Stark (6 page)

30: TURNING GREEN IN LA

I
t was, without doubt, the longest dinner it had ever been Sly’s misfortune to attend.

Festel had begun to speak, the head of a Norwegian chemical consortium. Here was a man with a monumental contempt for the common good. A man proud of his record that despite the numerous compensation claims that resulted from him putting poorly test’ed drugs on the market he had never paid out a single penny. He remained oblivious to the anguish of gangs of mothers holding up babies with no legs or torsos.

It was widely believed that Festel had personally arranged the framing and imprisonment of an employee who had threatened to expose the way his company rushed drugs onto the market. And yet, to Sly’s astonishment and anger, this same man suddenly seemed to have turned into a sort of wood-nymph, Pan-like figure, desperately concerned for the pastoral balance of the planet. He pointed out that fifteen million trees were felled every twenty-four hours in India alone. The resulting soil erosion was almost visibly creating deserts. What was more, without the forests there was a terrible danger of catastrophic flash-flooding.

India? Sly was at a loss to understand why he had flown all the way to LA to whine on about trees in India…Bastard probably owns property in Delhi, he thought.

Trunk spoke next. Trunk was a car man. He had been a colossus in motoring for over thirty years. Hence few had been closer to the vanguard in the battle against legislation on lead- free motoring than he. Trunk had fought it tooth and nail, lobbying politicians, obstructing research, deliberately encouraging his own technicians to distort their findings in order to produce ambiguous results. This, despite being well aware all along of the terrible toll that lead emissions take on growing bodies and minds. Trunk’s motive in all this had been the fear that other manufacturers might not take on the cost of the retooling required and of the slightly more sophisticated engines. He could be left on his own with the other bastards selling slightly cheaper cars. Rather than risk this, he had tried to stop the whole idea. This was the metal of the man Sly now heard bleating on about sneezing seals and how some damn mammal or other was choking on its own phlegm.

Sly knew all this, he read his Sunday colour supplements, everybody knew about pollution, so what? One thing was for sure, if he had come half-way round the world to be asked to join some damn top-snob, green charity whinge for tax loss purposes, he would tell them to stuff it up their arseholes.

Lord Playing, the British tobacco giant, spoke up. Here was a man who was presently denying, on his mother’s grave, that his company had been sure about the connection between tobacco and lung cancer since the mid-fifties. Denying that he had personally suppressed the findings and harrassed independent researchers. But now this same cynical man was shouting down Festel claiming that it was the salination caused by the rise in the water-tables that was the most terrifying aspect of the death of the forests. ‘And where is the oxygen to come from, without trees?’ the tobacco king added.

The whole evening sounded more like a gaggle of green Euro MPs having a whinge than a cabinet meeting of the World Government of Money. It wasn’t that Sly disapproved of worrying about the environment — he didn’t like having to swim round clusters of old rubber johnnies when he went for a dip in the sea, any more than the next fellow. But what had it got to do with them? Jesus, if they wanted a donation why hadn’t they written to him? Sly was no longer simply disappointed, he was angry. If there was one thing Sly couldn’t stand it was whingers.

31: A QUESTION OF PRINCIPLE

I
n the cab Rachel had asked if CD was a vegetarian. It was a very tricky moment. What to reply? CD loved meat, his idea of vegetables was tomato ketchup. He was the sort of bloke who reckons not fishing out the bit of gherkin in your hamburger counts as eating your greens. But what did Rachel think? Was she a veggie? She was into peace, but that wasn’t conclusive. Jesus had been into peace but he never said anything about having to eat rabbit food or multi-grain when you fancied a hot dog. What should he say? People were very touchy on this subject. If he said no would she throw red paint over him and say she refused to share the same cab as a murderer? Those animal rights activists did not mess around. He didn’t want the first time Rachel visited his place to be when she came round to put dog shit through his letter box. CD knew these people. Once, at a folk concert, he left his jacket on a seat and some bastard had written on it in lipstick: ‘There used to be a dumb animal inside this leather jacket. There still is.’ The annoying thing had been it was only imitation leather. Served him right for going to a folk concert of course. But, how to answer? Maybe she wasn’t a true fanatic, maybe she was a conscience-stricken would-be veg, that was worse. That would mean a mind-numbing, tedious six-hour discussion on degrees of personal responsibility.

‘Well, I’m prepared to wear leather shoes but I wouldn’t personally harpoon a whale.’

‘I’m basically a vegetarian, it’s just I get this craving for half a pound of bacon every morning.’

