This Other Eden

by Ben Elton

  ‘If it’s a boy we’ll call it Judy,’ they said, ‘and if it’s a girl we’ll call it Hercules.’ In this manner the margins were not blurred, and Judy got dead-legged every day at school for Sixteen years.

  When Judy reached his majority he astonished those who knew him by not changing his name. He had, of course, always intended to do so the moment he got the chance; but when that chance finally came around, he had suffered so much at the hands of bullies that there seemed little point in bothering. Children are much crueller than adults, Judy reasoned, so he had already weathered the worst of it. He was, of course, wrong. At college, the coarser element laughed at him and pushed him around every day, and as an adult he rarely turned his back without hearing a snigger.

  It was not just that Judy was a boy with a girl’s name; his problems were further compounded by the fact that he was the least prepossessing of men. He had one leg slightly shorter than the other and something of a stoop. His glasses were thick and his hair always greasy. He was what the Americans call a nerd and since Judy was an American, nerd became his middle name. He was a textbook nerd. It was almost as if he had been deliberately designed that way. In terms of appearance there was quite literally nothing about him that was not nerdy. If they gave out air-miles for looking ineffectual and inadequate, Judy could have been the first man on Mars.

  If he had been a stupid nerd Judy might simply have been ignored, but he wasn’t: he was a clever nerd, very clever indeed, which was of course something of a red rag to the bullies. It was bad enough, the bullies reasoned, putting up with someone who was such a dork, without that dork having the gall to be cleverer than they were.

  Occasionally, in his younger days, Judy had considered having a physical rebuild, or at the very least getting his face done. But as he grew up he came to rather resent the idea of paying a surgeon to attack his body simply because people did not find it attractive. Besides which, he could not have afforded a really decent operation. The cosmetic surgery industry had become fearful of creating a world filled with semi-identical, plasticized, doll-like figures. They had therefore introduced a system which they called ‘financial discrimination’, which meant that only very rich people could turn themselves into semi-identical, plasticized, doll-like figures.

  Therefore Judy remained as nerdy as the day he was born and suffered the consequences. It was probably because of this discrimination that a clear sense of what was right grew strong in Judy’s heart, and he determined that he would spend his life fighting intolerance and injustice. To this end, he employed his considerable intellect to win himself a place with the FBI, reasoning that he would certainly find plenty of intolerance and injustice in the FBI.

  He was right. Nothing changed. Judy irritated the nastier element amongst his new colleagues no less than he had irritated the bullies at school and college. He continued to look stupid and talk smart, a combination almost guaranteed to bring out the bully in anyone who was even remotely so disposed. During his training the oafs and toughs continued to beat him up as they had always done. He was shouldered aside on the firing range and wet-towelled in the showers. Many of his colleagues were, of course, nice to him, but a kind smile does little to mitigate the pain of being held down and given a Chinese burn, or of having a Magnum .44 suspended by a piece of string from your scrotum.

  The passage of years had not tempered Judy’s sense of injustice and the resentment he felt at being constantly dismissed remained undiminished. Therefore, when the coastguard on the polluted cliff top called him a nerd, he drew himself up to his full height, which was either five-five, or five-five and a half, depending on which leg he put his weight on, and prepared to confront yet another nerdist.

  ‘My name is Judy Schwartz,’ he said. ‘I am an FBI agent and I demand that you take me with you on to the bridge of this stricken tanker. Otherwise I shall devote the rest of my life to finding out who your mistress is and then revealing her identity to your wife.’

  Dead hand at the tiller.

  The little coastguard helicopter stood with its engine idling on the roof of the ship’s bridge, while Judy, two coastguards and the local chief of police went inside and surveyed the scene.

  ‘Well, he sure saved us a lot of trouble,’ said the police chief.

  ‘Did the decent thing, I reckon,’ a coastguard added.

