Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

Where they were, of course, it was hot and sunny with barely a breeze, and just a few clouds building up in the south that looked like rain later.

“This all look real strange to you, coming from Holland?” Mary asked, taking advantage of a lull in the eating. She and the other Cajuns had worked out that Saskia’s team were Dutch, but apparently Rufus hadn’t divulged more than that.

Saskia mastered the urge to correct Mary on her use of the not-exactly-correct term “Holland.” “Oh, you might be surprised. There are parts of the Netherlands where people drive around in pickup trucks, and go to . . .” She was about to say “church” but wasn’t sure how these people would respond once she brought up religion, so she finished, “. . . a very traditional kind of church, very conservative.”

“Got your own Bible Belt, do you?” Mary answered, with a nod.

“Very much so.”

“Y’all with Shell?” Reggie asked.

“Shale?” Saskia was having trouble with his accent and assumed he was talking about the oil-bearing rock.

“I think he means Royal Dutch Shell,” Alastair put in, slightly amused. “Maybe you have heard of it.”

Saskia’s family had co-founded Royal Dutch Shell—which was why it was called Royal—and she personally owned a significant percentage of the company.

“You meet a Dutchman in Houston, that’s who he generally works for,” Reggie said with a wink.

“In a manner of speaking,” Saskia answered, “I suppose you could say that, yes, I am connected with that company.”

But, as she came to see, the Boskeys were, in a very polite and roundabout way, trying to bring the conversation around to business. Not in the sense of seeking to extract money from the Dutch castaways—that seemed to be the furthest thing from their minds—but in the sense of trying to figure out where this was all going, and what to do next. How, in other words, to properly discharge the responsibilities they had cheerfully shouldered when they had taken in the foreign castaways. Camped here on this sandbar they were not getting any closer to Houston. Nor were they getting closer to Lake Charles, which was where the rest of the clan presumably awaited their return. A general plan seemed to be coalescing that a number of Boskeys and their friends and associates might converge on Houston in a pincer maneuver, a couple of days hence, after the storm had abated, but while they could still make themselves useful assisting flood victims.

If that was the intention, they needed to get moving. For the Brazos was a convoluted river, and the number of miles they needed to cover on the water was greater by far than the straight-line distance. If they departed now and kept moving day and night, the timing would work out. Saskia and her team were welcome to come along, but they needed to understand that it would not be a mere party cruise; from this point onward they would not again stop moving for longer than it took to refuel.

Saskia discussed it with her team, but not for very long. The weather had forced their hand. They had about two days to kill no matter what. They could kill it in some nearby hotel, supposing they could find a room—but even at this distance from Houston, all the hotel rooms had been snapped up. Staying with the Boskeys would give them lodging, transportation to Houston, and privacy. Even if word somehow leaked out to the Dutch press that the queen was in Texas, they could release video of her assisting with disaster relief, which was (a) just the sort of thing queens were expected to do, and (b) relevant to the Netherlands’ timeless, overriding, existential concern of not ending up underwater.

So that was the queen’s decision. They helped pack up the encampment and they headed south. Rufus was part of the caravan. His trailer, when parked, could be occupied, but when it was moving no one was allowed to be in it. Likewise the pontoon could be towed down highways, but not with people in it. So for the most part the boats were used to transport people, and rarely stopped moving. The wheeled vehicles ranged ahead of them, foraging for gasoline, food, beer, and other consumables. They transferred these to the boats at places where roads came to the river’s edge. More Cajuns showed up, towing additional boats, and so both the waterborne and dry-land parts of the caravan grew. Alastair and Fenna generally looked for ways to “ride shotgun” in air-conditioned vehicles. Saskia for the most part stayed on the pontoon boat and Amelia stayed with her, both resorting to the use of earthsuits during the hottest parts of the day.

An earthsuit was not so much a single garment as a toolkit of parts that could be snapped together in different ways depending on conditions. The refrigeration system couldn’t work unless it could discharge heat into the environment. Normally it did that by shooting hot air straight up out of a pipe, but in circumstances like these, where a supply of water was near to hand, the air-based heat exchanger could be swapped out for a module that performed the same task by heating up water. A system of umbilicals made it possible for the hot part of it to trail in the Brazos along the flank of the pontoon boat, so long as the users didn’t expect to do a lot of moving around. There was only so much moving around one could do in a craft of this size and so the restriction wasn’t a problem.

PENTAPOTAMIA

Deep had grown up in Richmond, British Columbia. This was an island on Vancouver’s south flank, bracketed by the two forks of the Fraser River, and destined to be submerged by the rising waters of the Salish Sea into which they flowed.

Deep’s elementary school had once done a “project-based learning” unit about salmon, focused on rehabbing a nearby creek that had been channelized and made lifeless by the processes of suburban development. Then, as now, “physically active” and “a kinesthetic learner,” young Deep had never taken well to classroom learning. But working in the rain with a shovel, and observing the movements of fish, had brought him alive.

In the summer, Chinook salmon came in from the ocean and swam up the rivers to spawn. This had had the unintended but, to his parents, desirable side effect of lengthening Deep’s school year. His family operated gas stations. They’d started in the 1960s with a single one near Chilliwack, but now had thumbtacks spattered across the map of British Columbia, conjoined by a web of kinship and financial ties. Deep cross-correlated the thumbtacks with topo maps showing the courses of rivers and cajoled his father into taking him on summer expeditions. Father would drop him off by the side of some river with a net, a fishing pole, and lunch, and then go hang out in the back room of a gas station with a cousin or a brother while Deep rambled up and down the riverbank figuring out where the salmon were, and attempting to catch them. By that point in their life cycle, they did not make for very good eating. But as he got older, and these trips lengthened from day hikes to overnight camps, he ate them anyway, cooking them over smoky fires that he taught himself how to kindle in wet wood.

It was on the return leg of such a trip that his uncle Dharmender bestowed on him the nickname that stuck. Deep had come into Dharmender’s gas station smelling of fish and smoke, and been dubbed “Lox.” In Punjabi it was rendered “Laka” but pronounced similarly. It was a weird nickname. But he needed one, because there were a lot of people in his world named Deep Singh—three of them in his elementary school alone.

Laks’s father was a pious and loving man who never quite bounced back from the realization, which came to him when Laks was about twenty, that his son was never going to get any formal education beyond the high school diploma he already had. Laks’s interest in fish was not going to lead to a career as a wildlife biologist. Fisherman was more likely. He took summer jobs on commercial fishing boats up and down the coast: basically unskilled labor, perfect for a brawny and energetic teenager. At the beginning this was couched as “saving money for college.” But Laks was not college material. He was an exceptional athlete, but no university would award him a scholarship for the sports in which he most excelled: snowboarding, and the martial art known as gatka.