Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

Bugs in a wide range of sizes, from microscopic up to several centimeters long, had been upon her from the moment she’d stepped outside, so she moved directly to one of the pop-up canopies that had walls made of mosquito netting. She’d had all the shots recommended for travel to Texas—dengue, Zika, the latest and greatest COVID, the new malaria vaccine—but getting chewed up by bugs was no fun even if you were immune to the diseases they were trying to give you. She zipped the net shut behind her and sat down in a folding camp chair. A torn-open bale of plastic water bottles rested askew on the ground, as if it had been flung out of a helicopter. She worried one out, opened it up, and drank most of it in one long pull. She wasn’t dehydrated now, but she would be soon. She heard a distant rifle shot.

One part of her was incredulous that people would live here. Could anything less sustainable be imagined? She was drinking water from a bottle made of petrochemicals. At three in the morning the temperature was still so high that humans could not sleep unless they ran air conditioners powered by generators that burned more petroleum. The generators and the air conditioners alike dumped more heat into the air. Over dinner, Rufus—speaking in an understated, deadpan, almost scholarly way—had told the story about the fire ants and the relays in the air conditioners. Over dessert, Beau talked about meth gators in a much more exuberant style.

It made Texas sound about as hospitable as the surface of Venus. But Saskia was conscious of the fact that she and her people had been living in an unsustainable country for so long that it was the only thing they knew. If the pumps that held back the North Sea were shut off, the country would be flooded in three days. There was no place they could retreat to. If anything, Texas was more sustainable than the Netherlands. It was mostly above sea level, it produced its own oil, and when that ran out, the Texans could have all the wind and solar energy they felt like collecting.

They just couldn’t hold back the ocean. When it came to that, the Dutch could give them a few pointers.

To that point: it was midday in the Netherlands and so she put on a pair of glasses and checked in. The first thing she established was that there were no news headlines about the queen crashing a jet in Waco. Of course the crash was mentioned in local Waco news, but nothing was said about who was aboard. Willem had chartered it from a British leasing service known for its discretion. The kinds of people who made a habit of flying around in these things generally didn’t like having their identities and their movements exposed to every plane spotter on the Internet, and so various layers of obfuscation were in place as a matter of course.

Having established that, Saskia relaxed a bit by checking Dutch news feeds and football scores, then sent a short affectionate note to Lotte, her sixteen-year-old daughter, who could be relied upon to ignore it. Not that she was a terrible person or that their relationship was bad. Just that she was sixteen and for all practical purposes dwelled on another planet.

A minute later, though, a smiley face came back, a little warm round beacon hanging there against the Texas night like an egg yolk, and that gave Saskia a warm feeling that lasted long enough for her to drift off to sleep.

The princess’s real name was Charlotte Emma Sophia. But in a family where people had such rambling monikers, nicknames were a must. Lotte was a simple contraction of the first of her names.

For Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia, it had never been so easy. “Freddie” was out of the question. She detested “Rika.” “Mathilde” could have yielded “Mattie” or “Tillie,” which weren’t much better. For a while she had gone by “Lou” and some of her older relatives still called her that.

The addition of “Saskia” to her string of names had been controversial, even shocking, at the time of her christening. It wasn’t a proper royal name. It had a dignified enough history—Rembrandt’s wife had been a Saskia—but these days it was seen as common. The name of a farmer’s wife. There weren’t any precedents in the royal family tree for a Saskia; the name had been added to honor a favorite aunt, a commoner who had married into the family. So it had come in through the back door, as it were. The servants’ entrance.

People who actually bothered to concern themselves with the queen’s fourth name took different views of it. To the most snobbish, it was an embarrassment. From time to time, on an engraved invitation, or in an introductory address, “Saskia” would be pointedly omitted. She was not above being offended when that happened, and holding grudges because of it. Because she had really loved her aunt Saskia.

Less fancy people, on the other hand, rather liked the queen’s fourth name because it showed a common touch. From time to time the queen would be referred to, in some tweet or tabloid headline, as Saskia, in the same ironic way as Queen Elizabeth might be called Bess. Snobs might do it as a sly way of suggesting she wasn’t royal enough. But ordinary Dutch people—at least, ones who took a basically favorable view of the monarchy—might do it to suggest that the queen was actually, when you got down to it, norMAL. The haters, of course, would call her Queen Fred.

Among a small inner circle, Saskia had become her most commonly used nickname. At the moment in Waco when Amelia had asked, “What should I call you?” Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia had blurted out “Saskia” without thinking. And Amelia had raised her eyebrows for a whole slew of reasons. Foremost of which was that, until that moment, Amelia would never have dared to address the queen by that name. Its use was reserved for perhaps half a dozen close friends and younger family members. Even they considered it a bit naughty. But orders were orders. So Amelia and the others had been forcing themselves to use that name, with only occasional slip-ups in which they would say mevrouw or even Uwe Majesteit . But no one here knew what those words meant.

Rufus, of course, knew her only as Saskia, and had introduced her as such to all of the Boskeys. It was a code name; but at the same time she felt in some ways that it was her true name, and she very much enjoyed being called it.

Saskia awoke hot and sweaty to the sound and aroma of yet more food being prepared. Weather was fine (if sultry) here, but the hurricane had struck the Gulf Coast overnight, passing just far enough south of Houston that it wouldn’t go down in the records as a direct hit. But rainfall and storm surge had still been huge.

Caught in the periphery of the hurricane had been the part of Louisiana where the Boskeys lived. According to news coming in from their network, there’d been some flooding. But the Boskeys had shown her pictures of their homes. These were constructed on stilts as much as six meters high. As long as those stilts didn’t get knocked out from under them by floating cars, trees, or houses that hadn’t been put up on stilts, they’d be fine.

On the outskirts of Houston there were apparently places where the big radial freeways leading into and out of the metropolis were equipped with crossover lanes that could, with the flip of a switch, be shunted into a special evacuation mode. A freeway that normally had, say, five lanes going into the city and five going out would suddenly become a one-way, ten-lane behemoth, a fire hose of traffic aimed outward into the higher and dryer hinterlands. Or, given that it was Houston, maybe the correct figure was fourteen or eighteen lanes. Anyway, that switch had been thrown yesterday. So, as Saskia and her team tried to consume food as rapidly as Mary Boskey and her son-in-law Reggie were producing it, they were treated to imagery on the screen of Rufus’s laptop showing a webcam feed of a vast unidirectional traffic jam in open territory some forty miles west of downtown Houston. The camera was rocking slightly in what they assumed were powerful bursts of wind. The image was frequently blurred, or blotted out, by waves of what looked like static. It was actually rain coming down with such intensity as to stop all light. When it abated they could see a galaxy of red taillights.