Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

She just looked at him expectantly. Her instinct was to say little until she got the background check back from Amelia.

“Look,” Michiel said with a shrug, “someone like you will want to have an explanation of who and what I am. That is only fair and reasonable. We should get out ahead of that and not let it develop into a source of confusion. But perhaps you’ll agree that this cocktail party isn’t the place or time.”

“I do agree and will take that as an offer for us to find some place and time that is better.”

“Done. I do not have a staff per se, but am accompanied by my sister and my aunt. We shall work it out with Dr. Castelein.”

“It has been a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Michiel.”

“The pleasure is all mine, Your Majesty,” he returned, and excused himself.

Verdict: Michiel was low drag (though it might be weird having his sister around), very high lift, but only on the condition that he wasn’t some kind of fascist. The Netherlands too had its share of far-right characters, and Saskia had to be careful about even being seen talking to someone like that. So the verdict was out until Amelia (and the larger Dutch security apparatus at home) could figure out who the hell this guy was.

“Ex-footballer for AC Milan,” Willem said, after Michiel was out of earshot.

“Ah. I thought he looked familiar.”

“Played for a few seasons. Not a big star but had a good run. Parlayed it into some endorsements. You’ve seen his face on ads for fancy watches in duty-free shops. From an old Venetian family, as it turns out.”

It remained only to make some sort of contact with the Brits. Saskia dispatched Alastair, who knew some of the lord mayor’s entourage through City connections. He came back a few minutes later with a pair of white men in tow: a mop-topped blond (medium drag, medium lift, too young) who looked like he’d stepped right off an Oxford or Cambridge quad, and a posh and podgy sort in his fifties (probably low drag, but zero lift). This was the guy whose cuff links—made from Roman coins, it turned out—had caught her eye earlier. His name tag identified him as Mark Furlong. “Bob’s knackered,” he announced. “Just useless. Too much free Beaujolais on the Gulfstream.”

A moment passed while Saskia re-calibrated her conversational brain for this kind of highly layered and ironic talk. In some ways it was more difficult than learning a foreign language. Which was sort of the point; you couldn’t be part of this social class unless you got it. “Bob”—Robert Watts, the Right Honorable the Lord Mayor of London—was a teetotaler. He had blown up a marriage and a job by drinking too much, then sworn off the booze and put his life back together and gotten married to Daia Chand, a British journalist. The assertion by Mark Furlong—a trusted member of Bob’s inner circle—that he’d been incapacitated by too much free Beaujolais on the Gulfstream was under no circumstances to be taken at face value. It was, first of all, a joke that derived its humorous payload from being so utterly outrageous in its falsity. But for the hearer to get the joke they’d have to know Bob at least well enough to know that he was—extremely unusually for a man in his role—an absolute teetotaler. Anyone so ill-informed or credulous as to actually believe this slander would be left out in the cold, operating on bad information. In due time they might work out that they’d committed the monstrous faux pas of taking at face value what had been meant as an ironic witticism and have the good grace to throw themselves in front of a Tube train at Bank. Further embroidering on all this was Mark’s specification of Beaujolais as the drink in question, that being seen, by a certain class of drinker, as an inexpensive and faddish vintage for lightweights. The mention of the Gulfstream was a lovely touch. Mark was basically remarking on how absurd it was for people to travel that way. So the underlying reality was that Mark was a profoundly decent man who knew and loved Bob but couldn’t bring himself to say as much.

Fine. But it simply took Saskia a few moments to get her head in that groove, so different from talking to the Sylvester Lins of the world. During that brief period of readjustment, Mark—who was evidently not a teetotaler—began to look just faintly queasy as it crossed his mind that Saskia might be too dim or literal-minded to get the joke. She was, after all, just a hereditary monarch. It wasn’t like you had to pass an intelligence test to land that job.

“He says he knows you,” Mark said, beginning to sound apologetic.

“Is Dr. Chand holding his head?”

