This Other Eden (5 page)

The
only thing that could be more beautiful, the boy Plastic thought, was if both
companies were owned by the same people.

It
would be well into the twenty-first century before the truth about that
emerged.

Advertainment
.

All kids love TV, but it
irritated young Plastic intensely. Years later, in
Selling: My Soul,
he
would recall his youthful anger.

‘I kept
wondering why there had to be commercial breaks. You know? Insulting little
ghettos where the marketing got crammed in any old how? As if the adverts were
some kind of embarrassing necessity, instead of the very thing that was paying
everybody’s damn wages! And I’m thinking, one day I’m going to change all that.
But I knew even then that, to do it, I’d have to control not just the imagery
but also the
means of communication.
I vowed then on my mother’s memory,
except, of course, at the time she wasn’t dead, that one day I would own a
network and on that network the insulting division between entertainment and
adverts would be banished for ever. The shows, the ads, even the news would all
be mutually complementary. Sure, everybody knows that now, but one time I was a
pioneer! I conquered an American frontier, I’m the guy who invented
Advertainment.’

Often
when
Selling: My Soul
was being screened at marketing seminars, the
eager young salesmen and women would burst into spontaneous applause at this
point, such was the passion and conviction of Tolstoy’s message.

‘Let me
remind you of something incredible,’ the video Plastic would pontificate with
evangelical zeal. ‘There was a time when they made films just so that people
might watch and enjoy them. You hear what I’m saying! Then gape in awe, why
don’t you? Let your jaws drop in disbelief. For decades, Hollywood created
entertainment from which the only source of revenue was the price people paid
to see it! You got millions of people sitting silently in cinemas, their
attention completely focused and
not being sold anything!
A hundred
million Americans went to the cinema every week, and what did they see? A
stupid movie! A story, nothing else! No subliminals, no product identification,
nothing! People actually went to all the trouble of telling a story simply in
order to tell a story! It makes me sick to my stomach.’

Even
the most committed students of marketing were sometimes a little surprised at
the passion with which Tolstoy spoke of his contempt for the likes of
Gone
With the Wind, The Grapes of Wrath
and
Casablanca.
To Plastic these
were not classic works of art, they were sterile self-indulgences. Pointless,
egotistical displays of imaginative power and technical skill, nothing more.

‘It’s
like a tennis player without a sponsor,’ he would say. ‘Take the name plugs off
the guy’s shirt and what have you got? Some rich brat hitting a ball around
with a bat, and that’s
all
you’ve got. Which is nothing.’

Of
course, even in Plastic’s childhood, things were changing. He well remembered
and spoke glowingly of seeing
Batman
as a tiny child, and noting with
great satisfaction the extent to which the film was in fact a colossal advert
for the spin-off paraphernalia which accompanied it. But the product still
followed the story: the film came first and the marketing developed out of
that. It was Plastic who finally put things in their proper order.

‘The
Second Law, boys and girls, is that the marketing is the product, and vice
versa.’

Selling
the future.

Some people say that the
hour produces the man.

‘That’s
bullshit,’ Plastic Tolstoy would answer. ‘You have to make your own history in
this world, ain’t nobody going to make it for you.’

Perhaps
the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Certainly Tolstoy was no scientist and
he never designed a Claustrosphere. On the other hand, by his late twenties be
had built up a communications empire which put him in a position to pitch for
what would become the biggest sales campaign in history. When it began to dawn
on people that the Earth was dying, Plastic Tolstoy was perfectly placed to
take up the portfolio.

The
Second Great Green Scare was sparked off when it was revealed that the
governments of the world were using BioSphere technology (i.e., the research
into self-contained, self-supporting environments) to construct bolt-holes to
be used in the event of the Earth becoming unable to support life. The powers
that be had recognised that planet death was a possibility and they had begun
to sink bunkers from which they might administer the world’s death-throes. The
argument was the same as had been used during the Cold War. The
responsibilities of the civil authorities remain unaffected by global
catastrophe. Though the public might be dead, their interests would not go
unrepresented.

Concerned
individuals the world over reacted in horror to this revelation. If those in
power were actively anticipating and preparing for life after Eco-death, then
the situation was clearly horribly serious. Even the most complacent began to
realise that the Earth was in terrible danger, and a vast and furious
groundswell of public opinion grew up. The immorality of those in power,
preparing to survive Eco-death rather than prevent it, was clear to all. The
fact that BioSpheres cost millions of dollars to construct, hence placing them
beyond the reach of all but governments and the most stupidly rich, fuelled
righteous indignation.

This
was the chance the Environmentalists had been looking for: clear proof that
those in control accepted the reality of the approaching catastrophe.

‘When
the rats prepare to leave, you can be sure the ship is sinking,’ thundered a
very young Jurgen Thor in his first appearance as leader of Natura. It was a
speech which rang round the world.

‘These
despicable individuals are preparing their escape! Their rat runs!’ the big
Norwegian declaimed. ‘Having first destroyed the Earth by their greed and
irresponsibility, these human rodents seek to escape the dreadful consequences
of their actions.’

Such
was the horror this idea engendered, that people finally began to demand real
action on the environment. Sustainable 
development became politically
fashionable and for a time it seemed that, as if out of evil (the BioSphere
alternative) had come forth good, the craven self-interest of the few had
spurred the many to action.

Then
the price of BioSphere technology began to drop.

