Coming down the glidepath into Tripoli, on the other hand, had left Monique no doubt that she was once again approaching the Lands of the Lost.
That same familiar sinking sensation somewhere between her stomach and her conscience. That same nagging twinge of outraged True Blue righteousness. That same guilty but grateful Green thankfulness that while this was going to be another terrible place to visit, she and her client would be ensconced in an air-conditioned first-class hotel, so that she wouldn’t even have to endure living there while she was living there.
For all Monique knew, Tripoli might once have been an Arabian Nights fantasy facing an azure sea over a golden strand. Now, however,
the Mediterranean had long since flooded the Libyan littoral, past what must have once been the Tripoli waterfront, so that what the flight approached over an endless waste of mudflats, tide pools, and half-submerged ruins was a typical “second growth” Land of the Lost seacoast metropolis.
Cheapjack office towers and cheaper apartment blocks surrounded by shanties and, in this case, tents. Only government buildings, mosques, and housing for the rich built atop high artificial hilltops proclaimed any investment in a local future much past next Tuesday, and they were a testament only to conspicuous architectural consumption.
Who knew how far the oceans would rise before the sea level stabilized? The northern ice cap and the Antarctic ice shelves might be just about gone, but would the cloud-cover generators
really
halt the melting of the Antarctic continental cap itself? Who would invest in anything built to last when no one knew if or when or how far the city would have to be pulled back again?
As per the drill to which Monique was accustomed, an air-conditioned jetway conveyed her and Mervin Appelbaum into the air-conditioned terminal, where a Water Authority functionaire slid them through VIP customs and directly into an air-conditioned limo, which whisked them through the squalor into their air-conditioned hotel.
The only contact with the local atmosphere that they were forced to endure was while covering the few meters between the limo and the hotel, a full ninety seconds of searing dry heat and merciless actinic solar glare that had Appelbaum bitching and moaning about sleazebag hotels that failed to provide proper entry through an air-conditioned garage.
Monique had managed to restrain herself from pointing out that the unfortunate local populace enjoyed no such respite, that billions of humans in the Lands of the Lost endured such toxic climate and worse for their entire short lives.
She arrived in her standard VIP air-conditioned room fuming and cursing to herself, and stood there before the standard sealed window staring down and out over the scene below with her standard case of the True Blue blues.
In her capacity as a Bread & Circuses VIP-services operative, Monique
all too frequently found herself shepherding said Very Important Persons on deal-making trips to the Lands of the Lost, found herself all too frequently in a clone of this room, looking down from on air-conditioned high upon the malarial coastal mangrove swamps of China or Brazil or Texas, the refugee barge-huts of Nouméa or Perth or Hokkaido, the favelas of Athens or Ankara or Nairobi, the patchwork Bedouin tents and shacks of Tripoli, whatever, feeling like one of those colonial overseers in the historical pix, lacking only a servile native in a red organ-grinder monkey suit delivering a room-service mint julep to make her guilty wallow complete.
The sad song that the True Blue sang was that despite the manifest increase of the biomass, the warming had produced more losers than winners, or at least the losers had lost more than the winners had won, and that the planet should therefore somehow be restored to the status quo ante, as God or the greatest good for the greatest number or the local self-interest intended.
Monique’s ramblings through the Lands of the Lost had convinced her that they at least had a point. The interior deserts of North America, Asia, and Africa might as well have been another planet, upon whose surface un-air-conditioned humans could not hope to survive. What was left of Japan clung precariously to upland earthquake zones. The Great Mississippi Estuary drowned what had been some of the best farmland in the world. The entire Pacific Rim festered with refugees from Polynesia and the Southeastern Asian littoral.
One would have to have a heart of stone not to feel sympathy for the desperate dispossessed billions of the Lands of the Lost.
One would have to have a brain of similar density not to thank fortune that one was not one of them.
One would have to have the saintliness of a Gandhi or a Diana to contemplate trading the newly balmy green lands of Northern Europe and America and Siberia, delivered from the gray glooms of winter at their expense, in order to rescue them.
