Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

But Punjabi TV was only a channel click away from American. Gradually the language wormed its way into his brain. Some words were hardly different at all. “Sant” had a meaning different, but not terribly far off, from “Saint.” “Naam,” which was another very important word to Sikhs, was “Name.” The Punjab had been named Pentapotamia, Five Rivers, by Alexander the Great when he had tried and failed to conquer it. But the Persian “Panj” and the Greek “Pent” both meant “five” and if you followed both upstream to their origin in the lost language of the Aryans, they were the same word.

What really blew his mind, though, was his discovery—an incredibly belated discovery of what ought to have been obvious—that the same thing applied to his nickname. “Laka” in Punjabi, “Laks” in Hindi or Urdu, “Lox” in English, “Lachs” in German, and basically the same word in many other languages across Eurasia all meant exactly the same thing. The word had been coined by people who lived, before the beginning of history, in some place where catching salmon and smoking the meat was important to their survival. From there—probably around the Black Sea—they had spread out in all directions and taken the word with them.

But having a few similarities between languages was more confusing than having none at all. So it was a rocky first few weeks. More than once, while pumping away on an elliptical trainer in the fitness center of some Western-style hotel, Laks surfed to travel websites to check the price of a one-way ticket back to YVR.

Part of the difficulty was his self-consciousness whenever he stepped outside of the Western bubble. In Canada he’d been tall and muscular enough to be mistaken for a hockey or football player. Here he was a giant. More importantly, it was obvious that razor and scissors had been allowed to touch his beard and his hair. He had begun to grow them back out. But in the eyes of a random passerby on an Amritsar street he was neither fish nor fowl: a big, somewhat shaggy chap who could have originated from anywhere between Persia and the foothills of the Himalayas.

Other than that, however, he just wasn’t special here. Well over a hundred million people—three times the population of Canada—spoke Punjabi, and most of them spoke it better than him. He’d come to a place where everyone—shopkeepers, cops, lawyers, farmers, even criminals—belonged to the same religion. In Vancouver, being the only Sikh on the fishing boat or the only Sikh welder had made him stand out, for better or worse. Not here. He needed an identity beyond just that.

One morning, he slept later than he should have, and finally twitched his curtain open to let in a blade of sunlight that would force him not to go back to sleep. The sun happened to fall on his arm band, making the burnished steel gleam—except in one place, where he noticed a faint bloom of rust. This was so superficial that he was able to rub it off using a towel. But it seemed like an omen. He had chosen to make, and to wear, the big kara in part because it said something about his connection to the traditional martial arts of his people. Now it was getting rusty! What did that say about him?

He decided to do something about it beginning that day.

LOUISIANA

Willem drove down in a rented pickup truck and rendezvoused with the caravan during a pit stop at a bend in the river near College Station. He sat down with the queen inside a screen house that the Boskeys had pitched on a sandbar. They reviewed the various large and small affairs of the House of Orange.

They began with what was urgent and nearby—chiefly the two wounded members of the group in hospital in Waco. Lennert, he reported, would be fine, though he had a few months of physical therapy ahead of him. He would be on medical leave for a while and so he would have to fly back to the Netherlands once the doctors had cleared him for travel.

Sending out a replacement bodyguard would be complicated and slow, and so Amelia would have to shoulder that responsibility alone for the time being. Security chieftains at home weren’t happy about any of this and so Willem was having to devote a lot of time to calming them down. Amelia had her hands full working out backup plans to be implemented in case various contingencies arose.

Johan was going to be as fine as it was possible for a concussion victim to be, but the plane he’d been sent here to co-pilot no longer existed and so there was no point in keeping him in Texas. Tomorrow he’d be on a KLM flight back to Amsterdam.

Authorities in Waco were only just beginning the investigation of the crash. Sooner or later they’d want to interview “the pilot” but they had surprisingly little actual power. No crime had been committed; they couldn’t arrest anyone, couldn’t force Saskia to give information even if they knew where she was.

They then moved on to the quotidian tasks of the royal household that they would have talked about had they been at home: preparations for the Budget Day Speech in a couple of weeks, various upcoming appearances, and the never-ending flow of royal correspondence. So familiar were these tasks that it almost became possible to forget that they were not in the queen’s office at Noordeinde Palace in The Hague. But then a pause in the conversation brought them back to the here and now, and they sat there quietly for a few moments hearing the cacophony of the bugs and the frogs, the soft liquid sound of the running river.

“Is there anything else?” Willem asked. For he could tell something was on the tip of her tongue.

“I’ve been meaning to ask you sort of an odd question.”

“Ask away.”

“ Brazos ,” she said, looking out over the river. “Why does the name sound so familiar to me? What am I missing?”

“You’ve been seeing the word on financial statements ever since you became old enough to read them,” Willem said.

“Bingo! So I’m not crazy.”

Willem shook his head. “On the contrary.”

“So my next question is . . .”

“At the place where this river empties into the Gulf of Mexico,” Willem said, “south of Houston, there are some mounds—natural formations—rich in sulfur. At the beginning of the twentieth century some businessmen started a company called Brazos Sulfur to mine those deposits. There was a lot of crossover between those guys and early oilmen. This was the era when the oil industry was just going ballistic around here.”

“The gushers you see in old photos.”

“Spindletop and all that. The origin of Gulf and Texaco and others.”

“You are a gusher of obscure industrial history, Willem!”

“You’re too kind. The only reason I know any of this is that it came to light during the last few weeks when I was putting together that packet of information about Dr. Schmidt.”

“How is T.R. mixed up in it?”

“His great-grandfather Karl Schmidt was one of the founders of Brazos Sulfur. As well as an oilman. That’s how T.R. got his name. Karl was an admirer of Teddy Roosevelt. Named his son—Dr. Schmidt’s grandfather—after him.”

“All right,” Saskia said, “so I’m getting the picture of how it all started, more than a century ago. But why would I be seeing the word ‘Brazos’ on financial statements? I’m not aware of any investments in sulfur mines.”

Willem nodded. “But you are aware, if I may make a blindingly obvious point, that your family from the very beginning were investors in Royal Dutch Shell.”

“It just came up in conversation,” Saskia said drily.

Willem nodded. “If you follow the history of Brazos Sulfur through the twentieth century, it expands to other domes—those sulfur-rich mounds—in the Gulf Coast and then diversifies to other minerals. Manganese, nickel, potash. Kaolin, which is a kind of fancy clay used to make paint and diarrhea medicine. So about as unglamorous as you can get.”