The caryatids, p.25
The Caryatids, page 25
Zeng’s gift was best described as a Chinese power-clique I Ching, a political fortune-reader. It read the tangled, subtle Chinese nation as one might read a sacred text.
The Chinese nation consisted of the vast, ubiquitous, state-owned computational infrastructure, plus the fallible human beings supposedly controlling that.
The state machine was frankly beyond any human comprehension. While the human beings were human: they were a densely webbed social network of mandarins, moguls, spies, financiers, taipans, ideologues, pundits, backstage fixers, social climbers, hostesses, mistresses, cops, generals, clan elders, and gray eminences; not to mention the mid-twenty-first-century equivalents of triad brotherhoods, price-fixing rings, crooked cops, yoga-fanatic martial-arts cults, and other subterranean social tribes of intense interest to the likes of Mr. Zeng.
Sonja did not fully trust Zeng’s I Ching because, just five months after entrusting the password to her, Mr. Zeng himself had been killed. Along with thirty-seven high-ranking members of his exalted clique—many people even more senior than Mr. Zeng himself—Mr. Zeng had smothered inside an airtight government basement in a Beijing emergency shelter.
This terrorist assassination, or mass suicide, or political liquidation—it might have even been a simple tragic accident during a heavy dust storm—had come with no visible warning. If Zeng’s gift were truly useful, then, presumably, Zeng should have used it to avoid his own death.
So: Maybe Zeng’s ambivalent gift was nothing more than a superstition, a pseudo-scientific magic charm against the pervasive fear so common to people in any authoritarian society. Maybe this service was a manly gesture that Zeng offered to all his women—not because it was helpful, but because it made his women feel better. There were times when Sonja despised herself, and felt sure that this was true.
Still, Sonja used it, because—as Zeng had pointed out—she herself was featured in it.
In Zeng’s weird network of slowly pulsing simulated blobs, she, Sonja Mihajlovic, was a small, fluffy blue cloud.
She was a little fluffy cloud, and, since her role was to legitimate the medical activities inside the Jiuquan Space Launch Center, she was a cloud of political obfuscation. Her purpose was to be the Angel of Harbin, and thereby to allow the Chinese state to quietly inject ID tags into every Chinese citizen, to quietly compile massive DNA databases of every individual, and to thoroughly scan the Chinese body of every Chinese individual, head-to-toe, at a cellular level.
To the extent that her reputation for bravery and integrity would stretch to cover this, Sonja was further to ensure the global credibility of the national blood samples, the microbial stool samples, the lymph samples and brain scans, the exotic probiotic gut organisms of possibly Martian descent … Everything and anything that China did to survive.
Totalitarianism was blatant, old-fashioned, and stupid: it stamped the face of the public with the sole of a boot, for as long as it could do that. A ubiquitarian state was different. Because it flung one, or ten, or a thousand, or a million boots every nanosecond, when no human being could possibly see or feel what a “nanosecond” was.
Sonja understood her role. She knew its consequences and she felt that she knew what she was doing. She chose to do these things, not for her own sake, but for the cause of public health.
Sonja had come to realize, through her own experience, that public health had little to do with any individual conscience. If a million people were dying, you didn’t heal them by crying over one of them. The issue was not the pain and grief to be found in any one sickroom, or one house, one street, one neighborhood, city, province—it was all about massive scaling powers, exponential powers-of-ten.
Did people die, or did you save people? People died with statistical regularity, until you found and used some power large and strong enough to avert their woe.
When that power reached a certain level of invasive ubiquity, the power of computation would directly confront and crush the power of disease. Because they were two rival powers. Diseases were everywhere, while surveillance was everyware. Everyware crushed diseases, subtly, comprehensively, remorselessly.
The sensorweb could scan the actions of bacteria invading a human body, and, like a Chinese army general, it could defeat that invading horde in real time.
Even an invading bacterium had a certain military logic: any germ had to observe its environment within the human body, orient itself, “decide” on a course of action, and then execute that strategy.
The state was far better at grasping such strategies than any bacterium could be. Once it had a human body firmly staked out in its scanners, it would wage a computational war-in-detail against internal disorders, baffling, frustrating, starving, arresting, and poisoning bacteria.
Wherever the bionational complex spread its pervasion, diseases gasped their last. Diseases simply could not compete. What the state’s nationware could do within the individual human body, it could also do at the level of streets, cities, provinces—everywhere within the Great Firewall of China.
