Knife Fight and Other Struggles (26 page)

“Prison seems to have agreed with you,” said Max.

“Careful, Maxie,” she said. “There but for the grace of God. . . .”

“I meant it kindly,” said Max.

Mimi shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I didn’t actually serve much of my sentence; my skill set’s in short supply these days, and GET snapped me up pretty quickly for their oceanographics lab. Serving my sentence saving the environment I was so bent on destroying. And with only a little social engineering. . . .” Max grimaced (“social engineering” was Mimi’s euphemism for “alcohol-assisted seduction”) “. . . gaining access to an otherwise classified library of abstracts and raw data you would not believe.”

“Lucky you,” said Max.

“You don’t know how lucky,” said Mimi. She flashed a wide, white-toothed smile with a larcenous glint that erased any illusion of innocence. “I’m putting us back on the map, Maxie. The things I’ve found. . . .”

“I do not want to know,” said Max.

“Think,” said Mimi, “
Nautilus
.”

“What does an exercise machine have to do with anything?”

“
Nautilus
. You know—Captain Nemo?
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea
? The giant—”

Max couldn’t hear what Mimi said next—the turbines had begun to cycle up for takeoff, and it took a second for the noise-dampers to kick in.

“—Well I’ve found a nest of them!” finished Mimi. “A nest! Filled with
hundreds
of them!
Hundreds
, Max! Nobody’s been able to find more than one in nature, and here we’ve got a nest! Jerry is positively thrilled. That’s why he wanted you back—this is going to put
Wylde’s Kingdom
back on the charts.”

“Whatever,” said Max. “I’m tired.”

“Tired, hmm? We’ll see about that.” Mimi sidled closer as the VTOL lifted off the pad and started its queasy ascent over the storm. She rested her head on Max’s shoulder, and her hand fell on Max’s thigh. He felt her fingernails through the cloth of his jeans. “You weren’t being literal about being a castrated rodent? Were you,
Jim
?”

“Actually,” said Max, “yes. Pretty literal.”

Max settled back in his seat as Mimi’s hand withdrew and she sighed. The old survival instinct, Max thought, was finally kicking in. It was about time.

The world looked better at ten thousand feet.

For one thing, Max could see the sun—and some uninterrupted blue sky. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen blue sky and taken it for granted. Atlantica and its bastard offspring had darkened the planet’s surface pretty effectively, and every time the clouds moved you went out and basked in it, melanoma be damned. It was tough to get worked up about something as trivial as skin cancer under the too-rare brightness of direct sunlight.

From up here, even Atlantica didn’t look so bad—clean white cotton balls marching off forever, mixing into a vortex so wide you needed to be in orbit to see it for what it was: the beast that had wiped out close to half the Earth’s population over the past decade and set the other half on the fast track to a soggy and wind-ravaged stone age.

It was no wonder, thought Max, that Jerry Wylde’s star was waning under such a cloud: Atlantica had made the so-called Last Great White Hunter redundant.

In Jerry’s first season, Atlantica wasn’t charted as anything more than a grouping of hurricanes in the mid-Atlantic: Hurricane Colin, Hurricane Donald, Hurricane Elroy; then Freddy and Gerhardt and Helmut; Irving and Jacob and Kenneth and Lothar; Marvin and Noel and Otto. Only when it persisted past the usual hurricane season, crested the alphabet at Zoe and survived past Christmas, did Weath-Net name it for what it was—Atlantica, Earth’s answer to Jupiter’s spot—the world’s first persistent superstorm.

Then, Jerry Wylde was already halfway through the twenty-six-episode first season of
Wylde’s Kingdom
, building his studio on the
S.S. Minnow
, a loaded-down oil tanker anchored off British Columbia, and fending off subpoenas from a dozen different governments. With the help of Max and a team of zoologists, he had identified and exterminated eight species of animals that were headed that way anyway.

The first season was a good one for Max. He didn’t even mind being only addressed as Jim by everyone he saw: hell, in half a season he’d become more famous as Jerry Wylde’s athletic animal troubleshooter than he’d become in six seasons as
Shoorsen
’s pink-bellied second banana.

