The Caryatids

To refuse such a role was unthinkable. To accept it was unimaginable. Passionately embracing the unimaginable-that always moved the world more effectively than horribly embracing the unthinkable.

This was the course of action which had directly brought Sonja to her present predicament. And she had had methods by which to deal with such problems. Zeng's finest gift to her was a word: a simple, quiet word. That word was the password to a clandestine web service, run by Zeng's intelligence apparatus. Like Zeng himself, this service was in the state, and of the state, and for the state, and yet it was somehow not quite of the state.

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 sca

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 sca

That was not the end of the grand story, either: that was only its begi

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.