Meaning that halfway down the staircase the surface of the river was
above her head
. The dormitory studio she had been assigned as a student had been on the first floor. This had not seemed significant until the first time she had stood atop Seawall Avenue to catch the view over the river and then looked east and back whence she had come and realized the awful truth.
The place she lived in was
below sea level
. Every night she slept with a threatening ocean towering over her head. Even now, up on the eleventh floor, she still had the occasional nightmare about it.
That had been what the Third Force mystics called the satori. If her parents had sent her to New York to develop a True Blue social conscience, that had been the moment they had succeeded. That was when Monique had gotten the big picture.
Living down there in the city below the waterline, dreaming at night of tidal waves washing over her, slogging her way through the chronically flooded streets, impoverished by the sky-high survival taxes, shoulder-to-shoulder, cheek-by-jowl, nose-to-armpit with the refugees who had managed to make it this far and their displaced descendants, she did indeed feel for the washed-over masses of the drowned isles and lost littorals, and in the greenhouse summer, when temperature and humidity exceeded even her grandparents’ tallest stories of lost New Orleans and vast clouds of giant mosquitoes invaded the nights, she felt at one with the survivors in the jungle fringes of the Amazon Sea.
That was the Blue of it.
The Green of it was that a girl who had grown up in sunny sultry Paris would have had to be a saint in a crown of thorns and a hair shirt to trade such environs, which the gods of chance had greened, for the modulated surcease of the agonies of the Lands of the Lost.
A no-colored animal with Green and Blue stripes.
Which, upon graduation, as it turned out, made her a valuable
recruit for Bread & Circuses, and made the syndic culture thereof an offer she couldn’t refuse.
Monique’s pedicab dropped her off at Thirty-fourth Street, where Bread & Circuses’ headquarters occupied a modest four floors atop the Empire State Building. This second-most-prominent visual icon of the Apple had had its ups and downs during the two centuries that it had been to New York what the Eiffel Tower was to Paris, and when Bread & Circuses had moved in, it was going through one of its seedy epochs.
As far as B&C was concerned, since the Statue of Liberty was unavailable, this made the deal perfect. The syndic bought the top thirty floors at a distressed price, renovated the exterior tower and the lobby, lit it up like a halogen and laser Christmas tree, redid the top four floors as its headquarters, and then sold off the twenty-six floors below, one by one, at ever-increasing prices, to chic entertainment, couture, travel, and resort syndics.
This resulted not only in a handsome profit to its citizen-shareholders but in soaring property values in the rest of the skyscraper and the consequent renovation of the whole building’s decor and prestige, leaving Bread & Circuses sitting high, wide, and handsome atop the city’s reborn signature edifice.
That is, the crowning monument to New York’s mighty edifice complex, Monique could never refrain from thinking, despite the tired awfulness of the pun, every time she stared up the gargantuan gray length of the Empire State Building, capped by a rounded and gleaming silvery tower, from which B&C had caused the antenna to be removed in order to enhance the phallic effect.
Deliberate?
Believe it!
Advertising, public relations, lobbying, putting on events, promoting causes, however the client wished to interface with the public, B&C could handle it for a price.
But Bread & Circuses wasn’t content to be just the world’s
leading
public interface syndic, it intended to be
the
public interface syndic for all practical purposes, and nesting atop this ultimate totem pole to the potency of the deep sell image was not the sort of thing B&C did
without full consciousness of the effect it was achieving.
Nor, she had to admit, without a syndic sense of humor.
Of which, she hoped, she was not about to become the hapless object.
Bread & Circuses had a private express elevator to its suite of offices, and Monique took it to middle-management country, where Giorgio Kang’s lair was located.
Giorgio had been humorously appreciative of how she had not only been instrumental in closing the Gardens of Allah project for the client, but had done so in a manner likely to garner B&C a lagniappe larger that the original deal in the form of a long-term interfacing contract from the projected Islamic disneyworld.
But while Giorgio handed her her assignments, he was only a supervising account executive, far below the board level, and a long lateral distance from the accounting department too.
So when an immediate bonus of additional shares had not been forthcoming from on high, she took Giorgio’s assurance that this was merely a bureaucratic hang-up as less than definitive.
“Don’t worry, Monique, once we get the Gardens of Allah interfacing contract, you’ll see at least a hundred shares out of it.”
“And if we don’t?”
“Be real, cara mia, with something of this magnitude, who else is there?”
True enough, but in the meantime, they had kept her spinning her wheels doing inconsequential this and that around town for six weeks, waiting more and more nervously for her next assignment.
And leaving her with a little too much time to think.
B&C’s syndic charter called for it to serve the custom of any and all paying comers; Green, Blue, Bad Boys, the tourists boards of central African disaster areas, or unreconstructed capitalist predators, whatever.
Thus a good portion of its billing was racked up by wicked old corporate dinosaurs like Advanced Projects Associates selling their services to the flotsam and jetsam desperately trying to cool down the planet—or at least their little corner of it.
And Monique’s True Blue spirit allowed her to work better than
most Green-tinged Bread & Circuses operatives for just such clients. As she had just once more proven.
This, she was beginning to worry, had its downside, as well as its more obvious upside.
The upside being that this was what had interested Bread & Circuses in her in the first place and was why her career had progressed so rapidly into VIP services, the cushiest posting in the syndic since it dealt with fulfilling the requirements of honchos and honchas and had the appropriate budgets with which to do so while traveling in the appropriate grand manner.
The downside was where Monique generally found herself when she got there. Namely, more often than not in the Lands of the Lost. In which, she now realized to her dismay, she had unwittingly made herself something of a specialist. And by turning a routine operation in Libya into a potential bonanza for Bread & Circuses, she had hammered the point home.
