Greenhouse Summer (44 page)

Eric gave Mom a harder kick.

“And I probably wouldn’t believe it if he did,” Monique shot back rather woodenly and sat down beside her.

“Takes one to know one, hon,” said Mom.

Eric groaned inwardly, already feeling the tense ennui of the blah-blah
to come and wishing it over before it had ever begun, the weight of the two pistols somehow having become both insistent and strangely comforting.

Wasn’t it some American president who had said, upon sending in the riot troops with the truncheons and tear gas, “If we’re going to have a bloodbath, let’s have it
now
”?

“. . . you’re the white tornado lady, aincha?”

“. . . it’s my climate model that predicted it, if that’s what you mean, Mrs. . . . er . . . Princess . . . what
do
you call a Prince’s mother?”

“Countess, hon!”

“Well, then Countess Esterhazy—”

“Countess No-Accountess, hah, hah, hah!”

Monique found the banality of the table talk horridly surreal under the circumstances.

“. . . you’re the one that walked out of the conference, right Allie?”

“. . . she made an important statement . . .”

“. . . and then walked right back in!”

“. . . only as far as parties!”

Monique found herself wanting to make a quick exit with Eric and Davinda so that she could get it all over with, yet at the same time unwilling or unable to do anything to effect it, perversely wishing this boring blather would go on forever so she would never have to.

“. . . I did not come here for the parties, Mr. Marenko.”

Monique noticed that Eric had been keeping his mouth shut during these endless few minutes, and now he was trying to send her exit signals with his eyebrows and glances in the direction of Davinda, who, equally out of the conversation and then some, was passing the time mechanically slurping up vodka, though fortunately the Marenkos had not yet laid out the designer dust.

“. . . but as long as you are, huh . . . ?”

“. . . nothing wrong with free drink and food!”

“Despite current appearances, UNACOCS is a serious conference,” Allison Larabee said frostily.

“That you walked out of, Allison,” said Dr. Braithwaite.

“And returned to when the lateness of the planetary hour became evident!”

“Famous white tornadoes again!”

“A little convenient, da . . . ?” said Stella Marenko.

“What do you mean by that?” Larabee said ingenuously.

“Walk-out, tornadoes, return,” said Ivan Marenko. “Like script.”

“Or coincidence,” said Dr. Braithwaite, gallantly coming to her defense.

“One is event, two is coincidence,” said Ivan. “Three is—”

“Pattern,” said John Sri Davinda in a loud toneless voice.

It was the first word he had said, and the effect was to freeze the conversation.

“When two forces oppose . . .” Davinda went on in that flat voice. And then paused, as his blink rate went way up, and something flickered wanly behind his dead eyes, and he completed the moldy old aphorism in a voice that at least hinted at humanity. “A . . . a Third Force emerges. . . .”

“Third Force claptrap!” Pereiro groaned.

Eric caught Monique’s eye and mimed even more insistently with his eyebrows for an egress.

“What
are
you on about, John?” Allison Larabee said.

“Chaos,” Davinda said hollowly.

“You’ve incorporated chaos theory into your climate model?”

“Chaos is not a theory,” Davinda said. “Chaos is real.”

“So I’ve noticed,” said Eric’s mother.

“But useless as a predictive parameter,” Larabee said. “By definition.”

“I do not predict.”

“Your climate model isn’t predictive? Then what—”

“I am.”

“You stink, therefore you am?” cracked Eric’s mother.

Everyone groaned but John Sri Davinda.

“Or not,” he said.

“What next, Hamlet, alas poor Yorick, perchance to dream, to be or not to be, that is the question?”

The effect on Davinda was startling. For about thirty seconds, his
blink rate went way up again and his face writhed through a series of contortions that Monique could not identify as any recognizable human expressions.

Then it abruptly stopped.

His face smoothed out into an expressionless mask. His blink rate dropped. He stared straight ahead, stopped talking entirely, and began drinking vodka again as if nothing at all had happened. It was as if someone had abruptly changed the control program in an audioanimatronic robot.

It was utterly weird. It was certainly a total conversation stopper.

It was also, Monique knew, the perfect exit cue.

But the weight of the gun in her purse made her reluctant to take it.

“I do believe Dr. Davinda has had a bit too much again,” Eric said suavely, gently removing the vodka glass from Davinda’s hand. “If you’ll give me a hand, Monique, we’d better take him to someplace quiet.”

Davinda made no resistance as Eric helped him to his feet, nor could Monique as she rose to assist him. Each of them holding the climatologist lightly by an elbow, they walked Davinda out of the bar.

John Sri Davinda moved unknowingly and to all appearances uncaringly toward his fate like a good little amusement-park robot running on destiny’s rails.

And so, it seemed to her, or so perhaps she was merely trying to convince herself, did Monique Calhoun.

“Open sez me,” said Eric Esterhazy, activating Ignatz. When the interface personality menu came up, Eric hesitated.

He needed Ignatz to control the machineries but he really didn’t want a virtual kibitzer watching over his shoulder as
he
watched over Monique Calhoun’s shoulder.

So he did what he rarely did and chose the neutral computer voice and affectless AI personality.

Nor did he want any distractions, so he blanked all the video screens save the one displaying the interior of the virtuality boudoir and another to display menus.

And come to think of it . . .

“Can you cancel the automatic recording?” he asked Ignatz, something he had never done or thought to. But making a recording of a prospective hit did not seem like sane procedure.

“Affirmative.”

“Cancel recording.”

“Recording canceled.”

