a gaunt, pathetic, and de-energized figure standing there facing the boos and catcalls, all too eager now to let the General Secretary lead him away.

Once again, Allison Larabee was called upon to speak after a lead-in that had galvanized a dozing audience and probably brought back much of the lost live coverage too.

Monique cast a suspicious eye at Jean-Luc Tri.

“Was
that
one of your scripts too?” she asked half-seriously.

Jean-Luc shook his head. “Don’t I wish!” he said.

“You can’t say I didn’t warn you,” Allison Larabee began unceremoniously. “My climate model predicted the onset of Condition Venus in roughly this time-frame and you responded with these conferences which only served to keep the world asleep. After all, Larabee’s climate model hasn’t discredited itself like all the others by failing to predict the usual microchanges only because it doesn’t try to. And nothing in the Condition Venus scenario’s happened yet. . . .”

Dr. Larabee turned to gaze up at the white tornado whirling behind her.

“Yet?” she repeated sardonically. “You wanted
yet
?” She gestured at the vortex. “Well here’s your
yet
!” she said.

She turned to regard the audience, or rather the cameras.

“For all you folks out there who haven’t been paying rapt attention to these conferences all these years or read the journals or downloaded my climate model and run it, I will tell you just what these so-called white tornadoes are,” she said.

Without taking her eyes off the cameras, she pointed up and back at the screen. “
That
is a transient superthermal updraft. Under certain newly natural conditions, where and when the surface reaches a superheated threshold, a vortex of superheated air rises upward until the cooling of its expansion destabilizes it.”

Larabee lowered her arm and leaned forward slightly.

“At present, they are transient and they occur only above the hottest spots on Earth,” she said. “Locales that were furnaces
before
the greenhouse warming even began. Locales which are now far hotter than the geological record for any place on this planet before
we
in our infinite wisdom began pumping carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide and heat into its atmosphere. Death Valley. The deep Australian Outback. The central Sahara. And so forth. Where the biomass approaches zero. Where the biochemistry with which the biosphere of the Earth evolved is no longer viable. Places which by any previous climatological criteria
are no longer part of this planet
.”

Monique shuddered, remembering that Libyan blimp ride.

Been there. Felt that.

“Am I saying that these places now resemble conditions on Venus?
Of course not! The Venusian surface is still over five times hotter. So what’s the problem? We’re nowhere near approaching the conditions of Venus, now are we?”

She looked away from the cameras at her fellow climatologists for a beat. “
Condition Venus
made a nice news header, didn’t it?” she said. “But they got the meaning wrong, now didn’t they?”

She turned back to the camera. “Condition Venus doesn’t really mean that the surface temperature of the Earth will rise to five hundred degrees centigrade by next Tuesday, or ever,” she said. “Condition Venus refers to what
happened
to Venus. A planet just about the size of the Earth, and certainly not six times closer to the sun, reputable astronomers used to imagine swamps and oceans beneath those clouds. But closer enough to the sun so that the temperature rose above a certain threshold, creating a natural greenhouse effect, and then . . .”

She suddenly slapped her palms together. “Wham!” she shouted. “It fed on itself, went exponential, and shot up to where it is now in a relative planetological eyeblink.”

She paused for a long moment of silence, then gazed back up at the vortex. “So what are these so-called white tornadoes telling us?”

She looked back at the camera and seemed to Monique to be attempting to put on, not too successfully, a folksy face.

“I’ll put it simply, so that anyone who’s ever boiled water to cook spaghetti in can understand it,” she said in a similar attempt at a grandmotherly voice.

“You know how nothing at all seems to be happening as the water heats up? You know how finally a few streams of bubbles start drifting up to the surface? And you watch, and you wait, and then you turn away in boredom. . . . And then when you turn around, the whole thing’s foaming and bubbling up and if you don’t turn it down it’s going to overflow and turn into steam!”

Dr. Allison Larabee cocked her head at the camera, no more foxy grandma now. “They say a watched pot never boils?” she said.

Once again, she turned to look up at the white tornado. “Well, we’ve been watching ours for quite a while now. And it’s starting to. Don’t you think it’s damn well time we turned down the stove?”

“Fakes, and what you’ve just seen proves it,” said Eric Esterhazy. “The white tornadoes are
disneys
. Literally done with mirrors.”

He turned off the monitor and the video deck, then slid the false bookshelf over the equipment to convert his office back into the faux-library of a faux nineteenth-century British nobleman, hoping that the clubby effect would give him more weight in this rare direct man-to-man with Eduardo Ramirez in the absence of Mom.

“Can I get you a drink, Eduardo?” he said, moving toward the bar. He fantasized offering sherry or brandy, but that would be going way over the top. Besides which, he lacked the traditional cigars to go with it.

“Tequila in the Mexican style if you can manage that,” Eduardo said, as if changing the mode to match his white linen suit, so reminiscent of Mom’s cherished Floridian retro gangster chic.

Eric poured him his tequila, put it on a plate with a lemon slice and a saltcellar, took a snifter of old Calvados himself, put the drinks down on the little round coffee table between two big leather armchairs, sat down across from Eduardo, and waited for him to react to what he had seen.