This great feat was real, for she herself had seen it, and had done it in Harbin. It would take the world a while to understand what that accomplishment meant. It always took the world a while to comprehend such things. But it meant that infectious diseases were doomed. Diseases had been technically outclassed, they would not survive. That was a far greater medical breakthrough than older feats like sanitation, or vaccines, or antibiotics.
Bacteria would surely fight back—they always did. But this time, they were done. They could mutate against mere antibiotics, but they could never hide from the scanners. Being single-celled creatures, bacteria could never get any smarter. So epidemics, without exception, were going to be tracked down, outflanked, outperformed, and exterminated.
That was not the end of the grand story, either: that was only its beginning. One day soon there would be no hunger in China. People outside Jiuquan—outside China—they lacked basic understanding of the potential of a human gut with fully advanced, reengineered bacteria. But: Those newly farmed microbes made old-fashioned digestion, that catch-as-catch-can spew of wild internal microbes, seem as backward and primitive as hunting-and-gathering.
The new Chinese microbes turned people’s insides into booming internal factories of energy and protein: so tomorrow there would be no famine. The Chinese state was going to re-line the nation’s guts with the same seeming ease that the Chinese had once covered the planet’s feet with cheap shoes.
Never any more starving children, no more human bodies reduced to sticks of limbs and racks of protruding ribs. Obsolete. Defunct. Over. Nothing left of that vast tragedy. Not one microbial trace.
So: Two mighty Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Famine and Pestilence—they had already been shot dead in China. They were titans in scale, so it would take them maybe forty years to fall from their thundering black horses and hit the dust for good. But they were over, doomed. And she, Sonja, Angel of Harbin, ranked among the victors.
Plague and Starvation would be history. Their apocalyptic depredations would be forgotten as if such things had never occurred. In the future, they would have to be explained to people.
That still left Sonja’s two other Apocalyptic enemies, War and Death, still very much in the planetary saddle, but nevertheless, in Jiuquan—in Jiuquan!—she’d just been scorched by an antipersonnel bomb and yet she was going to be on her feet, healthy, unmarked, clear-eyed, and partially bionic, in a week. In ten days, at the most.
Developments of this scale, the most grandiose scale possible: These were the schemes that kept Sonja standing firm at her duties. Forged in the heat of combat, she was an iron pillar of the state.
Except on Mr. Zeng’s analytical screens, where the Angel of Harbin was not an iron pillar but a vulnerable fluffy blue cloud.
With her bioplastic notebook uneasily poised on her exfected knees in her watery hospital bed, Sonja saw, with a sinking, seasick sensation, that her blue cloud looked distinctly stormy. In Zeng’s world, this was the hexagram sigil and omen signifying that one was (in a colloquial translation) “getting too big for one’s boots,” that “the heat was on,” that “tomorrow’s prospects were dim.”
As she studied these cryptic hints, Sonja realized for the first time that Mr. Zeng’s service had a name in English: it was a “correlation engine.” She had been using a correlation engine all this time, in another language and another context. Apparently these radical techniques had escaped Chinese state secrecy, and become so common lately that even Western businesspeople like George saw fit to use them.
Sonja certainly was not in “business.” Sonja was a state heroine. Profits were not her concern—but purges were. As a state operative, if you didn’t already know for sure who the chosen victim was and why, then that victim was probably you.
This established, Sonja had to discover who had tried to kill her. There were three basic varieties of killers in China: the people supporting the state, the traitors against the state, and, worse yet, the people like herself and Mr. Zeng, the people definitely with the state yet not eminently of the state, people who were plausibly deniable and eminently disposable.
After some deft string pulling, the local police saw fit to share the results of their investigations with Sonja.
The attack plane had been vaporized by its payload of explosive. However, one of its wings and parts of its landing gear had cracked and fallen off. Those fragments were rich with criminal evidence.
For the Jiuquan police, any grain of stray pollen was a clue that blazed like an asteroid. The police knew the range of the plane, from its wing shape and its fuel capacity. They knew, roughly, what landscapes it must have overflown, because of the pollen lodged in its crude seams. They further knew that the plane had been hand-built, recently, in the desert, from snap-together panels of straw plywood.
It was a toy airplane made in a secret bandit camp—made from pressed Mongolian hay. The plane’s lightweight panels were so carelessly glued that they might have been assembled by a ten-year-old child.
As a further deliberate insult, the plane had somehow been salted with DNA from several high-ranking officials who had once been major figures of the Chinese state. Fake DNA evidence was no surprise to the local police, of course—even the cheapest street gangs knew how to muddy a DNA trail, these days. Still, given that the police in Jiuquan were absolutely sure to study DNA evidence, this was a nose-thumbing taunt, a knowing terrorist provocation. It showed a mean-spirited cunning that could only be the work of true subversives.
