Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

This was doing brisk business. T.R. had bought the whole place out and thrown a security cordon around it, so everyone here was somehow involved in the project, had signed all the NDAs, was in on the joke, as it were. The drinks were free. A table had been reserved and made ready for them. They plunged down into vast chairs and sofas for which many Texas longhorns had sacrificed their lives and their hides. The skull of one such looked down on them from above a fireplace large enough that it could have done double duty as a parking space for one of those SUVs. Amelia ordered club soda, Willem a Manhattan, Saskia a glass of red wine. She enjoyed her first sip and took in the scene.

Twenty-four hours ago, on the bank of the Brazos, they’d been in the world where things made of microchips and petrochemicals cost basically nothing, and a whole city could be summoned into being in a few hours out of tarps, zip ties, and garbage bags. It wasn’t a fancy city, but it wasn’t terrible. Gumbo might be featured on the bar menu here in this hotel lobby, but Saskia deemed it unlikely that it would be any better than what they’d made last night over camp stoves and consumed in the open air in plastic bowls.

This place, however, was about permanence. Permanence, and uniqueness. Every detail custom-built of polished old wood, wrought iron, sculpted marble. Original works of art wherever some decoration was wanted, living flowers arranged by human hands. That human effort immanent in every detail. Napkins folded just so, drinks hand-shaken and served with origami twists of citrus rind.

People were expensive; the way to display, or to enjoy, great wealth was to build an environment that could only have been wrought, and could only be sustained from one hour to the next, by unceasing human effort. Saskia, with her staff, was as guilty of it as anyone, but she tended to forget about it until some event such as the journey down the Brazos reset her thinking.

Woven through the preparations had been a series of tests, administered to all the invited guests, for contagious diseases. Everyone who’d made it as far as this hotel lobby had passed that screening, and so they were all in a shared bubble now, with no masks or social distancing required. The accents in the lobby—other than the obvious Texan—tended to be British, Italian, and Chinese. Though in truth many of the Asian-looking people spoke indistinguishably from well-educated Brits. Saskia assumed they were from Hong Kong until Willem somehow inferred from reading a couple of name tags that they had to be from Singapore. As for the Italians, she guessed that they were from the northern part of that country; there were no visual clues to distinguish them from any other Europeans other than, perhaps, great attention to detail in matters of appearance. As usual Saskia drew a lot of glances and even some indiscreet stares once people understood who she was. T.R.’s staff had been extraordinarily tight-lipped about the guest list; Saskia didn’t know who the other honored guests were, and so it stood to reason that her presence came as a surprise to them.

Rufus and Alastair, the unlikeliest of couples, wandered in and looked shyly in her direction. Saskia sent Willem to corral them and make it clear they were welcome at her table. He did so and they came over, looking somewhat relieved. Neither of them was one for cocktail party banter.

“This is all I got that’s clean,” Rufus said, plucking at his T-shirt and then looking around at the other guests in their tailored suits.

“I’m a queen,” Saskia said. “I don’t think about it every minute of every day, and I try not to make a big deal about it. I try to be norMAL. I don’t ‘pull rank’ as you say. But in cases like this I am a tyrant. You’re with me , Red. Your T-shirt is fine. I said so.”

Rufus enjoyed hearing that and came closer to smiling than usual. Willem had gone missing. On his way back from rounding up these two strays, he had been buttonholed by one of the Singaporeans. Saskia heard the man hailing him in some variant of Chinese. Willem glanced her way, she nodded, and he proceeded to return the greeting and to enter into conversation.

Amelia had stood to make room for Rufus and Alastair. They noticed this, felt bad about it, and made room for her, but she wanted to prowl around. There wasn’t much for her to do. T.R. was providing security and so her main role was to stay in sync with her opposite numbers on his and the other staffs. These were standing around the periphery of the room, identifiable mostly from the fact that they never engaged in anything like normal social interaction. A Brit detached himself from the Brit squad, approached Amelia, and introduced himself. Saskia couldn’t hear, but the man fit the profile of one of those ex-military guys who filled the ranks of British security details.

Both of them turned their heads to look at a man and a woman entering from one of the adjoining spaces. It took Saskia a few moments to realize that the man was T.R. and the woman presumably his wife, Veronica. Compared to his YouTube persona, T.R. McHooligan, he was (of course) older, smaller, and more dignified. A little of the same impish energy still came through. Veronica was a full-time helpmeet to T.R., a society lady who had been doing this her whole life. Early in his advance through the bar, T.R. got brought up short by a staff member and so Veronica peeled away without breaking stride and came for Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia like a border collie homing in on a Frisbee. Saskia stood up and there was the usual society-lady greeting, an activity Saskia had been born and bred for and that largely consisted of defusing any awkwardness or self-consciousness that the other might be experiencing without getting too informal too fast.

Veronica obviously knew her business and so it came off without a hitch. She understood the message Saskia was sending, for example, by wearing blue jeans. She’d done something similar that involved a pair of shockingly exquisite cowboy boots. It was entirely within the realm of possibility that she’d checked out Saskia on one of the video cameras that were presumably ubiquitous on her property and the hotel’s, and only then chosen her outfit.

A minute or two into that procedure, T.R. sidled up to his wife, who unfastened her gaze from Saskia long enough to make the introduction—which seemed like an afterthought. So that was finally out of the way. Protocol dictated that the host and hostess move on to greet other guests before too much time passed, and Saskia gave them an opening to do so after introducing her team. Veronica, much to her credit, didn’t so much as blink when introduced to T-shirted Rufus “Red” Grant, who had to transfer his beer to his other hand and wipe his hand on his pants in order to shake hers. T.R. even managed to work in a “thank you for your service.” This meant that in the approximately six hours since Saskia had abruptly and impulsively added Rufus to her entourage, T.R.’s people had run a background check on him and unearthed his military record and communicated all that to T.R.

“You and I gotta talk pigs later,” T.R. added as a parting shot. “Got a real problem on my Cotulla property!”

“Not for long,” Rufus shot back.

T.R. was knocked back on the heels of his hand-tooled ostrich hide cowboy boots only for a moment, then pointed his index finger at Rufus like a six-shooter and exclaimed, “Oh. Yes. You and me.”

“Yes sir !”

“We gonna take care of it!”

“I got the means!”

“I got a chopper,” T.R. threw in suggestively. His wife was dragging him off. He turned back to utter some barely coherent instructions regarding which of his people Rufus needed to follow up with to arrange it. Though Rufus was a shy man, Saskia could see in his face how pleasantly surprised he was that T.R. McHooligan, of all people on this planet, knew of him and his profession. Just before being dragged out of range, T.R. shot Saskia the slightest glance to make sure she had observed all these goings-on. My staff and I pay attention; in the Lone Star State no sparrow falls from a tree, no bug hits a windshield, no vulture lights on a road-kill armadillo without my knowing it. Saskia for her part just suspended her incredulity for a moment to revel in the fact that there was a part of the world where two men with so little in common could derive such mutual pleasure—not feigned—from the mere prospect of being able to go out into a harsh place and shoot feral swine out of a helicopter.