them report to you in Xanadu. From now on I think you will find your duties more to your liking up here at the resort. Just be sure to come and see me as soon as you get in/
'I'm on it/ the thin man said. And under his breath, when the phone went dead: 'What are you — some kind of mind-reader? But anyway, you're right — that's just exactly what I wanted to hear after a day spent sweltering in all this heat, sweating my balls off, watching, waiting, and trying not to look suspicious. Shitty work, in weather like this. But up there at the Pleasure Dome..
… Up at the Pleasure Dome, he thought, putting the car in first and turning out of the parking lot, life is sheer luxury! The pools, the broads in their bikinis, the good food and drink — even the casino, huh! — where I can spend my money almost as fast, or faster, than Mr fucking Milan pays me! And he grinned.
But on the other hand, no one could call Milan mean. Garth Santeson, a private investigator for twenty years and then some, had never had it so good. What? Milan, mean? No way! Shady, definitely — how else would you describe a guy who only ever comes out at night? But never mean — hell, no! The way Aristotle Milan throws money around, it's like… like tomorrow there'll be no use for it!
Never knowing just how close he had come to the truth, and in more respects than one, Santeson headed his battered vehicle for the ring road south around Brisbane. Then he would look for the signpost for the town of Beaudesert, which would put him on a heading for the Macpherson Range right on the border with New South Wales. Eighty miles of good road, and he'd be up into the mountains, yes. And finally Xanadu…
On the way into town, Jake said, 'Now I remember!'
'What you were dreaming about?' said Lardis Lidesci.
'Eh?' Jake looked at him.
'On the plane, you were dreaming about something. When Liz woke you up you couldn't remember.'
Jake shook his head. 'No, not that,' he said. 'I'm talking about Brisbane — I'm remembering about this place. Looking down on the city from the chopper, I thought it looked too neat, too new. Well, that's because it is new.'
Jake and Lardis were travelling in the first limo with the team's top technicians, a pair of young, whizz-kid computer and communications types who were fully-fledged members of E-Branch but not espers as such. One of these, Jimmy Harvey — a compact, prematurely bald man of perhaps twenty-six, with lush red sideburns and bushy eyebrows that together were trying hard to make up for his baldness, grey, watery eyes, and a genius for electronics — wanted to know: 'Jake, where have you been hiding out these last three or four years? I mean, on the Richter Scale of national disasters, Brisbane's Great Fire of 2007 ranks several notches higher than the sinking of the Titanic, and very nearly as
high as Krakatoa!' There was little or nothing of sarcasm in Harvey's comment, just surprise.
Jake sighed, shrugged apologetically, and said, 'Yes, that was what I remembered. As for where I've been: mainly I've been doing my own thing. My world has been — I don't know — kind of a small place, for a long time. I've only had room for personal problems, things that I need to get sorted out.'
'Aye,' Lardis grunted. 'Your vow! I can understand that.'
'My vow?' Jake frowned at him. As usual, he found the old boy full of indecipherable statements. But now:
'In Sunside,' Lardis deciphered, 'when a man has something to do — a wrong that needs righting — he makes a vow, usually in public. And he holds to it until it's done. I made just such a vow one time, and it still isn't done. But if I can't be killing the bloodsucking bastards there, at least I'm helping to kill them here.'
Jimmy Harvey, despite that he wasn't privy to Jake's past, believed he'd got the drift of it. 'So how about you, Jake?' he said. 'You mentioned things you 'need' to get sorted out: present tense. So like Lardis, you're not finished yet, right?'
'Not quite, no,' Jake shook his head. 'But there's plenty of time yet.' And to change the subject: 'Why don't you tell me about Brisbane, fill in whatever it is I've missed?'
