The Caryatids

“Djordje, suppose that I go to Europe, and I lose my temper there, and I kill you? ”

“Oh, you would never do that!” George lied. “Any more than I would ever kill you.”

Sonja thought about his proposal for all of fifteen seconds. No, his sad, meager, bourgeois little notions wouldn’t do.

“George,” she told him sweetly, “I want you to help me leave Ji­uquan.”

“Great, great! Excellent news! Now you’re talking sense! You name the date!”

“I want you to find some Provincial Reconstruction Team—Acquis, Dispensation, whoever—located in central Asia. Well outside the borders of China, out in the desert, where the wild people are. Get them to put in a formal request for my aid and expertise. It’s always much easier for me to travel outside China when the state has the formal documents.”

“All right, fine, one small moment here,” said George, “let me use my correlation engine! With this amazing new business tool, I can change your life from right here in my chair! My new network engine is Californian! Inten years the whole Earth will have a new economy!”

Sonja’s keen ears heard George busily tapping at keys. “’Scythia’?” George said, almost at once. “Would ‘Scythia’ do for you? Scythia is a poststate disaster region in the middle of Asia. You could go anywhere in Asia and claim you were going to ‘Scythia.’”

“I know about Scythia. I also need special travel gear, George. Some private-militia, hunter-killer, Scorpion- tag-team, covert-penetration gear.” Sonja paused. “That’s not for me. It’s a wedding gift.”

This demand made George unhappy. “You know that I stopped facil­itating that market. Those years were the bad old years. Those years are behind both of us now.”

“I’m sure you didn’t forget how to globally traffic in arms.”

“Sonja, don’t say that sort of thing about me. That hurts my feelings. I am paying to do this for you, and I will not pay to see you get killed in a desert. I want you to not get killed, that is my program. Forget rushing into the wild desert with many big guns. That is not practical.”

“I have to leave here. I’m attracting trouble. So I have two choices: space, or the desert. We have no manned launches scheduled in Ji­uquan. Oh, there is one third choice: if I’m willing to go to Antarctica. The ice desert. In Antarctica, I would be wearing a giant nuclear­powered robot suit and building glaciers with my fists.”

George was interested. “Is it so bad for you in Jiuquan that the state would send you into exile in Antarctica? That’s the sister project to that giant Chinese project in the Himalayas.”

“How did you know all that?”

“Never mind.”

“Antarctica is very like Mars. The Chinese state would reassign me to build fresh ice at the South Pole. There I would be out of reach of any flying bombs. Except for the state’s own flying bombs.”

“That’s a strange tangle,” George said thoughtfully. “Your state’s plan for preserving your welfare is very ingenious and very not-human. An autonomous bureaucracy makes peculiar, lateral moves.”

“The Chinese state loves me,” Sonja told him. “I’ve always had a spe­cial rapport for ubiquitous systems.”

“You don’t want to go to Antarctica?”

“No,” she shouted, “I don’t want to hide from the bandits in a nuclear robot suit! That useless strategy is for cowards! You find the bastards, you triangulate their position, and you fry them! Then you seize their com­puters and phones and arrest everyone that they know. That’s my war.”

“Are you required to say that sort of thing, Sonja?”

“I don’t ‘say’ that. I do that.”

“Let me do another search on my beloved new engine,” said George. “It never fails to hit on correlations of major interest.”

George tapped away. He was such a soft European idiot. George had no grasp of harsh reality; he was useful but weak. The state needed strong people, like herself and the Badaulet. It needed human agents willing to venture beyond its limits.

Being a nation, the Chinese state had many national limits. It held power: because it commanded the rivers and the national canals. The state commanded anything to do with the nation’s precious water re­sources: the distilleries, dams, the reservoirs, the plumbing, the sewers, the water-treatment recyclers… the streets, the traffic… the national power grid, the urban video system, the telecoms, the archives and every Chinese satellite, of course…

George was postnational, global… but his beloved “global busi­ness” had been selling human flesh in public, when, during China’s worst crisis, the Chinese state never grieved and it never faltered and it never gave up restoring and extending control.

The state controlled public health. The state destroyed disease. The Chinese state destroyed disease with the ruthless and dispassionate effi­ciency of a computer defeating human grandmasters at chess. Sonja hated and feared disease more than any other horror she had witnessed. Any enemy of disease was Sonja’s friend. She was grateful for what the state had done.

“Scythian ice princess,” George announced.

“What did you just call me?”

“This is a beautiful correlation here. Only a very speedy and glorious network could have linked these phenomena. Listen to this: I am look­ing at a Scythian ice princess. She’s not pretty, because she is a dead Bronze Age woman. She was buried in central Asia in a tomb of per­mafrost. But: That permafrost was melting quickly. So the Chinese used their Martian ice probes to search for frozen tombs in the Asian desert… and the Chinese found this Scythian princess, this tattooed mummy that I am seeing at this moment, and they dug her up with a se­cret strike-and-retrieval team. That ancient corpse is under scientific study—there in Jiuquan, in the same hospital, with you! She is not one hundred meters away from you! Top that, eh?”

George chuckled gleefully. “She is two floors away from you, locked inside a medical refrigerator! Correlation engines are amazing technol­ogy, aren’t they? I have used business-to-business networks all my life, but this is supernatural. Can you imagine how much data the net has sorted, to find that out so quickly? And I possess that speed and power, on my desk, here in Vienna! The world will be transformed!”

Sonja ran her fingers gently over the seething, blistering, restorative exfection on her forearms. “George, why should I care about your ‘Scythian ice princess’?”

“You don’t care—and I don’t care that you don’t care, because I care. This dead Scythian woman has human gut flora that dates back before antibiotic pollution. She has her original human commensal microor­ganisms! Does that sound familiar to you?”

Sonja was in Jiuquan, so of course microbes sounded familiar to her. “George, no one wants any ancient, wild microbes. Those microbes are backward and feudal. Those microbes are of academic interest only. You want Jiuquan’s fully advanced internal gut microbes, created in the state’s genetic-recombinatorial labs. Those microbes are state secrets, and very valuable.”

“Oh no, I want those good old-fashioned all-natural microbes,” George said firmly. “Just-don’t scrape any nasty goo out of some Asian corpse. I want the genetic sequences of the microbes. Just the pure data. Could you supply that microbe data to me? Could you do that, Sonja?”

“Probably. I am a public health officer here. Yes, I could do that.”

“Excellent!”

“If I get you those Scythian microbes—will you ship me what I need for my military operations, with no more trifling?”

“Yes.”

* * *

SONJA METHODICALLY READIED HERSELF for vengeance: to find out who to kill, why, and how. Vengeance was a rather more thor­ough, thoughtful, and comprehensive effort than it had once been for Sonja.