Plankton-seeding barges, cloud-cover generators, cloud-seeding drones, various species of potted Qwik-grow trees. Scale-model mock-ups of orbital mirrors, launch vehicles, occluders. Screens and holos running loops of nuclear terrain-sculpting demos, orbital mirror weather adjustments, damming projects, reforestation schemes, and yes, the S&L for the Gardens of Allah prepared by Bread & Circuses at the Advanced Projects Associates pavilion.
All glorified and enhanced by multicolored strobes, flashing lights, halogen tubing, a cacophony of competing musical accompaniment.
And, since everyone on the trade show floor who wasn’t press seemed to be an industrial presenter, all for the benefit of the multitude of microphones and cameras.
Although it was not her professional turf, it
was
the work of her syndic, and Monique felt a surge of patriotic pride as a citizen-shareholder thereof at how Bread & Circuses had turned out the coverage for an event the previous versions of which, in the words of Jean-Luc Tri, B&C’s Paris press maven, had they been horse turds, would have been unable to draw flies.
They were all there, or so it seemed—Worldnet, StarNet, Sat One, BBC, NipponOrb, TeleFrance, Mundoticias, SiberWeb, as well as a horde of camera people from local stations and news sites, still photographers for the pix mags, freelancers covering for the indigent media of the Lands of the Lost—swarming around the exhibits shooting their visuals before the heads began to talk.
The talking heads in question were just about settled in as Monique passed through the blue fiberboard screening discreetly separating the unseemly trade show huckstering from the serious scientific raison d’être.
The amphitheater of temporary seating was just about full, but Monique’s priority pass gained her access to B&C’s own little reserved section ten rows back from the stage and only slightly left of center. Ariel Mamoun was already there, Tri was down at the cluster of cameras in front of the stage, there were several people from the Paris office that she didn’t know, and her own little crew of gophers.
“Well, it’s all over for the moment except for the speaking, as they say wherever it is they say it,” Ariel said by way of greeting.
“Shouting,” corrected Monique.
“Whichever. Either way, it will no doubt go on and on and on.”
Jean-Luc Tri, an exaggeratedly dapper figure in a black silk pinstriped suit and ruffled white linen shirt, scuttled up the aisle and took a seat beside Monique. His sleek black mane was static-molded into a rakishly crested coiffure without a hair out of place; he might be panting a bit, but his smooth oriental skin did not deign to display a single bead of sweat.
“Great turnout, Jean-Luc, how did you pull it off?”
Tri gave her a characteristic cynical lidded smirk. “With B&C picking up the tabs for the stars, and the lower levels fighting each other for the assignment like the famished dog packs of Detroit, attracting the paperatti to an expense account junket to Paris is about as difficult as dumping a load of fresh fish in the Seine and waiting for the alligator feeding frenzy to start.”
The reaction was somewhat more subdued than that as Lars Bendsten led six people up onto the stage and launched the standard UN welcoming speech. These were supposedly the MIPs of the conference, that is the Most Important Persons, and they had all made it to both the Ritz and Monique’s invitation list for tonight’s opening party on the riverboat.
“Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, mesdames et messieurs, meine Damen und Herren, distinguished guests, and welcome to the sixth United Nations Annual Conference On Climate Stabilization. . . .”
But interestingly enough, all of the scientists had been on the VIP list handed to her by the General Secretary. None of them had been deemed worthy of Avi Posner’s attention or the direct funding of Big Blue.
“Dr. Allison Larabee, whose Condition Venus climate model was the genesis of these conferences. . . .”
“Dr. Paolo Pereiro, whose climate model predicted the current breakup of the north polar ice cap, and which many now regard as the current state of the art. . . .”
“Hassan bin Mohammed, chairperson of the Committee of Concerned Climatologists . . .”
The scientists were
window dressing
, Monique realized, as Bendsten’s introductions droned on. Window dressing from the point of view of what had become the real power here, the economic power that had financed this high-budget move to Paris in the first place. And was now calling the tunes.
Including, she was forced to admit, her own.
“Mary Cardinal N’Goru, Papal Legate to the United Nation. . . .”
“Dr. Bobby Braithwaite, winner of the Nobel Prize for Climatology for his modeling of the desiccation of Mars and the threshold theory of climate change . . .”
“Dr. Dieter Lambert, developer of the Qwik-grow tree, the carbon-dioxide-fixing coral, the photosynthetic fungus . . .”
Fancy
window dressing to be sure, but window dressing still, just as whatever went on at the actual conference in here was no doubt going to be window dressing for the main event out there on the trade show floor.
A True Blue setup, as these conferences had always been—this time, however, financed by, and fronting for, the commercial interests of the Big Blue Machine.
That was the cynical professional analysis, and a bit of the Green in Monique doing the calculating. Larabee, Braithwaite, Pereiro, and Lambert were all climatological superstars of the True Blue persuasion, but they were no longer workers at the cutting edge; monstres sacrés, as the French would put it, or, as the Americans would say, famous long ago.
The speeches began with just the sort of yawners Monique had dreaded and expected. Pereiro delivered a numbing discourse on the mathematics of climate modeling incomprehensible to her layman’s knowledge of the subject. Lambert presented an embarrassing paean to his own faded brilliance.
Braithwaite, a tall, courtly, black man with gray dreadlocks, a wistful Jamaican lilt to his voice, and an air of not quite knowing why he was there, at least was able to rouse Monique from her daze, if only because he was a better and more sympathetic speaker.
“What’s an expert on the climatological history of Mars doin’ at
a conference about stabilizin’ the climate of
this
here planet?” he said with a shrug after presenting the dry facts of Martian desiccation.
He grinned boyishly despite his years.
