The Caryatids (27 page)

Sonja had come to treasure poetry, during the long marches between flaming cities. On the deadly, broken roads of a China in chaos, in the teeming refugee camps, she had come to understand that a memorized poem was true wealth—it was a precious work of art, a possession that could not be burned or stolen.

Sonja crooned:

"
No one attacks her with the long lance,

No
one shoots her with the strong bow.

Suckling her progeny, rearing her cubs,

She trains them in her own savagery.

Her reared head becomes the great wall

Her waving tail becomes the war banner.

The greatest pirates from the eastern sea

Would dread to meet her after dark,

The savage tiger, met on the western road,

Would terrify the greatest bandits.

What good is any sword against her?

When she growls like thunder, hang it on the wall!

From the secret foothills of Tai mountain

Comes the sound
of
women weeping,

But government regulations forbid

Any official to dare to listen."

Lucky was blissfully quiet now. He had wisely chosen not to argue with her anymore. A host of ducts and long hydraulic chambers and strange stiffening flows of blood . . . And yet, human beings emerged from these oblong glands and their conduits, men and women were sired by all this gadgetry—well, not herself, of course, but most people had a father . . . People emerged as single-celled genetic packets out of this complex, densely innervated, profoundly temperamental fluid--delivery system. The secret of humanity. Here it was, in her hands.

No matter how many human bodies Sonja encountered, and how well she grasped them and their intimate functions, there was always some new magic in a new one.

Sonja switched filters and gazed straight into Lucky's brain. His arousal was ferociously devouring a host of tagged radioactive sugars. Sex was like a bonfire in his basement.

Women often knowingly told other women that "men only wanted one thing," but it took a sensorweb to catalogue and reveal that. To see it was to believe it. To know all was to forgive all. A man wanted that one thing he wanted because there
wasn't room
in
his head
for anything else. A bonfire of gratified lust was roaring around in Lucky's skull. Hor-mones washed through him in visible tides. With surgical delicacy, she rubbed him with three oiled fingertips. Instantly, an aurora of utter bliss boiled through him. He teetered on the brink of unconsciousness.

This was the world's most human "humane intervention." It was the one consoling act that, during its few sweet minutes, could obliterate loneliness. Obscure horror. Dismantle grief. The famed rewards of Heaven for the warrior-martyr were seventy-two heavenly maidens doing just this.

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THE AIRLOCK INTO THE FABLED MARS DOMEwas very likely the single most paranoid security space in all of China. The Mar-tian dome was under the strictest official state quarantine, so the disin-fected visitors went in there wearing single-seamed, quilted space gowns, soft little foamy space boots, and nothing else whatsoever. Visi-tors were allowed no tools, no possessions, no equipment of any kind. Not a fleck. Not a speck. Their bare humanity.

Sonja always had trouble with this airlock, for there were old bits of shrapnel inside her: pieces of another human being. A suicide bomber. Lucky and Sonja tenderly held hands on their waffled and comfortless plastic bench while the security scanners whirred overhead. There was nothing much to do except to gaze out the windows.

The Martian airlock featured two oblong portholes. Their shape mimicked the two world-famous portholes in the Martian landing cap-sule. These portholes helped some with the monotony of security scans, for the portholes offered boastful views of downtown Jiuquan.

Certain knowledgeable pundits called Jiuquan "the planet's most ad-vanced urban habitat," although, as a supposed "city," Jiuquan had its drawbacks. Jiuquan, which had sprung up around China's largest space-launch center, resembled no previous "city" on Earth.

Jiuquan bore some atavistic traces of a normal Chinese city: mostly morale-boosting "big-character" banner ads — but it had no streets and no apparent ground level. Jiuquan consisted mostly of froth, foam, and film. It looked as if a fireworks factory had burst and been smothered with liquid plastic. Solar-sheeted domes more garish than Christmas ornaments, linked with pneumatic halls and rhizomelike inflated free-ways. Piston elevators, garish capsules, ducts and dimples and depres-sions, decontamination chambers. Hundreds of state laboratories.

Jiuquan was thirty-eight square kilometers of zero-footprint, a young desert metropolis recycling its air and all its water. Jiuquan was an arti-ficial Xanadu where fiercely dedicated national technocrats lived on their bioplastic carpets with bioplastic furniture, interacting with bio-plastic screens, under skeletal watchtowers and ancient rocket launch-pads.

