Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

“Very good,” said Fahd. “And the cargo?”

“The fuselage will be full of tanks, with baffles to control sloshing and weight distribution. The tanks will be full of sulfur dioxide when it takes off, empty when it lands. Because the whole purpose of it is to inject SO 2directly into the stratosphere.”

“Clearly my presence here as tour guide is superfluous!” said the prince, allowing his usual mask of stony dignity to be cracked open with a grin.

The compliment was appreciated, but she knew flattery when she heard it. People had been talking about making a plane like this for decades. She’d seen CGI renderings. Not of this exact plane, of course, but of ones very like it, in PowerPoints and videos envisioning how solar geoengineering might change the climate for better or worse. Depending on how you felt about the idea, you could soundtrack the animation with scary war drums or with soaring anthemic strains and make it seem like the end of the world or the dawn of a new era. In any case, she’d have to have been pretty ill-informed not to know this for exactly what it was.

“You had the airframe designed by . . . someone who knows what they’re doing,” she continued. “Composite wings made by people who do wind turbine blades. I recognize the engines—but you’ve had them modified for high altitude. The airframe is built, but that’s the easy part. Now the fancy systems are being integrated into it by contractors from around the world.” The coveralls worn by various teams were blazoned with corporate logos, most of which she’d seen before. But it was all pretty understated and you had to get up close to make them out. Americans, Germans, Israelis, Japanese were working on different subsystems, many using AR goggles to gesture at figments in the air.

“With all due respect to Dr. Schmidt,” Fahd said, “who really has accomplished something quite remarkable, we think that this is the future of solar geoengineering. The second wave, if you will. The first wave is a stopgap measure. Hurling enough SO 2into the stratosphere to begin making a difference. All well and good; when a house is on fire, you throw water on it. The second wave will be about tuning the distribution of the veil so as to achieve the results . . .”

Saskia looked him in the eye. She got the idea he was about to conclude the sentence with “we want” but after the briefest of hesitations he said “that are most beneficial.”

Their loop around the plane ended at a cafeteria that had been set up in the corner of the hangar. Several rows of folding tables, a buffet line staffed by what she guessed were Filipino and Bangladeshi food service workers, the very latest in coffee-making robotics. “You must be famished,” Prince Fahd said, extending a hand to give her unnecessary help in alighting from the golf cart. She had to admit that a cup of coffee sounded good. Maybe a pastry. Lunchtime was over. So only a few workers were here, taking solo breaks or holding impromptu meetings. Saskia peeked over the shoulder of a man with close-cropped, sandy hair and a deeply tanned neck as he fluidly worked his way through the user interface of a coffee machine. By the time he had finished, she had an idea what to do, and without too much floundering was able to get away with a decent enough macchiato. She turned around and scanned the tables until she picked out Prince Fahd, who had chosen a seat conveniently far away from any other diners. He was scrolling messages on his phone. She sat down across from him and began to enjoy her coffee and her Danish. “A thousand apologies,” he mumbled, “something has come up, you know how it is.”

“On the contrary, this lets me enjoy my snack!”

She had been enjoying it for no more than thirty seconds when Fahd’s phone signaled an incoming call. “So sorry, I must take this,” he said, and stood up. He walked away, beginning the conversation in English but then switching to Arabic. Saskia gazed through the vacancy he’d left in his wake and saw that the sandy-haired man had taken a seat at the next table, facing her squarely. And his green eyes were looking at her squarely, with no trace of the atavistic deference that some people still afforded to royals.

“Your friend T.R. is quite a character,” he said. He spoke in a somewhat lilting, bemused accent that might have been Eastern European. But she’d seen enough circumstantial evidence to know that this guy was Israeli.

“Friend might be too strong a word? He does have some likable qualities.”

“Well, a person in whose company you have been seen from time to time, let’s say.”

“Only by people with truly exceptional powers of observation. But do go on.”

“He might be wrong, he might be crazy, but you have to admire his focus.” The Israeli emphasized that word. He liked focus. “Very important. Very good! But sometimes when you’re focused, you get tunnel vision. You don’t see the bigger picture.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“You know, things that come at you from the side.”

“I haven’t seen him in a while but I’ll be sure to pass that on.”

“He wasn’t at Vadan.”

“No.”

“You’d think he would have been there. To see his big gun go off.”

“It surprised me a little. But apparently he’s quite busy in some different part of the world.”

The Israeli snorted. “Different is for sure the right word. He has an eye for strange places, that one.” He took a sip of his coffee. “Look. I just wanted to say you might want to have a talk with your friend. Tell him to raise his head up out of that hole in the ground and look around. To be a little more aware.”

“Can you be more specific?”

“Sources and methods,” he said. Intelligence-speak for I can’t tell you what I know because by doing so I might inadvertently reveal how I came to know it . “Maybe look to the north.”

“How far north? Oklahoma? Canada?”

“You don’t know where he is,” the Israeli realized. “He’s in New Guinea.”

Saskia was taken aback. It wasn’t so much that she was surprised by the news. Rather it was a sense of inevitability. Brazos RoDuSh, the selfies from Cornelia, Willem’s contacts with the Papuan nationalists . . .

“I suppose I ought to have seen it coming.”

“You’re a shareholder! You have to keep an eye on your investments!” he said, in an amused, world-weary tone. “Look. We like the guy. We like what he’s doing. It helps us”—he flicked his green eyes toward the plane—“do what we’re doing. But we have reason to believe that the time has come when he should just keep his wits about him a little more.”

“And I am somehow the person who needs to deliver this message.”

“Texans!” The man threw up his hands. “Like some other ethnic groups I could mention, they seem to place great stock in personal relationships. He respects you. That’s all I’m saying.”

Saskia nodded. “What’s in this for you guys?”

“You ever wonder why people in the Bible are always fighting over our tiny scrap of land? Why the Romans even bothered with it? Israel used to be sweet real estate. The land of milk and honey. Now it’s kind of a shithole, climate-wise.”

“So it’s all about bringing back the milk and honey.”

“Sure.”

“Nothing more than that.”

“You thought otherwise?”

“Maybe I’m just of an overly cynical nature,” Saskia said, “but it occurs to me that you and the Saudis might be working together to completely fuck Iran.”

The man shrugged. “Personally, nothing would give me greater pleasure. But the models are complicated.”

“The Arabian Peninsula, all by itself, is vast. If you add Israel and Jordan to the north, it spans a huge range of latitude. If you fly those planes south . . . well, I don’t think Somalia has the technology to shoot planes out of the stratosphere. You could fly to the equator and beyond. You could dispatch those planes anywhere you like across that range. Put the SO 2exactly where you want it. Do acupuncture on the region’s climate.”