Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

After a decent amount of time had been spent on this project of letting the wayward Toon know how happy they were to see him alive, Willem got the royals moving in the direction of where volunteers were wanted. The security team naturally came along with them. This triggered a sort of herd instinct among those onlookers who were just milling around anyway, since they had been ejected from the top of the dune by the police. Space available for random citizens was shrinking, as lanes were staked out for heavy equipment trundling in from the city: red trucks with long multi-jointed cherry pickers that could reach down into the foam, ambulances, and so on. The royals might be doing the aid workers a favor just by drawing a few people away toward the rear. Which was the message Willem would put out later today on every social media outlet he had access to when anti-royalist cranks began slinging their mud at Queen Frederika. His phone was already buzzing with alerts. He piped the feed to his glasses. As he strolled along in the rearguard of this growing crew of volunteers, he scrolled through freshly posted images of the queen clasping Toon’s hand.

Someone slapped him on the ass. Fenna, blowing past him on her bicycle, cosmetics case lodged in the basket on its handlebars. Behind him a random old Dutchman, having observed this, made a quizzical/bawdy remark.

The volunteers got to work. Willem just stood off at a remove, watching it play on social media. He could sense some of the people looking askance at this weird old Indo, just standing there with his hands in the pockets of his thousand-euro overcoat while good ordinary citizens bent to the task of doing what they could in the face of this disaster. There was almost a level at which he relished being the asshole in cases like this.

He took the opportunity to skim through the last twenty-four hours’ work-related message traffic. Until half an hour ago, the biggest concern on his mind had been how to manage a wave of speculation and gossip that was starting to build around the whereabouts and activities of the queen during the last week. Going out to look at the fallen branch would have served the same purpose as displaying a photograph of a kidnapping victim holding up today’s newspaper. What the queen was doing right now was much better than that. They were going to win this news cycle. The livid royal-haters and creepy royal-stans flourished when nothing was happening and they had nothing to latch on to besides their own obsessions. This would silence them for perhaps three days, long enough for Queen Frederika’s weeklong Texas absence to be washed out of the nation’s attention span. Then Willem would have to think up something else. It would be comparatively easy since the queen’s Budget Day speech to the States General was coming up soon. This was a lot of work but was something of a self-licking ice cream cone by this point. There would be a lot of articles about the fancy hats that ladies would wear to the event. There would be a stink about the queen’s horse-drawn carriage, which was decorated with ancient, stereotypical paintings of colonized people.

So in a lot of ways Willem’s tasks were clearly plotted out for the next week and a half.

But. There was this looming question of how and when to come clean about the trip to Texas. T.R.’s staff had done a shockingly effective job of preventing word from getting out, so far. And the fact that he had fired the gun eighteen times in a day without anyone noticing was simply mind-blowing. But tomorrow—now that the White Label geeks had finished crunching the numbers on that first salvo—the big gun at Pina2bo would go into action again, firing shells into the stratosphere around the clock. Even if no one connected Queen Frederika to the Pina2bo trip, she’d eventually be asked her opinion of solar geoengineering. Willem already had press releases cued up that he would fire off if word started to leak. But for now, the official story seemed to be holding up: She had taken a bit of time off for a personal visit to a friend in the Houston area (most people would make the obvious assumption that it was someone connected with Royal Dutch Shell) and had been detained for a few extra days because of disruptions related to the hurricane. While there, she had visited some locations related to climate change and sea level rise.

Which was all true.

Back to the here and now. A moment was going to come when it was time to extract the royals and get them back to Huis ten Bosch. A little of this kind of thing went a long way. All the good pictures had already been taken. He knew what the front pages of the newspapers were going to show tomorrow and it would be fantastic. Staying here for hours wouldn’t make it any better. They might draw crowds that would impede rescue operations.

He saw a gray-haired man pull up on a bicycle, go halfway up the dune, and turn around with a pair of binoculars. No interest in the tragedy just on the other side of the dune. He’d come here just to get a look at the queen. There would be others like him; they just hadn’t gotten here yet.

Willem noted with approval that the security team had relocated the cars to within a few meters of where the queen was at work spraying disinfectant on plastic tables. They could extract her on a few moments’ notice at any point.

It was up to her, of course. She could leave whenever she wanted. But Willem’s job was to keep an eye on the overall scene, notice things that she wouldn’t, and make discreet suggestions. The time was not now. She’d only just got to work. Leaving too soon would make this seem too much like a cynical photo op. She ducked into one of the cars with Fenna for a routine upgrade, then spelled the princess while she got the same. Willem checked his watch. Maybe another half hour of this would make sense. By then the rescue workers would have found as many bodies as they were going to find, the scale of the disaster would be known. The queen could make a statement on camera and then go back to Huis ten Bosch for a hot lunch and an afternoon nap.

An expensive car was admitted through the security cordon and rolled up to the base of the dune. Out stepped Ruud Vlietstra, the prime minister. He drew attention for a few minutes as he went up to the top of the dune for a look-see and a briefing. The interior minister showed up minutes later on an electric bicycle. All these people had flats practically within walking distance, and most such people were likely to be in The Hague now during the run-up to Budget Day.

Bodies kept coming over the top of the dune. The relentless gradualness of it was a special kind of horror. He kept waiting for the moment when some kind of all clear would be sounded. But it just never stopped. He found a bird’s-eye video feed on the Internet and watched it in his glasses. The fucking beach was still covered in foam! The sea was vomiting it up as fast as it could be removed. Its overall level seemed to be subsiding, though.

Photos of mostly young, healthy-looking surfers began to cover a portable whiteboard that had been set up under a canopy. The friends and family members collected in a waiting area where they milled about hugging each other or sat on folding chairs staring into the distance and sipping hot tea. From time to time a rescue worker would descend from the triage area up on the dune and call out a name. The name of a dead person. One or two or five people would converge on them and hear a few low solemn words and then break out in sobbing and wailing.

It was just utterly, fantastically awful and it went on and on and on.

Queen Frederika had finished doing setup work and was now just roaming through the waiting area clasping people’s hands, admiring the photos they’d brought of their missing sons and daughters, muttering words of comfort. Most people had the decency not to take pictures.