Termination Shock

Houston

The next morning’s race to Sugar Land ended up being the most benign sort of competition in that everyone had a good time and came away somewhat vindicated. In the early going it seemed to those on the boat that they were going to destroy Rufus. The Brazos was wide open—even wider, today, than normal—all the way down to Sugar Land. Their skipper, one Mitch, was uxoriously proud of his boat and the speed at which it could travel and completely unconcerned about the rate at which he was consuming gasoline. Even in these hot and humid conditions the wind blast was more than sufficient to keep them cool, and on the long straightaways between meanders, they all had to retreat behind the shelter of the windscreen—all, that is, except Alastair, who seemed fully alive for the first time since the jet crash. His hairstyle—tawny stubble with sparks of gray and scalp gleaming through—had nothing to fear from wind, and bugs could easily be picked out of it before gaining purchase and tapping into a vein. With the exception of those rare places where the river was bridged, it looked like a subtropical stream rambling free across a landscape that had never been visited or altered by humans.

This above all was the hardest thing for Saskia to grasp about Texas. She knew perfectly well that just beyond the screen of vegetation flanking both banks existed a modern landscape of farms, roads, oil refineries, and power plants. Willem could prove as much by showing her their current position on the map, which, other than the river itself, was farmland and small towns giving way, as the ride went on, to suburbs. But all they could actually see was the same general ecosystem that had hemmed them in since Waco: trees that had become trellises for climbing vines and then been overwhelmed by mats of ivy so thick that from a distance it looked like emerald felt draped over furniture. That was the case everywhere except on the steepest and most exposed parts of the banks, which were bare adobe-red clay. As they rounded one bend followed by another and the little arrowhead on Willem’s map crept closer to Sugar Land, the queen kept waiting for the moment when this foliage would peel back from the river and they would find themselves in an urban environment. But it never happened.

Mitch, tending closely to his own electronic map, cut the motor and nosed the boat over to the right bank. This was somewhat indistinct, as high water had inundated the trees above it. He pressed a button that caused the huge outboard to angle up and forward, getting its propeller safely out of the water, and then went back and started a much smaller “kicker” motor for maneuvering through places where water was shallow and obstructions numerous.

A few minutes’ poking around in the flooded woods brought them suddenly in view of Rufus, just standing there, pretending to look at an imaginary wristwatch. He was up to his knees in the water, cargo pants rolled up but wet anyway. He caught a painter tossed to him by Amelia, put it over his shoulder, and towed the boat a few meters to a place where the ground finally made up its mind and rose out of the water. Saskia and the rest had long since got in the habit of wearing footgear suited for wading, so they hopped over the side and sloshed the last few steps onto what could euphemistically be called dry land.

They’d forgotten to properly thank and say goodbye to Mitch, which they now tried to redress by a lot of waving and blowing of kisses. He clambered up onto the front deck, pulled off his baseball cap, and bowed deeply, causing Saskia a moment’s concern that he had figured out who she was. But it was probably just him being courtly. Rufus nearly turned it into a comic pratfall by shoving the boat back. Mitch recovered his balance well for a man carrying a substantial beer belly, and he bid Rufus adieu with some kind of complicated high five (high for Rufus anyway, low for Mitch) and finger-snapping and -pointing exchange. Then he turned his back on them and went back to see to the needs of his “kicker.”

It was late morning by this point, the weather system had cleared off, the sun was high, and they had all become miserably hot and sweaty during the few minutes it had taken to get off the boat and say goodbye. Rufus strode past them and led them into the woods. Saskia was steeling herself for a long hot hike. For, anticipating that they’d end up in some air-conditioned building in Houston, they had packed up the earthsuits and worn normal, non-refrigerated clothes.

But the hike was literally no more than ten strides long. That was all the distance they needed to cover before the trees and the vines and the ivy fell away and they found themselves in a suburb. Oh, it was a part of the suburb that had been set aside as a park, but the first row of nearly identical tract homes was only a few hundred meters distant. Rufus’s truck was idling a few steps away on a gravel access road. Alastair and Amelia vaulted into the back and sat on luggage while Willem and Fenna got into the rear row of seats. Saskia “rode shotgun.”

“They’re waiting for you,” Rufus said as he put it into gear. He drove for no more than thirty seconds along the gravel road before it descended slightly into a flooded parking lot. Beyond, parked on a right-of-way just above the flood, was an immaculate black SUV the size of four typical Dutch cars welded together. Condensation beading up and trickling down its windows spoke of ice-cold air-conditioning within.

The difference in elevation between the flooded parking lot, across which Rufus’s truck made a spreading V-shaped wake, and the road was probably more than one meter and less than two. Less than the height of a man. And yet it was everything. The placement of the road—more generally, the engineering of the levee along which the road ran—was all quite deliberate. People above the water drove around in clean vehicles and might live their whole lives unaware that the sea, globally, was coming for them. Those who found themselves just the height of a man closer to the earth’s center found themselves inundated from time to time, according to the weather’s whims, and either had to stew in shantytowns or, like the Cajuns, become masters of an amphibious lifestyle.

The occupants of the SUV—an African American driver and a Latino in the shotgun seat—did not take the rash step of opening the doors until Rufus had parked next to them and set his parking brake. Both of the men had the physique of soccer players. Both wore loose khakis with untucked shirts. Saskia had seen enough discreetly armed security personnel in her day to recognize the type. Amelia, their direct counterpart, exchanged credentials with them. They set about transferring the baggage into the back of the SUV. The driver came round to the side of the truck, opened Saskia’s door, and extended a hand to help her down off the wet running board. “Dr. Schmidt welcomes you to his hometown, Your Majesty.”

Saskia was at a loss for words. From the moment she had entered the cockpit of the jet in the Netherlands, she had not been a queen. She had largely forgotten about it. But the world hadn’t forgotten about her.

“It is good to be here” was the best she could manage.

“Dr. Schmidt apologizes for not being here in person, but he thought you and your party might want a few moments to freshen up after your adventure.”

Saskia looked down at her grubby feet, thrust into a pair of flip-flops Willem had scored at a Walmart. “That is most considerate of T.R.,” she said. For Theodore Roosevelt Schmidt, Ph.D., was the real name of the man who appeared in television commercials and billboards, across the South, as T.R. McHooligan, quasi-fictitious founder and proprietor of a vastly successful regional chain of family restaurants-cum-mega-truck-stops.

“My instructions are to convey Your Majesty and her party to his estate, unless you express a different preference.”

“That will be fine, thank you.”

“And—so that I can make sure all is in readiness—the size of your party is five?”

She thought about it. “Six,” she decided.

He looked slightly befuddled and checked a list on the screen of a tablet. “Your Majesty, Willem Castelein, Fenna Enkhuis, Captain Amelia Leeflang, Dr. Alastair Thomson, and—?” His eyes strayed toward the only one here who could bring the total up to six.

“Rufus,” Saskia said, nodding at him. “Mr. Rufus Grant, Esquire. He probably has a military rank. I forgot to take down that information.”

The driver nodded, taking in Rufus.

“I imagine he’ll drive his own vehicle. With him, it’s all about mobility.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The first part of the drive took them through mile after mile of classically American strip development landscape. They got on an elevated highway that was the largest she’d seen outside of China and drove east for a while past a district of mid- and high-rise office buildings, many of which bore the names of oil companies. This wasn’t downtown, though; much larger buildings loomed in the distance. Her internal GPS, calibrated for the Low Countries, told her that they were driving from Amsterdam to Rotterdam, or Rotterdam to Antwerp, but of course nothing of the sort was happening—they were just moving around between different parts of Houston, a metropolitan area the size of Belgium.

A few miles short of the downtown high-rise district, the caravan ducked off the freeway and dropped into the valley of a river that snaked right through the middle of the city. It was canopied with big mature trees beneath which sheltered expensive homes. Buffalo Bayou, as this watercourse was called, was of course flooded. Many of the streets were blocked, so the caravan had to take a circuitous route through the neighborhood. Saskia didn’t mind, since she enjoyed seeing some of the fine homes that wealthy Texas families had built here.

The destination was a hotel and spa complex that had been created by merging a few adjoining properties. The hotel proper had been the mansion of some great Texas dynasty. To this a pair of wings had been discreetly added, reaching back into the woods, adding capacity without altering the look.

T.R.’s residence was so nearby as to seem almost an extension of the same complex, and indeed one of her hosts mentioned that, were it not for the flood, one could travel between the two properties by walking along a cool path through the forest. Today, you’d need a canoe.

Of the four “distinguished guests” whom T.R. had invited, Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia had the highest social rank, as such things were calibrated in books of old-school etiquette. She would be lodged in his home as a personal guest, while others were relegated to the hotel. Alastair and Rufus, as less essential staff, got off at the hotel, while Saskia, Willem, Fenna, and Amelia stayed in the car for a sixty-second drive to T.R.’s place. En route the vehicle passed through deep fords of running floodwater. It was the first time, in Saskia’s experience, that Americans’ absurd attachment for gigantic, high-off-the-ground SUVs had actually served any useful purpose.

T.R.’s residential compound rose above the waters of Buffalo Bayou on a sort of artificial mesa; he had jacked the buildings up off their original foundations, put new supports under them, then filled it all in with water-resistant soil called levee clay. There was a mansion in Tudor Revival style, and, out back of it, a guesthouse with seven bedrooms and as many baths. This was where Saskia and the others finally came to rest after a journey from Huis ten Bosch that had ended up taking the better part of a week.

And given some of what had happened en route, one might have thought it perfectly reasonable to lock oneself in and do nothing but recuperate for the next week. Their hosts had the good taste to leave them alone; both T.R. and his wife, Veronica Schmidt, sent their handwritten regrets that they couldn’t be there to say hello in person and left them in the hands of staff members who clearly knew that being unobtrusive was part of the job description. Yet, perhaps because of that hands-off policy, Saskia found that after she had spent twenty minutes drowsing in a bathtub, washing away the Brazos grime and taking inventory of her bug bites, she was of a mind to put on some clean clothes and go back to the hotel for a drink. Some kind of optional social hour was listed on the schedule.

About half of her luggage had been salvaged from the jet crash. Willem and Fenna had made arrangements for more clothes to be plucked from her wardrobe at home and express-shipped here. She called Fenna, rousing her from what sounded like deep slumber—no surprise given the nature of her activities last night with Jules. Wrapped in a huge plush terry robe monogrammed with T.R.’s family crest, she glided into Saskia’s suite like a somnambulating figure skater, profoundly relaxed and satisfied. Quite obviously Jules had been the cure for the case of jitters she had picked up in the jet crash. “One, I think,” Saskia said. Fenna opened up the cosmetics case and applied Face One, a scheme that went well with the outfit Saskia had picked out: blue jeans with a nice blouse and vest, chosen to disarm people who might have inflated expectations of what a queen would look and act like, but with enough fancy bits that it wouldn’t seem downright insulting. In truth Saskia could do Face One without assistance, but her hair had sustained some damage and needed a bit of chemical and mechanical help. Before long, Fenna was able to pad back to her room and fall into bed to have sweet dreams of Jules while Saskia, looking every inch the modern, norMAL, unpretentious monarch, met Amelia and Willem in the foyer for the quick drive back to the hotel and its capacious bar.

