A fan spoke up. "Carrot for me, too. The dinosaurs lived during a greenhouse era, didn't they?"
A voice spoke from the doorway. "Pros get first choice. This is the Meet the Readers Party, right?"
Lutenist nodded as if there had been no interruption. "Dinosaurs, and the Great Mammals, too. In fact, prior to the Pleistocene the world was quite warm. Hippopotami wallowed in the Thames."
He paused a moment. When he continued, half a dozen voices spoke in unison with him. "Then, in the blink of a geological eye, they were replaced by polar bears."
Lutenist beamed.
Alex looked to Sherrine. "What--"
She laughed. "Some of us have heard Gregory before."
Cucumbers, celery, carrots, luxuries beyond his wildest dreams were cradled in Alex's arms. He couldn't eat; he had to share this with the whole room; and he couldn't get his hands on any of it without dropping the tray. Little dark red spheres, little bright red spheres with white inside, were displayed on big green leaves. Where were they with that damn table?
Badges were showing on various chests. Here were tiny oil paintings of alien creatures and landscapes and starscapes, or wheel-shaped and band-shaped artificial habitats infinitely more sophisticated than Mir and Freedom. A few badges bore angular cartoon faces and elegant calligraphy: CLOSET MUNDANE. KNOWS HARLAN ELLISON (evil smirk. HAS READ MUCH OF DHALGREN (bewilderment).
Lutenist continued. "Human history is so short that, living between the hippopotamus and the polar bear, we thought those conditions were 'normal.'
"After the sun went out, the interglacial ended and the world grew colder and drier. The Saraha rivers dried up, one by one, until only the Nile was left. By 1500 BC, the Scandinavian tree line had dropped to six thousand feet, and broad-leaf trees had disappeared from the Arctic.
"The weather changed. The North African coast was the breadbasket of the Roman Empire. It began to dry up. Great migrations began, Huns, Arabs, Navajos, Mongols. There were Viking colonies on Greenland, but the Greenland Glacier began to move south, until it covered them all."
"Tell you another one," the man in the bush jacket said.
"Go ahead, Wade," Lutenist said.
Sherrine looked around. "Wade Curtis. A pro."
"Writer?" Gordon asked. She nodded.
Curtis's voice boomed even in the large room. "In the American Revolutionary War, Colonel Alexander Hamilton brought cannon captured by Ethan Allen at Ticonderoga down to assist General Washington in Haarlem Heights. He brought them across the ice on the frozen Hudson River. By the twentieth century, the Hudson didn't freeze at all, let alone hard enough to carry cannon on!"
Lutenist smiled agreement. "Right! The Little Ice Age was coming to an end! In fact, a warming trend had started around 1200, and lasted for eight centuries. Anyone know why?"
"Hey, let's eat!" someone called.
"Let him finish," Curtis growled. He drained his beer. A bearded man behind him silently handed him another.
Lutenist stabbed a hand into the air. "Why?"
Someone in the audience responded. "Because a farmer doesn't give up his land."
"That's right, Beth. Farmers! Hunters run, which is what our ancestors did during the Thirty-Fifth Ice Age. But the five hundred million settled and civilized humans of the thirteenth century were not going to pull up stakes and move elsewhere. London, Copenhagen, even Moscow were too valuable to abandon. So what did they do?" He used and stared around the audience.
Several responded in unison. "They threw another log on the fire!"
Lutenist beamed. "Exactly! They fought the cold with heat, soot and CO2. Air pollution!"
"Smudge pots," Curtis growled.
Right, Lutenist shouted. "Smudge pots! Greenhouse effect!"
"Pollution, poll-ooo-tion," someone sang.
Everyone shouted. "Jenny! And Harry!"
"The moonbeam's here!"
Alex painfully twisted around to see. The two people who came in through the archway were matched in clothes and height, but in nothing else. The man was enormous, broad of shoulders, large of chest, and much larger of belly. He wore a battered slouch hat, and an oil-stained denim jacket. His boots clumped on the floor. Over one shoulder was slung a huge guitar case. In his hands he carried two nylon bags that clinked as he walked. He set the bags down and opened one, took out a jar, opened it and sipped at the clear liquid. "Finest corn squeezin's Kansas ever produced!" He handed the jar to Curtis.
The woman called Jenny was as tall as Harry, but thin. Her skin might have been leather. Her hair was long and straight, and dead silver-gray. The eyes burned brightly out of the wrinkles. She carried a guitar, but she wasn't playing it. "Don't drink the water, and don't breathe the air!" she sang.
Mike got up from his place on the floor. "We'd given upon you two," he said.
"Bike broke down in Wyoming," Jenny said. "Had to sing for our suppers. Some things you can't sing, though…"
Harry struck a chord. "It's minus ten and counting, and time is passing fast, it's minus ten and counting-"
"O God, don't," Curtis said. The room was still for a moment.
"Yeah," Jenny said. "And you can't sing 'A Fire in the Sky'--"
An older man went over to her and eyed her belligerently. "I know you. Jenny Trout."
"We do NOT use real names," Jenny said.
"You're a goddamned feminist," the man insisted. "What the hell are you doing here--"
He was interrupted by Wade Curtis, who roared with laughter. "Adams, you know Jenny! Sure, the feminists won, they're running the government along with--God almighty. But think about it, she's too damn much anarchist to be inside the government! Any government. Even a Green-Feminist government."
"I'm no goddam Green," Jenny said.
"Sorry." Curtis actually sounded apologetic. "Anyway--"
"Anyway, Adams," Harry said, "she knows who her friends are. So do I. Have a jug of corn. Real moonbeams."
"Jenny likes to feel wanted," Fang said. "She's not comfortable unless she's wanted by the law."
Jenny grinned, and sang,
"Wanted fan in Luna City, wanted fan on Dune and Down,
Wanted fan at Ophiuchus, wanted fan in Dydeetown.
All across the sky they want me, am I flattered?
Yes I am!
If I could just reach orbit, then I'd be a wanted
fan."
"… and in the midst of the Thirty-Sixth Ice Age, we were lighting global smudge pots. Wood-burning during the Middle Ages was so intensive that the forests of Europe were actually smaller than in the twentieth century. Coalburning, which began in the fifteenth century, saved the forests and put even more gunk into the air. By the late nineteenth century, most homes were heated by coal furnaces." Lutenist paused and rubbed his hands together, as if imagining heat vents and radiators.
A line had formed. Veggies disappeared as they moved past Alex. Almost everyone who passed put something in Alex's mouth. Dark red was miniature tomatoes; Alex feared the implications. The red-and-white spheroid burned.
Jenny sang,
"Wanted fan for mining coal and wanted fan for drilling oil,
I went very fast through Portland, hunted hard like Gully Foyle.
Built reactors in Seattle against every man's advice,
Couldn't do that in Alaska, Fonda says it isn't nice."
"Nice touch, Jenny. They'll be expecting you to rhyme it with 'ice.' "
"You don't really think the nukes could have saved Alaska, do you Jenny?"
Alaska had been beneath the Ice for fifteen years.
"… Then, beginning in the 1950s, we began to clean up our environment. Household coal furnaces gave way to centralized electric heating; and pollution was confined to the power plant areas, instead of belching from every chimney in the city. The famous pea-soup fogs of London disappeared."