![Termination Shock [calibre 4.99.4] - Читать Любимую Русскую Полную Книгу 👉 Read-E-Book.com](/uploads/posts/books/1/9/3/5/termination-shock-calibre-4-99-4-download.jpg)
Termination Shock [calibre 4.99.4]
- Автор: Стивенсон Нил Таун
- Год: 2021
- Язык: английский
- Год: HarperCollinsPublishers
- Жанр: Научная фантастика
Электронная книга - «Termination Shock [calibre 4.99.4]». Краткое содержание книги:
For all its immensity, you could drive right over the Bonnet Carré Spillway and not take note of it. You’d see the water under the causeway, of course. But around here there was a lot of water.
The Mississippi was about seven Rhines. When this spillway was wide open, it diverted two and a half Rhines into the lake.
Now, where Willem came from, a Rhine was sort of a big deal. A third of the Netherlands’ economy passed up and down one single Rhine. They had, in effect, built a whole country around it. Here, though, people were gunning their pickup trucks over a causeway bestriding two and a half Rhines just as a temporary diversion of a seven-Rhine river over yonder. It was one of those insane statistics about the scale of America that had once made the United States seem like an omnipotent hyperpower and now made it seem like a beached whale.
Willem pulled off the highway onto an access road leading to the spillway, just so he could check his messages and spend a few minutes watching the cranes gliding along pulling the wooden timbers up. It had been a wet year to begin with. Now, rains in the hurricane’s wake had sent huge flows coursing down the Mississippi and so they were opening the spillway full bore. He got a few curious looks from the workers, but once again the white pickup served as industrial camouflage.
Hugh was on vacation in some cooler and drier clime, but he referred Willem to Dr. Margaret Parker, a colleague in the same department at Tulane, who agreed to have coffee with him. Ten years ago they would simply have met on the campus, but her lab had been downsized in the pandemic and never re-upsized, and she worked out of her home. It was just as convenient for her to meet him at a café in the French Quarter. She knew of a place with a second-story, open-air gallery that looked out toward the river.
The Bonnet Carré Spillway, which he now put in his rearview mirror, was the upstream bulwark of The Wall, aka HSDRRS (Hurricane and Storm Damage Risk Reduction System): a system of flood defenses, largely invisible to the non-expert observer, that encircled greater New Orleans. Dutch experts had been brought in to consult, and this was how Willem had come into occasional contact with people like Hugh and Margaret.
Once he had pierced The Wall at Bonne Carré, he saw no more of it as he drove twenty miles down the road—which eventually became Tulane Street—into the center of the city. Most of what he saw out the truck’s windows just looked like any other place in Outskirts, USA. After a while, though, the buildings got bigger and less commercial. He drove through the downtown campus of Tulane University. It gave way to that part of New Orleans that answered to the purposes of all big-city downtowns: high-rise hotels, convention center, stadium, casino, and a cruise ship port along the river. Willem passed through it as quickly as he could and got an impression of many tents and RVs, cars that looked inhabited, plenty of private security at doors of buildings and entrances to parking structures.
But then he was in the old part of town. The truck got him to within a block of the café, then politely suggested he get out and walk. He opened the door and stepped down to a three-hundred-year-old cobblestone street. The truck drove away as fast as it could, which around here was little better than walking pace. It would park if it found a space, or circle the block otherwise.
Margaret had sent him a token that tagged him as having a reservation, so a hostess swung the door open for him as he drew near, plucked a menu from a stack, and led him up a rickety ancient stair and down a narrow hall to the open gallery above. This had probably looked out over the Mississippi when it had been constructed. Willem guessed it was over two hundred years old, maybe pre-Revolutionary. Nowadays the picture had been complicated by other buildings, waterfront facilities, and constructs forming aspects of The Wall. Even so, once Willem had taken the proffered seat beneath a large umbrella, he was able to see brown water sliding slowly by, sparkling in the afternoon sun. For better and worse, he could now smell the French Quarter on a warm summer’s afternoon in the wake of a hurricane. It took him a full minute just to take in the olfactory mise-en-scène. More than anything he’d seen or heard, this took him back, made him a sixteen-year-old boy again, loitering self-consciously outside the entrance to a gay bar, wondering what would happen if he stepped over its threshold. So Margaret found him with tears in his eyes. She gave him a moment.
They sat there on the gallery and chatted for about half an hour. It wasn’t a life-changing conversation for either of them, just a pleasant enough diversion. Willem dutifully told his cover story: going to check on Dad in the wake of the near miss by the hurricane, wanted to see the sights relevant to climate change. Margaret brought him up to speed. “We have something y’all don’t,” she said, where “we” meant the Mississippi Delta and “y’all” meant the Netherlands. “The river is an unstoppable land-building machine, if we just let it do its work. We can’t switch it off, just point it in different directions. When y’all want to build land, y’all have to lug the sand to where it’s needed, and lay it down. Pros and cons: you get nothing for free—”
“But we get it exactly where we want it,” Willem said.
“With us, it’s like—have you ever seen what happens when a firefighter loses his grip on a fire hose?”
“No,” Willem said, “but I can imagine.”
“It’s a chaotic behavior. The hose can’t be shut off. It thrashes around like an angry snake. That’s the Mississippi downstream of New Orleans. For a long time we just tried to keep it channeled between levees. We had to keep building those higher. You’ll see. It couldn’t break out, so its outlet stretched farther and farther into the Gulf as it kept laying down sediment. Meanwhile the Gulf went on rising, sneaking around to attack the Delta on its flanks. Created a huge system of saltwater marshes and a whole economy to go with it—oysters, shrimp, saltwater fish. But something had to change. So we created the two big diversions. That’s what you’ll want to see. Here, I brought you a present.”
Margaret reached into her bag, favoring Willem with a mysterious smile, and pulled out a wad of bright fabric. She shook it out and held it up to reveal a reflective fluorescent green safety vest of the type worn by road crews. “Don’t worry, it’s been washed.” She gave it a toss. It wafted across the table and he snatched it out of the air.
“Who or what is ERDD?” he asked, reading letters stenciled across the back.
“Ecological Restoration of Delta Distributaries,” she said. “The name of a crowdfunded project I worked on for a while. Now defunct. Doesn’t matter. South of here, no one can read.” (This was dry humor.) “You wear one of these, you can walk just about anywhere down where you’re going and people will think you’re doing something official.”
“And I have the vehicle to go with it,” Willem said. “A generic white pickup.”
“Oh, you can get in anywhere with that and a reflective vest!”
“Thank you!”
“You’re welcome. So. What you want to see is the two big diversions. We blew holes in the levee. One on the left bank at Wills Point, just about thirty miles down from here, the other in the right bank another, oh, five miles farther along. Fresh water’s pouring through, dumping silt where it hits the Gulf, and the silt’s making new land—taking back some of what the Gulf stole from us. But the water isn’t clean—remember where it all came from.” Here Margaret swept her arm around in an arc directed generally northward, as if to encompass the whole watershed of the Missouri-Mississippi-Ohio system, all the way to Canada. “And because it’s fresh, it kills the saltwater ecosystem. All those homeless people you saw on your way in? Many of them were working oystermen ten years ago.”