A wry look had spread across Daia’s face as this carefully worded answer went on and on. If this was supposed to be informal off-the-record chitchat, it was already failing. “It’s very different from the British monarchy, isn’t it? I’ll be certain to spell that out for our viewers.”
“What, the tradition of abdication?”
“British monarchs—with one notable exception—never abdicate.”
“But it’s become the rule rather than the exception in the Netherlands, it’s true.”
“It’s like retiring.”
“Yes. And some retire earlier than others.”
“Early enough to . . . pursue a second career, perhaps?”
“We’ll see. It’s a bit soon to be thinking about such things.”
“Do you think you’d have stayed on if it hadn’t been for all the controversies? The campaign of deepfakes? All the attention around geoengineering?”
“Oh, almost certainly. I was raised to do that job. I was good at it. People—even anti-monarchists—liked me. And it’s a big burden to dump on Charlotte’s shoulders at such a young age. But when you start becoming a distraction from the country’s real business, it’s time to leave. I just had to present Charlotte with the choice: we can all walk away, and put an end to the monarchy, or you can take over for me. She made her choice.”
Saskia’s phone had chimed several times in the last minute. It was Lotte. Saskia checked it, expecting some desperate plea for advice. But instead it was a selfie of her standing next to a ridiculously handsome prince from the Norwegian royal family. Smiling, she shared that with Daia, who laughed out loud at the beauty of the young man. “Somehow one suspects Queen Lotte will get along just fine.”
There was that little pause that signifies a turn in the conversation. The two women sipped their drinks and took in the view across the flat water of the Lagoon to Venice, only a kilometer away.
“Your Royal Highness,” Daia said, “as much as tomorrow is supposed to be a soft-focus puff piece, there is one question I can’t not ask you. And that’s just an ineluctable truth about who I am—who my people are.”
Saskia nodded. She’d known this was coming. Daia was a Sikh. Her grandparents had come to England from the Punjab. She wasn’t observant to the point of wearing a headscarf all the time. But any photo of a Chand family reunion would feature a lot of turbans. And she was said to be as fluent in Punjabi as she was in English. “Go on, by all means!” Saskia offered.
Daia nodded. “Here we are in the second week of July,” she said. “The monsoon is late. So late that some in the Punjab are beginning to wonder whether it will come this year at all.”
Saskia nodded. “What are the latest forecasts? I heard there was hope.”
“The long-range forecast is not without promise. Thank God.”
“Has it ever been this late before?”
“Of course. Some years it fails altogether. But that’s not the point. The point is that people look at this”—Daia gestured toward the sunset, which was of rare beauty—“and they see that the rains are late in the Punjab . . .”
“And they can’t not put two and two together.”
They walked across the courtyard to join Michiel, Chiara, and Cornelia for a light, informal dinner in what had formerly been the convent’s refectory. Also with them was Marco Orsini, the leader of the Vexital movement, sometimes called “the Doge” by the tabloid press. He was in his forties, conservatively attired, with an earnest, approachable manner that probably came in handy in his role of trying to promulgate what most would consider a daft idea. And Marco had brought with him his friend Pau, an activist from Barcelona—a city that, like Venice, was trying to get free of the country it had been lumped into.
The table looked a thousand years old; the molecular-cuisine tapas being carried in by the waitstaff had been prepared in a kitchen that looked like it had been refurbished by NASA. Art, mostly quite old, adorned those parts of the walls not covered by cracked and faded frescoes. Saskia could only imagine what this family’s art collection must look like. She saw paintings she supposed were knockoffs of Titians or Tintorettos until she got it through her head that they were the real things.
The most prominent work on display was a Renaissance painting of Ceres in her winged chariot. The very goddess after whom cereals were named. She was flying over an idealized Tuscan landscape looking for her lost daughter Proserpina. Saskia knew the story perfectly well. The grief of Ceres over the loss of contact with her daughter—taken away to be the unwilling queen of the underworld—was the cause of seasons. Crops withered and died at the bidding of Ceres. But she was also the goddess of growth and fertility when she was in a more generous frame of mind. The choice of this painting to hang above this dinner table could not have been an accident, any more than the “Queen of Netherworld” banner.
“I wonder what the Romans would have made of that myth,” Saskia reflected, “if they had understood the workings of the hemispheres and the fact that winter in the north was summer in the south? That you can’t have one without the other?”
It was meant as a light conversational gambit, but Daia didn’t take it that way. “Let’s be clear about what you’re getting at,” she said. “Saving Venice from the sea might mean famine in the Punjab.”
“That’s actually not what I was getting at,” Saskia said.
“No one wants famine in the Punjab, or anywhere else,” Cornelia said. “It’s not as simple a trade as that—fortunately for everyone.”
“The Indian Academy of Sciences has published some climate simulations that suggest otherwise.”
“In the scenario where Pina2bo is the only site of stratospheric sulfur injection in the whole world,” Michiel said, “and it runs at maximum capacity year-round, maybe that is the case. That is why we are bringing Vadan online later this year. And it’s why T.R. has begun work on Papua. Which adds a site in the Southern Hemisphere.”
“How does that help us?”
“Historically, volcanic eruptions south of the equator are associated with stronger monsoons.”
It turned out that Daia had never heard of Vadan. Saskia could hardly blame her. She’d never have known any of this had Cornelia not made her aware. So they took a minute to explain the basics: it was a rocky isle off the remote Albanian coast, formerly an outpost of the Venetian Empire, later a Soviet chemical munitions factory, and—as of about a year ago—the site of a project to build a clone of Pina2bo. From Venice, Vadan lay about eight hundred kilometers to the southeast. Along with other attendees, Saskia was scheduled to visit the place for a conference in a few days.
“You people are full of surprises,” Daia mused. “Who knew that Albania was going to become a player?”
“North Macedonia?” Chiara guessed.
“You joke, but what’s to prevent it? Why shouldn’t North Macedonia build one, if Albania’s doing it?”
“Because they don’t need to. The effects spread out over a wide area,” Michiel reminded her, “so North Macedonia gets a free ride. What’s good for Albania is good for them, and everyone else downwind.”
“In this hemisphere, prevailing winds are from the west,” Daia pointed out. “Vadan’s in the wrong direction from Venice, is it not?”