This was doing brisk business. T.R. had bought the whole place out and thrown a security cordon around it, so everyone here was somehow involved in the project, had signed all the NDAs, was in on the joke, as it were. The drinks were free. A table had been reserved and made ready for them. They plunged down into vast chairs and sofas for which many Texas longhorns had sacrificed their lives and their hides. The skull of one such looked down on them from above a fireplace large enough that it could have done double duty as a parking space for one of those SUVs. Amelia ordered club soda, Willem a Manhattan, Saskia a glass of red wine. She enjoyed her first sip and took in the scene.

Twenty-four hours ago, on the bank of the Brazos, they’d been in the world where things made of microchips and petrochemicals cost basically nothing, and a whole city could be summoned into being in a few hours out of tarps, zip ties, and garbage bags. It wasn’t a fancy city, but it wasn’t terrible. Gumbo might be featured on the bar menu here in this hotel lobby, but Saskia deemed it unlikely that it would be any better than what they’d made last night over camp stoves and consumed in the open air in plastic bowls.

This place, however, was about permanence. Permanence, and uniqueness. Every detail custom-built of polished old wood, wrought iron, sculpted marble. Original works of art wherever some decoration was wanted, living flowers arranged by human hands. That human effort immanent in every detail. Napkins folded just so, drinks hand-shaken and served with origami twists of citrus rind.

People were expensive; the way to display, or to enjoy, great wealth was to build an environment that could only have been wrought, and could only be sustained from one hour to the next, by unceasing human effort. Saskia, with her staff, was as guilty of it as anyone, but she tended to forget about it until some event such as the journey down the Brazos reset her thinking.

Woven through the preparations had been a series of tests, administered to all the invited guests, for contagious diseases. Everyone who’d made it as far as this hotel lobby had passed that screening, and so they were all in a shared bubble now, with no masks or social distancing required. The accents in the lobby—other than the obvious Texan—tended to be British, Italian, and Chinese. Though in truth many of the Asian-looking people spoke indistinguishably from well-educated Brits. Saskia assumed they were from Hong Kong until Willem somehow inferred from reading a couple of name tags that they had to be from Singapore. As for the Italians, she guessed that they were from the northern part of that country; there were no visual clues to distinguish them from any other Europeans other than, perhaps, great attention to detail in matters of appearance. As usual Saskia drew a lot of glances and even some indiscreet stares once people understood who she was. T.R.’s staff had been extraordinarily tight-lipped about the guest list; Saskia didn’t know who the other honored guests were, and so it stood to reason that her presence came as a surprise to them.

Rufus and Alastair, the unlikeliest of couples, wandered in and looked shyly in her direction. Saskia sent Willem to corral them and make it clear they were welcome at her table. He did so and they came over, looking somewhat relieved. Neither of them was one for cocktail party banter.

“This is all I got that’s clean,” Rufus said, plucking at his T-shirt and then looking around at the other guests in their tailored suits.

“I’m a queen,” Saskia said. “I don’t think about it every minute of every day, and I try not to make a big deal about it. I try to be norMAL. I don’t ‘pull rank’ as you say. But in cases like this I am a tyrant. You’re with me, Red. Your T-shirt is fine. I said so.”

Rufus enjoyed hearing that and came closer to smiling than usual. Willem had gone missing. On his way back from rounding up these two strays, he had been buttonholed by one of the Singaporeans. Saskia heard the man hailing him in some variant of Chinese. Willem glanced her way, she nodded, and he proceeded to return the greeting and to enter into conversation.

Amelia had stood to make room for Rufus and Alastair. They noticed this, felt bad about it, and made room for her, but she wanted to prowl around. There wasn’t much for her to do. T.R. was providing security and so her main role was to stay in sync with her opposite numbers on his and the other staffs. These were standing around the periphery of the room, identifiable mostly from the fact that they never engaged in anything like normal social interaction. A Brit detached himself from the Brit squad, approached Amelia, and introduced himself. Saskia couldn’t hear, but the man fit the profile of one of those ex-military guys who filled the ranks of British security details.

Both of them turned their heads to look at a man and a woman entering from one of the adjoining spaces. It took Saskia a few moments to realize that the man was T.R. and the woman presumably his wife, Veronica. Compared to his YouTube persona, T.R. McHooligan, he was (of course) older, smaller, and more dignified. A little of the same impish energy still came through. Veronica was a full-time helpmeet to T.R., a society lady who had been doing this her whole life. Early in his advance through the bar, T.R. got brought up short by a staff member and so Veronica peeled away without breaking stride and came for Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia like a border collie homing in on a Frisbee. Saskia stood up and there was the usual society-lady greeting, an activity Saskia had been born and bred for and that largely consisted of defusing any awkwardness or self-consciousness that the other might be experiencing without getting too informal too fast.

Veronica obviously knew her business and so it came off without a hitch. She understood the message Saskia was sending, for example, by wearing blue jeans. She’d done something similar that involved a pair of shockingly exquisite cowboy boots. It was entirely within the realm of possibility that she’d checked out Saskia on one of the video cameras that were presumably ubiquitous on her property and the hotel’s, and only then chosen her outfit.

A minute or two into that procedure, T.R. sidled up to his wife, who unfastened her gaze from Saskia long enough to make the introduction—which seemed like an afterthought. So that was finally out of the way. Protocol dictated that the host and hostess move on to greet other guests before too much time passed, and Saskia gave them an opening to do so after introducing her team. Veronica, much to her credit, didn’t so much as blink when introduced to T-shirted Rufus “Red” Grant, who had to transfer his beer to his other hand and wipe his hand on his pants in order to shake hers. T.R. even managed to work in a “thank you for your service.” This meant that in the approximately six hours since Saskia had abruptly and impulsively added Rufus to her entourage, T.R.’s people had run a background check on him and unearthed his military record and communicated all that to T.R.

“You and I gotta talk pigs later,” T.R. added as a parting shot. “Got a real problem on my Cotulla property!”

“Not for long,” Rufus shot back.

T.R. was knocked back on the heels of his hand-tooled ostrich hide cowboy boots only for a moment, then pointed his index finger at Rufus like a six-shooter and exclaimed, “Oh. Yes. You and me.”

“Yes sir!”

“We gonna take care of it!”

“I got the means!”

“I got a chopper,” T.R. threw in suggestively. His wife was dragging him off. He turned back to utter some barely coherent instructions regarding which of his people Rufus needed to follow up with to arrange it. Though Rufus was a shy man, Saskia could see in his face how pleasantly surprised he was that T.R. McHooligan, of all people on this planet, knew of him and his profession. Just before being dragged out of range, T.R. shot Saskia the slightest glance to make sure she had observed all these goings-on. My staff and I pay attention; in the Lone Star State no sparrow falls from a tree, no bug hits a windshield, no vulture lights on a road-kill armadillo without my knowing it. Saskia for her part just suspended her incredulity for a moment to revel in the fact that there was a part of the world where two men with so little in common could derive such mutual pleasure—not feigned—from the mere prospect of being able to go out into a harsh place and shoot feral swine out of a helicopter.

The purpose of this get-together in the bar was to get introductions out of the way so that when the various attendees bumped into each other during the program slated to begin tomorrow morning, they’d simply be able to begin talking and not have to fuss with protocol. Saskia resolved to grit her teeth and just get on with it. To relieve the sheer tedium—for queens had to spend rather a lot of time in these kinds of situations—she decided that she would try to see the whole scene from Lotte’s point of view as a loved one who deeply cherished the hope that Saskia might find a romantic partner. The first step in that process was to ruthlessly evaluate every straight man in the room on two independent axes: one, availability; two, a trait that Lotte, with Dutch bluntness, would probably call fuckability, but for which Saskia needed a more elevated term. The tools she had used to evaluate boys as a teenager were no longer adequate to the task. She decided to consider the whole matter as she might evaluate the lift-to-drag ratio of an airplane’s wing.

T.R. was surprisingly more high lift than she’d have guessed from YouTube, but extremely high drag in that he was married. And Veronica, though impeccably bred, seemed like the type to interrupt the proceedings with a shotgun.

Alastair: low drag (available), but low lift (she didn’t feel much).

Rufus: low drag and, the more she saw of him, extraordinarily high lift. But it would never cross the poor man’s mind in a million years and so she would have to slip a Xanax into his Shiner Bock and then throw herself at him.

Having established that basic framework for all this afternoon’s social interactions, Saskia met two of her three counterparts: the Italian and the Singaporean. As for the third—the Brit—it turned out she already knew him. He was the lord mayor of the City of London. But he’d had to excuse himself early because of pressing concerns in his world. Or maybe jet lag.

Willem reeled in the Singaporean: Dr. Sylvester Lin, a man in his fifties. Other than that slightly odd choice of Western first name, he was what you’d expect of an official dispatched by the Singaporean government to attend a hush-hush conference. He wore a black suit with a blue necktie, rimless glasses, no jewelry other than a simple wristwatch, had all the etiquette down pat. He made a carefully rehearsed allusion to “the long-standing relationship between our countries up and down the Straits.” He was attended by three senior aides who happened to represent the Malaysian, Tamil, and white minorities of his country. Each of them had at least one junior assistant. Sylvester paid his respects, made the obligatory sixty seconds of polite chitchat, then excused himself—not before uttering some pleasantry in Fuzhounese to Willem and then ponderously translating it into English for Saskia’s benefit. Saskia made a mental note to review the basics of Singapore’s early history and how it related to the Dutch East Indies.

Verdict: Sylvester Lin: high drag, low lift.

The apparent leader of the Italian contingent was the most physically beautiful man Saskia had seen since Jules the diver. He was a self-assured man of perhaps forty with wavy blond hair that fell to his shoulders in a way that looked careless, and yet it somehow miraculously never fell across his face. He was here to represent Venice. The Venetian’s name was Michiel (pronounced with a hard “k” sound like meeky-ell) and he didn’t seem to have any titles that would supply clues as to his status or profession—no Ph.D., no doctor, professor, count, reverend, or any of that. She had the vague sense that she was supposed to know who he was, but she didn’t. Pre-COVID he’d have kissed her hand. Instead he pantomimed a hand kiss from two meters away. Saskia responded by clasping one hand warmly with the other. “I should have anticipated that someone from your city would be here,” she said.

Michiel nodded. “We built it in a swamp, as Your Majesty will know, because Huns didn’t have boats. We have been building houses on stilts since Alaric the Goth.” He looked around. “These people have been doing it since Hurricane Harvey.”

She well knew the long rich gory gaudy brilliant history of the Venetian Republic. Her knowledge began to sputter out around the time of Napoleon, when the eleven-hundred-year-old republic had been extinguished, leading, after a few decades of subordination to Austria, to its becoming just another part of Italy. In the last decades they had famously been challenged by climate change and sea level rise, to which they were uniquely vulnerable. They had tried, and almost failed, to build a barrier . . .

“If you follow this sort of thing—which as sovereign of a country below sea level, you must—you’ll have heard the ignominious story of MOSE,” Michiel offered. He was good at this—feeding her the missing background and immediately broaching the awkward topic.

