Greenhouse Summer

by Norman Spinrad

  There was a large and raucous crowd of demonstrators on the Avenue Churchill sidewalk across from the Grand Palais, held back by Force Flic horsemen, and waving placards bearing such slogans as COOL THE EARTH NOW!, STOP CONDITION VENUS!, and A BLUE WORLD OR NONE! though mercifully neither REPENT NOW! nor THE END IS NIGH!”

  What Monique had not quite been prepared for was such well-organized pandemonium.

  Not only were the placards slickly printed, they seemed limited to about half a dozen slogans, and although the color of the type varied, the print font did not. There were even computer-enhanced stills from the only extant TV footage of a white tornado.

  The same still cloned dozens of times.

  The entrance to the Grand Palais itself was being kept clear by a functional semicircle of flics on foot armed with electric wands, but the horsemen holding back the crowd across the street were Garde Républicain in full fancy kit—plumed steel helmets, cloaks, costume swords—available for ceremonial occasions only at a hefty premium.

  The gutter itself was jammed with camera crews who threatened to outnumber the demonstrators, and although it was a bright sunny afternoon, they turned on brilliant white shooting lights to herald the entry of major players, cuing shouting, screaming, and pro forma surging against the Force Flic lines, and pro forma gooses with electric wands by the flics, who made a pro forma show of displeasure. Even Monique got her share of eye-killing glare and incoherent shouting as her pass got her inside.

  The vast trade show floor, on the other hand, was eerily empty of people, even camera crews, except for those streaming through the exhibits toward the makeshift auditorium and the guards at the canvas enclosure hiding the mysterious whatever.

  The atmosphere inside the Grand Palais was oppressively grim and electric. It took Monique a long moment to realize that this was at least in part due to a deliberately created visual special effect.

  The smart glass panels of the roof had been adjusted so that the bright blue sky outside became the sinister luminescent gray of an impending thunderstorm in which the sun was bleached but undimmed to roughly simulate a schematic version of the furnace vortex of a white tornado.

  And when you entered the makeshift auditorium itself, your eye was immediately drawn to a loop of video footage of the real thing cycling on the big screen behind the stage:

  Mirage-shimmering desert that could’ve been the Sahara or central Australia or Nevada or the sere empty waste at any low-latitude continental heartland under a bleached-out cloudless sky. In the middle distance, a whirling white maelstrom abruptly rises from the desert floor, corkscrewing upward, sucking sand and rock with it, rising up into the stratosphere for all the camera eye can tell, persists for a minute or so, then like footage of the birth of a conventional tornado run backward, disappears upward into the empty sky.

  And again, and again, and again, endlessly.

  By all accounts, the white tornadoes were quite transient, at least so far, and occurred only in the hottest of hot spots long since all-but-abandoned by humans, so this brief footage shot by a scientific expedition who had chanced to be on the scene of one was all there was.

  But there had been anecdotal accounts of distant sightings. And satellite instruments had picked up a few of the white tornadoes from on high. And measured their temperature and internal wind velocities.

  The white tornadoes seemed to be superheated columns of air, monster thermal updrafts that developed a vortex whirl as they rose through the atmosphere, then, cooled by the upward expansion, destabilized at their base and disappeared skyward.

  That was about as much as was known about the white tornadoes. As to what was causing them to appear now, how many there had been, whether the phenomenon might continue, what might happen next, there were a thousand theories, all of which when translated into screaming news headers came out: “CONDITION VENUS! END OF THE WORLD!”

  “End of the World” or not, however, Jean-Luc Tri made no hypocritical attempt to hide his glee when Monique reached the reserved Bread & Circuses seats in the otherwise standing-room-only auditorium.

  “Look at this crowd! What coverage! I only wish I had thought of it myself!”

  “You mean you didn’t?” Monique said dryly.

  Jean-Luc laughed. “I’m good,” he said. “I would not give you an argument if you said I was the greatest. I would love to take the credit.” He shrugged. “But God, I am not.”

