Part 18 (1/2)

Ric stood for a long time seeing Penny in repose. Even thus she seemed unrelaxed and tired. He thought she should go with Thea to Psathi immediately. He and Hep would cope with the AG with Marina's a.s.sistance. But he knew she would not go now. Perhaps if she could finally get over Alexander she would feel things were more able to be handled. He could only hope.

Chapter 7.

If the manager of the surprisingly large and elegant Olympia Hotel, tucked away among the larger 'thirties' villas, off the North Circular in North Hendon, was surprised to be chosen as a venue for a three-day international conference of 'shoe manufacturers' he did not show it. New reception staff booked-in some highly recognisable members of the Advisory Group, as the manager and all of his usual staff enjoyed an unexpected holiday. Marina's people had recently been taken on as temporary staff to service the conference with all its needs for food, 'phone calls, faxes and email communications. Only people in Marina's pay would get near any of the guests. The hotel was discretely located and the Thatcher Suite, was ideal for small private conferences.

As usual, Penny and Ric were on hand to greet the guests for drinks at the first evening session, before the admirable dinner. The guests were cut off from the rest of the world, and closely guarded by Marina's staff. No one entered or left without her knowledge.

The guests filtered in from their rooms, clearly pleased to see each other. There was much hugging, kissing and hand clasping. It was a quite different atmosphere from the early meeting which set up 'Operation Denial'. Although members of the group met each other from time to time at functions and gossip-worthy sporting and artistic events; only at this gathering were they able to lower their guard and be themselves without playing a role. They were in constant touch with GAIANET and monitored by Ric and Hep but telecommunications, were a poor subst.i.tute for flesh and blood contact. Electronic contact would never be quite the real thing. Penny was revived in spirit by the presence of these hand-picked people. For the next two to three days she would have her energy recharged by people in tune with herself and Ric. The only missing person was Alexander, a thought she quickly put from her.

It was a unique gathering, dedicated to reframing commerce and industry to ensure mutual balance between the needs of people and a more easily maintained sustainability of the earth's resources - but with the financial muscle to make a difference. They were not merely urging corporations and governments to try and change things at some indefinable time in the future. They were activists in a.s.sociation who deployed great financial, social and technical strength. This was the phenomenon of the now dispersed but highly active JNO.

They knew the vast wealth they had 'inherited' from the break up of the Dodona's enterprises gave them an edge and their access to HIGO and the resources of GRADE, put them ahead of other interest groups. Between them and with Ric's information they influenced modifications and productive capacities in the biggest commercial conglomerates on earth. In six short years this group had become the unknown back-room of the planet.

The first phase of Operation Denial was complete. Their success, came largely from the element of surprise. While it was not possible to siphon billions of dollars of profits from oil, s.h.i.+pping, and money transactions without detection and re-deploy them without causing problems which would give them away; they had got away with a significant amount of re-deployment and were still in control - just. While some observers had always been suspicious of the Dodona empire, a few of the more a.s.siduous were beginning to smell a conspiracy, not yet identified but unseen in the background.

Penny and Ric moved among their guests saying their h.e.l.los. Hep and Marina were in a sealed room recording the whole event for a.n.a.lysis. Marina was searching for any dissonance's which might betray total trust. Hep was after the overview to feed into HIGO.

At the oval conference-table in the centre of the room, each place was rigged with an videophone. These were encrypted and linked by JNO's private satellite to the internet and were connected to a large monitor visible to all. They were also coupled to HIGO and GAIANET. All the delegates could communicate instantaneously with each other and anyone, anywhere in the world. All information, incoming and outgoing, was simultaneously interpreted by HIGO.

Clapping her hands for attention over the steady hubbub, Penny brought the group to order. When everyone was a.s.sembled for business she flashed the agenda on the screen. No paper ever exchanged hands, nothing was recorded except by HIGO. Marina insisted on this simple precaution.

As on all previous occasions, Ric as chairman opened the proceedings. The meetings of the AG were informal and allowed time for people to find their own ways into the meat of the discussions and decisions. Ric, pushed the electrical paraphernalia in front of him slightly to one side and remaining in his seat addressed the group informally.

