Bendsten fidgeted nervously. “And indeed, so it is, Ms. Calhoun. But in order to stage it in Paris, where we . . . where it is hoped it will draw more serious media attention, and in order to afford the services of your syndic to accomplish that end, it was necessary to . . . go outside the United Nations appropriations budget to secure a bit of supplemental funding.”
Come to think of it, renting the Grand Palais
did
seem like over-budget overkill for an event that had never needed much more than a fancy thousand-seat auditorium.
Curiouser and curiouser, Monique thought, giving him the silent stare.
“Nothing unseemly, you understand,” Bendsten said, contemplating his vodka. “A few . . . educational exhibits . . . some . . . industrial displays . . . by organizations equally concerned with re-establishing a stable planetary climate . . .”
“Mmmmm . . .” Monique observed carefully.
“And of course, in return for these subsidies, our patrons desire an enlarged and enhanced image for UNACOCS and their participants’ participation . . .”
“Hence Paris. Hence Bread & Circuses.”
Bendsten smiled. More or less.
“Exactly, Ms. Calhoun,” he said.
“Perhaps it might be a good idea for me to . . . look over the set while we both have time, before the principals start arriving.”
“Excellent idea, Ms. Calhoun,” said the General Secretary, smoothly slurping down the rest of his vodka as he stood to conclude the meeting. “I’d be delighted to show you around. Shall we say tomorrow at fifteen-thirty?”
As Monique trotted up the formal flight of stairs leading to the somewhat grandiose entrance to the Grand Palais, she found last night’s dinner conversation with her grandparents coming back on her like an unbidden burp flavored with the taste of jambalaya and blackened redfish.
Her grandparents’ Cajun restaurant in the Marais, like the district, no longer chic, had now retired to the merely quaint. The Marais had been Seineside swampland, then a rough-and-ready quartier populaire, then a gay nightlife district, and now a re-creation of the French Quarter of New Orleans, itself a vanished Louisianian re-creation of mythic Paris, to complete the strange karmic circle.
Bayous et Magnolias’ entrance marquee still featured a holo riverboat incongruously gliding down an outsized bayou overhung with Cyprus and weeping willow and the dining room was still the glassed-over interior courtyard of what had once been a sixteenth-century tenement.
The Grand Palais had originally been constructed in the nineteenth
century as what it was now, an exhibition center, not a conference auditorium. The art-nouveau iron framework and crystal-palace ceiling had been retained and preserved during its several renovations, the ceiling glass smartened to provide variable tints of “natural” lighting, the ironwork rather garishly gilded and fitted with concealed halogen tubing, the lighting, sound, and computer systems updated to state-of-the-art. But it was still a single huge space far more suitable to carnivals, book fairs, and industrial exhibits than conferences.
An odd venue for a scientific symposium, Monique had made the mistake of mentioning to her grandparents by way of idle table talk last night. Why the Grand Palais?
Her grandparents had been stridently convinced that they had the True Blue answer.
Thanks to Monique’s involvement, they had boned up on these conferences. Indeed they knew more about UNACOCS than Monique had felt she had a professional need to know herself.
Chez Grandma and Grandpa, the conferences had indeed been instituted as a ploy by the UN to be seen to be Doing Something about the Condition Venus threat so as to push the panic below the surface.
But the substance of the conferences was the continuation of a serious scientific quest, a quest whose beginnings went as far back as the closing years of the twentieth century—the search for a predictive planetary climate model that actually worked, the holy grail of climatologists ever since.
What had gotten her grandparents’ old True Blue blood bubbling was that while previous UNACOCS had taken place out of media sight and mind in obscure locales, the United Nations had now moved the conference to
Paris
, had hired
Bread & Circuses
to bring it to the attention of the world.
Had rented the Grand Palais.
Ergo, something had obviously changed.
Grandma and Grandpa were sure it could only be one thing.
Someone was going to announce a planetary climate model that worked. And the UN wanted to present it to the world as loudly as possible. And that had to mean that it would prove what they already
knew, namely that the planetary warming which had lost them Louisianne must be reversed or the biosphere was doomed.
Well, that had seemed a long chain of questionable assumptions last night, but what greeted her inside the Grand Palais certainly gave her an even more piquant aftertaste of last night’s food for thought.
Lars Bendsten was there to meet her.
At the edge of considerable chaos.
A stage backed by a huge video screen had been set up at one end of the vast space, workmen were completing the installation of a semicircular amphitheater of temporary seating around it, other workmen were stringing lights, speakers, microphones, wiring. A circle of blue-painted fiberboard panels emblazoned with the white UN logo was in the process of going up, apparently to screen the conference auditorium from what was being set up in the rest of the Grand Palais.
Large-scale booths and industrial displays in various stages of erection. Video screens. A scale model of an orbital mirror. A full-size plankton-seeding barge being hauled into place by a tractor. Cloud-cover generators. A silvery ovoid looking like a nuclear terrain-sculpting charge that Monique earnestly hoped was a replica. Cloud-seeding drones. Qwik-grow trees. Devices and bits and pieces of this and that being hauled around and put together that Monique couldn’t identify. Kiosks. Signs. Holos. Banners.
“A bit of supplemental funding, Mr. Bendsten?”
Lars Bendsten gave Monique a smarmy smile. “We are fortunate to have secured the generous support of quite a few private entities seriously concerned with stabilizing the planetary climate,” he admitted redundantly, as he led her across the bustle of the exhibition floor.
“At a profit to themselves, of course.”
“They could hardly continue to operate without sufficient funding,” Bendsten pointed out.