“Well, it’s so complicated, isn’t it?” Saskia returned. “All those channels and marshes. You can’t just wall off the Adriatic the way we do the North Sea.”

Michiel nodded. “Building a surge barrier can only buy us time. We must prevent sea level from rising, or lose the city.”

Saskia raised her eyebrows and smiled as if to pass that remark off as a mere jest. It was very blunt talk by the standards of climate change cocktail party discourse. You couldn’t “prevent sea level from rising” in just one place. That was the whole point of sea level. You had to change the climate of the whole world. That kind of thinking—adjust the climate of the entire planet just to make things good for Venice—might have been very typical of Venice in, say, the twelfth century but was not what one expected today.

He sensed her caution and gave a disarming shrug. “Pardon me,” he said, “but that is what we’re here to talk about, is it not?”

“Did you know who was invited?” Saskia asked.

“Not until fifteen minutes ago. London, Singapore, Venice, the Netherlands, and of course Houston. What do they all have in common?”

“Other than the obvious? That they are all under dire threat from rising sea level?”

“But so is Bangladesh. The Marshall Islands. Why aren’t they here?”

“Money,” Saskia said, gazing at a beautiful set of cuff links on the wrists of one of the London contingent. His French cuffs had, of course, been tailored so that one of them was slightly larger to accommodate his massive wristwatch. A side benefit of being a queen was that you didn’t even have to pretend to be impressed by that stuff.

“To join the club,” Michiel said, extending one hand palm up, discreetly taking in the room, “I infer that you must be under dire threat—but you must also have the money and let’s call it the technocratic mentality needed to take effective action.”

Saskia made a mental note to ask Amelia to run a check on this guy and find out whether he had any fascist affiliations.

“Does Venice?” Saskia asked. As long as they were being blunt.

“Officially? No. Oh, it’s under threat, to be sure. But it’s just another cash-strapped modern city. Part of a country that pays lip service to climate orthodoxy. As does the Netherlands.”

She didn’t need to ask what Michiel meant by climate orthodoxy. Even if she weren’t the head of state of a very Green country, she got an earful of it almost every day from Lotte.

“But . . . if you were here in some official capacity, I imagine you’d have told me a little more about yourself,” she said.

“Venice doesn’t have monarchs, so we have to make do,” Michiel said, gesturing to himself in a self-deprecating way. “But the money, the technocratic will to power—those aren’t going to come from the Italian government, as you well know.”

She just looked at him expectantly. Her instinct was to say little until she got the background check back from Amelia.

“Look,” Michiel said with a shrug, “someone like you will want to have an explanation of who and what I am. That is only fair and reasonable. We should get out ahead of that and not let it develop into a source of confusion. But perhaps you’ll agree that this cocktail party isn’t the place or time.”

“I do agree and will take that as an offer for us to find some place and time that is better.”

“Done. I do not have a staff per se, but am accompanied by my sister and my aunt. We shall work it out with Dr. Castelein.”

“It has been a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Michiel.”

“The pleasure is all mine, Your Majesty,” he returned, and excused himself.

Verdict: Michiel was low drag (though it might be weird having his sister around), very high lift, but only on the condition that he wasn’t some kind of fascist. The Netherlands too had its share of far-right characters, and Saskia had to be careful about even being seen talking to someone like that. So the verdict was out until Amelia (and the larger Dutch security apparatus at home) could figure out who the hell this guy was.

“Ex-footballer for AC Milan,” Willem said, after Michiel was out of earshot.

“Ah. I thought he looked familiar.”

“Played for a few seasons. Not a big star but had a good run. Parlayed it into some endorsements. You’ve seen his face on ads for fancy watches in duty-free shops. From an old Venetian family, as it turns out.”

It remained only to make some sort of contact with the Brits. Saskia dispatched Alastair, who knew some of the lord mayor’s entourage through City connections. He came back a few minutes later with a pair of white men in tow: a mop-topped blond (medium drag, medium lift, too young) who looked like he’d stepped right off an Oxford or Cambridge quad, and a posh and podgy sort in his fifties (probably low drag, but zero lift). This was the guy whose cuff links—made from Roman coins, it turned out—had caught her eye earlier. His name tag identified him as Mark Furlong. “Bob’s knackered,” he announced. “Just useless. Too much free Beaujolais on the Gulfstream.”

A moment passed while Saskia re-calibrated her conversational brain for this kind of highly layered and ironic talk. In some ways it was more difficult than learning a foreign language. Which was sort of the point; you couldn’t be part of this social class unless you got it. “Bob”—Robert Watts, the Right Honorable the Lord Mayor of London—was a teetotaler. He had blown up a marriage and a job by drinking too much, then sworn off the booze and put his life back together and gotten married to Daia Chand, a British journalist. The assertion by Mark Furlong—a trusted member of Bob’s inner circle—that he’d been incapacitated by too much free Beaujolais on the Gulfstream was under no circumstances to be taken at face value. It was, first of all, a joke that derived its humorous payload from being so utterly outrageous in its falsity. But for the hearer to get the joke they’d have to know Bob at least well enough to know that he was—extremely unusually for a man in his role—an absolute teetotaler. Anyone so ill-informed or credulous as to actually believe this slander would be left out in the cold, operating on bad information. In due time they might work out that they’d committed the monstrous faux pas of taking at face value what had been meant as an ironic witticism and have the good grace to throw themselves in front of a Tube train at Bank. Further embroidering on all this was Mark’s specification of Beaujolais as the drink in question, that being seen, by a certain class of drinker, as an inexpensive and faddish vintage for lightweights. The mention of the Gulfstream was a lovely touch. Mark was basically remarking on how absurd it was for people to travel that way. So the underlying reality was that Mark was a profoundly decent man who knew and loved Bob but couldn’t bring himself to say as much.

Fine. But it simply took Saskia a few moments to get her head in that groove, so different from talking to the Sylvester Lins of the world. During that brief period of readjustment, Mark—who was evidently not a teetotaler—began to look just faintly queasy as it crossed his mind that Saskia might be too dim or literal-minded to get the joke. She was, after all, just a hereditary monarch. It wasn’t like you had to pass an intelligence test to land that job.

“He says he knows you,” Mark said, beginning to sound apologetic.

“Is Dr. Chand holding his head?”

“Perhaps. I thought she might join us.” Mark looked around, then shrugged as if to say no such luck. “I’m afraid I’ll have to do. On behalf of the Honorable the Lord Mayor, howdy and welcome to Texas! Can I grab you a beer?”

“I’m fine with this lovely glass of Beaujolais,” she shot back.

For one exquisite second, she had him. Mark looked exquisitely mortified, his eyes strayed to the glass in Saskia’s hand, but then he saw that it looked more like a Bordeaux. “I’ve heard it’s quite good,” he said.

Obviously discomfited by Mr. Furlong’s breezy informality was the younger man, one Simon Towne by his name tag. He turned out to be a viscount. As such he probably had been brought up to behave in a certain way when in the presence of queens. So Saskia went through the requisite formalities as Mark Furlong gazed on, seeming to find it all worth watching. Mark was a City man through and through. His protégé Simon was of another recognizable type: fresh out of a posh education, sent down to the City for seasoning and to rack up some millions and find a wife who would enjoy picking out curtains in Sussex.

“Mark, you mentioned Alastair had worked for you. May I assume in that case that you too are a risk analyst?”

“We all are,” Mark said.

“We meaning—?”

“Everyone in this room. Even the waiters and bus boys. Especially them. It’s just that some of us actually have the temerity to print it on our business cards.” He regarded Saskia. “Your country. Surrounded by walls. So high, but no higher. There’s a risk that waves will overtop them. Boffins like Alastair understand the maths of waves.” Mark winked.

“So he keeps telling me,” Saskia returned, with a glance at Alastair.

Alastair reddened, and his jaw literally dropped open.

“We’re joking!” she said. But she’d put him in a bad spot and he had to defend himself—if not to Mark and Saskia, who were in on the joke, then to others who were listening. “Anyone who claims to understand waves needs to be fired,” he said.

He had written his dissertation on rogue waves—incredibly random events of astonishing power, thought to be responsible for sudden disappearances of ships, therefore of interest to City insurance companies, who’d hired him before the ink was dry on his Ph.D.

“I know, Alastair,” Mark said calmingly. “So you told me ten years ago. Now it’s how I cull the yearly crop of people like Simon.”

With that it seemed that the basic purpose of the cocktail hour had been accomplished. Saskia could reasonably claim to be “knackered” herself and so she made excuses and returned to the guesthouse with Amelia, leaving Alastair to pal around with the City boys, Rufus to talk pigs with T.R., and Willem to brush up on his Fuzhounese with the Singapore crew. Lotte demanded a progress report via text message and Saskia dutifully let her know that two possibles (Rufus and Michiel) had been identified. But she drew the line at sending her daughter pictures.

They could have just done this aerial tour from the comfort of T.R.’s mansion-on-stilts along Buffalo Bayou, relaxing on leather furniture with drinks in hand and experiencing the whole thing through virtual reality, but that would not have been the Texas way and it certainly was not the T.R. way. Instead T.R., Queen Frederika, the lord mayor, Sylvester Lin, and Michiel were humming through the stifling air above the metropolis, each in their own personal drone: an air-conditioned plastic bubble with splayed arms that ramified like fingers, each finger terminated by an electric motor driving a carbon fiber propeller. Two dozen independent motors and two dozen propellers kept each vehicle in the air. In front of Saskia was a touch screen control system completely different from anything she’d ever seen in an airplane. She couldn’t have piloted this thing if she’d tried. Fortunately she didn’t have to. The drone was being controlled by swarm software, based on the murmurations of starlings. T.R.—presumably with a lot of assistance from an AI safety system—piloted his drone. The others—Saskia’s, the three other guests’, and half a dozen more drones containing aides and security personnel—flew in formation with it, basically going where T.R. went but never getting closer than a few meters to any of the others. Or to any solid object whatsoever. For the flock was smart enough to part around hazards when it came upon them and then to knit itself back together after leaving obstructions in its wake.

“I sucked at math,” T.R. remarked as he piloted the flock on an obstacle course among the skyscrapers of downtown Houston. This was just a few kilometers to the east of the posh leafy neighborhood where they had lifted off a few minutes earlier. It was not, Saskia suspected, the important part of the tour. It was just T.R. getting the touristy bits ticked off the list, making sure the drones were all working.

“Or leastways, math as it was taught in the prep schools my folks sent me to. ‘How do we get to AP calc?’” He chuckled. “That’s what that’s all about. I was a twenty-seven-year-old college dropout before I finally met some real mathematicians and found that those people don’t even give a shit about calculus. My Ph.D.’s in probability and statistics. Took me ten years to get it because I was building a business and raising kids at the same time. You could say I went to grad school on the short bus.”