  Maybe not, but Monique had it from the source that it had been Ariel Mamoun who had broached the idea of an emergency plenary session of the conference to Lars Bendsten when the story broke. And Jean-Luc who had secured the only footage of a white tornado for UNACOCS and had probably suggested using this loop of it as the background visual for the emergency session. And probably had a word or two with the Grand Palais people about the smart glass effects too.

  Bread & Circuses!

  Of course B&C could not possibly have created this mysterious climatological phenomenon. But who but Bread & Circuses could have so quickly and thoroughly turned it to the client’s advantage?

  Monique should’ve been proud of her syndic. And on a professional level, she supposed she was. But there was another level on which the whole thing was elusively disturbing.

  Okay, the organized crowd supplied with professional placards, the max coverage, the visual grace note of the Garde Républicain, the smart glass special effect—standard B&C technique, nothing to upset the conscience about a little scene setting like that, now was there?

  But were these “white tornadoes” really the apocalyptic event that the coverage was making of them? Was it really time to panic?

  After all, if you took a deep breath, and stood to one side of the hype, were a few hyperthyroid dust devils really major disasters?

  On a planet that had seen a rise in temperature that turned farmland into wasteland and wasteland into deadland and the flooding of the littoral homelands of hundreds of millions and the breakup of at least one of its polar ice caps?

  The impending advent of Condition Venus?

  Was the sky really falling?

  Was the End of the World really Nigh?

  Or was Chicken Little a Bread & Circuses professional too?

  “Open sez me.”

  “I hear and obey, Little Master of All the World.”

  Given the silly pun password, it seemed only appropriate to Eric Esterhazy to have Ignatz reply through the persona of a genie out of a hokey Arabian Nights pic.

  Certainly better than having the AI talk through the persona of Mom, which was a menu option too. The real thing had been more than enough for one day.

  It was afternoon, La Reine de la Seine was moored at the Quai Branly, and Eric had the boat and the computer room more or less to himself, besides which, if he wasn’t quite master of all the world, he was for present practical purposes the master of this little part of it.

  Much of the rest of the world might be flapping its arms and rushing about in front of television and net coverage of the emergency session of the UNACOCS conference, but Eric had more important things to do. If the world came to an end this afternoon, he’d just have to catch it on the late news playback.

  Eric had been having lunch with Mom at a favorite Chinese restaurant when the subject of the so-called white tornadoes had arisen in the conversation as it must have at that moment in tens of thousands of such luncheon conversations all over Paris.

  “Seems to me I’ve heard the term somewhere before . . .”

  “Hardly surprising, Eric, seeing as how the white tornadoes’ve replaced the King Bobbie’s sex-change operation as the hot media wank . . .”

  “I mean before they made the news. . . .”

  “What? You’re sure about this, Eric?”

  “Not really . . .”

  “Where? When?”

  “I don’t really remember. . . .”

  “Think, fer chrissakes, Eric! You do know how to think, don’t you? It’s not really as hard as it seems. Y
ou just forget about your pecker for five minutes and pretend your most important organ’s located between your ears.”

  “I’m not even sure I heard the two words together in the same conversation . . . it was all rather jumbled together and cut up somehow, as I recall. . . .”

  Mom had pounced on that like a mongoose.

  “Like a lot of random microphone feed over the surveillance equipment on the boat?”

  “Now that you mention it . . .”

  “Hell’s bells, Eric, I have to mention it before you take your head out of your rectum? Who? When?”

  Eric had shrugged.

  “Don’t you think it would be sort of swift if you found out?”

  Eric had indeed been constrained to agree.

  “Phrase search, Ignatz. White and tornado or tornadoes.”

  “Time-frame, Master?”

  Let’s see, the story broke yesterday, so . . .

  “Go back three days, then forward for forty-eight hours.”

  “Your wish is my voice command.”

  The stage was as packed as the auditorium, additional folding chairs shoehorned together to accommodate the crush. Every chair but one barely held the vibrating butt of an attending climatologist, nineteen of the heavyweights, each eager to get in the first and/or last word. If the individual mikes had been on, it would already have been a tower of media Babel; they were already arguing with each other. Such was the chaos that the return of Allison Larabee to the conference she had so recently stormed out of had created no drama at all.

