Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

Willem stationed himself in the queen’s eye line and just stood there. Gradually in a two steps forward, one step back cadence she drew closer. There was a wordless understanding that as soon as she reached him they would leave. Willem communicated that fact to the security team. Finally the moment arrived. The queen wound up her last, sad, hand-clasping conversation with a ruined surfer mom, accepted a curtsy (Mom was all in for old-school royalist etiquette), and turned around into a horseshoe of aides and security, centered on Willem. This became a loose flying wedge that got her out into a light drizzling rain and into the car. The bicycles had presumably been seen to.

In the moments before the cars pulled away, Willem had an opportunity to survey the crowd that had gathered on the outside of the cordon. The inevitable flower mound had begun to accumulate. Candles, tricky in this weather, were also being attempted. People were waving Dutch flags and holding up rain-streaked hard copies of surfers’ selfies. And there were just a few complete assholes—there were always these people, the feral swine of the political ecosystem—who could not see this tragedy as anything other than an opportunity to show up in public and wave their fucking idiotic signs around. Since the royal house was, in theory, above politics, such persons were usually more of an annoyance or curiosity than a central concern. However, some were insanely pro- or anti-royal and so it behooved Willem to pay attention. Not wanting to be obvious, he activated a feature in his glasses that turned them into a camera, then quickly scanned the crowd, silently snapping a picture whenever he saw a sign being thrust into the air. Then he got into the back seat of the car that was waiting for him.

The drive back to Huis ten Bosch took all of about three minutes. Willem spent most of it holding Fenna’s hand and trying to get her settled down. She was more freaked out than at any time since the plane crash. She didn’t know any of the surfers but the whole scene had really upset her, perhaps because the victims reminded her of her darling Jules in Louisiana.

When they were back at the royal residence, though, and Willem had a moment to himself in his little office there, he reviewed the photos he had captured just before getting into the car. One detail was bothering him, to the point where he was questioning his own memory.

It was a woman of perhaps forty holding up a hastily hand-lettered sign reading

ERDD A FALSE IDOL

and adorned in the corners with crosses and Stars of David.

Typical religious wack job stuff in every way. But ERDD? He had never heard of ERDD. Or rather he had, of course. But in a very different context. Just last week. Ecological Restoration of Delta Distributaries was a defunct crowdfunded nonprofit that Dr. Margaret Parker had told him about over coffee in New Orleans. Its initials had been stenciled across the back of the reflective vest she’d loaned him. He still had the vest, folded up in his luggage. He meant to send it back to her with a thank-you note once he’d had a chance to launder it.

All the Germanic languages had words like “Erda,” meaning Earth, or (in a mythological context, which was presumably the mindset of the sign brandisher) a deity personifying the earth. Mother Earth, basically. Willem did a bit of googling and satisfied himself that there was no language in any branch of the Germanic family tree in which “Erdd” was an accepted spelling.

The “false idol” reference, the crosses and the stars, made it plain that the sign maker was using ERDD in some religious way. To the extent he could peer inside this woman’s mind, she seemed to be suggesting that people who worshipped the false idol of Earth—Greens, presumably?—were committing a kind of heresy and that the foam disaster was an omen, a punishment.

Willem did a few more searches, this time linking the word to religious terms, and began to land some hits. They were intermingled with old references to Margaret’s group in Louisiana, as well as to other entities that used that acronym. This muddied the waters until he hit on the idea of limiting the search to pages that had been changed within the last year. Then he found a number of ERDD references that seemed to align with whatever was going on in the brain of the sign-holding lady. Most of them were in Dutch. They were cropping up on message threads and social media groups of a decidedly political nature: anti-Greens and anti–lots of other things.

He had already spent more time on this than it was likely to be worth, but he couldn’t stop clicking. It was a lot of right-wing types becoming frothingly enraged because they had been tagged, with surgical precision, in postings on a few Green, tree-huggerish feeds that were all about ERDD as a kind of synthetic umbrella deity for everything related to environmentalism. These Greens were making no bones about it. They weren’t claiming to have rediscovered a lost religion. They were cheerfully admitting right up front that they’d just made it all up, like dungeon masters prepping for an all-night Dungeons and Dragons session. There was one feed where the people who were boosting this idea were stating their case and tagging exactly the kinds of right-wingers who could most be relied upon to respond furiously as all their cultural and religious buttons were mashed to a point that had basically driven them mad.

Now, as T.R. would have put it, this was not Willem’s first rodeo. So as he surveyed the ERDD feeds, he saw all sorts of clues that made it obvious to him that it was all fake. No one actually believed in ERDD. The sole purpose of this stuff was to induce a backlash.

He had been sifting through all this for at least half an hour when it finally occurred to him to start looking at the dates when it had been posted. Those were, of course, perfectly easy to see; he just hadn’t been paying attention to them.

But now he scrolled back through all his open tabs and discovered that every bit of this stuff had gone up within the last five days.

He went back and compared it against his calendar, allowing for time zones. Not a trace of it had existed anywhere prior to his visit to the Mississippi Delta, his tour of the diversion, and his conversation with Bo.

During which Bo had snapped a picture of the ERDD vest drying out on a coat hanger.

Now, there were certain things that Willem would only discuss with the queen. Others he would without hesitation bring to the attention of the security team, the police, or Dutch intelligence. Matters of a more personal and informal nature he might chat about with Fenna. But there were certain things you could only talk about with your husband. This was one of those.

Willem excused himself for the day and took the train up to Leiden, fifteen kilometers north. He walked to the flat that he shared with Remigio. Typically for this area, it was in a post-war building, but constructed at a pre-war scale, so that it blended reasonably well with those older buildings that had survived. It looked out over a canal and it was conveniently located with respect to the university buildings where Remigio pursued his career as a history professor.

Last night Willem had just thrown his stuff down. His bag was still sitting on the floor with Walmart clothes and Flying S swag spilling out of it. He rooted through it and found the ERDD vest. He unfolded it, put it on the back of a chair, and photographed it, just to prove he wasn’t out of his mind.

Then he pulled on his new cowboy boots and walked to the pub.

Remigio was Portuguese. He was a decade younger than Willem but looked even younger than that thanks to lucky genes and assiduous skin care. He’d come up to Leiden to do Ph.D. research on the migration of expulsed Sephardic Jews from the Iberian Peninsula to the Low Countries in the sixteenth century. They’d liked him well enough that they’d offered him a job, and he’d liked the Amsterdam nightlife well enough that he’d accepted it. After a decade of that he’d “settled down” in Leiden, which was where he and Willem had met. They had a happy and stable life together.