by Ben Elton
This was the chance the Environmentalists had been looking for: clear proof that those in control accepted the reality of the approaching catastrophe.
‘When the rats prepare to leave, you can be sure the ship is sinking,’ thundered a very young Jurgen Thor in his first appearance as leader of Natura. It was a speech which rang round the world.
‘These despicable individuals are preparing their escape! Their rat runs!’ the big Norwegian declaimed. ‘Having first destroyed the Earth by their greed and irresponsibility, these human rodents seek to escape the dreadful consequences of their actions.’
Such was the horror this idea engendered, that people finally began to demand real action on the environment. Sustainable development became politically fashionable and for a time it seemed that, as if out of evil (the BioSphere alternative) had come forth good, the craven self-interest of the few had spurred the many to action.
Then the price of BioSphere technology began to drop.
It always happens. Pocket calculators started off as luxury items; a decade later they were giving them away with petrol. One day, the first back-garden Claustrosphere went on the market and the Earth was in big trouble. At first the threat seemed small. The unit was still pretty pricey and its life support systems basic and uninviting. It required a quarter of an acre of good firm land under a sixty-metre geodesic dome. It could provide water and air and recycle human waste, but that was all. It didn’t offer a night and day cycle and nothing could be grown. The food supply was just a hundred years of military ‘C’ rations. Hardly an appetising prospect.
It didn’t take long though.
Techno-research that had been sold to the public as pertaining to some future trip to Mars was employed on Earth. A five-year secret development was undertaken in the Arizona desert. When the pioneers emerged from their exile with a tray of hot muffins freshly baked from BioDough, raised within the dome, the first true Claustrosphere was ready to market.
Plastic Tolstoy called it Eden One.
The initial ads were a teaser campaign. They featured Rodin’s thinker pondering an apple, and the caption was a simple, bald statement: ‘Think about it.’
Plastic loved an enigmatic little come-on.
Think about the Earth, think about the apple, think about Eden, think about the future. It’s all there in the one image. It’s brilliant, though I say it who shouldn’t.’
Next came an apple that was also a globe. ‘The Earth is in danger!’ screamed the caption, ‘Recycle! Join Greenpeace! Buy a Claustrosphere!’ That had been Plastic’s strategy in the early days, to equate Claustrosphere with the concerned individual. One per cent of the cover price of an Eden One went directly to the Worldwide Fund for Nature.
All that had been nearly forty years ago. Now, both Claustrosphere and Plastic Tolstoy were huge on a scale which the multi-nationalists and media moguls of the twentieth century could only have imagined. Tolstoy had fulfilled his dream, and he owned the very news and entertainment services which delivered his messages.
At heart, though, he was still just a salesman. Which is why, big though he was, he was standing in his kitchen, watching a stricken oil tanker on the news and personally bawling out his staff for allowing some donut commercial to get between him and the proper exploitation of an environmental disaster.
Chapter Five
A spy unmasked
The man who talked too much.
Judy was being hoisted off the stricken tanker. Nathan was stuck with the private cops outside the Beverly Hills Fortified Village. Tolstoy was in his kitchen, giving his people hell, and Rosalie Connolly, a Mother Earth unit leader, or terrorist, as Tolstoy would have called her, was standing in a California desert.
An Irish girl of twenty-five, she carried great responsibilities on her young shoulders, for it was her job to save the world. Not on her own, of course. Mother Earth was a large organisation and, despite being a unit leader, Rosalie was by no means particularly senior. None the less, saving the world is a big job, even if you have help, and the romantic, slightly mystical girl who had joined Youth Natura at the age of ten had grown into a tough and cynical individual. Rather tougher and more cynical than she would have liked to have been had the world been different.
But the world, of course, is never different. Nothing ever is, and Rosalie had a nasty little job to do before she and her team could depart in the large personnel-carrying helicopter that stood waiting for them.
