Eric could do nothing but stare at her with a mind as blank as the expression on his face. The expression on Stella Marenko’s face, however, revealed a frightening intensity.
“Because what Big Blue Machine seems to be doing is too stupid,” she said. “They pour last big money they have down rathole of UNACOCS. Take terminal gamble with faked white tornadoes, gamble they lose if we want to expose it. Why?”
“Because they’re desperate. Because they’ve sucked all the money out of the Lands of the Lost that there is to suck.”
“Da, maybe,” said Stella Marenko. “And if we find out they want to turn Siberia the Golden back into Siberia the Ice Box just to make money, we buy the recordings and use them to pound those capitalist bastards into mincemeat filling for pilmenyi!”
Now Stella Marenko actually grew pensive. “But . . .”
“But . . . ?”
“But what if something more important than money makes them so desperate?”
“More . . . important . . . than . . . money . . . ?” Eric said very slowly, rolling this novel morsel around in his mouth to see how it tasted. “What’s more important than money?”
“Life, Prince Potemkin,” Stella Marenko said. “Life on Earth. Not so easy to enjoy your money if you and everyone else and whole biosphere are dead. Da, white tornadoes are fakes. But this does not prove Condition Venus cannot be real. Maybe is real. Maybe is really starting to happen. Maybe Big Blue knows this. Maybe this is what makes them so desperate. Might be enough to have even unreconstructed capitalist bastards desperate for more reason than profit—especially if is big profit in selling awful truth anyway!”
“Da,” said Eric. “Da,” he repeated, remembering that Eduardo Ramirez had presented him with more or less this very train of logic. Apparently just before showing the white tornado recordings to these very people.
And now Eric actually saw an expression of sadness form on this formerly clownish woman’s face.
“This is what we are here to find out,” she said almost softly. “Because if this is true, and we prove to world that white tornadoes are fakes, we do terrible thing, worse than Stalin, worse than gulag, worse than . . . worse than . . .”
She shrugged, throwing up her hands. “All-time-Olympic-record atrocity. Because then no one will believe that it is true. No one pays to cool planet. And we all die. Syndicalists. Capitalists. Saints. Assholes. Birds and trees. Fishes and flowers.”
Stella Marenko leaned forward, almost teary-eyed now, or so to Eric it seemed.
“So, Prince Potemkin,” she said, “if this is really true, we must eat as big pile of shit as is necessary to prevent it, da? Must eat shit and let Big Blue Machine get away with evil capitalist fakery. Must eat shit and let Big Blue plot succeed. Siberian syndics must eat all-time-Olympic-record pile of shit and lead the way to finance the cooling of the planet.”
“But—”
Now there definitely were tears misting Stella Marenko’s formerly hard blue eyes.
“But is a lot of shit to eat, da,” she said in a voice barely above a whisper. “But if we don’t, no one else will. And if we who have most to lose lead, world will follow, da. . . .”
“But—”
“Da, Siberia the Golden pays to destroy its own days of wine and roses. . . . Da. . . .”
A single teardrop formed in the corner of Stella Marenko’s left eye, and hung there, perhaps only by dint of her iron will, nor would she deign to notice it by brushing it away.
“But we are Siberians!” she said, her voice hardening. “Great-grandchildren of zeks Russian czars sent east to freeze to death for centuries. Grandchildren of Uncle Joe’s gulag. Children of the capitalist collapse. We know long long winter before this greenhouse summer comes. We are tough bastards, Prince Potemkin. We are Siberians. We survive. We are not Soviets, we are not Russians, we are Siberians! We are not communists, we are not capitalists, we are syndicalists! And we are not the kind of assholes who let building burn down with ourselves inside it because it is cold outside! We are Siberians! And if Siberian summer must die so the world can live, well . . .”
She managed an ironic little smile. “If world dies, Siberia the Golden dies with it anyway, da, Prince Potemkin? We can always go back to furs and thermal underwear, and I get to wear mink and ermine all year round.”
