Artemis used the V-gloves to highlight Earth’s glaciated areas and rearranged
the ice mass into a square. “Covering glaciers is an excellent idea, but even if the
topography were this simple—a flat square—it would take several armies half a
century to get the job done.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Foaly. “Human loggers seem to be getting through the
rain forests a lot quicker than that.”
“Those on the fringes of the law move faster than those bound by it, which is
where I come in.”
Foaly crossed his front legs, which is not easy for a centaur in a chair. “Do tell.
I am all ears.”
“I shall,” said Artemis. “And I would be grateful if you would stifle the usual
expressions of horror and disbelief until I conclude. Your cries of astonishment
every time I present an idea are most tiresome and they make it difficult to keep
track of the word count.”
“Oh my gods!” exclaimed Foaly. “Unbelievable.”
Raine Vinyáya threw the centaur a warning look. “Stop acting the bull troll,
Foaly. I’ve come a long way for this and my ears are very cold.”
“Should I pinch one of the centaur’s nerve clusters to keep him quiet?” asked
Holly with barely a grin. “I have studied centaur incapacitation, as well as human,
if we happen to need it. I could knock out everybody here with one finger or a
sturdy pencil.”
Foaly was eighty percent sure that Holly was bluffing, but all the same he
covered the ganglia over his ears with cupped fingers.
“Very well. I’ll keep quiet.”
“Good. Proceed, Artemis.”
“Thank you. But keep your sturdy pencil at the ready, Captain Short. I have a
feeling that there could be some disbelief on the way.”
Holly patted her pocket and winked. “2B hard graphite, nothing better for a
quick organ rupture.”
Holly was joking, but her heart wasn’t in it. Artemis felt that her comments
were camouflage for whatever anxiety she was feeling. He rubbed his brow with a
thumb and forefinger, using the gesture as cover to sneak a peek at his friend.
Holly’s own brow was drawn in and her eyes narrow with worry.
She knows, realized Artemis, but what Holly knew, he could not say exactly.
She knows that something is different, that the even numbers have turned
against me. Two twos are four fairies spitting bad luck on my plans.
Then Artemis reviewed this last sentence, and for a second its lunacy was
clear to him and he felt a fat coiled snake of panic heavy in his stomach.
Could I have a brain tumor? he wondered. That would explain the obsessions,
the hallucinations, and the paranoia. Or is it simply obsessive-compulsive
disorder? The great Artemis Fowl felled by a common ailment.
Artemis spared a moment to try an old hypnotherapist’s trick.
Picture yourself in a good place. Somewhere you were happy and safe.
Happy and safe? It had been a while.
Artemis allowed his mind to fly, and he found himself sitting on a small stool in
his grandfather’s workshop. His grandfather looked a little sneakier than Artemis
remembered, and he winked at his five-year-old grandson and said, Do you know
how many legs are on that stool, Arty? Three. Only three, and that’s not a good
number for you. Not at all. Three is nearly as bad as four, and we all know what
four sounds like in Chinese, don’t we?
Artemis shuddered. This sickness was even corrupting his memories. He
pressed the forefinger and thumb of his left hand together until the pads turned
white. A trigger he’d taught himself to elicit calm when the number panic grew
too strong. But the trigger was working less and less recently, or in this case not
at all.
I am losing my composure, he thought with quiet desperation. This disease is
winning.
Foaly cleared his throat, puncturing Artemis’s dream bubble. “Hello? Mud Boy?
Important people waiting, get a move on.”
And from Holly. “Are you okay, Artemis? Do you need to take a break?”
Artemis almost laughed. Take a break during a presentation? If I did that, I
might as well go and stand beside someone wearing an i’m with crazy T-shirt.
“No. I’m fine. This is a big project, the biggest. I want to be sure that my
presentation is perfect.”
Foaly leaned forward until his already unsteady chair teetered dangerously.
“You don’t look fine, Mud Boy. You look . . .” The centaur sucked his bottom lip,
searching for the right word. “Beaten. Artemis, you look beaten.”
Which was the best thing he could have possibly said.
Artemis drew himself up. “I think, Foaly, that perhaps you do not read human
expressions well. Perhaps our faces are too short. I am not beaten by any
manner or means. I am considering my every word.”
