The Caryatids

“Your banquet hosts in Jiuquan tonight are the taikonauts! The astro­nauts! The cosmonauts! The taikong ren. The yuhangyuan. The hang­tianyuan. Do you understand that? I mean the Chinese heroes who flew to Mars and returned to Earth.”

“Oh yes, the famous Great Pilgrims to Heaven. I understand. They mean to honor the Badaulet for my valor in combat.”

“To meet these heroes brings great good fortune. They are the fu­ture!”

“Did your men of valor fight on Mars?”

“No. They collected rocks there.”

“Though they have returned from Heaven, if they failed to fight the jihad they have earned no merit.”

Sonja planted the point of her elbow into Lucky’s spine, and with one decisive lunge she ripped the tumor loose.

The Badaulet gasped in agony and writhed like a hooked fish. “You felt that pang all down your leg, didn’t you?”

He was angry. “You hurt me now! You cut my hair! You washed my guts! You stole my clothes! You burned me with hot wax! And I’m no better, Sonja! I hurt! You promised you would fix me and I hurt.”

Sonja rolled him over onto his back. For the first time since she had met him, Lucky had gone gratifyingly limp. Normally he was as nervous and tensile as a bundle of barbed wire. His torn spine was bleeding a lit­tle, inside of him. Not too much. She had done it precisely right.

What amazing skin this boy had. There were hen-scratched scars all over him, pits, pocks, frostbite, dimples… “Lie quiet now… Rest and heal… Shall I sing to you while I make you feel better? I’ll sing you a little song. I know many old and beautiful songs. I will sing you ‘The Ballad of the Savage Tiger.’”

As she sang, Sonja suited actions to his needs. The springy, salty vi­tality of the masculine body, how endearing that was. The body was ir­repressible, it wanted to live despite everything. The sexual body, with resources for new life.

Sonja had come to treasure poetry, during the long marches between flaming cities. On the deadly, broken roads of a China in chaos, in the teeming refugee camps, she had come to understand that a memorized poem was true wealth—it was a precious work of art, a possession that could not be burned or stolen.

Sonja crooned:

“No one attacks her with the long lance,
No one shoots her with the strong bow.
Suckling her progeny, rearing her cubs,
She trains them in her own savagery.
Her reared head becomes the great wall
Her waving tail becomes the war banner.
The greatest pirates from the eastern sea
Would dread to meet her after dark,
The savage tiger, met on the western road,
Would terrify the greatest bandits.
What good is any sword against her?
When she growls like thunder, hang it on the wall!
From the secret foothills of Tai mountain
Comes the sound of women weeping,
But government regulations forbid
Any official to dare to listen.”

Lucky was blissfully quiet now. He had wisely chosen not to argue with her anymore. A host of ducts and long hydraulic chambers and strange stiffening flows of blood… And yet, human beings emerged from these oblong glands and their conduits, men and women were sired by all this gadgetry—well, not herself, of course, but most people had a father… People emerged as single-celled genetic packets out of this complex, densely innervated, profoundly temperamental fluid­-delivery system.

The secret of humanity. Here it was, in her hands.

No matter how many human bodies Sonja encountered, and how well she grasped them and their intimate functions, there was always some new magic in a new one.

Sonja switched filters and gazed straight into Lucky’s brain. His arousal was ferociously devouring a host of tagged radioactive sugars. Sex was like a bonfire in his basement.

Women often knowingly told other women that “men only wanted one thing,” but it took a sensorweb to catalogue and reveal that. To see it was to believe it. To know all was to forgive all. A man wanted that one thing he wanted because there wasn’t room in his head for anything else.

A bonfire of gratified lust was roaring around in Lucky’s skull. Hor­mones washed through him in visible tides. With surgical delicacy, she rubbed him with three oiled fingertips. Instantly, an aurora of utter bliss boiled through him. He teetered on the brink of unconsciousness.

This was the world’s most human “humane intervention.” It was the one consoling act that, during its few sweet minutes, could obliterate loneliness. Obscure horror. Dismantle grief.

The famed rewards of Heaven for the warrior-martyr were seventy­two heavenly maidens doing just this.

* * *

THE AIRLOCK INTO THE FABLED MARS DOME was very likely the single most paranoid security space in all of China. The Mar­tian dome was under the strictest official state quarantine, so the disin­fected visitors went in there wearing single-seamed, quilted space gowns, soft little foamy space boots, and nothing else whatsoever. Visi­tors were allowed no tools, no possessions, no equipment of any kind. Not a fleck. Not a speck. Their bare humanity.

Sonja always had trouble with this airlock, for there were old bits of shrapnel inside her: pieces of another human being. A suicide bomber. Lucky and Sonja tenderly held hands on their waffled and comfortless plastic bench while the security scanners whirred overhead. There was nothing much to do except to gaze out the windows.

The Martian airlock featured two oblong portholes. Their shape mimicked the two world-famous portholes in the Martian landing cap­sule. These portholes helped some with the monotony of security scans, for the portholes offered boastful views of downtown Jiuquan.

Certain knowledgeable pundits called Jiuquan “the planet’s most ad­vanced urban habitat,” although, as a supposed “city,” Jiuquan had its drawbacks. Jiuquan, which had sprung up around China’s largest space­launch center, resembled no previous “city” on Earth.

Jiuquan bore some atavistic traces of a normal Chinese city: mostly morale-boosting “big-character” banner ads—but it had no streets and no apparent ground level. Jiuquan consisted mostly of froth, foam, and film. It looked as if a fireworks factory had burst and been smothered with liquid plastic. Solar-sheeted domes more garish than Christmas ornaments, linked with pneumatic halls and rhizomelike inflated free­ways. Piston elevators, garish capsules, ducts and dimples and depres­sions, decontamination chambers. Hundreds of state laboratories.

Jiuquan was thirty-eight square kilometers of zero-footprint, a young desert metropolis recycling its air and all its water. Jiuquan was an arti­ficial Xanadu where fiercely dedicated national technocrats lived on their bioplastic carpets with bioplastic furniture, interacting with bio-plastic screens, under skeletal watchtowers and ancient rocket launch­pads.

Oil-slick paddies of bacterial greenhouses, deftly fed by plug-in sew­ers, created fuel, food, and building materials, all of it manufactured straight from the dust of the Gobi Desert. A city built of dust.

A radical yet highly successful experiment in sustainability, Jiuquan was booming—it was the fastest-growing “city” in China. It was sited in the Gobi Desert with nothing to stop its urban expansion but the dust. And Jiuquan was made of dust. Dust was what the city ate.

Sonja was finally allowed to clear the steely skeins of the Martian air­lock. Dr. Mishin, who had been waiting