The caryatids, p.31
The Caryatids, page 31
His fatuous words brought her nothing but pure dread. For all his tireless global meddling, he was from California, a place where people believed that the future was golden. While she was from the Balkans … a broken place, the cockpit of empires where the lost chickens pecked each other’s eyes out…
The world to come was so much worse, so much more direly threatened than she had ever let herself believe …
But at least her mother was dead. No matter the city-killing look in the eyes of that nomad general—at least she had that transcendent joy to fully treasure. It was all she could do not to laugh in his masked, carnivorous face.
She suddenly broke from the general and strode into the middle of the tent, her ribs heaving.
Montalban followed her, touched her shoulder. “These people here … they’re not beyond hope! They’re just another runaway experiment.” John rubbed his temples, suddenly weary. “I have so many colleagues working on ‘Relinquishment’ issues—colleagues in both the Dispensation and the Acquis … ‘Relinquishment,’ that’s what we call it when we cram those techno-genies back into their bottles… ‘Relinquishment’ is difficult-to-impossible, and this next stunt I hope to pull—it’s beyond me. It does not walk the Earth, it is literally out of this world.”
Lionel spoke up. “I could make a good case that you’re the best Relinquishment activist of all time, John. You have no peer in that work.”
“Oh, come now.”
“It’s the truth! How many is this? Seven big projects defeated? Eight? You’re doing the seventh and the eighth Relinquishment at the very same time!”
“Oh, it can’t possibly be eight. I’m only thirty years old.”
Lionel was cheering his older brother through his moment of doubt. “There were the hypervelocity engines. That was the first project you killed off.”
“That wasn’t ‘Relinquishment.’ Those were commercial competitors to our family’s launch sites.”
“There were those German tissue-culture labs.”
“I was only tangentially involved in that scandal. Besides, there’s tissue-culture practice all over the Acquis nowadays, so I sure wouldn’t call that a victory.”
“You knocked a huge hole in the genetics industry with that intellectual-property battle over DNA as an interactive network instead of patentable codons.”
“That was all science paperwork! That was just about hiring smart lawyers and printing some letterhead. I didn’t lift a finger.”
“They lost billions, though. In terms of damage to hostile technologies—that was your best spanner thrown in the works, ever.”
John Montalban was rallying. “Well, maybe. Maybe you’re right about that one.”
“Last summer you chased those neural fanatics out of the Balkans practically single-handed.”
“They’ll be back. Those boneware people are like mice. You chase ’em out of one spot, they pop up in a hundred other places … How many wild stunts does this make out of me? You’re tiring me.”
“There’s our hosts here. They’ll sure need some taming.”
“ ‘Constructive engagement.’ Simple diplomacy. They just need to be brought around to the world system, taught what side their bread is buttered on. Anyone could do that.”
“But you spotted their hidden tomb, John. Tons and tons of burned machinery. The backup records of the Chinese state. That’s gonna be the biggest archaeological discovery since the First Emperor of China burned all the books.”
“No it won’t. Bandits have been raiding that tomb for years now. There’s probably some idiot raiding it right now. I had my informants, I had researchers, I even had inside help … and, hell, Lionel, the chances are really great 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 satisfaction—so 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. If he 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 routine.”
Biserka shot him a grateful look. “It’s all about victory! And what happened in outer space! And my mother’s death! And it’s my interpretative dance performance about the world’s bravest, noblest people—my people! They are going to overthrow all the systems, and cover the Earth in free blackspots, and break the walls of surveillance and haul the oppressors out of there … and pile their heads up in pyramids!”
Hands on her hips, Biserka drew a breath. “I choreographed it all by myself! I call it ‘The Seven-Veiled Dance of Shiva, the Goddess of Destruction.’ ”
“Shiva is a male god,” said Lionel.
“Really?”
“Yeah, Shiva is a male dancer, like I am.”
“Never mind that, Lionel,” said Montalban calmly. “Let Biserka dance. She has an eager public waiting here.”
Biserka pouted. “You’ve gone and spoiled it all. How could you let her come in here? I was really, really happy today, for the first time in my whole life! I was happy for maybe one hour! I can dance! You know I can dance. I learned some hot new moves in Los Angeles, and you were going to love those! Now my timing’s all messed up and it’s all ruined.”
