Greenhouse Summer (15 page)

With modern technology, storing it all on chips was no problem, but filtering and sorting and searching it before it dated into worthlessness—meaning as close to realtime as possible—was quite literally an inhuman task.

Hence Ignatz.

Eric’s comprehension of such technical arcana might be vague, but he did understand the difference between hardware—or in this case meatware—and software. Ignatz was a program. Ignatz could be removed from
La Reine
’s computer and installed elsewhere. Ignatz could be duplicated.

Ignatz could be preprogrammed to follow individual guests throughout the night, or combinations of guests, or combinations of guests linked to keywords, and display the edited results in realtime on the screens. Or sift through the night’s recordings retrospectively for same in a few seconds. Ignatz could also alter the atmospheres in the boudoirs by direct command or inject psychotropics according to preselected word and/or guest-identity triggers.

Ignatz operated by voice command. Ignatz was an Artificial Intelligence sophisticated enough to be commanded in plain or colloquial English, French, Russian, Spanish, or German by the likes of technologically unsophisticated humans like Eric.

Despite the name, which was a sardonic reference to some obscure twentieth-century fictional rodent, Ignatz’s “personality” was entirely independent of the rat-brain meatware on which it ran.

Indeed, Ignatz did not have
a
“personality.” Ignatz had a large menu of personalities to choose from. You could talk to everything from a flat affectless computer voice, to something that sounded like
a duck on methamphetamine, to any number of show business personalities living and dead, or historical figures, or even to yourself, if you were narcissistic enough to try it, as Eric had done on several occasions.

But Ignatz was not in evidence as Eric gave Monique Calhoun the computer naif’s tour of the control room. The computer boys had prepared what they called a “Potemkin interface.” Ignatz would now emerge from behind the Potemkin interface only in response to a voice fitting Eric’s voiceprint parameters uttering the key phrase “open sez me.”

So Eric threw a series of manual switches to activate the twenty video screens.

“Every camera and microphone has its own number,” he told Monique, “which is how we can display the feed from all of them on only these twenty screens.”

He began typing number keys on an actual keyboard and the scenes on the screens began changing—a casino table, a toilet stall, a table on the upper promenade deck, boudoirs, staircase, flick, flick, flick.

“And if you hold down the control key when you type in a number, that camera and mike feed records until you do it again,” Eric lied. In fact everything was being recorded all the time.

“But how in the world do you remember what number refers to the feed from where . . . ?” she asked dazedly.

“Oh, it becomes second nature after a while,” Eric told her cavalierly.

For while Ignatz was now hiding behind the Potemkin interface, it was up and running and controlling this preprogrammed demonstration while Eric hit random keys. Otherwise, he would have been just as hopelessly confused as Monique Calhoun now looked.

“But for the novice, there’s the help menu. . . .”

He hit “Control H” and six adjacent screens filled with schematic diagrams of the casino, the restaurant, the bars, the promenades, the belowdecks boudoirs, each camera and mike pair marked with a number.

“My God . . .” groaned Monique Calhoun.

“You can either type in the number of the camera and mike you
want, or . . . use this trackpoint to point and click . . .” Eric said in what sounded to him suitably like a geek in a computer pub spot, “and . . . voilà!”

Monique slumped back in her swivel chair. “You . . . do this all by yourself, Eric?” she said, with a gratifying awe as she regarded him in this unexpected new technically proficient light.

“Of course not, only when I’m anticipating . . . something of significance, I leave it to a technical assistant to do the routine monitoring . . .” Eric told her.

This was a species of truthful lie, another aspect of the Potemkin interface, for the “technical assistant” was in reality the inhuman, tireless, sleepless, boredomless Ignatz. But when Monique was in the computer room without him, Eric would supply her with a human “techie” from the security department of Bad Boys.

“Well, I guess I’ll have to hire one of my own. . . .”

Eric shook his head ruefully. “Not part of the deal, Monique,” he said. “For obvious reasons, this is a secure area. The door lock is keyed to my retinas. I escort everyone in and out. You are the only outsider I’ll risk giving access.”

“But you can hardly expect me to—”

“No problem, Monique, when I’m not here with you, my technician will be,” Eric told her airily. “You just tell him what you want, and he’ll work the system for you.” Or rather, Ignatz will be listening in and doing it while your minder tickles the computer ivories.

“But when I’m not down here—”

“You just use one of these,” said Eric, reaching into a drawer filled with assorted cigarette lighters, and extracting the one with the Moonlight & Roses logo.

“Mobile mike,” he said, handing it to her. “What I use to instruct the technician down here to record the scene wherever I might be on the boat.”

Actually, of course, since Ignatz had access to every mike aboard, and could be keyed to her voiceprint parameters as well as his, such a silly gizmo was unnecessary. But to explain that would require him to reveal Ignatz’s existence.

Somewhat dimly, Eric found himself appreciating the esthetic elegance of the completeness of the Potemkin interface’s design.

Monique Calhoun eyed the device dubiously, then cocked her head at Eric himself, and gave him a similar fish-eyed stare.

“Moonlight & Roses?” she said. “Why the logo of a gigolo syndic?”

Eric mooned at her soulfully. “Call it a romantic notion, Monique,” he said, “for with it you may also instantly call me to your side.”

That much was true.

