Termination Shock

West Texas

Alastair and Rufus had staked out tables on opposite sides of the Money Car’s center aisle and were just taking it easy, gazing out the windows. Of the two, Alastair was drinking and seemed in a more sociable mood. Saskia sat down across from him.

“This might sound odd,” Alastair said, gazing quizzically into his Laphroaig, “but what is striking to me about all this is how cheap it is.”

“Yes,” Saskia answered, “that is a very odd thing for you to say, Alastair.”

“Did you see the sulfur pile?”

“Saw it, touched it, watched T.R. set fire to it. Well, part of it anyway. How did you know about it?”

Alastair peered at her. “You can see it from space.”

Saskia laughed. “That doesn’t impress me; you can read license plates from space!”

“Well, boat tours on Trinity Bay pass by it so that tourists can take selfies.”

“Okay, okay.”

“Can you guess how much it’s worth?”

“Some number that is surprisingly large or small. Please don’t make me guess.”

“Fifteen million dollars.”

“That’s all!?”

“That’s all.”

“You can buy that much sulfur for fifteen million dollars!?” Saskia was suddenly having to restrain an irrational urge to run out and buy a sulfur pile of her own.

“Not only that, but the price of sulfur on commodities markets has been going up during the last couple of years. So T.R. has probably made more, simply by owning that pile, than he could have made by investing fifteen million in an index fund.”

“It cost him nothing, you’re saying.”

“Less than nothing, in a manner of speaking. The pile sits on a property he inherited. Its value too appreciates over time. Last night he rented out a luxury hotel, of which he happens to be part owner. Today we ate barbecue at a truck stop he owns. Now we are in this beautiful railway carriage that he borrowed from a friend, being pulled across Texas by the cheapest form of long-range transportation that exists: a bloody freight train.”

“Granted. But you have to admit it’s extremely well staffed and organized.”

Alastair nodded. “That is indeed the big spend here. Almost none of these people actually works for T.R., of course. He has hired an event planning firm, a very good one.”

Saskia gazed down the length of the carriage. Bob had occupied a table at the other end for an impromptu catch-up with his entourage. A waiter was taking orders and a busboy was pouring water. Nearby was a man who was obviously security, just standing there, not gazing out the window, not checking his phone. An outgoing woman of about thirty was chatting with Fenna and Amelia, working in tour guide mode, explaining the history of this carriage, showing them old photographs. Of course it would be crazy for T.R. to have all these people on his permanent full-time staff. Of course it was a contract job.

“So what is your point, Alastair? That it’s all just smoke and mirrors?”

“Oh, no, on the contrary,” he returned. “The sulfur pile is as real as it gets. The tech he showed you—?”

“An experimental engine that burns sulfur.”

“Smoke then, but no mirrors,” he cracked.

“Sulfur dioxide actually.”

“What I’m really trying to say is that the man is really quite canny.” He pronounced the word as only a Scotsman could. “He spends where he needs to. That’s all.”

“That sounds like an endorsement, then.”

He recoiled slightly. “Of the whole program? Perhaps not. Not yet. But his overall conduct of the thing shows much more intelligence and sophistication than I was expecting when your staff first reached out to me about this, and I watched a lot of vintage T.R. McHooligan videos on YouTube.”

Rufus was seated across the aisle from them, arms folded, just gazing out the window. Alastair had glanced at him once or twice, as if offering to draw him into the conversation, but Rufus had paid him no heed. Finally now some little shift in Rufus’s body language signaled an opening.

“The land of your forebears?” Alastair asked.

“Hmm?”

“I downloaded a couple of books about the Comanches,” Alastair confessed.

Rufus shook his head. “Tough ol’ bastards.”

Alastair’s face relaxed slightly. Rufus had defused any social awkwardness that might have surrounded the Comanches’ well-documented practice of torturing captives to death.

“That’s putting it mildly,” Alastair agreed. “Anyway, according to the maps, we’re passing across the southern bit of Comancheria, am I right?”

Rufus looked at him. “We’ve been there the whole time.”

“I suppose that is true,” Alastair admitted, a little unsure. “Waco, the Brazos . . .”

“Nah, I mean in a larger sense.”

Alastair exchanged a bemused look with Saskia and said, “Do tell.”

Rufus had taken to rasping his stubbled chin between the thumb and index finger of one hand, as if limbering up his jaw for speech. He now used that hand to point, in a subtle, flicking way, down the length of the carriage. “That right there is a Comanche,” he said.

Alastair could see the “Comanche” directly. Saskia had to turn round. The only person Rufus could possibly be referring to was the security guy stationed at the head of the car. He was dressed in what amounted to a uniform among such people. He had long sandy hair pulled back in a ponytail and a reddish beard. His eyes, which were presumably blue, were hidden by wraparound sunglasses. He was wearing a bulky vest over bulky cargo pants tucked into matte black speed-laced boots. Without an assault rifle he seemed naked. He looked straight out of an American Special Forces squad in Afghanistan circa 2002.

“Looks more Scottish,” Alastair said drily.

“You been reading those books you downloaded, you already know it was never about the DNA,” Rufus said.

“Indeed,” Alastair said, “the Comanches were enthusiastic recruiters.”

“Had to be, once they started dying out,” Rufus said.

Saskia shot him a curious look.

“A euphemism,” Alastair admitted. “They took captives on raids. Most of them . . .” He trailed off and shot an uneasy glance at Rufus.

