This Other Eden (18 page)

‘Exactly,
sir. In every case we’ve heard today, the Natura people were on the spot before
even the emergency services. I’ve been studying the files, sir. It’s happened
numerous times; nuclear meltdowns, toxic leaks, Dodo syndromes, conveniently
placed disasters occurring where no one could have predicted them, and with no
one left to say what happened
—‘

‘Schwartz,
that’s what happens with disasters, they pop up and they kill the people who
are around.’

‘And
every time Natura are there to extract the maximum propa
—

‘Are
you saying these people are being tipped off? That these well-meaning and
highly-respected greenies are somehow being
used
by nastier, more
sinister, less principled people?’

‘I
think it’s possible, sir.’

‘Who?’

‘Mother
Earth, sir,’ said Judy firmly. ‘They were definitely present on the Natura ship
that approached the stricken tanker. I know, I encountered an activist on
board. We’ve heard today from other agents who have detected a covert presence
at similar disaster scenes. Agent Thompson,’ Judy addressed a colleague sitting
behind him, ‘is it not true that Mother Earth were present at the scene of the
most recent Five Mile Island meltdown?’

‘Of
course they were, it’s in my report,’ said Thompson testily. ‘It was they who
first alerted us to the leakage. They discovered it.’

‘Oh,
they “discovered” it, did they? Isn’t that rather convenient?’ said Judy.
‘Sir, I believe we may be facing the nastiest piece of black propaganda in
history.’

‘OK,
that’s lunch,’ said Maw, closing his file.

As
people began to leave the room, Judy approached his boss. ‘Something strange is
happening, I swear it. If I could just infiltrate them, get inside the
organisation. Please. I’ve made numerous requests.’

‘I   know
that, Schwartz, it’s me that keeps knocking them back Listen, Judy,’ said Maw,
for a moment trying to be nice.

‘You’re
keen, I like that, but you’re not a cool, glamorous spy and you never will be.
You’re a shitty little assessment officer whose job is to compile shitty little
assessments. That’s it, no more. Now in words of one syllable, get the fuck out
of my face.’

Despite
his best intentions, Maw just simply was not very good at being nice.

LFS.

The next day, Judy’s luck
changed. He was summoned to Maw’s office and shown a series of photos of the
recent Mother

Earth
raid on the roof of the DigiMac Studios.

‘Yes, I
read about that,’ Judy admitted. ‘Pretty audacious stuff, eh? The leader
escaped via a birthday cake, didn’t she?’

‘Yes,
she did,’ Maw replied. ‘And we’re getting a lot of heat to make an arrest. The
studio wants blood. It’s getting sued by just about everybody who was at the
damn restaurant. There’s a full LFS developing.’

‘That
bad, huh?’ Judy was impressed.

LFS or
Litigation Frenzy Syndrome could leave families and communities divided, it
could destroy vast corporations, it could leave grand and respected
institutions broken in the dust. Studies had suggested that, left unchecked,
LFS could eventually develop into civil war. LFS was, however, always checked
eventually, due to the first law of legal dynamics. The first law of legal
dynamics states that litigation will expand to absorb the amount of money
available; a corollary of this law clearly being that all litigation will cease
when the money runs out.

The LFS
which was consuming the DigiMac Studio, and hence causing so much concern to Maw,
was a textbook example. A potentially dangerous situation of some kind had
occurred, in this case, exposure to sunlight. Medically a very simple problem,
legally a potential minefield. The moment the first rays of light had fallen on
the beautiful people in the DigiMac commissary the anguished cry had gone up,
‘For God’s sake, somebody phone a lawyer.’

Within
minutes, the streets approaching the studio had been jammed with Rapid Response
Litigation Teams. Over the years this type of development had become a major
headache for the emergency services. It was not uncommon in the aftermath of an
accident for the fire and ambulance people to find themselves unable to get to
the scene because the roads were blocked with lawyers. As it happened, the
DigiMac disaster required no medical assistance because the UV exposure had
been so brief. This was great news for the law firms, it being recognised that
the absence of specific injury was a classic catalyst in the development of
LFS. With no actual physical problem to get in the way of vague speculation,
the leap to the fantastical was much more easily made.

The
first claims were obvious. Compensation would be required for the emotional
stress caused by the
potential
damage via exposure to sunlight. The
studio instantly recognised the danger it was in and mobilised its own damage
control teams to counterclaim, their assertion being that their reputation as a
responsible and caring employer was being irrevocably damaged by such wild
accusations. Also, that the mere fact of being beautiful and famous meant that
the litigants had set themselves up as terrorist targets, so in real terms, the
attack had been their fault and they should pay for the roof.

All
this had happened within minutes of the attack. A legal meltdown was occurring
even before Rosalie had escaped from the building. Faced with the studios
counter-attack, the original litigants hit back furiously. The second phase
began, as claims were made on behalf of the children of the litigants. Children
whose home life would be rendered dysfunctional by the suffering caused through
fear of their parents getting cancer. The logical knock-on from this, of
course, was phase three: representations made on behalf of the as yet unborn
and indeed unconceived offspring of the litigants, notional children whose
future existence would be adversely affected by the case, should they ever
materialise.

It was
the acceptance in the courts of the principle of cross-generational suffering
that made LFS such a terrifying phenomenon, because once it was accepted that a
hypothetical future child could be affected, then clearly so could future
grandchildren and indeed great-grandchildren. Presuming a reproductive rate of
two children per adult, a lawyer who extrapolated a mere ten generations into
the future could find him or herself representing over a thousand
hypothetically injured hypothetical parties, all of whose costs would be
awarded against the plaintiff should their case prevail. This was, of course,
presuming that the original litigant had only one family, something extremely
rare in Hollywood. Then, inevitably, there were all the claims from friends and
relatives (plus
their
future offspring) whose lives had also been
adversely affected due to stress caused by knowing somebody who might have been
exposed to dangerous sunlight.