“And I remind you,” he told her, transforming his expression into what he hoped was a charming parody of a lupine leer, “that this is one of the only two places aboard blind to electronic eyes.”

That was of course a lie.

Who, after all, shall watch the watchmen?

The computer room was bugged too.

MONIQUE CALHOUN HAD NEVER HANDLED VIP services for a major conference before, and as the said VIPs began to arrive, Avi Posner’s elusive clandestine agenda and Eric Esterhazy’s fatuous passes at seduction were put on hold by the donkey-work of installing her charges at the Ritz and dealing with their “special requirements.”

Her VIPs fell into four broad categories: chief representatives of some of the major exhibitors, heads of delegations from sovereign and semi-sovereign jurisdictions, speakers and presenters at the conference itself, and the press.

Her list of speakers and governmental functionaires came from Lars Bendsten and their needs were financed out of the official UNACOCS budget. The list of trade delegation people to be favored by her care came from Avi Posner, meaning the client, meaning the Big Blue Machine of which their operations were components, meaning they were self-financed. The press list came from Bread & Circuses’ Paris office and
their
lavish freebies came out of the B&C operational budget.

The Ritz being the Ritz and Bread & Circuses’ Paris branch providing her with a team of gophers, the hotel arrangements were the
least of Monique’s problems. She herself was only called in to iron out a few delicate details. A Muslim delegate’s prayer rug had disappeared in transit and a replacement had to be supplied. A Chinese climatologist had to be shown four rooms before finding one that she deemed possessed of the proper feng shui. The dos and don’ts of various peculiar dietary requirements—halal, kosher, Hindu, vegan, two different variants of macrobiotic—had to be carefully explained to the bemused and unamused hotel chef.

The real headaches were the “special requirements” and judging just how far VIP services should go to fulfill them.

The requests for professional sexual companionship were easy enough to meet, though Monique felt it prudent to get authorization from Ariel Mamoun before picking up the tabs from Ladies of the Evening or Moonlight & Roses for the press.

Drugs presented more difficulties. Ordinary marijuana, hashish, and cocaine were readily available from Bad Boys at reasonable prices, but theirs was basically a mass-market, not an artisanal, operation, and some of the special orders were expensive pains in the ass.

Lydia Maren, a formidable London press dragon, insisted on trying absinthe, a concoction that no one had made for over a century, and Monique had spent a whole day and a ridiculous amount of money ferreting out the chemical formula and having the stuff synthesized. John Sri Davinda, a climatologist from California, insisted that he had to have peyote, a wild cactus from the great Tex-Mex desert, in order to sufficiently “focus his consciousness” to make his presentation at the conference, and given the current incoherent state thereof, Monique was forced to agree that any alteration was likely to be an improvement. Chativan Kuritkul, the Thai Minister of Climate Control, insisted on a gourmet strain of Colombian marijuana, and Bernard Kutnik, CEO of Erdewerke, would only be satisfied with Thai stick.

By the time requests came in from several quarters for Cipriani, a red-wine-and-cannabis potation popular among the upper crust in the nineteenth century, Monique had gotten the message that ungrateful souls were bent on seeing how far she could be pushed.

So she bought four liters of the worst plonk she could find, dissolved a half kilo of hashish in foul Moldovan gin, mixed it all together, poured the mess into bottles with phony labels, and let them
toast their greediness with that. The escalating requests for arcane psychotropics began to wane considerably the morning after.

But dealing with the ruffled feathers of those she had been forced to drop from the guest list for tonight’s inaugural soiree aboard
La Reine de la Seine
was the lowest bridge she’d had to duck her head to pass under on her way to the conference’s opening.

The riverboat comfortably accommodated 240 people, and Eric Esterhazy refused to take on more even for one night, citing some Syndique de la Seine regulation, nor could he be wheedled into giving her some of his own slots just this once.

This left Monique with a maximum guest list of 120. Cutting the UN’s list of governmental VIPs was impossible since they were at least officially the client and the results would be a series of nasty diplomatic incidents. The major speakers could hardly be axed. This left Posner’s trade delegation people and the press. Snubbing any major press figures would be public relations seppuku. And Posner’s list represented the organizations footing the bill.

After she explained this to Avi Posner, a dozen of the people on his list turned out to “have other engagements.” How this had been accomplished Monique did not at all feel a need to know. This still meant that twelve lesser lights had to be dropped from the press list.

This was not going to make her life easier. These people were going to have to be on
La Reine
lists for the next two nights if she had to bump Jesus Christ and the Twelve Apostles to do it.

But by the afternoon of the conference’s opening ceremony, Monique was able to take a breather. Her VIPs were now all cozily installed at the Ritz, her gophers had loaded them into their limos and delivered them to the Grand Palais before she went over herself, so at least until evening, she could fade into the A-list crowd with her top-level pass and play VIP herself.

Though it was a partly cloudy afternoon outside, the smart glass of the greenhouse ceiling enclosing the great exhibition hall had been set to simulate a brilliant bright blue sky with a golden sun at the zenith, the better to glorify the climatech engineering displays for the benefit of the television cameras.

Fully set up now, except for something near the center of the exhibition space hidden by a makeshift box of canvas screening and
apparently still under construction, the trade show, and that was certainly what it was, made an impressive demonstration of the wares of the Big Blue Machine.