So when Giorgio Kang told her on the phone that he had finally “stuck in his thumb and pulled out a plum,” Monique earnestly hoped that she had misread the irony she thought she had heard in his voice, that the syndic hadn’t heard the old one about how no good deed goes unpunished.
Giorgio’s standard-issue office was decorated in pseudo-Italianate chic as befitted his adopted pseudo-Italianate persona—sleekly curved pink marbline desk, chairs and couch off some fantasy Venetian deco spaceship, and as its centerpiece, the Coffee Monster, a huge gleaming chromed coffee machine that could produce every variety of the beverage known to man simultaneously while doing a fair imitation of “O Sole Mio” as played by a steam calliope.
Giorgio himself wore a tightly tailored powder-blue cotton suit with enormous lapels, a white dress shirt open down to his breastbone, and swept-back semi-mirror-shades in titanium frames. His sleek black hair seemed sculptured into a helmet.
Giorgio’s family were Vietnamese Chinese fisherfolk who had migrated to New York to work the South Bronx marshes and still had a string of shrimp boats. He had been born George. Why he had gone Italian was something Monique never quite got. De gustibus non, or however they said it in Milano.
Giorgio produced two anisette-laced double espressos, strong enough to raise the dead and propel a mirrorsat into orbit.
“How would you like to represent the syndic in Paris?” he said.
“The one in France, or the ghost town in the Texas desert?” replied Monique, looking the gift horse in the mouth and counting its teeth.
“Seriously,” said Giorgio. “The Gardens of Allah deal went through. The board was impressed and grateful. This is your reward.”
“I’d rather have my bonus shares.”
Giorgio waved his hand in a fair take on Roman insouciance. “That too, cara mia,” said. “Not my department, but I’ve been told there’s a hundred and fifty making their way down the pipeline. What do you know about UNACOCS?”
“Unacocks? Is that a straight line to a dirty joke?”
Giorgio displayed his perfect smile. “It has been in the past, in a manner of speaking. The United Nations Annual Conference On Climate Stabilization. UNACOCS to its friends, assuming it has any. Surely you’ve heard of it.”
“Something to do with Condition Venus . . . ?”
Giorgio nodded.
Right.
The typical UN response to the Condition Venus scare of a few years back.
As Monique remembered it, one Dr. Allison Larabee had produced a climate model purporting to demonstrate that if the warming wasn’t stopped, at a certain point it could suddenly go exponential, converting the Earth into a six-hundred-degree clone of Venus within the theoretical lifetimes of children already born, though of course they wouldn’t survive to see it.
Since such dire Blue climate models were chronically produced by the score and no climate model of whatever color had ever proven itself usefully reliable and Larabee had not enlisted the services of Bread & Circuses, the loud Blue screams resulting therefrom had been pretty much confined to the professional journals and the science sites.
Had B&C been given the contract, they surely would have broken the story out into the front pages of the general news sites and press
by keying into Larabee’s claim that her model showed that the endless tinkering with world-level climate effects by every two-bit sovereignty and demi-sovereignty and syndic was about to trigger Condition Venus
right now
.
As it turned out, the sudden terminal fragmenting of the north polar ice cap a year or two later had broken the story anyway, producing banner tabloid shrieks that it was too late already and Holy Rolling panic that the End Was Nigh.
So the UN had decided that Something Had To Be Done.
Or at least it had to look that way.
So, what else, they established these annual conferences.
And while they hadn’t succeeded in coordinating worldwide climate-engineering efforts according to True Blue planetary goals, they
had
succeeded in pushing Condition Venus into the back pages and end files of the news syndics, and turning these conferences into easily ignorable yawners.
“There’ve been how many of these things, four?”
“Five,” said Giorgio. “This is number six.”
Something here did not add up. The United Nations had long since become a threadbare, toothless, and flatulent forum for the whinings and mendications of the plethora of impoverished and atavistic full sovereignties of the Lands of the Lost who dominated it numerically.
And . . .
“
Paris
? But haven’t these things always been held in cheap locales in the Lands of the Lost?”
“Brasília, Damascus, Nairobi, Tijuana, Colombo . . .”
“So why Paris?”
Giorgio’s shrug was more Gallic than Italian, though perhaps you had to be a Parisian to notice. “Why not? No doubt those in charge finally decided on a city with world-class restaurants.”
“And they’ve hired Bread & Circuses? To do what?”
“What we do so well, cara, give their event cachet, brio, a touch of class.”
Monique eyed Giorgio narrowly. “They’ve never hired us before, have they. . . ?”
Giorgio gave her the nod and the smile at the same time. “And as a consequence, UNACOCS has always had a tawdry image, lacked a certain credibility. . . .”
The odor of Giorgio’s familial enterprise was beginning to waft off this. “Not to mention sufficient financing to put on an event like this in a city like Paris,” Monique said. “Or afford our services.”
“For which,” said Giorgio, beaming, “they have therefore paid in advance.”
“Why do I get the feeling there’s something you’re not telling me, Giorgio?”
For a moment, Giorgio Kang dropped the whole act. For a moment, Giorgio actually became sincere. “Because,” he said, “I don’t know. The financial end of it makes no more sense to me than it does to you.”
Then the mask went up again, the silky mediated mafia don this time. “This is not an offer you can’t refuse, Monique,” he said out of the side of his mouth, flicking ash off a phantom cigar. He smiled with massive fatuity. “If you don’t want to run VIP services for us in Paris, France, I
can
offer you an alternative assignment . . .”