The Caryatids

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 i

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. Hormones 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.

THE AIRLOCK INTO THE FABLED MARS DOME was very likely the single most paranoid security space in all of China. The Martian dome was under the strictest official state quarantine, so the disinfected visitors went in there wearing single-seamed, quilted space gowns, soft little foamy space boots, and nothing else whatsoever. Visitors 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 sca

The Martian airlock featured two oblong portholes. Their shape mimicked the two world-famous portholes in the Martian landing capsule. 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 advanced 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» ba

Jiuquan was thirty-eight square kilometers of zero-footprint, a young desert metropolis recycling its air and all its water. Jiuquan was an artificial 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 sewers, 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 airlock. 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 considered 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 consultant," 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 impartially 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 earpiece. "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."