The Caryatids

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 a

"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 Vie

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.