Jim did everything: jumped from helicopters into alligator-infested swamps, staged commando raids on lion prides, reprised his debut with the rhinos on an African veldt in the two-part special
Rhino Revenge—
this time armed with a Russian-built hammergun and benefiting from some heavy-duty air support. He even had his own line of action figures—which sold like hotcakes—and a prime spot in the
Wylde’s Kingdom
console game, which, although less successful than the show, still made Jerry Wylde a mint.

By the end of the show’s first season, Atlantica had taken a sizable chunk out of the Eastern Seaboard of the United States and reduced the islands of the Caribbean to little more than a few depopulated atolls.

As Jerry and his crew were preparing for the second season with a trip to the fragile, still-icy regions of the Antarctic, the Global Ecological Trust was beginning to mobilize. It probably shouldn’t have surprised anyone that the multinational force sworn to restabilize the planetary ecosystem by persuasion or force should target Jerry Wylde and his nose-thumbing television program as public enemy number one.

One person it didn’t surprise was Jerry himself. It turned out he had good reason for locating his studios on board an oil tanker: when the GET gunboat pulled up alongside the
S.S. Minnow
, demanding Wylde surrender to the justice of the world court, Jerry asked hypothetically how many years they thought he’d get if he were to blow the stopcocks on the tanker’s two million barrels of crude oil and spread it all across the West Coast salmon beds—which he said would be easy to do before, as he put it, “you get a single one of your Greenpeace-surplus Zodiacs into the water, you tree-hugging candy-ass dupes.”

Predictably, the GET ordered the gunboat’s withdrawal, and the second season of
Wylde’s Kingdom
kicked off without further harassment—although Jerry was effectively Polanskied from GET-signatory nations ever after.

And so it went. Tidal waves exfoliated Hawaii and the Philippines after California made good on its century-old promise to slide into the ocean. Waters continued to rise, with the ever-swelling Atlantica egging them on. Meanwhile, Jerry and Jim slogged their way through season two, then season three, and then half of season four.

Jim probably could have stayed on for longer quite comfortably. The nice thing about working with Jerry was it didn’t require you to think much: Jerry had it all worked out. On Jerry’s advice, Jim fired his agent and lawyer, and let the
Wylde’s Kingdom
accountants look after him so he could concentrate on the work.

Max had been used to keeping himself in shape, but only as the camera demanded. Jim, on the other hand, had to not only look good, but
be
good. Sit-ups and weight training with a Hollywood-refugee personal trainer wouldn’t cut the mustard—so Jim spent his every waking moment not in the infirmary in the
Minnow
’s training maze with the former SAS team that made up Jerry’s personal guard.

So, yes, Jim probably would have continued in such a way indefinitely, a willing lapdog to the
Wylde’s Kingdom
entertainment machine, were it not for the arrival, in the middle of the fourth season, of the new crew of naturalist consultants led by Dr. Mimi Coover.

In
I, Jerry
, the ghostwriter professed not to have a clue about what drove the wedge between Jim and Jerry Wylde. A third of chapter twelve was devoted to a maudlin and accusatory meditation on the falling out: “Did I neglect Jim in some horrible, horrible way? Did I miss a single feeding, fail to exercise him, neglect his entertainments for even a second? Was I such an irritating seatmate on the trans-Atlantic flight of life that there was no other way?”

Ah, if only Jerry had known. Sitting on the shuttle, Max studiously avoided looking at Mimi—although he was hotly aware of her gaze on him. On board the
Minnow
he had fallen in love with her, and he had to admit he was deathly afraid of repeating the mistake here in the stratosphere.

As Jim, Max had lived the life of an aesthete. Between training and performance, there wasn’t much time remaining in his day for anything but sleep. Although Max later learned his inbox was overflowing with every imaginable kind of sexual offer, Jerry never gave Jim a chance to read a word of it.