There were so many opinions on the subject, so many chasmic pitfalls to be circumnavigated. It’s all a question of degrees. Some people are quite happy to eat a raw chicken stuffed with a couple of shoals of fish but consider it an offence against God to toy with a chop. Others would eat anything, great steaks dripping with blood, raw suchi, sausages, bloater, black pudding, haggis, unwary family pets, anything, and yet would call the police if they caught you even considering veal.

‘You know how they make it don’t you? They tear the baby cow foetus from the mother then artificially fatten it by feeding it napalm and electrocute its testicles to make the meat whiter, then cut its head off and stuff it up its arsehole while it’s still alive!!!!’

People just take their pick on the subject of vegginess, draw their line where they feel like it. It’s not about conventional morals. Hitler, after all was a veggie, but he didn’t mind cooking Jews. There is absolutely no logic on the subject, but you cross people at your peril.

‘Are you a vegetarian?’ she had said it so simply, so casually, as if it was of no consequence.

No consequence! Ha! As CD squirmed and writhed and desperately tried to compute the chances of various answers being acceptable, he knew that his entire sex life could be hanging on his reply.

‘Because I fancy a hamburger,’ Rachel continued.

He could have kissed her.

Neither of them had much money and there was only an hour until the film and so they decided to dine at Slampackers. They did this knowing that it would probably make them feel sick, knowing that the stuff had much the same effect on the complexion as napalm had on North Vietnam and also knowing that it was absolutely delicious and they could just fancy one.

32: CRUSHED IGUANA

T
hey studied the enticing menu, with its dazzling array of choices. Cheeseburger, cheeseburger with salad and sauce, double cheeseburger with twice the salad and twice the sauce. Curiously there was no Iguana or fruit-fly on the menu. No open-ended list of as yet undiscovered life forms but, indirectly, that was what CD and Rachel were consuming.

Thousands of miles from where Rachel and CD stood there had once lived an Iguana. Had that Iguana still been alive it would have wept to see that facile menu (obviously being alive wouldn’t have been enough, it would have had to have been able to read, and speak English…and Iguana probably don’t cry anyway, but whatever…).

The Iguana, and millions like it, and millions more unlike it, for a tropical rain forest contains a wider variety of life forms than any other environment — with the possible exception of a sleeping bag at a rock festival — all these life forms had died in the service of Slampacker. They had been consumed along with the slice of gherkin smothered in secret recipe sauce.

Iggy had been chewing a fly when he first felt a tremendous rumbling. At first he thought that the fly must have disagreed with him and that he himself was responsible. But then the rumbling got louder and more terrible and Iggy realized in his little lizardy brain, that something was wrong. He knew his own bottom and no way was it capable of producing flatulence that was clearly going to feature on the Richter scale. This, Iggy sensed, was an approaching disaster, and of course he was right, which was no comfort at all. Being right is not as good as being alive. Suddenly Iggy found himself surrounded by plummeting species. Species which he had never seen before. Shaken from the various life levels that the forest houses were many creatures as yet undiscovered by humankind. Creatures that never would be.

They don’t cut down trees anymore, it’s too slow. They blow them up, or push them over with bulldozers. This was how Iggy and his host of little forest pals — whom Beatrix Potter would probably have called things like Simon and Jemima — met their ends, under bulldozers. For such is the demand for beef that the global hamburger addiction has fuelled that the rain-forests, which provide oxygen and change the weather, are being bulldozed down to create short-life pastures.

Besides the obvious undesirous side-effects, can be added the fact that much of science and medicine is derived from plant and animal research. It’s just possible that the undiscovered cure for cancer went splat the day Slampacker sent Iggy to join Dave the dolphin and Mrs Pastel.

33: IDENTIFYING THE ENEMY

S
ly’s mind was in a spin. He wanted to punch their faces and shout: ‘Shut the fuck up about the environment!!’

Tex Slampacker could see that Sly was irritated by the discussion. ‘Look here, boy,’ he barked, ‘you know my burgers?’

Sly did indeed know them for although he could have afforded to eat an elephant full of caviar every lunch-time without going to the cash machine, he still secretly craved Slampackers and scoffed plenty.

‘Well, hell, we all know what the damn boxes are doing to the ozone layer, Christ I wish we’d never developed the damn things,’ he continued. ‘But we did and those boxes mean I don’t have to pay anyone to wash up dirty plates. I am faced with a cruel choice, gentlemen. Voluntarily cut my profits by re-introducing crockery, or subject the world to the risk of skin cancer.’ Tex Slampacker was deeply affected by this awesome moral confusion. Just framing the phrase ‘voluntarily cut my profits’ had felt like swearing in church. He was a hard man, not easily upset, but some things offended his conscience.

