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but the most important thing about it, if you happened to be a member of the Dutch royal family, was that “norMAL” was exactly what royals were forever under suspicion of not being, and so anything you could do that made you norMAL was desirable; and since that could easily be faked, it worked best if it were some activity that would get you killed if you did it wrong.
For starters he learned that pigs, like white people, were an invasive species from Europe.
he was thoroughly confused. Did these kids hate humans because they were an invasive species that should be eradicated? Or did they love humans and not want them to become extinct? Imponderable questions, these, which perhaps college sophomores stayed up all night hashing out over pizza and beer while Rufus was out alone with a tripod and a rifle hunting a demon.
For all the complicated operations described in the book, the basics were as simple as could be: they rowed out in a boat so that a guy could chuck a spear into the whale. Guys who were good at chucking the spear made bank. Boat-rowers were a dime a dozen and had to supplement their measly income by going home and writing huge novels.
The AK’s brute simplicity, its ability to keep firing after he had dropped it into a wallow, fascinated him as a mechanic. It was the feral hog of guns. ARs, on the other hand, reminded him overmuch of the army. On the civilian side of things, he had come to associate them with kids at the shooting range wearing overpriced wraparound sunglasses. Bros in tactical trousers who were evidently in it because of some story they were telling themselves.
Beau Boskey, a fellow from Louisiana who was to alligators what Rufus was to hogs. Beau was as boaty a man as you could ever hope to find.
Just for starters this meant filling every hotel room in greater Houston. RVs—already at a premium because of COVID-19, COVID-23, and COVID-27, and the general inability of Americans to travel outside of the Lower 48—spiked
spiked in price as people snapped those up and parked them in their driveways. People went full nomad and began to occupy every legal campsite they could find, and when those were full they began to park illegally. The thing was that these people had resources. They all owned houses, after all. So they were affluent nomads.
His eyes were tracking a group of three workers who had apparently come back to the parking lot on their break to use the portable toilets and smoke cigarettes. “A hundred years ago they’d have been black. Fifty years ago, Vietnamese. Twenty, Mexican,” Bo said. They were white. “Maybe this will teach them some kind of decent work ethic. What they are doing out there looks a lot like transplanting rice seedlings, no?”
Was Laks aware that the Iron Lions Crew currently operating along the northern shore of the Pangong Tso consisted of hand-picked fighters from the elite Piguaquan schools around Cangzhou where they had perfected a simplified variant of the Crazy Demon style using asymmetrical red oak staffs? Or was he expecting to deploy along the ridge above Chushul, which was currently under pressure from a squad of Guangzhou-based fighters versed in the more classically southern, Wing Chun–derived style? Obviously different tactics would be called for in that case, given the latter’s preference for
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No doubt it had already been debated at exhausting length in the comments thread dangling from the end of this video like a string of fecal material from a yak’s ass hairs.
She took a stroll around the grounds. Stars and a half-moon were visible in the south, but the northern half of the sky was a dark indigo blur as clouds, invisible in the dark, swept across it in advance of the summer storm. A faint hiss, building toward a roar, reached her ears from the ancient forest all around as the tops of the great trees, thick with late summer foliage, began to seethe and toss in the rising wind.
Lotte returned the courtesy by not asking Saskia directly about the topic that had been the subject of so many text messages during the last few days. This would have been inadvisable anyway with staff in the next room. It was a curious thing about texting and other such faceless electronic communications that they enabled people to say things and to reveal sides of their personalities they’d have avoided in person.
Certainly any stranger who had read some of the texts Lotte had sent to her mother in Texas would have formulated an image in their mind that was at odds with the somewhat unconventional but basically wholesome teenager now sitting across the table from Saskia, her strawberry blond hair in a loose braid falling down over the front of a powder blue T-shirt.
Those around her had changed their behavior accordingly. She was getting a little status report from an emergency worker. Not because she’d asked for one. She would never do that. But because when you were a first responder at a disaster and suddenly you noticed the queen was standing right there, you delivered a status report.
“Yes. And almost from the moment it was first mentioned, the idea was loathed by Greens. Just anathematized.
