Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

“What can you say about the actual probability of drought or famine? The possible toll?” Saskia asked.

“Very little really,” Alastair said. “But what I can say with some confidence is that maps similar to this one are probably being looked at by people in Delhi right now. As well as Beijing and other places.”

“It doesn’t matter anyway,” Willem said. “I’m sorry to be so cynical, but once people have seen a map like this one, the scientific, on-the-ground reality no longer actually matters.”

Saskia nodded. “We discussed this on the train. It’s about how everything is perceived.”

“Yes. People already believed that the weather was being manipulated even when it wasn’t . Now that T.R. actually is doing something, any perceived change whatsoever will be credited to, or blamed on, him.”

“Or anyone seen as supporting him,” Saskia added, nodding. She nudged Lotte. No point in inviting her to these things if she wasn’t going to learn anything. “How about it, darling? Now that you are an instant expert on the Punjab, what’s the mood there? Are people furious at T.R. McHooligan?”

“A few of them,” Lotte said, “but no, mostly they are too excited about Big Fish to pay any attention to geoengineering.”

“Who or what is that?”

By way of an answer, Lotte clicked on a browser tab and rotated the screen toward her. Bracketed between luridly colored headlines in what Saskia assumed to be Punjabi script was a photo of a magnificently ripped young man posing on a peak of some impossibly high mountain brandishing a stick. “Behold,” Lotte said.

Saskia gave him a good long look. The picture seemed to have been taken someplace cold. Atop Big Fish’s massive pecs, brown nipples jutted out like Himalayan pinnacles.

“What does he do other than look like that?”

“Beats the hell out of Chinese bastards with a stick.”

Despite being a reasonably mature woman with serious responsibilities, Saskia found it difficult to get her mind back on track, and the way Lotte was speed-scanning through Big Fish Pinterest boards didn’t help. What had they been talking about a minute ago? How it was all perceived.

“We didn’t hire Alastair to set official government policy,” Willem said. “That’s Ruud’s problem. The only thing we need to concern ourselves with is what if any stance the royal house needs to adopt about these matters.”

He lapsed into Dutch at some point during all that. Alastair tuned out. But his body language said he had something to add: “Earlier I mentioned that there was a cause side as well as an effect side, when it comes to how these things are situated around the planet. There are plenty of studies showing that where a volcano erupts—or a geoengineering project is sited—has a very significant impact on how these effects play out around the world. It has been known for a while, for example, that volcanic eruptions in the Southern Hemisphere lead to wetter monsoons, whereas Northern Hemisphere volcanoes produce the opposite effect.”

“So if T.R. had put the gun in Argentina . . .” Willem said.

“The consequences for China and India might very well be the other way round,” Alastair confirmed.

Saskia had been following this even more keenly than usual. “How about—” she began, then stopped herself and met Lotte’s eye.

“I know what that look means!” Lotte said and stood up. Willem and Alastair, still on their best behavior, stood up also.

“The lesson in climate geopolitics has been, I should say, even more informative than expected!” Saskia said. “Go back to your room, young lady, and pursue your studies of Big Fish.”

“Oh, I very much intend to, Mother. By the time you see me next—”

“That will do.” She gave her daughter a kiss on the cheek. Willem and Alastair were too embarrassed to bid Lotte goodbye. The princess left the room.

“You’ll remember our Venetian friends,” Saskia began.

Willem and Alastair were both a little taken aback at this unexpected turn. For Willem’s part, he had never expected to see or to hear from the Venetians again. They’d been a fascinating historical curiosity, nothing more.

“I think I’m going to sit down!” Alastair joked, and did. So did Willem.

“I have remained in occasional contact with Cornelia since Texas,” Saskia said. “Just friendly text messages back and forth, that sort of thing. She’s been on vacation the whole time. Or so I assumed—until recently—based on the selfies she was sending me. Is there a way I can put pictures from my phone on the screen?”

It turned out that there was. And for once, it actually turned out to be simple enough that between the three of them they were able to sort it out without having to bring in a Ph.D.

Cornelia was almost unrecognizable in the first because she was in casual touristy garb very different from the kind of elegant look they’d come to expect from her on the train. A big straw hat, large sunglasses, a white sun shirt over a tank top. She was on a boat. They could see very little of this, just enough to surmise that it was a yacht. In the background was an island in a blue sea, and in the greater distance, muddled by haze, was a much bigger landform, presumably the mainland. Both were mountainous and rocky. One might think the Aegean, except that the forest was denser and darker than the islands of Greece and Turkey. “Black Sea?” Alastair guessed. Willem thought Corsica.

Saskia advanced through several more photos. Some were selfies, but Cornelia wasn’t in all of them. They told a little story. The yacht docked at a pier on the island. Not a very nice-looking pier. It looked industrial/military, abandoned and dangerously tumbledown, with new caution tape surrounding old cave-ins on the pier’s surface that were large enough to swallow cars. There were stern-looking signs in block letters, written in the Roman alphabet, but not in a language any of them could identify. Fragments of both Greek and Cyrillic could also be seen.

“I give up!” Alastair admitted.

“How about you, Willem?” Saskia asked.

“Former Yugoslavia? Macedonia?”

“Albania!” Saskia announced triumphantly and gave Willem a mock-stern look as if to say What am I paying you for if you can’t recognize Albania!? She swiped through a couple of snapshots depicting a miserable port facility. “Right across the Adriatic from the heel of the boot of Italy.”

“It looks like shit,” Alastair said. “Not Cornelia’s kind of place at all.”

“Oh, but it is!” Saskia said. She’d come to a picture of a ruined stone building, very ancient, but vaguely recognizable as a church.

Willem had been speed-googling. “Albania only has two islands,” he said. “Both of which used to be part of—”

But Saskia had beaten him to the punch line with a zoomed-in snapshot of the collapsed front of the church. Barely discernible, carved into a heavily timeworn stone lintel, was a winged lion. “The Venetian Empire!” she proclaimed. “Not since about 1800, of course. The Austrians gobbled it up, then lost it. Later it fell under Soviet control.”

“But as we’ve seen, Cornelia’s crowd have long memories,” Alastair said drily.

“They seem quite good at maintaining these connections, down through the years,” Saskia agreed.

“If this is the island I’m reading about,” said Willem, scrolling on his tablet, “the Soviets built a chemical weapons plant there during the Cold War.”

“That would explain so much,” Alastair remarked. For, aside from the ruined church, all the other pictures were fully consistent with the decorative theme of “abandoned Warsaw Pact nerve gas complex and toxic waste dump on godforsaken island.”