Shackleton, her tough ex-marine second in command, was priming the charges on the detonators when Rosalie approached him.
He nodded at her, she nodded at him, there was a pause, then she put a gun to his temple.
‘Mr Shackleton, I believe you are an FBI spook and I think I may have to kill you.’
Rosalie was right. The man was an agent, although in a very different mould to Judy Schwartz. This man’s name was Cruise and he was tall and tough and rugged and handsome. He was also one of the bullies who had tormented Judy, having been in the same training team. Cruise and the guys had regularly given Judy and the other nerds surreptitious dead-legs during forensics classes and compared their dick sizes unfavourably with a .22 slug from a ladies’ handgun.
Rosalie, of course, knew nothing of this, but had she done so, she would have liked Cruise even less, which was saying something because she did not like him at all. She had suspected him from the day he had joined them, ostensibly fresh from service against loggers in South America. The man had just talked too bloody green.
‘Sometimes I think it’s my own environmental impotence that makes me most angry,’ Shackleton (or Cruise) would say as they sat around the fire at night, while everyone else was trying to talk about sport or sex.
‘I mean, the logging is ten times worse than the press admit and the defoliants are so deep into the water table they’re never going to come out. .
The man was a complete bore. Greener than green, whiter than white and holier than thou. It was like he’d found God, started therapy and given up smoking all on the same day; he just wouldn’t shut up.
‘God, Shackleton goes on, doesn’t he?’ other members of the team would remark to one another. ‘I don’t think I can stand it much longer, let’s turn him in to the Feds.’
But Rosalie was beginning to fear that Mr Dull was a Fed.
Most Mother Earth activists had been in environmental politics so long they never discussed it. What was the point of talking about planet death? It was too depressing and everybody felt the same way about it anyway, so why go on? There was nothing worse than a bunch of self-righteous zealots sitting round the bean casserole, all nodding in agreement and going, ‘Yeah, doesn’t it make you so angry? I mean it’s just unbelievable! Don’t you think?’
At one point, the problem of endless talking about the environment had actually begun to have a seriously destructive effect on the whole Environmental Movement. People were forever getting trapped into spending entire evenings agreeing with each other. It was beginning to affect recruitment. The syndrome became known as ‘green discussion fatigue’ and so many potential fighters had drifted away as a result of it that eventually it became an unwritten rule within the Environmental Movement that you did not discuss the environment. Therefore, when an ostensibly experienced activist turned up in her unit, stating the bloody obvious about Eco-Armageddon over and over again, Rosalie was immediately suspicious.
And then there was Shackleton’s endless references to Mother Earth funding. Of course, everybody would love to know who was putting up the cash, but it had been a secret for thirty years and was certain to remain so. Rosalie herself had been an activist since leaving college. She was moderately well-advanced in the Movement, yet completely ignorant about the greater part of Mother Earth’s financial affairs. The FBI and indeed every other law enforcement agency in the world were endlessly probing and investigating, trying to get to the heart of it. But they never would. It was the big secret and, had Shackleton been the experienced fighter
he pretended to be, he would have known not to mention it.
The clincher came when Shackleton got on to the subject of Jurgen Thor. He professed to worship the man, quoting that old chestnut about him being called the last sane person on Earth. That did it for Rosalie. Nobody who had been around Mother Earth long thought Jurgen Thor was sane, and nobody worshipped him. The people who dodged the bullets did not have much time for a personality cult egomaniac who would try to screw a tree if it had a dress on. Jurgen Thor was immensely talented, hugely charismatic and absolutely crucial as a spokesperson to the wider world. At the sharp end, however, the general impression was that he was a bit of a big hairy git.
Rosalie began to investigate the history of the man who called himself Shackleton.