“Were just put to death. You can say it.” Rufus said. “But kids like my great-great-granddad—he was taken when he was eight—they were adopted into the tribe. Consequently there was white Comanches, Black Comanches, Mexicans, you name it.” He put an index finger to his forehead. “You just had to adopt the mindset, that’s all.”

Alastair glanced at the Special Forces poster child down at the far end of the carriage. Rufus caught it. “How did we end up with dudes like him in the military?” Rufus asked. “Well, you got to go back to times before the Civil War, when Texas was young. Alamo times. Moby-Dick times. Regular army couldn’t even come close to dealing with the Comanches. So they started the Texas Rangers. Most of ’em just got killed. Old man Darwin having his way. The few who survived, survived because they lived and fought exactly the same as Comanches. That was the only way. They became Comanches to fight Comanches. Later, regular army saw those same Rangers fighting in the Mexican war, as scouts, and called ’em white savages. No uniform, bearded, long hair, undisciplined, random weapons, unconventional tactics.”

“Got it,” Alastair said. “And that’s how we ended up with . . .”

“With dudes like him running around in Afghanistan,” Rufus concurred. “Being glorified in movies and such. Don’t get me wrong, the Texas Rangers of today is clean-shaven, spit and polish. But the idea of the old-school Ranger with the beard and the Bowie knife, traipsing around eating snakes and ambushing people . . . that stayed with us and it went viral beyond Texas into the whole United States. And any time you see one of these young white dudes at the range with the wraparounds and twenty-five different weird guns, flaunting that Ranger chic . . . that is the survival into our time of that. So, yeah. To answer your original question, Alastair. We are passing across the southern part of Comancheria. It’s just you and I have different takes on what that is. To you it’s a patch of Texas and Oklahoma and New Mexico that used to exist back in the old days. To me it’s the whole United States of America right now.”

“It never really died out, you’re saying,” Saskia put in.

“It’s a pandemic,” Rufus diagnosed.

“Do you think it is spreading now?”

“It spreads where it succeeds. Or leastways where people make believe it’s succeeding. Young fellas, they’re predisposed to love that shit. They want to have guns and violence and adventure. ‘It is a way of driving off the spleen and regulating the circulation.’ But in the regular army, none of that’s to be had without discipline. Young fellas chafe under that. Comanches got the best of both worlds. Guns, violence, adventure, and glory with no one to boss you around. It worked out here”—Rufus waved his hand out the window—“when there was infinite buffalo and plenty of open space.” He now pulled his focus back into the interior of the antique railway car. “But it don’t give you all this here.” He picked up a silver fork from the table. “A fork! Comanche can’t make a metal fork to save his life.” He tossed it back onto the table. “To get all this, they had to give up their ways. And since their ways was all that they were—being that there was this come one, come all philosophy as far as DNA and all that—they diminished.”

Alastair glanced at the red-bearded “Comanche” at the end of the carriage. “And became America.”

“Seems that way to me,” Rufus answered with a diffident shrug. “Now, to be clear, you got your Mississippian woodland maize cultivators and your Plains horse tribes. Your Cherokees as well as your Comanches.”

Saskia and Alastair exchanged a look across the table, each just verifying that the other had lost the thread of Rufus’s discourse. Rufus got a sheepish, mischievous look. “Now we call ’em Blue States and Red States. But it’s the same. The Cherokees, the Chickasaws, and others—the Five Civilized Tribes—got corn—what you call maize—from Mexico long before white people times and settled down and became farmers. West of, oh, about the meridian where we are right at this moment, corn wouldn’t grow. Just grass. People can’t eat grass. Bison can. So the people would eat the bison. Tough way to make a living until the Spaniards brought horses. Then it was a fine way to live. And that’s where you get your Comanches. Whole different mindset there from the Five Tribes. They never reconciled. What we now call Oklahoma was split in half right down the center. Five Tribes raising crops to the east. Comanches and Kiowas ranging free to the west, raiding the Five Tribes nations for horses and slaves.”

Rufus had previously told Saskia the story of his great-great-grandfather Hopewell’s adoption into the Comanches and so didn’t repeat it here. “But the whole Blue State/Red State thing is just that.”

Saskia to this point had been mostly content to observe the conversation, but she now shifted forward, her face showing sudden curiosity. “Which side do you stand on, Rufus? When I first saw you, you were standing on the tarmac blasting away at a giant beast with a Kalashnikov. Which would seem to put you more on the west side of that meridian you spoke of.”

“Well, that’s just what I’ve been asking myself,” Rufus answered with a wry look. “That’s my decision, innit? I’ve tried both. Worked both sides. Tried to settle down and grow crops and raise a family. Look where that got me. Then, I went all ‘Call me Ishmael.’ But Tashtego and Daggoo are supposed to die at the end. I’m not dead. So what am I gonna do now? You tell me.”

“I don’t think I have the capacity to tell you,” Saskia returned, “but you’re obviously a very intelligent man with energy and skills . . .”

“It’s not about energy and skill,” Rufus said. “It’s about finding a fit. Where does ol’ Rufus fit? Not many places.”

Saskia could think of one place where Rufus might fit perfectly. But this did not seem to be the right moment to point that out. So she crossed her legs demurely under the table and broke eye contact.