'I suppose it sounds trite to say this, but it's a privilege to sit here with you at these meetings and particularly at this time. Our coming together becomes more and more important and the more crucial it becomes, the more difficult it is for each of you. So I want you to know that we are fully aware of the problems many of you have experienced merely getting away from your work; finding time in your busy calendars and putting up with the intricate security arrangements dreamed up by the indomitable Marina. At least I can a.s.sure you of the quality of the food and I hope you are comfortable. We think we have thought of most things to make this conference as easy and convenient as possible, but as you know, each time it gets that bit harder to ensure success. Should you need anything, any of us will be pleased to try and meet your requirements. That said, I have one piece of news I could not impart electronically as it has to be for your ears only. It is that Lucina Dodona has asked to spend a little time with you tomorrow morning - if that's okay with you of course?'

He waited to see the reaction to this announcement. They were all aware the Dodona's were central to their work as a group through the fortunes of the enterprises they, or through them, their princ.i.p.als manipulated. Apart from Penny and Matsuko Morii, none of the members had met either of the Dodona's. A visit from Lucina was a significant event not to be missed.

'Before anyone asks why she is coming, the answer is that none of us know any more than she has made a simple request to share a small amount of our time. I am as much on tenterhooks as yourselves. Until then I ask you not to speculate pointlessly. Not that that will stop you,'

There was polite laughter, 'But honestly we have no idea and can only wait. We have already been pointlessly speculating for twenty-four hours longer than you have and it's done us no good so far.'

Another polite laugh went round the table.

'Can I take it that there is no objection to her coming?' He searched the listening faces and was struck as always by the sense of satisfaction he felt at the energy and the poise of the members. These were important and influential people in their own worlds. The highest of high-flyers. Whenever they met outside the group they behaved as themselves and on their own terms. Here, by contrast, they were a team; their own needs and desires sublimated or linked to achieve joint goals.

He thought it a miracle of Penny's commitment that each one of them shared her unshakeable desire to bring harmony into the world as an objective over and above any of their personal ambitions or those of their firms or countries. They knew the dangers and costs of acting independently. Of taking complex initiatives often against the direct interests of their employers, colleagues or friends. Even though they did it for ideals beyond personal or corporate ambitions, if detected they each would be ruined. That they believed they should act together in this way; was a major connecting strand that kept them involved. None of them gained anything personally in terms of worldly power, influence or reward from their activities with JNO - but they changed things. Many of the original, now defunct advisory group, had believed their a.s.sociation with the Dodona empire would be good for their own enterprises and or social standing and left when they realised they had to put more in more and more resources than they would ever take out, and expose themselves to ever greater risks. Of the several hundred candidates and early members screened by Marina; those a.s.sembled here were the best of them.

They could be trusted to seek out like-minded people and nurture them as supporters. Each member of the group represented at least a hundred other individuals on a first ring of a network, like ripples in a pond, each of the hundred were in touch with another hundred and so on to the outer limits; where it was harder to see the connections even though they existed. Not even the group knew how many they influenced, but it must have been tens of thousands, probably millions. The development of the information super-highway enabled their influence to reach further than ever possible before - millions were linked unknowingly to HIGO through this small selected gathering.

In response to Ric's question Dov Krajowa the grizzled old Sabra, asked ironically, a half-smile hovering on his strongly hewn face, 'I thought the Dodona's were a law unto themselves. Don't they go where they like?'

'True,' answered Penny. 'And it is as a mark of her respect that she first asks our permission. As you know our work now reaches a critical point. The Dodona's have long waited for this time and it is our belief Lucina Dodona wants to check where we have got to for herself.'

'What's the exact nature of your relations.h.i.+p with her Penny?' asked Doris Botham. 'I know you were Executive Chairman of JNO for many years and a partner, but since JNO, well - broke up, I've been meaning to ask you for a long time but it didn't seem important as long as GRADE was sh.e.l.ling out....but her coming here like this...well it begs certain questions about our relations.h.i.+p with the ...what shall I call it...the 'mother company' springs to mind.' Doris smiled her nicest smile.