On the surface it all looked fine. An American named Shackleton had been assigned to join her active service unit after seeing action under cover in Argentina. But anyone could switch a body, Rosalie thought. She had the Mother Earth database modem her up a photo of the real Shackleton. That checked out too, but since, if you had the money, you could get a temporary cosmetic rebuild done in an afternoon, that was also non-conclusive. Eventually Rosalie took a scroll of the man’s fingerprints from an organic carrot juice container that he was carrying around until he could find somewhere to recycle it.
The result was great news. Shackleton was a spook. Nobody would have to listen to him whine on about the environment ever again.
Rosalie continued to hold the gun to his head.
‘What did you do with our man?’ she inquired. ‘The real Shackleton.’
‘We’ve got him, that’s all, he isn’t hurt,’ replied Cruise. ‘How did you see through me?’
‘You just didn’t talk about the environment enough,’ replied Rosalie, ‘it just didn’t seem like you cared at all.’
Cruise was mortified. He had studied so hard, he had felt he could spout green crap in his sleep. He had got the majority of his environmental bilge from that asshole nerd Judy Schwartz. Cruise made a mental note to kill Judy at the next reunion.
‘Where’s your tracer implant?’ asked Rosalie. The spy glanced down at his arm. ‘Do you want us to cut it out or do you want to do it yourself?’
‘Hey, listen…’ Cruise protested nervously. No matter how tough you are, you still don’t relish having a hole cut in your arm.
‘Oh, come on! You know all about today’s hit,’ snapped Rosalie impatiently. ‘If we leave you wired up you’ll send out an alarm. Your pals will come and get you, you’ll tell them where we are and we’ll be blown out of the sky. Now you know very well that we either have to shoot you or cut out your tracer, so which is it to be?’
Reluctantly the FBI man offered his forearm. Rosalie drew her Swiss Army Knife. There was a brief hiatus while she tried to find a blade. She searched through the scissors, the toothpick, the digital video camera, the miniaturised two-way communications system, the BioShield umbrella, the thing for getting stones out of horses’ hooves . .
‘Christmas present,’ Rosalie said apologetically. ‘Stupid, really. I never use any of these things.’ Finally she found the knife, only the little one, but it would do. She advanced upon a rather scared Cruise.
‘Now you might feel a bit of a prick,’ said Rosalie. And she was right, he did.
Chapter Six
When two stars collide
Fortune’s child.
It was still the same morning. Nathan was negotiating with the thugs at the Beverly Hills Fortified Village. Plastic was in his kitchen, watching Judy and Jackson get winched off the stricken tanker on fifteen different screens. Rosalie was in a helicopter with the Mother Earth direct action team, heading for a spot of terrorism and, back in the desert, Cruise, who has little further to do with this story, was nursing a bleeding arm.
Max had problems too. Problems, that is, in addition to his usual one, which was that of being a screw-up. Admittedly, at present he was a rich and famous screw-up, a colossally popular screw-up. The screw-up, in fact, of the moment. But Hollywood is a place where the distance between being a celebrated screw-up and a despised, pitied casualty doing underwear ads is a short one. Something in the very back of Max’s addled brain was telling him that the time was coming to pull himself together. At twenty-six he had been a very big star for over eight years. A celebrated ‘brat’, to be found drinking, partying and getting into fights all over town. What’s more, he was the real thing, a genuinely naughty boy. Not one of the amorphous mass of pouting pretty things who got puke drunk once on their eighteenth birthday and spent the next five years telling People magazine how they kicked their booze hell. Max was adored not only for the wild, confused characters that he played on screen and inside Virtual Reality helmets, but also for the wild, confused character that he clearly was.
The Good Fairies that had attended Max’s birth were many and generous. They gave him great charm, tremendous acting talent and a fine, powerful, if rather small, physique. They gave him wonderful looks, which included ice-blue eyes set against dark Mediterranean colouring. Also, and perhaps most importantly of all, they gave him James Dean eyebrows which slanted upwards in a sad, little-boy-lost manner whenever he frowned. All this did the Good Fairies give to the baby Max, who laughed and gurgled as befitted the carefree, devil-may-care, sunny personality which was also their bequest to him. The Bad Fairy, on the other hand, gave Max only one gift, but it nearly killed him. For the Bad Fairy decreed that at the age of seventeen, Max would, without any warning or preparation, become hugely famous as the super-cool teenager in a Levi’s ad.
