Greenhouse Summer Read online

  PRAISE FOR NORMAN SPINRAD

  DEUS X

  “A witty, short novel . . . Spinrad maintains just the right tone of mock-serious concern for the philosophical and theological conundrums faced by the church. . . . It is clear that the author has got hold of a powerful metaphor for transcendence that he intends to push to the limit—with thought-provoking results.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A unique theological dialogue takes shape. In many respects, it’s worthy of the best moral science fiction of C. S. Lewis. . . . Succeeds to a remarkable degree.”

  —Washington Post

  RUSSIAN SPRING

  “It’s moving. It’s inspiring. . . . An impressive work, a powerful book by a very good author.”

  —San Diego Tribune

  “A monumental, prophetic, epic novel . . . Norman Spinrad is a hip, worldly, high-tech Nostradamus whose engaging predictions are occurring on CNN as you turn his pages.”

  —Timothy Leary

  “The novel that shows us all what the best of ‘90s science fiction can be . . . Read it because it’s as good and strong a story as you’re likely to find this year. . . . It will leave you filled with hope and joy.”

  —Orson Scott Card, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction

  LITTLE HEROES

  A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

  “Intelligent, well crafted, and gutsy . . . A primer for the survival of the human soul . . . An absorbing and provocative work.”

  —Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “One of the best books written about the human soul, or lack thereof, of [rock] music and its merchandisers. But it is first and foremost an excellent, extrapolative science fiction adventure.”

  —Houston Post

  ABOUT GREENHOUSE SUMMER

  Norman Spinrad’s science fiction stories and novels have kept him on the cutting edge of the field since the ‘60s. He is one of the big names internationally in SF, a peer of Harlan Ellison, Michael Moorcock, Samuel R. Delany, and the late Roger Zelazny. He has had a long and distinguished career. A new major novel by Spinrad is an event in the SF world; Greenhouse Summer is the event in 1999.

  About a hundred years from now the world is in a lot of trouble. Pollution, overpopulation, and ecological disasters have left the rich nations still rich, but less so, though the party never ends, and the poor nations, the Lands of the Lost, slowly strangle in drought and pollution. New York City is below sea level, surrounded by a seawall. And balmy. The climate in Paris is much like the twentieth-century climate of long-drowned New Orleans. And Siberia, Golden Siberia, is the cropland of the world.

  Still, for the international corporations and businesses who make a profit on technofixing the environment, the Big Blue Machine, it is business as usual: sell what you can where you can whenever you can. It is better to be rich. But maybe it is all coming to a terrible end: a scientist has predicted Condition Venus, the sudden greenhouse downfall of the entire planet—but she can’t say when. So now the attention of the world is focused for a week on a UN conference on the Environment in Paris, where all hell is about to break loose. Filled with sex, science, politics, and great parties, this book will be one of the most-read SF books of the year.

  Part One — True Blue Blues

  • Chapter 1

  • Chapter 2

  • Chapter 3

  • Chapter 4

  • Chapter 5

  • Chapter 6

  Part Two — Glass Houses

  • Chapter 7

  • Chapter 8

  • Chapter 9

  • Chapter 10

  • Chapter 11

  Pour le peuple et l’exception française.

  Merci pour votre compréhension.

  “TO BREAD & CIRCUSES,” SAID MERVIN Appelbaum, toasting her with one final glass of first-class champagne as the Right Stuff flight from Tripoli came out of the holding stack, through the cloud deck, and turned on final toward Newark International.

  “To the Gardens of Allah,” Monique Calhoun replied, fixing a virtual grin on her face as she hoisted a virtual glass.

  Little did her client know that the tag she had hung on the project was a snide reference to a seedy motel in twentieth-century Hollywood wherein famous literary lions like Fitzgerald and Faulkner had cranked out film scripts for corporate capitalist dream factories under the morally anesthetizing influence of oceans of booze.

