Greenhouse Summer

by Norman Spinrad

  —and reversed—

  —and again—

  —and reversed—

  —and again—

  —freezing on the interior of the hood. Zooming in on the field of blunt metal pins that seemed to line its interior. Zooming in further and further into a vista of dull gray dots dissolving into grayness itself . . .

  Suddenly becoming blackness. Nothingness.

  Into which faraway voices began to blissfully intrude . . .

  “. . . to him now . . .”

  “. . . not unlike this equipment . . .”

  And slowly Eric felt bodily sensations returning . . .

  The first of which were a pounding headache and a queasy greenness in his guts.

  “It’s your theory, and you deserve to take the credit for it directly,” Avi Posner told Monique Calhoun. “But security must be maintained, and you have no need to know.”

  Or desire, Monique Calhoun thought.

  It was the most bizarre communications setup she had ever experienced. She and Posner sat side by side in the so-called living room of his so-called apartment. Each of them had a voice-only telephone handset. The phones were plugged through the computer in some arcane manner which allowed Posner to speak and hear but Monique only to speak.

  Monique would be able to speak directly to Posner’s nebulous contact with “the client” without hearing the “contact’s” voice even through a distortion algorithm.

  Posner hit a function key on which a telephone number was stored. The phone apparently rang on the other end, but Monique couldn’t hear it. Someone had apparently picked up because Posner started speaking into his phone.

  “Posner, Avi, shalom,” he said flatly, as if identifying himself to voice-recognition circuitry, which he probably was.

  A long minute or two of silence as Posner listened to something obviously not to his liking.

  “Yes, yes . . .”

  Silence.

  “Well Calhoun has come up with a theory that makes sense to me . . .”

  A short beat of silence.

  “Of course!”

  More silence.

  “You had better listen to what she has to say!”

  A shorter silence.

  “Of course send only! What kind of rank amateur do you think you’re dealing with?”

  Silence.

  “Then hire another syndic, damn it!”

  A very short beat of silence.

  “All right then . . .”

  Posner glanced at Monique, nodded.

  “What am I supposed to do?” Monique asked.

  “Just speak into the phone. Tell . . . them what you told me.”

  “I believe I’ve figured out the . . . ah general nature of the . . . operation against . . . you under the designation Lao . . . ” Monique said, and paused for the reaction, as she naturally would have at this point in any conversation she had ever had, live or electronic.

  But of course there wasn’t any. Except for Avi Posner impatiently waving his hand for her to go on.

  “Since there is . . . uh . . . strong reason to believe that it’s . . . uh . . . a Siberian operation targeting John Sri Davinda, and . . . er . . . or his climate model, and . . . ah . . . since . . . the climate model is already completed and in place in the computer . . .”

  Monique paused, covered the mouthpiece with her hand. How was she supposed to do this without any feedback at all? How could she even know there was anyone on the other end of the phone?

  “How am I doing, Avi?” she whispered.

  “Go, go, go!”

  Monique spit it out quickly, anything to get this over with. “So Davinda or his climate model or both can’t be the targets of the operation, they have to be part of it. He’s got to be, what do you call it . . . ?”

  “A mole,” Posner stage-whispered.

  “A mole. And since the Marenkos kept repeating the word ‘Lao’ to Davinda, it must be either an activation signal or a confirmation code, and . . . and . . . and that’s all I have to say . . .”

  Monique put down her phone with no little relief, cocked an inquisitive look at Posner. Posner made a circle with his thumb and forefinger.

  But then he spent at least two minutes time just listening, shaking his head, grimacing. “Understood, I’ll wait for your call,” he finally said, and hung up.

  “Well?” demanded Monique.

  “I said I had poked a stick in a wasps’ nest?” Avi Posner said. “Well, you just cracked it open like a piñata!”

  After an injection of something-or-other and a good snort of high-quality designer dust, Eric Esterhazy felt restored to a state approximating human existence. He had even managed not to puke when he sat up, though not by much.