She laughed then, and Eric found the bravado of it quite touching.
“More stylish at least than raggy prison uniforms and newspapers stuffed in boots!”
“. . . okay, Dr. Larabee, so after white tornadoes come on stage, how long we have before planet turns into broasting oven?”
“. . . before the biosphere is terminally damaged? Or before the greenhouse runaway becomes irreversible?”
“. . . is not the same?”
“. . . the runaway may become irreversible before the biosphere becomes terminal, if we start seeing measurable rises in atmospheric pressure, if the superheated thermals increase in number, if they persist longer, if we start to see them over the equatorial oceans, if the overall humidity increases along with the temperature . . .”
“. . . we’re all climatologists on this here bus, not biospheric ecologists . . .”
“. . . so before is too late to do anything but stay drunk . . .”
“. . . is there’s anyone at this table who hasn’t reached that state already . . . ?”
“. . . forty years, plus or minus a margin of error of twenty-five percent . . .”
Monique Calhoun tried not to find herself idly visualizing what Stella Marenko must be doing in the toilet to have been gone so long.
“. . . is awful big margin for error . . .”
“Not in predictive climatology . . .”
Boring!
“. . . we start now, we can see a full degree drop within a decade . . .”
It wasn’t so easy to keep the scatological and barfological images from flitting through her mind as she sat there sipping tentatively at her vodka enduring this tedious climatological table talk that seemed little more than a woozy face-to-face reprise of the whole damned conference itself.
The climatologists, who had obviously been prepped, kept trying to convince Ivan Marenko that the white tornadoes meant The End Was Near. Aubrey Wright and the climatech executives kept trying to turn this into an unsubtle sell for their planet-cooling services.
Marenko, the object of this ham-handed amateur-night pub, seemed to have his wits together at least well enough to see through it, admittedly not a major intellectual feat, and took rude pleasure in rattling the bars of their cages while refilling their glasses almost, if not quite, as fast as he kept draining his own.
“. . . mylar shits . . . ah sheets . . . a few molecules thick, you’d be shurprised at the area we can occlude per throw-weight . . .”
“. . . trees, y’see, sequester th’ charbon dioxide . . .”
“. . . better marijuana, da, grows even faster, valuable cash crop . . .”
“. . . but you release what you’ve sequestered when you burn it . . .”
Marenko, it seemed, was being a lot more successful in getting these eminent scientists and climatech corp execs blotted than they were at selling him Condition Venus.
“. . . flower gardens, then, da, on rooftops, window boxes, everywhere, carpet all city space with roses, tulips, peonies, poppies, da, let a million million flowers bloom, as says famous Chinese Communist . . . Bao? Chao . . . ? Lao . . . ?”
“Lao?”
“Mao!”
“. . . not such a crazy idea, worldwide campaign, cover lots an’ lots of unused shurface area . . .”
“. . . Qwik-grow flowers . . . make ’em white t’increase th’ albedo too . . .”
On the other hand, Marenko wasn’t failing to get himself blotted either. He was, after all, drunk enough to be blithely ignoring the fact that his wife had disappeared toward the toilet with a character like Eric Esterhazy at least fifteen minutes ago.
If that was really w
here they were.
Somehow Monique suddenly found herself doubting it.
“. . . crow shits on little chicken’s head, and Chicken Little runs around screaming sky is falling, da, famous proverb . . .”
“. . . point of which is . . . ?”
“. . . do not listen to birdbrain running around like chicken with head cut off, da . . . hah, hah, hah . . .”
Now the images that Monique could not keep from swimming through her mind’s eye involved both Eric Esterhazy and Stella Marenko, they did not involve urinary, excretory, or vomitory functions, and the set was Prince Eric’s private dressing room, rather than the ladies’.
And she was bemused to find that these images infuriated her.
Not that jealousy had anything to do with it.
What was there to be jealous about?
But Eric Esterhazy had some nerve!
