Termination Shock

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?”