Greenhouse Summer

by Norman Spinrad

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

The world of the future is in a lot of trouble. Pollution, overpopulation, and ecological disasters have left the rich nations still rich, and the poor nations dying. Still, for international businesses it is business as usual. It is better to be rich. But is it all coming to a terrible end? A scientist has predicted Condition Venus, the sudden greenhouse end of the planet - but she can't say when. So the attention of the world is on a UN conference in Paris, where all hell is about to break loose.

Release date: May 27, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 317

Sample

“TO BREAD & CIRCUSES,” SAID MERVIN Appelbaum, toasting her with one final glass of first-class champagne as the Right Stuff flight from Tripoli came out of the holding stack, through the cloud deck, and turned on final toward Newark International.

“To the Gardens of Allah,” Monique Calhoun replied, fixing a virtual grin on her face as she hoisted a virtual glass.

Little did her client know that the tag she had hung on the project was a snide reference to a seedy motel in twentieth-century Hollywood wherein famous literary lions like Fitzgerald and Faulkner had cranked out film scripts for corporate capitalist dream factories under the morally anesthetizing influence of oceans of booze.

It’s people like you who make this job disgusting, Mervin, she restrained herself from saying.

While I, of course, am as pure as the natural snow.

Not that Bread & Circuses’ charter didn’t provide its citizen-shareholders with a moral rationale along with the dividends and fringes.

The Hypocritic Oath, as it was sometimes referred to in B&C circles.

Just as it was the professional duty of a legal syndic to represent the interests of any person or legal entity accused of a crime in any jurisdiction, so was it the professional duty of an interface syndic and its citizen-shareholders to represent the client’s agenda to the client’s satisfaction, not its or their own.

As Monique had once again so admirably done.

Mervin Appelbaum was a vice-president in charge of marketing the services of a corporate dinosaur calling itself Advanced Projects Associates.

APA seemed to consist of a suite in a fancy office building in London, a pool of funds or perhaps merely credit lines, and the e-dresses of actual construction syndics to fulfill its contracts. In the hoary old corporate capitalist tradition, it made the deals, skimmed the cream, and did nothing of work-unit value itself.

The deal in question, if not the outfit, had seemed idealistically Blue up front. Back in the twentieth-century, Muammar Qaddafi, a Libyan generalissimo given to bizarre costumes and financing extravagant projects with his desert jurisdiction’s oil riches, had caused the construction of a massive series of tunnels to bring the waters of interior oases to the cities and towns of the coastal plain where most of the population resided.

As with the earlier and even more grandiosely naive damming of the Nile at Aswan and many later such ill-conceived climatech projects up to the present day, it had seemed like a good idea at the time.

But just as the Aswan Dam had destroyed the fertility of the Nile Valley by ending the annual flooding that maintained it, the Libyan Water Authority had by now long since sucked the oasis aquifers dry.

And while a simple nuclear device might have sufficed to take out the Aswan Dam, drain Lake Nasser, and get what was left of the central African silt flowing back down the Nile, something a bit more sophisticated than a Blue terrorist bomb would be needed to convert a tunnel network leading from dried-up oases to what was left of the flooded littoral population centers into an asset again.

This Advanced Projects Associates proposed to achieve at a handsome profit by building desalination plants at the coast, blasting large craters at the sites of the defunct oases, and reversing the original direction of the pumping operation to fill them, thus creating large artificial lakes surrounded by newly valuable primo real estate.

It had seemed like a good idea when Giorgio Kang had handed her the assignment. But once again, what had seemed True Blue in Giorgio’s air-conditioned office in New York turned out to be something else again on the ground in the Lands of the Lost.

The flight had been approaching Newark International from the east, over the seafood farms and dismal mosquito-infested swamplands of southern Long Island, where once New York’s main airhub had been sited, back when the Island was a lot wider than it was today.

But when the Dutch engineers had presented their estimates, even an idiot who was not a savant could have calculated that saving JFK International Airport would not be remotely cost-effective. Indeed, even diking-in Manhattan was going to keep the property holders and renters thereof paying off the bonds for the next several hundred years.

Now they were coming down across the Apple itself, Manhattan Island, girded by its seawall, its non-alabaster towers, if not exactly undimmed by human tears, then at least soaring far above the level of the otherwise encroaching greenhouse tide.

