Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

“But you didn’t say who will be on which side. Whose ox is gonna get gored?”

“Ask me in a week. Or—belay that—don’t bother. Watch the news.”

Rufus nodded. He didn’t say what he was thinking, which was that he and the other people living at Flying S Ranch might end up being the news.

BIG FISH

Pippa cut it all together on her laptop during the bus ride back to the nearest volunteer base camp and uploaded it while they were eating their lentil and potato curry. The camp was centered on a little compound of stone walls and stone huts above the lake. Faded signs indicated it had once been a hostel for backpackers and extremely adventuresome Indian motorists. When their bellies were full and their wounds seen to, the Fellowship found an unclaimed patch of ground, kicked rocks out of the way, and just managed to get tents and tarps pitched before darkness fell.

Laks awoke with a need to pee and a fragrance in his nostrils. Which was unusual, for him. Since COVID, most of what he smelled was bad. His doctor had explained to him that COVID damaged the nerve cells in the linings of your nostrils—the ones that intermediated between the olfactory receptors themselves and whatever nerves ran back into your brain. Or something like that. Once the body had defeated the infection, those nerve cells tried to grow back, with varying success depending on how badly they’d been damaged. Sometimes they never grew back at all. Sometimes they got completely better. In between, though, it was like the body was trying to nail down its most survival-relevant capabilities first. And the most important thing your sense of smell could do for you in the way of keeping you alive was to warn you of things that could actually kill you: smoke, gas leaks, rotten meat. And so for some patients those were the smells that came back first. And they got crosswired to the olfactory receptors in crazy ways. So you might put your nose up to a rose or a garlic clove, give it a sniff, but instead smell something dangerous. Laks had never got past that phase. He could smell certain things correctly. Mostly dangerous things. Not so much good things.

What he was smelling right now was a blend of dangerous and good, though. It was definitely smoke. But not the smoke of burning wood or coal, which was what you normally smelled in this part of the world. This smoke had an herbal, almost perfumed aroma.

He was not the first to wake up. He could hear Pippa, Bella, and Sue talking in their tent, quite cheerfully and with outbursts of laughter and of delighted surprise.

It sounded and smelled like someone had re-stoked their little campfire; but where had they obtained that much wood?

Laks extracted himself from his sleeping bag and stumbled out into the Fellowship’s mini-compound to find an officer of the Indian Army sitting there in a low-slung camp chair next to the campfire, which was blazing. He was sipping something hot from a thermos, swiping his finger across a tablet, and somehow—as if he were one of those many-armed Hindu deities—managing, at the same time, to smoke a pipe. He was smoking a pipe. This was a thing Laks had seen in black-and-white movies but this was the first time in his life that he had actually seen a man smoking a real pipe! This, then, was the source of that nice aroma. They must put extra stuff in the tobacco to make it smell good.

The officer looked up over his reading glasses at Laks. Fortunately Laks, anticipating a need to get up in the middle of the night, had slept fully clothed and with his keski on his head.

“Major Raju,” said the visitor in English. “I’d get up, but it’s hard to clamber out of this thing once one is settled in.” His accent was spiffy. “Do I have the honor of addressing Big Fish?”

“Huh?”

“You may know yourself as Laks, or Deep Singh. Big Fish is what you’re called now. On the Internet. Someone took the liberty of translating your nickname into a proper nom de guerre. All the cool kids have them. The man you absolutely destroyed yesterday? That was Thunder Stick. Can’t remember how to say it in Mandarin. Not his real name, I’d imagine.” Major Raju, gripping the bowl of his pipe in one hand, used its stem to point at features in what must have been an imaginary spreadsheet hanging in space. “Thunder Stick’s fall in the MRLB has been . . . precipitous.”

“MRLB?”

“Oh, Meta-Ranking Leader Board. Many who drafted Thunder Stick into their fantasy squads are gnashing their teeth this morning!” Major Raju sipped from his thermos and added, “I expect you need to urinate! Don’t let me stop you.”

Laks needed to do more than just that. When he got back some little while later, he found that Pippa had emerged from the ladies’ tent. She, Bella, and Sue, who had been so chatty when Laks had awakened, had all suddenly gone silent when they’d heard the voice of Major Raju. By the time Laks got back, though, Pippa was squatting comfortably on her haunches, long shanks doubled in front of her face, drinking tea and having what sounded like a very professional sort of conversation with the major. She probably was not one who needed to have MRLB spelled out for her. Laks had been puzzled by the lavish expenditure of firewood, but he now saw that Major Raju had been conveyed here in an army truck. He’d actually brought his own firewood with him. His driver was awaiting the major’s return in the comfort of its heated cab.

As he neared, Pippa turned to look at him with a bemused smile. “Big Fish!”

“So I’m told.”

“You’re number one on the Force To Be Reckoned With metapoll, and you’ve broken the top 25 overall.”

“Vegas is going bananas,” Major Raju put in. “Macao less so, but what would you expect from those people?”

“Oh, because . . . China?”

“Have you signed anything yet?” the major inquired.

Laks’s confusion must have been obvious because Pippa said, “He means deals with sponsors or agents.”

“While I was taking a shit in the rocks? No.”

“Good. Don’t. Sign anything, I mean,” Raju said. “Classic mistake for one in your position.”

“Sir, why are you . . . here?” Laks asked.

“What you did yesterday added five point seven hectares of territory to India and subtracted an equal amount from China. It was the largest single shift that has occurred on this front in the last three weeks. If bookies in Vegas are interested in you, why, you can assume that the Indian Army is much more so. I work for the Indian Army.”

“And when you say interested, that means . . .”

“He knows you’re Canadian,” Pippa said.

“It will hardly surprise you to know that the volunteer units on both sides of the Line are supported, under a thin veneer of plausible deniability, by their respective military establishments,” Major Raju said, with a glance down at the generous stack of firewood. “Thunder Stick didn’t bring his now world-famous oxygen tank with him from Hebei; it was supplied when he got up here and discovered he couldn’t breathe. Any crew on our side that can turn in your kind of results with no support at all . . . well, it merits . . . some support. So I am here to ask you, Big Fish, what you need? Other than an agent, a manager, and a lawyer, that is.”

“Rock throwers who can take orders.”

“Done.”

“And—I hate to say uniforms, but—”

“A look?” Pippa suggested.

“We understand each other,” Major Raju said.

THE HAGUE

Acurious thing about Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia was that, once she had got accustomed to being in a new setting—which never took more than a couple of hours—it was as if she’d never been anywhere else. When she’d been in Texas, answering to “Saskia” and floating down the Brazos, or tucking into some brisket at T.R.’s mega gas station in the suburbs of Houston, it had taken mere moments for her to forget about the fact that she was the scion of a royal family that went back many generations and lived in palaces in a faraway country. She was fully immersed in the moment of chopping the celery with Mary Boskey or screwing Rufus on the train, and that was that. She could have kept riding that train forever.