  It’s people like you who make this job disgusting, Mervin, she restrained herself from saying.

  While I, of course, am as pure as the natural snow.

  Not that Bread & Circuses’ charter didn’t provide its citizen-shareholders with a moral rationale along with the dividends and fringes.

  The Hypocritic Oath, as it was sometimes referred to in B&C circles.

  Just as it was the professional duty of a legal syndic to represent the interests of any person or legal entity accused of a crime in any jurisdiction, so was it the professional duty of an interface syndic and its citizen-shareholders to represent the client’s agenda to the client’s satisfaction, not its or their own.

  As Monique had once again so admirably done.

  Mervin Appelbaum was a vice-president in charge of marketing the services of a corporate dinosaur calling itself Advanced Projects Associates.

  APA seemed to consist of a suite in a fancy office building in London, a pool of funds or perhaps merely credit lines, and the e-dresses of actual construction syndics to fulfill its contracts. In the hoary old corporate capitalist tradition, it made the deals, skimmed the cream, and did nothing of work-unit value itself.

  The deal in question, if not the outfit, had seemed idealistically Blue up front. Back in the twentieth-century, Muammar Qaddafi, a Libyan generalissimo given to bizarre costumes and financing extravagant projects with his desert jurisdiction’s oil riches, had caused the construction of a massive series of tunnels to bring the waters of interior oases to the cities and towns of the coastal plain where most of the population resided.

  As with the earlier and even more grandiosely naive damming of the Nile at Aswan and many later such ill-conceived climatech projects up to the present day, it had seemed like a good idea at the time.

  But just as the Aswan Dam had destroyed the fertility of the Nile Valley by ending the annual flooding that maintained it, the Libyan Water Authority had by now long since sucked the oasis aquifers dry.

  And while a simple nuclear device might have sufficed to take out the Aswan Dam, drain Lake Nasser, and get what was left of the central African silt flowing back down the Nile, something a bit more sophisticated than a Blue terrorist bomb would be needed to convert a tunnel network leading from dried-up oases to what was left of the flooded littoral population centers into an asset again.

  This Advanced Projects Associates proposed to achieve at a handsome profit by building desalination plants at the coast, blasting large craters at the sites of the defunct oases, and reversing the original direction of the pumping operation to fill them, thus creating large artificial lakes surrounded by newly valuable primo real estate.

  It had seemed like a good idea when Giorgio Kang had handed her the assignment. But once again, what had seemed True Blue in Giorgio’s air-conditioned office in New York turned out to be something else again on the ground in the Lands of the Lost.

  The flight had been approaching Newark International from the east, over the seafood farms and dismal mosquito-infested swamplands of southern Long Island, where once New York’s main airhub had been sited, back when the Island was a lot wider than it was today.

  But when the Dutch engineers had presented their estimates, even an idiot who was not a savant could have calculated that saving JFK Inter
national Airport would not be remotely cost-effective. Indeed, even diking-in Manhattan was going to keep the property holders and renters thereof paying off the bonds for the next several hundred years.

  Now they were coming down across the Apple itself, Manhattan Island, girded by its seawall, its non-alabaster towers, if not exactly undimmed by human tears, then at least soaring far above the level of the otherwise encroaching greenhouse tide.

  One could take this as a metaphor for the Apple’s iron determination to triumph over its natural ration of planetary disaster and remain on the side that was winning by sheer act of economic will, especially if Bread & Circuses was being paid to put such a Green triumphalist spin on it, and the extra expenditure for keeping the Statue of Liberty from going the way of JFK was a typical insouciant New York touch.

  Coming down the glidepath into Tripoli, on the other hand, had left Monique no doubt that she was once again approaching the Lands of the Lost.

  That same familiar sinking sensation somewhere between her stomach and her conscience. That same nagging twinge of outraged True Blue righteousness. That same guilty but grateful Green thankfulness that while this was going to be another terrible place to visit, she and her client would be ensconced in an air-conditioned first-class hotel, so that she wouldn’t even have to endure living there while she was living there.

