Greenhouse Summer Page 6

  He might know nothing about boats or navigation, and could not be trusted to supervise the accounting, but he had matured within the syndic well enough to run the commercial-intelligence end of the operation too.

  Who better than a comic-opera prince whom no one could take seriously as more than a glorified doorman?

  Once the evening’s passengers were aboard and the gangway was up, Eric paraded through the grand salon and up the semicircular staircase to the upper-deck promenade and then forward to the wheelhouse to be seen presiding over the commencement of the voyage.

  Theater it might be, but he did enjoy starring in it.

  The captain of La Reine, Dominique Klein, though grandly costumed in white pantaloons and blue jacket and cap liberally festooned with gold braid, was a taciturn career Seine boatman and not much for center stage.

  The “pilot,” Eddie Warburton, might be dressed in a white suit as the elder Mark Twain and had even been persuaded to affect the hair and mustachios, but he knew about as much about steering a boat or the currents of the Seine as Eric did, being a virtuality-effects engineer hired away from a midsized traveling circus.

  The wheelhouse might be a perfect simulacrum of the historic article, and yes, there was even a big ship’s wheel with which one could at least in theory steer La Reine in the event of computer failure or an attack of lunacy, but the screens and keyboards and consoles between the wheel and the front windows were the real controls of the boat.

  So Prince Eric was not entirely unjustified in strutting into the wheelhouse as if La Reine really were under his command. Not for a prince, after all, to master the grubby details, and indeed, should Captain Klein fall overboard and be eaten by the alligators, the riverboat’s computer system was fully capable of guiding the rest of the evening’s voyage.

  “Evenin’, Yer Highness,” Warburton drawled.

  “Ready, Captain?”

  “Bien sûr, Monsieur Esterhazy.”

  “Light her up, Eddie!”

  “Rock and roll!” said Warburton, and hit the appropriate function key.

  Eric saw the effect live from the outside only when changes were being rehearsed, but he had seen the coverage and the pub often enough to see in his mind’s eye just what they were seeing over at Trocadéro, on the Eiffel Tower, all along this stretch of the river, and phony prince or not, he had not yet become so jaded as to not share the thrill.

  Bah-bah-BAH! BAH-BAH!!

  A huge recorded full orchestral fanfare resounded over the Seine as the halogen tubes hidden in the woodwork lit up the great white riverboat in a blaze of glory, and two tall holographic virtual smokestacks sprouted amidships belching black clouds of virtual coal smoke and gouts of white virtual steam.

  La Reine’s lasers painted virtual fireworks across the purpling vault of the crepuscular sky as the paddle wheels began to churn. The band in the grand salon began to play “When the Saints Go Marching In” as she warped slowly away from the dock, and her speakers boomed it out over the river.

  The band segued to “Rollin’ on the River” as La Reine de la Seine reached the center of the channel, made a majestic right turn, and headed east at her leisurely top speed beneath her own virtual aurora borealis.

  Eric Esterhazy, head tilted slightly upward, gazed out the front windows of the wheelhouse, an icon of lordly vision in which in this moment he more than half believed himself.

  As they promenaded grandly up the Seine, the Left Bank, the Right Bank, lights beginning to come on before darkness had really fallen as if by grace of her passage, gondolas, canoes, dragon boats, even bateaux mouches pausing in midstream to allow their tourists to gape and cheer, the Eiffel Tower behind, the Musée d’Orsay approaching, La Reine de la Seine was indeed Queen of the River.

  Was not her master therefore in a certain sense the real thing?

  Was there a nobler domain than the City of Light?

  Was not Eric Esterhazy truly Prince of the City?

  IT HAD BEEN A HECTIC AND RATHER MYSTIFYING week in Paris for Monique Calhoun, and the United Nations Annual Conference On Climate Stabilization hadn’t even started yet.

  She actually felt relief, dutifully guilty relief, but relief nonetheless, that Father was halfway around the world working on some fore-doomed project to desalinate the Hanoi marshlands and had taken Mother with him.

