Termination Shock

The Beaver

From the river IJ—the water in the heart of Amsterdam—to the Lagoon of Venice was beyond the Beaver’s range. So the former queen stopped off at Lake Como to refuel, to pee, to get a cup of coffee, and to drop off her co-pilot. She would fly the last leg solo. Partly that was for the visuals. Whenever there were two people in the cockpit, cynics assumed that Frederika Mathilde Louisa Saskia was just faking it.

But also she needed some alone time. She had abdicated the throne and seen Lotte become the new queen first thing in the morning. Since then she’d hardly had a moment to herself; and those moments had been interrupted by texts from Lotte asking her mother for advice and for reassurance.

She answered a couple of the more urgent questions while sipping her coffee beneath an awning by the water. Nobility and royalty had been coming to Lake Como since Roman times, often to lick their wounds after some kind of reversal in their fortunes. So its shores were strewn with spectacular old buildings with long, complicated, and not especially cheerful histories. Saskia could have found family connections to many of these, should she care to go rooting around in her ancestral tree. So having that cup of coffee, there in the dockside café of a luxury hotel that had once been the private villa of some great-great-uncle thrice removed, was a reminder that, if she so chose, she could while away the rest of her life in such a place. Just like many other defrocked, deposed, defunct, or disgraced persons of former importance down through the ages. To some that might be an irresistible siren’s call, but it made Saskia’s skin crawl. She couldn’t finish that coffee fast enough. She had a sort of vision, sitting there enjoying the temperate breeze off the lake, that if the climate apocalypse happened, this place would be the last bastion to fall. And having now given up her throne in the pursuit of the climate wars, she didn’t want to hole up in the last bastion. She wanted to go down fighting in the front lines.

So she stood up and tossed back the dregs of her coffee as soon as the lads down on the fuel dock were finished. She texted “OMW” to her contact in Venice, then shut off her phone. Under the lidless eyes of several paparazzi drones she marched down to the dock, climbed aboard her seaplane, and began to work her way down the pre-flight checklist. A few minutes later she was in the air, bound south down the Y-shaped mountain valley that clasped the lake. The plain of Lombardy then unfolded below her and she swung east toward the Adriatic, some two hundred and fifty kilometers away—an hour’s flying time in this lumbering old pontoon plane. You could get faster, fancier ones, but this was a Canadian classic: a De Havilland Beaver. Her family had warm connections to Canada, going back to the war, and so this was the one she had picked out.

Once she had got the Beaver trimmed in level flight and headed in the right direction she spent ten minutes crying. Not that she was particularly sad. It was just that during important transitions you had to get this out of your system, and she hadn’t performed that task yet. The Dutch didn’t do formal coronations and so Lotte had become the new queen in a basically secular ceremony in Amsterdam’s Nieuwe Kerk, which was a church only in name. No crown had been placed on her head. They didn’t even have a crown. In attendance had been everyone who mattered in the Netherlands as well as a smattering of foreign royalty and international diplomats. Very convenient for Saskia who’d been able to exchange pleasantries with, and say goodbye to, many people in very little time. But when you had abdicated, you needed to get out of the country. To make a clean break and clear the stage for your successor. So after a quick change of clothes in the adjoining Royal Palace—as of ten minutes ago, her daughter’s official Amsterdam residence—Saskia had walked down to the IJ, jostling and dodging through pedestrian traffic like a private citizen, and climbed into the waiting plane and simply flown away.

Her Royal Highness Princess Frederika of the Netherlands, as she was now styled, reached the skies above Venice at the time of day movie people referred to as Golden Hour, when everything was softly lit by the warm colors of the western sky. In the life she’d just left behind, that would not have been an accident; it would all have been arranged by Willem and Fenna. Today it actually was an accident, though helped along somewhat by Pina2bo, which by this point had put enough sulfur into the stratosphere to make a noticeable difference in the sunsets of the Northern Hemisphere. The light of Golden Hour was famously forgiving to ladies of a certain age. Saskia liked to think she wasn’t quite there yet, but Venice certainly was. And there could have been no better light in which to view La Serenissima.