Alastair had warned her to expect this, encouraged her to watch a few online videos of the real T.R. Schmidt. Ninety-nine percent of all T.R. content on the normal Internet was him twenty years ago during the business-building phase of his life, making an ass of himself in deliberately amateurish television ads for his chain of family-themed strip mall restaurants, which catered to the child birthday party market. Eventually he had hired a younger actor to slip into the role of T.R. McHooligan: a sort of goofy slapstick dad/cowboy figure, beloved of kids, relatable to men in their twenties and thirties. He was masculine enough to seem like a regular guy you could go have a beer with but not rising to the level of a potential wife-beguiler. That actor had eventually fallen into disgrace and been replaced by an animation, a change that had coincided with a rebranding and expansion of the chain into something called T.R. Mick’s. The small (by Texas standards—unbelievably colossal to Europeans) standalone restaurants had been phased out, only to crop up on yet larger parcels on the edges of cities, where they served as the central anchors of truck stop/gas stations designed around the slogan “Never Less Than a Hundred!” meaning—as every motorist in Texas understood—that the smallest T.R. Mick’s Mobility Center had a hundred fuel pumps. That did not include electric charging stations, of which there were also plenty. All sheltered from sun and rain by wide solar-power-collecting awnings and all connected into the central restaurant/entertainment plaza with moving walkways like in one of your longer airport concourses. Everyone knew and understood that this business strategy had enabled T.R. to parlay the tens of millions he had inherited from “Daddy” Schmidt into billions.

Not a whole lot of billions. T.R., over drinks last night, had been keen to make this understood. On a good day in the stock market he might be worth ten billion. He was not, he wanted it understood, one of “those tech boys” who had, as the result of an IPO, overnight come into more money than Dr. T.R. Schmidt would ever be able to accumulate simply by dint of actually growing a business. He’d made this statement matter-of-factly, in the same emotional tone he used to describe the underground plumbing that fed gasoline from central tanks out to the hundred pumps. He was not, in other words, bitter. In no way did T.R. wish to deprecate “the tech boys” who had ten times as much money as him. No, it was that the rootedness of his fortune in “steel in the ground” was somehow going to become a part of the argument he was making today.

They swung north up a downtown thoroughfare that was labeled “Main Street” on the augmented-reality overlay in the drone’s bubble. In a few moments this terminated in a small plaza on the edge of a swollen brown stream. Another stream of about the same size emptied into it here. Several bridges had been thrown over these watercourses. “I promise I’m about done with the tourist shit,” T.R. said. “This here, the confluence of Buffalo Bayou and White Oak Bayou, is Allen’s Landing, where Houston was founded two hundred years ago. Y’all ought to be seeing a little old 3D movie playing right about now. Holler if it ain’t.”

The glass bubble darkened, cutting down the brightness of the incoming sunlight, and the landscape seemed to turn green. The bridges and streets were still visible, but they’d been overlaid with an artist’s conception of what this place had looked like a couple of hundred years ago. Mostly it looked like the same kind of vegetation Saskia and her companions had traveled through between Waco and Sugar Land. In this fictional rendering, some sail- and oar-powered wooden vessels, including some indigenous canoes, had congregated on the south bank of Buffalo Bayou, right where the present-day historic site was located. A man in a broad-brimmed hat was standing on a platform reading from a fancy document. Basically it looked like a cut scene from one of your more expensively produced video games: close to photorealistic if you didn’t zoom in too far. The actor who had recorded this dialog had done the best he could with the material that had been handed to him. But at the end of the day, the words were those of a real estate prospectus that had been written in 1836—not exactly Shakespeare.

In Saskia’s headphones, much of the dialogue, or rather monologue, was drowned out by questions and remarks from some of the other guests. For all of them were sharing the same open comm channel with T.R. But Saskia was able to hear the actor declaiming, in timeless real-estate-hustler style, about the pure clean spring water, fertile soil, salubrious climate, and other fine conditions here prevailing. On that basis he ventured to guess that this settlement did “warrant the employment of at least one million dollars of capital,” then paused as gasps of astonishment, followed by whoops and huzzahs, propagated through the procedurally generated, AI-driven crowd of improbably diverse Texans assembled to hear his oration. “. . . and when the rich lands of the country shall be settled, a trade will flow to it, making it, beyond all doubt, the great interior commercial emporium of Texas!”

“Blah blah blah,” T.R. said, as another round of applause swept across the computer-generated crowd below. The simulation faded, the drones gained altitude, the glass bubbles undarkened. The swarm was climbing straight up, fast enough to make Saskia’s ears pop. T.R. went on, “The gist of it is, there’s a data point for y’all. Two hundred years ago. One million dollars. In today’s money that’s more like thirty million.”

The boost in altitude was broadening the view to include much of Houston. Several miles east of Allen’s Landing, the bayou spilled into a vast bay extending far to the south, where it was sealed off from the Gulf of Mexico by a barrier island. Much of that waterfront was dominated by industrial complexes and shipping facilities on a scale that would be impressive if you had never seen Rotterdam. Directly south was the downtown high-rise district, lodged in the center of a spiderweb of freeways. Any one of those freeways, traced outward, supported its own chain of sub-metropolises. “I’m not gonna insult y’all’s intelligence by explaining compound interest,” T.R. said. “The value of the real estate in greater Houston today is one point seven five trillion dollars. Big number. But it’s just six percent annual interest compounded for two hundred years from that starting point. Now just stash that number in your short-term memory for a spell while we go look at some other unique exhibits.”

The swarm had begun to shed altitude while tracking gradually northwest. They flew, at an altitude of maybe a hundred meters, up the incredibly wide freeway Saskia had seen from ground level yesterday. It was really a system of freeways at multiple levels, interlaced with ramps and crossed over, or under, by lesser freeways that would have been considered important in the Netherlands. It was bracketed between ground-level frontage roads, each many lanes wide and capable of carrying huge flows of traffic were they not partly underwater. “Interstates 10 and 45 combined is what you’re seeing,” T.R. said. “I-10 connects L.A. to Florida; 45 runs up to Dallas and connects to points north. In the other direction it’s our connection to the Gulf.” Presently those two roads parted ways and T.R. chose the left fork, veering onto a westerly course above 10, or the Katy Freeway as locals called it. “See, just looking at them on a map can’t do these constructs the justice that they are due,” he remarked, then surprised them all by swooping down and taking the swarm for a roller-coaster ride beneath the many lanes of the 10, which marched across sodden ground on reinforced concrete pillars. “And people talk about Rome and what they built,” T.R. muttered.

“T.R., what do you mean ‘the justice that they are due’?” Saskia asked.

“The size of it. The sheer amount of steel in the ground. The engineering. The presence, Your Majesty, the physical mass and reality of it. Every strand of rebar was drawn out in a steel mill. Where’d the heat come from? Burning things. The cement was produced in kilns, biggest things you ever seen. How do we keep the kilns hot? Burning things. We put the steel and the concrete together to make these things, these freeway interchanges, just so cars can run on ’em. How do we keep the cars moving? Burning things.”

“Putting CO₂ into the atmosphere,” Saskia said.

“Oh yes.”

“It is not sustainable.”

“With all due respect, Your Majesty, it is as sustainable, or as unsustainable, as your whole country. Later we can talk about how to sustain what matters to us. Now, hang on a sec, this calls for focus.”

What he focused on next was slaloming his drone through the huge pillars he’d just been describing, cutting under ramps and looping through cloverleafs. Finally he pulled out into the open and swooped them up to an altitude where they could look down on the Katy Freeway skimming beneath them. It had become even wider, if such a thing were possible. “Twenty-six lanes,” T.R. said, as if reading her mind.

Right now those lanes were only spattered with vehicles, as many businesses, schools, and activities had been shut down because of the hurricane. But Saskia noticed the bubble of her drone getting dark again, signaling another AR sequence about to start. “Not much going on today,” T.R. remarked, “so I’m gonna take you on a little trip down memory lane. This is the same day of the year, same stretch of freeway, as it was back in 2019.”

As he said it, the twenty-six lanes of the Katy Freeway suddenly filled up with cars and trucks, countless thousands of them, moving along at moderate speed—not quite a traffic jam, but still with enough brake lights igniting here and there to temper the flow. A motorcycle weaved through, going twice as fast as everyone else, using the bigger vehicles as pylons. The illusion was powerful even though the rendering had been simplified—every semi was a clone of a simple featureless semi model, and the same was true of cars, vans, pickups, and so on. But if anything that simplification made it easier to “read” the data. T.R. was showing them, in a way that was easy to grasp, exactly how much traffic had passed down this freeway at this time of day on this day of the year in 2019.

“2020,” T.R. said, and the display shifted. This time traffic was sparser, and moving faster. “The first pandemic. Now, 2021.” Another shift. More traffic moving more slowly—there was a traffic jam. “2022.” It sped up. “2023. 2024.” The lanes emptied out. “That was a hurricane year, just like this one. 2025. You’ll notice a change taking hold,” T.R. said, as the years ticked upward, “as self-driving cars take over. In heavy traffic, they drive closer together, almost like they join together into a train. So we can fit more vehicles onto the same stretch of pavement and those vehicles are all going faster—much greater throughput! Here, I’ll flip between 2019 and 2029 and that’ll make it easy to see.”

He did so, and it was. The flow depicted in 2019 was gappy and spasmodic. Ten years later the cars were moving the way everyone was accustomed to nowadays, following one another closely, adapting smoothly to lane changes and merges. Saskia had lived through that transformation and was aware that it had happened but had never seen it demonstrated so vividly.

“So just when the Greens might be fixing to dance on the grave of the automobile, software crams twice as many of the little buggers onto the roads, makes the commute safer and easier for everyone. Guess what? People buy more cars! Burn more fuel. T.R. Mick’s makes more money, builds more mobility centers on all the new highways getting laid down to carry all those cars.”

The virtual display faded, the real world brightened. This whole time, the swarm had been humming eastward above the centerline of the Katy Freeway fast enough to overtake and pass the speediest vehicles. And yet, for all the distance they had covered, nothing had changed. The more Houston they put behind them, the more just rolled up over the western horizon to replace it. Like an infinite conveyor belt of mega-city.

“What kind of money we talking? That’s the question my daddy and his daddy always used to ask, looking at an oil field, trying to work out how much to pay, how much to invest. What kind of money we talking?”

They’d passed over an interchange the size of central Amsterdam, where the Katy crossed one of the inner, older ring roads. Now they were looking several miles out toward another, much newer and larger interchange. Saskia began to see features she had noticed lately on maps: the tall corporate-campus buildings of Energy Corridor, and the two large regions shown on maps as bodies of water. On satellite imagery they looked like forested parks. Today they actually did look like reservoirs, albeit very untidy ones. Instead of placid open water their surfaces were grubby with trees, and instead of neatly staying within bounds they had burst their levees and invaded the suburban developments that had ill-advisedly been constructed on surrounding land.

“The maps lie,” T.R. said, as they slowed, banking rightward off the freeway and approaching one of those reservoirs. “I’ll show you what the maps have to say about what we’re looking at right here.”

Once again the AR system did its thing, this time by superimposing a plain old Google Map on the landscape. This was the bare-bones version, like something from the first decade of the twenty-first century. No satellite imagery, no traffic data, no overlays of any kind. Just roads in white, dry land in beige, and bodies of water in light blue. “Looks pretty tidy, don’t it?” T.R. scoffed. “Who makes these things? Anyone who lives down there knows that ain’t the real picture. Here’s the real picture.”