  Trying to get up off the “operating table” and walk, however, was something his shaky equilibrium told him might prudently wait for a bit later. Finding out whether anything had been learned which could in any way justify the ordeal he had been put through could not.

  The techs had left the room sometime before the hood had been taken off his head, leaving only Dr. Duvond and Eduardo, and Eric was in no mood to converse with the Marquess de Sade.

  “Well, Eduardo,” he demanded peckishly, “did you find out anything we didn’t know already?”

  “Oh yes,” Eduardo told him. “It was well worth it.”

  “Oh really?” Eric snarled. “To whom?”

  Eduardo glanced at Duvond.

  “We cannot be certain without actually inspecting the device in question itself,” Duvond said, “but it’s a conservative hypothesis to assume that the ‘virtuality hood’ circuited into their computer is no more a virtuality hood than what we’ve just applied to you. It’s a similar device, but probably more sensitive, and almost certainly not read-only.”

  “More simply put for a lowly mammal, Doctor?” said Eric.

  “In basic layman’s terms, it is likely a socket for a human meatware processor. A central processing unit of unprecedented power.”

  This had Eric starting bolt upright. The sudden movement sent a wave of vertigo and nausea surging through him.

  “It would appear than they’ve found a way to do it without removing the brain from the body,” Eduardo said. “The Davinda climate-model computer will have a human brain in the circuit,” Eduardo said.

  “Davinda’s?” said Eric.

  “Who else?”

  “Could anyone survive that?” he said dubiously.

  “Since the brain is not being removed from its original biological matrix, there should be no physical damage to the meatware processor or the organism itself,” Dr. Duvond said.

  “But what about the inhabitant of the biological matrix and the meatware processor?” Eric demanded.

  “I don’t quite follow your terminology . . .”

  “The poor bastard with his head stuck in the socket! Davinda! What happens to the person?”

  “I would imagine that a subject experiencing even brief usage as a meatware central processing unit would emerge with his psyche severely fragmented. More prolonged usage and he would probably not retain an integrated human consciousness at all.”

  Eric nodded.

  Bad move. His cranium felt like a glass flshbowl that had been cracked with a hammer. And he had only been subject to a few minutes of the read-only version.

  “Take it from someone who’s been there,” he groaned. “If he does, he’ll wish he hadn’t.”

  Neither of them were in any mood for small talk, so Monique had spent about a half an hour staring at Avi Posner, the ceiling, the wall, anything, nothing, waiting for the phone to ring.

  When it finally did, she found herself doing likewise for another ten minutes while whoever was on the other end delivered a monologue that had Posner’s expression slowly and then not so slowly turning graver and graver.

  By the time he hung up, he was quite ashen. “I need a drink,” he said woodenly. “And I need someone to have one with me.” He went into the kitchen and c
ame back with two water glasses a quarter full of what looked like vodka.

  He handed Monique one glass and slugged the contents of the other down. Monique took a sip for the sake of solidarity. It was vodka. Warm vodka, and quite horrible.

  “I am not authorized to tell you this,” Posner said, “but I am going to tell you anyway. Because I don’t know what to do and I must talk to somebody.”

  “What is it, Avi?” Monique said softly. She had never seen him quite like this. It wasn’t at all . . . professional.

  “That thing that looked like a virtuality helmet?” he said. “It’s a socket for a processing unit.”

  “You mean . . . a human processing unit . . . ?”

  Posner nodded. “A human brain still inside a living body . . .”

  “Davinda?”

  “Davinda came to them for the financing to implement climate model software he claimed was not only the state of the art but definitive.”

  “Definitive?”

  “A one-for-one realtime model of the planetary climate and everything inputting into it: satellite data, individual climatech mods, atmospheric patterns, ocean temperatures, the works. A complete virtual Earth in software running in realtime. Or speeded-up. Input your climatech mods or natural factors and see the effects beforehand. The best climate model even theoretically possible.”

