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.
The Maasvlakte comprised several docks. One of them was named after Princess Frederika—a nakedly political move on someone’s part, and yet it had given her a proprietary attitude about the place. There was an access road where you could go and park without getting in the way of port traffic, so that was where her three-car caravan went, just to see the sights and kill a little
time before they got the go-ahead to drop in at the Maeslantkering, which was just a few kilometers upstream.
The Maeslantkering’s status as the largest robot in the world seemed less exceptional when viewed from the Maasvlakte. The entirety of the Port of Rotterdam was a giant machine. Not that it didn’t have plenty of greenery—you could hardly stop green things from flourishing here—but the soil in which it grew was just another component of the machine, graded and shaped and tamped just so to channel water or to support unbelievably heavy objects. The greenery had a purpose too: to keep important dirt from washing away. Decades ago one might have seen long strips of grass running parallel to the roads, railways, canals, and pipelines that serviced the docks. Those were still there, but they had all been turned into picket lines of wind turbines, all of which today were facing into the winds coming down out of the north as harbingers of the storm and spinning around as rapidly as their robot control systems deemed prudent. For space on the skyline they competed with looming queues of container cranes, parked oil rigs, and refinery stacks. These were arranged in layers that were interleaved at various distances as far as one could see, eventually blurring into a silvery mist.