Free Greenhouse Summer by Norman Spinrad

both have time, before the principals start arriving.”
    “Excellent idea, Ms. Calhoun,” said the General Secretary, smoothly slurping down the rest of his vodka as he stood to conclude the meeting. “I’d be delighted to show you around. Shall we say tomorrow at fifteen-thirty?”
     

    As Monique trotted up the formal flight of stairs leading to the somewhat grandiose entrance to the Grand Palais, she found last night’s dinner conversation with her grandparents coming back on her like an unbidden burp flavored with the taste of jambalaya and blackened redfish.
    Her grandparents’ Cajun restaurant in the Marais, like the district, no longer chic, had now retired to the merely quaint. The Marais had been Seineside swampland, then a rough-and-ready quartier populaire, then a gay nightlife district, and now a re-creation of the French Quarter of New Orleans, itself a vanished Louisianian re-creation of mythic Paris, to complete the strange karmic circle.
    Bayous et Magnolias’ entrance marquee still featured a holo riverboat incongruously gliding down an outsized bayou overhung with Cyprus and weeping willow and the dining room was still the glassed-over interior courtyard of what had once been a sixteenth-century tenement.
    The Grand Palais had originally been constructed in the nineteenthcentury as what it was now, an exhibition center, not a conference auditorium. The art-nouveau iron framework and crystal-palace ceiling had been retained and preserved during its several renovations, the ceiling glass smartened to provide variable tints of “natural” lighting, the ironwork rather garishly gilded and fitted with concealed halogen tubing, the lighting, sound, and computer systems updated to state-of-the-art. But it was still a single huge space far more suitable to carnivals, book fairs, and industrial exhibits than conferences.
    An odd venue for a scientific symposium, Monique had made the mistake of mentioning to her grandparents by way of idle table talk last night. Why the Grand Palais?
    Her grandparents had been stridently convinced that they had the True Blue answer.
    Thanks to Monique’s involvement, they had boned up on these conferences. Indeed they knew more about UNACOCS than Monique had felt she had a professional need to know herself.
    Chez Grandma and Grandpa, the conferences had indeed been instituted as a ploy by the UN to be seen to be Doing Something about the Condition Venus threat so as to push the panic below the surface.
    But the substance of the conferences was the continuation of a serious scientific quest, a quest whose beginnings went as far back as the closing years of the twentieth century—the search for a predictive planetary climate model that actually worked, the holy grail of climatologists ever since.
    What had gotten her grandparents’ old True Blue blood bubbling was that while previous UNACOCS had taken place out of media sight and mind in obscure locales, the United Nations had now moved the conference to
Paris
, had hired
Bread & Circuses
to bring it to the attention of the world.
    Had rented the Grand Palais.
    Ergo, something had obviously changed.
    Grandma and Grandpa were sure it could only be one thing.
    Someone was going to announce a planetary climate model that worked. And the UN wanted to present it to the world as loudly as possible. And that had to mean that it would prove what they alreadyknew, namely that the planetary warming which had lost them Louisianne must be reversed or the biosphere was doomed.
    Well, that had seemed a long chain of questionable assumptions last night, but what greeted her inside the Grand Palais certainly gave her an even more piquant aftertaste of last night’s food for thought.
    Lars Bendsten was there to meet her.
    At the edge of considerable chaos.
    A stage backed by a huge video screen had been set up at one end of the vast space, workmen were completing the installation of a semicircular amphitheater of temporary seating around