Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

“I see you got your silver dollar back,” Saskia said to T.R. during the opening chitchat phase of the proceedings. “At least, I assume that was yours.”

“You are well-informed!” T.R. exclaimed. “Yep, those Boskeys got a diver down into my storage container. It’s where we stashed all the odds and ends from the former HQ of Brazos Mining. That silver dollar was the first buck they ever made. I shoulda gone and moved all that stuff to higher ground a long time ago.”

Bob and Daia looked mildly curious about all this, but not enough to follow up. From there the conversation moved on to light chitchat about the weather and such, interrupted by the occasional toast. But after the main course had been brought out, and everyone had tucked into it, T.R. looked at Saskia and said, “So what do you think?”

Bob looked up from his bison steak, all ears, and next to him Daia favored Saskia with a sympathetic smile.

“Why, you shall have to ask me tomorrow,” Saskia answered. “Like a good Texas poker player, you don’t show your hand too soon.”

“You’re too kind, Your Majesty. I was just asking in a more general sense about where it’s all going.”

“Perhaps you should have invited a philosopher! I can only represent the perspective of the Netherlands, of course.”

“The Netherlands,” Bob said, through a mouthful of bison, then swallowed. His face betokened just the right amount of dry amusement. “A place whose very name means ‘low country.’”

“I am aware of its meaning and of its altitude, Robert,” Saskia returned, with a glance at Daia who was enjoying the little jab at her husband.

“But it really is the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in all this, isn’t it?” Bob asked.

“The City of London is not without a stake in the matter.”

“The Romans, at least, had the good sense to build on a hill,” Bob returned. “Oh, some of the property down along the river will be flooded. But it’s been decades since we began moving the server rooms, the generators, all that up out of the cellars to the roofs. Slow and steady, but with very material progress. We could absorb a 1953 event rather easily. Not that we wouldn’t get our hair mussed, but . . .”

“Love, I believe Her Majesty was referring to a financial stake,” Daia put in.

Bob made the faintest suggestion of an eye roll as if to suggest that the complexities of all that were beyond him. “I worry about sewers ,” he claimed. Everyone laughed, enjoying his beleaguered tone. “Oh, I’m quite serious!” he insisted. “If you’ve ever walked down Farringdon on a rainy day, and inhaled the fragrance, you’ll know it’s all quite medieval. Because you are literally walking on the lid of a covered—”

Daia squeezed his arm.

“Sorry. It’s actually somewhat fascinating. Similar to your present difficulties in Houston, T.R. We are at risk of being caught in a pincer attack between rainfall draining down out of the north, and storm surge coming up the Thames. At some point the sewers and the river have to meet and come to an understanding.”

“It is the same too in Venice,” Chiara offered from mid-table. “We can close the Lagoon. But many rivers empty into it.”

“Just so,” Bob said. “But we do strive to address these very down-to-earth matters so that the boffins can enjoy modern sanitary facilities while they think about all of—whatever it is these two have been going on about.” He looked toward Alastair, who was next to Saskia, and Mark Furlong, diagonally across from him. The two had mind-melded very soon after taking their assigned seats and had not since shut up about their shared obsession with “Black Swan” events, rogue superwaves, The Mule from Asimov’s Foundation series, and such. Every few minutes they would remember that there were other people at the table and make some token effort to bring them into the conversation. Chiara and Daia were sustaining most of the collateral damage, but making game efforts to lob in the occasional remark.

Alastair took in Bob’s glare and faltered in the middle of a disquisition about some arcane financial product that had caused a bank in Frankfurt to go under because of a derecho that had destroyed all the corn in Iowa.

“You’re boring my wife!” Bob growled.

“Not bored,” Daia said, “but as a representative here—along with Dr. Eshma—of what you lot used to call the Subcontinent, I will ask: we don’t have derechos in India that I know of. But we do have disasters of our own: locusts, droughts, and so on. If you want to muck about with the climate, how do we know that it won’t create more of those?”

“We’ve been mucking about with it inadvertently for two hundred years,” Mark demurred. “Now we’re talking about a different sort of mucking.”

“All perhaps very true on a technical, scientific level,” Daia said. “I get it. I do. But I’m talking about how it is perceived . That’s what matters.” She looked across at Saskia. “I’ll let Her Majesty speak for herself and her country. But as for, say, the Punjab—where my family came from—if there is a drought there now, some people already will claim that it happened because Bill Gates or someone tampered with the weather even though no one is actually doing any such thing yet .”

“But that cuts both ways,” T.R. pointed out.

“What do you mean?” Saskia asked.

“If folks all over the world are going to get riled up at billionaires messing with the climate even when we are not really doing a goddamn thing , then we got no real downside politically.”

“ You don’t, perhaps,” Saskia said.

“We might as well take action and save a few hundred million lives,” T.R. concluded, as if it were the simplest thing in the world.

“They’re going to condemn you no matter what,” put in Cornelia from the far end of the table, where all had gone silent to listen to this. “So let them condemn you for something that is real and not just a made-up conspiracy theory.”

“It is a bit different where I come from,” Saskia said, but she didn’t want to draw invidious distinctions between Punjabi farmers and Dutch coffee shop hipsters.

“Setting aside the political dimension,” Daia said coolly, “what about actual, physical reality? Will geoengineering damage crop yields in Punjab? Or . . . Bangladesh? Hubei? Iowa? It can’t be good for everyone, everywhere.”

“I would, of course, defer to Eshma, who actually knows what she’s talking about,” said Mark, with a glance down to that end of the table. “But when you put it that way . . .”

“Nothing can be good for everyone, everywhere,” Eshma confirmed. “The models tell us that much.”

Mark continued. “And yet uncontrolled global warming will certainly kill, as T.R. points out, hundreds of millions or billions. We can’t stop it from happening in any other way.”

“Even if we could get China and India to stop burning shit tomorrow , and crash their economies for the sake of Mother Earth,” T.R. said, “it wouldn’t undo what we’ve done, as a civilization, to the atmosphere since we first worked out how to turn fossil fuel into work.”

“People will ask, why not put the same amount of effort and engineering cleverness into removing that carbon from the atmosphere?” Daia said.

“And are you asking that, Daia? Or merely pointing out that others will?” Mark asked.

“Both, I suppose. I really am genuinely curious.”

“Let’s put a pin in that, I got a neat little demo,” T.R. said. He thumbed a speed dial on his phone and muttered, “Yeah, could you bring in the bell jars?”

“This is only part of the demo we’ll be showing to the media tomorrow,” T.R. said, a few minutes later. “We are working on a bigger presentation. But I thought you might get a kick out of it.”