Her plane was in its element chugging along at low altitude. She’d filed a flight plan that kept her out of the way of heavy commercial traffic at Marco Polo Airport, which was on the mainland to the north. She made a pass around the island city, shedding altitude, resisting the temptation to wave back at the onlookers watching her arrival from waterfront bridges, balconies, rivas, and piazzas. She banked the plane round into a light northwesterly breeze and brought it down gently into the soft waters of the Lagoon with the Giardini della Biennale on her right and the red spire of San Giorgio on her left. Water might have been a menace to the Venetians and the Dutch alike, but she loved to land planes on it. Waco had left her skittish about that critical instant when rubber met terra firma. But in a seaplane you had this long glide from flying to floating with no clear moment when one became the other.

The wind’s direction made it easy for her to drive the plane right up to the quay at the park by the Piazza of San Marco. She only had to keep her peripheral vision engaged so that the propeller didn’t chop up any excited boaters. When that simply became too stressful she killed the engine, shut everything down, unbuckled her safety harness, and climbed out onto the pontoon. From there she was able to toss a line into the cockpit of an approaching powerboat. Behind its wheel was Michiel, grinning beneath a pair of sunglasses that probably cost as much as Saskia’s airplane. And worth every penny, if looks had value. His boat, naturally, was one of those handcrafted, all-mahogany runabouts. No fiberglass in this man’s reality. The Venetians had been at great pains to set themselves apart from Italy, but they had no compunctions about Italian design when it made them look smashing.

With a little help from some friends in the boat, Michiel took Saskia’s plane in tow and pulled her the last few meters in to the point where lines could be transferred to bollards along the edge of the quay. Suddenly divested of all responsibility, Saskia was able to just stand there on the pontoon, one hand braced on the wing strut, the other waving from time to time at people who had gathered in the park to greet her, to denounce her, or simply to watch. There was the usual variety of signs and banners. The Frederika who had awakened this morning in Amsterdam as Queen of the Netherlands had been tuned to pay careful attention to those. Saskia Orange could afford to shrug most of it off. And to be honest, the feeling was probably mutual. Venice had seen it all. Her arrival was not a big deal.

The park was separated from the docks by a stone balustrade. Along this someone had deployed a banner reading, in English: “Welcome Queen of Netherworld!”

Saskia well knew how to spot the differences between signs that really had been improvised on kitchen tables by amateurs, and ones carefully fashioned to seem that way. This was one of the latter. Nor did it escape her notice that when Michiel—who had vaulted up out of his beautiful runabout onto the quay—stepped forward to offer his hand as she stepped off the pontoon, it all happened with that banner in the background. So the image was all over the world before her foot touched what passed in Venice for dry land.

She had never before encountered that usage of the word “Netherworld,” but she got it. Nederland—her kingdom until this morning—was a land that happened to be low. From a parochial Northern European standpoint it was the low country and so that was what people had always called it. From a global perspective, though, it was just one of many places where people lived close to sea level; and though, a hundred years ago, all such places would have seemed quite different—as different as Venice was from Houston or Zeeland from Bangladesh—when sea level began to rise, they all turned out to have much in common. A whole planet-spanning archipelago of threatened nether-places. Why not “Netherworld”? Whether it really needed to have a queen, though, was another question.

It was understood that she’d had a long day and so formalities at quayside were kept to a minimum: Saskia accepted a bouquet and an official greeting from the mayor as well as one from the leader of an entity called Vexital. After waving to the crowd and posing for a few photos she climbed into Michiel’s sleek mahogany runabout and enjoyed a rousing dash across the Lagoon to a private island.

Dozens of tiny islands were strewn across the water around Venice, each with its own long history of use as a monastery, convent, prison, dump, cemetery, or fortification. Many were uninhabited and unused, a fact remarkable to Saskia, who would have expected that a charming private island only a few minutes’ powerboat ride from the Grand Canal would be a hot property. The fact that they were all in danger of ceasing to exist had probably depressed the market. The one they were going to was less than a hundred meters wide. It was square except for an indentation on one side for a dock. Saskia had banked over this island a few minutes ago and got a good look out the side window of the plane. It was outlined on three of its sides by old buildings that had once served as the wings of a cloister. In medieval times those had risen directly from the water of the Lagoon, but sea level rise had forced the owners to expand the island’s footprint slightly by dumping fill into the shallow water to build up a surrounding levee. Resulting environmental controversies had become a political flash point in a way that was suspiciously useful to Vexital: a local movement dedicated to the proposition that Venice ought to secede, not just from Europe (“Vexit”) but from Italy (“Vexitalia”).