Michiel poked his head in from the Tree Car and raised his eyebrows at Saskia. Is now a good time? She smiled and nodded. Rufus, seeing how it was, excused himself and Alastair followed. Michiel thumbed out a message on his phone while coming down the aisle, then gestured at the seat across from her as if to say May I? Thus politely ensconced, he said, “I took the liberty of telling my sister and my aunt. They may be along in a little bit to pay their respects.”

“I shall look forward to it,” Saskia said. “This is very much a family affair, it seems.”

He turned his palms up. “We are not here in any official capacity. Venice does have an official plan for sealing off the Lagoon during storm surges. We are not part of it.”

“We’re back on the subject of MOSE?”

He nodded. “Currently, further work on the project is blocked because it was found to be in violation of the European Directive on Birds.”

“Excuse me, did you say birds?”

“Yes.” Michiel gave a shy, wry smile. “That is only one such violation, to tell you the truth. Also, the construction of the MOSE sea gates disturbed aquatic life on the bottom of the Lagoon. Mussel populations were impacted across several hectares. Every time such a violation is found to have happened, it triggers the European Infraction Procedure.”

“I have heard of this procedure,” Saskia said drily.

She did have to tread a bit carefully. Michiel was complaining—with very good reasons—about the European Union and its regulations. It was a well-worn topic that had led to Brexit and other consequences. Many and vociferous were the Euro-skeptics in the Netherlands. The queen had to treat the pro- and anti-European Union groups evenhandedly. “Some say,” she went on, “that it is not the most rapid or efficient process. Others say that such things are necessary for the protection of . . . birds.”

A new voice joined the conversation: that of a younger woman who had come forward from one of the Amtrak cars and now presented herself at the head of their table. “Have you been to our beautiful Lagoon? There are birds all over the fucking place!”

“My sister, Chiara,” Michiel said.

“Please, join us!” Saskia said.

Chiara sat down next to her brother. She was as enjoyable to look at as he was. It was one of those beautiful families. Some wordless communication passed between the two. She settled down. “Whatever Her Majesty might think in her heart of hearts about the European Union, she is here representing a member in good standing of the same, so let’s not put her in an awkward position!” Michiel said, glancing at Saskia.

“Of course,” Chiara said. “My apologies.”

Saskia laughed. “If you could hear some of what my countrymen have to say about European regulations, you would not be so worried about hurting my feelings on that score.”

“And yet you find a way to build those colossal storm defenses!” Chiara exclaimed. “I have been to the Maeslantkering! Fantastic! But we can’t even build a couple of gates.”

“It’s because their whole country needs it,” Michiel said.

“True,” Chiara admitted. “I complain of Europe, but in truth Europe is just a hammer that they use to hit us with.”

“Who are ‘they’ and ‘us’?” asked Willem, who had just showed up and taken a seat next to Saskia. He knew how to smooth things over if the conversation became difficult.

“‘They’ are the rest of Italy, who don’t care about Venice, and also the local Greens. ‘Us’ means those who want Venice to still exist fifty years from now. ‘They’ can always identify a hundred infractions in any plan we come up with, and file papers in Brussels to stop any progress, and then congratulate themselves on being so virtuous.” She put her hands together in the prayerful style of a little girl going to her First Communion.

Michiel sighed and exchanged a few words with his sister in Italian, then added, “To be perfectly honest there is also corruption.”

“You will be shocked!” Chiara added.

“I had heard that there were problems with MOSE,” Willem said sympathetically.

“To give you an idea, it was started in 1987 and the gates didn’t become functional until 2020,” Michiel said.

“By which time the whole system was obsolete!” Chiara said.

“The lord mayor can tell you similar stories about the Thames Barrier,” Willem said. “They started talking about it after the 1953 disaster. They argued about it for twenty years. They started building it in 1974. They got it working in 1982. It is already outmoded.”

Chiara shook her head and looked out the window at a phalanx of wind turbines that extended over the curve of the horizon, red lights blinking in unison. “My brother is too diplomatic,” she said. “I’ll say it. You can’t solve such problems with local barriers. The politics are too . . .” She whirled her hand in the air, exchanged a few words with Michiel, and then settled on “intractable. A planetary solution is the only way.”

“We have a unique attachment to our city,” Michiel said. “It—not Italy—is our country.” He shrugged. “Other Italians, in the high country of Romania or Tuscany, might look at the map of Italy and say, ‘Eh, the Lagoon, it is a small bit of the map. If we lose it, Italy remains and is only a little diminished—we can move all the nice art to higher ground, we can even dismantle St. Marks and the Ducal Palace and reassemble them elsewhere.’”

“Euro Disney!” Chiara cracked.

“Arizona is now home to London Bridge,” Saskia pointed out with a wink.

“Perhaps they have room for the Bridge of Sighs!” Chiara shot back.

“There are some in Venice who, sadly, agree,” Michiel said. “We are not among them. We are here to represent those Venetians for whom the Lagoon is the map. Nothing else matters. Venice is our country—our whole country—and if we lose it, we are stateless.”

“Do you see your country as part of Europe?”

“Venice has never,” said yet another new voice, “been part of Europe.”

They looked up to see a woman standing in the aisle nearby. She might have been anywhere between fifty and a well-preserved seventy. Making zero concessions to the informal Western style that had begun to pervade this train, she was in a long dark skirt, cashmere turtleneck, and blazer with a few well-thought-out pieces of jewelry including a big gold pin depicting the winged lion that was the ancient symbol of Venice. Saskia mastered a brief, ridiculous urge to duck her head around the edge of the table to check out this woman’s shoes. No doubt they would be utterly fabulous and yet tastefully understated.

