This Other Eden (12 page)

‘If
your treatment is on micro, leave the chip in the bucket. We accept no other
formatting,’ Shannon said.

Rosalie
had had enough. The studio security staff would not take long to work out that
she was wearing somebody else’s dress. She had to get out.

‘OK,
love, I don’t know what kind of loony-bin I’ve wandered into here, but you
listen to me and you listen hard.’ Rosalie was employing the kind of look and
tone that had cowed whale murderers on the bridges of their own ships and
unmanned SWAT teams in the bowels of nuclear power stations. ‘This is very
important.’

But
Rosalie wasn’t on the bridge of an illegal whaler, nor was she attempting to
interfere with a nation’s civil domestic nuclear capacity. She was in a little
pale bungalow on a back-lot in Hollywood, facing the most formidable attack
beast ever developed. The producer’s secretary.

‘Everybody’s
treatment is important, dear.’ Shannon’s smile never left her lips, but the
voice was honeyed steel. ‘Everybody’s idea is an idea that’s time is now. Just
place your micro-chip in the bucket provided, dear, and I’ll see that —‘

Rosalie
lunged forward, intending to grab Shannon’s lapels and shake the information
out of her. Instead, she found herself staring down the barrel of a
stun-thrower. She had not even seen Shannon move.

‘You
know, dear, I can’t tell you how much I miss the days when writers went off and
killed themselves instead of trying to kill me.’

‘I’m
not a bloody writer,’ Rosalie shouted. ‘I’m a terrorist.’

‘I
never met anyone on this lot who didn’t think there was something special about
themselves, dear. Take a hike.’

Rosalie
stumbled out of the little pale bungalow.

Where
ideas go to die.

In the midst of Hollywood,
the dream town, Rosalie had stumbled upon the place where there were only
nightmares. For in those quiet little buildings the desperate met the scared.
Desperate writers and scared producers. Writers, desperate to be used;
producers, scared of making the wrong decision.

The
place where ideas went to die.

There
are two ways for an idea to die in that sunny bungalow world; fast and slow.
Fast is easier. Fast is when it gets rejected outright. Of course, even then
the idea only dies for the studio; for the writer it will never die, but since
the writer is one of the living dead anyway, that’s irrelevant. The slow way
for an idea to die is in development. This happens when a person inside a
bungalow takes an interest in an idea. This special privilege is reserved for
very few ideas indeed. These are special ideas and for them a very special form
of torture has been devised: they will be discussed to death. Considered from
every possible angle by as many people as the producer can afford to employ until
nobody can remember what was good about the idea in the first place. Then
somebody will say: ‘I think we’ve gotten real complex here. We need to get back
to first cases,’ and slowly the idea will fade and die.

There
is a haze which hangs over Los Angeles. Many people say it’s pollution, others
say it’s something to do with what happens when cold water meets warm air out
over the ocean. The truth is that it is the haze of a million ideas slowly
fading away.

A
way-out appears.

Rosalie knew she had to
get out, not merely because she had just perpetrated a violent act of terrorism
and the forces of the law were closing in on her, but also because she could
sense something strange and terrible about the place in which she had found
herself. Rosalie was born and brought up in Dublin; she was fourth-generation
hippy and had listened to poetry and song all her life. She knew when a place
had bad karma and this one had it. She was not a writer nor an actor. She had
nothing to do with the entertainment industry, but quite suddenly she knew she
was surrounded by lost souls and unhappy spirits. The ghosts of a hundred years
of unrequited artists, all of whom had died in development.

She
began to run, sensing that if she stayed much longer she would never leave. A
strange sensation was beginning to overtake her. She felt a desire to buy the
daily trade papers, to attend improv’ classes, to talk to kindred spirits about
which heads had rolled at the majors, to drop a mention or two of a potential
meeting over at Fox… She ran, up one avenue, down another, past sound
stages, more bungalows. .

A car
pulled up beside her.

‘Jump
in,’ said Max.

Max had
followed Rosalie out of the commissary. Her disguise had not fooled him for a
moment. He was a good actor and he knew a performance when he saw one. Also,
the girl who had originally owned the dress had only a few moments previously
approached Max at his table and mentioned that she admired his work. Max
remembered the dress and he remembered the girl. Now there was the dress again,
but on a very different girl. A much more interesting looking one. Max had
watched, fascinated, as the strange woman in the stolen dress made her escape.
He was hugely impressed. Here was somebody who clearly had a purpose. Somebody
who had worked out what it was they wanted to do and was doing it. What’s more,
that thing was nothing to do with show business. To Max, this was quite
incredible. He wanted to know more about this woman. That was why he had
followed her out and was now offering her a lift.

For a
moment, Rosalie thought about punching Max out and taking the car. However,
reflecting that she still had absolutely no idea how to get off the lot, this
did not seem like a very clever move. Besides, Rosalie may have been a Green
terrorist, but she read magazines and went to the pictures. This was Max
Maximus. If she ever got back to Dublin, this would make for great gossip down
at Flannagan’s. ‘So there I was, driving about in Hollywood with your man
Maximus himself. Would I lie to you?’

She got
into the car and Max headed for the studio gates.

Horn
of a dilemma.

Once they were out on the
public highway Rosalie asked Max something she had wanted to know for months.

‘Why
did you have the horn done?’

‘I’m
getting rid of the horn.’

Max
hated that horn. Why the hell had he done it? Drunk, that’s why, drunk enough
to get a stupid, dumb, simulated-bone spike grafted to the front of his head. Doctor
Rock said he could take it off again in about a month and it wouldn’t scar, but
then Doctor Rock was a Bioquack and a casualty. Doctor Rock’s principal source
of income was doing dick extensions for porno stars that fell apart if you so
much as gave them a slap.