  In the center of the lion cage sat Lars Bendsten, pressed into service to preside over the emergency session. From the look on his face, it seemed to Monique that, provided merely with a mike and a mike control panel in lieu of the traditional whip and pistol, he was wondering how long it would be before he was forced to stand up and defend his ground with his chair.

  “The emergency plenary session will now come to order,” he began. When it didn’t, the General Secretary turned up the gain on his microphone and commanded it by brute auditory force. “THE EMERGENCY PLENARY SESSION WILL NOW COME TO ORDER.”

  It did, more or less.

  “We will conduct this session in a rational and civilized manner,” Bendsten said, turning his volume back down to a more bearable level and proceeding in his standard UN diplomat’s voice.

  “Each of the participants will have five minutes to make an opening statement, and then the floor will be opened to discussion.”

  The mighty collective groan that arose at this came from the news crews massed in front of the stage. If everyone stuck to their time limit, an optimistic assumption indeed, it would be at least an hour and a half before the real show began.

  “As it was written, so it has been done, Little Master,” said Ignatz. “Search completed. Twenty-seven instances of ‘white tornado’ recorded within the time-frame of the search parameters.”

  “Really?” said Eric. Mom was right, he thought out of all-too-well-ingrained reflex.

  “By the Beard of the Prophet, I swear it to be true, oh Little Master of All the World!”

  Eric decided that the genie of the lamp had already gotten tedious. “Identify the speakers,” he said, replacing it with the breathy purr of Marilyn Monroe.

  “In alphabetical order, Eric . . . Dr. Jackson Belaview, Hans Cartwright, Chu Lun, Birgit Holmgren, Bernard Kutnik, Dr. Allison Larabee, Hideki Manimoto, Horace McPherson, Hassan bin Mohammed, Dr. Paolo Pereiro, Aubrey Wright.”

  “That many!”

  “Exactly that many . . . Eric.”

  No question about it, “white tornadoes” had definitely been a hot topic of conversation before their advent. Curiouser and curiouser.

  “Tag the speakers,” Eric said, replacing the distraction of Marilyn with the flat neutral voice of the twentieth-century actor Leonard Nimoy playing the logical alien, Mr. Spock.

  “Dr. Jackson Belaview, meteorologist. Hans Cartwright, President, Orbital Solutions, Incorporated. Chu Lun, Minister of Environment, Guangdong. Birgit Holmgren, Chairwoman of the Board, Environmental Imagineers S. A. Bernard Kutnik, Chairperson of the Board, Erdewerke, A. G. Dr. Allison Larabee, climatologist. Hideki Manimoto, engineer, Orbital Solutions, Incorporated. Horace McPherson, Chief of Public Relations, Committee of Concerned Climatologists. Hassanbin Mohammed, Chairperson, Committee of Concerned Climatologists. Dr. Paolo Pereiro, climatologist. Aubrey Wright, General Secretary, Committee of Concerned Climatologists.”

  Eric didn’t need to be Machiavelli or even Mom to realize that most, if not all, of these personages were one way or another, on one level or another, associated with the Big Blue Machine.

  And with the “white tornadoes.”

  Ergo, the white tornadoes were associated with Big Blue.

  You didn’t need the logic of Mr. Spock to figure that much out either.

  But . . .

  Why?

  They couldn’t . . .

  Could they?

  They wouldn’t . . .

  Would they?

  Oh yes they would, if they could, and had a bottom-line reason why!

  “Sequence the conversations and play them back in chronological order,” he told Ignatz.

  “Illogical command, Captain. Some of them took place simultaneously.”

  “Well then just give me those in alphabetical sub-order!” Eric snapped irritably.

  “Illogical command, Captain. Alphabetize according to what parameter?”

  “According to whatever,” Eric groaned. “According to a random number program. According to the last name of whoever said the keywords first. According to the I-Ching.”

