Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

“Her Majesty has invited me to—”

“I know, Red.”

“Okay.” He turned his back and began retracing his steps.

“Thanks for checking in, though.”

“Oh, no problem at all, Amelia.”

“That shirt looks good on you.”

“Think it’s my color?”

“It’s not our proper Dutch orange.”

“I know. It’s got a little Southern sunburn.” He threw her a glance over his shoulder and saw evidence of a dimple forming beneath those dark glasses.

He knocked on Saskia’s door. “Come in!” came the answer.

She had been in the bath. It was muggy and fragrant despite the best efforts of the modern A/C system that this car’s owner had shoehorned into the old-fashioned cabinetwork. Saskia, in a terrycloth robe, was flapping a towel, trying to dispel steam.

“I’ll leave the door open.”

“No,” she said.

“Might help get some air moving.”

“The air will be fine.”

What he had really been getting at was that people might get the wrong idea. Of course she was blind to that possibility. It was the kind of consideration her man Willem got paid to think of. Willem didn’t seem to be around, though. So Rufus was trying to step into his shoes, do his job for him.

Saskia actually stepped past him, brushing by close in the small compartment, and shoved the door closed. And locked it. “Everyone wants to pay their respects to the queen,” she said. “Not that many royals show up here.”

“How many of these people are what you’d call royals?”

“None of them. But I understand your confusion.” She smiled. In circumstances like this she could be taken for an affluent American woman of a certain class, the kind of lady you might see getting lunch with her lady friends at an upscale mall after Pilates. Not one of the snooty type, though. He’d seen her chopping celery. “‘Royal’ means actually a king or queen, or someone in their immediate family. I am the only such person here.”

“What’s up with that Cornelia?”

“She has a royal bearing and she comes from a family that is much older than mine. But Venice never had royals. They did have noble houses, self-selected, who elected a leader. That’s where she comes from.”

“She’s got a chip on her shoulder about Venice.”

“You could say that, yes.” Saskia smiled at him sweetly.

“The lord mayor?”

“He’s elected. You don’t inherit that job. But once you win the election—which is a very strange one, very English—you become a lord. Still, quite different from being a royal.”

“How so?”

“Broadly speaking, royals have tended to be like this with the nobility in most times and places.” She was banging her little fists together.

“Oh, see now that’s a new idea to me because I thought they were all on the same side.”

“If you were a medieval peasant it would certainly seem that way. In general, however, it is not the case. But of course that is all ancient history; very little of it really applies in the modern era of constitutional monarchy.”

“Speaking of which, what are you doing here? I never asked you,” Rufus said. “According to Wiki it’s more of a symbolic role.”

“Well, for one thing, I personally own a significant percentage of Royal Dutch Shell.”

“Shell? The Shell? The oil company?”

“Yes. So, even if I were not the Queen of the Netherlands, I could exert some influence over who sits on their board and so on.”

“And Shell has a lot to answer for, global warming wise.”

“Indeed we do!”

“Well, that is interesting. But you are .”

“I am what?”

“The Queen of the Netherlands.”

“Yes.”

“And in that capacity—”

“I can do nothing,” Saskia said, “except change my facial expression while reading an annual speech that is written for me on Budget Day.”

“Whoa, you lost me there!” Rufus chuckled.

“In, let me see, about ten days,” Saskia said, “the Dutch Parliament will open. It is the tradition that the king or queen goes there in a fancy carriage—”

Rufus waved her off.

“You’ve read about it on Wikipedia.”

“Yeah. Oh, I don’t mean to be rude. Just sparing you the effort. You got to go there and sit at the front of the room, all the ladies wearing fancy hats, and you read out a speech.”

“That is exactly what I do. The speech is written for me. It would be improper, you see, for the monarch to write his or her own speech.”

“Who writes it?”

“Parliament. In the Netherlands we call it the States General.”

“And who you reading it to?”

“The States General.”

“So you could just be cut out of the loop and save yourself the trouble!”

“It has symbolic importance. And I get to adopt facial expressions.”

“Yeah, that’s where you lost me.”

“Also, I can pause. Raise or lower my voice. Adopt various positions. Talk slow or fast. When I do these things it’s thought that I am, perhaps, reflecting the attitudes and priorities of the Dutch people.”

“Well, you must be very good at it.”

“That is very kind of you, Rufus. What makes you say so?”

Rufus’s face warmed as he became aware that he had stumbled into something. “Oh, I didn’t mean nothing by it. Just that you have a very . . . beautiful presence that is warm and that expresses your feelings.”

Saskia blushed.

He thought it might help extract him from what had become a bit of an awkward situation were he to draw a contrast: “Ol’ Sylvester Lin, now, he would not be the man to give that speech.”

She shook her head and smiled at the thought.

“Or maybe he would , but you wouldn’t have a clue what the man’s emotional state was!”

She nodded, still smiling, and averted her gaze. It would seem that a lot was going on in her mind.

“And you’re saying,” Rufus continued, “that by the power of that you can affect what happens.”

“So it is said,” Saskia replied. “And!” She clasped her hands together. “In that vein . . .”

“What vein?”

“Saskia letting her feelings be known.”

“Oh.”

“From the first moment we met in Waco, and you bravely put yourself in harm’s way to assist Lennert, I have admired you, Red, and felt grateful to you. Those feelings only increased and deepened as you helped us get out of the airport and down the river to Houston. After that, T.R.’s program pulled you and me in opposite directions and so I never got around to expressing my gratitude—as well as expressing my admiration for all that is so personally attractive about you, Red. And now suddenly I find myself on the eve of departure. A summer storm is blowing up in the North Sea and forcing us to depart early in the morning so that we can get there before the winds become too high. I’m afraid that much time might go by before we cross paths again. I didn’t want to let the opportunity just slip by.”

“Opportunity?”

She made a face and shrugged as if to say, Who knows?

“For what?”

“Well,” the queen said, and a thoughtful look came over her face for a moment, as if she were pondering an important phrase in her speech to the States General and wanted to be quite certain that she said it in just the right way and that the millions of Dutch people watching would feel what she was feeling. “A blow job would not be totally out of the question, but I was rather hoping to see those cargo shorts hit the floor.”

Rufus had been expecting her to give him a medal or a letter of commendation. Blow job hadn’t entered his mind. He got tunnel vision and felt his heart pounding in a way that hadn’t happened since he had been on the runway at Waco, closing in on Snout and unslinging his Kalashnikov. He now wished that he had taken an extra minute to put on clean underwear, since his penis was getting bigger and rubbing against the rugged mil-spec stitching. “You have a problem with cargo shorts?” he asked, stalling for time.