This Other Eden (8 page)

‘Your
arm’s on my hair,’ Krystal said gently. ‘It’s pulling my hair.’

Max
whispered an apology and shifted, making them both yelp loudly because their
skin had got stuck together and it hurt when Max moved his arm. Returning to
the business at hand, Max placed his mouth gently on Krystal’s and began to
tease her tongue with his. Moments later, like all couples, they had to stop
for a moment to fish the hair out of their mouths.

In all
the countless shows that Max had starred in, movies, Virtual Reality Reactive
Scenarios, Direct Input home entertainments, all the times he had been called
upon to plant huge lippy kisses on flaxen-haired beauties, never once had he
fished a hair out of his mouth.

He and
Krystal returned to their embrace. There was another yelp.

‘Do you
think perhaps you could take your watch off?’ Krystal inquired. ‘It’s in danger
of amputating one of my buttocks.’

Max’s
watch was a fully-equipped home entertainment centre with a library of ballgame
mini-vids and a six-pack of Dehydrated Budweiser. He took it off.

‘Thanks,’
said Krystal.

‘No, I
should have remembered,’ said Max, smiling his sweetest smile.

‘Oh, my
God,’ Krystal said, ‘what’s happened to your mouth?… Oh no, hang on, it’s
just my lipstick.’

On-screen,
of course, Krystal spent almost entire shows with her gums round some guy’s
plums and still had impeccable lip-gloss when she came up for air. Off-screen,
however, like any other woman she could smudge it eating a banana.

Slowly
the romance returned and the two lovers began to work their bodies against each
other until Krystal opened her thighs and allowed Max to slip between them.

‘For
old times’ sake, huh?’ she whispered.

Max
could not actually recall any old times but he was happy to believe there had
been some, and with one smooth, gentle motion, he entered her.

Except of
course he didn’t. That was what he did in the movies. In the movies, one lover
can gently enter another without so much as a guiding hand; without even
breaking the embrace, they just slide in. This is, of course, virtually
impossible. For a penis to simply glide into a vagina, whilst the lovers
involved continue a passionate embrace, would actually require a funnel. In
real life, people have to probe a bit.

‘Almost,’
Krystal breathed. ‘Down a bit, that’s it, nearly, no, up a bit, yes, a bit
more, nearly … No! Not there! Get out of there!’

Max
jerked back like a startled rabbit.

‘Sorry,
sorry, sorry, sorry!’ he gasped.

The
misunderstanding over, Krystal guided Max to the correct orifice and they
began, finally, to make love. And it was good. She gasped, he gasped, they both
gasped. Then they squelched.

It was
the old problem. When a man is on top of a woman and the sweat begins to flow,
the woman’s cleavage will often start to blow rasberries. It never happened in
movies, of course. Max had pumped his body up and down on top of countless
gorgeous actresses, Krystal had gasped and sweated beneath numerous bits of
thespian beefcake. Yet never once had a single cleavage so much as squeaked. In
the real world, however, it was a noise that had intruded on many an ecstatic
moment. It’s always a difficult decision, whether to refer to it or not.
Krystal always did.

‘Your
chest is making my tits fart,’ she said.

‘Yeah,
I know,’ replied Max.

‘I
could let some air out of them, maybe.’

‘No,
that wouldn’t work, it happens with little ones too. Try to forget it, OK?’

‘Yeah,
OK.’

So they
returned again to the matter in hand. Soon their passion began to take control
again. The gasping returned. He grunted, she squeaked. She squeaked, he
grunted. She arched her back, he plunged his hands under her buttocks.

‘Yes,’
she said. ‘Yes, yes, yes!’

‘Oh!’
he said. ‘Mh! Ah! Oooh!’

Krystal’s
body was dissolving, making ready to orgasm. As she got warmer and wetter, Max
thrust with ever greater passion. The inevitable happened. There was a squelch
that made Krystal’s cleavage sound positively polite.

‘Damn!
I hate it when my crotch makes that noise,’ said Krystal. ‘Sorry.’

