by Ben Elton
At first, having a horn had felt great. Nobody had had a horn before. Krystal had liked it and Geraldine his agent thought it was a terrific idea.
‘Sure, a horn, why not? It goes with the whole wildman thing and it kind of resonates solidarity with endangered species. Like Rhinos. Do they still have Rhinos, by the way or did they get Dodoed?’
Rhinos had definitely got Dodoed some fifteen years earlier. What’s more, a drunk movie star with an imitation horn surgically grafted on to his forehead was not going to bring them back. Still, it did look pretty wild. Geraldine had immediately organised a major stills photo-shoot which had gone over big. Max had looked great. Torn jeans, slashed open at the fly to reveal a flat hard stomach rising to a lean, wiry torso. Arms spread wide like Christ. The expression on his sweetly handsome face that of a wounded beast, sad, tortured, noble and come-fuck-me all at once. And atop it all, that majestic spike, thirty centimetres of smooth clean imitation bone. What a pose. Eight pages in Vanity Fair plus the cover. The teens had gone crazy for it. Within a week the shops had been full of plastic stick-on horns and Max got twelve per cent of all the marketing. Of course, as always, some kids went too far and Max had to go on the TV and try and look responsible; not an easy thing to do with a horn grafted on to your head.
‘Mr Maximus,’ the talk-show guys had said, ‘how do you feel about reports of kids whose parents can’t afford decent sub-cellular surgery getting cheap horn jobs from backstreet BioQuacks and ending up scarred and maimed and totally socially dysfunctional for life?’
Max had been very firm on this one. ‘Don’t do it, kids,’ he had said. ‘The easily removable, glue-on “Horno Maximus” is available at any K-Mart, so you can look keen and stay safe.’
But all that was weeks ago. Now Max was sick to death of the thing. He couldn’t wear a hat, toughs had started throwing ring doughnuts at it in bars, and it banged against the faucet when he was in the shower.
‘I’m having it removed next month,’ Max said to Rosalie and changed the subject. ‘So what do you do, then?’
‘I kill people who murder planets.’
‘That sounds pretty radical. Did you ever think about trying to talk to them first? You know, put love out to them and keep it there?’
Coincidence considered.
The stricken tanker was a stricken tanker no more; it was a wreck. Only the port bow of the forward section could now be seen above the water. It stood out like the tombstone that it was. A tombstone for a dead sea.
The water surrounding the wreck was a mass of activity. The coast defences had been scrambled and the ‘clean up’ was underway. ‘Clean up’ was of course a strange description for a process which really consisted of nothing more than spreading the mess about a bit. Worse, the detergents and chemicals used in the pointless operation were in themselves dangerous pollutants. Basically, the whole effort was entirely cosmetic and a cynical world knew it. The reason that they knew it was largely because of the constant efforts of Natura to put the facts before the public. For more decades than anybody cared to remember, Natura had battled against terrible and dangerous odds to get to the heart of environmental disaster. Their aim was always to expose the cover-up efforts of those who profited most from those disasters, or at least from the industrial and economic activities which made such disasters inevitable.
The Natura scientists were hard at work as the little coast-guard launch, upon which Judy Schwartz had hitched a lift, approached their ship. Once aboard, Judy and the other authority figures were met with the cold hostility they had come to expect from any encounter with green activists. As far as Natura were concerned, the FBI, the coastguard and all other law enforcement agencies were there to protect the interests of the polluters.
‘You see this!’ an irate biology professor from Princeton said, addressing the news cameras that had also arrived at the ship. ‘Now the coastguard turn up! Coastguard! That’s got to be a the sickest joke on record. Did they guard this coast? I don’t think so, because this coast is now dead. So what do they do now? Subpoena the people that created this hell? No, they come and hassle us!’
‘Your ship is impeding the clean-up operation,’ the chief coastguard said, employing that stiff ‘only doing my job’ manner that cops of any description adopt when they find themselves in front of a camera. ‘You have no authority to sail in these waters.’