At first glance she personified homespun Britain. A motherly figure, no more than five feet two, almost as round as she was tall, her little legs hardly reached the floor of the solid armchairs provided by the hotel for the additional comfort of their conference guests. Despite her fifty-five years her face had maintained a smooth roundness and her hair, expertly cut, framed large, intelligent, piercing, cobalt-blue eyes. She had never married, wedded to her work and her politics, she was however, against all appearance by no means the innocent figure she seemed. As Chief Secretary to the Ministry of Industry, Trade and Innovation in the UK Government. She also chaired Europe's standing committee on trade and industry. Her strategic intellect and fearsome homing instinct for the phoney and the spurious in human endeavour had killed off many who thought to benefit from the support of either governmental body. Her staff called her the smiling a.s.sa.s.sin. Many who accepted on face value her 'b.u.t.ter wouldn't melt in her mouth' demeanour, later found themselves totally undone without being at all aware, until too late, of the ruthlessness of her decisive genius.

Penny smiled back, 'dear Doris, I wish I really knew. When you meet her you will form your own judgement. To be honest I don't ask and never have. She, as you say, enables GRADE to keep 'sh.e.l.ling out' and that's the main thing.'

'I don't think there is any value in this conversation continuing any further,' Matsuko Morii trilled in her soft, clear voice. 'Madame Dodona will make it entirely clear why she comes. Penny's relations.h.i.+p is not an issue, as you will discover when you meet her. I can say that I have met Madame several times in recent years, and I say you do not have a relations.h.i.+p with her, she has one with you. There is no more to be said - wait and discuss this after her visit, if you still have need.'

This comment was met by a silence during which Doris continued to smile sweetly and which Ric believed meant that Matsuko's statement might or might not be the last to be made in relation to the forthcoming visit. Not wanting any important threads left dangling he adressed the point and speaking to Matsuko said, 'Okay - Fine, an interesting experience to come. Thank you Matsuko.' He turned to Doris. 'Is that alright with you? I felt you might want to know more from Penny. Do you have any reservations about our relations.h.i.+p with JNO or any other of the princ.i.p.als?'

As if to clear her head, Doris coquettishly shook her hair and smoothed it back with her two hands. Her bell-like voice filled the room without being too loud. It was impossible to do anything but pay attention when she spoke.

'We all know we are at a watershed. What happens next will make all the difference to our success or failure. Look, on one level I don't have any problems with it either way. If we succeed then my dreams will be fulfilled (and while I don't know what that would do to me personally, it will certainly be a time for universal rejoicing). If we fail I will go on ploughing my furrow as I always have. Things will be slower, more damage will occur, I probably will lose more in the end than I will gain in terms of real success but I will have the satisfaction of having done my best according to my abilities. You can't ask for more than that. But on another level, I have to say what alarms me is the fact of the Dodona's being at the back of things. When all this began several years ago, I was too pre-occupied with getting things done and the thought of being able to manipulate events from the wings was, so to speak, too enticing. Like, getting the Euro linked to the Dollar and the Yen to make what is now essentially a world currency, took all my and other people's time and well...you know the effect of more or less taking out the money traders from the world scene. But without the Dodona fortune, it could not have been done. I now realise I don't know these people. I a.s.sume they share our aims or they wouldn't put such resources at our disposal. But what's in it for them? It's a question I ought to have put at the beginning, and I'm not sure why I didn't - why any of us didn't!' She turned her penetrating blue eyes on Penny and continued. 'And if you don't know Penny, who does?'

