The Caryatids

These sensory devices in her head—alien impositions—joined the chips of bone shrapnel lodged deep in Sonja’s body. For seven years, she’d been part of a zealot’s personal graveyard. Tiny chips of the dead woman’s bones were melting away in her flesh, year by year. Sonja was metabolizing them.

Sonja was sure she would get used to her ears. As for the presence of another woman’s bones in her own flesh: those had expanded her op­tions. Vera, Radmila, Biserka: they were merely identical clones, while Sonja had become a hybrid chimera. Life always had fresh options for survivors.

This desert town in Gansu Province had once catered to wealthy tourists, gallivanting from around the world to tramp the Great Wall. Like all globalized tourist towns, the place had once been sophisticated. The town was now deader than Nineveh, for an urban water war had broken out here.

Water wars had a classic look all over China. They were small wars, or large deadly riots, fought with small arms: with automatic rifles, shoulder rockets, and improvised bombs.

The weapons were wielded by people who had once been cheerfully peaceable neighbors, but were crazed with hunger, thirst, and despair. It was dreadfully simple for China’s host of workshops and forges to manufacture rifles. Cheap, simple rifles were much easier to make than, for instance, little homemade robot airplanes. Their computerized sights were brutally accurate. They were rifles reborn as digital cameras: point, click, and kill.

Some part of the civilian population here had hurriedly surrounded the last water wells. They had hastily piled up barricades to survive the stinging sniper fire from the excluded.

Thereafter, the besieged held the water, but those outside the walls could run around to make more guns and bombs. The dead city was a visible history of wild sorties, doomed assaults, random acts of arson, mining and countermining.

The stricken town, which had once sold placid postcard views of its Great Wall, was a crazy mass of tiny walls. These small walls had been piled up, in thirst and heat and darkness, by thousands of human hands, using hand tools.

The walled divisions tore through former neighborhoods. They were probably ethnic divisions: between the local Han Chinese, the Hui Chi­nese, Uighurs and Kazakhs and Kyrgiz, as well as a few hundred trapped foreign tourists and businesspeople, unable to believe how suddenly their pleasantly exotic life had gone to the extremely bad.

With every human soul covered head to foot in windy torrents of black Gobi dust, with the air thick with miasma from merciless urban fires, no previous social distinction would have made much difference on the ground. A water war wasn’t a mere civil war but a hell on Earth, where you either seized water or you died.

Breathing through cloth, bricking up the windows, heaving their pos­sessions from their homes and stores to form impromptu barricades, struggling to climb through burnt-out high-rises to dominate the free­fire zones… in a matter of weeks, with hand tools and their own backs, they had churned their urban fabric into this vast, scumbled-up, fatal labyrinth: a graveyard of sandbags, cruel palisades, sharpened stakes of iron reinforcing rod, high-piled, bullet-riddled washing machines, the twisted hulks of bomb-seared cars.

Eventually, the survivors had been led on an organized long march, the weakest of them dropping like flies, to some new locale where the state guaranteed them some water. The people of their city had never come back to their death trap. If they ever returned, they would never again live in this doomed, unsustainable way. They would be living in Jiuquan-style bubbles where every drop of the water was micromanaged by state machines.

The rains had been good this year. The ruined town was rankly over­grown with tall, weedy, sulfur-yellow flowers.

It took them four hours to march outside the line of sight of the Great Wall, with its mystically swaying and Taoistically impartial wands. This effort achieved, they stripped themselves and buried every traceable relic of China in a cairn of anonymous rocks.

Sonja then made a special point of plucking the state’s radio ID tags from the flesh of their arms. That was a simple matter when you knew what you were doing, and, when done correctly, it was only slightly bloody.

They then climbed, barefoot, wincing, cautious, and entirely naked, over the crest of a long hill to the predetermined spot where George had hidden his bounty.

An unmanned cargo helicopter sat there. It was a kind entirely new to Sonja, though she considered herself a connoisseur of helicopters. Crazily lightweight and transparent, all veins and segments, it looked like a sleeping dragonfly.

It bore Indian markings, and if it had really fluttered in from whatever was left of India, it must have traveled a fantastic distance.

The cargo helicopter was lying precisely where its global positioning system had placed it, inside a rugged little declivity, with poor lines of sight but a decent amount of sunshine for its exhausted batteries.

Sonja had a hard-won philosophy when it came to long marches through harsh territory. Sonja believed in traveling light. Her cargo con­sisted mostly of fabrics.

Everything else within the helicopter, she had ordered as a wedding gift for the Badaulet. The Badaulet had no such minimalist philosophy about his own goods. On the contrary: He had a gorgeously barbarian “more is more” aesthetic.

The Badaulet’s gifts were a sniper rifle, a plastic pistol, binoculars, a gleaming titanium multitool, self-heating meals for those of an Islamic persuasion, a canteen, chemical lightsticks, paracord, a radio, a razor­keen ceramic dagger, a global positioning system, ammunition, and a veritable host of horrible little marble-sized land mines.

The Badaulet was painfully shy about his nudity, so he quickly tun­neled into his desert camouflage. He swiftly disappeared. His new uni­form was spotted with colored chromatophores, like the hide of a squid. It had a similar bush hat, with a face net.

Sonja’s signature garment was her blindingly white robe. It was a sim­ple baggy mess of dust-repellent fabric. Any fabric that was “dust­repellent” was also somewhat skin-repellent, so it was a stiff and unforgiving thing.

Sonja lashed the fabric to her wrists and waist and ankles with her signature magic charms, which George had included in the ship­ment. Long, crisscrossed black cords, with hexagrams, yin-yangs, lucky ideograms, crucifixes, Stars of David, tiny Muslim moon-and-­crescents.

Ernesto had once told her that only a madwoman would dress in such fashion. She had made herself a big white target for snipers.

But Sonja, who unlike Ernesto was still alive, had sensed in some oc­cult fashion, she had known, that the war surrounding them was not about their supposed enemies: the real war was about the dust. It was about the black dust, gray dust, red dust, yellow dust, that catastrophic omnipresent filth that penetrated every aspect of human existence. Peace would come—it would only come—when brought by cleanli­ness. Cleanliness brought by something—an angel, a saint, a prophet, a machine, a system, an entity, anyone, anything capable—that was in the dust but never of the dust.

Time and again Sonja had walked into the hellholes where they stored the sick and dying—the dead factories, the empty schoolyards­where, at the first sight of her, a medic without any dust, the moaning, sobbing crowds fell silent…

In the midst of the filthiest inferno, there were people and things and actions and thoughts that were not of that inferno. They were beyond the grip of hell.

The people could never leave hell with bullets. They needed a figure shining and white and clean who would hold out her two compassion­ate hands and pour fresh cleaning water on their split and aching faces. Despair was killing them faster than any physical threat.

It was they, not she, who had begun hanging magic charms on her­—the knickknacks they’d been clutching in their desperate hope of re­demption. She looked different, she was different, and they were hanging meaning on her.

They needed to hope in order to live, and for a dying public, a pub­lic image brought hope. A radiance that might come to them, bearing a handheld lamp: radiance to the bedside of the sufferer at the midnight of the human soul. There to wash the filth from their suffering feet.

Hope would cure when all other methods failed, when other treat­ments weren’t even noticed. True anguish, the killing kind of despair, could only be relieved by ritual… If the sky turned black and the air was brown, an armed general could reason and bluster and bribe and threaten—not a soul would stir, even to