So, Sonja had the profile of her enemies: they were not of the Chinese state. They were ragtag political diehards, pretending to state connections, skulking outside the state’s borders, and trying to liquidate her. They were anti-state bandits who wanted revenge.
It had never been Sonja’s intention to provoke revenge attacks. Sonja had never wanted to kill anyone. Her first jaunt into China had been as a teenage camp follower in a medical relief column. Its poorly armored trucks were piled to bulging with rations, water barrels, tents, cots, bandages, antibiotics … Not thirty kilometers from port they’d been ambushed with rockets and small arms, their convoy shot to pieces and everything of value stolen by feral, screeching, dust-caked, rag-clad bandits who had scrambled back into the barricaded rubble that had once been their town.
That was Sonja’s introduction to the true situation on the ground, and what followed had been unspeakably worse. As Sonja’s first husband had put it: “It is necessary to incinerate the towns in order to save the cities,” and he had incinerated many such before he met the death he’d always courted.
Ernesto had been a brave man from a distant corner of the Earth who had come to offer his hands and his heart and his medical knowledge and his strong, shapely, noble back to a stricken people—and, as many did, Ernesto had swiftly found it necessary to shoot many of them. Specifically, Ernesto had to shoot the gangs of malcontents who interfered with his redemption of the masses.
Nobody called Ernesto the “Angel” of anything, because when he sent his convoys tearing through the Chinese landscape he moved like a bloody hacksaw through a broken leg.
Sonja had been his wife, a caress and a whisper of comfort to Ernesto in his darkest hours, yet China didn’t lack for bitter people who remembered things they had done. Along with many similar things Red Sonja herself had done since, in the same cause.
So: This latest episode of attempted revenge was part of her older story. It was simply a smaller and more personal story, because the scale of the havoc had dwindled. Bandits had once skulked in screaming thousands in the ruins of China’s major cities. Bandits were now skulking in crazy dozens in the dusty wilderness far outside the state’s armed boundaries. They were still bandits.
Bandit warlords came in a thousand factions, but they were all the same. Most were already gone, and the rest had to go.
AN UNMANNED POLICE VEHICLE deposited Sonja and her new husband at the ancient slopes of the Great Wall. Then it turned and fled with an unseemly haste back toward Jiuquan, leaving the two of them abandoned under the dazzling blue tent of central Asian sky.
If they were lucky in their lethal venture, they would never be seen by anyone. Sonja and the Badaulet were now a two-person “Scorpion team.” Their task was to venture across the wilderness, spy out the camp of their enemies, call in a covert strike, and have the bandits annihilated.
They had both done such work before, so the chance to do it in tandem was a blessing to them as a couple.
The Great Wall of China was a sullenly eroded, ridge-backed dragon on the Earth. The color of dirt—for it was mostly handmade of dirt—it wriggled over an astounding expanse of central Asia. In the state’s recent hours of need, technicians had brusquely drilled fresh holes and topped the Wall with the state’s surveillance wands, transforming an ancient barrier into a modern surveillance network.
The new Wall consisted of the old Wall, plus tall, thin, gently swaying observation towers. Each needlelike tower was blankly topped with a mystical black head, a sphere devouring every trace of light that touched its opaque surface.
No merely human being could outguess what the state watched with these towering wands, for, potentially, the state surveilled everything within the Wall’s huge line of sight. Not just passively absorbing light from the landscape, but sorting that light as data, sifting through it, searching it, collimating and triangulating and extrapolating from it … comparing each new nanosecond, pixel by pixel, to the evergrowing records of its previous observations.
The state’s impassive visual ubiquity rambled on for thousands and thousands of closely linked kilometers, rooted in the ancient bricks and dirt of the longest, heaviest human structure ever created, its black towers like a fruiting bread mold in the immemorial substance of the planet’s greatest fortress. There was not a single human guard along the new Wall. Like astronauts on the Martian surface, people were politically glorious yet practically unnecessary.
Hand in hand, Sonja and the Badaulet skulked past the monster ruins of a once-thriving tourist town. A life spent on horseback had made the Badaulet bowlegged, yet now he had an odd, spry, hop-along shuffle, for the Jiuquan clinic had done extraordinary things to the broken bones of his feet.
The medical operatives had also tactfully replaced Lucky’s bomb-blown ears, so that the two of them no longer needed any earplug translation units. Their new language translators were sophisticated onboard devices the size of flecks of steel, and they ran on blood sugar.
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.