Penny felt a strong need to answer but knew she had nothing to say that would satisfy Doris. She sensed correctly the others were equally as interested in her response. She again faced the feeling that Lucina had another agenda as well as her own. Her basic honesty was driving her to answer Doris' reasonable question with her own inability to grasp their ultimate motives. Her more considered response was to utter some plat.i.tude about all of them sharing the same goals, but was afraid she would sound insincere. Doris had asked the question deliberately, and Penny was sure her reply was vital. Any hesitation would also be read by the group as an evasion, whatever she said afterwards. Before she was however, able to say anything, she was grateful to be rescued by Ric, who, without a glance in her direction, simply interposed, 'I think You'd better wait for Lucina Dodona, and put the question to her. I think it's a question none of us should speculate about, not even Penny.' He paused for a long two seconds and in view of the silence he continued by introducing the business agenda. Doris smiled ever so sweetly at him.

'The first item is my report from the GAIANET work since the last meeting. You should have been receiving coded information directly. We think that with the speed of change now developing, this method of disseminating information to you is outmoded and potentially insecure. We have therefore, devised a direct link to HIGO which you can only access with a special programme. This is written in a new form of computer language which you can voice or type into your PC's and which is coded differently for each of you so that HIGO will automatically know who is doing the accessing. Any unauthorised user will get nothing from HIGO and it will recognise rogue equipment and automatically destroy the memory of an unauthorised computer which tries to make contact. The personal code programme will be given to you while you are here and we require you to memorise your own. It's not very long. Any questions?' There were none.

Right, if you will be so good as to notice the screen, I will take you through the developments in the time since we last met. The first set of diagrams shows HIGO's interpretation of the overall effect of our collective work since we began.'

Ric threw onto the screen a series of overlapping graphs figures and patterns which lasted for about an hour.

The overall effect clearly showed the extent of the multiple crises of social and ecological change acting and reacting. The series on global warming alone, showed the actual effect on the polar ice-caps and rising sea-levels, coastal inundation, together with s.h.i.+fting weather patterns. These were linked to the human and financial costs of hurricanes, severe cold-snaps, excessive summer heat-waves, changes in desertification, insurance costs, employment changes, new dust-bowl areas from soil erosion, deforestation, s.h.i.+fts in the production patterns of oil and electricity, the effects of acid-rain - and so on. The next set of screens traced the changes of industrialisation on society and the ecology of the earth from the early nineteenth-century to the beginnings of the twenty-first and projected several alternative scenarios for the next hundred years. The conclusions of all this a.n.a.lysis were inescapable and simple. While production of raw-materials, foodstuffs, and economic growth used the marketplace as a natural regulator, there was simply not enough time for human ingenuity to come up with sufficient antidotes to the existing consequences of the ignorance and greed of previous and current generations before the conditions for human life on the planet as it was now lived; became simply untenable. The consequences of global warming alone included the dual catastrophe of a drying out of the American Mid-Western grain-belt together with an inundation of coastal agricultural lands amounting to a third of all global cropland. This linked to the current difficulty of feeding the rising world population, was only one of many socially explosive ingredients. Then there was the addition of the destruction by the permanent flooding of the Egyptian and Banglades.h.i.+ Deltas. Other screens dealt with the social and ecological effects of pollution, growing amounts of indestructible nuclear waste, the effect of global agricultural production and land owners.h.i.+p and the effect of all this on economic and social life. Interestingly, a hypothetical scenario slipped in by GAIANET showing the time-scale for the earth to rehabilitate herself naturally, a.s.suming people were wiped out, coincided with the critical date to reverse the worst ravages of the industrialised world.

The year which acted as the pivotal point of no return was set by the computer as 2012. For reasons best known to itself, it gave a twenty five year caveat as leeway.

Mo Chu of the Chinese Food and Agriculture Commission, sitting on the left of Chieko Terakoa of Taiwan s.h.i.+pping, with whom he was on very good terms despite the att.i.tudes of his Government, ostentatiously cleared his throat. He was everything a Mandarin might be expected to be. Tall, dressed impeccably in a Saville Row suit and tailor made s.h.i.+rt, his elongated frame seemed to thrust his long head in a majestic rise from the loose confines of his high collar. He was almost completely bald, with deep set eyes, cadaverous cheeks and an enormous Adam's apple which danced as he spoke a too impeccable English with no hint of an accent, despite having learned the language entirely abroad.