“Perhaps. I thought she might join us.” Mark looked around, then shrugged as if to say no such luck . “I’m afraid I’ll have to do. On behalf of the Honorable the Lord Mayor, howdy and welcome to Texas! Can I grab you a beer?”

“I’m fine with this lovely glass of Beaujolais,” she shot back.

For one exquisite second, she had him. Mark looked exquisitely mortified, his eyes strayed to the glass in Saskia’s hand, but then he saw that it looked more like a Bordeaux. “I’ve heard it’s quite good,” he said.

Obviously discomfited by Mr. Furlong’s breezy informality was the younger man, one Simon Towne by his name tag. He turned out to be a viscount. As such he probably had been brought up to behave in a certain way when in the presence of queens. So Saskia went through the requisite formalities as Mark Furlong gazed on, seeming to find it all worth watching. Mark was a City man through and through. His protégé Simon was of another recognizable type: fresh out of a posh education, sent down to the City for seasoning and to rack up some millions and find a wife who would enjoy picking out curtains in Sussex.

“Mark, you mentioned Alastair had worked for you. May I assume in that case that you too are a risk analyst?”

“We all are,” Mark said.

“We meaning—?”

“Everyone in this room. Even the waiters and bus boys. Especially them. It’s just that some of us actually have the temerity to print it on our business cards.” He regarded Saskia. “Your country. Surrounded by walls. So high, but no higher. There’s a risk that waves will overtop them. Boffins like Alastair understand the maths of waves.” Mark winked.

“So he keeps telling me,” Saskia returned, with a glance at Alastair.

Alastair reddened, and his jaw literally dropped open.

“We’re joking!” she said. But she’d put him in a bad spot and he had to defend himself—if not to Mark and Saskia, who were in on the joke, then to others who were listening. “Anyone who claims to understand waves needs to be fired,” he said.

He had written his dissertation on rogue waves—incredibly random events of astonishing power, thought to be responsible for sudden disappearances of ships, therefore of interest to City insurance companies, who’d hired him before the ink was dry on his Ph.D.

“I know, Alastair,” Mark said calmingly. “So you told me ten years ago. Now it’s how I cull the yearly crop of people like Simon.”

With that it seemed that the basic purpose of the cocktail hour had been accomplished. Saskia could reasonably claim to be “knackered” herself and so she made excuses and returned to the guesthouse with Amelia, leaving Alastair to pal around with the City boys, Rufus to talk pigs with T.R., and Willem to brush up on his Fuzhounese with the Singapore crew. Lotte demanded a progress report via text message and Saskia dutifully let her know that two possibles (Rufus and Michiel) had been identified. But she drew the line at sending her daughter pictures.

They could have just done this aerial tour from the comfort of T.R.’s mansion-on-stilts along Buffalo Bayou, relaxing on leather furniture with drinks in hand and experiencing the whole thing through virtual reality, but that would not have been the Texas way and it certainly was not the T.R. way. Instead T.R., Queen Frederika, the lord mayor, Sylvester Lin, and Michiel were humming through the stifling air above the metropolis, each in their own personal drone: an air-conditioned plastic bubble with splayed arms that ramified like fingers, each finger terminated by an electric motor driving a carbon fiber propeller. Two dozen independent motors and two dozen propellers kept each vehicle in the air. In front of Saskia was a touch screen control system completely different from anything she’d ever seen in an airplane. She couldn’t have piloted this thing if she’d tried. Fortunately she didn’t have to. The drone was being controlled by swarm software, based on the murmurations of starlings. T.R.—presumably with a lot of assistance from an AI safety system—piloted his drone. The others—Saskia’s, the three other guests’, and half a dozen more drones containing aides and security personnel—flew in formation with it, basically going where T.R. went but never getting closer than a few meters to any of the others. Or to any solid object whatsoever. For the flock was smart enough to part around hazards when it came upon them and then to knit itself back together after leaving obstructions in its wake.