Free Greenhouse Summer by Norman Spinrad Page B

Ocean Systems. Euromirror. BlueGenes. Smaller outfits. Scores of them in all shapes and sizes, and yes, Advanced Projects Associates, too.
    What all these enterprises had in common was the sale of climatech services. Some of these outfits would be quite willing to set up cloud-cover generators for one sovereignty and then sell orbital mirrors to supposedly correct the mess they had made to the outraged neighbors.
    But most of them were True Blue, most of them were in the business of reversing the effects of the warming, locally and globally: increasing albedo, lowering carbon dioxide, generating cloud cover, reforesting, restoring the status quo ante.
    The sixth annual United Nations Conference On Climate Stabilization was being massively supported by the Big Blue Machine.
    Lobby or trade organization, keiretsu or paradoxical syndic of corporate entities, the Big Blue Machine had neither formal charter nor legal existence in any jurisdiction.
    Nevertheless, its nonexistent membership list was a matter of unofficial public record, and its nonexistent charter required all member entities to refuse any contract that would add greenhouse gases or calories to the atmosphere.
    True Blue.
    But Big Blue was far from an idealistic charitable organization. Most of its components were either unreconstructed or cosmetically reconstructed revenant capitalist corporations or semi-corporate arms of semi-sovereignties like NASA and Aerospaciale, and all of them were deeply interested in turning a profit.
    True Blue climatech
mercenaries
.
    Monique didn’t get it.
    For five years, these conferences had been held in Land of the Lost cities, and the Big Blue Machine’s financing was nowhere to beseen, even though virtually all of its potential client base was there. And Big Blue, dependent upon said penurious Land of the Lost jurisdictions for its contracts, was itself not flush enough to have developed the habit of throwing money down black holes.
    Yet now Big Blue was pouring funding into a UNACOCS.
    In Paris.
    Which they certainly wouldn’t be doing if they hadn’t
wanted
the conference here.
    But
why
?
     

    Ariel Mamoun gave her the old Gallic shrug when she asked him the same question later in the day over coffee in a sidewalk café close by Bread & Circuses’ Paris offices.
    “Do not look a fat contract in the mouth, Monique, is this not an American aphorism?”
    “Gift horse,” corrected Monique.
    The director of the Paris branch gave her an owlish look. “In America, they are still in the habit of gifting each other with horses?”
    “In New York at least, they are in the habit of counting the silverware
before
the guests leave, Ariel.”
    They laughed together.
    Given that he was the head of a branch of B&C considered more of a sinecure than the cutting edge, there could’ve been bad blood between Mamoun and the young hotshot from headquarters sent in to take over VIP services on the biggest contract he had seen in years from his own staff.
    But somehow the chemistry was right. After twenty minutes in his office, they were on a tu-toi basis in French and a first name basis in English.
    Mamoun was pushing seventy, he had a wife, two children, and six grandchildren, he had a gentleman’s farm in Jura, he had enough shares to live there comfortably for the rest of a long life on the two-thirds retirement dividends, he could not be more indifferent to matters of turf or pecking order.
    “Seriously, Ariel, why do you imagine Big Blue is subsidizing this conference?”
    Mamoun shrugged again. “I am perhaps too old to have the energy for imagining such things anymore.”
    “Come off the foxy grandpa act, Ariel.”
    “More comprehensible if considered not as the subsidizing of a conference, but the use of the conference as an element in an advertising and publicity campaign, Monique. I am given to understand that what is budgeted for Bread & Circuses far exceeds what they are spending on the conference