This Other Eden (34 page)

The
Claustrosphere Company, recognising the problem, had begun to fit ‘Spheres
located in low-lying regions with diving gear. Being hermetically sealed, a
Claustrosphere could offer complete protection against submersion as long as
one did not open the door. This was fine for a while, except that the whole
point of the Claustrospheres was that the human race would survive to walk
again on the surface of the planet. It would be a shame if one’s children’s
children were to emerge from their long captivity and immediately drown. Hence
the scuba tanks.

Jurgen
was distracted from his sombre musings by the distant sound of an approaching
helicopter. He was at once on guard. He had invited no other guests and as the
world’s premier greenie, he had many enemies. Jurgen suggested that Scout get
dressed and, calling to his servants to arm themselves, he took his gun and
climbed up the spiral staircase that led to the heli-pad.

The
sound of the helicopter grew louder.

An old
lover was returning.

From
Galway to the Alps.

After leaving the little
village in Galway where they had had so much excitement, Rosalie and Max had
rejoined Rosalie’s unit in the mountains, where they were preparing for their
next action, an assault on the toxic waste convoys that converged in Belgium on
their way to Britain.

Saunders,
Rosalie’s bag-headed colleague, was his usual inhospitable self.

‘So now
we’ve got a bloody poncey actor to add to our FBI man,’ he had sneered through
the hole in the front of his bag.

‘This
man saved my bacon in that village raid,’ Rosalie snapped. ‘We lost Hilary down
in the street and without Max here, I’d have been caught as well for sure.’

‘Oh, so
he saved your bacon, did he? So now we have to cart around
two
Yanks
who’ve saved your bacon, do we?’ Saunders said, referring to poor Judy who was
sitting under a tree, wrapped in a blanket. Judy looked miserable, which he
was. He was not well-suited to the life of a guerrilla fighter and was missing
his duvet and hot malted chocolate. The sneer which Saunders directed at Judy’s
bedraggled form could be felt even through his bag. ‘Jesus Christ, Rosalie, if
we have to take on every bastard that saves your bloody bacon it looks like
we’re going to end up quite a crowd.’

But
Saunders did not really mind. He was actually quite impressed to have someone
as famous as Max Maximus join them for a spell. He had long thought that
The
Man With No Face
would make a terrific subject for a movie and here was
just the person to talk it over with.

‘What I
was thinking, right,’ the scouser said, buttonholing Max, ‘was that you could
play me before I got contaminated and I could play me after. That way we could
save money on make-up. What do you think?’ and with that, Saunders whipped his
bag off.

‘Potentially,
it’s huge. I’d suggest we did lunch but I don’t think I could keep it down.’
Max looked around, hoping that Rosalie would come and save him from the
Liverpudlian lunatic. Rosalie, however, was nowhere to be seen. She had asked
Judy to accompany her on a little stroll and they had wandered off together out
of earshot. They were now sitting on some rocks, deep in conversation. At least
Rosalie was sitting on the rocks. Judy, who suffered occasionally from piles,
was trying to avoid sitting on any cold damp surfaces, which is rather a
difficult thing to do if you happen to be living on the side of a mountain.

Rosalie
was questioning Judy about Mother Earth funding.

‘Surely
the FBI must have investigated it?’ she asked.

‘I’m
sure they did, but either they drew a blank or else they covered up their
findings, because I asked many times. Not one of my superiors admitted to
having any idea whatsoever about where your cash came from.’

‘What
about you, did you try to find out? Did no hint ever come out in all the files
you had to work on?’

‘I
never saw the slightest thing. It’s too well-laundered. Sometimes I wonder
whether even Jurgen Thor himself knows who pays.’

But
Rosalie felt that he did know. The memory of Jurgen’s tired cynicism on that
night in his sex den all those years ago kept returning. Rosalie knew that
Jurgen Thor held the only key to the mystery.

Sad
reflections.