“He’s one of them,” Rufus nodded. “Native son. Built a huge gun. Thumbed his nose at the environmentalists. They’ll go full Alamo for him.”
“So it comes down to what’s left of the United States government, and what they might do. And that can be delayed in committees and court filings for a long, long time. Long enough that the specter of termination shock enters the conversation.”
“What’s termination shock?” “A bogeyman—to be fair, a legitimate concern—that always comes up when people debate geoengineering,” Alastair said. “It boils down to asking what the consequences might be of shutt...
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“Years ago some people ran models to predict the effect of aerosols—sulfur, basically—being injected into the atmosphere from different parts of the world. What happens if we do it from Europe? North America? China? India? The outcomes were surprisingly different. It really matters where you do it. And it then affects each part of the world differently. But if I had to place a bet right here, right now, in this pub, based on what I’ve seen, I’d say it’s going to come down to China versus India.”
She actually wondered if this feature of her personality qualified her as some kind of sociopath.
Saskia sighed. “We didn’t expect a lot of things.” She was referring to the pigs. This had been much on her mind of late. Everyone who knew about the plane crash was still waiting for the other shoe to drop. But apparently in Texas you could just crash jet airplanes, shoot it out with giant predators on the tarmac, set fire to the wreckage, and flee, and no one would get particularly excited about it.
Like every other state-of-the-art conference room AV system in the history of the world, it failed to work on the first go and so it was necessary to summon someone who understood how it worked; and like all such persons he could not be found.
From a distance it looked fat and solid but as you zoomed in, it frayed to a loose-spun yarn. He remembered taking art classes in school, learning that instead of laying down a simple firm stroke you should make many fine scratches and gradually thicken the ones that were in the right place.
Young Rufus might have assumed that this drought of dependability was a problem peculiar to Lawton, had he not joined the army and become aware of the fact that it was a worldwide phenomenon. If you did happen to be one of those rare people blessed or cursed—take your pick—with dependability, there were opportunities everywhere. The world’s howling need for it would suck you into all kinds of situations that might look peachy if you had just fallen off the Lawton turnip truck but that, in the light of experience, probably needed to be vetted a little more carefully before saying yes. Which was
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“It’s because you are a hero of India,” Kadar said, “but India is not quite finished with you yet.”
But having seen shit you wouldn’t believe in Indonesia, he had arrived at the conclusion that political stability anywhere was an illusion that only a simpleton would believe in. That (invoking, here, a version of the anthropic principle) such simpletons only believed they were right when and if they just happened to live in places that were temporarily stable. And that it was better to live somewhere obviously dangerous, because it kept you on your toes. Willem had thought all this daft until Trump and QAnon.
T.R.’s phone had buzzed, and he had put on reading glasses. He looked at Willem over the lenses. “My granddad built a mine in Cuba. Castro took it away from him. Does that mean he shouldn’t have built it?”
“It’s an asset, you’re saying. The sheer incompetence of the United States.” “People have come to rely on it.” “It’s true.”
“Trust me, they are going too far. But it will play well in their media. And they know they’ll get away with it. America will be very angry for forty-eight hours and then get bored and get angry about something new. A movie star will kick his dog or a quarterback will park his Lambo in a handicapped space.” “Sounds like T.R. is screwed then.” Bo shrugged. “Perhaps a real country could be persuaded to step in and restore calm.”
Comancheness was a viral thing that could hop from brain to brain, regardless of skin color, and that—using the early Texas Rangers as a vector of infection—it had completely taken over America a long time ago. Old-school Christian values and straight-out racism had held it at bay through the world wars and the fifties, but then the barriers had fallen one by one and before you knew it there was a white guy in red-white-and-blue war paint sacking the U.S. Capitol in what the media described as some kind of Viking getup but Rufus knew perfectly well was a Plains Indian–style bison headdress.
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Rufus felt that some kind words, some expression of gratitude, was now in order, but there was no time to lose, so he just stroked the horse’s nose as he took his leave and told him what a fine fella he was.
“Woo-eee!” he exclaimed, “I got a hot sausage here that’s about to bust open from the heat if I don’t take good care.”