  They were referring to the captain of the stricken tanker who was dead, killed, apparently, by his own hand. There he sat, slumped across his bloodied charts, a bottle in one hand, a revolver in the other and his brains in the wastepaper basket on the other side of the room.

  It was déjà vu for Judy. He had seen this scene before, on another bridge in another storm. In the midst of a different disaster he had seen a ship’s master dead over his charts. Dead before he could explain why he had allowed his ship to get so close to shore in such inclement circumstances.

  Outside on the enormous deck, which was listing at an angle that made standing up extremely difficult, the crew were being winched to safety. Apart, that is, from the captain, who was dead, and the second in command, a competent looking woman named Jackson. She was standing near the bridge, awaiting any further instructions from the coastguard before following the crew off the ship. Judy wandered outside into the gale and spoke to her, shouting, to be heard above the wind and the rain.

  ‘Did you order the abandon ship, Ms…?‘ he asked.

  ‘Jackson. Barbara Jackson. No, I did not, sir. The captain ordered abandon ship and most of the crew got away in the boats before the situation deteriorated to necessitate coastguard helicopters.’

  ‘So the captain discharged his duties and then killed himself?’

  ‘That is the case.’

  ‘Was that like him?’ Judy asked.

  ‘Was what? Discharging his duties or killing himself?’

  ‘Killing himself.’

  ‘Well, he didn’t make a habit of it,’ Jackson responded angrily. ‘But then he didn’t make a habit of losing ships. Certainly not like this. We went down like a stone, holed both sides. The captain would have known what the consequences of that would be. This coast’s finished for three hundred miles, the fishing, the wildlife, everything. Would you want that on your conscience? He was a decent man. I reckon he’d have been dead inside before he pulled the trigger.’

  ‘Holed both sides, you say?’ Judy inquired. ‘Seems rather unusual, doesn’t it? The rocky coast is only on the one side.’

  ‘There’s plenty of channels, we must have got caught in one.’

  ‘And yet the captain was a good seaman?’

  ‘As good as I’ve sailed with … They say he’d been drinking.’

  ‘Did he often drink on duty?’

  Jackson hesitated. She was a loyal crew member, but did not wish to lie to the FBI.

  ‘He may have touched it. But, as I say, he was a good seaman. I never saw him even remotely drunk on watch.’

  Judy was lost in thought for a moment. The captain was a drinker, that much was clear, which could certainly make him the culprit … but it could also make him a very convenient scapegoat.

  ‘Do you think he got drunk and ran the ship aground?’ he asked Jackson.

  ‘I suppose he must have done,’ she replied.

  Inside, the coastguard and police chief, having completed their perfunctory investigation, were preparing to leave.

  ‘Can I see where the ship’s ruptured?’ Judy asked hurriedly.

  ‘Sure, if you’re a fish, they’re both below the waterline,’ Jackson replied.

  ‘But the ship’s listing, eventually the port-side rupture will emerge.’

  ‘It might,’ Jackson conceded, ‘if the ship hasn’t broken up by then, which it probably will have, the way this storm’s blowing.’

  But Judy was insistent, he wanted to see the hole in the side of the ship. The coastguard people were astonished, and informed him that if he wished to risk his neck on damn fool errands he could do it alone. Then they left in their helicopter w
ithout him. Jackson, despite Judy’s protestations, elected to stay, arguing that Judy would have no hope whatsoever of finding his way into the ship’s hold without guidance.

  Judy thanked her and radioed the helicopter, which had by now winched the crew aboard, requesting it to stand by overhead. The pilot was not overjoyed.

  ‘Lieutenant Schwartz!’ the pilot called back. ‘We’re getting blown all over the damn sky! What the hell are you doing down there?’

  Judy replied that he was conducting the fullest investigation possible into the source of a major environmental catastrophe before the principal piece of evidence was lost to the elements.

  ‘Something,’ Judy added angrily, ‘which the coastguard has signally failed to do. Now shut your face and do your job or I’ll give your address to the Mormons.’

  Hidden depths.

