Your perfect host, not merely moving from group to group, but melding groups into each other, moving people between them en passant.
“Yes, this is sort of an unofficial official party for the climate conference, Jean-Pierre, and if you want to meet Dr. Larabee, come along with me. . . .”
That he seemed to know everyone on his guest list—which seemed to run to show business and infotainment movers and shapers, syndic heavyweights, patrons and practitioners of the arts, high-level bureaucrats, and the sort of celebrities who, like himself, were famous for being famous—was hardly surprising.
“Allison, if I’m not interrupting, this is my good friend Jean-Pierre Balfort, chairman of the Syndique de la Seine. Jean-Pierre, Dr. Allison Larabee, of Condition Venus fame, and, I believe, Dr. Franco Niri, who was short-listed for the Nobel a few years back, and Dr. Istavan Bukan, the fellow in charge of the smoke and mirrors that keeps the Gulf Stream going and our Parisian asses from freezing off. . . .”
But that he seemed to recognize everyone on hers and not only greeted them by name but dropped the sort of bits of knowledge that hinted he knew and had admired their careers had to mean that he had either an eidetic memory or psychic powers, or more likely was using the sort of contact lens dataprompt favored by campaigning politicians and private club bartenders.
“You’re the cow fart man, aren’t you, Dr. Collins? All that methane!”
“Not just cows, Prince Esterhazy, all ruminants contribute their fair share of greenhouse gases. Billions of cubic meters per annum.”
“Which is why we should stop raising them and switch to getting our protein from beans instead. . . . ?”
“Bart was a confirmed vegetarian to begin with!”
“Well, I suppose I could give up tournedos Rossini and choucroute garni to save the biosphere if I had to, but on the other hand, beans make me fart, an all-too-common human condition, so wouldn’t that just put us back to square one . . . ?”
Even the manner in which she had been allowed to spend the past two hours drifting about as a detached observer impressed her with Eric Esterhazy’s professionalism. Knowing all too well that he had every intention of seducing her and that sooner or later in her own good time he was going to succeed, Monique had to admire the way he neither stooped to sidelong glances, nor attempted to squire her about, nor smarmily avoided her. She was one of the guests, and it was his job to make each and every one of them feel equally important.
Prince Eric was no mere professional bullshitter.
He was a true bullshit artist.
And only now, with the party well under way and their two guest lists thoroughly mixed, did Eric come sauntering over to her bearing two glasses of wine like the perfect host spying a nervous wallflower.
“You don’t seem to be having all that good a time, Monique,” he said, handing her one.
Monique shrugged. “I’m here as a working girl,” she said.
“Oh? I thought you were a citizen-shareholder in Bread & Circuses, not Ladies of the Evening. . . .”
“There are times when the distinction seems a bit subtle. . . .” Monique found herself muttering.
Eric leaned closer, deep into her body-space by any cultural criterion. “Then this might be a good time for a quick trip belowdecks,” he said.
“To do what?”
Eric beamed at her, took her hand. “Wouldn’t you like to try out my equipment?”
“Getting a little crude, aren’t we, Prince Charming?”
“The surveillance equipment,” he hissed, without leaving the role of the seducer making his move to the eyes of any beholders. “Though of course, on the other hand, if you’ve got something better in mind . . .”
Monique could not help laughing.
Nor could she help realizing that in this moment she did.
“Loose zips sink spy ships, Eric,” she told him, running a quick finger up through the air about a hand’s breadth from his fly.
Eric led Monique Calhoun by the hand through the dining salon and down the stairs just as if they were one more couple on their merry way to one of the belowdecks boudoirs, and the gossip would make the obvious assumption when he returned to his hostly duties a half hour or so later.
It was part of the mystique. A gallant host did not refuse a lady. A good enough sophist might even contend it was in the line of duty.
Nor did Monique do anything to break the public illusion.
If that was what it was.
Eric had the feeling, by instinct and long experience, by the moist warmth of her palm, that warm moisture was gathering elsewhere, that if he suggested a detour, it would be an offer she would be hard put to refuse. But hard as he was to put that offer to her, as insistent as Mom was that he do it already, his sense of timing said, No, wait, she will come to you, so let her do it in her own time, and it will only be the sweeter.
Besides which she was playing the current game quite well, giving him a real match, and the prolonged frisson of arch frustration was not exactly unpleasant and in the end would only make the match point more enjoyable.
So Eric, true to his princely word, keyed them into the computer room with his retina-print. Although Ignatz was recording everything as usual, one of the security boys from Bad Boys was inside pretending to be a technician, the human component of the Potemkin interface hiding La Reine’s resident AI from Monique Calhoun.
Much of what he was whiling away the time watching was not what the conventional would deem fit for the eyes of a conventional lady, a dozen of the screens being filled with the feed from the boudoirs and toilets, and the sound system producing an unseemly cacophony of grunts, moans, gurgles, and splashes.
Eric dismissed him with a lidded scowl, but noted with interest that Monique seemed more amused than offended by the copulatory, excretory, and urinary live uncoverage.
