Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

“Are you talking about the plane?” he said. “Last I heard, the insurance company—”

“They are no longer claiming that feral swine are an act of God. They will pay for the plane. If they don’t, I will just liquidate some of my Shell stock and pay for it out of pocket, just to make this go away. They won’t have to sue Waco for not properly maintaining the fence.”

“Fence?”

Saskia tried to suppress a sigh. Usually, Ruud was better prepared. “ The fence that the pigs went under. To get on the runway and crash the plane.”

Ruud was momentarily torn between the fascinating and distracting topic of the jet/pig/alligator thing in Waco, and why he was actually here. He looked vaguely out a volleyball-court-sized window into a sea of orange-clad Dutch royalists. One could sense the prime ministerial superego calling to him faintly, as if from a great distance: Ruud! Ruud! Come back to me! It is Budget Day!

And then he was back. “I’m talking about—”

“I know what you’re talking about.”

“We thought we were being very clever. What we expected was that you, in your capacity as a private citizen, would accept this invitation to go to some dinners and parties in Texas and view this experimental curiosity that T.R. was fooling around with on his farm.”

“Ranch.”

“Whatever. Then you would come back and we would talk about it and I would decide, in consultation with the Council of Ministers of course, what position we ought to adopt.”

“It did actually seem like a reasonable plan a month ago,” Saskia said.

“We did not expect,” Ruud said, slapping the palm of one hand with the revised draft of the speech, “that it would go into operation. Full round-the-clock operation! Actually re-engineering the climate of the whole planet!”

“Of course we didn’t.”

“And now there are rumors and leaks. People are connecting the dots.”

“That I was there?”

“Yes. Which is all right, provided we get out ahead of it and make a statement.” Ruud had the habit, which now that Saskia had noticed it was beginning to get on her nerves, of lapsing into English mid-sentence when he wanted to drop in buzz phrases, like “connecting the dots” or “get out ahead of it.” Though, come to think of it, maybe that was preferable to letting that kind of talk seep into the Dutch language and clutter it up with faddish garbage.

“You want me to talk about this, specifically, half an hour from now!?”

Ruud shook his head. “Not Texas specifically . It would be a distraction, as you know. But to avoid confusion—if the whole story does come out—we can preempt it by issuing a policy statement against geoengineering.” He shook the papers. “Which I have inserted into this new draft. I just wanted to mention it to you so you won’t be surprised by the new wording when you come across it.” He paused and gave a little shrug. “I don’t know if you rehearse the speech—try to commit portions of it to memory—”

“I don’t. But I very much appreciate the consideration you have shown me by ducking in to give me this ‘heads-up.’” There. Now she’d done it too. But it triggered a memory of Rufus using that phrase in his dually, after the plane crash, and Alastair nearly being decapitated by a branch. Now she had to suppress a smile at the memory of that moment of slapstick.

Ruud noticed this and didn’t know what to make of it. He was now regarding her with just a trace of concern. “The least I could do,” he said. “Are you all right with this?”

On one level—the Grondwet level—this was a purely rhetorical question. It didn’t matter whether she was all right with it. Her job was to read the bloody speech. But it did actually matter.

“Is this the first time,” Saskia asked, “that the government has issued such a sweeping, blanket condemnation of geoengineering?”

“To my knowledge, yes.”

“Do you actually consider that to be a coherent policy? For a country such as ours that is, to a large extent, below sea level and kept in existence solely through, dare I say it, geoengineering?”

Ruud got a faintly disappointed look on his face and checked his watch, as if to say There isn’t time for me to explain these basic realities to you . There was an upwelling of crowd noise from outside. A horse-drawn carriage, not quite as magnificent as the queen’s but still richly encrusted with gold leaf, was entering the gates of the palace courtyard to collect the first members of the household. Horseshoes and iron wheel rims clattered on the paving stones as it swept round in a wide curve—the turning radius of these things was atrocious—that took it up to the door below. Nearby, a military band struck up a patriotic song.

“Let me guess,” Saskia said, “you’re about to tell me that it’s not about what you, or your party, actually think is the best policy. It’s about politics.”

Ruud now looked slightly less disappointed. He blinked and waited, eyes darting once or twice to the scene below, which looked not much different from how it would have during the days of Napoleon. But with jarring modern touches: the grenadiers in their red uniforms and tall bearskin caps shouldered NATO M16s, not muskets.

Ruud was the leader of the center-right party that in general got the most votes and anchored the ruling coalition. But there always had to be a coalition of some sort; in this country, it never happened that one party got enough votes to form a government all by itself. Ruud’s party had to form that coalition with parties that were either to the right or to the left of it. It had been the case for the last few years that Ruud was able to get almost all the votes he needed from a party that was more conservative. It was not quite a fringe party. It did, however, include a fair number of climate change skeptics. New elections were coming up next year and the big center-left party was predicted to make a strong showing. By forming a coalition with single-issue parties on the far left they might be able to wrest the government away from Ruud’s party.

So Ruud was guarding his left flank here. Throwing a bone—blanket condemnation of geoengineering schemes—to the Greens, to blunt the force of the opposition’s campaign next year. He had probably been up all night hitting “refresh” on numerous browser tabs, watching his political foes “connect the dots” on Saskia’s trip to Texas and the Pina2bo bombshell. This made him potentially responsible—according to the letter of the Grondwet—for any fallout. Inserting this language into the queen’s speech would serve a dual purpose of protecting not just Ruud but Saskia as well from the repercussions of T.R.’s actions in Texas.

Saskia had pulled the speech from Ruud’s hand. She allowed him to meditate over the weird cosplay scene below while she flipped through the pages looking for the section about the klimaat nood , the climate emergency. This over the last few Third Tuesdays had been working its way steadily up the agenda and occupying more space on the page. Pocking hooves and grinding wheel rims announced the departure of that first carriage.

She found it and read it under her breath. In her peripheral vision she could see Fenna sneaking up on her in the comically exaggerated mincing tiptoe gait, owing a lot to vintage Warner Brothers cartoons, that she used when she was well aware that she was annoying Saskia in the middle of more important duties. The dressmaker was drafting along behind Fenna, like a bike racer allowing a stronger rider to break the wind. Moments later she could feel deft hands messing with her hair and her skirts.

“I realize that you wrote this ten minutes ago . . .” Saskia said.