  With one side of the ship shuddering slowly upward and every inch of the vehicle screaming and groaning and loudly announcing its imminent break-up, Judy and Jackson edged their way below. It is not easy trying to descend a ship’s stairway at the best of times, but when those stairs are leaning over at an angle of forty-five degrees it is very nearly impossible. Particularly if you are extremely conscious of the fact that at any moment the entire million-tonne ship is going to snap in two and hurl you into a freezing vortex of oil, rock and toxic seawater. It was also pitch-black, of course, the ship’s emergency lights having given up at the first sign of an emergency. Jackson led the way with a flashlight.

  They found the breach in a vast container dock still half-filled with oil and water. There was no way they could actually reach the great tear in the side of the ship, because the flood stood between them and it. Judy played the flashlight around the edges of the rupture.

  ‘Notice anything strange about this hole?’ he inquired, shouting himself hoarse above the crashing of the sea outside and the huge booming and creaking of the ship itself.

  ‘Only that it’s pretty big. I didn’t think we’d done that much damage. If the hole on the other side is as drastic, we’d better get out now. I don’t give this hulk five more minutes.’ But Judy continued to play the light around the edges of the hole, or at least those parts that the torch beam could reach.

  ‘It is strange, though, isn’t it?’ he said, almost to himself.

  ‘I can’t hear you,’ Jackson shouted. ‘Give me the flashlight. We have to leave!’

  Judy took no notice. He was still thinking, his mind elsewhere. His body was in danger of being elsewhere shortly, too. The ship was shuddering its last and it was a question of get out now or go down with it. Fortunately for Judy, Jackson was much stronger than he was. As he mused, she wrenched the torch from his grasp and let them both out of the huge half-kilometre chamber that could so nearly have become a rather loose-fitting coffin.

  As they ascended the stairs, Judy could not resist taking one last look back despite the danger.

  ‘It is strange, though, don’t you think?’ he said.

  But Jackson was way ahead of him.

  Chapter Three

  On a drive through Hollywood

  The city that Liz built.

  Before you can be green-lighted or knocked back, you have to make a pitch, and it was Nathan’s day to pitch. The biggest day of his life.

  The riots were dying down as he drove his hire car through Century City; the city, legend had it, that Liz Taylor built. Nathan had heard the story a number of times in various versions. The facts seemed to be that the whole area had once been the back-lot of Twentieth Century Fox. It was here that in another, more innocent age they had re-enacted great wagon trains, built medieval castles and re-fought the Pacific battles of the US marines.

  Anyway, the story went that Fox lost so much money on Liz Taylor’s movie Cleopatra that they had to sell most of the back-lot to real estate developers. This débâcle was a direct result of the curious Hollywood belief that equates gossip column inches with potential ticket revenue. The extraordinary idea that, just because the public is interested in who some celebrity is screwing, they will go and see them in a movie is a delusion that nearly cripples the industry regularly.

  So Fox sold their back-lot, and a mighty city of steel and glass skyscrapers grew up, and was subsequently burnt down as a result of the civil unrest that became part of day to day life in the LA area. It was through this urban strife that Liz’s city gained a far more significant claim to fame than as a mere monument to the fiction of the star-system. For it was here that pollution was first used as a means to facilitate social engineering.

  Environmental protection.

  The problem was a serious one. Every time the city was rebuilt, the disaffected have-nots would come up from the badlands to loot it and burn it down again. This, obviously, was a source of considerable irritation to the civic authorities. Even more galling, though, was the fact that these regular acts of vandalism were perpetrated under the protection of top quality filtered sun and the very cleanest air, for which the victims of the attacks were paying.

  Century City, by dint of its great wealth, boasted a state-of-the-art municipal eco-defence system. Its sun was UV-filtered by the satellite method, whereby a solar screen was placed in orbit over the city. The air was kept reasonable by the simple blow system, where huge fans prevented smog from gathering by blowing it away into other parts of the city.

