Termination Shock

But, as she came to see, the Boskeys were, in a very polite and roundabout way, trying to bring the conversation around to business. Not in the sense of seeking to extract money from the Dutch castaways—that seemed to be the furthest thing from their minds—but in the sense of trying to figure out where this was all going, and what to do next. How, in other words, to properly discharge the responsibilities they had cheerfully shouldered when they had taken in the foreign castaways. Camped here on this sandbar they were not getting any closer to Houston. Nor were they getting closer to Lake Charles, which was where the rest of the clan presumably awaited their return. A general plan seemed to be coalescing that a number of Boskeys and their friends and associates might converge on Houston in a pincer maneuver, a couple of days hence, after the storm had abated, but while they could still make themselves useful assisting flood victims.

If that was the intention, they needed to get moving. For the Brazos was a convoluted river, and the number of miles they needed to cover on the water was greater by far than the straight-line distance. If they departed now and kept moving day and night, the timing would work out. Saskia and her team were welcome to come along, but they needed to understand that it would not be a mere party cruise; from this point onward they would not again stop moving for longer than it took to refuel.

Saskia discussed it with her team, but not for very long. The weather had forced their hand. They had about two days to kill no matter what. They could kill it in some nearby hotel, supposing they could find a room—but even at this distance from Houston, all the hotel rooms had been snapped up. Staying with the Boskeys would give them lodging, transportation to Houston, and privacy. Even if word somehow leaked out to the Dutch press that the queen was in Texas, they could release video of her assisting with disaster relief, which was (a) just the sort of thing queens were expected to do, and (b) relevant to the Netherlands’ timeless, overriding, existential concern of not ending up underwater.

So that was the queen’s decision. They helped pack up the encampment and they headed south. Rufus was part of the caravan. His trailer, when parked, could be occupied, but when it was moving no one was allowed to be in it. Likewise the pontoon could be towed down highways, but not with people in it. So for the most part the boats were used to transport people, and rarely stopped moving. The wheeled vehicles ranged ahead of them, foraging for gasoline, food, beer, and other consumables. They transferred these to the boats at places where roads came to the river’s edge. More Cajuns showed up, towing additional boats, and so both the waterborne and dry-land parts of the caravan grew. Alastair and Fenna generally looked for ways to “ride shotgun” in air-conditioned vehicles. Saskia for the most part stayed on the pontoon boat and Amelia stayed with her, both resorting to the use of earthsuits during the hottest parts of the day.

An earthsuit was not so much a single garment as a toolkit of parts that could be snapped together in different ways depending on conditions. The refrigeration system couldn’t work unless it could discharge heat into the environment. Normally it did that by shooting hot air straight up out of a pipe, but in circumstances like these, where a supply of water was near to hand, the air-based heat exchanger could be swapped out for a module that performed the same task by heating up water. A system of umbilicals made it possible for the hot part of it to trail in the Brazos along the flank of the pontoon boat, so long as the users didn’t expect to do a lot of moving around. There was only so much moving around one could do in a craft of this size and so the restriction wasn’t a problem.

Pentapotamia

Deep had grown up in Richmond, British Columbia. This was an island on Vancouver’s south flank, bracketed by the two forks of the Fraser River, and destined to be submerged by the rising waters of the Salish Sea into which they flowed.

Deep’s elementary school had once done a “project-based learning” unit about salmon, focused on rehabbing a nearby creek that had been channelized and made lifeless by the processes of suburban development. Then, as now, “physically active” and “a kinesthetic learner,” young Deep had never taken well to classroom learning. But working in the rain with a shovel, and observing the movements of fish, had brought him alive.