Venice itself, at less than four miles long, would seem so small that it was superfluous to have a microcosm of it; but Santa Liberata, as this island was known, had been seen as just that. Cornelia, its owner, had appeared in a very well produced video sloshing barefoot down flooded corridors of its ancient cloisters, gazing sadly down through six inches of water at beautiful mosaics, and looking up at frescoes soon to be dissolved by rising seawater.

Anyway, Liberata was safe and sound for the moment behind those new levees, thrown up in defiance of the European Union’s Infraction Procedure. The family of Cornelia had done a brilliant job of fixing the place up one bit at a time, bringing some rooms up to modern luxury-hotel standards while leaving others in exactly the right stage of dusty, weedy, comfortable decay. So upon her arrival Saskia was able to freshen up in a bathroom that sported sleek high-tech chrome-plated plumbing fixtures she couldn’t even work out how to use; but then she was able to walk out onto a patio lit up by a red Pina2bo sunset and have a drink on thousand-year-old flagstones with Daia Kaur Chand.

“So, Your Royal Highness, what’s it like to be an ex-queen?”

Wonderful was on Saskia’s lips, but she held back. The last time she’d been in Daia’s company was on the Flying S Ranch. Then Daia hadn’t been working in her capacity as a journalist but tagging along with her husband, the lord mayor. This time, it was different. The conversation they were having now was off the record. But it was still a sort of dress rehearsal for the real interview they’d be conducting tomorrow with a full BBC production crew in attendance. So it would be wise for Saskia to get in the habit of being a little guarded. “It’s nice to be relieved of some of those responsibilities,” she allowed, “but of course Queen Charlotte—who has shouldered them in my place—is never far from my mind.”

A wry look had spread across Daia’s face as this carefully worded answer went on and on. If this was supposed to be informal off-the-record chitchat, it was already failing. “It’s very different from the British monarchy, isn’t it? I’ll be certain to spell that out for our viewers.”

“What, the tradition of abdication?”

“British monarchs—with one notable exception—never abdicate.”

“But it’s become the rule rather than the exception in the Netherlands, it’s true.”

“It’s like retiring.”

“Yes. And some retire earlier than others.”

“Early enough to . . . pursue a second career, perhaps?”

“We’ll see. It’s a bit soon to be thinking about such things.”

“Do you think you’d have stayed on if it hadn’t been for all the controversies? The campaign of deepfakes? All the attention around geoengineering?”

“Oh, almost certainly. I was raised to do that job. I was good at it. People—even anti-monarchists—liked me. And it’s a big burden to dump on Charlotte’s shoulders at such a young age. But when you start becoming a distraction from the country’s real business, it’s time to leave. I just had to present Charlotte with the choice: we can all walk away, and put an end to the monarchy, or you can take over for me. She made her choice.”

Saskia’s phone had chimed several times in the last minute. It was Lotte. Saskia checked it, expecting some desperate plea for advice. But instead it was a selfie of her standing next to a ridiculously handsome prince from the Norwegian royal family. Smiling, she shared that with Daia, who laughed out loud at the beauty of the young man. “Somehow one suspects Queen Lotte will get along just fine.”

There was that little pause that signifies a turn in the conversation. The two women sipped their drinks and took in the view across the flat water of the Lagoon to Venice, only a kilometer away.

“Your Royal Highness,” Daia said, “as much as tomorrow is supposed to be a soft-focus puff piece, there is one question I can’t not ask you. And that’s just an ineluctable truth about who I am—who my people are.”

Saskia nodded. She’d known this was coming. Daia was a Sikh. Her grandparents had come to England from the Punjab. She wasn’t observant to the point of wearing a headscarf all the time. But any photo of a Chand family reunion would feature a lot of turbans. And she was said to be as fluent in Punjabi as she was in English. “Go on, by all means!” Saskia offered.

Daia nodded. “Here we are in the second week of July,” she said. “The monsoon is late. So late that some in the Punjab are beginning to wonder whether it will come this year at all.”

Saskia nodded. “What are the latest forecasts? I heard there was hope.”

“The long-range forecast is not without promise. Thank God.”

“Has it ever been this late before?”

“Of course. Some years it fails altogether. But that’s not the point. The point is that people look at this”—Daia gestured toward the sunset, which was of rare beauty—“and they see that the rains are late in the Punjab . . .”

