Eric shook his head ruefully. “Not part of the deal, Monique,” he said. “For obvious reasons, this is a secure area. The door lock is keyed to my retinas. I escort everyone in and out. You are the only outsider I’ll risk giving access.”
“But you can hardly expect me to—”
“No problem, Monique, when I’m not here with you, my technician will be,” Eric told her airily. “You just tell him what you want, and he’ll work the system for you.” Or rather, Ignatz will be listening in and doing it while your minder tickles the computer ivories.
“But when I’m not down here—”
“You just use one of these,” said Eric, reaching into a drawer filled with assorted cigarette lighters, and extracting the one with the Moonlight & Roses logo.
“Mobile mike,” he said, handing it to her. “What I use to instruct the technician down here to record the scene wherever I might be on the boat.”
Actually, of course, since Ignatz had access to every mike aboard, and could be keyed to her voiceprint parameters as well as his, such a silly gizmo was unnecessary. But to explain that would require him to reveal Ignatz’s existence.
Somewhat dimly, Eric found himself appreciating the esthetic elegance of the completeness of the Potemkin interface’s design.
Monique Calhoun eyed the device dubiously, then cocked her head at Eric himself, and gave him a similar fish-eyed stare.
“Moonlight & Roses?” she said. “Why the logo of a gigolo syndic?”
Eric mooned at her soulfully. “Call it a romantic notion, Monique,” he said, “for with it you may also instantly call me to your side.”
That much was true.
“And I remind you,” he told her, transforming his expression into what he hoped was a charming parody of a lupine leer, “that this is one of the only two places aboard blind to electronic eyes.”
That was of course a lie.
Who, after all, shall watch the watchmen?
The computer room was bugged too.
MONIQUE CALHOUN HAD NEVER HANDLED VIP services for a major conference before, and as the said VIPs began to arrive, Avi Posner’s elusive clandestine agenda and Eric Esterhazy’s fatuous passes at seduction were put on hold by the donkey-work of installing her charges at the Ritz and dealing with their “special requirements.”
Her VIPs fell into four broad categories: chief representatives of some of the major exhibitors, heads of delegations from sovereign and semi-sovereign jurisdictions, speakers and presenters at the conference itself, and the press.
Her list of speakers and governmental functionaires came from Lars Bendsten and their needs were financed out of the official UNACOCS budget. The list of trade delegation people to be favored by her care came from Avi Posner, meaning the client, meaning the Big Blue Machine of which their operations were components, meaning they were self-financed. The press list came from Bread & Circuses’ Paris office and their lavish freebies came out of the B&C operational budget.
The Ritz being the Ritz and Bread & Circuses’ Paris branch providing her with a team of gophers, the hotel arrangements were the least of Monique’s problems. She herself was only called in to iron out a few delicate details. A Muslim delegate’s prayer rug had disappeared in transit and a replacement had to be supplied. A Chinese climatologist had to be shown four rooms before finding one that she deemed possessed of the proper feng shui. The dos and don’ts of various peculiar dietary requirements—halal, kosher, Hindu, vegan, two different variants of macrobiotic—had to be carefully explained to the bemused and unamused hotel chef.
The real headaches were the “special requirements” and judging just how far VIP services should go to fulfill them.
The requests for professional sexual companionship were easy enough to meet, though Monique felt it prudent to get authorization from Ariel Mamoun before picking up the tabs from Ladies of the Evening or Moonlight & Roses for the press.
Drugs presented more difficulties. Ordinary marijuana, hashish, and cocaine were readily available from Bad Boys at reasonable prices, but theirs was basically a mass-market, not an artisanal, operation, and some of the special orders were expensive pains in the ass.
