The Caryatids

When Sonja had first arrived in China—fresh off the boat at the age of nineteen—she had known that she was heading for a cataclysm. She had desired that fate, she had sought that out: the bold desperado, with­out a homeland, joining a foreign legion.

She’d instantly fallen in with much bolder desperadoes. All the men Sonja had loved were keen-eyed, domineering, headstrong, fearless men. They were men at home in hell. However, their courage, while al­ways necessary and always in short supply, was not what was needed to make a cataclysm stop.

On the contrary: Raw courage was superb at provoking cataclysms. Any gutsy teenager, boldly careless of his life, could empty his gun into some archduke and create colossal chaos. Stopping cataclysms required imposing order.

Sonja had come to understand the order as the hard part of the work. To end a war meant either restoring an old order, or invoking a new order. Neither work was easy. Order, unlike war, required unglamorous skills such as political savvy, business sense, and rugged logistics.

Restoring order required a crisp, succinct articulation of the big pic­ture and why one’s efforts mattered in that regard. It required a tre­mendous knowledge of details. It needed the patience to build a long-lasting, big-scale enterprise that would not collapse instantly from guerrilla attacks. And it needed a cold-blooded ability to make firm choices among disgusting alternatives.

George was a merchant and a fixer, never the kind of man she liked. Yet George, for all his countless demerits, had a definite rapport for ubiquitous systems. George had a positive genius for handling border delays, security compliances, fuel costs, detours on the planet’s weather-shattered roads and bridges, documentation hurdles, no-fly zones and confiscatory carbon-footprint taxes, port congestion, cargo security, reg­ulations both in- state and offshore, liaisons with manufacturers, out­sized and overweight shipping modules… Boring things, dull things. Yet George could ship things to her, and that mattered.

Bravery mattered much less. A brave woman could be “very brave” in a field hospital. She might hold the hand of a dying child while it coughed up blood. That moral act required a courage that left dents all over one’s soul, while, in the meantime, any tedious holdup in the flow of medical supplies could kill off entire populations, not tender children killed tragically in their ones and twos, but masses killed statistically in their hundreds and thousands.

Privates and sergeants bragged about courage: digging foxholes and kicking in doors. Colonels and generals talked soberly about supply trains and indirect fire. Barbarism, disorder, chaos, and murder were the ground state of mankind, so foxholes and ambushes were in infinite supply. Public order was about leveraging the things that were in short supply: with sturdy supply trains and superior firepower.

It had taken Sonja quite some time to comprehend all this, because, as a nineteen-year-old adventuress, she had been far too busy learning Chinese, sopping up a patchy medical training, and establishing her personality cult. But she had finally learned such things, well enough. She’d had teachers.

The fortunes of war favored the bold, if the bold survived. Sonja was nothing if not bold. Eventually, an important apparatchik had de­scended from the murky heavens of Beijing’s inner circles to manifest a personal interest in her glorious career.

This gentleman was Mr. Zeng, a thoughtful, open-eyed chief of the “Scientific Research Bureau.” Which was to say, Mr. Zeng was a Chi­nese secret policeman.

Having been publicly befriended by the important Mr. Zeng, Sonja had become a de facto member of Zeng’s “clique,” or “power center,” or “faction,” or “guan-xi network,” as those terms were generally phrased by offshore Beijingologists. The twelve weeks Sonja had spent in high­society Beijing as Zeng’s “protegee,” or “client,” or “escort,” or, not to put too fine a point on it, as one of his mistresses, was the closest Sonja had ever come to achieving true power within the Chinese power structure.

Mr. Zeng was a top domestic spy in an authoritarian, cybernetically hyperorganized, ultrawealthy nation-state in a calamitous public emer­gency. So Mr. Zeng had extreme and scary and even lunatic amounts of power. This power did not make Zeng happy. He faced many serious problems.