At
first, having a horn had felt great. Nobody had had a horn before. Krystal had
liked it and Geraldine his agent thought it was a terrific idea.

‘Sure,
a horn, why not? It goes with the whole wildman thing and it kind of resonates
solidarity with endangered species. Like Rhinos. Do they still have Rhinos, by
the way or did they get Dodoed?’

Rhinos
had definitely got Dodoed some fifteen years earlier. What’s more, a drunk
movie star with an imitation horn surgically grafted on to his forehead was
not going to bring them back. Still, it did look pretty wild. Geraldine had
immediately organised a major stills photo-shoot which had gone over big. Max
had looked great. Torn jeans, slashed open at the fly to reveal a flat hard
stomach rising to a lean, wiry torso. Arms spread wide like Christ. The
expression on his sweetly handsome face that of a wounded beast, sad, tortured,
noble and come-fuck-me all at once. And atop it all, that majestic spike,
thirty centimetres of smooth clean imitation bone. What a pose. Eight pages in
Vanity
Fair
plus the cover. The teens had gone crazy for it. Within a week the
shops had been full of plastic stick-on horns and Max got twelve per cent of
all the marketing. Of course, as always, some kids went too far and Max had to
go on the TV and try and look responsible; not an easy thing to do with a horn
grafted on to your head.

‘Mr
Maximus,’ the talk-show guys had said, ‘how do you feel about reports of kids
whose parents can’t afford decent sub-cellular surgery getting cheap horn jobs
from backstreet BioQuacks and ending up scarred and maimed and totally socially
dysfunctional for life?’

Max had
been very firm on this one. ‘Don’t do it, kids,’ he had said. ‘The easily
removable, glue-on “Horno Maximus” is available at any K-Mart, so you can look
keen and stay safe.’

But all
that was weeks ago. Now Max was sick to death of the thing. He couldn’t wear a
hat, toughs had started throwing ring doughnuts at it in bars, and it banged
against the faucet when he was in the shower.

‘I’m
having it removed next month,’ Max said to Rosalie and changed the subject. ‘So
what do you do, then?’

‘I kill
people who murder planets.’

‘That
sounds pretty radical. Did you ever think about trying to talk to them first?
You know, put love out to them and keep it there?’

Coincidence
considered.

The stricken tanker was a
stricken tanker no more; it was a wreck. Only the port bow of the forward
section could now be seen above the water. It stood out like the tombstone that
it was. A tombstone for a dead sea.

The
water surrounding the wreck was a mass of activity. The coast defences had been
scrambled and the ‘clean up’ was underway. ‘Clean up’ was of course a strange
description for a process which really consisted of nothing more than spreading
the mess about a bit. Worse, the detergents and chemicals used in the pointless
operation were in themselves dangerous pollutants. Basically, the whole effort
was entirely cosmetic and a cynical world knew it. The reason that they knew it
was largely because of the constant efforts of Natura to put the facts before
the public. For more decades than anybody cared to remember, Natura had battled
against terrible and dangerous odds to get to the heart of environmental
disaster. Their aim was always to expose the cover-up efforts of those who
profited most from those disasters, or at least from the industrial and
economic activities which made such disasters inevitable.

The
Natura scientists were hard at work as the little coast-guard launch, upon
which Judy Schwartz had hitched a lift, approached their ship. Once aboard,
Judy and the other authority figures were met with the cold hostility they had
come to expect from any encounter with green activists. As far as Natura were
concerned, the FBI, the coastguard and all other law enforcement agencies were
there to protect the interests of the polluters.

‘You
see this!’ an irate biology professor from Princeton said, addressing the news
cameras that had also arrived at the ship. ‘Now the coastguard turn up!
Coastguard! That’s got to be a the sickest joke on record. Did they guard this
coast? I don’t think so, because this coast is now dead. So what do they do
now? Subpoena the people that created this hell? No, they come and hassle us!’

‘Your
ship is impeding the clean-up operation,’ the chief coastguard said, employing
that stiff ‘only doing my job’ manner that cops of any description adopt when
they find themselves in front of a camera. ‘You have no authority to sail in
these waters.’

‘The
clean-up operation is a crock of shit and these waters are not waters, they are
a porridge of oil, heavy metals and dead fish,’ the Princeton professor stated,
addressing both coastguard and cameras. ‘As regards who has authority to be
here, Natura is a world party and claims the moral authority to be wherever
Eco-death is being covered up and sanitised.’

One
thing was for sure, Judy noted. They might be losing the environmental war, but
Natura certainly won all the propaganda battles. The little confrontation
which he was witnessing would play heavily on all the news broadcasts. Judy
drifted away from the group. As usual, he was able to do this because of his
appearance. He looked so harmless, the casual observer would certainly have
picked him for a greenie rather than a Fed. Judy reasoned that although the
activists on the ship would know each other, extra personnel would now be
arriving on board to help cope with the disaster. He decided to see how far he
could get before he was challenged.

‘Looks
pretty bad, doesn’t it?’ he observed to a couple of scientists who were drawing
up buckets of polluted seawater for analysis.

‘Worse
than I’ve seen for a while,’ said one of the scientists, clearly very upset.
‘It’ll dilute a little, further out to sea, but what’s it going to dilute into?
lt’s shit out there too.’

‘Still,’
said Judy. ‘Kind of fortunate in a way, though, isn’t it? I mean, not
fortunate, but sort of, well … you know.’

‘What
the hell are you talking about? Fortunate? What do you mean “fortunate”?’

‘Just
that the Natura ship was here and everything when it happened. You know, to
exploit the propaganda value of it and all. It’s a lucky coincidence.’