This Other Eden (13 page)

‘That’s
a damn strange way to look at things. Who the hell are you, anyway? I don’t
know you.’ The scientist turned to his companion. ‘Do you know this guy?’

‘I do.’

There
was a voice behind Judy which he thought he recognised. Turning round, he
found himself facing an old adversary, a man whom he had first encountered
during a Mother Earth blockade of a leaking nuclear facility.

‘Hello
Pierre,’ Judy said. ‘How are you? Any tumours yet?’ The man called Pierre was
in no mood for comradely reminiscences.

‘You
have no jurisdiction here, Schwartz,’ he said, making no attempt to conceal his
hostility.

‘We’re
in US coastal waters, Pierre. Sorry,’ Judy reminded him.

Pierre
changed his tack, although not his manner.

‘Well,
you’ll get no co-operation from us… This man is an FBI agent!’ Pierre
loudly informed the scientists working on the deck. ‘Offer him no assistance,
answer no questions, show him nothing unless he produces a warrant.’

Judy
glanced around. Suddenly he was the focus of attention. Angry, hostile faces
glared at him wherever he looked.

‘I have
no warrant,’ he said. ‘This is a peaceful Natura protest ship, why would I need
one?’

‘Exactly,’
said Pierre.

‘So
what are Mother Earth terrorists doing here?’ Judy asked.

Pierre
did not reply. Instead, with calm deliberation he spat on the deck at Judy’s
feet.

The
scientist whom Judy had first approached spoke up. ‘A whole sea is dying, so
what do they do? They send the FBI. Brilliant.’ The man’s voice shook with
anger and contempt.

Judy
turned and walked away. He knew that he would learn nothing more, now that he
had been unmasked as an agent.

None
the less, his trip had not been wasted. He had made an important discovery:
Mother Earth terrorists were present at the scene of the disaster. Judy felt
they would have done better to keep themselves hidden.

Chapter
Ten

Holistic bullets,

robotic needles and

Cupid’s arrow

Script
Conference with God.

Nathan peered over the top
of his knees. He was in Plastic Tolstoy’s study, seated on quite the softest,
lowest couch he had ever encountered. It was like sitting in a luxuriously
cushioned hole. On the table in front of him stood a glass of fizzy water, but
he could not reach it, not without a rope to haul him out of the couch. His
shoulders were at a lower level than his knees and his head was sunk deep into
his chest. Where his neck had gone, Nathan did not know. He presumed it would reappear
when he emerged from the couch, should he ever find himself in a position to do
so. He did not need his neck at the moment, anyway. At the moment he cared for
neither neck nor water. All Nathan cared about was how Plastic was reacting to
his treatment.

This
was the biggest break it was possible to have. Nathan was past every hurdle,
every script reader, every consultant, every vice president in charge of
development. He was pitching direct to the man. It was unheard of. To pitch
direct to Plastic Tolstoy was a writer’s Holy Grail. This man owned the largest
communications empire on Earth. He commissioned more copy than everybody else
in advertainment put together. He took a direct personal interest in probably
no more than one in a thousand of the projects his companies developed for
production.

Writers
would plead to be allowed to compromise every artistic principle they ever had
just to eat in the same commissary as the lowliest of Plastic’s people. A few
years previously, before it was made illegal, some Harvard undergraduates had
isolated Shakespeare’s DNA and fast-grown another Bard of Avon. Plastic’s
office had not even bothered to return the guy’s call.

Nathan
watched nervously as the great man paced about. Plastic spoke without looking
up from the synopsis that Nathan had prevaricated over for so many lonely
nights in his hotel room.

‘So the
rat’s going to go eat the kid?’ he said.

‘Yes,’
said Nathan, ‘I thought that might make us care . in a warm way.’

‘You
want me to put a rodent carnivore about to orally defile a cute little girl on
prime-time?’

Nathan
sensed some criticism in Plastic’s tone.

‘Well,
I don’t know about orally defile… I mean . eat, yes.’

