“As all of my colleagues here today know,” she said in a soft grandmotherly voice, “I’ve attended every one of these conferences since they started. . . .”
She paused for a bit, and when she spoke again, it was in a voice twice as loud and dripping acid. “Every damned last stupid one of them!”
She paused again to let her audience feel the shock.
“Well this is the last one of these things I’m attending!”
Stunned jaw-dropped silence.
“No, I’m not on my deathbed, I’m afraid I’d probably outlive our
planet
if that were somehow possible,” she said, reverting to the little-old-lady voice.
She wagged an outraged granny’s finger at her poleaxed audience. “Speaking as a scientist, there’s a technical term for what’s been going on here for six years. Do you know what that technical term is, my esteemed and learned colleagues?”
She allowed a long beat of dramatic silence.
“The word,” she shouted at the top of her lungs, “is
bullshit
!”
Monique could hardly believe what she was hearing. What was going out live to the largest television audience these conferences had ever garnered. What was going to make headlines all over the world.
“Nero fiddled while Rome burned, the orchestra played traveling music as the
Titanic
went to the bottom, and you people have been bullshitting yourselves and the world while the Earth reels closer and closer to Condition Venus! And mea culpa, I’ve been one of you!”
Murmurs, looks of disbelief, groans, moans of anger.
“There’s nothing left to talk about!” Larabee shouted. “There never was, but we’ve all wasted six years talking about it anyway! We
cool down this planet and we do it fast, or all too soon there’ll be no one left alive on it to engage in any more useless goddamn conferences! That is my contribution to this symposium! That’s all I’ve got to say because that’s all there
is
to say! Get it together this time, or do it without me!”
She stepped out from behind the podium with her hands on her hips.
“You may now throw dead cats and rotten eggs,” she said sweetly, then stormed down off the stage to an uproar of shouts, applause, boos, and angry contumely, and the opening session of the conference broke up into pandemonium.
“And the tail . . .” said Jean-Luc Tri.
Groups of people were on their feet shouting at each other. Others sat there stunned. Some followed in Larabee’s wake as she marched through the chaos, through the cluster of cameras before the stage, and right out of the auditorium. After a moment, the camera people exited after her, still shooting.
Perhaps half the audience remained clogging the seats and aisles of the makeshift amphitheater babbling to each other. The rest, drawn by the most recently evolved of human tropisms, tried to follow the media following Larabee out beyond the partitions and onto the trade show floor.
Monique, too, found herself kneeing and elbowing her way through the crush, going with the flow of the intellectual exodus out into the realm of commerce without really thinking about why, as stunned as any of them by what had happened.
By the time she was out there among the climatech displays and industrial sales exhibits, Dr. Allison Larabee was nowhere to be seen, and the news crews who had followed her were now indistinguishable from those who had been shooting visuals out here before the speeches began.
Monique stood there blinking in the strange disjunction.
Camera crews were crawling all over the exhibits. Crowds were milling about. There was something so insanely
normal
about it. As if the Cardinal hadn’t made her fire-breathing speech. As if the godmother of UNACOCS had never screamed “bullshit” and stormed out of the conference.
As if it had all been forgotten.
As if it had never happened.
But of course it
had
happened.
And it wouldn’t be forgotten.
Because it had happened live on television and the net and had been seen by perhaps a hundred million people. And because of
what
had happened, ten times that many people would tune in and log on to the recorded coverage.
Monique wondered how many of them would feel what she now felt. And she wondered just what this psychic dyspepsia was, this visceral malaise compounded of shame, and shock, and rude awakening.
Shame for what?
For her backstage role in promoting a conference whose spiritual founder had cursed it as useless bullshit and walked out?
Shock at what?
At witnessing live the sort of iconic news event—like a political assassination or major disaster—that transcends the bread and circuses of the media of transmission?
Awakening from what into what?
From doing her job as usual into the unbidden realization that she might
really be involved
, however tangentially, in however minor a role, in something upon which the very fate of life on Earth might conceivably depend?
Lost in the unaccustomed depths of these musings, Monique didn’t notice that Jean-Luc Tri had come up beside her until he spoke.
“Well, did we spin news, or did we
spin news
!”
“What . . . ?”
B&C’s Paris press maven grinned sly satisfaction at her. “What an opening! I
knew
I was right to go with that sin and bullshit script! Let them try and ignore the Paris UNACOCS after
that
!”
“Script . . . ?”
“The Cardinal was perfect, but then they’re all pros. Larabee remembered her lines, but that ‘dead cats and rotten eggs’ bit was an ad lib. . . .”
Tri frowned, he eyed Monique speculatively.
“What do you think, Monique, professional opinion,” he asked, “was that maybe a little over the top?”
Scant hours ago, this grandmotherly woman in the rakish white evening gown had been shouting “bullshit” in an apparent fury on the news channels, but now it seemed it was all that Dr. Allison Larabee could do to keep from blushing like a schoolgirl and curtsying as Eric Esterhazy greeted her at the top of the gangway with the standard Romanian hand-kiss.
“Welcome aboard
La Reine de la Seine
, Dr. Larabee. . . .”
“Thank you, Prince Esterhazy, uh, Your Highness. . . .”
Eric beamed her his best noblesse oblige smile. “Simply
Prince Eric
to you, Dr. Larabee. . . .”
“
Allison
to you, Prince Eric.”
Now she actually did blush as she moved on to allow the next guest aboard.
“Ah, Sidney, I’ve been hearing rumors about some rather outré cross-gender casting in your production of
Faust
. . . .”
