Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

“I’m going to work on carbon capture.”

“Well, you seem like a wonderful young man. Serious and self-disciplined. Respectful in the way you treat women. I wouldn’t want anyone in my family to end up with some playboy.”

From the look on Bjorn’s face it seemed that this term was unfamiliar to him. Once again, she had dated herself. “I think now they are called fuckboys or something.”

The bathroom door opened and Michiel strode out, staring down at the screen of his phone. His bathrobe was wide open, sash dragging on the floor, flat stomach glistening, his erect penis sticking out like the bowsprit of the royal yacht. “Something came up while I was in the shower!” he announced, snapping a photograph. Then he looked up.

“His Royal Highness Prince Bjorn of Norway,” Saskia announced, but before Bjorn could scramble to his feet Michiel had retreated into the bedroom.

“Like that,” Saskia said coolly. “Don’t be like him and we’ll get along fine, you and I.”

It occurred to Saskia that if she moved fast she might be able to reach Michiel before it was too late. “See you at the opening session, Bjorn, in—what—an hour and a half?”

“Thirty minutes, in fact,” Bjorn said apologetically, getting to his feet. His eyes darted to the bedroom door. “But, you’re a queen, you know.”

“More of a Dowager at this point.”

“Anyway, you can show up whenever you like, of course.”

“I’ll be there in forty-five,” Saskia said. “Tell them I’m powdering my nose.”

Crescent had many fine qualities, but at the end of the day it was a pleasure barge and its largest single room was a disco. That was the backup location for the conference, if the weather turned bad. But it was fine and so they met under a canopy that the event planners had pitched a short walk up the road from the pier, amid the ruins of the old fortified town that the Venetians had built there a thousand years ago. The remains of a church could be seen, with a pitted and broken frieze of the winged lion that was the emblem of that city and its long-forgotten empire. Across the way from that was a loudspeaker thrust into the air on a pole from which the Muslim call to prayer was broadcast five times a day. The construction of the big gun had drawn a couple of hundred Albanian workers to the island, and this was a largely Muslim country, so they were making do with this simple workaround while a proper mosque was being constructed nearby.

An Audi was waiting for Princess Frederika on the pier, but it hardly seemed worth the trouble of climbing into it, so she walked up to the site in time for the tail end of the pre-meeting coffee-and-pastries mixer. Michiel would follow later; he had some things to catch up on with Cornelia, who was inbound from Brindisi. The day was sunny and looked as though it might turn warm, but a cool breeze was coming up from the Adriatic and the event planners had stockpiled electric fans that they could deploy if they noticed guests fanning themselves with their programs. But with the exception of the Norwegians and a City of London contingent—which included Alastair—most of the people here came from hot places. A lot of Arabs. Some Turks. Texans and Louisianans. Contingents from Bangladesh, West Bengal, Maldives, Laccadives, the Marshall Islands. Indonesians displaced by the flooding of Jakarta, Australians from a part of their country that a few months ago had been the hottest place in the world for two straight weeks. If any audience could put up with a balmy afternoon, it was this one.

The name of the conference was Netherworld. It had a logo, inevitably, and swag with the logo on it. The image was a stylized map of the world showing only what T.R. would have described as stochastic land: everything within a couple of meters of sea level. Deep water, and the interiors of continents, were blank. So it was a lacy archipelago strung about the globe, fat in places like the Netherlands, razor thin in places like Norway or America’s West Coast where the land erupted steeply from the water.

It was always a pleasure working with a fellow professional. Prince Bjorn had the royal thing down pat. He understood as well as Saskia that his job at an event like this one was to say a few words—just enough to sprinkle the royal fairy dust over the proceedings—and then sit down and shut up, smiling and nodding and applauding on cue. So he said his words, and Princess Frederika, newly abdicated but always a royal, said hers, and they sat down next to each other in the front row and did their jobs. Prince Fahd bin Talal, on the other hand, was from a place where royals still had some real authority, and so he took a more active role.

A series of panel discussions and solo talks had been artfully programmed to give equal time to the likes of the Marshall Islands. But the money was Norwegian and Saudi. Bjorn was here as figurehead, but the real power was a trio representing three-eighths of the executive board of the Oil Fund. That wasn’t its official name, but it was what people called it, because that’s what it was: a sovereign wealth fund into which Norway had dumped the profits of its North Sea oil production over the last fifty or so years. Last Saskia had bothered to check, it was well over a trillion dollars—the largest such fund in the world. And she should know; the oil from those rigs came ashore at Rotterdam.

So the Oil Fund contingent was two men and a woman, all in their fifties or sixties, dressed in business casual as per the invitation, in no way famous or recognizable. They could have been lecturers at a Scandinavian university or docents at a museum. But they controlled a trillion dollars that had been earned by injecting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. No accident that Prince Bjorn’s engineering talents were going to be dedicated to carbon capture technology; this was very much a case of a royal leading by example.

The Saudis had made a lot more from petroleum than the Norwegians, but spread the money out among funds and companies and individuals in a way that was more difficult for Westerners to keep track of. But it wasn’t unreasonable to guess that their host could tap into an amount comparable to what the Norwegians were looking after. And he probably had greater freedom to spend it.

Prince Fahd did have some skill at public speaking. Not for nothing had he earned degrees at Oxford and at Yale. “Some of us live in places that are too low,” he said, with a gesture of respect to Saskia, and a nod to the Marshall Islanders, “but I live in a place that is too hot. Perhaps we can work together. Those of us who have reaped great rewards making the situation worse”—this with a glance at the Norwegians—“are sensible that we might have a role to play in setting things right. One who could not be here today has amazed the world by taking aggressive action to shield our world from an angry sun. Later we’ll go up to the top of the mountain to see another such facility launch its first projectile into the Albanian stratosphere. As the veil spreads downwind it will, I hope, provide a measure of relief to our brothers and sisters in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Other such projects are being contemplated in places farther to the south, where we hope they will benefit my home country as well as helping to combat rising sea levels all over Netherworld.” This the first, albeit oblique, public acknowledgment of something Saskia had got wind of from the Venetians, namely that the Saudis had been busy with a little project of their own.

“Many are the voices who will say—who have already said, quite vocally—that this is at best nothing more than a stopgap solution. I’m sure our friends from the Maldives, the Laccadives, and the Marshall Islands would take a different view! But of course the detractors have a point. It is absolutely the case that we cannot long survive on a program that consists exclusively of bouncing back the sun’s radiation using a thin veil of gas. We must take advantage of the brief respite that such interventions give us to remove carbon from our atmosphere .” This the big lectern-thumping applause line. “And we must do it,” he continued, raising his voice over the clapping, “on a scale that matches—no, even exceeds—the scope of the coal and petroleum industries’ global operations during the last hundred and fifty years. They had a century and a half to put carbon into the atmosphere; we have only decades to take it back out. It will be expensive. But we have money. Abraham Lincoln, in his second inaugural address, said, ‘Yet, if God wills that the Civil War continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword . . . so still it must be said that the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’ If, at the end of all this, the pensioners of oil-rich countries are once again only being supported by the proceeds of modern clean industries, then we will truly know that the money has been well looked after.”