Greenhouse Summer

by Norman Spinrad

  The guards eyed each other greedily but, it seemed to Monique, forlornly.

  “We don’t know.”

  “They don’t tell us.”

  “We play game. You guess. We like, you win.”

  “Bunch of computer stuff, I think.”

  “Not climatech?”

  “Don’t look like it.”

  The Marenkos looked at each other, exchanged a few words in Russian.

  “Okay boys,” Stella Marenko said, handing over the money, “have a nice day.”

  “So what you think, Monique?” Stella said as Ivan wandered over to inspect a plankton-seeding barge.

  “About what?”

  “Mystery item.”

  Monique shrugged.

  “You have conference program? Anything interesting Sunday?”

  Monique fished the program booklet out of her bag, scanned it. “Presentation of ocean current modification proposal by Orbital Mechanix. Presentation of climate model by John Sri Davinda. Presentation of albedo-increasing forest cover by Qwik-grow. Summing up by General Secretary Lars Bendsten. Closing ceremony. Usual stuff.”

  Shit, she realized, I’m lapsing into Russified English!

  She vowed to watch her sentence structure for the duration of the Marenkos’ tour of the climatech exhibitions, which fortunately did not prove difficult, since the Siberians seemed to lose interest after another twenty minutes or so during which they mostly conversed with each other in Russian.

  “Okay, we see enough,” Ivan Marenko finally said as their brownian trajectory took them near the entrance to the makeshift auditorium from which the drone of the proceedings could be dimly heard.

  “You want to catch some of the conference?” Monique asked.

  “So, Ivan?” Stella Marenko asked.

  “Better to catch up on drinking,” her husband said. “Is bullshit in there. Answers only one question . . .”

  Stella Marenko eyed him warily. “This is going to be joke, Ivan?”

  “Da.”

  Stella glanced at Monique. “Dirty joke,” she told her. “Knows no other kind.” Monique noticed that half a dozen people on the way into the conference, drawn, no doubt, by the visual spectacle of the Marenkos, had paused within earshot to listen.

  “Why is planet like nymphomaniac?” Ivan Marenko said.

  Stella Marenko rolled her eyes. “Okay, so why is planet like nymphomaniac, Ivan?”

  “You should know, Stella!”

  Ivan Marenko grabbed his wife squarely by the crotch as Monique goggled in disbelief.

  “Much easier to heat up than cool down!”

  The restaurant band was playing Dixieland Bach, the tables were full of chattering diners, but the raucous noise leaking from the aft bar was still audible over the general buzz of the far larger salon even from the foot of the spiral staircase.

  Eric Esterhazy smiled, waved, chatted, did his professional hostly duty as he meandered through the restaurant toward the stern, but inside he was seething as he made his way to the Marenkos’ lair.

  For two nights now the Siberians had held court back there. He had been constrained, that is all but ordered, to remove a third of the tables in the aft bar to make room for one that the Marenkos appeared to have acquired at one of those larcenous antique boutiques specializing in fobbing off flea-market junk on tourists at ridiculous prices, an oversized round wrought-iron dreko-deco monstrosity that looked as if it had been fabricated from an outsized manhole cover and a defunct nineteenth-century Métro kiosk.

  And there they sat, drinking like Road Warrior mercenaries back from a bone-dry six-month tour guarding the Ka’bah in Mecca, ordering whole smoked Scottish salmon and baked sturgeon by the school, wild boar, venison, and pheasant by the meat locker, fruits de mer by the boatload, and caviar by the ice bucket delivered to their table, and floating it all on a continuous flood of the most expensive champagne and wine and exotic vodkas swilled down as if they were supermarket plonk as they invited all comers to partake of their largesse in loud beer-hall voices.

  Eric wondered why he was even drawn to visit this unseemly permanent brouhaha, since there was nothing he could do to impose any measure of civilized restraint, Eduardo Ramirez having made it clear that if the Marenkos chose to bite the heads off live chickens and spit them across the room, he was to supply the poultry and spittoons.

