Greenhouse Summer (36 page)

She held up her hand for silence. “And
don’t
ask me how!” she told him.

“May I ask if it involves Davinda?”

“You may ask, but the best answer I can give you is probably.”

Posner did not look tremendously pleased. And
that
had been the good news.

“And the bad news?”

“Very bad indeed,” Monique said.

Avi Posner tapped his foot impatiently.

Monique frowned, paused, hesitated, glanced around. She realized on a rational level that she really
was
being paranoid, but, well . . .

“You once told me to assume that
everywhere
was bugged . . .” she said.

Now Posner’s impatient demeanor became one of worry, of professional concern. “
That
bad?”

“Worse,” Monique said.

“Let’s walk.”

Southeast from the Tower to the École Militaire, the long oblong park of the Champ-de-Mars ran through a corridor of immense live oaks, another canopy of shady greenery.

A “natural” disney, Monique thought sourly as they ambled slowly down a path through the leafy tunnel toward the incongruous square shape of the École Militaire. Lost Louisianne re-created in a Paris that was itself the product of climate change and sustained by climatech. Climatech which was now perhaps being turned against it. The same climatech which was at least temporarily turning the world into a disney of Condition Venus. Disneys within disneys within disneys.

“The white tornadoes are fakes, Avi,” Monique finally said. “It’s being done with orbital mirrors.”

Posner froze in his tracks. “How do you know this?” he said sharply.

“Esterhazy told me.”

“
Esterhazy
! You expect me to believe anything he tells you isn’t disinformation?”

“They have proof. They have recordings of conversations.”

Posner sat down on a nearby bench. It seemed like a involuntary action. He seemed quite stunned. Even more stunned, or so it seemed to Monique, than the revelation warranted.

“Our
client
is creating the white tornadoes with orbital mirrors . . . ?” he said softly.

“And they could just as easily be creating the rest of this so-called Condition Venus weather, couldn’t they?” Monique said, sitting down beside him.

“Adjust some mirrors, move some jet stream, fiddle with the ocean currents . . . no one would spot it unless they were monitoring their orbital mirrors very closely . . . from orbit . . . and only the Big Blue Machine itself has that kind of gear. . . .”

Posner had descended into muttering to himself, and the frowning set of his brows grew deeper and deeper. “Human brains . . . faked tornadoes . . . Condition Venus disneys . . .”

“That’s not all . . .” Monique told him tentatively.

“There’s
more
?” Posner groaned.

Monique nodded nervously.

“Well?”

“Well . . . I had to trade information to find all that out . . .”

“This is supposed to be a surprise?” Posner snapped. “You told Esterhazy what?”

Monique hesitated. “That the Davinda climate model may be run on a computer with human meatware in the circuit,” she blurted quickly.

“
And
?” Posner demanded.

“Look, Avi, I’m no professional at this, and I don’t want to be, so you can’t blame me,” Monique said, adopting a strategically defensive whine. “I didn’t know they’d . . . I mean . . .”

Another set of disneys within disneys within disneys, for that very disclaimer was a calculated move itself, masking her collusion with Eric, her betrayal of B&C’s client, Mossad’s client, in the service of Bad Boys’ client, to find out the truth about what
her
client was hiding.

No professional? It seemed to Monique that she was becoming more of a professional at this moment by moment. But just what her profession had now become and whether it was any younger than the oldest did not at the moment bear close contemplation.

“And, well, Esterhazy, Bad Boys . . .”

“Out with it, will you!”

Me thinks the lady has protested long enough, Monique decided.

“Bad Boys intends to find out what’s being hidden under guard,” she said breathily, making her final show of reluctance. “And, well—”

“Spit it out!”

“And they’re using the recordings to do it. I’m to deliver their ultimatum. Esterhazy is given access to the computer that’s going to run Davinda’s climate model on Sunday, or they release the recordings that prove the white tornadoes are fakes to the media on Saturday.”

Monique shrugged, smiled wanly. “And now I have.”

Avi Posner took a moment to digest this. Then, unexpectedly, he favored her with a grim little smile. “Good,” he said.

“
Good
?” Of all the reactions she had imagined, this certainly had not been among them.

“You have done well. And you have also done right. And so have Bad Boys.”

“I have? You’re not angry?”

“Oh, I’m quite furious, at least provisionally,” Avi Posner told her. “But not at you. And not at Esterhazy or his syndic.”

“At . . . our client?” Monique said, beginning to get his drift.

Posner nodded. “Let’s walk,” he said, getting up from the bench, reversing course and leading Monique slowly through the overarching glade back in the direction of the Eiffel Tower.

“What do you know about Mossad?” he said after a few silent moments.

“It began as the Israeli secret service?” Monique said. “It became a syndic when the Israeli government shed most of its sovereign functions? It provides security and intelligence services to its clients?”

And does dirty work and wet work when the price is right
, she found it impolitic to add.

Posner nodded. “The operative point is that Mossad is a
syndic
with a charter and citizen-shareholders. We are
not
the dedicated security service of any entity, corporate or sovereign. We work under contract. And under our charter, there are limits on the contract terms we will accept.”

“What are you trying to tell me, Avi?”

Avi Posner seemed somehow elsewhere. He made direct eye contact with her, but he didn’t answer directly.

“Israel itself was partially founded by kibbutzniks,” he told her. “The kibbutzes were one of the direct ancestors of modern syndics. They had charters, they were collectively owned by citizen-shareholders who elected their governing boards, this even in the era of capitalism and absolute national sovereignty.”