  For all Monique knew, Tripoli might once have been an Arabian Nights fantasy facing an azure sea over a golden strand. Now, however, the Mediterranean had long since flooded the Libyan littoral, past what must have once been the Tripoli waterfront, so that what the flight approached over an endless waste of mudflats, tide pools, and half-submerged ruins was a typical “second growth” Land of the Lost seacoast metropolis.

  Cheapjack office towers and cheaper apartment blocks surrounded by shanties and, in this case, tents. Only government buildings, mosques, and housing for the rich built atop high artificial hilltops proclaimed any investment in a local future much past next Tuesday, and they were a testament only to conspicuous architectural consumption.

  Who knew how far the oceans would rise before the sea level stabilized? The northern ice cap and the Antarctic ice shelves might be just about gone, but would the cloud-cover generators really halt the melting of the Antarctic continental cap itself? Who would invest in anything built to last when no one knew if or when or how far the city would have to be pulled back again?

  As per the drill to which Monique was accustomed, an air-conditioned jetway conveyed her and Mervin Appelbaum into the air-conditioned terminal, where a Water Authority functionaire slid them through VIP customs and directly into an air-conditioned limo, which whisked them through the squalor into their air-conditioned hotel.

  The only contact with the local atmosphere that they were forced to endure was while covering the few meters between the limo and the hotel, a full ninety seconds of searing dry heat and merciless actinic solar glare that had Appelbaum bitching and moaning about sleazebag hotels that failed to provide proper entry through an air-conditioned garage.

  Monique had managed to restrain herself from pointing out that the unfortunate local populace enjoyed no such respite, that billions of humans in the Lands of the Lost endured such toxic climate and worse for their entire short lives.

  She arrived in her standard VIP air-conditioned room fuming and cursing to herself, and stood there before the standard sealed window staring down and out over the scene below with her standard case of the True Blue blues.

  In her capacity as a Bread & Circuses VIP-services operative, Monique all too frequently found herself shepherding said Very Important Persons on deal-making trips to the Lands of the Lost, found herself all too frequently in a clone of this room, looking down from on air-conditioned high upon the malarial coastal mangrove swamps of China or Brazil or Texas, the refugee barge-huts of Nouméa or Perth or Hokkaido, the favelas of Athens or Ankara or Nairobi, the patchwork Bedouin tents and shacks of Tripoli, whatever, feeling like one of those colonial overseers in the historical pix, lacking only a servile native in a red organ-grinder monkey suit delivering a room-service mint julep to make her guilty wallow complete.

  The sad song that the True Blue sang was that despite the manifest increase of the biomass, the warming had produced more losers than winners, or at least the losers had lost more than the winners had won, and that the planet should therefore somehow be restored to the status quo ante, as God or the greatest good for the greatest number or the local self-interest intended.

  Monique’s ramblings through the Lands of the Lost had convinced her that they at least had a point. The interior deserts of North America, Asia, and Africa might as well have been another planet, upon whose surface un-air-conditioned humans could not hope to survive. What was left of Japan clung precariously to upland earthquake zones. The Great Mississippi Estuary drowned what had been some of the best farmland in the world. The entire Pacific Rim festered with refugees from Polynesia and the Southeastern Asian littoral.

  One would have to have a heart of stone not to feel sympathy for the desperate dispossessed billions of the Lands of the Lost.

  One would have to have a brain of similar density not to thank fortune that one was not one of them.

  One would have to have the saintliness of a Gandhi or a Diana to contemplate trading the newly balmy green lands of Northern Europe and America and Siberia, delivered from the gray glooms of winter at their expense, in order to rescue them.