 It
always happens. Pocket calculators started off as luxury items; a decade later
they were giving them away with petrol. One day, the first back-garden Claustrosphere
went on the market and the Earth was in big trouble. At first the threat seemed
small. The unit was still pretty pricey and its life support systems basic and
uninviting. It required a quarter of an acre of good firm land under a
sixty-metre geodesic dome. It could provide water and air and recycle human
waste, but that was all. It didn’t offer a night and day cycle and nothing
could be grown. The food supply was just a hundred years of military ‘C’
rations. Hardly an appetising prospect.

It
didn’t take long though.

 Techno-research
that had been sold to the public as pertaining to some future trip to Mars was
employed on Earth. A five-year secret development was undertaken in the Arizona
desert. When the pioneers emerged from their exile with a tray of hot muffins
freshly baked from BioDough, raised within the dome, the first true
Claustrosphere was ready to market.

Plastic
Tolstoy called it Eden One.

The
initial ads were a teaser campaign. They featured Rodin’s thinker pondering an
apple, and the caption was a simple, bald statement: ‘Think about it.’

Plastic
loved an enigmatic little come-on.

Think
about the Earth, think about the apple, think about Eden, think about the
future. It’s all there in the one image. It’s brilliant, though I say it who
shouldn’t.’

 Next
came an apple that was also a globe. ‘The Earth is in danger!’ screamed the
caption, ‘Recycle! Join Greenpeace! Buy
a
Claustrosphere!’ That had been Plastic’s strategy in the early days, to equate
Claustrosphere with the concerned individual. One per cent of the cover price
of an Eden One went directly to the Worldwide Fund for Nature.

All
that had been nearly forty years ago. Now, both Claustrosphere and Plastic
Tolstoy were huge on a scale which the multi-nationalists and media moguls of
the twentieth century could only have imagined. Tolstoy had fulfilled his
dream, and he owned the very news and entertainment services which delivered
his messages.

At
heart, though, he was still just a salesman. Which is why, big though he was,
he was standing in his kitchen, watching a stricken oil tanker on the news and
personally bawling out his staff for allowing some donut commercial to get
between him and the proper exploitation of an environmental disaster.

Chapter
Five

A spy unmasked

The
man who talked too much.

Judy was being hoisted off
the stricken tanker. Nathan was stuck with the private cops outside the Beverly
Hills Fortified Village. Tolstoy was in his kitchen, giving his people hell,
and Rosalie Connolly, a Mother Earth unit leader, or terrorist, as Tolstoy
would have called her, was standing in a California desert.

An
Irish girl of twenty-five, she carried great responsibilities on her young
shoulders, for it was her job to save the world. Not on her own, of course.
Mother Earth was a large organisation and, despite being a unit leader, Rosalie
was by no means particularly senior. None the less, saving the world is a big
job, even if you have help, and the romantic, slightly mystical girl who had
joined Youth Natura at the age of ten had grown into a tough and cynical
individual. Rather tougher and more cynical than she would have liked to have
been had the world been different.

But the
world, of course, is never different. Nothing ever is, and Rosalie had a nasty
little job to do before she and her team could depart in the large
personnel-carrying helicopter that stood waiting for them.

Shackleton,
her tough ex-marine second in command, was priming the charges on the
detonators when Rosalie approached him.

He
nodded at her, she nodded at him, there was a pause, then she put a gun to his
temple.

‘Mr
Shackleton, I believe you are an FBI spook and I think I may have to kill you.’

Rosalie
was right. The man was an agent, although in a very different mould to Judy
Schwartz. This man’s name was Cruise and he was tall and tough and rugged and
handsome. He was also one of the bullies who had tormented Judy, having been in
the same training team. Cruise and the guys had regularly given Judy and the
other nerds surreptitious dead-legs during forensics classes and compared their
dick sizes unfavourably with a .22 slug from a ladies’ handgun.

Rosalie,
of course, knew nothing of this, but had she done so, she would have liked
Cruise even less, which was saying something because she did not like him at
all. She had suspected him from the day he had joined them, ostensibly fresh
from service against loggers in South America. The man had just talked too
bloody green.

‘Sometimes
I think it’s my own environmental impotence that makes me most angry,’
Shackleton (or Cruise) would say as they sat around the fire at night, while
everyone else was trying to talk about sport or sex.

‘I
mean, the logging is ten times worse than the press admit and the defoliants
are so deep into the water table they’re never going to come out. .

The man
was a complete bore. Greener than green, whiter than white and holier than
thou. It was like he’d found God, started therapy and given up smoking all on
the same day; he just wouldn’t shut up.

‘God,
Shackleton goes on, doesn’t he?’ other members of the team would remark to one
another. ‘I don’t think I can stand it much longer, let’s turn him in to the
Feds.’

But
Rosalie was beginning to fear that Mr Dull
was
a Fed.

Most
Mother Earth activists had been in environmental politics so long they never
discussed it. What was the point of talking about planet death? It was too
depressing and everybody felt the same way about it anyway, so why go on? There
was nothing worse than a bunch of self-righteous zealots sitting round the bean
casserole, all nodding in agreement and going, ‘Yeah, doesn’t it make you so
angry? I mean it’s just
unbelievable!
Don’t you think?’

At one
point, the problem of endless talking about the environment had actually begun
to have a seriously destructive effect on the whole Environmental Movement.
People were forever getting trapped into spending entire evenings agreeing with
each other. It was beginning to affect recruitment. The syndrome became known
as ‘green discussion fatigue’ and so many potential fighters had drifted away
as a result of it that eventually it became an unwritten rule within the
Environmental Movement that you did not discuss the environment. Therefore,
when an ostensibly experienced activist turned up in her unit, stating the
bloody obvious about Eco-Armageddon over and over again, Rosalie was
immediately suspicious.