Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

Venice itself, at less than four miles long, would seem so small that it was superfluous to have a microcosm of it; but Santa Liberata, as this island was known, had been seen as just that. Cornelia, its owner, had appeared in a very well produced video sloshing barefoot down flooded corridors of its ancient cloisters, gazing sadly down through six inches of water at beautiful mosaics, and looking up at frescoes soon to be dissolved by rising seawater.

Anyway, Liberata was safe and sound for the moment behind those new levees, thrown up in defiance of the European Union’s Infraction Procedure. The family of Cornelia had done a brilliant job of fixing the place up one bit at a time, bringing some rooms up to modern luxury-hotel standards while leaving others in exactly the right stage of dusty, weedy, comfortable decay. So upon her arrival Saskia was able to freshen up in a bathroom that sported sleek high-tech chrome-plated plumbing fixtures she couldn’t even work out how to use; but then she was able to walk out onto a patio lit up by a red Pina2bo sunset and have a drink on thousand-year-old flagstones with Daia Kaur Chand.

“So, Your Royal Highness, what’s it like to be an ex-queen?”

Wonderful was on Saskia’s lips, but she held back. The last time she’d been in Daia’s company was on the Flying S Ranch. Then Daia hadn’t been working in her capacity as a journalist but tagging along with her husband, the lord mayor. This time, it was different. The conversation they were having now was off the record. But it was still a sort of dress rehearsal for the real interview they’d be conducting tomorrow with a full BBC production crew in attendance. So it would be wise for Saskia to get in the habit of being a little guarded. “It’s nice to be relieved of some of those responsibilities,” she allowed, “but of course Queen Charlotte—who has shouldered them in my place—is never far from my mind.”

A wry look had spread across Daia’s face as this carefully worded answer went on and on. If this was supposed to be informal off-the-record chitchat, it was already failing. “It’s very different from the British monarchy, isn’t it? I’ll be certain to spell that out for our viewers.”

“What, the tradition of abdication?”

“British monarchs—with one notable exception—never abdicate.”

“But it’s become the rule rather than the exception in the Netherlands, it’s true.”

“It’s like retiring.”

“Yes. And some retire earlier than others.”

“Early enough to . . . pursue a second career, perhaps?”

“We’ll see. It’s a bit soon to be thinking about such things.”

“Do you think you’d have stayed on if it hadn’t been for all the controversies? The campaign of deepfakes? All the attention around geoengineering?”

“Oh, almost certainly. I was raised to do that job. I was good at it. People—even anti-monarchists—liked me. And it’s a big burden to dump on Charlotte’s shoulders at such a young age. But when you start becoming a distraction from the country’s real business, it’s time to leave. I just had to present Charlotte with the choice: we can all walk away, and put an end to the monarchy, or you can take over for me. She made her choice.”

Saskia’s phone had chimed several times in the last minute. It was Lotte. Saskia checked it, expecting some desperate plea for advice. But instead it was a selfie of her standing next to a ridiculously handsome prince from the Norwegian royal family. Smiling, she shared that with Daia, who laughed out loud at the beauty of the young man. “Somehow one suspects Queen Lotte will get along just fine.”

There was that little pause that signifies a turn in the conversation. The two women sipped their drinks and took in the view across the flat water of the Lagoon to Venice, only a kilometer away.

“Your Royal Highness,” Daia said, “as much as tomorrow is supposed to be a soft-focus puff piece, there is one question I can’t not ask you. And that’s just an ineluctable truth about who I am—who my people are.”

Saskia nodded. She’d known this was coming. Daia was a Sikh. Her grandparents had come to England from the Punjab. She wasn’t observant to the point of wearing a headscarf all the time. But any photo of a Chand family reunion would feature a lot of turbans. And she was said to be as fluent in Punjabi as she was in English. “Go on, by all means!” Saskia offered.

Daia nodded. “Here we are in the second week of July,” she said. “The monsoon is late. So late that some in the Punjab are beginning to wonder whether it will come this year at all.”

Saskia nodded. “What are the latest forecasts? I heard there was hope.”

“The long-range forecast is not without promise. Thank God.”

“Has it ever been this late before?”

“Of course. Some years it fails altogether. But that’s not the point. The point is that people look at this”—Daia gestured toward the sunset, which was of rare beauty—“and they see that the rains are late in the Punjab . . .”

“And they can’t not put two and two together.”

They walked across the courtyard to join Michiel, Chiara, and Cornelia for a light, informal dinner in what had formerly been the convent’s refectory. Also with them was Marco Orsini, the leader of the Vexital movement, sometimes called “the Doge” by the tabloid press. He was in his forties, conservatively attired, with an earnest, approachable manner that probably came in handy in his role of trying to promulgate what most would consider a daft idea. And Marco had brought with him his friend Pau, an activist from Barcelona—a city that, like Venice, was trying to get free of the country it had been lumped into.

The table looked a thousand years old; the molecular-cuisine tapas being carried in by the waitstaff had been prepared in a kitchen that looked like it had been refurbished by NASA. Art, mostly quite old, adorned those parts of the walls not covered by cracked and faded frescoes. Saskia could only imagine what this family’s art collection must look like. She saw paintings she supposed were knockoffs of Titians or Tintorettos until she got it through her head that they were the real things.

The most prominent work on display was a Renaissance painting of Ceres in her winged chariot. The very goddess after whom cereals were named. She was flying over an idealized Tuscan landscape looking for her lost daughter Proserpina. Saskia knew the story perfectly well. The grief of Ceres over the loss of contact with her daughter—taken away to be the unwilling queen of the underworld—was the cause of seasons. Crops withered and died at the bidding of Ceres. But she was also the goddess of growth and fertility when she was in a more generous frame of mind. The choice of this painting to hang above this dinner table could not have been an accident, any more than the “Queen of Netherworld” banner.

“I wonder what the Romans would have made of that myth,” Saskia reflected, “if they had understood the workings of the hemispheres and the fact that winter in the north was summer in the south? That you can’t have one without the other?”

It was meant as a light conversational gambit, but Daia didn’t take it that way. “Let’s be clear about what you’re getting at,” she said. “Saving Venice from the sea might mean famine in the Punjab.”

“That’s actually not what I was getting at,” Saskia said.

“No one wants famine in the Punjab, or anywhere else,” Cornelia said. “It’s not as simple a trade as that—fortunately for everyone.”

“The Indian Academy of Sciences has published some climate simulations that suggest otherwise.”

“In the scenario where Pina2bo is the only site of stratospheric sulfur injection in the whole world,” Michiel said, “and it runs at maximum capacity year-round, maybe that is the case. That is why we are bringing Vadan online later this year. And it’s why T.R. has begun work on Papua. Which adds a site in the Southern Hemisphere.”