  Some twisted impulse made him replace Mr. Spock with Mom as he parroted one of her all-too-familiar lines at Ignatz.

  “Use your noodle for a change, kiddo!”

  “Now you’re finally using yours, Eric!” the Artificial Intelligence said.

  Surreal boredom was a concept that would have previously seemed self-contradictory to Monique Calhoun.

  However the possibility of its existence was being amply demonstrated now, as one after another climatologist delivered learned discourses, most of which were puffs for the efficacy of their own climate models, while everyone else waited for Allison Larabee herself to have the last formal word.

  While behind them, on the giant screen, the endless loop of the white tornado towered over the proceedings with the iconic menace of the previous century’s mushroom pillar cloud.

  Perhaps without the presence of the image of the impending apocalypse in question, Monique might have found this symposium moderately interesting. Certainly she had already learned more about the art of climate modeling than she had ever thought she wanted to know.

  And first and foremost, though the participants would never own up to it themselves, was that climate modeling, at least in its current state, was as much an art as a science.

  Since even if the data were sufficient, even if a definitive climate model program could be written, there existed no computer of sufficient power to run it on, all the malarkey about “indeterminacy,” “plus or minus x percent,” “insufficient data,” “margin of error,” “random factors,” and the rest of it, seemed to be academic euphemisms for estimations, fudge factors, or just plain bullshit.

  In the twentieth century, or so Monique had heard, they used to say that everyone talked about the weather, but nobody did anything about it. Now that everyone was doing something about it, the futile talk had shifted to the results thereof upon the planetary climate, but none of these savants had produced a climate model that had really proven predictive.

  Except perhaps one.

  Models were presented that had indeed in the past predicted the breakup of the north polar ice cap, the weakening of the Gulf Stream, the permanent El Niño, the rapid southward march of the Sahara, the rough rate of the sea-level rise, and all the rest of it. Indeed it was fair to say—and each partisan of their own model certainly did—that there wasn’t a major
aspect of the rapidly changing climate that someone’s climate model hadn’t predicted.

  But it was also true that none of the climate models being put forth here as the latest state of the art hadn’t missed predicting one or more of the major climatic events. And therefore, given their track records, none of them had much credibility when it came to forecasting what would happen next.

  Except perhaps one.

  Only Dr. Allison Larabee’s Condition Venus model had yet to be discredited by conspicuous failure to predict a major climatic change, Perhaps because it was more speculative than the others, broader, looking further ahead. Admittedly it hadn’t yet got anything right that the others had gotten wrong either. . . .

  Or had it?

  The image glowering over the palaver ominously suggested otherwise. The video loop of the white tornado continually reminded the audience and the cameras, if not, it would seem, the speakers, that it was what this emergency plenary session of the United Nations Annual Conference On Climatic Stabilization was supposed to be about.

  Meaning that the fidgeting and murmuring grew and grew as speaker after speaker droned on while everyone else waited in impatient and expectant boredom for Larabee.

  “This is an excruciation,” Ariel Mamoun groaned.

  Jean-Luc Tri shrugged. “At least it’s a build.”

  “But we’ve probably lost most of the live coverage,” Mamoun said.

  “Bendsten didn’t really have much choice,” Jean-Luc pointed out. “Anyone he put on after Larabee would be like shoving a dog act onstage after the magician pulls a live brontosaur out of his top hat.”

  “He could at least have limited the speakers to two minutes each,” Monique suggested wearily.

  Jean-Luc snorted. “And repealed the law of gravity while he was at it.”

  “Ready when you are, C.B.,” said Ignatz’s simulation of Mom’s voice.

  “Roll ’em,” said Eric. “Screen one.”

  On the chosen screen, Hassan bin Mohammed, the Chairperson of the CCC, Bernard Kutnik, Chairperson of the Board of Erdewerke, Hideki Manimoto, the engineer from Orbital Solutions, and bin Mohammed’s deputy Aubrey Wright, sat around a table in the aft bar.