by Hammond, Ray
They had been talking for two days and all around them were huge maps propped on ancient easels on which new boundary lines and corridors had been drawn, appropriately in red ink.
At the head of the great room, to the right of a vast black-marble and gilt fireplace, was a recently installed Holo-Theater. It had been a gift from Tye Business Communications to mark Thomas Tye’s first state visit to Russia and it also provided the APU with the opportunity to scrub these ancient rooms electronically and install the necessary white-noise generators and other anti-surveillance devices.
Tye had been counselled that such blustering over the cession of this territory was likely to go on for some time and he was struggling to be patient with the brabble. He slumped in his chair, resting his head in his hand as he listened, his right ankle supported on his left knee, and his loafer-shod foot twitching furiously. Unusually, he was thinking about his son.
It was a big deal for the Russian people, that was clear. Over one and a half million square miles – almost eighty million dessiatine – of the republics of the Central and Eastern Siberian Plain was involved. Leasing such a vast tract of land to the Tye Corporation took monumental political nerve and the absolute willingness of the Russian federal army to back such an arrangement. For that reason General Yevgeny Padorin, Supreme Chief of the Federation’s armed forces, had been included in the party that visited Hope Island and he was now a prominent member of the Russian delegation sitting on the other side of the table. Although he didn’t yet know it, he too would become the proud owner of a new holiday property in a uniquely sunny area of the Baltic, along with the presidents of the two vast, poverty-stricken and corrupt republics affected.
But the benefits for the immense mother country were incalculable. Of the one hundred and sixty million people that made up Russia’s population, only three million moujiks – most of the Tchuktchi, Koryak, Lamutic and Yukaghir ethnic groups – lived in the gelid dry tundra of the Siberian heartland and on its vast eastern slopes. As a jointly mounted, year-long survey had shown, the immense government-owned plain and mountain range was good for little but oil, gas, diamond and mineral extraction and the Tye Corporation had generously agreed that these resources would remain in the hands of the local Sakha Republic leaders or Russian government-owned or government-appointed companies – two, at least, to be headed by Anton Vlasik and his cronies – throughout the duration of the cham-part lease.
Even new finds would remain either the property of the individual republics that were ceding territory or of the Federal head landlords for disposal as they chose. The incumbent operators would pay no tax or levies to the new regional authority. The Tye Corporation had no interest in the energy and mineral resources of the industrial age and the lessors did not fully appreciate what was likely to happen to the price of fossil energy once the world understood the alternative that the Tye Corporation would offer as the Phoebus programme rolled onwards.
But, most important of all to the Russian federal government, the lessee company was agreeing to extend its heavenly largesse to specific parts of the vast swampland of the West Siberian Plain abutting the Urals that would remain Russian sovereign territory, owned directly by the federal government. Two million square miles of harsh and uninviting terrain would suddenly have sizeable areas that, over the next few years, would develop temperate and invitingly habitable graminiferous micro-climates.
The Federal Council had already passed the outline legislation in closed session and the President’s signature and those of two other appointed ministers would complete the agreement recognizing the sovereignty of the new state. The Duma was firmly controlled by Orlov’s followers and would provide an immediate rubber stamp: the ukase would be issued on schedule.
‘First, we are not taking Central and Eastern Siberia away from your people, we are simply leasing it,’ explained a theatrically weary Furtrado once more as the minister sank back into his chair. It was so painful, so old fashioned, so full of friction, to have to samba with the uncivilized, the nekulturny.
‘What we are saying is that we will not be able to allow uncontrolled immigration to the new state of Sybaria. Those already resident will be entitled to remain in their homes and continue to live their lives in the enhanced environment we shall be providing there. They will have dual Russian and Sybarian nationality and they will be able to move freely between the two territories. We will respect all cultural traditions, provide absolute religious freedom and support the freedom of individuals and human rights. What we cannot have – and, I would have thought, what you would not want – is an open-border policy that allows your people to emigrate to our territory. Besides, you will have an enhanced Western Siberia, so there’s more than enough land for everyone.’
