Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

So she stood up and tossed back the dregs of her coffee as soon as the lads down on the fuel dock were finished. She texted “OMW” to her contact in Venice, then shut off her phone. Under the lidless eyes of several paparazzi drones she marched down to the dock, climbed aboard her seaplane, and began to work her way down the pre-flight checklist. A few minutes later she was in the air, bound south down the Y-shaped mountain valley that clasped the lake. The plain of Lombardy then unfolded below her and she swung east toward the Adriatic, some two hundred and fifty kilometers away—an hour’s flying time in this lumbering old pontoon plane. You could get faster, fancier ones, but this was a Canadian classic: a De Havilland Beaver. Her family had warm connections to Canada, going back to the war, and so this was the one she had picked out.

Once she had got the Beaver trimmed in level flight and headed in the right direction she spent ten minutes crying. Not that she was particularly sad. It was just that during important transitions you had to get this out of your system, and she hadn’t performed that task yet. The Dutch didn’t do formal coronations and so Lotte had become the new queen in a basically secular ceremony in Amsterdam’s Nieuwe Kerk, which was a church only in name. No crown had been placed on her head. They didn’t even have a crown. In attendance had been everyone who mattered in the Netherlands as well as a smattering of foreign royalty and international diplomats. Very convenient for Saskia who’d been able to exchange pleasantries with, and say goodbye to, many people in very little time. But when you had abdicated, you needed to get out of the country. To make a clean break and clear the stage for your successor. So after a quick change of clothes in the adjoining Royal Palace—as of ten minutes ago, her daughter’s official Amsterdam residence—Saskia had walked down to the IJ, jostling and dodging through pedestrian traffic like a private citizen, and climbed into the waiting plane and simply flown away.

Her Royal Highness Princess Frederika of the Netherlands, as she was now styled, reached the skies above Venice at the time of day movie people referred to as Golden Hour, when everything was softly lit by the warm colors of the western sky. In the life she’d just left behind, that would not have been an accident; it would all have been arranged by Willem and Fenna. Today it actually was an accident, though helped along somewhat by Pina2bo, which by this point had put enough sulfur into the stratosphere to make a noticeable difference in the sunsets of the Northern Hemisphere. The light of Golden Hour was famously forgiving to ladies of a certain age. Saskia liked to think she wasn’t quite there yet, but Venice certainly was. And there could have been no better light in which to view La Serenissima.

Her plane was in its element chugging along at low altitude. She’d filed a flight plan that kept her out of the way of heavy commercial traffic at Marco Polo Airport, which was on the mainland to the north. She made a pass around the island city, shedding altitude, resisting the temptation to wave back at the onlookers watching her arrival from waterfront bridges, balconies, rivas, and piazzas. She banked the plane round into a light northwesterly breeze and brought it down gently into the soft waters of the Lagoon with the Giardini della Biennale on her right and the red spire of San Giorgio on her left. Water might have been a menace to the Venetians and the Dutch alike, but she loved to land planes on it. Waco had left her skittish about that critical instant when rubber met terra firma. But in a seaplane you had this long glide from flying to floating with no clear moment when one became the other.

The wind’s direction made it easy for her to drive the plane right up to the quay at the park by the Piazza of San Marco. She only had to keep her peripheral vision engaged so that the propeller didn’t chop up any excited boaters. When that simply became too stressful she killed the engine, shut everything down, unbuckled her safety harness, and climbed out onto the pontoon. From there she was able to toss a line into the cockpit of an approaching powerboat. Behind its wheel was Michiel, grinning beneath a pair of sunglasses that probably cost as much as Saskia’s airplane. And worth every penny, if looks had value. His boat, naturally, was one of those handcrafted, all-mahogany runabouts. No fiberglass in this man’s reality. The Venetians had been at great pains to set themselves apart from Italy, but they had no compunctions about Italian design when it made them look smashing.

With a little help from some friends in the boat, Michiel took Saskia’s plane in tow and pulled her the last few meters in to the point where lines could be transferred to bollards along the edge of the quay. Suddenly divested of all responsibility, Saskia was able to just stand there on the pontoon, one hand braced on the wing strut, the other waving from time to time at people who had gathered in the park to greet her, to denounce her, or simply to watch. There was the usual variety of signs and banners. The Frederika who had awakened this morning in Amsterdam as Queen of the Netherlands had been tuned to pay careful attention to those. Saskia Orange could afford to shrug most of it off. And to be honest, the feeling was probably mutual. Venice had seen it all. Her arrival was not a big deal.

The park was separated from the docks by a stone balustrade. Along this someone had deployed a banner reading, in English: “Welcome Queen of Netherworld!”

Saskia well knew how to spot the differences between signs that really had been improvised on kitchen tables by amateurs, and ones carefully fashioned to seem that way. This was one of the latter. Nor did it escape her notice that when Michiel—who had vaulted up out of his beautiful runabout onto the quay—stepped forward to offer his hand as she stepped off the pontoon, it all happened with that banner in the background. So the image was all over the world before her foot touched what passed in Venice for dry land.

She had never before encountered that usage of the word “Netherworld,” but she got it. Nederland—her kingdom until this morning—was a land that happened to be low. From a parochial Northern European standpoint it was the low country and so that was what people had always called it. From a global perspective, though, it was just one of many places where people lived close to sea level; and though, a hundred years ago, all such places would have seemed quite different—as different as Venice was from Houston or Zeeland from Bangladesh—when sea level began to rise, they all turned out to have much in common. A whole planet-spanning archipelago of threatened nether-places. Why not “Netherworld”? Whether it really needed to have a queen, though, was another question.

It was understood that she’d had a long day and so formalities at quayside were kept to a minimum: Saskia accepted a bouquet and an official greeting from the mayor as well as one from the leader of an entity called Vexital. After waving to the crowd and posing for a few photos she climbed into Michiel’s sleek mahogany runabout and enjoyed a rousing dash across the Lagoon to a private island.

Dozens of tiny islands were strewn across the water around Venice, each with its own long history of use as a monastery, convent, prison, dump, cemetery, or fortification. Many were uninhabited and unused, a fact remarkable to Saskia, who would have expected that a charming private island only a few minutes’ powerboat ride from the Grand Canal would be a hot property. The fact that they were all in danger of ceasing to exist had probably depressed the market. The one they were going to was less than a hundred meters wide. It was square except for an indentation on one side for a dock. Saskia had banked over this island a few minutes ago and got a good look out the side window of the plane. It was outlined on three of its sides by old buildings that had once served as the wings of a cloister. In medieval times those had risen directly from the water of the Lagoon, but sea level rise had forced the owners to expand the island’s footprint slightly by dumping fill into the shallow water to build up a surrounding levee. Resulting environmental controversies had become a political flash point in a way that was suspiciously useful to Vexital: a local movement dedicated to the proposition that Venice ought to secede, not just from Europe (“Vexit”) but from Italy (“Vexitalia”).