This Other Eden (51 page)

‘So
you’ve always known what Plastic Tolstoy has been doing?’ Rosalie asked.

‘Not
always, but nearly always. I joined the board of Claustrosphere as Tolstoy’s
number two about a year after I founded Natura.’

‘But
that’s nearly thirty years ago! You’ve been on the board of Claustrosphere for
thirty years?’ Rosalie gasped.

‘Yes,
my attitude changed very quickly,’ Jurgen replied. ‘Like any good greenie, I
could see the way the wind was blowing. The industrialised world’s blind
obsession with “growth” meant death, that much was obvious. The human race was
going to self-destruct and take the planet with it. That would happen whatever
anybody did, despite me, despite Tolstoy, despite Claustrosphere. I knew that
then and I know it now. At least Claustrosphere offers people some kind of future.’

‘Have
you got one?’ Rosalie inquired.

‘Of
course. I am not a fool. My Claustrosphere covers the whole of a small Pacific
atoll. It is very beautiful.’

‘How
come they tried to kill you with that bomb?’

It was
Judy who asked this question. He had collected himself sufficiently to slowly
follow Rosalie up to the bathroom and had heard most of what Jurgen Thor had
said.

‘Believe
me, man,’ Jurgen said. ‘If they’d wanted to kill me they would have succeeded.
It was just a marketing strategy. Claustrosphere sales have been down for a
while, Plastic was planning a relaunch and I volunteered to be a part of it.’

‘That
was good of you,’ said Rosalie bitterly.

‘Get
real, baby, I’m no philanthropist. I have nearly as many shares as Tolstoy
does, it’s my profits too. I must admit to you, though, I was pretty annoyed
that my dick got blown off. The blast was only supposed to singe my hair. Our
sabotage people said there must have been other bombs planted in the building
which ours set off. That’s European democracy for you, for every delegate, an
assassin.

They
made a strange triumvirate. Judy was on his hands and knees, the only position
he could sustain without fainting. Jurgen sat against the basin amongst the
broken bottles. Only Rosalie was on her feet and she was mightily bruised about
the head and neck. It was a sorry scene, but a fitting one in which to learn
how careful and meticulous was the marketing of the end of the world.

‘You
seem kind of happy to talk about all this. You’ve kept your secret carefully up
until now,’ Judy gasped between breaths.

‘I once
promised myself that if I could, I would one day tell pretty little Rosalie
here the whole truth. The whole truth about her life and her world. Crueller
than killing you, eh, baby? Don’t you think? Your tape of Tolstoy’s confession
has long since vanished into the depths of my mountain. The only evidence you
possess now is your word, and let me tell you, OK? Dead people speak neither
truth nor lies.’

‘Dead
people?’ Rosalie inquired.

‘Yes,
I’m afraid so, baby. I know Plastic Tolstoy, you see, and if you attempt to
tell your story, you will be dead almost before you have uttered the first
sentence.’

Jurgen
spoke no further. He could not, for he himself was dead. Rosalie shot him
through the head. She did not plan to do it, she just did it, without even
saying goodbye. The world’s second best Claustrosphere salesman was no more.

The
end of the world.

Shortly after which, the
Rat Run started.

It
began quite slowly. One morning, about a week after the incidents described
above, all the news bulletins were suddenly full of stories describing the
Claustrospheres of the rich and famous. Also detailed reports about the
preparations which those people were making for their own personal Rat Runs.

‘These
days, I have a chopper on permanent standby wherever I go, man. Hey, you’re
looking at one mother who ain’t gonna get left out with the garbage.’

There
was nothing new in stories like this, except that the reports seemed to
indicate a slightly disturbing sense of urgency about the preparations being
made. Almost as if the elite were in possession of information which was denied
to the general public.

On the
second day, these dark hints had become the top story, gaining weight with each
repetition. Was there something which the people did not know? Had the
pestilence and hunger so long predicted, in fact arrived, and were those in
authority refusing to admit it for fear of mass panic? By late that afternoon
there were widespread reports that a large, unspecified number of important
people had
already
retreated into their Claustrospheres. The bulletins
reported that the US President and the Chairperson of the European Federation
could not be contacted for comment, the scarcely veiled suggestion being that
their staff did not actually know where they were. Both the White House and the
Palace of Peace and Profit quickly issued detailed statements about the
whereabouts of the two key figures, but these were only sparsely reported. The
suspicion had been planted and it was widely rumoured that the leaders were
jumping ship. These rumours were of course immediately picked up and
re-reported, gaining credibility as they did so.

‘Is
government on auto pilot? Who’s driving the bus? I’m Dan Bland coming to you
live, as it happens.’

The
story had become self-perpetuating. Those channels that had not run with the
original rumours soon found themselves reporting the fact that the rumours had
been reported.

By now
fear had gripped the world community. Those people who found themselves away
from home began to try to get back. Flights were booked out, roads were
clogged. Footage of packed airports and colossal traffic jams played heavily on
the news media, causing more people to rush to the airports and jump into their
cars. Every official denial that there was a problem served only to heighten
the suspicion that there really was one. If not, why were they denying it?
Smoke was being wafted about and everybody was looking for the fire.

The
rumours were turning to fact.

The
President of the USA announced that he would make an emergency statement on
television. This he did, appearing dressed in a chunky cardigan, standing in
front of a fire, and assuring America and the world that there was no need for
panic. The exercise backfired badly. The statement was broadcast but so, almost
simultaneously, was the news that the majority of people considered it a hoax.
They felt that the President looked younger, his hair shorter, his teeth whiter
than had been the case of late. The idea that the broadcast had been recorded a
year or more earlier quickly gained ground.