One could take this as a metaphor for the Apple’s iron determination to triumph over its natural ration of planetary disaster and remain on the side that was winning by sheer act of economic will, especially if Bread & Circuses was being paid to put such a Green triumphalist spin on it, and the extra expenditure for keeping the Statue of Liberty from going the way of JFK was a typical insouciant New York touch.

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.

Oases? Palm trees? Crops? Gardens? People?

Water or not, nothing could live in that heat, under that sun.

Surely Advanced Projects Associates had to know that.

Nor did Muammar Al Fawzi impress Monique as a world-class idiot.

So what was APA really up to?

And why had Al Fawzi dragooned them into this torturous inspection of the brutally obvious?

The answer to the second question turned out to be that Muammar Al Fawzi’s local version of a Bread & Circuses S&L sell, or rather anti-sell, was his sardonic way of getting down to the down and dirty of extracting a straight answer to the first.

At length, at considerably more length than Monique would have liked, after hours of this grand tour of the lifeless broiling void, after she had long since become well basted with her own sweat and Appelbaum was panting like a beached Mississippi manatee, Al Fawzi finally verbalized the point he had long since made, at least as far as she was concerned.

“So you see, Sheik Appelbaum,” he began as if the bazaar haggling had been going on for some time already, “the notion of re-establishing oases in what the Sahara has become lacks, shall we say, a certain practical cost-effective credibility.”

“Perhaps if the tunnel system hadn’t already been built,” said Appelbaum. “But as it is, it’s simply a matter of a few cookie-cutter nuclear desalination plants thrown up by the low bidder, pumping stations we can acquire from any number of dried-up oil fields for a song, and a few nukes readily available on the open market.”

Al Fawzi gave him the look of a Bedouin of old regarding a spavined and scrofulous camel. “By that logic, we would have only to defrost a bit of the polar permafrost and pump the water into a few selected craters to turn the Moon into the Garden of Eden.”

“The atmosphere out there is perfectly breathable.”

“Perhaps then you would like us to leave you out there for a few hours to breathe it as an experiment . . . ? With all the water your metabolism might require?”

Appelbaum’s eyes became carefully hooded. If he weren’t soaked already, he would’ve started sweating. Somehow Monique found herself beginning to enjoy this.

“Mr. Appelbaum, I remind you that my position requires a certain modest expertise in climatech engineering. While it may be true that you can pump water out here at a rate that could keep up with the evaporation, it would not lower the ambient temperature by a single degree or raise the humidity an iota. You would need to construct thousands of such artificial oases in order to create cloud cover significant enough to make the area even remotely habitable or arable. While you’re at it, why not dam the Strait of Gibraltar and the Bosporus and pump enough of the Mediterranean into the Sahara to reclaim the former shorelines and turn the desert into an African version of the Siberian savanna?”

“This is a serious proposal, Mr. Al Fawzi,” Appelbaum snapped irritably.

“Then suppose we get down to serious business.”

Mervin Appelbaum finally did, and that was when Monique’s enjoyment of the conversational fencing match began to evaporate as swiftly as a dewdrop in the desert sun.

“Fuller domes with controllable albedo over the lakes and surrounding farmland,” Appelbaum said. “Standard Israeli prefab.”

“At considerable extra cost.”

“Our . . . financial backers will absorb the overage.”

“Will they now? And toward what end?”

“Agriculture.”

“Hardly a cost-effective means of growing cucumbers and oranges.”

“That’s not quite what they had in mind. They would plant crops chosen to maximize the financial yield per acre.”

“They would not happen to be Bad Boys, now would they . . . ?” Al Fawzi ventured.

“You have a problem with that?” said Appelbaum.

“Nothing personal,” said Al Fawzi. “But there is a certain humorless conservative point of view here that does not quite comprehend that that which calls itself Bad Boys is a righteous syndic of citizen-shareholders rather than a revenant criminal triad.”

“They strictly observe the local ordinances of all jurisdictions in which they operate,” Appelbaum pointed out.

“Or cause them to be modified when inconvenient.”

“Be that as it may, the cultivation of marijuana is legal in this one.”

“You are saying that no legal adjustments would be required?”

“Coca is an even more lucrative crop in terms of financial yield per acre,” Appelbaum opined. “Strictly for export, of course, and taxed at an attractive rate.”

“Opium poppies would be even more profitable,” Al Fawzi suggested sardonically.

“Even Bad Boys draw the line somewhere,” Appelbaum huffed indignantly.

“How nice to know . . .”

Speak for yourself, Monique thought sourly.