While she sat here waiting for him to return through a subjective eternity of boring blather he was probably belowdecks in his dressing room bonking Stella Marenko!
Stella Marenko placed her palms on the bed behind her, leaned back, arching her breasts in Eric’s direction, and while in a strictly physical sense this moved her farther away from the chair on which he sat, in some other subtle sense she seemed closer.
He found himself admiring this woman. Even liking her.
Nor, he discovered in some surprise, was his penile alter ego in disagreement.
“You are right about one thing, Prince Potemkin,” she said. “Only thing we know for sure is that Big Blue capitalists are desperate to get Siberian money for planet-cooling schemes. Maybe to save the world. Maybe just to save financial asses. We must know. We have big decision to make. We must be very careful.”
“You and Ivan don’t exactly impress me as the careful types,” Eric told her.
Stella Marenko laughed. “Careful, not . . . timid,” she said. “This means we take care to do right thing, da, not that we are cowards. We are loud, we are brave, but we . . . take care.”
She smiled at Eric, she stretched like a cat, upward and outward, looked directly at him with those bright blue eyes.
“For instance, Sweet Prince, we have been gone from table a long time, we must . . . take care that people do not think this conversation happened,” she said.
Eric found himself moving forward to the edge of his chair, leaning toward her. Was what he sensed was beginning to happen really beginning to happen? Did he want it to?
“By convincing them we were doing something more . . . innocent?” he ventured.
Stella Marenko lifted her hands off the bed, slowly pulled herself upright using the muscles of her back alone, an unexpectedly fluid and athletic motion, and one which Eric found suddenly and acutely stimulating.
“Who would believe that?” she said.
“You have . . . something better in mind?”
Stella Marenko leaned deeply forward, toward him, with that same athletic fluidity, and held that difficult position like a yogic adept, affording him an excellent and not at all uninviting vista down the majestic slopes of her cleavage.
“Something . . . more credible,” she said.
And then, amazingly, she ran her hands through her bejeweled cornrowed hairdo, disarranging it into dishabille. She ran the back of one hand across her mouth, smearing lipstick. She reached down, popped her left breast out of her bodice, the nipple of which was erect, Eric could not fail to notice as she all but shoved it in his face.
“Wha—”
She bounded off the bed, and stood there towering over Eric where he sat, hiking up her short skirt, yanking down her black silk panties, deliberately ripping them in the process, and stood over him, a mighty blond amazon looking for all the world as if he had had his way with her already.
Or rather, realistically, vice versa.
She ran both hands through his long blond hair, thoroughly tangling it. She stuck a hand down his shirt to feel his chest, popping the top two buttons. She withdrew it. She cupped his face in both hands, pulled him upright, kissed him everywhere but on the mouth, wetly and messily. She reached down, pulled open his velcro fly, and—
Stood back, while Eric stood there with a throbbing erection half out of his pants, all but panting and drooling.
She shoved her breast most of the way back into her bodice, pulled her ripped panties up to half-mast, rearranged her short crumpled dress so that just a hint of torn black silk showed if she bent a little too far over.
She reflected a moment, then bit Eric just under the left ear hard enough to create a little bloody bruise, unceremoniously and with some difficulty stuffed his prick back into his pants, artfully resealed the fly halfway up and crooked.
“Da,” she said, observing her handiwork critically. “Now when we leave, no one who sees us will think we were doing anything in here but fucking.”
Monique found making a graceful exit from the Marenko table ridiculously easy. She had not been taking part in the conversation, there were a dozen people waiting to squeeze into any momentarily empty chair at the feast, and Ivan Marenko, too drunk to notice that his wife had gone missing, didn’t even notice her departure.
Getting the recordings of all the Marenkos’ past drunken table talk out of Eric Esterhazy tonight, though, was not going to be as easy.
It would probably take some arduous exercise of her feminine wiles to even get him to admit they existed, though admittedly, if Posner hadn’t all but ordered her to do just that and she weren’t so pissed off at Eric, that wouldn’t exactly be the most onerous task she had ever confronted.