While pleased to see his aunt—for this was obviously her—Michiel was caught off guard and drew breath to make some greeting. The woman cut him off. Gazing directly at Saskia with big anthracite eyes, she said, “Every time we have made the mistake of trusting Europe we have gotten fucked.” She was frank and firm but not quite scary, though Saskia could imagine a younger version of herself being quite intimidated by such a woman.

“Cornelia!” Michiel said. He turned to Saskia. “Your Majesty, may I introduce my aunt—”

“You’re referring to events that happened during the time of the Crusades,” Saskia said, somewhat amazed. It was impossible to make sense of what Cornelia had just said otherwise.

“Well, the Corsican did us no favors either, but yes, that is what I mean.” Cornelia took a step closer and extended her hand. Saskia reached out and clasped it.

The newcomer showed no interest in anyone else. Chiara, until now a strong presence, had already scurried out of the way. Michiel now followed his sister into the aisle and extended a hand, unnecessarily helping Cornelia take the seat opposite Saskia. The two younger Venetians then just stood there observing, not quite anxious, but certainly alert.

Cornelia put one elbow on the table and cradled her impressive jawline on the heel of her hand, thrusting a couple of plum-colored fingernails up into jet-black hair streaked, just so, with gray. Bracelets cascaded down her forearm. She was looking directly at Saskia. Saskia looked right back at her and enjoyed doing so.

She’d had almost zero sexual interactions with women and had long ago written those off as the result of youthful “confusion.” But her daughter’s incessant demands had put her into a peculiar way of thinking. Every decade or so, some woman came along who seemed like a possible exception.

She wondered if others around them could sense that Saskia’s thoughts were headed that way. It seemed incredibly obvious to her. A faintly wry look on Cornelia’s face suggested that at least one person was having similar perceptions. But then Cornelia broke eye contact, sat back, and sighed. “The Netherlands knows what it is to be abandoned. To be hated by those who are jealous.”

“But doesn’t every country feel that way at one point or another?” Saskia asked. “It is how nations establish a sense of identity.”

“Sometimes it is actually true, though. Venice has been hated and suspected for a long time. Even by other Italians. Especially by them. We are our own country. It is the only thing that has ever worked.”

“If I may,” Willem said. “Oh, I’m nobody,” he added, when Cornelia’s eyes briefly flicked his way. He was bemused, not offended, by Cornelia’s utter lack of interest in niceties. “Just putting this all together: the whole city of Venice will certainly be underwater very soon. Perhaps no city in the world is as vulnerable. MOSE failed because of cumbersome European Union regulation and Italian corruption. Worse, it failed extremely slowly.”

The Venetians all laughed. It was the first time Cornelia had cracked a smile.

“If Venice were free to act in a decisive way, as it was famous for doing back in its golden age, it would just—”

“Solve the fucking problem, yes,” Cornelia said.

“But being part of Italy, which is in turn part of the EU, makes that completely impossible.”

“Completely. Good word.” Cornelia shook her head sadly. “Europe,” she said, in the tone of voice that might be used by the founder of a three-star Michelin restaurant talking about Velveeta.

“So, you are”—and here Willem looked also to Michiel and Chiara—“Venetian nationalists.”

“Did you suppose we were fascists?”

Michiel flinched.

“Don’t worry,” Cornelia went on, “we hate those idiots.”

Michiel smiled.

“We are more like oligarchs,” his aunt concluded. Michiel turned sideways to Chiara, who smiled and put a consoling hand on his arm.

“How many people like you are there?” Willem asked.

“It doesn’t take that many,” Cornelia returned.

“You’re not merely thinking about what I’ll call Vexit—to leave the EU—”

“We want out of Italy. To be like those guys,” Cornelia said, and turned to look back in the direction of the Tree Car.

“Singapore?”

“Yes. And Italy can serve as our Malaysia.”

The same words, uttered in a Venetian coffeehouse, might have seemed a little ridiculous. But on this train rattling across the darkling plains of Central Texas, all things seemed possible.

“Why isn’t she wearing a wedding ring?” Saskia asked, when she had a moment together with Willem, Amelia, and Fenna. They were in Saskia’s private chamber at the back of the Money Car. Fenna was putting on Face Three, more suitable for evening. So Saskia wasn’t free to look around—she had her eyes rolled up toward the ceiling so that Fenna could get at the lower lids—but even so she could sense Willem and Amelia exchanging a look.

“It’s a perfectly normal question,” Saskia insisted. “It doesn’t mean anything.”

Fenna snickered, and she knew she had protested a little too much.

“She is so fuckable. Definitely a top though,” Fenna observed. Saskia couldn’t roll her eyes without incurring Fenna’s wrath, but she did heave a sigh. But then Fenna’s phone buzzed and she actually stepped away to check it. Saskia was on her way to being shocked by this unprofessional behavior when she got a look at Fenna’s face and saw the love light in her eyes. Jules was sending her selfies.

“It’s thought that Cornelia’s husband is now out of the picture,” Amelia said, watching Fenna in a bemused way.

“What does that mean?” Saskia asked.

“Early onset dementia. Possibly other issues as well.”

“Where is he?”

“Family palazzo on an island in the Adriatic.”

“Because of course they would have one of those,” Saskia said.