Lydia Maren, a formidable London press dragon, insisted on trying absinthe, a concoction that no one had made for over a century, and Monique had spent a whole day and a ridiculous amount of money ferreting out the chemical formula and having the stuff synthesized. John Sri Davinda, a climatologist from California, insisted that he had to have peyote, a wild cactus from the great Tex-Mex desert, in order to sufficiently “focus his consciousness” to make his presentation at the conference, and given the current incoherent state thereof, Monique was forced to agree that any alteration was likely to be an improvement. Chativan Kuritkul, the Thai Minister of Climate Control, insisted on a gourmet strain of Colombian marijuana, and Bernard Kutnik, CEO of Erdewerke, would only be satisfied with Thai stick.
By the time requests came in from several quarters for Cipriani, a red-wine-and-cannabis potation popular among the upper crust in the nineteenth century, Monique had gotten the message that ungrateful souls were bent on seeing how far she could be pushed.
So she bought four liters of the worst plonk she could find, dissolved a half kilo of hashish in foul Moldovan gin, mixed it all together, poured the mess into bottles with phony labels, and let them toast their greediness with that. The escalating requests for arcane psychotropics began to wane considerably the morning after.
But dealing with the ruffled feathers of those she had been forced to drop from the guest list for tonight’s inaugural soiree aboard La Reine de la Seine was the lowest bridge she’d had to duck her head to pass under on her way to the conference’s opening.
The riverboat comfortably accommodated 240 people, and Eric Esterhazy refused to take on more even for one night, citing some Syndique de la Seine regulation, nor could he be wheedled into giving her some of his own slots just this once.
This left Monique with a maximum guest list of 120. Cutting the UN’s list of governmental VIPs was impossible since they were at least officially the client and the results would be a series of nasty diplomatic incidents. The major speakers could hardly be axed. This left Posner’s trade delegation people and the press. Snubbing any major press figures would be public relations seppuku. And Posner’s list represented the organizations footing the bill.
After she explained this to Avi Posner, a dozen of the people on his list turned out to “have other engagements.” How this had been accomplished Monique did not at all feel a need to know. This still meant that twelve lesser lights had to be dropped from the press list.
This was not going to make her life easier. These people were going to have to be on La Reine lists for the next two nights if she had to bump Jesus Christ and the Twelve Apostles to do it.
But by the afternoon of the conference’s opening ceremony, Monique was able to take a breather. Her VIPs were now all cozily installed at the Ritz, her gophers had loaded them into their limos and delivered them to the Grand Palais before she went over herself, so at least until evening, she could fade into the A-list crowd with her top-level pass and play VIP herself.
Though it was a partly cloudy afternoon outside, the smart glass of the greenhouse ceiling enclosing the great exhibition hall had been set to simulate a brilliant bright blue sky with a golden sun at the zenith, the better to glorify the climatech engineering displays for the benefit of the television cameras.
Fully set up now, except for something near the center of the exhibition space hidden by a makeshift box of canvas screening and apparently still under construction, the trade show, and that was certainly what it was, made an impressive demonstration of the wares of the Big Blue Machine.
Plankton-seeding barges, cloud-cover generators, cloud-seeding drones, various species of potted Qwik-grow trees. Scale-model mock-ups of orbital mirrors, launch vehicles, occluders. Screens and holos running loops of nuclear terrain-sculpting demos, orbital mi
rror weather adjustments, damming projects, reforestation schemes, and yes, the S&L for the Gardens of Allah prepared by Bread & Circuses at the Advanced Projects Associates pavilion.
All glorified and enhanced by multicolored strobes, flashing lights, halogen tubing, a cacophony of competing musical accompaniment.
And, since everyone on the trade show floor who wasn’t press seemed to be an industrial presenter, all for the benefit of the multitude of microphones and cameras.
Although it was not her professional turf, it was the work of her syndic, and Monique felt a surge of patriotic pride as a citizen-shareholder thereof at how Bread & Circuses had turned out the coverage for an event the previous versions of which, in the words of Jean-Luc Tri, B&C’s Paris press maven, had they been horse turds, would have been unable to draw flies.
They were all there, or so it seemed—Worldnet, StarNet, Sat One, BBC, NipponOrb, TeleFrance, Mundoticias, SiberWeb, as well as a horde of camera people from local stations and news sites, still photographers for the pix mags, freelancers covering for the indigent media of the Lands of the Lost—swarming around the exhibits shooting their visuals before the heads began to talk.
