The caryatids, p.24
The Caryatids, page 24
“Djordje, suppose that I go to Europe, and I lose my temper there, and I kill you?”
“Oh, you would never do that!” George lied. “Any more than I would ever kill you.”
Sonja thought about his proposal for all of fifteen seconds. No, his sad, meager, bourgeois little notions wouldn’t do.
“George,” she told him sweetly, “I want you to help me leave Jiuquan.”
“Great, great! Excellent news! Now you’re talking sense! You name the date!”
“I want you to find some Provincial Reconstruction Team—Acquis, Dispensation, whoever—located in central Asia. Well outside the borders of China, out in the desert, where the wild people are. Get them to put in a formal request for my aid and expertise. It’s always much easier for me to travel outside China when the state has the formal documents.”
“All right, fine, one small moment here,” said George, “let me use my correlation engine! With this amazing new business tool, I can change your life from right here in my chair! My new network engine is Californian! In ten years the whole Earth will have a new economy!”
Sonja’s keen ears heard George busily tapping at keys. “ ‘Scythia’?” George said, almost at once. “Would ‘Scythia’ do for you? Scythia is a poststate disaster region in the middle of Asia. You could go anywhere in Asia and claim you were going to ‘Scythia.’ ”
“I know about Scythia. I also need special travel gear, George. Some private-militia, hunter-killer, Scorpion-tag-team, covert-penetration gear.” Sonja paused. “That’s not for me. It’s a wedding gift.”
This demand made George unhappy. “You know that I stopped facilitating that market. Those years were the bad old years. Those years are behind both of us now.”
“I’m sure you didn’t forget how to globally traffic in arms.”
“Sonja, don’t say that sort of thing about me. That hurts my feelings. I am paying to do this for you, and I will not pay to see you get killed in a desert. I want you to not get killed, that is my program. Forget rushing into the wild desert with many big guns. That is not practical.”
“I have to leave here. I’m attracting trouble. So I have two choices: space, or the desert. We have no manned launches scheduled in Jiuquan. Oh, there is one third choice: if I’m willing to go to Antarctica. The ice desert. In Antarctica, I would be wearing a giant nuclear-powered robot suit and building glaciers with my fists.”
George was interested. “Is it so bad for you in Jiuquan that the state would send you into exile in Antarctica? That’s the sister project to that giant Chinese project in the Himalayas.”
“How did you know all that?”
“Never mind.”
“Antarctica is very like Mars. The Chinese state would reassign me to build fresh ice at the South Pole. There I would be out of reach of any flying bombs. Except for the state’s own flying bombs.”
“That’s a strange tangle,” George said thoughtfully. “Your state’s plan for preserving your welfare is very ingenious and very not-human. An autonomous bureaucracy makes peculiar, lateral moves.”
“The Chinese state loves me,” Sonja told him. “I’ve always had a special rapport for ubiquitous systems.”
“You don’t want to go to Antarctica?”
“No,” she shouted, “I don’t want to hide from the bandits in a nuclear robot suit! That useless strategy is for cowards! You find the bastards, you triangulate their position, and you fry them! Then you seize their computers and phones and arrest everyone that they know. That’s my war.”
“Are you required to say that sort of thing, Sonja?”
“I don’t ‘say’ that. I do that.”
“Let me do another search on my beloved new engine,” said George. “It never fails to hit on correlations of major interest.”
George tapped away. He was such a soft European idiot. George had no grasp of harsh reality; he was useful but weak. The state needed strong people, like herself and the Badaulet. It needed human agents willing to venture beyond its limits.
Being a nation, the Chinese state had many national limits. It held power: because it commanded the rivers and the national canals. The state commanded anything to do with the nation’s precious water resources: the distilleries, dams, the reservoirs, the plumbing, the sewers, the water-treatment recyclers … the streets, the traffic … the national power grid, the urban video system, the telecoms, the archives and every Chinese satellite, of course …
George was postnational, global … but his beloved “global business” had been selling human flesh in public, when, during China’s worst crisis, the Chinese state never grieved and it never faltered and it never gave up restoring and extending control.
The state controlled public health. The state destroyed disease. The Chinese state destroyed disease with the ruthless and dispassionate efficiency of a computer defeating human grandmasters at chess. Sonja hated and feared disease more than any other horror she had witnessed. Any enemy of disease was Sonja’s friend. She was grateful for what the state had done.