And waited.

“Well, Eduardo . . . ?” he finally said.

“Well, Eric, I certainly agree that these recordings are valuable material,” Eduardo Ramirez said. “The operative question is, to whom?”

“To whom?” said Eric. “To us, who else? To Bad Boys.”

“Then what do you recommend we do with them?”

“Sell them, what else?”

“To be sure, but to whom?” Eduardo wagged a cautionary finger. “Think carefully before you advise the obvious. Consider the larger ramifications. Yes, there are news organizations and scandal sites who would pay well for this, but by
their
modest standards, not by ours. Not nearly enough to cover what we would lose by selling it to them.”

“Lose?” said Eric. “What would we lose?”

“Give your brain some isometric exercise, Eric,” Eduardo said, softening it with an urbane little smile. “As your mother might somewhat less gently say.”

Eric thought.

The first thing that he thought, and sourly, was that going directly to Eduardo with this coup had not kept Mom, even in her physical absence, entirely out of the loop.

Eric had never really felt uncomfortable dealing with his mother’s lover as his superior in the syndic, or at least so he told himself, and he knew that if it hadn’t been for Mom’s connections with Eduardo and unnamed others like him, he wouldn’t be where he was today.

But he
was
where he was today.

While it might have been Mom who had made him a Bad Boy, he was also a big boy now. He had made his bones. He was master of
La Reine de la Seine
, if perhaps in name only. And now he believed he had contributed something major to the fortunes of the syndic. The making of another set of bones, and perhaps a more important one. One that would establish him as more than a front man. More than his mother’s son. As a real player.

And it would seem that Eduardo was challenging him to think like one.

Well then . . .

“If these recordings were broadcast, everyone would know they were made on
La Reine de la Seine
 . . .” Eric said slowly. “Meaning that everyone would know that the boat was wired. Meaning we’d lose the whole operation. . . .”

Eduardo merely nodded, smiled, salted the back of his hand.

“So the recordings are worthless to us . . . ?”

Eduardo shook his head, licked his hand, knocked back the tequila, bit into the lemon slice.

“Selling to any syndic that would make them public would be a loser then . . . ?”

“You are beginning to comprehend, Eric. . . .”

“But
threatening
to sell them to the media . . .”

Eduardo put on an exaggerated show of moral outrage. “Why Eric, that would be . . .
blackmail
 . . . ” he said. “You’re a . . . Bad Boy.”

Eric grinned. Then frowned.

“But it would be a bluff,” he said. “And Big Blue would have to know it . . . so . . . so . . . ?”

Eric realized, in no little confusion and consternation, that he appeared to have taken this train of logic to its inevitable unfortunate
conclusion. “So we can’t do that either . . . ?” he said unhappily.

“Not necessarily,” said Eduardo. “Consider what Bad Boys loses if we bluff and Big Blue calls. To preserve our honor and credibility, we are constrained to sell the recordings to the media at the cost of losing
La Reine
as a data sponge. A net loss, true, but less than catastrophic . . . to
us
.”

He smiled, and this time Eric could see the gleam of the predatory teeth behind it.

“Now consider what
Big Blue
loses if that happens. The conference they desperately financed to revive their sagging fortunes turns into a fiasco. Having faked the white tornadoes and been exposed, they can never credibly cry wolf again, even with a real one at the door. The True Blue cause itself is discredited and the Hot and Cold war is decided in favor of the Greens. If you were playing their hand, would you dare to call?”

“No way,” said Eric.

“And how much would you say they’d pay to prevent such a terminal outcome?”

Now it was Eric’s turn to make with the feral grin, one top predator to another. “Just about anything short of everything they have.”

“You’re learning, Eric,” Eduardo Ramirez said, and Eric felt a boyish glow of pride.

“So we go ahead and do it!” he said. “Send them a copy of the recordings!”

Eduardo Ramirez sighed. “Your mother’s son,” he said. “A woman of many virtues. But patience is not among them, as you may have noticed from time to time.”

The flush that Eric now felt was far from pleasant.

“Being young is nothing to be ashamed of, Eric,” Eduardo said gently. “We all must endure it, after all.”

This did not exactly tranquilify Eric’s mood.

“I don’t see what
patience
has to do with any of this,” he said irritably.

“So I’ve noticed,” Eduardo said. “But consider. Is the value of these recordings likely to deteriorate with time? Might not their value
increase
if we
didn’t
use them to thwart Big Blue’s schemes and they somehow succeeded in using the UNACOCS to gain major new financing?
The more money they have, the more money they have to lose, the more money they would be willing and able to pay to avoid losing it.”

“Oh,” said Eric.

Eduardo Ramirez nodded and favored him with a smile. “Some assets appreciate with time,” he said. “And all assets appreciate with knowledge.”

“Knowledge . . . ? Of what?”

“In this case, of what is really behind the moves the Big Blue Machine has been making. They spend money they cannot really afford to move UNACOCS to Paris and hire Bread & Circuses to promote it. They perhaps enlist Dr. Larabee and the Papal Legate in their scheme. They simulate the white tornadoes. But why?”

“
Why
? To create a panic and trick Green money into financing their Blue operations.”