Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

“It’s not mine until I accept the gift,” she cautioned him.

“Well, should you decide you are in an accepting mood,” he said, “on behalf of my father, I am offering you the unlimited use of the royal yacht Bøkesuden .”

“Really?”

“Really. The hydrogen-fueled jet can, of course, take you to many places much more quickly . . .”

Saskia held out one hand, palm down, and bobbled it from side to side. “I can’t leave , though, until a truck full of hydrogen shows up. Could take a while!”

“My point exactly. For some missions, a boat is really what you need.”

Saskia raised her eyebrows. “So it’s missions I’m to be going on now, is it?”

“Perhaps the wrong choice of words. We talked about this before. I am too much the engineer sometimes.”

“You’re forgiven, Bjorn, since you’re trying to give me a yacht.”

“ The use of a yacht,” he corrected her.

“What if His Majesty the King of Norway has a mind to go boating? While I’m on his yacht, on a mission ?”

“It’s Norway. We’ll make another.”

She went to bed thinking that it was all perfectly ridiculous—just a case of some well-meaning friends with too much money, taking this “Queen of Netherworld” gag too seriously, and acting on impulse. Tomorrow, the second and last day of the conference, she would find a way to take these guys aside one at a time and let them down easy.

Saskia woke up in the opposite frame of mind. Looking down at the snoring Michiel, she realized it was him she was going to have to let down easy. The other guys she had to begin taking seriously.

What had changed was a series of messages and news reports that had come in while she was sleeping. It seemed that a lot was going on in both New Guinea and West Texas. India was making noises about “climate peacekeeping” and denouncing the firing of the gun in Albania yesterday—in a way hinting that it justified their taking unilateral action. China was talking in an equally menacing way about the instability in Papua. Indonesia, they were saying, might claim the western half of New Guinea for their own, but that was really just a holdover from the days of Dutch colonialism—a discredited way of thinking. The United States—which used to intervene in such situations—was a basket case and global laughingstock; the United Nations couldn’t act fast enough; something had to be done to protect the defenseless Papuans and incidentally safeguard the world’s copper supply. Jumping out from all these news feeds were words like “Sneeuwberg” and “RoDuSh”—constant jabbing reminders of the connections back to the Netherlands.

Yesterday, during all the talk about carbon in the atmosphere, Norway had been taking a bullet that might otherwise have been aimed at the Netherlands. Royal Dutch Shell had been one of the world’s great petro-powers and had amassed great wealth during the twentieth century. It was only in the last five decades that Norway had turned into a petro-state and eclipsed the Dutch—who at the same time had been retreating from their colonial empire. The workings of the stock market had spread the ownership of Shell and its profits and its liabilities among shareholders all over the world. Saskia’s country had been happy to quietly park Norwegian crude in vast tank farms at Rotterdam, to refine it, and to pipe it up the Rhine.

It was all what Alastair described as “cruft,” meaning complicated and messy holdovers from obsolete code and discontinued operating systems. This was cruft of a geopolitical sort. But cruft was a real thing, it had consequences, and it had to be managed. It seemed that the world was asking Saskia to play some part in its management.

THE LINE

There was a catch, sort of. When in life, though, was there ever not a catch? During the after-dinner chitchat, Prince Fahd had strolled over for a bit of airplane talk. In an apologetic and self-deprecating tone—as if he had embarrassed himself by giving Princess Frederika the wrong type of jet airplane—he mentioned that its range was nothing like what a modern bizjet was capable of. Gone were the days of nonstop flights from Schiphol to Sydney. No, getting around in that thing was going to be more akin to traveling in the Beaver: shorter hops, more frequent stops. And, further compounding his shame, the stops couldn’t be just anywhere: obviously you had to put the thing down at a location where hydrogen was available. Of course, very few airports had that on tap. But in many of your more technologically advanced countries it was possible to have a truck deliver the stuff to the tarmac and pump it directly into the plane. It just required a bit more advance planning, which the prince’s staff would be glad to assist with until Princess Frederika and her people got up to speed.

Saskia had to suppress an impulse to confess that she no longer had “people” in that sense of the term. She was meaning to get some sooner or later. She could support a modest staff. But, for now, she was still enjoying the simplicity and freedom of not being anyone’s boss.

“If you are interested in taking the thing on a little shakedown cruise,” Fahd bin Talal went on, “I would draw Your Royal Highness’s attention to the Line. It is just within range from here, and as part of the kingdom’s commitment to decarbonization, we have, as a matter of course, equipped the airport with state-of-the-art facilities for the storage and delivery of hydrogen. It is easily the most hydrogen-friendly air terminal in the world today.”

Saskia had heard of this Line place. It was a completely new city, a hundred miles long and only a few blocks wide, that the Saudis were constructing on mostly unoccupied land. Its western end was on the Gulf of Aqaba at the head of the Red Sea, its eastern reached deep into the desert. They’d started the project years ago with high aspirations and a great deal of fanfare, but it had stalled out after the Khashoggi assassination, which had led many international corporate partners to back away from it.

The prince’s description made sense, though. When you were building a completely new airport from scratch, drawing on an infinite fund of petro-dollars, why not plumb it for hydrogen? Why not pave the runways in gold?

She wondered if she was being set up here for a photo op. And to his credit, Fahd scented her misgivings. “This would not, in any way, be a public visit,” he hastened to add. “On the contrary. Publicity would be counterproductive. Fortunately, we control the airspace.”

On that promise, Princess Frederika allowed as how she might consider a spontaneous shakedown cruise to the Line the next day, provided she could then fly back and be reunited with her good old Beaver. The prince took this as an unconditional yes and nodded. “Everything will be made ready,” he announced. “Departure will of course be at your convenience, but might I be so forward as to propose wheels up by nine in the morning?”

He was a hard man to say no to. He knew what he wanted, he was used to getting it, and his politeness was as a veil of finest silk draped over a brick. Thus did Saskia find herself suddenly obliged not only to accept the gift of the airplane but to sit in the co-pilot’s seat the next morning as Ervin flew it to the Line.

On the contrary. Publicity would be counterproductive .

Saskia ought to have been paying attention to the advanced controls and unusual features of the hydrogen-powered plane. Ervin was keen to show her these, on the assumption that one day she’d be piloting it herself. And she did manage to show a polite level of interest, but only by dint of a lifetime’s royal experience pretending to pay attention to things for the sake of other people’s feelings. She got the sense that Ervin was frustrated, or at least a bit nonplussed, by her tendency to drift off into long silences as she pondered the prince’s words.