‘The clean-up operation is a crock of shit and these waters are not waters, they are a porridge of oil, heavy metals and dead fish,’ the Princeton professor stated, addressing both coastguard and cameras. ‘As regards who has authority to be here, Natura is a world party and claims the moral authority to be wherever Eco-death is being covered up and sanitised.’
One thing was for sure, Judy noted. They might be losing the environmental war, but Natura certainly won all the propaganda battles. The little confrontation which he was witnessing would play heavily on all the news broadcasts. Judy drifted away from the group. As usual, he was able to do this because of his appearance. He looked so harmless, the casual observer would certainly have picked him for a greenie rather than a Fed. Judy reasoned that although the activists on the ship would know each other, extra personnel would now be arriving on board to help cope with the disaster. He decided to see how far he could get before he was challenged.
‘Looks pretty bad, doesn’t it?’ he observed to a couple of scientists who were drawing up buckets of polluted seawater for analysis.
‘Worse than I’ve seen for a while,’ said one of the scientists, clearly very upset. ‘It’ll dilute a little, further out to sea, but what’s it going to dilute into? lt’s shit out there too.’
‘Still,’ said Judy. ‘Kind of fortunate in a way, though, isn’t it? I mean, not fortunate, but sort of, well … you know.’
‘What the hell are you talking about? Fortunate? What do you mean “fortunate”?’
‘Just that the Natura ship was here and everything when it happened. You know, to exploit the propaganda value of it and all. It’s a lucky coincidence.’
‘That’s a damn strange way to look at things. Who the hell are you, anyway? I don’t know you.’ The scientist turned to his companion. ‘Do you know this guy?’
‘I do.’
There was a voice behind Judy which he thought he recognised. Turning round, he found himself facing an old adversary, a man whom he had first encountered during a Mother Earth blockade of a leaking nuclear facility.
‘Hello Pierre,’ Judy said. ‘How are you? Any tumours yet?’ The man called Pierre was in no mood for comradely reminiscences.
‘You have no jurisdiction here, Schwartz,’ he said, making no attempt to conceal his hostility.
‘We’re in US coastal waters, Pierre. Sorry,’ Judy reminded him.
Pierre changed his tack, although not his manner.
‘Well, you’ll get no co-operation from us… This man is an FBI agent!’ Pierre loudly informed the scientists working on the deck. ‘Offer him no assistance, answer no questions, show him nothing unless he produces a warrant.’
Judy glanced around. Suddenly he was the focus of attention. Angry, hostile faces glared at him wherever he looked.
‘I have no warrant,’ he said. ‘This is a peaceful Natura protest ship, why would I need one?’
‘Exactly,’ said Pierre.
‘So what are Mother Earth terrorists doing here?’ Judy asked.
Pierre did not reply. Instead, with calm deliberation he spat on the deck at Judy’s feet.
The scientist whom Judy had first approached spoke up. ‘A whole sea is dying, so what do they do? They send the FBI. Brilliant.’ The man’s voice shook with anger and contempt.
Judy turned and walked away. He knew that he would learn nothing more, now that he had been unmasked as an agent.
None the less, his trip had not been wasted. He had made an important discovery: Mother Earth terrorists were present at the scene of the disaster. Judy felt they would have done better to keep themselve
s hidden.
Chapter Ten
Holistic bullets,
robotic needles and
Cupid’s arrow
Script Conference with God.
Nathan peered over the top of his knees. He was in Plastic Tolstoy’s study, seated on quite the softest, lowest couch he had ever encountered. It was like sitting in a luxuriously cushioned hole. On the table in front of him stood a glass of fizzy water, but he could not reach it, not without a rope to haul him out of the couch. His shoulders were at a lower level than his knees and his head was sunk deep into his chest. Where his neck had gone, Nathan did not know. He presumed it would reappear when he emerged from the couch, should he ever find himself in a position to do so. He did not need his neck at the moment, anyway. At the moment he cared for neither neck nor water. All Nathan cared about was how Plastic was reacting to his treatment.
This was the biggest break it was possible to have. Nathan was past every hurdle, every script reader, every consultant, every vice president in charge of development. He was pitching direct to the man. It was unheard of. To pitch direct to Plastic Tolstoy was a writer’s Holy Grail. This man owned the largest communications empire on Earth. He commissioned more copy than everybody else in advertainment put together. He took a direct personal interest in probably no more than one in a thousand of the projects his companies developed for production.