Despite the absence of
snow and ice the Swiss Alps still presented an awesome sight when viewed from
the air, and as she and Max approached Jurgen’s lair in the helicopter Max had
hired, Rosalie was remembering the last time she had flown over those
mountains. On that occasion she had been filled with excitement, nervously
anticipating the adventure which she had let herself in for. Now she felt a
strange sense of foreboding. She could not explain it, but the mountains which
had appeared so inspiring before, with their glittering peaks, now seemed
sombre and unforgiving. Of course the sun was setting and the great craggy
shadows which blackened the landscape would surely have dampened the lightest
of spirits, but it was more than that. Rosalie could not shake a strange
sensation of defeat and sorrow. Her spirits were sinking with the sun.

Perhaps
it was because it had been amongst these mountains that she had first begun to
lose her innocence. Not sexual innocence, although she had lost that here too;
Rosalie attached no great significance to virginity. She knew that there was a
first time in life for all things, and a last. Rather it was her spiritual innocence
which had been so sadly eroded since she had last left these mountains. Since
then she had seen so much horror. Horror which she had never dreamt of as an
idealistic girl. Dead forests, dead lakes, dead species, dead communities.
Everything she ever saw or touched was dead or dying. Rosalie was a naturally
spiritual person and the planet’s agony was her agony. She honestly believed
that she felt it, just as some people’s bones ache when the weather changes.

As Max
piloted the helicopter through the gloomy sunset (he had starred in the fourth
remake of
Apocalypse Now)
it dawned upon Rosalie that it was here that
she had first begun to understand how unutterably and indescribably sad
humankind was. Jurgen Thor’s little lesson in compromise had proved horribly
prophetic. She was a terrorist in a terrible world and, like a black crow
struggling in a stormy sky, she could not be distinguished from the environment
in which she did battle. The passion which had brought her to the struggle
against planet death had been replaced by what was merely a grim refusal to
take the inevitable lying down. Only a fool could have seen the things which
Rosalie had seen and remain an idealist. She had long since given up any
thought of fighting for a better, more beautiful world. All her life meant now
was struggle, to prevent the most gruesome excesses of a situation which was,
and always would be, disastrous.

‘Anything
wrong?’ Max asked.

‘People
are shit, the world’s dead and everything is pointless.’

‘Oh,
good, I was worried something was bothering you.

Rosalie
smiled wearily.

‘I was
just thinking, that if your theory about Claustrosphere and Mother Earth is
correct, my entire adult life has had no point whatsoever.’

‘Well,
you’re only twenty-five. Plenty of time to jack it in and do something else.’

‘Perhaps
I should.’

She
wanted to turn round. She was losing her nerve. All they had, after all, was
the stupid hunch of one dead screenwriter, and an English one at that. On the
strength of this they were preparing to invade the great man’s privacy,
entirely uninvited, and confront him with the extraordinary suggestion that the
forces of environmental protection were in fact in the pay of the planet’s
number one enemy.

‘He’ll
laugh at us,’ said Rosalie as Max manoeuvred the craft down on to the heli-pad.

‘Laughter
would be fine,’ Max replied. He could see Jurgen and a couple of minions
waiting on the deck, heavily armed and ready to shoot.

The
pragmatist concludes his lesson.

‘We have to speak to you,
it’s important,’ Rosalie said as the clatter of the helicopter blades began to
subside.

‘Why
not?’ Jurgen shrugged. ‘It must be pretty important, OK, for you to interrupt
your preparations for the toxic convoy raid. Yes, babe?’

Jurgen
loved to show how he was party to all Mother Earth actions. He knew Rosalie as
an activist, he also recalled their previous intimacy. Max Maximus, he
recognised, of course, but if he was surprised at the arrival of a famed media
star, he did not show it. Jurgen of course mixed constantly with world leaders
in every field, he was more than used to celebrity. Besides, he himself was a
bigger star than any Hollywood actor.

