Greenhouse Summer (47 page)

“Any more . . . operational suggestions . . .
Mom
?” he asked bleakly, all too aware in that moment that he was talking to a mask over a vacuum.

“No way around it, you gotta go in there now and ice him,” Mom’s voice told him.

“That’s for Bad Boys, that’s for the biosphere, that’s for the Gipper, whatever. But you’re either gonna be able to walk out of there like a man, Eric, or end up crawling out on your belly like a reptile. And that one’s for you, kiddo.”

With tears sliding down her cheek, Monique drew the flechette pistol from her purse and pointed it at Davinda’s head with a shaky hand.

“If . . . you don’t talk to me right now . . . I’m . . . going to have to blow your head off . . .” she shouted over the white tornado’s roar. “Really I am! I mean it! Really!”

It came out sounding more to her own ears like a desperate plea than a credible threat. And John Sri Davinda just sat there like a stone buddha.

I am going to have to do this, Monique told herself. I am going to have to do this, she repeated silently, trying to turn it into a mantra. I am going to have to do this.

She reached up with her other hand to steady her aim.

I am going to have to do this because it is right. I am going to have to do this because I must. I am going to have to do this because if I don’t—

There was a sudden sound behind her.

She whirled reflexively—

Eric Esterhazy strode through the maelstrom toward her like a god of doom, a gun in either hand.

Eric’s jaw dropped in poleaxed amazement as he found himself staring at the muzzle of a pistol pointed squarely at his chest, held in a shaky double-handed grip by Monique Calhoun.

A spent-uranium flechette pistol that was the clone of his own. A weapon that he knew could not fail to be deadly at this range even in the trembling hands of an amateur as rank as Monique.

“Don’t get the wrong idea, Eric!” Monique said hastily. “This is for
him
, not you!”

Nevertheless it did not seem too clever an idea to prove it by lowering her gun just yet.

Even when Eric Esterhazy broke into manic laughter.

Seeing as how even then, he didn’t lower
either
of his.

“What’s so damned funny?” demanded Monique Calhoun. “This is your idea of situation comedy?”

Eric broke up again.

Only Mom would fully get the joke.

There he was, in the howling of a raging virtual white tornado, pointing a pair of pistols at a woman who was pointing one at him. The woman he was about to frame for the hit he was about to perform. And it was not inconceivable that the fate of the Earth might hang in the balance.

Yet thanks to the vapors with which he had filled the chamber, he was facing this most dire existential moment of his life with a raging hard-on.

“It does have its humorous aspects,” Eric said.

“Hah . . . hah . . . hah . . .” said Monique Calhoun. “Would you mind letting me in on the joke?”

Her voice caught. Her bravado broke. She sobbed, once, twice. “I could use a little comic relief long about now,” she said plaintively.

Was it the aphrogas?

Was it the way Monique Calhoun stood there sobbing with a gun bravely pointed at his chest in her trembling hands?

Was it what Ignatz’s simulation of Mom had told him—
you’re either gonna be able to walk out of there like a man, Eric, or end up crawling out on your belly like a reptile
?

Was it because he knew the genuine item would’ve said the same thing?

Whatever. The synergy had touched and clarified his heart.

Could he act on a probability, not a certainty? Could he kill John Sri Davinda under the supposition that it might be necessary to preserve the Big Blue Machine from the results of its own machinations? To preserve a cabal of cynical revenant capitalist liars from the just consequences of their own assholery?

Yes, he could do that.

Yes, he
should
do that.

The Marenkos believed that under these very circumstances it would be necessary, Eduardo Ramirez believed it, and Eric had accepted the contract because he believed it too.

He could do his honorable duty and fulfill his contract and walk out of here afterward like a man with his head held high.

But could he lay the deed off on Monique Calhoun?

No, he couldn’t.

No, he
shouldn’t
.

No matter the personal consequences.

Because if he did, he would indeed be constrained to crawl out of here on his belly like the reptile it would make him.

Eric laughed again.

“Would you believe,” he said, “that under these strange circumstances, a Bad Boy’s best friend is his virtual mother?”

And tossed away the grip-taped pearl-handled revolver.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Monique said. “And . . . and what did you just do?”

Throwing away his
little
gun made no sense, since his
big
flechette pistol was still pointed straight at her.

“It means today I am a man,” Eric Esterhazy said in a tone of smarmy insincerity that seemed to mask something deep and real. “And what I just did was . . . what I feel good after.”

“Can we cut the crap for once?” Monique pleaded. “Can we please get real, Eric?”

“I thought you’d never ask,” said Prince Eric Esterhazy.

“Ground zero,” Eric commanded Ignatz. “Flush with forty percent oxygen. Turn off the bubble machine.”

The white tornado abruptly vanished. The only sounds were their breathing and the hum of the pump purging the boudoir atmosphere.

And then there they were, just two people in a plain and featureless pearlescent chamber pointing pistols at each other.

“It doesn’t get much realer than this, does it, Monique?” Eric told her softly.

“We have to talk, Eric,” Monique said, followed by a bark of a laugh that Eric found strangely touching.

“What’s the gun for, Monique?”

Monique nodded backward in the general direction of Davinda, who sat there as motionless and indifferent as a well-watered house-plant.

“
You
have a contract on him?”

Monique nodded.

“From whom, if I may be so crude as to ask?”

