The Golden Fleece (12 page)

“Bullshit,” said Jarndyke, although he didn’t mean it, and it wasn’t true.

Again, he could have left on that note and let Adrian get back to work, but again, he didn’t.

“I want you to tell me what you saw in the barn,” Jarndyke said. “I want you to explain to me what it was that you saw but I couldn’t.”

“I can’t,” Adrian told him.

“Because Angie forbade you to?”

“No, because I literally can’t. Sometimes, you have to be there. Sometimes, it just isn’t possible to explain what I can see to people who can’t see it for themselves.”

Lying, Adrian thought, wasn’t as difficult as it sometimes seemed—and sometimes, it wasn’t all that difficult to keep the story straight, even when the reasons were tangled.

“She still won’t let me in, you know. You’re privileged—and she doesn’t hold it against you that you didn’t like it. Told me this morning that you were a real treasure, and that I should be sure to cherish you. Said she wished that she could do what you can do. Can’t all be scientific geniuses, though, can we? How are things coming along?” The last question was just for form’s sake, to transfer the dialogue back to safe ground, to the
terra firma
of business.

“The deep reds are coming along nicely now. The test genes are ready for implantation for preliminary trials. The true blues are very slow—but organic chemistry’s always had difficulty with true blues. I hope to have first of the lemon yellows ready for implantation next week...but I still haven’t mastered the configuration of the perfect gold. I’ll know it when I’ve imagined it, because it will be the most beautiful DNA sequence in the world. It’s just a matter of racking my brains, reaching out a little further...eventually, I’ll find it.”

“It’s a marathon, not a sprint,” the big man said, automatically. “Making progress—that’s the main thing.”

“It’s the only thing,” Adrian replied. “It’s all we have, this side of the grave. All else is illusion.”

<>

~ * ~

SOME LIKE IT HOT

“Gaia likes it cold.”

—James Lovelock,

The Ages of Gaia

Gerda Rosenhane fell in love with Kelemen Kiss—who did not like his forename and insisted on being called Kay—at the age of six, and somehow avoided ever falling out, in spite of all the customary childish quarrels and jealousies, adolescent metamorphoses and adult shifts in perspective. She was able to fall in love with him in the first place, and to sustain their relationship for many years thereafter, because they spent their childhood living on the same street in Strasbourg, within walking distance of the European Parliament.

The resilience of their relationship was greatly aided by the fact that Gerda and Kay had the same birthday, March twelfth; they always celebrated it together as children, thus founding a tradition that extended far into adulthood.

Under other circumstances, the cultural differences between Gerda, who was Swedish, and Kay, who was Hungarian, might have been immense, but they not only lived on the same street, they attended the same school: the so-called New International School, whose pupils came from the assorted nations of the EC, but where all the classes were taught in English. Everything in their world tended to be prefaced with the label “New,” even though the practice was getting rather old. As beneficiaries or victims of New Internationalism, however, they were certainly united in their cultural affiliations in a way that even their immediate families did not entirely understand.

Another circumstance that helped Gerda and Kay find common cause in their early days was that they only had one parent each, and that the parents in question, busy about the ever-problematic business of running Europe, were almost entirely absent from their quotidian lives. Gerda’s father, an EC bureaucrat, had died on a fact-finding trip to the vanishing Arctic ice cap before her second birthday, a victim of the treacherously melting ice; Kay’s mother—a much-married woman—had resumed her briefly interrupted career as a celebrity model as soon as she had recovered her figure after the relevant divorce, which was finalized not long after her pregnancy came to term.

At six, Gerda believed, with an innocently boundless conviction of which only six-year-olds are normally capable, that Kay was her other half—or, because she had a precocious love of language, her “inevitable counterpart.” They did, in fact, look uncannily alike, apart from the fact that Gerda was very pale of complexion, blonde and blue-eyed, while Kay was dark, black-haired and brown-eyed. “Like opposing pawns on a chessboard,” Gerda’s mother once observed, rather unkindly—quickly adding, for the sake of kindness, even though it wrecked the analogy: “But one day, when you’re grown up, you’ll be a queen.”

Even at the age of six, Gerda had been able to reply, “I can’t, Mommy. We live in a democracy.”

When Gerda and Kay started at the NIS, the fact that all its classes were taught in English was only mildly controversial, but by the time they reached their final year it had become a running sore of angry contention. This was not because anything had happened in the meantime to the ever-dubious reputation of the United Kingdom, which was still the Crazy Man of Europe, but because it was universally recognized that the NIS practice of offering classes in English had nothing to do with far-from-merry England and everything to do with an “American cultural hegemony” that was supposed to have died in the first half of the twenty-first century, and whose inertial persistence within the World Wide Web generated a good deal of World Wide Resentment. Pragmatism insisted, however, that if any language were ever to get the children of Europe’s elite talking like a true community, English was the only possible candidate, so English survived while “American cultural hegemony” became effectively synonymous, on European lips, with “the poisonous ideas that got us into this unholy mess.”

The unholy mess in question was, of course, the CC. Hardly anyone called it the Carbon Crisis any more, as if merely spelling out its name might somehow make the catastrophe worse. Indeed, such were the mysterious ways in which euphemism operated, that it was often re-expanded, with calculated absurdity, as “the Cubic Centimeter”—except in England, where the cultural significance of the letters CC was as farcically out of step with the rest of Europe as everything else. There, the unholy mess was routinely referred to, in a similar spirit of perverse flippancy, as the Cricket Club, even though—as the smart kids at the NIS were fond of pointing out, in order to demonstrate that the Second Great Depression hadn’t entirely robbed the world of its sense of humor—the only things England had that remotely resembled crickets were itsy-bitsy grasshoppers, which no one ever hunted with clubs, or even packs of hounds.