“One of those islands that was part of the Venetian Empire back in the day,” Willem added.

“He hasn’t been seen in public in two years,” Amelia said, “and even then he was showing visible symptoms.”

“I get the picture,” Saskia said. “To repeat Willem’s question: How many people like them are there?”

“Not many,” Amelia said. “Look, our initial background check was focused on Michiel. And he does come from an old Venetian family. They were named to the nobility in 1019.”

“Jesus, that is old!”

“No it isn’t.”

“It just gets better,” Willem said.

“We’re learning more now about Cornelia’s family.”

“The one she married into?”

“No, those were Greeks who came to Venice after the Fall of Constantinople.”

“Recent arrivals then!” Saskia cracked.

Amelia continued, “Yeah. Cornelia can trace her personal ancestry back to one of the founding families of Venice.”

“What does that even mean?”

Willem said, “Literally one of the Roman families who rowed boats out into the Lagoon to get away from Attila the Hun.”

“And they were old then,” Amelia said. “They knew Julius Caesar.”

Saskia could only shake her head and laugh silently.

She finally managed to catch Fenna’s eye. “Am I to go to dinner with only one eye done?”

By way of an answer, Fenna shyly turned her phone around. It was a photo of Jules in a wet suit. Enough said! Even the usually stoic Amelia gasped. He was in sunlight, in a RHIB. He’d just got out of the brown waters of the lower Brazos and was triumphantly holding up a waterlogged document in a picture frame. Mounted in its center was a large silver coin.

“It would be inappropriate for me to make any comment” was all Willem could say. He was talking about Jules, of course. Not the artifact he was holding up.

“His cousins all refer to him as the Family Jules,” Fenna said. “It’s a joke, you see, based on a slang expression—”

“That will do,” Saskia said. “Where were we?”

“Cornelia’s weird old family,” Willem said, reluctantly averting his gaze. “To answer your question: there aren’t many like her. But that’s not the real question. You want to know about this phenomenon of well-heeled covert Venetian nationalists whipped up into a frenzy over sea level rise. It appears that there are just a few.”

“But they are rich as fuck,” Amelia said, “and they have their backs to the wall. I’ll try to learn more.”

The reason for Face Three was yet another in a series of planned social events, this one bringing together a dozen people around a dining table that had been set up in the middle of the Beer Car. Dress was more formal; T.R. wore cowboy boots that were black and shiny. Veronica was well turned out, though slightly off her game as she didn’t know how to impedance-match with the likes of Cornelia. Easier to be comfortable with was Daia Chand, the wife of the lord mayor. While high-wattage in her own right (Oxford Ph.D., noted television presenter), she didn’t mind slipping into the role of “plus one of prominent bigwig.”

Saskia wasn’t sure who her plus one ought to be. She wanted to give Willem a break; he had earned it, and he needed to be fresh tomorrow. She was tempted to ask Rufus, but she suspected he’d be miserably uncomfortable in that company. In the end she asked Alastair. As it turned out, Mark Furlong had been added to the roster to fill out the table (since the Venetians numbered three) and so he and Alastair could mind-meld about risk analysis if they wanted and leave the rest of the guests to talk about normal-people things.

> Possible third target identified.

> Who is he?

> She

Saskia texted with Lotte as she was making her way up the aisle of the Tree Car. Response was nigh instantaneous, with a demand for a picture.

> My darling, there is absolutely no way that you are getting a picture.

> Aww!

> I hope you sleep well. Going into a fancy dinner.

> I hope you don’t sleep AT ALL

Lotte shot back, followed by a train of emojis that started with a wink and escalated from there. Saskia was so rattled by some of what she saw that she found herself suddenly in the middle of the party in the Beer Car, where Sylvester, uncharacteristically, was regaling (there was no other word for it) Bob, Daia, Cornelia, and T.R. with some kind of narration about sand pirates.

“It’s simple maths,” he insisted to a skeptical-looking lord mayor. “Just to maintain the land area we already have, we need to dump a certain amount of sand into the water to keep up with sea level rise. To create even more reclaimed land, as our friends in the Netherlands do”—this a way of welcoming Saskia into the conversation—“we must deposit more sand yet. We don’t have our own sand mines, so we must buy it. There’s a market for it, like any other commodity. But we found that when the price went up—because of our purchasing activities—sand piracy skyrocketed.”

“How does one pirate sand?” Daia asked, as if she’d always wanted to know this. “I’ve heard of more conventional ‘yo ho ho and a bottle of rum’ piracy but—?”

“You pull up alongside some island with a barge and just go to work with hoses. It’s like a big watery vacuum cleaner. The barge fills up and the island gets smaller.”

“And these islands are where?”

“That, of course, is the problem, Dr. Chand. If the plan is to sell the sand to Singapore, why then the profits are higher the closer the island is to that market. So it started in nearby coastal areas of Malaysia and Indonesia and spread to Vietnam and the Philippines.”

“I beg your pardon,” said Daia Chand, “but am I to gather that there are people living on these islands that are being vacuumed up and barged to Singapore!?” Her face was showing the correct balance of amusement and moral outrage.

Dr. Eshma spoke up. She was Sylvester’s plus one. Until now, Saskia had seen very little of her. “That would be very bold. People got wise to this quite early and drove the pirates off.”

“And bully for them!”