Dismissing
his servants, Jurgen led Max and Rosalie downstairs into the house. They
descended through the bedroom which, as Rosalie recalled, covered the entire
top floor of the house and offered the only access to the heli-pad. Scout was
still there as they passed through and Rosalie experienced a small sense of
déjà vu. Pausing for a moment on the spiral stair, she took in the proud, slightly
defiant face of the pretty young woman and glanced at the huge white bed and
crumpled sheets.

Jurgen
Thor made his excuses to Scout and led Max and Rosalie down into his study.
There on the wall, they were astonished to find the mounted heads of animals
belonging to several species which were basically extinct, except of course,
for a few genetically recreated specimens in zoos. There was a tiger, a lion,
even an elephant, its expression one of inconsolable sadness… as indeed it
might have been, considering its head had been cut off and stuffed with straw,
its natural habitat had been totally destroyed, and its race had disappeared
from the face of the Earth. Jurgen noted the surprise and indeed revulsion that
convulsed the faces of his guests as they took in his macabre interior decor.

‘They
keep my anger alive,’ he said, by way of an explanation, although it fell a
long way short of convincing either Max or Rosalie. They could not help feeling
that there were perhaps more sensitive ways of maintaining one’s commitment to
wildlife than displaying the severed heads of dead life-forms above your
writing desk.

‘So
what is it that is so important that you fly all the way to the highest
mountain to talk to me about?’ Jurgen inquired.

Max had
convinced Rosalie that, if Nathan’s idea was correct, the only hope of getting
Jurgen to come clean about it was to catch him off-guard, to confront him
directly and with confidence. It was a risky plan because if they were wrong,
Rosalie, in particular, was going to look something of an idiot. She was, after
all, an environmental activist and it was pretty big stuff to accuse the
biggest green hero of all of sleeping with the enemy. Max, however, was
confident that they were not wrong.

‘Mr
Thor,’ he said. ‘We have come here because we know that the Claustrosphere
Corporation funds Mother Earth and we want to know why.’

Jurgen
could not prevent a flicker of shock from crossing his handsome, granite-like
face. He had not expected this and for a moment it seemed that he would hurl
their accusation back in their faces. Then he sighed. He had been feeling that
events were beginning to approach their end. This surely was just one more
symptom.

There
was almost a hint of relief in his voice when he said, ‘You ask me why? I would
have thought the answer was patently obvious.’

Despite
his sombre mood, Jurgen enjoyed the effect he had on Rosalie. He might have
failed to get it up Scout, but he was certainly still capable of making a
beautiful woman gasp and roll her eyes.

‘How did
you find out?’ he added, casually stroking the head of a monkey, whose jaw
served as a tobacco pouch.

‘It
isn’t true!’ Rosalie shouted. ‘Claustrosphere pays us! Pays me! It’s madness,
they’re the enemy. They hate us .

‘Of
course, they hate us, and we hate them. That doesn’t mean that we can’t do
business, does it?’

Rosalie
was speechless. She could not begin to imagine what Jurgen Thor was talking
about. It was nonsense, it had to be. Except, of course, that it wasn’t, it was
just business, as Jurgen went on to explain.

‘Think
about it, Rosalie. Why do people buy Claustrospheres?’ Neither Max nor Rosalie
offered an answer, which was fine by Jurgen, the floor was his and he was
holding it. ‘Because they fear that the Earth is dying, of course. And who is
it that tells them every single day that they are right? That the Earth is
dying! Why, us, of course! It is Natura and Mother Earth whom people look to
for the truth, and my God, do we give it to them. We tell them the truth. We
show them the truth. You, Rosalie, personally risk your life most days to
confront people with the truth. And the truth is that the planet is getting
dangerously close to being incapable of supporting human life. We tell them
this in the hope that people will wake up! That they will start to nurture
their planet. That they will adjust their lifestyles. Boycott the products of
polluters, lobby their politicians,
save the Earth!
That is why we tell
them the truth. But what do most people
actually
do when confronted with
the unanswerable evidence that we hurl before them every day?’