All in
all, it was a classic case of Litigation Frenzy which, within a year or two,
would certainly destroy a mighty studio unless it could be contained. Obviously
the money would run out in the end, and the first law of legal dynamics would
apply, but that was scarcely a contingency to be desired. This was why an
arrest was required. If a conviction could be secured against a person or group
directly responsible for the outrage, then all other actions would go on hold
for fear of prejudicing the case. The trial with all its appeals and
counter-appeals would hopefully carry on long enough to dampen the worst
excesses of LFS, possibly extinguishing them altogether.

Target
.

‘So we need to make an
arrest,’ said Klaw.

‘How
can we arrest anyone? They got away. I mean, we’re the FBI. Investigation’s not
really our strong point, is it?’

‘Don’t
get smart with me, Schwartz. We know who one of them is.’ Judy was shown a
series of photos of a woman falling through a Biodome roof into a cake and then
running into the ladies’ lavatory.

‘We
took these stills from the security video tape.’

‘She’s
a bit blurred,’ said Judy, stating the obvious.

‘I know
that, jerk, but not when she comes out of the john.’ He held out another series
of pictures of a small, pale woman in a saucy little dress rushing out of the
ladies’.

‘That’s
her, she took the dress off a bimbo in the toilet.’

‘Very
clever.’

‘Sloppy
security work. In these situations the only way to avoid suspects escaping is to
shoot everybody. I tell these people till I’m blue in the puss, but do they
listen? Like hell they do.’

Judy
studied the photos.

‘She’s
a unit leader,’ Maw continued. ‘Agent Cruise was on to her but his cover was
blown.’

‘Yes, I
heard about that,’ confessed Judy. ‘You know, I think he rather blamed me.’

‘Of
course he blamed you, you were the briefing officer.’

‘Yes,
and I also sabotaged his parents’ gene pool, so that they’d give birth to a
complete dickhead.’

‘Shut
up, Schwartz, and stick to the point. The girl’s Irish. She works out of the
Dublin Natura office. We’ve had her marked for a year or so, always hoped if we
tailed her we might get something on Jurgen Thor. But now we’ve got to bust
her. DigiMac and the city want an arrest, so the chick gets thrown to the
scheisters.’

‘You do
know that we’re not allowed to bust people in Ireland, don’t you, sir?’ Judy
had often noticed a tendency in certain Federal agencies to presume that since
America was the world’s policeman then the planet was their precinct and US law
applied.

‘Yes, I
know that we can’t bust people in Ireland, you little fuck!’ Maw replied. ‘But
we have an extradition treaty with Europe on terrorism. The Garda will arrest
her and hand her over to you for escort back to the US.’

‘Why
me?’ asked Judy.

‘Because
she’s a cute little girl, concerned for the planet, and we are the FBI which is
slang for Satan to the liberal press. If she gets off a plane in cuffs with
some big hairy thug bearing down on her,
we
look like the bullies even
though
she’s
the terrorist. I was going to send a woman, but then I
thought, no, Judy’s the one. Christ, you’re such a nerdy little shit, people
will feel sorry for you.’

‘Thank
you, sir. That’s a lovely thing to say.’

Judy
decided on this occasion to let what was clearly a palpable bit of nerdism go
unchallenged. For he could see that, if he played his cards right, he would get
what he wanted; a chance to infiltrate Mother Earth.

Chapter
Thirteen

Astonishing vegetables and other surprising
developments

City
of the night.

Dublin was a night-time
city. Not in the traditional, Parisian sense of an exotic world that occupies
the town after dark, but in a literal sense. Dublin had become a night-time
city. Most cities had. It was all a question of money. If a municipality could
afford orbital filters like Up-Town LA, or if they had the money to enclose
their pavements in BioTubes, then some semblance of traditional day-time
activity could be maintained. But Dublin had never been rich, and so most
activities now took place at night. It had begun gradually. For years people
had simply put up with the inconvenience of ozone depletion. As the sun’s rays
became ever more deadly they had dodged from doorway to doorway and borrowed
each other’s BioBrellas, perhaps having their pores blocked as a special treat
at Christmas.

Slowly,
however, all over the world, it began to dawn on people that there were a good
eight to ten hours in every day when the sun wasn’t around at all. When it was
possible to walk down a street or kick a fluorescent ball around a park without
fear (from the sun, that is — you still had to breathe, of course). At first,
in many western cities there was a strong objection to switching to night-time.
It was thought of as something that only mutated peasants did in far away
places.

‘We’d
look like a piss poor little fourth world cock-up country,’ people said to each
other, flattering themselves that they did not look that way already.

However,
good sense eventually prevailed, and shops and offices began to open after
sunset. The whole structure of the day changed. Twilight became morning, and
people started to go to work at around six in the afternoon. Their evening’s
leisure time began at about four a.m. and the pubs closed sometime towards
noon.

Of
course, the European Federation had been promising to locate orbital shields
for years, but they never did. Not over the cities, anyway. As always in
Europe, agriculture came first. Hundreds of billions of ECUs had been spent
sun-screening large patches of the countryside. This was so that quaint old
ladies dressed in black could continue to bend their backs in tiny, chemically
saturated fields whilst their husbands pissed it up in the local bar. In this
manner, traditional country life was maintained. Also, vast quantities of
semi-poisonous crops were produced that were then piled up into enormous food
mountains, whose only use was that they provided some shade.