This Other Eden

by Ben Elton

  Within minutes, the streets approaching the studio had been jammed with Rapid Response Litigation Teams. Over the years this type of development had become a major headache for the emergency services. It was not uncommon in the aftermath of an accident for the fire and ambulance people to find themselves unable to get to the scene because the roads were blocked with lawyers. As it happened, the DigiMac disaster required no medical assistance because the UV exposure had been so brief. This was great news for the law firms, it being recognised that the absence of specific injury was a classic catalyst in the development of LFS. With no actual physical problem to get in the way of vague speculation, the leap to the fantastical was much more easily made.

  The first claims were obvious. Compensation would be required for the emotional stress caused by the potential damage via exposure to sunlight. The studio instantly recognised the danger it was in and mobilised its own damage control teams to counterclaim, their assertion being that their reputation as a responsible and caring employer was being irrevocably damaged by such wild accusations. Also, that the mere fact of being beautiful and famous meant that the litigants had set themselves up as terrorist targets, so in real terms, the attack had been their fault and they should pay for the roof.

  All this had happened within minutes of the attack. A legal meltdown was occurring even before Rosalie had escaped from the building. Faced with the studios counter-attack, the original litigants hit back furiously. The second phase began, as claims were made on behalf of the children of the litigants. Children whose home life would be rendered dysfunctional by the suffering caused through fear of their parents getting cancer. The logical knock-on from this, of course, was phase three: representations made on behalf of the as yet unborn and indeed unconceived offspring of the litigants, notional children whose future existence would be adversely affected by the case, should they ever materialise.

  It was the acceptance in the courts of the principle of cross-generational suffering that made LFS such a terrifying phenomenon, because once it was accepted that a hypothetical future child could be affected, then clearly so could future grandchildren and indeed great-grandchildren. Presuming a reproductive rate of two children per adult, a lawyer who extrapolated a mere ten generations into the future could find him or herself representing over a thousand hypothetically injured hypothetical parties, all of whose costs would be awarded against the plaintiff should their case prevail. This was, of course, presuming that the original litigant had only one family, something extremely rare in Hollywood. Then, inevitably, there were all the claims from friends and relatives (plus their future offspring) whose lives had also been adversely affected due to stress caused by knowing somebody who might have been exposed to dangerous sunlight.

  All in all, it was a classic case of Litigation Frenzy which, within a year or two, would certainly destroy a mighty studio unless it could be contained. Obviously the money would run out in the end, and the first law of legal dynamics would apply, but that was scarcely a contingency to be desired. This was why an arrest was required. If a conviction could be secured against a person or group directly responsible for the outrage, then all other actions would go on hold for fear of prejudicing the case. The trial with all its appeals and counter-appeals would hopefully carry on long enough to dampen the worst excesses of LFS, possibly extinguishing them altogether.

  Target.

  ‘So we need to make an arrest,’ said Klaw.

  ‘How can we arrest anyone? They got away. I mean, we’re the FBI. Investigation’s not really our strong point, is it?’

  ‘Don’t get smart with me, Schwartz. We know who one of them is.’ Judy was shown a series of photos of a woman falling through a Biodome roof into a cake and then running into the ladies’ lavatory.

  ‘We took these stills from the security video tape.’

  ‘She’s a bit blurred,’ said Judy, stating the obvious.

  ‘I know that, jerk, but not when she comes out of the john.’ He held out another series of pictures of a small, pale woman in a saucy little dress rushing out of the ladies’.

  ‘That’s her, she took the dress off a bimbo in the toilet.’

  ‘Very clever.’

  ‘Sloppy security work. In these situations the only way to avoid suspects escaping is to shoot everybody. I tell these people till I’m blue in the puss, but do they listen? Like hell they do.’

  Judy studied the photos.

  ‘She’s a unit leader,’ Maw continued. ‘Agent Cruise was on to her but his cover was blown.’

  ‘Yes, I heard about that,’ confessed Judy. ‘You know, I think he rather blamed me.’

  ‘Of course he blamed you, you were the briefing officer.’

  ‘Yes, and I also sabotaged his parents’ gene pool, so that they’d give birth to a complete dickhead.’

  ‘Shut up, Schwartz, and stick to the point. The girl’s Irish. She works out of the Dublin Natura office. We’ve had her marked for a year or so, always hoped if we tailed her we might get something on Jurgen Thor. But now we’ve got to bust her. DigiMac and the city want an arrest, so the chick gets thrown to the scheisters.’

  ‘You do know that we’re not allowed to bust people in Ireland, don’t you, sir?’ Judy had often noticed a tendency in certain Federal agencies to presume that since America was the world’s policeman then the planet was their precinct and US law applied.

  ‘Yes, I know that we can’t bust people in Ireland, you little fuck!’ Maw replied. ‘But we have an extradition treaty with Europe on terrorism. The Garda will arrest her and hand her over to you for escort back to the US.’

  ‘Why me?’ asked Judy.

