The Caryatids (37 page)

"Lionel Montalban," she said.

''Yes, what?"

"What are you doing here, Lionel Montalban?"

Lionel looked surprised. ''You mean, what am I doing here,
officially?
Oh. Officially, I'm on an 'Asian wilderness vacation.' I'm giving up my 'juvenile delinquent drug habits.' I'm in rehab. My brother's gonna clean me all out in the fresh air with some bracing backwoods hikes." Lionel turned on the charm: he grinned and winked. "What are
you
doing here, 'officially'? May I ask you that?"

Sonja said nothing.

"Never mind, Sonja! Whatever it is, it's okay by me! After that solar eruption—snarled communications all over the planet!—why sweat the small stuff? After a catastrophe like this one, nobody's gonna remember what I did, back in Los Angeles. Some riots, some burned-out neigh-borhoods, no problem!

It's all part of the legend of Hollywood."

Lionel waved his arms gleefully, which spooked his horse. The beast jerked the reins and almost knocked Lionel from his feet.

Lionel recovered his booted footing with a gymnast's half skip."You don't care about some derelict neighborhoods burned down in Los An-geles, do you? You don't care one bit, right? See, I'm almost home free!"

"What is John's assignment here?"

"Oh, this is John's usual work. We are shutting down an out-of--control tech operation. John never took me along for his work before, but, well, I learn fast." Lionel smiled. "Because I
have
to learn fast!

Bril-liancy, speed, lightness, and glory!"

It was a sinister business that the Acquis and Dispensation used the same slogan. Why had no one condemned them for that?

"Let me quickly brief you about my friend here," said Lionel. "The rider in the hairy wolf mask. He calls himself 'Vice Premier Li Rongji.' He is very serious about his name and his official Chinese title. He's a fanatic. So please don't tease him."

"Li Rongji was a great Chinese statesman."

"This man
is
the great Chinese statesman Li Rongji. He's a clone of a powerful Chinese official from twenty years ago. He's a clone, like you are. That's what John has discovered here. We found out that the Chi-nese state backed up its entire human regime. It cloned thirty-five key human politicians—I mean the
real
people inside the state, the crucial power brokers—and it hid them in a hole in the desert. The state even backed up
itself. All
of itself.It built itself a giant secret clone farm, and a giant secret library, and it hid that business underground in the Gobi, really deep underground, like nuclear-bomb-proof, in a kind of First Emperor of China airtight underground tomb."

Sonja scowled. "Why wasn't I informed about this matter?"

"Because you were five years old at the time. Sonja, you
are
this mat-ter. You are informed, because I just informed you. I informed you be-cause you are family." Lionel waved his arms again, and his horse, even angrier, almost succeeded in escaping him. When Lionel recovered-—he was ominously strong, an athlete, an acrobat—his face was flushed.

"It took the Dispensation a long time to map and track down this rogue project," he said. "John has found
fifteen
different cloning proj-ects that were all going on at the time you were born. The Balkans, that little island in the Adriatic: That was just the test bed for bigger projects elsewhere. Your project was small. This Chinese clone project was colossal. This one was the megaproject. And we're trying to
buy
it now. We're trying to buy whatever is left of it."

"There were
sixteen
cloning projects?
Sixteen
like me?"

"Most of those schemes never left the lab. Not one of those projects ever worked out as planned. Yours was a debacle for sure—and this Chi-nese one was the biggest debacle of them all. We're still dealing with the repercussions of it, right here and now. We got thirty-five extremely tal-ented cloned people, running loose and walking the Earth, who were trained in an underground bunker to take over the world. They escaped from that bunker and they're
still
planning to take over the world. They were supposed to emerge after a world apocalypse and restore Chinese civilization. And they
still
want to take over the world, and they want it on
their own terms.
You see my friend there, riding the horse, the one with the tattoos and the necklace of human teeth? He's one of them."

This was appalling news. Sonja sensed that it should have stunned her, it should have been beyond her comprehension. But it wasn't. Sonja was used to appalling news. Every juncture in her life that had ever mattered had been appalling.

She gazed at the rogue, apocalypse cultist, as he sat on his Mongol horse. He was young and fully dressed to terrify.

