Monique studied Muammar Al Fawzi’s reaction out of the corner of her eye as nuclear desalination plants arose on the latter-day coast, as preternaturally blue waters poured down the dry tunnels of the Great Man-Made River, as small, clean, nuclear charges blasted out lake beds, as foaming fountains filled them, as palm trees and vast green lawns sprang into being around them, as the music began to approach its triumphal orgasmic climax.
Oh yes it was kitschy, oh yes it was as obvious as the Bolero bedroom sell had been for a couple of centuries or so, and oh yes she could see him fighting it. The chairman of the Water Authority was a sophisticated cynic who no doubt was as aware of the nature of the sell as all those maidens, callow and otherwise, who had nevertheless succumbed to Ravel’s make-out music down through the years.
It was the deep sell that got them. There was a level on which Al Fawzi was about as immune to the wiles of the Bread & Circuses spinners as a fifteen-year-old girl would be to the biorhythmic protoplasmic seduction of this music. For a couple of centuries, there probably hadn’t been a female in the West who didn’t know just what a guy was up to when he played her Bolero. Nevertheless, it still worked.
And indeed, by the time the S&L concluded with a speeded-up flowering explosion of the desert wastes into riotous solarized green timed to the musical orgasm, from the look on his face, Muammar Al Fawzi, had the sell been sex rather than an irrigation project, would have had his hand in his pants. If he had been wearing pants.
“Very entertaining . . .” he said, as he came blinking out of it. A certain edge returned to his demeanor. “Quite a little . . . magical mystery tour,” he drawled, as if to let them know he was no raghead bumpkin.
Appelbaum slid a chip and a printout from his briefcase and handed them over to him. “The plans and the financial details,” he said. “As you’ll see, there’s no magic, it’s all simple off-the-shelf technology. And no mystery about the financing, you put up forty percent and we have interests who will pick up the rest.” He flashed Al Fawzi a winning foxy grandpa smile, seemed almost about to wink. “Not a loan bearing interest, but for a percentage of the real estate proceeds, in the approved Islamic manner.”
“Indeed?” said Al Fawzi. “No magic to the technology? No mystery to the financing? Then shall we proceed to the tour of the real estate?”
This turned out to be a long, slow, broiling, gut-wrenching cruise southeast across the Sahara in a Libyan blimp. The gasbag was in the form of an enormous wing, the better to maximize the surface area of the solar-cell array that powered the propellers, at the cost of a certain increased susceptibility to the roller-coaster dips of the up-and-down drafts, of which there were plenty. Whether the Water Authority had sprung for helium, or whether the balloon-wing was filled with cheap but explosive hydrogen, was something Monique did not care to contemplate.
The landscape below, however, was something she could hardly avoid contemplating, and the more she did, the more harebrained the “Gardens of Allah” scheme seemed.
The deep Sahara had been a largely uninhabitable waste long before the hand of man had sent its borders creeping south and its temperature soaring upward. Now the moaning air conditioner of the gondola was hard put to maintain an interior temperature below forty degrees centigrade as the blimp flapped like an overweight manta ray through an ocean of air at least twenty degrees hotter than that at a humidity of approximately zero.
Dunes of sand and rocky wastes searing under a pitiless and cloudless sky bleached to near-whiteness by a sadistic sun. No mirages from this aerial vantage, but the sun, and the whited-out sky, and the heat waves pulsing up off the shadeless surface into the superheated atmosphere, turned the horizon into a silvery microwave shimmer, abstracted the landscape below into an unreal and unearthly glare.
If the Earth ever really succumbed to Condition Venus, surely the runaway effect would begin here, in the Sahara, a vast deadland stretching from the drowned littoral of the Mediterranean shore deep into the withering heart of Africa, which, as far as supporting the life-forms of the Gaian biosphere was concerned, was no longer part of this world already.
Pump water into craters here and it would steam into the atmosphere like soup boiling on a stove. It was so hot and dry that not even local cloud cover would form. It would be like opening the windows of this gondola so the air conditioner could attempt to cool down the whole planet.