Long before she came to the end of her schooldays, Gerda had grown used to thinking of her relationship with Kay as an unholy mess, but it wasn’t the same kind of unholy mess as the CC, even though the CC had already become tangled up in it. The CC was all about unwelcome overheating, but Gerda’s love for Kay had never had a chance to overheat, because Kay had never given it a chance to do so. When Gerda first confessed to Kay that he was her other half, her inevitable counterpart, he agreed, but his casual manner made it obvious that he didn’t really understand. It soon became painfully clear to Gerda that he understood the analogy in a very different way. He thought that they were like non-identical twins: that his idea of “inevitability” was that they were and would always remain pseudo-siblings, as close as close could be but in an inviolably non-erotic sense. As time passed, although his sexual indifference never became a hostile jet of ice-cold water chilling the force of her emotion, it definitely functioned as a frustrating gust of carbon dioxide, warm enough in its fashion but fatal to wholehearted flamboyance.

Because she continued stubbornly to yearn for him, in a pathetically desperate fashion, Gerda grudgingly accepted and adapted to Kay’s insistence on thinking of her as a sister. By slow degrees, as she passed through puberty and matured into an adult, she even managed to half-convince herself that perhaps it was for the best; romance was, after all, an obsolete twentieth century delusion born of a world careless of the deadly Cubic Centimeter, blithely unconscious of the holocaust to come. She, as an apostle of New Internationalism, owed her first and greatest dedication to whatever part she might be able to play in the Great Crusade for the Salvation of Civilization.

There were, of course, many parts available in that great drama, which was an end that lent itself to many means, but Gerda and Kay were MEP kids in an era when European politics was proudly recovering the old dynastic dimensions that it had briefly forsaken in the twentieth century. There was a tacit expectation in the NIS that the best of its students would become the MEPs and EC bureaucrats of the future, and that all other vocations were second-rate. Kay was never in any doubt that he would follow in his father’s footsteps, but Gerda was not at all sure that she wanted to follow in her mother’s. This was not because of any difference in the quality of the role models that Miklos Kiss and Selma Rosenhane provided, but did have something to do with the fact that they were routinely opposed in key debates, Miklos being an orthodox Gaian utterly dedicated to the war against global warming, while Selma represented a constituency that had seen significant local benefits from the shift in climate and was not at all averse to keeping them, in spite of the nasty problems that were being caused elsewhere.

While Gerda and Kay were children, their parents flew home on a regular basis to visit their constituencies—Selma Rosenhane to Kiruna, Miklos Kiss to Szeged—but the need to maintain the continuity of their NIS schooling and conserve their NIS-based social lives meant that the only times Gerda ever saw Sweden and Kay saw Hungary were during the long summer vacations. There was a sense in which they both felt even closer to the beating heart of EC politics than their parents did, but that sense of closeness affected them differently. The fact that it was his father who currently had a seat in the chamber never seemed to Kay to be anything more than a mere technicality, and Kay lived in the expectation not only of one day stepping into his father’s shoes but also of finding them a perfect fit. Gerda, on the other hand, was not so sure that her mother’s shoes were the correct size, or the most apt design; in particular, she was not sure that her mother was sufficiently passionate in the cause she represented.

Kay and Gerda remained united, however, in the conviction that they had been born with a mission to change the world, and that their schooling constituted an intense training-program that would allow them to carry their mission through. The Strasbourg chamber was still afflicted by the Curse of the Thousand-and-One Interpreters, but in the corridors of the NIS there was no need for such barriers to understanding. Even the six-year-olds there knew that they were the future in embryo, whose responsibility it would be to steer the New Old World through the climatic ravages of the CC. Such subsidiary tasks as defending the EC against the economic ravages of the New New World of Asian Slow Developers—whose brief days as Asian Rapid Developers had recently run into the bumpers at the end of the Great Historical Track—were also on the agenda, but the focal point of all their hopes, fears, and endeavors was the Cubic Centimeter.

~ * ~

Kay was a trifle envious of Gerda’s summer holidays in the Far North, not because they took her away from him for weeks on end—which always left her own heart more than a trifle desolate—but because they gave Gerda an opportunity to see snow. The snow in question was not, admittedly, in her immediate vicinity, but on the as-yet-undefrosted mountaintops that formed Kiruna’s western horizon. Snow was snow, though, and everyone knew that it was soon to become extinct, except in Antarctica, where the colossal mass of the great ice-sheet was not yet in a tearing hurry to be gone. Snow was symbolic of Gaia’s ongoing decline; it was her favorite dress, and all true Gaians loved it. Gerda had never known the ravages that snow and ice could inflict on populations for whom winter was Hell, but she nevertheless contrived, during her summers in Kiruna, to absorb something of the traditional local terror. She never liked snow herself, and became impatient with Kay’s reverence.

“Green is supposed to be Gaia’s color,” she told Kay ostentatiously when they came together again after the summer that divided the Elementary and Secondary sectors of their NIS education. “There’s plenty of green in Kiruna nowadays. The New Agricultural Revolution is just as spectacular in Sweden as it is in Greenland and Siberia. Nobody there wants the old winters back.”

“Szeged may not be the hell on Earth that Southern Italy and Spain have become,” Kay retorted, dutifully reciting the Gaian party line, “but it’s still bearing the cost of your New Agricultural Revolution. I know that your population’s expanding as people from the drowned coasts are relocated, but it’s tiny by comparison with the numbers whose livelihoods have been wrecked. We live in a democracy, remember. Anyway, I hate spending summers in Szeged. My great-great-great-grandfather should never have moved from the mountains to the city. It’s still tolerable up there, even in July—so they say.”