The map now began to fluctuate in a way that at first was visually jarring and difficult to follow. But as time went by Saskia understood that this was a collage that someone had assembled from aerial imagery. It was a mixture of satellite and drone photography showing the “reservoir” and its environs as they had actually looked over the last few decades. Early on, the coverage was spotty—they only had images at intervals of weeks or months, so the change from one to the next was jarring—but soon enough (as years went by and satellite coverage became ubiquitous) it smoothed out to the point where you could watch it like a movie. And what the movie showed was the reservoir throbbing like a living thing, an organic blob under a biologist’s microscope. Sometimes it shrank to nothing and all you saw was trees. But then in the aftermath of a heavy rain it would form puddles in the low places that would grow explosively over a few hours or days to fill the neat boundaries circumscribed by the levees. Every so often it would break out and become an even larger body of water with houses projecting from its surface. As years went by, some of those houses disappeared. T.R. wanted them to notice that. He led the swarm toward the edge of one such neighborhood and let them see how a swath of homes had been lost to the floodwaters of Hurricane Harvey. “A hundred and twenty-five billion,” T.R. said. “That was the price tag for Harvey. Second only to Katrina, which was a hundred and sixty-one. So that’s what kind of money we’re talking. Damages on the order of one or two hundred billion, inflicted on this city suddenly and at unpredictable times.”

He ran the simulation forward over a couple of decades, then back, then forward again. Saskia sensed he must have his finger on a scroll bar in some UI, racking it up and down across the years. This made obvious something that might have gone unnoticed if they’d watched it more slowly, which was that the neighborhood was moving vertically upward—actually gaining altitude, here and there, in fits and starts. More precisely, the level of the ground itself stayed the same but the houses were rising into the air, new foundations being slipped under them. “We see the rise of the house-jacking industry,” T.R. remarked. “Here are its fruits.”

And he shut off the AR visuals and took the flock on a slow flyby of a suburban street that was on the front line of the struggle against rising water. There were a number of vacant lots, currently sporting brown puddles of floodwater shaped like the floor plans of houses that had once stood there. All the houses that hadn’t been torn down were now standing proud of the water. Some were on high foundation walls of reinforced concrete, enclosing garages or storage space, currently filled with water but, it could be guessed, easy to hose out and dehumidify when the waters receded. Others—and these looked newer and nicer—stood above the water on reinforced concrete stilts, connected to the ground by ramps or stairs of welded aluminum.

“You can just imagine how expensive this is,” T.R. remarked, pausing the swarm for a moment so that they could look at a house that had been caught in the middle of the house-jacking process when the current round of flooding had struck. The contractors had left it high and dry on stacks of crisscrossed railroad ties and evacuated their equipment. An open skiff was bumping against its front porch on the end of a rope. A man came to the window of an upper bedroom, drawn by the noise of the drone swarm, and peered back at them. He was an ordinary-looking man in his fifties, shirtless in the heat, a strap angling across his pudgy torso from a long weapon slung across his back.

“Screwed” was T.R.’s verdict, “because thirty years ago, before Harvey, he bought a nice home here in this nice new development, and it all seemed like a great idea.” He took the swarm higher, effectively zooming out to remind them of just how many houses and neighborhoods were going through the same transition. “He did not understand—none of these people did—that this is stochastic land on the edge of a stochastic reservoir. They didn’t understand it because those are statistical concepts. People can’t think statistically. People are hardwired to think in terms of narratives. This guy’s narrative was: the little missus and I want to settle down and raise a family, here’s a house we like in a neighborhood full of folks like us, they can’t all be wrong, let’s take out a thirty-year mortgage on this thing. And now he’s probably taking out a reverse mortgage or a HELOC to pay the house-jackers so he can have a prayer of being able to sell the thing. Multiply his story times all the houses you can see from here and you get an idea of what kind of money we’re talking. Now, we gotta recharge.”

As he had been delivering this peroration he had guided the swarm north and west and increased their speed. Saskia glanced at a gauge on her drone’s panel that showed battery charge; it had turned yellow as it dropped to about one-third. She opened a private voice channel to Alastair. “Stochastic?” she asked. “I vaguely know this word but it is important in the mentality of T.R.”

“From a Greek root meaning to guess at something,” Alastair said. “In maths, it just means anything that can’t be calculated or positively known but that you instead have to approach statistically, probabilistically.”

“Got it. Right up your alley then.”

“Indeed. See you soon?”

“Looks that way.”

“It’s quite a spread, as they say.”

Their destination, which they reached some quarter of an hour later, was a T.R. Mick’s mobility center in a suburb that seemed to be above flood level for the most part. Its vast parking lots were splotched with puddles, but they were shallow. Most of the parking acreage was under hard roofs or pitched awnings, which Saskia had come to understand was a necessity in Texas; only a desperate person would park a vehicle in direct sunlight here. The roofs were tiled with photovoltaics, presumably helping feed the electric vehicle charging stations that were interspersed with gasoline and diesel pumps along the complex’s splayed arms.

One of those arms, in its entirety, had been cordoned off for the private use of T.R. and his drone swarm. Buses—the very largest and newest kind of gleaming inter-city double-decker behemoths—had been parked in queues, nose to tail, to either side, apparently for no purpose other than to form temporary walls. Drivers sat in them, comfortable in the A/C, and security personnel in earthsuits paced to and fro on their roofs.

Within that cordon Saskia could see a dozen or so black SUVs that had been used to transport support staff to the location while she and the other VIPs had enjoyed the drone ride. Saskia’s drone touched down in the open and she learned that its arms could be folded back so that it was small enough to roll into a parking space of the dimensions considered normal in Texas. In that configuration the drone found its way into a shaded stall next to an electric vehicle charger. A mechanical cobra reared up and sank its copper fangs into the drone’s flank. The instrument panel announced that it was now charging. Three men with large umbrellas converged and opened the hatch next to her. Saskia had seen the umbrellas before. Security personnel used them to shield VIPs from the prying eyes of camera drones and long-lens paparazzi. Below the fringe of one umbrella Saskia could see a pair of ankles and sensible shoes that she recognized as Amelia’s. A few moments later the Queen of the Netherlands was safely inside the T.R. Mick’s without her face having once been exposed to the all-seeing sky.

The plaza—the central hub of the mobility center—was the size of a shopping mall but with fewer internal partitions. Maybe airplane hangar was a better analogy. One zone seemed to be a convenience store where travelers could buy chips and jerky. There were toilets, hyped as being unbelievably large and surgically clean. An amusement arcade, pitched mostly at kids, and a toddlers’ play area and an indoor dog walk and a ventilated aquarium for smokers and a lactation suite and an urgent care facility and, one had to assume, many other amenities that she didn’t have the opportunity to see since a lot of highly efficient personnel were dead set on whisking her past all that and getting her to one of several peripheral lobes that served as restaurants. Of those there were several, including an actual taco truck parked inside the building and outlets for several well-known fast-food chains. Most of those, as one would expect, were for travelers who wanted to spend as little time as possible here. But in one corner was a thing that better approximated a real sit-down restaurant. It was a barbecue, Texas style, of course. It had long rows of plank picnic tables and a counter where customers would normally order and fetch their food on big metal trays. But for today’s event it had been cordoned off and fancied up. One table in the middle had been covered with a white tablecloth and set with cutlery that was real, in the sense that it was not plastic. There were wineglasses and a simple, rustic floral arrangement.

But before they could get to it, they had to be welcomed. Saskia and the other VIPs from the drones—four in total, plus T.R.—were greeted just short of the special table by a burly man with a long salt-and-pepper beard and a bright orange turban. He was introduced by Victoria Schmidt as one Mohinder Singh, the proprietor of this T.R. Mick’s franchise, as well as part owner of two others farther west along the I-10 corridor. Speaking—unexpectedly to Saskia—in a perfect Texas drawl, he thanked the Schmidts for the opportunity to show the meaning of hospitality to so many honored guests. He quickly introduced his wife, who had tied a T.R. Mick’s apron over an ornate traditional kurta, and several children and extended family members who had apparently converged on the site as reinforcements for the big day. Most of them were in a sort of uniform consisting of black polo shirts blazoned with a relatively dignified variant of the T.R. Mick’s logo. Though as a matter of course, all the young men wore that particular style of head covering that gathered the hair into a small bun poised above the forehead.

This was the first time Saskia had come anywhere near Robert Watts, the lord mayor, who yesterday evening had been indisposed. Standing at his side was his wife, Dr. Daia Kaur Chand, smartly but not flashily attired in pants and flats well adapted to a daylong program of clambering in and out of diverse vehicles. She had the accent you’d expect of one who had been awarded degrees from Oxford and Cambridge. But she astonished and delighted their hosts by greeting them in a language that Saskia had to presume was Punjabi. Mohinder and his family didn’t have a Willem on staff to do advance research on everyone they were going to encounter over the course of a day and so it was a joyous surprise to them to discover that one of their guests shared their religion and spoke their language. Whether or not it was part of Daia’s plan, this broke the ice and created an opening for Mohinder to usher the five VIPs to their special table, leaving in their wake the family all now clustered around Dr. Chand.

The surrounding tables had marginally less elaborate settings for an additional three dozen or so. Saskia spied Alastair and Willem bending over to scan place cards, looking for their assigned seats. A long row of picnic tables against one wall served as an informal mess for support personnel. Of these there were too many for Saskia to readily pick out hers, but during the few minutes of social hubbub before everyone sat down, Fenna emerged from that crowd and came over to inspect Saskia’s face. This was Face Two, a minor variation on Face One, geared for serious business, somewhat higher maintenance. The timing was good in the sense that T.R. had become embroiled in conversation with Mark Furlong about some kind of abstruse financial derivative that she didn’t care about. The kind of thing Alastair thought about for a living. And indeed Mark threw Alastair a significant look that caused him to walk over and join the conversation.

“More than good enough for a truck stop” was the verdict of Fenna. “I was worried. That glass bubble—the sun—” She was hitting Saskia with some powder, knocking down the glare on the shiny bits. Men around them politely averted their gaze. “Lipstick or—”

“Pointless, I’m about to guzzle wine and eat something called brisket.”

Fenna crinkled her nose and nodded agreement. “Can you guess what the vegetarian option is?”

“Let me think . . . fake brisket?”

“Yeah, two kinds! Grown in a vat, or simulated from plants.”

“Ladies and gentlemen, if we could get started!” T.R. hollered as he dinged a wineglass.

“Later?” Fenna asked.

Saskia nodded. “When I go to the toilet—before dessert probably.”

Fenna nodded and turned to go. Then she turned back. “Can Jules come with me?”

“To West Texas?”

“Yeah.”

“Let’s talk about it later.”

“Before we get to the main course I just wanted to get the paper-shoveling out of the way,” T.R. hollered. He was standing up, directly across the table from Saskia, who like all the other guests was seated. A team of energetic, well-groomed minions were pushing a cart piled with many copies of a bound document about an inch thick. These they passed out to people like Alastair and Willem, who tended to leaf through them curiously before slipping them into briefcases. “It’s the boring necessary shit, also available electronically of course. Due diligence and all that.”