“I don’t get it, Avi, what’s the point . . . ?”

“The point, Monique, is that Mossad’s syndicalist roots go back deep into the capitalist era, and the organizations our syndic has indirectly evolved from were not corporate capitalist ones, but collectives of Utopian idealists.”

“So okay, Mossad is a respectable syndic, so—”

“So our client is
not
, Monique!” Posner snapped. “Do you know who really runs the Big Blue Machine?”

“Kutnik? Hassan bin Mohammed?”

“
No one
, Monique. There are no citizen-shareholders for the boards of its constituent corporations to be responsible to. And no syndic charters setting forth a moral philosophy. It’s a loose collection of capitalist revenants, each a corporation whose default and only value is the maximization of profit. The Big Blue Machine is . . .
a machine
. A mechanism for generating profit with no human moral responsibility in the circuit, individual or collective.
This
was why the capitalist world order could blindly destabilize the planetary climate in the process of destroying itself. It wasn’t evil. It didn’t recognize evil
or
good. In that sense, in a moral sense, it had no soul.”

“So . . . ?”

“So
we
are not capitalists!” Posner declared with a passion that quite took Monique aback. “Not Bread & Circuses, not Bad Boys, and certainly not Mossad! Your syndic, and mine, and even Esterhazy’s, may have
different
moral philosophies, but unlike Big Blue
we have them
. And our charters agree on one thing—no contract binds us to aid capitalist clients in committing moral atrocities for no higher cause than their own profit!”

“Such as using human brains as meatware processors in computers? Such as faking the onset of Condition Venus?”

“It depends . . .” said Posner, suddenly pensive.

“On what?”

“On the ends to which they are the means. You have surely been
subjected to the asinine aphorism that claims that the ends do not justify the means. But of course, the reverse is true.
Nothing
but the ends justify the means.”

“What ends can possibly justify means like using human brains as computer processors and faking the onset of the end of the world?”

“Saving the planet from the
real
end of the world, of course,” Avi Posner said. “If we were convinced that it was indeed necessary to save the biosphere, Mossad would commit atrocities that would make Hitler himself cringe if we had to.”

They were back under the Eiffel Tower now, surrounded by the tourists and the vendors and the buskers, shaded by the vines overgrowing the pillars of the tower, breathing the rich floral perfumes.

Even in the shade, the humid air was still sweltering, but foul though the current weather might be, disney though this sweet arbor might be, this was still, at the moment at least, part of the tender biosphere of a living world.

Would
I
commit atrocities that would make Hitler cringe to save it? Monique wondered.

That she didn’t know, and hoped to never have to find out.

But she did believe that she understood what Avi Posner was trying to tell her. She understood his hard and ruthless moral logic, and could only agree with it in her own hardest heart of hearts.

She knew that whether she would do evil to save her living breathing world was not a question of whether it was right or wrong but of courage.

For the first time in her life, Monique was confronted with the cruel realization that greater than the courage to do right in the face of danger or adversity was the courage to commit a lesser evil to prevent a greater.

And that if the evil that needed preventing was the ultimate one, the death of all living things, then Avi Posner was right.
Any
means were justified to accomplish that end. Anything at all.

“You’re right, Avi,” Monique said quietly. “Some ends do justify any means.”

“But merely turning a profit is not one of them!” Posner said savagely. “And if those capitalist sons of bitches are committing such
evils for no higher cause than profit, any contract they had with Mossad is null and void!”

He made a visible effort to calm himself. “And so . . .”

“And so?”

“And so
I
have
more
need to know whether my client has installed a human brain in that computer that you and Esterhazy do,” Posner said. “Because, now that we know they’ve lied to us about faking the white tornadoes and probably this stinking Condition Venus weather too, if they’ve installed a human brain in the Davinda climate model computer and hidden it from us, Mossad is not about to continue to honor its contract without at least extracting the full truth. By whatever means necessary.”

“Then you’ll transmit Esterhazy’s blackmail threat up the line?”

“Oh indeed I will,” Posner told her. “And on behalf of my syndic I will add one of my own—there will be no further provision of the contracted services by Mossad until
I
see what they are hiding myself!”

One did not
summon
Eduardo Ramirez, and certainly not to a meeting within hours, so despite his trepidation at walking into the lion’s den under these circumstances, Eric Esterhazy was constrained to show up at Eduardo’s office unannounced.

Bad Boys did not maintain a suite of syndic offices as such, each citizen-shareholder who needed one rented his own with syndic funds, and Eduardo had chosen one high up the old Tour Montparnasse, a somewhat déclassé business address which afforded him a measure of anonymity, along with a magnificent view northward across the city.

The office was small by design—just an entrance foyer, an outer office for a receptionist and a computer operator, a modest inner office for Eduardo’s executive assistant, and Eduardo’s own lair itself.

This was more of a lounge than an office and done in an Italianate retro-deco mode. No desk as such, rather an enormous free-form ebony table thing at dining-room height, with an inset swirl to accommodate Eduardo’s favorite chaise—an antique dentist’s chair which could be pneumatically arranged to almost any configuration and position—and lesser seats for lesser folk.

The window with its sweeping view of Paris was the main item
of the decor and had been framed in sleek silver paneling as if it were a painting, though there were a couple of small Mondrians and a Modigliani on the walls.

Eduardo, in true Bad Boys style, maintained minimal bureaucratic protocol, and so there was no problem for a citizen-shareholder on Eric’s level to show up and gain almost immediate access.