“No problem,” said Lionel, beaming supportively. “Just get ready to run your theme again. When I throw out my hand like this”—he gestured—“that’s your cue.”
Without warning, music blasted from Lionel’s flesh: brassy, insistent, heart-thudding. Lionel strode confidently into the empty performance space, drew himself up with a winning smile, and did three backflips with a half gainer. Then he threw out his hand.
The stunned audience, who had never seen such behavior from any human being, howled in awed delight.
Biserka came to with a sudden start. She began to dance.
It was not that Biserka danced shamelessly. It was much worse than that. Biserka knew what shame was, and she was using their shame as a weapon to titillate them. Biserka danced corruptively. One wanted to hide the eyes of children from the spectacle. Though the children were quite enjoying it.
Sonja knew that it was her duty to put a swift end to this. She would kill Biserka. Killing Biserka would be the crown of her lifetime.
Sonja was stopped short by a hand on her elbow. It was the Badaulet.
Lucky put his lips next to her ear, so that she could hear him over the howls and the sticky, slinky music. “Our hosts have been telling me about the Chinese state,” he said.
“They’re lying to you.”
“Well, you are my wife, and I want you to tell me the truth.”
Sonja wrenched her arm free from his grip. “I always tell the truth to my men.” No matter how much it hurt them.
“Are these young men really the Chinese state? They’re the former leaders of the Chinese state, only living in the wilderness?”
“Yes. That is true.”
“But they are bold men like me, and brave like me, and they ride and fight like me. And they do not hide behind Chinese walls because they aim to conquer the world.”
“They won’t succeed.” She pointed. “He is going to conquer the world. He’s already conquering the world. He’s doing it right now while he’s watching that slut dancing for him.”
The expression on Montalban’s face could have been canned and poured over cereal. He was transfixed by Biserka’s dancing. He was fascinated.
Biserka sensed this and was playing to him. Biserka knew that she had him. She had found some aching hole in him, found a stained chink in the white knight’s armor. It wasn’t, after all, that hard to find. That part of him that belonged to her. She was reeling him in.
The Badaulet watched Biserka’s flurried writhing with unfeigned disgust. “Your lord and master there is a decadent weakling.”
“I’m sure he would tell you that he is ‘healthily in touch with his darker side.’ ”
“I could kill him. He’s not so much of a man. His younger brother, the one who dances like a woman, he’s strong, but he has long hair. They are only two men, they’re not two gods. In the eyes of the one God, I’m as good as them. Only, I have pride and cleanliness, and decency, and aspirations to please my Creator. If I put my body next to his body, I can put my knife through him.”
“Don’t do that. To kill a guest is dishonorable. Also, he’s so rich that he might not stay dead.”
“You love him,” he told her. “That’s why you urge me not to kill him. I want you to tell me, as my wife, that you love me better than him. That you will leave him and his life, and live my life.”
“I know that you deserve that from me,” she told him, “but I already swore once by everything I held sacred that I’d never see him, or hear him, or touch him again, and, here he is.” Sonja began to cry. “I swear I can’t help it.”
“Any woman among these noble people would be a better wife to me than you are,” he said. “They all admire me very much, they need my warrior skills. If I join them, I will be high in rank, they will give me twenty women like you. Better women than you.”
“I don’t doubt it,” Sonja said between her sobs. “The only thing I ever wanted was to be dutiful and good. I’m just so tired and sick of everything. I can’t go on.”
“Look at the way that slave dances for him,” he said. He was revolted. “She’s like a worm. She’s an unclean reptile. I can’t take part in this disgusting orgy, this is wrong. Our marriage is over, Sonja. I Divorce You. I Divorce You. I Divorce You!”
Sonja howled in pain and grabbed for him. “Oh please don’t divorce me, please don’t!” He tore himself from her grip and stalked away.
Sonja was trembling from head to foot. She was cracking inside. There was an abyss inside her. She had lived for years in that abyss once. It was a red abyss.
Carried by blazing impulse, Sonja stalked into the middle of the dance floor. She raised both her arms overhead, but this incantatory gesture did nothing. Biserka had seized everyone’s attention. Biserka had stripped off three of her veils and was beaming with malicious delight. She capered around Sonja, waving her chiffon headdress, delicately wriggling.