Last night in the hotel bar, Rufus had made an observation that had left the other members of the party nonplussed. On the television an American football game had been playing. For this was September and apparently it was the season for that. Accustomed to the more fluid rhythm of what Americans called soccer, Saskia was struck by the amount of high-value, on-camera time claimed by the officials, who seemed to stop the game every ten seconds to litigate what had just happened and to mete out punishments with arcane gesticulations. Gazing at one especially stern official, Rufus glanced over at T.R.—who was holding forth at the bar with Sylvester Lin—and remarked, “If you put a zebra shirt and a black cap on him, gave him a whistle, man, he’d fit right in.” Whereupon he nodded back at the television. It was, like many of Rufus’s offhand comments, a very peculiar thing to say. And yet now sitting five feet away from T.R. and watching him address the room, Saskia could absolutely not get out of her head the image of this man in a black-and-white-striped shirt blandly but firmly twanging out judgment on a sweltering gridiron.

“I’m sure everyone wants to dig in, and no one’s asking him- or herself ‘I wonder when T.R.’s gonna stand up and give a great big long boring speech?’ and so I will just say welcome to our honored guests from the Netherlands”—he glanced at Saskia—“the Square Mile” (Robert Watts, its lord mayor); “Singapore” (Sylvester Lin, to Saskia’s left); “and Venice” (Michiel, next to T.R.). “You are not all, but you—along with me and my friends in Houston—are enough. I’ll explain later. Let’s eat.” And he sat down to light, uncertain applause.

“My Lord Mayor,” Saskia said to the man on her right. “You’ll have to forgive me, I didn’t recognize you without the huge ridiculous hat!”

“Not wearing it is a most effective form of disguise, Your Majesty. Please address me as Bob.”

“I have been going by Saskia lately.”

He made the closest approximation of a courtly bow that was possible while sitting on the bench of a picnic table.

“I, like you, am trying to do this discreetly, and so I left the huge ridiculous hat at home with the golden mace and the other bits.”

“Should have guessed it was you from all the SAS types hanging around.”

“Are they that obvious?”

“It’s the hair. Or lack thereof.” She looked across the room to see Fenna closely evaluating a very fit young Englishman, every one of whose hairs was exactly three millimeters long. Fenna quickly arrived at the conclusion that, while not lacking in potential, he was no Jules.

“Not like your chap with the dreadlock-Mohawk. Not conspicuous at all, that one.”

“Well, I hope word doesn’t leak out.”

“About the biggest gun in the world? That will be hard to keep secret.”

“No, that you are dining with a royal.”

“Oh, the aldermen will forgive me. You’re not one of those lot from Westminster.”

“What the hell,” T.R. said, “are the two of you talking about?”

Bob stifled a smile and collected himself. “As you know, T.R., I am the 699th lord mayor of the City of London.”

“The Square Mile. The financial district. Limey Wall Street.”

“Just think of it as O.G. London—the bit that was enclosed by the Roman wall,” Bob said. “We have always run the place as suits our purposes.”

“Business, shipping, finance.”

Bob nodded. “Now, some centuries after the Romans cleared out, grubby hillbillies with lots of sheep and sheep-based money—”

T.R. liked that. “Ha! Like our cattlemen.”

“Yes, they caused a lot of trouble for us, and to make a long story short people got tired of it and drew up the Magna Carta. Which among other things says ‘hands off the bit of England that’s circumscribed by the Roman wall, we know how to run that, stay out!’ The King of England may not even set foot in the Square Mile unless I invite him to do so.”

“Good for you!” T.R. exclaimed, but then threw a nervous glance at Saskia. She smiled to indicate she was not offended.

“So this banter between me and Her Majesty is a joke that goes back at least to 1215.”

“You and the British royals are natural adversaries,” T.R. said.

“There is a cultural divide between us and the, er—”

“I believe ‘grubby hillbillies’ was your characterization of my cousins at Buckingham Palace,” Queen Frederika put in.

“With sheep and swords,” T.R. added.

“Yes,” Bob said. “The divide is probably invisible to foreigners, who see us all as English people with similar accents, but it is real.”

Conversation went on as brisket, ribs, and red wine were brought out. Saskia stole a glance at Michiel, who was bemused by the ribs. Was one expected to pick these up with one’s bare hands and bite the meat off the bones like a savage? Fifteen hundred years after the first Venetians had fled into the Lagoon to found a new city, had it really come to this? He wisely postponed committing to any one course of action, picked up knife and fork, and went after a slice of brisket.

“Not a fascist, as far as we can tell” had been Amelia’s verdict at breakfast. The security crew at home had pulled an all-nighter trying to figure out Michiel. “I mean, we can’t read his mind. But if he has fringe political opinions, he has kept them to himself. Hasn’t associated with such people.”

“Who does he associate with?”

“Others like him?” Amelia threw her hands up.

“Meaning—?”

“Old Venetian families with inherited wealth.”

“Is there such a group, really?” Saskia asked. “One imagines that they all just intermarried, over the centuries, with other rich people who weren’t Venetians.”

“Still gathering data,” Amelia said. “I don’t think it is a large group. Maybe a few traditionalists from some of the old noble houses. His great-uncle seems to be a connector of some importance.”

“He did mention he had an aunt with him. Tell me more about this great-uncle of Michiel.”

“Banker—which can mean practically anything. Connections to shipping. Philanthropist.”

“What kind of philanthropy?”

“Mostly related to the preservation of Venetian cultural patrimony.”

“Well . . . keeping Venice above sea level would probably be important to him, then.”

“We should know more soon,” Amelia said. “But you could just ask him. Worst case, if someone posts a photo of you talking to him, and he turns out to be a nutjob, you can honestly say that nothing in his background or past associations provided any hint.”

“Okay. How about Sylvester? To begin with, the name.”

Amelia deferred to Willem. “Stallone,” he said.

“What!?”

“Chinese have been giving themselves Westernized handles for a long time,” Willem said. “The old-school approach is to pick something very conventional like Tom or Joe. By the time our friend ‘Sylvester’ was of an age to be thinking about that, it had become hip to choose cooler and more distinctive names. Sylvester Stallone was enjoying a comeback then. Lin liked the sound of it.”

“I wouldn’t have marked him out as a forward-leaning hipster at any phase of his life.”

“Other than that, he’s quite the straight arrow,” Willem said.

“They speak Fuzhounese to you.”

“I mostly speak English back. I remember very little of that dialect. It’s hard to keep it and Mandarin in your head at the same time.”

“What about this guy Bo? The Chinese operative who tracked you down in Louisiana?”

“The Chinese seem to know what T.R. is planning,” Willem said. “They are—I don’t know—offended? quizzical? concerned? that they were not invited. They are tending to assume, from that, that T.R.’s plan might be bad for China. That T.R. knows as much. T.R. knows China will naturally be opposed to his plan—so why would he invite them?”

“Is that actually the case?” Saskia asked.

“That it’s bad for China?”

“Yes. Has T.R.’s team done any computational modeling?”

“Have we done any?” Amelia asked.

“We don’t even know what the plan really is,” Willem pointed out. “Look. It’s not a question of good or bad, for a continental power like China. If you’re like us—or Venice, or London, or Singapore—you’re a speck on the map, right up against the ocean, and all you care about is sea level. Anything that puts the brakes on sea level rise is good.”

“And it’s rising because of the ice caps,” Alastair said, just to be clear.

“Indeed. So for us it is very simple: make the climate colder. Same goes for Venice and everyone else T.R. has invited. But if you’re anyone else, you have to be asking yourself what are the knock-on effects of that? How is climate in the interior going to be affected? Is there going to be enough rain? Or too much of it? Will we be able to grow enough rice? Will our hydroelectric projects be compromised?”

“And no one knows,” Alastair said. “Yet.”

“The Chinese seem to assume that T.R. knows. Based on what we’ve seen so far, though—” and here Willem broke off.

“T.R.’s just shooting from the hip,” Saskia said, completing the thought.

“We’ll know more in a few hours. Some kind of document is going to be handed out at lunch.”

After lunch the entire cavalcade—drones in the air, cars and buses on the ground—doubled back eastward, angling south so that the skyscrapers of downtown Houston swung across the horizon on their left. The sky was brilliant blue, interrupted here and there with huge roiling buttresses of cloud. These were blinding white where the sun shone on them, but otherwise a shade of dark gray that, to Saskia the pilot, suggested they were burdened with more moisture than they could handle. They were crowned with wreaths of lightning. She watched one such formation grope blindly for the earth with a fuzzy gray pseudopod. From miles away it looked soft and slow. It was even decoratively framed in a brilliant rainbow. But yesterday on the drive in from Sugar Land they had been caught in one of these. She knew what was going on in there. All the cars caught in it went blind. Most slowed down, some stopped. Collisions happened that would not be visible until the squall had moved on.

For the most part the drone swarm kept well clear of those things, but as they closed in on their destination they had fewer options and found themselves boxed in. “What do you say we just sit this one out?” T.R. suggested over the voice channel in his easygoing drawl. All the drones were settling in for a landing in a vacant field. As fat drops began slamming into the glass domes, their arms retracted into the drone equivalent of a fetal position. A few moments later the storm smote them with a vertical blast of what seemed to be solid water. Part of Saskia wondered if there was enough air between the drops to sustain life; was it possible to drown standing up? The glass dome couldn’t shed water fast enough and it seemed to pile up into a sludding mound, centimeters thick. This at least deadened the noise, which had drowned out everything. Only the subsonic shocks of thunder could penetrate it.

She actually enjoyed the perfect isolation for as long as it lasted, which was no more than thirty seconds. Then over the course of a minute or two the storm abated, and the sun came on full blast. The vacant field had become a rectangular lake spotted all over with wads of crushed vegetation. This being Texas, it was not planted with any crop, as would have been the case in the Netherlands. And this being Houston, it bore zero similarity to nearby parcels, which hosted activities as disparate as schools, strip malls, office blocks, residential subdivisions, and oil refineries. The drone’s arms swung back out, the props spun up, and it rose into the air along with the rest of the swarm. “We have the Johnson Space Center to thank for that,” T.R. said. “It’s just a little old parcel of vacant land they’re not using for anything just now. Probably never will, since it’s only a couple of meters Above.”

Saskia had now spent enough time around him to know that when he said “Above” or “Below” in that portentous and knowing tone of voice he meant “above sea level” or “below sea level.” In it was a kind of droll sarcasm at the very idea that there was such a thing as sea level in any useful sense. He saw it all stochastically and wouldn’t be caught dead speaking of sea level with a straight face.

Parking lots and office buildings were in view to the east. Beyond those was an industrial port zone that put her in mind of Rotterdam, with open water beyond that. She spied a familiar logo on several of the nearer buildings and realized it was all NASA property. The Houston of “Houston, we have a problem.” A little more altitude gave her the perspective to delineate a border fence, guarded by gates where it was pierced by roads, as well as other kinds of defenses that had been heaped up to protect vulnerable parts of the complex from floodwater. But the swarm didn’t go in that direction. Instead it followed an adjacent road to a commercial development that was as close to the Johnson Space Center as it could get without encroaching on government property. Logos on some of the buildings, and signs planted near street entrances, were suggestive of aerospace.

One of these buildings sported a five-story parking ramp with a flat roof. That was where the drones all came to rest, landing one at a time, each folding up and rolling out of the way to make room for the next. There were more big umbrellas and choreographed movements that conducted Saskia and the others into one of the adjoining office buildings. They were ushered through the doors and past a range of security checkpoints into the offices of White Label Industries LLC, whose logo was a featureless white rectangle.