But first she had to find him. And while she now had an unpleasant idea of where to find him, it didn’t seem like such a smart move to go banging on his dressing-room door to roust him out of bed with Stella Marenko.
Still, she didn’t see what else she could do, so she made her way belowdecks to boudoir country, passing a couple on their way in to one of the chambers, and another on the way out of one, on her way to Eric Esterhazy’s dressing room.
Now what?
Mercifully the corridor remained empty for several minutes, so there was no one to observe her standing there like a fool trying to decide whether to knock or wait.
If she knocked and got no answer, it could mean either that they weren’t in there, or that they were, and naturally didn’t want to be discovered. If she waited, and they did eventually emerge, it would be just as awkward, and if she was wrong, and they weren’t in there, she could wait forever.
Fortunately there was no keyhole, or no doubt she would have been caught bent over with her ass in the air peering through it like the foil in some moldy old French bedroom farce by the two couples who came sauntering down the corridor as—
—the door opened.
And out staggered Prince Eric Esterhazy and Stella Marenko in a state hardly more fit for public consumption.
Her hair was a mess. Lipstick was smeared all over her face. Her short skirt was hiked halfway up one buttock. One of her enormous tits was just about hanging out.
His hair was also a rats’ nest. The top two buttons of his shirt were missing. His face was smeared with lipstick too, and there was a bloody bruise under one ear. And his fly was half open, though at least his cock wasn’t hanging out.
What a spectacle! Couldn’t they have at least washed their faces, combed their hair, and pulled up their drawers properly afterward?
“I hope I haven’t interrupted anything important,” Monique Calhoun said in a voice like a cryogenic stiletto.
Eric stood there grinning stupidly like . . . like someone caught with his pants down.
As Stella Marenko had intended.
“Oh we jus’ having little philosophy talk about state of world and ethical structure of universe,” Stella woozed, giving Monique a broad wink that didn’t seem to improve her current opinion thereof.
“But we’re finished now,” Eric told her.
“You’re sure?” said Monique, glancing portentous
ly down at his crotch.
Stella laughed. “Whoops!” she said, reaching down to reseal his fly.
Eric shrugged weakly and gave Monique a vapid smile. Like it or not, and he wasn’t quite sure why he didn’t, he was going to have to go along with this bedroom farce to cover the true nature of his tête-à-tête with Stella.
As Stella Marenko had intended.
“And your, ah, slip is showing, Mrs. Marenko,” Monique said with poisonous sweetness. “Not to mention your tit and your ass.”
“Thank you,” Stella said blithely, smoothing down her dress, pulling up her bodice.
“Would not want to upset Ivan, da?” She gave Monique a conspiratorial one-of-the-girls look. “Men are such jealous beasts, da? No need to know.”
“My lips are sealed,” Monique told her with Saharan dryness.
Stella Marenko regarded Eric like a prime cut of meat, gave Monique yet another stage wink, ran her tongue slowly around her mouth like a cat licking cream.
“No need to go that far,” she said.
A sentiment which in that moment Eric amply shared.
“Do you think you can . . . navigate by yourself, Mrs. Marenko?” Monique said. “Prince Esterhazy and I have a bit of business to discuss.”
“No problem,” Stella told her. “Exercise clears head. Handsome prince is finished doing my business, now is turn for him to do yours.”
She walked away slowly up the corridor a few paces, turned, gave Monique Calhoun one last juicy wink. “Have fun,” she said, “but don’t do anything I haven’t done already,” and exited, stage left.
“What was that woman doing with you in there?” Monique said acidly after Eric Esterhazy had dismissed the tech and they were alone in the computer room. “Showing you what made Catherine the Great great? Something to do with screwing horses, wasn’t it?”
“You’re jealous!” Prince Eric said in what seemed like genuine surprise as he stood there looking as if he had just played overmatched stand-in for the said equine stud service, which he probably had.
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