Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

“Only when they are in the way. I see their practicality.”

“Well, I just wouldn’t feel right about the first option you mentioned. It doesn’t seem decent given your dignity and so on. I would feel bad.”

“It was just an example.” Saskia’s phone buzzed and her eyes flicked to it. “My daughter,” she said, “demanding a progress report.”

“On the conversation you and I are having right now!?”

“On my romantic life in general. She worries about my solitude and wonders if something similar is in her future.”

Saskia’s face then fell as she perhaps realized that the remark was double-edged. Rufus too was solitary. But he had no Lotte to look after him. Just occasional check-ins from Mary Boskey.

“What about that Michael character?”

“You mean Michiel?”

“Yeah. I saw you checking him out.”

“Did it make you jealous, Rufus?” she asked hopefully.

“Oh, I never dared have any such thoughts. There’s a history here, in Texas and in the South—”

“I know.”

“One of the worst lynchings was actually in Waco.”

“I shouldn’t have gone there. You asked about Michiel. He is obviously attractive. The sort of man that the tabloids would set me up with, if they had the power. But there isn’t the connection.” She pointed back and forth between herself and Rufus.

“Of what happened on the runway, you mean?”

“Partly that. But . . . both of us suffered losses some time ago and have been alone since then. That’s really what I meant.” Saskia’s phone buzzed again. With exaggerated annoyance she picked it up and held down the button that shut it off.

Rufus made himself a little more comfortable by plucking at his shorts and leaning forward, elbows on knees.

“It has been a long time for me,” he said. “I’m worried I forgot where everything goes.”

“We can google it.”

“You think Google will come up with anything?”

They both laughed.

“I ain’t coming over there because of the history I alluded to,” Rufus said. He looked at the chair he’d been sitting on. It was narrow, hard, old-fashioned Antiques Roadshow stuff. He eased down out of it and sat on the carpet, back against the wall. “Plenty of room here now, though, if you are feeling disposed to come on over my way.”

Saskia glanced at the door (still locked) and the window (curtain still drawn), then padded over and sat down next to him, very close. She put her head on his shoulder. This felt so good he was stunned for a few moments. Then he summoned the presence of mind to put his arm around her.

“You have beautiful arms,” she said.

“Push-ups,” he explained. “Got no time for gyms. Look now, in case something happens and we get carried away, I gotta ask . . . birth control?”

“Taken care of. We have socialized medicine.”

“These cargo shorts contain many things,” he said, “but it’s been a long time since I packed a . . .”

She reached into the pocket of her bathrobe and produced a condom in its little foil packet. “Any particular size?” she asked.

“That’ll do.”

Her thigh came up over his, making contact along the way with two different knives, phone, notebook, spare magazine, a couple of Sharpies, and other sundries.

“Ouch. Those really do have to come off,” she announced.

ROHTANG

While arguably the areas being disputed between China and India were far from the Punjab and belonged to distant provinces, the truth was quite different once you started to think about the Five Rivers of the Punjab and their significance. For all five of them, as well as the Indus into which they all eventually flowed, originated in the Himalayas. Once you had gained control over a river’s headwaters, you could put a dam there. As soon as you did that, you could control its flow, and thereby control the lives of all who lived downstream of it.

Sorting out the details of where to go and how to get there had been a somewhat bewildering process because of the convolutions and forkings of the river valleys in the mountains. But once Laks had uploaded the geography into his head, the place that leapt out as being of greatest interest was where the Chenab and the Beas originated within just a few kilometers of each other on opposite flanks of a high spine of rock spanned by a nightmare of switchbacks called the Rohtang Pass. Northeast of there was the even higher region of Ladakh, indistinctly bounded by the Line of Actual Control.

Down in the lowlands—basically everything west of Chandigarh—it was easy to move laterally from one river to the next by crossing the table-flat doab or Mesopotamian plateau between them. Now, though, topography made it imperative simply to choose one river and follow it up to its beginning. By far the most direct one was the Beas. It had stopped Alexander the Great. Perhaps it could stop the Chinese as well. Shimla, a city of a couple of hundred thousand that the Brits had planted up in the mountains so that they wouldn’t all perish of heat stroke during the summer, was not on the Beas. But one of the least terrible ways to get to the upper Beas from Chandigarh was to pass through it, and anyway Jasmit was bound in that direction and avidly wished to support the quest of (until this morning) Laks and (now) the Fellowship. Halfway there, they stopped at a factory that, like all other structures here, was perched improbably on a slope, and picked up cargo, which the boys helped load, then sat on the rest of the way.

Once they had parted company with Jasmit at Shimla, Laks’s bhai s only slowed him down, since group hitchhiking was slower than solo. But before they went very much farther they entered into the valley of the Beas, which ran straight north to the destination. There were two roads running parallel to the river on opposite banks. It was impossible to get lost. So for a couple of days they split up, leapfrogging one another on various modes of transport, staying in sync with phones, reconnecting in hostels or dhabas. They were now decisively out of the Punjab, in a Sikh-minority part of the country, predominantly Hindu of course. But the farther north they went, the more strongly it was inflected by Tibetan Buddhists and Western backpackers. Of the latter, some were pure adventurers while others were pilgrims, figuratively and literally on the road to Dharamshala.

This put Laks into a funny state of mind when he found himself, as happened increasingly, among such people in hostels or bus stations. To extend Ilham’s analogy, if this was the Fellowship of the Ring, Laks was Aragorn, part man and part elf, equally capable of hanging out with Lord Elrond at the high table of Imladris or slamming down pints in a tavern in Bree. When not standing next to his modern backpack he looked absolutely like a Punjabi Sikh, and so was assumed to be just that by locals and Westerners alike. When he started talking, most would peg him as American, though people in the know could guess from his articulation and certain vowel sounds that he was Canadian.

He generally kept his distance, though. The backpackers carried their own rolling soap opera with them, with an ever-shifting cast of characters and set-piece dramas: who was sleeping with whom, who was a cool kid, a user, a narc, or moocher, who was in the know, who was clueless, who had left the communal bathroom in a terrible state. None of this was going to help Laks and so he kept his mouth shut.

During the first part of the journey, the truck drivers who picked him up, all of whom were Sikhs, seemed to assume he was just a young wanderer who needed a lift somewhere. But north of about Kullu this all changed. South of there this young hitchhiker might have been bound in any direction, and the thing in his hand was just a walking stick, the kind of thing a savvy traveler might carry to fend off rabid dogs. North of there his destination and his intentions were obvious, the purpose of the stick unmistakable. His bhai s discovered likewise. They opened up the bundle of rattan and passed out sticks even to the non-combatant Ilham. Their baggage grew heavy with food and even clothing donated to them by truck drivers and dhaba staff who knew what they were doing.