Нил Стивенсон: Termination Shock

DEDICATION

To A.L.

EPIGRAPH

If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break

If it keeps on rainin’, levee’s goin’ to break

And the water come in, have no place to stay . . .

I works on the levee, mama both night and day

I works on the levee, mama both night and day

I works so hard, to keep the water away

—KANSAS JOE MCCOY AND MEMPHIS MINNIE

CONTENTS

Dedication

Epigraph

Texas

Pentapotamia

Louisiana

The Mississippi Delta

Amritsar

Houston

The Camp on the Brazos

Houston

Chandigarh

West Texas

Himachal Pradesh

The Chihuahuan Desert

Rohtang

South Texas

Nederland

The Line of Actual Control

Pina2bo

Big Fish

The Hague

The Blue Herons

The Marble Mine

The Storm

The Barracks

Eindhoven

The Line of Actual Control

Informateur

Eight Months Later

Cyberabad

The Beaver

Vadan

The Line

Tuaba

Coolattin, British Columbia

Sneeuwberg

Trail

St. Patrick’s

The Columbia River

Uncle Ed’s

Squeegee Ninja

Rijsttafel

Performative War

Flying S

The Pecan Orchard

Pina2bo

Combustion Chamber

Queen of the Netherworld

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Neal Stephenson

Back Ad

Copyright

TEXAS

Houston’s air was too hot to support airplanes. Oh, the queen’s jet could have landed there, given that, during the flight from Schiphol, it had converted ten thousand kilograms of fuel into carbon dioxide and dumped it into the atmosphere. Refueled, though, it could not safely take off until the heat wave broke. And what was going to break it was a hurricane.

Under the direction of air traffic controllers, Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia—for that was the queen’s given name—and her co-pilot, a Royal Dutch Air Force captain named Johan, began to drive the jet through a series of maneuvers that would culminate in Waco.

Now, maybe Waco was not the optimal choice for them. But there was no point in quibbling over it. The business jet, slightly crowded with seven souls aboard, flew higher and faster than airliners. It had been slicing through the lower stratosphere at better than six hundred miles per hour, almost ready to begin its descent into Houston, when they had gotten the news about the insufficiency of that city’s air. A decision had to be made. It didn’t have to be the best possible decision.

As she was informed by Texan voices on the radio, as well as Willem coming up to the cockpit with whatever he’d gleaned over the jet’s data link, a thunderstorm had swept over Waco in the last few hours, dropping the temperature to a mere 45. Or 113 as they measured things in the States. Low enough, anyway, that they could at least look it up in the tables of important numbers that the jet’s manufacturer had calculated three decades ago, when this design had been certified. It had never entered those people’s minds that it would get as hot as it was today in Houston, so the tables didn’t go that high.

Waco’s airport would give them everything they really needed. It had two runways arranged in a V. Current winds dictated that they should land on the more westerly of those, southbound. The air traffic controllers told them what to do. They did it.

Those controllers had their hands full juggling a large number of planes—mostly airliners—that had likewise been disappointed in their hopes of landing in Houston. Most of them needed larger airports and so it didn’t seem right to argue with them about whether Waco was perfect. These transmissions could be heard by anyone with a radio. They were being recorded. It was of some importance that they not make waves, not draw attention to themselves. The queen had been raised from infancy never to seem as though she were arrogating royal prerogatives. For to do so would be un-Dutch. It would merely give ammunition to anti-royalists. Lennert, her security chief, was coming around to the view that Waco would be fine. There was a hangar suitable for jets like this one. Willem had already reserved hotel rooms and worked out how to rent cars.

All she had to do was get the jet on the ground. She was good at that. Even if she weren’t, Johan could do it with no help from her.

Along with royalty and wealth, she had inherited from her father this strange pastime of piloting jet airplanes. Despite being a king, he had moonlighted as an airline pilot for KLM—Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij—Royal Dutch Airlines, whose logo was actually a crown. As Papa had explained to her long ago, there was a reason he had become a pilot. It was that when he was at the controls he had not merely the opportunity but the sacred obligation to focus solely on the machine that was keeping him and his passengers alive.

There were two things about this statement that little Princess Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia hadn’t fully understood at the time.

One (more obvious): because Mama and Papa had tried to raise her as some semblance of a normal human being, she hadn’t understood until much later how many demands the crown placed on one’s attention. Now she knew this very well.

Two (which had only come to her recently): “the machine that was keeping him and his passengers alive” was a metaphor for the Netherlands: an engineered contraption that would kill a lot of Dutch people if they didn’t keep pushing the right buttons.

She felt a sense of freedom and clarity of mind while at the controls of an airplane during the descent and the preparations for landing. It was all a matter of operating the controls so as to keep certain numbers within certain ranges. By the time the jet was skimming the runway at Waco, its speed needed to have been reduced to a figure denoted VREF. This varied with such conditions as temperature, weight of the aircraft, and runway conditions; but anyway it could be calculated from those thirty-year-old tables and there were known procedures for getting the plane’s speed down to that number.

At the same time they needed to pass vertically downward through the entire troposphere—the shell of air surrounding the earth, where weather happened—until the number on the altimeter matched whatever the altitude of Waco was. Again there were known procedures for achieving that, all of which needed to mesh with the series of turns dictated by those harried Texan air traffic controllers. The operation of the jet’s controls toward the systematic achievement of those objectives, the terse, pithy, but utterly calm exchanges with Johan and with the voices on the radio, all combined to put her into a state of being that the Dutch referred to as normal with the accent on the second syllable. A different thing altogether from the English “NORMal.”

To explain “norMAL” fully would fill a book, but the most important thing about it, if you happened to be a member of the Dutch royal family, was that “norMAL” was exactly what royals were forever under suspicion of not being, and so anything you could do that made you norMAL was desirable; and since that could easily be faked, it worked best if it were some activity that would get you killed if you did it wrong.

If you rode your bicycle to school, as she had famously done when she had been a little girl, haters could and would claim it was a publicity stunt and scoff at anyone naive enough to fall for it. But even the most frothing anti-royalists could not deny that the king or queen had actually landed that plane, and that, had they just been faking it, they’d have ended up dead. Moreover, it was not something a monkey could do. Even a royal could not get certified for it until she had taken in a fair bit of mathematics, physics, engineering, and meteorology. In the distant past, kings had shown the world that they meant it by strapping on a sword and riding into war, putting their lives on the line. Getting behind the controls of a plane and pointing it at a runway was as close as one could reasonably come in the modern world to the same public blood oath.