Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

“Now I see why everything around here has nets stretched over it,” Saskia said, “what with all these sabots and nose cones and shells raining down out of the sky.”

“A certain kind of person would almost say God made West Texas for this,” T.R. said. “We got concentric circles drawn all over the map. Circular error probables—CEPs—for all that stuff. We know where shit’s gonna hit the ground. Sounding rockets give us the initial conditions. After that we track each shell to get an accurate picture of the upper-level winds. We can make stuff fall where there ain’t nothing to fall on save rocks and snakes.”

“It’s an expensive way to kill snakes!” some wag joked.

T.R. looked at him coolly. “Not if you figure in the appreciation of my Houston real estate portfolio.” His gaze shifted to Saskia. “Others can make similar calculations. Remember the figure I quoted earlier?”

“You’re a figure-quoting machine, T.R., you’ll have to be a bit more specific.”

“Over Houston. In the drone. What kind of money we talking? Remember? Anyone? One point seven five trillion dollars. That’s the value of all the real estate in greater Houston. Let’s say my buddies and I—the kinds of people who live in big houses on stilts along Buffalo Bayou—own one percent of it. That’s about twenty billion dollars’ worth of real estate. If the value declines by ten percent, that’s two billion in value that just went up in smoke. If it goes up by ten percent”—he turned and waved his arm in the general direction of the gun—“ that alone pays for all this.”

“You’re altering the climate all over the world ,” Bob translated, “to make a profit on a portfolio of real estate that is limited to Houston.”

“The numbers check out,” T.R. confirmed. “Those of y’all who don’t live in Houston may wish to make calculations of your own. ‘Sea level’ is the same everywhere.” He checked his watch. The afternoon was getting on. “Oh. And as long as I dragged y’all out here into the heat, don’t forget to collect your party favor.” T.R. indicated a solitary boxcar that had been parked on a nearby side track. A canopy had been set up next to it. Beneath that was a table staffed by a highly presentable young woman whose white cowboy hat made for an incongruous combo with the earthsuit that covered everything from her jawline down to her cowboy boots. Saskia, sans earthsuit, was nearing the limit of how long she could remain outdoors, but decided to venture over.

The boxcar looked as if it had been chosen specifically to stand as a visual emblem of decrepit Industrial Revolution tech. It looked like it had traveled a million miles during its career, survived a few derailments, and finally reached the end of the line. Rust was blooming through old faded graffiti. No part of it was flat or straight. It was full to overflowing with coal, and excess coal had spilled out on the ground all around it.

As Saskia drew closer to the blessed shade of the canopy, she saw a row of bell jars on the table, similar to the ones T.R. had displayed last night at dinner. Each sat on a wooden pedestal. Each contained a golden cube that Saskia would have mistaken for half a stick of butter had she not spent so much time in the last two days looking at, and talking about, sulfur.

“Welcome, Your Majesty; would you like to take your parting gift? I can have it packed for travel and delivered to your lodgings.”

“You are too kind,” Saskia said. She’d now drawn near enough to read the words engraved on the brass plaque attached to the wooden pedestal:

TEXAS GOLD

THIS AMOUNT OF PURE SULFUR

neutralizes the global warming caused by

ONE BOXCAR OF PURE CARBON.

Each shell fired from Pina2bo carries 20,000 times this amount of sulfur.

“Such propaganda!” said a nearby voice. Saskia turned to see that Cornelia had followed her over. The tone of her voice was somewhere between disdain and admiration. She had admitted defeat and traded any pretense of fashionable attire for an earthsuit. But thanks to that her face looked a lot cooler than Saskia’s probably did. Saskia was in Face Zero, which was what she basically used for gardening and swimming.

“He has a gift for the catchphrase,” Saskia said. “One can easily imagine him hawking these on YouTube. Texas Gold.”

“Jumpsuit Orange, if he’s not careful.”

“I have no idea as to the legalities. Do you?”

“No.”

“Presumably there’s not a specific law against shooting bullets straight up in the air and letting them fall back down on your own property.”

“In Texas? No, there won’t be any such law,” Cornelia scoffed. “The feds will try to get him on the airspace violation. Something like that.”

“Unless he has a permit. Which he did today.”

“They’ll stop issuing them!”

“And then he’ll go over their heads. To Congress. To the president. And he’ll take it to YouTube.”

“And . . . to you, Your Majesty,” Cornelia said. “What was the lord mayor’s unattractive phrase? The eight-hundred-pound gorilla.”

“The gorilla is hot,” Saskia said, “I’m going inside.”

> T.R. said something that reminded me of you.

> ???

> Lift over drag. Sorry. Private joke. Probably not funny.

The text hit Rufus’s phone from an unknown number with some kind of weird area code. He was peeling the foil from a burrito in a sort of food court that occupied the middle of the area that these people called Bunkhouse.

> Who this?

> Sorry. Saskia. Are you available for a chat? Leaving for NL early tomorrow.

> Half an hour okay? Going to take a shower.

> Of course, I am taking a bath!

Rufus consumed the burrito a little more quickly than had been his original plan, then found the men’s locker room, which included a row of shower stalls. Everything about this place put him in mind of the army. It was, in fact, made of army surplus housing modules that they hadn’t bothered to repaint. This was what the military threw together when they needed an outpost in some place like Afghanistan. Though, to be honest, most parts of that country were more hospitable than West Texas. Nothing was fancy, but everything was okay—at least up to the standards that many enlisteds could expect in the kinds of places where they lived stateside. Rufus had walked away from that deal after he’d put in his twenty years and hadn’t missed it. But it sure made it easy to find his way around the so-called Bunkhouse here at Pina2bo. He scored a toothbrush and miniature tube of toothpaste from a vending machine, found himself a shower stall, cleaned up using the liquid body wash from the dispenser on the wall—all army standard. He put on a clean Flying S swag T-shirt and, lacking a change of underwear, decided to just go commando beneath his cargo shorts. In flip-flops from the shower he walked slowly to the train, trying not to break a sweat or run afoul of any rattlesnakes or barbed plants, carrying his dirty laundry in a wad. This he stowed in the compartment they had assigned him in one of the Amtrak cars. He walked up to the fancy antique railway car where the queen and her staff usually hung out, but none of the Dutch were there except Amelia, standing at the far end of the coach. Her body language indicated that she was on duty, so he didn’t bother her.

> Where should I go?

> Just come to my compartment.

Just as a routine, automatic precaution, Rufus asked himself what were the odds that following these instructions could lead to his getting shot. The person most likely to do the shooting in this particular scenario would be Amelia. She and Rufus had gotten to know each other during the past few days, having a few meals together while the bigwigs did their thing, sharing vehicles. He’d have been interested in her if he wasn’t almost old enough to be her father. She wasn’t going to pull her Sig out of her shoulder bag and double-tap him. And yet still it was weird. It put her—Amelia—in an awkward spot. Rufus walked up the aisle toward her. She watched impassively through dark glasses that more than likely had a built-in AR display. She was a fine-looking woman in her big-boned, broken-nosed way.