"Your brother should mind his own business, Lionel. Someday John will get hurt."

"This
is
John's business, sugarplum! I have two secret clones in my own family! One is my niece's mother, and the other is my favorite set director." Lionel shook his handsome head. "My brother makes it his life's work to shut down crazy projects before they get out of hand. You should be grateful for what John's done for this world! John wants to see you, Sonja. He can brief you about this much better than I can."

"I will no meet John Montalban. Not again, never. I promised that I would never meet him again, or touch him, or look at him."

Lionel sighed heavily. "Is that your big personal story? You are so much like Radmila! That is exactly the sort of thing Radmila would say, except not with your weird Sino-Slavic accent. I love Mila very dearly, but
would you get over yourself?
Just for once? Because my brother is changing the whole Earth out here! It's not always about you, you, you, and all your clones!"

Sonja regretted that she had not killed Lionel, but there was no help for this. John Montalban was a power player. If Montalban was here, meddling, and in better command of the situation than herself, then she had no choice but to negotiate with him. She had involved herself with Montalban before, and though she had bitter cause to regret it, at least she understood what that entailed. "All right. Take me to see John."

"At last you're talking sense. It'll take us a while to reach him, it's a good distance."

"I have a man with me here. My husband."

Lionel blinked. "That's news."

Slowly and conspicuously, Sonja led Lionel—along with his silent bodyguard, escort, or assassin—around the hill. Mongolian horses were some of the world's toughest ponies, but the horses had a hard time of it—on ground the pack robot would have skimmed in moments. Sonja returned to the site of the nightlong siege. A sturdier rock wall had appeared there. The dead Acquis cyborg had been hidden behind the wall. There was no sign of the busy and cunning Badaulet.

''You wait," she told Montalban, and she climbed laboriously back to the top of the hill. As she had expected, the Badaulet was lurking in wait on the slope with his rifle trained on the horsemen below.

"That loud fool with the strange hat is Dispensation," Lucky ob-served, for he was wise beyond his years. "I can kill them both easily."

"Don't kill them. The fool is Dispensation. The other is from the grass people, that tribe that tried to kill us. I am going with them to ne-gotiate a solution. That is a flaw I have: I negotiate peace too often. Will you please come with me to help me? Our alternative is to shoot them both and run away. But that strategy won't work. If we kill these two scouts, there will be more airplanes sent after us." The Badaulet shouldered his rifle. "You are my wife. We stay to-gether."

"Then we must parley. Don't kill anyone unless I say. If you see me kill someone, or if I am killed—then kill them. Avenge me without pity."

The Badaulet nodded. "Let us go and learn more about our enemies. To learn about enemies makes them easier to kill."

They rode their bullet-riddled pack robot to the base of the hill. Li-onel Montalban looked pale and shaken. "There's some dead Acquis guy wearing neural boneware in this little homemade fort."

"Is that so?" said Sonja.

"Yes, and that's bad. The Acquis is supposed to restrict their neural boneware to Antarctica. John made a formal settlement about that. There shouldn't be any Acquis spies with nerve gear walking the Earth in the middle of Asia."

Sonja felt keenly irritated, but she spoke politely. "Does your brother John want this dead Acquis body?

John always wants dead bodies."

"That's all right, I geotagged it. We can fetch it later. I took a lot of video." The little party then rode cross-country. Sonja made a deliberate point of scurrying ahead inside the superior pack robot, so that the prim-itive horse riders had to catch up.

"You are angly, my bride."

"Badaulet, did you ever have someone in your life who haunted you, and stole your existence, and was always in your dreams, and never let you be alone, no matter what you did, or how hard you tried to forget them?"

"No, my bride. I kill such people, and my enemies stay dead."

"Well, I have such people. I had seven such people. And soon, very soon—I will see someone who is even worse. Because I will meet the man who
married us.
First he found one of us, then he found all of us. He
investigated
us. Because he considers himself a wise scholar, this sage, this prince, this technician. He learned more about us than we ever knew about ourselves. That is how he mastered us. And he
did
mas-ter us. He bent us to his will. We cannot rid ourselves of him, although each of us has tried. He is our sultan, and we are his harem."

