The Caryatids

Time passed; earnestly waving his cowboy hat, Lionel made a point of galloping up to catch them. “Lunch break!” he crowed.

Lionel was the only one among them hungry. Sonja and the Badaulet had altered guts, and were drinking fermented grass from their rumen bag. Much the same seemed to be true of the young marauder who called himself “Vice Premier Li Rongji,” and whose scarred, shabby horse calmly dropped an ashy black dung.

Sonja had yet to see this tribal bandit dismount from his horse. A su­perb rider, he and his ugly animal might have shared the same blood­stream.

With a showy gesture, Lionel offered them the roasted flesh of a mar­mot. Marmots existed in great profusion in the region, since they had lost most of their natural predators. Lionel gnawed this chewy ground­hog’s flesh with a deft pretense of enthusiasm.

Then Lionel introduced himself to the Badaulet, though the two had no language in common. Nothing daunted, Lionel pulled out a hand­held translation unit. He managed to spout a few cordial words at the warnor.

The Badaulet’s black eyeballs were rigid with hate. He despised Li­onel. Lionel, sensing this, redoubled his efforts to charm.

Though every human instinct warned her against it, Sonja decided to speak to Vice Premier Li Rongji. She walked empty-handed to the flank of the clone’s horse and looked up into his masked face. He had stiff,  taxidermy wolf ears and two mummified eye holes.

He was carrying, besides his long sniper rifle, a blunt combat shotgun that launched 40-millimeter grenades. Those searing, metal-splattering grenades hit almost as hard as artillery shells. One single man with one single such gun could briskly destroy a quarter of a city. He had a city­breaking machine on the rump of his ugly horse.

And his deadly grenade gun was made mostly of straw.

“Sir,” she said, “I have heard that your esteemed name is Li Rongji.”

“I am Vice Premier Li Rongji.” His Chinese was excellent, clearly his first language. He even had the posh Beijing accent of high Chinese state officials.

“I have also heard, sir—although it was before my time—that Vice Premier Li Rongji was the premier architect for relief efforts during the great Xiaolangdi dam catastrophe.”

“Yes, Xiaolangdi was one of my many important burdens of office be­fore my unfortunate demise.”

“Do you know who I am, sir?”

“I know that you are the mistress of this man’s elder brother. You must have a powerful hold on that soft man’s soft heart, for him to take such trouble for you, a mere girl, in the midst of his negotiations with us.”

“I am Sonja, the Angel of Harbin.”

He instantly wanted to kill her. His callused hands tightened on the horse’s reins. He was hungering to kill her.

Yet he was intelligent, and hardship had schooled him not to act on impulse. Furthermore, he was keenly afraid of Lucky. He tugged the muzzle of his wolf mask. “Since you are Red Sonja, then this man who accompanies you must be the world-famous Badaulet.”

It had not occurred to Sonja that the Badaulet was “world-famous.” But if this vast steppe and desert was “the world” to this man, then, yes, Lucky was much more famous than herself. “That indeed is he.”

“Please be so kind as to introduce me to this great man and gallant warrior.”

There was nothing for it but for everyone to trade places. Lionel jumped into the bucketlike robot with her, while the Badaulet mounted Lionel’s balky, snarling horse. With a few brutal whacks and sharp kicks, Lucky showed the horse that he meant business. The horse obeyed him humbly.

The Badaulet and Vice Premier Li Rongji were soon deep in con­versation.

“How many are they?” said Sonja. “How many members of his cult?” “Well,” said Lionel, lounging at his ease—for the robot’s reeling dance steps didn’t bother him at all—“there were originally thirty-five clones, down in their indoctrination bunker. After the clones blew that place up and escaped, each one of them started his own tribal global-guerrilla cell. They were pretty naive and sheltered people at first—basically, they were cave dwellers —but they’re clever. They were trained extensively on guerrilla tactics and statecraft. Their state was training them to emerge from their bunker after the Apocalypse and take over the world.”

A chill shot through Sonja. “That’s what we were trained for. We were also taught that we would take over the world. We would support the world with ubiquitous computing.”

Lionel was unsurprised by this story; it was certainly old news to him. “Every survivalist project has its own vogue. Survival projects are always faddish and fanatical. To ‘take over the world’? That must be the natural killer application for a secret clone army… All those clone projects were survivalist projects. They all failed, all of them. Because they lacked transparency.”

Lionel lifted his elegant brows and spoke with great conviction. “Rad­ical projects need widespread distributed oversight, with peer review and a loyal opposition to test them. They have to be open and testable. Oth­erwise, you’ve just got this desperate little closed bubble. And of course that tends to sour very fast.”

“Your brother is preparing you for politics?”

“I’m an actor.” Lionel shrugged. “An actor from California. So, yes, of course I’m preparing for politics.” Lionel shifted himself in the robot’s bucket, so he could study the Badaulet more closely. “Did you really marry that guy, Sonja?”

“Yes.”

“I can sure see why! He’s a fantastic character, isn’t he? Look at the way he moves his elbows when he rides. Look at his feet.” Lionel nar­rowed his eyes, shifted himself, muttered under his breath. He was mimicking the Badaulet. Copying his movements and mannerisms. There was something truly horrible about that.

It was well after noon when they arrived at the nomad camp of the grass people, a place much as she had first imagined it. There was noth­ing to mark this camp as a menacing terrorist base, although this was what it was. To the naked eye, the terror camp was a few shabby felt tents and a modest group of livestock.

From the desert silence came a steady babble of happy voices, for the people gathered within this camp rarely met one another.

The largest tent in the camp was full of rambunctious children. The children were shrieking with glee. They were supposed to be attending a school of some kind, but the excitement of their clan reunion was proving too much for them. Their teachers—young women—were un­able to get the children to concentrate on the classroom work at hand, which was building toy airplanes. Many toy airplanes. The kind of toy airplanes that could be glued together by a ten-year-old child.

Sonja’s pack robot excited alarm in the camp. People rushed to see it, guns in hand. The locals looked like any group of central Asian refugees, except that they had many more children and they looked much better fed. Their parents had probably been urbanites a genera­tion ago: people who went to Ulaanbaatar to see the beauty contests and drink the Coca-Cola.

The marauders stared at her, for camp people always stared at the Angel of Harbin. Some touched her white robes with wondering fin­gers.

In the hubbub, the Badaulet vanished.

John Montgomery Montalban appeared from the patchworked flap of a tent. Much like his brother, John also had a masked escort… his bodyguard, interpreter, tour guide—or the armed spy who was holding him hostage. Another of the clones.

So far, she had seen two clones among thirty-five. Sonja had vague hopes of killing all of the clones, but thirty-five? Thirty-five highly trained zealots, walking the Earth, scattered far across a desert? That was enough to found a civilization.

“I’m glad to see you, Sonja. Welcome.”

Sonja climbed out of the robot and ignored his offered hand.

John Montalban pursued her, his dignified face the picture of loving concern. He still loved her. Sonja knew that he still loved her. He really did love her: that was the darkest weapon in his arsenal, and it brought on her a bondage like no other. “Sonja, I have some bad news for you. Please brace yourself for this.”

“What now?”