In the course of her official duties, Saskia had endured hundreds of tech company tours. White Label Industries was the same as all the others: people sitting in chairs and typing. Some had made the switch to augmented-reality glasses, others—generally older—hewed to the ancient practice of walling themselves in with flat-panel monitors. They were all writing code or working on CAD models, not of anything spectacular but of bolts and brackets. Usually the queen had to feign interest, but T.R. seemed to know full well how boring this was. “I just wanted you to see that this exists. Everything you’ll see in West Texas was designed out of here. We needed a lot of aerospace guys. This is where it’s easiest to poach ’em. They’re happy working on shit that’s actually getting built, even if it ain’t going to Mars with some fucking billionaire. We gotta terraform Earth before we get distracted by Mars is my philosophy.”

Saskia saw nothing during her sweep through the place to contradict that. These guys did look happy. A little older, whiter, maler, and squarer than techies in Sunnyvale or Amsterdam. Calmly, even serenely focused on what they were doing.

A small bus, like an airport shuttle, was awaiting them in a loading dock that was otherwise crammed with cargo pallets bearing machine parts. None of those had the lightweight gracile look she associated with aerospace tech. Most of it was steel, and little of that was stainless.

Once they had taken seats, the roll-up door was opened and they pulled out onto a road that, over the course of the next few minutes, took them generally east, toward Trinity Bay—the lobe of the Gulf that served as Houston’s port. They passed a NASA gate but did not turn into it. The various buildings of the Johnson Space Center glided by them and Saskia realized with mild, childlike disappointment that they weren’t going there to ooh and aah at big old rockets. It simply wasn’t T.R.’s way. Instead they cut across a belt of subdivisions, variously hunkered down behind dikes or jacked up on stilts or abandoned and rotting. Boat-borne squatters seemed to have colonized some of the latter.

They entered into that industrial zone she’d glimpsed earlier, which made her homesick as it reminded her so much of the new parts of Rotterdam, close to the sea, where the big refinery complexes were built to process the oil coming in from Norway. Here, of course, the oil would be coming from offshore rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. But the equipment looked the same. She even spied a Shell logo in the distance. But eventually they passed through a security gate blazoned with the name of an oil company that she never would have heard of were it not for the fact that Willem had done his homework and compiled a dossier on T.R., and Saskia had read it. The company in question was a small (by Texas petrochemical industry standards) firm that had been founded by T.R.’s grandfather and that still existed as an independent legal entity, though it hadn’t been doing a lot of business in the last decade.

The gate gave way into a waterfront property that seemed forgotten compared to the larger complexes that hemmed it in. It had its share of industrial buildings, clad in rust-maculated galvanized steel, but by far its most prominent feature was a perfectly conical mound of brilliant yellow powder rising to the height of a ten-story building.

Her immediate thought, fanciful as it was, was that this must be some kind of immense, spectacular art project. This was partly because of its size and its geometrical perfection, but mostly because of its outrageous color: intense, pure, powerful yellow. She wished Fenna could be here to weigh in on this yellow and what made it different from other yellows. To a Dutchwoman, the obvious comparison was to daffodils. Not the paler color at the petals’ tips but the deeper hue at the base. But if you held a daffodil up against this thing, the flower would look paler, more toward the green/blue end of the spectrum. This cone of stuff, this artificial dune, tipped slightly more toward the red-orange. But it wasn’t dark. It almost glowed.

It was one of those things like a Great Pyramid or a Grand Canyon that you just had to walk toward, so everyone got out of the bus and did that. It was even bigger than it looked, and so it took a little while to reach the crisp edge where the slope of it dove into the ground. Saskia turned her head from side to side and estimated the size of it as comparable to a football field. The peak was something like thirty meters above her head.

She bent down and took a pinch of the yellow powder between her fingers. It was finer than table salt, less so than flour.

Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia was more than normally technical-minded by the standards of European royalty, and in the defense of her country she had put a career’s worth of effort into studying climate change. She had read the word “sulfur” a million times in scientific papers and conference proceedings. She knew its atomic number, its atomic weight, and its symbol. She was accustomed to the fact that Brits spelled it with a “ph” and Yanks with an “f,” and she knew its cognomens such as brimstone. Yet in all that time she had rarely seen sulfur and never touched it. A school chemistry lab might have a teaspoon of sulfur in a labeled test tube, so that children could say they had once seen it. But that was a very different experience from standing at the base of this . . . this industrial art project. As a sort of childish experiment she stood facing it and tried to position her head so that sulfur was the only thing she could see. Every rod and cone in her retinas maxed out on “yellow.” She brought a pinch of it close to her nose for a sniff.

“It don’t stink,” said T.R., who had drawn up alongside her. “This is pure enough that you’re not gonna get that rotten egg smell too bad.”

“It doesn’t dissolve in the rain?”

“Nope, water runs right through it,” T.R. said. He took a step back, extended his arms, and gave it the full Ozymandias. “Sulfur!” he proclaimed, in the same tone that a conquistador might have said “Gold!” “The stone that burns!” Then he added, “S!,” which Saskia knew was an allusion to its symbol on the periodic table. “We so rarely see or touch an actual element, you know. Nitrogen and oxygen in the air? Those are diatomic molecules and not the element itself. Aluminum, sure—but that’s always an alloy. Iron, sometimes—but usually steel, another alloy. Mercury in an old thermometer, maybe. Helium in a balloon. But here’s the real deal, Your Majesty. Two hundred thousand tons of an element. About a year’s supply, for our project.”

Saskia had gotten over the sheer visual power of the thing and begun to wonder about practicalities. “Did all this come from our mutual investment?”

This hauled T.R. down out of his Ozymandian reverie. He gave her a sharp look that made her glad she wasn’t sitting across the table from him in a boardroom. “You’re talking about Brazos RoDuSh.”

“Yes, I was reminded of it the other day.”

“You’re not an activist investor,” he said, with a diagnostic air. Then he brightened. “You don’t read the annual report!” He was just kidding around now.

“I’m afraid not.”

“Well, Brazos RoDuSh has been out of the sulfur business since my granddad got kicked out of Cuba in the 1960s! It’s all New Guinea copper and gold nowadays.” He looked around theatrically as if he were about to let her in on a fascinating secret. “Speaking of which, your man Red told me about his friends. The Boskeys.”

“Rufus?”

“Yeah. So I hired the Boskeys to make a little side trip, as long as they’re helping folks out down south of Sugar Land. That’s the old stomping grounds of Brazos Mining, you know!”

“The sulfur domes along the coast.”

“Exactly! I asked ’em if they wouldn’t mind swinging by a certain location, see if any of the old relics and souvenirs was bobbin’ around in the floodwater.”

“That seems . . . unlikely.”

“Just kidding, it’s all in a storage locker. And they got divers.”

Others had begun to gravitate toward them. T.R. turned to face them and raised his voice. “By-product of oil refineries,” he said, using the German-influenced pronunciation of “oil” common in Texas.

They began to stroll along the base of the pile. Other members of the group fell in with them. “Old oilmen like my granddad used to taste the stuff.”

“Taste!?” Very rarely, Saskia felt unsure in her command of the English language. Maybe this was some colloquialism?

T.R. grinned and pantomimed sticking a finger down into something and then lifting it to his mouth. “Literally taste. If the oil was sweet, it was low-sulfur. Sour crude, on the other hand, needs extra refining to take the sulfur out, so it sells at a discount. There’s a lot of sour in the Gulf, especially down Mexico way. Anyway, I been buyin’ it up.”

“No kidding!”

“Plenty more to be had in Canada. Tar sands oil is sow . . . ER!” He got a look on his face as if he had just tasted some and squinted up to the sharp peak of the sulfur cone. “This pile ain’t getting any bigger. That’s as high as that conveyor can reach.” Following his gaze, Saskia was able to see the muzzle of a long industrial conveyor reaching out over the pile from a source blocked from view on the harbor side of the operation.

Like any other port, this one had an abundance of railroad tracks, with innumerable spur lines reaching out to individual terminals. One such ran behind the sulfur pile. On its back side, as they could now see, the geometric perfection of the cone had been marred by an end loader that was chewing away at it, gouging out sulfur near ground level, touching off avalanches higher up. The end loader trundled across broken pavement for a short distance and dumped the sulfur into a hopper at ground level. Angling up from that was a conveyor that carried a thick flume of yellow powder to a height where it spewed forth into an open-top hopper car. A queue of those stood along the track, already full and ready to roll. Only one of them wasn’t full of sulfur, and at the rate the loader and conveyor were going, it soon would be. “Still just purely at a demonstration, proof-of-concept scale,” T.R. remarked, apparently to preempt any possible objections along the lines of this isn’t stupendously vast enough, you need to think big!

Saskia deemed it unlikely that anyone would actually lodge such a complaint. She knew her way around epic-scale geoengineering projects and colossal port facilities better than anyone on the planet. Even by Dutch standards, T.R. was definitely running an operation to be reckoned with.

Their perambulation had brought them to a folding table that had been set up in the open by T.R.’s staff. Above it was a pop-up canopy to protect them from whichever prevailed at the moment: merciless sun or drowning torrential rain. At the moment it happened to be the former. Plastic water bottles were passed out. The table supported a propane camp stove, some laboratory glassware, and a plastic bin containing an assortment of safety goggles. Waving off a diligent aide who wanted him to don protective eyewear, T.R. grabbed a glass beaker about the size of a coffee mug, walked over to the sulfur pile, and scooped up a sample of the yellow powder. Most of that he then dumped back out so that the beaker contained no more than a finger’s width of S. Meanwhile an aide was lighting a burner on the stove. T.R. carried the beaker over and set it over the pale blue flame. In just a few moments the lower part of the sample, in contact with the glass, changed its appearance, becoming liquid and smooth. T.R. turned the heat to a lower setting and picked up a pistol-grip thermometer. He aimed this down into the beaker, pulled the trigger, looked at the digital display. He gave it a little stir with a glass rod.

Within a minute’s time the entire sample had melted into a reddish-yellow fluid. T.R. let them see the reading on the thermometer. It was nothing impressive. “The point of all this is just that S has a very low melting point. You can melt it at a cookie-baking temp in your oven. Handling a fluid at that temp is easy. You don’t need weird science lab shit, just plain old metal pipes from Home Depot and some insulation to keep it from freezing up.” He picked up a pair of tongs and used it to lift the beaker off the flame. He took a few steps away from the sulfur pile and then dumped the yellow fluid out onto bare pavement, forming a little puddle. “And behold, it burns,” he said. He had fished a cigar lighter—a finger-sized blowtorch—from his pocket. He flicked it on, bent down with a grunt, and touched its flame to the edge of the yellow puddle. It readily caught fire, not with an explosive fwump like petrol, but more like wax or oil. “It don’t burn like crazy, mind you, but it totally burns. Steer clear of the smoke.” He’d had the presence of mind to perform this little demonstration downwind of them, so the plume of vapor boiling off the flame was moving away.

“That ‘smoke’ would be sulfur dioxide,” Saskia said.

“Yes, Your Majesty, and as I’m sure you know it loves to get together with water to make H₂SO₄.”