And so, Monique Calhoun, inhabitant of the Apple, daughter of Greenhouse Europe, discontented herself with her Green guilt and consoled herself with the thought that projects like the one Bread & Circuses had been hired to help peddle to the Libyan Water Authority at least served to ameliorate the catastrophe.
Nor was Mervin Appelbaum the worst of clients. Gray, balding, cherubically pink and chubby, decked out in the sort of loose-fitting short-sleeved tan pantaloon suit recommended by Saville for such climes, a proud grandfather, unlike certain Very Important Ass-Pinchers who had also been more than old enough to be her father, Appelbaum kept his hands and his suggestive suggestions to himself.
He even displayed a reasonable simulation of idealistic enthusiasm as he delivered the intro to the son et lumière that Bread & Circuses had prepared to Muammar Al Fawzi, chairman of the Libyan Water Authority.
“The Gardens of Allah will fulfill the great dream of your illustrious namesake, Sheik Al Fawzi, if not exactly in the manner he intended, and with a little creative financing, at a price you can easily afford,” he burbled as Monique booted up the holodeck and loaded the chip.
“Naming me after the Clotheshorse of the Desert was my father’s idea, not mine, Mr. Appelbaum,” Al Fawzi said dryly. He himself wore a plain white robe, a short black beard, and a tired sardonic expression that seemed permanently engraved on his sallow leathery face.
“I only meant—”
“Nor is ‘sheik’ a title recognized in postmodern Libya, and believe me, things being what they are, there is no such thing as a price we can easily afford.”
“Ready,” Monique announced posthaste.
“Let the show go on,” Al Fawzi drawled with a negligent wave of his hand, a take on both an impresario and a fictional Oriental potentate that Monique found somehow endearing.
Al Fawzi’s nondescript office filled with the S&L that Bread & Circuses’ imageers and spinners had prepared, and with no little creative conflict, Monique was given to understand.
THE GARDENS OF ALLAH!
Flowing green letters floated before them as they soared over an azure sea toward a mercifully vague and distant shore.
Someone had suggested opening with an actual muezzin’s chant of “Allah Akbar,” but this had quickly been scotched as dangerously and offensively obvious in favor of an electronic bass line mimicking
the rhythm thereof and an ululating tenor delivery of the title mirroring the phrasing.
The style of the lettering was supposed to suggest Arabic script, though to Monique it appeared more reminiscent of classic twentieth-century graffiti. Green was the sigil color of Islam, but since it also had a political implication that didn’t exactly play well in the Lands of the Lost, it was thought best to balance it with a simultaneous blaze of True Blue.
Of such finely spun cultural and motivational details was the syndic’s typical S&L crafted. Bread & Circuses. Though what bread had to do with it was something Monique had yet to comprehend.
The basic sell was the client’s climatech scheme, but the deep sell was what the tag Monique had hung on the project was meant to imply to an Islamic and Arabic demography unlikely to be intimately familiar with early-twentieth-century Hollywood folklore.
The Garden was the specific Koranic image of paradise and the Oasis its incarnation in real estate to which the faithful might aspire, an image that keyed into feelings of both wealth and virtue. To create or re-create oases, to bring gardens to the desert, was, therefore, both the professed socioeconomic ideal of Arabic governance of whatever system, and the mystical Utopian vision of doing the work of Allah by bringing a piece of His paradise down to the Earth. Which, it would seem, was why green was the holy color.
What this translated to in terms of the S&L specifics was a quick overflight of washed-out low-saturation dun-colored desert wastes stripped away to reveal schematics of the now-dry and useless tunnel system that the Clotheshorse of the Desert had proclaimed “the Great Man-Made River” while a dry cost accountant’s voice detailed the failure thereof, followed by a much more lengthy virtual tour of the virtual future glowing with supersaturated greens as a throaty houri crooned a seductive description of the Paradise that Advanced Projects Associates proposed to bring to the parched Libyan earth while an Arabized version of Ravel’s
Bolero
built behind her.
