Greenhouse Summer

by Norman Spinrad

  “But why not let Bread & Circuses in on it?” said Wright. “We’re their client. They’re professionals. Their job is to promote our agenda.”

  “Can’t really trust their discretion with something like this,” bin Mohammed told him.

  “But it’s in their syndic charter.”

  “Hassan is right,” said Kutnik. “It’s too risky.” He turned to Manimoto. “You’re sure the effects will be transient?”

  “Define sure.”

  “Certain. Beyond a doubt.”

  Manimoto shrugged. “When it comes to predicting the global climatic effects of local alterations, there’s no such thing, it’s a mathematical impossibility as every failed attempt at a definitive model has proven.”

  “Well give us numbers then,” said Kutnik.

  “Ninety-three percent chance that the effects will dissipate once the mirrors are no longer focused on the target areas.”

  There was a long moment of silence as Bernard Kutnik took a sip of his drink, and one by one the others followed suit, Kutnik, bin Mohammed, and Wright exchanging glances over the rims of their glasses. It seemed to Eric that this little cabal wasn’t so much pausing to ponder some decision, but rather nerving themselves up to go ahead and act on a decision that had long since been made.

  Kutnik finally shrugged and spoke. “A minimal risk, I’d say.”

  “Famous last words?” Wright suggested sardonically.

  “That is precisely what we’re trying to prevent.”

  “At a profit, of course, Bernie.”

  “A wise man does well by doing good.”

  “By any means necessary?”

  Kutnik scowled. “You just heard Manimoto assure us that the white tornadoes will have no lasting effect.”

  “A ninety-three percent probability, Bernie.”

  “Considering the alternative, I’d say those are odds we can hardly afford not to accept.”

  “Pause,” said Eric. “Well, what do you think of that?”

  “What do I think of that? Jeez, Eric, I don’t think anything of anything, I’m just an Artificial Intelligence, I’m not really your mother. And even if I were, I’d be telling you to use your own head.”

  Eric shook the cobwebs out of the said organ, replaced Mom with the neutral computer voice for the sake of clarity.

  “Is there more on this engineer Manimoto?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go to that.”

  On the screen, Hideki Manimoto stood with Hans Cartwright, President of Orbital Solutions, on the extreme prow-end of the upper deck promenade as La Reine de la Seine slowly cruised past the half-drowned and thoroughly overgrown abstract statuary of the Tino Rossi sculpture gardens, eerie ruins, somehow, of a future that never was.

  “White tornadoes is a misnomer, Mr. Cartwright,” he said. “What we’re going to simulate won’t be tornadoes, more like superheated thermals, not a true atmospheric vortex—”

  “It fits the model though, doesn’t it?”

  “If no one’s looking too closely. Or has a chance to study them for very long.”

  “How closely? How long?”

  “A reciprocal relationship. From the surface, it would be hard to tell. If anyone’s monitoring the mirrors—”

  “Pause,” said Eric.

  And paused to think himself.

  He didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to know that Manimoto was a rocket scientist, or anyway was in the employ of Orbital Solutions, one of the outfits that maintained and rented out a string of orbital solar mirrors.

  Or that these mirrors, ordinarily hired for such tasks as maintaining the Gulf Stream, burning off undesirable cloud cover in the monsoon latitudes, punching holes through temperature inversions, and undoing cooling effects for jurisdictions that didn’t want them caused by the contracts of adjacent jurisdictions that did, probably had the power to produce these, what did he call them, superheated thermals.

  And the head of Erdewerke had put out a contract with Orbital Solutions to do just that.

  The white tornadoes were fakes.

  And Bad Boys had the proof.

  And this was surely a hot commodity.

  How hot? How far did it go?

  Follow the money, as the Wolves of Wall Street and the Gnomes of Zurich used to tell each other in the bad old days.

  Besides Kutnik and Cartwright, Birgit Holmgren of Environmental Imagineers would seem to be in on it. And the Chairperson of the Committee of Concerned Climatologists. And his deputy. And his PR chief. And where was the UN getting the extra financing to hold this thing in Paris from in the first place?

