This Other Eden

by Ben Elton

  ‘Market the end of the world! My God, listen to yourself! You sound like Plastic Tolstoy.’ Rosalie could not bear the way Jurgen Thor seemed to glory in his pragmatism.

  ‘You pay me a handsome compliment.’ Jurgen smiled. ‘For Plastic Tolstoy is a genius. It was he who first understood what a splendid marketing tool we are for Claustrosphere. It was he who approached me with the offer to fund us. Believe me, if we could market ourselves with the skill with which he has marketed Claustrosphere, the planet would be healthy indeed.’

  ‘You can’t market responsibility! It’s not a packet of fish fingers.’

  ‘Exactly. What we offer is painful truth and difficult decisions, both of which are bloody difficult to sell, you dig? Which is why I take Tolstoy’s coin. No one but he would support such a hopeless cause with such generous commitment.’

  Rosalie sank into a chair made out of stag antlers. She was drained and weary.

  ‘So what am I supposed to do?’ she asked eventually. ‘Do? Why, nothing. You continue as before. You go back to your unit and organise the raid on the toxic waste convoy. Very few people know what you know. Myself, some senior figures in the movement and of course our opposite numbers in the Claustrosphere Company. If you ever did decide to break the confidences I have shared with you, I would of course deny them utterly. If necessary, I would have you silenced permanently, because if you were believed then Mother Earth and Natura would be finished and the last barrier between us and the Rat Run would be gone.’

  ‘I won’t tell,’ said Rosalie in a hollow monotone. ‘As you say, it would do more harm than good.’

  ‘Remember what I once told you, Rosalie,’ said Jurgen. ‘Be careful what you ask, tiny girl. You might get the answers that you don’t want to hear.’

  There was nothing more to say.

  ‘Come on, Max, let’s go,’ said Rosalie wearily. ‘Thanks for being so honest with us, Jurgen.’

  ‘It was nothing, baby, OK?’ Jurgen replied. ‘My congratulations at having discovered the truth for yourselves. Every day I expect the whole world to wake up and figure it out, but they never do.’

  Jurgen offered them dinner but they declined politely. Rosalie didn’t want to talk any more, she just wanted to leave. One thing was still bothering her, though.

  ‘If the Claustrosphere Company are your friends, how come they tried to blow you up in Brussels?’ she asked as they made their way up to the heli-pad.

  Suddenly all Jurgen’s masterly charm deserted him. His face flashed with fury. Rosalie thought that he would hit her.

  ‘They are not my damn friends, you stupid fucking bitch!!

  Haven’t you been listening to anything? I take their money because I hate them! I take their money because I want to fight them with the best weapons I have. I take their money because if I do not stop them they will destroy the Earth. They pay me, and I try to kill them. It’s a simple business transaction.’

  ‘And they try to kill you.’

  ‘Of course they do. At the moment, I am the leader of our movement but there are others, there will always be others. Perhaps one day you, Rosalie; you are very highly thought of in our movement. I am valuable, but expendable. That is why they tried to kill me. Why they try to kill me now.’

  ‘Why now?’ Now Max was curious.

  ‘Because Claustrosphere is in a mini-slump. Everybody already owns one. Tolstoy must mount a new marketing drive. He wants to institute a massive and completely pointless upgrade of existing technology. My death would be a tremendous boost for him. Can you see the headlines? Green God Dead! Last Sane Man On Earth Murdered! Environmental Movement In Turmoil! It would sell ten million units. Tolstoy has been saving me up for this.’

  Rosalie was about to enter the helicopter. She turned and looked at Jurgen.

  ‘So they pay us, we work for them, our goals are diametrically opposite and we want each other dead.’

  ‘Of course, isn’t it obvious?’

  Dominant fantasy.

