Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

“Still, it’s good that you saw it,” Sister Catherine remarked. “Not just the gun. The whole mine. So you know what we are dealing with. The scale of it.”

Noteworthy to Willem was the nun’s utter lack of curiosity about the attack. He raised his head from the floor of the bus and exchanged a look with Amelia.

He asked, “Do you think that the attack was related to the new gun project or—”

“No!” she said, with a brusqueness that gave Willem a glimpse of what it would feel like to be a dull pupil in her classroom. “No one here cares about any of that.”

“Climate change, geoengineering . . .”

“No one cares. Except foreign countries. And it is those who decide our fate.”

“Whether you will remain part of Indonesia or—”

“We are ‘part of Indonesia’ in the same sense that Indonesia used to be ‘part of the Dutch Empire,’” she said, and, in the scariest thing Willem had seen all day, turned around to look back and down at him while removing both hands from the steering wheel to form air quotes.

“Please overlook my poor choice of words,” Willem said, suppressing the rest of the sentence and keep your eyes on the fucking road .

“Go and sin no more,” she cracked, swinging the bus decisively onto a side street. Judging from the frequency with which Willem’s skull was slamming into the floor, this one was not as well paved. They were plunging into puddles that began, but never quite seemed to end. Canopies of trees were looming above the windows. The verdant scene was interrupted by the hard corner of a rusty shipping container. Standing atop it, well back of a coiling fumarole of razor wire, was a young man in a backwards baseball cap and mirror shades, cradling an AK-47 and smoking a cigarette. Others like him came into view as the bus slowed and then stopped. Sister Catherine put it in neutral and stomped the parking brake with a vehemence she might have used to crush a scorpion threatening a pupil. “School’s out,” she said.

“Home sweet home,” Willem said, and stood up. “Thanks for the lift, Sister Catherine.”

“I’ll be in touch,” she said, “as this plays out.” Again, this clear sense that there was a specific “this” and that she knew what it was. To Amelia she said, “There’s probably no safer place for you to be. It’s where we used to take Beatrix and the others when there was trouble.” Amelia didn’t know who Beatrix was, but she smiled and nodded politely.

Willem had been anticipating a potentially awkward delay out in front of the gate, during which he would gesticulate in front of Uncle Ed’s security camera in an effort to get buzzed in. But their arrival happened to coincide with the departure of several badminton buddies, whose taxi was waiting for them on the street. Clearly these men were not about to let a small insurrection alter their plans for the day. The last of them recognized Willem and simply held the door open for him by sticking one leg out. He made the most of the slight delay by lighting a cigarette. “See you tomorrow,” he said to Willem in Fuzhounese, as Willem walked past him.

THE COLUMBIA RIVER

Laks’s sixth sense—or maybe his seventh or eighth, he’d lost count—told him when it was time to dog-paddle to the left bank of the Columbia and clamber up onto the rocky shore. The sun had broken the horizon as he had snorkeled along beneath the dark surface of the river, but the place where he crawled up onto the land was still deep in the shade of the precipitous eastern bank. On the opposite shore there was practically nothing visible in the way of human habitation—just the same sort of pine scrub where his uncle had dropped him off north of the border. Laks peeled out of the wet suit and changed into the outfit that had been stashed at the top of his waterproof pack: T-shirt, jeans, sneakers, and a bandanna that he could use for the time being as a keski. He weighed the wet suit down under rocks beneath the water. The pack itself looked scarcely less ominously tactical, but it contained a rolled-up duffel bag into which he transferred the other stuff they’d given him: a change of clothes, some American snack food, a water bottle.

It was very quiet here, as there was next to no traffic on the roads and only a faint lapping of water along the bank. Laks’s ears—which were better now than they had been before he’d been fixed up in Cyberabad—picked up a faint whir. He swiveled his head to and fro until he picked out its source: a little drone hovering just above the river’s surface about a hundred meters away. It smelled safe. He paid it no further mind. There had been no drones shadowing him in Canada, but apparently the United States was a different story. It was, as all the world knew, a completely insane and out-of-hand country, unable to control itself. Men like the Texan could get away with anything; but by the same token, so could Indian military intelligence.

A two-lane highway ran along the top of the bank. He followed it south along a sweeping curve and came in view of an old bridge where the river was crossed by another such road. Around their intersection, half a mile farther along, was a small town built on a generous stretch of flat territory. The shoulder of the road broadened and flowed without any clear dividing line into the gravel parking lots of a few roadside bars, diners, and convenience stores. Laks’s ride was idling in one of those. It was a semi-trailer rig carrying a forty-foot shipping container. They hadn’t told Laks anything he didn’t actually need to know, but it was easy enough to guess that the container had arrived recently at Tacoma or Seattle and been collected by this driver. Laks walked right past it without looking very closely. But there was nothing to see. It looked like a million other trucks.

Half a minute later he heard it revving up, now a couple of blocks behind him. It pulled out onto the road, which doubled as the town’s main street. Laks turned around and stuck out his thumb. The truck slowed.

It could be inferred that the driver—who looked Indian—had been instructed to talk to him as little as possible. When asked his name, he simply glanced up at the dome light and then looked pityingly back at Laks. Thanks to Uncle Dharmender, the meaning was clear. “You can sleep back there” was the extent of his conversation. Oh, and he held up a certain kind of widemouthed plastic container that Laks well recognized. During the months he’d spent bedbound from vertigo, he had made frequent use of them. “For urination, please!”

Running athwart the semi-tractor behind the seats was a foam mattress. Tucked into clever built-in cabinets around that were a tiny fridge, a microwave, and some other conveniences. An overhead rail supported a blackout curtain that could divide the cabin in two. It looked tempting to Laks. On the other hand, it was a beautiful morning in eastern Washington. So he sat there and gazed out the windshield for an hour or so as the driver silently, patiently, and at no point exceeding the posted speed limit, maneuvered the rig along a country road that wound through rocky, rolling ranch territory, going brown in the heat of summer, framed by hills carpeted with dark evergreens. It was evident from the sun and from road signs that they were headed generally south, toward Spokane. They passed through a couple of small towns and a reservation for the other kind of Indians. In due time they verged on the outer fringes of the city, with the same lineup of big-box stores and fast-food places as everywhere else, and sleepiness overtook Laks. He took off his shoes, crawled into the back, and pulled the curtain.

He was awakened by the unaccustomed stillness of the truck. Its engine was still idling but it had ceased moving. He pulled the curtain back and was surprised to see that dusk had fallen. He must have slept for something like ten hours. They were just off an interstate highway, in the vast parking lot of some kind of commercial truck stop. The highway ran north-south and was bracketed between ranges of rugged hills. The last light of a gaudy sunset was silhouetting the ones to the west and reddening the scrub-covered slopes of those to the east. The truck driver was nowhere to be seen.