  Perhaps it was the same outraged instinct that caused baboons to display their flaming red buttocks in the face of intruders. The Siberians had usurped a portion of his boat as their own, and if he was powerless to drive them off, the least he could do was establish his own right to invade it with impunity, without, of course, going so far as dropping his pants.

  The Marenkos’ table and surrounding environs were crowded as usual. As many chairs as was geometrically possible had been pulled up to the table and filled, most of these with climatologists, including Pereiro, Braithwaite, and even Allison Larabee, plus Aubrey Wright, and some lower-rank climatech-corp people.

  A second-tier standing-room crowd consisting mostly of press, show people, professional celebrities, and assorted hangers-on reached greedily over the shoulders of the fortunate seated for the huge iced mountain of fruits de mer, the caviar-and-sour-cream-filled blinis, the contents of the caviar bucket itself, the charcuterie platter, the tranches of smoked salmon and smoked freshwater eel.

  Ivan and Stella Marenko poured drinks with one hand almost as fast as empty glasses were shoved under the bottles they held, he vodka, she champagne, while belting it down themselves with the other. There was a mound of designer dust on a Tiffany mirror that guests were vacuuming up through rolled and taped hundred-wu notes that had been thoughtfully supplied.

  “Aha, so Sweet Prince Potemkin arrives!” Stella Marenko shouted by way of greeting. “But sober as Saturday night in downtown Kabul and tush as tight as my dress!”

  This item was a silver sheath that seemed spray-painted on, the paint having given out just north of her nipples and south of her ass. Her long blond hair was cornrowed with beads of emeralds and rubies. A gem-encrusted golden dagger depended on a heavy chain between her bulging breasts.

  She shoved away the forest of empty glasses supplicating her like the ravening beaks of baby birds with her bottle, grabbed her husband’s, and filled a champagne glass with vodka. Her bloodshot eyes glowed like whorehouse neon.

  “Loosen rectum and join very serious intellectual party!” she barbled boozily. “I learn English verb form! You drink till you stink, he drank till he stank, I’m drunk as a skunk!”

  She handed the glass to Eric, who did not need to approach within range of her breath to verify that that exalted state had indeed long since been achieved.

  “Is everything all right, Madam Marenko?” he said frostily. “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “You think you’re up to it, do you, boy?”

  “I meant is there anything you need?”

  “Need to pee!” Stella Marenko woozed, attempting to rise to her feet, and, on the second try, barely making it.

  She reached out for Eric’s right forearm to more or less hold herself upright. “Be a good boy and help me!”

  Eric gave Ivan Marenko a sour not-my-job look; Ivan shot back a shit-faced shrug that said, Oh yes it is. At which point, Stella Marenko tugged heavily at his arm, or perhaps lost her balance and teetered backward, the result in any case being that Eric found himself being dragged out of the bar and into the salon by a reeling drunk.

  Once in the restaurant however, Stella Marenko’s balance suddenly improved at least to the point where she could walk more or less steadily by holding his arm and leaning up against him while nuzzling his ear.

  In this state, but with much more physical force than seemed apparent or that Eric could easily resist without creating an even more unseemly scene, she steered him like a tug pushing a river barge not toward the nearest toilet, but out onto the promenade that ran around the lower deck.

  There she threw he
r arms around his neck, pressing her body against him, pulling his head into her embrace, and for all the world seemingly whispering dirty sweet nothings in his ear.

  “Must be someplace on this boat that isn’t bugged,” she said quite clearly. “You take me there now.”

  Monique Calhoun had circled the lower promenade, wandered through the restaurant, peered into both lower-deck bars, subjected herself to the noise and babble of the upper-deck casino, mingled with the guests on the upper-deck promenade, then reversed course and did it all again backward, but, like the proverbial cop, just when she needed him, Prince Eric Esterhazy was nowhere to be found.

