Нил Стивенсон - Termination Shock

“One doesn’t hear much out of Albania,” Willem said.

“They’ve been active the last couple of decades, seeking foreign investment, trying to boot up a tech sector and all that,” Alastair said. “Every so often they’ll pop up in the City with a stock offering or a real estate scheme.”

“Well, it would appear that Cornelia and her friends have risen to the bait,” Saskia said. She was swiping slowly through a series of photos depicting a Land Rover journey up a switchbacked mountain road.

“That scans,” Alastair said. “London and Wall Street are skittish about the Balkans because they don’t understand the place. See it as unstable. With this unfathomable history. But if you’re a Venetian aristocrat, it’s . . . like Ireland is to England.”

The road led to a summit where there was, at last, some new activity: construction trailers, a helipad, storage containers. All surrounding a flat area, in the middle of which was a drilling rig and a stockpile of drill rods.

“They’re sinking an exploratory shaft,” Alastair guessed. “The first step toward a bigger one.”

Saskia looked at him. “Perhaps you could have a chat later with Willem about extending your contract.”

“Oh,” Alastair said, “it would kill me to walk away from this now.”

Saskia flipped through the handout. “It would be illuminating to know how these maps and charts would all look if, in a year or two, a clone of Pina2bo were to go into operation off the coast of Albania.” She looked up. “I believe that Cornelia has made up her mind to save her city from the sea. And heaven help anyone who gets in her way.”

THE BLUE HERONS

There was a trope in the martial arts videos that was so shopworn that even Laks, generally not one for fancy critical terminology, knew that it was a trope, and that it was called a trope. It would be the traditional move for a filmmaker to make at this juncture, were it the case that Laks was a fictional character in a low-budget martial arts film called, say, Big Fish . It was called a montage. Not a training montage, for Laks’s training days were behind him. More of a “learning the ropes” sort of montage combined with a “meteoric rise to fame” one. The sort of montage that would conventionally end with Laks, head wrapped in a perfect Chand Tora Dumalla, climbing out of the back seat of a limousine in downtown Mumbai and cheerfully flinching from an onslaught of paparazzi and nubile fangirls.

In this particular case the montage would consist of quick cuts among a number of battle scenes up and down the Line of Actual Control, featuring various triumphs and setbacks. But mostly triumphs. Makers of martial arts videos did this so that they could cover a lot of story in a few minutes of screen time, and it worked. But in a way, what happened to the Fellowship next seemed even faster, more compressed in time, than that. Now obviously that wasn’t the case; it was spread out over a few weeks. But there simply was not time at any point to stop and collect one’s wits and tally up the passage of time. Just mad dashing from one place to another. All those places were hot spots along the Line, where the services of Big Fish and his crew—which was rapidly growing—were deemed useful by people like Major Raju.

But if someone had come along for the ride and calmly watched it all happen and actually kept track, what they would have reported was that Big Fish ended up with a crew (“The School”) consisting of: a dozen handpicked gatka practitioners in color-coordinated turbans, including Gopinder; a similar number of Gurkha rock-throwing specialists; and a ragtag irregular contingent of limited military effectiveness but mighty social media presence. Sam, Jay, and Ravi got shunted into that. Sam and Jay had become famous among British persons of South Asian ancestry. They had gotten some professional advice on how to wear turbans that would hide their scandalously non-observant buzz cuts. Since the School had started out with no particular color scheme, they took the path of least resistance and patterned their look after the red and yellow logo-wear used by Sam and Jay’s football team in England. Ravi had his own following among non-Sikh Indians, which to put it mildly was a significant demographic.

Bella declared victory at some point and flew back to Argentina. Sue found an important role as the liaison between Big Fish’s crew and the online community of K-Pop stans. Pippa gradually got nudged out of the way by Indian streamers chosen for them by the military. Laks tried to become indignant on her behalf. She insisted she didn’t mind. Her career goals did not lie in grinding out propaganda. She had other objectives, difficult to articulate to anyone who did not live immersed in the film industry, having to do with portrayal of martial arts content in emerging three-dimensional formats, all under the heading of “performative war,” a term it was pointless to google since she had coined it, and what few hits came back all pointed back to her. Apparently she had worked out an understanding with their minders that enabled her to tag along and gather the materials she needed provided she didn’t get in the way. So Laks saw less of her, which was sad but probably good since he wanted to sleep with her in the most desperate way and that would have been a disaster. Somehow Laks’s expired visa problem got ironed out and hints were dropped that the pathway to Indian citizenship was wide open.

Ilham faded from the picture with no explanation, but when Laks thought to ask about him—which, to be honest, took an embarrassingly long time—he was assured that the troubles of Ilham and family were behind them, at least as far as immigration, food, and shelter were concerned. With a moment’s reflection, of course, it was clear why Ilham—who still had family in Xinjiang—would not want to become world famous doing what Big Fish’s School was doing.

The Chinese, of course, were not without resources of their own. So there were no more victories as easy as that over the Bonking Heads. Laks lost some fights against wushu stick fighters who knew what they were doing—and who, he realized, had spent time watching videos of Laks’s earlier duels. “Opponent-specific training” was what Major Raju called that. Laks now had to do it too if he didn’t want to fall off the leaderboard.

Meanwhile, the temperature was dropping, and even in these high arid places, snow was falling. The time would come quite soon when the Line of Actual Control would freeze in its current position until spring. Ski- and snowshoe-borne regulars might patrol, maneuver, and trade harsh language and snowballs, but almost all the volunteers would go home.

They were, in other words, building up to the season finale. And there weren’t a lot of options as to where that would happen. When there were only a few pieces remaining on a chessboard, you could guess where the moves were going to be made.

It turned out to be a valley between two ridges that had been bare during the summer but during the last couple of weeks had become covered with snow to a depth of a meter. Farther up that valley, at about fifty-eight hundred meters of altitude, was the foot of a glacier whose meltwater created a stream that ran down the valley toward the salt lake of Pangong Tso. In former days, the glacier had extended quite a bit farther down. At its foot, after the 1962 cease-fire, the Indian Army had set up a base and constructed a few buildings, of which the only one that wasn’t a total ruin was a barracks. This was a stone and mortar crackerbox consisting of two stories of soldiers’ quarters above a ground floor with a mess hall and other common rooms. It had long since been abandoned by the receding glacier, which because of the valley’s curve could not even be seen from its windows. The ridge to its west was almost always on the Indian side of the Line. From its top you could look west into territory that was, beyond all dispute, Indian. The ridge to its east was almost always on the Chinese side, and from there you could see the sun rising over China.