  ‘Because she’s a cute little girl, concerned for the planet, and we are the FBI which is slang for Satan to the liberal press. If she gets off a plane in cuffs with some big hairy thug bearing down on her, we look like the bullies even though she’s the terrorist. I was going to send a woman, but then I thought, no, Judy’s the one. Christ, you’re such a nerdy little shit, people will feel sorry for you.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. That’s a lovely thing to say.’

  Judy decided on this occasion to let what was clearly a palpable bit of nerdism go unchallenged. For he could see that, if he played his cards right, he would get what he wanted; a chance to infiltrate Mother Earth.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Astonishing vegetables and other surprising developments

  City of the night.

  Dublin was a night-time city. Not in the traditional, Parisian sense of an exotic world that occupies the town after dark, but in a literal sense. Dublin had become a night-time city. Most cities had. It was all a question of money. If a municipality could afford orbital filters like Up-Town LA, or if they had the money to enclose their pavements in BioTubes, then some semblance of traditional day-time activity could be maintained. But Dublin had never been rich, and so most activities now took place at night. It had begun gradually. For years people had simply put up with the inconvenience of ozone depletion. As the sun’s rays became ever more deadly they had dodged from doorway to doorway and borrowed each other’s BioBrellas, perhaps having their pores blocked as a special treat at Christmas.

  Slowly, however, all over the world, it began to dawn on people that there were a good eight to ten hours in every day when the sun wasn’t around at all. When it was possible to walk down a street or kick a fluorescent ball around a park without fear (from the sun, that is — you still had to breathe, of course). At first, in many western cities there was a strong objection to switching to night-time. It was thought of as something that only mutated peasants did in far away places.

  ‘We’d look like a piss poor little fourth world cock-up country,’ people said to each other, flattering themselves that they did not look that way already.

  However, good sense eventually prevailed, and shops and offices began to open after sunset. The whole structure of the day changed. Twilight became morning, and people started to go to work at around si
x in the afternoon. Their evening’s leisure time began at about four a.m. and the pubs closed sometime towards noon.

  Of course, the European Federation had been promising to locate orbital shields for years, but they never did. Not over the cities, anyway. As always in Europe, agriculture came first. Hundreds of billions of ECUs had been spent sun-screening large patches of the countryside. This was so that quaint old ladies dressed in black could continue to bend their backs in tiny, chemically saturated fields whilst their husbands pissed it up in the local bar. In this manner, traditional country life was maintained. Also, vast quantities of semi-poisonous crops were produced that were then piled up into enormous food mountains, whose only use was that they provided some shade.

  ‘What about us?’ the city dwellers’ representatives would occasionally ask. They would have liked to have asked more frequently, but they could not normally get past the near-constant demonstrations organised by the farmers. It was an accepted feature of European government that it existed under a state of siege and that mad farmers in huge combine harvesters would spend their lives blockading the various buildings designated for democratic debate and terrorist attack.

  The representatives of the Euro city dwellers knew that their requests for BioShields were useless. Euro administration was entirely crisis-led. Every time the coffers in Brussels were deemed to be sufficiently full to start thinking about sun-screening cities, another civil war would break out. These wars smouldered endlessly across the vast continent from Lisbon to the Urals and could break out at any time, meaning, of course that all the cash had to be spent sending soldiers to observe the genocide and say very firmly how horrid it was.

  The European Federation’s budget priorities were quite clear and had been for over half a century: first, the bureaucratic apparatus itself; second, the agricultural subsidy, third, observing genocide whenever it occurred and making a point of saying what a bad ‘thing it was, fourth, everything else. Sadly, there was very rarely any money left for fourth, so any city that wanted an eco-defence was forced to pay for it from its own local taxes.

  Hence, some of the countryside was on day-time, but not all, and some of the cities were on night-time, but again not all of them. The situation was much the same in America and South East Asia. It was of course far more confused in Russia where the whole thing changed on a twenty-four-hour basis and, indeed, from street to street. It was quite possible for a Russian to get out of bed, ready for a full eight hours’ work, walk five minutes up the road and arrive in time to clock off at the end of the working day. By this means it was possible for people to rack up vast amounts of overtime and still spend upwards of twenty-three hours out of twenty-four in bed.

  An actor does his research.

  Max and Nathan were sitting in the bar of the Dublin Shelbourne Hotel at about three-thirty in the morning, watching the office workers drift in for an after-work refresher. They were waiting for their drinks. It had already been half an hour, but that is nothing at all if you have ordered Guinness. It is an article of faith for bar-staff in Dublin that a pint is not worth drinking unless it has taken about an hour to pour and another hour to settle. Those with any experience in these things ring the pub and put in an order before leaving home, but Max and Nathan hadn’t worked that out yet.

  They had been in Dublin for three days, searching for Rosalie, and had so far drawn a blank. The reason for trying to locate Rosalie, apart from the fact that Max had developed a crush on her, was in order to use her to research the movie that Plastic Tolstoy had commissioned. They wanted to get inside a Mother Earth unit. Actually, it was Max who wanted to get inside a Mother Earth unit. He was thrilled with excitement at the idea. Nathan would quite happily have made the whole thing up. He was not big on research.