  “But that would be an enormous program, wouldn’t it?” Monique said. “And there’s no computer that could run such a thing in—”

  She paused.

  She swallowed hard.

  “Oh,” she said.

  Posner nodded. “Davinda’s tribe or commune or whatever they call it out there in Third Force Wonderland had also provided him with the schematics for a computer that would be able to run the model—”

  “Using a human brain as the central processor—”

  “Big Blue’s software people couldn’t run the whole thing, but when they ran bits and pieces and partial versions on partial data they got Condition Venus or something like it most of the time. The hardware people were confident they could build his human meatware computer at reasonable cost. Big Blue was very interested. . . .”

  Posner shrugged. “That much, I can readily believe.” He grimaced. “The rest . . . ?” He shrugged again. “According to what I have just been told, the Big Blue Machine still hesitated to finance the project out of tender moral concern for the welfare of the human component. So Davinda—”

  “Volunteered!” Monique exclaimed.

  “If you believe in the tooth fairy,” Posner said. “A cynic might suppose that they made it a condition for closing the deal.” He shrugged once more. “Operationally, it amounted to the same thing. They came up with the money and built the thing. And when they tested it—”

  “They’ve already run it? With Davinda in the circuit?”

  “Only for five minutes, or so I have been told,” Posner said. “Davinda came out of it shall we say somewhat less coherent than when he went in, but that was to be expected, sanity is not a required specification for a human central processing unit, and the results were so golden, or rather True Blue, that the Big Blue Machine conceived the present scheme to take over UNACOCS, and move it to a Green media capital—”

  “But faking the white tornadoes? And this suddenly weirder weather?”

  “This I am not supposed to have a need to know,” Posner said sourly. “But given that Davinda’s mental state would seem to have gravely deteriorated, probably after they bet the farm as it were on UNACOCS, and given that many elements of the Big Blue Machine originated as corporate constituents of the old national military-industrial complexes much given to a paranoid predilection for ‘overkill’ . . .”

  “Insurance, in other words?” said Monique.

  “One can imagine the cost-benefit analysis,” Avi Posner said. “All we have to do is readjust and reposition mirrors we already have in orbit, the cost will be negligible, so . . .”

  “Which is why they were less than terrified about having the white tornadoes exposed as frauds—”

  “They were still confident things would work on Sunday even after Davinda had to be led off the stage gibbering because the computer doesn’t need a sane brain to work—”

  “And they’d have their definitive climate model running on the most powerful computer ever constructed with its creator willingly risking death by putting his own brain in the circuit. Live on world television and the net! The ultimate deep sell!”

  Posner nodded. “But if Davinda’s been a Siberian mole all along, if the climate model demonstration has been programmed to fail in some highly counterproductive manner, the Condition Venus hypothesis will be discredited along with UNACOCS and conceivably the United Nations itself, and the Big Blue Machine will have bankrupted itself financing the fiasco. And so . . . and so . . .”

  “And so?”

  “If you don’t mind . . . ?” Posner said, hoisting his empty glass. Then, muttering to himself, “Or even if you do.” And he went back into the kitchen, emerging a moment later sipping from a quarter-filled glass.

  “And so a negative option clause in the contract with Mossad has been invoked,” he said. “Big Blue has prudently decided not to risk terminal destruction. If I cannot verify that Davinda is not a mole before Sunday, I am required to terminate him.”

  Monique squinted at Posner. “And you’ve got moral qualms about that, Avi?” she said skeptically. “It’s something you’ve never done in the . . . line of professional duty?”

  “Hardly,” said Posner. “That’s no moral dilemma if Davinda is a mole.” He paused for more liquid fortification.