His beloved country was measled all over with Manhattan Project­style technofixes for his nation’s desperate distress. As state secrets, these bold, wild projects were so opaque that nobody could number them. Furthermore, Beijing’s cliques were so corrupted that they might well have sold these projects to somebody. The Acquis and Dispensation doted on buying China’s crazy projects, and, mostly, shutting them down.

Mr. Zeng clearly derived some benefit from his personal liaison with Sonja. As a woman, Sonja lightened a few of his many cares of office. Sonja would not have called their activity a “love affair,” as she didn’t much care for him personally. Still, for her, it was definitely a transfor­mative encounter.

Mr. Zeng was not merely a top spy, but also a Stanford-educated bio­chemist who spoke four languages. Zeng was a searingly intelligent workaholic. The only trace of whimsy in Zeng’s character was the guilty pleasure he took in the garish and decadent entertainment vehicles of Mila Montalban. Everyone in Zeng’s sophisticated social circle doted on gaudy American pop entertainment. Hollywood was so entirely alien to their deadly crises that it seemed to refresh their spirits as nothing else could,

Mr. Zeng was an icily rational gentleman. It showed in the methodi­cally sacrificial way that he played board games with his cronies.

In their pillow conversations, Zeng gently explained to Sonja that “saving civilization” (her professed goal in life) had very little to do with her brashly tackling emergencies with her own two hands. No, if any civilization was going to be “saved” at all—said Mr. Zeng—the planet’s civilization was in so much trouble that it could only be saved by something new, huge, unexpected, extreme, and indeed almost in­describable.

The planet’s current power structure: the sudden rise of the Acquis and the Dispensation, and the abject collapse of nation-states generally, with the large exception of China—that power structure was predicated on arranging just such a situation. The planet was dotted all over with radically extreme experiments intended to “save civilization.”

The problem was that most of these innovations did not work. They could never work, because they were too far-fetched. It cost a lot to try such experiments. Worse yet, it was much harder to shut down failed ex­periments that it was to invent brand-new ones.

The largest such intervention in the world was, of course, Chinese. It was the Chinese effort to geologically engineer the Himalayas so that China’s rivers would once again flow. China had performed this feat with the twentieth century’s single most radical world-changing tech­nology: massive hydrogen bombs.

Mr. Zeng had been among the people planning and executing that national effort. Chinese geoengineering had not been an easy plan to explain to concerned foreigners. China had gotten its way in the matter by offering to drop hydrogen bombs on anyone who objected.

Glumly recognizing China’s implacable need to survive, the planet’s other power players had bowed to the Chinese ultimatum. There was a gentleman’s agreement to let the Chinese get on with it, and to not dwell too painfully and too publicly on their insane explosions digging monster ice lakes in the Himalayas. Instead, the Acquis and Dispensa­tion turned up their quiet diplomatic pressure, while enjoying the ben­efits of some ancillary planetary cooling.

That was how the serious players worked while literally saving the modern world.

So—Zeng continued gently, playing with her curls—if Sonja truly wanted to “save civilization,” she should not continue to do that by tak­ing small-arms fire in her medical tents at the edges of thirst-crazed cities. Serious- minded statesmen did not bother with such activities, since soldiery was one of the vilest of callings and best reserved for angry and ignorant young men. Instead of behaving in that backward way, Sonja should consider volunteering for duty at the highly prestigious Ji­uquan Space Launch Center, where there were extremely advanced and unexpected medical experiments under way. These antiplague measures involved combining microbes and medical scanners, and the implications of their success were extreme, even more extreme than blasting many large new holes in an Asian mountain range.

Sonja did not, at first, respond to Mr. Zeng’s recruitment proposal. She knew for a fact that Zeng was a secret policeman, and she knew in her heart that he was a mass murderer.

Mr. Zeng was not a small-scale, face-to-face killer in the bold way of the warriors that she knew and loved best. Mr. Zeng was the kind of killer who deployed a nuclear warhead the way he might set a black go­stone on a game board.

So, instead of going to Jiuquan, Sonja boldly volunteered to take some of those newfangled scanners and