Free This Other Eden by Ben Elton

environment. It was, after all, a lot cheaper to give a platform to a green
politico than to legislate against polluters.
    Jurgen
was, as always, pulling no punches.
    ‘When
you buy a private Claustrosphere!’ he thundered. ‘When your taxes help build a
municipal Claustrosphere! By that very action you accept as fact the dreadful
possibility that we are about to destroy the Earth! In essence you yourself
destroy the Earth! You commit planetary treason!’
    The
various delegates, lobbyists and Euro MPs listened in uncomfortable silence.
They were uncomfortable, partly because the seats of the particular Grand
Chamber in which they were sitting had been designed for purely aesthetic
purposes. They looked all right. The architect (a Latvian) had attempted
to create a prismatic effect, making all the seats out of perspex pyramids, and
when the room was empty, light bounced from seat to seat, creating a dazzling
effect. However, when the room was full of delegates (which was, after all,
what it was there for) the effect was merely one of lots of people wincing
because they had hard plastic points up their behinds. The Euro delegates were
also uncomfortable, however, because of what Jurgen Thor was saying. It was
horrid to be accused of planetary treason, particularly if secretly you felt
the accusation to be a fair one. There was not a person in that huge chamber,
with the probable exception of Jurgen Thor, who did not own a Claustrosphere.
Everybody had of course agonised over buying one, but what could you do? Everybody
knew that the Earth was half dead and that there was every possibility of it
going the whole hog at any moment. A person would feel something of a fool
standing outside some pal’s Claustrosphere, explaining with their last gasp
that the pal had hastened the situation which was about to kill them. It was,
when everything was said and done, all very well having principles, but no
principle was worth sacrificing your children for, was it?
    ‘You
tell me you have to protect your children!’ Jurgen Thor beat his mighty fist
down upon the lectern. ‘Will your children thank you for bequeathing them a
rat-hole in exchange for a paradise?’
    Jurgen
Thor was, as he had done a thousand times in the previous twenty years,
demanding immediate legislation against Claustrospheres. He might as well have
gone to Texas and demanded immediate legislation against a man’s right to buy a
machine-gun in a service station.
    Jurgen
was not stupid. He knew his argument was unwinnable; it was riddled with
inherent contradictions. You could not, on the one hand, say, as Jurgen often
did, that world eco-degradation was at the point of going critical, that we
were all about to die horribly with bubbling flesh and phlegm-choked lungs,
then on the other hand seek to deny people a small sealed, self-sustainable
environment in which they might survive this unpleasant prospect. All the same,
he kept plugging away. Endlessly pointing out that, by purchasing an
alternative to Earth health, one gave up on tackling pollution.
    ‘Not
so,’ the Euro delegates said. ‘If you buy a burglar alarm, does it mean you’ve
given up on crime?’
    ‘Yes,’
cried Jurgen Thor, ‘yes, yes, yes! You stupid Euro delegates! Crime is a very
pleasant and perfect metaphor! The world is staggering towards violence and
anarchy and what do we do? We lock our doors! Employ guards! Buy guns and hide!
We have given up on crime, and we’ve given up on the environment also!
What is air, yes, if you can’t breath it, huh? What is food, I don’t think, if
you can’t eat it?’
    Jurgen
was a Viking. His first language was Norwegian and when much moved his English
lapsed into the Euro-American MT V-speak of his youth, that strange language
which seems to be a constant series of questions.
    ‘I’m
going to save the world, yes?’ he had said in one of his first interviews,
decades previously, before Natura, the world political party of which he was
principal