“The pirates are a little cleverer than that,” Sylvester said. “They go to uninhabited islands, take a little here, a little there. However, even this has bad consequences for fisheries that the local people depend on. So for a while it was quite a bad state of affairs, to be quite honest. But Singapore heard the complaints from these neighboring countries and instituted new purchasing schemes to confound the sand pirates.”

Saskia was enjoying looking at Eshma’s outfit, which she guessed was something traditionally Malaysian. Eshma was a computational modeling specialist with a raft of degrees and post-docs, and had been mousy and unobtrusive up to this point. Willem said that she was of mixed Tamil and Malaysian heritage. She had now, suddenly, gone full Cinderella. Saskia wanted to high-five her, but it wouldn’t have been appropriate. Noting Saskia’s interest, Eshma smiled back. Saskia gave her the full head-to-toe and winked.

But T.R. was still fixated on sand. “So if I pull up in front of Singapore tomorrow with a barge full of sand,” he said, “I have to—what? Present a certificate that I got every grain fair and square?”

“In effect, yes, T.R.,” Sylvester said, after seemingly running down a mental checklist of all the ways in which this was a crude oversimplification.

T.R. snorted. “I’d like to see how you enforce that.”

“There are procedures that can make life difficult for sand pirates,” Sylvester insisted. “The outcry from our neighbors has subsided. However, better yet, from our perspective, would be if the sea level were to stop rising.”

“Here’s to that,” T.R. responded and raised his glass. The lord mayor tinked his tumbler of pure sparkling water against every cocktail within easy reach and drank to it with the others.

Saskia sat across from Bob. According to some rule book that Veronica must have pored over, the queen and the lord mayor flanked T.R. at the head of the table. Veronica presided over the opposite end, which tended more Venetian/Singaporean. Eshma—she used only a single name, according to Willem—sat on Veronica’s left and Cornelia on her right. As Saskia stole the occasional coquettish glance at Cornelia, it seemed that she was happily absorbed in getting to know her counterparts from that other island-city-state-whose-emblem-was-a-lion. The menu, as foretold by elegant cards set out next to each plate, was Texas themed (Gulf prawns, mesquite-grilled bison with chile-based sauce, etc.) but with nods to the guests’ home cuisines (a hilarious fish-and-chips-based amuse-bouche with a dot of curry sauce; Adriatic mussels and wine of Friuli; a spicy salad with Singaporean flavors; a selection of Dutch cheeses and the inevitable Stroopwaffel for dessert).

“I see you got your silver dollar back,” Saskia said to T.R. during the opening chitchat phase of the proceedings. “At least, I assume that was yours.”

“You are well-informed!” T.R. exclaimed. “Yep, those Boskeys got a diver down into my storage container. It’s where we stashed all the odds and ends from the former HQ of Brazos Mining. That silver dollar was the first buck they ever made. I shoulda gone and moved all that stuff to higher ground a long time ago.”

Bob and Daia looked mildly curious about all this, but not enough to follow up. From there the conversation moved on to light chitchat about the weather and such, interrupted by the occasional toast. But after the main course had been brought out, and everyone had tucked into it, T.R. looked at Saskia and said, “So what do you think?”

Bob looked up from his bison steak, all ears, and next to him Daia favored Saskia with a sympathetic smile.

“Why, you shall have to ask me tomorrow,” Saskia answered. “Like a good Texas poker player, you don’t show your hand too soon.”

“You’re too kind, Your Majesty. I was just asking in a more general sense about where it’s all going.”

“Perhaps you should have invited a philosopher! I can only represent the perspective of the Netherlands, of course.”

“The Netherlands,” Bob said, through a mouthful of bison, then swallowed. His face betokened just the right amount of dry amusement. “A place whose very name means ‘low country.’”

“I am aware of its meaning and of its altitude, Robert,” Saskia returned, with a glance at Daia who was enjoying the little jab at her husband.

“But it really is the eight-hundred-pound gorilla in all this, isn’t it?” Bob asked.

“The City of London is not without a stake in the matter.”

“The Romans, at least, had the good sense to build on a hill,” Bob returned. “Oh, some of the property down along the river will be flooded. But it’s been decades since we began moving the server rooms, the generators, all that up out of the cellars to the roofs. Slow and steady, but with very material progress. We could absorb a 1953 event rather easily. Not that we wouldn’t get our hair mussed, but . . .”

“Love, I believe Her Majesty was referring to a financial stake,” Daia put in.

Bob made the faintest suggestion of an eye roll as if to suggest that the complexities of all that were beyond him. “I worry about sewers,” he claimed. Everyone laughed, enjoying his beleaguered tone. “Oh, I’m quite serious!” he insisted. “If you’ve ever walked down Farringdon on a rainy day, and inhaled the fragrance, you’ll know it’s all quite medieval. Because you are literally walking on the lid of a covered—”

Daia squeezed his arm.

“Sorry. It’s actually somewhat fascinating. Similar to your present difficulties in Houston, T.R. We are at risk of being caught in a pincer attack between rainfall draining down out of the north, and storm surge coming up the Thames. At some point the sewers and the river have to meet and come to an understanding.”

“It is the same too in Venice,” Chiara offered from mid-table. “We can close the Lagoon. But many rivers empty into it.”