34: CASE FOR THE DEFENCE

T
hat was it for Sly, he’d heard enough. He jumped to his feet. He was angry now. To think he had respected this man. ‘Cruel choice, Mr Slampacker? Cruel choice?’ he snapped, surveying the assembled company with that famous Aussie squint. This was his money-making look and with it Sly could have sheared the wool off a sheep’s scrotum if he’d thought there was enough on it for an egg cosy. ‘Forgive me, mates,’ he said, fist in hand, the good old boy, teaching the highbrows horse sense, ‘but I see no choice here, I see no dilemma. Clearly we have a question of morality to face, gentlemen, and I hope we’re men enough to take it on.’

It would be a brave bookmaker who would have taken odds on that one but Sly wasn’t leaving room for hecklers. ‘Look we’re all bloody sorry about the trees, of course we are, but people want the wood for Christ’s sake! What can we do? You don’t force them to buy your damn burgers!! The laws of a free market economy are sacred and we are guardians of those laws. Strewth, mates, you can’t bugger about with market forces, that’s social engineering, gentlemen, Brave New 1984 and all that. Your average bloke doesn’t want some little Hitler from the ministry telling him what he can and can’t buy! What he can and can’t make! For sure it’s a shame about the sneezing seals, and the birds with mouldy armpits, and the ozone layer, a bloody shame, and Christ if anyone’s passing the hat round I’m in for 10K towards cancer research, no worries, but you can’t stop progress and progress is marketing.

The faces around the table remained inscrutable, Sly had no idea how they were taking his little lecture but he didn’t care. He wasn’t closing his aerosol factory until it stopped making a profit. ‘Listen, Mr Slampacker,’ he continued, ‘if you didn’t use those boxes some other bugger would and then where would you be? I’ll tell you, mate, hanging out in the sun to dry with the wombats using your hat for a toilet. Meantime the ozone layer’s still fucked and the other bastard’s building a private dermatological ward to get the malignant melanomas chopped out of his arse. Gentlemen, we can’t weaken, it would be a crime to interfere with the sacred laws of free enterprise simply to protect the environment. Do that and what do you get for an encore? I’ll tell you, some green cop telling you you can’t take a piss in your back garden because it upsets the ants.’

Sly would have continued but to his astonishment he found himself interrupted by warm applause. He had thought that he was speaking against the mood of the meeting. Now he discovered that he had captured it perfectly.

‘Young man, you speak for all of us here and also those who attend in spirit,’ said Slampacker. ‘We are all of us engaged in one activity or another that is destroying the environment, we don’t like it, we wish we weren’t, but in the long run, what can we do?’

There was a brief silence during which around the world the acid rain fell, the nitrates seeped through the soil into the rivers, the greenhouse effect melted the ice caps and the kids breathed the lead from the leaded petrol. Sly realized that he was amongst friends. They weren’t wimping on the problem they were merely recognizing it. What next? he wondered.

35: CONNECTIONS

A
nd well Sly might have wondered for the problem was so clear, so terrible. The earth was dying. To be more specific, the earth was being killed. Done to death by its fond owners. Killed by the pursuit of money. For the men gathered around the table it was so utterly frustrating to have inherited the earth and then have the damn thing die on you. And, of course, its death would mean their death, everybody’s death. Like it or not, the human race, powerful though it is, remains only a part of the astonishingly complex chain of beings that makes up life on earth. It is not an island and cannot survive without the other life forces; the life forces that create the oxygen and food, that clean the water and protect us from the sun, the forces that bind the soil together and prevent the deserts spreading across the whole globe; the forces that keep the ice caps from melting and drowning us all.

It’s all connections. If dung beetles didn’t eat cow shit, we’d be knee-deep in flies by now. Eating cow shit is a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it. Luckily, either by divine plan or cosmic coincidence, at the dawn of creation the dung beetle said, ‘Oh, for God’s sake, I’ll eat the cow shit, if no one else will.’ But the dung beetle, like all other forms of life, depends on all other forms of life. From micro-organisms to Great White whales, it’s a chain. Break that chain and all the money in the world will not save you from the ecological Armageddon that will engulf us all. So, what was to be done?

They were coming to that, they had a solution. They’d been working on it for a while. Everyone had a part to play, including Sly.

‘Mr Moorcock,’ said Slampacker, leaning back in his chair, ‘I’d like to tell you, if I may, about the Stark Conspiracy.’