'My dear Ricardo, do you mean to say that the world as we know it is to come to an end in such a short time. Because, if I may say so, this puts the wondrous GAIANET system into the same category as many other 'earth-enders', if I may put it so. I cannot believe this is a prediction of certainty. Surely you would not presume to be so absurd.'

'It could be true,' said Piotre Ulybin of Moscow Oil. 'If you take it all together and if you don't take into account our current work - I take it Ric that this information doesn't take into consideration the collective work of this group. Of course I don't either believe the year 2012 is any more than convenient stab at a watershed time - a computer simulation of prediction based on limited information. I agree with Chu here, to take literally would be absurd.'

Ric scanned the a.s.sembly and spoke in the same quiet even tones he had been using so far. He wanted to keep emotion out of the discussion for as long as possible. The facts which he knew would be pouring from GAIANET once HIGO delivered the interpreted work of the group would make it difficult to keep things calm later on.

'No, I don't take it literally Piotre, but neither Chu, do I think it absurd. But if you will bear with me, I want to leave such considerations on the back-burner for now. We need to feed into the machine the finer details of your experience of the last months. If the indications are right you may well be at the point of turning the tide. By the end of tomorrow morning's session I want us to have a clearer picture of the potential for change you have initiated, contrasted with the predictions of GAIANET. I am not however certain that 2012 is a bad year for us nevertheless. - I notice however colleagues that it is dinner time. I suggest we adjourn to the dining room and continue afterwards with your own inputs.'

The dinner was excellent but regrettably for several, without alcohol. Minds needed to be kept sharp. They were there to work and given the tight time-frame, through the night and into the next day if necessary. It would not be the first time, and given the current scenario, it probably would not be the last. When the members were again seated after the meal, there began a brief input from each of the partic.i.p.ants in turn. They were recorded by GAIANET and interpreted by HIGO. In much the same way as the bottom line of a spread-sheet changes as information is changed on the grid, so the interpretations of HIGO changed the predictions of GAIANET. The burning question was whether the inputs would change the sixty four thousand dollar date of 2012. Or despite whatever they did, would it remain inexorably the same?

Three themes gradually developed. The production of mineral and vegetable resources; ecological consequences; and social and political effects. Several trends connected to these themes interwove, as each member spent about fifteen minutes indicating the current effects of their work as they saw it. Screens flashed over and over as members checked new information against their own and up-dated effects. All the time HIGO re-interpreted the three main themes and all eyes kept re-checking the 2012 date as it changed as new information was fed into it - sometimes lengthening, sometimes shortening.

The last speaker, Lynne Farrell had been working on digital telecommunications. After many boardroom and stock exchange battles, her international corporation, Sydney Communications, now dominated the international digital TV and telephone networks. While the internet remained free territory, SYDCOM could exercise control over nearly all the server systems and although it would take a computer genius all his time and several thousand million dollars to funnel everything into GAIANET. Lynne was getting into position to link nearly three-quarters of the population of the earth directly to JNO's computer at Markham at Penny's instruction; but not for some considerable time. When asked how long, she could not yet answer. This news had the effect of bringing the date back from 2043 to 2015.

At the end of the session there was a hubbub of conversation. Ric allowed people to talk freely for a good half-hour and when the conversations subsided a little he called them back to order.

'Ladies and gentlemen, as you see there is a terrifying inevitability binding our work to the approximate 2012 date. It seems that if we are unable to accomplish the changes for which we strive, after 2012, the earth will have gone beyond the point where its self-regulatory mechanisms can permanently restore it to full historical functioning. After 2012 it will always be less of itself and there will follow a slow but inexorable decline of the optimum conditions for human life. If we cannot modify this scenario we will have failed in our task. If we remain on course it is still possible we can just about change things in time. However our current predictions rest entirely on the interpretation of this model of events - as if they were to go along in the present pattern and this we know is unlikely.

Before the visit from Lucina Dodona we must therefore concentrate on worst case scenarios and how they can be offset. I suggest we now retire as it's three am and resume at eight a.m. to prepare for Madame Dodona's visit'.