“Just so,” Bob said. “But we do strive to address these very down-to-earth matters so that the boffins can enjoy modern sanitary facilities while they think about all of—whatever it is these two have been going on about.” He looked toward Alastair, who was next to Saskia, and Mark Furlong, diagonally across from him. The two had mind-melded very soon after taking their assigned seats and had not since shut up about their shared obsession with “Black Swan” events, rogue superwaves, The Mule from Asimov’s Foundation series, and such. Every few minutes they would remember that there were other people at the table and make some token effort to bring them into the conversation. Chiara and Daia were sustaining most of the collateral damage, but making game efforts to lob in the occasional remark.

Alastair took in Bob’s glare and faltered in the middle of a disquisition about some arcane financial product that had caused a bank in Frankfurt to go under because of a derecho that had destroyed all the corn in Iowa.

“You’re boring my wife!” Bob growled.

“Not bored,” Daia said, “but as a representative here—along with Dr. Eshma—of what you lot used to call the Subcontinent, I will ask: we don’t have derechos in India that I know of. But we do have disasters of our own: locusts, droughts, and so on. If you want to muck about with the climate, how do we know that it won’t create more of those?”

“We’ve been mucking about with it inadvertently for two hundred years,” Mark demurred. “Now we’re talking about a different sort of mucking.”

“All perhaps very true on a technical, scientific level,” Daia said. “I get it. I do. But I’m talking about how it is perceived. That’s what matters.” She looked across at Saskia. “I’ll let Her Majesty speak for herself and her country. But as for, say, the Punjab—where my family came from—if there is a drought there now, some people already will claim that it happened because Bill Gates or someone tampered with the weather even though no one is actually doing any such thing yet.”

“But that cuts both ways,” T.R. pointed out.

“What do you mean?” Saskia asked.

“If folks all over the world are going to get riled up at billionaires messing with the climate even when we are not really doing a goddamn thing, then we got no real downside politically.”

“You don’t, perhaps,” Saskia said.

“We might as well take action and save a few hundred million lives,” T.R. concluded, as if it were the simplest thing in the world.

“They’re going to condemn you no matter what,” put in Cornelia from the far end of the table, where all had gone silent to listen to this. “So let them condemn you for something that is real and not just a made-up conspiracy theory.”

“It is a bit different where I come from,” Saskia said, but she didn’t want to draw invidious distinctions between Punjabi farmers and Dutch coffee shop hipsters.

“Setting aside the political dimension,” Daia said coolly, “what about actual, physical reality? Will geoengineering damage crop yields in Punjab? Or . . . Bangladesh? Hubei? Iowa? It can’t be good for everyone, everywhere.”

“I would, of course, defer to Eshma, who actually knows what she’s talking about,” said Mark, with a glance down to that end of the table. “But when you put it that way . . .”

“Nothing can be good for everyone, everywhere,” Eshma confirmed. “The models tell us that much.”

Mark continued. “And yet uncontrolled global warming will certainly kill, as T.R. points out, hundreds of millions or billions. We can’t stop it from happening in any other way.”

“Even if we could get China and India to stop burning shit tomorrow, and crash their economies for the sake of Mother Earth,” T.R. said, “it wouldn’t undo what we’ve done, as a civilization, to the atmosphere since we first worked out how to turn fossil fuel into work.”

“People will ask, why not put the same amount of effort and engineering cleverness into removing that carbon from the atmosphere?” Daia said.

“And are you asking that, Daia? Or merely pointing out that others will?” Mark asked.

“Both, I suppose. I really am genuinely curious.”

“Let’s put a pin in that, I got a neat little demo,” T.R. said. He thumbed a speed dial on his phone and muttered, “Yeah, could you bring in the bell jars?”

“This is only part of the demo we’ll be showing to the media tomorrow,” T.R. said, a few minutes later. “We are working on a bigger presentation. But I thought you might get a kick out of it.”

“Could you first say more about the media?” Saskia inquired. “I was told—”

“All NDAed, all embargoed. As my people discussed with your people when we set this up,” T.R. assured her. “Sooner or later, according to your man Willem, you’re going to make it public that you visited the site.”

“We have to,” Saskia said.

“The agreement was, you can do that on your own timetable. That agreement stands, Your Majesty. And it’s up to you whether you take a pro-, anti-, or neutral position.”

T.R. seemed rattled by how Saskia had just reacted, to the point where she now felt it necessary to put him at ease. “My job is an unusual one,” Saskia said. “The boundary between personal and public is complicated and somewhat ambiguous. One moment I am enjoying a lovely dinner with interesting people and the next I’m having to think about media. Pardon the interruption.”

“Pardon me for letting that dirty word out of my mouth!” T.R. answered. He glanced awkwardly at Daia (who had been a media personality) and then at the rest of the guests, who had fallen silent when one of T.R.’s aides had rolled in a stand supporting a pair of glass bell jars. Beneath one was a heap of powdered sulfur—a miniature version of the huge pile they’d seen earlier. Beneath the other was a mound of powder the same size, but black as black could be. “Two elements,” T.R. said, “alike in dignity! The yellow one needs no introduction. You’ll have guessed that the black one is carbon. Both alter the climate. Carbon makes it get warmer by trapping the sun’s rays. Sulfur cools it by bouncing them back into space.”

“We’ve been over this, T.R.,” Bob reminded him.