Oases? Palm trees? Crops? Gardens? People?
Water or not, nothing could live in that heat, under that sun.
Surely Advanced Projects Associates had to know that.
Nor did Muammar Al Fawzi impress Monique as a world-class idiot.
So what was APA really up to?
And why had Al Fawzi dragooned them into this torturous inspection of the brutally obvious?
The answer to the second question turned out to be that Muammar Al Fawzi’s local version of a Bread & Circuses S&L sell, or rather anti-sell, was his sardonic way of getting down to the down and dirty of extracting a straight answer to the first.
At length, at considerably more length than Monique would have liked, after hours of this grand tour of the lifeless broiling void, after she had long since become well basted with her own sweat and Appelbaum was panting like a beached Mississippi manatee, Al Fawzi finally verbalized the point he had long since made, at least as far as she was concerned.
“So you see, Sheik Appelbaum,” he began as if the bazaar haggling had been going on for some time already, “the notion of re-establishing oases in what the Sahara has become lacks, shall we say, a certain practical cost-effective credibility.”
“Perhaps if the tunnel system hadn’t already been built,” said Appelbaum. “But as it is, it’s simply a matter of a few cookie-cutter nuclear desalination plants thrown up by the low bidder, pumping stations we can acquire from any number of dried-up oil fields for a song, and a few nukes readily available on the open market.”
Al Fawzi gave him the look of a Bedouin of old regarding a spavined and scrofulous camel. “By that logic, we would have only to defrost a bit of the polar permafrost and pump the water into a few selected craters to turn the Moon into the Garden of Eden.”
“The atmosphere out there is perfectly breathable.”
“Perhaps then you would like us to leave you out there for a few hours to breathe it as an experiment . . . ? With all the water your metabolism might require?”
Appelbaum’s eyes became carefully hooded. If he weren’t soaked already, he would’ve started sweating. Somehow Monique found herself beginning to enjoy this.
“Mr. Appelbaum, I remind you that my position requires a certain modest expertise in climatech engineering. While it may be true that you can pump water out here at a rate that could keep up with the evaporation, it would not lower the ambient temperature by a single degree or raise the humidity an iota. You would need to construct thousands of such artificial oases in order to create cloud cover significant enough to make the area even remotely habitable or arable. While you’re at it, why not dam the Strait of Gibraltar and the Bosporus and pump enough of the Mediterranean into the Sahara to reclaim the former shorelines and turn the desert into an African version of the Siberian savanna?”
“This is a serious proposal, Mr. Al Fawzi,” Appelbaum snapped irritably.
“Then suppose we get down to serious business.”
Mervin Appelbaum finally did, and that was when Monique’s enjoyment of the conversational fencing match began to evaporate as swiftly as a dewdrop in the desert sun.
“Fuller domes with controllable albedo over the lakes and surrounding farmland,” Appelbaum said. “Standard Israeli prefab.”
“At considerable extra cost.”
“Our . . . financial backers will absorb the overage.”
“Will they now? And toward what end?”
“Agriculture.”
“Hardly a cost-effective means of growing cucumbers and oranges.”
“That’s not quite what they had in
mind. They would plant crops chosen to maximize the financial yield per acre.”
“They would not happen to be Bad Boys, now would they . . . ?” Al Fawzi ventured.
“You have a problem with that?” said Appelbaum.
“Nothing personal,” said Al Fawzi. “But there is a certain humorless conservative point of view here that does not quite comprehend that that which calls itself Bad Boys is a righteous syndic of citizen-shareholders rather than a revenant criminal triad.”
“They strictly observe the local ordinances of all jurisdictions in which they operate,” Appelbaum pointed out.
“Or cause them to be modified when inconvenient.”
“Be that as it may, the cultivation of marijuana is legal in this one.”
“You are saying that no legal adjustments would be required?”
“Coca is an even more lucrative crop in terms of financial yield per acre,” Appelbaum opined. “Strictly for export, of course, and taxed at an attractive rate.”