The other wasn't about to start prying; the one thing he'd learned in his time with the Branch was that these people hated to talk about their private lives almost as much as about their weird 'talents'. And as far as their powers were concerned: the majority didn't see them as bonuses at all, just extra baggage. Jake hadn't been around too long and was a new one on Harvey. Still, he was on the team and so must be an esper. Well, no one can be expert in everything. But… the Great Fire of Brisbane? Something like that had escaped his notice? Jake had to be pulling his leg. But he didn't look like he was. And so:
'It was about this time of year,' Harvey started out. 'And what do you know, 2007 was another El Nino year, just like this one — synchronicity, or something! Anyway, these freaky weather years have been coming around far too often. 1997—98, and again in 2002, and finally in 2007. And this current one, of course.
'In an El Nino the currents in the Pacific go all to hell. They circulate the wrong way, or something like that. The water gets warm where it should be cold, and vice versa. Since everything is connected to ocean temperatures — like, you know, the ecosystem? — the weather goes to hell in a bucket. Everywhere, everything, and everyone gets affected.
'Add to this the depletion of the rain forests, soil erosion, acid rains, holes in the ozone, the not-so-gradual melting of the ice caps, earthquakes, volcanoes blowing their tops left, right and centre… the whole thing seems symptomatic of planetary and climatic upheaval. Or maybe I should say 'seemed', past tense, because these aren't just symptoms I'm talking about but the actual disease. In short, we're in it up to our necks! And finally people are beginning to sit up and pay attention to the ecologists and environmentalists, the guys who used to get tagged as sensationalists and doomsayers.
'Back around 1997—98 was when it became really noticeable. Now, hey, we're only talking a time-span of maybe twelve or thirteen years here, but the speed at which things have changed you really wouldn't know it. Like, a thousand years worth of climatic damage packed into just a decade and a half?
'So, let's go back to the years leading up to and including 1997 and '98.
'The Antarctic pack ice had already started breaking into icebergs bigger than large English counties. There were grasses and mosses and flowers where before there'd only ever been ice. Similarly, in the Arctic, the sea ice was getting thinner every year, the so-called 'permanent' ice simply wasn't permanent any more, and the cap in general was shrinking. So, all that water had to go somewhere, right? My guess: into the air, the atmosphere, Jake. And as the old saying goes, what goes up must come down again — in precipitation. And brother, did we get rain!
'The Netherlands: flooded to hell… so badly that for a while it looked like all the major dams would go. Germany, and Poland: all the rivers breaking their banks. Greece: unseasonal hail, with hailstones as big as ping- pong balls that flattened the crops. The USA: Jesus, the Mississippi! All that water trying to get out of there, and God help anything that got in its way! And in '97, right here in Australia: first they had fires that scorched people out of their homes — destroying thousands of acres of prairie, woodlands, and national parks, and killing people, livestock, wildlife galore — and then monsoon rains to match anything the rest of the world had suffered. It was just crazy fucking weather!
'But the hell of it was, these were only warnings. The El Nirios are warnings; the melting ice is a warning, and likewise the ozone layer. Like planetwide alarms that have been sounding for a long, long time, all in vain because no one has been listening. Or rather, no one was listening to the ones who were listening…
'In the Far East, they wouldn't stop burning the rain forests. The Americans took the hump when people said their carbon dioxide emissions were off the scale… but they weren't half as snooty in the summer of '98 when Texas turned into a desert! Heat wave? They'd never seen anything like it! As for the Russians: well as usual they hid or disguised or denied any and all wrongdoings whatsoever. Huh! What else would you expect of the people who turned the Aral Sea into the Aral Pond… the folks with more toxic nuclear and chemical garbage per acre than most countries have per square mile! In E-Branch — during my three years with the Branch, anyway — we've been monitoring the hell out of the Russians. Ask Ben Trask about it some time.'
And Jake cut in, 'Well, at least I know something about all that: the way they dump their clapped-out subs, et cetera.'
'That's part of it,' Harvey agreed, 'but the rest of it is just as bad. Anyway, all that's away from the main subject, and in fact we were talking about—?'
'—The big fire,' Jake reminded him. 'Until you went a bit off track.'
Harvey nodded. 'Yeah, the Great Fire of Brisbane, 2007. It was around this time of year, and El Nino was up to its unusual tricks. The weather had been freakish everywhere, especially in the UK, England. For fifteen years the