“I can understand why you’d have sight and sound from the boudoirs and even the washrooms,” she said, as they sat down in the swivel chairs, “but why the toilet stalls? What do you expect to happen there except . . . the usual?”
“You’d be surprised,” Eric told her, though somehow he doubted it. “Nevertheless, let’s kill the sound, and kill the toilet visuals,” he said, typing random numbers on the keyboard and allowing Ignatz to create the illusion that he was actually controlling the mike and camera feeds in this primitive fashion.
“There,” he said, “much more . . stimulating.”
Seven of the screens still showed couples—hetero, homo, and in one case an ambiguous threesome—having at it.
“Speak for yourself, Eric. If I want to watch porn, I’d prefer professional performers, decent lighting, and a director. The real thing just looks silly when you’re watching it.”
“Really? Haven’t you ever done it with mirrors?”
“I’ll bet you do all the time. And you probably don’t even need a partner to enjoy it.”
“Admittedly one does meet a better class of people.”
Monique laughed. And Eric had to admit that this sort of repartee was more . . . stimulating than the action on the screens. Who was it who had said that the most sensitive erogenous zone was the human brain?
“Well, shall we have a quick tour of the less erotic aspects of the party?” Eric said somewhat reluctantly.
He hit ‘Control H,’ which automatically replaced the boudoir feed on six screens with the schematics of the boat and their plethora of camera and microphone numbers.
Moving the cursor over the numbers on the diagrams with the trackpoint and clicking the pickup equipment on was within the limits of Eric’s modest computer expertise, and so he did it, more or less at random.
This filled the remaining fourteen video screens with a series of new visuals, but it also resulted in a screech of babble, as fourteen microphone feeds came gibbering out the sound system together.
“Uh, I think Control S also cuts the sound,” Eric shouted for the benefit of Ignatz as he typed it, who, picking up o
n the voice command, made it so.
“And then . . . to hear the feed from a microphone, you just put the cursor on it, and type Control M. . . .”
Eric did so with a microphone picking up a table in the restaurant.
“—said that the only reason to be here at all was the food and drink—”
“Well, Esterhazy does know how to cater a party, but some of the people at this one—”
“Boring!” Eric said hastily and switched to Allison Larabee having a tête-à-tête with Paolo Pereiro out by the aft upper-deck rail.
“Embarrassing, you mean!” said Monique.
“—means necessary.”
“Oh really, Allison, such cheap theatrics. . . .”
“Maybe, but this really could be our last chance.”
“You know as well as I do that the Condition Venus model is full of unresolved variables. . . .”
“And whose climate model isn’t?”
“Mine at least was eighty percent predictive in its time.”
“In its time-frame, Paolo, which was quite modest.”
“Whereas yours is far too ambitious to be predictive of anything short-term at all.”
“I hope I’m wrong, but I’m afraid I’m right.”
“I’ll believe it when I see one of your white—”
“Tedious climatech babble,” said Eric, cutting to two stools at the forward bar, where Lydia Maren was attempting to pick up Geoff Gilden, the Lloyds ambassador to Paris. “Much more amusing.”
“—in any of the boudoirs downstairs?”
“Oh, I’ve done the dungeon, once or twice, ma chérie.”
“S or M?”
“Depends on my mood, the phase of the moon. . . .”
“What’s so amusing about this?” Monique demanded.
“She seems to have no idea that Geoff is thoroughly gay.”
Monique frowned at him. “If you’re through peeping through keyholes, Eric,” she said, “may I give it a try myself?”
And she reached for the trackpoint, placed the cursor on the feed from a table in the private aft bar, where Hassan bin Mohammed was having a hunched, hushed conversation with three other men, hit Control M.
“—but it’s in their syndic charter—”
“—too risky—”
“Mmmm, the Chairman of the CCC,” muttered Monique, “this might be interesting, how did you say I record?”
“Uh . . . you record by keeping the cursor where it is and hitting Control R.” Eric said for the benefit of Ignatz.
“—sure the effects will be transient?”
“—define sure—”
“—certain—”
“—a mathematical impossibility as every failed attempt at a definitive model has proven—”
“Who are these guys, anyway?” Monique muttered.
Eric shrugged. His dataprompt identified them as Hideki Manimoto, a contract climatech engineer for an orbital mirror corp; bin Mohammed’s deputy at the Committee of Concerned Climatologists, Aubrey Wright; and the chairman of Erdewerke, Bernard Kutnik—but telling her that would of course be giving too much away.
“—numbers then—”
“—ninety-three percent—”
“—minimal risk, I’d say—”
“—famous last words—”
“—precisely what we’re trying to prevent—”
“—at a profit, of course, Bernie—”
“—a wise man does well by doing good—”
“Oh really!” Eric groaned, and he moved the cursor to another screen, where an unlikely threesome of the female captain of the sixteenth arrondissement’s Force Flic and two males, one a Bad Boys importer, the other a not-all-that-well-known actor, were sashaying arm-in-arm-in-arm down the corridor past the boudoir doors.
“—the Sun King’s?”
“—too retro—”
“I’ll place my bet on the sauna, Monique, what about you?”
“—the tree house—?”
