Termination Shock [calibre 4.99.4]

This was doing brisk business. T.R. had bought the whole place out and thrown a security cordon around it, so everyone here was somehow involved in the project, had signed all the NDAs, was in on the joke, as it were. The drinks were free. A table had been reserved and made ready for them. They plunged down into vast chairs and sofas for which many Texas longhorns had sacrificed their lives and their hides. The skull of one such looked down on them from above a fireplace large enough that it could have done double duty as a parking space for one of those SUVs. Amelia ordered club soda, Willem a Manhattan, Saskia a glass of red wine. She enjoyed her first sip and took in the scene.

Twenty-four hours ago, on the bank of the Brazos, they’d been in the world where things made of microchips and petrochemicals cost basically nothing, and a whole city could be summoned into being in a few hours out of tarps, zip ties, and garbage bags. It wasn’t a fancy city, but it wasn’t terrible. Gumbo might be featured on the bar menu here in this hotel lobby, but Saskia deemed it unlikely that it would be any better than what they’d made last night over camp stoves and consumed in the open air in plastic bowls.

This place, however, was about permanence. Permanence, and uniqueness. Every detail custom-built of polished old wood, wrought iron, sculpted marble. Original works of art wherever some decoration was wanted, living flowers arranged by human hands. That human effort immanent in every detail. Napkins folded just so, drinks hand-shaken and served with origami twists of citrus rind.

People were expensive; the way to display, or to enjoy, great wealth was to build an environment that could only have been wrought, and could only be sustained from one hour to the next, by unceasing human effort. Saskia, with her staff, was as guilty of it as anyone, but she tended to forget about it until some event such as the journey down the Brazos reset her thinking.

Woven through the preparations had been a series of tests, administered to all the invited guests, for contagious diseases. Everyone who’d made it as far as this hotel lobby had passed that screening, and so they were all in a shared bubble now, with no masks or social distancing required. The accents in the lobby—other than the obvious Texan—tended to be British, Italian, and Chinese. Though in truth many of the Asian-looking people spoke indistinguishably from well-educated Brits. Saskia assumed they were from Hong Kong until Willem somehow inferred from reading a couple of name tags that they had to be from Singapore. As for the Italians, she guessed that they were from the northern part of that country; there were no visual clues to distinguish them from any other Europeans other than, perhaps, great attention to detail in matters of appearance. As usual Saskia drew a lot of glances and even some indiscreet stares once people understood who she was. T.R.’s staff had been extraordinarily tight-lipped about the guest list; Saskia didn’t know who the other honored guests were, and so it stood to reason that her presence came as a surprise to them.

Rufus and Alastair, the unlikeliest of couples, wandered in and looked shyly in her direction. Saskia sent Willem to corral them and make it clear they were welcome at her table. He did so and they came over, looking somewhat relieved. Neither of them was one for cocktail party banter.

“This is all I got that’s clean,” Rufus said, plucking at his T-shirt and then looking around at the other guests in their tailored suits.

“I’m a queen,” Saskia said. “I don’t think about it every minute of every day, and I try not to make a big deal about it. I try to be norMAL. I don’t ‘pull rank’ as you say. But in cases like this I am a tyrant. You’re with me, Red. Your T-shirt is fine. I said so.”

Rufus enjoyed hearing that and came closer to smiling than usual. Willem had gone missing. On his way back from rounding up these two strays, he had been buttonholed by one of the Singaporeans. Saskia heard the man hailing him in some variant of Chinese. Willem glanced her way, she nodded, and he proceeded to return the greeting and to enter into conversation.