Termination Shock

“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.