  Jurgen Thor watched as the helicopter containing Max and Rosalie disappeared into the distance. They had been lucky, he thought. Really, he should probably have killed them for what they had discovered. But somehow, he preferred to let Rosalie stew in it. He knew she would not tell and Jurgen rather enjoyed the knowledge that beautiful, dedicated little Rosalie, one of the prides of Mother Earth, should have been tainted by the terrible truth. Or at least a part of the terrible truth. Jurgen could not really explain it to himself, but he felt that by sharing at least some of his dark secrets with Rosalie, he had somehow soiled her, and that made him feel good. It made him feel strong and bad. He had forced that sweet, pure little girl to descend partway into the mess of compromise and deceit that he lived in every day. She was dirty now, like him, and he had made it so.

  One day, perhaps he would tell her the whole truth, then she really would have something to cry about.

  Within his loins Jurgen felt the stirrings of the erection that had eluded him earlier in the evening.

  ‘How do you feel now, little virgin?!’ he shouted after the lights of the distant helicopter. ‘Now that you’re in Jurgen Thor’s world? Do you feel good, huh? I said, do you feel good?’ But Jurgen knew that she didn’t feel good, he knew that she felt sad, and compromised. He could picture her, sitting in the passenger seat of the helicopter, miserable, small, confused and … dirty. That made Jurgen happy. It filled him up and satisfied him. Except it didn’t, because now he wanted to screw her. If only she hadn’t brought that shitty little movie star, he told himself, he would have screwed her too.

  Then he remembered that Scout was still in his bedroom. Now there was a treat indeed with which to end his sad, dark day. Why not? he had earned it. He would go downstairs and fuck that young idealistic little idiot’s brains out … what brains she had, anyway. There would be no collapse of manhood this time, Jurgen told himself. For he was Jurgen Thor and he was standing on top of the world. The chill wind of the night whipped at his long blonde hair as he glared angrily into the darkness. His chest thrust out, his legs four square and his face set with ugly defiance. It was if he was challenging whatever God watched over him to damn him for the things he had done. For the things he had still to do.

  Before retreating to the bedroom for his reward he watched until the lights of the helicopter disappeared completely.

  Yes, one day he might give himself the pleasure of telling sweet little Rosalie the whole truth and she could come with him to hell.

  Fatal idealism.

  Jurgen Thor turned and went back down the staircase into his bedroom. There would be no protracted foreplay this time, no gentle pursuit of the female orgasm. Jurgen Thor intended to tear the clothes off young Scout and bang her till he was finished, that was all. Then he would drink all night and bang her again as the dawn came up.

  His fantasies of domination were brought to something of an abrupt conclusion, however, when he found himself facing the barrel of a gun.

  ‘You disgust me,’ said Scout, her lips trembling with emotion.

  ‘Excuse me, baby?’ Jurgen inquired, genuinely shocked.

  ‘Don’t “baby” me, you limp-willied hypocrite!’ Scout shouted. ‘I was listening at the door to everything you said when you were downstairs.’

  ‘You listened?’ Jurgen Thor was a little concerned by this.

  ‘Of course I did! Coo, you don’t get many chances to hear Jurgen Thor talking with huge movie stars. I thought it would be exciting, a bit more exciting at least than things have been with you so far, anyway. I thought it would be inspiring, that Max Maximus must be a secret activist and that I’d hear wonderful things about the fight against Claustrosphere. What do I hear? The most disgusting compromise there could ever be. I still can’t believe it. You, me, all this, paid for by Plastic Tolstoy! It makes me bloody sick. I’ve wasted two whole years of my life training to be a hypocrite and I think it’s absolutely off.’

  ‘Give me the gun, Scout,’ Jurgen said.

&nb
sp; ‘Like hell, I will. Crikey, you’ve got some nerve, still thinking you can hand out orders to me.’

  ‘So what is it you want, then?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what I want, chum. I want a full confession from you on video tape. This bloody charade has gone on long enough.’

  Scout was just too young and idealistic to swallow the kind of pragmatism with which Jurgen had persuaded Rosalie to maintain her silence. She had not gone through the five years of pointless struggle that Rosalie had gone through, had not watched everything she tried to defend die. She was still a young girl who believed the world could be saved by people acting decently. She also believed fervently in that old Mother Earth dictum that Claustrosphere was planetary treason — in fact, she had a poster of Jurgen Thor on her bedroom wall which said exactly that. How often had she lain on her bed, staring into those gorgeous eyes, dreaming of how one day she would follow the Green God into battle against Claustrosphere. Now it turned out that those eyes had lied, that Jurgen Thor and Plastic Tolstoy were just two sides of the same coin. Scout was too young to accept that nothing was sacred and that even idealists must make compromises. She was discovering all at once just how wicked the world was and what a terrible thing it was to be human. She could not take it.