"Why did this prince come to this place? To take you away from me?"

"No. He doesn't need me. Not anymore. He has had plenty of me, because he possessed me. He came here to fulfill his own jihad."

"I see that my great rival is indeed a wise man."

Time passed; earnestly waving his cowboy hat, Lionel made a point of galloping up to catch them.

"Lunch break!" he crowed.

Lionel was the only one among them hungry. Sonja and the Badaulet had altered guts, and were drinking fermented grass from their rumen bag. Much the same seemed to be true of the young marauder who called himself "Vice Premier Li Rongji," and whose scarred, shabby horse calmly dropped an ashy black dung.

Sonja had yet to see this tribal bandit dismount from his horse. A su-perb rider, he and his ugly animal might have shared the same blood-stream.

With a showy gesture, Lionel offered them the roasted flesh of a mar-mot. Marmots existed in great profusion in the region, since they had lost most of their natural predators. Lionel gnawed this chewy ground-hog's flesh with a deft pretense of enthusiasm.

Then Lionel introduced himself to the Badaulet, though the two had no language in common. Nothing daunted, Lionel pulled out a hand-held translation unit. He managed to spout a few cordial words at the warnor.

The Badaulet's black eyeballs were rigid with hate. He despised Li-onel. Lionel, sensing this, redoubled his efforts to charm.

Though every human instinct warned her against it, Sonja decided to speak to Vice Premier Li Rongji. She walked empty-handed to the flank of the clone's horse and looked up into his masked face. He had stiff, taxidermy wolf ears and two mummified eye holes.

He was carrying, besides his long sniper rifle, a blunt combat shotgun that launched 40-millimeter grenades. Those searing, metal-splattering grenades hit almost as hard as artillery shells. One single man with one single such gun could briskly destroy a quarter of a city. He had a city-breaking machine on the rump of his ugly horse.

And his deadly grenade gun was made mostly of straw.

"Sir," she said, "I have heard that your esteemed name is Li Rongji."

"I am Vice Premier Li Rongji." His Chinese was excellent, clearly his first language. He even had the posh Beijing accent of high Chinese state officials.

"I have also heard, sir—although it was before my time—that Vice Premier Li Rongji was the premier architect for relief efforts during the great Xiaolangdi dam catastrophe."

"Yes, Xiaolangdi was one of my many important burdens of office be-fore my unfortunate demise."

"Do you know who
I
am, sir?"

"I know that you are the mistress of this man's elder brother. You must have a powerful hold on that soft man's soft heart, for him to take such trouble for you, a mere girl, in the midst of his negotiations with us."

"I am Sonja, the Angel of Harbin."

He instantly wanted to kill her. His callused hands tightened on the horse's reins. He was hungering to kill her.

Yet he was intelligent, and hardship had schooled him not to act on impulse. Furthermore, he was keenly afraid of Lucky. He tugged the muzzle of his wolf mask. "Since you are Red Sonja, then this man who accompanies you must be the world-famous Badaulet."

It had not occurred to Sonja that the Badaulet was "world-famous." But if this vast steppe and desert was "the world" to this man, then, yes, Lucky was much more famous than herself. "That indeed is he."

"Please be so kind as to introduce me to this great man and gallant warrior." There was nothing for it but for everyone to trade places. Lionel jumped into the bucketlike robot with her, while the Badaulet mounted Lionel's balky, snarling horse. With a few brutal whacks and sharp kicks, Lucky showed the horse that he meant business. The horse obeyed him humbly. The Badaulet and Vice Premier Li Rongji were soon deep in con-versation.

"How many are they?" said Sonja. "How many members of his cult?" "Well," said Lionel, lounging at his ease—for the robot's reeling dance steps didn't bother him at all—"there were originally thirty-five clones, down in their indoctrination bunker. After the clones blew that place up and escaped, each one of them started his own tribal global-guerrilla cell. They were pretty naive and sheltered people at first—basically, they were cave dwellers—but they're clever. They were trained extensively on guerrilla tactics and statecraft. Their state was training them to emerge from their bunker after the Apocalypse and take over the world."