What Furtrado had not mentioned, and what he knew his Russian counterparts would never raise (unless the negotiations started to spiral towards failure), were the difficulties most of the autochthonic groups in the region would have in adapting. In particular, the Tungus, Kamtschadales and Lamouts, all subarctic tribes scraping a living along the coastline of the Sea of Okotsk, were unlikely to apply for trainee positions in the fast-food restaurants and hotels that had already signed provisional leases to build outlets and facilities in the area. The Sybarian business plan budgeted for these people to draw a form of corporate welfare and, the planners privately agreed, it would be necessary to work hard to ensure they did not become the Sybarian equivalent of the Native Americans or the Australian Aborigines.
Another issue that would not be raised was the withdrawal of democratic rights from the region. The new province of Sybaria would never be democratic and it would always have only one government. The new plutarchy would, over time, develop a standard of living that would be possible nowhere else on the Asian continent and, if the predictions of economists and social scientists were right, in few other places on earth.
DID YOU KNOW THOMAS TYE?
REWARD OFFERED
Author seeks any new (previously unpublished) information about Thomas Tye’s childhood, family background or education. An attractive financial reward is available to anyone who provides new information about Mr Tye’s early years that can be successfully checked and verified.
Hayley would post it in all the Thomas Tye communities and in the Tye newsgroups. She would also create links from her new publisher’s network resource and from the companion sites that had been created for her earlier books. But should she mention how much the reward might be? The Sloan Press had been generous. Their initial advance payment on top of Nautilus’s money had, for the moment, eased her financial worries. No, how much she would pay would depend on what, if anything, was offered. She assigned the ad to her posting agents, provided the locations, sent them on their way and went to make a cup of coffee.
*
Thomas Tye stifled a yawn. He wondered how long these blustering negotiations would continue. He realized that it was the largest deal that most of these politicians would ever be involved in – well, it was also his largest deal so far – and he understood that they would all want their turn to show off their political skills. Something to tell the grandchildren. Something for the history books. Something an enthusiastic, unusually literate but inexperienced writer in the Tye Corporation’s public relations agency had already dubbed a ‘a truly historic and Brobdingnagian agreement’ in a headline proposed for one of many press statements.
In another room, across a marbled corridor, Furtrado’s conveyancing lawyers were still arguing with their Russian counterparts for an extension of the lease. That debate would eventually have to come back here to the main table. In yet another room, Richard Rakusen, his co-financiers and a covey of architects were exhibiting architectural models of the airports, roads, hotels, housing estates, golf clubs and sports facilities they would be constructing to create new spa resorts around the Sea of Okhotsk and on the Kuril Islands as the ice receded and a new environmental ecology was born.
Technically, Rakuse
n and the other developers who would follow him into the new territory of Sybaria were not required to show their plans to the Russian government or to any authority except the Tye Administrative Council for the new region. But it had been agreed that for the sake of goodwill, and to help Russian understanding of the peaceable plans that the Tye Corporation and its development partners had for the ceded territory, the plans and three-dimensional models for the first major real-estate development of the new province should be shown and discussed. The disclosure also provided Anton Vlasik and his associates with a pre-emptive opportunity to select the investment and development projects in which they wished to participate.
Immediately after the Act of Cession was signed and Sybaria was receiving its first season of ecological and climatic re-engineering, Rakusen-Webber would launch a new Sybaria Fund to offer the world’s investors an opportunity to share in the huge development opportunities. The first leisure resorts would be centred on the best of the many coastal hot-springs locations and the littoral would be marketed as both summer and winter resorts to the nearby Japanese as well as to the North American market.