“Scythian ice princess,” George announced.
“What did you just call me?”
“This is a beautiful correlation here. Only a very speedy and glorious network could have linked these phenomena. Listen to this: I am looking at a Scythian ice princess. She’s not pretty, because she is a dead Bronze Age woman. She was buried in central Asia in a tomb of permafrost. But: That permafrost was melting quickly. So the Chinese used their Martian ice probes to search for frozen tombs in the Asian desert … and the Chinese found this Scythian princess, this tattooed mummy that I am seeing at this moment, and they dug her up with a secret strike-and-retrieval team. That ancient corpse is under scientific study—there in Jiuquan, in the same hospital, with you! She is not one hundred meters away from you! Top that, eh?”
George chuckled gleefully. “She is two floors away from you, locked inside a medical refrigerator! Correlation engines are amazing technology, aren’t they? I have used business-to-business networks all my life, but this is supernatural. Can you imagine how much data the net has sorted, to find that out so quickly? And I possess that speed and power, on my desk, here in Vienna! The world will be transformed!”
Sonja ran her fingers gently over the seething, blistering, restorative exfection on her forearms. “George, why should I care about your ‘Scythian ice princess’?”
“You don’t care—and I don’t care that you don’t care, because I care. This dead Scythian woman has human gut flora that dates back before antibiotic pollution. She has her original human commensal microorganisms! Does that sound familiar to you?”
Sonja was in Jiuquan, so of course microbes sounded familiar to her. “George, no one wants any ancient, wild microbes. Those microbes are backward and feudal. Those microbes are of academic interest only. You want Jiuquan’s fully advanced internal gut microbes, created in the state’s genetic-recombinatorial labs. Those microbes are state secrets, and very valuable.”
“Oh no, I want those good old-fashioned all-natural microbes,” George said firmly. “Just—don’t scrape any nasty goo out of some Asian corpse. I want the genetic sequences of the microbes. Just the pure data. Could you supply that microbe data to me? Could you do that, Sonja?”
“Probably. I am a public health officer here. Yes, I could do that.”
“Excellent!”
“If I get you those Scythian microbes—will you ship me what I need for my military operations, with no more trifling?”
“Yes.”
SONJA METHODICALLY READIED HERSELF for vengeance: to find out who to kill, why, and how. Vengeance was a rather more thorough, thoughtful, and comprehensive effort than it had once been for Sonja.
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, out-sized 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 high-society Beijing as Zeng’s “protégée,” 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 Project—style 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 go-stone on a game board.
So, instead of going to Jiuquan, Sonja boldly volunteered to take some of those newfangled scanners and microbes and test them out in practice in the field. Mr. Zeng remarked that this was characteristic of her. He said that it was endearing, and that he had expected her to say that. He praised her bravery, patted her bottom wistfully, gave her a number of valuable parting gifts, and told her to stay in touch.
So Sonja swiftly fled from Zeng’s embraces and took his spotless state-secret equipment to the filthy mayhem in Harbin, where that equipment more or less worked. It worked against all sane expectations and it worked radically and it sometimes even worked beautifully.
Mostly, it worked because no one in her barefoot-medical team, including Sonja herself, had ever quite understood what they were supposed to do with cheap lightbulbs that made flesh as clear as glass, or black-box devices that combated infections by “fatally confusing” germs. In Harbin, everyone had made a lot of valuable fresh mistakes.
Before the Harbin episode, Red Sonja had been notorious within paramilitary circles, but after Harbin, Sonja had become an official national heroine. Which was to say, she was a kind of sleekly feminine hood ornament for the state’s least-imaginable enterprises.
To refuse such a role was unthinkable. To accept it was unimaginable. Passionately embracing the unimaginable—that always moved the world more effectively than horribly embracing the unthinkable.
This was the course of action which had directly brought Sonja to her present predicament. And she had had methods by which to deal with such problems. Zeng’s finest gift to her was a word: a simple, quiet word. That word was the password to a clandestine web service, run by Zeng’s intelligence apparatus. Like Zeng himself, this service was in the state, and of the state, and for the state, and yet it was somehow not quite of the state.
