Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

“The Americans have not been very hospitable, but we thought that the least we could do was reach out and say hi,” Bo said, in Mandarin except for the “say hi.”

Willem was actually pretty sure that hospitality on a pharaonic scale was planned in Texas but saw no purpose in volunteering that.

“You are too kind,” Willem said. “Here, of course, they like their cold sugary beverages.”

Bo made a slight roll of the eyes and puffed out his cheeks, perhaps simulating one who was about to throw up, perhaps trying to approximate the look of one who had put on a hundred pounds’ Big Gulp–fueled adiposity.

“But of course that is not the true way to beat the heat ,” Willem continued. He spoke the last three words in English and then raised his teacup to his lips. Chinese people kept emerging, Keystone Kops–like, from the RV. Bo raised an antique fan from his lap, snapped it open, and fanned his face. One of his staff members knelt and plugged in a little electric fan that was aimed in Willem’s direction. All these aides were brandishing objects that looked like cheap plastic simulacra of squash rackets. As soon became obvious, they were actually handheld bug zappers. The aides initially formed a defensive perimeter, but as insects were observed slipping through gaps, they broke formation and began to roam about in a sort of zone coverage, swiping their weapons through the air with the controlled grace of YouTube tai chi instructors, incinerating bugs with crisp zots and zaps while pretending not to hear a word of what Bo and Willem were saying. A brand-new thirty-two-gallon Rubbermaid Roughneck stood nearby, lined with a heavy-duty contractor bag from a fresh roll of same, already overflowing with the packaging in which all these fans, extension cords, bug zappers, and so on had, Willem guessed, been purchased from Walmart inside of the last two hours. Occasionally the burnt-hair scent of a vaporized bug would drift past Willem’s nostrils, but he’d smelled worse.

Bo seemed in no great hurry to get the conversation rolling. His eyes were tracking a group of three workers who had apparently come back to the parking lot on their break to use the portable toilets and smoke cigarettes. “A hundred years ago they’d have been black. Fifty years ago, Vietnamese. Twenty, Mexican,” Bo said. They were white. “Maybe this will teach them some kind of decent work ethic. What they are doing out there looks a lot like transplanting rice seedlings, no?”

He meant the ancient process by which flooded rice paddies were planted at the beginning of the growing season. It was, of course, ubiquitous across Asia. Each language and dialect had its own words for it. The term he had used was not from Mandarin. Obviously from Bo’s speech and appearance he was a straight-up northern Han lifelong Mandarin speaker, but he’d strayed into the dialect of Fuzhou that was used by Willem’s extended family. This could not possibly have been an accident.

“Yes,” Willem agreed, “this process looks very similar but here, of course, instead of growing food, they are creating new land.”

“It must be very interesting to you and the person you work for—the Dutch know more about this than anyone!” Bo proffered. The thin edge of a conversational wedge that was aimed at getting Willem to divulge more about the queen. Did the Chinese know that she was in Texas? Did they merely suspect it? Or did they know nothing?

“Oh, I don’t think you give your own country due credit,” Willem returned. “Earlier I was driving along the river where it runs between the levees, higher than the surrounding land. It put me in mind of the Yellow River, which as you know has looked very much the same since long before Dutch people began constructing their sad little windmills.”

Bo nodded. “Both a flood control measure, and a weapon.” He uttered a phrase that meant something like “water instead of soldiers.”

Willem recognized it. “You might be interested to know that the Dutch used exactly the same tactic. William the Silent, Prince of Orange—yes, the ancestor of the person I have the honor of working for—opened the dikes in 1574 as a way to rout an invading Spanish army. The gambit succeeded. Every year it is celebrated with a festival in Leiden.”

“Your adopted hometown,” Bo added, quite unnecessarily. “So you are a student of history. You’ll know that whenever those Yellow River levees broke, it was a great catastrophe. The emperor was viewed as having lost the Mandate of Heaven.”

Bo said this with all due wryness, as if to emphasize that he was not some pedantic blinkered scholarly idiot. Willem chuckled. “If you are trying to draw some analogy to the person I work for, then let’s keep in mind that her mandate comes from the people. In the Netherlands no one believes in heaven anymore.”

“In Amsterdam, The Hague, perhaps that’s true,” Bo returned. “Do you ever go into the east, though?”

“You mean, the east of the Netherlands !?”

“Yes.”

“It is a twenty-minute drive from those cities you mentioned!”

“You are busy. Twenty minutes must seem an age.” Bo took a sip of his tea. “Those clodhoppers in—what’s it called? Brabant?”

“North Brabant, yes.”

“They are still religious, I’m told. Conservative. Even reactionary.”

Willem didn’t like where this was going, but there was no getting around the fact that just a few hours earlier he had been standing in the hallway of his father’s house looking at a shrine, dedicated to everything Bo was alluding to.

“In my experience, people all over the world think the same way,” Willem said. “If there is a disaster, it means that whoever is in power has lost the ‘Mandate of Heaven’ and must be gotten rid of.”

Bo said, “Western historians write about this phenomenon in China in a patronizing style, because they believe that the West—”

“Has evolved beyond all that superstitious nonsense. I know.”

“Don’t you think that that proclivity for self-delusion makes Western leaders vulnerable?”

Willem shrugged. “You raise an interesting philosophical question of a sort that is amusing to ponder in one’s free time. My job is to remind a powerless constitutional monarch to send handwritten thank-you notes to schoolchildren and to see to it that the name cards are properly arranged on the tables at state dinners.”

Bo looked away, apparently thinking that what Willem had just said was so stupid that it simply couldn’t be responded to without a breach in etiquette. But it would always be thus. The Chinese were either too obtuse to understand constitutional monarchy—preferring to see it as a paper-thin cover story to conceal what was really going on—or else they were so infinitely more sophisticated that they understood the realities in ways that the self-flattering Europeans never could. Either way, the Chinese seemed to have much firmer opinions on the matter than Willem did. Willem was willing to entertain the hypothesis that Queen Frederika actually could wield serious temporal power, but it seemed too far-fetched, too at odds with the unassailable constitutional bedrock of the Grondwet to which he’d sworn himself.

“You are—what’s the English word? Underemployed. A man of your experience and erudition—arranging place cards? Really?”

Since that sounded like the germ of a job offer—which could only lead in the direction of incalculable disaster—Willem said, “I couldn’t be happier in my role.”

“Then you must have other duties that are more challenging—more interesting!” Bo exclaimed, as if this were a fascinating new revelation. “But of course, it makes sense. Why else would you be here —looking at this ?”