  “But what if he isn’t? What if Condition Venus is really beginning and Davinda’s climate model would prove it? What if John Sri Davinda really is a dedicated idealist willing to risk death to save the biosphere? And I terminate him. And the proof is lost. Moral responsibility for one death, even if the reasoning for its requirement later turns out to be flawed, is something one accepts as a professional. But that . . . that!”

  Avi Posner slugged down the rest of his disgustingly warm vodka. “And the worst of it is that it’s a negative option. Unless I can verify that Davinda isn’t a mole, I am required to terminate him. Without knowing! And I haven’t the faintest idea of how to even try to find out!”

  This hardened Mossad professional looked positively haunted, and Monique understood all too well by what, for that ghost of ultimate holocaust future was leering down at her too, with dead empty eye sockets like the lunar craters of a moribund planet.

  Whose big mouth, after all, had created this situation? Was not she just as morally responsible for what came out the other side as Avi Posner?

  Or more so?

  She choked down a swallow of warm vodka for courage, or rather, perhaps, merely to wash away personal vanity, modesty, shame, which seemed like pretty picayune stuff under the circumstances.

  “Maybe I do . . .” Monique said softly. “I never told you how I extracted the information for Eric Esterhazy that . . . that . . . that created this situation and you never asked. . . .”

  “I didn’t think I had a need to know.”

  “Well, Avi, you have a need to know now.”

  So she gulped down a larger slug of vodka and told him.

  All that had transpired in the Kama Sutra room and the ersatz dungeon. In clinical but graphic detail. Leaving nothing relevant out.

  By the time she had finished, Posner was staring at her in slack-jawed wonder. And confusion.

  “Why . . . why are you telling me this . . . ?”

  “Because you have a need to know, Avi . . .” Monique told him tremulously. “Because if Esterhazy can pump aphrogas into those boudoirs, he can pump in other things as well, and I think we can assume that Bad Boys are pretty sophisticated in the arts of chemical interrogation, can’t we . . . ?”

  “And you’re willing to . . . ?”

  “Tell your principals that I’m willing to tell Esterhazy som
e fairy story that will get me into one of those boudoirs with Davinda and the best cocktail of cock-and-tongue-looseners he’s got. . . .”

  “Knowing that he’ll be watching and listening?”

  “Knowing that he’ll be watching and listening.”

  “It could be dangerous. . . .”

  Monique gave him a little shrug of bravado, but after all, it was hard to imagine the likes of Prince Eric endangering much beyond her sexual judgment or emotional tranquility.

  And emotional tranquility was something she knew she must do this to restore.

  “Why are you doing this, Monique?” Avi Posner said in the most tender tone of voice she had ever heard emerge from his lips.

  “You’re not the only one with a need to know, Avi,” Monique replied in kind.

  Hardened Mossad operative or not, Avi Posner seemed near tears as he raised his glass and clinked it with hers in a toast.

  “Here’s to you, Monique Calhoun,” he said. “Should you choose to change your citizen-shareholdership, there will always be a place for you in Mossad.”

  Monique laughed softly. “Have I made it, then, Avi?” she said. “Have I finally gotten professional?”

  “Oh no,” Posner told her with sincere but well-lubricated gravity. “That is something you’ve gone beyond.”

  “And you’re another, Avi Posner,” she said.

  It had been decided between Eduardo Ramirez and the Marenkos to hold this meeting on La Reine de la Seine, in the midafternoon, and Eduardo had told Eric not to have anything more than snacks prepared, though of course when inviting Stella and Ivan Marenko to anything, a liberal supply of vodka, wine, and champagne was de rigueur.

  But as it turned out the Siberians were as abstemious as Eric had ever seen them, merely sipping at pepper vodka as they sat at a table out in the hot muggy open air on the fantail while Eduardo, with only an occasional word edgewise from Eric, brought them up to speed on what Bad Boys had learned about the Davinda climate model and the machinations of Big Blue.

  They were not pleased.

  “Why you keep us out of circuit so long?” Ivan demanded when Eduardo had finished.