Oil-slick paddies of bacterial greenhouses, deftly fed by plug-in sew-ers, created fuel, food, and building materials, all of it manufactured straight from the dust of the Gobi Desert. A city built of dust. A radical yet highly successful experiment in sustainability, Jiuquan was booming—it was the fastest-growing "city" in China. It was sited in the Gobi Desert with nothing to stop its urban expansion but the dust. And Jiuquan was made of dust. Dust was what the city ate.

Sonja was finally allowed to clear the steely skeins of the Martian air-lock. Dr. Mishin, who had been waiting for her, rose to his feet and hastily jammed his dust-grimed laptop into his dust-grimed bag. Leonid Mishin was a Russian space technician who had wandered the world like Marco Polo and finally moored here in Jiuquan. Mishin dwelt inside the Mars simulator, as one of its few permanent residents. Everyone else in Jiuquan also resided in an airtight bubble of some kind, but Mishin's bubble, the Martian simulator, was officially consid-ered the most advanced bubble of them all. This made up somewhat for the fact that Dr. Mishin was never allowed to leave.

Dr. Mishin labored in his confinement as a "senior technical con-sultant," which was to say, he led a career rather similar to her own as a "senior public health consultant." They were both emigre servants of the Chinese state, multipurpose human tools used to fill cracks in the walls of Chinese governance, or to putty over a rip in its seams. The Chinese state had thousands of such foreign agents. The state impar-tially rewarded any human functionary that it found to be skilled and convenient. Lucky was still battling with the airlock's fabric. The interfaces there had baffled better men than him.

"You slept with that barbarian," Mishin concluded at once. Sonja rolled her eyes and ran her fingers through her hair.

''Yes, you did that, you did!" Dr. Mishin mourned. "What is wrong with you?
Him,
of all people? A creature like
him?
Have you finally lost all self-respect?"

"Leonid, do you think our age difference matters? I'm only twenty-seven."

"They cut off people's heads out there! They do it on video!"

"The Badaulet is very loyal to the state. He believes that the Chinese state is divinely sanctioned by the Mandate of Heaven. You should take him seriously, he's an important political development."

"He's a tribal lunatic! There's no reason for you to involve yourself with him! What do you expect to gain from him? There's nothing left but sand and land mines between here and Kazakhstan!" Why was Mishin so bitterly jealous? His sexual politics were his worst flaw. Yes, true, she had a penchant for taking lovers, but this was China. For every hundred women in China there were a hundred and thirty men. What else should the world expect?

And Jiuquan, a deeply technical city, had an even more destabilizing male-female imbalance. Mishin was from Russia, where the men died young and the women were lonely. He was being a fool. Lucky kicked through the airlock, snarling and slapping at his ear-piece. "What is wrong with that stupid tent, that ugly prison? It trapped me in there and it tried to kill me!"

"Badaulet, this is the wise scientist that I told you about: Dr. Leonid Mishin. No man in this world knows more about the future potential of Mars. Dr. Mishin will be our official state guide today." Lucky, still angry, stared in raw disbelief at the chilly pink sun crawl-ing the seamless, alien, purplish sky. The Martian extraterrarium, logi-cally, ran on Martian time—it featured 24.6-hour days and 687-day years. The wine-dark plastic firmament displayed accurately Martian stellar constellations, including two racing, tumbling blobs of light that mimicked Phobos and Deimos.

Mishin was usually a polished Martian tour guide, but he was upset with her. Yet he'd been so kind and eager about it when she'd said she was coming to visit him. What a shame.

Lucky rubbed his nose. "Why does Mars stink?"

"The breathable air within this model Martian biosphere," Mishin recited grudgingly, "was created, and is maintained, entirely by our ex-traterrestrialized organisms. Through the ubiquitous oversight of the state and the heroic efforts of the dedicated scientific workers of the glo-rious Jiuquan Space Launch Center—" Mishin drew a breath. "—this project has become the model, not of Mars today, but of the
future
Mars! Your translation understands all that, sir? Yes? That's very good!" Mishin wheeled in his insulated worker boots, waving his uniformed arms at the glowing Martian sunset and the spare, frozen scrub that dot-ted the rusty soil. "At this moment you are privileged to step within the Mars of Tomorrow! Here, spread all around you, is the living, air-breathing harbinger of Humanity's Second Home World! The develop-ment of Mars is China's most ambitious megaproject—and this dome, which is merely a model of that future effort, ranks with the Great Wall of China as the most ambitious construction on the surface of planet Earth!"