“Opium poppies would be even more profitable,” Al Fawzi suggested sardonically.
“Even Bad Boys draw the line somewhere,” Appelbaum huffed indignantly.
“How nice to know . . .”
Speak for yourself, Monique thought sourly.
Not that she had anything in particular against cannabic confections, eptified cocaine, or for that matter the Bad Boys syndic, which, after all, was no more a capitalist wage-slaver than Bread & Circuses.
What made the blimp ride back to Tripoli even more disagreeable than the trip out was not so much the deal that Appelbaum and Al Fawzi worked out between them along the way, as the entirely correct expectation that Bread & Circuses, and she herself as its representative, would do their professional duty to sell this particular icebox to the local Eskimos.
Even at the thirty percent that Al Fawzi got Appelbaum down to, the Libyan Water Authority was still going to be pouring funds into this scheme which would have to come from somewhere, and whether through taxes or water-rate raises, there was no place for them to come from but the parched and threadbare hides of the local populace.
Winners and losers.
Bad Boys would have a large cost-effective supply of cannabis and cocaine. Advanced Projects Associates would make out like bandits just by putting the deal together. The subcontractors would do well even after APA dipped its wick. B&C would get the lucrative interfacing contract. The Water Authority or some other Libyan entity would collect considerable taxes. And all along the line mucho baksheesh would pass along from one hand washing the other.
The Libyan citizens, however, who, as was common in these Land of the Lost jurisdictions, were not shareholders in even what was left of the oil revenues, would get little more than a thorough hosing. Bad Boys’ syndic charter might require them to grant citizen-shareholder status to a few thousand field hands, but those servicing the workers and their families would be on their own as wage slaves. The desert would not bloom. The “Gardens of Allah” would be sealed terrariums. They might as well be on the Moon or the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
Winners and losers.
Bread & Circuses would earn its hefty fee from the former for selling this scam to the latter, if not exactly what Monique could call honestly then certainly not without strenuous labor.
In some elusive way, the unfortunate roll of the climatological dice always seemed to lead to even more bad karma in the Lands of the Lost. In some less than elusive way, with the truest of Blue sentiments, Monique could not avoid adding to it.
First-class and supersonic though it was, the flight back to New York had been too long and the movie too short for Monique to avoid conversing with Mervin Appelbaum, nor did the unlimited champagne with which she sought to ameliorate the experience do much to enhance her taciturnity.
Besides which, she was, after all, in VIP services, and it was her self-interested professional duty as a citizen-shareholder in B&C to not only keep the client happy and represent his agenda but to do so creatively and at least simulate enthusiasm.
And while she was no spinner or imageer, wittingly or not, she knew damn well she had been all too creative when she had tagged the project “The Gardens of Allah.”
Appelbaum had at least had the grace not to get down to the down and dirty until they were well into the Strawberries Romanoff. “We may have a bit of a problem selling the project to the local electorate,” he ventured, a gross understatement by Monique’s lights.
Nevertheless, she chose to play the ingenue. “As I understand it, there isn’t exactly any such thing as a Libyan electorate,” she said. “And even if there was, the Water Authority is a trans-sovereign entity. . . .”
“Call it public opinion then. I mean, the tunnel network is fairly vulnerable to sabotage, the desalination plants even more so. Nothing that a good security syndic like Road Warriors or the Legion couldn’t handle, but they don’t work cheap, and even low-grade terrorism would eat into the profit margin.”
“You would like the Libyan populace to love Big Brother.”
Appelbaum gave her a blank look.
“To love the Gardens of Allah . . .”
“Right. How do we sell it to the raghead masses?”
“Not on the economic benefits to their standard of living, that’s for sure. We have to deep sell it.”
“We are not paying Bread & Circuses to tell us the obvious, Ms. Calhoun.”
“But it is obvious, Mr. Appelbaum, and thanks to my brilliance, we’re halfway there already,” Monique found herself blurting. “We deep sell the Gardens of Allah as the Gardens of Allah.”
“En inglés, por favor.”