  Dining at Bayous et Magnolias would be familial duty enough under the trying professional circumstances. The phone conversation with her parents had made it all too clear what life would have been like had they been in town and she been unable to escape living en famille in her old room in the apartment on the Avenue Émile-Zola.

  Out of town or not, they had felt thoroughly snubbed even at half a world’s remove when she had thanked them for their kind offer but told them she’d be staying at the Hotel Ritz.

  “The family home is no longer good enough for our woman of the world?”

  “Really, Mamam—”

  “How on Earth can you afford a suite at the Ritz?”

  “I can’t, Father, no human can. Bread & Circuses is paying for it. Do try to remember that this is not a vacation trip back home, I’m here on syndic business!”

  “Still, Monique, wouldn’t you feel more comfortable at home? You’d have the whole place to yourself.”

  “Of course I would, Mamam,” Monique had lied. “But I need the suite at the Ritz for an office.”

  The latter was at least half true. Bread & Circuses’ Paris branch had two floors in a converted Hausmannian apartment building right behind Trocadéro, she would be using their staff when necessary, and they could’ve found her office space there.

  But she was here to run VIP services, which meant sticking close to her charges, most of whom would be put up at the Ritz or hotels like it. Besides which, she was authorized to rent herself a first-class suite on the expense account. It was a sweetheart of a job, but somebody had to get to do it.

  The Ritz had been, well, ritzy enough for a couple or so centuries for the word to have passed into several languages, and Monique’s suite, though by no means the top the hotel had to offer, had a bedroom approximately the size of her parents’ living room, a salon approximately half the size of their entire apartment, and a bathroom larger than her studio apartment in New York.

  The suite was decorated in a bizarre mélange of Louis-the-Something-or-Other Rococo and Retro-Deco. The bathroom was swirling chrome and black marble reminiscent of both the Chrysler Building and classic 1950s Harley-Davidson. The bedroom ran to burgundy-flocked walls with gilded sconces, an enormous bed canopied and braided in the same color scheme, a huge antique Bokhara rug, a halogenated crystal chandelier, Tiffany incidental lamps, and a ceiling whose fruit-salad moldings and central medallion had been carefully painted in full colors. The salon mirrored this style in royal blue and gold, with antique eighteenth-century couches and tables choc-a-bloc with Bauhaus chairs and a desk-cum-media-console stunningly packaged in abstractly carved mahogany inlaid with silver Yemenite filigree.

  If the suite struck Monique as more than a tad over the top, well that was the point; this was, after all, to be the headquarters of VIP services, and therefore must make the point that the mistress thereof was herself a Very Important Personage.

  It did seem to daunt Lars Bendsten when she invited the General Secretary of the United Nations Annual Conference On Climate Stabilization up to the suite for an introductory meeting.

  Bendsten, as the impresario of the event, represented, and in a functional sense was, the client and she his subordinate, but he entered the suite as if summoned into The Presence.

  He was a tall silver-haired man in a dark-blue UN diplomatic suit, the sort of Scandinavian professional that the United Nations had strategically reverted to in an attempt to counter its all-too-accurate image among the economic powers as a shrewish alms-seeking Land of the Lost debating society.

  Bendsten had the standard manners and cool restraint, but Monique sensed something else beneat
h. Perhaps it had something to do with the way he had turned down her suave offer of champagne or sherry and requested a shot of ice-cold vodka straight up.

  “Well, what can I do for you, Mr. General Secretary?” Monique said after these niceties had been concluded.

  “Mr. Bendsten will do, Ms. Calhoun,” he replied primly, whacking down a slug of vodka in a manner that suggested it was not his first of the day, even though it was not yet even a civilized British teatime. “At the moment, not very much, since the displays and exhibits are still being set up in the Grand Palais, and none of the . . . invitees have actually arrived yet.”

  “Displays . . . ? Exhibits . . . ? I was given to understand that UNACOCS was a scientific symposium.”

  Bendsten fidgeted nervously. “And indeed, so it is, Ms. Calhoun. But in order to stage it in Paris, where we . . . where it is hoped it will draw more serious media attention, and in order to afford the services of your syndic to accomplish that end, it was necessary to . . . go outside the United Nations appropriations budget to secure a bit of supplemental funding.”