  Not just Erdewerke.

  The collective slush fund of the Big Blue Machine.

  Was the sainted Allison Larabee in on it too?

  Perhaps there was a way to find out.

  “Go to the Allison Larabee recording,” he told Ignatz.

  The white-haired savant in question leaned against the aft upper-deck railing talking with Paolo Pereiro.

  “Do you really intend to sit out the rest of the conference, Allison?”

  “That’s not quite what I said,” said Larabee. “I said this was the last one of these things I’m attending, and that I meant.”

  Pereiro eyed her narrowly. “So in other words, your dramatic walk-out was a piece of attention-getting sophistry, not sincere outrage.”

  “My outrage at six years’ worth of useless talk that’s gone nowhere is sincere all right, Paolo!” Larabee snapped back at him. “And I sincerely intend to do whatever I can to save the biosphere of this planet from the myopic stupidity of its top predator. By whatever means necessary.”

  “Oh really, Allison, such cheap theatrics do not exactly enhance your scientific credibility.”

  “Maybe, but this really could be our last chance.”

  “You know as well as I do that the Condition Venus model is full of unresolved variables.”

  “And whose climate model isn’t?”

  “Mine at least was eighty percent predictive in its time.”

  “In its time-frame, Paolo, which was quite modest.”

  “Whereas yours is far too ambitious to be predictive of anything short-term at all.”

  “I hope I’m wrong, but I’m afraid I’m right.”

  “I’ll believe it when I see one of your white tornadoes.”

  “Will you, Paolo? Or will you shrug that off as one of my model’s ‘unresolved variables’ too?”

  Pereiro gave her a rueful but ameliorative little smile. “At least if the phenomenon occurs, we’ll all have to admit that your model supersedes all of ours.” His smile broadened and lightened. “And when can we hope to see one, Allison?” he said. “The time-frame’s always been a bit vague.”

  Dr. Allison Larabee was not amused. “Hope to see one? Believe me, I hope we never see one! Because if we start seeing white tornadoes, it just might be too late.”

  “Pause,” said Eric. Ignatz paused the tape, and Eric pondered.

  The Larabee recording was ambiguous. Someone who wished to believe she was not in on the white tornado fakery could easily enough convince herself of her own innocence.

  But spinmeisters could easily enough make the point that Larabee had probably been following a Bread & Circuses script when she walked out of the conference, since this conversation with Pereiro had taken place before Big Blue faked the white tornadoes.

  And if a case could be made that Larabee was in on it, a case could also be made that so was the Roman Catholic Church, that Cardinal N’Goru’s fire-breathing sermon had been a deliberate lead-in to Larabee’s act, scripted by B&C too.

  In a trial by justice syndic, the Larabee recording would prove nothing. But in a trial by media, it could be made to suggest anything.

  How hot was this material?

  Hot enough to melt down the UNACOCS conference into slag, maybe take the Big Blue Machine and the United Nations with it, and have enough heat left over to take care of what was left of both polar ice c
aps too.

  Hot enough to get a phony prince taken as a man of consequence within his syndic. Hot enough to take directly to Eduardo Ramirez.

  Monique realized that she had been staring vacantly at the white tornado for several speakers now. The endlessly repeating video loop seemed to function as an animated mandala, drawing the focus of her attention into its depths as the only escape from the boredom of the proceedings short of nodding off.

  As several people in the audience had actually done, one of whom had produced snores of sufficient volume to garner him an elbow in the ribs from a neighbor.

  Most of the speakers were Blue, as they had always been at these things, most of the climate models they presented were therefore similar, most of them concluded that the mean planetary temperature should be stabilized at a lower level than at present, and what differences there were were over the means of achieving this, which boiled down pretty much to pub for what was being hawked in the trade show outside by the financial sponsors of the conference.

  It was like being forced to endure the screening of endless dull amateurish television commercials one after another.