  All this safe sun and clean air made life in Century City very pleasant. Unfortunately, it was as pleasant for the visiting vandals, as for the legitimate residents. The outrageous fact was that honest citizens were paying local tax, so that the people who robbed them might be protected from skin cancer and lung disease. Something had to be done.

  Something was. The world’s first pollution-based security system was installed. The orbital sun-shield was sent spinning away to join the ever growing slicks of debris caught in the gravitational pull of other planets and the giant fans were silenced. The sun-screen was replaced by a solar cell intensifier which acted in the manner of a vast UV magnifying glass. A deal was done with the electricity people, who stopped pumping their exhaust out over the Pacific and let it out on the Avenue of the Stars instead. Parking lots were connected to buildings via BioTube, so that the legitimate citizen could step from the safety of his or her car directly into a sealed environment. Anybody without BioTube access was in big trouble.

  The effect was dramatic. Signs went up on the freeways entering the district: ‘WARNING. This Area is Environmentally Protected!! Even short-term exposure to the Century City environment will result in serious illness leading to death! Stay in your car and keep moving unless you have access to a BioTube.’

  By this simple method, unfiltered sunlight and industrial smog were transformed from problems into solutions. Pollution became a saleable commodity.

  Fame is the spur.

  Nathan eased his car to a halt. He lowered his windows only very slightly because the atmosphere outside was pretty foul. He would have liked to have dealt with the guards via his car-roof air-lock, but that might have appeared furtive, and the last thing you did with the Beverly Hills Perimeter Private Police Force was appear in any way furtive.

  Looking furtive was crazy behaviour and, as far as the Beverly Hills Perimeter Private Police Force was concerned, crazies were the principal targets of their profession. Beverly Hills was the home of the stars and hence attracted crazies like bees to honey. Crazies would queue up in line to get a chance to try and murder the object of their love and admiration. There were hot-dog stalls and cheap hotels all over the surrounding area, set up purely to cater for the number of unbalanced sad-acts who flocked to Hollywood in pursuit of this vicarious and violent brush with celebrity.

  How Hollywood had changed. There had been a time when every bus that pulled into LA had ten kids on it, all desperate to be a star. Suddenly it was ten kids, all desperate to kill one.

  The problem, as always, was one of celebrity. Just about everybody seemed to want it, but not everybody could have
it. Celebrity could be achieved by becoming a star, but that was a very tough call. The crazies had discovered an easier way.

  Why, they argued, spend years going to acting and improv’ classes, exhaust oneself moonlighting as bar-staff and waiters, suffer the endless auditioning for adverts and pleading for bit-parts in exploitative cheapo vids, torture one’s conscience wondering whether to sleep with producers or not, generally fritter one’s life away looking for that million to one break that would make you a star? Why do all that when you could get just as famous by finding some idiot who had already done it, and shooting them?

  It was this kind of remorseless logic that had led some people to ask themselves who were the crazies.

  Agencies had sprung up to deal with what had become a major part of the industry. The life of a star-killer was big news; there were the book rights, the movie rights, the exclusive interviews, the exclusive photos. These things needed careful handling.

  ‘Lock up your past,’ was the first thing an agent would tell a hopeful young crazie who approached them for representation. ‘If you get lucky and waste a biggy, every childhood photo of you becomes a gold mine. Believe me, the press will have stripped your ol’ mama’s home clean before the gunshots die away. You have to have every document, every picture relating to you hidden away, ready for me to sell the first day you go on trial. We need to do exclusive interview deals with all your old pals and school teachers before you kill your star. Believe me, even your own family will start seeing dollar signs once they realise what you’re going to be worth.’

  By the time Nathan arrived in Hollywood, the worst excesses of stardom via murder were over. At its height, though, people were walking out of prison straight into talk-show host jobs and six-picture deals. A vicious circle developed. Scarcely would the ex-murderer have time to adjust to his or her new-found celebrity when they themselves would be shot, and so the dreadful cycle continued.