  Come to think of it, renting the Grand Palais did seem like over-budget overkill for an event that had never needed much more than a fancy thousand-seat auditorium.

  Curiouser and curiouser, Monique thought, giving him the silent stare.

  “Nothing unseemly, you understand,” Bendsten said, contemplating his vodka. “A few . . . educational exhibits . . . some . . . industrial displays . . . by organizations equally concerned with re-establishing a stable planetary climate . . .”

  “Mmmmm . . .” Monique observed carefully.

  “And of course, in return for these subsidies, our patrons desire an enlarged and enhanced image for UNACOCS and their participants’ participation . . .”

  “Hence Paris. Hence Bread & Circuses.”

  Bendsten smiled. More or less.

  “Exactly, Ms. Calhoun,” he said.

  “Perhaps it might be a good idea for me to . . . look over the set while we both have time, before the principals start arriving.”

  “Excellent idea, Ms. Calhoun,” said the General Secretary, smoothly slurping down the rest of his vodka as he stood to conclude the meeting. “I’d be delighted to show you around. Shall we say tomorrow at fifteen-thirty?”

  As Monique trotted up the formal flight of stairs leading to the somewhat grandiose entrance to the Grand Palais, she found last night’s dinner conversation with her grandparents coming back on her like an unbidden burp flavored with the taste of jambalaya and blackened redfish.

  Her grandparents’ Cajun restaurant in the Marais, like the district, no longer chic, had now retired to the merely quaint. The Marais had been Seineside swampland, then a rough-and-ready quartier populaire, then a gay nightlife district, and now a re-creation of the French Quarter of New Orleans, itself a vanished Louisianian re-creation of mythic Paris, to complete the strange karmic circle.

  Bayous et Magnolias’ entrance marquee still featured a holo riverboat incongruously gliding down an outsized bayou overhung with Cyprus and weeping willow and the dining room was still the glassed-over interior courtyard of what had once been a sixteenth-century tenement.

  The Grand Palais had originally been constructed in the nineteenth century as what it was now, an exhibition center, not a conference auditorium. The art-nouveau iron framework and crystal-palace ceiling had been retained and preserved during its several renovations, the ceiling glass smartened to provide variable tints of “natural” lighting, the ironwork rather garishly gilded and fitted with concealed halogen tubing, the lighting, sound, and computer systems updated to state-of-the-art. But it was still a single huge space far more suitable to carnivals, book fairs, and industrial exhibits than conferences.

  An odd venue for a scientific symposium, Monique had made the mistake of mentioning to her grandparents by way of idle table talk last night. Why the Grand Palais?

  Her grandparents had been stridently convinced that they had the True Blue answer.

  Thanks to Monique’s involvement, they had boned up on these conferences. Indeed they knew more about UNACOCS than Monique had felt she had a professional need to know herself.

  Chez Grandma and Grandpa, the conferences had indeed been instituted as a ploy by the UN to be seen to be Doing Something about the Condition Venus threat so as to push the panic below the surface.

  But the substance of the conferences was the continuation of a serious scientific quest, a quest whose beginnings went as far back as the closing years of the twentieth century—the search for a predictive planetary climate model that actually worked, the holy grail of climatologists ever since.

  What had gotten her grandparents’ old True Blue blood bubbling was that while previous UNACOCS had taken place out of media sight and mind in obscure locales, the United Nations had now moved the conference to Paris, had hired Bread & Circuses to bring it to the attention of the world.

  Had rented the Grand Palais.

  Ergo, something had obviously changed.

  Grandma and Grandpa were sure it could only be one thing.

  Someone was going to announce a planetary climate model that worked. And the UN wanted to present it to the world as loudly as possible. And that had to mean that it would prove what they already knew, namely that the planetary warming which had lost them Louisianne must be reversed or the biosphere was doomed.

  Well, that had seemed a long chain of questionable assumptions last night, but what greeted her inside the Grand Palais certainly gave her an even more piquant aftertaste of last night’s food for thought.