“From the Big Blue Machine. Unless I have proof he’s no Siberian mole programmed to turn tomorrow’s climate model demonstration into their fiasco I have—”

Eric laughed.

“What’s so damned funny about that?”

“Same contract,” he told her. “More or less. From the Marenkos.”

“
The Marenkos
? The Marenkos want
their own mole
eliminated?”

“He may be
someone’s
mole, but not the Siberians’. The Marenkos don’t want to see the Big Blue Machine destroyed.”

“
They don’t
? Even though they faked the white tornadoes to bilk the Siberian syndics?”

“Not if their climatech is going to be needed to save the world from Condition Venus.”

“Even if it means the end of Siberia the Golden?”

“Even if it means the end of Siberia the Golden.”

Monique nodded in the direction of the discarded pearl-handled revolver.

Eric shrugged. “I was supposed to use
that
, get your fingerprints all over it, and pin the . . . removal on you.”

“And you threw it away . . . ?” Monique gaped at him. “But won’t they . . . ?”

Her lower lip trembled.

“Oh, I think I can finesse the situation if Mr. Davinda just disappears,” Eric said, emulating cavalier insouciance. “The Seine is full of alligators who do not at all believe there is no such thing as a free lunch.”

He gave her his best heroic hunk smile.

“So you see, Monique, we don’t
really
have to shoot each other,” Eric said, and lowered his gun. “On the other hand, we
do
have our contractual obligations.”

He took a step toward John Sri Davinda.

“And since
I’m
the professional here,” Eric said suavely, with a little bow, “do allow me. . . .”

In some ultimately mad but ultimately touching way, this was the single most gallant thing any man had ever proposed to do for Monique in her entire life.

“I can’t let you
murder
a man for me, Eric,” she told him, lowering her own gun.

“We
do
prefer the term
removal
in the profession.”

“Do either of us
really
have to kill him?” Monique asked him all too rhetorically. “I mean, if he’s not a Siberian mole—”

“A narrow interpretation of
your
contract might remove
your
obligation, but mine calls for a removal to protect the Big Blue Machine from its own self-created public relations catastrophe, and if they install this brain-burn case in their computer and run their climate model expecting Condition Venus to come out the other end . . .”

Eric shrugged. “You’re Bread & Circuses,” he said. “You tell me.”

Monique sighed. “Goodbye, UNACOCS. Goodbye UN, maybe. Goodbye, any remaining credibility for the Big Blue Machine.”

“Goodbye Earth, if it turns out later we’re going to need their climatech to save it from Condition Venus after all . . .”

“But we
still
don’t really know, not for sure!”

Monique whirled around in a desperate fury to face Davinda, who, bereft of whatever benefits he might have had from the chemical augments previously in the atmosphere, now sat there blank-faced, vacant-eyed, his cock hanging ludicrously limp from his still open fly.

Dropping to her knees, she yanked him as hard as she could by the phallic handle,
hoping
it would hurt. Hard enough at least to get a good yelp out of him.

“Haven’t you been
listening
to all this?” she shouted in his face. “Won’t you at least
try
to talk us out of killing you? Don’t you even
care
?”

No human reaction was in evidence.

All right then, Monique decided in what she knew was her final desperation, try
its
image system.

“Lao!” she shouted, yanking his cock once more, and quite brutally. “I know
you’re
at least in there.”

The yelp she extracted this time did not seem quite human. Less still the voice that finally deigned to speak.

“I am Lao.”

“Do you realize the full program . . . will be run tomorrow, unless . . . unless . . .”

“I await complete and definitive iteration.”

One final question, framed properly.

“Will your . . . definitive iteration demonstrate that Condition Venus is inevitable?” Monique said. “Yes or no?”

The
terminal
question, in
binary
terms, so that the answer would have to be . . . definitive.

“No,” said John Sri Davinda. “Condition Venus is not inevitable.”

“It . . . it isn’t? You’re . . . you’re sure?”

“Full iteration will definitively demonstrate that no existing or theoretically possible climate model can or ever will produce a reliable prediction of climatological conditions beyond a ten-year time-frame from any dataset. The geosphere of this planet has become a chaotic
system. This is Condition Chaos. Condition Chaos cannot be reversed.”

“Not even
Lao
can tell us whether Condition Venus is inevitable?” Monique whispered. “No climate model ever can?”

But neither the man who had been John Sri Davinda or what he had become would speak again.

Yet Monique knew that she had had her terminal answer. Chaos mathematics and climate modeling might be image systems beyond her fathoming. But it translated easily enough into an image system she could all too well understand.

No climate model could produce any certainty now. Not because the program wasn’t good enough or the hardware powerful enough but because that which it sought to model, the future climate of the Earth itself and the effects of humanity’s endless alterations thereof, had gone beyond the limits of causal knowability.

Thanks to human climatech itself.

“Did you understand all that, Eric?” asked Monique Calhoun, rising slowly to her feet.

Eric thought about it.

All of it?

No, he didn’t fully understand all of it. But he understood enough of the mathematics to know that what they ultimately, definitively, and paradoxically proved was that no one and nothing would
ever
be able to mathematically predict what further climatech mods would finally do to the climatological destiny of the planet.

The Big Blue Machine’s planet-cooling climatech might be needed to save the biosphere now or ten years from now or a century from now or never. And there was no way of knowing.