‘Did
your mother reject you?’ Plastic inquired with bitter sarcasm. ‘Were you denied
the breast? Is that where the sicko stuff started? You think a
rat
eating
a sweet little girl is not a defiling thing? You think that it is somehow
nice!’

The
combination of power and indignation was terrifying. Nathan sank so far into
his seat that he was in danger of disappearing altogether. Plastic towered over
him, shaking the few pathetic pages.

‘Here’s
an idea — why doesn’t the rat
screw
the kid first? Yeah, that’s right,
he could screw her,
then
eat her. Would that be sick enough for you?
Huh? What is it with you English guys? Is Disgusting Pervert on the syllabus at
Eton? Can’t you even pitch a script scenario without flaunting your
sado-masochistic paedophile obsessions?’

Plastic
had been in California for about a thousand years, but he still spoke New York
Media Jewish. Rhetorical questions and heavy-handed sarcasm were his
conversational armoury and he was always at war. He did not really mean to
hurt. In fact, what he really liked to do was amuse. Plastic loved to get a
laugh, and if none was forthcoming from his audience of cowering employees, he
was always happy to provide his own. He certainly had to do his own laughing in
this case, for Nathan could not laugh. He was too horrified, terrified and bent
double inside a couch.

‘We
don’t actually see the rat eat the girl,’ Nathan murmured. ‘It’s implied.’

‘Oh,
it’s
implied!!
I’m
so sorry,
Jeeves, old boy! I missed the
sub-text, don’t you know, what ho and pip-fucking-pip!’ Plastic’s English
accent was no less biting for the fact that it sounded about as English as the
Statue of Liberty.

‘Implied!
Don’t give me your fucking English fucking subtlety.’
He seemed almost in despair. ‘What are you? T S Eliot? You think a prime-time
vision bite gives you time to indulge your obscure pretensions? You think people
who clean cars and wait tables want to spend their precious leisure dollar
trying to work out some up-its-ass limey bullshit?’

Nathan
gulped in fear and confusion, something to be avoided when folded in half with
your ears resting on your shoulders and your knees forced against your chin. It
was an action almost certain to bring on the hiccups, and it did.

‘Why
stop there with your pretentious fucking subtlety? How about this, how about we
don’t even
have
a little girl?’ said Plastic, who, as always, liked to
milk any comic theme he found himself developing till its tits squeaked. ‘Maybe
we should have a packet of Pop Tarts that
represents
a little girl, so
ten years from now, when we’re all on welfare because our product stank, some
fag English professor from UCLA can tell the world that the whole thing was
actually a masterpiece, if only we coulda worked out what was
implied!’

‘Hic.’

‘What,
are you going to puke on my couch now?’ asked Plastic.

‘No, I
have hiccups,’ said Nathan, and with a monumental effort he rocked himself
forward far enough to grab the bottle of water on the table before plunging
back into the bottomless couch.

‘Like,
I want to hear about your hiccups. Like that
really
interests me. You
know what the Claustrosphere advertainment budget is each year, Nathan?’
Plastic asked. ‘Twenty billion minimum, in the US alone. Work out how many
dollars just got spent so you could tell me about your damn digestive problems.
We brought you here… we sent a
limo
to the damn airport! So you
could pitch. So pitch!’

‘Uhm…
hic… do you think perhaps, hic, we might show something of the little girl’s
fate, but tastefully, you know, avoiding the more graphic details.’

“‘Do I
think perhaps hic”!’ Plastic quoted Nathan with such withering sarcasm that all
the pot plants died. ‘Do
I
think!
I’m
not the damn writer!
You’re
the damn writer. I’m just the moron who
pays
the damn writer.’
Plastic punched his intercom. ‘Sarah! You know that outrageously inflated sum
Nathan Hoddy’s agent demanded for her client’s pathetic services? Get her on
the line and tell her since Mr Hoddy seems to desire me to do half his work
would she object to me taking half his fee.’

Nathan hiccupped
miserably.