“And they can’t not put two and two together.”

They walked across the courtyard to join Michiel, Chiara, and Cornelia for a light, informal dinner in what had formerly been the convent’s refectory. Also with them was Marco Orsini, the leader of the Vexital movement, sometimes called “the Doge” by the tabloid press. He was in his forties, conservatively attired, with an earnest, approachable manner that probably came in handy in his role of trying to promulgate what most would consider a daft idea. And Marco had brought with him his friend Pau, an activist from Barcelona—a city that, like Venice, was trying to get free of the country it had been lumped into.

The table looked a thousand years old; the molecular-cuisine tapas being carried in by the waitstaff had been prepared in a kitchen that looked like it had been refurbished by NASA. Art, mostly quite old, adorned those parts of the walls not covered by cracked and faded frescoes. Saskia could only imagine what this family’s art collection must look like. She saw paintings she supposed were knockoffs of Titians or Tintorettos until she got it through her head that they were the real things.

The most prominent work on display was a Renaissance painting of Ceres in her winged chariot. The very goddess after whom cereals were named. She was flying over an idealized Tuscan landscape looking for her lost daughter Proserpina. Saskia knew the story perfectly well. The grief of Ceres over the loss of contact with her daughter—taken away to be the unwilling queen of the underworld—was the cause of seasons. Crops withered and died at the bidding of Ceres. But she was also the goddess of growth and fertility when she was in a more generous frame of mind. The choice of this painting to hang above this dinner table could not have been an accident, any more than the “Queen of Netherworld” banner.

“I wonder what the Romans would have made of that myth,” Saskia reflected, “if they had understood the workings of the hemispheres and the fact that winter in the north was summer in the south? That you can’t have one without the other?”

It was meant as a light conversational gambit, but Daia didn’t take it that way. “Let’s be clear about what you’re getting at,” she said. “Saving Venice from the sea might mean famine in the Punjab.”

“That’s actually not what I was getting at,” Saskia said.

“No one wants famine in the Punjab, or anywhere else,” Cornelia said. “It’s not as simple a trade as that—fortunately for everyone.”

“The Indian Academy of Sciences has published some climate simulations that suggest otherwise.”

“In the scenario where Pina2bo is the only site of stratospheric sulfur injection in the whole world,” Michiel said, “and it runs at maximum capacity year-round, maybe that is the case. That is why we are bringing Vadan online later this year. And it’s why T.R. has begun work on Papua. Which adds a site in the Southern Hemisphere.”

“How does that help us?”

“Historically, volcanic eruptions south of the equator are associated with stronger monsoons.”

It turned out that Daia had never heard of Vadan. Saskia could hardly blame her. She’d never have known any of this had Cornelia not made her aware. So they took a minute to explain the basics: it was a rocky isle off the remote Albanian coast, formerly an outpost of the Venetian Empire, later a Soviet chemical munitions factory, and—as of about a year ago—the site of a project to build a clone of Pina2bo. From Venice, Vadan lay about eight hundred kilometers to the southeast. Along with other attendees, Saskia was scheduled to visit the place for a conference in a few days.

“You people are full of surprises,” Daia mused. “Who knew that Albania was going to become a player?”

“North Macedonia?” Chiara guessed.

“You joke, but what’s to prevent it? Why shouldn’t North Macedonia build one, if Albania’s doing it?”

“Because they don’t need to. The effects spread out over a wide area,” Michiel reminded her, “so North Macedonia gets a free ride. What’s good for Albania is good for them, and everyone else downwind.”

“In this hemisphere, prevailing winds are from the west,” Daia pointed out. “Vadan’s in the wrong direction from Venice, is it not?”

“Yes, if all we cared about was cooling the weather here,” Michiel said. “Vadan won’t do that. Instead it will cool down Turkey, Syria, and Iraq—places that are in danger of becoming uninhabitable because of rising temperatures.”

“Just as Pina2bo has already made a measurable difference in Austin and Houston,” Chiara put in.

“Well, that gives me a hint as to how you financed Vadan,” Daia said.

This connection hadn’t occurred to Saskia. She’d vaguely assumed that Vadan was all financed by mysterious Venetian oligarchs. But the look on the faces of Michiel and Chiara made it clear Daia had guessed correctly.