“An unfortunate fact of life even in our postcapitalist world, as the United Nations and UNACOCS itself have annual cause to contemplate.”
“And of course, in return for their idealistic support of the conference, they hope to secure lucrative contracts for their goods and services. . . .”
“Enlightened self-interest must be a feature of any functional economic system, must it not?”
“Bien sûr . . .”
Something about this arch conversational fencing match was beginning to grate on Monique. She found herself giving the conference General Secretary her own version of smiling smarm.
“And of course, their enlightened self-interest will in no way impinge upon the intellectual or political content of the conference,” she said. Maybe her grandparents had managed to get to her a bit after all.
“The United Nations takes no advocacy position on the optimum goal of planetary climatic stabilization.”
“Meaning that this UNACOCS will no more reach a meaningful conclusion than the previous ones?” Monique found herself blurting. “Allowing these conferences to continue into the indefinite future?”
Lars Bendsten’s fair Scandinavian complexion reddened. Other than that, UN professional that he was, he displayed no emotion.
“The United Nations provides the venue and the infrastructure for these scientific symposia,” he said. “We would hope that a scientific consensus on planetary climate goals will be reached as soon as possible, of course, but we do not set the technical agenda or influence the content, nor do we seek to.”
“Of course not, Mr. General Secretary,” Monique said, backing off as she realized that she had gone too far. “No offense intended.”
Bendsten’s Caucasian flush remained, but his expression softened, became more personal, turning it into a sigil of embarrassment rather than anger, or so it seemed.
“None taken, Ms. Calhoun,” he seemed to say almost sadly.
Monique found herself tuning out Bendsten’s patter as he showed her around the temporary auditorium, the state-of-the-art media facilities, the lighting, as he went on about the coverage B&C’s Paris branch had already secured. She found herself constantly looking back over her shoulder at the industrial display area, at what would seem to have become the real main event.
UNACOCS had somehow metamorphosed into a trade show. The main order of business was going to be business.
The climatic engineering business.
That much was obvious.
But something more seemed to be going on too.
Monique found herself reading the names on the kiosks and banners and holos going up and doing a nose count.
NASA. Erdewerke. Boeing. Bluepeace. ESA. Tupelov. Aerospaciale. Ocean Systems. Euromirror. BlueGenes. Smaller outfits. Scores of them in all shapes and sizes, and yes, Advanced Projects Associates, too.
What all these enterprises had in common was the sale of climatech services. Some of these outfits would be quite willing to set up cloud-cover generators for one sovereignty and then sell orbital mirrors to supposedly correct the mess they had made to the outraged neighbors.
But most of them were True Blue, most of them were in the business of reversing the effects of the warming, locally and globally: increasing albedo, lowering carbon dioxide, generating cloud cover, reforesting, restoring the status quo ante.
The sixth annual United Nations Conference On Climate Stabilization was being massively supported by the Big Blue Machine.
Lobby or trade organization, keiretsu or paradoxical syndic of corporate entities, the Big Blue Machine had neither formal charter nor legal existence in any jurisdiction.
Nevertheless, its nonexistent membership list was a matter of unofficial public record, and its nonexistent charter required all member entities to refuse any contract that would add greenhouse gases or calories to the atmosphere.
True Blue.
But Big Blue was far from an idealistic charitable organization. Most of its components were either unreconstructed or cosmetically reconstructed revenant capitalist corporations or semi-corporate arms of semi-sovereignties like NASA and Aerospaciale, and all of them were deeply interested in turning a profit.
True Blue climatech
mercenaries
.
Monique didn’t get it.
For five years, these conferences had been held in Land of the Lost cities, and the Big Blue Machine’s financing was nowhere to be
seen, even though virtually all of its potential client base was there. And Big Blue, dependent upon said penurious Land of the Lost jurisdictions for its contracts, was itself not flush enough to have developed the habit of throwing money down black holes.
Yet now Big Blue was pouring funding into a UNACOCS.
In Paris.
Which they certainly wouldn’t be doing if they hadn’t
wanted
the conference here.
But
why
?
Ariel Mamoun gave her the old Gallic shrug when she asked him the same question later in the day over coffee in a sidewalk café close by Bread & Circuses’ Paris offices.
“Do not look a fat contract in the mouth, Monique, is this not an American aphorism?”
“Gift horse,” corrected Monique.
The director of the Paris branch gave her an owlish look. “In America, they are still in the habit of gifting each other with horses?”
“In New York at least, they are in the habit of counting the silverware
before
the guests leave, Ariel.”
They laughed together.
Given that he was the head of a branch of B&C considered more of a sinecure than the cutting edge, there could’ve been bad blood between Mamoun and the young hotshot from headquarters sent in to take over VIP services on the biggest contract he had seen in years from his own staff.
But somehow the chemistry was right. After twenty minutes in his office, they were on a tu-toi basis in French and a first name basis in English.
Mamoun was pushing seventy, he had a wife, two children, and six grandchildren, he had a gentleman’s farm in Jura, he had enough shares to live there comfortably for the rest of a long life on the two-thirds retirement dividends, he could not be more indifferent to matters of turf or pecking order.
“Seriously, Ariel, why do you imagine Big Blue is subsidizing this conference?”
Mamoun shrugged again. “I am perhaps too old to have the energy for imagining such things anymore.”
“Come off the foxy grandpa act, Ariel.”
“More comprehensible if considered not as the subsidizing of a conference, but the use of the conference as an element in an advertising and publicity campaign, Monique. I am given to understand that what is budgeted for Bread & Circuses far exceeds what they are spending on the conference itself.”