  Lars Bendsten was there to meet her.

  At the edge of considerable chaos.

  A stage backed by a huge video screen had been set up at one end of the vast space, workmen were completing the installation of a semicircular amphitheater of temporary seating around it, other workmen were stringing lights, speakers, microphones, wiring. A circle of blue-painted fiberboard panels emblazoned with the white UN logo was in the process of going up, apparently to screen the conference auditorium from what was being set up in the rest of the Grand Palais.

  Large-scale booths and industrial displays in various stages of erection. Video screens. A scale model of an orbital mirror. A full-size plankton-seeding barge being hauled into place by a tractor. Cloud-cover generators. A silvery ovoid looking like a nuclear terrain-sculpting charge that Monique earnestly hoped was a replica. Cloud-seeding drones. Qwik-grow trees. Devices and bits and pieces of this and that being hauled around and put together that Monique couldn’t identify. Kiosks. Signs. Holos. Banners.

  “A bit of supplemental funding, Mr. Bendsten?”

  Lars Bendsten gave Monique a smarmy smile. “We are fortunate to have secured the generous support of quite a few private entities seriously concerned with stabilizing the planetary climate,” he admitted redundantly, as he led her across the bustle of the exhibition floor.

  “At a profit to themselves, of course.”

  “They could hardly continue to operate without sufficient funding,” Bendsten pointed out.

  “An unfortunate fact of life even in our postcapitalist world, as the United Nations and UNACOCS itself have annual cause to contemplate.”

  “And of course, in return for their idealistic support of the conference, they hope to secure lucrative contracts for their goods and services. . . .”

  “Enlightened self-interest must be a feature of any functional economic system, must it not?”

  “Bien sûr . . .”

  Something about this arch conversational fencing match was beginning to grate on Monique. She found herself giving the conference General Secretary her own version of smiling smarm.

  “And of course, their enlightened self-interest will in no way impinge upon the intellectual or political content of the conference,” she said. Maybe her grandparents had managed to get to her a bit after all.

  “The United Nations takes no advocacy position on the optimum goal of planetary climatic
stabilization.”

  “Meaning that this UNACOCS will no more reach a meaningful conclusion than the previous ones?” Monique found herself blurting. “Allowing these conferences to continue into the indefinite future?”

  Lars Bendsten’s fair Scandinavian complexion reddened. Other than that, UN professional that he was, he displayed no emotion.

  “The United Nations provides the venue and the infrastructure for these scientific symposia,” he said. “We would hope that a scientific consensus on planetary climate goals will be reached as soon as possible, of course, but we do not set the technical agenda or influence the content, nor do we seek to.”

  “Of course not, Mr. General Secretary,” Monique said, backing off as she realized that she had gone too far. “No offense intended.”

  Bendsten’s Caucasian flush remained, but his expression softened, became more personal, turning it into a sigil of embarrassment rather than anger, or so it seemed.

  “None taken, Ms. Calhoun,” he seemed to say almost sadly.

  Monique found herself tuning out Bendsten’s patter as he showed her around the temporary auditorium, the state-of-the-art media facilities, the lighting, as he went on about the coverage B&C’s Paris branch had already secured. She found herself constantly looking back over her shoulder at the industrial display area, at what would seem to have become the real main event.

  UNACOCS had somehow metamorphosed into a trade show. The main order of business was going to be business.

  The climatic engineering business.

  That much was obvious.

  But something more seemed to be going on too.

  Monique found herself reading the names on the kiosks and banners and holos going up and doing a nose count.

  NASA. Erdewerke. Boeing. Bluepeace. ESA. Tupelov. Aerospaciale. Ocean Systems. Euromirror. BlueGenes. Smaller outfits. Scores of them in all shapes and sizes, and yes, Advanced Projects Associates, too.

  What all these enterprises had in common was the sale of climatech services. Some of these outfits would be quite willing to set up cloud-cover generators for one sovereignty and then sell orbital mirrors to supposedly correct the mess they had made to the outraged neighbors.