Termination Shock

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.”