Greenhouse Summer Page 4

  Are we Blue? Are we Green?

  The Hot and Cold War? Which side are we on?

  On our side, whose else, buster?

  And we intend to keep it the side that’s winning.

  In place of politics, New York had attitude.

  Winners and losers?

  Do what it takes.

  Ocean rising gonna drown the Apple?

  So hire the Dutch to dike it in.

  It’s gonna cost a bundle.

  So tough shit.

  Brooklyn and the Bronx and Long Island gone to feed the fishes?

  So eat as much as you can digest of lobster Newburg and bouillabaisse and linguine marinara and peddle what’s left to the rubes west of the Hudson at fancy prices.

  Attitude.

  Monique just didn’t get it when she arrived in New York as a college freshman straight off the plane from Paris and into a city that seemed to be on another planet.

  Paris might not exactly be the bargain-basement capital of Europe, but not even Novosibirsk or Zekograd could have prepared her for the prices here. Building the seawall that had saved New York from an ocean of water had inundated the city in an ocean of bond debt, the result being that there were sky-high taxes on everything, including, it would seem, taxes on taxes. As a result, the prices in the shopwindows were unreal, and what would rent you a decent forty meters in Paris got you the equivalent of a maid’s room here. The metro had long since been inundated, the trams were expensive and unreliable, the motorized taxis were only for the rich.

  How do people live here?

  What am I doing here?

  New York speedily enough taught Monique its answer to the first question. You did not waste time and energy bitching and moaning about taxes or the climate or the injustice of it all or your crappy broom closet of an apartment except when you had the leisure to indulge in New York’s favorite parlor game.

  You survived.

  Columbia University had dormitory studios students could afford at three per room. The street food was plentiful and varied and cheap. The gray-market pedicabs and rickshaws got you around at cut-rate untaxed prices to be negotiated. Tax-free secondhand machine-made or first-hand-crafted clothing was inexpensive once you developed the street smarts to find the black markets. You wore a mosquito repeller in the summer and sprung for sonic cockroach guard and air-conditioning no matter what it took.

  You developed the attitude.

  Or else.

  It took a bit longer for New York to teach her to fully appreciate the irony of the answer to the second question, though she had known it even before she left Paris.

  Monique had been dispatched to New York to develop a True Blue social conscience. It had been a negotiated compromise to bring about a truce in the familial Hot and Cold War.

  Mother had grown up in balmy palmy Paris as the daughter of Cajun refugees who ran a restaurant in the Marais called Bayous et Magnolias.

  Father was the son of a French architect who had made his pile building mansions for the movers and shapers of booming Siberia and the American public-relations consultant he had met there doing likewise with their rough-and-ready images. Having made their fortune in the Wild East, they had repaired to Paris to enjoy it.

  In Paris, however, an American PR lady with limited French hardly commanded the salary to which she had become accustomed in Siberia the Golden. Nor was an architect who had specialized in neo-Las Vegas mansions for the Siberian nouveau plutocracy in hot demand in the City of Halogen Light.

  So by the time Monique’s father married her mother, her paternal grandparents had been constrained to sell off their Paris apartment and retire to a farmstead in Var, where they could afford to live off their capital and from which reduced economic vantage they could not afford to look down their noses at the daughter of modest restaurateurs as economically below their son’s station.

  The Blue and the Green of it, however, was a cat-and-dog matter.

  Mother’s family wore their Blue on their sleeves, not to mention the decor and menu of their restaurant. Pining for Lost Louisianne was their stock-in-trade, and you couldn’t eat oysters bienville and crayfish gumbo from their kitchen without a dripping garnish of Spanish moss and True Blue climatological revanchism.

  Father’s folks, on the other hand, having been enriched by the warming of Siberia and the consequent boom times to the point of being able to live off it through decades of permanent midcareer crisis, had their own class self-interest in viewing the brave and balmy new world through Green-colored glasses.