  Or rather, no doubt, since Prince Eric was constantly in hostly motion and so was she, their trajectories had failed to intersect in the same place at the same time. There was probably a mathematical equation to explain it, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle or something, but Monique, being no mathematician, preferred the characterological interpretation, namely that the karmic logic of a character like Prince Eric would of course impel his random motion along a path of least resistance to pissing her off.

  Not that she had boarded La Reine de la Seine tonight in the best of moods to begin with. Avi Posner had made his displeasure plain after her report this morning.

  “What you’ve given me so far is virtually useless. The Marenkos examine the climatech equipment and seem to understand what they’re looking at. They try to bribe their way into an unfinished exhibit out of piqued curiosity. They talk to a lot of climatologists on La Reine de la Seine where they seem permanently drunk. Low-grade, Monique, low-grade! Talk about what? Where’s the pattern? Didn’t I tell you that your priority assignment was to find out what they’re trying to find out?”

  “You also told me, as I remember, that I was to obtain for them whatever they require, Avi, and believe me that alone is a full-time job! How am I supposed to cater to the every wish of people who seem to have one a minute, run the rest of Bread & Circuses’ VIP operation, which just happens to be my day job, and vet their drunken table-talk babble all at the same time?”

  “Amateurs, amateurs . . .” Posner had grumbled. “You get copies of all of their table-talk recordings since they arrived out of Esterhazy and review them in your spare time!”

  “Spare time? I heard you say spare time? And what recordings are you going on about?”

  “The automatic recordings that Esterhazy’s surveillance equipment makes of everything that’s said on board the boat, what else!”

  “Esterhazy didn’t mention anything about his equipment automatically recording everything. . . .”

  “Of course it does! It has to! The Secret Service of Lower Moronia wouldn’t install surveillance equipment that didn’t!”

  “But how am I supposed to get Esterhazy to admit it and hand over copies?”

  “I . . . suggest . . . you . . . use . . . your . . . feminine . . . charm,” Posner had told her very very slowly as if indeed explaining it to one of the aforementioned morons.

  This had not exactly piped Monique aboard La Reine tonight in a lighthearted mood, and fruitlessly trying to track down Eric Esterhazy in order to accomplish this moronically modest task was not improving it.

  And while she was ignorant of the mathematical raison d’être for her current state of frustration, she now recalled a semimathematical method for resolving it that she had once heard, the lazy woman’s way out, namely that if you sat in one place long enough, anyone you were looking for would sooner or later come to you.

  Nor did she need to be a mathematician to figure out that where she planted her ass would likely exert a non-random influence on the time-frame thereof.

  Monique sighed, then made her way across the restaurant to the aft bar, and what even a certified agent of the Lower Moronia Secret Service could not fail to perceive as the logical nexus even if she wanted to—the table of Stella and Ivan Marenko.

  The only places on La Reine de la Seine deaf to the surveillance equipment were the wheelhouse, hardly suitable for a private conversation, the interior of the fuel tank, not exactly practical, and Eric’s own dressing room, so the forced choice was obvious.

  This had an upside and a downside and they were one and the same. The downside was that it required Eric to squire Stella Marenko down the corridor past the private boudoirs and for her to do her amorous drunk act when several people to-ing and fro-ing from their own assignations observed them en passant.

  The upside was that it provided a sufficiently lubricious cover for their somewhat prolonged disappearance from public view.

  Once inside the dressing room, however, Stella Marenko was all business. She parked herself on the bed, but sat upright on the edge, and made no protest when Eric, somewhat relieved, sat down on the single chair rather than romantically close beside her.

  “What do you know about Davinda?” she said, in a voice that betrayed no hint of drunkenness, quite impressive considering how much she had been slugging down.

  “This is what?” asked Eric. “An obscure branch of Hinduism? Some new flavor of Third Force psychic energy?”

  “This is John Sri Davinda. This is a human.”

  “Oh yes, the name is vaguely familiar . . .”

  “A climatologist from California. He presents climate model on last day of conference. What can you tell me about him?”

  Eric shrugged. “Not much more than you’ve just told me,” he said. “I remember meeting him once, I think, the opening night of the conference. Dressed and barbered like the Ancient Mariner.”