  And so, Monique Calhoun, inhabitant of the Apple, daughter of Greenhouse Europe, discontented herself with her Green guilt and consoled herself with the thought that projects like the one Bread & Circuses had been hired to help peddle to the Libyan Water Authority at least served to ameliorate the catastrophe.

  Nor was Mervin Appelbaum the worst of clients. Gray, balding, cherubically pink and chubby, decked out in the sort of loose-fitting short-sleeved tan pantaloon suit recommended by Saville for such climes, a proud grandfather, unlike certain Very Important Ass-Pinchers who had also been more than old enough to be her father, Appelbaum kept his hands and his suggestive suggestions to himself.

  He even displayed a reasonable simulation of idealistic enthusiasm as he delivered the intro to the son et lumière that Bread & Circuses had prepared to Muammar Al Fawzi, chairman of the Libyan Water Authority.

  “The Gardens of Allah will fulfill the great dream of your illustrious namesake, Sheik Al Fawzi, if not exactly in the manner he intended, and with a little creative financing, at a price you can easily afford,” he burbled as Monique booted up the holodeck and loaded the chip.

  “Naming me after the Clotheshorse of the Desert was my father’s idea, not mine, Mr. Appelbaum,” Al Fawzi said dryly. He himself wore a plain white robe, a short black beard, and a tired sardonic expression that seemed permanently engraved on his sallow leathery face.

  “I only meant—”

  “Nor is ‘sheik’ a title recognized in postmodern Libya, and believe me, things being what they are, there is no such thing as a price we can easily afford.”

  “Ready,” Monique announced posthaste.

  “Let the show go on,” Al Fawzi drawled with a negligent wave of his hand, a take on both an impresario and a fictional Oriental potentate that Monique found somehow endearing.

  Al Fawzi’s nondescript office filled with the S&L that Bread & Circuses’ imageers and spinners had prepared, and with no little creative conflict, Monique was given to understand.

  THE GARDENS OF ALLAH!

  Flowing green letters floated before them as they soared over an azure sea toward a mercifully vague and distant shore.

  Someone had suggested opening with an actual muezzin’s chant of “Allah Akbar,” but this had quickly been scotched as dangerously and offensively obvious in favor of an electronic bass line mimicking the rhythm thereof and an ululating tenor delivery of the title mirroring the phrasing.

  The style of the lettering was supposed to suggest Arabic script, though to Monique it
appeared more reminiscent of classic twentieth-century graffiti. Green was the sigil color of Islam, but since it also had a political implication that didn’t exactly play well in the Lands of the Lost, it was thought best to balance it with a simultaneous blaze of True Blue.

  Of such finely spun cultural and motivational details was the syndic’s typical S&L crafted. Bread & Circuses. Though what bread had to do with it was something Monique had yet to comprehend.

  The basic sell was the client’s climatech scheme, but the deep sell was what the tag Monique had hung on the project was meant to imply to an Islamic and Arabic demography unlikely to be intimately familiar with early-twentieth-century Hollywood folklore.

  The Garden was the specific Koranic image of paradise and the Oasis its incarnation in real estate to which the faithful might aspire, an image that keyed into feelings of both wealth and virtue. To create or re-create oases, to bring gardens to the desert, was, therefore, both the professed socioeconomic ideal of Arabic governance of whatever system, and the mystical Utopian vision of doing the work of Allah by bringing a piece of His paradise down to the Earth. Which, it would seem, was why green was the holy color.

  What this translated to in terms of the S&L specifics was a quick overflight of washed-out low-saturation dun-colored desert wastes stripped away to reveal schematics of the now-dry and useless tunnel system that the Clotheshorse of the Desert had proclaimed “the Great Man-Made River” while a dry cost accountant’s voice detailed the failure thereof, followed by a much more lengthy virtual tour of the virtual future glowing with supersaturated greens as a throaty houri crooned a seductive description of the Paradise that Advanced Projects Associates proposed to bring to the parched Libyan earth while an Arabized version of Ravel’s Bolero built behind her.