Also in Phase I would be opportunities to invest in the vast solar farms that would occupy two million hectares of the former Siberian permafrost. These vast acres would contain mile after mile of curved Anacamptonite solar-capture panels that would feed electrical power to huge underground storage silos ready for marketing to the cities of Japan, China, India and Russia via superconducting underground cables. The former ‘sleeping land’ of Siberia would become an electronic counterpart of the great wheat expanses of America’s Midwest, only this ‘basket’ would hold energy, not the ingredients for bread. Later would come opportunities to invest in an area enjoying macroclimate manipulation and the vast agricultural opportunities presented by nocturnal crops and livestock – once the happy point of autarky was passed.
Although ‘Sybaria’ had been accepted as the official name for this new territory, suggested by one of Furtrado’s classically educated English lawyers, an unidentified wag on the team had already suggested the region should be called ‘Tyeland’. This idea had been officially abandoned for fear of confusion, but inside the company this name had stuck as the code name for the new province.
Tye ached to have a shower and he craved the comfort he derived from a protective mask and gloves. He sprayed his mouth with antiseptic again. This was the first time in a decade he had attended a meeting in which he could not control his environment. Only he, and the geneticists of Tye Life Sciences, understood the damage that common infections could do to the suppression of free radicals in his body. As his immune system rose to respond to infection, it overcame the inhibitors produced by the oral cell-maintenance therapy that he had taken daily for the last sixteen years: if he caught a cold, Tye would resume ageing like everybody else for as long as the infection lasted.
But it would be worth the risk and at least he didn’t have to suffer the Russians’ disgusting tobacco smoke. He had made that an absolute condition when this trip was being arranged. Every half an hour one of the Russian party would make an excuse and disappear from the room. That had proved a useful weakness to exploit. Several times Furtrado had insisted on labouring a point while the Tye party watched a Russian negotiator start to fidget and sweat, desperate for a cigarette break. That way some details had been agreed hastily but Tye guessed there would be at least another day of negotiations. If everything was agreed tomorrow, the deal would be done on his fiftieth birthday, but only Connie and Furtrado would offer him congratulations on his anniversary and there would be no public celebrations of his age. Tye did not discuss this subject in public even though the media was bound to home in on the story.
But this deal would be settled, that much was for sure. Furtrado had bank authorizations for transfers of a total of one trillion US dollars in his briefcase – enough to eliminate Russia’s global debt in a single payment, if that was how the government chose to spend their giant windfall. Tye judged that President Orlov would do just that and his nation’s economic rating would suddenly be propelled back into that of the world’s top half-dozen countries, even before the economic benefits of the forthcoming climatic re-engineering had been calculated.
Another man, pale with a patchy red moustache and ill-fitting rust-coloured jacket, rose at the far end of the table: the E&E minister – environment and ecology. The Greens had finally found a voice in the polluted behemoth that had been industrial Russia and, after years of prevarication, the state was at last attempting to fulfil some of its biosphere obligations to the international community.
‘The Tye Corporation and the University of Hope Island have both been very helpful in modelling the short, medium and long-term impact of these climatic . . . improvements,’ the minister began portentously. He spoke good English so the Tye corporate team was pleased to switch their earpiece-jewellery to ambient, and join real-time again. ‘We have been very encouraged by the models that show the impact of carbon dioxide reduction in the atmosphere and the improved economic prospects of the region and the surrounding territories.’
He paused and everybody waited for his objection. ‘However, I have been unable to find any prognostications or projections for the future of the indigenous species. Although the region is classified mostly as taiga, tundra and ice cap, the Tye delegation must know that there is a rich, diverse and important collection of birds, mammals, rodents, reptiles, insects and fish in that area. These include Stella sea eagles, the white-tailed eagle, the Siberian bear, Siberian tiger, Siberian fox, Siberian chipmunks, buzzards, picus, polatouche, salmon, deer, moose and many thousands of insects, reptiles and other fish. Many of the species have not yet been identified and named. Are they to go the way of our elasmotherium or the Stella sea-cow? What is to happen to them, please?’