  Nor was the conflict ameliorated when Father—under the baleful Blue influence of Mother and her family, or so his family saw it—chose the career of climatech engineer, spiting one’s parents and impressing one’s girlfriend by declaring oneself an enemy of their class being a youthful mode never likely to go out of fashion.

  Thus, when Monique’s two sets of grandparents did speak to each other, they did it at the top of their lungs, and often enough with the destiny of their darling granddaughter as the dialectical shuttlecock.

  Given this girlhood, it was not without her own enthusiastic consent that Monique’s parents, when the time came, decided to extract her from this ideological battleground by sending her to university in America. Nor was it without political cunning.

  Her maternal grandparents approved on nostalgic Blue grounds and recommended Tulane, which had been re-established on suitably muggy swampland in bayou suburbs of St. Louis.

  Her paternal grandparents concurred on practical career grounds—an Anglophone higher education was essential, even the mighty Siberians were constrained to interface with the rest of the world in English—but assumed it would be Berkeley or Stanford or one of those Newer Age universities endowed by the major syndics headquartered in the lotus land of the Pacific Northwest.

  Instead, it was Columbia, in New York, a city whose political hue was ambiguous enough to leave both sets of grandparents equally dissatisfied. A city far more hard-edged than climatologically blessed Paris, where, or so her parents hoped, Monique would herself gain a keener appreciation of the unfortunate fact that there were people for whom the warming was not all palm trees and long golden afternoons in the Jardin des Plantes without being exiled to durance vile and a third-rate education in some truly grim Land of the Lost metropolis.

  Monique shuddered a little inside as she began to descend the stairs leading down to the pedicab stand on West End Avenue. She knew it was irrational, but she also knew it would be unnatural ever to get used to this.

  Seawall Avenue was about five meters above the Hudson, and from this perspective, when she looked west, the surface of the river seemed more or less at eye level. But West End Avenue was not just east of Seawall Avenue, it was down.

  Ten meters down.

  Meaning that halfway down the staircase the surface of the river was above her head. The dormitory studio she had been assigned as a student had been on the first floor. This had not seemed significant until the first time she had stood atop Seawall Avenue to catch the view over the river and then looked east and back whence she had come and realized the awful truth.

  The place she lived in was below sea level. Every night she slept with a threatening ocean towering over her head. Even now, up on the eleventh floor, she still had the occasional nightmare about it.

  That had been what the Third Force mystics called the satori. If her parents had sent her to New York to develop a True Blue social conscience, that had been the moment they had succeeded. That was when Monique had gotten the big picture.

  Living down there in the city below the waterline, dreaming at night of tidal waves washing over her, slogging her way through the chronically flooded streets, impoverished by the sky-high survival taxes, shoulder-to-shoulder, cheek-by-jowl, nose-to-armpit with the refugees who had managed to make it this far and their displaced descendants, she did indeed feel for the washed-over masses of the drowned isles and lost littorals, and in the greenhouse summer, when temp
erature and humidity exceeded even her grandparents’ tallest stories of lost New Orleans and vast clouds of giant mosquitoes invaded the nights, she felt at one with the survivors in the jungle fringes of the Amazon Sea.

  That was the Blue of it.

  The Green of it was that a girl who had grown up in sunny sultry Paris would have had to be a saint in a crown of thorns and a hair shirt to trade such environs, which the gods of chance had greened, for the modulated surcease of the agonies of the Lands of the Lost.

  A no-colored animal with Green and Blue stripes.

  Which, upon graduation, as it turned out, made her a valuable recruit for Bread & Circuses, and made the syndic culture thereof an offer she couldn’t refuse.

  Monique’s pedicab dropped her off at Thirty-fourth Street, where Bread & Circuses’ headquarters occupied a modest four floors atop the Empire State Building. This second-most-prominent visual icon of the Apple had had its ups and downs during the two centuries that it had been to New York what the Eiffel Tower was to Paris, and when Bread & Circuses had moved in, it was going through one of its seedy epochs.