  ‘Shakespeare had no experience of the Roman Empire but he still wrote Julius Caesar,’ he was fond of saying. In Nathan’s opinion, if you took the experience and reality theory to its proper conclusion, he could only ever write about emotionally shattered middle-class Englishmen who had screwed up their lives and lost the only person they had ever loved.

  ‘Exactly,’ said Max. ‘And that’s just about all most English writers do ever write about. I admire that, it has integrity it’s dull, but it has integrity.’

  Max believed that artists had to inhabit the thing which they wished to portray.

  ‘You have to live the experience. Be the experience. If you’re lying to yourself, then you’ll be lying to the audience and, believe me, they’ll know.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Max,’ said Nathan. ‘The last thing I wrote, a bloke cut off his own leg because a rat was eating it.’

  ‘Then you should have cut your leg off,’ said Max piously. ‘My last role was about this guy who is indulgence-obsessed, right? It was a harrowing drama about a man addicted to having a great time. All he does is eat, drink and screw beautiful women. The guy’s a hollow shell, right? His existence is empty and pointless. Do you think that scared me off? Do you think I shirked confronting the debilitating properties of excess? No way, man. I did my research! I went out and ate and drank and screwed around like some jerk trying to party himself to death. That’s the point, man. I have commitment. Without commitment you’re Jack Shit.’

  ‘OK, so what about Yellow Ribbon, when you played that POW who got tortured and put in solitary for twenty years?’

  ‘I researched that.’

  ‘You did?’ Max was surprised.

  ‘Sure. The thing I figured was that the horror of the guy’s situation had to lie in his back history, right? Back history is the whole thing for an actor. I thought, the guy gets tortured, right? So what? A lot of guys get tortured. How can I make this torture different? How can I make it special? Then it hits me. I think, if this man has lived a life of unadulterated luxury, that would make his suffering more acute and more ironic. You see what I’m saying. To give the characterisation depth, in my own mind I needed to juxtapose his present torture and loneliness with a previous life of …

  ‘Eating, drinking and screwing beautiful women?’ Nathan inquired.

  ‘Exactly. I felt if I could get that side of things right, the suffering would develop naturally from there.

  Picked up by the greenies.

  A sweet-looking little old lady approached Max and Nathan at their table.

  ‘Mr Maximus?’ the sweet old lady inquired.

  ‘Sure, it would be a pleasure,’ said Max, producing a pen and paper. ‘Whom shall I dedicate it to?’

  Although Max was disguised, he was still being recognised and always gave autographs when asked. This was partly because he was a nice person who did not like to disappoint people and partly because he was normally followed around by ten or fifteen journalists, waiting for him to refuse to sign an autograph, so that they could write stories about how rude and arrogant he was and how he had forgotten the people who made him what he was. On this occasion, however, Max need not have worried.

  ‘I don’t want a fucking autograph,’ the sweet-looking little old lady said. ‘You’ve been making inquiries at the Natura shop about a friend of mine. Follow me.’

  They walked outside into the darkened, bustling street. In the park opposite the hotel some kids were playing a game of fluoro-soccer. The bright, glowing shoulder sashes danced about in pursuit of the moon-like ball. Max and Nathan stood on the pavement whilst the sweet old lady made a signal. Up the street a large car pulled into the traffic and across towards the hotel entrance. It was a big new Japanese limo, a real Eco-car, greener than green, as befitted a Natura vehicle. So copious were its filters that it emitted not one single poisonous gas of any sort. You could have put a flatulent elephant on the back seat and nobody would have been any the wiser.

  Not for the first time, Nathan wondered where the hell these people got their funding. Natura always had the best transport. Mother Earth always had the best assault choppers. Whilst the IRA and the Basque separatists were making bombs out of fertiliser in their bac
k garages, Mother Earth bought the best, direct from British and German businessmen, paying top dollar.

  ‘Nice car,’ Nathan observed. ‘How many tin rattling volunteers does it take to buy one of those?’

  ‘Get in,’ said the woman, as the hotel doorman opened the back door for them.

  They got in the car, Nathan experiencing his never-ending hotel dilemma of whether to tip the doorman or not. Max, of course, had no such problem. He was so rich and famous it would not have occurred to him to do something so mundane as tip a person. Max had people to do that for him. In fact, he was so big and special that even his people were too important to tip, they too had people to do things like that. It is a strange fact of power, fame, riches and general celebrity that the more you have, the more you get. Real celebrities never pay for a ticket to a show. They endlessly eat for free, it being generally assumed that, by simply gracing an event with their presence, the mega-sleb is making contribution enough. It is, in fact, possible to be so rich that you have no need for money at all.

  Nathan tipped the doorman the price of a pint for five seconds’ labour that he would have preferred to have done himself, and they got in the car. Once inside Nathan noticed that the rear windows were all blacked out. Max did not notice because, despite it being night-time, he was wearing shades. The sweet-looking, foul-mouthed old lady did not join them and they were left alone as the big limo pulled away. They could not see the driver because there was a screen between the front and the back of the car. Max lifted the screen. There were two men in the front.

  ‘Hey guys,’ he said. ‘Where are we going?’

  The front passenger pointed an automatic pistol in Max’s face.