“Well, who could resist a free trip to Paris?” he said. “But long as I’m here, I
could
point out th’ obvious. Earth is a planet. Mars is a planet. On Earth, life began t’evolve in the soup of a sea. Started likewise on Mars. Might’ve made it. Might’ve evolved into brilliant critters with a roomful of advanced degrees just like us.”
He held up the thumb and forefinger of his right hand a millimeter or two apart.
“Came
this
close,” he said. “Jus’ a
little
more mass, and Mars has a
little
more gravity. Jus’ a
little
more gravity, and Mars holds enough hydrogen and carbon dioxide to increase the vapor pressure
jus
’ enough to hold its liquid water and give its infant biosphere the chance to photosynthesize oxygen and maybe those microbes get to evolve into thee and me.”
He shrugged. “So what’s that got to do with stabilizin’ th’ climate of
this
planet? Well, what we’ve been doin’ to the chemistry of the atmosphere and the energy budget of
this
planet for th’ past three hundred years or so is
orders of magnitude
greater than what made the difference between a warm wet Mars with a breathable atmosphere and a biosphere an’ the dead desiccated Mars we see today. Was a close thing, and when Mars went, it went—”
He snapped his fingers. “
Jus’ like that!
”
Braithwaite smiled ruefully. “In geological terms, of course. So what can we Earthlings learn about life on Earth from th’ story of Mars?”
Another one of those engaging shrugs.
“Well, the evolution of a planetary biosphere may not be quick and easy come,” Braithwaite said, “but it
sure is
quick and easy go.”
And ambled away from the podium to not much more than a polite pro forma ration of applause, which left Monique feeling vaguely annoyed, a bit of a Martian herself, a naif among the sophisticates.
Or was it the other way around?
Hassan bin Mohammed followed with the sort of standard whining True Blue political screed that was soporific enough to ease whatever it was that Braithwaite had stirred within Monique back into its
slumber and to bring the bulk of the audience, who had heard and probably said it all themselves a thousand times before, to fidgeting murmuring boredom.
But Mary Cardinal N’Goru managed to turn it to pregnant silence just by the way she walked ever so slowly and majestically to stage center, a tall regal black woman in middle years, her head turned to one side to maintain eye contact with the audience, or rather the cameras, bright red cloak swirling and then swept aside with a theatrical gesture as she reached the podium.
Bread & Circuses could still learn a trick or two from the Roman Catholic Church, Monique realized. They had always had the gear. They had always had the moves.
“I am here as a Princess of the Church to speak to you of sin!” she boomed out in a prophet’s voice to the audible dismay of her secular audience.
“The Bible speaks out against the sin of killing a human and names it murder! And this was the worst sin known to man until the twentieth century invented a worse evil, the deliberate killing of whole peoples, and lo! we have named that sin genocide!”
The only sounds were the squirming of asses on hard seats and the subliminal hum of the massed television equipment.
Mary N’Goru leaned a tad closer to her audience, addressed those cameras a bit more intimately, spoke in another, slightly softer voice, a voice more of sorrow than anger.
“But I am also here as a daughter of Africa, and I must speak to you with the voice of that dying continent, with the voice out of the great central desert where nothing may live, with the voice of forests gone into dust, with the voice of a thousand species of animals and birds gone into that final night from which there is no returning, with the voice of a hundred peoples existing on bile and ashes for a while before they follow. . . .”
And it seemed to Monique that this woman had made herself that voice, the voice not only of dying Africa, but of all those Lands of the Lost, crying out not
in
the wilderness, but
from
that widening wilderness, here in the balmy green City of Light.
“And that too is a sin!” she declaimed, reverting to the posture and voice of the righteous prophet. “A century ago we began to commit
a sin too terrible to be named! The sin of killing not a human or a people but whole lands, whole ecosystems. It began as a sin of careless ignorance and willful stupidity, but now it is a sin of knowing indifference and egoistic greed!”
Again Mary Cardinal N’Goru leaned forward and gazed directly into the cameras, but this time there was cruelty in her eyes as well as anger, a sardonic set to her mouth.
“But though we have not yet found a name worthy of a sin as terrible as
that
, now we must find a name foul and awful enough for the
ultimate
sin, the sin whose burden the soul of our species will bear to the grave and the Final Judgment beyond!”
She paused, she hooked her elbows under her red cloak so that it rose into a mantle about her as she raised her arms.
“And what shall we call the sin of murdering an entire biosphere?” she roared. “How do we name the slaying of a living world?”
And, swirling her cape around her, swept back to her seat to guttural murmurings, a scattering of nervous applause that swiftly died away into silence.
“Both ears and the tail . . .” Ariel Mamoun muttered beside Monique.
“Not quite the tail,” said Jean-Luc Tri.
Monique heard these peculiar remarks with only half an ear, caught up in the moment with her heart, but also wondering who could possibly be shoved forward to do what after an act like that, as a Bread & Circuses professional.
And then she found out.
“Dr. Allison Larabee . . .” was all that Lars Bendsten said or had to.
And there was a mighty round of applause as the frail white-haired old woman shakily made her way to the podium.
And why not?
Allison Larabee was the Grand Old Lady of UNACOCS. The Patron saint of these conferences. The woman who had spoken at all of them. The creator of the Condition Venus climate model. Which had been instrumental in creating the panic that had called the United Nations Annual Conferences On Climate Stabilization into being.
Without her, UNACOCS would not exist.
Without her, these people would not now be here.
Anyone who was here out of True Blue conviction or for academic credit or commercial gain or just for a free trip to Paris owed their presence to Allison Larabee. And they showed it with prolonged applause whose enthusiasm seemed entirely unfeigned.
But for some reason Dr. Larabee did not seem amused.
Not at all. She stood there scowling until the ovation finally died away.