Some high school kids, faced with suddenly becoming the most celebrated and drooled-over adolescent on the planet, might have handled it with calm detachment and genteel reserve. Max was not such a kid.
‘Max, last week you were shooting hoops with your pals in Burbank, now you’re on the cover of every magazine in the store. Do you worry about what you will do when the adoration ends?’ a motherly chat-show host had asked Max in one of his very first celebrity interviews.
‘No way, little lady dude, babe,’ young Max had replied. ‘For I hereby vow to party myself to death before the dumper beckons me.’
The advert that shot Max to superstardom was a co-sponsorship deal between Levi and Claustrosphere. It was set in the future, on the day of the Rat Run. Eco-death had ostensibly arrived and everyone was fleeing in terror for their Claustrospheres. Max’s character, the cool teen, refuses to join his fleeing, terrified family until his jeans come out of the tumble dryer. The memorable caption being: ‘Without your Levis, eternity will seem like a very long time.’
Ever since that famous last shot, when Max had set a billion hearts fluttering as he rushed towards the Claustrosphere’s closing door, pulling on his faded jeans whilst his mother screamed, Max had been front-page news. He still was, but behaviour which is cute in a lad of twenty is a bit pathetic in a man of thirty. Max was twenty-six and getting rather bored with himself. It would not be long, he reasoned in his occasional lucid moments, before he began to bore everyone else. Someday soon, he kept promising himself, maybe not today, but someday soon, he would get himself together.
Morning head.
There were, however, more immediate things to consider. Where was he and what time was it?
It was, in fact, nearly time to meet Rosalie and for his life to change for ever, but of course he did not know this. What he did know was that he had a mouthful of carpet. By this he deduced that it must be morning. He always started a day like that. Of course, it wasn’t always carpet; sometimes it was tarmac, or paving stone, garbage, quite often, occasionally even a pillow. Max slept face down and breathed through his mouth, so whatever he collapsed into the night before was what he would find his tongue stuck to when he woke up in the morning. He could generally tell where he was without opening his eyes.
Carpet, thought Max, not bad. Things were looking up already. Police cells did not have carpets, nor did streets. Max reasoned from this that he was nei
ther under arrest nor in immediate danger of being so. The carpet was also clean, that was a surprise. Max could not remember the last time he had tasted a clean carpet but this seemed to be one. He could detect no booze nor vomit beyond that which traditionally adorned his person when he awoke in the morning. Where was he? They had carpets in brothels and low bars, but you tended to stick to those carpets and this one was definitely non-adhesive. Max wondered whether maybe he had made it home. It seemed unlikely, he had never made it home before. As a matter of fact, Max was only vaguely aware of where his home was. On the morning of his mother’s latest marriage he had woken up in the surf on Malibu. He had had to buy a tourist map of where the stars lived, just so he could get home for half an hour on his bathroom stomach pump and grab a change of clothes. Max never went home unless he absolutely had to. Home was dull and Max was wild.
Max decided he did not care where he was. Whatever, wherever, it was OK by him. The carpet tasted good. This would be a good day. Max could not see how being crashed out in some place with a nice clean carpet could get him into trouble. It was not worth a spread in the tabloids, it was unlikely to land him in court and it would not give his mother an excuse to get back on the chat show circuit claiming that she blamed herself.
Cautiously he opened his eyes and raised his head a little. It took a moment or two to focus, and maybe another half a moment for all the vague confidence he had been feeling about the clean carpet to evaporate before his bloodshot eyes. He had made an asshole of himself again. Stretched out on the carpet before him was a naked woman. A gorgeous naked woman. The sort of woman who looked great on the front of scandal magazines.