“Sorry. Preacher man gotta preach. What’s not so obvious is the incredible difference in leverage between these two substances. To put enough of this stuff”—he slapped the carbon bell jar, and his wedding ring made a sharp noise on the glass—“into the atmosphere to bring the temp up a couple degrees, we had to put a large part of the human race to work burning shit for two centuries. We chopped down forests, dug up peat bogs, excavated huge coal mines, emptied oil reserves the size of mountains. Hell, in Afghanistan they even burn shit. All that disappeared into the air. The total weight of excess carbon we put into the atmosphere is about three hundred gigatons. All those trees, all that coal, all the oil and peat and shit. Now. To reverse that change in temperature—to bring it back down by two degrees—how much sulfur do you think we need to put into the stratosphere? A comparable amount? Not even close. A smaller amount? Yes, but that don’t do it justice. Because sulfur has leverage like you wouldn’t believe. This amount of carbon here”—he once again did the wedding ring thwack on the bell jar full of black stuff—“could be neutralized, in terms of its effect on global temperature, by an amount of sulfur too small to be seen by the naked eye. So small that we couldn’t even demo it in these bell jars unless I rolled out a microscope. Tomorrow you’ll see the ratio. A boxcar of coal, and a cube of sulfur you can put in the palm of your hand.”

“You’re saying that removing the carbon from the atmosphere would be a much bigger project than putting sulfur into it,” Saskia said.

“We would have to make a pile of carbon the size of Mount Rainier. About thirty cubic miles. Imagine a cube a mile on a side, full of this stuff.” He rested his hand a little more gently on the carbon jar. “And now imagine thirty of those. To get that done in any reasonable amount of time—let’s say fifty years—you have to imagine a 747 cargo freighter loaded with pure elemental carbon dumping it onto the pile every nine seconds for fifty years, 24/7/365,” T.R. said. “Now, maybe someone will make that happen. But they gotta be a whole lot richer and more powerful than everyone sitting around this table put together.”

“We all live in technocratic societies,” Saskia said, “and we naturally think in terms of a certain style of doing things. A giant atmosphere processor that sucks in air and removes the carbon through a chemical process and loads it onto the 747s every nine seconds. But I am preparing, psychologically, to go home and talk about this with my daughter—whom you might think of as a proxy for millions of Greens. The question from them will be . . .”

“Why not plant a shitload of trees?” T.R. finished the sentence for her. “Or make algae bloom over big patches of ocean? Get plants to do the work for us.”

“Exactly. Is it just that plants can’t sequester enough carbon, fast enough?”

“Partly,” T.R. nodded.

“If I may,” said the lord mayor, “we have looked at this. Oh, England’s not big enough. Canada maybe. The scale of the program would be spectacularly enormous, and it would by its very nature have to be distributed over a significant part of the earth’s surface. Many jurisdictional boundaries crossed. Many nations would have to cooperate just so. And once the plants have grown and stored up all that biomass, you can’t allow the carbon to find its way back into the atmosphere, or else what’s the point? You basically have to chop down the forests, stack up the wood somewhere safe, make sure it never catches fire, and then start growing a whole new forest.”

“I saw a video of some very angry chaps in Pakistan literally uprooting, with their bare hands, a new forest that had been planted in their district,” Daia said. “Some sort of dispute over who owned the land.”

Sylvester had been trying to get everyone to pay attention to Eshma. Heads turned in her direction. “There’s another angle that tends not to get mentioned,” Eshma said. “This one might be a bit tricky to explain to your daughter, Your Majesty.”

“Let’s have it!” Saskia said.

“What is the big question mark surrounding solar geoengineering?” Eshma asked, rhetorically.

“In other words, what T.R. is proposing to do,” Sylvester footnoted.

“It’s the fact that it will impact the climate differently in different parts of the world,” Eshma said. “When I return to Singapore, my duty will be to organize the running of massive simulations to get some idea of the ramifications of what Dr. Schmidt is proposing.”

“I ain’t just proposing,” T.R. muttered under his breath; but Eshma was at the far end of the table and didn’t hear. She continued, “The thing is that growing a lot of trees, or algae, or what have you, would also have such knock-on effects. These of course can be simulated by the same computer models. And they would unquestionably be different since it is a different scheme from Dr. Schmidt’s. But there is absolutely no basis for supposing that they would be globally better.”

“Planting huge forests, or making algae bloom in the ocean, would create a drought, or catastrophic flooding, somewhere,” Saskia said.

“It has to,” T.R. said, “it can’t not.”

“The Greens,” Saskia said, “idolize nature and will want to say that if drought or deluge happens in Mali or Nebraska or Uttar Pradesh because of their carbon-sequestering forest, why, that is nature’s decree. Gaia’s just verdict. We must bow to it. But try telling that to the victims.”

“Or those whose land was expropriated to plant the new forests,” Daia added.

Saskia sighed.

“Should make for one festive conversation with Princess Charlotte,” T.R. remarked.

“It makes me tired just thinking of it,” Saskia said. “Or perhaps I am simply tired. It has been quite a day.”

That was the signal for everyone else at the table to say all sorts of complimentary things about the hospitality that the Schmidts had bestowed on them. The dinner broke up. A few night owls showed interest in smoking cigars and drinking single malt in the Tree Car, which had openable windows that made it quite breezy. But Saskia was suddenly feeling knackered, and very much not of a disposition to get laid even if any clear opportunity were to present itself. Which it did not. For Willem intercepted her on the way down the aisle to brief her on the day’s events in the Netherlands, and to let her know that a jet was flying over tomorrow afternoon to take her and her entourage directly back to Schiphol the morning after that.