  ‘I don’t care what it does to Mother Earth, I’m going to make this nightmare public,’ she said. ‘In the long run you can’t build anything lasting and decent on lies.’

  ‘That is not so, my love. Lies are as important as truth, for without lies, the truth is worthless,’ said Jurgen.

  ‘Now that’s just bloody twaddle and you know it. You don’t like being called a hypocrite, that’s all. But that’s what you are and I’m going to tell, so just get downstairs, you must have a video recorder in your study.’

  And so Jurgen Thor returned to the study where he had been so recently conversing with Rosalie and Max, only this time he was not the masterful one, secure and in control. This time he was the prisoner of someone he considered scarcely more than a child. That was what Scout thought, anyway. As it happened, Jurgen was about to regain control in spectacularly brutal fashion. He did not want to kill her, so he made one last attempt to reason with her.

  ‘Scout, you’re making a big mistake here. No good can come of this, for you or the Earth. Are you catching what I’m saying here, babe?’

  ‘Listen, Mr Thor, either you’re going to tape a confession about Claustrosphere and Mother Earth or I’m going to shoot you and hang the consequences. I feel sick of everything and I don’t care anymore.’

  ‘So be it,’ said Jurgen Thor sadly.

  It was a simple matter for Jurgen to manoeuvre Scout into the position he wanted. She was maintaining the maximum distance she could from him, so in order to get her to stand against the wall he required, he merely had to stand against the opposite wall himself. Of course he could have disarmed her. Jurgen was as sure as anything that Scout would not shoot if he called her bluff. But what then? He could scarcely let her go. This was one girl that he could not guarantee would keep her mouth shut. She would blab and blab and blab and even though no one would believe her, hers was a story that Jurgen simply did not want told.

  The house was built on the actual peak of the mountain. The top floor, which made up the bedroom, was parallel with the mountain-top, and the lower floors were built out from the steep rock that fell away from the summit. This meant that underneath the bottom floor, which was Jurgen’s study, there was nothing but the supporting poles which jutted out of the rockface. In order that these support poles might be periodically maintained, there was a trapdoor in the study floor. It was over this trapdoor that Scout now stood.

  Jurgen Thor had always loved that trapdoor. He sometimes opened it at night and sat at the edge, dropping lighted coals into the dark chasm beneath, watching as the bright embers disappeared into a grim crack in the rock hundreds of metres below. He had even had a trapeze fitted. His friends could scarcely credit it, but Jurgen Thor sometimes swung from beneath the trapdoor. With no safety harness or line of any sort, he would hurl himself through the air, back and forth, back and forth, nothing but rushing air between him and the chasm below.

  ‘Scout,’ he said, ‘you are about to experience something truly strange and unique. Something I have always wondered about. Try to stay conscious and aware as it happens, for it will be a fine and a triumphant end for a brave but stupid girl.’

  Even as a moment of nervous doubt and concern flitted across Scout’s face, Jurgen crossed to his desk in a single stride and pushed a button. The trapdoor fell away beneath her feet and with no more than a gasp of surprise, she disappeared into the cold darkness.

  Jurgen went to the edge of the deadly hole and peered out. There was nothing to be seen, Scout was long gone and the velvet night had enveloped her. She could still be heard, though. The scream, which had found its voice moments after Scout’s deathly descent began, rang around those dark and terrible rocks, invisible in the blackness, but awesomely present all the same.

  Scout screamed for a moment or two, even after she died. The drop was a long one and the speed of sound is no respecter of the dead. As the last echoes of her short life faded into the stillness, Jurgen Thor closed the trapdoor. To his surprise, he found that he was crying, as much for himself as for Scout. He was truly sorry that he had had to kill her. Repentance would do him no good, though, he knew that. If there was a God, then Jurgen Thor was damned and a few idle tears would not wash away his sins.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Betrayal and disaster

  Traitor in the midst.