‘You
think I’m being hard on you, don’t you? You think I’m being unnecessarily
negative,’ said Plastic.

Nathan
did not reply. He had nothing to say but hic.

‘You
want to see negative!’ barked Plastic. ‘This is negative.’ Suddenly Plastic
pulled open a drawer of his mighty desk and took out a gun. Nathan could not
have moved had he wanted to, being stuck in a couch as he was, but there was no
time anyway. It was over in a second. Plastic took two steps towards him,
pointed the gun into Nathan’s astonished face and fired. Three shots,
point-blank range. The gun flashed, the noise in the confined space was
deafening, the glass rattled as acrid smoke filled the room.

‘Have
they gone?’ Plastic inquired mildly.

Nathan
could not reply; you cannot talk when your heart is in your mouth.

‘The
hiccups, have they gone?’ Plastic asked again. ‘All that eerk-eerk-eerk was
making me nauseous. Thought I’d try this out on you.’

The gun
disappeared and in its place Plastic held a small tube with a switch on it.

‘It’s a
holographic projector,’ Plastic explained. ‘We’re going to give them away at
gas stations. Look.’ He held the tube as if it was the butt of a pistol,
flicked the switch and the three-dimensional image of the pistol reappeared in
his hand. ‘Did it cure your hiccups?’

‘Yes,
they’ve gone,’ whispered Nathan.

‘OK,
let’s play some tennis.’

‘All
right,’ said Nathan, struggling out of the couch.

‘We’ll
play in the Claustrosphere.’

Play?
In the Claustrosphere? Play
tennis
in a Claustrosphere? Nathan thought
Plastic must mean table-tennis, but he didn’t. Set in the grounds of Plastic’s
house in Beverly Hills was quite the biggest Claustrosphere Nathan had ever
seen. In fact, it wasn’t really set in the grounds, it was the grounds.

‘Hey,
who wants a damn garden?’ Nathan said. ‘At least in a Claustrosphere your grass
don’t die.’

Nobody
likes it but what can you do?

They walked down the
connecting BioTube and through the EcoLock into the central dome.

Nathan
was stunned, he had never in his life encountered such opulence. The thing must
have covered well over four acres, and contained everything: living quarters,
gardens, a little stream. The air was fresh and sweet, birds chattered in the
upper reaches, butterflies fluttered over a small field of wheat, fish went
‘glop’ in the pond.

‘Of
course it’s all BioMechanically generated,’ Plastic explained. ‘A genuine
eco-cycle is impossible on such a small scale. This whole cycle is kept
functioning with sub-cellular protein concentrates and fast-grow organic
engineering. It’ll work for at least a hundred years though, so who’s
complaining? This is the kind of development that Mother Earth have been trying
to knock out for years. Stupid Luddite schmucks, always bombing the wrong
labs.’

Nathan
had of course been aware, as everyone who read a Sunday colour supplement was
aware, that BioSphere technology had improved; but he had not quite realised
how good it had got. Plastic’s dome made his and Flossie’s ancient old backyard
job look like exactly what it was: a poxy little eco-shelter. A bog standard
Eden Three, no frills. It had water rotation and a basic food cycle. It could
break down and reconstitute human waste and it could maintain a breathable
atmosphere. It had come with a free gift miniaturised bonsai tree rain forest,
but that was about its only luxury. Even the video library was manual … you
actually had to eject the micro-tapes yourself. Flossie and Nathan had debated
whether to purchase the optional day and night cycle, but had decided that they
couldn’t really afford it. Those eye guards you get for sleeping on aeroplanes
would be just as good anyway.

The
truth of the matter was that they had both been rather reluctant to buy a
Claustrosphere at all. They had not been the first of their friends to do it,
but they were not the last, either. They had, in fact, wrestled with their
consciences for about the average amount of time taken by most middle-class
liberal couples before buying one. Nathan often reflected that his generation
seemed to have spent its entire adult life sitting round dinner tables drinking
red wine, eating Tuscan bean soup, and trying to justify the morality of buying
a Claustrosphere.