The Caryatids (31 page)

This gentleman was Mr. Zeng, a thoughtful, open-eyed chief of the "Scientific Research Bureau." Which was to say, Mr. Zeng was a Chi-nese secret policeman.

Having been publicly befriended by the important Mr. Zeng, Sonja had become a de facto member of Zeng's "clique," or "power center," or "faction," or "guan-xi network," as those terms were generally phrased by offshore Beijingologists. The twelve weeks Sonja had spent in high-society Beijing as Zeng's

"protegee," or "client," or "escort," or, not to put too fine a point on it, as one of his mistresses, was the closest Sonja had ever come to achieving true power within the Chinese power structure. Mr. Zeng was a top domestic spy in an authoritarian, cybernetically hyperorganized, ultrawealthy nation-state in a calamitous public emer-gency. So Mr. Zeng had extreme and scary and even lunatic amounts of power. This power did not make Zeng happy. He faced many serious problems. His beloved country was measled all over with Manhattan Project-style technofixes for his nation's desperate distress. As state secrets, these bold, wild projects were so opaque that nobody could number them. Furthermore, Beijing's cliques were so corrupted that they might well have sold these projects to somebody. The Acquis and Dispensation doted on buying China's crazy projects, and, mostly, shutting them down.

Mr. Zeng clearly derived some benefit from his personal liaison with Sonja. As a woman, Sonja lightened a few of his many cares of office. Sonja would not have called their activity a "love affair," as she didn't much care for him personally. Still, for her, it was definitely a transfor-mative encounter. Mr. Zeng was not merely a top spy, but also a Stanford-educated bio-chemist who spoke four languages. Zeng was a searingly intelligent workaholic. The only trace of whimsy in Zeng's character was the guilty pleasure he took in the garish and decadent entertainment vehicles of Mila Montalban. Everyone in Zeng's sophisticated social circle doted on gaudy American pop entertainment. Hollywood was so entirely alien to their deadly crises that it seemed to refresh their spirits as nothing else could, Mr. Zeng was an icily rational gentleman. It showed in the methodi-cally sacrificial way that he played board games with his cronies.

In their pillow conversations, Zeng gently explained to Sonja that "saving civilization" (her professed goal in life) had very little to do with her brashly tackling emergencies with her own two hands. No, if any civilization was going to be "saved" at all—said Mr. Zeng—the planet's civilization was in so much trouble that it could only be saved by something new, huge, unexpected, extreme, and indeed almost in-describable.

The planet's current power structure: the sudden rise of the Acquis and the Dispensation, and the abject collapse of nation-states generally, with the large exception of China—that power structure was predicated on arranging just such a situation. The planet was dotted all over with radically extreme experiments intended to "save civilization."

The problem was that most of these innovations did not work. They could never work, because they were too far-fetched. It cost a lot to try such experiments. Worse yet, it was much harder to shut down failed ex-periments that it was to invent brand-new ones.

The largest such intervention in the world was, of course, Chinese. It was the Chinese effort to geologically engineer the Himalayas so that China's rivers would once again flow. China had performed this feat with the twentieth century's single most radical world-changing tech-nology: massive hydrogen bombs.

Mr. Zeng had been among the people planning and executing that national effort. Chinese geoengineering had not been an easy plan to explain to concerned foreigners. China had gotten its way in the matter by offering to drop hydrogen bombs on anyone who objected.

Glumly recognizing China's implacable need to survive, the planet's other power players had bowed to the Chinese ultimatum. There was a gentleman's agreement to let the Chinese get on with it, and to not dwell too painfully and too publicly on their insane explosions digging monster ice lakes in the Himalayas. Instead, the Acquis and Dispensa-tion turned up their quiet diplomatic pressure, while enjoying the ben-efits of some ancillary planetary cooling.

That was how the serious players worked while literally saving the modern world. So—Zeng continued gently, playing with her curls—if Sonja truly wanted to "save civilization," she should not continue to do that by tak-ing small-arms fire in her medical tents at the edges of thirst-crazed cities. Serious-minded statesmen did not bother with such activities, since soldiery was one of the vilest of callings and best reserved for angry and ignorant young men. Instead of behaving in that backward way, Sonja should consider volunteering for duty at the highly prestigious Ji-uquan Space Launch Center, where there were extremely advanced and unexpected medical experiments under way. These antiplague measures involved combining microbes and medical scanners, and the implications of their success were extreme, even more extreme than blasting many large new holes in an Asian mountain range. Sonja did not, at first, respond to Mr. Zeng's recruitment proposal. She knew for a fact that Zeng was a secret policeman, and she knew in her heart that he was a mass murderer.

Mr. Zeng was not a small-scale, face-to-face killer in the bold way of the warriors that she knew and loved best. Mr. Zeng was the kind of killer who deployed a nuclear warhead the way he might set a black go-stone on a game board.

So, instead of going to Jiuquan, Sonja boldly volunteered to take some of those newfangled scanners and microbes and test them out in practice in the field. Mr. Zeng remarked that this was characteristic of her. He said that it was endearing, and that he had expected her to say that. He praised her bravery, patted her bottom wistfully, gave her a number of valuable parting gifts, and told her to stay in touch. So Sonja swiftly fled from Zeng's embraces and took his spotless state-secret equipment to the filthy mayhem in Harbin, where that equipment more or less worked. It worked against all sane expectations and it worked radically and it sometimes even worked beautifully.

Mostly, it worked because no one in her barefoot-medical team, in-cluding Sonja herself, had ever quite understood what they were sup-posed to do with cheap lightbulbs that made flesh as clear as glass, or black-box devices that combated infections by "fatally confusing" germs. In Harbin, everyone had made a lot of valuable fresh mistakes.

Before the Harbin episode, Red Sonja had been notorious within paramilitary circles, but after Harbin, Sonja had become an official na-tional heroine. Which was to say, she was a kind of sleekly feminine hood ornament for the state's least-imaginable enterprises.

To refuse such a role was unthinkable. To accept it was unimagin-able. 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 suppos-edly controlling that.

The state machine was frankly beyond any human comprehension. While the human beings were human: they were a densely webbed so-cial network of mandarins, moguls, spies, financiers, taipans, ideo-logues, 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 subter-ranean 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 emer-gency 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 use-ful, then, presumably, Zeng should have used it to avoid his own death, So: Maybe Zeng's ambivalent gift was nothing more than a supersti-tion, a pseudo-scientific magic charm against the pervasive fear so com-mon 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 injectID 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 sam-ples and brain scans, the exotic probiotic gut organisms of possibly Mar-tian 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 peo-ple 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 anyone 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 scanners, it would wage a computational war-in-detail against internal disorders, baf-fling, frustrating, starving, arresting, and poisoning bacteria. 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 ac-complishment meant. It always took the world a while to comprehend such things. But it meant that infectious diseases were doomed. Dis-eases 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 scanners. Being single-celled creatures, bacteria could never get any smarter. So epidemics, without exception, were going to be tracked down, outflanked, outperformed, and exterminated.

That was not the end of the grand story, either: that was only its be-ginning. One day soon there would be no hunger in China. People out-side Jiuquan-outside China-they lacked basic understanding of the potential of a human gut with fully advanced, reengineered bacteria. But: Those newly farmed microbes made old-fashioned digestion, that catch-as-catch-can spew of wild internal microbes, seem as backward and primitive as hunting-and-gathering.

The new Chinese microbes turned people's insides into booming in-ternal 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.