  Like?

  This event, after all, was being put on for the benefit of what world television and net audience hadn’t yet tuned it out. The speeches were commercials, for the climate models of the speakers, for the services of the Big Blue Machine.

  It was television from hell—all bad commercials and no program.

  “. . . John Sri Davinda.”

  “At last,” groaned Ariel Mamoun. “There’s no one left but Larabee after this.”

  Davinda wore a faux-African dashiki-shirt and authentically threadbare antique American jeans. His mousy brown hair was done in a buzz cut. His eyes . . .

  His eyes . . .

  His eyes reminded Monique that Davinda was the Californian climatologist for whom she had had to procure that obscure hallucinogenic cactus, at no little hassle, all the way from the Tex-Mex desert.

  Those bloodshot sclera, those enormous pupils, that vacant stare, seemed to indicate that Davinda had not let her efforts be in vain.

  “Are we become Shiva, Breaker of Worlds?” he began in a loud but quavery and somehow haunted voice.

  “Insufficient realtime processing capacity,” he said in quite another voice, this one flat and affectless.

  Uneasy murmurs swept in waves through the audience.

  “Are all our climate models written on the wind blowing through Maya’s tattered veils?” Davinda declaimed.

  Again, a schizoid alter ego seemed to answer in that mechanical parody of a synthesized software voice: “No deterministic outcome is inherent in the data.”

  “Mon Dieu,” groaned Ariel Mamoun, “he’s up there talking to himself!”

  “To be or not to be, is that the operative algorithm of the question?”

  “The algorithmic time-frame has not been specified.”

  Davinda’s blink rate went sky-high when he spoke in what seemed to be his natural voice, dropped suddenly when he answered his own crypticisms in what to Monique’s mercifully untrained ear seemed like nerdish computer babble.

  “Are these the Last Days? Is this the Great Wheel’s final turning?”

  “Insufficient realtime processing capacity.”

  “Merde!” exclaimed Ariel. “Speaking in tongues! Next will he produce a basket of snakes and proceed to handle them?”

  “Condition Venus? Condition Terminal?”

  “No deterministic outcome is inherent in the data.”

  “The man is drunk!” exclaimed Ariel Mamoun.

  “Stoned is probably a more accurate description,” Monique muttered guiltily.

  “But literate,” said Jean-Luc Tri.

  “Is Chaos the condition of Lao’s Tao?”

  “Third Force gibberish!” someone shouted from the audience, to general cries of agreement.

  This seemed to bring Davinda back from somewhere.

  “The . . . the results were not anticipated,” he stammered. “The initial iteration was only partial.”

  “Get off!”

  “The full implementation will not be demonstrated until—”

  “Get him off!”

  “Get him out of there!”

  The learned audience now began to stamp its feet like a boorish soccer crowd. Lars Bendsten moved to the podium, put a gentle hand on Davinda’s shoulder.

  “I didn’t know!” Davinda shouted.

  Bendsten pulled at him rather less gently. And Davinda fairly roared, his voice now an eerie amalgam of his own and that of his strange computer-like alter-non-ego.

  “All will be known when I become the Whirlwind’s Voice!”

  And with that, John Sri Davinda, or whatever peyote demon from a fractured id had been seeking to possess him, or both, seemed to deflate like a collapsing balloon, leaving a gaunt, pathetic, and de-energized figure standing there facing the boos and catcalls, all too eager now to let the General Secretary lead him away.

  Once again, Allison Larabee was called upon to speak after a lead-in that had galvanized a dozing audience and probably brought back much of the lost live coverage too.

  Monique cast a suspicious eye at Jean-Luc Tri.

  “Was that one of your scripts too?” she asked half-seriously.

  Jean-Luc shook his head. “Don’t I wish!” he said.

