Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

The truck of Jasmit was relatively small, consisting of a cab over the engine and a flatbed extending out over the rear wheels. Usually this was walled in by a steel frame to make it a sort of well-ventilated restraint system for cargo. Panels and tarps could be instated over that to protect from the elements, but they were entering the spell of clear weather after the monsoon and so none of that was necessary today. On big highways in more densely populated parts of India this would have been one of the smaller vehicles on the road. A large one, though, would have been hard pressed to negotiate the road up to Shimla. For as soon as they got out of Chandigarh’s eastern suburbs, Jasmit was obliged to downshift as the engine began to labor uphill. The formerly straight road became an interminable series of zigzags, with little zigzags superimposed on big ones. They were ascending into the foothills of the Himalayas. They stayed as far to the left as they could to allow impatient cars to veer past them with tooting horns. But before long this ceased to be an issue as the whole road became packed solid with a traffic jam of mysterious origin. Roadside dhabas clung with increasing tenacity to the lips of increasingly high and sheer retaining walls. In traditional usage “dhaba” would mean a teahouse, and if you looked around in sufficiently remote places you could still find ones as rustic as this implied. Most of them, though, had evolved into convenience stores, as visually riotous as might be expected. On an open road the passengers would have been blown to tatters, shouting at each other the whole way, but here the wind of passage, when they were moving at all, was little more than a light mountain breeze.

Ilham hadn’t bothered to explain himself yet, but now he did. “You have no idea what you’re getting into,” he said. “I am not much of a fighter. But if I learned one thing from watching the Chinese, it’s that you need several people to think about logistics for every man who is carrying a weapon.” His eyes strayed to Laks’s leather-covered stick. “So I thought it might help you to have at least one such person in your group—what is the word you use? San-something?”

“Oh, the word you are probably thinking of is sangat ,” Laks said. “It usually means a fellowship of sants . Not really the right—”

“ Sangat. Yes, that’s the word.”

“It is really more of a religious connotation,” Laks protested. “Sometimes, it’s true, in old war stories they use that word to mean a column of saint-soldiers on the move, but it’s a little inappropriate . . .”

“Like the Fellowship of the Ring,” Ilham said, nodding solemnly. It wasn’t his first foray into weird pop culture references. The hostels and dhabas of the high mountain trekking corridors tended to sport communal TV-watching parlors stocked with a diverse but absurdly random selection of DVDs left behind by previous guests.

“Fair enough,” Laks said. “And by joining my sangat you are like my bhai , my brother, now, and the same goes for you, Gopinder, and you, Ravi.”

Ilham signaled his approval by running his hand up the back of his neck and cocking his Kullu hat forward at a rakish and stylish angle. Then he squinted into the hazy sun rising above the white Himalayas.

THE CHIHUAHUAN DESERT

This was the most forbidding landscape Saskia had ever seen. The Sahara might be even bigger and more arid, but it looked soft—a world of dunes. This was a world of rocks. Rocks that had never been rounded and smoothed by water. What little rain fell on it seemed to have been sucked up by plants with no purpose other than to produce spines and serrations. She gazed out the train’s window for hours without seeing a trace of surface water. Even before global warming, this landscape would kill anyone who tried to walk out of it.

“Welcome to the Flying S Ranch!” T.R. proclaimed, raising a stein, as the Beer Car crossed the property line. Here the railroad track ran side by side with a gravel road, and both passed between a pair of stone gateposts blazoned with a letter S bracketed between wings. Adjacent to that was a reinforced-concrete guardhouse topped with solar panels and antennas. A man in a brown cowboy hat stood in front of it, armed (disappointingly) not with a pair of six-guns but with a Glock. He unhooked a thumb from his belt and waved at people who were apparently waving at him from other windows on the train. No stranger to modern security measures, Saskia observed that the road had not just a gate, but also retractable bollards sturdy enough to stop any vehicle that might attempt to blast through.

“It’s so ridiculous!” Amelia muttered in Dutch to Saskia. The two of them were at a table in the Beer Car’s saloon with Rufus and Eshma, who had come over and befriended them. Amelia was sitting with arms folded, getting a load of the gate, like a student puzzling over a math problem. She caught Rufus looking at her and switched to English. “These Texas ranch gates! We have seen a number of these now. So huge and grand. But they don’t connect to anything.” She waved her hand off to the side. Each of the two massive stone gateposts was buttressed by a wing of stone wall, maybe two meters high and extending for a few meters away from the gate. There it gave way to chain-link fence, newly installed, which ran off into the desert for no more than thirty meters before giving way to standard-issue ranch fencing: strands of taut barbed wire that rose no higher than an average person’s midsection.

Rufus pondered the question long enough to clue them in that they had stumbled upon some kind of major cultural/conceptual gap. “They’re connected to fences ,” he pointed out, which was true.

“Yes but—” Saskia began.

“Traditionally the gate is the weakest point in a perimeter defense,” Amelia pointed out. “Not the strongest . It’s just basic logic. Surely as a military veteran you—”

Rufus nodded. “I got you.”

“Is it all just for ostentation? Show?”

“Extetics,” Rufus answered with a nod. They’d heard him use the word before. It was his pronunciation of “aesthetics.”

“It’s a signal too,” he continued. “You’re on my property now. Best respect it, or get you gone.”

“That makes sense,” Saskia said.

Rufus looked at Amelia. “Past that—as a military veteran, like you said—don’t look at the barbed-wire fence and say it’s nothing. Look at where it is . This is defense in depth. Maybe when we get where we’re going, they’ll let us go out in some ranch vehicles, some ATVs or four-wheel drives. That desert might look open and flat from out the window, but if you leave yonder road and try driving across it, you’ll learn real soon it is a barrier. Even walking is hard—every footstep requires you formulate a plan.”

Eshma nodded. “I’ve gone hiking in such terrain. It’s exhausting. Mentally exhausting,” she hastened to add. “The cognitive load of having to think about each step.” Eshma tapped her forehead.

Rufus processed that and nodded with the distracted air of a man who was soon going to look up “cognitive load” on the Internet and spend an hour clicking on links. “That’s why people who knew this land used horses. The horse handles the cognitive load . You just tell it where to go and how fast.”

In case anyone had missed the entry to ranch property, event staff were now passing through the saloon handing out baseball caps, bandannas, and steel water bottles bearing the same winged S symbol they had seen on the gateposts. Only for a moment had Saskia assumed that this was the ancient name of the ranch. T.R. had rebranded the place. Literally rebranded, since the Flying S logo was a mark designed to be burned into the hide of a cow. The S was obviously Sulfur.