  As far as B&C was concerned, since the Statue of Liberty was unavailable, this made the deal perfect. The syndic bought the top thirty floors at a distressed price, renovated the exterior tower and the lobby, lit it up like a halogen and laser Christmas tree, redid the top four floors as its headquarters, and then sold off the twenty-six floors below, one by one, at ever-increasing prices, to chic entertainment, couture, travel, and resort syndics.

  This resulted not only in a handsome profit to its citizen-shareholders but in soaring property values in the rest of the skyscraper and the consequent renovation of the whole building’s decor and prestige, leaving Bread & Circuses sitting high, wide, and handsome atop the city’s reborn signature edifice.

  That is, the crowning monument to New York’s mighty edifice complex, Monique could never refrain from thinking, despite the tired awfulness of the pun, every time she stared up the gargantuan gray length of the Empire State Building, capped by a rounded and gleaming silvery tower, from which B&C had caused the antenna to be removed in order to enhance the phallic effect.

  Deliberate?

  Believe it!

  Advertising, public relations, lobbying, putting on events, promoting causes, however the client wished to interface with the public, B&C could handle it for a price.

  But Bread & Circuses wasn’t content to be just the world’s leading public interface syndic, it intended to be the public interface syndic for all practical purposes, and nesting atop this ultimate totem pole to the potency of the deep sell image was not the sort of thing B&C did without full consciousness of the effect it was achieving.

  Nor, she had to admit, without a syndic sense of humor.

  Of which, she hoped, she was not about to become the hapless object.

  Bread & Circuses had a private express elevator to its suite of offices, and Monique took it to middle-management country, where Giorgio Kang’s lair was located.

  Giorgio had been humorously appreciative of how she had not only been instrumental in closing the Gardens of Allah project for the client, but had done so in a manner likely to garner B&C a lagniappe larger that the original deal in the form of a long-term interfacing contract from the projected Islamic disneyworld.

  But while Giorgio handed her her assignments, he was only a supervising account executive, far below the board level, and a long lateral distance from the accounting department too.

  So when an immediate bonus of additional shares had not been forthcoming from on high, she took Giorgio’s assurance that this was merely a bureaucratic hang-up as less than definitive.

  “Don’t worry, Monique, once we get the Gardens of Allah interfacing contract, you’ll see at least a hundred shares out of it.”

  “And if we don’t?”

  “Be real, cara mia, with something of this magnitude, who else is there?”

  True enough, but in the meantime, they had kept her spinning her wheels doing inconsequential this and that around town for six weeks, waiting more and more nervously for her next assignment.

  And leaving her with a little too much time to think.

  B&C’s syndic charter called for it to serve the custom of any and all paying comers; Green, Blue, Bad Boys, the tourists boards of central African disaster areas, or unreconstructed capitalist predators, whatever.

  Thus a good portion of its billing was racked up by wicked old corporate dinosaurs like Advanced Projects Associates selling their services to the flotsam and jetsam desperately trying to cool down the planet—or at least their little corner of it.

  And Monique’s True Blue spirit allowed her to work better than most Green-tinged Bread & Circuses operatives for just such clients. As she had just once more proven.

  This, she was beginning to worry, had its downside, as well as its more obvious upside.

  The upside being that this was what had interested Bread & Circuses in her in the first place and was why her career had progressed so rapidly into VIP services, the cushiest posting in the syndic since it dealt with fulfilling the requirements of honchos and honchas and had the appropriate budgets with which to do so while traveling in the appropriate grand manner.

  The downside was where Monique generally found herself when she got there. Namely, more often than not in the Lands of the Lost. In which, she now realized to her dismay, she had unwittingly made herself something of a specialist. And by turning a routine operation in Libya into a potential bonanza for Bread & Circuses, she had hammered the point home.