The talking heads in question were just about settled in as Monique passed through the blue fiberboard screening discreetly separating the unseemly trade show huckstering from the serious scientific raison d’être.
The amphitheater of temporary seating was just about full, but Monique’s priority pass gained her access to B&C’s own little reserved section ten rows back from the stage and only slightly left of center. Ariel Mamoun was already there, Tri was down at the cluster of cameras in front of the stage, there were several people from the Paris office that she didn’t know, and her own little crew of gophers.
“Well, it’s all over for the moment except for the speaking, as they say wherever it is they say it,” Ariel said by way of greeting.
“Shouting,” corrected Monique.
“Whichever. Either way, it will no doubt go on and on and on.”
Jean-Luc Tri, an exaggeratedly dapper figure in a black silk pinstriped suit and ruffled white linen shirt, scuttled up the aisle and took a seat beside Monique. His sleek black mane was static-molded into a rakishly crested coiffure without a hair out of place; he might be panting a bit, but his smooth oriental skin did not deign to display a single bead of sweat.
“Great turnout, Jean-Luc, how did you pull it off?”
Tri gave her a characteristic cynical lidded smirk. “With B&C picking up the tabs for the stars, and the lower levels fighting each other for the assignment like the famished dog packs of Detroit, attracting the paperatti to an expense account junket to Paris is about as difficult as dumping a load of fresh fish in the Seine and waiting for the alligator feeding frenzy to start.”
The reaction was somewhat more subdued than that as Lars Bendsten led six people up onto the stage and launched the standard UN welcoming speech. These were supposedly the MIPs of the conference, that is the Most Important Persons, and they had all made it to both the Ritz and Monique’s invitation list for tonight’s opening party on the riverboat.
“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, mesdames et messieurs, meine Damen und Herren, distinguished guests, and welcome to the sixth United Nations Annual Conference On Climate Stabilization. . . .”
But interestingly enough, all of the scientists had been on the VIP list handed to her by the General Secretary. None of them had been deemed worthy of Avi Posner’s attention or the direct funding of Big Blue.
“Dr. Allison Larabee, whose Condition Venus climate model was the genesis of these conferences. . . .”
“Dr. Paolo Pereiro, whose climate model predicted the current breakup of the north polar ice cap, and which many now regard as the current state of the art. . . .”
“Hassan bin Mohammed, chairperson of the Committee of Concerned Climatologists . . .”
The scientists were window dressing, Monique realized, as Bendsten’s introductions droned on. Window dressing from the point of view of what had become the real power here, the economic power that had financed this high-budget move to Paris in the first place. And was now calling the tunes.
Including, she was forced to admit, her own.
“Mary Cardinal N’Goru, Papal Legate to the United Nation. . . .”
“Dr. Bobby Braithwaite, winner of the Nobel Prize for Climatology for his modeling of the desiccation of Mars and the threshold theory of climate change . . .”
“Dr. Dieter Lambert, developer of the Qwik-grow tree, the carbon-dioxide-fixing coral, the photosynthetic fungus . . .”
Fancy window dressing to be sure, but window dressing still, just as whatever went on at the actual conference in here was no doubt going to be window dressing for the main event out there on the trade show floor.
A True Blue setup, as these conferences had always been—this time, however, financed by, and fronting for, the commercial interests of the Big Blue Machine.
That was the cynical professional analysis, and a bit of the Green in Monique doing the calculating. Larabee, Braithwaite, Pereiro, and Lambert were all climatological superstars of the True Blue persuasion, but they were no longer workers at the cutting edge; monstres sacrés, as the French would put it, or, as the Americans would say, famous long ago.
The speeches began with just the sort of yawners Monique had dreaded and expected. Pereiro delivered a numbing discourse on the mathematics of climate modeling incomprehensible to her layman’s knowledge of the subject. Lambert presented an embarrassing paean to his own faded brilliance.