  The police could only stand back and watch as the first of the mighty tankers pulled on to the grand mosaic-covered piazza at the front of the European parliament.

  In a Land-Rover leading the lethal procession, squashed in between Rosalie and Saunders, sat Judy, his mood swinging from misery to elation with every bump in the road. He was miserable because he was cold and wet and his backside was sore. Judy had loathed camping and adventure holidays as a child, and the intervening years had not changed his attitude at all. The lifestyle which Mother Earth had chosen for themselves was one which, as far as Judy was concerned, they could keep.

  Despite the cold and the damp, however, he was also feeling pretty pleased with himself. Here he was, at the very heart of a major Mother Earth action. He had infiltrated further into the organisation than he could have dreamt possible, further indeed than any of his more favoured colleagues had managed in a very long time. True, he was acting entirely on his own initiative, and had deserted whilst in the line of duty in order to do it, but Judy hoped that if he achieved the result he was looking for, then all would be forgiven.

  He shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

  ‘Keep still, will you!’ barked Saunders, the man with no face.

  ‘Sorry. I was just thinking that I may have developed piles.’

  ‘Ha! You hear that, Rosalie?’ Saunders sneered. ‘A noble wound, eh? Give the man a Purple Heart, he’s got a sore arse. Some of us have got real battle-scars.’

  One of Saunders’s hands left the steering-wheel and began to tug at the buckles that secured his head-bag at the neck.

  ‘Leave it alone, Saunders, and drive the bloody car!’ snapped Rosalie.

  She too had a lot on her mind. Despite the fact that the raid had so far been a colossal success, Rosalie could take no pleasure in it, knowing as she did that the whole thing had been financed by Tolstoy … who was, to all intents and purposes, the anti-Christ. She was certainly in no mood to deal with Saunders’s bombast.

  ‘Don’t even think about taking off your bag, Saunders,’ she went on. ‘I’m in no kind of mood for it. Just leave Schwartz alone to worry about his bum.’

  It was not, in actual fact, haemorrhoids that had made Judy shift uncomfortably in his seat. His reflections on how successful he had been so far had reminded him of the unpleasant fact that his success had been obtained at the expense of deceiving Rosalie. Judy
was not at all happy about this. He admired Rosalie, and knew that it was only because of her recommendation that the Mother Earth leadership had agreed that he remain with the unit at all. Let alone be allowed to take part in a mission.

  ‘He saved me from a life sentence,’ Rosalie had said whilst pleading Judy’s case. ‘That means prison for him if we throw him out. I think we owe him the benefit of the doubt. Besides, if he is what he says he is, then he could be very useful indeed. Let me keep an eye on him, I’ll answer for it.’

  Judy was keenly aware that Rosalie had chosen to trust him and that he intended to repay that trust by betraying her. This did not make him feel good about himself. However, it was Judy’s opinion that Rosalie was about to commit a ruthless and wicked crime which he had to stop. He did not doubt that she would be acting in accordance with her own sense of what was right and just, but then every murderous zealot in history had claimed to have God on their side.

  Celeb status.

  Rosalie had also sought to get Max on to the team, but at this, a line had been drawn. It was felt that famous media stars could prove something of a liability whilst trying to hijack toxic waste shipments. Autograph hunters would only get in the way.

  ‘If he wants to join Mother Earth,’ the leadership had said, ‘he can start at the bottom, just like anybody else.’

  Rosalie could see their point. Terrorist raids were not social events, lovers and boyfriends could not be included. Max was less understanding. In fact he was mystified.

  ‘But I’m a major celebrity, man!’ he had exclaimed. ‘Most people kill to have my puss in their hood.’

  ‘Max, Mother Earth is a guerrilla army, not an LA nightclub or a video launch. We don’t get better results because we have famous people along.’

  Max said that he understood, but he didn’t really believe it. He had lived for too long in a world in which fame was the ultimate credential. A world where there was literally no activity, neither business nor pleasure, which was not deemed the better for having a celebrity attached to it.