Not that she had anything in particular against cannabic confections, eptified cocaine, or for that matter the Bad Boys syndic, which, after all, was no more a capitalist wage-slaver than Bread & Circuses.

What made the blimp ride back to Tripoli even more disagreeable than the trip out was not so much the deal that Appelbaum and Al Fawzi worked out between them along the way, as the entirely correct expectation that Bread & Circuses, and she herself as its representative, would do their professional duty to sell this particular icebox to the local Eskimos.

Even at the thirty percent that Al Fawzi got Appelbaum down to, the Libyan Water Authority was still going to be pouring funds into this scheme which would have to come from somewhere, and whether through taxes or water-rate raises, there was no place for them to come from but the parched and threadbare hides of the local populace.

Winners and losers.

Bad Boys would have a large cost-effective supply of cannabis and cocaine. Advanced Projects Associates would make out like bandits just by putting the deal together. The subcontractors would do well even after APA dipped its wick. B&C would get the lucrative interfacing contract. The Water Authority or some other Libyan entity would collect considerable taxes. And all along the line mucho baksheesh would pass along from one hand washing the other.

The Libyan citizens, however, who, as was common in these Land of the Lost jurisdictions, were not shareholders in even what was left of the oil revenues, would get little more than a thorough hosing. Bad Boys’ syndic charter might require them to grant citizen-shareholder status to a few thousand field hands, but those servicing the workers and their families would be on their own as wage slaves. The desert would not bloom. The “Gardens of Allah” would be sealed terrariums. They might as well be on the Moon or the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

Winners and losers.

Bread & Circuses would earn its hefty fee from the former for selling this scam to the latter, if not exactly what Monique could call honestly then certainly not without strenuous labor.

In some elusive way, the unfortunate roll of the climatological dice always seemed to lead to even more bad karma in the Lands of the Lost. In some less than elusive way, with the truest of Blue sentiments, Monique could not avoid adding to it.

First-class and supersonic though it was, the flight back to New York had been too long and the movie too short for Monique to avoid conversing with Mervin Appelbaum, nor did the unlimited champagne with which she sought to ameliorate the experience do much to enhance her taciturnity.

Besides which, she was, after all, in VIP services, and it was her self-interested professional duty as a citizen-shareholder in B&C to not only keep the client happy and represent his agenda but to do so creatively and at least simulate enthusiasm.

And while she was no spinner or imageer, wittingly or not, she knew damn well she had been all too creative when she had tagged the project “The Gardens of Allah.”

Appelbaum had at least had the grace not to get down to the down and dirty until they were well into the Strawberries Romanoff. “We may have a bit of a problem selling the project to the local electorate,” he ventured, a gross understatement by Monique’s lights.

Nevertheless, she chose to play the ingenue. “As I understand it, there isn’t exactly any such thing as a Libyan electorate,” she said. “And even if there was, the Water Authority is a trans-sovereign entity. . . .”

“Call it public opinion then. I mean, the tunnel network is fairly vulnerable to sabotage, the desalination plants even more so. Nothing that a good security syndic like Road Warriors or the Legion couldn’t handle, but they don’t work cheap, and even low-grade terrorism would eat into the profit margin.”

“You would like the Libyan populace to love Big Brother.”

Appelbaum gave her a blank look.

“To love the Gardens of Allah . . .”

“Right. How do we sell it to the raghead masses?”

“Not on the economic benefits to their standard of living, that’s for sure. We have to deep sell it.”

“We are not paying Bread & Circuses to tell us the obvious, Ms. Calhoun.”

“But it is obvious, Mr. Appelbaum, and thanks to my brilliance, we’re halfway there already,” Monique found herself blurting. “We deep sell the Gardens of Allah as the Gardens of Allah.”

“En inglés, por favor.”

Shit. Now she was going to have to lay it out for him. Well, it had to happen sooner or later.

“We do what we did with the industrial S&L writ large. Commercials. Billboards. Popular songs. Graffiti. Endorsements by mullahs if we can swing it. Key it into Koranic verses. Paint it all green. The heroic and righteous Libyan people are virtuously following the Word of the Prophet and fulfilling the Will of Allah by building his Gardens in the desert.”

Monique found herself gagging, and not on her final strawberry. “That should get your infrastructure built without any undue restlessness on the part of the natives.”

“And once they see what they hath wrought?”

Mercifully, the cabin lights dimmed for the movie.

“Let me get back to you on that,” Monique said. “I want to see this.”

This, as kismet and the nature of the flight would have it, was an erotic remake of a classic D. . .