“Here’s where I issue the standard disclaimer that I work for the royal house—not the government,” Willem said.
“And yet one reason you were selected for that role was your family connection back to the colonial past,” Idil said. Calmly, without rancor.
“Fair enough,” Willem said. “Is there some way, Sister Catherine, that I might be of any assistance in the work that you and my cousin are pursuing?”
“We seek independence,” Sister Catherine said. “The Brazos RoDuSh mine has until now been a stumbling block. Like all mines, its fate is to become depleted over time. The less valuable it becomes, the lower the stumbling block. If what’s next is that the site becomes a geoengineering complex—why, that looks to us like an opportunity.”
Willem hadn’t seen that coming. “How so? I’d have thought the opposite would be true. As you said, if the mine peters out, Indonesia covets it less. Becomes more willing to let Papua out of its clutches. But I’d think that if the site gets a new lease on life, all the old problems stay with you.”
Sister Catherine was just looking at him. Not someone you’d want to play poker with. “It has to do with interests. Cui bono?”
“Who benefits?” Willem translated.
“Nation-states—some of which might be quite far removed from my homeland—that would benefit from injection of stratospheric aerosols from a high mountain near the equator will weigh in on our behalf. Even if, until now, they would not have been able to find Papua on a map.”
Viewed from space, the twin gates of the Maeslantkering—the largest movable objects ever built—looked a bit like the pie-wedge–shaped wings that children scraped out in fresh snow when they were making angels. The curved rim of each pie wedge was the actual barrier meant to stand fast against the full force of a North Sea storm surge. Each was made to block one half of the width of the waterway joining Rotterdam to the sea. They came together in the middle, each swinging inward from a pivot on the embankment. The rest of the pie wedge—the triangle that spanned the 240-meter radius from the curved barrier to the pivot—consisted of massive steel tubes welded together to form a rigid trusswork. That structure transmitted the sea’s force from the barrier to the ball and socket that might be thought of as the shoulder joint of the angel’s wing. It went without saying that these were the largest ball-and-socket joints ever made. The balls were ten meters in diameter. They were cradled in sockets consisting mostly of reinforced concrete, set deeply into the ground and distributing the force into the surrounding earth through long concrete buttresses that splayed out like fingers and eventually ramped down below ground level to connect with massive subterranean footings.
Precisely curved trenches had been gouged into the banks to give the barrier arcs a place to abide during the long spans of time—on the order of decades—during which they were not actually needed. Like dry docks, these trenches lay below the level of the water, but most of the time they were kept empty, leaving the barrier arcs high and dry so that they could be inspected and maintained. The arcs themselves were hollow boxes, normally full of air. Once floated into position across the waterway, they could be flooded so that they would sink and form a seal against the floor of the channel.
The whole complex had been formally christened in 1997 by Saskia’s grandmother and never actually needed until ten years later. After that, it had sat high, dry, and motionless—aside from regularly scheduled annual closures just to make sure it all still worked—for another sixteen years, when another surge had come along. Today, for the third time in its history, they were going to close it to protect the Netherlands from what was predicted to be the largest surge in the North Sea since the disaster of 1953. It was the first such closure in Saskia’s reign.
Thanks to a program that had been set in motion by Willem in the days following her speech to the States General, Queen Frederika had spent much of the last three weeks touring the country in support of disaster preparedness. Now, trying to get Dutch people to prepare for disasters was a little like trying to get English people to watch football on the telly or Americans to buy guns. They were receptive to the message, to a degree that made the queen’s efforts on this front completely superfluous. The very inaneness of it was just the sort of thing that caused anti-royals to roll their eyes and ask what was the point of maintaining such an institution if its work was to be that insipid. For all the good she was doing, Queen Frederika might as well have stayed home at the palace tweeting about muffin recipes. And yet, given the run of close calls and scares the household had experienced last month, this was actually just the ticket. Any royal-hater or royal-skeptic, any tabloid journalist who had become excited or suspicious by the whiff of mystery and possible scandal that had surrounded the queen around the time of her visit to Texas and the geoengineering kerfuffle on Budget Day, was now catatonic with boredom after twenty consecutive days of watching Her Majesty remind pensioners in Zeeland not to get trapped in their attics. She had gone to little towns along the Rhine to inspect their dikes. She had stood in the rain stomping the royal shovel with the royal gum boot. She had nodded thoughtfully as civil servants had pointed to maps of evacuation routes. She had laid wreaths on the graves of people who had drowned in 1953.
During the first half of that three-week span it had all bordered on self-parody. Even steadfast fans of the House of Orange had thought it was a bit much. The weather had been as non-threatening as it could be. But then it had turned decidedly autumnal. Not in a cozy way. Heavy rainfall inland had begun to raise the levels of the rivers. And long-range forecasts produced by computer models had raised concern about a low-pressure system forming in the North Atlantic, south of Iceland. This had intensified and begun to move toward the chute between Scotland and Norway. Curiosity had turned into excitement, then concern, then dread. Tides were going to be exceptionally high to begin with—simple bad luck, that. This thing was then going to push a monster storm surge ahead of it.
So they’d known for days that they were going to have to close the great gates of the Maeslantkering. Across the sea, the same precaution was being taken at the Thames Barrier below London. It was only a question of when the linked computer models that ran the thing would decide to pull the trigger. For along with all the other superlatives that characterized that system, it was also the world’s largest robot.
They had a pretty good idea of when it would happen. And once it started, it took a while. Advance notice had gone out to mariners so that they would have time to move their vessels in or out of the gates before they swung shut. Saskia wanted to be there for at least part of it, as the capstone of her disaster preparedness jihad. So she went out a bit early and, to kill time, did an informal drive-by inspection of the nearby Maasvlakte.
This was an artificial peninsula that protruded, wartlike, from the nearby coast into the North Sea. Its purpose was to support an immense container port. Back in the age of sail, oceangoing ships had been able to glide all the way up to the ancient center of Rotterdam, some twenty-five kilometers inland. But as centuries had passed and ships had gotten bigger, they’d tended to drop anchor farther downstream. Accordingly the port had grown in that direction. The culmination of all that had been the creation of this Maasvlakte, an anchorage that could be reached without entering the waterway at all. It was thus capable of servicing the very largest container ships in the world: absurdly enormous things, double the width of the biggest ship that could fit through the Panama Canal, that boggled Saskia’s mind whenever she came out here to look at them. It was the place where the economy of China made a direct umbilical connection to Europe. The ships were two dozen containers wide and drew twenty meters of water when fully loaded. Some of them, fresh in from Asia, would unload part of their burden here just so that they would ride higher in the water, making it possible for them to move on to smaller and shallower European ports.