Writers would plead to be allowed to compromise every artistic principle they ever had just to eat in the same commissary as the lowliest of Plastic’s people. A few years previously, before it was made illegal, some Harvard undergraduates had isolated Shakespeare’s DNA and fast-grown another Bard of Avon. Plastic’s office had not even bothered to return the guy’s call.
Nathan watched nervously as the great man paced about. Plastic spoke without looking up from the synopsis that Nathan had prevaricated over for so many lonely nights in his hotel room.
‘So the rat’s going to go eat the kid?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ said Nathan, ‘I thought that might make us care . in a warm way.’
‘You want me to put a rodent carnivore about to orally defile a cute little girl on prime-time?’
Nathan sensed some criticism in Plastic’s tone.
‘Well, I don’t know about orally defile… I mean . eat, yes.’
‘Did your mother reject you?’ Plastic inquired with bitter sarcasm. ‘Were you denied the breast? Is that where the sicko stuff started? You think a rat eating a sweet little girl is not a defiling thing? You think that it is somehow nice!’
The combination of power and indignation was terrifying. Nathan sank so far into his seat that he was in danger of disappearing altogether. Plastic towered over him, shaking the few pathetic pages.
‘Here’s an idea — why doesn’t the rat screw the kid first? Yeah, that’s right, he could screw her, then eat her. Would that be sick enough for you? Huh? What is it with you English guys? Is Disgusting Pervert on the syllabus at Eton? Can’t you even pitch a script scenario without flaunting your sado-masochistic paedophile obsessions?’
Plastic had been in California for about a thousand years, but he still spoke New York Media Jewish. Rhetorical questions and heavy-handed sarcasm were his conversational armoury and he was always at war. He did not really mean to hurt. In fact, what he really liked to do was amuse. Plastic loved to get a laugh, and if none was forthcoming from his audience of cowering employees, he was always happy to provide his own. He certainly had to do his own laughing in this case, for Nathan could not laugh. He was too horrified, terrified and bent double inside a couch.
‘We don’t actually see the rat eat the girl,’ Nathan murmured. ‘It’s implied.’
‘Oh, it’s implied!! I’m so sorry, Jeeves, old boy! I missed the sub-text, don’t you know, what ho and pip-fucking-pip!’ Plastic’s English accent was no less biting for the fact that it sounded about as English as the Statue of Liberty.
‘Implied! Don’t give me your fucking English fucking subtlety.’ He seemed almost in despair. ‘What are you? T S Eliot? You think a prime-time vision bite gives you time to indulge your obscure pretensions? You think people who clean cars and wait tables want to spend their precious leisure dollar trying to work out some up-its-ass limey bullshit?’
Nathan gulped in fear and confusion, something to be avoided when folded in half with your ears resting on your shoulders and your knees forced against your chin. It was an action almost certain to bring on the hiccups, and it did.
‘Why stop there with your pretentious fucking subtlety? How about this, how about we don’t even have a little girl?’ said Plastic, who, as always, liked to milk any comic theme he found himself developing till its tits squeaked. ‘Maybe we should have a packet of Pop Tarts that represents a little girl, so ten years from now, when we’re all on welfare because our product stank, some fag English professor from UCLA can tell the world that the whole thing was actually a masterpiece, if only we coulda worked out what was implied!’
‘Hic.’
‘What, are you going to puke on my couch now?’ asked Plastic.
‘No, I have hiccups,’ said Nathan, and with a monumental effort he rocked himself forward far enough to grab the bottle of water on the table before plunging back into the bottomless couch.
‘Like, I want to hear about your hiccups. Like that really interests me. You know what the Claustrosphere advertainment budget is each year, Nathan?’ Plastic asked. ‘Twenty billion minimum, in the US alone. Work out how many dollars just got spent so you could tell me about your damn digestive problems. We brought you here… we sent a limo to the damn airport! So you could pitch. So pitch!’