“The benefit to Venice is . . . indirect,” Marco said. He’d been mostly quiet until now. Pau, his friend from Barcelona, hadn’t said a word; he was content to enjoy the food and the wine and proximity to Chiara. It was clear that these two were an item.

“Oh, I get it. Sea level,” Daia said. “So Venice’s existential threat from the sea creates a natural alliance between you and overheated Persian Gulf states lying downwind of this island of Vadan, which is otherwise just a Soviet-era toxic waste dump that is useless to Albania but desirable to Venice in beginning to reassemble her Adriatic sphere of influence. Strange bedfellows!”

Cornelia said, “Strange bedfellows have been a constant throughout all history.”

“It’s just that climate change moves the beds around?” Saskia added.

“To cool off this part of the world, you’d have to build one upwind,” Daia supposed. “In your neck of the woods, mevrouw?”

“T.R. had his eye on some coal mines in the southeastern Netherlands,” Saskia said, “but the sonic booms could be heard across the border in Germany and it would have meant trouble with the neighbors. No, if people want to put sulfur into the stratosphere over Northern Europe, they’ll have to build special aeroplanes.”

“Back to the Punjab,” Daia said. “The Breadbasket. Maybe I should start calling it that, just to make the stakes clear. Where food comes from. The climate simulations—”

“Were based on a different scenario. Pina2bo only,” Cornelia said. “Not factoring in Vadan or Papua.”

“And what do the simulations say when those are factored in?”

Cornelia, never a great one for diplomacy, broke eye contact in a way that showed impatience, even irritation. Michiel, in his role as smoother-over, glided in like a soccer player moving to intercept a pass. “That is a little like asking, ‘What is the result of acupuncture?’ There is no one answer.”

“You lost me there.”

“I used to have sinus headaches,” Michiel said. “Nothing helped. Miserable. I went to see an acupuncturist. She put needles in my face, as you might expect. But also in my hands and feet! How can this possibly work!? How can a needle between my toes make my sinuses feel better?” He shrugged. “It all has to do with the flow of energy around the system.”

“Which is never obvious,” Marco added.

“But acupuncturists have that all mapped out, you’re saying,” Daia said. “We can trust them.”

“In this case,” Michiel continued, “maybe there are three points where we have the needles: Pina2bo, Vadan, Papua. Maybe more later. What does that mean for the Punjab? There is no one answer. It depends on how they are used. How they are tweaked.”

“This is why we got involved with Vadan,” Marco said. “Maybe we find out that if Pina2bo shuts down for two months in the winter and Papua runs heavy for six weeks in the spring, the monsoons in the Breadbasket come out perfect.”

“But people starve in China,” Daia said.

“China might have something to say about that,” Cornelia said, in a tone of dry witticism.

Daia exchanged a look with Saskia, the import of which was Do you understand what she’s on about? I don’t.

“What do you mean, Cornelia?” Saskia asked.

“You could just as well point out that the United States could drop a bomb on Beijing, and hurt China! Why don’t they? Because China doesn’t like to get bombed and would retaliate.”

“Also,” Chiara put in, with a nervous glance at her aunt, “because it’s just stupid to hurt people for no reason!”

“That too. Now, imagine if it took six months to transport the bomb from America to Beijing, and you had to do it in the open.”

Daia nodded. “There can be no sneak attacks. No climate Pearl Harbors.”

“The Alastairs and the Eshmas of the world know their business too well.”

“But they are just voices crying in the wilderness,” Saskia said, “if they’re not backed up by some kind of muscle. China and India both have the big stick. What about, I don’t know, Iceland? Myanmar? Chad?”

“Venice?” Marco added.

“Catalunya!” said Pau.

“All that boils down to,” Cornelia said, “is that strong countries are strong and weak countries are weak. Which was true before.” She picked up her phone and began shuffling through pictures. “You know, on the boat trip I took last year, we passed through the Suez Canal. The Bab el Mandeb. The Malacca Strait. All famous choke points to the navigation of the seas. People have been fighting wars over those places for hundreds of years. And when they are not fighting wars they are playing geopolitical chess games around who will control those ‘acupuncture points.’ This is the same. It’s just that some places that most people have never heard of are going to become the Suez Canals of the future. And the great and small powers of the world will have to mark them out on their chessboards and maybe even prepare for conflict. But if you suppose any of that is new, you don’t know history.”