“Sulfuric acid.”

Bob shrugged. “So if there’s more rain—?”

“Think lungs,” T.R. suggested.

“There’s available water in your lungs,” Saskia explained, “so if you inhale sulfur dioxide, next thing you know you’ve got sulfuric acid in a place where you really don’t want it.”

Bob raised one eyebrow and nodded.

“So what have we established?” T.R. asked rhetorically. “T.R. owns a fuck ton of sulfur. Sulfur can easily be made into a liquid. Sulfur burns. Does that put y’all in mind of anything?”

He had begun leading them toward a rusty galvanized steel warehouse a few dozen meters away. Parked near it were a few newish-looking cars and pickup trucks. Saskia observed parking stickers for White Label Industries LLC, and sure enough the distinctive white-rectangle logo—just a blank sheet of printer paper—was taped to a door that led into the warehouse.

She was also noticing an abundance of orange wind socks, such as were commonly seen around airports. These people very much cared which way the wind was blowing.

The building was a lot more spruce inside than its exterior would lead one to expect. Of paramount importance to them, it was air-conditioned. For all purposes it was an extension of White Label headquarters a few miles away. This, however, had more in the way of safety gear and other real-world operational features.

They were ushered into a control room separated from the building’s cargo bay by a wall of windows that seemed inordinately thick. In spite of that, they were each given full-face respirators and taught how to put them on when and if a certain alarm were to sound. The previous conversation about sulfuric acid in the lungs had left little to the imagination and so all of them paid due attention. In the meantime, on the other side of the glass, workers in white bunny suits and respirators were working on a system that, to the eyes of a layperson, consisted entirely of plumbing. At the end closest to the open bay door, basically outside the building, was the object that seemed to be the point of it all, tended to by the bunny-suited priesthood on the far side of the glass. But even this was just plumbing. It was a pipe on a stand, aimed out at the world.

“Your Majesty,” T.R. said, “will know more than anyone else here—with the possible exception of the Right Honorable the Lord Mayor—about the V-1 buzz bomb.”

“The Farting Fury!” Bob said with surprising relish. “My granddad used to talk about them. He saw—and heard—one pass over him in Kent.”

Saskia knew the term at least as well as Bob. She was slower to respond, though, since she had been trained to think hard and choose her words carefully when any topic related to the Second World War came up in conversation. “One of Hitler’s advanced superweapons. The Nazis launched some of them from my country. They had some kind of a special engine. A primitive jet.”

“Pulse jet, it’s called,” T.R. said agreeably. “The pulsing style of operation is why Bob’s pawpaw referred to it as the Farting Fury. Absolutely terrible design for anything other than our exact purposes.”

Technicians here in the control room had been talking to the bunny suit wearers on the other side of the glass. These had been opening valves and checking gauges. On a signal, they all vacated the bay. Some kind of extremely well-organized procedure ensued, similar in its emotional arc to a rocket launch countdown. As such it dragged on for a few minutes. T.R. killed a little time by stepping up to the window and using a laser pointer to draw their attention to some details that might otherwise have been lost in the welter of pipes and cables. First was an ordinary white plastic five-gallon bucket, sitting on the floor, half full of sulfur. “Our high-tech S transportation modality. Totally human-powered,” T.R. explained, with the deadpan style that Saskia was coming to recognize as a hallmark of his personality. Near it was a rolling steel staircase, currently positioned so that it ran up to a platform at about head height. There was a vertical glass tube maybe a hand span in diameter and an arm’s length in height, mostly full of sulfur. Its top was open, presumably so that more sulfur could be dumped in from the bucket. Its bottom was swallowed in a stainless-steel fitting. “Fuel tank.” From there, things got hard to follow until T.R.’s laser dot tracked down the length of a pipe—or at least one could assume the existence of a pipe—jacketed in a tubular blanket of insulation and helpfully labeled S (MOLTEN) WARNING HOT. This led directly to the big pipe aimed out the door. “Fuel line,” T.R. explained. “Liquid sulfur’s flowing down it right now.” The laser dot terminated its journey on the device. “To the combustion chamber.”

A few sporadic thuds reached their ears, and their rib cages, through the glass, each accompanied by a burst of flame and a puff of smoke from the end of the pipe that was aimed out at Texas. After some false starts this settled into a steady rhythm. The tube looked like a fat machine gun emitting a series of muzzle flashes. Even through the glass, it was impressively loud. From miles away, such a sound could perhaps be likened to a long drawn-out fart.

The test ran for no more than fifteen seconds, then segued into a shutdown procedure that, if anything, was more elaborate than the startup. T.R., as close as he ever came to being sheepish, said, “We don’t like to run it very long, ’cause of the neighbors and the EPA.”

“Oh, I’m sure you can get away with murder in a place like this!” said Michiel.

“People do, in fact,” T.R. said.

“To connect the dots, if I may,” said Sylvester, “your engineers—drawn from the aerospace complex—have invented an engine—”

“The world’s shittiest by any metric you care to apply,” T.R. hastened to make clear.

“That uses sulfur—in molten form—as its fuel.”

“Yes.”

“And produces sulfur dioxide as its exhaust.”

“That follows.”

“Interesting! What’s next, then?”

“More dots. More connecting. First, a choo-choo ride.”

The property, though small by the standards of refinery complexes, was large enough that another short bus ride was in order. That put the huge sulfur cone and the farting fury behind them. They zigzagged around some other buildings and passed beneath cranes and conveyors used to load and unload trains. Then they emerged into an open logistics depot. Several parallel railroad tracks ran across it, connecting the waterfront to points inland. On the landward side those were funneled together into a single track. In other words, it was, among other things, a switching yard where trains could be assembled out of shorter strings of cars. The cars visible on the nearest tracks were, as one would expect, freight: mostly containers on flatbeds, some tarp-covered hoppers that presumably contained sulfur. The bus, moving gingerly over rough ground, cut behind these, bringing into view additional tracks. “Before you see what you are about to see and we part company for a couple of hours,” T.R. said, “I want it understood that I don’t, personally, give a shit about trains at all. I’m not gonna corner you and talk your ear off about trains. I’m not that guy. But I do know that guy. Long story. Old buddy. Too much money. Crazy about this stuff. Collects these things. Stores ’em on his property, fixes ’em up. Lended ’em to me. Likes to see ’em used. ‘Exercised’ he calls it. Good for the bearings or something. Voilà. Enjoy.”

On one of the parallel tracks, blocked from view to either side by strings of freight cars on adjoining lines, sat three consecutive railway carriages of a type that, to this point in her life, Saskia had only seen in museums of transportation.

In Amsterdam’s central train station, there was a special waiting room, technically for the use of Saskia or whoever was currently king or queen, but never actually used because it was so outrageously non-norMAL. It was where the kings of the Belle Époque would cool their heels waiting for their private trains. From there, when all was ready, they would be ushered into carriages that probably resembled the ones Saskia and the others were looking at now. They were the Victorian equivalent of today’s private bizjets. In the American version, they were not for hereditary royalty but for business magnates, thundering to and fro over the Gilded Age rail network with their families and support staff, smoking cigars and dashing off telegrams as Kansas or Appalachia glided by outside the windows.

As usual, there were helpers, trim and polite, wired up with earplugs. Each of the VIP guests was escorted to a different private suite on one of these cars, encouraged to wander, and reminded that the cars might, without warning, go into movement at any time. After freshening up, Saskia strolled up and down the length of this three-car string, gawking like an unabashed railway-buff tourist. Clearly each of these cars had a long and interesting backstory. But circumstantial evidence told her that one had been owned by a St. Louis beer baron of German ancestry. Another seemed to have been the property of a resource extraction magnate from the mountain West: mostly timber, some mining. The last was fancier, but harder to suss out. She guessed someone from New York, in finance. She mentally dubbed them the Beer Car, the Tree Car, and the Money Car. Saskia’s lodging was at the aft end of the Money Car and consisted of a bedchamber with en suite washroom complete with claw-footed cast-iron bathtub. A narrow passageway ran along one side of it. On the other side, big windows provided a view out of the left side of the train.

As warned, the cars had gone into motion almost as soon as the guests had stepped up into them, and since then had never stopped for long. It was a back-and-forth, inconclusive shuffling. If Saskia had been a train buff, she would have followed the details avidly. This string of three antique carriages was being made part of a longer train consisting mostly of freight cars. The view out the window became longer as neighboring tracks were cleared. The sulfur pile came back into view in the distance. But eventually the train pulled out for good and began to traverse the largely industrial landscape that ran west along Buffalo Bayou from Trinity Bay (which they had now put behind them) toward downtown Houston and the vastness of Texas beyond.

In the midst of Houston’s industrial belt, only a few minutes’ transit time from the sulfur pile, the train slowed and eased onto a side track in a larger switching yard. Awaiting them, pre-assembled, was a string of half a dozen Amtrak passenger coaches, plus a dining car. The fleet of buses and SUVs, which Saskia had last seen at the T.R. Mick’s, had ended up here. She had to exit her suite and cross to the right side of the Money Car to see it. But looking into the windows of those coaches as they glided by, she could see faces she recognized, including some of her own staff.

Having passed all the Amtrak cars, the train slowed, stopped, reversed direction onto the side track, and backed up until it thudded into them. Saskia by now had abandoned all pretense of not finding it fascinating, and opened windows on both sides of the Money Car so that she could stick her head out and assemble a mental picture of what was going on. The Money Car had until now been the last in the train. Her compartment was in its rear. Another suite at its forward end appeared to house the lord mayor. Forward of that was the Tree Car, home to Sylvester and Michiel, and forward of that was the Beer Car, which was T.R.’s temporary residence as well as serving as a private saloon well stocked with, unsurprisingly, beer. Everything forward of the Beer Car, all the way to the locomotives, was freight: sulfur hoppers, container carriers, and the odd tank car.

What now happened was that the string of Amtrak coaches was coupled to the end of the Money Car, immediately to the rear of Saskia’s compartment. The corridor that ran along one side of her bedchamber was terminated by a door—of polished wood, naturally, with gleaming brass fittings—with a window in it, through which she watched as the train eased together and finally connected with a jolting thud. On the other side of the gap she could see Amelia’s face framed in the corresponding window. They had been in touch electronically the entire day, of course, but one of Amelia’s training and disposition could never quite relax until she had eyes on the person she was charged with looking after. So the relief on her face was evident even across the gap.

Making all the connections between the cars took another few minutes, but then the train pulled out onto the main line and began to pick up speed toward downtown Houston. The doors opened. Amelia and Fenna came forward, followed by a porter carrying Saskia’s baggage. Willem took care of stashing it in Saskia’s compartment while Fenna set up the apparatus pertaining to her trade on the tiny makeup table in the corner. Alastair and Rufus, the Odd Couple, entered and loitered awkwardly until Saskia invited them to make themselves at home in the middle part of the Money Car, which was a sort of parlor. Terribly important Englishmen stormed past them to get after Bob. A waiter emerged and took drink orders. Saskia excused herself and lay down on her bed for a nap. When she woke up, the fiery sun had reddened and cooled. She opened her curtain to behold the hill country of Texas, glowing in the flat red light of the setting sun.