“—missing one Jane—”
“Don’t you have any interests that aren’t prurient, Eric?”
“—the dungeon—”
“—what kind of boys do you think we are—?”
Eric leered at her languidly. “Give me a week and I’ll think of one,” he told her. “Don’t you have any that are?”
“—just a big enough overbid to stick them with the contract—”
It had taken Monique Calhoun less time to learn the simple command structure than it had to outlast Eric Esterhazy’s smarmy attempts to seduce her via voyeurism; in fact, she supposed a reasonably intelligent chimpanzee wouldn’t have taken much longer.
“—a smile like the Mona Lisa with nothing but hard vacuum behind it—”
“—cruel, Terry, really cruel—”
So the so-called technician Eric had summoned when he finally left her alone in the computer room was probably a minder who needed to know about as much about the equipment as she did about quantum mechanics to do the job.
“—tornadoes, more like superheated thermals, not a true atmospheric vortex—”
“—fits the model though—”
“—if no one’s looking too closely—”
At first, Monique had played along with the charade, calling out locations on the boat, and letting the “tech” enter them with the keyboard.
“—think they’re telling us everything—”
“—only what serves the client’s interests, Jean-Luc—”
But it soon became obvious that she could do just as well or better with the boat schematics and the cursor herself. And if her suspicions needed any confirmation, she got it from the way Eric’s minder raised no objection at all to handing over the controls, quite out of character for the techie type.
“—desperation, if you ask me, they’ve sucked the Lands of the Lost dry—”
“—still money to be made adjusting to the local adjustment, always will be—”
What was not obvious, upon reflection, was what she was supposed to be doing here, how she was supposed to do it, or why.
So she had learned to operate the surveillance equipment, but what was she supposed to be looking for? And even if she knew what she was looking for, how was she going to find and record it in this chaos of images and sound from hundreds of cameras and microphones?
And why me, anyway?
“—like dogs and cats, the nastiest backstage atmosphere I’ve ever seen—”
“—didn’t seem to hurt the production, though—”
She was supposed to be here running Bread & Circuses VIP services, not playing Mata Hari for Mossad. What would happen if she told Avi Posner just that? To piss off and let her do her real job?
But Monique knew in the pit of her stomach that it would not be a smart career move to try to find out. Meaning she was afraid to find out. Meaning she was over her head in waters she had never had a desire to swim in. Political waters, her grandparents’ waters, the Hot and Cold War.
“—a lot worse at the turn of the millennium, everything from flying saucer cults to the Second Coming—”
“—Jesus or Elvis—?”
“—both, and half of them didn’t know which one played the guitar—”
Monique had never considered herself a political person, whatever that might still mean in this largely post-sovereign world. From what she had seen in her travels, patriotism, emotional allegiance to a geographical or ethnic identity, sovereign or semi-sovereign, living or dead, was the hobgoblin of mesmerized minds.
“—the central Sahara, Kansas, Australia, need deserts to make it work—”
“—and the hottest spots to make it plausible—”
Her only true allegiance was to Bread & Circuses, the syndic of which she was a citizen-shareholder, and that wasn’t political in the bad old bug-brained sense. That was a confluence of her individual and its collective self-interest. That was enlightened syndicalism.
Never be a citizen of anything in whic
h you would not want to hold shares.
“—most beautiful country left on the planet, and a climate to die for now that the rainfall’s under control—”
“—for who to die for is the usual question, White Man—”
So her heart was not made of emerald-green stone. So she had seen far too much of the Lands of the Lost not to feel True Blue inside. But that was conscience, wasn’t it, not politics? Idealism, if you wanted to get sloppy about it.
“—used by artists and scientists and mystics to enhance their consciousness—”
“—and brain-burn cases to get wasted—”
Something that was not an obvious feature of the revenant capitalist corporations displaying their climatech wares in the Grand Palais. Cool this place down, heat that one up, cloud cover here, burn it away from orbit there—their only allegiance was to what they had called in the age of capitalism the sacred bottom line. They did it for the money.
“—never been so disgusted in all my life—”
“—de gustibus non vomitorium, my dear—”
Big Blue was a mercenary outfit.
Everyone knew that.
Didn’t they?
So what does that make me?
Just a cog in the gearing of the Big Blue Machine. A pawn in some game I don’t even understand. Upon which the fate of the Earth might hang. Or just a lot of fat contracts.
Do I really want to know?
Does it matter?
Not really, Monique realized sourly, because either way it leaves me right where I already am.
The choice had never been hers to make.
This was politics.
And like it or not she was in it.
“Summon Prince Eric to key me out of here,” she told her faux-techie minder. “I do believe I need a breath of fresh air.”
GIVEN THE MEDIA SPOTLIGHT TURNED ON THE United Nations Annual Conference On Climate Stabilization by the sudden advent of the so-called white tornadoes and the obvious self-interest of Bread & Circuses and the client in turning it up even higher than such a harbinger of planetary doom might naturally inspire, Monique Calhoun was prepared for the pandemonium that greeted her as she arrived at the Grand Palais for the emergency plenary session of UNACOCS.
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