Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

“I’ve seen the numbers on the mine.” Willem nodded vaguely in the direction he thought most likely to be north. The mountains as usual were completely invisible behind a blank white sky. “Eventually the ore will run out—or become so difficult to extract that it can no longer compete on the world market.”

“Decades from now,” Ed said dismissively.

“You’ve been here for decades. It’s not that long. What happens to the family business then?”

Uncle Ed didn’t have a ready answer.

“Do you move to some other part of the world? Or stay here?”

“Why would we stay in this hellhole?” Ed asked. As if on cue, a gunshot sounded in the distance, then two more. The men with the shotguns did not seem to find this remarkable.

“Maybe something new happens.”

“Where?”

“Up there.” Willem nodded to the north again.

“What could possibly happen up there besides the copper mine?”

Willem got up, took a few steps across the patio, and stepped down to the gravel lot. He bent over and scooped up a handful of gray muck from the edge of a puddle. He held it up to the skeptical, bordering on worried, inspection of Uncle Ed. “Do you know what this is?”

“The shit that washes down from the mine. Tailings that don’t have enough copper to be worth refining.”

“Do you know what else it contains besides copper?”

“Gold. A tiny amount.”

“What else?”

“I don’t know, I’m not a geologist.”

“Sulfur.”

Ed snorted. “There are easier places to get sulfur, even I know that.”

“None that are so close to the stratosphere.”

COOLATTIN, BRITISH COLUMBIA

This time, Uncle, I’m headed down stream. Just following the flow of the river,” Laks said, “like a fry becoming a smolt.”

Uncle Dharmender crossed his arms across his belly and regarded Laks in a way that might best be described as alert. “Is that some kind of fish terminology? You forget I am not a fish guy.” He held up both hands as if to say look about you, boy! and then re-crossed his arms.

Laks didn’t need to look about himself. Now that he had got most of his long-term memory back he knew exactly where he was: a small town in British Columbia, on the banks of the Columbia River about twenty miles north of the Canada-U.S. border. When Laks had been a boy, Uncle Dharmender’s holdings here had been limited to a mere gas station, but a few years ago he had, during a COVID-related tourism slump, purchased the adjacent, down-at-heels resort and begun fixing it up one unit at a time.

“Resort” was a grand term. It was a rustic affair comprising a dozen small cabins scattered through woods surrounding a larger building that served as reception, kitchen, laundry, and banquet hall. In the latter facility, Aunt Gurmeet—the wife of Dharmender—and various cousins and family friends had accorded Laks a hero’s welcome this evening with a reception, a lavish meal, and a party hosted by a Punjabi MC/DJ team out of Vancouver.

When the guests had taken their leave, Dharmender and Laks had been deemed surplus to requirements and been shooed into the conference room. This was a B.C. classic with a stuffed bighorn ram’s head on the wall and curtains in a vintage North Woods print featuring ducks, moose, and men in plaid shirts paddling canoes.

To show respect for the occasion both men had put some effort into their turbans. It was a matter of perspective, really, what should be considered exotic in such a juxtaposition: the decor, or the occupants? Dharmender seemed very much at home. If that bighorn sheep were still alive, his dark, slit-like nostrils, spreading like wings from the center of his lip, would be filled with the aroma of Punjabi cuisine, as well as some rare perfumes that some of the guests had put on during this occasion—somewhat out of the ordinary, here—to get all dressed up.

Not that Laks could smell any of it. His nose was as dead as that ram’s. The place did, however, smell safe to him, thanks to certain upgrades that had recently been implanted in his skull.

Above the opposite end of the conference table was a king salmon mounted to a varnished plank. A brass plaque, dark with age, provided statistics on its weight and the circumstances of its demise. Dharmender gave it the side-eye, as if hoping it might supply a clue that would help him solve Laks’s gnomic utterance about fry and smolt. But the dead glass eye of the stuffed fish stared back at him, pitiless and baleful.

“What the hell are you trying to say, Laks?”

“If you could give me a lift down to Trail, or even a little farther, tomorrow morning before sunrise—”

“We are practically at the North Pole here,” said Uncle Dharmender, with hyperbole that Laks decided to overlook. Actually, as Laks could tell without looking at a map, they were at a latitude of 49.3196 degrees North, so, more like halfway between the equator and the said pole.

“It is the middle of summer, the sun rises at three in the morning!” Dharmender went on. Also an exaggeration; the correct figure was 5:09. “We should have gone to bed five hours ago if that was your intention!”

“Sorry to spring it on you like this.”

“You weren’t kidding. You literally are going to go down the river.” He was referring to the Columbia. “Into the United States.” Which was where the Columbia flowed.

“I have a wet suit,” Laks volunteered, in case Dharmender was getting ready to give him a hard time about hypothermia.

“Why don’t you just cross on the land like a normal person? I mean, the United States is a mess, sure. But it’s not like going to North Korea.”

“I’m not at liberty to say, but—”

“You’re on some kind of secret mission?”

Apparently Laks’s face was quite easy to read.

Uncle Dharmender raised his voice. “Gurmeet!” His wife, two rooms away, could not hear him in the clatter and chatter of the kitchen. “Gurmeet! Gurmeet! Our nephew is going on a secret mission!”

The kitchen suddenly became a lot quieter. Gurmeet bustled into the room, drying her hands on a simple cotton apron she had tied on over a spectacular getup that made her look, in small-town Canadian eyes, like the wife of the Romulan ambassador. In her wake were several younger women, as well as Gurmeet’s mother. They were all dressed to party.

“For the Indian government?” she asked.

“Who else would he be doing it for?!”

“You’ll need food!”

“He’s sneaking into the U.S. They have food.”

“It is carrion.”

“He’s probably carrying a ton of cash money, he can buy proper food.” Dharmender looked at him. “They gave you money, yes? American cash? Bitcoin?”

“Yes, Uncle.” But Laks now became distracted by the sight of Tavleen—one of the younger women—whipping out her phone and getting busy with both thumbs.

“Tavleen!” Laks shouted. “Are you Facebooking this?”

Far from seeming in any way mortified, Tavleen glared back at him as if to say that the answer was so ridiculously obvious as to be not worth giving. “Your last secret mission was the biggest thing on the Internet! I’m just giving you a signal boost!”

“This actually is secret ,” Laks protested.

Dharmender explained, “If you put it on social media, he will be arrested for swimming across the border and put in real handcuffs.”

“Then why are you telling us?” Gurmeet demanded.

Dharmender checked his wristwatch, a momentous bauble that he kept with him at all times in case everything went sideways and he had to trade it for a jet airplane. “Because at this point we are going to be up all night, and you’ll notice.”