Panic
now set in in earnest. People spoke of nothing else. Everybody knew someone who
knew someone who had already retreated to their Claustrosphere. Ships were
returning to port. Airlines and other transport services faltered as staff took
holiday in order to avoid travelling too far away from their place in a
shelter.

The
question was no longer if, but when, and for how long?

‘If we
must go,’ people asked each other in anguish, ‘how long must we set our timers
for? When will we be released?’

The
answer was forty years. Nobody knew quite how it came about, but that figure
was suddenly on everybody’s lips. It seemed that some scientist or other on the
news had been pressed to take a guess, and scarcely before the words had left
his lips, it had become the truth.

‘We’re
hearing forty years,’ reporters endlessly asked experts. ‘How accurate do you
think that is?’

‘That
certainly seems to be the figure we’re hearing.’

‘Four
decades!’ The cry went round the world and with every repetition the accuracy
of the prediction became more inalienable.

Then it
happened. The panic damn burst. Ten billion television sets seemed to
broadcast the bad news simultaneously. The Rat Run had started. People had
decided that the Earth was giving up. It was being reported that the planet
could not and would not support the human race any longer. ‘Don’t drink the
water!’ the TVs said. ‘Don’t breathe the air! Get in your Claustrospheres and
set your timers for forty years! Everybody else is.’

And
everybody was. They all ran at once. Newsreaders turned around, having read
their last bulletin, to discover that they were sitting alone in empty studios.
Their colleagues had already gone.

As
people rushed for their shelters, it was almost as if they were embracing the
Rat Run, as if it was in some way a relief to be done with the Earth at last.
To be done with the waiting and the uncertainty. To be done with the guilt, and
that constant, nagging feeling that one really ought to be
doing
something,
and never really knowing what. Now there was nothing to be done. It was over
and nobody had to worry about it any more.

There
were of course doubters, those who wondered for a moment if what they were
hearing could be true, but they did not wonder for long. The panic was its own
proof. People needed no further evidence that Eco-Armageddon was truly upon
them than to see their neighbours disappearing into their Claustrospheres.
There was no question of holding back, once others had begun to run,
particularly for the majority of people who were destined to spend their
remaining years in communal shelters. The prospect of being left outside once
the BioLocks had been closed and the timers set was too horrible to
contemplate.

It was
all over in a day. The human race simply disappeared. Not quite all of it, of
course. There were those in the poverty nations who had no access to
Claustrospheres. They remained outside, scratching away at the dust upon which
they lived. Perhaps not even noticing that anything had happened, except that
from that moment on, their lives began slowly to improve. To all intents and
purposes, however, people just vanished, the only evidence that they still
existed at all being the millions, and millions of geodesic domes which dotted
what had up until recently been the industrialised world. The human race was
hiding from its own nightmare.

This
Other Eden.

Plastic Tolstoy had saved
the Earth, and ironies do not come any more ironic than that. Judy pieced
together the sequence of events as he sat outside Ruth and Sean’s cottage,
peeling the potatoes with which Roger had promised to make a shepherd’s pie.

It had
happened this way.

Judy
and Rosalie had returned from Jurgen Thor’s mausoleum to discover Max
sufficiently recovered to inform them that he did not, for God’s sake, possess
only
one
Ansafone. There were, in fact, machines in every room of his
mansion and on every one would be a copy of Plastic Tolstoy’s confession.

‘I’m a
big star, you know?’ he had whispered from his sick bed. ‘I get a lot of
important messages.’

Rosalie
decided to wait until Max had recovered a little before telling him that she
had seen the type of messages that he received, and that he’d better never
receive any more. Meanwhile, Sean paid his first and only trip to Hollywood,
collecting all of the incriminating tapes from Max’s Beverly Hills home.

Judy
sent one tape to the FBI, one to the LA Police Department, one to the US
President and one to Plastic Tolstoy.

That
was the day that the Rat Run started. Tolstoy, faced with the certainty of
ending his life in a cell, had chosen instead to serve out his sentence inside
his fabulous Claustrosphere. It was not difficult to arrange. Panic is an easy
thing to provoke, particularly if you own a large percentage of the world’s
media. In order to escape the justice of the law, Plastic Tolstoy used his
power to sentence the rest of the world to serve time with him.

The
extraordinary side-effect of this entirely selfish act was that Plastic Tolstoy
ended his wicked life by saving the world. For the Earth, cured temporarily of
people, soon began to recover. Free from the exploitative, parasitic human
virus that had infected it for so long, the planet was able to cleanse itself.
With no further poisons being produced and no further natural resources being
destroyed, the process of renewal actually began with the Rat Run and when,
forty years later, the human race reappeared, it was to a fresh start and a
whole new view of the planet. For as far as this new generation were concerned,
the Rat Run had been for real. A genuine response to a genuine global
emergency, which of course in many ways it had been. Only a strange little
group of aged, weather-beaten people in the west of Ireland knew the truth and
they would never tell. It was better that the people who emerged from the
Claustrospheres believed that the lonely exile of the human race had been a
necessary punishment for its sins, that they had survived the flood and it was
time to start afresh, resolving never again to practise the selfish planetary
vandalism that had led their forefathers and mothers to the day of the Rat Run.

Of
course, some Claustrospheres were destined never to open again, those into
which only the old or the lonely had gone. One such shelter stood silent in
California and inside it, under a false sky at the foot of a mountain on the
edge of a rain forest, lay a slowly decomposing body. Lasting proof of the fact
that whilst the planet may survive, all people, no matter how powerful, must surely
die.