It had long since ceased to surprise but not to amaze Eric how a properly delivered kiss on the hand and warm smile from a handsome prince, even a phony one, could have this effect on ladies of a certain age, world figures or not, media stars of the hour or not, especially if they came from a country, such as America, that had never had its own tacky tribe of titled parasites.
“Nice piece on that nasty mess in Athens, Derek, maybe you’d like a change of pace, like a bit of puffery on
La Reine
after you’re through covering this tedious climate conference. . . .”
It was a goodly part of his stock-in-trade, and beyond that, it gave him a certain warm altruistic glow when applied to women he had no intention of bedding for reasons of lust or commerce. Why not? It gave them pleasure and it cost him nothing.
“Mr. General Secretary, an honor to have you aboard. . . .”
Of course, it didn’t always work. It hadn’t gone too well with Cardinal N’Goru a few minutes ago. The heads-up display in the contact lens in his left eye might supply him with the curriculum vitae of all the guests as they came aboard, but there was nothing on precisely where a prince was supposed to kiss the hand of a female cardinal. Eric had made for the proper fingertips, but Mary N’Goru, none too charmed to begin with, had more or less shoved her ring in his
face, and scowled at him as if he had committed a faux pas by neglecting to kneel.
“The famous Dr. Davinda, I believe? Welcome aboard.”
The tall, thin, slovenly dressed man with eyes deeply set in blackened sockets gave him the strangest haunted paranoid look, as if caught in some vile sexual act or under the influence of some even viler drug and possibly both.
“I do hope there’s nothing but the famous local weather in that climate model you’ve brought for us from sunny northern California.”
The fellow’s eyes all but rolled like slot-machine tumblers, and came up as blankly vacant as well-polished cue balls. He skittered boorishly past Eric as if he didn’t exist, or as if he wished Eric didn’t exist, without so much as a return word of greeting.
What did I say? Eric wondered, covering his discomfort by quickly kissing the next available hand, which fortunately turned out to be feminine.
Could it be that Davinda didn’t realize that a professional meeter and greeter on Prince Eric Esterhazy’s exalted level would be accessing a database in the act thereof? Was he perhaps stoned and Californian enough to now be convinced that Eric was some vibrating Third Force psychic?
“Well, well, well, the famous Lydia Maren herself! Isn’t scientific reporting a bit far from your usual purview . . . ?”
“Would I pass up ten days in Paris at the Ritz and the chance to party on your fabulous riverboat?”
“Would the sun fail to rise in the east? Would I serve Spanish Rioja with lobster Thermidor?”
“Not the last time I looked, but these days, quién sabe?”
And so it went and so it had been going, as Eric did his hostly duties wondering when, and as it went on even if, Monique Calhoun would finally come aboard.
And although he did not presently have a gun in his pocket, not just because he was looking forward to being glad to see her.
Word had come down from the board via Eduardo and thence through Mom that it was the opinion of Bad Boys that the chances of a fire-and-brimstone intro by a high diplomatic official of the Roman Catholic Church followed by an out-of-character speech and
walk-out by the doyen of the conference being random bolides were about that of the dealer drawing two royal flushes in a row in an honest game of poker.
“Got Bread & Circuses written all over it, Eric,” Mom had told him. “
Written
, like in
script
, get me?”
“Obviously they wanted to draw the sort of media attention to the opening that these boring things have never had. . . .”
“No shit, Sherlock! But why?”
“Why? Why not?”
“
Why not?
Why not shoot your wad on the first day of a ten-day conference? Use your head for something besides a pretty hat rack, Eric! Despite appearances, if B&C sets off a blast like that the first day, it
can’t
be the capper! If they fire such big guns up front, it’s got to be to have the lights and cameras around for something much bigger later.”
“Like what?”
“Eduardo thinks that maybe that’s for Monique Calhoun to know and you to find out. You fucked her yet, Eric?”
“
Mother!
A gentleman never tells!”
“I’m not asking a
gentleman
, I’m asking
you
.”
Eric had been sourly constrained to tell the unflattering truth, and Mom had told him in no uncertain terms to get cracking, and it was hard for him to decide whether this maternal demand to get down to the business of mixing business with pleasure took something of an edge off his natural desire or was a kink that would turn it up a notch when the time came.
Eric went through the motions with growing annoyance, which became anxiety, and then perplexity, as
La Reine
took on its full nightly load of passengers, before Monique Calhoun finally sauntered out of the embarkation pavilion and up the gangway. She was appetizingly enough presented in a tight kelly-green pants suit, but the way she moved somehow wasn’t quite flaunting what she manifestly had, and, strangely enough considering her syndic’s professional triumph of this afternoon, she did not have the look on her face of a happy camper.
Eric made with the dreamy smile and the hand-kiss anyway. “I thought you’d never get here, Monique. . . .”
The distracted look in her eyes raised the question as to whether she yet had. “First the sheep, then the shepherdess,” she said.
Eric gave her a perplexed look.
“I’ve been here all along checking the arrivals against my guest list,” she told him. “Doing my job.”
“Bread before circuses, as it were . . . ?”
“The circus had an early matinee today, or didn’t you notice?” Monique said, in a tone of voice neither pleased nor amused.
“Ah you mean the sturm und drama at the conference,” Eric ventured, fishing for he knew not quite what. “Marvelous theater!”
Monique Calhoun suddenly snapped out of her funk to give him a hard appraising look of the sort that said
maybe you’re not just a pretty face
. Which, while a compliment and in accord with Eric’s own opinion of himself, made him realize that he had made a tactical blunder he had better cover.