‘Uhm… hic… do you think perhaps, hic, we might show something of the little girl’s fate, but tastefully, you know, avoiding the more graphic details.’
“‘Do I think perhaps hic”!’ Plastic quoted Nathan with such withering sarcasm that all the pot plants died. ‘Do I think! I’m not the damn writer! You’re the damn writer. I’m just the moron who pays the damn writer.’ Plastic punched his intercom. ‘Sarah! You know that outrageously inflated sum Nathan Hoddy’s agent demanded for her client’s pathetic services? Get her on the line and tell her since Mr Hoddy seems to desire me to do half his work would she object to me taking half his fee.’
Nathan hiccupped miserably.
‘You think I’m being hard on you, don’t you? You think I’m being unnecessarily negative,’ said Plastic.
Nathan did not reply. He had nothing to say but hic.
‘You want to see negative!’ barked Plastic. ‘This is negative.’ Suddenly Plastic pulled open a drawer of his mighty desk and took out a gun. Nathan could not have moved had he wanted to, being stuck in a couch as he was, but there was no time anyway. It was over in a second. Plastic took two steps towards him, pointed the gun into Nathan’s astonished face and fired. Three shots, point-blank range. The gun flashed, the noise in the confined space was deafening, the glass rattled as acrid smoke filled the room.
‘Have they gone?’ Plastic inquired mildly.
Nathan could not reply; you cannot talk when your heart is in your mouth.
‘The hiccups, have they gone?’ Plastic asked again. ‘All that eerk-eerk-eerk was making me nauseous. Thought I’d try this out on you.’
The gun disappeared and in its place Plastic held a small tube with a switch on it.
‘It’s a holographic projector,’ Plastic explained. ‘We’re going to give them away at gas stations. Look.’ He held the tube as if it was the butt of a pistol, flicked the switch and the three-dimensional image of the pistol reappeared in his hand. ‘Did it cure your hiccups?’
‘Yes, they’ve gone,’ whispered Nathan.
‘OK, let’s play some tennis.’
‘All right,’ said Nathan, struggling out of the couch.
‘We’ll play in the Claustrosphere.’
Play? In the Claustrosphere? Play tennis in a Claustrosphere? Nathan thought Plastic must mean table-tennis,
but he didn’t. Set in the grounds of Plastic’s house in Beverly Hills was quite the biggest Claustrosphere Nathan had ever seen. In fact, it wasn’t really set in the grounds, it was the grounds.
‘Hey, who wants a damn garden?’ Nathan said. ‘At least in a Claustrosphere your grass don’t die.’
Nobody likes it but what can you do?
They walked down the connecting BioTube and through the EcoLock into the central dome.
Nathan was stunned, he had never in his life encountered such opulence. The thing must have covered well over four acres, and contained everything: living quarters, gardens, a little stream. The air was fresh and sweet, birds chattered in the upper reaches, butterflies fluttered over a small field of wheat, fish went ‘glop’ in the pond.
‘Of course it’s all BioMechanically generated,’ Plastic explained. ‘A genuine eco-cycle is impossible on such a small scale. This whole cycle is kept functioning with sub-cellular protein concentrates and fast-grow organic engineering. It’ll work for at least a hundred years though, so who’s complaining? This is the kind of development that Mother Earth have been trying to knock out for years. Stupid Luddite schmucks, always bombing the wrong labs.’
Nathan had of course been aware, as everyone who read a Sunday colour supplement was aware, that BioSphere technology had improved; but he had not quite realised how good it had got. Plastic’s dome made his and Flossie’s ancient old backyard job look like exactly what it was: a poxy little eco-shelter. A bog standard Eden Three, no frills. It had water rotation and a basic food cycle. It could break down and reconstitute human waste and it could maintain a breathable atmosphere. It had come with a free gift miniaturised bonsai tree rain forest, but that was about its only luxury. Even the video library was manual … you actually had to eject the micro-tapes yourself. Flossie and Nathan had debated whether to purchase the optional day and night cycle, but had decided that they couldn’t really afford it. Those eye guards you get for sleeping on aeroplanes would be just as good anyway.