“Maybe you should consider a little faster,” advised Holly gently. “We are quite
exposed here.”
Artemis closed his eyes, collecting himself.
Vinyáya drummed the table with her fingers. “No more delays, human. I am
beginning to suspect that you have involved us in one of your notorious plans.”
“No. This is a genuine proposal. Please, hear me out.”
“I’m trying to. I want to. I came a long way for that exact purpose, but all you
do is show off with your suitcase.”
Artemis raised his hands to shoulder level, the movement activating his Vgloves,
and tapped the glacier.
“What we need to do is cover a significant area of the world’s glaciers with a
reflective coating to slow down the melt. The coating would have to be thicker
around the edges, where the ice is thawing more rapidly. Also it would be nice if
we could plug the larger sinkholes.”
“A lot of things would be nice in a perfect world,” said Foaly, once again
making smithereens of his promise to keep quiet. “Don’t you think your people
would get a tad upset if little creatures popped out of the ground in spaceships
and started carpeting Santa’s grotto with reflective foil?”
“They . . . we . . . would. And that is why this operation has to be carried out
in secret.”
“Secretly coat the world’s glaciers? You should have said.”
“I just did say, and I thought we agreed that you would hold your peace. This
constant haranguing is tiresome.”
Holly winked at Foaly, twirling a pencil between her fingers.
“The problem with coating the icebergs has always been how to deploy the
reflective blanket,” continued Artemis. “It would seem that the only way to do it
would be to roll the stuff out like carpet, either manually or from the rear of some
kind of customized snow crawlers.”
“Which is hardly a stealth operation,” said Foaly.
“Exactly. But what if there were another way to lay down a reflective covering,
a seemingly natural way.”
“Work with nature?”
“Yes, Foaly. Nature is our model; it should always be.”
The room seemed to be heating up as Artemis drew closer to his big reveal.
“Human scientists have been struggling to make their reflective foil thin
enough to work with, yet strong enough to withstand the elements.”
“Stupid.”
“Misguided, centaur. Not stupid, surely. Your own files—”
“I considered the foil idea briefly. And how did you see my files?”
This was not a real question. Foaly had long since resigned himself to the fact
that Artemis Fowl was at least as talented a hacker as he himself was.
“The basic idea is sound. Fabricate a reflective polymer.”
Foaly chewed his knuckles. “Nature. Use nature.”
“What is the most natural thing up here?” said Artemis, giving a little hint.
“Ice,” said Holly. “Ice and . . .”
“Snow,” whispered the centaur almost reverentially. “Of course. D’Arvit, why
didn’t I . . . Snow, isn’t it?”
Artemis raised his V-gloved hands, and holographic snow rained upon them.
“Snow,” he said, the blizzard swirling around him. “No one would be surprised
by snow.”
Foaly was on his feet. “Magnify,” he ordered. “Magnify and enhance.”
Artemis tapped a holographic flake, freezing it in midair. With a couple of
pinches he enlarged the ersatz flake until its irregularity became clear. It was
irregularly regular, a perfect circle.
“A nano-wafer,” said Foaly, forgetting for once to hide how impressed he was.
“An honest-to-gods nano-wafer. Smart?”
“Extremely,” confirmed Artemis. “Smart enough to know which way is up when
it hits the surface and configure itself to insulate the ice and reflect the sun.”
“So we impregnate the cloud province?”
“Exactly, to its capacity.”
Foaly clopped into the holographic weather. “Then when it ruptures, we have
coverage.”
“Incremental, true, but effective nonetheless.”
“Mud Boy, I salute you.”
Artemis smiled, his old self for a moment. “Well, it’s about time.”
Vinyáya interrupted the science lovefest. “Let me see if I’ve got this straight:
you shoot these wafers into the clouds and then they come down with the snow?”
“Precisely. We could shoot them directly on to the surface in dire cases, but I
think for security it would be best to have the seeders hovering and shielded
above the cloud cover.”
“And you can do this?”
“We can do it. The Council would have to approve an entire fleet of modified
shuttles, not to mention a monitoring station.”