Braithwaite, a tall, courtly, black man with gray dreadlocks, a wistful Jamaican lilt to his voice, and an air of not quite knowing why he was there, at least was able to rouse Monique from her daze, if only because he was a better and more sympathetic speaker.
“What’s an expert on the climatological history of Mars doin’ at a conference about stabilizin’ the climate of this here planet?” he said with a shrug after presenting the dry facts of Martian desiccation.
He grinned boyishly despite his years.
“Well, who could resist a free trip to Paris?” he said. “But long as I’m here, I could point out th’ obvious. Earth is a planet. Mars is a planet. On Earth, life began t’evolve in the soup of a sea. Started likewise on Mars. Might’ve made it. Might’ve evolved into brilliant critters with a roomful of advanced degrees just like us.”
He held up the thumb and forefinger of his right hand a millimeter or two apart.
“Came this close,” he said. “Jus’ a little more mass, and Mars has a little more gravity. Jus’ a little more gravity, and Mars holds enough hydrogen and carbon dioxide to increase the vapor pressure jus’ enough to hold its liquid water and give its infant biosphere the chance to photosynthesize oxygen and maybe those microbes get to evolve into thee and me.”
He shrugged. “So what’s that got to do with stabilizin’ th’ climate of this planet? Well, what we’ve been doin’ to the chemistry of the atmosphere and the energy budget of this planet for th’ past three hundred years or so is orders of magnitude greater than what made the difference between a warm wet Mars with a breathable atmosphere and a biosphere an’ the dead desiccated Mars we see today. Was a close thing, and when Mars went, it went—”
He snapped his fingers. “Jus’ like that!”
Braithwaite smiled ruefully. “In geological terms, of course. So what can we Earthlings learn about life on Earth from th’ story of Mars?”
Another one of those engaging shrugs.
“Well, the evolution of a planetary biosphere may not be quick and easy come,” Braithwaite said, “but it sure is quick and easy go.”
And ambled away from the podium to not much more than a polite pro forma ration of applause, which left Monique feeling vaguely annoyed, a bit of a Martian herself, a naif among the sophisticates.
Or was it the other way around?
Hassan bin Mohammed followed with the sort of standard whining
True Blue political screed that was soporific enough to ease whatever it was that Braithwaite had stirred within Monique back into its slumber and to bring the bulk of the audience, who had heard and probably said it all themselves a thousand times before, to fidgeting murmuring boredom.
But Mary Cardinal N’Goru managed to turn it to pregnant silence just by the way she walked ever so slowly and majestically to stage center, a tall regal black woman in middle years, her head turned to one side to maintain eye contact with the audience, or rather the cameras, bright red cloak swirling and then swept aside with a theatrical gesture as she reached the podium.
Bread & Circuses could still learn a trick or two from the Roman Catholic Church, Monique realized. They had always had the gear. They had always had the moves.
“I am here as a Princess of the Church to speak to you of sin!” she boomed out in a prophet’s voice to the audible dismay of her secular audience.
“The Bible speaks out against the sin of killing a human and names it murder! And this was the worst sin known to man until the twentieth century invented a worse evil, the deliberate killing of whole peoples, and lo! we have named that sin genocide!”
The only sounds were the squirming of asses on hard seats and the subliminal hum of the massed television equipment.
Mary N’Goru leaned a tad closer to her audience, addressed those cameras a bit more intimately, spoke in another, slightly softer voice, a voice more of sorrow than anger.
“But I am also here as a daughter of Africa, and I must speak to you with the voice of that dying continent, with the voice out of the great central desert where nothing may live, with the voice of forests gone into dust, with the voice of a thousand species of animals and birds gone into that final night from which there is no returning, with the voice of a hundred peoples existing on bile and ashes for a while before they follow. . . .”
And it seemed to Monique that this woman had made herself that voice, the voice not only of dying Africa, but of all those Lands of the Lost, crying out not in the wilderness, but from that widening wilderness, here in the balmy green City of Light.
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