Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

“Why was it a hellhole?”

“Built by convict labor. Legal slavery, after the Civil War. Sugar plantations are so bad, you almost couldn’t have sugar without slaves.”

“What’s there now?”

“Subdivisions. The Brazos runs right through the middle of it. We can get there direct on a boat, or we can drive.”

A man with a thick accent took exception, and for a minute they talked in a way that Saskia couldn’t follow. Willem had brought up a map on his laptop. He and Saskia played a guessing game of trying to match place-names with the word fragments that they managed to fish out of the verbal gumbo. Just north of Sugar Land, in the western suburbs of Houston, the map showed large bodies of water, obviously artificial given that they were neat polygons outlined by roads. They were labeled as reservoirs. And yet on satellite imagery they appeared to be forests, dotted with recreational facilities. Sometimes, it seemed, these parts of the city were wooded parkland and other times they were underwater. Rufus and the Cajuns were talking about “Energy Corridor” and “Buffalo Bayou.” Willem identified these on the map as well—both ran eastward toward downtown. The former was a row of office complexes, including at least one Shell facility. The latter was a natural watercourse that apparently drained those huge park/reservoir zones.

The direction it seemed to be going was that Rufus—as the first Texan to have greeted the Dutch, and taken them under his wing, upon their startling advent in the New World—would take responsibility for getting them to their rendezvous with T.R., so that the Cajuns could go about their business farther south. After which, Rufus—having not only killed Snout but furthermore discharged his hostly obligations—would be free to join up with the Cajuns if he wanted, or to do anything else whatsoever that struck his fancy.

The easiest way to make this rendezvous in Sugar Land would be to just blast straight down the Brazos tomorrow on a proper boat—not a slow-moving pontoon—and look for a place where they could get out and hike up the riverbank to whatever passed for dry land at the moment. The alternative, supported by Rufus, was to drive. But as to that there was much disagreement. Could Sugar Land even be reached by a wheeled vehicle? Opinions differed. Saskia, unable to follow much of what was being said, had to observe it as an anthropologist or even a primatologist. It was like any other meeting, be it of European Union bureaucrats in Brussels or members of the Dutch royal household, which was to say that it was at least as much about social dominance and hierarchy as about boats and trucks. Those who didn’t like to play the game excused themselves or pushed their chairs back and dissolved into the twilight world of social media. The others engaged in this contest, which was not in any way disrespectful but was nonetheless a kind of struggle that, once begun, must be resolved. Rufus, in an understated but firm way, not lacking in deadpan humor, wanted it understood that boats were not the be-all and end-all. The Cajuns—some of them, anyway—were watercraft fundamentalists. Saskia, queen of one of the world’s boatiest nations, saw in it a parable of climate change. These Cajuns had come down out of French Canada and spent the next quarter of a millennium dwelling in swamps and navigating around bayous: marginal places overlooked, or looked down on, by the drylanders in their concrete-and-steel fastnesses. But now the water was advancing upon the dry land. Their time had come. They were just slightly annoyed with Rufus’s dogged insistence that wheeled vehicles had not become a thing of the past just because of a little rain, his patient reminders that Houston was crisscrossed with immense freeways on stilts, his pointing out that he’d mounted a snorkel on his truck that made it capable of driving through chest-deep water without stalling the engine.

It all got resolved, in the end, the only way such arguments could be resolved without anyone’s losing face: through a sort of competition. Tomorrow the four Dutch and the one Scottish visitor would be conveyed swiftly down the river on a boat while Rufus tried to keep up with them in his truck, going roughly parallel to the Brazos on Interstate 10, and carrying the baggage. Rufus’s trailer would later be towed out of here behind a Boskey vehicle and they’d look for a safe place to park it near their projected theater of operations. Once Rufus had seen the foreigners delivered to Sugar Land, he could retrieve his trailer and then ponder what to do with the remainder of his allotted life span. It was this last detail that seemed to be of paramount concern to Mary Boskey. She and Saskia had somehow wordlessly arrived at a shared understanding that someone now needed to keep an eye on Rufus and make sure that in the post-Snout phase of his life he didn’t go off the deep end.

> WHO IS THE HOTTIE!?!?

Lotte wanted to know after Saskia had sent her a selfie with the mound of crayfish in the background. Saskia scrolled back and examined it and saw Jules in the background making eyes at Fenna.

> He’s taken.

> Aww.

> By Fenna.

> AWESOME

Then, later, after a few more selfies:

> OMG Surinamese guy on the left. Your age.

Saskia looked at the selfie, puzzled. Then she understood.

> Not Surinamese. They don’t exist here.

> He seems fit for a guy that age.

> You mean, a senior citizen like me?

An exchange of emojis followed, reflecting embarrassment and apologies accepted.

“My daughter thought you were Surinamese,” she said to Rufus later. The man was obviously an introvert, not fully comfortable with the hyper-gregarious Boskeys. Saskia exchanged a glance with Mary, a few yards away, who seemed glad to see that Rufus had company.

Rufus had never heard the term.

“Like Amelia,” Saskia explained. She nodded over toward her acting security chief. As usual the poor woman was on the phone, looking preoccupied and tense, with frequent glances toward Saskia. She beckoned Willem over and they huddled on the edge of the bonfire’s circle of smoky, bug-strewn light.

Rufus nodded. “Something gone wrong, or is that just how her job is?”

“I don’t think anything has gone wrong in particular. It’s just that there are a lot of nervous people on the other end of the line. Trying to work through all the contingencies.”

“Those people didn’t like it that you went down the river like you did.”

“They didn’t like anything about this.”

Rufus nodded. “So your daughter thinks I look like her ? That’s a fine compliment.”

Saskia smiled. “I’m glad you think so! I consider Amelia quite beautiful even though her looks are unusual by Dutch standards.”

Rufus shifted his gaze to Saskia. “Most Dutch look more like you.”

“Yes.”

“Well, that’s not a bad way to look either.”

Saskia swallowed.

“Takes all kinds,” Rufus added. “The reason I look the way I do is because of my great-great-granddad Hopewell, who was an African man. He was a slave owned by Chickasaw Indians.”

“Indians owned slaves?”

Rufus nodded. “Oh yes, ma’am. Lots of ’em. Chickasaws were one of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes, down in the Southeast. They lived like white people. White people had slaves. So they had slaves too. Later the Five Tribes got pushed west across the Mississippi to Oklahoma, which was called Indian Territory in those days. Took their slaves with ’em. Hopewell, he was born into slavery around about 1860. When the Civil War started, a lot of the Five Civilized Tribes supported the Confederacy, because they wanted to keep things like they was. Now, when Juneteenth came—the day the slaves were emancipated—Hopewell’s family took the name Grant.”