  So when Giorgio Kang told her on the phone that he had finally “stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum,” Monique earnestly hoped that she had misread the irony she thought she had heard in his voice, that the syndic hadn’t heard the old one about how no good deed goes unpunished.

  Giorgio’s standard-issue office was decorated in pseudo-Italianate chic as befitted his adopted pseudo-Italianate persona—sleekly curved pink marbline desk, chairs and couch off some fantasy Venetian deco spaceship, and as its centerpiece, the Coffee Monster, a huge gleaming chromed coffee machine that could produce every variety of the beverage known to man simultaneously while doing a fair imitation of “O Sole Mio” as played by a steam calliope.

  Giorgio himself wore a tightly tailored powder-blue cotton suit with enormous lapels, a white dress shirt open down to his breastbone, and swept-back semi-mirror-shades in titanium frames. His sleek black hair seemed sculptured into a helmet.

  Giorgio’s family were Vietnamese Chinese fisherfolk who had migrated to New York to work the South Bronx marshes and still had a string of shrimp boats. He had been born George. Why he had gone Italian was something Monique never quite got. De gustibus non, or however they said it in Milano.

  Giorgio produced two anisette-laced double espressos, strong enough to raise the dead and propel a mirrorsat into orbit.

  “How would you like to represent the syndic in Paris?” he said.

  “The one in France, or the ghost town in the Texas desert?” replied Monique, looking the gift horse in the mouth and counting its teeth.

  “Seriously,” said Giorgio. “The Gardens of Allah deal went through. The board was impressed and grateful. This is your reward.”

  “I’d rather have my bonus shares.”

  Giorgio waved his hand in a fair take on Roman insouciance. “That too, cara mia,” said. “Not my department, but I’ve been told there’s a hundred and fifty making their way down the pipeline. What do you know about UNACOCS?”

  “Unacocks? Is that a straight line to a dirty joke?”

  Giorgio displayed his perfect smile. “It has been in the past, in a manner of speaking. The United Nations Annual Conference On Climate Stabilization. UNACOCS to its friends, assuming it has any. Surely you’ve heard of it.”

  “Something to do with Condition Venus . . . ?”

  Giorgio nodded.

  Right.

  The typical UN response to the Co
ndition Venus scare of a few years back.

  As Monique remembered it, one Dr. Allison Larabee had produced a climate model purporting to demonstrate that if the warming wasn’t stopped, at a certain point it could suddenly go exponential, converting the Earth into a six-hundred-degree clone of Venus within the theoretical lifetimes of children already born, though of course they wouldn’t survive to see it.

  Since such dire Blue climate models were chronically produced by the score and no climate model of whatever color had ever proven itself usefully reliable and Larabee had not enlisted the services of Bread & Circuses, the loud Blue screams resulting therefrom had been pretty much confined to the professional journals and the science sites.

  Had B&C been given the contract, they surely would have broken the story out into the front pages of the general news sites and press by keying into Larabee’s claim that her model showed that the endless tinkering with world-level climate effects by every two-bit sovereignty and demi-sovereignty and syndic was about to trigger Condition Venus right now.

  As it turned out, the sudden terminal fragmenting of the north polar ice cap a year or two later had broken the story anyway, producing banner tabloid shrieks that it was too late already and Holy Rolling panic that the End Was Nigh.

  So the UN had decided that Something Had To Be Done.

  Or at least it had to look that way.

  So, what else, they established these annual conferences.

  And while they hadn’t succeeded in coordinating worldwide climate-engineering efforts according to True Blue planetary goals, they had succeeded in pushing Condition Venus into the back pages and end files of the news syndics, and turning these conferences into easily ignorable yawners.

  “There’ve been how many of these things, four?”

  “Five,” said Giorgio. “This is number six.”

  Something here did not add up. The United Nations had long since become a threadbare, toothless, and flatulent forum for the whinings and mendications of the plethora of impoverished and atavistic full sovereignties of the Lands of the Lost who dominated it numerically.