Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

“I believe ‘grubby hillbillies’ was your characterization of my cousins at Buckingham Palace,” Queen Frederika put in.

“With sheep and swords,” T.R. added.

“Yes,” Bob said. “The divide is probably invisible to foreigners, who see us all as English people with similar accents, but it is real.”

Conversation went on as brisket, ribs, and red wine were brought out. Saskia stole a glance at Michiel, who was bemused by the ribs. Was one expected to pick these up with one’s bare hands and bite the meat off the bones like a savage? Fifteen hundred years after the first Venetians had fled into the Lagoon to found a new city, had it really come to this? He wisely postponed committing to any one course of action, picked up knife and fork, and went after a slice of brisket.

“Not a fascist, as far as we can tell” had been Amelia’s verdict at breakfast. The security crew at home had pulled an all-nighter trying to figure out Michiel. “I mean, we can’t read his mind. But if he has fringe political opinions, he has kept them to himself. Hasn’t associated with such people.”

“Who does he associate with?”

“Others like him?” Amelia threw her hands up.

“Meaning—?”

“Old Venetian families with inherited wealth.”

“ Is there such a group, really?” Saskia asked. “One imagines that they all just intermarried, over the centuries, with other rich people who weren’t Venetians.”

“Still gathering data,” Amelia said. “I don’t think it is a large group. Maybe a few traditionalists from some of the old noble houses. His great-uncle seems to be a connector of some importance.”

“He did mention he had an aunt with him. Tell me more about this great-uncle of Michiel.”

“Banker—which can mean practically anything. Connections to shipping. Philanthropist.”

“What kind of philanthropy?”

“Mostly related to the preservation of Venetian cultural patrimony.”

“Well . . . keeping Venice above sea level would probably be important to him, then.”

“We should know more soon,” Amelia said. “But you could just ask him. Worst case, if someone posts a photo of you talking to him, and he turns out to be a nutjob, you can honestly say that nothing in his background or past associations provided any hint.”

“Okay. How about Sylvester? To begin with, the name.”

Amelia deferred to Willem. “Stallone,” he said.

“ What!? ”

“Chinese have been giving themselves Westernized handles for a long time,” Willem said. “The old-school approach is to pick something very conventional like Tom or Joe. By the time our friend ‘Sylvester’ was of an age to be thinking about that, it had become hip to choose cooler and more distinctive names. Sylvester Stallone was enjoying a comeback then. Lin liked the sound of it.”

“I wouldn’t have marked him out as a forward-leaning hipster at any phase of his life.”

“Other than that, he’s quite the straight arrow,” Willem said.

“They speak Fuzhounese to you.”

“I mostly speak English back. I remember very little of that dialect. It’s hard to keep it and Mandarin in your head at the same time.”

“What about this guy Bo? The Chinese operative who tracked you down in Louisiana?”

“The Chinese seem to know what T.R. is planning,” Willem said. “They are—I don’t know—offended? quizzical? concerned? that they were not invited. They are tending to assume, from that, that T.R.’s plan might be bad for China. That T.R. knows as much. T.R. knows China will naturally be opposed to his plan—so why would he invite them?”

“Is that actually the case?” Saskia asked.

“That it’s bad for China?”

“Yes. Has T.R.’s team done any computational modeling?”

“Have we done any?” Amelia asked.

“We don’t even know what the plan really is ,” Willem pointed out. “Look. It’s not a question of good or bad, for a continental power like China. If you’re like us—or Venice, or London, or Singapore—you’re a speck on the map, right up against the ocean, and all you care about is sea level. Anything that puts the brakes on sea level rise is good.”

“And it’s rising because of the ice caps,” Alastair said, just to be clear.

“Indeed. So for us it is very simple: make the climate colder. Same goes for Venice and everyone else T.R. has invited. But if you’re anyone else, you have to be asking yourself what are the knock-on effects of that? How is climate in the interior going to be affected? Is there going to be enough rain? Or too much of it? Will we be able to grow enough rice? Will our hydroelectric projects be compromised?”

“And no one knows,” Alastair said. “Yet.”

“The Chinese seem to assume that T.R. knows. Based on what we’ve seen so far, though—” and here Willem broke off.

“T.R.’s just shooting from the hip,” Saskia said, completing the thought.

“We’ll know more in a few hours. Some kind of document is going to be handed out at lunch.”

After lunch the entire cavalcade—drones in the air, cars and buses on the ground—doubled back eastward, angling south so that the skyscrapers of downtown Houston swung across the horizon on their left. The sky was brilliant blue, interrupted here and there with huge roiling buttresses of cloud. These were blinding white where the sun shone on them, but otherwise a shade of dark gray that, to Saskia the pilot, suggested they were burdened with more moisture than they could handle. They were crowned with wreaths of lightning. She watched one such formation grope blindly for the earth with a fuzzy gray pseudopod. From miles away it looked soft and slow. It was even decoratively framed in a brilliant rainbow. But yesterday on the drive in from Sugar Land they had been caught in one of these. She knew what was going on in there. All the cars caught in it went blind. Most slowed down, some stopped. Collisions happened that would not be visible until the squall had moved on.

For the most part the drone swarm kept well clear of those things, but as they closed in on their destination they had fewer options and found themselves boxed in. “What do you say we just sit this one out?” T.R. suggested over the voice channel in his easygoing drawl. All the drones were settling in for a landing in a vacant field. As fat drops began slamming into the glass domes, their arms retracted into the drone equivalent of a fetal position. A few moments later the storm smote them with a vertical blast of what seemed to be solid water. Part of Saskia wondered if there was enough air between the drops to sustain life; was it possible to drown standing up? The glass dome couldn’t shed water fast enough and it seemed to pile up into a sludding mound, centimeters thick. This at least deadened the noise, which had drowned out everything. Only the subsonic shocks of thunder could penetrate it.

She actually enjoyed the perfect isolation for as long as it lasted, which was no more than thirty seconds. Then over the course of a minute or two the storm abated, and the sun came on full blast. The vacant field had become a rectangular lake spotted all over with wads of crushed vegetation. This being Texas, it was not planted with any crop, as would have been the case in the Netherlands. And this being Houston, it bore zero similarity to nearby parcels, which hosted activities as disparate as schools, strip malls, office blocks, residential subdivisions, and oil refineries. The drone’s arms swung back out, the props spun up, and it rose into the air along with the rest of the swarm. “We have the Johnson Space Center to thank for that,” T.R. said. “It’s just a little old parcel of vacant land they’re not using for anything just now. Probably never will, since it’s only a couple of meters Above.”