Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

By the same token, however, when she got back home it was as if none of that stuff in Texas had ever happened. Once the bug bites had stopped itching, it was as if she’d never left the familiar confines of Huis ten Bosch. She actually wondered if this feature of her personality qualified her as some kind of sociopath. It wasn’t as if she had no family at home. Her family was vast, and today—the third Tuesday in September—she was going to see most of them. And yet the only connecting thread that had remained intact while she’d been in Texas had been the exchange of messages between her and Lotte.

There was only one exception to this weird ability to feel at home in random places: Noordeinde Palace, the official “working palace” of the Dutch monarchy. She could never get used to this place. It was in The Hague, really just a few minutes’ walk from Huis ten Bosch, but surrounded by streets instead of trees. Rooms of enormous size with doors and windows of enormous dimensions connected by enormous hallways lined with vast old paintings, all seeming even more comically enormous in contrast to the overall small tidiness of the Netherlands. The palace did not just have a vestibule. It did not just have two. It had three consecutive vestibules. This might have been quite useful back in the days when affairs of state required the receiving of dignitaries according to elaborate protocols while making sure they didn’t freeze to death. The English idiom “cooling one’s heels” might have been coined by a British diplomat awaiting an audience with some past king of the Netherlands in the days before central heating. The overall decoration scheme was blindingly white and glacially stark. The past couple of monarchs had made efforts to enliven it with colorful modern touches, but these felt stuck on, and only emphasized the glabrous obduracy of the underlying structure. This had probably worked back in the era when men and women both wore much fancier clothing. Nowadays, it just added to the overall chilly alienation.

Today—the late morning of Third Tuesday—it was as lively as it would ever be. The protocol was that various members of the royal household would emerge from a certain door and, in full view of television cameras and a throng of (mostly happy, royal-loving) onlookers safely cordoned on the other side of a massive wrought-iron fence, climb into antique horse-drawn carriages for a journey of less than a mile to the Binnenhof, which was the seat of the Dutch government. The last to leave the palace and to arrive at the Binnenhof would be the queen, who upon her arrival (in a fairy-tale golden carriage) would be escorted into a big room called the Ridderzaal—literally, the Knight’s Hall—and read out a speech that the prime minister had written for her. Or rather the Council of Ministers and their aides had contributed bits and the PM had pulled it all together.

Anyway, as far as the overall scene in Nordeinde Palace was concerned: Saskia’s immediate family might be tiny, as it consisted of just her and Lotte, but the extended family was quite vast, as Saskia’s siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, and so on seemed to know all about the birds and the bees. They didn’t all get together that often, but when they did, there were enough of them to make even Noordeinde Palace seem lively. Not all of them would make the journey through the streets of The Hague to the Binnenhof—there weren’t enough seats in the Ridderzaal, and anyway it was supposed to be a serious occasion of state. But they were all here. And the few notables who were going to be walking down that short stretch of red carpet and clambering into those carriages were all wearing the fanciest clothes, hair, and makeup one could get away with nowadays. So a lot of fuss and bother was happening in connection with that—enough to spill over into some of those vestibules and salons that otherwise rarely saw much use.

To judge from the sounds of laughter and happy exclamations ricocheting like musket balls up the punishingly hard flat surfaces of the palace’s grand staircase, everyone else was having a good time. But today was all about Queen Frederika. It was a truism that, at your own wedding, you never actually got to have a real conversation with all the dear friends and family who had gathered to celebrate it. Likewise, her job this morning would be to descend that staircase on cue, air-kiss a lot of cousins, climb into the golden carriage without falling off her heels, jump out at the Ridderzaal, and read the damned speech. Unlike a lot of those family members, who were dressed as if for the Academy Awards, she was in a pretty sensible outfit. Not that she didn’t like dressing up. But the point of the exercise, at the end of the day, was to open Parliament so they could get cracking on budget negotiations. To amaze the world with a fashion-forward frock was a goal that could maybe be postponed for some other occasion. So she was in a long dress, deep blue, with bits of orange that flashed out of darts and pleats and linings as she moved around. The designer had insisted that it was inspired by military uniforms. Saskia didn’t see the resemblance at all, but she wasn’t a fashion designer.

She had been getting prepped in one of the vast echoing rooms at the top of the stairs. Fenna, and the fashion designer responsible for the dress, had established their respective base camps at one end of this space. At the other, Saskia was having an unexpected last-minute check-in with Ruud.

Ruud was the prime minister. Technically speaking, he was her prime minister. He’d popped in through the back door with an emended copy of the speech.

“We did not expect,” Ruud said, “that this thing was actually going to go into operation.”

He did not even need to specify that “this thing” was the Biggest Gun in the World.

Saskia sighed. “We didn’t expect a lot of things.” She was referring to the pigs. This had been much on her mind of late. Everyone who knew about the plane crash was still waiting for the other shoe to drop. But apparently in Texas you could just crash jet airplanes, shoot it out with giant predators on the tarmac, set fire to the wreckage, and flee, and no one would get particularly excited about it. The story had simply disappeared. No one cared. The government of the Netherlands, eight thousand kilometers away, was the closest thing to adult supervision in the matter. They had taken the action of grounding Saskia pending the completion of what was promised to be a discreet, yet thorough, investigation.

They had the power to do this. To ground Saskia, that is. She couldn’t blame them really. The deal was that the monarch was personally above reproach, but the PM was responsible . She could go out and murder someone and the prime minister would take the heat. Oh, he wouldn’t go to jail, but he’d have to resign and the government would fall along with him. So her very inviolability created a peculiar co-dependency with the PM. Whenever they felt like it, the Dutch government could cut the budget and curtail the powers—what was left of them, anyway—of the royals. Saskia—the whole monarchy, really—served at their pleasure. If she behaved in a way that created serious inconvenience for them—forcing PMs to fall on their swords and governments to collapse—consequences would follow. She and Ruud had daggers at each other’s throats. Not because they were dagger-to-the-throat kinds of people—Ruud was the very definition of a Euro-technocrat—but because that’s how the Grondwet had been written.

Ruud was a few years older than her, but other than a few lines in his face, seemed to have stopped aging at thirty-nine. If his hair was graying, he hid it by shaving his head. His rimless glasses were nearly invisible and didn’t seem to actually do anything—what sort of prescription was that, anyway? A strict one-beer-a-day policy combined with intermittent fasting and lots of bicycling made things very easy for whatever tailor was putting together his wardrobe of black, navy blue, and charcoal suits.