Shit. Now she was going to have to lay it out for him. Well, it had to happen sooner or later.
“We do what we did with the industrial S&L writ large. Commercials. Billboards. Popular songs. Graffiti. Endorsements by mullahs if we can swing it. Key it into Koranic verses. Paint it all green. The heroic and righteous Libyan people are virtuously following the Word of the Prophet and fulfilling the Will of Allah by building his Gardens in the desert.”
Monique found herself gagging, and not on her final strawberry. “That should get your infrastructure built without any undue restlessness on the part of the natives.”
“And once they see what they hath wrought?”
Mercifully, the cabin lights dimmed for the movie.
“Let me get back to you on that,” Monique said. “I want to see this.”
This, as kismet and the nature of the flight would have it, was an erotic remake of a classic Disney animation called Aladdin, with the original songs re-recorded by the Silicon Wayfarers and a seamless combination of computer decor and fantasy creatures with live actors. The Arabian Nights as a lavishly over-the-top porn opera.
Aladdin? Disney? Arabian Nights?
Shit.
Halfway through the film, Monique realized that she had it.
By the time the lights went up, she had convinced herself to lay it on Appelbaum.
“You build a real Garden of Allah first, make sure it’s finished before you build anything else, and you keep it the biggest and the best. The biggest lake in the biggest oasis. An artificial tropical reef. Glass-bottom boats. Scuba. The world’s greatest botanical gardens. Tiled pathways through them. Fountains filling the air with multicolored mists—”
“Are you out of your mind—”
“A museum of Islamic art! A museum of Islamic culture! A mighty modern mosque! The whole thing designed in consultation with top-drawer mullahs and Islamic scholars!”
“It’s insane!” Appelbaum cried. “Why, it’d cost as much as a minor disneyworld—”
He brought himself up short.
“Oh,” he said.
“An Islamic disneyworld,” said Monique with a creamy smile. “The one and the only. A billion Muslims worldwide. Bring the wives, bring the kiddies, bring the whole harem, ’cause it’s certified kosher . . . er, halal, by the highest religious authorities, who dis
tribute ten percent of the profits to Islamic charities. And the Libyan populace becomes citizen-shareholders in another twenty percent, which also entitles them to one free entry per family per year.”
“Ten percent.”
“Whatever. You really think there’s going to be any unseemly noise over whatever else you do with the rest of the property after that?”
And Appelbaum would have grinned from ear to ear had that been physically possible. “Bread & Circuses!” he had exclaimed in delight.
“At what we do,” Monique had told him quite sincerely, “we . . . are . . . the Greatest!”
“I would say this calls for more champagne, Ms. Calhoun!” Mervin Appelbaum had declared, snapping his fingers imperiously for the steward’s attention.
After that, there had been no need for more than small talk, and no need for the steward to have to be summoned to keep their glasses filled.
As the wheels dropped, and the flaps opened, and the plane crossed the sprawl of tacky hotels, antique malls, crumbling warehouses, and industrial bric-a-brac that formed the usual airport accretion disc around Newark International and touched down on the runway, Monique consoled her True Blue conscience with the thought that she had at least salvaged something for the Libyan citizenry out of this sleazy deal.
Thanks to her, they would at least be citizen-shareholders in something, which was more than could be said for most of the unfortunate denizens of the Lands of the Lost, politically dominated by generalissimos military and otherwise, incompetent retrosocialist dreamers, or nepotic monarchies, economically dominated by the last of the corporate capitalist dinosaurs when anyone cared to have anything economic to do with them at all.
True, also thanks to her, Bread & Circuses would make out like the other bandits on this one. At least for the next few weeks, she would be the fair-haired girl with Giorgio Kang and the syndic board. There might even be some extra shares for her in it. There damn well should be. She certainly deserved it.
And there you have me, Monique Calhoun thought as the plane taxied to the terminal. Think Blue, live Green, as befits the granddaughter of Cajun refugees from Lost Louisianne and a Franco-American marriage born in Siberia the Golden.
Greenhouse Summer Page 2