The Caryatids

“Your mother is dead.”

Sonja looked him in the eye. John Montalban was telling her the truth. He never lied to her.

“She died in orbit two days ago,” Montalban told her. “Everyone in the Shanghai Cooperative Orbiting Platform was killed by a solar flare. In my family’s space station, my own grandmother was killed. It was a natural disaster.”

“I am sorry about your grandmother,” Sonja told him, and then her voice rose to a shriek. “This is the happiest day of my life! What luck! God loves me! She’s dead, John? She’s truly dead? She’s dead, dead, dead?”

“Yes. Your mother is dead.”

“You’re sure she’s dead? You saw her body? It’s not another trick?”

“I saw a video of the body. A few systems on that space station are still operational. Most of it was stripped by that solar blast. That was a world disaster, Sonja. Communications are scrambled across the Earth… power outages, blackouts on every continent—that was the worst solar storm in recorded history. It was bad and it came out of nowhere. So this is not your happy day, Sonja. This has been a very grim and ominous couple of days for the human race.”

“The human race? Ha ha ha, that counts me out!” said Sonja, and she was unable to restrain the bubble of pure, euphoric joy that rose within her. Happiness lit the core of her being. She began to dance in place. She wanted to scream the glorious news until the sky rang.

Realizing that nobody would stop her, Sonja tilted her head back, threw put both her arms, and howled. She howled with a heartfelt pas­sion.

When Sonja opened her eyes, wetly streaming tears of joy, she could see from the looks on the grimy faces of the nomads that she still had her old magic. They were awestruck. Ten minutes alone with her as an inspired healer, and they would have done anything that she said.

“You don’t really feel that way,” John told her mildly. That was the worst thing about knowing John Montalban: that he was always telling her about her own true feelings. Worse yet, he was generally right.

“Djordje told the others about your mother’s death,” he said. “They’re all in shock.”

“I’m not shocked! I feel fantastic! I’m so happy. I want to dance!”

“Stop convulsing, Sonja. That first emotional reaction doesn’t last,” he told her. He put his arm on her protectively, and ushered her inside the tent.

The inside of the woolly ger tent was brisk and garish: there were scat­tered carpets, plastic ammunition crates, gleaming aluminum stewpots, and grass-chopping equipment. The place reeked of new-mown hay.

“I felt that I was just getting to know your mother,” said John. “Her twisted motivations were the key to the whole Mihajlovic enterprise, but… no extent of her paranoia could protect her from a fate like that. There wasn’t a cop, spy, general, or lawyer on Earth who could dig Yelisaveta out of her flying bolt- hole-and yet she was dead in ten min­utes. Killed by space weather. I’d call that cosmic retribution, if not for the forty other international crewmen up there. Those poor bastards had maybe six minutes’ warning of that catastrophe, and not one damn thing they could do to save themselves. Not one damn thing except to watch the wave roll in and fry them. I hate to think about a death scene like that.”

Sonja remembered her taikonaut training. “Everyone is dead in the space station? All of them? They had a radiation shelter.”

John shook his head. “For a blast of that size? That flare was ten times bigger than planet Earth!”

“The sun blew up? Truly?” That was a difficult matter to grasp.

“The sun is a star, Sonja. Stars are unstable by nature. Some stars are violently unstable.”

Lionel entered the tent and noticed his brother’s mournful look. His face fell in instant sympathy. “My grandmother was a very fine lady,” Li­onel offered, voice low. “She was the kind of great lady that a woman can become, when she’s been poor, and hungry, and homeless, and a nobody.”

John beamed at his younger brother. He was proud to see his fellow aristocrat commiserating with the little people.

Now the fuller extent of the strategic situation dawned on Sonja. The event that had happened changed everything. “You say that the Chinese space station is empty? Nothing in it but corpses?”

“Corpses,” John agreed. “The Chinese station is one more large, failed, overextended technical megaproject. Although I had nothing to do with stopping this one myself.”

Lionel smirked. “I think you’re selling yourself a little short there, John.”

Montalban shot his brother a warning glance.

“What?” Sonja shouted. “What is it this time, what have you done? What are you doing, John? What, what?”

“Not so loudly, please,” said Montalban.

A busy nomad council of war was convening inside the ger. Outrid­ers from a distant cell had arrived. The terrorists were briefing each other, issuing orders and making contingency plans. They were doing it all with paper. Little slips of grass parchment. Charcoal ink brushes.

“They never use electricity,” said Montalban, “because it makes them too easy to track. That fact is making me, and my big correlation engine here, into the largest electronic-warfare target in a hundred kilo­meters. There are Chinese hunter-killer teams wandering out there, with who knows what kinds of weaponry. They use the local civilian populations for target practice.”

For the first time, Montalban’s bodyguard spoke. He spoke in a stiffly proper Beijing Chinese, and he spoke to Sonja. “This man said, in En­glish, ‘hunter-killer teams.’”

“Yes, he did say that, sir,” Sonja told him.

“Red Sonja, you should tell your friends in Jiuquan not to send any more ‘hunter-killer teams’ into these steppes. Because we hunt them and we kill them.”

“May I ask your name, sir?”

“I am Major General Cao Xilong, director of the army’s General Po­litical Department.”

“You were a very able ideologist and military political thinker. You were a legend in your field.”

“That,” said Cao Xilong, “is why they have assigned me to oversee these fat Californian subversives in their ridiculous hats.”

Montalban looked on, smiling benignly. Foreign languages had never been an American strong suit.

Sonja smiled politely at Cao Xilong. “May I inquire why your col­leagues found it necessary to attempt to liquidate me with a flying bomb?”

“Yes. That matter is simple. We cannot allow the doomed Chinese regime to unilaterally impose their first- strike capacity against us. Politi­cal violence and war must be reinscribed into the geographies and ar­chitectures of cities in ways that—while superficially similar to feudal Chinese walls against roaming Mongols—inevitably reflect contempo­rary political conditions. Important here are these distinctions.”

Major General Cao Xilong paused heavily, mentally searching for something he had memorized from a screen.

“•First, the demonstrated ability of the Jiuquan Space Launch Cen­ter to rival us in flourishing under postapocalyptic conditions.”

The general was actually speaking aloud in bullet points. Sonja had never heard such a thing done before. It was deeply alarming.

“•Second, the seamless, ubiquitous merging between security, cor­rections, surveillance, military, and entertainment industries within China, making conventional urban-guerrilla warfare useless.

“•Third, the proliferating range of postglobalist private, public, and private-public bodies legitimized to act against nation-states, among whom we of the World Provisional Survival Empire must number our­selves.”

The general stopped counting his fingers. “Contemporary cities are particularly vulnerable to focused disruption or appropriation, not merely of the technical systems on which urban life relies, but also to the liquidation of key human nodal figures who serve as the system’s human capital.”

The general then raised a fingertip. “The worst threats among those state running dogs are provocative figures who foment new relation­ships emerging from the long-standing interplay of social and urban control experiments practiced by the state elites against the colonized posturban peoples. Through continually linking