Holly thought of something. “These wafers don’t look much like snowflakes.
Sooner or later some human with a microscope is going to notice the difference.”
“Good point, Holly. Perhaps I shouldn’t lump you in with the rest of the LEP as
regards intellect.”
“Thanks, I think.”
“When the wafers are discovered, as they inevitably will be, I will launch an
Internet campaign that explains them away as a by-product from a chemical
plant in Russia. I will also point out that for once our waste is actually helping the
environment and volunteer to fund a program that will extend their coverage.”
“Is there a pollution factor?” asked Vinyáya.
“Hardly. The wafers are entirely biodegradable.”
Foaly was excited. He clip-clopped through the hologram, squinting at the
enlarged wafer.
“It sounds good. But is it really? You hardly expect the People to stump up the
massive and ongoing budget for such a project without proof, Artemis. For all we
know, it’s one of your scams.”
Artemis opened a file on the screen. “Here are my financial records. I know
they are accurate, Foaly, because I found them on your server.”
Foaly did not even bother blushing. “They look about right.”
“I am prepared to invest everything I have in this project. That should keep
five shuttles in the air for a couple of years. There will be profit on the back end,
naturally, when the wafers go into production. I should recoup my investment
then, perhaps even turn a respectable profit.”
Foaly almost gagged. Artemis Fowl putting his own money into a project.
Incredible.
“Of course, I hardly expect the People to take anything I say on face value.
After all, I have been”—Artemis cleared his throat—“somewhat less than
forthcoming with information in the past.”
Vinyáya laughed humorlessly. “Less than forthcoming? I think you’re being a
little gentle on yourself, for a kidnapper and extortionist, Artemis. Less than
forthcoming?
Please. I find myself buying your pitch, but not everybody on the Council is as
charitable toward you.”
“I accept your criticism and your skepticism, which is why I have organized a
demonstration.”
“Excellent,” said Foaly eagerly. “Of course there’s a demonstration. Why else
would you have brought us here?”
“Why else indeed.”
“More extortion and kidnapping?” suggested Vinyáya archly.
“That was a long time ago,” blurted Holly, in a tone she would not usually take
with a superior officer. “I mean . . . that was a long time ago . . . Commander.
Artemis has been a good friend to the People.”
Holly Short thought specifically of a close call during the goblin rebellion when
Artemis Fowl’s actions had saved her life and many more besides. Vinyáya
apparently remembered the goblin rebellion too. “Okay. Benefit-of-the-doubt
time, Fowl. You’ve got twenty minutes to convince us.”
Artemis patted his breast pocket five times to check on his phone.
“It shouldn’t take more than ten,” he said.
Holly Short was a trained hostage negotiator, and found that in spite of the
importance of the topic, she was rapidly shifting focus away from nano-wafers
and toward Artemis Fowl’s mannerisms. Though she commented occasionally as
the demonstration progressed, it was all she could do not to cradle Artemis’s face
in her hands and ask him what was the matter.
I would have to stand on a chair to reach his face, Holly realized. My friend is
almost a grown man now. A fully fledged human. Perhaps he is fighting his
natural-born bloodthirsty desires and the conflict is driving him crazy.
Holly studied Artemis closely. He was pale, more so than usual, like a creature
of the night. A snow wolf maybe. The sharp cheekbones and triangular length of
his face added to this impression. And perhaps it was frost, but Holly thought she
could see a streak of gray at his temples.
He seems old. Foaly was right: Artemis looks beaten.
Then there was the number thing. And the touching. Artemis’s fingers were
never still. At first it seemed random, but on a hunch, Holly counted, and soon
the pattern was clear. Fives or multiples of five.
D’Arvit, she thought. Atlantis Complex.
She ran a quick search on Wicca-pedia and came across a brief summary:
Atlantis Complex (at-lan-tis kom-pleks) is a psychosis common among guiltridden
criminals, first diagnosed by Dr. E. Dypess of the Atlantis Brainology Clinic.
Other symptoms include obsessive behavior, paranoia, delusions, and in extreme
cases multiple personality disorder. Dr. E. Dypess is also known for his hit song,
“I’m in Two Minds About You.”
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