He sat down.
Tye leaned back and raised his eyes to the ceiling. All this had been covered in the detailed discussions and scientific documents that his teams had prepared and delivered months before. They had already started freezing sperm from many of the life forms of the region. Jesus! What more could they want? He would be delivering them a Moscow with winter daylight time extended by fifty per cent. The city would have temperatures similar to San Francisco, for Christ’s sake! He could even switch supplies off to give them fucking white Christmases whenever the government asked – just to ensure the ancient city didn’t lose touch with its original character!
He sighed and nodded to Furtrado to respond.
The counsellor shuffled through his documents for the folder on wildlife and endangered species. But before he could find the reassuring words he had selected so carefully the questioner rose to his feet again.
‘I was wondering whether Mr Tye would honour us by sharing his personal views on this topic?’ suggested the Minister of the Environment.
Tye felt a sudden sense of alarm. Could it be possible that this was not a done deal after all? Was this a trap? He and Furtrado had been sure that the Russian government would provide nothing but a token, albeit prolix, show of resistance during these negotiations. But if this new voice represented anything more than a desire to be heard, everything could still fall through. Tye had been thoroughly briefed on the Russian political system so he knew that consensus, not majority voting, was required for the Presidential Council to endorse such radical legislation.
Perhaps it was time to utilize the old magic. Outside of his public appearances, he used it so rarely now – almost never in private meetings. It had grown too large, too kerystic, to be used against just a handful of people in what, for one of his performances, would be a comparatively small room. But, Tye reasoned, as business had become a form of theatre all individual careers had become performances. He also guessed that they couldn’t resist the chance to see if this supposedly legendary performer was truly as great as the rest of the world thought.
He glanced along the table at his interlocutor, then smiled, his grin lighting up the who
le conference table. He pushed himself to his feet and stepped back, lithe in his movements. Despite the formality of the occasion, he wore his usual open-necked white shirt and black trousers. His hair was tied back in a short ponytail.
‘The Minister is quite right, of course,’ he began. ‘This is a subject that I am pleased to address personally, since it is of the utmost importance.’
Tye clasped his hands behind his back and walked slowly towards the head of the table, where President Orlov presided – so far in silence. When he reached the president’s side he stopped and turned to face his audience.
‘We will be bringing light and heat to areas that have never received those natural benefits before.’ He spoke slowly and carefully, aware that many of the Russians around the table would be able to understand his carefully enunciated English. He raised his arms in practised chironomy. ‘But this energy, our energy, is totally controllable – to within a radius of one mile, as I have had the pleasure of demonstrating to President Orlov, Minister Konstantine and General Padorin recently on Hope Island. We have created a complete model of the world’s climate on the most powerful parallel-processing computer ever built. It’s capable of five trillion operations per second – we call it the Halcyon system. It allows us to play “what-if” with different conditions. We know precisely what each joule and nanowatt will achieve and its knock-on effects in the global ecosystem as a whole.’
He paused and looked at each of them in turn, holding their gazes, ensuring their absolute attention.
‘Remember, I care about this planet!’
Tye paused again. The Tye corporate heads were already nodding – then some of the others. He had them now.
‘Humans have been aware for nearly forty years that we are slowly choking our world. Temperatures have been rising – especially in the northern latitudes – and, unless the Tye Corporation takes this crucial step, with the help and aid of the great Russian Federation, carbon dioxide concentrations will be at seven hundred and fifty parts per million by the middle of this century – three times its pre-industrial level. That means we will destroy the Amazon rain forest and all other rain forests, and global sea levels will rise by two metres. A four-degree Celsius increase in the planet’s mean atmospheric temperature would increase global rainfall by twenty per cent – but all of it in the wrong places. Water vapour in the air is, in itself, a powerful greenhouse gas. So it becomes a vicious circle. After that the remaining vegetation will disappear and the sea will continue to rise.’