The virtuality boudoir was a single englobing softscreen. The smooth texture of the liquid-crystal plastic couldn’t be changed nor the pillowlike kinesthetics, but since the visuals could be any mix of images in any database or realtime feed in the world and likewise for sound, the choices were for all practical purposes unlimited.

Of course the boudoir’s use was usually limited to
one
practical purpose, and for those clients whose imaginations were also limited or intimidated by such a surfeit of choice, there was an extensive menu of preprogrammed erotic venues and scenarios.

But since erotic arousal was hardly the purpose of the current exercise, Eric was going to have to wing it.

The default value for the virtuality boudoir was a verdant green lawn under a cloudless schematic tropical sky the color of impending sunset, with soft faraway breakers, and occasional grace notes of mellifluous birdsong.

That was where Monique Calhoun and John Sri Davinda were now, seated facing each other in a padded depression in the lawn quite like the so-called conversation pits which had been à la mode around the sixth decade or so of the previous century.

And indeed, for once, conversation
was
what was intended.

Though not occurring.

Davinda sat there gazing blankly at Monique in what appeared to be either yogic meditation or an attempt to engage her in a schoolyard staring contest. And although the cameras were hidden, Monique kept looking around with an impatient expression as if trying to find one to play to.

This seemed to Eric to be a clear request to get on with it already, which he himself was eager enough to do. The first order of business was obviously to rouse Davinda from his stupor. But how?

“Stimulant menu,” he told Ignatz.

A long list of chemical names began to scroll down the menu
screen in alphabetical order. Eric knew next to nothing of organic chemistry or psychopharmacology; just enough to know that, thanks to a skin-contact carrier called DMSO, he could introduce just about anything into the bloodstreams of whoever was in any of the boudoirs via the ventilation system.

This would not do.

“Rank in order of mental stimulation.”

The names on the menu rearranged themselves but remained incomprehensible.

“Eliminate everything with hallucinogenic properties.”

More electronic card shuffling.

Eric shrugged. “Pump in the top three on the list, optimum dosage,” he said.

And now for the visuals and sound . . . something a bit more stimulating too . . .

The tropical sunset sky swiftly darkened as a front of towering black clouds moved in with surreal speed to a drumroll of approaching thunder, and though Monique Calhoun knew that the virtuality effects in the boudoir were limited to sight and sound, it seemed she could smell an ozone keenness in the air, feel her senses heightened, a tension building within her, as if at any moment blue sparks might shoot out from her fingertips.

FLASH!

CRACK!

An impossibly mighty bolt of lightning lit up the sky like a thermonuclear klieg light, followed by an earsplitting blast of thunder fit to wake the dead.

“Jesus Christ!”

“I am not him.”

Or even John Sri Davinda.

The climatologist’s eyes now blazed with a cold electric fire and he seemed to have been jolted out of his nonverbal daze to the point where he was at least capable of spouting gibberish.

But Monique found herself terminally out of patience with this shit. “Oh really?” she shot back, her nerves twanging. “Why I’ll bet you’re not Buddha or Vishnu or Elvis either!”

Beats of thunder became a crazy rhythm track as the black thunderheads above strobed with stuttery flashes of lightning, turning this disney of a storm into a mad meteorological discotheque.

“I don’t give a bayou rat’s ass who you think you are, you asshole,” Monique found herself gabbling with a crazed energy and passion to match the unnatural elements, “and I’m up to the eyeballs with mystical bullshit and Third Force obfuscation! You tell me what’s going to happen when you plug what’s left of your deep-fried brain into that climate model right now! Or . . . Or else . . . or else . . .”

Monique found her hands balled into furious fists, and clean out of “or elses” save the ultimate one throbbing heavily in the purse beside her.

“Condition Chaos,” said John Sri Davinda.

“SHIT!” Monique bellowed into the storm in red-hot outrage.

Eric was forcefully reminded that whatever he pumped into the boudoir affected both Davinda and Monique Calhoun by observing how the stuff that had done no better than minimally rouse the climatologist from his semicomatose funk had turned Monique into a raving rug-chewing monster.

Now what?

If he turned Monique
down
, he’d likely turn Davinda
off
again.

He needed help.

And if the only help he could get was virtual, well . . .

Sighing, Eric pumped up Ignatz’s personality interface menu, and booted up “Mom.”

“What do I do now?” he demanded.

“Me you’re asking, kiddo? I’m not even here. The only advice available from this simulation is operational.”

“Then how do I keep Monique Calhoun from going over the top without having Davinda drop back down through the bottom? I can’t cut the stimulants, can I?”

“Take the edge off with a hit of mescaline doped with psilocybin. Ditch the storm und drang effects and play ’em a Himalayan high.”

Eric was rather vague on just what Ignatz was suggesting through the cryptic interface of Mom, but whatever it was, he didn’t have a better idea.

“Do it,” he said.

Abruptly the sky cleared to a perfect cerulean blue subtly purpled by lofty altitude. Monique found herself surrounded by the snowcapped peaks of a range of mighty rugged mountains that rose from verdant valleys far below but failed to attain her even loftier altitude.

She sat facing John Sri Davinda upon an oriental rug that magically insulated them from the cold of the icy ultimate pinnacle upon which they perched. Or not-so-magically, considering that the air temperature inside the boudoir had not been altered. In the background, a sitar and tabla played, backed by an acoustic bass and sampled surf-sound.

Welcome to the Hindu Kitsch! Monique thought sardonically.

Still, kitsch or not, she had to admit that the effect was clarifying. At least to the point where she was able to realize that one would not be likely to extract anything coherent from a lunatic by raving at him like one yourself.