It was a pity that they'd lost valuable time while trapped within that balky airlock. With the setting of the pink sun in its tear-proofed plastic sky, the Martian bubble was getting bitterly cold. The three of them crunched briskly across the rust-red cinders, staring at the Chinese and Latin botanical labels stuck in the tough, humble scrub: harsh tufts of spiky needlegrass
(Stipa gobica).
Indestructible, color-less saltwort
(Salsola passerina).
Bone-colored Mongolian sagebrush
(Altemisia xerophytic).
Mishin rambled on, but Sonja had heard his lectures. She could not help but remember what John Montgomery Montalban had quipped while he was walking in here. She and Montalban had been lovers at the time, and, to her stunned amazement, Montalban had somehow managed to smuggle a fancy glass ball into the Martian dome. It was a tiny, liquid city that he confidently tossed from hand to hand. Montalban had whispered to her, endearments mostly, but some-times he would slyly subvert the official discourse with classic poetry from his distant California . . . The Dispensation, the Acquis, they al-ways tried to mock or ignore Chinese national accomplishments. The global civil societies were afraid of nation-states. Especially the Chinese state, the largest and most powerful state left on Earth. One hundred years in the past, Mao Zedong, the Great Helmsman, had chosen the province of Gansu, the city-prefecture of Jiuquan, the Gobi Desert at the edge of Mongolia, as a locus of Communist futu-rity. This was where China's spacecraft would conquer the sky. Little did Mao know that the sky of the Gobi Desert was the true future of China . . .

China, its sky reddening with endless smokestack spew, China as its own Red Planet . . . The world had never seen a technological advance so headlong, so relentless, so ambitious in scope and so careless of Earthly consequence as China's bid to dominate the global economy . . .

That was how John Montgomery Montalban perceived things around here . . . As a lover, she missed Montalban keenly, all the more so in that she had sworn never to meet him again. No one had ever been kinder, sweeter, more considerate, more nearly understanding of her troubles and pains . . . Of the five men that she had truly loved in her life, John Montalban was the only one who wasn't yet dead. A jerboa bounded between her booted feet like a fur-covered tennis ball. Then they scared up a big captive flock of tiny finches, each thumb-sized desert bird with its own unique ID and onboard health-tracking instruments.

One greasy, bean-laden bush had thoroughly mastered Martian sur-vival. It was bursting through the alkaline soil on an eager net of roots and runners. The way it flung itself out like that, all runners, green pods, and rooty crisscrossings . . . it was rather like a little city of Jiuquan, when you looked at it. Lucky dodged the orating scientist, slipping around to place her body between himself and the other man.

This Martian extraterrarium, the most ambitious biosphere in the world, had cost as much to build as the damming of a major Chinese river. It surely deserved a much greater world fame — but the topsy-turvy life trapped within here was so frail, so advanced, and so imperiled that the state rarely allowed any human beings inside this place. The Mar-tian biosphere was gardened by sterilized robots, Earthly twins to the state-controlled devices remotely exploring Mars.

Quite likely the state had wisely sensed that human beings had al-ready wrecked one biosphere and would be cruelly thrilled to smash this new one.

The life struggling here had been carefully redesigned for extrater-restrial conditions. Some cloned organisms proved themselves in prac-tice, while most mutants perished young. The extraterrarium was an entire experimental ecology of genetic mutants . . .

All creatures very much like herself, all of these. All those little birds, those hopping, shivering, tunneling rodents, the half-dozen runty cen-tral Asian ponies whose sixty-six chromosomes firmly distinguished them from domesticated horses . . . They were all her Martian siblings under the skin. Every creature in here had been cloned—especially the bacteria. The Martian soil—that unpromising melange of windy silt, crunchy bits of meteoric glass, volcanic ash, and salty pebbles—it was damp and alive.