  “He is not aboard tonight?”

  “He had the poor taste to appear drunk or stoned or insane onstage at the conference. In the absence of a proper classic vaudeville hook, Bendsten had to drag him off himself. For obvious reasons, he hasn’t been on Calhoun’s guest list since.”

  “Put him on yours. Get him here.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “We want to talk with him, Ivan and me.”

  “About what?”

  Stella Marenko shrugged, a motion that came perilously close to popping her breasts out of her dress.

  “There is mysterious something in Grand Palais under guard,” she said. “Secret is to be revealed on Sunday. Sunday program has closing ceremony, speech by Bendsten, something about Qwik-grow forest, something about playing with ocean currents from orbit, and presentation of climate model by Davinda. Closing ceremony, General Secretary, forest, orbital mirrors, these cannot be hidden inside canvas tent. Must be something to do with Davinda climate model, da?”

  “Da,” said Eric, actually impressed by this woman for the first time; despite all appearances, obviously not just another stupid face. “But what?”

  “What we must find out, Prince Potemkin,” Stella Marenko told him. “You know what means ‘Lao’? This is a word in English?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Not Russian either. Maybe Chinese, but—”

  “What does this have to do—?”

  “I hear Kutnik say this word to Aubrey Wright, he looks at me as if to see if I heard it, I do not think they speak Chinese, so . . .”

  “So . . . ?”

  “So maybe is code, how do call it, acronym?”

  “For what?”

  “Maybe for Sunday surprise package?” said Stella Marenko. “Maybe you better find out before they open it?”

  “He takes Stella to the toilet,” Ivan Marenko informed Monique when she inquired after Eric Esterhazy.

  “He took your wife to the toilet?”

  Marenko laughed, shrugged, knocked back another slug of vodka. “Stella’s face, how you say, shitted?”

  “Shit-faced,” corrected Dr. Bobby Braithwaite to a general round of less-than-sober laughter.

  “Take load off feet, Monique,” Marenko said, patting the seat apparently temporarily vacated by his wife. “Tie load on,” he said, pouring her a glass of vodka.

  Gingerly, Monique took her seat at the crowded table. The sit-and-wait theory,
it would seem, would soon pay off. If Stella Marenko was so drunk that she required the services of Prince Eric to get her to the ladies’, then simple logic would seem to indicate that when she was finished with her business within, Eric would have to bring her back.

  “What’s so important about knowing what the Sunday surprise is anyway?” Eric Esterhazy asked Stella Marenko. “If you’re right, it’s probably just Davinda’s climate model.”

  “Nyet, climate model is software, software you don’t hide behind screening. Must be something else in there.”

  “So what?” said Eric. “After the panic they’ve created with their rake white tornadoes, how can whatever it is be anything but an anticlimax?”

  “Bad theater. Very stupid, da?”

  “Da. Very.”

  “Too stupid. Only assholes assume other players are assholes. No one ever tells you this, Prince Potemkin?”

  Eric couldn’t help smiling. “Not quite as elegantly,” he said dryly.

  “So not to be assholes, we must assume Big Blue Machine thinks their move will be smart, da?”

  “Da,” Eric found himself muttering, and rather stupidly by his own lights. The quality of Stella Marenko’s English seemed to vary like a faucet she turned up and down at random, but the more she talked, the sharper she seemed.

  “Ramirez tells you why we are here, da?”

  “To decide whether to buy the recordings that prove the white tornadoes are fakes and expose the whole thing . . .”

  “More than that, Prince Potemkin,” Stella Marenko said. “You ever ask yourself why?”

  “Why? Why what?”

  “Why do we even think of paying Bad Boys hundreds of millions of wu for recordings?”

  “To use them to destroy UNACOCS and Big Blue. . . .”

  “What for?”

  “What for?”

  “Why bother when we already know white tornadoes are fakes?” Stella Marenko said. “Why not just stay home, drink vodka, make love, and sit on our money?”