The Caryatids

that some lethal Chinese Scorpion team walks up to the two of us, now, out of nowhere, and we end up dead. Dead today. I’m gambling our lives, and the Earth’s future, on something crazy that happened forty-eight hours ago. I’m gambling that the Acquis and the Dispensation have faster reflexes, after a catastrophe, than any nation-state. And they might dither. Or quarrel. And forget all about their necessity for speed. And brilliancy. And lightness and glory, and then we are both dead. And then we’re not two rich idiots from Califor­nia who are provisionally dead. We’ll be the ashes of history.”

Lionel pointed at Sonja. “There is her. You know that means hope.” “What, you mean Sonja? What about Sonja?”

“I mean all of them. I mean the Mihajlovic Project. That was your ul­timate feat. That one was your greatest triumph, that was the most hu­mane one, the most decent and loving Relinquishment of all.”

Seeing the look on her face—Montalban always did that—­Montalban was quick to apologize to her. “You have to forgive him, Sonja. Lionel’s just a kid.”

“Oh no,” said Sonja through gritted teeth, “I love to hear him talk about us.”

Lionel was stricken. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, Sonja. You are family—just like I said. You know that.”

“What are you doing here, John? What is your great new purpose? You must tell me. I might be able to save you.”

“Well,” Montalban said, “at first, I came out here to the desert to dig up the buried brains of the state. Maybe it’s a useless twenty-year-old backup, but even if its human cloned apparatus rebelled against it and set fire to it, there has to be a great deal of historical evidence buried down there. And I wanted that evidence, of course. We Synchronists al­ways want history. Because history is the ultimate commercial resource. Someday the human race will have to come to terms with the vast genocide in China, and what the state did to the human beings within its grasp. Of course the state itself is never going to reveal that historical truth. So it is up to us, the outside scholars, the researchers, to steal whatever evidence we can.”

“Evidence of what? The state saved Chinese civilization.”

“Well… ‘genocide’ is such an emotionally loaded term… But it’s entirely obvious from consumer demographic studies that the people who hindered the state—the burdens to its technical functions—were eliminated. There were over a billion Chinese people twenty years ago, now there are just under half a billion. No elderly, to speak of. No men­tally ill. The handicapped are entirely gone. Criminals, liquidated. Even the people in the security apparatus, who were performing the liq­uidations, were themselves mostly purged… Even the male-female gender disparity was honed way back. The current China is very safe and peaceful. It’s a hyperefficient machine.”

“The strong survived. The weak died in the troubles. That’s what hap­pened.”

“No, Sonja, that is just the party line. The state killed the weak and unfit. It controlled so many aspects of daily life that it had a million dif­ferent methods to cull its herd.”

“That is a slander and a lie.”

“I know it’s not politically correct of me to say that, but demograph­ics never lie.” Montalban shrugged irritably. “Look… I’ve gotten so used to combating the unthinkable, that I forget how the unthinkable can shock people. Yes, there was a genocide in China, during China’s climate crisis. You look into the walled bubble from outside the walled bubble, and the dirty murk in there is very obvious. I’m not angry about it. I’m not condemnatory. I don’t even want to discuss it right now. We in California could have accepted a hundred million refugee Chinese. We didn’t do that. Nobody let them out. So of course they had to die. The real genius of the solution was programming machines to do the dirty work so that politicians could keep their hands clean.”

John Montalban was rubbing one hand against the other. “My theory is that the architects of the regime’s Final Solution were about thirty-five Chinese statesmen. I surmise that they were the very same thirty-five guys who were cloned, and then trained for war in a godforsaken bomb shelter buried in the middle of nowhere. They did that terrible thing be­cause they were patriots. Then they marched out to die like heroes along with their own victims, leaving one last ace in the hole. They died in their own genocide and they left their clones. That’s my big hypothesis. I haven’t proved that idea yet. I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to prov­ing it. But it’s the sort of thing I have to know for my own satisfaction­so that I know that I’m making real-world decisions.”

“If you libel the state in that fashion, the state will take reprisals against you.”

Montalban sighed. “I am not ‘libeling’ the state. The Chinese state is the world’s most remarkable case study in ubiquitous computing. It’s ‘ubiquity with Chinese national characteristics.’ I don’t consider that machine my enemy. It is not any moral actor, it’s a machine. I don’t condemn it. If the Chinese state committed ‘genocide,’ then the human race has committed ‘geocide.’ The ‘Fossil Fuel Project,’ that was infi­nitely worse. That was the worst and most comprehensive blunder that our species ever committed. Every human being had some share of guilt in that monstrous crime. Am I ‘libeling’ us when I point out that the human race got what it asked for? We blew it with the world’s biggest gamble, and the minor stunt I happen to be pulling right now, that is just another return to the same table with much smaller stakes.”

Lionel offered his brother a canteen. “John’s been running at pretty much full steam for three days straight. I don’t think he’s slept for three hours. Ifhe sounds a little overwrought, you need to cut him some slack.”

Montalban sat down on a patterned carpet; his burst of oratory had drained him. The nomad tent had suddenly grown crowded. While John had passionately ranted, busy tribesmen had carried the pots and kettles from the place and cleared a small arena. A crowd had gathered, sitting cross-legged, chattering and munching snacks. Fried meat of some kind. It smelled like fried rats.

“Hey wow! Entertainment!” said Lionel. At the prospect, he bright­ened so much that he almost seemed to glow.

An overpowering melody came from nowhere, a sourceless wave of powerful, thudding music. A woman strode into the tent, carrying the soundtrack with her.

She wore a spangled golden headdress, a veil, a sequined bra, a span­gled vest, and two thin skirts of overlapping chiffon. Bells chimed around her ankles and golden bangles jingled on both her arms. Her eyes were caked in kohl and her palms were stained red with henna.

She glided into the center of the tent, barefoot on the carpets, bathing in the crowd’s eager, yelping applause.

Her music faded to a steamy, rhythmic clicking. She stamped her slippered feet in time so that her silver anklets jingled, and banged her red palms so that the bracelets clashed.

Then she gazed seductively around her crowd, and saw Sonja. She stopped at once.

“Now we’re in for it,” Lionel groaned.

“I thought I told you to keep Biserka under wraps,” said Montalban. “Where did she get that crazy costume?”

“Downtown Hollywood maybe? She’s so tricky!”

Shivering with rage, the veiled dancer stalked over to confront John Montalban. “You have just completely ruined my best scene.”

“We didn’t know you were having a scene,” said Lionel.

“I especially didn’t know you were stealing Mila Montalban’s best theme music,” said John.

Biserka yanked the veil from her painted lips. “How did she get in here?” Biserka demanded. “You said she’d been killed by airplanes and robots and something.”

“Last night that seemed pretty likely,” John said, “but Sonja’s a trooper.”

Biserka turned to glare at Sonja. She spoke Chinese. “Well: Look around you. I win.”

“Are you speaking to me?”

“What are you, bitch, five years old? I’m telling you that I win! You know that I win. You tried to chase me out of China: well, these are my people here. These are my very special people, the people who love me, the people who are all my good friends.”

“Where did this ragtag find the money to hire you?”

“I did it for love,” Biserka shrieked. “You’re the one that’s the merce­nary! You whore, just look at them, look at their faces, see how much they love me! I taught them everything! I taught them what the real world is really like! Before me, they were like lost children.”

Lionel intervened. “What’s the name of your big victory dance, Bis­erka? Tell me about your cool new