‘It’s
me, too, I’m creating the vacuum,’ Max observed reasonably and nuzzled up to
Krystal’s ear. ‘Try not to think about it. It’s beautiful.’

‘Beautiful!
My crotch is blowing reveille and you’re saying it’s beautiful!’

‘Well,
it is.’

Krystal
liked Max’s attitude. She held him tighter, and gasping and squelching away,
they rushed towards climax and astonishingly it looked as if they were going to
reach the tape together. Nearly. Nearly. Gasp, squelch, squelch, gasp. Sadly,
at the last moment, as Krystal began to come and Max drew back for a last
glorious plunge … it came out and he banged it into her thigh, bending it
double and making him screech in pain.

‘Yes!’
said Krystal.

‘Ouch,’
said Max.

And so
the brief marriage ended, amicably, painfully and messily. Afterwards they had
a cup of coffee and discussed the upcoming divorce.

‘Who
shall we sell the story to?’ Krystal asked

‘Well,
I’m having lunch with my agent at the studio. I’ll have a talk with her about
it, she’ll get us a good price.’

So Max
headed into Hollywood for lunch at the DigiMac Studio commissary. Which was,
as it happens, where Rosalie and her team of Eco-terrorists were heading in
their helicopter.

Meanwhile,
far away in Europe, where the morning was early evening, the man often
celebrated as the last sane person on Earth was addressing the European
parliament on the subject of environmental destruction. To emphasise his
arguments, live footage of the Alaskan oil tanker disaster was playing on
screens hung about the Grand Chamber. The same disaster which Plastic Tolstoy
was watching in his kitchen and above which Judy Schwartz was hanging on a winch,
still puzzling over the surprising nature and extent of the ruptures in the
tanker’s sides.

Chapter Seven

A gunpowder plot

The
House that Jacques built.

Jurgen Thor stood, massive
and imposing, behind the marble podium inside the magnificent European
Federation Parliament building in Brussels.

The
place had only been open a week. It had been scheduled to open fifteen years
ago but, having been designed by a committee of architects from all thirty-six
Federal States, it had overrun somewhat. Also, and for the same reason, there
were no toilets. No country was prepared to take responsibility for so mundane
an area. No proud Euro Head of State was going to be the one who had to stand
before that great, imposing repulsive marble palace and say, ‘Our man did the
bogs.’

There
were no cloakrooms either, no kitchens, no committee rooms and no offices, just
thirty-six Grand Chambers. Everybody had wanted to design the Grand Chamber
and in the end everybody did. The Palace of Peace and Profit (for such was the
Euro building’s name) was almost three square kilometres of Grand Chamber.
Thirty-six Grand Chambers contained within an edifice of such striking horror
that children ran crying in fear to their mothers’ arms after a single glance
at it. If an infinite number of monkeys were given an infinite amount of
graphic design equipment, never, in an infinite number of years, could they
have designed such a stupid and repulsive building. But then that could have
been said about most of the new buildings in the thrusting modern Europe.

The
Palace stood in the centre of what had been beautiful Brussels, mile upon mile
of marble and precious hardwoods almost entirely obscured from view by the ring
of Portaloos that surrounded it. As it happened, the Portaloos were not really
necessary because there were so many statues, fountains and frescos symbolising
the Euro ideals of peace, liberty and buggering the rest of the world’s trade,
that it was a simple matter, even for female delegates, to find some large
symbolic lump behind which to relieve themselves.

Jurgen
points the finger.

The European Federation
had invited Jurgen Thor to address the opening session of the Palace because it
wanted to demonstrate to the world Europe’s continued commitment to defending
the 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 spokesperson, had even been formed. ‘I am the champion for all living
things, OK? You dig it?’ he had said and, hopeless though his battle sometimes
seemed, the world could not have had a more convincing champion.

Green
God.

Jurgen Thor was almost too
good to be true. From his great mane of shaggy golden hair to his enormous
sixteen-hole, tan leather Timberland work boots he was more God than man. His
gimlet-sharp clear grey eyes could puncture a politician across a hundred-metre
conference room. They were more than just piercing, they were armour-piercing,
and a thousand women had felt the prick.