  “You can’t say I didn’t warn you,” Allison Larabee began unceremoniously. “My climate model predicted the onset of Condition Venus in roughly this time-frame and you responded with these conferences which only served to keep the world asleep. After all, Larabee’s climate model hasn’t discredited itself like all the others by failing to predict the usual microchanges only because it doesn’t try to. And nothing in the Condition Venus scenario’s happened yet. . . .”

  Dr. Larabee turned to gaze up at the white tornado whirling behind her.

  “Yet?” she repeated sardonically. “You wanted yet?” She gestured at the vortex. “Well here’s your yet!” she said.

  She turned to regard the audience, or rather the cameras.

  “For all you folks out there who haven’t been paying rapt attention to these conferences all these years or read the journals or downloaded my climate model and run it, I will tell you just what these so-called white tornadoes are,” she said.

  Without taking her eyes off the cameras, she pointed up and back at the screen. “That is a transient superthermal updraft. Under certain newly natural conditions, where and when the surface reaches a superheated threshold, a vortex of superheated air rises upward until the cooling of its expansion destabilizes it.”

  Larabee lowered her arm and leaned forward slightly.

  “At present, they are transient and they occur only above the hottest spots on Earth,” she said. “Locales that were furnaces before the greenhouse warming even began. Locales which are now far hotter than the geological record for any place on this planet before we in our infinite wisdom began pumping carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide and heat into its atmosphere. Death Valley. The deep Australian Outback. The central Sahara. And so forth. Where the biomass approaches zero. Where the biochemistry with which the biosphere of the Earth evolved is no longer viable. Places which by any previous climatological criteria are no longer part of this planet.”

  Monique shuddered, remembering that Libyan blimp ride.

  Been there. Felt that.

  “Am I saying that these places now resemble conditions on Venus? Of course not! The Venusian surface is still over five times hotter. So what’s the problem? We’re nowhere near approaching the conditions of Venus, now are we?”

  She looked away from the cameras at her fellow climatologists for a beat. “Condition Venus made a nice news header, didn’t it?” she said. “But they got the meaning wrong, now didn’t they?”

  She turned back to the camera. “Condition Venus doesn’t really mean that the surface temperature of the Earth will rise to five hundred degrees centigrade by next Tuesday,
or ever,” she said. “Condition Venus refers to what happened to Venus. A planet just about the size of the Earth, and certainly not six times closer to the sun, reputable astronomers used to imagine swamps and oceans beneath those clouds. But closer enough to the sun so that the temperature rose above a certain threshold, creating a natural greenhouse effect, and then . . .”

  She suddenly slapped her palms together. “Wham!” she shouted. “It fed on itself, went exponential, and shot up to where it is now in a relative planetological eyeblink.”

  She paused for a long moment of silence, then gazed back up at the vortex. “So what are these so-called white tornadoes telling us?”

  She looked back at the camera and seemed to Monique to be attempting to put on, not too successfully, a folksy face.

  “I’ll put it simply, so that anyone who’s ever boiled water to cook spaghetti in can understand it,” she said in a similar attempt at a grandmotherly voice.

  “You know how nothing at all seems to be happening as the water heats up? You know how finally a few streams of bubbles start drifting up to the surface? And you watch, and you wait, and then you turn away in boredom. . . . And then when you turn around, the whole thing’s foaming and bubbling up and if you don’t turn it down it’s going to overflow and turn into steam!”

  Dr. Allison Larabee cocked her head at the camera, no more foxy grandma now. “They say a watched pot never boils?” she said.

  Once again, she turned to look up at the white tornado. “Well, we’ve been watching ours for quite a while now. And it’s starting to. Don’t you think it’s damn well time we turned down the stove?”

  “Fakes, and what you’ve just seen proves it,” said Eric Esterhazy. “The white tornadoes are disneys. Literally done with mirrors.”

  He turned off the monitor and the video deck, then slid the false bookshelf over the equipment to convert his office back into the faux-library of a faux nineteenth-century British nobleman, hoping that the clubby effect would give him more weight in this rare direct man-to-man with Eduardo Ramirez in the absence of Mom.