Monique studied Muammar Al Fawzi’s reaction out of the corner of her eye as nuclear desalination plants arose on the latter-day coast, as preternaturally blue waters poured down the dry tunnels of the
Great Man-Made River, as small, clean, nuclear charges blasted out lake beds, as foaming fountains filled them, as palm trees and vast green lawns sprang into being around them, as the music began to approach its triumphal orgasmic climax.
Oh yes it was kitschy, oh yes it was as obvious as the
Bolero
bedroom sell had been for a couple of centuries or so, and oh yes she could see him fighting it. The chairman of the Water Authority was a sophisticated cynic who no doubt was as aware of the nature of the sell as all those maidens, callow and otherwise, who had nevertheless succumbed to Ravel’s make-out music down through the years.
It was the
deep sell
that got them. There was a level on which Al Fawzi was about as immune to the wiles of the Bread & Circuses spinners as a fifteen-year-old girl would be to the biorhythmic protoplasmic seduction of this music. For a couple of centuries, there probably hadn’t been a female in the West who didn’t know just what a guy was up to when he played her
Bolero
. Nevertheless, it still worked.
And indeed, by the time the S&L concluded with a speeded-up flowering explosion of the desert wastes into riotous solarized green timed to the musical orgasm, from the look on his face, Muammar Al Fawzi, had the sell been sex rather than an irrigation project, would have had his hand in his pants. If he had been wearing pants.
“Very entertaining . . .” he said, as he came blinking out of it. A certain edge returned to his demeanor. “Quite a little . . . magical mystery tour,” he drawled, as if to let them know he was no raghead bumpkin.
Appelbaum slid a chip and a printout from his briefcase and handed them over to him. “The plans and the financial details,” he said. “As you’ll see, there’s no magic, it’s all simple off-the-shelf technology. And no mystery about the financing, you put up forty percent and we have interests who will pick up the rest.” He flashed Al Fawzi a winning foxy grandpa smile, seemed almost about to wink. “Not a loan bearing interest, but for a percentage of the real estate proceeds, in the approved Islamic manner.”
“Indeed?” said Al Fawzi. “No magic to the technology? No mystery to the financing? Then shall we proceed to the tour of the real estate?”
This turned out to be a long, slow, broiling, gut-wrenching cruise
southeast across the Sahara in a Libyan blimp. The gasbag was in the form of an enormous wing, the better to maximize the surface area of the solar-cell array that powered the propellers, at the cost of a certain increased susceptibility to the roller-coaster dips of the up-and-down drafts, of which there were plenty. Whether the Water Authority had sprung for helium, or whether the balloon-wing was filled with cheap but explosive hydrogen, was something Monique did not care to contemplate.
The landscape below, however, was something she could hardly avoid contemplating, and the more she did, the more harebrained the “Gardens of Allah” scheme seemed.
The deep Sahara had been a largely uninhabitable waste long before the hand of man had sent its borders creeping south and its temperature soaring upward. Now the moaning air conditioner of the gondola was hard put to maintain an interior temperature below forty degrees centigrade as the blimp flapped like an overweight manta ray through an ocean of air at least twenty degrees hotter than that at a humidity of approximately zero.
Dunes of sand and rocky wastes searing under a pitiless and cloudless sky bleached to near-whiteness by a sadistic sun. No mirages from this aerial vantage, but the sun, and the whited-out sky, and the heat waves pulsing up off the shadeless surface into the superheated atmosphere, turned the horizon into a silvery microwave shimmer, abstracted the landscape below into an unreal and unearthly glare.
If the Earth ever really succumbed to Condition Venus, surely the runaway effect would begin here, in the Sahara, a vast deadland stretching from the drowned littoral of the Mediterranean shore deep into the withering heart of Africa, which, as far as supporting the life-forms of the Gaian biosphere was concerned, was no longer part of this world already.
Pump water into craters here and it would steam into the atmosphere like soup boiling on a stove. It was so hot and dry that not even local cloud cover would form. It would be like opening the windows of this gondola so the air conditioner could attempt to cool down the whole planet.