So when one night Mimi stole down to Jim’s dressing room, dressed in nothing but a pair of retro-porn cutoff jeans and a lumberjack shirt with several of the buttons strategically removed, Jim was defenseless. And when she breathlessly informed him she had watched him in action since she was a child—spotting his heroic potential in the very first season of
Look Out for Shoorsen!
, then seeing it realized past even her pubescent dreams in
Wylde’s Kingdom
—Jim was lost to her.

Yet if it were as simple as that—a beautiful groupie, a secret rendezvous in the dressing room, followed by a few more secret rendezvous in the training room, on the bridge, in three of the
Minnow
’s lifeboats . . . just that, and Jim would have been fine. But Dr. Mimi Coover was more than a groupie. She was a marine biologist; the kind of marine biologist who would sign on board the
Minnow
to work for Jerry Wylde. And she had . . . ideas.

“Do you ever wonder,” she said one rainy night as they lay sweating underneath the tarpaulin of Lifeboat 6, “why Atlantica?”

“Yes,” said Jim immediately.

“And California? Why now?”

“They’d been predicting a quake like that for years,” said Jim, then, when he felt the sweat-damp skin of her thigh peel disappointedly from his own, added hastily: “But, yes, I do wonder why now.”

Mimi rolled over onto her stomach, propped up on her elbows so she looked down at Jim. “It’s true what you say, though. We have been predicting a massive, continent-splitting earthquake along the San Andreas fault—and for
decades
, not just years. Just like we’ve been anticipating a superstorm like Atlantica for years, and we’ve been warning about the rising of the oceans, and we’ve been worrying about mutant viruses like the ones vectoring across North America and Asia right now. So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised?”

“Guess not,” said Jim.

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” she continued, “that half the Earth’s population is drowned or starved or dead from disease; that the United Nations is gone, replaced by an ecologically overcompensating military machine that throws you in jail if your car doesn’t pass emission standards and shoots you without trial if you cut down a tree in your backyard. And I guess I shouldn’t be surprised Jerry Wylde and his throwback hunting show, which seems to be doing nothing but hastening the process of planetary death, is the ratings hit that it is.”

Mimi got up and pulled the tarpaulin back. Cool, sharp rain pummelled down on their naked bodies, and Mimi swivelled her long legs over the gunwale and jumped onto the
Minnow
’s deck. No slouch in the jumping department himself, Jim followed easily. But Mimi was still halfway to the nearest hatch.

“I’m sorry!” he shouted, feet slapping the metal deck plates as he hurried to catch up with her. Mimi stopped and turned.

“For what?” she demanded.

“For—” Jim paused, searching for some kind of culpability “—for hastening the planetary death!”

Mimi laughed, and threw her arms around him. “Hastening the
process
of planetary death, is what I said. God, Jim, you are so malleable. You’re like the soft top of a little baby’s skull—I could draw a happy face there with my finger, and it would stay that way until the day you died.”

Jim’s mouth opened and closed, but no words came out—his mind was filled then with the horrifying image of Mimi’s thin finger digging happy-face furrows on newborns’ heads. Her flesh suddenly felt as cold and clammy as the fish she studied. But she only held him tighter when he tried to pull away.

“Here’s the secret,” she whispered. “The world
is
dying, Jim. It’s a terminal case—the life that’s infested it, become it, has run its course, and the world is reverting to its older, more natural geological state—joining its stately brethren of rocks and ice and gas-balls circling the sun. The world’s dying, and the world knows it. It’s obvious, and we should welcome it.”

Jim reached up and pulled Mimi’s arm from his shoulder. He stepped back. Mimi was grinning at him through black strands of hair washed over her face like seaweed in the storm.

“No way,” said Jim.

“Oh, don’t be stupid, Jim,” she shouted. “The world is ending—Jerry Wylde is finishing it off, and you’re right there with him! And now so am I! Centre stage!” She threw her head back so the rain ran into her eyes, her mouth. Lightning flashed paparazzi-silver across her naked body, made an apparition of her—ribs standing out in sharp relief, eyes shadowed into black and unknowable pits, mouth wide and streaming water as her head came back down to look at him.